Utopianism in Postcolonial Literatures 9781138187788, 9781138187801, 9781315642918

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UTOPIANISM IN POSTCOLONIAL LITERATURES

Postcolonial Studies is more often found looking back at the past, but in this brand new book, Bill Ashcroft looks to the future and the irrepressible demands of utopia. The concept of utopia – whether playful satire or a serious proposal for an ideal community – is examined in relation to the postcolonial and the communities with which it engages. Studying a very broad range of literature, poetry and art, with chapters focusing on specific regions – Africa, India, Chicano, Caribbean and Pacific – this book is written in a clear and engaging prose which makes it accessible to undergraduates as well as academics. This important book speaks to the past and future of postcolonial scholarship. Bill Ashcroft is a founding exponent of postcolonial theory, co-author of The Empire Writes Back, the first text to examine systematically the field of Postcolonial Studies. He is author and co-author of sixteen books, including The Postcolonial Studies Reader and Post-Colonial Transformation. He is an Australian Professorial Fellow at the University of New South Wales, Australia.

UTOPIANISM IN POSTCOLONIAL LITERATURES

Bill Ashcroft

First published 2017 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2017 Bill Ashcroft The right of Bill Ashcroft to be identified as the author has been asserted by him 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 of this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-18778-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-138-18780-1 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-64291-8 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Saxon Graphics Ltd, Derby

The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice. (Martin Luther King) I can easily believe that there are more invisible than visible beings in the universe … About such matters the human mind has always circled without attaining knowledge. Yet I do not doubt that sometimes it is well for the soul to contemplate – as in a picture – the image of a larger and a better world, lest the mind, habituated to the small concerns of daily life, limit itself too much and sink entirely into trivial thinking. (744). Epigraph to Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner Hope is an anticipatory virtue that activates powerful motivating forces: countermemories, imagination, dream work, religion, desire, and art. Hope constructs the future in that it opens the spaces onto which to project active desires; it gives us the force to process the negativity and emancipate ourselves from the inertia of everyday routines. It is a qualitative leap that carves out active trajectories of becoming and thus can respond to anxieties and uncertainties in a productive manner and negotiate transitions to sustainable futures. (Braidotti, Rosi, Nomadic Theory, Columbia University Press, New York, 2011: 297) It is of the nature of desire not to be satisfied, and most men live only for the gratification of it. (Aristotle)

CONTENTS

List of illustrations ix Acknowledgements xi Introduction

1

  1 Utopia, travel and empire

18

 2 Heimat, anticipation and postcolonial literatures

37

  3 The ambiguous necessity of utopia

63

  4 Remembering the future: Time and utopia in African literature

81

  5 Beyond the nation state

97

  6 Writing and re-writing India

114

  7 Borderland heterotopia: Aztlán and the Chicano nation

133

  8 Archipelago of dreams: Utopianism in Caribbean literature

145

  9 Oceanic hope: Utopianism in the Pacific

164

10 Settler colony utopianism

180

viii Contents

Conclusion

202

Bibliography 208 Index 223

ILLUSTRATIONS

2.1 Visit Palestine postcard by Franz Kraus (1936) 55 2.2 Amer Shamali, Visit Palestine (2010) 55 2.3 Handala cartoon by Naji El-Ali 56 2.4 Larissa Sansour, Nation Estate (2011) 58 2.5 “Lobby,” Nation Estate, Larissa Sansour (2012) 59 2.6 “Olive Tree,” Nation Estate, Larissa Sansour (2012) 60 2.7 “Jerusalem,” Nation Estate, Larissa Sansour (2012) 60 2.8 Space Exodus, Larissa Sansour 61

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

1. Les Murray, “The Future” and “The Meaning of Existence”, taken from Collected Poems (Sydney: Duffy and Snellgrove, 2002) with kind permission from Carcanet Press Limited. 2. Lee Cataldi, “What Lies Ahead”, taken from The Race Against Time (Melbourne: Penguin, 1998). 3. Kofi Anyidoho, “Mythmaker”, taken from Harvest of Our Dreams with, Elegy for the Revolution (London: Heinemann, 1984) with permission. 4. Kofi Anyidoho, “Gathering … Dance”, “Harvest Dance” and “The Drums” taken from Black Renaissance 9 (2) (Winter, 2009). 5. Edward Kamau Brathwaite, ten lines from “Islands”, taken from The Arrivants (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981) by permission. 6. Agostinho Neto, “Bleeding and Germinating”, “Sculptural Hands” and “A Succession of Shadows”, taken from Sacred Hope (Dar es Salaam: Tanzania Publishing House, 1974). 7. Kofi Awoonor, “A Death Foretold”, taken from The Literary Review 34 (4) (Summer, 1991): 445–446. 8. Derek Walcott, excerpt from Twenty Five Poems (Bridgetown: Savacou, 1949) with permission from Faber and Faber Ltd. 9. Martin Carter, “Looking at Your Hands”, taken from The Hill of Fire Glows Red (British Guiana: Master Printer, 1951). 10. John Puhiatu Pule, “So When the Future is Dormant” from 100 Love Poems (2005) http://www.nzepc.auckland.ac.nz/authors/pule/100future.asp used with kind permission of John P. Pule. 11. Vaine Rasmussen, taken from Our Pacific, in Remembrance of Pacific Pasts – An Invitation to Remake History, R. Borofsky (ed.) (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2000): 399–400. Used with kind permission of the University of Hawaii Press.

xii Acknowledgements

Disclaimer The publishers have made every effort to contact authors/copyright holders of works reprinted in Utopianism in Postcolonial Literatures to obtain permission to publish extracts. This has not been possible in every case, however, and we would welcome correspondence from those individuals/companies whom we have been unable to reach. Any omissions brought to our attention will be remedied in future editions.

INTRODUCTION

In 1515 Thomas More, on a diplomatic mission to Bruges completed Book II of his masterpiece Utopia which was published the following year. Although Book I followed the next year outlining the features of English society that Utopia was addressing, it is Book 2 of Utopia that has become the most famous discourse on the ideal society. Indeed, the word “utopia” has become the universal term for the ideal, whether achievable or not, the very embodiment of social aspirations to a perfect community. More invented the word, “utopia,” or “no place,” as opposed to “eutopia” or “good place,” but the genre of utopianism has come to refer to utopia as an ideal possibility of human community. The idea of perfection has given the term the character of a dream or an illusion, but still the term persists in Western consciousness as the very definition of the possibility of a better world. The most persistent question to haunt the reading of Utopia is: What did he mean by it? C.S. Lewis (1975) regarded it as an elaborate joke and Stephen Greenblatt (1980) pointed out that every rule or amenity for the ideal life in the book turns out to be fatally flawed. Did More really mean it to be the picture of an ideal society? Is it a satire or a serious plan for social improvement? While it appears to follow the model of Plato’s Republic, the feature that marks this book and the genre itself is a distinct ambivalence about the actual existence of the island. “Utopia” means “no place;” the main river “Anyder” means “waterless;” the main city “Amaurote” means “dim city.” Like the Utopians, the Achorians are the people of no place while Polylerites inhabit the land of much nonsense. Despite this, early readers of the fantasy were convinced that Utopia referred to a real island. The debate over whether Utopia is a playful satire or a serious proposal for an ideal community persists to the present day and goes right to the heart of the problem with utopias. The resolution of this debate might have been a little clearer if More hadn’t written Book I, which, although written later than the more famous Book II, outlined very clearly the unjust and unequal state of England at the time.

2 Introduction

Land was amassed and occupied by a relatively few wealthy landowners, while the majority of the population hardly possessed the means of subsistence. There is no question that More’s criticism of the contemporary state of affairs in England was serious and deeply felt. Clearly, whether satire or fabulation, Utopia addressed a very pressing need in More’s mind. The distribution of work, property, wealth, and basic subsistence was grossly unequal and social conditions quite unjust. So scathing was this picture that Book I was not distributed until fifty years after the more famous Book II. In the light of his perception of England it is hard to see Utopia as a joke! Nevertheless, the debate continues because the book remains deeply ambivalent. So great are the contradictions that it is hard not to see More’s description as both serious and playful, the two tendencies working in an intricate, ambivalent and unresolved conflict in the book. Ultimately, it makes sense, in the light of More’s considerable dismay at the state of England, to assume that Utopia outlined at least the principles of a true “commonwealth.” When considering commonwealths which nowadays anywhere do flourish, so God help me, I can perceive nothing but a certain conspiracy of rich men procuring their own commodities under the name and title of the commonwealth. They invent and devise all means and crafts, first how to keep safely, without fear of losing, that they have unjustly gathered together, and next how to hire and abuse the work and labour of the poor for as little money as may be. (More 2009: 121) We might pause to consider how little has changed in the world. Regardless of the ambivalent tone in which Utopia was conceived, the basic principles of shared property, egalitarianism and universal employment continue to be central to utopian theory because inequality and exploitation remain prominent features of global capitalism. Utopia provided a literary “beginning” to a fundamental feature of the human imagination – what Ernst Bloch would later call its “anticipatory consciousness.” We include earlier visions of ideal societies, such as Plato’s Republic, in accounts of utopias, either because More mentioned them, or because Utopia gave them a name. The truly fascinating thing about Utopia is its persistence. Despite existing nowhere and becoming the term of choice for anything fanciful and absurd, anything remotely like panglossian wishful thinking, utopian discourse has persisted in many forms, and for most of the twentieth century has been driven by a combination of Marxism and science fiction. The origins of modern post-industrial utopia was Edward Bellamy’s, Looking Backward (1888), which had an impact far in excess of its literary merit and for much the same reason as More’s original. It proposed a remarkably simple and attractive model of socialist sharing in which a uniformly middle-class society benefited from undisputed equality, in a social system that somehow had naturally evolved as people came to their senses. Bellamy,

Introduction  3

in characteristic American fashion completely avoided the term “socialist,” and in response, William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1891), a semi-satirical rejoinder to Looking Backward, argued the need for revolution and social transformation rather than Bellamy’s benign evolutionary development of a utopian society. Oscar Wilde’s long essay “The Soul Of Man Under Socialism” (1891) was hardly socialist but proposed the intriguing idea that true individuality, particularly artistic individuality, would be fostered by communal equality. Like William Morris, Wilde saw in the work of the artist a survival of that rapidly disappearing phenomenon – unalienated labour. After the turn of the century utopian novels flourished and no writer was more intrigued by the subject than H.G. Wells, whose The Time Machine (1895), When the Sleeper Wakes (1899), Anticipations (1902) and A Modern Utopia (1905) built on Bellamy’s ideas of a world state. Feminist utopias also emerged at the turn of the century – Elizabeth Wolstoneholme’s Woman Free (1893) and most famously Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915), a utopia of entirely female population that reproduced itself by the parthenogenetic production of girl children. But one fascinating example of a feminist utopia occurred in a story by Rokeya Hossain in 1905 called “Sultana’s Dream.” Although written by an Indian woman it is not specifically a postcolonial utopia but a feminist “dream” of an inverted world in which men rather than women were kept indoors and women performed all the important social tasks. Nevertheless, coming out of colonial India we can place it at the very origins of postcolonial utopianism, a confirmation of the fact that the spirit of future thinking permeates the landscape of political oppression. An unusual example of this genre is the 1889 novel Anno Domini 2000 by the New Zealand writer Julius Vogel, which imagines a future world where all the major political positions are held by able and admired women. This builds on the strong tradition of New Zealand utopian literature perhaps in affirmation of the growing women’s movement. One of the more interesting features of the early period of the twentieth century was the sudden proliferation of dystopias, which captured something of the fear of the growth of totalitarian states and perhaps an even greater fear of mass production epitomized by Fordism and Taylorism. But what becomes most characteristic of the best dystopian writing is the ways in which they pivot upon the ambivalence of utopias themselves. Although E.M. Forster’s short story “The Machine Stops” tied eugenics to other forms of oppressive state control, it was Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (2006) that paved the way for a small but extremely influential series of dystopias of which Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and George Orwell’s 1984 (2003) are the best known, but joined by Katherine Burdekin’s less well-known critique of Nazism, Swastika Night (1937). As this dystopian period drew to a close it gave birth to the last communal utopia, B.F. Skinner’s Walden 2 (1948). Written by the famous behavioural psychologist it attempts to demonstrate the utopian possibilities of behavioural conditioning. Like many modern utopias it doesn’t dwell on the ways in which the utopia arose, and presents the usual unquestioned acceptance by the occupants of

4 Introduction

the conditions of the utopia. This kind of utopian commune proved to be a particularly popular American phenomenon, and the subsequent century saw many utopian communities, based on various ideologies, establish and dissolve. Utopian communities in the colonized world have been based on cultural and religious principles. Stanley Barrett, in his The Rise and Fall of an African Utopia (1977) outlines the progress of one he calls (fictitiously) Olowo in Nigeria, established in 1947 by some fishermen – members of a subgroup of the Christian sect, Aladuras. Olowo had an astounding initial economic success, compared to other villages and communities in Nigeria. Its authoritarian communal nature was maintained for about twenty years, very much along the lines of Thomas More’s Utopia and of utopian communities ever since. Its achievements in education, technical training, and public works were astounding, particularly in comparison to neighbouring communities in this impoverished area and even included road building in the swampy marshland. Everyone was engaged in productive activity from early morning to late at night, and the religious and economic communalism was virtually complete, even including periods with an enforced system of communal marriages.

Postcolonial utopianism Clearly, utopian activity from the time of Looking Backward has been increasing in energy as the prospect of the communal ownership of property and the sharing of wealth became more remote. In the colonial world the sharing envisaged by utopia was not economic wealth as much as the political wealth of liberation and enfranchisement. However, in his Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times Krishan Kumar argues that “so far as I have been able to establish, nothing like the western utopia and utopian traditions exist in any non-western or non-Christian culture” (1987: 424). But this has appeared increasingly questionable: Ralph Pordzik produced The Quest for Postcolonial Utopia in 2001 and more recently Jacqueline Dutton and Lyman Tower Sargent produced a volume of Utopian Studies 24.1 (2013) on “Utopias from Other Traditions” that revealed the rich and widespread presence of utopianism in other cultural traditions. At around the same time Sargent, Ashcroft and Kesler produced an issue of Spaces of Utopia dedicated to postcolonial utopianism (2nd series no. 1 2012). Utopias and utopian thinking arise from all cultural traditions but postcolonial utopianism offers a particularly intense rhetoric of the future characterized by its engagement with imperial power. Postcolonial utopianism began with anti-colonial utopias that focused on the prospect of an independent nation, but the postcolonial vision of utopia has become the persistent belief in a transformed future. In Ruth Levitas’s description this is “the desire for a better way of living expressed in the description of a different kind of society that makes possible that alternative way of life” (1995: 257). The need for this book lies in the habit of some postcolonial analyses to see the postcolonial as locked into a simple anti-colonialism. Postcolonial utopianism arises from an unrecognized but powerful reality: that successful resistance is transformative, and transformation rests on the belief in an achievable future (Ashcroft 2001).

Introduction  5

Utopian theory has undergone a vigorous renaissance during the post-Cold War period of global empire. The concept of the utopian remains a conceptual anchor to any theory of a better world, any hope for social change and amenity. Although not everything we imagine may be achievable, what is never imagined cannot be achieved. But in using the word utopianism we already make a distinction between the fantasy, the “placeless place” and the spirit of hope. And it is this spirit that lies at the heart of postcolonial liberation. Sargent clarifies the distinction between a utopia, which is “a non-existent society described in considerable detail and normally located in time and space,” and utopianism, which he classifies as “social dreaming” (1994: 9). The pre-independence utopias of soon to be liberated postcolonial nations provided a very clear focus for anti-colonial activism in British and other colonies. While they were not always depicted in the literature, the independent nation was a widely imagined utopia for anti-colonial activism. But this appeared to come to an abrupt halt once the goal of that activism was reached and the sombre realities of post-independence political life began to be felt. The utopian nationalist dreams of the anti-colonial liberation struggles were doomed to disappointment, bound, as the newly independent nations were, to the political structures of the colonial state, and a political system largely incompatible with cultural realities. Indeed it has been argued that the idea as well as the colonial institution of the nation was inimical to the cultural realities of colonized societies (Chatterjee 1986). Yet the literature that flourished after independence, although it had its full share of critical anger about post-independence regimes, and more than its share of gaoled writers, nevertheless developed a hope in the future that could not be quenched. Literature and other creative cultural productions are critical in the production of postcolonial hope because their very raison d’etre is to imagine a different world. With the significant exception of the settler colonies few postcolonial utopias were conceived in quite the same way as those found in the tradition of utopian literature, nevertheless hope, anticipation and future thinking have been fundamental features of postcolonial writing. Belief in the future exists everywhere. It only appears extraordinary in the context of postcolonial discourse because it seems to many to be overshadowed by the dominance of an imperial past. Even the famously pessimistic Theodore Adorno detects the universalism of hope when he observes in a conversation with Ernst Bloch, that all humans deep down, whether they admit this or not, know that it would be possible or it could be different. However the social apparatus has hardened itself to the extent that whatever appears to people as the evident possibility of fulfillment, presents itself to them as radically impossible. (Bloch and Adorno 1975: 4) This conversation occurred early in the twentieth century. How much more obvious would it appear to colonized peoples struggling out of the weight of imperial dominance later in the century? How much truer would it appear to

6 Introduction

people today caught in the inequalities of neo-liberal capitalism? Adorno’s interlocutor, Ernst Bloch, had radically expanded the scope of Marxist utopianism, proposing, in his magisterial three-volume The Principle of Hope that the utopian instinct is a fundamental human trait. While dismissing More’s Utopia as a social experiment, Bloch declared that human life, from daydreams to plans for revolution, was driven by the pressing conviction of the Not-Yet. He suggested, better than any other theorist of the twentieth century, the possibilities of utopia, largely because he himself firmly believed in the possibility of social change. The role played by the creative imagination is powerfully illuminated in The Principle of Hope and the essays collected in The Utopian Function of Art and Literature, works that will have a prominent place in this study. But it is remarkable, considering Marx’s own view of utopia, to see the extent to which Bloch situates the utopian in Marx’s thought, although he does so in the most general way. This paradox reminds us that Bloch was a perpetual outsider. His work could have been published in England in 1940, but it was considered too Marxist. When it was published in the 1960s to great acclaim, it was considered by Lukacs, the Frankfurt School and the East German academy to which he returned after the War, to be too mystical. The reason for giving Bloch such prominence in this analysis of non-European cultures is that he not only offered the most thoroughgoing theorization of utopia but he remained a passionate believer in the possibility of social transformation, a belief that emerged from his staunch Marxism. According to Bloch, “Marx’s work marks the turning-point in the process of concrete venturing beyond becoming conscious” (1986: 5). But even so, he confessed that true insight into hope, the most important of all revolutionary principles, remains clouded: “The desiderium, the only honest attribute of all men, is unexplored” (5) and the prevalence of utopianism, if we link it to all forms of forward thinking, remains disregarded and “un-illuminated” (6). For this reason Bloch conceives his project in The Principal of Hope “to bring philosophy to hope, as to a place in the world which is as inhabited as the best civilized land and as unexplored as the Antarctic” (6). As Alain Badiou puts it, in Bloch’s terms, “Philosophy, in its very essence, elaborates the means of saying ‘Yes!’ to the previously unknown thoughts that hesitate to become the truths that they are” (2009: 3).

Future thinking The most difficult thing about the future is that it doesn’t exist. As Australian poet Les Murray put it in “The Future” (2002: 153) it is not something that is there for us to know: There is nothing about it. Much science fiction is set there but is not about it. Prophecy is not about it. It sways no yarrow stalks. And crystal is a mirror.

Introduction  7

Our crystal ball gazing offers us a mirror to ourselves, yet in literature it is this “ourselves,” this present, to which the non-existent future constantly speaks. Only the imagination can comprehend the future. Our projections must remain mere projections: We see, by convention, a small living distance into it but even that’s a projection. And all our projections fail to curve where it curves. It is the black hole out of which no radiation escapes to us. We may be able to see the start of the future, which is now: But, from here, there’s a blindness. The gouffre Avenir that will swallow all our present blinds us to the normal sun that may be imagined shining calmly away on the far side of it, for others in their ordinary day. So we are faced with the gouffre de l’Avenir, the abyss of the future, the black hole out of which no radiation reaches us. Yet the future, this unknowable abyss, is as much the horizon of our lives as the past. For Ernst Bloch “everybody lives in the future, because they strive” (1986: 4). Abyss though it may be, the future is the necessary horizon of our being – it is the space of becoming, the horizon of possibility within which our being gains life, and only the work of the creative spirit can give form to that possibility. For Bloch, humans are constantly projected forward, constantly thinking of the future, constantly oriented towards the Not-Yet-Become. It is through the Novum – the idea of the new – that we orient ourselves and reshape questions about the nature of human existence in concrete ways so that we can see more clearly the direction of utopia. The very presence of daydreams, desires, longings, anticipations, confirms the permanent orientation of human consciousness towards the future. Moving from the curiosity and craving of childhood to the constant presence of mature desire Bloch indicates the depth and prevalence of hope. Urging, longing, craving, wishing, imagining, dreaming – the Not-Yet lies deep in human consciousness: The emotion of hope goes out of itself, makes people broad instead of confining them … How richly people have always dreamed of this, dreamed of the better life that might be possible. Everybody’s life is pervaded by daydreams: one part of this is just stale, even enervating escapism, … [The] other part has hoping at its core, and is teachable. (3)

8 Introduction

Not only the dream and the imagination but thinking in and of itself is, for Bloch, a projection towards the future because it is a constant venturing beyond: Thinking means venturing beyond … [R]eal venturing beyond never goes into the mere vacuum of an In-Front-of-Us, merely fanatically, merely visualizing abstractions. Instead, it grasps the New as something that is mediated in what exists and is in motion, although to be revealed the New demands the most extreme effort of will. Real venturing beyond knows and activates the tendency which is inherent in history and which proceeds dialectically. (4) It is this perception that “real” venturing beyond activates the historical tendency that is most relevant to postcolonial utopianism. The present is the crucial site of the continual motion by which the New comes into being. This is because the utopian function is essentially critical: hope itself, by going beyond the present, critiques it. “Utopian beliefs,” says Scott, “can, in fact, be understood as a more or less systematic negation of an existing pattern of exploitation” (Scott 1990: 81). This is as true for postcolonial literatures as it is for Thomas More.

Utopia and critique Indeed it becomes clear, in reading literary utopias, that the distinguishing feature of all visions of utopia is the critique of those social conditions that make utopia necessary. Although More’s Utopia more or less saves this purpose for Book 1, modern utopias since Looking Backwards spend as much time upon discussion of the failings of the present as they do upon the imaginative solutions of their visionary worlds. Indeed, without the problems the solutions would have no point. As postcolonial writers demonstrate, the utopian is grounded in a critique of the present, not just the colonial past. Any utopianism worth the name, says Zygmant Bauman “must engage in a significant polemic with the dominant culture” (Bauman 1976: 47). In Demand the Impossible (1986) Tom Moylan coined the term “critical utopias” which “dwell on the conflict between the originary world and the utopian society opposed to it so that the process of social change is more directly articulated” (10–11). In postcolonial writing this leads to an inevitable clash with post-independence administrations which tend to perpetuate the structures of imperial rule. In other words the utopian vision is transformative, its vision of the future a transformation of the present. An example of the link between transformative resistance and utopianism is found in a statement by Édouard Glissant proclaiming a severance from France, not to fight her but simply to tell her that the French Caribbean is going to do something else: And just what are we going to do? Let’s seek out markets around the world for goods that we agree to make here, that we design and put into production

Introduction  9

ourselves, instead of following orders from foreign politicians and world bankers only to end up making commodities that don’t sell. Sure, we’ll have to face plant reconversions, reorganize work, redistribute resources, invent new products … Sure, the going will be tough – but is our current situation all that good? It really isn’t even liveable! So if we don’t devote ourselves to this utopia, then we’ll have to imagine some other one. (1997; translated and cited in Holland 2006: 222–223) This statement raises several issues. First, there is a clear recognition that a utopian vision is necessary for the impetus of change. Second, the utopian vision is economic and yet this economy is clearly derived from cultural difference, something that is perpetuated in cultural productions such as literary texts. Third, the resistance to French hegemony involves the appropriation and transformation of systems that exist beyond the imperial relationship but are still extensions of it. This is global capital itself, which is not rejected but appropriated in a way that allows the transformation of Martiniquan society. Glissant implies perhaps that the best prospects for utopia lie beyond the nation state within the global market. He proposes the necessity, even utility of a utopian scheme that exists within the process of change itself. The transformative energy of the utopian impulse explains why it remains so apposite to the functions of the literary text. The strength of this transformative utopianism is that it has no programme, no prescriptive line, no utopia. The spirit of this coincides with the agonism of Foucault who, in a discussion with Deleuze in “The Thought from Outside” explicitly rejects any form of resistance that would replace one system with another. Anyone who attempts to oppose the law in order to found a new order, to organize a second police force, to institute a new state, will only encounter the silent and infinitely accommodating welcome of the law. (Foucault 1990: 38) Sobering though this is it anticipates one of the dilemmas of utopia: perfection always fails. Or, to put it another way, the perfect society exists in no-place (u-topia). The solution may lie in the form of transformation that characterizes much postcolonial theory. In “The Commitment to Theory,” Homi Bhabha says, A critical discourse does not yield a new political object … The language of critique is effective … to the extent to which it overcomes the given grounds of opposition and opens up a space of translation; a place of hybridity, figuratively speaking, where the construction of a political object that is new, neither the one nor the other, properly alienates our political expectations, and changes, as it must, the very forms of our recognition of the moment of politics. The challenge lies in conceiving of the time of political action and understanding as opening up a space that can accept and regulate the

10 Introduction

differential structure of the moment of intervention without rushing to produce a unity of the social antagonism or contradiction. (1994: 25) Rather than foresee a particular utopia, the function of postcolonial utopianism is to open up a space for political action that is buoyed up by the possibility, indeed, the probability of social change. This is the probability Bloch calls “concrete utopia.” Bhabha cautions against the (regrettably common) tendency to fall into the trap of installing a “unity” of binary oppositions in the practice of critique, the desire to seek a “resolution” of real or symbolic contradictions by asserting one dogma over another. One of the most effective ways of achieving this is to redirect the “language of critique” into the language of the possible, the utopian language of liberation without the necessary insistence of resolution. This is entering the area of continual negotiation rather than conclusive negation. The language of this critique opens up a “space of translation; a place of hybridity” as he puts it, but it does this principally because the text, and the utopian text in particular, no longer refers to a space, but adds to that space. This is what Bhabha calls the “event of theory.” But it may be much more compellingly seen as the “event of the possible” in the agonism of the postcolonial text. This raises the question: “How can postcolonial resistance be utopian if it has no vision of utopia?” The simple answer is that all utopias are critical because their focus is the present, the distinguishing feature of all utopian visions being the critique of those present conditions that make utopia necessary. Ironically, imperial discourse has a conception of the Novum, but its real utopia is history itself. The problems with the fully conceived and fully realized utopian state are comprehensively depicted in imperial utopias: the tension of freedom and coercion; the struggle between the education and manipulation of desire; the necessity of the Law and the rule of the enlightened. Where postcolonial thinking turns away from imperial utopia is by reconceiving the present, specifically the place of the present and place in the present. In many cases postcolonial texts re-conceive the present by re-telling the past and thus run the risk of nostalgia. But in the main the combination of time and space offers a different way of being in the present: its utopian energy is directed at resistance to the tyranny of history by the confirmation of a transformation of place “here and now”. The prominent feature of postcolonial utopianism, then, is critique. This leads to a critical utopia that attempts to achieve a “breach in the ideological and cultural structures that persist as a consequence of imperialism” (Moylan 1986: 213). But the dominant tendency in postcolonial critique is transformation. Unless structured firmly around a critique, a utopia is simply a fantasy. We can see the reason for this in the modern utopias in which coercion has been internalized through the naturalization of regulation. When asked, in Looking Backward if service in the universal system of employment is compulsory, Dr Leete replies “It is rather a matter of course than compulsion … It is regarded as so absolutely natural and reasonable that the idea of its being compulsory has ceased to be thought of … to

Introduction  11

speak of service being compulsory would be a weak way to state its absolute inevitableness” (Bellamy 1888: 38). The most hopeful feature of modern utopias is their belief in the underlying morality and rationality of human beings. Many utopias rely upon the innate goodness of human beings inevitably emerging if only the system were different, for it is the system that is in error. The question of how future societies discard what appear to be innate tendencies to aggression, competitiveness and greed, and just happen to come round to seeing the good sense in a system based on equality, universality and the brotherhood of man, is simply never answered. If we examine the emancipatory tendency in postcolonial writing and ask: What is this freedom that impels the postcolonial writing? Can a truly free subject exist? One answer is that freedom, like consciousness, can never exist in the abstract, it must be realized in the terms “freedom from” and “freedom to.” Freedom can only exist in the act of struggle against coercion, “freedom to” may only be realized in the struggle of “freedom from” domination and the transformation of power. This then is the dynamic function of the utopian impulse. Not to construct a place, but to enact the utopian desire for freedom in the engagement with power. Liberation in this way comes through transformation. The vision of utopia is located in the act of transformation of coercive power, a certain kind of praxis rather than a specific mode of representation. In postcolonial writing this praxis has developed many different forms. Writing that could be called the postcolonial literature of globalization, best represented by Salman Rushdie, oscillates continually between straight critique of ideology and dazzling heteroglossic social possibilities: from critique of imperialism, nationalism, communalism, in Midnight’s Children, to passionate critique of neo-imperialism and genocide in Kashmir in Shalimar the Clown. Both offer, in turn, a picture of a fluid, destabilized, hybrid utopian world as an alternative, a world in which utopia is constantly adumbrated but never secured. This representation of a radically hybridized world hovers in an unclosed space between critique and possibility.

Ideology and utopia The advent, and apparent failure, of the postcolonial nation raises the question of the place of national ideology. For all its apparent failures, does the comparatively progressive nature of the national ideology of former colonies require us to see the link between ideology and postcolonial utopia as more nuanced? When state ideology seems to have simply betrayed the pre-independence utopianism of decolonizing countries, does the hope for the future still remain? Lyman Tower Sargent offers an astute definition of ideology as a system of values and beliefs regarding the various institutions and processes of society that is accepted as fact or truth by a group of people. An ideology provides the believer with a picture of the world both as it is and as it should

12 Introduction

be, and, in doing so, organizes the tremendous complexity of the world into something fairly simple and understandable. (Sargent cited in Sargent 2006: 12) As such “every ideology contains a utopia and the problem with utopia arises when it becomes a system of beliefs rather than what it is in almost all cases, a critique of the actual through imagining a better alternative” (2006: 12). Karl Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia (1936) was the first work to focus directly on the relationship, although it is Mannheim’s take on ideology rather than utopia that exercises most critics. But he makes the important point that “both ideologies and utopias are ideas” that are “incongruous with the state of reality within which [they] occur” (Mannheim 1966: 173). The key point of difference between them is that ideologies work to sustain the present state of things, while utopias serve to bring about change. Paul Ricoeur’s Lectures on Ideology and Utopia in 1976 presented one of the most comprehensive discussions of the link between these two apparent opposites (Ricoeur 1986). The general interpretation of ideology still tends towards the Marxist view of it as pathological: an expression of false consciousness, or the ideas of the ruling class. But if the potentially progressive ideology of the postcolonial nation forces us to think again about ideology, we find that the connection has already been made. Ernst Bloch’s 1918 The Spirit of Utopia first raised the idea of the utopian dimension of ideology in the section “The True Ideology of the Kingdom,” in which he advocated an alliance of Marxism and religion to produce a “genuine” cultural, social and historical ideology in “a will to the Kingdom.”1 In this early volume Bloch warned that it was an illusion to imagine that a better society could be based purely on Marxist analyses. Ideology critique as it developed through Althusser, and to some extent the Frankfurt School, “interprets dominant ideology primarily as an instrument of mystification, error, and domination” (Kellner 2011: 85). For Marx, ideology is a distortion of “reality”, and Marxist theories of ideology hinge on its identity as false consciousness. Ricoeur makes a canny observation about the consequences of this attitude: Ideology is always a polemical concept. The ideological is never one’s own position; it is always the stance of someone else, always their ideology … Utopias are assumed by their authors, whereas ideologies are denied by theirs. (1986: 2) Ricoeur points out that ideology has a significant constitutive function both in legitimation and identification, and that it reflects utopia in certain ways: both can be seen positively and negatively; both have a pathological and constitutive dimension, the pathological always appearing first (1986: 1). But crucially, Ricoeur’s position might best be explained by the fact that “reality” itself is framed by ideology (171), and that it is impossible for the critic to escape it. This is

Introduction  13

generally known as “Mannheim’s paradox.” Mannheim confessed that he was unable to critique ideology from any position outside ideology itself. Ricoeur responded that it was precisely the “nowhere” of utopia from which ideology could be critiqued (17). In The Principle of Hope Bloch conforms more readily (than his early Spirit of Utopia) to Marx’s dictum that “Ideologies as the ruling ideas of an age, are … the ideas of the ruling class” (1986: 150). But he insisted that ideologies also incorporate the image of a world beyond alienation and that without the utopian function operating even within ideology, no spiritual surplus, no idea of a better world would be possible. Certainly, he concurs, “since ideologies are always originally those of the ruling class, they justify existing social conditions by denying their economic roots and disguising exploitation” (149). But in ideology there is an attempt to transcend the present “through its embellishing, condensing, perfecting or signifying exaggeration,” (149) and for Bloch this is not possible without a distorted or displaced utopian function. Importantly, although distorted, “the original and sustained concrete utopian function must also be discoverable in these inauthentic improvements” (149). In his essay “Art and Utopia” Bloch claims that without the utopian function it is impossible to explain the intellectual surplus that went beyond the status quo and that which had been accomplished, even if that surplus is filled with illusion instead of anticipatory illumination. Therefore, all anticipation must prove itself to the utopian function, the latter seizing all possible surplus content of the anticipation. … it also seizes the content in interests that have been progressive at one time, in ideologies that have not completely vanished with their respective societies, in archetypes that are still encapsulated, in ideals that are still abstract, in allegories and symbols that are still static. (1989: 111) Most interestingly, Bloch the Marxist points out the utopian function even of capitalism, “And it was this economy that Smith praised ceremoniously as utopian” (1989: 112). Bloch’s purpose is at least threefold: on the one hand he is convinced that utopian hope is so fundamental to human life that it characterizes every aspect of social thinking, that the need to grasp the spirit (geist) of utopia in human consciousness was fundamental to understanding human life; on another he wants to make a case for progressive socialist ideology, “the ideology of the revolutionary proletariat,” (1986: 155) as something more than mystification. But he also contends that all ideological discourses contain appeals to a better life. They contain a “surplus” or “excess” that is not limited to mystification. The point is that while the utopian surplus exists within ideology, it creates tension between the vision and the reality that can expose levels of social inequality while maintaining the hope for justice. This tension raises the question of the emancipatory potential of a postcolonial state ideology. Bloch’s position was not simply that there was “bad” ideology and

14 Introduction

“good” (i.e. socialist) ideology but that all ideology has a utopian element that needed to be understood. Rather than simply denounce ideology he wants to examine ideology for any emancipatory potential. Hence, rather than claim that postcolonial state ideology is progressive (which it is not necessarily) and therefore good, we need to examine ways in which the utopian element of ideology may be maintained as a form of self critique. This leads even to an observation of the workings of capitalism that beautifully demonstrates the operation of imperialism: exploitation under the guise of improvement. Mannheim also sees an alignment between ideology and utopia and in particular between distinct social strata or classes: “ideology is linked to dominant but declining classes, utopia to oppressed (or at least subordinate) and rising ones” (Levitas, 1990: 74–75). Thus, the larger argument of Mannheim’s analysis of ideology and utopia can be summarized as follows. In contrast to ideologies which “express the world view or perspective of a dominant group or class”: Utopias […] are the belief systems or worldviews of groups which are excluded from a full realization of their socio-economic interests. Utopias outline and indicate a future alternative social order which is oriented towards their specific interests. Political culture is the oscillation and conflict which takes place between these total worldviews, representing the interests of diametrically opposed social classes groups. (Turner 1995: 719) For Mannheim, it is only when these “reality-transcending” ideas or “wishimages” are taken up by certain (oppressed or subordinate) social groups and are “embodied […] into their actual conduct, and [they try] to realize them, [do] these ideologies become utopian” (Mannheim 1966: 174).

Outline of chapters The paradox of ideology and utopia is significant because this is where the story begins: in the utopian dynamic of imperial expansion itself. Although this study is devoted to those writers imagining a future freed from colonial control, the ideology of imperialism cannot survive unless it couches its expansionist aims in the utopian idea of the civilizing mission. While examining the utopian dynamic of imperialism Chapter 1 investigates the close affinity between utopian writing and travel writing, an affinity established at the very beginning with some readers thinking Utopia was a real place. The abiding contradiction of the utopian element in European expansion was that between the idea of a utopia located far enough away to make it the glowing object of desire, and the need, once arrived, to re-create it in the image of Europe. For this task of reconstruction through the ingenuity and will of British civilization, Robinson Crusoe remains a classic allegory. The development of postcolonial utopianism therefore occurs against the backdrop of imperial expansion. But the defining difference is the persistence of

Introduction  15

utopianism over utopia in the postcolonial consciousness, the dominance of utopian function over utopian form, an expansion of the imagination rather than an expansion of territory. In this pursuit the function of art and literature is central. Chapter 2 launches from Ernst Bloch’s perception of their value in the utopian enterprise, in particular their capacity to anticipate heimat, Bloch’s term for the home we have all sensed but not experienced. Both heimat, the anticipatory illumination, or vorschein of art and literature, and creativity in general remain central to this book and the chapter proceeds to examine the connection between utopia and creativity with particular emphasis on the function of art and literature in Palestine. The great paradox of utopia, as critics of Utopia have pointed out, is the very thin line between utopia and dystopia and Chapter 3 examines three ambiguities on which this distinction rests: the difference between utopia and utopianism; the connection between the future and memory; and the struggle between “I” and “We.” Resting on a defining paradox: utopia’s position “Nowhere,” which, according to Ricoeur, is its greatest strength, these three ambiguities are shown to track the very delicate balance between utopia and dystopia: while actual utopias always fail, without utopian thinking liberation is not possible; while utopias by definition exist in the future, utopianism demands the prophetic engagement with memory in its critique of the present; while the equality of individuals in the collective is fundamental to utopian thought, the collective is always inimical to individual fulfilment. All of these paradoxes are resolved in particular ways by postcolonial literatures. One of the recurrent themes of this study is the significance of time, both in the struggle with the linear structure of European history and the production in postcolonial literatures, of a revolutionized conception of time as layered and spiralling rather than linear. This is a particular capacity of the novel, which, although progressing in time, takes us out of time. Chapter 4 starts by examining two ways in which African writers interrogate the discourse of history: Ayi Kwai Armah’s interpolation of history with a rendition of Cheikh-Anta Diop’s view of Egyptian civilization as black, and Ben Okri’s presentation of a different kind of history, which embraces rather than rejects that mythic consciousness relegated to the “pre-historic.” One of the key features of postcolonial utopianism is the location of the future in memory, not as a nostalgic yearning for the past but as a “prophetic vision” of what may be possible outside imperial structures such as linear history. Time spirals in these texts, in a circular movement that layers memory and the future much like what Jameson calls “archaeologies of the future.” Another recurrent theme of postcolonial writing is the disappointment with the nation. The utopia of pre-independence thought was usually the utopian vision of an independent nation freed from colonial shackles. Invariably the failure of the postcolonial nation to throw off the structures and political architecture of the colonial state (and its entrapment by neo-liberal capitalism) meant that the spiralling trajectory of postcolonial writing led beyond the nation towards a vision of Heimat. Chapter 5 examines the ways in which postcolonial writing in the independence

16 Introduction

period critiques both the nation state and the confining pressure of borders of all kinds. Even in anti-colonial writing such as Aghostino Neto’s, the direction of liberation is beyond the nation toward a realization of African futures. The natural extension of this vision is a realization of Africa’s place in the world. Both Afromodernity and pan-Africanism demonstrate how African writing has moved beyond the nation to realize global connections. The disappointment with the nation occurs even in the most successful postcolonial nation state – India. Despite the stunning success of Nehru’s statism, the utopian vision of a truly free India, one that critiques nationalism and the nation state, finds its origins at the beginning of the century in the work of Rabindranath Tagore and Mohandas Gandhi. Chapter 6 examines the role of creativity in the writing and rewriting of India. While Nehru established the nation state the chapter argues that the production of the film Mother India “wrote” the Indian nation as one whose modernity was founded on a timeless tradition. The myth of mother India arose much earlier in the century but has been a powerful element in developing the fiction of the ancient unity of the Indian nation. The rewriting of India in the post-Rushdie novel (as seen in successive Booker Prize winners) draws its inspiration, however implicitly, from the anti-nationalist writing of Tagore and the profoundly anarchist polemic of Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj to provide a critique of the corrupted nation. Given the consistent critique of the failures of the nation, what of the national aspirations of a people who have no hope of creating a nation state? Chapter 7 examines the specific case of the utopian vision of Aztlán among the Chicano people in the south west of the US. The situation of the Chicano utopia justifies a case study of its own because Aztlán combines, more comprehensively than any other utopian vision, the imbrication of memory, culture, location and the anticipatory consciousness of heimat: it is both utopia and utopianism. In these and other respects it conforms closely to Foucault’s concept of heterotopia. The myth of Aztlán focused the political aspirations of the Chicano people and took a prominent place in Chicano history and political identity, both powerfully represented in Chicano literature. Aztlán provides a very specific case of the political utility of utopian writing. Despite its mythic status and unreachable location, it demonstrates how utopian thinking transforms the present by focusing a Chicano “national” identity. The Caribbean has become the most vibrant example of postcolonial transformation, powerfully demonstrating how colonized writers may interpolate dominant discourses of literature and culture. Utopia and islands have a long historical connection, but what makes Caribbean islands resistant to their mythic function as utopias and at the same time a source of openness and renewal, is their location in an archipelago. Chapter 8 examines the importance of archipelagic theory in understanding the Caribbean and with a particular emphasis on Derek Walcott and Kamau Brathwaite it investigates the particular forms of creativity to which it gives rise: the perception of places as history, the principle of tidalectics and the creole cosmos, all focused on the dream of a different world.

Introduction  17

A very different group of islands, a much more expansive archipelago can be found in the Pacific. Small, apparently insignificant and scattered, these islands lie at the edge of European thought apart from their stereotyping as tropical paradises. This changed in the 1970s and 1980s when Pacific writers conceived the utopian idea of Oceania. Chapter 9 examines the significance of this concept in Pacific writing and culture. Rather than scattered islands in a great sea, Oceania established these micro nations as “a sea of islands.” Pacific writers have had to contend with the lingering prehistory of the tropical paradise myth, but like postcolonial literatures in general the imperial utopianism has been replaced by a vision of heimat and an archipelagic sense of movement and flow that has enabled these states to deal with the disruptions of colonialism. While the utopian dynamic in most colonized societies is a vision of liberation beyond the prison of colonialism, the settler colonies are very different by virtue of the prevalence of consciously utopian thinking that drove people to seek a new life on the other side of the world. In some respects Chapter 10 comes full circle to the contradictions and ambivalences of imperial ideology. Settler colonies were the manifestation of the utopian dimension of imperial expansion, and in this had to balance the contradiction between seeking a utopia and creating it. Focusing mainly on Australia and New Zealand the chapter reveals the very different motivations for settlement, the different forms of utopian thinking that emerged. Yet in all British colonies a certain trajectory occurred: the hope for a better England; a surge in nationalist optimism; the disappointment with nationalism if not the nation; visions of how things might have been different if the settler colonies had not simply transported European culture overseas.

Note 1 In private correspondence Bloch was scathing about Mannheim’s unaccredited deployment of Bloch’s views on the link between ideology and utopia.

1 UTOPIA, TRAVEL AND EMPIRE

The publication of More’s Utopia launched a steady stream of utopias, most of them operating upon the dual premises of equality and shared property. But from the seed of a colonial philosophy in Utopia an imperial utopianism in various forms grew in subsequent literature as the benefits of utopian life were seen to be available to those (not so willing) cultures brought into the embrace of an imperial Britain. If, as seems likely, Utopia was in some part motivated by the discovery by Columbus of a new unknown part of the world, it is surprising that America made so little impact on writing at the time. The three most famous texts cited as evidence of the impact of America in English literature: More’s Utopia, Spenser’s Faerie Queene, and Shakespeare’s The Tempest – make no direct mention of America at all. However, despite the tardiness of England’s attraction to the New World, we see from Utopia onward, in various literary imaginings of lost and ideal places, the development of a concept of a utopian place in uncanny conjunction with the philosophy of colonialism. More was the first English writer to use the word colonia in the Roman (i.e. imperialist) sense, and the principles of cultural and topographic reconstruction that impel King Utopus appear to predict the developmental drive of British imperialism. We can begin to think about the relationship between imperialism and utopia by considering Deleuze and Guattari’s contention that philosophical thought has truly flourished in two specific historical epochs: the Greek city state and the world market (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 98). In both cases what is especially propitious for philosophical thought is “the connection of an absolute plane of immanence with a relative social milieu that also functions through immanence” (1994: 98). In the Greek city state immanence is constructed politically, in the market it is created economically. These in turn correspond to two versions of utopia: product or blueprint utopia corresponds as a mode of thought to the politically constructed immanence of the agora, where the thrust of utopian thought is to arrive at collective agreement about “the good” or “justice”, “the ideal society” and so on. Process utopianism,

Utopia, travel and empire  19

on the other hand, corresponds to the deterritorialization and decoding characteristic of the world market, where agreeing on content is less important than identifying multiple forces of production of the new that are active in a given socio-historical milieu. The former is a matter of ideal representation, while the latter is diagnostic rather than representative. However, More’s Utopia – a “product” utopia if ever there was one – the text from which most contemporary utopian thinking derives, is written at the beginning of the period of the world market, the cusp of modernity, the moment when the agora begins to transform into the world economy. What is it, then, that produces a utopia, an ideal society, within the epoch of the world market? There must be some factor other than economics behind this phenomenon, and that other factor is the political force lying at the foundation of the world market itself – imperialism. The world market is supposedly a field of reterritorialization. But empire, in its Anglophone (and Francophone) varieties, also comes about, paradoxically, through the reterritorialization of the imperial nation. In this process, the idea of a colonial utopia, in which civilization, prosperity and amenity is established, a utopia regulated by the ordering power of a higher civilization is absolutely fundamental to imperialism’s discourse of self-justification. It is this imperialist utopianism that gives rise to the emancipatory process of postcolonial utopian thinking. So Deleuze and Guattari’s distinction of the agora and the world market is reproduced in the distinction of colonialism and its postcolonial agonist, even while imperialism serves to expand the deterritorializing character of the world market. Frederic Jameson offers an interesting analysis of the notion of Utopia appearing on the cusp of modernity, by seeing its appearance in the interstices of a fading feudalism and an emerging capitalism. Using the semiology of Louis Marin’s Utopiques: Jeux d’espaces Jameson suggests that one ought to look at utopian discourse as a “determinate type of praxis, rather than as a specific mode of representation” (2002: 6) whose “ultimate subject-matter … would then turn out to be its own conditions of possibility as discourse” (2002: 21). This, I think is critical in the task of separating the representation of utopia which is regularly seen as the result of illusory or wishful thinking, and the anticipatory function of utopianism, which perceives the actual possibility of a different world. Paradoxically, Utopia offers an alternative to both feudalism and capitalism, something that at the time of its writing was impossible to formulate. Marin writes: “Utopian discourse is the one form of ideological discourse that has anticipatory value of a theoretical kind: but it is a value which can only appear as such after theory itself has been elaborated, that is to say, subsequent to the emergence of material conditions for the new productive forces” (qtd. in Jameson 2002: 18). We begin to see why such praxis is eminently suited to the figurative operations of art and literature – the possibility of utopia, dwelling within anticipatory consciousness itself, lies far in advance of its representations. The paradoxical historical location of Utopia, as well as its thick overlay of contradictions, prefigure the paradoxical nature of modern imperialism itself, a

20  Utopia, travel and empire

paradox grounded in the contradictory relationship between ideology and utopia. As Bloch asserts, all ideology has a utopian element (1986: 149). In imperial thinking, as in all ideology, the belief in a “better” world, however fanciful, can only be maintained by being at some level authentic. Clearly all empires, and perhaps most particularly the contemporary US empire, display their utopian element when they manage to convince themselves that their overthrow of nations, their control of international policy and their securing of markets is conducted for the benefit of humanity. Imperialism is a classic demonstration of the realisation of a utopian dream, the legislation of which ensures its degeneration into dystopian reality. The paradox of utopia then, is not limited to the contradictions of the clash between regulation and freedom, it also emerges as a feature of what is in Bloch’s mind a fundamental contradiction of the relationship between ideology and utopia. Within a century the utopian genre had taken permanent root. Utopia emerged at a transitional period, a period in which More’s Utopia was coexistent with Machiavelli’s The Prince, written in 1513 and Luther’s Ninety Five Theses, proclaimed in 1517. This is a pivotal period for European imperialism, which we might see as the expansionist arm of modernity itself. The classical utopias that emerged in the century after More’s book were largely motivated by a sense of Christian morality, although all pursued the ideal of an equally shared material world. Tommaso Campanella’s City of the Sun (1602); Johann Andreae’s Christianopolis (1619) and Francis Bacon’s The New Atlantis (1627) were all examples of this early modern idealism that drew directly on More’s example. However, the more subtle and interesting effect of utopian thought was its gradual impact on what might be called the “pre-literature” of empire. Long before Britain even thought about an empire the dynamics of the civilizing mission, what today might be called developmentalism, were in evidence.

Imperialism, capitalism and the production of space The location of Utopia on an island performs at least two important functions. First the island balances the “product” and “process” distinction between utopias and utopianism. While the utopian society offers a blueprint, its location at a distance separated from the present by the ocean makes it a constant, if unobtainable object of desire. But second, the creation of More’s Utopia as an island (actually made separate from the mainland) is crucial to understanding the importance of the sea in the growth of capitalist imperialism. Andre Lefebvre, in The Production of Space (1974) suggests three stages in the capitalist production of space. Pre-capitalist “Absolute Space” was “made up of fragments of nature located at sites which were chosen for their intrinsic qualities (cave, mountaintop, spring, river), but whose very consecration ended up by stripping them of their natural characteristics and uniqueness” (48). Early capitalist space was “Historical space” in which “the forces of history smashed naturalness forever and upon its ruins established the space of accumulation (the accumulation of all wealth and resources …) … One ‘subject’ dominated this period: the historical town of the West, along with the countryside

Utopia, travel and empire  21

under its control” (48–49). Late capitalist space – “Abstract space” – took over from historical space and became “The dominant form of space, that of centres of wealth and power, [which] endeavours to mould the spaces it dominates (i.e. peripheral spaces), and it seeks, often by violent means, to reduce the obstacles and resistance it encounters there …” (49). Although far distant, Utopia is located in historical space, the space in which imperialism, centred on the imperial city, brings the world into history as it constructs that world space as a mercantile network. Paradoxically, the location of Utopia on an island manages to bring colonized space into history while simultaneously keeping it at a distance. While this process is fundamental to imperialism and, for example, occurs in Africa when the “pre- or non-historic” is brought into history as “primitive” dystopia, the island is brought into history as a utopia, which obscures its function as producer of commodities for capitalist consumption and underpins its lasting invention as “tropical paradise.” Islands in general and Utopia as an island reveal the supreme importance of the sea in establishing the capitalist network of historical space. But curiously, perhaps because he links space so closely to property, Lefebvre completely overlooks the significance of the ocean. The state and each of its constituent institutions call for spaces – but spaces which they can then organize according to their specific requirements; so there is no sense in which space can be treated solely as an a priori condition of those institutions and the state which presides over them. Is space a social relationship? Certainly – but one which is inherent to property relationships (especially the ownership of the earth, of land) and also closely bound up with the forces of production (which impose a form on that earth or land); here we see the polyvalence of social space, its “reality” at once formal and material. Though a product to be used, to be consumed, it is also a means of production; networks of exchange and flows of raw materials and energy fashion space and are determined by it. (1974: 85) While Lefebvre’s designation of space as both a product and a means of production is ingenious, his omission of the ocean is striking since capitalist accumulation depended so completely on the production of ocean space.1 Hegel’s famous statement in The Philosophy of Right marries the dense connections between capitalism and the ocean to a range of concomitant concepts, on which capitalism depends – risk, industry, flux, danger, destruction, and communication: The natural element for industry, animating its outward movement, is the sea. Since the passion for gain involves risk, industry though bent on gain yet lifts itself above it; instead of remaining rooted to the soil and the limited circle of civil life with its pleasures and desires, it embraces the element of flux, danger, and destruction. Further, the sea is the greatest means of

22  Utopia, travel and empire

communication, and trade by sea creates commercial connections between distant countries and so relations involving contractual rights. At the same time, commerce of this kind is the most potent instrument of culture, and through it trade acquires its significance in the history of the world. (qtd. in Cohen 2004: 75) While the sea could not be owned, the routes devised to traverse it could be policed. Hugo Grotius’s argument that a “law of the seas” could be established to guarantee the possibility of every (powerful) state to traverse the ocean as “free domain.” The fundamentally deterritorialized quality of the ocean was far too threatening for the law. To be contained, it had to be conceptualized as territory. According to Steinberg (2001: 91) this was a matter to be performed by capitalism itself, so adept in the constant dynamic of deterritorialization and reterritorialization. Islands, those territories found between the “old world” and the “new” became immensely useful in this process: “islands were the ‘territories’ that could achieve the improbable feat of territorializing the unterritorializable” (Llenin-Figueroa 2012: 179). While Utopia emerges at the beginning of the period of “historical space,” it is arguable that it performed a crucial role in the growing imperial imagination because it established the importance of islands, both imaginatively and strategically. At the very moment capitalism was producing historical space, with islands as nodes for territorializing the sea, a flood of imaginary utopias, mostly located on islands, began to emerge in the eighteenth century. It is arguable that, as distant and ambivalently historicized spaces, islands are by their very nature objects of desire, and although not all utopias are located on islands, their distance coincides with the imperial spread of European influence. James Burgh’s Cessares (1764), Thomas Spence’s Crusonia (1782), Carl Wadstrom’s Sierra Leone (1787), Wolfe Tone’s Hawaii (1790), Thomas Northmore’s Makar (1795), and Robert Southey’s Caermadoc (1799) were all utopias established in isolated regions of Africa, the Caribbean, South America, or the Pacific, with a blissful absence of moral qualms about setting up a colonial utopia on someone else’s land.

Travelling empire: paths to utopia But the flourishing of utopias in distant places, as imperialism and capitalism progressed hand in hand, reveals a fundamental reality of utopian thinking – utopia has always existed at a distance in either space or time and this distance must be traversed. As Bloch puts it: “The will to journey to the end where everything turns out well … always pervades utopian consciousness” (1986: 98). Since utopia has always emerged at the end of a journey, a journey that is in fact crucial to its allure, utopian fiction has developed a strong affinity with travel writing. Indeed, the parallels between travel writing and utopian fiction are so obvious that they sometimes seem commonplace. According to Fausett, “In narrative terms a utopia is inseparable from the imaginary voyage to it” (Fausett 1993: 9); and for Kumar “Utopia retains throughout its long history the basic form of the narrative of a

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journey” (Kumar 1991: 89). More’s Utopia might have been an unreal place but it “looked exactly like the period’s genuine travel books – complete with a map and an alphabet of the Utopian tongue” (Hulme and Youngs 2002: 3). So clearly is it written in the form of travel writing that in its day some people mistakenly presumed Utopia to be an actual place. Writing to Jerome Busleyden in 1516, Peter Giles suggests that the island must have been overlooked or recorded under a different name. In a reply to Giles More says, mischievously, that, “we forgot to ask, and [Hythlodaeus] forgot to say, in what part of the new world Utopia lies” (Houston 2010: 2). More’s delight at this mistake suggests that he was aware of the travel writing of the time. Most commentators believe that he was indebted to contemporary travel narratives and more directly, that Utopia had its foundations in the Renaissance “discovery” of the New World. In playing along with the idea that Utopia was a genuine travel narrative, More suggests that his text is a similarly untrustworthy document with an uncertain status. “The similarity of Utopia to contemporary travel writing, and the kinds of questions this raises about the text and the way in which it was read, demonstrate the richness of the relationship between utopia and travel from its genesis” (Houston 2010: 2). Utopia creates its own sub-text in the island of England, the “real” island behind the island of Utopia, the potential beneficiary of the discoveries made on the island: “As he told us of many things that were amiss in those new – discovered countries, so he reckoned up not a few things, from which patterns might be taken for correcting the errors of these nations among whom we live” (2009: 7). Such potential application becomes viable as soon as one can extract knowledge of the island by means of an agent who has travelled there and has returned: “I should never have left them [the Utopians] if it had not been to make the discovery of that new world to the Europeans” (30). The condition of an imperial traveller to islands, who always returns “home” to use the knowledge gained, is therefore one that recurs repeatedly in the discovery and creation of colonial utopias. Consequently, the dual concepts of distance and travel become critical in both the capacity of home to receive the benefits of the utopian place and simultaneously declare its sovereignty over it. Needless to say, this dynamic continues in the twentieth-century spread of tourism, where “benefits” are realized in leisure, difference, the experience of newness, and “sovereignty” is realized in the wealth that underpins travel.

Travelling to utopia Travel to utopia is long preceded by attempts to find the earthly paradise. While the earliest utopias were metaphoric islands conceived as city states – Phaeacia in Homer’s Odyssey, and Atlantis in Plato’s Republic, Timeaeus, Critias and Laws – these implied the need for travel owing to their isolation. Pseudo-Callisthenes’ Historia Alexandri magni (the Alexander Romance) written between 200–100 bc and ad 200–300 narrates the story of Alexander the Great making several painful attempts to discover paradise. The Christian Middle Ages developed a whole

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literature of the quest (Lecoq and Schaer 2000: 49–58): voyages in search of places where a new life could be found. First among these places was Jerusalem, considered the earth’s navel. Travel to the geographic Jerusalem came to replicate the essentially spiritual quest. But one of the earliest medieval utopian quests is recorded in the Navigatio of the Irish Abbott Saint Brendan and fourteen monks (Moylan 2007). The story narrates a journey by St Brendan among the magical islands near Ireland in a quest for the Promised Land of the Saints. At the end of their seven-year quest they arrive at a fog encircled island of light and fruit and precious stones. After forty days a young boy tells them to leave and promises Brendan that he will return to the island paradise upon his death. In many respects Brendan’s voyage is the prototypical utopian journey: paradise is changeless, located on an island, encountered after many adventures and much travel and is a foretaste of perfection unrevealed to most people. But his journey is paradisal rather than utopian: paradise is a vision of static perfection situated in the past while utopia is the hope for an achievable future. While elements of the encountered utopia remain, the search for paradise struggles to overcome the pull of nostalgia. In several texts the discovery of paradise is the discovery of a changeless perfection, a non-social prophetic glimpse of heaven. This is distinct from utopia which is organized around communal ownership of property, and characterized by social relations, particularly that of equality. The paradise/utopia distinction is common in postcolonial discourse where the paradise of a pre-colonial cultural perfection continues to exert its nostalgic pull while the hope for the future, despite being grounded in memory is a vital product of the literary imagination’s struggle against the idea of the nation state. But the idea of utopia as paradise retains a lingering hold in the European imagination, and remains intact in the designation of the “tropical paradise.” In the mind of Columbus, the act of discovering the New World had been prefigured in ancient prophecies and he was merely the chosen agent. “God made me the messenger of the new heaven and the new earth, of which he spoke in the Apocalypse of Saint John after having spoken of it by the mouth of Isaiah; and he showed me the spot where to find it” (Davis 2000: 96). This idea is developed by Alejo Carpentier in Explosion in a Cathedral in which the High Admiral’s initial doubts about the classical authority for paradise are overcome: “I cannot find, nor have I found, any Latin or Greek author who states categorically where the Earthly Paradise is situated in this world, nor have I seen it marked on any map” (Carpentier 2001: 246). But that was before the Gulf of Paria: “Here then at the Dragon’s Mouths, where the water turned transparent in the rising sun, the Admiral could shout his exultation aloud, having understood the meaning of the age-old struggle between the fresh water and the salt water” (246). If paradise and utopia are contrasted by the characteristics of nostalgia and hope, they are comparable in their evocation of mystery. In the history of imperial travel it is the mystery of the unknown places of Earth that proves the most magnetic attraction. While people were long aware of the Americas, the most mysterious part of the world has always been the Antipodes, the Great South Land, which,

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from the time of the Greeks had been the region of monsters and other inversions of normal life. The flourishing of utopian novels in the eighteenth century was preceded by a set of works spanning the four decades from 1668 to 1708 all dealing with the Southland in one way or another (see Fausett 1993). Such works were often announced as “philosophical novels” and usually had a preface emphasizing the truth of the story as a way around political censorship. Most of these were located in the vast unknown reaches of the Southern Hemisphere because this was still the region of greatest mystery. But perhaps more interesting is that this is the period before the emergence of the realist novel, a time when the boundary between the traveller’s tale and fiction was quite unclear, and the truth claims of fiction extend into the eighteenth century, most famously with Robinson Crusoe. The “austral theme” was pivotal to literary and intellectual history. These travel tales were a source of literary inspiration because they were never simple valuefree reports of an individual’s experience but were ideologically loaded, implicated in a collective identity and belief system. (Fausett 1993: 2) A significant feature of this ideological weight was the opportunity to critique societies that were heavily defended by censorship and punitive political control, a tendency shared with utopian fiction. The Isle of Pines, a nine-page pamphlet that appeared in London in 1668 is a striking demonstration of the space opened up for critique by the allegorical conflation of utopia and travel writing. What appeared to be an erotic fantasy, was an immediate sensation not least because it claimed to be a true account. George Pine, sailing to the South Seas in 1569 on the India Merchant as the captain’s secretary is the only male survivor of a shipwreck, along with the captain’s fourteenyear-old daughter, two young maidservants and a Negro slave girl. After some months, finding that “Idleness and Fulness of everything begot in me a desire of enjoying the women,” he proceeds to beget children and in time the women bear seven to thirteen children each before the second generation take over. At age 60 he has 565 descendants who form four tribes distributed territorially to encourage exogamy. At age 89 with 1789 descendants, he calls them together, places a written account of their history in the sons’ hands and bestows on them the name “the English Pines.” This history is the one purportedly discovered by the Dutch ship and printed by Neville. The critique of Restoration England is hinted at in the engraving from the early edition. As Fausett explains it (1993: 86–88) the wrecked ship, a royal coat of arms emblazoned on its stern, represents the ship of state, presumably Restoration England. As it strikes the new land the bowsprit breaks off, and on it escape the five who will found a new society – “appropriating in this way the phallic symbol or power principle of the old order” (88). The people who escape include three representatives of the working classes, one of the petty bourgeoisie (captain’s

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daughter) and one of the totally dispossessed (the Negress). The new state will be one of, and for, the common people. These five figures appear as archetypal figures representing the great migrations of Europe’s dispossessed, who left to form new societies in the New World. In contrast, the ship of state was an ideological vessel containing the desires of the masses in the interests of the powerful. This power is subverted by “low” individuals who escape to form a new society, and Pine, from whom every member is descended “is the archetypal modern citizen, emancipated from the old social order and its metaphysical underpinnings” (88). Despite the subversive allegory, and the erotic allure of the story, its sensational success was generated by its relation to real events in Australia, such as the shipwreck of the Batavia and stories of marooning, murder and cannibalism. “The world was avid about news of the Southland,” says Fausett (89). Thus, despite its flimsy claim to be utopian the story combines the essential elements of utopian fiction, the fantasy of a world very different from this one, the need of travel to discover it, and the critique of the present order from which its inhabitants are freed. The story also captures the attraction felt by the poor and disenfranchised to the possibilities offered by the New World. Whereas the possibilities were more likely to be realized in America at the time, the Southland stood for the permanent mystery of the unknown, an allure generated by the infinite possibilities it seemed to offer.

Coming of age in Samoa A similar dynamic operates in a text written three centuries later in Margaret Mead’s examination of adolescent life in Samoa. While this text is neither imperialist nor strictly utopian, it provides a romantic view of a paradisal, “uncomplicated” society and reports on a social organization from which Western attitudes to adolescence might putatively learn. In this respect it mirrors the function of utopia in displaying benefits that the traveller might take back home, benefits enhanced by the fact that utopia lies at a distance, requires travel and, above all, is located on an island. Like many imperial designations of “utopia,” Coming of Age in Samoa sees the tropical island as a natural paradise, suggesting not only that the text follows a centuries-old tradition of utopian thought, but also that the “scientific” observation of the society cannot extricate itself from the paradisal discourse in which such islands are located. The book opens with a description of dawn on the island: The life of the day begins at dawn, or if the moon has shown until daylight, the shouts of the young men may be heard before dawn from the hillside. Uneasy in the night, populous with ghosts, they shout lustily to one another as they hasten with their work. As the dawn begins to fall among the soft brown roofs and the slender palm trees stand out against a colourless, gleaming sea, lovers slip home from trysts beneath the palm trees or in the shadow of beached canoes, that the light may find each sleeper in his appointed place. Cocks crow, negligently, and a shrill-voiced bird cries from

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the breadfruit trees. The insistent roar of the reef seems muted to an undertone for the sounds of the waking village. (1928: 12) This romantic description relies almost totally on the major characteristics of the tropical paradise discourse: coast, sea, palm trees, background roar of the reef contrasted with the quiet of the village. But some time later the description of dusk recasts the quietness as deadness: “The village is dazzling and dead; any sound seems oddly loud and out of place. Words have to cut through the solid heat slowly. And then the sun gradually sinks over the sea” (14). The sea is colourless, the cocks are negligent, the ocean roar muted. At the end of the day, the village is dead although dazzling, and language travels slowly in the heat of the island’s climate – “the slower pace dictated by the climate …” (154). In a word, paradise is “sleepy,” slow moving, uncomplicated, and being an island, provides a laboratory with a fewer number of variables than can be found in “more complex societies” (7–8). Invariably the utopia to which Europeans travelled was a natural paradise, the very imagery suggesting quietness and relaxation, an escape from the complexity of the metropolis. In Mead’s case the simplicity is the source of an easily observed fabric of social relations, specifically the relations surrounding adolescent sexuality, an example from which Western societies might benefit. As such the tropical island is an object of nature in contrast to the culture of the traveller/anthropologist. The fundamental principle of colonialism is that the colonial utopia is not a natural paradise but must be made and in that making civilization will transform nature into culture. Distance is equally important for this task, for the colony is as much a social laboratory as Margaret Mead’s island.

Creating a colonial utopia Where the search to establish imperial utopias is concerned, the distinction between finding a utopia and creating one is not always clear-cut. Both North and South America were the locus of descriptions of the earthly paradise and the place where the millennium might come – but only after the conversion of the Indians (that is, nature acculturated by religion). Columbus shared the early assumption that the New World might offer the promise of Revelation of a New Heaven and a New Earth. But, as Peter Hulme explains, this idea competed with another one – that he might find instead a primitive and uncivilized world. On hearing that the occupants of a nearby island had one eye in the middle of their head and ate people, the “Canibales” became the embodiment of savagery, the extreme Other of civilized society (Hulme 1986: 16–17). The New World was subsequently downgraded from its romantically imagined exoticism, to become a place that needed to be subdued, either by rapacious kleptomania or civilizing mission, or both. Although the discourse of noble savage vs. primitive continues to the present day, this moment marks the symbolic juncture between the discovery of utopia and the need to create it with the technology of civilization.

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The settler colony utopias established by the British in the nineteenth century were based on the explicit desire to create a better England. This very often involved some considerable reconstruction of place, as we find in this early letter from New Zealand: When Christchurch has grown to a pretty town, when the young oak of England stands by the side of the giant trees indigenous to New Zealand, when the avenues to houses are lined by the graceful and beautiful shrubs, when the green grass of England is sprouting in her meadows, fenced by hawthorn hedges, when daisies and butter-cups flower over the land, when the timid hare springs across the field, and the coveys of partridges break from cover, and the sun of heaven shines brightly through the pure atmosphere, tempered by breezes from the Pacific and the Alpine shore, then there will be but one thing wanting to make New Zealand the Eden of the world – the charm of age, the vestiges of the past, the spot endeared by old associations and traditions. (qtd. Sargent 2001: 4) Such a bucolic picture could only eventuate with the introduction of destructive plants and animals and the general agricultural reshaping of the land, not to mention the expulsion of the indigenous human occupants. This attitude to the creation of utopia has a very long prehistory. In 1515, some twenty-two years after Columbus landed in the Caribbean, but still centuries before the establishment of a British Empire, Thomas More unveiled the ideology of colonial, if not imperial thinking, lying deep within the English psyche. King Utopus whose name as conqueror the island beareth (but before his time it was called Abraxa) which also brought the rude and wild people to that excellent perfection in all good fashions, humanity, and civil gentleness, wherein they now go beyond all the people of the world, even at his first arriving and entering upon the land, forthwith obtaining the victory, caused fifteen miles of space of uplandish ground, where the sea had no passage, to be cut and digged up. (2009: 50) This, in fact, is the colonial process in microcosm: the land was conquered; its name was changed; the indigenous inhabitants were “civilized”; what was previously “wasteland” was cultivated; and the land was physically reconstructed. Here we see the importance of the reconstruction of place, both physically and discursively, in the imperial utopian project. Reading the story of this ideal place we encounter a deep repository of attitudes that form the very soil of what would come to be seen as colonial thinking. Questions about how serious More was in proposing the utopian model become irrelevant to this topic since the book is infused with deeply ingrained views of social and political behaviour. At one level,

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even if it is the level of ideology, or illusion, the colonial process, as the local enactment of imperialism, is utopian in principle. But reading the deep contradictions in Utopia we discover that in terms of its attitudes and its deployment of power and control, colonies may be very similar to More’s model island.2 Above all, force is necessary for the establishment of a civilized society; land must be cultivated and reconstructed before it can be regarded as properly colonized; and the seal of this is the renaming of colonial space. One of the key utopian attitudes to the question of land is the repudiation of those people whose land is not tilled and rendered fruitful, a common agricultural prejudice of imperial nations. But in Utopia this emerges from a philanthropic source: More’s insistence upon the necessity of cultivation arose from the exploitative nature of the “enclosure movement,” which transformed arable land into private pastures, creating an impoverished, landless working class. Hythloday’s complaint was that enclosure steals peasants’ livelihoods while creating an oligopoly that raises the price of bread and wool. In short, he claims that English society is implicitly engaged “manufacturing thieves and then blaming them for being thieves.” Consequently, Utopia insists that land be utilized. Nearly two centuries later, in The Second Treatise of Government (1690), John Locke extends this perception of property considerably, for the key to property is enclosure, ideally, that which one man can till in a day (1690: 330). Ironically, property, that most rigid of colonial markers emerges from the almost moral compulsion (and in its time politically progressive idea) that land must be cultivated. If any of their neighbours choose not to cultivate the ground, or maintain ground cultivated by the Utopians, they are promptly invaded: For they count this the most just cause of war, when any people holdeth a piece of ground void and vacant, to no good nor profitable use, keeping other from the use and possession of it, which notwithstanding by the law of nature ought thereof to be nourished and relieved. (More 2009: 63) It is cruelly ironic that More’s initial desire to open up land for the poor, land that in Utopia is owned communally and private property abolished, should give way to the radical marginalizing of non-agricultural peoples and the inextricable linking of agriculture to property that characterized the advance of colonial occupation. This early colonial prejudice, which turns the accusation that a land is “idle and waste” into a justification for colonizing it, came in fact to be repeated time and again in the American propaganda of Renaissance England (see Mancall 2007). “Only savages,” says William Crashaw (1610), “cannot plow, till, plant nor set” (qtd. Knapp 1991: 231). The agricultural imperative gathered pace in the nineteenth century as the British sort to justify colonial incursions. For the social reformer Thomas Fowell Buxton only the Bible and the plough could lead Africa on to a higher level of existence: for “plough” meant agriculture, and agriculture meant property, and property meant civilization (Baumgart 1982: 14). In 1856 Charles

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Kingsley wrote: “Each people should either develop the capabilities of their own country, or make room for those who will develop them. If they accept that duty, they have their reward in the renovation of blood, which commerce, and its companion, colonization, are certain to bring” (1860, vol. 2: 21–22). A tract by the Frenchman Marc Lescarbot, which Hakluyt had translated for the new Virginian venture (1609), emphasizes the need for hard work, arguing that “our felicity consisteth not in mines, specially of gold and silver, the which serve for nothing in the tillage of the ground nor to handicrafts’ use” (Lescarbot 1928: 14–15). “A Colony,” writes the anonymous author of the Virginia Company’s True Declaration (1610), “is therefore denominated, because they should be Coloni, the tillers of the earth, and stewards of fertility” (36). The unspoken condemnation of Spanish imperialism, with its obsession with plundering gold and silver, is patent. But the issue is not simply a matter of the Protestant work ethic. The clamour for gold proved disastrous in Virginia. As Captain John Smith recounts, the Virginian settlers had become so “distracted” by gold (1986: 264) that they neglected the more fundamental needs of a colonial livelihood for an obsession with the precious metal. The utopian concern for proper management of the land thus took shape in the British mind as an issue of responsibility, on the one hand, and as a counterweight to the Spanish history of extracting the greatest amount of gold for the smallest cost, on the other. But estimable as this philosophy may have seemed, it came, by the nineteenth century to attain the force of a moral justification for the occupation, colonization, and exploitation, of an enormous area of the world’s land. The marginalization of hunter-gatherer societies, for instance, had an even greater and more far reaching impact than the Spanish devastation of the Americas. Francois Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532–52) reveals how very soon after More’s Utopia the civilizing mission arose to justify imperial expansion. Having subdued the land of the intractable Dipsodes by populating it with a colony of Utopians, Rabelais’s exuberant giant reflects that “the manner of preserving and retaining Countries newly Conquered in Obedience, is not … pillage, plunder, force, spoil, trouble, oppress, vex, disquiet, ruine and destroy the People,” but in the manner of Osiris, Alexander and Hercules, to relieve them from “monstrous Oppressions, Exactions and tyrannies … governing them with Discretion, maintaining them in Equity and Justice, instructing them with seasonable Policies and wholsom Laws” (Rabelais 1994: 302–303). This sets out the principles by which a utopia might be created out of a “primitive” culture and perhaps only in this way can the colonists come to terms with the ambivalence of their invasion. As we saw in the imbrication of ideology and utopia, imperial expansion is always accompanied by utopian motives. Balasopoulos sees this as a chiasmus in which “the presence of utopian elements within expansionist ideology [are] dialectically linked to the corresponding persistence of expansionist ideological elements within utopian fantasy” (2004: 11). In the British Empire, particularly the settler colonies, the expansionist rhetoric was couched in distinctly racial tones, as commentators regularly

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explained the motive for expansion in terms of the obligation of the white races to “lesser breeds without the law” (Kipling 1897: 328–329). This habit was even more extreme in the US, where senator Albert J. Beveridge puts it unequivocally at the turn of the century: God has not been preparing the English-speaking and Teutonic peoples for a thousand years for nothing but vain and idle self-contemplation and selfadmiration. No. He made us master organisers of the world to establish system where chaos reigned. He has given us the spirit of progress to overwhelm the forces of reaction throughout the earth. He has made us adept in government that we may administer government among savage and senile peoples. Were it not for such a force as this the world would relapse into barbarism and night. And of all our race He has marked the American people as His chosen nation to finally lead in the redemption of the world. (qtd. Sargent 2007: 95) Having sealed its colonial credentials with the Spanish–American war of 1898 and the Philippine war of 1899 the US was ready to take over the mantle of empire from Britain. Teddy Roosevelt’s speech on the eve of his election to the Presidency in 1901 suggests that this is a defining period in the movement of imperialism from Britain to the US: It is our duty toward the people living in barbarism to see that they are freed from their chains … and we can free them only by destroying barbarism itself. Exactly as it is the duty of a civilized power to scrupulously respect the rights of weaker civilized power […] so it is its duty to put down savagery and barbarism. (Beale 1956: 32, 34) This speech, which perhaps marks the apex of classical imperialism and the beginning of the US’s serious appropriation of the concept as a policy, confirms the effortless way in which the ideology of imperialism, with its huge contradiction of nurture and exploitation, transfers into the twentieth-century global economy.

Robinson Crusoe The ambivalent relationship between discovering and creating a utopia remains a central feature of the European imperial advance across the world and continues in the conflicting representations of colonies as both civilizing and in some ways a more natural state than the metropolis. While stories such as The Isle of Pines begin to suggest the very real hope that drove masses from Europe to the New World, the utopian attraction of that world, and the opportunity to build a new society based on freedom and equality meant the decimation of the indigenous populations. This ambivalence is established more clearly in Robinson Crusoe. The

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novel marks the coincidence between the Puritan Revolution, the rise of a mercantile middle class and the release of greater leisure time in that class for the pursuit of activities such as reading. In this respect it is a significant milestone in the history of English literature. But it may be an even greater milestone in the history of British colonial thought. Robinson Crusoe is an extraordinary text by virtue of the comprehensive way in which it traverses the perceptions and assumptions of imperial discourse and outlines in elaborate detail the various strategies of the colonial enterprise. The wayward and wilful Crusoe, a runaway prodigal son (Defoe 1994: 6) is wrecked on a desert island and discovers both ethical and spiritual redemption occasioned by the necessity to rely on his own resourcefulness; by the escape into a world freed from reliance on money and property; and by religious conversion occasioned by his solitude, a chance to come face to face with his maker. In each case, redemption is occasioned by the opportunity for a new beginning in a new, unoccupied and thus malleable place. The island is a tabula rasa, an unsullied natural wilderness that nevertheless requires, even for the barest level of survival, the importation of whatever goods Crusoe can retrieve. The recognition of having nothing and having to start from scratch remains crucial in the utopian character of colonial thinking. Having nothing, Defoe appears to be saying, except the deep fund of European resourcefulness and the civilized character of British manhood! But more pertinently, it is a moment when the transformative power of his civilization’s technology becomes the means that, paradoxically, makes the utopia of the “natural man” possible. Significantly, although Friday is not indigenous, but also a visitor to the island, he is promptly enslaved, an extension of the “civilizing” function of colonial settlement. Colonial utopias rely, then, on a number of paradoxes: the escape from the corrupting influence of civilized life but the need for the technology (and economy) of civilization to make the “natural” life possible; the rejection of the corrupting influence of money and possessions but their replacement with the equally corrupting sense of kingship and ownership of the island; the sense that the “colonized” place offers the chance for a new beginning but the determination to refashion that new space into a familiar place with the technology of modernity; the possibility of spiritual redemption through nature but a deep fear of uncivilized “savages” who inhabit nature; and the overarching contradiction of travel and settlement; process and production. The attractions of the “natural” state will always exert a romantic pull for the colonist, but the everyday business of life requires tools and materials as well as ingenuity. This tension is a fundamental feature of the colonial mentality, which wants to “begin anew” without surrendering the privileges of modern life. Whatever attractions the simple life might hold, he cannot abide the thought of “meer savagery,” a feeling reflected in his attitude to nakedness, not only because clothes offer protection but because clothes separate him from the naked savages (Defoe 1994: 98).

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Surveillance and colonial mastery The need for the technological intervention into nature is not the only contradiction of this newly freed state. Even more paradoxical in Crusoe’s colonial utopia is the fact that while money, property and the lust for material possessions have disappeared, the sense of ownership that rises to take its place, a sense of possession arising from the mastery of place, is a far more ominous eventuality that I was King and Lord of this Country indefeasibly, and had a Right of Possession; and if I could convey it, I might have it in Inheritance, as compleatly as any Lord of a Manor in England. (73) While the absence of competitors makes him King, needless to say, the idea of the island “belonging” to any other inhabitants doesn’t enter his head. This sense of possession comes to Crusoe after he climbs to a ridge of hills, and looks out upon a flourishing and verdant country “like a planted Garden” (73) laid out before him. One of the most powerful strategies of imperial dominance is that of surveillance, because it implies a viewer with an elevated vantage point, it suggests the power to process and understand that which is seen, and it objectifies, and interpellates the colonized subject, and in this case, the colonized place, in a way that fixes its identity in relation to the surveyor. Crusoe’s simple act of looking out over a verdant valley is metonymic of the mastery invoked by imperial surveillance and it is concentrated in the fact that this utopia-to-be is an island.

Writing, reading and the control of space and time Among the materials Crusoe rescued from the ship were pens, paper and books that seemed less important than the more functional items at first, but they quickly proved to be the most important tools in his occupation of the island, as they are, indeed, in the colonizing process itself. The three classes of implements he brings with him – writing implements, navigation instruments and books – represent three fundamental modes of control over the modern world. In one respect each of these classes of implements is concerned with representation and it is the refashioning of colonial space and time through representation that has a far greater impact than the material reconstruction, agriculture and invention that seems to best characterize Crusoe’s occupation. Since there is no one to whom to write, writing is more than a form of communication, it is ontological for Crusoe in the sense that it steadies his sense of control over events and allows his reason to master his despondency (48). Crusoe’s introduction of writing onto the island enacts one of the most important technologies, if not the most important technology of control in colonial occupation. For writing, as manifested in Crusoe’s journal, transcribes within the novel the process of ordering time through historical discourse (52). Crusoe begins

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a journal, thereby demonstrating the way in which Imperial Europe maintained control over the representation of world time. The journal narrativizes time, and the narrative of events that affect Crusoe directly become the history of the island, because they are written as such. It is precisely in this way that the history of the world becomes an extension of the history of Europe. Crusoe’s control of time becomes, in effect, the control of space when he logs the seasons of the year. “I found now That the Seasons of the Year might generally be divided, not into Summer and Winter as in Europe, but into the Rainy Season and the Dry Seasons” (78). He constructs a table of seasons, which becomes a model for the method of discourse in ordering space and time, by structuring the year in relation to the European climate. Though the seasons on the island are very strange to him, he can achieve mastery by recording (in writing) their relation to European space and time.

The dangers of savages Crusoe’s gradual belief that he has attained a state of “providential selfsufficiency,” which mirrors the state of the noble savage, contrasts radically with his growing fear of actual “savages.” Indeed, the fear of savages is one of the stock prejudices of the traveller. Very early in the journey, well before the shipwreck, Crusoe eludes his enemies by feigning to go towards the Barbarian coast where “whole nations of Negroes were to surround us with their Canoes, and destroy us; where we could ne’er once go on Shore but we should be devour’d by savage Beasts, or more merciless Savages of human kind” (19). In an uncanny foreshadowing of Heart of Darkness, Crusoe heads at one stage to the African shore where they heard dreadful noises “Barking, Howling of Wild Creatures” (20). He declares it impossible to describe the horrible noises, which appear to be of wild animals. Crusoe’s encounter with Friday is inflected with the full gamut of colonial attitudes and prejudices to the native other. His relationship with the “Native” has been to some the central aspect of the novel because it so manifestly embodies the power relationship between colonizer and colonized. There is much more in the novel than this relationship but it does display, both clearly and comprehensively, the power relationship at the heart of colonialism. The assumption of sovereignty by Crusoe, the amazement that Friday should prove to be a genuine human companion, the ways in which Friday characterizes the many conflicting stereotypes of the savage, make the relationship with Crusoe a revealing view of the European confusion about colonized natives. Interestingly, the contradiction between discovering and creating a utopia is embodied in Friday, who, as noble savage, a submissive and teachable child, is also a cannibal, a potentially dangerous savage, and it is in the tension between cannibalism and infantilism that the paradox of colonial discourse is stretched to breaking point. Some time after Crusoe saves Friday from being killed and eaten he is appalled to discover Friday’s own base instincts:

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I found Friday had still a hankering Stomach after some of the Flesh, and was still a Cannibal in his Nature; but I discovered so much Abhorrence at the very thought of it … I had by some means let him know, that I would kill him if he offer’d it. (150) Crusoe feels justified in killing Friday rather than allow him to indulge in an act that breaches the bounds of civilized humanity. So at this point abjection (cannibalism) and death are contiguous in the mind of the colonist. There is a constant slippage between abjection and filiation; that is why Kipling can refer to the native in “The White Man’s Burden” as “half devil and half child” (1899: 323). But most importantly, this process shows that rather than a site of formation, the child is, in imperial rhetoric, already the site of transformation as it slips between abjection and subjectivity. This is critical to postcolonial interventions into the trope as writers rewrite the Crusoe story as a fundamental colonial myth.

Robinsonades In one sense the ambivalence of colonial utopias is grounded in the confusion between paradise and utopia, a confusion that comes to characterize the extensive genre of Robinsonades. In The Swiss Family Robinson this distinction occurs when the father compares their situation with that of Adam and Eve when driven out of the garden: we are here in this desert island, in just such a situation as that of our first parents when they were driven out of the garden of Eden; it was still in their power to enjoy happiness in the fertile land to which God permitted them to live; and this happiness was to proceed from their obedience, from the work of their hands and the sweat of their brow. (Wyss 1966: 64) The fascinating distinction between paradise and utopia focuses on the issue of communal equality and sharing. The “desert island” is at the same time a “tropical paradise” and this ambiguity seems to lie at the heart of colonial and imperial utopianism. They are a chosen people as were the children of Israel, their occupation of the island providentially sanctioned. Pastor Wyss’s invocation of obedience and hard work inserts a clearly Lutheran work ethic. But it is a desert island outside paradise, and the significant feature of the father’s admonition is the idea that the move from paradise to utopia is a function not of divine ordination as of social determination. This very clear gesture of the utopian benefits of communality points to the assumption of the capacity of colonial occupiers to transform far-flung desert islands, and hence colonies, into utopian societies. ***

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The dual processes of discovering and creating imperial utopias demonstrate the ambiguity of utopia and it is clear that imperial utopianism is the prehistory against which postcolonial utopianism has established itself. Most interesting, perhaps, imperial utopias demonstrated the paradoxical function of the utopian imagination within its apparent opposite – ideology. Imperial ideology was deeply conflicted between utopian visions of the exotic East on one hand and the equally utopian belief in the capacity of the civilizing mission to create reflections of European civil government on the other. Thus imperial utopias are contradictory because their vision of change works entirely to sustain the present state of imperial power, which as Mannheim points out (1966: 173), is the function of ideology. While utopias existed as islands in the far distance, thus creating a close analogy with travel writing, the actual impact of imperial expansion was to attempt to create copies of the imperial society, a disastrous process from which postcolonial utopias emerged as a promise of freedom.

Notes 1 This continues to the present day. Patricia Yaeger reminds us: “our era’s airborne imaginary should not mask the real materiality on which late capitalism is based: Earth’s commerce still depends on oceans. Ninety percent of the world’s goods (most of what we eat or type on or wear) still travels in container ships” (2010: 523). 2 Foucault suggests that if the role of the colony is to create a space “that is other, another real space, as perfect, as meticulous, as well arranged as ours is messy, ill constructed, and jumbled” (1967: 27), then that would be a heterotopia in terms of its relation to all other space.

2 HEIMAT, ANTICIPATION AND POSTCOLONIAL LITERATURES

While Europe looked for utopias located in the shimmering distance the distinctive feature of postcolonial utopias was the dominance of utopianism over utopia, because while utopias provided particular models of perfection on which the imagination might contrast the social conditions of the present at leisure, postcolonial hope for the future is both more urgent and more socially integral. Certainly individual utopias occur from time to time in the literature, and the utopian impulse is prominent in the settler colonies, where several utopian communities were established, but the predominant dynamic is the belief in the possibility of social change. Even in pre-independence literature where the utopia of the independent nation is conceived, the dominant ethos is freedom and selfrealization. For this development art and literature become crucial: future thinking in postcolonial societies reveals itself most clearly in the ways in which art, literature, music and other cultural productions project a sense of the possible, particularly the possibility of a transformed postcolonial society. Indeed, it is not the representation of utopia that matters but the declaration of possibility. It is by narrative, by the stories we tell, that we have a world, and the stories we live by determine the future. By utopian thinking, utopian forms, utopian narrative, we may have a conception of a radically changeable world.

The utopian function of art and literature Imagination forms the basis of the utopian in literature and the process of imagining is the key to the utopian in postcolonial transformation. The idea that literature has a utopian function is nevertheless open to confusion: it does not mean that literary works themselves are always utopian, nor even necessarily hopeful, but rather that the imaging of a different world in literature is the most consistent expression of the anticipatory consciousness that characterizes future thinking. Consequently,

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the act of imagining is crucial to the utopian in postcolonial resistance. Utopia is a vision of possibility that effects the transformation of social life, an imagined future that can be at once oppositional and visionary, a state of affairs that explains the importance of the literary and other creative arts in postcolonial representation. Tanzanian Sam Raiti Mtamba puts it somewhat hyperbolically in his story “The Pound of Flesh”: only art and literature could unlock the mysteries of life. Before men of letters there was nothing either cabalistic or magical. It was the open sesame, the sea into which everything flowed, the sea from which everything had its source and succour. (2011: 167) This is the euphoric outpouring of a man who wants to be a writer. Nigerian Chris Abani puts it more temperately in a talk on the stories of Africa: What we know about how to be who we are comes from stories. It comes from the novels, the movies, the fashion magazines. It comes from popular culture. In other words it’s the agents of our imagination who really shape who we are. (2007a) The utopian imagination has the capacity to shape who we are by anticipating what we might become. For Ernst Bloch the fact that the raison d’être of art and literature is the imaging of a different world is the source of their utopian function – what he calls their vorschein or “anticipatory illumination.” The anticipatory illumination is the revelation of the “possibilities for rearranging social and political relations to produce Heimat,” Bloch’s word for the home that we have all sensed but have never experienced or known. “It is Heimat as utopia … that determines the truth content of a work of art” (Zipes 1989: xxxiii). Heimat becomes the utopian form in postcolonial writing that replaces the promise of nation. It may lie in the future but the promise of heimat transforms the present. Heimat is a very contentious term cunningly and ironically deployed by Bloch. The Principle of Hope was written between 1938 and 1947, during the time when the Nazis were deploying the term to identify the German nation as an Aryan homeland. Heimat is a term dense with historical controversy and cultural baggage, a fact of which the Jewish Marxist philosopher, Ernst Bloch, must certainly have been aware. But he makes a distinction between the political soil of the motherland, and the utopian aura of the heimat, which exists far beyond the conceptual and metaphoric boundaries of the nation. Indian poet Meena Alexander explains something of the ambivalence of heimat. When travelling to join her father, seconded to the Sudan from India after the Bandung conference, she turned five aboard ship:

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I still think that birthday on the deep waters of the Indian Ocean has marked me in ways utterly beyond my ken. It has left me with the sense that home is always a little bit beyond the realm of the possible, and that a real place in which to be, though continually longed for can never be reached. It stands brightly lit at the edge of vanishing. (2009: 2) While Alexander appears to conform to the discourse of loss that has become a staple of diaspora theory, home is in fact always on the horizon, always up ahead. But at the same time poetry and place are bound up together. “If poetry is the music of survival,” she says, “place is the instrument on which that music is played, the gourd, the strings, the fret” (2009: 4). When home becomes detached from place, the implication is that the music of poetry flourishes by producing different worlds – worlds that offer the horizon of the future, the horizon of heimat. As the home we have sensed but never experienced, heimat remains a constant beacon for the spirit of liberation even after the goals of colonial independence appear to have been achieved. For Bloch, What is envisioned as home (Heimat) in childhood is in actuality the goal of the upright gait toward which human beings strive as they seek to overcome exploitation, humiliation, oppression and disillusionment. The individual cannot attain such a goal, which is only possible as a collective enterprise. Yet the measure of the individual’s ethical backbone can be determined by his or her struggle to stand and walk upright and contribute to the collective goal. (Zipes 1989: xxvii) The significance of the phrase “the upright gait” towards which human beings strive is that it identifies heimat as the stimulus of a process rather than an identifiable goal. Indeed, the individual may not be able to attain such a goal, but the collective enterprise, the sharing of the goal by writers and readers, may be achieved in art and literature. Bloch was so adamant about the utopian power of art and literature that it led him to the very challenging, even startling assertion that aesthetic representation produces an object “more achieved, more thoroughly formed, more essential than the immediate-sensory or immediate-historical occurrence of this Object” (1986: 214). The Australian Aboriginal poet Lionel Fogarty shows how the vision of heimat operates in the poetic imagination in his poem “Farewell Reverberated Vault of Detentions”: Today up home my people are indeedly beautifully smiling for the devil’s sweeten words are gone. Today my people are quenching the waters of rivers without grog

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Today my people are eating delicious rare food of long ago. Tonight a fire is made round for a dance of leisuring enjoyment where no violence fights stirs. Certainly my people are god given A birthright of wise men and women Our country is still our Motherland Our desires ain’t dying in pitifully lusting over contempt and condition Tonight my peoples sleep Without a tang of fear No paralysed minds No numbed bodies No pierced hearts hurt The screams of madness ends. … Today my people feel precious as human beings burials and birth Mankind demands imperative love for all, And my people never wants to escalating barbarous century. For now Today up home they free, Tonight they learn to fight consciences. (Fogarty 1996: 266) This powerful poem offers an almost perfect expression of the utopian. The searing irony critiques the present situation of Aboriginal people with a vision of what might be, distinguished by its radical difference from the present and grounded in the past as they eat “delicious rare food of long ago.” Fogarty’s ironically imagined hope, expressed as much in terms of recovery and critique of the present as in terms of possibility, concerns his people conceived as a group connected to the earth, survivors of devastation, a people in country, a people at home. This home is Bloch’s heimat – a home beyond the nation, a home produced by the creative imagination, one that exists beyond the boundaries of the political reality in which Aboriginal people find themselves. The poem demonstrates how deeply the utopian is grounded in critique, which in turn drives the hope for the future. Utopian critique, then, arises from possibility. It is through the novum – the idea of the new – that we orient ourselves and reshape questions about the nature of human existence in concrete ways so that we can see more clearly the direction of utopia. It is this spirit that lies at the heart of postcolonial liberation. But this, in turn, is built upon a profound paradox, which underlies all our encounters with the genre: all achieved utopias are degenerate, indeed, become dystopias, yet without utopianism, without the spirit of hope, liberation is not possible.

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The creative imagination is ideally placed to anticipate possibilities beyond the present reality. As Gert Ueding puts it “Literature is utopia in the very wide sense of course that it is not identical with the reality that faces us as nature and society. It is utopia in the very precise sense that its connection to this reality is like that of fulfilment to lack” (1978: 7). When literature draws away from reality it does this intentionally to test human possibilities, to conserve human demands for happiness and playfully to anticipate what in reality has not at all been produced but what dreams and religious or profane wish-images of humans are full of. On this definition, literary activity becomes a special form of dream work. (1978: 10) But there is another way in which creative acts gesture toward the future. For, as cultural theorist Tony Bennett points out, if “production” is completed only with “consumption” then so far as literary texts are concerned, their production is never completed. They are endlessly re-produced, endlessly remade with different political consequences and effects (Bennett 1979: 136). But this is surely not only the case for literary works alone. Whenever the creative work is engaged, it is reproduced in the context of another person, place and time. Thus, despite Bruno Latour’s assertion that the created work, in contrast to criticism, “is all about immanence” (2010: 181), it is on the contrary, because it is never finished, all about imminence. The created work remains alive and constantly on the threshold of a future world. In this way created works always offer an imminent rearrangement of social and political relations in ways that critique the present. Perhaps the most telling example of utopian imminence occurs in literature that is manifestly pessimistic, writing that seems to reject hope, and a perfect example is Australian poet Lee Cataldi’s “what lies ahead”: it is not for the poet to have faith that is for the preacher it is not for the poet to have hope that is for the doctor the poet can only wring her hands like Cassandra this is how it will be my bladder is not real good and then the man next to me is dead our children

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have vomited they bled they have wept all over each other packed into this one remaining cattle truck on their way to the future (1998: 43)

From what place does this poem speak? How does it frame human possibility? On the face of it we could find no more anti-utopian a poem, for it rejects both faith and hope as the province of the preacher and the doctor, the poet left “wringing her hands.” Yet the vorschein of this poem lies in its perception of human suffering and the suggested injustices that launch our children “packed into this one remaining cattle truck/on their way to the future.” The poem speaks from a no-place in a way that forces us to “rethink the nature of our social life,” as Ricoeur says (1986: 16). What redeems it from simple despair is the affective response to human suffering and abjection it generates. Affect thus becomes the medium of critique. With critique comes the perception that the world could be different. The poem gestures towards a “fulfilment” contrasted to, and evoked by, this “lack” (Ueding 1978: 7). And in that perception of a different world is grounded the very hope that is ostensibly dismissed in the poem. What we recognise in this poem is that hope and critique are necessarily united to produce what Bloch calls “concrete utopia,” that is, a realizable future. The very exposure of the suffering of the world is the anticipatory illumination of a better world. For him, “the unfinished nature of reality locates concrete utopia as a possible future within the real; and while it may be anticipated as a subjective experience, it also has objective status” (Levitas 1990: 89). This forms the basis of the view of utopia held by Gordin et al., who see utopias and dystopias not as genres or distinct cultural products and not even merely as ways of imagining the future (or the past), but as “concrete practices through which historically situated actors seek to reimagine their present and transform it into a plausible future” (2010: 2). While this seems to dismiss literary genres, we can on the contrary see art and literature as concrete practices imbued with a vision of possibility. Bloch’s enthusiasm for the aesthetic work lies in its capacity to transcend the ideological basis from which it arises, to transcend the false consciousness of class ideology. For him, things that have cultural value express more than the goal of one age or class, they “speak of the future,” Therefore great achievements in the superstructure no longer belong completely to their age. The Parthenon cannot be written off just because it was built by a slaveholding society. Its social mission at the time is no longer the important thing. What interests us now is its meaning for later generations living under a changed general situation. (Landmann 1975: 183–184) This is true for all kinds of aesthetic achievements: the Acropolis belongs to a slaveowning society, Strasbourg cathedral to feudal society, yet they carry the full

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weight of human aspiration, “in contrast to the base, in contrast to the conditions of production of the time no matter how progressive they may have been” (Bloch 1986: 155). In the same way the postcolonial text rises above the immediate urgency of political resistance. Whether Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Ngugi’s The Wizard of the Crow, Neto’s Sacred Hope, Wright’s Carpentaria or Walcott’s “The Schooner Flight,” the text conceived in a situation of oppression and resistance rises above the particulars of the struggle to provide a vision of the possible.

The horizon of the work But there is something deeper than art’s transcendence of its ideological base, something in the formation of the artwork itself that generates human aspiration. This capacity for realizing possibility is captured in Australian novelist David Malouf’s Harland’s Half Acre when the budding artist Frank Harland discovers the magic of the white page totally transformed by a single line. Whiteness. That alone was enough to take your breath away. It was the source of all possibility, an infinity of objects and occasions. Unsteadily, but with a steady hand, he intervened, he acted; and with his eye on the real object he was about to capture, made a line – one clear stroke, slightly curved. The page was transformed … (1984: 29) This captures the magical possibilities for transformation offered by art, and indeed, all forms of creativity, beginning with a simple line on a white page. Frank’s subsequent experience of the power of creation is as clear a vision of utopian possibility as anything in literature. The page and his mind could become one, and what they contained was the infinite plenitude of things that was Creation, in which all things were equal; their equality, and the possibility of their springing into immediate existence, guaranteed by his recognition of them and by the space he had prepared and would let them fill. (30) This is the essence of the utopian in creative work – not just its capacity for imagining different worlds, but the fact that its very existence is grounded on possibility, guaranteed by the space the artist prepares in silence to let the objects fill. In this way the vorschein of created works intimates the horizon of the future. While the horizon “circumscribes” the limit of our view of the earth, it bisects our field of vision, providing us with a permanent sign of spatial possibility. Language is familiar with this horizon which surrounds us and which can be very near or very

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far. The horizon became a key concept in phenomenology when it first appeared in Husserl’s Ideen (1913), referring to the circumference in which all things, real and imaginable are bound to appear “spread out in space endlessly, and in time becoming and become, without end” (101). For Husserl the horizon is the principle by which both meaning and its open possibilities appear to us. Crucially, the horizon itself is created in language. As Wittgenstein says, “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world” (1922: #5.6). But literary language, while not limitless, opens up the constant presence of the horizon to the imagination. This means that literary language operates in excess of the boundaries on which ordinary language insists; it exceeds the “limits of my world.” But it also identifies the fact that the horizon is something I normally take for granted in everyday life, and is “the ground of all praxis,” says Husserl, “not only the praxis of life but also the theoretical axis of cognition” (1973: 30). It exists as the background of all my perceptions. Any experience always has a horizon of possible experiences, and these exist submerged, rather than explicitly seen as possibilities, within the experience. Literary language, therefore, in allowing for the ubiquity of the horizon in consciousness, allows for the fact that the future is the horizon of our actions that will never be reached. Speaking of a night journey on a train towards the state border David Malouf says: “What I was hungry for was some proof that the world was as varied as I wanted it to be; that somewhere, on the far side of what I knew, difference began, and that point could be clearly recognised” (1985: 127). Of course there is no point at which difference can be recognized – difference, transformation, change are the constant horizon of our experience, unreachable but already there at the beginning. Literary language then, and indeed creativity in general, is always open to the future represented by the horizon, but the moment that future is named, it seems to disappear. Horizonality exists most powerfully in language itself. As Mr Warrender in David Malouf’s The Great World recites a verse from his own poem: Beyond never-death into ever after, being In love with what is always out of reach: The all, the ever-immortal and undying Word beyond word that breathes through mortal speech. (1990: 236) The line “in love with what is always out of reach” describes the function of literature to take us beyond that which we can reach in our rational minds. “Poetry” intimates that created moment, either in narrative or verse, when image or word captures us, however fleetingly, and slows us down long enough to receive a vision of something beyond the boundaries of our lives. In postcolonial writing these boundaries are those of time and space, the boundaries of our imagination, but they are also the boundaries of culture, the horizon of

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our way of being in the world. The “word beyond word” that breathes through mortal speech is the word that poetry is designed to speak. In David Malouf’s writing it is always a word that breathes possibility, the possibility of a different world. This possibility suggests a sacred dimension because the “word beyond word” reminds us of the Word that was in the beginning in John 1. But the sacredness lies in the wondrous idea of possibility itself, of our capacity to apprehend all that we do not know. In apparent contrast to this in “The Meaning of Existence” Les Murray offers what seems to be a statement of the inadequacy of language: Everything except language knows the meaning of existence. Trees, planets, rivers, time know nothing else. They express it moment by moment as the universe. (2002: 101) Yet the intimation of the world’s knowledge of the meaning of existence comes to us in language through which we encounter its presence. It is through language that the poet makes us aware of a form of knowledge beyond language. Language intimates the horizon of potentiality by intimating that which lies beyond language, but language also locates the horizon in objects themselves. This quality, something suggested in Murray’s poem, can be described as luminosity. Luminosity is not obviously temporal but it is the horizonal quality of objects and of language that conceives what is out of reach, both in space and time. The fascination with the luminosity of objects can be found everywhere in the literature, but some well-known examples occur in Patrick White and David Malouf. In White’s work the luminosity of objects has a sacred dimension. In Riders in the Chariot, when asked by his wife “who will save us?” Himmelfarb answers by touching the table: “God will,” he answered. “God is in this table.” In the same way Hurtle Duffield, near the end of a stellar career thinks that he had only ever conceived fragments of the whole, but “Mightn’t the Whole have been formally contained from the beginning in this square-legged, scrubbed-down, honest-toGod, but lacerated table?” (White 1961: 385). David Malouf suggests that objects lead us into the past as well as the future: It is in a changed aspect of time that we recognise them, as if the substance of it – a denseness that prevented us from looking forward or too far back – had cleared at last. We see these objects and ourselves as co-existent, in the very moment of their first stepping out into their own being and in every instant now of their long pilgrimage towards us, in which they have gathered the fingerprints of their most casual users and the ghostly but still powerful presence of the lives they served. (1986: 124)

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Tangible things, the mundane things that make up a place – whether it is a childhood home or the landscape – have a luminosity that connects past and future. The anticipatory consciousness of literary works lies not only in the horizonality of language but also in their capacity to capture the luminosity of objects. In other words, ordinary objects are radiant with intimations of the future because their horizon is the constant adumbration of possibility. This is one reason this luminosity of objects might be considered utopian. For Jean Luc Nancy (2002: 7), utopia is the excess over world, thought, sense and meaning, what Husserl would call the constant presence of the horizon. And it is this apprehension of the point at which finite beings “at their limit” touch an irreducible excess, that gives the irreducibility of mundane objects such a utopian potency.

Social dreaming Whatever a literature’s politics, the capacity to dream, and the possible worlds that are dreamt are obstinately impervious to political control because the imagination separates itself from agendas of political commitment with a deeper more liberatory politics. At a rally in support of Salman Rushdie, Ben Okri made a statement that could almost have come from Bloch’s The Principle of Hope, so steeped is it in the anticipatory power of literature: Writers are amongst other things the dream mechanism of the human race. Fiction affects us the way dreams affect us. They share the same insubstantiality. They both have the capacity to alter reality. Dreams may be purer because they are not composed of words, but when fiction has entered into us, it no longer exists as words either. We can control our fictions to some extent, but we cannot control the effects that they have on the world and we can’t wholly control our dreams. (Okri 1990: 77) The “dream mechanism of the human race” neatly concurs with Bloch’s view of the function of art and literature. For him dreams are “a stepping stone to art …” (1986: 94) and the dream launches art beyond political commitment. As Caryl Phillips puts it, whatever the commitment or the politics of the writer, his or her first commitment is to “write well.”1 Writing well means more than writing fluently, elegantly, or convincingly: it means writing in a way that realizes the full potential of the imagination. This is what launches the anticipatory consciousness of art and literature beyond the ideological environment of its production. “Literature as utopia is generally encroachment of the power of the imagination on new realities of experience” (Ueding 1978: 7). This is not, of course, to dismiss the revolutionary function of anti-colonial literature but to see this function as just the beginning of the political trajectory of postcolonial creative work. Seeing this is to more deeply understand “revolution” itself.

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We might say that not only does imagination shape who we are, the imagination helps us rethink the meaning of culture, civilization, history and identity. When it comes to utopia we might see the imagination functioning on behalf of political resistance but one of the key dimensions of the imaginative achievement, and thus the vision of possibility offered by art and literature, is the power of affect and its connection with hope. Take these lines from Ghanaian poet Kofi Anyidoho’s “Mythmaker” in The Harvest of Dreams: Though our memory of life now boils Into vapours, the old melody of hope Still clings to the tenderness of hearts Locked in caves of stubborn minds The children will be home The children will be home The children Those children will Be home Some Day (1984: 197) While there is no time frame – no specific vision of the future – the melody of hope (and these lines need to be heard), the moving repetition of “the children will be home,” a line that conceives home as heimat, explains the powerful and dynamic nature of hope that re-emerges in the work of so many postcolonial poets and novelists. Poetry offers a particularly apt demonstration of the utopian potential of affect produced through the sound and rhythm of the lines. Can we extend the power of the imagination to the cultural properties of literature? Do art and literature transcend their cultural provenance as well as their ideological base? This is an important question for postcolonial writing, which is concerned, among other things, with manifesting cultural difference. But universalist though Bloch’s belief in the utopian function of art and literature may appear, neither the cultural nor political qualities of writing inhibit their capacity to transcend class or culture to point to the future. The question is rather one of the capacity of the reader, viewer or listener to apprehend imminence, to discern the ways and extent to which art and literature transcend their origin. Bloch insists that ideologies incorporate the image of a world beyond alienation and without the utopian function operating even within ideology, no spiritual surplus, no idea of a better world would be possible. Creative effort both carries and resolves this paradox: The exact imagination of the Not-Yet-Conscious thus completes the critical enlightenment itself, by revealing the gold … [which] rises when class illusion, class ideology have been destroyed. (1986: 158)

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The imagination of the Not-Yet-Conscious looks beyond class illusion and ideology and thus beyond the treatment of art as mere decoration, to open up “on truly attained summits, the ideologically unobstructed view of the content of human hope” (158). The utopian function is much more than recollection or “idle contemplation.” Utopian anticipation is robust and active, and in the artistic or literary work has a powerful projection into the future. The work must have a überschuss or surplus for it to be truly utopian. Literally translated, überschuss means overshot. Historically, the surplus of a work of art enables us to grasp the conditions and tendencies of the times during which the artist worked, for it critically formulates what was lacking and needed during its period of conception and realization. Works of culture reveal this surplus, “those that take effect in a continuously progressive way, a surplus reaching beyond their mere stationary ideology” (118). This sense of the überschuss has echoes in much contemporary philosophy that would not regard itself as specifically utopian. For Cesare Casarino, “to write of a liberation beyond measure is to love potentiality” (2002: 79). To love potentiality means, among other things, to write, to experiment with forms and narratives that allow subjects to surpass their limits. Conversely one could turn this around to say that: to write is to love potentiality, which is to imagine a trajectory of liberation without measure. This is the utopian dimension of writing, of literature – its horizon of absolute potentiality – liberation without telos. Postcolonial utopianism in particular reveals to us how the ethic of emancipation need not cling to teleology, to the located utopia. Rather, the unstable and unfamiliar, as well as the liberation of the possible is actively produced and changed in the process of writing and reading (Agamben 1999: 68–69). What is expressed in writing is “an absolute writing that no one writes: a potential to be written.” Thus, Agamben stresses, “pure actuality, that is, the actuality of an act, is (also) pure potentiality, that is, potentiality of a potentiality” (1999: 216). Writing, insofar as it is capable of producing unfamiliar and unstable perspectives, spatialities and subjectivities, has the capacity to bring into presence that which is yet to exist, such is the function of the imagination. “The poetic practice of writing trespasses the ‘limits’ of familiar and stable subjectivities, viewpoints and voices and any relations that might exist actually or potentially between a reader and an author. The unstable and unfamiliar is actively produced and changed in the process of writing and reading” (Agamben 1999: 68–69). Deleuze, following Nietzsche, notes that to create, one attends to forces not as “form” but as being “in a transformation” (1998: 105). The world’s future, in terms of its absolute potentiality, is immanent in our labour, our doing, creating and inventing. For Blanchot, “To write is to surrender to the interminable,” and what is expressed in writing is “an absolute writing that no one writes: a potential to be written” (1982: 27).

Utopia, creativity and revolution In the project of decolonization the perennial question “The Book or the Barricade” – whether words or war are more effective – has generated much

Heimat, anticipation and postcolonial literatures  49

argument, but the two need not be separated. Creativity is important to revolution because its function is to inspire hope: hope for change, hope for freedom, hope for the future. This may not be its goal or its purpose, we have seen how the creative work rises above the immediate urgency of its production, so political liberation may have nothing to do with the subject of the creative work but it functions this way because it affirms that “another world is possible.” As Mahmoud Darwish says in “State of Siege”: Here, on the slopes facing the sunset And the cannon-mouth of time’, Near orchards stripped of their shadows, We do what prisoners do; We do what the unemployed do We cultivate hope. (2002) The creative cultural product is unmatched in its ability to cultivate hope because creativity itself is the act of “stepping beyond.” As Salman Rushdie puts it: “this is how newness enters the world” (1991: 394). Simply by imagining the world differently the creative work shows the possibility of a different world. This linking of creativity and hope may serve to reconstitute our understanding of resistance, to think of resistance as most powerful when it is transformative. In the words of Darwish again: To resist means – to be confident of the health of your heart, And of your balls, To be confident of your incurable malady, The malady of hope. (2002) Clearly, creativity is deeply involved in revolution through resistance literature. The concept of resistance literature (mugãwamah) was first applied in a description of Palestinian literature in 1966 by the Palestinian writer and critic Ghassan Kanafani in his study Literature of Resistance in Occupied Palestine: 1948–1966. He asserts the integral relationship between armed resistance and culture, particularly through resistance literature. Such literature is seen to be an identifiable, and significant, accompaniment to the project of political, military and social striving for national liberation. Yet there is a problem with linking literature directly to revolutionary action. He makes the claim that no research into such literatures “can be complete unless the researcher is located within the resistance movement itself inside the occupied land” (Kanafani 1987: 3). This invocation of critical exclusivity and insider knowledge is familiar in postcolonial criticism, and raises similar questions about the capacity of the literature itself to communicate “outside the occupied land.” For whom and to whom, we might ask, does any writer write? To choose a language is to choose an audience.

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Consequently, in the fifty years since Kanafani wrote, and particularly with the emergence of postcolonial studies, it became very clear that resistance needed to progress beyond mere oppositionality. As Coetzee’s protagonist, Dawn, puts it in Dusklands: The answer to a myth of force is not necessarily counterforce, for if the myth predicts counterforce, counterforce reinforces the myth. The science of mythography teaches us that a subtler counter is to subvert and revise the myth. The highest propaganda is the propagation of new mythology. (1974: 24–25) This is particularly true in the case of Palestine. Palestine may be the site of struggle, but it is not the site of victory. The site of transformation is the imperial centre – in this case America. And it is not the American government but American public opinion. The lesson taught by postcolonial writers is that the secret of selfrepresentation is the capture of the audience: the appropriation of English, the interpolation of the dominant discourse and the transformation of that discourse and the site of power itself. If liberation lies in self-representation, then the battlefield is American television. Just as the most powerful perpetuation of Orientalism has been in the “coverage” of Islam in the Western media, so the most strategic site for transforming the representation of the Middle East is that same media, that same audience. The way in which political oppression works is to lock the oppressed into a myth of binary opposition. But this is precisely where music, art and literature demonstrate their power: they take us beyond resistance into the realm of possibility: indeed, they dare to imagine the impossible. In the words of Darwish: I believe that the unwavering commitment to resistance and defence is not some sort of nostalgia, but the saturation of the present and future with the past without which neither present nor future will come to be. (Darwish 1999: 6) Such saturation leads us to see time as a form of spatiality, something that recurs in postcolonial societies apparently shackled to the linear temporality of colonial history. An example of this can be seen in a sculpture by Fareed Amali called Palestinian Rock, which appeared in an exhibition called Documenta 11, and even determined the floor plan. Though apparently simple, this installation alluded to the rocks that are the only weapons available to the incarcerated civilian population; it alluded to Palestinian land occupied by Israel and to the network of relationships between the occupied territories and Palestine proper. It suggests a new kind of mapping of Palestine and the occupied territories based on Deleuzian lines of flight rather than traditional cartography. The key to such a piece is not mere resistance but a vision of connection: connection within and between the severed parts of Palestine. Whatever the rhetoric, whatever ways in which history

Heimat, anticipation and postcolonial literatures  51

conspires against liberation the image remains seared on the consciousness. The mesh that completes the rock is the image of the possible impossible. This is the concrete appearance of hope. In the postcolonial context the most powerful means of overcoming the stalemate of resistance rhetoric was the transformation of the genres and discourses of the colonial powers in order to conceive a liberated future and to speak to the widest possible audience. There is perhaps no more striking demonstration of the power of colonized people to transform the discourses designed to oppress them than the culture which developed in the Caribbean. African slaves were unable to transport their culture or their languages with them to the plantations in any coherent way. Members of the same language group were placed with strangers on plantations either through the exigencies of the system or to prevent conspiracy. The resulting heterogeneity limited what could be shared culturally. Yet Afromodernity took on a form generated from this heterogeneity, a dynamic adaptation to the physical and social conditions with which they had to deal. In this process, both the various slave and non-slave populations absorbed aspects of the various African heritages. What developed was a culture of such creative adaptation that its transformative capacities were able to resist absorption into the dominant culture. This powerful demonstration of agency shows how creativity can be stimulated by conflict. If we accept the definition that “creativity is the result of the combination of previously unrelated areas of knowledge” (John-Steiner 1997: 186), what Arthur Koestler calls “bisociation,” then conditions of conflict and disruption engendered by colonization have the potential to enhance creative work. Of course, all subjects of oppression might say “I would rather have freedom than creativity,” but can they ever be entirely separated? How free would such freedom be without creative renewal? Creativity can be the most effective and subtle path to freedom because the imagination cannot be shackled, its utopian dynamic refuses to be locked in to the status quo. The postcolonial situation intensifies such conditions of change because the effect of colonial power is the production of hybridization (Bhabha 1994: 160). Writers writing from the in-between space of hybridization grapple at the same time with the challenges of identity formation, and with questions of place, nation and history. These writers envision renewal out of conflict, doing what Bhabha calls “borderline work,” where conditions of displacement and disjunction have the potential to rewrite boundaries and borders, to reconceive the future in order to re-imagine the meaning of human community. This process deploys a radically transformed sense of the relation between memory and the future. The borderline work of culture demands an encounter with “newness” that is not part of the continuum of past and present. It creates a sense of the new as an insurgent act of cultural translation. Such art does not merely recall the past as social cause or aesthetic precedent; it renews the past, re-figuring it as a contingent “in-between” space, that innovates and interrupts the performance of the present. (Bhabha 1994: 10)

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Creativity, time and revolution This suggests that a proper understanding of the capacity of the creative spirit to anticipate the future requires a rethinking of the nature of time itself, and we will revisit this question several times in subsequent chapters as we consider the postcolonial struggle with memory, history, and European conceptions of linear time. We commonly think of time as either flowing or enduring and dismantling this apparent dichotomy between succession and duration is important for utopian theory. The characteristic of modernity with its concept of chronological “empty” time, dislocated from place or human life is a sense of the separation of past, present and future. Although the present may be seen as a continuous stream of prospections becoming retrospections, the sense that the past has gone and the future is coming separates what may be called the three phases of time: past, present and future. Friedrich Kummel proposes that the apparent conflict between time as succession and time as duration in philosophy comes about because we forget that time has no reality apart from the medium of human experience and thought (1968: 31). “No single and final definition of time is possible … since such a concept is always conditioned by man’s understanding of it” (31). Or as Mahmoud Darwish puts it, “Time is a river/blurred by the tears we gaze through” (1992). Kummel makes the point that duration without succession would lose all temporal characteristics. A theory of time therefore must understand the correlation of these two principles. Duration arises only from the stream of time and only within the background of duration is our awareness of succession possible. The critical consequence of this is that If something is to abide, endure, then its past may never be simply “past,” but must in some way also remain “present;” by the same token its future must already somehow be contained in its present. Duration is said to exist only when the “three times” (put in quotation marks when used in the sense of past, present and future) not only follow one another but are all at the same time conjointly present … the coexistence of the “times” means that a past time does not simply pass away to give way to a present time, but rather that both as different times may exist conjointly, even if not simultaneously. (1968: 35–36) One of the features of postcolonial texts, particularly those from Africa and the Caribbean, as we will see, is a transformed conception of time that sees it as layered and interpenetrating, spiralling rather than linear. This conjoining of time in these texts is related to a radically different epistemology – a different way of knowing. This way of knowing is profoundly utopian because it includes the past and the future in the perception of the present. The crucial characteristic of the genre of the novel, for instance, is its engagement with time. The telling of stories appeals to us because they offer the progress of a world in time and thus can become narratives of temporal order. But magically, by

Heimat, anticipation and postcolonial literatures  53

unfolding in time they take us out of time. It may be that narrative, whose materiality is isomorphic with temporality, provides a way (though not the only way) of communicating different experiences of time. How then can the novel convey a different knowledge of time, specifically knowledge of what has been called the “broken” time of the traumatized colonized subject? One way of doing this is through the “circular time” developed from the forms of oral storytelling. But a more common way is to convey experience itself as a palimpsest of different phases of time and different orders of reality, as Chinua Achebe does in a scene in which elders of the tribe perform the dance of the egwugwu, or spirit beings, an occasion in which the ontological distinction between acting and reality, the human world and the spirit world, dissolves. Exactly the same laminating of time can be seen in the Aboriginal Dreaming. Postcolonial literatures continually affirm this sense of the future in the past and bring us back to our understanding of revolution as a revolving or spiralling into the future as well as a revolt against the failures of the past. The concept of a spiral into the future perfectly captures the utopian hope without which resistance could not take place. Importantly, it demonstrates the way the future emerges from the past. The future, or the “In-Front-Of-Us,” is always a possibility emerging from the past, not as nostalgia but as renewal. For those Caribbean writers and artists working in the borderland of language, race and identity the past is the constant sign of the future. One of the most common, and popular, examples of this is the limbo dance, a performance of slave history, which re-enacts the crossing of the Middle Passage in a continual reminder of memory, survival and cultural resurrection. As Kamau Brathwaite puts it “Long dark deck and the water surrounding me/Long dark deck and the silence is over me” (Brathwaite 1969: 35). The dancer goes under the limbo stick in an almost impossible bodily position, emulating the subjection of the slave body in the journey across the Atlantic, going through the “limbo” of the Middle Passage but rising triumphant on the other side. The performance of memory is a constant reminder of a future horizon, a “return” that performs each time the “rising” of the slave body into a future marked not only by survival but also by renewal, hybridity and hope. The dance is a metaphor of slave history that celebrates the present with the continuous re-enactment of future hope. Brathwaite’s poem reminds Wilson Harris of the importance of the limbo dance, which leads him to state, “I believe that a philosophy of history may well lie buried in the arts of the imagination” (2008: 10). So past, present and future are conjoined in the creative work in the same way that the dance performs a radical transformation of the reality of slave exile. The descendants of the slave labour of sugar plantations have developed a culture that draws its ontological energy from the very fact of displacement, of homelessness, heterogeneity and syncreticity. This is not revolution but transformation, yet its relation to time is exactly the same as that on which revolution depends, because the revolt is also a revolving in which past, present and future are conjoined and mutually enforcing. Kummel sees this relation between past, present and future as a feature of all human life so that “the openness of future and past is, in other

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words, the vital condition for the conduct of man’s life and all his actions” (1968: 50). We make the past our own by bringing it into a free and positive relation with the present. “The natural discrepancy of future and past constitutes a productive tension, which forms the real medium for new action and new mediation” (50). In other words the tension of revolution is rendered productive by its location in a spiralling compression of time. A very clear example of this can be found in the strategic use of a postcard called “Visit Palestine,” designed in 1936 by Franz Kraus. Palestinian art and literature are important demonstrations of postcolonial creativity because Palestine is still colonized by an apartheid regime: the “postcolonial” is not necessarily “after colonialism.” Kraus’s postcard operates as an iconic point of connection between past, present and future. The postcard identifies Palestine as a destination – an actual identifiable place in the world before the Nakba (the catastrophe) – and out of the reality of the country as a destination emerges the utopian concept of destiny. The postcard operates as a hinge between past, present and future by becoming a palimpsest. The past is present in Amer Shomali’s Visit Palestine in which the wall testifies to the attempt by the state of Israel to not just incarcerate the Palestinians but to wall off the past. Can utopianism exist without a vision of utopia? What the “Visit Palestine” postcard series reveals is that heimat is not paradise. Home is the luminous possibility of the present and in this respect it is far from static, but a dynamic horizon of everyday living. This is particularly significant in the case of the Palestinian people because the wall has been described as “an attempt to steal the horizon.”2 This theft is both visual, political and spiritual and only a utopian view of the horizon of the future can offer the prospect of freedom. In Palestine, the utopian impulse revolves around the reality of a place – but the utopian is enacted in the engagement with power. The vision of utopia is located in the act of transformation of coercive power, a certain kind of praxis rather than a specific mode of representation.

Palestinian creativity and heimat Palestinian art and literature demonstrate how utopianism can be “grounded” rather than transcendental, because they are located in the present as a transformative vision of the future. They are dynamic because they cannot avoid the reality of time as succession, yet the duration of the struggle connects past and future as aspects of the continuing present. Palestine cannot avoid the linking of hope and place any more than it can avoid the apartheid regime of the Israeli state. But this is not a vague utopia in the future: it is a utopianism in which past, present and future are laminated. Laurence Davis contends that critics and defenders of utopia alike “have tended to conceive of utopia primarily as a transcendent and fixed ‘ought’ opposed to the ‘is’ of political reality and the ‘was’ of social history,” but “it may also be understood as an empirically grounded and open-ended feature of the ‘real world’ of history and politics” (2012: 127).

FIGURE 2.1 

Visit Palestine postcard by Franz Kraus (1936)

FIGURE 2.2 

Amer Shamali, Visit Palestine (2010)

56  Heimat, anticipation and postcolonial literatures

Grounded utopias both emerge organically out of and contribute to the further development of, historical movements for grassroots change. As a result, they are emphatically not fantasized visions of perfection to be imposed upon an imperfect world, but an integral feature of that world representing the hopes and dreams of those consigned to its margins. (2012: 136–137) The key to grounded utopias, as integral to the real world, and particularly to the drive for change, transformation and revolution in the colonial context, is the question of representation because, as the history of colonial domination demonstrates, the most powerful form of oppression is not military control or the carceral function of the state, but the control of representation. This is the point at which wishful thinking transfers into willful action. In Marxist thinking the power of ideology is its ability to convince the oppressed that the interests of the powerful are the interests of all. In the case of Palestine it is the power to convince the world that the desperately oppressed and downtrodden civilian population is a collection of dangerous fanatics. A powerful example of creative resistance is offered by the cartoonist Naji ElAli, whose figure “Handala” became one of the most widely known silent witnesses of injustice. Handala became the signature of Naji El-Ali’s cartoons and remains an iconic symbol of Palestinian identity and defiance. He is depicted as a ten-year-old boy, El-Ali’s age when he was forced to leave Palestine, and, as the artist explained, would not grow up until he was allowed to return. Handala is a witness to the corruption and brutality of the Palestinian occupation and the mendacity of Arab politicians. His hands clasped behind his back, his face turned to the events he witnesses, Handala rejects outside solutions.

FIGURE 2.3 

Handala cartoon by Naji El-Ali

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The artist remarked presciently that “this being that I have invented will certainly not cease to exist after me, and perhaps it is no exaggeration to say that I will live on with him after my death.” Today the website Handala.org has as its motto “Let this child return home.” The impact of the image is demonstrated by his assassination in 1987 in London outside the offices of the Kuwaiti newspaper Al Quabas. Although Mossad (the Israeli spy agency) was clearly implicated and its London headquarters closed by Margaret Thatcher, no one was charged. Although cartoons, El-Ali’s images are rarely humorous, but are in turn cuttingly satirical, poignant, melancholic, angry, but also irrepressibly hopeful.

Larissa Sansour and Nation Estate However, there is a form of utopia that not only operates from a conjoining of past, present and future, but in doing so avoids the conception of utopia as an ahistorical abstraction that is either hopelessly impractical or dangerously idealistic, or both, a position argued most forcefully by Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto. This is Palestinian artist Larissa Sansour’s photo project called Nation Estate. First introduced as another version of Fritz Kraus’s postcard it also becomes the key to future hope. Playing on the British use of the term “estate” for tower block housing, Sansour depicts a virtual Palestinian homeland in the form of a skyscraper dwarfing the “real” Palestine outside. The artist explains that: The idea of “Nation Estate” is that should any future Palestinian state hope to house the entire population, one would have to think vertically. And hence the idea of a single skyscraper with whole cities on each floor came about … The nation state reduced to a building simply became the “Nation Estate” – a single block of forced migrants. Its subtitle, “Living the High Life,” expands on the irony. (2012) Crucially, from our perspective Nation Estate plays on the idea of place that remains critical to any colonized perception of the future. But it is a conception of place that operates within a layered conception of time in which past, present and future conjoin as the essential feature of revolutionary hope. In doing this Sansour’s utopia avoids the trap of transcendental abstraction or hopeless impracticality that might come from being quarantined in the future. Laurence Davis says of grounded utopias that: Part and parcel of dynamic and open-ended processes of struggle, and grounded in immediate everyday needs, such utopias challenge dominant conceptions of reality not by measuring them against the transcendental ethical standard of a fixed vision of an ideal society, but by opening a utopian space for thinking, feeling, debating and cultivating the possibility of historically rooted (and thus historically contingent) alternative social relations. (2012: 136–137)

FIGURE 2.4 

Larissa Sansour, Nation Estate (2011)

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Although whimsical, Larissa Sansour’s utopia is such an integral feature of the Palestinian world, “representing the hopes and dreams of those consigned to its margins,” grounded in the reality of the erosion of Palestine as a place. Whether in the lobby or watering an olive tree or getting out of the life at level 3 to Jerusalem, Nation Estate is a grounded utopia because it is the utopia of the single state. Nation Estate consists of a number of photos of different floors of a single building representing Palestine. The lobby indicates various floors with no distinction between Israel and Palestine. Watering an olive tree on another floor is an activity that can be carried out anywhere in this single nation state. While Jerusalem is simply one floor of the building among others rather than the focus of ongoing conflict. The utopian function of this series is to ground the possibility of a single state in an imaginative space beyond conflict, something that the opponents of her work did not realize. The reaction to this humorous depiction of the nation state was unexpected controversy. After they were shortlisted for the prestigious Musée de l’Elysée art prize in Switzerland, the major sponsor, Lacoste, requested that the works be removed from the competition for being “too pro-Palestinian.” After the ensuing international scandal the Museum cancelled the prize and broke off partnership with Lacoste. Political censorship is always a good indicator of the effectiveness of a work, and it is most interesting that the political implications of an upbeat and humorous utopianism were seen by the sponsors of the Musée de l’Elysée art prize to be so dangerous.

Nation Estate, Larissa Sansour (2012) © Larissa Sansour, with permission

FIGURE 2.5 “Lobby,”

“Olive Tree,” Nation Estate, Larissa Sansour (2012) © Larissa Sansour, with permission

FIGURE 2.6 

Nation Estate, Larissa Sansour (2012) © Larissa Sansour, with permission

FIGURE 2.7 “Jerusalem,”

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The project’s depiction of a single high-rise nation clearly meets the requirements of a grounded utopia – challenging dominant conceptions of reality, and “opening a utopian space for thinking, feeling, debating and cultivating the possibility of historically rooted (and thus historically contingent) alternative social relations” (Davis 2012: 136–137). I would contend that, although whimsical, Larissa Sansour’s utopia offers a possible picture of the Palestinian world, grounded in the reality of the erosion of Palestine as a place. Whether in the lobby, watering an olive tree or getting out of the lift at level 3, Jerusalem, Nation Estate is a grounded utopia because it is the utopia of the single state. Ironically, the impossibility of a single state becomes more possible with each Israeli settlement. When there is no land left for Palestinians, there will be no option but to incorporate Palestinians. Sansour’s urban utopia, the vertical state, is the metaphor for a different, but possible, way of inhabiting Palestine. We can test the grounded nature of Nation Estate by comparing it to another of Sansour’s pieces: the short film called Space Exodus, which shows a Palestinian female astronaut planting a Palestinian flag on the moon. This is not “grounded,” in the way that Nation Estate is grounded in the reality of Palestinian dispossession and renewal of the past, yet neither is it utopia. Space Exodus is a representation of what appears to be the impossible: the planting of a Palestinian flag on the moon. But it demonstrates precisely how the utopianism of art and literature work. By the very act of representing the impossible, the work clears a space for the imagination. It may be improbable, but the very production of the film contests its impossibility. ***

Space Exodus, Larissa Sansour © Larissa Sansour, with permission

FIGURE 2.8 

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The creative works we see here are not involved in conflict in the way we normally expect revolution to occur, or in the way, for instance, Kanafani sees resistance literature operating. But they are revolutionary in their capacity to collapse time, to fuse past, present and future into the image that spirals into the future. This is the function of vorschein, the anticipation, and assurance, that heimat is achievable. There are different forms of revolution but all must reject the stereotype of victimhood. These works are transformative in their disruption of stereotype, their rejection of fear, their undercutting of expectation. Ultimately they demonstrate the utopian power of art and literature because they affirm that a different world is possible. Creative works confirm a fundamental truth of revolution: that no future is achieved unless it is first imagined.

Notes 1 Talk at EACLALS Conference, Venice, 29 March 2008. 2 Hanan Ashwari, interviewed in “Make Humus not War,” ABC Radio National, 12 March 2015.

3 THE AMBIGUOUS NECESSITY OF UTOPIA

It may well be that the überschuss of art and literature is necessary not only for the transformative spiralling of postcolonial resistance but also to resolve the contradictions of utopia, for the quest for utopia has produced profoundly contradictory results. Many of these contradictions can be seen in More’s Utopia, such as the conflict between freedom and regulation, between voluntarism and coercion, and in general the contradictions surrounding the question of power and its operation in utopian society. Paradoxically, only the thinnest of lines separates utopia from dystopia and the slippage from one to the other hinges on three kinds of ambiguity, three contradictions demarcating the very thin line between them. Wherever utopias occur these contradictions emerge: the relation between utopias and utopianism; the relation between the future and memory; and the relation between the individual and the collective. These are contradictions because: a) while achieved utopias are always degenerate – that is, quickly become dystopias if they aren’t already from the beginning – without utopian thinking, without a vision of the future, liberation is not possible; b) while utopias are by definition set in the future, utopianism cannot exist without the operation of memory, which is suppressed in dystopias; c) while the equality of the individuals in the collective is a fundamental principle of utopian thought, the collective, in classic utopias, is always inimical to individual fulfilment. While these ambiguities are present in all utopian thinking, the particular ways in which postcolonial writers and thinkers negotiate them tell us a lot about their distinct form of cultural and political hope. The dominant utopian literary form from about the mid-twentieth century has been science fiction, yet the forms of utopianism emergent in postcolonial writing – a utopianism almost completely devoid of actual utopias – display the abilities of these literatures to resolve contradictions dialogically.

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A future nowhere Underpinning these three ambiguities is a more fundamental contradiction between the impossibility of utopia and the social conditions in More’s England that made utopia necessary. More’s Utopia seems at odds with the book’s very stringent utopianism – its critique of the inequitable conditions of English life. In other words Utopia formulates a future that exists nowhere, and while this seems entirely paradoxical, Paul Ricoeur sees this as utopia’s most potent force. Ricoeur wonders whether the problem of utopia cannot be structured in the same way as ideology – starting from a quasi-pathological concept of utopia and working downward towards some integrative function similar to that of ideology. For him “this function is achieved exactly by the notion of the nowhere.” Nowhere is precisely the empty place from which we may look at ourselves (1986: 15). May we not say then that the imagination itself – through the utopian function – has a constitutive role in helping us rethink the nature of our social life? Is not utopia – this leap outside – the way in which we radically rethink what is family, what is consumption, what is authority, what is religion, and so on? Does not the fantasy of an alternative society and its exteriorization “nowhere” work as one of the most formidable contestations of what is? (1986: 16) For Ricoeur the location of utopia nowhere is the only location from which we may critique the present because it is the only place that exists outside ideology. We can see a powerful demonstration of this in Larissa Sansour’s Nation Estate. The ironic, almost mischievous rendition of Palestine as an estate tower block, exists nowhere, but critiques the present in several ways. While the tower block cannot exist, the idea of a single state succeeds as a grounded utopia, the concrete representation of utopian desire. The “Nation Estate” focuses the issues of the inequality of income, of living space and access to resources while projecting the possibility of a harmonious multi-ethnic state. To unearth the functional structure of utopia, however, we must go beyond the specific contents of utopias, because they not only vary greatly but may even be opposed. Thomas More’s Utopia provides a clue in its very ironies and Ricoeur suggests that we start from the kernel idea of the nowhere, implied by the word “utopia” itself and by the descriptions of Thomas More: a place which exists in no real place, a ghost city; a river with no water; a prince with no people, and so on. What must be emphasised is the benefit of this extraterritoriality. From the “no place” an exterior glance is cast on our reality, which suddenly looks strange, nothing more being taken for granted. The field of the possible is now open beyond that of the actual; it is a field, therefore, for alternate ways of living. (16)

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The elements of More’s Utopia that prompted confusion about whether he was really serious, are seized upon by Ricoeur as the most powerful elements of its function as critique. “The nowhere puts the cultural system at a distance; we see our cultural system from the outside precisely thanks to this nowhere …” (17). Ricoeur’s concern with the power of the nowhere comes ultimately from utopia’s contradictory relationship with ideology. His position might best be explained by the fact that “reality” itself is framed by ideology (171) and that it is impossible for the critic to escape it. Where Mannheim confessed that he was unable to critique ideology from any position outside ideology itself (“Mannheim’s paradox”), Ricoeur responded that it was precisely the “nowhere” of utopia from which ideology could be critiqued (17). Utopia becomes important because the use of power exposes a credibility gap in all systems of legitimation, all authority. Utopia exposes the credibility gap wherein all systems of authority exceed both our confidence in them and our belief in their legitimacy. “So I am very attentive to the function of power in a given utopia,” says Ricoeur, “and how the problem of power is subverted by the utopia” (17). This, we might say, exposes the fatal flaw of “achieved” utopias (Stalinist Russia, the Third Reich, neo-liberal capitalism), because no utopia can fully resolve the problem of power, and therefore, of inequity. In fact this is a major factor in the collapse of political and social utopias into dystopias. But Ricoeur suggests that “all the regressive trends so often denounced in utopian thinkers – nostalgia for the past, for some paradise lost – proceeds from this initial deviation of the nowhere from the here and now.” In postcolonial discourse this nostalgia for the past, for paradise lost, is a perennial problem with anti-colonial discourse. The alternative of a future nation, is, as we shall see, hardly any better because of its failure to deliver either critique or hope, but for Ricoeur nowhere offers both of these and most regularly offers them through the creative spirit. Ultimately the nowhere is the source of both the paradoxes of utopia and the exposure of the pathology of ideological thinking, “which has its blindness and narrowness precisely in its inability to conceive of a nowhere” (17).

Utopias and utopianism – form and function Utopias are of two kinds: one that comes directly from More’s Utopia – the utopia of a regulated commonwealth – is one we could call, along with Deleuze, the “product utopia.” The other, the kind that comes from the “anticipatory consciousness” of the desire for a better world – is one we could call the “process utopia.” The first is a utopia of form, the second a utopia of function. Both may speak to the present from “nowhere” but ironically, the thing that makes utopian forms achievable is the very thing that undermines them – power. Institutional power inevitably consolidates the function of organic utopianism into the legislated institutional form, at which point it slips over into dystopia. This is probably the simplest explanation of the debasement of anti-colonial utopias, the derailing of the utopian project of post-imperial nationalism. The utopianism of anti-colonial

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nationalism leads to resistance, but the realized form of the postcolonial nation deteriorates into a legislated reflection of the imperial utopia. In both cases, the colonial and national, the operation of power as Foucault understood it – the continual productive and reproductive operation through individuals – is that which maintains hegemony, by giving the legislated utopia the constant appearance of the organic. This is why literature is so important in its anticipation of heimat, the home that exists beyond both colony and nation. The settler colonies provide a particular example of the disappointment in utopias. These colonies were generally established with a strong utopian motivation, particularly New Zealand, which didn’t have the complication of convict transportation that dogged Australia’s utopian possibilities. As Sargent explains, “The plan outlined by the colonial promoter Edward Gibbon Wakefield (1796– 1862) and other early visionaries was to produce in New Zealand a Britain without the very rich or the very poor” (2001: 3). John Robert Godley (1814–1861), the founder of Canterbury, explains the failure of such a utopian dream: When I first adopted and made my own, the idea of this colony, it pictured itself to my mind in the colours of a Utopia. Now that I have been a practical colonizer, and have seen how these things are managed in fact, I often smile when I think of the ideal Canterbury of which our imagination dreamed. Yet I see nothing in the dream to regret or be ashamed of, and I am quite sure that without the enthusiasm, the poetry, the unreality (if you will,) with which our scheme was overlaid, it would never have been accomplished. (Qtd. Sargent 2001: 3) Despite the failure of the New Zealand utopia the fascinating thing about Godley’s summation is his endorsement of the utopianism of the project, without which settlement may never have been accomplished. In all such utopian projects the function of utopianism is the energizing of the present with the anticipation of what is to come, and for Bloch this is a fundamental human trait. The “[f]unction and content of hope are experienced continuously, and in times of rising societies [such as those rising up out of colonialism] they have been continuously activated and extended” (Bloch 1986: 4). He postulates that humanity requires utopia in order to imagine and thus affect the future. The orientation towards the future, the Not-Yet-Become is intrinsic to human beings. To emphasise this Bloch explicitly separates utopianism, which he sees as a universal human characteristic, from utopias, which, as playful abstractions, are pointless and misleading – a parody of hope. “The word utopia emerged here coined by Thomas More,” admits Bloch, “though not the philosophically far more comprehensive concept of utopia” (1986: 14). “To limit the utopian to the Thomas More variety,” he says would be like trying to reduce electricity to the amber from which it gets its Greek name and in which it was first noticed. Indeed, the utopian coincides

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so little with the novel of an ideal state that the whole totality of philosophy becomes necessary … to do justice to the content of that designated by utopia. (15) Bloch’s major premise is the energizing of the present with the anticipation of what is to come is the key to social transformation and this utopian consciousness is much more than mere fantasizing. It “does not play around and get lost in an Empty-Possible, but psychologically anticipates a Real-Possible” (144). This anticipatory consciousness, the perception of a “concrete” or achievable utopia, has the power to change society. Revolution is driven not by the vision of perfection but by the anticipation of the realm of freedom. As Ruth Levitas explains: The point of contact between dream and life … It is here that the apparently paradoxical term of concrete utopia seems to be appropriate. Hence it is an anticipatory utopia, which is not at all identical with abstract utopian reverie, nor is it directed by the immaturity of a merely abstract utopian socialism. (Levitas 1990: 106–107) The function of utopias to offer critique means that the concern with the future is a concern with the present and with sketching our ways out of it. Vision and critique are deeply implicated. The issue is not what is imagined, the product of utopia so to speak, the imagined state or utopian place, but the process of imagining itself. As Jameson contends: Utopian form is itself a representational meditation on radical difference, radical otherness, and on the systematic nature of the social totality, to the point where one cannot imagine any fundamental change in our social existence which has not first thrown off Utopian visions like sparks from a comet. (2005: xii) Utopia is a vision of possibility that effects the transformation of social life. In most respects, and particularly in relation to postcolonial discourse, utopianism doesn’t need a specific utopia. Portalano makes a connection between utopianism and rhetorical discourse where “a psychological and political understanding of persuasion would suggest an imagined better world existing in the minds of both speaker (rhetor) and audience” (2012: 114). For her, “‘utopia’ is not an impossible political dream or a philosophical ideal but, rather, any kind of symbolic expression of hope for a better world, whether in a concrete future or in fictional or spiritual realms” (114). We may consider the hope for a better world that populates postcolonial literatures as rhetorical in this sense, or at least sharing the impulse of persuasion. However, postcolonial hope goes beyond this general rhetorical trajectory because it produces visions of utopia that rarely have location but have a particular form as heimat.

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As we have seen, heimat occupies an important place in postcolonial writing, because, despite the prevalence of nationalist discourse in anti-colonial rhetoric, heimat reaches beyond the nation. For example, one form of Caribbean utopianism is situated in Rastafarianism with a vision of return to Ethiopia, and the nation features hardly at all in discussions of Caribbean arts or sport. Neither does the African past represent a utopia; rather the memory of Africa in Caribbean writing is seen as something that can transform the present with a vision of the future. Place is the location of the present, the site of a re-conception of otherness that may only gain density in the process of struggle, of dialogue, and transformation. Utopian resistance is given a “form” in the nature of a vision of possibility rather than a vision of place. Invariably that place, the nation, falls short of the expectations of anti-imperial struggle. The utopianism of indigenous peoples in settler colonies is one that exists categorically within yet beyond the nation and manifests itself in a form that blurs the boundary between utopia and utopianism, as well as condensing the linearity of past, present and future into a cyclic vision of place. There is a perceptive description of this in Alex Miller’s Landscape of Farewell when the narrator goes with an Aboriginal man to visit his ancestral country, which was still “the country of his Old People.” The Old People, indeed, suggested to me another way altogether of looking at reality and the passage of time than my own familiar historical sense of things, in which change and the fragmentation of epochs and experience is the only certainty. (2007: 233–234) The Dreaming is perhaps the archetypal demonstration of the infusion of the present and future with the hope of a mythic past, a fusion of time and place, because the Dreaming is never simply a memory of the past, but the focusing energy of the present. The Dreaming is a supreme example of the circularity of time in postcolonial visions of a future that are embedded in a cultural past. The utopianism in Australian Aboriginal novels such as those by Alexis Wright, Carpentaria (2006), and Archie Weller, Land of the Golden Clouds (1998), owes very little to the western utopian tradition, for the Dreaming is a radical infusion of the present by a myth that encompasses both past and future. But one thing all literary versions of postcolonial hope share is a vision of heimat, whether in a geographical region, a culture, a local community, a racial identity – all conceived in a disruption of conventional boundaries, a dynamic operation of memory.

Memory and the future The Aboriginal Dreaming is a union of past and future that has a profound effect on the Aboriginal lived present. This is a particularly intense and deeply mythic example of the phenomenon, but the circularity of time can be found in one form

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or another in all postcolonial utopianism. This is what Mahmoud Darwish sees as the saturation of the present and future in the past (1999: 6). However, such a union reveals a second area of ambiguity in utopian thought – the relation between memory and the future. We see the danger memory poses to tyranny in Orwell’s 1984. The two things abolished in Oceania by Big Brother are memory and writing, and when we see the function of memory in postcolonial utopianism we understand why: memory is not simply about recovering a past but about the production of possibility. Utopianism cannot exist without the operation of memory because the future is always grounded in the past and Bloch’s importance to postcolonial utopianism lies in his fascination with cyclic continuity with the past of the future in the present – leading to what we might call a non-teleological eschatology in which “the drive upwards at last becomes a drive forwards” (1278). Bloch often quotes Marx’s famous statement about dream and fulfilment: [I]t will become clear that since long ago the world has the dream of a thing and the world only has to have consciousness to really possess the thing. It will become clear that it is not a matter of a great connecting line between the past and the future but a matter of the fulfilment of the thoughts of the past. (1986: 117) This profoundly European philosopher provides a framework in which we might think beyond temporal linearity – to the interpenetration of past and future that characterizes such a great deal of postcolonial utopianism. This polarity between past and future often seems insurmountable in European philosophy, particularly in the question of ontology. Bloch asserts that for Plato “Beingness” is “Beenness” (8) and he admonishes Hegel who ventured out furthest: What Has Been overwhelms what is approaching, the collection of things that have become totally obstructs the categories Future, Front, Novum. (8) According to Bloch the problem with Being or the concept of Being in Hegel was that it overwhelmed becoming – obstructing the category of the future. When we dismiss the “closed static concept of being” we find that “the world is full of propensity towards something” (18) and this is the core of Bloch’s most important idea – Anticipatory Consciousness. The core of his ontology is that “Beingness” is “Not-Yet-Becomeness”: Thus the Not-Yet-Conscious in man belongs completely to the Not-YetBecome, Not-Yet-Brought-Out, Manifested-Out in the world … From the anticipatory, therefore, knowledge is to be gained on the basis of an ontology of the Not-Yet. (13)

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Vorschein, or anticipatory consciousness, closes the gap between epistemology and ontology because what we know will only be realized in the process of becoming who we are. As Chris Abani says in reference to the African in a globalized world: “identity is a destination” (Aycock 2009: 7) and the idea of becoming is critical in the transformative processes of postcolonial cultures. Memory has a complex relationship with time. Both technically and philosophically speaking, the present doesn’t actually exist, at least not in stasis, but is always a process of the future becoming past, becoming memory. Thus the present moment is always an imbrication of past and future as Kummel points out. But to remember does not bring the past into the present, rather the act of remembering or the invocation of memory transforms the fluid present. As Derrida puts it “the rhetoric of memory … recalls, recounts, forgets, recounts and recalls forgetting, referring to the past only to efface what is essential to it: anteriority” (1989: 82). It is also, we should add, realized in writing, and as such becomes the “history” of those to whom the doors into the empire of history have been closed. But here we find in Derrida a curious synergy with postcolonial utopianism because memory is, in the sense of discursive production, neither about the past or the present, but about the future. The memory we are considering here is not essentially oriented toward the past, toward a present deemed to have really and previously existed. Memory stays with traces, in order to “preserve” them, but traces of a past that has never been present, traces which themselves never occupy the form of presence and always remain, as it were, to come – come from the future, from the to come. (1989: 58) Memory refers to a past “that has never been present” not only because the present is a continual flow, but memory invokes a past that must be projected so to speak, a past that lies in the future, not only the future of its recalling, but the future of the realm of possibility itself. Put simply: “To speak of memory, is also to speak of the future” (1989: 93). But what kind of future? Derrida gives a fascinating twist to this question in an interview filmed in 2003. He distinguishes two kinds of future: the future “which – tomorrow, later, next century – will be. There’s a future which is predictable, programmed, scheduled, foreseeable” (Dick and Kofman 2003). This is the future as it might be understood in a linear conception of time: though it has not yet arrived, we have some notion of how it will follow on from the present: day will follow night, politicians will fail us, war will follow upon war. There is, however, another future which refers to someone who comes whose arrival is totally unexpected. For me, that is the real future. That which is totally unpredictable. The Other who comes without my being able to anticipate their arrival. So if there is a

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real future behind this other known future, it’s l’avenir in that it’s the coming of the Other. When I am completely unable to foresee their arrival. (Dick and Kofman 2003) This unanticipated future is dangerous because before it arrives we do not know what it will be. It is this kind of future that lies in the region of utopia, which, although dangerous, may be summoned up in the multiple possibilities offered by the imagination. Not to know does not mean unable to be imagined, nor expected, since that which is possible in human life is by definition that which can be imagined. But this reminds us of the strange relationship between utopia and memory in many colonized societies. If the “real” future is that which cannot be known, it nevertheless does not exist outside the range of imagination or hope. It is located Nowhere – the only place, as Ricoeur explains, from which ideology can be critiqued. Such hope is provided by the anchor of memory, which is itself a projection, a horizon, a future. This is why the postcolonial utopia so often dwells in the recollection of myth, which becomes the future projection of an identifying hope. In the sense that memory is a recreation, it is not a looking backwards, but a reaching out to a horizon, somewhere “out there” and in this way it frames an ontology of the Not-Yet. Bloch uses the term anagnorisis – a process of recognition rather than recollection – that transforms memory into new visions of the future (Landmann 1975: 178). In many respects memory is much more than a process of recall, it is already a process of transformation. The past in general and memory in particular become central in postcolonial discourse through the prevalence of what may be called the “Myth of Return.” All colonies appear to generate myths of return and they take on forms dictated by culture and history. One version in Indian writing, for instance, is the redeployment of Hindu myths in contemporary literature. From Raja Rao’s The Serpent and the Rope (1960), to Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981), to Shashi Tharoor’s The Great Indian Novel (1989) the past is allegorically deployed in literature to re-conceive a utopian future. For Caribbean writers cultural production is haunted by the myth of return to Africa, while in Caribbean Asians it is manifested in the resilience of traditional cultural practices. In Africa the myth is of a past before colonialism, while in settler colonies the myth is often, bizarrely, a psychological return to the imperial centre. Myths of return are precariously balanced between nostalgia and anticipation. They can so easily dissolve into a yearning for a past (pre-colonial) perfection, but as myths they have a significant function in a culture’s view of its cosmological reality and, paradoxically, become pivots towards a transformed future. Whether in language, in legend, in social activity and literature the metaphor of return invariably operates in terms of the radiant hope for some pure untrammelled identity. In Stuart Hall’s famous distinction between two forms of cultural identity: “The first position defines ‘cultural identity’ in terms of one shared culture, a sort of collective ‘one true self’” (1990: 223). This conception, in its various guises, Negritude, nativism, nationalism, played a crucial role in decolonization. But it relies heavily on the location of the essence of culture in the past, a “re-telling of the past” that is invariably

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Arcadian, or paradisal. Arcadian thinking is that in which a pre-colonial social order is held to encapsulate the harmony, industry, social amenity and personal happiness that characterizes the collective “one true self”. Arcadian thinking may lead to political and cultural transformation but generally it remains locked into an oppositional mode, too concerned with looking backward to be genuinely transformative. It is sometimes assumed that only in this way can some purity of identity be recovered. The myth of an Arcadian past and a “one true self” can operate strongly in societies such as African nations that have been occupied, and in fact invented, by a colonizing power, their social structures changed, but some essential link to the past is retained. Yet what this form of the myth refuses is the inevitability of change, the constructedness of identity and the necessity of process. The second form of cultural identity is a matter of becoming as well as being. “Cultural identities come from somewhere, have histories. But, like everything which is historical they undergo constant transformation” (Hall 1990). Identity is not an essence but a positioning. In Bloch’s terms such cultural identity is Not-Yet-Becomeness.

History and cultural memory One important way in which memory produces a future in postcolonial art and literature is its capacity to contest the linear discourse of history. History, and its associated teleology, has been the means by which European concepts of time have been naturalized for postcolonial societies. How they might resist it, why they might want to resist it, and what kind of story they might replace it with are crucial to the self-representation of colonized peoples. As Édouard Glissant says: “The past, to which we were subjected, which has not yet emerged as history for us, is, however, obsessively present” (1989: 64). He proposes a view of the past that projects into the future, a prophetic vision of the past. Such a vision, claims Glissant, is neither “a schematic chronology” nor a “nostalgic lament.” The myth of return finds itself constantly pulled towards both poles, drawn on the one hand to an interpolation of European time and on the other towards the radiant hope for some pure untrammelled identity. But ultimately memory is utopian because it is able to resist the master discourse of European history. There is a quite specific role for memory to play in the postcolonial context, for it becomes a major form of self-assertion. As Fanon suggests in The Wretched of the Earth, “Colonialism is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and emptying the native’s brain of all form and content.” It also “turns to the past of the oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures, and destroys it” (1963: 209–210). Clearly this is the effect, if not the stated function of history, which not only reshapes the past of the colonized but also locks the “native” into the linear trajectory of a historical future. Cultural memory is important because individual memory is tied up with identity. In Reasons and Persons (1984), British philosopher Derek Parfit argues that identity and memory come from the same place: a psychological connectedness and continuity that organizes our sense of self. Selfhood hinges on our ability to order memory, and connect a set of experiences

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to form a coherent autobiography of who we were and how we became the person we are now. This is an admittedly partial view because, as Heidegger points out, we are beings-in-the-world: our subjectivity is a function of relationships with other people. But these relationships are at least partly focused on a shared culture with shared language, beliefs, habits, activities and a range of shared memories. Personal memory exists through the stories we tell ourselves about the past, cultural memory occurs in the stories we hear and pass on. Given this connection between memory and identity it is no wonder that postcolonial memory conflicts with the history from which the postcolonial subject is excluded. Meena Alexander in “Migrant Memory” says: As a young poet I used to feel a faint paralysis creeping up on me when I thought of history – I took this to be what was rendered up of the past by those who were in power and as such were clearly able to do so. A history from which one was always crossed out. (2009: 10) Salman Rushdie challenges history in Midnight’s Children when he writes his life story with Padma at his elbow, “bullying me back into the world of linear narrative, the universe of what-happened-next: ‘At this rate,’ Padma complains, ‘you’ll be two hundred years old before you manage to tell about your birth’” (1981: 37). But Saleem attempts to educate her: “‘Things have a way of leaking into each other,’ I explain, ‘like flavours when you cook … Likewise,’ I intone earnestly, ‘the past has dripped into me …’” (37). Despite Saleem’s exuberant narrative, Rushdie sees the relationship between memory and history as a struggle. “Memory creates its own truth” (211), Saleem says at one stage, and “my memory refuses to alter the sequence of events” (222), unveiling the fact that the postcolonial struggle with history is one in which memory becomes a crucial weapon. “Memory and forgetfulness become relevant to utopian thinking,” says Ehud Luz, “which always oscillates between two poles: undermining society’s attachment to the past for the sake of a desired future, while at the same time appealing to collective memory as a source of vision and motivation” (1993: 360). His discussion makes the further link between memory, utopia and the sacred. As Karl Löwith has noted, “On the levels of both secular and sacred history, hope in the future is grounded in the actual event which has come to pass” (1962: 188). In the Jewish and Christian view of history, “the past is a promise to the future. Consequently, the interpretation of the past becomes a prophecy in reverse, demonstrating the past as a meaningful preparation for the future” (1962: 6). Hence, memory is the source of faith. When “things have a way of leaking into one another,” as Rushdie says, then memory disrupts the ordered flow of time. Postcolonial memory is not concerned with the atavistic desire to retrace the path of history, that is, it is not so much dominated by a concern with time, as with an overwhelming concern with place. Stephen Muecke remarks for instance,

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In outback Aboriginal communities strangers arrive who ask the Aborigines, “Why do you do as You do?” … the answer was, and is, “Come back tomorrow and I’ll take you to a place that is important to us.” (Muecke 1997: 84) In this respect place absorbs and signifies time in the way a word embodies its referent, and the two are interchangeable in the Dreaming. The key form of indigenous utopianism is the continual cycling of an ancient past within the present. Similarly, for Derek Walcott, “the sea is history” (1979: 367), place and time coextensive, and in much postcolonial writing the idea of utopia can be an image of possibility in place as we find in the Chicano myth of Aztlán. This “place” may not be location but the metaphoric site of freedom itself. In Caribbean literature memory plays an important role in identity formation because memories must be created. Derek Walcott shows that the transformation of time into place is crucial for the production of Caribbean identity. Although return is impossible the African past transforms the present in a particularly potent way. Robbed of a past, a history, a culture, the descendants of the slave labour of sugar plantations have developed a culture that draws its ontological energy from the very fact of displacement, of homelessness, heterogeneity, syncreticity. In this respect the Rastafarian myth of “return” embodies a Caribbean identity par excellence. For the return is not a return at all but a future horizon within which the difference of Caribbean identity can be developed. Only perhaps in Oceania has regional identity assumed such significance. One of the most common, and popular, demonstrations of cultural memory in the Caribbean is the limbo dance, which, as we saw, is a performance of slave history that re-enacts the crossing of the Middle Passage in a continual reminder of memory, survival and cultural resurrection. While the limbo is a physical reenactment, the woman in Grace Nichols’ “One Continent/To Another” finds memory embodied in the unborn child. From the darkness of her womb she feels the Congo surfacing, Sierra Leone and the Gold Coast, reincarnated to life within her as she searches “the horizons for lost/moon” (Thieme 1996: 582). There is perhaps no better figure of a future inspired by memory than the unborn child. But performed or embodied, memory becomes a profound orientation to the future. The tension between memory and the horizon of future identity sums up the most important cultural effect of slavery and slave-descended populations in the Caribbean. For if there is no return, there will be no rescue. And so, gradually, this region has developed some of the most profoundly transformative concepts of cultural living: hybridity, creolization. Kamau Brathwaite is one of the most thoughtful celebrants of Caribbean transformation and in the poem “Islands” (1969: 20) we see this affirmation of the hope for a different future. As the poet looks through a map of the islands he sees that when “hope splinters,” when only lust rules the night and men make noises louder than the sea’s voices, then the pain of exile will never be extinguished and the islands of the archipelago will remain as mere rocks.

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By offering a warning against the splintering of hope the poem celebrates transformation: from displacement to a place humanized by its occupants; from exile to hope; from the grim history of sugar production to the possibility of beauty. This Caribbean archipelago – this “place” – is not More’s utopia (nor the dystopia it might seem to the observer), but the location of the spirit of hope. Hope for Brathwaite, the kind of hope that sees a future grounded in, but not imprisoned by memory, is not an optional choice for the West Indian, but a necessity. It may be an ambiguous necessity – earlier in the poem he says the butterflies “fly higher/ and higher before their hope dries.” But in a performance of Ernst Bloch’s conviction, that hope, that anticipatory consciousness, is fundamental to human life. History teaches, says the poet, that when “hope splinters” then “the iron’s travelling flame will never be extinguished” – the rope of historical enslavement and oppression will never unravel its knots. The hope for the region is the hope of a vibrant cultural complexity and creolization, a hope often belied by the grim realities of politics, but a necessary hope best imagined by its poets and writers.

I and we It is significant that the first modern dystopian novel was Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We. It is in this relation between “I” and “We” that the contradictions of power are most evident. The mobilization of society for the betterment of all, for the “common good” is virtually indistinguishable in utopias and dystopias. This is one of the major contradictions in More’s Utopia. In utopias it is assumed that the improvement in life will automatically ensure the cooperation of the individual in the perfection of society, and all modern utopias since Looking Backward are based on this unexplained assumption. In dystopias the fulfilment of the individual is always denied as a condition of a collective utopian dream. One of the most riveting contemporary demonstrations of the thin line between utopia and dystopia is Dave Eggers’ The Circle (2014) which depicts the beneficence of the corporation to its workers – producing a utopia of economic and social fulfilment, bought at the price of complete transparency to the corporation’s total surveillance, a surveillance that its products are extending into the whole world. The first line “My God, Mae thought. It’s heaven” (1) is the beginning of a gradual downward spiral into the horror of the disappearance of the self. At all times this disappearance is couched in the most philanthropic terms, and Mae’s absorption into “We” is total. Individuality seems an unlikely player in visions of socialist utopias because it is so evocative of the kind of bourgeois self-fashioning nurtured by capitalism. However, the danger inherent in the destruction of individuality occupies a very prominent place in nineteenth-century thought, one extended by Ernst Bloch in his allusions to Marx. Oscar Wilde makes a robust defence of individualism in “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” the central thesis of which is that the abolition of private property will enable people to return to their own individuality, to “be perfectly and absolutely” themselves. This sense of individualism, of the private, is precisely that which is dissolved in dystopian conception of the common

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good, of “We” as the source of identity and authority. Wilde argues that, “Individualism, which is now more or less dependent on the existence of private property for its development, will benefit by the abolition of such private property.” Wilde proffers the creative artist as the model of the self-perfecting individualist able to do so by being freed from the worry of property, which has “crushed true individualism.” He takes the example of “Men of private means, such as Byron, Shelley, Browning, Victor Hugo, Baudelaire, and others, [who] have been able to realise their personality more or less completely. Not one of these men ever did a single day’s work for hire” (1891). Wilde’s argument is that freedom from private property will release the latent and potential individualism in mankind. For Wilde, the creative artist is the true utopian hero. It is the creative artist who, once private property is abolished, can teach people to be true individuals, truly themselves. At first glance Oscar Wilde and Ernst Bloch make strange companions. But the struggle between the individual and the collective becomes a key feature of Bloch’s conception of the utopian striving, a feature that remains largely unresolved because he recognizes the dystopian potential for a tyrannical “collectivity” – an inauthentic “We” – to dominate social life. Bloch endorses the Marxist concept of the “classless collective” but the ideal collective is not one of the mass, “it works precisely as inter-subjective solidarity, a many-voiced unity of direction of wills which are filled with the same humane-concrete goal-content” (1986: 969). The manyvoiced unity of the collective bears a remarkable resemblance to James Gilroy’s “convivial multicultural democracy” – the complex intersubjectivity of a postimperial cosmopolitan world. We might therefore look beyond the utopia of the proletariat to which Bloch clings, or at least see it differently, as a totally heterogeneous “smooth space” (Deleuze and Guattari 2004) in which cultural individuality defines the multicultural collective. The vexed relationship between the “I” and the “We,” between the individual and the collective, still remains the point at which utopia slips into dystopia. Bloch prophesies hopefully that An arc will be described between I and We, [when] the collective has truly become total i.e. when it embraces new individuals in a kind of community which has never before existed. (1986: 970) It is, ironically, within postcolonial concepts of utopian imagining that such a “many-voiced unity of direction of wills” may be seen to emerge, not in a socialist community but a cultural. This is something Kamau Brathwaite envisages in the idea of a “creole cosmos” (see Chapter 8), but it is in general a relationship that is much more easily conceived in the mythic structures of postcolonial cultural identity. But no matter how urgently and energetically Bloch reiterates the consummation of individuality in the pure collectivity of the classless society, the ominous possibilities of the absorption of the “I” into the “We” continue to insist

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themselves as the utterly dystopian possibilities of the utopian vision. This imbrication of the utopian and dystopian, hinging on the relation between I and We is one that appears to resist ultimate resolution.

The cultural collective What happens when we look beyond the social collective to the cultural? Does this begin to resolve the tension between I and We? Again, the Caribbean is an interesting example here. The first consequence of a society that has no roots, which has been transplanted in a massive diasporic movement, is the drama of subjectivity itself. The point of departure for Caribbean literatures has been to write the subject into existence, with its master theme the quest for individual identity. For Aimé Césaire, the subject is not privileged but simply the site where the collective experience finds articulation. This is reminiscent of the “collective subject” invoked by Guatemalan writer Rigoberta Menchu in her book I, Rigoberta Menchu (1983). The collective subject of testimonio is perhaps the most effective literary resolution of the distinction between I and We (Ashcroft 2004) and the tension between the individual and collective in postcolonial writing is often resolved in such acts of dynamic identification, particularly where the issues of race or trauma are prominent. In Édouard Glissant, and Césaire, we find that the decentred subject is central to the poetics of the cross-cultural imagination. Such a subject is relentlessly drawn back by the urgency of resistance, the material effects of the colonizing process into identification with the cultural collective. As Derek Walcott puts it in The Schooner Flight: I have Dutch, nigger and English in me, And either I’m nobody or I’m a nation (1979: 8) In a situation where the group is ignorant of its past, resentful of its present impotence, yet fearful of future change, the creative imagination has a special role to play. For it is the creative imagination that can focus the collective imagination, provide an identity for a subject that is dis-articulated and dispersed. Importantly, it is in writing that a collective memory must be invented; it is in writing that the myth of return is projected into the future. Bloch attempted to resolve the tension between the individual and the collective in the concept of a “multi-voiced unity” of a true emergent socialist collective. This “multiverse of cultures” is the beginning of heimat which designates humanity’s “feeling at home in existence” (1986: 1196). It signifies an instance of arrival rather than origin. Thus it has global rather than national, regional, or ethnic dimensions. He gives no specific information as to what this utopian state will look like, but he does provide an abstract framework for the definition of utopia as a state of communion in which subject and object have simultaneously ceased to be separate.

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The subject has ceased with its truest attribute: the desiderium; the object has ceased with its untruest attribute: alienation. This arriving is victory, and the goddess of victory, the ancient Nike, stands on a point a concentration of Being, brought out and gathered in and to the Humanum. At this place on earth of arrived-at being, of world as homeness, homeness as world, it settles down, here both flight and message end. (1311) Kamau Brathwaite has a similar notion of home, since, historically, the Caribbean is a place of arrival rather than origin. As a result of the extermination of the Amerindians in the sixteenth century, today’s Caribbean island populations consist of ethnic groups that have migrated to the archipelago from elsewhere, mostly by slavery or indenture. Brathwaite detects deep ambivalence in the relation between I and We in his early autobiographical piece “Timehri.” He quotes from George Lamming’s novel In The Castle of My Skin where G is puzzled by Trumper’s identification with the (American) Negro people. This is to call attention to the conundrum of the writer who attempts to “speak about ‘the people’” when “those to whom he refers have no such concept of themselves” (Brathwaite, 1974: 38). The writer becomes the “I” who not only speaks for the “We,” but in doing so may also create the community, by describing an arc between I and We. For Brathwaite, West Indian literature approaches the question of subjectivity in the same way it is resolved by jazz. In “Jazz and the West Indian Novel” he compares the syncopation between the individual musician and the collective band in American jazz with a similar function in Caribbean literature. Jazz is a music which expresses something of the modern “problem” of the individual personality vis-à-vis the group – and in American terms an oppressed minority at that – within the context of the wider society. Jazz has been from the beginning a cry from the heart of the hurt man, the lonely one. But its significance comes not from this alone, but from the collective blare of protest and its affirmation of the life and rhythm of the group. (1993: 58) Both jazz and literature resolve the dilemma of the utopian relation between “I” and “We.” For literature words are the jazz-like notes, and its language the embodiment of the unity of improvisation and performance. But it is also in writing that the question of language becomes most prominent, not only because writing can explore variations, but also because writing can be more widely disseminated. It is no accident that in the displaced, heterogeneous, turbulent descendants of the plantation economy, language is most easily released from its myth of origin, its fantasy of autonomous being. The creolization of language in the Caribbean stands as both the origin and the metonymy of the

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postcolonial dynamic of hybridization. Edward Kamau Brathwaite puts the problem in poetic form: But my island is a pebble If you crack an egg, watching its black jagged grin, a glue of life exudes a sticky death You cannot crack a pebble. it excludes death Seeds will not take root on its cool surface. It is a duck’s back of water. A knife will not snap it open. It will slay giants but never bear children (1969: 39) The idea of islands as pebbles comes from Brathwaite’s vision of the Caribbean archipelago born in his childhood habit of skipping pebbles across the water. The pebble has no history; seeds will not take root on its surface. It can slay giants but never bear children. To bear children, the pebble must be re-invented as an egg. It must invent its history as it invents the possibility of procreation. The creolization of language represents that hybridization that offers the paradoxical avenue to identity in the balance between the subjectivity of the individual and the cauldron of the heterogeneous displaced community. The balance between an impotent pebble and an egg that exudes a sticky death is a different conceptualization of being, one in which regeneration itself must be invented. *** The ambiguities of utopia, far from being disabling, may, in the postcolonial context, be its great strength. The functioning of a continuous spiralling utopianism offers a strong element of future thinking for the project of social transformation; the imbrication of memory and the future, divested of nostalgia, provides the most powerful way in which colonized societies may imagine a future free from the linearity of imperial history; the ambiguity of I and We may be resolved by the postcolonial writer who speaks for a cultural collectivity. Ambiguities are explored, blurred and perhaps resolved, within postcolonial literatures, by an anticipatory consciousness that lies at the core of its liberatory energy. The different manifestations of this genre are nearly always at least an implicit critique of state oppression of one

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kind or another. The dynamic function of the utopian impulse is a dual one: to engage power and to imagine change. Literature tends to resolve the ambiguities of hope. The tension between memory and the future is resolved by their constant and prophetic interaction in the present. And the ambiguous relation between “I” and “We” is resolved in literary approaches to a different form of insurgent, or communal identity, imagined beyond the colonial inheritance of the nation. The utopian function of postcolonial literatures is therefore located in its practice as well as its vision – the practice of confronting and transforming coercive power to produce an imagined future.

4 REMEMBERING THE FUTURE Time and utopia in African literature

The imbrication of memory and the future in postcolonial literatures raises the particular issue of the function of history in African colonization. Since the nineteenth century, Africa’s place in history has carried the unwelcome burden of an ahistorical past. Hegel’s notorious abolition of Africa from his Philosophy of History is well known,1 but neither he nor Africa are alone in this. Karl Marx thought Asiatic and African societies to be ahistorical, as well Slavic countries, Latin Europe, and the whole of South America. But the consequence of this has been that Africa, like the rest of the world, wants to enter history, because, as Ashish Nandy puts it “Historical consciousness now owns the globe … Though millions of people continue to stay outside history, millions have, since the days of Marx, dutifully migrated to the empire of history to become its loyal subjects” (1995: 46). When colonial societies are historicized they are brought into history, brought into the discourse of modernity as a function of imperial control – mapped, named, organized, legislated, inscribed. But at the same time they are kept at history’s margins, implanting the joint sense of loss and desire. Being inscribed into history is to be made modern because history and European modernity go hand in hand. As Dipesh Chakrabarty says: So long as one operates within the discourse of “history” at the institutional site of the university it is not possible simply to walk out of the deep collusion between “history” and the modernizing narratives of citizenship, bourgeois public and private, and the nation-state. (1992: 19) So the nation conspires with the imperial discourse of history in conferring the holy grail of modern being on postcolonial subjects. If we recall Fanon’s warning that history “turns to the past of the oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures and

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destroys it” (1963: 209–210), we see what a two-edged sword historical consciousness can become. However, far from accepting this distortion and slavishly following Europe into a neo-liberal future, African literature offers the potential to envision a different kind of future not only for Africa but also for the world. African writers have negotiated a perilous path between the idea of Africa as a backward version of the West, and Senghor’s idea of Africa as the emotional opposite to the rational West: “L’émotion est nègre, comme la raison héllène” (“emotion is Negro, as reason is Hellenic”) (1964: 288). The task of employing the images and metaphors of a traditional past to conceive a vision of the future is complicated by the fact that the very word “Africa” comes burdened with centuries of cultural baggage stereotyping the continent as “dark,” “primitive,” and “prehistorical.” The utopianism of the past in the postcolonial imagination is not only an attempt to disrupt the dominance of European history, but also an attempt to reconceive a place in the present, a place transformed by the infusion of this past. In traditional postcolonial societies the radically new is always embedded in and transformed by the past. This is related to a larger argument about the nature of resistance. Is resistance always simply implacable opposition? Or does such grounding in the past leave room for the appropriation of imperial cultural capital? In which case, culture, which is always changing, may change with the agency of individual, and perhaps particularly creative subjects. It is this second form of transformative resistance that gives memory its peculiar power – memory does not reverse history or idealize an Arcadian past so much as it reinvigorates the present with a vision of a different possibility. In his essay “The Use and Abuse of History,” Nietzsche discusses the usefulness of the quest for historical knowledge. On the one hand, too much engagement with history “mutilates and degrades lives” since it drains the vitality needed to build for the future. In this sense, “forgetfulness is a property of all action.” But, on the other hand, the past, particularly “the monumental” past, is in his view one of the main sources of motivation for any great action: “The greatest and most powerful nature … would assimilate and digest the past … and turn it to sap.” Thus, “the unhistorical and the historical” – memory and forgetfulness – are equally necessary to the health of an individual, a community and a system of culture. “Historical men,” as Nietzsche calls them, are those who achieve an appropriate balance between the two: “Their vision of the past turns them towards the future … They believe that the meaning of existence will become ever clearer in the course of its evolution; they look backward at the process only to understand the present and stimulate their longing for the future” (1959: 10). Postcolonial writers’ re-conception of history is very clearly designed to “understand and stimulate their longing for the future” as Nietzsche puts it (1959: 10). This occurs through Glissant’s concept of a “prophetic vision of the past.” There are two ways in which the re-invention of African history has proceeded in literature. On the one hand we find a history that interpolates the master discourse of European history, engaging it on its own terms, a method powerfully represented

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in the later novels of Ayi Kwai Armah. On the other hand we find the positing of a different kind of history, a history that might disregard the boundaries between “myth” and memory, a history that subverts the tyranny of chronological narrative. This is the history offered by Ben Okri in Infinite Riches. Literature has been a key method of re-imagining the discourse of history itself in its assertion of the histories of colonized peoples. Because colonized peoples were often excluded from world history (and this includes all kinds of colonies, even settler colonies) literature became a strategic method of rewriting, or at least imagining a different kind of history. Clearly, though, the strategy of interpolation has been pervasive in postcolonial literatures as they invade the discursive and material structures of English literature.

Ayi Kwai Armah’s re-writing of history Armah is better known for his earlier novels such as The Beautyful Ones are Not Yet Born (1968), Fragments (1970) and Why are We so Blessed? (1972) – all deeply pessimistic about the post-independence African regimes. Yet that dystopian view of the present betrayal of Africa by its leaders is closely connected to the utopianism that emerges in his later writing. Two Thousand Seasons (2000) is an example of an allegorical rewriting of African history in which a pluralized communal voice recounts the experiences of his people over a period of one thousand years. In a sense it is an extension of the critique launched by his earlier trilogy, but this time it generates a discourse of possibility. Arab and European oppressors are portrayed as “predators,” “destroyers,” and their local henchmen as “zombies” and “askaris” and the journey of the people enacts a journey through historical time. This historical rewriting is made in an elliptical and proverbial style that shifts from autobiographical and realistic details to philosophical pondering, prophesying a new age. The centre of this revisionist imaginative history is the account of the betrayal of the people by their king into slavery, the subsequent rebellion against the slave ship and the choices offered by the idea of return. The deception of rulers and governments is a familiar theme of Armah’s and in most of his novels they are given a large measure of the blame for Africa’s dependent state. Whether kings who have sold their subjects into slavery or political leaders who have adopted, without question, Western habits and values, the rot begins with power. If we could see this novel as the point at which Armah moves from despair to a vision of hope, the critical moment in the story, when the rebellious slaves have established a community to recover from the slave ship ordeal and having recovered their strength face the choice of return, encapsulates the different potential choices of the myth of return itself. A third of the people choose to stay where they are, “unwilling to risk a return to the dangers of known pasts, afraid to follow any future visions” (2000: 234). Many more choose to return to their destroyed and colonized villages:

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Returning was their dream. Strongest for these spirits was the call to return, the unequivocal call simply to go back to the places where their mothers had borne them … Ah blind illusion of nostalgic spirits. Ah, self-murdering deafness of ears forever cut off from the quiet reasonable call of our way. (234) The third choice is a return of a different kind, a return to a way of life that offers a utopian transformation of the future, the return “Not back to Anoa, not back to any illusory home, but to the fifth grove, the secrecy of seers, refuge of hearers, keeper of the utterers. From there we would make a beginning to destruction’s destruction” (235). Armah appears to well understand the different dimensions of action available through the myth of return and this third form of cultural and spiritual return clearly captures the transformative strength of an anticipatory consciousness grounded in memory. Putting an end to “destruction’s destruction” means, in the first instance, staging a successful uprising against the slave fort and stealing its armaments. The revolution Armah describes is a revolving that attempts to take the people back to the founding principles of “the way.” This revolutionary return is a key feature of Armah’s and other African writers’ utopianism. Two Thousand Seasons, having imagined a successful uprising reverts to historical reality, acknowledging the apparently insurmountable power of the destroyers, but doing so in order to propose the importance of hope, that “our way lies beyond despair: far beyond despair our way, the way” (310). The closing pages of the novel are resolutely and energetically utopian as the narrator asserts that “our people are not just of the present, not just the walking multitudes of murdered souls and zombies now around us, but many, many more gone, and man, many more to come” (313). Against the memory of the havoc wreaked by the destroyers what a vision of creation yet unknown, higher, much more profound than all erstwhile creation! What a hearing of the confluence of all the waters of life flowing to overwhelm the ashen desert’s blight! What an utterance of the coming together of all the people of our way, the coming together of all the people of the way. (317) One of the keys to the health of the communal body allowing it to move on “the way” is the role of the healers and the sharing of the secrets of the healers’ art. This is the basis of a similar form of historical memory found in The Healers (2000a), which tells the story of a group of physical and spiritual healers whose vocation is not only to heal but also to unify. Drawing upon ancient African wisdom their task is to “replace the toxic ignorance that breeds ethnic, class and caste divisions with the healing knowledge of African unity,” as Armah explains on the back cover.

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Pharaohnic Africa Re-telling the history of slavery is one form of historical recuperation, but Armah is even more interested in engaging the discourse of Western history and he does this by adopting the revisionist history of Cheikh Anta Diop. Diop’s book, Nations negres et culture, is a passionate attempt to show that ancient Egyptian civilization was in fact a Negro-African achievement, and thus to prove that the West owed its enlightenment to Africa. Asking why the emphasis is on the role played by Greece rather than on the Egyptians from whom they borrowed, he says: The foundation for this attitude can only be understood by recalling the heart of the question. Egypt being a Negro country, and the civilization which developed there being the product of black people … Consequently, it is wiser and surer purely and simply to strip Egypt of all her achievements for the benefit of a people of genuine white origin … In saying that it was the ancestors of Negroes, who today inhabit principally Black Africa, who first invented mathematics, astronomy, the calendar, science in general, the arts, religion, social organisation, medicine, writing, engineering, architecture … in saying all this, one is simply stating the modest and strict truth, which nobody at the present moment can refute with arguments worthy of the name. (Diop 1974: 253) This attempt to re-assert the place of Africa in world history is not without its critics. Over forty years ago Abiola Irele made a point that has often been levelled at negritude as a whole: that by reversing the hierarchy established by the colonizer, without contesting the basis on which it was founded, such a re-assessment falls into the trap of total acceptance of the Western measure of evaluation, which, in this case, is technical achievement (Irele 1965: 514). However, the discourse of Pharaohnic Africa has been taken up wholeheartedly by Armah in KMT (2002, pronounced Kemet) and Osiris Rising (2008), extending his re-imagining of African history into a vision of the subversive and politically repressed reality of African Egypt in African culture. The fundamental thrust of Diop’s pharaohnic discourse is rediscovery. Sparked by references in Aristotle to the Egyptians as agane melane – black – this argument proposes that the deep history of classical African culture has been occluded by imperialism as it sought to maintain Africa as the absolute Other of Europe. While the didactic function of Armah’s recent novels makes them overly polemical, they are driven by the arguable thesis that the problems of African society are a direct consequence of the history of colonialism and the suppression of African culture. In this respect the retrieval of the pharaohnic is a utopian vision of a way out of the morass of African political and cultural crisis. The novels rest on the less arguable thesis that Egypt saw itself as part of Africa and that “African” history precedes European colonialism as a coherent continental narrative. But the most interesting

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thing about them is the idea that modernity may be transformed by a dialectical interaction with traditional African wisdom. Here we have a recovery of an African identity in a retelling of the past, a tale in which Egypt and its African pharaohnic culture deconstruct European myths about Africa. But according to Armah, the failure to disseminate this African knowledge comes from within – from the dominance of the hieratic tradition in which esoteric knowledge is kept secret rather than shared. This refusal to share the knowledge of pharaohnic culture destroyed African consciousness of Africa. Although the concept of Africa as an integrated whole is never questioned, for Armah, Africa itself “refers to someone who comes whose arrival is totally unexpected” which for Derrida was the true image of the future – the appearance of someone whose arrival we are unable to predict. (Perhaps another way of saying it is “the beautyful ones are not yet born” the title of Armah’s earlier novel.) To whatever extent “Africa” was an invention of Europe, and an invention that has served to Other the continent as a whole over five centuries. This strategy of taking the notion of Africa and seeing its coherence, its “unexpected arrival,” is a profoundly utopian move that has particular resonances in addressing the underlying premise: that traditional knowledges may intervene in and transform modernity as it affects African societies. Key to the strategy is the perception of pharaohnic culture as African and with deep links with oral cultures. The story of KMT is told from the perspective of a young girl, Lindela Imana, a protegé of Jengo, the Professor of Classics, who shocks the university during his inaugural lecture by proposing Egyptology and pharaohnic studies as the African Classics equal to Greek and Latin. “We can replace the old established lies from Europe,” he says to Lindela, “the complex we call education, with real knowledge” (Armah 2002: 108). The “discovery” that Egyptians were black and that this knowledge had been suppressed by Western learning makes Egypt, for Jengo, a key to the resistance to European knowledge. Egypt is where the European consciousness gets confronted with the mirror of history. If Europe looks open-eyed into that mirror, it will see its own face, made up with lies. The most ancient Egyptian texts say that Egypt was African. Crack. They say the Egyptian population was black, before succeeding waves of nomads, immigrants and pillagers came. Crack. Crack. (112–113) The traditional holders of knowledge, then, offer the path back to a different kind of knowledge and hence, a different kind of living in the world. “We want to knock holes in the walls erected between traditional and modern knowledge,” says Lindela, “to embrace each other in the fullness of liberating possibility” (135). These liberating possibilities are identified by two traditional village healers, Astw and Hor, who suggest that African life should go back in time beyond the

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hierarchical symbol of the pyramid to that of the sphere. The pyramid represents the power that Africa once had, but its meaning is both of power and oppression. The sphere is the sign of a new beginning of Life without the brutalities of caste, without people who know and people not allowed to know, without those who work and those unable to work. No poverty, and no massive riches. The sphere is about a world without the terrible injustices we now call natural. (149) This is a classic restatement of the original utopian dream. The revolution back to beginnings is no nostalgic backward gaze, as Armah is at pains to point out. The sphere symbolizes a utopian future, and KMT offers a vision of a shared African knowledge, shared both internally and externally so that the post-European, postcolonial world might be transformed by a different way of being in the present. The symbol of the sphere, which transforms old hierarchical structures into a model of integration and harmony, perfectly captures the idea of the past reinvigorating the present through a vision of the future. The memory of pharaohnic culture suggests the potential of a world capable of being transformed by the emergence of African traditional knowledge.

Ben Okri’s mythic vision Where Armah interpolates historical discourse by reconceiving the African identity of Egyptian culture, an even more radical strategy is to reconceive Africa’s relationship with “history.” Ben Okri, for instance, often imagines a different African history by presenting a different phenomenal world, and the most direct narrative of the writing of African history comes in the chapter “The Battle of Rewritten Histories” in Infinite Riches. This provides an imaginative depiction of the struggle involved in the writing of African history when the Governor General, clearly a symbol of the entire institution of imperial knowledge making, puts pen to paper: He rewrote the space in which I slept. He rewrote the long silences of the country which were really passionate dreams. He rewrote the seas and wind, the atmospheric conditions and the humidity. He rewrote the seasons and made them limited and unlyrical. He reinvented the geography of the nation and the whole continent. He redrew the continent’s size on the world map, made it smaller, made it odder. (1998: 110–111) This is not only a summary of the prosaic effects of historiography and the flattening out effects of modernity but also a powerful condemnation of the function of naming in imperial geographies and historical accounts:

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He changed the names of places which were older than the places themselves. He redesigned the phonality of African names, softened the consonants, flattened the vowels. In altering the sound of the names he altered their meaning and affected the destiny of the named … The renamed things lost their ancient weight in our memory. The renamed things lost their old reality. They became lighter, and stranger. They became divorced from their old selves. (1998: 111) But in his enterprise of “knowing” the other the embodiment of the empire is shown to rob the colonized place of its reality. Although the principle is Foucault’s very recognizable link between knowledge and power that underlies Said’s Orientalism (1979), colonial history offers a particular rewriting of history because it re-invents beginnings. The Governor General Made our history begin with the arrival of his people on our shores … in his rewriting of our history [he] deprived us of language, of poetry, of stories, of architecture, of civic laws, of social organization, of art, science, mathematics, sculpture, abstract conception, and philosophy. (Okri 1998: 111) This is an astute and comprehensive perception of the function of imperial control, the actual effects of the “civilizing mission” – the country had to be erased, wiped clean so that it could be invested with life and history at the moment of colonial contact – “with a stroke of his splendid calligraphic style, he invested us with life … and we awoke into history, stunned and ungrateful, as he renamed our meadows and valleys, and forgot the slave trade” (111). In his rewriting the Governor General wiped out Africa’s ancient civilizations, its religion, spiritual dimension, its art and music, and in so changing the past “he altered our present.” The assumptions surrounding our idea of the modern include a deeply ingrained conception of time as linear and sequential, a conception that African cultural production is in an ideal position to dismantle. Here the utopian effects of Okri’s writing hinge, not on the hope that history may deliver freedom, but on the reconception of African history that might interpolate and transform world history. Okri goes on to imagine a different history, a layering of different orders of time that now projects into the future, when the old woman of the forest weaves the secret history of the continent. As the novel unfolds, the immense energy of her “retelling,” and thus re-historicizing a different kind of Africa, produces a (pan) Africa that is not only vast, but powerful in its potential effect on the entire world. For the history she weaves is Frightening and wondrous, bloody and comic, labyrinthine, circular, always turning, always surprising, with events becoming signs and signs becoming reality. (112)

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This is more than a history, it is a laminating of different orders of time. The old woman codes the secrets of plants, the interpenetrations of human and spirit world, the delicate balance of forces. She even coded fragments of the great jigsaw that the creator spread all over the diverse peoples of the earth, hinting that no one race or people can have the complete picture or monopoly of the ultimate possibilities of the human genius alone. With her magic she suggested that it’s only when all peoples meet and know and love one another that we begin to get an inkling of this awesome picture, or jigsaw, or majestic power. The fragments of the grand picture of humanity were the most haunting and beautiful part of her weaving that day. (112–113) This is a richly utopian view of the capacity of the African imaginary to re-enter and reshape the modern world. It is not merely a hope for African resurgence, but a vision of Africa’s transformative potential, a potential that will be realized as the expansionist and hegemonic tendencies of the West are gradually subverted. In one sense Infinite Riches is an attempt to show the scope of that cultural possibility by infusing the language of excess with the enormously expanded vision of the horizons of African cultural experience. While the Governor General’s dreams of taking Africa’s wealth (204), and of his divine status in the universe of humanity (205), eventually drive him crazy, it is the dreams of the old woman of the forest that conceive of a future filled with the wonder of new possibilities. She dreamt of the chaos to come, of the short reign of colonial domination … She dreamt of new fictions and new poetics, new ideas sprung from the old earth of our ancient philosophies and traditions. She dreamt many years in advance … when the salvation of the earth would be in the hands of the righteous peoples of the world. (207–208) Whether African peoples are “the righteous” or not, the vision is of a greatly transformed world, new fictions and poetics “sprung from the old earth.” Okri’s narrator calls himself a spirit child who represents the eternal recurrence of the world and in so doing provides a very different picture of the world itself from the one that emerges from the Governor General’s pen. “Things that are not ready, not willing to be born or to become … things that are not resolved, things bound up with failure and fear of being, they all keep recurring, keep coming back, and in themselves partake of the spirit-child’s condition. They keep coming and going till their time is right. History itself fully demonstrates how things of the world partake of the condition of the spirit child” (487). Rather than a teleological condition of development and change, history is conceived as a continual recurrence of things that are not ready – nations, civilizations, ideas, but also people.

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They are all part-time dwellers in their own secret moonlight. They all yearn to make of themselves a beautiful sacrifice, a difficult sacrifice, to being transformation, and to die shedding light within this life, setting the matter ready for their true beginnings to cry into being, scorched by the strange ecstasy of the will ascending to say yes to destiny and illumination. (487) This is an elegiac picture of human possibility, not limited to Africa but imagined in “African” terms. For the spirit-child narrator sees in this recurrence “the challenge to give birth to one’s true self, to one’s new spirit, till the conditions are right for the new immutable star within one’s universe to come into existence” (488). Okri engages in a recurrence of his own in this trilogy as he returns to the scene of Africa’s debasement, the scene of his paradoxical vision of possibility. Part of this hope involves the disarray of the present corrupt system, as when the loudspeakers at a political rally behave oddly, as though ghosts had entered them and play mischievous games with the speakers whose long speeches cannot be understood at all (228). That his utopian vision is constantly tempered by the recognition of the corruption of the system is not surprising since it formed a central theme in his early work. The crucial thing in this trilogy is the vision of a totally transformed world, a world in which the recovered reality of African culture not only sweeps away the corruption of post-independence politics, but also changes the world. Critically, this vision arises from a place outside that insistent reality Nandy calls the “empire of history.” The function of such a vision is not the clarity of efficacy of the changes, but the clarity and efficacy of anticipation itself. The novel is not meant to be prophetic, but to capture the energy of the utopian spirit through which change will come. This is the key to his vision of the “worlding” of Africa.

Literature, history and the future We saw in the previous chapter how deeply utopian visions of the future are grounded in memory, something quite distinct from historical discourse. The vision of African futures begins in a reformulation of African pasts – to disentangle Africa from history, and there is no better place to reaffirm the ahistorical past, the mythic past, the diversity of cultural pasts, than literature, or, more broadly, various forms of creative cultural production. This has been the way in which postcolonial writers have reported their society’s history: having been driven to the margins of history, postcolonial history is written through literature, by means of memory and the imagination. This arouses deep suspicion from the “scientific” discourse of Western History. As Nandy observes: Part of the hostility of the historically minded towards the ahistorical can be traced to the way the myths, legends, and epics of the latter are intertwined with what look like transcendental theories of the past. Historians have

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cultivated over the last two hundred and fifty years a fear of theories of transcendence. (1995: 51) The response is to render the ahistorical as prehistorical. But William Thompson’s At the Edge of History (1972) sees myths as a way of “thinking wild” about the future by reversing the relationship between myth and history. In Kofi Anyidoho’s poetic rendition of the history of colonialism, “Gods of the Pathways,” he observes that Africa stands at the crossroads at which the ahistorical past can become the new ground for a vision of the future. “We are standing at The CrossRoads,” says the poet, at the meeting point of “NightMare and DawnDream.” But there are those who still remember the past and who can speak of “ancient joys long buried/ beneath a topsoil of bad memories” (2009: 140). The message is that the topsoil of the bad memories of colonialism can be swept away, that the “ghost who stands at memory’s door” can be exorcised. In the celebrated Ghanaian novelist Kojo Laing’s Search Sweet Country, the character ½ Allotey offers some sage advice to Professor Sackey: We sat down and let the change, the history be thrown at us. And in spite of over five hundred years of association with foreigners, we have been very stubborn: we have kept our basic rhythms, we know our languages and have assimilated so much into them, we laugh the way we used to laugh if you take away the bitterness here and there, we dress and eat what we want which is basically the same … Do you really think our traditional ways were so weak that they could have been so easily swept aside? They were too strong. (2011: 102–103) This is a resounding statement of the resilience of the ahistorical past, the power of myth to resist history, the centrality of memory in the maintenance of culture. In Anyidoho’s “Gathering the Harvest Dance” he suggests that the future can only be realized by staring history in the face: We come today to Stare our History in the Face We come today to Shake Hands with our Deepest Fear We come today to exchange our Shame for Hope Our Deep Silence for Ancestral Harvest Songs (2009: 142) The phrase “our History” is ambiguous: it could be the shameful history of colonialism, or it could refer to the European discourse of history, which produces the African as an object of shame. But in either case it is exchanged for the Hope produced by Ancestral Harvest Songs – history is exchanged for cultural memory. It is the writer’s role to apprehend the transformative potential of that past, not

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only to disrupt the dominance of European history, but also to re-conceive a place in the present, a place transformed by a vision of the future that fulfils this past. In a similar way the “anticipatory consciousness” of much postcolonial literature is cyclic and recuperative. As Gambian poet Tijan Sallah writes in “Prayer for Roots” For stems must have roots Dreams must seek tenacity In lumps of savage earth. For skies without pillars Crumble like ancient roofs. Skies without pillars Crash to the dust of earth (1993: 9) It is in the roots that the future is planted. We should open the shutters of the mind To those hidden spaces of Dusty Kingdoms For memory is roots; dreams are branches (9) There can hardly be a better statement of the location of the future in memory – “memory is roots; dreams are branches” – our dreams of the future are rooted in memory. Memory generates the future as the trunk grows branches. This correspondence between past and future illuminates the distinctive nature of Afro-modernity. Such a modernity is firstly characterized by what Jorge Casteñeda has called “longitudinal nationalism” (1993) – the development of horizontal, non-state based relationships between political actors in various nation states for the purpose of challenging or overturning policies in one or more nation states. Therefore, when we discuss African novels we need to maintain that tension between the particularity of the cultural site and the transnational implications of African utopianism. But Afro-modernity is characterized, perhaps most prominently, by its attitude to time. In his essay “Modernity and Intellectual Life in Black” Frank Kirkland writes, “Whereas modernity in the West fosters the belief that a future-oriented present, severed from any sense of an historical past, can yield culturally distinctive and progressive innovations, modernity in black promotes the conviction that a future oriented present can be the fortunate occasion in which culturally distinctive innovations are historically redemptive of a sense of past” (Kirkland 1992–1993: 159). Whereas the cultural impact of Afro-modernity on Western modernity is clear in popular culture in its music, fashion, art, and even sport, a more subtle impact was that of the African diaspora on concepts of time. Whereas modernity had “disembedded” time as Giddens puts it (1990: 17–26), the emergence of what Hanchard calls “racial time” may be said to have “re-embedded” it. “Racial time

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is defined as an awareness of the inequalities of temporality that result from power relations between racially dominant and subordinate groups” (Hanchard 2001: 280), inequalities of temporal access to institutions, goods, services, resources, power and knowledge – effects that can be seen in the daily interactions of multiracial societies (281). Ralph Ellison in Invisible Man expressed this concept of racial time as a feeling of being off the beat. Invisibility, let me explain, gives one a slightly different sense of time, you’re never quite on the beat. Sometimes you’re ahead and sometimes behind. Instead of the swift and imperceptible flowing of time, you are aware of its nodes, those points where time stands still or from which it leaps ahead. And you slip into the breaks and look around. That’s what you hear vaguely in Louis’ music. (1952: 7–8)

The spiral of postcolonial time While racial time in Afro-modernity is described as off-beat rather than flowing, a phenomenon that Ellison sees as a result of invisibility, a different sense of time emerges in the very visible renditions of the layering of time that occur in African poetry. As we saw in Chapter 3, a proper understanding of the capacity of the creative impulse to anticipate the future requires a re-thinking of the nature of time itself and this begins with a questioning of the distinction between succession and duration. The spiral of time occurs as a process of simultaneous recuperation and projection. Bloch uses the term anamnesis to signify recollection – which leaves the past intact and static – whereas anagnorisis, or recognition, affirms the way the past links to the present and the future, helping to shape the new – the utopian horizon that emerges from the anticipatory consciousness (Landmann 1975: 178). Circular time is a way of comprehending the non-linear progress of temporality in the African novel. But it also has great relevance to the distinction between memory and history. While history (and to a greater extent, biography) is fictional to the extent that it assumes that life experience is lived like a story, memory does not experience events in this way. Memory jumbles events according to their importance relative to the present rather than arrange events within a linear narrative. Anagnorisis is a process of transforming memory into new visions of the future. Therefore, while the colonial subject may be excluded from history, that subject has access to the layered, circular, non-linear function of memory, which becomes a key feature of the postcolonial strategy of rewriting history through the literary text. Memory operates to disrupt history, while at the same time becoming the foundation of a vision of the future. The apparent disruption of time in postcolonial writing leads the African philosopher Emmanuel Eze (2008) to suggest that a prominent feature of the African novel is the presentation of “broken” time. The African writer

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not only writes about African cultures as “broken” by the experiences of colonialism but also appears to experience language itself – in this case, the language of writing – as re-enactment of otherwise de-centered traditions. (2008: 25) On the surface this might seem to correspond to Hanchard’s concept of “racial time,” but the problem with this is that it implies a culture that is static, an object suddenly fractured and “denatured” by colonialism, a fracturing that, just possibly, may be mended by a return to an essential cultural reality. But what we actually find in African writing is a circular or layered time, in which the layering of past, present and future becomes the dynamic origin of African utopianism. We can see this layered time throughout African literature, from the scene of the egwugwu in Things Fall Apart, who are the actual mythic ancestors of the village and at the same time the recognizable elders dressed up to dance, to the layering of time in Kojo Laing’s Search Sweet Country, when Kofi Loww stands in the market: He stood still caught in perfect African time – time that existed in any dimension – and blocking the paths of other sellers with the same time that brought ancestors to the market, that touched the eyes of sellers and buyers now, that moved beyond those yet to be born. (Laing 2011: 156) In a fascinating poem Anyidoho links the circular African time to the rhythm of the drums, which lead in a backwards–forwards dance. Ultimately the rhythm of the dance is the rhythm of time itself. Africa is centred in a union of time and sound and silence, a circular time in which the future and past are lodged in and energize the present. The drums guide the dancers’ feet in a “backwards–forwards Dance”, a “Dance of the future/That ends in the Past. Two steps Forward to where Hope rises like RainBows. One step Backward to where Sorrow falls like Tropical ThunderStorms. And Africa Africa leans against the Storms Leaning against the Future Like a Warrior Tired from History’s BattleFields. (2009: 134)

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The poet goes on to invite us to come with him across the Birth of Time in a union of sound and silence. The rhythm of the drums becomes a powerful image of layered time, because drums in Anyidoho have the role of enfolding, collapsing time. In his poem “The Return” he takes on the persona of the Creator who made a new world filled with Gods and goddesses who “soiled their glory/with passions unfit for dogs.” So he made a newer world peopled with HumanBeings. Thus the dance of life beaten by the drums is the birth of a new world. Anyidoho further develops this interpenetration of past, present and future in the images of the “rope” or “creeper” or “birth cord” which symbolize time, the different generations bound together by the creeper rather than separated by the line of history. The ancestors are like the seed that gives birth to the creeper linking together the past and present members of the clan (10); the weaving of a rope represents tradition. In a wider sense, the rope or creeper is the image of life itself and in particular of man’s regenerative faculties: the weaving of the rope is also a reminder of the importance of procreation, the foremost duty of every man (12). And the procreation of children is linked, in the Ewe vocabulary, to the creation of poetry and music (547). In his paper on Ewe funeral poetry Anyidoho says: All the activities generated by death, all the rites, the ceremonies, the funeral dance and song, may be seen as properly motivated by one overriding desire – the desire to, perpetuate life in spite of and because of death […]. The dead continue to live not just in spirit but also in the artistic tradition […]. The ultimate reality that rules the universe […] is life’s permanence in various transformations even beyond death. (Anyidoho 1984: 21–22) Here we find a powerful statement of the cultural underpinning of African hope and the location of the future in the present. *** “Ontologies of the present,” according to Jameson, “demand archaeologies of the future, not forecasts of the past,” and African literature provides an “archaeology of the future” by “remembering” it in the density of the cultural past. Though ostensibly anti-utopian, Marx believed the world has “a dream of which it only has to become aware. Then it will become clear that the issue is not a big dash between past and future, but a completion of thought of the past” (qtd Bloch 1986: 117). The “completion of thought of the past” encapsulates the continuity between memory and the future in much African writing and indeed, in postcolonial writing in general. The utopian spirit we find in the very different writing of Armah and Okri can be seen to spread broadly in African literature, despite, or perhaps because of the great deal of critical and resistant energy it displays. The great difference between Marx’s world and the present one may be suggested by the diffusion of the African imaginaire. By engaging the colonial phenomenon of literature, these

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novelists demonstrate how that imaginaire can enter, encounter and potentially transform, the world they are interpolating. Through all this, the key revelation of African literature is the importance of memory to visions of the future. Memory, and its contestation of history, ushers in a totally different conception of time from the linear temporality of history.

Note 1 “The Negro, as already observed, exhibits the natural man in his completely wild and untamed state. We must lay aside all thought of reverence and morality – all that we call feeling – if we would rightly comprehend him; there is nothing harmonious with humanity to be found in this type of character …   At this point we leave Africa, not to mention it again. For it is no historical part of the World; it has no movement or development to exhibit” (1956: 99).

5 BEYOND THE NATION STATE

By the end of the Second World War, heralded by India’s apparently miraculous seizure of nationhood, the boundaries of the postcolonial utopia became firmly identified with those of the nation. The years since 1947, when India led the way for other colonial states into postcolonial independence, have been marked by the disappointment of nationalist utopias, while at the same time a vibrant and unquenchable utopianism – an irrepressible generation of future thinking – continued in the various postcolonial literatures. By the latter decades of the twentieth century utopian thinking began to take a very different turn from preindependence nationalist desire – one affected to some extent by globalization, with its increasing mobility and diasporic movement of peoples, directed to the heimat beyond the nation. Indian literature has led the way in this movement, not only because of the proliferation of South Asian diasporic writing, but also because India itself has thrown the traditional idea of the nation as imagined community into question. African literature shows an even more enthusiastic pre-independence nationalism, but as African nations gradually achieved independence and disappointment quickly set in, a very different form of utopianism developed in the writing. Postcolonial utopianism gained much of its character from its problematic relationship with the concept of the nation, a concept that once generated visions of a post-independence utopian future. The critical dimension of utopianism began to replace the ideological elements of pre-independence utopias. Paradoxically, imperialism’s major export may have been the very idea of identity: a phenomenon previously unformulated by most colonized societies but forged in the heat of political resistance and its attendant identity politics. However arguable this might be, the most widespread political and geographical export of imperialism was certainly nationality. According to J.A. Hobson in his influential Imperialism: a Study, “Colonialism, in its best sense,” by which he meant the settler colonies, “is a natural overflow of nationality.” But “When a State advances

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beyond the limits of nationality its power becomes precarious and artificial” (Hobson 1902: 8. Quoting Seely “Expansion of England lect iii”). A nationalism that bristles with resentment and is all astrain with the passion of self-defence is only less perverted from its natural genius than the nationalism which glows with the animus of greed and self-aggrandisement at the expense of others. From this aspect aggressive Imperialism is an artificial stimulation of nationalism in peoples too foreign to be absorbed and too compact to be permanently crushed. (1902: 11) Hobson’s prescient complaint was that empire-bred nationalism undermined the possibility of a true internationalism. Partha Chatterjee, on the other hand, sees nationalism as a blow against true decolonization, because these countries are forced to adopt a “national form” that is hostile to their own cultures in order to fight against the Western nationalism of the colonial powers (Chatterjee 1986: 18). The adoption of a national form is related to the absorption of colonial states into history. This is why Rushdie gives Saleem a spiralling and non-linear narrative in Midnight’s Children. Because “‘History’ as a knowledge system is firmly embedded in institutional practices that invoke the nation-state at every step” (Chakrabarty 1992: 19). The disruption of linear history goes hand in hand with scepticism about the myth of nationhood. India is “a country that would never exist except by the efforts of a phenomenal collective will” (Rushdie 1981: 112) and the scene of that collective will is the omnipresent empire of history. National cultures, thus created in (and by) nineteenth-century imperialism arose to manage the contradiction between the imperial and the local. The state’s role was twofold: on the one hand, it established the difference of the national culture from the cultures beyond it; on the other, it promoted cultural homogeneity inside the national territory. It is to disrupt this homogeneity that Rushdie conceives the radical heterogeneity of the Midnight’s Children themselves, a noisy multiplicity of characters who reveal how different the nation is from the nation state. But a deeper problem lay in wait for the postcolonial state. For liberals going back to Adam Smith, David Hume and John Locke, the modern state is a necessary evil – necessary to police the inequalities generated by markets and protect private property from the masses, who would inevitably steal or destroy it. Adam Smith wrote with alarming candour in The Wealth of Nations that “civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all” (Smith 1776: Book V, Chapter I, Part II, p. 715, para. 12). In this respect the colonial state displays in stark relief the function of the nation state: it is instituted for the security of property, which in this case means the “property” of the colonizers (stolen from the colonized) and the trading dominance of the imperial power. This is all the more evident in extreme cases

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such as the East India Company, which relied on British troops to protect its outrageous looting of the Indian economy, a looting which the British government took over after the corruption of the company became too great to ignore. Problems arise for all postcolonial states after independence because although the conditions of government may change, the principles do not. The colonizers may go home, but often fueled by a toxic union of corrupt leaders and global capitalism, the function of protecting the property of the rich remains. Thus the national culture established by imperialism is doubly hostile to the local culture, and the “necessary evil” of the nation state regularly demonstrates its capacity to turn against the powerless. For this reason the idea of a national utopia that drove the anti-colonial movement in Africa quickly sounded hollow as African nations received the failed heritage of what Basil Davidson famously called the “cracked plate” of colonial administration (1973: 94). African writers were the first to recognize that the emancipatory potential of independence had been, at the very least, overestimated, and more often simply betrayed. While historians and social scientists were busy celebrating the achievements of nationalism “the failure of independence became the overriding theme of African literature in the 1960s” (Zeleza 1994: 482). If we consider novels such as Achebe’s A Man of the People (1966), Soyinka’s The Interpreters (1965), and Armah’s trilogy of despair The Beautyful Ones are Not Yet Born (1968), Fragments (1970) and Why are We so Blessed? (1972) and many other novels of these decades including Ngugi’s Petals of Blood (1977) and Devil on a Cross (1982) we might well wonder what place utopianism really had in this litany of protest. Yet these novels, which rejected both the imperial presence and its colonial inheritance in distorted nationalisms, provide the very critique on which the imagination of a better future could be built. The anticipatory dimension of African literature changed as anti-colonial resistance gave way to a broader sense of future hope. The natural assumption is that utopianism died with post-independence disillusion (Obiechina 1992), but a utopian view of the future remained essential to the transformative function of literature. Negritude offers a fulcrum for this discussion because this deeply influential philosophy – so often depicted as essentialist, binaristic, exclusionary and backward looking – embodies a central feature of all postcolonial utopianism: a vision of the future grounded in a resurgent memory of the past. As we have seen, this return to the past can be a dangerous strategy because it can paralyze transformative action with an Arcadian nostalgia. When discussing what kind of future awaits Africa, Paul Zeleza dismisses the concept of return by saying: By traditions, I do not mean a return to some mythical “indigenous roots” suggested by George Ayittey … or to Maxwell Owusu’s (1992) pristine village democracy. This is the mystical language of nationalist discourse, of Afrocentric essentialism. (1994: 489)

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This is certainly true of cultural nostalgia, but the kind of recuperative return we find in African literature offers a strategy that can circumvent the dismay underlying the proliferation of political critique. The utopian vision takes various forms but it has become a form of hope that transcends the boundaries of the nation state, because the independent state has come to represent disappointment and entrapment rather than liberation. This suggests a considerable revision to the now somewhat notorious idea of Frederic Jameson’s that all Third World texts are national allegories (Jameson 1986: 69). Aijaz Ahmad’s equally notorious response was to accuse Jameson of turning all Asian and African critics and writers into mystifïed “civilizational others” by reducing all the issues they dealt with to the problem of a nationalist struggle against colonial oppressors and their postcolonial successors (Ahmad 1987). Ahmad underestimated the importance of the word “allegory” and the undoubted prominence of national concerns. But by the same token, “national allegory” fails to embrace the complexity of the relationship between literature and the idea of nation. In particular, it “fails to adequately describe the dissolution of the idea of nation and the continuous persistence of national concerns” (Franco 1989: 211). So “national concerns” without the “nation state” might force us to rethink the concept of nation, but it is clear why most contemporary utopian thought came to operate beneath, above or outside the concept of the nation state. The core of the problem of the postcolonial nation was the inheritance of colonial boundaries. As Wole Soyinka put it, the Berlin Conference in 1884 carved up Africa “like some demented tailor who paid no attention to the fabric, colour or pattern of the quilt he was patching together” (1994: 31). The problem was that individual nations and the OAU itself, which might have done something about it, kept the colonial boundaries sacrosanct. Likewise, the catastrophic Partition of India not only institutionalized ethnic hatred as a strategic enmity that still dominates South Asian politics, but exposed the real absurdity of boundaries, as Amitav Ghosh reveals in The Shadow Lines. The climax of Ghosh’s questioning of national borders comes when he recalls riots that had occurred in Calcutta in his youth. The cause of the riots, the disappearance of a Muslim relic in Srinagara, unleashed riots against Hindus and riots in response two thousand miles away in Calcutta. This prompts the narrator to consider the nature of geographical space and of the “shadow lines” of national borders. Taking a compass he looks at an old atlas and finds that “Khulna is about as far from Srinagar as Tokyo is from Beijing, or Moscow from Venice, or Washington from Havana, or Cairo from Naples” (1988: 226). Drawing a circle with Khulna at the centre and Srinagar at the circumference he finds that the map of South Asia is not big enough. He has to turn to a map of Asia before he finds one big enough for his circle: “It was a remarkable circle: more than half of mankind must have fallen within it” (227). Yet the loss of a relic in Srinagar can have catastrophic consequences two thousand miles away in Calcutta because these places fall within national borders. The consequence is a fear that exposes the provisionality of identity itself. The atlas showed him that “within the tidy ordering of Euclidean space, Chiang Mai in Thailand was much nearer Calcutta than Delhi is.

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Yet I had never heard of those places until I drew my circle, and I cannot remember a time when I was so young I had not heard of Delhi or Srinagar…” (227). Thus, quite apart from the catastrophe of Partition, national borders have had a constricting effect upon India that intensifies communal conflict. But the structure of state administration is just as confining. Post-independence nations have almost inevitably taken over the role of the colonial state and maintained its administrative and class structure. As Fanon says: National consciousness, instead of being the all-embracing crystallization of the innermost hopes of the whole people, instead of being the immediate and most obvious result of the mobilization of the people, will be in any case only an empty shell, a crude and fragile travesty of what it might have been. (Fanon 1963: 148) He goes on to describe the way the newly created middle class will “look toward the former mother country and the foreign capitalists who count on its obliging compliance” (149). This merely confirms the structural reality which colonialism installs and which the nation cannot escape. Just as boundaries and colonialism went hand in hand, so they locked incipient nationalisms into a discourse that in most cases amounted to a political prison. This does not erase the simple fact of the importance of nationalism in the anticolonial struggle. One of the most powerful voices of hope in the pre-independence period in Africa was that of Aghostino Neto, whose cry against the repressive Portuguese regime in Angola stands as a benchmark for the persistence of hope, and the clarity of a vision for the future. Neto’s road to the future passes through prison, exile, torture, and the death of close friends, but it is sustained by the certainty of hope. He is a classic example of the anti-colonial struggle for nationhood, but his collection Sacred Hope lodges the cry for freedom in something much deeper than the nation state. This is the source of his poetry’s power, because the cry of freedom expresses the dynamic of hope that continues to project into the future. As Basil Davidson says, “He is followed or opposed as the leader of a struggle for the future, a struggle that all men must fight for their different times and places, and all women too, shaking off the past, transforming the present” (1973: vii). This is a salutary reminder that despite the disappointments of subsequent national regimes in Africa, the vision of heimat still persists and the dynamic of hope is one that continues to drive its creative writers. Neto can say on behalf of all African writers: “I am a day in a dark night/I am an expression of yearning” (1974: viii). For Neto, hope is not a vague wish but something grounded in action, a sense of the future grounded in the present. Tomorrow we shall sing anthems to freedom When we commemorate The day of the abolition of this slavery (1974: 1–2)

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The words of Neto’s translator are apposite here: “the pressing need is not to preserve elements of the past which are being shattered by the present, but to release the future imprisoned in the present” (xxxviii). Hope is the unassailable constant in Neto’s poetry; hope which is a profound faith in the people’s ability to transcend slavery. Hope is in the sorrowful line of contract workers carrying heavy burdens on the highway, but singing. It is … in the realisation that those whose “hands laid stones on the foundations of the world, those who built the present with their hands and their blood, have an inalienable right to the future.” (1974: xxxix–xl) Although Neto’s utopianism is very concrete in its expression of desire – freedom from slavery, the breaking of chains, national independence – nevertheless hope requires an element of the rhetorical expression of desire because hope itself is dynamic. This dynamic lends the literary work a particular potency, one that lives on even after the disappointments of the postcolonial state. This is the case in the poem “Bleeding and Germinating” which sees that from the bleeding caused by colonialism, germinates the impact of Africa on the “fraternity” of the world. Where hope finds its most powerful trajectory is in its vision beyond the nation to a united Africa. In the poem “Bleeding and Germinating” we find that out of blood and suffering germinates hope, peace and love. Our eyes, blood and life Turned to hands waving love in all the world Hands in the future – smile inspirers of faith in The vitality Of Africa earth Africa human Of immense Africa Germinating under the soil of hope Creating fraternal ties in freedom of desire Of anxiety for concord Bleeding and germinating For the future here are our eyes For Peace here are our voices For Peace here are our hands Of Africa united in love. (1974: 43) It is possibly only in the context of Neto’s history of imprisonment and torture that the euphoria of this rhetoric can be understood. But equally significant is the celebration of Africa rather than the Angolan nation. Just as boundaries and

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colonialism went hand in hand, so they locked incipient nationalisms into a discourse that in most cases amounted to a political prison.1 This prison wasn’t entirely inherited in Africa. Mazrui makes the point in a 1982 essay that “while the greatest friend of African nationalism is race consciousness, the greatest enemy of African nationhood is ethnic consciousness …” Modern African nationalism was born and prospered under the stimulation of racial solidarity and shared blackness. On the other hand, the struggle for viable modern nations within Africa is considerably hampered by ethnic cleavages. (Mazrui 2004: 118–119) An early vision of escape from this prison was the idea of a postcolonial transnationalism. The symbolic moment of anti-colonial solidarity came in 1955 with the Asian– African conference in Bandung, Indonesia, in which twenty-nine formerly colonized nations met in a groundbreaking conference that was meant to establish what today might be called a “new world order.” The African contingent was, in reality, quite small – only Egypt, Libya, Ethiopia and Liberia were independent. Most African colonies achieved independence in the 1960s. But Richard Wright’s 1956 travelogue The Color Curtain, written after his attendance at the conference, “depicts the moment of transition from anti-colonial dream to postcolonial reality as one already rife with failure” (qtd in Ahmad 2009: 179). According to Dohra Ahmad the moment that might have been the realization of W.B. Du Bois’ “world of colored folk” is depicted by Wright as “a world of irrationality, mysticism, lack of specificity and internal incoherence” (Ahmad 2009: 179). But an even greater problem than the conditions eliciting this rebuke, and one very soon elaborated in African literature, was the political betrayal of colonial nationalist hopes. In The Color Curtain Wright urged newly independent nations to foreswear mysticism and become “secular and practical” (Wright 1956: 218), but these nations proved themselves more than capable of learning the lessons of their former masters, including the pull of Cold War polarities. In his words, all the men at the Bandung conference “represented governments that had already seized power and they did not know what to do with it” (1956: 207). Despite its symbolic importance, the conference showed “how the newly independent nations have lost the energy of resistance and gained an unwelcome accountability without achieving anything resembling the motivating utopia” (Ahmad 2009: 180). This betrayal of nationalist hope provided the themes for much postcolonial writing in the years to come. The remarkable feature of postcolonial writing after independence is that it saw not only beyond national boundaries but also beyond transnationalism. Although it might still be based in the concept of a people, it embraced a fluidity, mobility and multiplicity, that while still recognizable as “African,” “Indian,” “Caribbean,” “Chicano,” “Oceanic” or “Indigenous,” conceived of freedom, identification or self-representation in a space beyond the nation state. This is true

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even when writers used the concept of “nation” to identify a people with a cultural or ethnic unity. The distinction between a nation, which represented a people, and the nation state, which represented the political and administrative structures providing identifiable boundaries to that people, became a marked feature of the new utopianism. While the partition of African states was not as immediately catastrophic as the separation of India and Pakistan, nevertheless the boundaries created were irrelevant to African demographics and installed political and economic pathologies that have lasted to the present. Those who dismiss African nations as “failed states” and “kleptocracies” overlook the fact that the source of African dysfunction is the destructively irrelevant nature of the borders created by the colonial states. These borders established civil governments detached from any sense of historic or ethnic communality and operated according to Adam Smith’s description of their economic function – to protect the rich and powerful. African literature has implicitly critiqued the failure of borders by condemning the failures of the postindependence national governments. The idea of borders between nations tends to dissolve beneath the more attractive vision of an African transnationalism, and beyond that the impact of Afro-modernity on the world itself. The driving force of this is a utopian hope outlined by Ghana’s most famous poet, Kofi Awoonor: I believe in hope and the future of hope, in victory before death collective inexorable, obligatory;… I believe in men and the gods in the spirit and the substance, in death and the reawakening in the promised festival and denial in our heroes and the nation in the wisdom of the people the certainty of victory the validity of struggle (Awoonor 2014: 70) While the post-independence novel has been the site of stringent critique, more often it has been African poetry written both before and after independence that offered a glimmering hope for the future. In his inaugural lecture in Tubingen in 1961 entitled “Can Hope be Disappointed?”, Ernst Bloch’s answer was that even a well-founded hope can be disappointed: otherwise it would not be hope. In fact hope never guarantees anything. It can only be daring and must point to possibilities that will in part depend on chance for their fulfilment. Hope can be frustrated and thwarted, but it can never be driven off course. As Neto puts it, “He who has strived has not lost/But has not yet won” (1974: 12). When thinking of the

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revolution that Neto and others hoped for, we must remember that “revolution” has two meanings: it is not simply a revolt but a revolving, a spiral into the future, a spiralling energized by creative works (Chapter 2). Seeing this, we can understand that the belief in the future doesn’t stop with independence: it remains part of the continuous spiralling of hope. Even if independence comes, and hope has been disappointed, creative work continues to spiral into the future, continues the revolution. That movement into the future must first be a movement of the imagination and in Africa the trajectory of the literary imagination has been beyond the nation, towards a transnational African consciousness and then towards a vision of Africa’s impact on the world.

Africa and the world A little-known exponent of utopianism amongst Francophone African intellectuals demonstrates the different ways in which a vision of an African future was taking shape during the period of post-independence disillusion. This was the Congolese philosopher and theologian Kä Mana, who developed the concept of imaginaire as a way of Africans getting out of the “mega-crisis” in which he saw them caught. Imaginaire is more than imagination, it is the entire framework of beliefs, patterns of thinking and drives that motivates one’s social being, and Kä Mana believed that the African imaginaire was “broken.” Like most African contemporary thinkers, he was fascinated by the groundbreaking works of Aimé Césaire, Leopold Sedar Senghor and Cheikh Anta Diop in devising the concepts of the black personality and Negritude. But his work provides a counterpoint to them in much the same way as early critiques of the movement criticized its binary ethnocentricity. The way he described what he termed the African crisis in his doctoral thesis was “a disarticulation between nature, history and culture.” Having conceived Africa as Nature (identity), and as History (determinism of causes and effects), Africans have lost the inventive power of Africa. Having conceived Africa as Culture (in terms of definite values), Africans have lost the utopian energy of Africa. (Kä Mana 1992: 129) Kä Mana posited a reuniting of identity, history and culture to re-ignite this utopian energy and his aim was to suggest ways in which an African imaginaire could be directed towards a transformed future. His Afrique va-t-elle Mourir? (Will Africa Die?) (1991) suggests rational ways to transform the myths that make us dream into problems that make us think, convert the problems that make us think into energies that make us act, change the energies that make us act into new reasons to live and die, and into new motifs fundamentally to hope and believe. (Kä Mana 1991: 14)

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Consequently, any attempt to “de-alienate” Africans from the West must include a “psychic reform.” It is not enough, he claims to call for a liberation from the West, “We must undertake a process of reconditioning of our inner life: conscience, heart, imagination and spirit.” This can’t be achieved simply by “denunciation and uprising” but by a transformation of the spirit, which gives us a “sensible and significant world, not a world that is barren, morbid and frozen in its creative possibilities” (1991: 58). Kä Mana’s purpose was to see the re-integration of nature, history and culture as the path to an unexpected, indeed eschatological future. For him, Christianity, as a religion of utopia par excellence, was the way in which this inner life could be reconditioned. But we can see the same energy of transformation in African art and literature. The re-integration theorized so resolutely in Kä Mana’s theology finds its complement in the re-integration that occurs in African literature, for both his thesis of the African imaginaire and the literature of the later twentieth century amounts to a re-integration of the past into the present in such a way as to revivify its utopian energy of that inner life. The consequence of this in the literature, despite the robust critique of colonialism and the various African governments that replaced it, was a vision of the future that came increasingly to look outward. At the end of his “Notebook of a Return to My Native Land” Aimé Césaire writes that the work of man is only just beginning and there is a place for all “at the Rendezvous of Victory” (1983: 76, 77). This embracing confidence from one of the most robust critics of colonialism among the Francophone negritudinists confirms the “anticipatory consciousness” that transforms the rhetoric of resistance into a positive anticipation of future freedom. But more than this, the words “there will be a place for all” states the vision of an inclusivism that is rarely identified in postcolonial writing, and even less often identified in African resistance rhetoric. In Neto’s poetry it is the vision of Africa in the world and not simply freedom from Portuguese rule that begins to transfer wishful thinking into wilful action, into concrete utopia. Neto’s poetry is trenchantly political and there is a sense of the future beyond the immediate attainment of a nation. When he writes that “Now is the time to march together/bravely/to the world of/all men” (1974: 30) he is suggesting something that comes to be taken up by writer after writer in Africa, the desire to enter the world of all men, the world of an Africa that is no longer formed in the imagination of Europe. This is the ultimate meaning of the Reconquest “Let us go with all of humanity/To conquer our world and our peace” (40). Neto is avowedly internationalist and this is why he is a key figure in the African vision of the future. Although profoundly Angolan, profoundly African, and passionately devoted to political liberty, his poems reach beyond Africa to combat oppression everywhere. In “Sculptural Hands” he writes I see beyond Africa love emerging virgin in each mouth in invincible lianas of spontaneous life

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and sculptural hands linked together against the demolishing waterfalls of the old Beyond this tiredness in other continents Africa alive I feel it in the sculptural hands of the strong who are people and roses and bread and future (1974: 49) While in “A Succession of Shadows” he writes Here are our hands Open to the fraternity of the world For the future of the world United in certainty For right for concord for peace (1974: 23)

Afro-modernity and pan-Africanism Ben Okri’s vision of Africa’s impact on the world in Infinite Riches questions the nature of modernity itself. We think of European modernity as coterminous with imperialism and capitalism. From one point of view, modernity is like a wave “flowing over and engulfing one traditional culture after another” (Taylor 2001: 182). A cultural theory, in contrast, holds that modernity is not simply a function of historical development but of cultural difference. It always unfolds within a specific cultural or civilizational context and different starting points for the transition to modernity lead to different outcomes (Gaonkar 2001: 17). Cultures are not necessarily engulfed by modernity, but creatively adapt it to local needs. As we see in the model of postcolonial literatures, transformation is the way “people ‘make’ themselves modern, as opposed to being ‘made’ modern by alien and impersonal forces” (18). A very dramatic example of the cultural movement of modernity occurred in the black diaspora: people scattered across the world in that immense contradiction of the Enlightenment – slavery. Violently captured and transported, dispersed throughout the New World, placed in plantations with speakers of different languages, deprived not only of a common tongue, but a common history and birthplace, they eventually succeeded in articulating their own postcolonial modernity. Paul Gilroy has problematized the African diaspora’s relationship to the West, arguing that Afro-modernism and the Black Atlantic represent a counterculture of modernity (Gilroy 1993). But if, as Gilroy proposes, “the cultures of diaspora blacks can be profitably interpreted as expressions of and commentaries

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upon ambivalences generated by modernity and their locations in it,” (Gilroy 1993: 17) then they become a significant feature of modernity itself. If slavery is the counter-culture of modernity it is also its central, defining contradiction. We can more profitably see this postcolonial modernity as an alternative, not only in its selective appropriation of modern discourses and technologies, but in its profound influence on modern global perceptions of transnational space and time. The vast and dramatic African diaspora points to a historical phenomenon central to modernity and yet fundamental to the emergence of alternative modernities: postcolonial literatures. The literatures written by colonized people in the languages of their colonizers are both a model for, and a key feature of the operation of late modernity itself. Writers from the African diaspora are one source of the transformation of modernity, which begins soon after colonial contact, when colonized, invaded or enslaved people take hold of the imperial languages in which modernity is systematized and diffused. The African example is useful not only because Africa is commonly held to be the antithesis, or the other, of modernity but also because “there has been a popular academic tendency to diminish, deny, or neglect the impact that African peoples, practices, and civilizations have had on the West’s development, as well as to forget the extent to which these populations have sought paths that have veered away from Western modernities even while being interlocked with them” (Hanchard 2001: 273). This ambivalent relationship has been a feature of alternative modernities, but there has been little attention to the impact of Afro-modernity on the West. In fact, the impact of Afro-modernity has been foundational. It has been said that American popular culture is the popular culture of the world. If that is so, we can say that the popular culture of the world derives from exiled African slaves, in whom popular music and culture has its roots. In a statement by the African-American formulator of pan-Africanism, Alexander Crummel, we find the beginnings of a revolution in the postcolonial relation between memory and anticipation: What I would fain have you guard against is not the memory of slavery, but the constant recollection of it, as the commanding thought of a new people, who should be marching on to the broadest freedom in a new and glorious present, and a still more magnificent future. (Crummel 1969: 13) Crummel’s desire exemplifies a strategic utopianism that comes to be one of the most powerful instances of the postcolonial transformation of global modernity: powered by memory rather than the oppressive weight of constant recollection. Where Western modernity became characterized by openness to the future, we see now a situation in which that openness is revolutionized by the political agency of memory. These various features of Afro-modernity: its supranational character; its circulation and re-circulation of liberating discourses of identity; its recovery of history in a vision of the future are all, incidentally, features of the utopian in

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African literature, features shared and augmented by a growing utopianism in other postcolonial literatures. Key to this is the utopian vision of pan-Africanism. And a diasporic Africa has multiple ways of circumventing history. As well as traditional ways of conceiving the past, diasporic communities generate their own pasts outside history in visa stories, documentation stories, passage and arrival stories, in effect, escaping history. Neto and Okri saw Africa impacting on the world through the dynamic of hope, but how has Africa impacted on the world and how have African writers envisaged that impact? Some of the most potent include Afro-modernity and its associated pan-Africanism, and a transnational dismantling of national identity. The re-circulation of a shared sense of oppression and purpose back to newly independent African states is one of the more interesting consequences of the African diaspora. The emergence of the “New Negro” and calls for transnational solidarity were heard in Ghana and characterized Kwame Nkrumah’s demand for a free Africa. Although Nkrumah was murdered, the tide that had begun in the African transnation had turned against colonialism and the postcolonial character of twentieth-century modernity was established. In “Harvest Dance” Kofi Anyidoho calls on Africans to reach out to the world: So raise your arms Brothers Stretch your hands Sisters Reach your hand to the BrotherMan from Birmingham in Alabama still Standing Tall with Wonder in his Eyes Stretch your arm to the Sister from SouthSide Chicago still Standing Firm against the Hostile Winds Stretch your eyes to that Tender Child from Harlem in Nu York wearing a Rainbow for her Hair Embrace that Grand Mama from San Salvador de Bahia And yes that Hell of a Guy from KingstonTown in Jamaica From GeorgeTown in Guyana and From Barranquilla in Colombia. From CapeTown in MandelaLand and From Addis Ababa in Abyssinia. From Kumbi-Saleh of AncientTimes and from Timbuktu of Ancestral Dreams. (Anyidoho 2009: 142) At the heart of this hymn to a pan-African world beats the energy of a growing cosmopolitanism. Like Caribbean literature, African literature finds itself increasingly emerging from London and New York, and no less African for that. Chris Abani, Kojo Laing, Chimamanda Adiche, spend time moving between Nigeria or Ghana and the West. Adiche’s latest novel Americanah (2013) moves between the US, UK and Nigeria, demonstrating the mobility yet elaborating on the difficulties of the global African. This mobility allows her to poke fun at the super-sensitivity of Americans about race. Friends are dress shopping in the novel and when they go to pay, the

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cashier asks which of two saleswomen helped them, but they’re not sure. She lists numerous physical characteristics to identify the salesperson before giving up. “Why didn’t she just ask ‘Was it the black girl or the white girl?’” the main character, Ifemelu, exclaims after they leave. “Because this is America,” her friend tells her. “You’re supposed to pretend that you don’t notice certain things” (2013: 128). Africa can laugh at such anxieties, but the relationship of contemporary African writers to the West is ambivalent to say the least. We may ask how these novels of Africans in the West differ from other diasporic narratives, and one answer is that like much Caribbean literature, their narratives are mostly set in the postcolony. But these contemporary worldly narratives continue to tread a fine line between a negritudinist Africa and an Africa that looks to the West, to history, desiring inclusion. Chris Abani’s work is a commentary on the violence, poverty and oppression in Africa, first in the images of child soldiers in Song for Night (2007) and in a familiarly dystopian view of Lagos in Graceland (2005). While he doesn’t use the words “hope” or “utopia,” Abani often talks about transformation and possibility, even though the transformation sometimes involves “reaching the sublime through the grotesque.” On his website he calls himself a “zealot of optimism,” despite the violence, darkness and indeterminacy of his accounts of Nigeria. In his talk on the Stories of Africa he says, “I am asking us to balance the idea of our complete vulnerability with the complete notion of transformation…” So for Abani transformation is a key, and youthful protagonists like My Luck in Song for Night and Elvis in Graceland are ideal subjects for transformation, because identity and agency are negotiated through discovery and possibility. But euphoric optimism that pervades Graceland even in the face of the horror of Lagos is deeply ambivalent because it is generated by a vision of America as utopia. For Elvis, who is given a passport by his friend Redemption, America is redemption. “Yes, this is redemption,” he says as they call his name. This is unsettling because the implication is that utopia lies, like Elvis’s dancing, in a simulation of America and its popular culture. For Omelsky the ambiguous politics of Graceland is a strategy. Abani deploys ambivalence as a discursive vehicle with which to expand the contours of how we come to think and imagine African youth resistance – pressing us to consider the inherent contradictions, complicities and contingencies that perhaps accompany any ascription of agency. (Omelsky 2011: 85) This seems supported by Abani’s comment on this aspect of the novel: It’s a story about a loss of innocence, and yet that being some sort of redemption. It’s already a lie. Healing, or any kind of transformation or transubstantiation is never an erasure of the trauma, but it’s the attempt to cobble together damaged self, that can limp through in a very beautiful way.

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It’s not America that’s important, or that he’s coming to it, it’s that he’s able to have that moment of transfiguration right there at the end. (Aycock 2009: 8) Perhaps we will have to take Abani’s word for it. It is not America that is important but the moment of transfiguration – the very idea that such transformation is possible that generates a utopian vision of the future. The thing that holds this idea in place is that “Identity is a destination.” … and that’s why all of my work is about becoming. We’re all transnational, either in the real sense of a passport, where you’ve lived in different countries and have spent life migrating through different continents, or in the way in which culture mixes. (Aycock 2009: 7) So, with resonant echoes of Bloch’s ontology of “Not-Yet-Becomeness,” Chris Abani negotiates that pathway between an essential, emotional intuitive Africa, the primitive other of the West, and an Africa that has generated its own alternative modernity. Whether Elvis achieves it or not, Abani’s concept of African worldliness is utopian. For him the impact of Africa on the world is simply in being there. While Abani’s observation of the tenuous link between culture and identity is exemplary, Elvis’s transfiguration is not entirely convincing. Both Adiche and Abani are caught in the paradoxical trap of cosmopolitanism, a trap that opens where ideology and utopia meet. There is a cosmopolitanism of the sophisticated global traveller, the elite cultural producer and the mobility of the ordinary subject. The ethical dimension of cosmopolitan theory is its great strength and I admire its utopian orientation. But it constructs cosmopolitanism as an attitude of mind rather than a subject position. It is “a perspective, a state of mind […] a mode of managing meaning” (Hannerz 1996: 102). If the ethical defines the cosmopolitan then it is located in an empty space, a polis that is not “of the cosmos,” but of nowhere, a protean term amenable to almost any meaning. Attractive though the ethical dimension is, it doesn’t solve the problem of who can be allowed into the cosmopolitan club. When asked once “Where is home?” Chris Abani replied that, “home is in language.”2 Similarly, heimat, that is, the home we have sensed but not yet experienced, the utopian No Place, may also be achieved in language. Kojo Laing reveals that not just the future, but the future of Africa in the world, the future of African worldliness may lie in the capacity of language to disrupt accepted ideas of nation or culture by the circulation of difference. The appropriation and transformation of English informed by the grammar and syntax of the vernacular is a fundamental strategy of postcolonial writing. But Laing’s language is much more than this, for while he does include Ga names, and other Ghanaian terms from various sources, and while there is evidence that he uses “a poetic syntax that is typical (with variations) of both poetry and oratory in Akan and Ga” (Dakabu

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1993: 23), his language is fundamentally comic – a comic disruption of the cultural space between languages. The two beards crowded in one corner of Accra did not agree … The father’s beard shifted and pulled at different angles, taking in the sun and folding its rays under the hair … The son’s beard was soft and vast with Vaseline, the hair parting ways at the middle … Both beards were, in the brotherhood of hair, heavy with commas. (Laing 2011: 2) The utopian element of Search Sweet Country lies in the overwhelming of linear narrative by a proliferation of subject positions. The national story is many individual stories, a transnation in which the overlapping multitude of stories overwhelms the borders of history and even time itself. Beni Baidoo was Accra, was the bird standing alive by the pot that should receive it, and hoping that, after being defeathered, it would triumphantly fly out before it was fried. (2011: 1) He represents not just language, but the failure of language, which is one of the novel’s major themes: in the past he had been a clerk (but never of the first division) and an unsuccessful letter writer; now he is a desperate, indiscriminate talker, obsessed with founding a village, a town of his own, but unable to find a more solid building material than words. But this is part of the point of the novel that the utopia of the syncretic can be achieved in words. Laing holds passionately that the search for wholeness involves change, cultural and social interaction between Europe and Africa (Cooper 1998: 179). This underlies the theme of Afro-Christianity that runs through his novels and recalls the words of the Congolese philosopher and theologian Kä Mana, for whom Christianity was a religion of utopia par excellence. As he puts it, “the Christian message as an innovative power is capable of injecting a creative dynamism into African traditions in order to initiate an ethical redemption of African social imaginaire” (Kä Mana 1992: 130). But this is only one aspect of Laing’s vision of the future. Woman of the Aeroplanes offers a relationship with Europe beyond an ambiguous cosmopolitanism. This emerges in the exchanges between the Ghanaian town of Tukwan and Scottish Levensdale, both doubly oppressed and peripheralized. The novel, balanced as it is between two marginal spaces, undermines the idea of the West as a glistening utopian goal, and also reveals the nation to be a “transnation” operating both within and beyond national borders. Despite the magical real dimension of Woman of the Aeroplanes, Tukwan, according to Laing “is realistically possible in terms of cross-cultural interchange. In terms of hope it is a realizable utopia” (Cooper 1998: 195). It is realizable because it is grounded, not a fantasized vision of perfection to

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be imposed upon an imperfect world, but an integral feature of that world “representing the hopes and dreams of those consigned to its margins” (195). *** Nationalism is the great paradox of postcolonial literatures. While it provided a powerful energizing force in anti-colonialism, the failure of the postcolonial nation meant that the vision of the literature was projected beyond it, to Africa, to panAfrica and to the world. While the impact of African culture has been strongly realized in music, the scope of this literary vision begins to play its part in shaping the world. The nation state, boundaries, borders and the entire edifice of modernity cannot contain the vision of heimat on which much postcolonial literature dwells.

Notes 1 Neto’s own career shows the ambiguity of hope. Leader of the guerilla group M.P.L.A. (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola), he became the country’s first president and allowed US oil companies into the country, an attempt to gain foreign currency, a move that resulted in Angola’s descent into a nation run by a small oligarchy with staggering inequality between expatriate and national workers. 2 In conversation with the author.

6 WRITING AND RE-WRITING INDIA

India remains one of the most interesting examples of the imbrication of an antinational utopianism and the formation of the nation state. The paradox of this spirit of anti-national heimat continuing alongside the successful establishment of postcolonial state ideology raises interesting questions about how the nation is both written and re-written. This paradox is seen most powerfully in the way the Indian nation was “written” by the film Mother India and continues at the turn of the century to be re-written in post-Rushdie literature in an anti-national utopianism that continues the visionary scepticism of Tagore and Gandhi. But perhaps the deepest paradox lies in the ways in which Gandhi’s anti-nationalist, anti-capitalist and anti-modern philosophy of Hind Swaraj or Indian home rule provided the spiritual energy for Nehru’s nation state. The reason for turning to this radical social movement is that it demonstrates, in a clearer way than literature, the point at which utopian thinking leads to social change and thus helps us assess the political utility of utopia. The imagined community of the Indian nation can be understood in three stages in India’s literary development. Of course, they are not clearly demarcated periods, they overlap extensively, but each is dominated by a particular utopian vision. The first period, from the beginning of the century to independence is the time of nationalist fervour, of the light on the hill, the promised utopia of the modern Indian nation. This is the period in which Tagore’s vision went against the grain of Swadeshi nationalism – two poles around which Indian writing continued to circulate. This is also the period in which Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj was published in English, but the effect of Gandhi’s deep skepticism about nationalism wasn’t to take effect until after independence. The second is the period after independence, a period of apparent modernization but one that in reality consolidated the alternative modernity that had begun during colonial occupation. This is the period of national triumph in which Gandhi’s vision of Hind Swaraj, although

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co-opted by official nationalist politics, proved to be subversive in the purity of its philosophical anarchism. The third stems from the time of Indira Gandhi – a manifestation of the imagined community for which Midnight’s Children, if not its initiator, is its most evocative example. This is a period of rebellion and recovery, but it moves by the turn of this century into a period of global optimism. In each one of these periods the figure of Mohandas Gandhi looms large, but his presence underpins the imagining of the nation in quite different ways. The idea of nation clearly focused the utopian ideals of independence and perhaps nowhere more so than in the early decades of twentieth-century India. Nevertheless, in Tagore we find the trenchant position of the earliest and most widely known anti-nationalist. For Tagore, there can be no good nationalism; it can only be what he calls the “fierce self-idolatry of nation-worship” (Tagore 2005: 39) – the exquisite irony being that his songs were used as Bengali, Bangladeshi and Indian national anthems. Tagore’s warning against the model of European nationalism was unmistakable. This abstract being, the Nation, is ruling India. (2005: 46) The Nation, with all its paraphernalia of power and prosperity … cannot hide the fact that the Nation is the greatest evil for the Nation. (60) Nationalism is a great menace. It is a particular thing which for years has been at the bottom of India’s troubles. (87) Tagore’s scepticism about nationalism was a by-product of his utopian vision. He railed against the teaching that “idolatry of the Nation is almost better than reverence for God or humanity” (83). Tagore’s utopianism is nowhere more evident than in his belief in the spiritual potential of human society for openness and acceptance. I have no hesitation in saying that those who are gifted with the moral power of love and vision of spiritual unity, who have the least feeling of enmity against aliens, and the sympathetic insight to place themselves in the position of others, will be the fittest to take their permanent place in the age that is lying before us. (2005: 78) It is certainly not the spiritual fervour of this that characterizes contemporary Indian writing, but rather the sense of a future world beyond the restrictions of the nation. Indian society has always been exogenous and this has only become more pronounced.

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Tagore was ahead of his time in more ways than one. But the early years of the century were marked by an anti-colonial momentum that, like all anti-colonial movements, relied on the idea of the nation. Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s coining of the Mother India myth and its iconic representation in the film Mother India ensured that it would continue to haunt the Indian imagination. Such images offer a much more powerful focus than “visions of spiritual unity” and the connection between the nation and Mother India was imprinted on the Indian psyche. But against the militancy of “Swadeshi” nationalism, Tagore produced Ghare Baire (The Home and the World) (1999). Swadeshi advocated the boycott of foreign goods but “drew increasingly on the rhetoric and iconography of a revivalist Hindu nationalism that sought to define the nation in religious terms” (Gopal 2009: 34). When Hindu– Muslim riots broke out Tagore became one of the movement’s most trenchant critics, earning him the reputation of apologist for colonialism. The complexity of utopian thinking can be seen in the clash between Mother India, Gandhi’s philosophy of Hind Swaraj and Tagore’s vision of a union of home and world. All are visions of the future.

Gandhi and Hind Swaraj The reason Hind Swaraj is so interesting is that it was able to achieve what Fanon thought nationalism could not do: mobilize the “innermost hopes of a whole people” (1963: 148). It is arguable that Nehru’s modern industrial socialist nation could not have been established without the utopia of Hind Swaraj. But paradoxically this vision, so critical in the birth of Indian nationalism was anti-nationalist, antiEnlightenment and anti-modern. “Home rule” imagined an India outside any conception of the modern nation state. This paradox emerges in Partha Chatterjee’s foundational Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World (1986), which, although he doesn’t mention utopia, exposes the ambivalent relationship between utopian thinking and nation building and the actual process by which utopian thinking may evolve, or “degenerate,” into an organized nation state machine. Chatterjee offers the thesis that postcolonial nationalism emerges in three stages: the moment of departure, the moment of manoeuvre and the moment of arrival. He identifies these stages in three Indian thinkers: Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, Mohandas Ghandi and Jawaharlal Nehru, all of whose philosophies exhibit a particular relation to the problematic and thematic of Orientalism, which underlies the nationalist discourse it inherits from Enlightenment thinking. Nationalist thinking might reverse the problematic of Orientalist thought which sees the “Oriental” as a passive subject, but still operate within the Orientalist thematic – the post-Enlightenment framework of knowledge, science and reason within which it re-defines that subject. This leads to an inherent contradictoriness in nationalist thinking because it reasons within a framework of knowledge whose representational structure corresponds to the very structure of power nationalist thought seeks to repudiate. (1986: 38)

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For Chatterjee, this contradictoriness signifies both the theoretical insolubility of the national question in a colonial country and the extended problem of social transformation in a postcolonial country, within a strictly nationalist framework (39).1 But one solution to this problem was a utopianism that was able to step outside both the problematic and thematic of Enlightenment thinking. Hind Swaraj was able to transcend the imperatives of modernity and of global capitalism and repudiate the nation state as a symptom of the problem. The paradox of Gandhi’s swaraj is that a utopian moment so critical in the development of Indian nationalist thinking was fundamentally opposed to that modernity on which the nation was founded. For him: “It is not the backwardness or lack of modernity of India’s culture that keeps it in continued subjection … it is precisely because Indians were seduced by the glitter of modern civilization that they became a subject people. And what keeps them in subjection is the acceptance by leading sections of Indians of the supposed benefits of civilization” (Chatterjee 1986: 86). It’s not just an attack on capitalism, it is an attack on civil society itself. Industrialization would lead to the exploitation of villages and socialism would not change this (88). The pamphlet Hind Swaraj or Indian Home Rule, first published in the columns of Indian Opinion and written in 1908 on a voyage home from London, stylistically avoids the doctrinaire by setting up a dialogue between Reader and Editor. In this way utopia emerges as a conversation rather than a programme, which tends to domesticate its radical utopian vision but also reinforces the fact that Gandhi’s utopian agenda is an ethical rather than economic imperative. He refused to formalize swaraj into a political programme no matter how often he was asked, and for this reason he remains the most utopian anarchist in history. However, the “science” of non-violence satyagraha “provided for the first time in Indian politics,” says Chatterjee, “an ideological basis for including the whole people within the political nation” (1986: 110). This whole people, in its multiplicity, its mobility and annoying capacity to render the boundaries of the state porous, may also be referred to as a “transnation” (Ashcroft 2010). The nation had its own boundaries and divisions, most notably the caste system which Gandhism worked strenuously to overturn. But the utopian vision of the whole people could be kept quarantined from the business of state politics and the business of Congress. “Swaraj can only come through an all-round consciousness of the masses” (Speech at AICC meeting Patna, 19 May 1934, CWMG vol. 63: 514). The interesting feature of Gandhism is the ease with which it maintained a vision of the apparently unobtainable, such as the ideal of property in trust. This, like all other ideals, would “remain an unattainable ideal, so long as we are alive, but towards which we must ceaselessly strive” (Interview, 9 November 1934, Gandhi 1958, vol. 59: 318). Here lies the profound and defining paradox in utopian thinking as radical as Gandhi’s: in order to remain true to its ideals it must divorce itself from the possibility of a partial success, which is precisely what “national development” now represented. Swaraj could only maintain its character as a social possibility if it separated itself from the emerging machinery of the postcolonial nation state. This is because Gandhi’s, like all utopias, is a critical utopia, and

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utopian interventions “like those of the great revolutionaries, always aim at the alleviation and elimination of sources of exploitation and suffering” (Jameson 2005: 12) rather than blueprints for a perfect world. It is this critical element in Tagore’s and Gandhi’s utopianism that comes to inspire Indian literature at the turn of the twentieth century.

Writing India: Gandhi, Mother India and Nehru’s statism How then did Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj pave the way for Nehru’s statism? First, it showed that an organized support could be built on the whole of the peasantry, appropriated into “the evolving political forms of the new Indian state” (Chatterjee 1986: 124). But it did so also because the working out of the politics of nonviolence made it abundantly clear that the political mobilization of the peasantry could not achieve what Gandhi intended, that is, “to train the masses in selfconsciousness and attainment of power” (124). The political mobilization of the peasantry not only took a different form than Gandhi had envisaged but took a form that could be said to have contradicted his vision. This is because the next stage of the nationalist project, its moment of arrival, was to “situate nationalism within the domain of a state ideology” (132). This was the position of Nehru who believed that a strong nation state structure was essential to the provision of social justice, which was impossible under the decadent colonial state. A new set of modern institutions must be established so that the economic structures of society could be reorganized and enough wealth created to ensure social justice for all. This, unlike Gandhi’s, must be an achievable utopia in which the state has a central coordinating and directing role. In Nehru’s mind, only a modern socialist state could provide for all. The process by which national modernity appropriated Gandhi’s utopian vision can be seen to be uncannily replicated in the iconic ur-text of the Indian film industry: Mother India (also known as Bharat Mata, directed by Mehboob Khan in 1957). “Mother India” dates from 1882 when Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s novel Anandamath coined the image that was to become the essence of Indian nationalism, “an enchanting image more beautiful or glorious than Lakshmi or Sarasvati” “Who is she?” “The Mother” “Who is this Mother?” The monk answered: “She whose children we are.” (Chatterjee 2006: 149) By exploiting this deep cultural myth, Mother India not only embodies India’s development of its own modernity but metonymically reproduces the contradictions of that development. It re-invents the foundational myth of Nehruvian socialism – the nation state will provide for the marginalized and needy – by appropriating the maternal embodiment of land and community. This builds upon Nehru’s

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invention of a timeless Indian nation in The Discovery of India (1946). Just as Nehru founded the nation state on this invented history, so it succeeds by appropriating Gandhi’s ability to mobilize the whole cross-section of the Indian people with Hind Swaraj. In this way the film shows the modern state built on the foundation of a timeless and communal peasant tradition. Thus the mythic identity of the modern Indian nation state becomes written, the mother myth of India – Bharat Mata – persisting despite the plight of actual women, whose back-breaking life is enacted by the heroine in a hymn of sacrifice and suffering. In 1949 the Film Enquiry Committee commissioned by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting appealed to Indian producers and directors to cooperate with the government, and share the responsibility of nation building. Indian cinema should serve as an “effective instrument” for “national culture, education and healthy entertainment” to promote and further induce “a national character with its multifaceted aspects” (Kumar 2004: 140). Mehboob Khan, under his studio’s banner of hammer and sickle, completed this monumental saga eight years later. Indian cinema became a protector of the official culture and the history of the nation, and gained the status of the generally accepted social and ethical consciousness of India. Mehboob reproduced “the Indian woman” as an icon of national martyrdom, and submission to the nation state, although for one critic “It is neither in touch with the reality of the largely economic, social and political exploitation of Indian women, nor does it sympathise in any way with the real plights of peasants” (Schulze 2002: 75). Ever since Mother India, filmmakers have been adapting and reproducing its national iconic imagery and emotional set-up albeit as the same scenario of the individual sacrificing for the collective. However, the film demonstrates very powerfully how the creative product can anticipate a different future. In this case the heimat produced is the nation and Mother India quickly became the embodiment of the Indian nation. The effect is to make this vision of India appear a discovery rather than an invention, just as Nehru’s The Discovery of India was the invention of an India that could lead into the new utopia of Indian nationhood. The core of this invention was of course “Indian Civilization,” which had never existed as a homogeneous entity and was as removed from daily reality as Mother India from peasant women. Nehru’s invention of Indian national culture lay well within the thematic of Orientalism, which traditionally constructed India under the rubric of an unchangeable “Hinduism,” based on the Sanskrit epics and the “golden Aryan past” which very few upper castes ever inhabited. The film opens with Radha, “Mother India” lifting a lump of earth close to her face and then letting the earth slowly crumble in her work-worn hands. The camera draws back a little, to take in her surroundings. The old woman is squatting in the furrow that apparently a tractor driving behind her, has just ploughed. The camera pans, and surveys the technological progress taking place in rural India. Invited to open the dam she humbly demurs and in the following two and halfhours, we see how Radha is transformed into “Mother India,” beginning with her

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wedding, her husband’s loss of his arms in an agricultural accident, and her resistance to a moneylender’s sexual advances. Her youngest son Birgu tries many times to retrieve the bangles she wore at her wedding and are now with the moneylender. Eventually joining a dacoit gang he returns one day to humiliate the moneylender and retrieve the bangles. But when riding away from an angry village with his childhood sweetheart, his mother runs after him, calls his name and then shoots him with a gun from behind. She rushes to the dying son and holds him. He hands over, with his last strength, the bangles to her. His blood runs over his mother’s hand and in a superimposition of images, in mother’s memory, the blood mixes with the water flowing from the dam sluice into the canals. However, as it does so the red becomes clear – she has sacrificed her son so that the nation may be purified. The symbolism is disturbing: honour is to be preserved above justice; tradition to be maintained against disruption at all costs; strangely, the traditional structure of village life must be preserved to avoid hindering the process of modernization. The mother – India herself – must ensure this. The shooting of the son shows that the nation has no room for lawlessness. Its utopian vision is one in which the regulation of the individual is necessary for the good of the collective. The collective of the modern nation state rests on the solid foundation of Indian civilization – Bharat Mata. This is a very clear demonstration of the relationship between ideology and utopia. Both ideologies and utopias are ideas that are “incongruous with the state of reality within which they occur” (Mannheim 1966: 173). The key difference is that ideologies work to sustain the present state of things, while utopias serve to bring about change. But the way in which Mother India acts to preserve the dominant, though emerging, ideology of the nation with a vision of social purity demonstrates the ways in which all ideologies need an element of utopianism to gain legitimacy. The concept of Mother India shooting her son to preserve the purity of the nation deploys a concept of the future that preserves the status quo of emerging Indian nationalism.

The utility of utopia We can therefore see how greatly the romantic vision of a Mother India produced by Mehboob’s film differs from Gandhi’s vision of Hind Swaraj. His vision was neither an economic nor a cultural romanticism because he lay completely outside the problematic and thematic of Enlightenment thought – the very thematic that mobilizes the Mother India image. Neither can we see in Birgu an example of Gandhi’s enlightened anarchy in which each man ruled, because that form of anarchy assumed the leadership of the wise and moral satyagrahi – the local leader of the non-violence movement. But the comparison shows the process by which Nehru’s modern Indian nation state was able to build on the idea of swaraj just as it built on the myth of Indian civilization that he claimed to have “discovered.” Both of these encompassed Fanon’s phrase “the innermost desires of a whole people.” In the film that whole is a mythic fantasy, whereas in reality Indian

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independence was successful because Gandhi had paved the way for a belief that the Indian people regardless of caste division, and in particular including the peasantry, could be instrumental in the project of national self-determination. Paradoxically, this occurred, not through the establishment of the nation, but through a vision of heimat on which all that hope for liberation was projected. What then of the utility of utopia? If we examine Hind Swaraj in order to address the question of the political utility of literary utopianism, we see that the literary vision and the social movement have something in common. Their value lies not in their capacity for producing social change directly, but for encapsulating that intensity of desire without which change cannot take place. That desire is founded on a thorough critique of the conditions of exploitation and oppression. The fact that political change in India meant Nehru adopting the very statism that Gandhi’s swaraj explicitly rejects does not alter the fact that it was the vision of swaraj which mobilized the Indian peasantry into a sense of being a whole people, despite the disruptions and divisiveness of caste. To put it another way, it may have been Gandhi’s vision that enabled Indians to imagine a national community, the very imagined community on which Nehru built the postcolonial nation. Paradoxical as it is, the fact still remains that Gandhism, originally the product of an anarchist philosophy of resistance to state oppression, itself becomes a participant in its imbrication with a nationalist state ideology. (Chatterjee 1986: 155) This is not the only contradiction in the trajectory of utopian thought, nor does it need to stand as an argument for or against political utility, but in the Indian case it is one of the most fascinating. Did Nehru hijack the utopian vision of Gandhi’s swaraj, or did swaraj infuse Indian modernity with its particular character? This conundrum lies embedded deep in the very concept of appropriation. What emerged was a new utopia, modern, scientific, industrial – a state that existed to provide identifiable political, economic boundaries within which the Indian transnation could embrace modernity. The conclusion we reach is that the power of utopian thought lies precisely in its refusal to be practical. As Fredric Jameson observes, “practical thinking” everywhere represents a capitulation to the system. “The Utopian idea, on the contrary, keeps alive the possibility of a world qualitatively distinct from this one and takes the form of a stubborn negation of all that is” (Jameson 1971: 110–111). The power and hence, we may say, the utility of Gandhi’s vision was maintained by his adamant, impractical refusal to reduce his vision of swaraj to a structured political programme. Ironically, it was this refusal that gave his vision its attraction, mobilized a whole people, and ultimately conceived the Indian nation. This is why utopianism manifests itself so widely and so powerfully in postcolonial literatures, and why literature is such an important vehicle of the utopian. Literature is not called upon to produce a practical programme in the way Gandhi’s was. But the energy and utility of this genre might lie in its similar refusal to be reduced to a

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practical programme, because what literature anticipates, what it illuminates, is the power of desire itself.

Re-writing India: the post-Rushdie revolution For most critics, and possibly for most readers, contemporary Indian literature entered a decisive, cosmopolitan and globally popular phase with the publication of Midnight’s Children in 1981. The following decades have witnessed the growth of an Anglophone literature that has been outward looking, confident and increasingly widely read. It is arguable that in that time the Indian literary diaspora has had a greater impact on English literature than writing from any other nation. The revolution inaugurated by Rushdie hinged on the subversion of the nationalist euphoria of midnight, 27 August 1947. One version of this story is that the euphoria continued until the arrival of Indira Gandhi, when disappointment set in with a vengeance. The 1980s saw the flourishing of a literature – particularly the Bombay novel (Ashcroft 2011) – virtually obsessed with Gandhian corruption. But whatever the confluence of forces, it seems that Midnight’s Children triggered scepticism about nationalism that has characterized India’s increasingly vital and outward moving literature. But the “Rushdie revolution” represents a continuation rather than a break. It regenerates the tradition of anti-nationalist utopianism inaugurated in the writings of Rabindranath Tagore and Mohandas Gandhi. Mother India captures the way in which the nation was written, but the anti-national scepticism of Gandhi and Tagore remained the energizing force behind contemporary postcolonial literature, arguably the deeper and longer lasting in the Indian literary consciousness. The irony of this is that both Tagore and Gandhi have become nationalist icons and in Gandhi’s case sanctified almost as a national deity. For both Tagore and Gandhi future thinking was inextricable from a sense of moral purpose in which Indian destiny existed beyond the confines of the nation and in many respects that utopian supranationalist vision of India came into full flower in the period inaugurated by Midnight’s Children. We have seen the paradoxical way in which Gandhi’s antination, anti-capital, anti-modern doctrine of Hind Swaraj paved the way for Nehru’s spectacularly successful launch of the Indian state. But the utopian direction of Gandhi’s vision re-emerged in Indian cultural productions during the late twentieth century, and nowhere more powerfully than in literature. It is their insurgent anti-national philosophy that best survives in the contemporary novel. Midnight’s Children (1981) became the founding text of a new generation, one characterized by mobility and hybridity, and which gained worldwide attention through Indian literature in English. The long and immensely powerful discourse of Indian nationalism makes the novel’s critique of the nation all the more significant. But the distrust of national enthusiasm also has its precursors. In E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India, Aziz expresses a nationalist utopianism indicative of much Indian political thought in the first decades of the century when he declares, “India shall be a nation! No foreigners of any sort! Hindu and Moslem and Sikh

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and all shall be one!” (1979: 289). While Forster’s criticism of the Raj in India is clear in the novel, he is ambivalent about the revolutionary promises of nationalism: Fielding taunts Aziz with the remark “India a nation! What an apotheosis! Last comer to the drab nineteenth-century sisterhood!” (1979: 289). Some readings of Midnight’s Children insist on Rushdie’s continued allegiance to nationalism (Rege 1997; Brennan 1989; Heffernan 2001). But if we see Midnight’s Children in the light of the other master discourses he deconstructs – the discourse of history within which nations come into being; the discourse of language; those of race and ethnicity and their embedding in language – then we get a clearer picture of the range of Rushdie’s radical dismantling of the myths of identity that surrounded that fateful midnight. What Rushdie dismantles is not so much the idea of nation as the wider ranging tyranny of borders within which such concepts come into being. Midnight’s Children is marked by a deep distrust of the boundaries of the nation, a distrust embodied in Saleem’s despair. But Rushdie’s novel had a different, more utopian vision as he explains in Imaginary Homelands. The story of Saleem does indeed lead him to despair. But the story is told in a manner designed to echo, as closely as my abilities allowed, the Indian talent for non-stop self-regeneration. This is why the narrative constantly throws up new stories, why it “teems.” The form – multitudinous, hinting at the infinite possibilities of the country – is the optimistic counterweight to Saleem’s personal tragedy. (1991: 16) Saleem’s personal tragedy is not only the tragedy of the postcolonial nation, but also the tragedy of the idea of the bordered nation itself. The saving grace, for Rushdie, is the capacity of a people to “teem,” its irrepressible and exorbitant capacity to transcend the nation that becomes its most hopeful gesture. The rich underpinning of mythic allegory allows him to conceive a multitudinous civilizational reality existing beyond the nation. This is precisely the function of the midnight children themselves: to reveal the improbability of the nation ever encompassing their extravagant variety and potential. This potential is one we could call utopian, not in Su’s sense of disappointment, but in the very unbounded extent of its possibilities.

The global turn in Indian writing In the decades after Midnight’s Children, Indian writing took a significant cosmopolitan turn (despite Tagore’s reference to the “colourless vagueness” of the term, 2005: 39) which put the traditional idea of the nation as imagined community into question, a questioning that begins even before independence. When Gandhi wrote, as early as 1909, that India’s freedom struggle had misunderstood the “real significance” of swaraj by equating it with independence, and that “my life henceforth is dedicated” to realizing its true meaning (CWMG 10: 64 Hind Swaraj,

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Nov. 22 1909), he introduced a range of ideas centring on the concept of satyagraha, that had little to do with conventional nationalism. Whereas independence meant outward freedom, Gandhi’s goal was a deeper one that came, in time, to clash with conventional nationalist ideals: “The outward freedom therefore that we shall attain will only be in exact proportion to the inward freedom to which we may have grown at a given moment” (CWMG 38: 1–2, Nov. 1 1928). In the “post-Rushdie” novel, stories of family and community continue, but in very different form and orientation than the Gandhi-inspired vision of Rao and Narayan. Midnight’s Children won the Booker Prize in 1981 and we can follow the trajectory of subsequent Indian Booker Prize winners, the inheritors of Rushdie’s prize-winning revolution, to understand how India came to be “re-written:” Arundahti Roy’s The God of Small Things (winner in 1997), Kirin Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss (2006), Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger (2008) and a nonprizewinning novel that perhaps more than any others demonstrates the direction of Indian writing: the expatriate Hari Kunzru’s Transmission (2004). The constant tension between the Gandhian sense of community in family or village and the large, increasingly global sense of history and nation characterize these novels in different ways. They don’t highlight the growing tensions of communal violence, of Shiv Senna and Hindu majoritarianism, which form much of the interest of the “Bombay novel” of the 1990s. But they expose the extent to which both the idea and reality of nation has betrayed those who so enthusiastically embraced it in 1947. Sixteen years after Midnight’s Children, Roy’s The God of Small Things refuses the grandeur and epic scale of Rushdie’s novel in favour of a story of small people whose lives are shattered by small things that take on an immense significance. After “the stylistic pyrotechnics of magical realism, Roy’s novel proffered a masterly command of realism and the pleasures of seemingly unmediated experience” (Gopal 2009: 156). Indian history, argues Guha (1996: 3) is fixated on the nation state, which determines how the past is to be read; this can be undone by listening to the myriad “small voices” in Indian society. This is a classic postcolonial approach to history, which is invariably the history of the state. Where the “Big God” of nation or empire writes history, it gets in the way of memory – the grand narrative of the nation swallows up the smaller narratives of its people. So often it has been the task of literature to rewrite history because the dominance of Imperial history so easily slides into the grand narrative of the nation. Where “Big God” controls the writing of official history, Small God “climbed into people’s eyes and became an exasperating expression.” If the nation is the dominant story, then individuals are subject to that story. It is the “small things,” according to Roy, wherein the life of the nation is contained and it is by reading the silences in the interstices of the grand narrative of history that the stories that make up the nation can be recovered. Kirin Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss (2006) circulates around the pathos of those discarded by history, those out of time and place, whether the Anglophile remnants of a faded empire, or those caught out of place by the desire to better their lives in the West. The “loss” inherited is the loss of empire, of privilege, of home and also of the sense of place bestowed by the idea of nation. “Could fulfillment ever be felt

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as deeply as loss?” (2) asks the novel as it questions the possibility of fulfilment in the constantly shifting realities of nation and history. Set in the Himalayan region of the Indian/Nepal border and illuminating the debilitating state of displacement experienced by wealthy Anglophile Indians, as the region is torn apart by a “Gorkhaland” nationalist movement, the novel touches on the inevitability, and the inevitable futility of nationalism. It contrasts this with the desperate straits of Biju the cook’s son, in New York without a green card, who demonstrates a different state of loss, as he gradually loses his dream of wealth in the harsh reality of the exploited illegal immigrant. The novel hinges on the uncertainty of liminal spaces – the geographical liminality of those on the borders of the nation, the liminality of those who have been betrayed by history, the liminality of the immigrant worker. Aravind Adiga’s searingly iconoclastic novel The White Tiger (2008) raised considerable controversy when it was published for its unflattering view of Indian society. But the novel continues an approach to the corruption of politics and the “democratic state” that lies deep in the Indian social consciousness. His mantra “to be a man” is no great distance from Gandhi’s philosophy of satyagraha although the language he uses to attack the failed democratic nation is far more trenchant, a savage critique of the corruption of capitalist society. The putative address of the novel to Wen Jiabao places the novel in a global context from the first line. Though it enables an informal insouciant style, its globalizing trajectory also enables a considerable degree of dramatic irony in the voice of the “white tiger” as he continually compares the Indian economic reconstruction to that of the Chinese. “And these entrepreneurs – we entrepreneurs – have set up all these outsourcing companies that virtually run America now” (Adiga 2008: 4). The White Tiger is the novel of an India that has unquestionably taken its place in the world. But here the silences of the “small things” overwritten by history find an ironic revenge as Balram enters the entrepreneurial future through murder, theft and bribery. A novel that didn’t receive a Booker Prize and yet reveals the global trajectory of Indian writing perhaps better than any other, is Hari Kunzru’s Transmission. Including this novel within this company raises a significant question: What is an “Indian” novel today? Hari Mohan Nath Kunzru was born in London of Kashmiri Pandit origin. Sometimes referred to as a “British Indian” novelist, and deputy president of English PEN, he, along with Ruchir Joshi, Jeet Thayil and Amitava Kumar risked arrest by reading excerpts from Rushdie’s Satanic Verses (which is banned in India) at the 2012 Jaipur Literature Festival. So by orientation, commitment, and, in Transmission, by subject matter, Kunzru is deeply implicated in the widening production of Indian writing. The question: “What is an Indian writer?” may never be conclusively answered. So many Indian novels are now written in the diaspora that it seems that Tagore’s admonition about the world has been fulfilled with a vengeance, writers’ national identities becoming more and more a matter of representation. If Balram Halwai in The White Tiger moves out of his life of poverty into the Bangalore milieu of “the entrepreneur,” Transmission’s hero Arjun Mehta extends

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this movement into the Silicon Valley Nirvana of every middle-class computer nerd. Arjun, a geeky, day-dreaming Indian software engineer fares little better, at first, than the impoverished Biju in Inheritance of Loss. He is recruited by an exploitative staffing agency to work in Silicon Valley, “the daydream location, a hidden ravine lined with fibre optics and RadioShacks” (Kunzru 2004: 22). Employed as a specialist in virus protection, when he is unfairly laid off he creates the Leela virus (based on his film idol Leela Zahir): a virus so sinister that only he will be able to find the cure, thus making him an indispensable employee. When his company refuses to re-employ him, systems around the globe suddenly become infected and inoperable, with a mysterious rendering of Leela Zahir dancing across the screen. But Arjun’s plot is uncovered by the FBI, and simple, day-dreamy Arjun becomes the world’s most-wanted terrorist. In a classic Bollywood conclusion the film star Leela Zahir, herself unhappily exploited by her mother’s ambition, disappears after viewing a message Arjun has sent her. We are not told, but can certainly assume that Leela has run off with Arjun, “like Arjun Mehta, Leela Zahir has never reappeared” (271), thus emphasizing the complex and confusing integration of the virtual and the “real” in the modern world.

The legacy: class, nation, world These novels display in brilliant colours the link between utopia and critique. Each one critiques the scramble for nationality and the corruption of the postcolonial state in different ways, but all of them launch their critique from an implicitly utopian position derived almost directly from Gandhi. Three themes emerge from this inheritance: first is the continuation in different ways of the condemnation of class and economic injustice. In Gandhi this was most prominent in his condemnation of untouchability, but the philosophy of Khadi or selfsufficiency was at the same time a programme of economic equality and a critique of capitalism. Second is the critique of the bounded nation state itself, a critique that blossoms in Indian writing in the metaphor of borders, and continues the spirit of both Tagore’s and Gandhi’s anti-state philosophies. The third characteristic of the contemporary novel is its movement outward from “Home” into the “World,” as Tagore termed it. Both in the actual mobility of writers, and in the exogenous way Indian consciousness interpolates the economic, cultural and literary world in these novels suggests a trajectory that will continue through this century.

Class The theme of class is summed up in The White Tiger when Balram says in his letter to Wen Jiabao: “I won’t be saying anything new if I say that the history of the world is a history of a ten thousand year war of brains between the rich and the poor” (Adiga 2008: 254). The war being one of brains is significant, but it is one in which the structure of the contest is heavily weighted against the poor. Despite

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Arundhati Roy’s very well-known activism and her radical interest in class struggle, the distinction between the “Small God” and the “Big God” is a subtle one in which class overlaps nation, as private and personal despair drops below the gaze of the public, citizenship, the Big God of nation. “Then Small God (cozy and contained, private and limited) came away cauterized, laughing numbly at his own temerity” (Roy 1997: 19). The Small God is the God of the impoverished and disenfranchised, but it is also the God of the teeming ordinariness of the people living beneath the level of the grand narrative of nation. If the nation is the dominant story then the ordinary individual stories are footnotes. Individual despair doesn’t enter into the story. In each of these novels the issue of class, of poverty and abandonment by corrupt officials is inextricable from the failure of nation. In Tagore’s words “the Nation is the greatest evil for the Nation” (2005: 60). But this failure is just as often a consequence of nationalism. In The Inheritance of Loss the pathos is maintained by the confusion of those caught in a changing world in which their privilege is diminishing under the onslaught of a demand for justice and independence. The sisters Lola and Noni find themselves “with the rotten luck of being in the exact wrong place at the exact wrong time when it all caught up – and generations worth of trouble settled on them” (Desai 2006: 241). The achievement of the novel is to reveal the extent to which issues of class, privilege and discrimination occur as a function of the structure of the postcolonial nation fuelled more by ignorance than active discrimination. Lola and Noni are the recipients of the privilege bestowed by empire. Now the Nepali inhabitants of this border region are demanding change. The obnoxious judge whose Anglophilia is so rampant that he functions as a cultural metaphor in the book, is driven by hatred for everything – his wife, daughter, cook, India and probably subconsciously himself for his abjection to imperial power. As a Cambridge student he had undertaken with utter resolve to become as English as he could, only to be despised by both his countrymen and his colonial masters. It is not until the moment of independence that he realizes this, when he sees the civil servants sailing away, “throwing their topis overboard, leaving behind only those ridiculous Indians who couldn’t rid themselves of what they’d broken their souls to learn” (Desai 2006: 205). The issue of class (and caste) is deeply bound in The White Tiger with the social and political corruption. Gandhi waged a lifelong war against untouchability, claiming that there was nothing in the Shastras justifying it (CWMG 62: 121–122, Nov. 16 1935). But class seems to have taken a greater hold on the contemporary literary imagination. Balram, the narrator of The White Tiger, sees caste as meaningless rather than constricting. A member of the Halwai caste, or sweet makers, he knows nobody in his family who made sweets. His father was a rickshaw driver. Caste is overshadowed in the novel by the spectre of economic class and poverty, particularly the poverty of those at the very bottom of society. This is perhaps nowhere clearer than in the corruption of the health system. Balram’s father, dying of TB, waiting at a hospital to which no doctor will visit, is

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“permanently cured” of his TB at 6pm that night “as the government ledger no doubt accurately reported” – by dying (50). The doctors, by bribing the supervisor, were marked as present and released to earn money in private practice. The poor are not only subject to the corruption of the system. They dwell completely outside the political process. Balram is regarded with scorn by his employers, who see his ignorance as disqualifying him from political enfranchisement. When asked questions such as “Who was the first Prime Minister of India? What is the name of this continent?” Balram’s apparently risible answers lead him to remark, “And we entrust our glorious parliamentary democracy – he pointed at me – to characters like these. That’s the whole tragedy of this country” (Adiga 2008: 10). Consequently (in a poignant echo of Rohinton Mistry), everybody’s vote in Balram’s village is controlled by the landlord. When a “brave mad man” turns up to the voting booth to demand to cast his vote he is beaten to death by the local politician and the police. “After a while the body of the rickshaw puller stopped wriggling and fighting back, but they kept stamping on him, until he had been stamped back into the earth” (102). Significantly, the poor are of the soil and are kept there by the system – “stamped back into the earth.” This is something Gandhi himself sensed. His conception of the nation looked beyond the structure of the legislature. “What strange blindness it is that those who are elected as legislators to represent the people should seem, and in fact are, their rulers!” (CWMG 38: 18, Nov. 4 1928). The White Tiger puts horrifying flesh to the bones of that reality. As Balram says “I am India’s most faithful voter, and I still have not seen the inside of a voting booth” (102). It is not just in voting but in access to the amenities of society that the poor find themselves excluded. The drivers who wait outside the gleaming glass mall for their masters to shop are enthralled to see a rickshaw puller attempt to enter the mall but is stopped by the guard. “Instead of backing off and going away – as nine in ten in his place would have done, the man in the sandals exploded, ‘Am I not a human being too?’” (148). As one of the drivers remarks: “If all of us were like that we would rule India and they would be polishing our boots” (148–149). The problem is, of course, that individuals like this are very rare and Adiga explains it with the metaphor of the Rooster coop: Never before in human history have so few owed so much to so many, My Jiabao. A handful of men in this country have trained the remaining 99.9 per cent – as strong, as talented as intelligent in every way – to exist in perpetual servitude; a servitude so strong that you can put the key of his emancipation in a man’s hands and he will throw it back at you with a curse. (2008: 175–176) The Rooster coop does its work when servants keep other servants “from becoming innovators, experimenters or entrepreneurs” (194). However extreme and hyperbolic we regard The White Tiger, it is worth remembering that Gandhi regarded economic equality as the “master-key to non-violent independence.”

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Working for economic equality means abolishing the eternal conflict between capital and labour. It means the levelling down of the few rich in whose hands is concentrated the bulk of the nation’s wealth on the one hand, and the levelling up of the semi-starved naked millions on the other. A non-violent system of government is clearly impossible so long as the wide gulf between the rich and the hungry millions persists. (CWMG 81: 366, Dec.13 1941) A subtle issue in the question of class is education, for economic equality relies not only on the levelling of wealth but on the education of the poor. As Balram discovers, the reading matter of choice for the drivers is Murder Weekly, which acts as a form of social control, because “the murderer in the magazine is so mentally disturbed and sexually deranged that not one reader would want to be like him … So if your driver is busy flicking through the pages of Murder Weekly, relax. No danger to you. Quite the contrary. It’s when your driver starts to read about Gandhi and the Buddha that it’s time to wet you pants Mr Jiabao” (126).

The nation and its borders Both Tagore and Gandhi saw the issues of class and economic disparity tied up with the problem of the nation state and its promotion of profit. In one of his more resonant visions of unmet possibility Tagore says: The conflict between the individual and the state, labour and capital, the man and the woman; the conflict between the greed of material gain and the spiritual life of man, the organized selfishness of nations and the higher ideals of humanity; the conflict between all the ugly complexities inseparable from giant organizations of commerce and state and the natural instincts of man crying for simplicity and beauty and fullness of leisure – all these have yet to be brought into harmony in a manner not yet dreamt of. (Tagore 2005: 7) The core of the problem was the inheritance of colonial boundaries, colonial administrative structures, and colonial prejudices. Part of the power of The God of Small Things comes from the vividness with which the children’s impressions and voice are relayed. Childhood is a time without divisions, whereas now “Edges, Borders, Boundaries, Brinks and Limits have appeared like a team of trolls on their separate horizons” (Roy 1997: 3). Despite Roy’s apparent break from the exuberant excess of Rushdie’s sweeping novel, she focuses on similar issues – the boundaries that hem us in on all sides. In many respects, despite the soaring aspirations of politicians, the nation took over the function of the colonial masters. As Balram says in The White Tiger: “In 1947 the British left, but only a moron would think we became free then” (Adiga 2008: 22). But perhaps worse than that, the new order was a jungle.

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And then, thanks to all those politicians in Delhi, on the fifteenth day of August 1947 – the day the British left – the cages had been left open; and the animals had attacked and ripped each other apart and jungle law replaced zoo law. Those that were most ferocious, the hungriest, had eaten everyone else up. (Adiga 2008: 63–64) The novel depends upon hyperbole, because this is the métier of Balram’s discourse in his letters to Wen Jiabao. But it is clear that the triumph of the nation has become the triumph of corruption. The “Great Socialist” is the regional strong man who eventually wins the national elections and his record is spectacular: “a total of ninety-three criminal cases – for murder, rape, grand larceny, gunsmuggling, pimping and many other such minor offences – are pending against the Great Socialist and his ministers …” (97–98). In Inheritance of Loss, the nation is just as powerful in its invisibility as in its obvious control, partly because the region is in the grip of an insurgency in which the very concept of nation is at stake. Here at the geographical edges of nation, the porous border of the state, a new nationalism rises up to demonstrate the persistence of national feeling. “This state making,” says Lola, “biggest mistake that fool Nehru made. Under his rules any group of idiots can stand up demanding a new state and get it too. How many new ones keep appearing?” (Desai 2006: 128). There is an ironic moment when Gyan, coming to visit Sai, is ordered by the judge to recite poetry, to which he responds by reciting Tagore. “Where the head is held high. Where knowledge is free, Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls … Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let me and my country awake.” Every schoolchild in India knew at least this. (Desai 2006: 109) This is a poignant reminder of Tagore’s view of nationalism, because Gyan is becoming enmeshed in “the narrow domestic walls” of a Ghorkaland rebellion, a political passion that will destroy his love for Sai. Indeed the pathos of the novel is played out in the conflict between the justice of the Ghorka’s cry for equality, their desire for “that heaven of freedom,” and the consequences of their actions. Here at the edge of the nation, in the liminal space of a porous border, a different kind of nationalism wreaks its havoc. In 1947, brothers and sisters, the British left granting India her freedom, granting the Muslims Pakistan, granting special provisions for the scheduled castes and tribes, leaving everything taken care of brothers and sisters – Except us. EXCEPT US. (Desai 2006: 158)

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Although the cry of freedom is strong in this liminal space of the Himalayan border, this passage re-affirms the continued dependence of postcolonial national formations on imperial structures. “The men sat unbedding their rage, learning, as everyone does in this country, at one time or another, that old hatreds are endlessly retrievable” (161). Rage, enmity, passion, the feelings of class exclusion and economic injustice, of ethnic marginalization resolve themselves inevitably in the utopia of nation. As Lola ponders: “What was a country but the idea of it? She thought of India as a concept, a hope, or a desire. How often could you attack it before it crumbled?” (236). What Sai finds herself in the middle of is the endless cycle of history, the passion for decolonization repeating itself.

The world It would be foolhardy to see the mobility and outward movement of Indian writing and, indeed, Indian society itself as motivated by those high ideals expressed by Gandhi and Tagore, the “moral power of love and vision of spiritual unity.” But it is worth noting that the global sensibilities of the contemporary Indian novel have a deep prehistory. Long before colonization India was already a migratory and even diasporic aggregation of flows and convergences, both within and without state boundaries (Motwani 2004). This flow, however, is not always enriching. The other side of the story of displacement and loss in The Inheritance of Loss is the failed aspirations of those like the son of the judge’s cook, Biju, whose journey to New York leads to poverty and exploitation by other Indians. Ejected from restaurant after restaurant as he looks for work, slipping “out and back on the street. It was horrible what happened to Indians abroad and nobody knew it but Indians abroad” (Desai 2008: 138). One thing Biju discovers in New York, is the extent to which a country is no more than an idea, an idea that grows more vague the further away you travel. “What was India to these people? How many lived in fake versions of their countries, in fake versions of other people’s countries? Did their lives feel as unreal to them as his did to him?” (267). Biju exists in the dystopian version of diaspora inhabited by many: without visa or green card, exploited, underpaid, sleeping on the floor of the restaurant kitchen. To him home is loss and absence – America, exile and loneliness. He knows that he represents the magical possibility of freedom and wealth to many back home. But it is an illusion. This has become the stereotype of the diasporic condition – absence and loss, poverty and failure. But there is another story demonstrated by Indian writers themselves, writers who have interpolated Anglophone literature. In this respect these novels can be seen to outline a trajectory towards a more self-assured engagement with the global. From the dystopian exile of Biju’s life in New York, to Balram’s move to Bangalore with its industries and call centres plugged into the global economy, to Arjun’s move to Silicon Valley and his catastrophic revenge upon Virugenix and subsequently, the world. This is not strictly chronological since Transmission was written before Desai’s and Adiga’s novels. But it indicates

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the outward movement of Indian society, a movement that is increasingly captured in the writing. Transmission stands for the direction of the contemporary Indian novel in many ways: the complications of its authorship; its generic border crossing; its representation of the ways in which Indian expertise and Indian culture – through Bollywood and computer savvy – have infiltrated the world; its confident satire of both US and global technological society even as it demonstrates an Indian familiarity with that society; its ability to balance an insider knowledge of Indian family dynamics with knowledge of the computer geek world. These qualities suggest a literature that is both deeply rooted in the Indian cultural consciousness and yet prolific in its engagement with the world. *** The Mother India trope may continue to hold its grip on the Indian imagination but a deeper and perhaps more lasting tendency is that spirit of questioning that occurs most influentially in Tagore and Gandhi. While we may be tempted to view their anti-modernism as anachronistic, and their moral urgings as naïve, these thinkers captured a sceptical view of the devil’s pact between nation and capitalism that remains even more relevant today. The utopianism of contemporary Indian literature stems directly from their trenchant critique, driven by the belief that people can live free of rampant inequality, free of the borders of nation and the global capitalism it serves. In these contemporary novels that deep vein of hope continues: an awareness of the interrelation of “Home and World;” the often exuberant iconoclasm of their approach to questions of nation and history; and the alertness to the potential failures of democracy and of international capitalism suggest that the trajectory of the Indian novel has taken it a long way from the village. In their global reach, sophistication and social critique, Indian novels continue to shape Anglophone literature.

Note 1 We should note in passing that where Chatterjee talks about nationalism and the nation state he is talking about India where nationalist discourse is both historically long lived and well developed. Although many inferences can be made to postcolonial nationalism around the world, the case he discusses is not identical with them all.

7 BORDERLAND HETEROTOPIA Aztlán and the Chicano nation

The disillusion with the utopian dream of national independence is clear in Africa and India. The African movement beyond the nation state into a transnational or supranational network of connections and the critique of the Indian nation in postRushdie writing show the extent to which the dream of nationhood was disappointed. A very different utopian function emerges when a people with no hope of a separate nation state imagines a nation as a people rather than a structural entity. This is the case of the Chicano people in the US1 who frame their culture with both ethnic and geographic location around the utopian concept of Aztlán. Chicano utopianism deserves a case study of its own because Aztlán combines, more comprehensively than any other utopian vision, the combination of memory, culture, location and the anticipatory consciousness of heimat: it is both utopia and utopianism. A Chicano nation state exists “Nowhere” because it can never come about. But the identification of the myth of Aztlán with both the Chicano people and the Southwest of the US suggests that the concept of nationhood remains prominent in Chicano consciousness. Aztlán occupies a “real,” although fluid site based in the unbounded space of the borderlands. As such it is describable by Foucault’s term: heterotopia. The concept of heterotopia has seen a surge in popularity in recent times, coinciding with the spatial turn in cultural studies, because it provides a way of conceiving the identification of cultures, particularly marginalized ones, with place. In “Of Other Spaces” (1967) Foucault describes six principles that distinguish heterotopic spaces from all others: 1. All cultures manifest heterotopias, some as sacred places like cemeteries, and others more profane such as museums and ships. 2. Each heterotopia has a “precise and determined function” that may shift over time. Cemeteries, for example, were generally located near the town’s centre

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3.

4.

5. 6.

next to the church until the end of the eighteenth century. Their migration to the suburbs during the nineteenth century marked a significant ideological shift from the “sacred and immortal heart of the city” to the “other city,” where each family possesses its dark “resting place.” Heterotopias are capable of “juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are themselves incompatible.” He provides the examples of libraries and oriental gardens. Heterotopias “are most often linked to slices in time,” as in the functions that a library or cemetery serve. These spaces always “presuppose a system of opening and closing that both isolates them and makes them penetrable.” Some heterotopias require rites of passage while others appear to be publicly accessible but “hide curious exclusions.” Finally, heterotopias function in relation to all spaces that exist outside of them. At the same time that they mark a culturally definable space that is unlike any other space, they also act as microcosms reflecting larger cultural patterns or social orders.

Although in a strict sense the Chicano borderlands are not set apart or enclosed in the way Foucault initially conceives heterotopias, and are occupied by the dominant culture as well as the Chicano, the geographical identification of Aztlán with Chicano place ensures that it occupies a space that can be seen to correspond to several of the defining characteristics Foucault outlines. Unlike utopias, heterotopias are real sites. Society designates sites for work, for recreation, for rest, for education, for transportation, and so on. But Foucault is interested in “counter-sites,” places positioned on the outside of cultural space – such as gardens and cemeteries – irrelevant to the practical functioning of everyday life. These are real places but “absolutely different” from other sites: not utopias but “heterotopias.” They can be disruptive, as he suggests in the Preface to The Order of Things: while “Utopias afford consolation: although they have no real locality there is nevertheless a fantastic, untroubled region in which they are able to unfold,” heterotopias, on the other hand “are disturbing, probably because they secretly undermine language” (Foucault 1970: xviii). If we think of the Chicano nation as an unbounded site, but a real site, a site of extension rather than enclosure, we can see how disruptive its potential may be to state structures and its socially designated sites. To classify Chicano space as a heterotopia requires a number of caveats: this space is far from irrelevant to the functioning of everyday life. Foucault wonders whether some colonies have functioned in this manner. “In certain cases, they have played, on the level of the general organization of terrestrial space, the role of heterotopias” (1967: 27). He refers to primarily religious colonies, Puritan and Jesuit, “marvelous, absolutely regulated colonies in which human perfection was effectively achieved” (27). Whether disingenuously or not he equates human perfection with absolute order and regulation. But the point is that these are real sites, not imagined ones and the reality of the Chicano nation, supported as it is by

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the Aztlán myth offers the model of a space that, according to Foucault’s sixth principle of heterotopias, has “a function in relation to all the space that remains” (27). While these may represent the fruits of an imperial utopianism they differ greatly from the utopianism that began to be generated in postcolonial literatures.

Aztlán and utopia At the First Chicano National Conference in Denver in 1969, the conference manifesto, called El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán encapsulated, for the first time, the hopes, political aspirations and cultural identity of the Chicano people. It is in many ways an extraordinary document because in effect it gave birth, or rebirth to the myth of Aztlán, the sacred Aztec homeland, a myth that has had an incomparable effect on the Chicano sense of identity and national purpose. Remarkably, although the myth is many centuries old it was virtually forgotten among Chicanos before 1969, owing its creation to the poet Alurista as Luis Leal explains: The concept of Aztlán was originated by the poet Alurista in the year 1969 at the conference organized by Corky Gonzales in Denver. At that time, he read a paper called “El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán” and included a poem. In this “Plan Espiritual De Aztlán” Alurista says that Aztlán is the homeland of the Chicanos. And he associates this with the land, precisely. He [took] the concept from the Mexican Revolution Zapatista, [who said] that the land belongs to those who work it. (Leal 1989: 11) Its revival demonstrates the empowering function of utopianism no matter how mythical or fantastic. Aztlán is both a myth and a symbol of Chicano identity, Chicano space and Chicano history. As a myth it is often conceived as a utopia where injustice, evil, sickness, old age, poverty, and misery are absent. As a symbol, Aztlán has two meanings, both of which have a powerful effect in Chicano political life: first, it represents the geographic region known as the Southwestern part of the United States, composed of the territory that Mexico ceded in 1848 with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo; second, and more important, Aztlán, as the El Plan Espiritual indicates, symbolizes the spiritual union and historical identity of the Chicanos. In this way it embodies one of the central ambiguities of utopia: the union of memory and the future. Significantly, by locating Aztlán in Southwest US it demonstrates this union as a transformative feature of the present. It is this location of the myth that justifies the concept of a borderless Chicano heterotopia. In an elegant demonstration of the ways in which a utopian future cycles through the past to transform the present, the mythic location of Aztlán occupies the southwest borderlands inhabited by the Chicano people today. As a region in mythical geography, Aztlán has a long history. According to the Nahuatl myth, the Aztecs – descendants of the original Cochise people of the

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Southwest of the US – were the last remaining tribe of seven, and they were advised by their god Huitzilopochtli to leave Aztlán in search of the promised land, which they would know by an eagle sitting on a cactus devouring a serpent. This was the site of Mexico City. The myth of Aztlán soon became established in Aztec lore. As early as the fifteenth century Moctezuma Ilhuicamina (ruler from 1440 to 1469) sent his priests in search of Aztlán. The historian Fray Diego Durán, in his Historia de las Indias de Nueva Espafza e Islas de Tierra Firme, a work finished in 1581, says that Moctezuma I, desiring to know where their ancestors had lived, what form those seven caves had, and the relation between their history and their memory of it, sent for Cuauhcóatl, the royal historian, who produced a report of Aztlán as a paradise, a garden of plenty (Durán 1994: 213). Subsequently, when the Spanish conquered Mexico in 1521 they soon looked for new lands to conquer and projected their own myths onto the region that was to become the Southwest. In one such history, Historia de las Indias de Nueva España, Fray Diego Durán provided a vivid picture, derived from native informants, of this place called Aztlán: our forebears dwelt in that blissful, happy place called Aztlán, which means “Whiteness.” … There they had at their disposal great flocks of ducks of different kinds, herons, water fowl, and cranes … They also possessed many kinds of large beautiful fish. They had the freshness of groves of trees along the edge of the waters. They had springs surrounded by willows, evergreens and alders, all of them tall and comely. (Durán 1994: 213) Such a paradise excited the imaginations of the Spaniards, and after seeing the gold of Tenochtitlan, they no doubt imagined Aztlán to be an El Dorado. All attempts to find it failed and it faded into mythic memory. Unlike utopias, paradises are static and nostalgic. But the mythic location of Aztlán in geographic space had a profound effect on the development of a Chicano consciousness.

Aztlán place and identity The pronouncement of El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán confirmed a Chicano ethnicity, a homeland and a nation: Chicano ethnicity was now grounded in the Aztec origins; its homeland was now identified as the territory ceded to the US by Mexico in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848; Chicano ownership was further ratified by the fact that the land belongs to those who work it, who “plant the seeds, water the fields, and gather the crops;” so Chicano nationality was now focused in the location, mythology and significance of Aztlán: (“We are a nation, we are a union of free pueblos, we are Aztlán”). In short, Aztlán became a focus for Chicano cultural and political identity and a permanent confirmation of the possibility of cultural regeneration. Aztlán, although more a paradisal myth than a future utopian place, functions as a concrete utopia to provide identity, location,

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and meaning for a people who were previously scattered, directionless and politically unorganized. In short, Aztlán is heimat for the Chicano people – although grounded in the mythic past it resonates with the Not-Yet of a future arrival. This myth, as with myth in all cultures, became an essential dimension of their everyday experience. Aztlán has a place it has a history and most importantly it apprehends a future as the “home we have all sensed but not experienced.” The Aztlán myth proved to be a surprisingly resilient weapon in the Chicano political arsenal because it so comprehensively united ethnicity, place and nation. It is different from other utopias because it combined the mythic and the political so directly: on one hand it was a spiritual homeland, a sacred place of origin; on the other it generated a practical (if impossible) goal of re-conquering the territories taken from Mexico. But this union of sacred and political proved to be its secret power. Chicanos interpreted their nationalist cause as more than a political movement; they were involved in the regeneration of sacred time and space, as the ultimate concern of Chicano nationalism sought to transcend the existent temporal and spatial barriers and establish a homeland patterned after the primordial homeland from which the Aztecs originated. This would be a spiritual nation rooted in a sacred landscape charged with the power of an indigenous spirituality and justified by the validity of their national liberation struggle. (Pina 1989: 36) Consequently, in the 1960s, “Chicano” took on a new meaning, as a term to be worn with pride by activists, or to be rejected by those for whom it was too militant. In either case, it was no longer a term of dismissal but one rooted in a renewed concept of ethnicity. The issue of Chicano land, Chicano space, raises the associated issue of Chicano colonization and why we are justified in seeing Chicano resistance as a postcolonial movement. The border between the United States and Mexico is one of the longest between any two countries, some 3000 kilometres from Tijuana–San Ysidro to Brownsville–Matamoros. The fact that seems to have disappeared from US history is that this border is a consequence of the invasion and colonization of the inhabitants. Like many of America’s colonies, such as Hawaii and Puerto Rico, North Mexico was absorbed into the State of the US, but in the case of Mexico both the origin and process of that absorption disappeared from official and popular memory. In 1846 the US provoked Mexico to war, the result of which was the invasion of Mexico and the annexation of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado and California. The border fence that now divides the US and Mexico was created, in effect, on February 2 1848 when the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, annexing those states, left 100,000 Mexican citizens on the US side. This puts a very different slant on the hysteria surrounding illegal immigration and “border protection” in the US today. These people were mostly mestizo, and they can truly say, in the

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words of the Chicano song, “I didn’t cross the border, the border crossed me.” Land established by the Treaty as belonging to Mexicans was soon swindled away and the mestizo inhabitants originally working the land were by and large dispossessed. The borderlands therefore carry a meaning dense with history, belonging and cultural identity. If we consider the “borderlands” to include all the territories taken from Mexico it is an extensive region, a space of intense interaction, a contact zone like no other. For Gloria Anzaldua the US–Mexican border is a “1950 mile long open wound” (1988: 193). It is not just a border, but “running down the length of my body/staking rods in my flesh” it splits Chicano identity in a way that must be continually overcome in the vision of Aztlán. Anzaldua takes the problem of contamination, as the US sees the border, and turns hybridity and inbetweenness into a strength. The U.S.-Mexican border es una herida abierta where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms it haemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country – a border culture. Borders are set up to define places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them. A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition. The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants. (1988: 194) Ironically, the people of the borderlands are considered to be beyond the boundary by the dominant white society – beyond the boundary of race, culture, and politics. The challenge to the Chicano is to transform that ambivalent and often outcast space into a space of affirmation and possibility. The myth of Aztlán accomplishes this with its powerful fusion of the sacred, historical, geographical and political. In an enormous region covering five states, many Chicanos are still living in their homeland. However, this may be the secret power of the concept of “borderlands” – because they are interstitial they cannot be bounded. Indeed, this leads to the ultimate utopian vision of the dissolution of all national borders imagined by Rudolfo Anaya (1988). The Chicano population is not a scattering but rather the occupants of an expanding cultural space called Aztlán. While this may be geographically questionable it is imaginatively powerful and demonstrates the hidden power of utopian thinking in cultural nationalism.

Chicano nationalism Myths explain the cosmic structure of a culture’s world. Sacred myths in particular are important in postcolonial utopianism because they become the horizon of the culture’s world, and particularly the horizon of hope. Myths are, to borrow Lichtheim’s description, “the product of a collective will-to-believe” and “a

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prophetic anticipation of that which is to come” (Lichtheim 1971: 118, 112). However, as an imaginative feature of the rise of nationalism, utopianism carries dangers. In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon launches into a discussion that has a direct bearing on the relation between Aztlán and nationalism, and upon the liberatory function of utopianism itself. I am ready to concede that on the plane of factual being the past existence of an Aztec civilization does not change anything very much in the diet of the Mexican peasant of today … But it has been remarked several times that this passionate search for a national culture which existed before the colonial era finds its legitimate reason in the anxiety shared by native intellectuals to shrink away from that Western culture in which they all risk being swamped. Because they realize they are in danger of losing their lives and thus becoming lost to their people, these men, hotheaded and with anger in their hearts, relentlessly determine to renew contact once more with the oldest and most precolonial springs of life of their people. (1963: 209–210) Here we see the importance of the connection between past and future for all postcolonial peoples. But while, as Fanon suggests, it may have been necessary for Chicanos to “renew contact once more with the oldest and most pre-colonial springs of life of their people,” the danger always exists that rather than allowing the mythic past to generate empowering cultural narratives, utopianism may lead to the kind of vague and nostalgic wishing that Bloch warns against. The claim “to a national culture in the past … [may] serve as a justification for the hope of a future national culture,” and such renewed contact with the “pre-colonial springs of life” provides a “psycho affective equilibrium … responsible for an important change in the native,” one that may lead to political resurgence and liberation. But it also involves dangers which Fanon warns may well end in forms of exoticism and romantic idealizations of the past, which, rather than furthering the material struggle, lead to its bogging down in dreams and delusions of a past grandeur. He warns that the tendency to idealize the past must be qualified; otherwise, the material aims of the group may indeed be led astray by idle dreams and empty symbols. However, as we have seen again and again, without the heroic dreams and cultural symbols generated by utopian hope, the material aims of a nationalist movement may lack the spiritual centre that sustains struggle. Struggle of any kind cannot survive without a belief in future success. As with other postcolonial movements, the drive for a homeland, the dream of a liberated future, however illusory, obtains its power from its sacred nature, and is to a great degree inspired by literature and art of various kinds, within which a different kind of future is best imagined. Thus despite materialist criticism of the place of cultural mythology the anticipation of a utopian future in literature fixes the hope for that future in the cultural imagination. Whatever effect it may have on the immediate success or

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otherwise of political resistance, the spiritual sustenance of utopias such as the myth of Aztlán is inestimable, instilling “a form of psychic resistance that remains intact well after the actual phase of physical resistance has ended.” In this way “the role of the artist, then, proves to be a significant and often more continuous one than that of the political nationalist” (Padilla 1989: 114). Aztlán reminds us of the connection between visions of utopia and the sacred dimensions of cultural experience that we find in almost all postcolonial utopias. This sacred dimension appears to be the one thing that can preserve hope against discouragement. The interesting dimension to the question of Chicano nationalism is the severance of the ties between the nation and the state. Nation and state are usually regarded as synonymous, and postcolonial theory tends to critique nationalism since its energy and promise in uniting people to anti-colonial resistance, inevitability degenerated into, or became absorbed into colonial-generated state structures, often characterized by authoritarianism or corruption, or both. However, by observing such huge and complex state societies as the US, China and India it becomes obvious that the “nation” is a transitive phenomenon, a “transnation” (Ashcroft 2010), the idea of “nation” severed from clear identification with the state, except in times of pronounced state propaganda. Most commentators regard communities such as Chicanos as oppressed national minorities forming part of a multinational state, rather than “nations.” However, the broad acceptance of the term “First Nations” has provided a conceptual basis for considering the presence of intra-state nations. Whether groups such as Chicanos can be considered to be nations raises broader questions of strategy, which Jorge Klor de Alva outlines in a Marxist context. Assuming that nationalism is a foremost organizational tool, he suggests that deploying that nationalism raises several questions: What should be the goal of national liberation: Political autonomy? Effective political representation through electoral strategies? Or should the demand for self-determination be primarily a call for cultural autonomy, with local control of schools and bilingual–bicultural education? Chicano and Puerto Rican strategists are not in agreement as to what the right answers are … But to what extent it truly can be of one sort without implying another is a crucial question. (1988: 143) Whatever that answer might be, we can see that the strategy involves the constant risk of an essentializing and reifying identification of a people into a unit called a nation. Nevertheless, the utility of this in the programme of political assertion is clear. The myth that the concept of nation draws on for sustenance in the Chicano context is one that is formed and developed in the powerful anticipatory discourse of literature.

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The role of literature The most vigorous engagement in all colonized societies occurs in language. Hybrid and adapted forms of English transformed the language itself (see Ashcroft 2008), offering a strategic intervention in the construction of identity that remains relevant to the complex nature of Chicano subjectivity. Alfred Arteaga says: I define myself as a Chicano … My nation is not Mexico, yet I am ethnically Mexican and racially mestizo. But my people exist in the borderlands that traverse the national frontiers of the United States and Mexico. It is obvious for us here that the language we speak both reflects and determines our position in relation to the two nations. (Arteaga 1994: 3–4). However, in literature and other forms of cultural production this in-betweenness can be a form of strength. The relation between the two nations can be one emerging from and confirming Chicano identity. Rather than diluting cultural identity, linguistic versatility and adaptability can confirm it. Chicano developments of hybrid language strategies uncover an example of the felt experience of natio existing outside, or beneath the racial and historical narrative of the nation state. In this existence in the borderlands of the state, the use of language is not only a central fact but also an empowering “technology” for self-fashioning. The example of the borderland culture is important because it reveals a truth about all language: that while identity is usually held to reside in language, identity is actually performed in the range of different ways the language is used. The maintenance of myth in any society is the responsibility of its singers and storytellers. In this respect, Chicano artists and poets, like the traditional cantadores (ballad singers) or cuentistas (storytellers) in the folk community, as well as writers like Alurista, Rudolfo Anaya, Luis Valdez, Tomás Rivera, act as the “guardians of their people’s culture and singers of its themes” (Lewald 1972: 11). These are like the tlamantini, (Nahuatl for “philosopher or wise man”), who were responsible for composing and teaching the songs and poems in which the Aztecs preserved their knowledge. This role as guardian and upholder of the group culture increases in intensity and consequence in times of crisis. We might regard colonialism itself as a time of “crisis” and certainly it introduces a critical dissonance into a people’s sense of itself. In the case of British colonies the appropriated language became the technology of resistance and transformation, and this may be seen to be the case in the Chicano renaissance as well. Hispanic writers required an audience, perhaps a world audience, but certainly an audience extending beyond their own people, despite the intense significance of these works in times of crisis. While such storytellers always offer a perception of what is possible for a people, we often see periods of imaginative intensity and literary flourishing, and such cultural renaissance swept through Chicano society of the Southwest in the 1970s. This resurgence went hand in hand with a sense of cultural nationalism motivated

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by, and focused in the myth of Aztlán. The first edition of the Chicano journal Aztlán in 1968, which effectively began the Aztlán revival, illustrates the essential function of the arts in conveying a sense of a nationalist spirituality. One of the key figures in this cultural renaissance was the novelist Rudolfo Anaya who repeatedly explored the relationship between myth and history, the spiritual and the material, the intuitive and rational elements of culture. His first novel, Bless Me, Ultima (1972) was an attempt to infuse the Chicano experience of the contemporary with a mythic consciousness, but it was generally regarded as unsuccessful, a nostalgic harkening back to an idealized and unobtainable past rather than a linking of that past to the social dilemmas of the present. Consequently, in his second novel, Heart of Aztlán (1976), Anaya invested the mythic component with direct political relevance by setting it squarely alongside a story in which a community is engaged in a bitter strike against railroad management. In this way he was more successful in deploying the myth as a “collective reservoir of the culture’s intuitive understanding of itself and as a renewing force” (Padilla 1989: 128). In this novel myth leads to direct social action when a member of the cultural community, Clemente Chávez, learns how to follow, or read, the “signs” of his people’s journey through history. He is forced through economic necessity to move his family from the land into the barrio of Barelas in Albuquerque despite his fear that this will erode the traditions that have nurtured and supported his family on the sacred landscape of the Llano. When he stands up to corrupt union officials he is fired from his job, and is cut off from the land that might sustain him, he takes to drink, alienating himself from his family, the men of the barrio and even from himself. One night at a meeting of striking union members this all changes suddenly. Clemente hears the legend of Aztlán as it is told by a mystical figure, Crispín, a blind poet: “We are the fruit of the people who wandered from the mythical land of Aztlán, the first people of this land who wandered south in search of a sign.” … “It is a simple story,” Crispín continued, “a burning god fell from the sky and told the people to travel southward. The sign for which they were to watch was a giant bird in whose claws would be ensnared the poisonous snakes which threatened the people. In that place, under the protection of that plumed bird, the wanderers from Aztlán were to build their new civilization. There they would meet the second part of their destiny. But the important thing,” Crispín leaned forward so that all could listen, “is to know how to interpret the signs. The legend renews itself with each generation, and we must know how to unravel the meaning of the sign.” (Anaya 1976: 83–84) Crispín draws analogies between the winding trains and the serpents that threatened the people. But the question arises, “Where will a man find the power to melt the steel?”. Crispín responds, “In his heart, in the heart of Aztlán,” which compels

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Clemente to search for Aztlán, and launches him on a mystical journey that nearly takes his life. But he emerges from the experience with the knowledge that the power that can defeat the railroad is the power of love. In a speech to the strikers at the novel’s end he says: There is a heat more intense than the fire of a torch! And it can be rekindled at a moment’s notice! Wherever discrimination and injustice rear their ugly heads the fire can be called upon to burn them away! Wherever there is an honest man, a poor man, an oppressed man, the fire smolders within his heart ready to ignite and light his path! It is the fire of love that burns in each man and woman and child: it is the fire of the soul of the people which must serve us now. (Anaya 1976: 207–208) This novel, although criticized in Marxist circles for its mystical vein, and possibly a little too programmatic in its aesthetic achievement, is a more successful effort to put the utopian vision into a contemporary political context. It also provides a potent demonstration of the power of literature to imagine a different world, to focus on a vision of utopia that has an immediate political implication. Heart of Aztlán showed that the literary vision can cement the place of utopian thinking in political resurgence. Anaya provides a view of the past that, rather than dissolve into nostalgia, gives a vision of the future that can be acted upon in a struggle for economic as well as cultural justice. This prophetic view of the past transforms the present – as it does in all postcolonial utopianism – with a vision of the possible. The genuinely utopian character of Anaya’s thought becomes even more evident in an essay he wrote in which he suggests that now, having had its impact in Chicano resurgence, Aztlán should be considered as a “homeland without boundaries” (1988). “We must move beyond the limitations of ethnicity to create a world without borders” (1988: 231). For him, Aztlán is not just a myth but the promise of “a more fulfilling and harmonious future” (1989: 241). This has an uncanny resonance with much postcolonial writing and criticism written towards the turn of the century. Like Amitav Ghosh in Shadow Lines, Anaya sees not just ethnicity but the idea of the nation state itself, with its obsessive patrolling of the shadow lines of its borders, as something that needs to be transcended. An idealistic, utopian thought? Perhaps, but one we need to dare to consider. Those who deal in competition and the selfishness of the modern nation state are in control, and they have falsely named competition and material gain as the true values of the world. Perhaps it’s time to think of unity. Aztlán can become the nation that mediates between Anglo America and Latin America. We can be the leaders who propose human answers to the human problems of the Americas. The real problem of border regions when addressed from a world perspective should be dealt with in human terms, in terms of families and neighbors, not terms of profit or ideology. Unity and

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human potential should guide us, not market values and the gross national product. This, after all, is the challenge of our generation, to create a consciousness which fosters the flowering of the human spirit, not its exploitation. We need healing in our world community; it can start here. (1989: 241) We can see echoes here of Clemente’s advocacy of love rather than violence as a solution. Seeing Aztlán as a place where “those first inhabitants of Aztlán took their destiny into their own hands, they were born into a new prophecy, and they moved to complete it.” Anaya asks, “Can we do less?”. There is perhaps no better conclusion to a discussion of the utopian than the exhortation with which Anaya concludes: That illumination and leap of faith for those people did not make for perfection. History moves us toward perfection through small epiphanies. The tribes moved out of Aztlán as Adam and Eve moved out of Eden, to challenge the future and to fulfill their potential. Our nature moves us forward, groping for illumination, yearning for a truer knowledge of our spiritual and human relationships. We know within that we can create a more fulfilling and harmonious future. For me, this is the promise of Aztlán. (1989: 241) *** “How is it possible,” we might ask, “to live in a way that might escape the borders of nation, maps and memory?” because however illusory and arbitrarily established the borders of the state may be, they insist on their function as rigid constructors of identity. The Chicano nation, impelled by the utopian myth of Aztlán identifies the space of the borderlands as a heterotopia. This nation without a state is an imagined community, occupying a partially desacralized space, the smooth space in-between, around and through the structures of the state. It is a spectral contact zone, reflecting the continual possibilities of negotiation, transformation and change. These possibilities are those of the borderlands, which ironically dissolve borders, and perhaps confirm the possibility that lies at the heart of the transnation – a homeland without boundaries.

Note 1 Chicano derives from a tribe of the Aztecs known as Mexicas. In time, references to the tribe in the Nahua language as Mexicanos led through contraction and pronunciation to the present spelling and pronunciation Mexicas, Mexicano, Xicano, Chicano (Meier and Rivera 1994: xiv, 8).

8 ARCHIPELAGO OF DREAMS Utopianism in Caribbean literature

The Caribbean, that complicated and unruly invention of empire, devastated and impoverished by the sugar industry, often seen to be crime ridden and dysfunctional, has become one of the most vibrant examples of postcolonial transformation. Conceived in what Kamau Brathwaite calls the “catastrophe” of slavery, the region has produced some of the most powerful examples of literary and cultural selffashioning. The habit of postcolonial critics to focus on the catastrophe of colonization is deeply ingrained and resistance is the cause célébre of much discussion of the region. But more widespread and more deeply rooted is a radical hope, a belief in the future that underpins the region’s ebullient capacity for creative invention. Visions of the future are not necessarily models of a utopia and we continue to be alert to the difference between “utopia as compensation, as escapism, as fantasy” and “utopia as a vehicle of criticism and utopia as a catalyst of change – that which Ernst Bloch called anticipatory thinking” (Levitas 2000: 199). The strategies developed in the Caribbean to reshape self and society, strategies based on a critique of the history of slavery and its consequences, offer some of the most powerful examples of utopian thinking by enacting a belief in radical transformation. This belief results in a demonstration of political “resistance” as it has always been most effective in postcolonial literatures: transformative, innovative and future thinking. What gives this transformative urge its force and scope is what may be called an “archipelagic consciousness,” a sense of the vibrant multiplicity of the region that embeds itself in every individual cultural production. Sidney Mintz suggests that the capacity for newness is a function of the very nature of Caribbean modernity. The mostly violent transplantation of people to the Caribbean region from different continents to satiate the desire of metropolitan populations for sugar and other stimulants meant that new forms of social organization had to be created “without recourse to previously learned forms” (Mintz 1996: 296). As a result, Caribbean people’s development

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was an instance of a precocious modernity, an unanticipated (indeed unnoticed) modernity – unnoticed especially, perhaps because it was happening in the colonies before it happened in the metropolises, and happening to people most of whom were forcibly stolen from the worlds outside the West. No one imagined that such people would become “modern” – since there was no such thing; no one recognized that the raw, outpost societies into which people were thrust might become the first of their kind. (1996: 298) This reprises a familiar argument of Benedict Anderson’s that the idea of the nation first emerged in the New World. It also reflects the argument that multiple modernities are often coeval rather than simply inherited from the West (Ashcroft 2009c). Creative expression has had a central role in this process of cultural transformation. Caribbean literature, owing to its radical creolization of the English language has been at the forefront of the innovative production of Caribbean culture and thus has been a major factor in the region’s capacity for future thinking. As we have seen, the anticipatory illumination found in art and literature is the revelation of the “possibilities for rearranging social and political relations to produce Heimat” – a place beyond nation, perhaps even beyond time, but it is a home given its unique character by the archipelago. The vision of heimat does not avoid the sedimented memories of catastrophe that layer Caribbean consciousness, but utopian potentiality is deeply situated in those memories. Kamau Brathwaite, in “History, the Caribbean Writer and X/Self” (1990), suggests that Plato’s mythic Atlantis, presumably situated halfway between Africa and the Caribbean, belongs to the Caribbean archipelago but has become submerged, both in the ocean and in the memory of the Caribbean people: The islands that we inhabit are in fact the sunken tops of a mountain chain and the people who inhabit them have an echo of that catastrophe in their memory. It is part of our psyche. (Brathwaite 1990: 26) Atlantis, the no-place, is more paradisal than utopian because it is set in the past. But its utopian potential rests, for Brathwaite, in its function as a sign of possibility. As Otto puts it: “In this virtual space of Atlantis, the space of possibility, suggests Brathwaite, the ‘creole cosmos’ is realized. In this sense, Atlantis, the dream island, is a symbol of the longing for Heimat on both sides of the Atlantic” (2005: 38). But also, it perfectly symbolizes the utopian function of memory: Atlantis, the Nowhere set between the African past and the Caribbean present is a mythic memory, the sign of a possible future. This “memory of the future” is inflected in the strategic location of the Caribbean islands. Islands have always loomed large in the Western imagination. From Plato to Thomas More to Margaret Mead to Gilles Deleuze, writers have been fascinated

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with islands. Islands force us to face the disturbing contingency of human habitation. According to Deleuze: “Humans cannot live, nor live in security, unless they assume that the active struggle between earth and water is over, or at least contained” (2002: 9). This is, of course, why islands are and continue to be so important for utopian thinking. They are not only “insular” or “contained” but in some respects, beyond – before or after – humankind. “Humans find themselves separated from the world when on an island” (10), but more importantly “it is humans who create the world anew from the island and on the waters” (10). An island doesn’t stop being deserted simply because it is inhabited … “humans do not put an end to desertedness, they make it sacred” (10). “The essence of the deserted island is imaginary and not actual, mythological and not geographical. At the same time, its destiny is subject to those human conditions that make mythology possible” (11). Desert islands may be sacred but they are philosophically uninhabitable, the “other” of the continent. But while being ideal places of separation, and while Caribbean islands in particular became strategic for capitalist production, islands resist their function as nodes for territorializing global capital because they are open in ways that continent cannot be. As Édouard Glissant says, the “island embodies openness. The dialectic between inside and outside is reflected in the relationship of land and sea” (1989: 139). Apart from being well-bounded spaces islands are also the ideal location of utopia because they automatically imply travel. “Every living thing on an island has been a traveller,” says Greg Dening, “Every species of tree, plant and animal on an island has crossed the beach” (1980: 24). But at the same time islands fulfil a mythic need: both islands and utopias occupy the horizon of desire, the glistening but unobtainable goal at the end of the journey. Desert islands became the natural locations of imagined utopias from Thomas More to the present. But this very fluidity, this tidal indeterminacy of the beach allows, for island populations, a different way of thinking about culture, literature and philosophy. Thus despite their strategic function in territorializing of the sea, what makes the Caribbean islands resistant to their mythic function as utopias, what makes them “open,” “horizonal,” a source of renewal, is their location in an archipelago.

Archipelagos Archipelagos are not simply the “other” of continents, they challenge the polarity of “Old World” and “New World,” of sea and land, of island and continent, and indeed, go so far as to challenge binary thinking itself. The concept of the archipelago has become prominent in cultural geography.1 Stratford et al. claim that of the three sets of topological relations in island studies, land and water, island and continent/mainland and island and island, the last is greatly undertheorized (Stratford et al. 2011: 115). The significance of this is that such relations affect cultural discourse. For Benítez-Rojo these relations are a “discontinuous conjunction … a field of observation quite in tune with the

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objectives of Chaos,” which “provides a space in which the pure sciences connect with the social sciences, and both of them connect with art and the cultural tradition” (1996: 2–3). Pugh suggests that, “Western culture not only thinks about islands, it thinks with them” (Pugh 2013: 9). He then asks, “how can thinking with the archipelago change how we think about the world and our place in it?” (10). “Thinking with the archipelago,” seems vague but it implies a number of particular ways of thinking: a rejection of the binarism of island and mainland; an awareness of the collectivity and interconnectivity of other islands in the archipelago (and hence other subjects in society), which become the nodes of constant movement and exchange, both geographically and culturally. This leads ultimately to a perception that culture is always a surplus to the nation. In the archipelago space becomes more than the backdrop of political action and postcolonial resistance, it is the site of constant creative interaction. Hence the exorbitant nature of Caribbean life is spatial, not because it is wedded to place, but because place, in an archipelago, becomes an integral part of that life. This is one reason why the region dominates the nation in the Caribbean imagination. More interesting for our purposes is the question of how archipelagic thinking is directed towards the future and how it generates hope rather than simple opposition. The utopian dimension of such thinking comes about through the appropriation and transformation of inheritances of all kinds, both inheritances from colonial culture and those from other islands. Seen in this light “thinking with the archipelago” offers us a clue to the Caribbean capacity for fluidity, multiplicity and transformation in everything from language and literature to history and myth, including effects such as carnival, politics, religion, folklore and food. This way of thinking is inevitably transformative, exogenous and creative, confirming both the hope for the future and the capacity of that imagined future to critique the present. When we see how writers such as Derek Walcott, Kamau Brathwaite, Wilson Harris, Martin Carter and Édouard Glissant think with the archipelago we see how the transformative processes of creolization and its cultural effects occur. In his 1992 Nobel lecture Derek Walcott turns to the poignant image of a broken vase to visualize the “African and Asiatic fragments” strewn across the Caribbean (Walcott 1997: 36). While the glue accentuates more vividly the “white scars” of the reassembled vase, so that the whole is never quite a seamless reintegration of its broken parts, the love that reassembles the fragments through art and poetry is stronger than “that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole.” Poetry transforms and renews these remnants of different pasts. it conjugates both tenses simultaneously: the past and the present, if the past is the sculpture and the present the beads of dew or rain on the forehead of the past. (1997: 36)

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Poetry is “excavation and self-discovery,” but although the archipelago seems to be made up of scattered shards of Africa and Asia, poetry by its very nature creates newness: “for every poet it is always morning in the world.” Walcott’s imagery is of renewal, new birth. There is a force of exultation, a celebration of luck, when a writer finds himself a witness to the early morning of a culture that is defining itself, branch by branch, leaf by leaf, in that self-defining dawn, which is why, especially at the edge of the sea, it is good to make a ritual of the sunrise. (37) Islands lend themselves readily to the metaphors of renewal and Walcott detects here that the utopian direction of Caribbean literature (and philosophy) with its innovative transformations of language, history, geography and race is entirely identified by renewal. But an archipelago gives a new shape to the idea of renewal, it takes us beyond the binary of land and sea into a constellation of possibilities. Here we approach the character of postcolonial writing as a whole. Creativity then (particularly poetic and musical creativity), is a key actor in this “self-defining dawn” of Caribbean culture, and the metaphor of connection, and the many interconnected origins from which such creativity evolves, suggest a way of conceiving the future to which Kamau Brathwaite has given much thought and energy. In his Neustadt lecture he says: the constant i wd even say consistent fabric & praxis of my work has been to connect broken islands, cracked, broken words, worlds, friendships, ancestories & I have seen the sea outside our yard bring grain by gentle grain out of its granary, coast upon coast, & then in one long sweep of light or night, take all away again A poem tree of tidalectics. A strange 12-branching history of it which I leave you wit. (Brathwaite 1994a: 653) The fracturing and disruption of language here is not only a rebellion against standard English but an “archipelagic” transformation of the language; archipelagic in the way the fractured islands of language constitute a new whole. For Brathwaite, much more than Walcott, it is language itself that epitomizes the hope for a transformed future, but like Walcott, the vision of transformation begins in the space of the archipelago. In Barbajan Poems Brathwaite reveals how he came by an idea for a poem about the Caribbean archipelago: It began the day I bent down for a pebble to play duck-and-drakes, skidding it along the water … skip skip skip skip … along the water … with that little hiss, as if the pebble had its own life until it spins in its own little white & disappears. (1994b: 117–118)

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He talks about the inspiration this gives: “the pebble and sand, both from the same continent, the underwater bone of the world,” an inspiration for the “Kaiso” which celebrates God’s creation of the Caribbean skipping stone, which, for Brathwaite, had to be accompanied by music. The emboldened words in the quote above are one example of Brathwaite’s “video style,” an attempt to reproduce in the physical words something of the sound and tone of Caribbean language. The very concept of writing has alter, and it’s as if I’m gone back to the Middle Ages, in a way … To release the pen from the fist of my broeken hand and begin what I call my video style in which I tr(y) make the words themselves live off – away from – the page. (1999: 166) This use of a varied script, coupled with his term for an appropriated creolized English – “nation language” – are examples of the belief in the possibility of a transformed future because they show so clearly how language itself can be transformed, thus demonstrating the agency of language users. The utopian consciousness in the Caribbean is indicated most powerfully in the ebullient and transformative elasticity of the creole appropriation and transformation of English. This reconfigured language is not simply reflective of a decolonized reality, it is indicative of a new ontology prompted by the archipelago, one based on movement – on becoming rather than being. No longer do we observe “a simple gathering of islands, but an emphasis upon how islands act in concert, through constellations, so that the framing of an island archipelago draws attention to fluid cultural processes, sites of abstract and material relations of movement and rest, dependent upon changing conditions of articulation or connection” (Pugh 2013: 2). The archipelago lies at the core of Caribbeanness, an ontological position that looks beyond nation towards multiplicity. As Édouard Glissant says in a revealing passage: Caribbeanness, an intellectual dream, lived at the same time in an unconscious way by our peoples, tears us free from the intolerable alternative of the need for nationalism and introduces us to the cross-cultural process that modifies but does not undermine the latter. What is the Caribbean in fact? A multiple series of relations. We all feel it, we express it in all kinds of hidden or twisted ways, or we fiercely deny it. But we sense that this sea exists within us with its weight of now revealed islands. The Caribbean Sea is not an American lake. It is the estuary of the Americas. In this context, insularity takes on another meaning. Ordinarily, insularity is treated as a form of isolation, a neurotic reaction to place. However, in the Caribbean each island embodies openness. The dialectic between inside and outside is reflected in the relationship of land and sea. It is only those who are tied to the European continent who see insularity as confining. A Caribbean imagination liberates us from being smothered. (1989: 139)

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The idea of the Caribbean as a “multiple series of relations” is a perfect description of its archipelagic consciousness and holds true for its various dimensions of cultural reality. While such an idea is familiar to postmodern critics for whom all identity is relational it is particularly significant for the complex web of relations out of which Caribbean identities emerge. But such relationality also generates a unique concept of travel, and the archipelago develops a very different understanding of exploration from the imperial traversal of the world. According to BenÍtezRojo, “The Antilleans’ insularity does not impel them toward isolation, but on the contrary toward travel, toward exploration, toward the search for fluvial and marine routes” (1996: 25).

“The Schooner Flight” The sea presents itself as the space of the future as well as the scene of arrival from Africa and Asia. While for many migrants this future is embodied in the mundane expectation of a better life in London or New York, to the archipelagic imagination travel is no longer across the seas to discover utopia, but around the complex of islands to discover the utopian potential of this “cracked vase,” and this is the motivation in Walcott’s poem “The Schooner Flight” (Walcott 1979b: 345–361). Shabine traverses the archipelago searching for utopia. Although he loves his wife, his children, his home “as poets love the poetry/that kills them” (347), nevertheless he gives them up for the image of perfection embodied in Maria Concepcion: “Her beauty had fallen on me like a sword/cleaving me from my children, flesh of my flesh!” (349). Patricia Ismond claims Shabine’s sea-flight serves a twofold purpose, in that “through it, Walcott musters his inner forces to name the apocalypse of political and social degeneracy; and in the odyssey of self undertaken in that sea journey, he points the way back to a possibility of recovery and wholeness” (Ismond 2001: 228). While some have detected “an eschatological final vision of ultimate fulfilment” (Coyle 2011: 200), Shabine’s journey hinges on the utopian hope for a zone of liberation and freedom, beyond the stalemates of history. Shabine’s journey is not merely religious or personal, but a statement of the possibility of heimat, a possibility lying not at the end of a linear journey but within the process of travel itself as Shabine sails around the islands. The poem concludes with a vision of heimat, the utopia Shabine has been searching for throughout his travels. … and the soft-scissored foam as the deck turn white and the moon open a cloud like a door, and the light over me is a road in white moonlight taking me home. (Walcott 1979b: 361) This vision has the feeling of paradise opening, but the home Walcott imagines is one that appears both lying beyond the “home” of the islands yet one that is only

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achievable within the compass of the archipelago. In other words, utopia is the third space between the African past with its tragic legacy of the Middle Passage, and the call of the imperial home, the metropolitan centre, which many Caribbean writers, Walcott included, have heeded. While Shabine may be considered a shamanic figure (see Coyle 2011), since he is a visionary, he is also a figure of the artist and writer. Indeed, the name Shabine is a nickname, “the patois for any red nigger” (347). But being an outsider – truly ex-centric – allows him to step outside the idea of nation into the complexity of the archipelago. Recalling his recovery from the bends he declares that “I had no nation now but the imagination” (350), reflecting the fact that in postcolonial utopian discourse, heimat is beyond the nation, even anti-nation. At the end of the poem Shabine achieves a vision of unity and harmony of the archipelago. There are so many islands! As many islands as the stars of the night on that branched tree from which meteors are shaken like falling fruit around the schooner Flight. But things must fall, and so it always was, on one hand Venus, on the other Mars; fall, and are one, just as this earth is one island in the archipelago of stars (361) The scattered shards of the archipelago now seem to form a whole that not only lies in harmony with the earth, but offers the possibility of a different creole future.

Place as history The idea of the archipelago as a constellation, a pebble skidded across the water, disrupting the habit of linearity and binarism, has far reaching effects in other forms of discourse, particularly those connected with time. Jonathan Pugh explores an issue that is ubiquitous in postcolonial literatures – the imbrication of place and time. In The Muse of History (1998) “Walcott challenges the accepted idea of ‘history as time’” (Pugh 2013: 14). Such a concept is important to imperialism because it sees one culture’s present as another’s past: it is important to capitalism because it privileges the concept of economic growth. It embeds linear categories such as “developed” and “developing” countries, “civilized” and “primitive,” “mainland” and “island.” Above all, the imprisonment of history in time reduces the importance of spatiality. In one passage ridiculing the idea of history as time he says: In the history books the discoverer sets a shod foot on virgin sand, kneels, and the savage also kneels from his bushes in awe. Such images are stamped on the colonial memory, such heresy as the world’s becoming holy from Crusoe’s footprint or the imprint of Columbus’s knee. These blasphemous

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images fade, because these hieroglyphs of progress are basically comic. And if the idea of the New and the Old becomes increasingly absurd, what must happen to our sense of time, what else can happen to history itself, but that it, too, is becoming absurd? (1998: 41) For Walcott, history is irrelevant to the currents of the Caribbean archipelago. Every island in the archipelago can seem isolated but it is only by analyzing the currents between them – both tidal and cultural – that the pattern of the archipelago reveals itself. Whether in language, literature, religion, food, politics or music, the present is produced in place rather than time because “time” is a function of multiple origins and in the Caribbean a function also of memory, which disrupts history. For Walcott the present is the “Adamic” moment. In “The Sea is History” he concludes with a final image of a sound “like a rumour without any echo/of History, really beginning” (1979a: 367). What emerges from this local tidal phenomenon is “History really beginning” – history as place. The sea, which for imperial discourse is the space of travel, discovery and colonization, is here the source of a new cultural history. Indeed, Walcott returns to the sea in nearly all his poetry as the source of Adamic origin, cultural renewal and utopian possibility. Cahill-Booth (2012) sees narratives of place such as Walcott’s, where people come to inhabit history, environment and language, as “geomythography.” Walcott’s geomythography spans the archipelago. Despite the dominant Caribbean myth of the Middle Passage, the sea, for him, does not form a rupture with ancestry but becomes the origin of a new civilization. Many Caribbean writers have inscribed the Atlantic Ocean itself, as much as Africa, as an originary space, an amniotic fluid between continents. To Walcott’s characters in Omeros “Mer was both mother and sea” (1990: 231), while in Grace Nichols’ poem, “One Continent to Another” memory is embodied in the unborn child, in whom the “Congo surfaced, as did Sierra Leone and the/gold Coast which she used to tread/search the horizon for lost moons” (Thieme 1996: 582). Jamaican novelist Patricia Powell describes the nineteenth-century voyages from China to the Caribbean in ways that situate the sea as origin (DeLoughrey 2007: 23). Such a view of the sea is a profound form of future thinking because it designates the archipelagic culture as one of perpetual arrival. The unity of place and history recalls Bakhtin’s term “chronotope,” which literally connects the experience of time and space: We will give the name chronotope (literally, “time space”) to the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature. … space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history. This intersection of axes and fusion of indicators characterizes the artistic chronotope. … for in literature the primary category in the chronotope is time. (1981: 84–85)

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Bakhtin puts more emphasis on time than space, for in the novel – which is imagined in time – time enhances space. But for Caribbean history, time becomes responsive to the archipelagic irregularity of space; time is identified by place, or more precisely, by the fluid space of the sea around the archipelago. DeLoughrey observes that the ocean’s perpetual movement is radically decentring; it resists attempts to fix a locus of history. “Focusing on seascape rather than landscape as the fluid space of historical production allows us to complicate the nation state, which encodes a rigid hierarchy of race, class, gender, religion and ethnicity for its representative subjects” (2007: 21). This “dissolution” of history occurs differently in Walcott and Brathwaite: where Walcott dismisses the fixation of history on time in favour of the history in place, Brathwaite sees history as absorbed into the very consciousness of the people who turn Caribbean space into place. Nevertheless, both refuse the attraction of history (identified famously by Dipesh Chakrabarty (1992) as the history of Europe) for a different way of conceiving the past and future located in the present. Walcott rejects a simplistic and shallow defiance that is unable to see a future. “Art cannot last long in this shale. It crumbles like those slogans, fragments and shards of a historical fault … The revolution is here. It was always here” (1998: 57). His belief is that the future is a function of the archipelagic consciousness and is not realizable in slogans but through the utopian function of poetry. Despite the disdain for political slogans Walcott’s vision of an island future, distinct from capitalism and the rot of cities, is resolute: We do not ask a landscape of tall chimneys, there Would be a greater need of blasting again the air. If we know anything, we know we can have a better Island, bright as advertisements let it lose its litter Of hovels, hunger, and let there be no loss of anger Infectious in the peasant, which is the worse danger. Almost impossible and absurd the distant love for England. Love is here, and luck under your Feet; the world is green outside, you rot in rooms (“Call for Breakers and Builders” 1949: 19) The poet looks beyond the sense of marginality, beyond exile and loss that emerges from the “impossible and absurd” love of England, to celebrate the possible future in this place as it exists in its own kind of modernity. Whatever inheritances the Caribbean had, whether language, religion, music or the multifarious activities of culture, they were born again through the transformation of the archipelago. Mimicry, says Walcott, “is not the force of the current,” and its surface may be “littered with the despairs of broken systems and of failed experiments, that the river, stilled, may reflect, mirror, mimic other images, but that is not its depth” (1974: 6). For him, the island movement does not pretend to exercise power in the historical sense, but is energized by the

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force of a creolized culture that settles on its own mode of inflection in each island along the change, of in particular “an oral culture of chants, jokes, folksongs, and fables …” (1998: 15). In short, the island-chain archipelago is a force of transformation.

Tidalectics Walcott’s distinction between “mimicry” and “the force of the current” is taken much further by Brathwaite, who gives to the irregular currents of culture and creativity in the Caribbean archipelago the name “tidalectics” – a term designed to contest the Hegelian idea of the dialectical progress of history with the concept of ebb and flow (1999: 226). The term emerges from the puzzle of the Caribbean itself: “this archipelago, these beautiful islands – yes – which are contrasted in their beauty with extreme poverty and a sense, – a memory – of catastrophe” (1999: 28). Brathwaite finds an answer to this balance of contradictions in the vision of an old woman sweeping her yard in an impoverished region of Jamaica (29). The poet, who was staying in a house nearby, is deeply intrigued – indeed, he is “tirelessly tryin to” understand – this image, repeated every morning: She’s going on like this every morning, sweeping this sand – of all things! – away from … sand from sand, seen? … And I say Now what’s she doing? What’s this labour involve with? Why’s she labouring in this way? … Because I get the understandin(g) that she somehow believes that if she don’t do this, the household – that “poverty-stricken” household of which she’s part – probably head of – would have somehow collapse. (30) But watching the woman he gets the answer to his question: “it seems as if her feet, which all along I thought were walking on the sand … were really … walking on the water … and she was travelling across the middle passage, constantly coming from where she had come from – in her case Africa – to this spot in North Coast Jamaica where she now lives …” (33). To this constant and coastal back and forth movement – a repetition of the “coming out” of Africa and of the “arrival” on this “set of islands,” Brathwaite attributes the quality of a tidalectics. And so my poem startle to ask the question, What is the origin of the Caribbean? How do we come from? Where do we come from? And why are we as we are? Why are we so leaderless, so fragmented, so perpetually caught up with the notion of hope and still at the same time Sisyphean? Why is our psychology not dialectical – successfully dialectical in the way that Western philosophy has assumed people’s lives should be, but tidalectic, like our grandmother’s – our nana’s – action, like the movement of the ocean she’s walking on, coming from one continent/continuum, touching another, and

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then receding (“reading”) from the island(s) into perhaps the creative chaos of the(ir) future. (34) Life in the archipelago does not proceed in an ordered way with the contest of thesis and antithesis resulting in historical synthesis, for this supposes a progression that is antipathetic to the tidal currents of Caribbean life. If anything, the creole reality is all three at once, the constant ebb and flow between apparently opposing forces, including the constant syncopation, or even simultaneity, of belonging and not belonging, shifting entanglement of sea and land, exile and renewal. In other words, Brathwaite puts a name to Walcott’s argument with history. “Tidalectics engage what Brathwaite calls an ‘alter/native’ historiography to linear models of colonial progress.2 This ‘tidal dialectic’ resists the synthesizing telos of Hegel’s dialectic by drawing from a cyclical model, invoking the continual movement and rhythm of the ocean” (DeLoughrey 2007: 2). The concept captures the sense of identification that the sea gives to the Caribbean people. BenÍtez-Rojo, in The Repeating Island concludes: “the culture of the Caribbean … is not terrestrial but aquatic … the natural and indispensible realm of marine currents, of waves, folds and double folds, of fluidity and sinuosity” (1996: 11).3 The ontological and historical transformation embodied in the term “tidalectics” is the confident assertion of a different way of being, a becoming that will lead into different kinds of future. The problems of the Caribbean remain – poverty, wholesale immigration – problems that arise out of the colonial wreckage of the sugar industry, but the concept of a different place, a different way of understanding time offers a different and independent way of perceiving the future. By dispensing with ideas of exile, displacement, and the nostalgia of return, tidalectics names the process by which racial memory transforms the future. In this way the Caribbean is the most vibrant model of postcolonial discourse as a whole, which emerges from the devastation of colonialism with a vision of possibility conceived by its creative artists. The fascinating feature of tidalectics is that the movement of the tides is not exactly cyclical, but ebbing and flowing. Although the ocean appears to be engaged in an endless repetition of the same back and forth movement at every moment, the tide is, in fact, never exactly the same nor does it retreat or return to the same spot of “origin.” The beach is never a clear line, as anyone who lives near a beach would know; it is different every day. In contrast to the dialectic the tidal change is neither forward oriented nor perpendicular. What this means for a theory of history and culture is the rearrangement of time and space in terms of imagination, myth and metaphor. The woman on the sandy coast engaged in the Sisyphean task of sweeping sand is an image of hope rather than futility by virtue of her apparent stance upon the water between two continents. One of Brathwaite’s favourite themes is the inappropriateness of the conventional rhythms of English literature for the tidalectical rhythms of Caribbean poetry. In particular he scorns the pentameter, which “couldn’t allow me to write the sunlight

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under her feet – she walk on water and in light, the sand between her toes, the ritual discourse of her morning broom” (1999: 35). Importantly, Brathwaite is not only concerned with resisting the colonial language but with transforming it, and it is this process of transformation that perceives a different kind of future. In short, tidalectics is utopian in its perception of the growth of a different kind of cultural consciousness. At the same moment in ConVERSations as he scorns the pentameter, Brathwaite brings in Miles Davis and the theme of jazz and the West Indian novel, the title of one of his earliest and most significant essays. Jazz, says Brathwaite, is a music of protest. It is also in many ways a music of comfort and protection: a shield of sound behind which the individual and the group have been able to protect the spirit … it is also, often the sheer affirmation of the joy of living. (1993: 58) In “Jazz and the West Indian Novel” Brathwaite sees a fundamental difference between American slave-originated jazz and Caribbean music that comes from the very different features of their history and the nature of their slavery. But as we saw (Chapter 3), the West Indian art form that corresponds to the liberating assertion of the relation between the individual and the collective is literature. New World Negro cultural expression, based on an African inheritance, no matter how unconsciously but also (and this goes without saying), built (increasingly firmly?) on a superstructure of Euro-American language, attitudes and techniques. (1993: 61) This description applies to both jazz and literature. West Indian literature is “an expression of both European and African at the same time” (62). While we might argue that Caribbean literature appears to be a dialectical resolution of Europe and Africa, of English language and African rhythms, a tidalectical interpretation is that it is both at the same time. The thing that has troubled Brathwaite most is writing itself. He stresses that in nation language “the noise that it makes” is as important in nation language as the meaning: “When it is written you lose the sound or the noise and therefore you lose part of the meaning” (1993: 271). Video style is an attempt to return to poetry a dimension of the text that has been lost by the suppression of the noise. Video style is in fact the inscription of the noise of nation language. This goes beyond his condensations and word-splits and coinages. Tidalectics also serves to explain the relationship between colony and empire. This is more complex than a simple antithesis, and just as Walcott states that, “mimicry is not the force of the current,” tidalectics goes beyond hybridity, which might demonstrate a dialectical synthesis. Brathwaite gestures to the complex and more “tidalectical” relationship with Europe, which he explains in ConVERSations.

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I begin to conceive of this encounter with Europe as a weird unexpected echo of the “encounter” with my Father … with all the love doubts ambiguities + in this case of course the need for complex liberation. … and i older now more torn and tattered than my pride cd stand stretch out my love to you across the water but cannot reach your hand (1999: 111–112) This comparison with his father is a poignant one, because his father was regularly absent, and as in many Caribbean families, Brathwaite’s mother played the role of father. Therefore, although it grates to see the imperial centre as “father,” in this case it perfectly describes the “ebb and flow” of filiation and absence that conflicts the postcolonial subject. The struggle to find the right words for his relationship with an absent father reveals the tidalectical way in which a different kind of poetry emerges: is very difficile to find the words – “the right words”? – to fit these things, these drifting continents of feeling, driftin(g) like in the night. (1999: 113) Brathwaite explains his poem X/self in terms of another image to describe something like the tidalectical coming and going of an identity balanced between two centres. He takes the image of Mt Blanc as the symbol of Europe and that of Kilimanjaro for “nature” – all that Europe has suppressed. And so the poem is really “about” two forces seeking to find a balance in what I regard as a new or creole cosmos, a cosmos which in fact begins to “perdict” (signal/reflect/omen) the dissolution – and the slavery consequences of the dissolution – of empire. (117) The tidalectical resolution is not a “synthesis” of Mt Blanc and Mt Kilimanjaro – it is something altogether different, something like the “shifting continents of feeling” that describe his relationship with his father. The image that keeps recurring to Brathwaite between these two motions of power and powerlessness is a clump of bamboo, something without a centre but which, rhizomatically finds its own direction and growth. Bamboo is the landed equivalent of the tides; it grows outside his window, in a house between the “Kilimanjaro” of the natural hills and the “green hole of Mt Blanc or what would/could become Mt Blanc – certainly result and victim of Mt Blanc – the grey, rusty and off-white waste(s) of Kingston” (120).

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The creole cosmos Tidalectics offers a radical view of racial identity: whereas creolization is usually regarded as hybridization, both Walcott and Brathwaite pull away from this sense of the complexity of Caribbean racial identity as somehow fixed, a kind of substance. The creole continuum of Caribbean language (see Ashcroft 2008) reveals that creole identity itself is an ebb and flow along a continuum. Like many aspects of postcolonial thought the movement between memory and the future is persistent, and the creole cosmos is characterized by a constant tidal flow, an archipelagic way of conceiving global diversity. Kilimanjaro “around which wheels ‘Nature’,” (Brathwaite 1999: 116) and Mt Blanc which leads to “the diminution of … the world’s ‘nature’, the world’s culture” (117) are clearly symbols of colonized and colonizer, dominated and dominating: And unless these powers, … these two mountains – can come into conversation with each othe-(r); into some relationship of “true” balance and equilibrium – we are in/to some kind of new psychic apocalyptic abyss. (119) This is not an unfamiliar stance but Brathwaite’s tidalectical solution involves the ebb and flow of constant movement rather than a simple two-way dialogue. Creolization is much more than racial mixing, it is a process resulting in subtle and multiform orientation from or “to-wards” ancestral origins. In this way, Caribbean culture can be seen in terms of a dialectic of development taking place within a seamless guise or continuum of space and time: a model which allows for blood flow, fluctuations, the half-look, the look both/several ways, which allows for and contains the ambiguous and rounds the sharp edges off the dichotomy. (Brathwaite 1975: 7) Brathwaite’s creole cosmos sees the fluidity of racial and cultural syncretism disrupting and even demolishing the binary oppositions of imperial power, not by conflict or violence, nor even by simple dialogue, but by the tidalectic ebb and flow of difference and its accommodation. The creole cosmos is not limited to the Caribbean but offers a vision of a global tidalectic. It corresponds to Ernst Bloch’s concept of a “multiverse of cultures” (Multiversum der Kulturen), the “many voiced unity” of a utopian world (1986: 969). The Caribbean is particularly suited to the concept of heimat – “the home we have always sensed but never experienced” – because this home, like the Caribbean, is always a place, even for its inhabitants, of continual arrival and potentiality. As Otto explains (2005: 30), this example of “arrived-at being” suggests that Bloch’s designation of heimat as humanity’s “feeling at home in existence” (Bloch 1986:

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1196) means the arrival of a world creole existence. In an age of global migration, the Caribbean becomes a model, a utopian “Front” space beyond whose horizon lies the promise of “the world as homeness.” “Front” is Bloch’s term for the “foremost segment of history … even when it concerns itself with the past, namely with the still undischarged future in the past” (Bloch 1986: 200). The Caribbean creole cosmos therefore offers a model for a “global conversation.”

Dream The vision of a world creole existence is a dream in which the archipelagic consciousness provides a model for a transformed world reality, a world of constant arrival and potentiality rather than origin. The Caribbean dream is multifaceted, embracing the power of poetry to knit together the shards of the archipelago, the drive to travel on interconnected pathways rather than straight lines, and ultimately the dream of a tidalectic world and a creole cosmos – all founded on the developing potential of the Caribbean archipelago as heimat. But most importantly the dream of what might be, the dream of a different world, is the province of the artist and writer. “The point of contact between dream and life,” says Bloch, “without which the dream would only be abstract utopia, and life only yield triviality – is given in the utopian capacity that is set on its feet and connected to the RealPossible” (1986: 145–146). This is the process enacted by the vorschein of the literary imagination. Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams outlines several strategies of dream interpretation: as wish fulfilment, as distortions of experience, as displacements of repressed desires, etc. In the dream’s own strategy of displacement the psychic healing can proceed by giving an outlet to the subconscious. But for Ernst Bloch night dreams are about the past while daydreams are about the future. According to Bloch “dreams are not just foam, and naturally not prophetic oracles either, but lie half-way between the two … as fictitious fulfillments of an unconscious wishful fantasy” (1986: 78). The ego as moral censor is suppressed in night dreams and the displacement of the subject matter necessitates interpretation. However, “the daydream can furnish inspirations which do not require interpreting, but working out, it builds castles in the air as blueprints too, and not always just fictitious ones” (86). The significance of the daydream is that it is “a stepping stone to art … Art contains this utopianizing character by virtue of the daydream” (Bloch 1986: 94). Even Freud agrees that dreams “are the raw material of poetic production” (94).4 After declaring also that the daydream goes into music and into all the literary examples of “venturing beyond” Bloch goes on to say: “People and situations are themselves driven to their end by virtue of the daydream riding to its end in great art: the consistent, the objectively possible becomes visible” (94). For Bloch the daydream transposed into art is a form of “world extension” and such an extension in the work of art can be considered to be “the most exact imaginative experiment of perfection possible” (95).

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The political dimension of the dream is captured by Martin Carter, who says in “Looking at Your Hands”: I have learnt from books dear friend of men dreaming and living and hungering in a room without a light who could not die since death was far too poor who did not sleep to dream, but dreamed to change the world. (Carter 1951: 9) Ironically, in the context of Caribbean literature, the disinterest and occasional philistinism of the island populations, caused, no doubt, by rampant poverty, drives many writers to the metropolis. But “the dream to change the world” is not only a common postcolonial dream but can be said to be the function of poetry itself. In a commentary on Carter’s poetry Jan Carew refers to Andrew Salkey’s belief that writers, artists and musicians make sense of our unique and complex Caribbean experience of life, and shed new light on our society. Martin Carter’s poetry, therefore, is like the sheet lightning that illuminates dark Guyanese skies at the beginning of the rainy season. This analogy is very apt, because great poetry is like lightning, and lightning is never timid. It flashes and sheds light in the midst of darkness and great turmoil in the heavens. (Carew 1998: 106) Such illumination comes from the capacity to dream about a world that could be different. For Carew Carter’s words are etched upon the Caribbean mind: I do not sleep to dream but dream to change the world. When it produces poetry such dreaming is not idle, “Significant daydream imaginative creations do not blow soap bubbles, they open windows, and outside them is the daydream world of a possibility which at any rate can be given form” (Bloch 1986: 94). In some cases, such as Brathwaite’s DreamStories (1994c) both functions of the dream – healing and anticipation – take place. Despite the great difference between night dreams and daydreams there is sometimes an exchange, “a play of colours during the night which can also exist in the day” (Bloch 1986: 99). Such exchanges might produce the combined benefits of displacement, healing and anticipation. Brathwaite’s DreamStories is a volume that while producing dreams driven by the conscious ego, seems also to retreat into the space of the unconscious, and the reason is that the volume originates in trauma. Three disastrous occurrences in Kamau Brathwaite’s life led to a complete transformation of his art, a revolution in content, form and style. These were: the death of his wife Doris “Zea Mexican”

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on 7 September 1986; the near destruction of his home, library, and personal archives of over thirty years of collection when Hurricane Gilbert devastated Jamaica in September 1988; and his own experience of being threatened, robbed, gagged, and bound in his Marley Manor flat on 24 October 1990. He calls these disasters the Rift Valley, a reference to the Kenyan Rift Valley, sometimes called the “cradle of mankind.” These cataclysmic events resulted in a flourishing of creativity, which, although birthed in horrific psychic trauma, took his work in a totally new direction, characterized by DreamStories and “video style.” The first two events were immensely traumatic but the most striking is the occasion of being robbed in his flat, during which one of the robbers put a gun to the back of Brathwaite’s head and pulled the trigger. Although the gun either jammed or had no bullet, Brathwaite regards this as an occasion when he died, the “ghost bullet” (1999: 246) launching him into a new trajectory, “a break/new pathway in my poetry” (163). Metaphorical death led resurrection into a radically utopian form of creativity. Look, it means I undergo some strange kinda resurrection from that mo. It doan make me no kinda better poet not anything like that – But since I’m died, a strange set of circumstances begin to make themselves shall we say “possible” And I begin to dream, stepping on these stones of pearl and peril, back into each early morning, re/living. re/learning. (164) This is how he restored his shattered psyche to find the “word/sound/power” that began the process “of rehabilitation, resurrection, rebirth, ‘second birth’ ” (278). An important consequence of this restoration is the depiction of dreams, leading to the volume DreamStories. This collection is itself in the form of a voyage through the archipelago with dream-like observations such as “Dream Crabs” or “Dream Haiti.” Given its scope by the archipelago, the collection reconceives the potentiality of the archipelago through the medium of dream. As Brathwaite explains, “While the publishers struggle with what appears to be surrealism or magic realism I call it dream status or dreamstorie … I suppose dreams are a healing process” (166). There can be no better example of the human capacity to rise up out of catastrophe propelled by a dream of the future, and Brathwaite’s story is the story of the Caribbean: the metaphorical death of slavery has led to a resurrection through the work of the creative spirit, particularly manifested in literature and music. Such dreaming inexorably takes people forward. “When someone dreams,” says Bloch “they never remain rooted to the spot. They move almost at will away from the place or the state in which they find themselves” (1986: 24). For Brathwaite and for the Caribbean, the capacity to dream is nourished by an archipelagic consciousness. ***

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Rather than think of trauma as somehow “beneficial” the real message of this change of direction is that radical transformation is the sign of hope. The utopian function of Caribbean writing, as for all postcolonial writing, lies not in the perception of a utopia but in its very determination that the world could be different, that change is possible. Such literature refuses a eutopia, but rather speaks to the present from the position of Nowhere, which for Paul Ricoeur is critical to our capacity to rethink the nature of our social life. DreamStories speaks from just such a Nowhere in a radical transformation of form and content that offers a new path not only for Brathwaite’s work but for Caribbean subjectivity. As Bloch insists, the dream is the ultimate function of art and literature, and the archipelagic dream of a creole cosmos reaches far beyond the Caribbean and its catastrophic history. What remains significant for the Caribbean is that an “archipelagic consciousness” provides the setting and the dynamic for future thinking.

Notes 1 The field is now widespread and covers various regions but is most often discussed in relation to the Caribbean. See G. Baldacchino (Ed.), A World of Islands: An Island Studies Reader. (Charlottetown, Canada and Luqa, Malta: Institute of Island Studies, University of Prince Edward Island and Agenda Academic, 2007); Elizabeth DeLoughrey, “The Litany Of Islands, The Rosary Of Archipelagoes: Caribbean And Pacific Archipelagraphy,” Ariel: Review of International English Literature, 32.1 (2001): 21–51; Elizabeth DeLoughrey, “Island Ecologies and Caribbean Literatures,” Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie 95.3 (2004): 298–310; Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Routes and Roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Island Literatures. (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, 2007); Elizabeth McMahon, “Australia, The Island Continent: How Contradictory Geography Shapes The National Imaginary”, Space and Culture, 13.2, (2010): 178–187; Jonathan Pugh, “Island Movements: Thinking with the Archipelago,” Island Studies Journalm 8.1 (2013): 9–24; Elaine Stratford, G. Baldacchino, E. McMahon, C. Farbotko and A. Harwood, “Envisioning the Archipelago,” Island Studies Journal 6.2 (2011): 113–130. 2 In Brathwaite’s words “[KB’s ‘natural’ discursive alternative (alter/native(e)) to the Hegelian dialectic: instead of an ‘inevitable’, ‘Euromissilic’ tripartite synthesis, KB posits a tidal ebb&flow concept instead of a ‘successful destination /progress’ for colonial ‘circle’ cultures, where ‘equilibrium’, … is the ideal; the dialectical (materialism) model setting up irresponsible expectations in ‘underdeveloping’ colonial people.]” ConVERSations, (1999): 226. 3 Benítez-Rojo, The Repeating Island, (1996): 11. (Stratford et al. make it clear that their concept of the archipelago is different from Benítez-Rojo’s “repeating islands”: “repetition can mean duplication, or cloning; and yet no two islands are ever alike.” Stratford et al., “Envisioning the Archipelago”, (2011): 117). 4 Here Bloch quotes Freud’s view of dreams as the stepping stone to art: “They are the raw material of poetic production since the writer makes out of his daydreams, by certain reshapings, disguises and omissions, the situations which he inserts into his short stories, novels, plays” (Vorlesungen, 1922: 102).

9 OCEANIC HOPE Utopianism in the Pacific

The Caribbean archipelago has been perhaps the most fertile and resourceful generator of postcolonial future thinking. But there is a similar orientation to the Not-Yet-Become in another island region: the Pacific, including the island nations of Polynesia, Melanesia and to a smaller extent Micronesia – those islands described by the utopian term “Oceania.” The history of this region differs greatly from that of the Caribbean. Here the indigenous people maintain a continuous connection to an Oceanic past, in contrast to the slave society’s severance from an African (or Asian)1 homeland. Yet both share the same need for identification with something larger, whether geographically, historically or imaginatively, and this takes form in both regions in a regional, archipelagic consciousness. In the Pacific this utopian dimension has come to be recognized as “Oceania,” an ingenious redefinition of the significance of islands that had seemed tiny, insignificant and marginal. Oceania is not only itself the name for a utopian formation, but of a particular attitude to time and within which the remembrance of the past becomes a form of forward thinking that embeds itself in a vision of the achievable – a concrete utopia. “Oceania” owes its very meaning to the persistent reality of the crosscurrents of time and space in the region. Like the Caribbean, Oceania is a space of dreaming. In the words of John Puhiatau Pule: … when the future is dormant I dream of the symbols of strength that are the kereru’s saliva, its eyes guiding me through these mean spirited times, its wings create a daylight and a sunlight (Pule 2005)

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The oceanic dimensions of utopia first emerged with James Harrington’s Oceana, a veiled reference to England (like More’s Utopia), published in 1656 at the time of Cromwell’s Commonwealth. Oceans and islands became the natural repository of the utopian and a vision of the South Seas emerged during the eighteenth century as the region began to take form in the European imagination. Herman Melville, in Moby Dick and more pertinently Typee (1846) and Omoo (1851), set in the Marquesas and Tahiti respectively, emphasized the escapism, freedom and sexuality for which Europeans valued the Pacific. Charles Warren Stoddard (1873), Robert Louis Stevenson (1893), Paul Gauguin (whose Noa Noa (1957) along with his paintings of Polynesian women illustrated Rousseau’s thesis of the noble savage), Louis Becke (1905), Joseph Conrad and Somerset Maugham all developed the Pacific as the ideal locale of an exotic, unstressed and pre-modern paradise. Subramani divides this colonial fiction into three categories: in the first, the South Pacific provides “local colour,” as in Stoddard; in the second, it is used simply as exotic background for narrative adventure, as with the novels of Robert Louis Stevenson; and in the third, it is symbolic in nature, as in the works of Melville, Conrad and Maugham (Subramani 1976: 6). The striking feature of these for Subramani is the absence of genuine Polynesian characters. Generally, the image of the Polynesian falls into two parts; he is either a terrifying savage ... or he is a friendly primitive … The Polynesian character is no more than either a Caliban or a Friday. (1976: 17) This habit of stereotypical depiction of the inhabitants, disregarding their actual humanity, was common in all colonial discourse and is reminiscent of Achebe’s objection to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in which Africa is “a metaphysical battlefield devoid of all recognizable humanity, into which the wandering European enters at his peril” (Achebe 1978: 9). The stereotype of the Pacific was surprisingly resilient, persisting in James Michener, whose Tales of the South Pacific (1947) were developed into a well known musical, South Pacific, by Rodgers and Hammerstein, and the film Return to Paradise starring Gary Cooper (1953). Paul Theroux’s The Happy Isles of Oceania (1992), appeared to confirm the presence of a discourse every bit as determining as Orientalism – tending more towards the romantic but founded on an exoticism equally stereotyping. Crucially, the depiction of the actual humanity of its inhabitants remained elusive. When we consider the utopianism of contemporary Pacific literature then we must see it in the context of this long and persistent discourse of South Sea Paradise, which it parodies and subverts. If all utopias are critical then this is certainly true of Oceanic utopias. But it is not so much an inequitable economic system being critiqued as the inequitable colonial system of stereotypical representation and its lingering aftermath. Such a system diminishes individual island nations as “desert islands,” on which European sailors are stranded rather than on which vibrant

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indigenous communities live, and it is exactly such a diminution that propels the vast utopian vision of Oceania. This is not a simplistic vision but often comes with a healthy dose of irony: There is not one Pacific Only one common theme That development is certain Though foreign And coconuts will continue To fall (Rasmussen 2000: 399) Literature has been a central player in this development because the utopian vision of the Pacific began to take shape in the 1970s, around the same time that a written literature began to be produced. Subramani recounts that it was the awareness of the non-existence of any written literature (an awareness heightened by the first South Pacific Festival of Arts in Suva in 1972) that prompted a group of Pacific people to form the South Pacific Creative Arts Society (SPCAS) and establish Mana magazine in 1973. (Subramani 1985: 3) This early literature, as in most postcolonial societies, was heavily populated with the rhetoric of self-assertion and anti-colonial resistance (the same festival led to a flourishing of indigenous song, dance and oral tale-telling in Fiji). Although most Pacific nations were either independent or willing territories, the rhetoric of much early literature in English was directed (necessarily perhaps) at the cultural impact of Western intervention and the history of colonialism in the Pacific. As Subramani points out, this developed most strongly amongst those writers who were influenced by the political climate of their time at the University of the South Pacific in Suva, Fiji (58). A dominant theme of early literature was the dilution of culture. But at the same time the utopian vision (or re-vision) of a regional identity was beginning to take shape. Albert Wendt’s article “Toward a New Oceania” claimed, “I belong to Oceania – or, at least, I am rooted in a fertile part of it and it nourishes my spirit, helps to define me, and feeds my imagination” (1976: 49). So vast, so fabulously varied a scatter of islands, nations, cultures, mythologies and myths, so dazzling a creature, Oceania deserves more than an attempt at mundane fact; only the imagination in free flight can hope – if not to contain her – to grasp some of her shape, plumage, and pain. I will not pretend that I know her in all her manifestations. No one … ever did; no one does …; no one ever will because whenever we think we have captured her she has already assumed new guises – the love affair is endless, even her vital statistics … will change endlessly. In the final instance, our

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countries, cultures, nations, planets are what we imagine them to be. One human being’s reality is another’s fiction. Perhaps we ourselves exist only in each other’s dreams. (1976: 49) For him it was a vision created and nurtured above all by art and literature. “In their individual journeys into the Void, these artists, through their work, are explaining us to ourselves and creating a new Oceania” (1976: 60). Wendt’s essay was typical of the angry anti-colonialism of the time but his reference to a wide selection of Pacific writers demonstrated the point he was making: that denigrated, overlooked and often disregarded, the Pacific has a fund of creative talent, which has interpolated the world of English writing with confidence and power. This talent has been nurtured and inspired by “so dazzling a creature,” the vast and infinitely varied geographical and cultural expanse of Oceania. Wendt’s robust critique of Western control of the island nations generates a vision based on the vibrant literary tradition of the region. “Oceania” identifies a utopian hope in the Pacific and it is no surprise that it is its writers who have led the move towards an Oceanic consciousness. It is the agency of the literary imagination in particular that has the scope and vision to conceptualize this utopia. Epeli Hau’ofa insists that Oceania does not refer to a political structure or a formal confederation, but it does appear to recognize the existence of a supranational identity arising, among other things, from the cultural crosscurrents of the region, the interconnectedness of its literature, its histories, its mythologies. Hau’ofa first picked up Wendt’s vision in 1993 in an essay entitled “Our Sea of Islands” (Hau’ofa 1995). The need for a utopian view of the future emerged from the bleak assessment of Pacific Island nations and territories as “much too small, too poorly endowed with resources, and too isolated from the centres of economic growth for their inhabitants ever to be able to rise above their present condition of dependence on the largesse of wealthy nations” (1993: 88). Pacific Island nations had become what one commentator called MIRAB societies: dependent on “migration, remittance, aid and bureaucracy” Hau’ofa reversed this bleak denigration of island nations by a simple change of perspective. Rather than “islands in a far sea” they could be regarded as “a sea of islands.” Island nations may be tiny, but the history, myths, oral traditions and cosmologies of the people of Oceania constituted a world that was anything but tiny – it was a vast space, a space of movement, migration, of immensity and longevity. The difference is reflected in the names – “Pacific Islands” and “Oceania.” One denotes small, scattered bits of land, the other “connotes a sea of islands with their inhabitants” (1993: 92), a world in which people moved and mingled unhindered by the boundaries of state, culture or ethnicity. This moving world, which seems to have been confined, constricted and striated by the various boundaries of modernity, is the world of Oceanic hope, the world of the future. The tendency of “Oceania” to dismantle the structures of nation, race and ethnicity is seen when Hau’ofa asks “[Who] or what is a Pacific Islander?”

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The issue should not arise if we consider Oceania as comprising human beings with a common heritage and commitment, rather than as members of diverse nationalities and races. Oceania refers to a world of people connected to each other. The term Pacific Islands Region refers to an official world of states and nationalities … For my part, anyone who has lived in our region and is committed to Oceania is an Oceanian. (1998: 36) Clearly, seen in these terms, Oceania occupies what Deleuze referred to as “smooth space” existing in, around and between the “striated space” of states, governments and political formations of various kinds (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 528). Indeed, the sea might be the ultimate example of smooth space. It is above all, a space of movement, a movement that has been interrupted but not destroyed by the postimperial emergence of independent states. This smooth space subverts the postimperial dominance of the colonial state in the islands of the region. As “striated space” the region is one of poverty and dependency upon the rim states of Australia, New Zealand and the US, a region of remittance and migration. But imaginatively Oceania is a very different reality, an unstructured but interconnected, crisscrossing and interweaving fabric of cultural movement and exchange. It is above all, a space of movement, a movement that has been interrupted but not destroyed by the post-imperial emergence of independent states. This relation between smooth and striated space is particularly critical in the context of two coups in Fiji. If Oceania is to fulfil its utopian promise it must avoid the problems of ethnocentricity. The crucial factor, of course, is the position of the Girmit diaspora, the Indian Fijians. Just two years after Albert Wendt announced his Oceania manifesto, Satendra Nandan wrote that the Indian Fijian was becoming aware of an identity as a Pacific Islander who needed to Seek, establish and foster new relationships with Pacific neighbours, both big and small and leading to a dissolution of complexes when the Fiji Indian could say unselfconsciously “these are our people this sea of islands make up our country” and the multicultural islands of Fiji would stand as beacons of light in a world of encircling gloom. (Nandan n.d.: 41) The Indian factor is a very sobering check against romanticism. Two coups in Fiji (1987, 2000) designed to reduce or remove the South Asian presence in its politics, have shown that the boundaries of nation and ethnicity still striate the political space of the Pacific. But the utopian concept works because the indigenous people themselves are migratory – migration, movement, travel are indeed their claim to a regional identity. The myth of migration is one that all Pacific peoples can share. The common feature of most classic utopias after More’s was that all things are held in common. As in most postcolonial societies, tension between “I” and “We” is resolved by the traditional formations of communal land tenure (especially in

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Africa and the Pacific) which provide an economic structure that already prevents the enrichment of the individual at the expense of the many. The complication to this is that the Chiefly structure of land-holding groups in Fiji, which suggests a communal identity symbolized by the Chief, does not provide a place for Indian Fijians. Nevertheless, the communality of Oceanic utopianism lies in the potential of a fluid structure of migrating interspersed and intersecting groups of peoples holding in common a genre of foundation myths about crossing the sea, and a common desire to overcome the fragmenting effects of colonial nationalisms. The first and dominant consequence of this (or perhaps one cause of the doctrine of Oceania) is the predominance of images of the sea in Pacific writing. Lali (1980), the first of three anthologies of Pacific writing edited by Albert Wendt includes a predominance of sea imagery. Wendt’s “Inside Us the Dead” and Epeli Hau’ofa’s “Our Fathers Bent the Winds” commemorate Polynesian and non-indigenous ancestors who sought and settled “these islands by prophetic stars” (Wendt 1980: 264). In his editorial introduction to Lali, Wendt describes the Pacific writers as “nourished by the warmth and love of our mother, the Pacific,” and he characterizes the work of Pacific writers as springs of creativity, bubbling springs of water adding to the vast plenitude of the literary ocean. The Pacific formulation highlights the importance of cultural producers, because the utopian desire found a material consequence in the establishment of the Oceania Centre for Arts and Culture in 1997. The centre emerged as more than a location for an arbitrary collection of art, but was established on the maxim Hau’ofa had espoused years before in his seminal article “A Sea of Islands.” “At about the same time,” he says, “our journalism students produced the first issue of their newspaper, WANSOLWARA, a pidgin word which they translated as ‘one ocean – one people’” (1998: 37). The centre aims to “promote the development of contemporary Oceanic visual and performing arts that transcend national and ethnic boundaries,” to create “an autonomous cultural space within the global system, a space that is ours, in which we breathe freely, and of which we have full control.” This utopianism relies on mining the rich cultural resources of the Pacific to reinvigorate a present that has been depleted and destabilized by a colonial history (Hau’ofa 1998: 37). The vision of a regional identity takes particular care to separate common identity from homogeneity or national or international confederacy. Here, Oceanic identity is characterized not by the static identification with place, but the circulatory and migratory movements that historically criss-crossed the ocean. It is thus in the very significance of movement and mobility that the embedding of the future in the past takes form and, like the Caribbean, emerges from an archipelagic consciousness. The Pacific is a region in which national populations have been established and their myths and cultural practices given shape by the reality of migration and movement. Before the advent of Europeans into the Pacific, our cultures were truly oceanic, in the sense that the sea barrier shielded us for millennia from the

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great cultural influences that raged through continental land-masses and adjacent islands. This prolonged period of isolation allowed for the emergence of distinctive oceanic cultures with the only non-oceanic influences being the original cultures that the earliest settlers brought with them when they entered the vast, uninhabited region. (Hau’ofa 1998: 38) The sense of identity located in Oceania is thus in some respects a defensive concept, so small and so vulnerable are the Pacific Island populations. As an extended archipelago, Oceania is the largest “continent” in the world, with the smallest landmass, and it is completely vulnerable to the depredations of larger populations; through colonialism, fishing, mining and capital expansion. Nevertheless, while many Pacific urban populations have been alienated from their cultural histories, the ocean still forms the context of historical, social and cultural being. For the Caribbean, as Derek Walcott puts it, “the sea is history.” This is the sea of the Middle Passage, slavery and exile, a very different sea from the Pacific, a sea across which there is no return. But Oceania is no less historical, traversed as it is by journeys, migrations and the myths and legends such crossings produced. Hau’ofa sees this realization as “the beginning of a very important chapter in our history. We could open it as we enter the third millennium” (1998: 39). As history, it is also the hope of the future. As a space of being, it is the antithesis of place with its histories of disputes. The sea is a space free of territorial disputes, free of national boundaries. Ironically this freedom from disputation over boundaries, the ultimate cultural “smooth space” has been recently bound and restricted by the Law of the Sea Convention, which introduced the concept of territoriality. In this context Hau’ofa articulates the utopian possibilities of Oceania in exhortatory tones: As the sea is an open and ever flowing reality, so should our oceanic identity transcend all forms of insularity, to become one that is openly searching, inventive, and welcoming. In a metaphorical sense the ocean that has been our waterway to each other should also be our route to the rest of the world. (40) Hau’ofa is careful to avoid ethnocentrism, an avoidance made easier by the complex migratory history of the Pacific peoples. All our ancestors, including those who came as recently as sixty years ago, were brought here by the sea. Some were driven here by war, famine and pestilence; some were brought by necessity, to toil for others; and some came seeking adventures and perhaps new homes. Some arrived in good health, others barely survived the traumas of passage. For whatever reasons, and through whatever experiences they endured, they came by sea to the Sea, and we have been here since. (42)

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So it is the sea rather than the land that defines the identity of the Pacific Islander, and this has remarkable consequences, at least potentially for the nature of this subjectivity. For it is not linked to place as a hereditary site, national boundary, or even cultural location, but to a space of movement, a space situated in ecological time, a space in which the cycle of the future spins on the axis of the past. Ultimately Oceania is, like all utopias situated in the region of the poetic. Oceania is vast, Oceania is expanding, Oceania is hospitable and generous. Oceania is humanity rising from the depths of brine and regions of fire deeper still, Oceania is us. We are the sea, we are the ocean. (98) The concept of Oceania is interesting in the context of the increase in global mobility. While the growth and movement of diasporas has increasingly occupied postcolonial theory, the utopian dimension of such mobility is most pronounced in island regions such as the Caribbean and the Pacific where the concept of a region in the thinking of many intellectuals is not the striated space of a political confederation, but the smooth space of representational undecidability, a smooth space beautifully represented by the sea itself. Hau’ofa captures this sense of the overarching importance of the sea when he says “Our fathers bent the winds and strode the waves/to bring the Kula and Mothers of Kings from Upolo” (Wendt 1980: 255).

The Oceanic perception of time One of the key features of this utopian development has been a concept of “ecological time,” coined by Hau’ofa to describe the cyclic nature of Oceanic history. This cyclic perception of time is much like the African experience of layered or spiralling time, but here it is grounded in the language itself. “We can see our traditional nonlinear emphasis in the languages of Austronesian‑speaking peoples,” he says, “which locate the past in front and ahead of us and the future behind, following after us.” He quotes Lilikalā Kame’elelhiwa in her Native Land and Foreign Desires: It is interesting to note that in Hawaiian, the past is referred to as Ka wa niamua, “the time in front or before.” Whereas the future, when thought of at all, is Ka wa mahope, or “the time which comes after or behind.” It is as if the Hawaiian stands firmly in the present, with his back to the future, and his eyes fixed upon the past, seeking historical answers for present-day dilemmas. (qtd. Hau’ofa 2000: 459) In the Fijian and Tongan languages, the terms for past are gauna I liu and kuonga mu’a respectively; gauna and kuonga meaning “time” or “age” or “era”; and liu and mu’a meaning “front” or “ahead” (2000: 459–460). The terms liu and mu’a may be used

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as verbs in the sentence, “I am going ahead of you,” or more graphically in the popular Fiji English, “I am taking the lead,” which is the literal translation of au sa liu. The past then is going ahead of us, leading into the future, which is behind us. (460). Similarly, in PNG tok pisin “see you later” is lukim yu – behind time. Like the Caribbean, the language of Pacific Island peoples appears to reflect the shifting, tidally moving boundaries between land and sea, between space and time. Contrary to the assumption of the dominant idea of the island, its boundaries may have nothing to do with a strict attachment to land, indeed island boundaries question the definition of “boundary” itself. Islands constitute sites where time has much more to do with simultaneity than it does with discrete periods or “pasts;” where “evolution” becomes a concept that names not an inexorable overcoming and suppression of the past but rather a present coexistence of moments of change. This simultaneity is conceived in terms of circularity and inversion by Hau’ofa, in that Oceanic time, unlike the linear calendrical time of European culture, fits both the cycles of nature and the ritual activities that accompanied them. This is not unknown in English, which incorporates the notion of past as “ahead” and future as “behind,” as in “let us pay tribute to those who have gone before us,” and “the generations that are coming behind us.” That the past is ahead, in front of us, is a conception of time that helps us retain our memories and to be aware of its presence. What is behind us cannot be seen and is liable to be forgotten readily. What is ahead of us cannot be forgotten so readily or ignored, for it is in front of our minds’ eyes, always reminding us of its presence. The past is alive in us, so in more than a metaphorical sense the dead are alive – we are our history. (460) This cannot be too greatly stressed in the relationship of utopian thinking to time. Bloch was adamant that utopianism was no mere yearning for the future, but was a constant orientation to the Not-Yet that energized the present. The final will is that to be truly present. So that the lived moment belongs to us and we to it and “Stay awhile” could be said to it. Man wants at last to enter into the Here and Now as himself, wants to enter his full life without postponement and distance. The genuine utopian will is definitely not endless striving, rather: it wants to see the merely immediate and thus so unpossessed nature of self-location and being-here finally mediated, illuminated and fulfilled, fulfilled happily and adequately. (Bloch 1986: 16) In Oceanic time the past is not separated or ruptured either from the present or the future, rather they spiral within time so to speak. This is a move in which the present becomes “mediated, illumined and fulfilled,” as Bloch puts it (1986: 16). The present is inhabited by the past and transformed by the utopian hope for the

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future. This is partly because the cyclic nature of “ecological time” continually cycles the future in the present, maintaining a sense of the continuity of a primordial relationship to the land and sea, a tradition referred to as vakavanua. The rejection of linear time is widespread and though each region has its own way of conceiving circular or layered time, it provides the perfect foundation for the utopian, with its sense of the future circulating in the last and transforming the present. A central feature of the Oceanic conception of time is the concept of relationship itself, represented by the term “va” – a term for both the space and the connection between all things. As Wendt puts it: We each have preferred maps, learned maps – what we believe our cultures, our nations, ourselves were and are. Our maps may be our neighbours’ fictions, we read one another through what we believe, through the mirrors of who and what we are. Those maps and fictions are all in the spiral which encompasses the story of us in the ever-moving present, in the Va, the space between all things which defines and makes us a part of the unity that is all. (Wendt 1991b: 181) The choice of the term “map” is not an idle one. Mapping and naming have been a central feature of the European dominance of the world, as Ben Okri elaborated in Infinite Riches. But as Wendt explains it, in Oceania the map is not the outline (as it is with European maps which merely confirmed the smallness and insignificance of the Pacific Islands) but the intersection of pathways, the actual connection between all things. Va and va-tapuia, describe the relationship between humans and their environment, whether mythological or material. The va, or the relations between things, operates both physically and imaginatively and has become the utopian space of Pacific writers as they negotiate the different spaces within and between Oceania. These spaces – the va – are not spaces of separation but of connection. Crucially they are spaces that occur within time. Past and present spiral rather than separate. The land and sea themselves are thus cultural spaces that maintain a unique relationship – va – within time. Our landscapes and seascapes are thus cultural as well as physical. We cannot read our histories without knowing how to read our landscapes (and seascapes). When we realize this, we should be able to understand why our languages locate the past as ahead or in front of us. It is right there on our landscapes in front of our very eyes. (Hau’ofa 2000: 466) Thus the concept of a return to the past is not really a return but a way of living in circular or spiralling time. As the Hawaiian Moe’uhane Joseph Balaz puts it in “Identity and Empowerment”: “I dream of/the ways of the past/I cannot go back ... I never left” (Morales 1984: 91).

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The same feeling evokes in Hau’ofa a lyrical sense of an extended homeland Every so often in the hills of Suva, when moon and red wine play tricks on my aging mind, I scan the horizon beyond Laucala Bay, the Rewa Plain, and the reefs by Nukulau Island, for Vaihi, Havaiki, homeland. It is there, far into the past ahead, leading on to other memories, other realities, other homelands. (2000: 470) The place of Oceania in the poetic consciousness does not lessen its emotional and cultural reality.

Inside us the Dead Perhaps the most powerful affirmation of this circularity of past, present and future is Albert Wendt’s poem “Inside us the Dead,” arguably one of the major poems written in English in the twentieth century. In societies in which ancestry plays such a powerful role it is no surprise that this critique has a utopian dimension based on the notion of cultural survival, specifically through the agency of heritage, memory and ancestry itself. The Oceanic perception of time connects with the African habit of “remembering the future.” But in “Inside us the Dead” (1980: 284–290) we find an elegiac meditation on what it means to be “Oceanic” today – how complex and hybrid one’s ancestry may actually be, a complexity that gives a much richer meaning to the idea of “survival.” The remarkable thing about this poem is that it was written early in the emergence of Pacific poetry when the dominant theme was critique and anti-colonial resistance. Here we find a sense of the complexity of Pacific life that marries tradition to the concept of a different and complex future, a future of possibility. The utopian vision of Oceania is a space of migration and flow in which not only geographical and national boundaries, but also those of past and future become more and more blurred. The past history of migration, intermixing, hybridity and fluid movement lies Like sweet-honeyed tamarind pods That will burst in tomorrow’s sun Or plankton fossils in coral alive at full moon dragging Virile tides over coy reefs Into yesterday’s lagoons (Wendt 1980: 284) This poem demonstrates how utopian possibility emerges from what may appear on the surface to be its opposite, concluding as it does with a lament for his dead brother. The utopian in literature is not always overt but may work by deploying the anticipatory consciousness, suggesting possible futures by virtue of the very

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tangled complexity of the past. This is clearly signalled in the first stanza where the dead “inside us” are “Like sweet-honeyed tamarind pods/That will burst in tomorrow’s sun.” This is a very compelling entry into what becomes a beautifully elegiac meditation, one that invests in what has passed a future significance that celebrates by implication, the complexity, interweaving and intersecting profusion of Oceanic life. Such a life could be called “articulated” in the sense in which James Clifford uses it. Articulation is a useful term for the adaptability of subjects, not only in the Pacific but in most colonized regions because it stresses the jerkiness and contingency of the things that are “joined on” and taken off at various times in the performance of identity. “The whole is more like a cyborg, or a political coalition. The elements are more contingent. A body could have three arms or one arm depending on the context” (Clifford 2000: 97). The poem takes on – articulates – the complexity of inheritance by claiming its inherence. It is exactly this sense of the embodiment of time that forms the inclusive potential of the Oceanic concept. The poem is one of movement as well as articulation, a movement in which the cycle of the future spins inevitably on the same axis as the past. Wendt’s poem encapsulates several aspects of the Oceanic utopian. But it does so in an apparently contradictory way. How can a beautiful but elegiac meditation on the past direct our thinking towards utopian vision? How can the evocation of what has passed – including his reprobate German ancestors, his mother who died when he was twelve, and his recently dead brother – transmute into a gesture of hope? It does so by redirecting our gaze to the re-conception of time and space in the Pacific – to the circularity of time and the re-imagining of maps as lines of intersection and movement. And it does this by seeing them as traversing his own being. First, “my polynesian fathers/who escaped the sun’s wars, seeking/these islands by prophetic stars,/emerged from the sea’s eye like turtles …,” and established an island culture, knit together within the network of migratory Pacific routes that gave it a sense of both past and future. The poet was already there watching “from shadow root, ready for birth generations.” In this way the past, as Hau’ofa says, was already ahead of us. What might have become the sign of “authentic” Polynesian identity becomes instead the first stage of a process of cultural and ontological transformation, an embodiment of the Oceanic va. Inside him also are the missionaries, “the Sky Piercers terrible as moonlight … in black and white ships breaking.” In a dazzling metaphor he sees the missionaries “iron barking/the sermon of Light, in search/of souls in the palm-milk child,” while his father’s gods “slid/into the dark like sleek eels/into sanctuary of bleeding coral …” And so finally, “The Kingdom was come in” ... “the new way is the Cross.” Wendt gives an account of some lugubrious inheritances – missionaries driving out his forefather’s gods, traders marooned on a sea of whiskey and dashed hopes – but they are the signs of something other than failure, signs of more than mixed lineage. These dead inside him are in their own way a confirmation of the almost infinitely changing and adaptable circumstances of Oceanic life. These are the

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presences that prevent Arcadian nostalgia, that short-circuit the fiction of identity. In their own way, whatever their nature, by becoming a part of the present, they confirm the possibilities of the future. Memories of his mother, dead since he was twelve, “are flamboyant/blooms scattered across/pitted lava fields under/the moon’s scaffold.” Such memories, because of their elusiveness, because of their distance yet constant presence, are not so much history as a kind of enabling fairy tale, “the golden key to each child’s/ quest for the giant’s castle.” Such memories become a key feature of the writer’s ability to conceive the future, to anticipate possibilities through the power of the imagination. “Dead, she walks the miracle/of water-lily stars, more moonbeam/ than flesh, the sinnet of myth/I weave into my veins.” Though long dead, his mother, perhaps more than any other, dwells inside him as muse, as the capacity to imagine and the compulsion to write the future by re-conceiving the past. His brother, “an engineer, inspired like a juggler” “wanted/to be feet in iron, head/in the rainbow, rewinding/the moon.” Last seen boarding a plane, carrying a guitar, he was “brought/back from the snow in an oak box” after he had “slipped off/an ordinary/highway built/for ordinary mortals, car buckling in, like/a cannibal flower, to womb/him in death.” The juggler-engineer is a poignant image, an image of risk, skill, a tempting of fate, and it suggests a realm of possibility that depends upon the contingent. Yet contingency is the ally of potentiality and though his brother dies, perhaps needlessly in an accident, the balls juggled and dropped, he is a sign of the present because he too dwells within the poet. Hybridity, contingency, and cataclysmic cultural change are encompassed in this strangely forward-looking vision of the past. Many writers, including Wendt, make much of their ambivalent place in the Pacific, neither at home in the metropolis, the place of their education, nor, as writer-intellectuals, in Samoa. Epeli Hau’ofa writes in The Writer as Outsider of his own “rootless background” and of the fact that for the first forty years of his life he had always been an outsider to every society he had lived in (Va’ai 1999: 178). Yet there is something profoundly “placed,” securely centred about this poem, that causes us to cast around for explanations and one that appears immediately is the Samoan ideology of centrality. The myth is that Samoa is the centre of the world. As the poet Sia Fiegel reflects, “Samoans always carry that sense that Samoa really is the centre. Even Samoans who migrate outside always have that longing for the so-called centre which is really physically Samoa” (Ellis 1998: 71). Such an image of centrality can look very like national or ethnic chauvinism. But when we put it in the context of the intersecting flows of time and space that are central to the Oceanic we see that in the Pacific consciousness centrality is a function of movement and circularity rather than cultural or geographical fixity. The “Centre” cannot exist without the circumference of the Ocean.

Spiralling time and cultural appropriation Despite the strong tradition of the centrality of Samoa revealed in Fiegel’s poetry, the cyclic or spiralling view of time in the Pacific leads to a remarkably inclusive

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and adaptable approach to cultural practices, and a fascinating demonstration of this can be seen in the appropriation of religion. The common assumption in postcolonial studies is that the incursion of Christianity had a fracturing effect on traditional cultures, but to assume that this was universally true fails to understand exactly how culture works. Whoever we are, we only need to look at our own culture to see that while culture frames a society’s understanding of the world, that “frame” is always in a state of perpetual development. A much more sophisticated way to understand the impact of Christianity in the Pacific is to see the way it is appropriated by postcolonial and enslaved societies as a mode of liberation and cultural resistance. This is a process almost identical to the way English literary writing was appropriated, so that the cultural hegemony of English literature became transformed into a discourse of self-representation. In Oceania, due principally to a unique perception of time, Christianity was appropriated into the traditional culture, not only as a form of cultural resistance, but in a way that actually supported and even augmented that culture. James Clifford recounts the story of going to the Pacific to work on Maurice Leenhardt in New Caledonia: I encountered a brutal colonial history and, at the same time, a remarkable, exemplary history of cultural survival and transformation. Kanaks, the island’s indigenous inhabitants, were said to be dying out. Yet they have persisted. And one of the ways they have survived is by becoming Christian. But conversion, as Leenhardt put it, turned out to be a complex process of acculturation in two directions. Melanesia Christianity turned out to be a different, a new kind of Christianity and, in fact, has been a way of continuing to be Kanak in a different context. What I got was a remarkable sense of something both very old and very modern cobbled together in a strategy of survival. (2000: 92) Clifford sees this as an example of the remarkably adaptive function of articulation. The fascinating thing is that everything is available to be articulated and Clifford sees it as a useful way of thinking about conversion to Christianity in the Pacific. “There are elements of Christianity to which people hooked on rather easily, and there were other elements that were transformed” (97). But a better term, perhaps, than articulation is one that corresponds to the oceanic perception of the fluid interplay of past, present and future, a process described by vakavanua in Fiji, a term for cultural continuity, which sees culture and its various practices as spiralling within time, so to speak. The belief in primordial possession of the land ironed out the rupture of the colonial period. But Christianity was exempted from its association with colonialism and viewed positively. Although we could say, in Clifford’s terms, that Christianity was “articulated” – hooked on – to the indigenous Fijian reality, the process was a more organic one of incorporating this new religious practice into the oceanic, particularly Fijian, cosmogony.

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To elaborate on this Margaret Jolly compares two concepts – kastom and vakavanua in Fiji and Vanuatu. The terms kastom (“custom” or “tradition” in Bislama) and vakavanua (“the way of the land” in Fijian) seem to be local variants of a pan‑Pacific concept of tradition. But these terms mark quite different articulations of past and present. Kastom is predicated on a sense of rupture and revival, vakavanua on a sense of continuity between past and present. Kastom tends more thoroughly to expunge European elements and is associated not just with a moral criticism of European ways but with more trenchant opposition toward foreigners in general and whites in particular. Vakavanua incorporates European elements – Wesleyan Methodism and British codifications of chiefly hierarchies and land tenure – that are now seen as part of the way of the land. This is in contrast to the “way of money,” associated not only with foreigners – Europeans and Indians – but also indigenous practitioners of “the way of money.” In Vanuatu, Christianity and colonialism are (340) seen much more as a rupture with a heathen past, in Fiji (at least from the viewpoint of the eastern confederacies) as flowing continuously from ancestral practices. (Jolly 2000: 340–341) The differences between the two are greatly affected by the different colonial histories in Vanuatu, where the condominium colonial administration of France and Britain created a very different policy towards traditional land than that in Fiji. Consequently, the meanings of these two concepts differ markedly in that kastom is portrayed as ancestral ways that were disrupted by the colonial presence and that are being consciously revived in the present. In Fiji, vakavanua is portrayed rather in terms of a continuity of practices, flowing ceaselessly from past to present and into the future. Both of these terms offer a particular view of the future, and have very different utopian energies, but it would be true to say that vakavanua enabled local culture in Fiji to maintain its sense of time, and thus absorb Christianity into a very strong tradition of primordial Fijian values, which are assumed to anticipate Christianity. Against this history, the Fijian notion of tradition as “acting in the manner of the land” makes the present flow smoothly out of the past. From this perspective, “the coming of the light” did not violate indigenous cultural practice but revealed the inherent Christianity of the Fijian people (Jolly 2000: 697). Christianity is seen to have highlighted the inherently Fijian attributes of kinship concern, hospitality, and respect for the chiefs. Thus the received religion is constituted, through the cyclic view of time as a continuous and evolving aspect of Fijian cultural values. Here we find that the fluidity of religious practice occupies the same space as the ancestral fluidity characterizing Oceania itself. “Whatever others may say,” says Hau’ofa,

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we need to include in our philosophy of reverence for nature a strong element of spirituality that we may borrow from our pasts, other people’s pasts, or even invent it ourselves. (2000: 468) *** Where Christianity is seen through a cyclic view of time to be the realization of primordial values, the present is always the site, not just of the intersection of past and future but of the reality of Becoming. This is continuous with the sense of Oceania as not merely isolated islands, but vast trajectories of movement, migration, a nomadic reality, fluid in space as well as time. Oceania is a view of the humanum that, unlike Bloch, seamlessly includes religion rather than excludes it. But, like Bloch’s, it posits a very different view of eschatology. Eschatology is not located teleologically at the end times but cyclically. It is within this cyclic and inclusive view of time, history and culture, that Oceania Hope occurs, a hope situated in a radical sense of presence.

Note 1 While South Asian indentured workers were in practice just as exiled from their original homeland as African slaves, they were not as radically severed from their language and ethnicity. They could at least identify a part of South Asia to which they could return, even though they rarely did. In Fiji such myths of return are embodied in language and religion.

10 SETTLER COLONY UTOPIANISM

While utopian communities have been established on various occasions in the postcolonial world, usually based on religious and communitarian principles, the settler colonies are distinctive in the utopian drive that propelled people to settle. Throughout the British Empire in particular, settlers saw themselves escaping the rigid class structures and economic inequality of Britain and saw the colony offering a new start to free settlers. As one emigrant put it in a letter home: “eight hours is a day’s work. That is the best of this country. We go to work at 8 a.m., and leave at 5 p.m. A man is a man, and not a slave” (qtd. Sargent 2001: 6). But the escape from class was not matched by an escape from the civilizing mission. In the words from an 1828 poem by Thomas Campbell, the immigrant’s anticipation is To see a world, from shadowy forests won, In youthful beauty wedded to the sun; To skirt our home with harvests widely sown, And call the blooming landscape all our own, Our children’s heritage, in prospect long (1874: 249) Our children’s heritage will come when harvests are won from the shadowy forest, imagery that extended to prospects of the cultural enlightenment of the existing “shadowy” inhabitants. The settler colonies are a prime example of the contradictions of imperial utopianism with which this study began. The distance from home ensures the utopian promise of the new place. Reverend Sydney Smith, for example, writes: “To introduce a European population, and consequently the arts and civilisation of Europe, into such an untrodden country as New Holland, is to confer a lasting and important benefit upon the world” (Gascoigne 2002: 7). But utopia must be created, usually at the expense of the

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indigenous people, and as Alfred Crosby (1986) explains, at the expense of indigenous flora and fauna. If this start was not always as completely utopian as some texts hoped, it was an improvement for most settlers. But the settler colonies, or “dominions,” were as different from each other as they were from colonies in Africa, Asia and the Americas. Australia, in particular carried the burden of convict transportation, and as the great southern continent was depicted as both utopia and dystopia well before European arrival. Nevertheless, settler colonies demonstrated more purely utopian writing than any other colonized country (in Australia alone Lyman Tower Sargent lists 243 utopian works – both eutopias and dystopias – up to 1999).1 The reasons for this are fairly clear: settlers who moved by choice were always propelled by the promise of a new start, and often the ownership of land; European settlers drew inspiration from the Western tradition of utopian thought; the white population quickly overwhelmed the indigenous owners, who, if they had no agriculture, were considered to be on a level with the fauna. Needless to say, settler utopianism generated dystopian ruin in the displaced indigenous populations, and the consequences of attempting to re-locate England in the colonies soon revealed to settlers themselves that utopia, if it were at all possible, would have to be constructed in a different way. The prevalence of utopian literature in the US and New Zealand may have been a consequence of their European-type climates, and the general sense of an escape from the class restrictions of European life. But it is certain that both reveal more focused religious objectives not found in other colonies. Four of the original colonies in the US were founded by religious groups (Plymouth by Puritans, Rhode Island by Roger Williams leaving the Puritans, Pennsylvania by Quakers (Society of Friends), and Maryland by Roman Catholics). In New Zealand, Scots Presbyterians founded one colony, Otago, and Canterbury was intended to be Anglican. The city of Canterbury in New Zealand was “to be a Church of England settlement, complete with a Bishop, in which there would be neither extremely rich or extremely poor but which would include a strict hierarchy in those who settled” (Sargent 2001: 3). In all these cases, except Canterbury, a primary goal was to practise religious beliefs free from persecution. Only the Quakers of Pennsylvania were open to the idea of others practising different beliefs within their territory (Sargent 2007: 92). A curious outcome of the religious motivation for settlement in the US and New Zealand was that utopianism has had a central impact in the development of national identity in these colonies in particular. While all the other countries I have studied so far – Australia, Canada, Ireland, South Africa, and the United Kingdom (England and Scotland) – have national Utopian traditions that are important and help us understand their national cultures, only in New Zealand and the U.S. are these aspirations absolutely central to the national experience. (Sargent 2001: 14)

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In particular, “New Zealand appears to be unique in the way that Utopian projects became part of the normal course of political debate” (Sargent 2001: 1).

Paradise or prison: perceptions of Australia In contrast, when we turn to Australia we find a complication of utopia in that the idea of the southland existed in both utopian and dystopian form well before European arrival. Australia, more than any other colony has carried this ambivalent dualism – paradise or prison – throughout its history. Although Sargent contends that dystopian writings outnumber eutopian in Australia (2008: 115), the ambivalence of this dualism continues in all manner of representations of Australian place and society. This is captured in the concept of the antipodes, a sign of ultimate geographical, cultural and ontological otherness, which existed long before Australia was seen by Europeans. For St Augustine the idea of human habitation and even land itself on the other side of the globe was highly dubious: Those who affirm it do not claim to possess any actual information; … They fail to notice that, even should it be believed or demonstrated that the world is round or spherical in form, it does not follow that the part of the earth opposite to us is not completely covered with water, or that any conjectured dry land there should be inhabited by men. (St Augustine City of God: XVI.9) Augustine was at least partly correct – the other side of Earth is mostly covered by water in those latitudes corresponding to the European land mass. For centuries after this, Europeans speculated about the antipodes, or the unknown southland, that lay just beyond the limits of their navigational and shipbuilding ingenuity. But Augustine’s objections point out the cultural perspective that came to make the world map itself a sign of Eurocentrism. This is the first trace that begins to characterize the way Australia is seen. The sense of dislocation felt by the early settlers was a function of their being on the other side of the world. This feeling of exile doesn’t seem to have been repeated in New Zealand, where free settlement came later and was driven by very clear utopian motivations. The idea of a topsy-turvy world of wonders at the opposite pole of the globe became a commonplace which inspired writings like The Antipodes (1636), a play by Ben Jonson’s servant Richard Brome, where, amongst other natural inversions, All wit, and mirth and good society Is there among the hirelings, clowns and tradesmen; And all their poets are puritans. (Brome, 1636: 1, #199)

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This plays on the contradiction about the Antipodes that became more obvious after British settlement. It was both a terrifying absence, a place of exile and hardship on the far side of the world and a place of freedom, hope and possibility. In the tradition of Hesiod’s Blessed Isles which lay beckoning at the navigable extremity of the world, was as alluring as it was distant. And so long as the south land was not discovered, fancy could invest it with all the characteristics which might satisfy Utopian yearnings. The southern continent glowed in the imagination, a region far away in time and space, where a newly implanted society could flourish in freedom and plenty. (Gibson 1984: 1–2) Pedro Fernández de Quirós imagined that perfection could be attained in the southland. In 1606 he claimed it for the Holy Spirit and tried to establish a community devoted to the principles of pure religion, served by a new order of holy knights, at a place he prematurely called New Jerusalem. The crowning irony of Australian settlement was that this was not Australia but the island of Vanuatu, which still bears the name Espiritu Santo. One could see this as perhaps symbolic of the ambivalent place of religion in Australia, but it does underscore the power of religious motivation in colonial settlement. While each settler colony experienced a very different form of utopian hope, settler colonies in general demonstrate a fairly common trajectory: a view, at first, of the colony as an improved England, whether as bucolic paradise or a place of escape; a nationalist optimism that predicts a glowing future; a growing disappointment with nationalist fervour if not the nation itself; an imagination of ways in which things could be different. Indigenous depictions of dystopia and utopia, although quite distinctive from white utopianism are integral to both the national history and cultural consciousness of the settler colonies and offer a dimension of vorschein that has a deep impact on cultural history. Finally, two New Zealand writers, Kerri Hulme and Janet Frame, offer the prospect of a different direction for this trajectory; a radically new form of settler colony utopianism expressed by both white and indigenous writers in the disruption of ontological (and thus racial, gender and social) certainty.

A better England By the mid-nineteenth century the dystopian perception of the Antipodes was strongly augmented by a sense of its potential for the British race. In 1852, Samuel Sidney wrote: Australia ... a land of promise for the adventurous ... a home of peace and independence for the industrious ... an El Dorado and an Arcadia combined, where the hardest and the easiest best paid employments are to be found, where every striving man who rears a race of industrious children may sit

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under the shadow of his own vine and his own fig-tree, not without work, but with little care – living on his own, looking down the valleys to his herds – towards the hills to his flocks, amid the humming of bees, which know no winter. (1852: 17) James Anthony Froude, in Oceana – Or England and Her Colonies (1886) envisaged a global commonwealth of English-speaking colonies in which the words of “Rule Britannia” would come true. Colonists would “become the progenitors of a people destined to exceed the glories of European civilization, as much as they have outstripped the wonders of ancient enterprise” (Froude 1886: 429). According to Froude, New Zealanders should not simply renew the town life they had left behind: They will grow into a nation when they are settled in their own houses and freeholds, like their forefathers who drew bow at Agincourt or trailed pike in the wars of the Commonwealth. (1886: 212) The plan outline for New Zealand by Edward Gibbon Wakefield was to “produce in New Zealand a Britain without the very rich or the very poor” (Sargent 2001: 3). This hope for a better England seems to sum up the ambivalence we find between travelling to and creating a utopia. The title of a book attributed to Gouland, the Plan of a Proposed Colony to be called Britannia (1851) demonstrates that, like Robinson Crusoe, utopia was to be created through the exertion of British will and ingenuity. Despite its convict origins, or perhaps as a consequence of them, the utopian perception of Australia seemed to confirm all the imperialist objectives of reshaping the world. Charles Darwin, in his Journal of the Voyage of HMS Beagle observes of the practice of sending convicts to the other side of the world, that “As a means of making men honest – of converting vagabonds the most useless in one hemisphere into active citizens in another, and giving birth to a new and splendid country – and a grand centre of civilization – it has succeeded to a degree perhaps unparalleled in history” (Darwin 1836: 532). Ultimately the hope for a better England boils down to a better place for the immigrant, a place to call one’s own, which would never have happened in England. “The desire of ordinary men and women to become property owners was the making of this country,” says David Malouf, “To own a piece of Australia, even if it was only a quarter acre block, became the Australian dream” (2014: 133). This raises a question Malouf’s novels probe much more deeply: What is it that people seek in putting down roots in a place way across the other side of the world? One of the main things people seek is the one Digger’s mother had sought in The Great World – to find a place that you could name as your own. In this simple desire of a British orphan lies some of the deep issues of settlement: of occupying, fencing,

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naming a place you could possess, with no thought of the original owners. The absence of these owners is the ghostlike reality that haunts all Malouf’s settlers. In a way they are all, like Digger’s mother, orphans in search of a named place, even when the name is a palimpsest written over indigenous country. When she arrives at Keen’s Crossing she discovers that it isn’t much, certainly not what you’d expect of a place named on the map, but its stillness at least gave you time to breathe (1990: 16). The important thing was that They belonged here for all time now, it was marked with their name. They could see it on a map if they liked: a dotted line leading away from the highway; at the end of it a dot marking the store; beside that, in italics Keen’s Crossing. (20) Even Digger, who seems to be little affected by ownership discovers a new meaning in the name when he returns from war. So there it was: his own name, Keen, making an appearance in the great world. On a map, along with all those other magic formulations, Marcaibo, Surabaya, Arkangel. (197–198) In Malouf’s Harland’s Half Acre, the name of Frank Harland’s ancestral land – Killarney – speaks volumes of the function of naming. “Harlands are brought up on the story of how they won and then lost the land” (1984: 3). Possession was easy. One brief bloody encounter established the white man’s power and it was soon made official with the white man’s law. Subsequent occasions, if less glorious, are still recounted with Irish pride in the extravagance of their folly. Within a generation the Harlands had squandered most of what they owned and were reduced to day-labouring for others, or, like young Clem Harland, to grubbing a livelihood from odd patches of what was once a princely estate. (3) Frank’s mission is to retrieve the family lands, but to do so he must first free himself from the weight of his father’s talk. “Talk for Clem was its own reality” (50) and Frank’s breakaway from his father Clem is a break away from the seductiveness of myth, of the particular kind of myth of self and place which his father constructs. Clem represents the narrative of nationalism, his ceaseless talk shutting out any deeper thought of the nature of place, or the questioning of ownership. In this way the nationalist narrative and the utopian dream go hand in hand in a relentless drive towards the future.

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Nationalist optimism While utopian writing was central to the development of national identity in the US and New Zealand, all nationalist literature develops a utopian, even panglossian mode of future thinking. Ironically, given the enduring myth of Australian egalitarianism, the ambivalence of representations of Australia was complicated by a significant class distinction, between a largely English establishment that either pined for “home” or imagined an Australian model of the English class system (such as Wentworth’s “bunyip aristocracy”), and a largely Irish working class that developed utopian ideas of a new start. By the 1890s the nationalist resistance to imperialism had reached a climax and the class differences between rich pastoralists and workers, whether itinerant “bushmen,” shearers or miners, led to historic strikes that paved the way, eventually, for federation. The nationalist ideology of the late 1800s in Australia is fervently optimistic about the future, as it celebrates the achievements of Australian society in “taming” the land, producing wealth from it to feed and clothe Europe. But the optimistic sentiments of nationalist visions uncover the dark side of colonial nationalism – the fact that the discourse of the nation state is a continuation of the imperial discourse of the civilizing mission. For instance, the vision of the future in Henry Kendall’s “The Far Future” is a remarkable reconstitution of the imperial dynamic from which nationalism is attempting to free itself. Australia, advancing with rapid winged stride Shall plant among nations her banners in pride The yoke of dependence aside she will cast, And build on the ruins and wrecks of the Past Her flag on the tempest will wave to proclaim ‘Mong kingdoms and empires her national name The Future shall see it, asleep or unfurl’d The shelter of Freedom and boast of the world (Kendall 1920) In both nineteenth-century art and literature we find, time after time, that the civilizing dynamic establishes nationalism as a continuation of the imperial mission. A clear example of this is Frederick McCubbin’s “The Pioneer” (1904), painted after federation. In this triptych we first see the pioneer carving a space in the bush while his wife sits wistfully in the foreground apparently thinking of the future. The second panel shows the pioneer sitting on a log talking to his wife carrying a baby with cleared land in the background. The last panel shows him tending a grave, sign of the human cost of civilizing and farming the bush, while in the background the spreading city is a testament to the civilization that stands as the fruit of his labour. The postcolonial nation state cannot escape the vision of the future bequeathed to it by the imperial project.

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For Mary Hannay Foott in “The Future of Australia” (1885) the image of the child, so common in representations of Australia, grows to queenly stature from her role as the feeder of the Old World’s “starvelings.” I see the Child we are tending now To a queenly stature grown The jewels of empire on her brow And the purple round her thrown She feeds her household plenteously From the granaries we have filled; Her vintage is gathered in with glee From the fields our toil has tilled. The Old World’s outcast starvelings feast, – Ungrudged, – on her corn and wine; The gleaners are welcome, from west and east Where her autumn sickles shine (Foott 1885) Australia, still a “young” nation two centuries after settlement, remains locked into the identity it was given as a colony – the supplier of commodities to the world. The “gleaners” are welcome now from China, whose voracious appetite for coal and iron ore keeps Australia in the role marked out for it by imperial design. In Banjo Paterson’s “Song of the Future,” (1993: 164) there is a similar sentiment of youth and potential. After castigating Gordon for his pessimism, and extolling the beauties of the bush, in which the early explorers are compared to the Israelites looking for the Promised Land, he launches into a celebration of settlement. A young country without a “bygone history” the character of Australia comes from the “vast wonderland, the Bush.” Although “we have no songs of strife” we yet might find grand achievements “Within the bushman’s quiet life.” This egregious claim to a lack of history, excluding indigenous societies from history, is too obvious for comment, but Paterson continues the theme of an unknown country brought the benefits of civilization: And lo a miracle! the land But yesterday was all unknown, The wild man’s boomerang was thrown Where now great busy cities stand. (1993: 164) The future, for Paterson, is a future carved out of the wild but beautiful bush. Great cities now stand where once the “wild man’s boomerang was thrown,” sentiments echoed in Frederick McCubbin’s “The Pioneer” fifteen years later. But

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for all its nationalist unsubtlety there is a sense here as in the former poems of a form of social possibility, a hope that “all things may yet be for good.” And it may be that we who live In this new land apart, beyond The hard old world grown fierce and fond And bound by precedent and bond, May read the riddle right and give New hope to those who dimly see That all things may be yet for good, And teach the world at length to be One vast united brotherhood. (1993: 164) The hope expressed looks, to contemporary eyes, simply ludicrous. That Australia may teach the world to become “One vast united brotherhood” – having invaded and decimated the indigenous population, and now hysterically protecting its borders from asylum seekers desperately seeking “new hope” – is deeply ironic. Yet the idea that “all things may yet be for good” introduces a poignant note into its historical blindness. Each of these poems is an example of nationalist ideology and confirms Bloch’s insistence that ideology contains a “surplus” or “excess” that is not limited to mystification. While the utopian surplus exists within ideology, it creates tension between the vision and the reality that can expose levels of social inequality while maintaining the hope for justice.

Disillusion In all settler colonies, the contradiction between social inequality and the hope for justice was clearly exposed in the position of women. “Taken In,” published under the pseudonym “Hopeful,” presents a class analysis of who should and should not emigrate to New Zealand. While she argues that the working class should emigrate to achieve a better life, she belonged to the more “refined” class that should not. “Hopeful” quickly returned to England (Sargent 2001: 7). In Where Did She Come From?, a study of early women novelists in New Zealand, Heather Roberts says, “People felt betrayed because the depression destroyed the common expectation that this was a brave new world where everyone would have a better deal than they would have had in the place that they left” (1989: 61). A similar response occurs in Australian literature during the 1890s, particularly in the work of Barbara Baynton whose dystopian view of the Australian bush contested the nationalist ideology developing around the figure of the itinerant bushman. “Squeaker’s Mate” narrates the extent to which the woman’s dog is a closer, more loyal friend than her cowardly, deceiving, bushman husband, and the general gloom and horror induced by the bush offers a grim counterpoint to any kind of nationalist sentiment.

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But not only women found the utopian promise of the New World to have failed. William Lane, whose ironically titled The Working Man’s Paradise was written to help fund the families of shearers and bush workers charged with conspiracy after the 1891 shearer’s strike, led a migration to a utopian settlement called New Australia in Patagonia. Disillusioned and unemployed, many bush workers saw the strike’s failure as the end of their hopes for an egalitarian, workers’ Australia. When Lane proposed starting anew in South America, over 2000 prospective colonists signed up immediately. Perhaps the most famous recruit was poet Mary Gilmore who stayed at New Australia from 1885 to 1902 (Whitehead 2003). But like most utopian communities New Australia could not manage the problem of power and collapsed under Lane’s authoritarian rule. Disillusioned with the class hypocrisy of nationalism the utopians left only to be disillusioned in turn by New Australia. Even in New Zealand, contemporary disillusionment with nationalist utopianism ran deep. In Maurice Gee’s Plumb, one of the characters says, Joy. In those years it was in short supply. The dream of a Utopia in the southern seas, of God’s Own Country, had never been more than that: a dream. Holes had been shot in it before the depression. But in the depression it rusted like an old tin can, it fell to pieces. (1978: 231) While early New Zealand writers commonly saw the country as moving towards a pastoral paradise, a more critical generation believed that these dreams had already been betrayed. Lawrence Jones wrote that the typical pakeha was a racist, conformist, provincial, secularist puritan, sleeping complacently, if a bit fretfully in his self-made prison ... the dream of the Pastoral Paradise was simplistic to begin with, the arrogant imposition of a European dream on a South Pacific landscape, and that its realisation had led to the destruction of the land and the alienation of the settler from it. (1989: 196) In many respects the achievement of utopia led, as usual, to a dystopian reality, in which rather than a pastoral paradise, the white settler could be caricatured as “a racist, conformist, provincial, secularist puritan, sleeping complacently, if a bit fretfully in his self-made prison” (Jones 1989: 196). What the early utopian visions lacked was a dimension of critique; apart from the implicit critique of imperial Britain the immigrants had left. The problem was a dominance of utopian form over utopian function, of the vision of a perfect place rather than the continuing hope for a better future. In Australian novelist David Malouf we find a keenly realized utopianism that is both a vision of the possibility of a different Australia and a clear critique of the existing society. In Harland’s Half Acre Frank Harland’s painting conceives a very different Australia. This is first recognised by Knack, the immigrant second-hand dealer.

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I like this country you have painted Frank, This bit of it. It is splendid. A place, I think, for whole men and women, or so I see it – for the full man, even if there are no inhabitants as yet. Perhaps it is there I should have migrated. He gave a dark chuckle. It was one of his jests. But it is this country, Frank said. “You think so?” Knack looked. “No Frank, I don’t think it is. Not yet, anyway. It has not been discovered, this place. The people for it have not yet come into existence, I think, or seen they could go there – that there is space and light enough – in themselves. And darkness. Only you have been there. You are the first.” (1984: 116) This is an Australia as heimat – an anticipated country, a utopian country conceived on the white page, the source of all possibility, a country that does not yet exist. The Australia Frank has drawn is a place totally freed from the breath of his father’s mythology, freed from nation, from empire and ultimately, even from the Killarney his painting was intended to recover. When Knack says “You are the first,” he testifies to the capacity of art and literature to anticipate a possible world. Harland’s Half Acre balances its perception of possibility against the sombre reality of the darkness of Australian society. To Frank the darkness is palpable in the lust for possession, his passion for recovering his lost family land. But the darkness is visually represented in the space under Queensland houses – a theme that recurs in Malouf’s work, most noticeably in 12 Edmonstone Street. This darkness is a resonant metaphor for a settler population. Not only does the space under the house symbolize the inability to possess the land, as the house hovers over it, but it also signifies the hidden but ubiquitous presence of evil generated by Aboriginal dispossession. If we compare the settler colony disillusion to that of Africa or India, it is not the disillusion of a political independence that fails to meets the peoples’ hopes, but a disillusion in the society itself, a sense that perhaps the utopian dream of a new start and a place of equality and amenity could never have been attained in a country stolen from its owners.

What might have been: David Malouf’s prophetic vision One of the most fascinating aspects of David Malouf’s utopianism is his ability to write from the Nowhere of an Australia that might have been, a vision of the future that critiques the present by comparison to a different kind of country. Malouf is fascinated with the allegory of settlement, of a society coming face to face with the strangeness and wonder of its own out-of-place-ness. But for all the fears, ambitions, hatreds, stupidities and blindness that characterize the business of colonial settlement, what might Australia have become? What might it have

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become if people had seen the place differently, if they had learned a different way of such a vision of what Australia might have been? An answer to this occurs in Remembering Babylon when Gemmy, an abandoned white boy brought up with an Aboriginal tribe, leads Mr Frazer through the land revealing its bounty, a bounty to which the settlers are completely blind. Gemmy, whose very existence breaches every boundary that makes the settlers’ world safe – race, place, civilization, normality – is the means to a different way of inhabiting the country. For him There was no way of existing in this land, or of making your way through it, unless you took into yourself, discovered on your breath, the sounds that linked up all the various parts of it and made them one. Without that you were blind, you were deaf, as he had been, at first, in their world. (1993: 65) What if the settlers had freed themselves into this way of knowing the land? This is the question the novel explores as Gemmy leads Mr Frazer through the land naming its fruits and animals, avoiding its spirits and secrets. This is more than a tour, Gemmy leads Mr Frazer through his consciousness and it is precisely this different way of being that represents a possible future for Australia, one that perhaps only the literary narrative, having captured the ontological gap between these worlds, can open up as a real possibility. “We have been wrong”, says Mr Frazer to see this continent as hostile and infelicitous, so that only by the fiercest stoicism, a supreme resolution and force of will, and by felling, clearing, sowing with seeds we have brought with us, and by importing sheep, cattle, rabbits, even the very birds of the air, can it be shaped and made habitable. It is habitable already. (1993: 129) The long and lyrical entry into his diary from which this is taken is an account of the ecological blindness of the colonial mentality in settler societies and against which their literature and art have been in constant struggle. His vision is that by breaking out of this language the land might reveal its secrets “so that what spreads in us is an intimate understanding of what it truly is, with all that is unknowable in it made familiar within” (131). In this way Mr Frazer imagines a utopian future – an encountered rather than created future possibility – that combines the material and imagined, a future that includes the use of the ready-to-hand abundance of the Australian environment, but which leads to an imagined possibility, to a transformed experience of what it means to be Australian. Clearly, future thinking such as Malouf’s includes critique and social and dreaming. Disillusion with the trajectory of colonial settlement is balanced by a sense of almost boundless possibility. In An Imaginary Life Ovid sees the evolution

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of man as a process of inhabiting the dream – inhabiting the imagination that goes out ahead of the progress of life. This is in part a process of creating the place that will contain our transformed selves. He sees this in terms of the spirits that flow back and forth between us and the objects we have made, the landscape we have shaped and move in. We have dreamed all these things in our deepest lives and they are ourselves. It is our self we are making out there and when the landscape is complete we shall have become the gods who are intended to fill it. (1978: 22–23) The business of creating place is important to Malouf because it can be achieved by art and literature but it can also be debased, particularly in colonial settlement, by a lack of imagination, as we discover in Remembering Babylon. But it is powerful because “It is as if each creature had the power to dream itself out of one existence into a new one, a step higher on the ladder of things” (1978: 23). It is no surprise that language is so powerful in this process. By naming our gods “the beings we are in the process of becoming will be drawn out of us. We have only to find the name and let its illumination fill us” (1978: 26). But Ovid’s revelation is fundamentally the revelation of all that the imagination is capable. We can transcend ourselves if we have the imagination for it. Poetry quickens that imagination in us and Malouf achieves this quickening by depicting those moments when people sense the horizon of possibility.

Indigenous dreaming: Memory and the future Indigenous utopianism, coming as it does from an invaded and decimated population can be classed as a very different genre from that emerging in the white settler literature, much more akin to that in Africa and the Caribbean. However, there is a strong case for seeing Aboriginal utopianism as a dimension of the settler colony genre because it forms such an integral part of the conscience and consciousness of settler colony society. While there is an inevitable dystopian perception of Aboriginal marginalization, the utopian dimension of Aboriginal life is conceived through a reconnection with the spirit of country. As in all postcolonial utopianism, the issue of time and memory is prominent and this can be briefly demonstrated in two novels – Colin Johnson’s (Mudrooroo’s) Wild Cat Falling (1965) and Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria (2006a). The choice of the first writer is controversial because although identifying as an Aboriginal, Mudrooroo was found to have no Aboriginal blood. Nevertheless, his first novel, regardless of his own ethnicity, neatly demonstrates the movement from a dystopian present to the perception of a utopian future through the reclaiming of cultural memory. Wright’s celebrated novel, written over forty years later, begins from the reality of cultural memory and moves to a utopian vision of Aboriginal reassertion that includes the destruction of a mining company and white town. The location of memory,

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ending the first novel and beginning the second, testifies to the progress of cultural assertion among Aboriginal writers, a progress sometimes referred to as “preMabo” and “post-Mabo” writing. Mudrooroo’s work seems a natural choice since it demonstrates so forcefully the dystopian situation of Aboriginal people in mid-century Australia. The motif of the prison is one that recurs in his writing, and in Wild Cat Falling the novel begins with “Wild Cat’s” release from prison. This imprisonment and subsequent physical and mental dislocation upon his release clearly mirrors the state of Aboriginal people in white society. “In jail I graduated in vice and overcame my last illusion about life. Now I know that hope and despair are equally absurd” (1965: 41). Exchanging the “grey uniform of belonging” for “citizen-of-theworld” (16) his marginality is only confirmed: “I suppose I’m not what they call Australian. I’m just an odd species of native fauna cross-bred with the migrant flotsam of a goldfield” (69). He realizes his Aboriginality will always be outside society, outside the law, a condition of cultural orphan-hood confirmed by his lack of a father. Wild Cat’s transformation begins with a recurring dream in which the cat has wings of a crow and keeps falling to the ground. He reaches for the moon only to plunge in fear towards the earth, “Falling, falling. Plunging and twisting out of the sky. Down and down the dark ground rising up …” (124). It is only when an old Aboriginal rabbit trapper explains the dream that he discovers that it is not a nightmare but a song – given to him by his ancestors. The old man explains that the dream might have been given to him by a grandmother or sister but the dream itself “Belonging dreaming time,” he says. “That cat want to live a long time like the old crow. ‘How you don’t die?’ he asks. ‘I fly up high, high up to the moon. I get young up there, then come down.’ That cat look sorry then. ‘I got no wings.’ Then the old crow laugh carr-carr. ‘You don’t need no wings. You can fly all right. You try now.’ See?” (127). The dream connects Wild Cat to his Aboriginal identity and as the old Aboriginal man explains the dream he leads him back to the country through the medium of cultural memory. The novel navigates three levels of dreaming. The night dream is a sign of his Aboriginal Dreaming, which is itself a resolution of the utopian “day-dream” of reconnection to the earth. Crucially, the Aboriginal Dreaming is not a mythic past, a “Dreamtime” so much as a constant horizon of meaning around and within Aboriginal life. It is this horizon to which Wild Cat’s dream connects him. Although he speaks no Aboriginal language Wild Cat recognizes the song the old man sings. He begins to sing again, softly, like the humming of a bee, then the words shape on his lips and breaks off. “You know that song, son.” “Suppose I heard it somewhere before,” I say. “You dream it,” he says. “It belong your country.” “I haven’t got a country,” I say. “I don’t belong anywhere.”

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“You can’t lose it,” he says. “You go away, but you keep it here.” He claps his hand under his ribs. “Inside. You dream that place and that song too. I hear you sing it in your sleep.” (126) Through the medium of the dreaming the young man realizes his own dream of belonging. Regardless of the prison house of white society, he is in his country because his country is in him. Through the agency of memory the utopian future is revealed. Forty years later, Alexis Wright’s monumental novel Carpentaria begins, so to speak, where Wild Cat Falling ends, with a confident sense of connection to cultural memory, a stance outside the “prison” of white society. Wright says, “The fundamental challenge I wanted to set myself, was to explore ideas that would help us to understand how to re-imagine a larger space than the ones we have been forced to enclose within the imagined borders that have been forced upon us” (2006b: 4). A vast sprawling novel, it addresses the range of issues that affect Aboriginal life in the north. But most interesting is the way in which it begins by inserting the dreaming into the contemporary text. This is utopian because, having already capitalized upon a post-Mabo confidence in the relationship with country, the novel inserts, without explanation the reality of the dreaming in the opening sections of the novel, thus announcing the relevance of Aboriginal cosmology to Australian life: Picture the creative serpent, scoring deep into – scouring down through – the slippery underground of the mudflats, leaving in its wake the thunder of tunnels collapsing to form deep sunken valleys. The sea water following in the serpent’s wake, swarming in a frenzy of tidal waves, soon changed colour from ocean blue to the yellow of mud. The water filled the swirling tracks to form the mighty bending rivers spread across the vast plains of the Gulf country. The serpent travelled over the marine plains, over the salt flats, through the salt dunes, past the mangrove forests and crawled inland. Then it went back to the sea. And it came out in another spot along the coastline … When it finished creating the many rivers in its wake, it created one last river, no larger or smaller than the others, a river which offers no apologies for its discontent with people who do not know it. This is where the giant serpent continues to live deep down under the ground in a vast network of limestone aquifers. They say its being is porous; it permeates everything. It is all around in the atmosphere and is attached to the lives of the river people like skin. (2006a: 1) Though poetic and oracular, the lines also seem to be pushing the boundaries of realism. The last sentence states: “It is all around in the atmosphere and is attached

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to the lives of the river people like skin.” In that sentence, in the presence of the Aboriginal reality, the boundary between reality and myth is crossed and the renarration, re-creation of place begins to occur. Furthermore, the description includes no concessions to the contemporary reader for the passage simply interpolates Aboriginal reality into the contemporary English text. The common description of this as “magical realism” seriously misrepresents the radical interpolation of Aboriginal cultural reality into the demotic form of the novel. By re-inscribing the Aboriginal experience of place erased by two hundred years of white occupation, the novel confirms the possibility of a different future for Aboriginal people and by elaborating the politics of this possibility it establishes cultural memory as real rather than magical – a sacred realism. In effect, Wright, like Ben Okri in Infinite Riches, is presenting us with a different kind of history, one that interpolates and subverts the linear discourse of colonial history by layering memory in the present as a promise of the future. The narrator addresses the reader – “picture” and “imagine” – words that belong to the ocular dimensions of the English text and to the modern reader. In this way the vorschein of the text, anticipating as it does a completely different reality from that of its readers, anticipates a future transformed by cultural memory. Wright makes the connection between cultural memory and hope, and the importance of story in making the connection, quite clear: One evening in the driest grasses in the world, a child who was no stranger to her people, asked if anyone could find Hope. The people of parable and prophecy pondered what was hopeless and finally they declared they no longer know what Hope was. The clock’s tick-a-tock, looked as though they might run out of time. Luckily, the ghosts in the memories of the old folk were listening, and said anyone can find Hope in the stories, the big ones and the little ones in between. (Wright 2006a: 12) The epic nature of the novel describes many different journeys towards a transformed future with a utopianism that never slips into the romantic, but always maintains a sense of the ambivalent relation between utopian dreaming and the dystopian present of white violence, poverty, alcoholism and drugs in Aboriginal society. Yet a remarkable though humorously conceived collection of characters negotiate the dystopia/utopia divide with confidence in their Aboriginal identity. The Moses figure, Big Mozzie, leader of the Holden/Ford Dreaming, leading his followers to the Promised Land, dismisses Bible stories as “lived in somebody else’s desert” (142), and forbids both Christian beliefs and alcohol to his devotees: “so grog and other people’s religions would never do, never on the big Dreaming track” (142). Norm(al) Phantom, a man of the sea and land-rights activist is an artist who creates a haven of peace and solitude in the Pricklebush dump where he transforms smelly, colorless, dead fish into jewel-like artifacts of perfection, rivalled only in the reefs of his soul’s country, the sea.

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These characters are clearly symbolic of the Aboriginal capacity for self-assertion, creativity and transformation arising directly from the revival of cultural memory. The utopianism of the novel climaxes in the destruction of the town of Desperance by a cyclone that is itself a manifestation of the Rainbow Serpent. In the final sequence, the guerilla warrior Will Phantom survives for months on an island of garbage floating in the Gulf of Carpentaria, an island composed of the detritus of the destroyed town. This island, symbolic remnant of the white occupation always threatens to break apart in the strong gale. The utopianism of the novel lies in the dismantling of that prison with which Wild Cat Falling had begun. Thus by beginning with the Rainbow Serpent, the affirmation of Aboriginal cultural memory, and concluding with the island of garbage, symbolizing the remnants of white society, Wright reconfigures Australian history. But the utopian force of the novel lies not solely in the symbolic destruction of Desperance, but in the assurance, embodied in Will Phantom, that renewal is possible.

Centripetal and centrifugal: Kerri Hulme, Janet Frame and the transformation of memory In the New Zealand novelists Kerri Hulme and Janet Frame we discover an approach to memory that sees it as a similar transformation of the future. But in them something akin to Brathwaite’s concept of the creole cosmos can be seen in visions of the future that emerge from a complete disruption of racial and ontological essentialisms. This may be described as the development of a “centrifugal” consciousness in contrast to the “centripetal” force of master discourses. The distinction is developed from Bakhtin whose perception of a dominant ideology, such as imperialism, is that it is centralizing or “monologic” and contradicts the natural condition of language, which is “dialogic.” The linguistic sign itself is “multiaccentual” rather than unitary because signification hinges on this dialogic process (1981: 23). Bakhtin describes the true diversity of language (and hence of culture itself) as “heteroglossic,” a disposition that is “centrifugal,” multiplicitous and outward moving. The critical thing in this case is that both white and Maori writer shares the centrifugal dynamic in the settler colony. Clearly, within this framework the impetus of colonial culture is centripetal since imperialism occludes the heteroglossia over which it maintains control. But a corresponding centripetal force can be seen in nationalist and ethnocentric ideology. As we have seen, nation and nationalism may exert a control every bit as confining as imperialism, and disappointment in nationalism drives much postindependence discourse. In Bakhtinian terms the “authoritative word” of the nation resists the normal dialogical movement of the sign. David Malouf’s writing suggests the linkage between nationalism and imperialism through the continuation of transported social, agricultural and economic practices. But these two New Zealand women writers, Maori and white, produce a radically utopian view of settler colonial subjectivity that goes beyond static constructions of nation, gender or race.

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Hulme copes with the pressure of identity in The Bone People (1985) by the narrative of a painstakingly erected gender ambivalence and racial hybridity. The term “iwi” in Maori, referring to a tribal group, means “bone” and thus the phrase “E nga iwi o nga iwi” (395) can mean “O the bones of the people” or “O the people of the bones,” suggesting that the bones of the people can support many different kinds of flesh, different forms of Maoritanga, and the varieties of flesh on the bones, both gender and race, are a matter of discursive construction. This constantly, although implicitly, engages and dismisses gender stereotypes at the same time as it engages the racial. Perhaps the most embedded binarism is that of male/female. Hulme not so much opposes or “counter-identifies” with gender stereotypes as completely circumvents them. Race is as performative as gender but Hulme demonstrates that this can be reconstructed, by carving a tricephalos, a three headed figure which becomes the metonymic sign of an identity shared by the three protagonists: Kerewin, the young orphan Sim who finds his way to her house, and his adoptive Maori father Joe. Maoriness doesn’t disappear in this process. Rather it changes from “identity” to “identification.” This active working of the subject in identification is given a name – Maoritanga. Although her father’s father was English, Kerewin identifies herself as a Maori. But for her as well as for Joe, the “full” Maori, the problem is that the Maoritanga has got lost in the way they live. The important distinction here is between an a priori biological assumption of identity and an act of cultural or racial identification that can confirm itself in a way of life. The significance of language in this process is revealed in the character of Sim, the orphaned and mute boy who is shipwrecked on the coast and eventually finds his way to Kerewin’s tower. In his orphan dependence, his displacement and struggle with language Sim is a resonant symbol of white settler society. Hulme’s heroic incorporation of this colonial representative into the tricephalos is the ultimate confirmation of the syncretic, heteroglossic nature of postcolonial life through the nurturing dynamic of Maoritanga. The tricephalos is a concrete representation of the capacity for transformation that can emerge from the appropriation of dominant technologies such as English language and literature. But the most startling revelation of the tricephalos, the created symbol of a shared identity, is that hybridity may also be a matter of choice: it is Kerewin’s own transformative work that produces this metonym of identification. Hulme shows in this artistic construction of a tricephalos that hybridity itself is not a kind of transcendent biological reality, but itself a social and political construct. This kind of syncreticity is different from the erratic eclecticism represented, for instance, in the tower Kerewin builds for herself near the sea. a star gazing platform on top; a quiet library, book-lined, with a ring of swords on the nether wall; a bedroom, mediaeval style, with massive roofbeams and a plain hewn bed. (1984: 44)

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Kerewin’s life is itself a compilation of an eclectic Eurocentrism. Her cancer is a cultural cancer, issuing from the loss of the Maoritanga, which ironically, can only be healed in the discovery (or invention) of a different kind of syncretic community. Hulme uses the figure of the spiral as the sign of Maoriness. But the Maori spiral is the consummate model of deferral, a sign that collapses any idea of centrality. The spiral is continually going in towards the centre and coming out, its apparent centripetal direction perpetually diverted to the centrifugal. your eyes go round and round into the centre where surprise you found the beginning of another spiral that led your eyes out again to the nothingness of the outside. Or the somethingness (44) ... it was an old symbol of rebirth, and the outward-inward nature of things ... (45) In a brilliant reversal, the sign of Maoriness, which might be interpreted as biological essence, becomes the sign of cultural possibility and change. In the end it is the round shell house holding them in its spiralling embrace (442) rather than the spiralling but phallic tower that confers the principle of continuity, rebirth and unity on the trio. The utopian dimension of the novel lies not only in the idea of a fluid subjectivity but also in the concept of hospitality by which Kerewin accepts the orphaned white boy. While Joe’s violence symbolizes a different, perhaps more familiar form of colonial anger, the trajectory of the novel, through the vorschein of Kerewin’s sculpture and Hulme’s writing outlines the possibility of a different, more subtly assertive future for the indigenous subject. While Bone People can use the symbol of Maoriness as the paradoxical basis for a principle of hybridity, Janet Frame’s Carpathians (1988) launches a full-scale attack upon ontological certainty. The Carpathians is an allegorical play upon the European idea of the Antipodes for it intimates a psychologically and ontologically upside down world. The protagonist, Mattina Brecon, is a wealthy New Yorker who, upon hearing the legend of the Memory Flower, decides to fly to New Zealand to visit a rural town, Puamahara, where the magical flower is rumoured to grow. The Memory Flower has the capacity to release the memories of the land, linking them with the future, a power that has particular resonance in a settler colony where the memories of invasion are crying out for a different future. As Mattina discovers, her new antipodean neighbours are “imposters” brought into existence by the memory of another time and place. The people live in streets named by English settlers after rivers and towns they would never see again. Place is what it is because of distance. “Wouldn’t it be beaut,” says Hercus Millow, “if they abolished distance. Then you’d have the Carpathians in your garden” (66). The colonial subject understands perfectly the link between distance and identity; “Once we were nothing,” says Hene, “because we were so far from the seat of

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Empire,” (84) but even more drastic, “the further away you are, the less you are known, the more easily you may lose your state of being human” (84). Where Hulme offers the vision of a synergistic future, Frame sees an even more dramatic and centrifugal counterpart in a future of catastrophic change brought about by the “Gravity Star,” which annihilates the usual perception of distance and closeness. Such binary distinctions as “Near and far, then and now, here and there, the homely words of the language of space and time appear useless heaps of rubble” (14). Whereas Hulme’s spiral is the symbol of the illusion of the centre, an illusion underlying all binary distinctions of whatever kind, the Gravity Star is the agent of the collapse of those distinctions themselves in human experience. But Frame goes further, to grapple with the chaos incurred by the collapse of the certainty of being when language itself collapses. The Gravity Star is the star that annihilates the concept of near as near and far as far, for the distant star is close by, puncturing the filled vessel of impossibility, overturning the language of concept, easing into our lives the formerly unknowable, spilling unreason into reason. (52) Utopian possibility comes from our “puncturing the filled vessel of impossibility.” When human thought is overturned, “then the way would be clear to know the formerly unknowable, imagine the formerly unimaginable” (67). The formerly unimaginable occurs on the night of the Midnight Rain when the residents of Kowhai Street scream with terror as they lose their language. Mattina sees a kind of rain falling in which every raindrop is punctuation, apostrophe, notes of music, and letters of the alphabets of all the languages. Examining a pile of letters on her table Mattina discovers that the residents of Kowhai Street, under the influence of the Gravity Star and the Memory Flower had each suffered a loss of all the words they had ever known, all the concepts that supported and charged the words, all the process of thinking and feeling that once lived within the now shattered world of their words. The people of Kowhai Street had experienced the disaster of unbeing, unknowing and feeling that once lived within the now shattered world of their words. (129) This is the world beyond the certainty of identity, a terrifying journey beyond language itself. In both Bone People and Carpathians, the future is seen in the work of identification as opposed to the assumption of identity, the political rather than the ontological. And the narrative in which both books see the potentially chaotic multiplicity of social life as gaining a focus is the narrative of memory, the hermeneutic of myth. Myth explains the world, but opens the future through the horizon of allegory.

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Thus when Joe discovers the ancient Maori canoe which the old man tells him is “the heart of this country. The heart of this land” (Hulme 1985: 364), he discovers Indigenous myth itself as the living heart of the plural, changing postcolonial world. When Frame speaks of the myth of the Memory Flower, she speaks of something that is also, paradoxically at the centre of the island. Puamahara is “the centre. That’s why the Memory Flower grows here” (1988: 60). For white society as well as Maori, memory lies in the land, not in history. In Carpathians, the Gravity Star and the Memory Flower are the same thing. In its own symbolic structure as well as its narrative, the Memory Flower performs that conflation of cultural distance that the Gravity Star causes in the novel. Mattina wonders why she had survived the Midnight Rain and realizes that “she had removed herself, her real being, on that night to New York City, that is, to Memory ... clinging like an insect at the point of destruction to the Memory Flower” (151). She also realizes “that while races and worlds may die, if they are to change, to resurrect as new, they must remain within the Memory Flower” (151). This, as we have seen, is a fundamental strategy of postcolonial utopianism, and memory is also the only way to avoid the terror suffered by Kowhai Street at the loss of language. To incorporate myth into life does not mean being locked into the past, nor locked into history. In a curious way memory becomes part of a continually changing future: someone who knew and remembered the people of Kowhai Street would use persistence of memory to uncover the story, and perhaps rebuild in fiction the individual residents of the street: not to say, deifying the novelist, that the street vanished to reappear only in fiction, but to hope that future artists with whatever materials at their command would forever ensure new versions of Puamahara with the Gravity Star, the light of unreasonable reason, shining on the petals of the Memory Flower. (151–152) Here we find summarized the vorschein of literature. Through myth, memory subverts the teleology of history so that by the transformative work of fiction identity is made to hinge on change, heteroglossia and multiplicity. All unities, whether they be nation, race, gender or pre-colonial culture itself, become corrigible within this cyclotronic movement of the postcolonial. While memory is located in Maoritanga for Hulme, for Frame the memory that offers a path to the future is that which disconnects itself from the inauthentic past of empire. Both writers demonstrate Chris Abani’s statement, “identity is a destination” (Aycock 2009: 7). The destination shared by Maori and white writer is one that radically confirms the utopian function of literature, conceiving a world that is not only different but one that exceeds all the discourses by which our identity appears to be grounded. In this confluence of centrifugal energy we see a direction for the trajectory of settler colony utopianism, a sign of the future possibility of differences existing in harmony.

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*** The settler colonies, while demonstrating the contradictions of imperial ideology, were nevertheless founded by a genuine utopian hope for the future. Utopian optimism generated the exuberant and panglossian rhetoric of nationalism, but like colonies everywhere, disappointment in the nation and its hopes for a great new civilization soon emerged. However, if we see the utopian dynamic of the literature, the vision of what might have been, and include indigenous utopianism as part of the complex picture of the settler colonies, we find a range of possibilities in a centrifugal dissolving of the binaries of race and nation that promises a very different future from that the first settlers imagined. While the settler colonies come full circle to act out the ambiguities of the imperial vision, literature takes the imagination beyond those ambiguities towards heimat.

Note 1 Sargent’s work on settler colonial utopias – dystopias and eutopias – is foundational, particularly his comprehensive bibliographies of Australia, Canada and New Zealand utopian writing. I have relied heavily on his work for material concerning New Zealand utopian writing. But his focus on overtly utopian texts does not take into account the more complex hope for heimat in literature whose vision is not explicitly or overtly utopian.

CONCLUSION

At the end of his libretto for the opera Voss, David Malouf imagines this exchange between a reporter and Laura Trevellyan: REPORTER: Ah yes. A country with a future But when does that future become the present? LAURA: Now. Now. Every moment that we live, and breathe, and love and suffer. Now. Now. (2015: 221) The conclusion we reach in this journey is that future thinking is always about the present. “Utopia” has had the same struggle for acceptance in postcolonial studies as it has everywhere. The word might always remain derogatory, but the utopianism of postcolonial literatures is undeniable. This is a discovery that reaches beyond the postcolonial and even beyond literature: the resistance to oppression, the insurgent desire to claim a space in the world, the struggle for justice can only proceed if it is driven by hopeful anticipation. Hope by its very nature implies a future, but it is not a future anticipated to avoid the present, but to transform the present. This is a key feature of Bloch’s concept of “concrete utopia” – an actually possible future, in anticipation of which the present is changed. For Mannheim, utopian orientations, when they “pass over into conduct, tend to shatter, wither, partially or wholly, the order of things prevailing at the time” (1966: 136). The significance of the present explains why utopias are critical rather than merely fanciful. It also explains why time and its reconfiguration are so important in future thinking. The curious interrelation between the memory of the past, the

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anticipation of the future and the experience of the present characterizes all future thinking and nowhere more resolutely than in postcolonial writing. The resonant and often repeated phrase of Édouard Glissant – “a prophetic vision of the past” – captures this perfectly. This is the reality that distinguishes utopianism, or social dreaming, from mere wishful thinking; the characteristic that enables the voice from Nowhere to speak to the present social conditions that make utopia necessary. In postcolonial utopias the future may be viewed on the horizon of memory – not nostalgia, not history but a real horizon of possibility. Time is political in postcolonial writing because as Orwell puts it in 1984, “Who controls the past … controls the future: who controls the present controls the past” (2003: 37). Questioning the linearity of time is not solely the province of postcolonial literatures. As we saw in Kummel’s philosophy, the distinction between sequence and duration is largely imaginary. If something is to endure “then its past may never be simply ‘past,’ but must in some way also remain ‘present;’ by the same token its future must already somehow be contained in its present” (1968: 35). This becomes clearer when we see the function of postcolonial memory in its struggle with history. It becomes clearer when we see the significance of the future in helping transform a contemporary state of colonial oppression or postindependence disappointment. Consequently, time in postcolonial literatures spirals in a way that insures that future thinking always contains, cycling within it, both past and present. The spiral of time in the postcolonial text plays out one of the more important features of Ernst Bloch’s philosophy. Indeed, his importance to postcolonial utopianism lies in his fascination with cyclic continuity with the past of the future in the present – leading to what we might call a non-teleological eschatology in which “the drive upwards at last becomes a drive forwards” (1986: 1278). On one hand he provides a way in which we might think of utopia in terms of religious aspiration (a Kingdom without God and without heaven), on the other, this profoundly European philosopher provides a framework in which we might think beyond the teleology of the eschatological – to the interpenetration of past and future in the postcolonial text. This process includes the imagination in settler colonial writers such as David Malouf, of the future as it might have been. Bloch shows how this interpenetration occurs by bringing memory out of the cellar of consciousness to the forefront of the Not-Yet-Become. Unlike Freud, for whom the subconscious, what Bloch calls the “No-Longer-Conscious” (1986: 11), is replete with repressed memories, the horizon of the Not-Yet-Become is the potential fulfilment of memory, the future horizon that fulfils the mythic memory of postcolonial people. This occurs, most importantly through the vorschein of its writers. In the relation between memory and the future the “subconscious” is a horizon rather than an internal psychological state, a horizon adumbrated by the figurative language and affective power of art and literature. Utopianism focuses issues of overwhelming importance to culture and society because it deals directly with the fraught and inescapable question of power. This is not power in the abstract but power that has direct impact on postcolonial

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societies as it infiltrates even the most optimistic vision of a utopian society. It is in the struggle with power that the trajectory of hope coined by Martin Luther King in the epigraph to this book becomes most relevant: without hope that the arc of the moral universe bends towards justice, postcolonial liberation would not occur and perhaps not even be fought for. These ubiquitous factors: time, place and power interrelate in the operation of memory, colonial oppression, nationalism, the nation state, history, race and social and cultural transformation. The circularity of time leads to the interrelation of paradise, utopia and myth, all of which are to some degree involved in the processes of postcolonial resistance and transformation. For George Sorel, who categorized Marxian thinking in terms of myths rather than utopia, revolutionary myths are an expression of will rather than descriptions of the future. Myths are “expressions of a will to act” (1999: 28), compelling images and conceptions of a (future) collective enterprise that serve to inspire, motivate and mobilize the actors who will be engaged in this very enterprise. Myths, then, are a critical feature of utopianism rather than imagined utopias. In describing how the world is shaped morally, politically, and perhaps transcendentally, a myth operates as a whole, and is not susceptible to refutation by empirical evidence. This applies not only to revolutionary myths but also to cultural myths of all kinds. It is this resistance to practical refutation that makes cultural myth such a powerful and utopian focus of anti-colonial revolutionary resistance. The interpenetration of myth, paradise and utopia is nowhere more powerful than in the vision of Aztlán, which demonstrates the political utility and unifying power of utopia. As we have seen, the most ambiguous formation in the colonial struggle is the longed-for post-imperial, post-independence nation. The imaginary power of the nation is incontrovertible since it has cost so many millions of lives in the twentieth century when the combination of nation and race had been the most toxic force in world politics. But for postcolonial writers the nation has been a source of betrayal. Naruddin Farah’s Maps transgresses all kinds of boundaries – social, gender, generational, identity, and geographical – to show, like Amitav Ghosh, that the idea of nation is a porous, shifting and unstable construction, able to exert inordinate power on those within its boundaries. In some ways art and literature have a particular facility for critiquing and subverting the myth of nationhood just as they remain unmatched in their anticipation of heimat. The critique of nation often occurs in those countries with the strongest state structures such as India, where the moral weight of Tagore and Gandhi underpins the contemporary post-Rushdie critiques of nation. Such critiques are driven by the constant hope for a different country, a vision of heimat. But in archipelagos such as the Caribbean and the Pacific the significance of nation recedes beneath the far more powerful reality of the ebb and flow of archipelagic movement. In the case of the Pacific, the largest continent with the smallest land mass, the concept of Oceania has been as powerful a utopian dream as Aztlán for the Chicano. Ngugi’s Wizard of the Crow is a contemporary tour de force in the satiric destabilization of the nation. Although most critiques of the neo-colonial African

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nation focus on the depravity of despotic individuals, tyrants often took power in a context that set them up to exploit. As Achille Mbembe explains, “one major political event of the last quarter of the twentieth century was the crumbling of African states’ independence and sovereignty and the (surreptitious) placing of these states under the tutelage of international creditors” (Mbembe 2001: 73–74). This was true even for that most utopian of writers, Angolan Aghostino Neto, whose presidency was derailed by inviting US oil companies into the country. Ngugi’s answer to this is a novel that “takes the folklorization of social life further than any of [his] previous novels, deploying the folktale to overcome the lived and fictional worlds” (Gikandi 2008: 162). Just as Okri subverts history with the woman of the forest, so Ngugi challenges the modern African state with the continuing reality of folk narrative.

Postcolonial science fiction Ngugi’s and Okri’s determination to re-shape literary discourse by means of a mischievous engagement with realism raises an issue that this study has as yet left untouched. While utopianism has been driven in the twentieth century by a combination of Marxism and science fiction, the postcolonial claim for justice has always appeared more immediate and political than speculative. But science fiction has given postcolonial literatures a dimension of anticipation that can speak to the political urgency of the present with complex visions of the utopian, both eutopian and dystopian. In Postcolonialism and Science Fiction, Jessica Langer notes the scarcity of postcolonial science fiction as “the elephant in the room” or more precisely, in Nalo Hopkinson’s words “the elephant shaped hole in the room” (Langer 2011). The fact that postcolonial science fiction has had a limited utopian dimension so far does not diminish the capacity this field offers for an extension of the vision of heimat. In the first page of Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth he says: The need for [decolonization] exists in a raw, repressed, and reckless state in the lives and consciousnesses of colonized men and women. But the eventuality of such a change is also experienced as a terrifying future in the consciousness of another “species” of men and women: the colons, the colonists. (1963: 1) According to Canavan, these words suggest a deep affinity between anti-colonial and science fictional ways of thinking: radically altered futures, even the suggestion that there may exist multiple “species” of human being living on a single planet, fundamentally alien to one another. Both anti-colonialism and sf, we might note, share as a kind of first principle the assertion of other possible futures for humanity beyond the endless repetition of the same historical mistakes. (2012: 494)

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Postcolonial literatures and science fiction seek alternate futures for the human race, both look beyond the joint nightmare of colonial modernity, both are profoundly involved in future thinking, and both offer a clear platform for the utopian. Yet postcolonial science fiction responds, at one level, to the remarkably imperialistic character of much traditional science fiction. Rieder’s Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction (2008) exposes the extent to which the images of the inhuman alien and of the distant planet ripe for settlement reprise the motifs of colonial demonization and invasion that drove the imperial enterprise. The twin myths of colonialism, the native stranger and the strange land – which offer both a utopian destination and a chance to create a utopia by subduing them – are also the twin myths of science fiction. But rather than shy away from these colonial tropes ... these twin giants of the science fiction world, postcolonial science fiction hybridizes them, parodies them and/or mimics them against the grain in a play of Bhabhaian masquerade. The figure of the alien comes to signify all kinds of otherness, and the image of the far-away land, whether the undiscovered country or the imperial seat, comes to signify all kinds of diaspora and movement, in all directions. Their very power, their situation at the centre of the colonial imagination as simultaneous desire and nightmare, is turned back in on itself. (Langer 2011: 3–4) Indeed, an observation of the range of literature that calls itself postcolonial science fiction perpetually hovers around these two objects of critique, sometimes more concerned with writing back to the colonialist orientation of the genre than speculating on the utopian possibilities of places distant in time and space. But the richest examples of the genre raise both utopian possibilities and problematic philosophical questions about the species and the nature of human life itself. For example, Octavia Butler destabilizes the whole question of race and racism with visions of perpetually transforming species identity. On the face of it, the series of novels called Xenogenesis, reproduces the functions of imperialist world reconstruction in the alien Oankali species, who aim to transform humans into genetic versions of themselves. The human resisters’ insistence on biological and reproductive independence plays out some familiar themes of anti-colonial discourse. Yet there is an element of haunting ambivalence in the refusal to dictate and answer to these themes. The issue of the posthuman raises significant philosophical questions about the nature of life and the utopian potential of biological transformation. If race is a construct of racism rather than a genetic reality, what does the prospect of species hybridization say about the integrity of human life? However, while postcolonial science fiction meets utopian studies where it has been most energetic, the significance of utopianism to postcolonial literatures lies

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beyond the fantasy world of distant planets, times and species, in the very real circumstance of colonization, oppression, and the need for future thinking. While issues of time and nation are prominent in such thinking, postcolonial utopianism is inescapably oriented to place, not only the specific place of colonial encounter, but also in the ambivalent spaces of heterotopia, archipelago and border zones, the spaces of change and possibility within which social dreaming takes shape. Whether in the border zone of the Chicano heterotopia, or the island archipelagos of the Caribbean and the Pacific, the interstitial nature of the postcolonial space offers the perfect site for future thinking and the generation of hope. This is also true of the dynamic spatiality of pan-Africanism or the exogenous reach of Bharat – Mother India – in the spread of contemporary South Asian writing. In each one of these spatial configurations the potentiality of social dreaming is radically enhanced. This corresponds to Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “smooth space” (2004: 475), that space circulating around the “striated space” of fixed concepts such as the nation and its institutions. While smooth space is metaphoric it comes close, in the postcolonial context, to the actual instability of political and geographic borders as well as the contingent nature of time and history. Smooth space is the ideal space in which to dream the possible. Ultimately, the largely uncelebrated and often unrecognized power of future thinking in postcolonial discourse offers much to the modern culture of utopianism we have come to identify with Marxism and science fiction. Utopia is important, says Jameson, because the end of capitalism is impossible to imagine. The end of colonial occupation was easier to imagine for postcolonial societies, but no less elusive has been heimat – the home that independence failed to bring. Equally impossible to imagine has been the end of imperialism, striding hand in hand with capitalism in a constantly reforming neo-liberal empire. This is where art and literature come into their own by displaying the vorschein that anticipates heimat however far off it may seem. In the end postcolonial literature reveals one of Ernst Bloch’s most resonant declarations: hope may be disappointed but it can never be destroyed.

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INDEX

Abani, Chris 38, 70, 109–11, 200 Achebe, Chinua 99, 165 Adiche, Chimamanda 109, 111, Africa/African 15, 16, 21, 22, 29, 34, 38, 51, 52, 68, 70, 71, 72, 74, 82–96, 97, 99, 101, 106, 110, 111, 113, 153, 157, 181 African imaginaire 95, 96, 105, 106, 112 Afro-modernity and Pan-Africanism 107–13 Anaya, Rudolfo 138, 141, 142, 143, 144 Anyidoho, Kofi 47, 91, 94–5, 109 Awoonor, Kofi 104 Ayi Kwai Armah 15, 83–7, 95, 99 Aztlan 16, 74, 134–43 Bellamy, Edward 2, 3 Bhabha, Homi 9, 10, 51 Bloch, Ernst 5, 6, 7, 8, 12, 13, 15, 20, 22, 38, 39, 43, 47, 67, 69, 75, 76, 77, 93, 95, 111, 139, 104, 145, 179, 188, 202, 203; anagnorisis 71, 93; anticipatory consciousness (Vorschein) 2, 16, 19, 37, 46, 65, 67, 69, 70, 75, 79, 84, 92, 93, 106, 134, 174; anticipatory illumination 38, 42, 146; “Art and Utopia” 13; concrete utopia 10, 42; Dream 160–3, daydreams 6–8; Front 160; Heimat 15, 16, 17, 37–62, 66, 67, 68; In-Front-OfUs 8; “multiverse of cultures” 159;

Not-Yet 6, 7, 47, 69, 71, 137, 172; Not-Yet-Become/Becomeness 66, 69, 72, 111, 164, 203; The Principle of Hope 13, 38, 46; The Spirit of Utopia 12; utopianism a fundamental human trait 66; Utopian Function of Art and Literature 37–43 Brathwaite, Kamau 16, 53, 74–5, 76–9, 145, 146, 148, 149, 150, 154, 155–63, 196 Caribbean 8, 16, 22, 28, 51, 52, 53, 68, 71, 74, 75, 77, 78–9, 103, 109, 110, 145–63, 169, 170, 171, 172, 192, 204, 207 Crummel, Alexander 108, 164 cultural collective 77–80 Darwish, Mahmoud 49, 50, 52, 69, Deleuze, Gilles 9, 18, 19, 48, 65, 76, 146–7, 168, 207 Derrida, Jacques 70, 86 dystopia/dystopian 3, 15, 20, 21, 40, 42, 63, 65, 75, 76, 77, 83, 110, 131, 181, 182, 183, 188, 189, 192, 193, 195, 205 feminist utopias 3 Foucault, Michel 9, 16, 36, 66, 88, 133–5 Frame, Janet 183, 196, 198–200 Future Thinking 6–8

224 Index

Gandhi, Mohandas 114, 115, 116, 118, 119, 120, 121–8, 129, 131, 132, 204; Gandhi and Hind Swaraj 116–18 Gilroy, Paul 76, 107–8, Glissant, Edouard 9, 72, 77, 82, 147, 148, 150, 203 Hau’ofa, Epeli 167, 169, 170, 171, 172, 174, 175, 176, 178 heterotopia 133–5 History 8, 10, 15, 16, 17, 47, 50, 51–4, 70 93–6, 98, 105–6, 109, 112, 123, 124–5. 131, 79, 81–3, 160, 166, 167, 176–9, 183, 187, 200, 203; Ayi Kwai Armah’s re-writing of history 83–7; Chicano history 135–6, 137–8, 142, 144, 146, 148, 149; Historical space 20–1; History and Cultural Memory 72–5; Literature, History and the Future 90–3; Place as History 153–5; Walcott, “the sea is history” 170; Wendt, Albert “Inside us the Dead” 174–6; Writing reading and the control of space and time 33–4 Horizon of the Work 43–6 Hulme, Kerri 183, 196–8, 199, 200 I and We 75–80 ideology 11–14, 20, 28, 29, 30, 31, 42, 47, 48, 56, 64, 65, 71, 111, 115, 118, 120, 121, 143, 176, 186, 188, 196, 201 imperialism 10, 11, 14, 18, 20–2, 29, 30, 31, 85, 97, 98, 99, 107, 152, 186, 196, 207 India 3, 16, 25, 38, 39, 71, 97, 98, 99, 101, 104, 114–32, 133, 140, 168, 169, 178, 190, 204 Jameson, Fredric 15, 19, 67, 95, 100, 118, 121, 207 Kummel, Friedrich 52, 53, 70, 203 Lefebvre, Henri 20, 21 Malouf, David 43, 44, 45, 184, 185, 189, 190–2 Mannheim, Karl: Ideology and Utopia 12–14, 36, 65, 120, 202 Marx, Karl 6, 69, 75, 82, 95 Marxism 2, 205, 207

Marxist 6, 12, 13 38, 56, 57, 76, 140, 143 memory 15, 16, 24, 47, 51, 52, 53, 64, 68, 69, 72–5, 77, 79, 82, 83, 87, 88, 90, 91, 92, 93, 95, 99, 108, 120, 124, 133, 135, 136, 137, 144, 146, 152, 153, 155, 156, 159, 174, 198–200, 202, 203, 204 Memory and the Future 68–72; Indigenous dreaming 192–6 More, Thomas 1, 4; Utopia 1, 2 Murray, Les 6–7, 45 myth of return 71, 72, 77, 83, 84 nationalism 11, 16, 17, 65, 66, 71, 92, 97, 98, 99, 101, 103, 113, 114; Chicano nationalism 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 150, 169; India and nationalism 115, 116, 118, 120, 122, 123, 124, 125, 127, 130, 132; settler colony nationalism 185, 186, 189, 196, 204 Nation State 114, 116–20, 124, 126, 129, 133, 141, 143, 154, 186, 204; Beyond the Nation State 97–113 Neto, Agostino 16, 43, 101–2, 104, 105, 106, 109, 205 Ngugi wa Thiongo 43, 99, 204, 205 Nowhere 2, 13, 15, 62–5, 71, 111, 133, 146, 163, 190, 203 Okri, Ben 46, 83, 87–90, 95, 107, 109, 173, 195, 205 Palestine 54–62 paradise 17, 21, 23, 24, 26, 27, 35, 54, 65, 136, 151, 165, 182, 183, 189, 204 postcolonial science fiction 205–7 post-Rushdie novel 122–32, 133, 204 revolution 3, 6, 13, 15, 32, 46, 48, 49, 52, 53, 54, 56, 57, 62, 67, 84, 87, 105, 108, 118, 122, 123, 124, 135, 154, 161, 204 Ricoeur, Paul 12, 15, 42, 64, 65, 71, 163 Robinson Crusoe 25, 31–5 Robinsonades 35 Rushdie, Salman 11, 16, 43, 46, 49, 71, 73, 98, 114, 122–3 Sansour, Larissa: Nation Estate 57–62 social dreaming 5, 46–8, 203, 207 space, production of 20–2; control of 33–4

Index  225

Tagore, Rabindranath 16, 114, 115, 116, 118, 122, 123, 125, 126, 127, 129, 130, 131, 132, 204 Tidalectics 155–60 time (and space) 15, 33–4, 44, 45, 50, 52–4, 62, 68, 72–5; Creativity Time and Revolution 52–4; Oceanic Perception of Time 171–4; racial time 94; Spiral of Postcolonial Time 93–5; Spiralling time and cultural appropriation 176–9; time and memory 70; time and Utopia in African Literature 81–96 travel writing 14, 22, 23, 25, 36 Utopia 1–205; creating a colonial utopia 27–31; ideology and utopia 11–14;

postcolonial utopianism 4–6, 8, 9; paths to utopia 22–3; product and process utopias 18–19; Travelling to Utopia 23–6; utility of Utopia 120–2; Utopia and Critique 8–11; utopia and modernity 19 utopian 2, 3, 4; utopian communities 4; Utopian Function of Art and Literature 37–43 Walcott, Derek 16, 43, 74, 77, 148, 149, 151–5, 156, 157, 159, 170 Wright Alexis 43, 68, 103, 192, 194, 195, 196 Zipes, Jack 38, 39