Beyond The Black Atlantic: Relocating Modernization and Technology

Beyond the Black Atlantic ‘This is both an intellectually serious book and an informative one. The depth of its many a...

Author: W. Gobel

50 downloads 1139 Views 4MB Size Report

This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below!

Report copyright / DMCA form

DOWNLOAD PDF

Beyond the Black Atlantic

‘This is both an intellectually serious book and an informative one. The depth of its many arguments give real teeth to its claim of revisiting peripheral modernity – both as an important sign of value separating the “West” from its former colonies, and as a deeply detailed and tactile set of real-life situations, literary texts, and still-developing social settings. The book is much, much more informed, analytically sharp, factually substantial, and generously outward-looking than anything of its type.’ Timothy Brennan, University of Minnesota, USA Debates about the ‘Black Atlantic’ have alerted us to an experience of modernization that diverges from the dominant Western narratives of globalization and technological progress. This outstanding volume expands the concept of the Black Atlantic by reaching beyond the usual AfricanAmerican focus of the ﬁeld, oﬀering fresh perspectives on postcolonial experiences of technology and modernization. A team of renowned contributors come together in this volume in order to:

• • • • •

redeﬁne and expand ideas of the Black Atlantic; challenge uniﬁed concepts of modernization from a postcolonial perspective; question fashionable concepts of the transnational by returning to the local and the national; oﬀer new approaches to cross-cultural mechanisms of exchange; explore utopian uses of technology in the postcolonial sphere.

Exploring a variety of national, diasporan and transnational counternarratives to Western modernization, Beyond the Black Atlantic makes a valuable contribution to the ﬁelds of postcolonial, literary and cultural studies.

Walter Goebel is Professor of English and American Studies at the University of Stuttgart. He has published in the ﬁelds of the modern African-American novel, and postcolonial and gender studies. Saskia Schabio is also based at the University of Stuttgart and is working on studies of postcolonial aesthetics and early modern colonial encounters. Contributors include: Ian Baucom, Elleke Boehmer, Annette BühlerDietrich, Laura Chrisman, Martina Ghosh-Schellhorn, Benita Parry, Ralph Pordzik, Stephen Shapiro and Gauri Viswanathan.

Beyond the Black Atlantic Relocating modernization and technology

Edited by Walter Goebel and Saskia Schabio

First published 2006 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Taylor & Francis Inc 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2006 Walter Goebel and Saskia Schabio

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2006. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized 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. 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 Beyond the Black Atlantic: relocating modernization and technology / Walter Goebel and Saskia Schabio, editors.— 1st ed. p. cm. 1. Technology and civilization. 2. Globalization in literature. 3. Technology in literature. 4. Postcolonialism in literature. 5. Literature, Modern—Black authors—History and criticism. 6. Literature, Modern— Minority authors—History and criticism. I. Goebel, Walter. II. Schabio, Saskia. CB478.B49 2006 700′.1050899601812—dc22 2005033483 ISBN10: 0-415-39797-9 (hbk) ISBN10: 0-415-39798-7 (pbk) ISBN10: 0-203-96972-3 (ebk) ISBN13: 978-0-415-39797-1 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-415-39798-8 (pbk) ISBN13: 978-0-203-96972-4 (ebk)

Contents

List of contributors Acknowledgements Introduction: relocating modernization and technology

vii x

1

PART I

Negotiating African modernities 1 The presence of the past in peripheral modernities

11

13

BENITA PARRY

2 Black modernity, nationalism and transnationalism: the challenge of black South African poetry

29

LAURA CHRISMAN

3 Failure to connect – resistant modernities at national crossroads: Solomon Plaatje and Mohandas Gandhi

47

ELLEKE BOEHMER

4 Township modernism IAN BAUCOM

63

vi

Contents

PART II

Caribbean (in)versions of modernity 5 Ulysses and the shape-shifter: Caribbean modernity in Pauline Melville’s writings

77

79

SASKIA SCHABIO

6 V.S. Naipaul: the limitations of transnationalism and technological progress

95

WALTER GOEBEL

PART III

Colonial creations of the West 7 The technology of publicity in the Atlantic semi-peripheries: Benjamin Franklin, modernity, and the Nigerian slave trade

113

115

STEPHEN SHAPIRO

8 Spectrality’s secret sharers: occultism as (post)colonial aﬀect

135

GAURI VISWANATHAN

PART IV

Peripheral interpretations of technology 9 Transitionality at home and abroad: some examples from India and its virtual diaspora

147

149

MARTINA GHOSH-SCHELLHORN

10 Technologies in Hanif Kureishi’s ‘The Body’

168

ANNETTE BÜHLER-DIETRICH

11 Travels in technotopia: modernization and technology in postcolonial utopian and dystopian writing

184

RALPH PORDZIK

Index

199

Contributors

Ian Baucom is Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies at Duke University. He works on twentieth-century British literature and culture, postcolonial and cultural studies, and African and Black Atlantic literatures. He is the author of Out of Place: Englishness, Empire and the Locations of Identity (1999), History of Philosophy and Slavery, Capital, Finance Atlantic (forthcoming). Elleke Boehmer is Professor of English at Royal Holloway, University of London. She has published Colonial and Postcolonial Literature (1995), Empire Writing (1998), Empire, The National and the Postcolonial (2002), and critical editions of Robert Baden-Powell’s Scouting for Boys (2004) and Cornelia Sorabji’s India Calling (2004). She has co-edited a special issue of Interventions on colonial transnationalism. She is the author of three novels, most recently Bloodlines (2000), and is General Series Editor of the Oxford Studies in Postcolonial Literatures. Her Stories of Women: Gender and Narrative in the Postcolonial Nation was published in 2005. Annette Bühler-Dietrich teaches in the German Department at the University of Stuttgart. Her interest is in comparative literature, migration, and globalization, and she is currently working on German and German-American literature of the nineteenth century. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Virginia and is the author of Auf dem Weg zum Theater: Else Lasker-Schüler, Marieluise Fleißer, Nelly Sachs, Gerlind Reinshagen, Elfriede Jelinek (2003). Laura Chrisman took her degree at Oxford University. She has been a visiting Professor at Brown University, Stanford University and Associate Professor at Ohio State University. She is now Nancy K Ketcham Professor of English at the University of Washington. Her areas of specialization include African and African diaspora studies; postcolonial studies and theory; South African literature; nineteenth- and twentieth-century

viii

Contributors

British literature. She is the author of Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory: A Reader (1994), Altered State? Writing and South Africa (1994), Rereading the Imperial Romance: British Imperialism and South African Resistance in Haggard, Schreiner, and Plaatje (2000) and Postcolonial Contraventions: Cultural Readings of Race, Imperialism and Transnationalism (2003). Martina Ghosh-Schellhorn is Professor of New English Literatures and Cultures at the University of Saarbrücken. She has taught British Cultural Studies, New English Literatures and British Literature at several German universities, in Vienna, and at South African universities. Her publications include Anthony Burgess: A Study in Character (1986), Writing Women Across Borders and Categories (ed., 2000), Steep Stairs To Myself: Transitionality and Autobiography (forthcoming), and Peripheral Centres, Central Peripheries: Anglophone India and its Diasporas (ed., 2006). Walter Goebel is Professor of English and American Studies at the University of Stuttgart. He has published books on Sherwood Anderson (1982), Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1993), and the African-American novel of the twentieth century (2001), and he has co-edited Modernization and Literature (2000), Renaissance Humanism: Modern Humanism(s) (2001), and Engendering Images of Man in the Long 18th Century (2001). He is currently working on a volume of essays on Conrad in Germany. Benita Parry is Professor at Warwick University. Her books are Delusions and Discoveries: Studies on India in the British Imagination (1972), republished with a new preface by Verso 1998, Conrad and Imperialism: Ideological Boundaries and Visionary Frontiers (1984) and Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist Critique (2004). She is the author of journal articles and essays on Edward Said, South African writing, Tayeb Salih, the Institutionalisation of Postcolonial Studies. Ralph Pordzik teaches English and American literature at Würzburg University (Germany). He has published widely in the ﬁelds of nineteenth-century literature, British poetry and postcolonial theory and writing. Publications include The Quest for Postcolonial Utopia (2001) and Der englische Roman im 19. Jahrhundert (2001). His most recent book is entitled The Wonder of Travel: Fiction, Tourism and the Social Construction of the Nostalgic (2005). Saskia Schabio is Assistant Professor at the University of Stuttgart. She has written a book on Mary Wroth and Shakespeare and published on the eighteenth-century culture of sensibility. She is currently working on early modern colonial encounters and on languages of the emotions in postcolonial literatures.

Contributors

ix

Stephen Shapiro teaches in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. He has researched at the Department of Cultural Studies at Birmingham and taken his degree from Yale University. Before joining Warwick University he taught at Harvard. He is currently working on a monograph about the relation of the early American novel to the eighteenth-century circumatlantic economy of goods, people, cultural notations, performances, and artifacts. Gauri Viswanathan is Class of 1933 Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. She is the author of Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India, and of various articles in the Oxford Literary Review, Yale Journal of Criticism, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Modern Language Quarterly, Critical Inquiry, Race and Class, and of numerous edited volumes. She is also editor of Power, Politics, and Culture: Interviews with Edward W. Said and a special issue of ARIEL on ‘Institutionalizing English Studies: The Postcolonial/ Postindependance Challenge’. Her current work is on memory, history, and modern occultism.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the many friends in the ﬁeld of postcolonial studies who have taken an interest in this project and inspired us with discussions, advice or lectures on related topics, especially Elyette Benjamin-Labarthe, Tobias Döring, Annie Gagiano, Sue Kossew, Mpalive Hangson Msiska, Frank Schulze-Engler and Mark Stein. Special thanks are due to Stephen Shapiro, who – with great energy and warmth as usual – was helpful in discussing the general format and theme of this volume. We would also like to take the opportunity to thank many others who were of valuable assistance in preparing this publication for the press, Anthony Gibbs, Karen Kispert, Gretel Kuehner, Sarah Kuhs, Daniela Lakner and Jan-Sebastian Weimer. Thanks are furthermore due to the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft for generous ﬁnancial support for a number of international conferences at the University of Stuttgart. These meetings encouraged general debate and an exchange of ideas, both of which were, we feel, essential in making this project possible. Last but not least, we would like to show our appreciation to the Centre for Cultural and Technological Studies here at Stuttgart for their unﬂagging support of our postcolonial research at the Department of American Studies. Grateful acknowledgement is also due to the Indiana University Press for granting permission to include a revised version of Ian Baucom’s contribution which appeared in their publication Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity, eds Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005.

Introduction Relocating modernization and technology

The last surviving great narrative of the West may be the idea of inescapable, ubiquitous globalization, which is largely based upon technological modernization. It survives even though each day a number of minorities gain public attention, for instance, by claiming geographical terrain from the deforestation industry in many parts of the world; it survives, even though neo-imperial acts of the main western superpower continually get bogged down because of a stunning lack of intercultural imagination and competence, and it survives even though the agents of technologically and economically wielded power are being replaced and the crossroads of monetary and economic networks are moving from the Atlantic to the Paciﬁc. Western hubris may partly explain the longevity the idea of unidirectional globalization has enjoyed, but its persistence is surely equally due to the eﬀects of economic supremacy and international commodiﬁcation. Yet, when the economic and technological supremacy of the world’s superpowers comes into question, the idea of inescapable globalization within a homogeneous world market may ﬁnally be on its way out. Surely globalization loses some of its momentum when western economies need to be supported by tariﬀs and taxes that undermine the very ideology of a liberal capitalist market; and it loses even more when the West cannot prevent many so-called ‘developing’ countries from becoming increasingly impoverished, in spite of (some believe because of) all the counsel oﬀered by the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund. If we are, indeed, today witnessing a crisis of the idea of globalization, it is in more than one sense overdue, since the very basis for the story of globalization – a faith in technological progress and continual enlightenment – has eﬀectively been deconstructed within the postcolonial domain, along with simpliﬁed ideas of the technical impotence of the periphery. The fact that the remaining western superpower is economically overreaching itself in order to aﬀord an intimidating display of military power, that it is neglecting inner stability and the happiness and welfare of its own citizens for the

2

Introduction

phantasm of world hegemony, that, ﬁnally, it is losing world markets to emerging Asian powers, all indicates a deep crisis of unidirectional western ideas of progress and globalization. If we are to move beyond the linear account of social and economic processes presumed by traditional stories of globalization, we need to rethink modernization by re-envisaging its technological parameters, the role of accelerated international capitalism and what Arjun Appadurai has called the growing importance of diasporic public spheres and deterritorialized agencies. Modernization and its catalyst technology cannot merely be thought of as uniﬁed forces developing along linear trajectories, leading both western and non-western cultures to speed into a vortex of globalization. Instead, both modernization and its technologies have been transformed more than once, even in the West itself. We see this in the way some western nations have moved from envisioning ever-accelerating social and economic progress to slowly acknowledging the limits of growth and the ecological costs of modernization. We also see it in a gradual movement from ‘hard’ concepts of material technology to more intricate ‘soft’ versions of mediascapes and semiospheres. And we ﬁnally see it in the diversiﬁcation and translation of western cultures themselves by diasporan subversions and interventions. In this volume, Benita Parry investigates the interplay between the way in which developments in colonial locations are overdetermined by the ‘normative temporalities’ of the imperial centres on the one hand and by the activating of the resources of indigenous knowledge for a liveable future on the other. Parry concentrates on South African novels as examples for the way in which realities from radically diﬀerent moments of history are conjoined to evoke speciﬁc modernist sensibilities of the periphery, which are based upon counter-memory and African cognitive systems. Such an approach to cultural and literary phenomena acknowledges that the West is not the sole agent or centre of modernization, but is acted upon, aﬀected and modiﬁed by developments elsewhere. European modernist art and literature, for example, was and is frequently engaged, as it were, in debates on the darker aspects of modernization. In its central aesthetic features – such as decentring, ambiguity, intermediality and alienation – it is a product of the intercultural encounter and of the decentring of western epistemology.1 And in the postcolonial sphere western modernism is again inﬂected and translated from various vantage points.2 This, however, does not mean that we could in any way speak of a symmetrical dialogue about modernist aesthetics as envisioned by Habermas, but rather of an antagonistic battle against a normative temporality and an overpowering aesthetics which is supported and pushed by international publishers. For much of the twentieth century, modernization has been on trial for

Introduction

3

3

having exploited nature and deformed humanity, and many critics of culture have accordingly questioned its founding assumptions. But modernization has always been a multiple and discontinuous process, producing distinctions in the West between technologically advanced metropolitan areas and ‘retarded’ rural areas – distinctions which in due course were exported to the ‘developing’ nations. Today, modernization is again being stripped of its monologic western ideological façade, which has continually aﬀronted the more peripheral cultures while puﬃng up the ‘centre’. Hopes are arising that even the more subtle eﬀects of technology may not be permanent, including the make-up of man himself as he re-codes his world and his own nature with the help of new media within proliferating and intersecting public spheres, in a world in which, according to Arjun Appadurai, modernity seems to be at large. Transformations of our understanding of cultural evolution have helped us to re-articulate processes of modernization along the more complex faultlines of class, gender, ethnicity, and environment. While thus becoming more speciﬁc and less determinist, the pervasive nature of modernization, its technological eﬀects, and its serviceability for neo-imperialist tendencies ought also to be taken into account and, if possible, deconstructed on behalf of a truly cosmopolitan world – which must even tolerate nationalism and thus evade the pitfalls of radical transnationalism, which often merely reﬂects ‘universalising myths of U.S. benevolence’.4 Transnationalism may oﬀer a happy outlook for the postmodern centres of aﬄuence and conspicuous consumption, but is surely a contested concept for the peripheries, ﬁghting, as it were, against hegemonic pressures. As Benita Parry has pointed out, the ‘disavowal of nationalism overlooks the distinction between imperial and anti-imperial problematics’.5 Or, as Martin Jacques puts it, with reference to the US and its transnational aspirations: If the United States, as the sole superpower, wishes to reshape the world, then, given that colonialism is no longer an option, undermining the legitimacy of the nation-state becomes a central political task. The body of arguments used to justify the occupation of Iraq is a classic case in point.6 In The Black Atlantic, Paul Gilroy has alerted us to a non-western experience of modernization, which was induced by the traumatic suﬀering of the Middle Passage as a cataclysmic instance of dislocation and a sudden shift in the horizon of expectations. The monologic façade, and also the hidden ﬁssures in the western constructions of modernity, has made Gilroy’s narrative overdue. Nevertheless, we ﬁnd in The Black Atlantic a tendency to highlight the African-American experiences of dislocation while neglecting

4

Introduction

unique African experiences of emergency and of emergence, which have allowed and allow for a number of local articulations of modernization and modernity and for a more pronounced role of emerging nationalities than the diaspora is generally likely or able to summon. In this volume these dimensions are – again with reference to South Africa – explored by Elleke Boehmer and Laura Chrisman. They insist on local anachronisms, on national and ethnic speciﬁcity, and do not follow Appadurai – or Hardt/ Negri for that matter – in his belief that nationalism is on its last legs. Instead, they reconsider the interplay of nationalist and transnational perspectives, emphasizing the importance of local nationalist strategies over that of transnational networks. Asian explorations of modernization are also beyond the Atlantic scope of Gilroy’s narrative, though, as Boehmer shows, the political and cultural strategies of self-fashioning were sometimes quite similar to the black experience, and the technological catalysts of modernization – e.g. ships, planes, communications technology – were utilized in similar ways. Cross-cultural and national impulses seem to coexist in Indian and South African postcolonial voices and to belie Gilroy’s exclusive focus on transnational agendas. As Laura Chrisman has it, the nation ‘supplies the only eﬀective means for interpreting the category of black – or any – transnationality’. Chrisman introduces the idea of a ‘critical black transnationalism’ as a site of resistance to ‘indicate a transnational dynamic that is far more complicated’ than Gilroy’s notion of transnationalism seems to allow for.7 This volume moves beyond Gilroy’s Black Atlantic canvas in more than one direction: by specifying the heterogeneity of Black Atlantic experiences, whether national or transnational, by looking beyond the Atlantic to the Indian ocean and the Indian diaspora (Boehmer, Ghosh-Schellhorn, Baucom, Goebel) and by emphasizing exchanges and parallel developments between ‘black’ and ‘white’ cultural networks (Shapiro, Viswanathan). Gilroy’s narrative is partly anticipated by and partly dovetails with ideas of transatlantic cultural mediation in the Caribbean sphere,8 for example with Wilson Harris’s and Alejo Carpentier’s concepts of creolization and mestizaje and of (baroque) cultural syncretisms, while on the other hand taking an ethnocentrist turn which is not generally supported by investigations into Caribbean cultures or, for that matter, into European-African exchanges in the early modern world or in the history of ideas.9 Gilroy’s narrative, which does not suﬃciently acknowledge Caribbean and South American precursors, is furthermore called in question by V.S. Naipaul’s sceptical, even pessimistic interpretation of transculturalism, modernization and transatlantic exchange. With the fragmentary autobiographical form of his novels and travelogues, Naipaul subverts not only the concept of the uniﬁed subject of the western enlightenment but also the very basis for ideas of the

Introduction

5

transnational and of successful hybridization (Goebel). Boehmer and Ghosh-Schellhorn, on the other hand, provide more optimistic inroads to the Indian diaspora. They emphasize speciﬁc forms and speeds of Indian diasporan modernization which are not easily synchronized with Gilroy’s panorama, while adding a dynamic dimension to the modelling of diasporan identity within the World Wide Web. Saskia Schabio engages Pauline Melville’s short stories in a dialogue with Edouard Glissant’s Caribbean Discourse and Gilroy’s Black Atlantic. While Glissant in his later work develops Caribbeanness into a more transnational vision and relegates engagement to the cultural sphere, Melville’s approach recalls Glissant’s earlier concept of a dynamic nationalism as a political necessity which mediates between radical transnationalism and traditional concepts of the nation. A more sceptical view of transnational agendas is voiced in her uses of the Caribbean trickster-god Anancy, because such gestures – an intellectual trickster strategy – evade the intricacies of the ‘glocal’ Caribbean situation. Forms of marginalization and stories of penetration by the imperial invader and his technologies have been the staple themes of the canonized classics of postcolonial literature, such as Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness or Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. The rape of native cultures, their penetration by ship, train or boat, make up the gendered tales of modernization, of technological mastery and its usually baleful human eﬀects.10 One of the topics of this collection is that such tales have themselves to be continually modernized and revised in order to come to terms with complex processes of exchange between Self and Other, transitional modes of identity formation and advanced appropriations of technologies which move deftly beyond any kind of anti-technological nostalgia. This volume thus aims to add complexity to the stereotypical depiction of technology and modernization as bogeymen in the postcolonial sphere by elucidating how they are assimilated, transformed, and subverted at a distance from western origins. Such re-articulations and translations of technology and modernization are not only enacted between centre and periphery, but also within the very periphery itself when an expansionist capitalism and a predatory colonialism together propel the periphery toward the modern and inﬂict upon it the internal incongruities that generally accompany processes of modernization. The translation of modernities and the development of modernist vocabularies can be diﬃcult and even painful on the periphery, because experiencing new horizons of expectation and new transformations of the self often leads to social alienation and cultural dissociation. Modernization’s main catalyst is, of course, technology, as indicated by Gilroy in his key metaphor of the ship. Technology, however, does not merely trigger states of emergency but is actively utilized, transformed and locally reinterpreted in microhistories, as shown in Ian Baucom’s

6

Introduction

investigation of reciprocal modernizations in postcolonial townships and shanty towns. Speeds of technological innovation will usually vary and lead to asynchronous developments even in one locality (Parry, Boehmer, Baucom). A total inversion of Gilroy’s concept of sudden transatlantic change, as presented in his narrative of suﬀering, is suggested by Stephen Shapiro, who retells the story of modernization, of the emergence of capitalism and of cultural elites from an African viewpoint. Shapiro can show that, prior to the phase of high imperialism, the eighteenth century was witness to a circumatlantic spate of modernizations which allow us to place Ben Franklin’s ethics side by side with incipient forms of capitalist enterprise in Africa – for example, in the Nigerian Canoe Houses. Only after this stage of decentred co-emergence was capitalism appropriated and (mis-)interpreted by the West. Like Shapiro, Gauri Viswanathan focuses on earlier forms of syncretic and intercultural development spanning the colour divide. In her analysis of the exploration of the occult in ﬁn de siècle Europe (Yeats, Blavatsky) and in India, she ﬁnds traces of pre-Christian syncretic religious concepts, which restore to public memory beliefs and practices that were eﬀaced by mainstream Christianity, and which allow for the blurring of distinctions between colonizer and colonized. The circumatlantic interpretation of the pre-imperialist phase of economic and technological innovations (Shapiro) and the retrospective unearthing of occult intercultural practices (Viswanathan) are supplemented by Ralph Pordzik’s, Martina Ghosh-Schellhorn’s and Annette BühlerDietrich’s presentations of promising contemporary uses of technology in the postcolonial sphere. Ghosh-Schellhorn investigates the possibilities of computer-mediated communication for the articulation of Indian diasporan identities. Always at a remove from their imagined centre, India, the non-resident Indians found new virtual communities in cyberspace. BühlerDietrich focuses on biotechnology and the transformations of the concept of the uniﬁed subject that are explored in Kureishi’s stories. In his story ‘The Body’, Kureishi plays with concepts of purity and hybridity, aiming to critique biotechnological discourse, paradoxically enough in a science ﬁction setting. Pordzik concentrates on the utopian/dystopian perspective, which allows for explorative and also for subversive functionalizations of technology in postcolonial locations. In Amitav Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome (1996), for example, pre-modern discourses of medicine and theology interact with modern science, oﬀering a fusion of Indian and western cultural legacies. Between Shapiro’s reconstruction of a more open and interwoven circumatlantic emergence of capitalist technologies and the multiple local avenues toward the exploration and/or subversion of recent technologically

Introduction

7

induced developments, the phase of high imperialism, in which the western appropriation of the narratives of modernization was pervasive, appears not less menacing but less permanent than even Gilroy’s counter-narrative of sublime suﬀering has, perhaps unintentionally, suggested. With reference to Gilroy’s transatlantic project, it appears questionable whether the diaspora can ever speak for its centre, the imagined homeland. GhoshSchellhorn emphasizes a general split between periphery and ‘homeland’, and Boehmer distinguishes the nationalist from the outernational. The diaspora’s (and Gilroy’s) interpretation of the ongoing (ideally symmetrical) dialogue between transnational and national interests and ideas is perhaps not representative for phases of consolidation and/or subversion in some postcolonial national centres (‘homelands’). A similar dialogue between the local and the ostentatiously universal colours the interpretation of the experience of modernization, as Shapiro insists: The historiographic challenge is to avoid a nominalization that elides local particularities, while simultaneously ‘perceiving the shared logistic across geographically distant regions.’11 And, according to Laura Chrisman, nationalism and transnationalism can be ‘mutually enabling categories’.12 To sum up. The essays in this volume span two competing ideas which together may improve our understanding of technologically induced change and the impact of modernization on concepts of the national and the transnational. On the one hand, the authors reference the classical theme that technological innovation has been a tragedy for the cultures it transforms; on the other hand, they also entertain a more optimistic view of modernization, as exploring multiple avenues and modes of interaction and expression. The focus of the volume is thus to question monologic theories of globalization and restricted theories of transnational exchange – by rearticulating the mechanisms of modernization and by re-interpreting the experience of modernity in intercultural contact zones. This has led the contributors to ask a number of questions: What interpretive mechanisms have been used to produce alternative perspectives on modernization and its concurrence with capitalism? How have local expressions of modernization aﬀected the arts and their modernist vocabularies? And how have postmodern forms of computer-assisted technology (e.g. the World Wide Web) made it easier for agents on the periphery to explore the postcolonial possibilities of modernization and identity formation? It goes without saying that these diﬃcult questions have been investigated and expanded rather than answered fully. Walter Goebel and Saskia Schabio October 2005

8

Introduction

Notes 1 See E. Boehmer, ‘ “Immeasurable Strangeness” in Imperial Times: Leonard Woolf and W.B. Yeats’, in H.J. Booth and N. Rigby (eds) Modernism and Empire, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000, pp. 93–111, 108: ‘Modernism, it would appear, emerged out of later colonialism.’ 2 See, for example, R.S. Patke, ‘Literary Modernism in Asia: Pramoedya and Kolatkar’, Kunapipi XXVI, 2004, 18–32. 3 The clarion call being Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectics of the Enlightenment (1948), which exposed the reversion to barbarism as a logical eﬀect of technological rationality, while also voicing general anti-modernist scepticism. See also R. Nethersole, ‘Out of Modernity: “Fulﬁllment Without Lament” ’, in D. Kadir and D. Löbbermann (eds) Other Modernisms in an Age of Globalization, Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 2002, pp. 47–61, esp. p. 56. 4 T. Brennan, At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997, p. 316. 5 B. Parry, Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist Critique, London and New York: Routledge, 2004, p. 10. 6 M. Jacques, ‘Nationhood is way forward’, Guardian Weekly, Sept. 23–29, 2005, 15. A similarly sceptical interpretation of globalization and transnational neoimperialist impulses is oﬀered by E. San Juan, Jun. in Racism and Cultural Studies: Critiques of Multiculturalist Ideology and the Politics of Diﬀerence, Durham, N.C. and London: Duke University Press, 2002. 7 Quotations refer to Chrisman’s contribution in this volume, pp. 41, 32. 8 T. Brennan, ‘Cosmopolitanism and Internationalism’, in D. Archibughi (ed.) Debating Cosmopolitics, London: Verso, 2003, pp. 40–50. 9 For African presence and cultural inﬂuences in various parts of medieval and early modern Europe see I. Van Sertima (ed.) African Presence in Early Europe, New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers, 2000; also P. Beidler and G. Taylor (eds) Writing Race Across the Atlantic World: Medieval to Modern, Houndsmills: Macmillan, 2005. For philosophical exchanges see, for example, L.R. Gordon, Existentia Africana: Understanding Africana Existential Thought, New York and London: Routledge, 2000. 10 The gendering of the peripheries has been investigated, for example, by A. McClintock in Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Context, London: Routledge, 1995. 11 See Shapiro’s contribution in this volume, p. 119. 12 L. Chrisman, Postcolonial Contraventions: Cultural Readings of Race, Imperialism, and Transnationalism, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003, p. 86.

Bibliography Adorno, Theodor W. and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. J. Cumming, London and New York: Verso, 1997. Appadurai, A., Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Archibugi, D. (ed.) Debating Cosmopolitics, London: Verso, 2003. Beidler, P. and G. Taylor (eds) Writing Race Across the Atlantic World: Medieval to Modern, Houndsmills: Macmillan, 2005.

Introduction

9

Boehmer, E., ‘ “Immeasurable Strangeness” in Imperial Times: Leonard Woolf and W.B. Yeats’, in H.J. Booth and N. Rigby (eds) Modernism and Empire, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000, pp. 93–111. Brennan, T., At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997. —— ‘Cosmopolitanism and Internationalism’, in D. Archibugi (ed.) Debating Cosmopolitics, London: Verso, 2003, pp. 40–50. Chrisman, L., Postcolonial Contraventions: Cultural Readings of Race, Imperialism, and Transnationalism, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003. Gordon, L.R., Existentia Africana: Understanding Africana Existential Thought, New York and London: Routledge, 2000. Hardt, M. and A. Negri, Empire, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000. Jacques, M., ‘Nationhood is way forward’, Guardian Weekly, Sept. 23–29, 2005, 15. McClintock, A., Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Context, London: Routledge, 1995. Nethersole, R., ‘Out of Modernity: “Fulﬁllment Without Lament” ’, in D. Kadir and D. Löbbermann (eds), Other Modernisms in an Age of Globalization, Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 2002. Parry, B., ‘Directions and Dead Ends in Postcolonial Studies’, in D.T. Goldberg and A. Quayson (eds) Relocating Postcolonialism, Oxford: Blackwell, 2002, pp. 66–81. —— Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist Critique, London and New York: Routledge, 2004. Patke, R.S., ‘Literary Modernism in Asia: Pramoedya and Kolatkar’, Kunapipi XXVI, 2004, 18–32. San Juan, Jun., E., Racism and Cultural Studies: Critiques of Multiculturalist Ideology and the Politics of Diﬀerence, Durham, N.C. and London: Duke University Press, 2002. Van Sertima, I. (ed.) African Presence in Early Europe, New Brunswick and London: Transaction, 2000.

Part I

Negotiating African modernities

1

The presence of the past in peripheral modernities Benita Parry

Perry Anderson has argued that ‘Marx’s own conception of the historical time of the capitalist mode of production . . . was of a complex and diﬀerential temporality, in which episodes or eras were discontinuous from each other, and heterogeneous within themselves.’1 Although Anderson does not press this usage, his observation is especially pertinent to the advent of capitalism in the colonial worlds where, as Lenin and Trotsky observed in their theory of combined and uneven development, socio-economic conditions pertaining to pre-, nascent and ‘classical’ capitalism coexisted and overlapped. Without overlooking that even in contemporary Europe residual traces of archaic ideologies and customs remain, or that the sophisticated capital cities are contemporaneous with antiquated but stillfunctioning peasant societies – about which John Berger has written with empathy and critical distance in Pig Earth – the ‘simultaneity of the nonsimultaneous’ was structural to colonized societies and continues to be so in post-independence nation-states. For here vast rural populations living in village communities provided and continue to provide the material ground for the persistence of earlier social practices and older psychic dispositions. Moreover, as Mahmood Mamdani, writing about Sub-Saharan Africa, points out, the colonial state was deliberately deferential toward traditional forms and outlooks, encouraging the survival of ethnically based local power, ‘tribal’ divisions and those indigenous cultural habits deemed conducive to promoting social stasis.2 At the same time the architects of colonialism cynically blamed these very modes for perpetuating backwardness, and, while boasting an instrumental purpose in developing the wasted and underused material resources of the pre-industrial world in the cause of international progress, and claiming an ordained mission to elevate the minds and souls of its benighted peoples, they devised plans to compel the plentiful supply of cheap labour into the production of raw materials required for metropolitan modernization. This entailed imposing aspects of

14

Negotiating African modernities

capitalism’s productive methods, selectively initiating modernizing projects useful to their rule, and allowing a small elite a limited access to education. Together these policies produced a lower administrative stratum, facilitated suﬃcient social mobility to incline the beneﬁciaries toward complicity with the rulers, and ensured the retardation of the non-capitalist zones. This is not to say that colonial regimes were able to control economic development, stem urbanization or prevent proletarianization, since calculated strategies imploded under the impact of capitalism’s own dynamics. Nor were they able to contain the social agency of the bourgeoisie, the petty bourgeoisie or the populace as new modes of production generated new social relationships and altered forms of consciousness. In this sense anti-colonialism expressed the determination of colonial populations to possess a temporal condition into which they had been thrust by the penetration of capitalism and which colonialism sought to withhold. In their representations of the colonial project, the imperial nations had cast themselves as the only creators and inhabitants of modern times, and therefore as donors or exporters of material modernization, social enlightenment and moral progress to the retarded and dependent peoples of Africa, Asia and South America. This conceited account of the imperial centres as constituting the normative temporality, prompted the anthropologist Johannes Fabian in the 1980s to address the scandal of denying coevalness, or the sharing of the same time, to the worlds beyond the technically advanced metropoles: The expansive, aggressive and oppressive societies which we collectively and inaccurately call the West needed Space to occupy. More profoundly and problematically, they required Time to accommodate the scheme of a one-way history: progress, development, modernity (and their negative mirror images: stagnation, underdevelopment, tradition). In short, geopolitics has its ideological foundations in chronopolitics.3 Paradoxically, some postcolonial critics have echoed a concept of the time, consciousness and experience of modernity as being ‘western’, rather than as coextensive with capitalism’s worldwide consolidation, and as a consequence have proposed that peripheral modernities be perceived as ‘translations’ of, or counters to, the Eurocentric prototype.4 Harry Harootunian has challenged the move to ‘more fashionable descriptions’ such as alternative, divergent, competing and retroactive modernities on the grounds that these imply ‘the existence of an “original” that was formulated in Europe, followed by a series of “copies” and lesser inﬂections’.5 Hence, while recognizing that modern forms were introduced into societies outside of Europe through imperial expansion, the export of

The presence of the past

15

capital and colonial deterritorialization, Harootunian directs attention instead to the disparate but simultaneous experiences of change and upheaval precipitated transnationally by capitalism, naming modernity as ‘a speciﬁc cultural form and a consciousness of lived historical time that diﬀers according to social forms and practices’. Where, Harootunian maintains, the new intersected with the residual, it made possible the production of diﬀering inﬂections of the modern. It also promised not alternative modernities but coeval . . . modernities or, better yet, peripheral modernities . . . in which all societies shared a common reference provided by global capital and its requirements. Each society, however, diﬀered according to speciﬁc times and places, the ‘not quite the same’.6 Because transformation was propelled by the same mode of production, even if at diﬀerent speeds and to varying degrees, modernity according to Harootunian, should then be conceived as the simultaneous temporal condition of people everywhere. So too Enrique Dussel rejects the developmentalist and Eurocentric position which conceptualizes modernity ‘as an exclusively European phenomenon that expanded from the seventeenth century on throughout all the “backward” cultures’.7 Rather, he contends that it should be understood as a global process within which Europe, through the discovery, conquest, colonization and integration of other spheres, attained centrality as the system’s manager. This argument implies that metropolitan and colonial populations, whatever the profound material and cultural diﬀerences between and amongst them, were hurled into modernity at the same moment – a universality invoked in the opening lines of Marshall Berman’s All That is Solid Melts Into Air: ‘Modern environments and experiences cut across all boundaries of geography and ethnicity, of class and nationality, of religion and ideology: in this sense, modernity can be said to unite all mankind.’8 Such a perspective is shared by Peter Osborne’s designation of modernity as ‘our primary secular category of historical totalization’,9 a description which brings its global reach into proper focus, and serves as a reminder that modernity and modern times cannot be abstracted from the universalizing tendencies of capitalism. It also establishes the inadequacy of relegating the colonized peoples as ‘latecomers’ to modernity.10 This is not to overlook that the colonized were from the outset marginalized by the demands of an expansionist capitalism that installed and perpetuated an international division of labour and a grossly inequitable distribution of economic resources, political power and social agency. Nor is it to forget that modernities in colonial locations were overdetermined

16

Negotiating African modernities

by combined and uneven development in material, social and existential conditions. In discussions of modernity, emphasis has been placed on separating reason from its expression in religion and metaphysics and situating it in the autonomous spheres of science, morality and art (Weber), or on the revolt against the normalizing function of tradition (Habermas), or on its eﬀecting ‘a ruthless break with any or all preceding historical conditions’, having ‘no respect even for its own past, let alone of any pre-modern social order’.11 The seismic eﬀects of accelerated capitalist transformation are graphically invoked in The Communist Manifesto: ‘Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social relations, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All ﬁxed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient prejudices and opinions are swept aside, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify.’12 (If this passage has been read as infused with a sense of exhilaration, it should be remembered that the writings of Marx and Engels are notable for recording and protesting the violence of expropriation, the systemized punishment and servitude that the entrenchment of capitalist social relations visited on both domestic and colonized populations.) In the peripheries, however, the disruption of the old, though no less catastrophic, was more insidious, and, because economic, social and cultural practices from earlier times survived alongside new ones, the articulations of metropolitan upheaval do not provide a grid on which to place the diverse colonial experience where the positions on residual and emergent cultural values were more complicated and the reﬂections on the present condition more measured and critical. Even though new forms of economic life and social organization were coercively introduced into the colonial worlds, this does not mean that its inhabitants were passive spectators of metropolitan modernity, or that they perceived modernity as a gift from the colonizers. If colonialism was the messenger of modernity’s transformative capacities and emancipatory potential in colonial spaces, its message, bearing exploitation, inequalities and injustice, was refused by signiﬁcant numbers of the literate and illiterate. For those few with access to a larger cognitive ﬁeld aﬀorded by a secular education, and aware of living in chronologically simultaneous but non-synchronous moments,13 modernity was enunciated as existential dilemma and political problem, but also as promising new horizons. These discontinuities made for a particular sensibility to modernity on colonial terrains, its intellectual and imaginative expressions registering an aﬀection for and a dislocation from tradition, a propulsion toward but not an integration into the modern as this had been received by way of a predatory

The presence of the past

17

colonialism. Thus to relegate the modernities of peripheral societies to ‘shadow imitations’ of what had occurred in the metropole14 connotes an extraordinary insensitivity to the ways in which such experiential diﬀerence is apparent in prose and ﬁction dramatizing the trauma of modernity in situations radically distinct from those prevalent in the capitalist countries. Whereas modernity on colonial terrains did not perform an absolute break with and rejection of the pre-modern, this respect for the past cannot be dismissed as nativist and regressive. This is apparent in a nuanced stance on modernization in the writings of political intellectuals who recognized that technology in the form of ships and guns had made colonial conquest possible; that railways and the telegraph had enabled the installation and maintenance of colonial rule; and that it was advanced machinery which had facilitated the development of mining and the intensive production of other raw materials – all of which were returned to metropoles in furtherance of their own technological progress. Yet because anti-colonial movements set out to transform colonialist economic structures and develop society’s productive forces in the interest of the inhabitants, their writings acknowledge that new technologies had the potential to liberate labour from physical servitude and free humankind of want. In this there is perhaps an aﬃnity with Walter Benjamin’s usage of technik as signifying both technology or the material means of production – the hardware, the machinery, the empirical processes of production – and technique or the organization of social relations of production under capitalism, where private ownership and class exploitation constrain the beneﬁts of technology and frustrate its promise.15 The analyses and tracts of radical anti-colonial movements simultaneously confront the exclusions of capitalist modernity and engage its liberatory dimensions, in this using the past to contemplate a post-capitalist tomorrow beyond both the pre-colonial and the colonial.16 Contra Arif Dirlik’s contention that the ‘rewriting of history after the Eurocentric teleology of capitalist modernity, ruled out the possibility of looking into the past as a source of possible future alternatives to this teleology’,17 the consciousness of modernity in the peripheries condensed what Fredric Jameson has called ‘the forces of the past and the future within that present’.18 Thus because anti-colonial discourses were directed at reclaiming histories insulted by colonialist representations and practices, and mobilizing the populace to seize the future, it is singularly inappropriate for some postcolonial critics to charge anti-colonialism with evoking ‘an archaic past and authentic communal identity in order to assert its project of modernization’, or for incorporating ‘modern science and polity in the anti-colonial agenda’, while representing these ‘as a return of the indigenous and the archaic’.19 The error of these accusations is evident when we consider the

18

Negotiating African modernities

work of thinkers such as Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon and Amilcar Cabral, who articulate the aspiration to a socialist internationalism while at the same time validating native cultures for nurturing collective life. This doubleness of enunciation is registered when Césaire’s regard for cultures undermined or destroyed by imperialism is juxtaposed to his vision of a post-European future: I make a systematic defense of the non-European civilizations . . . They were societies that were not only ante-capitalist, as has been said, but anti-capitalist . . . For us the problem is not to make a utopian and sterile attempt to repeat the past, but to go beyond it. It is not a dead society we want to revive . . . It is a new society that we must create, with the help of our brother slaves, a society rich with all the productive power of modern times, warm with the fraternity of olden days.20 These sentiments are also audible in Fanon’s call to retrospection: ‘The plunge into the chasm of the past, is the condition and source of freedom’; and it can be detected in Cabral’s advocacy of developing ‘all aboriginal and positive values’.21 More recently the joining of modernity with pre-colonial African modes of thought has been considered in terms of acknowledging the resources of ‘indigenous knowledge systems’.22 As Paulin Hountondji points out, most of the people in Africa ‘still depend on indigenous knowledge’, whether in health or agriculture or handicraft.23 Yet, he continues, in the absence of a ‘fruitful exchange of method’, a dialogue about heuristic procedures between endogenous know-how and exogenous or imported science, indigenous knowledge has been marginalized. While cautioning against any tendency to overvalue this heritage, Hountondji attributes this undervaluing to the context of colonial domination within which local peoples internalized the colonizers’ ‘denigrating views of African ways of life and modes of thought’.24 The designation of African cognitive systems as prelogical was long ago contested by V.Y. Mudimbe when observing that new anthropological scholarship has discovered the theoretical dimensions of myth concealed in ‘its paradoxical forms and sometimes irrational contradictory version’. These can be shown to express ‘the mechanics of a discrete rationality giving an account of dependencies, overlapping or antinomic virtues within the natural, social and cosmic orders’, ‘ “a table of knowledge” maintaining memories, important discoveries, signiﬁcant deeds and their interpretation’, and ‘a powerful and amazing organization of classiﬁcations, ﬁliations, and their transformations and representations’.25 This argument reemerges in a book Mathematics Elsewhere: An Exploration of Ideas Across Culture, written by a traditionally trained mathematician married

The presence of the past

19

to an anthropologist who, according to a review in the journal Notices of the American Mathematical Society, had studied the mathematical ideas and concepts embedded in the cultures of non-literate societies – that is, the implicit mathematics in the logic of divination, the marking of time, the devising of calendrical systems, the drawing of maps and models, and the charting of kinship systems. In the opinion of the reviewer, Marcia Ascher’s work will help teachers ‘demonstrate to their students the universality of mathematical thinking’, since she has made it increasingly clear that people ‘have always “mathematized” ’, following their ideas well beyond the solution of their initial problems, and that ‘mathematization’, understood as ‘the combination and organization of ideas about number, logic, and space into systems and structures, is not the province of a limited number of cultures, but has in fact been accomplished by numerous cultures around the world’.26 Materialist theorists of modernity have proposed a conjunctural understanding of the connection between capitalism’s economic and technological modernization, the ideological and psychological process of modernity, and aesthetic modernism, the last credited with providing a vocabulary for the lived experience of historical transformation.27 This linkage can be loosened by observing the startling instances of modernist art in locations where modernization was incipient or retarded (Ireland, Latin America) or by arguing that modernity should be understood as constituting an institutional shift whereby absolutist or feudal or hierarchical regimes were dethroned, rather than as the awareness of existing within a time of accelerated historical change. But if we want to retain the notion of modernity as an existential category as well as a marker of epochal transition, as self-conscious reﬂection on a present perceived as constituting a passage from a past and a reach toward another time, then the grounding of the phenomenon in the mode of production demystiﬁes attempts at attributing modernity to the gifts or the luck of the capitalist homelands. It also both preempts a restricted view on modernity as a wholly cultural event, and opens the way to looking at aesthetic production as rooted in the empirical reality and received discourse from which it breaks free, even as it preserves the overwhelming presence of its social determinations.28 Fredric Jameson’s essay on ‘Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism’ (1986)29 oﬀered a way of reading non-metropolitan literatures that is properly attentive to the ‘crisis of representation’ in cultures that were and are in various distinct ways ‘locked in a life-and-death struggle with ﬁrst-world cultural imperialism . . . a cultural struggle that is itself a reﬂection of the economic situation of such areas in their penetration by various stages of capitalism, or as it is sometimes euphemistically

20

Negotiating African modernities

termed, of modernization’.30 In the ﬁctions of societies that are radically diﬀerent from those of the metropoles the primordial crime of capitalism is exposed: not so much wage labour as such, or the ravages of the money form, or the remorseless and impersonal rhythms of the market, but rather this primal displacement of the older forms of collective life from a land now seized and privatized. It is the oldest of modern tragedies, visited on the Native Americans yesterday, on the Palestinian today.31 The proposition that the violent arrival of capitalism in societies adhering to archaic customs and traditional values made for the ‘generic discontinuities’ of the literatures subsequently produced, is elaborated in another essay also addressing the Third World cultural situation, ‘On Magic Realism in Film’.32 Although the discussion here concerns a genre other than the novel, the ‘very provisional hypothesis’ Jameson advances when contrasting magic realism with postmodern nostalgia ﬁlm suggests a possible methodology for understanding the stylistic particularities and innovations of the postcolonial novel. What Jameson proposes is the possibility of considering magic realism as ‘a formal mode . . . constituently dependent on a type of historical raw material in which disjunction is structurally present’, a mode where content betrays the overlap or the coexistence of precapitalist with nascent capitalist or technological features. In such a view . . . the organizing category of magic realist ﬁlm . . . is one of modes of production, and in particular, of a mode of production still locked in conﬂict with traces of the older mode . . . [T]he articulated superposition of whole layers of the past within the present (Indian or pre-Columbian realities, the colonial era . . .) is the formal precondition for the emergence of this new narrative style.33 Indeed, the coexistence of realities from radically diﬀerent moments in history generated a range of novelistic forms, realist, modernist and postmodernist, where conventions imported from the metropoles are joined with local modes of storytelling, and the structures of cognition and feeling animate not only the discontinuities between the metropolitan and the peripheral but also the disjunctions within the writers’ own environments. As instances of evoking the particular sensibilities to the modernisms of the peripheries, where whole layers of the past are preserved within the present, I will brieﬂy refer to two recent novels by South African writers: Zakes Mda’s Heart of Redness34 and Zoe Wicomb’s David’s Story,35 both

The presence of the past

21

of which attend to the continuing psychic eﬀects of the ‘primal displacement of the older forms of collective life from a land now seized and privatized’ ( Jameson), and without romanticizing the ways of the ancestors. In observing how the books construe a counter-memory of dispossession and resistance challenging the accounts in the annals of the colonizers, I am not attempting a proper reading of the narrative structures and stylistics of these highly self-conscious and elaborately constructed ﬁctions. All the same I will remark that both novels mix realism with the fantastic, that oral legend occupies as much space as the written record, and that miracles, second sight, divination and apparitions which are staples of the folkloric, are joined with narratives of human agency, contradiction and conﬂict in a material world characteristic of the modern secular novel. There is in these novels abundant irony toward customs, entrenched and invented (and in Mda’s case sustained banter), and whereas both books foreground the problems of recuperation, neither denigrates the need to understand cultural inheritance. Instead, by juxtaposing rather than serializing past and present, the ﬁctions reﬂect empathetically on those memories that animate the capacities of oppressed peoples who, despite the eﬀorts of the rulers to stultify their thinking and nullify their practices, fashion new and historically informed forms of consciousness replete with reverberations of rediscovered histories. Inhabiting the stories of Wicomb and Mda – both of which coincidentally are located respectively in the eastern and western Cape and traverse the overlapping temporalities of the age of conquest and post-apartheid South Africa – are reincarnations of persons and repetitions of events that evoke the ubiquity of the past in a present irreversibly altered by new inﬂuences. In Mda’s serio-comic Heart of Redness the living Qukezwa, independent and resolute, proud of her heritage and indiﬀerent to the white community, walks on her horse Xagxa with the same conﬁdence as her deﬁant mid-nineteenth-century ancestor and namesake did on a long-dead Xagxa; the rivers which ‘thundered their laughter’ then continue to do so now;36 traditional wakes are held on the roofs of modern apartment blocks in the city; the musical instruments, dance and singing of old remain in use; marriage, birth and circumcision customs are still observed; Christianity coexists with allegiances to local gods; ceremonies for remembering the suﬀering of the forebears continue to be devised; the Believers or the Ochre people, and the Unbelievers, or the School people who regarded redness as a sign of backwardness, re-emerge in the contemporary factions committed either to tradition or ‘enlightenment’ – both of which aspirations collapse into bathos when confronted by a cynical choice between developing their idyllic rural settlement as a gaudy tourist paradise or a national heritage site frozen in an imagined past.

22

Negotiating African modernities

With the cattle-killings of 1856–7, the existing familial division between Believers and Unbelievers had been intensiﬁed. At a time when crops were failing, livestock dying of imported disease and white settlers appropriating the land, a child prophetess Nongqawuse called on the Xhosa people to slaughter their cattle and leave the ﬁelds untended, promising that the spirits of the ancestors would drive out the invaders and resurrect the dead. For Sir George Grey, the governor of the Cape, the day of the Great Disappointment for the Believers augured the ‘dawn of a new era in which the advance of Christian civilization would sweep away ancient races, antique laws and customs, superstition and the ruder languages’.37 For the descendants of the aﬄicted it is the story of an already demoralized people plunged into yet greater despair by starvation and displacement, an event that remains central to the communal memory of a people bearing the scars of history: in the words of Camagu, an American-educated expert in communication development, the prophecies of Nongqawuse ‘arose out of the spiritual and material anguish of the amaXhosa nation’.38 ‘Forgetting the past’ appears then as the luxury of persons like the white trader Dalton, a present-day oﬀspring of a zealous magistrate named Dalton in the employ of Grey who had despised the ways of the people. Remembrance or a consciousness of the past39 is a source of both anguish and inspiration to the descendants of those who had fought ﬁre power with guerrilla tactics and who themselves were later to combat their age-old dispossession. If the semi-educated schoolteacher Xoliswa Ximiya confuses being modern with contempt for indigenous cultural ways, and the realistic ﬁgures of a woodcarver fail to please city people with a debased taste for stylized ethnic art, such false consciousness of tradition as necessarily indurated is contrasted with the experience of modernity known by Camagu who simultaneously defers to Majola, the totem-snake of the amaMpondomise people whom he identiﬁes as his clan,40 and respects technology. Thus, as if following an ordained destiny, he reverses the passage from village to town by settling in Qolorha-by-Sea in the still rural and mythical land of Nongqawuse where he observes custom and with the democratic participation of the local people, and in the communal interest, is instrumental in implementing modern means of utilizing natural resources. David’s Story oﬀers itself as the work of many hands, the guiding ones being those of the sophisticated professional author alert to the ‘gaps’, the ‘meaning in the margin’ and ‘absence as an aspect of writing’,41 and whose narrative depends on the invasions of her invented protagonists. The conceit is that David Dirkse, in search of his people’s past, imparts to her a story already replete with excisions and exclusions but also rich in personal recollection, oral testimony and the fruits of archival research. Thus, despite the ‘author’, who in postmodernist mode insists on the uncertainty of the events

The presence of the past

23

related and the inherent pitfalls of narration, the book supersedes its own objections about the unreliability of memory and the partiality, as well as the repressions, of written records, when in the interstices of its multiple stories it tells of a colonial expropriation. This time it is the nineteenthcentury theft of the diamond-rich Namaqualand, a dispossession compared to that endured by the Xhosa people, and one that had reduced the Griqua population to tenants on their own farms, forced to sell their hard labour to the settlers for meager wages. The other timescale is 1991, the eve of the transition to democracy in South Africa, when those who had actively fought the old regime now see the victorious African National Congress concerned to silence the surveillance and torture that had been used to ensure discipline amongst its military wing. It is at this moment that David Dirkse, a former and now disenchanted guerrilla ﬁghter, is driven by his private need to know the history of the Griqua people who claim descent from the original inhabitants of the Cape, the Khoisan (‘Hottentots’ to the settlers) – a dangerous pursuit liable to misconstruction as advancing a separatist agenda at a moment when the new order is committed to a multi-ethnic nation. His quest, moreover, enrages his wife Sally who is cynical about those Africans obsessed with reclaiming their past and cultural heritage, seeing her community as a reprimand to ‘roots’ and ‘tradition’: ‘What do you expect to ﬁnd? Ours are all mixed up and tangled; no chance of us being uprooted, because they are all in a neglected knot, stuck. And that I’d have thought is the beauty of being Coloured, that we need not worry about roots at all, that it’s altogether a good thing to start fresh.’42 The claims of hybridity are further advanced by the ‘author’ who questions David’s quest by noting the more complicated making of the Coloured community – which included slaves from the Malayan peninsula, Europeans, Xhosa. She also brings another dimension to the past he is pursuing by invoking memories of the Coloured people disparaged as God’s step-children, and the settlers pruriently transﬁxed by the physiological features of Griqua women. Ironically, Sally or Saartje herself is a physical reembodiment of Saartje Baartman the ‘Hottentot Venus’ whose genitalia remain on display in Europe (she is also mentioned in Heart of Redness as an instance of the pathology of biological racism). Thus because the allusions to the steatopygia of the women and their eﬀorts to tame their frizzy hair are so many in the novel, it could seem that only by repudiating received history and reclaiming the past could the community cast oﬀ the burden of internalizing colonialist representation where the women’s very physiques were singled out as signs of shame. Unlike his father who had denied this ancestry, David is eager to link his life as a combatant against apartheid to that of the militant Griqua chiefs,

24

Negotiating African modernities

and his transcribed story juxtaposes a Griqua chief banished to Robben Island, and his own more recent incarceration there; it also aligns collaborators and spies of old who betrayed the causes of their embattled people with contemporary traitors, and compares the illegal theft of the diamond from the Griqua people with the illicit trade of the gems in modern times. However, on observing that his story represses the place of women in histories old and new, the ‘author’, despite his protests, introduces Griqua women who had carried gunpowder to the rebels and concealed secret documents of insurgency on their ample persons (Rachel Kok), and of strong and fearless women ﬁghters in the recent struggle who had organized, agitated, borne arms and endured torture (Dulcie Olifant). The heroism of the ancestors is thus doubly recuperated, but David also uncovers evidence about past treachery and betrayal, and confronted with information that he and his beloved comrade Dulcie are on the hit list drawn up by agents of the incoming government in fear of revelations about its military wing, a demoralized David kills himself. The presence of the past in these two novels has very diﬀerent resonances. Having demonstrated respect toward the early resistance of the Xhosa people, Heart of Redness is silent about the era of liberation struggles and scathing about the place-seeking, nepotism and greed of the businessmen, trade union leaders, and politicians in the New South Africa dominated by the African National Congress and presided over by the sons and daughters of the ‘Aristocrats of the Revolution’. Hence the novel plants the seeds of a redeemed past not in the achieving of political independence by the oppressed but in the unrecognized energies and creativity of the despised rural people who remain excluded from power but who, in organizing a cooperative to harvest and distribute the largesse of the seas, restore the banished collective life to a new beginning. David’s Story, where the armed struggle against apartheid is central, is without any murmur of redemption, the device of a hired writer recounting many stories, allowing a heroic past to be repossessed, reexamined, found wanting and abandoned. With the symptomatic destruction of the computer on which the many components of her story are stored, the author watches the machine’s memory leaking ‘a silver puddle onto the desk’, and with her ‘screen in shards’ and the words escaping her, she declares ‘I do not acknowledge this scrambled thing as mine.’43 Yet despite renouncing the narrative she has construed, a novel haunted by history survives and is testimony to the preoccupation with the past in the ﬁctions of the peripheries.

The presence of the past

25

Notes 1 P. Anderson, ‘Modernity and Revolution’, New Left Review, no. 144, March– April 1984, 96–113, p. 101. 2 M. Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. 3 J. Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object, New York: Columbia University Press, 1983, p. 143. Against the now popular insistence on diﬀerence as constituting a radical gesture of regard for what is not of ‘the West’, perhaps we need to assert a notion of universals freed from the constraints of a single world-view and open it out to its multiple manifestations. 4 Some have theorized modernity as a western phenomenon against which postcolonial thinking advances counter-discourses to its terms and truth-claims. See for example T. Serequeberhan, ‘The Critique of Eurocentrism’, in Postcolonial African Philosophy: A Critical Reader, ed. E.C. Ez, Oxford: Blackwell, 1997, pp. 141–61, pp. 142, 143. 5 H. Harootunian, History’s Disquiet: Modernity, Cultural Practice, and the Question of Everyday Life, New York: Columbia University Press, 2000, pp. 62–3; see also endnote 4 on p. 163. In Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000, Harootunian writes ‘whatever and however a society develops’ its coeval modernity ‘is simply taking place at the same time as other modernities’ (p. xvi). 6 Harootunian, History’s Disquiet, pp. 62–3. 7 E. Dussel, ‘Beyond Eurocentrism: The World-System and the Limits of Modernity’, in F. Jameson and M. Miyoshi (eds) The Cultures of Globalization, Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998. 8 M. Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (1982), London: Verso, 1983: ‘There is a mode of vital experience – experience of space and time, of the self and others, of life’s possibilities and perils – that is shared by men and women all over the world to-day. I will call this body of experience modernity’ (p. 1). 9 P. Osborne, The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde, London: Verso, 1995, p. 29. Osborne has suggested that there are ‘three distinct but connected approaches to the concept of modernity: modernity as a category of historical periodization, a quality of social experience and an (incomplete) project’ (p. 5). 10 For implicit criticism of this position, see D.P. Gaonkar, ‘On Alternative Modernities’, Public Culture 11/1, 1999, 1–18, p. 13. 11 D. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, London: Blackwell, 1989, p. 12. 12 K. Marx, The Communist Manifesto (1848), London: Verso, 1998, p. 38. 13 F. Jameson, Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, London: Verso, 1991, p. 308. 14 As Perry Anderson once perversely suggested of Third World modernism in ‘Modernity and Revolution’, p. 109. 15 See E. Leslie, Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism, London: Pluto, 2000. 16 See I. Zavala, Colonialism and Culture: Hispanic Modernisms and the Social Imaginary, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992, p. 8. 17 A. Dirlik, ‘Post-Socialism/Flexible Production: Marxism in Contemporary Radicalism’, Polygraph 6/7, 1993, 133–69, p. 142. 18 F. Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essays on the Ontology of the Present, London: Verso, 2002, p. 214.

26

Negotiating African modernities

19 See G. Gopinath, ‘Nostalgia, Desire, Diaspora’, in J.E. Braziel and A. Mannur (eds) Theorizing Diaspora, Oxford: Blackwell, 2003, p. 262, and G. Prakash, ‘Who’s Afraid of Postcoloniality?’, Social Text 49/14, 1996, 187–203, p. 195. 20 A. Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (1955); trans. J. Pinkham, New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1972, pp. 22, 31. 21 F. Fanon, ‘Racism and Culture’, in Toward the African Revolution, New York: Grove Press, 1967, and Unity and Struggle, London: Hutchinson, 1980. 22 C.A. Odora Hoppers (ed.) Indigenous Knowledge and the Integration of Knowledge Systems: Towards a Philosophy of Articulation, Claremont, South Africa: New Africa Books, 2002. 23 Hountondji, Paulin J., ‘Knowledge Appropriation in a Post-Colonial Context’, in Odora Hoppers, C.A., ibid., 23–38, p. 23. This recuperation does not vindicate the practice of some prominent South African politicians in oﬃce who insist on the eﬃcacy of patently ineﬀectual traditional remedies in the treatment of Aids and other diseases. 24 Ibid., p. 25. 25 V.Y. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy and the Order of Knowledge, London: James Currey, 1988, p. 144. 26 V.J. Katz, a review of Marcia Ascher, Mathematics Elsewhere: An Exploration of Ideas Across Cultures, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002, in Notices of the American Mathematical Society, vol. 50, no. 5, 2003, 556–60, pp. 559, 560. Bill Parry brought the review to my attention. 27 See for example, Jameson, A Singular Modernity, p. 310 and Harvey, Condition of Postmodernity, p. 99. 28 See H. Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward A Critique of Marxist Aesthetics, London: Macmillan, 1979, p. 6. Marcuse is here following Adorno: ‘There is no material content, no formal category of artistic creation, however mysteriously transmitted and itself unaware of the process, which did not originate in the empirical reality from which it breaks free.’ ‘Adorno on Brecht’, in Aesthetics and Politics, London: New Left Books, 1977, p. 190. See also ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’, in Prisms, trans. S. and S. Weber, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986, p. 23. 29 F. Jameson, ‘Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism’, Social Text 15, 1986, 65–88. In a footnote Jameson explicitly states ‘a more general methodology implicit in the essay: ﬁrst, that the kind of comparative work demanded by this concept of third-world literature involves comparison, not of the individual texts, which are formally and culturally very diﬀerent from each other, but of the concrete situations from which such texts spring and to which they constitute distinct responses; and second, that such an approach suggests the possibility of a literary and cultural comparativism of a new type . . . [that] would juxtapose the study of the diﬀerences and similarities of speciﬁc literary and cultural texts with a more typological analysis of the various socialcultural situations from which they spring, an analysis whose variables would necessarily include such features as the interrelationship of social classes, the role of intellectuals, the dynamics of language and writing, the conﬁguration of traditional forms, the relationship to western inﬂuences, the development of urban experience and money, and so forth.’ Footnote 5, pp. 86–7. 30 Ibid., p. 68. 31 Ibid., p. 84. 32 F. Jameson, ‘On Magic Realism in Film’, Critical Inquiry 12, Winter 1986,

The presence of the past

33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

27

301–25. In the Conclusion to Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, London: Verso, 1991, Jameson argued that modernism itself must be seen as ‘uniquely corresponding to an uneven moment of social development’, where there is a ‘peculiar overlap’ of future and past and where there is ‘the resistance of archaic feudal structures to irresistible modernizing tendencies’ (pp. 307, 309). Jameson, ‘On Magic Realism in Film’, p. 311. Z. Mda, Heart of Redness, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000. Z. Wicomb, David’s Story, New York: The Feminist Press, 2000. Mda, Heart of Redness, pp. 186–7. Ibid., pp. 211, 245. Ibid., p. 245. Ibid., p. 169. Ibid., p. 242. Wicomb, David’s Story, p. 2. Ibid., pp. 27–8. Ibid., p. 213.

Bibliography Adorno, T., ‘Adorno on Brecht’, in Aesthetics and Politics, London: New Left Books, 1977. —— ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’, in Prisms, trans. S. and S. Weber, Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press, 1986. Anderson, P., ‘Modernity and Revolution’, New Left Review, no. 144, March–April 1984, 96–113. Berman, M., All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (1982), London: Verso, 1983. Cabral, A., Unity and Struggle: Speeches and Writings, London: Hutchinson, 1980. Césaire, A., Discourse on Colonialism (1955), trans. J. Pinkham, New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1972. Dirlik, A., ‘Post-Socialism/Flexible Production: Marxism in Contemporary Radicalism’, Polygraph 6/7, 1993, 133–69. Dussel, E., ‘Beyond Eurocentrism: The World-System and the Limits of Modernity’, in F. Jameson and M. Miyoshi (eds) The Cultures of Globalization, Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998. Fabian, J., Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object, New York: Columbia University Press, 1983. Fanon, F., ‘Racism and Culture’, in Toward the African Revolution, New York: Grove Press, 1967. Gaonkar, D.P., ‘On Alternative Modernities’, Public Culture 11/1, 1999, 1–18. Gopinath, G., ‘Nostalgia, Desire, Diaspora’, in J.E. Braziel and A. Mannur (eds) Theorizing Diaspora, Oxford: Blackwell, 2003. Harootunian, H., History’s Disquiet: Modernity, Cultural Practice, and the Question of Everyday Life, New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. —— Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.

28

Negotiating African modernities

Harvey, D., The Condition of Postmodernity, London: Blackwell, 1989. Hoppers, C.A. Odora (ed.), Indigenous Knowledge and the Integration of Knowledge Systems: Toward a Philosophy of Articulation, Claremont, South Africa: New Africa Books, 2002. Jameson, F., ‘On Magic Realism in Film’, Critical Inquiry 12, Winter 1986, 301–25. —— ‘Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism’, Social Text 15, 1986, 65–88. —— Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, London: Verso, 1991. —— A Singular Modernity: Essays on the Ontology of the Present, London: Verso, 2002. Katz, V.J., ‘Rev. of Marcia Ascher, Mathematics Elsewhere’, Notices of the American Mathematical Society, vol. 50, no. 5, 2003, 556–60. Leslie, E., Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism, London: Pluto, 2000. Mamdani, M., Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. Marcuse, H., The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward A Critique of Marxist Aesthetics, London: Macmillan, 1979. Marx, K., The Communist Manifesto (1848), London: Verso, 1998. Mda, Z., Heart of Redness, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000. Mudimbe, V.Y., The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy and the Order of Knowledge, London: James Currey, 1988. Osborne, P., The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde, London: Verso, 1995. Prakash, G., ‘Who’s Afraid of Postcoloniality?’, Social Text 49/14, 1996, 187–203. Serequeberhan, T., ‘The Critique of Eurocentrism’, in E. Chukwudi Ez (ed.) Postcolonial African Philosophy: A Critical Reader, Oxford: Blackwell, 1997, pp. 141–61. Wicomb, Z., David’s Story, New York: The Feminist Press, 2000. Zavala, I., Colonialism and Culture: Hispanic Modernisms and the Social Imaginary, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992.

2

Black modernity, nationalism and transnationalism The challenge of black South African poetry1 Laura Chrisman

The 1990s witnessed the rise of Black Atlantic studies, inaugurated by Paul Gilroy’s landmark text The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness.2 Whereas Gilroy is interested in theorizing the black diaspora as a ‘counterculture of modernity’, my interest here is in the way this diaspora is elevated into the apex of black modernity by prominent scholars of Africana studies. Black diasporans are currently being positioned as a global vanguard, an elite, thus moving from the countercultural margins into the centre of modernity. Strikingly, expatriate African scholars are among the most enthusiastic advocates of this new diasporic vanguardism, seeing modern black America as a vital source of African modernization. Such scholars as Ntongela Masilela and Manthia Diawara argue that progressive African culture and consciousness derive from the uncritical emulation of black America. This argument is not simply prescriptive; it also claims to be historically explanatory. Thus, for example, when South African scholar Ntongela Masilela analyses the New African movement of 1930s South Africa, he presents the movement as derived from and led by black America: The construction of South African modernity by New African intelligentsia who modelled themselves on the New Negro Talented Tenth is inconceivable without the example of American modernity: the New Africans appropriated the historical lessons drawn from the New Negro experience within American modernity to chart and negotiate the newly emergent South African modernity: the Africans learned from African-Americans the process of transforming themselves into agencies in or of modernity.3 Masilela suggests that black South Africans and African-Americans share

30

Negotiating African modernities

the same cultural temporality; black America’s function is accordingly to help black South Africa accelerate its evolutionary progress up this ladder of modernity. However, South Africa during this period witnessed brutally repressive legislation, under Hertzog, that systematically segregated and completely disenfranchized black people, destroying the vestiges of nineteenth-century liberalism that had remained on the statute books.4 The prospect of 1930s black South Africans being able to chart and negotiate a modernity that was predicated on their total disempowerment is remote. And this remoteness also suggests a limit to the commensurability between the black populations of the two countries. For the United States of the 1930s, theoretically, the constitution and its judicial apparatus allowed space for African-American negotiational agency. West African cultural scholar Manthia Diawara, like Masilela, grants the black diaspora a progressive historical role in continental Africa. His In Search of Africa account of his youth in Bamako contends that black Americans taught him and other African youth of the 1960s how to achieve a properly racial consciousness: We dressed to resemble our black American heroes . . . slowly we became aware of race in our daily relations with French people. We began to see racism where others before us would have seen colonialism and class exploitation.5 Diawara revealingly goes on to argue that: [T]he black American civil rights struggle was the most advanced form of black modernity, because it successfully deployed race to change laws on the subject of belonging, citizenship, and national identity. Blacks in Europe are modern only via Marxism or religion or a Eurocentric version of humanism and universalism, while Africans and Arabs form resistance cultures to modernity in the name of religion or ethnic identity. Only black Americans have an authentic modernity, which serves as a culture to conquer America and the world.6 For these scholars, the black American diaspora functions as more than the apex, or vanguard, of black cultural modernity. It also supplies them with a liberal political and economic identity that they prefer to both nationalism and Marxism. Their approved version of modernity includes the freedom of the individual to compete and consume within global markets. Diawara criticizes nation-states as being, in eﬀect, not modern enough for this agenda: West African nations, he contends, are ‘antiquated because they divided tribes, restricted commerce and culture in the region’. These state

Black South African poetry

31

structures discourage ‘movement across frontiers, free enterprise, and competition’ (emphasis added).7 The polarization of black diasporic modernity (on the one hand), and nationalism (on the other) can be traced to black British cultural theorist Stuart Hall as well as to Paul Gilroy. ‘Diaspora’, writes Stuart Hall, does not refer to those scattered tribes whose identity can only be secured in relation to some sacred homeland to which they must return at all costs. Diaspora identities are those which are constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew through transformation and diﬀerences.8 Paul Gilroy, as I have discussed elsewhere, intensiﬁes the view that black diasporic consciousness and black nationalism are mutually exclusive impulses.9 While this version of black Atlanticism was gaining ground in the early 1990s, South Africans were making a very diﬀerent black Atlantic intervention, and doing so through the medium of poetry.10 For Lesego Rampolokeng and Seitlhamo Motsapi, the two poets I am concerned with here, ‘modernity’ denotes global capitalism, and they generally deﬁne as ‘new’ or ‘modern’ blacks those political leaders who collude with this system.11 As Motsapi observes: & so the new blackses arrive [. . .] from the ﬁery splash of pool pits they preach us redamp shun from the dust of the old ways their kisses bite like the deep bellies of conputers the gravy of their songs smells like the slow piss of calculatahs12 The response of these poets to such ‘new black’ leaders is emphatic. As Rampolokeng avers, ‘no one can negotiate / when their words amputate’ which rebuts the premises of South Africa’s ‘negotiated settlement’ of the 1990s as much as it challenges Ntongela Masilela’s construction of a 1930s modernity open to ‘negotiation’ by black South Africans.13 The modernity that concerns these poets is as global as it is local: Motsapi decries the condition of a son ‘jiving his ancestral integrity / for more

32

Negotiating African modernities

cowries at the imf’, while Rampolokeng warns the world to ‘run clear / it’s an ecological alert / the imf has opened its wallet’.14 Their poetry seeks to engage and participate in a radical alternative social imagination that embraces international socialism and Third World nationalism in the case of Rampolokeng, and pan-Africanism in the case of Motsapi. Theirs is not, pace Diawara, an anti-modern project, a nostalgic desire to retrieve reiﬁed cultural traditions. Frequently those very traditions are, as Motsapi points out, themselves commodiﬁed instruments of globalization. Instead these poets propose, and practice, a highly modern aesthetic that synthesizes African and black diasporic cultural practices that are both precolonial and contemporary. I have mentioned that black diasporic cultures are integral to this poetry. But these writers fail to accord the black diaspora the veneration provided by Diawara et al. Seitlhamo Motsapi critically engages with an imaginary diasporic ‘brotha’, contending that the brother’s Rastafarianism potentially creates criminal indiﬀerence toward African realities. Speciﬁcally, he warns: lissen ras lissen here jus don let de green of de spliﬀ curtain u from the red of mah blood as piggin babylon runs with de gold15 Lesego Rampolokeng borrows heavily from black diasporic musical forms – he goes so far, in his Horns for Hondo, as to title most individual poems ‘raps’.16 But his poetry conspicuously fails to mention a single black American, in a collection that follows praise poetry’s traditions by overﬂowing with laudatory references that range from Chile’s Pablo Neruda to Nigeria’s Christopher Okigbo. These surface details indicate a transnational dynamic that is far more complicated, and interesting, than the uncritical emulation of modern black America proposed by Masilela and Diawara. Such a dynamic – which I want to call critical black transnationalism – dates back at least to the ﬁrst African National Congress general secretary Sol Plaatje. His 1916 masterpiece Native Life in South Africa simultaneously harnesses and subtly undermines the Talented Tenth model of black American leader W.E.B. du Bois, subjecting it to a subalternist scrutiny that questions the adequacy of black petty bourgeoisie to represent the black majority. There is not the time here to explore Plaatje’s complex dialogue, or attempted dialogue, with black diaspora.17 But the example of Plaatje – whom Rampolokeng refers to as ‘the prophet’18 – suggests that black South Africans have always interrogated as much as they have appropriated

Black South African poetry

33

elements of the black diaspora. And that the two activities are frequently inseparable. Further, Plaatje demonstrates that black transnational aﬃliation emerges from, and works in conjunction with, nationalist aﬃliation. Pace Diawara, Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy, there is no necessary conﬂict between the ‘outernational’ diasporic impulse and the desire to belong to an autonomous nation. Rampolokeng and Motsapi oﬀer us an alternative transnational black nationalism against which we can measure and contest the theoretical claims of contemporary black Atlantic studies.

Reconﬁguring black music I want to start by examining black music, which has become a key concern within Africana studies. For Paul Gilroy, diasporic music is the supreme signiﬁer of black countercultural modernity. He suggests that ‘by posing the world as it is against the world as the racially subordinated would like it to be, this musical culture supplies a great deal of the courage required to go on living in the present’. It is both produced by and expressive of that ‘transvaluation of all values’ precipitated by ‘the history of racial terror in the new world’.19 For Manthia Diawara, black music is equally important, but as a medium is interchangeable with other diasporic athletic and political achievements: ‘[aged 18] I also wanted to be like the Jackson Five, Jimi Hendrix, Wilson Pickett, Angela Davis, Muhammad Ali, George Jackson, and those black Americans who had brought the world to its knees with their music, athletic ability, and deﬁance of white power’.20 Both critics tend to idealize music as a categorically emancipatory form of black expression. Seitlhamo Motsapi, equally invested in the musical sphere, refuses formalist idealization. For him, a pan-Africanist, music is as much an object of critique as it is a subject of aﬃrmation, as much an obstacle to black self-realization as a utopian anticipation of it.21 Black music’s political ambiguity derives from its highly visible commercial value. If Manthia Diawara celebrates the Jackson Five for ‘bringing the world to its knees’, Motsapi condemns that same Michael Jackson as an emblem of world domination: i am the nu man, mad i chant loves song–gobbledigoon i mumble chant me michael jerksin the spepsi s/perm while they kwashiorkor me22 Throughout his poetry Motsapi scrutinizes contemporary popular black music, both African and black diasporic, as media that actually make possible this sustained ‘kwashiorkor’ of black populations. It might be tempting

34

Negotiating African modernities

to read his attack as the product of a cultural nativist who is opposed on principle to any modern music that contains ‘white’ aesthetic and technological elements. Motsapi’s frequent references to the synthesizer might appear to encourage such a nativistic interpretation. He decries, for instance, ‘the mangled ﬂesh of our griots / stashed into belly of synthesiser’,23 and laments that: while they forget meroe & ancestral spear ﬁre-spitter already they stagger to makossa & chicco their dreams into synthesiser24 As an online article on Cameroonian ‘makossa’ music excitedly explains, ‘Like the nation’s favorite beverage, champagne, makossa delivers sweet, ﬁzzy intoxication.’25 This gloss is, in fact, extremely revealing. It is the oblivion-inducing properties of synthetic black music, its addictive melodic or rhythmic sweetness, that alarm Motsapi, rather than its origins in a Euro-American technology. Similarly he highlights the narcotic dangers of rhythmic reggae when he warns his Rasta ‘brother’: ‘Don let de rhythm ride u / When mah glass of freedom splinters’26 and suggests that the ‘new black man’ is ‘rotting to riddim’27 while ‘the songs ask for more sugar’.28 In other words, Motsapi’s critique of black popular music resembles Horkheimer and Adorno’s critique of the culture industry in Dialectic of Enlightenment. The late black American soul singer Marvin Gaye’s ‘sweet’ melodies,29 like the easy danceability of ‘tourorist disca / dence’30 or Congolese/Zairean soukous music,31 for Motsapi function as imperial domination’s alibi. Their structural relationship to globalization means that these media directly threaten the existence of a music that enables both social memory and social transformation. Such musical enablement can, to Motsapi, be found in talking drums, mbira (Zimbabwean thumb piano) and contemporary jazz. It is not, then, the traditionalism of drums and mbira as instruments that Motsapi values so much as the political uses to which these instruments have been put. This becomes clear when he refers approvingly to Thomas Mapfumo, a distinguished Zimbabwean mbira player, and quotes him to say ‘Only de poor suﬀer.’32 It is Motsapi’s tributes to contemporary jazz that most clearly diﬀerentiate his project from cultural nativism. Here Motsapi decidedly parts ways with Adorno, for whom jazz can only express the oppressive values of a totally administered society.33 For Motsapi, jazz is instead a modernist tool of social critique. Thus he creates an account of the South African jazz band Malombo that emphasizes its musical dissonance as a necessary violence, a refusal of social resolution:

Black South African poetry

35

while the panthers thought to x the clan [. . .] we scratched the violins into a furious bleed & mauled the drums into a new stance saxes screeching to the sun for rebirth34 Notice here the simultaneity of black American political struggle – the black panthers – with this African musical violence; this neatly condenses both Motsapi’s pan-Africanist sentiments and his perception of the reciprocity that should obtain between aesthetic and political practices. The progressive musical universe he projects is one in which the boundaries that separate diasporic metropole from African continent are blurred, but – and this is crucial – not in a way that serves to recentre diasporic authority. If anything, Motsapi tends to Africanize the metropole; Malombo’s tour of ‘the tame jungles of the west’ allows them to ‘return’ ‘the dinka griots to chicago’ while London’s black centre Brixton becomes a ‘village’ with ‘Kwesi mtabaruka thundering fearless / As the brawling boars grunted in’.35 This is a vision of black transnationality shorn of vestigial romanticism and rendered, instead, as a self-conscious work-in-progress. The poem ‘maasai dreadbeat’ enlists members of the avant-garde jazz band the Art Ensemble of Chicago in a way that makes of pan-Africa a paradoxically fragmentary whole: send me don moye’s bruised ﬁngers the drums gather dust the hallelujahs are impatient send me joseph jarman’s lungs too long, way too long the mountains haven’t heard ﬂutes36 The grotesque imagery of musicians’ body parts suggests a newly constituted, self-determining pan-African body; but it also underscores the violent dislocations that Motsapi sees as an inescapable component of any liberation project. The desire to articulate a black transnationalism that cannot aﬃrm either naïve romanticism or vulgar commercialism leads Motsapi to interrogate the visible display of blackness that his own poetry enacts. His awareness of the global circuits of black minstrelsy produces a technique that seeks to circumvent co-optation through self-consciously foregrounding the performativity of his dialogues with other black artists. Thus his tribute to the South African band Malombo opens with the simulation of a band’s sound check:

36

Negotiating African modernities les c what we can do to the mountain – plug the mic & les start what we have come to do alo, alo u hear me? okeh

before proceeding to the account of Malombo’s international touring career.37 The poem’s conclusion returns to the self-referential stage conceit, but turns a critical gaze on to its reader/audience, making them complicit with voyeuristic commodiﬁcation simply by the act of watching and applauding the musician/writer’s labour: as i write sweat trickles onto the souvenirs applause rankles thru the electric shrill of the submissive podium38 Rampolokeng, on the other hand, approaches the question of his own potential co-optation with the bravura postures of rap: let them come to the dance ﬂoor or stay outside the door my words are sacred honey cannot be bought with blood-money39 His solution to the problem of potential objectiﬁcation is to deny stasis itself, through rhetorical assertions about the uncontainable dynamism of performance. At times Rampolokeng also eﬀects this ﬂux through the production of line structures that reject conventional syntax, blurring subjects and objects. Thus, for example, in life on the breeze of a razor of windy massacres in the holy grail where landing platforms are ﬂesh for tarmac litter of mussy waves of searches ended with a splash before three faced judges of hell40

Black South African poetry

37

Temporalities of crisis If music has been a key concern of black Atlantic analysis, temporality has of course been another. Paul Gilroy’s discussion in The Black Atlantic emphasizes the racial terrors experienced by diasporic peoples as candidates for inclusion in Walter Benjamin’s ‘history of the oppressed’ (as discussed in his ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, Illuminations). Concomitantly, it is the catastrophes of the middle passage and of the Holocaust that have made possible the interrogation of modernity and a corollary critique of the concept of progression through ‘empty homogeneous’ time. Gilroy does not address colonialism as an equally signiﬁcant constituent of modernity. His theorization thus does not consider the possibility that colonized populations may also have experienced modern temporality as a state of emergency. Nor does he acknowledge that Benjamin’s call to blast open the lie of progress, to create the conditions for a ‘real’ – that is, revolutionary – state of emergency, may also have been sounded by continental Africans. We see a corrective to this diasporic exclusionism in Michael Hanchard’s analysis of Afro-modernity.41 Hanchard suggests that three perspectives on temporality can be found in diasporic and continental African populations: the notion of ‘waiting time’, of ‘appropriating time’, and the notion of millenarian or eschatological time, which has aﬃnities with Benjamin’s Messianic time. In ‘waiting time’, [m]embers from subordinate groups objectively perceive the material consequences of social inequality, as they are literally made to wait for goods and services that are delivered ﬁrst to members of the dominant group.42 In the second mode, ‘time appropriation’, collective action ‘emboldens individuals to appropriate the time of a dominant racial subject and its related institutions for themselves’.43 Finally, the third, eschatological mode, is witnessed overtly in [m]illenarian movements that . . . contain ideas of ‘the last time’ or a new time, either of which is the consequence of the encounter and arrival of God . . . Religion provides the language for impending confrontation, but the spaces for confrontation were and are plantation societies, tenements, rural areas, and nations . . . any site where racial prejudice, socio-economic exploitation, and violence are combined.44 Rampolokeng and Motsapi, I want to suggest, make neglected

38

Negotiating African modernities

contributions to the literature of transnational temporality. In particular, they extend representations of temporality through their exploration of the condition of neo-colonialism, in which the achievement of African political independence ushers forth a new state of emergency that both is and is not continuous with the colonialism that preceded it. The condition of neo-colonialism oﬀers a hermeneutic challenge that is also an aesthetic challenge to create a poetic that is adequate to the task of creating a ‘real’ state of emergency. This challenge is largely met through the intensive deployment of eschatological discourses. It should be pointed out that eschatological appeals of black South Africa did not begin with Rampolokeng and Motsapi. As early as 1916 that most genteel of constitutionalist black nationalists, Sol Plaatje, wished an absolute annihilation upon colonial South Africa, borrowing from King Lear on the heath to validate his genocidal fury and imagine an apocalypse which ‘unmakes’ inhumanity by unmaking humanity itself.45 But the condition of the ‘new’, post-apartheid South Africa both intensiﬁes and complicates this revolutionary dimension, since the catastrophe of the present takes the form of national liberation itself. Both writers understand that it is catastrophic. Motsapi observes i write from beneath the foot of time’s perforated stagger & as these scrawls or scrolls hasten into their air or earth slaves pile into the sky46 Yet this pile up is authorized by these very ‘slaves’ themselves, in the name of liberation. As Rampolokeng contends: the worm’s eaten the bird time’s gone mad the fowl’s seen the dog dead the deranged slave runs the whole range of fables of change47 Rampolokeng’s ﬁrst collection, Horns for Hondo, was published in 1990, before South Africa’s ANC came into governmental power. The book belongs to a 1980s South African ethos, in which apartheid was still dominant, and formed a coherent object of political critique. Rampolokeng’s second volume, Talking Rain, was published three years later, when the apartheid regime was oﬃcially nearing its end and the ANC was the visible heir of state oﬃce. According to Kelwyn Sole, early in the 1990s

Black South African poetry

39

it became evident that the A.N.C. was shifting away from its previously held position of ‘national democracy plus economic egalitarianism’ in order to compete on world markets and attract investors and I.M.F. and World Bank funding. At an early stage, an oﬃcial distinction between the micro-economic needs of local social development and overall macro-economic direction was pursued, with the new Government prioritising the logic and needs of the latter.48 There is a discernible escalation of scatological and eschatological language in this 1993 volume of Rampolokeng’s poetry. This corresponds to his perception that the new obstacle to social emancipation is not apartheid but ANC neo-liberalism. Talking Rain contains none of the earlier volume’s residual belief in the nation’s emancipation as a progress through empty homogeneous time. Such belief is clear, for instance, in ‘rap 7’ of Horns for Hondo (‘Hondo’ is Shona for war), where the poet presents southern African history as a sequence of completed liberation movements that he witnesses and assists. He begins with Zimbabwe whose liberation transcends Lancaster House’s attempts to produce a negotiated settlement: as you behold the drowning ﬂeet sent by downing street i blew the horn for hondo freedom danced in through the door And then proceeds through the region: from circumcision school zambia to sandbedded namibia i came home in the wind [. . .] then i cast my eye south of the border to where life is cannon fodder to culminate in an exhortation to south africa to ‘hurry up forging your destiny’.49 The trope of forged destiny reads very easily as an example of Hanchard’s second temporality, the ‘appropriation time’, in which the oppressed seize the ‘time and the related institutions’ of the oppressor. Such ‘stubborn faith in progress’ (Benjamin’s phrase) is also attested by Rampolokeng’s account of emancipation through the excavation of a hidden if continuous ﬂow of history:

40

Negotiating African modernities in holes & crevices see me salvage retrieve visions hidden by man turned savage i seek not to create existence anew but i’ve a history-based view . . .50

Or again, ‘I’m an active ingredient / Raising time up a steep gradient’.51 But this articulation of an organically progressive modernity is overwhelmed, even in Rampolokeng’s ﬁrst volume, by a much more energetic presentation of eschatological time, in which, to quote from his ﬁnal poem titled ‘End Beginnings’, ‘apocalypse is genesis. Sun a black glob of ice spurts impotence into earth’s barren womb’.52 By the time of Rampolokeng’s second volume, Talking Rain, history is not to be excavated but, instead, excoriated, as we can see in the histrionic apostrophe to the nineteenthcentury Zulu monarch Shaka, one-time emblem of black nationalism and latterly icon for multiple South African cultural narratives, national and ethnic: oh shaka your glory vomits rats onto royal thrones proclaims cockroaches kings of life’s jungle legislates the squelch of jackboots sanctions of transitions from miscarried presents to futures aborted drowned in past amniotic ﬂuids53 The dimensions of the struggle for freedom have become primarily cosmic, as ‘heaven is burning in the gorge of the grotesque’ and ‘the present is nailed to a cross’.54 The apocalypse is the end point of Rampolokeng’s poetic vision; he leaves his reader primed for a ‘real state of emergency’ with no prediction of the outcome or any attempt to imagine what form a newly minted cosmos might take. Motsapi makes a strikingly diﬀerent resolution a mere three years later. By 1996, the date of his only volume earthstepper / the ocean is very shallow, the ANC had been in government for two years, and its capitulation to the policies of capitalist globalization was no longer a matter for Rampolokeng’s prediction but an observable fact. It is all the more interesting, then, that Motsapi chooses not to end his collection in an apocalyptic state of emergency. Instead his collection traces a clear trajectory from insurgency through to the peaceful triumph of a Christian (if also pantheistic) redemption, in which the ‘baptisms remembered us / the Path hymned us home’ and the warriors give benediction to their adversaries:

Black South African poetry

41

we bless the splinters & the air full of asphyxiations & amnesia [. . .] we bless the belligerent strangers who stay on in our throats long after forgotten festivities55 If Rampolokeng concludes his demystiﬁcatory project ‘in whirlpools of riot’, Motsapi ends by blessing ‘the mysteries & the silence’. The triumph of globalization, in the hands of the ANC, seems to have generated here a correspondingly triumphant spirituality whose quietism renounces the political project that animates the majority of his book. His confrontational stance has vanished, and with it the poetic mandate to depict the present as a ‘real state of emergency’.

Conclusion The political aesthetic of these poets has to be interpreted as a response to very particular developments in their nation-state, and its rapidly changing relationship to globalization. In other words, I am suggesting that the category of the nation supplies the only eﬀective means for interpreting the category of black – or any – transnationality. Motsapi and Rampolokeng suggest also the utility of a critical apparatus that can perceive African nationalism and black transatlanticism as symbiotic political impulses. More broadly, I want to suggest that we start to look more sceptically at the vision of black transnationalism inaugurated by Paul Gilroy. His promotion of black diaspora as the vanguard of modern consciousness has curtailed the analysis of African political cultures and encouraged an assumption that African engagement with modernity is nothing more than an uncritical emulation of the black diaspora. Gilroy’s schematic segregation of diasporic from nationalist and Marxist critical perspectives needs to be rethought, and historicized as a metropolitan and ideological reﬂex of the globalizing 1990s. And, I suggest, it is time that the metropoles of Europe and the US heeded the call of South African poetry.

Notes 1 For very helpful feedback on this chapter, thanks to Priya Gopal, Simon Lewis, Scott McCracken, Sarah Meer, Kelwyn Sole, the participants of the Sheﬃeld Hallam University English Research seminar, and of the ‘Technology, Modernization and Cultural Conﬂict’ conference, University of Stuttgart, 2003, at which it was ﬁrst presented.

42

Negotiating African modernities

2 P. Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, London: Verso, 1993. The popularity and scale of black Atlantic studies, and terminology, crosses disciplines of literary/cultural studies (an example is A. Pettinger (ed.) Always Elsewhere: Travels of the Black Atlantic, London: Cassell, 1998); history (e.g. J. Walvin’s Making the Black Atlantic: Britain and the African Diaspora, London: Cassell, 2000); anthropology (e.g. J. Roach’s Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance, New York: Columbia University Press, 1996); musicology (e.g. V. Erlmann, Music, Modernity and the Global Imagination: South Africa and the West, New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). It has generated undergraduate and graduate courses, research seminar series, conferences and book series (e.g. that of Continuum Press), journal special issues (e.g. that of Research in African Literatures 27, 1997). 3 N. Masilela, ‘ “The Black Atlantic” and African Modernity in South Africa’, Research in African Literatures 27, 1997, 90. On debates in African modernity see J.-G. Deutsch, P. Probst and H. Schmidt (eds) African Modernities, Oxford: James Currey, 2002. Other cultural studies of black American–black South African exchange during the early twentieth century include Y. Gershoni, Africans on African-Americans: The Creation and Uses of an African-American Myth, New York: New York University Press, 1997; A. Kemp, ‘ “Up from Slavery” and Other Narratives: Black South African Performances of the American Negro 1920– 1943’, unpub. Ph.D. dissertation, Northwestern University, 1997; Z. Magubane, Bringing the Empire Home: Race, Class, and Gender in Britain and Colonial South Africa, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004; T. Couzens, ‘ “Moralizing Leisure Time”: The Transatlantic Connection and Black Johannesburg, 1918–1936’, in S. Marks and R. Rathbone (eds) Industrialisation and Social Change in South Africa: African Class Formation, Culture and Consciousness 1870–1930, Harlow: Longman, 1982, pp. 314–37. For a useful comparative political study see G.M. Frederickson, Black Liberation: A Comparative History of Black Ideologies in the United States and South Africa, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. 4 A useful historical outline is W. Beinart, Twentieth-Century South Africa, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. See also S. Marks and S. Trapido (eds) The Politics of Race, Class and Nationalism in Twentieth Century South Africa, Harlow, Essex: Longman, 1987; J. and R. Simons, Class and Colour in South Africa 1850–1950, London: International Defence and Aid Fund for Southern Africa, 1983. 5 M. Diawara, In Search of Africa, London: Harvard University Press, 1998, p. 100. 6 Ibid., p. 117. 7 Ibid., p. 33. 8 S. Hall, ‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora’, in P. Williams and L. Chrisman (eds) Colonial Discourse and Post-colonial Theory: A Reader, Hemel Hempstead: Harvester, 1993, p. 401. 9 See L. Chrisman, ‘Journeying to Death: A Critique of Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic’, Race and Class: A Journal for Black and Third World Liberation 39/2, 1997, 51–64, and chapter 4 of Postcolonial Contraventions: Cultural Readings of Race, Imperialism and Transnationalism, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003. See also B. M’Baye, ‘The Representation of Africa in Black Atlantic Studies of Race and Literature’, Thamyris/intersecting 11, 2003, 151–62. 10 For an excellent discussion of post-apartheid poetry, see K. Sole, ‘The Witness of Poetry: Economic Calculation, Civil Society and the Limits of Everyday Experience in a Liberated South Africa’, New Formations 45, 2001, 24–53. See also S. Lewis’s interview with K. Sole in Wasaﬁri 38, 2003, 5–11.

Black South African poetry

43

11 My focus here is on L. Rampolokeng, Horns for Hondo, Johannesburg, South Africa: COSAW, 1990, and Talking Rain, Johannesburg, South Africa: COSAW, 1993; Seitlhamo Motsapi, earthstepper / the ocean is very shallow, Grahamstown, South Africa: Deep South, 1995; repr. Portland, Oreg.: International Specialized Book Services, 2004. Their poetry is anthologized in R. Berold (ed.) It All Begins: Poems from Postliberational South Africa, Scottsville, South Africa: Gecko Poetry, 2003; D. Hirson (ed.) The Lava of this Land: South African Poetry 1960–1996, Chicago: TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press/UNESCO, 1997. Motsapi is also anthologized in A. Schwartzman (ed.) Ten South African Poets, Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1999. Many other South African poets critically engage with post-apartheid politics, economics and society. They include the late Tatamkhulu Afrika, Vonani Bila, the Botsotso Jesters, Angiﬁ Dladla, Peter Horn, Jeremy Cronin, Thwadi Komane, Mzi Mahola, Joan Metelerkamp, Mxolisi Nyezwa, Karen Press, Kelwyn Sole, and Phedi Tlhobolo. See also R. Berold (ed.) South African Poets on Poetry: Interviews from New Coin 1992–2001, Scottsville, South Africa: Gecko Poetry, 2003. 12 Motsapi, ‘moni’, earthstepper, p. 51. 13 Rampolokeng, ‘rap 33’, Horns for Hondo, p. 57. 14 Motsapi, ‘ityopia phase-in’, earthstepper, p. 42; Rampolokeng, ‘Broederbondage’, Talking Rain, 16. All Motsapi poems discussed in this chapter are taken from earthstepper / the ocean is very shallow. 15 Motsapi, ‘brotha saul’, earthstepper, p. 16. The colour symbolism here plays with the established Rastafari colours of red, gold and green. 16 For a discussion of Rampolokeng’s transatlantic aesthetics that focuses on Rampolokeng’s relationship with Caribbean dub, see J. Wright, ‘Syncretism as a Strategy of Political Resistance in the Poetry of Lesego Rampolokeng’, Scrutiny 2: Issues in English Studies in Southern Africa 9/1, 2004, 88–98. 17 I discuss this dialogue in ‘Rethinking Black Atlanticism’, The Black Scholar 30/ 3–4, 2000, 12–17; chapter 5 of Postcolonial Contraventions. 18 In ‘rap 6’, Rampolokeng, Horns for Hondo, p. 14. 19 P. Gilroy, Small Acts: Thoughts on the Politics of Black Cultures, London: Serpent’s Tail, 1994, p. 133. 20 Diawara, In Search of Africa, p. 41. 21 For a related discussion see M. Titlestad and M. Kissack, ‘ “The Mangled Flesh of Our Griots”: Music in the Verse of Seitlhamo Motsapi’, Scrutiny 2: Issues in English Studies in Southern Africa 9/1, 2004, 56–67. 22 Motsapi, ‘djeni’, earthstepper, p. 29. 23 Motsapi, ‘maasai dreadbeat’, earthstepper, p. 22. 24 Motsapi, ‘farover’, earthstepper, p. 15. ‘Chicco’ works as a pun that refers to the popular South African music producer and musician, Chicco Twala, as well as to Chicco the manufacturer of baby and toddler products. Thanks to Sarah Meer for pointing out Chicco Twala. 25 This is from the ‘Afropop Worldwide’ URL: http://www.afropop.org/explore/ style-info/ID/9/makossa 26 Motsapi, ‘brotha saul’, earthstepper, p. 16. 27 Motsapi, ‘djeni’, earthstepper, p. 29. 28 Motsapi, ‘moni’, earthstepper, p. 51. 29 Motsapi, ‘mah boy stah’, earthstepper, p. 33. 30 Motsapi, ‘the sun used to be white’, earthstepper, p. 18. 31 Motsapi, ‘farover’, earthstepper, p. 15.

44

Negotiating African modernities

32 Motsapi, ‘drum intervention’, earthstepper, p. 25. 33 Th.W. Adorno, ‘Perennial Fashion – Jazz’, Prisms, trans. S. Weber Nicolsen and S. Weber, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983, pp. 119–32. 34 Motsapi, ‘malombo paten dansi’, earthstepper, p. 35. The band Malombo is headed by guitarist Philip Tabane. In the CD liner notes of Uhh! (ICON records, 1989), Tabane has this to say regarding his musical relationship to the USA: ‘Often then there were groups who imitated American music. I appreciated it, but it wasn’t me . . . When I ﬁrst heard Wes Montgomery playing the guitar, it was 1952, ’53 . . . I said to myself, “my brother can play guitar better than this guy . . . how can he show them that he can play?” We can always hear from them [in America], but they can’t hear from us. It was a very painful thing to me.’ 35 Motsapi, ‘malombo paten dansi’, earthstepper, p. 37. The references here are to Linton Kwesi Johnson and Mutabaruka, Afro-Caribbean ‘dub’ poets. 36 Motsapi, ‘maasai dreadbeat’, earthstepper, p. 22. 37 Motsapi, ‘malombo paten dansi’, earthstepper, p. 34. 38 Ibid., p. 38. 39 Rampolokeng, ‘rap 33’, Horns for Hondo, p. 57. 40 Rampolokeng, ‘Buckle Up Your Heart America My Eponymous Leader’, Talking Rain, p. 6. 41 M. Hanchard, ‘Afro-Modernity: Temporality, Politics, and the African Diaspora’, Alter/Native Modernities, special issue of Public Culture 27, 1999, ed. D. Parameshwar Gaonkar, 245–68. 42 Ibid., p. 256. 43 Ibid. 44 Ibid., p. 257. 45 Chapter 9, ‘The Fateful 13’, in S.T. Plaatje, Native Life in South Africa Before and Since the European War and the Boer Rebellion [1916], intro. by B. Willan, foreword by B. Head, Athens: Ohio University Press, 1991. 46 Motsapi, ‘fayam’, earthstepper, p. 6. 47 Rampolokeng, ‘Rap Attack’, Talking Rain, p. 39. 48 Sole, ‘The Witness of Poetry’, p. 26. For further analysis of the ANC’s neoliberal economic policies see P. Bond, Elite Transition: From Apartheid to Neoliberalism in South Africa, Pietermaritzburg, South Africa: University of Natal Press, 2000; J.S. Saul, ‘Cry for the Beloved Country’, Monthly Review 52/8, 2001, 1–52. 49 Rampolokeng, ‘rap 7’, Horns for Hondo, p. 15. 50 Rampolokeng, ‘rap 42’, Horns for Hondo, p. 70. 51 Rampolokeng, ‘rap 48’, Horns for Hondo, p. 80. 52 Rampolokeng, ‘Endbeginnings’, Horns for Hondo, p. 95. 53 Rampolokeng, ‘Dawn of a Dying Time (a Bavino Monologue)’, Talking Rain, p. 24. 54 Ibid., p. 27. 55 Motsapi, ‘river robert’, earthstepper, p. 82.

Bibliography Adorno, Th.W., ‘Perennial Fashion – Jazz’, Prisms, trans. S. Weber Nicolsen and S. Weber, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983, pp. 119–32. Beinart, W., Twentieth-Century South Africa, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.

Black South African poetry

45

Berold, R. (ed.) It All Begins: Poems from Postliberational South Africa, Scottsville, South Africa: Gecko Poetry, 2003. —— (ed.) South African Poets on Poetry: Interviews from New Coin 1992–2001, Scottsville, South Africa: Gecko Poetry, 2003. Bond, P., Elite Transition: From Apartheid to Neoliberalism in South Africa, Pietermaritzburg, South Africa: University of Natal Press, 2000. Chrisman, L. ‘Journeying to Death: A Critique of Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic’, Race and Class: A Journal for Black and Third World Liberation 39/2, 1997, 51–64. —— ‘Rethinking Black Atlanticism’, The Black Scholar 30, 3–4, 2000, 12–17. —— Postcolonial Contraventions: Cultural Readings of Race, Imperialism and Transnationalism, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003. Couzens, T., ‘ “Moralizing Leisure Time”: The Transatlantic Connection and Black Johannesburg, 1918–1936’, in S. Marks and R. Rathbone (eds) Industrialisation and Social Change in South Africa: African Class Formation, Culture and Consciousness 1870–1930, Harlow: Longman, 1982, pp. 314–37. Deutsch, J.-G., P. Probst and H. Schmidt (eds) African Modernities, Oxford: James Currey, 2002. Diawara, M., In Search of Africa, London: Harvard University Press, 1998. Erlmann, V., Music, Modernity and the Global Imagination: South Africa and the West, New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Frederickson, G.M., Black Liberation: A Comparative History of Black Ideologies in the United States and South Africa, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Gershoni, Y., Africans on African-Americans: The Creation and Uses of an African-American Myth, New York: New York University Press, 1997. Gilroy, P., The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, London: Verso, 1993. —— Small Acts: Thoughts on the Politics of Black Cultures, London: Serpent’s Tail, 1994. Hall, S., ‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora’, in P. Williams and L. Chrisman (eds) Colonial Discourse and Post-colonial Theory: A Reader, Hemel Hempstead: Harvester, 1993, pp. 392–403. Hanchard, M., ‘Afro-Modernity: Temporality, Politics, and the African Diaspora’, Alter/Native Modernities, special issue of Public Culture 27, 1999, ed. Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, 245–68. Hirson, D. (ed.) The Lava of this Land: South African Poetry 1960–1996, Chicago: TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press/ UNESCO, 1997. Kemp, A., ‘ “Up from Slavery” and Other Narratives: Black South African Performances of the American Negro 1920–1943, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Northwestern University, 1997. Lewis, S., ‘Interview with Kelwyn Sole’, Wasaﬁri 38, 2003, 5–11. Magubane, Z., Bringing the Empire Home: Race, Class, and Gender in Britain and Colonial South Africa, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Marks, S. and S. Trapido (eds) The Politics of Race, Class and Nationalism in Twentieth Century South Africa, Harlow, Essex: Longman, 1987. Masilela, N., ‘ “The Black Atlantic” and African Modernity in South Africa’, Research in African Literatures 27, 1997, 88–96.

46

Negotiating African modernities

M’Baye, B., ‘The Representation of Africa in Black Atlantic Studies of Race and Literature’, Thamyris/intersecting 11, 2003, 151–62. Motsapi, S., earthstepper / the ocean is very shallow, Grahamstown, South Africa: Deep South, 1995; repr. Portland, Oreg.: International Specialized Book Services, 2004. Pettinger, Alasdair (ed.) Always Elsewhere: Travels of the Black Atlantic, London: Cassell, 1998. Plaatje, Solomon T., Native Life in South Africa Before and Since the European War and the Boer Rebellion [1916], intro. by B. Willan, foreword by B. Head, Athens: Ohio University Press, 1991. Rampolokeng, L., Horns for Hondo, Johannesburg, South Africa: COSAW, 1990. —— Talking Rain, Johannesburg, South Africa: COSAW, 1993. Roach, J., Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance, New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Saul, J.S., ‘Cry for the Beloved Country’, Monthly Review 52/8, 2001, 1–52. Schwartzman, A. (ed.) Ten South African Poets, Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1999. Simons, J. and R., Class and Colour in South Africa 1850–1950, London: International Defence and Aid Fund for Southern Africa, 1983. Sole, K., ‘The Witness of Poetry: Economic Calculation, Civil Society and the Limits of Everyday Experience in a Liberated South Africa’, New Formations 45, 2001, 24–53. Titlestad, M. and M. Kissack. ‘ “The Mangled Flesh of Our Griots”: Music in the Verse of Seitlhamo Motsapi’, Scrutiny 2: Issues in English Studies in Southern Africa 9/1, 2004, 56–67. Walvin, J., Making the Black Atlantic: Britain and the African Diaspora, London: Cassell, 2000. Wright, J., ‘Syncretism as a Strategy of Political Resistance in the Poetry of Lesego Rampolokeng’, Scrutiny 2: Issues in English Studies in Southern Africa 9/1, 2004, 88–98.

3

Failure to connect – resistant modernities at national crossroads Solomon Plaatje and Mohandas Gandhi Elleke Boehmer

Diptych In this chapter I want to set up a diptych involving two anti-colonial nationalists, both of whom began their political work just over one hundred years ago in South Africa, and who played inﬂuential and even iconic roles in the movements which they led. Both arguably left their mark on some of the ‘postcolonial’ concepts of resistance we work with today. Both, too, were locally grounded, and yet cross-nationally connected as activists and intellectuals – hence the neat symmetries of the diptych. The two historical ﬁgures are, on the one hand, the African nationalist Solomon Plaatje (1876–1932), and, on the other, the Indian nationalist Mohandas Gandhi (1869–1948), who, from 1893, spent some 21 years working as a lawyer in South Africa representing Indians, in particular the rights of indentured people.1 Gandhi and Plaatje worked at a time when anti-colonial nationalist elites, European-educated and bourgeois in social formation, were highly isolated within their own social contexts. Therefore these elites stood to gain much from cross-border or transnational link-ups with other, similarly placed elites, in order to learn by example and strengthen their own case for selfdetermination. Transnational networking of this kind was demonstrably in operation in relations between Irish, Indian, Boer and Egyptian nationalists, in diﬀerent conﬁgurations, around the turn of the last century. In the case of Plaatje and Gandhi in South Africa, however, despite the political commonalities which might potentially have connected them, there was disappointingly – even, timist judgements aside, surprisingly – no such linkup. In what follows I will attempt to investigate this breach in and apparent failure of the often mutually constructive phenomenon of international interaction and solidarity, and to question its implications. In particular I

48

Negotiating African modernities

would like to consider how the lack of intersection, even disjuncture, between the two activist leaders impacts on the concept of the hybrid, outernational formation of modern black identities which, pace Gilroy, has become inﬂuential – if not dominant – in cultural and postcolonial studies.2

Cross-nationalist contexts In colonized societies, such as in South Africa and in India at the start of the twentieth century, as Partha Chatterjee amongst others has described, native elites exploited ‘modern’ political structures and technological networks even as they ﬁlled such structures with traditional content.3 Although widely separated by the broad physical reaches of the British Empire, as well as by cultural, social and linguistic diﬀerences, nationalist leaders and intellectuals therefore potentially occupied areas of common political ground: ground situated on the ‘postcolonial’-looking cusp between tradition and modernity. To forge national pride they sought to revive ‘ancient’ customs, for example. Yet at the same time, in so doing, they referred in knowing, rationalist, and sophisticated ways to the cultural revival programs of similarly positioned elites in other parts of the world.4 By using in particular the modern technology of the telegraph they shaped deﬁnitive, newly minted concepts of traditionally based political agency. They honed, in interaction with one another, notions of identity as formulated via practices of self-help, for instance, and developed strategies for up-front and self-assertive modern resistance – most famously, the hunger strike and the boycott.5 That they were able to link up with relative facility in these kinds of ways of course owed a great deal to the Empire’s speeded-up communication grids. This accords with Gilroy’s idea that it was within the chronotope of marine transit, on the ships of the middle passage and the triangulated voyages of the slave trade, that black activists and their ideas of self and of cultural self-identiﬁcation could circulate and cross-fertilize. In the case I am examining here, however, the grids and entangled networks of exchange are more technologically complex and geographically broader, certainly extending to Africa itself and to the Indian Ocean. Moreover, the cultural mix of nationalists and intellectuals was at least in theory more diverse, including Ireland, Egypt and Bengal, as well as South Africa.6 Native elites from these diﬀerent regions came into contact with one another and one another’s ideas on the Empire’s steamships and trains; they read each other’s newspapers, The United Irishman, The Gaelic American, and Bande Mataram, which reached them on those same ships and trains, and via telegraph links. The colonial authorities, no matter how authoritarian and widely dispersed, could not fully police this cross-border contact, given that it would

Solomon Plaatje and Mohandas Gandhi 49 cut oﬀ the blood supply of the British Empire itself were the operation of these networks to be stemmed. Colonies worldwide had for some time been interconnected through the medium of widely ramifying administrative circuits animated by interpersonal connections but fundamentally based on the road, rail, steamship, and telegraph links which had initially been laid down in order to put in place and reinforce imperial security and eﬃcient government. Furthermore, the journeys undertaken by nationalist activists were often in the cause of educational self-advancement or some form of qualiﬁed self-representation, causes encouraged by imperial authority in the interests of forging a class of Macaulayite administrative middlemen across the Empire. Through their cross-national engagements, if variously established, anti-colonial elites in Calcutta, Cairo, Kimberley, and Dublin were essentially helping themselves to cross-border facilities already in existence. Poised between tradition and modernity, anti-colonial resistance movements, in particular between Ireland and Bengal, were haunted by, in Benedict Anderson’s phrase, ‘spectres of comparison’ – inﬂuential political and cultural modalities – from elsewhere (remembering however that Anderson continues to give primacy to Europe-based nationalisms).7 As I have suggested elsewhere, such movements can therefore be said to have emerged not between self and other but amongst others.8 Despite their relative social and political isolation in their own countries, anti-colonial intellectuals and nationalists crucially shared class expectations and the experience of homologous educational pilgrimages with one another across colonial borders, as well as their access to communication networks. It thus became almost self-evident to them to draw on situations corresponding to their own for inspiration, solidarity, guidance, and support. Acts of cooperation, even if purely performative, could be of mutual beneﬁt, especially where the opposition was seemingly so all-encompassing. As Aimé Césaire once observed in passing, the perception of anti-colonial movements operating internationally, and in international touch with one another, gave individual resistance movements an inspiriting sense of collective power.9 It was a rhetorical device popular with the Irish nationalists Maud Gonne and Arthur Griﬃth, too, to refer to the oppressions under the Empire of peoples across the world, and to their undying spirit of resistance, in order to raise support for the cause of Irish freedom.10 As the British aristocrat and supporter of Egyptian nationalism, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, implied in his rousing poem ‘The Wind and the Whirlwind’, published in at least one nationalist paper in India as well as in Egypt, nationalist fervour against the Empire was a mighty force.11 It had the power to sweep from country to country around the world. As will have become clear by this point, the picture of the cross-border

50

Negotiating African modernities

interchange of anti-colonial and nationalist discourses and motifs which I have built up so far gives a more constellated, interactive, and dialogic picture of the colonial world and of peripheral modernities than has been recognized until recently. As does Lyn Innes in her History of Black and Asian Writing in Britain 1700–2000 with respect to cultural interaction within Britain, it frees such discourses from charges of parochialism and essentialism.12 Certainly it allows us to pre-date the so-called hybrid constructions of identity and representations of modern selves which we conventionally designate postcolonial, against the grain, or interdiscursive, to years signiﬁcantly prior to the conventional chronological cut-oﬀ year of 1947. Moreover, with reference to Gilroy, the interactive picture signiﬁcantly complicates and expands the ‘black Atlantic’ basin as the crucible of interactive black/non-white modernities. It requests that the notion of the outernational formation of modern identity should be transposed and perhaps adapted to include, for example, the Indian Ocean, and, with respect to this study at least, the Atlantic Ocean as linked to the Indian. (The latter would pertain also to Bengal-Ireland connections.) In this regard it is worth noting that complicated cross-nationalist channels of inﬂuence and support have continued to operate across the twentieth century with greater and lesser degrees of success. So, for example, IRA activity in Northern Ireland in the late 1960s and early 1970s was directly galvanized by the example of the Civil Rights Movement in the US, though with very diﬀerent outcomes. And the IRA has in the past itself given acknowledged and unacknowledged support to the African National Congress and the PLO (certainly up to the late 1980s), as well as, more recently, to Colombian guerrillas and, allegedly, the Tamil Tigers.13 A key distinction between this scenario of anti-imperial cross-nationalism and Gilroy’s thinking is that the notion of emergent nationalist selfhood honed in the context of interrelationship which operates here maintains a central focus on the national; that is, the nationalist movement as base or ground of resistance. This focus is, relatively speaking, downgraded by Gilroy’s outernational, postmodernist routings and mappings. For example, in the case of Swadeshi Resistance in Bengal in the 1900s, a resistant nationalist selfhood emerged out of local traditions of atmasakti – the concept of ‘own force’ – and at the same time in the stimulating awareness of the contemporaneous Sinn Féin emphasis on cultural self-help or selfreliance. Aurobindo Ghose, one of the leaders of the Bengal Resistance, was in touch with developments in Ireland from the 1880s; a few decades later Gandhi certainly wrote of the inspirational example of self-help and passive resistance in Ireland in Indian Opinion. Such recognitions were preeminently modern, implicitly delighting in the exchanges which modern technologies had made available in the at least superﬁcially cosmopolitan

Solomon Plaatje and Mohandas Gandhi 51 emergence of modern, nationalist selves. Yet, even so, the nationalists’ focus remained primarily on the home nation – in this case India. By and large, nationalist movements in opposition to empire were concerned with their own particular processes of subversion or self-deﬁnition, even as they referenced or drew inspirational example from others. Cross-border solidarities were not allowed to compromise the longed-for integrity of the nation or create permanent structures of international interaction. Having set the scene, what I’d like to do in the second half of this chapter is to consider in detail the important case of Plaatje and Gandhi in South Africa – a case where, despite indications to the contrary, two proximate, potentially interactive anti-colonial nationalisms did not develop transnational links. I want to investigate the implications of this breach in or simple absence of the phenomenon of transnational solidarity. Does the omission of contact – omission rather than active rejection – signal a complicity with deep-seated forms of racist essentialism and xenophobia, forms characteristic of empire yet not wholly attributable to it, which the crossborder tendencies of the day were not able to override? Or does it suggest that cross-nationalist handholding takes place only in situations where nationalist movements are at once culturally linked and yet geographically distant from one another, and not in competition for scarce political and material resources? In other words, is cross-nationalism or transnationalism predominantly an idealistic and gestural phenomenon, which breaks down at actual political crossroads, or in lived situations of jockeying for territory, position and power? Certainly, as an aside, it is interesting that ethnic if not racial considerations do seem to have inhibited a two-way, cross-nationalist ﬂow of ideas and inﬂuence between India and Ireland at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. India learned from and was strengthened by the example of Ireland provided by Charles Parnell’s nationalist determination and recalcitrance, as well as by campaigns for home rule, boycott and self-help, as the pages of The United Irishman attest. Activists with radical Irish backgrounds like Annie Besant, Sister Nivedita, and the Cousenses contributed to the struggle for national freedom in India. Ireland, however, seems not to have drawn inspiration or example from India in the same way. In Arthur Griﬃth’s United Irishman the regular newsin-brief column, supplying heartening details of nationalist struggles abroad, did feature the occasional mention of India, in particular Bengal, especially after 1904. Certain Irish nationalists, like Yeats and James Cousens, were Theosophists, although Theosophy is of course at base a western repackaging of so-called Eastern spiritual lore. Yet this is most of the evidence I’ve been able to locate of inﬂuence moving in the other direction, from India to Ireland. By contrast, Irish republicans were happy to collaborate with white

52

Negotiating African modernities

nationalists like the Boers in the Anglo-Boer War, to share their anti-Semitic vocabulary, and to deplore along with them the use of black African troops by the British against the Boers. In the case of the lack of cross-national ﬂow from India to Ireland, it would appear, culturalist and racist considerations did probably intervene.14

Solomon Plaatje and Mohandas Gandhi To outline fully the potential of historical and geographic convergence between the nationalisms of Plaatje and Gandhi, despite their actual lack of intersection, this section will begin by assembling signiﬁcant commonalities between the two men. As Plaatje, founder secretary of the South African Natives National Congress (SANNC), could not himself be present, his paper to the 1921 Pan-African Congress was read out by W.E.B. Du Bois, an obviously symbolic representative. Plaatje’s paper looked forward to the time when the closer international cooperation of African-origin peoples might address the oppression of natives in South Africa. As his novel Mhudi, completed around this time, conﬁrms, Plaatje post-1918 was keen to invoke and develop the idea of an alternative, pan-African ‘League of Nations’ which would address African political rights cross-nationally, to the beneﬁt of Africans everywhere.15 Gandhi, during the second half of the nearly twenty-one-year period he spent in South Africa, also called up concepts of cross-border solidarity – in this case of peoples of Indian origin – when campaigning against legislation discriminatory to Indians. He repeatedly appealed to the 1858 Proclamation of Empire, India’s so-called Magna Carta, to claim Indian rights to just and equal treatment not only in India but across the Empire.16 Moreover, as another example of his openness to cross-border activism, if not to cross-nationalist inﬂuence, during his two visits to England in the 1900s, Gandhi was exposed to and probably inﬂuenced by the example of suﬀragette agitation (from 1903) – to their sit-ins, hunger strikes, and other activism. In his view, national identity, speciﬁcally Indian national identity, should be inclusive, bridging caste divides and also placing women on an equal footing with men. Plaatje, relatedly, counted feminists among his friends, wrote the ﬁrst woman-centred African novel, Mhudi (1930), and called for equal rights for women: Under the Union Jack every person is his neighbour’s equal . . . race or colour is no bar, and we hope, in the near future, to be able to record that one’s sex will no longer debar her from exercising a privilege hitherto enjoyed by the sterner sex only.17

Solomon Plaatje and Mohandas Gandhi 53 But their shared pan-nationalism and feminism is not where the comparison between Gandhi and Plaatje ends. Both political leaders were energetic as journalists and as activists in South Africa in the ﬁrst decadeand-a-half of the twentieth century; both were admirers of Ruskin’s valorization of labour and craftsmanship in Unto this Last; and both were advocates of temperance, if for diﬀerent reasons. Both also believed that common experiences of discrimination and of the denial of rights formed potential bonds of ‘sympathy and cooperation’ (Plaatje’s words) between non-white South Africans.18 Both, too, invoked the rights of their peoples as British citizens as at once a political tactic and as powerful rhetoric. Both proclaimed the values of ‘civilization’ – resting upon justice, equality and the rule of law – as against imperial barbarisms, in particular racial discrimination.19 For his part, Plaatje, on at least two occasions, went some way to mobilizing bonds of sympathy between South Africans – that is, between South African citizens from diﬀerent racial categories – in his eﬀorts to organize joint meetings between community groups. The ﬁrst meeting was in 1912, bringing together the predominantly Coloured or mixed-race African People’s Organization, led by Dr Abdurahman, and his own SANNC. At one of these meetings he made a reference to linking up with ‘Indian organizations’ also. He kept a weather-eye open for Indian cultural and political developments, including back in India, which related to native interests at home. He commented favourably in his journalism on the 1906 election of the Tory, Sir Mancherjee Bhownaggree, as a British MP. In 1917 he praised the fact that Indian papers printed in Durban, papers for which Gandhi had once been responsible as author and editor, were monitoring local injustices. Gandhi had founded Indian Opinion, a paper which was housed at Phoenix settlement in Durban, back in 1904. Taken together these details suggest a recognition on Plaatje’s part of the cross-nationalist lessons which might be learned from the South African Indians’ slightly anterior struggle. Interestingly, and indicatively, he described the 1913 peaceful protest against pass regulations by 600 African women in the Orange Free State as ‘passive resistance’. His phrasing reveals that he was probably aware of the non-violent campaign of passive resistance organized by Gandhi against restrictions on Indian registration in the Transvaal, the so-called ‘Black Act’. His friend Dr Abdurahman certainly noted that ‘British Indians’ were proponents of passive resistance in a speech that Plaatje admired, and cited in his own journalism, including it in Native Life in South Africa (1918). Plaatje was also aware that Indians in South Africa suﬀered working restrictions and social and political exclusions, including restrictions on so-called non-Christian marriages, just as Africans did. Yet, while mutually aware of the discrimination experienced by other socalled non-whites or non-Europeans, as well as of the strength that might lie

54

Negotiating African modernities

in expressions of solidarity, neither Gandhi nor Plaatje in fact mobilized the latent links between the constituencies they represented. And, as if following their leader, neither did others within their diﬀerent political organizations. A modern, nationalist outlook in the cases of Plaatje and Gandhi thus did not make for political or cultural interchange. There was no conﬂict as such, but also no exchange. No matter how technologized, speeded up, cosmopolitan and cross-nationalist were the potential channels of interaction which existed between them – especially the channels supplied by newspaper journalism and their busy collage-like pages of worldwide reporting – the two men at no point came anywhere close to collaboration; far from it. This was despite the fact that as avid consumers of and writers for newspapers they must have been aware at one time or another of each other’s political campaigns. To probe the nature of this in many ways astonishing lack or absence, it is worth elaborating the parallels between them even further, in particular in relation to the cross-nationalist movements and eﬀorts which they did manage to forge. This will have the eﬀect of highlighting by contrast the oddity of the fact that the crossroads of modernity that might have brought them together seem instead to have kept them apart. Signiﬁcantly, both Plaatje and Gandhi began as moderate leaders who, during the decades in question, 1900–20, believed in constitutional processes of protest and negotiation. Multilingual, both leaders self-consciously styled themselves as mediators between communities – as cross-cultural interpreters between their own people and the British – in eﬀect as inhabitors of crossroads. Moreover, thinking again of technologies that interconnect, both Gandhi and Plaatje interestingly wrote the foundational texts for the national movements with which they were associated, Indian nationalism and South African nationalism, on board ships traveling either to or from London on political missions. Gandhi wrote Hind Swaraj in 1909 while traveling from England to South Africa on the Kildonan Castle after campaigning for Indian rights in London. Plaatje wrote substantial parts of Native Life in South Africa when sailing to London in 1914 on board the Norseman to protest to the imperial government about native land rights. The texts were thus shipborn/e, and, while drawing on and citing their respective writers’ own journalism, they are fascinatingly journalistic also in their structure and manner of composition. Moreover, though in both texts the leaders are intent on campaigning on a nationalist platform, they are also at pains to cite cultural and political examples from contexts other than their own: they reference cross-nationally. Gandhi, in Hind Swaraj for example, notes the illustrative examples and role models of Tolstoy, Mazzini and Cavour.20 Plaatje, in Native Life in South Africa, in order to demonstrate the imperial

Solomon Plaatje and Mohandas Gandhi 55 loyalty of natives, cites the Tipperary chorus in all the diﬀerent languages of South Africa, including what he called Hindustani.21 Both nationalists, too, generated self-consciously modern and international systems of expressing and channeling political grievance, working interpersonally and creating interest groups, again very much along the same lines. Like Plaatje, Gandhi formed part of two deputations from South Africa to London, in his case in 1906 and 1909, to protest directly to the imperial government, but at the same time to address other constituencies such as liberals and interested ex-colonials within the metropole. Moreover, he set up standing committees to continue the work of protest and petitioning after his departure, as Plaatje was also later to do. Yet the modern space of London, where cosmopolitan interactions were made excitingly possible and practical by state-of-the-art transport and communications grids, was also the place where, perhaps unsurprisingly, and in this context also signiﬁcantly, both Gandhi and Plaatje were inspired to turn back to their own cultural traditions and beliefs. For example, while he was a student in London a pair of Theosophist friends introduced Gandhi to the Bhagavad-gita, at the time an increasingly important text for Hindu nationalism. Plaatje reconnected with Rolong oral traditions at the School of Oriental and African Studies in Russell Square when in 1916 he published collections of oral sayings in Tswana with the linguist Daniel Jones. And yet, even so, while potentially drawn together by these many parallels, neither man drew strength or solidarity from each other’s situation, deﬁnitely not openly so. They seem, in short, to have been mutually resistant to such contact. Although the movements they led in some cases converged geographically, and were almost contemporaneous, neither sought guidance or example in, or through the medium of, actual collaboration. So Plaatje does not appear to have consulted Gandhi’s political writings which were available in English when he was working on Native Life, although, as a political journalist, he would surely have been aware of them. Plaatje also almost certainly heard Gandhi’s political approach in South Africa praised in Parliament in 1919 by the former Boer War journalist, now politician, Leo Amery. This would have been when he himself was thinking in terms of cross-national solidarity with African America. But he did nothing to enlarge on or animate the potential parallel. Why did cross-national politics and technologies so spectacularly fail to ignite in the case of these two major South Africa-based nationalist leaders?

56 Negotiating African modernities

The lack of contact This ﬁnal section aims to oﬀer ﬁve interconnected answers to this diﬃcult question. It will suggest that all ﬁve may have pertained, even though in diﬀerent forms and with diﬀerent weightings with respect to the two nationalist leaders. One primary reason why Gandhi and Plaatje may have chosen to avoid one another, despite all they potentially held in common, is that they mutually entertained exclusionary stereotypes of one another’s people; that is, of Indians as aliens, of Africans as less civilized. These stereotypes of course circulated at large within the colonial system, yet related in particular to proto-apartheid South Africa where, as was reﬂected in urban planning and the layout of cities in particular after 1948, Indian areas were set up as buﬀer zones between African and white communities. (The situation came to a head in the Cato Manor riots in Durban of 1959.) Descriptions which were current at the time of Africans, for example, as defeated peoples (following the widely ramifying colonial wars of the nineteenth century), or of Indians as eﬀeminate, would have been applied in particularly acute, directive ways in South Africa in the early years of the twentieth century.22 There is certainly no lack of instances in twentieth-century Indian and African writing of such stereotypes being mutually posted, as it were, across the Indian Ocean.23 This reason overlaps with a second, related one, that despite their appeals to international rights, their nationalism found expression in a certain cultural chauvinism and atavism, which cannot wholly be blamed on empire. While nationalist movements across the Third World have importantly always sought the liberation of the oppressed, at the same time nationalism tends to self-deﬁne in relation to an Other, conventionally labelled as inferior in some way. In this anti-colonial nationalist movements are no exception.24 As has been seen, Gandhi and Plaatje shared as a key objective the integrity and unity of their diﬀerent home nations-to-be, to the exclusion of others. So, where Britain had strategically to be addressed as the champion of liberalism and equal rights, other candidates for othering were required, in particular candidates who were anyway already perceived as competitors for land and for rights claims. Although Plaatje’s chief Other was the Afrikaner, as I will shortly outline, he also entertained essentialized views of Indians in South Africa as non-indigenous migrants, and therefore as parasitic upon Transvaal society. They were ‘Asiatics’ or ‘British Indians’; to him they did not belong in the way natives did. For his part, Gandhi, while in South Africa, concerned himself exclusively with an Indian-centred activism: he did not, for example, form links with the leaders of Johannesburg’s Chinese community who were, however, like

Solomon Plaatje and Mohandas Gandhi 57 him, campaigning for self-representation and against discrimination.25 To this extent Gandhi’s experiments with passive resistance, while in South Africa, can be seen as an almost deliberate preparation for the political struggle he would help forge back in India, even though his rise to prominence in Congress was obviously not foreseen. As far as Africans were concerned, his views are interestingly not on record. ‘Natives’ seem to have existed beyond his immediate frameworks of reference. In relation to Plaatje, it is worth adding here that from his Cape Liberal point of view the outsider status of Indians within the demographic structures of South Africa would have been exacerbated by the fact that Indian communities tended to be concentrated in the Transvaal and Natal. Up to his return from South Africa after his ﬁrst trip to Britain, he had not much frequented the Transvaal, and Natal always remained a relatively unfamiliar space. To Plaatje, too, a certain amount of divide-and-rule resentment may have been in evidence, in that he believed that Indians were more favourably treated under imperial law, whereas Africans were addressed as aliens in the country of their birth. His anger at this injustice is of course the motor force behind Native Life in South Africa. Ultimately it was of prime importance to Plaatje to form bonds of solidarity within racial groups, or intra-racially. It was this that spurred his interest in exploring pan-nationalist ties with African America. On the subject of competing nationalisms there is, however, a third important factor to introduce to the equation, or more accurately nonequation, of African and Indian nationalisms in South Africa, namely, Afrikaner nationalism. As Mhudi conﬁrms, Plaatje was keenly aware that collaborations with a rival nationalism, in particular one that was racially based like Afrikaner nationalism, could work to the detriment of the more traditionally oppressed party to the relationship – in this case Africans. Indeed, so suspicious was he of Afrikaner nationalist encroachments upon black rights that ‘nationalist’ becomes something of a term of insult in his later political writings. Boer national traditions, it was his gloomy opinion, had as their aim the enslavement of dark races. Gandhi, too, though he felt a certain sympathy for Afrikaner nationalist claims during the Boer War, could have found little common ground between his political approach and the exclusivist, racially-coded nationalism of the Boers. A fourth reason to account for why it is that the two South Africa-based nationalists in question kept apart refers to their very diﬀerent religious traditions and preoccupations. On the ‘African’ side, the founding fathers of the South African Natives National Congress tended virtually to a man to be mission-educated and to profess the Christian faith. In their Protestant zeal and concern to do right by those who had ‘saved’ them, they may well have shared with their white Christian brothers prejudices vis-à-vis

58

Negotiating African modernities

faiths like Islam and Hinduism. On the other side, within the Indian community, religious divides may not have been as marked as they were back in India, as Gandhi’s own eﬀorts to bring the communities together, and his collaboration with Dr Abdurahman, conﬁrm. Yet the communalist dangers posed even by potential divides may have been suﬃciently preoccupying to prevent attempts to reach out to other communities also. Finally, or ﬁfthly, as the observation of Plaatje’s concerning ‘enslavement’ by Afrikaners suggests, it may be that contiguous nationalisms claiming both ethnic identity and civic representation are simply not as favourably placed for cross-national cooperation and exchange as are nationalisms situated at a greater distance from one another. (Where nationalism is viewed under its more modern, interactive aspect.) This may well be the most compelling reason of all. In his book Literature, Partition and the Nation-State, focusing on Ireland and Palestine, Joe Cleary illuminatingly explores the dilemma represented by conﬂicting claims to national self-determination when the communities involved are territorially interspersed. Due to racial segregation in early twentieth-century South Africa, the national communities I’ve been looking at were not in fact interspersed. However, they were, as I’ve already said, proximate, and their claims to social democracy and political liberation within a racially segregated context had the potential quickly to become competitive, or at least to be viewed as competitive. Essentially, they expressed ethnically-based nationalisms and sought a more or less homogeneously deﬁned sovereignty within South Africa and within the Empire. The rainbow nation came later. In such a situation of competition for limited resources, such as land, any mediation between them would ﬁrst have had to achieve a balancing of rights claims, and a negotiated marking of areas of control and authority. Something closer to this was achieved between the ANC and the South African Indian National Congress in the 1950s. Yet in Gandhi and Plaatje’s time the political structures did not exist within which such negotiations could have taken place. In other words, the lack of structures within which to express cross-nationalist interests caused them by default to fall back on ethnically derived nationalist ideas. Indeed, the irony of the ‘case’ of Gandhi and Plaatje is that the modern democratic institution to which they did have access in order to voice their rights, namely the press, was also the medium which brought them into selfconscious contiguity as representatives of diﬀerent ethnic groups. Plaatje was the editor of the Bechuana Gazette; Gandhi of Indian Opinion. On the pages of their own newspapers their liberal claims to individual rights for their people came into open, spatially-conceived conﬂict with their claims to collective rights as diﬀerent cultural groups, a conﬂict further reinforced

Solomon Plaatje and Mohandas Gandhi 59 by the fact that their newspapers were racially tagged. In this they were reminded almost daily that in segregated South Africa the right to self-representation had to be claimed virtually at the expense of others.

Conclusion In conclusion, I appear to have drawn from my ﬁrst diptych bringing together the two prominent nationalist activists Plaatje and Gandhi, a second dualism, though perhaps a dichotomy rather than a diptych, in which allusive outer- and cross-nationalist connections are contrasted with the solidity of nationalist formations. On the one side of the dichotomy, therefore, we have the performative strategies and cross-border interactions which, Gilroy would argue, are a characteristic of the formation of modern African identities. On the other side we have the pedagogic concern of nationalist movements to forge the independent, unitary nation, a concern which incidentally remains central to any nationalism, no matter how crossborder its inﬂuences and terms of reference.26 With the situations of Plaatje, international traveler within his own black Atlantic, admirer of Du Bois, supporter of equal rights for all races under Cape law, and of Gandhi, the transnational activist moving within an Indian Ocean political and legal network, it was the latter ‘side’, however, which remained dominant. Had there been some historical link between them it would have allowed us to draw interesting conclusions concerning the ability of cross-nationalist correspondences to bridge racial and cultural divides. But the link does not appear to have occurred. In their situation, modernity was interpreted not as the strategic manipulation of identities but in its more conventional guises of self-expression via the mechanisms of state, and of practices of othering.

Notes 1 On Gandhi’s political impact in South Africa, and, conversely, the socio-cultural impact of the country on him, see J. Brown and M. Prozesky (eds) Gandhi and South Africa, Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 1996. Brian Willan’s biography of Plaatje, Sol Plaatje: South African Nationalist 1876–1932, London: Heinemann, 1984, is unsurpassed as a study of this founder of the African National Congress (ANC), then the SANNC. 2 P. Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, London: Verso, 1993. 3 See E. Boehmer, Empire, the National and the Postcolonial 1890–1920, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002; P. Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World – A Derivative Discourse?, London: Zed Press, 1986; and also his The Nation and its Fragments, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994. See also R. Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction, Oxford: Blackwell, 2001, pp. 1–11.

60

Negotiating African modernities

4 See A. Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism, London: Routledge, 1998, pp. 174, 185. Bengal and Ireland were certainly mutually aware in this way. 5 The hunger strike was developed as a powerful political weapon by the suﬀragettes in the 1900s, and boycott emerged out of the Irish land wars of the second half of the nineteenth century. See M. Ellman, The Hunger Artists, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993; R. Foster, Modern Ireland 1600–1972, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988; F.S.L. Lyons, Ireland since the Famine, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971. 6 The idea of social life as entangled, made up of multiple, at times discontinuous durées, is drawn from A. Mbembe, On the Postcolony, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001, p. 14. 7 B. Anderson, The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia and the World, London: Verso, 1998. See also E. Boehmer and B. Moore-Gilbert, ‘Introduction: Transnational Resistance and Postcolonial Studies’, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 4/1, special issue on Transnationalism, 2001, 7–21. 8 Boehmer, Empire, the National and the Postcolonial, p. 2. 9 A. Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (1955), trans. J. Pinkham, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972. 10 M. Gonne, A Servant of the Queen, London: Victor Gollancz, 1938, p. 1; The United Irishman, ed. A. Griﬃth, 1898–1905. 11 W.S. Blunt, Poems, London: Macmillan, 1923; and The Secret History of the English Occupation of Egypt, London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1907, pp. 219–20, 263. 12 C.L. Innes, A History of Black and Asian Writing in Britain 1700–2000, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 13 Refer to Boehmer and Moore-Gilbert, ‘Introduction’, pp. 7–21; M. Thomson, ‘Document’, BBC Radio 4 (15 September 2003). 14 See also M. Malouf’s study of the parallels between the quests of De Valera and Marcus Garvey for national recognition on the world stage in 1919 and 1920: ‘With Dev in America’, Interventions 4/1, special issue on Transnationalism, 22–34. Once again, perceived correspondences did not lead to actual collaboration. 15 S. Plaatje, ‘Address to the Pan-African Congress, Paris, 1921’, in Selected Writings, ed. B. Willan, Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1996, p. 265; S. Plaatje, Mhudi (1930), London: Heinemann, 1989. In her discussion of Plaatje, Laura Chrisman, Rereading the Imperial Romance, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, pp. 15–19, is concerned to highlight some of the pan-African determinants of his ‘decentred national narrative’. It is noteworthy, however, that Plaatje criticized Marcus Garvey for the racial exclusivity of his politics. 16 See M.K. Gandhi, An Autobiography; or The Story of my Experiments with Truth (1927), Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House, 1958; J. Brown, ‘The Anglo-Boer War: An Indian Perspective’, Kunapipi 21/3, 1999, 24–35. 17 Plaatje, Selected Writings, pp. 64–6, pp. 70–1. 18 Ibid., pp. 167–8. 19 Boehmer, Empire, the National and the Postcolonial, pp. 159–60; Plaatje, Selected Writings, p. 74. 20 M.K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, ed. Anthony Parel, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp. 74, 75, 143, 148. 21 S. Plaatje, Native Life in South Africa (1916), Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1995. 22 See Z. Mda’s account of the Frontier Wars involving the Xhosa in The Heart of Redness, Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 2002; M. Sinha, Colonial

Solomon Plaatje and Mohandas Gandhi 61

23

24 25 26

Masculinity: The ‘Manly Englishman’ and the ‘Eﬀeminate Bengali’, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995. See, for example, R. Tagore, The Home and the World, trans. S. Tagore, rev. R. Tagore (1919), Madras: Macmillan India, 1992; Ngugi wa Thiong’o, A Grain of Wheat, London: Heinemann, 1967, p. 62; N. Gordimer, The Conservationist, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972, pp. 33–6, pp. 85, 114–17. C. Levecq, ‘Nation, Race and Postmodern Gestures in Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada, Novel: A Forum on Fiction 35/2–3 (Spring/Summer 2002), 281–98. See K.L. Harris, ‘Gandhi, the Chinese and Passive Resistance’, in J. Brown and M. Prozesky (eds) Gandhi and South Africa, Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 1996, pp. 69–94. On the distinction between the pedagogic and performative aspects of nationalism, see H. Bhabha, ‘DissemiNation: Time, Narrative and the Margins of the Modern Nation’, in H. Bhabha (ed.) Nation and Narration, London and New York: Routledge, 1990, pp. 297–302. See Boehmer and Moore-Gilbert, ‘Introduction’, pp. 7–21.

Bibliography Anderson, B., The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia and the World, London: Verso, 1998. Bhabha, H., ‘DissemiNation: Time, Narrative and the Margins of the Modern Nation’, in H. Bhabha (ed.) Nation and Narration, London and New York: Routledge, 1990, pp. 297–302. Blunt, W.S., Poems, London: Macmillan, 1923. —— The Secret History of the English Occupation of Egypt, London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1907. Boehmer, E., Empire, the National and the Postcolonial 1890–1920, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Boehmer, E. and B. Moore-Gilbert, ‘Introduction: Transnational Resistance and Postcolonial Studies’, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Special issue on Transnationalism 4/1, 2001, 7–21. Brown, J., ‘The Anglo-Boer War: An Indian Perspective’, Kunapipi 21/3, 1999, 24–35. Brown J., and M. Prozesky (eds) Gandhi and South Africa, Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 1996. Césaire, A., Discourse on Colonialism (1955), trans. J. Pinkham, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972. Chatterjee, P., Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World – A Derivative Discourse?, London: Zed Press, 1986. —— The Nation and its Fragments, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994. Chrisman, L., Rereading the Imperial Romance, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Cleary, J., Literature, Partition and the Nation-State: Culture and Conﬂict in Ireland, Israel and Palestine, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Ellman, M., The Hunger Artists, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993. Foster, R., Modern Ireland 1600–1972, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988.

62

Negotiating African modernities

Gandhi, M.K., An Autobiography; or The Story of my Experiments with Truth (1927), Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House, 1958. —— Hind Swaraj, ed. Anthony Parel, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Gilroy, P., The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, London: Verso, 1993. Gonne, M., A Servant of the Queen, London: Victor Gollancz, 1938. Gordimer, N., The Conservationist, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972. Griﬃth, A. (ed.) The United Irishman (1898–1905). Harris, K.L., ‘Gandhi, the Chinese and Passive Resistance’, in J. Brown and M. Prozesky (eds) Gandhi and South Africa, Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 1996, pp. 69–94. Innes, C.L., A History of Black and Asian Writing in Britain 1700–2000, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Levecq, C., ‘Nation, Race and Postmodern Gestures in Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada, Novel: A Forum on Fiction 35/2–3, 2002, pp. 281–98. Loomba, A., Colonialism/Postcolonialism, London: Routledge, 1998. Lyons, F.S.L., Ireland since the Famine, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971. Malouf, M., ‘With Dev in America’, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 4/1, special issue on Transnationalism, 2001, 22–34. Mbembe, A., On the Postcolony, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Mda, Z., The Heart of Redness, Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 2002. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, A Grain of Wheat, London: Heinemann, 1967. Plaatje, S., Native Life in South Africa (1916), Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1995. —— Mhudi (1930), ed. S. Gray, London: Heinemann, 1989. —— Selected Writings, ed. B. Willan, Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1996. Sinha, M., Colonial Masculinity: The ‘Manly Englishman’ and the ‘Eﬀeminate Bengali’, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995. Tagore, R., The Home and the World (1919), trans. S. Tagore, rev. R. Tagore, Madras: Macmillan India, 1992. Willan, B., Sol Plaatje: South African Nationalist 1876–1932, London: Heinemann, 1984. Young, R., Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction, Oxford: Blackwell, 2001.

4

Township modernism1 Ian Baucom

The courtesan’s gaze About midway through the assortment of notes and quotations that comprise his convolute on Baudelaire in the Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin oﬀers the following somewhat surprising suggestion: From the argument of the Guys essay, it would appear that Baudelaire’s fascination with this artist was connected above all with his handling of backgrounds, which diﬀer little from the handling of backgrounds in the theater. But because these pictures, unlike scenery on the stage, are to be viewed from close up, the magic of distance is cancelled for the viewer without his having to renounce the judgment of distance. In the essay on Guys, Baudelaire has characterized the gaze which here and in other places he himself turns toward the distance. Baudelaire dwells on the expression of the oriental courtesan: ‘She directs her gaze at the horizon, like a beast of prey; the same wildness, the same indolent distraction, and also at times the same ﬁxity of attention.’2 I say that Benjamin’s argument is somewhat surprising because in the essay on Guys that Benjamin has in mind (‘The Painter of Modern Life’), Baudelaire gives little mention to the problem of backgrounds, nor does he take up at any great length the question of distance, its magic, or what Benjamin here calls its mode of ‘judgment’. The essay is more famously concerned with the crowd, fashion, the ‘shock’ of metropolitan experience, the importance of the ‘transitory’ and the ‘fugitive’ as indexical modern forms, and the fate of an array of social types, most notably the ﬂâneur, the dandy and the prostitute. Benjamin, to be sure, may simply be conﬂating ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ with another essay, the ‘Salon of 1859’, in which Baudelaire does take up the question of backgrounds, distance, ‘magic’ and stage scenery (‘I long

64

Negotiating African modernities

for the return of the dioramas whose enormous, crude magic subjects me to the spell of a useful illusion. I prefer looking at the backdrop paintings of the stage where I ﬁnd my dreams treated with consummate skill and tragic concision. Those things, so completely false, are for that very reason much closer to the truth’3), and it is worth noting that in the essay on Baudelaire that Benjamin worked up from the Arcades Project material it is the ‘Salon’ rather than ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ that he draws on in discussing Baudelaire’s willed tendency to ‘pierce’ the ‘magic of distance’.4 It is also true that Benjamin quite clearly indicates that his comments on distance are not limited to the ‘Painter’ essay but, more signiﬁcantly, engage ‘the gaze which here and in other places he himself [i.e. Baudelaire] turns to the distance’. That gaze, which somehow manages to cancel the magic without renouncing the judgment of distance, it thus turns out, is for Benjamin proper not only to Guys or his courtesans but to Baudelaire himself. Description here, Benjamin thus argues, is also a form of Baudelairean self-description, as it is a way of typifying the gaze of the modern subject on modernity itself: a modernity ‘viewed from close up’, with the magic of its distance pierced. It is, then, not so much Guys but his courtesan that provides the Benjaminian link between the concerns of ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ and the problem of a modernity conceived as cancelled or no-longermagical distance, or, as Baudelaire puts it in the fuller passage from which Benjamin is drawing, a modernity ﬁgured as a ‘horizon’ toward which the courtesan directs an alternately absent-minded and ﬁxed attention, ‘tinged with a weariness which imitates true melancholy’. And it is this simultaneously weary, disillusioned, and melancholy experience of apprehending ‘modernity’ as a distant ‘horizon’ whose distance has been cancelled that I want to suggest characterizes the modernity not only of Baudelaire’s Parisian demi-monde but of the colonial and postcolonial township, as it further characterizes the modernism both township and demi-monde produce. Or let me put it this way. ‘Modernity’, Frederic Jameson has argued, in his recent A Singular Modernity, is not so much a thing as a narrative convention, a trope or ﬁgure for telling a ‘break’ and re-imagining that ‘break’ as a period. More vexingly, he contends, it is a narrative with which we are not yet done, a ﬁgure still in global circulation. My intention here is to examine some aspects of the imperial and post-imperial circulation of that ﬁgure, particularly as it is deployed in the quasi-Baudelairean demi-monde of the colonial and post-colonial township, and in the literatures that trope a set of Fanonian ‘native-quarters’ as a dispersed global region of modernity discourse and modernist narrativity. As a scattered region of modernism/ modernity discourse, I want to suggest, the global township grounds a melancholy re-reading of what Ayi Kwei Armah calls the ‘capricious

Township modernism

65

gleam’ of modernity, a re-reading in productive tension with Benjamin’s (Baudelairean) counter-allegory of modernity as that ‘cancelled distance’ across which the gaze of the ‘oriental’ courtesan plays, ‘tinged with a weariness that imitates true melancholy’. But what, on Benjamin’s terms, is this ‘cancelled distance’? Modernity itself, I have suggested, and in so doing depart from the more explicit deﬁnition of modernity Baudelaire provides in ‘The Painter of Modern Life’. ‘By modernity’, as Baudelaire there directly states, ‘I mean the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable . . . [the] transitory, fugitive element, whose metamorphoses are so rapid, [and which] must on no account be despised or dispensed with’.5 Shock; intensity; the ephemeral; the fugitive: these are what Foucault and others have taught us to expect of Baudelaire’s theory of modernity. What, then, does such a modernity have to do with ‘the judgment of distance’, with distance pierced, distance cancelled, distance demystiﬁed, or with the melancholy horizon across which the courtesan’s distracted/ ﬁxed gaze plays? By way of preliminary answer let me simply indicate that as Benjamin’s backward-glancing angel is to his quasi-modernist philosophy of history so is this horizon-gazing courtesan to my understanding of a demi-urban or township modernism ‘tinged with a weariness that imitates true melancholy’ as it absent-mindedly and ﬁxedly regards, ‘from close up’, a modernity made to appear like ‘an enormous crude and magic diorama’ on the fringes of the imperial metropolis. I will develop these arguments in what follows. But ﬁrst, since I began with him, let me put the question back to Benjamin. What is this ‘gaze in which the magic of distance is extinguished’? A type of blasé cosmopolitanism surely, to borrow one term from Baudelaire and one from current theories of distance and detachment.6 Cosmopolitan, blasé, dandyish, brothel-wise, the gaze of detached, extinguished distance is also, for Benjamin, something else. ‘Relevant here’, as he notes in the Arcades: ‘my deﬁnition of the aura as the aura of distance opened up with the look that awakens in an object perceived’.7 This, like so much else in the Arcades, is generically cryptic, but a little less so if we follow the comment through to its explication in ‘Some Motifs in Baudelaire’. Aura, as Benjamin makes clear in that essay, is intimately related to an almost Hegelian play of recognition across a distance: Looking at someone carries the implicit expectation that our look will be returned by the object of our gaze. Where this expectation is met . . . there is an experience of the aura to the fullest extent . . . To perceive the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return. This experience corresponds to the data

66

Negotiating African modernities of the memoire involontaire. (These data, incidentally are unique: they are lost to the memory that seeks to retain them. Thus they lend support to a concept of the aura that comprises ‘the unique manifestation of a distance’. The essentially distant is the inapproachable: inapproachability is in fact a primary quality of the ceremonial image.)8

This is dense, too dense for satisfactory explication in a brief paper. So let me note just a few things. Aura, Benjamin argues, adheres to an object ‘awakened’ by a gaze, an object held to return our look from a distance. As such, the auratic object is not merely something we recognize: it is something that recognizes us as proper to it, as privy to its domain. It incorporates us within its sphere. That sphere, however, is distant. The auratic object recognizes us from afar, whether across a distance of time or of space, in either case from across a space the gaze traverses but which it does not, therefore, cancel. The distance remains even as it is crossed, is, indeed, made more fully evident by being crossed. Without this double movement – of traversing and marking the distance between ourselves and the auratic object our gaze has awakened – the aura is pierced as its distance is cancelled. Schematically, then, for Benjamin the pre-modern is that which preserves the magic of distance in the objects it perceives and the modern is that which, while preserving the judgment of distance ﬁnds that distance cancelled or pierced. This, Benjamin suggests, was Baudelaire’s experience of the world, and his modern genius was not to lament but to force such an extinguishing of distance. The fugitive and the transitory may then be intense, but they cannot be auratic. They have been stripped of their magic. They fail to acknowledge us, refuse an organic awakening in our gaze. We regard them as the courtesan regards the things of her world, as the ‘data’ of a no-longer-inapproachable horizon of experience, as that which induces no true moment of recognition, only a weariness tinged with melancholy. This, for Benjamin, is Baudelairean modernity: a giant and crude diorama of life, a no-longer distant and magical horizon of experience, a ﬁxated and detached way of regarding a set of impressions so obviously false they can only provide the useful pleasure of the obvious lie. And this, I want to suggest, is one of the ways in which ‘modernity’ renders itself globally visible on the fringes of the imperial metropolis (on the border of Fanon’s Algerian medina; at the edge of the abject neighbourhoods of Ayi Kwei Armah’s urban postcolony; across the colour line of South Africa’s Sophiatown throughout the 1950s as the bulldozers of the apartheid state rolled in). This is the guise ‘modernity’ so frequently takes on the border of the township, native quarter, and shanty town. Which is, perhaps, another way of saying that it is to such spaces that we should look if we are to

Township modernism

67

understand the untimely workings, imperial and post-imperial wanderings, and uncanny persistence of what, following the unlikely lead of Jameson, Habermas, and Appadurai, we might think of as an unﬁnished modernity, at large.

The view from the township To read or discuss Benjamin is perhaps always to risk an allegorizing of thought. So let me turn from the allegory of the courtesan’s gaze to something more bitterly and more literally observed: Frantz Fanon’s description of colonial topography in The Wretched of the Earth: The colonial world is a world cut in two . . . The zone where the natives live is not complementary to the zone inhabited by the settlers. The two zones are opposed, but not in the service of a higher unity. No conciliation is possible, for of the two terms one is superﬂuous. The settlers’ town is a strongly built town, all made of stone and steel. It is a brightly lit town, the streets are covered with asphalt, and the garbage cans swallow all the leavings, seen and unseen, unknown and hardly thought about . . . The town belonging to the colonized people, or at least the native town, the Negro village, the medina, the reservation, is a place of ill fame, peopled by men of evil repute. They are born there, it matters little where or how; they die there, it matters not where, nor how.9 The sardonic anger of Fanon’s ﬁnal sentences is evident, as is his determination, throughout the body of his work, to make a lie of these ventriloquized sentiments, to reveal not only the fundamental centrality of the ‘native town’ to the colonial and postcolonial worlds but, as importantly, to demonstrate the paradigmatic modernity of ‘the native town, the Negro village, the medina, the reservation’. For it is, Fanon argues, in precisely such abject spaces that a colonial culture comes to ‘modernize’ itself.10 If modernism, by one deﬁnition, reﬂects a thoroughgoing determination to ‘make it new’, then, Fanon argues, in the colonial world that determination is never more evident than in the ‘native town’ and the medina, in ‘the ﬂuctuating movement’ which the struggling people of the township ‘are just giving a shape to and which, as soon as it has started, will be the signal for everything to be called into question’.11 ‘Let there be no mistake about it,’ Fanon admonishes his readers, ‘it is to this zone of occult instability where the people dwell that we must come’.12 Fanon’s comments are drawn from the essay ‘On National Culture’, in The Wretched of the Earth, and they are generally, and accurately, read as an exhortation to reject both nativist nostalgia and a habit of Eurocentric

68

Negotiating African modernities

mimicry, and as reﬂecting his assumption that to the extent that it can be wielded as a weapon of anti-colonial struggle, culture is, and must be recognized as, national. What is often missed in the ensuing debates regarding Fanon’s commitment to the nation form, however, is what I can only think of as the radical, demi-urban modernism of his conception of the nation and of national culture. It is not only the intellectual who must ‘come’ to ‘the zone of occult instability where the people dwell’. The national culture (and the nation) those intellectuals are charged with helping to ‘assemble’13 must also come from these wretched dwelling places, and coming from the medina, national culture, Fanon argues, will be, and must be, one whose ‘traditions are fundamentally unstable . . . shot through by centrifugal tendencies’. The nation, for Fanon as for Benedict Anderson, may be of the present, but the present to which it commits itself is recognizably modernist (in the aesthetic and cultural sense): an experimental, transitory, centrifugal present the nation encounters not as empty simultaneity but in the densely fugitive streets and experimental cultural practices of its ghettos, reservations, and townships. As a discourse on the transitory, the experimental, and the new, cultural modernism has been understood as serving any number of ideological purposes. But Fanon, I believe, is almost unique in so directly allying a modernist commitment to the new with the cause of a radical, anti-imperial nationalism or in imagining that the centrifugal and the experimental, and the subaltern ghettos that are home to such forms of cultural newness, could provide the basis for a national culture he evokes in a continuing series of comments on the modernizing impulses of the artists and storytellers of the native town. These read, collectively, not merely like a nationalist but like a modernist manifesto, or perhaps a manifesto for an alternative cultural modernism, a medina- or township-modernism charged with the task of formally assembling a nation around its own dis-assembling of tradition and inherited form.14 To speak of an ‘alternative modernism’, is, of course, to allude to Dilip Gaonkar’s recent theorization of alternative modernities, and so also to imply that the colonial townships in which Fanon detects the ﬂuctuating movements of the new are not only zones of an alternative modernism in cultural practice but also the zones of an alternative social modernity, sites in which, as Gaonkar suggests, a globalizing and western-style pattern of social modernization (the paradigm of convergence theories of modernity) ﬁnds itself diverged as it encounters the cultural multiplicity of the globally modern.15 And that is, indeed, part of what I want to suggest. But if Gaonkar’s ‘alternative modernities’ might thus ﬁnd their conceptual precursors in Fanon’s zones of occult instability, then they also ﬁnd a source in another, pre-Fanonian, theorist of the modern: unsurprisingly, perhaps,

Township modernism

69

in Baudelaire, and that ‘attitude to the present’ in which Foucault suggests Baudelaire demonstrates the essential character of modernity. But while Baudelaire’s modernity, like Fanon’s native town, like any one of Gaonkar’s ‘alternative modernities’, is indissociable from an attitude to a fugitive, transitory, unstable present, Fanon’s conception of the modernity of the colonial township does diﬀer from Baudelaire’s theory of the modern metropolis in at least two crucial respects. However unstable, however centrifugal, however experimental, modernity, in the Fanonian township, is still occult, still magical. And it is, simultaneously, distant: distant both from the reader who Fanon enjoins to ‘come’ to this not-yet-approached zone of fugitive instability; and, perhaps more vexingly for Fanon, too often perceived as distant from the point of view of the medina itself, mis-identiﬁed with the ‘brightly lit’ habitus of the settler, held inapproachably apart from the native town, a stone’s throw and a revolution in consciousness away. Pressing up against the edge of the colonial reservation, the settler ‘zone’, Fanon understands, remains separated from the township by a colonial colour line (and anger line, and poverty line) masquerading (and too often mistaken) as the border, the boundary, the uncrossable ‘horizon’ of modernity. Fanon, I am suggesting, understands himself to know and to see that the modernist zone of the present from which colonial societies will refashion themselves is the zone of the township, but he also understands that colonial society often fails to share that vision. And indeed this should come as no surprise, either to Fanon or to us. For as an analyst not only of society but of desire, Fanon recognizes throughout his work that desire is predicated not on arrival, not on what is, in fact, already present, but on lack, or the perception of lack, on what is denied or unheld, on what is not here but there – beyond the colour line, on the horizon, in the brightly lit colonists’ cities: modernity, or at least the illusion of modernity. Let me put this another way. The colonial world, Fanon suggests, is a world cut in two but jammed together. Modernity, Reinhardt Koselleck argues, is a world equally predicated on an enjambed division, a world made out of the collapsed partition between what he calls a ‘space of experience’ and a ‘horizon of expectation’.16 For Koselleck, that is, modernity makes its appearance when the gap between a collectivity’s historical space of experience and its horizon of expectation simultaneously widens and collapses; when, that is, a collective anticipates that a radically novel future is rushing in on it, has, indeed, already begun to arrive. Settler colonialism, Fanon’s work suggests, also embeds just such a structure – such a simultaneously widened and collapsed distinction between a received ‘space of experience’ and a novel ‘horizon of expectation’ – in its organization of everyday social life and space, particularly in the colonial townships, those demi-urban spaces in which a received structure of cultural experience

70

Negotiating African modernities

ﬁnds itself doubly confronted by a novel horizon of expectation: one proper to the township itself, within which antecedent cultural practices and forms are so evidently shot through with a set of emergent, centrifugal tendencies, and one identiﬁed with the colonial colour line and with the unapproachable but brightly lit zones of settler life which the wretched of the earth expect, one day, to make their own. While the virtue of Koselleck’s model, in other words, is to empty ‘modernity’ of any normative content, to alienate it from the exclusive property claim of any particular cultural formation, to prevent it from functioning as no more than a codeword, variously, for ‘Europe’, ‘America’, or ‘the West’, ‘modernity’, thus construed, is still susceptible to normalization if one half of its structure (the approach and part arrival of a novel horizon of expectation) is taken for the whole (the entanglement of a novel horizon of expectation and a received space of experience) and that half is then further given a single, universal (‘western’) content. ‘Modernity’ then becomes merely what is expected (seen, glimpsed, partially approached, but still ‘distant’); while what is expected is the ‘West’ (brightly lit but held apart, on the far side of the colour–poverty–anger line). And this is how modernity, to Fanon’s considerable frustration, all too often appears to the colonial subject, not only to the colonizers but to the colonized, particularly a nascent intelligentsia trained by colonial ideology and the colonial educational system to mistake the colour line for the border (the horizon) of modernity. Alternatively put, this is what happens when Koselleck’s fraught, dialectical, two-part modernity is ﬁltered through the simplifying optic of a modernist historiography which expects a common modernity as the universal future of global history and so holds out modernity to the undeveloped or underdeveloped world as no more than a distant promise, a not-yet-crossed horizon. And this, the cultural anthropologist James Ferguson has argued in his important study Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt, is precisely how modernity appears, not only in the colonial shanty town but in the cities and townships of post-independence Africa. In the townships and cities of the Zambian Copperbelt in particular, he indicates, urbanization has frequently ‘seemed to be a teleological process, a movement toward a known endpoint that would be nothing less than a western-style industrial modernity’.17 Over the last quarter of the twentieth century in particular, Ferguson further suggests, ‘urban workers’ conceptions of town and country, and of the cultural diﬀerences among urbanites were . . . not simply compatible with the modernist metanarratives of social science; they were a local version of them. Modernization theory had become a local tongue.’18 And perhaps unsurprisingly so, at least in the Zambian instance. Because, for a while, that anticipated, coming modernity

Township modernism

71

seemed to be in the process of constituting itself on Zambian soil as, by another of the code switchings common to the global transition from colony to postcolony, colonization and independence alike came to signify urbanization, and urbanization to signify modernity. To cross through the old colonial colour line thus came to be equated with the crossing into postcoloniality, while the postcolonial event horizon came to be coded, in its turn, as the passage into modernity. However parsed, the postcolonial processes Ferguson describes preserve the basic Fanonian structure of colonial misrecognition and desire, yet again equating modernity not with the dialectical enjambment of a diﬀerential structure of experience and horizon of expectation but with lack: an exclusive turn to a horizon perhaps less distant than it had earlier appeared, perhaps even partially crossed, but always deﬁned from (a western) elsewhere. But this, while central to Ferguson’s argument, is not his major concern. His problem, rather, is more Baudelairean than Fanonian. For Ferguson, the problem of ‘modernity’ in the post-independence urban quarters of southern Africa is not, primarily, the problem of an overtly auraticized, notyet-approached object of desire but of an object whose aura has been pierced, of an extrinsic ‘modernity’ that has been experienced as no longer entirely distant but viewed (however brieﬂy) ‘from up close’, with the magic of its distance cancelled, and the obvious lie of its pleasing illusions revealed. The problem of ‘modernity’ in the townships of the Zambian Copperbelt, in other words, is not that it remained forever distant but that something posing as modernity appeared to have arrived, sometime in the 1960s to be precise, when the lucrative mining and export of copper seemed to have drawn Zambia into partnership with the industrial West. Zambia, however, was unable to retain its newly signiﬁcant place in the world copper market. By the end of the 1980s the ﬂow of foreign investment and capital dried up. Europe and America moved decisively on, not only forgetting Zambia but, as Ferguson demonstrates, actively abandoning it, barring it from future capital investment, rewriting the old colour/ poverty/anger line as a world-banker’s redline. His comments on this subject bear citing at some length: When the color bar cut across colonial Africa, it fell with a special force upon the ‘Westernized Africans’ . . . It was they – the ‘not quite/not white’ – whose uncanny presence destabilized and menaced the racial hierarchy of the colonial order. And it was they who experienced the sting not just of exclusion but of abjection – of being pushed back across a boundary that they had been led to believe they might successfully cross. In a similar way, when the juncture between Africa and the industrialized world that had been presented as a stairway (leading

72

Negotiating African modernities from the ‘developing’ world to the ‘developed’) revealed itself instead as a wall (separating the ‘ﬁrst world’ from the ‘third’), it was the Copperbelt and places like it – proud examples of just how modern, urban, and prosperous an emerging Africa could be – that experienced this boundary-ﬁxing process most acutely, as a kind of abjection. The experience of abjection here was not a matter of being merely excluded from a status to which one had never had a claim but of being expelled, cast out-and-down from that status by the formation of a new (or newly impermeable) boundary. It is an experience that has left in its wake both a profound feeling of loss as well as the gnawing sense of a continuing aﬀective attachment to that which lies on the other side of the boundary.19

And what then, Ferguson asks? How is life experienced on the other side (rather than the near side) of ‘modernity’s’ boundary line? What happens when ‘modernity’, misidentiﬁed with a distinct, normative horizon of capital and cultural expectation, approaches, collapses its distance, and then departs, actively distances itself once again? What happens when this spectacle of modernity has been viewed not only from close up but from its far side; from backstage, if you will; from the wings to which the idled stagehands of imperial history have been exiled to no more than watch the main actors on the stage? The question is not only Ferguson’s, not only the question from the townships of the Zambian Copperbelt. It is also, I have been suggesting, the question from the brothels of Baudelaire’s Paris. As it is the question Ayi Kwei Armah poses from the abject urban neighbourhoods of postindependence Ghana. Certainly this is the question of Armah’s novel The Beautyful Ones are Not Yet Born, in which ‘the gleam’ of a simultaneously grasped and withdrawn/withheld modernity serves as one of the text’s organizing ways of invoking the object of the postcolony’s weary, melancholy, disillusioned, and angry structure of desire. The ﬁgure of ‘the gleam’ appears throughout the text; uncoincidentally, however, it makes its ﬁrst appearance as the protagonist of the novel (simply, almost Kafkaesquely, identiﬁed as ‘the man’) looks from the squalid quarter of the city in which he lives and works to the still-surviving and still-brightly-lit settler’s zone, now occupied by the postcolonial elite: On top of the hill, commanding it just as it commanded the scene below, its sheer, ﬂat, multistoried side an insulting white in the concentrated gleam of the hotel’s spotlights, towered the useless structure of the Atlantic-Caprice. Sometimes it seemed as if the huge building had been put there for a purpose, like that of attracting to itself all the

Township modernism

73

massive anger of a people in pain. But then, if there were any angry ones at all these days, they were most certainly feeling the loneliness of mourners at a festival of crazy joy. Perhaps then the purpose of this white thing was to draw onto itself the love of a people hungry for something just such as this. The gleam, in moments of honesty, had a power to produce a disturbing ambiguity within. And something terrible was happening as time went on. It was getting harder to tell whether the gleam repelled more than it attracted, attracted more than it repelled, or just did both at once in one disgustedly confused feeling all the time these heavy days.20 Anger, desire, repulsion, attraction – all attached to a capricious spectacle of simultaneously unapproached and captured whiteness: Armah’s ‘gleam’ is a virtually complete Baudelairean emblem of the pleasingly false, so obviously duplicitous illusion of modernity that Fanon, Ferguson, and Armah himself understand to be the poisoned (and withdrawn) gift of empire to colony and postcolony alike. But however obviously false, that illusion nevertheless has the power to ﬁx attention, to capture the gaze (no matter how melancholy). The man’s gaze, the gaze from the township, the gaze from the Copperbelt, the gaze from the medina, I am thus suggesting, are all, also, formal, global, ex-centric analogues of the courtesan’s gaze on modernity (all, like hers, directed ‘at the horizon, like a beast of prey, the same lazy absentmindedness, and also, at times, the same ﬁxity of attention’); as the colonial and postcolonial township repeats, extends, and continues Baudelaire’s Parisian brothel, Joyce’s ‘Nightown’, and Fanon’s neighbourhood of ‘ill-fame’. The inhabitant of one is like the denizen of the other: ‘a sort of gypsy’ as Baudelaire has it, ‘wandering on the fringes of a regular society’. But – and this is the fundamental point I have been trying to make – that subject, that space, and that look, are not, in fact, the subjects modernity leaves out, the spaces modernity leaves behind, the viewpoints on modernity from outside its blessed sphere. Rather, as Benjamin’s reading of Baudelaire would suggest, these are the subjects, spaces, and looks of modernity from within and on itself, the immanent actors, zones, and views on and of a global modernity whose magic and whose distance have been pierced. Modernity, however much it has been presented as such, is not a white thing somewhere out there on the abandoned ‘third world’s’ or abject city-dweller’s horizon of expectation and desire. Modernity, rather, is the experience, the dialectic, of engaging such a capricious, illusory spectacle of desire from a weary/angry/hungry space of experience actively distanced and no longer distant from a ‘white thing’ seemingly lit up for the dual purpose ‘of attracting to itself all the massive anger of a people in pain’ and

74

Negotiating African modernities

compelling ‘all the love of a people hungry for something just such as this’. Or let me put it this way: if modernity is not Armah’s gleaming ‘white thing’ it is because it is, instead, his ‘man’, standing in the abject squalor of his global ghetto, wearily, angrily, ﬁxedly studying this caprice of history. Modernity is not the gleam. It is the view from the township.

Notes 1 An earlier version of this chapter was published in L. Doyle and L. Winkiel (eds) Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005. 2 W. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. H. Eiland and K. Mclaughlin, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999, p. 314. 3 C. Baudelaire, ‘The Salon of 1859’, cited in W. Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. H. Zohn, New York: Schocken Books, 1968, p. 191. 4 Benjamin, Illuminations, p. 191. 5 C. Baudelaire, ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. J. Mayne, London: Phaidon, 1964. 6 Baudelaire, ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, p. 9. See A. Anderson, The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. 7 Benjamin, Arcades Project, p. 314. 8 Ibid., p. 188. 9 F. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. C. Farrington, Grove Press: New York, 1963, pp. 38–9. 10 Ibid., p. 240. 11 Ibid., p. 226. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid., p. 243. 14 The following comments, all drawn from Fanon’s essay on ‘National Culture’ in The Wretched of the Earth, provide a fair sample of his conception of the modernizing impulses of the artists and storytellers of the medina: ‘On another level, the oral tradition – stories, epics, and songs of the people – which were formerly ﬁled away as set pieces are now beginning to change . . . The contact of the people with the new movement gives rise to a new rhythm of life and to forgotten muscular tensions and develops the imagination. Every time the storyteller relates a fresh episode to his public, he presides over a real invocation. The existence of a new type of man is revealed to the public. The present is no longer turned in upon itself but spread out for all to see . . . The storyteller replies to the expectant people by successive approximations and makes his way, apparently alone but in fact helped on by his public, toward the seeking out of new patterns, that is to say national patterns’ (pp. 240–1). ‘Where handicrafts are concerned, the forms of expression which formerly were the dregs of art, surviving as if in a daze, now begin to reach out. Woodwork for example, which formerly turned out certain faces and attitudes by the million, begins to be diﬀerentiated. The inexpressive or overwrought mask comes to life . . . This new vigor in this sector of cultural life very often passes unseen; and yet its contribution to the national eﬀort is of capital

Township modernism

15 16 17 18 19 20

75

importance’ (pp. 241–2). ‘If we study the repercussions of the awakening of national consciousness in the domains of ceramics and pottery-making, the same observations may be drawn . . . Jugs, jars, and trays are modiﬁed, at ﬁrst imperceptibly, then almost savagely. The colors, of which formerly there were but few and which obeyed the traditional rules of harmony, increase in number and are inﬂuenced by the repercussion of the rising revolution. Certain ochres and blues, which seemed forbidden to all eternity in a given cultural area, now assert themselves’ (p. 242). ‘We might in the same way seek and ﬁnd in dancing, singing, and traditional rites and ceremonies the same upward-springing trend, and make out the same changes and the same impatience in this ﬁeld. Well before the political or ﬁghting phase of the national movement, an attentive spectator can thus feel and see the manifestation of new vigor and feel the approaching conﬂict. He will note unusual forms of expression and themes which are fresh and imbued with a power that is no longer that of invocation but rather that of the assembling of the people, a summoning together for a precise purpose’ (p. 243). See D. Goankar, ‘On Alternative Modernities’, in D. Goankar (ed.) Alternative Modernities, Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001, pp. 1–23. See R. Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. K. Tribe, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985. J. Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Ibid., p. 84. Ibid., pp. 236–38. A.K. Armah, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born: A Novel, Boston: Houghton Miﬄin, 1968.

Bibliography Anderson, A., The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. Appadurai, A., Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Armah, A.K., The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born: A Novel, Boston: Houghton Miﬄin, 1968. Baudelaire, C., ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. J. Mayne, London: Phaidon, 1964. Benjamin, W., The Arcades Project, trans. H. Eiland and K. Mclaughlin, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999. —— Illuminations, trans. H. Zohn, New York: Schocken Books, 1968. Fanon, F., The Wretched of the Earth, trans. C. Farrington, Grove Press: New York, 1963. Ferguson, J., Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Goankar, D., ‘On Alternative Modernities’, in D. Goankar (ed.) Alternative Modernities, Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001, pp. 1–23. Jameson, F., A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present, London and New York: Verso, 2002.

76

Negotiating African modernities

Koselleck, R., Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. K. Tribe, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985. Mattera, D., Gone with theTwilight: A Story of Sophiatown, London: Zed Books, 1987. Nixon, R., ‘Harlem, Hollywood, and the Sophiatown Renaissance’, in Homelands, Harlem, and Hollywood: South African Culture and the World Beyond, London: Routledge, 1994. Themba, C., The World of Can Themba: Selected Writings of the Late Can Themba, ed. E. Patel, Braamfontein, South Africa: Ravan Press, 1985.

Part II

Caribbean (in)versions of modernity

5

Ulysses and the shape-shifter Caribbean modernity in Pauline Melville’s writings1 Saskia Schabio

Diversion leads nowhere when the original trickster strategy does not encounter any real potential for development. Edouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays

Prelude ‘I had better tell you about the parrot.’ Thus begins a story titled ‘The Parrot and Descartes’. In this story Pauline Melville oﬀers a scathing satire of codiﬁcations of the West, as if engaging with too simplistic an explanation of modernity, the colonization process and the capitalist present on which she so sharply focuses in the other short stories collected in The Migration of Ghosts. The ‘Parrot and Descartes’ hinges on an epistemic shift, the moment when, as we learn later: ‘Magic and technology were, from then on, to go their separate ways’.2 This, as it turns out, is a paraphrase of the Cartesian moment. The result is a mock archaeology which revisits the popular haunts of postcolonial critique. Like Virginia Woolf, in her mockhistoriography Orlando, Melville delves into excessive satire. The story begins with the birth of a white ﬁgure in the Orinoco region: ‘A hand stuck up out of the earth. An arm. The earth opened. A woman who was watching turned into a male parrot and began to scream a warning. Then all sorts of things happened’ (p. 101). The divine ﬁat of the Genesis debunked as magic. Not even that: ‘everything began with a wish and a smell’, not a ‘spell’. Bathos is everywhere. The parrot, we learn, was caught by Sir Thomas Roe in 1611. In England the ‘parrot naturally developed a phobia about The Tempest’ (p. 102), and the narrator announces, mocking scientiﬁc discourse, ‘Why he should also have developed an irrational loathing of the philosopher and mathematician, René Descartes, is something I shall address later’ (p. 102). The parrot, a wedding present for Princess Elizabeth, went to the ‘wondrous city of Prague’ which was ‘host to every sort of

80

Caribbean (in)versions of modernity

cabbalist, alchemist and astronomer’. The castle of Prague, of course, contains all the tokens of the colonial enterprise: ‘books, maps, globes’ (p. 105); again the parrot screams. Why the parrot screams and whether parrots are prophets or merely the ‘owners of exceedingly good memories’ (p. 107) gives occasion for numerous hypotheses. The scream may relate to the death of Frederick when ﬁrst sighting a Caribbean ship. However, it may also relate to ‘a young man [who] slept and dreamed that mathematics was the sole key to the understanding of nature’ (p. 108): ‘And so, for a brief moment, they came face to face. The master of rationalism and the parrot’. ‘Intuitively’, the parrot had ‘recognised the danger of a man who believed that animals were automatons and that parrots ceased to exist when they were asleep’ (p. 110). When Descartes reappears in 1640 ‘out of the blue’, the parrot gives a ‘dismal squawk’, yet nobody heeds its warning: from then ‘mind and matter started to divide, body and soul to separate and science and magic to march in opposite directions’ (p. 111). In the end, Descartes arrives in the guise of the Jesuits in the Americas and the parrot is back in the Orinoco basin: ‘Time passed. It was clear to the bird that ideas from Europe were gaining ground in his own territory’ (p. 114). Finally, a group of players arrive and stage The Tempest. While Prospero abjures his magic once and for all in his famous epilogue, the parrot, reiﬁed and commodiﬁed, is taken to North America. Sardonic humour hardly contains sardonic anger. Melville’s writing, I would argue, transcends the playfulness of postmodern historiography. While narratives of modernity focus on the eighteenth century as the origin of western modernization in which capitalist economics engenders instrumental reason, Melville’s satire seems to insist on the contested genealogies of (western) modernity itself, hinting that the magus, that cabbalism, and neoplatonic ideas of transformation were central to early modern thought-experiments and explorations of new worlds. This reﬂects Melville’s own approach to writing which crosses the ‘boundaries between the natural and the supernatural’3 and invokes (Caribbean) myth as if to recuperate hidden histories of the past and perhaps glimpse a fuller, or more complex version of modernity.4 Such a revisionary eﬀort, ‘The Parrot and Descartes’ seems to suggest, will have to include simplistic visions of western modernity. Melville seems to employ the laws of Swiftian hypostasis and reductionism, as if debunking suppositions such as: all western thought has been ‘Eurocentric and rationalist’.5 The critique of western rationality and its truth claims does not suﬃce to address the global dynamics of the capitalist present which Melville traces in the other stories collected in The Migration of Ghosts. If so, ‘The Parrot and Descartes’ is not the only instance where Melville seems to challenge habituated perceptions of modernity. It

Ulysses and the shape-shifter

81

is in this light that I propose to read Melville’s subtle uses of Caribbean myth in Shape-Shifter, her ﬁrst collection of short stories.

Modernity: capitalizing on the unforeseen The introductory story to Melville’s collection Shape-Shifter is ‘I Do Not Take Messages from Dead People’. If the title seems programmatically to aﬃrm the rationalist agenda of western modernity, the story insists on the pervasive presence of myth in the Caribbean imagination: ‘Anancy, the regional folk-hero, the magic spider . . ., who continually outwitted the great and savage beasts of the jungle’ (p. 6). The ‘shape-shifter’ here is Shakespeare McNab. He is a journalist at the local radio station and a teller of folk tales, an allusion perhaps to collections of folk tales such as James Berry’s Anancy Spiderman (1988). As the story begins, we meet McNab waiting in the ‘outer oﬃce of the Ministry of Home Aﬀairs’. Apprehension and suspense dominate in this part of the story:6 ‘ “The Comrade vice-president will see you shortly” . . . Shakespeare experienced a ﬂicker of anxiety’ (p. 2). We then learn that Shakespeare McNab had told a story of the mythical ﬁgure Anancy which had obvious analogies to the rumour that the vice-president may have killed his wife. He advises McNab to show more consideration when choosing his stories and ﬁnally sacks him. McNab is extremely scared and on the verge of exile, but then devises a plan. Familiar with Hogg’s susceptibility to superstition he calls Hogg’s secretary: ‘This is Comrade Shakespeare McNab speaking . . . I have had a warning dream concerning the Vice-President. My dead mother appeared to me in a dream last night warning me that he is in imminent danger and I felt it my duty to pass the message on.’ There was a moment’s hesitation on the other end of the line, then came the snappy reply: ‘I do not take messages from dead people.’ Shakespeare’s brain raced. His entire plan would totter if the message did not get through: ‘No. The message is from ME,’ he said, hastily. (p. 13) Eventually, the secretary will pass on the message. And McNab appears to the vice-president in the guise of La Diablesse who lures ‘people to their death in the forest’ (p. 17). So good an improviser is he that Hogg, apparently, is thoroughly scared. Ironically, Hogg takes the Diablesse for an impersonation of his dead wife, and again, ironically, McNab has to explain the myth when conversing with Hogg. In the following, Melville stages how the theatrical improvisation of myth allows McNab to insinuate himself

82

Caribbean (in)versions of modernity

into Hogg’s consciousness. The apparition disappears and McNab returns undisguised as if coming to Hogg’s rescue. In a further ironic twist, McNab is appointed Hogg’s personal adviser. But in the end, the words of his grandmother reverberate, advising McNab to leave the country. ‘ “So, what you think, grandmumma. I clever? You grandson clever?” . . . She stirred some casreep into the pepper-pot. “Leave the country,” she said’ (p. 18). Let me expand a little on the ironies and paradoxes in Melville’s uses of the Anancy myth. The title of this chapter makes reference to yet another mythical ﬁgure, Ulysses. Here I refer to the protagonist of Horkheimer and Adorno’s account of modernity. As is well known, their analysis of modernity paradigmatically exempliﬁes the entanglement of the rise of capitalism and technology. As such their book has played a major role in postmodern and postcolonial critiques of western modernity as synonymous with an exclusively western mind-set to be located in the eighteenth century. However, it is, as has been suggested, no accident that they draw on the Odyssey to exemplify reiﬁcation in the form of instrumental reason, undercutting the exclusiveness with which it has been linked to the eighteenth century. Furthermore, if taken seriously, the analogy to the Odyssey implies another caveat: if the Odyssey is to be taken to illustrate the birth of bourgeois ideology and domination, and Ulysses advanced as its prototype, it is not the technologies of the stable subject, of mapping and surveying that assist him, but rather the arts of the improviser that come to his rescue in subordinating the powers of nature: ﬂexibility, simulation and insinuation. This is revealed in yet another genealogy of modernity – Greenblatt’s account of Renaissance Self-Fashioning. As if glossing the Dialectic, one persistent mode of the self-fashioner’s ﬂexibility is concomitant with the arts of the colonizer. Greenblatt, of course, gives a sceptical version of Burckhardt’s idea of the promethean liberal self which freely chooses its options. Indeed, the Dialectic reads like a subtext to Greenblatt’s idea of the ﬂexibility of the self. If Dialectic explains Ulysses’ improvisational attitude to mythology as the origin of instrumental reason, Greenblatt introduces the theatrical concept of ‘improvisation’. In what hence may be read as a gloss on Horkheimer and Adorno’s Ulysses, Greenblatt stresses ‘the ability . . . to capitalize on the unforeseen’.7 His example is Iago. Iago’s strategies of insinuation in Othello parallel those observable in colonial encounters in the New World. This, Greenblatt argues, holds for colonial improvisations of indigenous mythical beliefs, since ‘the mystiﬁcation of manipulation as disinterested empathy begins as early as the sixteenth century’ and is a far cry from the ‘imaginative generosity’ sociologist Daniel Lerner has found in The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East when describing the West as an essentially ‘mobile society’.8 To Greenblatt’s mind, the Renaissance and its commerce with the New World demonstrate that

Ulysses and the shape-shifter

83

[w]hat is essential is the Europeans’ ability again and again to insinuate themselves into the preexisting political, religious, even psychic structures of the natives and to turn those structures to their advantage.9 How does this now link up with Melville and her invocations of the Caribbean trickster-ﬁgure? Pauline Melville, I concede, makes no explicit reference to Ulysses. However, her uses of the trickster-ﬁgure may be read as elaborating on the contingencies spotted by Horkheimer and Adorno. If the title ‘I Do Not Take Messages from Dead People’ aﬃrms the premises of enlightened thinking, the story, nearly in textbook style, translates its recidivist moment as analysed by Horkheimer and Adorno to its totalitarian setting. Here, Anancian improvisation bears a conspicuous likeness to the theatrical arts of the colonizer. But so do Hogg’s. McNab is able to ‘outwit’ the oppressive political system he lives in, yet this act of subversion is also contained in its (mythical) power structures, since he will accept a position as secretary to the vice-president in the end. If McNab’s improvisational techné parallels that of the colonial modernizer who insinuates himself into and instrumentalizes indigenous systems of belief, the story insists on the ideological ambivalence of the shape-shifter.10 Proceeding by paradox, the shape-shifting imagination may glimpse alternatives, and in the grotesque ﬁnd intimations of that ‘cosmic freedom’, Harris claims, the ‘cross-cultural’ imagination aspires to.11 Guyanese myth and culture are established as counter-discourses, but not exclusively so.12 If, as has been observed, Melville’s writing proceeds by ‘deliberate juxtaposition of diﬀerent points of view in order to encourage multiple readings of the same event or phenomenon’,13 this is also true for her articulations of ‘modernity’. In Melville’s hands, the shape-shifter comes to signify the historical experience of the subordinated self, counter-memory, inventiveness, resilience and escape as much as recidivism, trickery and containment. This is not to sacriﬁce the imagination to a ‘claustrophobic’ vision.14 But still, the warning voice of McNab’s grandmother is pervasive, as if reminding us that any counter-discourse is vulnerable to recuperation by the ‘system’, a warning Edouard Glissant also voices in Caribbean Discourse.15 Melville’s conceited use of the trickster-ﬁgure, I would argue, seems to pre-empt alternative genealogies of modernity which uncritically claim the supposedly pre-modern as source and legacy as well as the inherent subversiveness of the subaltern.16 Just as in her later Migration of Ghosts the other stories in Shape-Shifter beg the question of a geopolitical perception of modernization, yet at the same time more diﬀerentiated, addressing a variety of social groups and diasporic experiences in the Caribbean and in Britain.17

84

Caribbean (in)versions of modernity

Criss-crossing the Atlantic: (dis-)locating modernity If the trickster strategies of the shape-shifting imagination or the migratory paths of exile seem the only choices the ﬁrst story oﬀers, ‘Eat Labba and Drink Creek Water’,18 the ﬁnal story of Shape-Shifter, is emphatically about return. It hinges on the classical moment of crisis the metropolitan citydweller experiences on the point of return – Aimé Césaire captures it for instance in Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (1939). When asked why she wishes to leave London and return to Guyana, the protagonist can only air a diﬀuse sense of belonging: ‘I don’t know. I want to see my aunts before they die. They’re old. And I want to spend some time in Georgetown, in the house with Evelyn and the others. I miss the landscape. Perhaps I’ll buy a piece of land there. I don’t know why. I just want to go back.’ (p. 193) In place of an explanation, as if to evade the impasse of the missing answer, the protagonist invokes proverbial truth: ‘ “Eat labba and drink creek water and you will always return”, so the saying goes.’ But no sooner the idea of a primordial place of belonging is invoked, it is challenged: Once I dreamed I returned by walking in the manner of a high-wire artist, arms outstretched, across a frail spider’s thread suspended sixty feet above the Atlantic attached to Big Ben at one end and St George’s Cathedral, Demerara, at the other. It took me twenty-two days to do it and during the whole of that time only the moon shone. Another time, my dream blew me clean across the ocean like tumbleweed. That took only three days and the sun and the moon shone alternately as per usual. (p. 193) Melville’s text is too dense, and too suggestive for careful exegesis at this point. But the image of the sea recalls a pervasive metaphor in deﬁnitions of Caribbeanness: ‘We are the roots of a cross-cultural relationship’, Edouard Glissant wrote in his Caribbean Discourse, ‘[s]ubmarine roots: that is ﬂoating free, not ﬁxed in one position, but extending in all directions in our world through its network of branches.’19 It is the trauma of the middle passage, and, more broadly, the trauma of a ‘history’ of enduring suﬀering and alienation he therapeutically rewrites in these lines. And it is because of this experience that a truly ‘cross-cultural imagination’ emerged in the Caribbean sphere: ‘We thereby live, we have the good fortune of living, this shared process of cultural mutation, this convergence that frees us from

Ulysses and the shape-shifter

85

20

uniformity.’ As is well known, Glissant laid the basis for the term créolité which describes the mixing of the numerous ethnic groups that has taken place in the Caribbean. If moon and sun traditionally serve as codiﬁcations of Western and African identity (‘the sun and the moon shone alternately as per usual’),21 the cross-cultural imagination may alleviate but cannot suspend the burden of a history of dislocation and pain, Melville’s protagonist seems to be suggesting: ‘We do return and leave and return again, criss-crossing the Atlantic, but whichever side of the Atlantic we are on, the dream is always on the other side’, she notes (p. 193). This reﬂects Melville’s own mixed-race ancestry as a white creole as well as the suﬀering imposed by history on the collective consciousness.22 ‘We’ is emphatically ambivalent. What follows is a dream-sequence, a time travel, which ﬁrst takes us back to the hopes of the early modern voyager: it is not the slave-ship that travels on the waters of the Atlantic. The language of the entire sequence is that of early modern travel journals such as Sir Walter Ralegh’s The Discoverie of the Large, Rich and Bewtiful Empyre of Guiana: ‘At last we have found entry into the Guianas,’ he says. Wat’s heart beats a little faster. This is it. Somewhere in the interior they will ﬁnd Manoa which the Spaniards call EI Dorado. They will outdo the feats of Cortes and Pizarro. They will discover The mountain of crystal The empire where there is more abundance of gold than in Peru The palaces that contain feathered ﬁsh, beasts and birds, all fashioned in gold by men with no iron implements The pleasure gardens with intricate replicas of trees . . . (pp. 194–5)23 Note how Melville exposes the ‘conscious’ delight in the theatrical and fabricated, releasing and prompting the collective energies of the early modern voyagers: ‘The pleasure gardens with intricate replicas of trees.’24 In the following, as in time travel, other passages of other fathers and other sons are interspersed. Each generation now seeking the ‘dream’ from the ‘other side of the Atlantic’. Each generation lured by the promises of the metropolis on the other side of the Atlantic: A young man of twenty-one braces himself against the rail taking deep breaths of the future. There is not much of the African left in his appearance, a hint of it perhaps in the tawny colour of a complexion

86

Caribbean (in)versions of modernity mixed over generations with Scottish, Amerindian and Portuguese. . . . His eyes never leave the horizon. Not once does he look back as the land recedes away behind him, because In England there is a library that contains all the books in the world, a cathedral of knowledge the interior of whose dome shimmers gold from the lettering on spines of ancient volumes . . . (p. 195)

The father’s Victorian reverence for the civilizational achievements of empire repeats itself in the son’s desire to exchange the colony for the metropolis. ‘Beneath his father’s framed certiﬁcate, given to him by the King of England, a slim youth of nineteen leans his back against the dresser thinking: “If I don’t get out of this colony I shall suﬀocate” ’ (pp. 197–8). Recognizably, his reveries parallel his father’s dreams of London and Ralegh’s dreams of a ‘rich and beautiful empire’: In London there is jazz and the Café Royal. [. . .] In London there are debonair, sophisticated, cosmopolitan men. It is impossible to be a real man until you have been to London. (pp. 198–9) Hence, if ‘the dream is always on the other side’, ‘we’ now includes the desires of the early modern discoverer and the dreams of the colonial subject: The great and golden city is to be discovered in the heart of a large, rich and beautiful empire. The city is well proportioned and has many great towers. Throughout, there are laid out goodly gardens and parks . . . (p. 199) After this sequence, Melville takes us again to the postcolonial present of the protagonist and to the moment she returns to Guyana: when visiting her aunts in New Amsterdam, they tell her ‘Everything’s gone middlymuddly over here’ (p. 210). ‘Here’, the signs of extreme poverty are all too visible: ‘I open the fridge door and recoil. Inside, the contents are webbed with mould from all the electricity cuts’ (p. 210). Again, Melville seems to allude to a classical moment in postindependence experience: it is the weariness which follows ‘the withdrawal of empire’ from which her aunts suﬀer and which Derek Walcott so memorably described in ‘What the Twilight Says’. ‘Colonials,’ Walcott wrote, ‘we began with this malarial enervation: that nothing could ever be built among these rotting shacks, barefooted back yards and moulting shingles.’25 All too recognizably do the reveries of father and son hinge on images of the ‘strongly built town, all made of stone and steel’, the metropolis, ‘a

Ulysses and the shape-shifter

87

26

brightly lit town’, and remind us of the melancholy that Walcott – under the inﬂuence of Fanon – describes as the legacy of a ‘schizophrenic’ boyhood, the twilight atmosphere of postcolonial existence: When dusk heightens, like amber on a stage set, those ramshackle hoardings of wood and rusting iron which circle our cities, a theatrical sorrow rises with it, for the glare, like the aura from an old-fashioned brass lamp, is like a childhood signal to come home . . . In true cities another life begins: neons stutter to their hysterical pitch, bars, restaurants, and cinemas blaze with artiﬁce . . .27 I have no space to expand on this, but Walcott’s Caribbean twilight reads like the eﬀort of an ‘auratization’ (witness his diction even in this brief passage), an attempt to thrive on ‘the pleasingly false, so obviously duplicitous illusion of modernity that . . . is the poisoned (and withdrawn) gift of empire to colony and postcolony alike’.28 Whether Melville would subscribe to this, I am not sure. Whether modernity’s dialectic of enchantment and disenchantment itself, the double vision of the ‘duplicitous illusion’ as it helps to channel and structure creative energies, can serve to create real change is, perhaps, the question Shape-Shifter seems to beg in the end. It is, in any case, not the protagonist’s personal history or quest for identity on which the story gravitates, as if, by a deliberate shift of focus, to bypass an obsession with a language of self-location and authenticity. When she phones Evelyn, a 36-year-old black woman, to announce her return from London, Evelyn asks her to bring ‘a Gestetner machine’ with her. For the ‘party headquarters’ (p. 197). When the protagonist ﬁnally arrives at Evelyn’s house, relieved from the sticky atmosphere of her aunts’ home, we encounter the following scene: I follow her up the old circular wooden staircase. Sitting on the steps half way up is a black woman in a loose skirt. Next to her are two sacks marked: ‘US Famine Aid. Destination Ethiopia.’ Evelyn sees my curious stare: ‘You are shocked? She’s a smuggler from the Corentyne. We past shame in this country. There are people for whom crime is still a shock. We way past that stage. Way past. That is wheat ﬂour she tryin’ to sell.’ (p. 211) Reminding her of the poverty which has ruled her country since Forbes Burnham’s government, Evelyn leads her to a political meeting at her house (pp. 211–12). At the back of Evelyn’s mind may be the energy with which Cheddi Jaggan had once founded the People’s Progressive Party: ‘If the party could get hold of two hundred thousand US dollars we could turn this

88

Caribbean (in)versions of modernity

country round. I will get it somehow. I am telling you, this place could be a paradise’ (p. 212). If so, later, when peering through the jalousies, the protagonist sees outside a ‘sugar-apple tree’ and in the yard she sees ‘the rusted shells of two cars’ (p. 212). I am not quite sure, then, what the ﬁnal image of that ‘machine in the Garden’ would suggest. Evelyn’s enthusiasm comes across as an anachronism. The ﬁnal gaze of the protagonist seems to suggest as much: that Eden will always already be lost. Not only does the image of the sugarapple tree recall the era of the plantocracy and suggest the persistence of colonial structures. The climate, the ebbs and tides of the sea seem to claim their own. Or is it that the protagonist falls prey to that peripheral languish and despair, that melancholy Walcott analyses in ‘What the Twilight Says’? And yet, the shape-shifting energies of Evelyn and ‘the others’ provide a strong utopian image, begging the question of agency, communality, and national commitment against all odds and in the face of a transnational system of economic power.29 Does the true power of the ‘trickster’ lie here? And will it, perhaps, only truly unfold when the postcolonial subject no longer falls prey to the lures of ‘modernity’ in the distant metropolis? That is, when monolithic narratives of civilization will indeed have lost their bearings?30 If Melvillle’s story then seems to recall Ian Baucom’s argument about Fanon in this volume, one lesson to be drawn may be, as Baucom suggests: ‘Modernity, however much it has been presented as such, is not a white thing somewhere out there on the abandoned “third world’s” or abject citydweller’s horizon of expectation and desire.’ Melville’s protagonist, is, like Fanon, ‘an analyst not only of society but of desire’ as ‘predicated not on arrival, not on what is, in fact, already present, but on lack, or the perception of lack, on what is denied or unheld’:31 ‘but whichever side of the Atlantic we are on, the dream is always on the other side’ (p. 193). And while in Melville’s story this structure comes to include the desires of early modern explorer and colonial subject alike, as if to dislocate ‘modernity’ by displacing periphery and centre, this is not to celebrate displacement.

Conclusion32 Apart from invoking Fanon’s thoughts about modernity as a frame of interpretation, I would also like to read Melville’s writing in the light of Edouard Glissant’s Caribbean Discourse. While he develops a vision of the ‘world and the Caribbean in particular in terms of an intricate branching of communities, an inﬁnite wandering across cultures’,33 he also emphasizes the importance of the ‘nation’ as an enabling frame of reference in the process of cultural self-liberation. It is in this spirit that Glissant describes

Ulysses and the shape-shifter

89

‘universal identiﬁcation with black suﬀering in the Caribbean ideology (or the poetics) of negritude’ as ‘diversion’ (p. 24) – a ‘trickster strategy’ (p. 23), a ‘response perhaps to the need, by relating to a common origin, to rediscover unity (equilibrium) beyond dispersion’ (p. 5). In a characteristic dialectical move, he considers this an acceptable but transitional strategy of escape, which, ultimately must ‘[authorize . . .] the necessary return to the point where our problems lay in wait for us’:34 We must return to the point from which we started. Diversion is not a useful ploy unless it is nourished by reversion: not a return to the longing for origins, to some immutable state of Being, but a return to the point of entanglement, from which we were forcefully turned away; that is where we must ultimately put to work the forces of creolization, or perish.35 It is just such a moment of return and entanglement, an anchoring in the local, the ﬁnal story of Shape-Shifter seems to recall or restage. Melville’s invocations of the trickster-ﬁgure seem to suggest as much. At least for Evelyn the dream is not ‘on the other side of the Atlantic’, just as Anancy is not a ﬁgure outside – but deeply entangled within – modernity. I do not know whether this is a fair reading of Melville’s intentions. All I can observe is that Evelyn recalls the verve with which, for instance, the early Glissant embraced political activism in La Lézarde. This, at a historical moment when Glissant himself was moving beyond an emphasis on national consciousness and wrote Tout-monde, ‘one of the most stridently enthusiastic ﬁctional incantations of a borderless world ever written’.36 It is true, the Anancian imagination may have strong aﬃnities with Glissant’s image of the tourbillon (‘whirlwind’), keeping pace with the unpredictable movements of a world in constant change, subverting ‘all distinction between centre and periphery’.37 It may well contribute ‘to depicting the network, the root of open and tolerant cultural identities that communicate with each other’ which Glissant envisages as the writer’s task in his ‘Opening remarks at the Cities of Asylum Congress of the International Parliament of Writers’ (1997).38 But in another trickery of the ‘Shape-Shifter’, charlatan or god, Melville’s image of the two sacks destined for Ethiopia may read like a critical comment on transnational visions of solidarity in the face of global capitalism and suggest the historicism of Caribbean Discourse. And if Caribbeanness, just like Gilroy’s black modernity, has become a model of cross-cultural contact, an alternative projection of past and future which embraces the complexities of accelerated globalization and modernization and which would evade the errors of retrograde concepts of authenticity and the nation, the ambivalences spotted in Melville’s short stories

90

Caribbean (in)versions of modernity

may alert us to what must not be lost: the nation as a necessary frame of reference for political struggle and change.

Notes 1 I would like to thank the participants of the Technology, Modernization and Cultural Conﬂict Conference, University of Stuttgart, 2003, for very helpful comments on this article. 2 P. Melville, The Migration of Ghosts (1998), London: Bloomsbury, 1999, p. 109. Until further notice subsequent references to Melville are to this text. 3 S. Lawson Welsh, ‘Pauline Melville’s Shape-Shifting Fictions’, in M. Condé and T. Lonsdale (eds) Caribbean Women Writers: Fiction in English, Houndmills, Basingstoke and London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999, pp. 144–71, 145. Rippl observes that Melville ‘mixes a realist, mimetic, representational code with an imaginative and fantastic one’ (p. 107): G. Rippl, ‘ “I Do Not Take Messages from Dead People”, Cultural, Linguistic and Personal Boundaries in Pauline Melville’s Shape-Shifter’, in M. Reif-Hülser, Borderlands: Negotiating Boundaries in Post-Colonial Writing, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999, pp. 103–12. 4 This would mean to extend Gauri Viswanathan’s observations on the function of the occult in the nineteenth century as a counter-movement to ‘European and American imperialism’ and then to ‘global capitalism’. See her chapter in this volume (pp. 143–5). See also Rippl, who argues that ‘Guyanese myth and magic are established in contrast to the culture shaped by the colonizers’ (‘Pauline Melville’s Shape-Shifter’, p. 106). 5 N. Lazarus, ‘The Fetish of “the West” in Postcolonial Theory’, in C. Bartolovich and N. Lazarus (eds) Marxism, Modernity, and Postcolonial Studies, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 43–64, 58. See also Ralf Pordzik’s chapter in this volume for a discussion of uncritical rejections of technology. Melville, much like Wilson Harris, envisages contingencies between the mind of science (‘a universe of black holes’, W. Harris, The Womb of Space: The Cross-Cultural Imagination, Westport, Conn. and London: Greenwood, 1983, p. xvi) and myth. See ‘The Girl with the Celestial Limb’, in P. Melville, ShapeShifter (1990), London: Bloomsbury, 2000. Subsequent references are to this edition. 6 This is a clear reﬂection of the persistence of colonial structures in statism (‘The rambling, wooden building in which he waited was one of the old, colonial houses built by the plantocracy and now converted into government oﬃces and ministries’ (p. 1)). 7 S.J. Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1980, p. 227. On Greenblatt and Horkheimer/ Adorno see H. Grady, Shakespeare’s Universal Wolf: Studies in Early Modern Reiﬁcation, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996, pp. 107, 219–23 in particular. 8 This is to quote and to revise Lerner’s thesis of ‘mobility’ and ‘ﬂexibility’ as catalysts of the western modernization process (D. Lerner, The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East (1958), New York: Free Press, rev. edn 1964, p. 49). Greenblatt, however, is suspicious: for Lerner claims that this capacity is an ‘act of imaginative generosity’ (Greenblatt, Renaissance SelfFashioning, p. 227). Greenblatt proposes to reconsider power ‘in the analysis of modernization’, demonstrating that what Lerner ‘calls “empathy”, Shakespeare

Ulysses and the shape-shifter

9 10

11

12

13

14

15 16

91

calls “Iago” ’ (Renaissance Self-Fashioning, p. 225). ‘Empathy’ or, for that matter, ‘improvisation’, is an essentially strategical deployment of theatricality. In general I wish to insinuate that Greenblatt’s argument may be extended to a reading of the Anancy-ﬁgure. Renaissance Self-Fashioning, p. 227. Lawson Welsh also notices the ‘vulnerability of the trickster ﬁgure’ (‘Pauline Melville’s Shape-Shifting Fictions’, p. 151), and E. Savory observes that ‘there are no absolutes, no ideological certainties’ in Melville’s writing (E. Savory, ‘Mathematical Limbs and Other Eventualities: Translocation of the Body in Pauline Melville’s Shape-Shifter’, New Literatures Review 30, 1995, 47–57, p. 55). Harris, The Womb of Space, p. xv. The aﬃnities between Melville’s and Harris’s writing deserve more careful exploration. Cross-references are mentioned by Rippl, ‘Pauline Melville’s Shape-Shifter’, and Lawson Welsh, ‘Pauline Melville’s Shape-Shifting Fictions’. Among other things Shakespeare McNab is, of course, also an ironic comment on the relegation of the aspiring West Indian author to ‘folklore’. See also Lawson Welsh for a discussion of McNab’s role as a West Indian writer: ‘Pauline Melville’s Shape-Shifting Fictions’, pp. 149–50. See ibid., p. 145. Lawson Welsh emphasizes Melville’s ambiguous reference to the trickster-ﬁgure as shaman and charlatan in this context. As she explains, Melville prefaces her own writings with two epigraphs which create two diﬀerent perspectives on the ﬁgure of the shape-shifter, combining the ‘general and the particular’. The ﬁrst one, attributed to an ‘unknown poet’, refers to the ‘shapeshifter’ as a ‘timeless, cross-cultural archetype’, while the second one draws on Walter Roth’s anthropological study, Enquiry into the Animism and Folklore of the Guiana Indians (1909) and evokes a ‘speciﬁcally Guyanese, Amerindian inﬂection of the concept of shape-shifting’ (Lawson Welsh, ‘Pauline Melville’s ShapeShifting Fictions’, pp. 144–5). Harris uses this term in The Womb of Space, p. xv. At the same time it is possible to read the story as mixing ‘diﬀerent cultures’ and as emblematic of the transformative potential of the cross-cultural imagination. The story suggests ‘the rational Western principle of empiricism, introduced by the colonizers’ and a more ‘hybrid’ one, represented by Hogg, while McNab is the ‘incarnation of transformation’ (Rippl, ‘Pauline Melville’s Shape-Shifter’, p. 104). Rippl theorizes this ‘transgression of cultural boundaries’ in terms of Bakhtin’s dialogic imagination (pp. 104–5). The reference is from P. Hallward, Absolutely Postcolonial: Writing Between the Singular and the Speciﬁc, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001, p. 125. Important studies had appeared which claimed the inherent self-reﬂexiveness of the black tradition and hinged on the ﬁgure of the trickster. See H.L. Gates, The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. Written at the beginning of the 1990s, Shape-Shifter seemed to second such a perspective. Melville’s allusions to the myth of Anancy seemed to evoke a recognizably postmodern trickster-ﬁgure, or to aﬃrm views about ‘the essentially subversive quality of Caribbean culture’ (L. James, Caribbean Literature in English, London and New York: Longman, 1999, p. 116). James, however, also qualiﬁes such a broad perspective, claiming that West Indian Carnival transcends a mere containment-subversion dynamics (pp. 115–16). His focus is on Wilson Harris. For a survey on the Anancy ﬁgure, see H. Tiﬃn, ‘The Metaphor of Anancy in Caribbean Literature’, in R. Sellick (ed.) Myth and

92

17 18

19

20

21

22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32

Caribbean (in)versions of modernity Metaphor, Essays & Monograph Series 1, Adelaide: Centre for Research in the New Literatures in English, 1982, pp. 15–52. For an excellent discussion of the other stories in Shape-Shifter see Lawson Welsh, ‘Pauline Melville’s Shape-Shifting Fictions’, pp. 144–71. See the Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage, ed. Richard Allsopp, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996: ‘creek-water is the dark, wine-coloured water of the inland creeks. Labba is a robust, brownish, coarse-haired rodent resembling an enlarged guinea-pig. Its ﬂesh is ﬁrm, succulent and white, and is esteemed above that of all other local animals.’ The reference is from Rippl, ‘Pauline Melville’s Shape-Shifter’, p. 108. Rippl herself gives credit to Klaus Stuckert-Trachsler for this hint. E. Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, trans. J.M. Dash, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989, pp. 66–7. In the English version of Glissant’s Discours antillais the term antillanité ‘has been systematically translated as Caribbeanness’, see translator’s annotation (p. 261). Caribbean Discourse, pp. 66–7. From a rewriting of the middle passage Caribbeanness evolves into a model of a broader transnational vision, an ‘unsystematic network of relationships where we guess about the unforeseeable aspects of the world’ (‘The City, Refuge of the World’s Voices’, ‘Opening remarks at the Cities of Asylum Congress of the International Parliament of Writers made at the Palais de l’Europe in Strasbourg’ (March 26–28, 1997). Quoted from , accessed 21.06.2002; translation by Christopher Mott). In particular, Melville may be invoking Walcott’s Dream on Monkey Mountain where the combination of the two images suggests the ‘twilight-nature’ of Caribbean identity (D. Walcott, Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays, Farrar, Straus and Giroux: New York, 1970). This theme is repeatedly addressed and explored in Melville’s stories. See, for instance, ‘You Left the Door Open’ or ‘A Disguised Land’, and Lawson Welsh’s comments in ‘Pauline Melville’s Shape-Shifting Fictions’, pp. 155–6. Melville harks back on a rich tradition of rewriting Ralegh’s expedition (e.g. W. Harris, Palace of the Peacock, London: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1988). For reasons of space I cannot expand on this move. Melville’s images are too complex and dense to be explored in detail. Here, she focuses on Ralegh’s son ‘Wat’ who will be lost and vanish in Guyana’s mythic waters. Walcott, Dream on Monkey Mountain, p. 4. F. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. C. Farrington, New York: Grove Press, 1963, pp. 38–9. Walcott, Dream on Monkey Mountain, p. 3. See Ian Baucom’s article in this volume, p. 73. Her later The Migration of Ghosts takes the cue where more than once women ﬁgure as political activists commenting on economic and political conditions and their eﬀorts to change them. In stories such as ‘The Iron and the Radio Have Gone’ (Shape-Shifter), Melville seems systematically to unwrite assumptions about white superiority and colonial power (see also Rippl’s comments in ‘Pauline Melville’s Shape-Shifter’, p. 106). See Baucom’s reading of Fanon in this volume, pp. 69, 73. Baucom refers to ‘On National Culture’, in F. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. C. Farrington, Grove Press: New York, 1963. For a recent exploration of Melville’s ambivalences in the light of Glissant’s

Ulysses and the shape-shifter

33 34 35 36

37

38

93

notion of creolization, see also J. Stouck, ‘ “Return and Leave and Return Again”: Pauline Melville’s Historical Entanglements’, Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal 3/1 (Spring 2005) <scholar.library.miami.edn/anthurium/ volume_3/issue_1/stouck-return.htm> (accessed 28.11.2005). M. Dash, ‘Introduction’ to Caribbean Discourse, p. xxviii. Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, p. 25. Ibid., p. 26. Hallward, Absolutely Postcolonial, p. 102. In general I follow his reading of Glissant. Hallward takes an evolutionary approach, perceiving a break between ‘the dialectical historicism’ (p. 120) of Caribbean Discourse and his later works Tout-monde and La Poétique de la Relation. He thus deviates from views which emphasize a ‘deconstructionist’ tendency as a general aspect of his writing. (See for instance the introduction to the English translation of Caribbean Discourse by M. Dash, p. xii.) See Hallward, Absolutely Postcolonial on Glissant’s Tout-monde, p. 107. Glissant introduces the image of the whirlwind which has aﬃnities with the Deleuzian rhizome. It is not possible to explicate the complex Leibnizian and neoSpinozian references of his thinking which Hallward traces. Quoted from http://www.autodafe.org/ipw/textes/glissant.htm (see note 19). There are obvious cross-references between Glissant’s and Gilroy’s work. In Caribbean Discourse Glissant oﬀers antillanité as a therapeutic rewriting of history as trauma (see note 18), and Gilroy pursues a similar strategy when he rewrites the experience of the middle passage to argue that the roots of black modernity are transnational. Much of the strategic context of Gilroy’s perspective is revealed in his observations on Glissant which acknowledge his role in the emergence of a creole counter-discourse and stress the Deleuzian aspects of his writing. The latter, he argues, were excised ‘from the English edition of his 1981 book Le discours antillais, presumably because to acknowledge this exchange would somehow violate the aura of Caribbean authenticity that is a desirable frame around the work’ (P. Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, London: Verso, 1993, p. 31).

Bibliography Adorno, T. and M. Horkheimer, Dialectic of Englightenment, trans. J. Cumming, London and New York: Verso, 1997. Allsopp, R. (ed.) Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Bakhtin, M., The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. M. Holquist, trans. C. Emerson and M. Holquist, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. Busby, M. (ed.) Daughters of Africa, London: Jonathan Cape, 1992. Cohen, R., Global Diasporas: An Introduction (1997), London: Routledge, 2001. Fanon, F., The Wretched of the Earth, pref. by J.P. Sartre, trans. C. Farrington, New York: Grove Press, 1963. Gates, H.L., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. Gilroy, P., The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, London: Verso, 1993.

94

Caribbean (in)versions of modernity

Glissant, E., Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, trans. J.M. Dash, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989. —— ‘Opening remarks at the Cities of Asylum Congress of the International Parliament of Writers made at the Palais de l’Europe in Strasbourg’ (March 26–28, 1997). Quoted from , accessed 21.06.2002; translation by Christopher Mott. Goankar, D., ‘On Alternative Modernities’, in D. Goankar (ed.) Alternative Modernities, Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001, pp. 1–23. Grady, H., Shakespeare’s Universal Wolf: Studies in Early Modern Reiﬁcation, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. Greenblatt, S.J., Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1980. Hallward, P., Absolutely Postcolonial: Writing between the Singular and the Speciﬁc, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001. Harris, W., The Womb of Space: The Cross-Cultural Imagination, Westport, Conn. and London: Greenwood, 1983. —— Palace of the Peacock, London: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988. James, L., Caribbean Literature in English, London and New York: Longman, 1999. Lazarus, N., ‘The Fetish of “the West” in Postcolonial Theory’, in C. Bartolovich and N. Lazarus (eds) Marxism, Modernity, and Postcolonial Studies, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 43–64. Lerner, D., The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East (1958), New York: Free Press, rev. edn 1964. Marx, L., The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America, London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1964. Melville, P., Shape-Shifter (1990), London: Bloomsbury, 2000. —— The Migration of Ghosts (1998), London: Bloomsbury, 1999. Morris, M., ‘Cross-Cultural Impersonations: Pauline Melville’s Shape-Shifter’, Ariel 24/1, 1993, 79–89. Rippl, G., ‘ “I Do Not Take Messages from Dead People”, Cultural, Linguistic and Personal Boundaries in Pauline Melville’s Shape-Shifter’, in M. Reif-Hülser, Borderlands: Negotiating Boundaries in Post-Colonial Writing, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999, pp. 103–12. Roth, W., Enquiry into the Animism and Folklore of the Guiana Indians, Washington, DC: Bureau of Ethnology, 1909. Savory, E., ‘Mathematical Limbs and Other Eventualities: Translocation of the Body in Pauline Melville’s Shape-Shifter’, New Literatures Review 30, 1995, 47–57. Tiﬃn, H., ‘The Metaphor of Anancy in Caribbean Literature’, in R. Sellick (ed.) Myth and Metaphor, Essays & Monograph Series 1, Adelaide: Centre for Research in the New Literatures in English, 1982, pp. 15–52. Walcott, D., Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays, Farrar, Straus and Giroux: New York, 1970. Welsh, Lawson S., ‘Pauline Melville’s Shape-Shifting Fictions’, in M. Condé and T. Lonsdale (eds) Caribbean Women Writers: Fiction in English, Houndmills, Basingstoke and London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999, pp. 144–71.

6

V.S. Naipaul The limitations of transnationalism and technological progress Walter Goebel

It is diﬃcult to imagine a society today which does not depend on more or less complex forms of technological organization for its own reproduction. And in fact techné in its various forms has always distinguished homo faber and helped him to govern and exploit nature, other species and his fellow men – but also to organize and use them to his, and sometimes to their, advantage. Usually the technological basis of human culture goes unnoticed if there are no sudden innovations or intercultural contacts transforming the given horizon of expectation.1 In Europe, the invention and perfection of the longbow, of ﬁrearms or of the steam engine have in their turn created an awareness of the import and eﬀectiveness of technological mastery, of its possibilities and dangers, and have in the last two centuries stimulated complex theoretical and aesthetic interpretations of technologically inspired new phases of cultural development. Visions of perfect future states and fears of general tendencies toward dehumanization, as voiced, for example, by the Frankfurt School, have proliferated since the nineteenth century. In the formerly invaded colonies, the optimistic and pessimistic interpretations of technology traditionally depend on the dominant vs. the subversive perspective, vacillating between idealizations of bridges, of intercultural passages by voyage or by ﬂight or the projection of interstitial spaces on the one hand, images of penetration, rape and violence on the other. I would like to investigate how such oppositional interpretations of technological progress have become blurred in late twentieth-century postcolonial literature, and speciﬁcally how V.S. Naipaul explores the subtleties of technological change in postcolonial Trinidad and in England, ﬁnally fusing both in his melancholy vision of humanity which is at the same time transnational and pessimistic. Naipaul’s early cycle of stories, Miguel Street (1959), presents a number of misﬁts, would-be poets and philosophers in Port of Spain, most of whom have diﬃculty adapting to modernization in its various forms. Bogart, for example, ‘made pretence of making a living by tailoring’ (p. 9):

96

Caribbean (in)versions of modernity He bought a sewing-machine and some blue and white chalks. But I never could imagine him competing with anyone; and I cannot remember him making a suit. He was a little bit like Popo, the carpenter next door, who never made a stick of furniture, and was always planing and chiselling and making what I think he called mortises. Whenever I asked him, ‘Mr Popo, what you making?’ he would reply, ‘Ha, boy! That’s the question. I making the thing without a name.’2

Popo and Bogart are lovable dilettantes who belong to the species homo ludus, rather than homo faber, and ignore the logics of the competitive marketplace in which only fully fashioned and clearly labeled commodities can be exhibited. Popo is more of a poet-philosopher (p. 15) than a carpenter, but after spending some time in jail he changes his former way of life; he begins to work for his living, making and selling chairs, tables and wardrobes. He has no more time to spend (with the young storyteller) philosophizing. A similar happy-go-lucky fellow is the poet B. Wordsworth who, when questioned by a policeman what he is doing (at the time he is lying in the grass watching the stars at night) answers: ‘I have been asking myself the same question for forty years’ (p. 60). Another misﬁt is George, an ineﬃcient pyrotechnicist, full of theories about ﬁreworks but unable to sell any he has made. Finally he burns down his house with a splendid display of colourful ﬁreworks, enjoying an epiphanic but evanescent self-destructive moment of celebrity. Miguel Street is peopled by would-be poets, philosophers and dreamers, whose charm lies in their ineﬃciency and ineptitude. None of them is successful in the traditional sense of the word: partly they belong to the childlike, naïve world-view of the young storyteller; partly they give voice to an anti-modern scepticism that is pervasive in Naipaul’s works and which is sharply perceived because of the unprejudiced naïve gaze of the narrator as he experiences a fall from his childlike world. In Naipaul’s tales eﬃciency often seems to lead to a loss of the imaginative faculty and of sympathy, warmth and loquacity. In A House for Mr Biswas, for example, Mohun Biswas is harassed by the material demands of his wife and her family until he ﬁnally dies from overwork. Though Biswas manages to acquire a number of houses in succession – besides a bicycle and a motor-car – paradoxically enough he feels most happy when he is informed that his house has been burnt down without insurance: ‘Not insuranburn. It burn down, fair and square.’3 Many of Naipaul’s ﬁgures break down or become disagreeable because of the dream of success they follow. They lose their humour, their health, in Biswas’s case even his life. As Popo remarks in Miguel Street: ‘Boy, when you grow old as me . . ., you ﬁnd that you don’t care for the things you thought you woulda like if you coulda aﬀord them’ (p. 18). Naipaul’s disillusionment with the modern world in

V.S. Naipaul

97

which the consumer’s desires are continually stimulated, his critique of market ideology and its technological promises strike at the very foundations of western modernization. However multidirectional Naipaul’s satiric tone may be in Miguel Street – to some extent most ﬁgures are also comic caricatures – a pervasive subtext establishes an opposition between philosophically or artistically gifted persons and the imaginative and emotional impoverishment experienced by those who work for pecuniary gain.4 This division between spiritual and emotional humanity and the world of the go-getters is a traditional one, reminding us of Hegel’s distinction between a poetic and a prosaic world-view or of the distinction established by Heidegger between instrumentalist technology and techno-science, on the one hand, and the endangered sphere of art and individual creativity on the other. Such oppositions may seem somewhat old-fashioned as they deny the interpenetration of technology and creativity and of technology and anthropology; that is, the technically induced transformations of man’s encultured nature. By mapping these oppositions onto the centre/margindistinction in his early works and by following the pattern of negative initiation in some of the Miguel Street stories, Naipaul tends to idealize and aestheticize postcolonial culture, though this tendency is continually undercut by comic and ironic elements. On one level, Port of Spain appears to be an idyllic place which is endangered by technology, eﬃciency and a fascination with the ideology of success – while in a formal respect Miguel Street still clings to the idyllic law of composition; that is, as a collection of little pictures. I would now like to show how Naipaul has moved beyond such oppositions with The Enigma of Arrival. Inspired by his knowledge of Wordsworth’s poetry and Constable’s paintings, the ﬁrst-person narrator of The Enigma of Arrival tends to interpret the countryside near Salisbury as idyllic, timeless and without decay, ‘an unchanging world’.5 The idyllic features are emphasized by the slow movement of the story, as the postcolonial narrator – who has many features of the author himself, including his earlier emulation of British culture – explores the landscape on foot, observing minutely every person encountered, every gesture of even chance acquaintances and perceiving the English landscape mainly through the eyes of a connoisseur of English literature and art. An elderly man with a load of wood on his bent back is compared to Wordsworth’s ‘Leech-Gatherer’, and geese will remind him of those in King Lear, ‘cackling home to Camelot’. Jack and his garden also seem to obey the laws of idyllic cyclicity, of an ever-unchanging natural seasonal cycle, and to compose a modern Book of Hours (p. 20). It takes some time for the narrator to understand that not only does death live in the Wiltshire Arcadia, but also decay, dilapidation, ugliness and neglect, albeit side by side with constant renewal and modernization. The ﬁrst part of The

98

Caribbean (in)versions of modernity

Enigma of Arrival is an education in seeing and understanding, as the postcolonial observer moves from an aestheticized version of pastoral England toward a more dynamic one. His gaze is startlingly clear. He takes note of alterations by focusing on minute details and mimics the gaze of the intrusive and puzzled anthropologist in a colonial setting. It seems as if a dialogue were enacted between two personae of the author: a former, more naïve self with illusions about English culture is deconstructed and replaced by a more detached and sceptical self posing as an anthropologist.6 The former persona has an imagination ﬁlled with English poetic allusions, or, to quote Wilson Harris: Schoolchildren in the West Indies used to write quite naturally and innocently, it seemed, of English snow and Wordsworthian daﬀodils that they had never seen . . . The absurdity has often (and rightly so) been quoted as a caveat of blindness inculcated by colonial institutions . . .7 In the course of the unlearning of ‘blindness’ the pastoral England of the Romantic poets is backgrounded and visions of imperial grandeur are equally deﬂated. It is no chance that a river with a collapsing boat-house can then remind the narrator of Joseph Conrad’s Congo and that, much as the colonial setting in Heart of Darkness, the landscape, and especially the farmyards, are littered with useless, discarded and broken machinery. In some passages we may detect a hidden triumph as decay and dereliction – even examples of the inhuman treatment of animals – are found at the heart of the former imperial centre. The dialogue between the more ‘blind’ and innocent former self which is overwhelmed by ideas of the grandeur of western art and culture, and the disillusioned present observer, something of a sceptical postcolonial interloper, can also indirectly cast a light on Naipaul’s own continual refashionings. The fascination with the equalizer, death, is pervasive in the novel. In a peculiar perversion – or perhaps it is a subversion – of imperial signiﬁers, the postcolonial observer associates the colour purple not with pomp and nobility but with death, because in his native Trinidad he had often seen horses in funeral processions, drawing a hearse covered with a purple pall (p. 196). Then again, he will calmly and unemotionally describe how ivy stiﬂes life in the large orchard of a manor house, slowly eﬀacing signs of bygone wealth and social status. But these examples of imperial decay, however signiﬁcant they may be, are few and observed in passing, not gloated upon. In some instances, the projection of idyllic aesthetic stereotypes onto the English landscape and English life is impeded by the exposure of the evils of a techno-scientiﬁc and inhumane world – for

V.S. Naipaul

99

example when the Indian observer describes deformed cows, surely especially shocking from a Hindu point of view: Once there were cattle there that had suﬀered from some malformation. The breeding of these cattle had become so mechanical that the malformation seemed mechanical too, the mistakes of an industrial process. Curious additional lumps of ﬂesh had grown on various places on the animals, as though these animals had been cast in a mould, a mould divided into two sections, and as though, at the joining of the moulds, the cattle-material, the mixture out of which the cattle were being cast, had leaked. There, in the ruined, abandoned, dungy, mossy farmyard, fresh now only with their own dung, they had stood, burdened in this puzzling way, with this extra cattle-material hanging down their middles like bull’s dewlaps, like heavy curtains, waiting to be taken oﬀ to the slaughterhouse in the town. (p. 16) This is one of the few examples in which the opposition between life and techno-science is clearly articulated, much as in Miguel Street. The cows appear to be either the technical products of an inept promethean demi-god or to be shoddily assembled by a worker in a modern factory. Their physical plight and simple ugliness is an attack on the hubris which allows man to interfere with the laws of creation and may well be interpreted as a precocious comment on some of the more recent failures of bio-technology. Generally, however, the critique of technological culture is muted and not inspired by any form of marked pastoral nostalgia. The farm machinery the narrator observes, whether in working order or broken and discarded, is mainly taken to be an indicator of time. Change and modernization are seen as inescapable parts of human existence rather than as sudden negative inﬂuences in the English Garden (the traditional opposition of machine and garden, as presented by Leo Marx, doesn’t quite apply here).8 The defunct machines, the decay and disorder observed, the violence which can even lead to murder, do of course cut England down to size, but hardly ever viciously, generally with a serene acceptance of human limitations. The machine only marks a new form of human endeavour, not a principally new horizon of expectations. As far as the central issues of human self-respect and contentment are concerned, modernization is simply irrelevant. Machines can in some instances even be assimilated to the pastoral landscape – for example, when Jack bounces along an uneven lane in his car on a Sunday outing to the local pub. Georg Lukács’s opinion, that pastoral is only of aesthetic interest when endangered (as in Miguel Street),9 is disregarded here, and the denial of the signiﬁcance of cultural change is so pervasive that we are even deprived of the most central part of the novel: a clear plot.

100

Caribbean (in)versions of modernity

Cutting England down to size means adopting a broader perspective, comparing it to the Congo, as, of course, Conrad himself had done. But England is also compared to Egypt and to India concerning the number of sacred sites to be found in these ancient cultures, and equally in the vicinity of Stonehenge. England is just one of many cultures – and surely no longer the leading one. In the appreciative comparison with India we may even detect a veiled attempt to revise earlier sceptical views of the subcontinent: if a lack of eﬃciency was a major point in Naipaul’s earlier travelogues, the more positive tertium comparationis is now antiquity.10 Cutting England down to size goes along with the adoption of a somewhat melancholy philosophical attitude toward the human condition. People spin their webs of signiﬁcation by adopting habits, customs, favourite walks and settings, by using machines or building houses. They ‘mark . . . out and maintain areas of cultivation in the midst of waste land’ as any native would (p. 180). Pitton, a gardener working in the manor house, is explicitly compared to a barbarian in North Africa and to a forest Indian in Guyana, South America (pp. 212, 232). When dislocated – Pitton, for example, is sacked after working for 25 years as a gardener at the manor house (p. 251) – human beings will lose their bearings ‘like an ant whose nest had just been smashed’ (p. 246). Recurring animal similes – comparisons with ants, with rats that have certain runs, with a turtle – again deny the signiﬁcance of cultural change, emphasizing an unalterable, natural and instinct-based human condition. The art of living consists in building nests like ants, in adapting to the spirit of place, as does the colonial observer himself: ‘I knew the walk by heart, like a piece of music’ (p. 298). Idyllic as this may sound, associating landscape and music as in the pastoral tradition, the idyllic places are man-made and temporal in The Enigma of Arrival. Jack’s garden, for example, is ‘destroyed in stages and ﬁnally concreted over’ after his death (p. 301). While accommodation and cultivation can bridge the split between the aesthetic and the material view of life that opens up in some of the early scenes of disillusionment, they are always limited in time. Material success is not essential for personal fulﬁllment in such a world-view. The storyteller’s landlord lives in a slowly decaying mansion with extensive gardens, but the categories of success and failure, which dominated in Naipaul’s earlier novels, don’t apply (p. 53). With his accidia (sloth), the landlord is a symbol of the decaying empire and also of the completion of a cycle of life. The postcolonial ‘interloper’ loves the decay and is well aware that in the heyday of empire he would not have found accommodation as the landlord’s tenant (p. 52). Thus on one level The Enigma of Arrival can be read as a nostalgic ‘love song of the empire’s ruin’.11 But the love of decay is ﬁrst and foremost of a philosophical nature, which allows for a transtemporal perspective of human endeavours and accepts the tenuousness

V.S. Naipaul

101

of everyone’s hold upon the land. The somewhat macabre love of decay is also partly conditioned by childhood experiences, as the narrator was ‘sent into the world with a sense of glory dead’ (p. 52); that is, of the heyday of empire being over. Focusing on the dance of death and the transient nature of human eﬀorts, the ‘postcolony’ and the imperial centre show many similarities in The Enigma of Arrival. In both there is instability, brutality, ugliness and decay. The common people Naipaul likes to focus upon in Trinidad, as much as in England, are just as insecure, liable to be sacked like Pitton or uprooted and dislocated like the Phillipses, who live in numerous houses that go with the jobs they take, much like migratory English versions of Mr Biswas. But in spite of the insecurity, the dependence and continual modernizations that supersede old habits and customs, happiness can be achieved, if only for a limited time: ‘It seemed that in that patch of ground, amid the derelict buildings of a superseded kind of farming, . . . Jack had found fulﬁlment’ (p. 33). The ﬁnal scene of the novel is set in modern suburban India, where the narrator feels no less estranged than in England, where change has also transformed the world of his youth: We had made ourselves anew. The world we had found ourselves in – the suburban houses, with gardens, where my sister’s farewell ceremony had taken place, was one we had partly made ourselves, and had longed for, when we had longed for money and the end of distress; we couldn’t go back. There was no ship of antique shape now to take us back. We had come out of the nightmare; and there was nowhere else to go. (p. 317) As in Miguel Street, the theme of this ﬁnal passage is the futility of the dream of success, which, when it has materialized, turns stale. In Miguel Street it even destroys the prospect of an aesthetic existence, money-mindedness devours philosophy and art and the childhood idyll of the young storyteller. Not so in The Enigma of Arrival. Here modernization and decay coexist, the building of new farms and the dilapidation of the relics of the Empire. Continual rhythms of formation and dissolution aﬀect the cycles of individual lives, but not the fortune of an entire culture. Machinery and modernization are not threatening phenomena in The Enigma of Arrival; rather, they are taken for granted. Dilapidated houses and abandoned and broken farm equipment does not eﬀectively impede the formation of new personal idylls, the making of new gardens. Each life cycle can aim at its own version of the pastoral. So from the stories of Miguel Street, which are deeply sceptical of modernization and show a fear of a general tendency toward

102

Caribbean (in)versions of modernity

dehumanization, a loss of aesthetics and philosophy, Naipaul has moved to a more serene point of view in which human nature appears to be more resilient, less aﬀected by the dangers of modernization and technology. Peculiarly enough, though, the earlier stories appear – in spite of the antimodern animus – lighter in tone and mood, more suﬀused with sympathy and the comic spirit, perhaps because of the childlike perspective that is assumed, while in The Enigma of Arrival a melancholy mood and an obsession with the dance of death seems to prevail and even to be a consolation: ‘These ideas, of a world in decay, a world subject to constant change, and of the shortness of human life, made many things bearable’ (p. 26). Is it perhaps the transitory nature even of modernization and technological progress, or the inevitable decay of empires, that consoles the narrator. Naipaul’s humanism in not so much anti-modern in The Enigma of Arrival than beyond modernity, because it is partly medieval (‘dance of death’ symbolism, vanitas-theme), and partly timeless. It levels the diﬀerences between the ‘postcolony’ and the centre from the vantage point of the detached and deeply humanitarian philosopher. It seems that in The Enigma of Arrival the pragmatist has come to supplant the despairing idealist, who had bemoaned the loss of the poetic world-view. The pastoral England Naipaul presents in The Enigma of Arrival is somewhat idiosyncratic – every individual creates his own networks of habits and customs, his own insecure gardens, to oppose change and modernization for a limited time – while in Miguel Street the inﬂuences of modernization were pervasive. The appropriate western intertext for Miguel Street could be Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, in which the neglect of many a would-be philosopher, many a gifted poet is bemoaned, while for The Enigma of Arrival the intertext could be Voltaire’s Candide, in which the itinerant hero ﬁnally decides to tend his own garden. Scepticism toward the dominant version of modernization has at the same time been supplanted by a resigned acknowledgement of the transitory nature of all human eﬀorts. The Enigma of Arrival oﬀers a somewhat cold and despairing version of the pastoral mode. Whether the darkness of Naipaul’s pastoral vision is an eﬀect of lifelong marginalization and homelessness, of the philosophical detachment of the ageing sage (with a modicum of Hinduism added), or of a deeply inbred scepticism is diﬃcult to determine. The anti-modern animus we found in Miguel Street has to some extent remained, and the choice of rural Wiltshire as habitat for the Indian observer, who lives a life of seclusion like a hermit, is in itself a sign of this. Placed at the former colonial centre, however, this anti-modernity is potentially subversive, because it calls into question the enlightenment basis of the project of modernization and of western ideas of globalization: if the mass of men in England lead lives of quiet desperation or cling to their idiosyncratic little

V.S. Naipaul

103

gardens like the eccentrics in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, if the general uplift of mankind in the spirit of capitalism and with the help of technology is an illusion, then there can be no legitimate excuse for globalization. Death and decay, the great levelers, show the futility and hubris of the project of technological rationality and enlightenment. The subversive compound ‘insuranburn’ comprises Naipaul’s verdict on the process of modernization and on capitalist market mechanisms. At least in the ‘postcolony’, all you can hope for is the quick and perhaps illegally achieved windfall proﬁt at the cost of losing your house and becoming homeless. Creation and destruction are paradoxically fused for the purpose of achieving the maximum proﬁt and human creativity is disregarded. Mr Biswas’s many homes are signs of the total commodiﬁcation of the concept of home, which ﬁnally leads to a continual homeless wandering, as indicated by the titles of the novels and/or ﬁctionalized travelogues – for example, A House for Mr Biswas, The Enigma of Arrival, A Way in the World and Half a Life. A glance at the form of Naipaul’s narratives will clarify this aspect: his so-called novels signiﬁcantly repeat the autobiographical gesture again and again without ever attaining any idea of identity or of belonging. Instead, an episodic, essayistic and inconclusive form evolves, which indicates continual ﬂuidity and can never achieve a sense of arrival. The dispersal of the self in a number of locations is enacted as a subversion of the enlightenment idea of any uniﬁed identity and implicitly also questions the idea of transnational self-fashioning. Only death can provide closure, can, for example, cut oﬀ Mr Biswas’s serialized accommodations to ever-new habitats; but death usually comes in a most banal form, unexpectedly, without any climax, providing no clear message. Life appears as a series of assumed habits and poses (some prompted by modernization) which never fully satisfy. The Enigma of Arrival begins in England with the observation of Jack’s life, which forms a cycle and seems to oﬀer a model of closure, possibly providing a pattern for the narrator’s own life. Then follow a number of ﬂashbacks to former times in Trinidad, to the ﬁrst and subsequent journeys to England. In Jack, Pitton, the Phillipses, the narrator seems to be collecting alternative patterns for an ordered, meaningful or more simple life, while he himself travels to and fro, unable to escape the episodic. He appears to feel most at home in de Chirico’s enigmatic and inconclusive depiction of an unsatisfying and incomplete journey, which can be interpreted as a visual representation of the failure of the autobiographical form and of the transnational idea. There may be a deep nostalgic longing for the ‘discourse of authenticity’ behind Naipaul’s inconclusive stories of pathetic or ineﬀectual lives,12 but closure is deﬁnitely not achieved in The Enigma of Arrival.

104

Caribbean (in)versions of modernity

There is a misanthropic – and to some extent also a misogynous – streak in Naipaul’s works, a Swiftian element, which naturally leads to the comparison of human beings and animals (rats, ants, turtles). Naipaul’s misanthropism and the pervasive tone of melancholia could even turn the bustling subcontinent of India into ‘an area of darkness’,13 and can perhaps tell us more about the suﬀerings of many a marginalized postcolonial existence and the plight of the alienated self than more outspoken cultural criticism – or visions of successful transnational hybridizations for that matter. Naipaul performs a trenchant critique of modernization and of the idea of the uniﬁed self which is reﬂected in the continual failure of the autobiographical form. It would perhaps take a Paul Gilroy to transform such suﬀering and failure, such aimless bungling through, as presented, for example, in A House for Mr Biswas, into a story of transnational triumph. That suﬀering, alienation and displacement can be conducive to successful transnational exchanges is called into question by Naipaul’s fragmented and melancholy autobiographies. Another instance of how the best-made plans of mice and men often go astray is presented in the early novel Mr Stone and the Knights Companion (1963): I would like to close with the beginning of the novel, which shows the devastating sweep of Naipaul’s comic satire of man’s pathetic ineﬀectivity and ineptitude, and which at this early stage already encompasses England itself, at a time when Naipaul was assumed to admire the hegemonial centre. With such dark and absurd visions of human existence Naipaul has attained one of his aims: to present a uniﬁed picture of the world and the human condition, merging Trinidad and England: Ever since I had begun to identify my subjects I had hoped to arrive, in a book, at a synthesis of the worlds and cultures that had made me. The other way of writing, the separation of one world from the other, was easier, but I felt it false to the nature of my experience. (p. 144) To arrive at ‘a synthesis of the worlds that had made me’ would be the usual aim of the autobiographer: at the centre of the synthesis the individual is expected to emerge. Not so for Naipaul. The individual only leaves traces behind of a series of attempts at self-realization in meaningful acts, but time eﬀaces all attempts sooner or later if one doesn’t want to ossify into the eccentricity of peculiar habits and, for example, like Jack’s father, come to look like a turtle. The synthesis of diﬀerent worlds, which the idea of transnationalism also aims at, cannot be attained individually; the autobiographical venture must fail as individuality is dispersed in numerous and aimless journeys. The synthesis can only be attained in a somewhat gloomy, but also comic, vision of the human condition in which individuality is lost.

V.S. Naipaul

105

And thus England and Trinidad can act out scenes from a common comédie humaine, as Mr Stone mirrors Mr Biswas: It was Thursday, Miss Millington’s afternoon oﬀ, and Mr Stone had to let himself in. Before he could switch on the hall light, the depthless green eyes held him, and in an instant the creature, eyes alone, leapt down the steps. Mr Stone cowered against the dusty wall and shielded his head with his briefcase. The cat brushed against his legs and was out through the still open door. Mr Stone stood where he was, the latchkey in one ungloved hand, and waited for the beating of his heart, the radiation of ﬁne pain through his body, to subside. The cat belonged to the family next door, people who had moved into the street just ﬁve years before and were still viewed by Mr Stone with suspicion . . . as soon as it began to dig up Mr Stone’s garden, its owners having no garden worth digging up, Mr Stone had transferred his hostility from the family to their cat. When he returned from the oﬃce he examined his ﬂowerbeds – strips of earth between irregular areas of crazy paving – for signs of the animal’s obscene scuttlings and dredgings and buryings. ‘Miss Millington! Miss Millington!’ he would call. ‘The cat pepper!’ And heavy old Miss Millington, aproned down to her ankles, would shuﬄe out with a large tin of pepper dust (originally small tins had been thought suﬃcient: the picture of the terriﬁed cat on the label looked so convincing) and would ritually sprinkle all the ﬂowerbeds, the aﬀected one more than the others, as though to obscure rather than prevent the animal’s activities. In time the ﬂowerbeds had become discoloured; it was as if cement had been mixed with the earth and dusted on to the leaves and stems of plants. Now the cat had penetrated into the house itself. The beating of Mr Stone’s heart moderated and the shooting pain receded, leaving a trail of exposed nerves, a lightness of body below the heavy Simpson’s overcoat, and an urge to decisive action.14 This simple English scene can be given a postcolonial interpretation if the xenophobic elements are emphasized, the fact that the new neighbours are still viewed with suspicion by Mr Stone after ﬁve years. And this suspicion is, peculiarly enough, projected onto one of the most common of English pets, which assumes the proportions and the ferocity of a tiger in the eyes of the paranoid observer, who later imagines most gruesome tortures for the innocent animal. Interpreted in a more general context, however, the opening of this novel borders on the absurd and shows the pervasiveness of Naipaul’s misanthropism which has, perhaps with undue precipitation, annoyed many critics

106

Caribbean (in)versions of modernity

when applied to the postcolonial sphere – for example to India. But already in Mr Stone and the Knights Companion the sceptical vision encompasses the centre itself. The multiple frustrations and failures of all Mr Stone’s plans and actions, the pathetically exposed nerves in a quivering, jellyﬁsh-like body, the helpless way in which he calls out for help from Miss Millington on her afternoon oﬀ, and the ineﬀectual way in which she turns the ﬂowerbed into a ﬂower-grave because the cat pepper is not eﬀective, all accumulate to present an image of man as an imbecile and grotesque animal. The scene continues with a farcical cat-hunt: [H]e laid a trail of cheese from gate to door, up the carpeted hall, now bitterly cold, and up the steps to the bathroom. Here, sitting on the cover of the lavatory bowl, still in his hat and overcoat, he waited, poker in hand. The poker was not for attack but self-defence . . . He had visions of dipping cat’s paws in boiling oil, of swinging the creature by its tail and ﬂinging it down to the pavement below, of scalding it in boiling water. He got up from the lavatory seat and turned on the geyser. Instant hot water! The water ran cold, then after a whoomph! as the jets caught, lukewarm, then at last warm. The geyser needed cleaning; he must remind Miss Millington. He ﬁlled the basin and sat down again on the lavatory bowl. The waterpipes ceased to hum; silence returned. Some minutes later, ﬁve, perhaps ten, he remembered. It was rats that ate cheese. Cats ate other things. He put on lights everywhere, closed the front door, and turned on ﬁres. The cheese he forgot. It was a pleasurably agitated Miss Millington who reported the next morning on the disappearance of her cheese from the larder, and its conversion into cubes laid in a wavering line from gate to bathroom. He oﬀered no explanation.15 Mr Stone’s dreams of eﬀective and heroic action smack of the mock-heroic because of his own insigniﬁcance, his pitiable weakness, his shivering posture of self-defence, and because the monster he wants to ﬁght is no more than a domestic animal. Imagined atrocities contrast sharply with the fearful posture of a fully clothed man crouching on a toilet-bowl. Even his water system is ineﬀective, mocks the demand for ‘instant hot water’, and adds to the general atmosphere of failure and repeated irritation. Mr Stone’s ﬁnal inability to oﬀer an explanation or solve anything enhances the general absurdity of the scene, which reminds us of the dismal darkness and coldness of some scenes of misery and inhumanity – for example the baptizing of Paul Dombey – in Dickens’ Dombey and Son. But what, in that novel, is an eﬀect of modernization has here a Kafkaesque quality of unbridled absurdity, which undercuts the logics of human

V.S. Naipaul

107

alienation in a materialistic world shown by Dickens. Naipaul does not criticize the negative eﬀects of modernization, he turns away from the project of modernization completely; it has failed for him and all that remains are little pathetic battles for the preservation of self-respect, in spite of the lack of plots and stories which would make lives meaningful or autobiographies coherent. The Swiftian darkness of Naipaul’s vision oﬀers a sceptical comment on the failure of modernization, albeit alleviated by an element of cosmic comedy, of laughter at man’s eccentric antics – here he is more Sterneian than Swiftian. In both Augustans’ and in Naipaul’s case we could speak of a kind of ‘conservative subversion’ of the enlightenment and of the project of modernization. The alternative, to criticize these discourses from the vantage point of a gleeful acceptance of the ‘splendidly inauthentic’,16 is beyond Naipaul’s world-view. While Swift reacted against political corruption and the negative eﬀects of modernization, while Dickens in his later novels exposed the darker sides of capitalism, Naipaul, in mimicking their anti-enlightenment gestures, moves a step beyond. His trenchant critique of the idea of the uniﬁed self, his despair in view of modern man’s many ineptitudes, aims at the very basis of transnational optimism. While painting an oppressively dark picture of the plight of the eternal wanderer who will never arrive, Naipaul reduces man to a comic ﬁgure, partly even to his animal self – when he compares him to an ant or a turtle, if not to a Yahoo. Any movement toward active cultural fusion and the bridging of gaps, or the negotiation of mutual futures, is questioned and subverted by the predominance of communal suﬀering and muddling through. The sceptical humanist comes to decentre transnational optimism and to supplant it with a misanthropic vision of the cosmic comedy. Naipaul’s serene scepticism undercuts the optimistic notes of triumphal globalism, but it also leads to a cul-de-sac in which any agency is in question. Here Naipaul’s view of man takes on some postmodern aspects: the dynamic glissando of concepts of the self that the eternal wanderer experiences reminds us of the shape-shifters and tricksters to be found in Saskia Schabio’s interpretation of Caribbean short stories in this volume. There is a marked diﬀerence, however: for Naipaul the experience of transitional identity is always marked by a lack and coloured by nostalgia – for the pastoral form or for the completed quest – while Pauline Melville seems to revel in the possibilities oﬀered by playful and dynamic self-fashionings. Naipaul’s scepticism is not representative for the Caribbean and for Trinidad, which for the superﬁcial European observer is the home of carnivalesque exuberance and has been presented by many poets as interculturally and even inter-ethnically successful. Naipaul’s multidirectional satire,17 which aims at postcolonial sites as much as at the centre, is balanced by

108

Caribbean (in)versions of modernity

many Caribbean voices that have insisted on the syncretic powers of the Caribbean. Alejo Carpentier, for example, has generally supported and even emulated creolization and mestizaje, and has presented Latin America and the Caribbean as especially resilient cultures and as baroque sites which were and are predestined for syncretic fusions with Spanish culture. He speaks of the baroque nature of the tropics, of Indian architecture and of African religion and, like Paul Gilroy, he ﬁnally turns toward music in his short novel Concierto Barroco (1974) as the medium predestined for a baroque synthesis and a universal syncretic culture. That both Gilroy and Carpentier turn toward music is on the one hand not surprising, as it has been called the mother tongue of the African-American. On the other hand, the fact that music is the least mimetic of the arts – and that it was the art best able to express romanticism’s longing for the universal – reveals much about the diﬃculties of the transcultural imagination, which, it appears, can ﬂower most easily in non-mimetic aesthetic discourses; that is, in an art which would perhaps most naturally approach Theodor Adorno’s ideal of aesthetic negation. Adorno idealized the ephemeral and evanescent qualities of (ideally autonomous) art in a society he perceived to be basically estranged and deformed by bourgeois and capitalist power structures, and the fragile ideal of the transcultural, whether in art or in life, exists in a similar state of duress on the peripheries. If, however, art moves toward the pole of general negation in states of emergency and especially in emergent societies (as Adorno has suggested) – and this also implicitly refers to Naipaul’s cosmic comedies – it will be in danger of becoming politically suspect or ineﬀective.18 On the other hand, in political and economic discourse or in the realistic discourse of Naipaul’s travelogues, it seems diﬃcult to sustain transnational optimism, which tends to transcend the laws of mimesis. For another instance of Caribbean transnational optimism we may recall Wilson Harris’s idea of the cross-cultural imagination, which takes its cues mainly from poetry and modernist novels, linking itself, for example, to Ralph Ellison’s poetics of ambivalence. To quote Harris: The capacity to convert, rather than succumb to, deprivations is one of the strands that we have pursued in ‘the womb of space’ . . . To convert rooted deprivations into complex parables of freedom and truth is a formidable but not hopeless task.19 That such diﬀerent interpretations of the transnational and its utopian/ dystopian tendencies can coexist in the Caribbean demonstrates the complexity of the negotiations between the national, the transnational and individual self-fashioning, and it also shows how a burden of accumulated suﬀering and deprivation can form or deform the poet’s imagination.

V.S. Naipaul

109

Experiences of multiple and continued alienation, whatever their cause may be (racial or social discrimination, marginalization of the artistoutsider, disenchantment with the seductions of modernization), can lead to forms of negation or resistance, but Naipaul’s characters and impersonations usually move toward despair, melancholia and isolation and make resistance, let alone ‘resistance in interaction’, diﬃcult to imagine.20 And to develop ideas of the transnational, as a step beyond resistance, is an even more precarious venture. For many of Naipaul’s heroes the auratic nature and the enigmatic promises of western modernity have lost their allurement. ‘Weariness tinged with melancholy’, to quote Ian Baucom, is the pervasive feeling of the many wanderers who have not arrived, who don’t know what they are aiming at and who have little left to expect.21 We can observe a multiple loss of the aura in The Enigma of Arrival. Not only has the advent of modernity in the ‘postcolony’ destroyed the Benjaminian magic of distance – as described by Baucom in this volume – but the English centre of modernization itself, metonymically personifying the West, proves somewhat of a disappointment when viewed at close range. Naipaul’s misanthropy may be exceptional, but again he may be speaking for innumerable disillusioned outsiders whose transnational episodic journeys allow for no more than melancholia and bricolage in incomplete autobiographical gestures.

Notes 1 The term is here used in the hermeneutic sense; see R. Koselleck, Vergangene Zukunft: Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten (1979), Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1995. 2 V.S. Naipaul, Miguel Street (1959), Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971, p. 10. Subsequent references are to this edition. 3 V.S. Naipaul, A House for Mr Biswas (1961), Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992, p. 301. 4 For multidirectionality in Naipaul’s satire, see J.C. Ball, Satire and the Postcolonial Novel: V.S. Naipaul, Chinua Achebe, Salman Rushdie, New York and London: Routledge, 2003, pp. 56–7. 5 V.S. Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival, Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1987, p. 34. Subsequent references are to this edition. 6 This second persona, at a sceptical distance from all things English, can also be interpreted as a hidden reinvention of Naipaul’s self, which would make The Enigma of Arrival his work of redemption. 7 W. Harris, The Womb of Space: The Cross-Cultural Imagination, Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983, p. 134. 8 L. Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America, London: Oxford University Press, 1964. 9 G. Lukács, ‘Sehnsucht und Form: Charles-Louis Philippe’, Die Seele und die Formen (1911), Neuwied and Berlin: Luchterhand, 1971, pp. 147–48. Lukács calls the

110

10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

18

19 20 21

Caribbean (in)versions of modernity

idyll the ‘greatest paradox of poetry’ (and especially of ﬁction) because it strives for stasis and against narrative progression (p. 150). It is somewhat puzzling how the descriptions of the lack of eﬃciency in India which, for example, are to be found in India: A Million Mutinies Now (1990), agree with the critique of modernization in Trinidad (in Miguel Street). I. Baucom, Out of Place: Englishness, Empire, and the Locations of Identity, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999, p. 182. I would, however, suggest that the love of decay supersedes nostalgia and turns toward misanthropy. As suggested by Ian Baucom in Out of Place, p. 188. Title of an early travelogue by Naipaul (see Bibliography). V.S. Naipaul, Mr Stone and the Knights Companion (1963), Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988, pp. 5–6. Ibid., pp. 6–7. Baucom, Out of Place, p. 189. The term ‘multidirectional satire’ is taken from Ball, Satire and the Postcolonial Novel. Naipaul often turned against bitter satire and endorsed a kind of mellow satire with an ‘all-embracing Christlike’ vision. See ‘The Documentary Heresy’, Twentieth Century 173, 1963–5, 107–8. We might call Naipaul’s world a kind of ‘cosmic comedy’ which includes periphery and centre. Adorno continually fought against this danger, wanting to paradoxically unite the autonomy of art with its social genesis. Indeed, the paradox is Adorno’s main ﬁgure of speech in his Aesthetics, e.g.: ‘Gerade als Artefakte aber, Produkte gesellschaftlicher Arbeit, kommunizieren sie auch mit der Empirie, der sie absagen, und aus ihr ziehen sie ihren Inhalt’ (Theodor W. Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 7, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970, p. 15). Harris, The Womb of Space, p. 137. E. Boehmer, Empire, the National and the Postcolonial 1890–1920: Resistance in Interaction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002; see also her chapter in this volume. See Ian Baucom’s contribution to this volume, p. 66.

Bibliography Adorno, Th. W., Ästhetische Theorie, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 7, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970. Ball, J.C., Satire and the Postcolonial Novel: V.S. Naipaul, Chinua Achebe, Salman Rushdie, New York and London: Routledge, 2003. Baucom, I., Out of Place: Englishness, Empire, and the Location of Identity, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999. Boehmer, E., Empire, the National and the Postcolonial, 1890–1920: Resistance in Interaction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Carpentier, A., Concierto Barroco, Madrid: Siglo XXI, 1974. Harris, W., The Womb of Space: The Cross-Cultural Imagination, Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983. Koselleck, R., Vergangene Zukunft: Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten (1979), Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1995. Lukács, G., Die Seele und die Formen (1911), Neuwied and Berlin: Luchterhand, 1971. Marx, L., The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America, London: Oxford University Press, 1964.

V.S. Naipaul Naipaul, V.S., An Area of Darkness, London: André Deutsch, 1964. —— A House for Mr Biswas (1961), Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992. —— India: A Million Mutinies Now (1990), New York: Viking, 1991. —— Miguel Street (1959), Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971. —— Mr Stone and the Knights Companion (1963), Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988. —— The Enigma of Arrival, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987. —— Half a Life, London: Picador, 2001.

111

Part III

Colonial creations of the West

7

The technology of publicity in the Atlantic semi-peripheries Benjamin Franklin, modernity, and the Nigerian slave trade Stephen Shapiro

A common argument about new technology condemns it as the battering ram that the capitalist metropolis uses to break down a provincial regime’s barriers against the world market’s pressures to commodify its peoples and natural resources by adopting bourgeois socio-cultural predicates.1 This penetrative model of domination by foreign inﬂuences may be true, but it is not analytically comprehensive. While Marx himself recognized that it is ‘possible to write a whole history of the inventions made since 1830 for the sole purpose of providing capital with weapons against working-class revolt’, this observation was only the prelude to his larger redeﬁnition of technology and its impact on non- or weakly capitalist societies.2 My project here will be to rehearse Marx’s argument about the capitalist institution of new social relationships through technical capacities as an enabling opportunity for replacing often de-historicized, functionalist readings of non-European structured dependency by ‘the West’ through a world-systems perspective, which emphasizes the mutually reinforcing and competitive pressures of simultaneously emerging sets of global bourgeoisie. Marx’s writing on technology remains pertinent because it stages his model for the diﬀusion of new social modes within western polities, which, in turn, analogically telegraphs Capital’s planned, but unwritten, sections on capital’s movement through the world market. When writing on technology Marx swiftly shifts from describing initial acts of economic repression to those moments when capitalist practices become systematized and selfreinforcing. Considered historically, this critical turn will recast the notion of non-European homogeneity and innocence before the capitalist West. Turning to the ﬁrst phases of industrialization in the eighteenth century, I compare Benjamin Franklin’s main invention – the technology of mass publicity – to similar processes by his contemporaries, the eighteenthcentury black African slave traders in the Niger and Cross River delta

116

Colonial creations of the West

city-states of Bonny and Old Calabar, as mutual touchstones of colonial modernity. If social actions are broadly conceptualized as resulting from the integration of multiple nodes in the world market, rather than as a formation that gets transported from one site to be implanted in another, we can discern how global formations result from overlapping commercial pressures and local capitalist forms.

Technology and modernity’s systematicity Since Marx aligns industrialism’s rise with the advent of a fully ﬂedged capitalist society in the late eighteenth century, one might expect him to claim that machinery’s replacement of human endeavour propels social transformation, especially given his initial distinction between a tool and a machine. Marx deﬁnes a tool as the instrument used to appropriate and transform nature. He then periodizes the mid-sixteenth century to the last third of the eighteenth as the West’s Era of Manufacturing, which is partially characterized by the proliferation of specialized tools that facilitate the work process’s segmentation. A machine, however, is a meta-tool, ‘a mechanism that, after being set in motion, performs with its tools the same operations as the worker formerly did with similar tools’ (p. 495). The mechanical replacement of human motive power may initially seem to be the deﬁning feature of a new industrial phase of historical capitalism, especially as it furthers the de-subjectiﬁcation of labour. Marx, however, rejects this move since there is nothing particularly capitalist in the loss of human agency to insensate power, as this substitution has been done for ages by ‘animals, water, and wind’ without ‘creating any revolution in the mode of production’ (p. 496). Marx turns instead to another deﬁnition of machinery: ‘All fully developed machinery consists of three essentially diﬀerent parts, the motor mechanism, the transmitting mechanism, and ﬁnally the tool or working mechanism’ (p. 494). Having already discounted the importance of tools and motors, Marx classiﬁes machinery as a new mode of transmission that synchronizes production processes to establish an interlocking operational process, a new ensemble of relations and power exchanges. The paradigmatic feature of the industrial age is not technology by itself but how the ‘transformation of the mode of production in one sphere of industry necessitates a similar transformation in other spheres’ to create an ‘articulated system’ that conjoins production across time and space despite heterogeneous local circumstances (pp. 502, 506). A machine is not something that works diﬀerently from a tool; it is the material result of a network of social relationships informed by capitalist prerogatives. Marx asks his reader to decipher the distinction between a tool and a

Franklin, modernity, and the slave trade

117

machine because it leads to his real sociological question in Capital: how was it that capitalism, as a restricted and often illicit practice in the early modern world, became a seemingly universal set of social practices? Given the incommensurate socio-spatial divide between early modern regulatory modes of caste diﬀerence and modern ones of class division, there can be no immediate transformation from one to another, since one cannot simply impress capitalist contingencies on other spheres or imagine noncapitalist societies as unable to mount a defence. To speed transformation, capitalist agents must instead establish a transistor environment and personnel that concatenates diﬀerent spheres and societies, just as the money-form acts as a mechanism for establishing equivalences between disparate kinds of commodities. Marx replaces a negative deﬁnition of machinery, as the suppression of human motors, for the positive one of systematizing trajectories to illustrate the means by which capitalism expands and institutes its authority. This passage begins as machiniﬁcation increasingly de-skills the Manufacturing Era’s detail worker in ways that allow capitalist industry to incorporate and re-engineer pre-capitalist inequalities to produce a larger transformation. As new machinery makes physical endurance and trained expertise less important for the human-minder, relatively underskilled, but more dexterous, women and younger workers can replace male labour in the workplace (p. 517). Because women, younger, and non-native workers are less acculturated in collective bargaining for employee rights and customary pay levels, they unwittingly threaten the security of older (white) male workers within the factory’s establishment. As employers introduce these ‘new economy’ labourers, the typical male worker increasingly experiences this threat to his employment security in terms of a horizontal division between the labouring-class genders and generations, rather than the vertical class confrontation between capitalist and proletarian. As male workers get sent oﬀ the plant grounds, they enter the non-industrial domestic sphere full of rage, where they paradoxically invoke an industrial-formed subjectivity in a gendered and generationalized form to insist on their authority as ‘real men’ as a private sphere compensation for their workplace disestablishment. This performance of resentful masculinity beneﬁts capital by redirecting class antagonism away from the space of production and fragmenting working-class solidarity whereby subalterns install a capitalist-deﬁned habitus in non-capitalist zones, like the household. In The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, Engels explored the ways in which this projection of capitalist-generated conﬂict continues its transmission eﬀect. Though Engels’s reliance on a social stage approach in The Origin has become discredited, his developmentalism does not

118

Colonial creations of the West

undermine his core claim regarding the historically mutable shape of kinship relations: ‘Once market relations, even in a quasi-capitalist phase, encounter traditional social formations, a structural crisis ensues.’3 This crisis reshapes the private sphere, but it also transfers these tensions into yet another sphere to produce new identities formed by institutional apparatuses that invoke the air of neutral objectivity to obscure the capitalist market’s intrinsic contradictions. Engels’s paramount example is the pairing of the bureaucratic State and its ideal of the abstract, disembodied citizen, but, as writers like Foucault have shown, these are not the only channeling facets in modern society. Marx’s and Engels’s perception that technology should not be conceptualized in terms of new instrumentation, but as a modern social process of cultural value transfers that become institutionalized to ease capitalism’s global expansion, allows for a new working deﬁnition of modernity. Modernity is the fetish-eﬀect of a capitalist-driven relational systematicity arising through the formation of autonomous spheres of socialization that appear to run alongside social conﬂict without seeming to be implicated in its antagonism though empowered to intervene in its operation. In this sense, capitalist modernity is a tautology. Modernity cannot distinctively be deﬁned as the experience of rapid, decisive historical transformation. If modernity is presented as altered cognition resulting from the apprehension of ongoing changes in the regimes of accumulation and modes of social regulation, we would have to evacuate the term of its periodizing speciﬁcity and speak of things like the Neolithic modernity or a post-Babylonian modernity. Similarly, modernity is not just the trauma of forced mass transhumance, although this typically is a preliminary feature of modernity. Contra Paul Gilroy, African modernity is not to be located within the slave ship’s Middle Passage because the voyage produces similar features to those shared by many others in the traditional trade in captured foreign bodies, such as those transported through Viking raids or in the Black Sea and Eastern Mediterranean slave trade.4 The particularity of Atlantic slavery involves its incorporation of an older mode of labour domination within a matrix deﬁned by the trade in commodiﬁed human labour-power (ranging from sailors’ wage relations to the exploitation involved in the textile ﬁnishing of cotton and the secondary food processing of sugar-cane) and the resulting rise in bourgeois subjectivity-forming institutional apparatuses located in the circumatlantic’s port-nodes. Since modernity is ultimately a compass of how social spaces relate to one another, it is most fully experienced neither in the administrative core nation-states, the zone of command, nor in the hinterland peripheries of coerced deruralization, the zones of seizure, but in the mixed regions of the semi-periphery, the zones of calibration that integrate multiple core nodes

Franklin, modernity, and the slave trade

119

and peripheries into an articulated network. These semi-peripheral sites form their own distinctive realm and comparable points of reference even while local conditions create conﬁgurations that are formally diﬀerent though they are functionally similar. At all times there are regional ‘capitalisms’, competing eﬀorts for advantage within a shared system by one set of bourgeoisie against another to negotiate a better return on the capitalist logistic. Likewise, there are ‘modernities’ that oﬀer diﬀerent aspects of Modernity. Our historiographic responsibility is to recognize regional particularities while perceiving the shared logistic across geographically distant regions. The approach below compares two conﬁgurations of eighteenthcentury modernity, one American, the other African, to argue that we need to reconsider the rise of capitalism as a process that was neither predetermined nor necessarily led by the ‘West’ or the ‘North’, against a homogeneous ‘Rest’.

Benjamin Franklin and the paradox of the public sphere Arguably the most renowned colonial scientist in the British eighteenthcentury ‘ﬁrst’ Empire, Benjamin Franklin and his Autobiography have long anchored debates about modernity, especially as Franklin narrates the coastal shift from his birthplace Boston to Philadelphia as the geographized record of historical transition from an early modern society based on ﬁliopietist deference to a more distinctively modern one marked by ﬂexible labour, credit, and extra-kinship markets. Yet while many critics focus on Franklin’s presumed representativeness for an exceptional national or western identity, they elide Franklin’s core project in scripting The Autobiography as a manual of the new mode of post-absolutist governance. From The Autobiography’s early mention of the Franklin family’s nonconformity in England to its increasingly dense accounts of public administration, Franklin remains preoccupied with discovering the most eﬀective means of civil rule. Unlike earlier treatises on sovereignty, like Machiavelli or Hobbes, who both still prioritize the extrinsic, coercive force of state repression, Franklin understands these modes of social regulation to be increasingly obsolete. Instead he explores the modernized techniques for organizing mass consent through new modes of disembodied publicness. Franklin highlights the power of this emerging mode of aﬃnity-making with a story about a ‘drunken Dutchman’ who falls overboard, and then asks Franklin to dry out his soaked copy of Pilgrim’s Progress. While this paradigmatic disorderly reader has clearly not taken Bunyan’s bourgeois asceticism to heart, he has spent money on an expensive edition (‘ﬁnely

120

Colonial creations of the West

printed on good Paper with copper Cuts’) rather than alcohol. Franklin cannily perceives that the Dutchman is less concerned with avoiding damage to his own body, as the soft tissue of potential terror, than the loss of the book’s ability to excite his mind, and he recognizes that it is Bunyan’s manner of presentation, rather than his didactic message, that cements the energy of interior aﬃliation. The observation indicates that Franklin has moved beyond contemporaries, like Adam Smith, who argue for the onset of bourgeois-deﬁned social regulation through a spontaneous consensual eﬀect that emerges from commerce, wherein middle-class concerns become a cultural dominant in a tranquil manner innocent of absolutist violence. Franklin believes instead that consensual aﬀect is always consciously structured and that the new mediums of mass publicity, like the novel, are saturated with power, which can be tactically operationalized for the gain of speciﬁc interests. To locate this new social technology of consensual subordination, Franklin typically intertwines the elements of unregulated private commerce; notions of the forthcoming nation-state, and the outward display of personal behavior and emotional life. These elements so frequently triangulate in The Autobiography that it suggests they operate as a ﬁxed structure. This interlocking of transparent government, public communication, and private aﬀairs has become familiar to contemporary readers through Jürgen Habermas’s inﬂuential model of the bourgeois public sphere, which narrates modernity’s passage through altering modes of public/private distinctions as notations of historical power formations.5 Encountering the immobile privilege of aristocratic blood lineage, territory, and mythic origin, the nascent bourgeoisie contested older social structures by promulgating an alternative to the vertical social architecture of the old regime. Because the middle classes had no estate rights in the various confrontations between the court and nobility, they counterpoised a notion of abstract spheres based on universal attributes of reason and law wherein sovereignty ought to be legitimated by a leveling standard of representative publicness deﬁned by extra-corporeal transparency. This abstraction took as its imperative the idea that all aspects of society should be visible and accessible, and this ideal was characterized by the republic of letter’s international use of print as a de-personalized mode of communication. The Autobiography, however, records that various technical projects of new social administration, like street lighting and cleaning, emerge only after the covert manufacture of consent. Unlike Smith, Franklin does not really believe that the public sphere can leverage transformation by itself, and he creates what ought to be a sociable discussion group, called the Junto, but is really a business networking organization for ambitious youth. The

Franklin, modernity, and the slave trade

121

members ﬁnd this corporate arrangement useful, and want to expand its membership and potential resources. Franklin reasons that to do so would make it diﬃcult to ‘avoid Applications of improper Persons for Admittance’, and he decides that each member of the Junto will instead ‘form a subordinate Club, with the same Rules . . . and without informing them of the Connexion with the Junto’.6 The advantage of this proliferating secret matrix is that the Junto can manage a population that does not resist because it does not realize that its assent is manipulated for the advantage of a nascent business elite. The main example Franklin gives of the Junto’s social action is its founding of the ﬁrst American public library, which he claims as ‘the Mother of all the N American Subscription Libraries’ [that] have improved Americans’ general intelligence and encouraged their commitment to postcolonial independence.7 By detailing how large-scale eﬀects are set in motion by the hidden springs of this secret sphere of male fraternity, Franklin ironically insinuates that bourgeois society is generally organized by a cryptic infrastructure that deploys seemingly neutral public institutions which have been crafted in advance to beneﬁt particular interests by bringing together previously discrete social groups within a machinic identity of mass nationalism. If the public sphere acts paradoxically, by denouncing covert interests even as it shields them, Franklin’s point is that the paradox of the public sphere’s twofold obscurity is not a blemish but its historical purpose in the strategy for commercial elites to rule society. Nowhere is this tactic more clear than when Franklin was sent to ancien régime France to represent the States. Knowing the French mythology of natural man in America, the lifelong diplomat Franklin performed nativism by continually wearing his fur cap as a seemingly innocent gesture in order to secure the court’s ﬁnancial support for an insurgency that could not otherwise seek capital investment from the London stock markets.8 Is the presence of a secret sphere of bourgeois interests within a masquerade of public openness limited to the Euro-American history of the Enlightenment as a constitutive feature of its exceptional dialectic, or is it a more general feature of an emerging capitalist circumatlantic matrix? To answer this question we need to follow its currents to the other side of the ocean and consider the African case for inclusion within the model.

Atlantic slavery and the African consumer revolution The Atlantic slave trade could not have occurred without the willing organization of human traﬃc by sets of African elites. Notwithstanding the prohibitive cost of continual armed incursions into the continent or

122

Colonial creations of the West

maintaining monopoly exclusions against competitors, Europeans could not overcome the formidable bacteriological frontier. Given the lack of direct European coercion amidst the slave trade’s explosive growth during the eighteenth century, why did African factions not only initially engage in Atlantic slavery but then substantively increase its volume? The link between Euro-African encounters and slavery is by no means a self-evident one, since neither Europeans nor Africans were primarily interested in exchanging humans in the ﬁrst phase of the Portuguese-dominated trade along the West African coast. Sixteenth-century Lusotanian interests initially sought a route that could bypass the transaction costs resulting from the Italian city-states’ control over the Eastern Mediterranean and Levantine portals to Asian commodity chains. The beneﬁt to Europeans of African contact with trans-Saharan exchange relays was then matched by the presence of Sudanic gold, which could resolve an associated circulation crisis. As Engels notes, ‘the vast expansion of European industry and the corresponding growth in trade in the fourteenth and ﬁfteenth centuries called for more means of exchange than Germany – the main source of silver from 1450 to 1550 – was able to provide’.9 This ‘gold famine’ drove the marginal Portuguese to Africa as a source of bullion that would more generally enable Europe’s integration within circuits of world trade. ‘Between the eleventh and the seventeenth centuries West Africa was the leading supplier of gold to the international economy, and in the later Middle Ages accounted, according to one estimate, for almost two-thirds of world production.’10 Because ‘West African gold was absolutely vital for the monetarization of the medieval Mediterranean economy and the maintenance of its balance of payments with South Asia’, a proper map of the pre-seventeenth-century world economy would surely have the West African coast and the Asian oceanic basin as global antipodes, and everything else in between constituting a mesh of intricate triangular trades leading to these poles.11 Europeans could rarely dictate market conditions to Africans already experienced in long-distance trade. With the exception of the Congo, placed at a distance from the dendrites of Saharic transportation links, West Africa was already integrated within networks of embryonic capitalist commerce, thanks to Islamic incursions across the desert from the eighth century onward. Before the Europeans, Africans had long been exchanging gold with Arab merchants in return for commodities like salt and cowrie shells, and a trans-Saharan slave trade likewise pointed eastward to satisfy Arabic needs for agricultural labour, military guards, concubinage, and early sugar plantations. ‘The “blueprint” for a moral community of business practice in Africa was provided by Islam’, not Christianity.12 Muslim traders introduced into sub-Saharan Africa

Franklin, modernity, and the slave trade

123

[a] competitive and acquisitive spirit, which manifested itself in the search for new sources of wealth, as well as trade in established staples. Muslim traders converted and clothed [African animists] with all the zeal of the Faithful – Islam being as much the inspiration of capitalist enterprise in West Africa as the Protestant ethic . . . was in parts of Europe.13 These cross-desert traders brought to Africa ‘devices such as the keeping of written accounts, the formation of business partnerships, and the formalization of banking and credit systems’.14 Because Africans were already incorporated within trade matrices before European arrivals, Westerners had to discover and deliver exchangeable goods which might satisfy Africans’ use needs. The primary goods that Africans desired were coloured textiles, particularly the sophisticated ones of East Indian cloths. Textiles made up nearly 50 percent of the total value of African imports from Europeans during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with alcohol and munitions far behind.15 European textile imports did not compete with African domestic production, they supplemented and encouraged its growth.16 If ‘the very areas that produced large quantities of cloth were the same as the regions that imported it’, Thornton argues, it was because these regions had substantial purchasing power resulting from an already present consumer market that was driven by ‘the ever-changing demands of a discriminating consumer who had already become accustomed to using large quantities of cloth and could be counted on to purchase more, especially if it was diﬀerent and new’.17 Africans’ interest for textiles beyond what their own markets could supply meant that Europeans found their one advantage over Muslim Saharan traders as nautical trade increased the tempo of variation and scale of the arrival of these heavier consumer goods in ways that land-based camel trade could not. By expanding the volume of non-staple commodities, Europeans functionally cheapened these goods and broadened their availability for non-elite Africans previously distanced from commodity purchasing. An African mass ‘consumer revolution’ occurred, which was initiated by Islamic trade, but quantitatively and qualitatively altered by Europeans carrying and copying Asian textiles. African societies were already in the process of transformation before European arrivals, since Islamic merchant commerce had begun the procedure of integrating West African societies within a regularizing world market. As with European mercantilism, early modern African trade remains regulated and supervised by pre-existing lineage elites, even while trade ﬂows began to have the eﬀect of disassembling status hierarchies within these societies. The entry of Europeans on the scene added nothing

124

Colonial creations of the West

substantively new in terms of trade practices, but the increased volume of goods conjoined with the cross-hatching of two world markets, the Atlantic and (Arabic) Asiatic, radically ampliﬁed already existing tensions. The increased demand for certain goods, like textiles, reformulated the trade in others, like slaves, and this new disequilibrium allowed for the rise of institutional mechanisms for the political and social beneﬁt of social groups who now were simultaneously identiﬁed with and enabled by the rise of new consumer patterns, be they in Africa, Europe, or the Americas. The ratio of power between African consumer markets and European trading interests radically altered after the conquest of the New World brought rich veins of gold and silver to Europe and dietary replacements to Asian spices, both with the introduction of carbohydrates, like potatoes, and condiments, like sugar. Potosi silver-mine production ﬂourished in the second half of the sixteenth century, and after gold and diamonds were discovered in Brazil during the last years of the seventeenth century a gold boom sent historically greater amounts of monetarized metals into Europe.18 By the 1760s, the relative price of West African gold had become too expensive in comparison to a relative overproduction of American metals; even ‘West Africa may have become a net importer of gold’ from the Americas rather than through infraregional trade.19 With their appropriation of New World mines, Europeans now controlled their own revenue sources in ways that dramatically reshaped their dependency on the African coastal system. While economic historians have long discussed the relationship between the inﬂux of South American bullion and Europe’s seventeenth-century inﬂationary price revolution as a motivating factor for a series of ensuing political and social crises, like the English Civil War and continental Europe’s Thirty Years War, there has been less analysis of its eventual eﬀects on African societies as Europeans no longer required African gold, spices, or its locational alternative to trade channels bypassing the Eastern Mediterranean. The long eﬀect of the African consumer revolution in relation to the New World metallics was that Africans now desired the continuation of the goods that Europeans carried, but had suddenly lost the demand for what they had traditionally supplied in exchange for their goods (i.e. gold). As New World metallics dampened European demand from Africa, even as African demand for European-carried Asian goods increased, Africans scrambled to achieve a balance of payments by reorienting their exchange market to emphasize the one good that Europeans now actively desired: slave labour. That the East Indian cloth-carrying trade was integral to the slave trade is seen as the English and French ports, like Liverpool and Nantes, that rose to prominence through the slave trade were those which had already established import links for Asian goods and were best situated

Franklin, modernity, and the slave trade

125

20

to re-export the goods to Africa. The Congo, at a distance from Sudanese gold, was ﬁrst to experience this consumer-led transition toward Atlantic slave trade, and its king already complained in 1526 that his subjects so desired Portuguese goods that they had begun violating the protocols of the traditional, juridical-based slave system and were capturing and selling free subjects in exchange for European merchandise.21 The explosive growth in the Atlantic slave trade came about because of the convergence of a European and African consumer revolution that became inaugurated by the appropriation of the New World for the former and initiated by Islamic trade for the latter. European discovery of New World streams of gold and silver created proﬁt as the production of the monetarized carrier of value was cheapened by the removal of middlebroker transaction costs and increased volume. Additionally, the New World became the source for the non-staple, non-luxury consumer goods involving sugar, caﬀeines, and textile dyes, which unlike prior precocities, were goods that appeared through industrialized ﬁnishing processes and new technical apparatuses. The lowering cost and increasing demand for these sensational processed goods reshaped European civil (‘bourgeois’) society by facilitating the enlargement of the market as new masses of non-elite consumers emerged as well as the smaller investors that speculated in the capital markets dedicated to this trade. The European desire for New World metallics and sensational consumer goods created a demand for increased labour supply in the mines and plantations, a demand that the aboriginal peoples of the Americas were increasingly unable to supply, not least because of epidemic mortality. While Europeans had previously bought slaves from Africans, they had done so mainly as a carrying-trade monetary commodity to exchange within mini-triangular trades along the African littoral. From the mid-seventeenth century and explosively during the eighteenth, Europeans sought to acquire African slave labour to produce value in the circumatlantic economy, rather than as human units of exchange. This change transformed the purpose of the slave trade. Before the onset of oceanic slavery, Thornton explains the diﬀerence between European and African modes of controlling agricultural and proto-industrial production as one of form, not function: Slavery was widespread in Atlantic Africa because slaves were the only form of private, revenue-producing property recognized in African law. By contrast, in European legal systems, land was the primary form of private, revenue-producing property, and slavery was relatively minor . . . Because of this legal feature, slavery was in many ways the functional equivalent of the landlord–tenant relationship in Europe and was perhaps as widespread . . . European landowning actually

126

Colonial creations of the West established the right of the owner to claim the product or a rent on the product . . . African law established claims on product through taxation and slavery rather than through the ﬁction of landownership. The African system was thus not backward or egalitarian, but only legally divergent.22

The revolutionizing aspect of the increasingly dominant Caribbean plantation and South American mine economy in the eighteenth century was its synthesis between two modes of revenue exploitation, one land-based, the other body-based, which came together via an increased consumer market to generate a distinctively bourgeois form of capitalist exploitation that depends on the labourer’s double alienation from the terrain and the energy of his or her body. Atlantic slavery as a distinctive mode of domination arose from this systematizing convergence, which was fashioned by the complementary and collaborative actions of increasingly less-isolated groups ‘becoming bourgeois’ in the pre-1800 era. If an African bourgeoisie, which emerged as a result of the new slave trade, ultimately became subordinated to a European one within the oceanic basin, then this question remains analytically other than and distinct from their history of emergence during a time when there was not yet any pregiven shape to the hierarchy of global authority. The onset of New World metallics led to a series of civil wars and internecine conﬂicts within the African strong states between the consecrated royal authority and nobility, who sought to circumvent the sovereign’s tributary market and monopoly of contact with the new volume of commodities carried by European traders. The Congo kingdom, the ﬁrst region to be integrated by Europeans into the world market, was the ﬁrst to fragment during the seventeenth century.23 The Bambara states witnessed civil conﬂicts between the hereditary dynasty and a more egalitarian military-age cohort, which ‘cut across kinship groups and castes’.24 The Yoruba zone, where ‘family principles were extended to the political superstructure’, saw its three leading states of Oyo, Benin, and Dahomey experience transformative restructurings during the mid- to late seventeenth century and throughout the eighteenth century. Rodney notes that ‘from about the middle of the eighteenth-century onwards’, the Yoruba nobility regularly deposed the royal alaﬁn and forced them to commit suicide, thus changing the ‘mode of succession from primogeniture to election by the major non-royal lineages’.25 Benin saw the local rulers of trading settlements break away from inland court control.26 Dahomey became a breakaway mercantilist state based almost entirely on the slave trade.27 Just as African state control over trade was being eroded, so, too, was that of the Europeans as the state-monopoly slaving companies became

Franklin, modernity, and the slave trade

127

increasingly replaced in the eighteenth century by free-trade companies that were organized less by blood and courtly privilege and more by a bourgeois ‘moral community’ girding an enlarged market of small investors.28 The tensions between regal and noble claims to authority and control over commerce made a space possible for those groups who sought freedom of market exchange. Imperial interests continually struggled with the centrifugal force of creole coastal traders who no longer subordinated themselves either to European or inland African courts. The emergence of new social formations is seen most clearly within the new micro city-states regions of the Niger and Cross River deltas, like the Ijo city of Bonny and the Eﬁk one of Old Calabar, formed partly by refugees from the regional conﬂicts within the strong state regions and partly due to the rising slave trade that linked riverine slave captures to oﬀshore European slave ships and holding depots. Hinterland migration and the new commodity markets forged a coastal modernity that transformed social and economic structures, retaining their titular form, while redesigning their function for the world market in slaves. Genealogical particularities are not causative in this new social geography, since the two main city-states do not share similar ethno-linguistic descents even as they fashion similar institutional procedures oriented to the circumatlantic trade in slaves. The Ijo- or Ijaw-speaking people were swamp ﬁshers and salt collectors who had been organized in extended-family houses. Due to their geographical advantage over the upland rivers, where the militarily weak, stateless villages stood as the main beds for slaving, the Ijaw reconstituted segmentary kinship structures, ‘where a society is organized from the top to bottom in terms of a single, embracing genealogical scheme’, to new corporate associations, the Canoe Houses.29 As a social unit organized around the equipment required for slave transport, the Canoe Houses functioned as a mechanism of assimilation for the rapid inﬂux of immigrants, partially due to the rise in enslaved captives, not all of whom were sold to Europeans. Because the household stands as the basic unit of African societies, this structure was superﬁcially retained, but reconﬁgured for the purposes of the current moment. Purchased captives were given ﬁctional kinship to their master and one of the buyer’s wives would become the captive’s ‘mother’ through ritual adoption. The Houses ‘took over the kinship idiom of the descent groups’, and ‘there were severe penalties for referring publicly to the ﬁctional nature of either a man’s kinship ties to his fellow house-members or of his descent from a house-founder’.30 As a medium that incorporated outsiders into Ijow society, the Houses were also the mechanism for a new non-descent form of subordination and restratiﬁcation according to the predicates of commerce, rather than blood kinship. The Canoe House’s pluralism appeared because it was ‘as much a commercial ﬁrm as an extended family. It owned assets such as trading canoes;

128

Colonial creations of the West

it controlled the labour and property of its members; it conducted credit operations and it organized agricultural plantations.’ One could become the head of a Canoe House, or start a new one, because the leaders were qualiﬁed in terms of trade skills, ﬁghting ability and wealth – the two latter qualiﬁcations stemming from the number of dependents [sic] acquired by purchase. Anyone able and willing to equip a war-canoe was permitted to establish a new House, and hence the term ‘Canoe House’. Such an individual remained politically subordinate to, though commercially independent of, his House of origin.31 Davidson contrasts the culture of the Ijo’s Canoe Houses to that of the aristocratic Yoruba and the further inland Ibo, with their republican-like ‘clamorous and personal democracy’. ‘Uncommonly among Africans’, the coastal communities have been markedly ‘success oriented’. Egalitarian, but individualistic, they have thought it an essential aspect of the ‘right and natural’ that talent should lead to enterprise, and enterprise to promotion, and promotion to privilege. They have insistently stressed social mobility.32 Informed by this entrepreneurial ideal and rewarded by the trade in human commodities, the Canoe Houses created an institutional framework much like the contemporaneous European family-based concerns, like the Barclays or the Cadburys, that stood midway between the personal power of the court and nobility and the impersonal power typical of modern bureaucracies and corporations. The competitive and hierarchal organization of the Canoe Houses led by a new class of ‘Big Men’, the merchants who conducted the slave trade with the Europeans, duplicated that of their European partners in business.33 As the nodes of circumatlantic trading became more interlinked, they also became more alike in their procedures. The Liverpool slave-trading ﬁrms tended to monopoly concentration, where ‘by the 1780s and 1790s the trade was dominated by ten ﬁrms, all conducting a regular trade, and each having roughly a dozen partners, who were often members of the same family’.34 Old Calabar, ‘a leading slave port for nearly two hundred years’, saw a similar concentration of capital ‘in the same way as at Whydah, Liverpool, Nantes’. A dozen important Canoe House dealers in mideighteenth-century Old Calabar became three by the century’s end and one in the early nineteenth century. The Eﬁk-speaking peoples at Old Calabar shared much of Bonny’s

Franklin, modernity, and the slave trade

129

proﬁt-oriented culture, although they did not allow slaves into their extended families and lineages, a function that was instead carried out by the secret Ekpe society. Another mechanism for consolidating Canoe Houses and Eﬁk entrepreneurship into collective prestige for the slave entrepreneurs was the institutional rise of secret masked dancing societies, the Ekine for the Ijo and the Ekpe for the Eﬁk. Just as the Canoe Houses had appropriated the traditional language and concepts of segmentary kinship in order to extend them beyond genealogical lines, so, too, did Ekpe function as a capitalist adaption. These masked societies were ‘invented traditions’, modernized resurrections of somewhat obsolete practices that use the language of immemorial custom to provide an interface between African communal provincial traditions and the world market of Atlantic capitalism.35 For instance, Ekpe’s leopard mask was a forest cult imported by coastal town inhabitants.36 These confraternities were ostensibly open to anyone capable of performing the dances, but in reality membership was mainly gained by those who could aﬀord the purchase price of inclusion.37 As Wolf notes, Ekpe was, on the one hand, a council sphere of male sodality where ‘the men of important wards could meet to talk or feast together’, but ‘on another level, it exercised legal authority’.38 Ekpe could ﬁne and arrest individuals and enforce the repayment of debts, thus institutionalizing the credit security that was absolutely necessary to ensure the reproduction of the slave trade’s capital ﬂows from the hinterland to the oceanic shiphold. In this latter sense, Ekpe functions as an extragovernmental device that promotes new commercial relations based on the marketplace through an admixture of public and covert functions: Ekpe may be compared to a marriage between Freemasonry and a tightly organized municipal corporation, with . . . a dash of Tammany Hall . . . It was in one respect an open society. All men in these Crossriver towns were eligible for membership no matter whether they were Ibo or Eﬁk, Ibibio, Oron or anything else – even occasionally European. In other respects Ekpe was a closed society in that membership was by subscription, and rank within Ekpe was carefully graded according to a member’s seniority and wealth. The result was a combination of limited democracy and rule by rich men: democratic but not egalitarian, competitive, but also restrictive. As such it proved a successful means of uniting peoples of diﬀerent ethnic origins, and of exploiting this unity to win advantage from the European monopoly at sea. If the European sea-traders acted together for their own interests, so also, with Ekpe, did the Cross-river land traders.39 As Ekpe functions as a non-descent mechanism for ensuring the personal

130

Colonial creations of the West

safety and credit insurance of traders further inland, there is a high correlation between the regional diﬀusion of Ekpe and the regions that had slavetrading connections with Old Calabar.40 While Ekpe’s performativity had public functions, it was also ‘secret’ in the sense that they gained inﬂuence over the inland oracular authorities, who would provide captives to the African traders in human ﬂesh through pronouncements of juridical slavery. Ekine for the Ijo, did not usurp governmental functions to the degree of Ekpe, but this may be because the Canoe House’s inclusiveness provided this correlative function.41 Whether the form was the Canoe House or Ekpe, a process appears where the tensions of capitalist commerce and consumption get transferred to domestic spheres via new modes of intimacy that summon forth ‘neutral’ public institutions. Given the congruence between events on the Atlantic and African coasts in the eighteenth century, it might be worth while to pose a few comparative questions. Increasing conﬂicts between the absolutist monarchy and a nobility restive about access to emerging markets and tax farming led to a civil confrontation that had the main eﬀect of then facilitating the rise of a new group of entrepreneurial interests. Is this a tale about France’s ancien régime of estate confrontation leading to a bourgeois revolution or one about Africa’s disintegration of royal authority that facilitates the rise of the coastal societies? A non-governmental zone of institutions, based on extra-lineage sociability and disinterested talent manifested through displays of depersonalized public action, actually operates covertly to establish commercial advantage within a new system of social relations. Does this occur in the eighteenth-century London coﬀee-houses next to the Exchange and the public sphere’s Cult of Reason or the Nigerian Canoe Houses and the Cult of the Leopard Spirit? As a ‘Founding Father’, is Franklin’s practice of combining statecraft and commerce diﬀerent from the Canoe Houses’ ‘Big Men’ and their management of coastal traﬃc? The comparative similarity of social transformation throughout the Atlantic semi-periphery suggests that these dynamics appear in a systematizing fashion within the price-setting market, which has little or no civilizational speciﬁcity. If there is nothing intrinsically western about capitalism, and capitalist templates exist in a mutually reinforcing and competitive fashion throughout the Atlantic, then penetrationist notions of domination, especially those tied to dependency theory, ought to be tempered with an analysis of productive transmission eﬀects that arise in a reinforcing loop. Is it possible that the practices on the Schuylkill’s banks and along the Cross River are not only analogous but also only possible because they collectively act as the transistor that manifests the capitalist circumatlantic in the ﬁrst instance? If Philadelphia and Bonny are more alike than diﬀerent, does it make sense to speak about the contemporaneous rise of an African

Franklin, modernity, and the slave trade

131

public sphere alongside a western one? Yes and no. The problem is terminological, since the ‘public sphere’, with its declarations of depersonalized rational-critical discourse, is diﬀerent from the depersonalized Ekpe mask of anatomico-technique that supplants the state. Yet the diﬀerence is simply formal, since the public sphere is the European variant of a more general phenomenon involving the historical transition between early modern personalized and fully modern depersonalized power. We actually need a more global set of terms that captures a larger general dynamic about new technologies of communication as a means of structuring particular advantage for a geographically diverse set of similar interests. Here the language of comprador elites may not be expansive enough, given its assumption of provincial elites’ subordination to the metropolisdriven command. It is wrong to assume that either the Big Men of the African coast or Franklin of the American eastern seaboard saw themselves as the junior partners or in any way culturally inferior to British and continental Europeans, who, after all, had little to oﬀer the world at large. If Europeans were later to dominate Africa in the nineteenth century, this result should not encourage us to risk teleology and forget that the eighteenth century had no pre-given trajectory. Had there been no gold and silver in the New World, we might equally be talking about African underdevelopment of Europe. Rather than continue to invoke ahistorical claims about technology’s negative impact, we might simply be better oﬀ recognizing that the debate about technology and modernity is really one about the convergence and collision of a regional bourgeoisie operating both vertically within its national/regional department and horizontally at a global level. Ensuing research questions might begin by considering these nodes as cases for a study of comparative capitalisms.

Notes 1 K. Marx and F. Engels, The Communist Manifesto, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992, p. 7. 2 K. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, London: Penguin, 1976, p. 563. 3 F. Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, New York: International Publishers, 1972, p. 175. 4 P. Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, London: Verso, 1993. 5 J. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989. 6 B. Franklin, Autobiography and Other Writings, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993, p. 104. 7 Ibid., p. 71. 8 C.V. Doren, Benjamin Franklin, London: Putnam, 1939, p. 571.

132

Colonial creations of the West

9 F. Engels, ‘Engels to Conrad Schmidt, London, 27 October 1890’, in Karl Marx/ Frederick Engels: Collected Works, London: Lawrence and Wishart, 2001, p. 58. 10 A.G. Hopkins, An Economic History of West Africa, Edinburgh: Longman, 1973, p. 82. 11 R.A. Austen, African Economic History: Internal Development and External Dependency, London: James Currey, 1987, p. 36. 12 Hopkins, An Economic History of West Africa, p. 64. 13 Ibid., p. 65. 14 Austen, African Economic History, p. 41. 15 H.S. Klein, The Atlantic Slave Trade, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, pp. 87–88. 16 D. Northrup, Trade without Rulers: Pre-Colonial Economic Development in South-Eastern Nigeria, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978, p. 109. 17 J. Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, p. 52. 18 Klein, The Atlantic Slave Trade, p. 22; C.R. Philips, ‘The Growth and Composition of Trade in the Iberian Empires, 1450–1750’, in J.D. Tracy (ed.) The Rise of Merchant Empires: Long-Distance Trade in the Early Modern World, 1350–1750, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990, p. 65. 19 W. Barrett, ‘World Bullion Flows, 1450–1800’, in J.D. Tracy (ed.) The Rise of Merchant Empires: Long-Distance Trade in the Early Modern World, 1350–1750, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990, p. 247. 20 Klein, The Atlantic Slave Trade, p. 88. 21 J. Iliﬀe, Africans: The History of a Continent, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, p. 130. 22 Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, pp. 74–6. 23 D. Birmingham, ‘Central Africa from Cameroun to the Zambezi’, in R. Gray (ed.) The Cambridge History of Africa: From c. 1600 to c. 1790, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975, pp. 328–43. 24 N. Levtzion, ‘North-West Africa: From the Maghrib to the Fringes of the Forest’, in R. Gray (ed.) The Cambridge History of Africa: From c. 1600 to c. 1790, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975, pp. 177, 174. 25 W. Rodney, ‘The Guinea Coast’, in R. Gray (ed.) The Cambridge History of Africa: From c. 1600 to c. 1790, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975, pp. 223, 241. 26 Ibid., p. 228. 27 K. Polanyi, Dahomey and the Slave Trade: An Analysis of an Archaic Economy, New York: AMS Press, 1991. 28 Klein, The Atlantic Slave Trade, pp. 81–2. 29 R. Horton, ‘From Fishing Village to City-State: A Social History of New Calabar’, in M. Douglas and P. Kaberry (eds) Man in Africa, London: Tavistock, 1969, p. 78. 30 Ibid., p. 48. 31 Rodney, ‘The Guinea Coast’, p. 261. 32 B. Davidson, The African Genius: An Introduction to African Cultural and Social History, Boston, Mass.: Little, Brown and Company, 1969, p. 95. 33 Hopkins, An Economic History of West Africa, pp. 96, 108. 34 Ibid., p. 96. 35 E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger (eds) The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Franklin, modernity, and the slave trade

133

36 Rodney, ‘The Guinea Coast’, p. 264. 37 E. Wolf, Europe and the People without History, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982, p. 219. 38 Ibid., p. 228. 39 Davidson, The African Genius, p. 97. 40 M. Ruel, Leopards and Leaders: Constitutional Politics among a Cross River People, London: Tavistock, 1969, pp. 250, 251. 41 Horton, ‘From Fishing Village to City-State’, p. 52.

Bibliography Austen, R.A., African Economic History: Internal Development and External Dependency, London: James Currey, 1987. Barrett, W., ‘World Bullion Flows, 1450–1800’, in J.D. Tracy (ed.) The Rise of Merchant Empires: Long-Distance Trade in the Early Modern World, 1350–1750, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Birmingham, D., ‘Central Africa from Cameroun to the Zambezi’, in R. Gray, (ed.) The Cambridge History of Africa: From c. 1600 to c. 1790, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975, pp. 328–43. Davidson, B., The African Genius: An Introduction to African Cultural and Social History, Boston, Mass.: Little, Brown and Company, 1969. Doren, C.V., Benjamin Franklin, London: Putnam, 1939. Engels, F., The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, New York: International Publishers, 1972. —— ‘Engels to Conrad Schmidt, London 27 October 1890’, in Karl Marx/Frederick Engels: Collected Works, London: Lawrence and Wishart, 2001. Franklin, B., Autobiography and Other Writings, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. Gilroy, P., The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, London: Verso, 1993. Habermas, J., The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989. Hobsbawm, E. and T. Ranger (eds) The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Hopkins, A.G., An Economic History of West Africa, Edinburgh: Longman, 1973. Horton, R., ‘From Fishing Village to City-State: A Social History of New Calabar’, in M. Douglas and P. Kaberry (eds) Man in Africa, London: Tavistock, 1969. Iliﬀe, J., Africans: The History of a Continent, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Klein, H.S., The Atlantic Slave Trade, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Levtzion, N., ‘North-West Africa: From the Maghrib to the Fringes of the Forest’, in R. Gray (ed.) The Cambridge History of Africa: From c. 1600 to c. 1790, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975. Marx, K., Capital, vol. 1, London: Penguin, 1976. Marx, K. and F. Engels, The Communist Manifesto, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. Northrup, D., Trade without Rulers: Pre-Colonial Economic Development in South-Eastern Nigeria, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978.

134

Colonial creations of the West

Philips, C.R., ‘The Growth and Composition of Trade in the Iberian Empires, 1450–1750’, in J.D. Tracy (ed.) The Rise of Merchant Empires: Long-Distance Trade in the Early Modern World, 1350–1750, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Polanyi, K., Dahomey and the Slave Trade: An Analysis of an Archaic Economy, New York: AMS Press, 1991. Rodney, W., ‘The Guinea Coast’, in R. Gray (ed.) The Cambridge History of Africa: From c. 1600 to c. 1790, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975. Ruel, M., Leopards and Leaders: Constitutional Politics among a Cross River People, London: Tavistock, 1969. Thornton, J., Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Wolf, E., Europe and the People without History, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982.

8

Spectrality’s secret sharers Occultism as (post)colonial aﬀect Gauri Viswanathan

My chapter probes the complex role of occultism in loosening boundaries between closed social networks. I will argue that in late nineteenth- to early twentieth-century colonial culture, occultism oﬀered the means for mobility between diﬀerent personae and world-views otherwise denied or at least circumscribed by the restrictive relations between colonizer and colonized. If the stratiﬁed class structure of British life oﬀered little room for broad social interactions (as witnessed in the awkward bridge party in Forster’s A Passage to India), occult practices like séances, table rapping, and spirit communication permitted colonial relations to be imagined outside a hierarchical framework, just as occult doctrines of the cyclical evolution of life forms from asexuality and hermaphroditism to sexual diﬀerentiation challenged normative conceptions of sexuality. Forster’s novel is a useful reference point in that it focused on the alienation of a small group of Englishmen from the racial exclusivism practiced by the colonial bureaucracy. As teachers, missionaries, doctors, and other professionals, they could not but be involved with Indians at a level of intimacy forbidden by colonial logic. Such contact, necessitated by the nature of their work as service professionals, did not necessarily mean they were all anti-colonial activists, but it did put them in positions where their day-to-day transactions with colonized Indians gave them a more complex perspective on racialized encounters, resulting in far deeper questioning of the structure and style of existing bureaucratic relationships. Aziz’s sharing of the photograph of his dead wife to Fielding opens a ﬁeld of interaction that would be impossible under the normal protocols of colonial relationships. ‘We can’t build up India except on what we feel’, says Aziz to Fielding, who in a quick and ﬂeeting moment is given access to a dead woman’s presence materialized in a photograph (‘he wished that he too could be carried away on waves of emotion’).1 The distance of people like Fielding from the exclusivist practices of the colonial administration dovetailed with an interest in new ways of

136

Colonial creations of the West

conceiving relations to various unseen powers, which constituted an important part of the belief systems of the Indians with whom they interacted. In part, this connected with an interest in spiritualist matters that late Victorian society had already begun to demonstrate through its fascination with herbalism, animal magnetism, mesmerism, and other mind practices.2 The phenomenal, worldwide growth of the Theosophical Society under the tutelage of Madame Blavatsky and Colonel Olcott, with its international headquarters set up in Madras, India, is one important indicator of the widespread enthusiasm for astral study among Europeans and nonEuropeans alike. Yet it is within the colonial context that spiritualism is seen most powerfully to loosen boundaries between closed social networks. In fact, the otherworldliness of the occult, and its premium on secrecy and silence, oﬀered alternative possibilities for imagining colonial relations outside a formal hierarchical framework. In reimagining colonial relationships, occultism performs a function similar to what Robert Young describes as culture’s role in imperial Britain, which allowed for a cross-fertilization of language, history, and literature without the racial degeneration caused by reproductive sexual relations.3 In part, the growing appeal of the astral world lay in its opening up of other cosmological views in which the normal distinctions between the colonizer and the colonized blurred and discrete histories across time and space were collapsed into simultaneous experience. Occult knowledge, in short, enables an expanding ﬁeld of social interaction. If, as I shall argue here, occultism signals the emergence of a postcolonial moment in literature, it does so by salvaging lost fragments from the past that collect suppressed memories and desires into an intimate social space shared by colonizer and colonized. This space constitutes a countermemory that expresses itself as (post)colonial aﬀect, whose moments of appearance are too ﬂeeting and elusive to be part of the historical record and are captured only in what I would like to call paranormal texts. I shall talk about one such text, Yeats’s ‘The Manuscript of Leo Africanus’, later in this chapter. But before I do so, I would like brieﬂy to contextualize my argument in the recent scholarship on occultism, which has gone a long way in establishing how important so-called fringe movements like occultism and spiritualism were in the shaping of ﬁn-de-siècle Europe and India. Alex Owen, for example, in her recent book The Place of Enchantment, places occultism squarely at the heart of the British national experience of modernity, arguing that ‘advanced occult theory and practice represented an acute engagement with the concept and experience of self’, resonating with the rise of new sciences of self such as psychoanalysis, each in its own way underscoring the self’s multiplicity and contingency. Her perspective helps one recall that occultism’s conventional identiﬁcation with the nonrational

Spectrality’s secret sharers

137

and premodern ﬂies in the face of the nineteenth century’s new scientiﬁc interest in the innermost recesses of the human psyche, which brought occult practices like mesmerism, clairvoyance, and telepathy within the purview of academic investigation (albeit in some instances to prove charlatanism, but in the process also validating the occurrence of certain forms of psychic phenomena – such as in the work of Arthur Conan Doyle). To trace the emergence of (post)colonial aﬀect, we must look at occultism’s shifting relationship not only to science but also to science’s putative opposite – religion. This relationship is particularly important – and I should add repressed – when one considers the enduring power of Matthew Arnold’s rewriting of literature as a successor to religion. Arnold gave humanism a new genealogy by making literature’s relation to religion its centerpiece. In reading the decline of Victorian religious life in inverse proportion to literature’s ascendant moral authority, Arnold sought to give cultural sanction to literature as the harbinger of a new canonicity, the strongest measure of which is that literature disseminates the moral and social values formerly dispensed by ecclesiastical authority. In Arnold’s reading, literature does not mark a break with religion or become the secular world’s chosen vehicle of expression, but rather inherits the mantle of religion in a world unmoored from its spiritual underpinnings. Literature, in short, becomes modernity’s moral anchor, bridging the inevitable gaps in time and space that measure the distance between text and readership by transmitting the values of a once religiously ordered society to a world robbed of any moral compass. The new cultural order based on the stable religious values of the past aﬃrms human superiority in those faculties that separate man from the beasts, and assigns to reason the key role of enabling a developmental narrative denied to animals. This narrative deserves to be questioned at many levels and in its many aspects, but the one I focus on here is the implicit assumption that a version of scriptural authority remains present in literature, accounting for its canonical power. Such a view ignores the counter-cultural, antirational, and anti-ecclesiastical trends that are as important to literary studies as traditions of religious orthodoxy and rationality. One might even describe occultism as post-religious, situated strategically between belief and unbelief, between the protocols of an orthodox believing society and the antithetical compulsions of an atheistic, skeptical, and rational one. In incorporating occultism into literary history, we also inevitably question reductive models of secularism based on an either/or logic (i.e., societies are either determined by religious ideas or they are not), just as we also question the empiricist foundations of rational civil society and its institutions. The question to ask, therefore, is not whether literature replaces religion, as Matthew Arnold had craftily proposed and henceforth secured the frame

138

Colonial creations of the West

of discussion from the nineteenth century onwards. Rather, I suggest we shift our focus to ask what kind of new narrative of literary history and its aﬀect emerges when we examine late nineteenth-century religion as a much more heterogeneous formation, in which esoteric, non-traditional currents (such as occultism) challenged the dogmas of institutional religion even while resisting rationalism and materialism. The question I suggest we ask, therefore, is this: How is the study of culture aﬀected by this other, hitherto subordinate face of religion – as esotericism and occultism, forged as ‘the monstrous alliance of all the conquered religions’? How indeed might this ‘monstrous alliance’ uncover an aﬀective dimension of coevalness and secret sharing hidden from view in the rupturing, rationalist discourse of us vs. them, civilized vs. savage, modern vs. pre-modern? Let me approach these questions by bringing into the discussion a signiﬁcant historical change wrought by what Helena Petrovna Blavatsky called ‘dogmatic Christianity’: the conversions of ‘pagan’ peoples. On the eﬀects of forcible conversion on a history of the occult, there is no more illustrative example than W.B. Yeats’s fragmentary correspondence with the sixteenthcentury African slave and Christian convert, Leo Africanus. In 1912, during a period when he frequented many séances, Yeats ﬁrst felt contact from a spirit claiming the name of Leo. Even though the spirit had a strong Irish accent, this voice from the dead described himself as a Moorish writer and explorer. Claiming to have been with Yeats since childhood as his alternative or opposite self, Leo asks the poet to write to him as if to Africa. In a curious conﬂation of the past life of a dead being with textual presence, Yeats’s discovery of Leo’s original name comes about only after researching Chambers Biographical Dictionary, where he learns that Leo was formerly Al Hassan Ibn-Mohammad al-Wezar Al-Fasi, a sixteenth-century Spanish Arab poet and explorer captured as a Roman slave and then subsequently forced to convert to Christianity. Leo’s insistence that Yeats write to him as if he were still living among the Moors and the Sudanese acquires a particular poignancy in the context of his servitude, forcible conversion, and the subsequent erasure of his African identity. Narrated through a tin trumpet and all the paraphernalia of mediums and séances, Leo’s story of Africa, colonialism, and slavery makes him both native informant and anti-colonialist. That is to say, he appears to be a native informant when his records of travels are incorporated into European writings on geographical exploration. But Leo is also ﬁercely an anti-colonialist, as when his disembodied voice taunts Yeats for his skepticism and rationality as prime causes for the poet’s failure to recognize the ‘not wholly stable’ identity produced by colonialism. Most importantly, the voice of Leo’s spirit reaches Yeats not as private, mystical experience but as

Spectrality’s secret sharers

139

public history. Nothing in the text conveys this eﬀect more than Leo’s conjoining of two geographies to show the scale of a world much larger than the one dominated by the West: ‘Side by side with the streets of Fez, or desert I seemed to see another world that was growing in weight & vividness, the double of yours, but vaster and more signiﬁcant.’4 Such a vision cannot be told in the sequential narrative of western history but requires a simultaneous experiencing of seemingly disparate moments in time and space. The occult serves a vital role in modernist writing in that it collapses the binaries between us vs. them, opening the door to an exploration of hidden or repressed histories that dislocates the ‘local’ as the time and space of immediate experience. It is precisely this dislocation of the local that enables the writing of another kind of history in which colonial subjecthood can be articulated, and in which ﬂuid identities come to characterize an emerging world order. Why would an obscure work in the Yeats corpus be important at all as a key text in the production of postcolonial aﬀect, as I am suggesting here? After all, few critics are willing to concede an integral importance to Yeats’s occult phase, other than to see it as oﬀering an elaborate repertoire of symbols that eventually spring free from their occult moorings and get reconstituted as a deﬁning feature of Yeats’s imagination. Yet I will argue that the relevance of occultism is precisely that, as a response to the crisis of knowledge it challenged the received developmental narratives of western knowledge and salvaged obliterated histories, cultures, and beliefs by means that were at once non-temporal and non-spatial. Seasoned scholars of the modern, we are all too familiar with the transformative eﬀects of epistemological crises on the history of English studies, producing radical schools of criticism like poststructuralism and deconstruction. In its response to the crisis of science and knowledge in the late nineteenth century and in its symptomatic questioning of representationalism in aesthetics and philosophy, modern occultism can loosely be described as a precursor to poststructuralism and postmodernism. If ﬁgurative and representational art constrained the colonized world, release from representationalism provided a freer way of expressing colonial subjecthood. The search for a higher reality beyond matter was simultaneously a search for ways of expressing the historical experience of oppression and subjugation, as well as a means of bypassing the Manichaean binarism of good vs. evil. Occultism’s interest in the blurred lines between seen and unseen forces is crucial in elucidating modern ideologies, modern systems of power, and diverse forms of colonial control. Maria Carlson, for instance, who has written extensively on the Theosophical movement in Russia, sees occultism as integral to a broad search for new values and a new world conception.5 The unresolved tension between the spiritual and the secular, with all that the struggle implied

140

Colonial creations of the West

for the modern subject, emerged as constitutive of a new dialectic of modernity. As Alex Owen astutely observes, occultism addressed this tension and sought to negotiate the oppositional deployment of a contingent and transcendent self as formulated through competing accounts of subjectivity. She notes that ‘it is in this sense that occultism constituted a crucial enactment of the ambiguities of the modern’.6 Theosophy and other occult movements played a major role in the crisis of culture and conscience in ﬁn-de-siècle Europe, reﬂecting changes in the status of not only science but also Christianity. Theosophy gained some legitimacy in scholarly circles because it was helping to make available Eastern texts at around the same time that western scholars were researching Hindu and Buddhist literature. For better or worse, Theosophy made possible new assertions of commonality between Indian and Irish cultures, Indian and Slavic cultures. Unlike other countercultural movements which became part of the mainstream, like modernism itself, Theosophy remained at the fringes and was perceived as too enveloped in arcane symbolism and wild sleights of hand to be anything more than an eccentric movement. Yet, despite being at odds with the prevailing world-view and establishment culture, Theosophy’s importance in the history of ideas cannot be denied. As part of a broad search for a new world conception, Theosophy explored psychic and spiritual states that deﬁed rational, positivist comprehension. In Theosophy artists and intellectuals found a new vocabulary for discussing topics that could no longer be discussed in the existing terminology of theology or science, although this did not mean that thinkers who were drawn to Theosophy necessarily stayed with the movement or remained faithful adherents. Some, in fact, like George Bernard Shaw, became downright hostile. But for artists like Kandinsky and the early Yeats, Theosophy contained a cache of imagery that helped them move far beyond the limiting Kantian categories of time, space, and causality. From such images they could develop a non-representational abstract art to convey spiritual and psychic realities that remained unseen and unknown. Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater’s 1901 publication, Thought Forms, which exerted a powerful inﬂuence on European and Russian writers and artists, explored the mysticism of form and color and the use of color and abstract forms as shorthand for emotions, thoughts, and feelings projected onto the astral plane. Widely available and advertised, Thought Forms was closely read by the avant-garde art community. The book deﬁnes thought form as a mental projection, thought, or idea, too subtle to be seen in gross physical matter but manifesting itself in reﬁned astral matter. The notion of the modern that emerges in such works as Thought Forms is based on the supersensible perceptions of a reality lying beyond the plane of gross matter, where spiritual ‘forms’ need not resemble the forms of physical matter

Spectrality’s secret sharers

141

found in this world. To an extent, this non-representational notion of the modern involved stripping the speaking voice of its historical baggage and even its own personality. Speaking through other voices is more than a trope of the poetic imagination. When combined with the widespread interest in the sciences of ventriloquism, hypnotism, and mesmerism, polyvocality is constitutive of modernity itself, deliberately fragmenting centers of authority into multiple speaking selves. Like the ventriloquists and mediums that deﬁne occult practices, historical subjects would have to see themselves outside their historical moment, just as Yeats is forced to do so by his ‘tormentor’ Leo, who impresses on him the experience of colonial conversion and enslavement several centuries earlier as a prototype for British imperialism. (Yeats alternately describes Leo as a Frustrator and malevolent control in A Vision.7) Indeed, Yeats’s encounter with the Moor in the geographies of the historical imagination shifts the register of ‘discovering’ the past through language. Leo appears before the poet through mediumship, to be sure, but the vivid reality of other worlds beyond Yeats’s immediate grasp comes about through Leo’s archeological method of reconstructing the poet’s memory of forgotten, repressed histories. Yeats’s turn to the historical past, through Leo’s archeological reconstruction, was preceded by Blavatsky’s and Bulwer Lytton’s in their respective search for lands literally submerged by history. In her work A Land of Mystery, Blavatsky substitutes archeology for philology as the means by which the origins of religions can be established. She writes, ‘If the history of religion and of mythology and – far more important – the origin, developing and ﬁnal grouping of the human species are ever to be unravelled, we have to trust to archeological research, rather than to the hypothetical deductions of philology.’8 Blavatsky reorients the basis of historical research away from philology, which had succeeded in deﬁning older civilizations as merely undeveloped, primitive prototypes of the Judeo-Christian civilization. Instead, through an archeology relying to a great extent on privileged communication with remote Masters, Blavatsky salvages the ruins of civilizations destroyed by western conquerors, of submerged continents lost to history. Unlike ancient languages, which can be deciphered by searching for a common origin that then becomes the key to reading other languages, ruins, suggests Blavatsky, resist the best eﬀorts of cryptographers. She illustrates her point by noting that knots of cords were a means of communication among the predecessors of the Peruvians. Though the knots were recoverable by archeological research, since the community that understood them was no longer alive the meanings of the knots had vanished with them. If history is an assemblage of fragments – broken pieces that once represented the sum of mankind’s achievements – those achievements can never

142

Colonial creations of the West

be thrust back into the past as forever dead, though it requires a signal intelligence (or spiritual insight) to acknowledge their continuing vitality. Invoking the Day of Judgment, in its broadest sense, as not simply the moment of Christian reckoning but also, more importantly, as the day when the unknown but always-present histories of the world would be made known – revealed – Blavatsky placed correct interpretation at the heart of real salvation, or more accurately, interpretation that was not restricted to interpretive communities. Hers is a view of culture that contradicts the Arnoldian notion, stressing not the enduring moral authority of texts (and the religiously ordered world therein reﬂected) but initiation into the absolute wisdom of the Masters who are key in bridging the present’s distance from the past. According to Blavatsky, only a select few – the Masters – had access to the hidden knowledge that would unlock nature’s secrets, and to understand their wisdom properly, to interpret it justly, was to restore the ‘race’ of people (as historical memory?) who had vanished along with the monuments of their civilization. Increasingly, then, archeology is the mode for salvaging the lived religion of the people, before it came to be hijacked by the forces of dogmatic Christianity. So, tellingly, even as the earth’s geography begins to be radically reconﬁgured from the latter half of the nineteenth century, ﬁrst by European and American imperialism and then by the spread of global capitalism, both of which have virtually left no part of the known world untouched, occultism conjures up ever new spaces and places – hidden, subterranean, extra-terrestrial – that are available for human recolonization, if only in and by the imagination. As ﬁelds of knowledge developed through the course of the nineteenth century, their most marked eﬀect was to make the earth less of an enchanted place. Occult fables of lost worlds like Atlantis and Lemuria emerge to complete the history of earth that had been emptied of religious signiﬁcance by the physical sciences. In contrast, therefore, to the geologist’s investment in lost continents, in order to document what had passed forever, the occult fable is not a disenchanted narrative of loss. I think this is the symbolic importance of Blavatsky’s huge investment in the Masters as key links to the past. As Sumathi Ramaswamy notes in her book on Lemuria, the search for lost wholeness and unity, for the lost Word and lost wisdom that animates the occult imaginary, reintroduces into the contemplation of the earth’s deep past all the mystery and meaning that were understood to have been banished with the steady progress of the material sciences, at the same time that the latter’s ﬁndings are used to construct new geographies of Spirit and new histories of Man.9 So let me then suggest that occultism is not so much opposed to modernity as it is to a particular mode of narrativizing modernity’s emergence as a disenchantment of the world, to counteract the ill eﬀects of which

Spectrality’s secret sharers

143

literature steps in to provide the values of a stable religious order. The great established religions of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, among others, appropriated heterogeneous religious experiences, which in some instances still preserved aspects of supplanted religions, even those of ‘pagan’ religions. Such religious experiences are often described as ‘mysteries’. Denis Saurat’s characterization of the occult as the ‘strange and monstrous alliance[s] of all the conquered religions’10 helps one to identify occultism with colonial subjecthood in its rebellion against ‘dogmatic Christianity’ and the European imperialism that sanctioned its spread. Blavatsky’s unique achievement, in my view, is that she uncovers the layers of history and experience that were suppressed by mainstream religion and encases them in a diﬀerent narrative mode, which may be described as at once archeological and cosmological. The method seems idiosyncratic enough for it to be dismissed as esoteric cosmography or personal myth-making. But in this elaborate counter-narrative of the evolution of races, Blavatsky cleverly picks up on a key understanding of science as creating systems of meaning about unseen phenomena in order to claim that her method is closer to science than it is to the history of religions. Religion treats the unseen as if it has already been experienced and seen. Science, on the other hand, depends on imagining the unseen in another space and time, prior to experience, to a degree that religion does not. To this extent, occultism claimed a closer aﬃnity to science than to religion. More often than not, occultism is associated with mythology rather than history or science. Yet I will argue, with Leon Surette, that occultism ‘typically seek[s] to establish a line of transmission of the gnosis from high antiquity, through the classical and medieval worlds, to the present’.11 This line of descent is the ‘secret tradition’. The occult theme of the secret tradition coincides and overlaps with broader trends in modern literary and aesthetic culture: historicism, speculative philosophy of history, and meta-history – all attempts to locate the overarching and persistent structure of historical events. Indeed, it should be possible to draw up a genealogy of modern literary studies that traces meta-history not to empiricist epistemologies alone but to occultism as well. In light of the revaluation of ‘pagan’ religions in relation to the JudeoChristian tradition, the Arnoldian proposition that literature replaces religion, even as it sustains the moral values once transmitted by religion, weakens considerably when ‘religion’ is considered in much more heterogeneous terms than Arnold intended. The decline of religion, if it is to be described as such, is less about the erosion of Christian faith than the destruction (or at best, appropriation) of myriad religions, mysteries, sects, and cults by ‘dogmatic Christianity’, as Blavatsky termed it. The occult literature of the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth recovers

144

Colonial creations of the West

these forgotten and repressed histories and restores to public memory aspects of other cultures, beliefs, and practices that were eﬀaced by mainstream Christianity. It is in this sense that occultism challenges both the Christian developmental and secular modernist narratives of literary studies, restoring to literature a function that just as much resists a stable structure of moral authority as aﬃrms it.

Notes 1 E.M. Forster, A Passage to India (1924), repr. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1952, p. 117. 2 See A. Winter’s study, Mesmerized: The Power of Mind in Victorian Britain, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998, for an engrossing account of mesmerism as a major spiritualist preoccupation of Victorian society, which engaged artists and musicians just as much as it did psychiatrists and medical doctors. One of the signiﬁcant insights of this book is its argument that mesmerism was instrumental in fashioning modes of human interaction through, for example, performative means: ‘The power of looking [that mesmerism conveyed] and the relations of inﬂuence operating between the person looking and the thing being looked at were at the heart of experiments’ (p. 31). 3 R. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race, London: Routledge, 1995, p. 95. 4 W.B. Yeats, ‘The Manuscript of Leo Africanus’, S.L. Adams and G.M. Harper (eds) in Yeats Annual No. 1, ed. R.J. Fineran, London: Macmillan, 1982, p. 31. 5 M. Carlson, ‘No Religion Higher than Truth’: A History of the Theosophical Movement in Russia, 1875–1922, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993, p. 189. 6 A. Owen, ‘Occultism and the “Modern” Self in Fin-de-Siècle Britain’, in M. Daunton and B. Rieger (eds) Meanings of Modernity, Oxford: Berg, 2001, p. 88. 7 See S.L. Adams, B.J. Frieling and S.L. Sprayberry (eds) Yeats’s Vision Papers: Volume 1, The Automatic Script: 5 November 1917–18 June 1918, London: Macmillan, 1992, pp. 276–7. 8 H.P. Blavatsky, A Land of Mystery (n.d.) repr. Bangalore: Theosophy Company, 1982, p. 10. 9 S. Ramaswamy, The Lost Land of Lemuria: Fabulous Geographies, Catastrophic Histories, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004, p. 54. 10 Quoted in L. Surette, The Birth of Modernism: Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, and the Occult, Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993, p. 13. 11 Ibid., p. 19.

Bibliography Adams, S.L., B.J. Frieling and S.L. Sprayberry (eds) Yeats’s Vision Papers: Volume 1, The Automatic Script: 5 November 1917–18 June 1918, London: Macmillan, 1992. Besant, A. and C. Leadbeater, Thought Forms (repr. 1992), Madras: Theosophical Publishing House, 1901. Blavatsky, H.P., A Land of Mystery (n.d.); repr. Bangalore: Theosophy Company, 1982.

Spectrality’s secret sharers

145

Carlson, M., ‘No Religion Higher than Truth’: A History of the Theosophical Movement in Russia, 1875–1922, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993. Forster, E.M., A Passage to India (1924), repr. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1952. Owen, A., ‘Occultism and the “Modern” Self in Fin-de-Siècle Britain’, in M. Daunton and B. Rieger (eds) Meanings of Modernity, Oxford: Berg, 2001. —— The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Ramaswamy, S., The Lost Land of Lemuria: Fabulous Geographies, Catastrophic Histories, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Saurat, D., Literature and Occult Tradition: Studies in Philosophical Poetry, 1930; rpt New York: Haskell House, 1966. Surette, L., The Birth of Modernism: Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, and the Occult, Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993. Winter, A., Mesmerized: The Power of Mind in Victorian Britain, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Yeats, W.B., ‘The Manuscript of Leo Africanus’, S.L. Adams and G.M. Harper (eds) in Yeats Annual No. 1, ed. Richard J. Fineran, London: Macmillan, 1982. Young, R., Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race, London: Routledge, 1995.

Part IV

Peripheral interpretations of technology

9

Transitionality at home and abroad Some examples from India and its virtual diaspora Martina Ghosh-Schellhorn

Only connect . . . E.M. Forster, Howard’s End

Introduction In Poona Company, the diasporan Indian writer Farrukh Dhondy begins his autobiographical sketches with an account of a ‘numbers’ game’, called ‘cotton ﬁgures’, speciﬁc to Bombay and its environs. In ‘satto-pancho (seven-O-ﬁve)’, as the betting game was known locally, the idea for the punters was to ‘guess the numbers after the decimal point in the cost of a bale of cotton on the New York cotton share market’ at opening and closing times before they were disclosed in the local evening newspapers. Dhondy comments that on becoming introduced to this bet as a youngster in Poona he became ‘aware that it was somehow one of the indications of a shrinking world. It was also evidence that America was a serious place, with share bazaars and prices and not simply a marvellous place where cowboys shot Indians and got slaughtered for their pains.’1 Dhondy’s anecdote is but a small and curiously twisted example of what Roland Robertson has theorized as ‘glocalization’; that is, the seemingly paradoxical ‘creation and the incorporation of locality’ within ‘globalization’, which eﬀects ‘the compression [cf. Dhondy’s “shrinking”] of the world’.2 Both these phenomena form part of what it is important to distinguish carefully as the global system, of which globalization, as Jonathan Friedman has it, is but ‘a sub-set’.3 He understands the ‘global system’ to be ‘a product of a deﬁnite set of dynamic properties, including the formation of centre/periphery structures, their expansion, contraction, fragmentation and reestablishment throughout cycles of shifting hegemony’ (p. 74). ‘Globalization processes’, for Friedman, are, by contrast, bivalent. We

150

Peripheral interpretations of technology

have the ‘global institutional structures’, such as ‘colonial administration, transnational corporations . . . international religions’, and so on, which ‘organise the already existing world’. These ‘structures’ simultaneously interconnect with ‘global cultural forms’ that are ‘either produced by or transformed into globally accessible objects and representations’ (pp. 75–6). The often disparate discursive practices of these ‘globalization processes’ – whether termed ‘hybridization’ (Nederveen Pieterse),4 ‘creolisation’ (Hannerz),5 or ‘interstitial emergence’ (Mann)6 – are all, however, inundated by the concept of mélange, of a mixture of two elements to form a third, a ‘third space’, if we wish to follow Bhabha. I have, however, argued elsewhere for the use of the term ‘transitionality’ as a more spatio-temporallysensitive concept which deconstructs the monolithic originarity of a ﬁrst and a second space.7

Brief outline of purpose and method In the following I will be exploring the parameters of transitionality in the context of the centre/periphery discussion – with reference to the new kinds of exchanges stimulated by technology envisaged in this volume – by focusing on some varieties of computer-mediated communication (CMC) in cyberspace between India and its diaspora. As the older centre-periphery models are necessarily circumscribed by their anchorage in an earlier period in the history of the relations of the colonized periphery to the colonial centre, I will commence to expand the centre/ periphery concept somewhat to encompass what I term the transitionality of India and its diaspora. Transitionality is predicated on the premise that several dominant orders – alongside the once-hegemonic colonial one – coexist in the post-colonies, and thereby serve to render these areas transcultural to varying extents. As its name suggests, transitionality is closely connected to the idea of ﬂux, of an ongoing process of transformation from one state to the next, and therefore of the impossibility of pinning down its exact points of either arrival or departure. Its referential context pertains to conditions prevailing in the former British colonies. For reasons of space, I shall be concentrating on the continuing eﬀects of British inﬂuence on only one location, India. In this context, it is worth noting that the implementation of Anglicist policy from the mid-1830s onwards has led to the formation of that section of society particularly aﬀected by transitionality: the less than three percent of the Indian population who claim English as their ﬁrst language, and the unnumbered millions of second-language speakers of what Braj B. Kachru had called a ‘nativised’ English. This situation has been brought about by an English education for a minority of the population, and it is not

Transitionality at home and abroad

151

surprising that schools oﬀering this medium of instruction should have attained to the status of channels to membership in elite Indian society. On an intellectual level, however, an English education eﬀected what Ashis Nandy has called ‘the second form of colonization’ which ‘colonizes minds in addition to bodies and it releases forces within the colonized societies to alter their cultural priorities once and for all’.8 Whether implied or explicitly expressed, the colonized learn about their own inferiority through what Charles Taylor has called a ‘misrecognition’ of an individual’s value by others, in the related context of multiculturalism.9 If ‘the [cultural] processes of identity formation and fragmentation’ are ‘directly generated in the global system’,10 then it stands to reason that one of the more complex forms globally systemic ‘centre/periphery structures’ can assume is the relationship between nation-states and their transnational diasporas. Anchoring abstraction to the particularities of the dialectics of nationhood and an extraterritorial trans-/supra-national diaspora, we can posit that a culture we can only rather loosely call ‘Indian’ in view of its multiplicity, commonly regarded as a periphery of the western industrialized world in general, and of Britain in particular, has a right to be reconsidered in the light of a possible centre, and by corollary, that its diaspora(s) can be regarded as peripheries of this centre. When, in a next step, we adapt William Safran’s idea of the Jewish ‘diaspora’ to the Indian context, we can begin to make room for the idea of the centre as an ‘ideal homeland, as the place to which they [the dispersed] or their descendants would (or should) eventually return’.11 Thus we can enable the term periphery to signify a ‘diaspora’ in a manner which extends its usage to the context of the global processes of migration. In the case of India, the texture of centre/periphery relationships is particularly rich. The term ‘Indian diaspora’ takes as its referent not only those areas of the world to which Indians had been transferred, on account of their being indentured to the British rulers, but also the regions to which, as agents of their own destiny, they have transposed themselves. Indian oﬃcialese distinguishes between two varieties of diasporan persons: those who no longer have a place of residence in India, the ‘PIOs (Persons of Indian Origin)’, who are clearly distinct from the ‘NRIs (Non-Resident Indians)’, a term ‘devised by bureaucrats in Delhi for tax purposes . . . Any Resident who lives more than 180/184 days out of India in [sic] a foreign land, becomes a Non-Resident Indian for tax purposes.’12 Again, it is the diﬀerence in the nature of Indian translocation, whether incepted historically through indenture or brought into existence by emigration, which determines the character of the relationship of India as a centre with its peripheries: it diﬀers in accordance with the varying nature of the ties maintainable with India.

152

Peripheral interpretations of technology

Thus, in engaging further with the premises of the coexistence of competing dominant orders as found in what I call the transitionality peculiar to postcolony cultures, I will, albeit cursorily, examine centres and peripheries in the interdisciplinary frame of a plurality and polyvalency more conducive to understanding the global system where peripheral centres and central peripheries indeed coexist.13 The centre/periphery dichotomy of a core country and its diasporas needs further to be comprehended, I would suggest, as fulﬁlling what Friedman has called the ‘requisites’ of ‘weak’ rather than ‘stronger’ cultural ‘globalization’. It manifests a ‘stable form of global reference, one that allows access from diﬀerent parts of the global system to the same set of expressions or representations’.14 For our purposes, this means that Rushdie’s idea of India as an ‘imaginary homeland’15 ‘allows access’ to those Indians dispersed over the globe to ‘the same set of expressions or representations’,16 while yet leaving the question open as to diasporic reception of this ‘set’. Still engulfed by the continuing presence of postcolonial hierarchical power structures in the so-called ‘Third World’, many intellectuals from the postcolonies have uprooted themselves and made what has come to be called the ‘voyage in’17 to their ‘imaginary’ intellectual ‘homelands’ in the West. To the extent that transitionality involves physical separation from one’s ﬁrst nurturing community, it involves the fact of being ‘uprooted’, in Simone Weil’s terminology. And, since the desire to ‘be rooted’ is, according to her, ‘perhaps the most important’ but ‘least recognized’ status to which ‘the human soul’ aspires,18 the state of transitionality is not necessarily subjectively experienced as being a liberating one. A new identity has to be created, cost what it may. Hence this is a situation which elicits statements like the following, made by the critic Gayatri Spivak in referring to her former location in Calcutta and her current one in the US: ‘I am a bicultural, but my biculturality is that I’m not at home in either of the places.’19

Cyberspace and CMC Cyberspace, according to Holmes, ‘speciﬁcally denotes the real and imagined space in which individuals meet in electronically mediated and simulated space . . . in which (predominantly text-based) communication can occur’.20 The term ‘cyberspace’ was ﬁrst used by William Gibson in his sci-ﬁ novel Neuromancer (1984), where it clearly has dystopian connotations.21 The cyberspace outside Neuromancer’s world is, however, a ‘conceptual space’ in which the Internet, as ‘a technological infrastructure for computermediated communication (CMC) across both time and space’22 is located. This ‘conceptual space’ of ‘communication can perhaps best be understood

Transitionality at home and abroad

153

in terms of the “agora” (Gk. “place of meeting”)’, which Lewis Mumford has called a site of ‘cultural seepage’,23 since the agora is ‘an open space, publicly held and occupiable (“temporary stalls and stands”) for public purposes’ which were ‘open to the passer-by’24 in the ancient cities of Greece and Rome. The ‘public purposes’ of this meeting place included that of the exchange of news and information, as there was, so Mumford says, ‘probably no urban market-place where the interchange of news and opinions did not . . . play almost as important a part as the interchange of goods’.25 Of particular relevance to this idea of cyberspace as an agora is Dipesh Chakravarty’s discussion of a cultural variant of the marketplace – the typically Indian ‘bazaar’ as a public place. In Chakravarty’s understanding, ‘the bazaar or the “outside” ’ is: a place where one comes across and deals with strangers. And if ‘strangers’ . . . are always suspect and potentially dangerous, it is only logical that the themes of familiarity/unfamiliarity and trust/mistrust should play themselves out in many diﬀerent aspects of the bazaar.26 I would like to use the idea of the ‘bazaar’ in talking about the Internet as an agora-like forum27 for Indians in cyberspace, while maintaining that this is a decidedly middle-class phenomenon. As such it also corresponds to Jürgen Habermas’s notion of a ‘public space’ as ‘a realm of our social life in which something approaching public opinion can be formed’.28 If the Internet, according to Derek Foster, is ‘a real example of a broadband, wide-area computer network that allows each individual user an equal voice, or at the least, an equal opportunity to speak’,29 then it must be seen to be one which allows unequal access in non-industrialized countries.30 The use of the Internet for the maintenance of CMC between middleclass India and its diasporan counterparts thus takes on varied forms. We have the one-way information-dispersing websites, the electronic forums and mailing lists of automatic listservers,31 and incorporated into both of these the chat rooms and bulletin boards,32 enabling two-way communication. In the next sections of this chapter I shall be concentrating foremost on the discursive formations of information-dispersing websites, on the results of CMC opinion polls, and on electronic bulletin boards. This choice is informed by my understanding of these sites as functions. Or, in other words, as instruments for the interpellation of subjects, for the collocation of collective information, and for individual opinion voicing, respectively.

154

Peripheral interpretations of technology

Oﬃcial sites Besides the oﬃcial home pages maintained by the Government of India High Commissions in the UK and the USA which oﬀer the basic oﬃcial facts about entry to India and related issues, we also have the site hosted by the ‘Non-Residential Indians and Persons of Indian Origin Division’ of the Ministry of External Aﬀairs, New Delhi. The latter site has the agenda of fostering and strengthening diasporan perceptions of India as a centre in its own right. This trend is also followed by the countless webzines catering to Indians abroad, of which Sulekha.com’s mission statement can be seen to be a good example: In a short span of three years, Sulekha has evolved from a tiny homespun webzine into the biggest and most popular online community for Indians worldwide, winning unanimous acclaim of the media (‘One of the ﬁnest Indian websites’ – Times of India, ‘Extremely popular . . . a hit’ – India Abroad, ‘Golden Pebble Award’ – Austin American Statesman, ‘Represents what’s exciting about the Net itself’ – Free Press Journal). Anchored around the concepts of ‘expression’, ‘interaction’ and ‘community’ that set it apart from scores of ‘portals’, Sulekha is sustained by contributions of tens of thousands of remarkable, creative Indians from over 50 countries. Sulekha captures like no other the amazingly diverse and dynamic portrait of the world of modern India and Indians.33

Opinion polls Some of the typical questions asked by and for the ‘NRI community’ in these polls can be found on the US-based website ‘NRIOL.com – Opinion Poll’. A few examples selected for their pertinence to our topic will have to suﬃce for our purposes: (a) Q: ‘What is the greatest factor outside of family that bonds NRIs to India?’ A: A narrow majority (31.1 percent) voted ‘patriotism’. (b) Q: ‘Taking all factors into account, where would you like to live?’ A: There was a 38.7 percent majority for ‘India’, the next highest percentage, 31.2 percent, voted for ‘the USA/Canada’. (c) Q: ‘As an NRI, which country do you strongly believe you belong to?’

Transitionality at home and abroad

155

A: 64.9 percent of the visitors to the website voted ‘India’, 8.6 percent for ‘country of residence’ and 23.8 percent for ‘both countries’ equally. (d) Q: ‘Do you feel the Indian govt. treats NRIs only as cash-cows, to be used when India needs the money, but otherwise ignores us when it comes to NRI issues (e.g. dual nationality)?’ A: A very large majority (62 percent) voted ‘yes’. (e) Q: ‘As an NRI, do you feel less “Indian”?’ A: An overwhelming majority (84 percent) voted ‘no’. The question which now needs to be asked is whether the ﬁgures for these polls are in any way corroborated by the statements made in other electronic forums, not only by the NRIs based in the US but also by resident Indians. In seeking answers we shall now focus on the bulletin-board systems, newsgroups, and listservers available to these target persons. As it is not possible here to deal with these forums in depth, it appears best to examine one particular type of exchange as found on the electronic bulletin board – while resting one’s arguments on the vast sources of information in the form of postings on oﬀer in the other forums as well.

BBs and chat rooms ‘Most BBSs [bulletin-board systems] allow participants to create topical groups in which a series of messages, similar to email messages, can be strung together one after another.’34 Hindustan Network hosts the edited BBS IndiaTalking.com on . The list below shows some of the topics upon which this BBS initiated discussion: • • • • • •

‘Do Indians leave India for money, greed or personal achievements?’ ‘Do Indian immigrants contribute to the host countries?’ ‘Can outside India movements or activism help eradicate dowry in South Asia?’35 ‘Return to India’ ‘Cultural Shock’ ‘Are Indians abroad diﬀerent from residents in India?’

As the last topic on this list engages directly with the concept of centre/ periphery with regard to India and its diasporas, close attention will be paid to it in what follows. The postings on the string ‘Are Indians abroad diﬀerent from residents in India?’ are jumbled, but the discussion, begun in

156

Peripheral interpretations of technology

May 1999 and carried on for over a year, focuses on the concept of ‘Indianness’, thus feeding into practices of stereotyping by those ‘at home’, whether in India or the US, and those considered to be ‘out there’, again, either in the US or in India, depending on the location of the BBS poster. Out of the plethora of postings I have therefore selected a few which exemplify the diasporan position with regard to India, and restricted myself to the US context as this is the diaspora which has expanded most rapidly in recent years, and its increase in size is almost proportionate to its increase in status in the host country.36 The high status of NRIs and PIOs in the US, in what we can call a ‘professional diaspora’, would imply that this group is fairly self-conﬁdent and that the investments the group makes for maintaining its self-esteem should, therefore, not be too high. It is, accordingly, to be expected that the self-images, a concept I have explored under the name of ‘egocentres’ in more detail elsewhere,37 of Indians sojourning in the US are open to interpellation by not only the dominant ideology of Americanism but the equally dominant one of Indian centrality in matters cultural. As this state of transitionality becomes even further layered by the inclusion of Indian immigrants in the States who have migrated from the Indian ‘labour diaspora’,38 and whose relationship to India as a centre needs more nuanced treatment than is here feasible, I am constrained to exclude them from my current exposition. My discussion of the BBS statements will address those features I regard as being signiﬁcant factors within the parameters of transitionality as contextualized by centre/peripheries discourse. They include south-south relations, self-images as (a) diasporan Indians, (b) as recent immigrants from India, and (c) ﬁrst and later generations of immigrants. These factors will feed into the larger complex of my inquiry; namely, the manner in which stereotypes are dealt with while maintaining self-esteem. The ‘themes of familiarity/unfamiliarity and trust/mistrust’ which Dipesh Chakravarty has discerned as ‘play[ing] themselves out in many diﬀerent aspects of the bazaar’39 are, I would like to suggest, precisely those which emerge in CMC within cyberspace – in the form of stereotyping.

Case-study of BBS postings The posting with which I begin my analysis is by a discussant who calls herself ‘Duchess’40 and whose parents migrated to the US when she was 13. She has since visited India several times and states that: posting a By Duchess on Saturday, May 22, 1999 – 08:16 p.m.: Whenever I go to India I tend to be extra conservative because I don’t know what

Transitionality at home and abroad

157

to expect and I don’t want to insult anyone so I remain low key. I wear only shalvar kameezes or sarees.41 However last time I went back in 94 to visit my cousins made me laugh. They were all walking around in shorts (yes girls) and everyone was so hip and cool that I felt like I was from a village and they were from the US. They seemed very disappointed when I refused to go eat at McDonalds. They seemed disappointed that I didn’t share their taste in clothes/music/ culture etc. Duchess’s decision to be ‘extra conservative’ in India is a response corroborated by several other postings, and therefore exemplary of the ambivalent position occupied by those living within transitionality in its diasporan speciﬁcity. In having moved away from living contact with her ﬁrst nurturing community in India, she has no timely yardstick to judge this culture. Afraid of appearing too westernized, she has recourse to stereotypes which correspond to the images of the country which have crystallized in her memory. Her perception of India as a centre is not, however, adjusted in a realistic way. Thus, her description of the spectacle her cousins make of themselves leads her to avail of the same stereotype, yet with a diﬀerence: she sees herself thrust into the role of ‘country bumpkin’ while her ‘country’ cousins play the cosmopolitans. What her statement further points to is the change which has come over the dominant ideology in India during her absence; the country has become susceptible to the lure of taking a short cut to globalization in the form of an uncritical westernization, or, rather, Americanization. The next relevant posting is sent by a participant who goes under the name of ‘Mukesh’. Mukesh’s message below moves the discussion into another, if related, direction; namely, the attitude of migrants from India to their diasporan counterparts in their country of settlement, in this particular case, South Florida, which, as Mukesh points out, has a ‘large South Asian population’: posting b By Mukesh on Friday, May 21, 1999 – 06:53 p.m.: I have genreally [sic] noticed that more recent immigrants from India treat people of Indian origin as being ‘less Indian’ or not ethnic enough. I actually noticed this when I went to a local religious function. More recent arrivals were commenting on the accents of their caribben [sic] brethren. Slightly later, a discussant called ‘Ram’, who delivers his credentials thus: ‘I studied at American University and decided to work for my country. I know in’s and out’s [sic] of US, life in US, life-style of Indians in US’,

158

Peripheral interpretations of technology

intervenes. Ram here presents the centre’s perspective on the NRIs who visit India (reproduced exactly as he wrote it): posting c By Ram on Saturday, May 22, 1999 – 05:05 a.m.: Here are couple things I observed when NRIs (from US) visits India. First thing they do is start shopping before six months . . . tries to ﬁnd goods at 50 to 80% oﬀ (second hand ok) for gift to friends and relatives. They convert couple thousand greens into Indian rupee (one day is going to be Rs. 1=$42, quite opposite of today . . . that time is just around the corner) which gives them big chunk of rupee bundles. Now they starts showing oﬀ their real power. Ram is reprimanded by Duchess who pities him for having ‘failed to understand your brothers and sisters in the US’. In the interim, however, ‘Amitav’ has entered to launch an, at times bilingual, attack on US-based NRIs, a community to which he has belonged for the past six years but to which he refuses his allegiance: posting d By Amitav on Tuesday, May 25, 1999 – 06:16 p.m.: Sub bandhuon ko mera pranaam. [Hindi for ‘greetings to all my friends’] As I recall, when I had moved from India and when I attended ‘Indian’ (it hurts to just associate those social gatherings with the word Indian) parties I was often looked upon, by the kids of other ‘Indians’, as some ignorant fool who somehow managed to jump on a plane from a jungle and landed on the great and knowledgeable soil of America and would only attain salvation if and only if he adjusted to the western, all-knowing, society and culture . . . Perhaps the mindset of an NRI can be described as . . . ‘I ran away from a country full of problems. I’ve worked hard to earn my wealth. In the process I’ve lost all that actually I was made of (my identity). There is no way in this world that this country [India], which I ran away from, can improve after I had lost all this.’ Duchess soon responds to this posting and writes: posting e By Duchess on Wednesday, May 26, 1999 – 03:51 a.m.: Amitav[,] I was 13 too when I came to the US and . . . I felt very inferior and superior and very confused at that time . . . I was the smartest nerd in school . . . Today I’ve gotten past that state and it’s been 14 years since. I am independent, strong, very American and absolutely by no means afraid

Transitionality at home and abroad

159

of being 100% Indian among everyone. I have a nose-ring which clearly says I’m Indian. I have a ‘Aum’ [sacred Hindu signiﬁer] tattoo on my arm that clearly says I’m Indian. I wear sarees and shalvars and go to the temple and yes I know and understand the words to my prayers, I don’t pretend. I follow my traditions to the best of my knowledge and make a damn mighty eﬀort at it. At this particular point, ‘Kenny’, a visitor to the forum who has logged on, as he mentions, ‘looking for stuﬀ on Hinduism’, reveals that he, a diasporan Indian, is ‘afraid to have a close relations [sic] with people of his grandpa’s country’. ‘Kenny’ launches into a ﬁerce attack on Duchess’s last posting, thereby provoking a discussant named ‘Red Mercury’ to intervene: posting f By Red Mercury on Thursday, September 09, 1999 – 08:13 a.m.: Phew! This is one hot, passionate exchange of ideas! . . . The fact of the matter, as it stands right now, is that we all need someone to take the fall and an outlet to vent our frustrations; and to do this, we make scapegoats out of these two groups, i.e. the NRIs point their ﬁngers at their Indian counterparts and call them naive and country-bumpkins and the Indian Indians get all pedantic and drone away on how the NRIs have ‘shamefully’ shedded their Indian-ness and allowed their Indian culture to be eroded by the ‘western glamour’. What should be obvious from the discourse just presented is that we have been looking at unmediated interaction within a ‘virtual community’. It is not possible to present each thread of the discussion here, but as the necessarily highly selective excerpts should indicate, the correspondents on this BBS qualify as participants in Howard Rheingold’s ‘virtual community’, since they ‘carry on those public discussions [on the Net] long enough, with suﬃcient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships in cyberspace’.42 Of particular relevance for our purposes is the deﬁnition oﬀered by Derek Foster of ‘community’ being built by a suﬃcient ﬂow of ‘we-relevant’ information. The ‘we’ or the collective identity that results is structured around others who are seen as similar to the ‘me’. In this sense, community, like any form of communication, is not fully realized without a conception of self.43 To return now to the BBS discussion. Red Mercury, a self-professed NRI like Duchess, Mukesh, and Amitav, has recourse to one of the bestestablished features of a community; that is, its strategy of stereotyping, and

160

Peripheral interpretations of technology

by naming the lines of demarcation between the NRIs and resident Indians, the discussion on diasporan identity loses its momentum. What presents itself as a sensible point of view is, in fact, instrumental to closure. Following Red Mercury’s posting, the discussion loses its momentum and eventually peters out. Since strategies of stereotyping are constitutive of we-identity, they need further commentary in the context of the identity which transitionality engenders. I shall be following Henri Tajfel’s (1974) and John Turner’s (1986) idea of ‘social identity’ as elaborated by Turner into ‘selfcategorization theory’ (1987), since this opens up space for connecting the interpellation by ideology of the individual subject’s self-image with the ingroup and outgroup self-concepts which have been internalized as stereotypes. Tajfel and Turner argue that what is contested in society are not its actual physical resources, but rather the ‘social resources’; that is, prestige and status for the members within a society. Thus, in order to maintain positive self-esteem, self-categorization manifests itself as well-diﬀerentiated ingroup stereotyping, while its counterpart is the set of more coarsely distinguished outgroup stereotypes. In our particular case, the ingroup/outgroup distinctions are not as easily traceable as was the case for Tajfel and Turner, or Lippmann (1922), Katz and Braly (1933), or Allport (1954) before them.44 In the case of centre/ periphery relations between India and its diasporas, we are not dealing in a transparent way with ‘national’ or ‘ethnic’ diﬀerences, such as those discerned, for example, in the case of Americans viewing other national groups such as the French or the Germans, nor with ethnic relations within a nation, such as those which exist between African-Americans and the white mainstream in the United States. In attempting to describe centreperiphery relations on the basis of the BBS discourse, I would ask you to consider an attempt at presenting the complex situation in a simpliﬁed fashion – as I have done in Figure 9.1. In summarizing the various positions just depicted, we can say that in the ‘bazaar’ of cyberspace where the ‘themes of familiarity/unfamiliarity and trust/mistrust’ are played out against the backdrop of transitionality,45 the idea of India as a centre is, for diasporan Indians in the US at least, a highly contested one. This corresponds closely to the way in which diasporan existence has been presented by Anglophone writers such as Bharati Mukherjee, Jhumpa Lahiri, or V.S. Naipaul, and has little connection to the theorization of the ‘diasporic imaginary’ by Vijay Mishra (1996), who more recently has added the concept of trauma to his theoretical arsenal.46 Over thirty-nine percent of the Indian population live below the poverty line, while 50 percent of the Indian population are likely to remain illiterate well into this century.47 Yet, as current changes in India can testify, the

Figure 9.1 Virtual community stereotypes and centre/periphery relations.

162

Peripheral interpretations of technology

concept of a country being in a state of ‘transition’ is borne out politically and culturally, and must be explained in terms of India’s transformation into a democratic republic, and, in particular, of global market developments. Following its rejection of a Soviet-inspired stance of hostility toward westernization, India’s present policy of encouraging investment by multinational companies is leading to unprecedentedly rapid changes for a middle-class population being literally catapulted (as once promised by the late Rajiv Gandhi) into an electronically determined twenty-ﬁrst century.48 It is predominantly the members of what Pavan Varma has called ‘the great Indian middle class’,49 who, after gaining their qualiﬁcations in Indian institutes of higher education, are now migrating to the US and who can be found engaging in CMC in ways which Harsh Verma ﬁnds hard to explain: The Internet has emerged as a major vehicle for the Indian Diaspora to connect together [sic]. While citizens of other countries use it for a variety of educational and entertainment purposes, the Indian Diaspora has turned to the Internet in a major way to remain connected with each other.50

Conclusion In making a ﬁnal comment on the directions the chart analysis takes, I would like to apply Zygmunt Bauman’s perception of a community to the virtual community we have just encountered: An odd thing has happened on the road from nation-state to community: without a centre wishing and able to hold, it is now the scattered peripheries that have to conjure up, by eﬀorts all of their own and divided as they are, centres to be held by. To acquire the power to bestow identities, communities must talk themselves into reality, whilst silencing the talk about this reality being but the reality of their talking.51 Bauman’s conceptualization of the community/nation dichotomy is highly pertinent to my subject since it demonstrates that the relationship which exists between a country and its diaspora needs to be thought through in globally systemic ways which are sutured into the fabric of centre/ periphery relations without being imbricated into either of the two categories in a straightforward manner. As we have just seen during our brief glance at a BBS exchange, the dictum ‘only connect’ is less innocuous than it appears.52 The ‘connecting’ which precedes the forming of a virtual community is fragile and highly

Transitionality at home and abroad

163

vulnerable to exclusionary strategies. Thus, identity within transitionality, in this particular case Indianness, is revealed not to be the transcendental one customarily posited by diaspora theory,53 but an empty signiﬁer which can be appropriated at will in challenging the unequal hierarchies of centres and peripheries.

Notes 1 F. Dhondy, Poona Company (1980), London: Gollancz, 1985, p. 13. 2 R. Robertson, ‘Glocalization: Time-Space and Homogeneity-Heterogeneity’, in M. Featherstone, S. Lash and R. Robertson (eds) Global Modernities, London: Sage, 1995, p. 40. 3 J. Friedman, ‘Global System, Globalization and the Parameters of Modernity’, in M. Featherstone, S. Lash and R. Robertson (eds) Global Modernities, London: Sage, 1995, p. 77. 4 See J. Nederveen Pieterse, ‘Globalization as Hybridization’, in M. Featherstone, S. Lash and R. Robertson (eds) Global Modernities, London: Sage, 1995, especially the idea of the ‘global mélange’ (pp. 53–4), which contains a ‘spectrum of hybridities’ (p. 57), but also H.K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, London: Routledge, 1994. 5 See U. Hannerz: ‘the process where meanings and meaningful forms from different historical sources, originally separated from one another in space, come to mingle extensively’ (Cultural Complexity, New York: Columbia University Press, 1992, p. 96). This would correspond to Bhabha’s idea of ‘hybridity’ as presented in the ‘Introduction’ to The Location of Culture. 6 See Bhabha’s ‘third space’: H.K. Bhabha, ‘The Third Space’, in J. Rutherford (ed.) Identity: Community, Culture, Diﬀerence, London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990; and M. Mann, The Sources of Social Power, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. 7 M. Ghosh-Schellhorn, Steep Stairs to Myself: Transitionality and Autobiography, Trier: WVT, forthcoming. 8 A. Nandy, Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983, p. xi. 9 C. Taylor, ‘The Politics of Recognition’, in A. Gutman (ed.) Multiculturalism and ‘The Politics of Recognition’, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992, p. 25. 10 ‘Global systems include globalization processes. These include the establishment of global institutional forms and global processes of identiﬁcation and their cultural products’ (Friedman, ‘Global System, Globalization and the Parameters of Modernity’, p. 74). Culture is deﬁned by Friedman as ‘the social organisation of meaning’ (p. 86). 11 W. Safran, ‘Diasporas in Modern Societies: Myths of Homeland and Return’, Diaspora 1, 1991, 83. 12 Explanatory posting by editor of . 13 See M. Ghosh-Schellhorn, ‘Revisiting Centres and Peripheries: Anglophone India and its Diaspora(s)’, in M. Ghosh-Schellhorn and V. Alexander (eds) Peripheral Centres, Central Peripheries: Anglophone India and its Diasporas: Hamburg: LitVerlag, 2006, for a more detailed treatment of this topic. Centre-periphery relations also formed the focus of the inaugural conference hosted by the

164

14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

31

32

33

Peripheral interpretations of technology

Transcultural Anglophone Studies Centre, Saarland University in August 2002 (www.tas.uni-saarland.de/conference.html). Friedman, ‘Global System, Globalization and the Parameters of Modernity’, p. 77. S. Rushdie, ‘Imaginary Homelands’, in S. Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991, London: Granta, 1991, pp. 9–21. Friedman, ‘Global System, Globalization and the Parameters of Modernity’, p. 77. E.W. Said, Culture and Imperialism, London: Chatto and Windus, 1993, p. 295. S. Weil, The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties Towards Mankind, London: Ark, 1987, p. 43. G.C. Spivak, The Postcolonial Critic, ed. S. Harasym, London: Routledge, 1990, p. 83. D. Holmes, Virtual Politics: Identity, and Community in Cyberspace, London: Sage, 1997, p. 234. It is ‘[a] consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation . . . A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding’ (W. Gibson, Neuromancer, New York: Ace, 1984, p. 51). D. Foster, ‘Community and Identity in the Electronic Village’, in D. Porter (ed.) Internet Culture, New York and London: Routledge, 1997, p. 24. L. Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Transformations and its Prospects, London: Penguin, 1991, p. 121. Ibid., p. 176. Ibid. D. Chakravarty, ‘Open Space/Public Place: Garbage, Modernity and India’ (1991) in Sarai Reader 2001: The Public Domain (Online), p. 10. David Holmes has made the connection between the forum and cyberspace thus: ‘the agora either dissipates, or is replaced by simulation, as in the shopping mall, or cyberspace’ (Holmes, Virtual Politics, p. 230). J. Habermas, ‘The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article’, in S. Bronner and D. Kellner (eds) Critical Theory and Society, New York: Routledge, 1989, p. 136. Foster, ‘Community and Identity in the Electronic Village’, p. 23. Holmes notes that ‘the Internet’s “superstructure” is a career of a range of informational forms and relations including Web browsing, information retrieval programs, Usenet, Multi-User Dimensions, broadcasting programs and point-to-point email’ and, more relevantly here, ‘its interactive, point-to-point network structure’ (Holmes, Virtual Politics, p. 43, footnote 4). ‘By subscribing to an electronic list, you can receive news or discuss issues of importance to your country, learn about another culture, practice a language, or just chat with friends.’ Explanatory note for users posted by Asian Studies WWW Virtual Library at Australian National University, 1998. Amit Rai has taken an important ﬁrst step in examining electronic bulletin boards with a view to determining the electronic trajectories of the diasporic Hindu identity. (‘India On-Line: Electronic Bulletin Boards and the Construction of a Diasporic Hindu Identity’, in Diaspora 4, 1995, 31–57). See ‘Sulekha’s Tryst with the Creativity Gene’, online (n.p.); ‘Sulekha and Penguin India announce global contest for humour writing’, online (n.p.);

Transitionality at home and abroad

34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42

43 44 45 46 47

48 49 50 51 52 53

165

‘Sulekha Events’, online (n.p.); ‘Penguin India releases the ﬁrst global Indian book, inspired by Sulekha.com’, online (n.p). P. Kollock and M.A. Smith, ‘Communities in Cyberspace’, in P. Kollock and M.A. Smith (eds) Communities in Cyberspace, London: Routledge, 1999, p. 5. This BBS was used for recruiting interest in the International Society Against Dowry and Bride-Burning in India (ISADB). A Merrill Lynch Report published in July 2003 conﬁrms this fact. Ghosh-Schellhorn, Steep Stairs to Myself. Categorization taken from R. Cohen, Global Diasporas: An Introduction, London: Routledge, 1997. Chakravarty, ‘Open Space/Public Place’, p. 10. The names of all the discussants have been changed. The reference here is to one type of traditional Indian female dress. H. Rheingold, The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier, Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1993, p. 5. Rheingold’s work derives from his membership in what is perhaps the quintessential form of a virtual community, the multiuser dimensions, but it has meanwhile been adapted to other modes of CMC. Foster, ‘Community and Identity in the Electronic Village’, p. 25. These social psychology researchers all worked at establishing racial and ethnic stereotypes on the basis of questionnaires. Chakravarty, ‘Open Space/Public Place’, p. 10. V. Mishra, ‘Traumatic Memory, Mourning and V.S. Naipaul’, in M. GhoshSchellhorn and V. Alexander (eds) Peripheral Centres, Central Peripheries: Anglophone India and its Diasporas, Hamburg: LitVerlag, 2006. This fact is the topic of controversy in the context of ‘Hindi in cyberspace’, as it is argued that the Net is exclusively for the higher-income wage earners, while Hindi is a ‘language spoken predominantly by the poor’ (Ravikant, ‘Hindi Web World: Tentative Steps in an Optimistic Direction’, in Sarai Reader 2001: The Public Domain (Online), pp. 136–9). The explosive expansion of the IT sector in the Indian cities of Bangalore and Hyderabad are certain indicators for this. P.K. Varma, The Great Indian Middle Class, Delhi: Penguin, 1998. H. Verma, ‘NRIs in the virtual world’, NRIworld News Service, n.d. online., 2003, n.p. Z. Baumann, Globalization: The Human Consequences, Columbia: Columbia University Press, 2000, p. 151. E.M. Forster, Howard’s End, London: Edward Arnold, 1960, p. 197. Safran, ‘Diasporas in Modern Societies’, pp. 83–99; Cohen, Global Diasporas.

Bibliography Allport, G.W., The Nature of Prejudice, Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1954. Bauman, Z., Globalization: The Human Consequences, Columbia: Columbia University Press, 2000. Bhabha, H.K., ‘The Third Space’, in J. Rutherford (ed.) Identity: Community, Culture, Diﬀerence, London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990, pp. 207–21. —— ‘Introduction’, The Location of Culture, London: Routledge, 1994, pp. 1–18. Chakravarty, D., ‘Open Space/Public Place: Garbage, Modernity and India’ (1991), in Sarai Reader 2001: The Public Domain (Online).

166

Peripheral interpretations of technology

Cliﬀord, J., ‘Diasporas’, Cultural Anthropology 9, 1994, 302–38. Cohen, R., Global Diasporas: An Introduction, London: Routledge, 1997. Dhondy, F., Poona Company (1980), London: Gollancz, 1985. Foster, D., ‘Community and Identity in the Electronic Village’, in D. Porter (ed.) Internet Culture, New York: Routledge, 1997, pp. 23–37. Forster, E.M., Howard’s End, London: Edward Arnold, 1960. Friedman, J., ‘Global System, Globalization and the Parameters of Modernity’, in M. Featherstone, S. Lash and R. Robertson (eds) Global Modernities, London: Sage, 1995, pp. 69–90. Ghosh-Schellhorn, M., ‘Revisiting Centres and Peripheries: Anglophone India and its Diaspora(s)’, in M. Ghosh-Schellhorn and V. Alexander (eds) Peripheral Centres, Central Peripheries: Anglophone India and its Diasporas, Hamburg: LitVerlag, 2006. —— Steep Stairs to Myself: Transitionality and Autobiography, Trier: WVT, forthcoming. Gibson, W., Neuromancer, New York: Ace, 1984. Habermas, J., ‘The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article’, in S. Bronner and D. Kellner (eds) Critical Theory and Society, New York: Routledge, 1989, pp. 136–42. Hannerz, U., Cultural Complexity, New York: Columbia University Press, 1992. Holmes, D., Virtual Politics: Identity, and Community in Cyberspace, London: Sage, 1997. Katz, D. and K. Braly, ‘Racial Stereotypes of One Hundred College Students’, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 28, 1933, 280–90. Kollock, P. and M.A. Smith, ‘Communities in Cyberspace’, in P. Kollock and M.A. Smith (eds) Communities in Cyberspace, London: Routledge, 1999, pp. 3–25. Lippmann, W., Public Opinion, New York: Macmillan, 1922. Mann, M., The Sources of Social Power, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Mishra, V., ‘The Diasporic Imaginary: Theorizing The Indian Diaspora’, Textual Practice 10/3, 1996, 421–47. —— ‘Traumatic Memory, Mourning and V.S. Naipaul’, in M. Ghosh-Schellhorn and V. Alexander (eds) Peripheral Centres, Central Peripheries: Anglophone India and its Diasporas, Hamburg: LitVerlag, 2006. Mumford, L., The City in History: Its Origins, Transformations and its Prospects, London: Penguin, 1991. Nandy, A., Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983. Nandy, P., ‘The Indian Experience in a Connected World’, 2001, online. Available: (accessed 30 June 2004). Nederveen Pieterse, J., ‘Globalization as Hybridization’, in M. Featherstone, S. Lash and R. Robertson (eds) Global Modernities, London: Sage, 1995, pp. 45–68. Porter, D., Internet Culture, London: Routledge, 1997. Rai, A.S., ‘India On-Line: Electronic Bulletin Boards and the Construction of a Diasporic Hindu Identity’, in Diaspora 4, 1995, 31–57. Ravikant, ‘Hindi Web World: Tentative Steps in an Optimistic Direction’, in Sarai Reader 2001: The Public Domain (Online), pp. 136–9. Rheingold, H., The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier, Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1993.

Transitionality at home and abroad

167

Robertson, R., ‘Glocalization: Time-Space and Homogeneity-Heterogeneity’, in M. Featherstone, S. Lash and R. Robertson (eds) Global Modernities, London: Sage, 1995, pp. 25–44. Rushdie, S., ‘Imaginary Homelands’, in S. Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991, London: Granta, 1991, pp. 9–21. Safran, W., ‘Diasporas in Modern Societies: Myths of Homeland and Return’, Diaspora 1, 1991, 83–99. Said, E.W., Culture and Imperialism, London: Chatto and Windus, 1993. Spivak, G.C., The Postcolonial Critic, ed. S. Harasym, London: Routledge, 1990. Tajfel, H., ‘Social Identity and Intergroup Behaviour’, Social Science Information 12/2, 1974, 65–93. Tajfel, H. and J.C. Turner, ‘The Social Identity Theory of Intergroup Behaviour’, S. Worchel and W.G. Austin (eds) The Social Psychology of Intergroup Relations, Chicago: Nelson Hall, 1986, pp. 7–24. Taylor, C., ‘The Politics of Recognition’, in A. Gutman (ed.) Multiculturalism and ‘The Politics of Recognition’, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992, pp. 25–73. Turner, J.C., ‘A Self-Categorization Theory’, in J.C. Turner et al. (eds) Rediscovering the Social Group: A Self-Categorization Theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. Varma, P.K., The Great Indian Middle Class, Delhi: Penguin, 1998. Verma, H., ‘NRIs in the virtual world’, in NRIworld News Service, n.d. online. Available: (accessed 30 June 2004). Weil, S., The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties Towards Mankind, London: Ark, 1987.

Internet sources http://www.sulekha.com http://www.nriol.com/ http://www.nriol.com/community/poll/vote.cgi?name=current&action=view http://hindustan.net ‘IndiaTalkingOpen Discussions related to India & Indian People’ online. Available: (accessed 30 June 2004). ‘Sulekha’s Tryst with the Creativity Gene’, in Times of India 13 April 2002, online. Available: (accessed 30 June 2004). ‘Sulekha and Penguin India announce global contest for humour writing’, online. Available: (accessed 30 June 2004). ‘Sulekha Events’, online. Available: (accessed 30 June 2004). ‘Penguin India releases the ﬁrst global Indian book, inspired by Sulekha.com’, online. Available: (accessed 30 June 2004).

10 Technologies in Hanif Kureishi’s ‘The Body’ Annette Bühler-Dietrich

In 2002, Hanif Kureishi published his latest volume of stories, The Body. In this collection, stories about families abound – father and son, son and mother are depicted in their diﬃcult yet rewarding interactions. The issue of ethnicity appears on the margins of the stories. Yet, the eponymous short novel ‘The Body’ deals with the very absence of these family ties. There, Adam, the ﬁrst-person narrator, a married, ailing writer in his mid-sixties, has his brain transplanted into the body of a handsome 25-year-old male. The body shift is intended to be temporary. Adam plans for a six-month vacation, but the story closes when a return to his old body has become impossible. Drawing on the genre of the fantastic novel, Kureishi conjures up biotechnological discourse as well as discourses of identity and race. Foucault’s notion of a technology of the self is taken up with respect to biotechnology, yet also with respect to writing, a dominant topic in Kureishi’s concurrent publication of his collected essays Dreaming and Scheming. In my discussion of ‘The Body’ I will consider how diﬀerent technologies put identity to the test and thus work toward a reconceptualization of identity alert to the stakes of a multi-faceted hybridity.

Identity as problem ‘The Body’ examines the relationship of body, biotechnology and subjectivity in late modernity. Its ﬁrst-person narrator addresses these issues from a thoroughly peripheral perspective – that of a non-synchronous monster of the biotechnological age. As such, Adam himself puts his transformation in the context of his famous predecessor, the monster in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. While Victor Frankenstein’s creation from dead body-parts remains hideous, Adam changes his deteriorating frame for a healthy, sinewy body – a transformation which makes his medical doctor exclaim ‘Michelangelo has made David!’ on visiting him after the operation.1 Yet

Technologies in Hanif Kureishi’s ‘The Body’

169

the site of the laboratory remains equivocal: on the one hand it evokes the aseptic matter-of-factness of medical feasibility, to which the doctor repeatedly refers. To him, ‘Newbodies’ are just a necessary step in medical exploration and discovery: ‘It is, of course, something that was always going to happen’ (p. 23). On the other hand, the store-room for bodies is ‘worse than a mortuary’ (p. 25) to Adam and almost makes him retch. In order to select his new body, he has to deny the knowledge that dead bodies are reanimated. Thus, taking refuge in the reassuring discourse of art, he picks a body that is ‘[s]tocky and as classically handsome as any sculpture in the British Museum’ (p. 25). Nevertheless, he remains suspicious of the laboratory’s technical vocabulary like ‘facility’, ‘Newbody’ (pp. 26 and 22), and questions the commodiﬁcation of bodies. While the laboratory works and experiments on behalf of the well-oﬀ, selling its expertise at a high price, the young and handsome bodies of the detritus of society are commodiﬁed and reused.2 Whereas the rich and successful like Ralph, formerly a wealthy businessman, get to live two or more lives if circumstances permit, all others have to die naturally.3 The body shift with its potentially endless prolongation of life, however, does not lead the ‘Newbodies’ in the story to an exploration of the constructibility of identity. Ralph, Adam’s mentor, lives his new life working toward the fulﬁlment of his long-cherished wish to play Hamlet. Only Adam’s journey in and with his new body amounts to an investigation of identity. While Ralph, who informs Adam about the possibility of the body change, lives an ‘ordinary’ life as a drama student, Adam’s new identity is jeopardized early on. Initially, he dreams of the power of invisibility.4 Yet, he is subsequently noticed, when a gay couple hail him: ‘ “Mark, Mark!” they called, straight at me. “It’s you!” ’ (p. 43). Although Adam has acquired an anonymous body, he now ﬁnds himself in a position M/marked by this new body – a subject position which at least for the moment of the conversation he has to comply with. When, later on in the novel, another ‘Newbody’, Matte, attacks him, it is the mark he is looking for: ‘Bodies have to be adapted. The “mark” on the head tells you that’s been achieved’ (p. 98). While the ‘mark’ indicates the body as a commodity, the naming re-personalizes the body and allows for a diﬀerent relationship. Adam’s careful choice of the body5 and his narratorial comment ‘I was falling in love with myself’ (p. 35) point to a relationship structured by identiﬁcation and desire. Yet, on knowing the original owner of the body, this identiﬁcation hinges on attachment instead of substitution. Now Adam registers an aﬀective life of the body: ‘It’s as if I have a ghost or shadow-soul inside me. I can feel things, perhaps memories, of the man who was here ﬁrst. Perhaps the physical

170

Peripheral interpretations of technology body has a soul. There’s a phrase of Freud’s that might apply here: the bodily ego, he calls it, I think.’ (p. 45)

Adam here refers to a Freudian concept elaborated in ‘The Ego and the Id’ in the context of Freud’s description of the psychical apparatus. There Freud writes: ‘The ego is ﬁrst and foremost a body-ego; it is not merely a surface entity, but it is itself the projection of a surface.’6 This concept of the body-ego raises the question of how Adam’s subjectivity is altered by the sensations of this M/marked body, which he registers to be conspicuously diﬀerent from the old one. Yet this alteration only dawns on him when another ‘Newbody’ tries to buy the body from him. Now he says: ‘I’m not handing my body over to anyone. I’m just settling in. We’re getting attached ’ (p. 99, emphasis added). Here the choice of pronoun attributes an identity to Mark’s body, since Adam/Leo is not getting attached to ‘it’, but ‘we’re getting attached’. Addressed therein is a reconﬁguration of identity which Homi Bhabha discusses under the heading of hybridity: This agonistic state of hybridity, this state of acting from the midst of identities, takes us beyond the multicultural politics of mutual recognition . . . For the diﬀerence of proximity refuses to posit the relations of persons or cultures as diﬀerent on the normalizing grounds of an abstract universality of meaning or on a shared, synchronized temporality of present being. Proximity is the excess of the hybrid state. . . .7 In spite of Adam’s awareness of ‘wearing’ another’s body, his body vacation at ﬁrst still clings to the concept of a singular identity – the successful writer with his ageing body, his family ties and his circle of respected friends. This identity is temporarily forsaken on the surface of his body, yet continued on the inside. Eventually, however, the detachment of mind and body fails and results in the above-mentioned attachment to Mark’s body. The crucial catalyst for this attachment happens in ‘the Centre’, a place for spiritual recreation on a Greek island and thus conspicuously apart from society. There Adam is forced into a sexual encounter with its middle-aged director. Since his own pleasure is aroused against his will, this situation alters the protagonist: ‘I discovered myself to be even more furious than before about what Patricia had done to me, and furious with myself for having failed to escape untouched ’ (p. 85, emphasis added). While all the previous sexual episodes leave the protagonist ‘untouched’, Patricia’s humiliation cuts through the outside frame and brings forth the aforementioned bodily ego: Leo as truly hybrid subject that breaches the distance between Mark’s outside and Adam’s inside comes into being through subjection:

Technologies in Hanif Kureishi’s ‘The Body’

171

The man described for us, whom we are invited to free, is already in himself the eﬀect of a subjection much more profound than himself. A ‘soul’ inhabits him and brings him to existence, which is itself a factor in the mastery that power exercises over the body. The soul is the eﬀect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body.8 Adam’s initial dream of an invisibility which escapes the subjecting and subjectivating glance here once more comes to an end, when social, physical and mental subjection coincide. A scarred body remains. Yet, when Alicia, his companion at the Centre, detects a scar upon scrutinizing his body, right after Adam’s encounter with Patricia, he cannot connect this scar to a physical injury, since it has not happened ‘during his lifetime’. Instead, the scar comes to represent Adam/Leo’s lack of knowledge of himself. As such, it can only work as a problem deserving attention in the ﬁrst-person narrative hindsight, because the notion of ‘himself’ becomes increasingly problematic. Although ‘hybrids were hip’ (p. 39), as Adam writes early on, his coupling of humanity and technology, old mind and young body, in the end means loss rather than gain: being surveyed by Matte’s body snatchers, Adam, whose old body now turns out to have been destroyed, is reduced from subject to mere body ‘facility’. This prevents him from continuing any of his former lives if he wants to live on. The loss of his ties, however, comes to signify the loss of everything: I was carrying my credit cards, but I realized there was nowhere I could go now; not back to my wife, to my hotel, or to stay with friends . . . I was a stranger on the earth, a nobody with nothing, belonging nowhere, a body alone, condemned to begin again, in the nightmare of eternal life. (p. 126) While the earlier party on Matte’s yacht evokes the myth of the Flying Dutchman and casts Matte in this role, Adam now perceives himself as such a creature. As the ship ﬁtfully assembles aimlessly travelling ‘Newbodies’ who wear internationally traded bodies, the superimposition of the Flying Dutchman myth criticizes a belief in unceasing technological progress.9 In spite of the pathetic alliterating reiteration ‘nobody’, ‘nothing’, ‘nowhere’, ‘nightmare’ with which the story closes, it could also be pointing to a position of chance: after all, the ﬁrst-person narrator writes ‘I was’, not ‘I am’. Yanked from his old self, he mentions what is involved – pain and loss – and what is ahead: another story to tell, the story which is in fact the story being told. Whereas Kureishi’s other story of leaving, Intimacy, couples

172

Peripheral interpretations of technology

the anxiety involved in giving up one’s old life and family with the urgency of this departure and its ensuing hope, the dreary ending in ‘The Body’ becomes positive only when one takes the process of writing into account. On the level of narrative discourse, the beginning and the end of the story are incompatible. Although the ﬁrst-person narrator seems to be Adam, who tells of a strange experience and intersperses his story with present-tense commentaries, the story ends in Leo’s voice, albeit in the past tense, who claims the impossibility of return. Thus, on reconsidering the novel’s beginning, one wonders if Adam’s body-change could be a (written) dream or fantasy. When talking about his intended journey, he remarks: ‘We [he and his wife, A. B.-D.] had agreed that I, too, could go on “walkabout” if I wanted to. (Apparently, “walkabout” was called “the dreaming” by some Aboriginals.)’ (p. 19). This reading is supported by Adam’s initial self-description. There he claims an instability of identity and complains: ‘Nothing has cured me of myself, of the self I cling to . . . I would probably say that my problems are myself; my life is my dilemmas. I’d better enjoy them, then (pp. 4–5).10 This self presents itself as a problem, since Adam considers youth, not experience, to be the guarantor for a successful participation in life and wonders: ‘Do I want to participate?’ (p. 5). The question remains open, because Adam begins to narrate the story, which is itself the answer: obviously he does want to participate. Yet the exhortative ‘I’d better enjoy them, then’ emphasizes a repression of wishes which are then fulﬁlled in a fantasy that ﬁnally turns into a nightmare.11 The ‘nightmare of eternal life’ punishes the subject for his wishes. In addition to Adam’s psychogram in the introduction, further clues for the narrator’s unreliablity are the references to ‘being’ and ‘seeming’ and to magical realism as well as Ralph’s anagrammatical presence in Adam’s new name ‘Leo Raphael Adams’.12 Two irreconcilable options for interpretation therefore persist: (a) Adam is writing down a fantasy; (b) Leo is writing down his autobiographical (sci-ﬁ) story – the present tense as well as the information the narrator gives about himself at the beginning are a ruse.

On art, biotechnology and race Wrapped into the genre of the fantastic novel, we ﬁnd Kureishi’s reﬂections on biotechnology and race. His choice of the plot of a brain transplantation recalls nineteenth-century race theory as well as more recent stories about organ donation.13 Organic rank and stage of culture from primitive to civilized were at the heart of evolutionary biology, medicine, and anthropology . . . The

Technologies in Hanif Kureishi’s ‘The Body’

173

plenum of universal organic evolution, reaching from ape to modern European with all the races and sexes properly arrayed between, was ﬁlled with the bodies and measuring instruments proper to the life sciences. Craniometry and the examination of sexual/reproductive materials both focused on the chief organs of mental and generative life, which were the keys to organic social eﬃciency.14 Connecting civilization, cultivation, race and class, nineteenth-century race theory favours the existence of diﬀerent races, where mixture is considered ‘miscegenation’ and the ‘purity’ of races is legally enforced.15 The issue of a progress which works by selection and is tied to class is taken up in ‘The Body’, where the possibility of a body change is dependent on money. The vision of a new class, criticized at the discursive level of the novel, is expounded by Matte: ‘There’ll be a new class, an elite, a superclass of superbodies’ (p. 96). A superclass, whose philosopher has to be Nietzsche.16 Nowadays, tracing the essence of character to the brain – a renewed eﬀort in neuroscience – is supplemented by a discourse on genetic determination and genetic engineering.17 There, an alteration which is only ﬁctive in ‘The Body’, is actually manageable: The technical ability to manipulate genetic information, in particular to pass it from one kind of organism to another in a regulated manner in the lab, or to synthesize and insert new genes, has grown exponentially since the ﬁrst successful genetic engineering experiments of the early 1970s.18 While ‘life itself’ for Adam’s engineers resides in the brain, now it equally resides in the gene. Drawing on Sarah Franklin, Haraway writes: ‘ “Life”, materialized as information and signiﬁed by the gene, displaces “Nature”, preeminently embodied in and signiﬁed by old-fashioned organisms’, and below: ‘In proprietary guise, genes displace not only organisms but people and nonhumans of many kinds as generators of liveliness.’19 As Haraway shows, biotechnological discourse displays two signiﬁcant epistemological inﬂections: it draws heavily on the Renaissance and it excludes race. Yet, the neglect of race betrays once more a presupposed universal white standard.20 At the same time, life as genetic information supersedes traditional visibility. ‘The boundaries of “race” have moved across the threshold of the skin. They are cellular and molecular, not dermal.’21 Adam’s invisible biotechnological hybridity thus provokes a rethinking of diﬀerence along the question: ‘In the instability of scale that characterizes our time, how is racialized and racializing identity being imagined?’22 ‘The Body’ addresses race ironically, and only in passing. When Adam is

174

Peripheral interpretations of technology

considering the body he wants, Ralph tries to persuade him to become a woman, but, on Adam’s refusal, he continues: ‘Or you could choose a black body. There’s a few of those,’ he said with an ironic sniﬀ. ‘Think how much you’d learn about society and . . . all that.’ – ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But couldn’t I just read a novel about it?’ (p. 24) Looking at Kureishi’s œuvre so far, we might say that some of his novels are indeed such ‘novels about it’. Yet, in contrast to The Buddha of Suburbia and The Black Album, in ‘The Body’ references to skin colour and ethnic origin are scarce. Although Kureishi is repeating elements of his other stories, here they are conspicuously raceless.23 Nevertheless, Leo’s body, too, is subject to discriminating scrutiny: ‘we went to bars suitable for looking at others as we enjoyed them looking at us – those, that is, who didn’t regard us dark-skinners with fear and contempt’ (p. 53). In spite of the seeming neglect of ethnicity (the above quote being the only reference to skin colour), ‘The Body’ self-consciously circles around hybridity and visibility in foregrounding the issue of temporality.24 The alienation-eﬀect, attained by the construction of a polytemporal subject, highlights what Bhabha calls ‘intermediate living’: The minoritarian presence is a sign of ‘intermediate living’ within the history of the present, that is neither gigantic nor small, neither global nor local. This subaltern ‘third force’ makes dramatically visible what is involved in regulating the ethical and political borderlands of the global world with its simultaneous, noncoordinating jurisdictions.25 Grounding minority in a ‘process of aﬃliation’26 instead of a bureaucratic taxonomy evades the implications of liberal identity politics. Wendy Brown points out how these identity politics ﬁx identities and subject individuals to a white male standard because this is the standard against which their minority status is deﬁned.27 To break this hegemony, Brown suggests a reconceptualization of identity: If every ‘I am’ is something of a resolution of the movement of desire into ﬁxed and sovereign identity, then this project might involve not only learning to speak but to read ‘I am’ this way: as potentially in motion, as temporal, as not-I, as deconstructable according to a genealogy of want rather than as ﬁxed interests or experiences.28 Kureishi’s polytemporal character Adam/Leo eludes a taxonomy of

Technologies in Hanif Kureishi’s ‘The Body’

175

race, class and gender, since he bridges diﬀerent classes, professions, generations and sexualities. His intermediate position allows him paradoxically to participate at a distance. One means for distancing, however, is just the reference to art. The discourse on art, especially from the Renaissance, is ever-present in the story. As the medical doctor compares the preparation of dead bodies for the transplantation to the ‘cleaning of a great painting’ (p. 23), the body itself as fragile and vulnerable, or as an abject corpse, is denied.29 When Adam, whose telling name connotes generic man as well as the creation of man in Genesis, calls himself ‘Leo Raphael Adams’, Adam refers to Raphael and possibly to Leon Battista Alberti and thus inscribes his self-fashioning in the discourse of art. Yet, the apotropaic gesture involved therein becomes obvious, when the accumulation of ‘Newbodies’ on Matte’s yacht provokes abundant comparisons with art: ‘I thought of them, the beauties around a table together, like moving statues, an art work’ (p. 89). Perceiving art, the observer can stick to Kant’s ‘pleasure without any interest’ and can squarely put the transgression in the context of the Pygmalion myth. Yet, on considering instead that ‘Matte and I were both mutants, freaks, human unhumans’, Adam needs to get back to ‘real people, those with death in them’ (p. 102). Kureishi’s monstrous prodigy eventually ﬁnds himself subjected by a trope which reveals how the trope erases the subject: ‘It was as though I were wearing the Mona Lisa’ (p. 126). Mediated through the discourse of art, Adam’s initial invisibility ﬁnally turns into a heightened visibility. Yoked to a body under surveillance, the individual choice born of desire turns into an enforced identity – the fate of the ethnic author?30 Kureishi’s reference to the Renaissance in ‘The Body’ recalls the epistemological caesura between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. In the Renaissance arose the concept of the individual, the world began to be mapped and the human body was examined in unprecedented ways.31 In the novel, the invention of brain transplantation likewise is about to trigger such a shift in paradigms: a society of two sets of people develops, where ﬁnancial means allow one part to supersede mortality while others are nothing but ‘body facility’.32 In combining ‘high art’ from a period of invention with new technology, this rhetoric glosses over the actual caesura entailed.33 Only toward the end of the novel does Adam/Leo see through this pretence.34 Kureishi’s construct of a biotechnological hybrid allows for an investigation of the stakes of hybridity as well as for a critique of the seemingly universal stance of science. Situated knowledge as a way to articulate scientiﬁc knowledge and identity is the foil against which the shortcomings of universality as well as ﬁxed particularity need to be read:

176

Peripheral interpretations of technology To see scientiﬁc knowledge as located and heterogeneous practice, which might (or might not) be ‘global’ and ‘universal’ in speciﬁc ways rooted in ongoing articulatory activities that are always potentially open to critical scrutiny from disparate perspectives, is to adopt the worldly stance of situated knowledges . . . From the standpoint of situated knowledge, strong objectivity – reliable, partially shareable, tropelaced, worldly, accountable, non-innocent knowledge – can be a fragile human achievement. But from the stance of the god trick of scientiﬁc creationism, only fetishism – the culture of no culture, the language of no language, the trope of no trope, the one self-referential word – is possible.35

Dreaming and scheming Beginning and ending in ‘The Body’ remain irreconcilable. Neither an aﬃrmation of the narrated world as stable, albeit belonging to science ﬁction, nor an aﬃrmation of the phantasmatic quality of the story attribute a position of certainty to the repeatedly called-upon reader. Instead, the reader is pointed to the story as construct, not as confession. This diﬀerentiation is also decisive in Kureishi’s Dreaming and Scheming: Reﬂections on Writing and Politics. On the cover of the book, contrary to the usual layout, the title is printed on the left and the author’s name on the right. Horizontal rectangles, like balloons in comics, connect Kureishi’s dominant portrait on the cover to the title. Thus not only is Kureishi named as the author of these essays, but he is also a product of the process of dreaming and scheming originating from the photographed author’s brain. This new title: ‘Dreaming and Scheming Hanif Kureishi’ thus constructs ‘Hanif Kureishi’ as an object tied to ‘Reﬂections on Writing and Politics’. It creates a relation between dreaming, connoting the unconscious, and the conscious activities of scheming and reﬂection. These activities connect with writing – a process oscillating between desires, fantasies, and an attentive revising of texts – and with politics.36 Because of the layout of the cover, it is these heterogeneous activities which bring about ‘Hanif Kureishi’.37 In Dreaming and Scheming, two essays on writing, ‘Something Given’ and ‘Dreaming and Scheming’, frame the other essays on ‘Politics and Culture’ and ‘Films’.38 In his essays on ﬁlm, Kureishi discusses the writing, making, and viewing of ﬁlms based on his novels or screenplays, whereas in ‘Politics and Culture’ he talks about his youth in England, his visit to Pakistan, and English society in the 1980s with its vested interest in racism. Kureishi shows himself to be an astute critic of British racism, and his childhood references include personal experiences of racial harassment.

Technologies in Hanif Kureishi’s ‘The Body’

177

In his motto to ‘Something Given: Reﬂections on Writing’, Kureishi quotes Wordsworth’s poem ‘Resolution and Independence’. He cites the turning point of the poem, when the poet’s dreary thoughts are interrupted by the sight of an old man, a leech gatherer, a sight which appears ‘[n]ow, whether it were by peculiar grace, / A leading from above, a something given’.39 He then begins his essay by talking about his father, who, by way of the reference to the poem, becomes ‘a man from some far region sent, / To give me human strength, by apt admonishment’. Yet, ‘admonishment’ is necessary because of ‘these untoward thoughts’ of the/a poet, whose depression and anxiety Kureishi addresses in the essay.40 Considering anxiety he writes: ‘When the words are ﬂowing the self disappears and your anxieties, doubts and reservations are suspended’ (p. 17). Instead of portraying the self, writing manages to elate, suspend and do away with the self, a process which hinges on the impact of fantasy and desire on writing. Thus, while the essay draws on his biography, it calls into question the importance of biographical information with regard to ﬁction: Still it is odd, the public’s desire to see ﬁction as disguised, or treated, or embellished, autobiography. It is as if one requires a clear line between what has happened and what has been imagined later in the construction of a story . . . But the imagination and one’s wishes are real, too. They are part of daily life, and the distinction between the softness of dreams and hard reality can never be made clear. (p. 9) Repeatedly, Kureishi deploys the means of ‘fantasy’ in his recent ﬁction.41 ‘The Body’, an exact realization of the impossible distinction between dreams and reality, is situated on this permeable border. Thus it can be read as a refutation of autobiographical interpretations of his writing – interpretations which are tied to his masculinity42 as well as to his ethnicity and which dominated the reception of Intimacy.43 Like Leo, who is as visible as if he were wearing the Mona Lisa, Kureishi’s skin colour gives him away as an ‘ethnic’ author – and therefore, in a ‘traditional’ deﬁnition of Britishness, not British. While his essays on politics and culture from the 1980s gesture toward a new deﬁnition of Britishness,44 ‘The Body’ displays a resistance to these questions, which coheres with the following statement: [I]f Britain seems pleasantly hedonistic and politically torpid, it might be because politics has moved inside, into the body. The politics of personal relationships, of private need, of gender, marriage, sexuality, the place of children, have replaced that of society, which seems uncontrollable. (p. 228)

178

Peripheral interpretations of technology

Yet, as some of the stories in The Body show, the realm of the private is free of neither political nor racial issues.45 Kureishi’s transgression of the shady line between ‘the softness of dreams and hard reality’ takes place in the movement of writing: ‘Sometimes you get up from your desk under the impression that your inner world has more meaning than the Real one’ (p. 17). This process is further addressed in the recent essay ‘Dreaming and Scheming’. There, next to the scene of a creative-writing workshop, which Kureishi sets at the beginning of the essay, we ﬁnd his musings on identity, fantasy and writing. Many of Kureishi’s characters are writers. This might be because he writes about a profession he knows well. Yet it also stresses an obsession with writing as a process constitutive of identity: ‘If I take the notebooks with me, I can be a writer all the time; the further from writing I get, the ﬂatter and more without purpose I feel, as if I don’t know who I am’ (p. 260, emphasis added). Writing is the site, where identity can constantly be assembled as well as invented. Fantasy, the scene of desire, allows for acting out provisional identiﬁcations, while identity conceived as identiﬁcation remains phantasmatic and ﬂuid. Writing thus works as a technology of the self, which brings about an identity instead of expressing it.46 For Kureishi, therefore, Brown’s concept of an identity in motion is intricately tied to writing. Creative writing is described as a physical act, depending on the hand of the writer moving over the page: ‘The movement of the writing on the page reminds me of someone drawing a model, looking up, moving between inner and outer worlds . . . Your materials matter; the whole thing matters’ (p. 260). Since materials matter, the change from fountain pen to computer keyboard and email transmittance impinges on the constitution of the subject. The technology of the self depends on the communication technologies available. Adam’s use of email communication thus guarantees a bifurcated identity.47 Although Adam/Leo can thereby straddle his old and new self, there is no social space to accommodate this hybrid identity, which cannot be communicated as such. Consequently, its literary articulation pays tribute to this aporia inscribing it by way of the fantastic novel. The shortcomings of a social space which fails to take hybridity into account are a recurrent issue in postcolonial theory. Although interacting ‘global cultural ﬂows’ shape the individual’s ‘imagined worlds’,48 a viable consideration of minorities which exceeds a classiﬁcation from a white male point of view is still missing.49 Meanwhile, anxiety, as a borderline sensation, articulates the strangeness of diﬀerence.50 In ‘The Body’, Adam/Leo’s extraordinary situation sheds light on a way of life marked by strangeness, as the novel’s ﬁnal sentence emphasizes.

Technologies in Hanif Kureishi’s ‘The Body’

179

Condensing the image of the ethnic and biotechnological hybrid and the myth of the Flying Dutchman, the last sentence combines a critique of technological progress with a critique of social exclusion. Adam/Leo’s prototypically embodied time-lagged life can thus be read as an allegory of postcolonial subjectivity. On this foil, Kureishi’s choice of family topics in The Body, and his overall ﬁction, sets out to counter this anxious strangeness. Even if family ties prove fragile, they provide the possibility of a temporary consolation.51 The reference to Wordsworth in ‘Something Given’ thus sets up Kureishi’s father, a person both desperately and devotedly a writer, as a ﬁgure of admonishment and encouragement – both needed to ward oﬀ strangeness by way of writing. Deploying topical biotechnology, albeit in a hyberbolic sci-ﬁ setting, ‘The Body’ thus opens up a space for a critique of the omissions of biotechnological discourse, as the link I drew to Donna Haraway has shown. Concurrently, it foregrounds the stakes of hybridity and pinpoints writing as a technology for an elusive subjectivity. Inscribing technology, globalization, and commodiﬁcation on the body of his protagonist, Kureishi addresses a humanity at stake. The capacity for reinvention and imagination is called upon to cope with this situation.

Notes 1 H. Kureishi, The Body and Seven Stories (2002), London: Faber and Faber, 2003, p. 35. Until further notice subsequent references to Kureishi are to this text. 2 See ‘The Body’, p. 47. 3 Discussing the fetus as the last sacrum in biopolitics, Donna Haraway emphasizes the blatant discrepancy between high-tech prenatal surveillance in the First World and high infant mortality rates in the Third World. D. Haraway, ‘The Invisible Fetus’, in D. Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium: FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouse™: Feminism and Technoscience, New York: Routledge, 1997, pp. 202–12. 4 See ‘The Body’, p. 42. 5 That this choice is born of desire is enforced by the reverse identiﬁcation originating from the body: ‘I had seen “my guy”. Or rather, he had seemed to choose me’ (ibid., p. 25). 6 S. Freud, ‘The Ego and the Id’, trans. J. Riviere, in The Major Works of Sigmund Freud, Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1952, p. 703. 7 H. Bhabha, ‘Editor’s Introduction: Minority Maneuvers and Unsettled Negotiations’, in H. Bhabha (ed.) Front Lines / Border Posts, special issue of Critical Inquiry 23/3, 1997, 431–59, p. 438. On the attribution of hybridity to Kureishi’s characters in criticism see B. Moore-Gilbert, Hanif Kureishi, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001, pp. 198ﬀ. He also discusses the various concepts of hybridity relevant with regard to Kureishi. See op. cit. pp. 194–8. 8 M. Foucault, ‘The Body of the Condemned’, in P. Rabinow (ed.) The Foucault

180

9 10 11 12

13 14 15 16 17

18 19 20 21 22 23

24

25

Peripheral interpretations of technology

Reader, New York: Pantheon, 1984, p. 177. See J. Butler, ‘Subjection, Resistance, Resigniﬁcation’, in The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997 for a discussion of the process of subjectiﬁcation. On the Flying Dutchman, see M. Frank, Die unendliche Fahrt: Die Geschichte des Fliegenden Holländers und verwandter Motive, Leipzig: Reclam, 1995. This consideration seems to refer back to the above-mentioned, Lacan (‘The Body’, p. 4). Kureishi’s psychoanalytic knowledge supports the suspicion that the body change is indeed a fantasy. These wishes concern youth, health, beauty and promiscuity. Albeit happily married, Adam suﬀers from monogamy (ibid., p. 48). See ibid., pp. 20, 121. To consider Ralph as Adam’s double further supports a reading of the plot as fantasy, since fantasy casts the desire of the subject in all its forms. Thus Ralph is cast as the successful ‘Newbody’, while Leo has to suﬀer the punishment for transgression. On fantasy see J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, ‘Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality’, International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 49/1, 1968, 1–18. On organ donation and race see Haraway, Modest_Witness, p. 253. Ibid., p. 233. See R. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race, 4th edn, London: Routledge, 2002, especially the chapter ‘Egypt in America’. References to Nietzsche occur repeatedly when the scene is set for ‘Newbodies’. While this appropriation coheres with a popular understanding of Nietzsche, the narrator is careful to distance himself (‘The Body’, pp. 40 and 87). That brain research is a vital ﬁeld of study is pointed out by Haraway, Modest_ Witness, p. 293, n. 4. It can also be seen in a recent spread of neuroscientiﬁc publications in general science publications. (In Germany, for example, the series of publications by Gerhard Roth in the non-medical Suhrkamp Verlag.) Ibid., p. 246. Ibid., pp. 134–5. See also Gilroy for a consideration of the impact of recent biotechnological changes on race. P. Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000, p. 20. As Haraway shows, The Human Genome Project and the Human Genome Diversity Project face problems concerning the way to acquire and deploy genetic information from indigenous peoples. Haraway, Modest_Witness, pp. 244ﬀ. Gilroy, Against Race, p. 47. Ibid., pp. 47–8. Adam recalls a Prince concert he has seen with his son and Deedee Osgood (‘The Body’, pp. 57–8), the college teacher from The Black Album, who has an aﬀair with Shahid. When he visits Ralph at the basement theater, he comes across Florence, an actress familiar to the reader from ‘Strangers When We Meet’. Finally, the fact that he casts himself as a creative-writing teacher takes up the essay ‘Dreaming and Scheming’. Stein paronomastically distinguishes between posed ethnicity and post-ethnicity in Kureishi and concludes: ‘The development traced here reﬂects the emergence of a body of writing which self-consciously escapes the conﬁnes of ethnicity.’ M. Stein, ‘Posed Ethnicity and the Postethnic: Hanif Kureishi’s Novels’, in H. Antor and K. Stierstorfer (eds) English Literatures in International Contexts, Heidelberg: Winter, 2000, p. 139. H. Bhabha, ‘Democracy De-realized’, in O. Enwezor et al. (eds) Democracy Unrealized: Documenta 11_Platform 1, Ostﬁldern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2002, p. 361.

Technologies in Hanif Kureishi’s ‘The Body’

181

26 Ibid., p. 360. 27 See W. Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995, p. 65. 28 Ibid., p. 75. 29 See also the beginning of this chapter. 30 See ‘Kureishi’s audiences’ for Kureishi’s refusal to be categorized as an ethnic spokesperson. Moore-Gilbert, Kureishi, pp. 17ﬀ. 31 On the Renaissance, see for example a classic in cultural studies, J. Burckhardt’s Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien (1860), ed. H. Günther, Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1997. 32 See the grisly picture Matte paints of the interconnection of technology, money and murder (‘The Body’, pp. 99, 100). Gilroy sees a paradigmatic shift in racial being toward a new commodiﬁcation of blackness at work due to recent developments in communication and biotechnology. Interestingly enough, he mentions ‘the loss of mortality as a horizon against which life is to be lived’ among the incentives of such a shift. Gilroy, Against Race, p. 36. 33 Commenting on an advertisement for electrophoresis power supplies showing two works of art, one of them the Mona Lisa, together with a third ‘work of art’, a framed DNA sequence autoradiograph placed in the middle, Haraway writes: ‘Like the art portraiture, the scientiﬁc portrait of man as gel and database signiﬁes genius, originality, identity, the self, distinction, unity, and biography.’ Haraway, Modest_Witness, p. 156. 34 Mark’s use as ‘body’ is followed by Leo’s commodiﬁcation as ‘beautiful lover boy’ in the course of the novel and culminates in the eventual proposal for trading only his body. This could be considered a comment on the recent commodiﬁcation of blackness in the media. On this issue see Gilroy, Against Race, pp. 21–4, pp. 36–7 and passim. 35 Haraway, Modest_Witness, pp. 137–8. See the entire subsection ‘Metaphors of Possession’ on situated knowledge (ibid., pp. 137–41). 36 On revising, see ‘Some time with Stephen: A Diary’, in H. Kureishi, Dreaming and Scheming: Reﬂections on Writing and Politics, London: Faber and Faber, 2002. Subsequent references to Kureishi are to this text. 37 Although ‘writing and politics’ constructs them both as two separate activities, Kureishi’s ﬁction refuses to set them up as binary opposites. See for example Kureishi’s The Black Album, where writing is reﬂected as private but political in Shahid’s translation and alteration of Riad’s poems and in its reference to Rushdie’s Satanic Verses. 38 The editorial page only says where some of the articles were ﬁrst published. Only ‘Dreaming and Scheming’ seems to have been written for this volume explicitly. 39 W. Wordsworth, Selected Poems and Prefaces, ed. J. Stillinger, Boston, Mass.: Houghton Miﬄin Company, 1965, p. 167. 40 Ibid., pp. 169 and 167. For depression see ‘Something Given’, p. 15. 41 See for example ‘Face to Face with You’, in Kureishi, The Body. 42 ‘There is no British writer more adept at articulating the impulses and latent regrets that frame a man’s life’, writes GQ, a quote the publisher printed (in small print) on the cover of The Body. 43 For a discussion of Intimacy and its reception in the context of the genre of male testimonials, see Moore-Gilbert, Kureishi, pp. 171ﬀ. 44 Both ‘The Rainbow Sign’ and ‘Bradford’ are clearly appellative in function,

182

45 46

47 48 49

50 51

Peripheral interpretations of technology

trying to work toward a New Britain which includes all people in Britain. On the concept of a New Britain see for example Y. Alibhai-Brown, Who do we think we are? Imagining the New Britain, London: Penguin Books, 2001. As to Kureishi, see also the introduction in R. Ranasinha, Hanif Kureishi, Horndon: Northcote House Publishers, 2002. See ‘Hullabaloo in the Tree’, in Kureishi, The Body. Looking at Kureishi’s œuvre so far, it is always the private realm where politics are played out. Kureishi’s reference to notebooks echoes Foucault’s comment on the function of notebooks for a technology of the self. These notebooks, whose function it is to ‘collect the already-said, to reassemble that which one could hear or read’ (M. Foucault, ‘On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress’, in P. Rabinow (ed.) The Foucault Reader, New York: Pantheon, 1984, p. 365), show their propensity to fantasies, which ‘arise from an unconscious combination of things experienced and heard’ (Freud, quoted after Laplanche and Pontalis, ‘Fantasy’, p. 10, n. 22) – a link Foucault does not explore. Via email, Adam continues to correspond with his wife and others (‘The Body’, p. 112). On the Internet as a site for the articulation of ‘identity within transitionality’, see Ghosh-Schellhorn’s chapter in this volume. A. Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996, p. 33. Brown, States of Injury; J. Butler, ‘Sovereign Performatives in the Contemporary Scene of Utterance’, Critical Inquiry 23/2, 1997, 350–77; and, to quote but the most recent, H. Bhabha, ‘Statement for the Critical Inquiry Board Symposium’, Critical Inquiry 30/2, 2004, 342–9 – all work toward such a reconsideration of the politics of diﬀerence. See also the desire for a ‘truly cosmopolitan world’ mentioned in the introduction to this volume (p. 3). On anxiety, see Bhabha, ‘Minority Maneuvers’ and ‘On the Irremovable Strangeness of Being Diﬀerent’, PMLA 113/1, 1998, 34–9. A plethora of families people Kureishi’s ﬁction, where the family becomes a site of irredeemable violation as well as consolatory refuge, always, however, remaining a site of conﬂict.

Bibliography Alibhai-Brown, Y., Who do we think we are? Imagining the New Britain, London: Penguin Books, 2001. Appadurai, A., Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Bhabha, H., ‘Editor’s Introduction: Minority Maneuvers and Unsettled Negotiations’, in H. Bhabha (ed.) Front Lines / Border Posts, special issue of Critical Inquiry 23/3, 1997, 431–59. —— ‘On the Irremovable Strangeness of Being Diﬀerent’, PMLA 113/1, 1998, 34–9. —— ‘Democracy De-realized’, in O. Enwezor et al. (eds) Democracy Unrealized: Documenta 11_Platform 1, Ostﬁldern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2002, pp. 347–64. —— ‘Statement for the Critical Inquiry Board Symposium’, Critical Inquiry 30/2, 2004, 342–9. Brown, W., States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995.

Technologies in Hanif Kureishi’s ‘The Body’

183

Burckhardt, J., Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien (1860), ed. H. Günther, Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1997. Butler; J., The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. —— ‘Sovereign Performatives in the Contemporary Scene of Utterance’, Critical Inquiry 23/2, 1997, 350–77. Foucault, M., ‘The Body of the Condemned’, in P. Rabinow (ed.) The Foucault Reader, New York: Pantheon, 1984, pp. 170–8. —— ‘On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress’, in P. Rabinow (ed.) The Foucault Reader, New York: Pantheon, 1984, pp. 340–72. Frank, M., Die unendliche Fahrt: Die Geschichte des Fliegenden Holländers und verwandter Motive, Leipzig: Reclam, 1995. Freud, S., ‘The Ego and the Id’, trans. J. Riviere, in The Major Works of Sigmund Freud, Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1952, pp. 697–717. Gilroy, P., Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line, Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 2000. Haraway, Donna, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium. FemaleMan©_Meets_Onco Mouse™: Feminism and Technoscience, New York: Routledge, 1997. Kureishi, H., The Black Album (1995), London: Faber and Faber, 2000. —— ‘Strangers When We Meet’, in Midnight all Day (1999), London: Faber and Faber, 2000, pp. 3–53. —— Dreaming and Scheming: Reﬂections on Writing and Politics, London: Faber and Faber, 2002. —— The Body and Seven Stories (2002), London: Faber and Faber, 2003. Laplanche, J. and J.-B. Pontalis, ‘Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality’, International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 49/1, 1968, 1–18. Moore-Gilbert, B., Hanif Kureishi, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001. Ranasinha, R., Hanif Kureishi, Horndon: Northcote House Publishers, 2002. Stein, M., ‘Posed Ethnicity and the Postethnic: Hanif Kureishi’s Novels’, in H. Antor and K. Stierstorfer (eds) English Literatures in International Contexts, Heidelberg: Winter, 2000, pp. 119–39. Wordsworth, W., Selected Poems and Prefaces, ed. J. Stillinger, Boston, MA.: Houghton Miﬄin Company, 1965. Young, R., Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race, 4th edn, London: Routledge, 2002.

11 Travels in technotopia Modernization and technology in postcolonial utopian and dystopian writing Ralph Pordzik Modern technology and the scramble for national self-deﬁnition In 1883, the pseudonymous ‘Ralph Centennius’ published a euphoric Canadian eutopia entitled The Dominion in 1983. Writing from the point of view of the ‘present advanced and happy times’,1 the narrative propounds to take a retrospective glance at the major political events and struggles of the past hundred years. The account is largely based on perceived diﬀerences between ‘corrupt’ America and ‘sturdy’ Canada, the latter saved from American consumer culture by the rigor of the youthful ‘Dominion’ which survived the (ﬁctitious) ‘great crisis’ of 1888 to re-emerge as a puriﬁed state. Europe has been devastated by ‘ﬁre and sword’, while English has become the chief language spoken from ‘Beirut to Bombay’; seat of the new ‘Imperial Government’ is London. What strikes the reader is that Canada seems to have beneﬁted most from the worldwide crisis. ‘Heading for the waters of prosperity’, it has now become the most famous nation in the world, ‘her name connected with great inventions and discoveries’, such as rocket cars and domestic lighting in form of ‘miniature suns’ kept at ‘white heat by a powerful oxy-hydrogen ﬂame inside’; social and hygienic conditions are splendid. ‘So rational and interesting’ has daily life become that ‘mind and body are constantly in healthy occupation.’ Feelings of national inferiority belong to the past: too long the apparent power and prestige of the United States caused many of our weak-kneed ancestors to lose heart in their own country . . . Stout hearts, however, ultimately gained the day, and we in the twentieth century are reaping the beneﬁts won for the country by the valor of our great-grandfathers.

Travels in technotopia

185

Not so the United States: ‘The Americans for years had been too careless about receiving upon their shores all the ﬁrebrands and irreconcilables from European cities, and the consequence was that these undesirable gentry increased in numbers, and the infection of their opinions spread.’ Centennius’s ﬁctive account is frankly exclusivist if not racist, targeted in particular against immigrants and their ‘brutish disposition and ferocity in the midst of all the civilizing inﬂuences of modern times’. Yet it may also be regarded as a postcolonial document in the sense that it oﬀers a prospect of the future that is not a ‘repetition of European civilization with all its defects, failures and vices’. Its narrator argues that since Europe and America have been corrupted by the pursuit of wealth, only the Dominions are left to provide the possibility of an improved society based on a new set of moral and religious values. It is curious to note that this euphoric utopia sets the tone for a large number of writings composed in a similar vein of postcolonial, nationalist enthusiasm. Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Australia, Canada and New Zealand abound with a vast and generally undervalued body of ﬁction exploring the respective countries’ improved futures from diﬀerent angles of vision.2 It is only since the 1950s or so that narrative response to issues of futurity has changed dramatically, ranging from mild sarcasm and anti-utopian disillusionment to downright rejection of the whole issue of political idealism as an altogether European concern.3 Only a small amount of utopian ﬁction written today lends itself to such markedly positive representations of future modes of life supported by a high standard of technological development as Centennius does in his eutopia.4 Recent surveys show that there is above all an inﬂuential tradition of dystopian writing informed by a general scepticism as to the real future prospects of postcolonial cultures in a rapidly changing ‘global’ modernity.5 In this chapter I shall address the important issues of technology and globalization in these writings; that is, in utopian and dystopian ﬁction written in English.6 Reading comparatively, I shall examine a selection of utopian and dystopian novels from countries as distinct as Canada, New Zealand and Australia in order to inquire into the speciﬁc ways diﬀerent writers visualize the future position of technology in relation to the modernization of their own, assumedly ‘postcolonial’ societies. My question will be: is technology merely imagined as a destructive or even tragic force, or can it also inspire new and proﬁtable models of development and radical alternatives of cultural exchange? Does (post)modern technology and everything associated with it – modernization, communicative networks, uneven economic growth, business, etc. – give new and valuable creative space to the local and regional speciﬁcs of the (sub)cultures and societies on which it is imposed?

186

Peripheral interpretations of technology

I shall proceed on the assumption that postcolonial utopian ﬁction addressing technological issues has been shaped by two diﬀerent stages of development, both of which demonstrate the complexity of the modernizing processes involved. In the ﬁrst phase, technology metaphorically embodies the twin destructive forces of western imperialism and rationality. At this stage, writers employ images of modern technology as metaphors for strategies of control and containment applied by colonizing powers. In the second phase, technology is aﬀorded diﬀerent, more outspokenly positive traits. This second stage is reﬂected in novels such as Peter Carey’s Tristan Smith or Amitav Ghosh’s Calcutta Chromosome, both of which seek to transform and punctuate western linear concepts of technology and modernization by adapting them to the local and translocal needs of postcolonial societies. According to these writers, technology as an accomplished, collective fact cannot be transcended, but in order to make it more meaningful it has to be assigned new and productive functions in the transculturalization process. These writers focus on agency instead of consumption, they evoke modern western technology as a powerful instrument provoking fear and resistance but also as a viable and meaningful expression of postcolonial desire moved into regional ensembles of irony, creativity and critical revision. I shall call these utopian narratives ‘postcolonial’, because they reconceptualize technology as a staging ground or contact zone for intercultural action, not for fetishist escape from the pressures of the present as in classical science ﬁction.

‘Orwellian nemesis’7 and the postcolonial text The ﬁrst stage is well documented by a series of texts published since at least the late 1960s. Most of them address the issue of technology in terms of its instrumental function in the context of (neo)colonial repression. In a number of writings from Australia, for instance, technology is evoked as a power embodying the destructive regiment of modern scientiﬁc rationality. In his narrative Walg: A Novel of Australia (1983), Banumbir Wongar – a pseudonym adopted by Serb writer Sreten Bozic who immigrated to Australia in 1960 and has lived with Aboriginal tribes in the Northern Territory – depicts a rural homeland devastated by extensive uranium mining and nuclear bomb tests conducted under British supervision. Cancer and radiation poisoning resulting from these experiments have killed a large proportion of the native population in this future Australia, where a young, pregnant woman sets out to ﬁnd her tribal country in order to ‘grow’ a new aboriginal nation. The power of the novel not only derives from Wongar’s erratic style, which frequently disrupts the logical sequence of narrative events, but also from his celebration of indigenous beliefs and forms of life,

Travels in technotopia

187

and from his appeal to the reader’s capacity for intercultural empathy. Putting themselves in the position of the heroine and following her on her journey from an intolerable state of enslavement – the British engagement in the reservation also involves a genetic ‘breeding program’ for Aboriginals – to self-empowerment and freedom, readers arrive at a better understanding of Aboriginal culture that not only confronts paternalistic attitudes toward native ways of life but also challenges western views of technological superiority and exploitation. A similar claim is made in Canadian writer Wayland Drew’s novel The Wabeno Feast (1973), published ten years earlier and certainly a book that deserves more recognition than it has as yet received. Beginning with a sequence of paragraphs depicting the life of a group of boys who grow up in a pulp-mill town in Northern Ontario, the novel quickly moves into a narrative mode that registers the nightmare of pollution, dread and disorder modern civilization has become. Paul and Liv, the novel’s protagonists, ﬂee into the countryside in hope of escaping the upsurge of violence and expulsion following the disintegration of society. Their journey into the interior along ‘deserted buildings’ and ‘places where settlements had been burned, and the ruins still smouldered’8 is only one of several lines of narration deployed to relate the horrors of the present to a vision of the future redeemed by the powers of the land and the relationship with the culture of its former inhabitants. The most important of these narrative lines consists of the fragmentary journals of eighteenth-century Hudson Bay trader Drummond MacKay, excerpts of which are read out to Liv by Paul on their trip into the Canadian wilderness. The couple’s quest for a new life in communion with nature is diametrically opposed to the plans of the trader who has entered the country to exploit and to conquer the natives. His only interest lies in the improvement of the Company’s fur trade with the Indians, savages ‘thick with vermin and loathsome scabs’ (p. 54) and roaming a country so ‘sotted with their ﬁlth that they cannot live upon it’ (p. 57). The description of MacKay’s expedition with a group of voyagers into the interior and his encounter with the strangely whiteskinned wabeno, the most powerful of the Indian shamans, constitute the symbolic centre of the novel. Exploring the origins of western colonization through a ﬁrst-hand account, Drew recapitulates the white intruders’ seizure of the land and registers the abiding impact of the colonial past by cross-referring to the violence and misfortunes of the present. The demise of Canadian society is thus envisaged as an inevitable consequence of the policy begun by the Bay Company in the eighteenth century. However, the novel also seeks symbolically to banish the horrors of the technological past: ﬁrst, by erasing MacKay’s journal from the map of modern history – each day Paul feeds into the ﬂames of their ﬁre portions of the manuscript,

188

Peripheral interpretations of technology

‘pages he has just read’ (p. 24) – and, second, by celebrating the strange wabeno cult the voyagers happen to observe while raising a camp on a small island in Lake Superior. In Ojibwa shaman mythology the wabeno presents the ‘enemy within’, the destructive and evil side of man the shaman seeks to exorcize through a ceremonial burning of his ﬂesh. MacKay’s descriptions of native life ﬁnd their culmination in his vivid account of the frenzied ﬁre dance of the wabeno: this lone dancing continued amidst the very ﬂames until I swore the man must be consumed. Yet he emerged, his loin cloth in smoking ribbons and his face ﬂickering with mingled pain and pleasure which was horrible to look upon. (pp. 86–7) The central imagery of ﬁre persists throughout the whole book, neatly capturing the text’s preoccupation with notions of cleansing and puriﬁcation. Moreover, it binds the diﬀerent lines of narration in an eﬀort to solve the problem the novel engages: the metaphorical and literal purging of the ‘enemy within’ not only parallels the exorcism of false doctrines Drew seeks to initiate but also involves the mapping out of a future disabusing itself of the wrongs of technology and boundless economic growth. Paul’s ritual burning of the past – a past symbolized in MacKay’s journal and its account of the development of the fur trade in the English settlement – correlates with the wabeno’s desire to ﬁght down the sinister forces at work within his body, to cleanse the remotest regions of his soul from what he loathes most. In the novel’s overall symbolical structure it is the white man’s unwanted presence in the North American wilderness the wabeno seeks to banish through the torture of his ﬂesh, the conqueror’s talent for destroying the natural world that sustains him. The decline of the western world and the ensuing renaissance of native tribal customs as anticipated in the book reinforce the underlying hypothesis that, if modern culture should fail to learn the lesson of the wabeno – i.e. to embrace self-puriﬁcation and the renewal of society – it will be doomed to perish; accordingly, the power the shaman wins over the ‘enemy within’ lends weight to the moral superiority of native culture and also reveals the importance the Indians’ way of treating their land respectfully will have for the generations coming after the survivors of the apocalypse.

The desire for modernization: travels in postcolonial technotopia It is crucial to note that from the 1980s onwards this binary view of technology as a malign force of modernity opposed to beneﬁcial nature or

Travels in technotopia

189

native cultural identity has been questioned in a series of writings addressing the postcolonial dimension of the globalizing process. First signs of a perceptual change can be observed in New Zealand writer Janet Frame’s highly acclaimed novel Intensive Care (1970)9 which emerges as an important revisionary eﬀort to transform the tradition of western dystopian thought. Basically, the novel is a family saga spanning three generations of the Livingstone family, stretching beyond their demise into a future under the ‘Iron Heel’ of a technological regime determined to exterminate all those unﬁt for survival. Darkly ironical in attitude, Frame’s depiction of the lives of the Livingstones in the ‘great little country with its compassionate social reform’ (p. 49)10 engages the relation between individual violence and the impersonal evils of a totalitarian system. In this future, large proportions of the globe, including the northern parts of New Zealand, have been devastated. Economic resources have become sparse to such an extent that if the survivors want to secure a ‘decent’ standard of living some ‘economising’ is considered necessary. A global power from North America has decided that New Zealand would be a good place to try the ﬁrst experiment in ‘Human Delineation’ (p. 214). The procedure is simple: a computer, fed with data about the inhabitants, is programmed to divide the population into ‘human’ and ‘animal’. Those classiﬁed as ‘animal’ are then subject to slaughtering, scientiﬁc experiments and economic exploitation. They may be eaten by those labeled ‘human’, melted down for ‘human soup’ or made into ‘blood and bone’ fertilizer. This shocking portrayal of a future reminiscent of both Swift’s A Modest Proposal (1729) and the terrors of Nazi Germany directs the reader’s attention to the greater horrors of mass extermination in the twentieth century and to the technological expertise needed to put this ‘project’ into practice. However, there is an ironic twist implied in Frame’s invention of Sandy Monk – a technological superman who is to play an important role in the liberation of this nightmarish future New Zealand. Grossly burned in the nuclear war that devastated New Zealand and having recovered alive from his trauma, this man has turned into a technological showpiece, ‘a hero, the Reconstructed Man with the mechanical memory, the golden skin, the implanted glossily dead eyes, the Brand-X penis’ (p. 247). In the shape of this superman with a ‘streamlined faultless mechanism’ (p. 248) the wish for human perfection seems to have come true: weakness and imperfection are abolished in favor of bodily strength, endurance, and power. A curious thing happens when this mechanical superman revolts against the ‘high-spirited’ plans of his creators and allies himself with Milly Galbraith, a mentally disabled girl among the ﬁrst to be chosen for annihilation. He encourages her to write down her private experiences (into a diary that is to become a document of historical signiﬁcance in the end) and

190 Peripheral interpretations of technology romanticizes her as being a ‘watching, waiting person . . . in the country of the simple-minded whose shores are washed and littered with the ﬂotsam and jetsam of the Seas of Complexity’ (p. 248). Together they form into a unique symbol of resistance against the dominance of a repressive government disenfranchising those who fail to live up to its expectations of a ‘healthy’ and ‘normal’ human being. Sandy’s critique of the lack of human care involved in his reconstruction is matched by Milly’s idiosyncratic spelling of words: the girl has developed her own orthography in which words are rendered in a way that mediates the experiential value Milly associates with them. Her vocabulary is provocative and revealing, allowing the reader to recognize the original word as well as to see the inner lining of the associated meanings: ‘a-doll-essence’ (p. 264), ‘dim-mock-crissy’ (p. 264), ‘wreckawds’ (p. 266), ‘Amerrykin’ (p. 268), ‘Reckinstruckdead’ (p. 269), ‘standead’ (p. 278), ‘usefool’ (p. 283), ‘fewture’ (p. 308) and ‘unscrewpulus’ (p. 309) are only a few instructive examples of Milly’s attempt to create new speech patterns that suit her individual perceptions. Her experiments exhibit a deep concern with the ways in which language represents as well as conceals the ‘truth’ and engage the impossibility of ﬁnding words that express reality in its multiplicity and cognitive inaccessibility. In this manner, Milly’s diary, ﬁnally receiving unexpected praise as a historical document in a time that has ‘forgotten about posterity’ (p. 336), undermines the scientists’ model of a planned society; in all its unevenness and imperfection it oﬀers evidence of the life of those deemed ‘inferior’, those without use in the grand scheme of shaping a monolithic and imperial future. In Intensive Care, then, technology no longer simply represents the ‘bad guy’ in the evolving drama of future developments. In fact, it is viewed in its capacity to serve other, as yet unidentiﬁed needs; it acquires the status of an instrument helping those physically or mentally disadvantaged to forge a new identity for themselves. This innovative conception of the technological is carried even further in Peter Carey’s alternative history11 The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith (1994). This exceedingly funny tale revolves around two imaginary islands named Eﬁca and Voorstand. Parts of the novel are modeled on Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), with everything in these countries – including technology and the institutions representing it – being out of proportion compared to things as western readers know them. Here as much as in Swift’s famous tale of two ideologically entrenched nations, we can observe a conﬂict of value standards and attitudes to the mega-rhetoric of enforced modernization. Eﬁca is an ex-colonial land mass with commercial dependence on Voorstand; the latter is a former colony occupying a vast northern continent spreading from arctic circle to hot desert. Voorstand is the promised land of milk and honey, an alternatively projected America, a vast and virtualized

Travels in technotopia

191

market of business opportunities; everybody wants to emigrate there. It even has its own national mythology which revolves around the stories of Dog, Duck and Mouse, creatures of a strange animal-revering cult with roots in the early settler history of Voorstand. On special holidays, they are animated in vast circuses and then satellite-beamed as giant-size projections to the smaller Eﬁcan ‘Simulation Domes’, equivalents of our modern TV sets. The reference to the Walt Disney industry is too patent to be overlooked. Dog, Duck and Mouse represent the myth of the creation of popular American culture and its neo-colonial practice of ‘disneyfying’ communities outside the United States. In the realm of the novel, the threat of ‘disneyﬁcation’ can only be banned by Tristan Smith. He is the hideously stunted actor-narrator born into a theater commune in a grubby quarter of Eﬁca’s capital. When his mother, involved in a campaign against Voorstand domination, is murdered by political agents, Tristan leaves Eﬁca in search of his father Bill Milleﬂeur. He hides his body in a derelict Mouse cyborg – a kind of futuristic robot with the features of a mouse – and enters Voorstand’s capital in the guise of one of its ultra-modern, computer-generated deities. Like the Struldbruggs in Gulliver’s Travels, Tristan is now exempt from natural death, though only in a metaphorical sense: his career ﬁnds an abrupt and comic ending in the ﬁnal unmasking debacle. Again, it seems, the venerable myth of permanently improving the human lot through technological progress has forcefully been exposed to ridicule. We may easily be led to interpret this novel as an autobiographical account of Carey’s years in the United States, as a loving parent threatened by the horrors of Disneymania as they recur twice a year with each new release of another ﬁlm. But any attempt at reading the text in this simple sense is eroded by its design as a contact zone of mutually inclusive views and discourses. English, Dutch, and North American technologies and cultures are fused with the anthropological tales of Voorstand and Eﬁca; the facts of western business expansion are interpolated with the chronicles of the imagined settler colonies; and the myths of the western nation-state are juxtaposed with the constantly shifting relations between colonizer and colonized as depicted in Tristan Smith. In the context of the novel, Tristan’s entering the cyborg and crossing the Voorstand desert like a deranged Mickey Mouse is clearly an allusion to Homi Bhabha’s concept of the ‘third space’ and the potential for semantic transgression produced in a situation of cultural ‘in-betweenness’.12 But it is more than just that; it is also a reappraisal of the meaning and purposes of technology as a cultural ‘weapon’ directed against the assumed colonizer: throughout his life as an illegal immigrant to Voorstand, Tristan’s identity has been determined and controlled by postmodern technology, computer science and modern

192

Peripheral interpretations of technology

electronic media; yet, paradoxically, it is technology which ensures his ﬁnal release from the yoke of a restricting and disabling power! It is through Tristan’s mask of a Mouse automaton that the reader is oﬀered a view of hybrid postcoloniality rendered more fertile by the inclusion of modes and practices formerly excluded from literary discourse, a view according to which new ‘media and technologies provide resources for self-imagining as an everyday social project’.13 The neo-colonial rhetoric of modernization is still with us in Carey’s Tristan Smith; but it is often punctuated and interrogated by the micro-narratives of locally produced forms of expression such as national television, music, folklore and ﬁlm – expressive forms which account for the gradual emergence of a ‘vernacular globalisation’14 oﬀering fuel for oppositional movements and intercultural subjectivities challenging the uniﬁed western myth of a globalizing market economy available to all.

Utopia and the global technological ﬂow The novels discussed above are peculiar because of the manner in which they confront modes of knowledge construction in western science and technology with established discourses of utopian and dystopian transformation. It is certainly fair to view the process described here in terms of a multilinear transition from a colonial to a contemporary stage of assessing technological change in narrative ﬁction – a transition, that is, involving discrete steps of national and local development that need to be accounted for: despite the inevitable distortions that such a view of genre history produces it is possible to argue that postcolonial utopian ﬁction addressing the issues of technology and global modernization ranges from (1) a phase in which technology is employed as a metaphor in the service of post-imperial nation-building – a phase largely informed by Victorian sentiments about the divine ends of progressive history – through (2) a postcolonial phase in which writers see technology as another instrument of repression in the hands of imperial rulers, to (3) the more recent ‘postwestern’ phase in which writers have self-consciously disrupted those previous patterns, modes and binary demarcations in order to arrive at a more encouraging and innovative understanding of technology in its global contexts. The later novels discussed here present radical perceptual alternatives both to prevailing anti-technological attitudes and to their cultural and political biases. Some of these revisions have been borne out in Indian writer Amitav Ghosh’s novel The Calcutta Chromosome (1996).15 Set in the immediate future, it is peculiar for the manner in which it relates western science to premodern discourses of history, medicine, and theology. The text combines the narrative practice of historiographic metaﬁction with the speculative freedom of utopian projection in order to fabricate a universe of the

Travels in technotopia

193

miraculous and the fantastic that confronts the very nature of reality as western readers understand it. Antagonistic forces clash in this ﬁctional future world characterized by its rational design and its magical properties, a world haunted by ghosts of the distant mythological as well as of the more recent postcolonial past. Protagonist and reader get hopelessly entangled in a self-conscious narrative game that involves both text and history, ‘trapped in an experiment’ (p. 217) conducted by those who have been ‘planting carefully selected clues for the last century or so’ and who, every once in a while, ‘choose to draw them to the attention of a couple of chosen people’ (p. 218). Here, the narrator’s quest for the ultimate truth threatens to metamorphose into a neurotic pursuit generated and sustained by the process of searching itself: ‘to know something is to change it, therefore in knowing something, you’ve already changed what you think you know so you don’t really know it at all: you only know its history’ (pp. 103–4). Heisenberg’s physics – which has dismantled the illusion of scientiﬁc objectivity – and early Mughal gnosticism meet in this mock-allegorical narrative. The reader is oﬀered insights into a genuinely cross-cultural future in which the diﬀerent perceptions and cognitive legacies can be encountered on equal terms, a future in which the cultural richness of India’s huge spiritual universe and the rationalist belief in a technically improved world will cooperate to create a composite vision of the future shaped by a set of shared eﬀorts, needs, and interests. This is of course not to say that the books discussed here merely seek to draw their readers into self-indulgent textual games of decoding and reassembling, of deconstructing or reconstructing established narrative modes and ﬁctive discourses. Rather, they try to explore new possibilities of utopian change in an assumedly ‘post-historical’ world which subscribes to the triumphal liberal practice of consumerism and the accelerating capitalist processes of the technological West. What writers as diﬀerent as Janet Frame, Peter Carey and Amitav Ghosh have in common is that they delineate the process of utopian transformation in their own societies with an eye to the technological revolutions involved in all potential change. They pay full attention to the fact that the dynamic yet also uneven ‘evolution’ of technology markets and modernizing strategies cannot be halted but only punctuated or domesticated according to the views and perceptions of the various cultures involved, and that this dynamic can be mobilized to secure and emphasize the diﬀerences that characterize the world today, ‘diﬀerences at various levels, with various valences, and with greater or lesser degrees of social consequences’.16 Technology will not go unnoticed in this process, for, as I think we all agree, it plays a fundamental and deﬁning role in articulating the actual boundaries and attributes of these diﬀerences.

194

Peripheral interpretations of technology

Notes 1 Quotations are taken from a privately printed, rare copy of the text kept in the British Library in London. No page numbers given. 2 For instructive surveys of speculative ﬁction produced in Canada, New Zealand and Australia during the nineteenth century, see N.B. Albinski, ‘A Survey of Australian Utopian and Dystopian Fiction’, Australian Literary Studies 13, 1987, 15–28; D. Ketterer, Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992; A. Paradis (ed.) Out of This World: Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature, Ottawa, Canada: Quarry Press and National Library of Canada, 1995; L. Sargent, ‘New Zealand Utopian Literature: An Annotated Bibliography’, Occasional Paper 97/1, Wellington, New Zealand: Stout Research Centre, 1996; and A. Weiss, ‘Separations and Unities: Approaches to Québec Separatism in English- and French-Canadian Fantastic Literature’, Science-Fiction Studies 25, 1998, 53–61. 3 A case in point is Canadian satirist Stephen Leacock’s early Afternoons in Utopia: Tales of the New Time, London: John Lane and the Bodley Head, 1932. In the book’s preface, Leacock deplores the (then prevailing) vogue of utopian ﬁction: ‘So many of these Utopias have been written that they have all run to a pattern that grows drowsy in its very sameness. In all of them the narrator falls asleep for two hundred years and awakes (which is a pity) to ﬁnd himself in an altered world. He is confronted with a “venerable being” who is cut to a pattern in a “ﬂowing robe”, with the further credential of a “majestic beard” ’ (p. 11). Large portions of Leacock’s book contain crude observations on the state of the arts, on medical progress, and on education, all informed by the writer’s politically conservative stance. Parodying a long-standing tradition of positive utopianism, Afternoons in Utopia strikes serious blows against the hardened narrative conventions of speculative ﬁction. 4 A considerable portion of progressive utopian and science ﬁction has been published by women writers addressing the feasibility of an all-female exclusivist future or society. See in particular E. Thomas, ‘Inventing Futures: A Notable Trend in Recent New Zealand Women’s Fiction’, in W. McGaw (ed.) Inventing Countries: Essays in Post-Colonial Literature, Wollongong, Australia: University of Wollongong, 1987, pp. 122–35, and L. Sargisson, Contemporary Feminist Utopianism, London and New York: Routledge, 1996. 5 For a comparative account and a detailed analysis of selected writings from Canada, Australia, New Zealand and other countries, see R. Pordzik, The Quest for Postcolonial Utopia: A Comparative Introduction to the Utopian Novel in the New English Literatures, New York: Peter Lang, 2001. 6 Deﬁning the properties and boundaries of the utopian genre is a task not without its challenges. Generally, it can be said that classical utopias project a society considerably better than the one against which it is set, whereas anti-utopias call into question the very possibility or desirability of a utopian society and dystopias extrapolate from the imperfect present into a nightmarish future. Science ﬁction may be seen as a sub-code or variant of dystopia, engaged with the feasibility and/or the hazards of technological progress rather than the outcome of social transformation. The case I shall make here is that the boundary lines between the diﬀerent genres are no longer clear-cut. The distinction between classical utopian and dystopian writing on the one hand and mainstream science ﬁction on the other has been challenged by the revision of

Travels in technotopia

7

8 9 10

11

12

13 14 15 16

195

western utopian orthodoxies in the last three decades. More particularly, the reassessment of projective ﬁction in the context of the allegedly ‘global culture’ of postmodern writing has engendered a tendency to create mixed and openended literary forms governed by the radical epistemological scepticism of poststructuralist and deconstructivist discourses. It is therefore diﬃcult to draw a clear line of distinction between the various genres as far as the growing number of narratives is concerned in which images of a bleak and hopeless future are combined with the presentation of fresh alternatives and post-apocalyptic hoping. A phrase coined by Caribbean writer and critic Wilson Harris; he calls for a new mode of ﬁction which transforms the ‘claustrophobic ritual’ of apocalyptic and dystopian writing ‘by cross-cultural imaginations’ that bear upon the future through ‘mutations of the monolithic character of conquistadorial legacies of civilization’. See W. Harris, The Womb of Space: The Cross-Cultural Imagination, Westport, Conn. and London: Greenwood, 1983, p. xv. W. Drew, The Wabeno Feast, Toronto, Canada: House of Anansi Press, 1973, p. 49. Subsequent references are to this edition. J. Frame, Intensive Care, London: Paladin, 1987. Subsequent references are to this edition. An ironical allusion to New Zealand’s self-image of a ‘small utopia’ where, free from the miserable realities of ‘old’ Europe, the virtues of a peaceful life can be shared and enjoyed. New Zealand writer and critic Vincent O’Sullivan has attacked his fellow writers for having produced a self-deceiving image of the country as a modern paradise, ‘where things eventually get better, governments more human, race relations more settled, the community more civil and informed’. See V. O’Sullivan, ‘Introduction’, The Oxford Book of New Zealand Short Stories, Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1992, p. vii. P. Carey, The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith, London: Faber and Faber, 1994. Alternative histories (or parahistorical ﬁctions) imagine worlds based on a partially diﬀerent hypothesis of historical development. Dependent for their eﬀect on changing the outcome of some watershed event, alternative histories attempt to answer such questions as what would have happened if Germany had won the Second World War or if the prophet Muhammad had been assassinated before writing the Koran. For further details see the article by W. Füger, ‘Streifzüge durch Allotopia: Zur Topographie eines ﬁktionalen Gestaltungsraums’, Anglia 102, 1984, 357–76. H. Bhabha, ‘The Other Question: Diﬀerence, Discrimination and the Discourse of Colonialism’, in R. Ferguson et al. (eds) Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Culture, Cambridge, Mass.: New Museum of Contemporary Art and MIT, 1990, p. 71. A. Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, 5th edn, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000, p. 4. Ibid., p. 10. A. Ghosh, The Calcutta Chromosome: A Novel of Fevers, Delirium and Discovery, London and Basingstoke: Picador, 1997. Appadurai, Modernity at Large, p. 13. I am, of course, aware of the critique that technology as a cultural metaphor in utopian ﬁction is amenable to the rhetoric of liberal pluralism reasserted in the vision of a globalizing economy – an economy, that is, ‘co-opting the very diversity and diﬀerence it proclaims’. See T. Moylan, Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia, Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 2000, p. 268. However, from the vantage point of Cultural

196

Peripheral interpretations of technology

Poetics, a diﬀerent view emerges, one in which technology and utopia are correlative terms: technology may be fashioned for us in a ﬁxed array of practices and norms, but there is scope within it for self-dramatization. We may not have control over the array as such, but through our performance we can draw attention to our part as individuals in the game, thus rendering visible an otherwise unconscious process. It is here that the parallel to utopian concepts emerges: as a system of norms, utopia, like technology, limits or even eﬀaces the agency of the individual in a given cultural or material context; within the denial of basic opportunities, however, utopia becomes essential for the formation of the subject as the only authorial instance enabled to change this situation.

Bibliography Albinski, N.B., ‘A Survey of Australian Utopian and Dystopian Fiction’, Australian Literary Studies 13, 1987, 15–28. Appadurai, A., Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, 5th edn, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Bhabha, H., ‘The Other Question: Diﬀerence, Discrimination and the Discourse of Colonialism’, in R. Ferguson et al. (eds) Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Culture, Cambridge, Mass.: New Museum of Contemporary Art and MIT, 1990. Carey, P., The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith, London: Faber and Faber, 1994. Centennius, R., The Dominion in 1983, Toronto: n.p., 1883. Drew, W., The Wabeno Feast, Toronto, Canada: House of Anansi Press, 1973. Frame, J., Intensive Care, London: Paladin, 1987. Füger, W., ‘Streifzüge durch Allotopia: Zur Topographie eines ﬁktionalen Gestaltungsraums’, Anglia 102, 1984, 357–76. Ghosh, A., The Calcutta Chromosome: A Novel of Fevers, Delirium and Discovery, London and Basingstoke: Picador, 1997. Harris, W., The Womb of Space: The Cross-Cultural Imagination, Westport, Conn. and London: Greenwood, 1983. Ireland, D., The Unknown Industrial Prisoner, North Ryde, Australia: Angus and Robertson, 1971. Ketterer, D., Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992. Laing, K., Major Gentl and the Achimota Wars, London: Heinemann, 1992. Leacock, S., Afternoons in Utopia: Tales of the New Time, London: John Lane and the Bodley Head, 1932. Moylan, T., Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia, Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 2000. O’Sullivan, V., ‘Introduction’, The Oxford Book of New Zealand Short Stories, Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1992. Paradis, A. (ed.) Out of This World: Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature, Ottawa, Canada: Quarry Press and National Library of Canada, 1995. Pordzik, R., The Quest for Postcolonial Utopia: A Comparative Introduction to the Utopian Novel in the New English Literatures, New York: Peter Lang, 2001.

Travels in technotopia

197

Sargent, L.T., British and American Utopian Literature: An Annotated Bibliography, Boston, Mass.: G.K. Hall, 1979. —— ‘New Zealand Utopian Literature: An Annotated Bibliography’, Occasional Paper 97/1, Wellington, New Zealand: Stout Research Centre, 1996. Sargisson, L., Contemporary Feminist Utopianism, London and New York: Routledge, 1996. Thomas, E., ‘Inventing Futures: A Notable Trend in Recent New Zealand Women’s Fiction’, in W. McGaw (ed.) Inventing Countries: Essays in Post-Colonial Literature, Wollongong, Australia: University of Wollongong, 1987. Weiss, A., ‘Separations and Unities: Approaches to Québec Separatism in English- and French-Canadian Fantastic Literature’, Science-Fiction Studies 25, 1998, 53–61. Wongar, B., Walg: A Novel of Australia, New York: George Braziller, 1990.

Index

Abdurahman, Dr 53, 58 Aboriginal peoples 186–7 Achebe, Chinua 5 Adorno, Theodor 34, 82, 83, 108 aesthetics: Adorno 108; modernism 2, 19 Africa: black America as source of modernization 29–31; black slave traders in city-states 115–16, 127–30; colonial attitude towards traditional forms 13; colour bar 71–2; early modern markets and European trade 122–5, 126–7; ideas of modernity in 37, 118; local articulations of modernization 4, 6; networks of exchange extending to 48; precolonial thought and indigenous knowledge 18; rise of public sphere 130–1; slavery system in 121–2, 125–6; see also West Africa; under names of countries African-Americans: and black South Africans 29–30; highlighted in Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic 3–4 African National Congress (ANC) 32, 50, 58; and capitalist globalization 40, 41; in novels by Mda and Wicomb 23, 24; shift from egalitarian position 38–9 African nationalism: Plaatje’s foundational text 54 African People’s Organization 53 Africana studies 29, 33 Afrikaners 58 agency: in novels by Mda and Wicomb 21; in postcolonial utopian/dystopian ﬁction 186

agora: and cyberspace 153 Allport, G.W. 160 Amery, Leo 55 Anancy myth 5, 81–2, 89 Anderson, Benedict 49, 68 Anderson, Perry 13 animals: in Naipaul’s writings 99, 100, 107 anthropology: studies of African cognitive systems 18–19 anti-colonial movements 14, 17–18, 56; and cross-nationalist contact 49–50; Gandhi and Plaatje 47–8 apartheid 24, 38, 56, 66; see also racial segregation Appadurai, Arjun 2, 3, 4, 67 Arab resistance cultures 30 archaeology: in Blavatsky’s A Land of Mystery 141–2 Armah, Ayi Kwei 64–5, 66, 72–3, 74 Arnold, Matthew 137–8, 142, 143 art: Adorno’s aesthetic 108; discourse in Kureishi’s ‘The Body’ 175; modernism 2, 19; role of modern occultism 139, 140 Art Ensemble of Chicago (jazz band) 35 Ascher, Marcia: Mathematics Elsewhere 18–19 Asian nations 2, 4; imperial conceit of modernization 14 Atlantic Ocean: image in Pauline Melville story 84, 85–6; link with Indian Ocean 50 Atlantis 142 aura: Benjamin on the gaze 65–6; in Walcott’s description of postcolonial

200

Index

existence 87; of western modernity 109 Australia: postcolonial utopian/dystopian ﬁction 185, 186–7 Baartman, Saartje 23 Bamako 30 Bambara states 126 Bande Mataram (newspaper) 48 Barclay, family 128 Baucom, Ian 4, 5–6, 88, 109 Baudelaire, Charles 72, 73; Benjamin’s reading of 63–4, 65–6; on modernity 63, 65, 69; ‘Salon of 1859’ 63–4 Bauman, Zygmunt 162 BBSs (bulletin-board systems): Indian diaspora 153, 155–6, 156–60, 160, 162 Bechuana Gazette 58–9 Bengal 48, 50, 51 Benin (state) 126 Benjamin, Walter 17, 37, 39, 67; on Baudelaire in The Arcades Project 63–4, 65–6; on magic of distance 63, 64, 65, 66, 73–4, 109 Berger, John: Pig Earth 13 Berman, Marshall 15 Berry, James 81 Besant, Annie 51; Thought Forms 140–1 Bhabha, Homi 150, 170, 174, 191 Bhagavad-gita 55 Bhownaggree, Sir Mancherjee 53 biotechnology: Haraway on discourse of 173; in Kureishi’s ‘The Body’ 6, 168, 172–6, 179 black American diaspora: and African modernization 29–31, 32; Plaatje’s critical view 32–3 The Black Atlantic see Gilroy, Paul (The Black Atlantic) Black Atlantic studies 29, 31, 33, 37 black diaspora: engaged by black South African poets 32–3; Gilroy’s theory of modernity 29, 31, 41; scholarly theories and views 29–31 black music 32, 33–6 Black Panthers 35 black South Africans: and AfricanAmericans 29–30; poets’ responses to modernity 31–41

black transnationalism 4; Gilroy 41; Plaatje 32–3; poetry of Rampolokeng and Motsapi 35–6, 41 Blavatsky, Madame (Helena Petrovna) 6, 136, 138; A Land of Mystery 141–2, 143 Blunt, Wilfrid Scawen 49 Boehmer, Elleke 4, 5, 6, 7 Boer nationalists 47, 52, 57 Bombay 149 Bonny (city state), West Africa 116, 127, 128–9, 130 Boston: and Franklin 119 bourgeoisie: and control of European trade 127; and Franklin’s idea of public sphere 120, 121; global emergence of 115, 126 boycott 48 Bozic, Sreten see Wongar, Banumbir Braly, K. 160 Britain: anti-colonial strategy towards 56; class system restricting social interactions 135; continuing inﬂuence on India 150; issues addressed in Pauline Melville’s stories 83; and nuclear bomb tests in Australia 186; occultism and modernity 136–7; see also England; Liverpool; London British Empire: cross-border links between anti-colonialists 48–9; Gandhi’s appeals for Indian rights 52 Britishness: Kureishi on 177–8 Brixton 35 Brown, Wendy 174, 178 Buddhist literature 140 Bühler-Dietrich, Annette 6 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward George, ﬁrst Baron Lytton 141 Bunyan, John: Pilgrim’s Progress 119–20 Burckhardt, Jacob 82 Burnham, Forbes 87 Cabral, Amilcar 18 Cadbury, family 128 Cairo 49 Calcutta 49 Cameroon 34 Canada: postcolonial

Index utopian/dystopian ﬁction 184, 186, 187–8 Canoe Houses 6, 127–30 capitalism: addressed in Pauline Melville’s stories 79; ANC’s capitulation to 40; and colonialism 13, 14; concurrence with modernization 5, 7, 19–20, 80; emergence in Africa 6, 122–3, 130; Marx on mode of production 13; Marx and Weber on impact of 16; and modernity 31, 118; need for new perspectives 2, 131; as not predetermined by the West 119, 130; and social relations 17, 116–17, 117–18; use of technology for commodiﬁcation 115 Carey, Peter 193; Tristan Smith 186, 190–2 Caribbean: interculturality and transnationalism 4, 107–9; issues addressed in Pauline Melville’s stories 83; plantations 126; see also Trinidad Caribbean myths 80, 81; see also Anancy myth Caribbeanness 5, 84–5, 88–90 Carlson, Maria 139 Carpentier, Alejo 4, 108 Cavour, Camillo Benso 54 Centennius, Ralph: The Dominion 184–5 centre/periphery: displacement in Pauline Melville story 88; and global system 149; India and Indian diaspora 150, 151–2, 155–6, 160, 161; in Naipaul’s Miguel Street stories 97; re-articulations 5; Western ideology of modernization 3; see also peripheries Césaire, Aimé 18, 49, 84 Chakravarty, Dipesh 153, 156 Chatterjee, Partha 48 Chirico, Giorgio de 103 Chrisman, Laura 4, 7 Christianity: changes in ﬁn-de-siècle Europe 140; eﬀacing of pagan/preChristian beliefs 6, 138, 142, 143–4; founding fathers of SANNC 57–8; in Mda’s Heart of Redness 21–2; in Motsapi’s poetry 40–1 Civil Rights Movement (USA) 50

201

civil rights struggle 30 ‘civilization’: and nineteenth-century race theory 173; values of Plaatje and Gandhi 53 class: and nineteenth-century race theory 173; and restricted British social interactions 135 Cleary, Joe 58 colonial locations/states: advent of capitalism 13, 14; centre-periphery models 150; cross-border contact 48–9; Fanon’s description of topography 67–8, 69–70, 71; idea of England 98; ‘normative temporalities’ and indigenous agency 2, 14; processes of modernity 15–16, 16–17, 71–2 colonialism: addressed in Pauline Melville’s stories 79; attitude towards traditional outlooks 13; connection with globalization 150; and education 151; enunciation of modernity 16–17; facilitated by technology 17; Leo Africanus’s story 138–9, 141; occultism in context of 6, 135, 136, 143; project of modernization 13–14; stereotypes of other peoples 56 commerce 116, 120; see also trade commodiﬁcation: and capitalist use of technology 115; of concept of home 103; cultural traditions 32 communications: British Empire’s networks 48, 49; technology 4 community: and virtual communities 159, 162 computer-mediated communication (CMC) 152–3; between India and Indian diaspora 150, 153–62 Congo 98, 100, 125, 126 Conrad, Joseph: Heart of Darkness 5, 98, 100 Constable, John 97 counter-memory 2, 21, 136 Cousens, James 51 creolization/créolité 4, 85, 108 cross-cultural contact: Caribbeanness 89–90; and nationalism 49–52, 54–5, 59 cross-cultural imagination 84–5, 108 cross-nationalist connections: anti-

202

Index

colonial movements 48–50; Gandhi and Plaatje 47, 52–5, 59; and omission of contact 51; in panAfricanism 52 cultural imperialism 19–20 cultural modernism 2, 68 cultural traditions: commodiﬁcation 32; revival programs 48; see also traditional beliefs and practices cyberspace 6, 152–3, 160; see also computer-mediated communication Dahomey (state) 126 dance of death 101, 102 Davidson, B. 128 Davis, Angela 33 death and decay: in Naipaul’s stories 98, 100–1, 102, 103 Delhi 151 Descartes, René: in Pauline Melville story 79, 80 deterritorialization 2, 15 developing countries 1, 3 Dhondy, Farrukh: Poona Company 149 diaspora: identities 5, 31, 160; impact on western cultures 2; racial terrors experienced by 37; see also black American diaspora; black diaspora; Indian diaspora Diawara, Manthia 29, 30–1, 32, 33 Dickens, Charles 106–7, 107 Dirlik, Arif 17 Disney industry 191 distance: Benjamin’s reading of Baudelaire’s ‘gaze’ 63, 64, 65, 66, 73–4 Doyle, Arthur Conan 137 Drew, Wayland: The Wabeno Feast 1867–8 Du Bois, W.E.B. 32, 52, 59 Dublin 49 Durban 53, 56 Dussel, Enrique 15 early modern explorer/voyager 85–6, 88 Eﬁk-speaking peoples 128–9 Egyptian nationalists 47; Cairo elites 49 Ekpe society, Old Calabar 129–30 Ellison, Ralph 108

empire: as decaying in Naipaul’s stories 98, 100–1, 102; ‘withdrawal of’ 86–7; see also imperialism Engels, Friedrich 16, 117–18, 122 England: Gandhi’s visits 52; Kureishi on his experiences in 176; Naipaul’s explorations of 95, 97–101, 102–3, 103, 104–5, 109; see also Liverpool; London English Civil War 124 English language: in Centennius’s The Dominion 184; in India 150 Enlightenment 121; Naipaul’s questioning of 102–3, 107 eschatological discourses: and South Africa 37–8, 40 ethnic diﬀerences: and centre-periphery relations 160; and inhibition of crossnationalist contact 51; reinforced in newspapers edited by Plaatje and Gandhi 58–9 Eurocentrism 14 Europe: centrality in process of modernity 14–15; cultural development and technological invention 95; need to heed South African poetry 41; occult movements in ﬁn-de-siècle period 136, 140; peasant societies 13; and slave trade 125–6, 128; trade interests and Africa 122–5, 126–7 Fabian, Johannes 14 Fanon, Frantz 18, 87; description of colonial topography 67–8, 69–70, 71, 73, 88; idea of nativequarters/medina 64, 66, 67, 69 feminism: Gandhi and Plaatje 52–3 Ferguson, James 70–2, 73 Forster, E.M.: ‘Only connect . . .’ 149, 162; A Passage to India 135–6 Foster, Derek 153, 159 Foucault, Michel 118, 168 Frame, Janet 193; Intensive Care 189–90 France: Franklin’s visit during ancien régime 121, 130; see also Nantes; Paris Frankenstein (Shelley) 168 Frankfurt School 95 Franklin, Benjamin 6, 115, 119–21, 130, 131

Index Franklin, Sarah 173 Freud, Sigmund 170 Friedman, Jonathan 149–50, 152 The Gaelic American (newspaper) 48 Gandhi, Mohandas (Mahatma): commonalities with Plaatje 47, 52–5, 59; lack of intersection with Plaatje 47–8, 51, 54–5; passive resistance 50, 57; reasons for lack of contact with Plaatje 56–9 Gandhi, Rajiv 162 Gaonkar, Dilip 68–9 Gaye, Marvin 34 the gaze (Benjamin on Baudelaire) 63, 65–6, 67, 73 Ghana: in Armah’s story 72–3 Ghose, Aurobindo 50 Ghosh, Amitav 193; The Calcutta Chromosome 6, 186, 192–3 Ghosh-Schellhorn, Martina 4, 5, 6, 7 Gibson, William 152 Gilroy, Paul (The Black Atlantic) 4, 5, 6, 7, 50, 59, 104, 108; on black diaspora and modernity 3–4, 29, 31, 33, 41; on the middle passage 3, 37, 48, 118 Glissant, Edouard: Caribbean Discourse 5, 79, 83, 84–5, 88–90; La Lézarde 89; Tout-monde 89 global capitalism 31, 142 globalization: ANC’s capitulation to 40, 41; and black popular music 34; commodiﬁed cultural traditions 32; crisis of idea of 1–2; distinguished from global system 149–50; and ‘glocalization’ 149; issues in postcolonial utopian/dystopian ﬁction 185–6, 192; Naipaul’s questioning of 102–3; questioning of monologic themes 3, 7; and technological modernization 1 ‘glocalization’ 149; Caribbean 5 Goebel, Walter 4, 5 gold and silver trade 122, 124, 125, 131 Gonne, Maude 49 Gray, Thomas: Elegy 102 Greenblatt, S.J. 82–3 Griﬃth, Arthur 49, 51 Griqua people: in Wicomb’s David’s Story 23

203

Guyanese myth and culture 83 Guys, Constantin 63, 64 Habermas, Jürgen 2, 16, 67 Hall, Stuart 31, 33 Hanchard, Michael 37, 39 Hannerz, U. 150 Haraway, Donna 173, 179 Hardt, M. 4 Harootunian, Harry 14–15 Harris, Wilson 4, 97, 108 Hegel, G.W.F. 97 Heidegger, Martin 97 Heisenberg, Werner Karl 193 Hendrix, Jimi 33 Hertzog, James Barry Munuik 30 Hinduism: Naipaul’s perspective 99, 102; Western research on literature of 140 Hindustan Network 155 history: and Blavatsky’s search for lost worlds 141–2, 143; in Rampolokeng’s poetry 39–40; and relevance of occultism 139, 143 Hobbes, Thomas 119 Holmes, D. 152 Holocaust 37 ‘homeland’: idea of India for Indian diaspora 152; and periphery 7, 151 Horkheimer, M. 8n, 34, 82, 83 Hountondji, Paulin 18 Hudson Bay Company 187 hunger strikes 48, 52 hybridity: and formation of identities 48, 50, 170–1; in globalization process 150; issues in Wicomb’s David’s Story 23; in Kureishi’s ‘The Body’ 6, 168, 170–1, 174, 175, 179; postcolonial theory 178, 192 Ibo people 128 identity formation: and cross-cultural nationalism 48, 50–1, 59; and hybridity 48, 50, 170–1; in Kureishi’s writings 168, 170–1, 178; transitional modes 5, 152, 160, 162; transnational diasporas 151; and use of World Wide Web 5, 7 identity politics 174 Ijo-/Ijaw-speaking people 127–8, 129, 130

204

Index

imperialism: conceit of modernization 14; introduction of modern forms by 14–15; reconﬁguring of geography by 142; and technology 186; see also empire India: centre/periphery relationships 150, 151–2, 155–6, 160, 161; colonial context of A Passage to India 135; computer-mediated communication with diaspora 150, 153–62; cross-cultural and nationalist impulses 4; cross-nationalist ﬂow of ideas with Ireland 50–1, 51–2; current changes in electronic age 160–2; English colonial policy 150–1; and Gandhi’s campaign for rights of Indians 52; Gandhi’s communalist activism 58; in Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome 193; in Naipaul’s writings 100, 101, 104, 106; role of Theosophy and the occult 6, 136, 140 Indian diaspora 5; and computermediated communication 150, 153–62; national and transnational cultures 4, 151; use of term 151; virtual communities 6, 159, 161, 162 Indian nationalists: Calcutta elites 49; focus on home nation 51, 56–7; Gandhi’s foundational text 54; transnational networking 47, 55; see also Bengal Indian Ocean 4, 48, 50 Indian Opinion 50, 53, 58–9 indigenous knowledge 2, 18 industrialism: Marx on capitalism 116 Innes, Lyn 50 interculturality: European modernist art and literature 2; and globalization 192; and the occult 6; view of Trinidad 107 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 1, 39; ‘imf’ in Motsapi’s poetry 32 internationalism see socialist internationalism Internet: as agora-like space 153; see also computer-mediated communication (CMC) IRA (Irish Republican Army) 50 Iraq: occupation by US 3 Ireland: cross-nationalist connections

with India 48, 50–1, 51; and intercultural role of Theosophy 51, 140; modernist art 19; nationalists and transnational networks 47, 49, 51–2; see also Northern Ireland Islam 143; and capitalist enterprise in West Africa 122–3, 125 Jackson, George 33 Jackson, Michael/Jackson Five 33 Jacques, Martin 3 Jaggan, Cheddi 87 Jameson, Frederic: on modernity 17, 64, 67; on Third World literature 19–20, 21 jazz: in Motsapi’s poetry 34–6 Johannesburg: Chinese community 56–7 Jones, Daniel 55 Joyce, James 73 Judaism 143 Kachru, Braj B. 150 Kandinsky, Wassily 140 Kant, Immanuel 175 Katz, D. 160 Kimberley, South Africa 49 King Lear (Shakespeare) 38, 97 Koselleck, Reinhardt 69, 70 Kureishi, Hanif: ‘The Body’ (short story) 6, 168, 168–76, 177–8, 178–9, 179; The Body (short story collection) 168, 178, 179; Dreaming and Scheming (essays) 168, 176–7; Intimacy 171–2, 177 labour: domination systems pre-dating slave trade 118; Marx on capitalist transformation 117 Lahiri, Jhumpa 160 Latin America 19, 108; see also South America Leacock, Stephen 194n Leadbeater, Charles: Thought Forms 140–1 Lemuria 142 Lenin, Vladimir Ilich 13 Leo Africanus: Yeats’s correspondence with 136, 138–9, 141 Lerner, Daniel 82

Index Lippmann, W. 160 literature: Arnold’s view of as successor to religion 137–8, 143; and challenge of occultism 136, 137, 137–8, 144; postcolonial classic themes 5; see also modernist literature/writing Liverpool: and slave trade 124–5, 128 London: Brixton in Motsapi poem 35; eighteenth-century coﬀee-houses 130; in Pauline Melville story 84, 86; visits of Plaatje and Gandhi 54, 55 London School of Oriental and African Studies 55 Lukács, Georg 99 Lytton see Bulwer-Lytton, Edward George, ﬁrst Baron Lytton Machiavelli, Niccolò 119 machinery: Marx on 116–17; in Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival 99 magic realism 20, 172 makossa music 34 Malombo (jazz band) 34–5, 35–6 Mamdani, Mahmood 13 Mann, M. 150 manufacturing: West’s Era of 116, 117 Mapfumo, Thomas 34 Marx, Karl: on capitalist transformation 16, 117; on machinery 116–17; on technology 115, 118 Marx, Leo 99 Masilela, Ntongela 29–30, 31 mass publicity: Franklin’s invention 115, 119, 120 mathematics: Ascher’s study of nonliterate cultures 19 Mazzini, Giuseppe 54 Mda, Zakes: Heart of Redness 20–1, 21–2, 23, 24 Mediterranean: medieval economy 122 Melville, Pauline 5, 107; ‘Eat Labba and Drink Creek Water’ 84–8; and Glissant’s Caribbean Discourse 88–90; ‘I Do Not Take Messages from Dead People’ 81–2, 83; ‘The Parrot and Descartes’ 79–81 mestizaje 4, 108 metallics: New World discovery of gold and silver 124, 125, 126, 131; Sudanese gold trade 122

205

metropolis: Baudelaire’s theory 69; in Pauline Melville story 84, 86–7, 88 metropolitan areas: addressed in Third World literature 20; Western distinctions with rural areas 3 middle passage 37; Gilroy’s study in The Black Atlantic 3, 48, 118; Glissant’s rewriting of experience of 84 military power: actions of world’s remaining superpower 1–2 Mishra, Vijay 160 modernism: in Fanon’s conception of the nation 68; link with capitalist modernization 19; and local expressions of modernization 7; sensibilities in recent South African novels 20–1 modernist art 2, 19 modernist literature/writing 2, 139; Third World 19–20 modernity: African perspectives of temporality 37; in Armah’s novel 72–3, 74; in Baudelaire’s ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ 63, 65, 69; Benjamin’s view of Baudelaire’s ‘gaze’ 64, 66, 73–4; black American diaspora 30–1, 33; capitalist 118; and cross-nationalist contact 50–1, 59; enchantment and disenchantment 87, 109; enunciated by colonialism 16–17; Fanon’s ideas 68, 69, 88; Ferguson’s study 70–2; Gaonkar’s ‘alternative modernities’ 68–9; Gilroy’s ideas 29, 37, 41, 118; Koselleck’s view 69, 70; local articulations in South Africa 4; materialist theories 19; and occultism 136–7, 139–40, 140–1, 142–3; in Pauline Melville stories 79, 80–1, 88; in peripheral states 16, 17, 50, 118–19; postcolonial critical views 14–16; and pre-colonial African modes 18; and role of literature 137; and slave trade in West African citystates 127; township 6, 64–5, 65, 66–7, 74; western constructions of 3 modernization: African viewpoint 6; Asian explorations 4; colonial project 13–14; concurrence with capitalism 7, 19–20, 80; eﬀects of 2–3; Fanon on

206

Index

colonial culture 67, 70; Gilroy’s study in The Black Atlantic 3–4; and globalization 1; inﬂicted on periphery by capitalism 5; interrogated by local expressive forms 4, 7, 192; link with modernism 19; Naipaul’s interpretations 4–5, 96–7, 99, 101–2, 102–3, 106–7, 109; new perspectives and questioning of old themes 2, 3, 7, 131; in postcolonial utopian/dystopian ﬁction 185, 186, 192, 193; and technology 2, 4, 185–6, 188–9, 193 morality: Arnold’s view of literature 137 Motsapi, Seitlhamo 31, 31–2, 33, 33–6, 37–8, 38, 40–1 Mudimbe, V.Y. 18 Mughal gnosticism 193 Muhammad Ali 33 Mukherjee, Bharati 160 Mumford, Lewis 153 music: and transcultural imagination 108; see also black music Muslim traders: early incursions in Africa 122–3, 123, 125 Naipaul, V.S. 4–5, 160; The Enigma of Arrival 97–103, 103, 109; A House for Mr Biswas 96–7, 103, 104; Miguel Street stories 95–6, 96–7, 97, 99, 101–2, 102–3; Mr Stone and the Knights Companion 104–7 Namaqualand, South Africa 23 Namibia 39 Nandy, Ashis 151 Nantes 124–5, 128 Natal 57 nation-states: Fanon’s conception 68; and interpretation of black transnationalism 41; undermining of 3 national identity: black Americans 30; Gandhi’s view 52 nationalism: activists and elites 47; competing with other nationalisms 57–8; and cross-cultural contact 49–52, 54–5, 59; dangers of disavowal of 3; dialogue with transnationalism 4, 5, 7, 33, 41;

polarization from black diasporic modernity 31; Rampolokeng 32; and resistance 50–1; self-deﬁnition and the Other 56 Native Americans/Indians 20; in Drew’s The Wabeno Feast 187–8 native cultures 18, 188 Nazi Germany 189 Nederveen Pieterse, J. 150 Negri, A. 4 neo-colonialism: in Carey’s Tristram Smith 191, 192; explored in poetry of Rampolokeng and Motsapi 38 Neruda, Pablo 32 New African movement (South Africa) 29 New World 124, 125, 126, 131 New Zealand: postcolonial utopian/dystopian ﬁction 185, 189–90 newspapers: cross-nationalist networks of exchange 48, 54; edited by Gandhi and Plaatje 58–9 Nietzsche, Friedrich 173 Nigeria: black slave traders in city-states 115–16, 127–30; Canoe Houses 6 Nivedita, Sister 51 ‘normative temporalities’ 2, 14 Northern Ireland 50 nostalgia: ﬁlm 20; in Naipaul’s writings 103, 107 occultism: in colonial culture 6, 135, 136, 143; in experience of modernity 136–7, 139–40, 141–2, 142–3; in literary history 137, 138, 139 Okigbo, Christopher 32 Olcott, Henry Steel 136 Old Calabar (city state), West Africa 16, 127, 128–30 opinion polls: Indian CMC 153, 154–5 oral traditions: in novels by Mda and Wicomb 21; Plaatje’s work 55 Orange Free State 53 Osborne, Peter 15 the Other: and Self 5; in self-deﬁnition of nationalism 56 Ouidah see Whydah Owen, Alex 136–7, 140 Oyo (state) 126

Index pagan/pre-Christian beliefs and practices: eﬀaced by Christianity 6, 143–4; and occultism 6, 142, 143 Pakistan 176 Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) 50 Palestinians 20 pan-Africanism: Motsapi 32, 33, 35; Plaatje 52 Paris: Baudelaire’s demi-monde 64, 72, 73 Parnell, Charles 51 Parry, Benita 2, 3, 6 passive resistance 50, 53, 57 pastoral: Lukács’s view 99; vision in Naipaul’s writings 98, 102, 107 peripheries: communities 162; diﬀerences with metropolitan areas 20; and ‘homeland’ 7, 151; modernist sensibilities in South African novels 2, 20–4; modernities in 16, 17, 50, 118–19; see also centre/periphery Philadelphia 119, 130 Pickett, Wilson 33 Plaatje, Solomon 32–3, 38; commonalities with Gandhi 47, 52–5, 59; lack of intersection with Gandhi 47–8, 51, 54–5; reasons for lack of contact with Gandhi 56–9 poetry: responses to modernity in Rampolokeng and Motsapi 31–41 politics: aesthetics of Rampolokeng and Motsapi 41; and black music 33; common ground of nationalist elites 48 Poona: Dhondy’s autobiographical sketches 149 Pordzik, Ralph 6 Port of Spain: in Naipaul’s stories 95–6, 97 Portugal 122 postcolonial aﬀect: occultism 136, 137, 139 postcolonial existence: African townships 70–1; in Naipaul’s writings 97, 98, 100–1, 101, 104, 107–8; transitionality 150, 152; Walcott’s description 87 postcolonialism: deconstruction of globalization 1–2; identity and

207

hybridity 50, 178, 179, 192; perspective on modernism 2; and utopian/dystopian ﬁction 185–93 postmodernism: Gilroy’s thinking 50; in Naipaul’s view of self 107; nostalgia ﬁlm 20; and occultism 139; Wicomb’s David’s Story 22–3 poststructuralism 139 pre-Christian beliefs and practices see pagan/pre-Christian beliefs and practices the pre-modern: Benjamin’s magic of distance 66 psychoanalysis 136 public space (Habermas) 153 public spheres: Franklin’s ideas 120–1; rise in Philadelphia and Bonny 130; and use of media technology 3 race: discourses in Kureishi’s ‘The Body’ 168, 172–3, 173–4; nineteenth-century theory 172–3 racial segregation: colour bar in colonial Africa 71–2; South Africa 30, 58; see also apartheid racism: Centennius’s The Dominion 185; eﬀect on African racial consciousness 30; issues in cross-nationalist connections 51, 52; Kureishi’s experiences of 176 Ralegh, Sir Walter 85, 86 Ramaswamy, Sumathi 142 Rampolokeng, Lesego 31, 32, 33, 36, 37–8, 38, 39–40, 41 rap: Rampolokeng’s poems 32, 36 reggae: reference in Motsapi poem 34 religion: Arnold view of literature as successor to 137–8, 143; Blavatsky’s understanding of 143; challenge of occultism 138, 143–4; eschatological discourses 37; see also Christianity; islam; Judaism Renaissance 82–3, 173, 175 resistance: anti-colonial and nationalist movements 48, 49, 50–1; and black transnationalism 4; Diawara on diﬀerent cultures 30 Rheingold, Howard 159 Robertson, Roland 149 Rodney, W. 126

208

Index

rural areas: Western distinctions with metropolitan areas 3 Rushdie, Salman 152 Ruskin, John: Unto this Last 53 Russia: inﬂuence of Theosophy 139, 140 Safran, William 151 satire: Naipaul’s tone 97, 104, 107–8; in Pauline Melville story 79 Saurat, Denis 143 Schabio, Saskia 5, 107 science: confronted in utopian/dystopian ﬁction 6, 192; and occultism 137, 143 séances 135, 138 secularism: and challenge of occultism 137, 139–40, 144 self: in Kureishi’s writings 168, 178; in Naipaul’s writings 98, 107; and Other 5, 56 sexuality: occult doctrines 135 Shaka 40 Shakespeare, William see King Lear; The Tempest Shapiro, Stephen 4, 6, 7 Shaw, George Bernard 140 Shelley, Mary see Frankenstein ships: in colonial conquest 17; Gilroy’s metaphor 5, 48; middle passage 118 Sinn Fein 50 skepticism: in Naipaul’s writings 98, 102, 107 slave trade: in Africa 121–2, 125–6; Black African traders in city-states 115–16, 127–30; factors in growth of 124–5, 125–7; features of Atlantic slavery 118; ships in middle passage 48 Slavic cultures: and Theosophy 140 Smith, Adam 120 social inequality 37 social relations: under capitalism 17, 116–17, 117–18 social reproduction: technology 95, 118 social transformation 130–1 socialism 18, 32 Sole, Kelwyn 38–9 Sophiatown 66 South Africa: anti-colonial nationalisms 49, 51; eschatological discourses

38–41; Gandhi’s Indian-centred activism 56–7; Indians’ struggle for rights 52, 53, 56, 57; modernist novels concerned with periphery 2, 20–4; modernity and black America 29–30; modernity in black poetry 31–41; nationalism and transnationalism 4, 32–3; postapartheid condition 38; racial segregation 30, 58; townships 66; work of Plaatje and Gandhi 47, 51, 52, 53, 55 South African Indian National Congress 58 South African Natives National Congress (SANNC) 52, 53, 57–8 South America 4, 14, 126; see also Latin America Spivak, Gayatri 152 stereotyping: Indian virtual communities 159–60, 161 Sterne, Laurence: and eccentricity in Naipaul 103, 107 storytelling 20 Sudan: gold trade 122 suﬀragettes 52 Sulekha.com 154 Surette, Leo 143 Swadeshi Resistance, Bengal 50 Swift, Jonathan: and darkness of Naipaul’s vision 104, 107; Gulliver’s Travels 190, 191; A Modest Proposal 189 Tajfel, Henri 160 Tamil Tigers 50 Taylor, Charles 151 technology: Benjamin on 17; as capitalist weapon of commodiﬁcation 115; in colonial conquest 17; and globalization 1; issues in postcolonial utopian/dystopian ﬁction 185–93; and modernity/modernization 2, 4, 185–6, 188–9, 193; Naipaul’s explorations 95, 99; need for new perspectives 2, 7, 131; promising contemporary uses 6; social and cultural development 95, 118; transformed into microhistories 5–6 The Tempest (Shakespeare) 79, 80 temporalities: concerns in Black

Index Atlantic studies 37; in novels of Wicomb and Mda 21; in poetry of Rampolokeng and Motsapi 38–41; see also ‘normative temporalities’ Theosophical Society 136 Theosophy 51, 55, 139, 140 Third World: nationalist movements 56; non-metropolitan literatures 19–20; postcolonial hierarchical structures 152 Thirty Years War 124 Thornton, J. 123 Tolstoy, Leo 54 township: Fanon’s description 67, 68, 69; in Ferguson’s study of Zambian Copperbelt 70–2; modernizations and modernity 6, 64–5, 65, 66–7, 68, 74 trade: early Islamic incursions in Africa 122–3, 123; European interests and Africa 122–5, 126–7; see also commerce; slave trade traditional beliefs and practices: colonial attitudes 13; Gandhi and Plaatje’s revival of 55; in novels by Mda and Wicomb 21, 23; see also cultural traditions transculturalism: and music 108; Naipaul’s interpretation 4–5, 95; networking among anti-colonial elites 47 transitionality 150, 152; Indian diaspora 150, 160–2; in postcolonial utopian/dystopian ﬁction 192 transnationalism: interplay with nationalism 4, 5, 33, 41; and lack of cross-nationalist contact 51, 59; questioning of restricted themes 7; US aspirations 3; utopian/dystopian perspectives 108–9; see also black transnationalism Transvaal 53, 57 travelogues: Naipaul 4–5, 103, 108 trickster-ﬁgure 5, 83, 88, 89, 107; see also Anancy myth Trinidad: Naipaul’s explorations 95–6, 97, 98, 101, 103, 104–5 Trotsky, Leon 13 Tswana 55 Turner, J.C. 160

209

Ulysses 82 The United Irishman (newspaper) 48, 51 United States: in Carey’s Tristram Smith 190–1; Indian diaspora and CMC 154–5, 156–60, 160, 161; need to heed South African poetry 41; in The Dominion 184–5; transnational aspirations 3; see also black American diaspora utopian/dystopian perspectives 6; Centennius’s The Dominion 184–5; ﬁction from postcolonial locations 185–93; issues of technology 95, 185–6; transnationalism 108–9 Varma, Pavan 162 Verma, Harsh 162 virtual communities: Indian diaspora 6, 159, 161, 162 Viswanathan, Gauri 4, 6 Voltaire: Candide 102 voyage: intercultural passages 95; middle passage 118; and postcolonial idea of ‘homeland’ 152; see also early modern explorer/voyager Walcott, Derek 86–7, 88 Weber, Max 16 Weil, Simone 152 the West: assumptions about ‘developing’ countries 3; changing attitudes towards modernization 2; narrative of globalization 1–2 West Africa: early European trade and capitalism 122, 123; nations seen as lacking modernity 30–1; see also under names of city-states and countries Whydah (Ouidah) 128 Wicomb, Zoe: David’s Story 20–1, 22–4, 24 Wiltshire: in Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival 97–8, 102 Wolf, E. 129 women: Griquas in Wicomb’s David’s Story 23; supported by Gandhi and Plaatje 52–3 Wongar, Banumbir (pseudonym): Walg 186–7 Woolf, Virginia 79 Wordsworth, William 97, 98, 177, 179

210

Index

World Bank 39 World Trade Organization (WTO) 1 World Wide Web 5, 7; websites used by Indian diaspora 153, 154; see also computer-mediated communication writing: Kureishi’s observations on 168, 177, 178 xenophobia 51 Xhosa people: in novels by Mda and Wicomb 22, 23, 24

Yeats, W.B.: interest in Theosophy and the occult 6, 51, 139, 140; ‘The Manuscript of Leo Africanus’ 136, 138–9, 141 Yoruba peoples 126, 128 Young, Robert 136 Zambia 39 Zambian Copperbelt: Ferguson’s study 70–2 Zimbabwe 39