My article considers Dori Felman and Shoshana Laub’s configuration of the witness traveller in relation to narrative witnessing across a range of texts by exilic writers. Framed and informed by Salman Rushdie’s rhetorical question in Shame, "Can only the dead speak?" — a question that foregrounds the politics of bearing witness to trauma from an exilic perspective — the paper considers the narrative mediation of secondary witnessing across the "threshold" (Agamben, 1998) that separates the primary and secondary witness. In so doing, it follows the hermeneutic logic of boundary-crossing by travelling across a range of literary registers in its consideration of the witness as insider and outsider, a mobile subject that moves across the boundaries of national and cultural affiliation. It shows how exilic writing can place a high premium on the value of a writer’s ruptured double agency and divided loyalty, which is offered as the alternative (and alter-native) discursive space in the absence of the voices of those who have been "disappeared" from the official record.
Post-2000 Zimbabwean literature in English demonstrates an unprecedented fascination with the child narrator. While there is some precedence for the use of child narrators or narratives that focus on child experiences to grapple with sociopolitical issues, the wide extent to which this style has been used post-2000 is unparalleled. The post-2000 socioeconomic crisis in Zimbabwe has clear victims; however, owing to the intensely polarized perspectives on its origins and nature, the identity of the victimizers is not so clear and is in fact hotly contested and politicized. As typical and "known" victims, their victimization can furtively reveal and reflect on their victimizers and in the process subtly expose them for knowing. This form of "knowing" transcends a mere discernment of the victimizers’ physical identities; it goes to the heart of their motives, apparent and subterranean political objectives, and means of attaining them. Victim child characters are often used symbolically to represent the weak and vulnerable members of society who are exploited as political fodder by the powerful. The symbolic children are seen to be caught in between the political goals and strategies of the powerful, and their victimization reveals overt and covert markings of their political abuse. This makes child-narrated or child-centred narratives possible sites to encounter the nexus between children’s victimization and the underhand methods of creating and sustaining political hegemony. This article explores this connection, particularly focusing on the aesthetic subtlety with which child-centred or child-focused narratives proffer a counter-discursive discourse which unsettles the dominant narratives presently given of victims and victimizers in a post-2000 Zimbabwean context.
The patriarchal, virilocal, patrilineal structure of the family in India not only exploits class upper-caste/middle-class women’s claims to equality within marriage but also renders their sexuality as particularly tied to the reproductive project of heterosexuality. Moreover, the institutionalization of marriage produces asymmetrical gendered relations to an extent that women are reduced to being men’s property and possession, rigidly placed under their sexual ownership. This is mirrored and upheld by the institutional structures of the nation, especially the legislative and adjudicatory framework and how it approaches marriage, incidents of extra-marital affairs, divorce, legitimate progeny, and varied property laws. The latest example of this is the Government Ordinance rejecting the recommendations by the Justice J. S. Verma Committee to criminalize marital rape. Thus, the patriarchal biases inherent in the structures of the nation-state are not willing to reconsider marriage and women’s negotiation of their sexuality out of the hegemonic framework that naturalizes consent. Through a reading of Mridula Garg’s Chittacobra, this article focuses on the discourses around sexuality and intimacy within and outside the institution of marriage, highlighting how the gendered biases endorsed by the family–community–nation continuum negate other modes of identifying relationships and concerns of sexuality that may rest on mediation of lived experience and individual subjectivities. Although first published in 1979, the concerns raised by Garg in Chittacobra significantly illustrate how patriarchal institutions like marriage, even as late as the contemporary context, operate with categories like good and bad women, constantly rendering them fluid and temporal, offering an insight into and interrogating the concomitant structures of the violence inherent in this intimacy.
In Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses, the protagonist Saladin Chamcha, born Salahuddin Chamchawala, undertakes a journey to England in order to escape his Indian identity and refashion himself as a "goodandproper Englishman". In my article I read this journey of Chamcha through the prism of other similar journeys towards England and "Englishness", which recur frequently in the past 200 years of Indian history. By highlighting the common elements that underline these different journeys, I seek to examine the desire to become "English" that they manifest and which forms an important, though critically neglected, facet of Indian middle-class self-fashioning under the colonial impact. The Satanic Verses, written four decades after India formally ceased being a colony of Britain, is central to this project because it is not only one of the most nuanced representations of the middle-class Indian desire for Englishness but also simultaneously an exploration of the sociocultural cul-de-sac to which this desire ultimately leads.
Drawing on recent theories of race from critical race theory, this article examines Michael Ondaatje’s 1976 novel Coming Through Slaughter to assess the involvement, or lack, of technologies of stardom such as photography and radio in the celebrity of the fictionalized jazz musician Charles "Buddy" Bolden. This essay builds on established postcolonial and aesthetic readings, and offers an alternative to the often-held view that Ondaatje is not concerned by race, or the suggestion that he is only preoccupied by art and artists. Its textual focus is an interpretation of the counterfactual (put differently, anachronistic) scene involving a radio and scenes related to the darkroom and the racial significance of its black and white negatives. It argues that these technologies "colour" the rooms in which they are found and thereby complicate ideas of domestic privacy and opposing publicity.
This article examines the literary and sociological significance of Ivan Vladislavić’s "double life" as both editor and writer. With reference to a number of his editorial roles as well as the joint projects he has worked on with writers and visual artists, the article considers how Vladislavić’s work with others spreads symbolic value. Described by one of his clients as the "quiet editor", Vladislavić can be read as a new kind of author; what he terms "creative editing" as a new kind of writing, through which more traditional models of authorship and literary production are thrown into question — less Bourdieu’s "field of literary production" or Casanova’s "world literary space", red in tooth and claw, and more Howard Becker’s "art world": a convivial "network of cooperating people, all of whose work is essential to the final outcome".
In his address at the Madrid Peace Conference, the Head of the Palestinian Delegation, Dr Haidar Abdul-Shafi challenged the persistent myth that has defined Palestinian existence for at least a century by saying: "For too long the Palestinian people have gone unheeded, silenced [...] we have been victimized by the myth of ‘a land without a people’" (Abd Al-Shafi, 1992: 133). Negation coupled with the trauma of the loss of territory has augmented the Palestinian silence. In this article, I look at Mahmoud Darwish’s Journal of an Ordinary Grief (2010) and In the Presence of Absence (2011), drawing on Edward W. Said’s After the Last Sky (1999), in which the authors recount the untold story of their marginalized people to give voice to the silenced through accounts of a lived and observed experience.
This article examines the centrality of hunger and food in Zakes Mda’s Ways of Dying, The Heart of Redness, and The Whale Caller. While Mda’s work has been the subject of incisive readings of the politics of development in contemporary South Africa, attention to his treatment of hunger, specifically, helps to clarify the centrality of gender to Mda’s critical re-envisioning of development policies pursued by late and postapartheid governments.
In the early months of 1980, during revision of a collection that was at that time to be called North and South, Derek Walcott typed a 12 page poem. This poem, I argue, would form the kernel of one that would eventually lend its name — "The Fortunate Traveller" — to the renamed title of the whole collection. Far from the suggestive and sparse, if undeniably political, poem that would be published in that 1981 volume, this early draft reads like a manifesto: both of poetics and of politics. This article takes that unpublished manuscript as a point of departure for thinking through issues of vernacular language and its eschewal, the question of centre and periphery, and Walcott’s avoidance of what would come to be known as "South–South" oriented postcolonial criticism. The article ultimately argues that it is through attention to neoliberalism that Walcott produces a novel approach to these questions of language and space.
In Native Stranger: A Blackamerican’s Journey into the Heart of Africa (1992), Eddy L. Harris explores what it means to be the person he is. What, if anything, connects him to Africa? What is the relation between the person he knows himself to be, and the person others see? Searching for answers to his questions, he finds himself caught between his attempts to remain open to new ways of seeing and understanding the world, on the one hand, and succumbing to the pressures of monolithic narratives about African otherness, race, belonging, roots and the past, on the other hand. This tension gives rise to an ambiguity and a number of contradictions which make the text fold back on itself. His literary project therefore ultimately serves to raise questions not only about his own identity and place in the world, but also about the conditions of writing about the self. Central among the contradictions that permeate the text is a doubling of epistemological perspectives, which can be described as an effect of what W. E. B. Dubois famously termed double-consciousness. While Harris is able to use the contradictions that arise from his writing to explore and represent the complexity of the questions that are foregrounded in his text, he is unable to answer them. His project is in other words a kind of failure, but as this article argues, this failure is the price that Harris pays to access the full complexity of selfhood, beyond political and social narratives about collective identity and how the present is shaped by the past.
Ugandan-born journalist, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown has published two autobiographical works: No Place like Home (1995) and The Settler’s Cookbook: A Memoir of Love, Migration and Food (2008). The former is an account of her childhood and adolescence in Uganda up to the expulsion of the Asian community in 1972. The latter work is a highly unusual combination of autobiography combined with no less than 113 recipes, each of which highlights a specific person, period, or event in her memoir. While No Place Like Home responds to the accepted principles of autobiographical writing, The Settler’s Cookbook defies generic classification and is perhaps the author’s own way of depicting the Asian community, sandwiched between two communities, the Europeans and the Africans. In this article I propose to focus on Alibhai-Brown’s critical stance towards her community in her analysis of the social and political reasons for the negative image of the Asian in East Africa, as reflected in the first part of my title. Despite her frank observations on the endogamic nature of her community, she also pays tribute to the many Asian women who tried to build bridges between communities, a difficult task considering the constraints placed on female agency. As she states in The Settler’s Cookbook, "[t]o be an Asian woman in the 1950s in East Africa must have been both exhilarating and confusing" (2008: 151). Alibhai-Brown’s work, written in the diaspora and with the benefit of hindsight, has unravelled many of the paradoxes of the ambiguous position of the South Asian community in East Africa.
Forests have always had a very special resonance with humans, one which is evidenced in the ways they are depicted in literatures and art throughout human civilization. This study attempts to look at the ways in which two contemporary authors, one Cameroonian and the other Singaporean, depict the forest in their novels. In both Linus Asong’s Crown of Thorns and Meira Chand’s A Different Sky, the nature/culture binary is shown as primal. Both narratives underline the essential inhospitability of the forests for human habitation. However, Asong’s narrative insists on the importance of ritual in negotiating this uninhabitable terrain and how, were the conduct of this ceremonial ritual to fail, the nebulous harmony between humans and this terrain will be irrevocably broken. Chand’s text, set in Second World War Singapore, reveals how, when the cultural terrain is rendered inhospitable to man due to conquest and human brutality, the forest appears as a refuge. However, this is misleading, for the essential disequilibrium between nature and culture is too deep to be overridden or resolved.
This article considers Kamau Brathwaite’s formal articulation of the migrant experience in Rights of Passage (1967). More specifically, it demonstrates how Brathwaite uses patterns of repeated sound — and the way those repetitions work in conjunction with, run counter to, or enter into a complicated relationship with, the metre of a line and stanza — to explore the role of migration in the Caribbean. This rhythmic principle closely mirrors his theory of Caribbean history as "tidalectic" rather than "dialectic", cyclical rather than linear. Thus the rhythmic shifts described in this essay enact, and give poetic shape to, a historical reality specific to the poet’s native region.
This article investigates representations of gender and class inequality in Attia Hosain’s classic novel Sunlight on a Broken Column (1961) and her short story collection Phoenix Fled and Other Stories (1953). It compares her work with that of Shama Futehally, another elite Muslim Indian woman writing in English several decades later. Born 40 years after Attia Hosain, the postcolonial world of Shama Futehally is very different, but the issues she explores in her fiction are remarkably similar: social and economic inequality, exploitation of the poor, and the ambiguous position of women privileged by their social class and disempowered by their gender. Both authors write carefully crafted realist fiction focusing predominantly on the experiences and perspectives of female characters. Shama Futehally’s novel Tara Lane (1993), like Attia Hosain’s Sunlight on a Broken Column, is a coming-of-age novel whose protagonist is a young Muslim woman in an affluent family, coming to terms with the uneasy combination of class privilege, gender disadvantage, and a strong social conscience. Both authors explore the perspectives of working-class Indian women in their short stories, emphasizing their vulnerability to exploitation (including sexual exploitation), as well as the deeply problematic nature of "noblesse oblige". Aware of the interconnections between gender and class inequality, Attia Hosain and Shama Futehally have written powerful fictional works which effectively dramatize not only the complex relationship between gender and social class hierarchies, but also the ways in which all privilege is predicated on inequality.
This article considers protest poetry written between 1961 and 1976. I argue that the Soweto poetry of the 1970s enabled activism that would change Johannesburg’s landscape, facilitating the racial mixing of inner city areas and eroding the segregationist policies that had defined the city from its beginnings. Concomitantly, the paper focuses on representations of the train as a site through which black localities were produced as resistance. Via close readings of poetry by Mbuyiseni Oswald Mtshali, Sipho Sepamla, and Mongane Wally Serote, I show how the train establishes Soweto as a "neighbourhood", while also constructing a white "other" against which its identity is affirmed.
This article uses close textual analysis of Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows in order to reevaluate contemporary theorizations of Islamophobia in relation to global speciesism. By addressing the lacuna in current work engaging with Islamophobia of an understanding of speciesism as a form of discriminatory oppression engrained within the hierarchical divisions of categories of human identity, the article seeks to establish a radically new vegan mode of reading with which to approach literary texts. Exploring the concept of a vegan lens as a mode of reading that seeks to expose the power of language and metaphor in maintaining the absent referent of nonhuman animals, and to challenge the way we understand the construction of human and nonhuman animal identity in relation to Islamophobia, it suggests the variety of ways in which speciesism has been foundational to the assertion of an "us" versus "them" dichotomy. Shamsie’s novel is thus read in order to complicate and multiply the human/nonhuman animal divide apparent within current discussions of postcolonial identity.
Samuel Selvon’s fiction reveals the author’s abiding concern with questions of identity and community and his investment in reconciling the seemingly conflicting subjects of creolization and ethnic identification in Caribbean societies, particularly in his native Trinidad. The pervasive and often violent ethnic conflict between Trinidadians of Indian and African heritage is linked to constructions of the nation in which claims to, as well as exclusion from, Creole identities play an important role. In response, Selvon’s fictional interventions position Indian communities (whether peasant, working- or middle-class) in relation to other ethno-racial groups in ways that construct Trinidadian-ness as an inclusive and dynamic negotiation of self and culture across the various communities represented in the nation. Drawing on Kamau Brathwaite’s seminal concept of creolization as well as the work of other theorists (including Mintz, Bolland, and Munasinghe) of Creole identities and the creolization process, the analysis of "Turning Christian" — a short story excerpted from Selvon’s unfinished novel — provides an account of Selvon’s identity politics in this and his other works of fiction.
This article argues that Mohsin Hamid’s How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia functions as a strategic parody of a self-help book that comments on economic globalization’s failures and in turn illustrates the violence that it produces. Although globalization is detrimental to individuals and relatively inescapable within the world of Hamid’s text, opportunities for reading creatively can counter its detriments. Hence, creative ways of reading provide alternatives to buying into the globalized and ever-globalizing capitalist system — alternatives that Hamid suggests his readers should embrace.
This article offers a comparative reading of the novel and film adaptation of The Reluctant Fundamentalist, looking at the ways these texts represent changing Western public perceptions towards Pakistan and vice-versa along the temporal axis 2001–2007–2012. Both novel and film are informed by the post-9/11 distrust of the Muslim other. Mohsin Hamid’s novel was begun before 9/11 and published seven years later, in 2007; Mira Nair’s film adaptation followed in 2012, with a premiere at the Venice Film Festival (as the opening film) and the Toronto Film Festival. Ostensibly more conciliatory than Hamid’s novel, Nair’s film adaptation attempts to build bridges, stressing the tragedy of cultural suspicion and mistrust that besets the relationships between Pakistan and the US, endeavouring to open and facilitate dialogue. Despite utilizing spaces of ambiguity to expose the dangers of binary thinking, both novel and film ultimately demonstrate that representations are still unable to escape the loop of orientalism and re-orientalism, highlighting the tension of how East and West continue as locked into this circular mode of relational identity.
This article examines J. M. Coetzee’s use of intuitive and interpretive exchanges within and across the tripartite structure of Diary of a Bad Year (2007). It argues that Coetzee rejects strict understandings of the novel genre in favor of a more fluid form, enabling him to explore heteroglot exchanges within the two monologues on each page of Diary of a Bad Year and complicate conventional understandings of Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism. Creating multiple layers that begin with unspoken words, pass through an "othered" interpreter, and arrive at the reader via the novel’s narration, meaning is reconfigured and reconsidered in a way that distances it from the author. The essay further argues that Coetzee’s use of dialogic discourse in Diary of a Bad Year privileges the perspective of the Filipina woman whose voice drives much of the novel’s commentary as she wins the interpretive game Coetzee creates.
Few of the earth’s creatures capture the popular imagination quite like the whale, which has come to serve as an ambivalent figure for both salvation and perdition, whether the moral dramas that unfold around it are seen in religious (eschatological) or scientific (ecological) terms. Whales are at once signifiers for extinction, pointing to the threat of planetary destruction, and signifiers for redemption, in which the ongoing environmentalist campaign for protection doubles as a human struggle to save us from ourselves. This article looks at two contemporary Australian literary texts, Tim Winton’s Shallows (1985) and Chris Pash’s The Last Whale (2008), both of which explore competing extinction scenarios: the extinction of whales; the extinction of the whaling industry; and the extinction of whaling as a way of life. Given the further possibility of human self-extinction, the article argues that a new cetacean imaginary is needed in which whales are seen as complex manifestations of a life that co-exists with humanity, but is neither reducible to human understandings of history nor to the various futures — or non-futures — that human beings might imagine for themselves.
In the early 1980s Zimbabwe witnessed an ethnic cleansing which has been ignored in official state discourses and rendered unspeakable. This "moment of madness" (Ellis, 2006: 40), as Robert Mugabe called it, has come to be referred to as Gukurahundi. The minority Ndebele tribe was persecuted by government-backed forces. This article draws on the theoretical reflections of El Nossery and Hubbell who argue that even though some traumatic experiences may be unspeakable, they are not necessarily unrepresentable. Through an analysis of Yvonne Vera’s The Stone Virgins (2002), Christopher Mlalazi’s novel Running with Mother (2012), several poems by John Eppel as well as Owen Maseko’s paintings , this paper contends that these works of art broach a subject which has been rendered quasi-taboo. It is argued that these works of literature fictionalize, against the grain of the official national narrative, Zimbabwe’s traumatic postcolonial violence in which the national army turned against the country’s citizens under the guise of weeding out "dissidents" in the immediate post-independence period. Moreover, this article contends that fictional and artistic works function in such a way as to keep the memory of civilian victims alive, to heal the national trauma through memorializing it, and to call perpetrators to account by pointing out their culpability.
In this article I attempt to show the Ao-Nagas’ experience of living in the hills under pre-industrial and industrial systems as represented in the poems of Temsula Ao, an award-winning poet from Nagaland, India. Ao represents the pre-industrial cultural landscape as peaceful, simple, and harmonious and uses the devices of idealization, nostalgia, and return and retreat, and represents the industrial cultural landscape as discordant and as constituting a struggle for survival. I argue that the powerful critical tool of post-pastoral reveals the dynamic ecopoetics in Ao’s poems.
This article considers the prevalence and dynamics of colonial paternalism and oedipal typicality as they operate within Shaun Johnson’s novel, The Native Commissioner (2006). Therefore, the article explicates how Freud’s oedipal theory can, read within its historical context, contribute and serve as a tool to elucidate colonial discourses. It also indicates the prevalence of colonial paternalism, not merely through the South African Union government (1910–1961) and apartheid, but as I will argue, within post-apartheid South Africa. Johnson’s novel, which presents a father–son narrative, interfaces with colonial paternalism through the father, George Jameson, and his role as a Native Commissioner. Through an analysis of the ideological assumptions underlying George’s identity as a father (and associated notions of husbandry, gardening, and cultivation), the shared ideological basis of his career as a Native Commissioner and his seemingly neutral role as a patriarch is highlighted. The article then considers how oedipal dynamics structure the novel’s focus on paternalism. Through an analysis of George’s failure as a patriarch and the psychically invested nature of the narrative, we encounter the concomitant anxiety of the son-as-narrator. This anxiety manifests itself in the oedipal mechanics of castration anxiety, rivalry, and identification as originally explicated by Freud. Through these mechanics, the power of the son-as-narrator is emphasized as the father dies and the son identifies with the father’s power. The remainder of the article re-contextualizes these findings within the novel’s reception by South African audiences. The novel’s popularity suggests that colonial paternalism remains a discourse that still has significant purchase for white South Africans even amid calls to identities based on equality and multiculturalism.
Scholars of early Australian drama have over-emphasized the stylistic relationship between Aboriginal characters in early Australian drama and blackface characters in early American drama. Focusing on stylistic connections between early US and Australian theatre potentially overlooks the complex ideological similarities in representations of race on the American and Australian stage. This article provides a close reading of two of Australia’s first plays — David Burn’s "The Bushrangers" and Henry Melville’s "The Bushrangers; or, Norwood Vale" — in order to nuance the critical record exploring the influence of American drama on Australian drama around 1830. Looking beyond formal connections between early US and Australian theatre can reveal an ideology of white spatial control underpinning early representations of Aboriginality and blackness in Australian and American drama.
This article argues that theoretical notions of resistance and agency prove inadequate for considering the complexities of the treatment of Sam Selvon’s Trinidadian characters. Indeed, to proceed from a binary logic of resistance and oppression carries the danger of universalizing those seen as oppressed, and smoothing over important complications in the novel. The Lonely Londoners, written at a pivotal moment of imperial decline, offers a valuable perspective on the experience of colonial immigration to England (and the accompanying complications of race and sexuality it wrought) as well as theories of resistance. By drawing on the circumspection of recent theorists, this article goes beyond the sort of analysis which might impose a binary logic of resistance and oppression on the complex intersections of race and sexuality on display in the novel. More specifically, The Lonely Londoners can be seen as grappling with and critiquing individualism, one of liberalism’s chief values; formally, the novel’s title invokes a group yet the narrative itself spends the majority of its pages detailing the individual lives of its characters, individual lives which stand in tension with their shared group identity and their daily struggles in postwar London. This tension between individualism and community reveals key moments — such as one character’s personification of the colour black — as being symptomatic of a complex field of identity categories that Selvon’s novel engages with. I argue that these categories should indeed be interrogated alongside the novel’s depictions of metropolitan geography; however, I suggest that such an analysis is best served by also treating a key concept that might be taken for granted with the same complexity and diligence: resistance.
Shashi Deshpande’s persistent realism has gone largely unmarked in the scholarship on her work and yet provides an important example of the ways in which the Indian novel in English has continued to rewrite, rework, and yet ultimately keep up a dominant realist capacity. Reading her 1996 novel, A Matter of Time, I argue that Deshpande explicitly rejects a modernist and postcolonial aesthetic in favour of a pedestrian and decidedly conventional realism. In so doing, Deshpande favours the social over the metaphysical as the location of meaning, reanimating realism as an internal communal process of social and cultural inquiry. Reality, the novel seems to offer through its realism, is found not by a search for absent meaning or metaphysical depth, but by recognizing it in its shared social surface and conventional presence.
When Judith Wright travelled to Europe in the "loaded spring" of February 1937, the 22-year-old poet found herself witness to "a break in the consciousness of Europe". This article argues that Wright’s experience of being an outsider in Europe at this crucial historical moment had profound implications for her poetics, in the form of a compound and productive series of displacements. Her peripatetic encounters with European cultures-in-crisis caused Wright to despair of Europe as a source of political and creative renewal, and exposed fault lines in her own cultural orientation. Sundered from her Anglophile cultural inheritance, and able to reflect on home with the distance and imaginative ambivalence of an outsider, Wright invoked Ulysses — that archetypal poetic wanderer — whose experience of archipelagic journeying came to express for her the contingencies and hauntedness of Australia’s palimpsestic identity. This essay positions the shifting perspectives and excursive patterns of Wright’s developing poetics in relation to concepts of outsideness and embodiment, drawing on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and phenomenological philosophies of mind.
This article focuses on British-Sudanese writer Jamal Mahjoub’s novel Travelling with Djinns (2003). I argue that the novel attempts to reconfigure European history and cultural memory through a transnational, exilic perspective by exploring the British-Sudanese protagonist Yasin Zahir and his son Leo’s road trip through contemporary Europe. Traveling enables Yasin to challenge official historical accounts, and envision cultural memory as fluid and dynamic. Not only does he conjure up forgotten memories of European migrants, minorities, and exiles, but he also interlinks these memories so that new solidarities can be formed across lines of ethno-cultural and/or religious division. The novel implies that only by reconfiguring the past and working through their traumatic memories can culturally hybrid individuals such as Yasin defy essentialist notions of European identity and develop a new sense of belonging.
Suttee is a well-discussed and widely researched topic and yet the literary representations of it are not sufficiently probed into. Suttee, if merely understood as the rite of widow burning in India, is one of the cruelest practices of female subjugation. Hence, women’s attempts at articulating their views on such a practice are significant. This becomes more arresting when two women writers come from different (even opposing!) cultures and stand on different rungs of the colonial hierarchy. Moreover, given the flexibility of fiction as a mode of expression, it can arguably best be used as a powerful tool for one’s own propaganda. Several questions emerge. How does each writer see and show suttee? How does an awareness of their respective status in an imperialist world shape their creative imagination? What kind of politics of representation is involved in their writings in face of the charged politics surrounding the topic of suttee in a colonial world? In depicting this rite, how and why does each bring in the argument of sainthood that is inevitably related with any suttee-death? Endeavoring to find answers to these questions, I will examine one work of fiction each by two contemporaneous women writers, one British (Flora Annie Steel) and one Indian writer (Cornelia Sorabji), to see how the concept of ‘suttee’ has been used in each case.
This article considers the intersection of ethics, responsibility, and literature through readings of Aminatta Forna’s The Memory of Love and Dave Eggers’ What Is the What. Examining the ways in which each novel situates its staging of African conflict against the a priori image of Africa, the article focuses on the ways in which each novel demands a readerly engagement based on alterity. Rather than viewing the text as a passive repository of ethical lessons, the article suggests that by leveraging narrative unreliability both novels create a vision of literature as the active site of ethical engagement and conflict.
Since the end of apartheid and South Africa’s first democratic elections in 1994, efforts at reconciliation have been dramatic, most notably in the form of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), as well as deeply incomplete. In response, a great deal of post-transitional South African literature and criticism has taken up the question of how to effect reconciliation, particularly outside institutional forums like the TRC. A prominent strand of South African literary studies insists that reconciliation rests on a form of ethical responsibility in which the individual is displaced from him- or herself in order to enact hospitality toward others. This view draws on a Levinasian conception of ethics whereby responsibility entails radical vulnerability with no assurance of reciprocation. Yet a growing corpus of fiction complicates this vision of reconciliation, recognizing that for many South Africans, the violations of apartheid gave rise to what Annie Coombes refers to as a "dissolution of [the] self", and any effort at building a more inclusive society must redress that dissolution. This article argues that Jo-Anne Richards’ My Brother’s Book (2008) and Achmat Dangor’s Bitter Fruit (2001) present reconciliation as a product of two opposing endeavours. On the one hand, it involves the willingness to give up a sense of self in taking on responsibilities for others. On the other hand, it requires reclaiming a sense of self by asserting one’s right to make affiliative choices and actively construct new spaces of belonging.
This article examines the post-imperial migration and racial anxieties that underwrite fantasies of national security in postwar British fiction. Focusing on the autocratic educational institutions featured in Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005), the article identifies the school as a fraught ideological site wherein conceptions of national insularity collide with the complex pressures of British globalization. Spark’s Marcia Blaine School and Ishiguro’s Hailsham masquerade as microcosms of a homogeneous British nation only through a rigorous process of racial redaction. By adapting Joseph Slaughter’s concept of the "vanishing point", the article traces two nonwhite immigrant characters whose brief, silent appearances unsettle the novels’ optics of power, thereby intimating a vast history of racial violence disavowed in the name of bodily, cultural, and political security. Connecting the novels’ vanishing acts to the discursive lacunae perpetuated in the war on terror, the article also considers the imperial residues that continue to shape the contemporary security state.
What are the politics of the genre of academic writing, and its enabling networks? This genre of writing and those networks shape the form and substance of our writing within an African research context. I examine the dominant template of academic writing style, which operates across many fields of scholarly endeavour. It enables different sorts of knowledge to be accepted as true, or to be excluded. What and how to write academically have been filtered through the colonial library, making it urgent to surface this template and its operationalizing networks of academic writers. The links between the language of academic writing, the colonial past, the field of African Studies, and networks of academics who appoint each other to posts and review each other’s submissions to journals, is usually silent. They became deafening in the aftermath of what became known as the Philip Curtin debacle. This article is situated at the 20-year anniversary of the notorious Philip Curtin intervention in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Curtin suggested that academic jobs were being reserved for African American or African candidates and that the teaching of African Studies disciplines was being "ghettoize". It is an important moment to wonder whether, 20 years down the line, the issues his intervention brought to bear — of power, politics, networks, and colliding knowledge highways within African Studies broadly defined — are still relevant. Finally, alternative forms and styles of academic writing, which may be more fit for purpose, are proposed and I touch on some of these possibilities towards the end of this paper. They include the role of fiction in academic writing; the possibility of the inclusion of the world of the gods and spirits; an interrogation of linear time and the nature of experiential knowledge in relation to academic knowledge.
Since the beginning of his career, J. M. Coetzee’s writing has occupied an uneasy threshold between the literary ideals of European modernism, with its emphasis on aesthetic autonomy, and the demands of socio-historical accountability that derives from his background as a South African novelist. This article revisits one of Coetzee’s novels in which these tensions come to the fore most explicitly, namely Age of Iron, to argue that it is precisely from the generative friction that arises between these two opposing fields that his writing draws its singularly affective force. I begin by considering the agonistic relationship between transcendent ideals and socio-material demands that marks Coetzee’s account of the classic ("What is a Classic?: A Lecture"), describing it as a defining feature of his literary sensibility. The article then moves on to a reading of Age of Iron that focuses on the protagonist Mrs Curren’s efforts, in the midst of the violent political struggle in apartheid South Africa, to speak in her own voice. My thoughts conclude with the suggestion that Coetzee’s perennial staging of the conflict between a desire for autonomous expression and a socio-historical milieu that is indifferent to that desire can be read as an imaginative form of resistance, in the field of literary expression, to both the pressures of historical determinism and the dangers of postmodern insularity.
This article argues that the protagonist in Hage’s Cockroach (2008) introjects the vermin as a representation of internalized antagonism. As the unnamed narrator struggles in an inhospitable city, he internalizes this unflinching feeling of estrangement through introjection. This process reveals how the loss of home entails the state of a vagabond who resists normalization and seeks the unruly life of the underground. The way the city of Montréal is portrayed as notorious for its indifference towards newcomers aggravates the condition of the divided self in exile, which necessitates the intrusion of the monstrous. In effect, not only does introjecting the cockroach signify a menacing presence but also suggests a decolonizing act of insubordination against a city whose hegemonic order, like its freezing weather, looms large.
Self-help books sell the myth of self-determinism, empowerment and the eternal hope of reinvention, reasons no doubt for their enormous popularity. In this article, I examine Pakistani-born Mohsin Hamid’s latest novel, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (2013) which, with its catchy, hyperbolic title signalling its masquerade as a self-help book, openly and ironically advertises itself as a satire. The object of the novel’s satire is the capitalist, neoliberal notion of the self that is predicated on an overweening sense of control and complete agency. Neoliberal subjectivity endorses the care and transformation of the self in order to take best advantage of a market economy, since the means to achieving material affluence is seen simply as a matter of individual choice and personal will. In the novel, Hamid brings into productive tension the conventions and assumptions of the self-help genre with those of the more traditional realist novel in order to interrogate not just the neoliberal self but the very ways in which the self is narrated and constructed. Engaging in particular with the affordances of technology in his novel as a thematic, Hamid appropriates the vantage points and perspectival positions made possible by modern technology to undermine the solipsistic self of the self-help book. He further exploits the narrative energies of the novel form to foreground a sense of historical contingency to lay bare various modes of self-constitution and self-narration. Through his use of metatextual narrative strategies, Hamid raises fundamental questions about the genre of the novel itself and the ways in which it is intimately invested in the insinuation of the development of a self. These questions, I argue, ultimately underline his affirmation of the novel’s important place and the ethical role it can play at this contemporary moment of late and global capitalism.
Canadian writer Margaret Atwood has spent years thinking and writing about the existential threat humanity now confronts in an era of an exponential growth in the global human population, accelerating environmental and habitat destruction, mass extinctions of plant and animal species, and ever-worsening ecological degradation. Like her 2003 novel Oryx and Crake, which Atwood describes as a "joke-filled romp through the end of the human race", her 2009 novel The Year of the Flood and her 2013 novel MaddAddam are admonitory satires. In MaddAddam, Atwood moves forward from The Year of the Flood and Oryx and Crake as she retells and reconsiders her dystopian eco-apocalyptic account of what leads up to and what follows mass human extinction. In her account of the apocalyptic and millennial environmentalism of Crake and the God’s Gardeners, Atwood draws on the philosophy of deep ecology, and she also invokes the type of radical environmentalism embraced by activist green movements like Earth First!. Intent on environmental consciousness-raising, Atwood offers a horrific and darkly satiric account of the gruesome final days of humanity in the twenty-first century. By wryly suggesting that the remedy to humanity’s ills lies not only in interspecies cooperation but also in interspecies breeding, Atwood engages her readers in an unsettling thought experiment as Crake’s genetically modified hominoids, which are presented in Oryx and Crake as a kind of mad scientist joke, become the best hope for the genetic survival of some vestige of homo sapiens in the future Craker–human hybrid.
This article examines the use of bureaucratic narrative — that which poses the subject as an administrative subject and emphasizes the depersonalized and routinized repetition of formulaic rhetoric — in Never Let Me Go (2005) and its suggestion that the language of regulation and job requirements pervasively shapes the seeming impossibility of a critical stance towards a system that is patently and determinedly cruel. By reframing Kathy’s and Tommy’s dystopian–bureaucratic narrative as a romance pushing against the boundaries of bureaucracy and by situating the reader as a sympathizing character within the text, the novel makes visible the contours of neoliberal rationalities. I argue that Never Let Me Go illustrates that the bureaucratic state is experienced as an array of narratives that structure interpersonal interactions, not just as a set of material and spatial practices. This means considering bureaucracy as an interpretative frame, not just material apparatuses or structures of management.
The paradigmatic antagonistic relationship between the Nigerian poet and the despot in his guise as a military ruler has often been examined in terms of a hegemonic contestation of power between unequal rivals. The military state’s typical response to the poet’s "truth" with the display of excessive might, often involving the emblematic battering of the poet’s tongue by the imposition of silence even in its eternal form of death, entrenches the notion of a powerful antagonist pitted against a weak opponent who nonetheless incarnates the spirit of the masses. A close reading of anti-military Nigerian poetry, however, underscores that the situation was replete with paradoxes: the inability of power to ignore apparent powerlessness; the ultimate triumph of powerlessness over power; and the fascinating replication in the counter-discourse of the (discursive) strategies of the dominant hegemony it battles against. This study highlights these trends in contemporary Nigerian poetry inspired by military despotism by paying particular attention to the work of the "third generation" of Nigerian poets.
Strictly speaking, annotations do not belong to the discipline of bibliography, that is, if we follow its reading by three of the masters of the discipline: Ronald B. McKerrow, W. W. Greg and Fredson Bowers. Bibliography, in their definitions, is a scientific activity aimed at the construction of text as a "material" object. It has guiding principles that govern the quest for the "definitive" text where words are primarily iconic or indexical signs. To gloss words and sentences in support of a variant reading is a necessary evil, not something which is part of its formal principles. If textual bibliography were to accommodate some notion of annotations, as "bibliograhie de l’érudit", then we need to make a case for annotation as an essential feature of the bibliographer’s exercise. This essay declares the legitimacy of annotation because it establishes the value of words well beyond the iconic or the indexical (the hitherto definition of the bibliographer’s object of reading). To explore this the article examines the use, in particular, of "numerology" in Salman Rushdie, annotates at length four numbers, and makes a case for their value in the organizational and thematic patterns of his novels. It is argued that numbers are also part of Rushdie’s interest in "affects" insofar as for Rushdie numbers are prior to cognition, they pre-exist consciousness and are not so much created as discovered. They also enter into the affective domain of being and are signs of the body’s visceral intensities as well as an index of its nonvolitional proclivities. In making the annotations the essay also explores the importance of intercultural annotations by giving the example of pre-colonial Indian scholarship.
A huge volume of literature has been written about Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses and the fatwa issued in response to it by the Ayatollah Khomeini. Whilst much literary criticism has recommended that we should avoid reading the text and the furore of "the Rushdie affair" along the harmful binary lines of Eastern tyranny and Western freedom, this article addresses this rhetoric of cultural difference directly. Arguing that an unhistorical idea of the Enlightenment is becoming increasingly central to the way that Rushdie and others explain what they perceive as the gulf between "Islam" and "the West", and analysing Rushdie’s recent tendency to construct himself as "the new Voltaire", this study crosses centuries and disciplines to shed new light on the ways in which the discursive figure of the Islamic despot is central to the cultural critiques of both authors.
This article will argue that Isaac Fadoyebo’s memoir A Stroke of Unbelievable Luck deserves recognition as a work of life-writing and a unique literary account of an African soldier’s military service in Nigeria, Sierra Lone, India, and Burma. While previous discussions of Fadoyebo’s memoir have approached it either as historical source material or as a documentary proof of an otherwise lost history, this article will demonstrate that Fadoyebo’s text must also be understood, in its own right, as a complex narrative. Critically, it will show how privileging historical experience in Fadoyebo’s text can marginalize its other qualities. In particular, it will draw attention to the spiritual, mystical, and philosophical dimensions of the memoir, and the discursive subjectivity associated with it. It will argue that this more abstract material is pivotal to our understanding of historical experience in the memoir. In doing so, it will demonstrate that Fadoyebo’s memoir actively situates and archives experience by writing, both helping the reader to interpret this experience, and by allowing the reader to invest affectively in it.
In this article we discuss how places of belonging are imagined in relatively recent white Zimbabwean narratives dealing with issues of land, landscape, and belonging. Two white Zimbabwean narratives, Peter Rimmer’s Cry of the Fish Eagle (1993) and Douglas Rogers’ The Last Resort (2009), are read for the ways in which the paradoxically imagined spaces of the "bush" and the "farm" can be seen to enable, in alternate forms, exigent accommodations with place under different historical and political circumstances. In Cry of the Fish Eagle, which preceded Zimbabwe’s land reform process of the 2000s, "bush" is a privileged category by virtue of its supra-national allowance of a claim to white belonging in "Africa" at large. In The Last Resort, on the other hand, the "bush" is a derelict wilderness rescued by the ingenuity of white subjects, who create "farms" of splendid regenerative capacity in an effort to purchase belonging in the Zimbabwean nation-state.
This article examines the political satire of Nova Scotian writer and politician Thomas Chandler Haliburton through the lens of early nineteenth-century transatlantic debates over reform and the best form of government. Haliburton’s Sam Slick sketches, featuring a charismatic Yankee commenting on global political affairs, were immensely popular at the time, being published and read in Britain, Canada, and the US. The following pages argue that Haliburton’s portrayal of American culture is informed by his negative views on popular democracy and on its relationship with the nascent industrial capitalism transforming North America. Haliburton’s political satire was meant to persuade colonial readers that the introduction of American-style elective institutions in Nova Scotia had the potential to radically alter British North American culture, and push the colonies out of the orbit of the Empire.
Sylvia Ashton-Warner’s fiction achieved considerable international success, particularly her novels Spinster (1958) and Incense to Idols (1960), which both reached Time magazine’s best books list. This achievement meant that Ashton-Warner was able to resign from teaching and focus on being a fulltime writer and she was eventually awarded an MBE in 1982. Ashton-Warner’s success in literature was matched by her work in education and over the past 50 years there has been a significant body of criticism from scholars in that field analysing her non-fiction as well as her novels. Ashton-Warner’s significance as a writer makes her continuing neglect by literary critics in her homeland of New Zealand all the more curious. This article argues that Ashton-Warner’s novels are neglected in New Zealand literary culture largely because they were published at a time when local criticism privileged a mode of masculinist realism and that their recuperation by feminist scholars keen to challenge the restricted canon has been problematized by their author’s divisive personality, as well as by the conventional conclusions of her novels that tend to involve a level of containment. By taking a feminist approach to two of Ashton-Warner’s most popular novels — Spinster and Incense to Idols — this article aims to demonstrate how they utilize, extend, and subvert modes of writing associated with popular female fiction in order to explore the contradictions of prevailing versions of mid-twentieth-century femininity.
This article uses readings of the abject body and writing as supplement in Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, The Icarus Girl (2005) to argue against a critical trend that reads the postcolonial Bildungsroman as promising a positively transformed postcolonial identity. Through our reading of Oyeyemi’s novel, we suggest that locating the debates and tropes conventionally mobilized within postcolonial gothic in the former colonial centre complicates subject formations and constructions of alterity. The Icarus Girl weaves together a Western literary tradition of gothic with the postcolonial Bildungsroman and we suggest that the interaction of these forms produces a reading focused on the abject, both in terms of physical abjection mapped onto bodies and places, and in the way writing functions as abject supplement. When bodies, borders, and writing disintegrate, the reading of the novel becomes a difficult process, one not easily co-opted into a critical discourse that tends to value a psycho-symbolic reading of the postcolonial gothic Bildungsroman and to promise a positively transformed postcolonial identity. Accordingly, we argue that The Icarus Girl is unable to find comforting resolutions, disrupt oppositional structures, and create a utopian hybrid space or to bring about a unified sense of self, meaning that it resists a redemptive or cathartic ending. We draw upon Kristeva’s theories of the abject and Derrida’s notion of the supplement in order to establish how Oyeyemi’s novel resists the construction of a stable identity through its emphasis upon expulsion and disintegration. Unlike the majority of criticism on postcolonial gothic, which focuses on texts emanating from formerly colonized countries, this article considers what happens to postcolonial gothic when it is written within and about the former colonial centre. In The Icarus Girl the repercussions of the colonial period are experienced in the present day through experiences of racism, dislocation, and alienation within Britain.
This article addresses the representation of London in Ishtiyaq Shukri’s The Silent Minaret (2005), tackling in particular three aspects of the portrayal of urban space: the house or home, the neighbourhood, and travel within the metropolis. Through these features of the text, an analysis of the relationship between multicultural or cosmopolite urban communities and the spaces they inhabit is undertaken.
Time in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children is characterized by a cacophony of representational forms that the narrator Saleem uses with and against each other, such as cyclical time, timelessness, and revisionary linear historical time. Existing analyses of the novel’s representations of time have generally concluded that one or another of the competing temporal frameworks in the novel is primary and that Rushdie and Saleem ultimately discard or subordinate the others. On the contrary, the novel denies a single coherent temporal structure and instead focuses on productively engaging the diversity of time in keeping with Paul Ricoeur’s theory of aporetic time. Ricoeur theorizes that every framework of representing time includes aporias, blind spots it can’t satisfactorily address, and he argues that we must explore these tensions in representations of time — a task for which narrative is uniquely helpful. Investigating aporetic time in Midnight’s Children develops our understanding of Ricoeur by providing a representation of aporetic time to supplement and challenge Ricoeur’s theoretical model (and Homi K. Bhabha’s thoughts on narrating the nation). Midnight’s Children’s narratorial ambivalence and multivalence with regard to temporal frameworks is closely tied to the novel’s major thematic concerns: constructing an understanding of oneself, one’s nation, and history in the face of conflicting experiences and imperfect narratives of significant and traumatic personal and historical events. Applying Rushdie and Ricoeur to each other productively develops our understanding of how complex, contradictory narrative representations of time and of identities can provide a way forward for individuals and nations between the twin dangers of tyrannical narrative orthodoxy and impotent relativism.
This essay meditates on the work of three Indian poet-translators: Toru Dutt, A.K. Ramanujan, and Arun Kolatkar. It explores whether these three share a way of translating, or at least a sensibility. Does the global stride of their work make them exemplars of "world literature", or is theirs an "Indian" view; or both?
Taken to be the essential feature of all literature, irony is actually quite problematic. Inseparable from the invention of the West by way of the Oriental society of Greece (above all, in Plato), irony enters the modern literary scene at the confluence of forms of labour, vestigial notions of medieval craft, an ethics of dissimulation, and an attack on dialectical thought. Indeed, there is a largely neglected tradition of hostility towards irony within dialectical thought, which leads to an aesthetic outlook on the world that, for a variety of historical reasons, has been most prominent in the global periphery. Irony is understood here as much more than a literary figure — as being, rather, a "standpoint" or position. It is impossible to decouple our largely uncritical reception of irony from the triumph of literary modernism, and so any attempt (as in this article) to question forms of "peripheral modernism" requires a critical revision of our welcome to irony itself, which is not essential to literature, and has in fact colonized it.
In What is World Literature? (2003) and other influential works David Damrosch suggests repeatedly that world literature "gains in translation". This article begins by showing that Damrosch gives no convincing account of what this phrase means. It then develops a wider argument that, even if translations may be accomplished literary works in their own right, the very notion of literature — or at least, one important notion of literature — is associated with untranslatability, or what is lost in translation. The losses, it is argued, may be felt or imagined in various dimensions, and reach into the institutional foundations of the study of literature and of foreign languages.
Literary description has traditionally been underrated by the Anglo-American academy; also by Indian critics with fixed ideas about what poems in English about their country should be like. ("Description", in this context, isn’t simply a stylistic term — it relates to how a style influenced by Anglo-American poetics might collide with traditional cultures.) I find in Arun Kolatkar’s descriptive verse about the temple town of Jejuri and urban Mumbai a type of exact factuality with aspirations toward something more: a nuanced understanding of India and its history. His tropes of sight affirm the importance of accurate reportage while also promulgating an unillusioned view of his nation’s colonial past. Documenting the lives of the poor and those caught between a superstitious and a rational understanding of the world, Kolatkar alludes to the larger processes of cultural and technological reorganization which condition their existence — while stressing that individuals are more than the product of their surroundings. His verse demands for its appreciation a true poetics of world literature, which would understand the tiniest cells of stylistic texture as historically expressive. This article therefore features several close readings of individual poems in which effects of rhyme, assonance, syntax, and tone outline a self-critical intelligence unique to Kolatkar’s poems in English. Which start, mischievously, to interpret themselves — critical analysis should not jettison the playfulness which cannot quite disguise the poet’s longing, when he writes in this language, for a greater intimacy with the people and places he describes.
This essay examines the epistolary craft of Monica Ali’s bestselling first novel, Brick Lane (2003), drawing on tools offered by Pierre Bourdieu’s model of the literary field. On one hand, the novel’s relation with its source texts, and attempt to forge an adequate literary material for banglabhashi (Bengali speaking) and oral narratives, signals a rejection of economic profit and pursuit of symbolic capital. On the other, Ali faces the overwhelming market demand for an accessible, marketable and saleable ‘big book’ for the English-language reader. The lack of fit between the spontaneous spoken language of the material that Ali attempts to present and the epistolary conventions that she uses, is subordinated to the need to conform with market requirements, masking what is a more challenging literary work than critics have allowed for. The ambition to present non-written and non-anglophone elements through English-language epistolarity therefore remains latent in the novel, but is ultimately traduced to the logic of the field of anglophone trade-publishing.
Many of the most ambitious and important South African novels of the past fifty years have been written in Afrikaans, but in order to reach a global audience the authors have had to turn to translators. Focusing on Marlene van Niekerk’s Triomf and Agaat, this article examines the challenges that this fiction, and the particular character and social status of different varieties of Afrikaans, present to the translator, and discusses the significance of the differences between versions addressed to an English-speaking South African readership and versions addressed to a global readership.
Over the last fifteen years scholarship on postcolonial literatures has increasingly turned to readers as the focus of empirical study. While such research has helped make visible the agency of postcolonial readers in global literary exchanges, it has tended to overlook the many ways in which postcolonial subjects’ encounters with texts can exceed or circumvent literal reading. The Asian-African-Canadian novelist M.G. Vassanji has been particularly attuned to the physicality of paper, most definitively in two of his novels set in East Africa, The Gunny Sack (1989) and The Book of Secrets (1994). In this article I analyse how Vassanji’s characters, both literate and illiterate, engage paper’s physical properties to ground their everyday practices of memory, valuation, and interpretation. By attending to paper’s materiality in Vassanji’s work postcolonial studies can situate its own reading practices in the context of material ways of doing things with texts.
From the renovation of Rose Hall plantation to the investigation of apparitions on Ghost Hunters International, the legend of eighteenth-century plantation owner Annie Palmer continues to thrive. Despite evidence that the legend is thoroughly fabricated, accounts perpetuate a reading of Palmer as Jamaica’s "white witch". This essay examines the four written versions of the legend– James Castello’s 1868 pamphlet, H. G. de Lisser’s novel (1929), Harold Underhill’s 1968 text, and Mike Henry’s 2006 adaptation. Through a focus on the manipulation of violence, sexuality, and obeah I point to the legend of Palmer as a symbol of resistance and subversion. In doing so, I call for an understanding of Annie as an early figure of female agency.
The Nature of Blood (1997) is perhaps the most formally experimental novel Caryl Phillips has yet produced, and features an innovative combination of literary devices such as polyphony, defamiliarization, and intertextuality. In this essay, I will argue that an overlooked effect of these techniques is the provocation of a self-reflexive, historically conscious and critical view of human subjectivity that chimes with what Rebecca Walkowitz (2006: 2) calls a "critical cosmopolitan vision". This is a way of seeing that is suspicious of the prevailing modes of interpretation and understanding that attend a given historical context, and which attempts to look beyond fixed notions of identity and belonging.
This article offers a detailed exploration and comparative reading of two poems published nearly thirty years apart: John Agard’s "Listen Mr Oxford Don" (1985), and Daljit Nagra’s "Kabba Questions the Ontology of Representation, the Catch-22 for ‘Black’ Writers..." (2007). The former poem is well-known, being regarded by a range of scholars as the acme of (and often, shorthand for) self-reflexively dialogic black British voice poetry, as it emerged in the 1980s, that plays off the friction between writing and speech. The latter is a complex and satirical take on poetic convention and canonicity — including the legacies of 1980s black British poetry — that exploits a tension between written poetic convention and artifice on the one hand, and the idea of the voiced poem as conveying "presence" or "authenticity" on the other. Both poems direct us towards a structuring paradox in which the embodied immediacy of human voice is mediated through the graphic conventions of written poetry. Reading these poems together, the essay considers on the one hand, how ideas about poetic form, language, and voice emerge out of particular historical junctures; and on the other, how such attentiveness to context can help us to develop techniques of a postcolonial "close reading", eschewing totalizing formulae or summative evaluations of linguistic dissidence.
Recent migration to Europe has become the focus of some interesting fiction produced in the last decade. One such narrative is On Black Sisters’ Street (2009) by Nigerian-born Belgian writer Chika Unigwe, which deals with the experiences of undocumented African immigrants in the Flemish city of Antwerp who must survive as sex workers in order to pay the human trafficking networks that brought them to Europe. However, the novel does not only stand as a testimony of a sad social reality but also as an exploration of urban space, urban movement, and subjectivity in contemporary European cities. This article examines the intersections between the protagonists’ use of urban space, their social status as prostitutes, and the emotions circulating about them in the city, since they will lead to relevant insights about contemporary urban movement and its literary representation.
A Latin Caribbean (forced) migration experience is at the centre of Angie Cruz’s 2005 novel, Let It Rain Coffee, which depicts the life and history of the Colón family in three different time periods (the early 1920s, the 1960s, and the 1990s) in the Dominican Republic as well as in New York City. This article focuses on the early 1990s immigrant experience of Esperanza Colón, whose addiction to the television show Dallas becomes illustrative of a cultural identity formed by the ideal of the American Dream and mass culture. Although Esperanza fails to live up to the impossible standards she has set herself, the novel’s presentation of failure as a creative activity (as envisioned by Halberstam, 2011) challenges the hegemony of capitalism and globalization. Instead of reading the novel in terms of the two extremes of success or failure which typically characterize migrant narratives (Pearce, 2010), we focus on Esperanza’s "middle ranges of agency" (Sedgwick, 2003: 13) to show how the commonplace terms in which migration is often presented fail to capture the nuances of immigrant experience at odds with the promise of the metropolis as negotiated by Cruz in the novel.
Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990) and Luka and the Fire of Life (2010) are telling instances of his hybridization of Eastern and Western narrative and aesthetic traditions. However, scholarly attention paid, perhaps rightfully, by the overlapping discourses of postcolonialism and postmodernism to the themes of Rushdie’s hybridity and cosmopolitanism has led to only a token acknowledgement of his indigenous influences. Particularly, the Islamic storytelling tradition of the dastan has been completely overlooked. While acknowledging that many narrative traditions of the West and the East, such as fairy tales, fantasies, boys’ adventure stories, as well as One Thousand and One Nights, Kathasaritsagar, Panchatantra, mythography, and so on, intersect in Rushdie’s children’s stories, this article seeks to foreground Rushdie’s embeddedness in the Indo-Islamic visual, narrative, and performative cultural heritage through tracing the dastan elements in Haroun and Luka.
This article encounters two Tasmanian novels, Richard Flanagan’s Death of a River Guide (1994) and Carmel Bird’s Cape Grimm (2004). The novels each contain two soundscapes: one detailing the hidden histories of violence and genocide at the frontier meeting of Aboriginal people and colonialists in the 1820s, and a second, set in a contemporary timeframe, that echoes these past traumas within the lives of characters facing extinction of their own. Deploying a close listening approach in the analysis of these soundscapes, the essay charts the space of the island in the novels, arguing that the resonance between the soundscapes past and present constitutes a transhistorical continuum of sound that links the colonial to the present. While there are both similarities and differences between the soundscapes in Flanagan and Bird, in the novels the sonic continuum reconstructs colonial history and remaps the space of the island. The discussion is positioned in relation to discourses of sound in Australian gothic literature, haunting, and theories of space.
This article seeks to place the autobiographical works of the maverick intellectual Nirad C. Chaudhuri within the context of twentieth-century Indian national autobiographies. It begins by tracing the trajectory of exile and homecoming that forms an integral part of the structural convention of this genre. It explores the conventional notions of "Indianness" and "West", and village and city that act as opposite poles in the national autobiographies, orienting the journey of exile and return. The article then goes on to show how Chaudhuri’s works deconstruct the India/West and village/city binaries by reversing the conventional spatial direction of the life’s journey while paradoxically conforming to the same pattern of exile and homecoming.
This article examines the writings of the anthropologist Sylvia Leith-Ross, who worked and travelled in Nigeria from the early 1900s to the 1960s. Her key anthropological study, African Women: A Study of the Ibo of Nigeria (1939) has been analysed by anthropologists and scholars of white women’s colonial history. However, no one has yet attempted to investigate her other writings, such as her field memoirs, African Conversation Piece (1944) and Beyond the Niger (1951). Critics who have discussed African Women have tended to compare Leith-Ross’s ethnography to contemporary studies and have criticized her imperialist tone. While I do not dispute that her writings are deeply problematic, this article analyses Leith-Ross’s work from a different perspective; one which attends to the stylistics of her writing. Drawing on previous work on the "literary" aspects of ethnographic writing by Clifford and Marcus et al., I illustrate the ways in which Leith-Ross blurs the boundaries between autobiography, travel writing, and ethnography in an attempt to formulate a more reflexive style of ethnography. By doing so, I argue that she challenged traditional anthropological methods and pushed the boundaries of convention. However, Leith-Ross’s later texts are imbued with a sense of "imperialist nostalgia" as she begins to lament the modernizing effects of colonialism and the move towards independence in Nigeria. The progressive potential of the challenges she makes to traditional anthropological methodologies is blunted by this shift. Nevertheless, this article calls for a reappraisal of Leith-Ross’s writings and suggests that her work reveals much about the developments that were occurring in anthropology in the 1930s and 1940s, as well as the shifting relationship between Nigeria and Britain at a pivotal moment in colonial history.
David Ballantyne’s novel The Cunninghams (1948) was deemed upon publication to be a "masterly study of working-class family life in a New Zealand town" and it was praised for its "utmost fidelity" to the "minutiae of small-town life". The novel’s grim tone, Depression-era setting, local referent and critical realism did much to establish Ballantyne as an author with "social interests", as did his own assertion that a writer is "an investigator of human existence" who "must try to understand the way in which average people live out their time". Ballantyne was one of several new writers deemed to be the "sons" of Frank Sargeson, capable of developing the line of realism established by the latter’s short stories that appeared between 1935 and 1945. Yet, in spite of his early promise, Ballantyne’s career as a fiction writer failed to take off, partly because of a long period of alcoholism, and partly because of the direction he took in his subsequent fiction. If his first novel answered literary nationalism’s need for an authentic depiction of local life, then Sydney Bridge Upside Down (1968), with its gestures towards the non-realist modes of fairy tale and gothic, was almost guaranteed to remain outside the body of writing understood to constitute "New Zealand literature". Yet, by combining aspects of realist with non-realist modes, the novel creates a mythologized version of New Zealand society in which threats associated with sexuality take on nightmarish, almost elemental forms that are far more effective in terms of representing the ways in which New Zealand society can damage the individual than social realism.
Michael Ondaatje’s novel Divisadero (2007) can be considered a global novel — although it resists certain aspects of globalization — not only because it stages a variety of geographies, from Nevada and California to Southern France, but also because it portrays orphans, displaced subjects, gypsies, all characterized by a nomadic existence and ideology. In particular, Anna, the American protagonist, retraces the biography of a French writer, Lucien Segura, which causes her eventually to embody and write through Colette, the well-known French feminist writer. It is particularly the genre of the fictional biography that translates the death of the author (Segura) into an autobiography (Anna’s own life story) through which Colette’s own autobiographical path surfaces as a ghostly ancestor. The international scenario also encompasses the Second World War as well as the Gulf Wars and the novel balances the right to oblivion with the importance of memory to retrieve the past. This essay is aimed at illustrating how nomadism and cosmopolitanism remain central paradigms in Ondaatje’s global narrative and how they become embedded in the genre of the fictional biography.
This article discusses Caryl Phillips’ novel, A Distant Shore (2004), in the light of recent work by John McLeod and Bill Ashcroft’s notion of the transnation to describe a revised sense of the British nation within which new resemblances gesture towards the potential for a post-racial society. These ideas will be applied to Phillips’ sense of himself as occupying an ontological mid-Atlantic location in relation to recurring images and concerns to be found in his collected essays in A New World Order (2001) and Colour Me English (2011). The article does not argue that Phillips’ novel depicts the success of a post-racial transformation, but rather, one that shows the individual struggles through which such transformation may be possible.
Responding to critiques of the status quo in transnational literary studies, this essay models an alternative approach, particularly for the field of African–Asian studies. The transnational turn in literary studies has often been less global than we might desire: postcolonial texts are frequently read in terms of predetermined features or ideologies, and comparative studies often posit the USA as their locus for comparison. Following Ato Quayson’s call for attention to the "ex-centric" in postcolonial and transnational literature, this essay demonstrates how the figures of gui and Eshu emerge as interpretative keys in two recent African–Asian works, by Ken Kamoche and Biyi Bandele. The essay argues that these figures point up the complexities inherent in transnational relations, which the texts explore. The essay invites us to read with greater alertness to the "ex-centric" in transnational texts in order to unpack their full implications.
Two novels from the early 2000s set key scenes at the Empire Exhibition in London in 1924: Hari Kunzru’s The Impressionist (2002) and Andrea Levy’s Small Island (2004). In both novels, the Exhibition is clearly intended to enshrine in the collective memory of British citizens a particular, museum-like vision of Britain’s history with its colonies. In part, the imperial propaganda generated by the exhibition is born out of England’s interwar anxiety about the looming breakup of its empire. It is ironic then that in both cases, the exhibits seem to evoke a very different reaction in the characters who encounter them: the presence of real people — specifically real Africans — undermines the tightly ordered fixity of the museum display. Instead it becomes another kind of memory site: messy and unpredictable, with the constant potential to expose the superficiality of colonial stereotypes and bear witness to more jagged and less flattering histories. Indeed, the same anxieties that create the need for stable memories of the past also lead to cracks in the structures of colonial domination, giving characters space to recreate their identities and their collective memories.
Betty Roland (1903–1996) is perhaps best known as a career dramatist for stage and radio in Australia and the United Kingdom. But Roland was also a prolific contributor to a print-culture that encompassed the influences of other countries in which she travelled, worked, and lived. These included (Stalinist) Russia in the 1930s, England in the 1950s, and Greece in the 1960s. In fact, there are few zones of literature into which the Australian-born Roland did not venture between the late 1920s and 1990. Her body of work comprises, for example, three volumes of autobiography, a travel memoir, four children’s books, four romance novels, newspaper and magazine articles, as well as film and comic book scripts. Roland’s artistic temperament, liberal social views and left-wing political stance, meant she was a part of male-dominated bohemian cultures and radical art theatre movements in Sydney and Melbourne in the 1930s and 40s. Her auto/biographical book, The Eye of the Beholder (1984), which is the subject of this essay, is ostensibly a study of Montsalvat, an artist’s colony, which was established in 1935 near Melbourne, Victoria. However, the book is principally concerned with Roland’s love-hate relationship with the colony’s founder, Justus Jörgensen. Roland writes herself into the time and space of Montsalvat to create an auto/biographical script where "I" and "You" are re-imagined and brought together. In Roland’s retrospective narrative, past selves are objectified through the act of writing them in the present. As a consequence, the boundaries between auto/biography and fiction are blurred.
In Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies I examine the ways of imagining and practising resistance by way of the concept of "vernacular cosmopolitanism". I use the concept in two senses: first, as a cultural and political term that Homi Bhabha describes as a "cosmopolitan community envisaged in a marginality", a form of materialist, actually existing, and rooted cosmopolitanism; second, in its vernacular, linguistic sense that reflects the way of words and the politics of language in the novel. In applying the term "vernacular", I wish to bring to the fore — in the spirit of Sheldon Pollock’s groundbreaking work on "Sanskrit Cosmopolis" — the linguistic aspect of the concept of cosmopolitanism, which I feel has been inadequately discussed. In Sea of Poppies, language importantly serves both as an index of the cross-cultural fusion that was operating in the Indian Ocean, Bay of Bengal, and their littoral zone and hinterland in the second quarter of the nineteenth-century, and also as a trope for the emergence of new identities in the Ibis trilogy.