Magazine: College Literature, October, 1992
DODGING THE CROSSFIRE: QUESTIONS FOR POSTCOLONIAL PEDAGOGY
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From the start, the project of teaching postcolonial literature has
involved negotiation between varied discursive and institutional
practices that serve competing pedagogical and political interests.
Forged out of the postcolonial world's peculiar circumstances and
historical antagonisms with the West, much of the literature tries to
break free of the narrative structures and tropes that for long have
dominated Euro-American representations of the Other. Equally urgent is
the perception that in order to move towards a truly egalitarian and
free society, culture itself has to be decolonized because of its
shaping effect on postcolonial experience and consciousness. As such,
postcolonial writers and critics largely accept the ideological
imperative to take charge of narratives and discourses in a manner that
maintains the oppositional edge of postcolonial knowledge if not its
semi-autonomous status. As such, they have for long warned against the
incorporation of their texts into an aesthetic and critical tradition
determined by the Euro-American canon. Under the anti-foundationalist
regime of postmodernism, this warning lends itself to being read as a
reactionary nostalgia for an imagined pre-colonial innocence.
Postcolonial writers have, in turn, responded with a ringing critique of
the formalism implicit in that position, and a call for renewed
attention to the politics and history of these texts.[1]
This exchange seems like a minor skirmish in comparison to the larger
battle over what has come to be known as multiculturalism. We are by now
familiar with the various charges made by critics of multiculturalism--
its polarizing or contentious stance, its alleged lack of intellectual
rigor, its supposed potential for reverse discrimination, and its
"exaggerated and preferential" treatment of a "minority" point of view.
The energies of proponents of multiculturalism have been so thoroughly
absorbed in responding to these criticisms that they have been
effectively distracted from vigorous analysis of the theoretical
questions and pedagogic challenges posed by the entry of postcolonial
texts into the discursive and institutional arenas of literary study. As
arguments for multicultural education become compelling in the context
of shifting demography of the United States and its contested place in
the global economic and political arena, multiculturalism is being
deployed increasingly as a reformist strategy that contains the
transformative potential of social heterogeneity. With multiculturalism
being recuperated as an a historical and depoliticized knowledge, it is
ever more important that discussions of pedagogy take up the question of
how postcolonial texts get mediated in the classroom rather than simply
engage with questions of what texts to teach and why.
As an upshot of contestations over literature, theory, and politics,
most of us professing literature today agree that canons and texts gain
their importance and currency from the work they perform of advancing
particular interpretations of historically urgent issues. Texts have
come to be seen as terrains of conflicting interpretations that attempt
to subvert or consolidate the distribution of power and wealth in a
social formation that, in our times, spans the globe. Foregrounding the
historical and political context as well as the theoretical framework
within which a text becomes meaning-full, then, makes visible the
interests the text serves at particular historical conjunctures. The
theoretical arguments of Michel Foucault have been crucial to the
elaboration of this process, drawing our attention to the ways systems
of nomenclature and taxonomic grids shape and direct our investigations
and their effects. Taking Foucault's arguments as its starting point,
this essay will examine the global politics of nomenclature and the
micro-politics of literary study in the American academy insofar as they
guide the study of postcolonial texts. Whether a text is read as a
Commonwealth, third world, or postcolonial text makes all the difference
to its meaning and status, the prefixes activating different genealogies,
emphases, and, inevitably, politics.
The essay also points to the need to attend to recent theoretical
developments mediating postcolonial texts into the Western academic and
scholarly circuit for their own implication--as mystification and
critical knowledge--in the global distribution of power, prestige, and
wealth. Such issues impress upon us the need for a mode of reading that
is attentive to the shifting meaning and ideological effectivity of a
text as it circulates between Western metropole and postcolonial
periphery.[2] Postcolonial texts are caught up in the regional dynamics
of third world politics and American culture wars as well as the global
negotiations demanded by the New World Order and multinational
capitalism. In other words, they are recruited to serve varying
ideologies and are involved in the work of producing first as well as
third world subjects. These multiple commitments prevent the emergence
of a single authoritative interpretation in any given instance. In
teaching these texts, it is not enough merely to acknowledge their
polyphony and indeterminacy but also, and more importantly, to situate
and understand their multiple inflections in the context of the
contradictory ideologies that speak through them. This would involve
setting up the diachronic and synchronic structural coordinates of the
various ideologies traversing a text. That is, the text's thematic
complexity and narrative form would have to be seen as driven by the
dual history of colonialism and indigenous aesthetic traditions as well
as the synchronic arrangements of domestic politics and the
international economic and political order.
In large part, the political context for the study of postcolonial
literature was created in the American academy by feminist and Afro-
American critiques of the literary canon, critiques that were echoed in
the international scene by writers such as Chinua Achebe and Ngugi wa
Thiong'o. These writers insisted upon the role of their literature in
decolonizing the mind, fostering a sense of collectivity, and thereby
creating the basis of an egalitarian society. Implicit in their
discussions is an understanding of narrative as a socially symbolic
mediation of the frustrations and hopes informing experiences of
postcoloniality. As such, these writers demand that the teaching and
reading of their texts be guided by the goal of transformative political
action. Accommodating this demand requires a re-understanding of the
classroom not as a space of cosmopolitan instruction but as a site of
contestation over what comes to be counted as the real and the truthful.
As counter-narratives that challenge, interrupt, or undercut the regimes
of knowledge--such as primitivism, orientalism, and underdevelopment--
that keep in place global economic and political arrangements,
postcolonial texts enable a critical consciousness of our implication in
oppressive social arrangements. Their strategies of defamiliarization
encourage a focus on alterity as a category continually constituted by
(neo)colonial practices. In the classroom, therefore, they discourage an
antiquarian or exoticized interest in constructions of Otherness,
drawing attention instead to the psychological and political investments
of the hegemonic Subject in these constructions. But while the
postcolonial text emerged as an object of study inextricably yoked to
politics, the terms of these politics have not been specified
adequately.
Historical and political reference has been almost completely suppressed
in contemporary uses of the term "Commonwealth literature." When the
Commonwealth was inaugurated by the Balfour Declaration of 1926 and
legalized in 1931 by the Statute of Westminster, it was only the "white
colonies" (a designation that suppresses the history of genocide and
silencing of indigenous populations in those territories) that were
recognized as "autonomous communities within the British Empire, equal
in status [to UK], in no way subordinate to one another" (qtd. in Lloyd
295). Later, as other parts of the British empire in Asia, Africa, and
the Caribbean gained independence, they joined the Commonwealth as well.
By now, the economic and political preferences ensured by the
Commonwealth were largely defunct, and it was acknowledged that the
organization mainly served a sentimental purpose: "The nerves of the
British were soothed in the two decades of decolonization which followed
[1949] by the thought that they were gaining new members of the
Commonwealth rather than losing colonies" (Lloyd 330).
The fact that sentiment did not blunt politically canny manipulation of
the Commonwealth is best exemplified by British immigration and visa
politics since the 1960s. As a result of a series of legislations, the
Commonwealth is effectively divided as the "old" and the "new," the
latter including all countries other than Australia, New Zealand, and
Canada. This division permits the selective continuation of privileges
to the "old" Commonwealth (Couper).
This hierarchy of privilege is, of course, not visible in the phrase
"Commonwealth literature," with its nostalgia for a shared history and a
myth of free exchange among equals bound by the rituals and codes of the
Queen's English and cricket. Furthermore, as Salman Rushdie points out,
the assurance that the Commonwealth is made up of members "equal in
status and in no way subordinate to one another" has proved to be
unfulfilled in the study of Commonwealth literature as well, for "it
would never do to include English literature, the great sacred thing
itself, with this bunch of upstarts, huddling together under this new
and badly made umbrella" (62). To the extent that "Commonwealth
literature" is used as if it were a neutral, descriptive category, it is
ideologically misleading.
Conceptually, as well, the category does not demonstrate any versatility,
lacking, as it does, points of coherence and principles of unity.
"Commonwealth literature" thus cannot provide an analytical handle on a
varied and yet coherent body of texts such as Anita Desai's novels of
manners, Ngugi wa Thiong'o's Marxist-inspired critiques of
neocolonialist elite, and Wilson Harris's abstract syncretism. And what
does one do with emigres like Salman Rushdie, V. S. Naipaul, and Buchi
Emecheta? As British citizens, these writers cannot technically be
considered Commonwealth writers. What of Nadine Gordimer, Alex La Guma,
J. M. Coetzee, and other South African writers whose country was
expelled from the Commonwealth for its apartheid policies? Perhaps
Ngugi's later writings in Gikuyu cannot be counted even though his early
English writings have set the terms of the debate on teaching non-
Western literatures. This would be one consequence of the outrageous
assumption that the most influential, imaginative, and compelling
writings of the postcolonial world are those in English. Teaching a
course under the rubric of Commonwealth literature would also
necessitate the exclusion of Francophone and Latin American texts that
add considerable range, depth, and complexity to discussions of
postcolonial texts. One particularly intriguing line of inquiry enabled
by a comparative analysis of Francophone and Anglophone texts is the
argument made by Abiola Irele and Es'kia Mphahlele, among others, that
"Africans have since the beginning been thinking the same thoughts and
putting them in the same words, whatever colonial flag has been waved
over [their] heads" (Ogede 181). As well, such comparisons illuminate
the distinctive features of the cultural politics of settler colonial as
opposed to assimilationist policies, and highlight the specific
strategies of resistance emerging out of Islamic, Christian, or Akan
traditions, to name but a few. Latin American texts bring these
investigations closer to home, so to speak, dwelling as they do on the
consequences of the changing of the guard from European to United States
imperialism.
More favored in the United States than "Commonwealth" is the term "third
world." This term has long been critiqued for implying that the non-
Western world is a monolithic entity and disregarding the profound
differences among the various national and social formations comprising
the third world. While the advantage of this perspective has been to
show the uniformity and ferocity of the battles each society has had to
wage for survival against first world imperialisms, the enormous variety
of national and religious cultures in the third world and vital
differences in their histories are papered over.[3] Reading texts as of
the third world, then, participates in the epistemic violence documented
by postcolonial intellectuals such as Fanon, Cesaire, and Ngugi.
With its increasing popularity, the term "third world" has all but lost
the historical and political distinctions it was meant to signify when
it was embraced as an identity by newly decolonized nations at the
Bandung conference in 1955. At that time, the urgency of the term
derived from the need to forge an economic and political alliance that
would help these nations articulate their agendas of growth and cultural
decolonization in a world dominated by cold war rivalries. The current
loose usage of the term "third world literature" continues to carry some
of this genealogical burden, albeit without its critical edge. Indeed,
largely as a legacy of area studies and development theories, "third
world" stands at the head of a chain of signifiers such as
"underdevelopment," "oppressive tradition," "high illiteracy," "rural
and urban poverty," "religious fanaticism," and "overpopulation." As
such, the depoliticization of the term is implicated in an understanding
of geopolitics that continues to carve up the world and arrange the
resulting segments in a hierarchy of first world (capitalist), second
world (socialist), and third world. Significantly, while the first two
worlds are defined in terms of mode of production, the defining feature
of the third world seems to be an absence of determinate economic or
political systems. The three world schema thus sets up the third world
as a vacuum to be filled by the economic and political maneuverings of
the first two worlds. More significantly, this hierarchical taxonomy has
underwritten a discursive modality and an accompanying power-knowledge
grid making possible an intellectual agenda in the academy that carries
out the ideological agenda of the cold war (see Pletsch). With the
collapse of the iron curtain and the second world's enthusiastic turn to
capitalism, it is time we reconsider the label "third world literature"
if only for reasons of historical relevance.
A more complex version of "third-worldism" is advanced by Fredric
Jameson:
All third-world texts are necessarily . . . allegorical, and in a
very specific way: they are to be read as what I will call
national allegories . . . particularly when their forms develop
out of predominantly Western machineries of representation, such
as the novel. ("Third World" 69)
According to Jameson, the ideological split between the public and
private that is fundamental to the constitution of Western societies
blocks the emergence of a politically informed culture. As a consequence,
politics has been regarded in the West as extraneous and disruptive to
art, like a "pistol shot in the middle of a concert" (69). Third world
literatures, on the other hand, are national allegories premised on
entirely different relations between the public and the private: "The
story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the
embattled situation of the public third-world culture and society" (69).
Jameson's formulation has the advantage of expanding the range of
oppositional positions available in a non-Western text to include not
just resistance to global (neo)imperialism, but also to oppressive and
exploitative domestic arrangements. However, Jameson's schema still
depends on a simplifying binary opposition between the first and the
third world in which, unlike dominant invocations of this opposition,
the third world is the privileged pole. Also implicit in his paradigm of
nationalist allegory is a valorization of the Western idea of nationhood,
which is taken as the norm every country aspires to. At this point, the
binary opposition collapses upon itself, since the nationalist allegory
of the third world always-already bears the trace of first world
nationalisms. At this point, Jameson's formulation lends itself to the
imperialist argument that a developed sense of nationhood was one of the
cultural benefits of imperialism (see Anderson, for instance).
Furthermore, by situating third world oppositionality only in texts
available to the West, Jameson ignores many narratives, often
untranslated, of subaltern resistance to imperialism. Since the
suppression of the subaltern voice has enabled the emergence of the
comprador bourgeoisie as the nationalist elite, Jameson's articulation
participates in the mystification of the transition from imperialism to
neo-imperialism as postcolonialism. Most importantly, Jameson oddly
ignores the effect by which so-called "feudal" or "pre-capitalist"
practices in postcolonial cultures (which are the bases of "nationalist
allegory") are subordinated to or even recruited to serve the interests
of global capitalism. As a consequence, the mutations of indigenous and
imposed cultural traditions as they are inscribed in postcolonial texts
escape his attention. So too, as Aijaz Ahmad has pointed out in his
response to Jameson, does the interesting question about the effects of
reading practices and theoretical schemas that "frame" postcolonial
novels at their points of reception.
The study of third world literatures takes place side by side with other
modes of studying the third world-modernization and development theories,
for instance-which all too often conveniently explain away the under-
development and deprivation of the third world as prima facie evidence
of its cultural inferiority. Such explanations explicitly set up the
first world as the model of rationality and planned development that the
third world should strive to emulate (Kofele-Kale 38). Critics have
attempted to alter this view of the third world by emphasizing the rich
array and depth of the folklore, art, and literature of the third world.
But the logic of commodity aesthetics, forever in search of new ideas to
commodify, steps in almost immediately. Cultural productions of the
third world have been equally available to bands like the Talking Heads
and to department stores like Bloomingdales to launch funky postmodern
sounds and fashions. Similarly, pluralist appropriations of postmodern
difference often enlist third world texts to support an agenda of
diversity or benign variation. Thus, it is not always clear whether
third world texts are merely taking their place on the shelves of exotic
imports, beside the Colombian coffee and the Darjeeling tea, or whether
they do indeed assert radically oppositional narratives that disrupt the
discourses--of orientalism and primitivism, among others--that serve as
ideological ground for economic and political maneuvering in the
postcolonial world.
Whether texts serve an agenda of commodity fetishism or radical critique
(these being but the two most compelling of any number of possibilities)
would depend on the discourses that mediate them into the classroom. It
could be argued that given the history and established patterns of its
use, the term third world pulls against the goals of radical pedagogy.
As a discursive frame, third worldism introduces a number of potential
problems in a discussion of texts. To quickly map out some of these
trouble spots, third worldism brings with it the burden of area studies,
which encourage a descriptive rather than an interrogative or critical
reading of texts. The pressures of multiculturalism further intensify
this tendency towards a vacuous pluralism. Constructions of the third
world as a geographical area, as a collectivity defined by its minority
status, or as an "imagined community," usually do not allow for a focus
on or understanding of the articulation-effects on culture of the third
world's shifting position in global economic and political orders.[4]
After this litany of woes, "postcoloniality" seems to provide a
promising analytical framework. As a historical and epistemological
category, postcoloniality immediately draws attention to the historical
and cultural contexts of producing and reading texts in a world riven by
political hierarchies, economic manipulations, and hegemonic interests.
Historically situating cultural politics in the aftermath of European
and American imperialisms of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
postcoloniality immediately draws attention to the political and
economic residues of colonialism. Certain issues become unavoidable in
the study of postcoloniality: the cultural violence of the colonial
encounter, the all too frequent failure to keep the promise of an
egalitarian society made during national liberation struggles, the
establishment of new class and gender elites in post-independence
nationalist cultures, the destruction of indigenous traditions and
kinship networks, the displacement of local modes of self-government,
the erosion of agrarian economies in favor of import-based "cash"
economies and urban industrialism, the ongoing economic dependency of
postcolonial societies linked structurally and financially to their
erstwhile colonizers, the effect of metropolitan practices and
institutions such as the church, mass media, and education, to name a
few.[5] At the same time, by allowing for the widely variant histories
of colonialism, the heterogeneity of the postcolonial context is not
overlooked. The range of questions brought into textual analysis by the
discursive history of postcoloniality necessarily broadens the scope of
pedagogic strategies. Primarily, these questions enable a discussion of
literature that is not only formal and stylistic, but also thematic and
contextual. In so doing, they initiate an interrogation of the
conventions of literary study that privilege the aesthetic qualities of
a text over its political content, or that do not understand the
aesthetic as itself a historically specific and politically fraught
category.
Postcoloniality also usefully foregrounds the political and
psychological investments of texts by drawing attention to the
contradictory position of the postcolonial writer and reader, cunningly
figured by Abena Busia as the predicament of Caliban:
This tongue that I have mastered
has mastered me;
has taught me curses
in the language of the master
has taught me bondage
in the language of the master
I speak this dispossession
in the language of the master (3)
This ambivalence is underscored by Gayatri Spivak as the defining
instance of postcoloniality, as an "impossible 'no' to a structure,
which one critiques, yet inhabits intimately" ("Poststructuralism" 225).
Analysis of this ambivalence leads one to explore its formal and
rhetorical ramifications as well. Language is an issue that immediately
comes to the forefront, for as Frantz Fanon remarked, for a postcolonial
writer, "to choose a language is to choose a world," a world where
oppression seems to provide the tools for its undoing. The evolution of
patois, the appropriation of Western narrative modes such as the novel,
the mutation of conventions of epistolary fiction and bildungsroman, the
refiguring of standard European tropes of alterity, are some powerful
strategies of resistance that undergo intriguing mutations when worked
into indigenous narrative traditions and ritual forms.
The advantages of postcoloniality as a frame of reference have been ably
demonstrated in the works of Barbara Harlow and Abdul JanMohamed, and
most recently by the Australian writers Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths,
and Helen Tiffin. These critics see the postcolonial text not as a
backward-looking attempt to retrieve a lost cultural purity, but as an
engagement with the history of colonial oppression. They read the novels
of Buchi Emecheta, Chinua Achebe, and Ghassan Kanafani as attempts to
understand the effects of colonial occupation on the contemporary
problems and social arrangements of the third world. Harlow and
JanMohamed trace the novels' oscillation between an anxious recognition
of the inescapability of the colonial experience and a cunning
orchestration of resistance to colonial hegemony. In doing so, both
critics underline the provisionality and precariousness of the "post" in
postcolonial literature, which continually threatens to succumb to a
despairing view that the world is still bound under neo-imperialism.
However, theorizing postcoloniality has run into dead ends in some
instances. In a recent attempt to investigate the ideological status of
postcolonial texts, postcolonialism has been defined as the "need, in
nations and groups that have been victims of imperialism, to achieve an
identity uncontaminated by Universalist or Eurocentric concepts and
images" (During 33). In this instance, the definition of postcolonialism
is explicitly situated as an attempt to satisfy post-modernism's
political desire for epistemologically pure grounds of opposition. By
displacing a nostalgia for lost origins and absolute presence--a
nostalgia that postmodernism has disallowed the West--onto the third
world, During is well within the postmodern tradition of continuing the
ideological groundwork for multinational capitalism in the guise of
valorizing the Other.[6] Such definitions of postcolonial writing have
profound textual and political consequences: For instance, since
During's definition freezes the text of alterity in a static relation to
a past defined exclusively in terms of imperialism, it rides roughshod
over crucial nuances in the history of erstwhile colonies. The complex
interaction of domestic patriarchal, caste, and class hierarchies with
the needs of a globally operative system that has evolved forms of
exploitation and domination only inadequately explained as "imperialism"
is effaced in During's understanding of postcolonialism. Furthermore, in
the systematic displacement of the possibility of political engagement
and revolutionary action--a possibility that postmodernism puts under
erasure--onto the Other constructed as third world, insurgent
nationalities, resisting margins etc., a new pattern of unequal demands
emerges. The curious similarity between the radical postmodernist's
epistemological and aesthetic expectations of non-Western cultures and
the economic and political demands made on the third world by the
international circulation of commodities and the balance of power,
supports Fredric Jameson's analysis of postmodernism as the cultural
logic of late capitalism.
In contrast to the textualized postcoloniality theorized by During,
Marxist discourses on colonialism and postcolonialism address the
neocolonial relations implicit in postcoloniality. Arguing that
imperialism did not disappear with the end of direct colonial rule but
merely assumed more insidious forms, postcolonial theorists see the
third world as sites of an ongoing capitalist exploitation. As certain
productive relations become impossible in the West because of
technological innovations and changing social arrangements, they are
moved out into the sweatshops of the third world; as first world markets
get saturated, the third world becomes the target or dumping ground for
commodities refused by the West. In this context, studying postcolonial
texts often aids intellectuals in their role as market researchers who
provide the cultural knowledge necessary for the efficient functioning
of multinational agencies and corporations. Gayatri Spivak has
forcefully argued that postcolonial texts are caught up in the ideology
of neo-imperialism and are often read in ways that implicitly serve the
interests of multinational capitalism by privileging an aspiring
bourgeois elite identified with the postcolonial space as the authentic
voice of the margins ("Poststructuralism"). In the face of such
recuperative strategies, it is crucial to resist romanticizing the third
world as a pure site of alterity and instead to generate nuanced
readings of the implication of third world elites in neocolonial
systems.
The status of postcolonial texts, as valorized texts of alterity,
derives to a large extent from the intellectual currency of
postmodernism. As a historically specific philosophy and aesthetic,
postmodernism is committed to producing anti-totalizing, anti-
foundationalist, decentered, fragmented, and oppositional narratives--a
commitment that has been a crucial factor in the installation of non-
Western texts within the academic study of literature. With the
deconstruction of Western metaphysics and the attendant decentering of
the subject, the margin gets fetishized, and alterity becomes a
privileged site of intellectual enquiry and political strategy. However,
even as postmodernism valorizes alterity for a variety of reasons and
resists absorbing the Other into the Self, it is consistently led to the
paradoxical recognition that the Other can never speak as Other. As the
insoluble precipitate that eludes, resists, and undermines the will of
master discourses to be all-inclusive, the Other is always in excess of
representation. Put differently, even as postmodern philosophy stages a
refusal to contain or assimilate the Other, it paradoxically invests
certain sites with an exclusive importance and meaning as Other for a
Eurocentric discourse. Not only does this move re-install, however
tortuously, a Eurocentric perspective, but it also shears off from the
third world text the urgent political burden it bears.
If we have spent so much time in charting the discursive field in which
postcolonial texts are read, it is only to demonstrate that these texts
are always already situated in hegemonic Western discourses, such that
reading them involves from the start a delicate negotiation through a
minefield of contesting interpretive claims and contradictory political
effects. But there are other points of mediation--especially that of
pedagogy--that must be acknowledged before we proceed further. If
postmodern theory has served as the implicit argument for the inclusion
of non-Western texts in literary studies, it has also been the
predominant conceptual frame within, or in reaction to, which the texts
are read and understood. The argument for "respecting difference" has
often been seized upon to situate postcolonial texts as a safe haven
from the onslaughts of theory. Two points need to be made here: First,
the principle of novelty is an important factor in guaranteeing the
assimilation of these texts into the postmodern canon, not only because
"newness" is the absolute mark of value in the capitalist marketplace,
but also because the postmodern privileging of the anti-mimetic ensures
an immediate valorization of texts of alterity as new modes of self-
fragmentation. Such instances often overlook the marked divergence of
ludic from political or resistance postmodernism (see Ebert). Second, a
decontextualization inevitably takes place during theoretical mediation
whereby politically charged and historically urgent discursive and
textual elements are reduced to purely formal and aesthetic properties
of the text. Social contradiction becomes ambiguity or deferral;
dialogic contestation becomes arbitrary juxtaposition, play, or collage;
and interrogation of politically interested narratives becomes self-
reflexivity. The political gets aestheticized and resistance becomes a
fashionable gesture.
Instead, if one begins with the material contexts of postcolonial
literature, it becomes clear that the simultaneous demands of numerous
ideological and social pressures produce an epistemology of difference.
That is, the sedimented effects of the various concerns and agendas
discussed earlier produce an indeterminacy that is somewhat at odds with
postmodern aesthetics. Viewed thus, postcolonial literature's frequent
focus on liminality and marginality can be seen as a provisional and
contingent emphasis rather than as an essential feature; its narrative
strategies of resistance and oppositional agency can be seen to be
grounded in histories of racism and imperialism rather than as an effect
of a decontextualized language. Given the fluctuations of history, the
parameters of oppositional agency are themselves seen as something to be
constantly negotiated rather than as something given. In this respect,
narratives become important as the staging ground of these negotiations,
the ground where memory, voice, and vision are constantly reformulated
in the press of an ever shifting global context.
This slippage is further consolidated by dominant pedagogic practices
within the academy. Postcolonial texts are most frequently taught and
studied within separate canons of non-Western, third world, or
Commonwealth literature. If a desire to disrupt ethnocentricity
initiated the study of these texts in the academy, a whole range of
institutional and social forces have helped protect most literature
departments from serious self-critique. The ghettoization of non-
traditional texts within their own canons and sometimes within their own
separate departments has severely circumscribed their disruptive
effects. Thus while it has become appropriate and even desirable to
allow postmodern texts like those of Derrida, Foucault, Jacques Lacan,
and Jean-Francois Lyotard to restructure canonical Western literature
and our ways of reading its texts, it is still uncommon for Joyce and
Sterne to be read through Rushdie, Evelyn Waugh and Conrad to be read
through Chinua Achebe, or Virginia Woolf to be read through Buchi
Emecheta.
Ngugi wa Thiong'o suggests that such encounters may be productive for
the study of Western canonical texts as well, by drawing attention to
the slippages and silences in European texts, particularly those
centered on the modernist moment of anxiety about "man without history-
solitary and free--with unexplainable despair and anguish and death as
the ultimate truth about the human condition" (Writers 78). A study of
postcolonial literature suggests that this stance may arise out of a
partial vision of a world riven by social changes or out of a dimly
apprehended investment in the social order threatened by the changes. In
fact, one of the joys of reading postcolonial writers such as Salman
Rushdie, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Jamaica Kincaid, Wilson Harris, and J. M.
Coetzee is tracking their irreverent appropriation and mimicry of
colonialist tropes. By critically appropriating and rearticulating
signifying structures of Western culture, these writers encourage a re-
understanding of the aesthetic modes and thematic concerns of canonical
texts. My point in discussing these levels of mediation is not to argue
for a rigorously positivist mode of reading. The solution to the
problems I have outlined is not to amass enough contextual detail to
flesh out the meaning of the text. Postmodern theory has taught us that
the text can never be an unmediated presence to us despite our best
efforts; feminist and postcolonial critics continue to challenge
familiar and comfortable reading practices that impose Euro- or
phallocentric readings as the unproblematic meaning of a text. What I am
arguing against is an uncritical valorization of alterity that ignores
the specific and contingent historical and political pressures--both
global and regional--within which alterity is articulated.
What Ngugi has to say about one much-discussed pole of alterity, race,
is especially pertinent here:
Often we [African writers and their readers] never moved beyond
blackness, beyond the racial aspect of the struggle for national
liberation from colonial rule, to see what was basic to colonial
oppression: the fact that we were part and parcel of a worldwide
system of production called capitalism: the fact that the colonial,
political and cultural invasion was to make conquest in the
economic sphere more entrenched and permanent: and therefore that
the African people's anti-colonial struggle was more than a racial
struggle. It was also, and more fundamentally, a struggle against
that system that for four hundred years had devastated a
continent. (7)
If we are to understand the full implication of Ngugi's argument, our
encounter with the postcolonial text cannot come to rest on authenticity,
"that respectable child of old fashioned exoticism" (Rushdie 67). It is
true that we have come, with increasing scholarly activity in the area,
to see European and American involvement in Africa, Asia, and South
America as merely a wrinkle in the unfolding of indigenous cultural
processes. But even the recovery of these processes, exciting as it may
be, takes its urgency from its role in providing counter-discursive
strategies to cultural imperialism. We must therefore follow the
shifting lines that link the struggle over representation to the
struggle for political and economic rights waged in different sectors of
the world-wide system to which Ngugi refers. It is precisely the
historical situatedness of postcolonial texts and their complex
articulation within postmodern, nationalist, and oppositional discourses
that make them subversive--and interesting-in a multi--pronged fashion.
Needless to say, the pedagogic challenge of facilitating such readings
in the classroom gains a new order of complexity around the issue of
third world feminisms. Even as I was putting together this paper, my
class on postcolonial women writers was reading Bessie Head's Collector
of Treasures. The first response of most of my students to this text was
an awed and respectful silence. As politically correct liberal arts
students, they knew too well the dangers of imposing their expectations
on the text, and therefore waited for the text to reveal itself, if only
through its proxy their teacher, a woman marked "Other" wise. Spivak's
analysis was invaluable in showing ways out of this bind
("Poststructuralism"). But there were others in the class, strong
feminists who had come to that point in their development when they were
questioning the homogeneity of the construct "woman" in feminist
discourses. For them the course provided an opportunity to explore the
differences and hierarchies between communities of women and to learn
about the widely divergent priorities implicit in narratives of feminine
experience in the postcolonial world. We had read selections from Maria
Mies's Patriarchy and Accumulation on the World Scale, where the
sexualization of the Western bourgeois woman in the nineteenth century
and the liberation of the professional woman in the twentieth century
are shown to be enabled directly by the economic benefits and
ideological imperatives of Western imperialism and neo-imperialism. We
had read the introduction to Kumari Jeyawardena's Feminism and
Nationalism in the Third World, which provided a historical ground for
understanding the complex negotiations between feminist and nationalist
agendas in the postcolonial world. We had also read Jennifer Wicke's
essay, "Postmodernism: The Perfume of Information," which establishes
the connection between the lifestyle of today's post-feminist woman and
the superexploitation of postcolonial women in the Free Trade Zones.
These considerations made it difficult, if not impossible, for the
course to become a safari of the intellect.
The problem of maintaining the polyvalence of the text in relation to
the different cultural and political contexts it straddles was the
trickiest. For instance, in one of Head's stories, "Witchcraft," the
main character Mma-Mabele is a staunch Christian who disdains the
superstitious practices of her village. Christianity seems to set up an
empowering distance between her and her community. The Church and the
Christian hospital impart to her the ability to rationalize, "to sort
out the true from the false in the everyday round of village life, but
not immunity from strange forms of assault" (48). But because she
refuses to accommodate male desire--constructed as freely roaming and
irresponsible--her sexuality is called into question and she comes to be
known as a "he-man." While Mma-Mabele does not seem to be affected in
any way by her reputation, she seems to realize that more than her
sexuality, it is her place and membership in the community that is being
threatened. For she develops a mysterious ailment that everyone around
her recognizes to be caused by witchcraft. Faced with social ostracism
that attempts to erase her as a sexual subject, Mma-Mabele displays
symptoms that situate her firmly within the superstitious communal
circle. Having withdrawn herself from sexual circulation, she inserts
herself into the circuit of the baloi who dispense charms and cures. In
her suffering, she becomes part of the village.
My attempts to analyze Mma-Mabele's ailment and her subsequent cure made
me painfully aware of the analytical suppleness demanded of postcolonial
readers. For one thing, Mma-Mabele's reliance on Christianity was
complexly inflected by the historical position of evangelism as the
right arm of imperialism, by the disruption of gynocentric religious
traditions by the Western church, by the hybridization of Christianity
in Africa, and by the empowering role played by the discourse of
Christian humanism during anti-colonial struggles. Indeed, this history
is repeatedly alluded to in many of the stories in Collector of
Treasures. While Africans in the diaspora are trying more and more to
reconstruct a pre-colonial spiritual and cultural identity, the African
Christian church is still a strong site of resistance in Botswana and
South Africa. To complicate matters more, religious identity is a
contentious point in ongoing rivalries amongst the African people. The
pedagogic challenge, then, is to keep in sight this shifting genealogy
of Christianity in Africa while trying to understand Bessie Head's
reliance on religion as an exemplary instance of saying "the impossible
'no.'" A similar problem presented itself when we tried to understand
women's roles and privileges within a sex-gender system informed by
traditional and Western patriarchal values. Mma Mabele attributes her
miraculous recovery by the end of the story to her sense of maternal
responsibility, saying, "I am too poor [to be ill] and there is no one
else to feed my children" (956). This was a vexed point for the
feminists in my class, who were dissatisfied with what seemed like a cop-
out to a patriarchal system powerfully critiqued in the story. While Mma
Mabele resists her heterosexist positioning as sexual object, she
accedes willingly to her position as mother within a gender system which
is integral to the heterosexual order. While rationality and religion
seem to give her an oppositional agency, they fail to support her at her
time of greatest need, in the process disclosing their implication in
the social arrangements that cause her illness in the first place.
In United States classrooms, Head's valorization of motherhood enters a
historically and theoretically fraught contestation. The predicament of
Mma Mabele resonates powerfully with ongoing sociological discussions on
the pauperization of women compounding the rising numbers of women-
headed single parent households. Theoretically, the question of
motherhood has drawn profoundly ambivalent responses from feminists in
the West. In the West, early feminists like Shulamith Firestone have
argued that motherhood is the very bane of women's empowerment, while
recent theorists like Kristeva have sought to inflect motherhood
differently, as both continuous pain and the inherent basis of an
alternative, woman-centered knowledge. As with the issue of religion,
understanding the significance of the family in Bessie Head's stories
would involve looking at the ways the institutions of marriage and
family functioned in pre-colonial societies and studying the effects of
colonialism, migrant labor, and urbanization on indigenous kinship
systems. Such an analysis, besides drawing out the contextual density of
the story, may also bring into contemporary discourses on motherhood an
understanding of the complex, globally articulated structures shaping
various experiences of maternity.
There are also enough hints in the story that Mma Mabele's affliction
may be caused by vitamin deficiency. We are also told of a shadowy but
"benevolent" employer who gives her time off when she falls ill, but who
obviously does not pay her well enough to sustain a healthy diet. One
wonders if this employer is a member of the native elite or of the
settler colonial class. These hints push us to look at the structural
causes of hunger, malnutrition, and the absence of health care
facilities, and their effect on gender ideologies. In turn, these
investigations allow us to explain the ambivalences and contradictions
in the story as arising out of the complex positioning of women as
subjects desirous of freedom in difference, that is, to see their
agonistic consciousness of the need to articulate their struggles as
women to the daily battle for survival under grossly adverse conditions
that consumes the energies of most members of their community, including
their adversaries in the gender system. It goes without saying that such
an enquiry will have to look outside of literary criticism or history
for its answers. A rigorous study of postcolonial texts does make
intellectual demands of a transdisciplinary nature, entailing as it does
a scrupulous tracing of historical contexts and discursive inflections.
And in the most successful instances, reading a postcolonial text
involves keeping in sight three questions simultaneously: How does the
text construct the world for postcolonial readers in all their
heterogeneity? How does it construct the "Other" world for equally
heterogeneous Western readers? And what does it tell Western readers
about their own world?
NOTES
1 For an early critique of the unmodified application of Western
aesthetics to postcolonial texts, see Soyinka. For more recent critiques
of poststructuralist theory, see Party and Sangari.
2 "Ideological effectivity" is a shorthand reference to the enormous
body of work on ideology inaugurated by Louis Althusser. For the
purposes of this essay, it is important to remember that ideology-
working principally through the institutional apparatus of education--
serves to "interpellate" or produce the subjects necessary for the
maintenance of existing relations of exploitation and domination.
3 In this context, Kofele-Kale's remark that the third world is not
confined to the geographical territories designated as such, but
includes the dispossessed of the first world such as the "Amerindians,
Appalachians, and Black America, and Latinos of North America" (38) is
an important intervention in the benign assignment of names (and
attributes) that have for long taken up the energies of first world
liberal scholars. A similar insistence by the women of color caucus at
the National Women's Studies Association further inflects the
essentialist construction of "woman of color" by drawing attention to
the economic and political consequences of racism as well as to the
heterogeneous positions occupied by third world women (Sandoval).
4 A notable exception to pluralist constructions of the third world is
Chandra Mohanty's discussion of the category. However I draw support for
my argument in favor of postcoloniality as a stronger analytical
category from Mohanty's assessment that the "common context of struggle"
in the third world is directly related to its colonial and neocolonial
history (8-9).
5 Select texts that bring up these questions are Ngugi wa Thiong'o's
Devil on the Cross, Ayi Kwei Armah's The Beautiful Ones Are Not Yet Born,
Bessie Head's Collector of Treasures, Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart,
Leila Abouzeid's Year of the Elephant, Buchi Emecheta's Joys of
Motherhood, Earl Lovelace's Wine of Astonishment, Tsitsi Dengarembga's
Nervous Conditions, Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses, Yambo Ouloguem's
Bound to Violence.
6 A more striking instance of postmodernism's displacement of the
nostalgia for lost presence onto the non-European world may be found in
Jacques Derrida's "The Ends of Man," where he argues that the
epistemological and military-economic violence of the West has so
completely coopted Western knowledge that a "radical trembling can only
come from the outside." In "Can the Subaltern Speak?" Gayatri Spivak
critiques a similar tendency in the work of Jean-Francois Lyotard and
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. She argues that the subject of
knowledge presumed by postmodern anti-foundationalism is deeply
implicated in the global arrangements of power and exploitation under
late capitalism.
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~~~~~~~~
By Rajeswari Mohan
Mohan is assistant professor of English at Haverford College. She has
published in the areas of colonial literature, popular culture, and
postcolonial literature, and is currently working on a manuscript on
literary modernism and the crisis of the British empire.
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Source: College Literature, Oct92/Feb93, Vol. 19-20 Issue 3-1, p28, 17p.
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