A Concise Companion to Postcolonial Literature E-Book

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Concise Companions to Literature and Culture
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 458

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Taking an innovative and multi-disciplinary approach to literature from 1947 to the present day, this concise companion is an indispensable guide for anyone seeking an authoritative understanding of the intellectual contexts of postcolonial literature and culture.

• An indispensable guide for anyone seeking an authoritative understanding of the intellectual contexts of Postcolonialism, bringing together 10 original essays from leading international scholars including C. L. Innes and Susan Bassnett
• Explains the ideas and practises that emerged from the dismantling of European empires
• Explores the ways in which these ideas and practices influenced the period's keynote concerns, such as race, culture, and identity; literary and cultural translations; and the politics of resistance
• Chapters cover the fields of identity studies, orality and literacy, nationalisms, feminism, anthropology and cultural criticism, the politics of rewriting, new geographies, publishing and marketing, translation studies.
• Features a useful Chronology of the period, thorough general bibliography, and guides to further reading

Leseprobe

Contents

List of Illustrations

Notes on Contributors

Introduction

Chapter 1: Framing Identities

Chapter 2: Orality and Literacy

Literature, speech, and writing

The aesthetics of adivasi oral traditions

The oral and the written in Ancient India

Medieval India

Conclusion

Chapter 3: The Politics of Rewriting

Chapter 4: Postcolonial Translations

Defining translation

The freedom of the translator

Translation and power

Calibans and cannibals

The translated colony

Postcolonial translation strategies

Cultural translation

Conclusion

Chapter 5: Nation and Nationalisms

The idea of the nation

Settler nationalisms

Third World nationalisms

Metropolitan critiques

Chapter 6: Feminism and Womanism

Chapter 7: Cartographies and Visualization

Introduction

Postcolonialism and cartographic debates

From colonial to postcolonial mapping techniques

Geovisual processes and the renewed politics of maps

Devolving cartographic power

Chapter 8: Marginality: Representations of Subalternity, Aboriginality and Race

Chapter 9: Anthropology and Postcolonialism

Writing Culture and after

Conclusion

Chapter 10: Publishing Histories

Index

Concise Companions to Literature and Culture General Editor: David Bradshaw, University of Oxford

This series offers accessible, innovative approaches to major areas of literary study. Each volume provides an indispensable companion for anyone wishing to gain an authoritative understanding of a given period or movement’s intellectual character and contexts.

Published

Modernism

Edited by David Bradshaw

Feminist Theory

Edited by Mary Eagleton

The Restoration and Eighteenth Century

Edited by Cynthia Wall

Postwar American Literature and Culture

Edited by Josephine G. Hendin

The Victorian Novel

Edited by Francis O’Gorman

Twentieth-Century American Poetry

Edited by Stephen Fredman

Chaucer

Edited by Corinne Saunders

Shakespeare on Screen

Edited by Diana E. Henderson

Contemporary British Fiction

Edited by James F. English

English Renaissance Literature

Edited by Donna B. Hamilton

Milton

Edited by Angelica Duran

Shakespeare and the Text

Edited by Andrew Murphy

Contemporary British and Irish Drama

Edited by Nadine Holdsworth and Mary Luckhurst

American Fiction 1900–1950

Edited by Peter Stoneley and Cindy Weinstein

The Romantic Age

Edited by Jon Klancher

Postwar British and Irish Poetry

Edited by Nigel Alderman and C. D. Blanton

Middle English Literature

Edited by Marilyn Corrie

Terror and the Postcolonial

Edited by Elleke Boehmer and Stephen Morton

Postcolonial Literature

Edited by Shirley Chew and David Richards

Realism

Edited by Matthew Beaumont

This paperback edition first published 2014© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.except for editorial material and organization © 2014 Shirley Chew and David Richards

Edition history: Blackwell Publishing Ltd (hardback, 2010)

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A concise companion to postcolonial literature/edited by Shirley Chew and David Richards.       p. cm. — (Blackwell concise companions to literature and culture)    Includes bibliographical references and index.    ISBN 978-1-4051-3503-0 (cloth) – ISBN 978-1-118-65235-0 (pbk.)1. Commonwealth literature (English)—History and criticism. 2. Postcolonialism in literature.I. Chew, Shirley. II. Richards, David, 1953–    PR9080.C595 2010    820.9—dc22

2009030163

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover image: Dima Berkut/ShutterstockCover design by Design Deluxe

List of Illustrations

Figure 7.1

Mapping socio-economic status across the Kingston Metropolitan Region, Jamaica, 1991.

Figure 7.2

Cartogram created to represent the quality of housing across the Kingston Metropolitan Region, 2001.

Contributors

Susan Bassnett is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Warwick. She is the author of Translation Studies (3rd ed., 2002) and Postcolonial Translation: Theory and Practice (1999) with Harish Trivedi. Recent books include The Translator as Writer (2006) with Peter Bush; Global News Translation (2008) with Esperança Bielsa, and Ted Hughes (2009). She also writes for several national newspapers.Duncan Brown is Dean of the Arts Faculty at the University of the Western Cape. He is also a Fellow of the University of KwaZulu-Natal. He has published widely in the field of South African literary and cultural studies, and his books include Voicing the Text: South African Oral Poetry and Performance (1998), Oral Literature and Performance in Southern Africa (1999), To Speak of this Land: Identity and Belonging in South Africa and Beyond (2006), and Religion and Spirituality in South Africa: New Perspectives (2009).Shirley Chew is Emeritus Professor of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Leeds. Her publications include the co-edited Translating Life: Studies in Transpositional Aesthetics (1999), Reconstructing the Book: Literary Texts in Transmission (2001). She is the founding editor of Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Writings (2001– ). Recent publications include articles and chapters in books on Shashi Deshpande, V.S. Naipaul, Nissim Ezekiel. A work in progress is the Blackwell History of Postcolonial Literatures.G.N. Devy, an activist for tribal rights and marginalized languages, writes in Marathi, Gujarati and English. Apart from his works dealing with tribal culture and literature, such as Painted Words (2002) and A Nomad Called Thief (2006), his major critical statements have appeared in The G.N. Devy Reader (2009). He has been the founder of Bhasha Research Centre, Baroda, and Adivasi Academy, Tejgadh. He is currently Professor at Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology.David Howard researches in the contemporary social and urban geographies of the Caribbean and Latin America. His specific interests focus on the Dominican Republic and Jamaica, and on the theoretical links between urban cartography, territory, violence and racial discrimination. He is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh and a CNRS Associate at the Centre d’Étude d’Afrique Noire, Université de Bordeaux IV. He is co-ordinating editor for the Bulletin of Latin American Research, and Chair of the Society for Caribbean Studies.C.L. Innes was born and educated in Australia before moving to the United States where she attended the Universities of Oregon and Cornell. From 1975 until 2005, she taught African, African American, Irish, Indian, and Australian literatures at the University of Kent, Canterbury. Her books include The Devil’s Own Mirror: the Irishman and the African in Modern Literature; Chinua Achebe; Woman and Nation in Irish Literature and Society, 1880–1935; A History of Black and Asian Writers in Britain; The Cambridge Introduction to Postcolonial Literatures in English; and Ned Kelly. She is currently researching the story of her Indian great-grandfather and his English wife.Gail Low teaches Contemporary Literatures in English at the University of Dundee. She is the author of White Skins/Black Masks: Representation and Colonialism (1996) and Publishing the Postcolonial (forthcoming). She has co-edited A Black British Canon? (Macmillan, 2006). Her research interests include postwar British cultural history and literature, the metropolitan publishing of anglophone West African and Caribbean writers, publishers’ series and Black British writing.John McLeod is Reader in Postcolonial and Diaspora Literatures at the University of Leeds. He is author of Beginning Postcolonalism (2000), Postcolonial London: Rewriting the Metropolis (2004) and J.G. Farrell (2007). He has co-edited The Revision of Englishness (2004) and is the editor of The Routledge Companion to Postcolonial Studies (2007). His essays on postcolonial literatures have been published in a range of international journals including Moving Worlds, Wasafiri, Atlantic Studies, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Interventions and The Journal for Transatlantic Studies.Stephen Morton is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Southampton. He is currently completing a monograph on ‘Colonial States of Emergency in Literature and Culture 1905–2005’. His publications include Foucault in an Age of Terror (2008) co-edited with Stephen Bygrave; Salman Rushdie: Fictions of Postcolonial Modernity (2007); Gayatri Spivak: Ethics, Subalternity and the Critique of Postcolonial Reason (2006); and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (2003). His articles have appeared in Textual Practice, Public Culture, New Formations, Ariel, The Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory and Interventions.Will Rea is Senior Lecturer at the University of Leeds. He is an anthropologist and art historian, with an area interest in West Africa and, more specifically, on the masquerade performances of a small Yoruba town in Nigeria. His PhD is from the Sainsbury Research Unit at the University of East Anglia and he taught previously at SOAS and Goldsmiths. He arrived in Leeds as Henry Moore Fellow in the study of sculpture and now teaches African art and the anthropology of art. A monograph on masquerade in Nigeria is forthcoming and he has written widely on culture and modernity in Nigeria and in Africa more generally.David Richards is the Professor of English Studies and Director of the Centre of Postcolonial Studies at the University of Stirling. His research interests are in the areas of colonial and postcolonial literature, anthropology, art history and cultural theory. His published work includes the representation of other cultures in literature, anthropology and art; cultural production in postcolonial cities; and discourses of the ‘archaic’ in colonial and postcolonial cultures. He is completing a monograph on the cultural history of the archaic, examining the role of anthropology and archaeology in modernism and postcolonialism from 1875 to the present. He is developing an interdisciplinary collaborative project on the politics of memory.Nana Wilson-Tagoe is Visiting Professor of African and African Diaspora Literature at the University of Missouri, and a member of staff on the MA programme in National and International Literatures at the Institute of English, University of London. She has taught African and Caribbean literature at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and at universities in Ghana, Nigeria and Kenya. In addition to several journal articles and book chapters, she has published Historical Thought and Literary Representation in West Indian Literature, edited National Healths: Gender Sexuality and Health in Cross-cultural Contexts, and co-published A Reader’s Guide to Westindian and Black British Literature. She has forthcoming books on Ama Ata Aidoo and Yvonne Vera.

Introduction

Shirley Chew

This volume of essays provides an innovative multi-disciplinary approach to postcolonial literature. Unlike other current guides to postcolonialism, which are chiefly concerned with the theoretical formulations of postcolonial discourse, it seeks to investigate and explain ideas, issues, and practices from ten fields and disciplines that have made significant impact upon the literatures and cultures of countries which became independent nation-states in and after 1947. The essays explore in depth the ways in which their respective areas – for example, cartography, anthropology, translation studies, feminism – have shaped and problematized the period’s key concerns, such as ‘race’, culture, and identity; literary and cultural translations; and the politics of resistance. They draw attention to fresh developments in the areas; and discuss a wide range of postcolonial authors and their representations of the contemporary world. The Companion is an indispensable guide for literary students, specialists from other disciplines, and general readers seeking an authoritative and accessible overview of the intellectual contexts of postcolonialism.

*

‘Postcolonial’ is both a historical and an epistemological category, and the following brief reference to Heart of Darkness is indicative of a historicist reading as well as a reading according to postcolonialism’s central concerns. In the waiting-room of the Belgian company which was sending him to the Congo, Marlow noticed ‘a large shining map, marked with all the colours of a rainbow’. Despite the many colours, there was no mistaking the presence of a ‘vast amount of red’ and this, to the narrator, was ‘good to see at any time, because one knows that some real work is done in there’ (Conrad 2008 [1899]: 110). With that verbal interpretation of the visual image, storytelling and cartography are conjoined in Marlow’s narrative to produce a particular idea of the British empire – extensive, unified, and permanent. His pride was no doubt a sign of the times, given that between February and June 1899 when Heart of Darkness was being serialized, Britain’s possessions overseas amounted to a quarter of the globe and many of these were recent acquisitions made in the face of keen competition from other European nations.

To attempt a postcolonial reading of Marlow’s map is to note its function as ‘the graphic arm of colonial enterprise’ (Howard, Chapter 7: 148); in other words, as one of the myths of power which, like Pax Britannica, the civilizing mission, and the white man’s burden, served to justify colonization. With its ‘vast amount of red’, the map visualized the empire as a homogenous entity, not the loose collection it actually was of diverse peoples and cultures, spanning different geographies and centuries; and with being pin-pointed as the location where ‘real work’, hence order, could be expected, it masked the pernicious concomitants and effects of colonial rule, among them territorial and economic exploitation, psychological repression, and epistemic violence.

Resistance to colonial domination took the form of widespread physical conflicts during the decolonizing period from the end of the First World War onwards. While that was the case, it should also be borne in mind that the empire was never altogether free from outbreaks of violence in one form or another, examples being slave revolts, Maori wars, and, as variously described, the Indian Mutiny of 1857 or India’s First War of Independence. In cultural and symbolic terms, resistance was a struggle for agency in the representation process, that is, for the power among different colonized peoples to reinvent themselves as the subjects of their own stories and histories. With that in mind, the critical work in these essays on postcolonial writing, both the imaginative and the discursive, is underpinned by attentiveness to specific historical, social, and cultural contexts. As David Howard notes in his ranging discussion of new mapping techniques and technologies, and the ways they have helped to reshape ‘knowledge-power dynamics in society’ (Howard, Chapter 7: 11), the growth of community mapping projects in countries like Guyana means that maps are being produced by the people themselves to chart their local and first-hand experience of the areas in which social problems, such as poverty, are concentrated (15).

‘The fact of blackness’, David Richards points out in his compelling investigation of discourses of (post)colonial identity, was one of the main preoccupations of Frantz Fanon – Martinican psychiatrist, political philosopher, literary critic and revolutionary – in his resistance to colonialism and its psychologically maiming effects. While Fanon advocated insurrection and civil war in Algeria as political strategies in the push for independence (Richards, Chapter 1: 13), he also channelled his intellectual passion and power into the task of forging ‘an anticolonial political rhetoric’ out of his dissections of racism. In his writing, he drew on a range of disciplines – existentialism, psychoanalysis, colonial anthropology, and Negritude with special reference to the poetry of Leopold Senghor and Aimé Césaire. The force of Fanon’s ideas, the intermingling of the different influences in his work, and the distinctiveness of his style meant that Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth were ‘as much of an intervention in literary concerns as … in either psychology or liberation politics’, and helped to reshape ‘emerging forms of literary expression’ as well as cultural criticism (14).

Of the theorists and critics indebted to Fanon’s theories of colonial identity, Edward Said, Homi K. Bhabha, and Gayatri C. Spivak occupy a central place in postcolonial discourse. This is due in part to their radical approaches as readers of texts, examples being Said on Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (Richards, Chapter 1: 18), Spivak on Mahasweta Devi’s Bengali short story ‘Breast-Giver’ (24), and Bhabha on post-Enlightenment colonialist documents, such as Thomas Macaulay’s ‘Minute on Education’ (1835) which, with its incisive analysis of colonial mimicry, makes realizable an ‘in-between’ space for subversion and reinvention on the part of the colonial subject.

Among creative writers, postcolonial reading of canonical literary texts is liable to go hand in hand with rewriting, the issues in question being those of ‘authority and authenticity’ and ‘representation and self-representation’ (Innes, Chapter 3: 57). Speaking to a broad and exciting selection of rewritings from Southern Africa, the Caribbean, and Australia, C.L. Innes draws attention to the dialogues that are opened up between the postcolonial writer and his or her antecedents, and the experiments with form and language which this has resulted in. Engaging with the critical problem of rewriting as reinscription, she argues for rewriting as the enactment of the writers’ identity ‘as cosmopolitan participants in a variety of cultures, capable of choosing the terms in which their worlds and the relationships between them are defined’ (76).

Not infrequently, strikingly original work has been known to come out of rewriting. An example being Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children which, indebted as it has been said to Kipling and Forster among others, is nevertheless a novel altogether distinct and new. To what extent then can translation – involving as it does the carrying across of a source text into something other – be accounted a kind of rewriting? Is the translated work bound to stay faithful to the original? As is evident from Susan Bassnett’s lucid exposition, a postcolonial poetics of translation cannot be separated from the politics of translation. In her delineation of changing critical perspectives, emphasis is placed upon translation not as loss but as re-creation, (Bassnett, Chapter 4: 79); and the translator not as ‘slave’ but as ‘playing a crucial role in the reclaiming and re-evaluating of a people’s language and literature’ (88). Part of the pleasure in translating a play by Shakespeare into, say, Indian languages or Yoruba or Mauritian Creole is said to lie in ‘the subversive power of neutralizing the dominance of the English original’ (83); and part of it, in its remaking – the same and also different – in another cultural space, another time.

The idea of nation, of subject peoples thinking of themselves ‘as coherent imagined communities’, impelled the anti-colonial movements of the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. Today not a few of the countries which subsequently became independent nations exist under oppressive nationalist regimes.1 Inevitably, the idea of nation has undergone in the last sixty odd years constant re-examination in postcolonial literature and criticism. Drawing upon a significant range of postcolonial theorists and writers, postcolonial narratives and counter-narratives, John McLeod explores ‘the vital cultural space’ they open up (McLeod, Chapter 5: 98), tracing in assured fashion the evolving views in the debate, the ambivalent responses, the disillusionment, and, in some instances, the ‘unshakeable faith’, despite the failures, ‘in the nation as an egalitarian ideal’ (117).

That postcolonial notions of resistance, identity, subjectivity and difference have themselves been complicated, reshaped, and extended through the interventions of feminism is central to Nana Wilson-Tagoe’s argument. Supported with close analysis of scholarly, critical, and creative literature by, among others, bell hooks, Chandra Mohanty, Chikwenye Ogunyemi, Buchi Emecheta, Ata Ama Aidoo, Alice Walker, Wilson-Tagoe’s exposition of the successive stages in the making of the discourse of feminism and womanism is clear and nuanced. It charts the impact feminism made in the 1960s and 1970s in the debates of postcolonialism; the critiques that feminism, as a ‘Western inflected political discourse’ (Wilson-Tagoe, Chapter 6: 121), was confronted with from African American feminist scholars, and scholars from South Asia and Africa; and the emergence of womanism as a counterdiscourse to mainstream feminism with its insistence upon the specific histories, struggles, and everyday knowledge of black women and black communities. Above all, it is concerned with ‘the productive interrogations and rethinking that the intersection between postcolonialism, feminism, black feminism and womanism has inspired’ in writings by women (137).

Likewise it was the ‘productive interrogations’ that, in its turn, postcolonialism, along with Marxism and feminism, brought to bear upon anthropology in the late decades of the twentieth century which contributed to the discipline’s reconstruction. Will Rea examines in knowledgeable ways, first, anthropology’s ‘complicity with a colonial past’ (Rea, Chapter 9: 190) as well as the paradoxes and contradictions that inhered in the discipline; and second, the breach effected in anthropology’s engagement with colonialism in the post-independence period through ‘loss of object’, that is, ‘the social group bounded by a singular identity (190); the reinvigoration of historical studies as against ‘the notion of the ethnographic present’; the shift of ‘emphasis from the public to the domestic’ (192); and ‘the “reading” of the subject as a cultural text wherein the voice of the interpreter is readily apparent’ (192). If anthropology has survived the crisis of recent years, this is in part due, like postcolonialism, ‘to its eclectic nature, its unfailing ability to adapt to its own needs the theories and discourses of other disciplines’ (199).

In their respective accounts of oral literature and performance genres in India and South Africa, Ganesh Devy and Duncan Brown argue for the vitality and significance of indigenous traditions which have been ‘important features’ of life ‘since the development of the first human communities’ in the regions (Brown, Chapter 2, part 2: 41). While Devy’s main focus is the aesthetics of Adivasi oral literature within a broad account of the oral tradition from medieval to modern times, Brown is concerned with the ways in which oral forms in South Africa have adapted themselves to the changing social and political landscape. And while Devy shows a wariness towards written and print culture as forces which are liable to undermine the distinctive features and vitality of the oral, Brown sees the transposition in recent years of oral forms to the printed page as, though problematic, part of oral literature’s continuing engagement with, and input in, the modern world. Brown’s intellectual commitment is with carving out a space for the ‘mutual engagement’ of the two disciplines of orality studies and postcolonial studies. Because postcolonial studies in South Africa have tended ‘to replicate metropolitan patterns in focusing on the relatively “elite” form of the novel in English or engaging in deconstructive readings of colonial/mission discourses’, it has undervalued oral and performance genres and material in African languages (7). And because postcolonial theory has, in general, adhered to the ‘centre-periphery’ model of the world, it is ‘unable to recognize the multiple and shifting modes of articulation of the colonized prior to the stage of resistance’. The result is that the oral is relegated to the ‘premodern and prehistorical, of value only as a point of origin, an influence within the written, or a kind of guarantor of authenticity/ difference’ (10).

In one of the several moments in this volume when particular readings of texts or lines of inquiry converge, the problems and anxieties attendant upon transposing an oral performance into print is underscored in Stephen Morton’s discussion of the works of Jeanette Armstrong, a Canadian Okanagan writer. The dilemma which Armstrong has to confront is that her recall of the community’s cultural practices is being rendered in ‘the very language that repressed the practices’; and furthermore, her account of Aboriginal women’s lives is being articulated through the individual-centred ‘I’ of lyric poetry (Morton, Chapter 8: 18–19). Within the broader argument of his challenging essay, Morton calls marginality into question as one of the privileged metaphors of postcolonial studies; and sets about repositioning the margins with reference to a selection of postcolonial literature which is rarely examined together: the hidden histories of subaltern groups in India, Adivasi voices, dalit autobiography, the narratives of people of mixed descent, the fiction and poetry of First Nation and Maori writers. As in the example from Jeanette Armstrong, the experiments with form and language in these texts are varied and innovative, and are ‘always also connected to a struggle for social and political empowerment’ (24) in the face of different kinds of oppression: colonial rule, the hegemony of dominant societies, and neo-liberal globalization.

Gail Low’s scrupulously detailed account of the ‘production, emergence, and dissemination of national and regional literatures’ (Low, Chapter 10: 1) in anglophone West Africa and the anglophone Caribbean traces the hesitant though not inconsiderable beginnings in the nineteenth century before moving into the ferment of activity which marked the decolonizing and early post-independence periods. Publishing was not free, and has never been free, of metropolitan control and market forces. But two high points can be singled out from Low’s survey. First, magazine publishing which burgeoned in the 1940s and 1950s. Spurred on by the nationalist impulse in the Caribbean, magazines, such as Bim, Kyk-over-al, and Focus, encouraged local writing that broke with the English tradition and was faithful to the cultures from which it sprang. Between them, they brought to their readers a clutch of now famous names – Derek Walcott, George Lamming, Sam Selvon, Wilson Harris and Martin Carter (211). In the same period, in West African countries, such as Nigeria, journals ‘associated with the newly emerging university colleges provided publishing opportunities for John Pepper Clark, Wole Soyinka, and Christopher Okigbo’ (215). Second, there was the book trade. The creation of Oxford University Press’ Three Crowns series was to make available the plays of Soyinka and Clark as well as, in the 1970s, poetry by distinguished Indian poets, among them A.K. Ramanujan and Nissim Ezekiel; and while the African Writers Series started with reprints of novels by Achebe, among others, it was not long before it began publishing new works by new writers, such as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. In the light of the vigorous and rich outputs of postcolonial literature today, these early publishing ventures were surely inspired, however short-lived, and however compromised by commercial considerations of lucrative markets in the newly independent countries.

Perhaps there is no better way to sum up the overarching idea and the specific lines of inquiry in this Companion than to quote here Christopher Okigbo’s words from ‘Silences: Lament of the Silent Sisters III’ (Okigbo 1971: 41):

We carry in our worlds that flourishOur worlds that have failed …

Note

1 Even as the writing of this Introduction proceeds, news comes in of ‘the final throes of the Sri Lankan Civil war’ – see, for example, The Times, May 29 2009 – and the high death toll among innocent civilians.

References

Conrad, Joseph (2008) [1899]. Heart of Darkness and Other Tales. Oxford World Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Okigbo, Christopher (1971). Labyrinths. African Writers Series. London: Heinemann.

Chapter 1

Framing Identities

David Richards

Frantz Fanon remembered an incident when, as a young student of psychiatry in France, his presence on a crowded train was noticed by a child:

“Look, a Negro!” The circle was drawing a bit tighter. I made no secret of my amusement.

   “Mama, see the Negro! I’m frightened!” Frightened! Frightened! Now they were beginning to be afraid of me. I made up my mind to laugh myself to tears, but laughter had become impossible. […] Then, assailed at various points, the corporeal schema crumbled, its place taken by a racial epidermal schema. In the train it was no longer a question of being aware of my body in the third person but in a triple person. In the train I was given not one but two, three places […] On that day, completely dislocated, unable to be abroad with the other, the white man, who unmercifully imprisoned me, I took myself far off from my own presence, far indeed, and made myself an object.

(Fanon 1986 [1952]: 112–13)

The incident is recollected in Fanon’s first major book, Black Skin, White Masks, which appeared in 1952. However, the work was not originally intended for publication, but for submission as an academic dissertation in order that Fanon might qualify as a psychiatrist at the University of Lyon. His supervisor at the faculty of medicine rejected the thesis and compelled Fanon to write a second piece which was more acceptable to the medical authorities. As David Macey, Fanon’s biographer, comments, the rejection of the thesis that became one of the most influential and foundational texts of postcolonialism was predictable, since it ‘defied all academic and scientific conventions’ in combining an ‘experimental exploration of the author’s subjectivity’ with lengthy quotations from literary works (Macey 2001: 138–9). The work was unconventional in other respects too. In analysing the effects of racism, Fanon had strayed from the strict path of psychiatry, which was dedicated to medical intervention and cure, into the rather more nebulous field of psychoanalysis. Further, the book was written in a style that was more poetic than scientific, influenced by the existential writings of Camus and Sartre, and by the Negritude poetics of his Martinican teacher and mentor, Aimé Césaire.

The child’s terrified response to the presence of the black man, and the ubiquitous, daily, casual racism of French society in the midtwentieth century which it symbolizes, triggers a ‘crumbling’ of the ‘corporeal schema’ in Fanon. The ‘corporeal schema’, a term derived from Gestalt psychology that Fanon had taken from the work of Jean Lhermitte, refers to the essential sense we have of ourselves as physical presences; a sense which enables us to interact and engage with the world around us (Macey 2001: 165). Racism fractures this ability to engage with others at a fundamental level by substituting a ‘corporeal schema’ with a ‘racial epidermal schema’. Instead of a body among other bodies with which he shares space, Fanon becomes in this encounter a ‘black body’ marked out by his difference, his ‘otherness’. The effects of this dislocation of presence are metaphorically dramatic – he is no longer ‘a man among other men’ but an ‘object’ of fear and loathing, ‘excised’ from productive contact with others and ‘imprisoned’, as the title of the chapter of Black Skin, White Masks where this appears has it, in ‘the fact of blackness’.

‘The fact of blackness’ is Fanon’s main preoccupation in Black Skin, White Masks. His intention is to diagnose this ‘febrile’ condition, but his analysis goes much further and has a wider relevance than this deeply personal recollection of a moment of ‘nausea’. The incident on the train is symptomatic of a much wider, global ‘dislocation’, as Fanon describes it, which has its roots in the pernicious effects of colonialism. The growth of European empires and dominance by foreign powers have had an impact on the economic, political, and cultural lives of subject peoples who experience radical distortions of their language, law, and civil society; indeed, imperialist intervention is a fundamental denial of the enabling features of humanity. But for Fanon, colonialism does more than simply deprive the colonized of their independence. Colonialism and its handmaiden, racism, strike much more deeply into the social and individual psychology of the colonized. The colonial regime re-enacts on a grand scale the drama of the incident on the train by substituting a society’s ‘corporeal schema’, as it were, with an image of alienation and domination where the colonial looks at the world and sees only a reflection of imperial power which has replaced an enabling sense of otherness. The colonial condition prevents, therefore, the formation of workable forms of social and cultural life by creating psychological dependence on these substituted images of domination and inferiority.

In other words, colonialism attacks the very essence of identity in its subject peoples by inducing a form of mental illness:

The Negro’s behaviour makes him akin to an obsessive neurotic type, or, if one prefers, he puts himself into a complete situational neurosis. In the man of colour there is a constant effort to run away from his own individuality, to annihilate his own presence. […] The attitude of the Black man toward the white, or toward his own race, often duplicates almost completely a constellation of delirium, frequently bordering on the region of the pathological.

(Fanon 1986: 60)

And

every ontology is made unattainable in a colonized and civilized society.

(Fanon 1986: 109)

Fanon is here, I think, using the term ‘civilized’ in a somewhat ironic sense. He was not alone, nor was he the first, to attempt to diagnose the psychological dynamics of colonial and racist discourses. Fanon located his own position from a triangulation of different influences from existentialism, colonial anthropology, and Negritude. He was profoundly influenced by Jean-Paul Sartre’s deconstruction of anti-Semitism, and he replicates in his discussion of ‘the fact of blackness’ Sartre’s counter-intuitive argument concerning Jewish identity that ‘[t]he Jew is one whom other men consider a Jew; that is the simple truth from which we must start … It is the anti-Semite who makes the Jew’ (Sartre 1965 [1946]: 69). This remarkable reversal, that identity is neither ‘natural’ nor ‘essential’, but constructed from discourses of difference and inequality, finds an immediate echo in Fanon when he writes that ‘not only must the black man be black; he must be black in relation to the white man’ (Fanon 1986: 110). But it was in his engagement with anthropology that Fanon further refined this position. A central argument of Black Skin, White Masks concerns Octave Mannoni’s then recent book on Madagascar, Prospero and Caliban (1950). On the face of it, Fanon would seem to share some very basic points of agreement with Mannoni: that colonialism extends into the realms of the psyche, and a full understanding of colonization is only possible if its psychological impact is properly acknowledged. But Fanon and Mannoni soon parted company as Mannoni argued that colonization does not create in its subjects the ‘constellation of delirium’ of the pathological and neurotic types Fanon observed in himself and others, but rather colonization is a type of traumatic experience that makes overt these latent forms of psychosis. In exasperation Fanon asks, ‘why does he try to make the inferiority complex something that antedates colonization?’ (Fanon 1986: 85) And echoing Sartre again, he declares, ‘Let us have the courage to say it outright: It is the racist who creates his inferior.’ (93).

Fanon also quarrelled with the very basic assumptions of the psychoanalytic method he had adopted to diagnose the colonial condition. The concept of the Oedipus complex is the root and origin of Freudian (and later Lacanian) psychoanalysis as it is the central theory of Freud’s first major work Totem and Taboo: Resemblances Between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics (1913). As the subtitle of Freud’s text may suggest, he was helped in the writing of this seminal work in the emerging field of psychoanalysis by a number of works in colonial anthropology, particularly Sir James Frazer’s Totemism and Exogamy (1910) which he drew on particularly heavily. Frazer’s four-volume work collected data from missionaries and travellers from all over the European empires to construct a compendium of every known form of totemic belief, which Freud then used to speculate on the nature of an original prehistoric human society. Having constructed an image of the archaic and original ‘primal horde’ from Frazer’s work on contemporary colonized peoples, Freud argued that avoiding sexual intercourse with members of the same clan or family must arise from ‘the oldest and most powerful of human desires’ (Freud 2001 [1913]: 32). To safeguard themselves, the primal horde fashioned strict taboos on incest, but these taboos only demonstrate ambivalent psychic impulses ‘corresponding to both a wish and a counter-wish’, and thus there exists a ‘psychological agreement between taboo and obsessional neurosis’ (35–6). Freud named it the Oedipus complex from the Greek legend of Oedipus who unknowingly killed his father and married his own mother. The Oedipus complex is the metanarrative of universal incestuous fears; but it also expresses paradoxically our fundamental desires and, so deeply is it ingrained in our psychic existence from prehistory to the present, that it can be thought of as ‘the beginnings of religion, morals, society and art’ (156). Everything flows from this archaic mixture of desire and fear. Fanon, however, was not convinced of the universal applicability of the concept: ‘Like it or not, the Oedipus complex is far from coming into being among Negroes’ (Fanon 1986: 151–2). It could be, he argued, that the anthropologists whose data Freud used, had projected their own cultural obsessions, unique to their societies, onto the peoples they had studied and consequently ‘discovered’ Oedipal complexes where none existed (152). This is a radical revision. A revisionism which not only undermines many of the fundamental principles of psychoanalysis (principles that Fanon himself relied upon to build his argument), but which also reiterates the necessity to see particular psychological states as arising from particular cultural and historical moments.

The impact of Fanon’s initial analysis of the psychology of colonialism was to be felt in a number of related but distinct areas. His insistence on linkages between colonial oppression and psychological repression led him to the formulation of a fully ‘politicized’ version of psychoanalytical discourse, and to his role of political philosopher of anticolonial liberation movements. As anti-colonial conflicts escalated, particularly in Algeria where he participated in the war against the French, Fanon argued in his subsequent book, The Wretched of the Earth (1961), that the mere achievement of independence from empire was insufficient to remove the colonialists’ distorting mirror and to return the subjected peoples to their rightful sense of identity. The colonial rupture had made ‘a constellation of delirium’ which perpetuates a tragic cycle and renders the colonial subject silent, invisible, and unformed since language, law, civil society, culture now consist of the replicated divisions of colonial identity. There is no possibility of a return to a state prior to colonial intervention, nor is there a ‘cure’ for colonialism; recuperation is only possible through violence. Only insurrection and civil war, matching the violence of imperial domination with the violence of resistance, will enable the colonial subject to achieve catharsis and be healed. Violence, for Fanon, was not only a political strategy to secure independence, it was a psychological necessity to liberate the minds of the colonized from the repressive effects of the empire. Here, Fanon is attempting to confront a major issue in the identity politics of decolonization: how, when colonialism psychologically debilitates so radically, can the colonial or postcolonial subject achieve any kind of agency? His answer is that the colonial subject achieves agency through the cleansing power of violence. There is not the space here to explore further how Fanon’s potent combination of political and psychic liberation through violent action found a ready audience among the ‘wretched of the earth’ of the European empires, and beyond, in black consciousness movements in the United States, and radical movements in Asia, the Caribbean, and Latin America. However, as James Le Sueur argues in his Uncivil war: Intellectuals and Identity Politics during the Decolonization of Algeria (2005), Fanon foregrounded the problems of identity and agency for those ‘confronting the problem of decolonization’, propelled ‘alterity or the issue of Otherness’ into the position of being the single most important theoretical concern of decolonization, and made ‘identity’ the universal lingua franca of contemporary global postcolonial discourse.

If Fanon’s writings on identity made a significant impact on anticolonial political rhetoric, his work both drew on, and helped to reshape, emerging forms of literary expression and cultural criticism. Black Skin, White Masks is embedded in and rests upon literary works; indeed, it makes as much of an intervention in literary concerns as it does in either psychology or liberation politics, so dependent is it upon literary texts for its ‘evidence’ of the impress of empire. Fanon deals with two kinds of literary texts. The first is the now rarely read fictions and semi-autobiographical writings of empire: works by Mayotte Capécia, Abdoulaye Sadji, and René Maran. To varying degrees, Fanon is disparaging or dismissive of each of these. Fanon’s purpose is not only to use these writings as evidence of his thesis but to deploy them as foils to another set of literary texts with which they are compared: the Negritude poetry of Leopold Sedar Senghor and Aimé Césaire. Negritude was a francophone literary and political movement that was begun in France in the 1930s by a group of colonial intellectuals, Senghor from Senegal, Césaire from Martinique, and Leon Damas from Guiana. Its influences ranged from the Black American Harlem Renaissance to European Surrealism, and it was strongly supported by the Existentialists, particularly Jean-Paul Sartre who wrote an influential essay in their praise entitled ‘Orphée Noir’ (1948). Although all the Negritudinists were committed to countering the racist dogma of colonialism by promoting the cultural identity and value of Black arts and cultures, there are important differences among them of which Fanon is all too aware. Senghor’s version of Negritude emphasized the physical, sensuous, and mythical qualities of Black African identity; his poetry is filled with images of a dark, female Africa, the body, and the drum.

Naked woman, dark womanRipe fruit with firm flesh, dark raptures of black wine,Mouth that gives music to my mouthSavanna of clear horizons, savanna quivering to the fervent caressOf the East Wind, sculptured tom-tom, stretched drumskinMoaning under the hands of the conquerorYour deep contralto voice is the spiritual song of the Beloved.

(‘Black woman’ [1948] see Senghor 1964)

This short extract is typical of Senghor’s belief that ‘l’émotion est nègre, comme la raison est héllène’ (‘emotion is Negro, reason is Greek’). For Senghor, black identity is the inverse mirror image of white identity: emotion rather than reason, body over intellect, rhythm against logic. Although Fanon could see the strategic value of any consciousness movement that tried to undo the depredations of colonialism, this anti-racism merely inverted colonial racism without challenging its basic presuppositions. Rather than liberating the agency of colonial subjects, Senghor’s Negritude simply confirmed racism by turning ‘negative’ stereotypical racial identities into ‘positive’ racial values. ‘My black skin is not the repository of specific values,’ Fanon commented, in a way that would be echoed later by many anglophone writers, Wole Soyinka most famously in the statement at a conference in Kampala in 1962, ‘A tiger does not proclaim his tigritude, he pounces.’

Aimé Césaire’s brand of Negritude was more to Fanon’s taste, although not without qualification. Césaire was a fellow Martinican, and briefly taught both Fanon and the poet Edouard Glissant in Martinique. ‘No book by Senghor has ever been banned by a French government,’ comments David Macey (2001: 184); the same could not be said of the Antillean form of Negritude. Césaire, in his Cahier d’un retour au pays natal [Notebook of a Return to My Native Land] (1939) defines his Negritude as belonging to:

Those who invented neither powder nor compassThose who harnessed neither steam nor electricityThose who explored neither the seas or the skies but thosewithout whom the earth would not be the earth[…]My negritude is not a stone, its deafness hurled against the clamor of the dayMy negritude is not a leukoma of dead liquid over the earth’s dead eyeMy negritude is neither tower nor cathedralIt takes root in the red flesh of the soilIt takes root in the ardent flesh of the skyIt breaks through the opaque prostration with its upright patience.

(Césaire 1983: 67, 69)

The language here is deeply indebted to French modernism (particularly the Surrealists who promoted his work), as was Senghor’s, but Césaire’s Negritude, although rooted in anti-racism and anti-colonialism, is not tied in the same way as Senghor’s to an essentialized black racial identity. In important ways, Césaire’s Negritude breaks out of the discourse of race to embrace all those subject to imperial hegemony; in that sense, ‘blackness’ is not only or merely a matter of skin colour but encodes a set of relationships of subjugation to dominant military, technological, and colonial powers. Fanon’s response to these lines, which he quoted in Black Skin, White Masks, was exuberant: ‘Yes, all those are my brothers – a “bitter brotherhood” imprisons all of us alike’ (124).

In the anglophone Caribbean, seemingly without the benefit of the influence of French modernism, surrealism, existentialism, and the developing theories of self and other, similar expressions of the psychological damage inflicted on subjugated identities were, nonetheless, being explored. In 1953, the Barbadian writer, George Lamming, published In the Castle of my Skin, the first of a series of semi-autobiographical fictions that would explore, in a Fanonian way but independent of Fanon, the colonial and postcolonial condition (see also The Emigrants, 1954, The Pleasures of Exile, 1960, and Natives of my Person, 1972). In an introduction he wrote to a new edition of In the Castle of My Skin celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of publication, Lamming makes explicit the novel’s purpose which is to explore the question of colonial identity:

It was not a physical cruelty. Indeed, the colonial experience of my generation was almost wholly without violence. No torture, no concentration camp, no mysterious disappearance of hostile natives, no army encamped with orders to kill. The Caribbean endured a different kind of subjugation. It was a terror of the mind: a daily exercise in selfmutilation. Black versus Black in a battle for self-improvement. […] The result was a fractured consciousness, a deep split in its sensibility which now raised difficult problems of language and values; the whole issue of cultural allegiance between imposed norms of White Power, represented by a small numerical minority, and the fragmented memory of the African masses: between white instruction and Black imagination.

(Lamming 1994: xxxix, xxxvii)

There are conflicting assessments of Fanon’s contribution to anticolonial political action: in Algeria he is regarded as a national hero, but in his native Martinique he is only grudgingly acknowledged. Since his early death from leukemia in 1961, his political legacy has divided commentators into those who see him as the prophet of liberation from empire, and those who regard him as the harbinger of an era of violence and terrorism. In the postcolonial academy, however, the reception of Fanon’s ideas on the colonial condition has been much less equivocal. His writings have had a profound effect on an increasingly influential body of visual artists, writers, sociologists, anthropologists and cultural theorists engaged in an interdisciplinary undertaking to refashion the epistemological basis for the discussion and analysis of visual representations, literatures, and cultures, in an era ‘after empire’. To gauge the distance travelled since 1961, we must leap forward in time to a conference on Fanon’s legacy held at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in 1995 as a prelude to a major exhibition, Mirage: Enigmas of Race, Difference and Desire. The conference took its theme from Fanon’s key chapter in Black Skin, White Masks – ‘The Fact of Blackness’, and was an indication of the growth both in significance and application of the central ideas of postcolonialism. Among those contributing were Martine Attille (filmmaker), Homi Bhabha (literary critic and theorist), Stuart Hall (sociologist), bell hooks (writer, artist, and cultural activist), Isaac Julien (filmmaker), Steve McQueen (artist), Mark Nash (editor and filmmaker), and Françoise Vergès (political scientist). In many respects, this was a different world from that in which Fanon wrote Black Skin, White Masks; the colonial regimes Fanon railed against have passed into history (although many feel they have simply reinvented themselves), and the discourse has changed from Fanon’s admixture of psychoanalysis, literature, and polemic to embrace an astonishing range of disciplines and practices (with many questioning Fanon’s views of women and gays). But, at the centre of all these different voices with different concerns, the old Fanonian questions of identity and agency still shaped the postcolonial agenda.

Let us take these two dates – the death of Fanon in Algeria in 1961, and remembering Fanon in London in 1995 – and ask what happened in between? An imperfect and partial answer is that Edward Said happened in between. Said was already a distinguished literary critic when his ground-breaking work Orientalism appeared in 1978. Orientalism was an extended critique of Western representations of the Orient that had, Said argued, depicted the East as exhibiting cultural traits and qualities that were fundamentally different from, indeed opposite to, the West. Orientalists portrayed the East as the West’s weak and irrational ‘other’, a shadowy reverse mirror image of a vigorous and reasonable occident. Far from offering a ‘real’ image, Orientalist discourse, Said controversially claimed, was a construction, which placed the ‘orient’ in a discourse that repeatedly expressed and reinforced unequal power relations between the West and the East. Orientalism was nothing more than the ideological support for colonial domination, and, although concerned principally with the West’s construction of the orient, Orientalism was but one of a number of ‘–isms’, such as Africanism and Americanism, that supported global colonial hegemony. The book, and the subsequent controversies it provoked, projected Said into the centre of the postcolonial debate on identity and cultural representation that took two related courses: he wrote extensively on the representation of Islam and the Palestinian conflict, as in The Middle East: What Chances For Peace? (1980), Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World (1981), and Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question (1988); and he continued to uncover the impact of colonial discourses in the canonical works of English literature, as in The World, the Text and the Critic (1983), and Culture and Imperialism (1993). Throughout, Said had an abiding interest in Fanon’s theories of colonial identity, returning repeatedly to his writings, most notably in the essays on ‘traveling theory’ (The World, the Text, and the Critic, 1983) and in Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (2000) where he argued that Fanon adapted Georg Lukács’ idea of ‘reification’ (a form of alienation, or distortion of consciousness, by which unequal class relationships are sustained) for colonial conditions of racial inequality. But it was probably his re-reading of canonical literary works that brought about the greatest transformation in postcolonial literary studies. In Culture and Imperialism, Said applied what he called ‘contrapuntal readings’ to literary texts to uncover the presence of hitherto hidden or obscured colonial contexts that alter our sense of the texts’ meanings. In his reading of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, for example, he argued that the material wealth and high social position of the Bertram family are wholly dependent on the slave trade, indeed the central narrative is occasioned by Sir Thomas’ absence in Antigua to put his West Indian plantations in order. Yet, Said argues, Austen only obliquely reflects this complicity in empire, an involvement which is revealed when the novel is read ‘against the grain’ or ‘contrapuntally’.

Said radically transformed postcolonialism and, although towards the end of his life he criticized postcolonialism’s increasing turn towards solipsism, he did much to shape an agenda of engaged political commitment and ‘contrapuntal’ critical analysis. First and foremost, Said embedded a process of questioning, which postcolonialism shares with many other forms of poststructuralist analysis, of the ‘essential’ or ‘natural’ or ‘commonsense’ categories by which identity is constructed: ‘race’, ethnicity, nationality, gender, sexuality. After Fanon, and after Said, postcolonialism sees identities, not as fixed and rooted, but as products of a world in constant motion. Although ‘race’, ethnicity, and nationality may appear to be the solid bedrock upon which we shape a sense of ourselves, these are not, nor have they ever been, stable, but are always being formed and reformed in different patterns and combinations in a process of constant interaction and change shaped by historical circumstance. As a consequence, identities are also in a constant state of flux. Colonialism has been a major engine driving an accelerated pace of change, forcing different cultures into new forms, ‘unfixing’ what was thought to be solid, and creating new identities. The postcolonial project is, therefore, concerned to deconstruct the older language of identity founded upon notions of impermeable entities, such as the nation, culture, and selfhood, and to reconstruct the debate around hybrid and porous formations, such as displacement, dislocation, and migrancy. This postcolonial subject inhabits ‘travelling cultures’ (meaning cultures in a constant process of transformation), transgressive intercultural zones and intersecting regions (see Pratt 1992), transnational and nomad identities (see Clifford 1997). According to Stuart Hall, these ‘diasporic conjunctures’ offer a truer model of identity than that which is founded upon, for example, the fixities of race and nation. They ‘invite a reconception … of familiar notions of ethnicity and identity’ (Clifford 1997: 36). However, the reconception of identity which postcolonial theory offers is neither neutral nor detached from its subject, but engaged and oppositional, since such a reconception of others also requires a radical reconception of one’s own identity as similarly ‘fluid’ and transforming. It involves an interrogation of such words as ‘homeland’, ‘nation’, ‘border’, ‘people’, the ‘orient’ in order to reimagine identity, not as exclusive, static, and pure, but as intercultural, plural, contingent, and constantly negotiated through contact with others. Postcolonialism is, therefore, constantly challenging accepted notions of ‘being’, particularly when those notions arise out of the ‘fractured consciousness’, as Lamming has it, of colonialism.

Of all those theorists involved in current postcolonial debates, perhaps the most Fanonian is Homi K. Bhabha. At least, he has written an illuminating foreword to a reissue of Black Skin, White Masks published in 1986, which he expanded upon in his subsequent book The Location of Culture (1994). In some important respects, Bhabha’s work begins where Fanon’s ends, with the ‘fact of blackness’ – Fanon’s encounter with the child on the train and the crippling sense of having one’s identity defined and trapped within another’s representation of oneself. Bhabha pushes this much further than Fanon, and even further than Said’s deconstruction of cultural representations, when he declares that ‘the question of identity can never be seen “beyond representation”’ (Bhabha 1987: 6): all we can know of identity is its manifestation in reproduction and we inhabit identities, like Sartre’s Jew, forced upon us by others. Bhabha goes on to define further that construction of identity as descending from ‘two … traditions in the discourse of identity’:

the philosophical tradition of identity as the process of self-reflection in the mirror of (human) nature: and the anthropological view of the difference of human identity as located in the division of Nature/Culture.

(Bhabha 1987: 5)

This needs a little unpicking. By the ‘philosophical tradition’, Bhabha means the sense we have of a unique selfhood whereby we imagine ourselves as possessing a distinctive core or kernel which is not the product of anything external to us but our inimitable possession. I look in a mirror and see ‘something’ that I take to be the real