Commodifying (Post)Colonialism : Othering, Reification, Commodification and the New Literatures and Cultures in English [1 ed.] 9789042032279, 9789042032262

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Commodifying (Post)Colonialism

C

ross ultures

Readings in the Post / Colonial Literatures in English

127 ASNEL Papers 16 Series Editors

Gordon Collier (Giessen)

Bénédicte Ledent (Liège)

Geoffrey Davis (Aachen)

ASNEL Papers appear under the auspices of the Gesellschaft für die Neuen Englischsprachigen Literaturen e.V. (GNEL) Association for the Study of the New Literatures in English (ASNEL) Mark Stein, President (English Department, University of Münster) Formatting, layout and final editing and cover image: Gordon Collier

Commodifying (Post)Colonialism Othering, Reification, Commodification and the New Literatures and Cultures in English ASNEL Papers 16

Edited by

Rainer Emig and Oliver Lindner

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2010

Cover image: Gordon Collier Cover design: Pier Post The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents - Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 978-90-420-3226-2 E-Book ISBN: 978-90-420-3227-9 © Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam – New York, NY 2010 Printed in The Netherlands

Table of Contents ——————————

Introduction

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THEORY Bourdieu, Capital, and the Postcolonial Marketplace JENS MARTIN GURR

3

FICTION ‘Savage’ Violence and the Colonial Body in Nathaniel Crouch’s The English Acquisitions in Guinea and East India (1708) and in Edward Cooke’s A Voyage to the South Sea (1712) OLIVER LINDNER

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Saccharographies CARL PLASA

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“The dark races stand still, the fair progress”: Matthew Kneale’s English Passengers and the Intellectual Commodification of Colonial Encounter in Tasmania WOLFGANG FUNK

63

Alice in Oz: A Children’s Classic between Imperial Nostalgia and Transcultural Reinvention SISSY HELFF

77

Think Local Sell Global: Magical Realism, The Whale Rider, and the Market LARS ECKSTEIN

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Dialogue Within Changing Power-Structures: Commodification of Black South African Women’s Narratives by White Women Writers? KSENIA ROBBE

109

Phantasmagorical Representations of Postcolonial Cityscapes in Salman Rushdie’s Fury (2002) and Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found (2004) CECILE SANDTEN

125

DRAMA Amiri Baraka’s Revisiting of Slavery : Memory, Historical Amnesia, and Commodification SAMY AZOUZ

147

Moving Beyond Irish (Post)Colonialism by Commodifying (Post)Colonial Stage Irishness: Martin McDonagh’s Plays as Global Commodities KATHARINA RENNHAK

161

FILM AND POP MUSIC The Moveable Frontier: John Ford and Howard Hawks at Home and in Africa STEPHAN LAQUÉ

179

“We are the ones you do not see”: The Need for a Change of Focus in Filming Black Britain BIRTE HEIDEMANN

195

Exoticism and Authenticity in Contemporary British-Asian Popular Culture : The Commodification of Difference in Bride & Prejudice and Apache Indian’s Music SABINE NUNIUS

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Salman Rushdie Superstar: The Making of Postcolonial Literary Stardom ANA CRISTINA MENDES

221

Celebrity Conservationism, Postcolonialism, and the Commodity Form GRAHAM HUGGAN

241

Notes on Contributors

259

Introduction ———————

N

E W E N G L I S H L I T E R A T U R E S and the study of cultures that emerge from or in the context of colonization are based on an awareness and investigation of difference. One cannot ‘discover’, explore, and colonize a geographical region and its inhabitants if one does not perceive them as different. Yet the diverse shapes of this difference, although conceptualized by various theoretical disciplines, often remain vague and confusing. This is where the idea of self and Other comes to the fore. In philosophy, theology, and psychoanalysis, the Other is the binary opposite that the self needs in order to assert itself. The greatest of these Others has traditionally been the idea of God – either as a tangible presence as in Christianity, Hinduism, and various forms of polytheism, or as an invisible presence as in Judaism, Islam or Buddhism. Levinasian philosophy with its roots in Jewish thinking has made the constant but intangible presence of the Other the philosophical precondition of our being.1 At the other end of the spectrum, Lacanian psychoanalysis as well as deconstruction have made the very denial of such a presence of the Other the basis of our lack of being, yet also of our incessant search for meaning and definition.2 Both present and

1

The seminal study here is Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, tr. Alphonso Lingis (Totalité et infini, 1961; Pittsburgh P A : Duquesne U P , 1969). 2 See Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book 2: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954–1955, ed. Jacques–Alain Miller, tr. Sylvana Tomaselli (Le moi dans la théorie de Freud et dans la technique de la psychanalyse, 1978; New York: W.W. Norton, 1991) and Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other: Or, the Prosthesis of Origin, rev. ed., tr. Patrick Mensah, (Le monolingualisme de l’autre: ou la prothèse d’origine, 1996; Stanford C A : Stanford U P , 1998).

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absent Others haunt colonial and postcolonial discourse with their insistence on racial, ethnic, and cultural identity or difference and form the benchmarks for a thinking in terms of inclusion or exclusion, assimilation, adaptation, mimicry, but also subversion, travesty or segregation. Yet colonial and postcolonial investigations cannot and do not stop at abstract concepts. Their foundation in practice and their indebtedness to cultural studies generally persuade them to look for actual material manifestations of supposed or real differences in cultural, social, and political practices. Differences are not merely demarcated. They are produced discursively, and as discursive formation they function as ‘truths’ generated from our historical circumstances and structures of power that in turn legitimate, produce, affect, and sometimes change precisely such ‘truths’ and power-structures.3 One sees this in terms of political movements, liberatory or otherwise, but also in terms of the creation of discursive authority along the lines of who speaks for whom or who cannot speak their oppression at all. The need to distinguish representation and articulation and to pay constant critical attention to their discursive construction derives from the fact that with representation enter forms of othering that have a tendency to fix the qualities of the supposed Other as permanent or indeed essential. This is where reification enters the critical debate. Originally merely the Latin expression for objectification or ‘thingification’ (a term that the colonial critic Aimé Césaire uses in French as chosification4), it was defined predominantly by the Hungarian socialist Georg Lukács. He regarded it as an inevitable consequence of capitalism: Reification requires that a society should learn to satisfy all its needs in terms of commodity exchange. The separation of the producer from his means of production, the dissolution and destruction of all ‘natural’ production units, etc., and all the social and economic conditions necessary for the emergence of modern capitalism tend to replace ‘natural’ relations which exhibit human relations more plainly by rationally reified relations.5 3

The most influential theorist behind ideas of discourse and power is Michel Foucault. See especially Power / Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. & tr. Colin Gordon (Brighton: Harvester, 1980). 4 Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, tr. Joan Pinkham (Le discours sur le colonialisme, 1950; New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000). 5 Georg Lukács, “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” in History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, tr. Rodney Livingstone (“Die

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The Frankfurt School thinkers Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer developed Lukács’ ideas (whose belief in unalienated ‘natural’ human relations strikes us as rather problematic today) and took them into the arena of culture. There, too, and perhaps particularly, capitalist materialism has a tendency to fix abstract qualities in supposedly fixed and rigid material forms. Contrary to liberal-humanist thinkers, who believe in the independence of art from social, economic, and political conditions and forces, Adorno and Horkheimer, especially in the chapter “The Culture Industry” in their Dialectic of Enlightenment, argue that, by turning itself into an industry, art “abjures its autonomy.”6 This is where yet another theory is helpful for an understanding of the way in which value is generated, maintained, and sometimes lost in culture: Pierre Bourdieu’s ideas concerning symbolic capital. In an extension of Max Weber’s relatively rigid ideas of status, Bourdieu defines symbolic capital as an ingredient of life-styles. These are determined as much by a person’s habitus, his or her way of playing a particular social and cultural role, as this habitus depends on the symbolic capital that a person can accumulate: Life-styles are thus the systematic products of habitus, which, perceived in their mutual relations through the schemes of the habitus, become sign systems that are socially qualified (as “distinguished”, “vulgar” etc.). The dialectic of conditions and habitus is the basis of an alchemy which transforms the distribution of capital, the balance-sheet of a power relation, into a system of perceived differences, distinctive properties, that is, a distribution of symbolic capital, legitimate capital, whose objective truth is misrecognized.7

The Marxist background of this debate on differences and their reification opens the arena for the term that is in the focus and title of the present collection of essays: ‘commodification’. The term has a short history. In fact, the Oxford English Dictionary lists its first known use for 1975 and defines it as “the action of turning something into, or treating something as, a (mere) comVerdinglichung und das Bewußtsein des Proletariats,” 1923; tr. based on 1960 tr. by K. Axielos & J. Bois, London: Merlin, 1971): 91. 6 Max Horkheimer & Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, tr. Edmund Jephcott (Dialektik der Aufklärung: Philosophische Fragmente, 1947; Stanford C A : Stanford U P , 2002): 127. 7 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, tr. Richard Nice (La Distinction: Critique sociale du jugement, 1979; London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984): 172.

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modity; commercialization of an activity, etc., that is not by nature commercial.”8 Yet what it describes has a history that is as old as humankind: the transformation of goods and services (and even things that may not normally be regarded as goods or services) into a commodity, or the assigning of economic value to something not previously considered in economic terms – for example, ideas and identities. ‘Commodity’, in Marxist thinking, in turn describes any good or service produced by human labour and offered as a product for general sale on the market. In Marx’s own words: Commodities, which exist as use-values, must first of all assume a form in which they appear to one another nominally as exchange-values, as definite quantities of materialised universal labour-time.9

Commodity fetishism and alienation are, for Marx, the inevitable consequences of this driving force behind capitalism. Here the link with colonial and postcolonial thinking and the literary and cultural manifestations that have been produced in the context of such thinking becomes evident. Colonization only works when it works – and this means that it ultimately has to pay for itself. This was the reason why early settlements, such as the first ones in North America, frequently collapsed. The recipe for success proved not merely to be self-sustainability, but ultimately the ability to exploit the newly settled lands, their natural resources, and their inhabitants, so that a profitable economic basis and trade became viable, which in turn safeguarded the stability and growth of the colony. Lenin, following on from Marx, ultimately declared that imperialism was the logical outcome of commodity capitalism with its endeavour to secure ever-larger markets, but also everexpanding sources of cheap raw materials and labour. He writes: Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of development at which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital is established; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world

8

Oxford English Dictionary Online, “Commodification,” Oxford U P , 2010, http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50045087?single=1&query_type=word&querywor d=commodification&first=1&max_to_show=10 (accessed 22 June 2010). One notices that the problematic term ‘nature’ raises its ugly head here too. 9 Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, vol. 2, ed. Maurice Dobb, tr. S.W. Ryazanskaya (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1971): 64.

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among the international trusts has begun, in which the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed.10

When one thinks of colonization today, one instantly thinks of colonial goods such as sugar, tobacco or cotton, and one equally quickly remembers the most drastic form of colonial labour: slavery. They represent the commodification of natural resources as much as the commodification of human life and energy. Without them, colonization would not have happened – and neither would the modernization of the Western world in terms of industrialization. Yet what happens to commodification after the end of traditional colonial rule, in a ‘postcolonial’ environment, at least according to the simplest (and insufficient) definition as ‘after colonization’? Commodification, of course, continues. Raw materials such as oil and diamonds are mercilessly ripped out of ‘developing’ countries, whose ‘development’, of course, means developing toward the standards and according to the principles of the Western world. Migrant workers and economic refugees show us that the commodification of labour power, too, did not come to an end after the end of colonies proper. Moreover, they prove that there exist much more subtle forms of enslavement than the physical subjugation of a human being under the control of others. How does literature, how does culture, respond to conditions of commodification? This is the question that prompted the present collection of essays. It intends to show that artistic responses to these conditions are not a development of the twentieth century, but that postcolonial texts have their origins in earlier texts, especially in colonial ones. Already the first encounters with new regions and their inhabitants produced fictional as well as non-fictional literary and visual depictions. As the ‘New World’ literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries amply demonstrates, separating documentary impetus from imaginary excess and both from shameless promotion of new exploratory ventures is a tricky and largely futile endeavour. In a similar vein, adventure stories from the nineteenth century glamorize the colonizers as much as the exoticism and wealth supposedly to be found in places like India and Africa. Yet, as postcolonial theory and especially its concept of hybridity have shown, objectifying, reifying, and commodifying others also affect those 10

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (Империализм как высшая стадия капитализма, 1917; London: Pluto, 1996): 92.

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doing the deed. In the same way as othering presupposes a negative definition of self as non-Other, colonial attitudes largely rest on a structure that contemporary theory has called ‘abjection’ – the seeming rejection of the non-self, yet at the cost of forever remaining tied to this rejection as the price of selfdefinition.11 This can be read in abstract, in psychological, but also again in materialist terms: I can reject the exploitation of the so-called ‘Third World’ (itself a label that gives evidence of abjection) as immoral and evil, yet my privileged position of moral indignation owes the basis of its superstructures of education, the media, the arts and literature to the economic base structures of exploitation that these superstructures teach me to abhor. This is where postcolonial writing and art as well as postcolonial theory (here in the sense of transforming continuing conditions of ‘coloniality’) find their bearing. Writers who might write about a state of hybridity of cultures, and who need not hail from formerly or presently colonized environments, can now discuss the manifold and sometimes quite paradoxical phenomena with which sometimes mutual commodification takes place. The exotic can feature as commodified touristy potential – also in the shape of supposedly morally valuable literature and art – while at the same time the tourist can find him- or herself an exploited commodity that brings much-needed capital to areas of the world that find it hard to generate capital in any other way. It is no coincidence that several contributors to the present volume are experts on tourism. The tourist as a key figure of commodifying otherness stands for all of us who can only peek at the representations of New Zealand Mori or white South African women writers as interested onlookers. New Literatures in English as well as the postcolonial academic paradigm from which much of it hails (and in which most of it is avidly discussed and regurgitated in the form of essays or books like the present one) are also a marketplace. Knowledge and insight, ideas in short, are our commodities, and we can only try to ensure that we do not sell them under value. Our material and our inquiries are no better or more topical than others. They are trickier, though. In them, the entanglement of artistic and cultural practices with their contexts of cultural and political power-structures as well as that of the power-structures and cultural politics of academia and mass media is more intimate – to the degree of becoming incestuous in the case of 11

The concept ultimately derived from the psychoanalytic ideas of Julia Kristeva. See her Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, tr. Leon S. Roudiez (Pouvoirs de l’horreur: Essai sur l’abjection, 1980; New York: Columbia U P , 1982).

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writers who are also theoretical thinkers like Salman Rushdie. This is why it is important to look at history, but also at the price-tags and labels, at the wrappings and logistics with which historical and cultural alterity have been rendered manageable, at the values attached to certain authors, texts, and critical discourses, and the denigration and virtual enslavement of others. Yet, in line with the mutually modifying give-and-take of hybridity,12 we can also investigate transformations – of value and meaning – of staples of Western culture, such as Jane Austen’s novels or Alice in Wonderland, and check how their reworking in colonial or postcolonial contexts brings out issues that might affect these contexts as much as the works’ original ones. Lastly, we can look at the case of postcolonial celebrities and their ambivalent status. A sketch in the British-Asian comedy series Goodness Gracious Me (whose title reiterates a famous commodification of colonial alterity, the white British actor Peter Sellers playing a clichéd Indian doctor in the 1960 comedy The Millionairess, directed by Anthony Asquith) features a T V book-discussion panel, “The Book Programme.”13 A Scottish-accented white female presenter introduces the show as one responding to “the phenomenal success of Asian writers in Western literature” and presents three Asian authors who are claimed to be on the Booker Prize shortlist. Anita Devi, the first to be introduced, wears a pale yellow salwar khameez and speaks in heavily accented English. When accused of bandwagon-jumping, she responds by declaring all Indians to be “natural authors” because of “the rich depth of our cultural experiences.” When she continues to insist on the “vast philosophical and cultural resources” she has “as an Asian,” “on the thousands of years of civilization, the indelible scars left by the struggle for independence, the duality of the immigrant experience,” the presenter confronts her with her book The Little Bear that Goes Shopping. What the fictional Anita Devi has uttered are critical commonplaces of postcolonial studies, at least of its initial phase, which liked to reverse the hierarchies of Western and Oriental by upholding the cultural sophistication of Asian and other cultures. She also knows the mantra of politically correct 12

The best definition of hybridity by its founder can be found in Homi K. Bhabha, “Signs Taken for Wonders” (1985), excerpt in The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths & Helen Tiffin (London & New York: Routledge, 1994): 34. 13 The sketch is in the second show in series two, also available on D V D as Goodness Gracious Me: Complete Series Two (B B C 2002).

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verdicts on migration and political liberation. When the presenter insists that Devi’s book is no more and no less than a children’s story, the second writer, a male, intervenes and calls this interpretation “incredibly eurocentric” and “based on imperialistic preconceptions.” Once again, the vocabulary of postcolonial criticism, some of which has been reiterated in the present Introduction, is not only known but is also strategically employed. When the second author’s shortlisted book turns out to be a colouring book, Devi jumps to his rescue and talks about a “tradition of pictorial representation in Indian literature” of which the presenter is “completely ignorant.” The presenter’s critical interventions are discarded by Devi as “denigrating a serious artistic movement” – in short, as denunciation amounting to censorship. When the presenter hands over the question of serious art versus bandwagon-jumping to the third writer, the heavily veiled Indira Pakistani, the latter turns out to be a white male who even wears Western brogues. He also has a hard time imitating an Indian accent, but still comes up with the statement “I am in total agreement wid dem.” “Didn’t you used to be Jeffrey Archer?” (a former Conservative politician turned writer of potboilers, who spent time in prison for perjury), retorts the presenter. Pakistani quickly responds “No,” though in the wrong (namely, educated) English accent, before s / he corrects him- or herself. The two other Asian writers bury their heads in shame. The sketch has several levels that are relevant to the issues raised in the present collection of essays. Commodification of (post)colonialism is addressed first and foremost in the sketch’s correct evaluation of Asian writing as a growth industry. It is also realistic in voicing the possibility that much bandwagon-jumping has occurred, and it is no coincidence that the actress playing Anita Devi (a name potentially modelled on the grande dame of Indian writing Anita Desai) is Meera Syal, who is also a successful writer whose first novel bears the title Anita and Me. Hijacking global formats such as children’s books is a strategy that ethnic writers have been very adept at, yet one that postcolonial criticism views ambivalently, again in relation to the commodifying strategies of globalization. The most evident case of reverse mimicry in the sketch, though, is the impersonation of a female South Asian writer by a white Western male. Even this contains a grain of truth, though, as the case of Mudrooroo alias Colin Thomas Johnson, taken by some to be one of the founders of Australian aboriginal literature, by others to be a fraud, shows.

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Perhaps even more importantly, however, the sketch also demonstrates that the concepts and theories underlying postcolonial studies themselves become symbolic capital and commodities. In the same way that it is possible to preclude a debate by pressing the political-correctness button, it is possible to support one’s positions by acquiring the correct (and intellectually fashionable) habitus of a ‘true’ postcolonial critic. The very success of postcolonial theory and of the study of the New Literatures in English in academia, with many chairs, entire departments, and degree schemes dedicated to its pursuit, also needs to be addressed with an eye on the dangers of commodifying what ought to remain critical – also towards itself.  The introductory contribution in this collection of essays reflects on a theoretical framework with which the phenomenon of commodified (post)colonialism can be approached. In his article “Bourdieu, Capital, and the Postcolonial Marketplace,” J E N S G U R R explores how Bourdieu’s concept of the different forms of economic, social, cultural, and symbolic capital and the mechanisms that regulate their acquisition, accumulation, exchange, and mutual conversion can help to illuminate diverse phenomena in the postcolonial marketplace. Stating the ubiquity of commodifying postcolonialism in the literary marketplace, but also in such disparate fields as the media, tourism, the academia, and popular culture, Gurr assesses several recent critical engagements with Bourdieu’s concepts, particularly those by Graham Huggan, James F. English, and Sarah Brouillette. After critically evaluating the applicability of Bourdieu’s ideas, Gurr proposes to examine more closely the hitherto under-theorized mechanism of commodifying and defusing subversion and dissent in the process of adoption into the mainstream. Gurr’s article calls for an emphasis on the narrativity, performativity, and mediality of individuals’ self-positioning in this field, as well as on the intersection between local, national, and transnational fields of cultural production. Gurr further proposes the notion of ‘field’ rather than ‘capital’ for an investigation of political and cultural conflicts in the postcolonial marketplace. In order to illustrate his claim, he uses the example of the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchú, whose famous autobiographical text I, Rigoberta Menchú (1983) can be regarded as a prime example of the struggle for interpretative authority.

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The first group of articles explores the commodification of colonial and postcolonial experience in fictional texts from many parts of the globe, ranging from the early-eighteenth century to the present. Taking a look at the commodification of colonial experience in early-eighteenth-century English travel narratives, O L I V E R L I N D N E R ’s article is concerned with a topic that has so far received only cursory attention in academe. Since these narratives of overseas contact are shaped to a large extent by articulating difference, the body of the savage is a primary site where difference is inscribed. Focusing on two early-eighteenth-century travelogues, Nathaniel Crouch’s The English Acquisitions in Guinea & East India (1708) and Edward Cooke’s A Voyage to the South Sea, and Round the World (1712), Lindner seeks to point out common patterns of representation that enable the reader to ‘consume’ the colonial body. The essay argues that representations of the colonial body in Crouch’s and Cooke’s texts employ in particular two strategies of othering which testify to the presumed ferocity of ‘savage’ violence: the scandalous trope of cannibalism; and the display of the ‘savage’ corpse. The article also links depictions of the fragmented colonial body to early-eighteenth-century medical discourse, since, as Lindner shows, the detailed description of the fractured body and its parts bears a considerable resemblance to the increase in anatomical procedures in Europe. Finally, Lindner claims that representations of the fragmented and savage body, a form of textual consumption that turns the savage body into a commodified object as a fixed set-piece, can be seen as the authors’ legitimate answer to the practice of cannibalism. In his contribution “Saccharographies,” C A R L P L A S A is concerned with the links between sugar and slavery. His essay deals with the representation of the positions of slaves on the Caribbean sugar plantations in the fiction of postcolonial black writers. After outlining some crucial texts of the colonial period, such as James Grainger’s poem The Sugar Cane (1764), “Monk” Lewis’s Journal of a West India Proprietor (1834), and abolitionist pamphlets, Plasa concentrates on Grace Nichols’s I is a Long Memoried Woman (1983), David Dabydeen’s Slave Song (1984), Caryl Phillips’s Cambridge (1991), and Austin Clarke’s The Polished Hoe (2002). As Plasa argues, these authors write back to and critique the colonial texts, in particular their idealizing notion of slavery and their use of the process of sugar-making as an allegory of refinement. Instead, these postcolonial black authors, whose works often cross and question the generic boundaries between fictional and historical forms, focus on the presence of sexual violence against black women, thus highlighting violent white male desire. They thereby introduce an aes-

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thetic of contamination that puts the traditional allegory of sugar-making into reverse. As Plasa summarizes, sugar is imbued with a certain textual power that compels both master and slave to tell its story in ways that are at once radically different yet bound up with each other. W O L F G A N G F U N K looks at the representation of colonial relations in Tasmania in recent British fiction in his article “‘The dark races stand still, the fair progress’: Matthew Kneale’s English Passengers and the Intellectual Commodification of Colonial Encounter in Tasmania.” As Funk states, the British author Matthew Kneale’s historical novel, published in 2000, is a thinly disguised rendering of eminent historical figures in the process of the colonization of Tasmania during the nineteenth century and can thus be regarded as a prime example of the commodification of colonial history. After providing an overview of eminent dates and processes in the colonial history of Tasmania and also drawing on Robert Knox’s famous manifesto The Races of Men (1850), Funk discusses Kneale’s adaptation and examines how the author manages to show the imperial endeavour as an alliance between scientific and colonial objectives. Funk then investigates the extent to which Kneale’s narrative itself can be seen as a commodification of the historical facts, and he seeks to demonstrate that narrating and streamlining history (put on the literary agenda by, among others, Linda Hutcheon and Hayden White), in particular colonial history, is in itself above all a commercial enterprise. In her article “Alice in Oz: A Children’s Classic Between Imperial Nostalgia and Transcultural Reinvention,” S I S S Y H E L F F looks at the many variations on the Alice in Wonderland story in an increasingly globalized culture industry where television programmes, films, animations, web pages, theatre productions, and other media provide innumerable versions of Carroll’s famous book. Helff introduces some of these variations: namely, Dorothy Hewett’s poetry collection Alice in Wormland (1987) and Nadine Amadio’s children’s tale The New Adventures of Alice in Rainforest Land (1988), in order to examine how Australian adaptations attempt to exploit the Alice motif in their creative negotiating of Australianness. As Helff argues, Hewett does not seem to target a global readership but, rather, focuses on aspects of a mature and self-confident Australian imagination, apparent in the rites-ofpassage topics of her poems as well as in the dismissal of the colonial legacy. Amadio, who incorporates many facets of the Australian flora and fauna into her story, stresses Australia’s traditional link with Great Britain and thereby evokes a nostalgic gaze that carries colonial undertones and can thus be seen as an example of commodifying imperial nostalgia. Further, the article also

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looks at the painter Charles Blackman’s widely acclaimed illustrations for Amadio’s text, which present an altogether gloomier version of Amadio’s bright and fanciful rendering of the Alice story. Remaining in this part of the globe, L A R S E C K S T E I N ’s contribution “Think Global Sell Global: Magical Realism, The Whale Rider, and the Market” examines how the Mori writer Witi Ihimaera’s novel The Whale Rider (1987), which has gained international renown because of the success of Niko Caro’s 2002 film adaptation, has been modified to suit the taste of a global readership. Eckstein particularly focuses on how magical-realist ideologies that originate in local communities and traditions are adapted to the late-capitalist book market and its policy of promoting postcolonial bestsellers. After introducing some features of the term ‘magical realism’ to reveal the novel’s magical-realist design, the article shows to what extent later textual changes modify Ihimaera’s approach. In his brief survey of the publication history of The Whale Rider, Eckstein underscores the fact that the original edition contains entire dialogues in te reo Mori, which are crucial in evoking the traditions and practices of Mori culture and which often lack satisfying equivalents in the English language, thus providing an exotic appeal, but also making it harder for non-Mori readers to follow the plot. Subsequent editions, however, have kept only very few sequences in Mori and have provided glossaries. Eckstein therefore claims that these ‘diluted’ versions have largely eliminated the magical-realist character of The Whale Rider and that the original version has been sacrificed in the process of the global commodification of Ihimaera’s text. K S E N I A R O B B E ’s article takes us to South Africa. It bears the provocative title “Dialogues within the Changing Power-Structures: Commodification of Black South African Women’s Narratives by White Women Writers?” In the 1980s and 1990s, South African white women’s writing increasingly tackled questions of identity-construction and re-formulations across racial lines. The article aims at exploring how black women figures and their narratives have been manipulated and commodified in Elsa Joubert’s Poppie, Wilma Stockenström’s The Expedition to the Baobab Tree, and Marlene Van Niekerk’s Agaat. Employing Bakhtin’s concept of dialogism to illustrate her comparative reading across both apartheid / post-apartheid and also literary and social borders, Robbe argues that black women are generally depicted as much too ‘civilized’ and objectified in white women’s writing and that these protagonists are surrounded almost exclusively by white authors, narrators, and readers. However, the article also shows that the novels by Joubert, Stockenström,

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and Van Niekerk defy simple oppositions in terms of race, ethnicity, and class, and thus also offer some resistance to the commodification processes inherent in writing about marginalized groups within South African society. C E C I L E S A N D T E N takes a closer look at the metropolis in recent postcolonial fiction in her article “Phantasmagorical Representations of Postcolonial Cityscapes in Salman Rushdie’s Fury (2002) and Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found (2004).” As Sandten shows in her introduction, the relationship between postcolonialism and the metropolis has been largely neglected. In her analysis of Rushdie’s and Mehta’s texts, Sandten is interested in the imaginary, textual, and multilayered inscription of the city, focusing particularly on the depiction of diasporas, identity-construction, the postcolonial flâneur, and aspects of commodification of the respective cityscape. Her reading of Fury highlights Rushdie’s strategies of presenting New York as a space of commodification and ‘poly-sitedness’ and of creating a multitude of phantasmagorical spaces and fictional counterworlds. Whereas Rushdie depicts the Western metropolis in order to expose its ubiquitous spirit of commodification, Mehta’s portrayal of Bombay foregrounds the city’s sex industry and its status as the home of Bollywood and thus also locates commodification at the very heart of the city. Moreover, via the narrator’s position as a diasporic flâneur, Mehta addresses the lack of individuality and the ubiquity of crowds as core issues of the contemporary postcolonial city. As Sandten concludes, in both texts the city is represented through simultaneity, heterogeneity, and phantasmagorical and commodifying notions. and is thus assigned a palimpsestic character that nevertheless offers the reader insights into new urban identities in formation. A second group of articles is concerned with the representation of colonial and postcolonial issues in drama. S A M I A Z O U Z ’s article on the artistic strategies and the critical and popular success of Amiri Baraka’s plays Slave Ship (1967) and The Motion of History (1976) emphasizes the ambivalence of an approach that, on the one hand, defamiliarizes drama in its white and Western context by introducing alien: i.e. African elements, such as incessant drumming, but, on the other, itself participates in an often problematical deification of African-American characters as the supposed new heroes of a rewritten history of the U S A . The commercial success of Baraka’s plays adds a further critical dimension to this act of re-mythologizing: namely, the commodification that is examined in the present essay-collection. In her contribution “Moving Beyond Irish (Post)Colonialism by Commodifying (Post)Colonial Stage Irishness: Martin McDonagh’s Plays as Global

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Commodities,” K A T H A R I N A R E N N H A K addresses questions of identity and belonging in the globally successful plays of Martin McDonagh. Rennhak explores how the commodification of Irish culture is presented in McDonagh’s plays in order to evaluate the politics of the playwright’s deconstruction of Irish myths as well as to examine recent criticism of McDonagh’s plays. By looking at The Lonesome West and The Lieutenant of Inishmore in particular, Rennhak shows not only how traditional Irish values are commodified by McDonagh’s characters, but also that the ‘national’ no longer functions as a valid category for identity-construction in a world of globalized markets. In contrast to other critics, Rennhak argues that McDonagh’s evocation of a violent, stupid, and backward Irish West does not simply mock the inability of the region to overcome its own provincial culture, nor does it point at the AngloIrish conflict as the source of its problems. Rather, as Rennhak points out, questions of Irishness in McDonagh’s plays can be seen as a prototypical struggle for identity-formation in a local site positioned firmly within the global, a situation that applies to virtually everyone and that therefore contributes greatly to McDonagh’s international success. Next to literature, filmic representations have contributed powerfully to shaping popular notions of (post)colonialism and foreignness. The third section of this collection of essays examines strategies of commodification in film. S T E P H A N L A Q U É ’s article “The Moveable Frontier: John Ford and Howard Hawks at Home and in Africa” examines the commodification of colonialism in commercial American cinema. As Laqué shows, after the genre of the western had lost its audience around 1960, Hollywood became increasingly interested in European colonial activity in Africa as a profitable topic. The article explores how the colonial myth as presented by the western genre was adapted to European, particularly British, encounters in Africa. By analyzing two major films of this new genre, John Ford’s Mogambo (1953) and Howard Hawks’s Hatari (1962), Laqué points out that the typical features of the western genre, such as the lonely hero, are exported to the radically different historical context of colonial Africa, and that Ford’s and Hawks’s American heroes in Africa ‘colonize’ the European colonizers and turn them into commodities. Ford’s and Hawks’s rendering of European colonial activity in Africa is furthermore contrasted with the British filmmaker J. Lee Thompson’s North West Frontier (1959) to show how the entertainment industry of the two major colonial powers tried to profit from the commodification of each other’s colonial endeavours.

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In her contribution “‘We are the ones you do not see’: The Need for a Change in Filming Black Britain,” B I R T E H E I D E M A N N looks at the British film director Stephen Frears’ proposed ‘new approach’ in black-British film. Drawing on Frears’ critique of stereotypical depictions of ethnicity and the ‘ethnic-feel-good-productions’ of contemporary cinema and his calls for a sharper focus on marginalized groups within Britain’s ethnic minorities, the article analyzes the representations of illegal immigrants in two black-British films, Stephen Frears’ Dirty Pretty Things (2002) and Udayan Prasad’s Brothers in Trouble (1995). As Heidemann states, the binary oppositions of ‘established immigrants’ and ‘new immigrants’ lead to new forms of othering and may even accelerate the shift of legal migrant communities from the periphery towards mainstream society. In her analysis, Heidemann shows how, in depicting the exploitation of illegal immigrants by established immigrants, Frears’ and Prasad’s films reflect this tendency, and demonstrate how such familiar concepts as ‘diaspora’, ‘acculturation’, and ‘assimilation’ are rendered obsolete by these hierarchies within the immigrant communities. Further, Heidemann contends that the depiction of the trade in body organs in Dirty Pretty Things foregrounds the literally commodified immigrant body and can be seen as another move away from established cinematic patterns of black film in Britain. S A B I N E N U N I U S ’s article “Exoticism and Authenticity in Contemporary British-Asian Popular Culture: The Commodification of Difference in Bride & Prejudice and Apache Indian’s Music” looks at processes of postcolonial commodification in contemporary Britain, where a heightened interest in the ‘exotic’ raises awareness of the articulation of a specifically British-Asian collective identity within popular culture. Gurinder Chadha’s adaptation Bride & Prejudice (2004) is one of the first ‘westernized’ films to combine British culture with the typical features of commercial Indian cinema, thus providing, as Nunius shows in her analysis of dance scenes, a prime example of a marketable version of ‘authentic’ Indian culture. Further, the article explores Apache Indian and his music, which, in its combination of traditional Punjabi music and rap, hip-hop or dancehall, represents a commercially successful hybrid that has gained increased attention in recent years. As Nunius shows, by deliberately catering for second-generation British-Asian immigrants, producers of bhangra praise their products’ potential as a basis for collective British-Asian identities. Nunius is also interested in the strategies that are used to evoke the aura of authenticity. Apache Indian’s specific dress-code, his flamboyant hairstyle, his incorporation of elements of both Caribbean and Western

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culture, and his lyrics create a blend of cultures and styles that attracts a heterogeneous audience and that oscillates between the status of a commodity and that of an ‘authentic’ cultural expression. Finally, the last two essays in this collection address the figure of the celebrity in the entertainment industry and its position in the global postcolonial marketplace. Throwing a spotlight on how postcolonial authors are marketed, A N A C H R I S T I N A M E N D E S ’s article “Salman Rushdie Superstar: The Making of Postcolonial Literary Stardom” is concerned less with Rushdie’s novels than with the author’s rise to the status of global literary celebrity. In order to illustrate Rushdie’s fame, Mendes provides an analysis of some of his widely noticed public appearances, such as his presence in music videos and in society columns, and also examines media reaction to them. Mendes provides a survey of recent publications in the field of celebrity studies and then focuses on the interweaving of the author’s literary work and the brand-name ‘Rushdie’. In her analysis, Mendes singles out three essential factors that have contributed to Rushdie’s fame as the celebrated postcolonial writer: the Iranian fatwa; Rushdie’s strategies of self-publicity; and his canonization in the academy. Drawing on recent theorists of celebrity studies, such as Wenche Ommundsen, Joe Moran, James F. English, and John Frow, the article approaches the literary celebrity as a commodity with a certain degree of agency. As Mendes argues, Rushdie’s status as a literary celebrity defies notions of fame as a mere by-product of the culture industry and instead highlights the author’s combination of literature, popular culture, and postcoloniality as a powerful formula in the global literary marketplace. A critical look at celebrity stardom in the postcolonial marketplace is also taken by G R A H A M H U G G A N , who explores aspects of postcolonial ecocriticism in his contribution “Celebrity Conservationism, Postcolonialism, and the Commodity Form.” Focusing on the late Australian T V naturalist Steve Irwin and the Japanese-Canadian scientist–broadcaster–activist David Suzuki, Huggan examines how those celebrities have acquired their popularity and status through media representations of environmental pollution and an everdiminishing ‘natural’ world. Against the backdrop of recent theories concerning the relationship between conservation and celebrity, Huggan shows that Irwin can be seen as an embodiment of the figure of the adventurer who, as a carefully constructed and cultivated T V persona, projects the fantasy world of adventure conservationism onto the techniques of nature documentaries. By contrast, David Suzuki presents himself as a left-wing intellectual who promotes an environmental ethic and denounces the values of an ultra-competi-

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tive capitalist system. However, both types of conservationism celebrities can also be regarded as an instrument of global capitalism that is largely insensitive to local human needs and primarily interested in marketing commercial content. As all these diverse contributions reveal, across the centuries and across the media commodification has been at the core of representations of colonial and postcolonial experience. A collection like the present one can only throw the spotlight on some selected areas of cultural production where this becomes obvious and worth debating. It is to be hoped that more work on the plethora of related phenomena will follow.

WORKS CITED Bhabha, Homi K. “Signs Taken for Wonders,” in The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths & Helen Tiffin (London & New York: Routledge, 1994): 29–35. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, tr. Richard Nice (La Distinction: Critique sociale du jugement, 1979; London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984). Césaire, Aimé. Discourse on Colonialism, tr. Joan Pinkham (Le discours sur le colonialisme, 1950; New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000). Oxford English Dictionary Online, “Commodification,” Oxford U P , 2010, http: //dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50045087?single=1&query_type=word&queryword =commodification&first=1&max_to_show=10 (accessed 22 June 2010). Derrida, Jacques. Monolingualism of the Other: Or, the Prosthesis of Origin, rev. ed., tr. Patrick Mensah (Le monolingualisme de l’autre: ou la prothèse d’origine, 1996; Stanford C A : Stanford U P , 1998). Foucault, Michel. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972– 1977, ed. & tr. Colin Gordon (Brighton: Harvester, 1980). Goodness Gracious Me: Complete Series Two, D V D (B B C 2002). Horkheimer, Max & Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, tr. Edmund Jephcott (Dialektik der Aufklärung: Philosophische Fragmente, 1947; Stanford C A : Stanford U P , 2002). Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, tr. Leon S. Roudiez (Pouvoirs de l’horreur: Essai sur l’abjection, 1980; New York: Columbia U P , 1982). Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book 2: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis 1954–1955, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, tr. Sylvana Tomaselli (Le moi dans la théorie de Freud et dans la technique de la psychanalyse, 1978; New York: W.W. Norton, 1991).

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Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich. Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (Империализм как высшая стадия капитализма, 1917; London: Pluto, 1996). Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, tr. Alphonso Lingis (Totalité et infini, 1961; Pittsburgh P A : Duquesne U P , 1969). Lukács, Georg. “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” in History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, tr. Rodney Livingstone (“Die Verdinglichung und das Bewußtsein des Proletariats,” 1923; London: Merlin, 1971). Marx, Karl. A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, vol. 2, ed. Maurice Dobb, tr. S.W. Ryazanskaya (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1971).

THE EDITORS

T HEORY ——————

Bourdieu, Capital, and the Postcolonial Marketplace ——————————

J ENS M ARTIN G URR

Introduction

I

1

I attempt to assess the extent to which Bourdieu’s notion of the different forms of economic, social, cultural, and symbolic capital and the mechanisms that regulate their acquisition, accumulation, exchange, and mutual conversion can help to elucidate diverse phenomena in the postcolonial marketplace. I begin by listing and briefly discussing a number of these phenomena which might be considered in the light of Bourdieu’s conception of capital. I then briefly ask whether these are merely related phenomena or whether they are in fact variants of one underlying mechanism. In doing so, I try to assess the plausibility of a comprehensive account of commodification by means of Bourdieu’s model in the light of a number of recent critical engagements with his ideas, particularly those by Graham Huggan, James F. English, and Sarah Brouillette. This leads me to a few points of criticism of Bourdieu’s use of the notion of ‘capital’. Finally, I suggest a few modifications and will sketch a case study: namely, the controversy about the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchú and her testimonial I, Rigoberta Menchú. I will argue that, in order to conceptualize something like a postcolonial transnational field (in the sense in which Bourdieu employs the term) of literature and culture, we might want to rethink the relation between autonomy and heteronomy as discussed by Bourdieu; we 1

N THIS ESSAY

This essay grew out of a larger project in the context of the Research Group “E Pluribus Unum? Ethnic Identities in Processes of Transnational Integration” at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF) at the University of Bielefeld.

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might want to pay more attention to the narrativity, performativity, and mediality of actors’ self-positioning in this field; and we might want to look more closely at the somewhat under-theorized intersection between local, national, and transnational fields of cultural production.

‘Capital’ and Selected Phenomena of Commodification in the Postcolonial Marketplace It seems useful to begin with a few brief observations on the contemporary postcolonial marketplace which may plausibly be discussed in the light of Bourdieu’s conception of capital. One such phenomenon, of course, is the marketing of exoticism, which Graham Huggan, Sarah Brouillette, and many others have recently discussed and which is also addressed in a number of essays in this volume. An obvious example is the exoticizing and essentializing display of ‘the Other’ on book covers: this frequently takes the form of ‘ethnicized’ author portraits on cover illustrations, even including the practice of representing them with significantly ‘darker’ skin colour.2 Further widely discussed phenomena are marketing strategies in the tourism industry or the ‘spicing-up’ of fiction with a few indigenous expressions just unusual enough to add ethnic flair but not jarring enough to impede immediate understanding and easy consumption.3 What we are looking at in all these cases is the commodification of ethnicity and difference to increase saleability. The phenomenon of prizes and awards and their role in marketing and selfmarketing, of course, also belong here. In this vein, Huggan has perceptively

2

A striking example is the cover illustration for the most widely used edition of Menchú’s I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala, ed. Elisabeth Burgos–Debray, tr. Ann Wright (Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia, 1983; London: Verso, 1984). The first edition appeared with Elisabeth Burgos–Debray as the author. 3 For a recent example of such strategies in the North-American publishing market for ethnic fiction, see Jens Martin Gurr, “The Multicultural Marketing of Urban Fiction: Temporality, Language, Genre and Readership(s) in Luis J. Rodriguez’ The Republic of East L.A. and Music of the Mill,” in E Pluribus Unum? National and Transnational Identities in the Americas/Identidades nacionales y transnactionales en las Américas , ed. Sebastian Thies & Josef Raab (Tempe A Z : Bilingual, 2008 & Münster: L I T , 2009): 263–76.

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analyzed the annual spectacle of the Booker Prize.4 As a kind of meta-phenomenon in what James English, in an excellent recent book, has called “the Economy of Prestige,” we might briefly consider what used to be a possible strategy of breaking the cycle and of eluding complicity: namely, to refuse a prize. As English argues, this is no longer an option: One can still refuse a prize, of course, but the refusal can no longer be counted upon to reinforce one’s artistic legitimacy by underscoring the specificity or the properly autonomous character of one’s cultural prestige […]. On the contrary, owing to the increasingly acknowledged complicities between those who ostensibly affront or embarrass the prize and those who promote its interests, the scandal of refusal has become a recognised device for raising visibility and leveraging success.5

As an example, one might cite Amitav Ghosh’s 2001 withdrawal of his novel The Glass Palace from the Commonwealth Prize, which Sarah Brouillette has recently discussed. Commenting on Ghosh’s highly publicized withdrawal, she observes: “Here, an act of political refusal becomes a gateway to authorial self-definition and to career development and promotion.”6 However, while that may well be so, it is a little facile to criticize Ghosh’s decision as a commercial move: protest must be made public to function as protest.7 I will return to this mechanism below. Finally, academic trends and fashions (not least in postcolonial studies) can also be seen in this light. For instance, we need only consider the cultural capital that has accrued to postcolonial studies and to individual figures in the global academic field, a phenomenon of which postcolonial literary and cultural studies have long been keenly aware. 4

See Graham Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London: Routledge, 2001): 105–23. 5 James F. English, The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 2005): 222. 6 Sarah Brouillette, Postcolonial Writers and the Global Literary Marketplace (London: Palgrave, 2007): 72. 7 For a case study of an artist in the field of tension between protest and mainstream see Gurr, “Shakey’s 40 Years of Zigzag: Neil Young between Commerce and the Counter-Culture,” in Sound Fabrics: Studies on the Intermedial and Institutional Dimensions of Popular Music, ed. Patrick Burger, Arvi Sepp & Martin Butler (Trier: W V T , 2009): 83–102.

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Autonomy and Heteronomy, Subversion and Commodification It emerges from the discussions in the work of Huggan, English, Brouillette, and others that all these developments conceivably to be subsumed under the heading of the ‘commodification of (post)colonialism’ are not separate phenomena but, rather, related manifestations of one underlying constant. In a latecapitalist global economy, the strategic positioning of individuals and groups in academia, the commercializing appropriation of originally subversive music or literature by the mainstream, or the marketing of exoticism and ethnic flair in the tourism industry or in the fiction market appear inevitable as variants of totalizing commodification. Bourdieu famously argues in The Rules of Art that the literary and artistic field is at every moment “the site of a struggle between two principles”: the principle of heteronomy, serving “those who dominate the field economically and politically”; and the opposite principle of autonomy.8 Similarly, he maintains, the rise of the literary market precisely coincided with an ideology of disregard for the market. However, the claim made in The Rules of Art that originally “the literary and artistic field is constituted as such in and by opposition to a ‘bourgeois’ world”9 is clearly no longer adequate. This neat conceptual separation between artistic seclusion and the demands of the market has rightly been questioned for some time now. Surely, the global literary marketplace – apart from countries where strong political censorship still prevails – is now to a large extent free of direct political influence, but, to an unprecedented degree, is part of the late-capitalist commodity culture and thus subject to the economic principle of heteronomy.10 In this vein, Spivak, Dirlik, Huggan, English, Brouillette, and others have perceptively discussed the issue of postcolonialism vs postcoloniality and their entanglement. Thus, Graham Huggan distinguishes between postcolonialism as the “anti-colonial intellectualism that reads and valorizes the signs of social struggle in the faultlines of literary and cultural texts” and postcoloniality as a “regime of value 8

Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, tr. Susan Emanuel (Les règles de l’art: Genèse et structure du champ littéraire, 1992; Cambridge: Polity, 1996): 216; see also 58. 9 Bourdieu, Rules of Art, 58. 10 Cf. also Brouillette’s discussion of the postscript to Bourdieu’s The Rules of Art, which she reads as problematising his earlier thoughts about these opposing principles in Postcolonial Writers, 62–64. English, too, aims to “contest some central aspects of Bourdieu’s grand narrative of art’s commercialization” (Economy of Prestige, 8).

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[pertaining] to a system of symbolic, as well as material, exchange in which even the language of resistance may be manipulated and consumed. [... ] [It is] a value-regulating mechanism within the global late-capitalist system of commodity exchange.” However, he makes it very clear from the beginning – and this appears to be one of the major concerns of his book – that “a cursory glance at the state of postcolonial studies at Western universities, or at the worldwide marketing of prominent postcolonial writers like Salman Rushdie, is enough to suggest that these two apparently conflicting regimes of value are mutually entangled.”11 Thus, as he further argues, “postcolonialism is bound up with postcoloniality – […] in the overwhelmingly commercial context of late twentieth-century commodity culture, postcolonialism and its rhetoric of resistance have themselves become consumer products.”12 Similarly, Brouillette has argued that “the very nature of the contemporary publishing industry makes claims to an authenticity defined by separation from the market a near impossibility.”13 Rather more bluntly, Jim Jarmusch has pithily commented on the related phenomenon of the inextricable entanglement of mainstream and counter-culture: [Capitalism and the counter-culture] coexist somehow. And the counterculture is always repackaged and made into a product, y’know? […] If you have a counter-culture and you put a name on it, you call them beatniks and you can sell something – books or bebop. Or you label them as hippies and you can sell tie-dyed T-shirts.14

To me, however, the point does not seem to be merely that they are mutually entangled or that a separation of the two is “a near impossibility.”15 The problem, it seems, lies precisely in the very fact that a separation of the two is not a near-impossibility but a logical impossibility. Postcoloniality does exploit 11

Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic, 6. The Postcolonial Exotic, 6 (emphasis in original). 13 Brouillette, Postcolonial Writers, 63. 14 Quoted in Jonathan Rosenbaum, Dead Man (London: British Film Institute, 2000): 51. 15 Brouillette, Postcolonial Writers, 63 (my emphasis). Huggan similarly appears to me to underestimate the problem when he merely speaks of “the increasing difficulty of distinguishing between a ‘euphemistic’ realm of artistic promotion and public relations and the unashamedly profit-driven world of modern corporate commerce” (The Postcolonial Exotic, 213). 12

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the saleable, hip, subversive anti-position of postcolonialism; there surely is a widely apparent mechanism of defusing appropriation of subversive material by the mainstream. Huggan points acutely to this dilemma when he states that “while postcolonial authors gain currency from their perceived capacity for anti-imperialist resistance, ‘resistance’ itself emerges as a commodified vehicle of symbolic power.”16 Adding a further twist, Brouillette has more recently drawn attention to the marketability even of an author’s awareness of this complicity, a phenomenon she appropriately calls “the marketability of postcolonial self-consciousness.”17 A related issue is the frequent game in current postcolonial studies of pointing out complicities with hegemonic discourses and practices in the work of other scholars. In this vein, Brouillette has argued that Huggan’s work on exoticism, too, is complicit with the system, that it is “a symptom of postcoloniality even while it is an assessment of it,”18 and has pointed out that this faulting mechanism certainly also applies to her own work. Her chapter heading of “The Industry of Postcoloniality” points nicely to this inescapable business of postcolonial self-denunciation – in other words, to what might be termed the ‘postcolonial guilt industry’. However, she does not quite point out just how logically inescapable and fundamental the mechanism is. This is not just a game central to the business we are engaged in – we are, after all, in a ‘denouncing business’. Complicity, and this seems to me to be a central point, is inescapable in the sense of Adorno’s dictum “There can be no right life in a false one” (“Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen”). What we are looking at, however, is a double mechanism. On the one hand, the commercial mainstream will incorporate and thus defuse voices of dissent – this is the mechanism most perceptively theorized, I believe, by Sacvan Bercovitch in his reading of the functioning of the ‘American Ideology’ as being based on the absorption of dissent into hegemonic discourse.19 This pattern is apparent in much of what Bourdieu writes, but it is not so neatly described and conceptualized as it is by Bercovitch, for instance. If we want to abstract the figure of thought underlying this mechanism, it might be termed ‘monistic inclusion’, the conflation of two seemingly opposite poles 16

Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic, 29. Brouillette, Postcolonial Writers, 5. 18 Postcolonial Writers, 22 (emphasis in original). 19 See especially Sacvan Bercovitch, “The Problem of Ideology in American Literary History,” Critical Inquiry 12 (1986): 631–53. 17

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into one of the extremes by means of incorporation. But the reverse process also applies, of course: voices of dissent actively make use of the system themselves in order to become audible as voices of dissent – Ghosh’s withdrawal from the Commonwealth Prize is a good example here.20 Postcolonial subversiveness, in order to make itself heard, has to rely on the marketing mechanisms of global commodity culture. Here it seems to me that, all too frequently, we see these mechanisms in isolation and either accuse a writer of complicity with the mainstream or lament the tendency of the mainstream to commercialize dissent without realizing that these are dialectically paired expressions of the same totalizing tendency of global commodity culture. Bourdieu’s dichotomy of ‘autonomy’ vs ‘heteronomy,’ so much is clear, does not help. One might argue that these opposite principles are aufgehoben, sublated, in a Hegelian sense in the mechanism of the commercializing and defusing of subversion and dissent.

A Few Problems with Bourdieu’s Notion of Capital If all these phenomena can be seen as variants of the same underlying pattern of commodification, it would appear that Bourdieu’s notion of the ‘forms of capital’ is ideally suited to conceptualizing this pattern. However, there appear to me to be problems with this approach, for it is precisely the fact that they are emanations of one underlying mechanism that has serious implications for the validity and applicability of Bourdieu’s model. In his extremely insightful book on The Economy of Prestige, English finds Bourdieu’s model “reductive” and argues that Bourdieu “leaves out or greatly underappreciates certain dimensions of art and literature.”21 Huggan also criti-

20

In a related vein, Sarah Brouillette has recently discussed Rushdie’s Fury as a “critique of [the] capitalist culture in which it is entirely complicit,” as a saleable commodity which simultaneously critiques the system from which it profits; see Brouillette, Postcolonial Writers, 10. 21 English, Economy of Prestige, 8. English himself attempts to rescue the economic terminology without falling prey to reductionism: He does admit that the “appropriateness and explanatory power” of the economic terminology he uses “have been much disputed.” What he calls “the economics of cultural prestige” “is woven together with, and cannot be understood apart from, the money economy, [but] is not itself based on money. It involves such terms as ‘capital,’ ‘investment,’ ‘endowment,’ ‘return’ […]. But it does not assume the primacy of the money economy; it is a matter

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cizes “Bourdieu’s somewhat Olympian view” of the world and rightly points to the limitations of his conceptualization of the relationship between artistic production and the market.22 In what follows, I will attempt to identify some of these problems more clearly. As far as Bourdieu’s notion of “forms of capital” and his application of the model are concerned, it seems to me that there are two seemingly opposite but again dialectically paired problems. On the one hand, there is the economic reductionism of the model; on the other, there is a somewhat hubristic claim of universal applicability and all-encompassing explanatory value. Let me briefly engage with both these points. Bourdieu repeatedly claims that, despite frequent accusations of simplistic economism against him, his work “from the very beginning […] was conceived in opposition to economism.”23 However, in Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, Bourdieu himself speaks of the “deliberate and provisional reductionism” of his method, on the grounds that it allows him to “import the materialist mode of questioning into the cultural sphere from which it was expelled, historically, when the modern view of art was invented.”24 In “Forms of Capital,” Bourdieu most clearly posits the primacy of economic capital: So it has to be posited simultaneously that economic capital is at the root of all the other types of capital and that these transformed, disguised forms of economic capital, never entirely reducible to that definition, produce their most specific effects only to the extent that they conceal (not least from their

not of reducing culture to economics, artistic motivations to money-lust, but of enlarging the notion of economics to include systems of non-monetary, cultural, and symbolic transaction”; English, Economy of Prestige, 4. 22 Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic, 213. 23 Pierre Bourdieu, “A Reply to Some Objections,” in In Other Words: Essays Towards a Reflexive Sociology, tr. Matthew Adamson (Choses dites, 1987; Cambridge: Polity, 1990): 106. For the critique of economism, see also Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. Randal Johnson (Cambridge: Polity, 1995): 40 and passim. 24 Pierre Bourdieu & Loïc Wacquant, Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Réponses: Pour une anthropologie réflexive, 1992; Chicago: U of Chicago P , 1992): 116.

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possessors) the fact that economic capital is at their root, in other words – but only in the last analysis – at the root of their effects.25

Roland Fuhrmann’s 2006 art installation Valuta obliquely lends itself to pinpointing a potential problem here: six industrial conveyor belts, each three metres long, are arranged in a circuit, carrying 100 kilogrammes of global coins around in circles. “This staged flow of money reduces the system of the financial markets to pure mechanics and shows its absurdity.”26 This appears to be a great idea, wonderfully self-explanatory and apparently so true. But then what? Conceptually, this is singularly uninteresting. Returning to Bourdieu’s model, the problem seems to be that the notion of ‘capital’ is a heuristic metaphor. In applying the model, there is a tendency – not least with Bourdieu himself – to lose sight of the fact that reduction to economic factors is a heuristic assumption. Thus forgetting that he is working with a metaphor, he literalizes the notion of capital and over-extends the applicability of the model. It is precisely due to the fact that the economism of the model is no longer recognized as an abstraction that he can then claim universal explanatory value: “the structure of the distribution of the different types and subtypes of capital at a given moment in time represents the immanent structure of the social world.”27 The universalizing tendency here might remind one of Borges’s “On Exactitude in Science” (1946) with its famous image of the map of an empire on a one-to-one scale: In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without 25

Pierre Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital,” in Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, ed. John G. Richardson (New York: Greenwood, 1986): 252–53. 26 See Roland Fuhrmann: Valuta, ed. Steffen Fischer (Heidelberg: Kehrer, 2006): 14–15 (exhibition catalogue); cf. also “Roland Fuhrmann,” http://www.roland fuhrmann.de (accessed 17 April 2008). The site shows several photographs and a film clip. 27 Bourdieu, “Forms of Capital,” 242.

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some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters.28

Although the relations between a model and the reality it attempts to capture and between a map and the territory it represents are conceptually different, the underlying philosophical problem, of course, is that of the ‘map–territory relation’, and the related category error is that of mistaking the representation for the object itself.29 If the notion of ‘forms of capital’ thus ceases to be regarded as a heuristic model that can be used to explain current phenomena on a rather abstract level but instead comes to be seen as a model ‘reflecting’ the contemporary world, it loses much of its diagnostic value.

Suggested Modifications and a Case Study I have already suggested above that Bourdieu’s notion of a dichotomy between ‘autonomy’ and ‘heteronomy’ in conceptualizing the interaction between the literary and artistic field, on the one hand, and the field of politics and the economy, on the other, might be profitably replaced with the mechanism of commodifying and defusing subversion and dissent in the process of adoption into the mainstream. In order to escape the economism of Bourdieu’s model while preserving its strengths, it seems that a shift of attention from the notion of ‘capital’ to that of the ‘field’ as a site of competitive interaction might be helpful. Let me try to take the concept of the field as the central notion and to supplement this by means of a number of further concepts. Though the notion of ‘field’ is, of course, just as metaphorical as the concept of ‘capital’, it is far less strongly tied to certain ideological preconceptions. One might thus speak of the ‘global cultural field’ as a – not necessarily spatial – social arena in which agents or groups of agents strategically position themselves and compete for desirable resources, recognition, prestige, awareness or interpretative authority. Thus, if 28

Jorge Luis Borges, “On Exactitude in Science,” in Collected Fictions, tr. Andrew Hurley (1946; Ficciones, 1989; New York: Penguin, 1998): 320. 29 Taking his cue from Borges’s text, which he cites as an epigraph, Umberto Eco has written a hilarious essay on some of the conceptual problems with such a map; see Umberto Eco, “On the Impossibility of Drawing a Map of the Empire on a Scale of 1 to 1,” in How to Travel with a Salmon and Other Essays, tr. William Weaver (Secondo diario minimo, 1992; New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994): 95–106.

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we take Bourdieu’s argument that “the struggle which takes place within the field is about the monopoly of the legitimate power (specific authority) which is characteristic of the field in question,”30 it can be argued that conceptualizing this struggle as one about ‘capital’ – of whatever form – will frequently not be very productive, and we should, rather, focus on the idea of specific performative strategies and tactics of self-positioning in the field. Space does not permit a full discussion here, but it is worth suggesting that this ‘struggle’ might also be conceptualized in terms of de Certeau’s notion of hegemonic “strategies” and subversive “tactics.”31 In theorizing such global postcolonial phenomena, we might also want to pay more attention to the intersection and interaction between local and transnational fields and competitive manoeuvres in these fields, because I think one can argue that inter- and transcultural phenomena remained somewhat under-theorized by Bourdieu, whose model seems geared towards an analysis of intra-cultural phenomena in ‘developed’ European nation-states or in developing economies. What I am looking at is a model that allows us to study the interaction of agents in the ‘global cultural field’, the processes of mediation between cultural practices, institutional contexts, cultural production and reception, and social processes and movements. In order to arrive at this model, I believe we need to supplement Bourdieu’s conception by taking into account theoretical insights into the narrativity, performativity, and mediality of such cultural positioning. In order to discuss these ideas more concretely, let me suggest a case study and weave in a few remarks on how the suggested modifications might be applied. Let us take a look at the case of Rigoberta Menchú, the 1992 Nobel Prize winner who became a global icon with her 1983 testimonial I, Rigoberta Menchú. It is the story of the murder of virtually her entire family in the genocidal Guatemalan civil war between 1960 and 1996. She told her story to the ‘Western’ anthropologist Elisabeth Burgos–Debray, who edited it and turned it into a book. As a very powerful account, which first drew attention to the genocidal proportions of the civil war and created awareness of the brutality of a U S -sponsored right-wing government, this text quickly became 30

Pierre Bourdieu, “Some Properties of Fields,” in Questions of Sociology (Questions de sociologie, 1980; Thousand Oaks C A & London: Sage, 1993): 73. 31 See Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everday Life, tr. Steven Rendall (Arts de faire, 1980; Berkeley: U of California P , 1984).

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required reading in many North American courses on multiculturalism, globalization, gender studies, anthropology, postcolonial studies, and a good number of other disciplines. Given this prominence, the text became a bone of contention in the U S ‘culture wars’ of the 1980s and 1990s. In a highly controversial 1999 book, which was accompanied by a major media campaign, the anthropologist David Stoll undertook to demolish the myth and questioned the veracity of Menchú’s account.32 He claims to have found that Menchú was by no means as uneducated as she claimed, that the land conflicts she writes about were not so much conflicts between the indigenous Mayan population and the ruling ladinos as conflicts between branches of Menchú’s own family. Finally, Stoll claims to have shown that some of the episodes of horrendous cruelty – such as the burning alive of her brother – cannot have occurred in the way she describes them. What he does not question is that the kind of cruelty and brutality Menchú describes did happen and was indeed common in Guatemala. In February 1999, Menchú admitted that “she used others’ accounts as well as her own: ‘I was a survivor, alone in the world, who had to convince the world to look at the atrocities committed in my homeland.’ She denounced criticism of the book as ‘a campaign that has political ends, that is lying and that is taking things out of Guatemala’s historical reality’.”33 Both Menchú’s 1983 testimonio and the controversy around it afford interesting perspectives on the concept of the global cultural and political fields. Although it is possible to use the notion of ‘capital’ here, this would not get us very far. This is where the suggested modifications become relevant. What about narrativity?34 The controversy turns not least on the generic question of the truth-claim made by the narrative mode of testimonio. In an interview given in the course of the controversy, Menchú insisted that “I, Rigoberta

32

David Stoll, Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of all Poor Guatemalans (Boulder

C O : Westview, 1999). 33

“Peace Prize Winner Admits Discrepancies,” New York Times (12 February 1999), http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A07E5D7163AF931A25751 C0A96F958260 (accessed 12 March 2008). 34

For the connection between narrative and identity, see, for instance, Narrative and Identity: Theoretical Approaches and Critical Analyses, ed. Birgit Neumann, Ansgar Nünning & Bo Pettersson (Trier: W V T , 2008); the classic account, of course, is Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 3 vols, tr. Kathleen Blamey & David Pellauer (Temps et récit, 1981–83; Chicago: U of Chicago P , 1984–88), esp. vol 3: 246.

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Menchú was a testimonial, not an autobiography. […] The history of the community is my own history.”35 Menchú’s narrative mode can clearly be regarded as a characteristic example of what Susan Lanser in Fictions of Authority calls “communal voice.” More specifically, the form employed here corresponds to the subtype she calls the “singular form in which one narrator speaks for a collective.” Interestingly, Lanser adds that “the communal mode seems to be primarily a phenomenon of marginal or suppressed communities.”36 It appears that Menchú’s testimonial, as far as the construction and projection of an audience were concerned, relied on specific conventions familiar to one community that were not recognized accordingly by another community, the North American reading public. It is precisely this need for an awareness of culturally specific narrative conventions that lies at the heart of much of the controversy.37 Thus, in an interview Stoll reveals a lack of just this awareness when he states that “Rigoberta said her story was the story of all poor Guatemalans, but the story of a single individual cannot be the story of everybody else, except in a literary sense.”38 It is precisely the point of a testimonio, however, to tell the story of a community in the narrative form of a personal memoir. What the Rigoberta Menchú controversy also lends itself to is the conceptualizing of the intersection between national and transnational fields of struggle.39 The controversy can be thought of as a struggle in the trans-American 35

Rigoberta Menchú, “Those who Attack me Humiliate the Victims: Interview by Juan Jesús Aznárez,” tr. Jill Robbins, in The Rigoberta Menchú Controversy, ed. Arturo Arias (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 2001): 110. 36 Susan Sniader Lanser, Fictions of Authority: Women Writers and Narrative Voice (Ithaca N Y : Cornell U P , 1992): 21. 37 For the genre of testimonio and the implications of the generic conventions for the debate, see Arturo Arias, “Authoring Ethnicized Subjects: Rigoberta Menchú and the Performative Production of the Subaltern Self,” P M L A 116.1 (2001): 75–88, and several contributions in The Rigoberta Menchú Controversy, ed. Arturo Arias (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 2001). 38 David Stoll, “I Don’t Seek to Destroy Menchú: Interview by Dina Fernández García,” in The Rigoberta Menchú Controversy, ed. Arturo Arias (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 2001), 68. 39 For an insightful theoretical account of this intersection, see Sebastian Thies & Olaf Kaltmeier, “From the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wing in Brazil to a Tornado in Texas?: Approaching the Field of Identity Politics and Its Fractal Topography,” in E Pluribus

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field of cultural politics, and the positioning both of Menchú herself and of other players in the debate can also be studied as strategic moves in a competition for attention and interpretative authority, with the struggle occurring at the intersection between national and global cultural fields. Thus, the positioning of Menchú’s testimonial itself was clearly aimed at ‘Western’ audiences, and much of the ensuing publicity – culminating in the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992 – was, of course, a global phenomenon. But the controversy around the book in the U S academy is largely a national phenomenon.40 We have to be aware here of the ‘culture wars’ going on in the U S academy, a struggle about the academic canon, a struggle for interpretative authority, and a struggle about political agendas in the scholarly community, which coincided with a major generational shift in the U S academy. In this struggle I, Rigoberta Menchú had been a central text for a number of years. As I argued earlier, the question of whether the account is to be believed in all details is largely pointless for purely generic reasons; what is interesting here is the strategic positioning of the book and its harnessing in political and cultural conflicts as conceptualized from the point of view of Bourdieu’s notion of the global cultural field and its subfields. To conclude, in order to make Bourdieu’s model more fruitful for the analysis of global postcolonial phenomena, it seems that a shift of attention from the notion of ‘capital’ to that of the ‘field’ as a site of competitive interaction seems helpful. Second, we might want to pay more attention than does Bourdieu to the narrativity, performativity, and mediality of such strategic moves in this global field. Third, the interaction between local and transnational fields and competitive manoeuvres in these fields is, I think, somewhat under-theorized in Bourdieu, and, in a twenty-first-century globalized world, needs to be considered more carefully. Finally, Bourdieu’s notion of a dichotomy between autonomy and heteronomy in conceptualizing the interaction between the literary and artistic field, on the one hand, and the field of politics and the economy, on the other, might profitably be replaced by an emphasis on the mechanism of defusing subversion by incorporating it – i.e. Unum? National and Transnational Identities in the Americas/Identidades nacionales y transnacionales en las Américas, ed. Sebastian Thies & Josef Raab (Tempe A Z : Bilingual, 2008 & Münster: L I T , 2009): 25–46. 40 See also Mary Louise Pratt, “I, Rigoberta Menchú and the ‘Culture Wars’,” in The Rigoberta Menchú Controversy, ed. Arturo Arias (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 2001): 29–48.

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the mechanism of commodifying dissent as conceptualized by Bercovitch – and the inverse process of a tactical form of making use of the system. The positioning of actors in the field generally might further be studied by drawing on de Certeau’s notion of hegemonic “strategies” and subversive “tactics.”41

WORKS CITED Arias, Arturo. “Authoring Ethnicized Subjects: Rigoberta Menchú and the Performative Production of the Subaltern Self,” P M L A 116.1 (2001): 75–88. Arias, Arturo, ed. The Rigoberta Menchú Controversy (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 2001). Bercovitch, Sacvan. “The Problem of Ideology in American Literary History,” Critical Inquiry 12.4 (1986): 631–53. Borges, Jorge Luis. “On Exactitude in Science,” in Collected Fictions, tr. Andrew Hurley (1946; Ficciones, 1989; New York: Penguin, 1998): 320. Bourdieu, Pierre. The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. Randal Johnson (Cambridge: Polity, 1995). ——. “The Forms of Capital,” in Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, ed. John G. Richardson, tr. Richard Nice (New York: Greenwood, 1986): 241–58. ——. “A Reply to Some Objections,” in In Other Words: Essays Towards a Reflexive Sociology, tr. Matthew Adamson (Choses dites, 1987; Cambridge: Polity, 1990): 106–19. ——. The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, tr. Susan Emanuel (Les règles de l’art: Genèse et structure du champ littéraire, 1992; Cambridge: Polity, 1996). ——. “Some Properties of Fields,” in Questions of Sociology (Questions de sociologie, 1980; Thousand Oaks C A & London: Sage, 1993): 72–77. ——, & Loïc Wacquant. Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Réponses: Pour une anthropologie réflexive, 1992; Chicago: U of Chicago P , 1992). Brouillette, Sarah. Postcolonial Writers and the Global Literary Marketplace (London: Palgrave, 2007). de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life, tr. Steven Rendall (Arts de faire, 1980; Berkeley: U of California P , 1984). Eco, Umberto. “On the Impossibility of Drawing a Map of the Empire on a Scale of 1 to 1,” in How to Travel with a Salmon and Other Essays, tr. William Weaver (Secondo diario minimo, 1992; New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994): 95–106.

41

Cf. de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, esp. 29–41.

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English, James F. The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 2005). Fischer, Steffen, ed. Roland Fuhrmann: Valuta (Heidelberg: Kehrer, 2006). Gurr, Jens Martin. “The Multicultural Marketing of Urban Fiction: Temporality, Language, Genre and Readership(s) in Luis J. Rodriguez’ The Republic of East L.A. and Music of the Mill,” in E Pluribus Unum?: National and Transnational Identities in the Americas/Identidades nacionales y transnacionales en las Américas, ed. Sebastian Thies & Josef Raab (Tempe A Z : Bilingual, 2008 & Münster: L I T , 2009): 263–76. ——. “Shakey’s 40 Years of Zigzag: Neil Young Between Commerce and the Counter-Culture,” in Sound Fabrics: Studies on the Intermedial and Institutional Dimensions of Popular Music, ed. Patrick Burger, Arvi Sepp & Martin Butler (Trier: W V T , 2009): 83–102. Huggan, Graham. The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London: Routledge, 2001). Lanser, Susan Sniader. Fictions of Authority: Women Writers and Narrative Voice (Ithaca N Y : Cornell U P , 1992). Menchú, Rigoberta. I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala, ed. Elisabeth Burgos–Debray, tr. Ann Wright (Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia, 1983; London: Verso, 1984). ——. “Those who Attack me Humiliate the Vicitms: Interview by Juan Jesús Aznárez,” tr. Jill Robbins, in The Rigoberta Menchú Controversy, ed. Arturo Arias (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 2001): 109–17. Neumann, Birgit, Ansgar Nünning & Bo Pettersson, ed. Narrative and Identity: Theoretical Approaches and Critical Analyses (Trier: W V T , 2008). “Peace Prize Winner Admits Discrepancies,” New York Times (12 February 1999), http: //query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A07E5D7163AF931A25751C0A96F95 8260 (accessed 12 March 2008). Pratt, Mary Louise. “I, Rigoberta Menchú and the ‘Culture Wars’,” in The Rigoberta Menchú Controversy, ed. Arturo Arias (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 2001): 29–48. Ricœur, Paul. Time and Narrative, 3 vols., tr. Kathleen Blamey & David Pellauer (Temps et récit, 1981–83; Chicago: U of Chicago P , 1984–88). “Roland Fuhrmann,” http://www.rolandfuhrmann.de (accessed 17 April 2008). Rosenbaum, Jonathan. Dead Man (London: British Film Institute, 2000). Stoll, David. “I Don’t Seek to Destroy Menchú: Interview by Dina Fernández García,” in The Rigoberta Menchú Controversy, ed. Arturo Arias (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 2001), 66–69. Stoll, David. Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of all Poor Guatemalans (Boulder C O : Westview, 1999).

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Thies, Sebastian, & Olaf Kaltmeier. “From the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wing in Brazil to a Tornado in Texas?: Approaching the Field of Identity Politics and Its Fractal Topography,” in E Pluribus Unum? National and Transnational Identities in the Americas / Identidades nacionales y transnacionales en las Américas, ed. Sebastian Thies & Josef Raab (Tempe A Z : Bilingual, 2008 & Münster: L I T , 2009): 25–46.

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F ICTION ——————

‘Savage’ Violence and the Colonial Body in Nathaniel Crouch’s The English Acquisitions in Guinea and East India (1708) and in Edward Cooke’s A Voyage to the South Sea (1712) ——————————

O LIVER L INDNER

W

I T H T H E G R A D U A L E M E R G E N C E of bourgeois society in post-1688 England and the general surge of print culture after the lapse of the License Act in 1694, travel literature, together with other genres such as the criminal biography or the amatory novel, constituted an essential part of the newly emerging market for sensational stories and bold adventures. Particularly after the publication of William Dampier’s immensely successful New Voyage Round the World (1697), English travel literature blossomed and developed into an important medium that familiarized its readership with exotic customs and alien rituals.1 Indeed, the new metropolitan readership displayed a healthy appetite for geographical and ethnological literature. Naturally, texts on intercultural contact with American, Asian or African peoples displayed a distinctive tendency to equate the European ‘centre’ with ‘civility’ and the colonial ‘periphery’ with ‘barbarity’ or ‘savagery’.2 This categorization also included aspects of violence.3 Repre1

Philip Edwards has estimated that at least two thousand travel narratives were published throughout the eighteenth century; Edwards, The Story of the Voyage: Sea Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1994): 2. 2 The present essay uses such terms as ‘savages’, ‘natives’ or ‘Negroes’ with reference to the times to which the analysis refers, and which reflect eighteenth-century European concepts of the Other.

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sentations of violence in depictions of cross-cultural relations were central to colonial discourse, as they not only negotiated desired power-relations but also marked the essential otherness of the non-European.4 Since these narratives of overseas contact are shaped to a large extent by articulating difference, the body of the savage is a primary site where difference is inscribed. In Western cultural history, the body has functioned as the touchstone of the representation of ethnic otherness. Depictions of the body in Western culture are, above all, sites where power-relations are articulated. In her seminal book The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (1985), Elaine Scarry has outlined the relationship between corporeality and power: To have no body is to have no limits on one’s extension out into the world; conversely, to have a body made emphatic by being continually altered through various forms of creation, instruction (e.g., bodily cleaning), and wounding, is to have one’s sphere of extension contracted down to the small circle of one’s immediate physical presence. Consequently, to be intensely embodied is the equivalent of being unrepresented and is almost always the condition of those without power.5 3

From the first written records of intercultural encounters in the New World, the alleged cruelty of Indian tribes, most prominently manifest in the scandalous custom of cannibalism, has been a defining feature of their otherness. See Urs Bitterli, Alte Welt – Neue Welt: Formen des europäisch-überseeischen Kulturkontakts vom 15. bis zum 18. Jahrhundert (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1986): 31; see also Gesa Mackenthun, Metaphors of Dispossession: American Beginnings and the Translation of Empire, 1492–1637 (Norman & London: U of Oklahoma P , 1997): 38. 4 The present essay’s understanding of ‘colonial discourse’ will follow Peter Hulme’s classic definition of colonial discourse as “an ensemble of linguistically-based practices unified by their common deployment in the management of colonial relationships, an ensemble that could combine the most formulaic and bureaucratic of official documents […] with the most non-functional and unprepossessing of romantic novels […]. Underlying the idea of colonial discourse, in other words, is the presumption that during the colonial period large parts of the non-European world were produced for Europe through a discourse that imbricated sets of questions and assumptions, methods of procedure and analysis, and kinds of writing and imagery, normally separated out into the discrete areas of military strategy, political order, social reform, imaginative literature, personal memoir and so on.” Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492–1797 (London: Routledge, 1992): 2. 5 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1985): 207.

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The strategy of displaying the subjected and inferior body in its corporeality while rendering the powerful body invisible suggests clear boundaries between vulnerability and invincibility. As David Spurr has claimed, the nonEuropean body, subjected to the gaze of the colonizer, has generally been imbued with various meanings that testify to its alleged inferiority: In classic colonial discourse, the body of the primitive becomes as much the object of examination, commentary, and valorization as the landscape of the primitive. Under Western eyes, the body is that which is most proper to the primitive, the sign by which the primitive is represented. The body, rather than speech, law, or history is the essential defining characteristic of primitive peoples.6

Scholars have so far examined the colonial body primarily in a few landmark travelogues of the late-eighteenth century, such as the widely disseminated journals of James Cook’s voyages.7 The present essay, however, analyzes two early-eighteenth-century travel narratives and focuses on the following works which have drawn only little attention: Nathaniel Crouch’s The English Acquisitions in Guinea and East India (1708); and Edward Cooke’s A Voyage to the South Sea, and Round the World (1712). Edward Cooke’s two-volume account tells the author’s adventures in a buccaneering expedition around the globe between 1708 and 1712. Cooke served under Woodes Rogers on an expedition which rescued Alexander Selkirk from his exile on an uninhabited island off the coast of Chile, and Cooke’s report of Selkirk’s fate is often re-

6

David Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration (Durham N C : Duke U P , 1993): 22. 7 Recent studies on the representation of the non-European in late-eighteenthcentury travel narratives include Kathleen Wilson, The Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge, 2003); Noel E. Currie, Constructing Colonial Discourse: Captain Cook at Nootka Sound (Montreal: McGill–Queen’s U P , 2005); Harriet Guest, “Ornament and Use: Mai and Cook in London,” in A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity, and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660–1840, ed. Kathleen Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2004): 317–44; and Kathleen Wilson, “Thinking Back: Gender Misrecognition and Polynesian Subversions aboard the Cook Voyages,” in A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity, and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660–1840, ed. Kathleen Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2004): 345–62.

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garded as the main inspiration for Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe.8 Nathaniel Crouch was a bookseller and an historian who composed major works of popular historiography and thereby gained singular popularity.9 His account of Guinea and the East Indies is not a travel narrative proper but, rather, a geographical and ethnographical survey which Crouch compiled from various sources. In the mushrooming book market of early-eighteenth-century England, Crouch’s accumulation of facts was a popular text which, as Robert Mayer argues, “responded to and fostered the craze for popularized natural history.”10 I wish here to investigate how the savage body is made visible to the scrutinizing Western gaze in these two early-eighteenth-century travel narratives. Two aspects will be central in my analysis, since they exert a powerful presence in the texts: the trope of cannibalism; and the display of the dead and fragmented savage body.11 I will argue that, in Cooke’s and Crouch’s accounts, cannibalism and the fragmented native body are employed to maintain and accentuate European superiority and to draw strict boundaries between the observer and his objects. Furthermore, I want to show that the body is displayed in several distinct categories, ranging from the body of the white explorer to the fragmented body of the savage, the latter acting not only as a signifier of both savage cruelty and ultimate powerlessness but also as a corrective that neutralizes the aesthetically pleasing native body. Finally, I aim to show that representations of the fragmented savage body, a form of textual corporeal consumption, can be seen as the authors’ self-legitimizing response to the practice of cannibalism.

8

See Maximillian E. Novak, Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions (Oxford: Oxford U P ,

2001): 539. 9

Robert Mayer, History and the Early English Novel: Matters of Fact from Bacon to Defoe (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1997): 128. 10 Mayer, History and the Early English Novel, 188. 11 David Hillman and Carla Mazzio have claimed that the body and its parts were invested with a rich inventory of meanings in early modern European culture: “We may say, in fact, that in early modern Europe more generally, the multiple traditions of medical and anatomical description, of Petrarchism, of religious and cultural iconography, converged to give individual parts of the body more semiotic complexity than they had ever had before.” Hillman & Mazzio, “Introduction” to The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe, ed. Hillman & Mazzio (New York: Routledge, 1997): xviii.

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Cannibalism As a haunting figure within the inventory of eighteenth-century colonial subjects, the cannibal was unmatched in his capacity to evoke curiosity and disgust. A central metaphor for the savage Other and the “West’s key representation of primitivism,”12 cannibalism was an enduring topos in early-modern European discourse on Native Americans from the early-sixteenth century onwards. Peter Hulme has claimed that cannibalism is “a term that has no application outside the discourse of European colonialism: it is never available as a ‘neutral’ word.”13 In early-eighteenth-century discourse, cannibalism appeared as the most powerful marker for indicating the boundary between civilization and savagery. Stephen Slemon has suggested that representations of cannibalism in European culture entail an ambiguous figuration, functioning as both “regulatory mechanisms for colonialism” and as “colonialist pathology.”14 In the figure of the cannibal, Europe’s own colonial policy of consuming is “marked out by representation, disavowed, and then projected onto colonialism’s Other.”15 Sixteenth-century Spanish travel accounts constituted a distinctive model for subsequent representations of the savage American.16 With their emphasis on body parts, they designated the colonial periphery as a territory that not only inhabits the fragmented body of the savage but also threatens the very integrity of the European body. For example, the famous woodcuts showing the Tupinambas, a Brazilian tribe notorious for its alleged man-eating rituals, were disseminated across Europe as a shocking token of savage cruelty. In the illustrations contained in Hans Staden’s Wahrhaftige Historia (1557), a popular account of the author’s capture by Indians, all the objects of the spectacle are present: the cooking-pot, fragmented parts of the victim’s body with the head as the prime signifier of the victim’s humanness, and, most importantly, a large group of cannibals. Of course, the fact that the scene also contains women and children as participants in the feast increases the horror even 12

Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths & Helen Tiffin, Key Concepts in Post-Colonial Studies (London: Routledge, 1999): 29. 13 Hulme, Colonial Encounters, 84. 14 Stephen Slemon, “Bones of Contention: Post-Colonial Writing and the ‘Cannibal’ Question,” in Literature and the Body, ed. Anthony Purdy (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1992): 168. 15 Slemon, “Bones of Contention,” 167. 16 See Mackenthun, Metaphors of Dispossession, 141.

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more, brushing aside less cruel theories of cannibalism as a ritual of war that is restricted to male warriors.17 Sixteenth-century Spanish descriptions of Indian savagery were also incorporated into Edward Cooke’s A Voyage to the South Sea, and Round the World: In some Provinces they were mighty Devourers of Man’s Flesh, and so greedy of it, that before the slaughter’d Wretch were quite dead, they would suck his Blood at the Wounds, having public Shambles of human Flesh, and making Puddings of the Guts, as Peter de Zieza was an Eye-Witness, and declares they would devour their own Children, and the Women they had them by, keeping some Prisoners for Breeders to supply them with Sons and Daughters to eat, and some of them, when any of their own People dy’d, immediately made a Feast of the Body. In the cold Countries, which afforded little of themselves, Necessity oblig’d them to sow Indian Wheat, and other Things; and those who fed not on human Flesh, follow’d Hunting and Fishing.18

Within the range of early-eighteenth-century travel accounts, Cooke’s passage is outstanding for its complex strategy of conveying the horrors of cannibalism. It bristles with sensational atrocities and thus encapsulates the most memorable facets of Cooke’s observations of Peruvian Indians, relegating subsequent descriptions of native customs and marriage policies to the margins of the narrative. By likening cannibalistic food preparations to wellknown parts of the English diet such as “Puddings,”19 Cooke dramatizes 17

Although all types of cannibalism were denounced as a perversion of natural law, there was a notable hierarchy concerning its causes. Exocannibalism, the consumption of enemies or slaves captured in military conflicts, was thought to be less cruel and separated from endocannibalism, the spectacle of intra-communal cannibalism. Ritualistic cannibalism where man-eating was confined to devouring prisoners in war was again more or less sharply differentiated from dietary cannibalism, which posed the most detestable form of man-eating practices since it marked it as an innate, ubiquitous feature of Carib existence. See Frank Lestringant, Cannibals: The Discovery and Representation of the Cannibal from Columbus to Jules Verne (Berkeley: U of California P , 1997): 141; see also Hulme, Colonial Encounters, 79ff. 18 Edward Cooke, A Voyage to the South Sea, and Round the World, Perform’d in the Years 1708, 1709, 1710, and 1711 (London, 1712), vol. 1: 217. 19 The reader should not take my reference to English diet here as meaning anything like the modern denotation of a sweet dessert; the primary, and prior, sense of ‘pudding’, as intended by Cooke, is to the stuffing of an animal’s entrails,

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Cieza’s less scandalous description and highlights the vividness as well as the regularity of man-eating practices. Furthermore, his use of culinary terms for body parts also evokes the Catholic principle of transubstantiation which associated bread and wine with the body of Christ and was strongly condemned by the Anglican Church.20 Thus, the passage forges a sinister link between the cannibal and the Catholics, a crucial connection in an age where, as Colin Kidd has intriguingly argued, “despite the undoubted reality of racism, slavery, and xenophobia, anti-Catholicism was a more pronounced feature of eighteenth-century British discourse than hostility to blacks.”21 Whereas the “public Shambles of human Flesh” conveys orgies of bloodshed and once again illustrates the process of food preparation, Cooke’s mentioning of “Breeders” as the human equivalent to English beef also foregrounds the character of man-eating as a common custom and further intensifies gastronomic dimensions. Hunting and fishing are dismissed as second-rate alter-

sausage-like, with extenders and other meats, as in the still-current, and quite ‘unsavage’ black sausage or black pudding (German Blutwurst). 20 David Hillman has persuasively argued that the Protestant rejection of Catholic devotional practice, apparent in the suppression of relics, the condemnation of the sacrament of the Eucharist, or arguments concerning the reality of stigmata, seem to be “in part disputes about notions of the significance and more particularly the openness of human bodies”; Hillman, Shakespeare’s Entrails: Belief, Skepticism and the Interior of the Body (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007): 38. A spate of publications throughout the early-eighteenth century testifies to the lingering actuality of the Eucharist in Britain. Whereas the dogma was strongly condemned, for example, in Matthew Buchanan’s Arguments mostly ad Hominem, against Popery (1719), Samuel A.B. Walker’s The Doctrine of the Eucharist Stated (1720) or Jacques de Daillon’s The Ax Laid to the Root of Popery (1721), other texts took an affirmative position, among them Thomas Brett’s The Christian Altar and Sacrifice (1713). Richard Sugg summarizes the proximity of the Eucharist and cannibalism in early-modern Protestant thinking: “For certain Protestants, the Catholic insistence that Christ’s body was literally being eaten and drunk in bread and wine provided not only one more instance of papist superstition and broadly magical or primitive behaviour, but a case that did indeed resemble the habitual physical sacrifices of Indian cannibals.” Sugg, Murder After Death: Literature and Anatomy in Early Modern England (Ithaca N Y : Cornell U P , 2007): 39. 21 Colin Kidd, “Ethnicity in the British Atlantic World, 1688–1830,” in A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity, and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660– 1840, ed. Kathleen Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2004): 261.

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natives to the Indians’ preferred diet of human flesh. The insistence that Indians consume raw flesh effectively deprives them of markers of culture, and the ‘reported fact’ that Indians devour their children as well as their relatives not only demonstrates utmost barbarity but places the Indians even below the animal kingdom. Although Cooke wrote about the Indians of the sixteenth century, this historiographic dimension is easily eclipsed by the sensational quality of the cannibalistic spectacle which summarizes the repulsive nature of South American Indians. Interestingly, Cooke’s gory description of reported cannibalism forms a sharp contrast to his own observations, since he acknowledges the civilizing influence of the Spaniards and even praises the decently dressed natives as well as their conversion to monogamy.22 However, in his account of remote Pacific islands, the cannibal returns with a vengeance. Here, Cooke differentiates between savage and less savage inhabitants: “A League farther up, they go stark naked, both Men and Women. The savage Part of them are said to eat white Men, if they take them, and drink their blood, devouring all they catch raw.”23 Cooke’s description of alleged cannibalism represents the apex of illustrating man-eating practices. The passage contains two signifiers of utmost barbarity. First, the notion of a white fragmented body epitomizes a reversal of power-relations to show the body of the European as firmly embedded in savage rituals. Secondly, the allusion to the consumption of uncooked human flesh again deprives the cannibals of fundamental signs of culture. Finally, Cooke’s arrival in southern Africa also foregrounds allusions to cannibalism, as in his depiction of the Hottentots: As to Disposition, they are crafty and perfidious, and given to most Vices, and very fond of living idle, indulging themselves in Lust and Debauchery. They wear raw Guts about their Necks and Legs, which look like Puddings, having much Ordure in them, and these serve both for Food and Ornament, being eaten by them raw as they are, and filthy, when tender’d by being almost rotten.24 22

Cf. Cooke, Voyage to the South Sea, vol. 1: 78. Voyage to the South Sea, vol. 2: 17. Pedro de Cieza de León’s The Seventeen Years Travels of Peter de Cieza, Through the Mighty Kingdom of Peru, the source of Cooke’s account of Peruvian cannibalism, was translated into English in 1709 and included various images of man-eating practices. See Cieza de León, Seventeen Years Travel, 35. 24 Cooke, Voyage to the South Sea, vol. 2: 70. 23

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Stirring the reader’s imagination, the origins of these “Guts” are not specified. In this passage, the body of the savage is presented as a ghastly mixture of external and internal body parts, with the guts as an epitome of the savage’s unstable boundaries. The comparison of the guts with “Puddings” establishes a crucial link to Cooke’s previous descriptions of historical accounts of Indian cannibals and their custom of making “Puddings” of their victims’ guts. Thus, although actual observations of cannibalism remain absent, the man-eater as a signifier of otherness is carefully maintained in Cooke’s journal. In Nathaniel Crouch’s account of Guinea, cannibalism also assumes a prominent position that establishes the otherness of the savage. The book offers lengthy descriptions of the English forts on the African coast and also includes numerous references to English contact with the indigenous population. Crouch’s observation of their eating habits clearly aims at evoking the reader’s disgust: [They] feed as unmannerly as Swine, sitting on the ground, not swallowing one Morsel after another, but tear their Meat to pieces, and throw it into their Mouths which stand gaping to receive it, they are always hungry and would eat all day long.25

Embedded in these words is the image of the savage as a dangerous opponent with an insatiable appetite who gorges on raw meat. His or her body appears reduced to claw-like hands and a mouth. Of course, as one of the most vivid images in Crouch’s account, the allusion to the open mouth of the savage, gaping to receive meat, is also bound to nourish European conceptions about man-eating practices. It conjures up an array of stereotypes among which cannibalism emerges as the most prominent aspect. Naturally, the reader is more or less compelled to define the Africans as cannibals.26 For the early-eighteenth-century reader, the most disturbing presence of cannibalism in Crouch’s book, however, involves two Africans feasting upon

25

Nathaniel Crouch, The English Acquisitions in Guinea and East-India (London,

1708): 10. 26

The frequent equation of non-Europeans with cannibalism in early modern texts, scholars have argued, turned cannibalism into a cultural expectation and fostered the tendency to denote cannibalism as an intrinsic feature of overseas peoples, regardless of actual observations of cannibalistic practices. See Hulme, Colonial Encounters, 81.

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a white body, after an English group of sailors is caught by the “Tawny Moors”: They took the Boatswain out of the Boat, and instead endeavouring to preserve what Life remained in him, one of them with a keen Weapon instantly cut off his Head; and while he was yet reeking in his Blood, they in a barbarous manner cut off Pieces of Flesh from his Buttocks, Thighs, Arms and Shoulders, and broil’d them on the Coals, and with much Impatience eat it before his Companions Faces to their great astonishment.27

The scene encapsulates the whole inventory of prevalent conceptions of the African. Inhumanity, the propensity for cruelty, appetite for human flesh, and intemperance – all testify to his detestable otherness. Apart from that, the passage is remarkable for its treatment of the disintegrating white body, focusing on the transition from life to death as well as on the body’s violent fragmentation. The severed head and the flesh removed from numerous parts of the body constitute a process of fundamental corporeal dissolution, drawing an antagonistic contrast between the mutilated European body and the greedy, threatening, and, above all, intact body of the African. By delineating the African’s superiority in this episode, Crouch’s passage epitomizes European trepidation about falling victim to the barbarity of the savage. Cannibals will later find entry into Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, which perpetuated stereotypes of man-eating savages and can be regarded as probably the most successful and lasting literary portrayal of man-eating savages in Western cultural history.

The Savage Corpse In addition to the cannibal, the savage corpse can be found as another essential trope in both works. In Cooke’s A Voyage to the South Sea, the connection of the native Indian and bodily fragmentation is explicitly asserted. Writing about the Indians of Chile, Cooke remarks that “their natural disposition is cholerick, proud and fierce, which inclines them to Cruelty, and consequently they treat their Enemies inhumanly, hewing them Piece-Meal and delighting in their blood.”28 Interestingly, this passage is written in the present tense and 27 28

Crouch, English Acquisitions, 53. Cooke, Voyage to the South Sea, vol. 1: 74.

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thus set apart from his earlier recapitulations of the history of Indian warfare against the Spaniards. It can be argued that the narrative here upholds savagery as a marker of difference even if it is not witnessed by the narrator himself, who, as indicated above, speaks about the rather ‘civilized’ conduct of contemporary Indians under Spanish rule. His account of Mexico uses a similar strategy of alluding to a reported savage ferocity. Here Cooke asserts that in some remote northern regions Indians still live like “wild beasts,” but he never meets them himself.29 Although Cooke is not witness to any forms of outrageous savage violence, the fragmented body of the Indian exerts a haunting presence in his text, as in the description of Indian pipes: “The warlike Indians us’d to make Pipes of the Bones of the Enemies they had slain in War; now they are made of those of other Creatures.”30 In Cooke’s survey of Indian cultures of mourning, however, the fragmented body is again present. Here, the author reports that Indian tribes keep the bones of the dead in their houses, “very reverently preserv’d, hung up in the same Cotton Beds they lay in whilst living.”31 The ubiquitous presence of the dead savage body as incontrovertible proof of his inferiority is crucial to the traveller’s articulation of self. Fragmentation represents a culmination of the native body’s general instability. In Crouch’s account of Guinea, the fragmented body likewise has a prominent position. His description of native rituals includes several passages on the methods of punishment among the “Negroes.” As Crouch asserts, the bodies of executed perpetrators are mutilated and then left in the open to rot and be devoured by animals. While the body is “cut into four Quarters,” friends of the transgressor “take away the Head as a great Present, and boiling it in a Kettle, drink up the Broth, hanging the Skull by their Fetisso or Idol.”32 As in Cooke’s description of the Indian custom of keeping bones in their huts, the preservation of the skull in African tribal cultures also testifies to the presence of the fragmented body in the colonial sphere. Moreover, the act of drinking the “Broth” and the fact that the skull is transformed into a token of religious worship again evokes Catholic somatic devotion. The author also dwells extensively on various other methods of elaborated punishment in non-European societies. For example, punitive rituals in Persia convey a fearful imagery of torn limbs, 29

Cooke, Voyage to the South Sea, vol. 1: 403. Voyage to the South Sea, vol. 1: 78. 31 Voyage to the South Sea, vol. 1: 257. 32 Crouch, English Acquisitions, 23. 30

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burnt body parts, and bodies devoured by the King’s dogs.33 Thus, the fragmented body of the savage is shown as an ever-present object that, in various forms and functions, is incorporated into native material culture and ritualism. Particularly Cooke’s travel narrative reveals a strict hierarchy concerning the representation of the body. At the top of this hierarchy reigns the white body, largely invisible and thus, as Elaine Scarry has argued, omnipotent.34 The body of the clothed savage comes next: as the subaltern, the clothed savage exerts power over subordinate or even hostile natives, apparent in Cooke’s portrayal of the colonized, richly clothed inhabitants of Chile or in Crouch’s account, where the native soldier who serves the English is differentiated from the hostile enemy by wearing “a Linnen Cloth around his Neck.”35 The naked savage, deprived of essential markers of culture, forms the next stage in the hierarchy. Finally, the dead, especially the mutilated, fragmented body of the savage, represent the lowest category. Of course, the disfigured body encapsulates the climax of powerlessness, since here even the interior of the body is visible to the European observer, which foregrounds the savage as an object of knowledge. On the other hand, in Crouch’s The English Acquisitions in Guinea and East India, the rather exceptional depiction of the fragmented white body in the hands of the Africans clearly defies the pattern of white impenetrability and savage vulnerability. Concerning the relationship between colonizing and colonized bodies, it articulates a far less confident vision of the colonial venture than does Cooke’s book. Sander Gilman argues in Difference and Pathology (1985) that what one fears most is inscribed in the body of another as proof that it does not lie within one’s own body.36 Therefore, mutilation, a loss of bodily boundaries, and organic decay in these two eighteenth-century travel narratives are projected onto the body of the savage, the ultimate site of alterity. A clear-cut demarcation is established between the self and the radically Other which prevents the European body from disintegration and reaffirms its superiority. The dead savage body is rendered as mere materiality in a process of decomposition, dissolved from the soul, hence confirming European stereotypes of the heathen. 33

Cf. English Acquisitions, 146. See Scarry, The Body in Pain, 207. 35 Crouch, English Acquisitions, 32. 36 See Sander L. Gilman, Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race and Madness (Ithaca N Y : Cornell U P , 1985): 20. 34

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According to Julia Kristeva, the corpse represents the strongest possible realization of the abject: The corpse, seen without God and outside of science, is the utmost of abjection. It is death infecting life. Abject. It is something rejected from which one does not part, from which one does not protect oneself as from an object. Imaginary uncanniness and real threat, it beckons to us and ends up engulfing us.37

In his confrontations with dead bodies as “the utmost of abjection,” the traveller, it can be argued, succeeds in a triumphant articulation of the self that has surmounted the destabilizing dangers of the abject. The corpse which, in Kristeva’s words, conveys “fundamental pollution” forms the foil against which the traveller builds up his identity as non-corpse and superior being.38 However, there is another way of looking at the function of the frequent allusions to the body in parts in early-eighteenth-century travel narratives. In Cooke’s account, the native body is praised for its immaculate constitution. For example, musing on the natives of Chile, he remarks that “no People in the world have better Teeth or Eyes, which never fail them as long as they live.”39 Further, Cooke denotes Chilean warriors as “strong and brawny, well shap’d, broad shoulder’d, high chested, active, vigorous, bold, and hardy to endure Hunger, Thirst, and Cold,” characterizing them as perfect soldiers.40 The Indians in Mexico likewise appear “strait and well limb’d” and the inhabitants of various Pacific islands are even characterized as “the largest and best limb’d Men I ever saw, some of them very hairy and strong.”41 Clearly, whereas the cultural and moral superiority of the Europeans can be pronounced, the physical constitution of the savage appears far less inferior. Against the backdrop of the alluring, erotically charged native body, the fragmented native body can be read as a necessary corrective. It neutralizes the outstandingly attractive native body and thus re-establishes European superiority.

37

Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, tr. Leon S. Roudiez (Pouvoirs de l’horreur: Essai sur l’abjection, 1980; New York: Columbia U P , 1982): 4. 38 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 109. 39 Cooke, Voyage to the South Sea, vol. 1: 78. 40 Voyage to the South Sea, vol. 1: 75. 41 Voyage to the South Sea, vol. 2: 17.

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Finally, the emphasis on depictions of the violently fragmented body of the savage can also be linked to early-eighteenth-century medical discourse, since the detailed description of the fractured body and its parts bears a considerable resemblance to the increase in anatomical procedures around 1700. In his analysis of anatomy in European culture, Richard Sugg has stressed the connection between anatomy and cannibalism: More fundamentally, anatomy is simply the best champion that European culture can summon to devour the cannibal: a form of ferocious bodily invasion distinctively inflected by particular Old World attitudes to knowledge and religion, offering the same degree of violence along with a certain ambiguous attempt at greater cultural legitimacy.42

Therefore, a detailed portrayal of the savage body mutilated by violent intrusion represents an acceptable Western equivalent to the spectacle of cannibalistic violence. According to Sugg, it signifies an act of devouring the cannibal by fragmenting and, crucially, inspecting his body. Viewed from this perspective, Cooke’s and Crouch’s unabashed fascination with the mutilated body of the cannibal, it can be argued, is motivated by an underlying desire to participate in what Sugg summarizes as the “raw, primitive sensuality with which cannibalism itself is charged,” and to ensure the reader’s participation in this sensuality.43

Conclusion As has been shown, cannibalism and the fragmented body appear as essential ingredients of Cooke’s and Crouch’s accounts. Scholars have argued that the continuing presence of the cannibal in colonialist discourse, even when actual observations of man-eating practices were not recorded, was essential, since it justified extensive colonial operation. Cooke’s A Voyage to the South Sea and Crouch’s The English Acquisitions in Guinea and East India can be brought within this pattern of representing the cannibal. Although Cooke can find no actual traces of cannibalism, his reference to history as well as allusions to supposedly more savage people in unexplored regions effectively re-mythologizes the American natives as cannibals. 42 43

Sugg, Murder after Death, 60. Murder after Death, 60.

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The violent fragmentation of the native body in travel narratives and other forms of print culture fulfils several functions. Most obviously, it testifies to the brutality of non-Europeans and their acts of warfare. Clearly, the body in parts as a hallmark of the non-European sphere locates cruelty outside European societies.44 It therefore emphasizes the ‘civilized’ character of bourgeois society by relegating atrocities to the very periphery of empire and contributes, it can be argued, to the complex process of nation-building in earlyeighteenth-century Britain. Whereas public display of the fragmented body in European societies was present only in rare cases of capital punishment where the perpetrator was both physically and symbolically dematerialized, the colonial sphere in early-eighteenth-century travelogues such as Cooke’s and Crouch’s accounts denounced such singularities by pitting abundant scenes of bodily mutilation against the European newcomer. By contrast, the rare occurrence of the European body in parts in travel narratives, as depicted in Crouch’s text, signifies a dangerous reversal of power relations between colonizer and colonized subject that undermines established binaries of superiority and inferiority. Depictions of mutilated white bodies form a gloomy counter-narrative to the more conventional portrayal of the superior European who forces indigenous tribes into submission with the help of his advanced military technology. Because of their subversive nature, accounts of the white body in parts imbue texts with a high shockvalue that secures maximum attention. They demonstrate that it is not only the moral and religious constitution which is threatened in African or American territories, but that the very integrity of the European body is exposed to dangerous intrusion. It can further be argued that the presence of the fragmented or dead native body in early-eighteenth-century travel narratives emerges as an answer to prevalent uncertainties about the relation between Britain and the wider world.45 Particularly in the early days of concerted colonial expansion, Euro-

44

Omitted from contrastive discussion in my essay, of course, are centuries of marginalized (or suppressed?) European discourse, visual and textual, on analogous phenomena within Europe itself: dismemberment in warfare and in public executions; cannibalism in times of famine; and even the ritual processing and ingestion of parts of corpses as ‘mummy’ (Paracelsus’ Mumia); not to forget, of course, Montaigne’s classic, deconstructive precursor essay “On the Cannibals.” 45 See Kathleen Wilson: “The routes and commodities of empire, the representations of war and conquest, the epistemologies of exploration and the arts of discovery each

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pean activities in overseas territories were characterized by threatened boundaries between ‘savage’ and ‘civilized’. As Kathleen Wilson has claimed, national as well as cultural and religious identities had to be preserved in a “space disrupting comfortable binary oppositions about insiders and outsiders posted by eighteenth-century European intellectuals to make sense of the wider world.”46 The depiction of the fragmented, mutilated body of the savage provides an answer to this dangerous disruption of stable boundaries by accentuating strict oppositions between European and savage bodies as an affirmation of difference. In other words, the violated body of the savage is a central trope that constructs difference between the West and the non-West, and the degree of the body’s vulnerability and fragmentation is the site where racial difference is inscribed, with the exception of Crouch’s depiction of the white body in parts. Finally, the fragmented body of the savage imbues the author and the reader with the omnipotence of the penetrating gaze that reaches into the interior of the colonial body and represents a legitimate Western equivalent to the practice of cannibalism. The articulation of the native body as a mere corporeal entity also accords with prevalent scientific arguments which, as Noel E. Currie has contended, identified the indigenous population of the colonial sphere as “natural products of the land rather than as human producers of culture.”47 Consequently, this imperial rhetoric “emptied out the New World territory, making it available for legitimate European possession.”48 With the repetitive scenario of the mutilated native body, travel narratives contribute to this discursive strategy of depicting colonial expansion as the occupation of non-cultural spaces. Moreover, the fragmented body of the savage in Edward Cooke’s A Voyage to the South Sea, and Round the World and in Nathaniel Crouch’s The English Acquisitions in Guinea, it can be argued, is the very anti-type to the Western principle of accumulation on the colonial periphery, both of objects and of people.

revealed that England owed its much-vaunted singularity in no small part to peoples and practices extending beyond the island of Britain or the British archipelago” (The Island Race, 204). 46 The Island Race, 17. 47 Currie, Constructing Colonial Discourse, 6. 48 Constructing Colonial Discourse, 6.

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WORKS CITED Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths & Helen Tiffin. Key Concepts in Post-Colonial Studies (London: Routledge, 1999). Bitterli, Urs. Alte Welt – Neue Welt: Formen des europäisch-überseeischen Kulturkontakts vom 15. bis zum 18. Jahrhundert (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1986). Cieza de León, Pedro de. The Seventeen Years Travels of Peter de Cieza, Through the Mighty Kingdom of Peru (London, 1709). Cooke, Edward. A Voyage to the South Sea, and Round the World, Perform’d in the Years 1708, 1709, 1710, and 1711, 2 vols. (London, 1712). Crouch, Nathaniel. The English Acquisitions in Guinea and East-India (London, 1708). Currie, Noel E. Constructing Colonial Discourse: Captain Cook at Nootka Sound (Montreal: McGill–Queen’s U P , 2005). Edwards, Philip. The Story of the Voyage: Sea-Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1994). Gilman, Sander L. Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race and Madness (Ithaca N Y : Cornell U P , 1985). Guest, Harriet. “Ornament and Use: Mai and Cook in London” (2004), in A New Imperial History, ed. Wilson, 317–44. Hillman, David. Shakespeare’s Entrails: Belief, Skepticism and the Interior of the Body (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). ——, & Carla Mazzio. “Introduction” to The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe, ed. David Hillman & Carla Mazzio (New York & London : 1997): xi–xxix. Hulme, Peter. Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492–1797 (London: Routledge, 1992). Kidd, Colin. “Ethnicity in the British Atlantic World, 1688–1830” (2004), in A New Imperial History, ed. Wilson, 260–77. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, tr. Leon S. Roudiez (Pouvoirs de l’horreur: Essai sur l’abjection, 1980; New York: Columbia U P , 1982). Lestringant, Frank. Cannibals: The Discovery and Representation of the Cannibal from Columbus to Jules Verne (Berkeley: U of California P , 1997). Mackenthun, Gesa. Metaphors of Dispossession: American Beginnings and the Translation of Empire, 1492–1637 (Norman & London: U of Oklahoma P , 1997). Mayer, Robert. History and the Early English Novel: Matters of Fact from Bacon to Defoe (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1997). Novak, Maximillian E. Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions (Oxford: Oxford U P , 2001). Purdy, Anthony, ed. Literature and the Body (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1992). Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1985).

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Slemon, Stephen. “Bones of Contention: Post-Colonial Writing and the ‘Cannibal’ Question” (1992), in Literature and the Body, ed. Purdy, 163–77. Spurr, David. The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration (Durham N C : Duke U P , 1993). Sugg, Richard. Murder After Death: Literature and Anatomy in Early Modern England (Ithaca N Y : Cornell U P , 2007). Wafer, Lionel. A New Voyage and Description of the Isthmus of America (London, 1704). Wilson, Kathleen. The Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge, 2003). ——, ed. A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity, and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2004). ——. “Thinking Back: Gender Misrecognition and Polynesian Subversions aboard the Cook Voyages” (2004), in A New Imperial History, ed. Wilson, 345–62.



Saccharographies ——————————

C ARL P LASA

Sugar calls up the binary rhythm of law and work, of patriarchal hierarchy, of scientific knowledge, of punishment and discipline, of superego and castration; it is the space [. . . ] of production and productivity, of rule and measure, of ideology and nationalism, of the computer that speaks and separates; it is, above all, the signifier that offers itself as center, as origin, as fixed destination, for that which signifies the Other. — Antonio Benítez–Rojo, The Repeating Island They have no leisure for the cultivation of aught but their estates, – & limit the alphabet to 5 letters, S – U – G – A – R. — John Anderson, A Magistrate’s Recollections, or St. Vincent, in 1836

Canes, Chains, and Texts

T

of her autobiography, posthumously published in 1877, Harriet Martineau recalls a mysterious dream occurring in early childhood. Given the nature of its content – a return to the domestic space and to the mother – it might be assumed that the dream would engender a sense of well-being, an expectation increased by the additional oneiric presence of the commodity to which all children are automatically drawn: sugar. In the event, however, the dream has the opposite effect, bringing neither comfort nor pleasure, but a chilling disquiet: OWARDS THE BEGINNING

By the time we were at our own door, it was dusk, and we went up the steps in the dark; but in the kitchen it was bright sunshine. My mother was standing at

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the dresser, breaking sugar; and she lifted me up, and set me in the sun, and gave me a bit of sugar. Such was the dream which froze me with horror!1

What can explain the young Martineau’s unhomely sense of “horror” here, as she strangely freezes in the “sun”? And why should it be precipitated by so sweet a thing as a “bit of sugar,” melting on the tongue as it is eaten? The answer is that sugar is not, as it turns out, anything like as innocent as it appears to be, but indissolubly linked to the history of slavery in the Caribbean, to which it was introduced by Christopher Columbus in 1493.2 While these nightmarish bonds remain unrealized or even unconscious amid the dreamy chiaroscuro of Martineau’s autobiography, they are openly acknowledged and explored in her other works, especially “Demerara” (1833), a tale composed just before the emancipation of slaves in the British West Indies in 1834. In this text, Martineau advocates a powerful if eclectic antislavery position by combining arguments derived from political economy with a somewhat less abstract emphasis on the psychological and corporeal sufferings endured by those she calls her “slave personages.”3 The links between sugar and slavery haunting Martineau’s dream and confronted in the politically awakened consciousness of her fiction have been the focus for many studies appearing long after the time in which she herself was writing, stimulating twentieth-century landmark analyses by Fernando Ortiz, Noël Deerr, and Sidney W. Mintz.4 Such classic contributions explore their 1

Harriet Martineau, Autobiography, ed. Maria Weston Chapman, 2 vols (Boston

M A : James R. Osgood, 1877), vol. 1: 11–12. 2

Columbus brought sugar from Madeira to Hispaniola in the course of his second voyage to the Americas. For a detailed analysis of his activities and the subsequent early growth of the sugar industry on the island where it was first attempted, see Genaro Rodríguez Morel, “The Sugar Economy of Española in the Sixteenth Century,” in Tropical Babylons: Sugar and the Making of the Atlantic World, 1450–1680, ed. Stuart B. Schwartz (Chapel Hill & London: U of North Carolina P , 2004): 85–114. 3 Harriet Martineau, Preface to “Demerara,” in The Empire Question, ed. Deborah Logan, vol. 1 of Harriet Martineau’s Writing on the British Empire, ed. Deborah Logan, 5 vols. (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2004): 69. Martineau’s antislavery stance takes on an additional charge when it is recalled that her family was itself implicated in slavery’s circuits of production and consumption: Robert Rankin, her maternal grandfather, was a sugar-refiner in Newcastle. 4 See Fernando Ortiz, Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar, tr. Harriet de Onís, intro. Fernando Coronil (Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azứcar, 1940; Durham

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subject from perspectives which are principally historical, economic, and anthropological and these methodologies retain a vital currency today, as evidenced in Richard Follett’s recent work on the sugar world of antebellum Louisiana.5 At the same time, other modes of inquiry, largely inspired and informed by developments in postcolonial theory, have emerged, for which the accent falls more firmly on the textual, as critics seek to engage with how sugar has been represented discursively. One of the most significant instances of this approach is Keith A. Sandiford’s The Cultural Politics of Sugar (2000), which deals with a body of plantation writings stretching from the era of early colonial settlement in the 1650s to the time of emancipation. In Sandiford’s view, these texts – by Richard Ligon, Charles de Rochefort, James Grainger, Janet Schaw, William Beckford, and Matthew Lewis – are marked, all in their different ways, by tensions between the desire to legitimate what he calls an “evolving ideal of Creole civilization,” on the one hand, and the anxious recognition, on the other, that the formation of such an ideal is compromised by “its central relation to slavery and its marginal relation to metropolitan cultures.”6 While Sandiford’s work is undoubtedly important, his project needs to be extended in one vital regard, leaving open, as it does, the question of how sugar comes to be reinscribed in the period subsequent to the one on which he concentrates, particularly by black writers of the postcolonial aftermath. What are the relationships between white and black saccharographies and how does the black figuring of sugar revise the white archive out of which it grows?

White Sugar: Sketching the Archive In order to answer such questions, it is first necessary to establish a broad sense of what that white archive contains, beginning with Grainger’s The Sugar-Cane, a long poem published in 1764, at a juncture when Britain had both emerged triumphant from the Seven Years’ War of 1756–63 and was N C & London: Duke U P , 1995); Noël Deerr, The History of Sugar, 2 vols. (London:

Chapman & Hall, 1949–50); and Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Viking, 1985). 5 See Richard Follett, The Sugar Masters: Planters and Slaves in Louisiana’s Cane World, 1820–1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State U P , 2005). 6 Keith A. Sandiford, The Cultural Politics of Sugar: Caribbean Slavery and Narratives of Colonialism (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2000): 3.

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consolidating its status as prime mover in the transatlantic slave trade.7 Critically neglected for many years, Grainger’s text has recently begun to attract a good deal of attention and is now generally regarded as a work with a major (if controversial) part to play in the initial shaping of the Caribbean literary canon.8 The recognition of the poem’s formative role would certainly have pleased its author, who regularly insists upon the innovative nature of his “West-India georgic,”9 while at the same time extolling the delights of the colonial periphery on which he writes (the Lesser Antillean island of St Christopher) and opposing them to the lures of the metropolis. Not quite so gratifying, equally certainly, however, would be the extent to which critics past and present have taken issue not only with the text’s overwhelmingly proslavery politics but also with its scandalous linguistic habits. If James Boswell could famously deride The Sugar-Cane for camouflaging the lowness of its agricultural concerns in “blank-verse pomp,”10 postcolonial critics have gone one step further. For them, the more urgent problem of the poem’s style – 7

For a useful overview of the Seven Years’ War and the problems the British encountered in the years following their military triumph, see Bruce P. Lenman, “Colonial Wars and Imperial Instability, 1688–1793,” in The Eighteenth Century, ed. P.J. Marshall, vol. 2 of The Oxford History of the British Empire, editor-in-chief Wm. Roger Louis, 5 vols. (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1988): 159–67. Britain’s history as preeminent slave-trading nation is discussed in detail by David Richardson, “The British Empire and the Atlantic Slave Trade,” also in The Eighteenth Century, ed. Marshall, 440–64. 8 For examples of renewed interest in Grainger’s poem, see Shaun Irlam, “ ‘ Wish You Were Here’: Exporting England in James Grainger’s The Sugar-Cane,” English Literary History 68 (2001): 377–96; Tobias Döring, Caribbean-English Passages: Intertextuality in a Postcolonial Tradition (London & New York: Routledge, 2002): 49–77; Jim Egan, “The ‘Long’d-for Aera’ of an ‘Other Race’: Climate, Identity, and James Grainger’s The Sugar-Cane,” Early American Literature 38 (2003): 189–212; and Steven W. Thomas, “Doctoring Ideology: James Grainger’s The Sugar Cane and the Bodies of Empire,” Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 4 (2006): 78–111. 9 James Grainger, “Preface” to The Sugar-Cane: A Poem. In Four Books. With Notes, in John Gilmore, The Poetics of Empire: A Study of James Grainger’s “The Sugar-Cane” (London & New Brunswick N J : Athlone, 2000): 90. Further page references to Grainger’s poem are in the main text. 10 James Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. R.W. Chapman, intro. Pat Rogers (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1998): 698.

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elevated and classical, periphrastic and cloying – is that it masks the realities of the plantation world with which it is concerned. In The Sugar-Cane, as David Dabydeen puts it, “the barbaric experience [of slavery] is wrapped in a napkin of poetic diction and converted into civilised expression.”11 Neat as it is, Dabydeen’s comment, to take up his own metaphor, invites unwrapping. On the one hand, there is no doubt that the rhetorical strategies he highlights – and sets out to reverse amid the brutal energies of Slave Song (1984), his own cycle of cane poems – can be viewed as the sign of a retreat from aspects of slavery Grainger finds deeply troublesome: the hardships of black labour and the white violence which attends it, interracial desire, and the threat of slave-rebellion. On the other, there is a sense in which such strategies at the same time ironically recall the material operations at the heart of the very system they are designed to disavow. The poetic processes transmuting “barbaric experience” into “civilised expression” have, that is to say, an analogical dimension, paralleling those by which the juice extracted from the “spiry Cane, / Supreme of Plants” (I. 22–23) is transformed into sugar. How successful, though, is The Sugar-Cane in its pursuit of discursive refinement? As Grainger tells the reader, the type of sugar on which he focuses is “strong-grain’d muscovado” (I. 29), a relatively crude brownish substance, whose name derives from the Portuguese mascavado, meaning ‘incomplete’ or ‘unfinished’.12 Muscovado’s lack stems, ironically, as John J. McCusker has noted, from an excess – in the shape of the impurities it harbours within itself. These need to be removed in the course of a larger cycle of production, culminating in the creation of the white sugar we more familiarly associate with the rituals of domesticity: The production of table sugar from sugar-cane juice involves a series of stages during which progressively greater quantities of liquid are purged from the crystallizing sugar. The initial boiling of the cane juice result[s] in both a raw brown sugar called muscavado [sic] and a liquid by-product called molasses.13 11

David Dabydeen, “On Writing ‘Slave Song’,” Commonwealth: Essays and Studies 8.2 (1986): 46. 12 For this etymology, see Russell R. Menard, Sweet Negotiations: Sugar, Slavery, and Plantation Agriculture in Early Barbados (Charlottesville & London: U P of Virginia, 2006): 75. 13 John J. McCusker, cited in Menard, Sweet Negotiations, 75. For an additional flavour of these technical procedures, see Donald Jones, Bristol’s Sugar Trade and Refining Industry (Bristol: Bristol Branch of the Historical Association, 1996): 4:

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From this perspective, it becomes evident that the analogy between the production of the text and the production of the sugar to which it pays homage is less straightforward than it might at first appear and would itself benefit from a degree of conceptual refinement: The Sugar-Cane may well strive to project a saccharine vision of plantation life but, ultimately, can only go so far and is repeatedly sullied by the refractory presence of the very things it sets out to expunge. The saccharophilia exhibited by The Sugar-Cane finds its antithesis in the saccharophobia of the abolitionists, whose campaign against the slave trade officially began in 1787 but did not finally realize its aims for a further twenty years. For many abolitionists, interest in sugar is not so much connected with its production – as in Grainger – as with its consumption, often polemically represented as a kind of cannibalism. Two texts in which the sugar-eater is imaged as cannibal are William Fox’s classic anti-sugar pamphlet, “An Address to the People of Great Britain, on the Propriety of Abstaining from West India Sugar and Rum” (1791), and Andrew Burn’s less well-known but direct response to Fox in “A Second Address to the People of Great Britain: Containing a New, and Most Powerful Argument to Abstain from the Use of West India Sugar. By an Eye Witness to the Facts Related” (1792). While these brief works might have similar titles, they differ radically from one another in their treatment of the motif they share, with the cannibal consumer in Fox restricted to a merely metaphorical status which, in Burn, becomes grotesquely literalized. Despite such differences of emphasis, though, Fox and Burn unite to advance a case against sugar which is just as powerful as the one that Grainger makes in its favour and which invests it with a version of the “horror” adumbrated by Martineau. For a taste of this, we might turn, for example, to the following extract from Burn’s pamphlet, in which he self-consciously acknowledges and yet departs from the stance adopted by his fellow abolitionist: It is evident beyond a doubt, that the Consumers of Sugar and Rum, innocent or guilty, are actually the first and moving cause of all those torrents of Blood and Sweat, that annually flow from the body of the poor African.

“Muscovado was contaminated with gluten, lime and caramel and it was the task of [. . . ] sugar refiners to expel the impurities and produce various grades of pure white crystalline sugar.”

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Take away the cause, and we all know the effect will cease. Abstain from Sugar, and Slavery falls. The consequence is as clear as the noon-day Sun; yet how difficult to persuade some, that when they eat Sugar, they figuratively eat the Blood of the Negro. This task I leave for others to accomplish; my business at present is, by plain matters of fact, of which I have frequently had ocular demonstration, to convince the inhabitants of Great Britain, who use Soft Sugar, either in Puddings, Pies, Tarts, Tea, or otherwise, that they literally, and most certainly in so doing, eat large quantities of that last mentioned Fluid, as it flows copiously from the Body of the laborious Slave, toiling under the scorching rays of a vertical sun, mixed with many other savory ingredients, which shall be hereafter mentioned.14

Here Burn echoes Fox by identifying “the Consumers of Sugar and Rum” as the slave trade’s sine qua non. At the same time, though, he deviates from his precursor by categorizing the culinary desires of these consuming subjects as not just “figuratively” but “literally” cannibalistic, grounding his seemingly outlandish claims on the authority of the eye witness. In stark contrast to its centrality in both the abolitionists and Grainger, sugar occupies a marginal position in Lewis’s Journal of a West India Proprietor, written between 1815 and 1817 but not published until 1834. As Sandiford summarizes, Lewis “exhibits no compelling narrative interest in sugar either as an object of natural history or for its long tradition of engendering metaphysical and aesthetic ideas,” making “references to [it]” which “are by no means continuous or extensive.”15 Yet if Lewis’s text says little about sugar, sugar has a lot to say about the text, as can be gleaned from the journal entry for 11 January 1816, written shortly after its author’s arrival at his Cornwall plantation. Here Lewis dwells at unusual length on the subject, giving a meticulous technical description of a morning visit to the ingenio (or sugarworks) and the processes of production which go on inside: The ripe canes are brought in bundles to the mill, where the cleanest of the women are appointed, one to put them into the machine for grinding them, and another to draw them out after the juice has been extracted, when she throws them into an opening in the floor close to her; another band of negroes collects

14

Andrew Burn, “A Second Address to the People of Great Britain: Containing a New, and Most Powerful Argument to Abstain from the Use of West India Sugar. By an Eye Witness to the Facts Related” (London: M. Gurney, 1792): 6–7. 15 Sandiford, The Cultural Politics of Sugar, 152.

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them below, when, under the name of trash, they are carried away to serve for fuel. The juice, which is itself at first of a pale ash-colour, gushes out in great streams, quite white with foam, and passes through a wooden gutter into the boiling-house, where it is received into the siphon or “cock-copper”, where fire is applied to it, and it is slaked with lime, in order to make it granulate. The feculent parts of it rise to the top, while the purer and more fluid flow through another gutter into the second copper. When little but the impure scum on the surface remains to be drawn off, the first gutter communicating with the copper is stopped, and the grosser parts are obliged to find a new course through another gutter, which conveys them to the distillery, where, being mixed with the molasses, or treacle, they are manufactured into rum. From the second copper they are transmitted into the first, and thence into two others, and in these four latter basins the scum is removed with skimmers pierced with holes, till it becomes sufficiently free from impurities to be skipped off, that is, to be again ladled out of the coppers and spread into the coolers, where it is left to granulate. The sugar is then formed, and is removed into the curing-house, where it is put into hogsheads, and left to settle for a certain time.16

This passage is characterized by a language of separation and removal, even with respect to the personnel recruited to assist in the labour of sugar’s birth. As Lewis fastidiously observes, only the “cleanest” of the female slaves are “appointed” to the initial task of handling the “ripe canes [...] brought in bundles to the mill,” just as the “juice” “extracted” from the canes themselves is subjected to the rigours of refinement, its “feculent” and “grosser parts” “drawn off” in favour of those which are “purer and more fluid.” The irony, though, is that this language of purity and pollution, selection and rejection, is marked by its own “impurities,” clouded by a signifying excess which allows it to be read not only in literal but also figurative terms. It is, in other words, not simply that the Journal describes the “process of sugar-making” (57) at this juncture but, rather, that the process provides an allegory for the making of the Journal, which consistently depicts Lewis’s Cornwall estate (the primary narrative focus throughout) as a milieu from which two of slavery’s “grosser parts” – in the forms of sexual and racial violence – have been siphoned away. Such discursive cleansing is already evident even within this early journal entry, whose final paragraph offers a vision of the master–slave 16

Matthew Lewis, Journal of a West India Proprietor, Kept during a Residence in the Island of Jamaica, ed. Judith Terry (Oxford & New York: Oxford U P , 1999): 57 (emphases in original). Further page references are in the main text.

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relationship radically at odds with the conventionally adversarial model a reader might expect. Contrasting his first impressions of Caribbean society with the “repulsive manners” of England, the newly arrived Lewis is in rhapsodies: his “heart [...] seems to expand itself [...] in the sunshine of the kind looks and words which meet [him] at every turn, and seem to wait for [his] as anxiously as if they were so many diamonds” (59). There is, of course, an ideological dimension to the textual strategies facilitating such moments of glittering cordiality, a politics to accompany the aesthetic. Writing in the transition between abolition and emancipation, Lewis finds himself awkwardly placed, personally implicated in a system not only increasingly contested on moral grounds but also of gradually diminishing importance within Britain’s changing imperial economy.17 By configuring the image of slavery on Cornwall in such clearly sentimentalized terms, as he does so often over the course of the Journal, Lewis is able both to legitimate his involvement in the system and defuse any emancipationist criticisms he might incur. After all, how could objections be raised to a plantation whose master is “surrounded” not by oppressed and exploited slaves but by lightsome “beings who are always laughing and singing, and who seem to perform their work with so much nonchalance” that Lewis “can hardly persuade [him] self that it is really work that they are about” (65; emphases in original)? As in Grainger, however, the discursive refinement of slavery remains imperfect, leaving the apparent utopia of existence on Cornwall adulterated by that which it attempts to cast out of itself. While the passage cited above claims to provide a complete account of how sugar is created, there is a sense in which the story it tells remains unfinished, since the sugar “left to settle” in those “hogsheads” would still be in a relatively crude condition at this stage of the cycle taking it from Caribbean “cane-piece” (217) to the realms of domestic consumption. By the same logic, sexual violence can never be fully eliminated from Lewis’s representation of slavery on his estate, even as he trans-

17

Excellent analyses of the various interlocking factors contributing to emancipation are provided in Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776–1848 (London & New York: Verso, 1988): 322–26 and 419–72; and Adam Hochschild, Bury the Chains: The British Struggle to Abolish Slavery (London: Pan, 2005): 309– 32. As both commentators point out, the growing threat to the slave-owner’s position on moral and economic grounds is compounded by the rhythms of unrest marking colonial relations in the British Caribbean during this period, as manifested in major slave rebellions in Barbados in 1816, Demerara in 1823, and Jamaica in 1831–32.

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forms the often brutal realities of white male desire into the stereotypical fantasy of the black man as rapist, and in turn confines the fantasy to “The Isle of Devils: A Metrical Tale,” the Gothic verse narrative inserted into the Journal shortly after its mid-point. Racial violence, similarly, is something that resists wholesale filtration: Lewis attempts to remove it from the depiction of Cornwall by transferring it to a range of temporal and geographical spaces other than his own, but the success of such self-exonerating strategies is only partial. Traces of white–black conflict linger on as a kind of textual “scum,” working to trouble and contaminate an account of colonial governance which, like Grainger’s, would otherwise be impossibly benign. As already suggested, the morally indigestible nature of sugar which Grainger and Lewis evade is directly confronted in the political writings of the abolitionists, with their evocations of the consumer as cannibal, whether in a figurative or a more viscerally literal sense. It is also addressed, or readdressed, albeit more obliquely, in a remarkable fictional work of the midnineteenth century, George Eliot’s “Brother Jacob,” a novella originally written in 1860 and published four years later. In this curious narrative of egotism, imposture, and final nemesis, Eliot takes up the unlikely and seemingly trivial topic of confectionery and subjects it to the sort of scrutiny it might elicit from Fox or Burn, debunking the apparently innocent pleasures to be had from the consumption of “candied sugars, conserves, and pastry.”18 But “Brother Jacob” is not just a tardy addendum to the abolitionists, despite its mid-Victorian moment and 1820s setting. As well as recalling abolitionist politics, Eliot’s text turns its satirical eye in two further directions, critiquing both the pursuit of profit in the sugar islands themselves and the quest for erotic self-gratification which invariably accompanies it (and about which Lewis is so notably tongue-tied). As it elaborates this critique, “Brother Jacob” simultaneously enters into dialogue with a series of other works, each differently concerned with the questions of colonialism, race, and desire preoccupying Eliot herself and ranging from the early modern period to her own contemporary era: William Shakespeare’s Othello (1604) and The Tempest (1611), the colonial romance of Inkle and Yarico, whose story is first told in Ligon’s A True & Exact History of the Island of Barbados (1657), and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847). In Grainger and Lewis, the production of sugar stands as a kind of allegory for the production of the text, and a kindred 18

George Eliot, “Brother Jacob,” in The Lifted Veil; Brother Jacob, ed. Helen Small (Oxford & New York: Oxford U P , 1999): 50.

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parallel characterizes Eliot’s narrative: if “Brother Jacob” is about the art of confectionery, it is at the same time a complex mid-Victorian instance of the confectionary of art.

Writing Against the Grain: An Aesthetics of Contamination While sugar is pivotal to “Brother Jacob” itself – both in thematic terms and as compositional analogue – it is not, for some considerable time to come, a subject with which later texts in Eliot’s literary tradition are inclined to engage to any great degree. After Eliot and exactly a century on from Grainger, sugar starts to fade from view, as if it were somehow being refined out of the white British literary imagination altogether. This trend is not significantly reversed until the appearance of Barry Unsworth’s Sacred Hunger (1992), an historical novel which assumes a suitably epic scale in order to critique the slave trade during the mid-eighteenth-century period when The Sugar-Cane is written and published. But while Unsworth’s text signals a belated revisiting of the question of sugar by a white British writer, the return it represents is already discernible in the somewhat earlier and very different context of the black Caribbean poetry produced in the decades after World War Two, when many formerly colonized territories (including Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados, Guyana, Antigua, Dominica, and St Christopher) finally gain independence from their so-called British motherland.19 The emancipation of slaves in the British West Indies in 1834 might be adduced as one reason for the relative scarcity of white writings on sugar in the protracted period which follows, as the commodity comes inevitably and increasingly to lose its cachet as a symbol of moral iniquity and racial oppression. Conversely, the processes of postwar Caribbean decolonization not only define another epochal moment in the liberation of black peoples from white power, but also bring about a discursive renaissance in the texts those peoples create, as sugar is reworked from the perspective of the slave rather than the master, and the dominant system of representation comes to be reconfigured in the name of a postcolonial counter-memory. 19

This is a topic which has to date received very little critical attention, but for a brief if sketchy preliminary analysis, which also extends to include an appreciation of the Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén, see Keith Ellis, “Images of Sugar in English and Spanish Caribbean Poetry,” A R I E L : A Review of International English Literature 24.1 (1993): 149–59.

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Early instances of such reconfiguration are to be found in the poetic output of Edward Kamau Brathwaite and Faustin Charles, whose reflections on sugar are featured in Andrew Salkey’s influential Breaklight anthology (1971).20 Both of these writers implicitly look back to the idealized version of slavery elaborated by Grainger, but, as befits their outright rejection of the plantocratic order the earlier poet embraces, their writing is governed by aesthetic and ideological principles radically different from those informing his. As suggested earlier, the production of Grainger’s poem can be compared to and understood in terms of the production of the sugar in which it so delights: The Sugar-Cane is animated, that is, by the desire – albeit never quite achieved – to refine slavery’s image into palatable form. For Brathwaite and Charles, the opposite is the case, as the brutal historical truths Grainger avoids assume new prominence, with the accent falling less on discursive cleansing than on discursive contamination. Even so, these two writers are not above practising their own kind of censorship, most noticeably in relation to the black woman, whom they tend to marginalize in favour of a focus on the predicaments of her male counterpart. The rewriting of sugar initiated by Brathwaite and Charles is developed on a much more ambitious scale and with even greater sophistication in Grace Nichols’s I is a Long Memoried Woman (1983) and Dabydeen’s Slave Song, both of which won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize in their respective years of publication. Like the more modest works preceding them, these innovative, challenging, and frequently disturbing texts are implicitly written against Grainger, but at the same time exist in a marked tension with one another. Adopting a black feminist perspective, Nichols is primarily concerned to give voice to the figure of the female slave whose presence is barely acknowledged in the poetry of her immediate male forerunners. This is something she achieves by drawing attention to the slavewoman’s body as it is subjected to extremes of suffering – whether in the defile of the Middle Passage, labour in the cane-field or the context of sexual exploitation – before ultimately becoming an instrument of resistance and revenge. Dabydeen’s Slave Song strives, for its part, to reconcile these opposed perspectives by encompassing both black male and black female experience, whether under slavery itself or in the post-emancipation era of the late-twentieth century. Yet, even as Slave 20

See Brathwaite’s “Labourer” and Charles’s “Sugar Cane Man” and “Sugar Cane,” in Breaklight: The Poetry of the Caribbean, ed. Andrew Salkey (Garden City N Y : Doubleday, 1972): 239–40, 88–90 and 185–86, respectively.

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Song thus constitutes a significant progression beyond the blinkered though formative visions of Brathwaite and Charles, it, too, remains caught up in the play of censorship, particularly with regard to the sexual violence which, historically speaking, has largely defined the white man’s relationship to the black woman. Together with its silence on the Middle Passage, the evasiveness of Dabydeen’s text towards such violence is one of its principal differences from Nichols’s and suggests a disavowal of historical realities. This is all the more striking when it is recalled that Slave Song is a text clearly preoccupied, not to say obsessed, with interracial rape as it occurs in other forms. Despite such differences of emphasis, it is evident that Nichols and Dabydeen are united in a concern to write back to and critique Grainger, challenging the aesthetic of refinement he puts in place with a new aesthetic of contamination. One of the main effects of such an aesthetic is to lay bare the extent to which the violence of slavery and the plantation is a sexual violence, directed overwhelmingly at black and mixed-race women. There is in such a counter-stress something not only politically exigent but also partly redemptive: history itself cannot be undone, but it can be rewritten in a way that allows its pain and injustice to emerge and its silences to be broken. The return to the question of sugar is not, of course, exclusively the preserve of postcolonial Caribbean poetry, but occurs in the fictional context as well, as evidenced in Caryl Phillips’s Cambridge (1991). Like many another postcolonial work, Phillips’s novel is one in which intertextuality plays a vital role. As Lars Eckstein has shown, the novel incorporates into itself a dizzying array of sources, drawing chiefly on white and black first-person accounts of Caribbean slavery produced during a period from the 1770s to the 1840s, especially Lewis’s Journal and Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789).21 The first of these works is integral to Part I of the novel, which consists of the diary of Emily Cartwright, a thirtyyear-old middle-class English spinster, deputed by her father to inspect his West Indian sugar estate at an unspecified moment after abolition. The Interesting Narrative, on the other hand, is exploited as intertext in Part II, providing the primary model for the confession of the African-born male slave 21

Lars Eckstein, Re-Membering the Black Atlantic: On the Poetics and Politics of Literary Memory (Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2006): 63–115. Almost all of the specific passages on which Phillips draws are helpfully collated by Eckstein in the appendix to his book (241–71).

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who belongs to the estate and after whom the novel is titled. As if to mirror the arrogance of empire and the discrepancies of power between white and black at the time when the novel is set, Emily’s journal occupies by far the greater space in this slender though formally sophisticated text, with the story told by the elderly Cambridge condensed into just thirty-five pages. The two narratives are circumscribed by other materials written in third-person voices, which augment Cambridge’s polyphonic effect still further. Together with a brief Prologue and Epilogue, these include (as Part III) a seemingly authoritative report on the violent death of the estate’s self-appointed overseer, Arnold Brown, which Phillips grafts into his novel, almost verbatim, from Mrs Flannigan’s relatively recondite Antigua and the Antiguans (1844). Despite its constitutive nature, however, Cambridge’s “larger intertextual dimension” has, as Eckstein observes, “gone practically unacknowledged”22 by criticism, perhaps not least because Phillips himself gives no obvious clues as to its existence. As a consequence, most critics tend to focus on the novel’s intratextual strategies, exploring the two key narratives around which Cambridge turns, together with the nuanced counterpoint between them.23 There is, though, a certain irony to this critical emphasis, since, far from being mutually exclusive, the novel’s intra- and intertextual elements are complementary, with Cambridge’s response to Emily paralleled in the broader dialogue the novel conducts with its white archive, Lewis’s Journal in particular. Viewed in terms of race, the stories told by white woman and black man exist in predictable tension: notwithstanding some initial bouts of antislavery sentiment, Emily offers an overwhelmingly negative portrait of the racial Other, which is subsequently debunked by Cambridge. Yet Cambridge’s narrative not only discredits Emily’s wayward assumptions about blackness (as a slave might rebel against a master or a mistress), but also serves as a kind of hermeneutic supplement to the tale she tells, filling out the

22

Eckstein, Re-Membering the Black Atlantic, 74. For examples of this critical approach, in which Cambridge’s intertextual elements are either acknowledged but not emphasized or ignored altogether, see Sylvie Chavanelle, “Caryl Phillips’s Cambridge: Ironical (Dis)empowerment?” International Fiction Review 25 (1998): 78–88; Bénédicte Ledent, Caryl Phillips (Manchester & New York: Manchester U P , 2002): 80–106; and Maurizio Calbi, “Vexing Encounters: Uncanny Belonging and the Poetics of Alterity in Caryl Phillips’s Cambridge,” Postcolonial Text 1.2 (2005), http://postcolonial.org/index.php/pct/article/view /343/121 (accessed 25 September 2008). 23

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gaps and silences in her text and resolving its enigmas. What it discloses, above all, is the hidden history of sexual violence inflicted upon Cambridge’s second wife, Christiania, by Brown, who, in addition to his other transgressions, has the distinction of becoming Emily’s eventual, if finally indifferent, lover. The revisionary effects of Cambridge’s narrative are not limited to Emily’s journal, however, but reach far beyond this to encompass Lewis’s, thus both crossing and questioning the generic boundaries between fictional and historical forms. As noted previously, the sexual violence the white man metes out to the black woman is something almost entirely eradicated from the representation of slavery in Lewis’s text: it is rewritten or masked in the figure of black male rape which dominates “The Isle of Devils,” and can only really manifest itself in fugitive and whispered forms. When it comes to such violence, Lewis’s colonial memoir is driven, in other words, by an aesthetic of refinement – for which the processes of sugar-making can stand as allegory – while Phillips’s postcolonial response puts the allegory into reverse. What his novel develops instead is an aesthetic of contamination, operative in relation both to Emily’s fictional text and to the key historical ur-text underlying its composition. Yet, while Cambridge readily illuminates the violence of white male desire, it is (like Slave Song) clearly less willing to acknowledge the black female suffering such desire provokes. By contrast, Austin Clarke’s The Polished Hoe (2002) not only provides a more graphic insight than Phillips’s novel into the systems of sexual oppression bred by plantation culture but also does so from the perspective of the woman who is caught up in them. At the same time, Clarke’s novel shifts perspectives in another but equally important sense, elaborating its own distinctive black version of the analogies between sugar and text examined earlier in the white writings of Grainger, Lewis, and Eliot. The first-person narrative of sexual torment all but muzzled in Cambridge emerges, in The Polished Hoe, in the tale told by Mary Gertrude Mathilda Paul, a mixed-race woman with skin “the colour of coffee with a lil milk in it.”24 This tale spans a period from the early 1950s, when the novel is set, to the time of Mary’s childhood and recalls her systematic abuse by Mr Bellfeels, manager of the Barbadian sugar plantation on which she is born. But 24

Austin Clarke, The Polished Hoe (Birmingham: Tindal Street, 2004): 367. Further page references are in the main text.

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Mary’s ability to articulate the sexual history she shares with the muted Christiania of Phillips’s text is only one of the differences between the two women and the novels they inhabit. As well as attaining the status of narrating subject, Mary assumes the sort of vengeful agency in which her enslaved counterpart is precisely lacking. In Phillips’s novel, indeed, the master’s wrongs are not, strictly speaking, avenged at all, since his death occurs more by accident than design during a passively voiced scuffle with Cambridge: “He struck me once with his crop, and I took it from him,” Cambridge observes, “and in the resultant struggle the life left his body.”25 In Clarke’s text, conversely, there is nothing remotely accidental about the demise of Bellfeels, whom Mary kills with the shining handle of the implement giving the novel its title, sexually mutilating him thereafter with the hoe’s sharpened blade, just for good measure. Mary divulges the long history of abuse culminating in this moment of gleaming violence in the form of a confession delivered over a single night to the village detective, Sergeant Percy DaCosta Benjamin Stuart, the black man who has been in love with her since he was ten years of age, but who remains separated from the object of his desire by barriers of race and class. While the confessional mode presupposes the revelation of secrets specific to the confessant, Mary’s statement simultaneously possesses a collective edge which represents a departure from this pattern. In speaking and acting for herself, she speaks and acts, equally, on behalf of other oppressed women, whether they be those who suffer directly at the hands of Bellfeels – her mother, for example, or Clotelle, the young black girl hanged from a tamarind tree – or those more distant and anonymous female figures who are part of the island’s slave past and whose stories Mary learns about from her maternal ancestors. The collective dimension to Mary’s tale is not restricted to the ways in which it incorporates the transgenerational narratives of other women, though, but extends to embrace the oppressed black men whose histories of failed rebellion are periodically invoked in the text, particularly in Part Three. As it recalls these vanquished rebels, Mary’s narrative both looks back to the bloody history of insurrection on her own plantation and moves beyond the horizon of Barbados itself to draw in the history of slave rebellion in the America of the early 1830s, alluding repeatedly to the exemplary figure of Nat Turner. Insofar as she stands in for and redeems the black man as failed rebel, Mary is implicitly a threat not merely to traditional hierarchies of racial dif25

Caryl Phillips, Cambridge (London: Picador, 2008): 162.

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ference but also to the conventions of gender identity as they are upheld in white and black communities alike. By visiting murder and mutilation upon Bellfeels, in other words, Mary obliquely unmans Percy, usurping the detective–lover’s potential role as defender of female virtue and avenger of its loss. In so doing, she confronts him with the anxieties about his own masculinity that regularly surface in the course of the novel, both in the professional context of his duties as policeman and in the more private realm of his sexual life. This being the case, it is not surprising that Percy should exhibit a certain ambivalence towards Mary’s confession, manifested as a tension between a desire to hear and record her story, on the one hand, and a wish to silence and erase it, on the other. The latter impulse corresponds to Percy’s disavowal of the broader history of slavery in Barbados, from which Mary’s account of her “personal life” (29) cannot readily be disentangled. It is also no doubt one sign of what Wilberforce, Mary’s only surviving child by Bellfeels, calls “the ironies of life” (15), since it makes Percy oddly complicit with Bellfeels’s own concern to silence the truths of Mary’s history, not the least of which is that she is, in fact, Bellfeels’s daughter, hence a victim of incest as well as rape. As Mary’s narrative attests, the instruments of colonial labour can assume purposes radically different from those for which they are originally fashioned, as the polished hoe she uses in the North Field of the plantation – prior to her elevation to the Main House as “servant girl” (166) and to the Great House as Bellfeels’s mistress – turns into the weapon with which, so to speak, she polishes off her oppressor. Yet even as Mary herself becomes more polished or refined as she effects the transition from field hand to mistress, her skills as a labourer are not forgotten but, rather, transmuted into those she deploys as storyteller. Such an analogy between the labours of the cane and the labours of narrative is suggested towards the novel’s outset, as Mary remembers the nausea induced by sex with Bellfeels. Here she speaks in a richly associative creole which is both quite typical of her oral style throughout and a sharp contrast to the Standard English of the novel’s third-person narrator: “I don’t know how I managed to stomach his weight laying-down on top of me all those years; breeding me and having his wish; and me smelling him; and him giving-off a smell like fresh dirt, mould that I turned over with my hoe, at first planting, following a downpour of rain, when all the centipees and rats, cockroaches and insects on God’s earth start crawling-out in full vision and sight, outta the North Field.” (39)

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The turning of the soil after a “downpour of rain” exposes a host of monstrous forms to Mary’s view, just as her “history in confession” (29) unsettles the official accounts of itself the colonial plantation likes to cultivate, revealing the hideous truths aswarm beneath their surfaces. What Mary’s narrative does is replicated in turn by The Polished Hoe itself, as it extends the aesthetic of contamination begun in Nichols and Dabydeen and developed in Phillips. Sugar locks oppressor and oppressed in violent union, whether at a stage far beyond emancipation, as in Clarke, or during the period when the slave trade is reaching its dreadful meridian, as in Grainger. It also subjects both parties to its rule, tempting the one with visions of wealth, luxury, and pleasure, while transforming the other into the means by which such visions are realized. Equally, though, sugar possesses a certain textual power, compelling white and black authors to tell its story, albeit in ways that are at once very different from one another yet intimately interlinked.26

WORKS CITED Benítez–Rojo, Antonio. The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective, tr. James E. Maraniss (La isla que se repite: El Caribe y la perspectiva posmoderna, 1989; tr. 1992; Durham NC & London: Duke UP, 2nd ed. 1996). Blackburn, Robin. The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776–1848 (London & New York: Verso, 1988). Boswell, James. Life of Johnson, ed. R.W. Chapman, intro. Pat Rogers (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1998). Brathwaite, Edward Kamau. “Labourer,” in Breaklight: The Poetry of the Caribbean, ed. Andrew Salkey (Garden City N Y : Doubleday, 1972): 239–40. Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre, ed. Margaret Smith (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1998). Burn, Andrew. “A Second Address to the People of Great Britain: Containing a New, and Most Powerful Argument to Abstain from the Use of West India Sugar. By an Eye Witness to the Facts Related” (London: M. Gurney, 1792). Calbi, Maurizio. “Vexing Encounters: Uncanny Belonging and the Poetics of Alterity in Caryl Phillips’s Cambridge,” Postcolonial Text 1.2 (2005), http://postcolonial .org/index.php/pct/article/view/343/121 (accessed 25 September 2008).

26

For a more detailed elaboration of the ideas on which this essay draws, see my Slaves to Sweetness: British and Caribbean Literatures of Sugar (Liverpool: Liverpool U P , 2009).

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Charles, Faustin. “Sugar Cane,” in Breaklight: The Poetry of the Caribbean, ed. Andrew Salkey (Garden City N Y : Doubleday, 1972): 185–86. ——. “Sugar Cane Man,” in Breaklight: The Poetry of the Caribbean, ed. Andrew Salkey (Garden City N Y : Doubleday, 1972): 88–90. Chavanelle, Sylvie. “Caryl Phillips’s Cambridge: Ironical (Dis)empowerment?” International Fiction Review 25 (1998): 78–88. Clarke, Austin. The Polished Hoe (Birmingham: Tindal Street, 2004). Dabydeen, David. “On Writing ‘Slave Song’,” Commonwealth: Essays and Studies 8.2 (1986): 46–48. ——. Slave Song (1984; Leeds: Peepal Tree, 2nd ed. 2005). Deerr, Noël. The History of Sugar, 2 vols. (London: Chapman & Hall, 1949–50). Döring, Tobias. Caribbean-English Passages: Intertextuality in a Postcolonial Tradition (London & New York: Routledge, 2002). Eckstein, Lars. Re-Membering the Black Atlantic: On the Poetics and Politics of Literary Memory (Cross / Cultures 84; Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2006). Egan, Jim. “The ‘Long’d-for Aera’ of an ‘Other Race’: Climate, Identity, and James Grainger’s The Sugar-Cane,” Early American Literature 38 (2003): 189–212. Eliot, George. “Brother Jacob,” in The Lifted Veil; Brother Jacob, ed. Helen Small (Oxford & New York: Oxford U P , 1999): 45–87. Ellis, Keith. “Images of Sugar in English and Spanish Caribbean Poetry,” A R I E L : A Review of International English Literature 24.1 (1993): 149–59. Equiano, Olaudah. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, in The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings, ed. Vincent Carretta (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995): 3–308. Flannigan, Mrs. Antigua and the Antiguans, 2 vols. (London: Saunders & Otley, 1844). Follett, Richard. The Sugar Masters: Planters and Slaves in Louisiana’s Cane World, 1820–1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State U P , 2005). Fox, William. “An Address to the People of Great Britain, on the Propriety of Abstaining from West India Sugar and Rum,” in The Abolition Debate, ed. Peter J. Kitson, vol. 2 of Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation: Writings in the British Romantic Period, ed. Peter J. Kitson & Debbie Lee, 8 vols (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1999): 153–63. Grainger, James. The Sugar-Cane: A Poem. In Four Books. With Notes, in John Gilmore, The Poetics of Empire: A Study of James Grainger’s “The Sugar-Cane” (London & New Brunswick N J : Athlone, 2000): 91–163. Hochschild, Adam. Bury the Chains: The British Struggle to Abolish Slavery (London: Pan, 2005). Irlam, Shaun. “‘Wish You Were Here’: Exporting England in James Grainger’s The Sugar-Cane,” English Literary History 68 (2001): 377–96. Jones, Donald. Bristol’s Sugar Trade and Refining Industry (Bristol: Bristol Branch of the Historical Association, 1996).

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Ledent, Bénédicte. Caryl Phillips (Manchester & New York: Manchester U P , 2002). Lenman, Bruce P. “Colonial Wars and Imperial Instability, 1688–1793,” in The Eighteenth Century, ed. P.J. Marshall, vol. 2 of The Oxford History of the British Empire, editor-in-chief Wm. Roger Louis, 5 vols. (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1988): 159–67. Lewis, Matthew. Journal of a West India Proprietor, Kept during a Residence in the Island of Jamaica, ed. Judith Terry (Oxford & New York: Oxford U P , 1999). Ligon, Richard, A True & Exact History of the Island of Barbadoes (2nd ed. 1673; London: Frank Cass, 1976). McDonald, Roderick A., ed. Between Slavery and Freedom: Special Magistrate John Anderson’s Journal of St. Vincent during the Apprenticeship (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P , 2001). Martineau, Harriet. Autobiography, ed. Maria Weston Chapman, 2 vols. (Boston M A : James R. Osgood, 1877). ——. “Demerara,” in The Empire Question, ed. Deborah Logan, vol. 1 of Harriet Martineau’s Writing on the British Empire, ed. Deborah Logan, 5 vols. (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2004): 69–141. Menard, Russell R. Sweet Negotiations: Sugar, Slavery, and Plantation Agriculture in Early Barbados (Charlottesville & London: U P of Virginia, 2006). Mintz, Sidney W. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Viking, 1985). Morel, Genaro Rodríguez. “The Sugar Economy of Española in the Sixteenth Century,” in Tropical Babylons: Sugar and the Making of the Atlantic World, 1450–1680, ed. Stuart B. Schwartz (Chapel Hill & London: U of North Carolina P , 2004): 85–114. Nichols, Grace. I is a Long Memoried Woman (London: Karnak House, 1990). Ortiz, Fernando. Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar, tr. Harriet de Onís, with a new Introduction by Fernando Coronil (Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azứcar, 1940; Durham N C & London: Duke U P , 1995). Phillips, Caryl. Cambridge (London: Picador, 2008). Plasa, Carl. Slaves to Sweetness: British and Caribbean Literatures of Sugar (Liverpool: Liverpool U P , 2009). Richardson, David. “The British Empire and the Atlantic Slave Trade,” in The Eighteenth Century, ed. P.J. Marshall, vol. 2 of The Oxford History of the British Empire, editor-in-chief Wm. Roger Louis, 5 vols. (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1988): 440–64. Sandiford, Keith A. The Cultural Politics of Sugar: Caribbean Slavery and Narratives of Colonialism (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2000). Shakespeare, William. Othello, ed. E.A.J. Honigmann (Walton-on-Thames: Nelson, 1997). ——. The Tempest, ed. Stephen Orgel (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1987).

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Thomas, Steven W. “Doctoring Ideology: James Grainger’s The Sugar Cane and the Bodies of Empire,” Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 4 (2006): 78–111. Unsworth, Barry. Sacred Hunger (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1992).

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“The dark races stand still, the fair progress” Matthew Kneale’s English Passengers and the Intellectual Commodification of Colonial Encounter in Tasmania ——————————

W OLFGANG F UNK

Introduction

O

M A Y 1 9 7 6 , the ashes of a woman were scattered over a small strip of water, known as the D’Entrecasteaux Channel, which separates Bruny Island from mainland Tasmania. According to her wish, Truganini – famous for being ‘the last Tasmanian Aborigine’ – had finally found a watery grave not far from the small island on which she had been born more than 160 years earlier. Her extraordinary journey – from collaboration to rebellion, from dying a relic of an innocent era to becoming the object of scientific interest – cannot only be seen as symbolic of the sorrowful fortune of her entire people. It can also offer a blueprint of relations in colonial Tasmania as such. While it is, in my view, not justified to categorize the extinction of the Tasmanian Aborigines as genocide, there remains little uncertainty that their disappearance was caused by a paradoxical mixture of neglect and enthusiasm. In their study on the subject, Chalk & Jonassohn use the term ‘ethnocide’ in a case like this, defining ethnocide as “cases in which a group disappears without mass killing.”1 The culture and traditions of the indigenous tribes were dismissed as infinitely inferior to the colonizing forces of Christianity and capitalism, such that their only hope of solution – it was argued – 1

N 1

Frank Chalk & Kurt Jonassohn, The History and Sociology of Genocide: Analyses and Case Studies, ed. Chalk & Jonassohn (New Haven C T & London: Yale U P , 1990): 23.

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lay in their introduction to both of these indispensable pillars of civilization. Science, on the other hand, seemed to display a genuine interest in the autochthonous people themselves, albeit only in their remains, which they used to corroborate racialist theories of white superiority. It is this truly unholy alliance of scientific interest and cultural negligence that I want to focus on in this essay. I will investigate various manifestations of this partnership, ranging from George Augustus Robinson’s so-called ‘Friendly Mission’ to the desecration of bodies that accompanied and aggravated the slow annihilation of the Tasmanian indigenous population. I will use the fragmentation and (in most case, erroneous) re-assemblage of bodies (‘bodies’ here used in both a literal and a figurative way) as a recurrent symbol in my analysis. This re-assemblage is not only conducted along the lines of colonialism’s guiding ideas of white superiority and the irresistible power of missionaries and the market, but has also made its way into our own, ostensibly ‘post’colonial, mindset. I shall try to support this claim by analyzing Matthew Kneale’s novel English Passengers, published in 2000, which, while valiantly attempting to depict the colonization of Tasmania in strictly unbiased terms, nevertheless falls prey to his very own version of the dismemberment of Truganini.

Composite Corpses – The Commodification of the Colonial Encounter in Tasmania English Passengers – Journeys into History The overriding topic of Kneale’s novel is the encounter of different ethnic and social groups, and the manifold consequences such encounters have on individuals and those groups. Central to the story is the British conquest of Tasmania, from early raids by whalers and sealers around 1820 via the systematic occupation and ‘civilization’ of the island since the 1830s to the lingering demise of the last of the indigenous people in purpose-built settlements in the 1860s and 1870s. Although many historical figures appear throughout the book, the main characters that represent the colonizers and the colonized are Kneale’s own inventions or (in some case quite literally) his compositions. The Tasmanians are embodied in what must be the most guilt-ridden motherand-son act since Hamlet and Gertrude. Walyer is a fearsome warrior queen, who leads the losing battle of the indigenous tribes against the invaders. Having been abducted and repeatedly raped by a sealer named Jack Harp in

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her youth, she managed to escape and has now turned the tables on the enemy by using their own cultural artefacts (namely language and fire-arms) to defend her people. Peevay is her son and the offspring of that primeval colonial encounter with Jack Harp. As a constant reminder of her shame, he is shunned by his mother. To compensate for this, he also tries to adapt to the dominant culture of the whites, learns the language, and becomes an intermediary between natives and settlers. On the other side of the colonial divide, we have an expedition of three Englishmen (the English Passengers of the novel’s title) and a ship full of Manxmen, who can be said to represent between them the driving forces behind British colonial expansion. The Manx crew’s main interest (and Captain Kewley’s in particular) is flogging their contraband goods, and it does not matter too much where the money actually comes from. Dr Potter and the Rev. Wilson represent scientific and religious obsession respectively, while the botanist Thomas Renshaw, with his unassuming, happy-go-lucky attitude, symbolizes probably the most significant attitude behind imperial expansion: namely, idleness. Kneale is obviously very eager to present a balanced picture of his story, and so he discards any single (and therefore necessarily biased) narrative authority within the text in favour of providing a polyphonic account of events from more than twenty different perspectives. This not only results in a systematic instability of this particular story but also points to the inherent contingency of all historical accounts, as theorized by Hayden White, Linda Hutcheon, and others. It would certainly be most rewarding to submit the novel to a detailed examination in terms of its status as ‘historiographical metafiction’ or to investigate the different degrees of alterity that exist in the book – not only between the colonizers and the natives, but also between Manx and English or settlers and convicts. But this would certainly go beyond the scope of this essay; suffice it to say that the book is highly critical of any concourse between different ethnic groups. All of these encounters end in bloodshed, death or loss of cultural identity, as the following examples will confirm. As I want to provide as ‘objective’ an assessment as possible of Kneale’s version of events, I must invert his approach. That means I will try to look at the historical facts and persons behind his story and juxtapose them with his fictional characters to uncover the literary commodification that has occurred in the process of revealing the crimes of colonization in Tasmania on various levels.

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Mechanisms of Extinction: How the Tasmanian Aborigines Disappeared Kneale is at his best when he illustrates the assorted procedures of the colonial machine, which ultimately lead to the annihilation of the Tasmanian natives. In order to make the island safe for white settlers, it was important to eradicate the most powerful enemy of all invasions – fear of the unknown Other. Possible courses of action to attain this goal include extermination, exposition, integration or separation of that Other. Colonizers in Tasmania opted for the latter. The methods employed to achieve this can only be described as stick and carrot. The Black Line in 1830 was an attempt to comb through the entire island and round up – if necessary by force – all those natives who were still impertinent enough to roam the land despite notes put up on trees in the forests urging them to leave their ancient settling grounds. Kneale’s character Peevay aptly describes the note he happens upon as consisting of “pictures of nothing”2 and the entire operation as a “giant creeping of white scuts” (145). These leaflets provided a fig-leaf of justice, as they seemed to invite the roaming tribes to turn themselves in, which for obvious reasons they did not. The net return of this campaign, which mobilized 2,500 men and was lampooned by James Morris as “the most farcical campaign in the history of British imperial arms,”3 was the capture of two natives. Kneale provides a plausible explanation for the failure of this venture in the lacklustre preparation and increasing unease of the members of the Black Line, who, as one character in the book points out, were admonished to think of themselves “as beaters engaged in a grouse hunt” (141) and soon realized that the Tasmanian forest presents a different hunting ground than the moors and fells of Britain. A change of strategy was called for, and a man fit for the occasion presented himself in the person of the Methodist bricklayer George Augustus Robinson. He went into the forests and used the gentle art of persuasion to convince more than a hundred natives to repatriate to a camp called Wybaleena on Flinders Island, which “became the model for all the missions and

2

Matthew Kneale, English Passengers (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000): 104. Further page references are in the main text. 3 James Morris, “The Final Solution, Down Under,” in The History and Sociology of Genocide: Analyses and Case Studies, ed. Frank Chalk & Kurt Jonassohn (New Haven C T & London: Yale U P , 1990): 215.

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reserves that followed in the next 130 years.”4 His principal confidante among the natives was a woman by the name of Truganini, who greatly helped his negotiations with the natives and who – according to his diaries – seems to have been his bed companion on several occasions. As a reward for his achievement, he not only gained financial security, but was, in due course, also awarded the post of ‘Chief Protector of the Aborigines’. In English Passengers, Robinson appears thinly disguised as Robson and receives a thoroughly unfavourable characterization. From the outset, he is intent solely on tricking the natives into the camp, where he leaves them to their own very limited devices at the first opportunity. Historical criticism seems to agree with Kneale to a large extent; Vivienne Rae–Ellis, for example, describes him as “a liar and a cheat, a man of little honour.”5 Despite or even because of this, there is no doubt that the establishment of Wybaleena, which Robinson ran as commander from 1835 to 1838, is a paradigm for the messianic principles of colonial encounter and its devastating consequences for the autochthonous population. The explicit goal of the establishment was what Catherine Price, wife of the storekeeper in Kneale’s book, describes as transforming the natives “into something like a happy band of English villagers” (244), and, of course, the means to this end is the conversion of the natives to worshipping the only two gods that nineteenth-century Britain tolerated: the God of the Scriptures and the god of the marketplace. Consequently, life in Wybaleena centred on religious education and the introduction of free trade. Visiting the local bible school, run by the resident missionary’s wife, became obligatory for adults and children alike, while 9 August 1836 saw the first instalment of a weekly market, where the natives were invited to cash in on the meagre spoils of their hunting expedition, so as to enable them to purchase goods such as straw hats and clay pipes. Robinson never seems to have laboured under any illusions as to the pointlessness of these exercises; Vivienne Rae–Ellis quotes from his diaries: “any move to instil into these people the rudiments of European civilization […] was doomed to fail.”6 Nevertheless, the charade was obviously convincing enough to fool Commandant Thomas Ryan, who had been sent to Wybaleena at the behest of Lieu4

Keith Windschuttle, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History. Vol. 1. Van Diemen’s Land 1803–1847 (Sydney: Macleay, 2002): 4. 5 Vivienne Rae–Ellis, Black Robinson: Protector of Aborigines (Melbourne: Melbourne U P , 1996): 82. 6 Rae–Ellis, Black Robinson, 112–13.

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tenant General George Arthur to make a report on Robinson’s progress. The Scriptures, on the other hand, seem by and large to have had no discernible effect on the natives; Morris reports that the only result of the teachings on the Christian afterlife was that “the aborigines were now inclined to suppose that when a black man died, his soul went to England.”7 Robinson seems to have managed to conceal the shortcomings of his education by promising money to all of those natives who displayed particular fervour during the singing of Christian hymns in school.8 This demonstrates not only Robinson’s pragmatic approach to all things spiritual but also the remarkable success of his business venture. Unlike the prospect of divine redemption and eternal life, the lure of money seems on the whole to have been compelling to the natives. It would be easy to shrug off these shenanigans as mere tomfoolery, had the excessive care that was devoted to the natives’ spiritual salvation and economic awareness not resulted in a distinct neglect of everything else. Mainly owing to diseases introduced by the settlers, such as dysentery, the natives died at a shocking rate. Not that Robinson was unaware of this sorry state. His report to Arthur in 1836 states that the “only thing to be deplored is the mortality that has taken place among them.”9 Indeed, it had. So much so, that when the camp on Flinders Island was shut down in 1847 and the remaining natives were again re-settled, this time to Oyster Cove, they numbered just forty-seven. It was another twenty-nine years before – with the death of Truganini in 1876 – the last Tasmanian native and with her an entire way of life perished. It only took the span of one human life from the first British settlement on the island in 1803 to the annihilation of its native population. It is probably Kneale’s most commendable achievement to have uncovered the complicity of civilizing enterprises such as free trade in this extermination by neglect.

Bones of Contention – The Fate of Truganini’s Remains and the Scientific Commodification of the Colonial Encounter Both in a metaphorical and in a very real sense, Truganini and her people were not allowed to rest in peace. Before her death, she had expressed the

7

Morris, “The Final Solution, Down Under,” 218. Rae–Ellis, Black Robinson, 117. 9 Quoted in Black Robinson, 124. 8

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wish that her body be cremated and the ashes scattered over the sea near her birthplace. But this was not to be. The desecration of her remains can be seen as the logical consequence of what I would call the scientific commodification of the colonial encounter. An obsession with the concept of ‘race’ is a natural by-product or even precondition of colonization, and a plethora of academic volumes on the subject of hierarchical categorization of the human races has accompanied European colonialism, at the very least since Johann Friedrich Blumenbach’s On the Natural Varieties of Mankind (1776) and Charles White’s Account for the Regular Gradation of Man in 1799, with Joseph Arthur de Gobineau’s monumental An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races (1853–1855) being probably the most famous and influential example.10 One of the chief objectives of this academic discipline is to provide a retrospective rationalization of the colonial enterprise. The argument for the superiority of the white race supplies a justification for the displacement of the native by the colonizing culture. In Kneale’s novel, the mouthpiece of this scientific type of racism is Dr Thomas Potter, the expedition’s resident surgeon. He is closely modelled on Robert Knox, whose treatise The Races of Men: A Philosophical Enquiry into the Influence of Race over the Destinies of Nations (1850, revised 1862) is one of the most comprehensive inventories of the human races in the English language. A few examples from this text will elucidate both the underlying structure of the argument and the conclusions drawn. Two tenets form the central line of reasoning: “Race is everything: literature, science, art, in a word, civilization, depend on it”11 and “He [the Saxon] is about to be the dominant race on the earth; a section of the race, the Anglo-Saxon, has for nearly a century been all-powerful on the ocean.”12 British dominance on the seven seas is taken to be the manifestation of racial pre-eminence, with lesser races already having lost out in the struggle for global power: “Look all over the globe, it is always the same; the dark races stand still, the fair progress.”13 A possible explanation for this disparity among the races is found in their 10

Cf. Robert Young’s excellent study Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London & New York: Routledge, 1995) for a detailed record of racialist literature. 11 Robert Knox, The Races of Men: A Fragment (Philadelphia P A : Lea & Blanchard, 1850; Miami F L : Mnemosyne, 1969): 7. 12 Knox, The Races of Men, 15. 13 The Races of Men, 149.

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dissimilar physique: “I feel disposed to think that there must be a physical and, consequently, a psychological inferiority in the dark races generally.”14 The brain as the faculty of learning and erudition is, of course, a preferred point of comparison. and it is small wonder that Knox discovers that “the texture of the brain is I think generally darker, and the white part more strongly fibrous; but I speak from extremely limited experience.”15 In order to attain a broader knowledge of the natives’ cranial and physical nature it is indispensable to get hold of authentic material, and that means the skeletons of the deceased. Again, Truganini’s fate is exemplary. Soon after her death, the Tasmanian branch of the Royal Society instructed the superintendent of the hospital in which she had died to remove the flesh from the bones and convey them to the Tasmanian Museum for scientific examination, where they were packed in an apple box. In this they remained unnoticed for twenty years until they were placed on exhibition in the museum, where they were displayed until 1947. It took another twenty-nine years and several rounds of fierce public debate before Truganini’s remains were finally cremated and scattered over the sea in 1976. Her last wish had finally been heeded. But had it really? Vivienne Rae– Ellis provides conclusive evidence that the skull and the bones that were cremated that day could not have come from the same person.16 Truganini’s skeleton must have been dismembered before, jumbled up presumably while it was examined by various scientists over the years. The bones of the Tasmanian natives had become exchangeable, a common good, literally stripped of all humanity, merely a piece of scientific evidence. And even if the reason behind commodifying these human remains might have changed from proving racialist theories to conserving the remnants of an extinct culture, the results are the same and the dismemberment of Truganini – irredeemable as it is – serves as a poignant illustration of the barbarous role science played in the ideological rationalization and actual implementation of the extirpation of Tasmanian natives and their ways of life. In Kneale’s book, Dr Potter becomes the focal point of all this scientific exploitation of the colonial encounter. He keeps a diary, in which he monitors his observations concerning the difference between the races and which 14

The Races of Men, 151. The Races of Men, 151. 16 Vivienne Rae–Ellis, Trucanini – Queen or Traitor? (Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, 1981): 171. 15

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resounds with Knoxian notions of Saxon supremacy. Here is a quotation from his book The Destiny of Nations: There is, in truth, no finer manifestation of the destiny of men than this mighty institution of imperial conquest. Here we see the stolid and fearless Saxon Type, his nature revealed as never before as he strides forth in his great quest, subduing and scattering inferior nations. (280)

He also amasses various specimens to prove his theories. The highlight of his collection is the skeleton of Walyeric, which he manages to steal from the morgue in which her body is laid out. In a beautiful (yet unfortunately completely fictitious) twist of fate, the tables are turned and it is Potter himself who is finally objectified and commodified. While Peevay manages to regain his mother’s bones and give them an adequate funeral, the ship that takes the expedition and its spoils back home to Blighty sinks off the coast of France, and when the remains of the victims are finally retrieved from the sand, Potter’s bones have been completely absorbed in his collection and his skull ends up in a display case with the caption “‘ Unknown male presumed Tasmanian aborigine. Possible victim of human sacrifice’” (454).

Histories Competing – Literature and the Postcolonial Ethos If we interpret Potter’s fate as poetic justice of some sort and thus a condemnation of the dismemberment of Tasmanian native culture and bodies, we could, of course, charge Kneale with throwing stones in a glass house. Some of his main characters are composites as well, assembled from different sources in much the same way as Truganini’s skeleton can be said to be an embodiment of her entire people. Walyeric, for example, is clearly modelled on and takes her name from Walyer, a warrior queen, who led the resistance to the white settlers in the early days of British colonization. Like her real counterpart, she was abducted and raped by sealers, which resulted in her ineffaceable hatred of the whites. Yet, unlike Walyeric in the novel, Walyer died in 1831 shortly after having been captured and moved to Gun Carriage Island, where the blacks were concentrated before Wybaleena was established. Walyeric’s subsequent fortune in the novel resembles that of Truganini, particularly as concerns the treatment of her remains, so that we could accuse Kneale of his very own version of desecration of bodies, albeit only on a literary level. By merging the real persons of Walyer and Truganini, who

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could not have been more dissimilar – Walyer fought the settlers until her end, while Truganini helped Robinson round up and displace her people – he shows the same disregard for personal identity that he so sternly denounces in his novel. Kneale himself acknowledges his rather generous handling of historical facts in the epilogue to the novel. Is his book just another example of the commodification of aboriginal experience after all, created for the sake of Western idols like entertainment or maybe even postcolonial discourse itself? In other words, is the representation of Aboriginal experience, even in its most balanced manner, always necessarily a synthesis of European culture and Aboriginal experience and thus a form of desecration, a defamation of a lost culture doubly sacrificed on the altars of racism first and post-racist political correctness later? I would argue against this, since, in the novel, this treatment of fragmentation is also meted out to the most fervent advocate of white supremacy – Dr Potter himself. He is also a composite character, modelled on Robert Knox, but also showing traces of William Lodewyk Crowther, an honorary medical officer at Hobart General Hospital, who attained notoriety for the theft of William Lanne’s skull. William Lanne, a.k.a. King Billy, was supposedly the last male Tasmanian native. After his death in 1869, Crowther, acting on behalf of the Royal College of Surgeons in England, led a cloak-and-dagger operation to break into the hospital and steal the skull of the deceased. He “gained entry into the morgue where the cadaver was kept and decapitated the corpse, removed the skin and inserted a skull from a white body into the black skin.”17 By presenting both of his main characters in the colonial encounter as composites (in the literal sense of being put together), Kneale makes a strong point for the invalidity of all historical accounts. Since all representation of history is necessarily a fabrication, a contingent composition consisting of arbitrary inclusions and exclusions of events and their interpretations, both the colonizers and their victims are confronted with the ultimate misrepresentation of their actions. History may (with Auden) say to the defeated ‘alas but cannot help or pardon’, but the fleetingness of truth applies to everyone. Eventually, all that remains of both colonizer and colonized are hybrid traces in narratives, with narrative authority and any claims to cultural identity torn to bits by history’s powerful fortuitousness. While Matthew Kneale and with 17

Andrys Onsman, “Truganini’s Funeral,” Island 96 (22 June 2004), http://www .islandmag.com/96/article.html (accessed 7 January 2008).

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him all of us are busy spinning the tales of the deceased for the sake of an authentic historical account (for, after all, this is part of what postcolonial studies aspire to), we fall victims to the hands of time just the same. Every utterance on the subject of colonial history (be it novel, scientific exposition, every article in this or, indeed, any other book on the subject) is from the moment of its publication wrested from its author’s influence and subordinated to history’s manipulative power. The question whether it is the story (even history) that informs its representations or the representations (such as Kneale’s book) that shape or even re-create the story cannot and need not be answered conclusively.

What Remains? – The Dismemberment of Experience Eventually, all parties to the historical encounter are necessarily misrepresented, hybridized even. This fragmentation of historical experience as manifested in the amalgamated skeletons of Truganini and Dr Potter originates not in a guiding (narrative) authority, but is brought about by the simple yet incomprehensible force of historic contingency. Not only colonialism but history as such can, in the words of David Trotter, be said to be “a text without an author.”18 This, of course, is no groundbreaking insight; it has often been claimed (most famously by Hayden White) that the concept of the omniscient, authorial historiographer in the vein of Ranke or Mommsen is no longer valid, that history is being falsified just because there seems to be a need to cast it in the structure of a narrative. One might be tempted to ask if literature (which tends to flaunt its status as fiction, both in the sense of being – partly at least – invented and in the sense of being cast in narratable shape19) has not always been the more truthful means of conveying past and irrecoverable experience, since it is not impeded by the burden of veracity. Historiography lost its innocence the moment it abandoned the factual style of the chronicle or the almanac and started flirting with teleology and narrative structure. This insolence, for which I would borrow Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s notion of the

18

Quoted in Young, Colonial Desire, 166. Kneale provides the reader with an ‘Author’s Note’ at the end of his text, where he painstakingly accounts for the reality-status of his dramatis personae and his source documents. 19

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‘narrative fallacy’,20 results not, as Fukuyama famously claimed, in ‘the end of history’, but perhaps in the end of historiography as we know it. Literature, with its tradition of depicting equivocal semblances instead of univocal truths, might be in a position to fill this void if it itself relinquishes its traditional authoritative gestus, which I would closely correlate with an aesthetic of mimesis for a new ‘aesthetic of humility’, which takes the fundamental unrepresentability of experience and the world (past and present) as its notional point of origin and starts out from there to not only adopt new narrative attitudes but also to eventually create a pristine locus for literature, from which it can more faithfully comment on a society that has in many ways become a post-realist one. It is as part of this current trend in contemporary fiction (under which I would also subsume works by Dave Eggers, Julian Barnes, Jasper Fforde, and Juliet Thomas, to name just a random few) that I want to read Matthew Kneale’s renunciation and shattering of the authorial narrative position. It is part of the postmodern conundrum we find ourselves in that this ostensively humble gesture could of course also be read as just another ploy of an unassailable narrative authority.

WORKS CITED Chalk, Frank, & Kurt Jonassohn, ed. The History and Sociology of Genocide: Analyses and Case Studies (New Haven C T & London: Yale U P , 1990). Kneale, Matthew. English Passengers (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000). Knox, Robert. The Races of Men: A Fragment (Philadelphia P A : Lea & Blanchard, 1850; Miami F L : Mnemosyne, 1969). Morris, James. “The Final Solution, Down Under,” in The History and Sociology of Genocide (1990), ed. Chalk & Jonassohn, 204–22. Onsman, Andrys. “Truganini’s Funeral,” Island 96 (22 June 2004), http://www .islandmag.com/96/article.html (accessed 7 January 2008). Rae–Ellis, Vivienne. Black Robinson: Protector of Aborigines (Melbourne: Melbourne U P , 1996). ——. Trucanini – Queen or Traitor? (Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, 1981). Taleb, Nassim Nicholas. The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (New York: Random House, 2007).

20

Cf. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (New York: Random House, 2007): 62–84.

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Windschuttle, Keith. The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, vol. 1: Van Diemen’s Land, 1803–1847 (Sydney: Macleay, 2002). Young, Robert J.C. Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London & New York: Routledge, 1995).

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Alice in Oz A Children’s Classic Between Imperial Nostalgia and Transcultural Reinvention ——————————

S ISSY H ELFF

“Where to?” the White Rabbit asked suspiciously. “To Australia!” said Alice triumphantly. “It comes out in a very special sort of Wonderland.”1

L

C A R R O L L ’ S F A N T A S T I C S T O R Y Alice in Wonderland (1865) is considered a children’s classic all around the world. It might be due to the book’s miraculous setting and its vividly portrayed characters that Alice and the White Rabbit continue to find their way into the bedrooms of our very young and of those grown-ups who still enjoy being intrigued by Alice’s magical world. The great many variations of the Alice in Wonderland fantasy circulating in an increasingly globalized memory-market bring home to us the fact that some stories obviously never have an expiry date. Such an observation confirms what Paula Hamilton and Graham Huggan have postulated for folk legends: namely, that the many interpretations of old stories point not just to the durability of a legend or tale, but also to its continuing profitability as a global fantasy circulating within an increasingly globalized cultural industry.3 In this respect, Alice products indi1

EWIS

2

Nadine Amadio, ill. Charles Blackman, The New Adventures of Alice in Rainforest Land (Surry Hills: Watermark, 1988): 2. 2 Lewis Carroll, Complete Stories and Poems of Lewis Carroll (New York: Geddes & Grosset, 2002). 3 See Paula Hamilton, “The Knife Edge: Debates About Memory and History,” in Memory and History in Twentieth-Century Australia, ed Kate Darian–Smith and Paula

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cate the powerful role played by popular culture and its representations in shaping cultural practices and establishing canons. Consequently, it is little surprise that, when pondering Alice alongside the original tale, several interactive storybooks, webpages, animations, television programmes and feature films,4 theatre productions, radio plays, children’s books and other printed works should immediately come to mind.5 No doubt all stories have to pass through a specific production, publishing, and marketing circuit before readers and viewers are able to consume a final Alice-product. This illustration, however, is somewhat simplistic and captures only very roughly the contours of increasingly globalized production processes. It is no secret that in the last decade especially the global publishing and marketing of cultural products have become increasingly complex and flexible; this holds true even if we decide out of sheer pragmatism to ignore new avenues such as open-access publishing, pirate copying, printing on demand, and Google E-books. In consequence, the communication circuit, to use Robert Darnton’s term for the interaction between authors, readers, and critics,6 has never been more opaque. In the light of these observations, it becomes clear that “the figure of the cosmopolitan reader necessarily serves a primarily rhetorical function.”7

Hamilton (Melbourne: Oxford U P , 1994): 9–32; and Graham Huggan, “Cultural Memory in Postcolonial Fiction: The Uses and Abuses of Ned Kelly,” Australian Literary Studies 20.3 (May 2002): 142–54. 4 Along with Norman McLeod’s movie Alice in Wonderland (1934) and the 1951 Walt Disney film, Jonathan Miller’s B B C production in the year 1966 (starring Malcolm Muggeridge, John Gielgud, and Peter Sellers) certainly belongs among the most evocative Alice productions ever broadcast. 5 There is a great variety of different theatre productions, ranging from puppet plays to special Christmas productions at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford. In New York, the African-American soul musical But Never Jam Today (1969) and the André Gregory’s experimental theatre production Manhattan Project (1970) have added new interpretations to this well-known story. 6 See Robert Darnton, “What is the History of Books?” Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Science 3.3 (1982): 65–83. 7 Sarah Brouillette, Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007): 21.

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Alice in Oz In the creative process of relocating Alice’s wonderland in Australia, a great variety of new Alice-stories are emerging, ranging from romantic sketches to ‘imperialist nostalgias’8 and to modernist and feminist fables.9 By bringing together a range of Alice variations, this article seeks to reflect on the interest in Alice of two writers and one artist and on how they make use of the Alice motif in their creative negotiating of Australianness. Further, this article scrutinizes the various commodifications of the Alice motif by paying particular attention to genre and publication / exhibition contexts. Such a contextualized reading is essential for understanding a writer’s positioning within the commercial sphere. Precisely this positioning is addressed in Brouillette’s statement that “the postcolonial author has emerged as a profoundly complicit and compromised figure whose authority rests, however uncomfortably, in the connection to the specificity of a given political location.”10 To me, such positioning is also evident in my selected texts; however, with regard to Dorothy Hewett’s poetry collection Alice in Wormland (1987),11 I would, rather, speak of a strategic non-positioning, since Hewett’s poetry does not seem to be targeting a worldwide readership. In consequence, it is not particularly amicable

8

See Renato Rosaldo, “Imperialist Nostalgia,” Representations 26 (Special Issue “Memory and Counter-Memory,” Spring 1989): 107–22. Taking their cue from Rosaldo’s work, Patrick Holland and Graham Huggan adroitly summarize: “Imperialist nostalgia [. . . ] does not have to depend on a vision of Empire; it describes a more generalized, pastoral mode of wistful reminiscence that seeks control over, but not responsibility for, a mythicized version of the past. In the work of several contemporary travel writers, however, this mythicized past actually pertains to Empire: it attempts the restoration of Empire’s former (imagined) glories, and the resuscitation of Empire’s erstwhile (imaginary) ‘subordinate’ subjects.” Holland & Huggan, Tourists with Typewriters: Critical Reflections on Contemporary Travel Writing (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P , 2000): 29–30. 9 For an analysis of the Alice motif in an Indian-Australian novel, see my “Multicultural Australia and Transcultural Unreliable Narration in Indo-Australian Writing,” in The Wizard of OZ: In Memory of Bernhard Hickey, Literature’s Roving Ambassador, ed. Maria Renata Dolce & Antonella Riem Natale (Undine: Forum Editrice Universitaria Udine, 2009): 105–17. 10 Brouillette, Postcolonial Writers, 3. 11 Dorothy Hewett, Alice in Wormland (Paddington: Paper Bark, 1987).

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towards postcoloniality,12 to bring Huggan’s terms into play, but is deeply rooted in postcolonialism.13 In her Alice composition, Hewett allows readers very private glimpses of an older Alice whose poetic first-person narrator self-consciously positions herself as a loner on the fringes of society. Starting with Alice’s childhood and youth, the poetic journey ultimately takes us through Alice’s fulfilling days of maternity and her later experiences of bodily decay and death. In a way, Hewett sends her poetic self on a rite of passage exemplifying the intimate journey of an outstanding Alice character, whose lust for life seems exceptional in its own right. The symbolism of death, transformation, and mythic resurrection eventually makes clear that Hewett’s claim for a mature and more self-confident Australian imagination that is not exclusively rooted in a British heritage was as much an issue in the late-1980s as it is today.14 Another example of a reinvented Alice can be found in Nadine Amadio’s children’s tale The New Adventures of Alice in Rainforest Land (1988), in which the author relocates the nonsense story15 somewhere in Australia’s magical rainforest. Rich in intertextual references to the original and its wellknown nursery rhymes, the story presents an intriguing combination of ‘belated imperial imagery’ against the background of an amazing Australian landscape. The emerging tale thus contains a thriving symbolism which not only introduces Australian animals and plants as Alice’s new friends, but also suggests a re-energizing of cultural practices which readers generally associate with Britain. Amadio’s little heroine celebrates with her indigenous guests a ‘tea party’ like Carroll’s Alice, who is drinking tea under a tree in front of the house with March Hare, the Hatter, and a Dormouse. No doubt,

12

I would regard this observation as holding true for poetry in general. For a more detailed differentiation between postcolonialism and postcoloniality, see Graham Huggan’s The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London: Routledge, 2001): 6. 14 See, for example, Graham Huggan, Australian Literature: Postcolonialism, Racism, Transnationalism (Oxford: Oxford U P , 2007): 5–14. 15 For a detailed discussion of nonsense in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, see Elizabeth Sewell’s The Field of Nonsense (London: Chatto & Windus, 1952), Klaus Reichert’s Studien zum literarischen Unsinn: Lewis Carroll (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1974), Anne K. Mellor’s English Romantic Irony (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 1980), and Donald Rackin’s “Love and Death in Carroll’s Alice,” E L N 20.2 (1982): 26–45. 13

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Amadio’s Alice is an enchanting and entertaining story, yet it also has its ‘problematic edges’, especially if readers consider its eloquent investment in imperialist nostalgia. This nostalgia, as Huggan has shown, is used as an aesthetic tool pointing to a ‘strategic exoticism’ which “masks the inequality of power relations”16 for the easy consumption of global readers. In this light, Amadio’s little book is celebrating nothing but a further Alice-commodification. Interestingly enough, it was none other than the Australian painter Charles Blackman who did the illustrations for Alice in Rainforest Land. Blackman spent many years experimenting with the Alice motif; his widely acclaimed Alice series (mainly oil on canvas) made him early on a celebrated painter whose name was particularly well known in Britain and continental Europe. In 2006, the National Gallery of Victoria (Melbourne) celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of Blackman’s Alice paintings with an exhibition that included all but two of the original forty-six paintings. The enormous interest Australian society has in Blackman’s Alice might be explained by the artist’s “elements of playfulness and the psychological probing of states of innocence and experience,” which are “extremely rare in antipodean art.”17 While Amadio’s narrative weaves shining and colourful pictures of Alice and her friends, Blackman’s magical charcoal illustrations and moody ink sketches add a deeper and gloomier level to the whole story.

A ‘Belated’ Journey to Rainforest Land Once upon a time when fields were green and afternoons were golden, Alice sat dreaming and remembering her adventures in Wonderland. She wished she could have another really extraordinary adventure before she grew up. Secretly she knew she would never really grow old but would always stay Alice inside, ready for wonder, but she thought it was really time to open a new door or fall into a new rabbit hole.18

Closely following Lewis Carroll’s character outline, Nadine Amadio’s children’s tale adds a new episode to Alice’s adventures, when the story sends little 16

Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic,14. Thomas Shapcott, The Art of Charles Blackman (London: André Deutsch, 1989): xi. 18 Amadio, Alice in Rainforest Land, 1. Further page references are in the main text. 17

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Alice on a journey to Australia, where the girl and her companions, the White Rabbit and the Cheshire Cat, meet amazing creatures and make friends with curious and ‘exotic’ indigenous animals. While in Carroll’s Alice (1865) the protagonist still believes that she has fallen “right through the earth” and wonders if this new place is “New Zealand? Or Australia?,”19 Amadio’s Alice is already a seasoned traveller. Thus her journey to Rainforest Land comes as no surprise and seems, rather, to be a well-planned trip: “‘Where to?’ the White Rabbit asked suspiciously. ‘To Australia!’ said Alice triumphantly” (2). This systematic itinerary, with which Amadio’s children’s book opens, provides a different perspective altogether on Alice and her passage to Australia. The different perspective is also reflected in Blackman’s illustrations, a series of black pen-and-ink works which contribute complementarily to producing a fascinating piece of children’s literature. Blackman’s unique racooneyed Alice, with her emphatic strangeness and hypnotically spaced-out look, already familiar from the artist’s intriguing Alice collection, never shows her face to the reading children, probably because Blackman was all too aware of his work’s haunting and disturbing power, which, in its great meditative moments, might have been too much for the young reader. Thomas Shapcott’s astute assumption about Blackman’s Alice motif, that “[Blackman] has dared to tap into the vulnerable, the intuitive,”20 might therefore explain why the artist presents his Alice in Amadio’s story only in profile or with her back turned to the reader. Interestingly enough, Blackman’s Alice iconography constantly ‘quotes’ Carroll’s Alice and thus in a way perfectly supplements Amadio’s strong textual reference to the original. The story of Alice in Rainforest Land, which is addressed to children aged between five and eight years, presents numerous challenges and questions with regard to postcolonial/ transcultural criticism of children’s literature. Following this pattern of thought, my further critical reading of Amadio’s story shall suggest that Amadio’s imaginative Australia becomes caught up in an imperialist and nostalgic gaze, which might appear not so disturbing and frightening as Carroll’s fantastic world but is similarly exotic. I also think it is the use of exotic elements and the construction of a somewhat awkwardly strange ‘otherness’ that prompts my own uneasiness about Amadio’s set of stock characters. To me, the story is too firmly fixed in a narrative framework featuring cultural stereotypes without seeking representational alternatives. 19 20

Carroll, Complete Stories, 12. Shapcott, The Art of Charles Blackman, xi.

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Moreover, I am inclined to say that the storyline plays with and transports an aesthetic of imperialist nostalgia. This also probably explains why intertextuality is only employed as a narrative technique through which the closeness to the original is highlighted. Accordingly, Australian mammals, insects, and plants seem to be far too often pushed aside. A main intertextual reference can be seen in Alice’s tea party, which she organizes somewhere in the rainforest. Whereas, in the original text, Alice joins a party,21 it is the little girl in Amadio’s story who invites the guests (36–38). ‘But we are going to have a special tea party and I will show you my butterfly book.’ ‘Did you say tea party?’ the White Rabbit asked. ‘Sparkle, sparkle, little cup,’ he quoted, his spirits rising. ‘Star! Little star, you mean,’ Alice corrected him, politely but firmly. (4)

The story’s intertextual playfulness thus challenges Alice’s polite firmness (which could be read as an English attitude) by means of humour. While not sufficiently providing a representation and iconography of Australia beyond affirmative schemes, such passages allude to a re-invention of an Australian aesthetic that distances itself from the British classic. Yet the story’s indebtedness to Carroll’s original is impossible to miss. Also, the beginning and the end of the story are framed by intertextual references to Carroll’s Alice, because, as in the longstanding children’s classic, Great Britain also serves Amadio’s Alice as point of departure and return: ‘Well,’ continued Alice, ‘I have found another much longer rabbit hole that takes you right through to the other side of the world.’ ‘Where to?’ the White Rabbit asked suspiciously. ‘To Australia!’ said Alice triumphantly. ‘It comes out in a very special sort of Wonderland at the top of Australia called Rainforest land.’ ‘It’s a strange land. It is all green. The sky is green, the air is green. All the trees are green, of course. The snakes and lizards and birds are all green.’ Alice knew she was telling a white lie because some animals were all sorts of other quite brilliant colours, but it did have a very green feel about it. (2) She turned bravely and said goodbye and thank you to her friends who waved sadly back at her [. . . ]. Waving one last time, she grabbed the White Rabbit’s 21

Carroll, Complete Stories, 32–35.

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paw and ran with him and leaped right into the middle of the pool and right into the middle of her image [. . . ]. Colour and light spun around them and became a golden colour, like the sun on a long summer’s afternoon. They blinked against the light and opened their eyes, and they were at home on the grassy bank and the Rainforest was on the other side of the world. But it was also in another place. A place no maps would show. It was in the mind of a little girl called Alice and she would never forget. (61–62)

It is in Britain that Alice’s exciting journey starts and comes to an end when the little girl eventually wakes up from her dream.22 By using the idea of dream travel, Australia as such becomes a pristine and invented place while Great Britain turns into the crucial location associated with reality. This plot element is somewhat disturbing, since it emphasizes the idea of Great Britain as the main source and reference-site of the Australian imagination. Following this pattern of thought, Alice, the White Rabbit, and the Cheshire Cat could all be read as representatives of a mainly ‘white’ British culture. Such an imaginative pattern provides facets of a national allegory which served for many years as a source of a white Australian iconography.23 Accordingly, Alice and her companions represent Britain and the joy of a ‘belated’ colonial travel endeavour, while Australia only comes alive in the form of ‘imperial imagery’, where all Australian characters are represented by indigenous flora and fauna. This happy-go-lucky approach to Australian culture and literature, with its unfortunate colonial undertone, has little to offer to readers who are seeking an original approach to Alice.

A Journey into Darkness: Dorothy Hewett’s Alice Life-Cycle Dorothy Hewett’s Alice also moves with ease between regional and national contexts while, without great difficulty, transgressing time-frames. Hewett wrote her fifth collection of poems Alice in Wormland (1987) in her early sixties, looking back on forty vibrant years as one of Australia’s most pro-

22

This narrative arrangement to some extent plays with Robert Young’s idea that “the Englishman is most English when he creates a new England far away, in the corner of a foreign field”; Young, The Idea of English Ethnicity (Oxford: Blackwell 2008): 2. 23 See, for example, Ghassan Hage, White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society (Sydney: Pluto, 1998).

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minent poets and writers. Brought up on her father’s isolated farm in Western Australia, Hewett, back then only in her early twenties, became a leading creative voice in Australia.24 Alice covers five years of Hewett’s poetic imagination, including many different places and locations in Eastern and Western Australia. Although Hewett’s poetry makes use of a direct and outspoken language to convey the poetic voice’s sexual longings, the poem’s abstract and imaginative style employs strong intertextual references to Carroll’s classic. In this respect, a new transcultural imaginative realm emerges from between the covers of Hewett’s poetry collection, which hardly resembles Carroll’s well-known plotline and seeks to introduce the life-story of an Alice whose sexual yearning for her invented friend and lover Nim25 is exceptional. This yearning, however, reflects not only her love for the boy but also an awareness of her life-shaping powers. Alice’s world-arranging and lifeshaping habitus somewhat echoes the ideas of colonialism and the myth of discovery. Yet, as we might expect, Hewett’s approach to Alice’s nostalgic punch-drunk self-love is one of deconstruction: So Alice invented Nim (the sinister boy) or thought she did she heard the owl scream & the cricket cry like them he was her creature & drunk with power said Why I can make him live or make him die.26

In order to introduce the two main poetic personae, their relationship and their individual fates, Hewett opens her collection with two poems that create a

24

For more bibliographical details about the author, see Bruce Bennett’s “Dorothy Hewett’s Garden and City” in his Homing In: Essays on Australian Literature and Selfhood (Perth: Network, 2006): 61–70. 25 Bennett suggests that Nim combines characteristics of the son of T.S. Eliot’s Fisher King and Billy Crowe in The Toucher; see Bennett, “Dorothy Hewett’s Garden,” 66. Furthermore, Nim can also be read as a reference to the Korean god of the sky. 26 Hewett, Alice in Wormland, 13. Further page references are in the main text.

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section in their own right. It is here that the subjective ‘I’ dedicates her wonderfully gloomy poetry to her young, sinister friend-cum-lover Nim: there was a boy called Nim in a fairytale the animals ran from him the insects flew from his torment he was punished his beautiful face in the burning glass of the garden grew old as Dorian Gray (iv)

The poem’s direct mention of Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray frames the readers’ expectations lastingly. Youth and decay are central motifs in both texts. Whereas Dorian, obsessed with his youth, finally dies in disgust at his neverending youth and without ever having experienced unconditional love, Hewett’s Alice dies while mourning her lost youth. However, in contrast to Dorian, Alice is able to experience deep, unconditional love. Nonetheless, with her friend and lover Nim she lives a rollercoaster relationship which she cannot let go of, because she misses her lover, his body, and sex, but most of all because she is scared of coming to terms with her declining youth, her ageing body, her menopause and mortality. Alice Came to the city in her white hair Not old though young at heart In the tall house with the rose window & the dead women under the clothesline. Alice in the spinning white dress [. . . ] she’s got rabbits in her blood so she runs three times through the plastic lands with her iridescent hair & who’s to remember sweet Alice in Wormland now? (v)

In this poem, the subjective ‘I’ insists on remembering Alice while referring to her by using the impersonal third-person singular. Through this poetic strategy, a distance between the subjective ‘I’ and the Alice character materializes. This distance allows the subjective ‘I’ to express sadness about

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Alice’s bodily decay. Her new and ageing self internalizes the rabbits while she moves within an artificial plastic world. Elastic plastic, like in a padded cell, shields Alice from further injuries and humiliations but also symbolizes emotional detachment or, rather, a departure from all earthly yearnings and ultimately her death. The close connection between landscape, space, and the quest for identity is also confirmed by Bruce Bennett’s reading of Hewett’s work: Hewett’s imaginative engagement with other Western Australian authors who seem to share this outlook [to heal with the power of imagination the gulf between human world and nature] especially Randolph Stow, Peter Cowan and Tim Winton, and British writers for whom ‘organic’ notions of local environments have counted, such as D.H. Lawrence, the Brontës and the Lake District poets, give her representations of place an intertextual richness and force.27

Yet, connecting Bennett’s observation with the Alice poems evokes rather bleak impressions, because a positive outlook on life can only be found in Alice’s somewhat cosy and nostalgic childhood memories: In the Dream Girl’s Garden there were dolls & rocking horses gilt hornets built clay houses on the verandah tom-tits swung dry grass nests in almond trees. This was Eden perfect circular the candid temples of her innocence the homestead in the clearing ringed with hills the paddocks pollened deep in dandelions the magic forest dark & beckoning. (10)

In leaving the obviously transfigured and idealized garden behind, Alice bids farewell to her youth. While she is aware that she has become a mature, middle-aged woman, she is still not ready to accept the new phase in her life, her menopause. Instead, she longs for life as reflected in her fertile and conceiving body: “she wanted blood a man’s seed swelling her belly…” (113). 27

Bennett, “Dorothy Hewett’s Garden,” 62.

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No doubt, fertility is a central concern for Alice, and it seems as if her physical incapacity to conceive affects not only her sex-drive but also her overall zest for life. Thus, Alice associates mainly negative feelings with this ‘new’ menopausal phase. Taking up this gloomy connotation, her aged body is poetically reflected in the spatial metaphor of an empty house that has long been left by its inhabitants, her children. Obviously she is mourning “the end of that rhythm.” Thus, in the closing sequence of the Alice poems, “The Shape-Changers,” Alice embraces death: He comes closer now the last visitor who will not show his face he is ashamed the brute! but I can smell him (132)

What Hewett seeks to address in her Alice in Wormland is that Australian poetry in the late-1980s (and this may be also true for the Australian imaginary in general) was still to some degree conditioned by a British storytelling tradition. This narrative convention and conceptual legacy seem to have been dominant features of the antipodean imagination, as Bob Hodge and Vijay Mishra suggest in their seminal work on postcolonial theory and Australian literature.28 It is this heritage that Hewett seeks to bring out, only to call it into question a little later and eventually to offer a new interpretation: I am the owl she [Alice] hoots Half-blind with light & double visioned Is it over?

28

Cf. Bob Hodge & Vijay Mishra, Dark Side of the Dream: Australian Literature and the Postcolonial Mind (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1990).

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No he [Nim] croaks It is the beast fable It is the myth of ourselves & only just beginning Come shrieks Nim Together they leave the chapel Testing the air they mount & are borne away That was the time When they made friends with death (143–44)

Alice’s double vision makes her see both: her white settler past as well as a new formation of stories and myths and re-evaluation of histories. Hewett’s imagery suggests that the British poetic tradition and storytelling need to be overcome before a new Australian imaginary can emerge. Alice’s final arrival in Wormland, then, indicates the ultimate limit, her inescapable death and mythic resurrection. Hewett’s Alice is allowed to live on, albeit in a different guise, as a supernal, independent self. What we are left with, then, is a poet’s attempt to imagine Australian poetry beyond a mainly British romantic creative tradition. Hewett’s Alice thus represents a cross-cultural form of creativity that openly reflects a multitude of cultural signifiers, codes, and practices while negotiating the poetic limits of the Alice figure. In doing so, Hewett safely shifts away from postcoloniality and thus revitalizes the motif without commodifying Alice. Furthermore, Hewett’s poetry and its aesthetic signify a fresh creative portfolio of what Australian literature might include. Her poems illustrate very well that the social categories of ‘Australian literature’ or ‘Australian poetry’ have started to move away from an exclujsively colonial creative legacy towards a distinctively multicultural and transcultural imaginary by bringing into play Australian colours, sounds, and locations. Thus Hewett’s Alice motif implies both the protagonist’s rite of passage and an altered creative landscape. Such australification of the tale notwithstanding, Amadio’s created Alice, too, at times struggles with an embedded multicultural and transcultural meaning, which shows in the book’s intertextual tensions. As with Carroll’s classic children’s tale, Amadio’s Alice book employs imperialistic levels of meaning. It thus nourishes an almost colonial stance towards Australia and the Australian imagination. Her employment of the Alice motif suggests at best a

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celebration of cultural encounters and, at worst, an intercultural juxtaposition of a British icon who never ceases to indoctrinate the ostensibly subordinate, indigenous creatures, her Australian ‘friends’. What we are reading to our children, then, is a conservatively narrated story which celebrates the commodification of a ‘belatedly’ imperialist nostalgia where Australia is illuminated as a dream destination with exotic creatures and colourful plants. In essence, my transgeneric readings of the two texts and Blackman’s paintings illustrate significant differences in the fabrication of Alice: namely, either as a motif symbolizing Australian postcolonialism (Hewett) or as a narrative pattern that is deeply ingrained in (post)coloniality (Amadio). Nonetheless, all three artefacts demonstrate facets of an Australian aesthetic at work which testify to the interest Australian writers and artists have in Carroll’s Alice.

WORKS CITED Amadio, Nadine. The New Adventures of Alice in Rainforest Land, ill. Charles Blackman (Surry Hills: Watermark, 1988). Bennett, Bruce. “Dorothy Hewett’s Garden and City,” in Homing In: Essays on Australian Literature and Selfhood (Perth: Network, 2006): 61–70. Brouillette, Sarah. Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007). Carroll, Lewis. Complete Stories and Poems of Lewis Carroll (New York: Geddes & Grosset, 2002). Darnton, Robert. “What is the History of Books?” Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Science 3.3 (1982): 65–83. Hage, Ghassan. White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society (Sydney: Pluto, 1998). Hamilton, Paula. “The Knife Edge: Debates About Memory and History,” in Memory and History in Twentieth-Century Australia, ed. Kate Darian–Smith & Paula Hamilton (Melbourne: Oxford U P , 1994): 9–32. Helff, Sissy. “Multicultural Australia and Transcultural Unreliable Narration in IndoAustralian Writing,” in The Wizard of OZ: In Memory of Bernhard Hickey, Literature’s Roving Ambassador, ed. Maria Renata Dolce & Antonella Riem Natale (Undine: Forum Editrice Universitaria Udine, 2009): 105–17. Hewett, Dorothy. Alice in Wormland (Paddington: Paper Bark, 1987). Hodge, Bob, & Vijay Mishra. Dark Side of the Dream: Australian Literature and the Postcolonial Mind (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1990). Holland, Patrick, & Graham Huggan. Tourists with Typewriters: Critical Reflections on Contemporary Travel Writing (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P , 2000).

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Huggan, Graham. Australian Literature: Postcolonialism, Racism, Transnationalism (Oxford: Oxford U P , 2007). ——. “Cultural Memory in Postcolonial Fiction: The Uses and Abuses of Ned Kelly,” Australian Literary Studies 20.3 (May 2002): 142–54. ——. The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London: Routledge, 2001). Rackin, Donald. “Love and Death in Carroll’s Alice,” E L N 20.2 (1982): 26–45. Reichert, Klaus. Studien zum literarischen Unsinn: Lewis Carroll (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1974). Rosaldo, Renato. “Imperialist Nostalgia,” Representations 26 (Special Issue “Memory and Counter-Memory,” Spring 1989): 107–22. Sewell, Elizabeth. The Field of Nonsense (London: Chatto & Windus, 1952). Shapcott, Thomas. The Art of Charles Blackman (London: André Deutsch, 1989). Young, Robert J.C. The Idea of English Ethnicity (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008).

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Think Local Sell Global Magical Realism, The Whale Rider, and the Market ——————————

L ARS E CKSTEIN

H

in literature affected by the workings of a late-capitalist book market, and how do writers and publishers deal with the expectations of global rather than local readerships? In this essay, I wish to address these questions by investigating the dissemination of the Mori writer Witi Ihimaera’s most popular novel to date, The Whale Rider. My particular focus in this context will be on how certain magical-realist ideologies that are often deeply rooted in local communities and traditions are adapted to the deterritorialized logic of the global. The idea for this essay in fact derives from a rather peculiar teaching experience in a course on magical realism at the University of Tübingen a while ago. I intended to use Ihimaera’s short novel The Whale Rider as an accessible introduction to some of the aesthetic and ideological complexities of magical-realist discourse, yet was soon confronted with the fact that there were not one but, indeed, four different editions of The Whale Rider in the classroom: a so-called ‘Movie Edition’ distributed by New Zealand’s Reed publishing house (my own copy, which I had bought in Australia); most students used a current Heinemann U K hardback; two students got hold of the American Harcourt Educational paperback, and one student copied the original 1987 N Z Heinemann /Reed edition from our library. Working with different editions and page numbers is, of course, a perfectly ordinary nuisance, yet in the case of The Whale Rider, it proved to be a harder nut to crack. In particular, the attempt to discuss Ihimaera’s strategic use of Mori in an anglophone novel turned out to be a strangely frustrating experience. Student reactions ranged from vacant stares to utterances of angry disbelief – until it OW ARE REGIONAL AGENDAS

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transpired that hardly any of them had read the text that I had read; in fact, the textual and paratextual organization of all four editions of The Whale Rider in the classroom differed significantly. As I wish to show in this essay, these differences particularly matter when it comes to the ideology of Ihimaera’s brand of magical realism, and serve as a seminal case study about the relations between local cultural practice, narrative strategy, and the distribution of postcolonial bestsellers on the global market. I will develop my argument in three parts: the first part attempts to unravel some of the confusion surrounding the term ‘magical realism’, and proposes a conceptual model to differentiate between different modes of magical-realist writing. This relatively extensive groundwork is helpful in order to more specifically position Witi Ihimaera’s original magical-realist design (the focus of the second part), but also to show how the later textual changes significantly affect and shift its position in the model. In a third part, therefore, I will turn to the peculiar publication history of The Whale Rider, and look more deeply into the changes that the novel underwent upon reaching larger market segments after the outstanding global success of Niki Caro’s film adaptation in 2002 almost overnight catapulted Ihimaera and his small book to international fame.

Magical Realism Let us begin, then, with some of the problems concerning magical realism. According to a recent survey by Maggie Bowers, there are at least three different fields of association with the term, which she suggests distinguishing by referring to magic realism, marvellous realism, and magical realism respectively.1 Cases of magic realism, in this sense, trace their aesthetic and ideological roots to the German art critic Franz Roh, who, as most critics agree, coined the term ‘Magischer Realismus’ in 1925 with reference to postexpressionist painting. The gist here is that Roh advocates a return to painterly realism which nevertheless captures the mysteries of life. Roh’s view that “mystery does not descend to the represented world but, rather, hides and

1

Maggie Anne Bowers, Magic(al) Realism (London & New York: Routledge,

2004): 2–3.

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palpitates behind it”2 thus vaguely relates to notions of marvellous realism as developed in Latin America in the 1940s. The foundational text here is the Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier’s essay “On the Marvellous Real in America,” first published in 1949, in which he argues that the discourse of the ‘marvellous’ in the Americas differs sharply from European variants of the gothic, fantastic or surreal. In the Americas, the interpenetration of the magical and the real is a product of what Carpentier refers to as ‘mestizaje’; the clash of European, African, and Amerindian cultures and cosmogonies has brought forth such highly syncretistic cultural practices that, from an ‘enlightened’ Western perspective, they indeed seem ‘marvellous’. Importantly, however, for Carpentier the ‘marvellous’ does not categorically differ from the ‘real’, but “arise[s] from unexpected alterations of reality […] or an amplification of the scale and categories of reality.” Carpentier consequently insists that “the marvellous presupposes faith,”3 and that the writer needs to partake in the ritual and communal practices (e.g., of voodoo) and believe in them in order to faithfully represent marvellous reality in writing. Carpentier’s idea of representing an ontological real maravilloso thus differs ideologically in many ways from the concept of realismo mágico which began to gain currency in the 1950s in relation to Latin American fiction, and which is today most commonly and fashionably associated with magical realism. In Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy Faris’s inclusive definition, magical-realist writing is distinguished by the fact that “the supernatural is not a simple or obvious matter, but it is an ordinary matter, an everyday occurrence – admitted, accepted, and integrated into the rationality and materiality of realism.”4 Over the course of the 1980s and 1990s, this notion of magical 2

Franz Roh, “Magic Realism: Post-Expressionism,” adjusted from tr. Wendy B. Faris (excerpt from Fernando Vela’s 1927 Spanish tr. of Nach-Expressionismus, Magischer Realismus: Probleme der neuesten europäischen Malerei, 1925), in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, ed. Lois Parkinson Zamora & Wendy B. Faris (Durham N C & London: Duke U P , 1995): 15. 3 Alejo Carpentier, “On the Marvellous Real in America,” tr. Tanya Huntington & Lois Parkinson Zamora (“De lo real maravilloso americano,” intro. to Carpentier, El reino de este mundo, 1949), in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, ed. Lois Parkinson Zamora & Wendy B. Faris (Durham N C & London: Duke U P , 1995): 86. 4 Lois Parkinson Zamora & Wendy B. Faris, “Introduction: Daiquiri Birds and Flaubertian Parrots,” in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, ed. Lois

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realism as a discursive practice has been increasingly associated with the postmodern project as a genre that effectively subverts Western logocentrism,5 and, not unsurprisingly, it is in this capacity that magical realism has also most frequently been enlisted for the postcolonial project. Maggie Bowers remarks: Magical realism has become a popular narrative mode because it offers the writer wishing to write against totalitarian regimes a means to attack the definitions and assumptions which support such systems (e.g. colonialism) by attacking the stability of the definitions upon which these systems rely.6

It is my contention, however, that this is only part of the truth. While some postcolonial uses of the magical-realist mode certainly partake of the subversive, postmodernist fashion, many others tend towards an affirmative cultural mode more in line with Carpentier’s model of the marvellous. Moreover, we are not dealing with a mutually exclusive choice, here, but with a continuum of literary practices which extends between oppositional ideological ends. It is neither helpful to conflate these ends nor to conceive of them as a binary opposition; rather, certain narrative procedures that are characteristic of magical-realist discourse are being shared across the continuum outlined below, while ideological ends may still significantly differ. magical doubt subversion cosmopolitan play alterity hybridity

      

marvellous belief affirmation communal ritual identity syncretism

Parkinson Zamora & Wendy B. Faris (Durham N C & London: Duke U P , 1995): 3 (emphasis in original). 5 Zamora & Faris emphasize in their “Introduction” that “magic is often given as a cultural corrective, requiring readers to scrutinize accepted realistic conventions of casuality, materiality, motivation” (3). 6 Bowers, Magic(al) Realism, 4.

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Two examples of writers and texts that are most frequently associated with magical realism in the anglophone world may serve to illustrate the opposite ends, here. Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, for instance, clearly tends towards the left side of the continuum outlined above. It presents readers with what Wendy Faris calls “irreducible elements” of magic7 – say, the outstanding telepathic powers of Saleem Sinai’s majestic nose. At the same time, however, it is quite obvious that Rushdie does not expect readers to really believe in the magic he evokes, but that the penetration of the magical into the real world is part of a larger strategy of shedding doubt on ‘official’ narratives of the real. This subversion of the received stories we live by is mostly cosmopolitan in outlook, both in terms of setting – much of Rushdie’s fiction is set in metropolises like Bombay, Delhi, Karachi, London or New York – and in terms of the supposed outlook of the implied author; and it works by a largely playful undermining of conventional identity-constructions, highlighting the instability of processes of signification in the encounter with other stories and their alterity. In Rushdie’s fiction, the received symbols of the nation (or religion, for that matter) are constantly challenged by idiosyncratic subjective narratives which refuse to comply with official versions, and thus celebrate a Bhabhaian notion of cultural hybridity. A good example of the other end of the spectrum is Toni Morrison’s bestknow work, Beloved. Just as in the case of Rushdie’s novel, Morrison presents us with an “irreducible element” of magic: i.e. Beloved’s ghost – but, in contrast to Rushdie, this magic is set as an ontological given which readers will find much harder to simply shrug off. Certainly, the characters in Beloved firmly believe in the existence of ghosts, and Morrison has repeatedly emphasized in interviews that the functioning of black communities in the U S A has been firmly rooted in such belief. I also doubt that Morrison is much interested in undercutting, or ‘writing back to’, white predecessors.8 Rather, she is concerned with affirming a distinctly African-American mythological and aesthetic tradition to support the cohesion of a black community in the present – hence Morrison’s repeated affirmation that her primary target audience is

7

Wendy B. Faris, Ordinary Enchantments: Magical Realism and the Remystification of Narrative (Nashville T N : Vanderbilt U P , 2004): 5. 8 See Lars Eckstein, Re-Membering the Black Atlantic: On the Poetics and Politics of Cultural Memory (Cross / Cultures 84; Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2006): 177–233.

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her “people” or “tribe.”9 The importance of communalism in Morrion’s work is highlighted in Beloved – for instance, in her decision to relocate the setting of her major source – the historical case of Margaret Garner – from downtown Cincinnati to the semi-rural outskirts of the city. Here, the magic is overall less ludically than ritually framed, as shown in the communal exorcizing scene at the close. At the end of the day, the ideology of Beloved is very much about the fashioning of a collective identity for the African-American community, which envisages a culture that draws upon African as much as Euro-Christian elements, but merges them into a syncretistic whole.10 Most texts, however, that are labelled magical-realist sit somewhere in-between the ideological camps from the start.11 This is also true for Witi Ihimaera’s The Whale Rider, which resists any entirely unambiguous attribution to one or the other camp. Still, it is safe enough to say that, in its original political scope, The Whale Rider tends more towards the right side of the continuum outlined above, and is in this sense closer to a novel like Beloved than to, for instance, Midnight’s Children. The Whale Rider is originally about belief as much as about fantasy, and evolves around a rural community, its cultural rituals, and the quest for an affirmative syncretistic identity in times of cultural crisis.

9

Thomas LeClair, “The Language Must Not Sweat: A Conversation with Toni Morrison” (1981), repr. in Conversations with Toni Morrison, ed. Danielle Taylor– Guthrie (Jackson: U P of Mississippi, 1994): 26. 10 Having said as much, it is important to point out that the neat distinction between Rushdie and Morrison becomes far less clear cut when we leave what could be termed ‘implied readerships’ aside, and turn to real reader responses on the global market. Such readers, of course, do not necessarily comply with the ideal magical-realist ideology as briefly sketched above, but read according to their own cultural dispositions and preferences. Thus some of the trouble that Rushdie ran into with The Satanic Verses certainly has to do with the fact that many took Rushdie’s magic very seriously as a matter of faith; conversely, if one engages with the academic reception of Morrison’s Beloved, one will quickly find that only a minority of critics investigate its core mystery in terms of African and Afro-Christian mythology and ritual, while Derrida and Lacan are part of the stock repertoire. 11 Take the arguably most famous and formative of all magical-realist novels, Gabriel García Márquez’s One Thousand Years of Solitude, which, I believe, falls right between the magical and the marvellous.

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The Whale Rider The novel opens with the foundation myth of Whangara, a village on the east coast of the North Island of Aotearoa New Zealand, told by an anonymous storyteller in the third person. According to the legend, the ancestor of the tribe did not arrive in a canoe from the ancestral homeland, Hawaiiki, but came riding on a whale. Also called Paikea, the whale rider, he shot spears of life-essence into the dormant land and thus initiated the history of the people. From here, the novel oscillates between two narrative strands set in the present: the first is printed in italics and comes as a third-person omniscient animal tale; it follows a herd of whales and their ancient leader, who, it soon transpires, is no other than the mythical bull whale whom Paikea rode to the shores of Whangara. On their way from Patagonia to the Arctic Sea, it becomes evident that the old bull is no longer capable of securely guiding his herd through the perils of the twentieth century (such as mass whale hunting or nuclear testing), and instead nostalgically craves for the friendship with Paikea in his youth. The second and much larger narrative strand comes in first-person mode. It tells the story of the girl Kahu, who grows up in Whangara with her greatgrandparents. It is told in colloquial style by the girl’s uncle Rawiri, a young man in his twenties. Kahu’s great-grandfather, Koro Apirana, is the old patriarchal chief of the village and desperately searches for a legitimate successor. Firmly believing in a tradition of male lineage, he treats Kahu with utter contempt from the day of her birth, even though Kahu, as the reader soon finds out, is the true destined heir of Paikea. Magically linked to the ancestor because her afterbirth was buried right where a spear of life-essence hit the ground, she is able to, among other things, converse with whales, and relentlessly loves her dismissive great-grandfather. The two narrative strands finally converge when, after a school of whales has stranded and painfully died at a nearby beach, the old mythic bull whale lands his herd right on the beach of Whangara. The attempt to save the whales becomes a symbolic fight for the survival of the community and its traditions, and it is eight-year-old Kahu who, in a tremendous sacrifice, swims out into the surf, climbs the ancient whale, and leads the herd into open water again. In the end, Kahu survives, Koro Apirana is cured of his patriarchal stubbornness, and all presumably live happily ever after. At first glance, this sounds like the stuff exotic fairy-tales are made of, despite an obvious gender- and eco-political thrust. What is it, then, that makes The Whale Rider a magical-realist text rather than a mere piece of

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fantastic entertainment? In my view, the answer to this question lies in the novel’s ideological and poetical staging of a transcultural conflict in which the elements of magic are given an ontological rather than purely discursive validity – in other words, The Whale Rider asks for belief in the magical as much as in the rational. In the village meeting-house, Koro Apirana accordingly lectures: ‘You have all seen the whale,’ he said. ‘[…] Does it belong in the real world or the unreal world?’ ‘The real,’ someone called. ‘Is it natural or supernatural?’ ‘It is supernatural,’ a voice said. Koro Apirana put up his hands to stop the debate. ‘No,’ he said, ‘it is both. It is a reminder of the oneness which the world once had. It is the pito joining past and present, reality and fantasy. It is both. It is both,’ he thundered, ‘and if we have forgotten the communion then we have forgotten to be Maori.’12

This, for non-Mori readers in particular, may, of course, not necessarily spoil a certain primitivist or exoticist appeal which critics like Jean–Pierre Durix or Timothy Brennan have identified as a frequent danger in the intercultural encounters of magical-realist discourse.13 It is therefore all the more crucial that the original Reed edition of The Whale Rider transposes the transcultural dilemma of modern Maoridom onto the level of narrative language. In his essay “Magical Realism as Postcolonial Discourse,” Stephen Slemon notes: In the language of narration in a magic realist text, a battle between two oppositional systems takes place, each working toward the creation of a different kind of fictional world from the other […], a situation which creates disjunction within each separate discursive system, rending them with gaps, absences, and silences.14

12

Witi Ihimaera, The Whale Rider (Auckland: Reed, 2002): 115. See Jean–Pierre Durix, Mimesis, Genres and Post-Colonial Discourse: Deconstructing Magic Realism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998), and Timothy Brennan, Salman Rushdie and the Third World (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989). 14 Stephen Slemon, “Magical Realism as Postcolonial Discourse” (1990), repr. in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, ed. Lois Parkinson Zamora & Wendy B. Faris (Durham N C & London: Duke U P , 1995): 409. 13

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In the original version of The Whale Rider, such “gaps, absences and silences” are indeed crucially supported by the poetics and politics of language. Thus, The Whale Rider is interspersed with bits of Mori from the start and in increasing degrees, so that, towards the end of the novel, entire phrases and indeed stretches of dialogue are rendered in te reo Mori. For readers who do not speak Mori (which in 1987 would have still included a large part of the Mori population, too), such words and passages come as obstacles, and indeed produce gaps and silences. The opening paragraph of the novel already serves to illustrate this: In the old days, the years that have gone before us, the land and sea felt a great emptiness, a yearning. The mountains were like the poutama, the stairway to heaven, and the lush green rainforest was a rippling kakahu of many colours. The sky was iridescent paua, swirling with the kowhaiwhai patterns of wind and clouds […].15

The first Mori word, “poutama,” in English ‘steps’, is more or less translated in the immediate narrative context; the following words, however, have to be inferred through their syntagmatic relations. While “kakahu” may be rather unambiguously identified as ‘cloak’ in this fashion, processes of syntagmatic inference come to their limits with “paua” and “kowhaiwhai” because, here, the gaps and silences really reach beyond the linguistic level to problems of cultural translatability. Thus, the “paua” is a particular type of shell whose iridescent colours the novel evokes, but which also plays a highly significant part in Mori art and spirituality. This is even truer of the term “kowhaiwhai,” referring to the elaborate traditional scroll painting on rafters in Mori meeting-houses; the patterns represent tribal lineage, and thus introducing one of the novel’s core themes. This already shows that the use of Mori in The Whale Rider is instrumental in continually unfolding an alternative cosmogony which resists satisfactory expression in the English language, and which readers will either experience as unsettling gaps of comprehension or, if they are either literate in Mori or actively look it up, will recognize as culturespecific and in several ways untranslatable. It is through this discursive fracture between English and Mori, I believe, that the original edition of The Whale Rider inherently resists easy appropriation into exoticist cliché.

15

Witi Ihimaera, The Whale Rider (2002): 10. (My italics.)

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The Market This, of course, brings us to the different text versions of The Whale Rider on the global market. How did the changes to the original version of the novel come about, then? While the novel enjoyed a high level of popularity in the Pacific world from the start, so much so that Ihimaera produced a full Mori version published by Reed in 1995 (Te Kaieke Tohora), Ihimaera’s work remained little known internationally. This dramatically changed, however, with the notable worldwide success of Niki Caro’s 2002 film adaptation Whale Rider, winner of numerous international prizes and, at the time of writing, still the most successful New Zealand movie ever.16 In November 2002, two months after the international premiere of the movie at the Toronto Film Festival, Reed New Zealand consequently re-issued the novel for the local book market – both in the original format of 1987 and in a ‘Movie Edition’ (the one I first bought) based on the same text, but with film stills and, significantly, a detailed, four-page glossary which translates all Mori terms. The distribution of an ‘International Edition’ of The Whale Rider was quickly undertaken under the auspices of Harcourt Educational publishing, of which both Reed N Z and Heinemann U K were an imprint at the time.17 This globally distributed edition, however, has only been labelled ‘International Edition’ in New Zealand, where Reed released it in 2003 with the following comment: After the huge international success of this year’s movie adaptation […] editions of the book are being released in the U S , U K , Australia, South Africa, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Finland, Japan, China, Ar16

That is, if we exclude Sir Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings series, which was almost exclusively U S -funded. As far as New Zealand box-office statistics are concerned, Whale Rider currently comes in third after Roger Donaldson’s The World’s Fastest Indian (2005), starring Anthony Hopkins, and Lee Tamahori’s Once Were Warriors (1994), from Alan Duff’s novel (1990). 17 It is important to know in this context that Reed N Z , the oldest Kiwi publishing house, was largely family-owned until 1983, when it sold the last shares to an overseas conglomerate and consequently changed owners various times. They ended up, together with Heinemann U K , as an imprint of Harcourt Educational, which was itself a major division of the notorious London-based Reed–Elsevier group. Ironically, in May 2007 Reed N Z lost the legal rights to their long-standing name after they were sold off to the Pearson–Penguin group, and now go by the name Raupo N Z – ‘raupo’, of course, being the Mori term for ‘reed’.

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gentina and Mexico. To address an international readership, Witi rewrote parts of the work and translated the Maori text.18

The international editions distributed by Harcourt, by contrast, provide no paratextual acknowledgement whatsoever of divergences from the copyrighted 1987 source, nor do the respective homepage of Harcourt or Heinemann comment on this. Most readers of The Whale Rider outside of the Pacific world will consequently be quite unaware that they are not reading the novel that Ihimaera originally published.19 In the ‘International Edition’, only very few sequences in Mori have been kept, and only in places where an English translation is contextually given. The American Harcourt version additionally provides a brief glossary of those remaining terms, which was abandoned again in the British 2005 Heinemann version, which, like the original, has no glossary. In both the Harcourt and the Heinemann version, most Mori passages have either been translated into English or deleted where such translation seems to have been impossible. The revised opening paragraph accordingly reads thus: In the old days, the years that have gone before us, the land and sea felt a great emptiness, a yearning. The mountains were like a stairway to heaven, and the lush green rainforest was a rippling cloak of many colours. The sky was iridescent, swirling with the patterns of wind and clouds […].20

A cursory comparison with the opening of the original version reveals that in the ‘International Edition’, what Stephen Slemon refers to as a magical-realist battle between “two opposing discursive systems, with neither managing to subordinate the other,”21 is effectively toned down. This matters crucially with regard to the novel’s positioning within the magical-realist continuum as outlined in the first part: in my view, The Whale Rider slides significantly 18

Reed Publishing, “Witi Ihimaera, The Whale Rider: International Edition,” http: //www.reed.co.nz/title.cfm?titleid=2559 (accessed 7 November 2007). 19 It is important to note that after Pearson–Penguin swallowed Reed in 2007, the web presence of the re-named publishing house was restructured and the information about the “International Edition” quoted above disappeared again. It is unlikely, therefore, that today any new readers of The Whale Rider anywhere on the planet will be aware of the fact that they are not reading the original version. 20 Witi Ihimaera, The Whale Rider (New York: Harcourt, 2003): 3. 21 Slemon, “Magic Realism as Postcolonial Discourse,” 410.

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away from the marvellous side of the continuum in its revised state, as it loses a central element of its local and cultural grounding in favour of global compatibility. Without the discursive fracture between English and Mori wordand world-making, international readers are encouraged to abandon what for Alejo Carpentier is the very prerequisite of the ‘marvellous’ in transcultural contact zones: namely, faith – faith in a Mori cosmogony and tradition that is more than just a projection foil for exoticist Western fantasies. The ontological relevance of the Mori world is thus much more easily relegated to the fictive and fantastic for global readers of the ‘International Edition’ than it is for local readers of the 1987 text. Who is to blame for all this? The most likely suspects in the scenario, I thought, were the publishers, pushing a ‘diluted’ version of the novel to boost sales in the wake of the tremendous success of the movie. Surprisingly, though, things apparently do not boil down to the marketing instincts of the international publishing industry after all, even if this is hard to verify from the point of view of the publishers, who did not to respond to my email inquiries. Witi Ihimaera himself, however, in a personal email, generously did share his ideas about revising the novel. In his own account, he decided to rework The Whale Rider for international publication entirely off his own bat without any intercession from Reed, and defends the ‘International Edition’ as a deliberate act of including wider readerships after he had done justice to the politics of Mori writing and publishing with the original version of 1987 and the Mori-language version of 1995.22 It is important to explain in this context that Ihimaera’s rewriting of The Whale Rider is no isolated exercise, but falls within the scope of a gargantuan ongoing project in which he revises and republishes most of his early oeuvre. This revisionary zeal is, indeed, quite extraordinary, given that Ihimaera’s early prose fiction, together with that of Patricia Grace, is widely cherished as laying the foundation of Mori (narrative) literature in English, and difficult to understand, particularly from the standpoint of a Western tradition rooted in the immutable authority of the printed word. Suffice to say here that Ihimaera’s work of the 1970s tends to construct a rather bucolic and organicist picture of Mori tradition, while his later work, beginning with The Matriarch (1986), turns to more complex investigations of Mori identity and mod-

22

Witi Ihimaera, “Re: Versions of the Whale Rider,” personal email communication (23 September 2007).

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ernity.23 More importantly, however, Ihimaera has intimated that his early work is flawed by an apolitical or even integrationist outlook, while his later work pursues a more aggressive and encompassing affirmation of Mori identity for Aotearoa New Zealand,24 and the systematic revision therefore reflects what he calls an “updated political framework.”25 In the specific case of The Whale Rider, however, I remain unconvinced that an “updated political framework” really manages to account for the predominantly linguistic changes, which, at the end of the day, work against rather than in favour of the narrative. The Whale Rider was written at a time when the standing of the Mori language in New Zealand was still far from secure; in the early-1970s, the body of native speakers of Mori was about to disappear and it was only with the Mori Renaissance that te reo Mori regained cultural prominence, until in 1987 – the very year that The Whale Rider was first published – it was eventually recognized as the official New Zealand language alongside English. Fifteen years later, in 2002, Mori was so firmly rooted in New Zealand society again that Ihimaera was possibly more relaxed about his language and, by extension, about cultural politics at home, and perhaps felt he could spare international readers the pain of having to put up with it. This line of thought, however, really contradicts Ihimaera’s current ‘counter-imperial’ aspirations for Mori culture in Aotearoa New Zealand as more recently expressed in, for instance, a B B C interview.26 It seems odd in this light that, by sacrificing the productive fracture between Mori and English world-making that is embedded in the novel’s syncretistic linguistic strategies, Ihimaera should somewhat insouciantly sacrifice not only a substantial part of the novel’s aesthetic complexity but also its stake in the marvellous. While an emphasis on ‘marvellous’ reality seems to lie a the heart of Ihimaera’s cultural and literary identity politics, his revisions turned The Whale Rider into a fairly clear-cut case of ‘magical’ realism that is easily digestible and predominantly marketed to young-adult audiences across the globe. It may be the more immediate didactic potential of the novel, then, and the attempt to distribute it as widely as possible that may have been on 23

Mark Williams, Leaving the Highway: Six Contemporary New Zealand Novelists (Auckland: Auckland U P , 1990). 24 “Witi Ihimaera,” B B C Hard Talk Extra interview with Witi Ihimaera, http: //news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/hardtalk/4529547.stm (accessed 24 January 2009). 25 Witi Ihimaera, “Re: Versions of the Whale Rider.” 26 “Witi Ihimaera,” B B C Hard Talk Extra interview.

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Ihimaera’s mind – yet, should this be the case, I believe that he underestimated his global readers. Whatever his true motivations were, I would suggest that, rather than the ‘International Edition’, the version that I first read – offering an extensive glossary of all Mori terms and concepts, yet retaining the original blend of English and Mori – would have been a better way of going global.

WORKS CITED Bowers, Maggie Anne. Magic(al) Realism (London & New York: Routledge, 2004). Brennan, Timothy. Salman Rushdie and the Third World (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989). Carpentier, Alejo. “On the Marvellous Real in America, ” tr. Tanya Huntington & Lois Parkinson Zamora (“De lo real maravilloso americano,” intro. to Carpentier, El reino de este mundo, 1949), repr. in Magical Realism (1995), ed. Zamora & Faris, 75–89. Durix, Jean–Pierre. Mimesis, Genres and Post-Colonial Discourse: Deconstructing Magic Realism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998). Eckstein, Lars. Re-Membering the Black Atlantic: On the Poetics and Politics of Cultural Memory (Cross / Cultures 84; Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2006). Faris, Wendy B. Ordinary Enchantments: Magical Realism and the Remystification of Narrative (Nashville T N : Vanderbilt U P , 2004). Ihimaera, Witi. “Re: Versions of the Whale Rider,” personal email communication (23 September 2007). ——. The Whale Rider (Auckland: Heinemann NZ/Reed, 1987). ——. Te Kaieke Tohora (Auckland: Reed, 1995) [Mori Edition]. ——. The Whale Rider (Auckland: Reed, 2002) [Movie Edition]. ——. The Whale Rider (New York: Harcourt, 2003) [International Edition]. ——. The Whale Rider (Oxford: Heinemann, 2005) [International Edition]. LeClair, Thomas. “The Language Must Not Sweat: A Conversation with Toni Morrison” (1981), repr. in Conversations with Toni Morrison, ed. Danielle Taylor– Guthrie (Jackson: U P of Mississippi, 1994): 119–28. Morrison, Toni. Beloved (1987; New York: Vintage, 1996). Reed Publishing. “Witi Ihimaera, The Whale Rider: International Edition,” http: //www.reed.co.nz/title.cfm?titleid=2559 (accessed 7 November 2007). Roh, Franz. “Magic Realism: Post-Expressionism,” tr. Wendy B. Faris (excerpt from Fernando Vela’s 1927 Spanish tr. of Nach-Expressionismus, Magischer Realismus: Probleme der neuesten europäischen Malerei, 1925), in Magical Realism (1995), ed. Zamora & Faris, 15–32. Rushdie, Salman. Midnight’s Children (1981; New York: Vintage, 1995).

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Slemon, Stephen. “Magic Realism as Postcolonial Discourse” (1990), repr. in Magical Realism (1995), ed. Zamora & Faris, 407–26. Whale Rider, dir. Niki Caro, starring Keisha Castle–Hughes (South Pacific Pictures Productions / ApolloMedia, New Zealand / Germany 2002; 101 min.). “Witi Ihimaera,” B B C Hard Talk Extra interview with Witi Ihimaera, http://news.bbc .co.uk/1/hi/programmes/hardtalk/4529547.stm (accessed 24 January 2009). Williams, Mark. Leaving the Highway: Six Contemporary New Zealand Novelists (Auckland: Auckland U P , 1990). Zamora, Lois Parkinson, & Wendy B. Faris. “Introduction: Daiquiri Birds and Flaubertian Parrots,” in Magical Realism (1995), ed. Zamora & Faris, 1–14. ——, ed. Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community (Durham N C & London: Duke U P , 1995).

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Dialogue Within Changing Power-Structures Commodification of Black South African Women’s Narratives by White Women Writers? ——————————

K SENIA R OBBE

I

N T H E I N T R O D U C T I O N to the study of stereotypes dominating the Afrikaans literary canon – published in the year of South Africa’s transition to democratic rule – Chris van der Merwe articulated his programmatic view of the relationship between literature and society as applied to the specific cultural context:

Not only did the values in Afrikaans literature change; in the political crises of the seventies and the eighties, Afrikaans literature was used as a means of changing the values prevalent in society. Afrikaans literature not only reflected some of the changes in Afrikaner ideological thinking, it also helped to effect the changes desired.1

In South African white women’s writing, Afrikaans writing in particular, the general processes of changing values and relations during the twentieth century have been complicated and intensified by major transformations of gender roles and stereotypes. In black and white cultures, both marked by colonial and patriarchal biases, the transformation of traditional values in the course of rapid modernization has been opening a space for broad identity reformulations and, in some instances, for attempts at negotiating across racial lines. These attempts constitute one of the leading features of South African 1

Chris van der Merwe, Breaking Barriers: Stereotypes and the Changing of Values in Afrikaans Writing, 1875–1990 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994): 8–9.

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literatures at the historical juncture of the 1980s–1990s. However, it would certainly be misleading to consider those changes – signalling what could be called a turn towards the ‘Other’ and thus a re-imagining of the self – outside of the power inequalities between white and black subjects of discourse, on whatever side authority may reside. This essay will address the issues of commodification and manipulation of black women characters and their narratives in three novels written between 1978 and 2004 by South African white female authors: Elsa Joubert’s Poppie, Wilma Stockenström’s The Expedition to the Baobab Tree, and Marlene Van Niekerk’s Agaat. All three were originally published in Afrikaans and have become part of the Afrikaans as well as the broader South African literary canon. Translated into several European languages, they have been marketed on the international scene as major works by contemporary South African writers. From a gender perspective as well, these are the narratives that focus on and participate in the constitution of women’s identities, particularly at the intersections of race, ethnicity, and class. In examining the complex relations between black and white women in these works – as authors, characters, and narrators – the essay will focus on the dynamics of those relations being performed and thematized in the texts themselves and played out in their reception. This comparative reading across the apartheid/ post-apartheid divide will be based on the idea of dialogue between the discursive positions occupied by women of different colour and class as participants in the writing/ reading process. The concept of dialogicity employed here draws on the theories of Mikhail Bakhtin, who saw language as “heteroglot from top to bottom” and every utterance within it as including or implying two or more intentionally distinct voices.2 Particularly important for the current reading of interactions between differently located and unequally empowered women’s voices is Bakhtin’s emphasis on the socio-historical aspect of every utterance and every literary text. The theorist’s understanding of every discourse’s dialogic connection not only to other discourses but also to other social practices draws attention to the specificity and at the same time irreducibility of a word / utterance to a single context.3 In Bakhtin’s view, dialogism is inherent in any discourse, but 2

Mikhail M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, tr. Caryl Emerson & Michael Holquist (Austin: U of Texas P , 1981): 291. 3 In his essay “Discourse in the Novel,” Bakhtin stresses the dialogic relationship between the extratextual social heteroglossia and its artistic representations in literary

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dialogic relations are not always obvious and easily discernible; they might be submerged in certain contexts and have the potential to become actualized in others. Furthermore, dialogue is not considered as a space of peaceful exchange of opinions by equally empowered partners but, rather, as a field of controversy and permanent struggle. A dialogic perspective seems to be specifically productive for a discussion of the issues in South African writing as outlined here, as it highlights the ambiguities in relations between women separated and united by major social inequalities. It also foregrounds the possibility of changes in power distribution even within the boundaries of conventionally ‘oppressive’ discourses and genres. The understanding of dialogue as irresolvable conflict4 can be effectively applied to cases of ‘collaborative writing’5 or of fiction by white feminist-oriented women writers featuring a biographical story of a black woman. Instances of misrepresentation, silencing, and othering inherent in such projects have been extensively analyzed and criticized by postcolonial scholars, particularly following publications by Gayatri Spivak and Trinh T. Minhha in the late-1980s.6 Among later studies, Gillian Whitlock’s The Intimate Empire highlights and elaborates these issues in her cross-cultural analysis of postcolonial women’s (auto )biography and collaborative writing. Discussing texts: “Thus at any given moment of its historical existence, language is ‘heteroglot from top to bottom’: it represents the co-existence of socio-ideological contradictions between the present and the past, between different epochs of the past, between different socio-ideological groups in the present, between tendencies, schools, circles, and so forth, all given a bodily form. These ‘languages’ of heteroglossia intersect each other in a variety of ways, forming new socially typifying languages.” Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 291. 4 Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 398. 5 Here and further ‘collaborative writing’ encompasses the instances of a white woman ‘transcribing’ or relating the story of a subaltern black woman in a (semi-) documentary work. 6 Among the most influential works have been Gayatri Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” and her essays from the In Other Worlds collection as well as Trinh T. Minhha’s Woman, Native, Other. See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson & Lawrence Grossberg (London: Macmillan, 1988): 271–313; Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York & London: Methuen, 1987); Trinh T. Minh-ha, Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana U P , 1989).

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the complex interactions between women of different colour co-authoring7 black women’s life-stories, varied across time and space but inextricably connected to the experience of the Empire, she repeatedly emphasizes the dangers of disregarding their colonial specificity. With reference to the work of the Australian Aboriginal writer and researcher Jackie Huggins, she writes: There is always the danger that black women will emerge from collaborative inter-racial work as ‘the experimental doll’. […] Inter-racial collaboration is, in Huggins’ view, contaminated by investigations, surveillance and intrusions which were characteristic of the period of ‘protection’ and ‘assimilation’; it remains caught in the force field of colonial relations.8

However, the author herself, while acknowledging the pitfalls of a collaborative situation within the persistent (neo)colonial structures dominating writing, reading, and scholarship, ultimately does not share this pessimist outlook. She argues that autobiographical writing, indeed, “can offer black women access to authoritative discourses and to a public that, in certain times and in certain places, allows their histories to perform important political work and engage with social change.”9 Some South African critics, particularly during the apartheid period, claimed that any attempt to ‘give voice’ to a black character by white authors inevitably results in its commodification. To a great extent, this pattern is traceable in many works of South African literature and criticism. Nevertheless, one could argue that texts staging cross-cultural dialogue in many instances offer some resistance to processes of commodification in explicitly reflecting on them, deconstructing persistent oppositions of cross-racial/ class representation, and revealing the ambiguities of power and powerlessness, agency and silence. This essay conceives of the relation between the suppression and commodification inherent in the projects of cross-cultural co-writing and the subversive, ultimately enabling element of collaboration as one of coexistence

7

Co-authoring or collaboration, as the variety of cases analyzed by Gillian Whitlock demonstrates, may imply different strategies ranging from recording, co-writing, editing, and publishing to reading and researching. See Whitlock, The Intimate Empire: Reading Women’s Autobiography (London & New York: Cassell, 2000). 8 Whitlock, The Intimate Empire, 163–64. 9 The Intimate Empire, 166.

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and reciprocal interruption. A dialogic look at the texts of women writers, telling and reading life-stories – in various reference frames, under different conditions, and with divergent interlocutors in mind – should provide common ground for negotiating differences assumed as a basis for literary and cultural divisions. In other words, the problematic of dialogue is seen as creating alternative connections between individual texts and entire discourses. As all three texts to be discussed contain some elements of (auto )biographical writing, various assumptions about ‘realism’, ‘truth’, and ‘authenticity’ (as discursive positions in the texts and their interpretations) will be significant for considering the problems of communication in and across the texts. This focus is intended to reveal the texts’ double-bind of adaptation / assimilation and resistance to systems of exploitation. In this connection, one of the central questions is whether and how the patterns of commodification penetrating colonial relations have changed in the post-apartheid period. From a dialogic (and, in this context, also deconstructive) viewpoint, the binarism created between the ‘pre-’ and ‘post-’ in historical thinking as well as the opposition between commodifying and empowering strategies can be intensively interrogated. When one thinks of a South African literary text having engendered the most contradictory responses and intensive public debate among critics both white and black, right and left, in South Africa and abroad, the best example is probably Elsa Joubert’s Poppie10 (written and published originally in Afrikaans as Die swerfjare van Poppie Nongena). The text has been interpreted and re-interpreted so much in the thirty years since its publication that it has itself become a commodity. In South African and postcolonial literary criticism and history, it has been employed for quite divergent agendas:11 both praised as an example of ‘responsible’ and ‘humanist’ white writing and condemned as a misrepresenting and commodifying text. Avoiding such plain judgement, it would be more productive to consider the novel in all its ambi-

10

The first English edition had The Long Journey of Poppie Nongena as its title; references here are to the later edition with the shorter title. 11 For an overview and critical analysis of the novel’s reception, see David Schalkwyk, “The Flight from Politics: An Analysis of the South African Reception of Poppie Ongena,” Journal of South African Studies 12.2 (1986): 183–95. The book has also been taken up in broader postcolonial research – for example, Ann McClintock’s Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995) and Whitlock’s The Intimate Empire. In both of the latter instances, the novel is referred to or analyzed within a comparative (post-)imperial framework.

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guities – as both participating in commodification and at the same time using its power-related position to subvert the entrenched ideologies. As the text’s reception history clearly demonstrates, a lot depends on the ideological position of the reader: the text has generated many varied interpretations among different cultural and political groups. The novel is based on a series of recorded interviews of a black woman who during the late 1970s insurgencies in the aftermath of the 1976 Soweto revolt came to Elsa Joubert, already an established writer and journalist, to tell the story of the ordeal she underwent because of apartheid policies. The strongest critique of Joubert’s novel has been its manipulation of a black woman’s narrative voice. In her study of representations of black women in Afrikaans fiction, Judy Gardner extensively analyzes the narrative techniques employed in Poppie, regarding it as an exemplary work of the late-apartheid period. She identifies a number of strategies resulting in what she calls Poppie’s ‘dubbed voice’ and, consequently, in the novel’s depoliticization: making use of an external narrator who relates almost seventy percent of the story (starting from the title, with its external focus on the protagonist); adopting the novel as genre; rendering the character fatalistic and loyal to the white people abusing her; and, not least, the author’s suggestion (made by Joubert in several interviews) that thebook be read as not pursuing any political agenda – just as a story of an ordinary black woman.12 Gardner’s important critique of Joubert’s novel, however, seems caught in the trap of a one-dimensional vision of literary texts as unmediated representations of reality. As David Schalkwyk suggests in his examination of Poppie’s highly contradictory reception, the novel, with all its supposed ‘achievements’ and ‘flaws’, should be seen in its historical and cultural context, such as the notions of ‘literature’ and ‘literariness’ dominant during apartheid. In a comparative perspective, these notions formed oppositional modes of discourse in black and white literary studies of the 1970–80s (also echoed in some later works): whereas white, particularly Afrikaans, literary criticism was dominated by aestheticism and universal literary values, black literary discourse was constructed as overtly political and directly connected with black people’s experience. Given Joubert’s dual allegiance here, it is important to grant her perspective a due degree of complexity. What did she understand by ‘political’ and ‘literary’ at that time? What was her position in 12

See Judy Gardner, Impaired Vision: Portraits of Black Women in the Afrikaans Novel (1948–1988) (Amsterdam: VU U P , 1991): 177–227.

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the Afrikaner literary establishment as a woman and as an author writing particularly about black Africans (not only in Poppie but also in her earlier semi-documentary novels and travel writing)? In fact, the novel and its divergent interpretations suggest Joubert’s determined effort to maintain a balance between different epistemological, aesthetic, and political positions implying contradictory assumptions about fiction and truth. Even though the author states in the Preface that “nothing is added that was not experienced by Poppie and her family,” the narrative is subsequently referred to and described as a ‘novel’ by the writer and critics alike. The fact that the work was published as a novel presumably indicates that the author proactively acknowledges the effects of her mediation as a white writer (her intervention in the communication between a disempowered black South African woman and a privileged white reader). Such transformation of a documentary first-person narrative into a ‘novel’ has produced a huge readership. At the same time, it has spurred debate, in South Africa and internationally, on problems of representation and, more practically, on the multiple discrimination of black women. One could argue that making the work a literary fact in the world served to integrate a marginalized person’s narrative into the Afrikaans literary canon (while maintaining its marginal status, of course). On the one hand, this might be considered as a sign of liberal benevolence and as marketing oneself as a ‘progressive writer’; on the other, the borderline narrative mediating between the ‘documentary’ and the ‘literary’, both adapting and resisting, could be viewed as a challenge to the canon. At the same time, the ambiguities of the writer’s position – in apartheid South Africa and in Joubert’s situation after the publication of Poppie – are clearly reflected in the ideological discrepancies between different interviews, articles, critical essays, and literary texts of this period. What could not have been said to the interviewers and readers of the conservative and even liberal editions shortly after the novel’s release could be written several years later in an essay for a collection with an articulate social focus, where it took its place alongside other contributions critically examining the South African writer’s position and his / her responsibilities in a radicalized political situation. Here, Joubert places her work explicitly outside of the literary domain, claiming that its lack of ‘literariness’ is due to the primacy of the socio-political message. This message, so the argument goes, was the author’s main intention in embarking on the ‘collaboration’ project. (That such an excuse had to be made demonstrates the power and authority of ‘the literary’ in the discourse of

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Afrikaans culture.) The making of this choice for a white female author, according to Joubert, was facilitated by the points of contact between the two women – their ‘belonging’ to the same ‘tradition’, described in linguo-cultural terms, as well as by the specific historical moment: The notion of Literature was wiped out in the urgency of the truth that had to be told. For the first time in my writing life I really did not care about literature, I just wanted to try and make real the life of a black woman. It was possible because her home language was Afrikaans and she had a long Afrikaans tradition behind her. It was also possible, I can say in all modesty, because I had my tradition […] behind me. Both of us had come long ways to meet in Poppie. Whatever can be said for or against Poppie, whatever its flaws might be, it was a striving towards the truth.13

However essentialist such claims of striving for ‘the truth’ might seem, in the apartheid context, especially within the constraints of the Afrikaans literary canon, such statements reveal the changing patterns and contexts of dialogue between the white/ Afrikaans writer and his/ her reader. The fact that Joubert aligns her works with those of black writers like Nat Nakasa, Can Themba, Ezekiel Mphahlele, and Casey Motsisi speaks eloquently for that suggestion. Along with the evidence of certain commodifying practices (such as placing the black township woman, speaking Afrikaans as her second language, within the “long Afrikaans tradition”), Poppie and the debates around it reflected significant shifts in white South African literature and culture. The issue of ‘realism’, as a generic convention, and the search for ‘the truth’ could be considered as the space of tension between different texts and narrative strategies within the late-apartheid period. The primary questions in this context would be: In which mode are the events presented? How are realist or fantastic conventions translated into a specific text? How are the narrators’ identities shaped? And, finally, how do the texts and their epiphenomena address readers’ expectations, sufficiently different in various times and cultural contexts? This field of concern, reflected in the commodification theme, constitutes the main ground for the following comparison of Elsa Joubert’s Poppie with another text written under the same historical circumstances – Wilma Stockenström’s novel The Expedition to the Baobab Tree (originally 13

Elsa Joubert, “Rassekonflik: hoe dit my raak,” in Skrywer en gemeenskap: Tien jaar Afrikaanse Skrywersgilde, ed. Charles Malan & Barto Smit (Pretoria: H A U M , 1985): 205. (My tr.)

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published in Afrikaans as Die kremetartekspedisie). Unlike Poppie, this novel, narrated and focalized entirely by a black slave woman presenting her life-story, lays no claim to ‘realism’ of representation. In this postmodernist narrative, time and place are rendered ‘indefinite’ (we can only guess that the action is taking place in the seventeenth-century Cape colony); the protagonist’s name is unknown, and only towards the end are we able to reconstruct the full picture of her life out of random pieces of the non-linear narration. The reader is given some clues to connect this life-story with the history of (South) Africa, and some associations could be made with the contemporary reality of the country under apartheid.14 However, any links are meant to be imaginatively constructed, across the time and space of coloniality, between white and black gendered subjectivities. The novel was initially received as one of the first examples of postmodernist fiction in Afrikaans and praised accordingly for its stylistic innovations – as advancing the evolution of the aesthetic trend started by the Sestiger (Sixties) generation15 and seen as a continuation of it. Later criticism focused also on the novel’s political dimension,16 which, I would argue, is directly related to its narrative strategies. The stylistic markers of (post)modernist fiction (fragmented narrative, metafictional and generally self-reflexive focus, ironic style, etc.) appear to function as political when appearing in a black woman’s narrative – at the intersection of genres and modes of discourse – a ‘slave narrative’ and twentieth-century Western writing, universalistic ideas of white feminism, and the particular contexts of black women’s oppression. The novel is narrated from a distinctly feminist perspective, thus prompting the question of whether it is not a commodifying technique to let a black subaltern woman speak as an ‘agent’ of Western discourse. The counterargument would posit that it is precisely such social oppositions that the novel is designed to deconstruct in its fictional space: the black subaltern woman is 14

The allusions to slave trade between West and Southern Africa, the expeditions to the inner regions of the continent (specifically, the failed expeditions to the legendary kingdom of Monomotapa), clashes between the Khoisan and black African tribes serve as a cultural ‘map’ for the reader’s historical orientation in the otherwise highly abstract and allegorical narrative. 15 John Kannemeyer, Die Afrikaanse literatuur 1652–1987 (Kaapstad: Human & Rousseau, 1990): 416. 16 Ampie Coetzee, ”Die kremetartekspedisie: ’n Marxistiese dekonstruksie,” Standpunte 84.3 (1984): 39–49.

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able to articulate her subjectivity in a highly sophisticated manner; in the course of her life, she turns from an oppressed slave into a privileged one (and, implicitly, maintains her distinction from other slaves – herself a potential oppressor); later on, she becomes a goddess for a Khoisan tribe. Thus, she is ascribed an unfixed, fluid identity, which is arguably not just a tribute to the postmodernist aesthetic but, rather, a vision of current social relations as they are refracted on an individual level – in the narrator’s memory of herself or in her final reflections on the reality of her existence and her powers of authoring the self as well as the world outside: The insult of not being allowed to be human, that I have overcome. All ugly visions too, of hairy huts and skew door-openings that try to entice me in and lock me up, all false solutions, all wrong exits; for I myself determine appearance and reality. I rule. I dream outwards and with the self-assurance of those who have long ago discerned that it is all just appearance I smile to myself, follow my own path diligently, will drink this parting poison gift in the nourishing awareness that dream leads to dream.17

Even though this ultimate determination to ‘rule’ her own life and the world – inwards and outwards – is expressed on the verge of her suicide, it is the act of making her last (and her first real) choice that is being stressed. It is against the odds of “not being allowed to be human,” in all her roles and manifestations, from slave to goddess, that the conscious transcendence of the life/ death border is taking place. By defying this humiliation and accepting it with the irony of the self-assured, she exposes the absurdity of existing attitudes and relations, and transforms them. At least in her own mind, she assumes the position of “overcoming” and self-determined action, even where it appears to be inaction. With this subversive force and implicit social critique, mostly present on a sub-textual level, the novel might be regarded as even more convincingly engaging with social reality than Joubert’s collaborative work. Although the two books are written in quite distinct modes (one ‘realist’ and the other ‘postmodernist’) and make use of different stylistic registers (the dialect of the working-class black /coloured population of the Cape vs the intensively poetic language of the white intelligentsia), these could be ultimately seen as performative strategies: both narratives balance and negotiate

17

Wilma Stockenström, The Expedition to the Baobab Tree, tr. J.M. Coetzee (Die kremetartekspedisie, 1981; London & Boston M A : Faber & Faber, 1983): 101.

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the ‘real’ and the ‘fictional’, the ‘high’ and the ‘low’, in their own ways. The connection of The Expedition and Poppie to the real hardships of (black) women across time and space is to be found primarily in their focus on the hierarchical relations in which the characters, narrators, and authors are involved. Both texts interpret relations across race and class lines as the ‘relations of production’ – those of master and slave, employer and employee – paralleled on the textual level by the author–character relation (between a white author and a black character/ narrator, and between white and black first-person narrators). This complex love–hate relationship emphasizes the interdependence of roles which sometimes change into their opposite. What makes such an interdependency difficult is the almost insurmountable problem of (mis) communication: in a situation of deeply rooted inequalities and abuse, any act of conversation, of speaking and hearing, is rendered virtually impossible. This, however, does not imply the absence of any relationship or dialogue, in the Bakhtinian sense. In Stockenström’s novel, the emphasis on the hierarchical nature of most relationships refers to the complexities of such situations. For instance, any communication between the similarly equal female slaves turns out to be impossible when the autobiographical narrator assumes an authorial function to interpret them. Similarly, viewed as a goddess by the Khoisan and thus someone from another, superior order, the protagonist feels isolated and virtually mute. In contrast to this, her communication with the elder black women who played the role of her adoptive mothers is remembered as uninhibited interaction free of any domination or subjection. This interaction is, however, depicted as part of the idyllic world of the protagonist’s childhood memories. The novels of Joubert and Stockentröm were among the first South African literary texts to engage with issues of cross-cultural communication, particularly from the gender perspective. Those acts of communication become even more problematized in post-apartheid writing, of which Marlene Van Niekerk’s works are among the most representative. In her 2004 novel Agaat (the English translation was also published under the title The Way of the Women18), the two women protagonists – the white mistress Milla, the owner and the ‘ruler’ of the farm, and her coloured maid Agaat, whom she has educated and taught to be a perfect house manager, her eyes and ears, her right 18

Although the quotations are from the re-titled edition, the novel will be further referred to as Agaat, as in the first, South African, English edition.

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hand (the bitter irony is that Agaat’s right hand is disabled) – are connected in multiple ways: as partners and opponents, accomplices and rivals. Their ‘relations of production’ are at times transformed into most intimate ones – of mother and daughter, of mothers for Milla’s son, of friends and sisters – with all the typical sympathies and tensions involved. This highly vexed relationship of both imitation and resistance passes through various stages, the last of which encompasses the last months before Milla’s death when, completely paralyzed, she lies in bed immersed in her memories, with Agaat serving as her only connection to the world outside. This turns out to be the moment of revelation and re-vision: being cut off from her normal surroundings, Milla realizes that throughout the larger part of her life her only true companion has been Agaat. As she puts it, there is only “I and you,” as at the moment when that coloured girl took on the role of midwife to help Milla deliver her child and as when, thirty years later, she decides to take care of the terminally ill Milla. While, according to the story, Milla is, oddly enough, the one who cannot speak (she can communicate only with her eyes), it is her narrative voice that we are hearing for the most part – interpreting Agaat and Agaat’s interpretations of herself. Here, physical and social disabilities have a double status: they are represented as both impeding communication (by creating major gaps and silences) and enabling it (through identification, as both protagonists appear to be dependent on each other). The condition of being enabled/ disabled is rendered as not something absolute and is accompanied by the constant questioning of a speaker’s authority: Milla is herself interpreted/remembered by an external narrator; Agaat is ‘speaking’, sometimes even imposing her will, through the messages of her body language and her (mis)interpretations of Milla’s orders and wishes. Even her reading for Milla and her choice of reading material can be seen as expressions of her agency. However, even though both women come to feel the impossibility of living without each other, their communication remains thwarted: they have never spoken to each other in an open, sincere way. They have always relied on a language of signs – looks, gestures, overheard talks, spying on each other, reading each other’s personal letters and diaries. It could be seen as a metaphor of the South African situation as a whole – one of the notorious doublebinds of postcoloniality: the living corpse of the white woman, which is presented as the only one having clear consciousness and vision (thus both supporting and mocking white readers’ expectations), accompanied by the black woman who wins the battle by refining the oppressor’s own methods. The

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reason for this miscommunication, as suggested by the narrative, is the total lack of trust between all characters, especially the two women protagonists, which results in their endless manipulations of each other, in acts of mimicking, abuse, and othering. An intriguing connection between Elsa Joubert’s novel and this story of power-relations is explicitly established in Agaat. Milla’s husband, representing the racist ideology of most conservative Afrikaners, points out Agaat’s affinity with Joubert’s famous character: he compares a possible story of Agaat’s life which she could tell to liberal white readers (if Milla transcribed it) with Agaat’s way of communicating with her mistress (her adaptation to Milla’s tastes, demands, and expectations expressed, for example, in Agaat’s obsession with whiteness, cleanliness, and order): Exactly what Poppie Whatsername also did, recounted her miseries as she knew the writer wanted to hear them, a story that could be sold, it’s being translated into all kinds of languages nowadays, they say. Even shares in the profits, the kaffir-girl. Remarkable business, Afrikaners making a name for themselves with coon stories that they pick up in the backyard and spread far and wide as gospel truth.19

Besides being a typically exploitative viewpoint, this remark, ironically, articulates a critique of literary writing and reading by white liberal South Africans. It can also be read as an alternative view of a subaltern woman’s agency: not a victim but an accomplice, a manipulator trapped in her own strategies. She cannot speak out her real experience, but she can tell the message she is expected to tell, she can adapt her own story in order to manipulate the white audience. In this way, she is exercising a kind of power over them: not a victim but an author of her story. The woman in The Expedition to the Baobab Tree is not victimized, either. Although she suffers abuse and cruelty from her white masters, she gradually adapts her behaviour to their needs and in this way manipulates them and enjoys her small powers of being the favourite mistress. Following the failure of the expedition and the death of all its members, she remains alone in the uninhabited forest, where she has no choice but to adjust herself to the laws of the wild by trying to learn from animals how to find water and food but feeling an eternal stranger who will

19

Marlene van Niekerk, The Way of the Women, tr. Michael Heyns (Agaat, 2004; tr. 2006; London: Little, Brown, 2008): 536.

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never be accepted by the world of nature. Some parallels could be seen between the condition experienced by the slave woman and that of Milla in Agaat: both are virtually denied any way of communication with the world as they know it, which results in an intensive process of self-examination through remembering and reconsidering the past. This indicates their complete integration in the society of colonial exploitation, their immersion in its culture. The writing which constructs power-relations between women of different colour – imbued with hypocrisy and distrust, but also with emotional attachment and sympathy – features the processes of mutual commodification. Black women in these narratives appear to be too ‘civilized’, too objectified to become subjects of their own discourse. However, the same could be said about their white madams and authors subjected to the conventions of patriarchal culture and literary canon. It seems symptomatic that all of the female characters discussed here at some point become confronted with a world that seemingly lies outside the system of exploitation, where they attempt to create ‘a room of their own’. The tree trunk where the slave woman lives, Poppie’s sacral space of the church, or in the hospital bed to which Milla is confined become such private isolated spaces enabling an uninhibited expression of creativity. Indeed, women’s creativity in all these novels – expressed in writing, storytelling, embroidery, mothering – has an ambiguous status. On the one hand, it offers a way out of slavery and oppression; on the other, creative work is also to a certain extent involved in relations of production, the personal space being subjected to the public discourse of appropriation. Poppie’s escape from the unbearable reality of subjugation into a religious experience makes her tolerant of brutal exploitation and thus supports the status quo. In The Expedition, the woman’s writing on the bark of the tree, her self-introspection from within / into “the belly of the tree,” appears to make no sense in the absence of someone to read and interpret her signs. For Agaat, embroidery provides a means to express herself in a creative way. However, being part of the activities that serve the goal of “cultural development of the nation,” as prescribed by the embroidery guide and Milla’s teaching, ultimately keeps her within the bounds of colonial culture. Every activity, then, is included in the production process, is not private, is not just leisure. Hence, in the end, the power-balance remains intact; its destabilizations are for the most part local and personal, usually taking place on the verge of death or suicide. However, the latter can be considered as expressing a potential, or a wish, for future change.

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The issues of the power and agency possessed by the figures of black women are certainly crucial to contemporary South African (women’s) writing. In all three novels, women protagonists are conceived of as simultaneously typical and exceptional: their determination and courage stem from a women’s lineage, ‘real’ or virtual (in Poppie and Agaat), or from a sense of belonging, though temporary, to an idealized community of women (in The Expedition). In all these instances, women’s moral strength forms part of this legacy and is connected with the notion of tradition, of preserving the ‘natural’ ways which have come to be seen as ‘unnatural’ in the current social order. However, this strength is always coupled with weakness – women’s inability or, more often, unwillingness to break the vicious circle of manipulation (evident in, for instance, their employing of conventional ‘women’s’ methods of influence). Though giving them some confidence, this turns into reversals and rehearsals of mutual fear, distrust, and hatred. All these strong women are at some point compared to marionettes and dolls. Finally, the black protagonists struggling against oppression in one or another way appear to be wholly surrounded by white authors, characters, narrators, readers, and critics, as the novels obviously address first and foremost white readers. These issues reveal the ambiguities of cross-cultural representation and communication: power appears to be charged with weakness, culture with nature, benevolence with abuse. Furthermore, it seems important that besides recognition of the persisting power-structures impeding communication across racial and class lines, in later writing, exemplified here by Van Niekerk’s Agaat, those patterns are increasingly reflected upon, which could be seen as the first step towards their subversion. In this vein, a dialogic focus of reading might facilitate an awareness of communication problems and, ultimately, contribute to attempts at structural change. As the present analysis has endeavoured to demonstrate, these three novels by white South African women writers foreground relations that are not reducible to simple oppositions along racial, ethnic, or class lines even when their intersections are considered. In this reading, I have therefore drawn attention to the inner dialogicity of these narratives and of every ideological position within them. I have endeavoured to indicate some important tensions between the commodifying techniques of authorial discourse and the counterstrategies of resisting subjugation and even attempts to commodify the images of those who embody narrative and social authority. This might suggest a new comparative and historically conscious perspective on reading South African literature from both the apartheid and post-apartheid periods. Such a per-

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spective is open to emergent subversions and changes in power-structures as well as to unexpected connections across literary and social borders.

WORKS CITED Bakhtin, Mikhail M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, tr. Caryl Emerson & Michael Holquist (Austin: U of Texas P , 1981). Coetzee, Ampie. “Die kremetartekspedisie: ’n Marxistiese dekonstruksie,” Standpunte 84.3 (1984): 39–49. Gardner, Judy. Impaired Vision: Portraits of Black Women in the Afrikaans Novel (1948–1988) (Amsterdam: VU U P , 1991). Joubert, Elsa. Poppie, tr. Elsa Joubert (Die swerfjare van Poppie Nongena, 1978, tr. 1980; Coronet, 1986). ——. “Rassekonflik: hoe dit my raak,” in Skrywer en gemeenskap: Tien jaar Afrikaanse Skrywersgilde, ed. Charles Malan & Barto Smit (Pretoria: H A U M , 1985): 200–06. Kannemeyer, John. Die Afrikaanse literatuur 1652–1987 (Kaapstad: Human & Rousseau, 1990). McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995). Minh-ha, Trinh T. Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana U P , 1989). Schalkwyk, David. “The Flight from Politics: An Analysis of the South African Reception of Poppie Nongena,” Journal of South African Studies 12.2 (1986): 183– 95. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson & Lawrence Grossberg (London: Macmillan, 1988): 271–313. ——. In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York & London: Methuen, 1987). Stockenström, Wilma. The Expedition to the Baobab Tree, tr. J.M. Coetzee (Die kremetartekspedisie, 1981; London & Boston M A : Faber & Faber, 1983). Van der Merwe, Chris. Breaking Barriers: Stereotypes and the Changing of Values in Afrikaans Writing, 1875–1990 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994). Van Niekerk, Marlene. The Way of the Women, tr. Michiel Heyns (Agaat, 2004, 2006; London: Little, Brown, 2008). Whitlock, Gillian. The Intimate Empire: Reading Women’s Autobiography (London & New York: Cassell, 2000).

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Phantasmagorical Representations of Postcolonial Cityscapes in Salman Rushdie’s Fury (2002) and Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found (2004) ——————————

C ECILE S ANDTEN

We live in the age of the city. The city is everything to us – it consumes us, and for that reason we glorify it.1

Metropolis, Postcolonial Metropolis, and the Aesthetics of Urban Representation

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possesses such a dynamic that it comes as no surprise that “for the first time the urban population of the earth will outnumber the rural,”2 with people all around the world migrating to the world’s great cities. Such metropolises are meltingpots of peoples, cultures, and languages, histories, architecture, and media representations. And frequently, as Walter Benjamin argued, chiefly via commonplace-book quotations from other authors, in his section on the ‘flâneur’ in The Arcades Project, they have – especially in literary modernity – been

1

HE PROCESS OF URBANIZATION

Onookome Okome, “Writing the Anxious City: Images of Lagos in Nigerian Home Video Film,” in Under the Siege: Four African Cities – Freetown, Johannesburg, Kinshasa, Lagos, ed. Okwui Enwezor (Ostfildern–Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2002): 316. 2 Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (London: Verso, 2006): 1–2.

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associated with images of the labyrinth, forest, and oceanic torrents3 and, above all else, chaos.4 Metropolises also function as a testament to different historical (colonial) eras, as well as representing the splendour and decay of their respective (former colonial) society. Moreover, they are hotbeds of radical and political tendencies, expressions, and subcultures. They are also multicultural meeting-places, contradictory urban places / spaces characterized by constant vertical and horizontal expansion, juxtaposition, simultaneity, heterogeneity, and acceleration of life, and they are primarily marked by a lack of space, crowds of people, and density. The term ‘metropolis’ has its origin in the Greek words mētēr (‘mother’) and pólis (‘polity’). Taken together, the two words have come to denote ‘mother city’. In ancient Greek history, the term ‘metropolis’ was used in order to describe “the parent state of a colony”5 – the centre, in contrast to the periphery. According to Ashcroft, Griffith & Tiffin, “the first specific use of the term to cover the modern colonial situation, in which ‘metropolitan’

3

See Walter Benjamin, “[The Flâneur],” in Benjamin, The Arcades Project, tr. Howard Eiland & Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge M A & London: Belknap P / Harvard U P , 1999): 446-55. Original as “Der Flaneur,” in Benjamin, Das PassagenWerk, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (1927–49; Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 5; Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1982): 524–69. See esp. “The city is the realization of that ancient dream of humanity, the labyrinth” (29); “The masses in Baudelaire. [...] Finally, within the labyrinth of the city, the masses are the newest and most inscrutable labyrinth” (446); “The tangle of the forest as archetype of mass existence” (444); “There is an effort to master the new experiences of the city within the framework of the old traditional experiences of nature. Hence the schemata of the virgin forest and the sea (Meryon and Ponson du Terrail)” (447); “ ‘ Now [the city] is a / torrent where you are rolled, buffeted, cast up, and swept to one side and the other.’ Edmond Jaloux, ‘Le Dernier Flâneur’ ” (435–36; “On Victor Hugo: ‘[...] He claimed that the deafening brouhaha of Paris produced in him the same effect as the sea.’ Edouard Drumont” (434); “The urban in Balzac: ‘ [...] the crashing of the ocean’s waves. [...].’ Ernst Robert Curtius” (436). 4 For London as an example of this, see Bernd–Peter Lange, Die Großstadt in der britischen Gegenwartsliteratur (Oldenburg: Bibliotheksgesellschaft Oldenburg, 1995): 1–31. 5 Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths & Helen Tiffin, Key Concepts in Post-Colonial Studies (London: Routledge, 1998): 138.

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means ‘belonging to or constituting the mother country’, is listed in the O E D as 1806.”6 In colonial and imperial eurocentric ways of thinking, the metropolis was seen as the seat of political, economic, and cultural power, a perception that has remained unchanged. In particular, London, Paris, and Moscow have traditionally been seen as centres of European and East European expansion. London and Paris were, in fact, the centres of major colonial empires and remain good examples of world cities that have been amply described and depicted in literature, film, and academic writing. In (post)modern times they are forced to share their status as world cities with one ‘older’ metropolis, New York City, and more recently with ‘new’ metropolises such as Delhi, Lagos, Mumbai, Kolkata, Cape Town, and Hong Kong,7 which contradict almost every defining feature of the ‘modern’ city. Hong Kong is the most impressive example of a new form of urban development, the rapidly expanding metropolis, defined as ‘high-rise high-density megalopolis’. These ‘Tiger Cities’ have taken a huge leap onto the world stage, catching up on three hundred years of European urban development in just one generation. They are characterized by many levels on which people live, work, eat, and travel. People also live extremely close together in the ‘Third-World’ and ‘new’ metropolises such as Cairo, Mumbai, and Kolkata – in favelas and in slums, and sometimes as illegal squatters. India’s five most populated cities have become megacities: Kolkata, Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai, Bangalore. They each have a population of over ten million inhabitants; Kolkata and Mumbai over fifteen million. In the Western world, industrialization or modernity have been the two defining features of the megacities. Conversely, the ‘Third-World’ megacities are often perceived in relation to the number of people living or moving there, often depicted as phantasmagorical,8 with frightening images of the city in the Western media.9 Phan-

6

Ashcroft, Griffiths & Tiffin, Key Concepts in Post-Colonial Studies, 138. My focus is primarily on metropolises which are part of the geographical and political entities formerly under British control. 8 A quality, of course, not limited to Third-World urbanism, as representations of Western cities (by Blake, Piranesi, Dickens and countless others) testify; cf. also the following citation by Benjamin: “ ‘ [...] there exists ... a phantasmagorical representation of Paris (and, more generally, of the big city) [....].’ Roger Caillois”; “[The Flâneur],” 439. 7

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tasmagoria generally refers to a shifting array of images and events, imagined or invented. Maria Kaika and Erik Swyngedouw discuss the phantasmagorical nature of the city in terms of its basic technologies, which appear and disapppear, leaving the traces of its past (dams, towers, sanitation projects, railways, underground constructions).10 Graeme Gilloch defines urban phantasmagoria in terms of the commodification of basic human needs (food, electricity, water), and the demarcation of its (imagined) physical space and the myth of progress, by which the city is separated from the country or the village.11 Further, I refer to urban phantasmagoria as a complex juxtaposition of physical space and social strata, abundance and scarcity of resources, over-consumption and under-consumption, class formation, alienation, exploitation, and domination. However, the relationship between colonialism and urbanism and, in particular, the relationship between postcolonialism and the metropolis have been “woefully neglected.”12 I will therefore argue along the lines of Rüdiger Kunow, who writes that after the ‘cultural turn’ we now have to engage in the ‘spatial turn’.13 On the other hand, the city as a central theme in (post)modern fiction and film, as Tobias Wachinger has eloquently outlined,14 has been a recurrent and productive topic during the last two to three decades. Scholars 9

See Davis, Planet of Slums; on this aspect, see also Robert Neuwirth, Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, A New Urban World (London: Routledge, 2006), Mythos Metropole, ed. Gotthard Fuchs (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1995), and Gerhard Schweizer, Metropole, Moloch, Mythos: Eine Reise durch die Megastädte Indiens (Stuttgart: Klett–Cotta, 2004). 10 See Kaika & Swyngedouw, “Fetishising the Modern City: the Phantasmagoria of Urban Technological Networks,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 24.1 (2000): 120–38. 11 See Graeme Gilloch, “Urban Optics: Film, Phantasmagoria and the City in Benjamin and Kracauer,” New Formations 61 (2007): 115–31. 12 Anthony D. King, “World Cities: Global? Postcolonial? Postimperial? Or Just the Result of Happenstance? Some Cultural Comments,” in The Global Cities Reader, ed. Neil Brenner & Roger Keil (London & New York: Routledge, 2006): 320. 13 Rüdiger Kunow, “Spaces Grown too Large for the Self,” in Postmodern New York City: Transfiguring Spaces – Raum-Transformationen, ed. Günter Lenz & Utz Riese (Heidelberg: Winter, 2003): 186. 14 See Tobias Wachinger, “Städteräume / Stadttexte unter der Oberfläche: Schichtung als Paradigma des zeitgenössischen britischen ‘Großstadtromans’,” Poetica 31 (1999): 261–301.

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are increasingly aware of the fact that, with the creation of such megapolises as Paris, London, Madrid, Moscow, and New York, there has also developed a particular interest in literary representation, with the city being ‘written’ into existence. As an aesthetic transformation of a real metropolis into a fictitious one, a novel or film functions as a microcosm of society, illustrating possibilities for experiencing and representing the cityscape. Generally, it is possible to identify two central modes of discourse in cityscape texts or metropolitan literature, as in contemporary ‘London fiction’. On the one hand, there is postmodern discourse, which deconstructs the concepts of city and reality and foregrounds textuality; on the other, there is the recently emergent postcolonial discourse of the metropolis, which focuses on the city as multicultural place/ space and its capacity to accommodate a variety of cultural and ethnic identities.15 Ever since writers such as Charles Dickens and Émile Zola, and sociologists such as Georg Simmel, there has been a particular interest in writing and analyzing the city, so that especially the novel and the city have – in the course of modernity – complemented each other. Since the early-twentieth century and the rise and diversification of modernism(s), a whole set of characteristics such as intensification of urban life through the constant influx of people and technologies have made themselves felt in exacerbated form. These are – paradigmatically – responsible for a new form of city-text: namely, the novel /text / film of the metropolis, in which narrative structures are broken up. Concentrating on these aspects of literary texts enables us to focus on the aesthetic “topography of the global city”16 and to grasp its imaginary, textual, multilayered, and semantic inscription. This combination of city and ‘globalized modernities’, a term productively employed by Frank Schulze–Engler, will be taken on board in my exploration

15

There are numerous narratives that can be interpreted as city novels: for instance, Thomas Pynchon’s V (1963) and The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Peter Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor (1985), and Doris Lessing’s The Four-Gated City (1969), or as ‘London novels’ – for example: Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988), Emma Tennant’s Two Women of London (1989), Penelope Lively’s City of the Mind (1991), Diran Adebayo’s Some Kind of Black (1996), and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000). For a discussion of black and Asian British films, in particular those focusing on London, see Barbara Korte & Claudia Sternberg, Bidding for the Mainstream? Black and Asian British Film since the 1990s (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004). 16 Kunow, “Spaces Grown too Large for the Self,” 183.

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of the concept of postcolonialism. The postcolonial metropolis is, even more than the modern one, characterized by the aspects mentioned above, but also by issues such as diaspora, the search for identity (of the individual and the group), multiculturalism, and commodification. I will, first, focus on Fury (2001), Salman Rushdie’s ‘American’ novel, in which the writer paints a picture of New York City the space of which has grown too large for the diasporic self.17 Secondly, I will analyze Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found (2004), Suketu Mehta’s autobiographical, semi-documentary travelogue. In the case of Rushdie, the writer himself has been transformed into a commodity, especially with regard to the media hype surrounding the fatwa, whereas, in the case of Mehta, it is his Maximum City that has gained commodity-status, as the extravagant claims made especially in advertising and promotional material have us believe. Both texts set a new tone in representing the specific cityscape of the metropolis in a postcolonial context, introducing alternative forms and modes of perception and viewing the urban scene through the eyes of a diasporic, ‘flâneur’.

Spatial-Semantic Layering and the Effects of Depth and Historicity on the City Perceptions of (post)colonial expansion characterize the images of many metropolises today, basically due to processes of migration, either from developing countries into world/ global cities or from the countryside into the metropolis. Thus, ‘city-texts’ are often marked by the dialectic of centre and periphery, which is also a dominant issue in the media. The textual representation of the metropolis is frequently carried out through meta-narrative strategies and even via foundational myths.18 This suggests that cities are historically multi-layered: there is a constant exchange of past and present which can be found in the reality of the metropolis (e.g., street names, monuments). Thus, the metropolis becomes a palimpsest to which the text corresponds. In many narratives, films, and historiographic writings about cities in the twentieth century, whether fictional or documentary, the city itself is the primary subject.19 The city no longer serves only as background but becomes the

17

See Kunow, “Spaces Grown too Large for the Self,” passim. See Wachinger, “Städteräume/Stadttexte unter der Oberfläche,” passim. 19 See “Städteräume/Stadttexte unter der Oberfläche,” 261–301. 18

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story’s central theme, a fact reflected in the German term ‘Großstadtroman’ (= ‘novel of the metropolis’). Characteristically, the perception of the ‘new’ metropolises is that of an even more intense and often nightmarish inner life. Wachinger accordingly speaks of the breaking-up of the urban dimension of depth in terms of what he calls a ‘space-semantic principle of layering’.20 Moreover, the ‘Großstadtroman’ is marked by its subtext as well as a discourse on the metropolis, including intertextual references. However, as we are talking about a ‘recording’ or transcription of the city, by way of its narrative presentation and structuring, there is never only one medium present but an ongoing discursive and transversal medial display expressed in horizontal conjunctions and assemblages, bringing to light the hidden historicity of the city, often with a touch of mysterious subterranean conspiracy.21 Metropolises have come into existence in several forms: first, there is horizontal expansion; secondly, there is the underground dimension; and, thirdly, there is the expansion of space through the utilization of verticality through, for example, skyscrapers, which, yet again, enhance the density of civilization by juxtaposition and layering. The space beneath the surface has traditionally been described as one of chaos – the cellar or basement, a space of the arcane and uncanny which lacks stability and security. The underground space is often seen as an imaginary dimension which spreads beneath the city’s surface and constitutes a parallel environment, and which Benjamin sees as one of the domains of the flâneur.22 The notion of the ‘flâneur’ can also be linked to the idea of the juxtaposition and layering of times; the flâneur is a “man of the crowd”23 with the power to simultaneously move in space and develop a form of illustrative vision. But the concept of ‘flânerie’ is characterized by the dialectic of being anonymous, invisible, while at the same time being part of and surrounded by the crowd.24 The flâneur strolls the streets ostensibly with20

“Städteräume/Stadttexte unter der Oberfläche,” 261–301. See “Städteräume/Stadttexte unter der Oberfläche,” 261–301. 22 “Maxim of the flâneur: ‘In our standardized and uniform world, it is right here, deep below the surface, that we must go. [...]’ Daniel Halévy”; Benjamin, (Arcades Project, “[The Flâneur],” 444. 23 See Benjamin, citing Baudelaire on Armand de Pontmartin’s review of Edgar Allan Poe’s stories, in “[The Flâneur],” 454. 24 See Benjamin, quoting Baudelaire: “ ‘ The perfect flâneur, ... [...] to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the center of the world, yet to remain 21

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out purpose but absorbing the scene. He is solitary, contemplative, and hidden from the world.25 Most people are familiar with New York City, a magnetic metropolis that has always been represented as a city of the arts and modern architectural wonders, and as the hub of world business. Mumbai (Bombay), by contrast, has always been depicted as a metropolis characterized by an absence of planning, by rampant settlement, and by growing social problems; India’s most hybrid and complex city, it suffers from “too-muchness.”26 Yet Mumbai is the Indian metropolis of business and Bollywood, both of which already embody the dynamic of commodification. All this implies that certain images and particular discourses of the metropolis prevail. Both Salman Rushdie and Suketu Mehta play with these, simultaneously addressing their own diasporic state of being in-between. Accordingly, Kunow observes that cities figure no longer merely as locations (of production, power or control) […] but increasingly also as destinations, as goals and end points of migrations, dislocations and diasporic life forms.27

They can thus be linked to the notion of ‘metroglorification’, the worship of the metropolis, where everybody is in search of the American Dream. And, as Homi Bhabha puts it, It is the city that the migrants, the minorities, the diasporic come to […] it is the city which provides the space in which emergent identifications and new social movements of the people are played out.28

In the following discussion of Fury and Maximum City, I wish, on the one hand, to draw attention to the dialectic of First- and Third-World metropolis hidden from the world [...]. The spectator is a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito’ ” ; “[The Flâneur],” 443; “ ‘ [...] a thickly massed population where each individual, unbeknownst to all the others, hides in the crowd, so to speak [...].’ Cited in Adolf Schmidt”; “[The Flâneur],” 417. 25 See Benjamin, referring to Poe, in “[The Flâneur],” 420, and later, quoting Georg Simmel (447–48), and again citing Poe (445). 26 Interview with Jonathan Noakes, in Salman Rushdie: The Essential Guide to Contemporary Literature, ed. Margaret Reynolds (London: Vintage, 2003): 12. 27 Kunow, “Spaces Grown too Large for the Self,” 183. 28 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994): 169–70.

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and, on the other, to reflect on the idea of ‘metroglorification’ in a certain phantasmagorical sense, that of the postcolonial flâneur, all in terms of aspects of cityscape commodification.

Salman Rushdie’s Fury: Diasporic Characters and Rambling Topographies In Rushdie’s Fury (2001) there is a plethora of signs, traces, and intertexts, which are rendered meaningless and empty by their very abundance. The more signs and codes there are, the more the city/metropolis becomes a mere surface and thus a target for commodification. This consciously created ‘unreadability’ and ‘poly-sitedness’ of the city becomes even more enhanced through the additional unknown layer of a crime story which is interwoven into the novel: a serial killer is murdering women with a lump of concrete, a metonym for the enraged city and its inhabitants. Rushdie’s protagonist Malik Solanka, a famous puppet constructor, is characterized by a diasporic identity, by decadence and despair. In a state of fury, he lets himself go, developing an erratic and extreme view of New York City. Fury is a pitiless pitch-black comedy and a disturbing inquiry into the darkest side of human nature, which hints again at the idea of the semantics of the uncanny. In addition, it is a love story and a portrait of New York, the commodified city par excellence. The novel can be interpreted as Rushdie’s aesthetic understanding and practical application of his sense of space, as revealed in his multilayered style and the innumerable aesthetic devices permeating the text. In Fury, Rushdie creates a compound of spaces: virtual, real, imagined, and urban spaces as well as fictionalized counter-worlds. His novel is, again, characterized by narrative innovation, by its embrace of both fictionality and historiography – all adhering to the postcolonial political agenda. In a heterodiegetic narrative situation, Malik Solanka travels from Bombay to London to New York, and finally to a fictional Third-World country. New York is the city of the immigrant, and Kunow rightly asserts that Fury has two protagonists: Malik Solanka and New York.29 In depicting instances of cultural decay, Rushdie alludes to Eliot’s The Waste Land and Shelley’s

29

Rüdiger Kunow, “Architect of the Cosmopolitan Dream: Salman Rushdie,” Amerikastudien / American Studies 51.3 (2006): 379.

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“Ozymandias.” The “Jekyll and Hide melodrama”30 is depicted in Solanka’s personal and cultural breakdown. The postcolonial aspect of the city is revealed through the novel’s topography of terror, which can be perceived in its representational and symbolic meaning. Although it was published before 9/11, when New Yorkers lived in a state of relative innocence and security, violence is most explicitly expressed in linguistic terms, as signified by the title itself. New York’s complex topography of terror is depicted through the noises and rhythms and some unbearable music in terms of the protagonist’s auto-reflexive issues with urban representation, thereby presenting also the diasporic and postcolonial flâneur’s point of view: Then a young man’s voice started up behind his right ear, disgracefully loud, not caring who listened, telling its story to a companion but also to the whole line, to the city; as if the city cared. To live in Metropolis was to know that the exceptional was as commonplace as diet soda, that abnormality was the popcorn norm. (39)

Solanka goes to New York and tries to ‘erase’ his past. While there, he is filled with rage. Along with the usual Rushdian intertextualities, several genres are mixed simultaneously, among them crime fiction and mystery, thus heightening the semantics of the uncanny. Rushdie also presents us with an imaginary space, a family romance, a satirical portrait of millennial Manhattan with all its media-generated, hence often fake, realities, and a sciencefiction fantasy of revolution. All this highlights multiplicity and juxtaposition, thus continuing the imaginative poeticity of his earlier books. Themes and sub-themes occur and recur, partaking in the layered plot and intertextual confusion. These plot-fractions mingle and shuttle past, present, and future. The plot is fractured because too many things are happening in the metropolis simultaneously. Solanka is an inconceivably wealthy man, transformed from a philosophy professor into a B B C T V star (another instance of commodification through popularization), then into the inventor of a wildly popular doll called ‘Little Brain’. He has abandoned his loving wife and three-year-old son in England, and gets involved with two new women. Fury is not so much about a coherently plotted life-line as about the mental reflections of the protagonist and 30

Salman Rushdie, Fury (London: Vintage, 2002): 83. Further page references are in the main text.

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the three worlds – but especially New York City – that surround and shape him and make him so furious, combined with a picture of contemporary Western society and an intertextual mix of commodities and cultural artefacts: The city boiled with money: Rents and property values had never been higher, and in the garment industry it was widely held that fashion had never been so fashionable. New restaurants opened every hour. Stores, dealerships, galleries struggled to satisfy the skyrocketing demand for ever more recherché produce. (3)

Like his creator, Solanka is Bombay-born, Cambridge-educated, and now Manhattan-resident. Most of the book depicts Solanka’s efforts to fit himself, ‘the man of the diaspora’, of non-belonging, of displacement, of homelessness, into the mosaic of contemporary Eastern and Western society in which he is rooted. At the end of the novel he asks to be completely absorbed by godlike America: For a greater deity was all around him: America, in the highest hour of its hybrid, omnivorous power. America, to which he had come to erase himself. To be free of attachment and so also of anger, fear and pain. Eat me, Professor Solanka silently prayed. Eat me, America, and give me peace. (44)

Fury can be described as a phantasmagorical representation of New York, its characters and the city ungraspable and represented by a deceptively postmodern consumer-based sign-system. Rushdie’s image of New York is like stream of consciousness, with all its associations. The structure of the novel can be described as an imitation of the metropolis. The individual disappears completely and is only viewed in sketches of the topography of the city. Thus, the city is seen as a representation of the sea – which can be linked up with Haroun and the Sea of Stories – in its intertwining and enumeration but also in its transcendence of boundaries of the city. Cataloguing is Rushdie’s main technique, the manner in which he depicts the streets, the houses, the cityscape environment. What becomes clear in reading Fury is that storytelling, Rushdie’s forte, is connected with the cityscape and its capitalist, aggressive, consumerist denizens: “For a single man with a few bucks in the bank and an inclination to party, this little piece of real estate stolen from those Mannahattoes is the happy hunting grounds, no less” (59).

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The metropolis – in the sense of a heterogeneous, historically complex set of simultaneity, juxtaposition, and layering – is represented in Fury in the ways outlined above and depicted as follows: Even the buildings began to speak to him in the sonorous manner of the rulers of the world. […] Such plundering and jumbling of the storehouse of yesterday’s empires, this melting pot or métissage of past power, was the true indicator of present might. (43)

New York City is a “city of half-truths and echoes that somehow dominates the earth” (44). Solanka becomes aware of this dissolution of reality in a crowded city when walking the streets and seeing people with their cell-phone headsets, or what is ironically called the “Telephone Continuum” (89), in which Solanka is no longer needed as a character. Rushdie uses disorderly metaphors and disparate enumeration in order to depict the city: The inadequate summer closed overnight, like a Broadway flop. The temperature fell like a guillotine; the dollar, however, soared. Everywhere you looked, in gyms, clubs, galleries, offices, on the streets and on the floor of the N Y S E , at the city’s great sports stadia and entertainment centres, people were readying themselves for the new season, limbering up for action, flexing their bodies, minds and wardrobes, setting themselves on their marks, Showtime on Olympus! The city was a race. (213)

Malik Solanka sees “America [as a place] to which he had come to erase himself, to be free of attachment, and also of anger, fear and pain” (44). Yet he does not feel American but a New Yorker. Thus, Solanka can also be interpreted as a postcolonial flâneur: he is a man of the crowd, who is, in Benjamin’s dialectical terms, simultaneously a suspect yet nowhere to be seen or found, hence invisible, part of the crowd and surrounded by people. However, Solanka comes with his whole package of postcolonialism, with a purgatorial past from which he wants to hide in order to find himself. Solanka is not a tourist but frequently walks the streets without purpose. He is a flâneur and not a voyeur, walking through the city, anonymous and lonely, for all his womanizing. As reader, we are constantly confronted with Solanka’s contemplation of his life, his fury, and his environment by way of a coexistence of different eras, with the past being vital for the constitution of the present, yet the present becoming more and more fractured. There are many layers in the novel which hint at the city as a fusion of horizontal, vertical, cultural, and

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historical layers. In its written representation, the city thus functions as a fictionaliszed palimpsest of the real city.

Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found: Travelogue, Autobiography, Reportage, Urban Portrait “The exploding cities of the developing world are also weaving extraordinary new urban networks, corridors, and hierarchies.”31 These issues are also addressed in Maximum City: If you look at Bombay from the air; if you see its location – spread your thumb and your forefinger apart at a thirty-degree angle and you’ll see the shape of Bombay – you will find yourself acknowledging that it is a beautiful city: the sea on all sides, the palm trees along the shores, the light coming down from the sky and thrown back up by the sea. It has a harbour, several bays, creeks, rivers, hills. From the air, you get a sense of its possibilities. On the ground it’s different. My little boy notices this. ‘Look,’ Gautama points out, as we are driving along the road from Bandra Reclamation. ‘On one side villages, on the other side buildings.’ He has identified the slums for what they are: villages in the city. The visual shock of Bombay is the shock of its juxtaposition. And it is soon followed by violent shocks to the other four senses: the continuous din of traffic coming in through open windows in a hot country; the stench of bombil fish drying on stilts in the open air; the inescapable humid touch of many brown bodies in the street; the searing heat of the garlic chutney on your vadapav sandwich early on your first jetlagged morning.32

This passage is a zooming-in on Bombay on arrival, both for Mehta and also for the reader, for whom the aspect of juxtaposition is highlighted: “Bombay is where worlds collide” (223). In addition, Mehta uses words such as “bombil fish” and “vadapav sandwich,” which he does not gloss in the text. He thus creates both an atmosphere of strangeness and of familiarity. In this passage he confirms and simultaneously destroys stereotypes of Mumbai. Investigating the city’s bloody riots of 1992–93, Suketu Mehta meets Hindus who have massacred Muslims, and their leader, Bal Thackeray, the notorious Godfather-like founder of the Hindu nationalist Shiv Sena party. He 31

Davis, Planet of Slums, 5. Suketu Mehta, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found (London: Headline, 2004): 15. Further page references are in the main text. 32

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also dares to explore the violent world of warring Hindu and Muslim gangs, travelling into the city’s labyrinthine criminal underworld with the tough top cop Ajay Lal, and he develops an uneasy familiarity with remorseless hit men. Mehta also deploys a documentary style when he investigates Bombay’s sex industry, with the depiction of a dancing girl called Monalisa, with whom he nearly falls in love, and a cross-dressing male dancer who leads a strange double life. ‘Bollywood’ also forms part of Mehta’s account of Bombay’s subcultures. Both aspects, the sex industry and Bollywood, are exemplars of commodification. In another passage (25), Mehta describes, as he does throughout the whole book, crowds and masses of people and, thus, density and lack of solitude; “the battle of Bombay is the battle of the self against the crowd” (589), and “Bombay itself is reaching its own extremity: twenty-three million people by 2015. A city in which the population should halve, actually doubles” (588). “It is a crowded city, used to living with crowds” (537). All of these observations underline Mehta’s intention of depicting Bombay as a phantasmagorical representation of cityscape, but also as a city “of possibilities”: “Once you leave Bombay, the rest of the world is a village” (225). “How are you going to go back to New York after this?” actresses, accountants, whores and murderers ask him, “New York will be boring” (587). Bombay is so crowded that, even for the most mundane acts, such as going to the toilet, people have to queue. Mehta constantly plays with figures in order to underline the issue of overcrowding. The idea of the postcolonial flâneur is stressed by first using the first-person plural, and by subsequently using the word ‘people’, which the author seemingly dives into. In another passage (541), Mehta again describes Bombay’s crowds by first addressing the reader in the third-person singular, as if we were an objectified part of this daily trip to work, thus underlining Bombay’s “internal diversity.”33 Again, Mehta, with the reader’s complicity, dives into the masses like Benjamin’s flâneur, who neither has to go to work nor resembles a tourist, but walks the streets seemingly without purpose. And Mehta asks why people still live in Bombay, as the living conditions – in terms of the crowds, work, pollution, diseases – are constantly worsening (515). People move to Bombay, he suggests, because of the ‘American Dream’ or ‘metroglorification’ – yet, at the

33

Ulf Hannerz, “The Cultural Role of World Cities,” in The Global Cities Reader, ed. Neil Brenner & Roger Keil (1996; London & New York: Routledge, 2006): 315.

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same time, following Indian ideals, for the sake of the intact family, in which it becomes a concept of unity. In his book, Mehta posits a dialectic of Bombay as a city lost and found, swollen to eighteen million and choked by pollution. Mehta returns to his childhood city from an uprooted diasporic situation after twenty-one years of absence. He describes it as an extreme, patchwork-like constellation by also using the historical index of the metropolis. He reinforces the good–bad dialectic by introducing a spatial-semantic formation of oppositionality. The uncanny is evoked when he enters the city’s underground existence: “In Bombay, the underworld is an overworld” (147), “the heart of Bombay is the heart of the gangwar” (158), or “in Bombay, to be a capable businessman, you have to be in touch with the underworld” (250). In talking of the need to cooperate with the underworld, he thus commodifies – for the reader – corruption, gang war, and killing. With regard to Bollywood, the underworld is also the overworld: “Underworld and dreamworld – in Bombay they are reflections of each other” (459). Mehta’s descriptive language for life in Bombay efficiently harnesses comparison and even personification: “The exhaust is so thick the air boils like a soup”; “like insect colonies people here will sacrifice their individual pleasures for the greater progress of the family” (515). The general idea evoked here what individualism is. Thus, Mehta, in addressing a problem inherent in the metropolis in general, uses phantasmagorical representations: namely, the lack of individuality in the metropolis and the overwhelming crowds in a ‘new’ metropolis such as Bombay: “In Bombay, numbers of people are important; the sense of being crowded by the Other in an already overcrowded city is very strong” (47); “Bombay has multiple-personality disorder” (50); and “the greatest luxury of all is solitude” (137). To depict the historicity of the past, Mehta turns to the issue of the renaming of cities, historical buildings etc. as introduced by the right-wing nationalist Hindu party. He points out an idealized Hindu past and underlines an archaeological view of the dialectic between past and present. Yet the layers move. In this sense, Mehta can be interpreted as a diasporic flâneur, wearing a mask that allows him to argue his own dialectic: he is a knowing and still searching writer, yet also a diasporic dreamer. This dialectic can also be observed in Rushdie’s opinion of the book: Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City is quite extraordinary – he writes about Bombay with an unsparing ferocity born of his love, which I share, for the old

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pre-Mumbai city which has now been almost destroyed by corruption, gangsterism and neo-fascist politics, its spirit surviving in tiny moments and images which he seizes upon as proof of the survival of hope; and the quality of his investigative reportage, the skill with which he persuades hoodlums and murderers to open up to him, is quite amazing. It’s the best book yet written about that great, ruined metropolis, my city as well as his, and it deserves to be very widely read.34

The expansion of the city’s shadowy, powerful, subterranean society is presented in Maximum City metaphorically in the idea that the “underworld is the overworld” (147) – an urbanity of the labyrinth. “Bombay is the future of urban civilisation on the planet. God help us” (15), Mehta comments ironically. Writing journalistic autobiography, as Mehta does, involves – as does any other historiographic act – formulating and thus forming one’s object, which is a subject in its own right. As the ‘city-text’ needs a narrative, in Mehta’s book there is, first, the personal level of the writer with reference to his diasporic experience and, secondly, the writer’s relationship to his city. Bombay, in this case, is both centre and periphery, exploding and characterized by slum-cities within the city. In Maximum City Bombay is depicted by means of a juxtaposition of different people and a kind of experimentation with form: there is, on the one hand, Mehta’s own (auto)biographical account in the form of hometown aspects or the depiction of food. There is also, on the other, Mehta’s schizophrenic view of Bombay, showing the corruption of institutions and organizations in which he is seemingly complicit. In the chapter “Pleasures,” for instance, Mehta becomes part of the scriptwriting team on Mission Kashmir, a Bollywood production, which is again juxtaposed with real life, thus providing evidentiary material for another constructed story (386). The book is characterized by a whole web of stories and the battle between the self and the crowd, the underworld vs apparently normal (New York-based) people, and contradictory views of and attitudes towards Bombay.

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34

“Praise for Maximum City,” Suketu Mehta, http://www.suketumehta.com/ (accessed 20 July 2010).

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Conclusion In Fury and Maximum City, although their contours are dissimilar, the cityscape or depiction of the respective metropolises of New York and Bombay is characterized by juxtaposition, simultaneity, and heterogeneity, as well as by an atmosphere of phantasmagoria and a subtext of commodifcation; the resulting impression is that of a palimpsest. Malik Solanka and Suketu Mehta (the latter as narrator–character), in a re-definition of the flâneur as postcolonial actant, dig into history and their own identity; there is the idea of solitude and a diffidence about coming into contact with people in the mass, which is, to a certain extent, subverted by both; both are the man in the crowd, diving into the crowd and being simultaneously part of the urban underworld. Or, as Mehta eloquently observes: The modern metropolis is a collection of transients, on their way from somewhere to somewhere else. New York is a collection of migrants from other cities; Bombay is a collection of people from villages, who come to the city and seek to re-create the village. (557)

The postcolonial metropolis by way of a phantasmagorical and commodified representation of its particular cityscape is shown as thoroughly fragmented, layered, and turned upside down. As Davis quite rightly suggests, the cities of the future, rather than being made out of glass and steel as envisioned by earlier generations of urbanists, are instead largely constructed out of crude brick, straw, recycled plastic, cement blocks, and scrap wood. Instead of cities of light soaring toward heaven, much of the twenty-first century urban world squats in squalor, surrounded by pollution, excrement, and decay.35

Thus, it seems as if the phantasmagorical image of the ‘new’ metropolis in ‘Großstadttexte’ such as Rushdie’s Fury and Mehta’s Maximum City – despite facts and statistics that speak of a radically unequal and explosively unstable urban world – is just another form of commercialization, echoing Rushdie’s own celebrity status. However, in spite of this commodifying aspect, it is important to point to the aesthetic of the “topography of the global

35

Davis, Planet of Slums, 19.

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city.”36 In both texts, the ambiguity in and of the metropolis is reflected in the transfer into a different narrative texture of urban phantasmagoria. It is in this polymorphous and apparently chaotic logic of the postcolonial city that, as readers, we may find the signs and codes of expression of new urban identities in formation. Rushdie writes and speaks “from a number of places, scrambling geographical and personal positionings.”37 He “cannot be said to be writing from one specific space of enunciation”38 but, rather, addresses a polymorphous cityscape in Fury by representing both London and New York as well as a fictional Third-World city, thus showing a cross-over between national and cultural boundaries. In so doing, Rushdie juxtaposes different cityscapes, creating a multi-layered intertextual and multi-historical ground, thus subverting modern representations of the metropolis and commodifying the postmodern cityscape. Both writers, Mehta with his journalistic account and Rushdie with his highly intertextual novel, illustrate the metropolis by means of a sense of poetic space: life is characterised by an encyclopaedic culture of name-dropping in which – particularly in Rushdie – eruptions of cultural knowledge occur as a fury which eventually serves to denote the contemporary metropolis itself. Rushdie performs a form of violent narrative by ferociously mixing knowledge and language and by thus showing its inherent simulacrum. The connection to the metropolis in Fury is rather evasive, with Rushdie demonstrating a kind of mental re-invention, whereas in Mehta’s text the tension or dialectic between Third- and First-World metropolis is depicted often ironically by a phantasmagorical representation of the cityscape which ends up, at times, as yet another form of commodification. Both Mehta’s Bombay and Solanka’s New York City are marked by a multilayered and multidimensional topography which, on the textual level, has to be read accordingly as a semantic re-inscription. In both books, the writers seek to explore the importance of the transcultural metropolis as a political, cultural, and social microcosm reflecting its colonial past and postcolonial legacy.

36

Kunow, “Spaces Grown too Large for the Self,” 183. “Architect of the Cosmopolitan Dream,” 370. 38 “Architect of the Cosmopolitan Dream,” 370. 37

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WORKS CITED Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths & Helen Tiffin. Key Concepts in Post-Colonial Studies (London: Routledge, 1998). Benjamin, Walter. “[The Flâneur],” in Benjamin, The Arcades Project, tr. Howard Eiland & Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge MA & London: Belknap P / Harvard UP 1999): 446-55. Original as “Der Flaneur,” in Benjamin, Das Passagen-Werk, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (1927–49; Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 5; Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1982): 524–69. Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994). Davis, Mike. Planet of Slums (London: Verso, 2006). Fuchs, Gotthard, ed. Mythos Metropole (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1995). Gilloch, Graeme. “Urban Optics: Film, Phantasmagoria and the City in Benjamin and Kracauer,” New Formations 61 (2007): 115–31. Hannerz, Ulf. “The Cultural Role of World Cities,” in The Global Cities Reader, ed. Neil Brenner & Roger Keil (1996; London & New York: Routledge, 2006): 313–18. Kaika, Maria, & Erik Swyngedouw. “Fetishising the Modern City: The Phantasmagoria of Urban Technological Networks,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 24.1 (2000): 120–38. King, Anthony D. “World Cities: Global? Postcolonial? Postimperial? Or Just the Result of Happenstance? Some Cultural Comments,” in The Global Cities Reader, ed. Neil Brenner & Roger Keil (London, New York: Routledge, 2006): 319–24. Korte, Barbara, & Claudia Sternberg. Bidding for the Mainstream? Black and Asian British Film since the 1990s (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004). Kunow, Rüdiger. “Architect of the Cosmopolitan Dream: Salman Rushdie,” Amerikastudien / American Studies 51.3 (2006): 369–85. ——. “Spaces Grown too Large for the Self: Arriving in the Global City,” in Postmodern New York City: Transfiguring Spaces – Raum-Transformationen, ed. Günter Lenz & Utz Riese (Heidelberg: Winter, 2003): 181–202. Lange, Bernd–Peter. Die Großstadt in der britischen Gegenwartsliteratur (Oldenburg: Bibliotheksgesellschaft Oldenburg, 1995). Mehta, Suketu. Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found (London: Headline, 2004). Neuwirth, Robert. Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, A New Urban World (London: Routledge, 2006). Okome, Onookome. “Writing the Anxious City: Images of Lagos in Nigerian Home Video Film,” in Under the Siege: Four African Cities – Freetown, Johannesburg, Kinshasa, Lagos, ed. Okwui Enwezor (Ostfildern–Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2002): 315–34. “Praise for Maximum City,” Suketu Mehta, http://www.suketumehta.com/ (accessed 20 July 2010). Reynolds, Margaret, ed. Salman Rushdie: The Essential Guide to Contemporary Literature (London: Vintage, 2003). Rushdie, Salman. Fury (London: Vintage, 2002).

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——. Haroun and the Sea of Stories (London: Granta, 1991). Schweizer, Gerhard. Metropole, Moloch, Mythos: Eine Reise durch die Megastädte Indiens (Stuttgart: Klett–Cotta, 2004). Wachinger, Tobias. “Städteräume / Stadttexte unter der Oberfläche: Schichtung als Paradigma des zeitgenössischen britischen ‘Großstadtromans’,” Poetica 31 (1999): 261–301.



D RAMA ——————

Amiri Baraka’s Revisiting of Slavery Memory, Historical Amnesia, and Commodification ——————————

S AMY A ZOUZ

A

M I R I B A R A K A is one of the most controversial of contemporary American playwrights. Born Everett LeRoi Jones in Newark, New Jersey, in 1934, he seemed destined for a respectable middle-class career. Jones first attended Rutgers University, then Howard University, where he obtained a B.A. in English. After serving in the Air Force, he moved to the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where he became part of a group of artists, musicians, and writers. Together with his new wife Hettie, he started the avant-garde literary magazine Yugen. He also founded Totem Press, whose claim to fame is that it was the first to publish works by Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and others. Jones published his first volume of poetry, Preface to a Twenty-Volume Suicide Note, in 1961. His increasing mistrust of white society emerged in two plays, The Slave and The Toilet, both written in 1962. His reputation as a playwright was established with the production of Dutchman in 1964. The controversial play won an Obie Award (for ‘best off-Broadway play’) and was turned into a film. In 1965, after the assassination of Malcolm X, Jones ended his former life and his marriage. He moved to Harlem and founded the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/ School, which lasted only a few months. He returned to Newark, and in 1967 married the African-American poet Sylvia Robinson (now known as Amina Baraka). In the same year he also founded the Spirit House Players. In 1968 his play Home on the Range was performed as a benefit for the Black Panther party. Jones became a Muslim and changed his name to Amiri Baraka. In 1969, his play Slave Ship attracted much critical attention. Baraka

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founded and chaired the Congress of African People, a pan-Africanist organization. In 1974 Baraka adopted a Marxist-Leninist philosophy. The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones/ Amiri Baraka was published in 1984. He has received numerous literary prizes and fellowships, and taught at numerous universities before becoming professor of Africana Studies at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, in 1985.1 The Motion of History (1976) demonstrates Baraka’s inclination to mythologize history by making the characters of his plays resemble revolutionaries of extraordinary powers and potential. Although Baraka draws on historical documents and archival materials, he by no means aims at a realistic depiction of history. In this Marxist2 play in the form of a pageant, Baraka appears to understand Marx’s materialism as a vehicle for an historical movement. The latter is embedded in a view of history as struggle. Consequently, the characters of the play are two-dimensional historical agents acting against dire conditions of oppression and exploitation, and godlike heroes who enjoy quasimythic status. Baraka is thought to turn black heroes into demigods in an effort to revolutionize history. This strategy, however, reveals his penchant for fetishizing black history. In his return to myth, Baraka seems to give vent to his revolutionary fantasies in playing with historical facts and events. The earlier Slave Ship (1967), one of the most successful of Baraka’s nationalist plays, also attests to Baraka’s interest in condemning slavery and depicting black rebellion at the risk of reifying black experience. Throughout the play, black music and dance feature strongly. Black chants, songs, and body movements become a ritual of revolt against thraldom. Eventually, the ceremonial execution of slave masters is accompanied by various African musical forms and dance. The playwright can be said to deliberately exoticize black folk music and African dancing styles to make them politically useful tools and ultimately also marketable goods on the market for off-Broadway plays. In revisiting these two playtexts, the present essay seeks to highlight how the remembrance of Maafa and the idealization of revolutionary action work 1

See Amiri Baraka, The Autobiography of Leroi Jones (New York: Lawrence Hill,

1997). 2

The Marxist plays are those plays written between 1974 and 1984. The prenationalist plays refer to Baraka’s dramatic texts written between 1963 and 1965 during his transitional period and farewell to the world of bohemia. The nationalist plays, in addition, refer to Baraka’s dramatic works written between 1965 and 1974, the date of his conversion to Marxism.

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against oblivion and exclusion, while at the same time making a fetish of history and reifying black experience.3 The essay is divided into two parts: the first is concerned with Baraka’s tendency to deify black heroes; the second deals with black musical art. Commodification is shown as a consequence of both the deification of black heroes and the valorization of black music.  The dramatist employs factual history very liberally in his plays. Indeed, imaginative exegesis is omnipresent, ultimately eclipsing any notion of realism. Baraka reworks historical data in an effort to fit his view of history into his vision of continual revolutionary action. The Motion of History’s storyline is, in fact, rather bland: themes of rebellion dominate. W.D.E. Andrews argues that the play is in essence “a visual poem or, to use another analogy, it is closer to an orchestration than to a conventional drama.”4 The play can be regarded as a dithyramb for Baraka’s revolutionary saints and their epic deeds. Like Greeks in ancient Athens reciting their choral hymn dedicated to Dionysus, Baraka in his panegyric play eulogizes his apostles and their grand endeavour to topple the institution of slavery, using as his representative examples Nat Turner in Southampton, Gabriel Prosser in Richmond, and Denmark Vesey in Charleston. In The Motion of History, fragmentation and self-division, themes in Baraka’s earlier plays, recede from view. Where in earlier plays frailty was admitted and explored, now acts of championship take centre-stage. The play is made up of a vast array of events and occurrences which have taken place in distant times and various places on American soil. Baraka stages acts of resistance inscribed in the fabric of American history or, rather, in the annals of black transformative action and contestation. The dramatist, in this respect, goes back to distant epochs to delineate the gestation of heroism and the birth of a revolutionary spirit. He even revisits the Greek heroic age to depict legendary acts of bravery and fortitude. In Scenes V , V I , and V I I I of Act I , Baraka goes back to Jamestown, Virginia, in the year 1676, to dramatize the rebellion of African slaves and English servants led by Nathaniel Bacon, an 3

The term ‘Maafa’ is widely used in African-American literature. It refers to and describes the atrocities and horrors of historical thraldom in America. 4 W.D.E. Andrews, “The Marxist Theater of Amiri Baraka,” Comparative Drama 18.2. (Summer 1984): 143.

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Englishman from Cambridge. The New World, as Bacon perceives it, has not extricated itself from the racial abuse and repressive practices of the Old. In his prophetic discourse of liberation, he exhorts the crowd to change their dreary conditions of life and erect the pillars of a new world order. Bacon’s speech is panegyric, almost visionary. To sabotage this union across the racial divide, Thomas Grantham, captain of an armed English merchantman, resorts to divisive tactics in order to preserve the institution of slavery. In this part of the play, Baraka takes great liberties in fleshing out historical material and condensing many details in order to highlight the inter-racial nature of Bacon’s revolutionary project. The playwright’s desire to fashion an early version of a communist revolution in American history determines the shape of his depiction of past rebellions, so that his account cannot be taken at historical face value. The dramatist revises historical documents to make them fit in with his own view of American history and his stance vis-à-vis revolution. Although the latter adheres to the laws of historical plausibility, it remains caught in a fantastic arrangement of strategically modified social and historic events. Marion, one of Bacon’s traitors, addresses the crowd to end its “fantasy rebellions.”5 Marion’s statement points out that the plan of rebellion is wholly unrealistic and unfounded. This is one of several examples of a fictive revolution staged by idealistic rebels. Baraka is intent on producing a dream-like saga – it may have little in common with factual history but it can be consumed by an already politically motivated black audience. As we move to Act I I I , another scene of rebellion is staged. The setting is now Southampton, Virginia, in 1831, the year of Nat Turner’s revolt. Here Baraka points up the fact that the ethos of rebellion against economic injustice and political oppression has not dwindled since the death of Bacon. In dramatizing Turner’s revolt, Baraka lends him charismatic qualities in stirring the crowd to action. Here it is once again Baraka’s imagination that transforms historical facts and events, providing him with a broad spectrum of possibilities. It can be argued that the free imagination plays a substantial role in allowing Baraka to encompass not only the probable but also the improbable and the unreal, in a mythicizing, convincingly articulated interpretation of

5

Amiri Baraka, The Motion of History (New York: William Morrow, 1976): 52. Further page references are in the main text.

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black history. In The Revolutionary Theater, Baraka contends that “the imagination is the projective of ourselves past our sense of ourselves as ‘things’.”6 Yet, in wishing to preclude this reification (or, in the words of Aimé Césaire, “chosification”7) of the self, Baraka becomes trapped in a process of reification himself. As a Marxist playwright, he appears constantly moved by his own imagination, which he conceives of as the concretization of myriad possibilities according to the laws of class struggle and conflict. His obsession with crafting the basis for a revolution in American history pushes him in this problematical direction. In the same act, Baraka makes his characters appear messianic and prophetic – God’s envoys. The discussion between Will, Hark, Henry, Nelson, and other characters is telling in its tendency to black heroizing. Turner is portrayed as the prophet of the coming rebellion that will destabilize the whole secular status quo and bring about absolute social justice and economic parity. In waiting for Turner, Will, Hark, Nelson, and Sam are really waiting for the Second Coming. When Turner’s does eventually arrive, he is, as the other characters describe him, prodigious and of impressively “great perception” and exceptional “clairvoyance” (61). He is like the Saviour, a new Moses preparing his people for a present-day exodus. Baraka, in this instance, demonstrates his prophetic vision by portraying his characters along biblical lines in order to make them acceptable to a large scripturally literate public. He mythologizes and fetishizes American history, revolutionizing and remodelling it and, consequently, deifying black heroes to convey his conviction that the American revolutionary spirit is really black. In doing so, he rewrites American history to dispel its inherent exclusivism and marginalization of other histories. History is, in Baraka’s view, inclusive, not exclusionary. Black revolutionaries are the real makers of history. Turner, in his plan for revolution, exhorts his people to rebel against the slave-owners and planters. He, much like a priest, intones the psalms and verses of revolution to his followers.

6

Quoted in The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. & Nellie Y. McKay (New York: W.W: Norton, 1997): 1901. 7 Aimé Césaire invents the following equation to refer to colonized people: “colonization = thingification”; Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, tr. Joan Pinkham (Discours sur le colonialisme, 1955; New York & London: Monthly Review Press, 1972): 21.

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To a present-day audience, the playwright seems to be marketing a crude version of Marxism. In this context, Jerry Gafio Watts states that, much like a black preacher who instilled hope in his congregation by asserting that God was on their side, Baraka marketed a secularized form of divine intervention. In this instance, Baraka’s gospel was scientific Marxism.8

His gospel preaches action to transmute the gritty realities of black and white people alike. Turner’s call to include whites is a testimony of his morality and care for human suffering. In a revealing dream that he relates to his followers, he recounts how he met the Holy Ghost and was encouraged to carry on the struggle to defeat the evil of bondage and exploitation. The reference to Christ and His suffering on the Cross is self-evident. Turner is another Christ who preaches action. Baraka is repeatedly seen to refer to his heroes as national apostles or sacred figures. The suffering and torment of his people is tantamount to Christ’s. Baraka turns his people into a community of tortured saints in order to market a hagiographic image of subjugation and oppression, historical heroism and valour. Moving back in time to 1800, the playwright presents yet another slave rebellion, Gabriel Prosser’s revolt in Richmond. In Act I I I Scene I I , Prosser stresses the fact that not all whites are members of the master class. As a consequence, he welcomes all those who form the large social stratum who “hate slavery and injustice” (64). Firmly convinced of his plan to eradicate servility and promote social justice, he adopts the slogan of the French Revolution. Unfortunately, the revolt fails because of a black traitor, Charmly, whose treason is suggested in the stage directions. Though some of Prosser’s staunch followers superstitiously connect the failure to a curse, Prosser cautions the mob to reorganize and develop new and better strategies. Baraka’s revolutionary parade moves on in Scene I I I of the same Act, which dramatizes Denmark Vesey’s revolt in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1822. Vesey is shown to possess high moral qualities, high esteem among the coloured community, and the respect of all in Charleston. White planters salute his bravery and his common sense. Much like Turner and Prosser, Vesey is another revolutionary hero who is committed to the cause of liberation. He refuses to confess until his last breath, knowing that the price of free8

Jerry Gafio Watts, Amiri Baraka: The Politics and Art of a Black Intellectual (New York: New York U P , 2001): 445.

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dom is the sacrifice of oneself to release society from the stranglehold of the master class. But, as is always the case, reaction is inherent in revolution. Vesey is also betrayed, this time by Byard, another black spy. Nevertheless, while Baraka chooses to end Prosser’s rebellion with disillusionment, he opts to end Vesey’s with a note of hope and belief in unity, communality, and solidarity. In a sort of a telescoping of historical events, Baraka now takes his audience to a courtroom to witness the obduracy of his black heroes before the same judge. All are unyielding and unrepentant. Together they are determined to face death in a spirit of defiance. Harriet Tubman, another black heroine or “good black Moses” (71), as Slave 2 refers to her, decides to rebel and flee with her people via the underground railroad to Canada. Baraka, as he usually does with black prominent figures, portrays Tubman as a prophetess aided by natural elements such as the North Star (the Big Dipper or ‘Drinking Gourd’). Heroizing and even mythologizing are, ultimately, a constant in Baraka’s The Motion of History. After the parade on stage of other black national heroes, among them Malcolm X, Elijah Muhammad, Ron Karenga, and members of the Black Panthers, Baraka, time and again, reshapes historical materials and revises manuscripts to match his personal design for revolution. After having Elijah Muhammad reiterate the black Muslim myth of creation, Baraka reconceptualizes Martin Luther King’s theses and speeches in order to align them with his revolutionary scheme: D O C T O R K I N G . (Speaking to sanitation workers. Brothers have sing “I Am A

Man”) Brothers, we have to see that we fighting something bigger than just these poor ignorant municipal government officials of Memphis. We fighting the same people oppressing the Vietnamese people. We fighting the same people who’re crushing our brothers and sisters in South Africa. If we tell about peace and non-violence, then as some of our critics have said, we need to ask the government to be peaceful and non-violent. (94)

In modifying King’s speech and posture, Baraka eventually incorporates him, along with Malcolm X, among the legendary heroes of his revised revolutionary pageant. From being a religious figure in the realm of the sacred, King is secularized, made part of the profane and worldly realm of international politics, thereby fitting Baraka’s re-appraisal of historical data to include blacks in the official history of America. But this time assassination and

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not treason ends King’s life. This is plainly a shift from what Claude Lévi– Strauss in Structural Anthropology calls “divinised heroes” to “decayed gods.”9 Even if they become perished deities, they nonetheless preserve their status of sacredness in popular folktales. As a willing returnee to remote time, Baraka appears to reflect that his people are in need of heroic images moulded in mythology. In his effort to corroborate membership and inclusion and suppress exclusion, he has frequent recourse to redefinition and revision. Prior to the 1960s, the writing of Afro-American history was dominated by an effort to attain the respect of white America. The playwright, conversely, seems to invert this equation by seeking entry into mainstream history. His objective is always to correct distortions and signal omissions of black people. In looking for inclusion and democratic recognition, Baraka, in The Motion of History, elevates the AfroAmerican past and mythicizes black history. This version of history is, however, ultimately a propagandistic product designed for consumption mainly by the converted. The need to revert to a pure unadulterated black time, to heroize and to deify black strugglers, drives Baraka away from the cruel realities of history into a kind of hagiography. In elevating his heroes to supernatural status, he makes them approach the providential order. “Too much has been made of the dangers that Afro-American historiography might fall into myth and hero worship,” notes Robert L. Harris.10 In the same vein, Nathan I. Huggins warns against creating a fantasy of black heroism by projecting indomitable mythic heroes: it is far better for blacks to understand their past realistically, so that they will know where they stand in relation to power and be able to judge the probable efforts of their actions.11

9

Claude Lévi–Strauss, Structural Anthropology, tr. Claire Jacobson & Brooke Grundfest Schoepf (Anthropologie structurale, 1958; New York: Basic Books, 1963): 207. 10 Robert L. Harris, “Coming of Age: The Transformation of Afro-American Historiography,” Journal of Negro History 57 (Summer 1982): 115. 11 Nathan I. Huggins, “Afro-American History: Myths, Heroes and Reality,” in Key Issues in the Afro-American Experience, vol. 1, To 1877, ed. Martin Kilson & Daniel M. Fox (New York: Wadsworth, 1971): 15–16.

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Baraka’s urgent desire to include the black experience in a saga of heroism stems from an intellectual requirement to rectify “the work [that] was usually impaired by white supremacy.”12 In intending to make a Communist precedent in America, Baraka elevates himself above the laws of history, overlooking historical junctures, social realities, and economic and material conditions and instead indulging in excessive praise of his people. He is caught in a pitfall of the aesthetic and dramatic imagination that make him oblivious to real black history, which is best grounded in a pragmatic view of reality. Black history as it is depicted in Slave Ship is a collection and recollection of social dramas that range from Maafa and the horrors of the Middle Passage to then current civil-rights struggle. More specifically, ceremony in the play underscores the importance of black music and dance traditions as affirmative determinants of black life. As has been pointed out, even the ceremonial summary execution of the slave owners is accompanied by various popular musical forms and dance. Music structures the whole play, punctuating its multiple visual images. It is conceived as an overriding theatrical vehicle. In David Harvey’s words, Slave Ship shows how oppositional and sub-cultural musics like reggae, Afro-American and AfroHispanic have taken their place ‘in the museum of fixed symbolic structures’ to form a flexible collage of ‘the already seen, the already worn, the already played, the already heard’.13

It is quite believable that Baraka’s stage is transformed into a slave ship that connotes slavery. The vessel becomes a kind of literal representation of black misery and degradation under bondage. This carefully chosen theatrical space spells out Baraka’s determination to display not only instances of historical deterioration but also an African-American legacy of resistance and struggle. 

12

John W. Blassingame, “The Afro-Americans: From Mythology to Reality,” in The Reinterpretation of American History and Culture, ed. William H. Cartwright & Richard L. Watson Jr. (Washington D C : National Council for Social Studies, 1973): 72. 13 Quoted in John J. Hanlon, “Niggers Got a Right to be Dissatisfied: Postmodernism, Race, and Class in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” Modern Drama 45.1 (Spring 2002): 6.

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At the outset, the props indicate that African drums, banjo music, and sounds of chains and the rocking of the slave ship will dominate the scene. Sound is also given prominence. Almost every effect of emotion or feeling, and every physical state or act, is expressed through sound that is originally African. In Black Music, Baraka states: “African sounds, too: the beginning of our sensibility.”14 The “atmos-feeling”15 is fraught with the ship’s “noises,” “bells,” and chain and whip sounds. Men, children, and women constantly evoke their ordeal with regular but sharp screams, clamouring, cries, and moans. Humming is pervasive. Imploration of the gods is incessant. The beating of African drums is continuous. Baraka clearly contrasts liberating music with the black experience of oppression, thereby, of course, again running the risk of instrumentalizing both. Baraka’s effort to ‘sell’ black music is beyond doubt. In this context, he turns black music into an object of worship (in an inversion of black music’s religious function). The black experience is thereby reified: “Baraka objectifies existing oppression by placing its resolution in a strict linear teleology.”16 Music and dance, exoticized and in the spotlight, shape this irresistible linearity. As the drumbeats and percussion sounds become louder, some dance forms are enacted in “genuine musical theatre.”17 Kimberly Benston notes that music in the play “is thus the strength, memory, power, triumph and affirmation – the entire historical and mythical process of Afro-American being.”18 African music and dance are shown to thrive – to be a redemptive necessity – in the context of inhuman thraldom and cultural deracination. African music and dancing persist, challenging suppression and enforced amnesia. The beating of drums, chants, tribal humming, percussive sounds, and “chant-moan” spell out the rhythmic being of black people and their wellcadenced lives. It is noteworthy that white characters are invisible; only their mad laughter is heard; their physical presence is irrelevant. Baraka, in effect, 14

Quoted in The LeRoi Jones / Amiri Baraka Reader, ed. William J. Harris (New York: Thunder’s Mouth, 1991): 200. 15 In the stage directions of the play, Baraka describes the aura and the atmosphere created on stage as an “atmos-feeling”; Amiri Baraka. Slave Ship (New York: William Morrow, 1967): 132. Further page references are in the main text. 16 Watts, Amiri Baraka, 465. 17 John Lahr, “On Stage,” Village Voice (4 December 1969): 51. 18 Quoted in Harry J. Elam, Taking It to the Streets: The Social Protest Theater of Luis Valdez and Amiri Baraka (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P , 1997): 86.

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depicts the Middle Passage as an agon between the hideous sound of the white man’s laughter and the authentic music of black people. The laughter attempts to suppress the music produced by the slave characters, but the music is constantly rising. Via clever lighting techniques such as recurrent flashes of light, Baraka juxtaposes black musical forms and dance styles with Tom’s obsequious shuffling and the white Voice’s horribly sarcastic laughter. Lights, time and again, flash on Slave, who does an “old-new dance” for the boss, and the white man’s demonic laughter continuously wrestles with the drumbeats and the humming. The laughter tries to drown the humming, but it is vanquished as the humming of the slaves grows louder and drowns it out. There is a constant contention between what Baraka perceives as authentic forms of music and dance and counterfeit ones. The open conflict between the two opposing modes affects the general tonality of the play. In the enclosure of the planters’ farms, black uprisings fail. The African drums are not completely silenced, but subside into “the sound of a spiritual” (141). To insinuate the blend of the African spirit and the nascent American experience of subjugation and drudgery, all characters sing the song “Oh, Lord, Deliver Me, Oh Lord” (141). Here Baraka delineates the merging of African–American musical patterns. The verses now include some Christian terms. Now, modern rhythms (the gibberish of the preacher Tom) are followed by the gospel “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.” Drumming persists as a buttressing of old rhythms. The preacher’s sermon is followed by blues and jazz scatting, and humming heightens as the play reaches its climax. Characters gather to prepare the ceremony of the execution of the Preacher and suppression of the white Voice. Louder hum, scat, clamouring, and chanting reach a climactic point; all is commingled with “the same sounds of slave ship” (143). The whole theatre is drowned in “an anarchy of sonority.”19 The chant “When We Gonna Rise” mounts with the sounds of saxophones and drums (143). The rising music injects new energy and élan into the assembly. The chant finally becomes song. The white man’s laughter is heard struggling to counter the music, but the jazz of Sun Ra and Archie Shepp mounts inexorably to prompt intense feelings and emotions. Song, mixed with instrumental music, becomes an epic expression of the entire black experience since Maafa. As the music rises, the white man’s laughter breaks and takes on a less arrogant tone, and Voice is breaking, too. In the hold of the slave ship, the dancing line 19

Kimberley Benston, Baraka: The Renegade and the Mask (New Haven C T & London: Yale U P , 1976): 252.

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performs an African dance and a new ‘boogaloo’, or what Baraka terms “Bogalooyoruba” (144). Music and dance convey this ascending movement to trigger a much-needed subversive action. In reality, however, when one considers the play’s effect on its audience, Slave Ship proceeds ritually and ceremonially, assuming an unquestionablly fetishizing character. The rising music and dancing forebode the ceremonial decapitation of the Preacher and the white Voice. The atmosphere created is one of suffused music and dance. All of the actors, amidst singing and dancing, grab the Preacher and kill him. Then they turn towards the Voice, now reduced to a pleading undertone. When the drums and the slaves’ voices return, the humming reaches a frightening pitch of intensity. Acting together now, all of the performers execute the white Voice. Both executions are carried out as a kind of celebration. When dancing and singing reach their pinnacle, the audience partakes in this celebration. The physical elimination of the traitorous Preacher and the white Voice becomes a kind of protest or “celebratory protest.”20 The rhythm, the action, and the music potentially persuade members of the audience to participate in the performers’ actions. More than spectatorship, Slave Ship calls upon the audience’s participation not only to visually consume those oppressive images of black harassment, but also to reflect on rising black consciousness. Indeed, the play is as much about listening as it is about participating visually in the overturning of oppression. Members of the audience become celebrants and participants. Dancing eventually asserts this physical movement on the part of all those who are assembled to end the cycle of political disenfranchisement, economic disadvantage, and cultural denigration. In the final analysis, Baraka’s penchant for marketing a mythologized version of black history can be identified as a paramount politico-artistic strategy. Baraka plots his theatrical representation of black valour and fearlessness predominantly for sheer visual and aural consumption. He is resolute in his marketing of a brighter image of his prophetic godlike apostles and dissidents. As a committed playwright, Baraka pursues the goal of erect the pillars of an historical pageant that can be packaged and sold to a politically aware black and white liberal audience. The dramatist reworks historical data to fit his understanding of the laws of supply and demand at a critical historical juncture. He takes recourse to certain critical historical moments and processes to 20

Erving Goffman, “Performances,” in Ritual, Play and Performance, ed. Richard Schechner & Mary Shuman (New York: Seabury, 1976): 95.

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fashion an alternative, impacted history deeply rooted in struggle against inhuman, exploitative slavery. Although Baraka has argued that music “was already in danger of being forced into that junk pile of admirable objects and data the West knows as culture,”21 he tolerates and exploits the power of market forces to make black folk art and black music into an irresistible dramatic spectacle and commodity. Baraka’s intention to harshly critique thraldom and demonstrate the horrors of slavery leads him to reify black experience. While accentuating the role of black music and dance in the performance of the ritual of rebellion and enactment of protest, Baraka underestimates the fact (of which, ironically enough, he is only too well aware with respect to black music) that blacks are strongly conditioned by consumer culture: Black Americans were socialized in the prevailing culture to view and accepts his drama as they would any drama, as commodified art or, worse, entertainment.22

In other words, Baraka, pursuing an oneiric line, would appear to exoticize black history, black folk music, and African dance styles, and treat them as commodities. In his very attempt to ensure by dramatic means how the memorizing of slavery can work against general amnesia and public oblivion, Baraka irrevocably fetishizes black history and reifies black experience.

WORKS CITED Andrews, W.D.E. “The Marxist Theater of Amiri Baraka,” Comparative Drama 18.2 (Summer 1984): 137–61. Baraka, Amiri. The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones (New York: Lawrence Hill, 1997). ——. The Motion of History (New York: William Morrow, 1976). ——. Slave Ship (New York: William Morrow, 1967). Blassingame, John W. “The Afro-Americans: From Mythology to Reality,” in The Reinterpretation of American History and Culture, ed. William H. Cartwright & Richard L. Watson Jr. (Washington D C : National Council for Social Studies, 1973): 53–81.

21

Quoted in William J. Harris, The LeRoi Jones / Amiri Baraka Reader, 196. See also Watts, Amiri Baraka, 183. 22 Watts, Amiri Baraka, 183.

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Césaire, Aimé. Discourse on Colonialism, tr. Joan Pinkham (Discours sur le colonialisme, 1955; New York & London: Monthly Review Press, 1972). Elam, Harry J. Taking it to the Streets: The Social Protest Theater of Luis Valdez and Amiri Baraka (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P , 1997). Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., & Nellie Y. McKay, ed. The Norton Anthology of African American Literature (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997). Goffman, Erving. “Performances,” in Ritual, Play and Performance, ed. Richard Schechner & Mary Shuman (New York: Seabury, 1976): 88–112. Hanlon, John J. “Niggers Got a Right to be Dissatisfied: Postmodernism, Race, and Class in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” Modern Drama 45.1 (Spring 2002): 95–124. Harris, Robert L. “Coming of Age: The Transformation of Afro-American Historiography,” Journal of Negro History 57 (Summer 1982): 107–21. Harris, William J., ed. The LeRoi Jones / Amiri Baraka Reader (New York: Thunder’s Mouth, 1991). Huggins, Nathan I. “Afro-American History: Myths, Heroes and Reality,” in Key Issues in the Afro-American Experience, vol. 1: To 1877, ed. Martin Kilson & Daniel M. Fox (New York: Wadsworth, 1971): 5–19. Lahr, John. “On Stage,” Village Voice 4 (December 1969): 45–52. Lévi–Strauss, Claude. Structural Anthropology, tr. Claire Jacobson & Brooke Grundfest Schoepf (Anthropologie structurale, 1958; New York: Basic Books, 1963). Watts, Jerry Gafio. Amiri Baraka: The Politics and Art of a Black Intellectual (New York: New York U P , 2001).

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Moving Beyond Irish (Post)Colonialism by Commodifying (Post)Colonial Stage Irishness Martin McDonagh’s Plays as Global Commodities ——————————

K ATHARINA R ENNHAK

Introduction: A Critical Impasse

C

R I T I C I S M O F T H E P L A Y S of the London Irish dramatist Martin McDonagh usually “fall[s] into one of two apparently irreconcilable extremes.”1 On the one hand, his Leenane Trilogy (1996–97), The Cripple of Inishmaan (1997), and The Lieutenant of Inishmore (2001) all met with enormous commercial success; McDonagh also received various important literary prizes and his plays were enthusiastically praised by critics and reviewers, not least for their witty subversion of many a stereotype of the great Irish tradition. On the other hand, McDonagh has been accused of being nothing but an “epigone of the dramatic art of Synge and O’Casey” and of

1

Patrick Lonergan, “‘The Laughter Will Come of Itself. The Tears are Inevitable’: Martin McDonagh, Globalization, and Irish Theatre Criticism,” Modern Drama 47.4 (2004): 636. See also Peter Lenz, “‘Anything New in the Feckin’ West?’: Martin McDonagh’s Leenane Trilogy and the Juggling with Irish Literary Stereotypes,” in (Dis)Continuities: Trends and Traditions in Contemporary Theatre and Drama in English, ed. Margarete Rubik & Elke Mettinger–Schartmann (Trier: W V T , 2002): 25–37; Shaun Richards, “‘The Outpouring of a Morbid Unhealthy Mind’: The Critical Condition of Synge and McDonagh,” Irish University Review 33.1 (2003): 201–14; John Waters, “The Irish Mummy: The Plays and Purpose of Martin McDonagh,” in Druids, Dudes and Beauty Queens: The Changing of Irish Theatre, ed. Dermont Bolger (Dublin: New Island: 2001): 30–54.

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“aim[ing] at a shock effect rather than concrete social analysis”;2 what most critics in this second group find most troubling about his representation of the Irish West is that – in their opinion – McDonagh uncritically and apolitically “appeals to the new consumer-Irish consensus” by exploiting traditional conventions of the Irish stage and thus ultimately reinforces “ideological positions of a […] neocolonial class.”3 Mary Luckhurst sings from the same hymn-sheet when she deplores (in a conference paper quoted by Catherine Rees) the absence of “a single intelligent Irish character in any of McDonagh’s plays” and censures McDonagh for creating “a set of characters who merge into a single cod stereotype of ‘Oirishness’.”4 In this essay I suggest that a look at the way in which the commodification of the Irish culture is present, presented, and discussed in McDonagh’s plays can point to a way out of this critical impasse. To put it differently: in what follows, an analysis of the various levels on which commodifying strategies are at issue in the theatrical world of and around a McDonagh play sets the stage for a re-evaluation of the politics of his globally successful Irish plays.

The Commodification of ‘the Irish’: Irish Culture as Constructed Reality Quite a number of critics have shown how McDonagh’s plays contribute to the “demythologisation of the West,”5 and how he debunks images of the Irish West as a refuge of Romantic pastoral perfection by creating in his Leenane, Inishmaan or Inishmore a microcosm which is characterized by the stupidity and violence of its inhabitants. The Beauty Queen of Leenane features a matricide, The Lonesome West a patricide as well as the constant lifethreatening fights and arguments of two brothers, for example; all inhabitants 2

Lenz, “‘Anything New in the Feckin’ West?’,” 31. Victor Merriman, “Decolonisation Postponed: The Theatre of Tiger Trash,” Irish University Review 29.2 (1999): 313, 316. 4 Catherine Rees, “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: The Politics of Morality in Martin McDonagh’s The Lieutenant of Inishmore,” New Theatre Quarterly 21.1 (2005): 28. See also Mary Luckhurst, “Martin McDonagh’s Lieutenant of Inishmore: Selling(-Out) to the English,” Contemporary Theatre Review 14.4 (2004): 34–41. 5 To use a phrase of Fintan O’Toole’s, quoted by Nicholas Grene, “Ireland in Two Minds: Martin McDonagh and Conor McPherson,” Yearbook of English Studies 35.1 (2005): 306. 3

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of Leenane – old and young, male and female alike – are characterized by their extremely aggressive behaviour; The Lieutenant of Inishmore, a play about a one-man terrorist ‘group’ that splits from the Irish Republican splinter group Irish National Liberation Army, features a “Reservoir Dogs-style torture scene”6 and the butchering of most of the play’s characters on stage. A good deal of critical energy has also been invested in demonstrating that McDonagh exposes the construction of this and other myths about Ireland by pointing to the divergence between the depiction of the Emerald Isle in the media (and in American movies especially) and his characters’ perception of their environment and society. In A Skull in Connemara, for example, Mick hints at his seventy-year-old neighbour Mary’s practice of “Telling them [American tourists] your Liam’s place was where The Quiet Man was filmed, when wasn’t it a hundred miles away in Ma’am Cross or somewhere?”7 The Quiet Man is, of course, John Ford’s nostalgic 1952 tribute to his Irish roots, starring John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara, and which is famous or, rather, infamous for unashamedly presenting a “picture of a premodern or preindustrial Ireland – an older society of dowries, cattle fairs and donnybrooks” which caters to its American audiences’ desire for ‘a never-never Golden Age,’ as Harlan Kennedy describes it, [and] perpetuat[es] various Irish stereotypes whose origins lay in long centuries of English political domination. Along with outright falsity, remarks James MacKillop, the sins attributed to The Quiet Man include ‘sentimentalism, condescension, clich‚ and gimcrackery.’8

The dialogue from A Skull in Connemara quoted above, ridiculing gullible American tourists who are in search of an Ireland which only exists in the movies, makes the same point. The fact that movies set in Ireland only ever construct and never depict a reality is also made obvious when, in a scene in The Beauty Queen of Leenane, Ray voices his lack of interest in such films: “Who wants to see Ireland on telly?” he asks, and goes on to explain: “All 6

Rees, “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,” 29. Martin McDonagh, Plays 1: The Beauty Queen of Leenane, A Skull in Connemara, The Lonesome West (London: Methuen, 1999): 67. Also see Rees, “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,” 32. 8 William C. Dowling, “John Ford’s Festive Comedy: Ireland Imagined in The Quiet Man,” Eire–Ireland 23.1 (2002), http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~wcd/quietman.htm (accessed 16 May 2008). 7

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you have to do is look out your window to see Ireland. And it’s soon bored you’d be. ‘There goes a calf.’ (Pause.) I be bored anyway. I be continually bored.”9 A different image of the Irish West: namely, that of the west coast as a place where the brave Irish people “eke out a living from the barren land […] in a constant struggle against Nature,”10 is shown to be just that – yet another construct or myth of the nation – in The Cripple of Inishmaan. The action of this play is set in the Aran Islands of about 1934, the time when Robert J. Flaherty shot his documentary Man of Aran. Scenes VII and VIII of this play, especially, have often been commented on, as they more or less straightforwardly stage the latest theories about the representation of cultures or national mythmaking. In Scene VIII, in which the play’s islanders watch and comment on Flaherty’s film in a makeshift cinema, McDonagh offers a masterful picture of “how idealized island-life in Flaherty’s Man of Aran baffles, [bores] and […] irritates the objects of its mythmaking.”11 The islanders’ cinema experience in Scene VIII, moreover, is framed by a trick which forces McDonagh’s audience into the position of the non-Irish American moviegoer and thus tops the debunking of cultural myths on the plot-level with what could be called a meta-theatrical ploy: Scene VII shows the cripple Billy, who has managed to leave Ireland with the film crew, “in a squalid Hollywood hotel room”12 where he delivers a heartbreaking monologue that abounds with stereotypes and clichés about the poor and forlorn but proud Irishman who dies in exile, but whose brave and God-fearing Irish spirit cannot be broken. When Flaherty’s movie winds out in Scene VIII, however, a light behind the screen “illuminat[es] the silhouette of Billy,”13 who has returned to Ireland. What the audience witnessed in Scene VII, it turns out, was nothing but a

9

McDonagh, Plays 1, 53. Also see, for example, Grene, “Ireland in Two Minds,”

300. 10

Werner Huber, “Contemporary Drama as Meta-Cinema: Martin McDonagh and Marie Jones,” in (Dis)Continuities: Trends and Traditions in Contemporary Theatre and Drama in English, ed. Margarete Rubik & Elke Mettinger–Schartmann (Trier: W V T , 2002): 16. 11 Mária Kurdi, Codes and Masks: Aspects of Identity in Contemporary Irish Plays in an Intercultural Context (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2000): 47. 12 Martin McDonagh, The Cripple of Inishmaan (New York: Vintage, 1998): 74. 13 McDonagh, The Cripple of Inishmaan, 85.

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casting for another Hollywood movie about Ireland which did not go well for Billy, after all. So, without a doubt, as has been shown by others before me, one of McDonagh’s main aims is to draw attention to the commodification of ‘the Irish’ in various myth-making enterprises, whether they take their origin from beyond Ireland or from within it,14 whether they are to be found in American movies or in the main foundational texts of the Irish Literary Revival15 or, as Werner Huber has argued, in Eamon de Valera’s politics as set forth in his St. Patrick Day’s Broadcast of 1943.16 In what follows, I will build on these observations, but, unlike most McDonagh critics, I will neither argue that the London Irish playwright sets out to uncover a different, very bleak and desolate Irish reality behind all those veils of representation, nor will I claim that his plays culminate in the denial of any reality. My interest is, rather, in evaluating the politics of McDonagh’s deconstruction of Irish myths. Before I can properly set out my main point, I must take a look at yet another aspect of the commodification of culture in McDonagh’s Ireland plays, however – the fact that McDonagh positions the Irish west of his plays squarely within a globalized world and postmodern commodity culture.

The Irish West as Part of a Global Commodity Culture in The Leenane Trilogy McDonagh’s characters may be stupid and backward but nonetheless – as, again, other critics have noticed – their village Leenane is undoubtedly also very much part of the global village; it is, to quote Fintan O’Toole, “saturated with objects and media images that float in like alien spacecraft”;17 the global finds its way into the local via international brands like Scalextrics and goods 14

In this context, Michael Bolten uses the German technical terms ‘autoimagotyp’ and ‘heteroimagotyp’, which can be paraphrased as ‘conceptions of Ireland by Irish writers’ and ‘conceptions of Ireland constructed by others’ respectively; Bolten, Imagining and Imaging Ireland: Konzeptionen Irlands bei den jungen anglo-irischen Dramatikern Martin McDonagh und Conor McPherson (Trier: W V T , 2005): 14. 15 See, for example, Grene, “Ireland in Two Minds,” 298–311. 16 Huber, “Contemporary Drama as Meta-Cinema,” 16. 17 Fintan O’Toole, “Introduction” to Plays 1, by Martin McDonagh (London: Methuen, 1999): xiv.

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ordered from Freemans catalogue (the famous mail order business in Great Britain) as well as via all kinds of modern media – radio and T V especially. In his analysis of the function of the various magazines, T V series, films, and radio programmes which McDonagh’s characters consume, Bolten notices that among the women’s magazines which Coleman reads (in The Lonesome West) are not just the U K ’s most famous Woman’s Own and the British Take a Break, but also Bella, a New Zealand magazine. He comments: “Because the content of these magazines is exchangeable they do not open a window onto a different world.”18 I partly agree with this statement, of course. The material printed in Bella is very much the same as the contents one finds in Woman’s Own. Nonetheless, I would like to shift the focus and drift of Bolten’s argument. While Bolten repeatedly stresses that McDonagh’s West of Ireland is depicted as isolated and as an “anachronistic-backward” or “backward-peripheral” society,19 I argue that New Zealand and British women’s magazines, Australian and American T V series, and international comic books are commodities that enter this rural society from the outside and as such they do “open a window onto a different world,” after all – to use Bolten’s metaphor but turn it against him. They do provide McDonagh’s characters with a number of alternative worlds: the world of the petty troubles and the bliss of domestic life in the women’s magazine; the fantasy of omnipotence and heroic masculinity in the American western starring John Wayne 18

This is my translation of Bolten’s “Durch die Austauschbarkeit der Inhalte der Frauenzeitschriften wird hier jedoch kein Fenster in eine andere Welt geöffnet.” (Imagining and Imaging Ireland, 166). The metaphor of the window can also be found in Werner Huber’s discussion of the relationship of media representations and reality in his article on “The Plays of Martin McDonagh”: “It is largely through the media (television in the Trilogy, Hollywood as a complex metaphor in The Cripple of Inishmaan) that McDonagh’s characters keep a window open onto the wider world. Detective, Western and comedy series of the 70s and 80s (e.g., Alias Smith and Jones, Starsky and Hutch, Hill Street Blues, and Quincy) are the moral points of reference in the world of the Trilogy and begin to take the place of traditional systems of popular or religious mythology. […] we have a clear dichotomy between the extreme inwardlooking tendencies of the communities portrayed and their participation in a mediadominated global culture”; Huber, “The Plays of Martin McDonagh,” in TwentiethCentury Theatre and Drama in English: Festschrift for Heinz Kosok on the Occasion of his 65th Birthday, ed. Jürgen Kamm (Trier: W V T , 1999): 565. 19 My translation of “anachronistisch-rückständige […] Gemeinschaft” and “rückständig-periphere[s] Irland” (Bolten, Imagining and Imaging Ireland, 155).

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or in Spiderman and X-Men comics; and the quotidian average life in an average neighbourhood as it is standardized in a global commodity culture which follows the same basic rules in American, European, and Australian soaps or dailies. The latter especially are shown to reach even the remotest localities where the images and constructs that they propagate take root. (That there is no Irish reality which could be set against such all-pervasive constructs of the average neighbourhood has already been shown above: McDonagh’s plays debunk myths of the Irish west and similarly wild and remote rural spaces as just one more product of a global culture industry and economy.) To use Bolten’s metaphor once again: McDonagh’s references to popular culture open a window not onto something foreign or different, but onto what also dominates the rest of the world; they open a window onto different geographical spaces which all participate in constructing the selfsame limited set of cultural myths and realities. “Everything’s Australian now,”20 says Ray in The Beauty Queen of Leenane to Mag, who pays no attention to The Sullivans, an Australian-made television series running in the background of the scene. Global television series, even though they have no attentive audience, it could be said, still penetrate the Irish characters’ world. Or, to put it with Catherine Rees, McDonagh’s Irishmen and women understand and articulate their experiences through television programmes, for instance, [in The Lonesome West] the local policeman glamoriz[es] his job as “just like Hill Street Blues,” while Catholic doctrine is reduced to “So that fella from Alias Smith and Jones, he’d be in hell?”, and Padraic’s view of women [in The Lieutenant of Inishmore] is limited to idealizing “Evie off The House of Elliott.”21

What has been noticed less frequently is that the global and the local intermingle not just because global commodities penetrate the Irish west but also because ‘the local’: i.e. traditional Irish objects and beliefs, is in turn commodified or, to put it differently, re-interpreted in a global context. It is not just, as Heath A. Diehl also notes, that

20

McDonagh, Plays 1, 8. See Catherine Rees, “How to Stage Globalisation?: Martin McDonagh: Irishman on T V ,” Contemporary Theatre Review 16.1 (2006): 118. 21 Rees, “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,” 32. Rees quotes McDonagh, Plays 1, 89, 154; and Martin McDonagh, The Lieutenant of Inishmore (London: Methuen, 2001): 58.

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the tea towel [mentioned in the stage directions for The Beauty Queen of Leenane, which is] embroidered with a traditional Irish blessing […] serves as a subtle reminder of the ways in which Irish culture, traditions, and people have been commoditized, packaged, and exported under the auspices of Western capitalism.22

The Irish characters also participate in a global commodity culture insofar as everything that is dear to them is nothing but commodified objects. In McDonagh’s Irish plays, objects which used to have some kind of ‘value added’, some symbolic meaning and worth, as long as they were embedded in traditional national or religious value systems, no longer have any kind of significance or meaning apart from being collectible items. The most obvious example of this practice is, of course, Valene’s obsessive gathering of “plastic Catholic figurines” in The Lonesome West.23 Those “figurines,” which he holds so dear that he attempts to kill his brother for destroying them, accrue their value from the sheer fact that he can mark them “with a black ‘V’.”24 Their value, that is, derives merely from the fact that they are his possessions. Another example of this commodification of traditional values is that, for Girleen, another character in The Lonesome West, the only way of expressing her love for Father Welsh that she can think of is to “order him [a] heart on a chain out of [her] mam’s Freeman’s catalogue. […] For months I’ve been saving up to buy it him. All me poteen money,” she explains.25 Girleen here uses a traditional symbol, the heart, to express her love, but she, too, must measure its value in monetary or financial terms. Also interesting in this context is the fact that the staple of Valene’s and Colman’s diet is crisps, that mother-of-all-snack-foods product and ruler of the global market, and that in this play questions of nationality are dealt with in the two brothers’ quarrel over crisps and crisp brands. While the stingy Valene prefers Taytos, the famous but comparatively cheap (formerly) Irish brand, Coleman loathes Taytos, which he deems nothing but “dried fecking

22

Heath A. Diehl, “Classic Realism, Irish Nationalism, and a New Breed of Angry Young Man in Martin McDonagh’s The Beauty Queen of Leenane,” Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 34.2 (2001): 109. 23 McDonagh, Plays 1, 129. 24 Plays 1, 129. 25 Plays 1, 176.

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filth.”26 Coleman prefers British McCoys, which, however, he cannot afford. The brothers’ argument over crisp brands obviously stands for two ways of dealing with one’s Leenane identity: while Valene is proud of the Irish-made and cheaper (but, significantly, also internationally successful) product that he can afford, Coleman aspires to participate in the larger and more expensive British economy, knowing that this is a dream which he will never be able to fulfil, because he does not have the means (even to buy Taytos). Only when, later in the play (Scene vi), Valene measures the value of Taytos in a slightly more elaborate hierarchy of national economies and lectures Coleman with a trite “There’s Bosnians’d be happy to have them Taytos,” only then does Colman agree that “They are good food, d’you know.”27 This, of course, is a conclusion which he reaches in his own interest, because if he does not eat Valene’s Taytos, he will simply starve. What becomes quite clear during these mainly antagonistic exchanges about crisp brands is that ‘the national’ no longer functions at all as a valid category with which to define an identity. What structures Valene’s and Coleman’s attitude toward crisp brands is again the monetary and financial value of the product: its affordability, perceived luxuriousness or sheer necessity. In the context of globalization, national pride (which can only be expressed with recourse to the global economy) is reduced to the absurd, not least because Taytos and McCoys, the products, are simply interchangeable, after all. By way of a different argument, I have thus reached the same – but in my case only preliminary – conclusion as Heath A. Diehl: McDonagh’s play[s] reflect […] a world in which Irish identity is systematically undermined and compromised by increasing forms of […] globalization; the identity category is evacuated of meaning and, thus, works to destabilize the nation from within its once immutable borders.28

The example of Valene’s and Coleman’s never-ending fight over crisps also demonstrates that in McDonagh’s world the extreme scarcity of relevant identity-categories which a global commodity culture provides is shown not only to destabilize processes of identity formation but also to engender the construction of violent identities. In what follows, it will become clear that, 26

Plays 1, 143. Plays 1, 175 (emphasis in original). 28 Diehl, “Classic Realism, Irish Nationalism,” 107. 27

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while I agree with a number of critics who regard this tension, which is caused by the local within the global and the global within the local, responsible for the construction of violent identities, I disagree with the various conclusions others have drawn from this observation in their attempts to locate McDonagh’s play in the discourse of what has come to be called the ‘politics of Irish drama’.

McDonagh and the Politics of the National and the Global: The Implosion of Antagonistic Constructions of Identity In his monograph The Politics of Irish Drama, Nicholas Grene succinctly describes the symbiotic relationship between Irish drama and Irish politics: “As long as there has been a distinct Irish drama it has been so closely bound up with national politics that the one has often been considered more or less a reflection of the other.”29 The wealth of intertextual references in McDonagh’s Irish plays must be understood in this context. Still in agreement with other critics (such as Catherine Rees), I would argue that McDonagh avails himself of vital aspects of the national dramatic tradition – first and foremost, the stage Irishman and the new Irishman as constructed in Synge’s Playboy of the Western World, but also other and more recent Irish plays – in order to signify that his plays, too, must be read and develop their meaning only within a typically Irish ‘theatrico-political’ discourse. The question that is more difficult to answer, however, is: what is the meaning of the violence that is at the centre of the local–global commodity culture which rules McDonagh’s world? Or: how, precisely, does McDonagh position himself within this discourse of the ‘politics of Irish drama’? Two main theses that endeavour to make sense of McDonagh’s grotesquely violent Irish west have so far been proposed by other critics. ‘Thesis 1’ (put forth in various different shapes by Michael Bolten, Nicholas Grene, and Werner Huber, for example) holds that McDonagh either mocks or deplores the inability of the West of Ireland to move beyond a pre-postmodern condition and its reluctance to participate fully and ably in a global culture and economy. Grene, for instance, suggests that the best that could befall Maureen or Ray or Pato would be to escape from the intolerable claustrophobia of Leenane. If there is little prospect of their thriving 29

Nicholas Grene, The Politics of Irish Drama: Plays in Context from Boucicault to Friel (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1999): 1.

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in London or Birmingham or even Boston, if they are likely to return from emigration mentally damaged as Maureen has from Leeds, it is because they carry the stigma of their backward provincial Irishness with them.30

Bolten, to give just one more example, also traces all the conflicts and violence to Leenane and the Irish west’s backwardness, to “the stagnation and neglect of the country in contrast to the centre.”31 This argument does not quite work. For, if – as Bolten and Grene also show – the stupidity and violence of McDonagh’s characters is mainly, or at least partly, due to the shallowness of global commodity culture and the ensuing lack of relevant categories within which a meaningful identity could be constructed – if all this is the case, a closer connection to the financial and cultural centres of the global world can hardly be assumed to offer any kind of solution or to mend any of the problems staged. To put it briefly, in McDonagh’s universe the rest of the global world is as bleak as Leenane and therefore cannot serve as an alternative. There is a second strategy which a number of critics adopt in their attempts to make sense of the politics of McDonagh’s construction of a grotesquely stupid and violent Irish west: Catherine Rees, for example, or Richard Hornby, embeds McDonagh’s Ireland firmly in the colonial and postcolonial national conflict between the Irish and the English or, in the case of Hornby, the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. According to him, It is impossible not to see the play[s] as an allegory of Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland, each side hot tempered and self-righteous, locked in strife that they can never escape.32

In a similar vein, Rees argues that McDonagh’s plays show that “nationalism [does not] become […] a redundant concept under the spread of globalisation,” or, rather, that it is not so much that nationalism ceases to exist, rather that it becomes a violent and brutal force, reinforced by a perceived threat to its existence […]. Thus, nationalism is not so much lost as re-invented, angrier and bloodier than

30

Grene, “Ireland in Two Minds,” 304. My translation of “Stagnation and Vernachlässigung des ländlichen Raumes im Vergleich zum Zentrum” (Bolten, Imagining and Imaging Ireland, 144). 32 Richard Hornby, “Ireland, Your Ireland!” Hudson Review 51.3 (1998): 561. 31

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before. […] Globalisation is not so much undermining nationalism as giving it a new lease of grotesque and self-parodic life.33

I find this second approach not much more convincing than the first. If my analysis of the argument over crisp brands in The Lonesome West is correct, it is quite obvious that the category of the national is shown to have lost its force to define an identity just as much as all other traditional categories. Rather than reinventing nationalism, McDonagh’s plays demonstrate that ‘the national’ has become as empty a signifier as the religious or the familial, and that it is the absence of ‘the national’ as well as of other meaningful categories that impedes the construction of any kind of healthy, socially compatible identities. Again, one must be careful with the conclusions one draws from these observations, however. Even though McDonagh certainly, as Kurdi puts it, points to “the absence of local and national cultural traditions that would allow people to identify with their community,”34 he is far from propagating a return to those “local and national cultural traditions,” which have been shown to be always part of interested constructions of the Irish, constructions that have never been helpful or have contributed to the Irish characters’ happiness. Before one can address the question of whether McDonagh offers any kind of solution to the problems posed by global commodity culture, one must realize that what his plays demonstrate is not what has changed with globalization but what has remained the same before and after the spread of its influence: characteristic of both Irish national culture and global commodity culture is the fact that in both cases the dominant process of identity-formation is driven by an antagonistic struggle. The only difference between the construction of identity in a pre-postmodern national Ireland and a postmodern globalized Ireland is that the Other which has to be demonized, fought, and killed in order to construct the Self is now found within the nation rather than beyond the Irish borders. In the Irish global village it is no longer the English or the Protestant Northern Irish that are used as foils and demonized as the necessary Other. This position is now filled by your neighbour, your parent or your brother.35 The inward turn of the violent negotiation 33

Rees, “How to Stage Globalisation?” 122. Kurdi, Codes and Masks, 50. 35 This is the frame of reference, I suggest, within which the principle of Nec tecum, nec sine te must be understood, which reigns over the character constellation of all of 34

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between Self and Other is particularly obvious in The Lieutenant of Inishmore, where mad Padraic, the terrorist who has formed his own splinter group of one, desists from torturing Northern Irish James (whom he does torture in the second scene of the play for selling drugs to children, not for any clearly defined nationalist cause), in order to run havoc within his own family, whom he suspects of having caused his cat’s death. What is implicit in all the plays of the Leenane trilogy is made explicit in The Lieutenant of Inishmore: the violent logic of nationalism as it betrays itself in jingoistic terrorism is shown to structure all processes of identity-formation. What happens if the national loses its relevance in a global commodity culture is that the subject imprisoned within the unrelenting logic of an antagonistic process of identityformation finds its necessary Other closer to itself (or its Self). I am not sure whether McDonagh’s plays do suggest a solution, a way out of this vicious circle, at all. The queering (in the broadest sense of the term) of binary structures at the end of some of his plays may be said to point to some kind of third space, some vision of a process of identity-formation which is structured differently. To give just two examples of the strange triangular formations in the final scenes of McDonagh’s plays: at the end of the last scene of The Cripple of Inishmaan, not only has the rather aggressive and violent Helen just bought “the fecker [Bartley] a telescope”36 for his birthday, thus giving one of her main antagonists the object he has always desired; she also promises Billy, the unattractive, unloved cripple, to finally fulfil his wish to go “for our fecking walk,” and to walk with him “the way sweethearts be.”37 The Lieutenant of Inishmore ends with all male terrorists, Republican as well as Northern Irish, dead. The would-be female terrorist, Mairead, marches off the stage with “harp and shamrock, green, white and gold”38 on her lips. The play ends with only Davey (a not very clever, podgy seventeen-

McDonagh’s ‘Irish plays’. Nec tecum, nec sine te is Werner Huber’s shortcut for the many variants of a partnership characterized by an antagonistic dependence in McDonagh’s Ireland plays; see Huber, “The Plays of Martin McDonagh,” 565–66. To add one more example to the relationship of Valene and Coleman in The Lonesome West: in the Beauty Queen of Leenane, Maureen kills her mother (a symbolic mother Ireland) only to end up in the same rocking-chair and same situation at the end of the play, with exactly the same facial expression: i.e. as the spitting image of her mother. 36 McDonagh, The Cripple of Inishmaan, 112. 37 The Cripple of Inishmaan, 113. 38 McDonagh, The Lieutenant of Inishmore, 67.

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year-old boy) and Donny (mad Padraic’s middle-aged father) on the stage. These two males, who have throughout the play rather helplessly, clumsily, and unsuccessfully attempted to prevent acts of violence, are joined by the cat that they hold responsible for all the corpses and the bloodbath still very much visible in Donny’s kitchen, but which they, ultimately, cannot bring themselves to execute.39 However that may be – whether one sees McDonagh as just staging the inward turn of the violent dynamic of the ever-same process of identity-formation between Self and Other in a globalized West of Ireland or whether one also detects in his plays’ endings subtle hints at alternatives – what I would like to record as the main result of my analysis is that McDonagh’s many intertextual references to the colonial and postcolonial Irish dramatic tradition do not serve the purpose of locating the McDonagh play within an Irish theatrico-political tradition insofar as it unfolds its argument in a world that is conceived of as characterized by antagonistic binaries (Ireland vs England; Republic vs Northern Ireland, the local vs the global). Rather, McDonagh’s plays point to the Irish people’s as well as the contemporary London Irish author’s distinct lack of a colonial or postcolonial context which previously structured and enabled the construction of national Irish – and, as such, meaningful but necessarily antagonistic – identities. The London-Irish playwright thus succeeds in writing for himself an international success story, because, writing about the problems of identity-formation in a local place situated firmly within the global, he is writing for everyone in a global culture that ignores traditional borders. One could also say that, by commodifying conventions of (post)colonial stage Irishness, McDonagh’s plays indicate a move beyond (at least the traditional British–Irish, Republican–Northern Irish) (post)colonial situation. Transposed from the West of Ireland to the global village Leenane and bereft of the discourses of the (postcolonial) ‘Irish’, the characters in McDonagh’s Irish west seem no happier than their colonized predecessors. McDonagh’s (Irish?) plays are, however, as entertaining and thus as successful globally as can be.

39

See The Lieutenant of Inishmore, 69.

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WORKS CITED Bolten, Michael. Imagining and Imaging Ireland: Konzeptionen Irlands bei den jungen anglo-irischen Dramatikern Martin McDonagh und Conor McPherson (Trier: W V T , 2005). Diehl, Heath A. “Classic Realism, Irish Nationalism, and a New Breed of Angry Young Man in Martin McDonagh’s The Beauty Queen of Leenane,” Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 34.2 (2001): 98–117. Dowling, William C. “John Ford’s Festive Comedy: Ireland Imagined in The Quiet Man,” Eire–Ireland 23.1 (2002): 190–211, http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~wcd /quietman.htm (accessed 16 May 2008). Grene, Nicholas. “Ireland in Two Minds: Martin McDonagh and Conor McPherson,” Yearbook of English Studies 35.1 (2005): 298–311. ——. The Politics of Irish Drama: Plays in Context from Boucicault to Friel (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1999). Hornby, Richard. “Ireland, Your Ireland!” Hudson Review 51.3 (1998): 561–67. Huber, Werner. “Contemporary Drama as Meta-Cinema: Martin McDonagh and Marie Jones,” in (Dis)Continuities: Trends and Traditions in Contemporary Theatre and Drama in English, ed. Margarete Rubik & Elke Mettinger–Schartmann (Trier: W V T , 2002): 13–23. ——. “The Plays of Martin McDonagh,” in Twentieth-Century Theatre and Drama in English: Festschrift for Heinz Kosok on the Occasion of his 65th Birthday, ed. Jürgen Kamm (Trier: W V T , 1999): 555–71. Kurdi, Mária. Codes and Masks: Aspects of Identity in Contemporary Irish Plays in an Intercultural Context (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2000). Lenz, Peter. “‘Anything New in the Feckin’ West?’ Martin McDonagh’s Leenane Trilogy and the Juggling with Irish Literary Stereotypes,” in (Dis)Continuities: Trends and Traditions in Contemporary Theatre and Drama in English, ed. Margarete Rubik & Elke Mettinger–Schartmann (Trier: W V T , 2002): 25–37. Lonergan, Patrick. “‘The Laughter Will Come of Itself. The Tears are Inevitable’: Martin McDonagh, Globalization, and Irish Theatre Criticism,” Modern Drama 47.4 (2004): 636–58. Luckhurst, Mary. “Martin McDonagh’s Lieutenant of Inishmore: Selling(-Out) to the English,” Contemporary Theatre Review 14.4 (2004): 34–41. McDonagh, Martin. The Cripple of Inishmaan (New York: Vintage, 1998). ——. The Lieutenant of Inishmore (London: Methuen, 2001). ——. Plays 1: The Beauty Queen of Leenane, A Skull in Connemara, The Lonesome West (London: Methuen, 1999). Merriman, Victor. “Decolonisation Postponed: The Theatre of Tiger Trash,” Irish University Review 29.2 (1999): 305–17. O’Toole, Fintan. “Introduction” to Plays 1 by Martin McDonagh (London: Methuen, 1999): ix–xvii.

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Rees, Catherine. “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: The Politics of Morality in Martin McDonagh’s The Lieutenant of Inishmore,” New Theatre Quarterly 21.1 (2005): 28–33. ——. “How to Stage Globalisation? Martin McDonagh: Irishman on T V ,” Contemporary Theatre Review 16.1 (2006): 114–22. Richards, Shaun. “‘The Outpouring of a Morbid Unhealthy Mind’: The Critical Condition of Synge and McDonagh,” Irish University Review 33.1 (2003): 201–14. Waters, John. “The Irish Mummy: The Plays and Purpose of Martin McDonagh,” in Druids, Dudes and Beauty Queens: The Changing of Irish Theatre, ed. Dermont Bolger (Dublin: New Island: 2001): 30–54. .

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F ILM AND P OP M USIC ———————————————

The Moveable Frontier John Ford and Howard Hawks at Home and in Africa ——————————

S TEPHAN L AQUÉ

A Genre in Crisis

“G

O W E S T , Y O U N G M A N , go west, and seek fame, fortune, adventure” (0:13:55) With these words of Horace Greeley begins the autobiographical narrative of Rance Stoddard, a young East Coast lawyer on his way west in John Ford’s classic 1962 western The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.1 Joining in the zealous optimism of the pioneers and settlers, Stoddard is following the defining American movement to the West. But his Greeley-inspired heroic musings are suddenly interrupted by an attack which leaves him stranded in a place called Shinbone – named after that exposed bone in the lower leg which has no tissue beneath the skin to protect it. Shinbone is situated on the mythic Frontier which once ran through the U S A and which stripped away any protective tissue that might shield society from the kicks and blows of the uncivilized American West. The Frontier is a moveable topographical line which was pushed west during the second half of the nineteenth century. An imagined line and an effect of a continuous stocktaking of colonial advance – no more, no less. But this vague and mobile line was turned into the central myth of American national identity by Frederick Jackson Turner’s 1893 essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” Turner claimed that the troublesome experience of the Frontier is never simply overcome, but has to be felt and lived through in order to create a strong – and American – form of man: 1

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, dir. John Ford, prod. Willis Goldbeck & John Ford, starring James Stewart & John Wayne (Paramount, U S A 1962; 121 min.).

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The frontier is the line of most rapid and effective Americanization. The wilderness masters the colonist. It finds him a European in dress, industries, tools, modes of travel, and thought. It takes him from the railroad car and puts him in the birch canoe. It strips off the garments of civilization and arrays him in the hunting shirt and the moccasin.2

Much as the myth of the Frontier was created by Turner, it was only firmly established and in turn fashioned into a box-office goldmine by the producers and directors of Hollywood who turned the screens of movie theatres all over the world into the site of the creation and affirmation of American identity. The myth of the Frontier was the ideal vehicle to justify American colonial expansionism and to assert America’s supremacy in the world – not least its supremacy over Europe.3 Based on the Frontier myth, the western movie became the foremost channel for the creation and promulgation of an American, non-European identity. Between 1910 and 1960 the colonial myth as presented by the western genre was disseminated with unparalleled success. But by 1960 an output of no fewer than 130 westerns produced in Hollywood in 1950 alone had dropped to a mere twenty-eight.4 The genre was exhausted; the ideology behind its clichés could no longer be communicated to younger audiences who were grappling with new social and economic problems in an increasingly globalized world, problems to which the glory of the receding Frontier could offer no answers. While Sergio Leone in Italy was re-inventing the genre as the ‘spaghetti western’, the Hollywood western was deeply in crisis – it was high time for producers to cast about for ways in which the genre might be rejuvenated. As I argue below, the creative minds in Hollywood’s western movie industry let their gaze, for once, turn east rather than west, across the Atlantic to Africa and, more specifically, to European colonial activity in Africa. In the late-nineteenth century, European nations embarked on a frantic scramble for Africa: France, Britain, Germany, Belgium, Italy – the great colonial powers of the time were all there. The one notable absence – at least 2

Frederick Jackson Turner, The Significance of the Frontier in American History (1893; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2008): 4. 3 As Turner proclaims, “the advance of the frontier has meant a steady movement away from the influence of Europe, a steady growth of independence on American lines” (The Significance of the Frontier, 4). 4 Edward Buscombe, “The Western,” in The Oxford History of World Cinema, ed. Geoffrey Nowell–Smith (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1999): 292.

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from our twentieth-century vantage point – is America. Three reasons might be adduced for this absence: 1) America had practised early and extensive defacto colonization of Africa from afar by abducting and exploiting African slaves; 2) America was still facing the challenge of forming a united nation out of the debris of the Civil War; and 3) America was still occupied with its very own form of internal colonization: the taking of the West. As a consequence of these divergent colonial programmes, different myths and different forms of representation of colonization developed on the two shores of the Atlantic. As the momentum of the myth fostered by the western genre waned, Hollywood began to survey Europe’s handling of African ‘frontiers’ for new material, with British colonial activity being of special interest to the transatlantic myth-makers. In order to examine Hollywood’s handling of this profitable transatlantic source of myths and clichés, I will be looking closely at two American films set in Africa by two of the most prominent directors of Hollywood westerns: Mogambo (1953) by John Ford5 and Hatari! (1962) by Howard Hawks.6 It is my contention that, during the 1950s and 1960s, Hollywood turned to British colonial history and the British colonization of Africa, adapting and satirizing its representation in order to create a new marketable hybrid movie genre to supplement the declining western. Through this process, British colonialism became the object of American postcoloniality, of what Graham Huggan has described as “the worldwide trafficking of culturally ‘othered’ artifacts and goods.”7 In an almost cynical reversal of historical roles, the lenses of American filmmakers turned the activities of European colonial powers into an exotic commodity. While America was using and appropriating British colonialism, Britain began to try its hand at commodifying Hollywood, at capitalizing on the prestigious patterns and myths of the western genre. As an example both of Britain’s representation of its own colonial activity and of Britain’s attempt to appropriate the prestige of the American western, I will be looking at North 5

Mogambo, dir. John Ford, prod. Sam Zimbalist, starring Clark Gable, Ava Gardner & Grace Kelly (Warner Bros., U S A 1953; 116 min.). 6 Hatari! dir. Howard Hawks, prod. Howard Hawks & Paul Helmick, starring John Wayne, Hardy Kruger, Elsa Martinelli, Red Buttons & Gerard Blain (Paramount, U S A 1961; 159 min.). 7 Graham Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London & New York: Routledge, 2001): 28.

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West Frontier,8 a British film of 1959 by J. Lee Thompson. Both sides of the Atlantic were therefore engaged in an endeavour of mutual cultural and textual annexation which offered consumers in cinemas across the globe the intriguing spectacle of two major colonial powers trying to profit from the commodification of the other’s colonial practice even as they staunchly celebrated their respective brand of colonial self-justification.

The Liminality of the Western Hero The fact that westerns tend to return to a limited set of historical events and figures has given rise to the genre’s reputation as a rigid mould which faithfully reproduces canonical plots, settings, and types. But the American western constitutes a highly flexible genre which is very much open to influences. As Jim Kitses has noted, “Westerns could incorporate elements of romance, tragedy, comedy, morality play.”9 The western could also absorb the popular discourse of European colonialism. In order to elucidate this latter influence, I will point to and distil a heuristically limited and simplified set of elements10 gathered from Ford’s and Hawks’s western movies, elements that pervade the genre as a whole and that feature, with notable modifications, in Mogambo and Hatari! The western hero has turned out to be a particularly influential concept. He tends to be free, autonomous, and, in most cases, solitary. He is not driven by material ambition, nor by any heightened sense of responsibility, of belonging to a group. As a consequence, his personal history and his motivation are often veiled, part of an undefined sense of justice and virile virtues. Ethan Edwards, the protagonist of John Ford’s 1956 The Searchers, epitomizes this inscrutable isolation.11 When the tribe of a Comanche chief called Scar destroys 8

North West Frontier (aka Flame Over India), dir. J. Lee Thompson, prod. Marcel Hellman, starring Lauren Bacall, Kenneth More, Herbert Lom, I.S. Johar & Wilfrid Hyde–White (J. Arthur Rank/Twentieth Century Fox, U K 1959; 129 min.). 9 Jim Kitses, Horizons West (London: Thames & Hudson, 1969): 24–25. 10 For an account of attempts at categorizing and defining the western, see Mark Cronlund Anderson, Cowboy Imperialism and Hollywood Film (New York, Oxford & Washington D C : Peter Lang, 2007): 11–15. 11 The Searchers, dir. John Ford, prod. Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney, starring John Wayne, Jeffrey Hunter, Vera Miles, Ward Bond & Natalie Wood (Warner Bros., U S A 1956; 119 min.).

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the ranch of his brother, Edwards sets out in search of his niece, who has been kidnapped. The iconic first shot of John Wayne as Edwards shows him approaching the house of his brother at the start of the film and is reflected in the contrast between the dark and sheltered space of the domestic interior and the blindingly bright openness of the desert in the very last shot of the film where Edwards leaves the farmstead. The life of the family that he has restored is not a life which he himself might lead, and he returns to the desert leaving behind a sense of the many undisclosed scars that have marred him no less than the Comanche chief whom he has killed. According to Turner’s Frontier essay, the mythic challenges and properties of the Frontier make of the western hero the quintessential American. The western pioneers who cross this line in order to pave the way for the settlers following them are in imminent danger not only of being killed by charging buffalo, by Indian arrows or by the bullets of outlaws. They are also in danger of degenerating, of becoming part of the beyond. Not every pioneer who faces up to the Frontier and is duly stripped of his European cultivation emerges as a model of virtue unambiguously dedicating his life to order and the greater good. Tom Doniphon, the master of the six-shooter in Liberty Valance, is in most respects a lot closer to Valance, the lawless criminal, than to Stoddard, who goes on to become a senator in Washington. There is an uneasy sense of respect between the two men when Doniphon describes Valance as “the toughest man south of the picket-wire – next to me” (0:27:22). Ethan Edwards in The Searchers is an even more striking example of the western hero’s uneasy proximity to lawlessness and savagery. Faced with the death of his brother’s family, Edward’s desire for revenge turns into an irrational murderous racism which none of his companions can share. When he comes upon a dead Comanche warrior, he shoots out the corpse’s eyes and explains to the startled settlers around him that, according to Comanche belief, a man who loses his eyes will never find peace in death. Beyond his intimate knowledge of the language and culture of the tribe, Edwards is even prepared to share their belief – if only in order to turn it into an instrument of his inhuman vengefulness. But the most disconcerting scene rendering Edwards suspended between the ideals of freedom and justice promulgated by an expanding community of American settlers and the savagery traditionally ascribed to Native Americans occurs when he at last gets to attack the camp of Chief Scar. After killing the man who has destroyed the family of his brother, Edwards proceeds to take his scalp; by doing so, he performs the very

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act that is invariably taken to represent Native American barbarity. Frederick Turner has anticipated precisely this astonishing transgression: Before long he [i.e. the colonist] has gone to planting Indian corn and plowing with a sharp stick; he shouts the war cry and takes the scalp in orthodox Indian fashion. In short, at the frontier the environment is at first too strong for the man.12

But Turner is confident that even the drastic lapse in cultivation which is scalp-taking is only a transitory moment in the creation of the American character, that the frontier is only “at first” too strong for those who are pushing westward. But both Edward’s irrational racism and his familiarity with native culture highlight the insistently precarious nature of his position – precisely the position that defines the solitary western hero. But western heroes are not all alone. However, the company they keep is not that of cultivated settlers, but of a motley crew of outsiders. Rio Bravo is a good case in point.13 The plot could hardly be more straightforward: the good guys have put a bad guy in jail for murder and are now having to defend the prison against attacks from the other bad guys.14 The group inside the prison consists of the Sheriff, a cackling old man, a drunkard, and a precocious youngster. Their friendship is contingent on the situation at hand but it is confirmed by simple rites, like the sharing of hand-rolled cigarettes and collective sing-alongs. John Ford’s films show similar cases of bonding in the face of adversity like the uneasy but tangible friendship between the lawyer Stoddard and the gunman Doniphon in Liberty Valance (1962). The western here creates a form of idealized American microcosm where the Frontier is shown to bring different and ill-fitting people together in a bid to join forces in the interest of peace and progress. The western hero is a well-established stereotype that has in time been transformed by contact with other genres and transferred away from its natural habitat in the American West. John Ford and Howard Hawks wrapped

12

Turner, The Significance of the Frontier, 4. Rio Bravo, dir. & prod. Howard Hawks, starring John Wayne, Dean Martin & Ricky Nelson (Warner Bros., U S A 1959; 141 min.). 14 This slightly cynical summary is indebted to the summary in Michael Althen’s appropriately condescending entry on Rio Bravo in Filmgenres: Western, ed. Bernd Kiefer & Norbert Grob (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2003): 230. 13

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up guns, native warriors, and even ‘the Duke’ John Wayne himself and carried this cargo across the Atlantic to Africa. The main challenge which this new environment posed for them was in its radically different historical contexts and connotations: unlike the prairies of the West, Africa did not offer American mythologists an historical past of adventure and colonial triumph to embellish and build upon. However, since America had never shown colonial activity on the African continent: i.e. had not violently disregarded the rights of black Africans in Africa the way it had done with the rights of Native Americans in the west, the colonial history of Africa provided the mythologists of the American cinema with a white canvas, an impeccable screen of national innocence which could be used to project a new American identity.15 Thus, rather than attempt to construct a new Frontier in Africa and create a fictitious American colonization of the African continent, Ford and Hawks took the myths and patterns of the western genre and contrasted and conflated them with clichés of European colonization. Removed from the scene of their own colonial blunders and atrocities, the image of the American pioneer could assume a remarkable new role of cooperation, tolerance, and thoughtful diplomacy in Africa. Mogambo and Hatari! are thus not films about American colonization but films about European colonialism. In its search for new material, Hollywood did not set out to colonize Africa, but to colonize the European colonizers, to turn them into commodities to be used and peddled in the film industry.

John Ford and British Failure at the Frontier In Mogambo, Victor Marswell, played by Clark Gable, is a lonesome adventurer who runs a safari organization and hunts exotic animals which he sells to zoos. When Eloise Kelly, an American ex-bar-dancer played by Ava Gardner, is stranded at Marswell’s station, he is charmed by her unpretentious ways 15

The western genre proper has usually bypassed the question of the settlers’ legitimacy by placing the action in an historical time and a place where the settlers have moved on from being Europeans and have become Euro-American. See Ella Shohat & Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (London & New York: Routledge, 1994): “That westerns are not ‘easterns’ is no accident, since ‘easterns’, set on the eastern seaboard of an earlier generation’s contact with Native Americans, might have stressed the ‘un-American’ foreignness of White Europeans, bringing up some of the intriguing ‘what ifs?’ of history” (115).

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and her adaptability to her new environment. With a past of questionable repute, Kelly is as much a product of a ‘Frontier’ as Marswell himself. Kelly has been jilted by one of Marswell’s clients, the Maharajah of Bunganore – a first nod in the direction of the British Empire. Marswell is happy to work for British colonial subjects and, rather than feeling called upon to correct the Maharajah’s blunders, knows how to profit from them. Marswell himself is American, but he employs two dropouts or leftovers from British imperialism: Brownie, a somewhat unkempt ex-gentleman complete with monocle and pipe, and a perpetually drunk Cockney-speaking captain. Marswell’s clients following the Indian Maharajah are a British colonial cliché: Mr and Mrs Nordley, two enthusiastic town-and-country dwellers who introduce the King’s English and some grotesquely out-of-place cultivation to the station. At the welcome dinner, Kelly cynically remarks that “you’ve brought culture to Marswell’s circus. I love the custom black tie in the middle of the jungle. Do you know that before you got here we wore onion sacks?” (0:48:02). What the Americans Marswell and Kelly are ridiculing here is not only a stereotype of British stuffiness but an image of European domesticity amidst the menace of the wild, which was a common feature in British media representations of the wars in Malaya and Kenya during the 1950s.16 Americans, so the scene suggests, do not require to be reassured of their identity in this way, but are capable of dealing with and, indeed, thriving on any Frontier experience that history throws at them. Kelly’s entry in an evening dress with Marswell in a white tuxedo demonstrates that, as products of the Frontier, they are equally at ease in the rough African environment as in a cultivated and no less outlandish European context. As their polar opposite, Mr Nordley passes out as a consequence of a vaccination against tsetse bites. Significantly, he is not struck down by a force of the wilderness itself, but by civilization’s pitiful attempts to control and domesticate the wild. The British press was predictably displeased by Mogambo’s depiction of British colonial culture. In its anonymous review, The Times of 2 November 1953 stated that “Mogambo is not only artificial, it is slick, silly [.. .] and the characters that set out on safari are fugitives from a slick, silly magazine story.” Above all the other characters, the Nordleys are slick and silly: “Miss Grace Kelly, as the impossible wife of an impossible English scientist.” But 16

See Wendy Webster, Englishness and Empire, 1939–1965 (Oxford: Oxford U P , 2005): 129–30, who describes this widespread image as ‘Little England’ under threat in the colonies.

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far more trenchant and less ironic in its dismissal of Britishness than the depiction of the Nordleys is a scene towards the middle of the film, where Marswell’s safari party stops at a British colonial outpost in Kenya. They find the villagers up in arms against British legislation and Jack Wood, the only remaining British official, defeated and dying in his bed. With police reinforcements days away, Wood has accepted his fate: “Don’t bother about me. I’ve had it” (1:16:02). But outstaring a sea of spears, Marswell rescues Jack Wood in the very nick of time and they continue their safari adventure. The waning glory of the British Empire being carried and led from his post by a displaced American cowboy is an image which The Times could hardly endorse in 1953 with an ongoing colonial war in Kenya. The most striking display of Marswell’s prowess in Mogambo is easily the ‘ceremony of courage’ by which he has to demonstrate his suitability as a leader in Africa. Tribal custom demands that anyone who wants to act as leader stand his ground while spears are thrown at him. Accomplishing a colonial ideal, Marswell wins the respect of the natives. His bared muscular chest exposed to the flying spears is here in blatant contrast to the whimpering Jack Wood. The contrast between the two men is therefore far more pronounced than its domestic parallel between Marswell’s American prowess and Mr Nordley’s incongruous British cultivation. The object of ‘colonization’ in this domestic context is Mrs Nordley rather than a native tribe, but even here Marswell’s supposedly American charm does not fail to impress – and to seduce. However, Marswell’s seduction of Kelly and Mrs Nordley gains significance beyond the common topoi of comedy. There is a sequence where a black employee at the station berates his wives. These shots are crosscut with images of Marswell’s love triangle, and Clark Gable’s smirk suggests that Marswell is not at all averse to the idea of polygamy, that he is closer to native culture than is appropriate or acceptable. This danger of venturing too far beyond the Frontier is very much present in the western genre, but since Mogambo is a comedy, this threat is successfully countered and the line dividing the cultured from the savage restored. The danger of going native here dictates a plotline which would be totally out of place in a John Ford western: the cowboy Marswell marries the girl Kelly.

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Howard Hawks and the Absence of Britain Howard Hawks’s Hatari! is a different film altogether from John Ford’s Mogambo, since Hawks is primarily an entertainer with little or no interest in history.17 John Wayne is Sean Mercer, an Irish-American hunter who, like Marswell in Mogambo, sells animals to zoos. His team is a mixed bag not unlike the men around Sheriff Chance who defend the town jail in Rio Bravo. As in Rio Bravo, there is any amount of collective singing, dancing, and drinking which gives the hunting station the air of a holiday camp.18 The mix of Mercer’s men is chiefly interesting for its careful composition of nationalities: American, German, French, Italian. Cooperation within the group is smooth and efficient and the team is designed to come across as an idealized American microcosm, the melting pot en miniature. The most notable ingredient of this mixed crew is the chief gunman of the team, a Native American named Little Wolf, the savant in the background. Little Wolf may have the makings of a modern-day Queequeg, but he is portrayed as a well-integrated member of the group, the sage adviser of Sean Mercer, and the only one to parallel Mercer’s knowledge of wild animals. The pioneer Sean Mercer has thus found his guide among the natives, a man from beyond the Frontier. Importantly, though, this native guide is a Native American guide, not a native African. The ideal society which Frederick Jackson Turner had envisaged in 1893 has come to Africa, complete with American moccasins and hunting shirts and no need for any further input from African culture. Apart from native Africans, another notable absence from Mercer’s team, which is made up of most European colonial powers, is, of course, Great

17

Cf. the assessment of Lee Russell: “Hawks has little historical sense. His ideology is primitive and anachronistic”; Russell, “Howard Hawks,” in Howard Hawks: American Artist, ed. Jim Hillier & Peter Wollen (London: British Film Institute, 1996): 84. 18 See also Robin Wood, who regards the convivial atmosphere of Hatari! as a façade covering more complex personalities and conflicts: “There is something of the air of an informal party, of long duration, at which one is never bored, but at which one cannot fight down a sense that the relaxed atmosphere is preventing all these obviously pleasant and entertaining people from revealing their deeper potentialities”; Wood, Howard Hawks (London: British Film Institute, 1983): 130–31. Kenneth Cameron, for his part, detects a barely contained homoerotic undertone: “The movie is about male bonding, with Africa as the mere setting and animal catching from trucks as the requisite dangerous activity”; Cameron, Africa on Film: Beyond Black and White (New York: Continuum, 1994): 134.

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Britain. In this light comedy, the question of colonialism and colonial strategies is never mentioned. Unlike Mogambo, Hatari! shows American cultural hegemony brimming with self-confidence and ostentatiously quite beyond the need for any sort of comparison with or even parody of nineteenth-century British colonialism. Rather than looking back at Europe’s colonial past, the film is firmly set in the 1960s. The New Yorker Pockets, whose name fittingly rhymes with ‘rockets’, is the intellectual of the group. When a zoo places an order for a group of monkeys, he takes recourse to a quintessentially American technology, everywhere present in the media during the 1960s, by building a rocket in bright American colours which will cast a net over the monkeys sitting in a tree. The plan succeeds and the others put on various protective mock-N A S A outfits to pick up the monkeys. Again, the film suggests, it is America that can handle and grow by the Frontier – whether at home, in Africa, or in outer space.19 In Hatari! the Other, whether immoral natives or incompetent colonial Brits, are kept right out of the picture. Hatari! picks up the American western movie’s mission in Africa where Mogambo left off: in Hawks’s 1960s, British colonialism is but a distant memory in Africa, while the melting-pot, Cape Canaveral, and light Hollywood romance have firmly established transplanted cowboys as suitable rulers in Africa.

North West Frontier: Britain Shoots Back While Hollywood was launching its forays into the discourse of European colonialism, British cinema was in turn engaging in attempts to tap into the popularity and mythology of the genre of the American western. As the critic Paul Simpson has gleefully noted, “Britain’s contribution to the western has been on a par with Switzerland’s contribution to naval warfare.”20 But in 1959, the British director J. Lee Thompson tried to ‘shoot back’ with the release of North West Frontier. According to a reviewer in the Daily Mail of 9 October 1959, “this north-western eastern can claim to be the first genuine 19

Cf. Peter Stowell, who observes that “the genre characteristics of Westerns and science fiction films have become both consciously and unconsciously similar, or, to put it crudely, space operas have replaced horse operas”; Stowell, John Ford (Boston M A : Twayne, 1986): 97. 20 Quoted in Paul Simpson, The Rough Guide to Westerns (London: Rough Guides, 2006): 243.

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British Western.” The film focuses on a British expedition which is ordered to take the Hindu prince Kishan to safety from his Muslim enemies. A voiceover introduces the scene: “This is India. A north-west frontier province, 1905. A country of many religions. Men find many reasons for killing each other. Greed, revenge, jealousy or perhaps because they worship God by different names” (0:02:04). This land of savage customs and unmotivated slaughter is cast as the Other outside the British headquarters and outside the train which Captain Scott and a group of elderly English ladies and gentlemen use to carry Prince Kishan across enemy territory. One emissary from the motherland of the western, the unabashed American Mrs Wyatt, accompanies Captain Scott on his mission. As the British men at headquarters discuss the situation at hand and the feasibility of the expedition, Mrs Wyatt gives a summary of the impression Americans are getting of their erstwhile colonial betters: “The British never seem to do anything until they’ve had a cup of tea – by which time it’s too late” (0:13:47). The British on board the train certainly seem to prove the validity of this assessment, with cups and teapots being constantly passed around. But the seriousness of the situation is soon driven home when they find a refugee train whose passengers have been massacred by Muslim warriors. As he walks across the corpse-strewn platform, Captain Scott uses the gruesome scene to point out the need for a British presence in India: “See what happens when the British aren’t around to keep order” (0:29:04). Proclaiming a British obligation to bring safety and cultivation to people in need and to nations which would otherwise drown in chaos is the standard self-justification of British imperialism: the much-quoted “white man’s burden.”21 Gradually, Mrs Wyatt begins to adopt this idiosyncratically British perspective and accepts the film’s credo that the British tea-drinking cultivation is the only alternative to chaos, injustice, and bloodshed in India. The one staunch critic of British colonial rule in the film is a Dutch-Indian journalist, a Muslim called van Leyden, who intends to kill Prince Kishan. When van Leyden faces Captain Scott in a fight on the roof of the train, Mrs 21

Cf. Wendy Webster, Englishness and Empire, 147: “The construction of British order against the violence of the colonised is [the film’s] most insistent theme. [. . . ] An opposition between British order and disorder in former British colonies could work to suggest empire as a historical burden for the British [. . . ] or as a blessing bestowed on people who were naturally disposed to the violence that erupted once the British departed.”

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Wyatt, though a self-proclaimed pacifist, saves the day by shooting him. The scene is a clear reference to Amy Kane’s intervention in Fred Zinnemann’s canonical 1952 western High Noon.22 Amy refuses to touch a gun but steps in during the showdown to rescue her husband by shooting one of Frank Miller’s companions. In North West Frontier, however, this scene is Mrs Wyatt’s initiation not into the values of the American West, but into those of the British Empire. In the last frame of the picture, Scott and Wyatt are carrying the Indian baby whom Wyatt has recovered as the sole survivor of the massacre on the refugee train. They decide to call the boy ‘Young India’ and thereby turn the final scene of the film into a gesture fraught with high national pathos: leaving the old but trusty train engine fittingly called ‘Victoria’ behind on her rails, Britain together with an American at last converted to British imperial doctrine carry ‘Young India’ off towards a better future. But North West Frontier does not offer this happy imperial ending without the appropriate British colonial caveat. Before they leave the station, Scott and Wyatt bid farewell to Prince Kishan, who tells them that, despite his gratitude, he will fight for Indian independence from Britain. It is Wyatt who gives Scott the cue for the final apotheosis of British imperialism: That’s all the thanks you’ll get. That’s all the thanks we ever get. ‘Be thankful you’re living and trust your luck / March to your front like a soldier. . . ’. W Y A T T : Who said that? S C O T T : A man called Kipling – another tea drinker. (1:32:58) WYATT: SCOTT:

Appropriately enough, it is Rudyard Kipling, the man who coined the phrase ‘white man’s burden’, who has the last word. Indeed, the film has all along been eager to stress Britain’s burdensome yet proudly executed service to colonial subjects who could not manage without its assistance. Britain, it is suggested, has a right and even a moral obligation to be in India. Unlike its American counterpart, the colonial project of Britain is exclusively unilateral. While Britain admits no input from the other side of the dividing line between British order and colonial chaos, the American western

22

High Noon, dir. Fred Zinnemann, prod. Stanley Kramer & Carl Foreman, starring Gary Cooper, Grace Kelly, Thomas Michell, Lloyd Bridges & Katy Jurado (United Artists, U S A 1952; 85 min.).

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elaborates and embellishes Turner’s idea of the Frontier as a site of tension and exchange where the experience of the wild and chaotic Other challenges and discards European values and norms so that a new, American identity can emerge – a prime example of what Mary Louise Pratt has called a “contact zone,” where “subjects are constituted in and by their relations to each other.”23 The heroic figures devised to propagate this American myth are therefore invariably tainted and problematic creatures whose rough nature is the sign of a dynamic adaptability by which the mythmakers of Hollywood can show them to be predestined to handle the difficulties that come with the Frontier – whether this Frontier happens to lie in the American West, in Africa, or in outer space. The question of the justification behind American colonial endeavours is rarely ever raised in the western movies, whose heroes are made out, by their very nature, to belong to any coveted uncharted territory. The first British western thus clearly misses the point of the genre. North West Frontier is the helpless attempt of British colonial discourse to borrow the charm and confidence of the western while fending off the implications of the central western myth of the Frontier in favour of the time-honoured doctrine of ‘the white man’s burden’. The Empire of Hollywood, by contrast, had set out to conquer new territory for its ongoing self-reconstruction and development. The outcome of its expeditions into European imperialism is a marketable and thoroughly un-European hybrid genre of western movie, safari adventure, romantic comedy, and colonial parody. But whether flawed or successful, the films I have discussed bear witness to remarkable acts of annexation which mutually colonize not the ethnic subaltern but the other colonizers, acts of annexation which treat foreign forms of colonialism as a cultural commodity to be imported, adapted, domesticated through parody, and, of course, marketed.

WORKS CITED Althen, Michael. “Rio Bravo,” in Filmgenres: Western, ed. Bernd Kiefer & Norbert Grob (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2003): 230–32. Anderson, Mark Cronlund. Cowboy Imperialism and Hollywood Film (New York, Oxford & Washington D C : Peter Lang. 2007). Anon. Review of North West Frontier, Daily Mail (9 October 1959).

23

Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992): 7.

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Anon. Review of Mogambo, The Times (London; 2 November 1953). Buscombe, Edward. “The Western,” in The Oxford History of World Cinema, ed. Geoffrey Nowell–Smith (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1999): 286–93. Cameron, Kenneth M. Africa on Film: Beyond Black and White (New York: Continuum, 1994). Hatari!, dir. Howard Hawks, prod. Howard Hawks & Paul Helmick, starring John Wayne, Hardy Kruger, Elsa Martinelli, Red Buttons & Gerard Blain (Paramount, U S A 1961; 159 min.). High Noon, dir. Fred Zinnemann, prod. Stanley Kramer & Carl Foreman, starring Gary Cooper, Grace Kelly, Thomas Michell, Lloyd Bridges & Katy Jurado (United Artists, U S A 1952; 85 min.). Huggan, Graham. The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London and New York: Routledge, 2001). Kitses, Jim. Horizons West (London: Thames & Hudson, 1969). The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, dir. John Ford, prod. Willis Goldbeck & John Ford, starring James Stewart & John Wayne (Paramount, U S A 1962; 121 min.). Mogambo, dir. John Ford, prod. Sam Zimbalist, starring Clark Gable, Ava Gardner & Grace Kelly (Warner Bros., U S A 1953; 116 min.). North West Frontier (aka Flame Over India), dir. J. Lee Thompson, prod. Marcel Hellman, starring Lauren Bacall, Kenneth More, Herbert Lom, I.S. Johar & Wilfrid Hyde–White (J. Arthur Rank/Twentieth Century Fox, U K 1959; 129 min.). Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992). Rio Bravo, dir. & prod. Howard Hawks, starring John Wayne, Dean Martin & Ricky Nelson (Warner Bros., U S A 1959; 141 min.). Russell, Lee. “Howard Hawks,” in Howard Hawks: American Artist, ed. Jim Hillier & Peter Wollen (London: British Film Institute, 1996): 83–86. The Searchers, dir. John Ford, prod. Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney, starring John Wayne, Jeffrey Hunter, Vera Miles, Ward Bond & Natalie Wood (Warner Bros., U S A 1956; 119 min.). Shohat, Ella, & Robert Stam. Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (London & New York: Routledge, 1994). Simpson, Paul. The Rough Guide to Westerns (London: Rough Guides, 2006). Stowell, Peter. John Ford (Boston M A : Twayne, 1986). Turner, Frederick Jackson. The Significance of the Frontier in American History (1893; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2008). Webster, Wendy. Englishness and Empire 1939–65 (Oxford: Oxford U P , 2005). Wood, Robin. Howard Hawks (London: British Film Institute, 1983).

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“We are the ones you do not see” The Need for a Change of Focus in Filming Black Britain ——————————

B IRTE H EIDEMANN

I

T W A S N O T until the 1960s that black Britons began to make their own films and television productions; since then, filmmaking has become a central part of black British culture and its importance has been increasingly recognized since the 1980s. When black filmmakers started to construct their own versions of postcolonial Britain, they not only had to put ‘ethnic’ London on the screen and thus make it visible, but they also had to shoot ‘their’ version of living in the U K against the predominant representational tradition. Even though it would be misleading to reduce black British productions to counter-discourse, the cinematic representation of black Britain in the late-1960s and mid-1970s was marked by oppositional and experimental productions, including a number of documentary films and political productions of filmmakers such as the Trinidadian Horace Ové and his cinematic works Baldwin’s Niggers (1969) or Pressure (1975). In general, this period forged a new self-esteem among black British artists that had actually been initiated by racist attacks and was confirmed by the medium ‘film’.1 During the 1980s, a new generation of Afro-Caribbean and Asian filmmakers emerged who were primarily concerned with topics such as the struggle against racism or the search for identity. Their low-budget productions

1

See Barbara Korte & Claudia Sternberg, “If you want to know about London . . . it’s a laundrette in Peckham: Black British Directors and Screenwriters Visualise the Metropolis,” Tuebingen Archive of Black British Film and Television: University of Tuebingen, http://www.uni-tuebingen.de/tabb/articles/metropolis.html (accessed 30 January 2007).

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also implied a modification of the term ‘black’. Owing to a change in academic and public perception in terms of a recognition of difference in marginalized cultures, it was only inevitable that the meaning of ‘black’ would be reconsidered. However, the political connotation established in the 1970s remained and was merely extended, open to what Stuart Hall calls “new ethnicities”;2 Paul Gilroy accurately terms this new dimension of Blackness “multi-accentuality.”3 There was one film which, in many respects, can be called revolutionary: Hanif Kureishi’s novel My Beautiful Laundrette,4 as scripted by Kureishi and adapted by the British filmmaker Stephen Frears, encompassses all of the above-mentioned aspects, in particular class, gender, homosexuality, and ethnicity. Kureishi’s differentiated depiction of the film’s Asian British characters corresponds to “the end of the innocent notion of the essential black subject.”5 To Stuart Hall, films like My Beautiful Laundrette “make it perfectly clear that this shift has been engaged and that the question of the black subject cannot be represented without reference to the dimensions of class, gender, sexuality and ethnicity.”6 Stephen Frears once stated: “I was politicised by Hanif Kureishi. My eyes were sort of opened for me when he wrote My Beautiful Laundrette.”7 Frears tried to transfer his newly gained experience to the audience by shooting this film. Its cinematic success of 1985 marks the entry of black British film into the ‘mainstream’ market and its acquisition of commodifying qualities. Even though the next two decades were to bring commercial success and worldwide acceptance to black and Asian British culture, as Korte and Sternberg’s

2

Stuart Hall, “New Ethnicities,” in Writing Black Britain 1948–1998: An Interdisciplinary Anthology, ed. James Procter (1988; Manchester: Manchester U P , 2000): 265. 3 Paul Gilroy, Small Acts: Thoughts on the Politics of Black Cultures (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1993): 112. 4 My Beautiful Laundrette, dir. Stephen Frears, prod. Tim Bevan & Sarah Radclyffe, starring Saeed Jaffrey, Roshan Seth & Daniel Day–Lewis (Channel Four Films, U K 1985; 97 min.). 5 Hall, “New Ethnicities,” 268. 6 “New Ethnicities,” 269. 7 Stephen Applebaum, “Stephen Frears Interview,” B B C Films, http://www.bbc.co .uk/films/2002/11/27/stephen_frears_dirty_pretty_things_interview.shtml (accessed 21 February 2008).

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Bidding for the Mainstream (2004) has accurately shown, the depiction itself was at the risk of adhering to stereotypes. In so-called ‘ethnic-feel-good-productions’, the same picture of black British life, mainly focused on families, has been repeatedly painted by exploring issues of race, gender, generational difference or culture-clash. Once more, it was Frears who recognized the need for a change of focus in filming postcolonial Britain. Seventeen years after the release of My Beautiful Laundrette, he again tried to open other people’s eyes – but by striking out on a new artistic path. In Dirty Pretty Things,8 he turns his camera on Britain’s illegal immigrants. This essay seeks to analyze Frears’ new approach by concentrating on two different groups of immigrants: the ‘new’ immigrants, particularly those who are illegal, and the ‘established’ immigrants who have already gained legal status. The binary oppositions of ‘new’ vs ‘old’ or ‘illegal’ vs ‘legal’ immigrants now lead to a new form of othering that may even imply a shift from periphery to centre. Besides this obvious subversion of the concept of ‘the Other’, two additional aspects will be analyzed in detail: 1) the dissolution of the concept of ‘diaspora’; and 2) Frantz Fanon’s notion of the black person’s admittance into the ‘white sanctuary’ as elaborated in Black Skin, White Masks (1952): namely, the black person’s admittance into the ‘white sanctuary’. These theoretical concepts help in the analysis of the film’s most important theme, which is also the focus of this essay – the role of the ‘human body as commodity’. In addition, a brief digression to another innovative cinematic project dealing with illegal immigrants in Britain seems inevitable. Udayan Prasad’s Brothers in Trouble9 is set in a Northern English suburban working-class environment and tells the story of eighteen illegal immigrants from Pakistan. The film concentrates on the early migrants’ experience in the 1960s, a period of significant migration from India and Pakistan. Thus, it calls for the comparison of the cinematic representations of illegal immigrants in postcolonial Britain in the two films mentioned above with their current position in society. Dirty Pretty Things broadens the scope of earlier cinematic structures. The film sensitizes the audience to a development in British society that, although not new, is frequently ignored. As this notion is made explicit towards the end 8

Dirty Pretty Things, dir. Stephen Frears, prod. Robert Jones & Tracey Seaward, starring Audrey Tautou, Chiwetel Ejiofor & Sergi Lopez (B B C , U K 2002; 97 min.). 9 Brothers in Trouble, dir. Udayan Prasad, prod. Robert Buckler, starring Om Puri, Pavan Malhotra & Angeline Ball (Renegade Films, U K 1995; 102 min.).

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of the film, this dialogue can be considered to be the movie’s key scene, in that it sums up what has been shown throughout the story – or, rather, what is generally kept under wraps in today’s society. Almost the sole white British person of any note in the entire film asks a group of immigrants, of whom two are illegal, the central question of the movie: “Who are you people? Why haven’t I seen you before?” The answer is both simple and striking: “We [the (illegal) immigrants] are the ones you do not see. We drive your cabs, clean your rooms and suck your cocks.” Hence, Frears focuses his camera on “the ones you do not see,” thereby rendering them visible. Moreover, this scene reveals a certain intention: Britain’s illegal immigrants actually represent the ones white Britons do not want to see. As Korte and Sternberg point out, cinematic representation has helped to draw a mental map of the British capital that has been marked by a conspicuous absence of the city’s many ethnic communities.10 Accordingly, Frears gives a unique cinematic portrait of London by examining a different aspect of black Britain, with white Britain almost completely excised from the film. In Dirty Pretty Things, white Britons exist strictly as peripheral characters, a conspicuous absence that indicates their marginalization. The film’s main setting is a hotel in London that functions as a microcosm or even as a parallel world. A hotel, as a place where people live only temporarily, always implies the notion of unsettled life. In Dirty Pretty Things, however, the hotel primarily reveals the constant coming and going of illegal immigrants rather than that of the guests. Hence, it is a film about people who do not live in a hotel but work there. It centres on two main characters: Senay, a young woman from Turkey, who is on a temporary visa in England and thus works illegally as a maid in the Baltic Hotel; Okwe, a doctor from Nigeria, drives a minicab by day and works at night as a porter in the same London hotel. One night, Okwe tries to unblock a toilet in one of the hotel rooms – and stumbles upon the hotel’s ‘dirty’ secret: the blockage is a human heart. The actual function of a hotel thereby gains a new meaning. It can indeed be considered as a parallel world, invisible to the rest of British society, in which illegal immigrants sell their kidneys in exchange for a passport, and thereby – literally – obtain new identities. The hotel manager, Señor Juan, has organized a ‘black’ market in human organs. In this business, he arranges passports and payments for people desperate to begin new lives in the seemingly ‘glorious West’. When he accidentally learns that Okwe is a medical 10

See Korte & Sternberg, “If you want to know about London,” passim.

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doctor, Señor Juan tries to enlist his services. Accordingly, Dirty Pretty Things is concerned with combining two different perspectives: on the one hand, it reveals the hotel’s dirty secret, illegal operations and the illegal trade in body organs respectively; on the other, the film unveils the otherwise invisible people in Britain’s capital, its illegal immigrants. In so doing, Frears enables people who are usually forced to stay silent to make themselves and their difficult position seen and heard. Thus it seems as if the legal immigrants take on the roles of the ‘new cannibals’ who feed on their illegal fellow men. Okwe’s Chinese friend tellingly verbalizes the fate of an illegal existence as follows: “You are an illegal. You do not have a position here. You have nothing. You are nothing.” And when Okwe feels constrained to report to the police what kind of ‘dirty’ business happens in the Baltic Hotel, it is again the immigrant from China who advises him of his hopeless situation: “If you are so concerned, go to the police – get deported.” Illegal status prevents even a verbal revolt against injustice. However, elsewhere in the film, it is Okwe who tries to convince Senay that their illegal existence allows them neither to lead a normal life nor to have dreams of such a life: “For you and I, it’s only survival. It’s time you wake up from your stupid dream.” In the case of illegal immigrants, theoretical concepts such as assimilation or acculturation have increasingly been rendered obsolete. The immigrants just try to survive on a day-to-day basis, living hand-to-mouth, with each day a new test of patience. They are leading an invisible existence, in constant fear of deportation. Hence, such people not only have to make compromises and take jobs nobody else wants to do, but, as Okwe simply puts it, have to make further sacrifices: “Because you are poor, they will cut you like an animal.” In Prasad’s Brothers in Trouble, the group of illegal Pakistanis all work in a textile factory because the management prefers illegal workers who have no rights and thus cannot complain about working conditions; they have “no papers, no existence, no rights.” Nevertheless, the exploitation itself is not the crucial factor: in both films, it is the legal immigrants who mainly exploit their illegal counterpart. The result is a divide between these two groups of immigrants; their differing motivations – self-interest on the one side (legal immigrants), and survival (illegal immigrants) on the other – shape the action of these two movies. In relation to these films, established theoretical concepts such as ‘diaspora’ (in a postcolonial context), assimilation, acculturation, or the search for cultural identity prove ineffective. First of all, these ‘new’ immigrants come from all over the world, making it impossible to simply label them ‘black’ or ‘Asian British.’

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Even though Stuart Hall characterizes ‘black’ by a proliferation of “new ethnicities” with the emphasis on ‘black’ as a differential concept, he refers to the term ‘imagined communities’,11 coined by Benedict Anderson, in order to cover African, Caribbean, and South Asian experience in Britain. Hall thus wants to show that people of these communities all share a common historical experience: namely, that of colonization. Hence, he considers “‘The Black Experience’ […] as a singular and unifying framework based on the building up of identity across ethnic and cultural difference between the different communities.”12 But this newly emerged divide between legal and illegal immigrants in postcolonial Britain contradicts the term ‘imagined communities’ – or one can also argue that the emphasis on this phrase has shifted and now lies on the notion of the ‘imagined’. The early migrants’ experience, as different ethnic groups defined themselves as a community, has to be considered an illusion that cannot be maintained in today’s society. This simultaneously brings about the dissolution of the concept of ‘diaspora’, which “connects multiple communities of a dispersed population”13 and therefore also implies the notion of ‘community’. Furthermore, this concept corresponds to Hall’s above-mentioned idea of a common historical experience among different ethnic groups living in postcolonial Britain. In contrast to both James Clifford’s and Stuart Hall’s theoretical approaches, the two films under discussion accentuate, rather, the representation of the reclusiveness and anonymity in which illegal migrants have to live. They had to leave their families behind in their home countries in order to escape persecution or poverty. The ‘established’ immigrants, however, mostly brought their families or relatives out after they themselves had settled down in the U K . In spite of the fact that it is the ‘new’ immigrants who are in need of support and solidarity to overcome their hopeless situation, the immigrants who have gained legal status are not interested in helping them; they are pursuing a different agenda. In both films, one notices a recurring phenomenon. Once illegal immigrants have obtained a passport, they tend to put on a ‘white mask’ and seek admittance to what Fanon calls the “white sanctuary” – to achieve a certain position in British society: 11

See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983; London: Verso, 1991): passim. 12 Hall, “New Ethnicities,” 266. 13 James Clifford, “Diasporas,” Cultural Anthropology 9.3 (1994): 317.

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For him the black man there is only one way out, and it leads into the white world. Whence his constant preoccupation with attracting the attention of the white man, his concern with being powerful like the white man, his determined effort to acquire protective qualities – that is the proportion of being or having that enters into the compensation of an ego. … it is from within that the Negro will seek admittance to the white sanctuary. … He requires white approval.14

In other words, the concept of the ‘American Dream’ tends to shape the immigrant’s actions. In Dirty Pretty Things, there are several characters wearing this ‘white mask’. The most obvious example is Señor Juan, whose main motivation is to make money and thereby gain power, which he again and again displays to his illegal employees. Even though the latter tellingly speak of him as “Sneaky,” they officially have to call him “Señor” Juan, which seems to imply that he does not completely deny his Hispanic heritage. However, his actions are so driven by a striving for power that he has lost his sense of humanity. This is particularly expressed in Señor Juan’s not showing any sense of guilt for his ‘dirty’ actions; he is even convinced that “my whole business [the operations on illegal immigrants and the trade in their organs] is based on happiness.” When Senay quits her job in the hotel for fear of getting caught and deported, she starts working in a sewing factory that is actually a sweatshop where illegal women have to work under inhuman conditions. The owner, obviously a first-generation South Asian immigrant, takes advantage of Senay’s precarious position. He will not call the immigration enforcement police so long as she willingly accepts being sexually abused by him. This divide between legal and illegal immigrants is even expressed on an official level. Again and again, two immigration police inspectors try obtrusively to seek out Senay, at home and at her (illegal) workplaces. Even though both speak with a distinct London accent, they obviously have a migratory background. That is to say, they have officially put on a ‘white mask’, further widening the divide between the two groups of immigrants. In Brothers in Trouble, the house leader Hussein Shah orders Mary Collins, a white Irishwoman with whom he has started an affair, to marry his nephew Irshad so that the latter can enter the country legally. When Mary pro14

Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, tr. Charles L. Markmann (Peau noire, masques blancs, 1952, tr. 1967; London: Pluto, 1999): 51.

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tests, Hussein Shah insists that it will be a paper marriage only: “This is a chance for one of our own to come here in freedom. We are all brothers in trouble, hiding from this, hiding from that.” Thus, it is Mary’s legal status that is valuable. But this fatally unbalances the household: Irshad develops a taste for pub visits and mingles with the outside world as much as he likes. The situation escalates when Hussein Shah, who is disgusted by his nephew’s habits, and the young man start to fight, culminating in Irshad stabbing his uncle, the man who has helped him come to England, to death. As the legal immigrants no longer show any solidarity with the people who are living on an illegal basis and who might even be their fellow countrymen, the concept of ‘diaspora’ and its idea of community based on a collective memory, or what James Clifford calls “a shared, ongoing history of displacement,”15 is rendered obsolete. Consequently, the image of having a collective home away from home gradually fades away and instead widens the gap between the two groups of immigrants. And now it is they, the legal immigrants, who are othering the Other. In other words, illegal immigrants are not only exploited by white capitalism but also by their own countrymen or people with a similar historical experience as migrants in the U K . However, as white Britons in both films exist strictly as peripheral characters, we do not know exactly how legal immigrants are treated by white British citizens. It is therefore not possible to determine whether the legal immigrants rhave access to the “white sanctuary” and whether they are able to cross the great divide between periphery and centre. Inversely, it is only fitting that the legal immigrants, as depicted in both movies, occupy a liminal position, floating in between periphery and centre and unable to overcome an ‘either/ or’. Nevertheless, the power structures that create the gulf between the two groups of immigrants lead to a further dimension depicted in Dirty Pretty Things, that of the trade in the organs of illegal immigrants. Despite the fact that this aspect is not present in Prasad’s Brothers in Trouble, it can also be related to the issue of ‘humans as commodity’. My argument here is based partly on an essay by Liselotte Glage on the global trade in body organs, in which she discusses two novels and one play; all three are, in their own way, “a cultural intervention into globalised misery.”16 15

Clifford, “Diasporas,” 306. Liselotte Glage, “Transnational Negotiations: The Global Trade in Body Organs,” in Transgressions: Cultural Interventions in the Global Manifold, ed. Renate Brosch & Rüdiger Kunow (Trier: W V T , 2005): 29. 16

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This “globalised misery” is the link to the two films discussed in my essay. Stephen Frears not only highlights the existence of the invisible people in Britain’s capital but uncovers a parallel world run by global capital markets which profit from commodifying the ‘Other’. The trade in human organs seems so simple, for the donors, the receivers, and the agents. Señor Juan describes this issue as a business on a give-and-take basis, which guarantees profit for everyone involved: “You give me your kidney, I give you a new identity.” This clearly shows the distribution of power and the perpetual state of dependence of the othered, in this case the illegal immigrants. For Glage, the recurrent but fatal justification of the trade in organs is: “Kidneys have no name, no identity.”17 Human organs are simply considered as ‘goods’; even most of the donors regard them as the only means of overcoming their illegal status. However, Dirty Pretty Things also shows the plain truth about illegal operations and the often painful physical consequences when the surgery goes wrong. When Okwe accidentally runs into two Somalis in the hotel’s back office, it immediately becomes clear that one of them, screaming with pain, is desperately in need of medical treatment. Again, Frears focuses his camera on something society prefers not to see: the open wound of an illegal operation. This picture underlines the existing trade in which human organs are seen as commodities. There was apparently not even time left to stitch the wound of the donor (or would it be more accurate to call him the ‘victim’?). Significantly, his innocent young daughter explains to Okwe why her father is able to endure all those tortures, since she is the only one in the family who speaks English. There is one simple justification for all the pain: “He is English now.” Nonetheless, I would prefer to stress the psychological effect of what Okwe calls “swapping your insides for a passport”; the trade in human organs is tantamount to selling one’s soul to global capitalism. And it remains a striking paradox that these people are trying to become legal illegally. In Brothers in Trouble, the aspect of ‘humans as commodity’ can be taken literally: the Pakistani Amir arrives illegally in Britain after a tortuous journey hidden as ‘human cargo’ in a vegetable crate. This image of a man trapped in a box for weeks while seeking shelter abroad serves as an apt visualization of human trafficking. But it also highlights the kind of suffering people are willing to endure to begin a – seemingly – better life in the ‘golden West’.

17

Glage, “Transnational Negotiations,” 29.

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Even though both of the films under discussion focus on the U K , their thematic approach has global relevance. In his article “Bodies in Pieces” John Frow finds the right words to describe this development of global capital markets and the role of the “commodified body”: “The plundered and commodified body of those who must sell pieces of themselves is not a postcolonial body, but a body torn and scattered along … the routes of capital dependence.”18 This essay has endeavoured to present a new development in filmmaking – black Britain is obviously moving away from the seemingly fixed cinematic patterns of the mainstream market. Instead of repeatedly painting the same picture of postcolonial Britain and thereby tailoring the representation of black Britons to the exigencies of commodification, the films dealt with here focus on ‘new’ immigrants who are leading an illegal existence. Both films have effectively shown that this distinctive thematic approach questions the above-mentioned established theoretical concepts. As regards content, they both reveal a dangerous development in global capital markets which confirms that Darwin’s thesis of the ‘survival of the fittest’ is more relevant than ever. In the context of the trade in human organs, Glage eloquently observes that “the body serves as a metonymy of a system in which any idea of unity and integrity … has been given up.”19 In order to achieve a certain social status in British society and to be able to obtain something like an idea of ‘Britishness’, which includes a switch from illegal to legal by putting on a ‘white mask’, people seem to stop at nothing. This attitude becomes particularly urgent among the diverse ethnic groups living in postcolonial Britain. The divide between ‘established’ and ‘new’, ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’, ‘rich’ and ‘poor’ immigrants is the result of a globalized society, or, to use Glage’s term again, “globalised misery,” in which the individual has to struggle on his /her own in order to gain admittance to the “white sanctuary.” By acquiring economic power, black Britons hope to become accepted by white Britons and to be able somehow to live a safer life. In other words, the idea of a diasporic community can only called ‘imagined’.

18

John Frow, “Bodies in Pieces,” in The Body in the Library, ed. Leigh Dale & Simon Ryan (Cross / Cultures 33; Amsterdam & Atlanta G A : Rodopi, 1998): 50–51. 19 Glage, “Transnational Negotiations,” 29.

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WORKS CITED Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983; London: Verso, 1991). Applebaum, Stephen. “Stephen Frears Interview,” B B C Films, http://www.bbc.co.uk /films/2002/11/27/stephen_frears_dirty_pretty_things_interview.shtml (accessed 21 February 2008). Brothers in Trouble, dir. Udayan Prasad, prod. Robert Buckler, starring Om Puri, Pavan Malhotra & Angeline Ball (Renegade Films, U K 1995; 102 min.). Clifford, James. “Diasporas,” Cultural Anthropology 9.3 (1994): 302–38. Dirty Pretty Things, dir. Stephen Frears, prod. Robert Jones & Tracey Seaward, starring Audrey Tautou, Chiwetel Ejiofor & Sergi Lopez (B B C , U K 2002; 97 min.). Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks, tr. Charles L. Markmann (Peau noire, masques blancs, 1952, tr. 1967; London: Pluto, 1999). Frow, John. “Bodies in Pieces,” in The Body in the Library, ed. Leigh Dale & Simon Ryan (Cross / Cultures 33; Amsterdam & Atlanta G A : Rodopi, 1998): 35–53. Gilroy, Paul. Small Acts: Thoughts on the Politics of Black Cultures (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1993). Glage, Lieselotte. “Transnational Negotiations: The Global Trade in Body Organs,” in Transgressions: Cultural Interventions in the Global Manifold, ed. Renate Brosch & Rüdiger Kunow (Trier: W V T , 2005): 29–37. Hall, Stuart. “New Ethnicities,” in Writing Black Britain, 1948–98: An Interdisciplinary Anthology, ed. James Procter (1988; Manchester: Manchester U P , 2000): 265–75. Korte, Barbara, & Claudia Sternberg. Bidding for the Mainstream?: Black and Asian British Film since the 1990s (Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2004). ——. “If you want to know about London . . . it’s a laundrette in Peckham: Black British Directors and Screenwriters Visualise the Metropolis,” Tuebingen Archive of Black British Film and Television: University of Tuebingen, http://www.unituebingen.de/tabb/articles/metropolis.html (accessed 30 January 2007). My Beautiful Laundrette, dir. Stephen Frears, prod. Tim Bevan & Sarah Radclyffe, starring Saeed Jaffrey, Roshan Seth & Daniel Day–Lewis (Channel Four Films, U K 1985; 97 min.).

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Exoticism and Authenticity in Contemporary British-Asian Popular Culture The Commodification of Difference in Bride & Prejudice and Apache Indian’s Music ——————————

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N T H E R E A L M of contemporary British popular culture, the preoccupation with British-Asian identity undoubtedly forms one of the recurrent topics.1 While, initially, discussion was largely restricted to prose renderings of the issue – ranging from Hanif Kureishi’s Buddha of Suburbia to more recent titles such as Zadie Smith’s White Teeth and Monica Ali’s Brick Lane – engagement with (re-)definitions of a specifically British-Asian collective identity now also covers music and film. At the same time, one may detect a heightened interest in ‘exotic’2 genres among the general (i.e. white,

1

This thematic focus is likewise discernible on an academic level. Hereby, terminological issues have come to the fore again and demands for a change of categories have been raised with great verve. For a critique of the concept ‘BritishAsian’ coupled with the suggestion of ‘BrAsian’ as a substitute, see Salman Sayyid, “BrAsians: Postcolonial People, Ironic Citizens,” in A Postcolonial People: South Asians in Britain, ed. Nasreen Ali, Virinder Kalra & Salman Sayyid (London: C. Hurst, 2006): 1–10. 2 Merriam–Webster defines ‘exotic’ as, among other things, “strikingly, excitingly, or mysteriously different or unusual ,” http://www.merriam-webster .com/dictionary/exotic (accessed 3 September 2008). The aspect of a thrilling yet safe experience is likewise foregrounded by Ashcroft et al., when they trace the etymology of the term: “During the nineteenth century, however, the exotic, the foreign, increas-

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Western) public which has, for instance, fuelled a fashion in Bollywoodinspired films. (Cultural) difference and its marketing plays a decisive role here. To demonstrate the respective approaches in the presentation of cultural difference and to outline the processes involved in its commodification,3 I have chosen Gurinder Chadha’s 2004 adaptation Bride & Prejudice as one of the first ‘westernized’ Bollywood films. Samples of songs by Apache Indian, a founding father of British bhangra, will serve to illustrate ways of exploiting commodified difference as a basis for collective identities. It is interesting to note that, despite the variations in terms of (intended) recipients and the presentation of exoticness, both cases may be considered to be instances of ‘strategic exoticism, a term designating the integration of ‘non-indigenous’ and, for that matter, ‘exotic’ elements into the framework of Western popular culture. Importantly, difference is hereby turned into a commodity – a resource that is produced for the market by wage labor. Whether it be a tangible good or an evanescent service, universally enticing or widely reviled, a consumer product or a producer’s good, a commodity by definition betrays defining linkages to capitalist production and, secondarily, to market exchange.4 ingly gained, throughout the empire, the connotations of a stimulating or exciting difference, something with which the domestic could be (safely) spiced. The key conception here is the introduction of the exotic from abroad into a domestic economy.” Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths & Helen Tiffin, Post-Colonial Studies (1998; London & New York: Routledge, 2000): 94–95. Especially with respect to Chadha’s Bride & Prejudice, we observe this importation or embedding of a thrillingly foreign element into ‘domestic’ culture in order to render it palatable to ‘indigenous’ audiences. 3 Owing to the limited scope of this essay, I will not deal at greater length with the process of commodification as such. For an insightful discussion, see Igor Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1986): 64–91. Likewise, I will not engage in debate on whether ‘commoditization’ might constitute a more appropriate term to describe the phenomenon in question but shall keep to the expression ‘commodification’ throughout. For a polemical differentiation between the two, see Douglas Rushkoff, “Commodified vs. Commoditized,” http://rushkoff.com/2005/09/04/commodified-vs-commoditized/ (accessed 9 May 2009). For a detailed survey of the status of the commodity as such, see John Frow, Time and Commodity Culture (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997). 4 Dan Schiller, “From Culture to Information and Back Again: Commodification as a Route to Knowledge,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 11 (1994): 98.

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This feature is clearly revealed both in Bride & Prejudice and in Apache Indian’s music. Yet, although difference is exploited as a selling point, this aspect is not openly acknowledged by the producers themselves. In Apache Indian’s case, the tunes are even explicitly promoted as an expression of ‘authentic’ British-Asian culture and presented as a possible point of reference for identity-construction among second-generation immigrants. Tension therefore arises between the status of the products as consumer goods and their being staged as samples of ‘authentic exoticness’. In the following, I will trace the strategies employed to evoke the impression of authenticity and outline the effects of this commodification of ‘Indian’ culture.5 Particular attention will be paid to the element of prestige, since it determines the value6 of an object in a given society. Why the value of exotic ‘Indian’ difference has increased in terms of cultural capital7 is, consequently, a further aspect explored in this essay.

Bride & Prejudice: Westernized Indianness8 Gurinder Chadha’s adaptation of Jane Austen’s canonical novel Pride and Prejudice may be considered a prime example of the instrumentalization and commodification of exoticism. As the textual basis of the film already indicates, the spectator is presented with a fusion of British high culture (with a 5

Mike Featherstone raises a further important point in highlighting the temporal dimension of commodification: i.e. the fact that goods “can move in and out of commodity status”; Featherstone, “Theories of Consumer Culture,” in Cultural Studies: An Anthology, ed. Michael Ryan (Oxford & Malden M A : Blackwell, 2008): 670. 6 Jean Baudrillard offers an insightful discussion of the interrelationship between use value and exchange value as well as of the general process of the generation of value with regard to commodities; see Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, tr. & intro. Charles Levin (Pour une critique de l’économie politique du signe, 1972; St. Louis M O : Telos, 1981). 7 For a discussion of the nexus between consumption and cultural capital, see Featherstone, “Theories of Consumer Culture.” 8 Although I am aware of the fact that concepts such as ‘the West’ or ‘India/ Indianness’ are highly controversial because of their reductive assumption of a homogeneous (cultural) space, I have nevertheless chosen to employ the two terms in order to set off ‘British’ popular culture (in many cases closely connected to or influenced by U S -American tendencies) from forms of cultural expression originating – or claimed to originate – in the Indian subcontinent.

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capital C) and the conventions of Bollywood cinema.9 What happens in the process of combining the two is a ‘watering-down’ of the exotic qualities of the cinematic genre in order to render it more easily digestible by audiences unfamiliar with the conventions of Indian cinema; these latter audiences, in fact, seem to constitute the main target group for the film. To illustrate the strategies applied in commodifying exotic Indianness, the dance routines integrated into the film’s main narrative have been selected, since they represent one of the most striking deviations from the conventions of Western popular cinema, and may, at the same time, be taken as one of the defining characteristics of Bollywood cinema.10 The focus here is on three scenes: the sisters’ dance, which comments ironically on the possibility of a marriage between Lalita and Mr Kholi (the alter egos of Austen’s Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Collins); the Ashanti dance; and the snake dance. All of these routines are stock elements in conventional Bollywood film but have clearly been adapted to meet Western expectations. The sequences chosen thus illuminate how a toned-down (or ‘tuned-down’) version of Bollywood exoticism is integrated into a Western romantic comedy framework.11 The sisters’ dance takes place after Mr Kholi’s visit to the family, an event loaded with suppressed tension (as well as giggles on the girls’ part). As far as the routine itself is concerned, the most obvious deviation from the conventional pattern consists in the use of the English language. This modification enables English-speaking spectators to follow the girls’ conversation, which has started shortly before. In aesthetic terms, the scene undoubtedly caters to ‘Western’ tastes and expectations: the three sisters are dressed in the wellknown ‘Hollywood-upper-class night-look’: i.e. sleek white slacks and matching tops. Further, several brief shots which interrupt the girls’ song performance ridicule Mr Kholi’s self-orchestration and his excessive engagement

9

Strikingly, in the international English title, this connection is highlighted by the subtitle “The Bollywood Musical.” 10 For a detailed discussion of the Bollywood film industry as well as key features of the genre, see Tejaswini Ganti, Bollywood: A Guidebook to Popular Hindi Cinema (New York & London: Routledge, 2004). 11 The film does contain more traditional scenes such as the wedding dance; because they are firmly embedded in the storyline, however, even a spectator unfamiliar with Bollywood conventions will most probably grasp their function. On the general employment of song-and-dance routines in Bollywood film, see Rachel Dwyer, All You Want Is Money, All You Need Is Love (London & New York: Cassell, 2000).

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in ‘quintessentially American’ activities such as working-out and physical grooming. The parody culminates in a panoramic view of the “KholiwoodHills.” Other shots, however, depict Kholi being fed Indian food by his wife, who is dressed in a sari. The film thus draws on stereotypical notions of both American and Indian culture. On the level of the plot, the scene is clearly intended to generate a comic effect. Considered on a ‘meta-level’, though, it ends up obeying the overall logic of the film: Kholi is ridiculed for his over-zealousness in assimilating to the American way of life, and the dance routine likewise blends a decidedly ‘Western’ aesthetic with an ‘Indian’ form of cultural expression. This strategy is discernible throughout the whole film. Consistently, efforts are being made to retain a sufficient number of ‘Western’ elements such as clothing and language so as not to render the production undecipherable by the target audience. Yet, at the same time, a note of ‘exotic’ difference is added by, for instance, the setting and the integration of dance routines. Via this procedure, a knowledge of the conventions of Bollywood cinema may come to be perceived as cultural capital, since those spectators able to recognize the patterns used can distinguish themselves from other viewers who are possibly baffled by the actors’ suddenly breaking into song and dance. This phenomenon clearly demonstrates that the notion of cultural capital as such is subject to temporal change. While a knowledge of Bollywood conventions might not yet possess the same status as say, familiarity with Godard or Pynchon,12 it nevertheless may be resorted to in order to demonstrate a certain cosmopolitanism and ‘culturalization’, which also bespeaks the viewer’s capacity to move in different cultural contexts. With regard to the positioning of Bride &Prejudice as a Bollywood film, a striking feature consists in the producers’ own perception of the film. Saroj Khan, a renowned Bollywood choreographer engaged for the film, comments on Chadha’s procedure as follows: “Gurinder is very precise, very particular what she wants, she has her decisions made and you try to tell her this is not right she’d say this is what I want because it’s nothing to do with Bollywood.”13 It would thus appear that Chadha herself does not consider the film 12

These examples are offered by Mike Featherstone in his discussion of Bourdieu in “Theories of Consumer Culture,” 672. 13 My transcription from the 2005 German release under the title Liebe Lieber Indisch (Munich: Universum Film): Bonusmaterial, Featurettes, Choreographie, 00:43–00:58. See also the original, Bride & Prejudice, dir. & prod. Gurinder Chadha,

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‘Bollywood proper’, despite the employment of characteristic features of the genre as well as the hiring of the firmly established Bollywood actress Aishwarya Rai for the lead part. Obviously, these elements serve only to set a specific atmosphere and to evoke an ‘Indian’ context – making Indianness a potential selling point. The same strategy of fusing Western elements with samples of allegedly ‘authentic’ Indian film may be observed in the Ashanti dance and the snake dance. In the first case, we are again dealing with a stock item of any Bollywood production: at some moment in the film, a female character enters the stage to perform a seductive, erotic dance. This scene, only partly motivated by the storyline, is set off from the rest of the plot by the fact that the dancer makes her only appearance in this cabaret-like number and does not figure in the story itself. Although dance routines in current Bollywood productions are beginning to draw on the Western video-clip aesthetic,14 the choice of the U S -born singer and actress Ashanti Douglas for the part is significant in other respects as well. Having previously performed with widely known and highly popular (Western) celebrities such as J Lo, Ja Rule, Big Pun, and Fat Jo, Ashanti had established her reputation as a sensuous and seductive singer and dancer before the filming of Bride & Prejudice. The expectations of the audience raised by her reputation are undoubtedly satisfied thanks to the M T V -inspired styling of the scene and its affinity with video clips in Western popular culture. Both the Bollywood convention informing the sequence and Ashanti’s striking costume once again merely serve as an exotic ‘coating’. A further instance of ‘strategic exoticism’ and commodified difference may be found in the snake-dance scene, which offers a parody of Bollywood dance. Echoing a passage in Austen’s novel, the snake dance has Lakhi making a fool of herself in front of her audience. The parodic effect arises from Lakhi’s (Mary’s twentieth-century counterpart) overdoing the ‘Indian’ elements of her performance. Apart from the (stereotypically) monotone, slightly lamenting music, her eye make-up as well as her dress-style highlight the exoticness of her performance. Instead of staging a traditional Bollywood dance routine, however, she ends up writhing on the floor before the bewildered spectators. Despite the unfavourable outcome, Lakhi’s dance may be starring Aishwarya Rai, Martin Henderson, Naveen Andrews & Sonali Kulkarni (Pathé/ U K Film Council, U K / U S A 2004; 111 min. English, 122 min. Hindi). 14 Dwyer, All You Want Is Money, 114.

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considered an attempt to commodify difference; by way of exploiting ‘authentic’ culture, Lakhi hopes to impress the visitors from the U S A and to cash in on her cultural capital. Although apparently quite popular with audiences, the general strategy of combining ‘authentic’ Indian elements with a conventional (Hollywood) framework and thereby assimilating them to Western tastes has been strongly criticized: At the level of circulation, the consumption of South Asian diasporic film represents consumption of multicultural diversity and non-engagement with difference. […] The films often make their narratives palatable to the elusive white, non-South Asian audience by translating Bollywood to Hollywood. The modes of translation involve complicity with the American nationalist project through resurrection of Orientalist tropes such as repressed/primitive female sexuality and with white liberal feminism through representations of exoticized and ‘othered’ rituals of marriage.15

With regard to the realization of the film, the producers’ attitude towards their exploitation of Bollywood features is striking. As indicated above, Chadha seems highly aware of her eclectic use of different traditions and does not classify the resulting film as Bollywood ‘proper’. In contrast, the accompanying marketing campaign emphasizes the ‘exotic’ quality arising from precisely those elements retained from Bollywood. Accordingly, both the trailer and the opening frame of the D V D version start with characteristically ‘Indian’ music, in the former case combined with shots from the wedding dance and other fairly traditional sequences. It is only later on that brief clippings from the westernized dance scenes are introduced, which, due to the length of individual cuts, nevertheless underline the general impression of exoticness: Lakhi’s snake dance, for instance, is only shown in snippets that do not reveal the parodic element of the scene in the film itself. Moreover, stereotypical images of India such as cows in the street blocking traffic figure prominently in the trailer. The seemingly authentic aspects of Indian culture thus mainly function as an add-on to increase the film’s appeal to Western

15

Malik Surbhi, “ ‘ U K is Finished; India’s too Corrupt; Anyone can become Amrikan’: Interrogating Itineraries of Power in Bend It Like Beckham and Bride and Prejudice,” Journal of Creative Communications 2 (2007): 83.

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audiences.16 In fact, this criterion may be considered one of the crucial distinctions between Chadha’s instrumentalization of difference and Apache Indian’s staging of British-Asianness.

Bhangra as an Expression of ‘Authentic’ British-Asianness: The Apache Indian Case Bhangra music constitutes a second field where the strategic instrumentalization of ‘exotic’ difference may be observed. Once more we encounter a fusion of different styles juxtaposing ‘Western’ and ‘Indian’ elements. With regard to Apache Indian’s music, however, the problem of tracing the various influences is rendered even more complex by the great diversity of sources drawn upon. While, as the generic description ‘bhangra’ (a traditional harvest ritual) 17 already indicates, Punjabi music exerts the most obvious influence, its traces are restricted to the use of specific instruments and musical patterns. As a genre, however, the initial form has been overlaid by elements from a number of styles in modern popular music such as rap, hip-hop, and dancehall. Consequently, bhangra in its current (British) version represents a hybrid mix which unites a broad range of musical styles with origins as diverse as the Caribbean, the U S A , and the Punjab. Nevertheless, as far as audiences are concerned, bhangra continues to appeal primarily to second-generation youth with an Asian background. In contrast to Bride & Prejudice, where the production suggests great awareness of the film’s ‘westernization’ of ‘Indian’ cultural expressions, bhangra stresses its potential as a possible basis for the construction of collective (British-Asian) identities. The aspect of commodification is thus glossed 16

It is for this reason that, unlike Ingrid von Rosenberg, I do not consider the film “to signal a new Asian self-confidence echoing the success of Asian cultural productions in western society”; von Rosenberg, “Shooting Blair’s Britain,” in New Britain: Politics and Culture, ed. Bernd Lenz (Passau: Karl Stutz, 2006): 172. Seeing the extent to which Bollywood exoticism has been ‘watered down’ and fused with a more familiar aesthetic, Bollywood references seem to be employed primarily to lend an exotic hue to the production. Moreover, they frequently serve to provoke humorous effects, a phenomenon explicitly discussed in the film when William Darcy comments on the characteristic Indian moves he is still unable to imitate. 17 For a detailed account of bhangra as a “harvest ritual of the Punjab region in North India,” see Anjali Gera Roy, “‘Different, Youthful, Subjectivities’: Resisting Bhangra,” A R I E L : A Review of International English Literature 32.4 (October 2001): 226–27.

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over by the professed intention to offer points of orientation to second-generation immigrants and to provide them with a shared basis of cultural expression. This tactic has been applied ever since bhangra’s earliest successes: Here [= in Southall], at the beginning of the 1980s, a new form of hybridised bhangra developed and came to constitute a means for the younger generations to express their identity as “Punjabis in the West.” […] British bhangra soon went beyond the borders of the Punjabi Sikh communities and started to connote a wider diasporic group: while Punjabis still represent the dominant group – especially in the production of this music – other South Asians (mostly those from the Northern regions of India) have also adopted it to express a broader shared diasporic identity, cutting across religious as well as regional divisions.18

Thus, unlike the case in Bride & Prejudice, producers of bhangra music market their tunes as a form of cultural expression intended to cater first and foremost to the demands of second-generation immigrants. Apache Indian states this intention explicitly: Our parents are born in India (Punjab), but we are coming from England. Reggae, Rap, Pop, music and fashion and a lot of other stuff exert influence on the present generation. But you also notice direct influences from India, like the ‘arranged marriages’, which is typical for the Indian culture. My music is a mixture of my provenance, blended with styles of reggae. Moreover, I was stamped by artists like Bob Marley and U B 40 (from Birmingham). Speaking frankly, it’s quite easy to describe my style of music: I mix the street style reggae with with [sic!] original Indian sounds that I experienced I experienced [sic!] at home. New generation – new culture.19

What is remarkable is Apache Indian’s use of the personal pronoun “we” and his reference to “the Indian” culture, which implies a) the existence of a homogeneous Indian culture and b) the possibility of a unified collective identity shared by the entire second generation. Moreover, in the last sentence, Apache seems to suggest that a new culture will inevitably emerge be-

18

Laura Leante, “Shaping Diasporic Sounds: Identity as Meaning in Bhangra,” The World of Music 46.1 (2004): 112. 19 Jerry Vazhayil & Sherry Kizhukandayil, “Apache Indian exklusiv im Interview mit theinder.net,” theInder.net (December 2001) http://www.indien-netzwerk.de /navigation/unterhaltung/artikel/apache_indian/apache-int-eng.htm (accessed 25 May 2008) (my emphases).

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cause the second generation will by default create their own form of cultural expression. This stance chimes in with Leante’s findings on the great identificatory potential offered by popular culture, popular music in particular. In this context, the status of the artist himself is equally significant: because he belongs to precisely the group that is his target audience, he is in a position to claim a certain authority to speak about the living conditions of second-generation immigrants. What is more, his mixed parentage enables him to draw upon ‘Indian’ elements as part of his ‘own’ culture and to juxtapose them with Western elements with which he is likewise familiar from his upbringing in Britain. In Apache’s self-promotion, this in-between status is openly thematized; interestingly enough, it is frequently the Indian features that are stressed, as in the song title “Make way for the Indian.”20 In addition, Apache addresses specifically ‘Indian’ topics and concerns such as arranged marriage. A further remarkable aspect has to do with the alleged ‘authenticity’ of Apache Indian’s music. As pointed out above, Apache Indian stylizes himself – usually in a tongue-in-cheek fashion – as ‘the Indian’, thereby setting himself off from established white English society. In order to do so, he overemphasizes those elements which mark him as ‘Non-English’. These features range from a specific dress-code and a flashy hairstyle to the register and pronunciation of his songs and the topics they cover. Likewise, many songs include humorous references to stereotypical notions of ‘India’ such as its being the land of magic and storytelling. Accordingly, Apache’s song “Magic Carpet” starts with the lines “Here me come upon the magic carpet / Here me come upon a magic carpet / And when you see me come / I say me come seh fe park it.” Juxtaposed with these joking references to clichés of Indian culture are titles that offer a more profound reflection on problems afflicting especially the second-generation such as arranged marriages or restrictions arising from religious affiliations.21

20

Kapur’s choice of stage name provides another indication of his specific form of engagement with his cultural identity: besides playing on the two meanings of the term ‘Indian’, the singer inscribes himself in the reggae tradition by reference to the reggae star Supercat, the ‘Wild Apache’; see Timothy Dean Taylor, Global Pop: World Music, World Markets (London & New York: Routledge, 1997): 155. 21 As the lyrics to his song “Religion” demonstrate, Apache usually adopts a conciliatory stance: Apache Indian, “Religion,” lyricsmode http://www.lyricsmode.com /lyrics/a/apache_indian /religion.html (accessed 24 June 2008).

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Yet, as a closer examination reveals, the expression of ‘authentic’ BritishAsianness in Apache’s music is by no means confined to a fusion of ‘English’ and ‘Indian’ components. On the contrary, one may likewise detect the strong influence of Afro-Caribbean culture: this additional factor primarily informs the register and pronunciation of Apache’s lyrics and renders his language a heady mixture of English, Jamaican English, and Punjabi, a ‘patwa’ […] whose meanings are sometimes obscure, but which come through most of the time thanks to Apache’s reggae-like style of syllabic declamation, more sung than rap lyrics, but not really sung either.22

By using such ‘patwa’ as “But listen when me talk tell everybody, / Me want me arranged marriage from me mum & daddy” or “Me wan gal from Jullunder City, / Me wan gal say a soorni curi,”23 Apache, on the one hand, appeals to stereotypical (and, in the case of ‘patwa’, wrongheaded) notions about the linguistic incapability of ‘ethnic’ communities in Britain and, on the other, clearly inscribes himself in the reggae tradition. The Jamaican / Caribbean influence likewise shows in songs that draw on musical patterns from reggae. Coupled with elements from dancehall and traditional bhangra they create Apache’s specific style, usually referred to as ‘bhangramuffin’.24 Nevertheless, one might speculate whether the decision to include elements from reggae derives at least partly from the popularity of the genre and its potential to increase record sales. Along with the merger of Caribbean, Black U S , and Punjabi culture, we discover yet another influence, Western pop culture. Apache’s song “Armagideon Time,” for instance, may be considered a ‘bhangramuffin-remix’ of a title published by The Clash on their 1979 album Black Market Clash. The sources of Apache’s references are consequently by no means confined to ‘ethnic’ music but, rather, cover Western popular music and culture as well. This phenomenon also shows in the aesthetic of some of his video clips,

22

Taylor, Global Pop, 162. Global Pop, 160. 24 On this syncretism of Caribbean origin generally, see especially Carolyn Cooper, “ ‘ Mix up the Indian with all the patwa’: Rajamuffin Sounds in ‘Cool’ Britannia,” Language & Intercultural Communication 4.1–2 (2004): 81–99. Repr. in Cooper, Sound Clash: Jamaican Dancehall Culture at Large (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004): 251–78. 23

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which are heavily informed by a kind of sexualized M T V -style coolness. The clip for Apache’s major club hit “Boom-Shack-A-Lak” offers a fusion of ‘exotic’ elements such as a snake charmer with ‘Western’-dressed (female) dancers combining their skinny-tight dresses with ankle-high trainers or sporting (equally tight) black leather outfits. By way of blending these different visual styles and musical genres, Apache manages to attract a comparatively heterogeneous audience with listeners stemming from both migrant and ‘English / British’ backgrounds. Even though the ‘Indian’ element is invariably present and – depending on the song – emphasized to different degrees, we, at the same time, discern the introduction of a sufficient number of ‘Western’ elements to make the music accessible to audiences moored in international pop culture. What is more, Apache Indian’s presentation of controversial issues is, in most cases, coupled with gripping beats and catchy tunes. As a result – the song “Arranged Marriage” is a prime example – the musical underpinning even proves misleading, as the rhythmic, flowing tone with the prominent refrain “Me wan gal” does not immediately reveal the profound reflection on the topic of arranged marriage in the individual verses; however, these prove less easily comprehensible because some words are muffled or in patwa. By way of this strategy, the aspect of commodification which undoubtedly has an impact on the production process is veiled, since the audience is allegedly presented with a specific form of cultural expression rather than a consumer good.

Commodified Exoticism: Selling Point or ‘Authentic’ Cultural Expression? As demonstrated by the two instances of ‘strategic exoticism’, the instrumentalization of commodified difference as a marker of ‘cultural authenticity’ and value (in the sense of cultural capital) may adopt various functions, depending on which target group is being primarily addressed. In the first case, exemplified by Bride & Prejudice, an eclectic selection of ‘exotic’ features is inserted into a ‘Western’ context and thereby embedded into a recognizable framework. By highlighting the ‘exotic’ elements, the marketing of the film conveys the impression that spectators are offered the opportunity to experience ‘authentic Indian culture’. By contrast, as the Apache Indian phenomenon shows, a similar strategy may be applied to a divergent purpose. Rather than providing a toned-down version of ‘authentic’ Indian culture, Apache integrates elements into his music that are foreign to Western lis-

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teners; he also refrains from offering explanations that might render the lyrics of his songs more accessible to listeners unfamiliar with the cultural contexts referred to. As a result, even though the music as such may appeal to a broader audience, a basic knowledge of British-Asian rituals and traditions – coupled with some linguistic facility – is required in order fully to grasp the content. This feature veils the fact that, in the last instance, we are dealing with a consumer product, even though it is promoted as an expression of ‘authentic’ British-Asian culture. In conclusion, it may be stated that, basically, two forms of engagement with exoticness and authenticity exist: in the first case, exotic features are used to convey to a Western audience the impression of an authentic foreign experience; those self-same elements, in the second case, come to act as a basis for the creation of authentic ‘Indian’ (or at least hyphenated) identities. Each time, however, exotic difference is commodified and serves as an asset in the consumer’s personal balance of cultural capital.

WORKS CITED Apache Indian. “Religion,” lyricsmode, http://www.lyricsmode.com/lyrics/a/apache _indian/religion.html (accessed 24 June 2008). Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths & Helen Tiffin. Post-Colonial Studies (1998; London & New York: Routledge, 2000). Baudrillard, Jean. For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, tr. & intro. Charles Levin (Pour une critique de l’économie politique du signe, 1972; St. Louis M O : Telos, 1981). Bride & Prejudice, dir. & prod. Gurinder Chadha, starring Aishwarya Rai, Martin Henderson, Naveen Andrews & Sonali Kulkarni (Pathé/ U K Film Council, U K / U S A 2004; 111 min. English, 122 min. Hindi). Cooper, Carolyn. “ ‘ Mix up the Indian with all the patwa’: Rajamuffin Sounds in ‘Cool’ Britannia,” Language & Intercultural Communication 4.1–2 (2004): 81–99. Repr. in Cooper, Sound Clash: Jamaican Dancehall Culture at Large (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004): 251–78. Dwyer, Rachel. All You Want Is Money, All You Need Is Love (London & New York: Cassell, 2000). Featherstone, Mike. “Theories of Consumer Culture,” in Cultural Studies: An Anthology, ed. Michael Ryan (Oxford & Malden M A : Blackwell, 2008): 667–82. Frow, John. Time and Commodity Culture: Essays in Cultural Theory and Postmodernity (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997). Ganti, Tejaswini. Bollywood: A Guidebook to Popular Hindi Cinema (New York & London: Routledge, 2004).

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Koptytoff, Igor. “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1986): 64–91. Leante, Laura. “Shaping Diasporic Sounds: Identity as Meaning in Bhangra,” The World of Music 46.1 (2004): 109–32. Merriam–Webster Online. “exotic,” http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary /exotic (accessed 3 September 2008). Roy, Anjali Gera. “‘Different, Youthful, Subjectivities’: Resisting Bhangra,” A R I E L : A Review of International English Literature 32.4 (October 2001): 211–28. Rushkoff, Douglas. “Commodified vs. Commoditized,” http://rushkoff.com/2005/09 /04/commodified-vs-commoditized/ (accessed 9 May 2009). Sayyid, Salman. “BrAsians: Postcolonial People, Ironic Citizens,” in A Postcolonial People: South Asians in Britain, ed. Nasreen Ali, Virinder Kalra & Salman Sayyid (London: C. Hurst, 2006): 1–10. Schiller, Dan. “From Culture to Information and Back Again: Commodification as a Route to Knowledge,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 11 (1994): 93–115. Surbhi, Malik. “‘U K is Finished; India’s too Corrupt; Anyone can become Amrikan’: Interrogating Itineraries of Power in Bend It Like Beckham and Bride and Prejudice,” Journal of Creative Communications 2 (2007): 79–100. Taylor, Timothy Dean. Global Pop: World Music, World Markets (London & New York: Routledge, 1997). Vazhayil, Jerry, & Sherry Kizhukandayil. “Apache Indian exklusiv im Interview mit theinder.net,” the inder.net (December 2001), http://www.indien-netzwerk.de /navigation/unterhaltung/artikel/apache_indian/apache-int-eng.htm (accessed 25 May 2009). Von Rosenberg, Ingrid. “Shooting Blair’s Britain,” in New Britain: Politics and Culture, ed. Bernd Lenz (Passau: Karl Stutz, 2006): 159–81.

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Salman Rushdie Superstar The Making of Postcolonial Literary Stardom ——————————

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“Did I tell you? I saw a light on him,” she said. “A radiance, an aura, that first day in the record store. Not excessive?, but definitely emanating. About equivalent to a hundred-watt bulb, that is to say, enough to illuminate an average-size room. Which was plenty.” […] “Bushwah,” I retorted. “Ormus is no god-man with portable lighting effects. Trouble with you is, you came to India and caught a dose of Wisdomof-the-East-itis, a.k.a. gurushitia, our incurable killer brain disease. I told you not to drink the water if it wasn’t boiled.”1

I

M A Y 2 0 0 8 , the spotlight was directed yet again at Salman Rushdie. The reason behind the hubbub in the media was that the writer made a cameo appearance – “a crazy fluke,” in his own words2 – in the video of Scarlett Johansson’s début single “Falling Down” included on her album Anywhere I Lay My Head. Rushdie is seen nuzzling the actress-turnedsinger’s neck, making her giggle, and then grinning at the camera. A news story in the Sunday Times reporting the ‘event’ begins by warning its “readers of a more sensitive nature” to “look away,” and proceeds thus:

1

N

Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet (New York: Picador, 2000):

129–30. 2

Sophia Banay, “Knight on the Town,” Portfolio.com (November 2008), http ://www .portfolio.com/culture-lifestyle/culture-inc/arts/2008/10/15/Rushdie-and-the-AilingBook-Industry (accessed 20 July 2010).

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Scarlett Johansson’s latest conquest is not a Hollywood hunk with a six-pack and a surf habit, but none other than our very own paunchy, hood-eyed, middle-aged genius Salman Rushdie. […] Well, well. Hasn’t he done well? The busty star is just the latest in a long line of stunning gals to be seen swimming upstream with Salman […]. So, what’s the pull? It can’t be his looks – the man has the face of an outraged woodpecker.3

In early 2009, the Daily Mail likewise ran an article on Rushdie’s allegedly “radical image makeover” and “come-and-get-me-girls” appeal after his divorce from the model, actress, chef, and reality-show hostess Padma Lakshmi in 2007: Since the break-up Rushdie has rarely been seen without a glamorous woman on his arm and has been overseeing his own radical image makeover. He has treated himself to an oversized “bling” watch that might be more at home on the wrist of David Beckham or the rapper Jay-Z. The wordsmith has taken to wearing sunglasses indoors and even toyed with getting fit. He also issued a “come-and-get-me-girls” invitation in the New York Times, when he announced: “I’m totally eligible, single and available.” […] He is significantly lacking in the hair department and suffers from a rare inherited condition called ptosis, which gives him the droopy-eyed look of a man fighting a losing battle with sleep. In short, when it comes to looks, Rushdie is no catch.4

In 2006, a headline in the gossip section of the New York Post online edition had already depicted Rushdie and his son Zafar as “babe magnets.” In similar vein to the above piece from the Sunday Times – a newspaper that does not consistently display an interest in matters literary – the anonymous reporter adopts an advisory tone when describing the Casanovian conduct of both father and son: Lock up your daughters when Salman Rushdie and his son hit the party circuit. The acclaimed author and his offspring are talking each other up as powerful chick magnets no woman can resist – with Zafar Rushdie, 27, even confessing he’s used his 59-year-old father’s prowess to score. “Most people who go to a 3

Anon. “Middle Youth Alert,” Sunday Times (11 May 2008), http://www .timesonline .co.uk/tol/life_and_style/men/article3883104.ece (accessed 20 July 2010). (My emphasis.) 4 Daniel Bates, “Four-times Married Salman Rushie Vows Never To Get Hitched Again,” Daily Mail (3 January 2009), http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article1104589/Four-times-married-Salman-Rushie-vows-hitched-again.html (accessed 20 July 2010).

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party with their parents try to run away from them. Not me. If I want to meet girls, I just stand near him […].5

“Known across the world for his flamboyance and... err.. . luck with the ladies, as much [sic] for his writing skills,” as Purnima Sharma puts it in The Times of India,6 Rushdie and his complex standing as literary star is well illustrated by his cameo appearance in Johansson’s music video, and by the ‘chick magnet’ label that has come most visibly to attach itself to the writer since his fourth divorce. Reiterating the question posed by the reporter in the Sunday Times article, what indeed is “the pull”? What social meanings are behind Rushdie’s pulling power? What makes the Indian-born writer the object of such frequent media attention and headline-grabbing? At the same time, why would this acclaimed postcolonial author be so willing to allow his image to be used to advertise the launching of Johansson’s new artistic pursuit, when he gladly abandoned a career in the advertising industry in the 1980s? What ramifications might this phenomenon hold for the field of postcolonial cultural production? The broad purpose of this essay is to offer tentative answers to these questions from a critical standpoint that approaches celebrity as a commodity. There has been a surge of celebrity studies since the 1960s, including the pioneering works The Image by Daniel Boorstin and The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord, as well as Stars by Richard Dyer, The Frenzy of Renown by Leo Braudy, and Celebrity and Power by P. David Marshall.7 Although these works remain central to star studies today, they failed to address comprehensively the specific issue of literary fame. In the groundbreaking study Star Authors (2000), an examination of literary celebrity in America, Joe Moran argues that celebrity writers are on average fig5

Anon. “The Rushdies: Babe Magnets?” New York Post (12 December 2006), http: //www.nypost.com/seven/12122006/gossip/pagesix/pagesix.htm (accessed 20 May 2008). 6 Purnima Sharma, “Hot Write Now,” The Times of India, (8 December 2008), http: //timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Potpourri/Hot_write_now/articleshow/3804469.cms (accessed 20 July 2010). 7 Daniel Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1962; New York: Atheneum, 1987); Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle tr. Donald Nicholson–Smith (La Société du spectacle, 1967; New York: Zone, 1994); Richard Dyer, Stars (London: British Film Institute, 1979); Leo Braudy, The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and its History (New York: Oxford U P , 1986); P. David Marshall, Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 1997).

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ures who “straddle the divide” between literary elitism and popular readership (in other words, what Pierre Bourdieu identifies as the ‘restricted’ and ‘extended’ subfields of cultural production).8 With reference to the contemporary U S A , Moran posits that literary celebrity status “has been conferred on authors who have the potential to be commercially successful and penetrate into mainstream media, but are also perceived as in some sense culturally ‘authoritative’”; as such, star writers are “usually ‘crossover’ successes who emphasize both marketability and traditional cultural hierarchies”9 and are, therefore, “ambiguous figures.”10 At least since the late-1980s, Rushdie has been the object of rumour and speculation in the British press. At that time, as Sanjay Subrahmanyam recounts in his examination of the two decades of the fatwa, or religious edict, issued as a reaction to the publishing of Rushdie’s fourth novel, “weekend newspaper supplements retailed gossipy accounts of how The Satanic Verses had failed to win the Booker Prize, with malicious claims regarding Rushdie’s tantrums when this happened.”11 Current criticism of the author’s work has been increasingly attentive to his location as a literary star in the field of postcolonial cultural production. Most influentially, Graham Huggan addresses Rushdie’s “contradictory status” as “celebrity minority” author, gauging the degree to which the writer’s achievements could be connected with “commodified perceptions of cultural marginality.”12 Anshuman Mondal frames Rushdie’s current work as springing from “within the celebrity glasshouse” and detects a dilemma in it: the writer’s texts are “as much a reinforcement of his own celebrity as an indictment of the culture that sustains it.”13 With a view to promoting a debate on Rushdie’s

8

Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, tr Richard Nice et al., ed. Randal Johnson (Cambridge: Polity, 1993). 9 Joe Moran, Star Authors: Literary Celebrity in America (London & Sterling V A : Pluto, 2000): 6 10 Moran, Star Authors, 7. 11 Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “The Angel and the Toady,” Guardian (14 February 2009), http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/feb/14/salman-rushdie-ayatollah-khomeini-fatwa (accessed 20 July 2010). 12 Graham Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London & New York: Routledge, 2001): xii. 13 Anshuman A. Mondal, “The Ground Beneath Her Feet and Fury: The Reinvention of Location,” in The Cambridge Companion to Salman Rushdie, ed. Abdulrazak Gurnah (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge U P , 2007): 174.

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literary stardom, the focus of this essay rests specifically on the interweaving of the writer’s authorial signature with the brand name ‘Rushdie’; in other words, it examines how the author has been undergoing construction as a global literary celebrity – or, rather, as a brand-name – ever since the issuing of the fatwa. Even though this non-literary avatar nearly engulfed his career as a writer, the death warrant is one of the central factors of Rushdie’s fame in academia as one of the most critically celebrated postcolonial writers, because, as Subrahmanyam caustically remarks, “no postcolonial literary critic can seemingly make a career without a comment on the matter.”14 Departing from Huggan’s arguments, and considering that Rushdie is seen at times as actively pursuing self-promotion and recognition in international literary circles, it is my contention that an examination of his status as the most visible face of the postcolonial glitterati literati can only be achieved through a critical understanding of the interplay between the three inextricable domains of the brand-name ‘Rushdie’: the celebrity status acquired in the aftermath of the Iranian fatwa; the literary stardom and academic canonization resulting from Rushdie’s standing as a renowned postcolonial writer; and the fame built up through strategies of self-publicity that include the granting of several promotional interviews, public appearances as intellectual and political advocate, the delivery of invited lectures at universities and literary festivals as writer and literary critic, and also, crucially, his regular presence in society columns. As such, the author’s celebrity status owes much to the skilful management (and self-creation) of these multiple associations, which are to some extent buttressed by a ‘minority’ appeal, all of which are included in the promotional circuit of publishing. Rushdie became internationally renowned in the 1980s for having “redr[awn] the literary map of India,” as the New York Times put it, with the critical acclaim granted to his Midnight’s Children (1981).15 This novel was the recipient of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and of the high-profile Booker Prize for Fiction, one the most prestigious British literary awards; subsequently, it was voted The Booker of Bookers, as the best novel to have won the literary prize in the twenty-five years since its inception, and was awarded the one-off The Best of the Booker to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the award in 2008. Furthermore, Rushdie’s literary texts won major 14

Subrahmanyam, “The Angel and the Toady.” Peter Kadzis, “Salman Speaks” (1999), in Conversations With Salman Rushdie, ed. Michael R. Reder (Jackson: U P of Mississippi, 2000): 216–17. 15

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international prizes such as the Whitebread Prize for Best Novel, the European Aristeion Prize for Literature, and the French Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger. In this sense, the writer’s ‘celebritization’ results in part from the burgeoning “literary-value industry” made up of individuals and institutions committed to “producing the reputations and status positions of contemporary works and authors, situating them on various scales of worth.”16 Still, Rushdie is probably best known globally for The Satanic Verses (1988) on account of the fatwa issued by the Ayatollah Khomeini. The decree pronouncing a death sentence against Rushdie was received by the author on 14 February 1989, and he looked back on it a decade later as a rather “unfunny valentine.”17 More startlingly, however, the fatwa was construed as “an extreme form of literary criticism,” as V.S. Naipaul notoriously declared, though as he later clarified that such comparison between literary criticism and the silencing by death of creative expression was intended to be read “as a joke.”18 The worldwide recognizability of Rushdie as the epitome of the conflict between freedom of speech and the defence of religious beliefs prompted Peter Kadzis, a decade later, to write in the foreword to an interview he conducted with the author that, as a result of the “distinction” conferred upon Rushdie by the Iranian government, and “although he may have wished otherwise,” he had been turned into “perhaps the most famous writer in the world.”19 Such a view holds true as late as 2007, with Andrew Teverson starting his monograph on Rushdie with the statement that the writer’s fame “is not hard to establish,”20 and using the opening paragraphs of his introduction to itemize the various areas involved in the writer’s celebrity status. Jay McInerney’s 9/11 novel The Good Life (2006) exploits the connection Teverson draws in particular between the ‘Rushdie Affair’ and the ‘exclusive’ 16

James F. English & John Frow, “Literary Authorship and Celebrity Culture,” in A Concise Companion to Contemporary British Fiction, ed. James F. English (Malden M A & Oxford: Blackwell, 2006): 45. 17 Salman Rushdie, “My Unfunny Valentine,” New Yorker (15 February 1999): 28. 18 Mel Gussow, “Another Bend in the River For Naipaul: He Tests the Water for Nobel Prize Speech,” New York Times (15 November 2001), http://query.nytimes.com /gst/fullpage.html?res=9F01EED71F38F936A25752C1A9679C8B63 (accessed 20 July 2010). 19 Kadzis, “Salman Speaks,” 216. 20 Andrew Teverson, Salman Rushdie (Manchester & New York: Manchester U P , 2007): 3.

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news reports dealing with the writer’s “complicated love life”21 by fictionalizing and thus exploiting creatively the hullabaloo, duly played out in the media, of Rushdie’s involvement with Padma Lakshmi and subsequent divorce from Elizabeth West, his third wife. The Good Life opens with a dinner party where Rushdie was expected to appear but cancelled at the last minute. One of the references to the writer in McInerney’s novel stresses precisely Rushdie’s and, somewhat by extension, Lakshmi’s standing as troublesome celebrities: “It wasn’t just Salman and his heady aura of celebrity; his new girlfriend was absurdly beautiful, to the point of being a socially disruptive force.”22 Supposedly, Rushdie is scheduled to embark the next day on his book tour for the novel Fury (2001), but the dinner-party host Corrine Calloway, instead of being upset, actually feels relieved by the absence of the “illustrious guest”: “They’d been friends with Salman’s wife, the mother of his youngest child,” and even though she “didn’t believe everything she read in the tabloids and she refused to take sides in marital disputes […] this one hit a little closer to home.” Furthermore, Corrine “was still worried that a bomb might go off in his vicinity, although supposedly the fatwa had been lifted”; after all, “the people who wanted him dead weren’t the forgive-and-forget type.”23 As a result of the (non-)literary polemic which catapulted Rushdie to fame and turned him into a target of religious hounding for alleged insults to Islam, the writer spent about a decade in hiding under British government protection for fear of being hunted down. Even though it is still uncertain whether the fatwa has been withdrawn or in fact renewed, it seems that “now he’s only hunted by cameras,” to judge from the title of an article printed in the New York Times around the same time as the Sunday Times piece quoted at the beginning of this essay.24 In this regard, in 1999 a Newsweek reviewer heralds him as “a household name” and “literature’s first global celebrity – as famous as a pop star.”25 One might argue that the label ‘Rushdie’ has been under21

Teverson, Salman Rushdie, 4. Jay McInerney, The Good Life (London: Bloomsbury, 2007): 10. 23 McInerney, The Good Life, 9–10. 24 Patricia Cohen, “Now He’s Only Hunted by Cameras,” New York Times (25 May 2008), http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/25/books/25cohe.html (accessed 20 July 2010). 25 Carla Power, quoted in Christopher Rollason, “Rushdie’s Un-Indian Music: The Ground Beneath Her Feet,” in Studies in Indian Writing in English, vol. 2, ed. Rajeshwar Mittapalli & Pier Paolo Piciucco (New Delhi: Atlantic, 2001): 96. 22

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going a process of self-fashioning at least since the publishing of The Satanic Verses, to the extent that the text itself suggests that its author was aware that his words would spark controversy. “It’s true that some passages in The Satanic Verses have now acquired a prophetic quality that alarms even me,” the writer penned in the essay “In Good Faith,”26 evoking sentences such as “Your blasphemy, Salman, can’t be forgiven. Did you think I would not work it out? To set your words against the Words of God,”27 and, most likely, the almost divinatory passage printed in the closing section of the novel – more accurately, in its last-but-one page: “Salahuddin was thinking [.. .] about how he was going to die for his verses, but could not find it in himself to call the death-sentence unjust.”28 As John Updike trenchantly argues, the period corresponding to Rushdie’s “dark decade”29 increased the writer’s mastery of celebrity-related topics. Updike remarks that the writer’s “fascination with fame and theatricality, movies and rock music predated the fatwa,” and still continues to imprint on his fictional work “a distracting glitter, like shaken tinsel.”30 This view of the writer’s attraction to celebrity is reiterated (albeit in a more forthright way) by Andrew Wilson writing in the Daily Mail – referring to Rushdie’s post-fatwa work as devoid of “literary merit,” the reporter argues that the writer “had become one of those people who are famous for being famous, and the books were sold on the back of this fact. [. . .] The more unreadable he becomes, the more the publishers promote him as a celebrity.”31 Despite his literary achievements, the post-fatwa Rushdie seems to have vanished into the gossip page. Here, I am rewriting Martin Amis’s notable phrase according to which Rushdie “had vanished into the front page” as a result of The Satanic Verses 26

Salman Rushdie, “In Good Faith” (1990), in Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981–1991 (London: Granta, 1991): 407. (My emphasis.) 27 Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (New York & London: Viking, 1989): 374. 28 Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 545–46. 29 Salman Rushdie, “A Dream of Glorious Return,” in Step Across this Line: Collected Non-Fiction, 1992–2002 (London: Vintage, 2003): 196. 30 John Updike, “Paradises Lost,” New Yorker (5 September 2005), http://www .newyorker.com/archive/2005/09/05/050905crbo_books (accessed 20 July 2010). 31 Andrew Norman Wilson, “Why the Prize for Pomposity, Titanic Conceit and Turgid Novels Should Go to Salman Rushdie Every Year,” Daily Mail (31 July 2008), http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1039995/Why-prize-pomposity-titanicconceit-turgid-novels-Salman-Rushdie-year.html (accessed 20 July 2010).

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affair.32 Alluding to Amis’s expression during an interview, the writer confirmed that that was “more or less exactly how it felt” and that what he was trying to accomplish at that moment was “to reappear in the cultural section.”33 Yet, regardless of Rushdie’s professed intent in the 1990s, the two newspaper extracts quoted at the beginning of this essay are from “Page Six,” a gossip column included in the New York Post, and from the “life and style” section of the Sunday Times. Even though it would be unfair to state that these are representative of the whole media output pertaining to the author over the post-fatwa decades, they nevertheless illustrate a fundamental contention of Theodor Adorno, who argues, in relation to music and the culture industry, that “the reactions of the listeners appear to have no relation to the playing of the music” – I am in this context drawing a comparison with literature and readership – and continues thus: they have reference, rather, to the cumulative effects which, for its part, cannot be thought of unalienated by the past spontaneities of listeners, but instead dates back to the command of publishers, sound film magazines and rulers of radio.34

Adorno claims that “the star principle has become totalitarian”;35 by the same token, the media responses to Rushdie have tended to record his fondness for partying and attraction for stunning women, bearing at times little relation to his literary achievements. It has been in this media environment that Rushdie’s star image has been made to circulate; in this sense, the despondent 32

Quoted in Timothy Brennan, Wars of Position: The Cultural Politics of Left and Right (New York: Columbia U P , 2006): 69. Amis’s words were originally published in “Rendezvous with Rushdie,” Vanity Fair (December 1990): 161. Brennan writes alternatively that “Rushdie, as a whole, has been foreshortened by the [Rushdie] affair” (69). Likewise, one may argue that the novel The Satanic Verses disappeared into The Satanic Verses affair. 33 Vijaya Nagarajan, “Salman Rushdie on Bombay, Rock N’ Roll, and The Satanic Verses,” Whole Earth Review (Fall 1999), http://wholeearth.com/issue/98/article/90 /salman.rushdie.on.bombay.rock.n'.roll.and.the.satanic.verses (accessed 20 July 2010). 34 Theodor W. Adorno, “On the Fetish Character of Music and the Regression of Listening,” tr. Susan H. Gillespie, in The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, ed. J.M. Bernstein (“Über den Fetischcharakter in der Musik und die Regression des Hörens,” 1938; London: Routledge, 1991): 35–36. 35 Adorno, “On the Fetish Character of Music,” 35.

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comment voiced by the first-person narrator in the novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999) seems to echo, one presumes, the author’s own musings on the workings of celebrity: We always did prefer our iconic figures injured, stuck full of arrows or crucified upside down; we need them flayed and naked, we want to watch their beauty crumble slowly and to observe their narcissistic grief. Not in spite of their faults but for their faults we adore them, worshipping their weaknesses, their pettinesses, their bad marriages, their substance abuse, their spite.36

This passage is significant both for disclosing the centrality of the subject of fame that permeates Rushdie’s work and for signalling the anxieties resulting from undesired celebrity. Huggan contends that Rushdie’s prominence in the 1980s as a star of the postcolonial literary field was at least partly the result of commercial strategies devised by publishers and literary-prize sponsors such as the Booker–McConnell company, sponsor of the Booker Prize for Fiction from 1968 to 2002, in order to, respectively, “market the margins” and “prize otherness.” By many accounts – and Huggan’s is no exception – Rushdie stands as the most canonical and critically lauded Indian postcolonial writer; notwithstanding this critical praise, he is often depicted, and accordingly attacked, as a writer who is permanently entangled in the superficial world of celebrities and glamour. For instance, Harish Trivedi regards the writer’s fame as incommensurate with his literary achievements, declaring that “Rushdie’s fan following is more for his worldly success than his writing.”37 Instead of simply having celebrity imposed on writers, it is now commonly agreed that these creative individuals retain a degree of agency in the negotiation of their own celebrity.38 As Wenche Ommundsen notes about the circular nature of the mechanics of celebrification, once famous, or imbricated in the discourse of celebrity, writers are subjected to (or subject themselves to – they’re not all innocent bystanders) practices, meanings and manipulations acted out in public culture.39 36

Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, 20. Quoted in Nona Walia, “Our Sheikhspeare?” The Times of India (8 July 2005), http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/1165634.cms (accessed 20 July 2010). To this criticism, Rushdie might retort that “in some Indian literary quarters, it has become fashionable to denigrate [his] work” (“A Dream of Glorious Return,” 196). 38 Moran, Star Authors, 10. 39 Wenche Ommundsen, “Sex, Soap and Sainthood: Beginning to Theorise Literary Celebrity,” J A S A L 3 (2004): 51. 37

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Likewise, James F. English and John Frow slate “the commonplace and generally alarmist narratives of cultural commodification” which “tend to conceive of literary celebrity as something wholly generated by the machinery of commerce and put to work in such a way as always to advance the interests of corporate profit.”40 Such pessimistic narratives result in a neglect of other kinds of interests that come into play as, for example, when writers themselves strive, not only through media appearances but in their very practice as writers, to manipulate the form and function of celebrity and to short-circuit some of its usual effects.41

Hence, even if Rushdie’s private live is ransacked, the strategic administration of the author’s multi-mediated image on the public stage is in all probability more impressive than his portrayal of celebrity culture in the novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet. In fact, the writer was the theme of a Seinfeld episode,42 and appeared as ‘himself’ in the film Bridget Jones’s Diary (Sharon Maguire, 2001), and in the near-slanderous political quiz show Have I Got News for You, while archive footage of a book-signing of The Satanic Verses was used in Kenneth Branagh’s Peter’s Friends (1992). In addition, Rushdie starred as the obstetrician–gynaecologist Dr Masani in Helen Hunt’s film Then She Found Me (2007), side by side with Bette Midler, Colin Firth and Matthew Broderick. “If Gore Vidal can do it, I thought, so can I,” Rushdie confides during an interview,43 alluding to Vidal’s part as the villain Director Josef in Gattaca (Andrew Niccol, 1997). Elsewhere, the author refers to “an unscratched itch about acting,” and considers that a “late career” like Vidal’s is more suitable to his more mature talents,44 even if he spent most of his time in Cambridge involved in his second passion besides writing.45 Besides Rushdie’s sporadic incursions into film and television, during what the author himself has referred to as his “plague years,”46 he took dramatically 40

English & Frow, “Literary Authorship and Celebrity Culture,” 44. “Literary Authorship and Celebrity Culture,” 44. 42 Seinfeld, Episode “The Implant,” number 59, season 4 (1992–93), broadcast on N B C 25 February 1993. 43 Cohen, “Now He’s Only Hunted by Cameras.” 44 Peter Kadzis, “Rushdie Rocks,” WeeklyWire (10 May 1999): http://weeklywire .com/ww/05-10-99/boston_books_3.html (accessed 20 July 2010). 45 Hena Ahmad, “Salman Rushdie,” in Great World Writers: Twentieth Century, ed. Patrick M. O’Neil (Tarrytown N Y : Marshall Cavendish, 2004): 1319. 46 Rushdie, “A Dream of Glorious Return,” 196. 41

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to the stage at a U2 concert at Wembley Stadium in 1993, and carried out a dialogue routine the band and he had rehearsed backstage beforehand. Later, Rushdie sends U2 a copy of The Ground Beneath Her Feet, “really expecting nothing,”47 and the band sets to music the writer’s words – specifically the lyrics of the sad love hymn that Ormus Cama, one of the protagonists of the novel, dedicates to Vina Apsara, his deceased lover – while afterwards Rushdie is seen on the music video to promote the song. Feeding the writer’s celebrity image, there are online newspaper articles on him, or at least making reference to his name (mostly in relation to the fatwa), on a daily basis. After the public wedding to Padma Lakshmi in 2004, a celebrity event in itself, and the divorce in 2007 – with rumours about the impending break-up of the marriage leaking into the press well before it was made official – newspaper reporters announce, almost weekly, a new girlfriend for Rushdie. In an interview, the writer belittles the media frenzy following his fourth divorce as a mere “occupational hazard”; nevertheless, as he himself recognizes, it lends a gloss to his public image: “nobody thinks less of Arthur Miller because he was married to Marilyn […]. They probably think more of him.”48 As previously mentioned, the “practices, meanings and manipulations acted out in public culture” that Ommundsen refers to as being (self-)enforced upon star authors seem in Rushdie’s case to be for the most part self-constructed through repeated performance in the media. This grants the writer, as literary superstar, an aura through mass reproduction, echoing Walter Benjamin’s reflections on film celebrity in “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” (1939). Instead of a shattering of the aura, a process that Benjamin would associate with the production of commodities through mass reproduction as opposed to the reception of rare artworks, what we have here is a sense of almost awe and veneration in Rushdie’s proximity. That aura inheres not in the writer himself but, rather, in external attributes of elusiveness and proximity of the buzzword ‘Rushdie’, presumably tailored for a mass audience, such as the restriction on his appearances on account of the fatwa, his overtly publicized opinions as a public intellectual, and his lectures as invited speaker at universities. Moreover, in a way that might be also construed as a product-placement strategy (‘Rushdie’ as commodity), the writer has become of late an habitué of the international dinner-party circuit and as

47 48

Nagarajan, “Salman Rushdie on Bombay.” Banay, “Knight on the Town.”

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such also a coveted item in global paparazzi culture. This celebrity phenomenon relates to Benjamin’s assessment of film stardom in the late-1930s: Film responds to the shrivelling of the aura by artificially building up the “personality” outside the studio. The cult of the movie star, fostered by the money of the film industry, preserves that magic of the personality which has long been no more than the putrid magic of its own commodity character.49

Adorno rejects Benjamin’s reasoning that the advent of mechanical reproduction and the democratization of art brought about the eradication of aura; according to Adorno, Benjamin neglects to take into consideration the autocratic “star principle”50 at the very core of the culture industry: i.e. the consumer attraction to glamour and celebrity. In this sense, Rushdie as literary star, and the individual processes of cultic worship on the part of cultural consumers of the commodity ‘Rushdie’, expand and complicate both the concept of ‘aura’, one of Benjamin’s most influential critical contributions, and Adorno’s theory of the culture industry. In fact, Rushdie’s literary celebritystatus is more than sheer commodification of culture, relying instead on a complex transaction between so-called ‘high culture’ and popular culture. Expanding on a perceived “broader historical shift over the last century” from authorial signature to brand-name, English and Frow argue that the specificity of contemporary literary celebrity is that it conflates a notion of authenticity and of personal presence that characterized the Romantic regimes of authoriality, of signature, and of copyright; and a model of seriality that is characteristic of the contemporary culture industries.51

Looking at this process of literary celebrification from a similar perspective, Moran notes that literary celebrities as cultural signifiers often contain elements of the idea of the charismatic, uniquely inspired creative artist associated with the autonomization of the

49

Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol 4: 1938–40, ed. Howard Eiland & Michael W. Jennings, tr. Michael W. Jennings (“Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit”, 1935; Cambridge M A & London: Belknap/Harvard U P , 2003): 261. 50 Adorno, “On the Fetish Character of Music,” 35. 51 English & Frow, “Literary Authorship and Celebrity Culture,” 51.

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cultural field, but they also gain legitimacy from the notion of celebrity as supported by broad popularity and success in the marketplace.52

This essay departs from the assumption that the construct of Rushdie as a postcolonial celebrity author articulates on several nodes. The author is by all standards as much a literary as a popular-culture phenomenon, as much a postcolonial icon as a media star. Undoubtedly, the separation between these areas is artificial, given that his stardom, as is the case with the celebritization of authorship in general, stands astride two discourses which might be regarded as distinct – the popular and the literary. Indeed, literary celebrity undermines and complexifies a reading of fame as more commonly a byproduct of the culture industries. Not only Rushdie’s strictly literary career but also his private life as represented in the media illustrate the notion of “journalistic capital,” a concept which encapsulates the “visibility, celebrity, scandal” that English proposes as the transformative and mediating power between economic and cultural capital.53 Rushdie’s stardom reflects the economy of literary celebrity culture because, more than being suggestive of a pervasive celebrity-driven and market-oriented cultural production, and “rather than being a straightforward effect of the commodification of culture,”54 it concurrently mobilizes a set of convergences and clashes between ‘high’ cultural capital and the marketplace which are at the heart of the construction of literature as a cultural category. Finally, how does the writer position himself in relation to his own stardom? “It is a terrible thing to be famous for the wrong thing,” he is reported as saying apropos the fame foisted on him by the fatwa.55 A case in point of this disenchantment and uneasiness about celebrity culture is illustrated by the article “For Salman Rushdie, Celebrity Is a Curse,” where he is described as being overburdened by the persona constructed by the machinery of fame. Feeling the weight of his own literary stardom, he compares instant fame to Islamic radicalism: The problem is that when you are well known there is a desire in some bits of the media to write about you at times when you don’t have a book to talk

52

Moran, Star Authors, 7. James F. English, “Winning the Culture Game: Prizes, Awards, and the Rules of Art,” New Literary History 33.1 (Winter 2002): 123. 54 Moran, Star Authors, 4. 55 Ahmad, “Salman Rushdie,” 1330. 53

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about. […] They talk about all kinds of nonsense. […] In the same way Islamic radicalism is one of the curses of our times, so is celebrity culture.56

As Huggan aptly demonstrates, the author is exceedingly conscious of his writing and of himself as a commodity; he is aware, as well, of his status in the image-making industry that has informed his writing from very early on. This is probably why Rushdie feels uneasy about having a film made about his life: around the time of the fatwa controversy, the director Miloš Forman approached him with a film project, but he declined the offer. On this proposal, he asserts: “If there’s going to be anything on my life, I’d rather write it myself, rather than have somebody else portray my life, leaving me with no control of how it turns out.”57 In an interview with Boyd Tonkin, the writer similarly laments: I think that when people become famous, there’s a public perception that they are not human beings any more. They don’t have feelings; they don’t get hurt; you can act and say as you like about them.58

The uneasiness disclosed by these statements is similar in tone to a confession he makes in his travelogue of his first trip to India in twelve years: “My metamorphosis from observer to observed, from the Salman I know to the ‘Rushdie’ I often barely recognise, continues apace.”59 The spirit of his words fleshes out the argument I have been endeavouring to present throughout this essay. Indeed, Rushdie stands as a key nodal point for discussion about the workings of postcolonial celebrity culture in the way in which he provides a mix of aura, literary capital, academic canonization of the postcolonial, and media buzz. In other words, the writer’s celebrity-status is the result of a convergence (or clash) of diverse discourses of fame: popular, literary, and postcolonial. He carries the aura, as much as – or even more than – his work. In56

Mike Collett–White, “For Salman Rushdie, Celebrity Is a Curse,” New Zealand Herald (6 September 2005), http://www.nzherald.co.nz/lifestyle/news/article.cfm?c _id=6&objectid=10344150 (accessed 20 July 2010). 57 Anubha Sawhney, “An Indian is Not a Freak in London: Rushdie,” The Times of India (21 January 2007), http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/msid-1343391 ,prtpage-1.cms (accessed 20 July 2010). 58 Boyd Tonkin, “Salman Rushdie: ‘Fiction Saved My Life,’” The Independent (11 April 2008), http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/salmanrushdie-fiction-saved-my-life-807501.html (accessed 20 July 2010). 59 Rushdie, “A Dream of Glorious Return,” 221.

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deed, it seems at times that the cultural commodity being fashioned, circulated, and consumed is not so much the writer’s text as the brand ‘Rushdie’. The writer is conscious of this, since celebrity seems to enforce self-reflexiveness: for those authors who experience it, it often becomes a constant preoccupation – they talk and write about it constantly, in both fictional and non-fictional forms, usually describing fame as a negative influence pervading their whole life and work.60

Indeed, he has on occasion commented on the workings of celebrity culture during interviews. As he confesses to Kadzis, I’m interested in the way in which we as a culture use celebrities. In that respect they are quite like the old pantheons of gods, who, you know, behaved very badly. Ancient gods were not model examples, but simply instances of human beings enlarged to divine proportions. It was about how humans might behave if you removed all restraints and gave them great power. In that sense, celebrity is a kind of recurrence of that theme: we take this group of people and we shine on them a very bright light and give them, if not great power, then certainly great influence. We ask how they behave when we remove all controls and restraints, and we enjoy watching the answer to that question. Sometimes they behave very well, and sometimes they’re destroyed by it.61

Besides, the writer has dealt at length with the phenomenon of stardom in his work: the characters in his latest novels (The Enchantress of Florence excluded) – Max Ophuls, Malik Solanka, Vina Apsara, Ormus Cama – are all stars. In this respect, The Ground Beneath Her Feet is, metadiscursively, the novel that displays the most visible concern with the postmodern political conundrum of living in a shifting world dominated by constructed media images. For instance, the narrator Rai Merchant attributes the diverse versions in circulation of the first encounter between the romantic couple in the novel, the mega celebrities Vina Apsara and Ormus Cama, to the clouds of mythologisation, regurgitation, falsification and denigration that have surrounded their story for years: depending which journal you read, you might have heard that he transformed himself into a white bull and carried her away on his back while she, warbling gaily, clutched with erotic delight at his two long, curved and gleaming horns; or that she was indeed an alien from a galaxy far, far away who, having identified Ormus as the most perfectly 60 61

Moran, Star Authors, 10. Kadzis, “Salman Speaks,” 225–26.

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desirable male specimen on the planet, beamed down smack in front of him at the Gateway of India, holding a space flower in her hand.62

In the face of such awareness of how stifling stardom can be, one is only left to wonder what strategies the writer will devise to leave the “Rushdie” he time and again hardly recognizes out of “that zone of celebrity in which everything except celebrity ceases to signify.”63

WORKS CITED Adorno, Theodor W. “On the Fetish Character of Music and the Regression of Listening,” tr. Susan H. Gillespie, in The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, ed. J.M. Bernstein (“Über den Fetischcharakter in der Musik und die Regression des Hörens,” 1938; London: Routledge, 1991): 29–60. Ahmad, Hena. “Salman Rushdie,” in Great World Writers: Twentieth Century, ed. Patrick M. O’Neil (Tarrytown N Y : Marshall Cavendish, 2004): 1317–32. Anon. “Middle Youth Alert,” Sunday Times (11 May 2008), http://www.timesonline .co.uk/tol/life_and_style/men/article3883104.ece (accessed 20 July 2010). Anon. “The Rushdies: Babe Magnets?” New York Post (12 December 2006), http: //www.nypost.com/seven/12122006/gossip/pagesix/pagesix.htm (accessed 20 July 2010). Banay, Sophia. “Knight on the Town,” Portfolio.com (November 2008), http://www .portfolio.com/culture-lifestyle/culture-inc/arts/2008/10/15/Rushdie-and-theAiling-Book-Industry (accessed 20 July 2010). Bates, Daniel. “Four-times Married Salman Rushie Vows Never To Get Hitched Again,” Daily Mail (3 January 2009), http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz /article-1104589/Four-times-married-Salman-Rushie-vows-hitched-again.html (accessed 20 July 2010). Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 4, 1938–40, ed. Howard Eiland & Michael W. Jennings, tr. Michael W. Jennings (“Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit,” 1935; Cambridge M A & London: Belknap / Harvard U P , 2003): 251–83. Boorstin, Daniel. The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1962; New York: Atheneum, 1987). Braudy, Leo. The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and its History (New York: Oxford U P , 1986).

62 63

Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, 90–91. The Ground Beneath Her Feet, 425.

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Brennan, Timothy. Wars of Position: The Cultural Politics of Left and Right (New York: Columbia U P , 2006). Cohen, Patricia. “Now He’s Only Hunted by Cameras,” New York Times (25 May 2008), http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/25/books/25cohe.html (accessed 20 July 2010). Collett–White, Mike. “For Salman Rushdie, Celebrity Is a Curse,” New Zealand Herald (6 September 2005), http://www.nzherald.co.nz/lifestyle/news/article .cfm?c_id=6&objectid=10344150 (accessed 20 July 2010). Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle tr. Donald Nicholson–Smith (La Société du spectacle, 1967; New York: Zone, 1994). Dyer, Richard. Stars (London: British Film Institute, 1979). English, James F. “Winning the Culture Game: Prizes, Awards, and the Rules of Art,” New Literary History 33.1 (Winter 2002):109–35. ——, & John Frow. “Literary Authorship and Celebrity Culture,” in A Concise Companion to Contemporary British Fiction, ed. James F. English (Oxford & Malden M A : Blackwell, 2006): 39–57. Gussow, Mel. “Another Bend in the River For Naipaul: He Tests the Water for Nobel Prize Speech,” New York Times (15 November 2001), http://query.nytimes.com /gst/fullpage.html?res=9F01EED71F38F936A25752C1A9679C8B63 (accessed 20 May 2008). Huggan, Graham. The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London & New York: Routledge, 2001). Kadzis, Peter. “Rushdie Rocks,” WeeklyWire (10 May 1999): http://weeklywire.com /ww/05-10-99/boston_books_3.html (accessed 20 July 2010). ——. “Salman Speaks,” in Conversations With Salman Rushdie, ed. Michael R. Reder (Jackson: U P of Mississippi, 2000): 216–27. Originally in The Boston Phoenix 7 (May 1999): 28–31. Marshall, P. David. Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 1997). McInerney, Jay. The Good Life (London: Bloomsbury, 2007). Mondal, Anshuman A. “The Ground Beneath Her Feet and Fury: The Reinvention of Location,” in The Cambridge Companion to Salman Rushdie, ed. Abdulrazak Gurnah (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2007): 169–83. Moran, Joe. Star Authors: Literary Celebrity in America (London & Sterling V A : Pluto, 2000). Nagarajan, Vijaya. “Salman Rushdie on Bombay, Rock N’ Roll, and The Satanic Verses,” Whole Earth Review (Fall 1999), http://wholeearth.com/issue/98/article /90/salman.rushdie.on.bombay.rock.n'.roll.and.the.satanic.verses (accessed 20 July 2010). Ommundsen, Wenche. “Sex, Soap and Sainthood: Beginning to Theorise Literary Celebrity,” J A S A L 3 (2004): 45–56.

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Rollason, Christopher. “Rushdie’s Un-Indian Music: The Ground Beneath Her Feet,” in Studies in Indian Writing in English, vol. 2, ed. Rajeshwar Mittapalli & Pier Paolo Piciucco (New Delhi: Atlantic, 2001): 89–125. Rushdie, Salman. “A Dream of Glorious Return,” in Rushdie, Step Across this Line: Collected Non-Fiction, 1992–2002 (London: Vintage, 2003): 195–227. ——. The Ground Beneath Her Feet (New York: Picador, 2000). ——. “In Good Faith” (1990), in Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981–1991 (London: Granta, 1991): 393–414. ——. “Personal History – My Unfunny Valentine,” New Yorker (15 February 1999): 28–29. ——. The Satanic Verses (New York & London: Viking, 1989). Sawhney, Anubha. “An Indian is Not a Freak in London: Rushdie,” The Times of India (21 January 2007), http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/msid-1343391 ,prtpage-1.cms (accessed 20 July 2010). Seinfeld, Episode “The Implant,” number 59, season 4 (1992–93), broadcast on N B C 25 February 1993. Sharma, Purnima. “Hot Write Now,” The Times of India (8 December 2008), http: //timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Potpourri/Hot_write_now/articleshow/3804469.cms (accessed 20 July 2010). Subrahmanyam, Sanjay. “The Angel and the Toady,” Guardian (14 February 2009), http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/feb/14/salman-rushdie-ayatollah-khomeinifatwa (accessed 20 July 2010). Teverson, Andrew. Salman Rushdie (Manchester & New York: Manchester U P , 2007). Tonkin, Boyd. “Salman Rushdie: ‘Fiction Saved My Life’,” Independent (11 April 2008), http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/salmanrushdie-fiction-saved-my-life-807501.html (accessed 20 July 2010). Updike, John. “Books – Paradises Lost: Rushdie’s ‘Shalimar the Clown’,” New Yorker (5 September 2005): 152, 154–55; http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/09/05 /050905crbo_books (accessed 20 July 2010). Walia, Nona. “Our Sheikhspeare?” The Times of India (8 July 2005), http: //timesofindia .indiatimes.com/articleshow/1165634.cms (accessed 20 July 2010). Wilson, Andrew Norman. “Why the Prize for Pomposity, Titanic Conceit and Turgid Novels Should Go to Salman Rushdie Every Year,” Daily Mail (31 July 2008), http: //www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1039995/Why-prize-pomposity-titanic-conceitturgid-novels-Salman-Rushdie-year.html (accessed 20 July 2010).

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Celebrity Conservationism, Postcolonialism, and the Commodity Form ——————————

G RAHAM H UGGAN

Introduction

B

A C K I N 2 0 0 1 , I called The Postcolonial Exotic “a speculative prolegomenon to the sociology of postcolonial cultural production,”1 partly in the knowledge that my own methodology was insufficiently rigorous to merit the admittedly capacious term ‘sociological’ and partly in the hope that others might go on to produce the kinds of empirical work that were needed to flesh out a field in which textual analysis continues to predominate over studies of the material conditions of production and consumption – studies often seen as not belonging to the remit of traditional literary studies and as falling, rather, into the ‘separate’ domain of literary publishing or the history of the book. Needless to say, I found – still find – this separation of the spheres to be naive, and I am grateful for a number of recent studies that look in much more detail than I was able to at various aspects of local literary industries and the global markets that increasingly sustain them (examples here might include the ongoing research of David Carter and Mark Davis on changing patterns of literary publishing in Australia, or an excellent 2007 book on Canadian literary celebrity by Lorraine York2). As Lynn Innes says in her similarly recent Cambridge Introduction to Postcolonial Literatures in English, much more work is needed on the different ways in which postcolonial literary works are read in a variety of contexts that are 1

Graham Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London: Routledge, 2001): xvi. 2 Lorraine York, Literary Celebrity in Canada (Toronto: U of Toronto P , 2007).

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as much local or regional as they are global, and which – in keeping with the dictates of an increasingly global literary marketplace – may end up being local, regional, and global at once. Innes warns, and rightly so, that globalization must not be used as an excuse to “de-differentiate” local readers, or to create the fiction of a “global market reader” who is addressed, explicitly or implicitly, in a wide range of market-conscious postcolonial literary texts.3 This point is also taken up, but in more detail, in Sarah Brouillette’s combative study Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace (2007), which seems unsure whether to pay tribute to what she calls my “innovative materialist assessment [of] postcoloniality [as] a form of industrial commodification that serves the interests of […] privileged audiences,” or whether to spike my guns by including me among the ranks of the privileged, thereby implicitly accusing me of practising the same bad faith as the largely mythic figure of the “global market reader” I seem so eager to denounce.4 The Postcolonial Exotic, claims Brouillette, is as much a symptom of postcoloniality as a critical assessment of it, and is motivated by an amateurish “ethnography of reading” that smacks alternately of academic elitism and postcolonial stricken conscience; moreover, it performs the same metropolitan commodity fetishism of which it complains by assuming that postcolonial literature “exists only as evidence of the Western fetishization of the rest of human experience, or that the reception of postcolonial texts is always or only a kind of market colonization.”5 For Brouillette, the book thus ignores the basic fact that the material organization of the current literary marketplace does not reveal a single market, but rather a fragmenting and proliferating series of niche audiences, which are admittedly united by a set of general rules dictated by the major transnational corporations.6

Unsurprisingly, I find the criticism unfair, outrageous even: not only does my book not ignore this last fact, but it is largely predicated on it, and I am actually in full agreement with her that few researchers, least of all myself, 3

Lynn Innes, The Cambridge Introduction to Postcolonial Literatures in English (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2007): passim, esp. ch. 11. 4 Sarah Brouillette, Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007): 15, 21. 5 Brouillette, Postcolonial Writers, 22–24. 6 Postcolonial Writers, 24.

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have performed what she calls “the detailed analyses of reading practices that might justify the identification of a characteristic mode of cosmopolitan consumption that is dehistoricising and depoliticising”7 – hence my insistence on the largely speculative nature of my work. Perhaps less now needs to be said about postcolonialism within the context of global commodity culture – postcolonialism as a global cultural commodity – than about the wide range of empirically verifiable reading practices that obtain within a literary field that is probably not even recognized as postcolonial by many of its readers, and the academic institutionalization of which has been much more varied – and often significantly less Western-oriented – in its effects than some of its practitioners seem ready to admit. I would like to think of my current work in the rapidly emerging crossover field of postcolonial ecocriticism as a reflection of this variety, although – as in previous, more obviously literature-oriented research – I remain attentive to the shaping influence of the global cultural marketplace, and to both writers’ and readers’ attempts to negotiate a bargaining position within it that allows for at least some degree of critical distance from the hyper-commodified global capitalism in which both parties find themselves almost inevitably enmeshed. One mechanism through which such entanglements can be explored is the cultural phenomenon of celebrity, and in the rest of this chapter I want to look at some specific instances of celebrity within the context of a conservationist ethic that owes as much to colonialism as to capitalism, and in which the ideology of conservationism exhibits some of the inherent contradictions of the capitalist commodity form. My focus will be on the figure of the ‘celebrity conservationist’, in the shape of the late Australian T V naturalist Steve Irwin – to whom I will turn first – and the Japanese-Canadian scientist–broadcaster–activist David Suzuki, both of whom have made fame and fortune through their hugely popular media representations of an ecologically ‘threatened’ world.

Steve Irwin: The Conservationist as Adventurer In 2007, while a visiting scholar at the University of Queensland, I was asked to do a talk on Steve Irwin, whose untimely death in 2006 had caused a massive outpouring of grief all over the world, but especially in his native Australia, where it was improbably placed on a par with the deaths of Princess 7

Postcolonial Writers, 24.

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Diana and John F. Kennedy: “such global shock and sadness comes only rarely,” wrote Richard Shears in his gushing ‘instant’ biography Wildlife Warrior, likening the emotional response Irwin’s death elicited to that surrounding the terrorist attacks in Bali and New York.8 The highly public funeral that followed was both fitting for a celebrity and attended by celebrities: Kevin Costner danced in attendance, and Justin Timberlake piped up to say that while he had spent only a day with the Irwins, it had been a day that he would never forget. The circumstances surrounding Irwin’s death might be seen as a ‘flashpoint’ event of the kind that occurs when “a particular celebrity completely dominates media coverage, producing an excessively focused global public.”9 Flashpoint events are characterized by the disproportionate relationship between the event itself and its emotional impact on the public, and by an unexpected interruption in the hitherto careful media management of the celebrity persona that apparently discloses an intimate connection between him, or her, and people’s everyday lives.10 Death, of course, is the best guarantor of this interruptive process. Nothing becomes a celebrity in his life like the leaving of it. As Elisabeth Bronfen puts it, “the corpse of a celebrity mirrors the lethal voyeurism of our culture”; or, shifting the theoretical register slightly, “in our celebration of narratives of catastrophe, the antagonism which above all else is repressed is that of facing the unsolvable yet unavoidable alterity [that] death represents for all of us.”11 Yet if it was Irwin’s death that sealed his celebrityhood, it certainly did not create it; his self-parodying exploits as Discovery T V ’s ‘Crocodile Hunter’ had long since made his name. I want to come back later to the characteristics of his carefully cultivated T V persona, which involves a combination of the lone adventure hero, the socially conscious conservationist, and the all-Australian family man. First, though, let me offer a few thoughts on the general relationship between conservation and celebrity and, more specifically, on the colourful figure of the celebrity conservationist himself. 8

Richard Shears, Wildlife Warrior: Steve Irwin, 1962–2006: A Man Who Changed the World (Sydney: New Holland, 2006): 12. 9 Graeme Turner, Frances Bonner & David Marshall, Fame Games: The Production of Celebrity in Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2000): 6. 10 Turner et al., Fame Games, 3. 11 Elisabeth Bronfen, “Fault Lines: Catastrophe and Celebrity Culture,” in Britain at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century, ed. Ulrich Broich & Susan Bassnett (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001): 133, 130.

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Four basic observations can be made about celebrities as a way of getting things started. First, celebrities are discursively produced through media and other communications networks; second, they are symptomatic of the blurring of private and public spaces in everyday social life; third, they are brandnames and marketing tools as well as cultural icons and model identities; fourth, they are both targets of and vehicles for a wide variety of cultural and ideological debates.12 To these preliminary observations, drawn mainly from the work of Graeme Turner, Frances Bonner, and David Marshall, we might add a fifth: namely, that celebrities are both less important and more important than they seem to be. Another way of saying this is that they carry surplus meaning in relation to the various contexts within which their identities are produced, disseminated, and consumed as highly mobile cultural commodities, or, as Turner et al. put it: Celebrities are called upon to (and do) carry meaning in situations far beyond what can reasonably be seen to be their professional expertise and to audiences far exceeding those who might be supposed to be interested in the products they represent.13

One field within which this surplus meaning is apparent in contemporary Western societies is conservation. Celebrities have long since been important in supporting this particular branch of the modern global-conscience industry. Such celebrity figures, like celebrities in general, are morally ambivalent. They are not just empty ethical vessels at the service of promotion (e.g., through the mediating role of the celebrity spokesperson or figurehead), but nor are they unlikely culture heroes whose emotional commitment provides a fail-safe means of carrying ethical issues to the world.14 More likely to be admired than conservationist celebrities, whose ideological inconstancy and susceptibility to media manipulation are well-documented, are celebrity conservationists, whose emotional commitment is matched by their proven professional expertise. The formula of the celebrity conservationist as T V presenter is a proven winner, with ‘old hands’ like David Attenborough and, perhaps most notably, David Bellamy providing a bankable mixture of the thoughtfully mature and the thoughtlessly maverick that reflects the perceived ec12

Turner et al., Fame Games, passim; see also David P. Marshall, Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 1997). 13 Turner et al. Fame Games, 164. 14 Fame Games, 165.

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centricities of their subject while falling just short of the expectations of that other attractive popular-science topos, the naturalist as buffoon.15 A rather different kind of celebrity conservationist, necessarily younger, is the adventurer. As the American anthropologist Luis Vivanco asserts, in an age in which adventure travel and support for nature conservation appear to combine in ecotourism and magazines featuring ‘extreme content’ like Outside and National Geographic Magazine, it is productive to consider the ways in which environmentalism itself relies on and draws from the imaginations and practices of adventure.16

As adventure conservationism blurs the line between the celebrity conservationist and the conservationist celebrity, it is no coincidence to find that Russell Mittermeier, the president of Conservation International, has admitted to a Tarzan fixation, while its vice-chair is Harrison Ford, alias Indiana Jones.17 Vivanco attributes the huge success of Steve Irwin’s Crocodile Hunter series to the ways in which it projects the fantasy world of adventure conservationism while remaining more or less faithful to the realist techniques of nature-documentary film. This formula, while commercially successful, has its obvious drawbacks, not least the tendency to emphasize “the fantasy spectacle of adventure over the hard work of collaborative social and political action in actual historical contexts of political-economic inequality and conflict.”18 This deliberate work of de-contextualization is backed up by the antics of the celebrity lead, one of whose functions is to short-circuit the information overload normally associated with educational documentary film.19 After all, as Turner, Bonner, and Marshall argue, the individual celebrity persona provides a powerful condensation of meaning which can be attached to commodities and issues, [while] celebrities can act as prisms through which social complexity is brought back to the human level.20

15

Patrick Holland & Graham Huggan, Tourists with Typewriters: Critical Reflections on Contemporary Travel Writing (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P , 1998): passim. 16 Luis A. Vivanco, “The Work of Environmentalism in an Age of Televisual Adventure,” Cultural Dynamics 16.5 (July 2004): 10. 17 Vivanco, “The Work of Environmentalism,” 10. 18 “The Work of Environmentalism,” 7. 19 Turner et al., Fame Games, 166. 20 Fame Games, 166.

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The apparent aim of Crocodile Hunter is more radical still: to eradicate social complexity altogether in favour of creating the illusion of a direct and deliberately fantasized confrontation with the wild. This staged confrontation illustrates a double paradox that underlies the relationship between adventure and conservationism: that of threatening threatened animals, where humans both produce and participate in the scenario of endangerment; and that of selfconsciously ‘interfering’ with the wild in order to argue that it be left intact. This paradox also obtains in other commercialized representations of endangered animals that retail clichés about ‘teeming’ wildlife on a ‘shrinking’ planet, or which, performing a natural version of what James Clifford calls “salvage ethnography,”21 rescue ‘vanishing’ wildlife for the camera before their time, and the planet’s, has run out.22 ‘Endangerment’, of course, is the most valuable commodity of all in the symbolic economy of conservationism: the rarer the species, the more value it has, and in some cases it continues to have value long after it has become extinct. The relationship between adventure and conservationism also brings to light some of the ideological contradictions built into the idea of conservation itself. The first and most obvious contradiction is that conservation is staunchly anthropocentric, placing human beings very much at the centre of their own responsibly altered world. The second is that conservation is historically complicit with the dominant practices of colonialism, and might even itself be seen as a form of colonialism insofar as it tends to serve First-World political and economic interests, or to provide the rationale for a ‘top-down’ management of environmental resources in which local social concerns are strategically overlooked.23 An extreme view of this is that Western conservation projects knowingly or inadvertently participate in what Marcia Langton calls

21

James Clifford, “On Ethnographic Allegory,” in Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, ed. James Clifford & George E. Marcus (Berkeley: U of California P , 1988): passim. 22 Holland & Huggan, Tourists with Typewriters, passim; see also Alexander Wilson, The Culture of Nature: North American Landscapes from Disney to the Exxon Valdez (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992). 23 William Adams & Martin Mulligan, ed. Decolonizing Nature: Strategies for Conservation in a Post-Colonial Era (London: Earthscan, 2003): passim; see also Richard Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1995).

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“the ongoing colonization of the natural world by the market”24 – which brings me to the third contradiction of conservationism: that, as an instrument of contemporary global capitalism, its protectionist strategies may pose a further threat to those already disadvantaged within the capitalist world system, e.g., by blocking access to traditional cultural practices which might be seen as conservationist in their own right.25 This is a very broad picture of a movement that is far from uniform or unified, but, as William Adams and Martin Mulligan among others have argued, conservationism, in adjusting itself to the needs of the late-modern / latecapitalist era, might well be seen to be in need of saving itself from itself. As Adams and Mulligan argue, the global discourse on conservation, dominated as it is by people and organizations from nations that benefited most from colonialism, has sometimes been used to justify new forms of colonization.26

Thus, while it is true that many conservationists have worked hard to adapt their agendas to discourses about dismantling the colonial legacy [… conservation action] has rarely been [as] sensitive [as it might be] to local human needs and a diversity of world views.27

In addition, conservation and development “have become entangled in messy post-colonial transitions”; nowhere more so than in Australia, where “an entrenched culture and economy of resource exploitation” now has to contend with, even though it is not necessarily challenged by, an “ideology of preservationism that resists human-induced change.”28 Crocodile Hunter can be seen in this context as a colonial fantasy of domination played out under the postcolonial conditions of a country (Australia) whose cultural, political, and economic indebtedness to America is peri24

Marcia Langton, “The ‘Wild’, the Market and the Native: Indigenous People Face New Forms of Global Colonization,” in Decolonizing Nature: Strategies for Conservation in a Post-Colonial Era, ed. William Adams & Martin Mulligan (London: Earthscan, 2003): 79. 25 Langton, “The ‘Wild’, the Market and the Native,” passim. 26 Adams & Mulligan, Decolonizing Nature, 9. 27 Decolonizing Nature, 9. 28 Decolonizing Nature, 7–8; see also Tom Griffiths, Hunters and Collectors: The Antiquarian Imagination in Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1996).

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odically resisted even as it is repeatedly enforced. (It is interesting to note here that Irwin’s manager John Stainton, the marketing brains behind the Crocodile Hunter series, reacted ecstatically to his marriage to Terri, an American-born naturalist: “That he had an American wife meant it was a formula made in heaven,” said Stainton, “It was like when you make up a new formula for a soft drink. I knew from day one that it was going to be a huge success.”29). I will return to Irwin’s ‘Australianness’ and its exchange value on the global and, more particularly, the American market below. For the moment, though, I would like to make a transition from one celebrity conservationist to another, Canada’s David Suzuki, who shares Irwin’s eye for publicity if not his apparent death-wish, and whose own T V shows have reached an audience of millions, both in Canada and worldwide.

David Suzuki: The Conservationist as Moralist While there are surface similarities between Irwin and Suzuki – their largerthan-life personalities, their appeal to family audiences, etc. – their approach to conservation is obviously very different (as, it seems, is their political stance, with Irwin on the Right and Suzuki largely on the Left). Suzuki is perhaps best seen as an example of what the Australian media theorist Tania Lewis calls the “embodied intellectual”: i.e. a highly visibly public figure whose importance is largely a function of what she calls the “mediatized public sphere.”30 Lewis lists among her examples Noam Chomsky, Camille Paglia, Germaine Greer, and Suzuki, all of whom “share the limelight of celebrity intellectualism as thoroughly corporeal individuals rather than as talking heads whose brains are somehow detached from their bodies.”31 While it is doubtful whether Irwin falls into this category, given the at times extreme anti-intellectualism of his public image, it is fairly clear that Suzuki does. One obvious thing that needs to be said about celebrity conservationists, from Jacques Cousteau and Attenborough to Irwin and Suzuki, is that they are emphatically not a homogeneous group. Nonetheless, what the different members of this group have in common are (1) a clear sense of themselves as pub29

Quoted in Shears, Wildlife Warrior, 96. Tania Lewis, “Embodied Experts: Robert Hughes, Cultural Studies and the Celebrity Intellectual,” Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 15.2 (July 2001): passim. 31 Lewis, “Embodied Experts,” 244. 30

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lic (or, more particularly, media) figures; and (2) an equally clear sense of their responsibility toward a common conservationist cause. Communicating this cause to as wide an audience as possible requires a variety of tactics, at least some of which can be brought together under the heading of popular science. In John Brockman’s 1995 study of the same name, he coins the concept of ‘third culture’ – a concept obviously drawn from C.P. Snow’s 1959 lecture “The Two Cultures,” which bewailed what Snow saw as the almost total lack of communication between the arts and the sciences, and which continues to be cited frequently today in the context of the so-called ‘science wars’. Brockman is eager to transcend these often highly constructed ‘misunderstandings’. “The playing field of intellectual life has shifted,” he says, and what has increasingly emerged is a ‘third culture’ consisting of “those scientists and other thinkers in the empirical world who, through their work and expository writing, are taking the place of the traditional intellectual in rendering visible the deeper meanings of our lives, redefining who and what we are.”32 Another word for this cadre of thinkers is ‘popular scientists’, and certainly celebrity conservationism can be considered to be a branch of popular science, for which there was a boom in the 1970s and, particularly, the 1980s that has continued up to the present day. The media appeal of popular science made household figures of such broadcaster–popularizers as Attenborough, Jacob Bronowski, Cousteau, and the astronomer Patrick Moore, the last of whom holds the record for the longest-running show on the B B C . At the same time, debates raged in both the U K and the U S A about how little science the average Briton or American knew.33 This led in the U K to the Public Understanding of Science Initiative, which sometimes goes under the unfortunate acronym of P U S , and which has now been replaced by the more dialogic Public Engagement with Science and Technology, though with little improvement in acronym: P E S T .34 Both P U S and P E S T have had some success in bridging the constructed divide between professional expertise and public ignorance; not nearly so much success, though, as individual celebrity figures, perhaps above all in the conservation field. There are a number of obvious reasons for the popularity of conservation as a public venture; let me 32

John Brockman, The Third Culture (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995): passim. 33 Brockman, The Third Culture, passim. 34 The Third Culture, passim.

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mention just two here. The first, as previously suggested, is its propensity for empathetic engagement, especially with endangered ‘charismatic’ animals and, to a lesser degree, with marginalized and / or threatened societies and cultures, which, in a dubious biology-to-culture transfer, come to be perceived as being endangered as well. The second is that conservation is compatible with what the eco-socialist David Pepper rather unfairly calls “white middle-class nature protection elitism,”35 where the emphasis is arguably on self-discovery or self-redemption rather than – as Pepper would prefer – on the politics of social change. Pepper’s charge is much too sweeping, but it is true that there are important differences between what Ramachandra Guha and Juan Martinez–Alier (1997) call ‘full-stomach’ and ‘empty-belly’ environmentalisms;36 and it is also true that conservationism is by no means incompatible with political conservatism, even of a fairly aggressive kind. (Irwin, although he tended to shy away from politics, might be seen as a case in point here, bizarrely regarding the now ex-Prime Minister John Howard as the greatest political leader in the world; perhaps a better example, though, would be those American-based environmentalist groups, such as Sierra International, which are heavily populated by Republicans and just as heavily reliant on Republican funds.) Suzuki, in this sense, should not be confused politically with Irwin. A staunch supporter of First Nations peoples both in Canada and elsewhere (e.g., Brazil), Suzuki remains a tireless anticolonialist campaigner, and there is an anti-establishment feel, some of it motivated by his own family’s experiences as disadvantaged Japanese-Canadians, to much of his media work. While I am probably on safe ground in calling Suzuki an ‘embodied intellectual’ and a popular-scientist–broadcaster–activist – his own preferred selfdesignation – I am already taking risks calling him much else, since I have not seen or read enough of his work. However, from what I have read so far – his 2006 autobiography, his co-written 2004 ecological fable Tree, his updated 2004 jeremiad From Naked Ape to Superspecies, and his 1997 New Age meditation The Sacred Balance – I have been able to gauge the following: (1) Suzuki is an anti-celebrity celebrity.

35

David Pepper, Eco-Socialism: From Deep Ecology to Social Justice (London: Routledge, 1993): passim. 36 Varieties of Environmentalism: Essays North and South, ed. Ramachandra Guha & Juan Martinez–Alier (London: Earthscan, 1997): passim.

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“It’s frightening to see the extent to which the phenomenon of celebrity has come to dominate our consciousness,” Suzuki begins one of the chapters of his autobiography. He goes on: “The result of our preoccupation with celebrity is that the opinion of someone who might be a lightweight or a fool carries as much heft as the words of a scientist, doctor, or other expert.”37 Nonetheless, he continues to take considerable advantage of his celebrity status, particularly in his environmental-activist work. He also regularly enlists the services of other celebrities; in his well-publicized support for the west coast Haida, for instance, he was quick to see the advantage of working alongside such performer–activists as John Denver, Gordon Lightfoot, and Buffy St. Marie. This is not to accuse Suzuki of hypocrisy but, rather, to say that he knows how to make the most of a celebrity-intellectual status that allows him to pose as scientific expert and man of the people at once. (2) Suzuki is an accomplished ‘infotainer’, well aware of his responsibilities as an educator in a media age in which, to cite Neil Postman, “information, ideas and epistemology are given [primary] form by television, not the printed word.”38 Suzuki writes books as well, of course, but it is T V that has largely created and sustained his celebrity as well as consolidating his public image as either affable eccentric or staunch adversarialist – and sometimes both of these at the same time. (3) Suzuki is less inclined to play the scientist as boffin (or buffoon) than the scientist as moralist. All of his work is infused with an environmental ethic, sometimes aggressively anti-capitalist (From Naked Ape to Superspecies), sometimes more contemplative or even mystical in form (The Sacred Balance). (4) Environmentally speaking, Suzuki seems – for the most part anyway – to be a deep ecologist. By this, I mean that he is not anti-technology, but certainly anti-technological suprematism; not anti-development, but certainly anti-development as unfettered economic growth; and not anti-humanist, but certainly anti-anthropocentric (i.e. against the self-privileging view that human beings are at the centre of ‘their’ world). There are deep ecological strains, as well, in Suzuki’s flirtation with Asian and Aboriginal religions, and in his espousal of what 37

David Suzuki, The Autobiography (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2006): 347. Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (New York: Penguin, 2005): passim. 38

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appears to be a version of philosophical holism, seen, for example, in his view that science tends to compartmentalize things and consequently loses sight of the whole. The Sacred Balance, in particular, taps into Aboriginal creation myths and epistemologies but sees these, New Age-style, as being virtually interchangeable (and tends, also New Age-style, to equate environmental values with Indigenous rights). I may well be mistaken, but The Sacred Balance looks to me like an environmental self-help book: it juxtaposes quotations from the Bible and other sacred texts with quotations from E.O. Wilson and other sacred biologists, while Suzuki himself towers over them all as a New Age guru, presiding over the spiritual recovery of a sick Earth and reclaiming ancient understandings of the interconnectedness of all things. (In fact, in this book at least, he plays fast and loose with ecology, e.g., with the title term ‘balance’, which now tends to be questioned by the very ecologists who once popularized the idea.) (5) Suzuki’s environmental ethic is underscored by restorationist rather than conservationist imperatives. The one does not exclude the other, but his emphasis is on recapturing the values – respect, companionship, humility – that an ultra-competitive modern world appears to have lost. His ethic is also underpinned by a keen sense of apocalypticism, itself – as Larry Buell among others has indicated – a common environmental mode.39 Suzuki’s own particular version of ‘environmental apocalypticism’ (Buell) is probably at its shrillest in From Naked Ape to Superspecies, which urges us, in 353 repetitive pages, to mend our wasteful ways before it is too late. As my tone implies, I agree with much of what Suzuki says but not necessarily with the manner in which he says it. At times, he carries a good argument too far – as in his all-out assault on economics in From Naked Ape to Superspecies – or becomes too ethereal and portentous for his own good. Since I am being rather personal here, let me say that Tree (co-written with Wayne Grady) is my favourite Suzuki book so far. Tree is a well-written work of popular science that doubles as an ecological fable whose general moral is that biological and cultural diversity is the stuff of life, and must be protected for our collective good. Involving a skilful confluence of natural and cultural history, Tree operates on a synecdochic principle: the history of 39

Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 1995): passim.

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one tree contains the history of all trees, and of a good few scientific ideas as well. Tree leads me to believe that Suzuki is at his best when using patient scientific explanation to enhance the wonder of the world (the tree is both specimen – object of research – and marvel – object of wonder – and, perhaps more than either of these, an ecological subject in its own right). Ironically, for me at least, it is Suzuki’s more contemplative work that provides greater incentive for social and environmental activism, though this may just be another way of saying that the problem of making activist exhortation aesthetically interesting remains. To sum up: Suzuki’s celebrity conservationism uses a variety of rhetorical tactics, from bludgeoning to bedazzlement, to get its environmentalist message across; it is often highly moralistic and adversarial, despite its pacifistic message of companionship and love; and it is pragmatic even at its most apparently idealistic, for Suzuki is nothing if not publicity-conscious: conscious, that is, of his own status, and the responsibilities it carries, in an increasingly globalized, media-driven public sphere. Before concluding, let me bring Irwin and Suzuki together one last time by considering them as local, not just global, public figures. For all their actionpacked globetrotting, both are firmly tied to particular locales – Queensland in Irwin’s case, British Columbia in Suzuki’s – and both are clearly national icons as well (even if Suzuki, in a straw poll of C B C viewers asked to identify the greatest Canadian, came in a rather disappointing fifth.)40 Suzuki, notwithstanding, tends to be as critical of Canada as he is celebratory of it, and, unlike Irwin, rarely allows himself to be co-opted into a cultural-nationalist cause. Not that Irwin had much choice in John Howard’s fulsome funeral speech, in which the ever-eager Australian leader lost no opportunity to sing the praises of the nation – seven mentions of Australia or Australians in eighteen lines – while claiming to embrace the different people (or, here, the different creatures) of the world. “Twenty million pairs of arms are reaching out to embrace you this morning,” Howard told Irwin’s bereaved wife Terri, “and to express our love and respect for what your beloved Steve in his forty-four years gave to Australia, gave to the creatures of this earth and gave to the world.”41 This almost literal engulfing of the global celebrity by culturalnationalist sentiment – twenty million pairs of arms sound distinctly suffocating – suggests that Irwin’s past (and, quite possibly, his daughter Bindi’s future) will likely be invested in the nation for years to come. It might be 40 41

See Suzuki, The Autobiography, passim, esp. ch. 17. Quoted in Shears, Wildlife Warrior, 189–90.

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interesting to consider whether there isn’t a kind of ‘postcolonial melancholia’42 at work here, as the sanctified figure of Irwin re-emerges to ‘indigenize’ white Australia in a mechanism that looks, on one level, like a return of the colonial repressed. Suzuki, though widely respected, has so far resisted these forms of cultural-nationalist lionization in Canada, although, as the C B C poll indirectly indicates, he will almost certainly encounter further attempts to inscribe him in a ‘Canadian tradition’, probably with the primary motive of differentiating him from his environmental-activist counterparts in the U S A . Whatever happens, one suspects that Suzuki will remain attentive, despite – or possibly because of – his broader social and environmental commitments, to the fundamental task of the celebrity: selling the commodity that is himself.

Conclusion My work thus far on celebrity conservationism reveals the truism that celebrities tend to move across established disciplinary boundaries.43 Positioned as they are between ‘high’ and ‘popular’ fields and between the forces of cultural and economic capital, celebrities continue, despite the apparent vapidity of the discourses that surround them, to provide valuable insight into the ‘networked’ social and cultural environments that are characteristic of today’s increasingly mediatized public sphere.44 However, as Graeme Turner has cautioned, “what constitutes celebrity in one cultural domain may be quite different in another.”45 Thus, while celebrity can be seen as a general cultural phenomenon attached to the conditions of contemporary global capitalism, its transferability from one cultural medium to another should not be automatically assumed. Literary celebrity, in this sense, is not necessarily the same as, say, cinematic celebrity – let alone conservationist celebrity – even though the cultural and economic mechanisms driving each of these forms of cele-

42

Paul Gilroy, After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? (London: Routledge, 2004): passim. 43 Richard Dyer, Stars (London: British Film Institute, 1979): passim. See also York, Literary Celebrity in Canada. 44 Lewis, “Embodied Experts,” passim; See also Marshall, Celebrity and Power, passim. 45 Graeme Turner, Understanding Celebrity (Thousand Oaks C A & London: Sage, 2004): 23.

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brity are closely affiliated with a global commodity culture in which the perception of fame creates a series of readily identifiable social effects. As Lorraine York argues in her aforementioned book on Canadian literary celebrity, the question of how long celebrity lasts is less significant than what particular effects it creates while it is in operation; in other words, what is important are the particular uses that are made of celebrity, not least by those considered – however temporarily – to be celebrities themselves.46 York thus suggests, quite rightly in my view, that discussions of literary celebrity must go well beyond which writers are included or not within any given literary canon, taking in the wider economic processes that are at work in the formation of literature as a whole. To repeat: this materialist view of literature is not an alternative to more traditional practices of text-based literary criticism, but a necessary supplement without which the critical ascription of literary value cannot be properly understood. What is more, this “remembering of the economic”47 is necessary for every field of cultural production – all the more so in the overarching context of a global cultural economy in which ‘high’ and ‘popular’ products intermingle, and where ideas associated with both circulate as commodities within a correspondingly globalized public sphere.48 It is perhaps inevitable that postcolonial critics’ engagements with celebrity will be seen by some as being complicit with the global-capitalist economy that sustains it, just as celebrities, postcolonial and otherwise, will be seen as apologists for a system in which they operate as commodities – a system they knowingly manipulate to their own advantage even as that system co-opts them for its own, not necessarily compatible, ends. It is good to see that work is now being done, across a number of different fields, which goes beyond the easy moral condemnation of celebrity and analyzes the mechanisms that drive it. For, perhaps paradoxically, it is at least in part through a detailed analysis of local, regional, and global processes of commodification that postcolonial studies might go some way toward achieving one of its objectives – the thoroughgoing democratization of knowledge – an objective by no means inimical, for all their ideological insufficiencies, to celebrities themselves.

46

York, Literary Celebrity in Canada, 26. Literary Celebrity in Canada, 28. 48 Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: The Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 1996): passim; See also Marshall, Celebrity and Power, passim. 47

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WORKS CITED Adams, William, & Martin Mulligan, ed. Decolonizing Nature: Strategies for Conservation in a Post-Colonial Era (London: Earthscan, 2003). Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: The Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 1996). Brockman, John. The Third Culture (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995). Bronfen, Elisabeth. “Fault Lines: Catastrophe and Celebrity Culture,” in Britain at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century, ed. Ulrich Broich & Susan Bassnett (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001): 117–39. Brouillette, Sarah. Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Buell, Lawrence. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 1995). Clifford, James. “On Ethnographic Allegory,” in Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, ed. James Clifford & George E. Marcus (Berkeley: U of California P , 1988): 98–121. Dyer, Richard. Stars (London: British Film Institute, 1979). Gilroy, Paul. After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? (London: Routledge, 2004). Griffiths, Tom. Hunters and Collectors: The Antiquarian Imagination in Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1996). Grove, Richard. Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1995). Guha, Ramachandra, & Juan Martinez–Alier, ed. Varieties of Environmentalism: Essays North and South (London: Earthscan, 1997). Holland, Patrick, & Graham Huggan. Tourists with Typewriters: Critical Reflections on Contemporary Travel Writing (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P , 1998). Huggan, Graham. The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London: Routledge, 2001). Innes, Lynn. The Cambridge Introduction to Postcolonial Literatures in English (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2007). Langton, Marcia. “The ‘Wild’, the Market and the Native: Indigenous People Face New Forms of Global Colonization,” in Decolonizing Nature: Strategies for Conservation in a Post-Colonial Era, ed. William Adams & Martin Mulligan (London: Earthscan, 2003): 79–107. Lewis, Tania. “Embodied Experts: Robert Hughes, Cultural Studies and the Celebrity Intellectual,” Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 15.2 (July (2001): 233–47. Marshall, David P. Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 1997).

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Pepper, David. Eco-Socialism: From Deep Ecology to Social Justice (London: Routledge, 1993). Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (New York: Penguin, 2005). Shears, Richard. Wildlife Warrior: Steve Irwin, 1962–2006: A Man Who Changed the World (Sydney: New Holland, 2006). Suzuki, David. The Autobiography (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2006). ——. The Sacred Balance: Rediscovering Our Place in Nature (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1997). ——, & Holly Dressel. From Naked Ape to Superspecies: Humanity and the Global Eco-Crisis (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2004). ——, & Wayne Grady. Tree: A Life Story (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2004). Turner, Graeme. Understanding Celebrity (London: Sage, 2004). ——, Frances Bonner & David Marshall. Fame Games: The Production of Celebrity in Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2000). Vivanco, Luis A. “The Work of Environmentalism in an Age of Televisual Adventure,” Cultural Dynamics 16.5 (July 2004): 5–27. Wilson, Alexander. The Culture of Nature: North American Landscapes from Disney to the Exxon Valdez (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992). York, Lorraine. Literary Celebrity in Canada (Toronto: U of Toronto P , 2007).

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Notes on Contributors ——————————

S A M Y A Z O U Z is lecturer at the Higher Institute of Languages, Gabès, Tunisia. He has taught at Le Havre University and as an adjunct at the University of Paris 13. He is interested in African American literary and cultural studies. His research interests include aesthetics and its link to politics, myth and mythology, race and its relation to class, and identity construction within the frame of identity politics. He is an affiliated researcher at the University of Howard in the Moorland–Spingarn Research Centre. His publications include “Cinema and Ideology in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.” Among his works in progress are articles on the role of black culture in identity-formation and on post-ethnic Identity in Amiri Baraka’s The Motion of History. L A R S E C K S T E I N is Professor of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures at the University of Potsdam. His publications include Re-Membering the Black Atlantic: On the Poetics and Politics of Literary Memory (2006) and Reading Song Lyrics (2010), as well as the edited collections English Literatures Across the Globe: A Companion (2007), Multi-Ethnic Britain 2000+: New Perspectives in Literature, Film and the Arts (with Barbara Korte, Eva Ulrike Pirker and Christoph Reinfandt, 2008), Romanticism Today (with Christoph Reinfandt, 2009), and The Cultural Validity of Music in Contemporary Fiction (2006). R A I N E R E M I G is Chair of English Literature and Culture at Leibniz University in Hanover, Germany. He is especially interested in the link between literature, culture, and the media and in literary, critical, and cultural theory, particularly theories of identity, power, gender, and sexuality. His publications include Modernism in Poetry (1995), W.H. Auden (1999), and Krieg als Metapher im zwanzigsten Jahrhundert (2001), as well as the edited collections Stereotypes in Contemporary Anglo-German Relations (2000), Ulysses (2004), Gender ↔ Religion (with Sabine Demel, 2008), Hybrid Humour (with Graeme Dunphy, 2010), and Performing Masculinity (with Antony Rowland, 2010). He is co-editor of the Journal for the Study of British Cultures.

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W O L F G A N G F U N K is lecturer in English Literature and Culture at Leibniz University Hanover, where he is working on his doctoral dissertation (working title: “Discourses of Authenticity in Contemporary Metafiction”). He has also taught in the field of gender studies. His publications include articles on contemporary British drama and fiction, among others on Bryony Lavery (2007), Jasper Fforde (2010), Martin McDonagh (2010), and Jez Butterworth (forthcoming). J E N S M A R T I N G U R R studied English and German at the University of Mannheim. He received his doctorate from the University of Duisburg for a dissertation on “Tristram Shandy and the Dialectic of Enlightenment” (1999). His postdoctoral thesis, The Human Soul as Battleground: Variations on Dualism and the Self in English Literature, was published in 2003. After teaching at the universities of Duisburg–Essen, Bamberg, and Waterloo, Canada, he is now Chair of British and Anglophone Literature and Culture at the University of Duisburg–Essen. His research interests include sixteenth- to twenty-first-century British literature, twentiethh-century American literature and culture, and contemporary anglophone literatures and cultures. More specifically, he works on urban studies, contemporary anglophone fiction, literary and cultural theory, the politics of identity in the Americas, film and film theory, literary and cultural history, eighteenth-century British literature, and British Romanticism. He is director of the University of Duisburg–Essen’s Main Research Area “Urban Systems,” in which over seventy researchers from ten faculties cooperate in interdisciplinary projects. B I R T E H E I D E M A N N teaches English and Postcolonial Literature at Chemnitz University of Technology. She studied English and German literature at the University of Bremen and at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. She is currently completing her dissertation on the concept of liminal space in contemporary Northern Irish literature and film. Her research interests are in postcolonial theory, contemporary Northern Irish literature, black and Asian British literature, and film studies. S I S S Y H E L F F has taught postcolonial and British literature, British cultural studies, and media studies at the universities of Paderborn and Frankfurt. She is particularly interested in the representation of postcolonial sport, theories of migration and diaspora, cyberspace, and film studies. She is the author of Unreliable Truths (forthcoming with Rodopi) and co-editor of Facing the East in the West: Images of Eastern Europe in British Literature, Film and Culture (2010), Transcultural Modernities: Narrating Africa in Europe (2009), Transcultural English Studies: Theories, Fictions, Realities (2008), and Die Kunst der Migration (forthcoming 2011). She is currently completing a monograph on the representation of the refugee in British literature.

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G R A H A M H U G G A N is Chair of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Literatures in

the School of English at the University of Leeds. He also currently directs the Leeds Institute for Colonial and Postcolonial Studies (I C P S ). A world-renowned scholar in comparative postcolonial literary/cultural studies, he is the author of twelve books, including The Postcolonial Exotic (2001), Australian Literature (2007), and, most recently, Postcolonial Ecocriticism (with Helen Tiffin, 2010). S T E P H A N L A Q U É teaches English literature at Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich. His main interests are Early Modern literature, modernism, and postmodernism, as well as literary and cultural theory. His publications include Hermetik und Dekonstruktion: Die Erfahrung von Transzendenz in Shakespeares Hamlet (2005) and co-edited volumes on Realigning Renaissance Culture: Intrusion and Adjustment in Early Modern Drama (with Enno Ruge, 2004) and Representing Religious Pluralization in Early Modern Europe (with Enno Ruge, Gabriela Schmidt and Andreas Höfele, 2007). O L I V E R L I N D N E R teaches English Literature and Didactics at Bayreuth Univer-

sity. His research interests include eighteenth-century literature, Daniel Defoe, science fiction, postcolonial literatures, and youth and popular culture. He is the author of “Solitary on a Continent”: Raumentwürfe in der spätviktorianischen Science Fiction (2005) and “Matters of Blood”: Defoe and the Cultures of Violence (2010), and of an edited collection of essays, Teaching India (2008). A N A C R I S T I N A M E N D E S is a researcher at U L I C E S (University of Lisbon

Centre for English Studies). Her interests span postcolonial cultural production and its intersection with the cultural industries. Her publications include articles in the journals Third Text and the Journal of Commonwealth Literature. She is currently editing an essay collection on Salman Rushdie and Visual Culture and coediting Re-Orientalism and South Asian Identity Politics, both forthcoming. S A B I N E N U N I U S completed a doctorate on contemporary British literature at Friedrich Alexander University, Erlangen–Nuremberg, where she also worked as a lecturer. The dissertation was published as Coping with Difference: New Approaches in the Contemporary British Novel (2000–2006) in 2009. Her main research interests, besides contemporary British literature, include popular culture, theories of Britishness and ‘British’ identity, gender and sexuality, and the cultural study of food. She took the state examination for translators (in English and economics) in July 2010. She is currently working as personal assistant to the Vice Presidents of Friedrich Alexander University. C A R L P L A S A is a Reader in English Literature in the School of English, Communication and Philosophy at Cardiff University. He is the author of Slaves to Sweetness: British and Caribbean Literatures of Sugar (2009), Charlotte Brontë (2004), and Textual Politics from Slavery to Postcolonialism: Race and Identi-

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fication (2000). His current projects include monographs on the rewriting of Greek myth in African American literature from Du Bois to Reginald Shepherd and on poetry of the Middle Passage since 1945. K A T H A R I N A R E N N H A K is Professor of English Literature at the Bergische Universität Wuppertal, Germany. She is especially interested in the link between literature and culture, in literary and critical theory (particularly narrative theories and in theories of identity, power, and gender), and in the relationship between British and Irish literary cultures and histories. Her publications include Sprachkonzeptionen im metahistorischen Roman: Diskursspezifische Ausprägungen des “Linguistic Turn” in “Critical Theory” and Geschichtstheorie und Geschichtsfiktion 1970–1990 (2002), as well as the edited collections Revolution und Emanzipation (with Virginia Richter; 2004), Romantic Voices, Romantic Poetics (with Christoph Bode, 2005), and Women Constructing Men: Female Novelists and Their Male Characters, 1750–2000 (with Sarah S.G. Frantz, 2010). Her second monograph, on narrative cross-gendering and the construction of masculine identities in British and Irish women writers’ novels around 1800, is forthcoming. K S E N I A R O B B E is a doctoral candidate at the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture in Giessen, Germany. She graduated in Oriental and African studies and in English translation studies from St Petersburg State University, Russia. In her dissertation, she explores the imaginaries of motherhood in South African women’s writing by reading the texts of eight contemporary authors across the traditions of ‘black’ and ‘white’ literatures in English and Afrikaans. Her research interests include African literature and history, postcolonial and transnational theory and writing, gender theory, autobiography, and theories of dialogism and translation. C E C I L E S A N D T E N is Chair of English Literatures at Chemnitz Technical University, Germany. Her teaching and research interests include postcolonial theory and literature, children’s literature and literature for young adults, Indian English literature, black and Asian British literature, Shakespeare and comparative perspectives, as well as adaptation studies, media transfer, and urban studies. Her publications include Broken Mirrors: Interkulturalität am Beispiel der indischen Lyrikerin Sujata Bhatt (1998) and the edited collections Zwischen Kontakt und Konflikt: Stand und Perspektiven der Postkolonialismusforschung (with Gisela Febel, 2006), Transkulturelle Begegnungen (with Martina Schrader–Kniffki and Kathleen Starck, 2007), and Industrialization, Industrial Heritage, De-Industrialization: Literary and Visual Representations of Pittsburgh and Chemnitz (with Evelyne Keitel and Gunter Süß, 2010). She is currently working on an interdisciplinary research project entitled “Postcolonialism in the Metropolis.”