Epistemic Justice and Creative Agency Global Perspectives on Literature and Film 9781032183930, 9781032183923, 9781003254317

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
List of contributors
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Changing the story? Epistemic shifts and creative agency
PART I: On the promise and peril of stories
1 Narratives, social justice, and the common good
2 Divine justice, epistemic crisis, storytelling
3 ‘The notation of a silent lament’: Hermeneutical injustice and Judith Schalansky’s An Inventory of Losses
PART II: Uncovering injustice
4 Representational epistemic injustice: Disavowing the ‘other’ Africa in the imaginative geographies of Western animation films
5 Farmers’ self-representations and agency: Protest music in the agitations against India’s farm laws
6 The postmigrant critique of the Bildungsroman and the epistemic injustice of the educational system in Deniz Ohde’s Scattered Light
PART III: Literary strategies of resistance
7 The ludic impulse: Race narratives ‘at play’ in Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark and Zoë Wicomb’s Playing in the Light
8 Narrative pilgrimage and chiastic knowledge. Olivia Wenzel’s 1000 Coils of Fear and Sharon Dodua Otoo’s Ada’s Room
9 Tell the truth but tell it slant: Mo Yan’s aesthetics of indirection
Index

Citation preview

EPISTEMIC JUSTICE AND CREATIVE AGENCY

Foundational theories of epistemic justice, such as Miranda Fricker’s, have cited literary narratives to support their case. But why have those narratives in particular provided the resource that was needed? And is cultural production always supportive of epistemic justice? This essay collection, written by experts in literary, philosophical, and cultural studies working in conversation with each other across a range of global contexts, expands the emerging ÿeld of epistemic injustice studies. The essays analyze the complex relationship between narrative, aesthetics, and epistemic (in)justice, referencing texts, ÿlm, and other forms of cultural production. The authors present, without seeking to synthesize, perspectives on how justice and injustice are narratively and aesthetically produced. This volume by no means wants to say the last word on epistemic justice and creative agency. The intention is to open out a productive new ÿeld of study, at a time when understanding the workings of injustice and possibilities for justice seems an ever more urgent project. Sarah Colvin is the Schröder Professor of German at the University of Cambridge, UK. She has a DPhil, MA, and BA in German from the University of Oxford, UK, and held chairs at the universities of Edinburgh, Birmingham, and Warwick before moving to Cambridge. Her current research focuses on alternative epistemologies and literary aesthetics. Stephanie Galasso is the Schröder Research Associate and an A°liated Lecturer in German at the University of Cambridge, UK. After completing her BA in German and English at the University of California, Davis, USA, she completed her MA and PhD in German Studies at Brown University, USA. Her doctoral research was partially supported by a Fulbright grant to study at the University of Konstanz, Germany. Her research focuses on intersections between racialization and aesthetics.

EPISTEMIC JUSTICE AND CREATIVE AGENCY Global Perspectives on Literature and Film Edited by Sarah Colvin and Stephanie Galasso

Cover image: Getty First published 2023 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 selection and editorial matter, Sarah Colvin and Stephanie Galasso; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Sarah Colvin and Stephanie Galasso to be identiÿed as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identiÿcation and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this title has been requested ISBN: 978-1-032-18393-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-18392-3 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-25431-7 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003254317 Typeset in Bembo by codeMantra

CONTENTS

List of contributors Acknowledgments Introduction: Changing the story? Epistemic shifts and creative agency Sarah Colvin and Stephanie Galasso

vii xi

1

PART I

On the promise and peril of stories

21

1

Narratives, social justice, and the common good Chielozona Eze

23

2

Divine justice, epistemic crisis, storytelling Galili Shahar

44

3

‘The notation of a silent lament’: Hermeneutical injustice and Judith Schalansky’s An Inventory of Losses Stephanie Galasso

57

vi

Contents

PART II

Uncovering injustice 4

5

6

Representational epistemic injustice: Disavowing the ‘other’ Africa in the imaginative geographies of Western animation ÿlms James Odhiambo Ogone Farmers’ self-representations and agency: Protest music in the agitations against India’s farm laws Shambhavi Prakash The postmigrant critique of the Bildungsroman and the epistemic injustice of the educational system in Deniz Ohde’s Scattered Light Kyung-Ho Cha

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106

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PART III

Literary strategies of resistance 7

8

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The ludic impulse: Race narratives ‘at play’ in Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark and Zoë Wicomb’s Playing in the Light Aretha Phiri Narrative pilgrimage and chiastic knowledge. Olivia Wenzel’s 1000 Coils of Fear and Sharon Dodua Otoo’s Ada’sšRoom Sarah Colvin Tell the truth but tell it slant: Mo Yan’s aesthetics of indirection Shiamin Kwa

Index

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176

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CONTRIBUTORS

Kyung-Ho Cha is a Senior Lecturer (Akademischer Oberrat) at the Institute

for Modern German Literature at the University of Bayreuth, Germany. After studying German literature and philosophy at the University of Bonn, the University of Oxford, and Columbia University and a fellowship at the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University, he was appointed Assistant Professor and Lecturer at the University of Bayreuth. He received his PhD in German literature from the Technical University of Berlin and his Habilitation from the University of Bayreuth. His primary work is in the ÿelds of (post-)migrant literature, law and literature (citizenship, human rights), and ecocriticism. Sarah Colvin is the Schröder Professor of German at the University of Cambridge, UK. She has a DPhil, MA, and BA in German from the University of Oxford, UK and held chairs at the Universities of Edinburgh, Birmingham, and Warwick before moving to Cambridge. Her current research focuses on alternative epistemologies and literary aesthetics. Her recent book publications include Shadowland: The Story of Germany Told by its Prisoners (2022), The Routledge Handbook of German Politics and Culture (editor, Routledge 2015; new ed. 2017), Ulrike Meinhof and West German Terrorism (2009), and Women and Death: Warlike Women in the German Literary and Cultural Imagination (editor, with Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly, 2009). She co-directs, with Stephanie Galasso and Tara Talwar Windsor, the collaborative research project ‘Cultural Production and Social Justice’. Chielozona Eze is a Professor of African and African Diaspora Studies at

Northeastern Illinois University, USA, where he is Bernard J. Brommel Distinguished Research Professor. He is also Extraordinary Professor of English

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at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. He has a PhD in English/Philosophy and an MFA in Fiction from Purdue University, an MA in Comparative Literature/German from the University of Bayreuth, Germany, an MA in Catholic Theology from Leopold Franzens University, Austria, and a BA in Philosophy from St. Joseph’s Seminary, Nigeria. He is the author of The Dilemma of Ethnic Identity: Alain Locke’s Vision of Transcultural Societies (Edwin Mellen, 2005); Postcolonial Imagination and Moral Representations in African Literature and Culture (Lexington Books, 2011); Ethics and Human Rights in Anglophone African Women’s Literature (Palgrave MacMillan, 2016); and most recently Justice and Human Rights in the African Imagination: We, Too, Are Humans (Routledge, 2021). Stephanie Galasso is the Schröder Research Associate and an A°liated Lecturer in German at the University of Cambridge, UK. After completing her BA in German and English at the University of California, Davis, she completed her MA and PhD in German Studies at Brown University. Her doctoral research was partially supported by a Fulbright grant to study at the University of Konstanz, Germany. Her research focuses on intersections between racialization and aesthetics. Her forthcoming monograph examines the role of German genre theory in normative constructions of the human. She co-directs, with Sarah Colvin and Tara Talwar Windsor, the collaborative research project ‘Cultural Production and Social Justice’. Shiamin Kwa is Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures and Comparative Literature at Bryn Mawr College in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, USA. She received her MA and PhD in Chinese Literature from Harvard University and her BA in English Literature from Dartmouth College. Her work explores relationships between form and content, text and image, self and self-presentation, surface and depth, and the con˛icts between what we say and what we mean. She is the author of Mulan: Five Versions of a Classic Chinese Legend (with Wilt Idema, 2010) and Strange Eventful Histories: Identity, Performance, and Xu Wei’s Four Cries of a Gibbon (2013). Her most recent book Regarding Frames: Thinking with Comics in the Twenty-ÿrst Century was published by RIT Press in 2020. James Odhiambo Ogone obtained a PhD in Anglophone Literatures and

Cultures from the University of Potsdam, Germany, in 2015. Since 2016, he has been teaching Literary Studies at Jaramogi Oginga Odinga University of Science and Technology ( JOOUST), Kenya. He has made signiÿcant contributions in his disciplinary area through the publication of several journal articles, books, and book chapters. His most recent publication is the book volume Emerging Trends in Eastern African Literatures and Cultures (2020), co-edited with

Contributors ix

S. Gehrmann, O. Obura, and O. Musumba, which also features a chapter by the author. Ogone’s current research interests are in the ÿelds of indigenous epistemologies, East African literature, Anglophone modernities, postcolonial theory, cosmopolitanism, and diaspora literature. Aretha Phiri is an Associate Professor in the Department of Literary Studies in English at Rhodes University, South Africa. A National Research Foundation-rated researcher, her research examines the intersectional interactions of race, ethnicity, culture, gender, and sexualities in comparative, transnational, and transatlantic considerations of identity and subjectivity, with a focus on African American, American and (contemporary) African diasporic literature. She has been a Resident Research Fellow at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study (2017–2019) as well as a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Black Atlantic Research, the Centre for the Study of International Slavery, and the National Humanities Center. She is the sole editor of the recently published African Philosophical and Literary Possibilities: Re-reading the Canon (2020). Shambhavi Prakash is Assistant Professor at the School of Language, Literature and Culture Studies in Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. She is interested in the poetics of knowledge, in the intersections of anthropology and history with literary and ÿlm mediums, and in aesthetic strategies as challenges to normative discourses. Her research and teaching areas include travel literature, memory studies, cultural studies, and ÿlm studies. Her recent publications explore documentary representations of exile and refugees in the context of Jewish migration to Shanghai during the Second World War and of African and Asian refugees seeking asylum in Germany in the 21st century. She has co-edited Displacement and Citizenship: Histories and Memories of Exclusion (2020), a volume on cultural citizenship and narratives of belonging and exclusion. Galili Shahar is Professor of Comparative Literature at Tel Aviv University, where he teaches German, Hebrew, and Persian literature. His work is dedicated to research and teaching of German, Jewish, and Hebrew literatures and classical Persian literature. Among his publications are books on Goethe, Kaf ka, and Celan. He has also written articles about Walter Benjamin, Gershom Scholem, Franz Rosenzweig and Erich Auerbach, S. Y. Agnon, and others. Since 2013, he has been serving as the Director of the Minerva Institute for German History at Tel Aviv University.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Special thanks to the Humboldt Centre at the University of Bayreuth, Germany, who in May 2021 hosted and supported the workshop Literature and Epistemic Injustice: Towards a Politics of Fiction, which became the basis for this essay collection, and to Dr. Kyung-Ho Cha and Professor Martin Huber at Bayreuth, our academic partners in the Bayreuth-based research project ‘Towards a Politics of Fiction’. Thanks also to colleagues and friends who attended the workshop and o˝ered generous feedback. Sarah Colvin’s contribution to the planning and editing of this volume was signiÿcantly enabled by a Senior Fellowship at the Bayreuth Humboldt Centre in 2021, and Stephanie Galasso’s contribution by the Cambridge Schröder Fund, which supported her Schröder Research Associateship at Cambridge; many thanks, too, to the Managers of the Schröder Fund.

INTRODUCTION Changing the story? Epistemic shifts and creative agency Sarah Colvin and Stephanie Galasso

What is epistemic injustice, and why does it matter? ‘If we ignore what other people are thinking […] then rational discussion must come to an end, though each of us may go on happily talking to himself ’ – citing Karl Popper, Jonathan O. Chimakonam in his essay ‘African Philosophy and Global Epistemic Injustice’ gets to the core of why epistemic justice matters.1 José Medina puts it even more bleakly, drawing on Hannah Arendt in Men in Dark Times, who posited that the greatest intellectual, moral, and political failure a person can commit is to become ‘immune to other experiences in the world’.2 Becoming immune to other people’s experience engenders a particular kind of ignorance that is also a refusal of knowledge: Gaile Pohlhaus, Jr., has described the ignorance ‘which occurs when dominantly situated knowers refuse to acknowledge epistemic tools developed from the experienced world of those situated marginally’. But that ignorance also has a strategic function: ‘Such refusals allow dominantly situated knowers to misunderstand, misinterpret, and/or ignore whole parts of the world’.3 Epistemic injustice, then, is not only about who speaks but about who is listened to, who is understood, and who is dismissed or ignored. It is about who has the right to know things or to choose not to know them, about whose knowledge has the status of truth and is felt to matter, and about who has access to knowledge, while others are denied access to the things they need to know. All of those things have massive practical consequences for people’s lived experience and life chances. As Medina reminds readers of his Epistemology of Resistance (2013), ‘the vicious epistemic resistances that result from privilege are not exclusively cognitive and are intimately related to social injustices’.4 Chimakonam points to the ‘exclusions and lopsidedness in global epistemic discourses’ DOI: 10.4324/9781003254317-1

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that have created signiÿcant gaps in the knowledge of scholars working particularly in the European and white North American traditions; and James Odhiambo Ogone has demonstrated that African knowledge has ‘not got a fair share of prominence in the global arena’.5 Dipesh Chakrabarty makes the same point for a range of global contexts, where Europe (still) ‘remains the sovereign, theoretical subject of all histories, including the ones we call “Indian”, “Chinese”, “Kenyan”, and so on’.6 In that delimited arena of knowledge, knowers are, in Pohlhaus’s words, ‘captivated by a distorted picture of the world’.7 Epistemic justice is, then, as Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni puts it, about the ‘liberation of reason itself from coloniality’.8 As the chapters in this volume demonstrate, it is also about the liberation of reason from class-based ignorance and prejudice, and from gender-based ignorance (‘white ignorance is not the only kind of privileged, group-based ignorance’, comments the philosopher Charles W. Mills, ‘Male ignorance could be analyzed similarly and clearly has a far more ancient history and arguably a more deep-rooted ancestry in human interrelations’).9 Indeed, it is reasonable to assume that epistemic injustice will tend to accompany power in all its forms. Existing work on disability and cultural production, and age in literature and ÿlm, already points the way to further conversations about art and epistemic (in)justice. The chapters collected here begin to explore what is possible and thinkable, in the hope and expectation that future work will go further and beyond. These are possible, rather than deÿnitive, interpretations of the relationship between epistemic injustice and cultural production. Some of the contributors to this volume focus on European and US American writing and ÿlm-making, in ways that explore coloniality and other injustices; others focus on contexts and subjects beyond Europe and North America. The trajectory of the thinking is toward (in Ndlovu-Gatsheni’s words) the liberation of reason from constraining forces. ‘If oppression theory is not liberatory’, writes the philosopher María Lugones, ‘it is useless from the point of view of the oppressed person’.10

Epistemic injustice: the history of an idea Questions around who knows and has access to knowledge, who speaks, who is listened to, who is believed, who is ignored, and who chooses ignorance did not begin with the publication of the philosopher Miranda Fricker’s in˛uential study Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (2007). As early as 1967 (for example) Howard S. Becker, a sociologist, had addressed the ‘hierarchy of credibility’, by which ‘the highest groups have the right to deÿne the way things really are’, and ‘credibility and the right to be heard are di˝erentially distributed through the working of the social system’.11 Before we outline some of the core contributions to the idea of epistemic injustice, it may be helpful to break the term down into its component parts.

Introduction

3

The standard deÿnition of the episteme in modern philosophy comes from Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things (Les mots et les choses, 1966). An episteme names ‘the conditions of possibility of all knowledge, whether expressed in a theory or silently invested in a practice’.12 One might, then, in a general and provisional sense, think of a distinctly epistemic form of injustice as one that pertains to inequities and issues that attend the production, reception, and/or suppression of knowledge. Foucault’s works excavate how power embeds itself in epistemes, or how power ‘produce[s] discourses of truth’.13 Beyond his theorization of the episteme itself, his analysis of di˝erentially distributed social and discursive power has led scholars such as Amy Allen and José Medina to consider him especially useful for theorizing epistemic injustice now. Foucault, maintains Allen, ‘could well be considered a theorist of epistemic injustice avant la lettre’.14 ‘The critical battle against the monopolization of knowledgeproducing practices’, Medina reminds his readers, ‘involves what Foucault calls an insurrection of subjugated knowledges’.15 Reclaiming Foucault’s work as a resource for strengthening contemporary understandings of epistemic injustice through ‘holistic analysis’, Allen identiÿes his ‘constitutive conception of power’ as especially useful.16 She explains this conception of power as ‘a mobile set of force relations spread throughout the social body that exist only in their exercise and that constitute agents as subjects’.17 In other words, Foucault’s analysis of power and knowledge reveals the ways that epistemes constitute not only discourses of truth, but subjects themselves. As helpful and generative as Foucault’s analysis of power as constitutive of subjects has been, and however much it may still prove useful for theorizing epistemic injustice, it also provoked one of the earliest and most in˛uential elaborations of ‘epistemic violence’, in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s critique of Foucault’s work in ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’.18 Spivak cautions that Foucault’s project of ‘undermining subjective sovereignty’ in fact furnishes ‘a cover for this subject of knowledge’. Foucault provides the framework for a transparent subject (‘transparent’ because universal, ergo masquerading as free from ‘identity politics’) in the form of the representative intellectual: the one who is unmarked by space or time and who can altruistically represent ‘the concrete experience of the oppressed’, such as people working in factories and held in asylums.19 And yet, that vision of reclaiming subjugated knowledges ignores the intellectual’s role in mediating them, and also ignores the global context of their emergence. Spivak therefore introduces the term ‘epistemic violence’ and links Western epistemes to founding acts of imperialist violence. For Spivak, epistemic violence is ‘the remotely orchestrated, far-˛ung, and heterogeneous project to constitute the colonial subject as Other’, where that Other is the counterpoint to all the qualities that should deÿne the Western subject, a counterpoint that is in fact required for the constitution of the Western subject. But, as Spivak notes, ‘[t]his project is also the asymmetrical obliteration of the trace of that Other in its precarious Subject-ivity’: in other words, the West

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continues to erase the signiÿcance of its colonial practices for its understanding of itself.20 Spivak’s articulation of epistemic violence instituted seismic shifts in approaches to epistemology, historiography, and literary and cultural theory. It also provided a name for the ongoing erasure of colonialism from Western accounts of subjectivity, knowledge, and power. But Foucault (arguably) and Spivak are not the only thinkers who might be considered theorists of epistemic injustice avant la lettre. Luvell Anderson cites some of the black women and women of color who have energized the debate around epistemic violence and oppression: Audre Lorde in her essay ‘The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House’ (1984), for example, and Patricia Hill Collins in her in˛uential study of Black Feminist Thought (1999).21 Collins and other feminist thinkers such as Sandra Harding developed feminist standpoint theory, with its exploration of the relationship between power and knowledge production.22 In 1991 Lorraine Code in What Can She Know? Feminist Theory and the Construction of Knowledge made the case for a (white) feminist epistemology, arguing that knowledge cannot be thought without a consideration of the gender of the knower, because signiÿcant injustice is perpetrated in the name of knowledge’s universality and neutrality.23 In his essay ‘Alternative Epistemologies’ (1988), Charles W. Mills developed a perspective on gender, race, and knowing that referenced Code’s thinking. Mills reminds his reader that it is ‘very di°cult to separate what is truly innate from what is merely socialized’;24 the ‘most plausible’ argument for alternative epistemologies, therefore, is socialization, where (in Marxian terms) ‘actually-existing sexist and racist capitalism’ generates ‘illusory appearances’. Di˝erent social groups relate di˝erently to those illusions: ‘hegemonic groups characteristically have experiences that foster illusory perceptions about society’s functioning’, observes Mills, ‘while subordinate groups characteristically have experiences that (at least potentially) give rise to more adequate conceptualizations’.25 This is not a simple equation where oppression automatically produces enlightenment, but power and privilege tend to produce knowledge limitations, where marginalization can stimulate the insights into the workings of power that marginalized people need in order to survive. Empowered people’s limited perceptions of how the world works (how it works for them, or from their perspective) are a signiÿcant factor in what Mills would later call white ignorance.26 Drawing on Mills’s work, Linda Martín Alco˝ in 1999 posited that social identity is linked to epistemic credibility: ‘Does a claim or judgement gain or lose credibility in virtue of the claimant’s social identity?’ Alco˝ asked, and concluded that it was ‘not irrational’ to interrogate how far criteria such as sex and race in˛uence people’s assessment of the ‘epistemic reliability’ of other people.27 (Privileged people who deny that race or sex in˛uences their perception of the world, Medina would later argue, are ‘ignorant of social positionality, which involves a double epistemic failure: a failure in self-knowledge and a failure in the knowledge of others’.)28

Introduction

5

With the publication of Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing in 2007, Fricker would name that general problem around who is heard and believed testimonial injustice. Its e˝ect – a system of understanding the world that is skewed toward the interests of the empowered deÿners – she calls hermeneutical injustice. David Coady di˝erentiates neatly: ‘Epistemic injustice occurs when someone is unjustly not believed to the degree they deserve to be believed; hermeneutical injustice occurs when someone is not understood (perhaps even by themselves) to the extent that they deserve’.29 But Coady also goes further, insisting that the distribution of epistemic goods such as information and education must be part of thinking about epistemic injustice. People can be ‘unjustly denied what they have a right to know’, argues Coady: unjust ignorance (where people are denied education, or left ignorant of things they have a right to know) and unjust error (where knowledge is withheld or misinformation spread so that people believe erroneous things) are important variants of epistemic injustice.30 Ogone in his essay on epistemic injustice and African knowledge (2017) agrees: the four forms of epistemic injustice identiÿed by Fricker and Coady can, he argues, ‘be perceived as part of a wider system of oppression in our modern world’. They are the foundation stones of epistemic oppression, which has among other things continued colonialism’s practice of using ‘epistemic structures, such as education, to buttress its political mission’.31 There is also, as Luvell Anderson and Ashley Atkins have argued, a form of hermeneutical (or interpretive) injustice that occurs when empowered people misconstrue what oppressed people say about their experience, thus ‘blocking the marginalized speaker’s contribution to making sense of social reality’.32 Mills’s essay ‘White Ignorance’ (2007) was published in the same year as Fricker’s Epistemic Injustice. It appeared in Shannon Sullivan’s and Nancy Tuana’s pathbreaking collection Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance.33 Mills here develops an idea he had already explored in his classic study The Racial Contract (1997), as well as in ‘Alternative Epistemologies’: namely that systems of groupbased supremacy entail a ‘group-based cognitive handicap’ for the dominant group.34 He addresses, in the racial context, the e˝ect of prejudice that Fricker named testimonial injustice: in Mills’s terms, ‘the epistemic presumption against th[e] credibility’ of black speakers.35 Presciently putting an ironic spin on Fricker’s future status as the founder of epistemic injustice theory, Mills notes the inaudibility of black scholars in an economy where ‘the “testimony” of the black perspective and its distinctive conceptual and theoretical insights will tend to be whited out. Whites will cite other whites in a closed circuit of epistemic authority’.36 He also deals with the causes of what Fricker called hermeneutical injustice: ‘the editing of white memory’, he notes, creates an ‘airbrushed white narrative of discovery, settlement, and building of a shining city on the hill’; in that narrative, ‘the mystiÿcation of the past underwrites a mystiÿcation of the present’.37 That mystiÿcation obscures or precludes a historicized understanding of black experience, thus creating the preconditions

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for hermeneutical injustice. Anticipating Medina’s response to Fricker in The Epistemology of Resistance, Mills notes that the injustices of epistemic authority have historically been met with epistemic resistance: the articulation of black experience, for example, which can shift white mythologies – ‘white ignorance is best thought of as a cognitive tendency – an inclination, a doxastic disposition – which is not insuperable’.38 Mills shifts the focus of epistemic injustice to the ways in which dominant groups and individuals actively invest in and maintain their prejudices. White ignorance, writes Mills, has ˛ourished because it is supported by a whole epistemology of ignorance.39 Other kinds of empowered ignorance – around gender, sexuality age, and disability, for example – have also ˛ourished in that environment. Kristie Dotson concludes her response to Miranda Fricker with a call for open conceptual structures in research on epistemic injustice. Reframing Fricker’s study in this open-ended manner, she considers Fricker’s book an account of epistemic injustice, rather than the account. Dotson reminds, ‘one has to remain constantly aware that there is always more to say and remain sensitive to the inevitability of damaging oversights’.40 In the years following publication of Fricker’s work, several scholars challenged its framing of dominant hermeneutical resources. In ‘Two Kinds of Unknowing’ (2011), for example, Rebecca Mason took issue with Fricker’s construction of hermeneutical resources as collective and all-encompassing.41 Mason argues that epistemically marginalized people and groups can and do develop interpretive resources for understanding their experiences. Focusing on ‘two kinds of unknowing’, she disambiguates Fricker’s original theorization of ‘gaps’ in hermeneutic resources (viewed primarily through their eŁects on the marginalized) from gaps that are actively maintained by ‘ethically bad epistemic practices’ on the part of the dominant, ‘even while alternative interpretations are in fact o˝ered by non-dominant discourses’.42 Likewise attentive to the epistemic agency of marginalized communities, Dotson seeks, in ‘A Cautionary Tale: Limiting Epistemic Oppression’, to problematize the boundaries erected around the concept of epistemic injustice.43 Where Fricker posited a ‘closed conceptual structure’ that perhaps limits the scope of what might be viewed as epistemic injustice, Dotson builds on Mason’s work, and on Charles Mills’s, to posit an additional form of epistemic injustice. ‘Contributory injustice’, as Dotson terms it, names the harm caused by the willful refusal of the dominant to ‘recognize or acquire requisite alternative hermeneutical resources’, a practice that serves to limit ‘the epistemic agency of a knower’.44 Medina’s Epistemology of Resistance (2013) is to date the most extensive response to Fricker’s study. Where Fricker in Epistemic Injustice surprisingly makes no mention of Mills’s thinking, Medina draws particularly on Mills’s analyses of the cognitive problems of privilege, where those who (in Medina’s words) enjoy the ‘cognitive beneÿts’ of epistemic injustice – such as ‘the presumption of knowing, of speaking authoritatively, of not being cognitively suspect’ – tend to

Introduction

7

su˝er from cognitive immaturity. Cognitive immaturity entails epistemic arrogance, which in turn leads to epistemic laziness (the result of ‘not needing to know’), and/or closed-mindedness (‘needing not to know’).45 Oppressed subjects, on the other hand, ‘often need to know more than they are supposed to – sometimes more than their oppressors’, Medina explains, again echoing Mills: ‘oppressed subjects accomplish the epistemic feat of maintaining active in their minds two cognitive perspectives simultaneously […]. This is what in race theory, following Du Bois, has been called having a “double consciousness”’.46 Medina’s core argument picks up Mills’s in ‘White Ignorance’, namely that epistemic resistance is both possible and historically demonstrable. It is, Medina insists, ‘a dangerous ÿction to postulate a dark time in which everybody was blind to the wrongs of slavery and nobody knew how to communicate about them’. Such an approach is injurious to those whose experience meant that they did know, whose eccentric agency, as Medina terms it, ‘exceeds standard meanings’.47 Epistemic resistance gives rise to epistemic friction, which is adversarial without seeking resolution; it is conversational in Chimakonam’s sense (‘critiquing and correcting; opening but never closing’).48 Conversationalism, Chimakonam explains, tolerates both di˝erence and dissent: it ‘does not seek to annihilate epistemic borders, but to build bridges to connect all borders’. It is ‘a perpetual process, a critical continuum and a creative struggle’, where answers ‘must generate new questions in the absence of ÿnalities and permanent solutions’.49 Ashley Atkins, however, remains ‘wary of the suggestion that inclusion in the great conversation constitutes an ideal of justice’; Atkins o˝ers a reminder that resistance sometimes happens most e˝ectively outside of that ‘great conversation’, because exclusion itself can sometimes ‘provide the basis for solidarity with other subordinated speakers, shared understanding, and even liberation. […] one must ask what would be gained from aiming for full participation in conversation with dominantly positioned speakers’. For the contemporary Black Lives Matter movement in the USA, argues Atkins, the priority might be ‘less to enter into conversation than to provoke a realization of how much needs to be done before there can be conversation’.50

Literature, ÿlm, and creative agency Epistemically privileged people’s failure to notice epistemic injustice, observes Medina, is a ‘failure of imagination’.51 Can literature and ÿlm provide new imaginative possibilities, and break down the barriers of resistance toward alternative knowledges? Creative art – text, music, image, drama – has existed in some form in all cultures at all times. But consumerist capitalism in wealthy societies has fostered a profound misunderstanding of creative art as a luxury product or lifestyle enhancement (rather than as, for example, a site of resistant agency). In recent years a number of European and North American thinkers have

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responded by making the case for art’s, particularly literature’s, use-value as a moral and social tool, arguing for its capacity to develop theory of mind and build empathy, to change the way people see the world and behave in it,52 even to make its audiences and readers more virtuous.53 The focus on morality and virtue is striking in the secular environment of Eurocentric thinking since the Enlightenment; the spiritual or religious is assumed to have no place in that ‘enlightened’ cognitive environment (an assumption that is stimulatingly confounded by Galili Shahar’s chapter in this volume). Moving beyond European and Eurocentric North American knowledges, Teresa N. Washington has produced in-depth analyses of the relevance and power of art as a spiritual force in Yoruba thought. Washington explores the Yoruba concept Òrò, which is ‘resident in and the impetus behind’ visual arts, dance, and literature, among other things. In a way that speaks interestingly to the analyses of literary writing in the ÿnal section of this volume, Washington writes of the capacity of storytellers moved by the spiritual dimension to which Òrò belongs to produce ‘multidimensional and intergenerational’ work. The work involves its readers or audiences in generative ways that can ‘alter worlds’.54 There seem to be future conversations, in Chimakonam’s sense, to be had here, across knowledges that accept the spiritual or religious, and knowledges that exclude it in order to privilege a tendentially white, male ‘humanism’.55 This is the ÿrst book-length study to focus speciÿcally on epistemic injustice, and creative resistance to it, in literary ÿction and ÿlm. Other scholars of literature and culture have anticipated and helped build our thinking, however. Key examples include Paula Moya’s The Social Imperative (2016); James J. Donahue’s, Jennifer Ann Ho’s, and Shaun Morgan’s collection of essays on Narrative, Race and Ethnicity in the United States (2017); Rafe McGregor’s Narrative Justice (2018); and Jean Wyatt’s and Sheldon George’s collection Reading Contemporary Black British and African American Women Writers: Race, Ethics, Narrative Form (2020).56 All of them model ways of reading and thinking about cultural production that recognize and seek to do justice to alternative epistemologies, and all of them explore cultural production – such as literature and ÿlm – as a potentially active force in what Sue J. Kim calls the ‘socio-political arena of contestation’.57 There have also been a number of article-length explorations of epistemic justice, art, and literature to which we are indebted, notably Daniel Coleman’s analysis of epistemic justice and decolonizing Canadian literatures (2010), Mihaela Mihai’s consideration of ‘Epistemic Marginalisation and the Seductive Power of Art’ (2018), and Zoë Cunli˝e’s exploration of epistemic injustice in ÿlm, television, and literature (2019).58 Investigating the relationship between culture and epistemic injustice raises the implicit question of how these two areas came to be separated in the ÿrst place. How, when, and to what ends did the production, reception, and interpretation of art assume the status of a distinct sphere of human activity, separate from, among other possible spheres, politics and law? Recent literary critical

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thinking is beginning to eschew that separation. In The Social Imperative (2016), for example, Moya deÿnes literature as a ‘trans-individual social institution – one that in˛uences, and is in˛uenced by, the ideas, practices and behaviors of all the actors within its sphere’. Art is thus understood to interact with, and thus to have the potential to intervene in the epistemic and ideological moments it encounters and is encountered by. It is ‘fundamentally ideological’; and that, argues Moya, is key to its productivity as an object of study. If literature were not fundamentally ideological – if it were not so revealing of the complex ways in which our diverse cultural ideas inform and motivate our equally diverse practices and behaviors – there would be little reason to retain literature as a ÿeld of study in the academy.59 Two years previously, in Freedom Time, Reed was thinking along similar lines, as he noted how literature makes ‘legible the outlines of its time, its framing of legible speech and illegible noise, and its injunction to think beyond present strictures of “allowable thought” and forms of value’.60 Nonetheless certain epistemological structures are embedded in, and reproduced through, normative Western frameworks for thinking about art and creativity. A major turning point in these structures occurred with the advent of a distinct aesthetic philosophy, when the term ‘aesthetic’ began to designate, broadly speaking, ‘the study of the nature and value of aspects of the human experience of art and (sometimes) nature’.61 Alexander Baumgarten used the term ‘aesthetics’ in his Metaphysics (1742) to describe, for the ÿrst time, a discipline that would o˝er ‘a study of the “sensitive” or percipient activity of the mind in recognizing beauty as an intrinsic feature of certain objects’, a uniquely human capacity that, while more ‘rudimentary’ than other forms of knowledge, still constitutes a valuable facet of experience.62 The word ‘aesthetics’ has come to mean a variety of things in di˝erent contexts, but a crucial element of its initial usage is the belief that it helps to deÿne that which makes one human, and that it supplies distinct kinds of knowledge. Recently, David Lloyd has demonstrated that one of the founding texts of Western aesthetic philosophy provided a regulative framework for the constitution of a universal subject along deeply racializing lines.63 A crucial movement in aesthetic thought, Lloyd notes, is Immanuel Kant’s shift, in the Critique of Judgement (1790), from thinking of artworks in terms of their e˝ect on the subject, to basing ‘the capacity for aesthetic judgment on the properties of the Subject in general’, a move which, while seemingly democratizing the space of artistic encounters, actually ‘endows the aesthetic with the function of determining the very possibility of a universal subject’.64 Lloyd’s work goes on to trace, through moves discussed in Ogone’s and Galasso’s chapters, how this supposedly universal subject is actually undergirded by a ‘narrative of development’ that places the racial subaltern outside the scope of the human.

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Part and parcel of this shift, Lloyd argues, is the construction of a supposedly apolitical, autonomous ‘aesthetic culture’ that is deÿned by its opposition to useful or practical objects and concerns. This context is important for naming and challenging the ways that Western understandings of aesthetic thought, since Kant, have presupposed that aesthetic judgment (when practiced by empowered subjects) is naturally apolitical and disinterested, meaning that the subject is not in any way dependent on the object of contemplation. Objects of aesthetic contemplation – rather than being viewed as inherently tied to the social relations in which they emerge – are consequently theorized as things that can be politicized (and for many, it would seem, should not be). Because the empowered white, masculine subject has enshrined his image in the theoretical constitution of the aesthetic subject and his relation to objects of aesthetic judgment, any re˛ection on art by his ‘others’ is considered to be the anti-aesthetic expression of ‘identity politics’. These historically loaded assumptions about what properly distinguishes ‘art’ from ‘mere’ social commentary play out repeatedly. Lloyd’s work thus also builds on Simon Gikandi’s earlier exposure of the centrality of race to Western aesthetics, the ÿeld of thought that purports to handle a distinctly disinterested, immaterial sphere of human activity.65 Calling for a more nuanced approach to utopic views of art, Gikandi notes that ‘it is perhaps true that concerns with beauty do indeed make us hanker for justice and just solutions to our social problems’; and yet, before one can begin to look to art to fulÿll these purposes, Gikandi cautions, ‘we need to consider its counterpoint: the injuries done to the bodies of those considered to be outside the domain of the beautiful and the injustices committed on these bodies in the name of beauty’.66 Gikandi’s work dismantles the alibi of Western aesthetics as a pure, universal ÿeld of thought supposedly unmarked by the racializing postures of ÿelds such as anthropology. The core tenets of aesthetic thought – its universality, its relationship to rationality and even morality – were, as Gikandi rigorously documents, always constructed with regard to essentialized oppositions, such as irrationality and incivility. This complex dynamic of exclusion, on the one hand, and provisional inclusion according to certain terms, on the other, continue to put aesthetic thought and artistic criticism at risk of relying on the ÿgure of the ‘native informant’. Spivak deÿnes the native informant, a term she derives from anthropological ethnography, as ‘a name for that mark of expulsion from the name of Man’.67 In that context, the native informant refers to the perspectives cited and used by Western anthropologists to di˝erentiate a distinctly Western civilization from its ‘primitive’ others. Spivak’s intervention locates the native informant not only in this ethnographic context but also in the major works of Western philosophy and literature that ‘take for granted that the “European” is the human norm and o˝er us descriptions and/or prescriptions’ for ways of being and knowing.68 While ethnographic texts have made these prescriptions explicit,

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Spivak argues that literary and philosophical texts also rely, covertly, on the ÿgure of the native informant in order to buttress normative constructions such as Kantian freedom and Hegelian consciousness. Denise Ferreira da Silva has cautioned that there continues to be a slippage between the anthropological (or ethnographic mode) and the aesthetic, such that ‘the work of artists of color is mediated by the anthropological notion of cultural di˝erence’, and artists of color are ‘forced into the position of having to resist being addressed as a “native informant” […] even when what they were articulating was an analysis of that very condition’.69 In other words, what artists are o˝ering up as diagnosis, analysis, and critique is again subsumed under normative epistemologies that treat their output as an ‘authentic’ expression of their ‘“native”/diverse experience’.70 This constitutes, in Anthony Reed’s terms, a ‘racialized reading’, which perpetuates the notion that ‘black writers (and other writers of color) are valuable insofar as they o˝er testimony or legitimate narratives about so-called race relations’, and neglects art’s potential for radical agency, tending instead to provide ‘a selective, occasionally prescriptive account of the project of black aesthetics as one of rejoinder, protest, or commentary, ÿguring black writing as reactive rather than productive’.71 Creative agency provides something more, Reed suggests, revealing in the form as much as the content of its creative output ‘a politics that exceed the ideological conÿnes of its moment’.72 One strength of cultural production is perhaps precisely this ability to challenge conventional perspectives on ways of being and knowing. Eccentric agency, Medina argues, ‘exceeds standard meanings’.73 The same has often been written of art and literature: Mikhail Bakhtin, for example, found that Dostoevsky’s ÿction, with its ‘polyphony of fully valid voices’, exceeded the limits of the singular or individual, and HansGeorg Gadamer noted the artwork’s capacity to exceed what we generally think of as coherence, producing ‘excess of meaning’.74 Analyzing Foucault’s concept of genealogy, Medina notes that genealogical practice, too, seeks to extend what is knowable, as it ‘tries to connect the truths generated within a given practice with the untruths that are also generated alongside them, digging up all sorts of epistemic frictions and struggles that reveal the competing and alternative truths’.75 Competing and alternative truths are characteristic of literature and art – an expression of what Bakhtin called the ‘dialogic imagination’. In that sense literary writing is a genealogical practice; and the Indian farmers’ songs that Shambhavi Prakash analyzes later in this volume can be seen as creative genealogical practice. Given the complex dialogues and perspectives found in cultural production, caution needs to be exercised to avoid conscripting its complexity into existing, hegemonic epistemologies. As history has shown, art and literature have regularly been used for violent ends. But history has also shown that art and literature have what seems to be a unique capacity to represent things that

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are unsayable at the time of their production, and to question, challenge, and disturb the very categories through which knowledge has been constituted.

Global perspectives on literature and ÿlm The chapters that follow unfold as speciÿc yet interlinked studies of the relationship between varied forms of cultural production and demands for justice. The primary texts and theoretical frameworks vary, but each chapter extends and complicates the volume’s overall negotiation of this central relationship. While the chapters can, of course, be read in any order, readers who engage with them sequentially will notice that they speak to and with each other – picking up on threads from the chapters that precede them, and, at times, posing questions for those that follow. Three parts – distinct, yet likewise interlinked – provide light framing for the chapters they contain. In Part I (On the Promise and Peril of Stories), the authors highlight the need for a di˝erentiated approach to key terms such as narrative and story, knowledge and non-knowledge, justice and injustice. Chielozona Eze’s chapter argues for an understanding of story rooted in Aristotelian virtue ethics, through which one might characterize the epistemically just story as one that has the common good as its central focus. With readings of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, Angie Thomas’s The Hate U Give, and selected poetry by Romeo Oriogun, Eze’s chapter provides critical political, legal, and literary context for the rest of the volume, and argues for literature as a catalyst for empathy. Galili Shahar picks up on this understanding of justice as a form of openness toward alterity, positing the concept of divine justice as a useful means of challenging normative cognitive frameworks and linguistic institutions. Examining three episodes from traditional Jewish literature, Shahar highlights the ways justice can inhere in the very act of storytelling itself. Stephanie Galasso’s conclusion to the section performs a challenge related to Shahar’s: revisiting Fricker’s conceptualization of ‘hermeneutical injustice’, Galasso complicates theorizations of justice that are predicated on intelligibility, and reads Judith Schalansky’s essay, ‘The Love Songs of Sappho’, as a text that struggles against the aesthetic’s role in such normative constructions of progress. Equipped with these necessary interventions in the understanding of stories and epistemologies, Part II (Exposing Injustice in and through Cultural Production) examines how dominant forms of knowledge exclude and marginalize. James Odhiambo Ogone’s chapter links the emergence of ÿlm against the backdrop of colonialism to the ongoing exclusion of African ÿlmmakers, a structural omission that in˛icts what Ogone – developing a productive new term – calls ‘representational epistemic injustice’. Focusing on the genre of animated ÿlm as a form that mobilizes speciÿc imaginative capabilities and is

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uniquely positioned to in˛uence children’s understanding of the world, Ogone argues that these ÿlms continue to represent a Eurocentric and exoticizing image of diverse African spaces. Carrying forward Ogone’s attentiveness to epistemic agency on the part of the marginalized, Shambhavi Prakash’s chapter moves the focus to contemporary India and the agricultural laws passed in the fall of 2020. Through songs and music videos, Prakash argues, farmers have asserted their right to tell their own stories and share their understanding of the situation. Kyung-Ho Cha then examines the exclusionary epistemic objectives of educational institutions in contemporary Germany, as critiqued through Deniz Ohde’s inversion of the genre of the Bildungsroman or narrative of education in the novel Scattered Light. Finally, Part III (Aesthetic Strategies of Resistance) looks to the obverse side of some of these dynamics, exploring how exactly literary texts resist the forms of injustice exposed in Part II. Crucially, literature’s capacities for polyvocality, discontinuity, and atemporality emerge as recurrent elements in resistant aesthetic practices. Aretha Phiri’s chapter stages the confrontation between, on the one hand, deeply entrenched racist representations of blackness in Western literature and, on the other, the moments of play, discontinuity, excess, and rupture that have been used to counter these representations. Sarah Colvin turns to recent literary texts that perform narrative ‘pilgrimages’ by disturbing linearity and univocality, and o˝er models for epistemic change and justice as they claim space and time ‘away’ from oppressive, hegemonic epistemic practices. Concluding the volume, Shiamin Kwa looks to Mo Yan’s Life and Death are Wearing Me Out as a model for literary practices that prompt readers to develop more nuanced and speciÿcally situated hermeneutic resources. With their overlapping attentiveness to the openness and indeterminacy of literary texts, the authors of this third and ÿnal part of the volume return to a core theme in Part I’s discussions of justice.

Editors’ note Spivak observed in ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ that leftist intellectuals of the Global North have arrogated to themselves the task of disclosing ‘authentic’ experiences of oppression, constructing themselves as ‘transparent’ subjects who can straightforwardly represent these experiences.76 That construction, argues da Silva, required an ‘arsenal of raciality’ such that whiteness (ÿgured as post-Enlightenment Europe) came to signify transparency and universality, while subaltern ‘others of Europe’ were relegated to a ‘place not encompassed by transcendentality’.77 Lloyd’s work follows through with an account of how the universalizing ends of the founding texts of aesthetic philosophy are reproduced in the neoliberal university and its humanities curricula, overlooked by a professoriate whose (ever fewer) members ÿgure as such ‘subjects of

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transparency’.78 Our (the editors’) work as white scholars at an elite university is fallible and implicated in institutions, relations, and structures that are marked by ‘the marketized university’s complicity in neocolonialism’.79 For its editors, this volume has been among other things part of an ongoing project of self-education as teachers and researchers. We are indebted to our distinguished, engaged, and always wonderfully collegial co-authors, who have generously brought their collective expertise and thinking, contextualized by a range of di˝erent institutions, relations, and structures, to the table. Medina (among others) observed that injustice is aided and abetted by those who fail to challenge hermeneutical gaps; our co-authors’ capacity to identify and probe hermeneutical gaps and their concern for justice are at the center of this volume’s contribution to contemporary thinking about creative agency.80 With Mills, we hope that ‘improvements in our cognitive practice should have a practical payo˝ in heightened sensitivity to social oppression and the attempt to reduce and ultimately eliminate that oppression’.81

Notes 1 Jonathan O. Chimakonam, ‘African Philosophy and Global Epistemic Injustice’. Journal of Global Ethics 13 (2017): 120–137 (129). 2 José Medina, The Epistemology of Resistance. Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imaginations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 20. 3 Gaile Pohlhaus, Jr., ‘Relational Knowing and Epistemic Injustice: Toward a Theory of Willful Hermeneutical Injustice’. Hypatia 24 (2012): 715–735 (715). 4 Medina, The Epistemology of Resistance, 57. Emphasis in original. 5 Chimakonam, ‘African Philosophy and Global Epistemic Injustice’, 129; James Odhiambo Ogone, ‘African Knowledge and Scholarship in the Global Arena’, in Anke Bartels, Lars Eckstein, Nicole Waller, and Dirk Wiemann (eds), Postcolonial Justice (Leiden: Brill 2017), 17–36. 6 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, new edn with a new preface by the author (Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2008), 27. 7 Pohlhaus, ‘Relational Knowing’, 731–732. 8 Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, ‘Introduction: Seek ye epistemic freedom ÿrst’, in Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni (ed), Epistemic Freedom in Africa: Deprovincialization and Decolonization (London and New York: Routledge, 2018), 3. 9 Charles Mills, ‘White Ignorance’, in Sharron Sullivan and Nancy Tuana (eds), Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance (New York: SUNY Press, 2007), 13–38 (22). 10 María Lugones, Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition against Multiple Oppressions (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littleÿeld 2003), 55. 11 Howard S. Becker, ‘Whose Side Are We On?’ Social Problems 14 (1967): 239–247 (241). 12 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Routledge, 2002 [1966]), 183. 13 Michel Foucault, ‘Society Must be Defended’: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador Press, 2003), 24. 14 Amy Allen, ‘Power/Knowledge/Resistance: Foucault and Epistemic Injustice’, in Ian James Kidd, José Medina, and Gaile Pohlhaus (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice (London: Routledge), 187–194 (187).

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15 José Medina, ‘Toward a Foucaultian Epistemology of Resistance: Counter-Memory, Epistemic Friction, and Guerrilla Pluralism’. Foucault Studies 12 (2011): 9–35 (13). 16 Amy Allen, ‘Power/Knowledge/Resistance: Foucault and Epistemic Injustice’, in Ian James Kidd, José Medina, and Gaile Pohlhaus (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice (London: Routledge, 2017), 187–194. 17 Amy Allen, ‘Power/Knowledge/Resistance’, 189. 18 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271–313. 19 Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, 271 and 275. 20 Ibid., 280–281. 21 Luvell Anderson, ‘Epistemic Injustice and the Philosophy of Race’, in Ian James Kidd, José Medina, and Gaile Pohlhaus (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice (London: Routledge), 139–148 (141); Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, 2nd edn (New York and London: Routledge, 2009 [1999]). 22 See e.g. Sandra G. Harding (ed.), The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader: Intellectual and Political Controversies (New York and London: Routledge, 2004). 23 Lorraine Code, What Can She Know? Feminist Theory and the Construction of Knowledge (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 1991). 24 Charles W. Mills, ‘Alternative Epistemologies’. Social Theory and Practice 14 (1988): 237–263. 25 Mills, ‘Alternative Epistemologies’, 246. 26 Mills, ‘White Ignorance’. 27 Linda Martin Alco˝, ‘On Judging Epistemic Credibility: Is Social Identity Relevant?’ Philosophic Exchange 29 (1999): 73–93 (74–78, 89). 28 Medina, The Epistemology of Resistance, 37. 29 David Coady, ‘Two Concepts of Epistemic Injustice’. Episteme 7 (2010): 101–113 (110). 30 Coady, ‘Two Concepts of Epistemic Injustice’, 112. 31 Ogone, ‘Epistemic Injustice: African Knowledge and Scholarship in the Global Context’, 21, 28. 32 Luvell Anderson, ‘Epistemic Injustice and the Philosophy of Race’, in Ian James Kidd, José Medina, and Gaile Pohlhaus Jr. (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice (London: Routledge, 2017), 139–148 (146). See also Ashley Atkins, ‘Black Lives Matter or All Lives Matter? Color-blindness and Epistemic Injustice’. Social Epistemology 33 (2019): 1–22. 33 Shannon Sullivan and Nancy Tuana (eds), Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance (New York: SUNY Press, 2007). 34 Mills, ‘White Ignorance’, 15; see also Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997). 35 Mills, ‘White Ignorance’, 33. 36 Mills, ‘White Ignorance’, 34. 37 Mills, ‘White Ignorance’, 31. 38 Mills, ‘White Ignorance’, 33 and 24. 39 Mills, ‘White Ignorance’, 35. 40 Dotson, ‘Cautionary Tale’, 42. 41 Rebecca Mason, ‘Two Kinds of Unknowing’. Hypatia 26.2 (2011): 294–307. doi:10.1111/j.1527-2001.2011.01175.x 42 Mason, ‘Unknowing’, 301. 43 Kristie Dotson, ‘A Cautionary Tale: On Limiting Epistemic Oppression’. Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 33.1 (2012): 24–47. 44 Dotson, ‘Cautionary Tale’, 31 and 32.

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53 54

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Medina, The Epistemology of Resistance, 30–31 and 33–34. Medina, The Epistemology of Resistance, 44. Medina, The Epistemology of Resistance, 100. Emphasis in original. Medina, The Epistemology of Resistance, 281; Chimakonam, ‘African Philosophy and Global Epistemic Injustice’, 134. Chimakonam, ‘African Philosophy and Global Epistemic Injustice’, 121, 134. Ashley Atkins, ‘Black Lives Matter or All Lives Matter?’ 15, 18. Medina, The Epistemology of Resistance, 309. See e.g. Lisa Zunshine, Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006); Suzanne Keen, Empathy and the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Cristina Vischer Bruns, Why Literature? The Value of Literary Reading and What It Means for Teaching (New York and London: Continuum, 2011); Michael Mack, How Literature Changes the Way We Think (London and New York: Continuum, 2012); Sarah E. Worth, In Defense of Reading (London and New York: Rowman & Littleÿeld, 2017). Martha C. Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990); Mark William Roche, Why Literature Matters in the 21st Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004). Teresa N. Washington, ‘Power of the Word/Power of the Works: The Signifying Soul of Africana Women’s Literature’. Femspec 6 (2005): n.p.; see also Teresa N. Washington, Our Mothers, Our Powers, Our Texts: Manifestations of Àjé in Africana Literature. 2nd, revised and expanded edn (Columbia, MD Oya’s Tornado, 2015 [2005]). These conversations are not – yet – being had even by posthumanist thinkers who have tended to sidestep not only ‘the analytical challenges posed by the categories of race, colonialism, and slavery’ but theoretical foundations from outside the Eurocentric post-Enlightenment context. See Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, ‘Animal: New Directions in the Theorization of Race and Posthumanism’. Feminist Studies 39 (2013): 669–685. Paula M. L. Moya, The Social Imperative: Race, Close Reading, and Contemporary Literary Criticism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016); James J. Donahue, Jennifer Ann Ho, and Shaun Morgan (eds), Narrative, Race and Ethnicity in the United States (Columbus: Ohio University Press 2017); Rafe McGregor, Narrative Justice (London: Rowman and Littleÿeld, 2018); and Jean Wyatt and Sheldon George (eds), Reading Contemporary Black British and African American Women Writers: Race, Ethics, Narrative Form (New York: Routledge, 2020). Sue J. Kim, ‘Asian American Studies and Narrative Theory’, in James J. Donahue, Jennifer Ann Ho, and Shaun Morgan (eds), Narrative, Race and Ethnicity in the United States (Columbus: Ohio University Press 2017), 13–26 (21). Zoë Cunli˝e, ‘Narrative Fiction and Epistemic Injustice’. Journal of Aesthetics 77 (2019): 169–180; Mihaela Mihai, ‘Epistemic Marginalisation and the Seductive Power of Art’. Contemporary Political Theory 17 (2018): 395–416; Daniel Coleman, ‘Epistemic Justice, CanLit, and the Politics of Respect’. Canadian Literature 204 (2010): 124–126, 163. Sarah Colvin has also explored literary responses to epistemic injustice from the 17th century to the present day; see Colvin, ‘Talking Back: Sharon Dodua Otoo’s Herr Gröttrup setzt sich hin and the Epistemology of Resistance’. German Life and Letters 73 (2020): 659–679; ‘Words That Might Save Necks: Philipp Khabo Koepsell, Epistemic Murder and Poetic Justice’. German Life and Letters 74 (2021): 511–556; ‘Freedom Time: Temporal Insurrections in Olivia Wenzel’s 1000 Serpentinen Angst and Sharon Dodua Otoo’s Adas Raum’. German Life and Letters 75 (2022): 138–165; ‘May Ayim and Subversive Laughter: The Aesthetics of Epistemic Change’. German Studies Review 45.1 (2022): 81–103; ‘Doing Drag in Blackface: Hermeneutical Challenges and Infelicitous Subjectivity in Courasche, or Is Grimmelshausen Still Worth Reading?’ Daphnis (2022): 1–27.

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59 Moya, The Social Imperative, 6–7. 60 Reed, Freedom Time, 6. 61 Paul Guyer, ‘Introduction’, in A History of Modern Aesthetics, Vol 1: The Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 1. Emphasis in original. 62 Nicholas Walker, ‘Introduction’, in Critique of Judgement by Immanuel Kant, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), viii. 63 David Lloyd, Under Representation (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019). 64 Lloyd, Under Representation, 45. Emphasis mine. 65 Simon Gikandi, ‘Race and the Idea of the Aesthetic’, Michigan Quarterly Review 40.2 (Spring 2001): 327. 66 Gikandi, ‘Race and the Idea of the Aesthetic’, 327. 67 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Towards a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 6. 68 Spivak, Postcolonial Reason, 6. 69 Denise Ferreira da Silva, ‘An End to “This” World’, interview by Susanne Leeb and Kerstin Stakemeier, Texte zur Kunst, April 12, 2019, text, https://www. textezurkunst.de/articles/interview-ferreira-da-silva/ 70 da Silva, ‘An End to “This” World’. 71 Reed, Freedom Time, 7–8. 72 Reed, Freedom Time, 209. 73 Medina, The Epistemology of Resistance, 100. 74 Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and tr. Caryl Emerson, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 6 and 21; Hans-Georg Gadamer, ‘Ästhetik und Hermeneutik’ (1964), in Gadamer, Ästhetik und Poetik I: Kunst als Aussage (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1993), 1–8 and 191. 75 Medina, The Epistemology of Resistance, 286. 76 Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, 275. 77 Denise Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 174–175. 78 Lloyd, Under Representation, 12–13. 79 Lola Olufemi, ‘Re˛ections on Decolonising the Curriculum’, in Odelia Younge (ed), A Fly Girl’s Guide to University: Being a Woman of Colour at Cambridge and other Institutions of Power and Elitism (Birmingham: Verve Poetry Press, 2019), 211. 80 José Medina, (2012) ‘Hermeneutical Injustice and Polyphonic Contextualism: Social Silences and Shared Hermeneutical Responsibilities’. Social Epistemology 26, 201–220. 81 Mills, ‘White Ignorance’, 22.

Bibliography Alco˝, Linda Martín. ‘On Judging Epistemic Credibility: Is Social Identity Relevant?’ Philosophic Exchange 29 (1999): 73–93. Allen, Amy. ‘Power/Knowledge/Resistance: Foucault and Epistemic Injustice’. In The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice, ed. Ian James Kidd, José Medina, and Gaile Pohlhaus, 187–194. London: Routledge, 2017. Anderson, Luvell. ‘Epistemic Injustice and the Philosophy of Race’. In The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice, ed. Ian James Kidd, José Medina, and Gaile Pohlhaus, 139–148. London: Routledge, 2017. Atkins, Ashley. ‘Black Lives Matter or All Lives Matter? Color-blindness and Epistemic Injustice’, Social Epistemology 33 (2019): 1–22. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and tr. Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.

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Becker, Howard S. ‘Whose Side Are We On?’ Social Problems 14 (1967): 239–247. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical DiŁerence, new edn with a new preface by the author. Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2008. Chimakonam, Jonathan O. ‘African Philosophy and Global Epistemic Injustice’, Journal of Global Ethics 13 (2017): 120–137. Coady, David. ‘Two Concepts of Epistemic Injustice’. Episteme 7 (2010): 101–113. Code, Lorraine. What Can She Know? Feminist Theory and the Construction of Knowledge. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 1991. Coleman, Daniel. ‘Epistemic Justice, CanLit, and the Politics of Respect’, Canadian Literature 204 (2010): 124–126. Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, 2nd edn. New York and London: Routledge, 2009 [1999]. Colvin, Sarah. ‘Talking Back: Sharon Dodua Otoo’s Herr Gröttrup setzt sich hin and the Epistemology of Resistance’, German Life and Letters 73 (2020): 659–679. Colvin, Sarah. ‘Words That Might Save Necks: Philipp Khabo Koepsell, Epistemic Murder and Poetic Justice’, German Life and Letters 74 (2021): 511–556. Colvin, Sarah. ‘Freedom Time: Temporal Insurrections in Olivia Wenzel’s 1000 Serpentinen Angst and Sharon Dodua Otoo’s Adas Raum’, German Life and Letters 75 (2022): 138–165. Colvin, Sarah. ‘May Ayim and Subversive Laughter: The Aesthetics of Epistemic Change’, German Studies Review 45/1 (2022): 81–103. Colvin, Sarah. ‘Doing Drag in Blackface: Hermeneutical Challenges and Infelicitous Subjectivity in Courasche, or Is Grimmelshausen Still Worth Reading?’ Daphnis (2022): 1–27. Cunli˝e, Zoë. ‘Narrative Fiction and Epistemic Injustice’, Journal of Aesthetics 77 (2019): 169–180. da Silva, Denise Ferreira. Toward a Global Idea of Race. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. da Silva, Denise Ferreira. ‘An End to ‘This’ World’, interview by Susanne Leeb and Kerstin Stakemeier, Texte zur Kunst, April 12, 2019, text, https://www.textezurkunst. de/articles/interview-ferreira-da-silva/ Donahue, James J., Jennifer Ann Ho, and Shaun Morgan (eds). Narrative, Race, and Ethnicity in the United States. Columbus: Ohio University Press, 2017. Dotson, Kristie ‘A Cautionary Tale: On Limiting Epistemic Oppression’, Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 33/1 (2012): 24–47. Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Routledge, 2002 [1966]. Foucault, Michel. ‘Society Must be Defended’: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976, trans. David Macey. New York: Picador Press, 2003. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. ‘Ästhetik und Hermeneutik’ (1964), in Ästhetik und Poetik I: Kunst als Aussage, 1–8. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1993. Gikandi, Simon. ‘Race and the Idea of the Aesthetic’, Michigan Quarterly Review 40/2 (Spring 2001): 318–350. Guyer, Paul. ‘Introduction’, in A History of Modern Aesthetics, Vol 1: The Eighteenth Century, 1–29. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Harding, Sandra G. (ed.), The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader: Intellectual and Political Controversies. New York and London: Routledge, 2004.

Introduction

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Jackson, Zakiyyah Iman. ‘Animal: New Directions in the Theorization of Race and Posthumanism’, Feminist Studies 39 (2013): 669–685. Keen, Suzanne. Empathy and the Novel. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Kim, Sue J. ‘Asian American Studies and Narrative Theory’. In Narrative, Race, and Ethnicity in the United States, ed. Ho Donahue and Morgan, 13–26. Columbus, OH: Ohio University Press. Lloyd, David. Under Representation: The Racial Regime of Aesthetics. New York: Fordham University Press, 2019. Lugones, María. Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition against Multiple Oppressions. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littleÿeld 2003. Mack, Michael. How Literature Changes the Way We Think. London and New York: Continuum, 2012. Mason, Rebecca. ‘Two Kinds of Unknowing’, Hypatia 26/2 (2011): 294–307. McGregor, Rafe. Narrative Justice. London: Rowman and Littleÿeld, 2018. Medina, José. ‘Toward a Foucaultian Epistemology of Resistance: Counter-Memory, Epistemic Friction, and Guerrilla Pluralism’, Foucault Studies 12 (2011), 9–35. Medina, José. ‘Hermeneutical Injustice and Polyphonic Contextualism: Social Silences and Shared Hermeneutical Responsibilities’, Social Epistemology 26 (2012): 201–220. Medina, José. The Epistemology of Resistance. Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imaginations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Mihai, Mihaela. ‘Epistemic Marginalisation and the Seductive Power of Art’, Contemporary Political Theory 17 (2018): 395–416. Mills, Charles W. ‘Alternative Epistemologies’, Social Theory and Practice 14 (1988): 237–263. Mills, Charles W. ‘White Ignorance’. In Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance, ed. Shannon Sullivan and Nancy Tuana, 13–38. New York: SUNY Press, 2007. Moya, Paula M. L. The Social Imperative: Race, Close Reading, and Contemporary Literary Criticism. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Sabelo J. ‘Introduction: Seek ye epistemic freedom ÿrst’. In Epistemic Freedom in Africa: Deprovincialization and Decolonization, ed. Sabelo J. NdlovuGatsheni, 1–41. London and New York: Routledge, 2018. Nussbaum, Martha C. Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. Ogone, James Odhiambo. ‘African Knowledge and Scholarship in the Global Arena’. In Postcolonial Justice, ed. Anke Bartels, Lars Eckstein, Nicole Waller, and Dirk Wiemann, 17–36. Leiden: Brill 2017. Olufemi, Lola. ‘Re˛ections on Decolonising the Curriculum’. In A Fly Girl’s Guide to University: Being a Woman of Colour at Cambridge and other Institutions of Power and Elitism, ed. Odelia Younge, 210–214. Birmingham: Verve Poetry Press, 2019. Pohlhaus, Gaile Jr. ‘Relational Knowing and Epistemic Injustice: Toward a Theory of Willful Hermeneutical Injustice’, Hypatia 24 (2012): 715–735. Roche, Mark William. Why Literature Matters in the 21st Century. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, 271–313. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Towards a History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.

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Sullivan, Shannon and Nancy Tuana (eds). Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance. New York: SUNY Press, 2007. Vischer Bruns, Cristina. Why Literature? The Value of Literary Reading and What It Means for Teaching. New York and London: Continuum, 2011. Walker, Nicholas. ‘Introduction’. In Critique of Judgement, trans. Immanuel Kant and James Creed Meredith, vii–xxiii. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Washington, Teresa N. ‘Power of the Word/Power of the Works: The Signifying Soul of Africana Women’s Literature’, Femspec 6 (2005): n.p. Washington, Teresa N. Our Mothers, Our Powers, Our Texts: Manifestations of Àjé in Africana Literature. 2nd, revised and expanded edn. Columbia, MD: Oya’s Tornado, 2015 [2005]. Worth, Sarah E. In Defense of Reading. London and New York: Rowman & Littleÿeld, 2017. Wyatt, Jean and Sheldon George (eds). Reading Contemporary Black British and African American Women Writers: Race, Ethics, Narrative Form. New York: Routledge, 2020. Zunshine, Lisa. Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006.

PART I

On the promise and peril of stories

1 NARRATIVES, SOCIAL JUSTICE, AND THE COMMON GOOD Chielozona Eze

The American writer Joan Didion states that ‘we tell ourselves stories in order to live’. This is, of course, a claim that demands that we examine not only the kind of stories we tell but also the kind of life we live. Di˝erent disciplines will have their unique answers to this. Anthropologists might suggest that our ancestors, who lived in caves, used stories to warn people of danger. Sociologists might claim that we tell stories in order to enhance social living, or even to maintain social hierarchy. Working within the Aristotelian tradition of virtue ethics, I argue that we tell stories in order to bring about social justice. With particular attention to Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), Angie Thomas’s The Hate U Give (2017), and selected poems of Romeo Oriogun’s Sacrament of Bodies (2020), this chapter examines not only the ways in which narratives (anecdotes, poems, novels, paintings, etc.) have been used to entrench injustice but also, and more speciÿcally, how they can be used to promote justice. Narratives that enhance justice, I argue, have the common good at their core and draw our attention to people’s fundamental right to the pursuit of happiness.

Introduction In 1787 English potter and abolitionist Josiah Wedgwood created a medallion of the image of the supplicant slave with pleading hands in chains, asking for compassion (Figure 1.1). Around the image is the inscription of the anti-slavery society: ‘Am I Not a Man and a Brother?’ The medallion became one of the most recognizable artworks of the 18th century, arousing in many people sentiment for the enslaved black people in Europe and America. The image embodies the quest for dignity in an undeniable visceral gesture and has inspired many others in the same DOI: 10.4324/9781003254317-3

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FIGURE 1.1

Josiah Wedgwood’s anti-slavery medallion

entreating posture depicting various claims of dignity. These include: ‘Am I not a Woman and a Sister?’ used by Sarah Moore Grimké and Angelina Emily Grimké, to draw attention to the rights of women. Wedgwood, like all artists, understood the power of art to change thoughts and feelings, mold public opinions, and ultimately e˝ect political changes in society. All arts are ethical and political to the degree that they enhance a certain disposition toward humans and the order of society. The 18th century was an important period in the evolution of the notion of human dignity and human rights in the Western imagination. One of the fruits of the Enlightenment in regard to the image of the human person is the central idea that every individual possesses dignity by virtue of being human. Immanuel Kant provides the clearest explanation of the moral implication of this image of the human person. As members of the same species, humans ought to be guided in their relation to one another by one imperative: ‘Act so that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of another, always as an end and never as means only’.1 With this imperative, Kant laid the foundation for the modern notion of human rights and is therefore rightly considered the philosophical father of human rights.2 The 18th-century sentimental writers contributed to the spread of the notion of human dignity and the broader understanding of social justice. Lynn Hunt argues that sentimental writing contributed to the early awareness of the notion of human rights. For example, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, one of the

Narratives, social justice, & the common good 25

central ÿgures of the Age of Enlightenment, wrote the sentimental novel Julie or the New Héloïse (1761), which explored the theme of love and a˝ection.3 To be sure, sentimental as it is used here is not the syrupy term one might use to qualify overly emotional romance novels. Rather, it refers to all writing that appeals to the feelings rather than the rational faculty of the reader. Indeed, all narratives, by deÿnition, appeal to the senses. According to Philip Fisher: [The] political content of sentimentality is democratic in that it experiments with the extension of full and complete humanity to classes of ÿgures from whom it has been socially withheld. The typical objects of sentimental compassion are the prisoner, the madman, the child, the very old, the animal, and the slave.4 The implicit goal of the writers of sentimental narratives was to end their fellow citizens’ gratuitous pain. This could be achieved only if other citizens’ moral indignation was aroused. People had to be led to understand that other people are humans as well, and this could be achieved by provoking co-feeling toward them. Indeed, Theodore Dwight Weld, one of the pioneering abolitionists, published the ÿrst full accounts of the slaves’ experiences, American Slavery As It Is, in order to arouse his fellow citizens’ feelings. Trusting the moral compass of his contemporaries, he introduced his volume as follows: ‘Reader, you are empaneled as a juror to try a plain case and in an honest verdict […]. You have common sense, and conscience, and a human heart: – pronounce upon it’.5 Of course, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin is the most famous of sentimental writings of the time. What Rousseau, Wedgwood, Stowe, Weld, and others have in common is their belief that art can bring about social change, and this belief is rooted in the Aristotelian conception of tragedy as an imitation of an action that is admirable, complete and possesses magnitude; in language made pleasurable, each of its species separated in di˝erent parts, performed by actors, not through narration; e˝ecting through pity and fear the puriÿcation of such emotions.6 Tragedy is then a way of re-presenting aspects of human life that are deemed important, especially for the purpose of having them elicit positive responses from the readers/audience. Aristotle speaks speciÿcally to how the narrative of the lives of others, for example, Wedgewood’s black man in chains, moves us toward them, or at least, to examine our attitude to them. Aristotle’s pity and fear, Stephen Halliwell argues, should be understood as the ‘capacity to sympathize with the su˝erer’.7 We must interpret ‘pity and fear’ in today’s language of empathy, which we understand as the ‘imaginative reconstruction of the experience of the su˝erer’ of gratuitous pain with the awareness that are not those persons.8

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Following the examples above, I claim that narratives exist in order to bring about social justice. I deÿne narrative as any work of art that yields a portrait of humans, partial or full, that is capable of initiating or changing an ethical attitude in the audience. These include anecdotes, jokes, poems, and novels. As per this understanding, every artwork tells a story. It helps to note here that the most famous examples of struggles for social justice in the 18th and 19th centuries were the abolition of slavery and women’s su˝rage. In the 20th the issue for blacks in America was the problem of the color line—as W.E.B. Du Bois famously stated. Africa has many human rights challenges, one of which is the failure to recognize the humanity of people with alternative sexualities: gays and lesbians. Much of the discussion of social justice in our times has largely rested on the racial relation between the dominant groups in Western societies and their minorities, on the one hand, and, on the other, between the West, as a neo-imperial agent, and its former colonies. Perhaps this is justiÿably so given the persistence of white supremacy and its attendant racism. Yet, social (and epistemic) justice outside the racial or colonial frames deserves equal attention. To properly situate my conception of narratives as vehicles for the promotion of social justice, I discuss Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, Angie Thomas’s youth novel, The Hate U Give, and selected poems of Romeo Oriogun, Nigerian gay poet. I proceed by ÿrst establishing my understanding of social justice, after which I discuss Lee, Thomas, and Oriogun. I conclude with a meditation on the limitations of literature as an agent of change and the unavoidable moral duty of having a non-destructive, if not positive, narrative of the other in our narratives.

Situating social justice in history All instances of injustice perpetrated on groups of people invariably trace back to the images the perpetrators had of them. The same goes for injustice against individuals. Racism, which we understand here as an umbrella concept for ideologically ÿxed image of the other as inferior and therefore not deserving of equal treatment as oneself, is essentially economic and political. The notion of racial superiority or inferiority is designed to maintain power by blocking people’s natural feeling of a°nity to others who are di˝erent. This, as Hannah Arendt has argued in The Origins of Totalitarianism, is the operative idea that helped the Boers in South Africa to establish their own version of white supremacy.9 They denied black people their humanity because it was to their social and economic beneÿt. Thomas Je˝erson believed that black people were inherently inferior. In Notes on the State of Virginia, he argued that the di˝erences between the races were ÿxed by nature and black people were inferior to white people ‘in the areas of physical beauty and mental and intellectual capacity’. Black people were naturally made ‘for manual labor because they are “tolerant of heat”’.10 Je˝erson’s racism, of course, served to soothe his conscience for his holding slaves and

Narratives, social justice, & the common good 27

keeping one of them as his concubine. But Je˝erson’s Enlightenment notion of the black body pales in the face of the post-Reconstruction racist backlash that produced Jim Crow minstrelsy (1861–1965). The post-Reconstruction narrative about black people peaked in Thomas Dixon Jr.’s The Clansman (1905), a romance novel that gloriÿed the Ku Klux Klan and provided vile and racist depictions of black people. It is therefore not a surprise that the Jim Crow minstrelsy sustained the eponymous laws that codiÿed social injustice against black people, producing a condition no better than slavery, one that would subject them to a one-and-a-half-century struggle for social justice. I argue that the American founding fathers are the initiators of social justice in America, and they did so in the Declaration of Independence: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness’.11 I locate the germ of social justice in their struggle for the right to control their a˝airs. To be sure, at the time of the declaration, the founding fathers meant only propertied heterosexual white men; women, black people, Native Americans, and other minoritized groups were not part of ‘all men’. In the e˝ort by these neglected groups to partake of the wealth of the declaration, we have some of the most prominent social justice movements in American history: the abolitionist and the women’s suffrage movements in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and civil rights, feminist movements, and gay rights movement in the mid-20th century until now. Each of these movements is characterized by a palpable desire in people to make real the ideals that all humans are created equal and so deserve to be treated fairly and to exercise the right to the pursuit of happiness. Historically, the concept of social justice, as it is now in currency, is at least one and half centuries old. According to Robert P. Kraynak, the term does not have a secular origin; rather it evolved from ‘the Thomistic natural law tradition’. It was ÿrst mentioned by Antonio Rosmini Serbati (1797–1855) and Luigi Taparelli d’Azeglio (1793–1862), both of whom coined the term la giustizia sociale more or less independently around the 1840s. To arrive at his notion of social justice, Rosmini combined ‘the classical and Thomistic view of man as a rational and social animal directed to virtue with modern liberal principles of natural rights and individual human dignity’.12 Highlighting the same Catholic origins of the term, Michael Novak states that it had meant ‘the capacity to organize with others to accomplish ends that beneÿt the whole community. If people are to live free of state control, they must possess this new virtue of cooperation and association’.13 He regrets that the term has been co-opted by secular progressives, who now give di˝erent interpretations to most traditional concepts such as freedom, the common good, dignity, and compassion. For him, social justice has devolved into activism that promotes a radical view of human nature housed in academic areas of inquiry such as postcolonialism, critical race theory, feminism, and LGBTQ studies.14

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Noah Rothman believes that social justice is a prescribed discrimination to treat inequality.15 In the same strain of conservative thinking, Michael Huermer formulates a sharp critique of the notion of social justice in his attack on social justice warriors, who, in his judgment, do not value justice. He directs his disapproval against government redistribution, which, for him, ‘violates property rights and is thus unjust’. More speciÿcally, he states that a°rmative action is ‘a form of unfair and harmful discrimination’. There is nothing like group rights; ‘there are only individual rights. So there cannot be any injustices to a group as such; there can only be injustices to individuals’.16 Huermer appears to echo Friedrich A. Hayek’s critique of the concept, according to which social justice is ‘not only unjust but also highly unsocial in the true sense of the word: it amounts simply to the protection of entrenched interests’. It is ‘no more than a pretext for making the interest of particular groups prevail over the general interest of all’.17 In contrast to the above, Brian Barry provides a fairly uncontroversial deÿnition that hews closer to the dictionary deÿnition of justice as having to do with fairness. Social justice for him is ‘about the treatment of inequalities of all kinds’.18 Behind this simple deÿnition lies a profound understanding of social justice as a moral judgment of ways in which freedom, opportunities, and resources are managed and distributed in society. Few people who have some would be in support of inequalities in access to opportunities and freedoms. But the means of addressing and ensuring the distribution of opportunities and freedoms provokes much disagreement, as can be seen in the examples provided above. The subject of social justice is the basic structure of society, which, as Barry states, is ‘constituted by the major institutions that allocate (or bring about an allocation of ) rights, opportunities and resources’.19 Every liberal society functions on the basis of institutions founded on the core liberal principle: right to life, freedom, and the pursuit of happiness; and this right issues from the fact of the person’s being human. For a person to possess a right to something implies that the person is entitled to that, and that no other person can stand in the way of the person’s exercising that right. We know, though, that historically, the same institutions that allocated rights, opportunities, and resources in the spirit of justice have denied certain people in societies the same goods they claimed to promote.20 It is in light of this historical and systemic breach, Barry argues, that ‘the demand for social justice can best be seen as a response to the inadequacies of liberal justice’.21 Essentially then, the institutions that were instrumental in denying certain people their rights can also be deployed to remedy the situation. In other words, ‘institutions often have a rectiÿcatory function’.22 Regarding the above concerns expressed by conservative thinkers, and in respect to Barry’s explanation, social justice in America is not a call for socialism or a grand design to funnel government resources to lazy people. Rather, it is a call for liberal societies to be true to their identity as avatars of the right

Narratives, social justice, & the common good 29

to life, freedom, and the pursuit of happiness for all. It has been traditional to subsume social justice within criminal justice, which as Dragan Milovanovic and Loretta Capeheart argue, centers largely on the traditional deÿnition of law and justice without much ‘attention to history, political economy, culture critique, or cross-cultural understanding of the purposes of these institutions’. Social justice, on the other hand, ‘must consider what is just not only in reaction to ‘crime’ but also in relation to evolving (nonstatic) society’.23 I endorse their insight, and argue that social justice must maintain knowledge of the past. It would, of course, be misleading to tether our understanding of social justice exclusively to history. Our knowledge of history is, however, important to help us grasp how certain inequalities came to be and what to do to rectify them.

Appeal to conscience in the quest for social justice Close to a century after the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harper Lee’s novel, To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), renewed the claim to dignity of the black body, a claim that was made in the heyday of abolition. Set in Macomb, a small town in Alabama during the Great Depression, it tells the story of Tom Robinson, a black man, who is falsely accused of raping a white woman. Atticus Finch, a good-hearted white attorney, convinced of Tom’s innocence, decides to defend him, thus attracting the scorn of the town. Despite the overwhelming evidence of Tom’s innocence, the all-white jury convicts him and he is condemned to death.24 To Kill a Mockingbird is a social justice novel of the 20th century in the same way that Uncle Tom’s Cabin is of the 19th. They are designed to arouse the co-feeling of a white audience for the humanity of black people. Much of the scholarly attention to the novel centers on the issue of racism.25 The most outstanding instance of the quest for social justice is Atticus Finch’s decision to defend Tom Robinson. Of importance here is that Atticus binds himself to the moral duty that places him and his children on the same level of human dignity with Tom. He thus establishes a universal ground for justice. He explains to his daughter his reasons for choosing to defend Tom. Tom Robinson’s case is something that goes to the essence of a man’s conscience—Scout. I couldn’t go to church and worship God if I didn’t try to help that man. […] The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.26 Finch assumes that conscience is that universal voice that whispers the inviolable truth about human social living to every individual. The root of social justice in his thinking lies in the individual’s awareness of his or her relation to others, who, by grace of being members of the same human race, possesses inviolable dignity. What is at stake here is the belief that the meaning of our life as

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individuals is inextricably tied to the degree we recognize other people’s right to live their lives. For Finch therefore the failure to recognize other people’s rights and dignity implies the negation of our own. In the court scene, we encounter a con˛ation or perhaps a con˛ict of deÿnitions of justice. What the government sees as criminal justice, Atticus sees as social justice. He locates the issue that brought Robinson to court in the American history, that is, the primordial disregard that white society has for black people. Black people have never been integrated into society and treated as whites have been. It is revealing that Atticus makes the argument of social justice to the members of the jury assembled to decide on Tom’s case, referencing Thomas Je˝erson’s assertion that ‘all men are created equal’.27 Taking this as a basis, he reminds the jury that ‘a court is no better than each man of you sitting before me on this jury. A court is only as sound as its jury, and a jury is only as sound as the men who make it up’.28 The fate of Tom lies in the ability of each member of the jury to activate their consciences, aided by America’s Declaration of Independence. It is his last-ditch e˝ort to excite the jurors’ co-feeling. He goes on to draw a connecting line between individual conscience that recognizes the other’s dignity and social living, including defending one’s own country. Atticus’s argument can be reframed thus: if we take ourselves seriously as Americans, we must not exclude other humans from the dignity we accord ourselves. But then what does it mean to take ourselves seriously, and what has it to do with conscience? To provide some explanation, I rely on the philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt. Agreeing with Socrates’s dictum that an unexamined life is not worth living, the philosopher Harry Frankfurt argues that taking oneself seriously is a fundamental moral principle. It means acknowledging who we are and living without illusions. Doing so, that is, accepting ourselves for who we are, ‘reestablishes the wholeness that was undermined by our elementary constitutive maneuvers of division and distancing’.29 But accepting ourselves for who we are does not mean resorting to cheap excuses for our laziness or moral lapses. We are beings who seek to make sense of our existence, and this is what differentiates humans from other animals. Humans think about what they have done; they re˛ect and plan for the future. As humans, he argues, we are wired to want our thoughts, choices, and behavior to make sense both to us and our community. ‘We are not satisÿed to think that our ideas are formed haphazardly, or that our actions are driven by transient and opaque impulses or by mindless decisions’.30 Taking oneself seriously is admitting the necessity of caring and being cared for; it is taking to heart the fact that if we do not care about ourselves and others, our world easily descends into chaos and anarchy. From the foregoing, therefore, we cannot take ourselves seriously without taking others seriously. The reverse is also the case; to take others seriously also implies taking oneself seriously. Later in this volume, Sarah Colvin addresses the same issue of

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mutual a°rmation in what she calls epistemic travel, which does not mean a person merely getting from point A to point B as tourists do, but rather involves ‘interactive encounter in the context of chiastic structures’ and does not privilege any partner in the encounter. In this context, Frankfurt raises an important question: ‘Is it not unmistakably apparent that people should at least care about adhering to the requirements of morality by which all of us are inescapably bound, no matter what our individual inclinations or preferences may be?’31 Morality is therefore a bounden duty. It is not frivolous or reserved for a selected few; on the contrary, it is ‘essentially designed to put people on the hook. Whether or not a person adheres to the moral law is not supposed to be independent of the kind of person he is’.32 We put ourselves on the hook not because we choose to make our lives intolerable but because our survival as humans depends on every one of us overcoming ourselves so we can work together within an agreed framework. Frankfurt’s philosophy helps us understand the argument Atticus is making to his daughter: ‘If I didn’t I couldn’t hold up my head in town, I couldn’t represent this country in the legislature, I couldn’t even tell you or Jem not to do something again’.33 He thus spells out to his child the notion that morality is a bounden duty because it is the very fabric that holds our lives together in a community. Atticus thus underscores his argument about the relationship between personal conscience and social justice. Atticus’s sense of justice extends to all living things, especially those that do no harm. Instructing his daughter about the use of guns, he tells her to shoot at tin cans. But if she must go after birds, she should not shoot at mockingbirds; but she could shoot blue jays. Miss Maudie interprets the meaning of the injunction: ‘mockingbirds don’t eat up people’s gardens. They merely sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird’.34 Of course, animal rights advocates would point out the error in Atticus’s encouraging his daughter to shoot at less valuable birds such as blue jays. But the overall message is to aim at guilty partners and to spare the innocent. Injustice does precisely the opposite, thus subverting the implicit moral framework of society. We take the killing of blue jays to imply that only the guilty party in a crime ought to be convicted. The correct thing to do in this case is to convict the woman who falsely accused Tom.

The limits of racial reasoning in the quest for social justice Based on Atticus’s justiÿcation of his intervention in Tom Robinson’s case, we have to understand the quest for social justice as the moral claim to dignity that one makes on society and oneself. This implies having a certain image of society as guided by disinterested institutions that distribute society’s goods. Maintaining those institutions requires individuals who are equally objective in their reasoning and are guided by universal moral frameworks. In Angie

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Thomas’s young adult novel, The Hate U Give (2017), Starr Carter occupies a parallel position to Atticus’s in To Kill a Mockingbird. The Hate U Give is the ÿrst widely circulated novel to engage with the issues that gave rise to the Black Lives Matter social movement. The election of Barack Obama as the president of the United States of America was widely celebrated as a great progressive step in American history and race relations. However, that triumph triggered a conservative and reactionary backlash against black people. Owing to a dramatic increase in police killings of unarmed black men and other instances of the humiliation of the black body, African Americans were forced yet again to declare that they, too, have dignity, hence the birth of Black Lives Matter social movement. The catchphrase ‘Black Lives Matter’ is the 21st-century recreation of the 20th-century civil rights slogan ‘I am a Man’, which itself was a reenactment of the original abolitionist version: ‘Am I Not a Man and a Brother?’ Starr Carter is a 16-year-old woman from Garden Heights, an inner-city neighborhood, who attends Williamson Prep, a school located in a white neighborhood. She is in a car with her childhood friend, Khalil, when they are stopped by the police. Khalil questions the motive for the stop and a misunderstanding ensues; a policeman kills Khalil, and Starr is drawn into the subsequent con˛ict between the police and the black community. The most obvious thing about the narrative is the justice that black people demand following Khalil’s death. I am, however, more interested in the overarching moral grammar grounding this demand, and which is announced by Starr. Starr is a vivacious, fun-loving 16-year-old who has no problems mixing and interacting with people of other races, especially with her white peers. In fact, she is in a romantic relationship with Chris, who is white.35 She attends a party interrupted by gunshots, probably as a result of a gang war. We are thus confronted with an incident—gang war—that will later be interpreted as society’s embrace of self-destruction. The interpretation is done through Tupac Shakur’s song, THUG, The Hate U Give. Khalil explains the acronym to Starr: ‘Listen! The Hate U—the letter U—Give Little Infants Fucks Everybody. T-H-U-G-L-I-F-E. Meaning what society give us youth, it bites them in the ass when we wild out. Get it?’36 It is uncertain whether what is being referred to here is speciÿcally white or black society, or just American society in general. There is anyhow an allusion to the condition to which history has subjected black people, one in which their fate seemed to have already been sealed. The more far-reaching question seems to be how to respond to that narrow racist world in which African Americans ÿnd themselves. Starr and Khalil signify two approaches which will determine the course of the narrative. Khalil adopts a nihilistic, self- and community-destructive attitude, one that fails to consider one’s own positive role in the quest for justice. He sells drugs, which contributes to the disintegration of his community, thus plunging it deeper into the injustice of history. The act of selling drugs to others, even though it was

Narratives, social justice, & the common good 33

the very thing that took his mother’s life, reveals Khalil as blissfully unaware of his complicity in the destruction of his community. Starr loves her community; she understands that this love implies responsibility toward others who live in it. Love is the undying resolve to defend human dignity in words and action; it is the force behind every quest for social justice. In condemning Khali’s attitude to their community, Starr reveals herself as possessing the disinterested moral awareness comparable to that of Atticus.37 Starr realizes that a racist society that appears to thrive on black people’s condition cannot break the vicious circle. It is, therefore, incumbent on black people to take steps toward building a beloved community themselves, one that cannot exist in the presence of widespread drug abuse. In a demonstration of her intense love for her community, Starr ruminates on the incident of police brutality and recalls her earlier resolve that in the event of any police abuse of the black body, she would make ‘sure the world knew what went down’.38 We see her disapproving of Khalil’s self-destructive action, but a°rming his dignity as a human being. Khalil’s character ˛aw does not diminish his dignity as a human being. He deserves justice. Starr decides she must be part of the activism that demands justice, in the knowledge that the issue is not just Khalil; it is also about the dignity of the black body. She therefore engages in a two-pronged activism designed to prove that black lives matter, by (a) drawing attention to police brutality, and (b) holding her community to a high moral standard. Thomas’s approach to social justice is characterized by her openness to reality, and this is an essential aspect of objective moral judgment. Starr’s friendship with Chris, a white man, introduces a cosmopolitan dimension to the quest for justice, thus underscoring the notion that social justice is a moral duty for everyone. Her musings while lying in bed at Chris’s house reveal her initial doubt that both of them belong to the same world: ‘Lying in his California King-size bed in his suite in his gigantic house, I realize the truth. I mean, it’s been there all along, but in this moment lights ˛ashed around it’.39 The truth is the chasm between the two worlds, which was brought about by historical injustice. But the unfolding of events will prove her wrong, revealing both of them as inextricably tied to a common destiny as Americans sharing the same society: while Starr and Chris are at Chris’s house, Starr’s phone buzzes. It is an emergency situation. DeVante, a teenage boy and member of the King Lords gang, who is seeking to leave the gang and who associates with Starr’s family, is missing. Everyone fears for his life. Starr and Chris leave for Starr’s house. Chris is inadvertently drawn into the crisis situation in Starr’s neighborhood. Even when DeVante alerts him to the danger ahead, he insists and even takes part in the demonstration at which Starr makes it public that she is a witness to the police killing of Khalil.40 It is striking that even though Starr has initial doubts about Chris’s love, they eventually reveal themselves as two young people who have found each other. In them, Thomas suggests a new generation of Americans who conceive of

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social justice as not bound by color or race. Despite history and enduring racism in society, humans of di˝erent racial and cultural backgrounds will always discover and respond to one another’s humanity. Starr draws Chris into the demonstration against police brutality not by shaming him as a white person but by an act of love, an act that draws out Chris’s humanity, nearly in the same way that Atticus felt obliged to defend Tom Robinson. In Thomas’s appeal to the conscience of her fellow citizens, she not only follows Harper Lee’s lead; she also evokes the debate that dominated the African American quest for social justice during the civil rights movement, between the champions of black nationalism led by Malcom X and those who believed in integration, led by Martin Luther King, Jr. Thomas seems to privilege the latter. Indeed, her preference for Dr. King becomes more pronounced in the concluding part of the narrative—as I will show further down. For a better understanding of Thomas’s overarching argument, it is helpful to say a few words about the shortcomings of black rage, against which she launches her more cosmopolitan quest for justice. Analyzing the e˝ects of black nationalism, which was obviously born of rage against the system, the African American philosopher and social critic Cornel West argues that black nationalists who constructed their identity in the context of rage contributed to black cultural conservatism, especially because of the mentality of closing ranks against a hostile white America. The mentality of closing ranks usually hinders moral awakening from within. He writes: Most black leaders got lost in this thicket of reasoning and hence got caught in a vulgar form of racial reasoning: black authenticity ˜ black closing-ranks mentality ˜ black male subordination of black women in the interests of the black community in a hostile white racist country.41 One of the greatest ˛aws and perhaps an enduring in˛uence of black rage and its nationalist movement is the entrenchment of identity politics from the civil rights era to date. West dismisses racial reasoning as counterproductive in African American life. He speciÿcally challenges Malcolm X’s purist notion of identity derived from history, which he believes feeds pessimism and a nihilistic moral attitude in black communities. West proposes prophetic response or practice that, as the name implies, is derived from the Old Testament prophets’ engagement with the ˛ourishing of the people of Israel. The prophets held their society to the highest moral standards because they believed it was the only means of survival for the people of Israel. Prophetic practice in our times, therefore, is the ability of humans to transform their world by engaging in continuous critical introspection, guided by an abiding love. Prophetic practice is a true practice of freedom. West argues that prophetic responses do not assume a black essence to which all black people should adhere. Rather, a prophetic framework encourages moral assessment of the variety of perspectives held by

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black people and selects those views based on black dignity and decency, which avoids putting any group of people or culture either on a pedestal or in the gutter.42 From West’s perspective, therefore, we assume that engagement with the evils in society does not imply constructing a purist sense of the self. On the contrary, it means being consciously universal and objective in judgments of good and bad. I think that The Hate U Give does exactly that; it critiques injustice in society without resorting to blanket judgments of race. Rather, it seeks to transform the world by attacking the evils of the system while engaging in introspection. In Chris, Thomas argues that there are enough white people who are morally persuadable to recognize the humanity of black people and treat them accordingly. The only politically and socially viable option is to ally with them in order to build a moral majority capable of in˛uencing society for the better. This is historically accurate, starting with the early abolitionists to civil rights activists. In The Hate U Give, this seemingly simple young adult novel, Angie Thomas ventures into a discursive area that has profound political and moral relevance to the black community, an area whose moral roots reach as far back as Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs. She reminds us that in the face of danger to human life, what now counts is not skin color, but the courage to challenge evil, and evil is not only the fact that the police shot and killed Khalil; it is also the gang war going on in black communities. The evil is King, the leader of King Lords gang, one who ordered that Maverick ‘Big Mav’ Carter’s (Starr’s father) store be set on ÿre, an incident in which Starr nearly lost her life.43 Thomas’s overarching concern is to instigate a community-building spirit as Starr emerges out of the struggle with a new identity as a ‘community-minded’44 person, and Garden Heights, which she is no longer ashamed to identify with, is now concerned with rebuilding.45 The most important wisdom comes from Mr. Lewis, the neighborhood barber, who has been concerned about the activities of gang members. Mr. Lewis tells Big Mav: ‘You can build a nice store, give folks something to be proud to shop in. All I ask is that you put up some pictures of Dr. King alongside your Newey Whoever-He-Was’.46 Mr. Lewis is, of course, referring to Huey Newton of the Black Panthers. He does not dismiss whatever Huey Newton stands for, but rather suggests tempering that position with whatever Martin Luther King stands for. This attests to Thomas’s open-mindedness in her understanding of the quest for justice.

Exile as the pursuit of happiness I have argued that the quest for social justice must be subjected to the universal law anchored in the dignity of every human. We take ourselves seriously by taking others seriously. It is important to underline this distinction, especially in relation to the formerly colonized societies in which many of the issues

36 Chielozona Eze

associated with social justice have no direct relation to colonial legacies—issues such as homophobia and spousal abuse. Indeed, in a remarkable ironic twist in the postcolonial history of the African quest for justice, the erstwhile president of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, argued that the universality of human rights did not apply to Zimbabwe because of its unique history and the history of Africa as a colonized space in search of its identity. The protection of the members of the LGBTQ community from violence, for him, was not a human right because homosexuality was unnatural: I ÿnd it extremely outrageous and repugnant to my human conscience that such immoral and repulsive organization, like those of homosexuals who o˝end both the law of nature and the morals of religious beliefs espoused by our society, should have any advocates in our midst and even elsewhere in the world.47 Mugabe’s argument is not unique in Africa. Presidents Daniel arap Moi of Kenya and Julius Nyerere of Tanzania had made the same argument years before.48 These political leaders’ refusal to acknowledge the rights of the people of alternative sexualities has morphed into outright hostility against the LGBTQ community in Africa. In the early months of 2014, Nigeria enacted a law against homosexual life in the infamous act titled, ‘Same Sex Marriage (Prohibition) Act, 2014’. It was conceived as an ‘Act to prohibit a marriage contract or civil union entered into between persons of same sex, solemnization of same; and for related matters’.49 Nigerian law foresees up to 14 years imprisonment for those who cohabit, or contract gay marriages, and ten years for those who promote any form of gay activities or lifestyle. Since then, there have been numerous cases of violence against homosexuals, often ending in death.50 The irony in the above-described conditions is that modern Africa had anchored its identity in the quest for social justice, conceived exclusively in racial, colonial terms. Justice is for them, as it is for a section of African scholars, predominantly if not exclusively, racial. They therefore turn a blind eye to other forms of justice such as gender justice, environmental justice, and intimate justice. Among writers and activists who have responded to the increase in crimes against the LGBTQ community and raised awareness of that aspect of social justice are David Kato of Uganda, who was killed in January 26, 2011, Jude Dibia of Nigeria, who published a well-received novel, Walking with Shadows (2005), and Romeo Oriogun, a gay poet who has not received deserved scholarly attention despite having won prestigious prizes such as the Brunel International African Poetry Prize.51 I discuss four of the poems in his recently published collection, Sacrament of Bodies. I focus more speciÿcally on the queer body’s e˝ort to stay alive by going into exile. Most of Oriogun’s poems, some of which I have discussed in my other works, deal with the experience of the body as the true site of human existence.

Narratives, social justice, & the common good 37

Sacrament of Bodies, the title of this present collection, gestures toward the same. Understanding sacrament both in its religious sense, as a holy ritual that imparts grace, and as its secular correlate—as a symbol—the title seems to present the body as a signiÿer. It raises the question of how people see the bodies of others and how the individual sees his or her own body. Many religions, especially Christianity and Islam, see the body as a poor imitation of the real world, or as housing the soul. They therefore subject it to mortiÿcation and ˛agellation with the goal of purifying the soul or preserving it from evil. For Oriogun, however, the body conceived as sacrament is not a signiÿer of anything other than itself. The body possesses dignity because it is human, not because it might gesture toward anything else. Oriogun celebrates the body as it is by drawing attention to the gratuitous pain to which society subjects it, because of society’s religiously induced narrow frames of existence. In ‘Departure’ the poet sketches the fate of a body forced to ˛ee its home because it is threatened by those who see it as abnormal.52 The speaker expresses the pain of seeing his beloved one ˛ee their homeland for fear of being lynched because of their sexual identity. Like most of the poems in the collection, ‘Departure’ is in free verse with irregular lines and stanzas, a style that highlights the precariousness of the body’s experience. The second stanza, a couplet that appears like a jolt in consciousness right after the ÿrst stanza consisting of seven lines, captures the pain of the body’s feeling: I was born to be darkness hiding under a cave, I know the weight of exile in a body. The redundant image of ‘darkness hiding under a cave’ evokes a condition of absence of light, that is, lack of enlightenment. Could the cave be an allusion to the society that is steeped in darkness regarding the complexity of the human body, especially that of gays? We are reminded of Plato’s allegory of the cave, with which he established his theory of knowledge. Those who are stuck in the cave will have only a faint image (shadow) of reality and not the reality itself. The irony therefore is that from the perspective of the speaker, who knows that his body is normal, it is rather society that is stuck in the cave of darkness. The next stanza provides more details of the speaker’s experience of darkness in the cave. The lover who has been left behind bemoans his own condition of utter loneliness and pain. The last stanza is an indirect indictment of the society that has necessitated this pain, an indictment that is sharpened by his recalling the words that were hurled at his lover, words that made clear to him the precariousness of his life and therefore the absolute need to ˛ee: I open my body into pain and bring out your words Faggot, sin, bones waiting for the tongue of ÿre. (5)

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But the accusation is indeed a plea to be left to live; it is a quest for justice, understood in its most basic form, as being granted the same condition and opportunities open to others. Following in the tradition of sentimental narrative, especially as exempliÿed by Wedgwood’s medallion’s ‘Am I Not a man and a Brother?’ the civil rights slogan ‘I am a Man’, and the Black Lives Matter’s eponymous slogan, Oriogun insinuates a question that goes to the heart of his poetry as a tool for the struggle for social justice: I, too, am a body like you. The next poem, ‘Saddest Night Alive’ is a monostich of 34 lines. The poem establishes imaginary scenes of subjection of queer bodies. Like in ‘Departure’, every incident takes place in the mind of the lover left behind by the lover in exile. The words are addressed to the lover in exile and relate how the lover at home is haunted by the other’s absence: ‘I’m shouting leave him alone: they were the words I shouted / when they lynched you in my dreams’ (9). The speaker understands what necessitated the ˛ight: his friend’s father gave him up to the police on his birthday In establishing forced exile as a consequence of the denial of justice to the queer bodies, Oriogun ties the fate of a sexual minority to that of the many Africans ˛eeing their homes because of political and social injustices. He invites his fellow Africans to empathize with the fate of the exiles in the poems. The last four lines of ‘How to Survive the Fire’ elevate the reason for ˛eeing to a metaphysical level. They make allusion to the cruciÿed Christ, who could not be saved by God, who … turned his face from Christ and whispered, Run. (14) The poet equates the fate of gay people with that of Christ, a symbol of innocence for Christians. In the same way that Christ was condemned to death for his religious beliefs, gay men are being lynched for their di˝erence. ‘Elegy for a Burnt Friend’, another one-stanza poem, is about the actual scene of the destruction of the queer bodies. The speaker is a queer man addressing another, who has lost his life to the mob. The most haunting moments are when the speaker begs the dead for forgiveness in the repeated phrase ‘forgive me’. Forgive me, there was a pipe lying so close to another man; there was a ÿre burning nearby and I ran into a dark street. (11)

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He calls the name of the assaulted man, wishing him to live, also in the sad knowledge that they will always be hunted like wild animals. The speaker’s guilt at not defending his friend is also an indirect indictment of society for failing to accord people of alternative sexuality the right to the pursuit of happiness. It is at the same time an appeal to the conscience of the majority to activate their co-feeling for their fellow humans of di˝erent sexual orientation.

Conclusion I have anchored my discussion of the core principle of social justice in liberalism, citing the American Declaration of Independence as one of its most famous formulations. As much as we understand liberalism as a political philosophy, it emerged as an emancipatory ideology in Western Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries. It is, however, not without baggage, which includes class and patriarchal prejudices. It was understood to be a social contract, but was in actuality a ‘racial contract’, as the philosopher Charles W. Mills argues, regulating as it were relations between whites and nonwhites.53 Having acknowledged the emancipatory potential of liberalism, Mills urges progressives to occupy it in the manner of ‘Occupy Wall Street’. They should try to retrieve liberalism for a radical democratic agenda rather than rejecting it, thereby positioning themselves in the ideological mainstream of the country and seeking its transformation.54 For liberalism to work, there must be a quantum of fairness, good will, and the acceptance and practice of the principle of the fundamental equality of all people. Some of the greatest champions of social justice in American history, from Frederick Douglass and Harriet Beecher Stowe down to Martin Luther King, Jr., Harper Lee, and others, have relied on appeal to liberalism’s central idea. The same goes for works of art that seek to enhance justice. Indeed, as I have argued elsewhere, literature works by appeal. The writer can never be sure of the nature of the reader’s response, and that is why works of ÿction are an appeal, albeit a structured, calculated one.55 Writing from a Marxist perspective, Jean-Paul Sartre is optimistic about the power of art as a catalyst for social revolution and change.56 He nonetheless acknowledges that it remains an appeal. Literature that seeks to achieve some measure of social justice does so by appealing to the faculty of empathy. Appeal to empathy is, however, notoriously limited. Yet we cannot discount the limitless possibilities it opens up in individuals once they realize that taking themselves seriously is intimately tied to how they relate to others. I thus return to part of my original claim in the introductory part of this chapter: the reason we tell stories is, according to Joan Didion, in order to live. I have sought to prove that we tell stories in order to take ourselves seriously. In the next chapter, Galili Shahar addresses the problem of storytelling, alterity, and justice. The experience of justice, he argues, is represented in the

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suspension of what we claim to know. I read him as proposing a fundamental openness such as expressed by Emmanuel Levinas. In stories we realize how interconnected and interdependent we are as rational animals. Without the other, our stories, self-conceptions, and our values would make no sense.

Notes 1 Immanuel Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. with an Introduction by Lewis White Beck (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1997), 46. 2 Jerome J. Shestack, ‘The Philosophical Foundations of Human Rights’, in Human Rights: Concept and Standards, ed. Janusz Symonides (Aldershot: Dartmouth Publishing Company Ltd, 2000), 54. 3 Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007), 16–18. 4 Philip Fisher, Hard Facts: Setting and Form in the American Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 99. 5 Richard O. Curry and Joanna Dunlap Cowden, eds., Theodore Weld’s American Slavery As It Is (Itasca, IL: F. E. Peacock Publishers, Inc., 1972), 3. 6 Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Malcolm Heath (London: Penguin Books, 1996), 10. 7 Stephen Halliwell, Aristotle’s Poetics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 175. 8 Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 327. 9 Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966). 10 Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, ed., Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1997), 95–103. 11 “Declaration of Independence: A Transcription”, accessed December 21, 2021, archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript 12 Robert P. Kraynak, ‘The Origins of “Social Justice” in the Natural Law Philosophy of Antonio Rosmini’, The Review of Politics, 80 (2018): 3–29 (5). 13 Michael Novak, ‘Social Justice: Not What You Think It Is’, The Heritage Foundation, accessed October 21, 2021, heritage.org/poverty-and-inequality/report/ social-justice-not-what-you-think-it 14 Novak’s concerns about the apparent abuse of the original Catholic-European term ignore the fact that if the term was invented to capture the social dreams of the emerging post-agrarian society of Europe, there is no reason that its original meaning must be frozen in time; there is no reason that it cannot be expanded to embrace the world that has grown more complex and multitudinous than early 19th-century Europe. 15 Noah Rothman, Unjust: Social Justice and Unmaking of America (New York: Gateway, 2019). 16 Michael Huemer, ‘My Problems with Social Justice’, accessed October 21, 2021, fakenous.net/?p=653 17 Friedrich A. Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty, Volume 2: The Mirage of Social Justice (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1973), 96. I do not think that actions taken to redress forms of injustice in society should be regarded as protecting entrenched interests. 18 Brian Barry, Why Social Justice Matters (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005), 10. 19 Barry, Why Social Justice Matters, 16. 20 For example, institutions of slavery and Jim Crow were designed to deny black people the full enjoyment of the rights due to all humans.

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21 Barry, Why Social Justice Matters, 23. 22 Barry, Why Social Justice Matters, 17. 23 Loretta Capeheart and Dragan Milovanovic, Social Justice: Theories, Issues, and Movements (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2007), 4. 24 Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2002 [1960]). All subsequent references will be provided in parentheses in the text. 25 See for instance Darryl Potyk and Cicely W. White, ‘Another Lesson from the Mockingbird: Institutional Racism in Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird’, The American Journal of Medicine, 133 (2020): 1360–1361; Rachel Watson, ‘The View from the Porch: Race and the Limits of Empathy in the Film ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’, The Mississippi Quarterly, 63 (2010): 419–443. 26 Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, 120. 27 Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, 233. 28 Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, 233. 29 Harry Frankfurt, Taking Ourselves Seriously (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 17. 30 Frankfurt, Taking Ourselves Seriously, 2. 31 Frankfurt, Taking Ourselves Seriously, 21. 32 Frankfurt, Taking Ourselves Seriously, 22. 33 Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, 86. 34 Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, 103. 35 Angie Thomas, The Hate U Give (New York: Balzer + Bray, 2017), 42. 36 Thomas, The Hate U Give, 17. 37 It is true that the lack of access to many of the jobs or services open to white society contributes to black people resorting to drugs. It is also true that some black people make fortunes by selling other people the drugs, and many black people would not be addicted to drugs if the drugs were not readily available on the streets. There is therefore a vicious circle of injustice that must be broken if black people are to experience some measure of happiness. 38 Thomas, The Hate U Give, 34–35. 39 Thomas, The Hate U Give, 375. 40 Thomas, The Hate U Give, 412–415. 41 Cornel West, Race Matters (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1993), 24. 42 West, Race Matters, 28. 43 Thomas, The Hate U Give, 419. 44 Thomas, The Hate U Give, 426. 45 Thomas, The Hate U Give, 442. 46 Thomas, The Hate U Give, 439. 47 Chris Dunton and Mai Palmberg, Human Rights and Homosexuality in Southern Africa (Uppsala: Nordiska Africainstitutet, 1996), 9. 48 Dunton and Palmberg, Human Rights, 24. 49 Centre for Laws of the Federation of Nigeria, ‘Same Sex Marriage (Prohibition) Act, 2014’, 2013, accessed April 28, 2019, lawnigeria.com/LawsoftheFederation/ Same-Sex-Marriage-Prohibition-Act,-2014.html 50 Human Rights Watch, ‘Nigeria: Harsh Law’s Severe Impact on LGBT Community Encourages Widespread Extortion, Violence. Human Rights Watch’, 2016, accessed October 21, 2021, hrw.org/news/2016/10/20/nigeria-harsh-lawssevere-impact-lgbt-community 51 Chielozona Eze, ‘Africanity, Litigation Aesthetics, and Openness to Being’, in The De-Africanization of African Art, ed. Denis Ekpo and Pfunzo Sidogi (London: Routledge, 2021), 77–95. 52 Romeo Oriogun, Sacrament of Bodies (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2020), 5–6. Subsequent references to this book will be provided in parentheses in the text.

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53 Charles Mills, The Racial Contract (New York: Cornell University Press), 1997. 54 Charles W. Mills, Black Rights/White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 10. 55 Chielozona Eze, Justice and Human Rights in the African Imagination: We, Too, Are Humans (London: Routledge, 2021). 56 Jean-Paul Sartre, What Is Literature? And Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 54.

Bibliography Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966. Aristotle. Poetics. Trans. Malcolm Heath. London: Penguin Books, 1996. Barry, Brian. Why Social Justice Matters. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005. Capeheart, Loretta and Dragan Milovanovic. Social Justice: Theories, Issues, and Movements. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007. Centre for Laws of the Federation of Nigeria. ‘Same Sex Marriage (Prohibition) Act, 2014’, 2013, accessed April 28, 2019, lawnigeria.com/LawsoftheFederation/ Same-Sex-Marriage-Prohibition-Act,-2014.html Curry, Richard O. and Joanna Dunlap Cowden, eds. Theodore Weld’s American Slavery As It Is. Itasca, IL: F. E. Peacock Publishers, Inc., 1972. Dunton, Chris and Mai Palmberg. Human Rights and Homosexuality in Southern Africa. Uppsala: Nordiska Africainstitutet, 1996. Eze, Chielozona. Justice and Human Rights in the African Imagination: We, Too, Are Humans. London: Routledge, 2021. Eze, Chielozona. ‘Africanity, Litigation Aesthetics, and Openness to Being’. In The De-Africanization of African Art, edited by Denis Ekpo and Pfunzo Sidogi, 77–95. London: Routledge, 2021. Eze, Emmanuel Chukwudi, ed. Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1997. Fisher, Philip. Hard Facts: Setting and Form in the American Novel. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Frankfurt, Harry. Taking Ourselves Seriously. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006. Halliwell, Stephen. Aristotle’s Poetics. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Hayek, Friedrich A. Law, Legislation and Liberty, Volume 2: The Mirage of Social Justice. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1973. Huemer, Michael. ‘My Problems with Social Justice’, accessed October 20, 2021, fakenous.net/?p=653 Human Rights Watch. 2016. ‘Nigeria: Harsh Law’s Severe Impact on LGBT Community Encourages Widespread Extortion, Violence. Human Rights Watch’, accessed October 20, 2021, https://www.hrw.org/news/2016/10/20/ nigeria-harsh-laws-severe-impact-lgbt-community Hunt, Lynn. Inventing Human Rights: A History. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007. Kant, Immanuel. Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals. Translated with an Introduction by Lewis White Beck. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1997.

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Kraynak, Robert P. ‘The Origins of “Social Justice” in the Natural Law Philosophy of Antonio Rosmini’. The Review of Politics, 80 (2018): 3–29. Lee, Harper. To Kill a Mockingbird. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2002 (1960). Mills, Charles W. Racial Contract. New York: Cornell University Press, 1997. Mills, Charles W. Black Rights/White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. Novak, Michael. ‘Social Justice: Not What You Think It Is’, The Heritage Foundation, accessed October 20, 2021, heritage.org/poverty-and-inequality/report/ social-justice-not-what-you-think-it Nussbaum, Martha. Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Oriogun, Romeo. Sacrament of Bodies. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2020. Potyk, Darryl and Cicely W. White. ‘Another Lesson from the Mockingbird: Institutional Racism in Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird’. The American Journal of Medicine, 133 (2020): 1360–1361. Rothman, Noah. Unjust: Social Justice and Unmaking of America. New York: Gateway, 2019. Sartre, Jean-Paul. What Is Literature? And Other Essays. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988. Shestack, Jerome J. ‘The Philosophical Foundations of Human Rights’. In Human Rights: Concept and Standards, edited by Janusz Symonides, 54. Aldershot: Dartmouth Publishing Company Ltd, 2000. Thomas, Angie. The Hate U Give. New York: Balzer + Bray, 2017. Watson, Rachel. ‘The View from the Porch: Race and the Limits of Empathy in the Film “To Kill a Mockingbird”’. The Mississippi Quarterly, 63 (2020): 419–443. West, Cornel. Race Matters. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1993.

2 DIVINE JUSTICE, EPISTEMIC CRISIS, STORYTELLING Galili Shahar

Introduction: justice, secrets, how to tell? Discussions about epistemic injustice assume that cognitive failures, misconceptions of reality, exclusions and acts of denial regarding alterity (the being of the Other, the unknown)1 in the private sphere and in the public realm, in cultural media and in the dominions of the law are among the causes of social repression and political violence. This assumption is not wrong: ‘knowledge is power’, and disinformation, manipulation and deformations of data, and misconceptions of alterity may imply oppression, discrimination and abuse. But reviewing this assumption enables us to analyze structures of political violence and to explore the epistemic construction of injustice. Epistemic injustice may refer to social/economic, ethnic/national and gender/sexuality conditions, as well as to other areas of structural disadvantage such as disability and old age. The term signiÿes prejudice and the practices of both symbolic and corporal violence. This assumption, however, is complicated when we discuss the concept of justice in its ‘divine’ forms. Divine justice, as presented by thinkers such as Franz Rosenzweig and Walter Benjamin,2 is considered a metaphysical category associated with certain theological assumptions regarding corrective intervention (repairing the world). Divine justice is the way in which God re-presents itself in the world, by acts of correction – repairing the corrupted structure of creation. This act of re-presentation (God’s corrective presence in the world) is often related to epistemic crisis, challenging cognitive categories and conditions of knowledge. Divine justice performs itself as the ‘unknown’: its essence is hidden, its form is the ‘secret’.3 Justice in its divine form is unmeasurable, yet it serves as a condition of all justiÿed measures. DOI: 10.4324/9781003254317-4

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Divine justice, while understood as an act of intervention, a radical correction of the world, bears with it a ‘futurist’ view. It demands an opening of being toward the Other, the ‘yet unknown’, the unfamiliar. It thus challenges discursive/dialogical schemas. Divine justice undermines the cognitive frameworks and the normative institutions of language. It demands/calls for the tale of the unknown, a tale of a secret. The question addressed here relates to these modes of representation. The experience of divine justice implies di˜erent modes of language – monologues, desperate dialogues, complaints, lament and silence; it also entails storytelling. The tales of divine justice – notable examples are the story of Gilgamesh, the Greek epic poem, ancient tragedy and the Hebrew Bible – are foundational, and are often related to acts of intervention as the Gods enter the human realm to ÿght evil and to restore order on earth. Storytelling, however, has served not only to represent God’s just act but also to depict the human state – a state of crisis. The tales of justice are the tales of humans who stand before the Gods, resisting, complaining about and lamenting injustice. The sign of justice, its measure on earth, is its production of human engagement with the divine. When we ask about divine justice we thus ask again about the human encounter with absolute, mighty forces. The Tale of the End Days, as it is famously delivered in the Book of Revelation (also called the Apocalypse of John), provides a canonical illustration of divine justice. The representation of justice is associated in the Apocalypse with visions of angels and magniÿcent creatures, monsters and strange animals, bringing about cosmic destruction, great wars on earth, homicide, plague and earthquake, eliminating the evil and punishing the sinners. The Apocalypse, however, is associated with the mysteries of a sealed book, with secrets and hidden knowledge, among them the secret of a sea monster (in Hebrew: Tannin) and the secret of a woman – ‘Babylon the Great’, the mother of harlots. Divine justice conjures secrets and mysteries of the scripts, with sublime visions, anxieties and horror. Little room seems to be left for humans in this prophesy of the Last Days, except for singing in praise, or complaining, weeping and lamenting their fate. The tale itself, however, in which the acts of divine justice are represented, is embedded in the human measure – the experience of victims. In the literary realms of Jewish tradition, in the biblical stories, in the Hebrew and Aramaic prophesies, in the Talmudic Aggadah, in Kabbalistic legends, in liturgical poetry and in the Chassidic tales, justice is often represented in tales of divine (violent) intervention. In these tales, such as the tales of the Day of Judgment in the Book of Zohar,4 apocalyptic visions of destruction are not uncommon. However, not only horrifying visions of destruction but also dialogues, negotiations, ‘complaints and lamentation’, are interwoven in the biblical, Talmudic and Kabbalistic narrations of justice. The case of Abraham, who stood before the Lord, arguing in the name of justice (‘Wilt thou also destroy the righteous with the wicked?’, Genesis 18:23) – to save the city of

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Sodom, is one of the best-known biblical passages demonstrating the dialogical measure of justice. We have here not only visions of the destruction, the fall of the city, the burning and the death of its inhabitants, but also the desperate (yet ironic) conversation of Abraham with God, calculating, comparing, assuming measures (‘What if there should be ÿfty righteous within the city: wilt thou also destroy and not spare the place for the ÿfty righteous that are therein?’, Genesis 18:24) which signiÿes (in questioning) what divine justice is (‘Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right’? Genesis 18:25). Sodom, we recall, was not saved. The passage describes it: Then the Lord rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and ÿre from the Lord out of heaven; and he overthrew those cities, and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew upon the ground. (Genesis 19:24–25) However, Abraham’s appeal to God, the negotiations regarding the fate of the city, creates a measure of justice. Lot, we recall, was saved from the city, as God remembered Abraham’s claim: ‘And it came to pass, when God destroyed the cities of the plain, that God remembered Abraham, and sent Lot out of the midst of the overthrow, when he overthrew the cities in which Lot dwelt’ (Genesis, 19:29). Divine justice, itself secret and monologic, gains its measure by the human word. The Talmudic conversations, their dialogical textures and the negotiations regarding the righteous act in the realm of Halacha, seem to echo this discursive dimension of justice. The divine becomes just when it is re-presented in the human realm, leaving its traces in language, in conversations and tales. This chapter explores the question: how does divine justice turn into a story? However, this question concerning the narration of justice is inverted by asking how storytelling itself, the tale of a secret, becomes an act of justice. We consider the corrective act of the tale, its role in repairing the world (in Hebrew: Tikkun). The assumption regarding the ‘secrets’ of divine justice, the ‘unknown’, demands a critical re˛ection on the metaphysical structure of ‘divine justice’ as a term: an acknowledgment of its theological/ideological implications and social and political contexts, and a recognition of its forms of violence. The apprehension of divine justice as the ‘unknown’ and arguments about its epistemic value as a ‘secret’ are claimed by and often serve certain circles, contexts and courses of action from the biblical priesthood and Talmudic scholarship to the contemporary Rabbinical courts. All had and still have ethnic/racial and gender implications. Traditional concepts of justice in Judaism should themselves be deconstructed and critically studied, assuming also that knowledge of the divine law and the implications of justice were and still are often held by a patriarchal caste, father ÿgures who claim to ‘hold the secret’.

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This critique is signiÿcant and should play a constitutive role in the discussion of the implications of justice in the framework of the Jewish tradition. One has to notice, however, that divine justice is often associated in the tradition with the undermining of sovereignty and agencies. Justice is related to radical conditions in which the law itself, the universal structure of power, is suspended. Divine justice cannot be truly claimed by agencies of religious, social, racial or gender orders. Divine justice in its proper, valid representation does not provide a form of absolute (totalitarian) sovereignty or a (false) government in the name of heaven. Its real representation lies in acts of resistance, in rupture of the false order. Engaging divine justice in terms of storytelling is an attempt to ÿnd the word, a proper name for the experience of an unknown, immeasurable act of correction. Literature, once it attaches itself to the act of justice, also carries the tale of a secret. In what follows I will introduce a few cases of literary interpretations of divine justice associated with three episodes from traditional Jewish literature. My major argument is that divine justice can essentially be understood in these episodes as a representation of God in the realm of language. The act of justice cannot be separated from the experience of telling its story. This argument leads me to acknowledge the radical potential of literature to serve as a primal agency of justice. Justice depends on storytelling. This echoes the major thesis introduced by Chielozona Eze in the previous chapter in this volume: narratives are made to serve justice by referring to the lives of others. The other, however, this chapter argues, is not only a familiar subject, a neighbor, but also the unknown, a ‘monster’.

Monsters, justice and representation The question of how justice is associated with epistemic crisis – with radical interruption in states of cognition, knowledge, study and discourse – has received diverse and somewhat contradictory interpretations in Jewish traditions. In its major expositions, biblical literature, Talmudic exegesis, Aggadah and the Midrash, alongside Kabbalah, liturgical poetry and the Chassidic tale, the question of justice was often bound up with perceptions of storytelling. Telling a story was a tool and a measure of justice: the very idea of praying for justice (and complaining about injustice) was not separated from the poetic forms and textures of its expression. Biblical lamentation, prophecy, the tale and the liturgical poem served to represent injustice, while indicating the potential for radical correction. These poetic forms, however, were often a°liated not only with ‘positive’ states of knowledge – open, critical hermeneutic discourses, and learning and debates – but also with states of non-knowledge. Justice in its divine representation was associated with the ‘unknown’ and often with the ‘untold’, which demands a mode of expression that re˛ects and contains its own impossibilities. The tale of divine justice is a narration of the untellable. As such

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literature provides a sign or a measure of the experience of justice, a witnessing of the human condition. Justice, we recall, is the way in which the absolute represents itself before man, re-acting toward him/her. Let us discuss the ÿrst example, from the Hebrew Bible. This is the episode of God’s conversation with Job, answering his complaints and laments following the disasters that had befallen him and the destruction of his household. Job is ready to present his case against God, calling for justice, saying: ‘I have prepared my case, I know that I will be vindicated’ ( Job, 13:18). Job is ready to argue against injustice before God. However, after hearing God’s answer to his complaints, telling him about the wonders of creation, arguing against the one who speaks ‘without knowledge’ and re-presenting to him, in powerful verses about Leviathan, the nature of divine justice, poor Job has to confess: You asked, ‘Who is this who hides counsel without knowledge?’ Therefore I have uttered what I did not understand, Things too wonderful for me, which I did not know. The dialogue (was it a dialogue?) on the nature of divine justice leads Job to admit his lack of knowledge. Non-knowledge (‘which I did not know’) is a condition of the possibility to experience God’s justice. It is not ignorance, however, but an epistemic crisis, a cogitative collapse that deÿnes the preliminary state of justice. The idea of divine justice, the essence of the righteous act, is anchored in the secret of creation. The secret is represented by the being of the sea monster Leviathan ( Job 41:1–34): its appearance – who wouldn’t be overwhelmed by it? Its body – sealed, and its heart ‘as hard as stone’; its sneezing is ˛ash and light, ‘a ˛ame goes out of his mouth’ and ‘smoke out of his nostrils’. On earth, the text tells us, there is nothing like this: ‘He is king over all the children of pride’. The sea monster represents the nature of divine justice: a sublime, mysterious, uncanny, powerful manifestation of God’s creation, incomparable and singular in its kind. Its description in Hebrew verses appears in the Book of Job, itself esoteric and partly incomprehensible. The tale of Leviathan is regarded as one of the most di°cult texts in the Hebrew Bible. This tale of justice demands a ‘wonder’ in the realm of language, representation of an unpresentable measure. Its e˝ect is that of the sublime (in the Kantian sense – an e˝ect of the ‘dynamic sublime’),5 yet it carries with it a certain comic, or at least ironic implication. There is something exaggerated in the descriptions of Leviathan. Its tale is not only sublime but also absurd. There is something grotesque in the re-presentation of this mighty creature, sneezing and smoking, embodying what divine justice is. (In the following chapter of this volume, Stephanie Galasso refers to the implications of the sublime in the aesthetic discourse and its association with the concept of justice.)

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Poor Job is doomed to silence, confessing his non-knowledge, admitting his discursive failures. Job’s conversation with God, however, not only implies but also challenges the idea of dialogue. God does present justice to Job, and their conversation implies a certain degree of learning. However, the experience of what justice is, which this biblical tale refers to, deconstructs the epistemic patterns, challenges the cognitive schemes and brings language itself (the Hebrew verses) to its edge. There is something demonic, monstrous, yet absurd in the appearance of these creatures in the tale of Job. Not in vain do the Bible and the Midrash (traditional Hebrew exegesis) refer to the monstrous, Leviathan and Tannin, the whale and the crocodile, as sea creatures belonging to the realm of the devil. Divine justice is associated with its double-ÿgure, its counterpart. Divine justice represents itself in the tale of a gigantic creature; this alone (the unmeasurable, secret body of creation) gives a measure to justice. Yet in Job, God himself turns into a storyteller who speaks and teaches. The idea of divine justice demands a proper narrator. This brings us to the second example. In the tale of the prophet Jonah, the Bible tells about Jonah as one called upon by God to preach against the great city of Nineveh ‘for their wickedness is come up before me’ ( Jonah 1:2). Justice, however, does not follow a straight path, but is told in detours and paths of escape. Jonah, we recall, ÿrst resisted his assignment and °ed from God. As the Bible relates, he found a ship, went on board and sailed the seas, until a mighty storm arose and the ship was about to break up. The men on board followed Jonah’s request – for he knew the reason for the storm, which had been brought against him – took him up and cast him forth into the sea, whereupon it ceased raging ( Jonah 1, 15). The Lord, it says, ‘prepared a great ÿsh to swallow up Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the ÿsh three days and three nights’ ( Jonah, 2, 1–2). Divine justice presents itself with ‘a mighty tempest in the sea’ (again, an image of the ‘dynamic sublime’ is at play) and with the presence of ‘great ÿsh’, a whale, perhaps. As in the tale of Job, here, too, justice is represented by a sea creature. It is an image of a monster, glorious yet associated with the comic spectacle of a prophet who tried in vain to escape his mission. The idea of justice in the book of Jonah is not concluded with the appearance of the whale alone, the demonic corpus of a creature embodying divine violence. It is rather a lesson, a didactic scene in which the concept of divine justice is presented in the book. After praying to his Lord and upon his rescue from the ÿsh’s belly, Jonah is again sent to Nineveh to preach against the city. Jonah recites the words of the Lord: ‘yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown’ ( Jonah, 3:4). And the people of Nineveh hear these words, the story runs, words that ‘turn everyone from his evil way, and from the violence that is in their hands’ ( Jonah, 3:8). The city turns from its wickedness and its people repent of their evil and avoid God’s punishment against them. Divine justice is

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represented not by an act of violence, anger or revenge but by the avoidance of the destructive deed. This concept of justice in this tale is embedded in the word ‘turn’. The turn (in Hebrew: tshuva) is the essence of the corrective act, the repair. Justice as an act of ‘turning’ is hinted at in the prophecy itself with the words, promise (the threat) that ‘Nineveh shall be overthrown’. Jonah, however, does not understand the double meaning of this word which he himself pronounced: ‘overthrown’ (in Hebrew: mithapechet) means ‘defeated’, but also ‘turned over’, implying thus not destruction alone but a radical (revolutionary) change. Justice is the act that lies between the promise of correction and the threat of destruction, its whole meaning hangs between judgment (in Hebrew: din) and mercy (in Hebrew: rahamim). This word, mithapechet, is associated with the tale of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, referring to God’s act: ‘and he overthrew (vayapoch) those cities, and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew upon the ground’ (Genesis, 19:25). Later, while describing how Lot was saved from the burning city, it again uses the word ‘overthrow’: ‘God remembered Abraham, and sent Lot out of the midst of the overthrow, when he overthrew the cities in which Lot dwelt’ (Genesis, 19:29).6 This, however, is what Jonah does not understand. He who had possibly read well the tale of Sodom and Gomorrah clearly had in mind what this word, ‘overthrown’, might mean – the destruction of the city. However, had he recalled the conversation of Abraham with his Lord, Jonah could have assumed the other meaning of this word, its full, corrective implication. Jonah thus protests against God’s mercy by sitting outside the city, waiting to witness its destruction. God, however, made a gourd plant to protect him from the sun by its shadow. Yet the next day he sent a worm into it that smote the plant so it withered. Jonah sank in great sorrow and wished to die. God answered him with the words: ‘And should not I spare Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more than six score thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand; and also much cattle?’ ( Jonah, 4:11). God reveals his secret: divine justice is anchored not only in visions of monstrous creatures, in horror and acts of destruction, but in concern and charity. Jonah and Job serve as heralds of divine justice, who, however, do not govern its secret. God re-presents to them the idea of justice, embedded in visions of sea creatures – mythical ÿgures, monstrous, demonic (yet also comic). A further interpretation of these biblical creatures may lead to the acknowledgment of their feminine attributes. The ocean, water and depth (in Hebrew: tehom), the creaturely body, the monster, a container, are a°liated with images of the feminine, associated with the womb – that hidden, secret, ‘horrifying’ organ – conjuring both birth and death.7 The representation of divine justice, we may assume, is not separate from the mythical manifestation of gender difference. The idea of correction – the elimination of evil and the repairing of

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distortion in the world of creation – is itself gendered. The representation of divine justice as a sublime yet uncanny body, one may argue, is not free from (false) perceptions of the feminine. Jewish writings have often referred to the divine body as associated with feminine aspects: the shekhinah. The tensions, the erotic attractions and the political struggles between the masculine and the feminine in the realm of the divine body were considered to be a source of evil and cause for a corrective act, reconciling the inner dialectic that governs God’s sphere. This issue will be further addressed below, in the discussion on the Chassidic tale. In both biblical cases the discourse of divine justice assumes and implies an epistemic crisis associated with anxiety, despair and disorientation of its agencies. The crisis, however, serves as a point of departure toward higher states of cognition. In both cases the human subject expresses its own being in revolt, resisting – from its own point of view – the injustice of God’s act. This crisis deÿnes the human relation to the divine, through which it gains access to the realm of justice. The complaints against God (disputing, protesting, lamenting injustice), the attempts to escape God’s commands and actions, as well as regret and silence are the human/humanist methods – creating a language for justice, giving a sign, a proper word, telling its story.

The tale, Tikkun This chapter explores the implications of storytelling as an expression of divine justice. The tale of justice is a tale of a secret, but also the tale of witnessing epistemic crisis, rupture and disorientation. Undermining the concept of knowledge in the discourse of justice does not imply only repression or blindness, ignorance or unawareness. Rather, this act of undermining knowledge invites engagement in higher epistemic states. By protesting against injustice, Job and Jonah enter the realm of God’s secret. Justice presents itself with a mighty corpus of tales and (didactic) monologues on the nature of creation. In addressing the questions, arguments, complaints and lamentations of man, the divine is transformed into an act of justice. In this tradition, in which prophesy and storytelling are interconnected, the Chassidic tale plays a signiÿcant role. The Chassidic literary corpus, written around 1800, is vast and diverse. One of its major, canonical bodies includes the Ma`asiyot of Reb Nachman of Breslov (1815) – tales told in Yiddish. The introduction to the Ma`asiyot, written by Rabbi Nathan, a follower of Reb Nachman, describes the nature of these stories. First, it postulates the secret nature of the stories, in which the wisdom of the Torah is hidden: And behold, see what else is in our sack: wonderful and awesome story tales, which we have been privileged to hear directly from his holy mouth, who balanced, probed and established many similes, clothing and

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concealing lofty and awesome perceptions in story tales in very wonderful and awesome ways. Because so was [the custom] long ago in Israel, regarding redemption and regarding exchanging, that when they wanted to speak of the hidden things of God, they would talk in the manner of riddles and similes, and they clothed the hidden things of the Torah, the treasuries of the King, in many, many di˝erent clothes and garments.8 The stories are ‘clothes’, texts in which the ‘hidden things of God’ are concealed. The tales are representations of the secret – keeping its hidden dimension, while hinting at its essence. The Ma`asiyot, these tales of wonders by Reb Nachman, however, are not only stories, but also a means for the spiritual correction of the world. The Yiddish tales are corrections of spoiled stories that had been spread among the people. By delivering a corrected version of the tales, the Chassidic storyteller performs ‘uniÿcations’ – corrections of the broken structure of creation: Before he told the ÿrst story in this book, he spoke up and said: In the story tales that the world tells, there are many hidden things and very lofty matters — but the stories have been spoiled because much is lacking from them and they are also mixed up, and they do not tell them according to the order, telling at the end what belongs in the beginning and vice-versa and so on. But in the stories that the world tells there are very lofty concealed matters. And the Baal Shem Tov, memory of the righteous bring blessing, was able via a story tale to perform yichudim (uniÿcations). When he would see that the upper channels were spoiled and it was not possible to repair them via prayer he would repair them and unify them via a story tale. And more did our Reb of blessed memory speak of this, and afterwards he began to tell the story that is on the next page, saying, ‘On the way I told a story’ etc.9 The act of telling the story is of the highest corrective value: only by telling the story can one repair the damaged, corrupted form of creation, re-establishing uniÿcation in the broken structure of being, namely – performing justice. What is implied here is the divine conception of justice, a metaphysical (ontotheological) concept that implies both a cosmic and a universal idea of redemption, of which the Chassid (the Jewish devotee) serves as an agent. The tales, however, are associated in the book of Ma`asiyot with states of epistemic crisis, with riddles, unawareness and sleep. This is the experience of the viceroy in the tale of ‘The Lost King’s Daughter’.10 The viceroy, who goes on a search for the princess after she disappears from her home, spends a long time traversing deserts, ÿelds and forests, and is exposed and doomed to disorientations and failures. The King’s daughter in the Jewish tradition (both the

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Rabbinical and the Kabbalistic) stands for the shekhinah, God’s feminine manifestation embedded in the exilic being of Israel. Saving the King’s daughter from prison implies redemption, the banishing of evil and the correction of disorders in the world of creation – the ultimate act of divine justice. The search, however, is doomed to failure as the viceroy falls asleep, losing the chance to rescue her. At the end of tale the viceroy is ÿnally successful in freeing her, but ‘how he removed her, he did not tell’.11 The ÿnal act of correction, the act of justice itself, is left untold in the tale of the King’s Daughter. The story does not reveal the secret: the full meaning of the act of justice is left hidden, unknown. The act of justice (the repair of the world, in Hebrew: tikkun) demands great (spiritual) e°orts, attempts of self-overcoming and devotion to the Other. Its ÿnal stage is comparable to a ‘wonder’, an event that transcends cognitive frames. The experience of justice (again in its ‘divine’ context) re-presents itself beyond the discursive (dialogical) orders, deconstructing agencies of sovereignty (power and knowledge). The experience of justice implies ÿrst ‘not knowing’. The states of epistemic crisis, confusion (disorientation), unawareness and anxieties are essential stages on this path to which the viceroy, like Jonah and Job, serves as a witness. Yet, unlike the biblical stories, the Chassidic tale does not provide its readers with God’s word. God disappears from the realm of the tale, leaving His traces in wonders, prophesies, riddles and promises. The Chassidic tales are permeated by a melancholic mood, and a sense of loss and longing. In discussing the concept of divine justice, we need to relate it to its melancholic echoes in the modern era. The epistemic crisis, the longing for a lost paradise, the downfall of the sovereign and the theo-political condition of exception are all characteristic of the critical, modern view of being12 as documented in the Elizabethan theatre, the German Baroque drama and the European novel of the 19th century. They are also well re˛ected in the Yiddish/Hebrew Ma`asiyot. The Chassidic tale relates itself to the realm of the fairytale – as an act of correction. The task of justice, repairing the damaged condition of this world, saving creation from the presence of evil, is, primarily, a literary act. This act (the act of literature) carries the question of gender. Following a major tradition, the concept of divine justice is associated in the Chassidic tale with the feminine embodiment of holiness, the spiritual ÿgure of a woman (the king’s wife, or the daughter of the king) who resists the attempts to save her. This implies a certain critical, ironic horizon of reading. Divine justice represents itself in the Ma`asiyot not by great deeds of kings and messengers, men of war and wisdom, the masculine heirs of the divine call. Rather, the act of justice is represented by a rupture in the ontological structure of the universe, manifested by a gender disruption, by resistance and by the escape of the daughter. The epistemic crisis, in which the messenger is doomed not to know, is also associated with (false) perceptions regarding the ‘secret’ of the woman.13

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Epilog My discussion of divine justice, epistemic crisis and storytelling, while associated with case studies from traditional Jewish literature, has led me to acknowledge the potential of the tale itself as an act of justice. The tale is a mode of literary representation serving a certain theological worldview that cannot easily be separated from its original social and cultural frameworks. Alongside its poetic values and aesthetic e˝ects, its historical and social context and its political impact, the tale implies an intervention. The story, in relating, protesting against, lamenting injustice, serves the cause of justice. It provides its readers with re˛ection, awareness, sites of memory and meaning. This argument about the implications of the tale in the discourse of justice obtains an additional implication – a liturgical one, while addressing the claim regarding its inner corrective potential. In the Jewish tradition this argument was often connected to the mystical theory of God’s name,14 as if semantic textures, words, letter combinations and vocals are ÿlled with creative, corrective power. The Chassidic tale reclaims this potential for serving as an act of divine justice by means of narration. Storytelling, by gathering both audience and readers, creates not only ‘imagined communities’ but also a spiritual medium for messianic world correction (Tikkun). The next chapter by Stephanie Galasso enlightens this issue further and di˝erently, while re˛ecting the potential of aesthetic theory (partly by German schools of thought around 1800) to provide a substance for the hermeneutics of (in-)justice and epistemic acts of correction. The question of what is left of this potential in its original liturgical meaning, namely of e˝ecting cosmic repair by means of telling a story, is not ours to answer. What it left to us is the reminder that literature can function as a work of justice, embedded in moments and states of epistemic crisis. The experience of justice is represented in the suspension of ‘what we know’; it calls us to the path, moving toward the ‘unknown’. Storytelling is a mirror of this road.

Notes 1 Emmanuel Levinas, Totalität und Unendlichkeit: Versuch über die Exteriorität, trans. Wolfgang Nikolaus Krewani (Munich: Verlag Karl Alber, 1987), 19–34. 2 Franz Rosenzweig, ‘Vom Geist der Hebräischen Sprache’, in Zweistromland: Kleinere Schriften zu Glauben und Denken, ed. Reinhold und Annemarie Mayer (Den Haag: Martinus Nijho˝ Publishers, 1984), 719–721; Walter Benjamin’s analysis of göttliche Gewalt, divine violence, in his essay from the beginning of the 1920s serves this argument. In Benjamin’s view Gerechtigkeit, justice, is a category of the divine determination (göttliche Zwecksetzung) and thus a subject of divine violence, while Macht, power, is a subject of the mythical forms of violence, establishing Recht, order and law. Yet, Benjamin admits, divine violence – in its pure form – is not recognizable: it does not let itself to be identiÿed (erkennen lassen) and is thus left – unknown. See Walter Benjamin, Zur Kritik der Gewalt (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1965), 57–64. Compare with Derrida’s analysis of Benjamin’s concepts of divine

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violence and its radical implications in the discourse of justice: Jacques Derrida, ‘Force of Law’, in Derrida, Acts of Religion, trans. Mary Quaintance (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), 239–298. Walter Benjamin, ‘Über das Rätsel und das Geheimnis’, in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, Vol. 6 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991), 17–18; Jacques Derrida, ‘Whom to Give To’, in Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death and Literature in Secret, trans. David Wills (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2008), 54–81. The Book of Zohar, Shemot (Names), 7–8, Jerusalem, 24–34. Immanuel Kant, ‘Vom Dynamisch-Erhabenen der Natur’, in Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 2009), 595–601. I thank Gilad Shenhav for discussing with me the double meaning of this Hebrew word – following the Midrash. Hélène Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, Signs 1 (1976): 875–893. The Book of Ma’asiyot ( Jerusalem: Keren Israel Dov Odser, 1985), 1. The Book of Ma’asiyot, 4. The Book of Ma’asiyot, 19–33. The Book of Ma’asiyot, 33. Carl Schmitt, Politische Theologie (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2004), 11–20; Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel HellerRoazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 74–78, 81–124. Does the woman bear – a secret? False assumptions regarding the ‘hidden’, unknown, uncanny female being belong not only to the world of Jewish and Christian tales but also to modernist theories. Freud’s own path is well associated with the wrong question regarding feminine desire. This manifests itself in his famous analysis of the dream of Irma in his The Interpretation of Dreams. Freud’s analysis, however, is accompanied by acts of doubt and self-irony, re˜ecting his own acts of writing. Sigmund Freud, Die Traumdeutung (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2000), 126–136. Gershom Scholem, ‘Der Name Gottes und die Sprachtheorie der Kabbala’, Judaica 3 (1987), 7–70.

Bibliography Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998. Benjamin, Walter. ‘Über das Rätsel und das Geheimnis’, in Gesammelte Schriften, edited by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, vol. 6, 17–18. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991. Benjamin, Walter. Zur Kritik der Gewalt. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1965. Cixous, Hélène. ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, Signs 1 (1976): 875–893. Derrida, Jacques. ‘Force of Law’, in Acts of Religion. Translated by Mary Quaintance, 239–298. New York and London: Routledge, 2002. Derrida, Jacques. ‘Whom to Give To’, in The Gift of Death and Literature in Secret. Translated by David Wills, 54–81. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2008. Freud, Sigmund. Die Traumdeutung. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2000. Kant, Immanuel. Kritik der Urteilskraft. Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 2009. Levinas, Emmanuel. Totalität und Unendlichkeit: Versuch über die Exteriorität. Translated by Wolfgang Nikolaus Krewani. Munich: Verlag Karl Alber, 1987.

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Rosenzweig, Franz. Kleinere Schriften zu Glauben und Denken. Den Haag: Martinus Nijho˝ Publishers, 1984. Schmitt, Carl. Politische Theologie. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2004. Scholem, Gershom. ‘Der Name Gottes und die Sprachtheorie der Kabbala’, Judaica 3 (1987): 7–70. The Book of Ma’asiyot. Jerusalem: Keren Israel Dov Odser, 1985. The Book of Zohar. Shemot (Names), 7–8, Jerusalem, 24–34.

3 ‘THE NOTATION OF A SILENT LAMENT’ Hermeneutical injustice and Judith Schalansky’s An Inventory of Losses Stephanie Galasso

Aesthetics as mastery In the preceding chapter, Galili Shahar has opened up the possibility that not knowing and un-knowability can play meaningful roles in thinking about justice. Shahar framed the idea of divine justice as that which challenges and subverts normative epistemologies and uses of language. In the pages that follow, I pursue related themes, questioning how frameworks of intelligibility and communicability as instruments for justice, including in formative moments of Western aesthetic thought, can unintentionally perpetuate forms of injustice. Pivotal moments in the theorization of the aesthetic involve attempted transgressions of limit points: whether these are the limits of human cognition, of that which can be communicated, or even the solemn limit of one’s mortality. Although German aesthetic philosophers of the 18th and 19th centuries gradually frame the aesthetic as a space of rare freedom and limitlessness, this hope appears as the obverse of an abiding interest in irrecuperable loss and never-ending grief. Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s discussion of the Laocoön sculpture, for example, which is considered formative for the development of the idea of aesthetics, examines what constitutes a digniÿed expression of grief in sculptural form. Friedrich Schiller, considered an architect of the ideological construct of aesthetics as a compensatory form of freedom,1 describes the stakes of that compensatory function in his On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry (Über naïve und sentimentalische Dichtung, 1795–1796), in which modernity is deÿned by its lost sense of harmony, heralded by the advancement of the division of labor and the division of the human faculties. The a˝ective relationship to that lost ideal, for Schiller, informs the genre of a given text. If, as I will proceed to argue, aesthetics ultimately informs conceptions of DOI: 10.4324/9781003254317-5

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the human, it also shapes the contours of death and loss, even (and especially) when its theoreticians try to derive timeless lessons from it. As David Lloyd argues,2 Kant’s conception of the sublime in the Critique of Judgment, too, stages an ascension from the fear of one’s own mortality to an identiÿcation with a broader, indefatigable collective. Terrifying natural objects like storms may strike us with fear, Kant writes: But, provided our position is secure, their aspect is all the more attractive for its fearfulness; and we readily call these objects sublime, because they raise the forces of the soul above the height of vulgar commonplace, and discover within us a power of resistance of quite another kind […] In the immeasurableness of nature and the inadequacy of our faculty for adopting a standard proportionate to the aesthetic estimation of the magnitude of its realm, we found our own limitation. But with this we also found in our rational faculty another nonsensuous standard, one which has that inÿnity itself under it as a unit […] This saves humanity in our person from humiliation, even though as human beings we would have to submit to external violence. CJ I §283 Undergirding this ‘secure position’, from which one might experience the sublime, is Kant’s notion of the proper cultural training that transforms what would otherwise be an experience of terror: ‘In fact, without the development of moral ideas, that which, thanks to preparatory culture, we call sublime, merely strikes the untutored individual as terrifying’ (§29, p. 95). And what are the fruits of such security? The ability to preserve ‘humanity in our person’ from the threat of external violence even though the isolated individual subject is mortal. Lloyd argues that this conception of the sublime degrades those who will be relegated anterior to the idea of a ‘preparatory culture’, and hence at a lower stage along that which Lloyd terms Kant’s ‘narrative of development’, with lasting consequences for the development of racialized and gendered categorizations.4 This move in Kant’s theorization of the sublime could be seen as corresponding to a speciÿcation in his description of judgments of the beautiful, which Lloyd reads with attentiveness to the idea of communicability entailed within it. At the earlier end of the narrative of development—for Kant exempliÿed by ‘Caribs’ and ‘Iroquois’—people remain transÿxed by charms. At the later and supposedly more developed end, the pleasure taken in the beautiful is communicable to all:5 Further, a regard to universal communicability is a thing which everyone expects and requires from everyone else, just as if it were part of an original contract dictated by humanity itself. And thus, no doubt, at ÿrst

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only charms, e.g. colours for painting oneself (roucou among the Caribs and cinnabar among the Iroquois), […] then, in the course of time, also beautiful forms (as in canoes, apparel, etc.) which convey no gratiÿcation, i.e. delight of enjoyment, become of moment in society and attract a considerable interest. Eventually, when civilization has reached its height it makes this work of communication almost the main business of reÿned inclination, and the entire value of sensations is placed in the degree to which they permit of universal communication. CJ I §416 Kant thus describes in the judgment of both the beautiful and the sublime an ideal subject who abstracts from the particular, and who transcends the limit point of his own experiences and mortality by identifying with a broader, supposedly (but not actually) universal community. In doing so, the subject also, crucially, masters the threat of external force to which individual subjects are vulnerable. Meanwhile, those who resist—or are perceived to be resisting— the terms of such a triumph over mortality are not admitted into the idea of the public sphere. Across these milestones of German aesthetic thought, there is a modulation between the threats of death or wordlessness, on the one hand, and the need to master these, on the other.

Aesthetics and intelligibility This theoretical attempt to master such limits has had grave consequences for the aesthetic construction of the human itself. I have begun this chapter by looking at these crucial moments in the development of aesthetic philosophy because I hope, in the pages that follow, to provide an initial proviso regarding the potential perils of coupling aesthetics with theories of epistemic justice. If, as Lee Edelman suggests, the recurrent notion of a ‘return’ to the aesthetic ‘more properly names its rehabilitation by critics intent on (re)claiming its utility for politically progressive ends’, I believe, following Edelman and Lloyd, that despite its progressive intentions, such a return is overhasty and risks merely reproducing the normative and regulative contours of Western aesthetic philosophy since its inception.7 As Chielozona Eze’s contribution reminds us, stories have consistently been crafted and told in order to e˝ect social change. And as Aretha Phiri, Sarah Colvin, and Shiamin Kwa will argue later in the volume, literary texts can make use of a range of practices to draw attention to and disrupt the normative claims of aesthetics. I write the following critique of aesthetic philosophy with an eye to the theoretical underpinnings that have modulated and constrained the social and political resonances of what Edelman calls ‘aesthetic autonomy’. In my understanding, there are layers of epistemic injustice embedded in the very core of Western aesthetics that can be made apparent in the types of representational injustice that James Odhiambo Ogone

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will illustrate in the chapter that follows on Western ÿlmic depictions of Africa, but which also inhere in the very idea of the aesthetic itself. More speciÿcally, I pair a close reading of the contemporary German author Judith Schalansky’s essay ‘Love Songs of Sappho’,8 which carefully attends to indeterminacy and ine˝ability, with a critique of Miranda Fricker’s concept of ‘hermeneutical injustice’. As I explain in more detail below, Fricker theorizes hermeneutical injustice as ‘the injustice of having some signiÿcant area of one’s social experience obscured from collective understanding owing to a structural identity prejudice in the collective hermeneutical resource’, such that the speaker may be unable to name or describe something ‘which it is in the interests of the subject to render communicatively intelligible’.9 Subsequent reception of, and challenges to, this theorization has greatly reÿned Fricker’s delimitation of what constitutes ‘collective understanding’, and what alternative hermeneutical practices may be developed and used by the hermeneutically marginalized. My critique, however, takes a broader approach that is informed by my research into Western aesthetics, racialization, and queerness, to ask: what are the consequences of predicating (in)justice on intelligibility, or what Lloyd has described as ‘communicability’? Such a question opens up the notion of hermeneutical injustice to broader discussions of the notion of intersubjectivity, and reveals its interconnections with core elements of aesthetic philosophy itself. On the one hand, As Hilkje C. Hänel has noted, there is considerable impetus to read Fricker’s account of hermeneutical injustice through the lens of persistent debates surrounding recognition, given the question of how alternative hermeneutical resources might be taken up, or recognized, in the dominant collective hermeneutical resources.10 Hänel concisely describes recognition theory as probing ‘how structures of intersubjectivity and intersubjective recognition are constituted’, dating back to the works of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Johann Gottlieb Fichte (340–341). In this contribution, however, I refer to several conceptually related accounts of what might be considered, following Judith Butler, to be normative preconditions for intelligibility that precede, and do not necessarily always culminate in, recognition: not all acts of knowing are recognition, although the inverse claim would not hold: a life has to be intelligible as a life, has to conform to certain conceptions of what life is, in order to become recognizable. So just as norms of recognizability prepare the way for recognition, so schemas of intelligibility condition and produce norms of recognizability.11 These schemas of intelligibility have been, as Lloyd’s work on communicability and racial ÿgures demonstrates, supported and provided by the terms of aesthetic philosophy dating back to Kant’s Critique of Judgment. Rather than o˝ering a theory of recognition and hermeneutical injustice, then, I draw on

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the work of David Lloyd, Lee Edelman, and Denise Ferreira da Silva to trace the conditions of intelligibility that produce the idea of an individual human subject, and how these are entangled within aesthetics—a speciÿc area within Western philosophy that, as Simon Gikandi12 and David Lloyd have argued, has historically been assumed to be free of any kind of political or prejudicial in˛ection. Denise Ferreira da Silva argues in Towards a Global Idea of Race that the very conception of the modern subject enshrined in Hegelian self-consciousness relies upon ‘transparency’, or the attainment, by identiÿcation with Spirit, of internalized Reason. In order to overcome and contain the duality between interiority and exteriority—a philosophical problem da Silva traces back to Descartes—Hegel safeguards the autonomy of the subject by making his full ascendance to self-consciousness (or what da Silva calls the ‘transparent (interior-temporal) “I”’) the product of his ability to recognize exteriority as only one moment on the path to freedom.13 On the other hand, da Silva argues, Hegel’s ontology thus also lays the groundwork for the construction of ‘a˝ectable’ subjects who remain subject to external force and who have not yet attained this transparency in which they will have mastered exteriority. Furthermore, transparency is presumed, via Hegel’s philosophy of history, to be the ultimate telos for all of humanity. Crucially, for da Silva, this fundamental architecture of transparent subjectivity as mastery over exteriority is retained in the idea of humanity despite philosophical critiques of modernity and science. Admittedly, da Silva’s account does not expressly theorize transparency with regard to aesthetic philosophy, but her work is frequently invoked in Lloyd’s understanding of the racializing work done by aesthetics. Lloyd links the image of the ‘Iroquois or Carib’ in his discussion of communicability to da Silva’s ‘subject of transparency’ through the way Kant describes their subordination to the ‘charm of sense’. Serving thus as the anterior end of the narrative of development—or, in another formulation from Lloyd, as the ‘limit point’ or ‘not-subject’ of Kant’s formulation of history—such ‘not-subjects’ are ‘subordinated as an object both to reason and to nature as a force that it has yet to master’ (51). Da Silva’s notion of transparency is thus crucial for the critique that Lloyd proceeds to o˝er of Western aesthetics, providing the terms and contours of that which he presents as the theoretical limit point of Kant’s aesthetic history. Lee Edelman, in a related gesture, troubles the idea of a ‘return’ to the aesthetic in an account that I analyze more fully below. Edelman resists calls to ‘return’ to the aesthetic, even with progressive ends in mind, by drawing attention to the paradoxical ways in which the aesthetic has been made answerable to the given social world despite its being posited as a space of freedom. This paradox means that any visions of alternative counterworlds that could be o˝ered via the aesthetic become reduced to their legibility within the terms of existing social and political relations.

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Aesthetic philosophy has reinforced a grammar through which only some can fully claim the status of humanity, enjoying with it a right to death and a right to mourn the deaths of others. Taken together, Lloyd’s, da Silva’s, and Edelman’s work articulates how Western aesthetics has been involved in the epistemic and ontological constructions of not only who counts as living and who ÿts the terms of the modern subject, but, relatedly, what constitutes death and its appropriate responses. Whether in Kant’s articulation of the sublime, or in Hegel’s trajectory of self-consciousness, the modern subject, whose story is deeply interwoven into Western aesthetic thought, exceeds his own limits by ascending to a universal that fundamentally regulates and distributes claims to humanity. Although my account in the following pages will focus mainly on the question of (aesthetic) legibility with regard to queerness, I understand this problem to be inseparable from the ‘racial regime’ of aesthetics identiÿed by Lloyd. While there are signiÿcant di˝erences between Lloyd’s ‘communicability’ and Edelman’s ‘intelligibility’,14 I argue that they both resonate with da Silva’s articulation of transparency, given the ways both are anchored in normative conceptions of subjectivity. Fricker’s conceptualization of ‘hermeneutical injustice’—which reproduces this emphasis on communicability and legibility derived from Western aesthetic philosophy—leaves the imperative to transparency intact despite its attempt to theorize justice. Following Kristie Dotson’s warnings regarding conceptual openness,15 I wish to stress that what I o˝er here is merely one account of the imbrication of Western aesthetic philosophy and epistemic injustice—one focusing on the regimes of legibility and transparency that permeates Fricker’s ‘hermeneutical injustice’—and not, by any means, a ÿnal or deÿnitive analysis of these complex interrelationships. But without attending to the implications of this theoretical undergirding, the concept of ‘hermeneutical (in)justice’ is compromised. I situate this argument in the context of Judith Schalansky’s ‘Sapphos Liebeslieder’ (‘The Love Songs of Sappho’), an essay in which mortality and transience are not threats to be overcome, but rather reminders of the limits of epistemes structured according to normative views of humanity, agency, and sexuality.

Schalansky’s ‘The Love Longs of Sappho’: proleptic losses The contemporary German writer and artist Judith Schalansky grounds her understanding of art in the inevitability of death and loss. She writes with awareness of those whose experiences excluded them from Kant’s idea of universal communicability—whose lives, deaths, and memories were never treated with the dignity of those of the ‘modern subject’. Although she admits that her own writing ‘springs from the desire to have something survive, to bring the past into the present’, she is otherwise content to remain on the side of mortality, vulnerability, and even incomprehensibility.16 Her work seems to critique some

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of the conceptual undergirding of Western aesthetics while also drawing attention to its own participation within that project. Her books question and destabilize genres associated with epistemic authority, such as an atlas or an inventory, and exhibit rigorous ornamentation and design in the process. Her beautifully illustrated and poetically imagined Atlas of Remote Islands [Atlas der abgelegenen Inseln, 2009]17 combines maps of remote islands with poetic re˛ections on some element of each island’s history. But unlike atlases that were historically painted and printed to re˛ect imperial ambitions, Schalansky’s atlas testiÿes to impossible travel, inspired, at least in part, by her childhood in the German Democratic Republic. And in An Inventory of Losses [Verzeichnis einiger Verluste, 2018], the ‘inventory’ is by nature incomplete: it is an inventory only of some [einiger] losses, because ‘we can only mourn what is absent or missing if some vestige of it, some whisper, perhaps little more than a rumour, a semi-obliterated trace, an echo of an echo has found its way to us’.18 Not everything is remembered equally, and not everyone is remembered, at all. This is a recurring theme in Schalansky’s collection. But for the subjects of her own inventory, Schalansky devotes a distinct chapter to each one—prefaced with a black-and-white image related to the subject and written from a distinct perspective. However striking her books may be visually—however pleasing to the eye and to the touch—Schalansky writes that she takes comfort in the knowledge that they, like any beautiful object, are fundamentally perishable: for a few precious moments during the long years of working on this book, the notion that all things must pass struck me as just as consoling as the image of all the copies of it gathering dust on the shelves. (26) Her inventory is also a memento mori, fated to enter its own mysterious archive. Just like her reservations about the epistemic authority of maps, which ‘reduce geographical variation and replace it with symbols, deciding whether a few trees make a forest or if a human trail is recorded as a path or a track’, her essay on Sappho is fundamentally concerned with the potential for inaccuracy and violation, for crossing borders and limits, whether material, geographical, political, or conceptual.19 And, like the general theme of the Inventory, the essay is imbued with the con˛uence of writing and loss.20 Whether it is the fact that Sappho’s last discovered poem was on paper that could be used either to preserve the dead or to form book covers,21 or that the very surface of the vellum and parchment was peeled o˝ of slaughtered animals and uprooted plants,22 even Sappho’s recovered poetry is strongly linked with death and destruction. In keeping with Schalansky’s cautious approach to limits, nearly every paragraph of the essay begins with some variation on the phrase ‘what we know’, so that each unit of the essay, rather than ‘building’ toward a logical argument,

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reinforces the indeterminacy of who Sappho truly ‘was’.23 As Schalansky writes, scholars have continuously remade the image of Sappho to suit speciÿc purposes. The only ÿrm details scholars seem to agree on is that Sappho lived between roughly 630 BCE and 570 CE, on the island of Lesbos, where she wrote her lyrical poetry, which often thematizes desire between women. With all the unanswered questions surrounding Sappho, with every line of her poetry that breaks o˝, scholars and readers are confronted again with the horizon of communicability: a limit point that seems to beckon—the alluring fantasy of inÿnitude and immortality makes the blank spaces of a Sappho poem look ‘like forms to be ÿlled in’ (136). Schalansky even admits in the preface to the volume that she, too, would wish to see the ending of Sappho’s 31st Fragment. The desire to liberate vulnerable parchments from future destruction is palpable and understandable.24 There is a proleptic quality to this impossible desire—one that washes over the essay. In evoking Sappho’s lost lyrics—emblematic as they are of queer love—Schalansky not only looks ‘back’ in time25 but also implicitly casts ahead across the intervening centuries, in which the persecution of queerness has claimed lives and dictated societal structures. It is hard not to read the essay with this multiplying temporal perspective in mind: in which remnants of the ancient past merge into forgotten and occluded losses of more recent centuries and decades.26 With this proliferating timeframe in mind, I read one of the most haunting lines of Schalansky’s essay: it is as if, in the places where the singing has faded away and the words are missing, where the papyrus scrolls are rotten and torn, dots had appeared, ÿrst singly, then in pairs, and soon in the vague pattern of a rhythmic triad – the notation of a silent lament.27 But a lament for whom or for what? Schalansky leaves this for the reader to decide: perhaps a lament for the missing music and words of Sappho’s work, for Sappho herself; perhaps, indeed, for subjugated knowledges such as the range of forms of desire and relationships outside of the heteronormative framework, to which Sappho’s partial writings attest. And perhaps, too, for everyone whose lives would have been saved or at least improved by the hermeneutic resources that a fuller archive of these knowledges might have a˝orded. A notation for a silent lament seems paradoxical.28 How would one score silence? And how can a lament be silent? On a surface level, the lament would be silent because what remains is not the original, musical composition of Sappho’s poetry, but rather a synaesthetic text, the visual experience of which on the page spurs Schalansky to imagine the impossible strains of these lost songs. Referring to the ellipses that stand in place of lost words, Schalansky imagines a triad, with each dot ÿguring as a note. To me, this forms a pivotal ÿgure for the essay: that of an impossible expression of grief; a lament that blurs the

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sensuous capacities, it is not quite legible and certainly not audible, but no less real for that. With this ÿgure, Schalansky acknowledges the seemingly inevitable wish to ÿll in the lost passages of Sappho’s writing, while also refraining from doing so. Warnings against such acts of supplementation are subtly embedded in Schalansky’s careful prose. First, gesturing toward semiotic critique, Schalansky draws attention to the fundamental instability of signiÿcation. Like the maps of an atlas reducing complex ecosystems and abundant landscapes to shapes on the page, signiÿers stand in for sounds, and ‘we know that words and symbols change their meaning’ (131). With every attempt to represent and to communicate, the risk of mis-representing or of failing to communicate also appears. But Schalansky o˝ers not only a postmodern critique of semiotics. In a further instance of prolepsis and shifting timeframes, Schalansky subtly interweaves Western colonialism into the notion of the written sign. At the opening of the essay, Schalansky contextualizes Sappho by noting events that were coeval with her writing: Nebuchadnezzar II’s plundering of Jerusalem, Solon ruling Athens, and ‘Phoenician seafarers circumnavigating the African continent for the ÿrst time’ (120). This reference to the Phoenicians will be picked up again later in the essay, when Schalansky notes that their alphabet is thought to have informed the Roman alphabet (Schalansky has an abiding interest in typography and scripts, including in her debut work, Fraktur mon Amour, 2006). Without drawing any explicit links, the initial image of Phoenicians circumnavigating Africa proleptically evokes the destruction and violence of modern colonialism, unthinkable without these initial seafaring voyages, which, alongside the modern Roman script, have been traced to the Phoenicians. The story of the Phoenicians sailing along the African continent is disputed, yet Schalansky’s reference to it draws attention to the epistemic ordering that has rendered it a deÿnitive milestone in world history. By situating the temporal context of Sappho’s writing in terms of these (albeit contested) historical milestones, Schalansky draws attention to the interconnectedness of violence, loss, and su˝ering within Western progress narratives. Indeed, looming large over that invocation of the Phoenicians is what the West made of that reputed feat: that global ordering that Sylvia Wynter29 has described as the geographical distinction between pure and ‘fallen’, because not yet Christian, lands. I read Schalansky’s reference to the Phoenicians’ journey as proleptically invoking this spatial ordering and its ontological consequences. Namely, the distinction between human and not-human, which was used to justify the colonization and expropriation of humans and goods from any land deemed fallen. These levels of historical narrative are interlinked in her subsequent allusion to the Phoenicians as the originators of the Roman script used by Western languages today. The porousness of Schalansky’s writing—its paratactic organization in which there are few rhetorical gestures toward cause and e˝ect, or to a hierarchy of ideas—links fungible scripts to that opening reference to the

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circumnavigation of Africa. One obstacle for recapturing the lost, then, is that the very scripts in which one writes are bound up in histories of destruction: in fact, they carry that history into the present.30 To ÿll in that which appears to be lacking, Schalansky’s writing implies, runs the risk of imposing meanings, ÿxing strict categories, and ultimately perpetuating epistemic injustice. After all, how does one adjudicate where there is a gap or an absence in the ÿrst place? Schalansky seems skeptical of facile attempts to determine what constitutes an absence. She suggests as much in her incisive re˛ections on literary and rhetorical criticism, which are themselves a particular kind of hermeneutics. She makes repeated reference to Longinus, whose On the Sublime (c. 1st century CE) helped to preserve some of Sappho’s writing. Elements of Longinus’s text, like Sappho’s poetry, have been lost over time. At one point, Schalansky mentions a concept not included in the extant version of On the Sublime, but which, she says, surely would have been in the original: a description of ‘aposiopesis—the technique of suddenly breaking o˝ mid-sentence’ (127)—a consequence of emotional experience that deÿes all communicability. She notes that this is a technique Sappho uses in her love poetry. Schalansky then moves onto a (seemingly) di˝erent topic in the next paragraph: Emily Dickinson’s love letters. On one level, Schalansky draws attention to occasions of aposiopesis in Dickinson’s writing to her beloved sister-in-law, Susan Gilbert. In the paraphrased example, Dickinson writes that language would become super˛uous if Gilbert were by her side. But this reference to Dickinson’s letters and this instance of aposiopesis are couched within Schalansky’s remark that these same passages were excised from editions of Dickinson’s correspondence by Susan Gilbert’s daughter. Aposiopesis names the breaking o˝ of speech, but what name can be given those remarks and expressions that have been erased because they contradict heteronormative grammars? When has someone stuttered or broken o˝ from speech because language is inadequate; and when because they have been forcibly silenced against their will? Again, the ÿgure of the notation of a silent lament seems apt: an image of a form of lament or protest that exceeds the constraints of language and normative epistemic constructs. This implicit link between aposiopesis and censorship contributes an additional layer of meaning to Schalansky’s essay—implying that the desire to ÿll in that which appears to be missing may also perpetuate underlying erasures such as the love between two women. Each turn of Schalansky’s essay respectfully, and with great care, seeks to preserve a right to indeterminacy for those who have been excluded from collective epistemic practices.

The actual Schalansky’s essay on Sappho’s poetry enumerates the problems that emerge in the attempt to transform a limit point into an expression of broader human autonomy. For Schalansky, Sappho’s poetry is irretrievably lost. The missing

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lines cannot be guessed nor ÿlled in. Nor should they be, despite the regret that their fragmentation elicits. I have discussed how Schalansky’s hesitations surrounding such transgressions encompass semiotics as well as more abstract relations between silencing, representation, and marginalization. Thus far I have looked at how these hesitations deal with the dangers emerging when the fragmentary is made whole; when the partial expressions are supplemented and coerced into representative systems. In short, I have discussed the idea of mis-representation as an additive threat. But Schalansky also considers that which risks being omitted or that which cannot be included within the terms of representative systems (whether semiotic, aesthetic, or perhaps even, I wish to suggest, politically). Returning to the image of the ellipsis and the instability of typographical signs, Schalansky writes: for a long time, three dots in a row along the writing baseline designated something lost and unknown, then at some point also something unuttered and unutterable; no longer only something omitted or left out, but also something left open [nicht mehr nur das Weg- und Aus-, sondern auch das OŁengelassene]. Hence the three dots became a symbol that invites one to think the allusion to its conclusion, imagine that which is missing, a proxy for the inexpressible and the hushed-up, for the o˝ensive and obscene, for the incriminating and speculative, for a particular version of the omitted: the truth [das Eigentliche].31 Again, Schalansky traces the multiple purposes a symbol can be used to serve. She makes a signiÿcant distinction between that which must be omitted (something unknown) and that which must be left open (something unutterable or unknowable). Even if one could retrieve such a lost or unknown entity, the entity could not be represented, because to do so would be to ÿx it in some form incommensurate to it, to transform it from unutterable to utterable, and thus also to undo its deÿnitive quality in the process. The entity would no longer be unutterable. The unknowable thus unleashes a paradox: the desire to represent, to determine the indeterminate, and to capture and know what Schalansky calls, in the original German, das Eigentliche—the actual; which is taken from the stem [eigen-] which can mean: distinct, separate, strange, singular. This distinctive element, das Eigentliche, is, in Schalansky’s description, fated to appear only through symbols which cannot convey it entirely. The actual is in fact undetermined and open, as Schalansky’s extended description suggests, and can even blend into the ‘incriminating’. In the Grimm brothers’ German Dictionary, eigen- is linked to the Latin word proprius: an adjective meaning ‘one’s own’, or denoting that which is particular to a certain thing. Schalansky suggests that that which is eigen to something cannot be expressed or must be covered up. This is a familiar point of discussion

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in aesthetic philosophy. Even before ethical discussions of representation and omission emerged,32 early aesthetic philosophy concerned itself with mimesis, or how one imitates and thus represents reality in an artistic form. Schalansky’s reference to das Eigentliche seems to probe both the practical and ethical challenges to attempting to represent forms of peculiarity. Kant’s description of the sensus communis, a crucial step in his discussion of the aesthetic judgment, also revolves around questions of actuality and Eigentümlichkeit, distinctiveness or peculiarity. Crucially, for Kant, Eigentümlichkeit is something that must be abstracted in the formation of an aesthetic judgment (although he uses the word somewhat counter-intuitively). This abstraction forms the core of the sensus communis, Kant’s idea of a ‘public sense’, against which the aesthetic subject is theorized to weigh aesthetic judgments: By the name sensus communis is to be understood the idea of a public sense, i.e. a faculty of judging which in its re˛ective act takes account (a priori) of the mode of representation of everyone else, in order, as it were, to weigh its judgement with the collective reason of mankind, and thereby avoid the illusion arising from subjective and personal conditions which could readily be taken for objective, an illusion that would exert a prejudicial in˛uence upon its judgement. This is accomplished by weighing the judgement, not so much with actual [wirkliche], as rather with merely possible, judgements of others, and by putting ourselves in the position of everyone else, as the result of a mere abstraction from the limitations which contingently a˝ect our own judging. This, in turn, is e˝ected by so far as possible leaving out the element of matter, i.e. sensation, in our general state of representative activity, and conÿning attention to the formal peculiarities [Eigentümlichkeiten] of our representation or general state of representational activity. CJ I §4033 The very idea of the sensus communis, as becomes clear in this passage, is opposed to distinctive actuality. Communis, after all, is the antonym of the Latin word proprius, whose German equivalent is eigen. Kant remarks that the distinctive is something of an obstacle in the way of the ability to formulate a pure, disinterested aesthetic judgment. Kant here describes how the aesthetic judgment proceeds from being able to weigh one’s judgment with regard to ‘the collective reason of mankind’, which can be done only, it would seem, by shearing it of any compromisingly subjective and sensuous peculiarity. Although he uses the word ‘wirklich’ for actual (and not ‘eigentlich’, which can also mean ‘actual’), Kant’s point here can be read as an attempt to preclude the kind of dynamics Schalansky describes in her evocation of das Eigentliche. Namely, he circumvents the empirical variability of individual aesthetic judgments (the discrete

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judgments made by observable, distinct subjects) by rendering these secondary to the idea of ‘possible judgments of others’ and the ability to imagine oneself in the ‘position of everyone else’. While he acknowledges that the qualities of objects may vary, and the ‘limitations which contingently a˝ect our own judging’ may vary, Kant attempts to prove that the type of judgment and the representational activities involved are consistent across that variation. But as David Lloyd has argued of this passage,34 such a formulation of judgment merely re-inscribes the centrality of communicability, and with it, the narrative of development according to which those occupying the apex (imaged as white masculinity) serve as an unmarked and unchallenged ‘universal’. Entry into this space of universal representability is regulated by a ‘symbolically violent ÿgure of the impassable threshold’, giving lie to the paradoxical constitution of Kant’s sensus communis.35 Schalansky’s passage about das Eigentliche suggests that the actual cannot be known; but crucially, unlike Kant, she does not attempt to recuperate it through representation. Her writing instead prompts the question: why is that representability imperative in the ÿrst place? Her description of the dots on the page questions the implicit, taken-for-granted underlying architecture of Western aesthetics, which, at bottom, presumes that representability is essential to validity: an objectivity legitimated by the ÿctive construction of a public sense. The grave implications of the sensus communis and its demand for abstraction recur throughout Schalansky’s essay. Schalansky refers, for example, to the case of two headmistresses at a Scottish school who, in 1819, were acquitted of the charge of improper behavior because the judge could not conceive of sex between two women. Schalansky also describes a homophobic attempt by residents of the island of Lesbos, the home of Sappho, to prevent the use of the term ‘lesbian’ to describe, in the terms of the complainants, ‘persons of sexual deviation’ [Personen, die eigenartig sind]36 —those of a deviant, strange, queer persuasion: the reappearance of the stem eigen- here connects this case to the problem which, Schalansky implies, is inherent in representation and actuality. In other words, the ‘persons of sexual deviation’ are those whose desires and practices do not ÿt the unmarked contours of the sensus communis. If, as David Lloyd’s work argues, the demand for communicability (abstraction from particularity and sensation) imposes a narrative of development, Schalansky’s work demonstrates that the judgment of what and who counts as ‘eigenartig’ is similarly fraught with the kinds of value judgments that are supposedly absent from aesthetic thought. These contradictions are precisely how, as in Schalansky’s formulation above regarding the three dots, the ‘actual’ quickly slides into the incriminating: in an episteme structured by dissimulating assumptions surrounding legitimacy, those who occupy positions of relative epistemic privilege determine who should be denied or granted admission into the epistemic community of the sensus communis.

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There is perhaps an additional resonance to the ÿgure of the ‘notation for a silent lament’, then, which Schalansky identiÿes in Sappho’s fragmentary writings. The German word used in this image, Klage, is not only a lament but also the word for a juridical grievance. Perhaps the silent grievance is, in this case, another name for a claim to legitimacy that seeks to avoid reproducing the very exclusionary (and paradoxical) grammar through which such claims are made. According to Lloyd, ‘the successive and always dissensual entry of certain subjects into [the] public sphere ends up conÿrming rather than displacing or destroying that regime of representation and its carefully calibrated distribution of “being part”’. The entry of the one into representation always reconstitutes the line that divides the remainder from those incorporated in ‘the nomos of the community’.37 Schalansky draws attention to this dynamic in her allusive references to juridical proceedings that are conceivable only in a public sphere in which sexual practices must be legible to and sanctioned by normative values. The obverse dynamic of this, as suggested in Lloyd’s critique, regards those deemed eigenartig, those whose sensuous and embodied experience remains opaque within the terms of the liberal public sphere. How do such subjects reject the imperative of representability while claiming basic rights? How does one articulate a grievance outside of this language of transparency and communicability?

Hermeneutical injustice and the problem with communicability The following section does not attempt to answer these questions, but instead grapples with them through a discussion of the fraught relationship between the idea of the aesthetic and hermeneutical injustice. I want to examine how the models of self hood, collectivity, and limit-crossing articulated in aesthetic philosophy continue to imperil projects aimed at furthering some form of epistemic justice. To my mind, there can be no discussion of the potential for forms of justice derived from, or inspired by, aesthetics, without analysis of the regulative grammars that aesthetics has imposed upon social life. Miranda Fricker’s theorization of hermeneutical injustice in her volume Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (2007), while not expressly tied to aesthetics, reproduces concepts set out in Western aesthetic philosophy. Fricker’s book aims to provide an account, ÿrst and foremost, of the ethical implications of ‘two of our most basic everyday epistemic practices: conveying knowledge to others by telling them, and making sense of our own social experiences’.38 For Fricker, the speciÿcally epistemic form of injustice occurs when there is a ‘wrong done to someone speciÿcally in their capacity as a knower’.39 The two basic epistemic practices shrouded by this potential for injustice—ÿrst, sharing knowledge and, second, making sense of social experiences—yield for Fricker two forms of epistemic injustice: testimonial and hermeneutical. Related to, but conceptually preceding the idea of, testimonial

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injustice (which describes the harm su˝ered by a subject whose words are less likely to be believed owing to prejudice), hermeneutical injustice refers to ‘the injustice of having some signiÿcant area of one’s social experience obscured from collective understanding owing to a structural identity prejudice in the collective hermeneutical resource’.40 Hermeneutical injustice thus occurs at a ‘prior stage’ to testimonial injustice because it concerns the subject’s understanding of their own social experiences, which, for Fricker, precedes the epistemic issues that arise in sharing knowledge with others. Thus the harm caused by hermeneutical injustice, the impeded ability to understand one’s own experiences, rebounds upon the idea of ‘collective understanding’. Symptomatic of the shortcomings of this collective understanding are ‘absences of proper interpretations, blanks where there should be a name for an experience which it is in the interests of the subject to render communicatively intelligible’.41 Intelligibility, too, motivates Fricker’s prescription of behaviors and practices to correct for hermeneutical marginalization via hermeneutical justice: ‘the guiding ideal is that the degree of credibility is adjusted upwards to compensate for the cognitive and expressive handicap imposed on the hermeneutically marginalized speaker by the non-inclusive hermeneutical climate, by structural identity prejudice’.42 The hearer should re˛ect upon the conditions and relations that have rendered the speaker’s experiences relatively less intelligible and thus ‘adjust’ the credibility they grant the speaker’s account. While I am in sympathy with Fricker’s aim of drawing attention to the lived consequences of everyday epistemic practices, I believe attention needs to be devoted to a more foundational conceptual question: what damage has been done, and continues to be done, in grounding justice in intelligibility and communicability more broadly? By critiquing this concept of legibility, I take a focus that di˝ers from that of scholars of recognition—as noted at the outset of this chapter—but also from that of scholars of epistemology and philosophy who have subsequently challenged Fricker’s circumscription of alternative hermeneutical resources that may be used by marginalized communities in order to make sense of their experiences. Rebecca Mason, for example, took issue with Fricker’s original positing of hermeneutical injustice for the way it assumes that the hermeneutical resources used by the dominant are the only sources of meaning available to the marginalized. This is a problematic presumption, Mason argues, because it not only ignores the alternative hermeneutical resources that may be established by and available to the marginalized, but also ultimately restricts the notion of ‘misunderstanding’ to the marginalized rather than the dominant. It is the dominant, Mason argues, who may willfully maintain and reproduce epistemic practices that ignore and suppress knowledge o˝ered by the marginalized.43 Kristie Dotson, too, takes issue with Fricker’s delimitation of available hermeneutical resources, arguing that those experiencing hermeneutical marginalization (drawing on Fricker’s example of a man su˝ering an unknown medical

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ailment) should not automatically be seen as lacking interpretive resources, as they often develop their own ‘alternative hermeneutical resources’. The issue, for Dotson, is the recalcitrance with which the hermeneutically empowered refuse ‘appropriate uptake’ of these alternative knowledges.44 José Medina crucially complicates and lends more nuance to Fricker’s theorizations of hermeneutical resources, arguing for a more dynamic understanding of epistemic practices, and, most crucially for my focus, for more speciÿcity in the use of the term ‘intelligibility’.45 Medina notes the importance of context: who seeks to make themselves intelligible to whom, and using what means? Each of these interventions sharpens Fricker’s account of hermeneutical injustice,46 but there remains a need to question how the idea of intelligibility is itself indebted to colonial logics that regulate and even re-distribute, but never fully dispense with, evaluating the humanity of subjects and collectivities. Thus I return to the opening scene of this chapter, Kant’s analytic of the sublime, for this is the moment that links together Western aesthetic philosophy and liberal politics through the abstraction from the empirical or ‘pathological’, in other words, from the eigenartig. Liberalism, the political formation in which the state exists to protect the formal rights of the individual as well as private property, has enshrined the supremacy of the disinterested, abstracted aesthetic subject who has completed the cultural transition from fear to sublimity. This forms the heart of what Lloyd calls the ‘regime of representation’, which has ‘the function of regulating and distributing the access of human individuals or groups to the place of the Subject’.47 He continues, ‘the regime of representation articulated in and through the aesthetic divides the human into the moment of the pathological and that of the representative and representable subjects’. This regime of representation, which compels each to abandon that which is eigenartig and to seek to occupy the ever-elusive space of the white masculine universal representative, constructs its ediÿce on cracked foundations. For only the rights of representative Man (the white masculine cis-heterosexual man) are fully guaranteed and recognized. The declaration of formal rights in Western liberal democracies such as the United States attempts to mask the lack of substantive rights for those who will never attain to the status of this unmarked representative. Within this regime, a disingenuous emphasis on ‘common sense’ and ‘universal communicability’ requires of the pathologized a constant making-legible-of-oneself—the communication of one’s humanity and dignity in order to secure the rights that they were already formally declared to have. Lee Edelman, in his discussion of aesthetics, similarly disrupts the attempt to ground political formations and aesthetic visions of justice in legibility. Looking not to Kant but to one of Kant’s most loyal readers, Friedrich Schiller, Edelman cautions against calls to ‘return to the aesthetic’ as a potentially emancipatory project.48 He does this not only because, like Lloyd, he is inspired by the work of scholars such as Simon Gikandi who have documented the

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racializing content of certain foundational texts of aesthetic theory, but to expose how the triumphant announcement of the ‘return to the aesthetic’ masks the persistence of many of the aesthetic’s most regulative features. One of these persistent elements is the ‘assumption of […] intelligibility’.49 A key tension for Edelman is the maintenance of a paradox in Schiller’s elaboration of aesthetic pedagogy in his Aesthetic Letters (Ueber die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reyhe von Briefen, 1795). Schiller suggests that the aesthetic o˝ers an exemplary mode of freedom precisely in its abstraction from material reality (something Schiller adapts from Kant’s Critique of Judgment, as discussed above), and yet, in making that freedom a model for human social relations, Schiller simultaneously subjects this supposed freedom to, in Edelman’s words, ‘the aim of exemplifying this aimlessness, this absolute of freedom’.50 Subsequent critics (Edelman refers here to Walter Benjamin) have challenged elements of Schiller’s conception of the aesthetic, particularly his conception of the aesthetic as a separate sphere of human activity enclosed unto itself, and one which, in a parallel fashion, delimits aesthetic experience to the individual rather than to collectives. Yet those who ‘return’ to the promises of the aesthetic in order to ÿnd models for alternative collectivities and alternative social formations nevertheless fail to escape the paradox between reality and novelty found in Schiller’s work. As Edelman summarizes the predicament, such accounts ‘must posit the aesthetic as, simultaneously, su°ciently other than factual reality to be free of its conceptual limitations and su°ciently intimate with factual reality to yield new forms of collective experience’.51 In other words, attempts to posit the aesthetic as a free space for the imagination of alternative worlds end up reducing that imagination to something legible and applicable to existent modes of living. As a result, he continues, these calls to return to the aesthetic fail to ask, ‘what happens if we take the notion of aesthetic autonomy seriously, recognizing the aesthetic as separate from and ex-centric to the concerns of actuality, and therefore, as incommensurate with the assumption of its intelligibility?’52 The problem with legibility, for Edelman, is precisely the way it limits the imagination of alternatives and ignores the foundationally exclusive ‘ontological ground supporting the aesthetics of collectivity’.53 Lloyd had imaged this double bind as a continually reconstituting line that absorbs gradually more subjects while serving to divide and bar other pathologized subjects.54 Both Edelman and Lloyd point to the dire consequences of political projects that strive toward comprehensibility.55 I wish to argue that one example of such projects is how Fricker predicates hermeneutical justice upon an imagined hearer’s ability to become ‘re˛exively aware of how the relation between his social identity and that of the speaker is impacting on the intelligibility to him of what she is saying and how she is saying it’.56 Hermeneutical justice, for Fricker, occurs in those moments when a virtuous hearer recognizes that a disempowered speaker is grappling with an ‘objective di°culty’, the lack of linguistic resources with which to describe their experience. But Fricker does not consider how such a

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move again renders intelligibility a necessary conduit for attaining justice, a coercive political project with origins dating back to Kant’s aesthetics. Fricker still locates transformative potential in ‘collective hermeneutical resources’, provided that these gradually incorporate ever more inclusive vocabulary to supplement existing lacunae and gaps. Edelman, however, complicates the idea of political collectivities and their aesthetic structurings, drawing on Lacan’s notion of the Thing57 or ab-sens, which ‘inhabit[s] the Symbolic as an impossibility produced by the Symbolic itself ’.58 The Thing, outside of sense, ‘testiÿes to the persistence of the null set in every account of the world as it “is” and to the presence of something uncountable in every enumeration of collectivity’.59 This ‘uncountable something’ is reminiscent of the impossibility of Schalansky’s paradoxical ‘inventory of losses’—a record or index that already contains within it something that cannot be contained because it has been lost. Schalansky’s interest in the Eigentliche within the Sappho essay draws on something Edelman will describe as ‘catachresis’—that which can only be left open, and which can never be represented. For Edelman, the Thing that can be symbolized only catachrestically is that which, by its very nature, cannot be incorporated into any ‘aesthetics as a mode of “collective becoming”’.60 This impossibility is due to the very nature of the ab-sens and to the Schillerian assumption that aesthetic freedom consists in the aesthetic’s mediation between the sensuous and the intellectual. The ab-sens is not accessible to sensuous or intellectual perception, it is a ‘nothing’ that can, at most, be ÿgured via catachresis. In order to posit an understanding of being, the ab-sens must be discounted, but this move also makes the ab-sens unthinkable (because thought is restricted to the terms of a mode of being from which the ab-sens is foundationally excluded). An example that helps to illustrate this problem for Edelman is Lacan’s theorization of sex as a ‘cut or division irreducible to the traditional binarization of sexual di˝erence and as such inaccessible to logic or sense’.61 For Edelman, queerness ÿgures the ab-sens of sex via catachresis: ‘the ab-sens that the fantasy of sexual relation, of complementarity between man and woman, masks’.62 Queerness, as such, ‘ÿgurally embodies the void inherent in the formation of every community’ and thus lies beyond any notion of aesthetic community or shared hermeneutical resources as a project of justice.63 It is fated to appear, then, ‘as the anti-aesthetic, the aesthetic’s inverse: in other words, the obscene’.64 Schalansky describes the void that is queerness at various points in her essay, including in the above-mentioned citation of the schoolmistresses acquitted of improper behavior because the judge did not believe that sex could occur without a man: a catch-22 in which the intelligibility of queerness would mark the moment of its criminalization. She also refers to Erasmus of Rotterdam’s comment on the word lesbiazein: ‘the term remains, but I think the practice has been eliminated’.65 Schalansky’s allusive and associative style repeatedly

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thematizes this ab-sens that cannot be named or represented, and documents the misnomers and misunderstandings that subject it to catachresis. As a consequence of these foundational paradoxes within the Western philosophical constitution of being and aesthetics, Edelman disputes the notion of political projects, whether aesthetically or epistemically imagined, centered on intelligibility. Like Lloyd’s moving line, the community envisaged in such projects can be realized ‘only by perpetuating the exclusion of whatever cannot be accommodated to being’, those who have been ‘ÿgured as [being’s] negation in order to shelter the concept of aesthetic totality from its inherent antagonism’: an antagonism that traces back to the ab-sens that inheres in any delimitation of a totalizing community or account of the world.66 This totality, Edelman concludes, ‘is always not-all’ and thus cannot inform an ‘aesthetic of collective becoming’.67 Queerness is one name for that which lies outside the jurisdiction of legibility and communicability. This is echoed in Schalansky’s closing remarks of ‘The Love Songs of Sappho’, in which she notes that ‘in German dictionaries, “lesbisch”, (“lesbian”) comes immediately after “lesbar” (“legible”)’.68 A catachresis for a mode of relating outside of the construct of heterosexuality, the ‘lesbian’ remains temptingly proximal to, yet separate from, legibility. The word’s written signiÿcation in the dictionary, that compendium of hermeneutic resources, does nothing to counteract or stabilize this illegibility, as the term ‘lesbian’ itself, as Schalansky notes elsewhere in the essay, marks anything but a stable concept. In contrast to visions of justice that place their hope either in broader hermeneutic resources predicated on intelligibility or in an emancipatory aesthetic which has regulated the idea and place of the subject, Schalansky’s essay embraces and practices indeterminacy and opacity. If ‘lesbian’ as a term indeed derives from the island of Lesbos, where Sappho lived and loved, then perhaps it is to be wished that this island and the ab-sens it has gone on to name could remain as inaccessible to epistemes of coercion and dominance as the ones Schalansky records in her Atlas of Remote Islands. She writes of these islands, ‘what I found in my journey were not models of romantic, alternative ways of living’, like those imagined in politically progressive claims of returning to the aesthetic, ‘but islands one might wish had remained undiscovered’, if, by discovery, one means submission to the imperative of legibility.69

Notes 1 See, for example, Terry Eagleton’s The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990). 2 David Lloyd, Under Representation: The Racial Regime of Aesthetics (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019), 37. 3 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, transl. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 91. Subsequent German quotations are taken from

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4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

15 16 17 18 19 20

Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft in Schriften zur Ästhetik und Naturphilosophie, edited by Manfred Frank and Véronqiue Zanetti (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1996). Lloyd, Under Representation, 59–60. For David Lloyd’s detailed analysis of the signiÿcance of this passage to the racial ÿgure of the ‘Savage’, see Under Representation, 32–34 and 48–51. Kant, Judgment, 127. Lee Edelman, ‘Queerness, Afro-Pessimism, and the Return of the Aesthetic’, Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature 35 (2019): 11–26 (12). Judith Schalansky, Verzeichnis einiger Verluste (Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2018). English version: An Inventory of Losses, transl. Jackie Smith (London: MacLehose Press, 2020). Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 155, 160. Emphasis mine. Hilkje C. Hänel, ‘Hermeneutical Injustice, (Self-) Recognition, and Academia’, Hypatia 35 (2020): 336–354 (336). Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2016), 18–19. Simon Gikandi, ‘Race and the Idea of the Aesthetic’, Michigan Quarterly Review 40.2 (Spring 2001), 318–350. Denise Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 70. Lloyd’s attentiveness to communicability, as already noted, derives from his focus on Kantian aesthetics in the Critique of Judgement. Edelman, in turn, focuses exclusively on Friedrich Schiller’s constructions of the aesthetic in his Aesthetic Letters (1795). While Lloyd, too, devotes extensive attention to Schiller in Under Representation, his inquiry is rooted in Kant’s initial outlines of aesthetics in the Third Critique. Moreover, Lloyd’s text o˝ers a broader inquiry into how ‘race structures critique’, whereas Edelman’s attentiveness to race is speciÿcally informed by Afropessimist approaches (Lloyd 3). Kristie Dotson, ‘A Cautionary Tale: On Limiting Epistemic Oppression’, Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 33.1 (2012): 24–47 (42). Schalansky, Inventory, 25. Judith Schalansky, Atlas der abgelegenen Inseln (Hamburg: mareverlag, 2009). English version: Pocket Atlas of Remote Islands, transl. Christine Lo (New York: Penguin, 2010). Schalansky, Inventory, 17. Schalansky, Atlas, 14. Monika Schmitz-Emans beautifully connects this overarching theme to the aforementioned illustrations that precede each chapter of the ‘inventory’: the unsettling nature of such dark images allows one quite literally to see how something disappears into the darkness of forgetting; but one also discovers that this disappearing takes place gradually and is held back: as long as the pages of a book are moved, something can still appear.

[Durch die irritierende Bescha˝enheit der so dunklen Bilder sieht man buchstäblich, wie etwas im ‘Dunkel des Vergessens’ verschwindet, entdeckt aber auch, daß sich dieses Verschwindens graduell vollzieht und auf halten läßt: So lange Buchseiten bewegt werden, scheint noch etwas auf ]. Monika Schmitz-Emans, Buchgestaltung als Poiesis: Zur literarischen Arbeit am Buch (Paderborn: Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh, 2021), 11–12. Translation my own. 21 Schalansky, Inventory, 125. 22 Ibid., 126. 23 Schmitz-Emans (n. 20) reads this mixture of biography and speculation as a kind of gathering of fragments similar to the ‘extant works of Sappho’ [wie [die von Sappho] noch au°ndbaren Werke] (18). Translation my own.

‘The notation of a silent lament’ 77 24 For an analysis of the signiÿcance of this intersection between, on the one hand, personal interest and emotion, and, on the other hand, the idea of an abstract and objectively organized archive, see Johanna Zeisberg’s ‘Archiv und Metalepse: literarische Gegenwartsanalysen von Orhan Pamuk und Judith Schalansky’, in Archive in/aus Literatur: Wechselspiele zweier Medien, ed. Klaus Kastberger and Christian Neuhuber (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter GmbH, 2021), 161–176. 25 For a discussion of the queer politics of ‘looking back’, see Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). 26 A nuanced and subtle reading of blended temporalities in Schalansky’s novel, The GiraŁe’s Neck (Der Hals der GiraŁe, 2011) can be found in Ariana Orozco’s ‘Memory in Contemporary German Prose by Jenny Erpenbeck and Judith Schalansky’ (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2016), 103–106. 27 Schalansky, Inventory, 125. 28 But perhaps no less paradoxical than Schalansky’s Inventory of Losses itself, and linked, in its impossibility, to Schalansky’s overall project. As Aaron Peck writes in a review of the book and its strategies of evoking and commemorating lost objects, ‘Instead of a requiem for what is gone, Schalansky sings a dirge for what remains’. See Aaron Peck, ‘The Abyss Echoes Back: Judith Schalansky’s An Inventory of Losses’, review of An Inventory of Losses, by Judith Schalansky, The White Review, January 2021. 29 Sylvia Wynter, ‘Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation--An Argument’, CR: The New Centennial Review 3.3 (2003): 257–337 (291–292). 30 For an illuminating analysis of Schalansky’s Atlas of Remote Islands as postcolonial critique, see Christina Gerhardt’s ‘The Atlas as Travel Writing and as Postcolonial Critique: Judith Schalansky’s Atlas of Remote Islands’ in Anxious Journeys: TwentyFirst-Century Travel Writing in German, ed. Karin Baumgartner and Monika Shaÿ (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2019), 193–206. 31 Schalansky, Inventory, 131; Schalansky, Verzeichnis, 131. My emphasis. 32 See, for example, Jacques Rancière’s ‘The Ethical Turn of Aesthetics and Politics’, Critical Horizons 7:1 (2006): 1–20. 33 Kant, Judgment, 123; Kant, Urteilskraft, 639. Emphasis in the original. 34 Lloyd, Under Representation, 30–33. 35 Lloyd, Under Representation, 7. The idea of common sense, as Lloyd argues, has been constructed as ‘part and parcel of its own self-evidence’ leading to a ‘circulatory relationship between common sense conceived as permitting the unity or accord of human judgment and its production through judgment itself ’ (22). 36 Schalansky, Inventory, 133; Schalansky, Verzeichnis, 133. 37 Lloyd, Under Representation, 43. 38 Fricker, Epistemic Injustice, 1. 39 Fricker, Epistemic Injustice, 1. 40 Fricker, Epistemic Injustice, 155. Emphasis mine. 41 Fricker, Epistemic Injustice, 160. 42 Fricker, Epistemic Injustice, 170. 43 Rebecca Mason, ‘Two Kinds of Unknowing’, Hypatia 26.2 (2011): 294–307. doi:10.1111/j.1527-2001.2011.01175.x 44 Dotson, ‘A Cautionary Tale’, 40. 45 José Medina, The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and the Social Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 98. 46 Fricker acknowledges and incorporates Mason’s, Dotson’s, and Medina’s attention to alternative hermeneutical resources in ‘Epistemic Injustice and the Preservation of Ignorance’ in The Epistemic Dimensions of Ignorance, eds. Rik Peels and Martijn Blaauw (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 160–177; see especially pages 164–170. 47 Lloyd, Under Representation, 39–40.

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48 One of the main texts that Edelman cites to this end is Christopher Castiglia’s ‘Revolution Is a Fiction’, Early American Literature 51.2 (2016): 397–418. 49 Edelman, ‘Return’, 17. 50 Ibid., 11. 51 Ibid., 17. Emphasis Edelman’s. 52 Ibid., 17. 53 Ibid., 18. 54 Lloyd, Under Representation, 43. 55 Kim Q. Hall makes a related point in describing queer epistemology as one that recognizes that ‘more self-understanding does not necessarily entail more justice’ (161). Dominant epistemic practices inform and restrain the kinds of understandings one might have about oneself and one’s sexuality, and as such, Hall argues that a queer epistemology requires the ‘epistemic humility’ to recognize that one’s self-understanding and understanding of others is subject to ˛uctuation and change. Kim Q. Hall, ‘Queer Epistemology and Epistemic Injustice’ in The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice, ed. Ian James Kidd, José Medina, and Gaile Pohlhaus (London: Routledge, 2017), 158–166 (161). 56 Fricker, Epistemic Injustice, 169. 57 Edelman is here pushing a point in Jacques Rancière’s Aesthetics and Its Discontents, in which Rancière claims that art as the politics of the resistant form is deÿned by its ‘testimony to the power of the Other’ (43). See Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and its Discontents (Malden, MA: Polity, 2009), 43. Edelman focuses on Rancière’s derivation of Otherness from Lacan. 58 Edelman, ‘Return’, 18. 59 Ibid., 18. 60 Ibid., 18. 61 Ibid., 19. 62 Edelman, ‘Return’, 19. Schalansky, too, it bears noting, describes the concept of binaristic, complementary sexes as a kind of division [einteilen] that had not yet been naturalized during Sappho’s time (Verzeichnis 129). 63 Edelman, ‘Return’, 19. 64 Ibid., 19. 65 Schalansky, Inventory, 132. 66 Edelman, ‘Return’, 20 and 24. 67 Ibid., 24. 68 Schalansky, Inventory, 134. 69 Schalansky, Atlas, 8. Reading Schalansky’s interest in islands alongside queerness might also link ‘The Love Songs of Sappho’ to Schalansky’s earlier works. Indeed, as Ariana Orozco (‘Memory’, 65–68) and Helga Druxes note, there are interconnected thematic threads of sailing, remote islands, and feminist critique across Schalansky’s work, including in her novel, Blue is Not Your Color [Blau steht dir nicht, 2008]. As Druxes notes of both Blue is Not Your Color and Atlas of Remote Islands, Attracted to the prospect of remote island living as a voluntary intellectual choice, she repurposed this idea to signify a space for self-recovery, an autonomous vantage point from which the normative systems such as communism, sexism, and neoliberalism can be understood as parallel to one another and may consequently be critiqued. (169) I would suggest that heteronormativity could also be included among these normative systems that Schalansky critiques through her interest in Sappho and Lesbos.

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Bibliography Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? London: Verso, 2016. Dotson, Kristie. ‘A Cautionary Tale: On Limiting Epistemic Oppression’. Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 33.1 (2012): 24–47. https://doi.org/10.5250/ fronjwomestud.33.1.0024 Druxes, Helga. ‘The Indictment of Neoliberalism and Communism in the Novels of Katharina Hacker, Nikola Richter, Judith Schalansky, and Julia Schoch’. In German Women’s Writing in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Hester Baer and Alexandra Merley Hill, 154–174. Rochester, NY: Boydell & Brewer, 2015. Edelman, Lee. ‘Queerness, Afro-Pessimism, and the Return of the Aesthetic’. Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature 35 (2019): 11–26. Fricker, Miranda. ‘Epistemic Injustice and the Preservation of Ignorance’. In The Epistemic Dimensions of Ignorance, edited by Rik Peels and Martijn Blaauw, 160–177. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Fricker, Miranda. Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Gikandi, Simon. ‘Race and the Idea of the Aesthetic’. Michigan Quarterly Review 40.2 (Spring 2001): 318–350. Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, et al. Deutsches Wörterbuch. Leipzig: Hirzel, 1956–. Hall, Kim Q. ‘Queer Epistemology and Epistemic Injustice’. In The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice, edited by Ian James Kidd, José Medina, and Gaile Pohlhaus, 158–166. London: Routledge, 2017. Hänel, Hilkje C. ‘Hermeneutical Injustice, (Self-) Recognition, and Academia’. Hypatia 35 (2020): 336–354. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment. Transl. James Creed Meredith. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Kant, Immanuel. Kritik der Urteilskraft: Schriften zur Ästhetik und Naturphilosophie, edited by Manfred Frank and Véronique Zanetti, 479–880. Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1996. Lloyd, David. Under Representation: The Racial Regime of Aesthetics. New York: Fordham University Press, 2019. Mason, Rebecca. ‘Two Kinds of Unknowing’. Hypatia 26.2 (2011): 294–307. doi:10.1111/j.1527–2001.2011.01175.x. Medina, José. The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and the Social Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. Orozco, Ariana. ‘Memory in Contemporary German Prose by Jenny Erpenbeck and Judith Schalansky’. PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2016. Peck, Aaron. ‘The Abyss Echoes Back: Judith Schalansky’s An Inventory of Losses’. Review of An Inventory of Losses, by Judith Schalansky, The White Review, January 2021, https://www.thewhitereview.org/reviews/the-abyss-echoes-backjudith-schalanskys-an-inventory-of-losses/ Rancière, Jacques. Aesthetics and its Discontents. Malden, MA: Polity, 2009. Schalansky, Judith. An Inventory of Losses. Translated by Jackie Smith. London: MacLehose Press, 2020. Schalansky, Judith. Pocket Atlas of Remote Islands. Translated by Christine Lo. New York: Penguin, 2010. Schalansky, Judith. Verzeichnis einiger Verluste. Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2018.

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Schmitz-Emans, Monika. Buchgestaltung als Poiesis: Zur literarischen Arbeit am Buch. Paderborn: Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh, 2021. da Silva, Denise Ferreira. Toward a Global Idea of Race. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Wynter, Sylvia. ‘Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation--An Argument’. CR: The New Centennial Review 3.3 (2003): 257–337.

PART II

Uncovering injustice

4 REPRESENTATIONAL EPISTEMIC INJUSTICE Disavowing the ‘other’ Africa in the imaginative geographies of Western animation ÿlms James Odhiambo Ogone

This chapter acknowledges the fact that politics signiÿcantly informs discourse on aesthetics. To this end, just as Stephanie Galasso does in the previous chapter, I integrate in this chapter David Lloyd’s valuable theorizations on the politics of representation. Critical discourses on the motion picture have tended to describe it as a cultural production of the colonial enterprise. The earliest form of screened motion picture was invented by the Lumière brothers, Auguste and Louis, in 1895. The timing of this development signiÿcantly coincided with the height of European imperialism across the globe.1 With imperialism serving as the socio-historical and political context, the motion picture was unavoidably immersed in the prevailing dominant tone already set by previous discourses. As Frank N. Ukadike reiterates, the colonialist representation of Africa predated the invention of the motion picture, as is evident in the works of literary artists and scholars like H. Rider Haggard, Joseph Conrad, and Etherelda Lewis, among others.2 In his Philosophy of History (1837), Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel had described Africa as ‘no historical part of the world’ with ‘no movement or development to exhibit’ and ‘still involved in the conditions of mere nature’.3 Eurocentric philosophical discourse continued along this trajectory, leading to the popularity of such stereotypical tropes as the ‘Dark Continent’ and ‘White Man’s Burden’, some of which contemporary Western cultural productions have yet completely to overcome. Representations are generally conceived of as the cultural practices and forms by which human societies interpret and portray the world around them.4 In popular culture, they are regarded as material reproductions, performance, and simulations meant to in˛uence the action of others and often take the form of ÿlms, television, photographs, and painting.5 As Augusto Boal has acknowledged, representation is never a neutral depiction of the represented. Instead, it DOI: 10.4324/9781003254317-7

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is a heavily political process that invests immense power in the agent of representation as opposed to the subject of the representation.6 In the postcolonial context, the biased representation of Africa persists in ÿlm, among other ‘instruments of Euro-American cultural imperialism’.7 Indeed, as Daniel Leonard Bernadi points out, Hollywood ‘names a hegemonic way of knowing and seeing’.8 And as Celeste Lacroix observes, critics and scholars recognize the power of these cultural products and the narratives they reproduce.9 Emeka Dibia Emalobe, for instance, maintains that motion pictures, such as ÿlm and television, are more than technological constructs. They are symbols of power which can be used to condition the minds of the audience.10 The role of the transnational culture industries that have ˛ooded the African continent with their products can be seen in this light. At a very basic level, they are commercial commodities that o˝er entertainment on a transnational scale. However, a closer scrutiny reveals layers of dominant ideological content that perpetuate a homogenous vision projected by the Euro-American centre on to other world cultures. The cultural force of ÿlm is perhaps most evident in animation ÿlms. Animation is deÿned as ‘a medium that generates an illusionary “reality” that re˛ects creators’ worldviews, and through which creators provide narratives and tropes for viewers to articulate cultural (national, gender, racial) identities’.11 As this deÿnition suggests, animation bestows immense powers on its creators, who are at liberty to load it with whatever content conveniently serves their interests. Since its innovation by Disney in 1937 in the ÿrst fully animated feature ÿlm Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the animation ÿlm genre has established itself as a potent cultural product on a global scale. Lee Artz acknowledges the ˛exibility that comes with the technical and artistic openness of animation, adding that its ÿctional nature lowers the threshold for our suspension of disbelief, thus enabling us to accept its plot, scene, character action, and ideas.12 As such, animation ‘allow[s] creators to ˛exibly manipulate the existing assumptions of ‘reality’ in order to project their own ideas’.13 The tendency of media conglomerates such as Walt Disney, Dreamworks, and Time-Warner to dominate the animation ÿlm industry has obvious consequences for the representation of Africa. As Maryellen Higgins notes, ‘Western studios have the power to frame events in Africa for global audiences—and to revise, edit out, voice in, and distribute the ÿnal product to mass audiences’.14 The simultaneous power of representation and dissemination characteristic of the ‘cinematic apparatus’ enables the Euro-American cultural industry to forge a ÿctionalized exotic image of Africa that need not go unchallenged. Animation has considerably more representational latitude than non-animated ÿlm since image, size, movement, colour, lighting, and continuity are easily altered with the stroke of a pen or key.15 These creative tendencies of animation, as Okaka Opio Dokotum reiterates, manifest imaginative potentials that enhance the representational nature of the cultural productions.16

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Imperial representational discourse has created what Julia Gallagher describes as a ‘European Africa’ that is artiÿcial and forced to ÿt an idealized Western image of the continent.17 Eurocentric representation is often keen on juxtaposing Africa as a single unit with the West, so that the di°erence between the two can clearly emerge. However, this understanding of di°erence fails to contemplate the possibility of any internal disparities within the vast entity that Africa itself is. Indeed, Africa is the world’s second largest continent in both size and population, measuring 30.2 million kilometres square and having 1.2 billion inhabitants. Ignoring these facts results in the construction of an unrealistic, homogenous image of the continent. It is ironic that the many powerful lenses (ÿlmic, ideological, theoretical, and hermeneutic) used to examine Africa are incapable of deciphering the diverse nature of the continent, its people, and cultures. Animation ÿlms have gained prominence as characteristic of the childhood experience of children across the world; hence, their in˛uence cannot be gainsaid. As evident in Disney, animation ÿlms tend to ‘combine an ideology of enchantment and aura of innocence’ in the narration of their stories to children.18 However, this apparent innocence has been questioned by many critics who argue that animation ÿlm texts often have far-reaching implications for the values and worldviews of children who form their primary audience. Telma O. Soares, for instance, maintains that animation ÿlms are not as innocuous or harmless as they appear.19 Oyinkansola Fafowora further brings the seemingly innocent and power-neutral circulations of knowledge in such ÿlms into question, recognizing the role animation ÿlms play in shaping individual and societal perceptions.20 As Henry A. Giroux puts it, the transnational media corporations are never ‘removed from the realm of power, politics, and ideology’.21 Being relatively uncritical audiences, children are likely to be shaped by animation ÿlms that are far from innocent. For Walt Disney, the pioneer of feature-length animation ÿlms, the innocence of children was to be taken advantage of while it lasted, in order to mould them for the future. He opined that ‘a child’s life is a blank book. During the ÿrst years of his life, much will be written on the pages. The quality of that writing will a°ect his life profoundly’.22 This perception of children as tabula rasa tends to betray the dominant intentions of the animation ÿlm genre. Of note is the fact that Disney discounted any contextual knowledge the children could already be in possession of by the time they encountered animation ÿlm content. In total disregard of the existence of culturally particular knowledge, Disney arrogated to himself the sole authority to overwrite it with perceived superior knowledge conveyed through his ÿlmic productions. This monopolistic attitude in animation ÿlms as technologies of representation does not augur well for African children, whose indigenous knowledge is supplanted by an externally imposed globalized uniformity.

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This chapter analyzes three ÿlms selected from among those produced by the dominant multinational companies in the global animation ÿlm industry. These are Madagascar (2005) and Madagascar 2: Escape to Africa (2008), both produced by DreamWorks and directed by Tom McGrath and Eric Darnell, and The Lion King (2019) produced by Walt Disney and directed by Jon Favreau. DreamWorks and Walt Disney, the two companies which produced the ÿlms, are among those with the widest distribution network globally. The ÿlms were selected for their strong thematic focus on Africa, location in the African continent, and contemporariness, since they were produced at the turn of the millennium.

Theoretical re°ections on imaginative geography and representation The origin of the concept of imaginative geography is credited to Edward Said in his seminal work Orientalism, where he employed it in reference to certain boundaries set up in our own minds to designate others’ territories and mentalities as di˝erent from ours.23 Writing several decades later, Diesbens revisits and develops the concept further, deÿning it as ‘representations of peoples and places that express the perceptions, desires, fantasies, and projections of their authors, who are generally external observers’.24 Evidently, although imaginative geographies are informed by the need to make sense of distant places and spaces, they proceed from a singular perspective that seeks to reify di˝erence above all else. They therefore exhibit the undesirable tendency of intensifying the di˝erence between the self and other by investing it with deeply entrenched meanings, in a process Said describes as ‘dramatising distance and di˝erence’.25 This leads to the construction of an exotic picture of Africa as a continent existing on the negative side of the historical timeline and epistemically characterized by ‘knowledge of another kind’.26 Diesbens perceives imaginative geographies as both tools and outcomes of colonialism and imperialism, indicative of the power dialectic between the observers and the observed.27 Further, the power potential of imaginative geographies is evident in their production of authority by way of discourse: as ‘systems of knowledge, imaginative geographies facilitate the circulation, citation, reiteration, and performance of various meanings with the result that these meanings become dominant, eventually acquiring the status of truth’.28 It is, however, worth remembering that the ‘truths’ that emanate from imaginative geographies should be treated with caution, since they are arbitrarily constructed by the observer. Hence ‘while appearing to exist objectively, [they] have only a ÿctional reality’.29 Films, as spaces of imagination, fall within the domains of imaginative geographies and their attendant discourses. Western animation ÿlms on Africa, in particular, exhibit the mental pictures of their

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dominant creators, who perpetuate an image of a distant Other that conforms to the familiar colonial grammar of representation. Scholarly discourses within aesthetic philosophy have been keen to liberate the concept of representation from a simplistic understanding with a view to grounding it more ÿrmly in epistemic politics. David Lloyd, as Stephanie Galasso has already outlined in her chapter, maintains that representation has implications beyond the mere mimetic depiction of the world, simplistic inclusion in canons or institutions, and even stereotypical depictions.30 Instead, Lloyd constructs representation as an activity that articulates the various spheres of human practice and theory, from the most fundamental acts of perception and re°ection to the relation of the subject to the political, economic, or social. He further explains that representation is a fundamentally regulative and operative concept that supplies the form in which racialization takes place and largely accounts for the persistence of racial judgement. Thus, representation has the potential to structure racial relations in the world, and to conÿgure ‘racial regimes of representation’.31 This chapter beneÿts from the expanded notion of representation as it theoretically informs an engagement with animation ÿlms as social texts that re°ect the ideological and political persuasions of their producers. The issue of Africa’s representation has been a matter of concern for scholars in the continent since its initial contact with Europeans hundreds of years ago, with little having changed even in the contemporary era. If anything, modern media technologies have provided more avenues for representation—some of which have been used by powerful external agents in ways that are detrimental to the image of the African continent. Emalobe asserts that representations are ideological tools that can serve to reinforce systems of inequality and subordination, and are thus capable of buttressing colonialist or neo-colonialist projects.32 Indeed, partial, inaccurate, or outright biased representation has played a major role in the shaping of Africa’s image in global discourse. In the sense of Valentine-Yves Mudimbe, Africa is therefore largely an invention of Western representational discourse or what Said terms ‘vocabulary’.33 This has been made possible by the existence of a vibrant ‘colonial library’: the immense body of texts and systems of representation that for centuries has functioned to produce knowledge capital constitutive of the epistemological locus of Africa’s invention.34 Media spaces accordingly serve as an avenue for the persistent projection of the epistemological distinction between the West and Africa as its Other. This chapter brings the ‘visual practices of representing Africa’ within the purview of epistemic injustice.35 Miranda Fricker has deÿned epistemic injustice as ‘a wrong done to someone in their capacity as a knower’.36 Epistemic power dialectics are clearly evident in the dominance of Euro-American cultural industries in the production and distribution of animation ÿlms.

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Epistemic power, perceived by Kristie Dotson as relations of privilege and underprivilege conÿgured through di˝erent social positions, through relevant resources and/or through epistemological systems with respect to knowledge production, is indispensable in the framing of animation ÿlms in Africa.37 I hereby advance the argument that the frequent forms of misrepresentation in the ÿlms actually amount to deliberate acts of epistemic injustice of the kind I term representational epistemic injustice. With this I imply the tendency of external agents to exercise arbitrary power to forge images of Africa in ÿlm and related visual media in a manner that alienates local African perspectives. Being a form of narrative ÿction alongside television and literature, ÿlm is recognized by Zoë Cunli˝e as exhibiting the twin potentials for worsening as well as alleviating epistemic injustice.38 This chapter seeks to disavow the externally imposed Otherness of Africa evident in animation ÿlms that feature the African continent. This pursuit is anticipated to embolden initiatives by Africa to tell its own story, with a view to reconstructing its image compromised by years of enduring ÿctional narratives that threaten to supplant local systems of knowing and expression.

African people and culture through the Western lens Film is a powerful tool of representation that plays a key role in mediating our experience of unfamiliar places. The camera, the primary instrument in the production of the ÿlm, however, stands accused of fostering unequal power relations between the person behind the lens and the person or thing in front of the lens, who frequently ends up being subordinated and Othered.39 This is evident in the animation ÿlms which, owing to their production mostly by dominant Euro-American conglomerates, represent an exotic image of the African continent and its people. Although this kind of representation exhibits high entertainment value, it simultaneously creates a cultural distance by accumulating accidental di˝erences.40 It is an intricately selective process that gives prominence only to certain essential aspects of the African continent and its people with a motive of framing it within a long-standing tradition of representation by Western foreigners. Following Said, Harry Garuba, and Natasha Himmelman, this chapter perceives the representation of Africa in Hollywood or Hollywood-in˛uenced ÿlms as relying on a reference system of citations in which the present image cumulatively builds on already existing images of Africa.41 One striking fact about the representation of Africa in the animation ÿlms Madagascar, Madagascar 2: Escape to Africa, and The Lion King is the near total absence of people and the domineering presence of animals. In Madagascar, the lion Alex asks the lemur King Julien where the people are, and is shown a skeleton of a dead person hanging on the trees in attire that suggest he may have crash landed from a plane. Alex probes further, ‘Do you have any live people?’

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to which Maurice, an aye-aye lemur and King Julian’s aide, quips: ‘If we had a lot of live people, it wouldn’t be called the wild, would it?’42 This response is reminiscent of the familiar stereotypical description of Africa as one big harsh jungle. At a symbolic level, however, the absence of people implies a deliberate attempt by the makers of the ÿlm to lower the threshold of expectations from the continent, which is portrayed as the wild anyway. Similarly, featuring only animal characters also exerts few ethical demands on the movie producers, thus allowing more elastic room for the creative manipulation of their characters in order to convey a hegemonic message. Kyung-Ho Cha’s chapter, a little later in this section, highlights the tendency of people from disadvantaged social backgrounds, such as racial minorities, to go unrepresented in the books that form part of the school curriculum in Germany. This chapter notes that Africans characteristically make up only a negligible percentage, if any at all, of the human ÿgures featured in animation ÿlms set in the continent by producers from elsewhere in the world. This absence can be read as amounting to the deliberate exclusion of the African perspective from the mainstream of contemporary cultural productions. It portends grave consequences for epistemic justice for the inhabitants of the continent. Since the production infrastructure and the economies of scale tend to favour the large conglomerates in the animation ÿlm industry, a near monolog results in terms of the stories ÿlms tell about Africa. Decrying the exclusion of black people in the science ÿction ÿlm sector, the Nigerian comic book writer Ziki Nelson commented that ‘it was as though they were passing on the message that there are no black people in the future’.43 Thus, there are genuine concerns that the contemporary underrepresentation of Africans in animation ÿlms continues to buttress other forms of alienation of Africans in the world, with far-reaching implications. In DreamWorks’ Madagascar 2: Escape to Africa, for instance, we encounter only one African human character, who plays the minor role of a tour guide. It is signiÿcant to note that while the major animal characters are given names, the only African human character is unnamed. He therefore remains nondescript and in the same league as the unnamed wild animals. When the vehicle they are travelling in is hijacked by penguins, he instructs the tourists to stay together, but they totally ignore him and take a risky detour into the dangerous jungle. The tourists hardly ever speak directly to the African tour guide, even though he is the de facto leader of the group given his familiarity with the park terrain and ecosystem. The alienation of the local tour guide by the foreign tourists amounts to epistemic silencing, since his valuable local knowledge is discounted as he is reduced to a mere spectator. Even though he is the only armed person in the team, his services do not seem necessary as the old white lady fearlessly takes charge. She usurps the role of protector of the tour group, and even engages the dreaded lions with her bare hands, a stunt that the local guide would not dare. The representation of the African tour guide as failing

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to live up to the expectations of his job description clearly points towards the political agenda of the makers of the ÿlm. In animation ÿlms, Africa is represented as a continent characterized by perpetual internal strife among its inhabitants, symbolized by the animal ÿgures. This is evident in The Lion King, where the lions and hyenas are portrayed as having been at war with each other since time immemorial. It is the case in Madagascar, too, where the fossa poses a constant threat to the lemurs of King Julien’s territory. While these rivalries are real in the food chain of the ecosystem, one cannot fail to note an attempt to by the ÿlmmakers to extend the symbolism to encompass political instabilities in the African context, which remain a pet subject for representation by the Western ÿlm and media industry. In The Lion King, the lion Scar forms an alliance with the hyenas to take on his fellow lion Mufasa in a ÿght over the pride lands. He pushes Mufasa into the dangerous gorge, where he is trampled to death in a stampede by other animals. He later exiles Simba and forcefully assumes the throne in a regime of terror aided by the hyenas. This representation seems to follow in the pattern of the regularly reported cases of military coups in the African continent. Dictatorship in African leadership is further hinted at in both Madagascar and Madagascar 2: Escape to Africa, in which King Julien is represented as an authoritarian clown. In the earlier ÿlm, King Julien orders his assistant Maurice to wave his arm for him; in the later ÿlm he leaves his gecko Stevie in charge as he travels abroad with Alex and his friends. This narrative of chaos is not new in discourse about Africa: it is part of what informed the colonial enterprise and continues to drive new forms of domination. While it is true that postcolonial Africa continues to experience numerous leadership challenges, a blanket representation of leadership failure across the continent is not a just appraisal of the situation. As unfamiliar African cultures, realities, and experiences are put into focus in the animation ÿlms, presumptions and misconceptions take center stage in the Western sense-making process of engaging di˝erence. In Madagascar 2: Escape to Africa, when Alex and his friends encounter other animals after crash landing in ‘Africa’ he assumes they cannot understand his language and proceeds to engage in a dramatized speech in broken English, thus: ‘Me Alex. Me and me friends ˛y, ˛y in great metal bird. Then plummet! [whistles] Smash ground! Go boom! Then here we emerge. We o˝er only happiness and good greetings’.44 Alex and his friends are surprised when the animals they are addressing respond in ˛uent English. Here, the Eurocentric assumption that Africa is an Other world inhabited by ignorant people is inadvertently deconstructed in a manner that ironically enables the local knowledge cultures to claw back some semblance of epistemic justice within the unjust representational economy. One can also read overtones of the politics of colonial languages in the African continent. The African animals’ mastery of English, to the surprise of Alex and his friends, represents the appropriation of foreign

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languages by Africans to competently express their local aspirations and experiences. Several colonial languages such as English and French have since found a second home in Africa, where they are no longer treated as foreign languages, but have been domesticated into contextual communication cultures that function nearly seamlessly. Marty, the zebra from New York, underrates the intellectual ability of the African zebras in the ÿlm Madagascar 2: Escape to Africa. He brags about his ‘unique’ water-spitting skills: I bet you haven’t seen that one before. Knocked them dead in New York […] Try all you want but it’s gonna take years of practice. You never gonna quite get a tight stream until you build up your lip muscles to the point that you put your lips like this.45 To Marty’s surprise, the African zebras learn the trick instantly, and thus resoundingly denying their di°erence. This scene demonstrates that the muchhyped di°erence of Africans is often over-interpreted in Eurocentric ÿlmic discourse, and thus sits interestingly in a ÿlm that often reproduces that conventional Othering. This incident brings to mind the biased notion of the supposed intellectual inferiority of the African people frequently implied in Eurocentric literature and cultural production. By underscoring their sameness to Marty, the African zebras not only deny their di°erence but also assert their epistemic credibility. However, while it is evident that the ÿlmmakers attribute some level of credibility to the African zebras as knowers with the inclusion of this scene, it remains problematic. The signiÿcance of their initiative is undermined by the presumptive stereotypical attitude that buttresses the disenfranchising Western epistemological dispensation. Seen through the Western lens, indigenous African knowledge is interrogated in the animation movies discussed here, and declared wanting. In Disney’s Lion King, Timon, Pumbaa, and Simba have varied explanations for the existence of stars in the sky.46 Pumbaa, for instance, says stars are balls of gas burning billions of miles away. This explanation signiÿcantly echoes the standard scientiÿc deÿnition of what a star is. For his part, Simba maintains that he was once told great kings of the past are up there watching over them. Timon and Pumbaa react to this by bursting out in laughter, amused at what they consider an illogical explanation. This discussion between the animal characters lends credence to a denial by the dominant Eurocentric epistemology of the existence of multiple perspectives of knowledge in the world. This is exacerbated by the fact that the audience is encouraged to laugh with Timon and Pumbaa, thus discrediting Simba. Therefore, Simba’s interpretation, which is anchored in his African oral history, is dismissed as untenable in spite of its admissibility in local epistemologies. This scenario exhibits features of ‘dismissive incomprehension’, the act of displaying one’s incomprehension (or pretending to be

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ignorant) of the meaning of some other agent’s speech in order to dismiss that speech and the agent who made it.47 Thus, the o˝ hand dismissal of the story handed down to Simba by his father is an act of epistemic injustice, as indigenous African knowledge is silenced. Africa has been represented as a place with strange cultural and religious beliefs, thus intensifying its Otherness and di˝erence from the West. The animals encounter a protracted period of drought, which takes a toll on them, leading to desperation in Madagascar 2: Escape to Africa. At this point, King Julien steps in with a superstitious solution that involves the sacriÿce of one of the animals to the water god, so that rain will fall once again. Melman, the gira˝e, o˝ers to be the sacriÿce (although it is a shark that eventually falls accidentally into the volcano believed to be the residence of the water god). When this fails to yield the expected results, King Julien wonders aloud, ‘I don’t know why the sacriÿce didn’t work. The science seemed solid’.48 Here, just like in the case of Simba cited previously, the viewers are invited to laugh at King Julien. The local cultural practice he performs is derided for its apparent failure to measure up to the empirical standards of a Eurocentric scientiÿc experiment. Further, the beliefs explored are represented as out of sync with the realities of rain-forming processes in modern geographical thought. However, this incident, in its disregard of indigenous African cultural beliefs, fails to acknowledge their potential as local ways of sense-making with di˝erent epistemic foundations altogether. Subjecting these knowledge systems to alien yardsticks in order to determine their relevance is unjust. It is signiÿcant that although King Julien claims credit, viewers are shown that the river roars back to life only by coincidence, when the blockage erected by the tourists is knocked down by the makeshift plane ˛own by the animals. The fact that the solution to the problem is real as opposed to magical implies a dismissive perception of African cultural and religious beliefs as devoid of any meaningful scientiÿc logic. Once again, an exclusive understanding of science fails to account for the functional role played by the indigenous African beliefs in helping the people contextually come to terms with their immediate environment. Instead, the African continent and its people are represented as perpetually frozen in the past as the rest of the world moves on. This explains why the drought problem is eventually solved by outsiders. African culture is also represented as commodiÿed and commercialized by foreign agents in the animation ÿlms, without any critique of that as a problem. In Madagascar 2: Escape to Africa, the old white lady from New York puts on a necklace made of animal tusks and carries a handbag made of African fabric and decorated with cowrie shells. The lady’s attire brings to mind the controversies that have dogged tourism in Africa with regard to its impact on African material culture. Although some ÿnancial beneÿts come with the commodiÿcation of African culture, the undesirable e˝ect has been that it de-contextualizes and debases it, making it just another marker of the Otherness of the continent on

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the global platform. For instance, a cowrie shell was traditionally used as an object for spiritual communication with the gods. Appended to a lady tourist’s handbag, it becomes a devalued, desecrated, and meaningless object of decoration whose original epistemic worth is irredeemably debased. This is the case too for non-material culture, such as catchphrases appropriated from African languages and repackaged into popular taglines for marketing Africa as an exotic tourist destination. This is illustrated in Lion King where the phrase ‘Hakuna matata’ (Swahili for ‘no trouble’) is rebranded into ‘a problem free philosophy’ meant reductively to represent Africa as a perfect haven for relaxation.49 In spite of its lofty promises, this representation is far from being problem free, as it reduces all of Africa to a mere playground for Western tourists while turning a blind eye to the people who inhabit the continent. The same can be said of the phrase ‘Jambo’ (Swahili for ‘Hello’) emblazoned on the old white lady’s T-shirt in Madagascar 2: Escape to Africa. The simple catchphrases betray the intentions of the foreigners to engage with African culture and people only at a superÿcial level, without taking the trouble to pursue a deeper understanding of the knowledges encountered on the continent. This tendency interestingly exhibits features of Alison Bailey’s epistemological concept of ‘strategic ignorance’, albeit in reverse, as it involves the dominant culture perpetuating misconceptions in its framing of the marginalized.50 This strategy helps sustain the prevalent myths of superiority that risk being deconstructed should a comprehensive engagement be initiated.

The representation of foreigners in Africa Of the three animation ÿlms analysed in this chapter, only Madagascar 2: Escape from Africa features humans, all of whom are white except one. In spite of being lost in the jungle miles away from their home, the white foreigners are represented as invincible and capable of innovatively overcoming any challenges posed by the strange African environment. This is evident in the old white lady’s utterance: Gather around children. We are New Yorkers, right? […] We survive the concrete jungle. When we need food, we hunt for a decent hot dog stand, am I right? […] When we need shelter, we build sky scrapers…When we need water, we build a dam […] If we can make it there, we can make it anywhere!51 While this excerpt refers consciously to a song familiar to adult viewers of the movie, it unconsciously betrays an underlying occupier mentality among the foreigners that echoes the old colonial era attitude towards Africans. The treacherous African environment is portrayed as presenting little challenge to the sophisticated foreigner. The gloriÿcation of the survival skills the

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New Yorkers are equipped with, and which enable them to conquer the African jungle, intentionally belittles the value of indigenous knowledge of the local environment. The Western foreigners’ ability to make it anywhere in the world intensiÿes their superiority even as it underscores the Otherness of the African environment. The assumption that their context-speciÿc knowledge for the everyday negotiating of the urban spaces of New York would easily apply to the African jungle reveals a questionable belief in the universal applicability of Eurocentric knowledge. The old lady from New York is represented as the star of the African jungle. She is incredibly resourceful and o˝ers the lost tourists ready solutions to all their problems in the jungle. She is brave and engages Alex the lion in physical combat and literally kicks his ass, to the amusement of the other tourists who readily capture the scene with their cameras. The lady easily overcomes Makunga, the tyrannical alpha male in the pride of lions, whom all other animals are scared of. She slaps his behind and kicks him around before dragging him o˝ the pride, thus restoring the deposed Zuba’s reign. Read against the grain, this scene reveals certain subterranean hegemonic ideas embedded in the Euro-American establishment. The representation perpetuates the savior stereotype of Europeans in Africa, who are often portrayed in movies as intervening to restore order in the ‘chaotic’ African environment. In this case however, the foreign intervention can be viewed as disruptive of the natural dispensation in the wild by enforcing externally imposed order. A critical look at the prevalent savior mentality that undergirds the intervention politics of the West reveals an idea built on quicksand. Although the scene in the ÿlm ends in the perfect restoration of order, this is rarely the case in reality (on the global scene, this is evident in the disastrous outcomes registered in military campaign e˝orts by the West in various countries, with Somalia and Libya being cases in point in Africa). The fact is that most externally imposed solutions to African problems ignore contextual circumstances and knowledges, thereby setting the stage for failure at the very initial stage. The ever-present camera of the tourists has signiÿcant implications for the telling of the African story. As part of the infrastructure of the visual media, the camera is a piece of equipment whose place of in˛uence in the representation of Africa cannot be gainsaid. Owing to their distant geographical location, the people of the Global North rely heavily on visual media ‘when they form an idea about what another place [Africa] is like’.52 Thus, the camera is central to the imagination of Africa. However, the camera is problematic since it invests too much power in the one who holds it, who is at liberty to focus on whatever he/she likes to the exclusion of everything else. Further, the timing of the shot and ensuing editing processes are decisions entirely left to the camera operator. The photographed person or landscape thus remains a pawn in the game of s/he who uses the camera. As Rylee McCone holds, the camera

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often creates narrow and single-sided representations of places.53 The obliteration of the local African perspective from the animation ÿlms gives rise to an ‘epistemic monoculture’ that deprives the world of its characteristic diversity in terms of knowledge forms.54 In DreamWorks’ Madagascar, the arrival of Alex and his friends on the island exhibits certain colonialist tendencies. Alex builds a replica of the Statue of Liberty, a prominent landmark in New York, at the beach in Madagascar. This is a deeply symbolic political act, as it implies an attempt to stamp the authority of the presence of the foreigners in African spaces. It was common practice among colonial regimes to leave material traces of themselves in the African landscape by means of erecting statues, some of which remain in place to date and have been the source of much controversy. A case in point is the Cecil Rhodes statue in South Africa, which was the object of the RhodesMustFall campaign in 2015. The statue was eventually pulled down, but the greatest impact of the movement was the push for the decolonization of the South African education system that persistently exhibited elements of exclusion owing to the nation’s di°cult political history. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, too, an imposing statue of King Leopold in Kinshasa City (originally named Leopoldville) was removed after independence but restored brie˛y in 2005 before being pulled down following outrage among citizens. Such symbols still dot the spaces of many African countries, serving as visual reminders of the colonial era and contemporary persistent forms of postcolonial domination by the powerful foreign nations. It is further notable that these material objects are signiÿcantly responsible for colonial attempts at re-writing African history. These have been executed through false claims of discovery which displace existing local records of knowledge. Thus, with the erection of the Statue of Liberty, Alex and company make some sort of claim to the discovery of Madagascar Island, even though it is already inhabited by King Julien and his colony of animals. This is the story of African countries whose relationship with the rest of the world continues to be deÿned by the old invention narrative long after the o°cial end of colonization. In many African history books, one ÿnds recorded claims by foreign explorers to the e˝ect that they discovered existing physical features located right within local African settlements. In fact, on many occasions, it was the locals who acted as guides for the foreigners as they sought to locate the physical features of interest. To claim discovery of phenomena that were common knowledge among the local communities perpetuates epistemic injustice. African indigenous knowledge is disregarded and the credibility of local knowers subjected to question by the mainstream epistemic dispensation. The tendency by foreigners to view African social structures from their own narrow perspectives, as evident in the animation ÿlms, underscores the fact that the cultural products are hegemonic projects. In Madagascar, Alex and company

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accidentally bump into King Julien and the other animals having a party upon arrival on the island. Alex makes a rather curious opening statement: We just got in from New York and we are looking for a supervisor because we’ve been sitting up at the beach back there for hours and nobody has even bothered to show up […] I don’t know how things are normally run around here but obviously there has been some sort of major screw up which is cool so if you could just point to your administrative o°cers […].55 In this scene, the ÿlmmaker’s interest seems to be focused on achieving a comic e˝ect through a sharp focus on the di˝erence between Madagascar and New York. In the process of Othering Africa, the scene ends up perpetuating certain epistemic problems. Alex attempts to impose Eurocentric administrative structures and systems upon an African society that clearly operates on totally di˝erent ideological foundations. Upon encountering a di˝erent epistemic dispensation, the Eurocentric gaze declares it odd, hence desires to forcefully organize it to ÿt into structures consistent with the familiar. The arrogance and sense of entitlement of the Eurocentric epistemology is implied by the fact that Alex takes o˝ense that no one was at hand to receive them at the beach, yet it is apparent that they were intruders. In the epistemic encounter between the local and the global, therefore, the latter is represented as a centrifugal force seeking to whitewash the margins and institute uniformity across the world. The notion of di˝erence with regard to the representation of the African continent in animation ÿlms is an intriguing one. This is underscored in a scene in Madagascar 2: Escape to Africa where both Alex and Gloria fail to tell their friend Marty apart from the other zebras. This incident demonstrates the unjust generalizing tendencies of the Western gaze which has undesirable consequences on the visibility of African epistemologies. Madagascar ventures into a representation of the politics surrounding the colonization of the African continent by Western nations and its eventual independence from them. Although some suspicion is shown to characterize the perception of the Europeans upon their initial arrival, they soon endear themselves to the locals. For instance, Alex scares away the fossa predators that have troubled King Julien’s territory for ages, thus earning accolades from the locals. King Julien leads his subjects in shouting ‘All hail the New York giants’.56 This representation captures the old liberator syndrome that buttressed the construction of the colonial institution in Africa. The naiveté of the Africans is e˝ectively captured in their inability to see through the guises of good intentions exhibited by the foreigners. When Marty introduces Alex as king, King Julien wonders aloud in amusement: ‘If he is the king then where is his crown? I have got the crown. I have got a very nice one and it is here on my head. Look at it. Have I got it

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on?’57 Clearly, the Africans are represented as incapable of deciphering the hidden sinister motives of the foreigners. King Julien has already signed away his powers to the visitors and is left only with a useless crown. This scene uncritically represents the leadership situation of the postcolonial African state as it downplays the disruptive consequences of the imperialist institution on the continent. This is more overt when King Julien hands over his original crown to Alex and takes a ridiculous bigger one with a gecko on it. Although meant to be a parting gift, there are all indications that it will be centuries before this parting is complete (in terms of his representation, King Julien seems to bear a striking resemblance to the current president of Madagascar, Andry Rajoelina, a deejay whose popularity catapulted him to o˜ce in 2009.)

The troubled picturesque landscape The landscape is frequently given prominence in animation ÿlms set in Africa, as though the value of the continent could simply be summed up in its beautiful physical features. It is notable that the original ÿlm Lion King (1994) was heavily informed by data gathered during landscape research conducted in Kenya. Africa is a dream tourist destination for many people in the West due to its Otherness. However, its perceived closeness to nature is equated with a lack of civilization that makes it ideal only for momentary excursions as opposed to long-term stay, as life on the continent is represented as nearly impossible for humans due to lack of basic facilities and utilities. In Madagascar 2: Escape to Africa, Melman asks the other gira˛es, ‘What! You don’t have doctors here? […] What if you catch a cold?’58 Africa’s representation as a momentary thrill is evident in how fast the excitement of Alex and his friends wears out in Madagascar, making them yearn for a return to civilization. The dominant cultural industry has a ÿxated idea of African geography that is inconsistent with the reality of a continent that has a vast array of ecosystems across its many countries. Africa is often represented as having bare and rugged savannah landscapes owing to its warm tropical weather. This is the picture o˛ered by The Lion King as well as Madagascar 2: Escape to Africa. Interestingly, the Indian Ocean island of Madagascar is treated as not being part of Africa, perhaps because it fails to ÿt into certain imaginaries of the foreigners about what the continent ought to be like. Instead, it is singled out as ‘Madagascar’, as though it were distinct from Africa. In fact, King Julien is represented as speaking English with an Indian accent, thus completing this externally imposed denial of Madagascar’s Africanness. When Alex and his friends crash land in continental Africa, they declare they have arrived in ‘Africa’. This representation feeds into existing trends where some countries that continentally belong to Africa are closely identiÿed with other regions of the world in global discourses. Such is the case with the Arab North of Africa, which is often lumped together with the Arabian Peninsula in the continent of Asia. The popularity

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of ‘sub-Saharan’ Africa as a category in global discourses is equally grounded in perceptions of the Otherness of tropical Africa. Africa is represented in the animation ÿlms as rich in minerals and other natural resources yet still ironically lagging behind the rest of the world in terms of development. While this may be true, there are other dynamics that we have to come to terms with if we are to gain a comprehensive understanding of the situation. Johannes Fabian proposes the neologism ‘allochronism’ in his critique of Western anthropological research, which he accuses of placing the Other in a di˝erent time.59 As Matti Bunzl expounds, this concept banishes the Other to a stage of lesser development while elevating the ‘civilized’ West as the pinnacle of universal human progress.60 In Madagascar 2: Escape to Africa, the animals face a terrible drought and make desperate e˝orts to dig a water well, without success. Moto Moto says in disappointment, ‘Just more diamonds and gold’.61 Thus, Africa emerges as a continent endowed with plenty of precious resources yet lacking the very basics such as water. This is rather ironic since the wealth accruing from the huge deposits of minerals could be converted into tangible beneÿts for the people. The failure of African governments to do this should be properly framed within the context of the Western-dominated global economy that is designed in a manner that disempowers Third World countries. For many African countries, their immense natural resources often end up controlled by foreign nations for years in lopsided trade agreements that rip o˝ the local governments. In other cases, African minerals have been a major cause of political instability, with invisible foreign players perpetually engaged in proxy wars on the continent. Tourism and other human activities have adverse consequences on the African ecosystem. Human-wildlife con˛ict features prominently in Madagascar 2: Escape to Africa, where the tourists construct a dam upstream, hence blocking the ˛ow of the river that supports the ecosystem in the park where wildlife thrives. They also hunt the animals for food. However, their adverse actions on the environment are represented in the ÿlm as a demonstration of their heroic ability to survive in the godforsaken African wilderness. For the foreign tourists proving their survival prowess in the African jungle, there are no limits nor rules. As the tourists attempt to grill Alex for their dinner, the old white lady says, ‘Now how about a nice lion casserole?’ to which the African guide responds in surprise: ‘You can’t eat a lion!’ The lady quips, ‘Don’t worry. It tastes like chicken’.62 This dialog exposes the hegemonic disposition of the ÿlmmakers as evident in their blatant imposition of foreign ideas at odds with the local socio-cultural context. The existing indigenous knowledge about environmental conservation is thus disregarded by the tourists with detrimental impacts on the ecosystem in the parks. It is evident that local belief systems prescribe which animals can be eaten and which ones are forbidden, hence protecting the endangered species. Lacking this situated knowledge and

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predisposition, the tourists end up posing a threat to the very ecosystem that attracted them to Africa in the ÿrst place. The hierarchical representation of animals in the animation ÿlms seems to exhibit political implications. In both Madagascar and Madagascar 2: Escape to Africa, penguins are portrayed as highly intelligent and capable of accomplishing human feats such as hijacking and steering a ship, building and °ying a plane as well as driving vehicles. The penguins are bilingual in European languages, as evident when they encounter Marty for the ÿrst time in Madagascar and ask him in German, ‘Sprechen Sie Englisch?’ [Do you speak English?].63 It is notable that the penguins employ African monkeys in their project of rebuilding a plane. Especially given that penguins are native to Antarctica, a continent that has been described as a ‘European invention’, 64 they can be read as Eurocentric agents who adopt an attitude of superiority within the African continent. The hierarchy of animals is further implied in the circle-of-life philosophy in The Lion King. King Mufasa tells Simba: Everything you see exists in a delicate balance, and respect all the creatures from the crawling ant to the leaping antelope […]. When we die, our bodies become the grass and the antelope eats the grass. And so we are all connected in the great circle of life.65 Although this line of thought is informed by the cyclical ecological concept of food webs and food chains, we cannot fail to read some political undertones in it. The circle-of-life philosophy can be seen to justify the predestination of hierarchies among people in the world. Thus, the downtrodden prey should remain content with their fate as any contrary action would destabilize the established natural order of things. This explains why Pumbaa and Timon, the two social rebels in The Lion King, are keen on deconstructing the circle-of-life philosophy proposed by Simba who occupies a position of privilege in the food chain in the wild: TIMON: No, no, no! I don’t know where you are getting a circle […] It is not

a circle…In fact it is the opposite. It’s a line. It is a meaningless line of indi˛erence. PUMBAA: And we are just running towards the end of the line and one day we’ll reach the end and that will be it. Line over!…And you can really just do your own thing and fend for yourself because your line doesn’t a˛ect anyone else’s line.66 In this case, the ÿlmmakers seem keen on poking holes in Simba’s argument for the maintenance of the status quo in the African wild. However, this dialog can be interpreted more critically to reveal its unintended far-reaching political

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implications for African people and knowledges. Timon’s and Pumbaa’s denial of the circle-of life-philosophy is an expression of an underlying desire for the recognition of their individual agency against established assumptions of predestined roles and positions in life. Framed against the backdrop of the prevailing global epistemic politics, this echoes the fate of African cultures within a global epistemic conÿguration that marginalizes their local knowledge perspectives. Animation ÿlms tend to disregard the disparities that exist within the continent of Africa. This emerges in The Lion King when a South African song, probably from the Zulu community, is used to represent the culture of the entire continent.67 A song derived from a particular socio-cultural context within Africa is thus imposed on the East African landscape in a manner that erases the endemic diversity in Africa. The African linguistic landscape is represented in a similarly undi˝erentiated way, as evidenced in Gloria’s reference to Swahili as ‘African’ in Madagascar 2: Escape to Africa. Africa is home to more than 2,000 languages; hence, this reductive representation actually creates epistemic injustice. The imposition of Eurocentric uniformity is further evident in the use of a South African accent in the ÿlm by Raÿki, without any pointers to its regional speciÿcity. The presumptive blanket representation of African people and cultures denies the reality of the situatedness of its knowledges, privileging an imposed global outlook characteristic of the dominant Eurocentric epistemic establishment. The animal characters tend to be represented in a heightened ÿctionalized form in the animation ÿlms. The images as well as demeanour of the animal characters as portrayed in the ÿlms in some cases appear markedly out of tune with their nature in reality. In Madagascar 2: Escape to Africa, Gloria is represented as much lighter in color than a real hippo would be. Hippos are normally greyish brown with a shade of pink in the background. The enhancement of the pink color in their representation in the animation ÿlm could be a strategy to make their hue more acceptable to the Euro-American audiences. Moto Moto, the other hippo character in the ÿlm, is sexualized in a manner that makes him one of the most likeable and memorable characters in the ÿlm. This is a misrepresentation of the real nature of hippos, which are some of the most dangerous animals in Africa, with available statistics showing that many human deaths are attributed to them. The lion, too, is cast in The Lion King, Madagascar, and Madagascar 2: Escape to Africa as a jovial and good-natured animal. This idealized image runs contrary to the real nature of Africa’s foremost hunter of the wild. The ‘Disney-ÿcation’ of the animal characters can be argued to hint at the hegemonic impulse of the Western ÿlm industry that is bent on exercising a fantasy of control on the African ecological landscape.

Conclusion Certain underlying intentions seem to drive the cultural imagining and production of Africa in animation ÿlms. Although the entertainment value of

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the animation ÿlms produced by the powerful culture industries located in the West is not in doubt, it is evident that the visual texts are actually sagging under the weight of suspicious political motives. In their representation of contemporary Africa, the ÿlms tend to rely heavily on a much older template—the outcome of which is the portrayal of Africa as a continent frozen in time. The manipulative a°ordances of the animation ÿlm genre come in handy in the production of a ÿctionalized exotic Africa that not only reinforces existing Western stereotypes but also makes commercial sense, since di°erence sells. Just as every other continent is peculiar in its own way, Africa is indeed di°erent. However, the Africa invented in the animation ÿlms is largely unrecognizable to the locals for whom it is simply a home and not the fantasyland it is represented as in the ÿlms. I have accordingly subjected this alien image of Africa to disavowal in this chapter. The critical engagement with animation ÿlms carried out in this chapter demonstrates that the dynamics of ÿlmic representation are governed by global epistemic power politics. By controlling discourse about Africa, foreign culture industries led by powerful media conglomerates tend to eclipse local knowledge perspectives, thus erasing contextual speciÿcity in pursuit of universality. The resulting skewed representation of Africa amounts to epistemic injustice of the kind I have called representational epistemic injustice. This type of epistemic injustice is informed by ideologies of superiority and buttressed by the infrastructures and economies of global visual cultural production. Evidently, the in˛uence of representational epistemic injustice championed by the global cultural industry is not about to wane any time soon—at least not until equally formidable dispensations enter the scene to provide a counter-balance in terms of representational perspectives. Recent initiatives on the continent such as those by the pan-African group known as Kugali Media, famed for their ‘kick Disney’s ass in Africa’ comment, are a step in the right direction towards achieving the long-term balanced representation of Africa in contemporary cultural productions.68

Notes 1 Robert Stam and Louise Spence, ‘Colonialism, Racism and Representation: An Introduction’, in Film Theory and Criticism; Introductory Readings, ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 6. 2 Frank N. Ukadike, ‘Western Film Images of Africa: Genealogy of an Ideological Formulation’, The Black Scholar 21, no. 2 (1990): 31. 3 Georg W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History. Trans. John Sibree (New York: Dover, 1956), 99. 4 Paul J. Cloke, Phil Crang, and Mark Goodwin, Introducing Human Geographies (Abingdon: Routledge, 2005), 12. 5 Emeka Dibia Emalobe, ‘Filmic Representation in Postcolonial Discourse: A Study of Selected Film Texts’, Creative Artist: A Journal of Theatre and Media Studies 3, no. 1 (2009): 211–226 (211). 6 Augusto Boal, Rainbow Desire (London: Routledge, 1995).

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7 Okaka Opio Dokotum, Hollywood and Africa: Recycling the ‘Dark Continent’ Myth, 1908-2020 (Makhanda: African Humanities Program, 2020), 15. 8 Daniel Leonard Bernadi, ‘Introduction’, in The Birth of Whiteness: Race and the Emergence of US Cinema, ed. Daniel Leonard Bernadi (New Brunswick: Rutgers University, 1996), 3. 9 Celeste Lacroix, ‘Images of Animated Others: The Orientalization of Disney’s Cartoon Heroines from The Little Mermaid to the Hunchback of Notre Dame’, Popular Communication 2, no. 4 (November 2004): 213. 10 Emalobe, ‘Filmic Representation’, 214. 11 Kori Yoshida, Animation and ‘Otherness’: The Politics of Gender, Racial, and Ethnic Identity in the World of Japanese ‘Anime’ (Vancouver: The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, 2008), 57. 12 Lee Artz, ‘Animating Hierarchy: Disney and the Globalization of Capitalism’, Global Media Journal 1, no. 1 (2003). globalmediajournal.com/open-access/animatinghierarchy-disney-and-the-globalization-of-capitalism.php?aid=35055 13 Yoshida, Animation and ‘Otherness’, 56. 14 Maryellen Higgins, ‘Introduction: African Blood, Hollywood’s Diamonds?’ in Hollywood’s Africa After 1994, ed. Maryleen Higgins (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2012), 11. 15 Artz, ‘Animating Hierarchy’. 16 Dokotum, Hollywood and Africa, 31 17 Julia Gallagher, ‘Theorising Image: A Relational Approach’ in Images of Africa: Creation, Negotiation and Subversion, ed. Julia Gallagher, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), 5. 18 Henry A. Giroux, The Mouse that Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence (Lanham: Rowman & Littleÿeld Publishers Inc., 1999), 90. 19 Telma O. Soares, ‘Films and Linguistic Stereotypes: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Accent Use in Disney Animated Films’, in BSU Master’s Theses and Projects, Item 53, 2017. 20 Oyinkansola Fafowora, ‘Imaging the “Dark Continent”: Disney’s Tarzan and Deÿning the African Post-Colonial Subject’, Reinvention: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research 10, no.1 (2017): (1). warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/iatl/ reinvention/archive/volume11issue1/fafowora/ 21 Giroux, The Mouse that Roared, 4. 22 Walt Disney, quoted in Susan Willis, ‘Problem with Pleasure’ in Inside the Mouse: Work and Play at Disney World, ed. Susan Willis, Jane Kuenz, Karen Klugman, and Shelton Waldrep (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 17. 23 Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 1978). 24 Caroline Diesbens, ‘Imaginative Geographies’, in The International Encyclopedia of Geography, ed. Douglas Richardson, Noel Castree, Michael F. Goodchild, Audrey Kobayashi, Weidong Liu, and Richard A. Marston (Hoboken: John Willey & Sons, 2017), 1. 25 Said, Orientalism, 55. 26 Said, Orientalism, 73. 27 Diesbens, ‘Imaginative Geographies’, 1. 28 Diesbens, ‘Imaginative Geographies’, 1. 29 Said, Orientalism, 55. 30 David Lloyd, Under Representation: The Racial Regime of Aesthetics (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019), 9. 31 Lloyd, Under Representation, 7. 32 Emalobe, ‘Filmic Representation’, 217. 33 Valentine-Yves Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988); Said, ‘Orientalism’, 71. 34 Valentine-Yves Mudimbe, The Idea of Africa (Oxford: James Currey, 1994), 29.

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35 Fafawora, ‘Imagining’, 3. 36 Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 1. 37 Kristie Dotson, ‘Conceptualising Epistemic Oppression’, Social Epistemology: A Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Policy 28, no. 2 (2014): 115–138 (125). 38 Zoë Cunli˜e, ‘Narrative Fiction and Epistemic Injustice’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 77, no. 2 (2019): 169–180 (171). 39 Shona Bettany, and Rissel W. Belk, ‘Disney Discourses of Self and Other: Animality, Primitivity, Modernity, and Postmodernity’, Consumption Markets & Culture 14, no. 2 (2011): 163–176 (165). 40 Mudimbe, ‘The Invention of Africa’, 16. 41 Said, ‘Orientalism’; Harry Garuba and Natasha Himmelmann, ‘The Cited and the Uncited: Toward an Emancipatory Reading of Representations of Africa’, in Hollywood’s Africa After 1994, ed. Maryellen Higgins (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2012), 16. 42 Tom McGrath and Eric Darnell, directors, Madagascar 2: Escape to Africa (DreamWorks Animation, 2008), DVD, 43:13. 43 BBC News, Disney Announces Landmark Collaboration with Kugali, 11 December, 2020. www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-55278034 44 McGrath and Darnell, Madagascar 2, 20:31. 45 McGrath and Darnell, Madagascar 2, 44: 35. 46 Favreau, Lion, 1:09:17. 47 Mathew J. Cull, ‘Dismissive Incomprehension: A Use of Purported Ignorance to Undermine Others’, Social Epistemology: A Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Policy 33, no. 3 ( June 2019): 262–271(263). 48 McGrath and Darnell, ‘Madagascar 2’, 1:14: 21. 49 Jon Favreau, director, Lion King, (Walt Disney Pictures, 2019), DVD, 54: 41. 50 Alison Bailey, ‘Strategic Ignorance’ in Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance, ed. Shannon Sullivan and Nancy Tuana (Albany: State University of New York, 2007), 88. 51 McGrath and Darnell, Madagascar 2, 34: 32. 52 Rylee McCone, Representations of Africa through Photography, Undergraduate Honors Thesis, University of Colorado at Boulder, 2019, 4. 53 McCone, ‘Representations of Africa’, 4. 54 Fricker, Epistemic Injustice, 207. 55 McGrath and Darnell, Madagascar 2, 38: 18. 56 Tom McGrath and Eric Darnell, directors. 2005. Madagascar (DreamWorks Animation, DreamWorks, 2005), 24: 47. 57 McGrath and Darnell, Madagascar, 1:01:20. 58 McGrath and Darnell, Madagascar, 24:47. 59 Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Objects (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 178. 60 Matti Bunzl, ‘Foreword: Synthesis of a Critical Anthropology in Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object, Johannes Fabian (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014, ix–x. 61 McGrath and Darnell, Madagascar 2, 1: 01: 00. 62 McGrath and Darnell, Madagascar 2, 1:09:57. 63 McGrath and Darnell, Madagascar, 6: 52. 64 Fabrice Argounès, ‘Antarctica: A “European Invention”’, ehne.fr/en/encyclopedia/themes/europe-europeans-and-world/colonial-expansion-and-imperialisms/ antarctica-a-%E2%80%9Ceuropean-invention%E2%80%9D 65 Favreau, Lion, 13: 09. 66 Favreau, Lion, 1:07:27. 67 Favreau, Lion, 1:14:44. 68 BBC, ‘Disney Announces’.

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Bibliography Argounès, Fabrice. ‘Antarctica: A “European Invention”’, ehne.fr/en/encyclopedia/ themes/europe-europeans-and-world/colonial-expansion-and-imperialisms/ antarctica-a-%E2%80%9Ceuropean-invention%E2%80%9D Artz, Lee. ‘Animating Hierarchy: Disney and the Globalization of Capitalism’. Global Media Journal 1, no. 1 (2003). globalmediajournal.com/open-access/animatinghierarchy-disney-and-the-globalization-of-capitalism.php?aid=35055 Bailey, Alison. ‘Strategic Ignorance’. In Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance, edited by S. Sullivan and N. Tuana, 77–94. Albany: State University of New York, 2007. BBC News. Disney Announces Landmark Collaboration with Kugali. December 11, 2020. bbc.com/news/world-africa-55278034 Bernadi, Daniel Leonard. ‘Introduction’. In The Birth of Whiteness: Race and the Emergence of US Cinema, edited by Daniel Leonard Benardi, 1–11. New Brunswick: Rutgers University, 1996. Bettany, Shona, and Rissel W. Belk. ‘Disney Discourses of Self and Other: Animality, Primitivity, Modernity, and Postmodernity’. Consumption Markets & Culture 14, no. 2 (May 2011): 163–176. Boal, Augusto. Rainbow Desire. London: Routledge, 1995. Cloke, Paul J. Phil Crang, and Mark Goodwin. Introducing Human Geographies. Abingdon: Routledge, 2005. Cull, Mathew J. ‘Dismissive Incomprehension: A Use of Purported Ignorance to Undermine Others’. Social Epistemology: A Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Policy 33, no.3 ( June 2019): 262–271. Cunli˝e, Zoë. ‘Narrative Fiction and Epistemic Injustice’. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 77, no.2 (April 2019): 169–180. Diesbens, Caroline. ‘Imaginative Geographies’. In The International Encyclopedia of Geography, edited by Douglas Richardson, Noel Castree, Michael F. Goodchild, Audrey Kobayashi, Weidong Liu, and Richard A. Marston, 1. Hoboken: John Willey & Sons, 2017. Dokotum, Okaka Opio. Hollywood and Africa: Recycling the ‘Dark Continent’ Myth, 1908–2020. Makhanda: African Humanities Program, 2020. Dotson, Kristie. ‘Conceptualising Epistemic Oppression’. Social Epistemology: A Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Policy 28, no. 2 ( January 2014): 115–138. Emalobe, Emeka Dibia. ‘Filmic Representation in Postcolonial Discourse: A Study of Selected Film Texts’. Creative Artist: A Journal of Theatre and Media Studies 3, no. 1 (2009): 211–226. Fabian, Johannes. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Objects. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. Fafowora, Oyinkansola. ‘Imaging the ‘Dark Continent’: Disney’s Tarzan and Deÿning the African Post-Colonial Subject’. Reinvention: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research 10, no. 1 (2017), warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/iatl/reinvention/ archive/volume11issue1/fafowora/ Favreau, Jon, director. Lion King. Walt Disney Pictures, 2019. Fricker, Miranda. Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Gallagher, Julia. ‘Theorising Image: A Relational Approach’. In Images of Africa: Creation, Negotiation and Subversion, edited by Julia Gallagher, 1–20. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015.

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Garuba, Harry and Natasha Himmelmann. ‘The Cited and the Uncited: Toward an Emancipatory Reading of Representations of Africa’. In Hollywood’s Africa After 1994, edited by Maryellen Higgins, 15–34. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2012. Giroux, Henry A. The Mouse that Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence. Lanham: Rowman & Littleÿeld Publishers Inc., 1999. Hegel, Georg W. F. The Philosophy of History. Translated by John Sibree. New York: Dover, 1956. Higgins, Maryellen. ‘Introduction: African Blood, Hollywood’s Diamonds?’ In Hollywood’s Africa After 1994, edited by Maryleen Higgins, 1–4. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2012. Lacroix, Celeste. ‘Images of Animated Others: The Orientalization of Disney’s Cartoon Heroines from The Little Mermaid to the Hunchback of Notre Dame’. Popular Communication 2, no. 4 (November 2004): 213–229. Lloyd, David. Under Representation: The Racial Regime of Aesthetics. New York: Fordham University Press, 2019. McCone, Rylee. Representations of Africa through Photography. Undergraduate Honors Thesis. University of Colorado at Boulder, 2019. McGrath, Tom and Eric Darnell, directors. Madagascar. DreamWorks Animation, 2005. McGrath, Tom and Eric Darnell, directors. Madagascar 2: Escape to Africa. DreamWorks Animation, 2008. Mudimbe, Valentine-Yves. The Idea of Africa. Oxford: James Currey, 1994. Mudimbe, Valentine-Yves. The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988. Said, Edward. Orientalism. London: Penguin, 1978. Soares, Telma O. ‘Films and Linguistic Stereotypes: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Accent Use in Disney Animated Films’. In BSU Master’s Theses and Projects, Item 53, 2017. Stam, Robert and Louise Spence. ‘Colonialism, Racism and Representation: An Introduction’. In Film Theory and Criticism; Introductory Readings, edited by Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, 98–103. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Ukadike, Frank N. ‘Western Film Images of Africa: Genealogy of an Ideological Formulation’. The Black Scholar 21, no. 2 (1990): 30–48. Willis, Susan. ‘Problem with Pleasure’. In Inside the Mouse: Work and Play at Disney World, edited by Susan Willis, Jane Kuenz, Karen Klugman, and Shelton Waldrep, 1–11. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995. Yoshida, Kori. Animation and ‘Otherness’: The Politics of Gender, Racial, and Ethnic Identity in the World of Japanese ‘Anime’. Vancouver: The University of British Columbia, 2008.

5 FARMERS’ SELF-REPRESENTATIONS AND AGENCY Protest music in the agitations against India’s farm laws Shambhavi Prakash

In the previous chapter, James Ogone examined representational epistemic injustice and how it alienates local systems of knowing. In this chapter, I look at the representational epistemic injustice emerging from the Indian government’s highly mediatized dismissal of farmers’ ability to understand the impact of the new agricultural laws passed in 2020. I am interested in exploring the challenge posed to this through counter-representations by farmers and their supporters in the community, during the farmers’ protests that began the same year in India. I investigate these counter-representations, which reclaim the farmers’ position as knowers, through popular protest songs that have been disseminated over social media during the protests and that highlight farmers’ knowledge of local agricultural issues and their critique of the farm laws. In September 2020, in the midst of a raging COVID-19 pandemic, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led Indian central government hastily introduced three farm bills in the Parliament.1 Despite widespread protests against the bills and calls for wider deliberations, the bills were passed as laws the same month. The three farm laws aimed to corporatize Indian agriculture, and were criticized for being beneÿcial to large corporations at the expense of small farmers. Apart from the content of the laws, the manner in which the bills were passed also invited criticism.2 Since agriculture is a state matter in the Indian Constitution, the passing of these laws by the central government has been described by constitutional experts as lacking in legislative competence.3 Months of protests followed in Punjab and Haryana, two northern Indian states most a˝ected by the new farm laws, particularly by the plans to remove existing state support in crop purchase, which had provided some protection from the vagaries of the market. These protests went unheeded, and the central government continued in its refusal to involve states’ elected representatives DOI: 10.4324/9781003254317-8

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and farmers’ unions in talks about the laws. Mainstream national media, too, remained uninterested in reporting farmers’ grievances and their months-long protests. After three months of protests, in November and December 2020, farmers from the northern states of Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Madhya Pradesh followed the call of over 200 farmers’ unions to march to Delhi and pressurize the government to listen to their critique of the new farm laws and to start a dialogue. Several thousand farmers reached Delhi’s borders, where they were stopped by barricades, water cannons, and police violence. The central government ordered the digging up of highways to stop the farmers from reaching Delhi on their tractors and farm trolleys. Multiple sites of protests thus cropped up around Delhi’s borders. As farmers sat on the highways in the following months waiting for negotiations with the government, the borders of Delhi witnessed the emergence of thriving protest camps with free community kitchens, libraries, and many other collective and individual initiatives run by the farming communities and their supporters.4

Government and media portrayal of the farmers’ protests With these developments, the national and international media started reporting the issue more intensively, while the government vociferously tried to dismiss the farmers’ concerns, to lead public opinion away from its sympathy with the farmers’ grievances. As several rounds of negotiations between the central government and farmers’ leaders failed, the Supreme Court of India intervened to declare a temporary stay on the laws, while the farmers continued to protest at Delhi’s borders.5 Amid now intensive media reporting and announcements by important ÿgures of the government, a few dominant narratives emerged which were repeatedly broadcast by the government and pro-government media. For example, a member of the Indian government’s think tank, Niti Aayog, stressed that the farmers had ‘not fully or properly understood these three laws’, which could even double their income in a year.6 On a primetime television show, the editor of a news agency described the farmers as ‘brainwashed’.7 A former Member of Parliament to the Rajya Sabha from the BJP described the protests as motivated by elite farmers.8 The editor-in-chief of a television news channel linked the farmers’ protests to ‘terrorists like the Khalistani separatists’.9 The Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, said in an address to the nation that the agricultural reforms were actually in the interest of farmers, but that the opposition was using ‘tricks’ to mislead them.10 The Chief Minister of the BJPled Haryana government accused other political parties, particularly the Congress which then led the Punjab state government, of instigating the farmers’ protests.11 The main views forwarded in such narratives were that the farmers did not understand their situation and the implications of the farm laws; that the

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protests opposing the farm laws were being carried out by rich farmers, middlemen, separatists, and terrorists; and that the farmers were naïve and were being manipulated by opposition parties and anti-national elements.12 These narratives sought to divert public opinion away from sympathy with the dire situation signaled by the farmers, and also aimed to dismiss farmers’ analyses and critique of the new laws, thus also dismissing their capability as knowers. Apart from the testimonial injustice evident here,13 the denial of farmers’ capacity to understand the laws also shows an implicit dismissal of their knowledge as situated and relational.14 The dismissal of the farmers’ ability to know and understand what was at stake in the new farm laws was, however, intensely countered by the farmers and their supporters. They took heavily to social media in order to articulate their own position through a variety of means such as live broadcasts from the sites of the protests, local newspapers from camp sites,15 photo essays, and interviews. One signiÿcant medium of epistemic resistance on the part of farmers’ communities was the songs and music videos produced by singers from northern India, especially Punjab and Haryana, who were also often farmers or belonged to farming communities. As Simona Sawhney points out, ‘The protestors understand very well that it is one of the strategies of the government to treat them as ignorant, and in fact, to constantly treat all dissenters, ÿrst as ignorant, and then as criminal’.16 This chapter discusses some of the hundreds of songs from the Punjab region. Released on social media soon after the protests began, these songs swiftly occupied a central role in countering the invisibilization and infantilization of the farmers’ perspectives by the government and mainstream media. This chapter analyzes how the songs represented the concerns of the protesting farmers and challenged the epistemic injustice of the government’s dismissal of the farmers’ ability to understand their own interests.

Farmers’ protest songs When the new bills were hastily tabled in the Parliament and as protests against them intensiÿed in the latter half of 2020, dozens of songs were released by various Punjabi folk and pop singers based in India and abroad. By early 2021, the numbers of such songs supporting farmers’ protests, their demands and their critique of the three farm laws, had rapidly increased to hundreds, and many had gone viral on the internet. The songs acquired millions of views, particularly addressed the youth in exhorting them to join the elderly protesters, and helped mobilize more protestors against the farm laws, quickly becoming anthems of the protests.17 The songs were broadcast mostly through YouTube channels of popular Punjabi and Haryanvi folk and pop singers and music labels, as well as by supporters of the farmers’ protests based within India or associated with the Punjabi diaspora abroad, especially in Canada and the United Kingdom. Within a few months, these songs had gained millions of views and

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had become popular in the villages as well as at the protest sites on Delhi’s borders, where they were blasted from loudspeakers on tractors and trolleys. Before discussing what the songs highlight, let us brie˛y note the aspects that they invisibilized. Women’s farm work is one example. Several Punjabi women singers released songs which were hugely popular at the protest sites.18 However, many of the music videos of the viral protest songs present the male singers with a lot of machismo and hypermasculine body language; they bear witness to the evidently patriarchal culture in which these songs are embedded. In their visuals and lyrics, these songs starkly invisibilize women’s farm work. For instance, lyrics referring to farming activities are often accompanied in the music videos by visuals of old male farmers. Although women protesters, who were also present in large numbers, are frequently shown, the lyrics accompanying the visuals tend to celebrate them primarily as mothers and sisters rather than as farmers in their own right.19 Resistance, emphasizes José Medina, ‘is a complicated and heterogeneous phenomenon that deÿes uniÿcation and explication according to abstract and rigid principles of subversion. Our cognitive, a˝ective, and political lives are caught up in various tensions among multidirectional relations of power/resistance’.20 The deeply rooted caste system is also evident in many of the songs, through the repeated address to the dominant-caste Jatt farmers in the lyrics, with references to their bravado and their refusal to become subservient on the lands they own. The references to the threat of becoming landless due to the corporate-friendly farm laws tend to invisibilize the fact that being landless is already the lived reality of a large section of Dalit peasants.21 While, on the one hand, some of the songs, especially those released in the ÿrst few months of the protests, speciÿcally address the dominant-caste Jatt landowners, in the months following the setting up of protest sites at Delhi’s borders, there appears to be a tapering down of this caste address despite persisting faultlines, which also points to the conversations taking place during the agitation, especially to the critique by the Dalit groups within the movement.22 Many of these later songs do not address the Jatt landowners directly, and they tend to overlook the existing discrimination of Dalit peasants in favor of calls for unity between the farmers and agricultural laborers. At the same time, many singers and songwriters who are known for songs critiquing the caste system have also released a number of immensely popular songs expressing support of the farmers’ protests.23 In the following three sections, I explore the modes through which these songs and their visual iterations in music videos responded to the dominant media representation of farmers’ concerns, articulated farmers’ resistance to state repression, and further heightened this epistemic interference by including farmers’ representations of themselves and their situation. The songs foreground the protesting farmers as essential food growers of the nation who are resilient in their opposition to unjust powers. The pop songs also present the

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farmers’ analysis of the laws and foreground what is at stake. The songs frequently invoke the trope of ‘Dilli’ (Delhi) as an unjust seat of power, and by tracing the lineage of the current farmers’ protests to previous regional struggles against the capital, they showcase the collective agency of the farmers as knowers and history-makers, and thus counter the narrative that they are ignorant and manipulated.

‘Punjab Bolda’:24 the protest song as critique of the farm laws In stark contrast to the dominant narrative that the farmers were naïve and did not understand the new farm laws, many of the popular protest songs emphasized how the laws would render the farmers more precarious than they already were. The songs frequently connect the usurpation of farmers’ lands and their rights to the new farm laws, and contain a working out of the farm laws and the capitalist destruction of the agrarian sector. With their catchy tunes and visuals that both showcase the persistence of the protesting farmers and exhort others to join them, these songs popularize critiques and analyses of the farm laws at a time when the government was dismissing the protesting farmers’ understanding as ignorance or naiveté. A number of songs point to the fact that the farm laws are intended to serve the corporate sector and not the farmers. They highlight the complicity of the government in ignoring the penury of farmers and prioritizing the proÿts of the corporate sector at the cost of farmers’ independence and welfare. Maninderjit Anmulla Jatt’s song ‘Farmer’ (‘Kissan’), released early on during the protests in September 2020, talks of the farmers’ precarious conditions which pushed many to suicide.25 It laments the invisibility of farmers’ suicides in public discourse and government policies, and points to the irony of this invisibilization in a highly mediatized culture of TikTok videos. The song also puts forward its understanding of the farm laws by drawing attention to the problems of contemporary agriculture that the new farm laws do not address. Among the problems it highlights are the increase in input prices and the lack of remuneration for seeds, which make farming unsustainable. In addition, the song points to government collusion with corporate interests, where elected political leaders do not represent farmers’ interests but only aim to ÿll their own co˝ers.26 Several other popular songs also bring up the pro-corporate and anti-farmer stance of the government and the new farm laws. For instance, ‘Tangle’ (‘Pecha’) by Kanwar Grewal and Harf Cheema, released in November 2020 and gathering millions of views in the following months, talks of Delhi’s bad intentions behind what are described as ‘black laws’ which threaten the farmers’ very existence.27 Kanwar Grewal’s song ‘Declaration’ (‘Ailaan’) or ‘Decisions of Harvest’ (‘Faslaan De Faisley’) also warns of the loss of farmers’ independence.28 Saishah Khan’s ‘Farmers’ Ire’ (‘Ros Kisana De’) talks about the government pushing ‘business’ into everything, implying its anti-people and pro-corporate

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stance, and criticizes it for having turned the nation into a mere market.29 The song thus also takes on the government’s nationalist rhetoric and its branding of the farmers’ protests as anti-national, as well as the allegation that the farmers have been misguided by separatists. Jass Bajwa’s song ‘Get Strong, Jatta’ (‘Jatta Takda Hoja’), released in September 2020, warns Punjab’s landowning farmers of politicians privileging corporations over farmers and bringing the private sector into agriculture.30 The song also highlights a predominant fear that farmers could become landless laborers on their own farms.31 In fact, scholars have long acknowledged the need for agricultural reforms while repeatedly pointing out longstanding sectoral problems and the state’s apathy toward farmers.32 That the new farm laws are to the detriment of farmers, and that the government’s intention behind these laws is to corporatize Indian agriculture, has also been underlined by several researchers. According to the economist Sudha Narayanan, the three farm acts ‘are not “farmer-centric”. Rather, they are focused on the “ease of doing business” of supply chain actors, with the [˛awed] premise that these actors will deliver beneÿts to the farmers’.33 Similarly, the agrarian and labor studies specialist Jens Lerche points out that the laws have made it abundantly clear to farmers that they matter very little to the government. Not for the ÿrst time has the BJP-led government sided with big corporate capital instead. While it pays lip service to competitive markets, it is steeped in crony capitalism. Multi-billionaires, big trading houses and agribusinesses with close connections to the government, such as the Adani and the Ambani groups, are expected by many to be the beneÿciaries from the opening up of the agricultural sector to corporate capital.34 Other critics have pointed toward the unequal power balance between farmers and corporations in the contract farming enabled by the new farm laws. ‘While the government is waxing eloquent about the “freedom” the farmers have to negotiate with the traders’, writes the economist Biswajit Dhar, ‘it is important to understand whether an ordinary Indian farmer has the ability to negotiate with large businesses and to get remunerative prices for their products’. Citing government data on farmholdings, he adds that even as per the government’s view, only the large farmers, or 0.57% of the total, are well-endowed. There cannot be a better indicator describing the vastly unequal bargaining powers between India’s farmers and large businesses. When have negotiations between entities with vastly unequal strengths beneÿted the weaker parties?35 It is therefore not surprising that in many songs attention is repeatedly drawn to the very real possibility of dispossession of land and of farmers becoming slaves

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on their own land. At the same time, the songs frame the protests against the laws as a matter of survival, not only for the farmers but also for others.36 This point has been underlined by researchers and experts such as Utsa Patnaik, who emphasizes that the farmers’ protests are not just about minimum support prices but also about the survival of the entire system of public procurement and distribution of foodgrains. Without ensuring the economic viability of foodgrains production in North India […] no continuity can be ensured for the public procurement and distribution system, which, despite its drawbacks, continues to provide a modicum of food security to vast numbers of our population.37 Activists have similarly pointed out how the new farm laws have detrimental consequences not just for the farmers but also for landless agricultural labor. As pointed out by the president of the Zameen Prapati Sangharsh Committee, an organization focusing on the land rights of Dalits and participating in the protests at Delhi’s borders, ‘If the government abolishes the Agricultural Produce Market Committees, lakhs of Dalit labourers will lose their livelihoods’.38 The songs, however, not only highlight what is at stake and what the future might hold if the laws were to be implemented, they also present the ‘farmers’ sense of meaningful survival’39 and foreground farmers’ lived experiences. One way in which the songs and their music videos do so is by representing the farmers doing their everyday work. We thus see images of toiling farmers, represented as connected to the earth, as generous ‘anndata’ or food providers, but also as victims of increasingly di°cult circumstances, highlighting their precarity. All of this also works toward building solidarity for the protests and presenting a counternarrative to the government’s representation of farm laws as farmer-friendly and the protests against it as misguided by a few rich farmers. This image of the farmer as simultaneously the nation’s food provider and the one deprived of food, which comes up frequently in the songs, will be discussed next.

The anndata’s struggle, resilience, and precarity As early as September 2020, some of the news media reported artists communities’ support of farmers’ protests against the three farm laws.40 Diljit Dosanjh, a popular ÿlm star and singer from Punjab, emphasized that the protests were about the rights of the nation’s food providers (‘desh de anndata’).41 In many of the songs, this image of the farmers as food providers for people and for the nation is central. This image serves to counter the government narrative that the protests involve only rich farmers and middlemen (‘arthiyas’) and anti-national separatists. The songs counter the government narrative by drawing upon two images—of farmers as providers of food, and of farming families as providers of

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the soldiers who protect the nation’s borders. By juxtaposing the farmer and the soldier, the songs also tap into the sentiments inherent in the slogan ‘Victory to the Soldier, Victory to the Farmer’ (‘Jai Jawan Jai Kisan’) popularized by India’s former Prime Minister, Lal Bahadur Shastri, during a time period where the country was facing food grain shortages and had been in wars with two of its neighboring countries.42 For instance, Anmol Gagan Maan’s ‘Farmers vs Politics’ (‘Kisaan vs Rajneeti’) criticizes the government for taking rotis away from those growing food,43 while Gippy Grewal’s ‘Cruel Governments’ (‘Zaalam Sarkara’) points to farmers ÿlling the ‘stomach of the world’ while themselves going to sleep hungry.44 Harbhajan Mann’s ‘Food Provider’ (‘Anndata’), released in October 2020 when the protestors had not yet arrived at Delhi’s borders, sketches a similar portrayal of the farmer toiling without break, providing food for everyone, his honor bound up with the land now being snatched away by thugs.45 The farmers are thus associated with hard work and the government with deception and theft. The accompanying images show men engaged in various farming activities. These stills in sepia frames are splashed with drops the color of mud or dried blood. This representation conveys the food provider bearing the burden of hardships in an unending rhythm that gives no pause. The melancholic tone of the song goes with the refrain that o˝ers an ode to the toil of the ‘simple’ farmer. Three months later, in another song by Harbhajan Mann, ‘A Wave of Farming’ (‘Leher Kisani Di’),46 we see more deÿant images involving protesting farmers. This contrasts with the stills of toiling farmers in the ‘Anndata’ song. In fact, the representations of the anndata on the streets became a central feature of most of the protest songs, once the protests reached Delhi and the media began to cover the protests as well as the police violence faced by the protestors. Mann’s ‘Leher Kisani Di’ refers to farmers as having risen to protect their land, and points to the irony when those who feed everyone are now ‘eating lathis’, a reference to state violence. This ironic juxtaposition is used in many other songs, such as Maninderjit Anmulla Jatt’s ‘Kissan’, discussed earlier. Another recurrent trope of injustice in these songs is that of farmers being viewed as enemies in their own nation. ‘Leher Kisani Di’ shows images of an old, unarmed farmer being beaten with a lathi by a policeman,47 of protestors on streets holding signs critiquing the farm laws, and of a line of tractors making their way to the protest site at the Delhi border. The pro-government media narrative pointed to the tractor as the main symbol of protest, thus dismissing the protests as the domain only of rich farmers. Although images of mass gatherings of farmers protesting at Delhi’s borders are frequently used in protest music videos, they also often show an array of farming implements depicting the daily toil of farming work. References to prosperous farmers now ready to sit on the streets to protest and demand the rights to which they are entitled occur alongside references to the impoverished

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toiling farmer. The songs thus present a range of images re˛ecting the range of groups that composed the protests. However, what connects the two songs discussed above by Harbhajan Mann—highlighting the farm work and the protests, highlighting the leisurely lifestyles as well as lives marked by toil—is a foregrounding of the resilience of farmers. The foregrounding of resilience had the potential to mobilize more people to join the protests as well as to communicate the resoluteness of the protestors to the central government in Delhi. Elly Mangat’s ‘Rebel Farmers’ (‘Baaghi Kisan’) uses the anndata imagery to ask people sitting in air-conditioned rooms to rise up in support for their food growers. While on the one hand it draws attention to how the food provider has been forsaken on the streets, it on the other hand warns that Delhi’s own food security is at stake if it does not pay heed to the food provider.48 The use of the anndata imagery brings together the resilience and the penury tropes, representing the farmers as both masters and providers who belong to and support vulnerable communities in need of help.49 This amalgamation of strength and precarity is also evident in the representation of farmers as soldiers. For instance, in ‘Punjab Speaks’ (‘Punjab Bolda’),50 we see Kulwant Singh, a Sikh farmer from Punjab, who was preparing to join the protests at Delhi’s borders when the news of his son’s death arrived. His son, 22-year-old Ri˛eman Sukhbir Singh, had died ‘in the line of duty’ at the Indo-Pak border. At a point when the pro-government mainstream media was dismissing the protesters as anti-nationals and separatists, this incident was picked up by the farmers’ movement to contest the anti-national narrative, and became particularly signiÿcant since many soldiers come from farming families.51 The images of father and son in ‘Punjab Bolda’ accompany lyrics that point out how 21-year-old men join the army and do not look back, and that India can sleep because the Sikh soldiers stand guard at its borders. These words are succeeded by references to anti-colonial freedom ÿghters and how the central government is not treating the farmers like its own, even as Punjab’s neighboring states have to come stand with Punjab’s farmers in support. The lyrics emphasize the bravery of the soldiers, farmers’ sons, and the many anti-colonial freedom ÿghters from the region, challenging the government to regain independence merely by doing yoga if the ‘white man’ were to rule again.52 Other songs, such as ‘Proud to be a Farmer’53 and ‘Food Provider’ (‘Andata’),54 play upon the link between the large number of soldiers posted at national borders, who hail from farming families in Punjab, and the farmers protesting at Delhi’s borders. ‘Andata’ refers to soldiers from Punjab who never return from the borders, implying both their service to the nation and their resoluteness in protesting at Delhi’s borders till their critique of the new farm laws is addressed. The song also points out that it is soldiers from farming families who ÿnally come home wrapped in the national ˛ag, which in the context of this song is also a reference to the many protestors who lost their lives in the police violence, and whose images are shown in the music video. It thus

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reverses the government’s and media’s rhetoric of protesting farmers as anti-nationals and ‘attwadis’ (terrorists) or Khalistani separatists. The precarity and the strength that this image evokes is again used to draw attention to their plight, but also to caution about the resoluteness of protesting farmers who never turn away from borders, which also implies the Delhi borders forming the camp sites for the farmers’ protests. Through these images the songs show farmers as generous food providers and protectors of the nation, while also highlighting their resilience and thus their ability to carry forward the protests against the new farm laws. At the same time, the sentiment linked with it in the lyrics and images is that of a toiling farmer providing food for others through exhausting labor and in stark conditions, but unable to meet his or her own basic needs through this labor. The same imagery of food provider, border-protector also highlights their extreme vulnerability and precarity, thus calling for the solidarity of the populace and the government’s concern. However, this call for solidarity and compassion toward the farmers’ di°culties is not only because they provide food for us and are vulnerable themselves, but is framed as a right, as a ‘haq’, which will be discussed in the conclusion. The next section explores in further detail the regional in˛ections in these songs and the use of historical ÿgures from Punjab.

‘Sun Dilliye’:55 singing the history of rebellion against Delhi The trope of Delhi in these protest songs works as a spatio-temporal point of unity—both in the way in which Delhi is deÿned as a seat of power that is unjust and indi˝erent to farmers’ concerns, as well a site against which the protesting farmers deÿne themselves. In highlighting their protests against an unjust seat of power, symbolized by Delhi, many of the songs invoke historical ÿgures from the Punjab region and present farmers’ protests in relation to previous movements against injustice. By doing so, they challenge the government’s representation of the protesting farmers as manipulated by opposition parties, and foreground their collective agency. In this context, the history of Sikhism and the ten Sikh Gurus who dedicated their lives protecting their community from oppressive Sultanate and Mughal rulers between the 16th and 18th centuries is often invoked. Also invoked is the history of India’s struggle for independence from the British colonial power and of freedom ÿghters from this region, such as Bhagat Singh, Sohan Singh Bhakna, and Baba Kharak Singh. In addition, there are references to the Naxal movement of the 1960s and 1970s, represented by poets such as Sant Ram Udasi. Yet another historical layer that appears in the songs is that of the decade of militancy and state repression in the 1980s in the Punjab and the Sikh genocide of 1984. For instance, Kanwar Grewal’s ‘Open Your Eyes’ (‘Akhan khol’) invokes toward the end the words of the orthodox Sikh leader,

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Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, while Ranjit Bawa’s ‘Many Came, Many Left’ (‘Kinne aaye kinne gaye’) reminds one not to forget those who died in the partition violence in 1947 or the victims of the Sikh genocide of 1984.56 One of the individual ÿgures from the Mughal period that some of the songs evoke is Baba Baghel Singh, leader of the Karorsinghia confederacy. Baghel Singh, who was from a village near Karnal in northern India, had led the Sikh forces that defeated the Mughal emperor’s army and entered Delhi to hoist the Sikh ˛ag, Nishan Sahib, at the Red Fort in 1783. The reigning emperor Shah Alam II was forced to negotiate a compromise, and his throne was spared. Many songs of the farmers’ protests (which are still ongoing at the time of writing) mobilize the ÿgure of Baghel Singh and his ÿght against oppressive rulers in Delhi:57 the songs by Elly Mangat and Harvy Sandhu, for example. In ‘Baaghi Kisan’, Elly Mangat wonders if Delhi has forgotten Baba Baghel Singh, and how the farmers of his region have always refused to give in to oppression. The song also evokes the Nishan Sahib ˛ag that Baghel Singh hoisted on the Red Fort, while representing it no longer as the Sikh ˛ag, but instead reframing it as the ˛ag of farming (‘jhanda […] kisani’), a phrase that comes up in many other songs.58 Harvy Sandhu in ‘Delhi, What’s Your Price?’ (‘Delhi Mull Lai Laiye’) challenges Delhi and reminds it of Baghel Singh, with a caution that Delhi could see a repetition of 1783.59 In this case too, the song evokes the memory of the challenge that Baghel Singh’s forces posed, and reminds Delhi of the farmers’ resolve not to back down before a strong oppressive force. Rupinder Handa’s ‘Tangle with Delhi’ (‘Pecha Dilli Naal’) likewise evokes the history of Punjab’s struggles against the Mughal empire and the British colonial empire, thus framing the farmers’ protests as a historical ÿght against an unjust seat of power.60 Ranjit Bawa’s ‘Punjab Bolda’ also evokes anti-colonial freedom ÿghters Sohan Singh Bhakna and Baba Kharak Singh, and claims their legacy by referring to them and those left behind in Lahore as one’s own blood.61 Sohan Singh Bhakna (1870–1968) was one of the leaders of the Ghadar Party, which was founded by northern Indian immigrants in North America in the early 20th century. The Ghadar Party has been described as ‘the most formidable anticolonial mobilization of an Indian community’; the Lahore Conspiracy Trials of 1915–1916 led to the execution or imprisonment of many of its members by the British colonial government.62 Baba Kharak Singh (1868–1963) was a Sikh leader and freedom ÿghter, who was jailed several times for participating in the Non-Cooperation Movement and other protests against the British colonial government. In ‘Punjab Bolda’, the lyrics referring to these historical ÿgures are accompanied not by their images but by those of old farmers currently protesting at Delhi’s borders, showing them sitting on the streets, exercising with agility, holding farmers’ unions’ ˛ags. The reference to Lahore is interesting for its historical connotations relating to the separation of numerous communities and families due to the Partition of India and Pakistan, as well as to the

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two ÿgures, as it indicates the Lahore Conspiracy Trials which saw many from Ghadar Party executed or imprisoned, and to Lahore as a location of many anti-colonial protests. Through the inclusion of Lahore, the song also moves beyond a narrow understanding of the struggle in nationalist terms to an understanding in terms of a broader regional history of struggle against structural colonial oppression. Apart from referring to previous anti-colonial movements against oppression and historical ÿgures related to them, several songs also evoke the revolutionary Dalit poet and activist Sant Ram Udasi (1939–1986), who was a schoolteacher and considered a poet of the masses.63 In one music video, Gurshabad sings Udasi’s poem ‘Time to Arise’ (‘Uthan da Vela’), for example. The poem, which was composed in the second half of the 20th century, exhorted those toiling to rise in protest against their oppression and uproot it.64 Accompanying these words in Gurshabad’s music video are images of farmers sitting on railway lines and at protest sides surrounded by barricades on Delhi’s borders. Similarly, Mandeep Randhawa sings Udasi’s ‘Dilliye Deyala Vekh’,65 which talks of Delhi’s apathy and callousness toward the masses. Randhawa’s music video shows images of the protesting farmers as well as paintings depicting the oppression of Sikhs by Mughal emperors in the 17th century. Interestingly, Udasi’s poem, while recounting the peasant struggle in post-independence Punjab, itself evokes previous histories of oppression emanating from Delhi by mobilizing the ÿgure of the ninth Sikh Guru Teg Bahadur and his disciple Mati Das, who were executed in 1675 in Delhi by the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb. Randhawa’s music video adds another layer by juxtaposing the lyrics with the images of Prime Minister Modi and the industrialists Adani and Ambani, who symbolize the corporations that the farm laws are seen to be beneÿting.66 In building a lineage between the farmers’ protests and previous anti-colonial and anti-imperial movements, as well as post-independence struggles and the Sikh militancy of the 1980s, these songs legitimize the current protests and work against the government’s accusations that the farmers are anti-national. At the same time, this history is used to mobilize support and assert the farmers’ collective agency against allegations of being manipulated by the opposition parties, as well as to highlight the current movement’s historical signiÿcance. In mobilizing movements and individuals from the Punjab region’s history, the songs locate the current central government in Delhi—with its refusal to discuss the new laws at length in parliament and to address the farmers’ critique—in the lineage of former oppressive seats of powers. These songs evoke an autocratic ‘Dilli’—that of British colonial rule and the rule of the Delhi Sultanate and the Mughal Empire. In doing so, they connect the current government’s autocratic disregard for people’s rights and farmers’ survival to previous histories of oppression emanating from Delhi, such as exploitative policies of taxation that caused mass su˝ering in previous centuries in this region, and were challenged by peasant rebellions.

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The central government in Delhi, which is depicted as serving corporate interests rather than the interests of the farmers, is thus seen as continuing with this history of oppression. Indeed, through titles such as ‘Farmers Versus Delhi’, ‘Watch It, Delhi’, and ‘Listen, Delhi’, many of the songs index Delhi as an unjust seat of power.67 Every song that celebrates the farmers’ ability to stand up for their rights also frames their ÿght as a challenge to the regime in ‘Dilli’, a regime characterized by its disregard for the welfare of ordinary people and particularly for food growers. Farmers have highlighted during these protests the autocratic manner in which the new farm laws were passed, which showed disregard for the spirit of federalism when, for example, the central government refused to allow the farm bills to be discussed in the state legislatures. ‘Despite the fact that the parliament is not empowered by the constitution to enact major changes in the agriculture sector, the Modi government has twisted rules, foraying into states’ ambit, to pass the contentious farm bills’, a senior advocate in the Indian Supreme Court, Bishwajit Bhattacharyya, pointed out.68 The ‘Dilli’ of the present is portrayed in the songs as powerful and cruel, indi˝erent to its people, and marked by a cold distance toward the people it is supposed to represent. Dilli, as used in these songs, is thus a palimpsest of previous struggles, while the notion of self that emerges is similarly layered by previous struggles against this Dilli. The songs often locate the protesting farmers as belonging to a long history of struggles against an oppressive center represented by ‘Dilli’. The songs also capture the wide range of possibilities available to protestors, giving expression to the willingness to sacriÿce lives for one’s rights,69 the threats of violence,70 the calls for protesting the laws through peaceful means and patience, and the insistence on living rather than dying for the struggle.71 Memories of histories of oppression as they are played out in these popular songs question the legitimacy of the current government as well as the government’s narrative that the farmers have been manipulated by opposition parties or a few rich landowners. The songs’ invocation of these histories showcases the collective agency of the protesting farmers, their understanding of their struggle, and their use of these histories to legitimize the protests and mobilize support.

Conclusion The attempt by the central government and the pro-government media to manage the farmers’ criticism of the laws was in denial of the fact that the farmers could represent themselves, their concerns and critiques. The question of justice that the farmers raised is also a question of representation. What emerges from the analysis of the songs discussed here is how, in countering the epistemic injustice in the framing of farmers’ protests by the government and the pro-government mainstream media, a range of histories are mobilized and

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invoked in the same movement. The histories invoked here range from popular Sikh histories to various left movements, and involve religious ÿgures, anticolonial freedom ÿghters, and separatists. Confronted with increasing authoritarianism and the current central government’s disregard of India’s federalist traditions, there is also a consolidation of the self taking place through the mobilization of these histories in the protest songs. Alongside the persistent opposition to the regime in Delhi, the farmers’ protests have also led to the emergence of new solidarities.72 In the epistemic interference that is o˝ered by the songs to the narratives broadcast through government and mainstream media channels, what is also being emphasized and mobilized is the value of lived experience of the farming communities and a critique born of it. In doing so, these songs serve as a reminder that the category of epistemic expertise ought to incorporate practice and lived experience. The songs showcase the epistemic agency of the farmers and those from farming communities in conveying their understanding of their situation, in communicating and consolidating the self through representations of farmers’ toil, their lived experience and their historical memory during this moment of crisis. At the same time, many of the songs also locate the present moment of farmers’ protests in a temporal horizon bracketed between the past and future histories—between the past histories of oppression and rebellion being gathered around the trope of Delhi, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the future history about this moment to be written by the generations to come. Both past and future histories are seen as calling upon the protesting farmers to challenge the injustice being in˛icted by the center. The songs represent the protesting farmers’ view of themselves as making history, and of the current moment of history calling upon them; they frequently refer to the accountability that the current moment and the farmers owe to the future—to future generations, to the pages of tomorrow’s history.73 The songs in support of the farmers’ protests show a wide range of articulations of critique of the laws, of the lived experience of food growers and their concerns, and of their embeddedness in the history of the region. In almost all of them, a strong theme of the entitlement to rights (‘haq’) underpins these di˝erent articulations, which challenges the notion of agricultural subsidies as a matter of charity.74 Haq is represented as a right not just of individuals but also of communities. In the context of the central government’s overstepping the mark by passing laws related to agriculture (passing such laws is enshrined in the Constitution as a matter for the individual states to legislate on), the demand for haq in these songs also symbolizes the struggle for the rights of the states. The songs place Delhi in the lineage of unjust seats of power, and the collective self that positions Delhi thus as a rights-bearing citizen who demands state subsidies not as charity but as a right.75 In the campsites of protesting farmers that sprang up on the borders of Delhi, this demand rang through, not

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just in experts’ critiques, but through these popular songs played as anthems of the protests, repeatedly from trolleys, tractors, and phones, articulating the epistemic agency of the farming communities.76

Notes 1 After promulgating the ordinances on June 5, 2020, the three new farm bills were introduced in the Lok Sabha on September 14 and passed within three days, while the Rajya Sabha passed them on September 20. By September 27, they were signed by the President of India and enacted as laws. The three laws are: (i) the Farmers (Empowerment and Protection) Agreement on Price Assurance and Farm Services Act, 2020, (ii) the Farmers’ Produce Trade and Commerce (Promotion and Facilitation) Act, 2020, and (iii) the Essential Commodities (Amendment) Act, 2020. According to experts, the laws herald ‘a fundamental reorientation of the existing regulatory framework’. Two of the bills relax ‘restrictions governing purchase and sale of farm produce […] and on stocking […], and the third […] enable[s] contract farming based on written agreements’. Sudha Narayanan, ‘The Three Farm Bills: Is This the Market Reform Indian Agriculture Needs?’ The India Forum, October 2, 2020, theindiaforum.in/article/three-farm-bills. On November 19, 2021, more than a year since farmers began protesting, Prime Minister Modi announced that his government would repeal the three laws. However, Modi’s reference to the protesting farmers in his address retained the framework of infantilization by emphasizing that the farmers had not understood the import of the new laws despite his attempts to explain it to them. Nonika Sharma, ‘“Let’s Start Afresh”, PM Tells Farmers’, NDTV, November 19, 2021, ndtv.com/india-news/pm-narendra-modiaddresses-nation-top-quotes-2616683#pfrom=home-ndtv_topscroll. 2 This led the Akali Dal, a coalition partner of the BJP to quit the government. Vikas Vasudeva, ‘Akalis quit NDA, say Centre ignored farmers’ sentiments’, Hindu, September 26, 2020, thehindu.com/news/national/shiromani-akali-dal-bjpsoldest-ally-leaves-nda-over-farm-bills/article32704939.ece. 3 ‘Leaving agriculture in the states’ domain was a substantive part of the federal character, which has been held to be a basic feature of the Constitution’. M. Sridhar Acharyulu, ‘Farm laws: Constitutional half-truths’, Deccan Herald, January 19, 2021, deccanherald.com/opinion/main-article/farm-laws-constitutional-halftruths-940625.html. Also see, Bishwajit Bhattacharyya, ‘How Parliament Overstepped Itself in Bringing the Three Farm Laws’, Wire, January 21, 2021, thewire. in/agriculture/how-the-parliament-overstepped-in-bringing-the-three-farmlaws. Bhattacharyya writes, The subject matter of legislative competence of the parliament (or a state) emanates from Article 246 of the constitution. Article 246 envisages three lists: I (Union List), II (State List), and III (Concurrent List) applies to both Union and states. From a bare look at the above entries under three lists, it stands established that the parliament lacks legislative competence under Articles 245 and 246 to enact any law pertaining to ‘agriculture’, except through the gateway of entry 41 of List III (Concurrent List). This entry, however, relates only to agricultural land that is evacuee property, which is not the case in respect of three farm laws. 4 Amrit Dhillon and Hannah Ellis-Petersen, ‘Digging In: On the Frontlines as Farmers Lay Siege to Delhi’, Guardian, December 11, 2020, theguardian.com/ world/2020/dec/11/farmers-delhi-protest-india-modi 5 ‘India’s Top Court Puts Controversial Farm Laws on Hold’, BBC News, January 12, 2021, bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-55615482

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6 ‘Protesting Farmers Not ‘Properly Understood’ New Farm Laws’, Times of India, November 29, 2020, timesoÿndia.indiatimes.com/business/india-business/ protesting-farmers-not-properly-understood-new-farm-laws-niti-aayog-member/ articleshow/79472670.cms 7 Anna Priyadarshini, ‘“Misled”, “Brainwashed”, “Instigated”: How Primetime TV Covered Farmer Protests’, Newslaundry, November 28, 2020, https:// w w w.newslaundr y.com/2020/11/28/misled-brainwashed-instigated-howprimetime-tv-covered-farmer-protests 8 Balbir Punj, ‘Agitation Against Farm Laws Only Serves Interest of Rich, Elite Farmers’, Indian Express, February 9, 2021, indianexpress.com/article/opinion/ columns/farm-laws-agitation-framers-msp-agriculture-sector-india-7180219/ 9 ‘Farmers’ Agitation Hijacked; Khalistani Terrorists behind Violence during Protests?’ Zee News, November 28, 2020, https://zeenews.india.com/india/ dna-exclusive-farmers-agitation-hijacked-khalistani-terrorists-behind-violenceduring-protests-2327127.html 10 Neelam Pandey and Shanker Arnimesh, ‘This Is How Modi Govt Plans to Address Farmers’ Problems, End Protests’, The Print, November 30, 2020, theprint. in/india/governance/this-is-how-modi-govt-plans-to-address-farmers-problemsend-protests/554809/ 11 ‘Khattar Accuses Political Parties of “Sponsoring” Farmers’ Stir; Capt Amarinder Hits Back’, Tribune, November 28, 2020, tribuneindia.com/news/haryana/ khattar-accuses-political-parties-of-sponsoring-farmers-stir-capt-amarinder-hitsback-177173 12 For more on the shaping of this narrative, see Prateek Waghre, ‘Radically Networked Societies: The Case of Farmers’ Protests in India’, Indian Public Policy Review 2, no. 3 (2021): 10. 13 Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Elsewhere Fricker notes, ‘Despite the speciÿc label, the speech act in which his word is expressed need not be strictly that of testimony or telling, but might equally be the airing of an opinion, suggestion, or relevant possibility’. See Miranda Fricker, ‘Epistemic Injustice and the Preservation of Ignorance’, in The Epistemic Dimensions of Ignorance, eds. Rik Peels and Martijn Blaauw (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 161. 14 Gaile Pohlhaus Jr., ‘Relational Knowing and Epistemic Injustice: Toward a Theory of Willful Hermeneutical Ignorance’, Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 27 (2012): 716. 15 See, for example, trolleytimes.online/about 16 Simona Sawhney, ‘Singhu: The Unwritten’, Dalit Camera, January 19, 2021, dalitcamera.com/singhu-the-unwritten/ 17 This also refers to the title of the song ‘Farmer Anthem’ (‘Kisaan Anthem’), which has been one of the most popular songs of these protests. Mankirt Aulakh, Nishawn Bhullar, Afsana Khan et al., ‘Kisaan Anthem’, YouTube video, December 8, 2020, youtube.com/watch?v=oNJiVuPmh9A&ab_channel=ShreeBrar Within a year of the start of the protests, the number of Punjabi songs expressing support for the farmers had run into several hundreds. This chapter mainly focuses on some of the most popular singers and songs, whose viewcount on YouTube runs into millions or several hundred thousand at the time of writing. A few of the songs used to illustrate the arguments in the individual sections may have relatively lower viewcounts as well. 18 Some of the Punjabi women singers supporting the protests are Afsana Khan, Rupinder Handa, Gurlej Akhtar, Anmol Gagan Mann, Jagjit Kaur Nikki, Jaspreet Kaur Jassi, and Ginni Mahi. For more about women singers, see Shivangi Thapa, ‘These Punjabi Women Artists are Supporting the Protesting Farmers’, SheThePeople,

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November 30, 2020, shethepeople.tv/news/punjabi-farmers-protest-punjabi-womenartists-support/ 19 Apart from their usual farm work, many young women activists have been a part of the movement from its beginning, and have been central to its organization and mobilization. See, for instance, Navsharan Singh, ‘Women Bring a Spring of Hope to the Farm Movement’, The India Forum, May 7, 2021, theindiaforum.in/article/ what-did-women-bring-farm-movement. Nilanjana Bhowmick, ‘“I Cannot Be Intimidated. I Cannot Be Bought”. The Women Leading India’s Farmers’ Protests’, Time, March 4, 2021, time.com/5942125/women-india-farmers-protests/ 20 José Medina, ‘Toward a Foucaultian Epistemology of Resistance: CounterMemory, Epistemic Friction, and Guerilla Pluralism’, Foucault Studies 12 (2011): 10. 21 Despite the continuing caste inequalities and discrimination against them, many Dalit agricultural laborers and farmworkers’ unions have also been part of farmers’ protests, although there remains a deep divide in their access to resources at the protest sites as well. See Ranjini Basu, ‘The Threat of Corporate Interests is a Key Unifying Factor in the Farmer Protests’, Wire, January 21, 2021, thewire.in/agriculture/farmers-protests-agriculture-laws-corporate-interests; Amandeep Sandhu, ‘Left, Khaps, Gender, Caste: The Solidarities Propping Up the Farmers’ Protest’, Caravan, January 13, 2021, caravanmagazine.in/agriculture/left-punjab-haryanacaste-gender-solidarities-farmers-protest. According to Sandhu, Gurmukh Mann, the founder of Sangrur-Barnala based Zameen Prapti Sangarsh Committee—an organisation that works to secure land rights for Dalit labourers—said in an interview that it was imperative for Dalit workers to support the farmer movement. ‘Our struggle against Jatts is possible within the current structure. If this structure erodes, our struggle against corporatisation of agriculture will be much worse,’ Mann said. 22 Shivam Mogha, ‘“Kisan-Mazdoor Ekta”: A Slogan to Unify Farmers and Labourers— and Break Caste Barriers’, Wire, December 29, 2021, thewire.in/rights/kisan-mazdoorekta-a-slogan-to-unify-farmers-and-labourers-and-break-caste-barriers 23 One of Ranjit Bawa’s songs was criticized by BJP leaders as anti-Hindu due to its critique of the hypocrisies underlying the Hindu caste system. Bawa was threatened with court cases, and although he took the song down from his YouTube channel, it continues to be popular. See Aditya Menon, ‘Anti-Hindu or Pro-Dalit? Punjabi Song Riles Some, Inspires Others’, Quint, May 8, 2020, thequint.com/news/india/ ranjit-bawa-punjabi-song-mera-ki-kasoor-dalits-hindu 24 This is a reference to the title of a song by Ranjit Bawa. Ranjit Bawa, ‘Punjab Speaks’ (‘Punjab Bolda’), YouTube video, December 8, 2020, youtube.com/ watch?v=3mjmmNq7XgA&ab_channel=RanjitBawa 25 Maninderjit Anmulla Jatt, ‘Kissan’, YouTube video, September 22, 2020, youtube. com/watch?v=si4Bv_YvwPA 26 The relevant lyrics are ‘Oh dilli baithe gharde sakeemaan rehnde ne, […] ina da ta kade bharya khazaana na’. Maninderjit Anmulla Jatt, ‘Kissan’. 27 ‘Kaalia neetiya karde laagu oh niyat maari dilli dee, Tere gall tak pahuch gayee aa aan kuhadi dilli dee’. Kanwar Grewal and Harf Cheema, ‘Pecha’, YouTube video, November 21, 2020, youtube.com/watch?v=QxAmWiZi2Kc&ab_channel= KanwarGrewal 28 Kanwar Grewal, ‘Ailaan’. Following a government directive, YouTube removed this song from its website in February 2021. Some other songs met with the same fate without any clariÿcation given about the reasons. 29 Saishah Khan, ‘Ros Kisana De’, YouTube video, December 18, 2020, youtube. com/watch?v=mp9JEnq8CWY&ab_channel=PunjabiTadkaTV 30 Jass Bajwa, ‘Jatta Takda Hoja’, YouTube video, September 23, 2020, youtube.com/ watch?v=Ct_Li7ujnPQ&ab_channel=JassBajwa-Topic

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31 The threat of losing lands also found expression in other songs such as Kanwar Grewal and Galav Waraich’s ‘Punjab Will Win’ (‘Jittunga Punjab’), which warns of the new farm laws as eating up the farmers’ ÿelds. Interestingly, this reveals the landowning farmers to be the main addressees of these songs, since many peasants in the region are already landless and in far more precarious positions than those owning land. Kanwar Grewal and Galav Waraich, ‘Jittunga Punjab’, YouTube video, July 10, 2021, youtube.com/watch?v=UBUDqrq_HOU&ab_channel=KanwarGrewal. See, Sandeep Singh, ‘“We Are One”: Why Punjab’s Landless Dalits Are Standing with Protesting Farmers’, Wire, January 7, 2021, thewire.in/caste/ punjab-landless-dalit-farmers-protest 32 As Surinder Jodhka summarizes, Public agricultural extension services have all but disappeared, leaving farmers to the mercy of private dealers of seed and other inputs such as fertilizer and pesticides who function without adequate regulation, creating problems of wrong crop choices, excessively high input prices, spurious inputs and extortion. Public crop marketing services have also declined in spread and scope, and marketing margins imposed by private traders have therefore increased. All this happened over a period when farmers were actively encouraged to shift to cash crops, away from subsistence crops which involved less monetized inputs and could ensure at least consumption survival of peasant households.

33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

41 42 43

Surinder S. Jodhka, ‘Beyond “Crises”: Rethinking Contemporary Punjab Agriculture’, Economic and Political Weekly 41, no. 16 (2006): 1530–1537 (1534). Sudha Narayanan, as quoted in Patralekha Chatterjee, ‘Agricultural Reform in India: Farmers versus the State’, in The Lancet Planetary Health 5, no. 4, (April 1, 2021): E187–E189. Jens Lerche, ‘The Farm Laws Struggle 2020–2021: Class-Caste Alliances and Bypassed Agrarian Transition in Neoliberal India’, The Journal of Peasant Studies 48 (2021): 2. Biswajit Dhar, ‘Protesting “Agri Reform”: Why Do Farmers Feel the Deck Is Stacked Against Them?’ Wire, December 14, 2020, thewire.in/agriculture/ agri-reform-farmers-protest-msp-pdscontract-farming Kanwar Grewal, Galav Waraich, Harf Cheema’s song ‘Jittunga Punjab’ for instance presents the issue as one of food (‘masla ae roti da’), while Darshan Aulakh’s ‘Kisaan’ also underscores this aspect. Utsa Patnaik, ‘The Global Angle to the Farmer Protests’, Hindu, December 30, 2020, thehindu.com/opinion/lead/the-global-angle-to-the-farmer-protests/article33447976.ece Singh, ‘We Are One’. Gopal Guru, ‘Infallible Farm Laws?’ Economic and Political Weekly 55, no.48 (2021): 9. Raakhi Jagga, ‘Paintings, Songs, Movies: Artists Community Rallies in Favour of Protesting Farmers’, Indian Express, September 20, 2020, indianexpress.com/ article/india/paintings-songs-movies-artistse-community-rallies-in-favour-ofprotesting-farmers-6602837 Mohammed Ghazali, ‘Singers Diljit Dosanjh, Daler Mehndi Weigh in Amid Row Over Farm Bills’, NDTV, September 20, 2020, ndtv.com/india-news/farm-billrow-punjabi-artistes-use-songs-social-media-to-amplify-farmers-voice-2298251 Anandita Bajpai, ‘Making the New Indian Citizen in Times of the Jawan (Soldier) and the Kisan (Farmer), 1962–1965’, Comparativ 28, no. 5 (2018): 97. ‘Nit jam nal breada khande ne kyu bhul gaye kisana da kheta to jande ne, Jihane roti diti ohto roti khondi aa’. Anmol Gagan Maan, ‘Kisaan vs Rajneeti’, YouTube video, September 22, 2020, youtube.com/watch?v=hWhZLQo8cr4

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44 ‘Dhidd bhar ke duniya da’. Gippy Grewal, ‘Zaalam Sarkaaraan’, YouTube video, December 3, 2020, youtube.com/watch?v=l2bJ1TaeH4E 45 The music video and the lyrics only refer to male farmers. Harbhajan Mann, ‘Anndata’, YouTube video, October 20, 2020, youtube.com/watch?v=MOLpKJahLvk 46 Harbhajan Mann, ‘Lehar Kisani Di’, YouTube video, January 24, 2021, youtube. com/watch?v=GiCVlzl2ha0. 47 For more on this image, taken by photojournalist Ravi Choudhary, of the old farmer (Sukhdev Singh) being beaten, and which became a well-known stand in for state violence against unarmed farmers, see Geeta Pandey, ‘India Farmers: The Viral Image That Deÿnes a Protest’, BBC News, December 2, 2020, bbc.com/ news/world-asia-india-55156219 48 Elly Mangat, ‘Baaghi Kisan’, YouTube video, September 25, 2020, youtube.com/ watch?v=2mQTwrzr6yU&ab_channel=GameKillerzRecords 49 The word ‘anndata’ refers to the one who provides food or sustenance and is also used as an address for a master or king. 50 Bawa, ‘Punjab Bolda’. 51 ‘Punjab Peasant’s Son Dies in Line of Duty Along LoC as Farmers of the State Take on Government’, DNA, November 28, 2020, dnaindia.com/india/news-punjabprotest-farmer-son-martyr-loc-rif leman-sukhbir-singh-cross-border-f iringpakistan-2858963 52 ‘Fauji deya mundeya […] Rab na kare je gora pher aa gaya, Lai leyo azaadi ohdon yoga karke’. Ranjit Bawa, ‘Punjab Bolda’. The reference to yoga here is a quip on PM Modi’s public performances of yoga, his party’s manipulation of it as a soft power tool for a Hindu nationalism, and their use of it to de˛ect attention from the growing culture of communal violence and intolerance in the country. ‘PM Modi Performs Yoga with Thousands at Delhi’s Rajpath’, NDTV, June 21, 2015, ndtv. com/photos/news/top-10-pm-modi-performs-yoga-with-thousands-at-delhisrajpath-20000#photo-256704 53 ‘Dilli wall desh de kisan chall paye ho borderan te putt khetan de, kitty pind hi basa na lain ni’. Kanwar Grewal, Rajvir Jawanda, Kamal Khan, ‘Proud to be a Farmer’, YouTube video, January 20, 2021, youtube.com/ watch?app=desktop&v=7ZvRMCr1gpk&ab_channel=BlackPointMusic 54 ‘Jehde kardi tirange da tu maan oh ch laashan saddiyan hi aaundiyan, Singh borderaan ton piche kade mudd gae ni mitt lu nasal dilliye’. Sukhbir Bajwa, ‘Andata’, YouTube video, May 27, 2021, youtube.com/watch?v=AIUGds6i2E&ab_channel=RanjitBawa 55 This is a reference to the title of at least three songs, meaning ‘Listen, Delhi’. Rajvir Jawanda, ‘Sun Dilliye’, YouTube video, December 2, 2020, https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=cZjzv8u7fCI&ab_channel=RajvirJawanda; Gagan Mallah, ‘Sun Delhiye’, YouTube video, December 7, 2020, youtube.com/watch?v=F45t2ElUdsw&ab_channel=BlackPointMusic; Ramneek and Simrita, ‘Dilliye Ni Sun Dilliye’, YouTube video, January 1, 2021, youtube.com/watch?v=0kEkwK5zS5A&ab 56 Kanwar Grewal, ‘Akhan Khol’, YouTube video, September 20, 2020, youtube.com/watch?v=42ZI9q0QFQs&ab_channel=KanwarGrewal; Ranjit Bawa, ‘Kinne Aaye, Kinne Gaye’, YouTube video, October 6, 2020, youtube.com/ watch?v=26vtBCQalSE&ab_channel=RanjitBawa. For additional similar references, see Adeela Naureen and Umar Waqar, ‘Punjabi folklore and farmers’ protests in Delhi’, Tribune, January 7, 2021, https://tribune.com.pk/story/2279096/ punjabi-folklore-and-farmers-protests-in-delhi 57 For more on Baghel Singh and his changing representations in Sikh history, see Kanika Singh, ‘Commemorating Baghel Singh’s ‘Conquest’ of Delhi: The Fateh Diwas’, Studies in History 36, no.2 (2020): 280–301. 58 ‘Oh lagda Baghel Singh yaad tainu reha ni […] Laal Kille utte chalu jhanda ae kissani’. Elly Mangat, ‘Baaghi Kisan’.

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59 ‘Karvaava chete tainu main Baghel Singh baare ni […] hun honi aa repeat es vaari 1783 keh laiye’. Harvy Sandhu, ‘Delhi Mull Lai Laiye’, YouTube video, January 15, 2020, youtube.com/watch?v=Pk1otAMBVyY&ab_channel=HarvySandhu 60 Rupinder Handa, ‘Pecha Dilli Naal’, YouTube video, December 6, 2020, youtube. com/watch?v=vQgariSxjds&ab_channel=GhaintRecords 61 ‘Oh Sohan Singh Bhakna, Khadak Singh dade aa reh gaye jo Lahore vich, ohvi khoon sadde aa’. Bawa, ‘Punjab Bolda’. 62 Parmbir Singh Gill, ‘A Di˝erent Kind of Dissidence: The Ghadar Party, Sikh History and the Politics Of Anticolonial Mobilization’, Sikh Formations: Religion, Culture, Theory 10, no.1 (2014): 24. 63 Avtar Singh and Nirupama Dutt, ‘In farm stir that has uniÿed, Udasi songs emerge as anthem’, Hindustan Times, December 9, 2020, hindustantimes.com/cities/ in-farm-stir-that-has-uniÿed-udasi-songs-emerge-as-anthem/story-mf T5q4LlRdTraOEMyZHpNO.html 64 ‘Utth Kirtiya, uth ve, utthan da vela’, translated as ‘Rise, O, Worker (those who toil), for it is the time to rise (in protest)’. This translation is from the article: thewire.in/rights/farmers-protest-farm-laws-art-celebrations-singhu-ghazipurtikri. Gurshabad, ‘Uthan da Vela’, YouTube video, October 9, 2020, youtube.com/ watch?v=Je1TlXZhyAg&ab_channel=Gurshabad 65 Mandeep Randhawa, ‘Fauji Khalse’, YouTube video, December 6, 2020, youtube. com/watch?v=3umKfmjhGqk&ab_channel=MandeepRandhawa 66 See Hartosh Singh Bal, ‘How the Adani Group Is Poised to Control the Agricultural Market Following the Farm Laws’, Caravan, April 9, 2021, caravanmagazine. in/excerpt/how-the-adani-group-is-poised-to-control-the-agricultural-marketfollowing-the-farm-laws 67 B Sandhu, ‘Kisan Vs Delhi’, YouTube video, September 25, 2020, youtube.com/ watch?v=cbZTtZLt5Lk&ab_channel=LOGAMUSIC; Jass Bajwa, ‘Dekh Dilliye’, YouTube video, January 8, 2021, youtube.com/watch?v=CFZc2Mdy0mI&ab_ channel=JassBajwa-Topic; Rajvir Jawanda, ‘Sun Dilliye’; Gagan Mallah, ‘Sun Delhiye’; Ramneek and Simrita, ‘Dilliye Ni Sun Dilliye’. 68 Bhattacharyya, ‘How Parliament Overstepped’. 69 For instance, Kanwar Grewal, Galav Waraich, Harf Cheema’s ‘Jittuga Punjab’. 70 Some of the songs refer to violent imagery such as the reference to ‘we will chop o˝’ in the title of Himmat Sandhu’s song ‘We Will Break’ (‘Asi Vaddange’), or the reference to the double-barreled gun (‘dunali’) in A.G. Maan’s ‘Kisaan vs Rajneeti’. Himmat Sandhu, ‘Asi Vaddange’, YouTube video, February 24, 2021, youtube. com/watch?v=2IPO_E5gv1s&ab_channel=HimmatSandhu. Sandhu’s song was taken down by YouTube following a government directive. See ‘YouTube pulls down songs on farm protest’, Tribune, February 6, 2021, tribuneindia.com/news/ punjab/youtube-pulls-down-songs-on-farm-protest-208948 71 For instance, Satinder Sartaj, ‘Law’ (‘Qanoon’), YouTube video, January 2, 2021, youtube.com/watch?v=sCASF8H0NIs&ab_channel=SagaHits. See also, Bir Singh’s ‘O Sons of the Soil’ (‘Mitti de putro ve’) which talks of learning to live for rights before dying for rights and of confronting the laws with minds, not swords. Bir Singh, ‘Mitti De Putro Ve’, YouTube video, October 15, 2020, youtube.com/ watch?v=VkHg-g5N67E&ab_channel=BirSingh 72 For more on the way these histories of Punjab are being linked in the farmers’ protests, see Sandhu, ‘Left, Khaps, Gender, Caste.’ For more on the role of the songs in the farmers’ movement, see Balbir Barn, ‘Lift As We Sing: The Role Of Songs During Farmers’ Protests’, Outlook, March 7, 2021, outlookindia.com/website/ story/opinion-lift-as-we-sing-the-role-of-songs-during-farmers-protests/376454 73 For instance, Bir Singh, ‘Mitti De Putro Ve’, YouTube video, October 15, 2020, youtube. com/watch?v=VkHg-g5N67E&ab_channel=BirSingh; Satinder Sartaj, ‘Tehreek’, February 17, 2021, youtube.com/watch?v=LjHJNZcPZ6A&ab_channel=SagaHits

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74 A powerful example of this is singer and songwriter Bir Singh’s comment that our anndata have now also become the guardians of our haq. He also highlighted that this issue was not just of the farmers’ but also of the rotis in every house. Bir Singh (@birsinghmusic), ‘Sangharsh jari hai’, October 4, 2021, twitter.com/i/ status/1445009249529057283 75 For instance, Mankirt Aulakh, Nishawn Bhullar, Afsana Khan et al., ‘Kisaan Anthem’. 76 After more than a year of protests by farmers, in November 2021, Prime Minister Narendra Modi was ÿnally compelled to repeal the three farm laws that had been hurriedly passed during the pandemic. Following the repeal of the laws in the Indian Parliament, the farmers vacated the protest sites at Delhi’s borders by the middle of December 2021. The farmers’ unions deferred the protests in the wake of the central government’s assurances about other related demands (such as extension of Minimum Support Price to all crops, compensation for farmers who lost their lives in the protests), although they continued various protest actions within their own districts in the states. At the time of writing, as the government is yet to fulÿl the other demands, Samyukt Kisan Morcha (the coalition of numerous farmers’ unions that led the protests) is beginning to pressure the government anew. See, for instance, ‘Centre hasn’t formed committee on MSP so far, farmers to observe “Virodh Diwas” on Jan 31: BKU’, Economic Times, January 15, 2022, economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/india/centre-hasnt-formed-committee-on-msp-sofar-farmers-to-observe-virodh-diwas-on-jan-31-bku/videoshow/88921633.cms; Vishwa Mohan, ‘No vote to BJP: Samyukta Kisan Morcha set to restart stir from Lakhimpur’, Times of India, January 16, 2022, timesoÿndia.indiatimes.com/india/ farmers-protest-2-o-lakhimpur-kheri-to-be-a-new-battleground-to-push-forpending-demands-from-january-21/articleshow/88922196.cms?from=mdr

Bibliography Acharyulu, M Sridhar. ‘Farm Laws: Constitutional Half-truths.’ Deccan Herald, January 19, 2021. deccanherald.com/opinion/main-article/farm-laws-constitutional-halftruths-940625.html Bajpai, Anandita. ‘Making the New Indian Citizen in Times of the Jawan (Soldier) and the Kisan (Farmer), 1962–1965.’ Comparativ 28, no.5 (2018): 97–120. Bal, Hartosh Singh. ‘How The Adani Group Is Poised to Control the Agricultural Market Following the Farm Laws’. Caravan, April 9, 2021. caravanmagazine.in/ excerpt/how-the-adani-group-is-poised-to-control-the-agricultural-marketfollowing-the-farm-laws Barn, Balbir. ‘Lift as We Sing: The Role of Songs during Farmers’ Protests.’ Outlook, March 7, 2021. outlookindia.com/website/story/opinion-lift-as-we-sing-therole-of-songs-during-farmers-protests/376454 Basu, Ranjini. ‘The Threat of Corporate Interests Is a Key Unifying Factor in the Farmer Protests.’ Wire, January 21, 2021. thewire.in/agriculture/farmersprotests-agriculture-laws-corporate-interests BBC News. ‘India’s Top Court Puts Controversial Farm Laws on Hold.’ January 12, 2021. bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-55615482 Bhattacharyya, Bishwajit. ‘How Parliament Overstepped Itself in Bringing the Three Farm Laws.’ Wire, January 21, 2021. thewire.in/agriculture/how-theparliament-overstepped-in-bringing-the-three-farm-laws Bhowmick, Nilanjana. ‘“I Cannot Be Intimidated. I Cannot Be Bought.” The Women Leading India’s Farmers’ Protests.’ Time, March 4, 2021. time.com/5942125/ women-india-farmers-protests/

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Chatterjee, Patralekha. ‘Agricultural Reform in India: Farmers versus the State.’ The Lancet Planetary Health 5, no.4, (April 1, 2021): E187–E189. Dhar, Biswajit. ‘Protesting “Agri Reform”: Why Do Farmers Feel the Deck is Stacked against Them?’ Wire, December 14, 2020. thewire.in/agriculture/ agri-reform-farmers-protest-msp-pdscontract-farming Dhillon, Amrit, and Hannah Ellis-Petersen. ‘Digging In: On the Frontlines as Farmers Lay Siege to Delhi.’ Guardian, December 11, 2020. theguardian.com/world/2020/ dec/11/farmers-delhi-protest-india-modi DNA. ‘Punjab Peasant’s Son Dies in Line of Duty Along LoC as Farmers of the State Take on Government.’ November 28, 2020. dnaindia.com/india/news-punjabprotest-farmer-son-martyr-loc-rif leman-sukhbir-singh-cross-border-f iringpakistan-2858963 Fricker, Miranda. ‘Epistemic Injustice and the Preservation of Ignorance.’ In The Epistemic Dimensions of Ignorance, edited by Rik Peels and Martijn Blaauw, 160–177. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Fricker, Miranda. Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Ghazali, Mohammed. ‘Singers Diljit Dosanjh, Daler Mehndi Weigh in Amid Row Over Farm Bills.’ NDTV, September 20, 2020. ndtv.com/india-news/farm-billrow-punjabi-artistes-use-songs-social-media-to-amplify-farmers-voice-2298251 Gill, Parmbir Singh. ‘A Di˝erent Kind of Dissidence: The Ghadar Party, Sikh History and the Politics of Anticolonial Mobilization.’ Sikh Formations: Religion, Culture, Theory 10, no.1 (2014): 23–41. Guru, Gopal. ‘Infallible Farm Laws?’ Economic and Political Weekly 55, no. 48 (2021): 9. epw.in/journal/2020/48/editors-desk/infallible-farm-laws.html Jagga, Raakhi. ‘Paintings, Songs, Movies: Artists Community Rallies in Favour of Protesting Farmers.’ Indian Express, September 20, 2020. indianexpress.com/article/ india/paintings-songs-movies-artistse-community-rallies-in-favour-of-protestingfarmers-6602837 Jodhka, Surinder. ‘Beyond “Crises”: Rethinking Contemporary Punjab Agriculture.’ Economic and Political Weekly 41, no. 16 (2006): 1530–1537. Lerche, Jens. ‘The Farm Laws Struggle 2020–2021: Class-Caste Alliances and Bypassed Agrarian Transition in Neoliberal India.’ The Journal of Peasant Studies 48 (2021): 1380–1396. Medina, José. ‘Toward a Foucaultian Epistemology of Resistance: Counter-Memory, Epistemic Friction, and Guerilla Pluralism.’ Foucault Studies 12 (2011): 9–35. Menon, Aditya. ‘Anti-Hindu or Pro-Dalit? Punjabi Song Riles Some, Inspires Others.’ Quint, May 8, 2020, thequint.com/news/india/ranjit-bawa-punjabi-song-mera-kikasoor-dalits-hindu Mogha, Shivam. ‘“Kisan-Mazdoor Ekta”: A Slogan to Unify Farmers and Labourers— and Break Caste Barriers’. Wire, December 29, 2021. thewire.in/rights/kisanmazdoor-ekta-a-slogan-to-unify-farmers-and-labourers-and-break-caste-barriers Narayanan, Sudha. ‘The Three Farm Bills: Is This the Market Reform Indian Agriculture Needs?’ The India Forum, October 2, 2020. www.theindiaforum.in/article/ three-farm-bills Naureen, Adeela and Umar Waqar. ‘Punjabi folklore and farmers’ protests in Delhi.’ Tribune, January 7, 2021. tribune.com.pk/story/2279096/punjabi-folklore-andfarmers-protests-in-delhi Pandey, Geeta. ‘India Farmers: The Viral Image that Deÿnes a Protest.’ BBC News. December 2, 2020. bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-55156219

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Pandey, Neelam, and Arnimesh Shanker. ‘This Is How Modi Govt Plans to Address Farmers’ Problems, End Protests.’ Print, November 30, 2020. theprint.in/india/governance/ this-is-how-modi-govt-plans-to-address-farmers-problems-end-protests/554809/ Patnaik, Utsa. ‘The Global Angle to the Farmer Protests.’ Hindu, December 30, 2020. thehindu.com/opinion/lead/the-global-angle-to-the-farmer-protests/article33447976.ece Pohlhaus Jr., Gaile. ‘Relational Knowing and Epistemic Injustice: Toward a Theory of Willful Hermeneutical Ignorance.’ Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 27 (2012): 715–735. Priyadarshini, Anna. ‘“Misled”, “Brainwashed”, “Instigated”: How Primetime TV Covered Farmer Protests.’ Newslaundry, November 28, 2020. newslaundry. com/2020/11/28/misled-brainwashed-instigated-how-primetime-tv-coveredfarmer-protests Punj, Balbir. ‘Agitation Against Farm Laws Only Serves Interest of Rich, Elite Farmers.’ Indian Express, February 9, 2021. indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/ farm-laws-agitation-framers-msp-agriculture-sector-india-7180219/ Sandhu, Amandeep. ‘Left, Khaps, Gender, Caste: The Solidarities Propping Up the Farmers’ Protest.’ Caravan, January 13, 2021. caravanmagazine.in/agriculture/ left-punjab-haryana-caste-gender-solidarities-farmers-protest Sawhney, Simona. ‘Singhu: The Unwritten.’ Dalit Camera, January 19, 2021. dalitcamera.com/singhu-the-unwritten/ Sharma, Nonika. ‘“Let’s Start Afresh”, PM Tells Farmers.’ NDTV, November 19, 2021. ndtv.com/india-news/pm-narendra-modi-addresses-nation-top-quotes-2616683# pfrom=home-ndtv_topscroll Singh, Avtar and Nirupama Dutt. ‘In Farm Stir That Has Uniÿed, Udasi Songs Emerge as Anthem.’ Hindustan Times, 9 December 2020. hindustantimes.com/cities/ in-farm-stir-that-has-uniÿed-udasi-songs-emerge-as-anthem/story-mf T5q4LlRdTraOEMyZHpNO.html Singh, Bir (@birsinghmusic). ‘Sangharsh jari hai’. October 4, 2021. twitter.com/i/ status/1445009249529057283 Singh, Kanika. ‘Commemorating Baghel Singh’s “Conquest” of Delhi: The Fateh Diwas’. Studies in History 36, no.2 (2020): 280–301. doi:10.1177/0257643020956625 Singh, Navsharan. ‘Women Bring a Spring of Hope to the Farm Movement.’ The India Forum, May 7, 2021. theindiaforum.in/article/what-did-women-bring-farmmovement Singh, Sandeep. ‘“We Are One”: Why Punjab’s Landless Dalits are Standing with Protesting Farmers’. Wire, January 7, 2021. thewire.in/caste/punjab-landless-dalitfarmers-protest Thapa, Shivangi. ‘These Punjabi Women Artists Are Supporting The Protesting Farmers’. SheThePeople, November 30, 2020. shethepeople.tv/news/punjabi-farmersprotest-punjabi-women-artists-support/ Times of India. ‘Protesting Farmers Not “Properly Understood” New Farm Laws’. November 29, 2020. timesoÿndia.indiatimes.com/business/india-business/ protesting-farmers-not-properly-understood-new-farm-laws-niti-aayog-member/ articleshow/79472670.cms Tribune. ‘Khattar Accuses Political Parties of ‘Sponsoring’ Farmers’ Stir; Capt Amarinder Hits Back’. November 28, 2020. tribuneindia.com/news/haryana/khattar-accusespolitical-parties-of-sponsoring-farmers-stir-capt-amarinder-hits-back-177173

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Tribune. ‘YouTube Pulls Down Songs on Farm Protest’. February 6, 2021. tribuneindia. com/news/punjab/youtube-pulls-down-songs-on-farm-protest-208948 Vasudeva, Vikas. ‘Akalis Quit NDA, Say Centre Ignored Farmers’ Sentiments’. Hindu, September 26, 2020. thehindu.com/news/national/shiromani-akali-dal-bjpsoldest-ally-leaves-nda-over-farm-bills/article32704939.ece Waghre, Prateek. ‘Radically Networked Societies: The case of farmers’ protests in India.’ Indian Public Policy Review 2, no.3 (2021): 41–64. ippr.in/index.php/ippr/ article/view/47 Zee News. ‘Farmers’ Agitation Hijacked; Khalistani Terrorists Behind Violence During Protests?’ November 28, 2020. zeenews.india.com/india/dna-exclusive-farmersagitation-hijacked-khalistani-terrorists-behind-violence-during-protests-2327127. html Songs on YouTube Aulakh, Mankirt, Nishawn Bhullar, Afsana Khan et al. ‘Kisaan Anthem.’ YouTube Video. December 8, 2020. youtube.com/watch?v=oNJiVuPmh9A&ab_channel=ShreeBrar Bajwa, Jass. ‘Dekh Dilliye’. YouTube Video. January 8, 2021. youtube.com/ watch?v=CFZc2Mdy0mI&ab_channel=JassBajwa-Topic Bajwa, Jass. ‘Jatta Takda Hoja.’ YouTube video. September 23, 2020. youtube.com/ watch?v=Ct_Li7ujnPQ&ab_channel=JassBajwa-Topic Bajwa, Sukhbir. ‘Andata.’ YouTube video. May 27, 2021. youtube.com/ watch?v=-AIUGds6i2E&ab_channel=RanjitBawa Bawa, Ranjit, ‘Kinne Aaye, Kinne Gaye’. YouTube Video. October 6, 2020. youtube. com/watch?v=26vtBCQalSE&ab_channel=RanjitBawa Bawa, Ranjit. ‘Punjab Bolda’. YouTube Video. December 8, 2020. youtube.com/ watch?v=3mjmmNq7XgA&ab_channel=RanjitBawa Grewal, Gippy. ‘Zaalam Sarkaaraan’. YouTube Video. December 3, 2020. youtube. com/watch?v=l2bJ1TaeH4E Grewal, Kanwar. ‘Ailaan’. YouTube Video. February 13, 2021. youtube.com/ watch?v=MIKNpHnsTpg&ab_channel=KanwarGrewal Grewal, Kanwar. ‘Akhan Khol’. YouTube Video. September 20, 2020. youtube.com/ watch?v=42ZI9q0QFQs&ab_channel=KanwarGrewal Grewal, Kanwar, and Galav Waraich. ‘Jittunga Punjab’. Youtube Video. July 10, 2021. youtube.com/watch?v=UBUDqrq_HOU&ab_channel=KanwarGrewal Grewal, Kanwar and Harf Cheema. ‘Pecha.’ YouTube Video. November 21, 2020, youtube.com/watch?v=QxAmWiZi2Kc&ab_channel=KanwarGrewal Grewal, Kanwar, Rajvir Jawanda, Kamal Khan. ‘Proud to be a Farmer’. YouTube Video. January 20, 2021. youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=7ZvRMCr1gpk& ab_channel=BlackPointMusic Gurshabad. ‘Uthan da Vela’. YouTube Video. October 9, 2020. youtube.com/ watch?v=Je1TlXZhyAg&ab_channel=Gurshabad Handa, Rupinder Handa. ‘Pecha Dilli Naal.’ YouTube Video. December 6, 2020. youtube.com/watch?v=vQgariSxjds&ab_channel=GhaintRecords Jatt, Maninderjit Anmulla. ‘Kissan’. YouTube Video. September 22, 2020. youtube. com/watch?v=si4Bv_YvwPA Jawanda, Rajvir. ‘Sun Dilliye’. YouTube Video. December 2, 2020. youtube.com/ watch?v=cZjzv8u7fCI&ab_channel=RajvirJawanda

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Khan, Saishah. ‘Ros Kisana De’. YouTube Video. December 18, 2020. youtube.com/ watch?v=mp9JEnq8CWY&ab_channel=PunjabiTadkaTV Maan, Anmol Gagan. ‘Kisaan vs Rajneeti’. YouTube Video. September 22, 2020. youtube.com/watch?v=hWhZLQo8cr4 Mallah, Gagan. ‘Sun Delhiye’. YouTube Video. December 7, 2020. youtube.com/ watch?v=F45t2ElUdsw&ab Mangat, Elly. ‘Baaghi Kisan’. YouTube Video. September 25, 2020, youtube.com/ watch?v=2mQTwrzr6yU&ab_channel=GameKillerzRecords Mann, Harbhajan. ‘Anndata’. YouTube Video. October 20, 2020. youtube.com/ watch?v=MOLpKJahLvk Mann, Harbhajan. ‘Lehar Kisani Di’. YouTube Video. January 24, 2021. youtube.com/ watch?v=GiCVlzl2ha0 Ramneek and Simrita. ‘Dilliye Ni Sun Dilliye’. YouTube Video. January 1, 2021. youtube.com/watch?v=0kEkwK5zS5A&ab Randhawa, Mandeep. ‘Fauji Khalse’. YouTube Video. December 6, 2020. youtube. com/watch?v=3umKfmjhGqk&ab_channel=MandeepRandhawa Sandhu, B. ‘Kisan Vs Delhi’. YouTube video. September 25, 2020. youtube.com/ watch?v=cbZTtZLt5Lk&ab Sandhu, Harvy. ‘Delhi Mull Lai Laiye’. YouTube Video. January 15, 2020. youtube. com/watch?v=Pk1otAMBVyY&ab_channel=HarvySandhu Sandhu, Himmat. ‘Asi Vaddange’. YouTube Video. February 24, 2021. youtube.com/ watch?v=2IPO_E5gv1s&ab_channel=HimmatSandhu Sartaj, Satinder. ‘Qanoon’. YouTube Video. January 2, 2021. youtube.com/watch?v= sCASF8H0NIs&ab_channel=SagaHits Sartaj, Satinder. ‘Tehreek’. February 17, 2021, youtube.com/watch?v=LjHJNZcPZ6A& ab_channel=SagaHits Singh, Bir. ‘Mitti De Putro Ve’. YouTube Video. October 15, 2020. youtube.com/ watch?v=VkHg-g5N67E&ab_channel=BirSingh

6 THE POSTMIGRANT CRITIQUE OF THE BILDUNGSROMAN AND THE EPISTEMIC INJUSTICE OF THE EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM IN DENIZ OHDE’S SCATTERED LIGHT1 Kyung-Ho Cha

In the preceding chapters in this section, James Odhiambo Ogone gave a close analysis of the epistemic injustice that occurs when peoples, landscapes, languages and politics are represented from the outside, rather than from within the relevant communities and by those with local knowledge; and Shambhavi Prakash explored the epistemically unjust representation of farmers in India by government and media, and the farmers’ epistemic resistance. In this chapter I develop that thinking about representational injustice and its consequences with an analysis of a novel – Deniz Ohde’s Scattered Light (Streulicht) – that o˝ers its readers an inside view of the experience of living as a young person in an immigrant family in Germany. I approach the novel using the conception of the postmigrant and of a condition I call postmigrant melancholy, and with an eye to the problem of social and epistemic self-positioning that Miranda Fricker terms hermeneutical injustice. In contemporary German sociology, the term ‘postmigrant’ is both a descriptive and a normative term. As a descriptive term, it encompasses the social transformations initiated and in˛uenced by migration, where migration is no longer conceptualized as an exception, but as a normality that a˝ects not only minorities but society as a whole.2 The postmigrant turn in sociology goes hand in hand with a paradigmatic shift in perspective: social transformations now are viewed from the perspective of migration and migrants. The normative meaning of the term envisages a pluralistic society in which political participation and equal opportunities are available for migrants and non-migrants alike. In contemporary Germany, then, the term postmigrant is meant to overcome the often polemical and pejorative distinction between Germans with and without the so-called background of migration.3 Contemporary racism in the postmigrant society focuses particularly on the migrant,4 and as a normative term, DOI: 10.4324/9781003254317-9

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postmigration refers to minorities’ ÿght against racism and their struggle for visibility and recognition.5 In the German context, the origin of the sociological term postmigration lies in Berlin’s theater scene of the 2000s.6 The so-called postmigrant theater that emerged during this period concentrates on stories of young people from immigrant families who are ignored in public or regarded as delinquents.7 A central theme of postmigrant theater is therefore the experience of social and racial injustice. Postmigrant stories are now told not only in theater but also in literature, ÿlm and art.8 In recent years, a number of new postmigrant novels have been published. Novels such as Fatma Aydemir’s Ellbogen (Elbow), Shida Bazyar’s Drei Kameradinnen (Three Comrades), Mithu Sanyal’s Identitti, Senthuran Varatharjah’s Vor der Zunahme der Zeichen (Before the Increase of the Signs) and Olivia Wenzel’s 1000 Serpentinen Angst (1000 Coils of Fear) are about the experiences of young people from immigrant families.9 The protagonists of these novels share experiences of social and racial injustice which distinguish them from the majority. Another recent example of postmigrant literature is the novel Scattered Light (Streulicht) by Deniz Ohde, published in 2020. Scattered Light describes the selective and formative power of the education system from the perspective of a young postmigrant woman who comes from a socially disadvantaged milieu. Her life is determined by intersectional injustices based on gender, class and ethnicity. The novel explores phenomena of injustice and inequality in the education system. Sociology has shown that the education system in Germany plays a crucial role in creating and perpetuating social inequality:10 only a small number of students from disadvantaged families succeed in the education system, and these exceptional students pay a high price for their advancement. The price consists in alienation from their parents and the devaluation of everything that was once valuable in their childhoods and youths.11 Ohde’s novel tells the story of a young woman who has to make sacriÿces for her social advancement. At ÿrst glance, the novel seems to take the quintessentially German form of the Bildungsroman, dealing with the protagonist’s personal development and the education system. The main thesis of this chapter is that Scattered Light in fact imitates the Bildungsroman, in order to show how that traditional genre fails to represent the postmigrant heterogeneous subject and intersectional experiences of discrimination. The reason for this is that the Bildungsroman’s underlying notion of education, based on the ideas of freedom and equality, is itself a form of hegemonic knowledge from which the novel’s postmigrant protagonist is excluded. *** The protagonist of the novel, whose name goes unmentioned in the text, is the daughter of a German father and a Turkish mother. This is a working-class

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family: the protagonist’s father works at an aluminum factory. The mother, who immigrated from Turkey to Germany in the 1960s and is dead at the time of narration, stayed at home to look after the family. The family home is near the large industrial complex where the father works. The compound noun Streulicht (scattered light) in the title refers to small airborne particles, such as produced by aerosols and emitted by industrial plants, which catch the light. In this di˝use light, things appear blurred and hazy, as if seen through a transparent veil; at night, industrial complexes and residential areas appear in this nebulous light. At the beginning of the novel, the unnamed protagonist visits her father, who has been living alone in the house since the death of his wife a few years previously. Scattered Light focuses on the protagonist’s social advancement and her social milieu. In order to go to university – where her main subject will be philosophy – she has to overcome several obstacles. Her main motivation for seeking social advancement is to leave behind the humiliating and at times traumatic experience of social discrimination and injustice. But the protagonist receives no support in this from her parents. Neither her mother, who grew up in a Turkish village, nor her working-class father, received any proper education: they are simply unable to help her. Compared to her friends from middle-class families, the protagonist is disadvantaged by more than her parents’ lack of resources, however. Rather, the family’s whole way of living precludes changes and the pursuit of dreams of a better life. There is not one beautiful object in the apartment, since beauty means luxury and luxury is the opposite of practicality. The protagonist’s father hangs rubbish bags on the handle of the kitchen door, since he has no waste bin; every single object in the parental home has a practical use. The sociologist Aladin El-Mafaalani identiÿes this kind of behavior, which favors function over beauty, as a ‘habitus of necessity’, based on an idea that only those objects with an immediate purpose deserve attention.12 In Ohde’s novel, another example of the habitus of necessity is the father’s tendency to buy things that have a function or may have a future function. He often ends up storing things because he thinks he may need them in future. He is constantly aware of the scarcity of resources, living in silent fear of losing the few things he calls his own. He is described in the novel as a hoarder, dominated by the objects which accumulate around him. And the lack of any aesthetic sense, or sense of beauty, goes hand in hand with the denial of the self: after the death of his wife, he completely loses control of his life and body. He stops taking care of himself, and his health begins to deteriorate. This habitus of necessity is as pervasive as the airborne dust particles which produce the scattered light. The narrator describes how they settle on windows and on car windshields. The industrial plant is constantly present; it is the secret center of the novel, even though it is invisible. It is inside the body of all those who live nearby. It is in the lungs ÿlled with polluted air. Even later it stays with

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the protagonist, lodged in her memory. The industrial estate is the epitome of her social background; it determines her entire life and identity: I was not foam-born, but dust-born; soot-born, born from the cooking salt in the air that settled on the car roofs. Born from the sour stench of the incinerator, from the river meadow and the trees between the electricity pylons, from the dark water that breaks against the boulder, a ÿlm of nitrogen and nitrate, not wave foam.13 The protagonist’s weakened self-conÿdence, which is expressed in this and similar passages, is shaped quite signiÿcantly at school. The novel, which is an open critique of the German education system, describes the role that school plays in the reproduction of social and racial inequality. At school, she often experiences social discrimination and has no support from teachers, who ignore and neglect her. Alone with her desire for knowledge, she becomes an autodidact, reading books that include Dietrich Schwanitz’s extraordinarily popular Education. Everything You Need to Know (Bildung. Alles, was man wissen muss).14 (The book was ÿrst published in Germany in 1999, and appeared in its 26th edition in 2006.)15 Schwanitz’s book o˝ers an overview of historical events he deems important, and of the history of literature, philosophy, art and music. It also lists the most important works that, in the author’s opinion, should be part of the educational canon in Germany. The book is aimed at autodidacts and contains some suggestions on how to acquire necessary cultural knowledge. It can be described as a philistine approach to culture: Schwanitz presents knowledge in a way that deprives the reader of the opportunity to have their own educational experience. The idea of education, traditionally associated with the bourgeoisie, is critically questioned in the novel. Instead, education appears – like in Schwanitz’s bestseller – as a commodity tailored to the interest of the audience. Ironically, in many positive reviews Scattered Light is called a Bildungsroman.16 The Bildungsroman is a controversial concept. Its protagonist is normally a male subject, its subject matter the ‘con˛ict between individuality and socialization, autonomy and normality’.17 The personal development of the subject that strives for autonomy and integration into society is regarded as the central ideas that deÿne the Bildungsroman, which is therefore often seen as the literary manifestation of liberalism. It is unclear whether this genre (which has also been called a ‘pseudo genre’ or ‘phantom’) even exists.18 Although there are reasonable doubts about its actual existence, there is, nonetheless, a literary and cultural tradition based on the reception of the idea of the Bildungsroman. Seen in the context of that literary and cultural tradition Scattered Light is not, I shall argue, a Bildungsroman, but a mimetic critique of the genre. The text imitates the essential features of the Bildungsroman throughout: the focus is on the development of the protagonist’s subjectivity. Ohde’s novel eschews,

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however, the fascination for literature and art that plays an important role in the traditionally imagined Bildungsroman, where the protagonist’s discovery of and fascination with literature and art initiates the process of their education for life or socialization (Bildung).19 Unlike the protagonist of the traditional Bildungsroman, the protagonist of Scattered Light does not have a personal or existential relationship to literature or art in general. Instead, she is interested in books which are about literature and art, such as Schwanitz’s book on education and ‘everything one needs to know’, with its summaries of canonical works of art and explanations of their cultural value. The book provides an imitation of education, which in Scattered Light corresponds to Ohde’s imitation of the Bildungsroman and the protagonist’s imitation of the white middle-class subject she desires to be. The fascination that the Bildungsroman genre holds for its audience lies not least in the ideas of individual freedom and equality that seem to inhere in it. This is probably one of the reasons why the Bildungsroman is, in Marianne Hirsch’s conception, ‘the most important genre for the literature of social outsiders, especially women or minorities’.20 But society and literary form refer to each other. According to Georg Lukács, the social dimension of a literary text is its form.21 As Stephen Heath writes, genre determines who is represented and made visible in and through literature. ‘We can grasp the politics of genre here as a politics of representation, with change and innovation implicated in crises as to who and what is represented and how and to whom’.22 The Bildungsroman, which is about the integration of the subject into society, does not represent the female postmigrant subject who experiences discrimination because of her gender, race and social background. And Scattered Light does not focus on self-development: the protagonist’s goal is not self-development but to overcome social and racial injustice. Scattered Light imitates the Bildungsroman in order to show that this traditional genre belongs to a hegemonic knowledge system called Bildung, from which the postmigrant subject is excluded. The heterogeneous postmigrant subject needs a di˝erent genre to represent itself, or a new form of Bildungsroman based on a new, more open and inclusive understanding of Bildung. In short, the postmigrant subject and the genre of the Bildungsroman do not ÿt together because the traditional Bildungsroman as a literary form represents a society from which the protagonist, who is not a privileged bourgeois subject, is excluded. The imitation of the Bildungsroman in Ohde’s novel makes it clear that the experiences of social discrimination and racism have no place in the genre of the Bildungsroman, nor in the idea of Bildung in general. The postmigrant subject is not included in the Bildungsroman, and the traditional idea of education does not include the postmigrant experience. In the novel, the idea of education focused on personal development stands in stark contrast to the reality of educational institutions that reproduce social inequality. In Germany, access to university depends on attendance at

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a grammar school (Gymnasium) or a comprehensive school with a grammar school upper level, where the necessary high school certiÿcate (Abitur) can be achieved. In Scattered Light, the protagonists’ teacher, who ignores and neglects her obviously because of her social and cultural background, advises her parents to move her to a secondary school that would not give her access to university. She attends the secondary school, but later on returns to grammar school and studies for her Abitur. This time around she gains the support of her teachers. Social advancement and the experience of social injustice are not the novel’s only themes, however. It also addresses racism in Germany. At school the protagonist is called Kanake, a derogatory word in German for people of Turkish, Arab, Persian or southern European descent. Her mother is surprised to hear that her daughter’s classmates regard the child as a Turk. For her, her daughter is German: ‘I asked what it [Kanake] meant and she said that it couldn’t be, that it couldn’t possibly refer to me. “It’s a swear word”, she said. “But it cannot mean you. You are German”’.23 The mother’s statement can be interpreted in two ways. First, it can be seen as a statement of fact, since the narrator grew up and was socialized in Germany. She is a German citizen and German is her ÿrst language, indeed her only language. Second, the mother’s perception of her daughter as German and not Turkish must be seen in the context of the relationship between the two. The mother has chosen to exclude her daughter from the Turkish culture she (the mother) grew up with. Although she sends her daughter to a language school where she is supposed to learn Turkish, she makes no e˝orts to introduce the girl to her Turkish family history, which should arguably be a part of her daughter’s identity. When the protagonist takes calls from relatives in Turkey, she can neither understand nor speak to them because she is not able to speak Turkish properly. Turkey is a foreign country for her. The mother demands total assimilation into German society from her daughter. In doing so she sacriÿces her own identity because she wants her daughter to succeed in German society. The desire for assimilation results from low cultural self-conÿdence (she is obviously ashamed of her Turkish roots), which is passed on from mother to daughter. At school, and later at university, the narrator uses her German ÿrst name, but does not mention her second, Turkish name, which she herself refers to as her ‘K-name’ (where K stands for the derogatory word ‘Kanake’).24 ‘It was a secret name, the sound of which would have turned me into dirt in the outside world’.25 She tries to pass herself o˝ as a white German at school – not out of a desire for social advancement, but to escape the experience of racial discrimination and injustice. But despite her mimicry of a white middle-class German identity, the fear of racist violence never leaves her. The novel alludes to the constant threat of right-wing violence. The notorious, racially motivated arson attack at Solingen in NorthRhine Westphalia in May 1993, in which ÿve Turkish people were killed,26 remains in the protagonist’s memory. Her quotidian habit is to look at the

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shoelaces of passers-by, because Nazis wear white shoelaces. But she is left alone with her fear by her mother’s refusal to talk about racism and determination to avoid any conversation on the subject. She ÿnally convinces herself that she is simply over-sensitive.27 The protagonist is caught between a German father and a Turkish mother. Their lives are associated with two types of injustice. Her father experienced social injustice, her mother racial injustice. This intersectional connection of forms of discrimination shapes the protagonist’s own biography. In the course of her education, the distance between herself and her parents increases, as does the gap between their social and cultural worlds. Her two crucial survival strategies consist of escaping social and racial discrimination, and passing as German to advance socially. Unlike their daughter, the father and mother seem unaware of the existence of social and racial injustice in Germany. In general, people can either choose to ÿght social or racial injustice, or they can withdraw from the con˛ict and choose resignation. Her parents do the latter, resigning themselves to a situation they cannot change. Their resignation comes to re˛ect a conviction that they deserve to be discriminated against. This is noticeable in how they treat themselves: the mother neglects the symptoms of the illness that will kill her, the father becomes more and more unkempt in his loneliness. Both clearly internalize the violence of discrimination, lacking self-respect because they have internalized society’s classist and racist disrespect for them. Her parents are unable to change their situation because they lack the knowledge to understand it. Miranda Fricker has termed this inability to recognize injustice hermeneutical injustice. According to Fricker, hermeneutical injustice is a type of epistemic injustice, referring speciÿcally to an inability to interpret and understand an unjust situation. She deÿnes hermeneutic injustice as ‘the injustice of having some signiÿcant area of one’s social experience obscured from collective understanding owing to a structural identity prejudice in the collective hermeneutical resource’.28 For Fricker, hermeneutical injustice occurs when the subject is either excluded from knowledge, or when the general hermeneutical resources are unavailable to the person or inadequate for making sense of her speciÿc situation. In Scattered Light, the protagonist (like her parents) does not have the concepts or the language to understand her own situation. The novel is an indirect critique of an education system which does not provide young people located outside the privileged mainstream with epistemic concepts to analyze and understand their lives. People like the protagonist, who come from a socially disadvantaged background and who are bi- or multiracial, go unrepresented in the books that shape the curriculum. Since her parents cannot support her intellectually, and school (as the only place where she could learn to analyze society and learn about the e˝ects of social or racial injustice on society) fails her, she has no other choice than to become an

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autodidact. The failure of the educational system in the novel relates exactly to what Fricker calls hermeneutical injustice: a person experiences hermeneutical injustice if this person ‘has a signiÿcant area of one’s social experience obscured from collective understanding’.29 When, toward the end of the novel, the protagonist ÿnally comes to understand her situation, she is confronted with the fact that the two feelings which dominated her life were fear and shame. In one passage, she remembers the statements of teachers who criticize or praise her. It seems to her as if they are speaking to her in her own consciousness, where the voices of the teachers mix with other voices. Among them is a voice that seems to come from within her. This voice asks her why she has put up with all this and not fought back: ‘Why didn’t you ÿght back?’ More and more desperate became their voices, more and more question marks strung together, and I wanted to shout that there had never been an I in the ÿrst place that could have fought back, nothing had ever come from me, everything had always just fallen on me, I had lived in a grammar in which ÿghting back was not intended, from the start.30 The grammar mentioned in the quotation is the grammar of injustice, which is like the Turkish language she does not understand. In this passage, the protagonist has not yet found her voice and is unable to speak. There is no ‘I’ in the chorus of voices in her head. By saying that she had lived in a grammar or language ‘in which ÿghting back was not intended from the start’ she refers to the language spoken in institutions such as school and university. She does not know the grammar, and without knowing the language, she cannot protest against the injustice she experiences. In this passage, there is a direct connection between knowing and feeling, between knowing and feeling injustice. She feels injustice before she is consciously aware of it. The relation between justice and emotion is intricate. Sarah Ahmed has pointed out in her book Politics of Emotions that justice involves feelings, but it cannot itself be called a feeling and should not be reduced to one. According to Ahmed, emotions connect human beings to fellow human beings and to the world. Justice is not simply a feeling. And feelings are not always just. But justice involves feelings, which move us across the surfaces of the world, creating ripples in the intimate contours of our lives. Where we go with these feelings, remains an open question.31 Justice is always connected to feelings, but a˝ect and emotions alone cannot determine whether something is just or unjust. Feelings can be regarded as the ripples on the surface of the social. In order to feel injustice, however, the

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subject must be sensitized enough to be able to feel the friction between the subject and the world. In the novel, it seems likely that the protagonist’s parents have never wondered what lies below the ripples on the surface. Subjectivity can be deÿned as the relationship between self and world, as determined by perception, thinking and feeling, and her subjectivity is di˝erent than the subjectivity of her parents. Her parents perceive the world di˝erently, they think about it di˝erently and also feel di˝erently from their daughter. The protagonist thinks about herself and what she wants in her future. She wants to change her personality and her entire subjectivity: her perception, her thinking and her feelings. Her parents, on the other hand, do not want to change and cannot change, as they are trapped in the world of everyday concerns: they focus on material goods and on the opinion of their social environment. At the end of the novel, their daughter’s subjectivity has indeed changed. Her inner distance from her parents permits her to observe them, and is a precondition for telling her story. She has become an ethnographer of her parents, who have almost become strangers to her. As a stranger she can see things in the lives of her parents which they cannot see. The dream of social and cultural advancement is important in the novel. But more important than upward mobility, for the protagonist, is learning to apprehend social and racial injustice. The moment when she hears the voices in her head and begins to understand her life is the climax of the novel. It is the ÿrst time that she talks about her feelings: ‘The voices don’t know that I learned everything out of fear, that I didn’t ÿght out of fear (against what exactly)’.32 This moment is a moment of confession. Confession is a speech act that produces a new self and an identity. By confessing her emotions, the narrator creates an image of herself for the ÿrst time in the novel. Here, in one of the rare moments of truth in her life, the narrative style changes. Before and after this passage, the style is factual, detached and sober. Objects and people are described in a neutral and even cold tone, a style reminiscent of social reportage. The sober, objective style corresponds to the habitus of necessity. Like her parents who cling to material things, the narrator lists and describes things in detail. No feelings are described and there is no insight at all into the interior of the person. In the quoted passage, however, the narrative style changes and takes on a di˝erent tone. Suddenly, there is an outburst of emotion. The narrator’s perspective no longer radiates outward, but is now directed inward. Before this passage, she describes the environment and the inner life of her parents. Now, however, the narrator looks into her own psyche. The confession is the beginning of a new language which allows her to overcome hermeneutical injustice, at least for a brief moment. She has found a new grammar or language to express her feelings and to voice her protest. The last chapter describes the last day of her visit to her father. At the door her father says: ‘If it doesn’t work out, come home again’.33 This is the last sentence of the novel: obviously, the father does not realize that his daughter’s

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subjectivity has changed and she already belongs to a world he might never understand. The protagonist now seems to see things more clearly; the scattered light in which objects almost vanish has disappeared from her life, the inner veil is lifted. Scattered light emerges as a symbol for the working-class background of the family; but it can be also understood as a metaphor for the lack of knowledge and the di˝use feelings the protagonist has had about her own life. In transforming herself and her subjectivity, she understands that she did not deserve to be discriminated against – that she was not responsible for social and racial injustice caused by others. Subjectivity is constituted by perception, cognition and emotions which together form the self of a person. In the novel two subjectivities can be identiÿed. First, the subjectivity of the protagonist as a youth. Second, the subjectivity of the older protagonist who is remembering her former self and analyzing it. The transformation of her subjectivity is a process which marks the di˝erence between the subjectivity of the narrator and the subjectivity of her former self whom she remembers. The act of remembering becomes a self-analysis. During her visit home, the protagonist reconstructs her life in order to understand her own development by narrating her life as a story. Making her former self the object of her investigation, she uses the narrative to construct herself and the subjectivity of her parents. Through telling a story she recognizes her helplessness and blindness as a young person. Constructing a former self enables the narrator to create a new personality and subjectivity. It thus seems as if the protagonist who is looking back at her own past has successfully become an emancipated subject, and has overcome the hermeneutical injustice she endured. However, the transformation is neither complete nor successful: her subjectivity is only transformed on the surface. A closer look reveals that she has internalized the classist and racist prejudices of her environment, which she does not recognize because she has adopted them in a sublimated form. These prejudices culminate in her descriptions of her parents. From the protagonist’s point of view, her parents appear as persons without a developed subjectivity; persons who are only interested in the material aspects of life; unemancipated individuals, in contrast to the protagonist. The novel thus demonstrates how the protagonist’s subjectivity is deformed by social injustice and racial discrimination, even as she begins to articulate her own sense of freedom. Those parts of her old self which belong to her social and cultural background are excluded from the new self. The internal process of exclusion creates a feeling of melancholia, and melancholy determines the protagonist’s perspective on her own life. In the passage in which she tells us that, unlike the goddess Aphrodite, she ‘was not foamborn but dust-born’,34 she devalues her own existence. Aphrodite is the goddess of love, but the protagonist sees herself as a person who has come into the world without love for the world or for herself. This means that she believes she does not deserve to be loved; in other words, she lacks self-respect.

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Sigmund Freud deÿned melancholy as a state that, in contrast to mourning, refers to one’s own self: In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself. The patient represents this ego to us as worthless, incapable of any achievement and morally despicable; he reproaches himself, viliÿes himself and expects to be cast out and punished.35 Melancholy is based on a devaluation of one’s own personality which is the result of the identiÿcation with an object that is lost. Judith Butler points out that melancholy results from the fact that the subject cannot fully replace the former objects with which it used to identify. Any attempt to substitute the lost objects remains incomplete. The formation of a new subjectivity is based on the unconscious experience of loss. ‘The ego is a poor substitute for the lost object, and its failure to substitute in a way that satisÿes (that is, to overcome it as a substitution), leads to the ambivalence that distinguishes melancholia’.36 For the protagonist of Scattered Light, the places of her childhood and youth and, above all, her parent’s home represent the abandoned spaces in her subjectivity. At the end of the novel, ‘the fallow ÿeld’ (‘das brachliegende Feld’) re˛ects the inner state of the melancholic subject. I walked down the road until I came to the hill. I took the path that runs along the meadow, and after a while I walked across the frozen grass, stumbling a few times but not falling, walking purposefully towards the stump of the tree that had fallen at my feet years ago during the summer thunderstorm, snapped like a single branch in a strong wind. […] Now it has grown dark, the trees become washed-out shadows; nothing stirs. Beyond the garden I can see the fallow ÿeld.37 The melancholy culminates in the memory of the tree – of which only a stump remains. The tree belongs to the memory of her childhood, but the darkness makes it di°cult to recognize the objects she used to know. The information that she ‘stumbled a few times […] but did not fall’38 reveals the fragile present state of the protagonist and hints at the development from an old self to a new self, which, however, has not yet come into being. The fallow ÿeld is the mirror of the empty self which is neither dead nor alive. The passage also suggests that the idea of an autonomous subject may itself be a chimera. The protagonist’s ‘classist’ perspective on her parents and the feeling of melancholia belong together. They represent a double bind which is typical of ambivalent relationships. The internal rejection of her origin results in the abjection of her parents, who are portrayed as individuals without a developed subjectivity, and in melancholia, as the separation from her origins causes the feeling of emptiness which cannot be compensated.

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The question remains if Scattered Light is a classist novel. If the perspective of narrator is taken to be the perspective of the novel, then it could indeed be understood as such. However, the end of the novel contradicts this view. When she meets her father the moment she is about to leave the house, he comes home from shopping; he has bought strawberries. When the key did turn, for real this time, I hurriedly got up, closed the window and walked towards my father in the hallway. I had to leave unexpectedly. Something had come up, a job interview, I was sorry, but I had to take the chance. He had a bag full of shopping in his hand, I saw that he had bought strawberries.39 The strawberries, which show him suddenly in a di˝erent light, are the symbol of her father’s care. The fact that he bought them is remarkable not only because it is winter – it is in stark contrast to her parents’ general attitude toward food. Her parents, who have neglected their own health in the past, have no relationship with food; this is underlined in many places in the novel. ‘What was needed above all was food, of which you could never have enough in stock’.40 Her mother and grandfather regularly take vitamin tablets and dietary supplements.41 ‘She [her mother] mixed vitamin tablets in her water, which then bubbled, turned orange and gave o˝ a chemical smell like tangerine’.42 Her parents’ attitudes toward food are important to understand the symbolic meaning of the strawberries, which are the opposite of vitamin tablets. The parent’s lack of self-care, symbolized by the vitamin tablets, contrasts with the father’s care for his daughter, for whom – and not for himself – the father buys the strawberries. This interpretation of the strawberries o˝ers an insight into the di˝erent perspectives of the novel. Three perspectives can be distinguished: ÿrst, there is the perspective of the protagonist as a child and teenager who experiences social and racial discrimination, the nature of which she does not understand. Second, there is the perspective of the protagonist as narrator, who remembers and analyzes her younger self. The narrator tries to relate the past to the present and to understand her own personal development without realizing that she has internalized the prejudices of those around her. Like the scattered light that makes the world around her appear blurred, a veil covers her present existence that she is not yet ready to lift. The third perspective, which comes to the fore with the symbol of the strawberry, belongs neither to the narrator nor to her younger self. This perspective is implied by the text and belongs to the reader, for whom alone it is recognizable. The strawberries are mentioned in the text as if in passing, and the narrator does not seem to be aware of them. However, the reader may recognize their symbolic meaning, and in that moment the father is no longer just a victim of society, but an active and caring person. Through the quiet, almost melodramatic gesture, the strawberries as a symbol of parental

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love shine through the scattered light that illuminates the protagonist’s life. At the door, just as she is about to leave, her father says, ‘If it doesn’t work out, come back home’.43 This is the last sentence of the novel, addressed not only to the daughter but also to the narrator. The narrator is invited to return to the beginning of her own story, to retell it and gain a new perspective on herself and her family.

Notes 1 I would like to thank Sarah Colvin and Stephanie Galasso for their important comments on the text and their support. Parts of my chapter were copyedited by Brian Hanrahan, to whom I would like to express my gratitude. 2 Naika Foroutan, Die postmigrantische Gesellschaft: Ein Versprechen der pluralen Demokratie (Bielefeld: transcript, 2019); Marc Hill and Erol Yıldız, Postmigrantische Visionen: Erfahrungen, Ideen, Re·exionen (Bielefeld: transcript, 2018). 3 Paul Mecheril, ‘Was ist das X im Postmigrantischen’, sub/urban. zeitschrift für kritische stadtforschung 2, no. 3 (2014): 107–112. ‘Persons with a migration background’ is a technical term in the German context. The Federal Statistical O°ce deÿnes it as follows: ‘The population with a migration background includes all persons who do not have German nationality by birth or where at least one parent has German nationality.’ https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/GesellschaftUmwelt/Bevoelkerung/Migration-Integration/Methoden/Erlauterungen/ migrationshintergrund.html (accessed December 19, 2021). The term has been controversial since it was introduced to the public about 15 years ago. In November 2020, a commission appointed by the Federal Government argued against its further use, as it does not re˛ect the diversity of German society. Instead of ‘person with a migration background’, it proposed the term ‘immigrants and their (direct) descendants’ (‘Zuwanderer und ihre[] (direkten) Nachkommen’). Fachkommission Integrationsf ähigkeit 2020, 15. 4 Naika Foroutan, ‘Rassismus in der postmigrantischen Gesellschaft’, APuZ 42–44 (2020), 12–18, 17–18. 5 Florian Ohnmacht and Erol Yıldız, ‘The Postmigrant Generation between Racial Discrimination and New Orientation: From Hegemony to Convivial Everyday Practice’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 44, no. 16 (2021): 149–169. 6 Langho˝, Shermin. ‘Nachwort’, in Postmigrantische Perspektiven: Ordnungssysteme, Repräsentationen, Kritik, edited by Naika Foroutan, Juliane Karakayali, Riem Spielhaus (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2018), 301–310; Anne Ring Petersen, Moritz Schramm, and Frauke Wiegang, ‘Introduction: From Artistic Intervention to Academic Discussion’, in Reframing Migration, Diversity and the Arts. The Postmigrant Condition, edited by Anne Ring Petersen, Moritz Schramm, and Frauke Wiegang (New York: Routledge, 2019), 3–10; Lizzie Stewart, Performing New German Realities: Turkish-German Scripts of Postmigration (Cham: Springer 2021); ‘Postmigration in Theatre as Label and Lens’, in: Postmigration. Art, Culture, and Politics in Contemporary Europe, edited by Astrid Sophie Ost Hansen, Anna Meera Gaonkar, Hans Christian Post, and Moritz Schramm (Berlin: transcript) 87–108. 7 Nurkan Erpulat and Shermin Langho˝, ‘Die spielen nicht das Klischee! Ein Gespräch mit dem Ensemble von Verrücktes Blut, Regisseur Nurkan Erpulat und Theatercheÿn Shermin Langho˝’, Jahrbuch der Zeitschrift Theater heute 1 (2011): 102–110. 8 Moritz Schramm et al., ed., Reframing Migration, Diversity and the Arts: The Postmigrant Condition (London: Routledge, 2019).

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9 Fatma Aydemir, Ellbogen (München: Hanser, 2017), Shida Bazyar, Drei Kameradinnen (Hamburg: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2021), Mithu Sanyal, Identitti (München: Hanser, 2021), Senthuran Varatharajah, Vor der Zunahme der Zeichen (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 2016), Olivia Wenzel, 1000 Serpentinen Angst (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 2020). 10 Aladin El-Mafaalani, Bildungsaufsteigerinnen aus benachteiligten Milieus: Habitustransformation und soziale Mobilität bei Einheimischen und Türkeistämmigen (Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 2012), 14. In contrast to the school systems of other countries, in which all students go through the same types of school regardless of their performance, even at the secondary level, the German school system is structured partly hierarchically. The school system comprises the primary (Grundschule) and secondary education sectors (Sekundarstufen I und II). In the secondary education sector, students are taught either in one school (comprehensive school) or separately in three di˝erent schools (Hauptschule, Realschule, Gymnasium) based on their performance. The Abitur, which can be earned at the Gesamtschule and at the Gymnasium, entitles students to attend university. In addition to the above-mentioned schools, special types of schools exist in many federal states. In addition to general education schools, the school system in Germany includes vocational schools. 11 Aladin Mafaalani, Vom Arbeiterkind zum Akademiker: Über die Mühen des Aufstiegs durch Bildung (Sankt Augustin: Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, 2014), 27. 12 El-Mafaalani, Bildungsaufsteigerinnen, 84. 13 ‘Ich war nicht schaumgeboren, sondern staubgeboren; rußgeboren, geboren aus dem Kochsalz in der Luft, das sich auf die Autodächer legte. Geboren aus dem sauren Gestank der Müllverbrennungsanlage, aus den Flusswiesen und den Bäumen zwischen den Strommasten, aus dem dunklen Wasser, das an die Wackersteine schlug, einem Film aus Sticksto˝ und Nitrat, nicht Gischt’. Deniz Ohde, Streulicht (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2020), 224. 14 Ohde, Streulicht, 71. 15 Dietrich Schwanitz, Bildung: Alles, was man wissen muss (Frankfurt am Main: Eichborn, 1999). 16 Fridtjof Küchemann, ‘Sie wirken doch ganz intelligent. Deniz Ohdes Roman Streulicht’, FAZ.NET, September 12, 2020, faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/buecher/ rezensionen/belletristik/buchkritik-deniz-ohdes-roman-streulicht-16949107. html; Huber Winkels, ‘Rußgeboren’, SZ.de, August 23, 2020, sueddeutsche.de/ kultur/bildungsaufsteiger-i-russgeboren-1.5007411 17 Franco Moretti, The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture (New York/London: Verso, 2000), 16. 18 Marc Redÿeld, Phantom Formations: Aesthetic Ideology and the ‘Bildungsroman’ (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018), VII, XI. Hans-Jürgen Schings, the editor (in 2006) of the Munich edition of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, 1796) argues, for example, against the use of the term ‘Bildungsroman’ in reference to the novel, even though it has traditionally been read as the epitome of the genre. ‘Bildungsroman? […] Perhaps one should not use the term anymore’. Hans-Jürgen Schings, ‘Einführung’, in Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, Sämtliche Werke nach Epoche seines Schaffens. Münchner Ausgabe, vol. 5, ed. Hans-Jürgen Schings (München: btb, 2006), 613–643, 643. 19 In German novels considered exemplary of the genre, such as Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre or Karl Philipp Moritz’ Anton Reiser (which is often regarded as an anti-Bildungsroman), the protagonist’s encounter with the works of Shakespeare changes their life. 20 Marianne Hirsch, ‘The Novel of Formation as Genre: Between Great Expectations and Lost Illusions’, Genre 12, no. 3 (1979): 293–311, 300.

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21 Georg Lukács, Schriften zur Literatursoziologie (Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1961), 79. 22 Stephen Heath, ‘Politics of Genre’, in Debating World Literature, ed. Christopher Prendergast (New York/London: Verso, 2004), 163–174. 23 Ohde, Streulicht, 49. 24 Ohde, Streulicht, 247. 25 Ohde, Streulicht, 40. 26 On May 29, 1993, ÿve members of the Genç family – Gürsün Ince, Hatice Genç, Gülüstan Öztürk, Hülya Genç and Saime Genç – ÿve women and girls were murdered in an arson attack in Solingen. The crime was the culmination of a series of racist attacks on refugees and migrants in the 1990s. The perpetrators were rightwing extremists aged 16–23 from the neighborhood. Between 1990 and 1992 there was an increase in right-wing extremist violence in Germany. Militant racism was preceded by a long, aggressive and emotionally charged debate in the media and politics about asylum and migration. 27 Ohde, Streulicht, 49. 28 Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 155. 29 Fricker, Epistemic Injustice, 155. 30 Ohde, Streulicht, 253: ‘Wieso hast du dich nicht gewehrt?’ Immer verzweifelter wurden ihre Stimmen, immer mehr Fragezeichen reihten sich aneinander, und ich wollte rufen, dass es von vornherein kein Ich gegeben hatte, das sich hätte wehren können, nichts war je von mir ausgegangen, alles ist immer nur auf mich eingefallen, ich habe in einer Grammatik gelebt, in der sich wehren von vornherein nicht vorgesehen war. 31 Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2004), 202. 32 ‘Die Stimmen wissen nicht, dass ich alles aus Angst lernte, dass ich mich aus Angst nicht gewehrt habe (wogegen genau)’. Ohde, Streulicht, 253. 33 Ohde, Streulicht, 285. 34 Ohde, Streulicht, 224. 35 Sigmund Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vo. 14, edited by James Strachey (London: The Hoogarth Press, 1966–1974), 243–258, 246. 36 Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (London/New York: Routledge, 1997), 169. 37 ‘Ich bin die Straße nach unten gelaufen, bis ich zum Hügel gekommen bin. Ich habe den Weg genommen, der an der Wiese entlangführt, und bin nach einer Weile querfeldein übers gefrorene Gras gelaufen, ein paar Mal bin ich gestolpert, aber nicht gefallen, bin zielstrebig auf den Stumpf des Baums zugelaufen, der mir vor Jahren während der Sommergewitter vor die Füße gefallen war, umgeknickt wie ein einzelner Zweig bei starkem Wind. […] Jetzt ist es dunkel geworden, die Bäume werfen verwachsene Schatten; nichts rührt sich. Hinter dem Garten kann ich das brachliegende Feld sehen’. Ohde, Streulicht, 284–285. 38 Ohde, Streulicht, 284. 39 ‘Als sich der Schlüssel dann doch drehte, diesmal wirklich, bin ich eilig aufgestanden, habe das Fenster geschlossen und bin im Flur auf meinen Vater zugegangen. Ich müsse überraschend los. Es habe sich etwas ergeben, ein Bewerbungsgespräch, es tue mir leid, aber die Chance müsse ich wahrnehmen. Er hatte eine Tasche voll Einkäufe in der Hand, ich sah, dass er Erdbeeren gekauft hatte’. Ohde, Streulicht, 284. 40 ‘Was man brauchte, waren in erster Linie Lebensmittel, von denen man nie genug auf Vorrat haben konnt’. Ohde, Streulicht, 53.

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41 Ohde, Streulicht, 90–91. 42 ‘Sie mischte Vitamintabeltten in ihr Wasser, die sich sprudelnd au˛östen, es orange färbten und einen chemischen Geruch nach Mandarine in der Küche verbreiteten’. Ohde, Streulicht, 64. 43 ‘Wenn’s nichts wird, kommst wieder heim’. Ohde, Streulicht, 285.

Bibliography Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. New York: Routledge, 2004. Aydemir, Fatma. Ellbogen. München: Hanser, 2017. Bazyar, Shida. Drei Kameradinnen. Hamburg: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2021. Butler, Judith. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. London/New York: Routledge, 1997. El-Mafaalani, Aladin. Bildungsaufsteigerinnen aus benachteiligten Milieus: Habitustransformation und soziale Mobilität bei Einheimischen und Türkeistämmigen. Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 2012. Erpulat, Nurkan, and Shermin Langho˝. ‘Die spielen nicht das Klischee! Ein Gespräch mit dem Ensemble von Verrücktes Blut, Regisseur Nurkan Erpulat und Theatercheÿn Shermin Langho˝’. Jahrbuch der Zeitschrift Theater heute 1 (2011): 102–110. Fachkommission Integrationsfähigkeit. Gemeinsam die Einwanderungsgesellschaft gestalten. Bericht der Fachkommission der Bundesregierung zu den Rahmenbedingungen der Integrationsfähigkeit. Frankfurt a.M.: Zarbock, 2020 Foroutan, Naika. Die postmigrantische Gesellschaft: Ein Versprechen der pluralen Demokratie. Bielefeld: transcript, 2019. Foroutan, Naika. ‘Rassismus in der postmigrantischen Gesellschaft.’ APuZ 42–44 (2020): 12–18. Freud, Sigmund. ‘Mourning and Melancholia.’ In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 14, edited by James Strachey, 243–258. London: The Hogarth Press, 1966–1974. Fricker, Miranda. Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Gaonkar, Anna Meera, Astrid Sophie Ost Hansen, Hans Christian Post, and Moritz Schramm. ‘Introduction.’ In Postmigration. Art, Culture, and Politics in Contemporary Europe, edited by Anna Meera Gaonkar, Astrid Sophie Ost Hansen, Hans Christian Post, Moritz Schramm, 11–44. Berlin: transcript, 2021. Heath, Stephen. ‘Politics of Genre.’ In Debating World Literature, edited by Christopher Prendergast, 163–174. New York, London: Verso, 2004. Hill, Marc, and Erol Yıldız. Postmigrantische Visionen: Erfahrungen, Ideen, Re·exionen. Bielefeld: transcript, 2018. Hirsch, Marianne. ‘The Novel of Formation as Genre: Between Great Expectations and Lost Illusions.’ Genre 12, no. 3 (1979): 293–311. Küchemann, Fridtjof. ‘Sie wirken doch ganz intelligent. Deniz Ohdes Roman Streulicht’. FAZ.NET, September 12, 2020. faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/buecher/rezensionen/belletristik/buchkritik-deniz-ohdes-roman-streulicht-16949107.html Langho˝, Shermin. ‘Nachwort.’ In Postmigrantische Perspektiven: Ordnungssysteme, Repräsentationen, Kritik, edited by Naika Foroutan, Juliane Karakayali, Riem Spielhaus, 301–310. Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2018. Lukács, Georg. Schriften zur Literatursoziologie. Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1961.

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Mafaalani, Aladin. Vom Arbeiterkind zum Akademiker: Über die Mühen des Aufstiegs durch Bildung. Sankt Augustin: Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, 2014. Mecheril, Paul. ‘Was ist das X im Postmigrantischen’. sub/urban. zeitschrift für kritische stadtforschung 2, no. 3 (2014): 107–112. Moretti, Franco. The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture. New York/London: Verso, 2000. Ohde, Deniz. Streulicht. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2020. Ohnmacht, Florian, and Erol Yıldız. ‘The Postmigrant Generation between Racial Discrimination and New Orientation: From Hegemony to Convivial Everyday Practice’. Ethnic and Racial Studies 44, no. 16 (2021): 149–169. Petersen, Anne Ring, Moritz Schramm, and Frauke Wiegang, ‘Introduction: From Artistic Intervention to Academic Discussion’. In Reframing Migration, Diversity and the Arts. The Postmigrant Condition, edited by Anne Ring Petersen, Moritz Schramm, and Frauke Wiegang, 3–10. New York: Routledge, 2019. Redÿeld, Marc. Phantom Formations: Aesthetic Ideology and the ‘Bildungsroman’. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018. Sanyal, Mithu. Identitti. München: Hanser, 2021. Schings, Hans-Jürgen. ‘Einführung’. In Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, Sämtliche Werke nach Epoche seines SchaŁens. Münchner Ausgabe, vol. 5, edited by Hans-Jürgen Schings, 613–643. München: btb, 2006. Schramm, Moritz, Sten Pultz Moslund, Anne Ring Petersen, Mirjam Gebauer, Hans Christian Post, Sabrina Vitting-Seerup, and Frauke Wiegand, ed. Reframing Migration, Diversity and the Arts: The Postmigrant Condition. London: Routledge, 2019. Schwanitz, Dietrich. Bildung: Alles, Was man wissen muss. Frankfurt am Main: Eichborn, 1999. Statistisches Bundesamt. ‘Personen mit Migrationshintergrund’. https://www.destatis. de/DE/Themen/Gesellschaft-Umwelt/Bevoelkerung/Migration-Integration/ Methoden/Erlauterungen/migrationshintergrund.html (accessed December 19, 2021). Stewart, Lizzie. ‘Postmigration in Theatre as Label and Lens.’ In Postmigration. Art, Culture, and Politics in Contemporary Europe, edited by Astrid Sophie Ost Hansen, Anna Meera Gaonkar, Hans Christian Post, and Moritz Schramm, 87–108. Berlin: transcript, 2021. Varatharajah, Senthuran. Vor der Zunahme der Zeichen. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 2016. Wenzel, Olivia. 1000 Serpentinen Angst. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 2020. Winkels, Hubert. ‘Rußgeboren’. SZ.de, August 23, 2020. sueddeutsche.de/kultur/ bildungsaufsteiger-i-russgeboren-1.5007411 Yildiz, Erol. ‘Ideen zum Postmigrantischen’. In: Postmigrantische Perspektiven. Ordnungssysteme, Repräsentationen, Kritik, edited by Naika Froutan, Juliane Karakayali, Riem Spielhaus, 19–34. Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2018.

PART III

Literary strategies of resistance

7 THE LUDIC IMPULSE Race narratives ‘at play’ in Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark and Zoë Wicomb’s Playing in the Light Aretha Phiri

In the previous chapter, Kyung-Ho Cha observed the hermeneutical injustice that is in play when literary characters a˝ected by race- and class-based injustices struggle for social self-understanding. This chapter develops some of that thinking with reference to narratives by Toni Morrison and Zoë Wicomb, exploring ‘playfulness’ as a literary and/or moral imperative: an imaginative, empathic curiosity that creatively troubles limiting epistemic practices.

Introduction: troubling epistemologies of whiteness Envisaged as a necessary expansion of mainstream critical race studies, critical whiteness studies seek to demystify and destabilize white racial/ethnic normativity, through analyzing the socio-historical intersections of gender and class. In disorienting this idealized monolithic identity, whiteness studies attempt to reorient the traditional white gaze from the (always-already racialized) Other to the (ostensibly non-racialized) white Self. In his popular, seminal text White (1997), Richard Dyer maintains that ‘to talk about race is to talk about all races except the white’,1 an observation captured also in Kobena Mercer’s assertion that the di°culty in theorizing whiteness is ‘precisely because it is so thoroughly naturalized in dominant ideologies of race and racism as to be invisible as an ethnicity in its own right’.2 Dyer’s examination of white racial imagery in popular media – literature, ÿlm and advertising – unveils its universalized, invisible particularity in ways that attempt to render whiteness (strangely) visible. In particular, his focus on the aesthetic, moral and material idealization of whiteness reveals, as Vron Ware, Ruth Frankenberg, Valerie Babb and Mason Stokes have similarly highlighted,3 its intersections with mainstream, patriarchal interpretations of (female) gender, (non-normative) sex and (hetero-) DOI: 10.4324/9781003254317-11

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sexuality. In highlighting thus its socio-political invention and embeddedness and exposing therein the psychosocial motivations and manifestations of whiteness,4 scholars’ occupation with revealing the ‘unconscious habits of racial privilege’5 that obtain in what has been constructed as the white race follows from and expands pioneering psycho-historical studies into the workings of white racism and concomitant ‘white racial projects’.6 Still other critics have made crucial connections between whiteness and exclusive socio-economic gains. David Roediger’s exposition of the speciÿc intersections of the ‘wages of whiteness’ 7 for white working-class Americans was succeeded by George Lipsitz’s delineation of their subsequent ‘possessive investment in whiteness’8 – the ways in which white people generally have proÿted from being white. Further unveiling whiteness as a (collective, inherited and intergenerational) structural ‘passport to privilege’,9 Cheryl I. Harris, who traces the history of di˝erential racial discrimination and oppression in the United States, does not just characterize white privilege as an ‘invisible package of unearned assets’ to be cashed in daily;10 she identiÿes the active, legitimated (legal) promotion of ‘whiteness as property’ – a value-laden asset that has historically been a°rmed as the ‘quintessential property for personhood’.11 Albeit the US-centric emphasis on Anglo-American culture, these critical insights support the operation of what Miranda Fricker describes as identity power, ‘social power which is directly dependent upon shared social-imaginative conceptions of the social identities of those implicated in the particular operation of power’.12 The resultant wrong that is incurred in one’s ‘capacity as a subject of knowledge and thus in a capacity essential to human value’13 demonstrates a practice of epistemic injustice that has global resonance, evidenced in postcolonial critiques of the (continued, pervasive) hegemony of Western, Anglo-Eurocentric cultural history and subjectivity (Young 1994, 2004). Functioning as a hyper-visible signiÿer, ‘as the marker or index of the traces of colonial legacies that yet lie latent (but not dormant) in the postcolonial world’s own “colonial unconscious”’,14 postcolonial whiteness analyses are animated, as with canonical postcolonial scholarship, with the (toxic) material, psychosocial and psychological residual e˝ects of whiteness on colonized indigenous ‘black’ populations, after empire and post-independence.15 Further interrogating this ‘whitely’ ingrained ‘commitment to the centrality of white people and their perspectives’,16 Sara Ahmed’s Fanonian development of a ‘phenomenology of whiteness’ reveals how whiteness, rendered pervasively worldly, coheres for non-white (indigenous/‘hybrid’) people into an embodied ‘background to experience’.17 As the plethora of scholarly investigations demonstrates, critical whiteness studies have e˝ectively placed white cultural hegemony under the spotlight for global attention and scrutiny. Its popularity has unveiled continued, hierarchical asymmetries of power and the pervasive socio-economic/-political inequalities and oppressions that obtain. This not only speaks to the shifting,

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amorphous contours of whiteness;18 it indicates a tear in the ‘racial contract’:19 an alleviation of the dys/functional cognitive condition of ‘white ignorance’20 in which ‘hegemonic groups characteristically have experiences that foster illusory perceptions about society’s functioning’.21 It suggests a concerted move, instead, ‘toward the abolition of whiteness’.22 But as the recurrent Black Lives Matter Movement implies,23 and the persistent global calls for reparations to non-white, indigenous communities and nations insist, whiteness is far from relinquishing its di˝use systemic power and privilege. Although wellintentioned and contributing signiÿcantly to the evolution of critical race and cultural studies, the (current) intellectualization of whiteness risks becoming an exercise in narcissism; that is, largely impotent to shift the material status quo, critical whiteness studies would appear (un)wittingly to recenter and cement – to further institutionalize – white cultural pervasiveness. The epistemic practice of theorizing the existential implications of whiteness has the paradoxical e˝ect of perpetuating the very epistemic injustice it seeks to expose and undermine. Ethical problems and the limits of white guilt/ shame24 – the disjuncture between what one is (socio-politically) and what one feels one ought (morally) to be – are in play. And still, deconstructing whiteness as a predominantly introspective intellectual exercise and its pursuit cannot ÿnally disrupt whiteness’s noxious, concrete consequences for black subjects. In this regard, the anti-Apartheid activist Steve Biko’s (1946–1977) militant black consciousness model – which echoes the writings on black South African colonial disenfranchisement of his predecessor and Du Boisean contemporary, Sol Plaatje (1876–1932) – anticipates the disconcerting ÿndings of a 2014 South African Reconciliation Barometer Report by the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation. Noting continued disparities in socio-economic/political well-being, despite the country’s (controversial) post-Apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) process and government-enacted ‘Afÿrmative Action’ transformation policies, the Report states that white South Africans ‘indicate high levels of denial of past injustice, low levels of responsibility for past injustice, and low levels of support for redress’ of the kind required by those who su˝ered under Apartheid’s implementation.25 Disparities in access to education, health, housing and employment similarly persist in the United States: a 2016 United Nations General Assembly report notes that the legacy of colonial history, enslavement, racial subordination and segregation, racial terrorism and racial inequality in the United States remains a serious challenge, as there has been no real commitment to reparations and to truth and reconciliation for people of African descent.26 As such, Robyn Wiegman cautions against missing ‘how seemingly “benign” is the popular cultural rhetoric of whiteness today and how self-empowering are its consequences’.27 This is in tune with Nadine Dolby’s observation of

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whiteness’s constant e˝orts to ‘re-invent itself and maintain its (still) privileged, although increasingly contested, position in the global arena’.28 In (hyper-)racialized societies, where the emphasis on the fact of racism forecloses complex interrogations into the workings of race, there is a danger of missing the complex cross-referential, inter-relational ensnaring ‘entanglements’ that obtain; it is precisely the entangled ‘condition of being twisted together or entwined’29 that provides opportunities for (re-)imagining and interpreting the world, otherwise.

Playing in the dark: race, narratives and the ‘play’ of epistemic practice Published in 1992, Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination is considered a seminal text in US-oriented/-based critical race scholarship. It has been identiÿed by many as a precursor to the growth in and prevalence of whiteness studies at the turn of the 20th century. Concerned with the ‘denotative and connotative blackness that African[-descended] peoples have come to signify’ in the national imagination,30 Morrison interrogates the literary uses and serviceability of a (formerly enslaved) black population whose presence/persona is expediently constructed – fabricated – for the purposes of white, exclusory nation-building in the United States, in its founding (19th- and 20th-century) canonical literature. In addition to tracing the obvious fabrication of Othered ‘Africanist personae, narrative and idiom’31 in this canonical white literature, Morrison’s study o˝ers a careful analysis in selected texts of the purposeful distancing mechanisms and e˝ects of this raw and savage, ‘dark and abiding presence’.32 She reveals how the textual anxieties – the gaps, ellipses and disjunctures in (black) racial representation – playing out on the page, re˛ect and manifest the subjective anxieties at play in the white literary consciousness. In this way, and quite di˝erently from the victim-/‘object’-based focus of traditional race studies, Morrison’s inverse attention to the ‘impact of racism on those who perpetuate it […] the e˝ect of racist in˛ection on the subject’, is to decipher the organizing and enabling, ‘operative mode’ of white America’s cultural hegemony and self-deÿnition.33 The ‘fabrication of an Africanist persona is re˛exive; an extraordinary meditation on the self ’ premised on black surrogacy, she argues, and canonical white literature provides ‘a way of contemplating chaos and civilization, desire and fear, and a mechanism for testing the problems of blessing and freedom’ – subjective values intrinsic to the founding narratives of quintessential Americanness.34 Here and elsewhere,35 Morrison’s sophisticated, probing examination illuminates the country’s studiously inverse white race ‘narrative’ as not just politically and discursively convenient but profoundly epistemic in design and articulation.

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The prejudicial ‘politics of epistemic practice’,36 Miranda Fricker notes, has ethical and existential resonance and implications. This was, long before the publication of her in˛uential essay, the occupation of African American writers whose creative literary responses to American canonical literature and cultural practices revealed the ‘peculiar disposition’ of the white gaze which renders black being and mind ‘invisible’.37 Their critical analyses have helped illuminate how white America’s ‘humanity masked its face with blackness’38 in ways that expand into an ontological paradigm Fricker’s delineation of hermeneutical injustice as ‘the injustice of having some signiÿcant area of one’s social experience blocked from collective understanding owing to a structural identity prejudice in the collective hermeneutical resource’.39 Morrison’s reading of Mark Twain’s controversial but much revered Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) is a case in point. The novel tells a story of a young white boy’s, Huck Finn’s, relationship with an adult runaway slave, Jim, and their ˛ight across the Mississippi River in pursuit of (their) freedom from ‘civilization’. It presents a bold critique of American democracy at the same time that it intimates its potential. Set before the Civil War, Huckleberry Finn endorses the founding American notion of manifest destiny and suggests the possibility of the genuine transcendence of socially constructed racial differences. But in its unsatisfactory ending, where Jim’s ‘freedom’ is averted, and in Twain’s persistent literary rendering of blackface minstrelsy – Jim’s excessive and contradictory portraiture, ‘like an ill-made clown suit that cannot hide the man within’40 – is evidence of a compromised (American) morality in which Huck’s white ‘self ’ cannot be realized without Jim’s black ‘specter of enslavement’.41 In his description of blackface minstrelsy, a cacophonous theatrical performance of blackness popularized in the post-Civil War era by white Americans apparently threatened by black freedom and concomitant socio-economic mobility, Ralph Ellison reveals the comic catharsis achieved as suggestive: the mask was the thing (the ‘thing’ in more ways than one) and its function was to veil the humanity of Negroes thus reduced to a sign, and to repress the white audience’s awareness of its moral identiÿcation with its own acts and with the human ambiguities pushed behind the mask. […] For out of the counterfeiting of the black American’s identity there arises a profound doubt in the white man’s mind as to the authenticity of his own image of himself.42 The ‘seeming counterfeit’43 of white involvement and investment in black representational ‘culture’ demonstrates not just a distorted exercise of white power/ authority; it reveals, in its use of a black surrogate, the parasitic nature of whiteness and the moral paucity of the white imagination. Eric Lott’s description,

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then, of this economically lucrative yet racially exploitative 19th-century cultural phenomenon as ‘love and theft’ aptly captures the irony of the intimately inter-relational and inter-subjective character of racialized identities.44 As a warped signiÿer of white power displaced, blackface minstrelsy was ‘less a repetition of power relations than a signiÿer for them – a distorted mirror, re˛ecting displacements and condensations and discontinuities between which and the social ÿeld there exist lags, unevennesses and multiple determinations’.45 In other words, in the porous borders between – and qualifying – white and black identity is the (existential) revelation that ‘the repellent elements repressed from white consciousness and projected onto black people were far from securely alienated – they were always already “inside,” part of “us”’.46 The expansion of black precarity to include a consideration of white precarity allows for further deliberations on the precarity of racialized identity and the concomitant precarity of (established) human relations. That race can be performed – that it is also iteratively performative – renders the integrity of naturalized, accepted racial categories/classiÿcations and their racial assumptions questionable. Similar to Judith Butler’s analysis of gender, this does not imply that race does not have real, material e˝ects, but illustrates how it is not inevitable; race is also a ‘changeable and revisable reality’47 governed by the socio-historical/-political moment(s) in which it is articulated. In this way, Morrison’s use of the nomenclature ‘play’ in describing the literary construction of American race relations is instructive and raises important ethical questions including: what might the notion of play bring to our accepted readings/understandings of race as a classiÿcatory system of identity; of racialism as the ascribing of racial essence to identity; and of racism as attaching value to this racialized essence or to race-based identities? Contrary to traditional, mainstream conceptions of play – which is di˝erentiated from the ritualized activity of game – as evasive, frivolous socio-communal activity, Thomas S. Henricks’ general survey of the theory of play situates it within an ethically existential paradigm: in that it is an ‘inquiry into the challenges and responsibilities of social living’ play ‘can be understood as a project of self-realization’48 within established societal relations of power. Play is thus an exercise in (self-) relationality that is commensurate with ÿctive literature’s ‘invitation to enter a parallel space, a hypothetical arena, in which you have imagined access to whatever is not you’.49 Herein, the ludic impulse, the desire to comprehend – to make some sort of a˝ective ‘sense’ of – the (other’s) world is activated. In the imaginative, generous engagement with the concrete, particular realities of the individual characters is the interior practice of self-compromise – the empathic intuition of the other-in-the-self. Insofar as ÿctive literature prompts the imagination of living otherwise, and to the extent that it a˝ords one the capacity to both experience and inhabit alterity, it provides opportunities for ‘epistemic correctives’50 to established norms. As Jean-Paul Sartre notes, one discerns at the heart of the aesthetic

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imperative, the moral imperative.51 Nonetheless ÿction’s prospects for disrupting and unlearning ‘reality’ are not without question, and its ‘positive, transformative potential […], [its] potential to in˛uence the social imagination and the shared concepts of social identity within it’52 is not without doubt. Literature’s formal, aesthetic ambiguity and the very elliptical character of language therein resist and undermine attempts at epistemic instrumentalization. That is, while ÿction contains within it an ethical imperative, serving as an ‘excavation of, and a meditation on, the pervasive sociocultural ideas’53 and ideals, in its own complex ‘play’ with/resistance to deÿnitive and conclusive, totalizing metanarratives literature resists guaranteeing ‘correctives’. Mark Kingwell’s description in this regard, of reading a novel as the ‘blessed burden of consciousness in action’,54 ties in with the notion of literary play – or the play of ÿction – as the enduring search for epistemic truth while questioning the very (unstable) premises upon which these truths are based. Skeptical, then, of its ‘positive’ transformative value/potential and advocating its ethical epistemic ambiguity, I am interested rather, in the extent to and ways in which literary aesthetics ‘at play’ translate into a moral imperative of ‘playfulness’ – an ‘openness to uncertainty that enables one to ÿnd in others one’s own possibilities and theirs’.55 That is, in light of pervasive racialized realities and the resultant social inequities that obtain, I consider literature’s interventionary limits in and potential for (re)calibrating and (re)conÿguring (positivist) history in the interest of realizing inclusive epistemic and socio-political justice.

Playing in the light: race, narratives and the ethics of ‘play’ Published in 2006, Zoë Wicomb’s Playing in the Light, which makes titular, cross-cultural and intertextual reference to Playing in the Dark, reads as a ÿctively ‘colored’, post-apartheid rejoinder to Morrison’s academic interrogation of the expedient uses of blackness in canonical white American literature. But where Morrison’s critique focuses on the deliberate literary construction and deployment of an abiding, racialized black ‘Africanist’ presence that simultaneously haunts and drives the national American imagination, Wicomb’s ÿctive attention to ‘playing white’ and the spectral presence of (native/indigenous) blackness within a liminal South African Coloured 56 subjectivity o˝er further ludic interrogations into and re˛ections on the political and performative e°cacy of race narratives. Playing in the Dark’s focus on the uses of blackness in the white American literary imagination is di˝erently articulated in Playing in the Light’s ÿctive consideration of the deliberate occlusion of blackness in the South African racial phenomenon/practice of passing – of ‘playing white’.57 ‘Coloring in’ the contours of Morrison’s own somewhat black-and-white examination in this way, Wicomb’s novel further develops the central question posed in this chapter around what happens to, or is unveiled in, the racial project when it is subjected to the ironies, ambiguities and nuances attendant to race discourse,

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ideology and practice that are ‘at play’ in ÿction. Bringing the two texts into dialogue in this way, while acknowledging the spatiotemporal and contextual (dis)continuities, including slave and apartheid/segregation histories, I focus in this section of the chapter in the potential excesses and ruptures that obtain in generic, o°cial (meta)narratives of race. Set in Cape Town in the years immediately before South Africa’s o°cial and heady transition in 1994 to a democratic post-apartheid state, Playing in the Light presents the story of Marion Campbell, whose privileged, successful – relatively apolitical and apathetic – life as a white South African is revealed as a farce and shaken when she discovers that her parents, John and Helen Campbell, were/are ‘play-whites’, Coloured South Africans who, suppressing any ancestral and cultural trace of blackness, ‘crossed over’ into whiteness.58 The novel is expressed predominantly from Marion’s viewpoint and conveys the sense of subjective anxiety she feels when she discovers the fraudulence, the inauthenticity of her perceived white, racial identity. Filled with ‘[a]nger and shame’59 at her parents’ willful renunciation and repression of their black, indigenous past, Marion is haunted psychosomatically in ways not unlike the characters subjected to perpetual inter-generational processes of ‘rememory’ in Morrison’s Pulitzer prize-winning neo-slave novel, Beloved (1987). Here, the revisionary, ÿctive rendition of the historical account of an escaped slave, Margaret Garner’s, killing of and subsequent haunting by her (adult) ‘crawling baby girl’ – Beloved – attempts to address the institutional and cultural legacy of slavery at simultaneously domestic and national levels.60 Marion’s recurring dream of a demanding stranger ‘calling her to account’ and hissing ‘a command to remember, remember, remember’, which recalls the haunting ‘[d]isremembered and unaccounted for’61 ÿgure of Beloved who ‘terrorizes’ family and friends in Morrison’s novel, does not just unveil the troubling specter of her familial blackness. As with ‘Beloved’s’ epigraphical dedication to (and ÿctional reclamation of ) the ‘Sixty Million and more’ descendants of the transatlantic slave trade, Marion is branded by and bequeathed an (oppressive and repressive racial) national history that she does not (fully) know. The revelation of her own consequent subjective ‘ÿction’ that she is white plunges Marion into an existential crisis that elicits in her a process of epistemic un/learning: She is, after all, not the person she thought she was […] It may be true that being white, black, or coloured means nothing, but it is also true that things are no longer the same; there is a di˝erence between what things are and what they mean.62 The mutable, evolving character of racial identity, which mirrors the country’s transitional political history, here accords with Butler’s postmodern, poststructural reading of gender as a ‘changeable and revisable reality’63 governed by the socio-historical/-political moment(s) in which it is articulated/performed.

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This is demonstrated in the novel’s ‘playful’ segues from past to present and in the polyphonic assertions of (the experiences of ) other characters. Marion’s emotionally ascetic mother’s, Helen (previously Karelse) Campbell’s, active pursuit of whiteness – a veritable ‘whiteache’ – especially illuminates the intimately intricate ‘business’ of whiteness as well as the ‘playful’ precarity of racialized identities. It shifts the conversation from the mere politics of race to a consideration of its ethical, existential dimensions; that is, to the im/possibility of ever ‘knowing’ race and the limited prospects for realizing epistemic and socio-political equity. Having ancestors from the Khoisan and other (migratory/enslaved) indigenous populations as well as from among the white (Dutch and British) colonial settlers, Helen and her husband John are, at the height of Apartheid (1948–1990s) – the o°cial implementation of white minority rule – categorically designated Coloureds. The governing National Party’s obsession with (one drop of miscegenating) white blood, which di˝erently mimicked America’s historical obsession with (one drop of miscegenating) black blood, legitimized the racial category of Coloured.64 Legislated in the Population Registration Act No. 30 of 1950, a Coloured person was conÿrmed by negation as ‘not a white person or a native’, a hierarchized interstitial identity65 whose ‘semiotic coding’66 as ‘in-between/hybrid/creole/mixed’ points to Colouredness as ‘a residual identity’67 in the national political imagination. In particular, the legal acknowledgment of miscegenation, ‘the origins of which lie within a discourse of race, concupiscence, and degeneracy’,68 binds Coloured identity simultaneously to shame and non-belonging, presenting a being whose racial ‘essence’ signiÿed the ‘unclassiÿable, the doubtful and the borderline’ and functions still today ‘as both the extreme Other of dominant racial discourse in South Africa, and also as its very ambivalent core’.69 Grant Farred notes, then, how being ‘confronted with the coloured body represents, in Judith Butler’s terms, a meeting with the “phantasm of the original”’ 70 that ‘plays with’ the ÿxedness of racial binaries and troubles as well as undermines the legitimacy and cognitive logic of accepted race narratives. In that the implicitly ‘black problem’ (articulated in Playing in the Dark and in African American literature) becomes explicitly the ‘problem of the color line’ in Wicomb’s Playing in the Light, Helen’s and John’s light(er)-skinned appearance allows them to pass as white, demonstrating the possibilities of race, particularly whiteness, ‘at play’. Mistaken for a Boer (white Afrikaner) and subsequently given a job at the Tra°c Department, John Campbell’s entrance into whiteness is ‘a happy case of mistaken identity. […] There was no question of needing to try on his part. Caught accidentally in a beam of light, he watched whiteness fall fabulously, like an expensive woman, into his lap’.71 He and (more so) Helen relish their acquisition of white identity and consequent access to its urbane privileges, including social, economic and spatial mobility. And it is this that allows Helen, conveniently – yet at great moral cost – to obliterate her old self and abdicate her blackness with its associative negative

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connotations. Subjected to the sexualized imperial gaze and physical groping of Councillor Carter, a white o°cial who facilitates her racial transition, she is ‘soiled’, and sacriÿces – Christ-like, in her mind72 – her Coloured self and familial relations in order to gain, o°cially, (entrance into) the sanctity of whiteness. Carter’s metaphoric ‘rape’ of Helen is re-played in the context of the stereotyped sexual allure of the black Other and suggestive of the gendered power di˝erentials that obtained in the colonial matrix.73 The pathological, ‘ineradicable sign of negative di˝erence’ 74 attached to her sexuality a°rms Fricker’s deÿnition of epistemic injustice as a wrong incurred in one’s ‘capacity as a subject of knowledge and thus in a capacity essential to human value’ 75 and testiÿes to the dehumanizing cost of whiteness. But insofar as Helen actively pursues, indeed aggressively ‘invests’ in whiteness (as value/asset), I would concur with Rebecca Mason’s critique of Fricker’s theory as underplaying ‘the epistemic agency non-dominant subjects possess despite their marginalization from dominant interpretive discourses’.76 In a scene described in an aptly wry religious tenor, the narrator muses, in Helen’s ‘transÿguration’, on the curious relationship between fact and ÿction: Like the signs and wonders of the Acts of the Apostles, the miracles where men and women rose and made their beds and started their lives anew speaking in fresh tongues, so Helen was remade. The Sunday-school texts of her girlhood, learnt by heart and seldom understood, grew clear with the music of meaning, of revelation. She may have been deÿled, but she’d also been obliterated, and believing in the miracle of rebirth, her own thoughts had remained pure. Not once did Helen doubt her actions.77 Albeit (mis)guided by dominant (religious) interpretive discourse, she is not ignorant of her contextual reality and situatedness and in fact could be said, in the absence of absolute free will, to be exercising, expediently, her limited choice. In this respect – and in her case, in her conviction in, rather than marginalization from, the dominant interpretive discourse, Helen could be said to practice willful hermeneutical ignorance which, manifesting in a ‘systematic and coordinated misinterpretation of the world’, presents ‘knowers who are simultaneously and without consultation captivated by a distorted picture of the world’.78 Echoing Cha's argument about the unnamed protagonist of Scattered Light in the previous chapter, the paradox of Helen’s ‘knowing’ complicity in her own subjection being simultaneously an exercise in subjective agency does not just complicate conventional theorizations of whiteness; it raises intriguing questions around the universal e°cacy of the epistemic imperative, that is, about the ethics of epistemology and the ways in which it lies at and is inevitably implicated in the ‘border politics of race’ 79 and other intersecting modalities. In this way, the novel’s central motif/trope of play gives readers pause to re˛ect and echo Gaile Pohlhaus’s (2012) query: is ‘all knowing necessarily

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intertwined with social values? Do our current theories of knowledge obscure the epistemic labor of those in particular social positions? And do our current theories of knowledge reinscribe certain social hierarchies?’.80 Where whiteness is conventionally theorized as a normative, invisible asset, the novel is at pains to reveal a more complicated, lived human experience: Play-whites: a misnomer if ever there was one. There was nothing playful about their condition. Not only were they deadly serious, but the business of playing white, of blu°ng it out, took courage, determination, perseverance, commitment – the list of qualities from which school teachers draw up end-of-year reports for star pupils like Helen. Not even in the privacy of their home, between their four walls, could they let up, act the fool, laugh at those who’d been duped, or mimic their public selves. In the blinding light of whiteness, they walked exposed: pale, vulnerable geckos whose very skeletal systems showed through transparent ˛esh. With a child to raise, a public-private distinction was a luxury they could not contemplate; the public selves required all their energies. Playing – as others would call it – in the light, left no space, no time for interiority, for re˛ecting on what they had done. Under the glaring spotlight of whiteness, they played diligently, assiduously; the past, and with it conscience, shrunk to a black dot in the distance.81 For the Campbells, the economy of whiteness – ‘the business of playing white’ – is an interminable obligation – or contractual ‘bargain’ – that takes enduring e˝ort, constant work and imagination to maintain and fulÿll. Whiteness is thus not an inevitable privilege but, necessitating the learned qualities of ‘courage, determination, perseverance, commitment’, becomes a burdensome luxury, even penalty82 – an unenviable project of survival. In an echo of the Foucauldian panopticon, the ‘blinding light of whiteness’ requires and ensures their constant self-discipline and self-surveillance, a condition aptly captured in the name of the suburb to which they are able to relocate – Observatory. In an analysis of gender performance that is applicable to race performance, Butler maintains that identiÿcation is never simply ‘mimetic but involves a strategy of wish fulÿllment; one identiÿes not with an empirical person but with a fantasy’, where ‘fantasies condition and construct the speciÿcity of the gendered subject with the enormously important qualiÿcation that these fantasies are themselves disciplinary productions of grounding cultural sanctions and taboos’.83 The Campbells’ desire for and performance of whiteness is unattainable because it is premised on the fantasy of original, a priori identity, a myth/ ÿction. Its ÿctionality is evidenced in the fact that their whiteness is further ‘conditioned’, that is, regulated, in accordance with a particular kind of whiteness – a ‘respectable whiteness’ scripted in accordance with a ‘well-thumbed etiquette book’ that is embedded in dominant (socially accepted) religious values.84 This

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attests to the non-generic variability of the category ‘white’ and points to the established inherent ‘properties’ of whiteness as being chimerical, located precariously somewhere between ‘substance and shadow’.85 In this regard, the enabling technology of passing for white becomes ‘not so much an ability’86 as it is an embodied, reconstructed and reiterative, approximate – that is, simultaneously dis-enabling – technique of discursive reproduction and regulation.87 For the Campbells, ‘to achieve whiteness is to keep on your toes’, in a state of constant ‘vigilance and continual assessment’88 in which the ‘individual and cultural anxieties induced by boundary crossing’89 seep through the cracks of their existential foundations: ‘If the whiteness they pursue is cool and haughty and blank, history is uncool, reaches out gawkily for a°nities, asserts itself boldly, threatens to mark, to break through and stain the primed canvas that is their life’.90 With the constant threat of exposure, of blackness’s seeping contamination, the achievement of whiteness is primed as not so much an aesthetic aspiration but as a risky, ‘deadly serious’ existential enterprise in which passing is transformed into trespassing. In an inverse and ironic echo of the infamous (dompass) pass laws designed to restrict black movement during Apartheid, the Campbells’ achievement of whiteness – realized in material and physical mobility – signiÿes a paradoxical passport that is qualiÿed by self-restriction/ self-policing. They do not quite pass the racial port/boundary but are doomed repeatedly to cross it.91 The prospects for passing into/passing as white are, then, fraught with or beset by the occlusion of (a particularized) blackness, the ritualized exorcism of the ‘traces of native origins’92 that renders the Campbells ‘enslaved’ to whiteness. More than that, though, ‘playing white’ operates in (historical) contravention of more humane, inter-relational and inter-subjective ‘laws’ and at profound existential deÿcit. Delineated as ‘anything but ludic’ in her novel, Wicomb’s interrogation of racial crossing – of ‘playing’ white – is motivated by empathic curiosity, the imaginative capacity, intuition and willingness to play in, or cross over into, the experiences and lived ‘realities’ of others. She explains: Now in political terms you may have contempt for play-whites; but as a writer I am interested in what it means for individuals born into a society that is hyper-religious and committed to family values to renounce their families. I had to imagine how such characters in the 1940s and 50s negotiated the tension between social and economic advancement and betrayal of their families and communities.93 Sealed o˝ from their past and renouncing familial and relational connections and connectedness, the Campbells’ are confronted with the alienating ‘silence and lack of colour’94 that makes up their whiteness. Premised on ‘[s]ecrets, lies and discomÿture’95 – including their subtle name change and the concealment of Helen’s biological mother and Marion’s maternal

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grandmother, Tokkie, as their family domestic – their play at ‘whiteface’ is an inverse enactment of blackface minstrelsy whose ‘seeming counterfeit’ signiÿes a moral and existential void. Marion is thus compelled to ‘excavate’ the substance of their lives. Scouring records at the National Library, hers is an interrogatory ‘response to the other facing’96 – an ethical gesture of un/knowing or un/learning the world. Given her discovery of the absurdity of Apartheid racial policies, it is a gesture that takes into empathic consideration John Campbell’s perspectival assertion that they are ‘not the monsters she seems to think they were; that was just how the world was’ back then.97 The fundamental ‘mask’ of whiteness is here unveiled not just in the vulnerability of their everyday existence but in the protean laws to which they subscribe in order to achieve whiteness. Reading through the Populations Registration Acts, Marion learns that Act No. 30 of 1950 deÿnes a ‘white person’ as: one who in appearance obviously is, or who is generally accepted as a white person, but does not include a person who, although in appearance obviously a white person, is generally accepted as a coloured person. Subsequently, the Population Registration Amendment Act of 1962 states that: A ‘white person’ is a person who (a) in appearance obviously is a white person and who is not generally accepted as a coloured person; or (b) is generally accepted as a white person and is not in appearance obviously not a white person, but does not include any person who for the purposes of classiÿcation under this Act, freely and voluntarily admits that he is by descent a native or a coloured person unless it is proved that the admission is not based on fact. The subjective anxiety – the ‘nervous condition’ – experienced by the Campbells and induced by whiteness is translated in the textual anxiety – ‘the decades worth of folly’98 – that plays out on the pages of the Act. Whiteness in the law is not so much biologically or materially deÿnitive as it is generally and ‘obviously’ surmised. It generates an imagined political community based on ‘cultural artefacts of a particular kind’99 and, as John Campbell’s accidental acquisition of whiteness demonstrates, the Act (of whiteness) is an ironic archival narrative of national racial history because it is susceptible to subjective (mis) interpretation. Intuited from what it is not and contingent on negation of the racial other, whiteness is revealed as parasitic. Exposed as not unalloyed substance, its interpretive proximity to and reliance on blackness for its realization and a°rmation fundamentally undermines its assigned or design[at]ed value. The referential intertext of whiteness, then, has implications for readings of race; race is located within a discursive paradigm that reveals how it is based

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not so much on veriÿable fact than on incomprehensible, and in this case, illogical kind of ÿction. In line with the interpretative malleability of the Act itself, race reads as a narrative that, ˛uid and changeable, is always in excess of itself, invariably overdetermined. That ‘˛oating signiÿer’100 whose sign(age) is arbitrary, race is predicated on a ˛awed, specious semiotics in which, as Marion discovers and her parents play out/perform, the ‘image does not illuminate the text’.101 In that whiteness is ‘in competition’ with and haunted by the garrulous messiness and ˛ux – the coloredness – of history, racial identity is primed as itself an unstable political category. In this regard, Marion’s mythical nickname – she is her father’s ‘meermin, his little mermaid’102 – points to her ‘hybrid’, liminal identity; it also signiÿcantly signals her (eternal, repeated and intergenerational) entrance into an ‘era of unremitting crossings’,103 an uncertain, unsettling existential space that probes accepted verities. Marion – who has e˝ectively, albeit unwittingly, also been playing white – is ironically ‘gifted’ by her parents the legacy of crossing over, un/bound by the strictures of (political) convention. But as a travel agency owner who is in the business of travel but actually detests it, she undertakes her (enforced) racial journey as ‘a reluctant traveller who has landed in a foreign country without so much as a phrase book’.104 That is, distinct from everyday, generic travel and quite di˝erently from her parents, Marion’s simultaneously epistemic and ontological journey engenders ‘the event of the foreigner’, something Catherine Malabou describes as a ‘type of defamiliarization […] this sudden emergence of otherness’.105 Traveling (to) the UK and reduced, also in her reading of (canonical, white) South African literature, inexplicably to tears, an ignominious Marion, ‘shocked to ÿnd herself a stranger’ in a (ÿctive) foreign land, experiences her own inner otherness – ‘a hole, a curious, negative deÿnition of the familiar emptiness’.106 Her sense of shame/humiliation lies not just in the disjuncture between her ‘real’ and ‘ideal’ (moral) self but in the discovery that ‘many versions of herself exist in the world’; or, even more, that ‘many versions of herself exist in the stories of her country’.107 Where her shame inhabits an ontological paradigm not unlike her parents’ experiential acquisition of whiteness, Marion is, di˝erently from them, moved to un/learn what she ‘knows’ of her ‘known’ self. It is an existential process implied in her encounter with the vagrant and emblematic foreigner, Outa Blinkoog, when embarking on an impromptu road trip of the Western Cape with her work colleague and unlikely companion, Brenda. Blinkoog’s itinerancy and generosity – giving freely of his ‘illuminating’ glass trinkets – transforms the (puritanical) artiÿce of race, enacted by Helen, into the colorful art of existence; into ways of seeing and envisaging the world di˝erently. Pressed into conversing with Marion and Brenda, Blinkoog ‘launches into narrative that has no end, each fragment leading into another […]. Words are fresh, newborn, untainted by history; all is bathed in laughter as clean as water’.108 In cacophonous, unscripted chatter that echoes

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the unbridled voices of the women in the Clearing in Beloved which sound ‘the key, the code, the sound that broke the back of words’,109 Blinkoog is suggestive of alternative possibilities of subjective reinvention/rebirth. In tune with the nomadic, peripatetic character of his own life, he signiÿes the prospects for pre-discursive, deterritorialized and unbounded, transitive humanity.

Conclusion: ÿctive art, architecture and the limits of epistemic justice Blinkoog symbolizes how the condition of alterity facilitates and translates ‘reality’ into a ‘new frame, a new story’ – an embodied, heterotopic narrative characterized by ‘cracks and ÿssures that will not permit monolithic ideological constructs’.110 This is demonstrated in Marion’s own initial dis-placement ‘on the balcony, the space both inside and out’111 which portends and mirrors the discovery of her liminal racial identity and, in her existential unraveling, culminates in the question of how one ever knows the self in a (pre-)design(at) ed world. In this regard, the metaphor of the located racial house (of positivist, collective history) is transformed into a dislocated ontological home (of interrelational/-subjective experience). Observing that narrative ‘requires the active complicity of a reader willing to step outside established boundaries of the racial imaginary’, Morrison maintains that we need to rethink the subtle yet persuasive attachments we have to the architecture of race. We need to think about what it means and what it takes to live in a redesigned racial house […] as a way of calling it home.112 That is, whereas the notion of house signals the materialization of past ‘realities’, the idea of home indicates the embodiment of future possibilities. Home is not a superÿcial, naive place ‘of pathetic yearning and futile desire’,113 but a space – an opening – that acknowledges how racial identity ‘permeates our being in the world, our being-with-others, and our consciousness of our self as being-for-others’.114 Not unlike the haunted houses in Morrison’s Beloved and Wicomb’s Playing in the Light whose (past) racial architectures presage ‘stirrings of the unhomely’,115 this interior – as opposed to anterior – ‘phenomenology of racial embodiment’116 elicits a ‘sensuality, susceptibility to being a˝ected’117 in ways that render alternative ways of knowing and being in the world possible. The interrogatory, ludic aesthetics of Playing in the Light, which exempliÿes ÿctive literature’s own ‘struggle over the sign, and over the authority that stands over meaning’,118 provides such paradoxical prospects of un-homing. In her essay, ‘The Art of Fiction’ (1993), Morrison has described the act of writing (black American) history as ‘a kind of literary archaeology’ whose imaginative

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reconstruction of the past can only ‘yield up a kind of truth’.119 In its ÿctive rendition of South Africa’s apartheid past and present, Playing in the Light similarly unveils itself as ‘less a singular act of archaeological retrieval – the triumphant unearthing of incontestable proofs of the event in question – than a dynamic and open-ended process of narrative mapping’.120 Parodying/‘playing with’ race’s questionable intrinsic value, outside of the discursive and providing neither narrative closure nor therapeutic relief, the novel implies ÿctive literature’s similarly ambiguous, qualiÿed capacity for providing epistemic correctives and upending racial ÿctions. Playing, as with passing, operates as a narrative and textual strategy of interpretive indeterminacy. In its metaÿctional segue from aesthetics to poetics, Playing in the Light advances a necessarily ironic ‘ethics of form’121 that in turn translates into an ethics of permanent, embodied un/knowing and troubles epistemic practice. In this respect, the architecture of race presented in the novel and delineated in this chapter parallels the architecture of ÿction in its pliability, opacity and multivalency. In a novel that haunts with the ‘specter of incommensurability’,122 in which the (racial) ‘image [on the page] does not [ÿnally] illuminate the text’, the reader is confronted with the reality of inÿnite subjective un-homing. Like its ironic ‘reading’ of race, Playing in the Light’s ‘endless narrative promise of belonging’123 puts forward a moral imperative ‘of playfulness’ – of ‘crossing over’ inÿnitely, in imaginative, empathic curiosity that a˝ords prospects for embodied alterity and presents nuanced opportunities for racial un/knowing.

Notes 1 Richard Dyer, White (London: Routledge, 1997), 18. 2 Kobena Mercer, Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1994), 215. 3 Vron Ware and Les Black (eds), Out of Whiteness: Colour, Politics, and Culture (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Ruth Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993); Valerie Babb, Whiteness Visible: The Meaning of Whiteness in American Literature and Culture (New York: New York University Press, 1998); and Mason Stokes, The Color of Sex: Whiteness, Heterosexuality, and the Fictions of White Supremacy (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001). 4 Theodore W. Allen, The Invention of the White Race: The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America (London: Verso, 1997); Gale Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South 1890-1940 (New York: Pantheon, 1998); Birgit Brander Rasmussen, Eric Klineberg, Irene J. Nexica, and Matt Wray, The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2001); Vron Ware and Les Black (eds), Out of Whiteness: Color, Politics, and Culture (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 5 Shannon Sullivan, Revealing Whiteness: The Unconscious Habits of Racial Privilege (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006). 6 Howard Winant, ‘White Racial Projects’, in The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness, eds. Birgit Brander Ramussen et al. (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2001), 97–112.

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7 Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London and New York: Verso, 1991). 8 Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Proÿt from Identity Politics (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1998). 9 Dyer, White, 44. 10 Peggy McIntonsh, ‘White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack’, Peace and Freedom July/August (1989): 1–3 (1). 11 Cheryl Harris, ‘Whiteness as Property’, in Identities: Race, Class, Gender, and Nationality, ed. Linda Martín Alco˝ and Eduardo Mendieta (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 75–89 (77, 79). 12 Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 4. 13 Fricker, Epistemic Injustice, 5. 14 Alfred Lopez, ‘Introduction: Whiteness after Empire’, in Postcolonial Whiteness: A Critical Reader on Race and Empire, ed. Alfred J. Lopez (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2005), 1–30 (6). 15 Canonical postcolonial scholars like Frantz Fanon’s (1967), Edward W. Said’s (1978) and Homi Bhabha’s (1994) delineations of whiteness’s toxic psychological residuality echo W. E. B. Du Bois’s (1903) description of the African American condition of ‘double consciousness’. Black America’s emphasis on the hypervisibility of whiteness indicates the postcolonial intersections between it and African experiences of whiteness. 16 Paul Taylor, ‘Silence and Sympathy: Dewey’s Whiteness’, in What White Looks Like: African-American Philosophers on the Whiteness Question, ed. George Yancy (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), 227–224 (229). 17 Sara Ahmed, ‘A Phenomenology of Whiteness’, Feminist Theory 8 no. 2 (2007): 149–168 (150). 18 Melissa Steyn, Whiteness Just Isn’t What It Used to Be: White Identity in a Changing South Africa (New York: State University of New York Press, 2001). 19 Charles Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997). 20 Charles Mills, ‘White Ignorance’, in Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance, eds. Shannon Sullivan and Nancy Tuana (New York: State University of New York Press, 2007), 13–38 (20). 21 Charles Mills, Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 28. 22 David Roediger, Towards the Abolition of Whiteness: Essays on Race, Politics, and Working Class History (London: Verso, 1994). 23 The Black Lives Movement, started in 2013 in response to African American, particularly male, experiences of police brutality and systemic racism in America, is a contemporary iteration of numerous preceding black-led civil rights movements. 24 Samantha Vice, ‘How Do I Live in This Strange Place?’, Journal of Social Philosophy 41 no. 3 (2010): 323–342. 25 Kim Wale, ‘Re˛ecting on Reconciliation: Lessons from the Past, Prospects for the Future’, South African Reconciliation Barometer Report ( Compress: The Institute for Justice and Reconciliation (2014)): 1–45 (29). Established as an Act of Parliament in 1995, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings sought to achieve national rehabilitation and reconciliation by bringing together victims and perpetrators of Apartheid, but was subsequently criticized for its narrow interpretive and reparative remits. 26 United Nations General Assembly, ‘Report of the Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent on its mission to the United States of America’, August 18, 2016, 1–22. 27 Robyn Wiegman, ‘Whiteness Studies and the Paradox of Particularity’, Boundary 2 26 no. 3 (1999): 115–150 (117).

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28 Nadine Dolby, ‘White Fright: The Politics of White Youth Identity in South Africa’, British Journal of Sociology of Education 22 no. 1 (2001): 5–17 (5). 29 Sarah Nuttall, Entanglement: Literary and Cultural Refections on Post-Apartheid ( Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2009), 1. 30 Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (London: Pan, 1992), 6–7. 31 Morrison, Playing in the Dark, 16. 32 Morrison, Playing in the Dark, 33. 33 Morrison, Playing in the Dark, 11. 34 Morrison, Playing in the Dark, 17 and 7. References to America or Americanness in this chapter indicate North America. 35 Toni Morrison, ‘Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature’, The Tanner Lectures on Human Values (Michigan University, 7 October, 1988). 36 Fricker, Epistemic Injustice, 2. 37 Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Penguin, 1965 [1952]), 7. 38 Ellison, Shadow and Act (New York: Vintage, 1995), 44. 39 Fricker, Epistemic Injustice, 155. 40 Toni Morrison, ‘This Amazing, Troubling Book’, in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, ed. Thomas Cooley (New York: Norton, 1999), 384–392 (388). 41 Morrison, Playing in the Dark, 56. 42 Ellison, Shadow and Act, 49 and 53. 43 Eric Lott, ‘The Seeming Counterfeit: Racial Politics and Early Blackface Minstrelsy’, American Quarterly 43 no. 2 (1991): 223–254. 44 Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). 45 Lott, Love and Theft, 8. 46 Lott, ‘Love and Theft: The Racial Unconscious of Blackface Minstrelsy’, Representations 39 (1992): 23–50 (36). 47 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. 2nd edn. (New York: Routledge, 1999), xxiii. 48 Thomas S. Henricks, ‘Play as Self-Realization: Towards a General Theory of Play’, American Journal of Play 6 no. 2 (2014): 190–213 (194 and 190). 49 Zadie Smith, ‘Fascinated to Presume: In Defense of Fiction’, Accessed June 8, 2021, nybooks.com/articles/2019/10/24/zadie-smith-in-defense-of-ÿction/ 50 Zoë Cunli˝e, ‘Narrative Fiction and Epistemic Injustice’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 77 no. 2 (2019): 169–179 (169). 51 Jean-Paul Sartre, What is Literature? (London and New York: Routledge Classics, 2007), 47. 52 Cunli˝e, ‘Narrative Fiction and Epistemic Injustice’, 169. 53 Paula Moya, The Social Imperative: Race, Close Reading, and Contemporary Literary Criticism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015), 9. 54 Mark Kingwell, ‘The Ethics of Ethics and Literature’, World of Literature Today 88 no. 5 (2014): 23–26 (26). 55 Maria Lugones, Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition against Multiple Oppressions (Feminist Constructions) (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littleÿeld, 2003), 19. 56 Formalized in Apartheid’s Population Registration Act of 1950, the term ‘Coloured’ is a (multi-) racial designation that applies primarily to the Cape’s indigenous Khoisan peoples, European settlers and people from southern Africa and Southeast Asia who were enslaved on the Cape Colony. In this chapter, I move between the terms Coloured/coloured and Apartheid/apartheid to indicate/re˛ect the shift, where applicable, from its generalized discursive interpretations to its contextual, political and legalized applications.

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57 Racial ‘passing’/‘playing white’ is a recurrent motif also in African American (literary) culture and is considered a contentious global phenomenon privy to popular and academic debate. A comparative reading of both nations allows for a comprehensive examination of the constitutive condition of racialized (epistemic) practices. 58 Zoë Wicomb, Playing in the Light: A Novel (New York and London: The New Press, 2006), 107. 59 Wicomb, Playing in the Light, 117. 60 As a neo-slave novel concerned with unveiling the unspeakable atrocities and lived, human experiences of slavery typically veiled in the formal conservatisms of the traditional, 19th-century slave novel, Beloved reads also as an illuminating and ‘liberating’ counter-narrative to the conveniently fabricated literary representations – the masks – of blackness that Morrison addresses in Playing in the Dark. Playing in the Light’s cross-cultural and intertextual references to Playing in the Dark thus extend to Beloved as well. 61 Morrison, Beloved (London: Vintage, 2005 [1987], 54 and 323. 62 Wicomb, Playing in the Light, 106. 63 Butler, Gender Trouble, xxiii. 64 Founded in 1914 to promote the socio-political and socio-economic interests of white Afrikaners, the National Party, which came into o°cial power as the ruling national party in 1948, was largely responsible for o°cializing historical white assimilation and segregation into exclusionary white Afrikaner nationalism. 65 Mohammed Adhikari, Not White Enough, Not Black Enough: Racial Identity in the South African Coloured Community (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005). 66 Desiree Lewis, ‘Writing Hybrid Selves: Richard Rive and Zoë Wicomb’, in Coloured by History, Shaped by Place: New Perspectives on Coloured Identities in Cape Town, ed. Zimitri Erasmus (Cape Town: Kwela, 2003), 131–158 (132). 67 Zimitri Erasmus, ‘Introduction: Re-imagining Coloured Identities in postApartheid South Africa’, in Coloured by History, Shaped by Place, ed. Zimitri Erasmus (Cape Town: Kwela, 2003), 13–28 (18). 68 Wicomb, ‘Shame and Identity: The Case of the Coloured in South Africa’, in Writing South Africa: Literature, Apartheid, and Democracy, 1970-1995, eds. Derek Attridge and Rosemary Jolly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 91–107 (92). 69 Thriven Reddy, ‘The Politics of Naming: The Constitution of Coloured Subjects in South Africa’, in Coloured by History, Shaped by Place, ed. Zimitri Erasmus (Cape Town: Kwela, 2003), 63–79 (78 and 68). 70 Grant Farred, Midÿelder’s Moment: Coloured Literature and Culture in Contemporary South Africa (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000), 4. 71 Wicomb, Playing in the Light, 126–127. South Africa was colonized by two competing settler populations, the Afrikaners of Dutch origin and the predominantly English/Scottish of British heritage, both of which represent a particular kind of whiteness (conservative, racist; liberal, racialist respectively) in the country’s (black) national imagination. 72 Wicomb, Playing in the Light, 142. 73 Sander L. Gilman, DiŁerence and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985). 74 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 75. 75 Fricker, Epistemic Injustice, 5. 76 Rebecca Mason, ‘Two Kinds of Unknowing’, Hypatia 26 no. 2 (2011): 294–307 (295). 77 Wicomb, Playing in the Light, 144. 78 Gaile Pohlhaus Jr., ‘Relational Knowing and Epistemic Injustice: Toward a Theory of Willful Hermeneutical Ignorance’, Hypatia 27 no. 4 (2012): 715–735 (731–732).

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79 Sue Kossew, ‘Repositioning the Borderlines on Race: A Reading of Zoë Wicomb’s Novel Playing in the Light’, Literatur in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 39 no. 2 & 3 (2006): 197–206 (197). 80 Pohlhaus, ‘Relational Knowing and Epistemic Injustice’, 715. 81 Wicomb, Playing in the Light, 123. 82 Thandeka, Learning to Be White: Money, Race, and God in America (New York: Continuum, 2006). 83 Judith Butler, ‘Gender Trouble, Feminist Theory, and Psychoanalytic Discourse’, in Linda Martín Alco˝ and Eduardo Mendieta (eds), Identities: Race, Class, Gender, and Nationality (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 201–211 (207). 84 Wicomb, Playing in the Light, 131 and 139. 85 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 40. 86 Ahmed, ‘She’ll Wake Up One of These Days and Find She’s Turned into a Nigger’, Theory, Culture and Society 16 no. 2 (1999): 87–106 (101). 87 Catherine Rottenberg, ‘Passing’: Race, Identiÿcation, and Desire’, Criticism 45 no. 4 (2003): 435–452 (435–436). 88 Wicomb, Playing in the Light, 152 and 132. 89 Elaine Ginsberg, ‘Introduction: The Politics of Passing’, in Passing and the Fictions of Identity, ed. Elaine K. Ginsberg (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 1–18 (2). 90 Wicomb, Playing in the Light, 152. 91 Not unlike America’s historic Black Codes and Jim Crow laws designed to disenfranchise and restrict the mobility of African Americans, the dompass – literally, pass laws – instituted in 1952 as part of the Pass Laws Act was a continuation of many preceding laws, including the Native Land Act of 1913, the Native Urban Act of 1923 and the Mines and Works Amendment Act of 1926, implemented in South Africa to curtail black socio-political and -economic freedom and equality. 92 Wicomb, Playing in the Light, 124. 93 Quoted in Aretha Phiri, ‘Black, White and Everything in-between: Unravelling the Times with Zoë Wicomb’, English in Africa, 45 no. 2 (2018): 117–128 (120). 94 Wicomb, Playing in the Light, 175. 95 Wicomb, Playing in the Light, 59. 96 Emmanuel Levinas quoted by Lingis, Alphonso, ‘Introduction’, in Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1998), xix–xxxix (xix). 97 Wicomb, Playing in the Light, 117. 98 Wicomb, Playing in the Light, 121. 99 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Re·ections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 2006), 4. 100 Stuart Hall, ‘Race, the Floating Signiÿer: What More Is There to Say about “Race”?’, in Selected Writings on Race and DiŁerence, eds. Paul Gilroy and Ruth Wilson Gilmore (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021), 359–373. 101 Wicomb, Playing in the Light, 117. 102 Wicomb, Playing in the Light, 22. 103 Wicomb, Playing in the Light, 107. 104 Wicomb, Playing in the Light, 74. 105 Catherine Malabou, Counterpart: Travelling with Jacques Derrida (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 2; emphasis in original. In contrast to Marion, her parents’ whiteness is a constructed and calculated emersion into ‘otherness’. 106 Wicomb, Playing in the Light, 189. 107 Wicomb, Playing in the Light, 190–191. 108 Wicomb, Playing in the Light, 88–90. 109 Morrison, Beloved, 308. 110 Wicomb, Playing in the Light, 88; Zoë Wicomb, ‘To Hear the Variety of Discourses’, Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa 2 no. 1 (1990): 35–44 (36).

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111 Wicomb, Playing in the Light, 1. 112 Morrison, ‘Home’, The House That Race Built: Black Americans, U.S. Terrain, ed. Wahneema Lubiano (New York: Pantheon, 1997), 3–12 (8–9). 113 Morrison, ‘Home’, 4. 114 Linda Martín Alco˝, ‘Towards a Phenomenology of Racial Embodiment’, Radical Philosophy 95 (1999): 15–26 (25). 115 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 9. 116 Alco˝, ‘Towards a Phenomenology of Racial Embodiment’. 117 Levinas, Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence, xxix. 118 Dorothy Driver, ‘The Struggle over the Sign: Writing and History in Zoë Wicomb’s Art’, Journal of Southern African Studies 36 no. 3 (2010): 523–542 (541). 119 Morrison, ‘Toni Morrison. The Art of Fiction No. 134’, in Elissa Schappell and Claudia Brodsky Lacour (eds), Issue 128, 1993. Accessed May 1, 2005. theparisreview.org/interviews/1888/toni-morrison-the-art-of-f iction-no-134-tonimorrison; my emphasis 120 Susan Spearey, ‘Displacement, Dispossession and Conciliation: The Politics and Poetics of Homecoming in Antjie Krog’s Country of My Skull’, Scrutiny 2 5 no. 1 (2000): 64–77 (73). 121 Andrew van Der Vlies, ‘Intertextualities, Interdiscourses, and Intersectionalities: An Interview with Zoë Wicomb’, in Race, Nation, Translation: South African Essays, 1990-2013, ed. Andrew van der Vlies ( Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2018), 261–281 (269). 122 Pamela Scully, ‘Zoë Wicomb, Cosmopolitanism, and the Making and Unmaking of History’, Safundi 12 no. 3–4 (2011): 299–311 (310). 123 Minesh Dass, ‘“A Place in Which to Cry”: The Place for Race and a Home for Shame in Zoë Wicomb’s Playing in the Light’, Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa 23 no. 2 (2011): 137–146 (142).

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Dass, Minesh. ‘“A Place in Which to Cry”: The Place for Race and a Home for Shame in Zoë Wicomb’s Playing in the Light’. Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa 23 no. 2 (2011): 137–146. Dolby, Nadine. ‘White Fright: The Politics of White Youth Identity in South Africa’. British Journal of Sociology of Education 22 no. 1 (2001): 5–17. Driver, Dorothy. (2010). ‘The Struggle over the Sign: Writing and History in Zoë Wicomb’s Art’. Journal of Southern African Studies 36 no. 3 (2010): 523–542. Dyer, Richard. White. London: Routledge, 1997. Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. New York: Penguin, 1965 [1952]. Ellison, Ralph. Shadow and Act. New York: Vintage, 1995. Erasmus, Zimitri. ‘Introduction: Re-imagining Coloured Identities in Post-Apartheid South Africa’. In Coloured by History, Shaped by Place: New Perspectives on Coloured Identities in Cape Town, edited by Zimitri Erasmus, 13–28. Cape Town: Kwela, 2003. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. London: Pluto, 1986 [1952]. Farred, Grant. Midÿelder’s Moment: Coloured Literature and Culture in Contemporary South Africa. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000. Frankenberg, Ruth. White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Fricker, Miranda. Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Gilman, Sander L. DiŁerence and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985. Ginsberg, Elaine K. ‘Introduction: The Politics of Passing’. In Passing and the Fictions of Identity, edited by Elaine K. Ginsberg, 1–18. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996. Hale, Gale Elizabeth. Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South 1890–1940. New York: Pantheon, 1998. Hall, Stuart. ‘Race, the Floating Signiÿer: What More Is There to Say about “Race”?’ In Selected Writings on Race and DiŁerence, edited by Paul Gilroy and Ruth Wilson Gilmore, 359–373. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021. Harris, Cheryl I. ‘Whiteness as Property’. In Identities: Race, Class, Gender, and Nationality, edited by Linda Martin Alco˝ and Eduardo Mendieta, 75–89. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003. Henricks, Thomas S. ‘Play as Self-Realization: Towards a General Theory of Play’. American Journal of Play 6 no. 2 (2014): 190–213. Kingwell, Mark. ‘The Ethics of Ethics and Literature’. World of Literature Today 88 no. 5 (2014): 23–26. Kossew, Sue. ‘Repositioning the Borderlines on Race: A Reading of Zoë Wicomb’s Novel Playing in the Light’. Literatur in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 39 no. 2 & 3 (2006): 197–206. Levinas, Emmanuel. Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1998. Lewis, Desiree. ‘Writing Hybrid Selves: Richard Rive and Zoë Wicomb’. In Coloured by History, Shaped by Place: New Perspectives on Coloured Identities in Cape Town, edited by Zimitri Erasmus, 131–158. Cape Town: Kwela, 2003. Lingis, Alphonso. ‘Introduction’. In Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence, xix–xxxix. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1998. Lipsitz, George. The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Proÿt from Identity Politics. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1998.

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Lopez, Alfred J. “Introduction: Whiteness after Empire.” In Postcolonial Whiteness: A Critical Reader on Race and Empire, edited by Alfred J. Lopez, 1–30. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2005. Lott, Eric. ‘The Seeming Counterfeit: Racial Politics and Early Blackface Minstrelsy’. American Quarterly 43 no. 2 (1991): 223–254. Lott, Eric. ‘Love and Theft: The Racial Unconscious of Blackface Minstrelsy’. Representations 39 (1992): 23–50. Lott, Eric. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Lugones, Maria. Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition against Multiple Oppressions (Feminist Constructions). Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littleÿeld, 2003. Malabou, Catherine. Counterpart: Travelling with Jacques Derrida. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004. Mason, Rebecca. ‘Two Kinds of Unknowing’. Hypatia 26 no. 2 (2011): 294–307. McIntosh, Peggy. ‘White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack’. Peace and Freedom July/August (1989): 1–3. Mead, George Herbert. ‘The Self ’. In Identities: Race, Class, Gender, and Nationality, edited by Linda Martin Alco˝ and Eduardo Mendieta, 32–40. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003. Mercer, Kobena. Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies. New York: Routledge, 1994. Mills, Charles. The Racial Contract. Ithaca: NY: Cornell University Press, 1997. Mills, Charles. Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race. Ithaca: NY: Cornell University Press, 1998. Mills, Charles. ‘White Ignorance’. In Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance, edited by Shannon Sullivan and Nancy Tuana, 13–38. New York: State University of New York Press, 2007. Morrison, Toni. ‘Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature’. The Tanner Lectures on Human Values. Michigan University, 7 October, 1988. Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. London: Pan, 1992. Morrison, Toni. ‘Toni Morrison. The Art of Fiction No. 134’, edited by Elissa Schappell & Claudia Brodsky Lacour, Issue 128, 1993. Accessed 1 May 2005. theparisreview.org/interviews/1888/toni-morrison-the-art-of-ÿction-no-134-toni-morrison Morrison, Toni. ‘Home’. The House That Race Built: Black Americans, U.S. Terrain, edited by Wahneema Lubiano, 3–12. New York: Pantheon, 1997. Morrison, Toni. ‘This Amazing, Troubling Book’. In Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, edited by Thomas Cooley, 384–392. New York: Norton, 1999. Morrison, Toni. Beloved. London: Vintage, 2005 [1987]. Moya, Paula L. The Social Imperative: Race, Close Reading, and Contemporary Literary Criticism. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015. Nuttall, Sarah. Entanglement: Literary and Cultural Refections on Post Apartheid. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2009. Phiri, Aretha. ‘Black, White and Everything in-between: Unravelling the Times with Zoë Wicomb’. English in Africa 45 no. 2 (2018): 117–128. Pohlhaus, Gaile Jr. ‘Relational Knowing and Epistemic Injustice: Toward a Theory of Willful Hermeneutical Ignorance’. Hypatia 27 no. 4 (2012): 715–735. Ramussen, Birgit Brander et al., eds. The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001.

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Reddy, Thriven. ‘The Politics of Naming: The Constitution of Coloured Subjects in South Africa’. In Coloured by History, Shaped by Place: New Perspectives on Coloured Identities in Cape Town, edited by Zimitri Erasmus, 63–79. Cape Town: Kwela, 2003. Roediger, David. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. London and New York: Verso, 1991. Roediger, David. Towards the Abolition of Whiteness: Essays on Race, Politics, and Working Class History. London: Verso, 1994. Rottenberg, Catherine. ‘“Passing”: Race, Identiÿcation, and Desire’. Criticism 45 no. 4 (2003): 435–452. Said, Edward. Orientalism. London: Penguin, 2003. Sartre, Jean-Paul. What Is Literature? London and New York: Routledge Classics, 2007. Scully, Pamela. ‘Zoë Wicomb, Cosmopolitanism, and the Making and Unmaking of History’. Safundi 12 no. 3–4 (2011): 299–311. Smith, Zadie. “Fascinated to Presume: In Defense of Fiction” Accessed June 8, 2021. nybooks.com/articles/2019/10/24/zadie-smith-in-defense-of-ÿction/ Spearey, Susan. ‘Displacement, Dispossession and Conciliation: The Politics and Poetics of Homecoming in Antjie Krog’s Country of My Skull’. Scrutiny 2 5 no. 1 (2000): 64–77. Steyn, Melissa. Whiteness Just Isn’t What it Used to Be: White Identity in a Changing South Africa. New York: State University of New York Press, 2001. Stokes, Mason. The Color of Sex: Whiteness, Heterosexuality, and the Fictions of White Supremacy. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001. Sullivan, Shannon. Revealing Whiteness: The Unconscious Habits of Racial Privilege. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. Taylor, Paul C. Race: ‘Silence and Sympathy: Dewey’s Whiteness’. In What White Looks Like: African-American Philosophers on the Whiteness Question, edited by George Yancy, 227–242. New York and London: Routledge, 2004. Thandeka. Learning to Be White: Money, Race, and God in America. New York: Continuum, 2006. United Nations General Assembly. ‘Report of the Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent on its mission to the United States of America’. 18 August 2016. 1–22. Van Der Vlies, Andrew. ‘Intertextualities, Interdiscourses, and Intersectionalities: An Interview with Zoë Wicomb’. In Race, Nation, Translation: South African Essays, 1990–2013, edited by Andrew van der Vlies, 261–281. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2018. Vice, Samantha. ‘How Do I Live in This Strange Place?’ Journal of Social Philosophy 41 no. 3 (2010): 323–342. Wale, Kim. ‘Re˛ecting on Reconciliation: Lessons from the Past, Prospects for the Future’. South African Reconciliation Barometer Report. Compress: The Institute for Justice and Reconciliation (2014): 1–45. Ware, Vron and Les Black, eds. Out of Whiteness: Colour, Politics, and Culture. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Wicomb, Zoë. ‘To Hear the Variety of Discourses’. Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa 2 no. 1 (1990): 35–44. Wicomb, Zoë. ‘Shame and Identity: The Case of the Coloured in South Africa’. In Writing South Africa: Literature, Apartheid, and Democracy, 1970–1995, edited by Derek Attridge and Rosemary Jolly, 91–107. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

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Wicomb, Zoë. Playing in the Light: A Novel. New York and London: The New Press, 2006. Wiegman, Robyn. ‘Whiteness Studies and the Paradox of Particularity’. Boundary 2 26 no. 3 (1999): 115–150. Winant, Howard. ‘White Racial Projects’. In The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness, edited by Birgit Brander Ramussen et al., 97–112. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2001. Young, Robert J. C. Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. Young, Robert J. C. White Mythologies: Writing History and the West. London and New York: Routledge, 2004 [1990].

8 NARRATIVE PILGRIMAGE AND CHIASTIC KNOWLEDGE. OLIVIA WENZEL’S 1000 COILS OF FEAR AND SHARON DODUA OTOO’S ADA’S˜ROOM Sarah Colvin

In the previous chapter, Aretha Phiri illuminated how literature’s imaginative potential, its seriously playful what-if scenarios, enables epistemic journeying. In this chapter I want to look at more literary stories that are imaginatively on the move, with protagonists who travel (not only) epistemically, and at how these narratives engage a rhetorical ÿgure that is emblematic of a di˝erent way of knowing: the chiasmus.1 I begin by explaining my use of the term narrative pilgrimage, which is inspired by María Lugones’s ludic engagement of the idea of pilgrimage in her often poetic philosophical writing. I then explore the political potential of chiasmus in literary aesthetics, where, like the other contributors to this volume, I see aesthetics as always-already political: the shape of creative agency vis-à-vis the status quo.

Narrative pilgrimage ‘Another way of understanding the pilgrimage’, writes Lugones, ‘is to think of it as also epistemic’.2 Lugones explicitly follows the anthropologist Victor Turner when, in her essay collection Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes (2003), she conceives of pilgrimages as ‘movements of people that loosen [the] hold of institutional, structural descriptions in the creation of liminal spaces’.3 That creates, in Phiri’s terms, a kind of ludic space where imaginations, too, can be on the move, probing di˝erent kinds of knowledge or (as Lugones puts it) ‘antistructural understandings of selves, relations, and realities’.4 Pilgrims, both in the literary imagination (notably in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales) and in real life,5 have traditionally told each other stories. Those stories, like the pilgrimage itself as Lugones conceives of it, o˝er ‘space and time away from linear, univocal, and cohesive constructions of the social’.6 And that ‘time out’ permits storytellers DOI: 10.4324/9781003254317-12

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to do something epistemically radical: in Anthony Reed’s terms, to ‘call into question the grounds of knowledge’.7 Narrative pilgrimage, then, is epistemic travel. I understand epistemic travel to be distinct from epistemic tourism – from that ‘middle-class leisurely journey’8 made in physical and emotional comfort, and in a state of functionalizing separateness (where ‘they’ – the people I encounter – exist to feed, house, and entertain me or ‘us’). Epistemic travel, by contrast, is interactive in Lugones’s sense of the term: it builds understanding of ‘what it is to be them and what it is to be ourselves in their eyes’.9 In the context of this book, it is unnecessary to rehearse the need for epistemic travel. James Odhiambo Ogone, Kyung-Ho Cha, and Shambhavi Prakash address its urgency in their analyses of the reductive and damaging e˝ects of epistemic and representational injustice in arts, media, government, education, and culture. Failure to travel epistemically and encounter interactively perpetuates, as Stephanie Galasso illuminates in the ÿrst part of this volume, a restriction of the category of human that has social, economic, psychological, corporeal, and artistic consequences. In this chapter I will focus in particular on the signiÿcance of interactive encounters in the context of chiastic structures or form, and on the capacity of the literary text to model both narrative pilgrimage and chiastic ways of knowing. I am approaching two recent works of literary ÿction – Olivia Wenzel’s 1000 Coils of Fear and Sharon Dodua Otoo’s Ada’s Room – as epistemological novels.10 In that I am following Charles Mills, who in his pathbreaking essay ‘White Ignorance’ described Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man as an epistemological novel. Invisible Man invites the reader to participate in epistemic travel, or in Mills’s terms in ‘the protagonist’s quest to determine what norms of belief are the right ones in a crazy looking-glass world’.11 Ellison’s narrator ÿnds himself cognitively ‘surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass’.12 Those mirrors are re˛ecting white ignorance back at itself, e˝ectively making invisible to white perceivers the possibility of anything that does not serve their interests, or that goes beyond the comfortable sightseeing of epistemic tourism. They represent the cognitive self-limitation of empowered groups – in Ellison’s novel, white midcentury US Americans who have embraced racialization in order to protect their own privilege. ‘White ignorance’, Mills explains, ‘has been able to ˛ourish all of these years because a white epistemology of ignorance has safeguarded it against the dangers of an illuminating blackness or redness, protecting those who for “racial” reasons have needed not to know’.13 Ellison’s invisible and unnamed protagonist notices how his white fellow citizens isolate themselves from knowledge about racialized privilege by adhering to a mode of perception that is resolutely non-interactive: ‘When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or ÿgments of their imagination – indeed, everything and anything except me’.14 They lack or resist any awareness of what it is to be him or indeed what it is to be them in his eyes.

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Elizabeth Spelman in Inessential Woman (1988) recalled her own upbringing as a white girl in the USA, in the context of a white habit of mind that she terms ‘boomerang perception’: ‘I look at you and come right back to myself ’.15 The boomerang gaze is entirely about what it is like to be me. It circumvents what it is like to be them (to borrow from Lugones) and what it is like to be me in their eyes; it swoops around and comes right back to me without ever having traversed the boundary line between self and Other. Boomerang perception is a hierarchy-based perceptual ellipsis that founds and supports testimonial, hermeneutical, and (to engage Ogone’s term) representational injustice. José Medina in The Epistemology of Resistance (2014), his response to and political development of Miranda Fricker’s Epistemic Injustice (2007), is in similar territory to Spelman when he describes the assumption common to culturally privileged people ‘that others are, at bottom, just like me’; it is an assumption that restricts ‘one’s sensitivity to di˝erences and one’s capacity to learn about them’.16 I am going to suggest that the opposite of boomerang perception – and therefore in some sense a solution to boomerang perception, or a way of breaking Ellison’s rigid and oppressive mirrors and enabling learning – is chiastic thinking. Chiastic thinking is a conversational mode (to borrow Jonathan O. Chimakonam’s term), and can be imagined, as Chimakonam imagines conversational thinking,17 as a multiple rather than two-way mode. My focus is on two novels by black women writers. Woman is still a marked and man an unmarked gendered category, and black a powerfully marked and white an unmarked racialized category. My intention here, as a white woman academic with a long-term interest in literature’s relationship with social justice, is to draw attention particularly to formal and structural innovation in the writing, and its aesthetic-political potential, without functionalizing the texts or their authors with a demand for ‘testimony or legitimate narratives about so-called race relations’18 – a kind of epistemic tourism – and without reproducing what Charles Mills has called ‘a kind of “left” biological determinism’, which replicates gendered and racialized stereotypes while giving them a positive spin.19 That does not mean that my analysis of the texts is (in Toni Morrison’s terms) ‘race-free’, which would risk ‘lobotomizing that literature’, and diminishing ‘both the art and the artist’.20 My particular interest is in how the novels not only represent epistemic pluralism, but begin to address the potential of chiasmus as a way of knowing.

‘We want to walk: so we need f[r]iction’:21 from epistemic friction to chiastic knowledge Medina posits epistemic pluralism as the foundation for socially just societies and communities. He speciÿcally advocates a pluralism that fosters epistemic friction, which ‘interrogates epistemic exclusions, disqualiÿcations, and hegemonies’.22 Epistemic friction is adversarial (Medina calls it guerilla pluralism, though I

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have issues with that terminology and have outlined them elsewhere).23 Crucially, epistemic friction is adversarial without seeking Aufhebung or Hegelian sublation; it does not seek to overcome other knowledges. Medina borrows the Foucauldian concepts of genealogies and knowledges, which, he argues, must remain plural: ‘Genealogies are insurrections of subjugated knowledges. And the plurals here are crucial, for the plurality of insurrections and of subjugated knowledges has to be kept always alive in order to resist new hegemonic uniÿcations and hierarchizations’.24 The mechanism of epistemic friction, therefore, is conversational in Chimakonam’s sense (‘critiquing and correcting; opening but never closing’)25 and interactive in Lugones’s. Medina’s phrasing reveals that it is also chiastic: ‘genealogists interpellate past subjects, but they are also interpellated by subjects of the past’, he writes. It is nothing new to say that the co-existence of and frictions between multiple points of view is the stu˝ of poetic and literary writing. It arguably distinguishes poetic and literary writing from other forms of discourse and textual production. Mikhael Bakhtin in his ‘Discourse in the Novel’ (ÿrst published in Russian in 1975) called it heteroglossia. Heteroglossia operates dialogically: ‘one point of view opposed to another, one evaluation opposed to another’; the literary writer mobilizes epistemic friction to avoid being trapped in ‘a unitary and singular language’.26 Medina’s account of the political quest for epistemic justice is rather similar: how do we ÿght against established and o°cial forms of knowledge when they are oppressive? Not by trying to escape knowledge altogether, but rather, by turning knowledge(s) against itself (themselves), or by mobilizing some forms of knowledge against others. The critical battle against the monopolization of knowledge-producing practices involves what Foucault calls an insurrection of subjugated knowledges.27 Like Foucault before him, Medina does not seem to notice that he is describing literary praxis. Wenzel’s 1000 Coils of Fear appeared in the original German in 2020, the author’s ÿrst novel in the context of her already established position as a dramatist.28 The novel has strong dramatic features, including a three-part structure and a multivocal, dialogic narrative form. Otoo’s Ada’s Room was published (again in the original German) a year later, also as a ÿrst novel – Otoo had won the prestigious Bachmann Prize for her short story Herr Gröttrup Sits Down in 2016, and had published two novellas.29 Ada’s Room, too, uses multivocal narrative: where 1000 Coils is narrated by an i/YOU or you/I partnership, Ada’s Room is narrated in a multiple ÿrst-person, which is sometimes the ‘I’ of the protagonist, Ada (in any one of her four incarnations) sometimes the ‘I’ (or ‘we’) of a mysterious time-traveling and shape-shifting Being whom readers ÿrst encountered in Herr Gröttrup Sits Down.

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Bakhtin describes heteroglossia as ‘double-voiced discourse’. ‘In such discourse’, he explains, there are two voices, two meanings and two expressions. And all the while these two voices are dialogically interrelated, they – as it were – know about each other […]; it is as if they actually hold a conversation with each other.30 Modern literary narration, he posits, is dialogic – which for Bakhtin describes not interpersonal dialog, but a polyphonic discursive mode, in which normative beliefs and language are in tension with other points of view.31 As Priscilla Layne has observed, Wenzel creates a narrative mode where ‘I’ and ‘you’ are actually in dialog or conversation with each other, albeit internally.32 It is doubly dialogic, in fact, as their interpersonal exchange puts normative and alternative perspectives in tension with one another, in a palpable version of Bakhtin’s heteroglossia. In the dual-voice sections of Wenzel’s novel, a lower-case voice (i or you) tends to narrate, and an upper-case voice (I or YOU) tends to intervene in the narrative in various ways. The arrangement of the upper- and lower-case voices across the novel’s three parts is chiastic, as in Table 8.1. Sometimes the capitalized, intervening voice praises the storytelling ‘YOU PUT THAT NICELY’,33 but more often it destabilizes the narration ‘WHAT DETAIL ARE YOU HIDING?’ or even ‘THAT’S NOT TRUE’.34 It strews anti-narrative moments that undermine or subvert the cultural ‘toolkits’ of storytelling and language: ‘DO YOU THINK REAL HEROINES EXIST?’, or ‘HAVE YOU EVER THOUGHT ABOUT THE WORD “HOME” IN THE WORD “HOMELY”?’35 Sometimes it throws curve balls to distract from a di°cult story: ‘HOW MANY SWIMMING AWARDS DO YOU HAVE?’;36 contrariwise, it sometimes intervenes to keep things on track: ‘PLEASE STAY ON TOPIC’.37 It questions behaviors (‘DOES KIM KNOW WHAT YOU’RE DOING WHILE SHE’S VISITING HER DYING UNCLE?’, YOU asks when the protagonist has an erotic threesome with two men while her girlfriend is visiting family in Vietnam),38 interrogates motivations ‘WHAT’S YOUR POINT?’, and prods for details ‘ARE YOU GUYS SLEEPING TOGETHER?’.39 Often the protagonist’s lived experience as a queer black woman is heteroglossically in tension with the normative will to believe TABLE 8.1 The chiastic narrative voice in 1000 Coils of Fear

Part

I (points of view)

II (picture this)

III (points of ·ight)

Narrative-focalizing voice

YOU / i

I

I / you

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in a progressive society, as in this internal dialog in the television tower restaurant in Berlin: What’s my white Grandmother supposed to answer when I ask her if she has any clue what it means not to have a place where you are the norm? YOU’RE SITTING IN A MEDIOCRE RESTAURANT WITH A WEIRD ROTATING MECHANISM AND A SPECTACULAR VIEW. YOU CAN AFFORD THE ENTRY FEE, YOU CAN AFFORD YOUR MEAL, YOUR LITTLE STUDIO APARTMENT IN NEUKÖLLN, CLOTHES, HOLIDAYS WHENEVER THE MOOD TAKES YOU, A HAIRDRESSER, THEATER VISITS, LANGUAGE COURSES, THIS AND THAT. HOW MUCH MORE NORM DO YOU NEED?40 The conversational interchange of i and YOU reveals the power of dominant discourse even in the protagonist’s own head. Sometimes the two voices share the same experiential knowledge: remembering a trip to America, they agree that fried chicken on waˆes with syrup and chocolate sauce is ‘perverse’ (12). At other times there seem to be gaps – when i starts telling the story of a man she encountered at the airport, YOU asks, ‘DID HE TOUCH YOU?’41 YOU may be pointing to the fallibility not only of memory but of cognition, and voicing an uncertainty about our capacity to know the nature of events. Her twin brother’s death by suicide is a cognitive problem that shapes the narrative, as the protagonist slowly negotiates the trauma of her loss and her imperfect understanding of it. In another exchange, YOU asks questions about his death: AND YOUR BROTHER? What about him? HOW DID HE LOSE HIS LIFE? How did he avoid having to live it?42 The protagonist knows that her brother jumped in front of a train when they were both 19; but she does not yet know how to live with her only partial access to the knowledge and experiences that led him to jump. Wenzel’s I/you storytelling demands re˛ection on knowledge and certainty, in this narrative and in narratives in general, both from the protagonist and from the reader, who is involved, even if not directly addressed, by the ‘you’ pronoun.43 It also models chiastic or interactive relations that transform not only what the protagonist is able to know, but eventually also what she is able to feel and do. That becomes clearer when 1000 Coils of Fear is read in the context of another novel: Ada’s Room, which formally models the epistemic potential of chiasmus.

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The events of Otoo’s novel are narrated by all four Adas, alongside the time-traveling Being which narrates and re˛ects in the ÿrst-person singular and plural (occasionally in the second-person plural). The protagonist’s, Ada’s name, like the ‘everywoman’ name of her sister, Elle, is a palindrome that seems to point like a signpost to chiasmus in the novel. Like Wenzel’s, Otoo’s narrative is chiastically shaped – in this case not by the narrative voices, but by the loops or orbits that structure the storytelling, arranged chiastically around a central eternity symbol (∞, printed in the text) that is itself both a loop, and chiastic in its shape (Table 8.2). Readers encounter the ÿrst Ada – known simply as ‘the woman they all called Ada’44 – in Totope, on the west coast of Africa, in 1459, shortly before she is murdered by the Portuguese merchant Guilherme Fernandes Zarco, who is focused on stealing a gold bracelet (another loop!) from her. The second is Lady Augusta Ada King, born Ada Lovelace (the historical daughter of Lord Byron and the mathematician Anne Isabella Byron), who in the novel is shot dead by her husband William in 1848 while her maid stands nearby holding the same bracelet, which has now made its way to imperial London. The third Ada is Adalajda Marianska, a Polish woman forced into prostitution in a Nazi concentration camp, and killed by guards as an SS man – called Wilhelm, rather than Guilherme or William – conspires to steal the familiar gold bracelet; and the fourth is the Ghanaian-British Augusta Adanne Lamptey, a gifted young mathematician who in 2019 travels from Ghana to visit her sister in Berlin, where she encounters the bracelet (now in the hands of the SS man’s son), and survives. The Adas’ learning journey through space-time reveals that epistemic traveling is not facilitated in the way that (epistemic) tourism is, and is often not a comfortable way to travel. The ÿrst and last Adas are black and grow up in Africa, the two middle Adas white and born in Europe – together they represent a structural chiasmus that

TABLE 8.2 The chiastic structure of Ada’s Room

The ÿrst orbits

Between the orbits The next orbits

Epilog

Ada Among the toothless Among the deceived Among the luckiest Ada ∞ Ada Among the luckiest Among the deceived Among the toothless Ada Me. We.

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unbuilds racialized separateness, even while their experience reveals the realities of racialized di˝erence. Each Ada has a di˝erent positionality, and each has agency and a perspective on the world that relates to those distinct positionalities: each life o˝ers the protagonist (to borrow from Jean-Luc Nancy, to whose thinking I will come in a moment) ‘another access to the world’.45 The Adas are not merely one, but (again, in Nancy’s terms) ‘one-by-one’ – they are singular plural, and their lives are ‘simultaneous as well as successive, in every sense’.46 Borrowing Ivo Strecker’s observation on chiasmus, one could say that the Adas ‘dance together and augment each other’.47 The essential connectedness and positional distinctness of the Adas reveals the remarkable, perhaps unique potential of chiasmus to unbuild separateness while retaining di˝erence. María Lugones uses the double-headed arrow ° to express a dynamic chiastic relation,48 and I would like to express the relation of the Adas to one another as connectedness ° di˝erence. Ada, or the Adas, narrate/s in ˛uid alternation with the Being that accompanies her/their journey through the centuries. Otoo’s prizewinning short story, Herr Gröttrup Sits Down, featured the same shapeshifting entity, narrating in the form of Herr Gröttrup’s breakfast egg.49 The Being inhabits what Lugones in her philosophy calls ‘ontological pluralism’;50 over the many centuries of its protean existence it has been, among many other things, a doorknocker, a broom, a passport, and a lipstick. It understands perhaps better than any other character in literature the importance of form: its experience, and its agency (‘my capacity to in˛uence events’),51 is conditioned by the shape that is given it. In Herr Gröttrup we learn it was the epicenter of the Accra earthquake of 1862, where it took some pleasure in destroying colonial fortresses; and it was the red carpet at a ceremony marking Helmut Kohl’s election to a fourth term of o°ce as German Chancellor in 1994, when it resisted the strong temptation to trip him (39–40). In Ada’s Room it is painfully frustrated by its lack of capacity for action in the form of the room where Ada lives and works in the Nazi camp: ‘I was damned to witness everything, but unable to prevent anything’.52 And still the Being chooses form over content, particularly when written discourse is in play: ‘whenever I become something in writing’, it explains in Herr Gröttrup, ‘I try (usually in vain) to ignore my content’ (39). The Being objects to the discursive violence of categories and categorization, which cause di˝erences to be forgotten. In an untranslatable German pun, it observes: Sprachen und ihre Kategorien, o! Menschen und ihre Kategorien, o! Sie sind nicht ganz dicht, o! Sie sind nicht ganz dicht. As a gist translation: languages, humans, and the categories they construct are on the one hand crazy (to read ‘nicht ganz dicht’ in its colloquial sense), on the other they are not fully watertight or impermeable (to read it in its literal

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sense).53 The ambiguity leaves it unclear whether this is a moment of lament about the craziness of language that forgets or hides connectedness ° di˝erence, or a moment of hope, because there are chinks in the discursive armor which might allow connectedness ° di˝erence to re-emerge. (‘The matrix of domination in which these controlling images are embedded is much less cohesive or uniform than imagined’, Patricia Hill Collins observes of racialized and gendered categories, even while she recognizes their discursive violence.)54 ‘The problem with clichés’, observes the i-voice in Wenzel’s novel, ‘is that they keep on reiterating the same, singular perspective’.55 Heteroglossia in literature subverts singular perspectives and allows di˝erence to emerge. Jumping o˝ from Medina’s conceptualization of epistemic friction as a kind of heteroglossic plurality, I would like to explore chiastic knowledge further using the notion of singular plurality, borrowed from Jean-Luc Nancy. Chiasmus, I shall argue (because it expresses not just di˝erence, but connectedness ° di˝erence), o˝ers a peculiarly e˝ective way of addressing the violence of categories.

Chiastic knowledge I have argued elsewhere that both Wenzel and Otoo create narratives whose progression is not linear but spiraling, allowing meaning to develop across time and space.56 In Wenzel’s novel that spiraling temporality resonates with the ‘coils’ of the title, in Otoo’s with the loops or orbits that shape the narrative. Spiraling is not the same as circling, which returns to where it started. The loops of a spiral are coextensive with one another, while also modeling a way of moving forward. Lugones advocates jettisoning ‘a linear way of telling’, instead ‘locating the multiple self in space, conceiving of space itself as multiple, intersecting, co-temporaneous realities’.57 Otoo’s Ada/Adas, in their formal singular plurality, live across time-space. Wenzel’s unnamed protagonist – a young queer black woman in contemporary Berlin – is superÿcially very di˝erent from the transhistorical Adas; but she, too, is formally singular plural (as I/you), and she, too, occupies di˝erent positionalities across space-time. In Germany she is oppressed as a black German; yet on holiday in Vietnam she is a privileged capitalist oppressor with a German passport (‘I EFFECTIVELY KEEP 44 SLAVES. BECAUSE OF MY LIFESTYLE AND MY CONSUMER BEHAVIOR’, the I-voice observes as her Vietnamese hostess serves her a meal).58 Oppressing and being oppressed are interlinked, as Lugones explains, and a person ‘may act in accordance with both logics’.59 Those logics can also exist in an interactive, chiastic relation with resisting: a relation that Lugones expresses as ‘oppressing/ being oppressed ° resisting’.60 Human beings tend to occupy di˝erent positions and have di˝erent levels of power in di˝erent life contexts. The capacity to retain a memory of one’s shifting positionalities across contexts is described by Lugones as living ‘across worlds’. Living consciously across worlds means ‘understanding the interconnections of our historico-spatialities’61 – it builds chiastic knowledge.

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Remembering ‘across worlds’, therefore, is an interactive epistemic practice that overcomes boomerang perception. Otoo’s Ada lives across worlds throughout the novel, but only near the end does she begin to remember her experience in other incarnations. That marks the beginning of the end of the narrative, and of the particular epistemic journey it records, as Ada becomes conscious of the chiastic relation of connectedness and di˝erence. Chiasmus has its etymological roots in the Greek word χιάζω, which means to form something in the shape of an X. The X shape represents a kind of mirroring. It does not, however, represent the kind of rigid, excluding mirroring experienced by Ellison’s invisible man. ‘While every chiasmus is a mirroring, not every mirroring is a chiasmus’, observes Strecker in his classic essay on chiasmus and metaphor. ‘More has to be going on; some kind of reciprocity, a giving back, a turn of meaning’. A chiasmus must, in other words, mirror interactively: like the Adas, the elements in a good chiasmus must ‘dance together, and augment each other’.62 Chiasmus is often represented as a symmetrically mirroring X ÿgure. Writing about chiasmus in poetry, however, Paul Beidler suggests that if chiasmus is an ab:ba relation, ‘then when the a’s and the b’s are connected with lines a ÿgure resembling the Greek χ emerges’.63 Chi (χ) does not represent a simple mirroring, but a more complex relation. Stephen Tyler, in his essay on chiasmi and di˝erence, imagines a chiasmus that is more complex still, pictured in Figure 8.1 as the not-quite-mirroring intersection of left and right spirals:64

FIGURE 8.1

Tyler’s chiasmus65

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Medina observed of epistemic friction that ‘the engagement with past subjectivities is mutually transformative’.66 Otoo’s Adas can be read as an aesthetic representation of that process: the fourth and ÿnal Ada achieves the transformative goal of her epistemic pilgrimage as she accesses memories of her past selves (a learning goal deÿned by the Being as the recognition ‘that all beings – past, present and future – are in connection with each other; that we always have been and always will be’).67 Tyler’s chiasmus, too, ÿgures a relation of transformation, where change happens at each moment of intersection. ‘Because of the chiasmic crossings, the ÿrst spiral is not the same as the second, and the second di˝ers from the third, and so on. Each spiral is transformed in some way by each chiasmic crossing’. That models a dynamic production of connectedness ° di˝erence, where ‘heterological singularities […] are produced only to be transformed in the next chiastic encounter’. Tyler notes that his image shows the intersection of only two singularities, where they should be multiple: but ‘I cannot ÿgure that thought’.68 Like Medina’s, Tyler’s concerns are explicitly epistemological. He is ÿguring chiasmi as a way of addressing philosophical approaches to identity formation as ‘the mastery of di˝erence’, where categories of self/same and Other are produced and naturalized to achieve that ‘mastery’. The problem, he notes (foreshadowing the irritation with language and its categories expressed by Otoo’s narrating Being), is that ‘categories create sames by an act of forgetting – the forgetting of di˝erences’. In Foucault’s terms, they ‘suppress the anarchy of di˝erence’.69 His dynamic conception of chiasmus explicitly addresses that, and implicitly enables the remembering of di˝erences within connectedness. Tyler is looking for a model beyond the adversarial Hegelian dialectic.70 He brie˛y explores Heidegger’s post-Hegelian conception of identity and difference, an ‘oscillation between self and other’ which Tyler represents as an X-chiasmus, but dismisses because it lacks the dynamism of Hegel’s dialectic (its back-and-forth movement ‘changes nothing and goes nowhere’).71 Chiastic spirals, by contrast, produce a ÿguration that interrupts the aufhebung [sic] without simultaneously inhibiting the creative work of the dialectic […] one that allows and accounts for accommodation, growth, decay, change and creativity; a dialectic of becoming that does not necessarily imply the overcoming of di˝erence72 Tyler’s thinking on chiasmus was ÿrst published in 1998,73 two years after the appearance in French of Jean-Luc Nancy’s radical rethink of Hegel and Heidegger in Être singulier pluriel, two years before its publication in English as Being Singular Plural. Like Tyler, Nancy is focused on the interrelationship of heterological singularities. ‘Being cannot be anything but being-with-oneanother’, he posits, ‘circulating in the with and as the with of this singularly

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plural coexistence’.74 Being may circulate, but Nancy’s conception of its movement is not circular (where circular movement would share the problem of the Heideggerian X-chiasmus as ÿgured by Tyler, of ‘going nowhere’). Nancy conceives of Being in a way that resonates with Tyler’s (and Otoo’s and Wenzel’s) spirals: ‘at the heart of a connection’, he explains, is the interlacing [l’entrecroisement] of strands whose extremities remain separate even at the very center of the knot […]. All of being is in touch with all of being, but the law of touching is separation; moreover, it is the heterogeneity of surfaces that touch each other.75 Nancy seeks to distance his work from political philosophy; even though Being Singular Plural makes no reference to any women philosophers, black philosophers, or philosophers of color, he attributes to his thinking a universality that is beyond politics. He writes this essay, therefore, as part of the large group of white thinkers who, as Mills expresses it, ‘take their racial [and gender, SC] privilege so much for granted that they do not even see it as political’. Mills observes in the Racial Contract how white epistemic privilege ‘precludes self-transparency’,76 and indeed Nancy positions himself as what Lugones calls ‘the impartial reasoner’, who ‘occupies the privileged vantage point with others like him […] his race and gender do not identify him in his own eyes’.77 While I question Nancy’s presentation of his thinking, his conception of singular plurality, when contextualized by the work of unembarrassedly political thinkers, is fruitful for a reading of the epistemological implications of Wenzel’s and Otoo’s literary writing. Nancy explores at length an idea that John Mbiti had already identiÿed in African philosophy in 1969, and which Achille Mbembe has recently highlighted, namely radical connectedness: in Mbiti’s terms, ‘I am because we are’, in Mbembe’s, the recognition ‘that each of us belongs to the same species, that we have an indivisible bond with all life’.78 In Nancy’s thinking an essential bond connects ‘all things, all beings, all entities, everything past and future, alive, dead, inanimate, stones, plants, nails, gods’.79 In her four di˝erent but related lives across ÿve centuries, Otoo’s singular plural Ada learns a core lesson about radical connectedness. It is articulated by the singular plural Being who co-narrates the novel as a coming-to-recognize ‘that all beings – past, present and future – are in connection with each other; that we always have been and always will be’.80 That resonates with Mbiti’s and Mbembe’s dicta, and with Nancy’s urging that all thinking and speaking beings must ‘expose sharing and circulation as such by saying “we”, by saying we to themselves in all possible senses of that expression, and by saying we for the totality of all being’.81 Beyond its three-section, chiastic structure, Ada’s Room has an epilog, titled ‘Me. We’. In this ÿnal short section of the novel, the fourth Ada gives birth to her daughter, an event that both circles back to and spirals forward from the

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death of the ÿrst Ada’s newborn baby, which opened the novel. With the birth of a daughter who is destined to live, Ada’s multiple existence as an ‘I’ is tangibly shifted into an existence as a ‘we’. It is worth noting that in other contexts saying we is part of the politics of rhetorical empowerment (and is still used in some single-authored academic texts to signal authority); and it is part of the adversarial politics of nationalism and separatism. Isabelle Zirden has observed how recent work by the Austrian political dramatist Elfriede Jelinek deliberately exposes the ‘non-rational character of this We-formation […], the strength of which derives from a group’s clear repudiation of what lies outside itself ’.82 For Nancy, ‘we’ crucially encompasses all being; there is nothing that lies outside of it. Anticipating concerns that his conception of being forgets di˝erence, he is emphatic that the essence of singular plurality is always already multiple.83 The meaning of being, he explains, is withness, understood ‘not only as the “meaning of with”, but also, and above all, as the “with” of meaning’84 – to express his conception of withness Nancy reaches, apparently instinctively, for chiasmus. Focused as he is on the ‘ontological laying-bare of being-with’ (which requires the ‘retreat of the political’),85 Nancy never explores the problem that dominant groups have historically, politically undermined ‘being-with’ in order to divide and conquer – to retain power. Lugones, by contrast, whose philosophy negotiates collective agency and di˝erence at the level of political praxis, warns of ‘the fragility of our connectedness’.86 The unnamed protagonist in Wenzel’s 1000 Coils of Fear grows up as a black child with an anti-racist white German mother and a racist white German grandmother; as a pregnant adult she faces the question of how she will relate to her baby if it is (like its father) white (317). Lived experience of being-with is gendered and racialized, fragile and fraught.

You have to change your life Pilgrimages are always about the journey, but in that journey inheres the idea of a (life-changing) goal. Ada’s epistemic travel through four lifetimes, and Wenzel’s protagonist’s through a dialogical and transtemporal mourning process following the death of her brother, leads for both to chiastic knowledge: an embodied recognition of radical connectedness. Chiastic knowledge as modeled in both novels (and recalling Tyler’s complaint about how categories ‘forget’ di˝erence) is an aesthetic act of remembering of diŁerences. The fragility and fraughtness of living ‘across worlds’ is rendered heteroglossically complex to produce plural perspectives, while spiraling spatio-temporal structures (narrative loops and coils) produce a dynamic interlacing of positionalities, of self and other, and self and self, in a formal singular plurality. Chiastic knowledge is by deÿnition knowledge that has consequences, as self and Other are transformed in the dynamic spirals of connectedness °

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di˝erence, or being-in-relation. ‘You have to change your life’, wrote the poet Rainer Maria Rilke in the famous ÿnal half-line of his sonnet ‘Archaic Torso of Apollo’ (1908). The poem evokes the e˝ects of the chiastic gaze in an aesthetic encounter with a headless sculpture in the Louvre: We never knew the strange and royal head in which his fructuous eyes matured. And yet his torso is still glowing like a lantern in which his gaze, just dimmed a touch, is still alight. For otherwise the swelling breast would leave you cold, and the soft swing in the loins couldn’t trace a curving smile towards the middle, and fertility. For then this piece of stone would be cut short below the shoulders’ translucent arc not shimmering and alive like tigerskin; not spilling light beyond its proper edge and limits, like a star; for there is nothing here that does not see you. You have to change your life.87 Rilke is clear that the interactive or chiastic gaze – seeing ourselves through the (paradoxically absent) observing eyes of the work of art we are observing – produces a radical epistemic shift that has consequences. Olivia Wenzel depicts the interactive gaze in a less sublime context, in a nonetheless memorable scene in which her protagonist encounters a snack dispensing machine at the train station where her brother died. ‘I stare into the snack machine, the snack machine stares into me’.88 She is looking at a memory, but (through the observing eyes of the observed snack machine) the memory is also looking at her. The past is thus portrayed not as hegemonically manageable, to borrow Charles Mills’s term,89 but as dynamically and dialogically in relation with the now; just as the Other (as ÿgured by the torso in Rilke’s poem) is dynamically and dialogically in relation with the self, as self ° other. In both novels, (non-normative)90 motherhood is a metaphor for the chiastic imperative. The trope of motherhood clearly recognizes di˝erence beyond the adversarial, and opens out the potential for interactive or chiastic holding. Mothering represents ‘a mutual holding and being-held’, writes Francine Wynn in her exploration of the mother-infant relationship as chiastic. That is epistemically transformative in an embodied way: ‘Mothering is […] exemplary of a transforming contact with the other that brings one to a turning point or takes one to the limit of oneself ’.91 Two of the last narrative coils in Wenzel’s novel touch on a double past moment: on the one hand on events 16 years previously, when the narrator saw her grandparents collapse at the news of her twin brother’s death; and on the other a recent moment at the airport,

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when the pregnant protagonist puts her hand on her belly and notices her fear ebbing away (335–336). From that remembered present moment she looks into a remembered near future: In a moment you’ll stand and join the queue for the check-in. […] You’ll fail to see a puddle of water on the ˛oor from a mop-bucket, slip, and fall. […] For one burning moment as you fall you’ll care so much about everything in your womb that you won’t be able to breathe. […] At that moment you’ll know that you are going to have this child […]. That you’ll be able to love it, with the kind of love you keep reserved for your brother.92 It is a life-changing moment, as her fear and mourning transform from debilitating emotions into loving-care: a fear that is deeper, warmer, and more able to tear you apart than any fear could you feel for yourself, your life, matters of identity: a fear tied to a love as strong as anything you’ve known before, multiplied by 1000.93 She will later decide to raise the baby with her ex-girlfriend, perhaps with the support of its father, in a relation of multiple connectedness. There is a rather similar moment of change when, in the epilog to Ada’s Room, Otoo’s fourth Ada wakes after her labor to ÿnd not only her sleeping baby next to her but her sleeping sister, Elle, covered by a sweater that belongs to Cash, the baby’s father. For Ada, that moment of visible multiple connectedness goes hand in hand with epistemic transformation: ‘ÿnally I had understood who I am’.94 This Ada’s full name is Adanna, which means daughter of the mother, and now, chiastically, she is mother of a daughter. She is in connection with Elle (who will be co-mother to her child) and implicitly (via the sweater) with Cash, with her new daughter and the future, and with her dead mother and the past. Misa Dayson has articulated a key political function of creative agency, namely to ‘create new objects of knowledge that do not replace one hegemony for another, but rather, provide us with a vision of conceiving of ourselves outside of oppositional frameworks’. She associates that function with ‘liminal [epistemic] status’, and it might indeed be most dynamically present in the context of what she calls ‘minority literary criticism and art’.95 It might simultaneously be an identifying quality of art and literature per se. ‘Art always has to do with cosmogony, but it exposes cosmogony for what it is: necessarily plural’, observes Nancy. In his view, ‘what makes art art’ is that it apprehends the ‘scattered origin’ – the always-already plural spring of meaning that makes what Bakhtin calls ‘unitary and singular language’ (and the categories it produces) an untruth that writers counter heteroglossically.96

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Chiasmus o˝ers a vision of something outside of oppositional frameworks: singular plurality, whose chiastic withness acknowledges di˝erence and connectedness as always already mutual (as connectedness ° di˝erence). ‘Are we capable of rediscovering that each of us belongs to the same species, that we have an indivisible bond with all life?’ Achille Mbembe recently asked.97 Otoo’s Ada, who in her name and plural form incorporates chiasmus, implicitly answers with a yes Mbembe’s question. And where the singular, empowered gaze categorizes in ‘ignorance of its own positionality’,98 Wenzel’s singular plural protagonist is alert to and permanently in dialog with her positionality. Like the Adas she models the chiasmic (self-) knowledge – living ‘across worlds’ – that enables (self-) change.99 Borrowing from Lugones, I have suggested that narrative pilgrimage describes the capacity of storytelling to create the ‘space and time away’ that enables epistemic travel. I have read Wenzel’s 1000 Coils of Fear and Otoo’s Ada’s Room as epistemological novels that represent protagonists who travel epistemically; they also o˝er readers the opportunity to accompany the protagonists on the epistemic journey, in this sense appealing to readers in Chielozona Eze’s terms (in Chapter 1). Like the peregrinations Lugones theorizes, the novels notice ‘oppression at its logic’ and ‘include an epistemic shift’.100 Multiple knowledges are in or at play, in the context of an underlying, singular plural epistemic structuring principle that models chiastic knowledge: that embodied recognition of radical connectedness. Aesthetic or literary forms can model structures that would make for a better society. Chiasmus, I have argued, does not merely inÿltrate dominant structures; it recalibrates them, and its interactive form represents a formal solution to boomerang perception. In the chapter that follows, and concludes this volume, Shiamin Kwa explores di˝erence and connectedness in Mo Yan’s innovative storytelling, where an ‘aesthetics of indirection’ in a ‘willfully fugitive’ text pushes again for an interactive imaginative exchange between readers and text.

Notes 1 I am very grateful to my co-editor, Stephanie Galasso, who drew my attention via her own work on chiasmus, in a di˝erent context, to the complex literary interest of the ÿgure; to my colleagues in German at Cambridge, who listened and responded encouragingly to a very early version of this thinking; and to my co-authors in this volume, who have challenged and expanded my sense of what is necessary and possible. 2 María Lugones, Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition against Multiple Oppressions (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littleÿeld, 2003), 7. 3 Lugones, Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes, 8. Lugones is referencing Victor Turner, ‘The Center out There: Pilgrim’s Goal’. History of Religions 12 (1973): 191–230. 4 Lugones, Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes, 8. 5 See e.g. Candace Slater, Trail of Miracles: Stories from a Pilgrimage in Northeast Brazil (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).

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6 Lugones, Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes, 8. 7 Anthony Reed, Freedom Time: The Poetics and Politics of Black Experimental Writing (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 207. See also Jerome Bruner, ‘The Narrative Construction of Reality’. Critical Inquiry 18 (1991): 1–21 (15). 8 Lugones, Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes, 98. 9 Lugones, Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes, 68–69 and 97 (italics in original). 10 Olivia Wenzel, 1000 Coils of Fear, transl. Priscilla Layne (New York: Catapult, 2022); German original: 1000 Serpentinen Angst (Frankfurt a.M.: S. Fischer, 2020). Sharon Dodua Otoo, Ada’s Room, transl. Jon Cho-Polizzi (New York: Riverhead, and London: MacLehose, 2023); German original: Adas Raum (Frankfurt a.M.: S. Fischer, 2021). Given that neither translation is yet published at the time of writing, all translations in this chapter are my own, and the page references are to the German-language editions. 11 Charles Mills, ‘White Ignorance’, in Shannon Sullivan and Nancy Tuana (eds), Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance (New York: SUNY Press, 2007), 13–38 (18). 12 Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (London: Penguin, 2016 [1953]), 3. 13 Mills, ‘White Ignorance’, 35. 14 Ellison, Invisible Man, 3. 15 Spelman, Inessential Woman, 12. 16 José Medina, The Epistemology of Resistance. Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imaginations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 151. Emphasis in original. See also Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 17 Jonathan O. Chimakonam, ‘African Philosophy and Global Epistemic Injustice’. Journal of Global Ethics 13 (2017): 120–137 (134). 18 Reed, Freedom Time, 7–8. 19 Reed, Freedom Time, 209; Charles Mills, ‘Alternative Epistemologies’. Social Theory and Practice 14 (1988): 237–263 (240). 20 Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 12. 21 I am punning on Medina’s citation from Wittgenstein. José Medina, ‘Toward a Foucaultian Epistemology of Resistance: Counter-Memory, Epistemic Friction, and Guerrilla Pluralism’. Foucault Studies 12 (2011): 9–35 (21); citing Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958), §107. 22 Medina, ‘Toward a Foucaultian Epistemology’, 21. 23 Sarah Colvin, ‘Words that might save necks: Philipp Khabo Koepsell, epistemic murder and poetic justice’. German Life and Letters 74 (2021): 511–556. 24 Medina, ‘Toward a Foucaultian Epistemology’, 20. Emphasis in original. 25 Chimakonam, ‘African Philosophy’, 134. 26 Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘Discourse on the Novel’, in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 259–423 (314). 27 Medina, ‘Toward a Foucaultian Epistemology’, 13. 28 Her previous dramatic writing included mais in deutschland & anderen galaxien (2015). 29 Sharon Dodua Otoo, Adas Raum (Frankfurt a.M.: S. Fischer, 2021); Sharon Dodua Otoo, Herr Gröttrup setzt sich hin / Herr Gröttrup Takes a Seat / Herr Gröttrup Sits Down. Transl. Katy Derbyshire, Patrick Ploschnitzki, and Judith Menzl (Berlin: Still, 2019). The novellas were published by edition assemblage both in the original English and in German translations by Mirjam Nuenning: Synchronicity. Münster 2014 (German), 2015 (English); the things I am thinking while smiling politely. Münster 2012 (English), 2013 (German). 30 Bakhtin, ‘Discourse’, 324. 31 Bakhtin, ‘Discourse’, 314.

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32 See Layne’s recorded lecture, ‘Suspicious Spiral: Autoÿction and Black German Subjectivity in Olivia Wenzel’s 1000 Serpentinen Angst’, Brandeis University, 26 October 2020. Online: brandeis.edu/cges/news-events/fall-2020/201026_layne_ priscilla.html 33 ‘DAS HAST DU SCHÖN GESAGT’. Wenzel, 1000 Serpentinen, 13. 34 ‘WELCHES DETAIL UNTERSCHLÄGST DU?’ Wenzel, 1000 Serpentinen, 18; ‘DAS STIMMT NICHT’. Wenzel, 1000 Serpentinen, 310. 35 ‘GLAUBST DU, ES GIBT ECHTE HELDINNEN?’ Wenzel, 1000 Serpentinen, 27; ‘HAST DU SCHON MAL ÜBER DAS WORT “HEIM” IM WORT “VERHEIMLICHEN” NACHGEDACHT?’ Wenzel, 1000 Serpentinen, 45. The ‘cultural toolkit’ that shapes storytelling is theorized by Jerome Bruner, ‘The Narrative Construction of Reality’. Critical Inquiry 18 (1991): 1–21 (2–3). 36 ‘WIE VIELE SCHWIMMABZEICHEN HAST DU?’ Wenzel, 1000 Serpentinen, 29. 37 ‘BITTE BLEIB BEI DER SACHE’. Wenzel, 1000 Serpentinen, 236, 263. 38 ‘WEISS KIM, WAS DU MACHST, WÄHREND SIE IHREN STERBENDEN ONKEL BESUCHT?’ Wenzel, 1000 Serpentinen, 95. 39 ‘WARUM ERZÄHLST DU VON IHM? WORAUF WILLST DU HINAUS?’; ‘SCHLAFT IHR AUCH MITEINANDER?’ Wenzel, 1000 Serpentinen, 54–55. 40 ‘Was soll mir meine weiße Großmutter antworten auf die Frage, ob sie eine Ahnung hat, was es bedeutet, keinen Ort zu kennen, an dem man selbst die Norm ist? DU SITZT IN EINEM MITTELMÄSSIGEN RESTAURANT MIT EIGENWILLIGER DREHVORRICHTUNG UND SPEKTAKULÄREM AUSBLICK. DU KANNST DIR DEN EINTRITT LEISTEN, DU KANNST DIR DAS ESSEN LEISTEN, DEINE KLEINE EINZIMMERWOHNUNG IN NEUKÖLLN, KLEIDUNG, URLAUB, WENN DIR DANACH IST, FRISEUR, THEATER, SPRACHKURSE, DIES DAS. WIE VIEL MEHR AN NORM BRAUCHST DU NOCH?’ Wenzel, 1000 Serpentinen, 82. 41 ‘HAT ER DICH ANGEFASST?’ Wenzel, 1000 Serpentinen, 25. 42 ‘UND DEIN BRUDER? Was soll mit ihm sein? WIE IST ER UMS LEBEN GEKOMMEN? Ums Leben drumherum gekommen?’ Wenzel, 1000 Serpentinen, 43. 43 See e.g. Monika Fludernik, ‘Second Person Fiction: Narrative You as Addressee and/or Protagonist’. Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 18 (1993): 217–247. 44 ‘die Frau, die sie alle Ada nannten’. Otoo, Adas Raum, 15. 45 Nancy, Being Singular Plural, 14. 46 Nancy, Being Singular Plural, 32 and 11. 47 Strecker, ‘Chiasmus and Metaphor’, 71. 48 Lugones, Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes, 11. 49 See Sarah Colvin, ‘Talking Back: Sharon Dodua Otoo’s Herr Gröttrup setzt sich hin and the Epistemology of Resistance’. German Life and Letters 73 (2020): 659–679. 50 Lugones, Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes, 55. 51 ‘Meine Möglichkeiten, Ein˛uss auf das Geschehen zu nehmen’. Otoo, Adas Raum, 43. 52 ‘Ich war verdammt, alles zu bezeugen, aber nichts verhindern zu können’. Otoo, Adas Raum, 88. 53 The two translators into UK and US English translate this by each rendering one meaning of the phrase. See Otoo, Herr Gröttrup, 39–40. 54 Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. 2nd edn. (New York and London: Routledge) 2009 (2000), 109. 55 ‘Das Problem mit Klischees ist nicht, dass sie nicht stimmen. SONDERN?

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56

57 58

59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81

Sie stimmen ziemlich oft. Das Problem ist, dass sie immer wieder nur dieselbe, eine Perspektive beschreiben’. Olivia Wenzel, 1000 Serpentinen Angst. Frankfurt a.M. 2020, 42. Sarah Colvin, ‘Freedom Time: Temporal Insurrections in Olivia Wenzel’s 1000 Serpentinen Angst and Sharon Dodua Otoo’s Adas Raum’. German Life and Letters 75 (2022): 138–165. See also Priscilla Layne’s recorded lecture, ‘Suspicious Spiral: Autoÿction and Black German Subjectivity in Olivia Wenzel’s 1000 Serpentinen Angst’, Brandeis University, 26 October 2020. Online: brandeis.edu/cges/news-events/fall-2020/201026_layne_priscilla.html, accessed 10 July 2021. Lugones, Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes, 16. ‘Du sitzt neben dem leeren Teller, den Binh später abräumen wird, gleitest mit dem Handy durchs Internet. ICH HALTE MIR INDIREKT 44 SKLAVEN. DURCH MEINEN LEBENSSTIL UND MEIN KONSUMVERHALTEN. Findest du auf einer Webseite heraus’. Wenzel, 1000 Serpentinen, 312. Lugones, Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes, 13. Italics in original. Lugones, Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes, 11. Lugones, Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes, 98. Ivo Strecker, ‘Chiasmus and Metaphor’, in Boris Wiseman and Anthony Paul (eds), Chiasmus and Culture (Oxford: Berghahn, 2014), 69–88 (71). Paul G. Beidler, ‘Hopkins’ Chiasmus: Stanza 1 of “The Wreck of the Deutschland”’, Victorian Poetry 39 (2001): 627–644 (628–629). Stephen Tyler, ‘Chiasmi Figuring Di˝erence’, in Chiasmus and Culture, ed. Boris Wiseman and Anthony Paul (Oxford: Berghahn, 2014), 116–123 (122). Reprinted with kind permission of Paideuma. First published in Stephen A. Tyler ‘Them Others - Voices without Mirrors. Paideuma: Mitteilungen zur Kulturkunde 44 (1998): 31–50 (41). Medina, ‘Toward a Foucaultian Epistemology’, 28. ‘dass alle Wesen – vergangene, gegenwärtige und zukünftige – in Verbindung miteinander sind, dass wir es immer waren und immer sein werden’. Otoo, Adas Raum, 127. Tyler, ‘Chiasmi’, 122. My emphasis. Tyler, ‘Chiasmi’, 116, my emphasis; see also Michel Foucault, Language Countermemory Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 186. This puts him in similar territory to Lugones: ‘I agree with Hegel that selfrecognition requires other subjects’, she writes, ‘but I disagree with his claim that it requires tension or hostility’. Lugones, Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes, 97. Tyler, ‘Chiasmi’, 120. Tyler, ‘Chiasmi’, 121. Tyler, ‘Them Others’. Nancy, Being Singular Plural, 3. Nancy, Being Singular Plural, 5. Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 18. Lugones, Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes, 131. John Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy (London: Heinemann, 1969); cited in Chimakonam, ‘African philosophy’, 129. See also Mbembe, ‘The Universal Right’, 62. Nancy, Being Singular Plural, 3. ‘dass alle Wesen – vergangene, gegenwärtige und zukünftige – in Verbindung miteinander sind, dass wir es immer waren und immer sein werden’. Otoo, Adas Raum, 127. Nancy, Being Singular Plural, 3. Emphasis in original.

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82 Isabelle Zirden, ‘After the Postdramatic? Elfriede Jelinek, Kathrin Röggla and the Possibility of Political Subjects’. PhD thesis, University of Cambridge 2019, 82. 83 Nancy, Being Singular Plural, 10. 84 Nancy, Being Singular Plural, 37. 85 Nancy, Being Singular Plural, 37. 86 Lugones, Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes, 7. 87 My translation of Rainer Maria Rilke, ‘Archaïscher Torso Apollos’. The original German is: Wir kannten nicht sein unerhörtes Haupt, darin die Augenäpfel reiften. Aber sein Torso glüht noch wie ein Kandelaber, in dem sein Schauen, nur zurückgeschraubt, sich hält und glänzt. Sonst könnte nicht der Bug der Brust dich blenden, und im leisen Drehen der Lenden könnte nicht ein Lächeln gehen zu jener Mitte, die die Zeugung trug. Sonst stünde dieser Stein entstellt und kurz unter der Schultern durchsichtigem Sturz und ˛immerte nicht so wie Raubtierfelle; und bräche nicht aus allen seinen Rändern aus wie ein Stern: denn da ist keine Stelle, die dich nicht sieht. Du mußt dein Leben ändern.

88 89 90 91 92

93

94 95

96 97 98

In Der neuen Gedichte anderer Teil [1908], in Sämtliche Werke in sechs Bänden, ed. Ernst Zinn (Frankfurt: Insel, 1955–1966), 1: 557. ‘Ich starre in den Snackautomaten, der Snackautomat starrt in mich’. Wenzel, 1000 Serpentinen, 23. Mills observes that hegemony depends on the management of memory to support ideologies of hierarchized di˝erence. Mills, ‘White Ignorance’, 28. Otoo’s and Wenzel’s protagonists choose forms of motherhood that depart from traditional heteronormative and Western ‘nuclear’ arrangements. Francine Wynn, ‘The Embodied Chiastic Relationship of Mother and Infant’. Human Studies 19 (1997): 253–270 (260, 269, 258). ‘Gleich wirst du aufstehen und dich in die Schlange zum Check-in einreihen. […] Dabei wirst du eine Lache Putzwasser am Boden nicht sehen, ausrutschen und hinfallen. […] während des Sturzes wirst du dich für einen glühenden Moment so sehr um alles in deinem Bauch sorgen, dass es keinen Sauersto˝ mehr gibt. […] Du wirst in diesem Moment […] wissen, dass du das Kind bekommen wirst […]. Dass du fähig sein wirst, es zu lieben, mit der Art von Liebe, die du für deinen Bruder reserviert hältst’. Wenzel, 1000 Serpentinen, 336. ‘eine Angst, tiefer, wärmer und zerreißender als jede Angst um dich selbst, dein Leben, deine identitären Beÿndlichkeiten es je sein könnte: eine Angst, gebunden an eine Liebe, so stark wie alles, was du bisher kanntest, mal 1000’, Wenzel, 1000 Serpentinen, 337. ‘Denn endlich hatte ich verstanden, wer ich bin’. Otoo, Adas Raum, 317. Misa Dayson, ‘Imagine Us There: Visions of Radical. Art. People. Spaces’, in The Little Book of Big Visions: How to Be an Artist and Revolutionize the World, ed. Sandrine Micossé-Aikins and Sharon Dodua Otoo (Münster: Edition Assemblage, 2012), 32–53 (49). Bakhtin, ‘Discourse’, 314; Nancy, Being Singular Plural, 14. Achille Mbembe (transl. Carolyn Shread), ‘The Universal Right to Breathe’. Critical Enquiry 47 (2021): 58–62 (62). Lorraine Code, ‘The Power of Ignorance’. Philosophical Papers 33 (2004): 291–308 (219).

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99 ‘that self-knowledge is interactive, that self-change is interactive’. Lugones, Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes, 74. 100 Lugones, Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes, 12.

Bibliography Bakhtin, Mikhail. ‘Discourse on the Novel’, in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, edited by Michael Holquist, translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, 259–423. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. Bruner, Jerome. ‘The Narrative Construction of Reality’. Critical Inquiry 18 (1991): 1–21. Chimakonam, Jonathan O. ‘African Philosophy and Global Epistemic Injustice’. Journal of Global Ethics 13 (2017): 120–137. Code, Lorraine. ‘The Power of Ignorance’. Philosophical Papers 33 (2004): 291–308. Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. 2nd ed. New York and London: Routledge, 2009 (2000). Colvin, Sarah. ‘Freedom time: Temporal Insurrections in Olivia Wenzel’s 1000 Serpentinen Angst and Sharon Dodua Otoo’s Adas Raum’. German Life and Letters 75 (2022): 138–165. Colvin, Sarah. ‘Talking Back: Sharon Dodua Otoo’s Herr Gröttrup setzt sich hin and the Epistemology of Resistance’. German Life and Letters 73 (2020): 659–679. Colvin, Sarah. ‘Words That Might Save Necks: Philipp Khabo Koepsell, Epistemic Murder and Poetic Justice’. German Life and Letters 74 (2021): 511–556. Dayson, Misa. ‘Imagine Us There: Visions of Radical. Art. People. Spaces’, in The Little Book of Big Visions: How to be an Artist and Revolutionize the World, edited by Sandrine Micossé-Aikins and Sharon Dodua Otoo, 32–53. Münster: Edition Assemblage, 2012. Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. London: Penguin, 2016 (1953). Foucault, Michel. Language, Counter-memory Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977. Fricker, Miranda. Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Layne, Priscilla (recorded lecture). ‘Suspicious Spiral: Autoÿction and Black German Subjectivity in Olivia Wenzel’s 1000 Serpentinen Angst’, Brandeis University, 26 October 2020. brandeis.edu/cges/news-events/fall-2020/201026_layne_priscilla. html Lugones, María. Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition against Multiple Oppressions. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littleÿeld, 2003. Mbembe, Achille. ‘The Universal Right to Breathe’. Translated by Carolyn Shread. Critical Enquiry 47 (2021): 58–62. Mbiti, John. African Religions and Philosophy. London: Heinemann, 1969. Medina, José. The Epistemology of Resistance. Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imaginations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Medina, José. ‘Toward a Foucaultian Epistemology of Resistance: Counter-Memory, Epistemic Friction, and Guerilla Pluralism’. Foucault Studies 12 (2011): 9–35. Mills, Charles. ‘Alternative Epistemologies’. Social Theory and Practice 14 (1988): 237–263. Mills, Charles. The Racial Contract. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997.

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Mills, Charles. ‘White Ignorance’, in Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance, edited by Shannon Sullivan and Nancy Tuana, 13–38. New York: State University of New York Press, 2007. Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992. Nancy, Jean-Luc. Being Singular Plural. Translated by Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000 Otoo, Sharon Dodua. Adas Raum. Frankfurt a.M.: S. Fischer, 2021. Otoo, Sharon Dodua. Herr Gröttrup setzt sich hin / Herr Gröttrup Takes a Seat / Herr Gröttrup Sits Down. Translated by Katy Derbyshire, Patrick Ploschnitzki and Judith Menzl. Berlin: Still, 2019. Reed, Anthony. Freedom Time: The Poetics and Politics of Black Experimental Writing. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. Rilke, Rainer Maria. ‘Archaïscher Torso Apollos’, in Der neuen Gedichte anderer Teil [1908], in Sämtliche Werke in sechs Bänden, edited by Ernst Zinn, 1: 557. Frankfurt: Insel, 1955–1966. Slater, Candace. Trail of Miracles: Stories from a Pilgrimage in Northeast Brazil. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. Smith, Zadie. ‘Read Better’. The Guardian, 20 January 2007: 21–22. Spelman, Elizabeth. Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought. Boston, MA: Beacon, 1988. Spencer, Stephen. ‘Narrative Process and Cultural Identity in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony’, in Narrative, Race and Ethnicity in the United States, edited by James J. Donahue, Jennifer Ann Ho, and Shaun Morgan, 57–69. Columbus: Ohio University Press, 2017. Strecker, Ivo. ‘Chiasmus and Metaphor’, in Chiasmus and Culture, edited by Boris Wiseman and Anthony Paul, 69–88. Oxford: Berghahn, 2014. Turner, Victor. ‘The Center Out There: Pilgrim’s Goal’. History of Religions 12 (1973): 191–230. Tyler, Stephen. ‘Chiasmi Figuring Di˝erence’, in Chiasmus and Culture, edited by Boris Wiseman and Anthony Paul, 116–123. Oxford: Berghahn, 2014. Tyler, Stephen A. ‘Them Others - Voices without Mirrors’. Paideuma: Mitteilungen zur Kulturkunde 44 (1998): 31–50. Wenzel, Olivia. 1000 Serpentinen Angst. Frankfurt a.M.: S. Fischer Verlag, 2020. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Blackwell, 1958. Wynn, Francine. ‘The Embodied Chiastic Relationship of Mother and Infant’. Human Studies 19 (1997): 253–270. Zirden, Isabelle. ‘After the Postdramatic? Elfriede Jelinek, Kathrin Röggla and the Possibility of Political Subjects’. PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 2019.

9 TELL THE TRUTH BUT TELL IT SLANT Mo Yan’s aesthetics of indirection Shiamin Kwa

Imagine yourself the subject of one of two narratives. First narrative. You are a landowner in a countryside town in Gaomi township, executed at the beginning of Mao’s land reform, when landlords were persecuted en masse, sometimes to the point of death, and their land redistributed among the previously landless peasants. Upon execution, you are thrown into the underworld, where you are submerged in a cauldron of boiling oil for two years, all the while claiming your innocence. You manage to convince Lord Yama, judge of the underworld, that an injustice has been done, and that you have been mistakenly condemned to death before your allotted time. He thus allows you, Ximen Nao, to return to the mortal world. However, you are sent back to earth as a donkey. As a donkey, you are ultimately dismembered and eaten by a mob, who are starving during the Great Famine of the late 1950s and early 1960s. The next time you return to the mortal world, it is in the form of an ox, and eventually you su˝er death at the hands of your own son, Jinlong, who beats and burns you to death in one of many violent and senseless acts that take place during the Cultural Revolution. Coming back in the next life as a pig, you start out as a greedy and tyrannical beast, but eventually sacriÿce your life by sel˛essly diving into an icy river to rescue children from drowning. The decades roll on. Lord Yama sends you back again, this time in the form of a dog, and you spend this lifetime faithfully accompanying an old man who was once your former foster son, Lan Lian (‘Blue Face’). You are so loyal to him that, when he dies, you follow him into his grave. Sent once more to the mortal world by Yama, this time for a short two-year stint as a monkey, you come to your next violent death; this time, your monkey self is shot by ‘your’ grandson in a ÿt of passionate rage. Then, at last, you are reborn as a human again, a DOI: 10.4324/9781003254317-13

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big-headed baby named Lan Qiansui at the start of a new millennium, with a strange blood disease that can be treated only with the ashes collected from burning your grandmother’s magical hair. Second narrative. You are born on the same day as a braying baby donkey on a farm that recently belonged to a feudal landowner named Ximen Nao, who has been brutally executed. Your own name, Jiefang, means ‘liberation’, a name chosen to honor Chairman Mao’s proclamation of China’s liberation from feudal practices and traditions. You bear a large blue birthmark on your face, just like your father, who was named Lan Lian, or ‘blue face’, a foundling raised by Ximen Nao. Following Ximen Nao’s execution as a landowner, Lan Lian has married his foster father’s ÿrst concubine, and they are your parents. You live with your parents and your half-siblings from your mother’s ÿrst marriage to Ximen Nao. Your home is on redistributed land, and your father is the single holdout who refuses to join the commune and stubbornly insists on cultivating his own piece of land. You have a childhood friend, a rascally liar and blowhard named Mo Yan, who becomes a writer and writes novels about your hometown. You live through the next 50 years in the same body, and, from that body, as Lan Jiefang, you watch the tumultuous cycles of revolution that ceaselessly rock the second half of China’s 20th century from one decade to the next. Following the land reforms and the Great Leap Forward, you survive the Great Famine: three years of starvation in what is considered by some to be the greatest man-made disaster in human history.1 Following this famine, you witness the Cultural Revolution, during which roles are once again overturned and formerly respected village leaders are now paraded around in humiliating costumes as villagers jeer and call out insults. You watch your own father, whose name is ‘Blue Face’, get his face painted over with red paint so that he cannot even open his eyes. You eventually marry a woman, and then fall in love with another woman, commit adultery with her, and eventually leave your ÿrst wife. Your father dies, accompanied in death by his faithful dog. As the decades roll on, you watch your half-brother redevelop the village where you grew up from farmland into an amusement park where people come to experience a recreation of the Cultural Revolution as entertainment. This amusement park takes all the su˝ering that you have witnessed and experienced, and erases it, reproducing it as high-gloss kitsch. Following the death of your second wife, you seek out your ÿrst love, who happens to be the sister of your ÿrst wife. You watch as your blue-faced son grows up and becomes a policeman, and you discover too late that he has fallen in love with a woman whom he doesn’t know is his blood relation. She is pregnant, and she dies giving birth to a baby with an unusually large head. The baby is born in the ÿrst moments of the new millennium. You name him Qiansui, a name that means ‘1000 years’. On the day of his ÿfth birthday, the child Qiansui turns toward you, spreads his arms

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wide like a storyteller, and embarks upon a tale which begins with the same words that begin the novel. Of these two narratives, which one has been more extraordinary? Which series of events more preposterous or more magical? Whose experiences more unbelievable? Whose memory more credible? ‘My story begins on January 1, 1950’ are the ÿrst and also ÿnal words in the novel by Mo Yan, Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out (Shengsi pilao).2 The novel is sprawling, and encloses both of the narratives described above, framed as a long narrative told by this bigheaded child named Lan Qiansui, who started out at the beginning of the novel as Ximen Nao, then returns each time in di˝erent form: in the body of a donkey, ox, pig, dog, and monkey, enacting the two-character compound word, translated as ‘life and death’ (shengsi) in the title. The term shengsi (a compound of ‘life and death’) denotes samsara, the never-ending Buddhist cycle of su˝ering and rebirth that continues until insight and nirvana is reached. The novel is divided into books. The ÿrst book is narrated by Qiansui and describes his life as a donkey. The second book describes Ximen Nao’s life as an ox, narrated by Jiefang. The narrative returns to Ximen Nao/Lan Qiansui’s ÿrst person voice as he describes being reborn as a pig in Book 3, and then as a dog in Book 4. The novel ends with the relatively short Book 5, in which the character named ‘Mo Yan’ takes over the narration. This shift between narrators, and the unique strategy of maintaining a single narrative voice with one continuous thread of memory across multiple incarnations in di˝erent bodies, is quite similar to the narrative device of Otoo’s ‘Being’ in the novel Ada’s Room as discussed by Sarah Colvin in the previous chapter. The use of a rhetorical ‘singular plurality’, which Colvin suggests is a strategy for ‘addressing the violence of categories’, is combined with the religious belief in samsara in Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out. Mo Yan is o˝ering more than a novel mode of storytelling here; this volatile narrating voice is also an innovative mechanism of truth-telling that evades a localized corporeal subject that can be potentially punished or held accountable for making such testimonials. Mo Yan’s method produces an aesthetics of indirection, where the artfulness of the text is willfully fugitive, twisting and turning as the plot develops. Its success thus depends on the cultivation of a reader engaged enough to participate in following, but also maintaining, a consistent through line of memory through the ÿctional narrative.

Mo Yan and side-stepping Combining sprawling and bawdy narratives that ˛ow through the decades that correspond to historical events that he lived through himself, Mo Yan’s literary output has divided critics, who feel obliged to explicate these historically embedded but fantastical texts with the author’s intentions. David Wang wrote in 2000 that Mo Yan’s relative silence beyond the world of the literary texts is

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precisely what one should expect from an author. Wang notes that, despite a nom de plume meaning ‘don’t speak’ (Mo Yan’s given birth name was Guan Moye), from his pen emerges an endless cascade of words. Whatever the subject matter, a torrential ˛ow of rich, unpredictable, often lacerating words remains his trademark. While this claim to silence amid an outpouring of ÿctional works may signify a contradiction of self-mockery and selfpraise, it is precisely why so many literary critics have lent their voices in his support. […] yet Mo Yan responds, almost without exception, to this academic and literary clamor with silence. He knows, instinctively, that the written page is where the novelist exists.3 Perry Link is less convinced about the freedoms of a novelist to let his work speak for itself, downplaying the literary value of Mo Yan’s work while criticizing him for his unwillingness to speak out against the Communist party. Link wrote several critical pieces following Mo Yan’s selection for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2012, explaining why he, and others, felt it should have gone to a more political writer, one who would use the international platform to shed a critical light on the People’s Republic of China’s Communist leadership. Mo Yan seemed to Link to be a writer who represented the compromises necessarily made by those who are ‘writing on the inside’: Mo Yan has written panoramic novels covering much of twentiethcentury Chinese history. ‘Rewriting history’ has been a fashion in Chinese ÿction since the 1990s; it holds great interest for readers who are still struggling to confront the question of ‘what happened?’ during and after the country’s Maoist spasm. For writers inside the system, a dilemma arises in how to treat episodes like the Great Leap famine (1959–1962), in which 30 million or more people starved to death, or the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966–1970), which took the lives of another two or three million and poisoned the national spirit with a cynicism and distrust so deep that even today it has not fully recovered. Today’s Communist leaders, worried that their power could su˝er by association with these Maoist disasters, declare the topics ‘sensitive’ and largely o˝-limits for state-sponsored writers [like Mo Yan]. But a writer doing a panorama cannot omit them, either. What to do? Mo Yan’s solution (and he is not alone here) has been to invoke a kind of daft hilarity when treating ‘sensitive’ events…Mo Yan has great fun with the craziness but leaves out the disaster.4 Lucas Klein discusses Mo Yan’s reception in the West, pointing out that Mo Yan frames his literature as literature of the world, inheritor of both Chinese

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pre-modern and vernacular storytelling traditions, and inspired, if not always informed by, American modernism and Latin American magic realism.5 Klein proposes a ‘translational reading’ for Mo Yan, in which the point of view is constantly shifted to enable what Klein calls a ‘sideways’ reading that ‘can remain ˛uid, seeing and at times reconciling but not speaking from the perspective of any stable global position; in this way it can remain sideways’.6 This translational reading allows the creation of a system where the reader can access the text’s ‘source and target cultures, but through which source and target cultures can access each other as well’.7 Klein’s proposal is particularly apposite in the context of Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out, which itself o˝ers a glancing, sideways presentation of multiple perspectives within the novel that acquire a di˝use narrative force di°cult to attach to one speciÿc corporeal body. The diverse voices of Ximen Nao, each of them compromised in some way by the body that happens to contain them, are yet attached to a single consciousness that is associated with the name Ximen Nao. Yet, the novel also acknowledges that the person associated with that name is dead from the beginning of the novel. The narrating soul moves through its various incarnations with an intact memory, which is modiÿed and altered as he embodies these six di˝erent corporeal forms. This premise is abetted by the Buddhist framework of samsara, which divides the speaking consciousness of Ximen Nao among the various lives in which he has been transmogriÿed and therefore ÿnds him neither attached to, nor responsible for, a single and culpable legal person. The novel also adopts formal strategies that mimic this circularity of living forms in application to what one would typically consider the ‘same person’. Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out thus inserts the narrative of characters external to the many voices of Ximen Nao’s incarnations. In between the various Ximen Nao narratives, Mo Yan also uses Lan Jiefang, who plays a signiÿcant role in narrating events; and an even more meddlesome narrator, the diegetically placed and most unreliable character named Mo Yan. ‘Mo Yan’ ÿgures in most of the chapters before taking over the narration at the end of Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out, but his authority and credibility are constantly questioned. This kind of ÿction, which combines real settings and speciÿc historical placeholders with elements that index its ÿctionality, represents a certain kind of narrative ÿction in world literature that pushes the boundaries between real and unreal, non-ÿction and ÿction.8 Speciÿcally in the post-1989 context in Chinese literature, however, this narratological imprecision allows room for the screen created by a fugitive subject, a voice untethered from a body; narrators are conveniently already deceased or comatose, and thus evade the kind of legal personhood that could occasion legal responsibility and punishment.9 The multiple narratives told through disparate versions of cohesion of body and voice, and over decades, have a geographically static setting. The imaginary

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hometown, also called Gaomi, is based on what David Wang calls a ‘historical space’, a literary rendering of Mo Yan’s hometown, Northeast Gaomi Township in Shandong Province, and the people who live there. Wang notes that Mo Yan is unique because while many modern Chinese nativist writers take their hometown as the chief inspiration for their ÿction, there are few who are able to transcend the simple method of imitation and duplication, and consistently provide readers with room to exercise their imagination.10 This ‘historical space’ of Gaomi, with its humans who are born and age as humans do in the world that we inhabit, accommodates Ximen Nao’s extraordinary life story. Ximen Nao’s transmigratory capers, which move him through six di˝erent animal and human incarnations by novel’s end, paradoxically create an imaginative storyworld for his narrative interlocutor (and foster grandson), Jiefang, who ages naturally and stays in one body throughout his narrative. Jiefang is put on equal footing with Ximen Nao, and his life is shown to be hardly more banal than the metempsychotic somersaults of ‘Ximen Nao’. Mo Yan shows how the two voices are inextricably braided. Fashioning himself as neither a patsy of a regime nor an intricately allegorical agitator, Mo Yan deliberately embraces the role of the storyteller, a person capable of keeping many voices in balance, but who is cannily aware of the danger of making up vividly told stories that could invite attention and, perhaps, trouble.11 Hence the nom de plume he adopted, Mo Yan, meaning ‘don’t talk’. In a lecture given when Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out was awarded the Newman Prize in 2009, he explained, describing himself in the third person: Thirty years ago, when a man with the name ‘Guan Moye’ took a character from his given name, Mo, split it into two characters, and changed it into Mo Yan, he did not fully realize the implications of this rebellious act of changing both family and given names. Back then he was thinking that he should have a pen name, since all major writers had one. As he stared at the new name that meant ‘don’t talk’, he was reminded of his mother’s admonition from way back. At that time, people in China were living in an unusual political climate; political struggles came in waves, one more severe than the one before, and people in general lost their sense of security. There was no loyalty or trust among people; there was only deception and watchfulness. Under those social conditions, many people got into trouble because of things they said; a single carelessly uttered word could bring disaster to one’s life and reputation as well as ruination to one’s family. But at a time like this, Mo Yan, or Guan Moye, was a talkative child with a good memory, an impressive ability to articulate, and, worst of all, a strong desire to express his views in public.

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Whenever he felt like showing o˝ his eloquence, his mother would remind him, ‘Don’t talk too much’. But as the saying goes, it’s easier for a dynasty to rise and fall than for a man to change his nature. […] In Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out […] there is a Mo Yan who spews incessant nonsense and incurs everyone’s displeasure. Though I cannot say that this Mo Yan is the real Mo Yan, he isn’t far o˝.12 In the same speech, Mo Yan notes that ‘I have said elsewhere that the novel was written in the short span of forty-three days, but it took forty-three years to germinate and develop’.13 Later, in his 2012 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, he explained: A person can experience only so much, and once you have exhausted your own stories, you must tell the stories of others. And so, out of the depths of my memories, like conscripted soldiers, rose stories of family members, of fellow villagers, and of long-dead ancestors I learned of from the mouths of old-timers. They waited expectantly for me to tell their stories. My grandfather and grandmother, my father and mother, my brothers and sisters, my aunts and uncles, my wife and my daughter have all appeared in my stories. Even unrelated residents of Northeast Gaomi Township have made cameo appearances.14 The storyteller persona allows the author to adopt narrative voices that are constantly in peril of being challenged and that are sometimes knowingly untrue. Such a literary approach acknowledges the ways that testimonial injustice (where the hearer doubts the credibility of the speaker due to prejudice) depends on the acceptance of the hearer, and indeed the necessity of having someone to hear the testimonial at all. It also underscores the fact that, as Miranda Fricker has pointed out, hermeneutical injustice is a limitation where a speaker is semantically unable to apprehend, let alone control, their experience.15 The epistemic injustice of trying to report on events that are either actively denied by the authorities or else summarily dismissed in histories and collective memory is apparent, but layered on top of this is also a threat that those who speak out may be silenced. Mo Yan’s work o˝ers a workaround for telling the truth, by telling it slant. He presents an excess of detail in complex narrative structures and leaves the reader responsible for ÿnding the truth that inheres within it. The reader is thus o˝ered a view of history that views a corporeal self as simply a more slowly transforming vessel of so many di˝erent selves, recognizing that truth can exist only through the persistence of such narratives over time. If a subject lacks control of how her experiences are interpreted, or may be silenced for even attempting to speak out, what are some potential literary

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strategies that can participate in inciting the hearer or reader to intervene? The aesthetics of indirection uses a series of aporetic devices that draw the reader’s attention to the suspension of multiple voices from which a credible narrative can be found. This kind of text needs a reader willing to extract the truth from its narrative, a reader who is willing to see it slant. Novels like Mo Yan’s, which deliberately engage the reader’s attention in puzzling out the varied rhetorical levels of communication at work in the novel, construct an animistic medium in the interconnection between the meetings of author, text, and reader.16 This medium’s meeting is the surface in the Deleuzian sense, where ‘surface’ is what exists in between the inside of the subject and everything to the exterior of the subject. Thus, objects are read at rather than on the surface, so that surface is less an object than it is a strategy to condition and engage our perceptions.17 It is in this medium where knowledge and interpretation is assembled, where the reader pushes beyond the static modes represented by author and text to bring their changed interpreting self forward and into the world after an encounter with the text. Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out creates its animistic medium quite literally: the author generates a text that engages the reader in the act of deciphering a strategy for reading the narratives through these multiple focalized voices. This reading strategy forces the reader to contemplate what constitutes a ‘person’ and how a narrative voice can be untethered from a physical corporeal subject in the harbor of ÿction. The narrative is composed of multiple di˝erent voices all tied together by a primary narrative voice that is identiÿed with Ximen Nao, even as it moves through the various corporeal forms, and names, as his soul is reborn, and each time into very di˝erent bodies. The characters in the novel are completely unaware that these various animals are all incarnations of Ximen Nao. By the time the reader reaches the section where Ximen Nao is ÿnally reborn as Lan Qiansui, a certain degree of fatigue has set in. Only the reader, through considering the deictic shifts of who is meant by ‘I’ and ‘you’ in the narrative, can discern the stability of person that is maintained by the narrating voice.18 Tasking the reader with this role shows the perlocutionary power of the text; it summons ethical responsibility in the competent reader, who is the only individual, other than this narrating voice, who is able to remember the past experiences that are carried forward into each new body as the plot evolves. As Chielozona Eze warns us at the beginning of this volume, ‘the writer can never be sure of the nature of the reader’s response, and that is why works of ÿction are an appeal, albeit a structured, calculated one’. Mo Yan’s narrative makes such an appeal to the reader’s ability to maintain the speciÿc memories of the ÿctional Ximen Nao. By maintaining a continuous ‘Ximen Nao’ voice, the reader facilitates the maintenance of speciÿc memories of trauma, corruption, and brutality. Those are the kinds of memories that may be otherwise suppressed, or that may be swallowed up by the debilitating

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malaise of ambient amnesia, among people in mainland China and abroad who have other things they would much rather think about.

Easy to remember, so hard to forget The notion of an underworld where souls were sent following death was already extant in China before the introduction of Buddhism. The Chinese Underworld was imagined as a complex and carefully detailed bureaucracy, with carefully regulated hierarchies, record-keeping and o°cial documents, and the same kinds of hazards that were present on earth, such as mistaken identities and cases of bribery and corruption. To this, Buddhism contributed several important elements to this Underworld, one of which was a more fully developed notion of many hells (according to one version, eight cold and eight hot), located at di˝erent levels, each with speciÿc forms of torture designed for speciÿc types of sins.19 In popular Buddhist beliefs in China, samsara was syncretized with the extant elaborate system of Underworld bureaucrats who could be tasked with overseeing the cycles of su˝ering and rebirth. After death, the soul of the deceased departs to a series of courts in the underworld o°ciated by judges who mete out rewards and punishments and send souls on assignments back into the mortal world, in lesser forms. As Grant and Idema explain: Hell was more of a purgatory, or rather, to use the Chinese term, it was an ‘earth prison’ (diyu) from which one would be released…after one had undergone one’s punishment. If the Underworld was thought of as a prison, this required the presence of judges (not to mention secretaries and security guards) who were qualiÿed to determine the punishment appropriate to the sin […]. [Each of the Ten Courts of Hell were] presided over by a king, who, with the help of his aides, studied the ledgers of life and death, considered the crimes, and meted out the punishment. Souls of the deceased who had to appear before these kings were sometimes, although not always, allowed to plead their own cases. The most important of the Ten Kings is King Yama.20 Souls could be sent on to other levels of hell, or they could be lucky enough to be sent back to earth by Yama. Returning to earth as various animals, these souls could continue this cycle either in the same form or reassigned by Yama to a higher form in consideration of their acquisition of incremental enlightenment. Mo Yan represents himself as no expert on Buddhist scripture, but he has referred often to the fact that he once saw a profoundly inspiring Buddhist mural depicting the six stages of samsara, and that he chose to use it as the premise for

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a novel about a man he remembered from childhood, who was the model for Lan Lian. Referring to himself in the third person, he shared: In the early 1960s, Guan Moye was still in elementary school. Every morning during the calisthenics broadcast after second period, he would see an independent farmer with the surname Lan pushing a cart with wooden wheels, something that was no longer in use even then. It was pulled by a gimpy donkey accompanied by Lan’s wife, a woman with bound feet […]. Back then, like all the other kids, Guan Moye felt nothing but disgust and disdain for this stubborn farmer who had insisted upon working independently instead of joining the commune, and even joined them in the evil act of pelting him with stones. Lan Lian resisted the pressure until 1966, when, under the cruel persecution of the Cultural Revolution, he could no longer hold out and took his own life. Many years later, after Guan Moye became Mo Yan, he wanted to turn the independent farmer’s story into a novel […]. but Mo Yan delayed writing the novel because he had yet to ÿnd the right narrative structure. It was not until the summer of 2005, when he saw in a famous temple the mural of the six transmigrations of life, that he had an epiphany […]. The loquacious baby recounted the many strange and uncommon experiences of his lifetimes as domestic animals, while examining, from the perspectives of those animals, the transformations of the Chinese countryside over the past ÿfty years.21 He explained again in his Nobel acceptance speech: the basic tenets of the Buddhist faith represent universal knowledge, and that mankind’s many disputes are utterly without meaning in the Buddhist realm. In that lofty view of the universe, the world of man is to be pitied. My novel is not a religious tract; in it I wrote of man’s fate and human emotions, of man’s limitations and human generosity, and of people’s search for happiness and the lengths to which they will go, the sacriÿces they will make, to uphold their beliefs.22 Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out uses the cyclical patterns of samsara as a means to explore the more mundane cycles that every human goes through over the passage of time, their potential to slip and fall behind, as well as their potential to rise toward grace and redemption. This structure also allows the voice of Ximen Nao to pass through ÿve decades of China’s history from multiple perspectives and bodies. But unlike most, who are never aware of their former lives, Ximen Nao maintains his memories intact—fueled, it seems, by his resentment about the injustices he has su˝ered. In the Underworld’s bureaucratic system, there are certain rules. The soul would typically drink an elixir of forgetfulness, administered by an Underworld

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character known as Granny Meng, and would embark on their new life totally unaware of their former lives. This is not the case, however, with Ximen Nao. In Book Three, he has just been returned to Yama’s court after having already lived life as an ox, as a donkey before that, and as the man Ximen Nao before that. Yama is annoyed to see him again, and chastises him: I am not authorized to send you back as Ximen Nao. Having undergone two reincarnations already, you know as well as I that Ximen Nao’s time has ended. His children are grown, his corpse has rotted away in the ground, and nothing but ashes remain from his dossier. Old accounts have been settled. Why can you not put those sad recollections out of your mind and seek happiness instead? (219) Ximen Nao’s resistance to forgetting is too powerful, however: Those painful memories are like parasites that cling stubbornly to me. When I was reborn as a donkey, I was reminded of Ximen Nao’s grievances, and when I was reborn as an ox, I was reminded of the injustice he su˝ered. (220) Such injustices, and the accompanying resentment about them, are too intense to shed, making the broth ine˝ective. Mo Yan’s irony is pointed. Characters in the novel whose lives have not been terminated continue to move on with their lives, forgetting grave injuries, but Ximen Nao, who is supposed to drink the amnesiac liquid, cannot seem to forget. Even though departed souls are supposed to come back to earth with no memories of their former lives, the injustice su˝ered overrides the possibility of forgetting things. As he explains to Lord Yama: Great Lord, I tell you the truth, I did not drink the tonic when I was sent back as a donkey. But before I was reborn as an ox, your two attendants pinched my nose shut and poured a bowl of it down my throat. They even gagged me to keep me from throwing it up. (220) To appease him, Yama tells him that he will be born to a governor’s family, where he will be gifted with a luxury car. Instead, he is dragged over to Granny Meng who angrily ladles the amnesia elixir into his mouth and says ‘I hope you drown, you stupid pig, for saying my broth was faked. I want to submerge your memories, submerge your previous lives, leaving you only with a memory of swill and dung!’ and Ximen Nao ÿnds himself being cast into the body of a pig. Nonetheless, even though he has been fed Granny Meng’s broth again, he remarks in his pig incarnation: ‘the ox memory is still with me. Am I still an

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ox? Was all that other stu˝ a dream? I put up a ÿght, struggling as if trying to break from of a nightmare’. Angry to be reborn a pig rather than a human, he resolves, ‘I’ll starve myself, that’s what I’ll do, so I can get back down to the underworld and settle accounts with that damned Lord Yama’ (221). The narrator occupies ‘the timeless structure of trauma’, and the cycles of life and death can be read as the systematic repetitions of attempts to break from its melancholia.23 The samsara invoked by the title and the need to narrate against the impossibility of forgetting also help to support a narrative framework by which we understand not only the novel but also the history of China in its long 20th century.

On meaning what we say A striking scene occurs at an earlier moment in Book Two of Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out, a section of the novel that is largely narrated by Lan Jiefang and centered on Ximen Nao’s ox incarnation. Jiefang is urged on by the big-headed child—who is the ÿnal incarnation of Ximen Nao—to begin by describing what he saw. In response to Jiefang’s demurral that ‘there isn’t much to say, anyway, since it’s all things we experienced’, Big-head Lan Qiansui insists that Jiefang ‘begin with the marketplace, focus on the fun part’ (155). Gaomi village is in the throes of the Cultural Revolution and now the chief of the county, Chen, has fallen out of political favor: his head was shaved, the skin showing black—afterward, in his memoirs, he said he’d shaved his head so the Red Guards couldn’t pull him by the hair—and a papier-mâché donkey had been tied around his waist. As the air ÿlled with drumbeats and the clang of gongs, he ran around to the beat, dancing with a goofy smile on his face. He looked like one of the local entertainers at New Year’s. (155) Chen had, in the previous ‘Donkey’ section of the book, been exceedingly kind to the Lan family donkey, which was Ximen Nao’s ÿrst incarnation following his execution. Because Chen had previously made his inspection trips while riding on Ximen Donkey, he is now accused of being a capitalist roader and publicly persecuted and called ‘Donkey Chief ’. A girl shouts out his accused crimes for all to hear. He is Capitalist-roader Chen Guangdi, a donkey trader who wormed his way into the Party, opposed the Great Leap Forward, opposed the Three Red Banners, is a sworn brother to Lan Lian […] an ideological reactionary […] immoral. He had sexual relations with a donkey and made her pregnant. (157)

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All this is greeted with the roaring approval of the crowds. This kind of story of public humiliation and mass hysteria is familiar to anyone who has read a Cultural Revolution memoir, or the ‘Scar Literature’ detailing the persecution of intellectuals during this time, let alone to anyone who lived through those times as Mo Yan did. Neither is Chen’s story the only description of the indecencies in˛icted on others in the village. However, Jiefang introduces a competing narrative in the pages, and it is in the form of Chen’s own memories of the described events, retrospectively considered. The villagers witness Chen dancing around in this donkey costume with a goofy smile on his face, while another capitalist roader is forced to eat a turnip drenched in ink. The men are paraded in this particular public struggle session, and are turned beastlike by the torments of the crowd. But Jiefang intervenes to adjust our interpretation of these moments with an interpretive gaze that complicates the way these incidents are received and even digested. Typical ‘Scar Literature’-style memoirs and testimonials were published by intellectuals following the Cultural Revolution, and Roy Bing Chan points out the imbalance created when the only testimonials about the Cultural Revolution came from the intellectuals who, as the literate elite, were largely the only ones documenting that period. Chan notes that the critique of this phenomenon came from two typically opposing sides: On one hand, those uncomfortable with the collusion of intellectuals with the post-Mao ruling elite see such literature as incomplete in their denunciation of the entirety of Communist horror. On the other hand, Scar Literature’s singular attention on the su˝erings borne by a fractional elite, however signiÿcant, work to repudiate and negate the entirety of egalitarian initiatives in the Mao era.24 Not so in the so-called documentary evidence furnished in Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out, however. Jiefang remarks on Chen’s memoir, which narrates the same events typical of Scar Literature narratives, but in an entirely contrary style. Rather than writing a narrative detailing all he su˝ered during the Cultural Revolution, Chen o˝ered a counternarrative. Jiefang explains: Plenty of cadres later wrote their memoirs, and when they related what had occurred during the Cultural Revolution, it was a tale of blood and tears, describing the period as hell on earth, more terrifying than Hitler’s concentration camps. But this o°cial wrote about his experiences in the early days of the Cultural Revolution in a lively humorous style. He wrote that he rode his paper donkey through eighteen marketplace

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parades, and in the process grew strong and healthy. No more high blood pressure and no more insomnia. He said the sound of drums and gongs energized him; his legs quaked, and, like a donkey spotting its mother, he stamped his feet and snorted through his nose. When I linked his memoirs and my recollection of him wearing the papier-mâché donkey, I understood why the goofy smile had adorned his face. (156) In Chen’s purported memoir written decades after the events, Chen revises the narrative signiÿcantly, writing that he becomes increasingly stronger as he proceeds. In the memoir: He said that when he followed the beat of the drums and gongs and started dancing in his papier-mâché donkey, he felt himself slowly changing into a donkey […] and his mind began to wander, free and relaxed, as if he were living somewhere between the real world and a wonderful illusion. To him it felt as if his legs had become a set of four hooves, that he had grown a tail, and that he and the papier-mâché donkey around his waist had fused into one body, much like the centaur of Greek mythology. As a result, he gained a ÿrsthand perception of what it felt like to be a donkey, the joys and the su˝erings. (156) In contrast to the misery and trauma that Jiefang and the novel’s readers might imagine from the description of the scene, Chen’s retrospective memoir paints it over with a description that does not simply say that Chen was not bothered by this treatment. Rather, it goes one step further to suggest that the dazed smile on his face bespeaks the great joy he feels at being one with the donkey persona and feeling free of bodily pain and illness. A pretend donkey who isn’t resentful. And so it goes. Some scholars have tended to take Jiefang’s inclusion of Chen’s memoir at its word rather than as a narrative device that deliberately echoes the actual transformation of a character into a donkey in the novel. Chen’s experience of ‘changing into a donkey’ is accepted as the direct reporting of the person who experienced this treatment, and thus read as a statement of compassion and freedom. For example, Huang writes: For Mo Yan and Chen, becoming a donkey is not degrading. More than cathartically relieving his pain in the manner of successful satire, it appears to be a moment of redemption that combines warmth, humor, compassion, and freedom. Chen ÿnds therapy in becoming a donkey.

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In Huang’s interpretation, Chen’s memoir, and even Mo Yan himself, embrace su˝ering as an opportunity for empathy: This other realm of being an animal comforts him, enlivens him, receives him, and expands him […] In blasting open the virtual boundaries of ego, Chen becomes fully conscious of and exclusively centered on a donkey’s woes and joys. In looking beyond himself, he has become a donkey and gained its perception. He has achieved real empathy.25 Here is an example where the interpretation of the reader is crucial. Just because Chen claims, through Mo Yan, that he enjoys being paraded around as a donkey, are we meant to accept this without question? Occasions like these invite a reader’s skepticism, or at least a reader who raises an eyebrow, knowing that one can never quite know with absolute certainty whether ‘direct’ statements as these are made with sincerity or with irony. A sideways look at Chen’s memoir might see a perlocutionary prompting from the text to consider his testimony against other surface details. Chen could be saying what the Party wants to hear. Or, the experience could have disintegrated his subjectivity so that he saw himself no longer as a person but as a beast of burden. The novel’s narrative complexity and purposeful engagement with epistemic injustice should give the reader pause rather than simple acceptance. The responsible reader must be alert to deciding between what is said and what is meant.

An aesthetics of indirection As many times as we read someone’s testimony about things as they were seen, and things as they were remembered, we are also reminded not to believe everything we read. The great 18th-century novel The Story of the Stone or Dream of the Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin (1715?–1764?) declared ‘Truth becomes ÿction when ÿction is true; real becomes not-real where the unreal is real’.26 This simultaneous claim of authenticity and disavowal of a reliance on the real has been how ÿction is understood in relation to reality, especially in the case of the ÿctional autobiography o˝ered in this novel. This paradox is exploited in a text that also manipulates the reader’s expectations. The novel presents itself as autobiographical but also given to supernatural occurrences that defy accepted notions of reality and believability that would be more at home in the realm of fantasy ÿction. Building on the considerable amount of criticism on Autobiography Studies in combination with the work on largely ÿctional narratives by narratologists, Dan Shen and Dejin Xu explore the nature of unreliability in autobiography in contrast to ÿction.27 Teasing out the di˝erences between a ‘cognizant audience’ of autobiography and an ‘authorial audience’ of ÿction, they note that the former may be totally unsought by, and unwelcome to, the autobiographer, who always wants readers to take the text to be true to his or her

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experiences, whereas the latter is intended by the author to be aware of the ÿctiveness of the story told, so that the audience can judge the narrator and characters together with the author.28 In their taxonomy of the various mechanisms that readers use to determine the reliability of the narrator/author, Shen and Xu conclude that the cognizant reader, ‘no matter whether in ÿction or in autobiography, is often both unintended by and unwelcome to the author’.29 Mo Yan’s text, on the other hand, does not seem to reject the cognizant reader. Instead, in his playfully constructed narrations, he tends to court the suspicions of the reader, drawing attention to inconsistencies and inaccuracies made by the various speakers, including ‘Mo Yan’, in the novel, as well as the various contextualizing bodies associated with the same speaker. It is a formal necessity of the text that the reader is often unsure who is speaking, and who is remembering, and relies on the maintenance of a mental chronology of events and parties to follow the narrative. In this way, the reader is made to perform the role of historian and adjudicator. The aesthetics of indirection thus creates and conditions a reader who vacillates between belief and disbelief in such a way that seemingly opposite views of the same narrator are held in suspension as simultaneously true and untrue, reliable and unreliable. Within Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out, the narrator with the most contested credibility is the character named Mo Yan. This device begs the question: if the narrator nested within the text is this unreliable, how can Mo Yan, the novel’s author, be held accountable for anything written in these pages? If ÿction is necessarily a way of telling things sideways, with made-up and preposterous elements, then who is to say that any of it can be prosecuted as dissent? Time and again, the narrators recall how certain incidents occurred and were documented in such and such a story written by Mo Yan, borrowing from traditions of historical chronicle or documentary style that suggest the verisimilitude of ‘this really happened’. Equally, and often even in the same paragraph, the narrative will follow up with ‘who believes anything a novelist says?’ When Ximen Nao is reporting on his life as Ximen Pig, for example, he adds: Some time later, when I was reborn as a dog, a friend of mine, an experienced, knowledgeable, and wise German shepherd […] concluded: People in the 1950s were innocent, in the 1960s they were fanatics, in the 1970s they were afraid of their own shadows, in the 1980s they carefully weighed people’s words and actions, and in the 1990s they were simply evil. I’m sorry, I keep getting ahead of myself. It’s a trick Mo Yan uses all the time, and I foolishly let it a˝ect the way I talk. (266) This statement suggests the changeability of individuals (people or dogs) over the decades, or at least the changeability of others’ interpretations of them.

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It also echoes other references to the trickiness of Mo Yan, whose rhetorical strategies are ridiculed as much as his personality traits: ‘he was incapable of doing anything worthwhile and unwilling to do anything spectacularly bad; in other words, someone who was always causing trouble and forever complaining about his lot’ (288). Denial of credibility is accompanied by denial of accountability, and the text relies on the maintenance of this particular balance. Mo Yan is introduced in the novel as Ximen Jinlong’s junior by seven years, and in the section narrated by Ximen Pig, Ximen relates that Mo Yan’s mother used to say that Mo Yan had been Lord Yama’s personal secretary in a former life. Ximen Nao/Pig muses that Mo Yan’s mother must have ‘made up most of this tale to give her son some respectability in the village, since stories like that have been a part of China’s popular tradition for a long time’ (294). Fiction becomes the safe harbor from which the truth can still be managed, and this is carried out precisely by the insistence on the unreliability of the narrator. The rhetorical strategies of the Mo Yan character in the text a˝ect the other characters as well, who constantly refer to how unreliable Mo Yan is as a storyteller: ‘It would be a mistake to take him at his word, since his stories are ÿlled with foggy details and speculation, and should be used for reference only’ (294). And indeed, the novel follows through on that advice, and includes excerpts from stories by ‘Mo Yan’, evidently for reference: for example, many excerpts are included from his narrative ‘Tales of Pig-Raising’, embedded in the novel and used as evidence in support of descriptions of events (294–295). The strangeness of the ‘Pig’ section of Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out is exacerbated by the fact that the narrative of Ximen Pig’s life incorporates an extensive opera, complete with song numbers, that is performed by a band of farmers’ pigs who join up with a band of feral pigs who have created their own ‘band of outsiders’-style society. In the novel, Lan Qiansui’s narrative of his life as a pig is fantastical, whereas the character Mo Yan’s story about pig farming within the novel is celebrated because of its purportedly autobiographical strengths and truth-telling capabilities: ‘it was a work that was clearly related to his experience and position at Apricot Garden Pig Farm. There was talk that the renowned ÿlm director Ingmar Bergman thought about bringing ‘Tales of Pig-Raising’ to the silver screen, but where was he going to ÿnd that many pigs?’ (323). The reader acquainted with the life and work of the author Mo Yan recognizes that these references are exaggerated versions of how he is generally understood as a writer, and also of how he fashions himself. His writings are speciÿcally related to the ‘historical space’ of Gaomi Township, and he has spoken and written often about how his ÿction is based on real people and events from his own life. Speciÿcally embedding a story about the life on the pig farm written by the ÿctional Mo Yan is yet another way for the author to playfully critique the impulse of readers and critics alike to read the personal and autobiographical into an author’s work, even using it as historical evidence. As Mo Yan says, ‘the Mo Yan in the novel is a character created by the writer

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Mo Yan, but is also the writer Mo Yan himself. In fact, this is the connection between a novelist and all the characters in his novels’.30 In this way, Mo Yan also activates Lugones’s framework of an ‘openness to uncertainty’31 as applied in both Colvin’s and Phiri’s analyses in the preceding chapters. I have written elsewhere about the way that post-1989 novels in Chinese have employed experimental and intricate narrative strategies to communicate this untethered voice that rises in spite of the ambient amnesia of o°cial historical narratives, as in Ma Jian’s novel Beijing Coma.32 Mo Yan tells a series of anecdotes in his Nobel acceptance speech, one of which involves his mother who had been caught gleaning ears of wheat from the ÿelds of the collective, considered a crime since the wheat belonged to the people rather than individuals. Because her feet were bound she could not run away, so she was caught by the watchman and slapped so hard that she fell to the ground. Mo Yan recalls carrying the memory of this insult and, many years later, when encountering the man again, he wanting to avenge his mother. He recounts that she stopped him by saying ‘the man who hit me and this man are not the same person’.33 In this formulation, where narrative and temporality are braided together but still separated, Mo Yan can claim that he is simply a mouthpiece for a series of stories that emerge from somewhere and someone else. The people we were a few years ago really are distinct from the people we are today, but they are also tied to us like a memory that just cannot be shaken. Most importantly, although Mo Yan assumes the conventions of the storyteller who travels from village to village with a stock of stories, he also eschews the oral tradition: he has written these stories down. And there they all are, the o°cial histories, the memoirs, the ÿctionalized stories, all in writing, all di˝erent from each other, all waiting to be encountered. And therein too lies the ethical role of the reader: to receive the command that comes from the text itself, which puts on us what Sanford Goldberg calls ‘conversational pressure’, where ‘being addressed puts one under some pressure to do something which, when one does it competently, can have additional downstream e˝ects of putting one under further sorts of normative pressure’.34 That pressure, I think, is to open our eyes a little wider, to pay attention a little better, to look at things from all directions, and to slant our way a little bit closer to the truth.

Notes 1 See Frank Dikotter, Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-1962 (New York: Bloomsbury, 2010); Jisheng Yang, Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958-1962 (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2012). 2 Mo Yan, Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out, trans. Howard Goldblatt (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2006), 3. Further page references will be given in the text. 3 David Der-Wei Wang, ‘The Literary World of Mo Yan’, trans. Michael Berry, World Literature Today 74, no. 3 (2000): 487–494. 4 Perry Link, ‘Does This Writer Deserve the Prize?’, The New York Review of Books, December 6, 2012, nybooks.com/articles/2012/12/06/mo-yan-nobel-prize/

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5 Lucas Klein, ‘A Dissonance of Discourses: Literary Theory, Ideology, and Translation in Mo Yan and Chinese Literary Studies’, Comparative Literature Studies 53, no. 1 (2016): 185; Link notes the similarities but doubts actual in˛uence between Mo Yan and magical realist writers Link, ‘Does This Writer Deserve the Prize?’. 6 Klein, ‘A Dissonance of Discourses’, 191. 7 Klein, ‘A Disonance of Discourses’, 192. 8 Some recent examples in the ÿeld of narratology include Rochelle Tobias, PseudoMemoirs: Life and Its Imitation in Modern Fiction (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2021); Annjeanette Wiese, Narrative Truthiness: The Logic of Complex Truth in Hybrid (Non)Fiction (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2021). 9 Ma Jian’s Beijing Coma takes place in the body of a comatose patient, who has been shot during the Tiananmen student demonstrations, and Yan Lianke’s Dream of Ding Village is narrated by a young boy whose father has made a fortune from encouraging villagers to sell their blood and plasma, initiating an HIV epidemic. 10 Wang, ‘The Literary World of Mo Yan’, 488. 11 For an introduction to Mo Yan’s ÿction, see Angelica Duran and Yuhan Huang, eds., Mo Yan in Context (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2014). 12 Mo Yan, ‘Six Lives in Search of a Character: The 2009 Newman Prize Lecture’, trans. Sylvia Li-chun Lin, World Literature Today 83, no. 4 (August 2009): 26. The name Mo Yan sounds very much like the author’s given name, Moye, and is a rebus for the ÿrst character ‘Mo’ in his given name: 謨. The character is broken down into its two radicals—yan 言 on the left and mo 莫 on the right—to make up a name ‘Don’t talk’ when they are inverted. 13 Mo Yan, ‘Six Lives in Search of a Character: The 2009 Newman Prize Lecture’. 14 Mo Yan, ‘Storytellers’ (Nobel Prize, Stockholm, December 7, 2012), 6, https:// www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2018/06/yan-lecture_en.pdf; Mo Yan, ‘Jiang gushi de ren’ (Nobel Peace Prize Awards, Stockholm Sweden, December 7, 2012), 8, nobelprize.org/uploads/2018/06/yan-lecture_ki.pdf 15 Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 4. 16 Ingawanij has written on the way that Apichatpong’s ÿlms generate this animistic medium in May Adadol Ingawanij, ‘Animism and the Performative Realist Cinema of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’, in Screening Nature: Cinema beyond the Human, ed. Anat Pick and Guinevere Narraway (New York: Berghahn Books, 2013), 91–109. 17 Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, ed. Constantin V. Boundas, trans. Mark Lester and Charles Stivale (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 305; see also Shiamin Kwa, Regarding Frames: Thinking with Comics in the Twenty-First Century (Rochester, NY: RIT Press, 2020), xxvi; Shiamin Kwa, ‘Surface’, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature online. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore./9780190201098.013.1105 This will be published in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Literary Theory, ed. John Frow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). 18 I have explored deixis and its ethical demands in another contemporary Chinese novel in Shiamin Kwa, ‘Can’t Get There from Here: Deictic Will and the Mapped Life in Ma Jian’s Beijing Coma’, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture (MCLC) 31, no. 1 (2019): 47–78. 19 Beata Grant and Wilt Idema, Escape from Blood Pond Hell: The Tales of Mulian and Woman Huang (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2011), 20. 20 Grant and Idema, Escape, 20. 21 Mo Yan, ‘Six Lives in Search of a Character: The 2009 Newman Prize Lecture’, 27. 22 Mo Yan, ’Storytellers’, 8; In Chinese Mo Yan, ‘Jiang gushi de ren’, 11–12. 23 Yiju Huang, ‘A Buddhist Perspective: Trauma and Reincarnation in Mo Yan’s Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out’, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 28, no. 2 (Fall 2016): 294.

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24 Roy Bing Chan, The Edge of Knowing: Dreams, History, and Realism in Modern Chinese Literature (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2017), 150. 25 Huang, ‘A Buddhist Perspective: Trauma and Reincarnation in Mo Yan’s Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out’, 302–303. 26 Xueqin Cao, The Story of the Stone, or The Dream of the Red Chamber, Vol. 1: The Golden Days, trans. David Hawkes (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1974), 55; Cao Xueqin, Honglou Meng (Dream of the Red Chamber) (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1972), 6. 27 On autobiography see for example Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010); and also Philippe Lejeune, On Autobiography, ed. Paul John Eakin, trans. Katherine Leary (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989); in narratology, see for example James Phelan, Narrative as Rhetoric: Technique, Audiences, Ethics, Ideology, 1st ed. (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1996); James Phelan, Experiencing Fiction: Judgments, Progression, and the Rhetorical Theory of Narrative (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2007); Jim Phelan, Living to Tell About It (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005); Monika Fludernik, ’SecondPerson Narrative and Related Issues’, Style 28, no. 3 (Fall 1994): 281–311; Monika Fludernik, ‘Fiction vs. Non-Fiction: Narratological Di˝erentiation’, in Erzählen und Erzähl-Theorie im 20. Jahrhundert: Festschrift für Wilhelm Füger, ed. Jörg Helbig (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C., 2001), 85–103. 28 Dan Shen and Dejin Xu, ’Intratextuality, Extratextuality, Intertextuality: Unreliability in Autobiography versus Fiction’, Poetics Today 28, no. 1 (2007): 48. 29 Shen and Xu, ’Intratextuality’, 59. 30 Mo Yan, ‘Six Lives in Search of a Character: The 2009 Newman Prize Lecture’, 27. 31 Maria Lugones, Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition against Multiple Oppressions (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littleÿeld Publishers, 2003), 19. 32 Kwa, ‘Can’t Get There from Here: Deictic Will and the Mapped Life in Ma Jian’s Beijing Coma’. 33 Mo Yan, ’Storytellers’. 34 Sanford C. Goldberg, Conversational Pressure: Normativity in Speech Exchanges (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 14.

Bibliography Cao, Xueqin. Honglou Meng (Dream of the Red Chamber). Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1972. Cao, Xueqin. The Story of the Stone, or The Dream of the Red Chamber, Vol. 1: The Golden Days. Translated by David Hawkes. Trade Paperback Edition edition. Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1974. Chan, Roy Bing. The Edge of Knowing: Dreams, History, and Realism in Modern Chinese Literature. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2017. Deleuze, Gilles. The Logic of Sense. Edited by Constantin V. Boundas. Translated by Mark Lester and Charles Stivale. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990. Dikotter, Frank. Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958–1962. New York: Bloomsbury, 2010. Duran, Angelica, and Yuhan Huang, eds. Mo Yan in Context. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2014. Fludernik, Monika. ‘Fiction vs. Non-Fiction: Narratological Di˝erentiation’. In Erzählen Und Erzähl-Theorie im 20. Jahrhundert: Festschrift für Wilhelm Fueger, edited by Joerg Helbig, 85–103. Heidelberg: Universitaetsverlag C., 2001.

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———. ‘Second-Person Narrative and Related Issues’. Style 28, no. 3 (Fall 1994): 281–311. Fricker, Miranda. Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Goldberg, Sanford C. Conversational Pressure: Normativity in Speech Exchanges. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Grant, Beata, and Wilt Idema. Escape from Blood Pond Hell: The Tales of Mulian and Woman Huang. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2011. Huang, Yiju. ‘A Buddhist Perspective: Trauma and Reincarnation in Mo Yan’s Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out’. Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 28, no. 2 (Fall 2016): 285–312. Ingawanij, May Adadol. ‘Animism and the Performative Realist Cinema of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’. In Screening Nature: Cinema beyond the Human, edited by Anat Pick and Guinevere Narraway, 91–109. New York: Berghahn Books, 2013. Klein, Lucas. ‘A Dissonance of Discourses: Literary Theory, Ideology, and Translation in Mo Yan and Chinese Literary Studies’. Comparative Literature Studies 53, no. 1 (2016): 170–197. Kwa, Shiamin. ‘Can’t Get There from Here: Deictic Will and the Mapped Life in Ma Jian’s Beijing Coma’. Modern Chinese Literature and Culture (MCLC) 31, no. 1 (2019): 47–78. ———. Regarding Frames: Thinking with Comics in the Twenty-First Century. Rochester, NY: RIT Press, 2020. ———. ‘Surface’. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature and The Oxford Encyclopedia of Literary Theory, edited by John Frow. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.1105 Lejeune, Philippe. On Autobiography. Edited by Paul John Eakin. Translated by Katherine Leary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. Link, Perry. ‘Does This Writer Deserve the Prize?’ The New York Review of Books, December 6, 2012. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2012/12/06/mo-yan-nobel-prize/ Lugones, Maria. Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition against Multiple Oppressions. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littleÿeld Publishers, 2003. Mo Yan. ‘Jiang gushi de ren’. Presented at the Nobel Peace Prize Awards, Stockholm Sweden, December 7, 2012. https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2018/06/ yan-lecture_ki.pdf. ———. Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out. Translated by Howard Goldblatt. New York: Arcade Publishing, 2006. ———. ‘Six Lives in Search of a Character: The 2009 Newman Prize Lecture’. Translated by Sylvia Li-chun Lin. World Literature Today 83, no. 4 (August 2009): 26–27. ———. ‘Storytellers’. Presented at the Nobel Prize, Stockholm, December 7, 2012. https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2018/06/yan-lecture_en.pdf Phelan, James. Experiencing Fiction: Judgments, Progression, and the Rhetorical Theory of Narrative. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2007. ———. Narrative as Rhetoric: Technique, Audiences, Ethics, Ideology. 1st edition. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1996. Phelan, Jim. Living to Tell About It. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005. Shen, Dan, and Dejin Xu. ‘Intratextuality, Extratextuality, Intertextuality: Unreliability in Autobiography versus Fiction’. Poetics Today 28, no. 1 (2007): 43–87.

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Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. 2nd edition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. Tobias, Rochelle. Pseudo-Memoirs: Life and Its Imitation in Modern Fiction. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2021. Wang, David Der-Wei. ‘The Literary World of Mo Yan’. Translated by Michael Berry. World Literature Today 74, no. 3 (2000): 487–494. Wiese, Annjeanette. Narrative Truthiness: The Logic of Complex Truth in Hybrid (Non) Fiction. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2021. Yang, Jisheng. Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958–1962. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2012.

INDEX

Note: Bold page numbers refer to tables; italic page numbers refer to ÿgures and page numbers followed by “n” denote endnotes. Aayog, Niti 107 abolitionism 23, 25, 27, 35 Abraham 45–6, 50 ab-sens 74–5 abstraction, demands for 68–9, 72–3 Adani 111, 117 Ada’s Room (Otoo) 176–7, 179, 181–8, 182, 190–1, 200 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Twain) 155 aesthetic autonomy 59, 73 aesthetic culture 10 the aesthetic, Schiller’s conception of 73 aesthetic judgment 9–10, 68–9 aesthetic philosophy: and epistemic injustice 62, 70; intelligibility and communicability in 57–9, 72–3, 75; and mimesis 67–8; in neoliberal university 13–14; and subjectivity 60–2 aesthetic practices, resistant 13 aesthetic subject 10, 68, 72 aesthetics: and the human 57–8; and morality 156–7; and racialization 61–2; and representability 69 a°rmation, mutual 31 a°rmative action 28, 153 Africa: as chaotic 90, 94; colonialist representation of 83–7, 101; homophobia in 36–8; Phoenician

circumnavigation of 65–6; representation of foreigners in 93–7; representations of people and culture 88–93; troubled landscape of 97–100 African Americans: and American canonical literature 155; narratives about 26–7, 30, 32–5; and racial passing 169n57; writing history of 165–6; see also Black Lives Matter; slavery African culture 90, 92–3, 100 Africanist personae 154 African knowledge 2, 5, 91–2 Afrikaners, white 169n64, 169n71 Afro-pessimism 76n14 Ahmed, Sarah 138, 152 Akali Dal political party 120n2 Alco˛, Linda Martín 4 Allen, Amy 3 allochronism 98 alphabet, origins of 65 alterity 39; denial of 44; and ÿctive literature 156, 165–6; openness toward 12 Ambani 111, 117 ambiguities 155, 157, 184 Anderson, Luvell 4–5 animals: in animation ÿlms 88–92, 94–6, 98–100; in apocalyptic literature 45

Index 221

animation ÿlms 12–13, 84–6; epistemic injustice in 87–8; set in Africa 88–101 anndata 112–14, 124n49, 126n74 anxiety: cultural 162; subjective 154, 158, 163 apartheid 153, 158–9, 162–3, 167n25, 168n56 Aphrodite 140 Apichatpong Weerasethakul 216n16 aposiopesis 66 Arendt, Hannah 1, 26 Aristotle 12, 23, 25 arrogance, epistemic 7 art: moral and social use of 8–12, 24, 39; and new objects of knowledge 190; in Scattered Light 134–5 artists of color 11 ‘The Art of Fiction’ (Morrison) 165 atemporality 13 Atkins,Ashley 5, 7 Atlas of Remote Islands (Schalansky) 63, 75, 78n69 Aufhebung 179, 186 autobiography, unreliability in 212–13, 217n27 autodidacts 134, 138 autonomy 61, 66, 134 Babb,Valerie 151 Baghel Singh, Baba 116 Bajwa, Jass 111 Bakhtin, Mikhail 11, 179–80, 190 Barry, Brian 28 Baumgarten, Alexander 9 Bawa, Ranjit 116, 122n23 Bazyar, Shida 132 Beidler, Paul 185 Beijing Coma (Ma Jian) 215, 216n9 Beloved (Morrison) 158, 165, 169n60 Benjamin,Walter 44, 54n2, 73 Bergman, Ingmar 214 Berlin, postmigrant theatre in 132 Bernadi, Daniel Leonard 84 Bhabha, Homi 167n15 Bhattacharyya, Bishwajit 118 Biko, Steve 153 Bildung 134–5 Bildungsroman 13, 131–2, 134–5, 144n18–19 biological determinism 178 BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) 106–7, 111, 122n23 black consciousness 153 black experience 5–6

blackface 155–6, 163 Black Feminist Thought 4 Black Lives Matter 7, 32–3, 38, 153, 167n23 blackness 13, 154–5, 157–9, 162–3, 169n60, 177 black people, in United States see African Americans black problem 159 black rage 34 black scholars 5 black women 4, 34, 178 Boal, Augusto 83 the body, and human experience 36–8 body language 109 boomerang perception 178, 185, 191 boundary crossing 162 British Empire, in India 115–17 Buddhism 202, 206–7 Bunzl, Matti 98 Butler, Judith 60, 141, 156, 158–9, 161 cameras 88, 94 Cao Xueqin 212 Capeheart, Loretta 29 Cape Town 158, 169 caste system 109, 122n21, 122n23 Castiglia, Christopher 78n48 catachresis 74–5 censorship 66 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 2 Chan, Roy Bing 210 Chassidic tales 45, 47, 51–4 Chaucer, Geo˛rey 176 Cheema, Harf 110, 123n36 chiasmus 176, 191n1; epistemic potential of 178, 181–3; etymology of 185;Tyler on 185, 186; and withness 188 chiastic gaze 189 chiastic knowledge 184–9, 191 chiastic narrative voice 180 chiastic relations, symbol for 183 chiastic structures 31, 177, 181, 182, 187, 191 chiastic thinking 178–9 children, and animation ÿlms 85 Chimakonam, Jonathan O. 1, 7–8, 178–9 Chinese ÿction 201–2 Chinese Underworld 198, 206–7, 209 Christ 38 cinematic apparatus 84 circle-of-life philosophy 99–100 civil rights movement 32, 34, 38 class-based ignorance 2

222

Index

classism 137, 140–2 closing ranks 34 Coady, David 5 Code, Lorraine 4 cognitive handicap, group-based 5 cognitive immaturity 7 cognizant reader 212–13 collective becoming 74 collective understanding 60, 71, 137–8, 155 collectivity 70, 72–4 Collins, Patricia Hill 4, 184 colonialism, and the written sign 65 coloniality 2 color line 26, 159 Coloured South Africans 157, 159–60, 168n56 common sense 25, 72, 77n35 communicability 57–62, 64, 66, 69–72, 75, 76n14 Communist Party of China 201, 210 communities, imagined 54, 163 complementarity, sexual 74, 78n62 comprehensibility 73 confession 49, 139 connectedness 162, 183–6; multiple 190; radical 187–8, 191 conscience 25–6; appeals to 29–31, 34 contract farming 111, 120n1 contributory injustice 6 conversationalism 7, 178–9 conversational pressure 215 corporeal subject 200, 205 corrective acts 44, 46, 50–4 cosmogony 190 cowrie shells 92–3 creative agency 1, 11, 14, 176, 190 creative art 7 credibility: hierarchy of 2; of local knowers 91, 95; of narrator 213–14; and social identity 4–5, 71 critical race theory 27, 151, 153–4 critical whiteness studies 151–3 Critique of Judgement (Kant) 9, 58, 60, 73, 76n14 cultural conservatism, black 34 cultural production: and creative agency 11; and epistemic injustice 2, 8, 12 Cultural Revolution 198–9, 201, 207, 209–10 culture industries, transnational 84, 87, 97, 101 Cunli˛e, Zoë 8, 88

da Silva, Denise Ferreira 11, 13, 61–2 Dalits 109 Darnell, Eric 86 Dayson, Misa 190 d’Azeglio, Luigi Taparelli 27 Declaration of Independence 27, 39 decolonization 8, 95 defamiliarization 164 deixis 205, 216n18 Delhi: in farmers’ protest songs 110, 115–19; protests in 107, 109 Democratic Republic of the Congo 95 Descartes, René 61 development, narrative of (Lloyd) 9, 58, 61, 69 Dhar, Biswajit 111 Dibia, Jude 36 Dickinson, Emily 66 Didion, Joan 23, 39 di˛erence: cultural 11; mastery of 186; racialized 155, 183; sexual 74; see also gender di˛erence dignity: of the black body 23–4, 29–33, 35; and social justice 27, 35 discontinuities 13, 156 discovery, claims of 95 discrimination, postmigrant 133–5 Disney 84–6, 91, 100 divine justice 12, 44–7; and gender 50–1, 53; narratives of 47–50 Dixon,Thomas Jr. 27 Dokotum, Okaka Opio 84 Dosanjh, Diljit 112 Dotson, Kristie 6, 62, 71–2, 88 double consciousness 7, 167n15 double-headed arrow 183–4, 186 Douglass, Frederick 35, 39 Dream of Ding Village (Yan Lianke) 216n9 DreamWorks 84, 86, 89, 95 drugs 32, 41n37 Du Bois,W. E. B. 7, 26, 167n15 Dyer, Richard 151 eccentric agency 7, 11 Edelman, Lee 59, 61, 72–5, 76n14 education: and Bildungsroman 13, 132–5; as epistemic good 5 eigenartig 69–70, 72 Eigentliche 67–9, 74 Eigentümlichkeit 68 ellipses 64, 67, 154, 178 Ellison, Ralph 155, 177, 185 El-Mafaalani, Aladin 133

Index 223

Emalobe, Emeka Dibia 84, 87 emotions: and justice 138–9; in tragedy 25 empathy: appeal to 39; and Aristotelian tragedy 25; and literature 8; and su˛ering 212 English language 90–1, 97, 99 Enlightenment: and human dignity 24–5; secular 8 epistemes 3 epistemic agency 6, 13, 119–20, 160 epistemic authority 5–6, 63 epistemic correctives 156 epistemic credibility 4, 91 epistemic crisis 44, 47–8, 51–4 epistemic expertise 119 epistemic friction 7, 11, 178–9, 184, 186 epistemic imperative 160 epistemic injustice 1–2, 131; in animation ÿlms 87–8, 92, 100–1; creative resistance to 8; and hermeneutical injustice 137; history of idea 2–7; and identity power 152; in Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out 204, 212; representational 12, 83, 87–8, 101, 106; and social justice 44; and whiteness 152–3 epistemic instrumentalization 157 epistemic interference 109, 119 epistemic journeying 31, 176–7, 182, 185, 191; see also narrative pilgrimage epistemic justice: and aesthetics 59; Medina on 179; and social justice 26 epistemic labor 161 epistemic monoculture 95 epistemic pilgrimage 186 epistemic pluralism 178 epistemic politics 87, 100–1 epistemic power 88 epistemic practices: ethical implications of 70–2, 78n55; interactive 185; politics of 154–5, 166 epistemic privilege 69 epistemic resistance 6–7, 108, 131 epistemic shift 191 epistemic silencing 89 epistemic tourism 177–8, 182 epistemic travel see epistemic journeying epistemic un/learning 158 epistemology: alternative 4–5, 8; ethics of 160; queer 78n55 Erasmus of Rotterdam 74 error, unjust 5 eternity symbol 182 ethnographic mode 10–11

Eurocentrism: and Africa 83, 85; in animation ÿlms 13, 90–2, 96, 99–100 exile 35–8 Fabian, Johannes 98 Fafowora, Oyinkansola 85 Fanon, Frantz 167n15 fantasies 86; of control 100; identiÿcation with 161; of sexual relation 74 ‘Farmer Anthem’ 121n17 Farred, Grant 159 Favreau, Jon 86 feminist standpoint theory 4 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 60 ÿlm 83; age in 2; and colonialism 12, 83–4, 88; see also animation ÿlms Fisher, Philip 25 form, ethics of 166 Foucault, Michel 3, 14, 179; deÿnition of episteme 3–4; and di˛erence 186; and genealogy 11 fragility 188 Frankenberg, Ruth 151 Frankfurt, Harry G. 30–1 fraughtness 188 Freud, Sigmund 55n13, 141 Fricker, Miranda 121n13: on epistemic injustice 87, 160; and hermeneutical injustice 60, 62, 70–4, 131, 137, 204; on identity power 152 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 11 Gallagher, Julia 85 Garuba, Harry 88 gender, and farmers’ protest songs 109 gender-based ignorance 2 gender di˛erence: and divine justice 50, 55n13 gendered power di˛erentials 160 gender performance 161 genealogical practice 11, 179 genre, politics of 135 German aesthetic thought 57, 59 German Democratic Republic 63 Germany 89; educational institutions in 13, 132, 134–6, 144n10; postmigrants in 131–2, 136–7, 143n3 Ghadar Party 116–17 Gikandi, Simon 10, 61, 72–3 Gilbert, Susan 66 Global North: leftist intellectuals of 13; and visual media 94

224

Index

God: and divine justice 44–51; feminine manifestation 53; hidden things of 29, 52 grammar of injustice 138 grammar schools 136 Great Famine 198–9 Great Leap Forward 199, 201, 209 Grewal, Gippy 113 Grewal, Kanwar 110, 115, 123n31, 123n36 Grimké, Sarah Moore and Angelina Emily 24 Grimm brothers 67 group rights 28 Gurshabad 117 habitus of necessity 133, 139 Hall, Kim Q. 78n55 Halliwell, Stephen 25 Handa, Rupinder 116, 121n18 Hänel, Hilkje C. 60 happiness, pursuit of 23, 27–9, 35–9 haq 115, 119, 126n74 Harding, Sandra 4 Haryana 106–8 The Hate U Give (Thomas) 12, 23, 26, 32–5 Hayek, Friedrich A. 28 Heath, Stephen 135 Hebrew Bible 45–6, 48–9 Hegel, G.W. F. 60–1, 83, 194n70 Hegelian dialectic 186 Heidegger, Martin 186–7 hermeneutical gaps 14 hermeneutical injustice 5–6, 12, 131, 151, 204; and communicability 70–2; in Scattered Light 137–40; and transparency 60, 62; and whiteness 155 hermeneutical justice 71, 73 hermeneutical resources 13; alternative 6, 60, 71–2, 77n45; collective 60, 71, 74–5, 137, 155; of Sappho 64 hermeneutics of (in-)justice 54 Herr Gröttrup Sits Down (Otoo) 179, 183, 192n28 heteroglossia 179–80, 184, 190 heteronormativity 66, 78n69 heterosexuality 75 hierarchies 23, 65, 99, 152, 161, 206 Himmelman, Natasha 88 historical narratives, o°cial 215 historical space 203, 214 Ho, Jennifer Ann 8 homosexuality 26, 36–8

Huemer, Michael 28 human rights 24, 36 humility, epistemic 78n55 Hunt, Lynn 24 identiÿcation 58, 61; Butler on 161; and melancholy 141 identity politics 3, 10, 34 identity power 152 ignorance: strategic 93; unjust 5 imagination: dialogic 11; failure of 7 imaginative geographies 86 imperialism 3, 83, 86, 97; cultural 84 incommensurability, specter of 166 incomprehension, dismissive 91–2 indeterminacy 13, 60, 64, 66, 75; interpretive 166 India: mainstream media in 108, 114, 118– 19; young women activists in 122n19 Indian Constitution 106, 118–19, 120n3 Indian farm laws 120n1; protest songs about 108–20, 123n31, 125n70; protests against 13, 106–8, 124n47; repeal of 126n76 indirection, aesthetics of 191, 200, 205, 212 inequalities, and social justice 28 intelligibility 12, 57, 59–62, 71–5 intersubjectivity 60 intuition, empathic 156 An Inventory of Losses (Schalansky) 63, 74 Jatt, Maninderjit Anmulla 110, 113 Jatt farmers 109 Je˛erson,Thomas 26–7, 30 Jelinek, Elfriede 188 Jim Crow 27, 40n20 ‘Jittunga Punjab’ 123n31, 123n36 Job 48–51, 53 Jodhka, Surinder 123n32 Jonah 49–51, 53 Judaism 45–7, 51–2, 54 justice, experience of 39–40, 48, 53–4 Kabbalah 45, 47, 53 Kant, Immanuel 9–10; aesthetics of 61, 68–9, 74; and human dignity 24; and the sublime 58–9, 72; on universal communicability 62 Kato, David 36 Kenya 36, 97 Khalistani separatists 107, 115 Kharak Singh, Baba 115–16 Khoisan 159, 168n56

Index 225

Kim, Sue J. 8 King, Martin Luther Jr. 34–5, 39 Kingwell, Mark 157 Klage 70 Klein, Lucas 201–2 knowledge: indigenous 85, 94–5, 98; multiple 191; sharing 70–1; subjugated 3, 64, 179 knowledge capital 87 Kohl, Helmut 183 Kugali Media 101 Lacan, Jacques 74 Lacroix, Celeste 84 Lahore Conspiracy Trials 116–17 land: dispossession of 109–12, 123n31 language: and divine justice 45; elliptical character of 157 Layne, Priscilla 180 laziness, epistemic 7 legibility 61–2, 70–3, 75 legitimacy 69–70, 118, 159 Leopold II, King 95 lesbian, concept of 69, 75 Lesbos 64, 69, 75, 78n69 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 57 Leviathan 48–9 Levinas, Emmanuel 40 LGBTQ community 36 liberalism: and aesthetic philosophy 72; and Bildungsroman 134; and social justice 27–9, 39 Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out (Mo Yan) 200, 202–7, 209–10, 213–14 limit points 57, 59, 61, 64, 66 Link, Perry 201 The Lion King 86, 88, 90–1, 93, 97, 99–100 Lipsitz, George 152 literature: age in 2; appeal to empathy 39; and justice 47; moral and social use of 7–12; and new objects of knowledge 190; and play 156–7, 165–6; in Scattered Light 134–5 Lloyd, David: on communicability 60, 69–70; on Kant’s sublime 58–9; moving line of legibility 73, 75; and neoliberal academia 13; on racialization and aesthetics 9–10, 61–2, 72–3, 76n14; on representation 72, 83, 87 Longinus 66 Lorde, Audre 4 ludic space 176

Lugones, María 2, 178; on chiasmus 183; and connectedness 188; on epistemic privilege 187; and Hegel 194n70; and pilgrimage 176, 191; and spiraling 184; and uncertainty 215 Lukács, Georg 135 Maan,Anmol Gagan 113, 121n18 Ma’asiyot 51–3 Madagascar 86, 88–90, 95–6, 99–100 Madagascar 2: Escape to Africa 86, 88–93, 96–100 Madhya Pradesh 107 Malabou, Catherine 164 Malcolm X 34 Mangat, Elly 114, 116 Mann, Gurmukh 122n21 Mann, Harbhajan 113–14, 124n45 Mao Zedong 198–9, 201, 210 maps, epistemic authority of 63 marginalization: and epistemic agency 160; hermeneutical 71; and knowledge 4; and silencing 67 masks 72, 74, 155, 163, 169n60 Mason, Rebecca 6, 71, 160 Mati Das 117 Mbembe,Achille 187, 191 Mbiti, John 187 McCone, Rylee 94 McGrath, Tom 86 McGregor, Rafe 8 Medina, José 1; on eccentric agency 11; and epistemic friction 186; and epistemic pluralism 178–9; and Foucault 3; and hermeneutical resources 72; on injustice 14; on resistance 109; response to Fricker 6–7 melancholia 140–1, 209 memento mori 63 Mercer, Kobena 151 metanarratives 157 Midrash 47, 49 Mihai, Mihaela 8 Mills, Charles W. 2, 4–6, 14, 39, 177–8, 187, 189 Milovanovic, Dragan 29 mimesis 68 Minimum Support Price 112, 126n76 minstrelsy 27, 155–6, 163 miscegenation 159 mis-representation 67, 88, 100 misunderstanding 1, 7, 32, 71, 75 mithapechet 50

226 Index

Mo Yan 13, 191, 200–8, 210–15, 216n12 modernity 57, 61 Modi, Narendra 107, 117–18, 120n1, 126n76 Moi, Daniel arap 36 monsters 45, 47–50, 163 Morrison, Toni 151, 154–5, 157–8, 165, 178 mortality, and aesthetic theory 57–9, 62 motherhood 189–90 motion pictures 83–4; see also film; television Moya, Paula 8–9 Mudimbe,Valentine-Yves 87 Mugabe, Robert 36 Mughal Empire 115–17 multivocal narrative 179 music videos, for farmers’ protest songs 13, 108–9, 112–13, 115, 117 mystification 5 Nancy, Jean-Luc 183–4, 186–8 Narayanan, Sudha 111 narrative pilgrimage 176–7, 191 narratives, and social justice 23, 26 narrative voices 180, 182, 200, 204–5 narratology 216n8 nationalism: black 34; white Afrikaner 169n64 National Party (South Africa) 159, 169n64 Native Americans 27 native informants 10–11 natural law 27 Naxal movement 115 Nelson, Ziki 89 Newman Prize 203 Newton, Huey 35 New York, in Madagascar films 91–2, 94–6 Nigeria 36 Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Sabelo J. 2 Nobel Prize in Literature 201, 204, 207, 215 nomos of the community 70 non-knowledge 12, 47–9, 57 normality 131, 134 Novak, Michael 27, 40n14 Nyerere, Julius 36 Obama, Barack 32 Occupy Wall Street 39 Ogone, James Odhiambo 2 Ohde, Deniz 131 ontological pluralism 183

opacity 75, 166 openness 12–13, 33, 40; of animation 84; conceptual 62; to uncertainty 157, 215 oppositional frameworks, knowledge outside 190–1 oppression, authenticity of 13 Oriogun, Romeo 12, 23, 26, 36–7, 39 Otherness 78n43; of Africa 88, 90, 92, 94, 96–8, 154 Otoo, Sharon Dodua 177, 179, 182–7, 190 pain, gratuitous 25, 37 panopticon 161 passing: as German 137; as white 157, 162, 166, 169n57 pass laws 162, 170n91 Patnaik, Utsa 112 Peck, Aaron 77n28 personal development 132, 134–5, 142 Phoenicians 65 pilgrimages 13, 176, 188 Plaatje, Sol 153 play: of epistemic practice 154; theory of 156 playfulness 151, 157 Playing in the Dark (Morrison) 154, 157, 159, 169n60 Playing in the Light (Wicomb) 157–66, 169n60 playing white 157–8, 161–2, 164, 166, 169n57 Pohlhaus, Gaile Jr. 1–2, 160–1 police brutality 32–4, 167n23 polyvocality 13 positionalities 4, 183–4, 188, 191 postcolonial scholarship 152 postmigrant melancholy 131, 140–1 postmigrant subject 132, 135 power, constitutive conception of 3 precarity 112, 114–15, 156, 159 preparatory culture 58 privileged people 4, 178 prolepsis 64–5 prophecy 45, 47, 50–1, 53 prophetic response 34 public sense 68–9 public sphere 59, 70 Punjab: border with Pakistan 114; farmers’ protests in 106–7; history of rebellion in 115–17, 125n72; protest songs from 108–9; protest songs from 121n17 ‘Punjab Bolda’ 110, 114, 116 queer bodies 36, 38 queerness 60, 62, 64, 74–5, 78n69

Index 227

race: and alternative epistemologies 4; architecture of 165–6; existential dimensions of 159, 166; and Western aesthetics 10 race narratives 151, 157–9, 163–4 racial contract 39, 153 racial discrimination 136–7, 140, 142, 152 racial embodiment, phenomenology of 165 racial essence 156 racial injustice 132, 135, 137, 139–40 raciality, arsenal of (da Silva) 13 racialized identity 156, 158–9, 164–5 racial judgement 87 racial privilege 152 racial un/knowing 166 racism 4; discriminatory language in Germany 136–7, 140, 145n26; and postmigration 132, 135; in United States 26–7, 29, 32, 34, 156; and whiteness 151, 154 radical agency 11 Rajasthan 107 Rajoelina, Andry 97 Rancière, Jacques 78n57 Randhawa, Mandeep 117 reason, liberation of 2 Reb Nachman 51–2 recognition 60, 71; embodied 188, 191 Reed,Anthony 9, 11 relationality 156 rememory (Morrison) 158 reparations 153 representability 69–70 representation: and the aesthetic 67–70, 186; and cinematic apparatus 84–5; of God 47; of justice 45; modes of 45, 68; politics of 83–4, 135; regime of 70, 72, 87; storytelling as 52; of the unrepresentable 48 representational discourse, imperial 85 representational injustice 59–60, 131, 177–8 representative systems 67 resignation 137 resilience, in farmers’ protest songs 112, 114–15 retreat of the political 188 return to the aesthetic 59, 61, 72–3 Revelation, Book of 45 rhetorical empowerment 188 Rhodes, Cecil 95 Rilke, Rainer Maria 189

Roediger, David 152 Rosenzweig, Franz 44 Rothman, Noah 28 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 24–5 rupture 13, 47, 51, 53, 158 Sacrament of Bodies (Oriogun) 23, 36–7 Said, Edward 86–8 Saishah Khan 110–11 samsara 200, 202, 206–7, 209 Sandhu, Harvy 116 Sandhu, Himmat 125n70 Sanyal, Mithu 132 Sappho 12, 60, 62, 75, 78n69; lost passages of 64–7; our knowledge about 63–4; silent lament in 70 Sartre, Jean-Paul 39, 156–7 savior mentality 94, 96 Scar Literature 210 Scattered Light (Ohde) 13, 131–3, 160; and Bildungsroman 134–8; emotions in 139–41; perspectives in 142–3 Schalansky, Judith 12, 60, 62–70, 74–5, 77n28, 78n69 Schiller, Friedrich 57, 72–3, 76n14 Schmitz-Emans, Monika 76n20 Schwanitz, Dietrich 134–5 sea creatures 49–50 self: former 140; sense of 35 self-analysis 140 self-care 142 self-compromise 156 self-conÿdence 134 self-policing 162 self-respect 137, 140 semiotics 65, 67, 159, 164 sense-making 90, 92 sensus communis 68–9 sentimental writers 24–5, 38 Serbati,Antonio Rosmini 27 sexuality, alternative 26, 36, 39 Shakur, Tupac 32 shame 138, 153, 158–9, 164 Shastri, Lal Bahadur 113 shekhinah 51, 53 Shen, Dan 212–13 shengsi 200 side-stepping 200 signiÿcation, instability of 65 signiÿer, ˝oating 164 signs, written 65 Sikhs 114–17, 119 silent lament 64, 66, 70

228

Index

Singh, Bir 125n71, 126n74 Singh, Kulwant 114 singular plurality 184, 187–8, 191, 200 singularities, heterological 186 slavery 7, 40n20; abolition of 26; sentimental writers and 23–5; in US literature 155, 158 Soares,Telma O. 85 social identity: and epistemic credibility 4; and hermeneutical justice 73; and identity power 152; and literature 157 social injustices 1, 27, 38, 136–7, 140 socialization 4, 134–5 social justice: and abolitionism 23–4; and appeal to conscience 29–31; and homophobia 35–9; notion of 27–8, 40n14; and racial reasoning 31–4; situating in history 26–9 Socrates 30 Sodom and Gomorrah 46, 50 Sohan Singh Bhakna, Baba 115–16 solidarities, new 119 Solingen, arson attack in 136, 145n26 South Africa: colonization of 169n71; post-apartheid 158, 166, 169; racial discourse in 159; and RhodesMustFall campaign 95; whiteness in 153; white supremacy in 26 sovereignty: and divine justice 47, 53; subjective 3 space-time 182, 184 Spelman, Elizabeth 178 spiraling 184–8 Spivak, Gayatri 3–4, 10–11, 13 spousal abuse 36 Statue of Liberty 95 Stokes, Mason 151 The Story of the Stone or Dream of the Red Chamber 212 storyteller persona 200, 203–4, 214–15 storytelling: justice and 12, 45–7, 51–2, 54; in order to live 23, 39; spiritual dimension of 8 Stowe, Harriet Beecher 25, 39 Strecker, Ivo 183, 185 structural identity prejudice 60, 71, 137, 155 subjectivities, past 186 subjectivity 3–4; and loss 141; in Scattered Light 134, 139–40; transparent 61–2 subjects: transparent 3, 13, 61; universal 9 the sublime 58–9; dynamic 48–9; Longinus on 66

suicide 110, 181 Sullivan, Shannon 5 ‘Sun Dilliye’ 115 supplementation 65 surface 205 Swahili language 93, 100 synesthesia 64 Talmudic narratives 45–7 Tannin 45, 49 Teg Bahadur 117 television 8, 83–4, 88, 107 terror 58 testimonial injustice 5, 70–1, 108, 204 theater, postmigrant 132 theory of mind 8 1000 Coils of Fear (Wenzel) 132, 177, 179–81, 180, 184, 188, 191 Tikkun 46, 51, 53–4 TikTok videos 110 Time-Warner 84 To Kill a Mockingbird (Lee) 12, 23, 26, 29–31 totality, aesthetic 75 tractors, in farmers’ protests 107, 109, 113, 120 tragedy,Aristotelian conception of 25 translational reading 202 transparency 13–14, 61–2, 70 trauma, timeless structure of 209 TRC (Truth and Reconciliation Commission) 153, 167n25 Tuana, Nancy 5 Turkish language 138 Turkish people, in Germany 132–3, 136–7 Turner,Victor 176 Twain, Mark 155 Tyler, Stephen 185–8 Udasi, Sant Ram 115, 117 Uganda 36 Uncle Tom’s Cabin 25, 29 United States 32, 72, 152–4, 156; see also African Americans Uttar Pradesh 107 Varatharjah, Senthuran 132 violence: divine 49, 54–5n2; epistemic 3–4 virtue ethics 12, 23 vocabulary 87 Wang, David 200, 203 Waraich, Galav 123n31, 123n36

Index 229

Ware,Vron 151 Wedgwood, Josiah 23, 24, 38 Weld, Dwight 25 Wenzel, Olivia 132, 177, 179–82, 184, 187–9, 191 West, Cornel 34–5 whiteface 163 white gaze 151, 155 white identity 159 white ignorance 2, 4–7, 153, 177 white memory, editing of 5 whiteness 13; epistemologies of 151–4; parasitic nature of 155–6; postcolonial scholars on 167n15; in South Africa 158–64; theorizations of 151, 160–1 white privilege 152, 187 Wicomb, Zoë 151, 157, 162 Wiegman, Robyn 153 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim 57

withness 188, 191 women of color 4 women singers, in Punjab 121n18 women’s su˛rage 26 writers of color 11 Wyatt, Jean 8 Xu, Dejin 212–13 yoga 114, 124n52 Yoruba thought 8 YouTube, farmers’ protest songs on 108 Zameen Prapati Sangharsh Committee 112, 122n21 Zimbabwe 36 Zirden, Isabelle 188 Zohar, Book of 45