Postcolonial Studies Across the Disciplines [1 ed.] 9789401210027, 9789042037519

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Postcolonial Studies Across the Disciplines

     



&

ROSS ULTURES

 Readings in Post / Colonial  Literatures and Cultures in English

170



ASNEL Papers 18

SERIES EDITORS

Gordon Collier (Giessen)

Bénédicte Ledent (Liège)

Geoffrey Davis (Aachen)

CO-FOUNDING EDITOR gHena

Maes–Jelinek

ASNEL Papers appear under the auspices of the 'ĞƐĞůůƐĐŚĂŌĨƺƌĚŝĞEĞƵĞŶŶŐůŝƐĐŚƐƉƌĂĐŚŝŐĞŶ>ŝƚĞƌĂƚƵƌĞŶĞ͘s͘;'E>Ϳ ƐƐŽĐŝĂƟŽŶĨŽƌƚŚĞ^ƚƵĚLJŽĨƚŚĞEĞǁ>ŝƚĞƌĂƚƵƌĞƐŝŶŶŐůŝƐŚ;^E>Ϳ ŝƚĞƌĂƚƵƌĞƐĂŶĚƵůƚƵƌĂů^ƚƵĚŝĞƐ͕hŶŝǀĞƌƐŝƚLJŽĨƵŐƐďƵƌŐͿ &ŽƌŵĂƫŶŐ͕ůĂLJŽƵƚ͕ĂŶĚĮŶĂůĞĚŝƟŶŐ͗'ŽƌĚŽŶŽůůŝĞƌ

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements List of Figures Introduction: Postcolonial Studies Across the Disciplines JANA GOHRISCH AND ELLEN GRÜNKEMEIER

ix xi xv

INTERDISCIPLINARY REFLECTIONS Postcolonial Studies and Atlantic Studies: Interdisciplinary Reflections on Slavery and Empire TIM WATSON

3

Postcolonial Textiles: Negotiating Dialogue JESSICA HEMMINGS

23

Masking the White Gaze: Towards a Postcolonial Art History of Masks MELANIE ULZ

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From Bush Talk to Nation Language: Language Attitudes in Jamaica Before and After Independence ANDREA SAND

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Track Studies: Popular Music and Postcolonial Analysis J O H A N N E S I S M A I E L –W E N D T

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Postcolonial Cultural Studies: Writing a Zulu Woman Back Into History ELLEN GRÜNKEMEIER

109

INTERDISCIPLINARY ATLANTIC STUDIES Postcolonial Pursuits in African American Studies: The Later Poems of Claude McKay TIMO MÜLLER

131

“Mainly Storytelling and Play-Acting”: Theatricality and the Middle Passage in Barry Unsworth’s Sacred Hunger CARL PLASA

151

Negotiating Family Models in Jamaican Literature: Class, Race, and Religion HENNING MARQUARDT

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Transatlantic Representations of the Revolution in Saint-Domingue at the End of the Eighteenth Century and the Haitian Turn ANJA BANDAU

185

Writing Off-Centre: Global Imagination and Modernism in the Short Fiction of Phyllis Shand Allfrey SARAH FEKADU

207

Emancipation and Protest: Moravian Mission and the Labour Strike in St Kitts JAN HÜSGEN

225

The Perspectives of African Elites on Slavery and Abolition on the Gold Coast (1860–1900): Newspapers as Sources STEFFEN RUNKEL

243

Fragile Modernities: History and Historiography in Contemporary African Fiction FRANK SCHULZE–ENGLER

263

CROSSOVERS: HISTORIOGRAPHY, FICTION, CRITICISM Historiographic Indian English Fiction: Indira Gandhi’s Emergency Rule in Midnight’s Children, The Great Indian Novel, and A Fine Balance MATTHIAS GALLER

285

Kaliyattam (The Play of God) by Jayaraj: Polymorphous and Postcolonial Poetics in an Indian Othello Adaptation CECILE SANDTEN

305

Othering Otherness: Stephen Muecke’s Fictocriticism and the Cosmopolitan Vision DENNIS MISCHKE

323

POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES

IN

RESEARCH

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TEACHING

The (Inter)Disciplinarity of Postcolonial Research URSULA KLUWICK

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Lessons for A-Disciplinarity: Some Notes on What Happens to an Americanist When She Takes Slavery Seriously SABINE BROECK

349

Postcolonial Studies as a Discipline: An External Perspective on Administrative Headaches JANOU GLENCROSS

359

On the Challenge of De-Provincializing the University Classroom: Teaching African History from a Postcolonial Perspective BRIGITTE REINWALD

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Studying Anglophone Literatures and Cultures in a World of Globalized Modernity: Notes on the ‘Frankfurt Experience’ FRANK SCHULZE–ENGLER

371

Postcolonial Readings in German Secondary Education ELINOR JANE POHL

377

Cross-Cultural Pedagogical Practices: Understanding the German Context MALA PANDURANG

383

Teaching India in the German E F L Classroom: Issues and Problems REINHOLD WANDEL

387

Notes on Contributors

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Acknowledgements

A S C O N F E R E N C E C O N V E N E R S , we would like to thank our financial sponsors: the Graduate Academy of Leibniz University, the Ministry for Science and Culture of Lower Saxony, the Visiting Scholars Programme of the Faculty of the Humanities (coordinated by Inga–Dorothee Rost), the Equal Rights Office of Leibniz University, the Friends of the University, CampusCultur (an association of senior students who wish to promote the humanities at Leibniz University), the British Council, a range of national and international publishing houses, and A S N E L itself. The organizing team was efficiently headed by Henning Marquardt, who then also helped in the first stages of preparing this volume. As editors, we would like to thank the contributors for their interest in this interdisciplinary venture and the work they have put into their respective essays. Further, we thank Jessica Fischer as our initial proof-reader. In addition, we extend special thanks to Stefen Haberecht for his careful and attentive initial correcting, editing, and formatting. Last but not least, we are obliged to Gordon Collier, the technical editor of the Cross /Cultures series, who was responsible for the final editing. JANA GOHRISCH

ELLEN GRÜNKEMEIER HANNOVER, JUNE 2013

AND

List of Figures

Jessica Hemmings, “Postcolonial Textiles” Figure 1. Elaine Reichek, Ten Little Indians (1992). Photographer: Orcutt Photography, New York.

45

Figure 2. Elaine Reichek, Whitewash (Galway Cottage) (1992–93). Knitted wool yarn, hanger and gelatin silver print. Overall dimensions 114.3 x 337.8 cm. Photographer: Orcutt Photography, New York.

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Figure 3. Elaine Reichek, Yellow Man (1986). Knitted wool yarn and hand-painted gelatin silver print. Overall 180.3 x 292.1 cm. Image courtesy of the artist.

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Figure 4. Elaine Reichek, Red Man (1988). Knitted wool yarn and gelatin silver print. Overall 165.1 x 177.8 cm. Image courtesy of the artist.

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Figure 5. Elaine Reichek, Gray Man (1989). Knitted wool yarn and gelatin silver print. Overall 165.1 x 180.3 cm. Image courtesy of the artist.

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Figure 6. Elaine Reichek, A Postcolonial Kinderhood (1994). Installation view, The Jewish Museum, New York. Image courtesy of the artist.

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Figure 7. Elaine Reichek, A Postcolonial Kinderhood (1994). Installation view, The Jewish Museum, New York. Image courtesy of the artist.

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Figure 8. Elaine Reichek, Untitled (Jesse Reichek) (1994). Hand embroidery on linen. 28.6 x 31.8 cm. Image courtesy of the artist.

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Figure 9. Elaine Reichek, Untitled (E.R.) (1993). Hand embroidery on linen. 33 x 21.6 cm. Image courtesy of the artist.

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Figure 10. Yinka Shonibare, Victorian Philanthropist’s Parlour (1996– 97). Reproduction furniture, fire screen, carpet, props, Dutch wax printed cotton textile. Approx. 2.60 x 4.88 x 5.30m. © the artist. Courtesy of the artist and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London.

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Figure 11. Yinka Shonibare, Victorian Philanthropist’s Parlour (1996–97), detail. Reproduction furniture, fire screen, carpet, props, Dutch wax printed cotton textile. Approx. 2.60 x 4.88 x 5.30m. © the artist.

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Figure 12. Yinka Shonibare, Mr and Mrs Andrews Without Their Heads (1998). Wax-print cotton costumes on armatures, dog, mannequin, bench, gun, 165 x 570 x 254 cm. © the artist. Courtesy of the artist and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London.

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Figure 13. Yinka Shonibare, Scramble for Africa (2003). 14 figures, 14 chairs, table, Dutch wax printed cotton textile. Overall: 132 x 488 x 280cm. © the artist. Courtesy of the artist and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London.

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Figure 14. Yinka Shoninbare, Figure of Eleanor Hewitt (2005). Image lent by the artist, Stephen Friedman Gallery, London and James Cohan Gallery, New York.

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Figure 15. Yinka Shonibare, Figure of Sarah Hewitt (2005). Image lent by the artist, Stephen Friedman Gallery, London and James Cohan Gallery, New York.

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Figure 16. Susan Stockwell, Pattern of the World (2000). Paper, dress making patterns, tea. 180 x 120 x 2 cm. Image courtesy of the artist. © Susan Stockwell.

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Figure 17. Susan Stockwell, Trayne (1998). Coffee filters, coffee, paper portion cups, cotton thread. Image courtesy of the artist. © Susan Stockwell.

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Figure 18. Susan Stockwell, Colonial Dress (2008). Maps, wire, glue. Image courtesy of the artist. © Susan Stockwell.

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Figure 19. Susan Stockwell, Colonial Dress (2008), detail. Maps, wire, glue. Image courtesy of the artist. © Susan Stockwell.

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Figure 20. Nicholas Hlobo, Ingubo Yesizwe (2008). Leather, rubber, gauze, ribbon, and steel. 150 x 260 cm x 3 m. © Nicholas Hlobo. Courtesy of Stevenson, Cape Town and Johannesburg.

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Figure 21. Nicholas Hlobo, Ingubo Yesizwe (2008), detail. Leather, rubber, gauze, ribbon, and steel. 150 x 260 cm x 3 m. © Nicholas Hlobo. Courtesy of Stevenson, Cape Town and Johannesburg.

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Figure 22. Studio Formafantasma, Moulding Tradition: Colony (Addis Ababa) (2011). Mohair, cotton, ceramic tiles. 230 x 120 cm. Photographer: Luisa Zanzani. Courtesy of Gallery Libby Sellers.

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List of Figures

Figure 23. Studio Formafantasma, Moulding Tradition: Colony (Asmara) (2011). Mohair, cotton, ceramic tiles. 230 x 120 cm. Photographer: Luisa Zanzani. Courtesy of Gallery Libby Sellers.

50

Figure 24. Studio Formafantasma, Moulding Tradition: Colony (Tripoli) (2011). Mohair, cotton, ceramic tiles. 230 x 120 cm. Photographer: Luisa Zanzani. Courtesy of Gallery Libby Sellers.

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Figure 25. Studio Formafantasma, Moulding Tradition: Colony (2011), detail. Mohair, cotton, ceramic tiles. Photographer: Luisa Zanzani. Courtesy of Gallery Libby Sellers.

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Figure 26. Studio Formafantasma, Moulding Tradition: Colony (2011), detail. Mohair, cotton, ceramic tiles. Photographer: Luisa Zanzani. Courtesy of Gallery Libby Sellers.

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™ Melanie Ulz, “Masking the White Gaze” Figure 1. Auction house Lempertz Auktion 662. Catalogue cover. Reproduced from Art Africain / Afrikaanse Kunst / Afrikanische Kunst, ed. Lempertz (Brussels: Auction 662, 23 February 1991).

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Figure 2. Romuald Hazoumé, Autoportrait (1997). Part of the series Masques bidons. Found objects (installation view). Documenta 12, Kassel 2007. Photo by Ira Plein.

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Figure 3. Fred Wilson, Colonial Collection (1990). Mixed media (installation view). Collection of the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham N C . Reproduced from Kunstwelten im Dialog: Von Gauguin zur globalen Gegenwart, ed. Marc Scheps, Yilmaz Dziewior & Barbara M. Thiemann (exh. cat., Museum Ludwig; Cologne: Walther König, 2000): 497.

67

Figure 4. David Hammons, Untitled (Hidden from View) (2002). Hauser & Wirth, Zurich (2002), installation view. Reproduced from: Diaspora – Memory – Place: David Hammons, Maria Magdalena Campos–Pons, Pamela Z, ed. Salah M. Hassan & Cheryl Finley (Munich: Prestel, 2008): 209.

68

Figure 5. Rotimi Fani–Kayode, Bronze Head (1987), Autograph A B P . Black and white photograph. Reproduced from: Rotimi Fani–Kayode, Black Male / White Male, intro. Alex Hirst (London: Heretic, 1988): 37.

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Introduction — Postcolonial Studies Across the Disciplines

J ANA G OHRISCH

I

AND

E LLEN G RÜNKEMEIER

J U N E 2 0 1 1 , the 22nd annual conference of the Association for the Study of the New Literatures in English (in the German-speaking countries) took place at Hannover University to discuss “Postcolonial Studies Across the Disciplines.” In 2007, Hannover University had named itself after Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716), who lived his academic life as interdisciplinarity incarnate. In addition to symbolizing the unity of its diverse subjects, this choice of patron indicates a desire for interdisciplinary academic endeavours. Until now, and despite his many unfinished projects, Leibniz has been internationally appreciated as a scientist, engineer, and legal scholar; as mathematician and machine builder as well as philosopher, historian, and librarian. The logo of the university was adapted from a letter by Leibniz in which he proposes the binary system of numeration and outlined its positional notation in relation to what – in everyday life – is still the dominant paradigm: the decimal system. The binary system, however, offers a new way of representing numbers and thus of looking at things mathematical. Employing Leibniz’s invention metaphorically, one may claim that postcolonial studies do much the same: they allow one to look at the world from another perspective, to perceive things differently – for example, by stressing transnational and interdisciplinary issues rather than national or disciplinary ones. Adopting a postcolonial-studies approach changes the ways of interpreting literary and cultural, historical, and geographical issues as much as the binary system has changed the rules of doing maths. For this reason, it has long been adopted by (computer) scientists. N

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In 1997, the 8th annual conference of A S N E L had been held in Hannover, which was later documented as Being/s in Transit: Travelling, Migration, Dislocation in 2000.1 In 2009, the association’s 9th Summer School on the New Literatures in English was organized by students from the English Department at Hannover offering lectures, seminars, and readings under the allusive title of “Connecting Cultures.” The 22nd annual conference continued some of the discussions of previous A S N E L summer schools and conferences about practical connections and meta-level connectedness, cultural and linguistic communities (Bayreuth 2010), space and location (Münster 2009) as well as about institutional concerns in postcolonial studies that have always occupied (not only the German) practitioners in the field. But why should the title of both the conference and its proceedings read “Postcolonial Studies Across the Disciplines” rather than multi-, pluri-, cross-, inter- or transdisciplinary postcolonial studies? The major difficulty here is to decide in favour of one of the terms, because they are often used interchangeably. Moreover, their meanings vary historically and across the (inter)disciplines according to the degree of disciplinary integration reached so far, as Julie Thompson Klein outlines in Interdisciplinarity: History, Theory and Practice.2 She reports on the study Interdisciplinarity: Problems of Teaching and Research in Universities, published by the O E C D in 1972,3 which offered a typology for defining multi-, pluri-, inter-, and transdisciplinary work based on structuralism and general systems theory.4 Klein summarizes the four different ways in which interdisciplinarity has usually been understood, adding cross-disciplinarity to the list of prefixes and using it to illustrate the ongoing discussions about labels and “their appropriateness.”5 Then follow two sections clarifying the differences between multi-, pluri-, and interdisciplinarity as well as between inter- and transdisciplinarity.6 The central but 1

Being/s in Transit: Travelling, Migration, Dislocation, ed. Liselotte Glage (Cross / Cultures 41, A S N E L Papers 5; Amsterdam & Atlanta G A : Rodopi, 2000). 2 Julie Thompson Klein, Interdisciplinarity: History, Theory and Practice (Detroit M I : Wayne State U P , 1990): 19–73, esp. 40, 63–64. 3 Leo Apostel et al., Interdisciplinarity: Problems of Teaching and Research in Universities (Washington D C : Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 1972). 4 Klein, Interdisciplinarity, 36–37. 5 Interdisciplinarity, 55. 6 Interdisciplinarity, 56–73.

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still vague category of classification for the first set of terms is integration, which – as the examples show – is particularly difficult to achieve.7 Rather than wanting to synthesize and establish “a new metalevel of discourse,” transdisciplinarity is bent on transcending the disciplines, subordinating them “to a particular issue, problem or holistic scheme.”8 Concluding the first part of her book, Klein claims that there “is no inevitable progression from ‘multidisciplinarity’ to ‘interdisciplinarity’ to ‘transdisciplinarity’.”9 Interestingly, three of these prefixes recur in debates about the development of decolonizing discourses, such as postcolonial studies, critical race theory, and transnational studies – “the conventional sequencing being from ‘multi-’ and ‘inter-’ and ‘post-’ to ‘trans-’.”10 In their book on Race in Translation: Culture Wars around the Postcolonial Atlantic (2012), Robert Stam and Ella Shohat also discuss the issues taken up by these “proliferating revisionist (inter)disciplines”: They unpack hegemonic discourses of racism, colonialism, Orientalism, and Eurocentrism while simultaneously engaging the mantra of race, nation, gender, class, and sexuality. What matters, in the end, is not the specific label but rather the decolonizing thrust of the work itself, not the exact rubric but the depth of the engagement with questions of coloniality.11

The analogy of prefixes is not accidental but points to one of the main (un/intended) results of interdisciplinary work: it questions academic disciplines as established modes of producing and communicating knowledge, which are defined as much by what they include as by what they exclude.12 As the example of cultural studies shows, interdisciplinary endeavours may become disciplines themselves (even if many practitioners resist this process13) and exclude certain kinds of material, methodologies or topics – as British cultural studies excluded literature in its preference for popular cultural forms after the 7

Klein, Interdisciplinarity, 55, 57, 63–64. Interdisciplinarity, 66. 9 Interdisciplinarity, 71. 10 Robert Stam & Ella Shohat, Race in Translation: Culture Wars around the Postcolonial Atlantic (New York & London: New York U P , 2012): 92. 11 Stam & Shohat, Race in Translation, 92. 12 Cf. Joe Moran, Interdisciplinarity (2002; London & New York: Routledge, 2010): 29. 13 Moran, Interdisciplinarity, 71–72. 8

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sociological turn in the 1970s.14 Thus, interdisciplinary practice is always revisionist and unfinished, which explains the sequence of prefixes it shares with other revisionist discourses. Being fully aware of the fact that terminology can both enable and restrict the production of knowledge, we use the term ‘interdisciplinarity’ in a very general sense. It refers to “any form of dialogue or interaction between two or more disciplines”15 employed to analyse a complex problem. Moran summarizes Geoffrey Bennington’s analysis of ‘inter’ as “an ambiguous prefix, which can mean forming a communication between and joining together, as in ‘international’ and ‘intercourse’, or separating and keeping apart, as in ‘interval’ and ‘intercalate’.”16 Therefore, interdisciplinarity can suggest forging connections across the different disciplines; but it can also mean establishing a kind of undisciplined space in the interstices between disciplines, or even transcending disciplinary boundaries altogether. This ambiguity of the term is partly why some critics have come up with other terms such as ‘post-disciplinary’, ‘anti-disciplinary’ and ‘trans-disciplinary’.17

The sequence of the terms suggests a progressive development indicating that each earlier term has left the desire for integration and, thus, for the unity of knowledge, unfulfilled. Unlike Klein,18 Stam and Shohat observe (regarding the prefixes used by revisionist discourses) that only the depth of the engagement matters, not the label.19 Moran’s notion of dialogue between disciplines is embodied by the preposition ‘across’ in the title of this volume, which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as “from one side to the other (of a place, area, etc.)” and as an “expression of position or orientation,” to which it supplies examples that may suggest bridging spatial distance by connecting places or existing in oppositional locations. Moreover, as an adverb, ‘across’ refers “to a crossword answer which reads horizontally.”20

14

Moran, Interdisciplinarity, 58. Interdisciplinarity, 14. 16 Interdisciplinarity, 14. 17 Interdisciplinarity, 14. 18 Klein, Interdisciplinarity, 56, 64. 19 Stam & Shohat, Race in Translation, 92. 20 Oxford Dictionary of English, ed. Catherine Soanes & Angus Stevenson (1998; Oxford: Oxford U P , 2005): 15. 15

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While introductions to postcolonial studies tend to conceive of it as a subdiscipline of literary studies,21 other writers observe “a neo-assimilatory process […] as most mainstream disciplines (sociology, psychology) list postcolonialism as just another methodology in their respective disciplinary traditions.”22 Describing the fractures within postcolonial studies, Diana Brydon writes: A major gap continues between those who conceptualize postcolonial work as constituting a fundamental challenge to the very organization and assumptions of contemporary Western disciplinary structures and those who see it as merely another addition to the range of critical approaches brought to bear on literature, history, and culture that may be studied quite adequately within conventional models.23

In this volume, we understand postcolonial studies as a global and interdisciplinary field of inquiry (especially when broadly defined as Postcolonial Cultural Studies24). In German-speaking countries, however, there are no fully-fledged departments of postcolonial studies. Rather, the field is institutionalized inside various academic disciplines and departments (such as art, economics, geography), often embodied by one scholar’s special interest in a postcolonial region. Most often, postcolonial literary studies are practised in departments of English (or Romance studies, for that matter), few of which have a recognizable sub-department (like Frankfurt, Munich, or Vienna) and many of which have a chair for the study of the New Literatures in English (such as Berne, Bonn, Cologne, Hannover, and Münster). Some English departments leave it to their staff to offer these literatures alongside British and American literary and cultural studies and linguistics. While the tightly knit Bachelor’s programmes hardly allow for systematic introductions to postcolo21

See Lynn C. Innes, The Cambridge Introduction to Postcolonial Literatures in English (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge U P , 2007); John McLeod, Beginning Postcolonialism (2000; Manchester & New York: Manchester U P , 2012). 22 Malreddy Pavan Kumar, “Postcolonialism: Interdisciplinary or Interdiscursive?” Third World Quarterly 32.4 (2011): 669. 23 Diana Brydon, “Postcolonial Cultural Studies: 1990 and After,” in The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism, ed. Michael Groden, Martin Kreiswirth & Imre Szeman (1994; Baltimore M D & London: Johns Hopkins U P , 2005): 761. 24 Cf. Brydon, “Postcolonial Cultural Studies,” 760–61; Stam & Shohat, Race in Translation, 85.

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nial studies, the Master’s programmes offer more space for specialization with their emphasis on anglophone studies in Hannover, national and transnational studies at the University of Münster, or (multidisciplinary) transcultural studies at the University of Heidelberg. At several universities (such as Bayreuth, Freiburg, Giessen, Hannover, Münster, Munich, Potsdam, Regensburg, and Trier), there are also linguistic chairs for the non-European varieties of English. This opens up inner-departmental possibilities for cooperation within the subject of English and between the disciplines of both linguistics and literary and cultural studies. Graham Huggan aptly writes: Postcolonialism’s more immediate future surely lies in a patient, mutually transformative dialogue between the disciplines rather than in triumphalist announcements of the imminent end of disciplinarity tout court.25

As conferences feature prominently among the visible “forums for interdisciplinary dialogue,”26 the participants in the Hannover A S N E L conference horizontally carried across the disciplines research results on regions and communities surrounding the Atlantic – the Americas, Africa, the anglophone and francophone Caribbean as well Europe – employing the explicitly selfreflexive impetus that comes with working across disciplines.27 The conference brought together postcolonial-studies scholars from similar disciplines but different academic fields: African, anglophone, Romance literary and cultural studies and linguistics as well as historiography, who share an interest in the comparative reflection of their respective disciplinary and individual methodologies. The following questions guided our inquiries into both entangled methodologies and entangled histories: How do we develop our research topics? Which factors influence our choice of material and methodology? How do the institutionalized modes of assessing and funding research as well as the ongoing reforms of the B A and M A programmes influence our scholarly work? How do we react to globalization and its impact on the regions we work on? How do the new media and especially the rise of the World Wide Web shape our teaching and research agendas as well as the ways we work as scholars? 25

Graham Huggan, Interdisciplinary Measures: Literature and the Future of Postcolonial Studies (Liverpool: Liverpool U P , 2008): 13. 26 Klein, Interdisciplinarity, 48, 51. 27 Cf. Moran, Interdisciplinarity, 181.

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And, last but not least: why should Leibniz University, Hannover be so well-suited to repeatedly hosting postcolonial studies events and especially a conference on “Postcolonial Studies Across the Disciplines”? The major reason lies in the encounter between this global and interdisciplinary field of inquiry and favourable local conditions which often mark interdisciplinary activity.28 First and foremost, the (sometimes annoyingly heterogeneous) Faculty of the Humanities at Hannover’s primarily technical university brings together scholars from history, sociology, and ethnography, education as well as from religious and (anglophone, Spanish, and French) linguistic, literary and cultural studies, who focus on Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America. The combined expertise on non-European as well as European regions allowed us to set up not only the interdisciplinary network Transformation Studies29 but also the multidisciplinary two-year Master’s programme Atlantic Studies in History, Culture and Society (marketed as interdisciplinary). Ever since it was established in 2009, we have been grappling with questions of disciplinarity – be it multi-, cross-, inter-, or transdisciplinarity. It remains a challenge to transform the multidisciplinary “simple juxtaposition”30 of history, sociology, political science, religious, literary and cultural studies into interdisciplinary research and teaching. Integrating the methodologies and approaches of several disciplines rather than juxtaposing them improves the chances of surmounting disciplinary boundaries and, thus, to question the dominant definitions of the respective disciplines both in teaching and in research.31 Since 2007, the English Department has been running the two-year Master’s programme Advanced Anglophone Studies, which combines (post28

Klein, Interdisciplinarity, 54. There are other inter- or, rather, multidisciplinary groups in the Faculty of Humanities, among them a network for diversity, migration, and education and a research initiative on Relations of Difference – Dynamics of Conflict in Global Perspective. After having received some money from the university, they now all need to generate extra funding to sustain their projects, in which different disciplines work next to each other rather than integrating their approaches. 30 Moran, Interdisciplinarity, 14; see also Klein, Interdisciplinarity, 56–58. 31 Both Jana Gohrisch and Ellen Grünkemeier repeatedly taught joint courses with historians from Hannover on West and South African as well as anglophone Caribbean histories and cultures. For two reflective essays on these co-teaching projects on West and South Africa, respectively (and suggestions for further interdisciplinary course designs), see the co-edited volume Listening to Africa: Anglophone Literatures and Cultures (Heidelberg: Winter, 2012). 29

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colonial) literary, cultural – and, increasingly, media – studies. Mainly relying on the discursive investigation of representations, it is less plagued by the desire to accomplish the – perhaps – impossible integration of different disciplines.32 But let us quote Graham Huggan again affirmatively, hoping that the sage’s vision will come true: Programmes such as these [i.e. cross-disciplinary programmes at European and North American universities] may well evolve new forms of interdisciplinarity which, moving between empirical and discursive modes of inquiry, provide viable alternatives to familiar representation-based procedures of (cross-)cultural critique.33

The Hannoverian disposition for interdisciplinarity prompted historians and literary studies scholars to establish the research project “After Slavery – the Caribbean and Africa in Comparison” and to apply for funding to the German Research Foundation in 2009. But the local desire to cross the boundaries between disciplines did not meet with national – and financial – approval: while the first set of historiographic projects covering the Caribbean and West Africa received the desired funding, the second set which contained two historiographic projects and a literary studies one did not. Interdisciplinarity clashed with the principles of state funding, which seems to follow a strictly disciplinary logic despite its lip-service to interdisciplinarity. As this example of colliding scholarly and institutional interests shows, the institutional context influences the way we plan future research undertakings, especially for PhD candidates who depend on external funding. On the panel “The Caribbean and Africa after the Abolition of Slavery: Historiography and Literary Studies in Dialogue” (chaired by Katja Füllberg–Stolberg), three advanced PhD candidates (from both the first and the second set of funding applications) presented their projects and discussed the merits and demerits of interdisciplinary research on West Africa and the Caribbean after slavery. The tensions between the institutional power-structures and individual research resurfaced at the round-table discussion on “Postcolonial Studies Across the Disciplines in Research and Teaching” (chaired by Ursula Klu32

According to Klein, the four basic “kinds of ‘interdisciplinary’ interaction in actual practice […] are (1) borrowing, (2) solving problems, (3) increased consistency of subjects or methods, and (4) the emergence of an interdiscipline”; Klein, Interdisciplinarity, 64. 33 Graham Huggan, “Postcolonial studies and the anxiety of interdisciplinarity,” Postcolonial Studies 5.3 (2002): 264.

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wick). Here, untenured junior scholars pointed out how difficult it is for them to practise interdisciplinarity, especially if they work within departmental power-structures that demand discipline – both academic and behavioural. Conforming to disciplinary expectations is part of the academic qualification as degrees are confirmed by disciplines which thus reconfirm their thematic and methodological scope. “Interdisciplinarity,” however, “is always transformative in some way,” as Joe Moran suggests (based on Roland Barthes), “producing new forms of knowledge in its engagement with discrete disciplines.”34 Valuing the provocative and transformative qualities of interdisciplinarity, senior scholars (in tenured positions) encouraged researchers to bridge the gaps between disciplines should their material profit from it. And as Moran observes, crossing the boundaries between disciplines has become much easier after the theoretical turn in literary and cultural studies which drew on many disciplines to question their basic assumptions themselves.35 At the beginning of the conference, six PhD candidates in literary and (carefully cross-disciplinary) cultural studies presented their work-in-progress in the “under construction” section that has become a hallmark of the annual conferences to promote research at an early stage. Getting young people involved in postcolonial studies begins at the advanced student level. In Hannover, we encouraged our Master’s students to join us in organizing the event through a course taught by Ellen Grünkemeier in the independent studies module of the Master’s programme in Advanced Anglophone Studies and the research module of the Atlantic Studies Master in the summer term of 2011. Here, students learned the basics of conference organization – for example, how to design a conference programme including formatting a booklet and how to locate information for introducing a plenary speaker. Moreover, they attended the conference and then some of them wrote conference reports, which appeared in Acolit, the information bulletin of 36 37 A S N E L , together with a third report by a PhD candidate. 34

Moran, Interdisciplinarity, 15. Cf. Interdisciplinarity, 74. 36 Johanna Lal & Lena Rindermann, “Conference Report: ‘Postcolonial Studies across the Disciplines’, G N E L /A S N E L Annual Conference, University of Hanover, 2–4 June 2011,” A C O L I T 68 (2011): 14–16; Friederike Apelt, Felix Brinker & Ricarda Wenige, “Postcolonial Studies across the Disciplines: A Report on the 22nd Annual A S N E L Conference at Leibniz University, Hanover, 2–4 June 2011,” A C O L I T 68 (2011): 17–20. 35

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Not all of the thirty-five papers and plenaries presented found their way into this volume, which is clearly more of “a ‘multidisciplinary’ collection […] than an ‘interdisciplinary’ synthesis.”38 In addition to two (out of three) plenaries and eleven papers originally given in Hannover, it contains four specially commissioned contributions: two of them (by the art historian Melanie Ulz and the musicologist Ismaiel–Wendt) enhance the disciplinary variety of Postcolonial Studies Across the Disciplines, and one of them (by Cecile Sandten) presents cinematographic material from India to balance the volume’s regional emphasis on Atlantic, African, and Caribbean as well as British and American literatures and cultures. In the fourth newly commissioned essay, Ellen Grünkemeier discusses the relationship between postcolonial and cultural studies. In addition to seventeen full-length essays, we print eight shorter statements from the round table discussion and from the teachers’ workshop organized by local high-school teachers who presented ways of teaching postcolonial literatures at the advanced school level. In her plenary lecture on “Gender and the modern abjection of blackness: Wollstonecraft’s feminism and what slavery had to do with it,” Sabine Broeck challenged the white discursive hegemony since the Enlightenment for epistemologically denying the fundamental role of slavery in the formation of modern Western societies and cultures. Until today, the concomitant denial of subjectivity to slaves and black people has frequently led researchers to ignore the contributions of black scholars and feminists on the role of race in the production of knowledge. Therefore, she called for both the decolonization of our own positions as scholars and the transnational decolonization of literary studies (and other disciplines). Sabine Broeck’s lecture is not included in this volume, because its central ideas and arguments appear in her forthcoming book No Slavery for the Subject: Slavery, Modernity and Gender. However, the lecture and the subsequent passionate discussion of Sabine Broeck’s propositions set the self-critical tone for much of the academic part of the conference. The authors Libor Mikeska and especially Bernardine Evaristo, who read from her verse novel Lara and her satirical novel Blonde Roots, added a note of reflective humour to our undertaking. 37

Wiebke Beushausen, “ ‘Postcolonial Studies across the Disciplines’: A Report on the 22nd Annual Conference of the Association for the Study of the New Literatures in English (A S N E L /G N E L ), University of Hanover, 2–4 June 2011,” A C O L I T 68 (2011): 12–13. 38 Klein, Interdisciplinarity, 51.

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As the following outline of the book’s structure shows, the articles are arranged by methodological, thematic, and regional considerations. In keeping with the conference’s central focus on ‘Postcolonial Studies Across the Disciplines’, the opening section explores postcolonial studies as an interdisciplinary field. While literary studies are the central concern and academic background of many scholars affiliated with A S N E L , the first group of essays is dedicated to neighbouring disciplines. Drawing on their expertise in history, textiles, art, linguistics, music, and cultural studies, the scholars provide perspectives that help to expand the breadth of postcolonial studies. Encouraging scholars to work across disciplines, T I M W A T S O N reflects upon the interfaces of transatlantic historical studies and postcolonial literary studies. In the first part of his article, he shows in what ways Atlantic studies research can benefit from methodological questions that are characteristic of literary and postcolonial studies. As his case study on the history of slavery and slave resistance illustrates, scholars are well advised to pay attention to the narrative forms of both historical documents and their own academic texts in which they (re)construct the histories of enslavement. In the second part, he argues that historical and transatlantic paradigms, in turn, also provide a helpful framework for postcolonial literary studies – even when studying an English writer such as Barbara Pym, who, at first sight, would hardly classify as ‘postcolonial’. As a lecturer and researcher in visual arts, culture, and design, J E S S I C A H E M M I N G S proceeds from the observation that textiles have often been marginalized in postcolonial studies, even though – or possibly because – they are ubiquitous in everyday life. Exploring the ways in which textiles can serve as ‘narrative texts’ that produce and circulate meanings, she analyses works by contemporary artists from around the world: i.e. the American Elaine Reichek, the British-Nigerian Yinka Shonibare, Susan Stockwell (U K ), the South African Nicholas Hlobo, and the Italian designers Simone Farresin and Andrea Trimarchi (known as Studio Formafantasma). In her close readings of the objects, their materials and messages, she illustrates how the artists aesthetically engage with recurring (post)colonial themes such as hybridity, racism, slavery, and globalization. The art historian M E L A N I E U L Z problematizes the reception and cultural (mis)appropriation of African contemporary art in Europe when she examines how artefacts have been subjected to the ‘white gaze’ and the processes of selection and evaluation it entails. Discussing works by Romuald Hazoumé from Benin, the African-Americans Fred

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Wilson and David Hammons, and the British-Nigerian Rotimi Fani–Kayode, she shows how these artists have used masks as a means of exposing stereotypes about ‘traditional’ African art, of criticizing the art-historical canon, and of challenging conventional museum exhibition practices. The linguist A N D R E A S A N D , with special expertise in analysing postcolonial Englishes, focuses on Jamaican Creole. Beginning with a brief outline of Jamaica’s colonial history, she explains how this restructured variety of English emerged and names some of its characteristic features. Discussing early accounts by English travellers in the Caribbean, literary texts by writers (such as Inez K. Sibley, Louise Bennett, and Kamau Brathwaite), scholarly texts by linguists (such as Robert B. LePage, David DeCamp, and Frederic G. Cassidy), as well as the role of the mass media, she traces changes in the language attitudes towards Jamaican Creole. While this variety had been held in very low esteem for a long time, this has changed considerably since Jamaica’s independence in 1962; and yet, in certain areas of public life – such as the educational system – the use of Jamaican Creole is still being contested. J O H A N N E S I S M A I E L – W E N D T , who has an academic background in cultural anthropology, sociology, and musicology, reads popular music as a distinct epistemological system, as a small and often overlooked but actually influential field of knowledge-production, practice, and representation. Exploring the relation of popular music to (post)colonialism, he argues that music – similar to politics, economics, and cultures – has been shaped by colonialism and its legacies. In an attempt to confront established and eurocentric power-structures, Ismaiel– Wendt proposes ‘sonic delinking’ as an alternative approach to popular music. In the final contribution to this first part of interdisciplinary reflections, E L L E N G R Ü N K E M E I E R probes the recent trend of postcolonial cultural studies by exploring the intersections of postcolonial, literary, and cultural studies. Arguing that postcolonial cultural studies is concerned with questions of power, dominance, and marginalization, inclusion and exclusion, she defines this methodology as a politically engaged and contextualist way of reading literary texts and other cultural products. In a case study that forms the second part of her article, she analyses a South African life narrative with regard to its complex power-relations. In the second section, on interdisciplinary Atlantic studies, the articles are concerned with various regions across the Atlantic, ranging from the Caribbean and America to the Gold Coast (today’s Ghana), Nigeria, and Zimbabwe. T I M O M Ü L L E R points out the interrelations of postcolonial and African-American studies, thus breaking with the widespread assumption that

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these fields are incompatible in their political and theoretical trajectories. He argues that a combined approach proves most productive for analysing writers such as Claude McKay, whose life and work oscillate between different regions. Researching literary representations of the middle passage, C A R L P L A S A devotes his contribution to Barry Unsworth’s prize-winning novel Sacred Hunger (1992). He studies its intertextual references to Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611) and the less-known adaptation The Tempest, or the Enchanted Island (1670) by John Dryden and William Davenant. Moreover, he shows how Unsworth’s novel employs additional forms of theatricality to commemorate experiences of the transatlantic slave trade. H E N N I N G M A R Q U A R D T turns to two novels about the colonial encounters between Europeans and Africans in post-abolition Jamaica, namely Tom Redcam’s Becka’s Buckra Baby: Being an Episode in the Life of Noel (1903) and Claude McKay’s Banana Bottom (1933). Adapting for literary analysis the historiographic concept of cultural exchange, he investigates how the novels negotiate issues of culture, race, and class through their character conceptions and family constellations. A N J A B A N D A U , who has an academic background in francophone and hispanophone literatures, is interested in narratives of the Haitian Revolution. While the representations are generally scarce, the anonymously written and still unpublished manuscript Mon Odyssée is significant, not least because of its form, which brings together dramatic and comic elements, verse and prose, ancient epic and poésie galante. Anja Bandau reads this generic hybridity as an aesthetic mediation of the violent confrontations and uprootings during the revolution. Focusing on the white Dominican writer Phyllis Shand Allfrey, S A R A H F E K A D U places Allfrey’s short fiction in the contexts of modernist literature. In her close reading of the short stories “O Stay and Hear” and “Parks,” she shows how narrative strategies such as multi-perspectivity and epiphany serve to illustrate the emerging global network of people, histories, and places in the early-twentieth century. Studying the gradual emancipation of slaves in the Caribbean, the historian J A N H Ü S G E N draws attention to the case of St Kitts, where the transition from slavery to apprenticeship met with particular resentment. On the basis of historical sources such as diary entries, letters, and official publications, he analyses how the slaves organized their resistance to this new system of forced labour and how the Moravian mission reacted to these protests. S T E F F E N R U N K E L also approaches slavery through the lens of historiographic research. To get an insight into the debates among the African elite on the Gold Coast, he examines the local press from before and after the legal abolition of slavery

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and the slave trade on the Gold Coast in 1874. These newspapers merit special attention because they are mostly written by Africans and thus provide perspectives that differ from and add to European contemporary sources. Investigating the parallels between writing fiction and writing history, F R A N K S C H U L Z E – E N G L E R discusses Yvonne Vera’s The Stone Virgins (2002) and Helon Habila’s Measuring Time (2007). Both novels explicitly engage with history and historiography: they deconstruct grand narratives and challenge generic concepts of postcoloniality, drawing attention as they do to the changing historical, social, and ideological contexts of contemporary Africa. The next section is made up of essays that explore the crossovers between historiography, fiction, and criticism. Focusing on contemporary Indian historiographical fiction, M A T T H I A S G A L L E R studies Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981), Shashi Tharoor’s The Great Indian Novel (1989), and Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance (1996). While all three novels engage critically with Indira Gandhi’s emergency rule, they employ different strategies in their aesthetic mediation of this phase in recent Indian history, ranging from Mistry’s realist descriptions to Rushdie’s magical realism and Tharoor’s experiments with narrating history as mythology. C E C I L E S A N D T E N examines an Indian Shakespeare adaptation: namely, the Othello movie Kaliyattam (The Play of God), directed by Jayaraj Rajasekharan Nair. Approaching the film through the concept of polymorphism, she argues that although the film mainly follows Shakespeare’s play, it opens up new interpretations. As the Othello-figure in Kaliyattam is not a foreigner but an ‘untouchable’ Indian, Sandten reads the adaptation as a critique of the caste system in (Hindu) India. Starting from the observation that ‘otherness’ has always been a central concern in postcolonial criticism, D E N N I S M I S C H K E asks how scholars can reach a cosmopolitan perspective without destroying or appropriating alterity. By way of an example, he draws on Stephen Muecke, who, as a white anthropologist engaging with indigenous Australian peoples, confronts this paradox of ‘self vs. other’. Mischke concludes that ‘fictocriticism’, a combination of academic and creative writing, offers a narrative strategy that enables such a cosmopolitan vision. The closing section is based on the round table and the teachers’ workshop, both of which formed separate parts of the A S N E L conference. In their discussions, the panellists and participants raise and address questions of how to pursue postcolonial studies in research and teaching at universities and in schools. The section opens with the contribution by U R S U L A K L U W I C K , who chaired the round-table discussion. Looking at publications, associations as

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well as teaching and research programmes in Germany and Switzerland, she scrutinizes different takes on the interdisciplinarity of postcolonial studies. S A B I N E B R O E C K is also concerned with questions of disciplinarity when she addresses the (de)merits of working outside of established frameworks. In particular, she asks how an Americanist literary studies scholar can engage with historical documents from the Bremen Staatsarchiv that refer – in a single sentence only – to slavery. Speaking as a co-ordinator of an interdisciplinary research initiative, J A N O U G L E N C R O S S provides insight into the administrative challenges of organizing and institutionalizing interdisciplinary research networks when both the universities and the funding agencies are sub-divided into specific disciplines. The Africa historian B R I G I T T E R E I N W A L D considers (post)colonial concerns as vital to her discipline, both in research and in teaching. She shows how she confronts students and scholars with Africa’s diverse cultures and histories in order to challenge common but largely unrecognized stereotypes about Africa(ns). E L I N O R J A N E P O H L , who teaches English at a Hannover grammar school, also draws on her teaching experience to explore the pedagogical potential of postcolonial literatures in secondary education, especially in a multilingual and multicultural classroom. In her contribution, M A L A P A N D U R A N G outlines the central aspects of the teachers’ workshop that was run by Annika Bierwirth, Jörg Heinke, Elinor Pohl, and Reinhold Wandel, and how she – as an Indian researcher – responds to their ideas. Starting from the observation that several German federal states have recently included the teaching of India in their curricula for English as a foreign language, R E I N H O L D W A N D E L scrutinizes textbooks, novels, and other materials on India that have been used in schools.

WORKS CITED Apelt, Friederike, Felix Brinker & Ricarda Wenge. “Postcolonial Studies Across the Disciplines: A Report on the 22nd Annual A S N E L Conference at Leibniz University, Hanover, 2–4 June 2011,” A C O L I T 68 (2011): 17–20. Apostel, Leo et al. Interdisciplinarity: Problems of Teaching and Research in Universities (Washington D C : Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 1972). Beushausen, Wiebke. “‘Postcolonial Studies Across the Disciplines’: A Report on the 22nd Annual Conference of the Association for the Study of the New Literatures in English (A S N E L /G N E L ), University of Hanover, 2–4 June 2011,” A C O L I T 68 (2011): 12–13.

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Brydon, Diana. “Postcolonial Cultural Studies: 1990 and After,” in The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism, ed. Michael Groden, Martin Kreiswirth & Imre Szeman (1994; Baltimore M D & London: Johns Hopkins U P , 2005): 760– 68. Glage, Liselotte, ed. Being/s in Transit: Travelling, Migration, Dislocation (Cross / Cultures 51, A S N E L Papers 5; Amsterdam & Atlanta G A : Rodopi, 2000). Gohrisch, Jana, & Ellen Grünkemeier, ed. Listening to Africa: Anglophone Literatures and Cultures (Heidelberg: Winter, 2012). Huggan, Graham. Interdisciplinary Measures: Literature and the Future of Postcolonial Studies (Liverpool: Liverpool U P , 2008). ——. “Postcolonial studies and the anxiety of interdisciplinarity,” Postcolonial Studies 5.3 (2002): 245–75. Innes, Lynn C. The Cambridge Introduction to Postcolonial Literatures in English (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge U P , 2007). Klein, Julie Thompson. Interdisciplinarity: History, Theory and Practice (Detroit MI: Wayne State U P , 1990). Kumar, Malreddy Pavan. “Postcolonialism: Interdisciplinary or Interdiscursive?” Third World Quarterly 32.4 (2011): 653–72. Lal, Johanna, & Lena Rindermann. “Conference Report: ‘Postcolonial Studies Across the Disciplines’, G N E L /A S N E L Annual Conference, University of Hanover, 2–4 June 2011,” A C O L I T 68 (2011): 14–16. McLeod, John. Beginning Postcolonialism (2000; Manchester & New York: Manchester U P , 2012). Moran, Joe. Interdisciplinarity (2002; London & New York: Routledge, 2010). Soanes, Catherine, & Angus Stevenson, ed. Oxford Dictionary of English (1998; Oxford: Oxford U P , 2005). Stam, Robert, & Ella Shohat. Race in Translation: Culture Wars around the Postcolonial Atlantic (New York & London: New York U P , 2012).

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I NTERDISCIPLINARY R EFLECTIONS

Postcolonial Studies and Atlantic Studies — Interdisciplinary Reflections on Slavery and Empire

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at the 2011 A S N E L conference; it has been lightly revised but is still recognizably an exploratory position paper, intended to stimulate discussion rather than deliver answers.1 Asked to speak about the importance of slavery in postcolonial studies, I offer a two-part reflection on transatlantic historical studies and postcolonial literary studies, and on the connections between them. I begin with a brief reflection on the organization that provided the site for this investigation while at the same time embodying in its institutional structure and history some of the very developments I am highlighting. Founded in 1989, the Gesellschaft für die neuen englischsprachigen Literaturen (Association for the Study of the New Literatures in English) (G N E L / A S N E L ) is one of the oldest and most important organizations in the world for the study of postcolonial literatures in English. Its emergence and flourishing coincide with what we might call the europeanization of Europe after the end of the Cold War; it is tempting to see the rise of A S N E L as the manifestation of a new interest in German-speaking countries in the literary and cultural history of the aftermath of British colonialism, an intellectual analogue to the weakening of some (though surely not all) internal European borders. When I left the U K to move to the U S A in 1990, it was still common to hear British people say that they were going ‘to Europe’ when they crossed the ‘English’ Channel or the North Sea; by contrast, at the end of the A S N E L 1

HIS ESSAY ORIGINATED AS A PRESENTATION

I am extremely grateful to Jana Gohrisch, Ellen Grünkemeier, and Henning Marquardt for the opportunity to present these reflections at the A S N E L conference and in this volume, and for their help, advice, and editing at all stages of this process.

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conference in Hannover in 2011, I flew on a German airline called Germanwings to an England that is very much in the middle of Europe, despite its non-membership in the Eurozone. On one level, certainly A S N E L represents the beneficial aspects of post-Cold War European integration: intra-European intellectual and academic cooperation rather than reliance on U S cultural, economic, and educational power; cultural and cross-linguistic cosmopolitanism; and a willingness to examine and leave behind the legacies of European imperialism. It would be tempting to see A S N E L this way, but of course it would be an incomplete understanding of the organization, for at least two reasons. First, as I will discuss presently, A S N E L has from the outset shown an interest in American literature, especially U S ethnic literatures; in contrast to much U S and U K -based postcolonial studies of the 1990s and early 2000s, A S N E L has been exploring the intersection of transatlantic studies and postcolonial studies for many years now. Secondly, German studies of what we now call postcolonial literature long predate the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of the European Union; to some extent, they even precede the academic study of what used to be called Commonwealth literature in the English-speaking world. As Gerhard Stilz pointed out in his keynote address to the conference “Imagination and the Creative Impulse in the New Literatures in English,” held at the University of Trento in 1990, German studies of what came to be called Commonwealth literature datefrom the end of the nineteenth century. The new literatures in English, in other words, are actually rather old: he says that “they have […] been regarded as part of the academic discipline called Englische Philologie for somewhat more than a century.”2 And while those early German surveys of the literature of “Greater Britain” emphasized the texts of the white settler colonies, especially Australia and Canada, already by the late 1950s German studies of African, Caribbean, and South Asian literature in English were well under way. For example, the great Caribbean novelist George Lamming reported in 1960 in his landmark study The Pleasures of Exile that “there are a few Germans who are working on this ‘strange pheno-

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Gerhard Stilz, “Any Business of Ours? Some German Reflections on the Purposes and Priorities of Studying the New Literatures in English,” in Imagination and the Creative Impulse in the New Literatures in English, ed. Maria Teresa Bindella & Geoffrey V. Davis (Cross / Cultures 9; Amsterdam & Atlanta G A : Rodopi, 1993): 25.

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menon of the British Caribbean novelist.’”3 Lamming is quoting the British novelist Kingsley Amis, who had used the occasion of a review of West Indian literature in the Spectator to attack a fellow reviewer from the Times Literary Supplement – Lamming felt that Amis didn’t really care about West Indian literature, only about the parochial literary squabbles of English culture. They [the Germans] are not doing it to attack anybody. They are doing it because it is another piece of evidence for some thesis they are trying to work out about the universality of regional cultures. I do not share all their views about the West Indian writers, but what really matters here is that they are serious readers and the nature of their interest is a good basis for dialogue.4

Now, it could be argued that here Lamming uses the “few Germans” in much the same way as Amis uses the West Indian novelists, as instruments in a quarrel. But he does show, even in this off-handed moment, that German postcolonial literary studies predated the end of the British Empire and had its own distinctive argument about regional cultures and literatures. Stilz, moreover, makes the crucial point that German scholars in the 1970s mostly abandoned the term ‘Commonwealth literature’, well before scholars in most English-speaking countries did so, rejecting its aura of imperial nostalgia and instead advocating for terms like ‘Literaturen in englischer Sprache’ and ‘New Literatures in English’. 5 There were significant consequences from this terminological shift: the open-endedness of the phrase ‘literatures in English’ allowed some within A S N E L to cross over the divide that is still massively present in the Englishspeaking universities, and that still afflicts scholars in the field of postcolonial studies in the English-speaking world: the divide between ‘British’ and ‘American’ literature. For example, as early as the second selection of papers from the annual A S N E L conferences (the conference was held in the early 1990s), there is a cluster of papers on U S ethnic literatures, with essays on Paule Marshall, Bharati Mukherjee, and Maxine Hong Kingston, among others.6 In 1960, Lamming had taken Amis to task for reviewing eight Carib3

George Lamming, The Pleasures of Exile, intro. Sandra Pouchet Paquet (1960; Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P , 1992): 29. 4 Lamming, The Pleasures of Exile, 29. 5 Stilz, “Any Business of Ours?,” 28. 6 Fusion of Cultures?, ed. Peter O. Stummer & Christopher Balme (Cross / Cultures 26, A S N E L Papers 2; Amsterdam & Atlanta G A : Rodopi, 1996).

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bean novels without using the word ‘America’ once, emphasizing the importance of an American literary tradition to the development of West Indian literature: The West Indian novel, particularly in the aspect of idiom, cannot be understood unless you take a good look at the American nineteenth century, a good look at Melville, Whitman, and Mark Twain.7

As if in response to Lamming, from its earliest beginnings all the way to a 2011 conference on interdisciplinary postcolonial studies in which transatlantic questions were central in every way, G N E L /A S N E L has shown in practice that the division between British or anglophone and U S literature is one that not only can but should be routinely crossed. In the reflections that follow, then, I see myself as continuing a trend exemplified by A S N E L -affiliated scholars that interrogates and challenges the presuppositions and borders that define and sometimes constrain academic work, even in a field like postcolonial studies that has been marked by a high degree of self-awareness and critical debate about its own origins and methods. (I might note, also, that these interrogations continue in a lively, intelligent way within A S N E L : the conference and its aftermath have been occasions for a spirited debate about the aptness of the term ‘new’ in the organization’s title.)8 In the first half of this essay, I look at the place of transatlantic studies of slavery in contemporary postcolonial studies, part of a cluster of papers at the 2011 conference on slavery in the Caribbean, North America, and West Africa that engaged with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century texts and histories. In the second half of my presentation I discuss the period that is more conventionally associated with the new literatures in English, the second half of the twentieth century – except that the writer I discuss, Barbara Pym, is typically read, if she is still read at all, as an archetypically English novelist who is about as far from postcolonial literature as you could possibly imagine. There too, I argue that transatlantic questions provide an important starting point for postcolonial analysis.

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Lamming, The Pleasures of Exile, 29. See the post-conference A S N E L blog at http://21stcenturyasnel.wordpress.com (accessed 29 December 2011) and Kathy–Ann Tan, “‘What’s in a Name?’ Panel at the G N E L /A S N E L annual conference in Berne, Switzerland, 2012,” A C O L I T 69: 26– 27, as well as Peter H. Marsden, “Lots in a Name,” A C O L I T 69: 27–29. 8

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Atlantic Studies, History, and the Stories of Slave Revolt Since the mid-1990s, when Paul Gilroy published The Black Atlantic and Bernard Bailyn established the Harvard University seminar on the history of the Atlantic World, the interdisciplinary study of ‘the Atlantic world’ has grown steadily like a sweeping ocean current: programmes and research groups in Atlantic studies, transatlantic studies, and Atlantic World studies have been proliferating on both sides of the Atlantic.9 It is hard to generalize about a remarkably diverse body of scholarship taking place in multiple languages and several different disciplines, but if I had to characterize this work in a couple of broad ways, I would say that, first, for all its interdisciplinary aims, it has mostly taken place under the aegis of a fairly conventional historical methodology, and secondly, if there is one historical process that unifies and defines this work, it is transatlantic chattel slavery and the slave trade. So: history and slavery, the history of slavery – these are what link Bailyn and David Brion Davis to Gilroy and Ian Baucom, and our understanding of the early-modern period, European expansion, and colonialism and empire has been immeasurably improved by the work that has been done by these scholars and countless others.10 Here I want to suggest that this rich body of work would be even richer if we paid more attention to the narrative form of the documents and texts that we have been using to reconstruct and analyse this history – and, ideally, if we paid more attention to the narrative form in which we retell these stories.11 Simply put, Atlantic studies could use a dose of the literary methodologies that have produced the critical work in postcolonial studies and the ‘new literatures in English’. So, I would suggest, Atlantic studies need to be more literary and more postcolonial – and in the second half of this essay, I will suggest that postcolonial literary studies would benefit from being more historical and more transatlantic. 9

Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 1993); International Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World, 1500–1825, (Cambridge M A : Harvard University, 24 February 2011), http: //www.fas.harvard.edu/~atlantic (accessed 6 January 2012). 10 David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (1975; New York: Oxford U P , 1999); Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (Durham N C : Duke U P , 2005). 11 This claim is substantiated more fully in the introduction and articles contained in a special issue of Clio: A Journal of Literature, History, and the Philosophy of History, “Atlantic Narratives,” ed. Tim Watson, 40.1 (2010).

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What I want briefly to address here from the vast Atlantic history of slavery is the complex topic of slave revolts. As we know, slavery produced resistance from the enslaved everywhere. Usually it was of the everyday, more or less passive variety – working slowly, faking sickness, pissing in the master’s coffee, performing obedience while mocking authority at the same time, and so forth. But regularly, although at unpredictable intervals, passive resistance gave way or turned into active, violent rebellion. Examples are too numerous to mention, and they occurred in every slave regime in the Americas, culminating in the series of revolts that became the Haitian Revolution at the turn of the nineteenth century. (Having said that, it is important to query the shorthand equation that calls the Haitian Revolution of 1791–1804 the only successful slave insurrection – not because it was not successful, but because the abolition of slavery in Saint Dominique in 1793 means that for most of the period of the revolution the insurgents were not in fact slaves.) Insurrections of the enslaved, varied as they may have been in their details of participants, locations, and consequences, together crystallize several key problems for Atlantic history. Some of the problems are methodological: how do you write a history from below, or subaltern history, when the surviving documents unanimously, and often explicitly, take the side of the white Creole and colonial authorities, giving documentary authority only to the suppressors of the revolt, and silencing or caricaturing the people most contemporary historians would want to see as the agents of those events? Some of the problems are interpretative: to what extent did slaves rebel against slavery itself? It would seem obvious that they did, but some historians, most notably João Pedro Marques, are sceptical of narratives that impute abolitionist motives to rebel slaves, seeing them instead as engaged in merely local power-struggles that were not about Enlightenment concepts of ‘liberty’ or ‘rights’ at all.12 If we take this point of view, it significantly disrupts our ability to see a transatlantic continuum between slave revolts in the colonies and anti-slavery political campaigns in Britain, France, Canada, and the U S A . Other historians, of course, quite explicitly put the rebels in the vanguard of abolition: it was the slaves who abolished slavery, as the title of Richard Hart’s well-known book

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Who Abolished Slavery? Slave Revolts and Abolitionism, a Debate with João Pedro Marques, ed. Seymour Drescher & Pieter C. Emmer (New York: Berghahn, 2010).

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about slave revolts in Jamaica has it.13 Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker likewise put the enslaved in the forefront of the “motley crew” who are the heroes of the eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century revolutionary Atlantic in their book The Many-Headed Hydra.14 As case studies, I want to discuss briefly two different revolts – or perhaps, rather, one slave revolt and one paranoid conspiracy theory about a nonexistent revolt. First, a few words about a revolt that most certainly did take place, but about which we know very little for certain, the Stono rebellion in South Carolina in 1739, one of the most extensive of all slave revolts in the mainland American territories before Nat Turner’s rebellion in 1831. In the case of Stono, in common with all these slave revolts in the Americas, we see the importance of stories themselves as active shapers of historical events. In many cases throughout the Americas, slaves rebelled when they heard and retold stories about how freedom had been granted to them by the King or Queen, or the authorities in Paris or Lisbon or wherever, but that the local authorities were blocking it or denying it. These stories, even though they were often factually inaccurate, played crucial roles in driving the enslaved to take the ultimate risk of rising up. In South Carolina, slaves heard – correctly, in this case – that Spain, in the build-up to war with England, had offered freedom to any slaves in British territories who could reach the border of Spanish Florida. On the night of 8 September 1739, a couple of dozen slaves just south of Charleston raided the local store, killed two white men who were inside, stole a considerable quantity of weapons, and then travelled south, picking up more followers as they went, attacking and killing more whites on plantations they passed on the road, apparently heading for St. Augustine and liberty.15 Of course, they never made it. They had the misfortune to run into the colony’s lieutenant governor on the road, they failed to recruit sufficient 13

Richard Hart, Slaves Who Abolished Slavery: Blacks in Rebellion (Mona, Jamaica: U of the West Indies P , 2002). 14 Peter Linebaugh & Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston M A : Beacon, 2000). 15 Details of the revolt taken from Peter Charles Hoffer, Cry Liberty: The Great Stono River Slave Rebellion of 1739 (New York: Oxford U P , 2010), and Jack Shuler, Calling Out Liberty: The Stono Slave Rebellion and the Universal Struggle for Human Rights (Jackson: U P of Mississippi, 2009).

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rebels, and they were attacked and defeated the following day. The punishments were, unsurprisingly, swift and severe. But after that the response to the revolt on the part of the whites was to close ranks and not talk about what happened. Silence. It was an odd response, given that the fear of slave uprisings was certainly and understandably widespread in the Americas – and lurid stories were told in the colonies about the massacres that would happen if the enslaved were encouraged by abolitionists to think about freedom. Later, the phrase ‘San Domingo massacres’, referring to the killings of whites during the Haitian Revolution, became proverbial among Creole whites throughout the Americas. And yet, in South Carolina, when an actual rebellion took place, little was said, at least in public. In 1835, Alexis de Tocqueville, discussing slave revolts in Democracy in America, wrote that “in the southern states there is a silence; one avoids discussing it with one’s friends, each man […] hides it from himself”16. For 250 years, there was very little in the historical records about Stono, until recently historians – spurred by the work on slave revolts elsewhere in the Atlantic world and the historiographic emphasis on “the world the slaves made” – have begun to put the event back into early American history. In the last few years, two new books on the rebellion have appeared, one by an historian, Peter Hoffer, and one by a literary scholar, Jack Shuler, and their different interpretations of the events in South Carolina are instructive, I think. Hoffer, the historian, sees Stono as the result more or less of luck and serendipity: he painstakingly reconstructs a story in which the rebels did not plan in advance but took advantage of circumstances and responded more or less impulsively as events unfolded. He certainly does not deny the importance of the event, but he emphasizes contingency, local conditions, and the quotidian: it was, he says, “the natural outcome of the everyday deformities of slavery.”17 Shuler, the literary scholar, by contrast, while acknowledging the relatively small scale of the rebellion compared to the uprisings in the Caribbean, sets Stono squarely in the centre of the Atlantic world and of a centuries-long struggle for human rights. His book’s organizing questions are: Where does this event fit into what we traditionally think of as a “century of revolutions”? How does it connect with the broader Atlantic world? And what does Stono say about how we imagine human rights?18 16

Quoted in Hoffer, Cry Liberty, 136. Cry Liberty, 146. 18 Shuler, Calling Out Liberty, 7. 17

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While Shuler sees Stono as “an exemplum, in the medieval sense of the word – it illustrates a model truth as it participates in the project to extend human rights to all human beings,”19 Hoffer instead sees it like the culminating episode in a realist novel, one that can be interpreted only by reconstructing the local webs of connection among people and places. Although he does not make this point explicitly, Hoffer implies that we could learn to ‘read’ Stono by thinking about those nineteenth-century novels that contain popular rebellions as dramatic centrepieces, such as Walter Scott’s The Heart of Midlothian, Charles Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge, George Eliot’s Felix Holt, or – as I suggest below – the less well-known Jamaican novel Hamel, the Obeah Man by Cynric Williams. All historical accounts are in fact shaped by the conventions and expectations of genre, understood in a literary sense, as Hayden White argued as far back as the 1970s;20 but an event like Stono, which of necessity involves a great deal of imaginative reconstruction in the absence of reliable source-material, brings to the foreground these questions of genre and historiography, forces them to the surface. In discussing his methods for dealing with the Stono source-materials (or the lack thereof), Hoffer ends by saying that he “resorted to the inspiration of the historical novel”:21 Adapting the literary skills of the novelist enables the historian to peer over, if not cross, the “boundary” between fact-based scholarship and fiction [. . . ] Novelesque techniques allow us to think about what might have happened at Hutchenson’s store that night, what the slaves were thinking in the field alongside Pon Pon Road, and how masters coped with the memory of Stono.22

Hoffer is a historian, so he perhaps sees this as a last resort: the choice of word “resorted” is telling; but I think his modest proposal that we “peer over” the boundary between “fact-based scholarship and fiction” actually counts as a kind of clarion call for interdisciplinary, transatlantic scholarship. So, let me give a concrete example of a way in which crossing that boundary can help us to understand an historical event – or silence about an event. In late 1823 and early 1824, the colonial authorities in two northern Jamaican parishes, St. Mary and St. George, were alarmed by reports of slaves plotting 19

Shuler, Calling Out Liberty, 9. Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore M D : Johns Hopkins U P , 1973). 21 Hoffer, Cry Liberty, 163. 22 Cry Liberty, 163–64. 20

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uprisings; arrests were made, troops were sent to restore order; and in trials several slaves were convicted of conspiracy and either deported from the island or hanged. The magistrates, in requesting the governor to send troops, were unequivocal: “a most extensive and diabolical plot has been laid among the slaves in this parish.”23 Richard Hart, author of Slaves Who Abolished Slavery, sees the St. George and St. Mary “plots” – and I use the term deliberately here – as strong evidence of slave cunning and ability to plan resistance despite all attempts to stop it.24 But the actual testimony is much more ambiguous, relying as it did mostly on the confession of one informant, a Haitian-born slave named Jean Baptiste Corberand, who implicated his fellow plotters in an elaborate conspiracy that reached all the way to elite Kingston mixed-race merchants who allegedly supplied weapons – and by telling this story, which matched so precisely the planters’ post-Haitian Revolution fears, Corberand saved his own life. The case was taken up by prominent antislavery activists in London and discussed in Parliament: “History did not furnish more flagrant instances of the violation of all recognized principles of law and justice than were furnished by those trials,” thundered Stephen Lushington in the House of Commons in June 1825.25 They argued that there never was any conspiracy, that the whole thing was the invention of the authorities. In this case, the abolitionists claimed, an imaginary story had deadly effects: the planters had taken their own fears of conspiratorial plots and moulded the people and events to fit that story – these genre expectations led to the execution of several innocent people. (Similar questions have been raised about the reality of the Denmark Vesey plot the previous year in South Carolina, which similarly had a Haitian connection, since the alleged plotters planned to sail to Haiti, according to some accounts.)26 23

Great Britain, Parliamentary Papers (House of Commons), 66.X X V (1825), “Papers Relating to the Manumission, Government, and Population of Slaves in the West Indies, 1822–1824,” Part V I I , “Copy of All Judicial Proceedings Relative to the Trial and Punishment of Rebels, or Alleged Rebels, in the Island of Jamaica, Since the 1st of January 1823; with the Previous Information, the Minutes of Evidence, and the Final Fate of the Prisoners.” Excerpts included as appendix C in Cynric Williams, Hamel, the Obeah Man, ed. Candace Ward & Tim Watson (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 2010): 468–72, quotation on 468. 24 Hart, Slaves Who Abolished Slavery, 228–40. 25 Parliamentary Debates, new series, vol. X I I I (London: Hansard, 1826): 1187. 26 Michael P. Johnson, “Denmark Vesey and His Co-Conspirators,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd series, 58.4 (2001): 915–76.

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Unlike the Stono revolt almost a century earlier, in the 1823–24 Jamaica cases we have abundant documentation: eyewitness accounts, depositions, trial transcripts, newspaper articles, pamphlets, and so forth. But despite the archival richness, facts are still in short supply. However, in this case, fortunately, we have literary evidence to help us untangle the historical complexity. In early 1824, while the St. George events were playing out, an English traveller, Cynric Williams, was visiting Jamaica, but his account of his trip, A Tour through the Island of Jamaica, published in 1826, contains surprisingly scant reference to the events that were apparently roiling the white and creole community at the time of his visit. He does refer to “apprehension of disturbances” among the white Jamaicans he meets;27 however, we witness no actual disturbances, and the narrator appears serenely untroubled by the white Creole anxiety he encounters, instead passing his time in flirting with a beautiful sixteen-year-old mulatto girl, Diana, drinking “sangaree,” and twice attempting to climb the summit of the Blue Mountains. The effect of his tale in the end is to make the reader sceptical of what Williams calls the planters’ “dread of being murdered by the negroes” – and this is in a pro-slavery book that is sympathetic to the planters.28 In stark contrast, though, at exactly the same time as his Tour was being published, Williams was writing (although not signing his name to) a 600-page gothic historical novel, Hamel, the Obeah Man, published a year later in 1827, that is completely dominated by a massive slave uprising that begins in northern Jamaica and threatens to spread throughout the island until it is foiled by the Hamel of the title, who has cleverly planned and leads the uprising but just as cleverly foils it out of loyalty to his master when the latter returns (disguised as a rebel slave himself) unexpectedly to the island.29 When we factor in the probability that Cynric Williams is the pseudonym for a white Creole planter – not a first-time English visitor to the island at all – the literary evidence becomes crucial to the establishment of a complex picture of this history.30 It does not provide a clear answer to the question of whether this specific plot was real, because, of 27

Cynric R. Williams, A Tour through the Island of Jamaica, from the Western to the Eastern End, in the Year 1823 (London: Hunt & Clarke, 1826): 88. 28 Williams, A Tour through the Island of Jamaica, 88. 29 Anon., Hamel, the Obeah Man, 2 vols. (London: Hunt & Clarke, 1827). 30 For more on the authorship of Hamel, see Tim Watson, Caribbean Culture and British Fiction in the Atlantic World, 1780–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2008): 70–74.

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course, it does not provide the point of view of the enslaved themselves. But it does help us to understand the planters’ ambivalence, and, through them, at least something of the culture of the enslaved at this moment: the travelogue shows that the Jamaican Creole whites were keen to keep quiet about slave unrest (just as South Carolinians were after Stono) at this time when the whole institution of slavery was under pressure from transatlantic antislavery movements; but the novel shows that the planters did indeed understand their enslaved labourers to be quite capable of the planning, organization, and execution of a large-scale revolt. If Peter Hoffer, in discussing Stono, shows that the lessons of interpreting novels – what he calls “novelesque techniques” – can be transferred to an interpretation of the historical record, Cynric Williams’s novel Hamel, the Obeah Man shows that novels themselves are crucial sources in the historical record, not just as models but also as historical documents. A turn to novelesque techniques and literary sources is, of course, not going to solve all the methodological and interpretative problems in Atlantic studies – but it does enrich our understanding of these complex local, regional, national, and international phenomena.

Transatlantic History and the Literature of Decolonization Now I will abruptly switch gears and periods for these interdisciplinary reflections and spend a little time thinking about the topic that has always been at the centre of the work of A S N E L and of postcolonial studies more generally: the literary texts produced in the era of decolonization and the postcolonial period, precisely the ‘New Literatures in English’ of this organization’s title. What I have to say should not be construed as a wholesale critique of the field – which is, after all, the one that has formed me intellectually and in which I continue to teach and write – but as a couple of suggestions for supplementary work that might enrich our research and teaching. First, and I hope least controversially, I would make a brief plea for us to peer over the boundary separating literary studies from historical studies and do a little more old-fashioned history: visiting archives, reading old newspapers, interviewing writers and their publishers, even and perhaps especially if it means learning the language of the formerly colonized and spending time in postcolonial nations and regions. Of course, historicism is not the only way to understand the poetry of Walcott or the prose of Naipaul or the drama of Soyinka, but there has certainly been a tendency in the field of postcolonial studies to fall back on vague generalizations about ‘the colony’ or ‘hybridity’

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or ‘nationalism’, and I think in most cases those terms would have to be significantly qualified, and sometimes even discarded, if critics immersed themselves in local situations a little bit more. We should be prepared to make smaller rather than larger claims, in other words, as Hoffer does in his analysis of the Stono rebellion – claims that would have the salutary effect of validating the writers, literary histories, and cultures of postcolonial societies in their own terms, rather than as case studies of ‘postcolonial literature’ or ‘world literature’. Each of these places, each of these writers, is interesting in and of themselves, not only to the extent that they enable us to say something about empire or decolonization or postcoloniality in general (whatever those things might be in general). My second point is more specific and perhaps a bit more surprising: to suggest that the framework of the ‘Atlantic world’ or ‘transatlantic studies’ remains useful even in analysing the period of decolonization and globalization since the 1950s – Atlantic Studies is not just a paradigm for the early modern European empires, in other words. Postcolonial studies have notoriously put India – and, even more narrowly, Bengal – at the centre of the field. But it is not clear that the divide-and-rule tactics of the British in India and the struggle to create an anti-colonial movement in South Asia help us particularly to understand postcolonial Trinidad, for example, and the works of V.S. Naipaul, despite that writer’s identification with his ancestral Indian home. (I am hardly the first to call for a non-Bengal-centric version of postcolonial studies, of course – this critique has itself almost become a commonplace within the field.) However, if we cannot easily map India onto Trinidad and the other Caribbean colonies, the economic and cultural circuit that joined the Caribbean, the U K , France, and the U S A together really is crucial, as Lamming pointed out in his response to Kingsley Amis that I cited above: we can’t understand Walcott and Naipaul and Lamming without understanding what ‘America’ means to them. One area in which this transatlantic framework is decidedly helpful is in thinking about the field of anthropology and its influence on literary culture in the period after World War Two and in the moment of decolonization, when artists and intellectuals in the West – and in the decolonizing world – turned to anthropology for new definitions of culture at a time when Western/ European notions of high culture as the best that had been thought and said (as Matthew Arnold put it) were hard to defend in the wake of the Holocaust and the violent twilight of European territorial empires. To understand these developments in postwar anthropology, and especially in the Anglo-American

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anthropology of Africa that was at the centre of the discipline, it seems to me that a transatlantic framework is precisely the most useful one available – and therefore the influence of that discipline on literature from the 1950s onwards (starting with Chinua Achebe’s complex ethnographic voice in Things Fall Apart). This is especially true at the level of institutional structures – the kind of thing that you can only really find out by burrowing away in the archives at boring account books and reports to funding agencies. Anthropology in the U S A can trace its modern roots back to the fieldwork of Franz Boas on Vancouver Island in the early-twentieth century: the work of this Jewish Germanborn, naturalized American scholar was funded in the first instance by the British Association for the Advancement of Science.31 Conversely, and even more strikingly, the bulk of the funding for the London-based International African Institute, the premier site for the development of British social anthropology from the 1930s onwards, was provided by U S philanthropic foundations: the Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Ford foundations bankrolled and kept operational the institute founded by Bronis¶aw Malinowski in the mid1920s.32 These foundations began by seeking to address U S social and political concerns: principally, how to understand and solve what had been called ‘the Negro problem’, but by the 1950s had become the question of civil rights. However, they expanded their work and added a transatlantic and transnational dimension – and successive directors of the International African Institute worked hard to maintain and strengthen these transatlantic financial and professional connections. And helping to administer these awards, and editing the reports and articles and books that resulted from them, was the International African Institute’s long-time staff member, the associate editor of the leading anthropology journal Africa, the very English novelist, Barbara Pym, who, I want to argue, also fits in this transatlantic postcolonial paradigm. Pym seems like an exceedingly unlikely candidate for introduction into the canon of ‘new literatures in English’ – if she is remembered at all, it is as the writer of decidedly old-fashioned, cosy, provincial novels about middle-class churchgoing English spin31

George W. Stocking, Jr., “The Pattern of Boas’ Fieldwork,” in The Shaping of American Anthropology, 1883–1911: A Franz Boas Reader, ed. George W. Stocking, Jr. (New York: Basic Books, 1974): 83–86. 32 Frank A. Salamone, “The International African Institute: The Rockefeller Foundation and the Development of British Social Anthropology in Africa,” Transforming Anthropology 9.1 (2000): 19–29.

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sters who drink tea and organize jumble sales. But in fact I would argue that her job at the I A I was not just a day job, and that the regular references in her fiction to Africans, to African languages and cultures, and the way in which she carries out a kind of ethnography of middle-class Englishness all combine to make her a kind of latter-day, postcolonial Jane Austen, showing how African objects, people, and ideas have come to saturate everyday Englishness. Moreover, her novels show that ethnographic ways of understanding cultural practice, honed in Africanist anthropology, can come home to Britain in the era of decolonization. And in order to properly understand this emergence of what Jed Esty has convincingly called “home anthropology,” we need a transatlantic frame of reference.33 And this is also where the archival research of the historian comes in, I think. In the Barbara Pym Papers in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, there are manuscripts of early drafts of her 1955 novel Less than Angels, a campus novel about anthropologists – a kind of ethnography of the ethnographers of Africa of the postwar period. In these early drafts, Pym wrote the opening scene of the novel as a celebration party at the African Library in London for “a generous grant of money from America.”34 However, in the published version of the novel, the granting organization has changed: instead of institutional funding from the U S A , the money comes from Mrs Minnie Foresight, an elderly English widow. It is only at the end of the novel, when the Foresight grants have been stolen by an Italian missionary linguist, Father Gemini, that Pym turns across the Atlantic again, closing the novel with Felix Byron Mainwaring, the director of the Library, setting off hopefully, but without a guarantee of success, on an American tour to raise funds. Why would Pym turn the American grant – matching the reality of the International African Institute on which the Africa Library of the novel is evidently based – into the donation of an individual English widow? Especially when we find in the archives of the I A I (housed at the London School of Economics) a printed report sent to the Rockefeller Foundation in 1939 making clear that Rockefeller-funded research “has been the Institute’s primary concern during the last eight years,” along with numerous documents and correspondence concerning the grants made to the institute by the Ford and Carnegie foundations to support fieldwork in Africa and the publications that resulted from it in the 33

Jed Esty, A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 2004). 34 M S Pym 16, fol. 1, Barbara Pym Papers, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.

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1950s.35 Pym, we know from the letters preserved in her papers to her long-

time publisher Jonathan Cape, was extremely keen to find an American publisher for her novels: was she emphasizing the ‘little England’ quality of her writing in an attempt to appeal to Americans keen to consume cosy versions of England? Or was the decision to downplay the transatlantic culture of anthropology in Less than Angels a sign of a more general British discomfort with American cultural and economic power after World War Two, a discomfort represented elsewhere in the novel by one of the student applicants for the Foresight fieldwork grants, Mark, who worries that in West Africa the roar of lions will be replaced by the roar of the high-powered motor-car of one of the urbanized anthropologists […] New travel books will have titles like Through Yorubaland in a Cadillac rather than the good old First Footsteps kind of thing?36

This professional and national discomfort with the rise of U S ‘soft power’ – cultural, social, and educational influence – in the postwar moment has its flipside in expressions of fascination with the allure of Americans and American culture, hinted at in Pym’s novel by the “suppressed giggle” of a young woman Barbara when Mainwaring mentions that U S soldiers were stationed in her village during the war.37 Just as George Lamming argued at the same time about the new West Indian novelists in English, the British novel in English in the era of decolonization does not make sense unless we think about the place of ‘America’ in it. However, as a supplement to Lamming’s sense that the styles of Melville, Whitman, and Twain were crucial influences on Caribbean literature, I am suggesting that some time looking at the institutional arrangements of organizations like the I A I – or the two high-profile conferences organized at Kenyon College in Ohio on “The Heritage of the English-Speaking Peoples and Their Responsibilities” in the late 1940s (where Lionel Trilling first delivered his essay “Manners, Morals, and the Novel”) – would add some fine35

“Report Presented to the Rockefeller Foundation on the Work of the Institute” (1939), fol. 2, I A I 8/17, Papers of the International African Institute, London School of Economics Library, Archives and Rare Books. Correspondence and accounts relating to the Ford and Carnegie grants can be found in I A I 7 and I A I 35. 36 Barbara Pym, Less than Angels (1955; Kingston R I : Moyer Bell, n.d. [2008]): 214–15. 37 Pym, Less than Angels, 203.

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grained detail and material texture to our understanding of the new literatures in English in the second half of the twentieth century.38 In my teaching, I have found increasingly that my postcolonial literature classes need to include more and more texts focused on, or significantly engaging with, the contemporary U S A – Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss, Edwidge Danticat’s fiction and non-fiction, Aravind Adiga’s White Tiger, Chris Abani’s GraceLand, and many others. However, a transatlantic framework lets us see that it is not just the fiction of the last ten or fifteen years – the era of globalization – that puts the U S A at the centre of fiction for which ‘world literature’ is perhaps becoming a more useful category than ‘postcolonial’. From Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones to Bessie Head’s short story “The Woman from America” and to the novels of Barbara Pym, the fiction of the era of decolonization consistently represented and referred to the transatlantic connections that were so central to the story of the end of European territorial empires, in both direct and indirect ways. In the end, then, I am suggesting that the most fruitful avenues of research inquiry will be those that peer over, if not cross, field, discipline, geographical, and period boundaries. It was a pleasure – and an invaluable learning experience – to be part of an A S N E L conference that sought to combine the study of postcolonial literature with research on the history of transatlantic slavery. Postcolonial studies and Atlantic studies will not always mesh smoothly together, of course, but their intersections and the models they offer to each other have been, and I think will continue to be, mutually enriching. I look forward to seeing the new directions these fields take, separately and together, over the next decade, from Hannover to Miami, from Havana to Luanda, from Halifax to São Paolo, and all points in between.

WORKS CITED Anon. Hamel, the Obeah Man, 2 vols. (London: Hunt & Clarke, 1827). Baucom, Ian. Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (Durham N C : Duke U P , 2005). 38

Lionel Trilling, “Manners, Morals, and the Novel,” in The Heritage of the English-Speaking Peoples and Their Responsibility: Addresses at the Conference, September 1947, Kenyon College (Gambier O H : Kenyon College, 1948): 222–36. A revised, and better-known version of the essay appears in Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society (New York: Viking, 1950).

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Davis, David Brion. The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (1975; New York: Oxford U P , 1999). Drescher, Seymour & Pieter C. Emmer, ed. Who Abolished Slavery? Slave Revolts and Abolitionism, a Debate with João Pedro Marques (New York: Berghahn, 2010). Esty, Jed. A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 2004). Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 1993). Great Britain. Parliamentary Papers (House of Commons) 66.X X V (1825), “Papers Relating to the Manumission, Government, and Population of Slaves in the West Indies, 1822–1824,” Part V I I , “Copy of All Judicial Proceedings Relative to the Trial and Punishment of Rebels, or Alleged Rebels, in the Island of Jamaica, Since the 1st of January 1823; with the Previous Information, the Minutes of Evidence, and the Final Fate of the Prisoners.” Hart, Richard. Slaves Who Abolished Slavery: Blacks in Rebellion (Mona, Jamaica: U of the West Indies P , 2002). Hoffer, Peter Charles. Cry Liberty: The Great Stono River Slave Rebellion of 1739 (New York: Oxford U P , 2010). International Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World, 1500–1825 (Cambridge M A : Harvard University, 24 February 2011), http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~atlantic (accessed 6 January 2012). Johnson, Michael P . “Denmark Vesey and His Co-Conspirators,” William and Mary Quarterly third series, 58.4 (2001): 915–76. Lamming, George. The Pleasures of Exile (1960; Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P , 1992). Linebaugh, Peter & Marcus Rediker. The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston M A : Beacon, 2000). Marsden, Peter H. “Lots in a Name,” A C O L I T 69: 27–29, http://www.gnel.de/acolit /Acolit69-Gesamttext.pdf (accessed 2 June 2013). Parliamentary Debates, new series, vol. X I I I (London: Hansard, 1826). Pym, Barbara. Less than Angels (1955; Kingston R I : Moyer Bell, n.d. [2008]). ——. M S Pym 16, fol. 1, Barbara Pym Papers, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. “Report Presented to the Rockefeller Foundation on the Work of the Institute” (1939), fol. 2, I A I 8/17, Papers of the International African Institute, London School of Economics Library, Archives and Rare Books. Salamone, Frank A. “The International African Institute: The Rockefeller Foundation and the Development of British Social Anthropology in Africa,” Transforming Anthropology 9.1 (2000): 19–29. Shuler, Jack. Calling Out Liberty: The Stono Slave Rebellion and the Universal Struggle for Human Rights (Jackson: U P of Mississippi, 2009).

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Stilz, Gerhard. “Any Business of Ours? Some German Reflections on the Purposes and Priorities of Studying the New Literatures in English,” in Imagination and the Creative Impulse in the New Literatures in English, ed. Maria Teresa Bindella & Geoffrey V. Davis (Cross / Cultures 9; Amsterdam & Atlanta G A : Rodopi, 1993): 25–40. Stocking, George W., Jr. “The Pattern of Boas’ Fieldwork,” in The Shaping of American Anthropology, 1883–1911: A Franz Boas Reader, ed. George W. Stocking Jr. (New York: Basic Books, 1974): 83–86. Stummer, Peter O., & Christopher Balme, ed. Fusion of Cultures? (Cross / Cultures 26, A S N E L Papers 2; Amsterdam & Atlanta G A : Rodopi, 1996). Tan, Kathy–Ann. “‘What’s in a Name?’ Panel at the G N E L /A S N E L annual conference in Berne, Switzerland, 2012,” A C O L I T 69: 26–27, http://www.gnel.de /acolit/Acolit69-Gesamttext.pdf (accessed 2 June 2013). Trilling, Lionel. The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society (New York: Viking, 1950). ——. “Manners, Morals, and the Novel,” in The Heritage of the English-Speaking Peoples and Their Responsibility: Addresses at the Conference, September 1947, Kenyon College (Gambier O H : Kenyon College, 1948): 222–36. Watson, Tim, ed. “Atlantic Narratives,” special issue of Clio: A Journal of Literature, History, and the Philosophy of History 40.1 (2010). ——. Caribbean Culture and British Fiction in the Atlantic World, 1780–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2008). White, Hayden. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore M D : Johns Hopkins U P , 1973). Williams, Cynric R. Hamel, the Obeah Man, ed. Candace Ward & Tim Watson (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 2010). ——. A Tour through the Island of Jamaica, from the Western to the Eastern End, in the Year 1823 (London: Hunt & Clarke, 1826).

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Postcolonial Textiles — Negotiating Dialogue

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– considering the ability of the textile to capture and convey cultural, national, and individual identity – that textiles have enjoyed little attention in postcolonial studies. This essay will consider what the American artist Elaine Reichek has referred to as the “politics of thread.”1 By this I mean debates about gender, skill, and the domestic that contribute, consciously or subconsciously, to our expectation of the textile’s meaning, used here with particular attention to themes of the postcolonial. Within the hierarchies of power that rule the visual arts, textiles are often experienced as a marginal discipline. The market value of art made in cloth tends to be lower than that made with the conventional materials of fine art, such as the framed canvas of painting. This is ironic, when we remember that painting for the most part resides on a textile; the painter’s canvas is cloth. But the familiarity, be it of the canvases under conventional paintings or, more commonly, the textiles that clothe our bodies and domestic lives, means that they are ultimately common. This familiarity means that textiles tend to be overlooked, rather than scrutinized.2 This essay will attempt to counter this with a close reading of visual art created by Elaine Reichek, Yinka Shonibare, Susan Stockwell, Nicholas Hlobo, and, most recently, Studio Formafantasma, and their works that address themes of the postcolonial through the textile. Writing of the 2005 exhibition Beyond Desire held at the ModeMuseum in Antwerp, Belgium, Zoe Whitley refers to the commercial motivations of the 1

T IS CURIOUS

Elaine Reichek, telephone interview with author (12 October 2011). See also Jessica Hemmings, “Material Meaning,” Wasafiri 25.3 (September 2010): 38. 2

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fashion industry to co-opt certain types of visual culture, particularly for their exotic associations. She observes: “difference, artisanal craftsmanship and indigenous traditions are all mobilized as types of aesthetic colonialism.”3 What I see Whitley observe is fashion’s appropriation of the material surface, hollowed out as fashion is so expert in achieving, and separated from original intentions. In the examples discussed in this essay, I look at a number of artistic practices that work in another way: the textile is used to capture hybridity and communicate the complexities of postcolonial identities. I would like to suggest that the works of Reichek, Shonibare, Stockwell, Hlobo, and Studio Formafantasma may be understood as offering us an aesthetic of postcolonialism. I am aware that my observations may already feel out of date to readers, even out of step with the current priorities of postcolonial studies and an interest in moving beyond the postcolonial moment, particularly in terms of analysis of current global production and trade. This, too, is a crucial and overdue dialogue where textiles are and should be considered. But I will, for the moment, attempt to pause and test the inclusion of a number of visual art practices in our understanding of the postcolonial. Here the textile is used as a material of artistic practice, rather than as functional design. To separate the two any further is self-defeating, as it is in many cases the potential for function that assists the textile in commenting on the lived complexities of personal and national identity and history. The literary roots of postcolonial studies mean that debates about voice and, crucially, voicelessness are familiar concerns. But it may be worth asking if it is fair to ‘read’ the textile in the same way that we might treat a piece of postcolonial literature. On the one hand, text and textile share numerous linguistic connections. It has, for example, been noted by scholars that the root of the word ‘text’ is shared with ‘textile’, essentially ‘to weave’.4 The construction of texts share similarities with that of the textile. By this I mean the building up of small increments (words, threads) into a larger whole (sentences, paragraphs, cloth). As a result, there is a structural familiarity between the two disciplines that has been explored by scholars who observe that the knowledge of one discipline may then be transferred to another. Elaine Show3

Zoe Whitley, “Craving the Exotic,” in Beyond Desire, ed. Kaat Debo (Ghent: Ludion, 2005): 82. 4 See Kathryn Sullivan Kruger, “Clues and Cloth: Seeking Ourselves in ‘The Fabric of Myth’,” in The Fabric of Myth (Warwickshire: Compton Verney, 2008): 12–14.

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alter, for example, likens the patterns of various quilting traditions in North America to the rise of the short story written by women and suggests that a confidence in one creative task may have informed the structures adopted as women moved from one familiar creative act (quilting) into an unfamiliar one (the rise of the short story).5 To my mind, textiles do thrive under close reading in much the same way as a text can. The closer you look, the more detail you see, and the more information tumbles out. In some cases, such as Reichek’s samplers, the textile literally contains text on its surface and can be ‘read’ as literature is read. But it would be unwise to adopt this as the only approach to understanding the messages contained in Reichek’s work, or in any other textile, for that matter. For instance, decisions regarding the design and production of textiles are often informed by touch. This value draws something of a short straw in the optical priorities of our world today. We tend to believe what we read. After that, we at least want to see the message at hand. But touch the message? Touch (and taste /smell for that matter) enjoys little foothold in our contemporary communication. (They are, incidentally, wholly absent from the webbased world of Internet communication.) While the textile does deserve, even thrives, on close reading, this ‘reading’ should be understood as more than textual. Words on cloth deserve scrutiny. But so do the particular materials and construction methods, installation, and presentational decisions. Paul Sharrad offers a sage reminder of the challenges that may lie ahead when ‘reading’ the textile alone as a text: It is not just a matter of avoiding mixed metaphors, but of attending to specific meanings, social histories and differences of value. Decolonising literatures is/are a complex enough phenomenon; if we bring in other heuristic devices to help us more clearly understand, we had best be as sure as possible we’re not clouding the project even more.6

With Sharrad’s warning taken to heart, I have selected a number of examples of visual art created over the past two decades that engage with ideas of the postcolonial. These examples have been chosen because of their use of cloth, and references to cloth, in tackling postcolonial ideas. Rather than use the textile for its functional potential, these artists situate their material practices 5

See Elaine Showalter, “Piecing and Writing,” in The Poetics of Gender, ed. Nancy K. Miller (New York: Columbia U P , 1986): 222–47. 6 Paul Sharrad, “Introduction: (Un)fabric/ating Empire,” New Literatures Review 36 (Winter 2000): 1–2.

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in the gallery and promote reflection on ideas about identity, hybridity, and the systems of power – such as museums – that hold our visual records of the past. I will attempt to pay particular attention to material differences that these examples provide and, as Sharrad astutely warns, treat each with necessary specificity.

Elaine Reichek The American artist Elaine Reichek has likened textiles to the “subaltern of the art world.”7 Over the past three decades, Reichek’s practice has used knitting and embroidery, often while making references across material boundaries to painting, photography, and literature. She describes her interest in textiles as driven by an attraction to a “non-rarefied quality. It doesn’t drag white western male identity with it.”8 Initially for Reichek, this white male identity referred to the establishment of fine art. The textile provided a route to questioning formal considerations surrounding the production of art. As Reichek explains, The reason I began to use thread – a disembodied line – was because it pierced the support. If you made a picture from embroidery, construction was made evident behind the support.9

The fact that the textile is the painting’s canvas, the support that underpins Western art history, feels somewhat ironic today when the boundaries between what is art and craft continue, even in this inter- or trans-disciplinary moment, to be fiercely policed. With these formal concerns in mind, Reichek reflects that the “politics of thread was not conscious for me until my first show.”10 Debates about the place of the domestic, handcraft, and gender – essentially the marginal nature of the textile within the broader value-system of visual culture – may not have been at the forefront of the artist’s mind when she set out to work with textiles, but they have become central to her practice. Her choice of embroidery samplers, for example, makes inescapable reference to the tradition of samplers used in Europe, Britain, and North America to teach young girls basic spelling and arithmetic, while honing their sewing skills. Reichek’s appro7

Reichek, telephone interview with author (12 October 2011). Reichek, telephone interview. 9 Reichek, telephone interview. 10 Reichek, telephone interview. 8

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priation of the format responds to these expectations, but revises the content to include alternative messages that reflect on cultural expectations about identity. As the artist explains, the textile “allows for a kind of seduction, a confrontation which is extremely ambitious although it uses a veil of modesty.”11 The sampler is always, initially, non-threatening. This first impression comes in handy when used to lull the viewer into a false sense of security that can lead to ideas that may otherwise be met with resistance. Throughout her work, Reichek uses the textile to help scrutinize alternative cultural perspectives. For example, her 1992 exhibition Home Rule at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin uses photographic and textile works to consider the history of British colonization of the Irish and Native Americans. She explains that her interests behind the project are in “the way dominant culture constructs ‘the Other’ through images and packaging that stereotype colonised subjects and encourage them to stereotype and objectify themselves.”12 Working from a catalogue-ordered craft kit, the artist stitched Ten Little Indians (Figure 1), an installation of ten child-size American-Indian waistcoats displayed on miniature hangers plus the original, now framed, paper pattern and pictures of the artist’s family in fancy dress as American Indians. The waistcoats line the gallery wall in one long row of what initially may look to be uniform, but slowly reveal the differences and discrepancies of the individual costumes constructed by hand. Ten Little Indians provides us with a number of entry-points: culture is consumable, making costume and simulacra difficult to differentiate from the ‘real’; culture is both individual and repeatable, entirely unique in its hand construction, while simultaneously for sale with the purpose of reproduction. Rather than establish a distance from which she observes, or even critiques, the erosion of culture, Reichek points out that the craft kits are not solely intended for foreign consumption. It’s interesting, actually, that Native Americans use this stuff too, for powwows. It’s not just the white people. There’s a kind of ‘instant Indian’ thing – anyone can do it. You can make anything you want with these kits.13 11

Reichek, telephone interview. Elaine Reichek, “Home Rule: 1992,” Elaine Reichek, http://elainereichek.com /Project_Pages/11_HomeRule/HomeRule.htm (accessed 8 January 2012). 13 Therese Lichtenstein, “An Interview with Elaine Reichek,” Journal of Contemporary Art (Winter 1993), 92–107, http://www.jca-online.com/reichek.html (accessed 8 January 2012). 12

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The Home Rule exhibition also contained Whitewash (Galway Cottage) (Figure 2), consisting of an ethnographic photograph of a traditional Irish cottage displayed beside a knitted replica of the dwelling. The knitted version is inverted, with the thatched roof below the dwelling, but also chromatically, so that white becomes black and black white in what essentially acts as a ‘negative’ version of the original. These distortions suggest a garment rather than a home, but it is a home emptied of function: a knitted cottage impossible to inhabit in its upside-down condition. As a result, it contains nothing and can offer little by way of protection. The artist foregrounds a further reading when she explains that the knitted replica severs the image from its cultural context and meaning (as documentary photographs also can) and summons the figure of ‘Mother Ireland’ and the common accusation that Irish patriots hid behind the skirts of women during the struggle for independence.14

Hidden in the pleats of the skirt/cottage, Reichek leaves us with alternative narratives to ponder. Any reading of protection or, more precisely, the absence of protection shifts from the literal to the metaphorical. This shift is crucial to the existence of the multiple narratives contained within Reichek’s textiles. Her decision to rework photographic imagery in knitting pokes fun at the ‘seriousness’ of supposedly non-biased records of the past, as well as assumptions surrounding what we understand knitting to convey. Works from the Tierra del Fuegians series (1986–87) are made of knitted costumes based on photographs of Indians from the islands off the southern tip of South America where the population died out by the 1940s. The textile plays an unfortunate role in the island’s history as a carrier of illhealth. Reichek explains: Christian missionaries there gave them clothing and blankets. They hadn’t worn any clothes before that – they’d just oiled and painted their bodies. The missionaries didn’t go for that. It’s a horrible climate, very harsh, very rainy, and I’m sure the missionaries thought they were doing something good, though I’m also sure it had something to do with shame as well. In any case, the clothing had germs in it to which they had no resistance. Also, it got wet. They’d survived for centuries without clothes; with clothes, they were cold. They died of upper respiratory diseases, measles, pneumonia.15 14 15

Reichek, “Home Rule: 1992.” Lichtenstein, “An Interview with Elaine Reichek.”

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Yellow Man and his colleagues Red Man and Gray Man (Figures 3–5) are impossible costumes to inhabit. Each lacks a physical entry-point for the potential user and is distorted, much like Whitewash, by the weight of its own fabrication. Here Reichek’s costumes could even be read as memorials. They are hermetic replicas of a now lost culture based on curiously empty sources. As Jo Anna Isaak observes, the process of transcoding or reweaving of texts reveals the bias of the original fabrication, what in fact the anthropological and ethnographic accounts have tried to cover up – the body of the text or, rather, the bodies of the natives.16

Writing about the Native Intelligence exhibition, Isaak interprets the artist’s translations of photographs into knitting as a way to highlight the absurdity of both endeavours: There is a flagrant and funny feminism weaving in and around Reichek’s reworking of ethnographic, anthropological and museum practices. It is manifest most overtly in the female-identified medium of knitting, which she uses to reproduce documentary photographs of native peoples and their dwellings. Knitting is an ‘inappropriate’ tool for this purpose – so unscientific, one of those typical feminine misunderstandings, as if some dotty old woman had gone on an anthropological expedition equipped with wool and knitting needles instead of camera and notebook.17

Reichek harnesses the sense of marginalization that the textile experiences within the larger hierarchy of visual culture as a way to critique the seeming authority of the photographer and the photograph that have come before her. Isaak is less inclined to this reading, noting instead that Native Intelligence is not about the failure of the museum to produce “truth,” or an objective account of other peoples. Nor is it about first world culpability. Rather this is a text about textuality, about fabrication and about our imbrication in our own fabrications.18

Instead of accusations, Isaak reads intricacies. It seems possible to allow both interpretations to coexist. Reichek’s work does pass comment on the failure of the photographic archive as a collection of cultural knowledge. Photography, so often used to record the ‘truth’, misses the point. The knitted simulacra 16

Jo Anna Isaak, “Who’s ‘We’, White Man?” Parkett 34 (1992): 145. Isaak, “Who’s ‘We’, White Man?” 144. 18 “Who’s ‘We’, White Man?” 143. 17

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critique the seeming authenticity of the photograph, by suggesting that neither is particularly accurate. The textile may be understood to act as something of a Trojan horse smuggling across these difficult and complex stories. The innocent façade is part of the plan. But so, too, is an enormous investment in the physical act of making. In an interview with Therese Lichtenstein, Reichek explains at length: So if I present two separate versions of reality, mine and the photographer’s, I’m asking the question, What’s real. It’s really a very simple question. But the way the work operates physically, on a tactile level, means that my knitted replication is in some ways more real: it’s out there in your space, it has body, some kind of presence that photography conspicuously lacks. Yet the photograph comes with a kind of a reality tag attached to it, in part because it appears, perhaps too convincingly, to have isolated a certain moment in time. That’s something else that interests me – the moment a photo takes to make, as opposed to the long, labor-intensive process of knitting […]. So I kind of like it when people ask me how long it took me to knit this or that. It means the element of time has come up in their reading, some idea that this is not an instant reproduction.19

The very nature of textile production reveals a sense of intention. If something is going to take a long time to make, it is unlikely that the ideas it contains are flippant or accidental. If something is produced swiftly, intention may or may not be present. This is not to say that labour in and of itself creates meaning, but it is harder to dismiss meaning from an object that has considerable time invested in its creation. In 1992, Susan Goodman from the Jewish Museum in New York approached Reichek and asked, “Done anything Jewish?” The artist explains: What was startling, at least to me, was the fact that I had never even considered working with any issues around Jewish identity. When Susan left I filed “Jewish” in the catacombs of the psyche and went on reading about Native Americans, Fuegians, and Ireland’s Easter Rebellion. Of course, the idea could not stay entombed, and the result was A Postcolonial Kinderhood, an installation re-creating my childhood bedroom.20 19

Lichtenstein, “An Interview with Elaine Reichek.” Elaine Reichek, “A Postcolonial Kinderhood: 1984,” Elaine Reichek, http://elaine reichek.com/Project_Pages/9_Postcolonial/PostcolonialKinderhood.htm (accessed 8 January 2012). 20

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The project (Figures 6–9) uses material far closer to home than explored in the artist’s previous works. Reichek refers to her childhood in Brooklyn and memories of a large Dutch Colonial house “full of reproduction Early American furniture”21 and concedes, of her family’s aspirations, “we were a bunch of Mayflower wannabes.”22 There is little sense of comfort offered up by the installation, which re-creates her childhood bedroom with furniture on a reduced scale to capture “an environment that I hope felt melancholy, unsettled, and out of kilter.”23 Distances between bed and mirror, for example, feel too great – as though every step must be motivated by feats of bravery and determination to travel across large empty expanses. Cosy this bedroom is not. The life of a middle-class Jewish girl from Brooklyn, I saw, encompassed the same sorts of ambiguities of belonging that the cultural theoretician Homi Bhabha has ascribed to cultures “in-between” – those “produced in the articulation of cultural differences.”24

Here the artist’s childhood bedroom feels like the site of surveillance, the policing of manners and measured movements rather than childhood freedoms, all caught in an impossible cultural trap of neither one nor the other. Reichek reflects on the silence that accompanied her family’s Jewish identity and the importance placed on taste, referred to as a gesture of ‘passing’ (more commonly used in reference to African Americans who ‘passed’ as white members of their community) as a way of signalling their American identity. The result is a site with all the necessary components to signify a bedroom, but without any sense of security or warmth. The mattress is wafer-thin. The bed made only with sheets. The white linen towels clean enough to cause worry if used. Even the rag rugs are displayed with an unnerving attention to symmetry and edited down to coordinated hues of cream and light brown, rather than the riot of clashing colours that a rag rug made by recycling would produce. The samplers that adorn the walls bring some visual variety to the setting, but do not contain the familiar ‘home sweet home’ proverbs we are conditioned to anticipate. Instead, comments the artist overheard from Jewish family and friends are stitched into the samplers. Some deliver unexpected humour: “If you think you can be a little bit Jewish, you think you can be a

21

Reichek, “A Postcolonial Kinderhood: 1984.” Lichtenstein, “An Interview with Elaine Reichek.” 23 Reichek, “A Postcolonial Kinderhood: 1984.” 24 “A Postcolonial Kinderhood: 1984.” 22

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little bit pregnant…”25 But even here humour is tinged with a weight, an unspoken expectation of appropriate demeanour. Others are more alarming in tone: “I used to fall asleep every night thinking of places to hide when the S S came. I never thought this was in the least bit strange.”26 As a whole, the installation initially connotes stability and comfort, but façades are shown to be misleading and discomfort runs close beneath the surface. From sources in her own culture, as well as those far afield and, in the case of Tierra del Fuego, long lost, Reichek scrutinizes our material records. She finds absurdities, both gross and minor, that she magnifies through material reinterpretation, causing a pause in information too often accepted at face value.

Yinka Shonibare The British-born Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare has made batik cloth the trademark of his artistic practice. Shonibare’s work typically involves installations of headless individuals, often dressed in Victorian-style fashion reworked in boldly patterned and coloured wax resist cloth. Since the mid1990s, his work has depicted clothed copulating couples, aliens, ballerinas, and the sails of slave ships all reworked in wax resist cloth. The artist explains his choice of materials as follows: The fabrics are signifiers, if you like, of ‘Africanness’ insofar as when people first view the fabric they think Africa. When I was at college in London my work was very political. I was making work about the emergence of perestroika [restructuring] in the then Soviet Union and I was also quite intrigued by the idea of the Cold War coming to an end. However my tutor, upon seeing this work, said to me: ‘You are African aren’t you; why don’t you make authentic African art?’ I was quite taken aback by this but it was through the process of thinking about authenticity that I started to wonder about what the signifiers of such an ‘authentic’ Africaness would look like.27

Shonibare’s choice of wax resist cloth is highly deliberate. Curiously, it is prompted by a similar line of questioning that Reichek recalls leading to the 25

Elaine Reichek, http://elainereichek.com/Project_Pages/9_Postcolonial/Sampler(Jesse Reichek).htm (accessed 8 January 2012). 26 Reichek, http://www.elainereichek.com/Project_Pages/9_Postcolonial/Samplers (ER_JohnPEngel).htm (accessed 8 January 2012). 27 Anthony Downey, “Setting the Stage: Yinka Shonibare in Conversation with Anthony Downey,” in Yinka Shonibare M B E (London: Prestel, 2008): 39.

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creation of the Postcolonial Kinderhood, essentially an external expectation of engagement with the artist’s personal identity. As John Picton explains, his [Shonibare’s] work is generally concerned (among other things) with the deconstruction of stereotypes and essentialized identities, most especially those of black and African people in the so-called West that persist within the three-fold legacy of racism, slavery, and colonialism.28

Reichek deployed the textile to cast doubt on authenticity, of the information photography records (and misses), of what the surfaces of affluent furniture are trying to suggest and lay claim to, and by embedding alternative voices in the narratives of embroidery samplers. In Shonibare’s case, wax resist cloth is a tradition that multiple cultures lay claim to originating. Because of this, it, too, provides an articulate critique of the notion that any identity, human or material, can be narrowed down to a single source. The Javanese islands of what is now present-day Indonesia have a particularly refined tradition of wax resist cloth production, referred to as batik. During Dutch colonization of the region, batik production was taken up in Holland, as well as by other textile manufacturing centres such as Manchester, England, initially for trade with the Indonesian market. There are several explanations for the failure of this plan. Commonly held is the idea that the Dutch batik was inferior to that made in Indonesia and the local market rejected the cloth on aesthetic grounds. Picton explains: the Indonesians rejected the Dutch fabrics because of the unacceptable quality of their veining and spotting, but these very imperfections found favor on the colonial African Gold Coast.29

Robert Hobb has suggested that the cloth manufactured in Holland and Manchester was not rejected by the Indonesian market only on aesthetic grounds, but because “the Indonesian Dutch government protected local productions by imposing stiff tariffs, thus forcing Vlisco and other Dutch companies to develop markets elsewhere, including Africa, which became Vlisco’s major focus.”30

28

John Picton, “Undressing Ethnicity,” African Arts 34.4 (Autumn 2001): 66. Picton, “Undressing Ethnicity,” 67. 30 Robert Hobbs, “Yinka Shonibare M B E : The Politics of Representation,” in Rachel Kent, Robert Hobbs & Anthony Downey, Yinka Shonibare M B E (London: Prestel, 2008): 29. 29

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It was originally aimed at consumers in the Dutch East Indies (presentday Indonesia), but proved more popular in central and western Africa, and so companies quickly tailored their designs accordingly. Vlisco was and remains the market leader with its patented Wax Hollandais fabric. “It’s made in the Netherlands yet Africans feel like it’s their product, which is magical,” says Vlisco’s Ester Huigen.31

Either way, the imported version was not successful with the Indonesian market and instead found a home further up the Dutch trading route in West Africa. Filip De Boeck and Césarine Bolya note: In the late 19th century, it [wax resist cloth] found its way into Africa on a grand scale. As a hybrid product, partly from earlier Dutch colonial influence in West Africa and partly through Ghanaian soldiers who had served under the Dutch in Indonesia and become acquainted with the Javanese sarong and batik printing, the wax print first captured the West African coasts and then rapidly gained in popularity in other parts of the African continent. Although these wax prints were also industrially produced in such major manufacturing centres as Manchester and Liverpool, the Dutch manufacturers were the ones who succeeded in winning over the African market.32

Today wax resist cloth is a symbol of national pride associated with independence of the West African nations gained in the late 1950s through the 1970s, but this, too, is a ‘new’ tradition. Shonibare courts this sense of complex and indeterminate authenticity in his practice, dressing headless sculptures of unspecific race (the mannequins’ skin-tone is not white and not black) in garments that refuse to suggest one clear cultural lineage or loyalty. As can be seen in The Victorian Philanthropist’s Parlour (Figures 10–11), the wax resist Shonibare chooses to use often includes the veining and spotting that may have encouraged the Indonesian market to reject the Dutch version of wax resist cloth. From a designer’s perspective, this material poses a difficult combination of information, striking my eye at least as lacking in quality. But to conclude with this interpretation, as I must confess I once did, is to miss the point entirely and to not ‘read’ the complex history of trade and exchange the artist refers to precisely through his choice of cloth. Further complicating the 31

Helen Jennings, New African Fashion (London: Prestel, 2011): 9. Filip De Boeck and Césarine Bolya, “Fashion in the African Metropolis,” in Philipp Pirotte, Carol Tulloch, Zoe Whitley, Filip De Boeck & Césarine Bolya. Beyond Desire (Ghent: Ludion, 2005): 109. 32

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history of this textile, Shonibare’s source of cloth today comes from the multicultural area of Brixton market in the south of London.33 Shonibare explains: When you realize that [African-print textiles] are designed and produced by people in Dutch and English factories, then that completely destroys the methodology of this seductive African thing. Therefore it is important that I don’t go to Africa to buy them, so that all African exotic implications remain fake.34

Mr and Mrs Andrews Without Their Heads (Figure 12) is taken from a Thomas Gainsborough painting from 1750. The English painter Gainsborough originally painted the couple with their heads of course, and the backdrop of land that confirmed their wealth and status. Shonibare takes off the couple’s heads and erases their comfortable backdrop. He concedes to allow the hunting dog to remain at the master’s heel, but otherwise the pair is stripped of the land that secured their wealth and therefore identity. The removal of heads is a tactic deployed throughout the artist’s work. Alongside allusions to the guillotine, beheading his characters also leaves his sculptures’ identities open-ended. Who are we looking at? Could it be you, or me? The gesture renders each of his installations peculiarly generic, in the same way as his choice of indeterminate skin-tone makes race vague. Shonibare explains: In the contemporary world, Gainsborough’s painting is an anachronism of sorts insofar as a man stands next to his wife, dog and gun – in no particular order – and displays the extent of his land ownership in the background. The view of his estate in the background indicates a society where reverence, if not deference, is absolute. This painting is first and foremost a celebration of deference and I want to deflate that somehow.35

In Scramble for Africa (Figure 13), fourteen headless male figures are seated around a table on which rests a map of the African continent. Even headless, their crowded body language suggests the animation of the moment. Each individual shares a style of dress that has been reworked in bright wax resist textiles with little to reveal national or cultural allegiance. This may in part be the point. Scramble for Africa is, in Shonibare’s words, 33

Downey, “Setting the Stage,” 39. Quoted in Rachel Kent, “Time and Transformation in the Art of Yinka Shonibare M B E ,” in Rachel Kent, Robert Hobbs & Anthony Downey, Yinka Shonibare M B E (London: Prestel, 2008): 12. 35 Quoted in Downey, “Setting the Stage,” 40. 34

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about people having a conference about a continent that was not theirs and deciding how they are going to divide it up without any form of consultation with those who would be most affected – the Africans.36

This is the same moment in history, the Berlin Conference of 1884–85, that Wole Soyinka has likened to a blood-stained quilt: One hundred years ago, at the Berlin Conference, the colonial powers met to divvy up their interests into states, lumping various tribes together in some places, or slicing them apart in others like some demented tailor who paid no attention to the fabric, colour or pattern of the quilt he was patching together.37

Either way – blood-stained quilt or fancy-dress party – the historical moment is captured for the alarmingly arbitrary nature of the dialogue that went on to have a decisive impact on the lives of an entire continent. In 2005, the Cooper–Hewitt, National Design Museum in New York City, a branch of the Smithsonian Institution devoted to design, invited Shonibare to be a guest curator. He responded to the museum’s extensive archive with a selection of objects that “addressed themes of transportation, imperialism, tourism, and cultural change.”38 Accompanying the exhibition drawn from the archive were two new works by Shonibare, a forceful pair of sculptures depicting two women on six-foot-tall stilts. Three Hewitt sisters, granddaughters of the industrialist Peter Cooper, founded the museum in 1897. Shonibare’s Figure of Eleanor Hewitt and Figure of Sarah Hewitt (Figures 14–15) move two of these sisters onto teetering stilts. In doing so, Shonibare alludes to the problematic provenance of many museum collections. Curiously, Shonibare’s own description of the works he created for the Cooper–Hewitt exhibition somewhat dilute a critical reading of their meaning when he explains that the sculptures refer to the “Hewitt sister’s superiority over their contemporaries in terms of their taste and adventurous spirit.”39 This may indeed be true, but, placed on what could be read as extreme pedestals, looming large above the crowds, all the while peering at the world through spectacles, the figures leave

36

Downey, “Setting the Stage,” 41. Wole Soyinka, “The Blood-Soaked Quilt of Africa,” The Guardian (17 May 1994): 20. 38 “Yinka Shonibare Selects: Works from the Permanent Collection” (15 July 2005), http://www.cooperhewitt.org/press/exhibition-press-materials (accessed 17 January 2012). 39 “Yinka Shonibare Selects: Works from the Permanent Collection.” 37

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ample room for a reading that questions the connection between collector, collection, and provenance. As Reichek pokes fun at the ethnographer’s photographs by reworking them in knitting to show up the treatment of human beings as objects of curiosity, so does Shonibare re-create the long-distance focus that gathered many of our museum archives. The Hewitt sisters are, frankly, above it all. Propped on stilts, observing life from a sanitized distance, they are cast as distant and untouchable. Even Sarah’s spectacles, difficult to balance on a headless woman, are carried on a stick, the better to keep things out of focus that aren’t part of the narrative desired. Here Reichek and Shonibare share a number of strategies, the most overt perhaps being what Picton quotes Shonibare as calling his “ ‘deliberate denial of the authentic’.”40 The textile, which is with us every day, in such mundane familiarity, works for both artists to overturn the expectation of historical ‘truth’ and a narrow notion of a singular cultural identity.

Susan Stockwell The British artist Susan Stockwell makes use of familiar materials, often used in repetition, to tackle postcolonial themes. Coffee filters, rubber, paper currency – materials that allude to the physical excess of our contemporary lives – appear in re-creations of maps and dresses that refer to colonial-era expansion and trade. As the art critic Anat Rosenberg observes, Stockwell’s works are indeed accumulations of the debris of everyday life. However they conjure up additional implications of accumulation, the strongest being the desire to appropriate everything from luxury goods to land to people. And in mapping out her chosen locations, Stockwell reminds us of the cost of this far-flung impulse.41

Pattern of the World (Figure 16) makes use of a paper dressmaking pattern of stained tea, reconfigured into a Mercator map of the world. It provides us with yet another version of the scramble for Africa, not blood-soaked as Soyinka sees it, nor disembodied as Shonibare’s table of headless men, but poignant nonetheless. “Shorten or lengthen here,” instructions to adapt the pattern to the wearer’s size, coincide with the tip of the African continent to provide yet another interpretation of the arbitrary madness that went into the creation of 40

Picton, “Undressing Ethnicity,” 66 (comment by Shonibare, 1992). Anat Rosenberg, “Susan Stockwell: Accumulations, Thomas Korzelius Fine Art, New York,” Art on Paper 4.6 (July–August 2000): 60. 41

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the contemporary African map. Stockwell seems to be telling us that skirts can be lengthened and shortened. Continents cannot, and should not. Trayne (Figure 17) uses coffee filters to create a life-sized woman’s dress with a pronounced bustle. The filters remind us that the wealth behind the ownership of luxury clothing came directly from the trade of materials such as tea and coffee. As I have noted previously, Stockwell collects the accessories to contemporary consumption [. . . ]. Alongside a historical reading is a contemporary concern with the sheer quantity of disposable clutter we send out into the world’s rubbish each day.42

The exaggerated form of the garment can be understood as alluding not only to the popular Edwardian silhouette but also the figure of Sarah (Saartjie) Baartman, known as ‘the Hottentot Venus’ in early-nineteenth-century Europe. Baartman was taken from what is now South Africa to Europe and displayed as an object of curiosity and ridicule because of the pronounced shape of her buttocks and genitals. She is thought to have turned to prostitution, and her short life ended in Europe. Her remains were finally returned to South Africa for burial in 2002.43 Thus Stockwell uses the domestic and essentially nonthreatening materials surrounding coffee preparation to create a sculpture that uses the intricacies of its own modular making to refer to an extraordinarily tragic moment in history. In Stockwell’s work, the colonial project becomes a set of symbols – headless like Shonibare – that remind us of exchanges both material and human. In a number of works including Colonial Dress (Figures 18–19), Empire Dress, and Highland Dress, the map and its history of mapping British colonization become the garment’s new material. The textile is very much personal and national at the same time. In more recent work, Stockwell refers to “today’s colonization – her world map of ‘A Chinese Dream’, for instance, shows the Chinese influence spreading globally, particularly in Africa, again through banknotes.”44 This approach is shared by the final artists to be discussed in this essay, the South African Nicholas Hlobo and the Italian design pair, Studio 42

Jessica Hemmings, “Revisiting the Colonial,” Surface Design Journal (Spring

2005): 42–43. 43

Anon., “Hottentot Venus Laid to Rest,” B B C , http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world /africa/2183271.stm (accessed 17 January 2012). 44 Hugh Pearman, “Plot on the Landscape,” Crafts Magazine (November–December 2011): 40.

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Formafantasma, both of whom create work that questions the ‘post’ in postcolonial and often suggests that the systems of power and imbalance witnessed during the colonial era have very material – and contemporary – examples in our world today.

Nicholas Hlobo The South African artist Nicholas Hlobo uses materials such as rubber and leather combined with brightly coloured stitches in satin to construct his sculptures. In 2009, his exhibition at the Tate Modern in London included a large patchwork sculpture of leather and rubber titled Ingubo Yesizwe (Figures 20– 21). The materials Hlobo works with can be traced back to their cultural significance, as the exhibition pamphlet at the time explained: “extensive use of leather in this piece reflects the economic, social, political, and spiritual importance of cattle in Xhosa culture.”45 But perhaps more important than the individual materials is the way in which Hlobo integrates the two, physically connecting what may otherwise be disparate parts. The leather top, representing traditional Xhosa values and practices, and rubber bottom, signifying modernisation and urbanisation, are carefully integrated so that the beginning of one material and the end of the other is not wholly discernible.46

The shape that results is difficult to define. A tapered tail greets the viewer entering the gallery. The ‘body’ of the sculpture – and it is a form that is difficult not to anthropomorphize – is in some indefinable way damaged. Perhaps it is the closeness of the bulk to the floor that suggests a weight or burden, or the ‘wound’ from which coloured ribbons pour near what may be expected to be the head. Hlobo also creates large-scale drawings made of paper that are cut and resewn with ribbon. In a telephone conversation in 2010 he referred to the process of creating these drawings: “I draw with a weapon. Cutting through the surface is a metaphor”47. This being the case, then the act of sewing or repairing the paper can also be read as a gesture towards recovery if not reparation. The drawings are maps of sorts, complete with contemporary lines drawn by 45

Tate Modern, Nicholas Hlobo (exh. cat. pamphlet), http://www.tate.org.uk/modern /exhibitions/nicholashlobo/artworks.shtm (accessed 28 January 2012). 46 Tate Modern, Nicholas Hlobo. 47 Nicholas Hlobo, telephone interview with author (27 February 2010).

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the white cables of iTouch ear-phones. The boldness and brightness of his stitches seem to suggest that the wounds – literally of apartheid, but also more personally of his identity as a young gay artist working in a conservative culture – are impossible to erase. When recovery is possible, traces, here bold, bright traces, are unlikely to fade. Much like Reichek and Shonibare, Hlobo refers to the burden of what may be expected of his artistic practice, in particular what he refers to as assumptions about what “African art should look like, especially from a black artist.”48 He concedes little in this respect, with the exception of his decision to use the Xhosa language to title his work. The artist explains this move as an effort to recover a linguistic heritage little known to him, as well as a gesture towards modernization of the language. (He explains that the Xhosa language has not adapted in the way that English and Afrikaans has to “global trends in technical terminology and high culture.”49) While Reichek, Shonibare, and Stockwell have all mined the past, Hlobo (and works such as Stockwell’s more recent Chinese Dream) focuses on the current. This interest in contemporary versions of the postcolonial experience is also apparent in the final example to be discussed here, Studio Formafantasma.

Studio Formafantasma Again it is the map, which appears in Stockwell and Hlobo’s work, that is taken up by the Italian designers Simone Farresin and Andrea Trimarchi, known as Studio Formafantasma. In their 2011 Colony collection (Figures 22– 26), the woven textile is used to explore themes of Italian colonization in Africa, alongside contemporary immigration. Each blanket in the series refers to a capital city of a country that experienced either Italian colonization or intervention: Tripoli in Libya, Asmara in Eritrea, and Addis Ababa in Ethiopia. While many of the previous examples have been preoccupied with individual identity, Studio Formafantasma explores issues of colonization from the viewpoint of urban identity – literally the development of buildings and urban planning that occurred during Italian colonial occupation of North Africa. “The series investigates the impact of Italian imperialism on the urban infrastructure

48 49

Hlobo, telephone interview. Hlobo, telephone interview.

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of these former colonies and the complex relationship these countries now have with Italy,” explains Studio Formafantasma’s Gallery Libby Sellers.50 In contrast to Reichek’s hand production, the woven mohair blankets of the Colony series were produced at the Textile Museum in Tilburg and commissioned by Gallery Libby Sellers. Each is the size of a single bed and includes a white line drawing overlaid with a city plan developed by Italian architects during colonization, followed by a brown architectural section drawing of a key building built during Italian colonization of the country. The third layer of overlaid text pertains to the site – for example, discussion from the 1940s of how an architect should build a city, as debated at the Fifth Triennial, Milan. The text for Tripoli (written in Italian) refers to the concord between Italy and Libya from 2005/7. Postal stamps that adorn the edges are woven replicas of those used during the colonial era, and on the back of each blanket a label helps to decipher these many layers of narrative. Asmara includes lines on the map that refer to immigration from North Africa to Italy in 2011. Architectural sites and cartographies of migration flows are woven together with iconic symbolism and written data, including the (now threatened) 2009 Italy–Libya friendship treaty that promised Italian investment as compensation for its former military occupation in exchange for Libya’s cooperation to combat illegal immigration coming from its shores.51

Throughout all their projects, Formafantasma chart the changing perceptions of production techniques, artistic heritage, and the “notion of tradition in a globalised context.”52 They refer to the “narrative potential of textiles to always tell a story” and see today’s anxieties surrounding national identity and immigration as ironic when understood in the bigger picture of centuries’ worth of exchange between cultures that are far from new.53

Conclusion Textiles are a material that in many ways lends itself to postcolonial dialogue. While textiles are, in the eyes of many, what Elaine Reichek has compared to 50

Gallery Libby Sellers, Studio Formafantasma press statement. Anon., “Colony by Formafantasma,” domus (20 June 2011), http://www.domusweb .it/it/news/colony-by-formafantasma (accessed 28 January 2012). 52 Studio Formafantasma, interview with author (26 October 2011). 53 Studio Formafantasma, interview. 51

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the “subaltern of the art world,” this position can also be understood to place the textile in an unexpected location of power. In recent years, artists have used the textile to communicate increasingly complex ideas informed by a broad range of theoretical thinking, including that of the postcolonial. The narratives held by textile art increasingly exist on a number of levels that range from the functional to the metaphoric. The beauty of the textile is often deployed as a visual seduction used to package challenging narratives. The presence of beauty can easily suggest a decorative role for the textile that does little justice to the concepts that underpin much of the work discussed in this essay. Working from the perspective of individual identity out to that of the nation, the examples discussed here make use of recurring themes such as mapping and photography that consistently question the authenticity of our visual culture. These are textiles that, operating within a system of intertextuality, benefit, as literature does, from close reading. But they also deserve to be understood within a value-system that, as Paul Sharrad notes, pays particular attention to the specificities of the textile – differing histories of production, use, and meaning that have a bearing on our contemporary understanding of cloth. To begin understanding the aesthetics of the postcolonial textile, we need to know how to read, touch (even if the latter requires a feat of imagination), and listen simultaneously to the complex stories they tell.

WORKS CITED Anon. “Colony by Formafantasma,” domus (20 June 2011), http://www.domusweb .it/it/news/colony-by-formafantasma (accessed 28 January 2012). Anon. “ ‘ Hottentot Venus’ laid to rest,” B B C , http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa /2183271.stm (accessed 17 January 2012). De Boeck, Filip & Césarine Bolya. “Fashion in the African Metropolis,” in Philipp Pirotte, Carol Tulloch, Zoe Whitley, Filip De Boeck & Césarine Bolya, Beyond Desire (Ghent: Ludion, 2005): 109–12. Downey, Anthony. “Setting the Stage: Yinka Shonibare in Conversation with Anthony Downey,” in Yinka Shonibare M B E (London: Prestel, 2008): 38–45. Gallery Libby Sellers Studio Formafantasma press statement. Hemmings, Jessica. “Material Meaning,” Wasafiri 25.3 (September 2010): 38–46. ——. “Revisiting the Colonial,” Surface Design Journal (Spring 2005): 42–43. Hobbs, Robert. “Yinka Shonibare M B E : The Politics of Representation,” in Rachel Kent, Robert Hobbs & Anthony Downey, Yinka Shonibare M B E (London: Prestel, 2008): 24–37. Isaak, Jo Anna. “Who’s ‘We’, White Man?” Parkett 34 (1992): 142–51.

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Jennings, Helen. New African Fashion (London: Prestel, 2011). Kent, Rachel. “Time and Transformation in the Art of Yinka Shonibare M B E ,” in Rachel Kent, Robert Hobbs & Anthony Downey, Yinka Shonibare M B E (London: Prestel, 2008): 12–23. Kruger, Kathryn Sullivan. “Clues and Cloth: Seeking Ourselves in ‘The Fabric of Myth’,” in The Fabric of Myth (Warwickshire: Compton Verney, 2008): 12–14. Lichtenstein, Therese. “An Interview with Elaine Reichek,” Journal of Contemporary Art (Winter 1993): 92–107, http://www.jca-online.com/reichek.html (accessed 8 January 2012). Pearman, Hugh. “Plot on the Landscape,” Crafts Magazine (November–December 2011): 40–43. Picton, John. “Undressing Ethnicity,” African Arts 34.3 (Autumn 2001): 66–73, 93– 95. Reichek, Elaine. “Home Rule. 1992,” Elaine Reichek, http://elainereichek.com/Project _Pages/11_HomeRule/HomeRule.htm (accessed 8 January 2012). ——. “A Postcolonial Kinderhood: 1984,” Elaine Reichek, http://elainereichek.com /Project_Pages/9_Postcolonial/PostcolonialKinderhood.htm (accessed 8 January 2012). Rosenberg, Anat. “Susan Stockwell: Accumulations, Thomas Korzelius Fine Art, New York,” Art on Paper 4.6 (July–August 2000): 60. Sharrad, Paul. “Introduction: (Un)fabric/ating Empire,” New Literatures Review 36 (Winter 2000): 1–2. Showalter, Elaine. “Piecing and Writing,” in The Poetics of Gender, ed. Nancy K. Miller (New York: Columbia U P , 1986): 222–47. Soyinka, Wole. “The Blood-Soaked Quilt of Africa,” The Guardian (17 May 1994). Tate Modern. Nicholas Hlobo (exh. cat. pamphlet, Tate Modern), http://www.tate.org .uk/modern/exhibitions/nicholashlobo/artworks.shtm (accessed 28 January 2012). Whitley, Zoe. “Craving the Exotic,” in Beyond Desire, ed. Kaat Debo (Ghent: Ludion, 2005): 82.

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F IGURES (see pages 45–50 following)

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Figure 1. Elaine Reichek, Ten Little Indians (1992). Photographer: Orcutt Photography, New York.

Figure 2. Elaine Reichek, Whitewash (Galway Cottage) (1992–93). Knitted wool yarn, hanger and gelatin silver print. Overall dimensions 114.3 x 337.8 cm. Photographer: Orcutt Photography, New York.

Figure 3. Elaine Reichek, Yellow Man (1986). Knitted wool yarn and hand-painted gelatin silver print. Overall 180.3 x 292.1 cm. Image courtesy of the artist.

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Figure 4. Elaine Reichek, Red Man (1988). Knitted wool yarn and gelatin silver print. Overall 165.1 x 177.8 cm. Image courtesy of the artist.

Figure 5. Elaine Reichek, Gray Man (1989). Knitted wool yarn and gelatin silver print. Overall 165.1 x 180.3 cm. Image courtesy of the artist.

Figure 6. Elaine Reichek, A Postcolonial Kinderhood (1994). Installation view, The Jewish Museum, New York. Image courtesy of the artist.

Figure 7. Elaine Reichek, A Postcolonial Kinderhood (1994). Installation view, The Jewish Museum, New York. Image courtesy of the artist.

Figure 8. Elaine Reichek, Untitled (Jesse Reichek) (1994). Hand embroidery on linen. 28.6 x 31.8 cm. Image courtesy of the artist.

Figure 9. Elaine Reichek, Untitled (E.R.) (1993). Hand embroidery on linen. 33 x 21.6 cm. Image courtesy of the artist.

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Figure 10. Yinka Shonibare, Victorian Philanthropist’s Parlour (1996–97). Reproduction furniture, fire screen, carpet, props, Dutch wax printed cotton textile. Approx. 2.60 x 4.88 x 5.30m. © the artist. Courtesy of the artist and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London. Figure 11. Yinka Shonibare, Victorian Philanthropist’s Parlour (1996–97), detail.

Figure 12. Yinka Shonibare, Mr and Mrs Andrews Without Their Heads (1998). Wax-print cotton costumes on armatures, dog, mannequin, bench, gun, 165 x 570 x 254 cm. © the artist. Courtesy of the artist and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London.

Figure 13. Yinka Shonibare, Scramble for Africa (2003). 14 figures, 14 chairs, table, Dutch wax printed cotton textile. Overall: 132 x 488 x 280cm. © the artist. Courtesy of the artist and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London.

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Figure 14. Yinka Shoninbare, Figure of Eleanor Hewitt (2005). Image lent by the artist, Stephen Friedman Gallery, London and James Cohan Gallery, New York.

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Figure 15. Yinka Shonibare, Figure of Sarah Hewitt (2005). Image lent by the artist, Stephen Friedman Gallery, London and James Cohan Gallery, New York.

Figure 17. Susan Stockwell, Trayne (1998). Coffee filters, coffee, paper portion cups, cotton thread. Image courtesy of the artist. © Susan Stockwell.

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Figure 16. Susan Stockwell, Pattern of the World (2000). Paper, dress making patterns, tea. 180 x 120 x 2 cm. Image courtesy of the artist. © Susan Stockwell.

Figure 18. Susan Stockwell, Colonial Dress (2008).

Figure 19. Susan Stockwell, Colonial Dress (2008), detail. Maps, wire, glue. Image courtesy of the artist. © Susan Stockwell.

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Figure 20. Nicholas Hlobo, Ingubo Yesizwe (2008). Leather, rubber, gauze, ribbon, and steel. 150 x 260 cm x 3 m. © Nicholas Hlobo. Courtesy of Stevenson, Cape Town and Johannesburg.

Figure 21. Nicholas Hlobo, Ingubo Yesizwe (2008), detail. Leather, rubber, gauze, ribbon, and steel. 150 x 260 cm x 3 m. © Nicholas Hlobo. Courtesy of Stevenson, Cape Town and Johannesburg.

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Figure 22. Studio Formafantasma, Moulding Tradition: Colony (Addis Ababa) (2011). Mohair, cotton, ceramic tiles. 230 x 120 cm. Photographer: Luisa Zanzani. Courtesy of Gallery Libby Sellers.

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Figure 25. Studio Formafantasma, Moulding Tradition: Colony (2011), detail. Mohair, cotton, ceramic tiles. Photographer: Luisa Zanzani. Courtesy of Gallery Libby Sellers.

Figure 23. Studio Formafantasma, Moulding Tradition: Colony (Asmara) (2011). Courtesy of Gallery Libby Sellers. Figure 26. Studio Formafantasma, Moulding Tradition: Colony (2011), detail. Mohair, cotton, ceramic tiles. Photographer: Luisa Zanzani. Courtesy of Gallery Libby Sellers.

Figure 24. Studio Formafantasma, Moulding Tradition: Colony (Tripoli) (2011).

Masking the White Gaze — Towards a Postcolonial Art History of Masks

M ELANIE U LZ Translation: Jean Hamilton–Bick

O

F E B R U A R Y 1 9 9 1 , the auction house Lempertz published a catalogue featuring a dossier showcasing Africa. Its title-page shows the photographic presentation of a face mask, which, through the use of strong lighting, close-up, and frontal positioning, and due to the lack of any visible mounting, appears to float (Figure 1).1 Based on the principle of object isolation developed around 1900 during the rise of art history as an academic discipline, the positivistic visual strategies used for this image seek a method of objectification in the service of object analysis.2 With the absence of shadow and the stark illumination the endeavour is not to obtain (alleged) neutrality, but instead to carve out the idealized facial features of the object. The mask comes alive due to the reflection of light onto the surface of the 1

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Auction house Lempertz (Cologne & Brussels), Art Africain/Afrikaanse Kunst/ Afrikanische Kunst, auction 662 (Brussels: Lempertz, 23 February 1991). 2 Heinrich Wölfflin, “Wie man Skulpturen aufnehmen soll,” Zeitschrift für Bildende Kunst 8 (1896/97): 294–97. See Wiebke Ratzeburg, “Mediendiskurse im 19. Jahrhundert. Wie die Kunstgeschichte ihre wissenschaftliche Grundlage in der Fotografie fand,” kritische berichte 1 (2002): 22–39; Silke Wenk, “Zeigen und Schweigen. Der kunsthistorische Diskurs und die Diaprojektion,” in Konfigurationen: Zwischen Kunst und Medien, ed. Georg Christoph Tholen & Sigrid Schade (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1999): 292–305; Wiebke von Hinden, “Die Macht kunstwissenschaftlicher Reproduktionen. Überlegungen zu den Fotografien der Schriftenreihe ‘Kulturen der Erde’,” in Globalisierung/Hierarchisierung: Kulturelle Dominanzen in Kunst und Kunstgeschichte, ed. Irene Below & Beatrice von Bismarck (Marburg: Jonas, 2005): 45–53.

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artefact’s dead materiality. The mask is looking at us. Its ‘strange and exotic’ aesthetic achieves the height of spectacle through the lighting effects and fulfils its anthropomorphic faciality (being the face, the abstract machine producing faciality), which is articulated through the familiar language of form. A haptic excitement, which appeals to the viewer’s perception, is simultaneously produced by these reflections. This visual performance divorces the African Dan mask from its cultural and historical context and re-inscribes it through the visual power system of the face, described as ‘strong organization’ by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.3 In the 1980s, Deleuze and Guattari juxtaposed the facelessness of so-called ‘primitive’ cultures against the principle of the faciality of the ‘civilized’ Western world. Their concept of the ‘power system of faciality’, which was developed for visual communication, was explicitly established in contrast to the mask-like character that was perceived as African and primitive.4 Not only does this distinction illustrate how this character is dismissed as ‘primitive’, but it also points to the dependent relationship between both principles: for setting the African mask as a counter concept to ‘Western’ faciality ultimately means that the face cannot exist without the mask, and not vice versa. In the following, I argue that such a mask was not selected randomly for the cover of a catalogue featuring so-called ‘traditional’ African art. On the contrary, masks play a key role in the economy of Western misappropriation, homogenization, and the determination of African art up to the present as masks became one of the strongest signifiers for the African continent in the twentieth century. In this catalogue image, the mask is rendered anonymous through the erasure of its origin, lacking information about the artist or workshop where it was made as well as the date. The object – consequently severed from authorship and historicity – is thus displaced into a timeless, mystical setting, which 3

“The organisation of the face is a strong one. We could say that the face holds within its rectangle or circle a whole set of traits, faciality traits, which it subsumes and places at the service of significance and subjectification.” Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, tr. Brian Massumi (Mille plateaux: Capitalisme et Schizophrénie, 1980; London & New York: Continuum 2004): 208. Cf. Das Gesicht ist eine starke Organisation, ed. Petra Löffler & Leander Scholz (Cologne: DuMont, 2004). 4 “Primitives may have the most human of heads, the most beautiful and most spiritual, but they have no face and need none.” Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 195.

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creates the precondition for the judgement of the art dealer, who, as a connoisseur, determines the artistic value of the auction goods.5 This de-individualization ensures that masks can henceforth stand for an entire West African region (Liberia and the Ivory Coast in this case) or, as suggested by the title page, even the entire African continent conceived of as a homogeneous unity. The cultural context in which such a Dan runner’s mask was designed and used is completely edited out of the catalogue. It is not evident to observers or potential buyers whether the mask was specifically produced for the art market, or even if it reached Europe as looted art. It is only this banishing of content and culture that makes the mask usable for Western projections and commercial interests. Through this type of visual presentation or mise-enscène, the object is transformed into a work devoid of biography. This process of stripping the object of its own past or origin makes the transfer into the new, Western context possible – a context which is determined by the rules of the international art market. Bringing the mask to life makes clear how the facial schema can be politicized for Western ends: the mask is not only stripped of its historical and cultural origins but – more importantly – it is overridden in terms of form and content. As a consequence, the animating effects of the visual mise-en-scène that are generated shroud the object’s cultural historicity. The mask is frozen, transcends time, and becomes an anonymous object that is reduced to its aesthetic similarities and differences. It can now represent the whole of Africa. This cultural appropriation of what is known as ‘traditional’ African art originated in the second half of the nineteenth century alongside the systematic collection of African art objects and cultural treasures by institutions and private individuals outside of Africa and succeeded due to increasing numbers of African works of art reaching Europe during the time of European colonialism. This is particularly relevant for the years after the West Africa Conference in Berlin (15 November 1884 – 26 February 1885), during which the continent’s territory was more or less divided among the European colonial powers.6 From today’s postcolonial perspective, it comes as no surprise that the artistic appropriation of African (cult) objects by Cubist and Fauvist 5

See Sally Price, Primitive Art in Civilized Places (1989; London & Chicago: U of Chicago P , 2001). 6 See Horst Gründer, “Der ‘Wettlauf’ um Afrika und die Berliner Westafrika-Konferenz 1884/85,” in Kolonialmetropole Berlin: Eine Spurensuche, ed. Ulrich van der Heyden & Joachim Zeller (Berlin: Berlin Edition, 2002).

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artists shortly thereafter was understood as part of the European ‘history of discovery’ of languages and formal stylistic elements.7 In fact, discoveries, conquests, and the incorporation of foreign cultures as well as the discourses on the visibility of the ‘New World’ have been closely connected since the early modern period.8 In the 1960s, President Léopold Sédar Senghor of Senegal positioned a cultural policy in opposition to the appropriation and simultaneous designation of African culture as the ‘peripheral Other’ to the Euro-American modern ‘centre’. Senghor achieved this by pursuing an arts policy that linked a refocusing on ‘traditional’ African art and culture to ‘modern’ nationhood, systematically aiming at promoting contemporary art. In the atmosphere of the Négritude movement of the time, a positive reinterpretation of cultural elements (dance, rhythm, masks), which were derogatvely characterized in the West as displaying ‘libidinal animal instinct’ and being ‘primal’, was important and necessary as a self-confident counter-positioning of African modernity. However, from the vantage-point of today, these qualities remain within the discourse over Africa’s ‘essence’.9 The date of publication of the aforementioned catalogue, however, represents a turning point in the history of the appropriation and reception of (modern) African art in Europe in the second half of the twentieth century. The catalogue was published prior to Documenta 9 (1992), curated by Jan Hoet, in which African contemporary artists – namely, the sculptor Ousmane Sow and the installation artist Mo Edoga – had taken part for the first time, 7

Still in 1984, this narrative was given by William Rubin, for instance, in the MoMA-exhibition Primitivism in 20th Century Art, see William Stanley Rubin, Primitivism in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1984). 8 Hildegard Frübis, Die Wirklichkeit des Fremden: die Darstellung der Neuen Welt im 16. Jahrhundert (Berlin: Reimer, 1995); Berichten, Erzählen, Beherrschen: Wahrnehmung und Repräsentation in der frühen Kolonialgeschichte Europas, ed. Susanne Burghartz, Maike Christadler & Dorothea Nolde (Zeitsprünge: Forschungen zur Frühen Neuzeit 7.2–3; Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2003). 9 Ima Ebong characterizes Senegalese cultural policy of the 1960s by referring to an installation of Issa Samb as a policy “between mask and flag.” See Ebong, “Negritude: Between Mask and Flag – Senegalese Cultural Ideology and the Ecole de Dakar,” in Reading the Contemporary: African Art from Theory to the Marketplace, ed. Olu Oguibe & Okwui Enwezor (London: Institute of International Visual Arts & Cambridge M A : M I T Press, 1999): 129–43.

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and two years after the controversial Paris exhibition Les Magiciens de la Terre (1989), curated by Jean–Hubert Martin.10 The latter exhibition is considered to be the first to enlarge the understanding of international art through a postcolonial lens due to the selection of Western and non-Western artists: i.e. artists from the centre and the periphery, who were exhibited on an equal footing.11 It was not recognized at the time how the criteria of selection exclusively followed the ideas and beliefs of Western, white (and male) curators. Retrospectively, many critics unmasked this selection process, one guided by the longing for the authentic otherness of non-Western art.12 In Germany, it was not until Documenta 11 (2002), curated by Okwui Enwezor, that a breakthrough on an international scale was achieved regarding both the selection of artistic positions and a decentralization of the venue by virtue of organized conferences called ‘platforms’.13 In their curatorship of Documenta 12 (2007), Roger Buergel and Ruth Noack, by relegating authorship and origin of the works presented to a back seat with reference to form and content and by hanging the artworks dialogically, counteracted the reproduction of preconceived views of non-Western artforms.14 10

Christian Kravagna, “Das dichte Jahrzehnt. Positionsverschiebungen afrikanischer Kunst 1989–2002,” in Kunst und Politik: Jahrbuch der Guernica-Gesellschaft 4 (2002): 99–112. 11 The Les Magiciens de la Terre exhibition (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 1989) was set up as a response to the Primitivism exhibition (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1984). 12 See the contributions to the debate in Primitivism and Twentieth-Century Art: A Documentary History, ed. Jack Flam & Miriam Deutch (Berkeley: U of California P , 2003): 311–414. 13 See the exhibition catalogue Documenta 11_Plattform 5: Ausstellung (Ostfildern– Ruit: Hatje Cantz 2002). On how extra-European art is dealt with in the Federal Republic of Germany, see Barbara Paul, “Schöne heile Weltordnung. Zum Umgang der Kunstgeschichte in der frühen Bundesrepublik Deutschland mit außereuropäischer Gegenwartskunst,” in Kunst oder Weltkunst? Die Kunst in der Globalisierungsdebatte, ed. Detlef Hoffmann (Rehburg-Loccum: Evangelische Akademie Loccum, 2003): 27– 60; and Viktoria Schmidt–Linsenhoff, “Wer begegnet wem? Bildbegriff und ‘Menschenbild’ in der Ausstellung ‘Weltkulturen und Moderne Kunst’ in München 1972,” in Kunst oder Weltkunst? Die Kunst in der Globalisierungsdebatte, ed. Detlef Hoffmann (Rehburg-Loccum: Evangelische Akademie Loccum, 2003): 9–26. 14 This perception of Documenta 12, however, was hardly shared by everybody – cf. Renée Green, Sebastian Egenhofer, Juliane Rebentisch, Christian Kravagna, Viktoria

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Nevertheless, African contemporary art is still confronted with the regime of stereotyping by the white gaze and its reception is structured accordingly. Contemporary artists from Africa or the African-American diaspora have for many years voiced strong objections to these discourses of usurpation, fixation, and alienation. Expectations with regard to the ‘art of Africa’ circulate in the international art and exhibition scene. These expectations are confounded, dissipated, disturbed, and unsettled by strategies of visualization, relocation, displacement or non-compliance as well as by postcolonial strategies of representation and alternative concepts of identity. I will now introduce four examples of artistic positions that have used masks as a strategy for disputing how African art is both displayed and concealed. First, I will discuss works produced in the 1990s by the contemporary Beninese artist Romuald Hazoumé, whose use of manipulated everyday objects ironically critiques the Western desire for and consumption of African masks. Secondly, I will analyse the work of the African-American artists Fred Wilson and David Hammons, who take a critical look at institutions and the museum as sites of safekeeping, exhibiting, and presenting African art outside of Africa. Thirdly, the photographic oeuvre of Rotimi Fani–Kayode will be discussed. Fani–Kayode, a British-Nigerian artist who died in 1989, not only thematizes the stereotyping of the (male) black body as a distorted masking but also problematizes the body and the mask as being equally subjected to the fetishizing white gaze.

Romuald Hazoumé: Masques bidons The series Masques bidons (Figure 2), created in the 1990s, is an intervention aimed at the Western desire for classical African art and the expectations of African contemporary artists to use this specific stylistic vocabulary. Hazoumé’s works Dogon and Autoportrait (1996) take a tongue-in-cheek look at this desire for African masks by adding material to a mask base, thus revealing the faciality of prosaic objects, jugs and canisters in particular.15 The works can therefore be analysed within the tradition of the ready-made Schmidt–Linsenhoff & Oliver Marchart, “Betrachter und Formschicksale in Kassel – Berichte von der documenta 12,” Texte zur Kunst 67 (2007): 197–211. 15 In the early works, cameras, radio sets etc., were being used as well. See, for example, Romuald Hazoumé, Rollbox II (1996), Ohasage (1997), Superscope (1997), in Romuald Hazoumé: Vor-Sicht, ed. Peter Volkwein (exh. cat.; Städtische Galerie Ingolstadt, 1999): n.p.

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and Récupération. Combining both African and European sign systems, he effectively fits them together to form new interrelated meanings. The objects are instilled with life through the addition of other materials such as brushes or shells, which serve as eyes or hair. The previous decontextualization of these objects, which leads to a complete disintegration of the object’s functionality, supports this effect. Hazoumé’s works are primarily animated not by an installed regime of the gaze from the outside, as the cover page of the auction catalogue might be, but by the modification and/or alienation of the everyday objects as such. Hardly subtle, the re-use of valueless rubbish is rather blatant in its quest to playfully create a facial schema that propels the Western search for the face ad absurdum – searching for a face of its own within that of the Other. In this respect, these works can be interpreted as ironic answers to the significance of African masks as European commodity fetish.16 The objects therefore play with the expectations of the Western audience, which superficially expects an African mask upon first glance.17

Fred Wilson: Colonial Collection Fred Wilson’s artistic practice aims at the museum as a site for meaning production, in that it is a venue of collections, presentation, and exhibitions. He addresses the institution, which, through a staged ‘spectacle of foreign things’, authoritatively produces the way in which these works are understood and how they are charged in terms of content.18 In this respect, Wilson often brings together historical information and aesthetic experiences to outline the powerful but largely invisible knowledge production of museums, which appropriate, exhibit, preserve, and interpret objects and declare them to be works of art. In the Colonial Collection installation (Figure 3), which forms

16

This term is understood to be a coveted object, which simultaneously obscures, displaces, and thus superimposes the appetite for the Other. 17 Daniela Roth, “Von Afrikanern erwartet man, dass sie Masken machen, also mache ich Masken,” in Romuald Hazoumé: My Paradise – Made in Porto-Novo, ed. Martin Henatsch, ed. (exh. cat. Herbert–Gerisch–Stiftung, Neumünster; Ostfildern– Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2010): 45–74. 18 On the spectacle of foreign things, see Karl–Heinz Kohl, “Entrückte Dinge: Über Ethnologie, Aneignung und Kunst,” Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften 1 (2007): 17–24.

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part of the 1990 exhibition series The Other Museum, the status of African art is understood as that of hostage in relation to Euro-American museums.19 Wilson presents six masks of various types and swathes them in the flags of two former colonial powers, France and the U K . Without exception, these objects are all mass-produced goods, so-called ‘airport art’. The objects can be interpreted as being an allusion to the categories ‘high’ and ‘low’ or original and copy, as conceived by the Western art regime and are therefore called into question in their status as artworks. The covered eyes and mouth openings of the masks are a reference to their exclusion from the Western sign system. They are blind and mute. They have become silent because they are decontextualized objects. The “aesthetic anesthetises the historic and […] continues the dislocation of what these objects are about,” according to Wilson.20 The artworks are cut off from visual and cultural communication symbolized via the artist’s use of the Western tropes of blindness and muteness. Wilson presents them together with a seemingly historical display including graphic reproductions of the American fashion magazine Harper’s Bazaar showing scenes of the British colonial wars along with purportedly scientific objects such as mounted insects. The work’s title, The French and British Collection 1914, links European colonialism in Africa with Europe’s cultural and academic appropriation of Africa. The date refers to the time when the entire continent had been captured through violent force. Moreover, the colonial-historical context suggests that many collections of African objects were established in Europe around 1900. The human skull in the glass case, which is decorated with beetles, butterflies, and lithographic prints, cannot only be interpreted as pointing to the murderous bestiality of colonialism, but primarily refers to the classificatory subjugation of people who were classified into ‘race’ categories by virtue of skull measurements. Skulls, insects, 19

The exhibition series took place in various places outside museums in New York (Bronx). Colonial Collection was also part of Wilson’s work The Other Museum (1991). See Marc Scheps, Yilmaz Dziewior & Barbara M. Thiemann, ed. Kunstwelten im Dialog: Von Gauguin zur globalen Gegenwart, exhibition catalogue Museum Ludwig (Cologne: Walther König, 2000): 496–97; Christian Kravagna, “Konserven des Kolonialismus: Die Welt im Museum,” eipcp: European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies (June 2008), http://eipcp.net/transversal/0708/kravagna/de (accessed 29 February 2012). 20 Fred Wilson, “Constructing the Spectacle of Culture in Museums,” in The Museum as Arena: Artists on Institutional Critique, ed. Christian Kravagna (Cologne: Walther König, 2001): 98.

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and masks represent the powerful taxonomic systems of academic and cultural appropriation, which is conducted through classification.

David Hammons: Hidden from View In his work Hidden from View (Figure 4), David Hammons critiques institutions in a similar manner. His African sculptures are ‘freed’ from the strict isolation of the white cube, a venue characterized by glass vitrines and bare walls.21 In Hammons’s installation, the objects are not showcased within a cavernous, dark, and sand-coloured room (ambient) as can be seen at the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris, but are hidden under the pedestals of the empty glass display cases.22 The box-like pedestals obstruct the view of the sculptures underneath, but anthropomorphic wooden bases can be seen through a hole in the floor. Functioning as masks themselves, the pedestals of the display cases obstruct the viewer’s access to the object and thus disrupt the established regime of the connoisseur’s gaze provoked within the museum context. The viewer must crouch on the floor to see what is concealed underneath the wooden boxes and therefore take on an unusual perspective: i.e. physically adopting an alternative viewpoint. Due to the marked absence of the artwork, the gaze, contextually predetermined, is refused and called into question. Within the space of the white cube, the constellation of the gaze is exposed and can open up a new perspective from which to view classical African art.23 The empty display case uncovers the gaze that scrutinizes it. The resulting empty space directs the viewer’s attention to the installation’s surroundings, whose production of meaning actually becomes the central focus. While such 21

See Claire Tancons, “An Elective Affinity: David Hammons’s ‘Hidden from View and Made in the Republic of Harlem’,” in Diaspora – Memory – Place: David Hammons, Maria Magdalena Campos–Pons, Pamela Z, ed. Salah M. Hassan & Cheryl Finley (Munich: Prestel, 2008): 196–209. 22 On Quai Branly, see Sally Price, Paris Primitive: Jacques Chirac’s Museum on the Quai Branly (London & Chicago: U of Chicago P , 2007); Die Schau des Fremden: Ausstellungskonzepte zwischen Kunst, Kommerz und Wissenschaft, ed. Cordula Grewe (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2006). 23 On the whiteness of the white cube, see Hito Steyerl, “White Cube und Black Box. Die Farbmetaphysik des Kunstbegriffs,” in Mythen, Masken und Subjekte: Kritische Weißseinsforschung in Deutschland, ed. Maureen Maisha Eggers, Grada Kilomba, Peggy Piesche & Susan Arndt (Münster: Unrast, 2005): 135–43.

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encasement is a well-established method for presenting objects, the decontextualization it induces is counteracted by a new displacement, and the meaning produced by the museum or the gallery becomes visible. With the wooden bases recalling transport crates, Hammon’s work points to the history of African sculpture. It is a success story in which African artefacts moved from the crowded floor of the ethnological or colonial museum to the isolating glass cabinets of European–North American art temples.24 All in all, Hammons’s work questions whether a ‘right’ presentational format exists for African art in the ‘wrong place’ that is the Western museum.

Rotimi Fani–Kayode: Bronze Head In his nude photography of the 1980s, Rotimi Fani–Kayode elaborated upon alternative means of representation, which were antithetically positioned in relation to the fetishizing representations of Africans – the Nuba photographs of Leni Riefenstahl being a well-known example. Fani–Kayode’s artistic work conceptualizes counter-images, which evoke a desiring but not subjecting gaze upon the eroticized black body. Fani–Kayode was one of the protagonists of the black-British artists movements formed in the 1980s and founding member of Autograph A B P , an association of black photographers. However, he dissociated himself from the A B P ’s attempts to establish an ‘authentic’ black photography.25 In this context of identity-politics, Fani– Kayode’s Bronze Head (Figure 5) must be situated and read.26 The photograph shows an African bust sitting on a stool positioned between the spread legs and buttocks of a naked black man, seemingly penetrating him. The image is framed to reveal only the lower part of the model’s body. The photograph’s content stands firmly within the production of homoerotic images, which articulate the white male desiring gaze upon the black male body. Therefore, the work can be read as a commentary to the pictures

24

See, for instance, the arrival of what is known as Art Premier in one side wing of the Louvre (Pavillon des Sessions) in 1999; Joseph Adandé, “Traditional African Art in Le Louvre: A Peaceful Revolution?” in Kunst und Politik: Jahrbuch der Guernica Gesellschaft 4 (2002): 91–94. 25 David A. Bailey, “Photographic Animateur. The Photographs of Rotimi Fani– Kayode in Relation to Black Photographic Practice,” Third Text 5.13 (1991): 57–62. 26 Rotimi Fani–Kayode, Black Male /White Male, intro. Alex Hirst (London: Heretic, 1988): 37.

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in the series entitled Black Male by Robert Mapplethorpe from 1974.27 It is all too clear that Mapplethorpe’s photographs fetishize the black male body, as evidenced by his choice of close-ups and cropping. Whether these images also question such fetishization has been heatedly discussed, as the photographs simultaneously employ and reproduce a subordinating white gaze.28 In Bronze Head, Fani–Kayode stages a bronze Ife sculpture, originating from the cultural and religious centre of the Yoruba. He creates a Nigerian frame of reference and thus makes a case for his own pictorial tradition of structuring the homoerotic gaze upon the black male body. While he offers up this image of a fetishized body through the fragmentation of the close-up, he deeply unsettles the voyeuristic gaze due to the outrageous placement of the head sculpture. This positioning of the object is simultaneously reminiscent of the (dis)placement of an African mask in the Western art system. Given the framing of this head sculpture, the object is placed in the position that is ambivalently connoted as a place of the abject and a site of desire. The placement of the Ife bronze thus proves to be an artistic strategy that blends together the presentation of African art and the spectacle of the black body, which is desired and equally rejected by the white observer. Both body and mask can thus be exposed as fetishes of the West, which obscure and disguise the Western desire for the Other. At the same time, the photograph can be interpreted in terms of the specific artistic position of Fani–Kayode, who describes himself as being ‘in-between’. As a gay Nigerian artist in the diaspora, he addresses his perspective as that of the triple outsider: in matters of sexuality, in terms of geographical and cultural dislocation, and in the sense of not having become the sort of respectably married professional my parents might have hoped for.29 27

Robert Mapplethorpe, Black Males, intro. Edmund White (Amsterdam: Gallerie Jurka, 1980); Robert Mapplethorpe, The Black Book, intro. Ntozake Shange (New York: St Martin’s, 1986). 28 Kobena Mercer, “Imaging the Black Man’s Sex,” in Photography/Politics: Two, ed. Patricia Holland, Jo Spence & Simon Watney (London: Comedia, 1986): 61–69; Kobena Mercer, “Skin Head Sex Thing. Racial Difference and the Homoerotic Imaginary,” in How Do I Look? Queer Film and Video, ed. Bad Object Choices (Seattle W A : Bay, 1989): 169–204, repr. in Kobena Mercer, Welcome to the Jungle. New Positions in Black Cultural Studies (New York & London: Routledge, 1994): 171–219. 29 Rotimi Fani–Kayode, “Traces of Ecstasy,” in Reading the Contemporary: African Art from Theory to the Marketplace, ed. Olu Oguibe & Okwui Enwezor (London: In-

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Based on this artistic self-positioning, he advocates a configuration of the gaze beyond the dominant white and hetero-normative culture by using conspicuously homoerotic images. With regard to the bronze sculpture, his Nigerian origin, as well as the cultural tradition of the Yoruba, is simultaneously inscribed in this photograph. Fani–Kayode’s visual strategy formulates border crossing, which expedites denaturalization and dehierarchization processes that thwart the normative gaze. The entanglement of sexualizing and racializing processes is determined in equal measure and consequently modified. The framing of the Ife bronze sculpture between the model’s legs ultimately begs the question of how African art is to be seen and how it can be seen. The positioning removes from the object that otherworldly moment inscribed in the presentation of the Dan mask previously discussed. The disturbing placement in Fani–Kayode’s photography exaggerates the spectacle of the mask and makes visible the conventions of the gaze. As a whole, the works discussed above illustrate how the subordinating, hierarchizing and determining gaze upon the ‘art of Africa’ in academic and non-academic contexts can be dismantled and changed. They constitute a thematic area of inquiry that continues to be dealt with exhaustively through various artistic positions. All of these works from a marginalized nonWestern or non-white perspective demonstrate what contribution contemporary art can make to sustainably change the art-historical canon and museum exhibition practices and the inclusion and exclusion produced therein. The debate within which these works circulate prompts critical reflection upon one’s own art-historical/art-theoretical approach and a fundamental reformation of the way one approaches classical African art.

WORKS CITED Adandé, Joseph. “Traditional African Art in Le Louvre: A Peaceful Revolution?” in Kunst und Politik: Jahrbuch der Guernica Gesellschaft 4 (2002): 91–94. Auction house Lempertz (Cologne & Brussels), ed. Art Africain / Afrikaanse Kunst / Afrikanische Kunst, auction 662 (Brussels: Lempertz, 23 February 1991).

stitute of International Visual Arts & Cambridge M A : M I T Press, 1999): 276–81; see Mark A. Reid, “Postnegritude Reappropriation and the Black Male Nude. The Photography of Rotimi Fani–Kayode,” in The Passionate Camera. Photography and Bodies of Desire, ed. Deborah Bright (New York & London: Routledge, 1998): 216–28.

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Bailey, David A. “Photographic Animateur: The Photographs of Rotimi Fani–Kayode in Relation to Black Photographic Practice,” Third Text 5.13 (1991): 57–62. Burghartz, Susanne, Maike Christadler & Dorothea Nolde, ed. Berichten, Erzählen, Beherrschen: Wahrnehmung und Repräsentation in der frühen Kolonialgeschichte Europas, Zeitsprünge. Forschungen zur Frühen Neuzeit 7.2–3 (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2003). Deleuze, Gilles, & Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, tr. Brian Massumi (Mille plateaux: Capitalisme et schizophrénie, 1980; London & New York: Continuum 2004). Documenta 11_Plattform 5: Ausstellung (exh. cat.; Ostfildern–Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2002). Ebong, Ima. “Negritude: Between Mask and Flag – Senegalese Cultural Ideology and the École de Dakar,” in Reading the Contemporary: African Art from Theory to the Marketplace, ed. Olu Oguibe & Okwui Enwezor (London: Institute of International Visual Arts & Cambridge M A : M I T Press, 1999): 129–43. Fani–Kayode, Rotimi. Black Male/White Male, intro. Alex Hirst (London: Heretic, 1988). ——. “Traces of Ecstasy,” in Reading the Contemporary: African Art from Theory to the Marketplace, ed. Olu Oguibe & Okwui Enwezor (London: Institute of International Visual Arts & Cambridge M A : M I T Press, 1999): 276–81. Flam, Jack, & Miriam Deutch, ed. Primitivism and Twentieth-Century Art: A Documentary History (Berkeley: U of California P , 2003). Green, Renée, Sebastian Egenhofer, Juliane Rebentisch, Christian Kravagna, Viktoria Schmidt—Linsenhoff & Oliver Marchart. “Betrachter und Formschicksale in Kassel – Berichte von der documenta 12,” Texte zur Kunst 67 (2007): 197–211. Frübis, Hildegard. Die Wirklichkeit des Fremden: die Darstellung der Neuen Welt im 16. Jahrhundert (Berlin: Reimer, 1995). Grewe, Cordula, ed. Die Schau des Fremden: Ausstellungskonzepte zwischen Kunst, Kommerz und Wissenschaft (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2006). Gründer, Horst. “Der ‘Wettlauf’ um Afrika und die Berliner Westafrika-Konferenz 1884/85,” in Kolonialmetropole Berlin: Eine Spurensuche, ed. Ulrich van der Heyden & Joachim Zeller (Berlin: Berlin Edition, 2002). Kohl, Karl–Heinz. “Entrückte Dinge: Über Ethnologie, Aneignung und Kunst,” Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften 1 (2007): 17–24. Kravagna, Christian. “Das dichte Jahrzehnt: Positionsverschiebungen afrikanischer Kunst 1989–2002,” in Kunst und Politik: Jahrbuch der Guernica Gesellschaft 4 (2002): 99–112. ——. “Konserven des Kolonialismus: Die Welt im Museum,” eipcp: European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies (June 2008), http://eipcp.net/transversal /0708/kravagna/de (accessed 29 February 2012).

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Löffler, Petra, & Leander Scholz, ed. Das Gesicht ist eine starke Organisation (Cologne: DuMont, 2004). Mapplethorpe, Robert. The Black Book, intro. Ntozake Shange (New York: St Martin’s, 1986). ——. Black Males, intro. Edmund White (Amsterdam: Gallerie Jurka, 1980). Mercer, Kobena. “Imaging the Black Man’s Sex,” in Photography/Politics: Two, ed. Patricia Holland, Jo Spence & Simon Watney (London: Comedia, 1986): 61–69. ——. “Skin Head Sex Thing: Racial Difference and the Homoerotic Imaginary,” in How Do I Look? Queer Film and Video, ed. Bad Object Choices (Seattle W A : Bay, 1989): 169–204; repr. in Kobena Mercer, Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies (New York & London: Routledge, 1994): 171–219. ——. Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies (New York & London: Routledge 1994). Paul, Barbara. “Schöne heile Weltordnung: Zum Umgang der Kunstgeschichte in der frühen Bundesrepublik Deutschland mit außereuropäischer Gegenwartskunst,” in Kunst oder Weltkunst? Die Kunst in der Globalisierungsdebatte, ed. Detlef Hoffmann (Rehburg–Loccum: Evangelische Akademie Loccum, 2003): 27–60. Price, Sally. Paris Primitive: Jacques Chirac’s Museum on the Quai Branly (London & Chicago: U of Chicago P , 2007). ——. Primitive Art in Civilized Places (1989; London & Chicago: U of Chicago P , 2001). Ratzeburg, Wiebke. “Mediendiskurse im 19. Jahrhundert: Wie die Kunstgeschichte ihre wissenschaftliche Grundlage in der Fotografie fand,” kritische berichte 1 (2002): 22–39. Reid, Mark A. “Postnegritude Reappropriation and the Black Male Nude: The Photography of Rotimi Fani–Kayode,” in The Passionate Camera: Photography and Bodies of Desire, ed. Deborah Bright (New York & London: Routledge, 1998): 216–28. Roth, Daniela. “Von Afrikanern erwartet man, dass sie Masken machen, also mache ich Masken,” in Romuald Hazoumé: My Paradise – Made in Porto-Novo, ed. Martin Henatsch (Herbert–Gerisch–Stiftung, Neumünster; Ostfildern–Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2010): 45-74. Rubin, William Stanley. Primitivism in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1984). Scheps, Marc, Yilmaz Dziewior & Barbara M. Thiemann, ed. Kunstwelten im Dialog: Von Gauguin zur globalen Gegenwart (exh. cat.; Museum Ludwig; Cologne: Walther König, 2000). Schmidt–Linsenhoff, Viktoria. “Wer begegnet wem? Bildbegriff und ‘Menschenbild’ in der Ausstellung ‘Weltkulturen und Moderne Kunst’ in München 1972,” in Kunst oder Weltkunst? Die Kunst in der Globalisierungsdebatte, ed. Detlef Hoffmann (Rehburg–Loccum: Evangelische Akademie Loccum, 2003): 9–26.

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Steyerl, Hito. “White Cube und Black Box: Die Farbmetaphysik des Kunstbegriffs,” in Mythen, Masken und Subjekte: Kritische Weißseinsforschung in Deutschland, ed. Maureen Maisha Eggers, Grada Kilomba, Peggy Piesche & Susan Arndt (Münster: Unrast, 2005): 135–43. Tancons, Claire. “An Elective Affinity: David Hammons’s ‘Hidden from View and Made in the Republic of Harlem’,” in Diaspora – Memory – Place: David Hammons, Maria Magdalena Campos–Pons, Pamela Z, ed. Salah M. Hassan & Cheryl Finley (Munich: Prestel, 2008): 196–209. Volkwein, Peter, ed. Romuald Hazoumé: Vor-Sicht (exh. cat.; Städtische Galerie Ingolstadt, 1999). von Hinden, Wiebke. “Die Macht kunstwissenschaftlicher Reproduktionen: Überlegungen zu den Fotografien der Schriftenreihe ‘Kulturen der Erde’,” in Globalisierung/Hierarchisierung: Kulturelle Dominanzen in Kunst und Kunstgeschichte, ed. Irene Below & Beatrice von Bismarck (Marburg: Jonas, 2005): 45–53. Wenk, Silke. “Zeigen und Schweigen: Der kunsthistorische Diskurs und die Diaprojektion,” in Konfigurationen: Zwischen Kunst und Medien, ed. Georg Christoph Tholen & Sigrid Schade (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1999): 292–305. Wilson, Fred. “Constructing the Spectacle of Culture in Museums,” in The Museum as Arena: Artists on Institutional Critique, ed. Christian Kravagna (Cologne: Walther König, 2001): 97–120. Wölfflin, Heinrich. “Wie man Skulpturen aufnehmen soll,” Zeitschrift für Bildende Kunst 8 (1896–97): 294–97.

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F IGURES (see pages 67–68 following)

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Figure 1. Lempertz Auktion 662. Catalogue cover.

Figure 2. Romuald Hazoumé, Autoportrait (1997). Part of the series Masques bidons. Found objects (installation view). Documenta 12, Kassel 2007. Photo by Ira Plein.

Figure 3. Fred Wilson, Colonial Collection (1990). Mixed media (installation view). Collection of the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham N C .

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Figure 4. David Hammons, Untitled (Hidden from View) (2002). Hauser & Wirth, Zurich (2002), installation view.

Figure 5. Rotimi Fani–Kayode, Bronze Head (1987). Black and white photograph. Autograph A B P .

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From Bush Talk to Nation Language — Language Attitudes in Jamaica Before and After Independence

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towards Jamaican Creole, from colonial times to the present day. The main hypothesis is that Jamaican Creole should be viewed more positively as a marker of national and cultural identity since Jamaica gained political independence in 1962. The textual evidence presented ranges from eighteenthcentury travel writing to present-day newspaper reports and letters to the editor, supplemented by language attitude studies. HIS ESSAY DEALS WITH CHANGING LANGUAGE ATTITUDES

Historical Background Jamaica was first colonized by the Spanish in the early-sixteenth century, but in 1655 a British fleet under Cromwell’s orders attacked the Spanish settlement. The Spaniards were taken by surprise and had to flee from the island; only a small number of men and several hundred slaves remained, waging a kind of guerrilla war on the English which finally failed in 1660.1 After the conquest, the English government immediately made plans to settle the colony, and in 1656 the first contingent of about 1500 settlers arrived from Nevis. Settlers from other parts of the Caribbean followed suit, bringing their slaves with them. By the end of the seventeenth century, the slaves already outnumbered the white settlers. As sugar soon became the 1

Robert LePage & David DeCamp, Jamaican Creole: An Historical Introduction to Jamaican Creole (London: Macmillan, 1960): 3–9.

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main crop in Jamaica, the number of slaves increased steadily until they made up about 92 percent of the total population in 1734.2 This economic and demographic change also led to a great linguistic change: namely, the creolization of English. Slaves speaking different and often mutually unintelligible African languages had to communicate with each other and with their white overseers, who spoke different varieties of regional English. Naturally, given their living conditions on the plantations, the slaves had very little contact with speakers of English. Hence, a radically restructured form of English emerged over the next generations, a creole, with a phoneme system altered to accommodate native speakers of West African languages, a lexicon containing mostly English words, and a drastically changed grammatical system, relying on particles rather than inflections.3 This can be illustrated by a brief sample sentence taken from Jamaican Creole: Di pikni dem tel im se a Klaris mash di pat. The children told her that it was Clarice who broke the pot.

Note the following features: In the subject of the main clause, the particle dem is used to indicate a plural; the lexeme pikni ‘children’ is ultimately of Portuguese origin. The verbs tel and mash are not inflected, but refer to an event in the past. The personal pronoun im translates into English he, him, she, and her. The English verb say has become a complementizer similar in function to English that. The subject of the subordinate is stressed by the use of the highlighter a (a Klaris). The equivalent of the relative clause who broke the pot does not require a relative pronoun in Jamaican Creole. The meaning of Standard English mash has been extended to any kind of destruction. Although it may appear at first glance that creolization means only a great simplification or an imperfect mastery of a ‘target language’, linguistic analysis has shown this not to be the case. A creole is by no means a kind of ‘broken English’ but a full-fledged language with grammatical distinctions not found in English – for example, article use based on whether the referent

2

John Holm, “English in the Caribbean,” in The Cambridge History of the English Language, ed. Robert Burchfield (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1994), vol. 4: 340–41; LePage & DeCamp, Jamaican Creole, 13–18. 3 For detailed information on the workings of creolization, see Sarah Grey Thomason & Terrence Kaufman, Language Contact, Creolization, and Genetic Linguistics (Berkeley: U of California P , 1988): 147–67.

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is known to both interlocutors or not.4 As language of the slaves, however, Jamaican Creole was held in very low esteem. With the emancipation of the slaves in 1838, most freed slaves became smallholders in the hill country, craftsmen, and traders. Emancipation did not improve the living conditions of the black population very much, and, since the governor refused to act on a petition, Paul Bogle and others organized the Morant Bay Rising in 1865, which was brutally suppressed by the governor and his armed forces. As a consequence, Jamaica became a British Crown Colony in 1866 to stabilize the political and economic hold on the island.5 During the depression in the 1920s, sugar prices fell drastically and a disease destroyed all banana plantations on the island. In this economically and politically unstable situation, the trade-union movement gained ground in Jamaica, especially Alexander Bustamente’s Industrial Trade Union, which was later to become the Jamaican Labour Party. Norman Manley established the People’s National Party and joined forces with the National Workers’ Union. These two parties have remained the major political forces in Jamaica to the present day. In 1944, a new constitution granted universal suffrage and in 1958 Jamaica became a founding member of the Federation of the West Indies, from which Jamaica was soon to withdraw again after a referendum. Following the failure of the Federation, Jamaica became independent in 1962. The political system is a parliamentary democracy modelled after the British system, and the Queen of England remains its official Head of State, represented on the island by the Governor General.6 Jamaica’s official language is English. The result of the continued coexistence of varieties of English and Jamaican Creole is a highly variable linguistic landscape. For the individual speakers, there is a clear division between English and Jamaican Creole, although one speaker’s variety of English may be more or less identical to another speaker’s version of the creole. Thus, the situation for the speech community as a whole is best modelled as a linguistic continuum, ranging from the broadest variety of Jamaican Creole to the most educated Standard English usage.7 This linguistic variability results in a large 4

See Andrea Sand, Linguistic Variation in Jamaica: A Corpus-based Study of Radio and Newspaper Usage (Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 1999): 126. 5 LePage & DeCamp, Jamaican Creole, 93–96. 6 Roland E. Jung, Jamaika (Hamm: Artcolor, 1992): 16–21. 7 See David DeCamp, “Implicational Scales and Sociolinguistic Linearity,” Linguistics 73 (1971): 30–43; Peter Patrick, Urban Jamaican Creole: Variation in the

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number of linguistic choices for each individual speaker and a high degree of code-switching and style-shifting in Jamaican speech.8

Early Accounts The earliest accounts of attitudes towards Jamaican Creole are mostly found in the writings of Englishmen and women travelling in the Caribbean. A typical example is quoted in LePage and DeCamp. Bryan Edwards writes in 1796: Concerning the Maroons, they are in general ignorant of our language, and all of them attached to the gloomy superstitions of Africa. […] Their language was a barbarous dissonance of the African dialects, with a mixture of Spanish and broken English.9

Similar sentiment is expressed in a letter quoted by Cassidy.10 In 1739, an English writer complains about the sons of Jamaican planters, who were perceived as sadly lacking in language skills and manners, because “a Boy till the Age of Seven or Eight diverts himself with the Negroes, acquires their broken Way of talking.” Such negative attitudes did not change after the emancipation of slaves in the 1830s. As Hubert Devonish puts it, One might have expected that, after emancipation, the Creole languages associated with the newly freed slaves would have expanded in function as an expression of their newly acquired rights as free people. In fact, however, the official attitudes to the use of Creole languages became quite hostile in the period after emancipation.11

This hostility is illustrated by another passage in Cassidy’s account of the development of Jamaican Creole. In 1885, an English visitor to Jamaica by the name of Chambre writes:

Mesolect (Varieties of English Around the World G17; Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1999). 8 Sand, Linguistic Variation in Jamaica, 151–73. 9 LePage & DeCamp, Jamaican Creole, 101. 10 Frederic G. Cassidy, Jamaica Talk (Kingston, Jamaica: Macmillan Caribbean, 1961): 20. 11 Hubert Devonish, Language and Liberation: Creole Language Politics in the Caribbean (London: Karia, 1986): 51.

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There is scarcely a black in a hundred who speaks pure English, and the white people take no pains to correct them. Sometimes they even adopt the barbarous idiom of the negro, thinking to make themselves understood. The consequence is, their pronunciation is abominable, and the rising generation, notwithstanding the pains taken to educate them, retain the villainous patois of their parents.12

Typical features of accounts from this period are the adjectives ‘barbarous’ and ‘villainous’ with reference to Jamaican Creole, indicating the lowest possible status. The term ‘patois’ itself became a common label for Jamaican Creole, and is still used – generally derogatively – today. Such negative attitudes at home and abroad persisted well into the twentieth century. In his introduction to the Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage, Richard Allsopp comments on language attitudes before the Second World War, quoting Wyld’s remark from 1920 that the colonial Englishes are “offshoots of a lesser breed.” Allsopp concludes: “In such a setting, North American English, if mentionable, was below the salt, Australian English ‘in waiting’ at the table, and the native speech of the Caribbean a kitchen variety.”13 It was a variety fit only for lower servants, not to be overheard by civilized company. These quotations clearly illustrate the pervasive negative attitudes towards Jamaican Creole that have obtained until quite recently.

Authors Take a Stand In the first half of the twentieth century, the first positive views on Jamaican Creole appeared in public discourse, mainly through the efforts of poets and writers. One of the earliest authors to use Jamaican Creole in his poetry was Claude McKay whose Songs of Jamaica and Constab Ballads were both published in 1912. H.G. de Lisser’s novel Jane’s Career (1914) portrayed a lower-class Jamaican woman and also contained some Jamaican Creole in the dialogues.14 In the 1930s and 1940s, authors like Una Marson, who was also responsible for the B B C series Calling the West Indies, or V.S. Reid, whose novel New Day (1949) shed new light on the 1865 Morant Bay Rising and 12

Cassidy, Jamaica Talk, 23. Richard Allsopp, ed. Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1996): liii. 14 Martin Mordecai & Pamela Mordecai, Culture and Customs of Jamaica (Westport C T : Greenwood, 2001): 116–17. 13

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contained some Jamaican Creole as well, fostered public acceptance of Jamaican Creole.15 A less well-known author, who explicitly addresses the issue of Jamaican Creole as a variety of English that is not to be judged as inferior to other varieties, is Inez K. Sibley. The collection of short stories titled Quashie’s Reflections in Jamaican Creole (1939) is unusual in that it is written entirely in a mesolectal16 variety of Jamaican Creole, while most earlier authors of prose tended to use the creole only in dialogues. The narrator by the name of Quashie is to be seen as a representative of the average Jamaican, as this is one of the Jamaican personal names that go back to the African tradition of naming children after the day of the week17 but has as the same time become a synonym for any male, rural, black Jamaican, with derogatory connotations of gullibility and naivety.18 In the short story “The English Language,” Sibley’s first-person narrator reflects on language use in Jamaica and England. The story begins with reference to a public debate in Jamaica on what is to be considered appropriate language use: Me hear sey de Jamaican Union ob Teachers hab one agiment bout de English langwidge as it peak out yah. Dem say sence ah de only langwidge we peak we ought to peak it prapa. Me barn in English colony ah wha else dem expect me fe peak but English; an me lub it to, specially de big wud dem.19

The narrator then proceeds to tell the reader about an encounter with a tourist in the Kingston streetcar and about meeting various speakers of non-standard varieties of English in London. In both cases, communication is hampered by 15

Mordecai & Mordecai, Culture and Customs of Jamaica, 118–19. In creole-continuum situations, the most prestigious variety at the one end of the lectal range is called the acrolect, while the least prestigious, broadest creole variety is called the basilect. All varieties patterning between these two extremes are called the mesolect or the mesolectal range. Mark Sebba compares the continuum to a ladder, with the basilect on the bottom rung and the acrolect on the top rung, with the mesolect in between. Variation in the mesolect is not random but rule-governed. Mark Sebba, Contact Languages: Pidgins and Creoles (London: Macmillan, 1997): 210–11. 17 Quashie is the name for a male child born on Sunday or the first day of the week. These names derive from Twi. See Cassidy, Jamaica Talk, 157. 18 See Allsopp, Dictionary of Caribbean Usage, 370. 19 Inez K. Sibley, Quashie’s Reflections in Jamaican Creole (Kingston, Jamaica: Bolivar, 1939), 10. 16

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differences between the varieties of English spoken by the interlocutors. In the concluding lines, the narrator claims the same right as the Englishmen he met in London to speak the King’s English in their own way, which also merits codification in the form of a dictionary. But me doan believe sey de touris lady understand me yet, cause she sey she waan a dictionary ob fe me dialect. Ah dat she call fe me Henglish. Me tel she, me would ah like fe derect she to it, but as far as me noa, it no publish yet. She sey, ‘Dats too bad,’ an me gree wid she entirely. Ah wa me waan noa is dis, ef de loayal subjects ober seas, low fe cut de King’s Henglish as dem like, why we can do de same out yah – we no free country?20

It is important to note that the narrator uses the term “Henglish” while the tourist uses “dialect,” a term that is traditionally associated with Jamaican Creole in Jamaica. It is thus not quite clear what the narrator actually spoke in the interaction with the tourist but, considering the introduction, it must have been his variety of English rather than creole. The issue of Jamaican Creole: i.e. the dialect, being equal to all other varieties of English is also taken up in one of Louise Bennett’s poems, “Bans o’ Killing”: So yuh a de man, me hear bout! Ah yuh dem sey dah-teck Whole heap o’English oat sey dat Yuh gwine kill dialect! Meck me get it straight Mass Charlie For me noh quite undastan, Yuh gwine kill all English dialect Or jus Jamaican one? Ef yuh da-equal up wid English Language, den wha meck Yuh gwine go feel inferior, wen It come to dialect? Ef yuh kean sing “Linstead Market” And “Wata come a me y’eye,” Yuh wi haffi tap sing “Auld Lang syne” An “Coming thru de rye.” 20

Sibley, Quashie’s Reflections in Jamaican Creole, 12.

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Da language weh yuh proud of’, Weh yuh honour and respeck, Po’ Mass Charlie! Yuh no sey Dat it spring from dialect! Dat dem start fe try tun language, From the fourteen century, Five hundred years gawn an dem got More dialect dan we! Yuh haffi kill de Lancashire De Yorkshire, de Cockney De broad Scotch and de Irish brogue Before you start kill me! Yuh wi haffe get the Oxford book O’ English verse, an tear Out Chaucer, Burns, Lady Grizelle An plenty o’Shakespeare! Wen yuh done kill “wit” and “humour” Wen yuh kill “Variety” Yuh wi haffe fine a way fe kill Originality! An mine how yuh dah-read dem English Book deh pon yuh shelf For ef yuh drop a “H” yuh mighta Haffe kill yuhself.21

Bennett thus assigns Jamaican Creole, her dialect, to the same category as a British regional dialect from Yorkshire or Scotland, the regional non-standard language of popular British folk songs, or the non-standard language used by such famous writers as Robert Burns, Geoffrey Chaucer or William Shakespeare. This is quite the opposite to the linguistic world-view of most Jamaicans, who regarded anything coming from Britain as far superior to their own language production. As Bennett’s poems were often first published in the local newspaper and also performed by her on stage, they reached a wide audience in Jamaica and certainly raised public awareness of the fact that Jamaican Creole can be regarded as a legitimate mode of artistic expression. Like Inez K. Sibley, Bennett makes use of a mesolectal variety of Jamaican Creole. There are creole elements, such as me as subject pronoun (ll. 1, 6), the 21

Louise Bennett, Jamaica Labrish (Kingston, Jamaica: Sangster’s, 1966): 218–19.

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progressive marker da(h) (ll. 2, 9, 37), the complementizer fi (ll. 21, 35), the relativizer wey (ll. 17, 18) or the negator no(h) (ll. 6, 19), but at the same time Standard English constructions such as the going-to future (gwine, ll. 4, 7, 11), modal have to (haffi/e, ll. 11, 25, 29, 36, 41) or the personal pronoun it (ll. 5, 12, 20), as well as many standard lexical items. What makes the poem appear more creole in structure than it actually is, is the sometimes inconsistent eye dialect to represent Jamaican pronunciation features, such as the stopping of the dental fricatives (de for the, ll. 1, 17, 25, 26, 27, or dem for them, ll. 2, 21, 23 , oat for oath l. 3, dat for that ll. 20, 21, wid for with l. 9), consonant cluster reduction (e.g., undastan l. 6, jus l. 8, respeck l. 18) or aphesis (bout for about l. 1, tap for stop, l. 15, pon for upon l. 40). The altered spellings draw attention to the poem’s distinct Jamaican Creole sound, even if it is just read silently. Other authors, such as Edward Baugh, Mervin Morris or Andrew Salkey, also published literature of high critical acclaim in the 1960s and 1970s, but none of them reached the popularity of Louise Bennett, or Auntie Lou, as Jamaicans still refer to her.22 In the 1970s, another author, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, coined the label ‘nation language’ as a means of referring to the variety of English owned by the people in the Caribbean. He writes: We also have what is called nation language, which is the kind of English spoken by the people who were brought to the Caribbean, not the official English now, but the language of slaves and labourers, the servants who were brought in by the conquistadors.23

Brathwaite’s aim is to identify shared elements of Caribbean culture, based on the shared history of the Middle Passage, and he also stresses those elements that are particular to the Caribbean, in terms of music, dance, and language. The concept of nation language thus expresses pride in the local variety of English. Interestingly, Brathwaite’s nation language is more in line with Sibley’s Henglish than with Bennett’s dialect, because he refers to the regional English rather than creole varieties. What is important in Brathwaite’s concept is that the national language of the Caribbean should be a local variety rather than the King’s or the Queen’s English.

22

Mordecai & Mordecai, Culture and Customs of Jamaica, 121–22. Edward K. Brathwaite, “Nation Language,” in Routledge Language and Cultural Theory Reader, ed. Lucy Burke, Tony Crowley & Alan Girvin (1979; London: Routledge, 2000): 310. 23

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These examples of writers taking a stand against the official language policy and the negative attitudes towards Jamaican Creole before and especially in the decades after Independence illustrate the beginning of a public debate about appropriate language use, especially in education and public domains. However, these are dissenting voices which did not reflect the opinions of the majority of the population.

The Linguists’ View During the same period when Louise Bennett and others were showing the Jamaican public that Jamaican Creole could be a language of literary expression, linguists were also at work to show that Jamaican Creole merits linguistic description and even codification. Fieldwork for the Linguistic Survey of the West Indies Creole started in the early 1950s.24 Already in 1960, Robert B. LePage and David DeCamp’s An Historical Introduction to Jamaican Creole, including four sample texts, became available. In 1961, Frederic G. Cassidy published his study Jamaica Talk: Three Hundred Years of the English Language in Jamaica, which focused mainly on lexical items, but also included sections on the historical development of Jamaican Creole and its pronunciation and grammar. The first comprehensive grammar of Jamaican Creole was published five years later by Beryl L. Bailey and, in the following year, the first edition of Frederic G. Cassidy and Robert LePage’s Dictionary of Jamaican English appeared. In addition to the massive task of compiling a dictionary that also includes etymological information, Cassidy and LePage also devised an orthography for Jamaican Creole, which is another important step towards codification. Unfortunately, as writing is still taught through the medium of Standard English today, the majority of those who use Jamaican Creole in writing rely on an eye dialect mainly based on English spelling conventions, while the Cassidy/ LePage system is only used for academic purposes.25 It is interesting that in these early linguistic publications, the terms ‘Jamaican Creole’ and ‘Jamaican English’ are used synonymously. However, in the general introduction to their Dictionary of Jamaican English, Cassidy

24

Frederic G. Cassidy & Robert B. LePage, Dictionary of Jamaican English, Second Edition (Kingston, Jamaica: U of the West Indies P , 2002): vii–viii. 25 See also Dagmar Deuber & Lars Hinrichs, “Dynamics of Orthographic Standardization in Jamaican Creole and Nigerian Pidgin,” World Englishes 26 (2007): 22–47.

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and LePage point out that they deal with what is “customarily called ‘the dialect’ in Jamaica.” They state that the better term for Jamaican dialect is “creole,” the term used by linguists today, which points to the origins of this folk speech as an amalgam of some features of English with others drawn from a large variety of African languages.26

Since the 1960s, linguists at the University of the West Indies and elsewhere have tried to educate their fellow Jamaicans and the interested public about Jamaican Creole and its status as a linguistic entity separate from Standard English. Very often, this was met with vehement opposition in the media and even ridicule.27 In the 1970s and 1980s, the first language-attitude studies were conducted in the anglophone Caribbean – for example, by Donald Winford in Guyana (1976) and John Rickford in Trinidad (1983), but not yet in Jamaica. However, the situation there at the time is probably best represented by the title of John Rickford and Elizabeth C. Traugott’s article “Symbols of Powerlessness and Degeneracy, or Symbol of Solidarity and Truth? Paradoxical Attitudes toward Pidgins and Creoles” (1985). Their survey revealed, at most, covert prestige for creoles in the Caribbean and elsewhere, while Standard English was held in high esteem as official language, language of learning, and language of economic success. More than two decades after Independence, despite the forays of writers, artists, and linguists, popular opinion did not embrace Jamaican Creole as their ‘nation language’.

The Role of the Media The mass media play a much more prominent role in the life of the average Jamaican than any academic or writer. They are thus also an important factor in shaping language attitudes. After Independence, a slow process set in which Hubert Devonish describes as “encroachments of Creole in Mass Media.”28 In the case of the most widely circulated newspaper of the island, 26

Cassidy & LePage, Dictionary of Jamaican English (2002), xi. A recent example is the letter to the editor titled ‘Nutty Professors and Patois’ by M. Turner–Smith in the Gleaner (19 February 2002). The author of the letter strongly attacks an article by Professor Hubert Devonish calling for official status for Jamaican Creole and steps towards its further codification. 28 Devonish, Language and Liberation, 89. 27

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the Gleaner, this meant that Jamaican Creole began to be used in direct quotations (mainly of less educated individuals), cartoons, and humorous texts, occasional columns or literary texts, such as poems by Louise Bennett and others.29 As mentioned above, writing in Jamaican Creole carries the added difficulty of choosing an appropriate orthography, the “encroachments” in oral media such as radio, television or movies would appear to be even more easily accomplished. Already in 1972, the politician Michael Manley was broadcast giving a political speech in which he used Jamaican Creole. Between 1982 and 1984, Jamaica’s Radio Central broadcast the local news in Jamaican Creole, which led to many extremely negative reactions by listeners. Devonish quotes one listener as telling the press: “I couldn’t believe what I was hearing: what sounded like news over J C B Radio Central here being delivered in patois!”30 Interestingly, when Devonish analysed the news broadcasts with a view to determining their linguistic features, he came to the conclusion that they were actually done in a standard variety of English but spoken in a very broad Jamaican accent, simulating Jamaican Creole phonology.31 This illustrates the difficulties of using Jamaican Creole in a domain formerly reserved for Standard English. In 1972, the first feature-length movie in Jamaican Creole was released, The Harder They Come, starring Jimmy Cliff, and many others were to follow.32 Such “encroachments” increased over the years, especially on the radio, where more and more quotations and interviews remained unedited, even on the news, and popular phone-in programmes allowed listeners to have their say in the variety of their choice. The presenters of the phone-in programmes are prime examples of skilled speakers who can switch easily from mesolectal Jamaican Creole to educated Standard English.33 All of this led, according to Devonish, to a “gradual erosion and decay of official language policy and practice in the post-colonial Commonwealth Caribbean”34 over the course of the past thirty years. In 1997, the Jamaican linguist Katherine Shields–Brodber was already predicting the demise of Standard English in her country, writing a “Requiem for an ‘Eng-

29

See Sand, Linguistic Variation in Jamaica, 153–55. Devonish, Language and Liberation, 94. 31 Language and Liberation, 96–97. 32 Mordecai & Mordecai, Culture and Customs of Jamaica, 129. 33 Sand, Linguistic Variation in Jamaica, 162–73. 34 Devonish, Language and Liberation, 89. 30

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lish-speaking’ Community: the Case of Jamaica.”35 She reported an increased use of Jamaican Creole in the media, especially among D J s, but also among the political elite.

The Situation Today The situation in Jamaica today can be described in the words of former Prime Minister Edward Seaga: If you look at it, government and commercial papers are all in English. Newspapers are mostly in English with a few Patois articles and Patois quotations in English articles. Television and radio are mixed with English and Patois and popular culture such as songs, DJ lyrics and roots plays are mostly in Patois.36

This passage illustrates quite nicely the further “encroachments” of Jamaican Creole – still referred to as ‘Patois’ (or ‘Patwah’) by most non-linguists in Jamaica – into the public sphere, especially in the media. In terms of official recognition, the situation could be described by what Peter Roberts called “the West Indian paradox”:37 on the one hand, the continuous coexistence of Jamaican Creole and English has led to the loss of the most basilectal, broadest creole forms. This is illustrated by Louise Bennett, who uses an intermediate mesolectal variety in her work, which is regarded by many Jamaicans today as typical of Jamaican Creole. On the other hand, the improved economic situation has led to greater national self-confidence and to more economic and educational development, and basilectal creole, which is no longer spoken by the majority of the population, is considered representative of the nation’s culture and identity. Nevertheless, while it is also exploited by the elites as a national symbol, it has not yet gained official recognition in terms of language policy or changes in the education system. Linguists such as Hubert Devonish are still calling for its recognition as official language, for the general adoption of the Cassidy/ LePage orthogra35

Kathryn Shields–Brodber, “Requiem for an ‘English-speaking’ Community: The Case of Jamaica,” in Englishes Around the World, vol. 2: Studies in Honour of Manfred Görlach, ed. Edgar Schneider (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1997): 57–67. 36 Keisha Hill, “Debate about Patois,” Jamaica Gleaner (11 April 2011), http: //jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20110411/lead/lead4.html (accessed 19 April 2012). 37 Roberts, Peter. West Indians and their Language (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1988), 13–14.

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phic system, and for the use of Jamaican Creole as medium of instruction in Jamaican schools.38 But education policy tends to be rather conservative. The Caribbean Examinations Board was only constituted in 1979, over a decade after independence. Before, exams from countries like Jamaica were sent to the Cambridge Overseas Examination Board, which strictly enforced British standards. It took until 1998 for the Jamaican Teachers Association to recommend the use of Jamaican Creole in the school system, at least as language of classroom interaction, but the political authorities have not yet reacted favourably to these recommendations. Since 2002, linguists from the University of the West Indies have been conducting teachers’ workshops in Jamaican schools to raise awareness among educators about the systematic differences between Jamaican Creole, the children’s mother tongue, and Standard English, the medium of instruction, in order to provide the schoolchildren with a better chance of succeeding in school. Meanwhile, the public debate about the appropriateness of Jamaican Creole in Jamaican schools continues in the media. In 2011, the then Prime Minister Bruce Golding was quoted in the Gleaner as saying: teaching Patois would be akin to saying, “We have failed to impart our accepted language of English, so we are giving up. This one can’t work, so let us find another one that can work.”39

Jamaican Creole in the classroom is thus equated with failure rather than with successful implementation of a national education policy. Outside of the education system, Jamaican Creole is making further progress as a written language, a process fostered by the increased use of electronic media. Recent studies show that more and more Jamaicans, both in Jamaica and in the diaspora, are using Jamaican Creole in writing in relatively informal types of computer-mediated communication such as e-mail40 or discussion fora.41 As a consequence, there is an increased tendency to develop

38

Devonish, Language and Liberation, 126. Hill, “Debate about Patois.” 40 Lars Hinrichs, Codeswitching on the Web: English and Jamaican Creole in EMail communication (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2006). 41 Christian Mair, “Language, Code, and Symbol: The Changing Roles of Jamaican Creole in Diaspora Communities,” Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 28 (2003): 231–48. 39

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what could be called ‘grassroots spelling conventions’,42 as those Jamaicans who are not trained linguists are not taught to use the Cassidy/LePage spelling system and Standard English spelling conventions are felt to be inappropriate because they often make it difficult to distinguish between the two codes in written texts. As computer-mediated communication has been found to promote the use of minority languages and non-standard varieties in writing elsewhere,43 it can be assumed that the growing importance of electronic media and communication will also foster the use of Jamaican Creole. Recent language-attitude studies are rare. Alicia Beckford–Wassink conducted a detailed study in a semi-rural Jamaican community in the late 1990s. She found ambivalent attitudes towards Jamaican English and creole among her informants. While the older generation still tend to think of Jamaican Creole as ‘bruok op English’: i.e. broken English, the younger generation has a more differentiated view, distinguishing ‘dialect’, the mesolectal variety of Jamaican Creole, used by Louise Bennett and others for performance purposes, ‘patois’, the variety spoken by themselves in informal contexts, ‘slang’, an informal variety of English especially used by younger speakers, and English, the most formal, mostly written variety of Standard English taught in school. While Beckford–Wassink’s informants agreed that Jamaican Creole is the appropriate code for interaction among family and friends and can be regarded as a marker of national and local identity, English was still considered unanimously as the more prestigious variety.44 In a more recent study testing the acceptability of creole loanwords and constructions commonly found in educated written usage in Jamaica, Sand noticed that creole lexical items were

42

As shown in Deuber & Hinrichs, “Dynamics of Orthographic Standardization in Jamaican Creole and Nigerian Pidgin,” 22–47. 43 See, for example, Andrea Sand, “Singapore weblogs: Between speech and writing,” in Corpus Linguistics and Variation in English: Focus on Non-Native Englishes (V A R I E N G : Studies in Variation, Contacts and Change in English 13, 2013), http: //www.helsinki.fi/varieng/series/volumes/13/sand/ (accessed 27 July 2013), on Colloquial Singapore English, or Jannis Androutsopoulos, “Language Choice and Codeswitching in German-based Diasporic Web forums,” in The Multilingual Internet, ed. Brenda Danet & Susan C. Herring (Oxford: Oxford U P , 2007): 340–61, on nonstandard German. 44 Alicia Beckford–Wassink, “Historic Low Prestige and Seeds of Change: Attitudes toward Jamaican Creole,” Language in Society 28 (1999): 57–92.

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found to be unacceptable in formal written usage by the majority of the informants.45 In the sphere of literature, many authors and performance poets today are expatriates, living in Great Britain, the U S A or Canada. Their use of Jamaican Creole appears to be more relaxed than that of previous generations of writers. In the work of Lorna Goodison, Christine Craig, Olive Senior or Jean Binta Breeze, Jamaican Creole is used less consistently, but these writers also do not feel the need to justify themselves for the use of this particular code. It has become one choice among several, its use no longer motivated by the aim to educate the public about the suitability of Jamaican Creole as a means of artistic expression.46

Conclusions The situation today appears to be characterized by a sometimes grudging acceptance of the increased use of Jamaican Creole in situations and domains formerly reserved for English, but no whole-hearted public or political endorsement. Language attitudes toward Jamaican Creole have changed since Independence sixty years ago, but not to such an extent as some might have expected or wished for. Especially in conservative fields such as education or religion, the use of Jamaican Creole as a language of instruction or as the language of the Bible is still hotly debated in the Jamaican public sphere. A quick search of the on-line archives of the Gleaner reveals over 1,000 entries for the search word ‘Patois’, ranging from lead articles to letters to the editor. The fact that the journalists, newspaper editors, and their readers still prefer the term ‘Patois’ over ‘Jamaican Creole’ is also indicative of the lack of overt prestige for the local variety.

45

Andrea Sand, “Language Attitudes and Linguistic Awareness in Jamaican English,” in Variation in the Caribbean: From Creole Continua to Individual Agency, ed. Lars Hinrichs & Joseph T. Farquharson (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2011): 163–87. 46 This is illustrated in Thelma B. Thompson, “Their Pens, Their Swords: New Jamaican Poets and Political Statements in Nation Language,” Studies in Literary Imagination 26.ii (1993): 45–62; or Andrea Sand & Merle Tönnies, “The Features and Meanings of Orality in Black British Performance Poetry,” in Anglistentag 2009 in Klagenfurt: Proceedings, ed. Jörg Helbig & René Schallegger (Trier: W V T , 2010): 105–14.

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Neither Robert Hall’s prediction in 1962 that the continued coexistence of Standard English and Jamaican Creole would lead to a complete decreolization – that is, the disappearance of the creole as it merges completely with its lexifier language47 – nor Shields–Brodber’s prediction in 1997 that Jamaican Creole will spread more and more at the expense of Standard English48 has proven to be true to date. Considering all the evidence presented in this essay, it appears to be likely that a mesolectal or moderate variety of Jamaican Creole will make further inroads into formal domains and especially written text types while a perceptibly Jamaican variety of Standard English will continue to be used in education, religion or text types such as academic writing. The younger generation of speakers and writers appear to be much more relaxed in their use of the various linguistic codes available to them, and less ideologically charged than their parents and grandparents. Jamaican Creole has been able to shed the image of ‘bush talk’ but has not yet been awarded the unequivocal status of ‘nation language’.

WORKS CITED Allsopp, Richard, ed. Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1996). Androutsopoulos, Jannis. “Language Choice and Code-Switching in German-based Diasporic Web forums,” in The Multilingual Internet, ed. Brenda Danet & Susan C. Herring (Oxford: Oxford U P , 2007): 340–61. Bailey, Beryl Loftman. Jamaican Creole Syntax (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1966). Beckford–Wassink, Alicia. “Historic Low Prestige and Seeds of Change: Attitudes toward Jamaican Creole,” Language in Society 28 (1999): 57–92. Bennett, Louise. Jamaica Labrish (Kingston, Jamaica: Sangster’s, 1966). Brathwaite, Edward K. “Nation Language,” in Routledge Language and Cultural Theory Reader, ed. Lucy Burke, Tony Crowly & Alan Girvin (1979; London: Routledge, 2000): 310–16. Cassidy, Frederic G. Dictionary of Jamaican English, Second Edition (Kingston, Jamaica: U of the West Indies P , 2002). ——. Jamaica Talk (Kingston, Jamaica: Macmillan Caribbean, 1961). ——, & Robert B. LePage. Dictionary of Jamaican English (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1967).

47 48

Robert A. Hall, “The Life-Cycle of Pidgin Languages,” Lingua 11 (1962): 151–56. Shields–Brodber, “Requiem for an ‘English-Speaking’ Community,” 57–67.

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DeCamp, David. “Implicational Scales and Sociolinguistic Linearity,” Linguistics 73 (1971): 30–43. Deuber, Dagmar, & Lars Hinrichs. “Dynamics of Orthographic Standardization in Jamaican Creole and Nigerian Pidgin,” World Englishes 26 (2007): 22–47. Devonish, Hubert. Language and Liberation: Creole Language Politics in the Caribbean (London: Karia, 1986). Hall, Robert A. “The Life-Cycle of Pidgin Languages,” Lingua 11 (1962): 151–56. Hill, Keisha. “Debate about Patois,” Jamaica Gleaner (11 April 2011), http://jamaicagleaner.com/gleaner/20110411/lead/lead4.html (accessed 19 April 2012). Hinrichs, Lars. Codeswitching on the Web: English and Jamaican Creole in E-Mail Communication (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2006). Holm, John. “English in the Caribbean,” in The Cambridge History of the English Language, ed. Robert Burchfield (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1994), vol. 4: 340–41. Jung, Roland E. Jamaika (Hamm: Artcolor, 1992). LePage, Robert, & David DeCamp. Jamaican Creole: An Historical Introduction to Jamaican Creole (London: Macmillan, 1960). Mair, Christian. “Language, Code, and Symbol: The Changing Roles of Jamaican Creole in Diaspora Communities,” Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 28 (2003): 231–48. Mordecai, Martin, & Pamela Mordecai. Culture and Customs of Jamaica (Westport C T : Greenwood, 2001). Patrick, Peter. Urban Jamaican Creole: Variation in the Mesolect (Varieties of English around the World G17; Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1999). Rickford, John. 1983. Standard and Non-Standard Language Attitudes in a Creole Continuum (Occasional Papers 16; St Augustine, Trinidad: Society for Caribbean Linguistics, 1983). Rickford, John & Elisabeth Closs Traugott. “Symbols of Powerlessness and Degeneracy, or Symbol of Solidarity and Truth? Paradoxical Attitudes toward Pidgins and Creoles,” in The English Language Today, ed. Sidney Greenbaum (London: Pergamon, 1985): 252–61. Roberts, Peter. West Indians and Their Language (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1988). Sand, Andrea. “Language Attitudes and Linguistic Awareness in Jamaican English,” in Variation in the Caribbean: From Creole Continua to Individual Agency, ed. Lars Hinrichs & Joseph T. Farquharson (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2011): 163–87. ——. Linguistic Variation in Jamaica: A Corpus-Based Study of Radio and Newspaper Usage (Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 1999). ——. “Singapore weblogs: Between speech and writing,” in Corpus Linguistics and Variation in English: Focus on Non-Native Englishes (V A R I E N G : Studies in Variation, Contacts and Change in English 13, 2013), http://www.helsinki.fi /varieng/series/volumes/13/sand/ (accessed 27 July 2013). Forthcoming also in Corpus Linguistics and Variation in English: Focus on Non-Native Englishes, ed.

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Magnus Huber & Joybrato Mukherjee (Helsinki: Research Unit for Variation, Contacts, and Change in English). ——, & Merle Tönnies. “The Features and Meanings of Orality in Black British Performance Poetry,” in Anglistentag 2009 in Klagenfurt. Proceedings, ed. Jörg Helbig & René Schallegger (Trier: W V T , 2010): 105–14. Sebba, Mark. Contact Languages: Pidgins and Creoles (London: Macmillan, 1997). Shields–Brodber, Kathryn. “Requiem for an ‘English-speaking’ Community: The Case of Jamaica,” in Englishes around the World: Studies in Honour of Manfred Görlach, ed. Edgar Schneider (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1997), vol. 2: 57–67. Sibley, Inez K. Quashie’s Reflections in Jamaican Creole (Kingston, Jamaica: Bolivar, 1939). Thomason, Sarah Grey, & Terrence Kaufman. Language Contact, Creolization, and Genetic Linguistics (Berkeley: U of California P , 1988). Thompson, Thelma B. “Their Pens, Their Swords: New Jamaican Poets and Political Statements in Nation Language,” Studies in Literary Imagination 26.2 (1993): 45– 62. Turner–Smith, M. “Nutty Professors and Patois,” Jamaica Gleaner (19 February 2012), http://jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20020219/letters/letters2.html (accessed 19 April 2012). Winford, Donald. “Teacher Attitudes toward Language Varieties in a Creole Community,” Linguistics 175 (1976): 45–75.

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Track Studies — Popular Music and Postcolonial Analysis

J OHANNES I SMAIEL –W ENDT Translation: Paula von Gleich

T

“Postcolonial Studies Across the Disciplines” with respect to music and musicology is nothing new. It would be wrong to assume that with this text deconstructivist theories and critical theories of culture and eurocentrism are being applied to (popular) music or musicology for the first time. On the contrary, the turn to more dynamic concepts of culture in postcolonial studies has not emerged independently from (popular) music. In fact, music and music theory have been crucial to shaping and inspiring postcolonial criticism and knowledge, as the work of some of the most prominent representatives of postcolonial studies makes clear: Paul Gilroy develops his thoughts on The Black Atlantic1 closely alongside the music of James Brown, Jimi Hendrix, George Clinton, and Fela Kuti. Stuart Hall repeatedly refers to the developments of Reggae, for example, to explain the dynamics of terms such as ‘diaspora’, ‘cultural identity’, or ‘imagined communities’.2 Edward Said’s idea of “contrapuntal readings”3 as a strategy surely springs from his profound engagement with so-called ‘classical’ music from Europe. Musical phenomena often serve as illustrations of world-views in postcolonial studies. In the following, I wish to propose a different focus on this rela1

O REFLECT ON

Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic. Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 1993): 199. 2 Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990): 231, 237. 3 Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1993): 66.

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tionship between music and postcolonial studies. Popular music should not merely illustrate knowledge about the world but should be understood as an epistemological system of its own. The following outline emphasizes the modes distinctive to music. I raise the question of how and to what extent popular music and postcolonial theories correspond to utopic understandings of culture. Based on the empirical analyses in my study tracks’n’treks: Populäre Musik und Postkoloniale Analyse,4 the following article summarizes my hypotheses and motivations for developing an analytical approach that considers postcolonial theory, popular music, and its practice as a theoretical and political project. Identifying popular music as postcolonial music is the starting point of my analysis. What does popular music have to do with colonialism? In what ways is contemporary music intertwined with excessive colonialist desires and compulsions to categorize and represent? In the second and third section of my analysis, I attempt to shake off the burden of representation in music by pointing to the potentials of music as sensation: i.e. – to use Susan Sontag’s words – becoming aware of the “erotics of art”5 or the erotics of sound. Based on musical forms, their dynamics and contemporary modes of production, I propose an alternative understanding of and listening to the world that is decolonial in motivation.

PART 1 POSTCOLONIAL SONIC TRAINING

The Topophilia of the Agents of Popular Music: How Popular Music is Categorized References to places, regions, countries, nations, or continents provide a central classification system for popular music. In fact, spatial references appear to be the most significant category for popular music besides references to sex 4

Johannes Ismaiel–Wendt, tracks’n’treks. Populäre Musik und Postkoloniale Analyse (Münster: Unrast, 2011). Fragments from my article “Lauter Kopien, keine Originale – laute Spuren und kein Ursprung,” in Lied und populäre Kultur, vol. 55, Original und Kopie, ed. Nils Grosch & Fernand Hörner (Münster: Waxmann, 2011): 63–77 are also included. 5 Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays (1978; New York: Octagon, 1964): 14.

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and gender. References to origin are pointers to musical forms and ‘typical’ styles – and of highly varying quality for cultural representation: disco and club music (places of listening), ‘Detroit House’ and ‘Hamburger Schule’ (cities), ‘Mali Blues’ and ‘Britpop’ (countries). There are prefixes such as ‘Afro-’ or ‘Latin-’ which correlate music with entire continents; and there are even localizations determined according to geographical altitude or vegetation such as music from the ‘Alps’ or ‘Jungle’. The attempt to compile a list of spatial references in artists’ names, on album covers, and in songs would be doomed to fail due to its tremendous length: countless indicators of location could be found from Africando to the Zulu Nation, from ‘Living in America’ to ‘Tales of Zimbabwe’. Apart from explicit references to places, we also associate many styles with particular areas: with salsa we immediately think of Cuba or New York; with tango, Argentina comes to mind; with banghra we see ourselves in the Punjab, London or Birmingham. Geographical or topographical references and the drawing of boundaries are a constitutive part of popular music. On the other side of the same coin: i.e. the drawing of a musical world map, we find fantasies of the dissolution of borders and boundaries that are inspired by popular music. The abolishment of national or ethnic borders through the unifying element of music is imagined in ‘World Music’, ‘Global Beats’, and ‘Crossover’. Mottos such as “One World-One Voice”6 and “One World, Many Cultures”7 as well as the big festivals celebrating international solidarity since the 1970s8 signify pacification and the transgression of nationalist and racist thinking. Nevertheless, the musical fantasy of crossing borders mostly remains linked to the logic of static correlations of music and location. Moreover, the biography of musicians is often mistaken for the music itself, or, rather, both are often strongly associated with each other. It is also striking that even socalled ‘World Music’ is sorted according to countries in music stores.

6

Various Artists, One World – One Voice (Virgin U K , B000007UJY, 1999). Various Artists, One World, Many Cultures (Putumayo / Exil [Indigo], B000IHY 9AW, 2006). 8 Bernd Wagner, “Kulturelle Globalisierung: Weltkultur, Glokalität und Hybridisierung,” in Kulturelle Globalisierung. Weltkultur und kulturelle Fragmentierung, ed. Bernd Wagner (Essen: Klartext, 2001): 20. Examples of such events are the “Concert for Bangla Desh” (1971) and the “Live Aid Concert” (1985). 7

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Yet, questions arise about whether there is any causally determined relation at all between music styles and territory. Are there any specific aesthetics in the sense of particular musical parameters which explain the correlation of music and location, as musicologists and ethnomusicologists like to imply? No single aesthetic form can be determined for any of the above-mentioned styles, at least none that would be consistently found in every piece of music assigned to the style. What African music and which Africans does the prefix ‘Afro-’ in ‘Afro Jazz’ refer to? What, then, is ‘Euro Jazz’? Can a band from Japan play ‘Britpop’? What is ‘World Music’? Is ‘World Music’ – qua negative definition – the term for all non-Western music styles? What, then, is ‘Western Music’? Bach? A monotonously beating techno bass drum or oompah-pah in three-quarter time? A definite correlation of music and location or nation cannot be justified, in any case. The bracketing of music and political geography is based entirely on the construction of ideal types. With respect to music styles, undeclared and indefinable “popular knowledge”9 often determines the mapping of music. There is also an ‘official knowledge’ about the bracketing of music and localities that is generated elaborately in the academies. Music and geography have often been considered in relation to each other in various scholarly disciplines at least since the early twentieth century, as Christoph Mager shows in his dissertation HipHop, Musik und die Artikulation von Geographie.10 Terms and research titles such as “Geography of Music,” “Soundscapes,” ”The Place of Music,” “Sonic Geographies,” “Sonorous Geographies”11 underline the fact that extensive attempts have been made to review and systematize music and sound with geographical references. 9

John Fiske differentiates between “official knowledge,” e.g., facts published by institutions, and “popular knowledge” of the media and fans / anti-fans. Interestingly, Fiske’s differentiation does not aim at awarding one form of knowledge more validity than the other. Instead he compares the two in order to locate and underline the powerful position of the sender of knowledge. For Fiske, truth is never factual or objective but completely determined by the power of those who express it. Fiske, “Elvis: Body of Knowledge: Offizielle und populäre Formen des Wissens um Elvis Presley,” tr. Johannes Moltke (“Official and Popular Forms of Knowledge on Elvis”), Montage/av 2.1 (1993): 20. As “Elvis: A Body of Controversy,” in Fiske, Power Plays, Power Works (London: Verso, 1997): 109–10. 10 Christoph Mager, HipHop, Musik und die Artikulation von Geographie (Stuttgart: Steiner. 2007). 11 Mager, HipHop, Musik und die Artikulation von Geographie, 24.

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The musical piece itself is in the first instance – if at all a location – a terra incognita or tabula rasa. The close relation between places and music is generated by all those involved in the practices of popular music. Musicians, producers, recipients, and scholars seem to long for the linking of musical forms and styles to territories and thereby indirectly to cultures. I call this desire for localization the topophilia of the agents of popular music.

The Topophobia of the Musical Form In contrast to its agents, the musical form itself is topophobic.12 It cannot function when fixed somewhere or somehow. In many respects, music arises from movements. The musicologist Martin Pfleiderer summarizes various movement-related aspects of music: Numerous movements underlie the physical principles of music: the bodily movements of musicians playing a musical instrument and the mechanical oscillation of the instruments and loudspeaker membranes, the movement of air particles spreading wave-like and the movement of the basilar membrane in the inner ear. Moreover, in most music cultures of the world music is also closely connected to body movements, i.e. the dancing of listeners; not uncommonly the musicians dance too.13

Music is and requires movement. If we glued the entire loudspeaker membrane of a sound system to an immovable object, we could no longer hear any music. Someone who has once learned to play a musical instrument (be it 12

The conceptual pair ‘topophobia’ and ‘topophilia’ is also used by the geographer Yi–Fu Tuan. For Tuan, topophilia means humans loving particular places: “topophilia is the affective bond between people and place sentence or setting. Diffuse as concept, vivid and concrete as personal experience”; Yi–Fu Tuan, Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values (1974; New York: Columbia U P , 1990): 4. Accordingly, topophobia is the discontent towards particular places. In my study tracks’n’treks these terms are reassessed and mean something different: topophilia and topophobia are not tied to particular places but to territorialized thinking and perceiving in general. Topophilia, the desire for localization, is criticized and topophobia is proposed as a positive and political theoretical concept. 13 Martin Pfleiderer, Rhythmus: Psychologische, theoretische und stilanalytische Aspekte populärer Musik (Bielefeld: transcript, 2006): 94 [translation Paula von Gleich].

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sound editing and mixing on the computer or the training of the human voice) knows that for the most part music-making requires the recording or memorizing of sequences of movement. Besides physical movements Pfleiderer also lists metaphors of movement, which find expression in the participles often used to describe music. Tone sequences are described by words such as ‘rising’ and ‘falling’. Rhythms are, for instance, ‘stomping’ or ‘circling’. The connection between metaphors of movement and physical movements is itself immediately suggestive.14 Another external movement-related facet of music is the process of music’s ‘being moved’. Music has always been moved by musicians on tours and through the circulation of instruments and of compositional ideas, and via techniques of performance. This process has accelerated owing to the distribution of recordings and other media today. The transportability of music also has the effect that music seems to adapt readily to various contexts or places of listening. The musicologist Peter Wicke writes that popular music does not know a static and valid implementation of its sonic form. He illustrates the polymorphic character of music as follows: The same song listened to through headphones at home, experienced as part of a 90-minutes-long stage performance, or taken as dancing material in a club is the same song in name only. While dancing, the song is made accessible from the bass line. A very differently structured form appears than e.g. during the subject-centered aesthetic perception through headphones which follows the relation of lyrics and sound.15

If the localization of music is understood as a fixation by its agents but the object itself is characterized as dynamic: i.e. in many respects shaped by movement, a discrepancy appears between the forms of (re-)presentation and the forms which the object or Gestalt takes. Thus, a fundamental paradox exists between polymorphic, movement-generated music and the localization of the same. The juxtaposition of the topophilia of the agents of popular music and the topophobia of the musical form introduced here initially seems merely to represent a pseudo-dilemma. Yet, this paradoxical relation poses a central 14

Pfleiderer, Rhythmus, 99. Peter Wicke, “Popmusik in der Analyse,” Popscriptum (2003), http://www2.huberlin.de/fpm/textpool/texte/wicke_popmusik-in-der-analyse.htm (accessed 8 February 2010), [translation Paula von Gleich]. 15

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problem: As soon as we question the existence of this topophilia, the references to places, nations, and continents in popular music, politically charged debates on exclusion, racism, and colonialism emerge on a global scale. This dilemma can already be discerned by looking closely, and with some knowledge of music, at the diversity of individual topographic musical labels. Stylistic labels such as ‘Underground’ or ‘Jungle’ obviously aim at an alternative topography beyond political world maps, while musical labels which include the names of cities such as Bristol or New York often indicate multinational, transcultural (im-)migrant societies rather than mono-nationalist or mono-racist ideas.

Popular Music is Postcolonial Music Taking these things into consideration allows us to develop hypotheses for combining popular-music analysis with postcolonial analysis. Music is cultural practice and therefore it is also part of the knowledge and representation systems ‘nation’, ‘ethnicity’, and ‘race’. Since these systems and discourses of culture have been maintained to this day16 – for example, in the persistent and common use of the term ‘non-European music’ in musicology – popular music is also subject to attempts at appropriation and safeguarding by those that have power to define. Thus, I argue, the excessive localization of music, the topophobia of the agents of popular music, is a consequence and also often the instrument of colonialist thinking and action in systems of representation. The invention of music as an element of continental or national ‘tradition’ involves imaginations of conquest and the division and distribution of land as well as (self-)essentializing stagings of cultures. A critique of this cultural racist circularity was established long ago by Frantz Fanon: The Negro, never so much a Negro as since he has been dominated by the whites, when he decides to prove that he has a culture and to behave like a cultured person, comes to realize that history points out a well-defined path to him: he must demonstrate that a Negro culture exists.17 16

Bart J. Moore–Gilbert, Postcolonial Theory: Contexts, Practices, Politics (London: Verso, 1997): 12. Matthew Head, “Musicology on Safari: Orientalism and the Spectre of Postcolonial Theory,” Music Analysis 22 (2003): 212. 17 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, tr. Constance Farrington, preface by Jean–Paul Sartre (Les Damnés de la terre, 1961; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967): 38.

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Music as cultural expression finds itself in precisely this quandary of representation, and the bracketing of allocated territories and cultures continues to affect today’s popular music. The world map can be spelled according to music styles from A to Z: ‘Afro Beat’, ‘Britpop’, ‘Celtic Folk’, etc. Popular music here is redefined as postcolonial music because the strands of colonization, decolonization, recolonization,18 and migratory movements intersect in music. The popular in music is not simply a mass phenomenon, but the mass or multitude exists, among other reasons, because of its colonial entanglement. It is no coincidence that particularly anglo- and hispanophone recordings enjoy such great popularity on the international music market, nor that so many popular styles have developed in the U K since the 1970s. The history of popular music has its roots in the nexus of European colonialism and imperialism, the (un)homely cultures of the enslaved, in resistance movements of the oppressed, in usurpations of newly coined significations by the culture industry, and, finally, in a fresh struggle about these usurpations. Popular music is postcolonial music because it is not only the ‘play’ of the colonizers with representation; popular music is also shaped by the entry of the marginalized into representation.19 Nonetheless, postcolonial complexity is not to be confused with simplified, essentialized narratives of the history of popular music beginning, for instance, with “African musical roots,”20 stolen by whites. The beat of a drum’n’bass track chosen by a D J because he or she thinks it is ‘awesome’ may sound just like a faster-pitched rhythmic pattern played by a small group of people somewhere in Africa. But the beat is neither of the two. It is neither a meaningless musical component nor a perpetuation of African ‘roots’. Its meaning is negotiated time and again in representation: maybe the beat was 18

María do Mar Castro Varela & Nikita Dhawan, Postkoloniale Theorie: Eine kritische Einführung (Bielefeld: transcript, 2003): 24. 19 Stuart Hall writes: “Indeed, the most profound cultural revolution in this part of the twentieth century has come about the consequence of margins coming into representation – in art, in painting, in film, in music, in literature, in the modern arts everywhere, in politics and in social life generally.” Hall, “The Local, and the Global: Globalization and Ethnicity,” in Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives, ed. Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti & Ella Shohat (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 1997): 187. This, of course, does not mean that representations of the marginalized are per se ‘good’ or free from essentialist or racist tendencies. 20 Portia K. Maultsby, “A Map of the Music,” African American Review 29.2 (Summer 1995): 183.

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once played in the work songs of the enslaved, maybe another time in civilrights freedom songs, maybe in soul and then in disco. Its meaning can only be understood – if at all – in the re-construction of particular contexts in which agency is stabilized or destabilized. Popular, postcolonial music has its origin in the colonial discourses of ‘race’ and ‘culture’ and their continual questions of representation. Popular music is like snow, run over by an “avalanche of popular representations,”21 and this snow is also part of the avalanche itself. Popular music is shaped by the colonialist white idea of ‘race’. This can easily be observed in German music stores which feature the label ‘Black Music’ on sales displays, whereas the corresponding display with the label ‘White Music’, which would include the music of, say, Bach, Zahra Leander, and Johnny Cash, does not exist.22 Popular music is not colonial music; neither is it ‘Western Music’. Popular music is postcolonial music because, as part of the spectacle of representation, it also – possibly even primarily – encroaches on the West itself. I equate popular music with postcolonial music because I recognize processes in popular music which are also attributed to postcolonial realities in general. (Pre-)conditions of colonialism are localization, fixation, and categorization with the simultaneous disregarding of difference. Only in this way can relations of authority be orchestrated and legitimized. Apart from the struggles about appropriation and the liberation movements, postcolonialism is ultimately shaped by migratory movements. As a hypothesis I therefore propose that the postcolonial world is shaped by a topophilic Zeitgeist, while the forms of life are strongly influenced by movement. This is the parallel I wish to trace between postcolonialism and popular music: popular music is significantly shaped by the topophobia of its agents, whereas the musical form is highly transitory, polymorphic, and generated by movement.

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21

Stuart Hall, “The Spectacle of the ‘Other’,” in Representations: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, ed. Stuart Hall (London: Sage / Open University, 1997): 239. 22 Roger Behrens, Martin Büsser, Tine Plesch & Johannes Ullmaier, “Editorial,” in testcard #13: Black Music (Mainz: Ventil, 2004): 4.

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PART 2 TRACKNOWLOGY The track is a popular musical form, a technological phenomenon of music that has developed considerably since the 1960s; it is a compositional mode of thought which, in my opinion, represents one of the most productive forms of world knowledge, enabling the experience of constant transformation and movement against the topophilic Zeitgeist. The concept of the track developed in popular music: i.e. the layering of analogue or digital audio tracks, is decidedly worldly and has the potential of world-making. D J s use tracks as tools to produce a new track.23 In hip-hop or electronic dance music from House to post-dub-step, composition means nothing less than track theory and the practice of choosing, layering, and transforming sound- and rhythm-tracks. The track can be characterized much as Roland Barthes describes plastic: “So, more than a substance plastic is the very idea of its infinite transformation; [. .. ] it is less a thing than the trace of a movement.” 24 The track is a productive concept to escape rigid and shallow world-views as well as the compulsion for cultural representation. The special and dynamic narrative strategy of the track: i.e. a clearly audible mode of construction, in which multiple worlds, performative spaces or acoustic atmospheres become possible, is heard as a musical equivalent to world-views in postcolonial studies. In music production, the term ‘track’ is used to describe both individual sound-tracks and the mix of sound-tracks or the completed musical object. Contemporary cultural theories that stress processuality and hybridity have long been audible in the modes of production and the aesthetic of the multitrack recording. Ideas of the world as well as the critique of essentialist and static cultural concepts, of linear and locally fixed narratives, as outlined by cultural, postcolonial language and literary studies, are recorded in the compositional styles of many tracks.25 Thus, the track does not imagine a fixed entity, it does not know a single order of events – and thereby lacks a hierarchy between melody, sound, and rhythm – and it is polymorphous and free from 23

Mark Jonathan Butler, Unlocking the Groove: Rhythm, Meter, and Musical Design in Electronic Dance Music (Bloomington: Indiana U P , 2006): 256. 24 Roland Barthes, Mythologies, tr. Annette Lavers (Mythologies, 1957; New York: Noonday, 1972): 79. 25 Stuart Hall, “The Question of Cultural Identity,” in Modernity and its Futures, ed. Stuart Hall, David Held & Tony McGrew (Cambridge: Polity, 1992): 273–316.

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the sole task of representation. In brief, the track means the death both of modern identity and of the original. In this sense, the track can be directly synchronized with the insights of the most important decentring theories of the past century (psychoanalysis, structuralist linguistics, discourse and speech act theory, feminist movements, postcolonial studies).26 In fact, when we read and hear track also as ‘trek’ and consider its etymological derivation from path, trace, journey, or as moving across land(-scapes), we can discern immediate correlations to the paradigms of recent cultural experience and scholarship such as migration, diaspora, inter- and transculturalism. Along this definition and the compositional style of contemporary track music, a cultural concept can be developed. Accordingly, tracks and cultures are understood as either random or strategic temporary affiliations of different traces. Cultures and tracks then result from the intertwined processes of blending or cross-fading and being detached, fading in and out in infinite forms. Since their invention, all multi-channel or multi-track mixers and recorders have known how to cross traces from different times and spaces. They are able to narrate a-chronically: they are anti-telos-generators, as it were, through which narratives about origins are eroded by breaks, irritated by samples, or repeated time and again in a loop, so that beginning and end no longer play any role.27 The track seems to question enlightened logics and imagined chronologies, just as it is capable of achieving a reverse sample of many a musical piece. Sounds dissected from one track and implemented into another, shifts of stress and sound synthesizing can be experienced as denaturalizing strategies. Strong alienation from familiar sounds and rhythms – just like the disarray of voices that becomes possible in the simultaneity of track playing – sometimes no longer enables any association outside the listener’s head and body. In this way, musical forms hardly function any longer as representatives or sound logos. Sometimes a track seems very constant. Perhaps a bass drum stomps steadily and bluntly for minutes. In this case, the bass drum is like a catalyst that beats unchanged through various performative and acoustic spaces and in so doing changes the atmosphere. Tracks are informed by their own diasporic

26

Hall, “The Question of Cultural Identity,” 287–93. Robert Fink, Repeating Ourselves: American Minimal Music as Cultural Practice (Berkeley: U of California P , 2005): 43. 27

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aesthetic. Narratives of migration resonate in digital echoes.28 Musicians refer back to earlier musical figures and draw on repertoires and archives in order to position themselves and to articulate counter-narratives. However, these counter-narratives are not necessarily new musical versions of essentialism; instead, these forms may remain ambiguous, dialectic, duppy, uncanny or ‘un-home-ly’.29 I hear tracks as an independent epistemological system. In so doing, opportunities for conceiving alternative stagings of culture and paying attention to aesthetics or forms of movement are revealed against the backdrop of the racist logic of representation and (music) cultural usurpation. This uncomfortably formulated clause must be added because mere postmodern idealization of the idea of movement and migration is not the objective. Although I assume only performative spaces or imagined geographies in music and politics, I do take seriously the logic of representation they entail, as the effects of the imagined may at times be quite real. More importantly, to understand culture as movement, dynamic and processual, has long developed into an empty formula of postmodernity. Yet, my intention is precisely not to convey this empty formula. Concepts such as fluidity, flow, and hybridity used readily by critical scholars, but also by automobile manufacturers and stock-market speculators, are not per se ‘somehow good’. Very different aesthetic and political concepts may lie behind the proliferating metaphors of dynamization and the dissolution of boundaries. Listening closely and in a new way is necessary; and the development of such a mode of hearing is the concern of track studies.

PART 3 SONIC DELINKING Track studies not only deconstruct aspects of mapping and representation in the context of music. They can also be considered as a mode of listening that inherently disrupts discourse. In this section, I want to present my motives for such an active mode of track listening and raise the following key questions: what is the purpose of ‘tracks’n’treks listenings’? In what ways can postcolo28

Michael Veal, Dub: Soundscapes and Shattered Songs in Jamaican Reggae (Middletown C T : Wesleyan U P , 2007): 197. 29 Alexander Weheliye, Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity (Durham N C : Duke U P , 2005): 103.

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nial theorizing but also musicians and listeners benefit from this approach? One aim and virtually a sign of quality of tracks is their ability to create spaces for transgression and for the shifting of clichéd invocations – to produce an increase in possible worlds, as it were. More specifically, I am interested in the anti- or decolonizing potential of tracks. Indeed, I would like to encapsulate the guiding theme of track studies in the term ‘decolonization’. Yet, decolonization seems much too ambitious for what track studies are able to achieve. In a way, this concept is inadequate, since decolonization frequently involves violent conflict or torture for those involved. In contrast to this, the concept of track studies appears to be a very comfortable idea – decolonization de luxe, so to speak.30 Another reason for dissatisfaction with the term ‘decolonization’ is that it is often (mis-)understood as something oppositional: i.e. it is equated with the declaration of independence by nation-states which have freed themselves from the status of colony. Understood in this way, one might think (as often happens)31 that the 30

Jenny Sharpe explains: “Unlike the literature of decolonization, which was bound up with the Third World national liberation movements of the sixties and seventies, postcolonial studies is primarily a first world academic discourse of the eighties and nineties.” Sharpe, “Postcolonial Studies in the House of U S Multiculturalism,” in A Companion to Postcolonial Studies, ed. Henry Schwarz (Malden M A : Blackwell, 2000): 114. Having said that, Sharpe does not want to describe academic discourses as politically inefficient but, rather, to explain that they have in fact spread in the imperial centres such as Great Britain and the U S A and have therefore grown out of the issue of multiculturalism. The eponymous term ‘postcolonial’ is thus indeed appropriate for this work. The reason why ‘decolonization’ is also introduced as a concept here is that my aim is not only to develop an analytical method but also to pursue political agendas. While this is not to say that postcolonial studies do not have such political intentions, I wish to emphasize the political impetus. 31 Thorsten Schüller’s publication Wo ist Afrika? Paratopische Ästhetik in der zeitgenössischen Romanliteratur des frankophonen Schwarzafrika (Frankfurt am Main: I K O , 2008) shall serve as a recent scholarly example for this unbelievable ignorance or avoidance strategy. Schüller considers decolonization as completed and refers to fiction from francophone sub-Saharan Africa (in his words “Schwarzafrika”: i.e. ‘black Africa’) as merely possessing a paratopical aesthetic (the subtitle of his publication). He writes that a combatively committed aesthetic has become obsolete. According to Schüller, the colonial era is negligible with respect to the form of the novels. To him, many contemporary authors have moved on from a committed dialogue between Africa and France with postcolonial implications into a new form of freedom (Schüller, Wo ist Afrika?, 10).

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process of decolonization had been seriously promoted in the years after the Second World War and is mostly complete today. Consequently, I will no longer use the term, although a “de-colonial epistemic shift,” as postulated by Walter Mignolo,32 continues to be the motive of track studies. Instead, I draw on a concept that Mignolo recognizes as rewarding in this very context and which ultimately clarifies the overriding thinking with respect to the perpetually evoked national, ethnic or racist representation and topophilia: “Delinking.” .

A delinking that leads to de-colonial epistemic shift and brings to the foreground other epistemologies, other principles of knowledge and understanding and, consequently, other economy, other politics, other ethics.33

Mignolo has taken extensive and detailed account of the process of mapping the so-called ‘New World’ through European colonialism. He makes it clear that in no way did this process create neutral relations: its racist classifications and a ranking of the planet into “First World,” “Second World,” and “Third World” continues.34 This is why he speaks of interrelated “body- and geopolitics,”35 and calls for delinking processes. Colonialism, which has remained unquestionably powerful to this day, has involved the racialization of politics, economics, cultures, and knowledge.36 Music is a small but nonetheless often underestimated component of knowledge that also needs to be delinked. Therefore, a sonic delinking should be fostered. Measured against other postcolonial realities, music is probably only one aesthetic form of expression among others; yet such artistic realities cannot be separated from the realities of life. Delinking is required at all levels of knowledge. Sonic delinking means disobeying the burdensome obligations of acoustic representation, liability, and belonging. What does it mean to disobey this burden? For one thing, it refers to the liberation of music from an outdated ethno-musicological world map, which 32

Walter Mignolo, “Delinking: The rhetoric of modernity, the logic of coloniality and the grammar of de-coloniality,” Cultural Studies 21.2 (March–May 2007), http: //waltermignolo .com/txt/publications/WMignolo_Delinking.pdf (accessed 11 February 2010): 453. 33 Mignolo, “Delinking,” 453. 34 “Delinking,” 497. 35 “Delinking,” 453. 36 “Delinking,” 497.

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is merely a racist world map charted in more detail. Sonic delinking further aims at an alternative world-view activated by musical forms. New cultural concepts have always developed in parallel to new aesthetic concepts in history. The anthropologist and musicologist John Blacking formulates quite carefully the impulses expected to arise from music: I am not claiming that musics, or the arts in general, are the motor of change, or that they have a problem-solving function. I am concerned with the cognitive functions of music, and shall suggest [. . . ] that music-making can be an indispensable tool for the heightening and transforming consciousness as a first step to transforming social forms.37

Sonic delinking is a synonym for refusing to adopt the imposed roles of the culturalized music, a refusal which can be performed on the levels of composition and reception. It means introducing, pluralizing, and temporalizing other acoustic atmospheres into the topophilic canon of knowledge. Hence, with the vocabulary developed above, sonic delinking constitutes motivated, topophobic disobedience.38 When tracks are listened to attentively, productive musical strategies and motives which enable de-territorialization can be heard, and this also includes the delinking of bodies. Appropriate means are, for instance, the creation of utopian acoustic atmospheres, changing the repertoire through remixing or synthesizing (artificializing). Wobbles, pitchings, cuts, and breaks can represent very important aesthetic concepts which destroy ostensible relations as well as essences and which (de)compose new thinking.39 Polyphony, polyrhythm, and polyrhythmics make “pluriversal”40 experiences audible instead of staging univocal knowledge and universalism. In sum: “one strategy of delinking is to de-naturalize concepts and conceptual fields that totalize A [sic] reality.”41 37

John Blacking, Music, Culture, & Experience: Selected Papers of John Blacking, ed. Reginald Byron (Chicago: U of Chicago P , 1995): 232. 38 Kien Nghi Ha uses a pun in his publication Hype um Hybridität: Kultureller Differenzkonsum und postmoderne Verwertungstechniken im Spätkapitalismus (Bielefeld: transcript, 2005) which is very apposite with respect to topophobic disobedience. He juxtaposes the settled patterns of “subordination” with successful “subversion” (116). 39 Sabine Broeck, White Amnesia – Black Memory? American Women’s Writing and History (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1999): 178. 40 Mignolo, “Delinking,”453. 41 “Delinking,” 458.

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Sonic Delinking does not mean clinging to the logic of centre and periphery or trying to make the voices of the periphery audible in the centre. Eurocentrism is not merely relativized through imagining many different cultures: i.e. by replacing it with ethnocentrism. Focusing on multicultural staging, synthesis or difference is not per se reasonable. Only the critique of eurocentrism and cultural usurpation itself is an attempt at sonic delinking. Nevertheless, this is not to say that European components – whatever these may be – are to be dismissed. Only the idea of music as a nationalist, racist or heteronomous means for representation is to be rejected. Sonic delinking involves processes of composition and consumption. For the creative process of production, the term ‘against’ or the prefix ‘de-’ do not mean renunciation but diversification: sonic delinking asks to irritate imagined monolithic tuning and timing and allows for diverse tuning and rhythmicization systems.42 It pledges to offer sonic space to the echoes of history, including narratives of devastation and abduction. In return, sonic delinking calls for the invention of acoustic worlds and resistance to imagined traditions of music. Sonic delinking is not merely a strategy reserved for the production process. It is also a strategy with which listeners can empower themselves when musical pieces are not too closed as to their potential shifts in meaning. Arguing that popular music is always postcolonial music does not mean that it is also always music of liberation. The myth that popular music is per se rebellious is just that – a myth. But the opportunity to listen differently and to hear another epistemological poetics is offered to listeners. Sensation can be heard not only inside music but also into the music: distortion and noise as acoustic agitations working against localization; sounds that refuse localizing 42

The musician and composer Carlos Sandoval proposes the two concepts of “detuning” and “detiming” in his article “heimat? identität? Reflexionen eines mexikanischen Komponisten zum Komponieren unter den Vorzeichen des Kolonialismus,” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 1 (2009): 40–45. With respect to conventions of composition, Sandoval observes that musicians have been systematically trained in obedience, no matter whether in the academies in postcolonial Mexico or in Europe, and asks why the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are studied as paradigms of music. He argues that a deeper sense of obedience, dependence, and subjection exists in hegemony, which is why composers learn to obey and copy before they learn to invent and identify their own acoustic worlds. With this, Sandoval not only criticizes European cultural monopolism but also the enormous restriction and displacement of the reference period (i.e. the quantity of history to be studied by a student).

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processes in the play of pannings and reverberations; audio palimpsests and echoes in which displaced voices and narratives reverberate – from slavery, for instance; collapsing bass sounds which make ostensibly staged and fixed identities sink into the deep. These are experiences of form and composition – ‘audio treks’ which may only be subjectively perceived as such in particular musics. Yet, it is of little significance whether the audio treks have been ‘correctly’ forged and perceived in this way or whether this was intended by the composers. They simply exist as forms of knowledge in this world – and the development of other forms and formations of knowledge is the explicit aim and the central cause of track studies. In the mode of tracks’n’treks there is no longer a ‘master’.

WORKS CITED Barthes, Roland. Mythologies, tr. Annette Lavers (Mythologies, 1957; New York: Noonday, 1972). Behrens, Roger, Martin Büsser, Tine Plesch & Johannes Ullmaier. “Editorial,” in testcard #13: Black Music (Mainz: Ventil, 2004): 1–6. Blacking, John. Music, Culture, & Experience: Selected Papers of John Blacking, ed. Reginald Byron (Chicago: U of Chicago P , 1995). Broeck, Sabine. White Amnesia – Black Memory? American Women’s Writing and History (Frankfurt am Main & New York: Peter Lang, 1999). Butler, Mark Jonathan. Unlocking the Groove: Rhythm, Meter, and Musical Design in Electronic Dance Music (Bloomington: Indiana U P , 2006). Castro Varela, María do Mar, & Nikita Dhawan. Postkoloniale Theorie: Eine kritische Einführung (Bielefeld: transcript, 2003). Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth; tr. Constance Farrington, preface by Jean– Paul Sartre (Les Damnés de la terre, 1961; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967). Fink, Robert. Repeating Ourselves: American Minimal Music as Cultural Practice (Berkeley: U of California P , 2005). Fiske, John. Elvis. “Elvis: Body of Knowledge: Offizielle und populäre Formen des Wissens um Elvis Presley,” tr. Johannes Moltke (“Official and Popular Forms of Knowledge on Elvis”), Montage/av 2.1 (1993): 19–51. Also in Widerspenstige Kulturen: Cultural Studies als Herausforderung, ed. Rainer Winter & Karl H. Hörning (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1999): 339–78. As “Elvis: A Body of Controversy,” in Fiske, Power Plays, Power Works (London: Verso, 1997): 94–123. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 1993). Ha, Kien Nghi. Hype um Hybridität: Kultureller Differenzkonsum und postmoderne Verwertungstechniken im Spätkapitalismus (Bielefeld: transcript, 2005).

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Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990): 222–37. ——. “The Local, and the Global: Globalization and Ethnicity,” in Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives, ed. Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti & Ella Shohat (Minnesota: U of Minnesota P , 1997): 173–87. ——. “The Question of Cultural Identity,” in Modernity and its Futures, ed. Stuart Hall, David Held & Tony McGrew (Cambridge: Polity, 1992): 273–316. ——. “The Spectacle of the ‘Other’,” in Representations: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, ed. Stuart Hall (London: Sage / Open University, 1997): 223–79. Head, Matthew. “Musicology on Safari: Orientalism and the Spectre of Postcolonial Theory,” Music Analysis 22 (2003): 211–30. Ismaiel–Wendt, Johannes. “Lauter Kopien, keine Originale – laute Spuren und kein Ursprung,” in Lied und populäre Kultur, vol. 55: Original und Kopie, ed. Nils Grosch, Fernand Hörner (Münster: Waxmann, 2011): 63–77. ——. tracks’n’treks: Populäre Musik und Postkoloniale Analyse (Münster: Unrast, 2011). Mager, Christoph. HipHop, Musik und die Artikulation von Geographie (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2007). Maultsby, Portia K. “A Map of the Music,” African American Review 29.2 (Summer 1995): 183. Mignolo, Walter. “Delinking: The rhetoric of modernity, the logic of coloniality and the grammar of de-coloniality,” Cultural Studies 21.2 (March–May 2007): 449– 514, http://waltermignolo.com/txt/publications/WMignolo_Delinking.pdf (accessed 11 February 2010). Moore–Gilbert, Bart J. Postcolonial Theory: Contexts, Practices, Politics (London: Verso, 1997). Pfleiderer, Martin. Rhythmus: Psychologische, theoretische und stilanalytische Aspekte populärer Musik (Bielefeld: transcript, 2006). Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1993). Sandoval, Carlos. “heimat? identität? Reflexionen eines mexikanischen Komponisten zum Komponieren unter den Vorzeichen des Kolonialismus,” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 1 (2009): 40–45. Schüller, Thorsten. Wo ist Afrika? Paratopische Ästhetik in der zeitgenössischen Romanliteratur des frankophonen Schwarzafrika (Frankfurt am Main: I K O , 2008). Sharpe, Jenny. “Postcolonial Studies in the House of U S Multiculturalism,” in A Companion to Postcolonial Studies, ed. Henry Schwarz (Malden M A : Blackwell, 2000): 112–25. Sontag, Susan. Against Interpretation and Other Essays (1978; New York: Octagon, 1964).

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Tuan, Yi–Fu. Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values (1990; New York: Columbia U P , 1974). Veal, Michael. Dub: Soundscapes and Shattered Songs in Jamaican Reggae (Middletown C T : Wesleyan U P , 2007). Wagner, Bernd. “Kulturelle Globalisierung: Weltkultur, Glokalität und Hybridisierung,” in Kulturelle Globalisierung: Weltkultur und kulturelle Fragmentierung, ed. Bernd Wagner (Essen: Klartext, 2001): 9–38. Weheliye, Alexander. Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity (Durham N C : Duke U P , 2005). Wicke, Peter. “Popmusik in der Analyse,” PopScriptum (2003), http://www2.huberlin.de/fpm/textpool/texte/wicke_popmusik-in-der-analyse.htm (accessed 8 February 2010).

Discography Various Artists. One World – One Voice (Virgin U K , B000007UJY, 1999). Various Artists. One World, Many Cultures (Putumayo / Exil – Indigo, B000 IHY9AW, 2006).

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Postcolonial Cultural Studies — Writing a Zulu Woman Back Into History

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has – for a long time and for good reason – been concerned with the critical analysis of literature, the field has recently witnessed some change as scholars have increasingly studied literature as well as other cultural products and phenomena. In research and teaching, they have gone “beyond the predominantly literary focus of postcolonialism, which characterized late-twentiethcentury scholarship, to other cultural realms.”1 The present article will explore this trend by outlining the theoretical and methodological framework of postcolonial cultural studies and by reflecting on both its benefits and its challenges. In the second part, a case study on a South African life narrative shall demonstrate the ways in which postcolonial cultural studies can serve as a suitable approach to literary texts and their historical, social, and political contexts. HILE POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES

Postcolonial Cultural Studies Discussing the history and (inter)disciplinarity of postcolonialism in his book Interdisciplinary Measures, Graham Huggan comes to the conclusion that “it would probably be true to say that the status of literature and the literary has shifted with the move to a more culturally oriented analysis.”2 Yet, his careful 1

John McLeod, Beginning Postcolonialism (2000; Manchester: Manchester U P ,

2010): 37. 2

Graham Huggan, Interdisciplinary Measures: Literature and the Future of Postcolonial Studies (Liverpool: Liverpool U P , 2008): 12.

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phrasing – “it would probably be true to say” – suggests that he is not quite convinced of this shift in focus; instead, he critically reflects upon this development. In what is sometimes now seen as the ‘first wave’ of postcolonial criticism (the period between roughly the mid-1980s and the mid-1990s), literary modes of analysis were central, and most of the key figures to emerge from this period were trained literary critics.3

Huggan’s choice of words and the passive voice – “what is sometimes now seen” – imply again that he doubts this classification. He goes on to discuss more recent work of the ‘second wave’, by comparison, as a “materialistinspired postcolonial criticism that is more self-consciously interventionist in its approach to current social and political debates.”4 While some critics consider the ‘second wave’ a “corrective to these earlier textualist/culturalist tendencies,”5 Huggan polemically criticizes it for “the lack of anxiety it shows over its own interdisciplinary methods, and the unabashedly symptomatic readings it gives of literary and other cultural texts.”6 Contrary to the metaphors of the ‘first’ and ‘second wave’, which suggest change and development, Huggan argues that literature continues to be central in what he classifies as “not-so-new forms of postcolonial analysis.”7 His arguments provide an appropriate starting point for exploring postcolonial cultural studies. Why has the study of literature been so influential in postcolonial studies? Why do scholars go beyond this focus and include other cultural products as well? Which products do they include? What benefit does it have to combine postcolonial and cultural studies? In what ways are the approaches concerned with issues of (inter)disciplinarity? Examining why literature has played a pivotal role in postcolonialism, Ania Loomba argues that literature is “an important means of appropriating, inverting or challenging dominant means of representation and colonial ideologies.”8 Literature does not simply ‘mirror’ its historical, social, and political surroundings but is characterized by its aesthetic mediation between reality and imagination. Creating fictional settings, characters, and plot-lines, it can 3

Huggan, Interdisciplinary Measures, 10. Interdisciplinary Measures, 10. 5 Interdisciplinary Measures, 11. 6 Interdisciplinary Measures, 11. 7 Interdisciplinary Measures, 11. 8 Ania Loomba, Colonialism / Postcolonialism (1998; London: Routledge, 2005): 63. 4

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playfully confront dominant sets of knowledge and construct alternative realities. Moreover, polyvalence is one of the defining features of literature, which is why the texts allow for different, possibly even contradictory, readings. Therefore, literary texts are, as Leela Gandhi argues, “more than any other social and political product [. .. ] the most significant instigators and purveyors of colonial power and its double, postcolonial resistance.”9 Given that literature has been so important in postcolonialism, it is not surprising that many scholars in this field are trained in or affiliated with literary studies. Yet, depending on their methodological approach, literary-studies scholars do not necessarily understand literature as an autonomous piece of art but may follow a contextualizing approach that locates literary texts in the historical, political, economic, and social processes of production, distribution, and reception. While it can be productive to link literatures from different parts of the world by characterizing them as ‘postcolonial’, it is also helpful to address their local specificities. In so doing, one avoids the risk of over-generalizing and neglecting the differences between and within postcolonial societies. Studying the relations between the (former) colonies and the European empires, postcolonial studies is concerned with literature as well as with other areas such as history, politics, religion, art, and culture. In an “attempt to make the field of knowledge more representative,”10 postcolonial studies recognizes and explores hitherto marginalized or omitted perspectives. In keeping with this aim, scholars have begun to go beyond the established canon of fictional and theoretical material. With his book Postcolonial Cultures, Simon Featherstone challenges the elitist focus on ‘high culture’ and engages with music, dance, popular cinema, sports. He argues: Any discipline works as much through its exclusions as its inclusions, and postcolonial studies’ relative inattention to popular culture, at least in what has become its academic mainstream, needs some consideration. It is a neglect that is, in many ways, surprising, given postcolonialism’s stated interest in reconfiguring dominant culture.11

Featherstone’s critique is plausible and his alternative study focus is highly welcome; yet it is challenging to realize his suggestions – especially in teaching. While canonical literary texts can be fairly easily obtained and usually at 9

Leela Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction (New York: Columbia

U P , 1998): 142. 10 11

Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory, 52. Simon Featherstone, Postcolonial Cultures (Edinburgh: Edinburgh U P , 2005): 8.

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reasonable rates, lecturers will find it more difficult to make cartoons, graffiti, radio programmes, street theatre, or performance poetry accessible to their students. Moreover, pursuing postcolonial cultural studies does not necessarily mean taking on ‘new’ (and popular) objects. As the term suggests, the critical framework draws on the interfaces of postcolonial and cultural studies that become apparent in, for example, shared questions of power and resistance, dominance and subordination, inclusion and exclusion. The cultural turn in postcolonial studies by no means implies that scholars are beginning to look down upon literary studies as “the relic of earlier, now outmoded forms of putatively anti-colonial textual criticism.”12 Bearing in mind the continued presence and significance of literature, postcolonial critics should not simply abandon literary studies but should, rather, expose the power-structures that shape literature as well as other cultural products and processes. Outlining the changes in postcolonial studies after 1990, Diana Brydon states that the focus has shifted from culture as context and literary texts towards an interest in the cultural production and circulation of identities, cultural representations, and commodities, yet there has been little interest in the economics, management, or social structures that control, produce, and profit from these.13

While acknowledging the shift in focus, she simultaneously identifies the need for further research: namely, a politically engaged investigation of culture. Cultural phenomena are invested in power-relations, which is why postcolonial cultural studies should aim to uncover the political dimensions of apparently apolitical cultural issues. This critical engagement with culture corresponds well to Lawrence Grossberg’s definition of cultural studies. Since meaning is subject to change, he calls for a “radically contextualist”14 approach to literature and culture. An event or practice (even a text) does not exist apart from the forces of the context that constitute it as what it is. Obviously, context is not 12

Huggan, Interdisciplinary Measures, 12. Diana Brydon, “Postcolonial Cultural Studies. 1990 and After,” in The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism, ed. Michael Groden, Martin Kreiswirth & Imre Szeman (1994; Baltimore M D & London: Johns Hopkins U P , 2005): 760. 14 Lawrence Grossberg, “Cultural Studies: What’s in a Name? (One More Time),” in Bringing It All Back Home: Essays on Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg (Durham N C : Duke U P , 1997): 254. 13

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merely background but the very conditions of possibility of something. It cannot be relegated to a series of footnotes or to an afterthought, to the first or last chapter. It is precisely what one is trying to analyze and it is the most difficult thing to construct.15

This political edge is a defining feature of cultural studies – especially in its British tradition.16 Pursuing postcolonial cultural studies therefore involves reflection on social hierarchies. According to Stuart Hall, researchers should pay “attention to all those voices, positions, experiences which have been ruled out of any dominant intellectual and political formation.”17 Following this approach, scholars read cultural products as a site of power-relations. Coming back to the metaphors of the ‘first and second wave’, it becomes evident why this trope falls short of representing the complex history of postcolonial studies. It is inappropriate to suggest that the ‘second wave’ of postcolonial criticism over-writes the ‘first wave’, because scholars continue to engage with literature and with the approaches and research findings of postcolonial literary critics. In his introductory textbook Beginning Postcolonialism, John McLeod uses a terminology that is more productive than the metaphors of the ‘first and second wave’. He classifies postcolonial cultural studies as an “emerging field,”18 thus highlighting the fact that this trend both derives from and transcends the established forms of postcolonial criticism. Since postcolonial cultural criticism promises to “open up new avenues and fields of study,”19 scholars might want to pursue and contribute to this critical investigation of culture. With a background in literary studies, however, they might lack the training and expertise to go beyond the critical analysis of literature. In his book Interdisciplinary Measures, Graham Huggan discusses postcolonialism as “a comparative field”20 that can benefit from the 15

Grossberg, “Cultural Studies,” 255. Since the political dimension of cultural studies is not accounted for in the term ‘cultural turn’, the sociologist Oliver Marchart has coined the neologism of a ‘political turn’, see Oliver Marchart, Cultural Studies (Constance: U V K , 2008): 26. 17 Stuart Hall, quoted in Kuan–Hsing Chen, “Cultural Studies and the Politics of Internationalization: An Interview with Stuart Hall by Kuan–Hsing Chen,” in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, ed. David Morley & Kuan–Hsing Chen (London: Routledge, 1996): 396. 18 McLeod, Beginning Postcolonialism, 37. 19 Beginning Postcolonialism, 37. 20 Huggan, Interdisciplinary Measures, 1. 16

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collaboration of academics and practitioners from different disciplines. He argues that the future of postcolonial studies “surely lies in a patient, mutually transformative dialogue between the disciplines,”21 but at the same time he is critical of joint ventures – at least, of how they have been practised so far. Postcolonial studies “has been marked more by the collective desire for crossdisciplinary procedures of analysis than by genuinely collaborative initiatives.”22 In his critical guide to Interdisciplinarity, Joe Moran reflects on both the uses and problems of interdisciplinary approaches which “can challenge ossified, outmoded systems of thought and produce new, innovative theories and methodologies which open up the existing disciplines to new perspectives.”23 Still, he cautiously points out that it is problematic to assume that “interdisciplinarity has all the answers, and that it can easily transcend the exclusions and limitations of traditional disciplines.”24 Again, these arguments show that interdisciplinary and cultural-materialist approaches cannot replace text-oriented postcolonial studies. Scholars can – and should – attend to the methodological challenges with a self-reflexive impetus: doing postcolonial cultural studies means considering both the opportunities and the limits of how to engage with cultural products and processes in research and teaching. On the basis of these considerations, this article’s second part will offer a case study. Following a postcolonial cultural studies approach, I will analyse the South African life narrative Zulu Woman and address the methodological challenges that become apparent in this text as well as in the genre of life writing in general.

Approaching Zulu Woman through the Lens of Postcolonial Cultural Studies In 1934, the U S -American journalist Rebecca Hourwich Reyher recorded the life narrative of Christina Sibiya, the first of sixty-five wives of the uncrowned king of the Zulu, Solomon kaDinuzulu. The life story was originally published under the title Zulu Woman in 1948 by Columbia University Press and republished in 1999 by the Feminist Press of the City University of New York. The latest edition includes a historical introduction by Marcia Wright, 21

Huggan, Interdisciplinary Measures, 13. Interdisciplinary Measures, 6. 23 Joe Moran, Interdisciplinarity (2002; London & New York: Routledge, 2010): 165. 24 Moran, Interdisciplinarity, 165. 22

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an afterword by the literary studies scholar Liz Gunner, and an appendix that provides further contextual material. In 1915, at the age of fifteen, Christina Sibiya, a mission-educated daughter of Christian peasants, married the Zulu king Solomon, despite the objections of her mother and the missionary. Living in the royal household from 1915 to 1931, Sibiya managed to find her place among the other women – Solomon’s ‘mothers’: i.e. the wives of his father and grandfather, and Solomon’s other wives. Yet, when Solomon increasingly abused her psychologically and physically, Christina Sibiya left him in 1931. From then on she struggled to make a living until she died in 1946. Zulu Woman lends itself to a critical discussion in postcolonial cultural studies. Had it not been for Reyher’s book, readers would hardly have the opportunity of encountering Christina Sibiya. While Solomon and the other Zulu kings left traces in African history, their female family members were usually ignored in official records, especially in political and national histories. Organized as a web of women’s voices and perspectives, ranging from Christina Sibiya and Rebecca Reyher to Solomon’s other wives and ‘mothers’, Zulu Woman provides an alternative history that offers insights into the everyday life of the royal Zulu family in the early twentieth century.25 It addresses often-silenced themes such as polygamous marriage, family, sexuality, and domestic violence. Concurrently, it adds to the conventional public perception of Solomon as the uncrowned Zulu king by presenting him in private as a husband and ‘son’.26 The life narrative thus epitomizes a key concern of postcolonial writing, which Georg Gugelberger defines as “the slow, painful, and highly complex means of fighting one’s way into European-made history.”27 Gugelberger’s discussion is informed by Albert Memmi’s and Walter Rodney’s arguments concerning the relation between history and colonialism. According to Memmi,

25

See Liz Gunner, “Afterword: ‘Let All the Stories Be Told’: Zulu Woman, Words and Silence,” in Rebecca Hourwich Reyher, Zulu Woman: The Life Story of Christina Sibiya (1948; New York: Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 1999): 203. 26 See Gunner, “Afterword,” 209. 27 Georg M. Gugelberger, “Postcolonial Cultural Studies: Origins to the 1980s,” in The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism, ed. Michael Groden, Martin Kreiswirth & Imre Szeman (1994; Baltimore M D & London: Johns Hopkins U P , 2005): 757.

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the most serious blow suffered by the colonized is being removed from history and from community. Colonization usurps any free role in either war or peace, every decision contributing to this destiny and that of the world, and all cultural and social responsibility.28

Likewise, Rodney states that “the power to act independently is the guarantee to participate actively and consciously in history. To be colonized is to be removed from history, except in the most passive sense.”29 Following the logic of these statements, Zulu Woman can be considered a counter-discursive product because it empowers Christina Sibiya, who writes herself and the domestic sphere of the Zulu kingdom back into history. However, this statement needs to be qualified when we look more closely at the processes of the text’s production, distribution, and reception. Life narratives are, as the Africa historian Kirk Hoppe points out, “complex multi-dimensional discourses between the African narrator and the oral story, between the Western scholar and the narrator, and between the reader and all voices of the text.”30 Through a contextualist and politically engaged reading, scholars can gain insight into the stories, perspectives, agendas, and hierarchies that shape life narratives. In their collectively edited volume Interpreting Women’s Lives (1989), the Personal Narratives Group31 follows such an approach because “only by attending to the conditions which create these narratives, the forms that guide them, and the relationships that produce them are we able to understand what is communicated in a personal narrative.”32 The locating of Zulu Woman in the broader contexts of African (literary) history makes it evident that personal narratives have been common in pre28

Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized, tr. Howard Greenfeld, Portrait du colonisé, précédé du portrait du colonisateur (1965; Boston M A : Beacon, 1991): 91. 29 Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Washington D C : Howard U P , 1974): 225. 30 Kirk Hoppe, “Whose Life Is It, Anyway?: Issues of Representation in Life Narrative Texts of African Women,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 26.3 (1993): 623. 31 Drawing on different disciplinary backgrounds and areas of expertise, the Personal Narratives Group is a research group affiliated with the Center for Advanced Feminist Studies at the University of Minnesota. In Interpreting Women’s Lives they reflect on theoretical and methodological benefits and challenges of engaging with personal narratives. 32 Interpreting Women’s Lives: Feminist Theory and Personal Narratives, ed. Personal Narratives Group (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana U P , 1989): 262.

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senting the lives and times of Africans. As in this case, these texts often work through mediation: an African tells his or her life, and another – often white – person converts this oral account into a written one.33 Owing to this negotiation, the narratives do not fit neatly into the established genre categories of either ‘autobiography’ or ‘biography’. Instead, the umbrella term ‘life writing’, which has frequently been used in postcolonial studies, is more appropriate. Compared to the literary history of (auto)biography which has long centred on dominant, white and male, history,34 life writing covers a broader scope of texts and viewpoints. Providing alternative perceptions (of marginalized subjects), it can challenge familiar and dominant perspectives. Despite its inclusiveness, life writing does not necessarily break with social hierarchies, as is shown by the imbalances of power between Christina Sibiya and Rebecca Hourwich Reyher, between the African and the American woman, between the oral account and the written text. The title Zulu Woman – used in the singular – and the subtitle The Life Story of Christina Sibiya suggest that Sibiya’s story is at the centre of the book. Nonetheless, voices of other women, especially of Solomon’s wives and ‘mothers’, are also woven into the text. Further, the book is the result of an extensive ‘collaboration’. In August and September 1934, Christina Sibiya told Rebecca Reyher her life story in several long sessions. Reyher took down the story, later reworked her notes, and published the text. Describing her part in this process, Reyher states in her preface that “I have recorded it [the story] as she [Christina Sibiya] told it.”35 In her introduction to the Feminist Press edition, the historian Marcia Wright therefore refers to Christina Sibiya as “narrator” and to Rebecca Reyher as “writer and reteller of the story.”36 Yet, 33

See Kirsten Rüther, “On the Book Shelf in My Study: Approaching African Literatures and Cultures from an Historian’s Perspective,” in Listening to Africa: Anglophone African Literatures and Cultures, ed. Jana Gohrisch & Ellen Grünkemeier (Heidelberg: Winter, 2012): 30. 34 See Marlene Kadar, “Coming to Terms: Life Writing – from Genre to Critical Practice,” in Essays on Life Writing: From Genre to Critical Practice, ed. Marlene Kadar (Toronto: U of Toronto P , 1992): 7. 35 Rebecca Hourwich Reyher, Zulu Woman: The Life Story of Christina Sibiya (1948; New York: Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 1999): 9. Further page references are in the main text. 36 Marcia Wright, “Introduction” to Rebecca Hourwich Reyher, Zulu Woman: The Life Story of Christina Sibiya (1948; New York: Feminist Press at the City U of New York, 1999): ix.

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this terminology can easily disguise the unequal distribution of power between Reyher and Sibiya in the processes of creating and publishing the story. The text is written in the third-person singular, suggesting that it is about, rather than by, Christina Sibiya. Some additional information is also included in the story, in the opening chapter, for example, on the geography of Zululand, on Zulu culture, and on the relation between Zulus and the South African government. It becomes apparent that Reyher does not simply ‘retell’ the story but claims authority over both the text and Christina Sibiya. The many layers of telling, writing, and editing the story challenge the concepts of author- and ownership. As Wright points out, many library catalogues therefore attribute Zulu Woman to Christina Sibiya as author and to Rebecca Reyher as alternative author.37 For large parts of the book, the narratives are so entangled that it is virtually impossible to differentiate between Sibiya’s oral report and Reyher’s interpretation. To shed light on the individual perspectives, one has to compare Zulu Woman with Reyher’s interview notes. For this reason, the Feminist Press edition features selected passages from the notebooks in the appendix so that readers can get some insight into the two different versions.38 The power-relations that shape the creation of the text become yet more complex when one takes into consideration the fact that Sibiya and Reyher communicated through a translator for want of a shared language. The interpreter was Eric Fynney, who had grown up in Nongoma, a town in Zululand. As the son and grandson of former magistrates, he is a member of the colonial elite in Africa, thus serving not only as a ‘mediator’ between Reyher and Sibiya but also a marker of the social hierarchy that shapes the text. The translator and his family arrange Reyher’s encounters with her African interviewees because she meets up with those “that the Fynneys suggested would have a story to tell. They talked freely to me because of their faith in and affection for the Fynneys” (8). As the Fynneys are actively involved in the project, it becomes apparent that the life narratives of the African subjects are not simply ‘given’ but the outcome of a process of evaluation and selection. Analysing the different stages of the creation of life narratives, Kirk Hoppe opens his argument with the observation that “no meeting is entirely ran37

See Wright, “Introduction,” xviii. To go into more detail, one would have to study the original transcript which is kept in the Schlesinger library, part of Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. 38

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dom.”39 Instead, each of the parties involved pursues certain interests – be they political, economic, and/or social. While it is difficult to discern the agenda of the Fynney family, the preface provides some insight into Rebecca Reyher’s motives. Seeking a career as a journalist, Reyher visited South Africa in 1924 and wrote articles, several of which were published in magazines. She returns to South Africa in 1934, with a clear agenda: “My trip had to produce immediately salable [sic] material, and I could not linger to listen to stories that might be fun to hear, and write, but might never sell” (7). Although Reyher and the magistrate’s family seem to be in charge of the project, it is actually Christina Sibiya who initiates the meeting. Hoppe reads Sibiya’s behaviour as a “political strategy” because she “showed up at Reyher’s door in support of her son’s (her own) political career.”40 To understand this interpretation, it needs to be read against the conventions of Zulu culture. As Rebecca Reyher points out in the epilogue to Zulu Woman, A Zulu King designates his heir, and all his sons are eligible to the succession. [. . . ] When Solomon died he apparently had named no heir. Cyprian, Christina’s eldest son, was a son, by his first wife, and therefore his natural heir. However, the elders of the tribe met in Council and designated another son heir apparent. (197)

Characterizing Cyprian as the “natural heir” suggests that Sibiya – and possibly also Reyher – are convinced of Cyprian’s rightful claim to the throne. Given that Sibiya instigated her encounter with Reyher, the Personal Narratives Group classifies her life story as a “campaign autobiography, marshalled in the interests of her son’s political future and ambitions.”41 Yet Hoppe’s comment quoted above implies two readings: Christina Sibiya not only takes action on behalf of her son but she herself can also benefit from Cyprian’s status in Zulu society. Throughout Solomon’s life the keenest rivalry between his many wives centred on each one’s hopes that her son would be the chosen one. [. . . ] As Mother of the King, Christina would have been an honored and privileged woman, no longer an impoverished outcast. How many would have remained silent, withstood the temptation to declare their son’s rights and establish their own glorified status? (197)

39

Hoppe, “Whose Life Is It, Anyway?” 624. “Whose Life Is It, Anyway?” 625. 41 Personal Narratives Group, Interpreting Women’s Lives, 99. 40

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This passage from the epilogue shows that Reyher is well aware of Sibiya’s motives. Yet she does not criticize her political ambition; instead, through the stylistic device of a rhetorical question, she invites readers to approve of Christina Sibiya’s actions. The first encounter and subsequent meetings of Reyher and Sibiya show that different – and possibly conflicting – interests are at work in the production of Zulu Woman. Sibiya is not only written about but constructs her life and self through the narrative: she decides which encounters and events she omits, includes, or emphasizes. “By choosing and adapting the form her narrative will take, the narrator interprets and, in a sense, makes or remakes her life.”42 Since Christina Sibiya claims a voice and subject-position, Marcia Wright reads Zulu Woman as an autobiography because “the subject propels and shapes it more than the interlocutor-biographer.”43 In the end, “Reyher had been less in control of her text than she imagined” because – largely unaware of Sibiya’s political assets – she was “insufficiently informed to be a full biographer.”44 Transforming Sibiya’s oral account in an African language into a written version in a world language, Reyher makes the life narrative accessible to a much larger readership. By arranging the story and by adding contextual information, she caters to a target audience consisting primarily of North American readers interested in – but hardly familiar with – Zulu society. In spite of her aims and efforts, Reyher struggled to find a publisher. Although Zulu Woman existed in draft already in 1937, it was not accepted for publication until 1948. A brief preface by Ruth Benedict, an American anthropologist renowned for her book Patterns of Culture (1934), finally helped Reyher to get the book published by Columbia University Press, albeit only in a limited print run. It was not until excerpts were reprinted in Life magazine later that year that Zulu Woman reached a broader readership.45 In 1999, the book was 42

Interpreting Women’s Lives, 101. Marcia Wright, “Personal Narratives, Dynasties, and Women’s Campaigns: Two Examples from Africa,” in Interpreting Women’s Lives: Feminist Theory and Personal Narratives, ed. Personal Narratives Group (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana U P , 1989): 156. 44 Wright, “Personal Narratives, Dynasties, and Women’s Campaigns,” 160. 45 Rebecca Hourwich Reyher, “Christina and the King of the Zulus: Anthropological Study Tells How a Fifteen-Year Old Christian Girl Married a Lusty Pagan King, Sharing His Favors and Abuse with 60 Other Wives and Dozens of Mothers-In-Law,” Life (25 October 1948): 118–36. See Wright, “Introduction,” xvi. 43

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republished by the Feminist Press of the City University of New Work, but – judging from my investigations – has only seldom received attention in research or teaching. It can therefore still be considered a ‘new’ text in the sense of Featherstone’s call for engaging with material that does not belong to the mainstream. In view of the book’s publishing history, it is rewarding to study its marketing and distribution processes more closely. Preparing her encounters with Africans, Reyher is interested in questions such as “What did Zulu women do? How did they manage lifelong marriage? Were they happy? Was polygamy [. .. ] a natural state of man?” (8). This focus on women, marriage, and family as well the special interest in Christina Sibiya’s story can be read against her own biography: Rebecca Hourwich Reyher was actively involved in the feminist movement and a member of the National Woman’s Party; moreover, she herself got divorced shortly before she came to South Africa.46 To Reyher, “the most fascinating search in a foreign land would always be for sameness, rather than difference” (7). However, the ways in which her life narrative of Christina Sibiya was promoted and discussed do not conform to this idea. In his review published in the Saturday Review in 1948, the English professor Bergen Evans refers to the book as Zulu Woman: The Story of a Modern Woman’s Rebellion Against Polygamy.47 Since the text was originally published as Zulu Woman, without any further specification,48 it seems likely that Evans introduced a subtitle to define the subject-matter and to guide the readers’ expectations. This is also true for the title of his review, “Puritan in a Pagan Land,” which draws on Sibiya’s Christian background to set her apart from Zulu society and African people in general. The heading under which excerpts are reprinted in Life magazine works along similar lines, as it reads, “Christina and the King of the Zulus: Anthropological Study Tells How a Fifteen-Year Old Christian Girl Married a Lusty Pagan King, Sharing 46

Rebecca Hourwich Reyher is one of the twelve women who were interviewed in the 1970s for the Suffragists Oral History Project, in which suffragists – especially those involved with the National Woman’s Party – were asked to comment on their campaigns to promote women’s rights. The entire text of Reyher’s interview Search and Struggle for Equality and Independence (from 1977) is accessible online: http: //content.cdlib.org/view?docId=kt6x0nb1ts&brand=calisphere. 47 Bergen Evans, “Puritan in a Pagan Land. Review: Zulu Woman: The Story of a Modern Woman’s Rebellion Against Polygamy,” Saturday Review (5 June 1948): 18. 48 The subtitle The Life Story of Christina Sibiya was only added later in the Feminist Press edition, see Wright, “Introduction,” ix.

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His Favors and Abuse with 60 Other Wives and Dozens of Mothers-In-Law.” As with Evans’s review, this phrase draws on binary oppositions such as ‘Western vs. African’, ‘Christian vs. pagan’, ‘civilized vs. primitive’ that have been used to establish and maintain colonial hierarchies. While these stereotypes say precious little about Christina Sibiya and the Zulu kingdom, they do say much about those who create and perpetuate this negative perception of Africa(ns). Reflecting on the publication and reception of Zulu Woman, Marcia Wright states: a lengthy life story of an African woman would not have been published [. . . ] were it not for its combination of power, sex, and drama. That the power was royal and tribal made it exotic. That the setting was South Africa in the industrial age made it accessible.49

In his review of the latest edition by the Feminist Press, Christopher Lowe comes to a similar conclusion, considering Zulu Woman “a significant document of the intellectual and literary history of American feminism in its relationship to Africa, and of Anglophone journalism about Africa.”50 Reading Zulu Woman in terms of postcolonial cultural studies is not limited to the relation between Sibiya and Reyher. Providing insight into the domestic sphere of the royal household, the text also adds to the public role and perception of the Zulu king Solomon. Christina Sibiya describes how Solomon travels across the country for long periods of time, while she and the other wives are left behind and wait for their husband’s return. For two months Solomon wrote at infrequent intervals. His letter always caused a stir of hope among the women – until they heard them through. Never was there any mention of the date of his return. The wives tried not to show their hurt and disappointment, to keep up a pretense of hope, but when the letters stopped altogether it was impossible to hide their resentment and bitterness. (81)

When Solomon is, at one point, away for sixteen months, Christina Sibiya complains in a letter about his neglect of his family. “We are going hungry. We go with nothing on our bodies, we have nothing to put on. We do not even have soap to wash us with. [. .. ] Were you overburdened with us?” (135). As her question indicates, she cannot understand Solomon’s behaviour 49

Wright, “Personal Narratives, Dynasties, and Women’s Campaigns,” 156. Christopher Lowe, “Review. Zulu Woman: The Life Story of Christina Sibiya,” African Studies Review 42.3 (December 1999): 209. 50

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and tries to find reasons – in the behaviour of herself and the other wives – for his long absence. Solomon’s reply, however, indicates that it is primarily his position as the Zulu king that keeps him away from his wives. “Do you realize I cannot take up my time with my wives, and forget matters of state?” (135). Since Zulu Woman is based on Christina Sibiya’s limited personal perspective and Reyher did not locate her story in the broader contexts of Zulu history, one needs to consider additional historical documents and historiographical criticism to be able to interpret Solomon’s behaviour. In nineteenthcentury southern Africa, Zululand (1816–79) was an influential and independent kingdom. In the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879, however, the Zulus were defeated by British troops. Subsequently, Zululand became a British protectorate in 1887 and was integrated into the Colony of Natal in 1897.51 Yet the power-structures are much more ambiguous than this simple outline suggests. After the defeat and annexation, the Zulu kings were no longer officially recognized by the British, which is why Solomon was an ‘uncrowned’ king when he succeeded his late father Dinuzulu in 1913. Nonetheless, Solomon continued to exercise control over Zulu society and thus provided an alternative authority to the colonial powers.52 However, his succession had not been entirely secure in the first place, which is why his marriages have also been read as political acts of forming alliances with other Zulu factions.53 This complex situation had repercussions for the royal household. In order to consolidate his position among the Zulu people and regiments, Solomon visited the kraals which he had inherited from his father and set up his own new settlements in strategically chosen places. This is why he was away from his wives for such long periods of time, as criticized by Christina. The powerrelations that define Solomon’s unstable position are implied in Zulu Woman only when Reyher outlines how Solomon tried to “give unqualified support to the white man’s government, and to win behind him a united Zulu nation” (59). The way in which his behaviour is described in the life narrative suggests that Solomon was under immense pressure. He drank, could hardly con-

51

See Shula Marks, “The Drunken King and the Nature of the State,” in The Ambiguities of Dependence in South Africa: Class, Nationalism and the State in TwentiethCentury Natal, ed. Shula Marks (Johannesburg: Ravan, 1986): 15. 52 See Marks, “The Drunken King and the Nature of the State,” 27. 53 See Wright, “Personal Narratives, Dynasties, and Women’s Campaigns,” 157.

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trol his temper, and increasingly abused Christina both psychologically and physically, which is why she finally left him. By comparison with the other wives, Christina Sibiya presents her marriage with Solomon as a love match, as the result of Solomon’s courtship and love letters. “As soon as she read that he was in love with her, Christina felt that she was really in love with him, too” (26). Commenting on his interest in her, Sibiya states that she “could not understand how a man of such high estate would want to marry anyone so lowly as she. Her family had nothing political or material to offer” (26). Although Rebecca Reyher does not openly challenge Christina Sibiya’s perspective, the circumstances permit a different interpretation, inasmuch as Sibiya belongs to the Christian-educated African elite. “Impressed by Christina’s reputation and education he [Solomon] believed that in her he had found a girl fit to be the mother of his children, to be his first wife, possibly even his Great Wife!” (23). The text thus makes it clear that – with her background, her education, and her religion – Christina actually has something to offer. Read against the historical setting in Natal in the early-twentieth century, Solomon’s decision to take Christina Sibiya as his wife can also suggest a political move, signalling his openness to Western influences.54

Conclusion While the engagement with Zulu Woman hardly meets Featherstone’s objective to redress postcolonialism’s relative inattention to popular culture, this life narrative can still be said to reconfigure dominant culture. By uncovering women’s voices and exploring domestic concerns, it recognizes perspectives that have long been eclipsed from history and other fields of knowledge. Zulu Woman prompts its readers to reflect on the limits of conventional (auto)biographies. As a “self-propelled personal narrative,”55 it oscillates between Christina Sibiya and Rebecca Hourwhich Reyher, narrator and interpreter, telling and writing, story and history. Although entangled with Reyher’s ‘mediation’, Christina Sibiya becomes visible and audible in the text, thus 54

Marcia Wright locates Zulu Woman in its wider historical contexts when she outlines the political impact the Sibiya clan had on the Zulu kingdom. She argues that Solomon actually reaffirmed an alliance when he took Christina Sibiya as his first wife; see Wright, “Personal Narratives, Dynasties, and Women’s Campaigns,” 161. 55 “Personal Narratives, Dynasties, and Women’s Campaigns,” 170.

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(re)claiming a subject-position and a place in history. As readers we are encouraged to dissolve a universal understanding of ‘History’ and, instead, to search for alternative views that help us rethink the dominant models of evidence, history, and historiography. In our attempts to retrieve perspectives of the excluded, powerless, and voiceless, we can – and should – work outside of textual authorities and rely on, for example, (mediated) life stories, on oral histories, on personal testimonies. The case study has shown that postcolonial cultural studies does not simply mean exploring ‘new’ and ‘popular’ material. The metaphors of the ‘first and second wave’ of postcolonial criticism are problematic because they suggest that literary texts and modes of analysis no longer play a central role in postcolonial studies. However, the approach of postcolonial cultural studies is less defined by its objects than understood as a politically engaged mode of reading. Echoing Marx’s often-quoted phrase, the Personal Narratives Group emphasizes that “women make their own lives (and life histories), but they do so under conditions not of their choosing.”56 As exemplified in the discussion of Zulu Woman, a contextualist approach thus draws attention to the production, distribution, and reception of literature and history. Pursuing postcolonial cultural studies implies that scholars examine ‘texts’ – in the widest sense of the term – as sites of power-relations and critically reflect on their interrelations with the historical, socio-political, and cultural contexts.

WORKS CITED Brydon, Diana. “Postcolonial Cultural Studies: 1990 and After,” in The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism, ed. Michael Groden, Martin Kreiswirth & Imre Szeman (1994; Baltimore M D & London: Johns Hopkins U P , 2005): 760– 68. Chen, Kuan–Hsing. “Cultural Studies and the Politics of Internationalization: An Interview with Stuart Hall by Kuan–Hsing Chen,” in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, ed. David Morley & Kuan–Hsing Chen (London: Routledge, 1996): 392–408. Evans, Bergen. “Puritan in a Pagan Land. Review. Zulu Woman: The Story of a Modern Woman’s Rebellion Against Polygamy,” Saturday Review (5 June 1948): 18. Featherstone, Simon. Postcolonial Cultures (Edinburgh: Edinburgh U P , 2005). Gandhi, Leela. Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction (New York: Columbia U P , 1998). 56

Interpreting Women’s Lives, 5.

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Grossberg, Lawrence. “Cultural Studies: What’s in a Name? (One More Time),” in Bringing It All Back Home: Essays on Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg (Durham N C : Duke U P , 1997): 245–71. Gugelberger, Georg M. “Postcolonial Cultural Studies. Origins to the 1980s,” in The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism, ed. Michael Groden, Martin Kreiswirth & Imre Szeman (1994; Baltimore M D & London: Johns Hopkins U P , 2005): 756–60. Gunner, Liz. “Afterword: ‘Let All the Stories Be Told’: Zulu Woman, Words and Silence,” in Rebecca Hourwich Reyher, Zulu Woman: The Life Story of Christina Sibiya (1948; New York: Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 1999): 199–213. Hoppe, Kirk. “Whose Life Is It, Anyway?: Issues of Representation in Life Narrative Texts of African Women,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 26.3 (1993): 623–36. Huggan, Graham. Interdisciplinary Measures: Literature and the Future of Postcolonial Studies (Liverpool: Liverpool U P , 2008). Interpreting Women’s Lives: Feminist Theory and Personal Narratives, ed. Personal Narratives Group (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana U P , 1989). Kadar, Marlene. “Coming to Terms: Life Writing – from Genre to Critical Practice,” in Essays on Life Writing: From Genre to Critical Practice, ed. Marlene Kadar (Toronto: U of Toronto P , 1992): 3–16. Loomba, Ania. Colonialism / Postcolonialism (1998; London: Routledge, 2005). Lowe, Christopher. “Review. Zulu Woman: The Life Story of Christina Sibiya,” African Studies Review 42.3 (December 1999): 206–209. McLeod, John. Beginning Postcolonialism (2000; Manchester: Manchester U P , 2010). Marchart, Oliver. Cultural Studies (Constance: U V K , 2008). Marks, Shula. “The Drunken King and the Nature of the State,” in The Ambiguities of Dependence in South Africa: Class, Nationalism and the State in TwentiethCentury Natal, ed. Shula Marks (Johannesburg: Ravan, 1986): 15–41. Memmi, Albert. The Colonizer and the Colonized, tr. Howard Greenfeld (Portrait du colonisé, précédé du portrait du colonisateur, 1965; Boston M A : Beacon, 1991). Moran, Joe. Interdisicplinarity (2002; London & New York: Routledge, 2010). Reyher, Rebecca Hourwich. “Christina and the King of the Zulus: Anthropological Study Tells How a Fifteen-Year Old Christian Girl Married a Lusty Pagan King, Sharing His Favors and Abuse with 60 Other Wives and Dozens of Mothers-InLaw,” Life (25 October 1948): 118–36. ——. Search and Struggle for Equality and Independence, Suffragists Oral History Project (1977), http://content.cdlib.org/view?docId=kt6x0nb1ts&brand=calisphere (accessed 8 May 2013).

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——. Zulu Woman: The Life Story of Christina Sibiya (1948; New York: The Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 1999). Rodney, Walter. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Washington D C : Howard U P , 1974). Rüther, Kirsten. “On the Book Shelf in My Study: Approaching African Literatures and Cultures from an Historian’s Perspective,” in Listening to Africa: Anglophone African Literatures and Cultures, ed. Jana Gohrisch & Ellen Grünkemeier (Heidelberg: Winter, 2012): 23–40. Wright, Marcia. “Introduction,” in Rebecca Hourwich Reyher. Zulu Woman: The Life Story of Christina Sibiya (1948; New York: Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 1999): ix–xvii. ——. “Personal Narratives, Dynasties, and Women’s Campaigns: Two Examples from Africa,” in Interpreting Women’s Lives: Feminist Theory and Personal Narratives, ed. Personal Narratives Group (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana U P , 1989): 155–71.

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I NTERDISCIPLINARY A TLANTIC S TUDIES

Postcolonial Pursuits in African American Studies — The Later Poems of Claude McKay

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between postcolonial and African American studies is an uneasy one. The two disciplines have been held apart by institutional, national, and political boundaries, by reservations on the part of individual scholars, and, most importantly, by concerns of theoretical and political incompatibility. In marked contrast to these anxieties, the works and lives of many black writers have ranged fluidly across boundaries of any sort – sometimes because of enforced migration but, more often, it seems, motivated by the cultural and intellectual productivity of such border-crossings. If disciplines are more restrictive in their outlook than the writers they study, however, they run the risk not only of methodological inaccuracy but, ultimately, of jeopardizing their basic legitimacy. In recent years there have been increasing calls for cooperation within both African-American and postcolonial studies. Often, however, these debates remain on a purely theoretical level, hesitant to acknowledge the central importance of writers and other objects of study in the definition of disciplinary aims and perspectives. In the following I want to highlight this importance by outlining the challenges posed to established disciplinary boundaries by the publication of Claude McKay’s Complete Poems in 2004. After a survey of theoretical arguments for compatibility and cooperation from the postcolonial and the African American side respectively, I will show the extent to which McKay’s later poetry – published for the first time in the Complete Poems – is pervaded by his international perspective and thus makes inevitable an approach that integrates postcolonial and African-American backgrounds. HE RELATIONSHIP

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From a postcolonial-studies perspective, it has been doubted whether African Americans can be classified as a colonial or a postcolonial people: while they have certainly been underprivileged and oppressed, they do not form a colony in the received sense of the term, which would presuppose at least territorial integrity and a lasting link with the mother country.1 Following Frantz Fanon, who distinguished sharply between the legal struggles of the civilrights movement and the “heroic fight” of African peoples against their colonizers, postcolonial critics have warned of diluting the postcolonial paradigm by applying it too widely or even figuratively, which would uproot it from its historical grounds and curb its political drive.2 Also, they have pointed out that by virtue of their U S -American citizenship African Americans are part of the first world, of the metropolis rather than the colonial sphere, and thus tempted to neglect the global economic hierarchies central to postcolonial analysis. Gayatri Spivak in particular has warned against subsuming the Third World under First-World topics, settings, and perspectives.3 There have been very similar anxieties on the African-American side, where postcolonial theory, especially of the Bhabha–Spivak variety, is often seen as too abstract, as universalist, or as blind to specifically African-American concerns that run laterally to the axis of colony and metropolis. Speaking for many AfricanAmerican critics, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. has expressed his wariness of imposing a “grand unified theory of oppression” on the predominantly local concerns of black Americans. Both Bhabha and Spivak have been criticized for “provincializing blackness” and for playing down the importance of race through their deconstructivist and economic approaches.4

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“Colony,” in The Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1961), entries II.4–5. 2 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, tr. Constance Farrington, preface by Jean–Paul Sartre (Les Damnés de la terre, 1961; tr. New York: Grove, 1963): 216; Christine MacLeod, “Black American Literature and the Postcolonial Debate,” Yearbook of English Studies 27 (1997): 51. 3 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, The Postcolonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues, ed. Sarah Harasym (New York: Routledge, 1990): 59–66. 4 Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “Critical Fanonism,” Critical Inquiry 17.3 (Spring 1991): 470; Malini Johar Schueller, “Articulations of African-Americanism in South Asian Postcolonial Theory: Globalism, Localism, and the Question of Race,” Cultural Critique 55 (Autumn 2003): 42, 49; see also Postcolonial America, ed. Richard C. King (Urbana: U of Illinois P , 2000).

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In recent years, however, there has been a shift of focus onto the political and theoretical congruencies between the two disciplines.5 Proponents of a more inclusive conceptualization of their relationship have advanced a number of arguments that can be summarized in four main strands – the first two from the postcolonial side, the other two from the African-American. (1) The United States is a postcolonial society and should be analysed accordingly. Native Americans are the obvious case in point here: they were the colonized indigenes and the reservation is still a separate space that cannot be easily subsumed under multiculturalist approaches.6 However, critics have also pointed out that the ethnic diversity, and the ethnic problems, of American society are an after-effect of its own past as part of the European colonial project, and that many postcolonial concerns, such as ‘writing back’ and canon-formation, exist analogously within the United States.7 And they have advanced alternative definitions of postcoloniality predicated on “the historical experiences of rupture, exile, subjugation, social marginality, and linguistic and cultural dispossession,” all of which suggest that African Americans are at least a “quasi-colonial” people and should be included in this category.8 From a different angle, Amritjit Singh and Peter Schmidt have argued that American studies since the 1990s have “gained immensely from dialogue with the emergent field called ‘postcolonial studies,’ which provided com-

5

This focus is not entirely new: a few early publications such as The Empire Writes Back had already argued that “while the phenomenon African American society is not specifically a consequence of colonization, it is a consequence of colonialism.” Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths & Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (1989; New York: Routledge, 2003): 202. 6 Karen Piper, “Post-Colonialism in the United States: Diversity or Hybridity?” in Post-Colonial Literatures: Expanding the Canon, ed. Deborah Madsen (London: Pluto, 1999): 18. 7 Deborah Madsen, “Beyond the Commonwealth: Post-Colonialism and American Literature,” in Post-Colonial Literatures: Expanding the Canon, ed. Deborah Madsen (London: Pluto, 1999): 3–4. 8 MacLeod, “Black American Literature and the Postcolonial Debate,” 54–55 (first quotation); Walter Göbel, Der afroamerikanische Roman im 20. Jahrhundert: Eine Einführung (Berlin: E S V , 2001): 17, my translation (second quotation); see also Gita Rajan & Radhika Mohanram, “Introduction: Locating Postcoloniality,” in Postcolonial Discourse and Changing Cultural Contexts: Theory and Criticism, ed. Rajan & Mohanram (Westport C T : Greenwood, 1995): 4.

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parative historical analyses of [major] issues from global or transnational perspectives.”9 (2) Postcolonial studies can widen their perspective if they take AfricanAmerican texts and experiences into account. Important contributions such as Bhabha’s The Location of Culture and Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic rely heavily on African-American sources, including literary ones like Richard Wright and Toni Morrison.10 Critics have also argued that the black experience in the the United States “illustrates and parallels various configurations of postcolonialism.”11 They have cited or suggested studies of ghettos as “internal colonies,” of the relationship between Du Boisian ‘double-consciousness’ and postcolonial ‘doubleness,’ of African-American literary figures like Wright’s Bigger Thomas as illustrations of the colonial psyche, and of manifestations of hybridity in the work of postmodern African-American writers such as Ishmael Reed and Charles R. Johnson.12 On the theoretical side, the editors of a collection on the cultural contexts of postcolonial discourse have argued that, given the complexity of recent identity-politics, “a claim for a homogeneous postcolonial identity politics would be naive” and have asserted that there are many different postcolonial identities, probably including African-American ones.13 (3) The African-American experience matters for postcolonial debate because it has always had a transnational dimension. W.E.B. Du Bois, as one of the founding fathers of African-American studies, is a key figure in this argument. His pronouncement that “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line” is probably the most-quoted phrase in the field, but, as several scholars have pointed out, it is actually the lead-up to a rather postcolonial statement: “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line, – the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia

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Amritjit Singh & Peter Schmidt, “On the Borders Between U.S. Studies and Postcolonial Theory,” in Postcolonial Theory and the United States: Race, Ethnicity, and Literature, ed. Singh & Schmidt (Jackson: U P of Mississippi, 2000): 3. 10 See Malini Johar Schueller, Locating Race: Global Sites of Post-Colonial Citizenship (Albany: State U of New York P , 2009): 33–54. 11 MacLeod, “Black American Literature and the Postcolonial Debate,” 55. 12 “Black American Literature and the Postcolonial Debate,” 57–58; Schueller, “Articulations of African-Americanism in South Asian Postcolonial Theory,” 37. 13 Rajan & Mohanram, “Introduction,” 7.

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and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea.”14 A few years later, Du Bois explained that “Africa is the Land of the Twentieth Century” and envisioned a “War of the Color Line” in which subjected peoples of colour around the globe would rise and take revenge.15 Du Bois was an early ‘border intellectual’, in Abdul JanMohamed’s term: a physically and culturally mobile thinker who reflected on his society from both an inside and an outside perspective.16 This mobility inspired a number of other African-American leaders and theorists. Pan-Africanism, for example, remained popular into the civilrights movement of the 1960s. Early postcolonial theorists such as Senghor and Césaire, in turn, were inspired by the confidence and radicalism of the Black Movement, which, according to Amiri Baraka, was a major influence on the negrismo and négritude movements.17 Today a number of scholars in the field, including such prominent figures as Cornel West, are attempting to revive this transnational orientation as a means of linking African-American studies with the broader global trend in cultural studies.18 And writers of fictional literature are exploring the congruencies and mutual influences between African-American and postcolonial forms of subjectivity.19 (4) The racial questions raised by African-American studies are relevant to, and should be incorporated into, the postcolonial debate. In this view, the inclusion of African-American perspectives contributes to the complexity of 14

W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903; New York: Signet, 1969): 54 W.E.B. Du Bois, “The African Roots of War,” The Atlantic Monthly 115.5 (1915): 707–14; reprinted in Black Titan: W.E.B. Du Bois, ed. John Henrik Clarke (Boston M A : Beacon, 1970): 279, 282. 16 Abdul R. JanMohamed, “Worldliness-without-World, Homelessness-as-Home: Toward a Definition of the Specular Border Intellectual,” in Edward Said: A Critical Reader, ed. Michael Sprinker (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992): 96–120. 17 Amiri Baraka, “The Revolutionary Tradition in Afro-American Literature” (1979), in The LeRoi Jones / Amiri Baraka Reader, ed. William J. Harris (New York: Thunder’s Mouth, 1991): 318. See Richard B. Moore, “Du Bois and Pan-Africa” (1965), in Black Titan: W.E.B. Du Bois, ed. John Henrik Clarke (Boston M A : Beacon, 1970): 187–212; Rajan & Mohanram, “Introduction,” 10. 18 For an early formulation of West’s program, see his Prophetic Reflections: Notes on Race and Power in America (Monroe M E : Common Courage, 1993): 123–25. 19 Christopher Wise, “The Dialectics of Négritude: Or, the (Post)Colonial Subject in Contemporary African-American Literature,” in Postcolonial Discourse and Changing Cultural Contexts: Theory and Criticism, ed. Gita Rajan & Radhika Mohanram (Westport C T : Greenwood, 1995): 33–46. 15

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postcolonial theory. It helps avoid some of the blind spots mentioned above, such as the idea that “contemporary globalization produced a worldwide diaspora that we can talk about through a common master vocabulary.”20 Bhabha, for example, has been criticized along these lines for the abstract quality both of his readings of African-American texts and of his approaches to the race question in general.21 African-American critics see themselves in a position to contribute the substratum of specific, local experience – of the “microphysics of power”22 – that they find missing in theorists like Bhabha. They have also pointed to the impact of American ethnic literature on global conceptions of postcolonial subjectivity, which postcolonial scholarship has not always taken into account.23 More generally, Singh and Schmidt suggest that, in examining the cultural “borders” internal to the United States, especially those of class and ethnicity, (African-)American studies have become accessible to and contributed to the global postcolonial debate.24 Thus, in recent years calls for cooperation and ‘cross-pollination’ between the disciplines have gathered momentum.25 Gilroy’s concept of the Black Atlantic has been an important impetus for such integrative approaches and provides the theoretical basis for an increasing number of studies.26 Many of these studies focus on the fuzziest borderline between the African-American

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Schueller, “Articulations of African-Americanism in South Asian Postcolonial Theory,” 36. 21 “Articulations of African-Americanism in South Asian Postcolonial Theory,” 41. 22 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, tr. Alan Sheridan (Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison, 1975; New York: Vintage, 1995): 26. 23 Madsen, “Beyond the Commonwealth,” 1. 24 Singh & Schmidt, “On the Borders Between U.S. Studies and Postcolonial Theory,” 6. 25 John Gruesser, Confluences: Postcolonialism, African American Literary Studies, and the Black Atlantic (Athens G A : U of Georgia P , 2005): 132. 26 See, for example, Gruesser, Confluences; Lars Eckstein, Re-Membering the Black Atlantic: On the Poetics and Politics of Literary Memory (Cross / Cultures 84; Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2006); Philip Gould, “Early Black Atlantic Writing and the Cultures of Enlightenment,” in Beyond Douglass: New Perspectives on Early African-American Literature, ed. Michael J. Drexler & Ed White (Lewisburg P A : Bucknell U P , 2008): 107–21; Yogita Goyal, Romance, Diaspora, and Black Atlantic Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2010).

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and the postcolonial sphere: the Caribbean.27 In historical perspective, the boundary between U S and Caribbean blacks has been more porous than that between African Americans and other hyphenated Americans.28 The black populations of the United States and the Caribbean share their roots in violent displacement and slavery, their experience of oppression and legalized discrimination, and the gradual (though temporally disparate) shift from Europe to Northern America as their political and cultural hegemon. The exchange routes of the ‘black Caribbean’ involve flows of people from the islands to the United States, flows of cultural and military power from the United States to the islands, and quasi-colonial economic flows of raw materials in one direction and manufactured goods in the other. A closer look shows that within these broad flows there are countercurrents, and that the hierarchies are often within rather than between national societies: African Americans may have manufactured the goods but they are seldom the ones who profit from them; economic deprivation forces many African Americans into the military, which is then deployed in the Caribbean or elsewhere. Cultural exchange has always been less hierarchical, and the African-American imaginary that flows back to the islands through books, films, and especially music has been shaped by Caribbean immigrants to a considerable degree. The complexity of these flows, and the difficulty of distinguishing clearly between the two spheres, is poignantly illustrated by the life and work of the poet Claude McKay. When McKay was raised in turn-of-the-century Jamaica as part of the overwhelming black majority of the country, he was both a colonial subject of His Majesty the King (a phrase he uses several times in his autobiography) and an Afro-American (a term that was just coming into fashion in the United States and as a matter of course was taken to refer to all blacks in the Americas).29 When he moved to Harlem in 1914, he became a 27

Another fuzzy borderline is, of course, that between the U S A and Mexico. See Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987); Rajan & Mohanran, “Introduction,” 5. 28 A person unacquainted with the intricacies of academic terminology is likely to assume that the very term ‘African American’ includes Caribbean blacks, and several scholars have argued that it does, or should; see Michael Hanchard, “Identity, Meaning, and the African-American” (1990), in Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives., ed. Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti & Ella Shohat (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 1997): 230–39. 29 The autobiography is Claude McKay, A Long Way From Home, ed. Gene Andrew Jarrett (1937; New Brunswick N J : Rutgers U P , 2007): 68, 86. On the term ‘Afro-

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citizen of the emerging black capital of the United States and at the same time a member of the Caribbean diaspora: historians estimate that as much as twenty-five percent of Harlem’s black population was of Caribbean origin.30 At that point McKay had already published two of his four collections of poetry. Their titles, Songs of Jamaica and Constab Ballads, indicate their Caribbean bent; they consist mostly of dialect pieces, with pastoral overtones, about life in rural Jamaica. His other two collections followed in the early 1920s: Spring in New Hampshire (1920) and its much-altered American version Harlem Shadows (1922). They focused on American scenes and settings, especially on New York City, and established McKay as a leading voice of black poetry. He was soon incorporated into the African-American canon, and as ‘African American’ came to acquire its more exclusive, nationalist meaning, his Caribbean work was often excluded from serious consideration even though it makes him a major representative of early Caribbean poetry.31 Significantly, it was regarded not so much as the apprentice work that it arguably is, but as the aberration of a credulous provincial youth under the influence of an outdated Victorianism, personified by his early mentor, the Englishman Walter Jekyll. This selective vision has been surprisingly persistent. Even today McKay is generally known for a handful of his American poems – “The Harlem Dancer,” “The Tropics in New York,” “America,” and “If We Must Die,” which, despite its general appeal, is read almost exclusively as a poem about blacks in the United States – and for his only American novel, Home to Harlem. (The americanization of his prose fiction followed a very similar course; his two other novels, Banjo, about Marseilles, and Banana Bottom, about Jamaica, were never as popular and have only recently received critical attention.) American’, see James Weldon Johnson, “Preface to the First Edition,” in The Book of American Negro Poetry, ed. James Weldon Johnson (1931; San Diego C A : Harcourt, Brace, 1969). In his own autobiography Johnson uses the word “Aframerican” and also takes it to include Caribbean and South American blacks. See James Weldon Johnson, Along This Way: The Autobiography of James Weldon Johnson (1933; New York: Viking, 1973): 375. 30 Robert Philipson, “The Harlem Renaissance as Postcolonial Phenomenon,” African American Review 40.1 (Spring 2006): 146. 31 Some (but not all) histories of Caribbean literature have claimed McKay as a major representative of early Caribbean poetry, particularly Lloyd W. Brown, West Indian Poetry (London: Heinemann, 1984), who devotes one of his seven chapters to McKay alone.

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Thus McKay’s status as an American poet rested on the exclusion of half his published poetry.32 It also required a bit of biographical refashioning, since McKay spent most of the 1920s and early 1930s in Europe and thus missed out on the very period of African-American literature he is taken to represent, the Harlem Renaissance (whose intellectual leaders he did not like anyway).33 Both of these blind spots in McKay criticism have begun to come under scrutiny,34 and the publication of his Complete Poems in 2004 marked a turning point. It assembles all of McKay’s later poetry, most of which was previously unpublished. Aside from a few individual pieces, the later poetry consists of three series of poems: “The Clinic,” about McKay’s hospitalization in Paris in 1923; “Cities,” about his travels through Europe and Africa in the mid-1930s; and a collection of fifty-four sonnets and short poems that McKay referred to simply as “The Cycle” (c. 1943). This body of work is significant both for its quantity – it amounts to more than a third of his entire output – and for its transnational perspective. It shows the full extent to which McKay experienced travel and dislocation around the Black Atlantic and reflected on his experiences from both a (post)colonial and an African-American perspective. McKay is at his most direct in “The Cycle,” which has a raw, unfinished quality to it.35 In simple, poignant lines, often with humorous or parodic overtones, it addresses racial problems in the United States – in this case, a public outcry over the supposed disloyalty of black agitation during the war – and puts them in an international perspective.

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McKay published a number of uncollected poems in magazines, but the page count in his Complete Poems shows that his Jamaican poetry does amount to almost exactly half his published work. 33 This is not to question McKay’s role in the Harlem Renaissance but rather to point to the movement’s international character, which is often neglected in traditional accounts. Contemporaneous writers and observers by contrast were quite aware of its links with Africa, Europe, and the Caribbean. See Carl Pedersen, “The Caribbean Voices of Claude McKay and Eric Walrond,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Harlem Renaissance, ed. George Hutchinson (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2007): 185–91; Philipson, “The Harlem Renaissance as Postcolonial Phenomenon,” 146. 34 See Pedersen, “The Caribbean Voices of Claude McKay and Eric Walrond,” 184– 91. 35 “The Cycle” will be quoted by poem and line number from Claude McKay, Complete Poems, ed. William J. Maxwell (Urbana: U of Illinois P , 2004): 241–69.

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Now I should like to ask for illustration, Why should blacks be overwhelmed with love of whites? Does the Jew waste love on the German nation For dooming him to medieval nights? There are German thousands who are not anti-Jew, More than friends of blacks in the U.S.A. perhaps, But all are blamed for what the Nazis do, And must take the righteous world’s unfriendly raps. Now I do love the United States, so grand In bigness, frankness and brutality, Love it because this great amazing land, Is so free from the Old World’s hypocrisy: But this new Negro anti-whitism rumor – Why, has America no sense of humor? (10, ll.1–16)

The ambivalent attitude at the beginning of the sestet is an echo of McKay’s early “America” (“I love this cultured hell that tests my youth”), but here it is expressed more directly and in transatlantic comparison with the “Old World,” which he had travelled extensively by that time. This wider perspective seems to colour the mood of the conclusion, which is much lighter than in “America.” No longer embroiled in the cultured hell of the United States, McKay now writes as an amused onlooker who has outgrown the childish backwardness of the American racial debates. The concluding couplet of his Shakespearean sonnet – a form McKay uses in very broad strokes here – provides an effective outlet for his ironic commentary on the myopia of white America, which generalizes about other countries and remains blind to internal issues like the continuing racial discrimination. The “grandness” of the United States is undercut by this conclusion, as is the idea of its lack of “hypocrisy,” which, on closer inspection, is just one of the self-indulgent stereotypes of the elite. Historical continuity is an important subtext in the poem: Germany has not outgrown its medieval antisemitism any more than America has outgrown the hypocrisies of racism and Puritanism. By portraying both nations as immature children and by looking at each from the other’s perspective, McKay establishes his own view as a spatially and temporally overarching one: if there is a “righteous world” entitled to spank these countries, he is its citizen and its speaker. This global perspective informs many of the poems of “The Cycle,” and it takes a variety of forms. In Poem 14, for example, McKay comments on the then popular theory in Shakespeare criticism that Othello was Arabian rather

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than African (and thus racially more acceptable). McKay flatly contradicts this notion and brings his comprehensive first-hand knowledge of Europe and Northern Africa into play to denounce the “New York critics” as backwoods provincials. Now everywhere in Europe, the word Moor Means African black as it did in Shakespeare’s day, When black folk were not “Untouchables,” before The Anglo-Saxons over the world held sway. The greatest sultan of Morocco was black, His tomb is there at Rabat to attest it, And Lalla Chella’s, his spouse, who turned her back On Europe to share his powerful throne – and blest it! (14, ll.5–12)

The historical reference to the sultan’s (probably) European wife, who converted from Christianity to Islam, re-enacts the racial trauma of white supremacism – the black man lures the white woman away from white society – that is at the heart both of Shakespeare’s play and of the racial debates it inspired in American criticism. At the same time, it defines Anglo-Saxon supremacy as a temporally limited period clearly distinguishable from both the cultural achievements of “Shakespeare’s day” and a spatio-temporal continuum of black achievement that links major cultural and historical icons with the present-day struggle of African Americans. His global and (post)colonial perspective enables McKay to contextualize this struggle in a black transnational imaginary and, in so doing, both to legitimize and to take part in it. Besides looking at the American scene from a wider perspective, McKay also operates the other way round and evaluates the impact of global developments on African Americans. In “The Cycle” this is most tangible in his discussion of the Communist movement, which he had supported in his younger days but, after the ascent of Stalin, had rejected as too narrowminded and oppressive. Here, too, his attitude is one of ironic derision: Thus I’m boycotted by the Communists, And censored by their literary dean, I’m never in their lugubrious lists Of Negro writers of the American scene. So in their way they do attempt their best To emulate the Soviet paradise, Where works of Trotsky and others are suppressed So the Russian soul should be more Stalin-wise. (13, ll.1–8)

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Besides criticizing the moral and cultural decline of the movement, McKay faulted the American communists for their lack of racial awareness. They were simply replacing the Christian prophets with Marxist ones, he argued, and in several poems he portrays them working as self-satisfied missionaries among the black population without recognizing that race, not class, is at the root of the problem. In this respect he foreshadows the African-American criticism of Marxist postcolonial theory mentioned above for its tendency to subsume racial concerns under economic ones. However, there is another strand of poems in “The Cycle” as well: poems that are bitter and belligerent rather than light-heartedly ironic. They are also written in a straightforward style, and they share the other poems’ direct, hands-on approach. Dating from the middle of World War Two, these poems repeatedly place the institutionalized antisemitism of Nazi Germany in parallel with institutionalized racism in the United States. The irony of black Americans fighting oppressive regimes abroad while suffering from oppressive conditions at home was not new, of course; it had been a set piece of black intellectual debate from World War One at the latest. The new intensity of German and Japanese fascism, however, adds to the urgency and radicalism of McKay’s poetry: we fight in Europe Germans, Asia Japanese For setting up a Fascist way of might While fifteen million Negroes on their knees Pray for salvation from the Fascist yoke Of these United States. (23, ll.1–6)

While earlier black poets and politicians had tended to play down the oppression of blacks in the interest of moderation and conciliation, McKay tends to overstate it. In a series of exasperated, polemic poems he ridicules the American fight for democracy, hurls its benevolent slogans back at the racist country, and ventures into questionable comparisons himself, as when he suggests that their wilful colour-blindness prevents Americans from understanding the workings of European fascism (Poem 29). The comparative perspective is typical of these poems; as one critic has said of such texts, “Europe becomes a lens through which to interpret the role of the African-American in

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Western civilization.”36 The international aspect is not limited to Europe, however. McKay also discusses the parallels between American segregation and the Indian caste system (Poem 42) and includes a sonnet in praise of his fellow Afro-Caribbean expatriate, Marcus Garvey, whose unpretentious direct-action socialism was a palpable influence on his later poetry (Poem 50). The “Cities” poems, too, have a decidedly international bent. While a few are about New York City and specifically about Harlem, most chronicle McKay’s travels in Europe and Northern Africa. True to his self-image as a simple migrant worker in touch with the raw reality of any new country, McKay avoids references to his American background and tries to blend his perspective with that of the unfamiliar city. Fez Mine eyes saw Fez, my heart exclaimed Baghdad In Africa. And smitten took her whole: Her labyrinthine lanes and crooked souks, And costumes hooding beauty from men’s sight. I am haunted by the aspect of her soul, Obscure like her dim passages and books – The laughing colors of infinite delight, Created by a folk so strangely sad: The houris of the sordid Paradise Of Moulay Abdullah, the nights exotic, And one dear night upon my memory warm, Sweet and enthralling like a dream erotic Of beauty African in shape and form, With glowing fire of Andalusian eyes.37

The first line of the poem suggests a typical tourist’s response, subsuming the African city under the more familiar realm of the Orient. But the enjambed qualification “In Africa,” which McKay added in the revised version, undercuts this categorization and reclaims the cultural heritage associated with 36

Lena Ahlin, The “New Negro” in the Old World: Culture and Performance in James Weldon Johnson, Jessie Fauset, and Nella Larsen (Lund: Department of English, 2006): 10. 37 McKay, Complete Poems, 226. The “Cities” poems in the following will cited by the page on which the poem appears followed by the line numbers within the individual poem.

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Baghdad for Africa, which blacks at the time began to regard as the cradle of humankind (though McKay had different ideas, as we shall see).38 The result is a strange mixture of African and Oriental imagery, to which McKay adds a European element in the concluding line. On one level the poem can be read as a celebration of cultural hybridity and the aesthetic stimulation it engenders. The black traveller claims a deeper understanding of the city than a mere tourist or an Orientalist scholar could achieve. Where the tourist merely stops to “gaze” and “purchase from the souks a souvenir,” as McKay puts it in the second part of “Tanger” (225, ll.9–10), the black traveller shares the city’s sensuality, its complex synaesthetic make-up (“laughing colors” has racial overtones as well), and thus its very “soul.” McKay moved among the lower classes and was always attracted to the underside of society; the sestet records his impressions of Moulay Abdullah, the red-light district of Fez, and continues the leitmotif of racial and cultural hybridity as a source of sensual stimulation and intercultural experience. However, its emphasis on the sensual combined with its Oriental imagery also leaves the poem open to the charge of Orientalist stereotyping of the Arabian world. The city’s marketplace is described as “crooked,” a double entendre probably intended but still indicative of the Western tourist’s general distrust of native traders. The description, at the end of the octave, of the city as a coy, veiled beauty blends with the image of veiled paradisal virgins (the houris) and, problematically, with the prostitutes of the red-light district. In effect, the strongest and concluding impression McKay gives of the city – a prestigious centre of learning in the Arabian world – is its likeness to a flirtatious prostitute. Admittedly, however, “Fez” is an extreme case. McKay generally tends to approach a city, whether African or European, via his sensual responses, and he reveals the pitfalls of Orientalism in several other poems of the series. “Marrakesh,” for instance, has its fair share of Oriental imagery as well but in a sobering twist suggests that the “Berber youngsters” who “skip gazelle-like for the approving throng” are actually selling sexual services (227, ll.9–11). “Tetuan” transforms the long struggle for cultural and political supremacy in Southern Spain into an exchange of cultural “homage” between Arabian and European occupiers, each leaving the best their culture has to offer on the walls and in the streets of the city (227, l.1). In a poignant reversal, it is the Arabians who bring cultural achievements such as “Filigree marvels from Koranic lines, / Mosaics chanting notes like tropic rain,” while 38

For the original manuscript version of the poem, see Complete Poems, 355.

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the Spanish bring sensual stimulants: “new life,” “crystal charm,” “flamenco laughter” (227, ll.7–14). While Orientalist stereotypes might persist in McKay’s series, they are decisively undercut by this revision of cultural exchange between Africa and Europe, especially because historical documentation supports it to a good degree. For a concluding evaluation of McKay’s later poetry I would like to turn to a mini-sequence of three sonnets on Tanger in the “Cities” series. Embedding the immediate impression of the city in its larger African, postcolonial, and even American contexts, these sonnets bring his physical and imaginative travels around the Black Atlantic full circle. In the first sonnet, Tanger is introduced as an inter-national city in the literal sense of the word: its coveted strategic position between Europe and Africa has made it the object of contention between many nations on both continents. In characteristically physical imagery, McKay concludes: “Morocco’s severed head is Europe’s ball / Kicked from goal to goal and all around / … / And aptly christened International!” (225, ll.9–14). This enforced internationality is contrasted, in the third sonnet, with the city’s long African history that the foreign conquerors can only affect on the surface: Tanger! A Rock of Ages painted white. And oh, I found within your native niche A beauty pregnant of life’s pristine womb, Whose fingers, dripping with experience, Caressed my spirit and held it growing rich, While, on your bosom asleep, I heard the drum Of Africa upswelling from the dense Dim deeps to stir you far upon the height. (225–26, 1–8)

Again, it is the double function of blackness as both shared heritage and transnational sensibility that gives him access to the true dimensions of this internationalized African city. The city is again seen as a woman, but not so much as a prostitute (though the overtones are there in the “painted white”) than as a mother, whose sexuality, intimated toward the end of the quoted passage, promises native fertility rather than foreign amusement. The complex internationality McKay ascribes to Tanger inevitably recalls his home region, the Caribbean, many of whose islands also became objects of contention between the European powers. St Lucia, the home of the poet Derek Walcott, changed possession fourteen times between France and Brit-

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ain alone.39 McKay’s home island of Jamaica was occupied first by the Spanish and then by the English, but neither European power managed to control the mountainous interior of the country. Like the white-painted Tanger, most English settlement remained confined to the coast while the mountains, settled by the Maroons (black runaway slaves who mixed with the native population), developed into a quasi-autonomous free black nation.40 Another image that might have been inspired by memories of the Caribbean is McKay’s depiction of Tanger in the second sonnet as an “iron pirate fettered now, / With iron heavy upon your bruised feet, / And iron manacles on your helpless hand” (225, ll.1–3). Piracy is not just associated with the Caribbean in the collective imaginary, it was also an important economic factor in the region, and, though often controlled by Europeans, was an insurrectionary means of disturbing colonial trade. The economic dimension is palpable in McKay’s description of Tanger, again representing colonized Africa, helplessly watching European “galleons” take their “golden cargo” away. The natural resources that would have made Africa the richest continent of all are exploited by the conquerors, who have taken care to disable the native powers first. Beside this postcolonial perspective, with its focus on political and economic hierarchies, the imagery also recalls a specifically African-American situation, however: when McKay sympathizes with the city because “tourists stop to gaze at you in chains,” he is evoking memories of enslavement and slave markets. The powerful African pirate and the mythic African mother have been reduced to object status. But while the white tourists think the African “soul breathes in a servile guide” McKay, sensitive to its spirit of pride and resistance, wonders: “What thoughts are hid beneath your lowered brow?” (225, ll.8–11). These poems, published for the first time in 2004, leave no doubt that the African-American and the postcolonial aspects of McKay’s writing, as of his biography, are closely intertwined. The full scope of these texts, and of many others from the Caribbean and elsewhere, cannot be understood from only a Caribbean, American or African perspective. They make the theoretical inte39

Charles Jesse, Outlines of St. Lucia’s History (Castries: St. Lucia Archaeological & Historical Society, 1964). 40 Bev Carey, The Maroon Story: The Authentic and Original History of the Maroons in the History of Jamaica, 1490–1880 (Garden Town: Agouti, 1997): 145–62; Werner Zips, Black Rebels: African-Caribbean Freedom Fighters in Jamaica, tr. Shelley L. Frisch (Schwarze Rebellen, 1999; Princeton N J : Markus Wiener, 1999): 59–67.

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gration and convergence of postcolonial and race studies a methodological necessity. The critical tools developed in such a move will help us better understand the writings and beliefs of McKay and many other black intellectuals whose background included African-American and (post)colonial elements. It might also encourage critics to take another look at a host of forgotten literary figures who moved along or across this borderline: J. Antonio Jarvis, for instance, a black poet from the American-owned portion of the Caribbean Virgin Islands, whose European poetic forms strain to delimit the powerful “atavism” (his word) of his African and Caribbean subject-matter.41 Or Ferdinand Levy, an African American who studied, lived, and published in Dublin around the time of World War Two – another postcolonial perspective that informs and supplements his poems on the United States, the Caribbean, and Africa. To gauge the potential of such convergent views and voices, however, critics need to avoid ideological categorizations and short-cuts. Rather than subsuming one branch of inquiries under the other, they need to sharpen their theoretical awareness of the dynamic – and historically specific – relationship between postcolonial and African-American studies.

WORKS CITED Ahlin, Lena. The “New Negro” in the Old World: Culture and Performance in James Weldon Johnson, Jessie Fauset, and Nella Larsen (Lund: Department of English, 2006). Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1987). Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths & Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (1989; New York: Routledge, 2003). Baraka, Amiri. “The Revolutionary Tradition in Afro-American Literature” (1979), in The LeRoi Jones / Amiri Baraka Reader, ed. William J. Harris (New York: Thunder’s Mouth, 1991): 311–22. Brown, Lloyd W. West Indian Poetry (London: Heinemann, 1984). Carey, Bev. The Maroon Story: The Authentic and Original History of the Maroons in the History of Jamaica, 1490–1880 (Garden Town: Agouti, 1997). “Colony,” in The Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1961).

41

J. Antonio Jarvis, Bamboula Dance and Other Poems (St. Thomas, V I : The Art Shop, 1935): 4.

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Du Bois, W.E.B. “The African Roots of War,” The Atlantic Monthly 115.5 (1915): 707–14; reprinted in Black Titan: W.E.B. Du Bois, ed. John Henrik Clarke (Boston M A : Beacon, 1970): 274–85. ——. The Souls of Black Folk (1903; New York: Signet, 1969). Eckstein, Lars. Re-Membering the Black Atlantic: On the Poetics and Politics of Literary Memory (Cross / Cultures 84; Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2006). Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth, tr. Constance Farrington, preface by Jean– Paul Sartre (Les Damnés de la terre, 1961; New York: Grove, 1963). Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, tr. Alan Sheridan (Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison, 1975; New York: Vintage, 1995). Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. “Critical Fanonism,” Critical Inquiry 17.3 (Spring 1991): 457– 70. Göbel, Walter. Der afroamerikanische Roman im 20. Jahrhundert: Eine Einführung (Berlin: E S V , 2001). Gould, Philip. “Early Black Atlantic Writing and the Cultures of Enlightenment,” in Beyond Douglass: New Perspectives on Early African-American Literature, ed. Michael J. Drexler & Ed White (Lewisburg P A : Bucknell U P , 2008): 107–21. Goyal, Yogita. Romance, Diaspora, and Black Atlantic Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2010). Gruesser, John. Confluences: Postcolonialism, African American Literary Studies, and the Black Atlantic (Athens: U of Georgia P , 2005). Hanchard, Michael. “Identity, Meaning, and the African-American” (1990), in Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives, ed. Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti & Ella Shohat (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 1997): 230–39. JanMohammed, Abdul R. “Worldliness-without-World, Homelessness-as-Home: Toward a Definition of the Specular Border Intellectual,” in Edward Said: A Critical Reader, ed. Michael Sprinker (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992): 96–120. Jarvis, J. Antonio. Bamboula Dance and Other Poems (St. Thomas, V I : The Art Shop, 1935). Jesse, Charles. Outlines of St. Lucia’s History (Castries: St. Lucia Archaeological & Historical Society, 1964). Johnson, James Weldon. Along This Way: The Autobiography of James Weldon Johnson (1933; New York: Viking, 1973). ——. “Preface to the First Edition,” in The Book of American Negro Poetry, ed. James Weldon Johnson (1931; San Diego C A : Harcourt, Brace, 1969). King, Richard C., ed. Postcolonial America (Urbana: U of Illinois P , 2000). McKay, Claude. Complete Poems, ed. William J. Maxwell (Urbana: U of Illinois P , 2004). ——. A Long Way From Home, ed. Gene Andrew Jarrett (1937; New Brunswick N J : Rutgers U P , 2007).

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MacLeod, Christine. “Black American Literature and the Postcolonial Debate,” Yearbook of English Studies 27 (1997): 51–65. Madsen, Deborah. “Beyond the Commonwealth: Post-Colonialism and American Literature,” in Post-Colonial Literatures: Expanding the Canon, ed. Deborah Madsen (London: Pluto, 1999): 1–13. Moore, Richard B. “Du Bois and Pan-Africa” (1965), in Black Titan: W.E.B. Du Bois, ed. John Henrik Clarke (Boston M A : Beacon, 1970): 187–212. Pedersen, Carl. “The Caribbean Voices of Claude McKay and Eric Walrond,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Harlem Renaissance, ed. George Hutchinson (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2007): 184–97. Philipson, Robert. “The Harlem Renaissance as Postcolonial Phenomenon,” African American Review 40.1 (Spring 2006): 145–60. Piper, Karen. “Post-Colonialism in the United States: Diversity or Hybridity?” in PostColonial Literatures: Expanding the Canon, ed. Deborah Madsen (London: Pluto, 1999): 14–27. Rajan, Gita, & Radhika Mohanram. “Introduction: Locating Postcoloniality,” in Postcolonial Discourse and Changing Cultural Contexts: Theory and Criticism, ed. Rajan & Mohanram (Westport C T : Greenwood, 1995): 1–16. Schueller, Malini Johar. “Articulations of African-Americanism in South Asian Postcolonial Theory: Globalism, Localism, and the Question of Race,” Cultural Critique 55 (Autumn 2003): 35–62. ——. Locating Race: Global Sites of Post-Colonial Citizenship (Albany: State U of New York P , 2009). Singh, Amritjit, & Peter Schmidt. “On the Borders Between U.S. Studies and Postcolonial Theory,” in Postcolonial Theory and the United States: Race, Ethnicity, and Literature, ed. Amritjit Singh & Peter Schmidt (Jackson: U P of Mississippi, 2000): 3–69. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. The Postcolonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues, ed. Sarah Harasym (New York: Routledge, 1990). West, Cornel. Prophetic Reflections: Notes on Race and Power in America (Monroe M E : Common Courage, 1993). Wise, Christopher. “The Dialectics of Négritude: Or, the (Post)Colonial Subject in Contemporary African-American Literature,” in Postcolonial Discourse and Changing Cultural Contexts: Theory and Criticism, ed. Gita Rajan & Radhika Mohanram (Westport C T : Greenwood, 1995): 33–46. Zips, Werner. Black Rebels: African-Caribbean Freedom Fighters in Jamaica, tr. Shelley L. Frisch (Schwarze Rebellen, 1999; Princeton N J : Markus Wiener, 1999).

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“Mainly Story-Telling and Play-Acting” — Theatricality and the Middle Passage in Barry Unsworth’s Sacred Hunger

C ARL P LASA

The most magnificent drama in the last thousand years of human history is the transportation of ten million human beings out of the dark beauty of their mother continent into the new-found Eldorado of the West.1

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on first publication in 1992 and co-winning the Booker Prize in the same year, Barry Unsworth’s Sacred Hunger was – with the exception of an insightful review-essay by Peter Hulme2 – largely ignored by the critical establishment. Since the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade in 2007, however, this situation has changed markedly, with articles now in circulation from Greg Forter, Peggy A. Knapp, and Susan Strehle.3 These confirm the sense that Sacred Hunger is being increasingly recognized as a major contribution to the literary memory of the Middle Passage with which it is so intimately concerned. As if in response to such delayed critical affirmation, Unsworth him1

ESPITE BEING FAVOURABLY REVIEWED

W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America: 1860–1880, intro. David Levering Lewis (1935; New York: Free Press, 1998): 727. 2 See Peter Hulme, “The Atlantic World of Sacred Hunger,” New Left Review I/204 (1994): 138–44. 3 See Greg Forter, “Barry Unsworth and the Arts of Power: Historical Memory, Utopian Fictions,” Contemporary Literature 51.4 (Winter 2010): 777–809; Peggy A. Knapp, “Barry Unsworth’s Sacred Hunger: History and Utopia,” Clio 38.3 (Summer 2009): 319–37; and Susan Strehle, “Rewriting Darkness: Imperial Knowledge in Barry Unsworth’s Sacred Hunger,” Studies in the Novel 43.1 (Spring 2011): 75–93.

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self has recently published a sequel to the novel in The Quality of Mercy (2011). The title to that later work is taken from Portia’s speech in act I V , scene i of William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (1600), but, in Sacred Hunger, Unsworth’s imaginative energies are engaged by a different Shakespeare text: namely, The Tempest (1611) or, more precisely, The Tempest, or the Enchanted Island (1670), John Dryden and Sir William Davenant’s revision of the better-known original. Why is Unsworth attracted to this version of Shakespeare’s magical romance rather than its canonical pre-text? In what ways does he both deploy and rework it? And how is the play’s incorporation in the text connected to Sacred Hunger’s account of the transatlantic slave trade? These are questions which this essay addresses in its first section, before going on, in its second, to explore how Sacred Hunger moves beyond a specific intertextual exchange to exploit the idea of theatrical performance in a broader sense. What are the uses of theatricality in the novel? How does its meaning shift as it crosses the colour-line and is variously appropriated by white subjects and black? In what ways is it enlisted into the service of personal and collective memory? And what light, finally, does theatrical representation shed upon the act of fictional representation in which Unsworth is himself involved as novelist?

Rehearsing The Tempest Unsworth’s turn towards a less familiar (and palpably inferior) adaptation of The Tempest might at first seem baffling or even perverse but, as Knapp points out, it was the Restoration incarnation of the drama that enjoyed the greater currency in the mid-eighteenth-century era when the narrative of Sacred Hunger unfolds.4 The play’s presence in the text is thus no enigmatic quirk but a covert sign of the meticulously achieved historical authenticity which typifies the novel as a whole. Dryden and Davenant make several changes to their Shakespearean source, cashiering some characters from the initial list of dramatis personae and either installing or recasting others. Their additional recruits most notably include

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Knapp, “Barry Unsworth’s Sacred Hunger,” 47, note 17.

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the sexually ingenuous Hippolito, “right Heir of the Dukedom of Mantua,”5 and Dorinda, who appears as Miranda’s sister, while Shakespeare’s Sycorax is herself set in a newly sisterly relation to Caliban, having previously been his mother. In general terms, though, the collaborators remain faithful to the earlier material on which they draw, following its major plot-lines to their felicitous ends: by the finale of their rendition of The Tempest, Ferdinand once more weds Miranda and is once more reunited with the father he had supposed for so long drowned at sea. Unsworth, by contrast, implicitly challenges the generic conventions ensuring such happy outcomes in both plays, refashioning these comedic narratives of true love and redundant mourning. This he does primarily in the story he weaves around Erasmus Kemp, wouldbe spouse to the aristocratic Sarah Wolpert and son to William Kemp, a financially imperilled Liverpool cotton broker, driven to enter the “Africa trade”6 in a speculative bid to avert the spectre of “bankruptcy and ruin” (32). Throughout Sacred Hunger’s deliberately meandering and sometimes labyrinthine course, Erasmus is linked, albeit by mutual enmity and opposed sensibility, to his troubled cousin, Matthew Paris, ship’s surgeon aboard Kemp Senior’s anthropomorphically named Liverpool Merchant. The bond between Erasmus and Paris is so tight indeed as symbolically to connect both figures to the two pairs of chained slaves whose miniature image precedes each of the nine Parts which span the novel’s two Books and offers a visual allusion to the abolitionist diagram of another Liverpool slaver, the Brookes, widely disseminated from the late 1780s onwards.7 Yet Erasmus is more 5

John Dryden & William Davenant, The Tempest, or the Enchanted Island, in The Works of John Dryden, vol. 10: Plays: The Tempest, Tyrannick Love, An Evening’s Love, ed. Maximillian E. Novak (Berkeley: U of California P , 1970): 8 (italics in original). Further page references are in the main text. 6 Barry Unsworth, Sacred Hunger (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992): 15. Further page references are in the main text. 7 This image was first produced and circulated by the Plymouth Chapter of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade in 1788 but is best known in the more powerfully reworked version which the Society developed in London shortly thereafter. For a contemporary account of how this latter image came to be created, see Thomas Clarkson, The History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave-Trade by the British Parliament, 2 vols (London: Longman, 1808), vol. 2: 111–15. The image’s different incarnations have recently been comprehensively discussed by Marcus Rediker in The Slave Ship: A Human History (London: John Murray, 2007): 308–42.

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significantly linked to The Tempest’s Ferdinand, assuming his character in the frequently disputatious and disorganized rehearsals of the play which Sarah intends to perform “as an entertainment for [her] father on his sixtieth birthday” (110) and it is in the context of this relationship to Ferdinand that Unsworth’s departure from Shakespeare’s self-consciously idealized designs is most clearly articulated. From the novel’s outset, Erasmus exhibits a marked distaste for acting, as when he recalls accompanying his anxious father to a local “timber yard on the banks of the Mersey” and is “embarrassed at the theatrical way” (7) the older man brings “his face so close up to snuffle at the raw wood” (7–8) out of which his slaver is being wrought and by which, he hopes, his financial empire (and reputation) will be salvaged. Such biases also underpin Erasmus’s impromptu “involvement” in Sarah’s “theatricals” (19), brought about when the cameo-figure of Jonathan Rigby, first choice for Ferdinand’s part, is injured in a fall while riding. Understudying for the doubly unseated Rigby to Sarah’s Miranda has the obvious advantage of granting Erasmus access to the “Abode of angels” (35) over which his high-born maiden presides, but at the same time demands a difficult yielding of self to other which makes him feel uncomfortable and is ultimately beyond his reach: as he tells Sarah in Chapter 15, after the debacle of yet another ill-executed scene in the grounds of her country house, “ ‘ I cannot act – I cannot stop thinking of Erasmus Kemp for long enough’ ” (108). Erasmus’s unwillingness and/or inability to subject himself to the role in which chance casts him is ironic, given the good fortune with which Ferdinand is blessed and all the more so when viewed in the light of his own extratheatrical destiny, which diverges from the fate of his intertextual counterpart in two vital and interrelated respects. In The Tempest, the death of Ferdinand’s father, Alonso, is nothing but an illusion manufactured by Prospero, just as the ship on which the death seemingly occurs turns out not to have been wrecked at all but lodged fully intact by Ariel in a “deep Nook” (18) for safe keeping. In Sacred Hunger, conversely, the corresponding demise is grotesquely genuine and admits of no miraculous reversal, taking place when Erasmus’s father becomes convinced that his “slaving venture” (29) has run aground and hangs himself in despair, his “shoeless feet [. . . ] dangl[ing] one distinctly lower than the other” (361). That said, it might be claimed that this ungainly private tragedy, which “widow [. .. ] and son” connive to mask as “death from heart failure” (366), is at least metaphorically redeemed: Erasmus determines to “go into sugar” (the initial paternal business) and grows

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rich and powerful during the twelve-year hiatus between the novel’s two Books (the first set in 1752–53 and the second in 1765), thus “restor[ing]” his father’s entrepreneurial “good name” (391) if not his life. Either way, the loss of the father and the disastrous portfolio of “debts” (387) his death reveals divorce Erasmus still further from the securely betrothed Ferdinand, since they necessarily prevent him from marrying the Miranda-like Sarah, that “radiant creature” (357) who once promised, in a delicate if subtly surgical trope, to “open his heart to wonder” (423). Erasmus perhaps comes closest to re-enacting Ferdinand’s story, as it is at any rate retold by Dryden and Davenant, in his serio-comic confrontation with Henry Adams, the experienced “playwright and critic” whom Sarah’s brother, Charles, summons from London when her theatrical “enterprise” – like the elder Kemp’s commercial operation – appears as if it is “in danger either of breaking down in disorder or petering out altogether” (110). Adams’s status as a belated extra to an existing “company” (48) of amateur dramatists brings him into tacit parallel with the supplementary Hippolito, but the congruencies between the two figures extend beyond this. In Dryden and Davenant, Hippolito’s strange distinction is that he is “one that never saw Woman” (8) but, once awakened to the charms of the fairer sex, resolves to pursue an erotic praxis so inclusive as to embrace not just Miranda but women in general. Similarly in Unsworth (according to the hypersensitive Erasmus at least), Adams takes “insolent freedoms with the ladies” (168) involved in the rehearsals and, aptly for someone described as “a man of the theatre to his fingertips” (110), “all too frequently” places his hands “on the persons of the female players – particularly Miranda’s” (142) – a gesture explored in greater detail below. Where the difference between the two texts resurfaces, however, is in the way in which these disturbingly laissez-faire libidinal economies are shut down. Hippolito’s dreams of sexual promiscuity end in violence when the jealous Ferdinand inflicts a seemingly fatal wound on him in a hopelessly one-sided sword-fight. Adams, by contrast, sustains only verbal rather than physical injury when Erasmus calls him a “beastly popinjay and sponger” and threatens to “kill” him should he “touch” his beloved Sarah “again” (168), even going so far as to attempt to coerce him into a sword-fight of his own. As befits a text in which shipwreck and drowning turn out to be false alarms, Hippolito’s death is itself an ephemeral deceit, occurring at the beginning of act I V , scene iii, only to be undone in the scene immediately after, when Ariel tells Prospero how he gathered “Simples” (93) far and wide before “pour[ing] into [Hippolito’s] mouth / The healing juice of vulnerary

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Herbs” (94). In thus playing doctor, he instigates a medical programme which not only restores the victim–patient to physical health but also rids him once and for all of his disruptively indiscriminate sexuality or “naughty blood” (96). From this perspective, it would appear that, of the two weapons respectively wielded against their enemies by Erasmus and Ferdinand, the word rather than sword is more long-lasting and destructive in its effects. It may not lead to anything as dramatic as Adams’s death (mock or otherwise), but certainly “put[s] paid” to his role as theatrical “director” (146). As Erasmus correctly surmises, the further consequence of his outburst is that it causes the “play itself” to “collapse” (181), though it is important to recognize that he is not sole author of this turn of events but is unwittingly aided by another cast member. This is the young curate, Parker, who has his own difficulties to negotiate, stemming mainly from his portrayal of Caliban as both “proud and rebellious” (142) and “debased, not in himself but by others” (182). For the dictatorial Adams, such a depiction of Prospero’s slave is itself rebellious, since, in his eyes, “there is only one way to see Caliban” (his own) and that is as servile and “abject” (142). For Parker’s ecclesiastical superior, the parish vicar, Reverend Edward Mansell, these “radical ideas” offend less on artistic or even theological grounds than political and personal ones. As might be expected from the telltale pun which freights his surname, the vicar belongs to a “family” which “ha[s] holdings in the West Indies” and is therefore not only disconcerted by the image of slave as rebel but also implicated in the processes of debasement which Parker is so eager to interrogate. It is for these reasons that Mansell bans his otherwise “ideal assistant” (182) from continuing in his theatrical passion, thus bringing down the curtain, so to speak, on the “performance” while it is still at a liminal stage, even as, in so doing, he ironically instils in his subordinate a “serious spirit of rebellion” (183). Despite the single-mindedness of his interpretation of Caliban, Adams acknowledges The Tempest at large as a “thing [. .. ] full of double meanings” and “all brilliantly paradoxical” (144). In this way, he implicitly endows it with qualities akin to those exhibited by his own equivocal behaviour during rehearsals and in the private scene with Erasmus, where, the latter suspects, even Adams’s “astonished” reaction to the accusations against him might be a deception born of his status as “actor” (169). Yet this sense of “double meanings” does not simply characterize The Tempest itself but encompasses the “fiasco” of its sudden disruption as well. The “abrupt end” to which the “rehearsals” (227) are subject is not, that is, to be taken literally or at face value

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but needs also to be viewed in figurative or, rather, prefigurative terms, looking forward to the events which overwhelm the Liverpool Merchant as the slaver makes its perilous way from Africa to Jamaica with approximately two hundred “negroes” (351) and a discontented crew on board. As if to underline the premonitory relationship between the two differently turbulent worlds between which his novel constantly shuttles, Unsworth makes recourse to what Adams himself refers to as a “language of the body” (167) and, in particular, the hand. In the domestic world of the play, this member is transgressive, encroaching upon the bodies of others in order to advance illicit desires beneath the respectable cloak of theatrical guidance, as when Adams “place[s] a hand in the small of [Sarah’s] back, in the elegant concavity just above her bustle,” keeping “it there for at least fifteen seconds while he spoke quite close to her ear.” In the Atlantic world of the slave trade, the hand is similarly associated with trespass, though here its infractions are far from trivial but properly outrageous. The episode in which this is dramatized is located towards the end of Sacred Hunger’s first Book, after the Liverpool Merchant has been struggling for “six days” against “bad weather.” Disquieted by the deteriorating condition of the slaves who are not already dead, Captain Saul Thurso determines to “cast” them “overboard” in order to claim, on their owner’s behalf, some “thirty per cent of [their] market value from the insurers,” using their actual or anticipated ill-health as “good and sufficient reason” (382) for his decision: Two naked male slaves stood together side by side, unchained, up against the ship’s rail. [Paris] heard Thurso utter some words. Haines and Libby moved towards the negroes, joined now by Wilson. Three powerful men . . . The slaves were about to be manhandled over the side. Others had gone before them [. . . ]. One of the negroes stood straight and impassive, but the other had given way to fear, he had brought his hands up to plead for him and thrust forward his head as if to make an obeisance before his oppressors. (383; first ellipsis in original)

While Adams touches the fashionably attired Sarah somewhat delicately, it is evident from this scene that the white woman’s “naked” black male counterparts receive much rougher treatment, their own “hands” “unchained” but divested of the power to intercede with their “oppressors.”8 Yet even as these 8

The events described in Unsworth’s text recall in miniature the mass killing in

1781 of some 132 slaves jettisoned from the slave ship Zong at the command of

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“negroes” look set to join those “Others” who have “gone before them” by being “manhandled over the side,” they are rescued by the salvific figure of Paris, who becomes once again ironically doubled with and fettered to his antipathetic cousin. When Erasmus beholds Adams’s hand on Sarah, he responds by “clench[ing] his fists” in fury and briefly considers the possibility of “attempting to incite a mutiny” (145) among his fellow thespians, even as it is only with the indirect assistance of Caliban’s self-styled champion, the “unhappy curate” (227), that the play is finally scuppered. Equally, it is when Paris sees, or at least envisages, white hands laying hold of black bodies in order to dispose of them that he is compelled to intercede. Moving “rapidly [.. . ] across the deck” towards the unbalanced grouping of the “Three powerful men” and two powerless slaves, he “raise[s] his right arm to [its] fullest extent, as if in witness” and “with all the strength of his lungs” triple-hollers out a “‘ No!’” (384) of defiance, actions which induce in the ship’s crew the very uprising Erasmus had dreamed of bringing about in his own rather different scenario. In a final if unspoken parallel with Erasmus’s position, however, Paris’s arm and voice succeed in their denial of Thurso only with the aid of the slaves they help to free. Unsworth’s careful orchestration of the rehearsals for The Tempest as a foreshadowing of what happens on the Liverpool Merchant is reminiscent of the part played by the similarly ill-fated rehearsals for August von Kotzebue’s Lovers’ Vows (1798) in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814), though there are some salient differences between Unsworth’s text and Austen’s. The ‘slave trade’ is just as important in its way to Mansfield Park as it is to Sacred Hunger, not least because it enables and sustains the elegant wealth of the manorial residence which gives Austen’s novel its title, but it conspicuously fails to emerge as a ‘subject’ in its own right. It is something merely remembered for the “dead silence” it provokes on the solitary occasion when it is directly mentioned and then further obscured by exchanges among the members of the “evening circle”9 who gather at the Mansfield estate, as they Captain Luke Collingwood. For respectively theoretical and historical accounts of this Atlantic atrocity, widely regarded as catalysing the abolitionist campaign, see Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (Durham N C & London: Duke U P , 2005); and James Walvin, The “Zong”: A Massacre, The Law and the End of Slavery (New Haven C T & London: Yale U P , 2011). 9 Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, ed. James Kinsley, intro. Jane Stabler (1814; Oxford: Oxford U P , 2003): 155. Further page references are in the main text.

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ponder the propriety or otherwise of discussing it at all. In addition to this, the rehearsals in which Austen’s “young people” (96) transgressively indulge do not so much anticipate colonial instabilities as restage them. Play-acting proliferates chaotically “all over the house” (132) at a time when Sir Thomas Bertram is not there to check it, precisely because he has left his residence in order to resolve the unexplained disturbances on his Antiguan sugar plantation which those “private theatricals” (99) obliquely mime.

Theatres of Cruelty As well as entering into a sophisticated dialogue with The Tempest, Sacred Hunger engages with theatrical performance in other ways, making it a significant element in the distinct but interlocking stories it tells about white and black experiences of the slave trade. From the white perspective, theatricality announces itself from the first in the exaggerated manner in which, as already noted, Kemp “lower[s] himself rather awkwardly down to sniff at the newly cut sections of mast for his ship,” all the while “scenting,” as Erasmus comes retrospectively to understand, “the reek of his own death” (7). It is also manifest, on a more sustained scale, in Chapter 12, where William Blair, a newly “paid off” sailor already “in a medium state of drunkenness,” enters an “obscure ale-house” to celebrate his first hours of freedom after “eight months at sea” (75). Here Blair carouses with the landlord and other patrons of this dubious establishment only to discover that he has not only been relieved of his “purse” and “knife” but also fallen foul of “actors” (80) intent on pressing him into service on Kemp’s “Guineaman” (82), the whole scene covertly stage-managed by the ship’s sadistic boatswain, Haines, acting on Thurso’s orders. Perhaps the most striking instance of a white theatricality occurs in Chapter 20 during the Liverpool Merchant’s outward voyage, when Paris, typically tortured and “inward-looking” (372), remembers his time as an inmate of Norwich Jail – where he was once detained as “punishment for printing seditious views concerning God’s creation” – and, in particular, the last visit from his pregnant wife, Ruth. Racked with guilt about the pridefulness which led him to this ironically named and Dantesque “hell” (158) – and indirectly caused Ruth’s miscarriage and death before his release – Paris is unable to countenance the memory of how the “distress on [her] face turn[s] to reproach” as she takes her leave of him. “Wide-eyed in the darkness” of his slaver’s cabin and “trying out versions of the past that might be tolerable to

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his imagination” (159), he masks this damning and Medusan look with the recollection of another visage, which, in its own ironic way, is just as upsetting: [Paris] sought for a shield and found one in the absurd and terrified appearance of a young debtor called Deever whose head had been thrust through the legs of a chair by his fellow-inmates of the common-room for his inability to pay chummage – the obligation to buy spirits for the company that was laid on all new arrivals. In this place of misery and shame, they aped the manners and adopted the ritual of those who had condemned them. Witnesses were sworn with due ceremony, counsel made their pleas on one side and the other. A burly thief with a towel tied up in knots in imitation of the judge’s wig solemnly pronounced the sentence . . . It was Deever’s face that Paris saw now as a refuge from Ruth’s, ashamed and fearful, looking from his cage at the tormentors who were his fellow-prisoners too . . . . (159; ellipses in original)

In this rogues’ theatre, rehearsal entails reversal, as Paris’s “fellow-inmates” relive their trials while at the same time mimicking the ceremonies of those who originally “condemned them,” as transgressor turns guardian of justice. In Deever’s case, however, it appears that the re-enactment of the past does not bring about a comparable transformation, since the crime he commits inside the prison (the “inability to pay chummage”) repeats his extra-mural misdemeanours, thus fixing the “young debtor” as scapegoat on the lowest of the prison’s “descending levels of damnation” (158). Yet, if in no other than an abstract sense, Deever’s position could be thought to shift, changing him from debtor to creditor: after all, the “violent criminals” who mock at being “lords” (612) in this “place of misery and shame” cannot assume such elevated offices without him. Paris, for his part, is similarly obliged to Deever and doubly so at that, exploiting his “absurd and terrified appearance” as protection not only against the judging Ruth but also the “agony of his [own] humiliation,” which he is unable to confront until later on in the novel, when he encounters and is befriended by Delblanc at an African slave-fort. As Paris tells this maverick figure – artist, revolutionary and confessor all in one – he too was “set” in a “pillory” for his anti-establishment crimes, spending “twelve hours” crouched in a “ludicrous, beast-like posture” such that his “head” seemed “detached from the rest of his body [and] offered like a pumpkin at a fair for the crowd to shy at.” Where Paris’s ordeal crucially differs from Deever’s, though, is that it is no freakish theatri-

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cal effect but an authentic expression of the persecutory laws operating in its victim’s supposedly “enlightened land” (332). The carnivalesque theatricality Paris witnesses in Norwich Jail, where criminals behave like judges, is “aped” and “adopted” in turn by the slaves taken aboard the floating prison of Kemp’s “Liverpool snow” (9) as it steadily trades its way along the African shoreline. This becomes evident in another scene observed by Paris when he is in the early phases of recovering from a “kind of swamp fever [. .. ] transmitted by the miasmic airs of the coast.” Hearing “sounds” ironically “more typical of [the] delirium” through which he has just passed – “a hullabaloo [.. . ] of stamping feet, jangling chains [and] the jaunty persistence” of Michael Sullivan’s “fiddle” – Paris goes up on deck to find the slaves “at their morning dance” (337), engaged, that is, in a compulsory ritual used by slave-captains to provide their charges with daily air and exercise as a brief relief from the cramped and fetid conditions of the hold overnight.10 As Paris soon realizes, however, this grotesque choreography is not all it seems, and not just because it is tinged with the “deceiving clarity that comes after fever” (337). While this state of “heightened but unreliable perception” leads him to the liberative “fancy that Sullivan [is] sawing at the negroes’ chains” as he plays his music, it also alerts him to the activities of an alternative troupe of performers, who are not in fact dancing but engrossed in a secret theatre of their own: “some of the younger boys, though moving to the music in apparent dance, were playing a game of ambush and kidnap in among the moving bodies of the adults. They were taking captives” (338). Like the improvisatory denizens of the jail, these equally resourceful slavechildren repeat their past with a difference, recasting themselves in the role of agents rather than victims, captors rather than “captives,” thus both recalling and revising their own history in a gesture one and the same. The use of theatrical performance as a means by which black figures commemorate epochal moments in a collective history recurs at two further junctures, both located in Book Two of the novel at a stage when the mutiny aboard the Liverpool Merchant has taken place and the “mutineers and the remnants of the negroes” have banded together to forge a precariously utopian community “in the wilds of south Florida” (458). Although this far-flung 10

On this aspect of the disciplinary regime to which slaves were subjected during the Atlantic crossing, see Geneviève Fabre, “The Slave Ship Dance,” in Black Imagination and the Middle Passage, ed. Maria Diedrich, Henry Louis Gates Jr. & Carl Pedersen (New York: Oxford U P , 1999): 33–46.

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experiment in racial harmony is short-lived (lasting for just a dozen years before its discovery and destruction by a vengeful Erasmus), it is periodically troubled, even before this catastrophe, by acts of internal violence, as if unable fully to unshackle itself from the values regulating the dystopias of slave ship and slave trade from which it arises. One episode illustrating this occurs when the “raw-boned Yorkshireman” (116), James Wilson, transgresses the libidinal conventions which the community swiftly establishes for itself, whereby men both black and white must share the bodies of the female exslaves, whom they outnumber two to one. Unable to accept the terms of this polyandrous sexual contract and perennially possessed of an “ugly temper” (243), Wilson “wait[s] in hiding and stab[s] a man to death, a negro, over a quarrel about [. .. ] a woman” whom both desire, perpetrating a “crime” condemned en masse when Wilson is “tied up and slaughtered like an animal” by “everybody” (548; italics in original) and left to hang “in his ropes” for two days “for everyone to see” (549). This incident occurs when the ad-hoc colony is in its egalitarian infancy and recalls events at the start of the slaver’s voyage when Wilson is alleged to have “raised his hand against” Haines, “one of the appointed officers” – thus implicitly also “rais[ing] his hand against the captain” (119) – and is personally flogged for his pains by Thurso in full view of the ship’s company. As well as rehearsing earlier violences, however, Wilson’s act of murder and the spectacular punishment it elicits provide material for later rehearsal, the conduit between past and present being the slaver’s “linguister” (or translator), Jimmy. Adopting the role of teacher in the years following the mutiny, this habitually smiling figure provides the young utopians in his “class” with “lessons” which are “mainly story-telling and play-acting,” only compelling “his face to seriousness” “for the sake of drama” (511). The children in turn replay the tales they learn, conducting them in a makeshift and relatively primitive “lingua franca [... ] derived from the trade pidgin of the Guinea Coast” (533). Their excited exchanges are brought to the reader via Sefadu, who has direct knowledge of Wilson’s fate from his own early youth: Somewhere not far away he could hear the voices of children. They were acting out the story of Wilson – he recognised the dialogue of the quarrel. Sefadu knew this story well; he had witnessed the execution of Wilson as a child and he had never forgotten it, the big man and his white, unbelieving face, the ragged volley of the muskets, fired by black men and white men together, all the men of the settlement. The voices of the unseen children carried to him, rapid, high-pitched, the

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actors scarcely distinguishable one from another, using words they knew by heart: “We here is two men one woman. You ken do matta mattick, yes or no? We got to share dis woman.” “I no share wit you, I wan’ fuck dis woman for wife.” “We go ask woman den. Woman, you take us share two husban’?” “Yes, sartin, I take you . . . ” (547–48; italics and ellipsis in original)

Whatever Sefadu might think of the children’s unseen performance in aesthetic terms, he remains just as “puzzled” now as he had been at the age of “ten” by a “Killing” which legitimates itself only to the degree that “everybody” (548) colludes with it. Such a sense of unresolved puzzlement at Wilson’s “execution” (547) is interlaced with a certain dramatic irony, since Sefadu himself competes with several other men (Blair, Inchebe, and Sullivan) for the favours of a single woman, Dinka. Of these three rivals, it is only the latter on whom the narrative focuses in any detail, if only gently to mock the limitations of his suit, drawing them out by comparing the artistic gift he offers Dinka with that which she receives from Sefadu. Sullivan’s present takes the form of the Celtic melodies he one night plays “some yards from the entrance” (554) to Dinka’s “hut” (550), using a fiddle lovingly prepared (and repaired) for this very purpose, while Sefadu’s consists of the “thirty-eight pearls” (547) he has spent several hours in gathering and then strung into a “necklace” (546) earlier the same day.11 The triumph of necklace over serenade becomes “grossly apparent” when it is not Dinka but the “naked” Sefadu himself who appears on the “threshold” (554) of the hut, quietly enjoining the tardy “fiddleman” to “Come back in de mornin’” (555). The pattern by which black child-actors deploy theatre as a vehicle for preserving a collective memory is extended and completed towards the conclusion of Sacred Hunger, when the text turns back to and fleshes out the moment of the shipboard mutiny itself, a central narrative event left deliberately unelaborated at the end of Chapter 35 in the disjunctive shift from Book One to Book Two. Using his own dramatic metaphor in The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon observes that the violent process of decolonization is one 11

These patiently collected gems provide one of the novel’s subtler links to The Tempest, obliquely recalling the opening lines of Ariel’s “mournful Ditty” about the seductive changes the sea performs upon the body of Ferdinand’s ostensibly “drown’d Father,” as his “bones” become “Coral” and “eyes” are rendered “Pearls” (30; italics in original).

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which “transforms spectators crushed with their inessentiality into privileged actors, with the grandiose glare of history’s floodlights upon them,”12 but in the case of the rebellion featured in Unsworth, the roles of actor and spectator are transposed. Having previously been the prime mover or “privileged” player in the mutiny, Paris (whose name, of course, has its own revolutionary ring) now watches as his radical “intervention” aboard the slaver is rehearsed before him “in the lingering sunlight of the day” (584): There was a line of small children, somehow linked together, perhaps tied. Two larger boys, armed with sticks, appeared to be guarding them. A group of older children stood in a cluster some yards off. Kenka [Paris’s son] was among these [. . . ]. A moment later he picked out the form of Tekka, tallest of the group. There was one standing slightly apart – it was the mulatto boy, Fonga [. . . ]. He saw Fonga point at the line of small children. The guards raised their sticks and made whipping motions at the captives. It was a game of slavery . . . Then Kenka stepped forward, a lonely figure between the group he had left and the linked line of slaves. Paris saw the raised hand, the uplifted face. [. . . ] With close attention he watched the game to its conclusion, saw Thurso draw his pistol, saw Cavana make the gesture of throwing the heavy spike which had destroyed the captain’s right eye and sent him staggering back against the bulkhead. Then came the wild shot that brought down Tapley with a shattered leg – performed now with much impressive writhing by a boy he did not recognize. [. . . ] Tekka the cynic it was who struck the decisive blow. As Rimmer, he stepped forward while the cursing Thurso fumbled to reload, and stabbed the captain to the heart. (583–85; third ellipsis in original)

In common with The Tempest, this militant theatre possesses the power to revivify, resurrecting past selves and past actions in the present, as the names of the actors involved in it are overwritten (with the exception of Tekka’s) by those of the characters they adopt. Yet while one sort of distance is unsettled here, another is established, since, as Paris notes, what he beholds, however lifelike it may seem, is ultimately only a “game of slavery,” distinguished from the scene it strives to restore by marks of “ceremony,” “accustomed ritual” (584), and “orderliness” (585). In Paris’s view, the fact that “actions of 12

Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, tr. Constance Farrington, preface by Jean–Paul Sartre (Les Damnés de la terre, 1961; tr. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967): 28.

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irrevocable violence” such as those he has experienced can be “endlessly repeated [and] modified” by theatrical performance is what gives the “stage” its “great advantage” over the “viscous substance of truth,” even as, at the same time, such artistry necessarily betrays the “confused reality” of things, in which, “to the touch of [Paris’s] memory,” all is “glutinous with blood, thick with discordant sound, grotesque.” In this sense, the act of recalling “history” (585) is paradoxically and ironically also the path to its forgetting. Such a double-bind is one that Sacred Hunger is itself unable to escape. Even so, for all the constraints intrinsic to the act of artistic representation, whether theatrical or fictional, Unsworth’s novel provides its readers with a remarkably visceral insight into slavery’s horrors and, in particular, those suffered amid the sea-change of the Middle Passage.

WORKS CITED Austen, Jane. Mansfield Park, ed. James Kinsley, intro. Jane Stabler (1814; Oxford: Oxford U P , 2003). Baucom, Ian. Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (Durham N C & London: Duke U P , 2005). Clarkson, Thomas. The History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave-Trade by the British Parliament, 2 vols. (London: Longman, 1808). Dryden, John, & William Davenant. The Tempest, or the Enchanted Island: A Comedy, in The Works of John Dryden, vol. 10: Plays; The Tempest, Tyrannick Love, An Evening’s Love, ed. Maximillian E. Novak (Berkeley: U of California P , 1970): 1–103. Du Bois, W.E.B. Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880, intro. David Levering Lewis (1935; New York: Free Press, 1998). Fabre, Geneviève. “The Slave Ship Dance,” in Black Imagination and the Middle Passage, ed. Maria Diedrich, Henry Louis Gates Jr. & Carl Pedersen (New York: Oxford U P , 1999): 33–46. Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth, tr. Constance Farrington, preface by Jean– Paul Sartre (Les Damnés de la terre, 1961; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967). Forter, Greg. “Barry Unsworth and the Arts of Power: Historical Memory, Utopian Fictions,” Contemporary Literature 51.4 (Winter 2010): 777–809. Hulme, Peter. “The Atlantic World of Sacred Hunger,” New Left Review I/204 (1994): 138–44. Knapp, Peggy A. “Barry Unsworth’s Sacred Hunger: History and Utopia,” Clio 38.3 (Summer 2009): 319–37.

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Kotzebue, August von. Lovers’ Vows, adapt. Elizabeth Inchbald, ed. & intro. Jonathan Wordsworth (Oxford & New York: Woodstock, 1990). Rediker, Marcus. The Slave Ship: A Human History (London: John Murray, 2007). Shakespeare, William. The Merchant of Venice, ed. Jay L. Halio (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993). ——. The Tempest, ed. Stephen Orgel (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1987). Strehle, Susan. “Rewriting Darkness: Imperial Knowledge in Barry Unsworth’s Sacred Hunger,” Studies in the Novel 43.1 (Spring 2011): 75–93. Unsworth, Barry. The Quality of Mercy (London: Hutchinson, 2011). ——. Sacred Hunger (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992). Walvin, James. The “Zong”: A Massacre, The Law and the End of Slavery (New Haven C T & London: Yale U P , 2011).

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Negotiating Family Models in Jamaican Literature — Class, Race, and Religion

H ENNING M ARQUARDT

Introduction

F

of most societies. However, families vary so much that it is impossible to give a clear definition. This is the case because they are constructed units that are influenced by different agents or groups of agents. They define, among others, the type of partnership, role allocations, and the number of children. In a colonial context, distinct family models and their representatives frequently come into contact, since very different agents and ideas meet in this field. These encounters are aesthetically represented in literature, which negotiates family forms and explores them in fictional realities. This essay will analyse family depictions in two Jamaican texts, Tom Redcam’s Becka’s Buckra Baby: Being an Episode in the Life of Noel1 (1903) and Claude McKay’s Banana Bottom (1933). The two novels are set in the early 1900s and explore the colonial encounter of European and African people in post-abolition Jamaica. In doing so, they are, among other things, concerned with cultural aspects of this encounter, such as Christianity and Obeah, as well as with race and class aspects and the resulting power-relations. My analysis of the literary family constructions will show that the texts link questions of culture, race, and class through representations of families. I will furthermore argue that the texts foreground the role racialized class plays in the colonial situation through its tight connection to cultural issues in the

1

AMILIES ARE ESSENTIAL CONSTITUENTS

Hereafter referred to as Becka’s Buckra Baby only.

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texts, not only in relation to generalizing concepts of national cultures but also with respect to race and ethnicity.

Cultural Exchange To prove my thesis statement, I want to draw on Peter Burke’s concept of cultural exchange. Burke is a British historian who is mainly concerned with Renaissance social history. He analyses history in terms of the exchange of cultural goods. Applying a broad definition of culture, his micro-historical approach focuses on contact and transfer of traditions, objects, and attitudes by individual agents.2 Burke describes a number of categories which can be used for analysing the historical situation. These categories include objects that are exchanged, products that are created through the intake and fusion of the received objects, and the agents who perform this exchange. Burke concentrates on the contact that takes place between cultures which are represented by individuals or small groups. He thus uses culture in two different ways; as a more or less national, uniform category to identify the agents and as an umbrella term for the objects and products of the exchange. In his recent survey Cultural Hybridity (2009), Burke devotes a brief passage to the role that class might play in cultural exchange. Without going into too much detail, he acknowledges the importance of inter-class exchange within one culture.3 What I want to add to his theoretical framework is the consideration of class aspects not only within one cultural context but also in inter-cultural encounters. Furthermore, I will equally consider race as a category of cultural exchange because race is essential to analyse the Caribbean with its history of slavery. However, it does not feature in Burke’s theory due to his European topic of research. In fact, a joint consideration of both categories, race and class, is necessary for analysing cultural exchange in the Caribbean, since race is closely connected to class in the colonial context. The U S -American historian Frederick Cooper, among others, works out that global slave trade and plantation economies fostered the interlinked develop-

2

Peter Burke, The European Renaissance: Centres and Peripheries (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998): 2–15. 3 Peter Burke, Cultural Hybridity (Cambridge: Polity, 2009): 77–78.

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ments of social differences in the Caribbean that can be analysed with the help of the categories of race and class.4 In my analysis of cultural exchange, I will not focus on national cultures as an analytical category as suggested by Burke. Rather, I will break down what Burke calls cultures into race-, class-, and religion-specific ideologies that I take as influences on family representations. With Terry Eagleton, I define ideology as a “body of meanings and values encoding certain interests relevant to social power.”5 This approach will provide more detailed categories in analysing the agents and objects of colonial cultural exchange. To avoid confusion with the double use of culture as groups of agents and as objects of exchange, I will refrain from using the generalizing term ‘culture’ for religious aspects in the following analysis. For my analysis and interpretation of family representations, I will use cultural-exchange categories on different levels. First, on the intra-textual level, I will read the characters as agents because they negotiate cultural objects to shape the families represented. Secondly, on the extra-textual level, I want to analyse the novels themselves as products of cultural exchange to find out which sources the texts draw on. In so doing, I consider the historical agents who are involved in negotiating family models. Cultural exchange thus provides a theoretical background that locates literature in its historical context. Thirdly, I want to include an inter-textual level in my analysis. Just as the texts refer to different ideologies from within and from beyond the texts, they also relate to other literary texts, which carry implications and ideologies which influence the family models represented.

McKay’s Banana Bottom Claude McKay was born in Jamaica in 1889 to black middle-class parents. He grew up on the island but left for the U S A in 1912. Throughout the following decades he lived in the U S A , the U K , the Soviet Union, Germany, France, Spain, and Morocco but never returned to Jamaica.6 McKay wrote his 4

Frederick Cooper, “Back to Work: Categories, Boundaries and Connections in the Study of Labour,” in Racializing Class, Classifying Race, ed. Peter Alexander & Rick Halpern (London: Macmillan, 2000): 224–26. 5 Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction (London & New York: Verso, 2007): 45. 6 See Gene Andrew Jarrett, “Chronology,” in Claude McKay, A Long Way from Home, ed. Jarrett (1937; New Brunswick N J : Rutgers U P , 2007): xi–xv.

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Jamaica-set novel Banana Bottom in Morocco between 1931 and 1932;7 the text was finally published by Harper & Row in the U S A in 1933. This high degree of mobility leads Gianfranca Balestra to describe McKay as a “migrant writer” but to consider Banana Bottom as his fictional return to Jamaica.8 The novel’s protagonist is Bita Plant, a black girl who grew up partly with her father and her aunt, who are well-off peasants, and partly with the white missionary family Craig. They took her in after she had been raped at the age of twelve and her parents thereupon sent her to the Craigs to the neighbouring village of Jubilee to avoid stigmatization. The Craigs in turn sent her to be educated in England, where she stayed for seven years. The novel starts when she returns from England and visits her home village, Banana Bottom. In the novel, the most prominent feature of families by which the text links notions of class, race, and religion is the type of partnership, which shows in the literary family constructions. There are two prominent forms of partnership – marriage and cohabitation, the latter being a partnership that is not legally confirmed. These are represented by different characters who can, at the same time, be categorized in terms of class, race, and religious belief. The nonconformist ideal of marriage is connected to the white middle classes – an example for this is the married missionary couple Priscilla and Malcolm Craig. Parallel to that, not legally confirmed partnerships are associated with Obeah and the black and rural lower classes at the same time. This group makes up the vast majority of the people in Banana Bottom: In Banana Bottom there were three families only of which it was positively known that they did not practise nor believe in Obeah: the Plants, the native shopkeeper’s […], and the schoolmaster’s.9

As a craftsman, the basket maker Kojo Jeems serves as a concrete example of the black lower classes; he is unmarried and lives with his cohabitant (77). These examples show that the text generally assigns Obeah to the black lower classes and Christianity to the mostly white middle classes; this also reveals the correlation between class, race, and religion that suggests a connection between these categories.

7

See Jarret, “Chronology,” xiii–xiv. Gianfranca Balestra, “Claude McKay’s Banana Bottom: A Fictional Return to Jamaica,” R S A Journal 12 (2001): 5. 9 Claude McKay, Banana Bottom (1933; London: Serpent’s Tail, 2005): 134. Further page references are in the main text. 8

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The above analysis points to different groups of agents, who can negotiate the cultural object of partnership. Marriage is a cultural object that is, in the novel, offered by the group of Christian missionaries and that is appropriated by black Jamaicans. At the same time I have shown that marriage is not only a religious but also a socio-economic matter; it is an indicator of class which in Jamaica is always constructed along racial lines. In addition to the abovementioned correlation of these categories, the characters’ individual behaviour in Banana Bottom supports this finding. Bita’s suitor Hopping Dick, for example, refuses to marry her in the end, because he does not have the money: “ ‘Ah couldn’t think ‘bouten marrying anybody when ah doan’ have nuttin’’ ” (224). The fact that a marriage can take place requires the appropriation of the Christian bourgeois ideals and thus already accounts for a degree of economic well-being. In a study of British cultural influences on the Caribbean, Moore and Johnson demonstrate that a wedding is quite an expensive endeavour.10 That also means that local agents can only appropriate the nonconformist cultural objects if a sufficient economic standard is reached. Family and marriage not only indicate socio-economic and religious affiliation but are also vehicles for social mobility. This becomes clear when Hopping Dick is finally to marry Yoni Legge because she carries his baby. Immediately it would have been if Yoni had not objected to a cheapand-poor Revival tail-end marriage. She wanted a picture-for-the-eye wedding which neither Ma Legge nor Hopping Dick could afford right then. (272)

The dimension of the marriage is therefore also important: Yoni, who is by then an active member of the church, trades off her child’s birth in wedlock against a great and expensive, and therefore representative wedding – she opts for the latter. Hence, the very fact that they marry symbolically accounts for a minimal status; the text suggests that they can gain more through the festivities themselves. In terms of social mobility, Bita’s virtual adoption by the Craig family is also telling. Priscilla Craig attempted a Pygmalion-like experiment11 after Bita had moved to Jubilee. “Mrs. Craig wanted to demonstrate what one such girl 10

Brian L. Moore & Michele A. Johnson, Neither Led nor Driven: Contesting British Cultural Imperialism in Jamaica, 1865–1920 (Kingston, Jamaica: U of the West Indies P , 2004): 100. 11 See Heather Hathaway, Caribbean Waves: Relocating Claude McKay and Paule Marshall (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana U P , 1999): 76.

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might become by careful training…by God’s help” (17). “At the finish she would be English trained and appearing in everything but the colour of her skin” (31). Priscilla Craig has at least partly succeeded in her attempt to transform the peasant girl into a well-educated young lady; this is just what the Banana Bottom inhabitants perceive after Bita returns from England. For in their eyes she was now a grand lady who had been to the high white folk’s country and was learned in their ways, just like one of them with only the difference of pigmentation. (51)

Only when Mrs Craig wants to top her efforts by arranging a beneficial marriage for Bita does she fail. She urges Bita to marry the minister-to-be Herald Newton Day. He, however, is finally disqualified by the plot design – leaving Jamaica after raping a goat, he does not appear on the character level again. Bita does not continue her social upward mobility. In the end she marries a peasant from Banana Bottom, reducing her social status again, at least from a white middle-class perspective. This episode clearly illustrates the vital role race plays in this constellation, since it is perceived as a qualifier of social mobility both by the white middle and by the black lower classes in the text. Interpreting Mrs Craig’s plan as a reference to George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion emphasizes the social dimension of the cultural exchange that Bita has to perform. Mrs Craig as a missionary’s wife does not concentrate her educational efforts on the cultural object of Christian theology (for which she is not qualified), but aims at the social advancement of her adopted black child – just as Henry Higgins wants to bring about Eliza Doolittle’s rise from a flower girl to a Baroness, only with the additional racial barrier coming with the Jamaican setting. The text thereby assigns Mrs Craig an important role in the transformation of her adopted child, but Bita herself takes on a major function for negotiating race and class. She actually has two families in two different racial and social surroundings. The white Craigs virtually adopted her, but she still remains a part of her black family of origin: “They had come prepared to take and educate Bita, bringing her up as their own child. And Jordan Plant would have the right to take her whenever he liked” (17). By this act Bita becomes a mediator between life on the mission station and peasant life in Banana Bottom. Ultimately, just like Eliza, who leaves her teacher and thereby makes his efforts come to nothing, Bita exerts the most important function, the executive one. She does not abandon her education or her educators but when she grows out of her two families and founds her own, she finds a compromise that follows her birth parents’ example: she marries, and there-

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fore appropriates white, nonconformist, middle-class family ideals, but does not use her marriage to leave peasantry behind – she marries her father’s adoptive son, who finally takes over her late father’s farm. This intermediate position between the ideals also shows when Bita sleeps with her future husband before they marry. Mervyn Morris interprets this act as Bita’s return to her roots, “she re-commits herself to the custom of the folk.”12 These ‘customs’ are practices developed during slavery and after, which were influenced by religious, racial, and socio-economic positions, as the above interpretation of marriage in Banana Bottom has already suggested. I therefore do not consider premarital sex to be a question of folk culture but, rather, one of racial, religious, and social affiliations. With premarital sex, Bita approaches what the novel depicts as Obeah and black peasant traditions, since the text links them to unmarried partnership through the character constellation. Marriage and premarital sex express the intermediate position that Bita takes on by marrying Jubban, the peasant from Banana Bottom, instead of black Herald Newton Day or any other representative of the black or white Christian middle classes. The gender roles that Jubban and Bita take on in and right before their marriage also account for the cultural exchange that Bita conducts. When Jubban saves her from being whipped at a revival meeting held by a congregation that competes with Banana Bottom’s nonconformist church for parishioners, she bakes a cake for him in gratitude. I therefore agree with Leah Reade Rosenberg, who states that Bita positions herself between black peasantry and white bourgeoisie in a stereotypical way, by marrying a peasant and taking on the cliché role of a white middle-class wife.13 Barbara Griffin describes a “patriarchal meta-structure”14 underlying the text and corresponding to the structures Bita enters by marrying Jubban. This becomes especially obvious when one looks at the village founder, the Scotsman Adair. Like Abraham in Genesis, he peopled the village with his descendants. One of those, Crazy Bow, rapes Bita at the start of the novel, thereby significantly determining her development – he brutally keeps up the patri12

Mervin Morris, “Contending Values: The Prose Fiction of Claude McKay,” Jamaica Journal 9.2–3 (1975): 41. 13 See Leah Reade Rosenberg, Nationalism and the Formation of Caribbean Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007): 118–19. 14 Barbara Griffin, “The Road to Psychic Unity: The Politics and Gender in Claude McKay’s Banana Bottom,” Callaloo 22.2 (Spring 1999): 501.

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archal structures that his ancestor had established.15 In spite of this maintenance of patriarchy through Crazy Bow, the narrative here critically comments on this structure through the telling name: the outcome of this kind of ‘Genesis’ is pathological. However, it is not the act of marrying Jubban that keeps Bita in patriarchalbourgeois dependency – something that is determined by the overall structure of the text – but, rather, the role Bita takes on after marriage. Her independent decision leads her into dependency; this paradox shows the inconsistencies and difficulties that result from the negotiation of family models and, with them, the association with different racialized socio-economic and religious groups. Race plays an important role in this paradox because it is tightly connected to class and religion. Still, the characters cannot negotiate race as freely as the other categories because race refers to the individuals’ unchangeable physical appearance as determined by birth. Besides Bita, her fatherly friend Squire Gensir is a key character in the negotiation of race, class, and religion through the family. Gensir, an upperclass Englishman, embodies an alternative to all the family models that have been discussed so far – he is wealthy, single, and living alone. He therefore cannot be clearly positioned between conflicting religious and social affiliations, which Bita and the other characters explore through their family relations. His life without a family indicates that the Squire is above the problems with which peasants and missionaries are concerned. However, despite what his high social status, which is already expressed by his name, might suggest, he moves equally easy among both missionaries and peasants: “And this gentleman […] had travelled and travelled, contacting with all classes of humanity, high, middle and low” (74). His indifference towards race and social class is particularly evident in the description of his clothes: His suits were made of the cheap cloth the peasants used, Holland drill or khaki, and the only thing about him that hinted of means were his stout broad-toed imported boots. (71)

Gensir wears simple clothes, which relate him to the black peasants with whom he spends his time. However, in spite of this association, his shoes express his connection to the white English upper class. Moreover, shoes may be read as a symbolic connection to the soil. They are the foundation on which people stand. Squire Gensir’s foundation is a very expensive one imported from England. 15

See Griffin, “The Road to Psychic Unity,” 500–502.

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Gensir is above Banana Bottom’s social order and moves freely within it at the same time. Equally, he is above religious questions – he is an atheist. He is therefore not located in a continuum between Obeah and nonconformist Christianity like the other characters in Banana Bottom, but is virtually neutral. His attitude could most suitably be labelled as deprecatory yet tolerant: “I don’t mean that it is good to practice Obeah. But the peasants waste a lot of money on Christianity also. […] One must be tolerant” (125). Gensir rejects both Obeah and Christianity for himself; however, he acknowledges them as parts of Jamaican life even though he classifies both as superstition. Gensir’s position with regard to race, class, and religion finds expression in his family life. Not only does he reject a Christian form of partnership, but also cohabitation that is not confirmed by Christian marriage. Consequently, he does not change his social status through a partnership, either. Gensir negotiates the various cultural and social facets of Jamaica in his own way – he lives and lets live. Squire Gensir assumes a third position, an alternative to that of Bita and the Craigs, one that does not approve of mixing racialized cultures, religions or classes and that at the same time condemns dominance of one group over another.16 This is also why he dislikes the Reverend Lambert; not because he is a man of the church, but because he tries to exercise power over the peasants. By negotiating, changing, and rejecting family ideals that are subject to religious and social influences, Banana Bottom assumes a critical stance visà-vis these ideals. The narrative as a whole is a product of cultural exchange that points out ways of dealing with different influences. As Tyrone Tillery remarks in his biography of McKay, the text is especially critical of religion, be it Christianity or Obeah, as exerting too great an influence over the lives of the inhabitants of Banana Bottom.17 The temporal and spatial setting of the novel, for example, decentres both forms of religious belief represented and therefore again creates the impression that the text is positioned between the extremes. The Obeahman Wumba’s cave, where he practises his rituals, is situated outside the village due to the fact that Obeah was illegal at the time. If the inhabitants want to consult him, they have to make some effort to get 16

For an alternative interpretation that relates to arts and not to every day culture, see Paul Jay, “Hybridity, Identity and Cultural Commerce in Claude McKay’s Banana Bottom,” Callaloo 22.1 (Winter 1999): 186–91. 17 Tyrone Tillery, Claude McKay: A Black Poet’s Struggle for Identity (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P , 1992): 134.

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there. I read this as a hint that Obeah is not a central aspect of the black peasants’ lives, even though it is accessible for them. The nonconformist church, conversely, is situated within the village. Still, I would argue that it does not play a central role, either. Banana Bottom is a so called ‘free village’, one of those villages that were set up after the end of slavery and that were inhabited by former slaves. Usually, these villages were founded by Christian missionaries who established the church as the communities’ central element.18 It is striking that Banana Bottom was not founded by missionaries but by the Scottish immigrant Adair, who bought a large piece of land, freed the slaves working on it, and sold them the land in small units. The text therefore expels the church from its role as a constitutive element of the society represented. Thus, the setting of Banana Bottom does not grant the different religious institutions much influence through its history and geography; the village keeps a critical distance without completely abandoning the Christian religion or Obeah. As the protagonist of the novel, Bita also contributes to the text’s position in the continuum between Obeah and Christianity. She rejects Obeah but at the same time she is, at least in parts, sceptical about the Christian church: “ ‘ I don’t have to swallow everything the Bible says. And I could never believe in a foolish thing like Obeah’ ” (132–33). Owing to the close connection between religion, race, and class, as argued above, the intermediary position in terms of religion can be applied to racialized social class. By linking these categories through family constructions, Banana Bottom draws an ambivalent picture of Jamaican society in the early-twentieth century and points out equally diverse ways in which individual agents may transcend or uphold boundaries within all three categories.

Redcam’s Becka’s Buckra Baby Thomas Henry MacDermot was born to middle-class parents in Jamaica in 1870. Rosenberg claims that MacDermot was ‘Jamaica white’, which means that he “appeared white but was generally known to be of African descent.”19 Until his migration to England in 1923, he mainly lived in Jamaica, where he 18

See Claus Füllberg–Stolberg, “Land Policies in Jamaica, 1830–1940,” in Humanitarian Intervention and Changing Labor Relations: The Long Term Consequences of the Abolition of Slave Trade, ed. Marcel van der Linden (Leiden & Boston M A : Brill, 2011): 320. 19 Rosenberg, Nationalism and the Formation of Caribbean Literature, 33.

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worked as a teacher, author, editor, and journalist. He published his literary work under the pen name Tom Redcam, probably to distinguish his work as a writer from his work as an editor, especially because he frequently edited his own texts. I shall use ‘Redcam’ instead of ‘MacDermot’ in this essay, as the text in focus, Becka’s Buckra Baby, was published under this pseudonym. Becka’s Buckra Baby is the story of two Jamaican families living in Kingston, the white Bronvollas and the black Gyrtons. The Bronvollas are a nuclear family, economically provided for by the father, who works in administration. Even after he dies he keeps up the role of the male breadwinner: “The money that he left his wife and only child, gave them decent support, since he owned the house in which he passed from his life.”20 It is characteristic that it is the father himself who owns the house, and not the whole family. This displays the patriarchal structures which underlie this middle-class family. The ideals that Redcam has inscribed in this family become even clearer when one considers the intertextual references that open two of the novel’s chapters. Immediately after the second chapter-title, Redcam inserts a brief epigraphical passage from Robert Browning’s poem “By the Fire-Side” (1855). The text emphasizes the dangers of a relationship – especially that posited by the death of a partner. However, at the same time the poem conveys that it is nevertheless worth risking such a relationship; this is especially clear in another passage, the forty-third stanza: Yet should it unfasten itself and fall Eddying down till it find your face At some slight wind – (best chance of all!) Be your heart henceforth its dwelling-place You trembled to forestal!21

“By the Fire-Side” becomes relevant at the first climax of Becka’s Buckra Baby. In Redcam’s text, Mr Bronvolla dies and leaves his wife and daughter behind. The relationship is accordingly described in terms of the initial Browning passage: “Mixed – In spite of the mortal screen” (13). In view of this intertextual reference, the father’s death does not question the use of marriage as initially appears to be the case. The lines quoted above make it clear that the individual should not refrain from an emergent relationship, no matter 20

Tom Redcam, Becka’s Buckra Baby: Being an Episode in the Life of Noel (Kingston, Jamaica: Times Printery, 1907): 11. Further page references are in the main text. 21 Robert Browning, “By the Fire-Side,” in Browning. Men and Women, ed. Paul Turner (1855; Oxford: Oxford U P , 1972): 51.

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what the risks might be. Browning uses a leaf as a symbol that accidentally falls from the tree and drifts towards the lover. The lover does not decide in favour of the relationship actively, but takes it on responsively anyway, once it has, by accident, come upon him or her. Redcam here refers to a middleclass ideal of relationship and family that includes marriage and patriarchy – the reference to Browning’s poem supports the ideals the text already ascribes to the Bronvolla family. The second quotation, which immediately follows Redcam’s third chaptertitle, further adds to the textual formation of a middle-class family ideal. It is an extract from Coventry Patmore’s poem “The Toys,” first published in 1876. It is telling that Patmore, of all people, should be quoted in this context, since he is well-known for his narrative poem “The Angel in the House,” an homage partly to married life in so-called ‘separate spheres’ – which have long been held to be the epitome of a Victorian middle-class family. I read Patmore as a metonym for his most famous work and thus for a middle-class family ideal similar to that of the Bronvollas. I will get back to the actual Patmore passage later on in this section. However, Redcam immediately blurs the ideal established by the intertextual references that the Bronvollas reflect. He does so by including elements which Rosenberg labels “working-class religion” and “peasant culture.”22 Rosenberg is here adverting to the close connection between the Bronvollas’ daughter, Noel, and her dead father. Noel tries to get in contact with her father’s soul. According to Rosenberg, this closely resembles ninth-night ceremonies.23 These ceremonies are wakes held on the ninth night after death. They aim to bring back the dead’s spirit to finally release it completely.24 The difference is, however, that Noel only wants to bring back her father; she does not want to set his spirit free. Still, these processes resemble each other so closely that Rosenberg diagnoses an “incorporation of folk beliefs into respectable Jamaica.”25 Further, she identifies another element of what she calls “folk culture” in the Bronvolla family: Mr Bronvolla sucks the diphtheria from his daughter’s windpipe and thereby breathes new life into her. This act has parallels with Ol’ Higue, a witch-like character (the Soucouyant) from 22

Rosenberg, Nationalism and the Formation of Caribbean Literature, 52. Nationalism and the Formation of Caribbean Literature, 53. 24 See George Eaton Simpson, “The Nine Night Ceremony in Jamaica,” Journal of American Folklore 70/278 (October–December 1957): 329–30. 25 Rosenberg, Nationalism and the Formation of Caribbean Literature, 53. 23

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Caribbean folklore who sucks the life from her victims by night.26 Like the characters in Banana Bottom, the Bronvollas also connect Obeah and Christianity. Noel is a Sunday school teacher. Still, she contacts her father with the help of Obeah practices after he dies from the very diphtheria he has saved his daughter from. However, the family does not appropriate these Obeah elements completely, but they assume an intermediate position between the two belief-systems and adjust them to their individual needs. Here, the family also plays a role in negotiating different ideals – however, in a different way than in Banana Bottom. While, in McKay’s novel, the process of marriage is a negotiation of different family models, in Redcam the family functions as a space of projection. Redcam uses the relationship between father and daughter, particularly after the father’s death, to introduce Obeah practices into the otherwise Christian middle-class family. It is striking that no characters with different religious backgrounds actually meet and that cultural exchange is represented as a one-way procedure. In view of this episode from Becka’s Buckra Baby (echoing as it does the context of Banana Bottom and its already sketched connection between race, class, and religion), this first interpretation points to the relevance of socioeconomic factors in the religiously influenced family models in Redcam’s text. The following analysis of the second family in Becka’s Buckra Baby, the black Gyrtons, will now consider these aspects in more detail. The Gyrtons – Becka and her parents – try to establish a middle-class family similar to that of the Bronvollas for themselves. This becomes apparent in the following passage, in which the omniscient narrator describes Becka and her parents using Becka’s mother as the focalizer: A small black creature of nine Augusts, she was Mrs. Gyrton’s only child; the only child she had ever borne; a fact that was often emphasised by Bella and other enemies of the Carpenter’s wife, when, in wordy battles, the contention was, on Mrs. Gyrton’s part, that she, as a married woman, was set on high above her fellows; and, on their side, that she was after all only an imitator of white people’s ways; and a failure of that. (41–42)

Becka is an only child, a fact that is mentioned twice in this brief passage. This is thus a nuclear family, as is the case with the Bronvollas. Furthermore, as in Banana Bottom, marriage is an important feature; Mrs Gyrton emphasizes her married status as a distinction from others. Mr Gyrton is a carpenter, 26

Nationalism and the Formation of Caribbean Literature, 53.

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which could classify him as either working-class or middle-class, depending on whether he is self-employed or not. Mrs Gyrton is not assigned any professional position. This creates the impression that Mr Gyrton is the family’s breadwinner. In the excerpt, the family is delineated as “an imitator of white people’s ways” (42). ‘White’ can in this context be read as a middle-class attribute. In Jamaica, the categories of race and class largely correlate, with Africans being brought as slaves to work on the plantations and Europeans coming to the Caribbean as plantation owners and overseers. In the novel itself, the reading of class as a signifier of race is suggested by the constellation of a nuclear family with a male breadwinner and the correlation between race and class that is suggested by the depiction of the Bronvollas. Not only the character constellation but also the structure of the text suggest that the Gyrtons imitate the Bronvollas, or any other middle-class family. The novel is divided into four chapters, of which numbers one and two describe the Bronvolla family and numbers three and four are devoted to the Gyrtons. Structurally, the Gyrtons are subordinate to the Bronvollas, and the reader therefore almost automatically relates the Gyrtons to the standards the narrative has set with the preceding description of Noel and her parents. The table of contents, too, is itself quite revealing: The titles of chapters three and four, which deal with the Gyrtons, are put in quotation marks. Since the titles are not obviously quotations, this can be taken as a hint that the Gyrtons have taken over ideas and ideals of others. Mrs Gyrton’s “enemies” (41), however, not only call her an “imitator of white people’s ways” but also “a failure of that” (42). This assessment can be backed by structural and stylistic features. The character constellation, for example, suggests the actual unimportance of what would be the male head of the family in middle-class terms, as applied by the Gyrtons: Becka’s father does not appear on the character level at all but is only mentioned by others. Throughout, it is clear that the mother has to care for the family’s material welfare because the absent father is not capable of doing so. This also means that she cannot stay at home to look after her child; according to middle-class ideology, she assumes a male role. This is supported by the use of martial metaphors to describe Mrs Gyrton. The above-quoted passage indicates that she has to fight her enemies at the fence. Elsewhere, she repeatedly has to sew buttons back on that have “deserted their posts” (42). The use of war metaphors contributes to the masculinization of Mrs Gyrton and therefore, with the other features, blurs the middle-class ideal that the Gyrtons appropriate. The Gyrtons are a working-class family, but in constructing their own family, they

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draw on ideals that resemble those middle-class ideals analysed in the previous section. The analysis of Banana Bottom has shown that socioeconomically, racially, and religiously determined family ideals are barely distinguishable from one another. Against this background, the Gyrtons’ religiosity is quite telling: Becka attends Sunday school, the family is formally a Christian one. Reading Becka’s Buckra Baby and Banana Bottom in connection confirms the impression that the Gyrtons try to define themselves not only as a Christian but also as a white middle-class family. Finally, this becomes apparent because economic reasons deprive the Gyrtons of fully realizing what I have shown to be their envisioned ideal. Here again, class can be read as a metaphor for race, since the Gyrtons would have to overcome both racial and social barriers to approach the ideal represented by the Bronvollas. However, even though they do not manage to pursue this aspiration with complete success, they at least appropriate it in parts, creating their individual intermediate family model. On the character level, the Gyrtons are thus agents of cultural exchange who negotiate different family models. The analysis of the novel itself as a product of cultural exchange shows that the text judges this exchange, which becomes apparent at the close. Becka received a white-skinned china doll for Christmas from Noel Bronvolla. Although Noel asks her not to open the present before Christmas, she takes her new doll with her when she goes to shop for groceries two days before Christmas. Becka’s mother could not do the shopping herself because she had to work to earn money for the family. On her way back from the shops, an older boy takes her china doll and throws it onto the tram rails. Hastening to retrieve her doll, Becka is run over by the tram and dies on the spot. A reading following the parameters of middle-class family constructions will result in seeing the tragic death of the likeable young girl as avoidable if the family had consequently adopted the middle-class family ideal. If the child had not had to help in the household, she would not have died. I read this climax of the plot as a valuation of the cultural exchange represented in the narrative. At this stage I want to return to the already-mentioned quotation from Coventry Patmore. Redcam includes the lines “When [sic] Thou rememberest of what toys / We make our joys” (29), which in the original context are followed by the lines “How weakly understood, Thy great commanded good.”27 I read this extract, and the complete poem it stands for, as a critique 27

Coventry Patmore, “The Toys,” in The New Oxford Book of Victorian Verse, ed. Christopher Ricks (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1987): 324.

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of turning away from God to material goods. Under the impression of the above interpretation, I argue that the reference to these lines sums up allegorically what seems to be the text’s judgment on cultural exchange: Becka’s Buckra Baby suggests that following a pure, unadulterated ideal, be it a religious, a racial, or a socio-economic one, is the measure of all things. Through these allusive lines, as through Becka’s death, the text criticizes the cultural exchange it represents. By publishing this novel, Tom Redcam takes part in historical cultural exchange; the narrative itself communicates ideas and judges the exchange it represents. Redcam critically assesses the exchange of family ideals, thus assuming a position in the historical context that other historical agents can respond to. Rosenberg identifies this context as “fundamentally middle class.”28 Especially when comparing the two families, the question focused on is whether and how a black working-class family can attain social recognition. Even though both of the families negotiate their standpoint individually, the novel tends to question the working-class family’s conventions and attitudes. While only religious aspects are part of the Bronvollas’ individual cultural exchange, the Gyrtons are faced with existential economic problems. Also, the Bronvollas do not change their status through the exchange. The Gyrtons, by contrast, make some effort to climb the social ladder. This also comes out in the text’s overall structure; no non-middle-class character intervenes in chapters one and two, where the Bronvollas are at the centre of attention – they are fully autonomous. The story of the Gyrtons and Becka’s tragic death in particular is greatly influenced by a representative of the middle classes: namely, Noel, who gives Becka her Buckra Baby. The story’s subtitle emphasizes that the Bronvollas are the actual centre of the story. Even though Becka’s tragic death serves as the narrative climax, the novel is subtitled Being an Episode in the Life of Noel. Becka’s death, then, becomes merely an episode in Noel’s coming of age, since she has to witness the whole scene and is held back by her fiancé. Beyond that, Noel frames the story, remaining in focus at the beginning and at the end – immediately after Becka’s death, the focalization, which shifts frequently throughout the text, stays with Noel and is not shifted to the Gyrtons, who have just suffered the loss of their child. It becomes clear that the Bronvolla family, hence a white Christian middle-class family, is the focus around which the story is built and that they are the reference-point for everything the Gyrtons do. 28

Rosenberg, Nationalism and the Formation of Caribbean Literature, 54.

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Conclusion My analysis has shown that the two novels resort to quite similar cultural objects in their negotiations of family models. Further, despite the different overall evaluations of the exchange, they agree in the position from which the agents in both texts approach Christian middle-class family ideals. In religious terms, this is not the alleged opposite of the Christian ideal of married parenthood. In Banana Bottom, Bita’s parents were married and she herself does not challenge marriage at any time. The same holds true for the Gyrtons in Becka’s Buckra Baby, who are likewise a married couple. These two novels can therefore be read as indicating that the question of religious differences is a minor one, maybe one that has already been settled. The novels actually negotiate racialized class differences through the families by discussing beneficial marriages and gender roles. At the same time, the analysis of cultural exchange has shown that objects determined on the basis of religion, race, and class can hardly be told apart. I accordingly interpret Redcam and McKay’s extensive use of the family as a site for negotiating ideals as a literary means of tying the notions of religion, race, and class together. Although they display different attitudes towards this cultural exchange – which certainly derives from Redcam’s being a member of Jamaica’s white middle class and McKay’s relationship to communism and the Harlem Renaissance – neither of the novels questions the actual connection between racialized class and religion itself. Banana Bottom and Becka’s Buckra Baby thus foreground racialized class as a key issue of Jamaica’s colonial situation in the early twentieth century.

WORKS CITED Balestra, Gianfranca. “Claude McKay’s Banana Bottom: A Fictional Return to Jamaica,” R S A Journal 12 (2001): 5–16. Browning, Robert. “By the Fire-Side,” in Robert Browning. Men and Women, ed. Paul Turner (1855; Oxford: Oxford U P , 1972): 43–53. Burke, Peter. Cultural Hybridity (Cambridge: Polity, 2009). ——. The European Renaissance: Centres and Peripheries (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998). Cooper, Frederick. “Back to Work: Categories, Boundaries and Connections in the Study of Labour,” in Racializing Class, Classifying Race, ed. Peter Alexander & Rick Halpern (London: Macmillan, 2000): 213–35. Eagleton, Terry. Ideology: An Introduction (London & New York: Verso, 2007).

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Füllberg–Stolberg, Claus. “Land Policies in Jamaica, 1830–1940,” in Humanitarian Intervention and Changing Labor Relations: The Long Term Consequences of the Abolition of Slave Trade, ed. Marcel van der Linden (Leiden & Boston M A : Brill, 2011): 319–50. Griffin, Barbara. “The Road to Psychic Unity: The Politics and Gender in Claude McKay’s Banana Bottom,” Callaloo 22.2 (Spring 1999): 499–508. Hathaway, Heather. Caribbean Waves: Relocating Claude McKay and Paule Marshall (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana U P , 1999). Jarret, Gene Andrew. “Chronology,” in A Long Way from Home, Claude McKay, ed. Gene Andrew Jarrett (1937; New Brunswick N J : Rutgers U P , 2007): xi–xv. Jay, Paul. “Hybridity, Identity and Cultural Commerce in Claude McKay’s Banana Bottom,” Callaloo 22.1 (Winter 1999): 176–94. McKay, Claude. Banana Bottom. (1933; London: Serpent’s Tail, 2005). Moore, Brian L., & Michele A. Johnson. Neither Led nor Driven: Contesting British Cultural Imperialism in Jamaica, 1865–1920 (Kingston, Jamaica: U of the West Indies P , 2004). Morris, Mervin. “Contending Values: The Prose Fiction of Claude McKay,” Jamaica Journal 9.2–3 (1975): 36–42, 52. Patmore, Coventry. “The Toys,” in The New Oxford Book of Victorian Verse, ed. Christopher Ricks (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1987): 324–25. Redcam, Tom. Becka’s Buckra Baby: Being an Episode in the Life of Noel (Kingston, Jamaica: Times Printery, 1907). Rosenberg, Leah Reade. Nationalism and the Formation of Caribbean Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Shaw, George Bernard. Pygmalion, ed. Herbert Geisen (1913; Stuttgart: Reclam, 1998). Simpson, George Eaton. “The Nine Night Ceremony in Jamaica,” Journal of American Folklore 70.278 (October–December 1957): 329–35. Tillery, Tyrone. Claude McKay: A Black Poet’s Struggle for Identity (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P , 1992).

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Transatlantic Representations of the Revolution in Saint-Domingue at the End of the Eighteenth Century and the Haitian Turn A NJA B ANDAU

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a set of reflections and questions situated in the interstices between history and historiography, literary and cultural studies, as well as the history of science. These reflections arise from my work on texts that deal with the Haitian Revolution and related topics, such as the abolition of slavery, the precarious relationship between metropolis and colony, and between Enlightenment and colonialism, at the turn of the eighteenth century – more precisely, between 1792 and 1815. The complex set of events that has come to signify the Haitian Revolution1 – wars of independence, abolition of slavery, civil war – becomes, I will argue in the following, a paradigmatic example of current issues and significant changes in postcolonial (francophone) studies that emphasized and partly redefined the links to transnational and cultural studies, positively asking for interdisciplinary approaches. It shows the need to adopt a transnational perspective or, in other words, a perspective on entangled histories, as well as the 1

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The struggle for independence and the abolition of slavery in the French colony of Saint-Domingue led to the prolonged historical period of the Haitian Revolution, between 1791 and 1804. This not only meant the end for the wealthiest of the French colonies but also led to the first independent nation in Central and South America. It also entailed a brief period in which slavery was abolished on French territory as a whole (1794-1802). The slave revolt and competing claims to power between colonial middle and upper classes (European and Creole) became historical simultaneities which took place in the transatlantic space between the metropolis, shaken by revolution, and the colony.

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turn to non-canonical texts in postcolonial studies. These ideologically ambivalent texts make explicit the colonial legacy of the post/colonial, while they do not lend themselves to an easy reading in line with established postcolonial tropes. (This paradigmatic status of the Haitian Revolution and associated matters is true for postcolonial studies in general but even more so for francophone post/colonial studies.) After a brief excursus into what I call somewhat emphatically ‘the Haitian turn’, I will focus on the work emerging from literary studies, particularly studies of (literary) texts in a number of publications and projects on the Haitian Revolution around its bicentenary. The scarcity of material on the event and the difficult access to parts of it, as well as its blatant ideological functions, raise conceptual and methodological questions for everybody aiming to undertake research on the Haitian Revolution. A prior search for suitable theoretical and methodological approaches would seem to be indispensable. A whole set of questions arises (which I will specify only for my fields of study): To what end can these texts be read in literary, cultural, and postcolonial studies and what does a postcolonial approach add to the understanding of colonial texts? A related issue concerns the ways in which knowledge about these events is produced. What role is ascribed to literary texts in the process of knowledge-production, and what role do literary studies assume in the interdisciplinary venture of mapping and analysing this production of knowledge? Finally, we have to take into account the new directions which literary and cultural studies can introduce when they creatively address the scarcity of accessible written sources.

The Haitian Turn, or Post-2004 Scholarship on Haiti This part of my essay’s title refers to the proliferation of studies on the Haitian Revolution as well as its paradigmatic readings in relation to interconnectedness, circulation, histoire croisée, which introduce a vision beyond bi-directional models of centre and periphery. The publications on the occasion of the bicentennial anniversary of the revolution in 2004 made this paradigmatic shift very clear and put Haiti back on the map of global history. These studies also shed light on certain pitfalls of postcolonial studies as addressed in recent critiques.2 As the British scholar Charles Forsdick points out, 2

I refer to the critiques by Graham Huggan and Ania Loomba concerning tendencies towards a certain reductionism and exoticism. Particularly at stake here is the

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interwoven commemorative moments […] have insured that slavery and its legacies have acquired a necessary prominence in debates of political, philosophical, social and cultural manifestations of postenlightenment modernity.3

Main concerns of this ‘Haitian turn’ or – putting it less emphatically – this new post-2004 awareness are to re-read the insufficiencies of the French Revolution and its unaccomplished universalism through the Haitian Revolution, to reconstruct the multiple relations in the so-called periphery of the Caribbean and the Americas and thus to subvert the centre–periphery model. Already in the late 1990s the studies of historians such as David Geggus and Carolyn Fick pointed to these links. In the French context, Yves Bénot and Louis Sala–Molins addressed these interconnections and their missing impact in French history, e.g., in the context of the 1989 bicentenary of the French Revolution or the 1994 bicentenary of the first abolition of slavery in the French colonial empire.4 The underlying motto of these re-readings can be theorizing of an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century postcoloniality struggling with anachronism. Authors such as Lynn Festa, Daniel Carey, and Timothy Watson have pointed out an historical dimension often missing, not only in the French context, but also in postcolonial studies, with keywords such as ‘postcolonial Enlightenment’; see Lynn Festa, Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France (Baltimore M D : Johns Hopkins U P , 2006); Postcolonial Enlightenment, ed. Daniel Carey & Lynn Festa (Oxford & New York: Oxford U P , 2009); and Timothy Watson, Caribbean Culture and British Fiction in the Atlantic World, 1770–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2008). Chris Bongie argues polemically that Haiti came to mean the site where a “return to the political” in postcolonial literary theory could take place; Bongie, Friends and Enemies: The Scribal Politics of Post / Colonial Literature (Liverpool: Liverpool U P , 2008). 3 Charles Forsdick, “Interpreting 2004: Politics, Memory, Scholarship,” Small Axe 27 (October 2008): 3. 4 Carolyn E. Fick, The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution from Below (Knoxville: U of Tennessee P , 1990); A Turbulent Time: The French Revolution and the Greater Caribbean, ed. David Barry Gaspar & David Patrick Geggus (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana U P , 1997); David Patrick Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies (Bloomington: Indiana U P , 2002); David Patrick Geggus, The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World (Columbia: U of South Carolina P , 2001). See also Yves Bénot, La Démence coloniale sous Napoléon (Paris: La Découverte, 1992); Rétablissement de l’esclavage dans les colonies françaises, 1802. Aux origines de Haïti, ed. Yves Bénot & Marcel Dorigny (Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose, 2003) Louis Sala–Molins, Les Misères des lumières: Sous la raison, l’outrage (Paris: Laf-

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found in the influential 1995 study by Michel–Rolph Trouillot bearing the title Silencing the Past.5 But with the advent of the new millennium, historians such as Laurent Dubois, John Garrigus, and Jeremy Popkin entered into dialogue with Trouillot’s thesis on the basis of new sources and archival material.6 Slavery is seen as an innate phenomenon of a history of empires that cannot be envisaged adequately without this dimension: the implicit dealings of the French Enlightenment with colonialism and its telling silences on the matter, its implications for the interpretation of Enlightenment thinking, and the colonial legal practice concerning abolition in the early French Republic. In the context of the revolutionary Atlantic – one of the key concepts in this paradigm – a whole network of interconnections arises; multiple agents in the Caribbean with transatlantic and inter-American affiliations become visible. Re-considering the Haitian Revolution as an important Caribbean counterpart to, or radicalization of, the French Revolution and its democratic implications is a crucial step towards restoring its importance in global history. Entangled histories begin to be told in terms of how Saint-Domingue font, 1992); and The Abolitions of Slavery. From L.F. Sonthonax to Victor Schoelcher, 1793, 1794, 1848, ed. Marcel Dorigny (Paris: U N E S C O & New York: Berghahn, 2003). 5 Michel–Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston M A : Beacon, 1995). Trouillot referred not only to the silence in contemporary texts and sources as well as to the impossibility of grasping this slave emancipation, but also to the modes of invoking the events and how historiography addressed the events, or chose not to. 6 See, in this regard, John Garrigus, Before Haiti: Race and Citizenship in French Saint-Domingue (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); as well as the publications by Laurent Dubois, A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787–1804 (Chapel Hill & London: U of North Carolina P , 2004), Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P /Belknap Press, 2004), “In Search of the Haitian Revolution,” in Francophone Postcolonial Studies. A Critical Introduction, ed. Charles Forsdick & David Murphy (London: Arnold, 2003): 27–34; and Jeremy D. Popkin, Facing Racial Revolution: Eyewitness Accounts of the Haitian Insurrection (Chicago & London: U of Chicago P , 2008), “Un Homère de l’émigration Saint-Domingoise: Mon Odyssée,” Dix-Huitième Siècle 43 (2011): 391–403, You Are All Free: The Haitian Revolution and the Abolition of Slavery (New York: Cambridge U P , 2010). See also new scholarship in French, such as Dominique Rogers, Les libres de couleur dans la capitale de Saint-Domingue: Fortune, mentalités, et intégrations à la fin de l’ancien régime (1776–1789) (Bordeaux: Université Michel de Montaigne, 1999).

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was intimately linked to decision-making in transatlantic colonial and imperial politics, or served as an example of colonial strategies and colonial administration, as well as a representation for the second French colonial empire during the second half of the nineteenth century.7 This is where the repercussions of the events in the southern states of the U S A also tie in with the Greater Caribbean region. With the demise of the colony of Saint-Domingue during the last decade of the eighteenth century, periods of intense violence against white settlers triggered an increasing circulation of people and information that had an impact not only on French metropolitan politics. Texts like Mon Odyssée, testimony by an anonymous plantation owner which I will discuss in the second part of this article, show that the structures of circulation (goods, subjects, and ideas) were more complex than suggested by the bipolar model of metropolis–colony, or the transatlantic triangle created by the slave trade. These multifaceted phenomena of interwovenness and circulation shed new light on the question of why Latin American independence has long been kept separate from the events in Saint-Domingue.8 The implications of the interwovenness of these phenomena have – in my understanding – contributed to Haiti’s new salience on the map of current research in postcolonial historiographical, literary, and cultural studies. In these various ways, the Haitian Revolution has come to signify a paradigmatic case of exemplary change: the shift from a centre–periphery model that juxtaposes metropolis and colony to a model of entangled history, a history of the circulation of objects, subjects, cultural practices, and, generally speaking, knowledge. It has come to represent the complex and ambivalent realities of colonial situations that haunt post/colonial settings. Walter Mignolo and others address these continuities and interrelations in the context of decolonial studies.9 7

Christopher L. Miller, The French Atlantic Triangle: Literature and Culture of the Slave Trade (Durham N C & London: Duke U P , 2008): 246–73. 8 See Alejandro Gómez Pernía’s 2010 doctoral dissertation, “Le Syndrome de SaintDomingue: Perceptions et représentations de la Révolution haïtienne dans le Monde Atlantique, 1790–1886” (Paris: École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 2010), or Ada Ferrer’s recent article “Talk About Haiti: The Archive and the Atlantic’s Haitian Revolution,” in Haitian History: New Perspectives, ed. Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall (London: Routledge, 2012): 139–56. 9 Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, & Colonization (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P , 2003).

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The Scarce Textual Basis for a Transatlantic Study of the Haitian Revolution Studying the Haitian Revolution confronts us with a situation where scholars have been working on scarce, scattered, un-reviewed material. Even more so, they try to study written testimony of African (American) emancipation where there are no known written testimonies by (former) slaves, in contrast to the anglophone and hispanophone context.10 In the case of literary and cultural critics working on the subject, the situation is even more challenging, given the fact that their projects depend to a large degree on evidence handed down in written form. These constraints on the corpus call for interdisciplinary work with different media. They prompt researchers to consider texts that manifest some resistance to a postcolonial reading. One of the main tasks of historiography during these last ten years has been to search the archives and make available a whole body of texts. The digitalization of documents and archives is a very important means to facilitate broader research on the sources (Bibliothèque Nationale de France, municipal libraries, Archives nationales d’outre mer de France [A N O M ], and others). A considerable number of the texts accessible to us were written by French metropolitan and colonial or Creole subjects: administrators, plantation owners and their families, settlers, civil and military servants, and journalists; the majority of them white. But there are some non-white plantation owners, while political and military leaders also figure among the authors. These texts provide information, but present a colonial and often racist point of view, as the ideological function is one of their main concerns. This has been, I believe, one of the reasons for the absence of research on these texts in the field of literary, cultural or postcolonial studies. (I am referring here to the French or francophone context, as the situation in the anglophone world is different.) After Leon–François Hoffmann’s study of the Romantic Negro,11 which provides a vast set of material but lacks a postcolonial perspective, no further study was published until the beginning of the twenty-first century. 10

Deborah Jenson, Beyond the Slave Narrative: Politics, Sex, and Manuscripts in the Haitian Revolution (Liverpool: Liverpool U P , 2011): 2–3, 18, 24, challenges the notion of the slave narrative as the standard expression of the slaves, and asks whether the black generals could have privileged other forms of testimony such as letters and political documents. 11 Léon–François Hoffmann, Le Nègre romantique: Personnage littéraire et obsession collective (Paris: Payot, 1973).

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Recent publications by Sibylle Fischer and Nick Nesbitt, as well as by Doris Garraway, Chris Bongie, and Deborah Jenson, clearly show the cultural (and political) turn in literary studies. These authors have turned to non-literary texts such as declarations of independence (in the case of Fischer) or political practices studied in combination with the few explicitly literary representations of the events (Nesbitt). In Modernity Disavowed, Fischer sheds light on the conditions that led to the Saint-Domingue revolution’s being received as a threat and a promise, the conditions of silence and fear in addressing the ‘horrors of Saint-Domingue’. Linking the events to the Spanishspeaking Caribbean and its reaction in various discursive moments, the author discusses the implication for a reconsideration of modernity. She makes silences and absences speak in a heterogeneous body of texts by relying on an interdisciplinary approach. She combines the critical methodology of literary research – that is, close reading “attuned to precise wording, to resonances, fantasies and imagery” and “sustained hermeneutical efforts” to “reach beyond literal meaning” – with psychoanalytic and philosophical arguments.12 Nick Nesbitt studies the Haitian Revolution in its relation to global modernity and Spinoza’s ‘radical’ Enlightenment. He proposes a “universal, categorical imperative to strive for a world without slavery” that informed the “philosophy of praxis” materialized by the slaves, calling his interdisciplinary adventure “a history of an idea.”13 Nesbitt’s and Fischer’s studies have distanced themselves decisively from traditional subjects of literary studies, applying an interdisciplinary set of analytical tools created for literary and cultural studies. The small body of texts by the leading figures of the slave rebellion has been increasingly studied and re-contextualized during the last five to ten years. Deborah Jenson’s Beyond the Slave Narrative addresses Jean–Jacques Dessalines’ and Toussaint Louverture’s heterogeneous media-conscious articulations in dispersed private and official letters as well as political documents. These texts make us reconsider the “conscripts of modernity” and understand the non-white free population (gens de couleur) and slave agency. My approach takes the claim to revisit the foundations of modernity back to the realm of literature, genre, and poetics. I investigate how ways of articulating, claiming, and representing modern subjectivities are being influen12

Sibylle Fischer, Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (Durham N C & London: Duke U P , 2004): x–xi. 13 Nick Nesbitt, Universal Emancipation: The Haitian Revolution and the Radical Enlightenment (Charlottesville: U of Virginia P , 2008): 8.

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ced by the violent confrontations and revolutional uprooting of colonial relations in the case of Saint-Domingue.14 To what extent is it possible, in studying the media / format of transmission, to detect repercussions in the spreading of news about the revolution, and what would be the impact on such regulated modes of speaking as genre? My analysis aims at studying texts of different genres that, from 1793 onwards, give an account of the initial slave uprisings that ended in destruction and flight or forced migration from Saint-Domingue. These early contemporary texts in the form of travelogues, pamphlets, and reports – texts between historiography and mémoire, testimony or letters – were written before any final outcome of the civil colonial war and struggle for independence was in sight. These narratives present individual destinies as well as developments in the colony and endeavour to comment on, contextualize, and understand the events. From the perspective of interdisciplinary literary and cultural studies, they provide the reservoir of narratives, episodes and anecdotes that has served until the late-twentieth century as a base for modes and topoi remembering the events of Saint-Domingue. In this context, narrative forms that prefigure the colonial novel, but also theatre, and fugitives’ narratives can be read as first scripts enabling us to see processes of repression, displacement, and transformation linked to processes of memory, differing in this from later narratives.

France, Saint-Domingue, and the USA: An Odyssey during the Haitian Revolution – Questions of Circulation and Genre In this section, I will comment on an anonymous manuscript Mon Odyssée.15 This work forms part of a body of texts by white Creoles affected by the 14

In a British context, these studies were undertaken much earlier and in a far more systematic way. The postcolonial reconsideration of the Enlightenment established continuity between Enlightenment thought and post-revolutionary developments, as in Timothy Watson’s Caribbean Culture and British Fiction in the Atlantic World, 1770– 1870. Lynn Festa’s work on sentimental figures in French Enlightenment discourse, adapted in the colonial and imperialist ventures at the end of the eighteenth century and during the nineteenth, is an important landmark in exploring the French context. In France, these issues are studied in the domain of Atlantic history. Only lately have French history and colonial history become interrelated objects of study. 15 The manuscript does not give the name of its author. However, only recently two French genealogists identified the author as Jean (Paul) Pillet, who was born in 1772– 73 in Saint-Domingue and died in 1832. He inherited a sugar plantation in the North of

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events of the uprisings. The historian Jeremy Popkin has included parts of it in his collection of testimonies on the Haitian Revolution, Facing Racial Revolution. So far, it was only known through an incomplete and not entirely accurate English translation published in 1959 by one of the author’s supposed descendants, Althéa de Puech Parham, under the title My Odyssey.16 The 390-page manuscript of Mon Odyssée, now conserved in the Historic New Orleans Collection library, is divided into three volumes that appear to have been composed at various points in time somewhere between 1793 and 1803. The text recounts the voyages of the protagonist from and to a number of places, voyages caused by the French Revolution and the civil war in SaintDomingue between 1791 and 1798. His ‘odyssey’ includes various returns to Saint-Domingue from the U S A .17 In the context of my argument, this text is of interest for several reasons: 1. It testifies to the notion of movement and interconnectedness in the Greater

Caribbean region and beyond in an historical perspective. 2. Relying on Mon Odyssée, I will argue that the study of texts written by

emigrant settlers is related to questions about the Black Atlantic and its early configurations, although in these texts black people are either treated in a very stereotypical manner or are entirely absent as agents. I suggest reading these texts against the grain – trying to understand the functions of fissures, blanks, and silences, detectable only when scholars look for representations other than the hegemonic. 3. My last point is related to this question of black subjectivities and their representation. Many of the recent scholarly publications on the Haitian

Saint-Domingue, together with his sister, whom he also addresses in his text. For further information, see Bernadette and Philippe Rossignol, “‘Mon Odyssée’, l’auteur et sa famille,” Généalogie et Histoire de la Caraïbe (20 March 2012), http://www .ghcaraibe.org/articles/2012-art09.pdf (accessed 12 February 2013). 16 My Odyssey: Experiences of a Young Refugee from Two Revolutions. By a Creole of Saint Domingue, ed. & tr. Althéa Puech de Parham (Mon Odyssée; Baton Rouge: Louisiana State U P , 1959). Together with Jeremy D. Popkin I am preparing an edition of the manuscript under the title Mon Odyssée: L’Epopée d’un colon de SaintDomingue, par Jean-Paul Pillet, ed. by Anja Bandau and Jeremy D. Popkin (Collection ‘Lire le Dix Huitième Siècle’; Paris: Société française d’étude du Dix Huitième Siècle, forthcoming 2014). 17 The circulation of subjects is quite manifest; moreover, what circulated then was not circulating later, while it was also circulating via certain routes and not via others.

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Revolution cite a passage from Mon Odyssée, referring to it as an exemplary representation of the Haitian slave revolt. 4. To discuss this prototypical status, I propose to consult genre as a convention inscribed in the text that allows for and shapes this representation. The numerous texts of emigrated settlers (French colons) commonly use stereotypical representations of black protagonists and offer harsh ideological positions: the good versus the bad slave, the singing and dancing slave versus the monstrous, disobedient one. Those instances are of interest especially where their actions do not fit the above-mentioned binaries. The attitudes towards slavery echo the popular discussions of pro-slavery debates during the second half of the eighteenth century, and although the texts do criticize the excess of violence exerted by slave masters, they do not question the institution of slavery itself.18 In short: the ideological point of view is mostly revealed blatantly and the perspectives of the majority of Saint-Domingue’s population – slaves – are marginal, if not absent. Reading these texts against the grain might bring to light Freudian ‘uncanny’ figures as well as ambiguities that are telling in expected and unexpected ways. I am interested in the ways in which literary genres and modes are invested in the circulation of knowledge and cultural practices related to the revolution of Saint-Domingue. I focus on how these conventions and their violation or subversion permit, foreclose, and shape the circulation of news items and ideas. How are certain characters constituted, especially concerning the description of the black majority and the news of their uprising? This is the set of questions I want to address and illustrate by reading a now-iconic passage from the manuscript Mon Odyssée. The paragraph is referred to in virtually every recent scholarly publication on the Haitian Revolution. It (re-)tells an episode that aims to give us an idea of the adversaries the narrator has to fight. He tells us about his pursuit of one of the black insurgents in violent and relentless man-to-man combat. The insurgent’s looks “caused me to judge him to be one of the principal chiefs.”19 The narrator–protagonist pursues his opponent, who aims his gun at him but, because the powder is damp, fails to get off a shot. When the narrator, in revenge, is about to “cleave his head with [a] sword,” the black man changes tactics and tries to convince his enemy of his 18

This is so although the contemporary discussion included voices that argued for the inefficiency of the system of slavery and the need to look for alternatives. 19 Popkin, Facing Racial Revolution, 63. The original quotation (here translated by Jeremy Popkin) is found in Mon Odyssée, M S 85-117-L.1, vol. 1: 51.

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innocence by telling him with tears in his eyes that he is the godson of the narrator’s mother. The narrator comments on how these words ‘disarm’ him (“Son ton me désarma”), causing him to decide to spare the black man’s life. But when he momentarily turns his back, he finds that the black man is once again pointing his pistol at him. Outraged, he chases down the fugitive rebel and overcomes him. The latter tries to justify himself a second time, relying on strategic argument and invoking the devil, who supposedly took possession of his body. When this fails as well, he fearlessly accepts his execution. The question I will explore is the following: what can we learn from this passage about the figure of the black slave in revolt, so often absent from discourse or represented only via sentimental stereotypes, gothic situations, and other conventions? This passage is one of the few that ascribe a certain degree of subjectivity to the black slave. In what ways and to what extent is this related to the question of literary genre? Can we understand genre as a medium that links the past, as a world we would like to access, to the present?

Negotiating Social Status via the Homeric Epic The struggle against the revolutionary uprising is narrated as an adventure and man-to-man combat. In this respect, references to the Homeric epic are prominent in the whole text, present from the very beginning. The narrating voice is telling “his odyssey” and claims to be a Ulysses of his time and circumstances. The text provides data on the age, family ties, and social status of the narrator–protagonist, who is about eighteen years old at the outbreak of the slave revolt in 1791, when, after receiving an education in Paris, he returns in July 1791 to Saint-Domingue, the place of his birth.20 The Odyssey proposes not only a model of subject-formation to this young author through the mastery of all sorts of adventures, hardships, and tests, liminal situations that must be overcome in order to find a way back home. What our author finds is a model narrative of a long journey, the facing of all kinds of dangers and archaic forces, the mourning of dead friends and survival, and finally the regaining of a home and a certain reputation – as in the case of Ulysses. The following passage shows, however, that the Iliad is also an explicit intertext here which serves to depict the colonial and civil war as a series of 20

The actual time-frame when the manuscript was written cannot be reconstructed with accuracy. But if we believe the allusions made in the text, the author edited his notes between 1800 and 1806 in the U S A .

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man-to-man confrontations. (In their Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno use the term ‘aristocratic’ to characterize this mode of fighting.) Je me précipitai sur lui mais il se donna garde de m’attendre; et nous voilà jouant tous les deux une partie de barre. Quoique bancal, le drole était ingambe autour des champs il joua de la jambe tout comme Hector en jouait autrefois […] quand poursuivi par Achille en colère des murs d’Illium il fit le tour sept fois, comme un lapin, sans regarder derrière. Je n’avais pas de Patrocle à venger, mais plus qu’Achille aussi j’étais léger, grace, d’abord, à ma personne étique ; puis à ce Grec du faubourg St Marceaux, qui nous croyant des apprentis héros, chaque matin, dans sa rage olympique, nous faisait faire un cours de gymnastique.21

Here, the black adversary is compared to the Trojan hero Hector, who, in a duel with Achilles, flees, running three times around the walls of Troy before being killed. In this passage, the narrating voice takes on the role of Achilles, saviour of the Greeks, who pursues Hector in revenge for the death of his friend Patrocles and who will defeat both Hector and the Trojans. While in the Iliad the physical and verbal man-to-man combat depends on the favour of the gods, they no longer offer shelter to the protagonists in Mon Odyssée. The passage develops an explicitly comic excursus on the physical exercises of the narrator, back in France, that enable him to outdo his opponents, just like the ancient “Olympic heroes.” The mocking effect is achieved through parodying 21

Mon Odyssée, vol. 1, book 1: 51. English translation: “I fell upon him, but he was on guard for my attack; and there we were both acting as if playing Prisoner’s Base. Although lame, the fellow was agile / And ran all around the field / The way Hector did once upon a time, / When, pursued by angry Achilles, / He went seven times around the walls of Ilium, / Like a rabbit, without looking behind him. / I had no Patroclus to avenge, / But more than Achilles, I was light-footed, / Thanks first of all, to my slim build, / And then to that Greek from the Faubourg Saint-Marceau / Who, seeing in us apprentice heroes, / Every morning, in his Olympic furor, / Gave us lessons in gymnastics.” (Popkin, Facing Racial Revolution, 78.) The quotations are taken from the manuscript and are reprinted as in the original, leaving the old spelling without correcting inconsistencies in spelling and grammar.

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the original scene of the chase. Instead of three times, the adversaries now run seven times around Troy, an exaggeration which is presented in the tradition of poésie galante, a genre I will discuss further on. The author is caught in a situation of actual fighting, contradicting the aristocratic ideal of combat, which is not so much linked to survival as to physical prowess. The mockery might be a symptom of the fact that this aristocratic behaviour is being put in jeopardy by the rebel slave, since he seems to appropriate to his needs the stratagems that distinguish Ulysses from the ancient heroes. Whereas the Iliad, as we know, is placed under the rule of close physical and verbal competition, the Odyssey presents a hero who defeats his adversaries by applying tricks and cunning. Quand il vit que son sort était décidé, il se mit à rire, chanter et badiner tantôt il nous injuriait d’un ton furieux, tantôt il se moquait de nous d’un air goguenard. Il donna lui-même le signal et reçut la mort sans crainte et sans se plaindre, nous trouvâmes dans une de ses poches des pamphlets imprimés en France remplis de lieux communs par les droits de l’homme et la sainte insurrection [. . . ]22

The linguistic registers used by this presumed chief of the rebellious slaves range from a set of (discursive and performative) puns and tricks to the honourable conduct demanded of one awaiting his death with dignity, thus situating him between Hector and Ulysses. Although in sync with the intertext, the distribution of roles makes it quite clear that this black man is destined to be defeated. He is, however, described with a wealth of detail. This variety of strategies and differentiated description has induced scholars to put the opponent on the same level as his ‘European’ counterpart.23 The passage quoted above gives good grounds for assuming that it is the rebel who takes the role of strategic agency in the epic. On the other hand, the same character is associated with voodoo – in the eyes of the narrator, archaic forces defeated by Homer’s Ulysses. These ambi22

Mon Odyssée, vol. 1, book 1: 51–52. English translation: “When he saw that his fate was sealed, he began to laugh, sing, and joke. At times, however, reviling us in a furious tone, at times jeering at us in mockery. He gave the signal himself and met death without fear or complaint. We found in one of his pockets pamphlets printed in France, filled with commonplaces about the Rights of Man and the Sacred Insurrection [. . . ]” (Facing Racial Revolution, 79.) 23 “It provides a powerful image of the black insurgency” (Facing Racial Revolution, 63).

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guities in the distribution of roles and values make it difficult to see perfect isotopy between a model and its epigone. Enlightened rationalism and archaic animistic myth seem to be distributed in unexpected ways, echoing the difficulties the narrator himself has in distributing roles among his characters. The man-to-man model of combat is undermined by the black opponent representing Ulysses; but at the same time his behaviour is associated with Hector. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno see the passage from archaic to modern, from myth to rationality, and from aristocracy to bourgeoisie, as being at the core of the Enlightenment, but this occurs dialectically through a process in which the subject interiorizes mythic power in order to overcome it.24 In an historical perspective, the bourgeoisie interiorizes aristocratic principles when overthrowing the Ancien Régime. Our author narrates this dialectic, while at the same time trying to maintain, or to redefine, the frontiers between both worlds in a colonial context. On the threshold to adulthood, while the colony is abandoned on the altar of the bourgeois revolution, he presents himself as an aristocrat who – very much like Ulysses – is moving in different spaces and is also applying cunning tricks. In his presentation, Jeremy Popkin catches the main characteristics of the text and its narrator very well in underlining the fluidity of the protagonist’s identity, subject to change in the course of the events narrated.25 The change, however, does not take a precise direction, as the parodic adoption of Achilles is abandoned at some point. Later, the narrator himself relies on the strategy of tricks, as he saves his life by travesty, dressing as a servant.26 This “cross dressing,” as Popkin shows, is a strategy from the very start, taking on gender here.27 It is the strategy of someone who is outnumbered, a consequence of the author’s reflection on his own position in a situation of radical change between the three corners of his Atlantic world: on one shore, the colonial world in the Caribbean endangered by the slave rebellion; on the other shore, the metropolitan revolution that empowers a bourgeois world-view – which at the same time led to a democratic government combined with slave-holding on a third shore north of the Caribbean, in the U S A . These coordinates, as our narrator– protagonist and his odyssey show, cannot be kept neatly separated geographi24

Max Horkheimer & Theodor W. Adorno, Die Dialektik der Aufklärung (1944; Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1981): 42, 48–51. 25 Popkin, Facing Racial Revolution, 62–63. 26 Mon Odyssée, vol. 1, book 3: 123. 27 Popkin, Facing Racial Revolution, 63.

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cally in the course of events; they clash and overlap, constituting new transatlantic configurations of space through the movement of our protagonist. The narrator, young and still malleable, has not yet made up his mind, navigating as he is between different timelines and spaces. Thus, different dimensions and possibilities of interpreting the actions overlap.

Ulysses as Floating Signifier This bricolage of different models and interpretations is possible because the young author is not somebody who cautiously designs his text as a highly complex construction, but one who works with the models he has to hand, relying on his classical education and making his understanding of it serve his purpose – which is limited to the use of parts, without regard to the coherence of the whole. The epic tradition becomes a kind of ‘antique shop’ where every item or fragment seems endowed with the aura of the epic universe, at the disposal of the buyer. The references to details in the intertexts are thus precise but often contradictory, while the projected figuration, the narrative itself, remains uncertain. However, the use of the genre model makes tensions and fissures visible that occur in the process of adaptation. The analogical presence of Ulysses and Hector enables the text to preserve aristocratic powerrelations that encompass the constellations of colonialism, enslavement, and cultural contact obtaining during Antiquity. At the same time, they narrow the possibilities of articulating social change and transforming subjectivity into bourgeois identity, and limit contact with other cultural systems. We can summarize the characteristics of the black man thus: associated with Hector in the beginning, Ulysses’ behaviour becomes temporarily characteristic of the black opponent. Ulysses thus provides a new paradigm or model of subjectivity that separates physical power from survival. Yet the notion of the ‘trickster’ might also be pointing to a presence within AfricanCaribbean mythology, a separate and autonomous tradition at the core of the opponent’s behaviour. The author interprets the stoic attitude of the black man in facing death as related to fetishistic beliefs. From this angle, the abovementioned archaic forces are mastered by the narrator–protagonist, who re-

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gains the role of Ulysses in attributing fetishistic beliefs to his black adversary.28 Are these new possible readings of the rebellious slave? The black opponent cannot be ascribed to either one of the generic models or intertexts. Eventually, this process of opening up the paradigm is nipped in the bud by the end of this scene, and plays no role in the further course of the narrative, with the gradually increasing fragility of the narrator’s position. We have to bear in mind the fact that the African opponent’s actions and speech are mediated through the ‘master’s voice’ – through the perspective of a white master born in the colony and educated in the metropolis. That is why the slave’s discourse contains images that have been used before by the narrator. It includes well-known stereotypical images of the black slave that circulated at the time (bon nègre). Nevertheless, in one case at least, this mimicry of the pre-uprising relationship of mutual obligation between slave and owner (“fils de sa marraine”) serves a different goal. His insistence on the quasi-parental relationship between master and slave is used here as a trick to manipulate the former master, in order to evade punishment for rebellion and to ensure survival. Jeremy Popkin argues that “framing their combat in Homeric terms [. .. ] humanizes both participants.”29 He significantly underlines the simultaneously courageous and strategic behaviour of the black man, who is also seen as an embodiment of the African Other and the principles of the French Revolution. This “seem[s] to represent the core of what many contemporary scholars want to find in the Haitian slave revolt.”30 But at the same time, the story, “too good to be true literally,”31 contains a conglomerate of all the commonplaces about this ‘core’ of the Haitian Revolution, e.g., the uprising inspired as by French philosophers and the important status of voodoo for African slaves. However, the question remains: Can one read this passage as an acknowledgement of black subjectivity and, if so, to what degree is this 28

This is, incidentally, in line with the inceptive events at Bois Caïman, in which the leader of the revolt, Mackandal, enlists African modes of communication and the forces of Dahomean vaudun. 29 Facing Racial Revolution, 63. 30 Jeremy Popkin, “Colonial Disaster and Literary Creation: Mon Odyssée and the End of the Saint-Domingue Planter Elite,” unpublished paper held at the French Colonial Historical Society conference in Paris, June 2010. 31 Popkin, Facing Racial Revolution, 63.

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facilitated by the convention of genre? There is no definite answer. One might think that at one moment the white author’s subjectivity is weakened, so that the framing of the discourse of the Other becomes uncertain and the subjectivity of his black opponent becomes possible. The author who is seeking value by comparing his story to the one Ulysses survived glorifies his own actions by confronting a worthy opponent. But later on in the story, the logic of war is changing and, parallel to that, so is the logic of representation. This ambivalence does not lead to a favourable situation concerning black subjectivity. On the contrary, in the course of the text, this possibility becomes increasingly constrained. The moments when this black subjectivity seems at hand are especially noteworthy. They are closed off as soon as they stop serving the narrative suspense. The “unquestionable symbolic truth” is, ultimately, a history of denial rather than a representation of the Other.32 The genre offers the possibility, but it depends on the author, who is more or less willing and able to let himself be guided by the internal ‘logic of the plot’.

The Poetic Powers of poésie galante/Gallantry as Coping Strategy There is, however, another French and Creole genre tradition to be considered, and this is poésie galante, the occasional and social gallantry of a sixteenth-century tradition of courtly and aristocratic pastime, in vogue until well into the second half of the eighteenth century. This tradition goes back to authors such as Vincent Voiture in the seventeenth century and, in his tradition, Jean–Baptiste Louis Gresset in the eighteenth, verse from whom forms the epigraph for each of the three volumes. The poetic practices of interest in our context are anacreontics, libertine or erotic poetry, and the mock-heroic tradition. The representation of a beloved or desired woman in an imagined landscape ranges from playful Platonic idealization to frivolous realism. One of the explicit intertexts that signal the affinity of the author of Mon Odyssée to these conversational lyrical genres, as well as to a contemporary model of genre-mixing, is Charles Demoustier’s Lettres à Emilie sur la mythologie (1786–90). Demoustier’s text – very popular at the end of the eighteenth century among the young French readership of the time – offers the model for further details. Addressing an anonymous beloved woman, the author ex32

Facing Racial Revolution, 64.

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plains Greek mythology to her in poetry and prose, in gallant verse, but freely interspersing his thoughts on emotional and psychological conditions. In this tradition of female education, the whole text of Mon Odyssée addresses mother, sister, unidentified lovers, and his future wife, as well as the occasional male friend. The use of the epistolary form in Mon Odyssée provides space for subjective reflections, facilitates the representation of emotional states, and introduces the reader to the emotional and psychic disposition of the young adult protagonist–narrator of Mon Odyssée. The few existing studies of Mon Odyssée have concentrated on the first two volumes of the text, which recount the author’s odyssey, leaving aside the third volume, which tells the author’s erotic adventures entirely in verse under the title Histoire d’une amour ou Epoques érotiques de mon Odyssée. However, as argued above, the tradition of poésie galante constitutes the subjectivity presented in the text. Educated in France, the young author is well trained in this conversational poetry, which affords him the opportunity to maintain his libertine self-image and which serves in the course of events as an antidote to his traumatic and destabilizing experiences of civil war, flight, and loss. The first two volumes themselves include various elements of this tradition: the dedication to a lover; the presence of nymphs, fauns, and dryads, which appear in these verses as inhabiting an idealized, Caribbean, paradisiacal landscape; finally, the mention of erotic adventures relates to this ‘other’ genre. The third volume, not published in the English translation of 1959 by Althea Puech de Parham (which also omits a good deal of the verse in the first two), reinforces the status of this lyrical tradition, which the author obviously privileged. Presenting far more dispersed material – poems written for a social occasion or to a lover, friend etc. – this part of the manuscript includes occasional comments on the historical context or important events, as well as on the emotional states of the narrator. What Mon Odyssée also shares with a number of the genre forms of salon writing is the reference to ancient mythology. The irony and parody with which the texts of the seventeenth and eighteenth century33 often approached the ancient models offer a key to understand the distancing from the epic, if not the sublime. In the scene commented on above, the ironic stance of the poésie galante serves as a model for the epic intertextuality in the manuscript.

33

Famous are the burlesque adaptations of Greek mythology by Paul Scarron in the seventeenth century.

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A New Testimonial Form at the Turn of the Century Both genres, the epic and the poésie galante, enter into a varied dialogue: they comment on each other and occasionally reinforce each other’s argument, but their intersection also generates tension and discursive ruptures.34 The curious mixture of erotic adventures and the crude experiences of civil war may be qualified as a new testimonial genre – not, however one necessarily intended by the author. The hybrid nature of the text as a whole – the merging of the dramatic and the comic, verse and prose, ancient epic and poésie galante – can thus be understood as the result of a more or less unconscious urge to integrate different spheres and experiences that have their expression in separate literary and genre traditions. The intersection of experiences is realized in colliding metropolitan, colonial, as well as aristocratic and bourgeois codes, but also poetologically with respect to genre. The transatlantic space the author traverses is represented through generic bricolage. The generic adaptations and intersections described provide an answer to the question articulated above as the aim of my analysis. The new testimonial forms are among the ways of addressing the violent confrontations and revolutionary uprooting attendant on the Haitian Revolution. The findings underline the fact that a postcolonial perspective on the sources of the Haitian Revolution raises vital questions for literary studies as a discipline involving such domains as literary history and genre-formation. Finally, embedded in an interdisciplinary set of questions, the tools of literary criticism enable fruitful insights when studying historiographical and other sources.

WORKS CITED Anon. Mon Odyssée (The Historic New Orleans Collection; New Orleans L A : Althea de Puech Parham Working Papers, M S 85-117-L.1).

34

The division between verse and prose, with verse being understood as stylization and prose as possessing authentic or testimonial force, is only one way to understand the tension between verse and prose. One might, as Popkin does, read the “shift to verse” as a sign of “leaving the realm of verifiable fact” (Facing Racial Revolution, 61), even more so in the context of the querelle des anciens et des modernes, where the style galant was seen as “beau mensonge” (Jürgen Grimm, Französische Literaturgeschichte [Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 1994]: 220). But I am more than sceptical whether it is possible to consider versification per se as creating a higher degree of the imaginary than prose.

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Anon. My Odyssey: Experiences of a Young Refugee from Two Revolutions: By a Creole of Saint Domingue, ed. & tr. Althéa Puech de Parham (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State U P , 1959). Bongie, Chris. Friends and Enemies: The Scribal Politics of Post / Colonial Literature (Liverpool: Liverpool U P , 2008). Bénot, Yves. La Démence coloniale sous Napoléon (Paris: La Découverte, 1992). ——, & Marcel Dorigny, ed. Rétablissement de l’esclavage dans les colonies françaises, 1802: Aux origines de Haïti (Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose, 2003). Carey, Daniel, & Lynn Festa, ed. Postcolonial Enlightenment (Oxford & New York: Oxford U P , 2009). Demoustier, Charles. Lettres à Émilie sur la mythologie (Paris: Grangé [later Cailleau, Desenne], 1786–90). Dorigny, Marcel, ed. The Abolitions of Slavery: From L.F. Sonthonax to Victor Schoelcher, 1793, 1794, 1848 (Paris: U N E S C O & New York: Berghahn, 2003). Dubois, Laurent. Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P /Belknap Press, 2004). ——. A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787–1804 (Chapel Hill & London: U of North Carolina P , 2004). ——. “In Search of the Haitian Revolution,” in Francophone Postcolonial Studies: A Critical Introduction, ed. Charles Forsdick & David Murphy (London: Arnold, 2003): 27–34. Ferrer, Ada. “Talk About Haiti: The Archive and the Atlantic’s Haitian Revolution,” in Haitian History: New Perspectives, ed. Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall (London: Routledge, 2012): 139–56. Festa, Lynn. Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France (Baltimore M D : Johns Hopkins U P , 2006). Fick, Carolyn E. The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution from Below (Knoxville: U of Tennessee P , 1990). Fischer, Sibylle. Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (Durham N C & London: Duke U P , 2004). Forsdick, Charles. “Interpreting 2004: Politics, Memory, Scholarship,” Small Axe 27 (October 2008): 1–13. Garraway, Doris. The Libertine Colony. Creolization in the Early French Caribbean (Durham N C & London: Duke U P , 2005). Garrigus, John. Before Haiti: Race and Citizenship in French Saint-Domingue (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). Gaspar, David Barry, & David Patrick Geggus, ed. A Turbulent Time: The French Revolution and the Greater Caribbean (Bloomington: Indianapolis U P , 1997). Geggus, David Patrick.The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World (Columbia: U of South Carolina P , 2001). ——, ed. Haitian Revolutionary Studies (Bloomington: Indiana U P , 2002).

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Gómez Pernía, Alejandro Enriqua. “Le syndrome de Saint-Domingue: Perceptions et représentations de la Révolution haïtienne dans le Monde Atlantique, 1790–1886” (doctoral dissertation, Paris: École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 2010) http://tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-00555007 (accessed 26 May 2013). Grimm, Jürgen. Französische Literaturgeschichte (Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 1994). Hoffmann, Léon–François. Le Nègre romantique: Personnage littéraire et obsession collective (Paris: Payot, 1973). Horkheimer, Max, & Theodor W. Adorno. Die Dialektik der Aufklärung. Philosophische Fragmente (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1981). Jenson, Deborah. Beyond the Slave Narrative: Politics, Sex, and Manuscripts in the Haitian Revolution (Liverpool: Liverpool U P , 2011). Miller, Christopher L. The French Atlantic Triangle: Literature and Culture of the Slave Trade (Durham N C & London: Duke U P , 2008). Mignolo, Walter D. The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, & Colonization (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P , 2003). Nesbitt, Nick. Universal Emancipation: The Haitian Revolution and the Radical Enlightenment (Charlottesville: U of Virginia P , 2008). Popkin, Jeremy D. “Colonial Disaster and Literary Creation: Mon Odyssée and the End of the Saint-Domingue Planter Elite,” paper delivered at the French Colonial Historical Society conference in Paris, June 2010. ——. Facing Racial Revolution: Eyewitness Accounts of the Haitian Insurrection (Chicago & London: U of Chicago P , 2008). ——. “Un Homère de l’émigration Saint-Domingoise: Mon Odyssée,” Dix-Huitième Siècle 43 (2011): 391–403. ——. You Are All Free: The Haitian Revolution and the Abolition of Slavery (New York & Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2010). Rogers, Dominique. Les libres de couleur dans la capitale de Saint-Domingue: fortune, mentalités, et intégrations à la fin de l’ancien régime (1776–1789) (Bordeaux: Université Michel de Montaigne, 1999). Rossignol, Benadette, & Philippe Rossignol. “ ‘ Mon Odyssée’, l’auteur et sa famille,” Généalogie et Histoire de la Caraïbe (20 March 2012), http://www.ghcaraibe.org /articles/2012-art09.pdf (accessed 12 February 2013) Sala–Molins, Louis. Les Misères des lumières: Sous la raison, l’outrage (Paris: Laffont, 1992). Trouillot, Michel–Rolph. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston M A : Beacon, 1995). Watson, Timothy. Caribbean Culture and British Fiction in the Atlantic World, 1770– 1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2008).

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Writing Off-Centre — Global Imagination and Modernism in the Short Fiction of Phyllis Shand Allfrey

S ARAH F EKADU

What has changed, what has happened, what has put the writer now at such an angle that he cannot pour his mind straight into the old channels of English poetry? Some sort of answer may be suggested by a walk through the streets of any large town. The long avenue of brick is cut into boxes, each of which is inhabited by a different human being who has put locks on his doors and bolts on his windows to ensure some privacy, yet is linked to fellows by wires which pass overhead, by waves of sound which pour through the roof and speak aloud to him of battles and murders and strikes and revolutions all over the world.1 in spite of the mysterious and inexplicable conflict of faiths and races in the world, it was still a world in which miracles happened.2

B

from Virginia Woolf’s seminal essay “Poetry, Fiction and the Future” and the one from the white Dominican writer Phyllis Shand Allfrey (1915–86) tackle the issue of crisis and conflict with a strong global consciousness. Woolf sees the circulation of news by means of new media like the radio as one of the reasons why the metropolitan 1

OTH THE QUOTATION

Virginia Woolf, “Poetry, Fiction and the Future,” in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, ed. Andrew McNeillie (1927; New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1994): 432–33. 2 Phyllis Shand Allfrey, “A Real Person,” in It Falls Into Place: The Stories of Phyllis Shand Allfrey, ed. Lizabeth Paravisini–Gebert (London & Roseau: Papillote, 2004): 108.

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individual cannot dissociate itself anymore from the violent rebellions and suppressions that happen elsewhere in the world. She considers the simultaneousness of global connection and local alienation as the defining characteristic of the modern condition and regards it as the task of modern fiction to represent precisely this simultaneousness. Allfrey foregrounds the global nature of religious and racial conflicts, that, in her account, are not restricted to a single nation or continent but pertain to the whole world. Of course, a strong sense of global turmoil and crisis is not an exclusive characteristic of twentieth-century thought and literature.3 Yet, the earlytwentieth century has been identified as a time of significant acceleration and intensification of global connections. Elleke Boehmer regards this as the consequence of imperial politics that not only brought in contact different cultures but also triggered anti-imperial action which impinged in different ways on the European metropolises.4 Extending Fredric Jameson’s view that modernism arose in response to the experience of spatial disjunction in the British Empire – an argument that he elaborates in “Modernism and Imperialism” (1988) – Boehmer sees the cultural and political exchanges between the socalled colonial centre and periphery as characteristic of the period: Globalized empire at the turn of the twentieth century, in other words, had for the first time in history made of the world an intermeshed, criss-cross network of communication link-ups, and cross-cultural and political relationships.5

Other, equally strong factors that contributed to the intensification of global connections at the beginning of the twentieth century include the increase in world travel, the global acceptance of the Greenwich Meridian, the development of international laws and regulations, and a growing sense of global conflict.6 3

For a detailed account of globalisation from the perspective of cultural studies, see: Ulfried Reichardt, Globalisierung: Literaturen und Kulturen des Globalen (Berlin: Akademie, 2010). 4 Elleke Boehmer, Empire, the National, and the Postcolonial, 1890–1920 (New York & Oxford: Oxford U P , 2002): 170. 5 Elleke Boehmer, Empire, the National, and the Postcolonial, 172. 6 For a detailed historical account of globalization in the early-twentieth century, which Bayly terms the period of “Great Acceleration,” see Christopher Alan Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World: 1780–1914 (Malden M A & Oxford: Blackwell): 451– 87.

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In the context of an emerging global consciousness and politics, modernist literature merits special attention because it does not simply reflect political developments on a thematic or aesthetic level but must also be seen as one of the generative sites of the global imagination. As Melba Cuddy–Keane argues, modernist literature can be taken as an example of the close relationship between the critical paradigms of globality and modernist aesthetics at the beginning of the twentieth century: The crucial stylistic modernist features of perspectivism, reflexivity, parataxis, and ambiguity parallel the complex interactive systems of globalist thought, leading us to consider both how modernism models globalism and, conversely, how increasing global connections exerted a formative influence on modernist styles.7

Hence, at the beginning of the twentieth century, economic, political, and cultural developments mutually influenced each other and took an equal share in the formation of a new global consciousness. This approach, according to Cuddy–Keane, not only deflects the appropriation of the term ‘globalization’ for a process driven solely by economics, but also prompts us to read in a new light narrative techniques that have traditionally been related to modernism’s fascination with philosophical relativism and psychology. “Did modernist perspectivism […] yield insights in global understanding?,” asks Cuddy– Keane. Or, to pose the reverse question, did increasing encounters with cultural others help to produce the multipersonal novel? Did an expanding awareness of inter-cultural connectivity inform the new intracultural discourse that was beginning, at that time, to emerge?8

This essay takes up Cuddy–Keane’s questions as hypotheses for an analysis of the ways in which global relationships enter the short fiction of Phyllis Shand Allfrey, whose biographical background is similar to that of her betterknown compatriot Jean Rhys. Allfrey’s relatively small corpus has – if at all – been considered solely in terms of a “quest for belonging and identity,”9 an 7

Melba Cuddy–Keane, “Global Modernisms,” in A Companion to Modernist Literature and Culture, ed. David Bradshaw & Kevin J.H. Dettmar (Malden M A & Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2006): 561. 8 Melba Cuddy–Keane, “Modernism, Geopolitics, Globalization,” Modernism / Modernity 10.3 (September 2003): 540. 9 Elizabeth Nunez–Harrell, “The Paradoxes of Belonging: The White West Indian Woman in Fiction,” M F S Modern Fiction Studies 31.2 (Summer 1985): 282.

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exploration of the themes of alienation and rejection endured by the white creole woman in the West Indies. In contrast, this essay sets out to show that Allfrey’s in-between position as a writer from the West Indies who also spent a significant amount of her life in England and the culturally mixed nature of her colonial experience also enabled her to register the specifically global horizon of twentieth-century (post)colonial experience and to express a vision that, in Susheila Nasta’s words, “both resisted and assimilated, critiquing from within the dominant epistemologies of a Western modernity which traditionally had sought to exclude [her].”10 I will argue that the multiple perspectives employed in Allfrey’s short fiction encompass both a global and a postcolonial consciousness. Her use of knowledge of different regions of the world prompts a repositioning of the self in the global sphere, thereby critically disrupting the complacency of a fixed subject-position. The duality of centre and periphery that forms an essential part of imperialist ideology is countered by a pluralistic poetic that emphasizes the interactions and entanglements between different cultures, individuals, and places. To further clarify the aim of the following analysis, a possible objection has to be dispelled. This objection is: why one should place Phyllis Shand Allfrey’s fiction in a global modernist framework at all? Allfrey was born in 1915; her short fiction, except for some scattered publications in journals, was not published during her lifetime, which, in historical terms, makes it difficult to grant it the label ‘modernist’.11 Moreover, her use of multiple perspectives in her short fiction does not parallel the greatly experimental nature of narrative techniques used by ‘high modernists’ like Virginia Woolf or James Joyce. Hence, from both an historical and an aesthetic point of view, Allfrey does not fit neatly into the framework we have come to associate with modernism. Yet, acknowledging that a global consciousness and the search for narrative techniques to express it did not only occur in so-called ‘high-modernist’ literature but in different places at different times requires an extension of both

10

Susheila Nasta, “ ‘ Voyaging in’: Colonialism and Migration,” in The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century English Literature, ed. Laura Marcus & Peter Nicholls (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2005): 567. 11 Allfrey’s biographer Lizabeth Paravisini–Gebert published fourteen of Allfrey’s short stories in 2004 in a volume entitled It Falls Into Place: The Stories of Phyllis Shand Allfrey (London & Roseau: Papillote, 2004). The quotations given in the text refer to this edition.

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the historical and the aesthetic framework of modernism.12 As theorists who are interested in the intersections between modernist and postcolonial studies have shown,13 this extension should not only be considered in terms of a loss of coherence but can also help us to rethink some of the problems that have haunted both modernist and postcolonial theory. Focusing on the relationship between texts and writers from different locations, Laura Doyle and Lara Winkiel hold that reading modernism along a global horizon “unveils both unsuspected ‘modernist’ experiments in ‘marginal’ texts and unsuspected correlations between those texts and others that appear either more conventional or more postmodern.”14 Melba Cuddy–Keane argues that the theoretical framework of “global modernisms” goes “beyond the binary paradigms […] that have characterised the primary relation between the imperial ‘centers’ and the colonial ‘peripheries’.”15 Moreover, while she acknowledges that narrative techniques commonly associated with modernism are particularly suited to expressing a pluralistic, relational poetic, she deems it a fallacy to “think that relational views cannot be expressed in traditional art.”16 In other words: thinking our way into twentieth-century literature by way of a global horizon not only calls for a fresh critical vocabulary to highlight how modernist inventions produce a global imagination but could change established definitions of ‘modernist inventions’ altogether. This opens the field of modernism studies to the work of a writer like Shand Allfrey, whose poetic can be satisfactorily contained neither by a conventional modernist nor by a postcolonial framework. With this (post)colonial female writer who inhabited the multiple cultural worlds forcibly conjoined by Empire, the articulation of a co-presence of ‘here’ and ‘there’, of alternative voices, histories, and modernities existing alongside each other did not 12

I tie in here with Melba Cuddy–Keane, who argues that “while ‘modernism’ needs, for coherence, to preserve its grounding in the period roughly from the fin de siècle […] to the end of the Second World War, obviously its beginnings and endings need to be adapted to the particular regions involved” (“Global Modernisms,” 563). 13 Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity, ed. Laura Doyle & Laura Winkiel (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana U P , 2005); Alternative Modernities, ed. Dilip Gaonkar (Durham N C : Duke U P , 2001); Simon Gikandi, Writing in Limbo: Modernism and Caribbean Literature (Ithaca NY: Cornell U P , 1992). 14 Laura Doyle & Laura Winkiel, “Introduction” to Geomodernisms, 3. 15 Cuddy–Keane, “Global Modernisms,” 558. 16 “Global Modernisms,” 563.

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simply form an aspect of an experimental narrative technique but constituted the basic fabric of her writing. Here, a brief biographical digression about Allfrey, whose life and work has up to now gained much less critical attention than that of her compatriot Jean Rhys, seems appropriate. As a white West Indian woman from an old and once wealthy planter family who, when she was young, lived for a while in the U S A and the U K but later returned to the West Indies, Allfrey not only bears the traces of the larger West Indian cultural history but was also heavily influenced by the passage of the West Indies from a colonial to a postcolonial polity. Born in 1915 into a family of colonial officials in the British colony of Dominica, she later founded the Labour party of Dominica, and, in 1958, was named Minister of Labour and Social Affairs in the newly formed but still British-ruled Federation of the West Indies.17 In 1961, when the Federation failed, she found herself excluded from Dominican politics and the party she had founded. She continued to live on the island – perhaps because her political enthusiasm was not linked exclusively to the independence politics of Dominica but had been forged during her years in the U K , where Allfrey had spent a large part of the 1940s and had joined the Fabian Society, the British Labour Party and the Parliamentary Committee for West Indian Affairs. Deeply impressed by the socialism of such people as Stephen Spender and Jawaharlal Nehru, whom she had met during her years in London, she regarded the welfare politics of the British Labour party as equally important for Dominican agricultural workers, and continued her political commitment as a journalist and editor of two newspapers. The sense of the interrelatedness of people, places, and histories in an imperial world that guided Allfrey’s political action also pervades her fiction. Writing from a subject-position that existed both within and beyond the dominant forces of colonial discourse provided her with the global consciousness and the mobility of mind that is reflected in the multiplicity of voices employed in her short fiction. But how to get at this when analysing a literary text? Aiming for a critical framework to analyse the ways in which modernist texts work towards a sense of global connectivity and negotiate globalized thinking, Melba Cuddy–Keane has identified four different “tropic structures, or ‘figures of thought’ ” for grasping the relationship between literature and globalization: critical, syncretic, cohabiting, and runaway globalization.18 In 17 18

See also Nunez–Harrell, “The Paradoxes of Belonging,” 283. Cuddy–Keane, “Modernism, Geopolitics, Globalization,” 545.

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the following section of this essay, I will analyse two of Allfrey’s short stories with reference to this critical framework. Of course, and as Cuddy–Keane acknowledges, the different tropic structures are not as distinct as a schematic division makes them appear to be, and they often overlap in Allfrey’s writing. I hold that they are, nevertheless, useful for shedding light on the politics implied in the aesthetic features of Allfrey’s texts. The aim, then, is not to insert Allfrey into the modernist canon or to show that the narrative techniques employed in Allfrey’s short fiction are as innovative and experimental as those of established modernists like Woolf or Joyce but to point to signs of an emerging global consciousness in her texts, which, despite the obvious differences in style and theme, link her to earlier and more canonized modernist writers.

Reversed Imitation: “O Stay and Hear” (1954) Allfrey’s short story “O Stay and Hear,” published in the British magazine Argosy in 1954, illustrates the global modernist stance that informed Allfrey’s writing particularly well. Like much of the writing of Jean Rhys, this story takes as its subject the life of a colonial elite living on a Caribbean island. Told by a heterodiegetic narrator, the story records the interaction between the white mistress of an upscale Caribbean home and her dark-skinned female servants, particularly her cook Ariadne and maid Melta, two close friends by whom she feels increasingly mocked. With the mistress acting as the major focalizer of the story, the reader experiences the events taking place at her home mainly from her point of view, and her stereotypical views of her black servants predominate. Yet the narrative presents us with more than a psychobiography of a white female character in the West Indies. At some points, the focalization shifts to the servants – for example, when we hear that they take an immense pleasure in teasing the woman and “see the amazement and appeal on Madame-là’s face” (18) or make her asking them questions “sounding lost” (18). By way of these occasional shifts in perspective, the mistress’s complacency of self-location is disrupted and the presence of ‘others’ and their secret knowledge – a knowledge that the mistress and her husband will never be able to fully grasp or control – is introduced into the text. The occasional shift to the servants’ perspective and the deliberate consideration of subaltern knowledge here works towards a narrative structure that, to borrow a phrase from Elleke Boehmer, can be described as a “self-conscious double-

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voicedness” of the text.19 By registering the presence of counter-voices and non-white subjectivities in a (post)colonial context, the narrative presents us with an alternative to the captivating focus of the female protagonist. The increasing sense of a loss of control is also acted out on the thematic level of the story. In the opening scene, the mistress listens to their maids singing “something rather merry and mocking” (15) while she is taking a bath. Later, the girls iron their hair with flat-irons for the dinner party that will take place in the evening, and the mistress wonders “why they should want to have hair as straight as ours, when they mock at us so!” (21). The servants’ behaviour towards their mistress can be read in terms of a “hidden transcript”20 – a critique of power that is spoken behind the back of the dominant and is inscribed in such everyday practices as cooking, cleaning, and serving meals. Even the avocado pears that the mistress and her guest have for dinner contain a “mysterious stuffing […] which must always remain a secret” (21). This ‘kitchen knowledge’ only gestures to the subalterns’ point of view, but it nevertheless effects a change in the white focalizing figure from seeing to being seen, from subject to object of power. The mistress cannot help but register that her sense of self is beginning to be transformed by the girls’ presence. This feeling is intensified by other actions of the girls – for example, their loose adoption of Western beauty ideals, as when they ‘de-kink’ their hair (21). The servant’s combination of mockery and imitation of whites causes bafflement and insecurity on the part of the mistress, thus disrupting her complacency. Yet the text performs a more complex move than the mere reversal of power-relations. The mistress is clearly sensing something about herself that she cannot fully grasp and control. The experience that prompts a self-reflexive repositioning arises not only from an encounter with something unexpected and foreign but from the adoption of others’ – in this case, the servants’ – knowledge. While desperately trying to dissociate herself from them by thinking of the girls in ethnic stereotypes (“people in this tropical island do not make love for romantic reasons, but as social and evolutionary means,” 20), she cannot help but register that her sense of self is beginning to be transformed by the girls’ presence. The climax of this transformation occurs at the dinner party that takes place at the end of the narrative where the mistress, 19

Boehmer, Empire, the National, and the Postcolonial, 180. James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven C T & London: Yale U P , 1990): xii. 20

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who has to cope with an arrogant male guest, gains confidence from the knowledge that “behind the glazed screen two interlinked forms are panting against each other with suppressed giggles” (22). During the conversation, she deliberately starts to imitate her servants, “borrowing an inflection of mockery from somewhere” (23). A moment later, one of the servants enters with a bowl of fruit jelly that looks, as the narrator says, “as if it is shaking – shaking with secret laughter” (23). Here, knowledge quite literally moves from the kitchen to the dining-room, where the hostess ‘borrows’ it from her servants in order to perplex her guest. It embodies the complexities and contradictions of cultural crossings that characterize the mistress’s household. Moreover, this knowledge constructs a secret complicity between the mistress and her servants, for the male guest has told a story that, unbeknownst to him, discloses to the mistress that he must be the father of her servants’ lightskinned children. In the depiction of this knowledge as a mobile and fluid force one can also locate the global consciousness of the text. It not only endorses how knowledge, as Laura Doyle puts it, “is issuing from somewhere ‘over there’ ” 21 but depicts this knowledge as freely circulating between mistresses, servants, and subalterns, thereby dissolving the boundary between ‘here’ and ‘there’. This is also dramatized in the spatial configuration of the narrative. While the situating of the mistress in the dining-room and the servants in the kitchen – “behind the glazed screen” – suggests a polarity and inscribes the idea of opposing classes and cultures, the knowledge that travels between the two spaces breaks down these oppositional relations. It is further hinted at in the transformation of the protagonist, who, as we saw earlier, not only borrows knowledge from her servants but even starts to imitate them. In this reversal of imitation – the girls imitate their mistress’s hairstyle earlier in the story – knowledge of different regions or cultures disrupts habitual perceptions (for example, the perception that English customs and habits are the only customs that are worth imitating) and the mistress’s sense of self is subjected to uncertainty. Following up on Melba Cuddy–Keane’s analysis of global encounters in modernist texts by identifying four different tropic structures, I interpret this reversed imitation as a figure of thought that prompts a transformative 21

Laura Doyle, “Geomodernism, Postcoloniality, and Women’s Writing,” in The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Women Writers, ed. Maren Tova Linett (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2010): 138.

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experience in the subject, but “not through an encounter with the foreign, but through the imagined adoption of the other’s point of view.”22 Cuddy–Keane calls this tropic structure ‘critical globalization’ and defines it as a textual strategy in which the cultural heritage of different regions is used in order “to disrupt habitual perceptions and practices,” thereby prompting a “self-reflexive awareness of positionality.”23 The story enacts this by depicting knowledge from different regions and cultures in circulation and in dialogue with each other. By imitating her servant’s sneering attitude, the mistress shows the signs of a cross-culturing that is characteristic of the flow of knowledge and experience in a globalized world. The spatial structure of the text highlights this. The mistress’s house is shown as a ‘contact-zone’ in which characters from different regions, cultures, and classes meet and interact with each other. But, contrary to the famous definition by Mary Louise Pratt, the power-relations in which the characters act and interact are not depicted as “radically asymmetrical”24 but are brought into constant flux by means of a shifting focalization, thereby expressing the complicated and shifting power-dynamics of a globalized contact-zone. Hence, the story employs both narrative and figural means in order to work towards a global – and, if we follow Cuddy–Keane, a critical – consciousness. The shifts in focalization not only inscribe the point of view of the subaltern in the text but show knowledge in circulation and power-relations in an ever-shifting configuration. The figural operation can be located in the mistress’s reversing imitation, where the imagined adoption of the servants’ – and, therefore, the subalterns’ – point of view causes self-location to wobble and induces a transformation in the woman and her relationship to her servants. This “chiasmic twist”25 in the story – the servants imitating the mistress, the mistress imitating the servants – not only disrupts habitual perceptions about the relationship between superior and subaltern, black and white, but also demonstrates how the short story, by way of its specific literary means, works towards a global imaginary and thus becomes the generative site for a critical discourse of globalization.

22

Cuddy–Keane, “Modernism, Geopolitics, Globalization,” 546. “Modernism, Geopolitics, Globalization,” 554. 24 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992): 8. 25 Cuddy–Keane, “Modernism, Geopolitics, Globalization,” 540. 23

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Epiphanic Encounters: “Parks” (first published in 2004) In “O Stay and Hear,” cultures are shown in relation and in interaction with each other. What the text establishes through its specific narrative and figural means are reciprocal rather than oppositional relations between cultures, races, and classes. If we follow Melba Cuddy–Keane’s distinction between different modes of globalized thinking in modernist texts, the narrative discourse of Allfrey’s short story can be called “critical” in aiming to represent both the multiplicity of voices and the multi-directional flows of knowledge and power in a globalized contact-zone, thereby offering a version of a globalized world that stresses the diversity and interconnectedness of people, histories, and places rather than the uniformity and homogeneity often associated with processes of globalization. But Allfrey’s short fiction does not always attempt to capture encounters between different cultures, contact-zone clashes, or the multidirectional flows of knowledge and power in a Caribbean setting. It also involves a perception of cultures that stresses the differences between them. My informing example here is Allfrey’s “Parks,” a story that dates from the 1940s but was published for the first time in 2004. Here, it is not so much the use of multiple perspectives as the use of epiphany – an element of figural narrative that is well known from ‘high’-modernist texts – that characterizes the narrative. Set in downtown New York, the story records the encounter between twenty-seven-year-old Minta Farrar – child of an Irishman and a black creole woman, adopted by an American family, and now married to a wealthy American businessman – and a nameless young man from Barbados whom she meets in a Trinidad nightclub in Harlem. With Minta acting as the main focalizer who secretly visits the nightclub while her husband is away on a business trip, the encounter between her and the young man could easily be depicted as an experience of mystic otherness in which the Barbadian would be constructed as the exotic immigrant. Instead – and despite the curious setting that Minta is normally not supposed to enter – what is emphasized in her meeting with the stranger is not the mystic or exotic aspect of this experience but the brief moment of fellowship that they share. New York here becomes a meeting-ground of outsiders, displaced characters and strangers, be it the adopted woman from the West Indies or the expatriates from Barbados, Jamaica, and other Caribbean islands who meet in the Trinidad nightclub. Similar to the Caribbean household in “O Stay and Hear,” the city can be analysed as a contact-zone in Mary Louise Pratt’s sense. But, once again, power-relations are turned upside down and are not easy to disentangle, and the characters are keenly aware of the possibilities

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and restrictions that are attached to this. As Minta ironically muses, her English driver would be a “third-rate planter” (36) on the island of Dominica but here, in New York, is her servant. As the illegitimate child of a “drunken Irishman” and a “seamstress, one-fourth African,” Minta knows that she would have been a “social outcast” in the West Indies but her very light complexion has given her the chance to climb the social ladder in New York. Hence, divisions of race and class separate Minta from other West Indian immigrants who gather in the nightclub. Divisions are also highlighted by the spatial structure of the story – Minta living in an “expensive Park Avenue apartment,” whereas the young man from Barbados lives in Harlem – and the racialized imagery that converts Harlem into the “notorious and amazing haunt of the negro race” (38) where Minta, “the sensitive coloured outcast” (38), does not fit in. Yet, the fact that she is a woman restricts her in ways that can hardly be compensated for by the extraordinarily comfortable lifestyle her American husband offers her. She is a “Lady of Shalott” (37), isolated in her expensive apartment with her baby girl, a woman with “too much money and no friends” (37). This feeling of alienation, in turn, links her to the Barbadian who works “in a little black hole of a place” and has no relatives in the U S A , “simply one or two casual and vagrant friends” (39). On the particular night of their encounter, Minta secretly leaves the apartment and, “yearning for humble brown companionship,” orders a taxi to drive her to the Harlem nightclub, where she meets the young man from Barbados. The experience of communion is initially a purely physical one, when Minta and the stranger dance with “their bodies in glorious rhythm” (38). After this physical experience, a communication without many words evolves in which both, despite their very different upbringing and social status, are suddenly struck by a sense of deep community, indeed by a sense of sameness: How suddenly two personalities can be riveted – bound by a glance, by a sharing of environment, by a gorgeous alikeness! Naively critical, they studied each other and perceived their semblance in a flash. But they were afraid of the ephemeral nature of their recognition. (40)

Presented as if seen through the eyes of both characters but nevertheless organized by a clearly discernible authorial voice, this scene can be read as an evocation of an epiphanic moment or, in Virginia Woolf’s words, a “moment of being.” For a very short period of time, the circumstances that restrain the characters in everyday life fade and a moment of intersubjective communication occurs. Modernist literature doubtless abounds with evocations of epi-

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phanic communion like the one quoted here, which Virginia Woolf, for example, has defined as the sudden revelation of an order behind the “cotton wool of daily life” that offers a relief from the limitations of the self: It proves that one’s life is not confined to one’s body and what one says and does; one is living all the time in relation to certain background rods or conceptions.26

These epiphanic moments in modernist literature have often been interpreted as a sign of modernism’s escapism, its retreat from the political and social sphere. But in Allfrey’s story the encounter between Minta and the young man from Barbados is not elevated to a mystic experience – what Minta is left with on her way back home from Harlem to her apartment in Park Avenue is “the blank mind of one who has sought wild danger and discovered fellowship” (41). For Minta, the encounter with the young man provides the insight that the alienation she feels in everyday life is not restricted to her subjectposition as a creole woman in New York. What she shares with the young man from Barbados is the sense of a condition that, in Susheila Nasta’s words, can be described as a “mulatto reality” – a reality “suspended in the spaces that both separate and conjoin […] colonial past and metropolitan present” and that cannot be comprehended by either.27 That is also acted out in the park imagery that is used repeatedly in the story and that contrasts a paradisiacal tropical garden with the desolateness of New York’s Central Park: “But the other park…ah, oranges, and mangoes…There is a difference” (41). The tropical garden suggests an alternative ordering of power-structures; it suggests a space beyond the colonial and racial confines of their actual surroundings. It thus puts into perspective the hierarchies that structure the urban space of New York. But the encounter has yet another significance. For Minta, the moment is revelatory and relieving because it shows her that the limits of her self do not mark the limits of the world – indeed, it shows her that life is more complex and varied than her present condition as a rich but bored and lonesome Park Avenue woman allows her to perceive. The non-assimilative encounter with the young man makes her aware of the coexistence of different subjective worlds, hence provides relief from her feeling of alienation. Melba Cuddy– 26

Virginia Woolf, “A Sketch of the Past,” in Moments of Being: A Collection of Autobiographical Writing, ed. Jeanne Schulkind (1985; San Diego C A , New York & London: Harvest, 1976 ): 73. 27 Nasta, “ ‘ Voyaging in’,” 567.

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Keane calls this mode of evoking encounters between cultures in literary texts “cohabiting globalisation” and grants it a specific role in modernism’s engagement with globalization: […] this mode acknowledges the autonomous, independent being of the other. […] Encounters with individual voices from elsewhere situate the self relationally and equally with others in the world.28

According to Cuddy–Keane, ‘cohabiting globalization’ fosters an awareness of the multiplicity of voices and cultures that inhabit the globe without trying to unify differences into one normative language. The way in which the relationship between Minta and the young man form Barbados is configured in “Parks” works towards this pluralistic vision of globalization because the story resists the assimilation of difference into an all-encompassing unity. Minta and the man share a brief moment of communion but this is neither romanticized nor presented as an experience that appropriates the young man into Minta’s world. This is also emphasized by the end of the story, which highlights the distinctness and separateness of Minta’s and the young man’s life: “[…] next Saturday he could go to the Trinidad Nightclub and make himself richly drunk. For herself, she would have a bath and some breakfast” (42). The epiphanic encounter leads to an apprehension of alterity and an awareness that this alterity can always only be glimpsed from the outside because one’s own point of view is necessarily limited.

Conclusion In his now seminal essay “Modernism and Imperialism,”29 the cultural theorist Fredric Jameson argues that the experience of displacement and spatial lack lie at the heart of literary modernism. According to Jameson, modernism arose in response to the experience of spatial disjunction in the British Empire. Colonialism meant that a significant part of the economic system was now located elsewhere, beyond the metropolis, outside of the daily life and existential experience of the home country, in colonies over the water whose own 28

Cuddy–Keane, “Modernism, Geopolitics, Globalization,” 549–51. Fredric Jameson, “Modernism and Imperialism,” in Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature, ed. Seamus Deane (1988; Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 1990): 43– 66. 29

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experience and life world – […] – remain unknown and unimaginable for the subjects of imperial power.30

The experience of the radical otherness of colonial life, an absent space that cannot be fully grasped and thus cannot be fully controlled, must therefore, according to Jameson, be understood as a catalyst of the modernists’ experiments with form: I want in fact to suggest that the structure of imperialism also makes its mark on the inner forms and structures of that new mutation in literary and artistic language to which the term modernism is loosely applied.31

Challenging the long-held view that modernism was an essentially self-contained, apolitical literary and aesthetic movement, Jameson’s essay marks a significant turn in modernist studies. What I have suggested in my reading of two of Phyllis Shand Allfrey’s short stories is that Jameson’s emphasis on the absent spaces and spatial disjunctions that, according to him, profoundly shaped the world-view and writing of the modernists, can well be extended to the period after 1945. Yet, in contrast to Jameson’s juxtaposition of the imperial metropolis and its ‘other’, the colony, and in contrast to his much-criticized tendency to posit the metropolis as the cultural and emotional heartland of modernism, the present essay has focused on the interface between different cultures, on clashes in contactzones, and intertwined histories that affected not only the metropolitan centres of empire but also the so-called periphery. Allfrey’s short fiction is particularly sensitive to the intensification of global connections that characterize the first half of the twentieth century, and her fiction speaks in various ways to the complex entanglements and contradictions of cultural crossings in a colonial and postcolonial world. Multiple perspectives and epiphany – two narrative strategies that have been strongly associated with ‘high’ modernism and have often been seen as a sign of the aloofness of modernist texts – are employed to dramatize the interconnectedness of people, histories, and places in a globalized world. However, what I have attempted to show with reference to Cuddy– Keanes’s theoretical framework of global modernism is that Allfrey’s short fiction not only mirrors historical or cultural developments but that it also functions as a generative site for a critical discourse of globalization. Allfrey’s 30 31

Jameson, “Modernism and Imperialism,” 50–51. “Modernism and Imperialism,” 44.

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engagement with perspectivism and epiphany works towards a global imaginary that complicates and even criticizes received notions of globalization – for example, the standard association of globalization with cultural heterogeneity. Instead, it insists on the irreducible plurality of voices and histories in the imperial and economic matrix of the first half of the twentieth century. The fictional worlds that her stories evoke are characterized by continuous cultural mixing and competing notions of history and truth. In the title story of Allfrey’s story collection, the main character – a biographer who struggles with writing the biography of an island poet – ends his research with the following words: Never mind whether he was a Frenchman or a Britisher, a coloured man or a white man – he was a great poet, who died unloved, and he will always be one of us. (126)

This can be read as a self-reflexive commentary on Allfrey’s own situation; more importantly, what can be felt when reading her short fiction is that Allfrey’s attempt to forge a global aesthetic was not influenced simply by her personal history but by the desire to create narrative styles that adequately reflected the new transnational affiliations formed by imperialism and the two world wars. Thus, Allfrey’s writing goes beyond traditional Caribbean writings of place, a genre that David Dabydeen proposes in praising Allfrey for her “fearless description of local landscape, her naming of it.”32 Rather, her short fiction can be said to display what Salman Rushdie has called the “migrant’s-eye view of the world,”33 a pluralistic version of a globalized world in which diverse points of view are acknowledged, the dichotomies of ‘local’ versus ‘global’, centre versus periphery are deconstructed, and the contingency and complexity of relations between cultures, histories, and places are constantly highlighted and, indeed, celebrated.

WORKS CITED Allfrey, Phyllis Shand. It Falls Into Place: The Stories of Phyllis Shand Allfrey, ed. Lizabeth Paravisini–Gebert (London & Roseau: Papillote, 2004). Bayly, Christopher Alan. The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Malden M A & Oxford: Blackwell, 2004). 32

David Dabydeen, “Island Dreams,” The Guardian (22 January 2005). Salman Rushdie, “In Good Faith” (1990), in Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991 (New York: Granta / Penguin, 1991): 394. 33

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Boehmer, Elleke. Empire, the National, and the Postcolonial, 1890–1920 (New York & Oxford: Oxford U P , 2002). Cuddy–Keane, Melba. “Global Modernisms,” in A Companion to Modernist Literature and Culture, ed. David Bradshaw & Kevin J.H. Dettmar (2006; Malden M A & Oxford: Blackwell, 2008): 558–64. ——. “Modernism, Geopolitics, Globalization,” Modernism / Modernity 10.3 (September 2003): 539–58. Dabydeen, David. “Island Dreams,” The Guardian (22 January 2005). Doyle, Laura. “Geomodernism, Postcoloniality, and Women’s Writing,” in The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Women Writers, ed. Maren Tova Linett (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2010): 129–45. ——, & Laura Winkiel, ed. Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana U P , 2005). Jameson, Fredric. “Modernism and Imperialism,” in Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature, ed. Seamus Deane (1988; Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 1990): 43– 66. Gaonkar, Dilip, ed. Alternative Modernities (Durham N C : Duke U P , 2001). Gikandi, Simon. Writing in Limbo: Modernism and Caribbean Literature (Ithaca N Y : Cornell U P , 1992). Nasta, Susheila. “‘Voyaging in’: Colonialism and Migration,” in The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century English Literature, ed. Laura Marcus & Peter Nicholls (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2005): 563–82. Nunez–Harrell, Elizabeth. “The Paradoxes of Belonging: The White West Indian Woman in Fiction,” M F S Modern Fiction Studies 31.2 (Summer 1985): 281–93. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992) Reichardt, Ulfried. Globalisierung: Literaturen und Kulturen des Globalen (Berlin: Akademie, 2010). Rushdie, Salman. “In Good Faith” (1990), in Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991 (New York: Granta/Penguin, 1991): 393–414. Scott, James C. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven C T & London: Yale U P , 1990). Woolf, Virginia. “Poetry, Fiction and the Future,” in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, ed. Andrew McNeillie (1927; New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1994): 428–41. ——. “A Sketch of the Past,” in Moments of Being: A Collection of Autobiographical Writing, ed. Jeanne Schulkind (1985; San Diego C A , New York & London: Harvest, 1976 ): 61–159.

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Emancipation and Protest — Moravian Mission and the Labour Strike in St Kitts

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had an enormous impact on colonial societies in the Caribbean. The enfranchisement of the slaves was anxiously expected, with government officials and planters concerned about whether the slaves could be emancipated without violence and, most significantly, whether they would continue to work in a plantation economy. The elites hoped to avoid significant changes in the plantation system or the hierarchical character of colonial society.1 The British Parliament introduced a transitional period, termed apprenticeship, in order to secure a smooth progression from slavery to full freedom and to reimburse the planters for their loss of property. All former slaves above the age of six had to serve the next six years as apprentices,2 working fortyfive hours a week on the plantations of their former owners, and they received allowances of food, clothing, and housing for their work, rather than wages.3 However, the transition from slavery to apprenticeship caused resentment at the resultant slave-like condition of bondage, with apprentices striking against the new system throughout the Caribbean. The most prominent case occurred

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HE GRADUAL EMANCIPATION OF SLAVES

William A. Green, British Slave Emancipation: The Sugar Colonies and the Great Experiment, 1830–1865 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991): 126. 2 Green, British Slave Emancipation, 121–22. Although apprenticeship was designated for a period of six years, full freedom was granted ahead of schedule on 1 August 1838. 3 British Slave Emancipation, 121–22.

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in St Kitts, where several thousands left their plantations to seek refuge in the mountains; it took the colonial authorities several weeks to restore order. Historians have scarcely drawn attention to the case of St Kitts, with Philip Sherlock writing merely that martial law “had to be proclaimed […] and some ex-slaves punished before the apprentices would work.”4 Indeed, Douglas Hall mentions only that there “were some riots” in St Kitts.5 Richard Frucht argues that the events following the official end of slavery in St Kitts on 1 August 1838 were not spontaneous but, rather, organized by ex-slaves opposing the apprenticeship system.6 While Frucht’s analysis of the events is based on Colonial Office records, the present essay will focus on material relating to the Moravian missionaries who had engaged in preaching among the enslaved in St Kitts since 1772, with primary sources including missionaries’ diaries and letters, as well as official Church publications containing remarks regarding the strike. The missionaries were accused of having fostered resentment among the subjects of the apprenticeship system, although they publicly denied any such interference. Armando Lampe assumes that Moravian preaching successfully disciplined slaves to remain obedient to their masters, and consequently that no Moravian slaves participated in the rebellions.7 However, new research by Claus Füllberg–Stolberg with reference to the uprisings in Jamaica 1831/32 and St Croix 1848 has indicated that many Moravian slaves actually were among the rebels. Accordingly, this essay will argue that – despite its preaching of obedience and submission – the Moravian mission offered slaves the possibility of organizing resistance. The first part of this essay will outline the specific situation of slave emancipation in St Kitts and the events following 1 August 1834. The Moravian manuscripts and missionary periodicals, considered in a second part, will be

4

Philip Sherlock, West Indian Nations: A New History (London: Macmillan, 1973):

229. 5

Douglas Hall, Five of the Leewards, 1834–1870: The Major Problems of the PostEmancipation Period in Antigua, Barbuda, Montserrat, Nevis and St. Kitts (Barbados: Caribbean U P , 1971): 24. In the same vein, Green, British Slave Emancipation, 133. 6 Richard Frucht, “Emancipation and Revolt in the West Indies: St. Kitts, 1834,” Science and Society 39.2 (Summer 1975): 199–214. 7 Armando Lampe, Mission or Submission? Moravian and Catholic Missionaries in the Dutch Caribbean During the 19th Century (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2001): 68.

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examined with a view to determining whether the missionaries supported the strike and how they reacted to it.

British Slave Emancipation in the Leeward Islands St Kitts was administered as part of the Leeward Islands, which in 1832 were brought under the administration of a Governor-General, residing in St John, Antigua, 60 miles north-west of St Kitts.8 The British government’s plans to establish a federal government for the Leeward Islands were unsuccessful, with each colony having its own assemblies, councils, and governors, all supervised by the Governor-General. Sugar had been the main crop grown on St Kitts since the eighteenth century, with the island offering fertile ground for its cultivation despite being volcanic and mountainous. In 1833, St Kitts was an extensively cultivated sugar colony with an underdeveloped allotment system for provisioning the slaves. Indeed, most of the population on St Kitts were slaves, outnumbering a minority population of free coloureds and whites.9 The Emancipation Act was proclaimed in St Kitts in August 1833 and later announced to the slaves. The colonial legislatures of St Kitts and Antigua discussed the Act of Emancipation during the following months. The act included certain essential and immutable conditions, such as that all children under the age of six should be completely free and, as mentioned above, that former slaves above the age of six were to serve a term designated as an ‘apprenticeship’ before being granted full freedom. While the colonial legislature was not permitted to alter the essential conditions of the Act, it was possible not to enforce an apprenticeship or, alternatively, to shorten this period;10 thus, estate owners could voluntarily relinquish the apprenticeship. Although St Kitts passed several laws to introduce the apprenticeship system, the assembly of Antigua chose another option, agreeing on 11 September 1833 that an apprenticeship period would be of no use to their colony.11 Therefore, 8

Hall, Five of the Leewards, 1. The British Leeward Islands included at that time Anguilla, Antigua, Barbuda, the British Virgin Islands, Dominica, Montserrat, Nevis, Redonda, and St Christopher (St Kitts). 9 Frucht, “Emancipation and Revolt in the West Indies,” 204. Total population of approx. 22,700 (whites: 1589; free coloureds: 2.497; slaves: 18.614). 10 Hall, Five of the Leewards 1834–1870, 16. 11 Five of the Leewards 1834–1870, 17.

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Antigua joined Bermuda in being the only colonies within the British Empire whose assemblies decided not to have an apprenticeship period, as they “considered the apprenticeship plan more damaging than full emancipation.”12 Most of the planters in Antigua maintained their slaves on the basis of imported provisions, as the provision-ground complex was not well developed on Antigua. Bearing this in mind, as well as the reduction of work-hours by twenty-five percent during apprenticeship, this option simply seemed too expensive for them. Consequently, the slaves on Antigua received their full and complete freedom on 1 August 1834, whereas those on St Kitts had to serve out the following years as apprentices to their former masters.

Labourers Protest in St Kitts While visiting several estates in July 1834 to explain the apprenticeship system to the slaves, Lieutenant-Governor John Lyons Nixon noticed disappointment among the slaves and, describing the situation in a report to Governor Evan MacGregor in Antigua, urgently requested Imperial troops: They all protested against the apprenticeship system, declaring their resolution to resist it, and not to work after the 1 of August without wages, saying that day they were to be free as announced by the King’s proclamation, […]; many of them observing that they had as good a right to be free as the negroes of Antigua, and that the Governor of Antigua, who was the Governor of St. Kitts also, had made them free, and that I was Lieut. Governor, and was brought by the white men to deceive them. They hooted and threw banana husks at or towards me.13

This source summarizes some of the main concerns of the slaves in St Kitts regarding the apprenticeship system: namely, the widespread belief that the King had made them free. They also created a furore about the uneven transition from slavery to apprenticeship in St Kitts and Antigua, and furthermore believed that the Governor-General of the Leeward Islands had also made them free, yet that their freedom was withheld by the Lieutenant-Governor and the planters. Frightened by the acts of opposition faced when announcing the Emancipation Act, Nixon appealed to MacGregor for additional troops. 12

Green, British Slave Emancipation, 124. Public Record Office London, Colonial Office (C O ) 239/37, Lieut. Gov. Nixon to Gov. Gen. MacGregor, 19 July 1834. 13

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He complained that no police force was stationed on St Kitts and considered the 239 men of his troops stationed at Brimstone Hill and the 500 men of the militia to be incapable of suppressing any potential riots. MacGregor sent arms, ammunition, and a regiment of soldiers to St Kitts. They arrived in St Kitts at the end of July,14 with signal posts erected throughout the island, the military parading in the streets, and members of the local militia prepared for action in the event of disturbances. All such actions were aimed at keeping the people calm and enabling the transition to apprenticeship to take place smoothly. Given that 1 August, a Friday, had been declared a public holiday, St Kitts’ planters did not notice the full extent of the strike prior to the following Monday. Refusing to work without pay, the apprentices left their homes in the estate yards and took to the mountains. On Monday 4 August, Governor MacGregor arrived from Antigua to restore order, threatening to declare martial law if the ex-slaves did not return to work by Wednesday.15 However, the passive resistance of the labourers continued, with even the public punishment of rebels failing to stop the opposition. With the apprentices still hiding in the mountains by 12 August, the government enforced stronger measures to end the strike. The huts of the apprentices on several plantations were burned and their allotments destroyed. The destruction of the little property they owned constituted harsh action against the former slaves, for whom access to land and the possibility of growing some food on their allotments was an essential part of the slave family’s economy. Concurrently, the military pressed upwards into the mountains, driving both the striking labourers and the runaway slaves out of the forest. The destruction of their homes and the military defeat of the apprentices led to their capitulation. While suspending martial law on 18 August, MacGregor declared an amnesty of all those who were not already under punishment.16 A court-martial was held for those accused of planning the strike, with sixteen people, including two women, convicted during the hearing. Five of them were banished to Bermuda for life, with the rest flogged or imprisoned for varying periods of time. In a despatch to Thomas Spring Rice, the Secretary of State, Governor MacGregor included a collection of reports from government officials, planters, and missionaries, dealing with the causes of the strike and its organiza14

Frucht, “Emancipation and Revolt in the West Indies,” 206. “Emancipation and Revolt in the West Indies,” 208. 16 “Emancipation and Revolt in the West Indies,” 213. 15

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tion.17 As the despatch did not feature any interviews with apprentices or proceedings of the court-martial, these reports represent the only means of attempting to reconstruct the perspective of the labourers. The main factors mentioned for the strike against the apprenticeship were as follows: the decision of the assembly in Antigua to suspend the transfer period; the fact that Earl Romney, a planter in St Kitts, voluntarily relinquished the apprenticeship period on his estates in St Kitts;18 and, finally, the rumour that the King had already given the slaves unrestricted freedom and that the planters on St Kitts had designed the apprenticeship period in order to maintain the slavery system.19 All of this had created an atmosphere of dissatisfaction and suspicion among those enslaved, in a situation exacerbated by problems involving the appointment of the Special Magistrates in St Kitts and the structure of the working week for the apprentices, both of which led to increasing resistance to the new system.20 Only one of the three Special Magistrates for St Kitts arrived in time, and some of the planters ordered their slaves to work for 7.5 hours per day for six days a week, rather than 8 hours per day for five days a week. The apprentices resented such an arrangement, as it excluded them from the opportunity to visit the market on Saturday, where they could sell what they had grown in their allotments. The slaves’ objection to the apprenticeship system had previously been noted some months prior to 1 August, particularly during meetings held to explain the system.21 The slaves on St Kitts communicated with their counterparts on neighbouring islands concerning measures for the transition period and apprenticeship laws.22 This explains the abundant information held by the St Kitts labourers about the situation in Antigua, and it was argued that this spread of information might have prompted the attempts at partial revolt on

17

MacGregor to Spring Rice, 19 August 1834, in House of Commons Parliamentary Papers (PP) 1837 L, 77–89. 18 Davis to MacGregor, 13 August 1834, in PP 1837 L, 80. Bigler to MacGregor, 17 August 1834, in PP 1837 L, 80–81. Cox to MacGregor, 18 August 1834, in PP 1837 L, 81–83. 19 Cox to MacGregor, 18 August 1834, in PP 1837 L, 81. 20 Frucht, “Emancipation and Revolt in the West Indies,” 210. 21 Burt to MacGregor, 3 December 1834, in PP 1837 L, 105. Crooke et al. to Nixon, 20 December 1834, in PP 1837 L, 106–107. 22 Piguenet to MacGregor, 5 December 1834, in PP 1837 L, 104.

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the neighbouring islands.23 Various government officials and proprietors noted that emissaries had been sent between the ring-leaders – the foremen of field work – organizing resistance on several estates to.24 On the morning of 4 August, they led their work gangs into the mountains, where the rebels could built huts and launch night-raids on the allotments situated on the mountain slopes.25 The leaders of work-gangs held a powerful position within slave society, organizing and supervising field-work, enacting punishment, and acting as intermediaries between slaves and the overseer. Consequently, their position within plantation society was highly complex, and they often used their mobility and authority to organize resistance during slave rebellions. Those apprentices who did not participate in the strike were mostly house servants and skilled workers who, despite occupying higher positions within the hierarchy of the slave system, had no close connection to field-work and might not have risked their position on the plantation.26

Moravian Mission and Slave Emancipation in St Kitts Founded by Count Nicolas of Zinzendorf in 1722, the German pietistic sect of the Moravian Brethren began their missionary work in the Caribbean in the early-eighteenth century, with their first mission established in the Danish West Indies in 1732, shortly before missions in the Dutch and British Caribbean.27 The Moravians began their missionary work in St Kitts in 1777,28 and, as elsewhere in the Caribbean, they were invited by a planter who had heard about their successful work in Antigua and wanted them to engage with the slaves on his plantation.29 Tolerance was extended towards the dissenting churches because the planters hoped that the missionaries would make the slaves more docile. In his 23

Piguenet to MacGregor, 5 December 1834, in PP 1837 L, 104. Crooke et al. to Nixon, 20 December 1834, in PP 1837 L, 106. 25 Frucht, “Emancipation and Revolt in the West Indies,” 211. 26 “Emancipation and Revolt in the West Indies,” 207. 27 Hartmut Beck, Brüder in vielen Völkern: 250 Jahre Mission in der Brüdergemeine (Erlangen: Evangelisch-Lutheranische Mission, 1981): 41–42. 28 G.G. Oliver Maynard, A History of the Moravian Church: Eastern West Indies Province (Port of Spain: Moravian Church Eastern West Indies Province, 1968): 79– 82. 29 Maynard, A History of the Moravian Church, 79. 24

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Idea Fidei Fratrum (1777), Count Zinzenberg’s successor August Spangenberg pointed out that the missionaries would not interfere with colonial policy.30 Indeed, the church did not question slavery but considered it part of the social order. The missionaries were “apologists of the political status quo.”31 As previously mentioned, the plantation owners put their faith in the positive effects that the missionaries’ presence would have on the slaves, expecting those who attended the Moravian services to be more obedient, especially since the missionaries rejected attempts at resistance. In several cases, the missionaries prided themselves on how faithful members of their congregation had been to their masters during militant conflict with slaves.32 However, during the ‘Christmas Rebellion’ in Jamaica of 1831/32, several members of the Moravian mission were among the rebels, with one missionary prosecuted for encouraging slaves to participate in the insurrection.33 Although it is unlikely that the missionaries actively promoted rebellion, these rumours endangered the mission in Jamaica, given that they caused hostility towards the missionaries among the planters. The Moravians published several pamphlets in the aftermath of the rebellion, denying any active participation on the part of their members. The Moravian missionaries were not abolitionists, not only because they never interfered in worldly affairs but also because they themselves owned slaves working as house servants or in their missionary enterprises.34 They

30

Louise Sebro, “Den kulturelle mission – Brødremenigheden i Dansk Vestindien,” in På sporet af imperiet: Dansk tropefantasier, ed. Lene Bull Christiansen (Roskilde: Institut for Sprog og Kultur, 2005): 41. 31 Claus Füllberg–Stolberg, “Moravian Mission and the Emancipation of Slaves in the Caribbean,” in The End of Slavery in the Americas and Africa: A Comparative Perspective, ed. Katja Füllberg–Stolberg, Ulrike Schmieder & Michael Zeuske (Berlin: L I T , 2011): 82. 32 Füllberg–Stolberg, “Moravian Mission and the Emancipation of Slaves in the Caribbean,” 87. 33 Mary Turner, Slaves and Missionaries: The Disintegration of Jamaican Slave Society, 1787–1834 (Kingston, Jamaica: U of the West Indies P , 2000): 165. 34 The majority of slaves belonged to the missionary enterprises in Suriname and in the Danish West Indies (nowadays the U S Virgin Islands). For Suriname, see Maria Lenders, Strijders voor het Lam: Leven en Werk van Herrnhuter Broeders en Zusters in Suriname, 1735–1900 (Leiden: K I T L V , 1996): 224–31. The slave holdings of the missionaries in the Danish West Indies are best described by Christian Degn, Die

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had been in an ongoing struggle with the Anti-Slavery Society since 1830, when the missionaries’ ownership of slaves became public in England.35 The announcement that the missionaries held people in bondage endangered the mission’s material existence, given its reliance on interdenominational financial support.36 Therefore, the manumission of the Moravians’ slaves in the British Caribbean took place under pressure of the abolitionist movement in April 1833, just months before the Emancipation Act was proclaimed.37 While the mission freed their slaves in the British Caribbean, they continued to hold slaves in the Dutch and Danish Caribbean and the U S A .

Raising Resistance? Moravian Mission and Labourers Protest in St Kitts Lieutenant-Governor Nixon only explained the Emancipation act to ten percent of the “well educated” enslaved,38 which must certainly have included some members of the missionary churches, given their access to education through the Church’s Sunday schools. This minority were then expected to explain the Emancipation Act to the remainder of the population. Further, in August 1833 Nixon sent the Act to all established churches in St Kitts, to be read to the slaves during the next service of worship.39 The missionaries were instrumentalized by the Government to secure a smooth transition from slavery to apprenticeship, and their role as “agents of colonial order”40 must have strengthened their authority in the eyes of the slaves. However, the missionaries had already noticed unrest and dissatisfaction among the labourers several months before emancipation, with the missionary David Bigler Schimmelmanns im atlantischen Dreieckshandel: Gewinn und Gewissen (Neumünster: Wachholtz, 2000): 43–58. 35 Lampe, Mission or Submission?, 68. 36 Mission or Submission?, 67. Füllberg–Stolberg, “Moravian Mission and the Emancipation of Slaves in the Caribbean,” 91. 37 Lampe, Mission or Submission?, 70. 38 Nixon to Stanley, 30 June 1834, in PP 1837, 234. 39 Unitätsarchiv der Evangelischen Brüder-Unität Herrnhut (Moravian Archives Herrnhut, Germany), U A H R15Fb 2f1 (1833–1877), Diarium von Basseterre, St. Kitts (Diary Basseterre St. Kitts), 27 August 1833. 40 Jeffrey Kerr–Ritchie, Rites of August First: Emancipation Day in the Black Atlantic World (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State U P , 2007): 17–18.

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describing the situation in a letter to the Brethren in England, printed in the Periodical Accounts: We are looking forward with, daily increasing apprehensions, towards the result of the important experiment of apprenticeship; for it becomes more and more apparent, the nearer we approach to the termination of the present order of things, that some of the negroes cannot, but by far the majority will not, understand their need being bound again.41

His remarks are representative of the anxiety connected with the abolition of slavery and common among many members of the white population in the Caribbean.42 The above text was also a political message concerning the Church’s approach towards apprenticeship. By emphasizing the resentment of the enslaved towards the new system, the missionaries highlighted the illegitimacy of the apprentices’ resistance. While Baptist missionaries had run a campaign against apprenticeship in particular, the Moravian mission fell in line with colonial policy on the subject.43 Like all missionary societies, they tried to explain their new situation to the apprentices and to exhort them to be obedient and faithful labourers.44 Br. Bigler, who conducted worship on the day of emancipation, did his best to fulfil the expectations of the colonial government: The text selected for the occasion was “If the son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed” John 8,36. Knowing the prejudices of the people against the terms bound & apprenticeship & that they persist in the belief that the King has made them free, but the Buckras or white people in Basseterre wish to bind them again. Care was taken not to use these terms at all but at once to explain the nature of the new system & enforce obedience & faithfulness by every possible argument.45

41

David Bigler, Basseterre, 14 July 1834, in Periodical Accounts Relating to the Missions of the Church of the United Brethren, established among the Heathen (P A ) vol. X I I I (London: Brethren’s Society, 1834): 185. 42 Green, British Slave Emancipation, 126. 43 Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830–1867 (Cambridge: Blackwell, 2002): 316–20. 44 Spring Rice to MacGregor 6 September 1834, in PP 1837 L, 75. 45 U A H , R15Fb 2f1 (1833–1877), 3 August 1834.

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The text of John 8:36 had already been used under slavery to tell the slaves that they should not fight for their physical freedom. At the moment of slave emancipation it was instrumentalized to prevent riotous movements and to secure a smooth transition to the new system.46 However, Bigler was unable to allay the apprentices’ disaffection and and quell their resistance. Moreover, it is likely that the sermon preached on that occasion served to trigger resistance among the former slaves. Although the missionaries were interested in the freedom of the soul rather than that of the body, the slaves might have interpreted what was said in another way.47 The belief that the King had already granted them their freedom must have supported such an interpretation, particularly as Bigler explicitly omitted the words “bound” and “apprenticeship” from his address. Furthermore, besides representing the Moravian Church he was also a mouthpiece of the colonial Government, and the apprentices, badly informed as they had been about the transition period, were reliant on his remarks. Even though Bigler actually did not intend to support riotous behaviour among the enslaved, some Church members encouraged the resistance of others by referring to his sermon of 1 August. The rebels could thus misuse the missionaries’ role as the mouthpiece of the colonial declarations: “You are free Massa Bigler says you are free & need not work unless the Master pays you either in money, rice beef pork, etc.”48 Two of the most important goals of the apprentices are mentioned in this short sentence: that they were free, and that their masters had to pay them. By referring to Bigler, the message looked official and convinced some rebels that at least the missionaries were on their side. In the mission diary, it is mentioned that this message was spread by “some evil-disposed persons,” supporting the assumption that Bigler’s sermon may have been used to support the strike. Further information regarding the situation is provided by a letter printed in the Periodical Accounts: The consequence was, I regret to say, that some evil-disposed persons (excluded members of our congregation), brought to their comrades on 46

Alex van Stipriaan, “July 1, Emancipation Day in Suriname: A Contested ‘lieu de mémoire’ 1863–2003,” New West Indian Guide / Nieuw West Indische Gids 78 (2004): 274. 47 Jon Sensbach, “Race and the Early Moravian Church: A Comparative Perspective,” Transactions of the Moravian Historical Society 31 (2000): 3. 48 U A H , R15Fb 2f1 (1833–1877), 3 August 1834.

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several estates, so gross and malicious a misrepresentation of my words, that not only the spirit of disaffection was increased, but my own and my Brethren’s good name might have suffered injury.49

Therefore, Bigler’s preaching was evidently used successfully by the apprentices in order to increase the number of those supporting strike action. Consequently, and contrary to their intention, Moravian missionaries were unable to prevent their congregations from participating in slave rebellions. Like other missionary societies, the Moravians had a subversive impact on the slaves because the latter construed the sermon’s appeal for submission and obedience as a message calling for freedom and resistance. The missionaries soon apologized to the Governor for the incident, and sent a letter to the colonial council declaring that they were “very unhappy with the evil spirit among the negroes” and that the words used by the apprentices had “been a total perversion of Br. Bigler’s sermon.”50 They were dissatisfied with the insubordination of the apprentices, which included many members of their church.51 Given that church congregants often held high positions in slave society, it could be presumed that some of the gang leaders who organized the strike were members of the Moravian mission.52 They might also have used the organizational structure of the church to organize opposition to the apprenticeship system, as had been the case in other slave uprisings.53

Official Reactions of the Moravian Church The worldwide Moravian community cultivated an extensive communication network, with several periodicals exchanged among the missionaries to foster a common spirit and to secure the community’s homogeneous development.54 In addition to the private diaries of the missionaries, each mission station had 49

David Bigler, Basseterre 14 July 1834, in P A vol. X I I I (1834): 181. U A H R15Fb 2f1 (1833–1877), 4 August 1834. 51 U A H R15Fb 2f1 (1833–1877), 10 August 1834. 52 Richard Dunn, “Moravian Missionaries at Work in a Jamaican Slave Community, 1745–1835,” The James Ford Bell Lectures 32 (1994): 9. 53 Turner, Slaves and Missionaries, 118. 54 Gisela Mettele, Weltbürgertum oder Gottesreich: Die Herrnhuter Brüdergemeine als globale Gemeinschaft 1727–1857 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2009): 114–23. 50

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an official diary recording information about the missionary work and ethnographical as well as political events, with copies sent to Bethlehem in Pennsylvania and Herrnhut in Germany. Given that these diaries were read at public meetings and intended to inform the whole Moravian community as well as guests, “they served to a certain degree as propaganda.”55 Sentences considered inappropriate for printing were deleted by members of the mission headquarters, particularly if the journal dealt with political issues. The extracts from these official diaries were printed in the so-called Gemeinnachrichten for the use of the brethren themselves. Another review, the aforementioned Periodical Accounts, was intended to distribute missionary intelligence among the public in Britain and thereby to raise money for missionary work.56 It also included several reports and extracts from mission diaries. All such printed records provide a vast amount of information, yet it is revealing to compare the information they provide with that contained in the original sources. The original journal from St Kitts mentions the severe punishment of the apprentices, with Br. Bigler being distressed, during his visit to Basseterre on 11 August, at the military’s “flogging all day long, the delinquents receiving each 100, 150, or 200 lashes.”57 Despite being only mildly critical, this description was not included in the extracts printed in the Periodical Accounts or the Nachrichten aus der Brüdergemeine.58 Likewise, his statement that “no open acts of violence had been committed” by the apprentices was left out.59 Both comments were clearly unsuitable for wider circulation within the Church as well as their public representation, as indirect criticism of the harsh punishment of apprentices was not in accord with the Moravian Church’s policy not to interfere in politics. Consequently, even the slightest form of 55

Carola Wessel, “Connecting Congregations: The Net of Communication Among the Moravians in the Late 18th Century,” in The Distinctiveness of Moravian Culture: Festschrift for Vernon Nelson, ed. Craig Atwood & Peter Vogt (Nazareth P A : Moravian Historical Society, 2003): 153–72. 56 Mettele, Weltbürgertum oder Gottesreich, 185–86. 57 U A H R15Fb 2f1 (1833–1877), 11 August 1834. 58 David Bigler & Abraham Scholefield, Bericht von Basseterre auf St. Kitts vom Jahre 1834, in Nachrichten aus der Brüdergemeine 1837 (Gnadau: Buchandlung der Evangelischen Brüder-Unität, n.d.): 59–80. Extracts of Letters from St. Kitts, in P A vol. X I I I (1834): 180–82. 59 U A H R15Fb 2f1 (1833–1877), 7 August 1834.

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criticism regarding colonial policies had to be deleted, as the extracts from the diaries were read to other Caribbean congregations and might have stirred unrest against the apprenticeship system. The Moravian Church accordingly condemned the events in St Kitts in the Periodical Accounts. In his foreword, Peter Latrobe, the editor of this review, praised slave emancipation and referred to the events in St Kitts by detailing that “a sudden and wide spreading insurrection, [had] ravag[ed] a third, and call[ed] into awful and destructive, the evil destructions of ungodly or misguided men.”60 Texts selected for publication focused on examples that justified the apprenticeship system. For instance, emphasis was placed on how often the missionaries had tried to explain the new system to the slaves, with several letters mentioning “that some of the negroes cannot, but by far the majority will not, understand their being bound again.”61 The apprenticeship period is described as being framed by “friends in England for their benefit, both spiritual and temporal, and [it] came like all other blessings from the Lord our God,”62 and the selection of letters closes with general comments on the revolt in St Kitts: We told them [the apprenticeship] was intended to prepare them more fully for the blessings of freedom, or rather that they all might become true Christians, and learn through the grace of God to keep His commandments, in which they knew themselves to be very deficient. At the same time we warned them against a spirit of disaffection and insubordination, when the system should come into operation. […] And now what do we wait for, but that God our Saviour may show mercy to these deluded creatures, who love darkness and lies more than light and truth, and turn them from the power of Satan unto God; yea transform those into servants of righteousness, who have hitherto, to our grief, served sin and Satan.

Much as the Moravians had justified slavery, they now justified the apprenticeship system. In the missionaries’ view, the newly emancipated had to be prepared for Christian freedom. Ironically, this very same argument was used by the missionaries in Antigua to explain why the slaves did not need an apprenticeship period, as they already had achieved full Christian freedom.63 60

U A H R15Fb 2f1 (1833–1877), 7 August 1834. David Bigler, Basseterre 14 July 1834, in P A vol. X I I I (1834): 180. 62 Peter Hoch, Basseterre 18 August 1834, in P A vol. X I I I (1834): 182. 63 Beck, Brüder in vielen Völkern, 191. 61

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Conclusion The transition from slavery to apprenticeship attracted protest by former slaves who longed for full freedom. Events such as the strike in St Kitts can hardly be considered unorganized spontaneous events; they show, rather, the labourers’ organized resistance to the apprenticeship system. Despite being unable to achieve their main goal: namely, the suspension of apprenticeship, they did achieve minor goals: the assembly of St Kitts passed a law in October 1834 that fixed the working time from Monday to Friday and allowed the apprentices to make use of Saturdays for their own purposes. The planters in St Kitts who controlled access to land became aware that they had to enter into negotiations with the apprentices, whom they needed as labourers.64 The five people who were banished for life to Bermuda were later pardoned, with Governor-General MacGregor begging for a royal pardon after becoming Governor of Barbados in 1836.65 Queen Victoria responded by granting amnesty on 5 February 1840. Although the colonial governments tried to exercise control over the former slaves with the help of the Moravian mission, many members of the church were among the insurgents. The Moravian mission thus presumably offered its congregants the same autonomous place in which to organize rebellions as did other missionary societies, including those in St Kitts. The missionaries were unable to understand the labourers’ opposition to the apprenticeship system and expected no revolutionary changes after emancipation.66 Even though some missionaries criticized the colonial order, the missions’ headquarters continued their policy of non-interference in worldly affairs. In the following years, 1 August was introduced as a day of public prayer in thanksgiving for the emancipation of the slaves in the British Caribbean. Each year, the missionaries would preach the same sermon based on John 8:36: “If the son has made you free, you shall be free indeed” – a text that would tell the apprentices that only decent Christians may be free. This allowed the missionaries to present themselves as guardians of a morality that was perfectly in line with post-slavery colonial interests.67 Consequently, the 64

Frucht, “Emancipation and Revolt in the West Indies,” 208. C O 28/129 MacGregor to Russel, 11 November 1839. 66 Füllberg–Stolberg, “Moravian Mission and the Emancipation of Slaves in the Caribbean,” 102. 67 van Stipriaan, “July 1, Emancipation Day in Suriname,” 273. 65

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Church became a supporter of the post-slavery interests of the planter class and colonial government.

WORKS CITED Primary Sources — Manuscript Sources Public Record Office London, Colonial Office (C O ): C O 239 St. Christopher (St. Kitts), Nevis and Anguilla: Original Correspondence. C O 28 Despatches from Evan Murray John McGregor, Governor of Barbados. Unitätsarchiv der Evangelischen Brüder-Unität Herrnhut (Moravian Archives Herrnhut, Germany) (U A H ): U A H R15 Fb 2f1 (1833–1877), Diarium von Basseterre, St. Kitts (Diary of Basseterre, St Kitts).

— Printed Primary Sources House of Commons Parliamentary Papers (PP), 1837 L. Nachrichten aus der Brüdergemeine 1837 (Gnadau: Buchandlung der Evangelischen Brüder-Unität, n.d.). Periodical Accounts Relating to the Missions of the Church of the United Brethren, established among the Heathen (P A ) vol. X I I I (London: Brethren’s Society, 1834).

Secondary Sources Beck, Hartmut. Brüder in vielen Völkern: 250 Jahre Mission in der Brüdergemeine (Erlangen: Evangelisch-Lutheranische Mission, 1981). Degn, Christian Die Schimmelmanns im atlantischen Dreieckshandel: Gewinn und Gewissen (Neumünster: Wachholtz, 2000). Dunn, Richard. “Moravian Missionaries at Work in a Jamaican Slave Community, 1745–1835,” The James Ford Bell Lectures 32 (1994): 1–23. Füllberg–Stolberg, Claus. “Moravian Mission and the Emancipation of Slaves in the Caribbean,” in The End of Slavery in the Americas and Africa: A Comparative Perspective, ed. Katja Füllberg–Stolberg, Ulrike Schmieder & Michael Zeuske (Berlin: L I T , 2011): 81–102. Frucht, Richard. “Emancipation and Revolt in the West Indies: St. Kitts, 1834,” Science and Society 39.2 (Summer 1975): 199–214. Green, William A. British Slave Emancipation: The Sugar Colonies and the Great Experiment, 1830–1865 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991). Hall, Catherine. Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830–1867 (Cambridge: Blackwell, 2002).

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Hall, Douglas. Five of the Leewards, 1834–1870: The Major Problems of the PostEmancipation Period in Antigua, Barbuda, Montserrat, Nevis and St. Kitts (Barbados: Caribbean U P , 1971). Kerr–Ritchie, Jeffrey. Rites of August First: Emancipation Day in the Black Atlantic World (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State U P , 2007). Lampe, Armando. Mission or Submission? Moravian and Catholic Missionaries in the Dutch Caribbean during the 19th Century (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2001). Lenders, Maria. Strijders voor het Lam: Leven en Werk van Herrnhuter Broeders en Zusters in Suriname, 1735–1900 (Leiden: K I T L V , 1996). Maynard, G.G. Oliver. A History of the Moravian Church. Eastern West Indies Province (Port of Spain: Moravian Church Eastern West Indies Province, 1968). Mettele, Gisela. Weltbürgertum oder Gottesreich: Die Herrnhuter Brüdergemeine als globale Gemeinschaft 1727–1857 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2009). Sebro, Louise. “Den kulturelle mission – Brødremenigheden i Dansk Vestindien,” in På sporet af imperiet: Dansk tropefantasier, ed. Lene Bull Christiansen (Roskilde: Institut for Sprog og Kultur, 2005): 39–48. Sensbach, Jon. “Race and the Early Moravian Church: A Comparative Perspective,” Transactions of the Moravian Historical Society 31 (2000): 1–10. Sherlock, Philip. West Indian Nations: A New History (London: Macmillan, 1973). Stipriaan, Alex van. “July 1, Emancipation Day in Suriname: A Contested ‘lieu de mémoire’ 1863–2003,” New West Indian Guide / Nieuw West Indische Gids 78 (2004): 269–304. Turner, Mary. Slaves and Missionaries: The Disintegration of Jamaican Slave Society, 1787–1834 (Kingston, Jamaica: U of the West Indies P , 2000). Wessel, Carola. “Connecting Congregations: The Net of Communication Among the Moravians in the Late 18th Century,” in The Distinctiveness of Moravian Culture: Festschrift for Vernon Nelson, ed. Craig Atwood & Peter Vogt (Nazareth P A : Moravian Historical Society, 2003): 153–72.

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The Perspectives of African Elites on Slavery and Abolition on the Gold Coast (1860–1900) — Newspapers as Sources

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B R I T I S H founded the Gold Coast Colony in 1874, they abolished slavery and the slave trade there. Earlier, in the 1860s, the Basel Mission Society had ordered its indigenous members to emancipate their slaves. Beginning in the 1860s, there was growing discussion, mainly in the coastal towns and especially among the Gold Coast’s elites, about the legitimacy of slavery.1 Relying on the contemporaneous Gold Coast press2 as a source for specific African perspectives, this essay investi1

HEN THE

The Gold Coast Colony and Protectorate comprised the southern part of today’s Ghana. See David Kimble, A Political History of Ghana: The Rise of Gold Coast Nationalism, 1850–1928 (1963; Oxford: Clarendon, 1971): 303. For definitions of the Gold Coast’s elites, see Kimble, A Political History of Ghana, 92 and 135–41; Raymond E. Dumett, El Dorado in West Africa: The Gold-Mining Frontier, African Labor, and Colonial Capitalism in the Gold Coast, 1875–1900 (Athens & Oxford: Ohio U P , 1998): 98–99; Kwabena Opare Akurang–Parry, “Aspects of Elite Women’s Activism in the Gold Coast, 1874–1890,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 37.3 (2004): 463–82; and Stephanie Newell, “Introduction” to Marita: Or the Folly of Love; A Novel by A. Native (Leiden, Boston M A & Cologne: Brill, 2002). 2 Here, the nineteenth-century Gold Coast press comprises all periodicals published mainly in Cape Coast and Accra between 1874 and 1900. They were primarily directed at a local Gold Coast readership. Examples are the Gold Coast Times, the Western Echo, the Gold Coast Chronicle, and the Gold Coast Independent. For a complete list, see section II of K.A.B. Jones–Quartey, A Summary History of the Ghana Press, 1822–1960 (Accra: Ghana Publications, 1974). To a certain degree, the London-based

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gates the attitudes and arguments of African elites on the Gold Coast about slavery and abolition during the period after abolition. It was only recently that research started to pay more attention to African domestic slavery and slave emancipation.3 This new interest has been especially concerned with the transformation of slavery and slave labour that took place after the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade in 1807.4 Research on the Gold Coast up to the 1980s did not consider such themes. Historiographical texts that mentioned slavery at all described it as a benign institution and did not consider significant the social and economic changes which resulted from the British Colonial Government’s abolition of slavery on the Gold Coast in 1874.5 In so doing, authors uncritically reproduced the arguments of colonial authorities in 1874 and afterwards to defend the results of the Emancipation Act and their reluctance to deal with ongoing slavery.

African Times is also part of this Gold Coast press. Started as the publication of London’s African Aid Society, this paper circulated mainly in the towns of the Gold Coast and had the same readership as the other papers. Its first editor (1861–84), Ferdinand Fitzgerald, was born in Liberia. For further information about the Gold Coast press, see below and Jones–Quartey, A Summary History of the Ghana Press; Evelyn Rowand, “Press and Opinion in British West Africa, 1855–1900: The Development of a Sense of Identity Among Educated British West Africans of the Later Nineteenth Century” (doctoral dissertation, University of Birmingham, 1972); Audrey Gadzekpo, “Women’s Engagement with Gold Coast Print Culture from 1857 to 1957” (doctoral dissertation, University of Birmingham, 2001); and the introduction to Newell, Marita. All of the newspapers are available on microfilm at the British Library Newspapers repository at Colindale, London. I wish to thank Trevor Getz, San Francisco State University, for granting me access to the D I V A web page of S F S U , which contains digitized copies of the African Times from 1862 to 1874. 3 See Raymond E. Dumett, “Traditional Slavery in the Akan Region in the Nineteenth Century: Sources, Issues, and Interpretations,” in West African Economic and Social History: Studies in Memory of Marion Johnson, ed. David Henige & Tom C. McCaskie (Madison: African Studies Program, U of Wisconsin, 1990): 7–22. 4 See Paul E. Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge U P , 1983). 5 See, for example, Kimble, A Political History of Ghana, and John Grace, Domestic Slavery in West Africa: With Particular Reference to the Sierra Leone Protectorate, 1896–1927 (London: Muller, 1975).

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This changed with Gerald McSheffrey and with Raymond Dumett and Marion Johnson,6 whose research began the controversial discussion of the “policy’s impact on slavery within the region”7 and who also regarded slaves as an active group that had the ability to contribute decisively to the effectiveness of emancipation. Since the 1980s, the possibilities open to slaves for deciding about their future have become a central subject of research. John Parker, for example, points out that slaves and their owners evinced a wide range of responses to abolition, and these resulted in ongoing negotiations between owners and slaves over ownership structures and the reciprocal relationships of dependence.8 So far, though, researchers have paid little attention to the detailed results of these negotiations.9 Still, what research there has been10 has shown that these results depended on the options available to slaves. For example, Peter Haenger, Kwabena Opare Akurang–Parry, and Trevor Getz have brought into focus slaves’ varying chances for success in colonial courts and the striking incompetence of the colonial administration in recognizing cases of slavery among the wide spectrum of forms of dependency that remained on the Gold Coast.11 6

Gerald M. McSheffrey, “Slavery, Indentured Servitude, Legitimate Trade and the Impact of Abolition in the Gold Coast, 1874–1901: A Reappraisal,” Journal of African History 24.3 (July 1983): 349–68; Raymond E. Dumett & Marion Johnson, “Britain and the Suppression of Slavery in the Gold Coast Colony, Ashanti, and the Northern Territories,” in The End of Slavery in Africa, ed. Suzanne Miers & Richard Roberts (Madison & London: U of Wisconsin P , 1988): 71–116. 7 See Trevor R. Getz, “A ‘Somewhat Firm Policy’: The Role of the Gold Coast Judiciary in Implementing Slave Emancipation, 1874–1900,” Ghana Studies 2 (1999): 97. 8 John Parker, Making the Town: Ga State and Society in Early Colonial Accra (Portsmouth N H , Oxford & Cape Town: Heinemann, 2000). See also Trevor R. Getz, Slavery and Reform in West Africa: Toward Emancipation in Nineteenth-Century Senegal and the Gold Coast (Athens & Oxford: Ohio U P , 2004): 103–104. 9 The most important reason for this is the lack of written sources. 10 Kwabena Opare Akurang–Parry, “Slavery and Abolition in the Gold Coast: Colonial Modes of Emancipation and African Initiatives,” Ghana Studies 1 (1998): 11–34; Trevor R. Getz, “The Case for Africans: The Role of Slaves and Masters in Emancipation on the Gold Coast, 1874–1900,” Slavery and Abolition 21.1 (2000): 128–45; and Akosua Adoma Perbi, A History of Indigenous Slavery in Ghana: From the 15th to the 19th Century (Legon, Accra: Sub-Saharan, 2004). 11 Peter Haenger, Sklaverei und Sklavenemanzipation an der Goldküste: Ein Beitrag zum Verständnis von sozialen Abhängigkeitsbeziehungen in Westafrika (Basel &

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The Gold Coast Press: A Unique Source for African Perspectives Research on the Gold Coast elites’ attitudes to slavery and abolition in this period is a promising way of adding new perspectives on and insights into the possibilities open to slaves on the Gold Coast after abolition, for many elites on the Gold Coast were slave owners, at least until 1874, and thus made decisive contributions to the success of all forms of emancipation. At the same time, as Akurang–Parry first mentioned, in 2004, some elites were “abolitionists.”12 The different views members of the elite class had towards slavery and abolition are displayed in the contemporary Gold Coast press, which therefore provides a unique source for research on slavery and abolition on the Gold Coast.13 Unlike most of the sources, such as court records, colonial documents, and missionary correspondence, which so far have been used in research on slavery and post-slavery history, these local newspapers were mostly published, managed, and written by some of the Gold Coast’s new elites and, thus, by literate members of African society rather than Europeans. Further, even though subscribers, who were also members of the elite class, seldom numbered more than 200–500, there are indications that they read Frankfurt am Main: Helbing & Lichtenhahn, 1997); Akurang–Parry, “Slavery and Abolition in the Gold Coast”; Getz, “A ‘Somewhat Firm Policy’,” “The Case for Africans,” and Slavery and Reform in West Africa. 12 See Kwabena Opare Akurang–Parry, “‘We Shall Rejoice to See the Day When Slavery Shall Cease to Exist’: The Gold Coast Times, the African Intelligentsia, and Abolition in the Gold Coast,” History in Africa 31 (2004): 22–23. Akurang–Parry was the first to refer to the existence of African abolitionists, underscore their neglect by researchers, and point to the need for research into the identification, numbers, motives, and social range of the new elites and their introductions to abolitionist ideas. 13 Akurang–Parry primarily used one issue of the Gold Coast Times (20 October 1874) to demonstrate the existence of Gold Coast abolitionists. So far, there has been no comprehensive research into elites’ perspectives on slavery and abolition which uses Gold Coast newspapers as sources. Rowand, “Press and Opinion in British West Africa, 1855–1900,” was aware of the topic as treated by the Gold Coast press (e.g., 96–97 and 502–503) but didn’t make a point of it in her doctoral dissertation. The one exception is John Parker, “Ga State and Society in Early Colonial Accra, 1860s– 1920s” (doctoral dissertation, University of London, School of Oriental and African Studies, 1995): 149, who refers curtly to an example of “a rare African perspective on the aftermath of abolition.” Akurang–Parry, “Slavery and Abolition in the Gold Coast,” 111, gives a compilation of “protest politics” in the Gold Coast newspapers.

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these newspapers out loud to a wider audience.14 In these newspapers, then, one finds African perspectives on the events and discussions that took place on the Gold Coast, perspectives which are very different from what one finds in sources written by European contemporaries. Publication of newspapers under local editorship on the Gold Coast started in 1857 with Charles Bannerman’s initially handwritten Accra Herald (later West African Herald).15 In 1874, James Hutton Brew founded the Gold Coast Times, the first of several papers under his editorship. From this year to 1900, there was almost always at least one paper under local ownership on the Gold Coast published primarily for indigenous readers. The editors of these papers can be described as pioneers in the publishing business. When Brew published his first newspaper, there were no professional journalists or printers and no logistical facilities; even printing type was rare.16 These problems, together with a lack of money and inadequate subscriptions, resulted in relatively short publication runs.17 Normally, these papers were only four to eight 14

See: “It is interesting to add that several of our illiterate brethren exhibit some anxiety to know the contents of each number,” Western Echo (9 December 1885): 5; “Those who did get it [African Times] were literally besieged by their friends […]. A man of consequence, but who can neither read nor write, informed me that he was going to order the African Times,” African Times (November 1863): 52. For the number of subscribers, see Kimble, A Political History of Ghana, 192, and The National Archives, Kew, War and Colonial Department and Colonial Office C O 100 series (Blue books of statistics Gold Coast colony).See also Rowand, “Press and Opinion in British West Africa, 1855–1900,” and Gadzekpo, “Women’s Engagement with Gold Coast Print Culture from 1857 to 1957,” 83–84. 15 See Jones–Quartey, A Summary History of the Ghana Press, 4–6. 16 Occasionally, this was picked out as a central theme. See: “We have embarked in this undertaking without any previous practical experience of the dangers and trials attendant on Editorship,” Gold Coast Times (28 March 1874; first issue): 2; “This is Africa and not England [. . . ] where too an order for types could be quickly executed,” Gold Coast Times (3 March 1883); “the whole of the anxiety, labour, and responsibility, both public and pecuniary, which it has involved, have been borne by one individual, the Editor,” African Times (June 1866): 134. For the characteristics of the Gold Coast press, see also chapter 3 of Gadzekpo’s “Women’s Engagement with Gold Coast Print Culture from 1857 to 1957.” 17 The Gold Coast Times, which was published continually between 1874 and 1885, was an exception. The African Times was also published for more than forty years, but it was based in London and in its first years had the support of the African Aid Society.

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pages long, and they were not always filled with articles; advertisements sometimes took up half of an issue. Although they were often intended to be published weekly or bi-weekly, publication was frequently interrupted by, for example, shortages of money, printing materials, articles, or manpower. In general, these papers were personal projects of their editors. At the same time, though, they depended on the assistance of their subscribers, for whom “reading was not a passive activity.”18 There were at best a few hundred subscribers, but these readers were, and had to be, very active in sending readers’ letters, which were often editors’ only source of news and which suggested the themes for most editorials. Some subscribers regularly delivered reports from their regions or answered direct enquiries from editors.19 Readers and editors often conducted conversations among themselves via these letters and editorials, and subscribers sometimes disputed with each other over months. Furthermore, editorials and readers’ letters were often used to air grievances and make serious allegations against the colonial government. As some editors – such as Brew and Joseph Ephraim Casely–Hayford – were full-time lawyers, the subjects of such editorials were also taken from their daily practice in court.20 Thus, newspapers were a platform for discussion of the most important political, social, and economic issues. Ignored by the local colonial administration, editors as well as readers sought a wide audience in the colonial administration in the U K and among the British public in order to make their newspapers supraregional organs for ‘African’ arguments.21 18

Newell, Marita, 22. See also: “In future the ‘Gold Coast Times’ will be published every ten days instead of weekly […] owing to the very small support,” Gold Coast Times (29 February 1884); “We are under the necessity of informing our friends that if they wish this periodical to continue in existence […] they must give us better support,” Western Echo (10–27 January 1887): 5; Gadzekpo, “Women’s Engagement with Gold Coast Print Culture from 1857 to 1957,” 84–85. 19 Sometimes editors had to interfere in these ‘duels’ (see African Times, February 1876: 90) or had to refuse to print letters (African Times, March 1883: 31). 20 For some of these editors’ biographies, see Michel R. Doortmont, The PenPictures of Modern Africans and African Celebrities by Charles Francis Hutchison: A Collective Biography of Elite Society in the Gold Coast Colony (Leiden & Boston M A : Brill, 2005). 21 See the Western Echo (31 May 1886): 3: “[T]he ‘Echo’ is perused by officials in the Colonial Office; by members of both Houses of Parliament; by many English gentlemen [. . . ] by the Editors of local journals all over the world” and the African Times, January 1883, 6: “For an independent representation of the grievances and

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All of the Gold Coast newspapers were published in English. The education required to read them, the money needed to subscribe, and the absence of transport facilities into the interior indicate that the readership consisted mainly of educated elites in the coastal towns.22 Nearly all of the papers in this period were published either in Cape Coast or in Accra, which were home to most of the subscribers.23 However, local agents later sold them to other towns, some of them beyond the Gold Coast.24 We can thus identify the participants in the discussions held in these papers as members of the elite. Indeed, in one issue of the Gold Coast Times from 1877, Brew states that it is his intention “to arouse and keep up in the intelligent members of the community an interest in the affairs of the country.”25 Still, it is very difficult nowadays to identify the authors of certain statements, editorials, and letters; sometimes it is even hard to identify a paper’s editor.26 For, although we may assume that editors were responsible for most editorials, the bulk of them were published without an author’s name, with initials, or with a pseudonym.27 The same problem arises for the authors of readers’ letters, which are nearly all signed with pseudonyms. Thus, there is no way to identify the authors of these letwants of the native people it has no other channel than the African Times.” Indeed, these newspapers were read by the colonial government on the Gold Coast as well as in the Colonial Office in London. And editors were even proud to announce when their papers’ discussions of grievances made them unpopular with the colonial administration. See, for example, the African Times (August 1868): 19: “Judge Parker alluded to the African Times as that nasty, dirty, stinking, pettifogging paper.” Fred I.A. Omu, “The Dilemma of Press Freedom in Colonial Africa: The West African Example,” Journal of African History 9.2 (1968): 286. 22 However, British officials and European merchants and missionaries were among their readers. 23 Cape Coast and Accra (after 1877) were, apart from that, the seats of the British colonial government. 24 These included Freetown, Lagos, and even London (among others). 25 Gold Coast Times (17 November 1877): 3. 26 See the chronology of Gold Coast newspapers and the efforts to identify their editors in section II of Jones–Quartey’s A Summary History of the Ghana Press and Gadzekpo, “Women’s Engagement with Gold Coast Print Culture from 1857 to 1957,” Appendix A. 27 There are indications that contemporaries sometimes knew the face behind a pseudonym. See Jones–Quartey, A Summary History of the Ghana Press, 9, and especially Newell, Marita, 26–27.

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ters, although a pseudonym’s style sometimes allows some insight into the self-image of its author.28 Colonial officials, who used the papers to make announcements or react to accusations, were exceptions, as were some distinguished members of Gold Coast society, especially those who wrote from their position as lawyers or political opinion-leaders. For these reasons, the Gold Coast press is a source of penetrating insights into the contemporary discourses of Gold Coast elites and their ‘African’ perspectives29 on, inter alia, slavery and abolition. It makes clear the relevance certain topics had for them at the time. Of course, not all subscribers were active in writing letters. Generally speaking, just the politically active elites were continuously engaged, and the elites themselves were only a relatively small, albeit politically and socially influential, group on the Gold Coast. Furthermore, editors had the power to promote certain topics, and this has to be considered in any interpretation of a newspaper’s articles. Nevertheless, the bulk of the educated community on the Gold Coast were certainly aware of their contents.

The Debate on Slavery and Abolition in the Gold Coast Press, 1860–74 The issue of slavery and its legitimacy as well as the abolition of slavery after 1874 were among the first topics to generate altercations in the press among the Gold Coast’s elites.30 Starting in the 1860s, there appeared in the African Times31 numerous letters and editorials containing descriptions and harsh 28

Some of these were humorous or sarcastic – for example, “No Humbug,” “Semper Fidelis,” “Sinner” and “Nobody”; others like “Wasp,” “Truth,” “Patriot,” “Watchman,” and “Zounds” provide insights into authors’ motivations. 29 In “ ‘ We Shall Rejoice to See the Day When Slavery Shall Cease to Exist’,” 71, Akurang–Parry calls it “the African intelligentsia’s microcosmic perspectives.” See also Philip S. Zachernuk, Colonial Subjects: An African Intelligentsia and Atlantic Ideas (Charlottesville & London: U P of Virginia, 2000): 12. 30 I intend the following compilation of comments and articles on slavery and abolition to illustrate the value of these newspapers as sources for Gold Coast elites’ perspectives on slavery and abolition. An elaborate discussion will be part of my doctoral dissertation. 31 All of these examples are from the African Times (1860–74), which was the only newspaper in circulation on the Gold Coast at that time.

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criticisms of slavery, the slave trade, and, especially, the ritual murder of slaves on the Gold Coast and in Asante.32 These give often fragmentary but sometimes very detailed information on the mechanisms of the slave trade on the Gold Coast.33 Although most readers’ letters were very short and factual, the disgusted comments they include express their authors’ animosity towards the practices described.34 There are also letters which discuss the social problems emancipation would bring – for example, the fate of slaves who, when emancipated, would lose their homes and work.35 Authors also commonly emphasized the differences between the so-called “domestic slavery” of the coast and Asante slavery.36 Other points of discussion were legal questions 32

Asante, north of the Gold Coast Colony, was an independent kingdom until 1896. The information includes references to slaves’ origins, trade routes, slave markets and prices. See Kwabena Opare Akurang–Parry, “Rethinking the ‘Slaves of Salaga’: Post-Proclamation Slavery in the Gold Coast (Colonial Southern Ghana), 1874–1899,” Left History 8.1 (2002): 33–60. The question of domestic slavery was at first often omitted. See, for example, “We may not interfere with domestic slavery here,” African Times (September 1872): 31. 34 “This [the slave trade] is going on in a splendid style. […] Her Majesty’s Government does not take any measure to prevent this trade, which is surely the ruin of the country,” African Times (October 1863): 44; “All the evils of which I before complained to you still exist. Slaves are still being brought through from the Volta and from Addah,” African Times (February 1864): 93; “The Ashantees have been making a regular slave-mart of Cape Coast. During the six weeks […] the Ashantee traders had brought down here no less than 300 slaves. We have seen these poor wretches […] And who do you think these poor creatures were, thus infamously hawked about for sale […]? Is not this an awful scandal?” African Times (December 1871): 64; “A fearful crime is being carried on daily in our streets […] In Cape Coast alone, during the last twelve months, at least 300 young creatures have been sold as slaves,” African Times (September 1872): 31. 35 See: “knowing this question will, sooner or later, bear upon [. . . ] the educated community at large […] I want to know what will become of the social condition of the so-called slaves after their emancipation?” African Times (April 1867): 122–23. See also the African Times (July 1868): 8–9. 36 See the African Times (April 1867): 122–23: “I admit with you that slavery and slave-owning is odious and inhuman […] But I want to point out to you the relative position of the so-called slaves of this place”; and: “is [it] a sin for those who buy the poor Krepees from the hand of the cruel Ashantees,” November 1872: 56. Fitzgerald, the editor of the African Times, described this as “a very large and important question,” African Times (November 1872): 56. 33

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about the limits of British jurisdiction and the possibility of British intervention in indigenous judicial matters, and these were sometimes linked with criticism of fellow citizens and the colonial administration for respectively exploiting and allowing such an ambivalent legal situation.37 Even without commenting on the validity of these assertions, it is clear that they are indicators of a controversial and surprisingly complex discussion among elites, who, before 1874, showed, at least in the African Times, considerable sympathy for the rights of slaves but also great reluctance regarding European intervention without legal authorization.38 It becomes clear in all of these discussions that no one opposed the fact that slavery was legal (except for British subjects and within British forts) at that time. Indeed, there was a great outcry in 1868 when British Chief Justice Parker tried to declare some prominent inhabitants of Cape Coast as British subjects in order to arrest them for slave-owning. Even Fitzgerald, the editor of the African Times and a strong activist against slavery in all its forms, opposed this intervention in indigenous affairs.39 Illuminating with regard to the importance of this discussion for Gold Coast society is a line from a letter by C.J. Briandt, a probably baptized cotton trader from Osu (Accra), to the Basel missionary Locher: “the question of slaves and slavery and their emancipation is the current topic among the educated community of this place [Accra].”40 Thus, even before 1874, the Gold Coast press or, more precisely, the African Times revealed the existence of a great deal of discussion on the topic of slavery and a great deal of argumentation for and against emancipation among Gold Coast elites.

37

African Times (July 1868): 8–9: “without law there is no sin”; “C O L O N Y is better than P R O T E C T O R A T E . And yet […] we seem to prefer, to be in the Protectorate to being in a Colony. And why? Because in a colony we neither buy or keep S L A V E S ” (January 1867): 81. Before 1874, slavery and the slave trade were prohibited only for British subjects and within the limits of British forts. 38 Surprisingly, the existing literature contains very little on this discussion among the elites even though these newspaper articles and letters clearly indicate it. 39 See African Time (August 1868): 18–19. See also Parker, Making the Town, 84. For Fitzgerald’s ardent engagement against slavery, see, for example, the African Times (January 1863): 78. 40 African Times (April 1867): 122. Parker, Making the Town (83–84) points briefly to the relevance of Briandt’s letter.

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The Abolition Ordinances of 1874 and the Gold Coast Press In 1874, the legal abolition of slavery created a new subject for discussion, which took on a new quality. There was now more than one newspaper on the Gold Coast and, therefore, a broader range of opinion can be found.41 The African Times and the Gold Coast Times documented all of 1874’s declarations, debates, and petitions on the question of abolition on the Gold Coast.42 This shows which information on the political situation elites received. Comments in these two newspapers also show a much wider range of arguments, and we can see that their editors – Fitzgerald and Brew, respectively – take somewhat different positions in the ongoing slavery debate, positions which represent elites’ major points of view.43 One event on the eve of the declaration of emancipation is particularly illuminating for understanding the various arguments that dominated debate on the Gold Coast. The British governor, Strahan, held two meetings with the kings and chiefs of the Gold Coast in which he more or less forced them to accept abolition without compensation,44 and Brew heavily criticized this form of emancipation in an editorial in the Gold Coast Times.45 Before the meetings, opinion, particularly in the Gold Coast Times’s editorials, were supportive of the expected abolition policy, stating that “we are of those who

41

Brew’s Gold Coast Times started publication in April 1874. It is clearly due to comments in the newspapers that the readers of one paper also subscribed to others, or at least took note of its contents. 42 For discussion regarding abolition, see Raymond E. Dumett, “Pressure Groups, Bureaucracy, and the Decision-Making Process: The Case of Slavery Abolition and Colonial Expansion in the Gold Coast, 1874,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 9.2 (January 1981): 193–215. 43 Again, apart from the editor’s opinion, it is hardly to say what the proportion of opinion was. Which positions existed is something that still requires evaluation. 44 On this so-called British-Indian model, slave owners had to set their slaves free, without compensation, on the slaves’ demand. See Akurang–Parry, “Slavery and Abolition in the Gold Coast,” 27–32. 45 He warns: “It is a question which must be dealt with most completely so as not to lead to misapprehension in the minds of the ignorant, and admit of evasion by the more intelligent of the community”; Gold Coast Times (20 October 1874): 50; he fears an “explosion of popular feeling” (51) and concludes “slavery exists here and will continue to exist in the face of a thousand such speeches” (53).

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would hail with gladness its [domestic slavery’s] total extinction, but not at the cost of the slave owners”46 and we may rest assured that the Government have found a solution of this great difficulty – a solution we trust, that will admit of no misunderstanding, and which will not leave scope for the existence of slavery in any shape, degree or form […]; nevertheless, with all this, we contend that the slave-holders are entitled to compensation.47

They also showed how important the topic of slave emancipation was for the Gold Coast’s elites.48 But, after Strahan’s decision for emancipation without compensation, numerous commentaries in the Gold Coast Times expressed the frustration of many educated elites.49 We may not conclude on the basis of such commentaries that most members of the elite class were strong supporters of slavery, and, because of differences in tone in the Gold Coast Times, we cannot even ascertain Brew’s position with any certainty.50 Nonetheless, elites’ main criticisms and points of discussion in 1874 do become apparent. It is illuminating how Brew commented on the events of 1874 when, in March 1875, he stated resignedly that “M I G H T makes R I G H T .”51 So, even if we cannot ascertain his position towards slavery, we see that he adopts a clear attitude towards the legality of British intervention. This expresses another elite attitude towards the overall legitimacy of British intervention, and from this perspective the critic of abolition can be read, in certain cases, as a critic of British interference in the independence of the Gold Coast. 46

Gold Coast Times (24 September 1874): 46. Gold Coast Times (20 October 1874): 50. 48 Gold Coast Times (20 October 1874): 50: “the slave question is uppermost in the minds of all.” 49 See, for example, Gold Coast Times, 30 November 1874: “Do you think that […] any of the powerful chiefs in the interior will listen to such stuff? […] I have slaves […]. I believe in compensation as the only remedy for this evil, and so does every other sensible person” (54). This is also quoted in Parker, Making the Town, 88, as an indication of Strahan’s failure. 50 Brew himself points to the fact that “so many theories have been stated as to the best method of putting an end to this curse to the human race […] it is not a matter of astonishment that the Government does not know what to do”; Gold Coast Times (24 September 1874): 46. On the other hand, there is no indication that “the Gold Coast African intelligentsia [. . . ] were avid abolitionists” as Akurang–Parry concludes; “‘We Shall Rejoice to See the Day When Slavery Shall Cease to Exist’,” 38. 51 Gold Coast Times (31 March 1875): 70. 47

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Contrary to Brew and the Gold Coast Times, where central themes were the practical problems of emancipation with special regard to legal questions and the financial rights of slave owners, the articles in the African Times provided a very different appraisal, and Fitzgerald can be seen as an ardent opponent of all critics of abolition.52 After reviewing a petition from the kings and chiefs of the Gold Coast for compensation for the loss of their slaves, he criticized Brew, the editor of the Gold Coast Times,53 stating that domestic slavery […] is not always of so innocently patriarchal and paternal a nature, not always so indulgent and humane, as the Gold Coast memorialists and their able advocate [Brew] would have us believe.54

Additionally, he charged that “there is too much softness of speech in influential quarters in Great Britain when treating of this abomination.”55 It is clear that his paramount interest was to condemn slavery in every form, not to draft concrete future plans for slaves and owners.56 Accordingly, he praises “Captain Strahan’s […] masterstroke”57 when commenting on the Emancipation Ordinances. His arguments found supporters not only in London but also on the Gold Coast and show that not only was there an awareness of abolitionist arguments but that some elites held abolitionist views.58

52

See also Dumett, “Pressure Groups, Bureaucracy, and the Decision-Making Process,” 203 and 214. 53 Brew supported this petition to the British Government in his capacity as a lawyer. 54 African Times (March 1875): 30. 55 African Times (August 1874): 19. To support his arguments, Fitzgerald even reprinted two articles from the British Daily News and The Times – see, respectively, the African Times (March 1875): 33–34; (April 1875): 40–41. 56 African Times (August 1875): 18: “It is too early yet [. . . ] to form a just estimate of the incalculable benefits that must and will flow from it [the abolition of slavery on the Gold Coast].” 57 African Times (April 1875): 42. 58 Following Fitzgerald’s editorial, a Cape Coast subscriber with the pseudonym “A New Colonist” writes in support of his position: “the slave himself was perfectly aware [. . . ] he was a slave […] On any morning the master might [. . . ] causelessly and carelessly address his slave – the elevated slave, mind you – thus: […] Dog, you are my slave’,” African Times (July 1875): 2. See also African Times (August 1875): 15–16.

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Brew also had things to say about Fitzgerald.59 After declaring that “we are of those who would hail with gladness its [domestic slavery’s] total extinction, but not at the cost of the slave owners,”60 he criticizes Fitzgerald directly, though not by name, for his use of sophism.61 The impression that lingers is that Brew’s Gold Coast Times considered the question of abolition almost solely from the perspective of slave owners and with special reference to their problems and concerns, whereas in Fitzgerald’s African Times the concerns of slaves and the injustice of slavery predominated. Thus, the two editors can be seen as representatives of two opposed positions in the Gold Coast discourse on abolition. Both fired this discourse and gave it a public stage. Comparison of these two newspapers makes it possible to see the arguments of more than one perspective in this discussion. It also reveals that the divisions over these issues were not simply between the colonial administration and elite slave owners but were much more complex.

The Aftermath of 1874 – No End to the Debate In 1885 and again in 1886, more than ten years after the abolition ordinances took effect, a repetition of the discussion of 1874/75 can be found in another newspaper, the Western Echo. Here a column’s headline called the Emancipation Act “The Question of the Day.”62 At a time when the African Times only sporadically informed its readership about slave-trading, the Western Echo 59

Gold Coast Times (24 September 1874): 46–47. Brew’s editorial proves that he assumed that his readers were also familiar with the African Times, for he mentions the latter’s issue of August 1874 without quoting from it. It also indicates that the Gold Coast’s elites commonly discussed abolitionist views and that Fitzgerald’s editorials were a crucial source for these discussions. So far, only Akurang–Parry has pointed out “that the African intelligentsia had contemplated the demise of slavery long before the British abolition was inaugurated” (“ ‘ We Shall Rejoice to See the Day When Slavery Shall Cease to Exist’,” 34). But his only source is the Gold Coast Times of 20 October 1874. He makes no use of other available sources such as the earlier editorials of the African Times and the direct references both papers made to the articles of their competitor. 60 Gold Coast Times (24 September 1874): 46. 61 Gold Coast Times (24 September 1874): 46–47. 62 Western Echo (19 December 1885): 3. The Western Echo was another of Brew’s publications. It succeeded the Gold Coast Times in 1885. See Jones–Quartey, A Summary History of the Ghana Press, 1822–1960, Section II.

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printed a series of articles and letters which were not only highly critical of the Emancipation Act but also described in drastic terms the impact of abolition on the Gold Coast. The Emancipation Act is described as a total failure.63 And the colonial administration is blamed for a hundredfold rise in the crime rate because the “subjects of judicial enquiry since the passing of the Act have in 9 instances out of 10 been these so-called slaves.”64 The article concludes that “this Act […] has [. . . ] been proved a fiasco, a willing instrument in the hands of Satan.”65 In the following months and especially May and June, 1886, further articles arguing for an adjustment of the Emancipation Act appeared.66 The question is why the subject of slavery became so prevalent again at that time, and why such strong rhetoric was used in these articles. As in the years preceding, it is not clear whether there was much support for such ideas, but the fact that several such articles appeared over the course of more than one year indicates that abolition was still topical. Indeed, it was a topic of public discussion a further ten years later when in 1894 and 1895 the Gold Coast Chronicle published several long, critical articles blaming the colonial government for the mischief which emancipation had caused for both owners and slaves.67 It should be noted that most of these articles were published around December of both years, which suggests that they were prompted by the anniversary of the foundation of the Gold Coast colony and the passing of the Emancipation Act in December 1874. Still, they were by no means only in remembrance of the “mischief” of 1874, and the dramatic terms in which they blame the British for the aftermath indicates that, for at least some members of the 63

Western Echo (19 December 1885): 3: “The Act by its apparent results seems to have aimed at the moral degradation and ruin of the so-called slaves.” 64 Western Echo (19 December 1885): 3. 65 Western Echo (19 December 1885): 3. Roger S. Gocking, Facing Two Ways. Ghana’s Coastal Communities Under Colonial Rule (Lanham M D , New York & Oxford: U P of America, 1999): 61–62, refers to Brew as the author of this article. However, this cannot be verified, as there were three co-editors at the Western Echo at that time. See Kimble, A Political History of Ghana, 412. 66 See Western Echo (21 May 1886 and 30 June 1886). 67 Gold Coast Chronicle (22 December 1894): 2; (12 December 1895): 2. The Gold Coast Chronicle was published in Accra by a group of local shareholders. See Jones– Quartey, A Summary History of the Ghana Press, 1822–1960, Section II; and Gadzekpo, “Women’s Engagement with Gold Coast Print Culture from 1857 to 1957,” Appendix A.

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elite, the subject was still urgent and emotional.68 Again, the topos of what elites referred to as ‘so-called Gold Coast slavery’ is used to defend slave owners and justify their position. And there are no letters or commentaries in either the Western Echo or the Gold Coast Chronicle which defend the Emancipation Act. These articles thus indicate that a significant number of the Gold Coast’s elites still opposed abolition in the 1890s and defended domestic slavery as it continued to be practised on the Gold Coast.69 It is striking that in all these articles and letters authors speak of “our” slaves as if they still owned them after ten or twenty years.70 Likewise, one reader lamented that “our runaway slaves have grown insolent and unbearable.”71 In addition to protest against the British Emancipation Act, it was therefore disgust at the behaviour of ex-slaves and their ingratitude that dominated elite discourse at that time.72

68

See the Gold Coast Chronicle (12 December 1895): 2: “When Domestic Slavery was abolished on the Gold Coast, a belief prevailed in Europe and elsewhere that something very terrible had been suppressed. On the contrary, the so-called slaves were rather sorry that there was ever such a thing as an Emancipation Act. The latter threw them upon the country houseless, almost friendless, and without food. […] Does the purchase of a human being always imply ‘bondage’ or ‘servitude’? It does not. On the contrary, conditions may exist as already demonstrated where it may prove an act of philanthropy.” 69 For the prevalence of slavery on the Gold Coast up to the 1890s, see the works of Getz, Haenger, and Akurang–Parry cited above. Again, one possible explanation for this opposition on the part of elites is that it was a form of protest against what they considered the illegal and unjustified proceedings of the colonial administration in 1874 and since, of which the Emancipation Act was just one example. 70 See the Western Echo (31 May 1886): 5: “[. . . ] that as it may not restore back to us our slaves – nay, our families which is so rudely took from our fold – that it should grant unto us […] the only means of greatly promoting our trading interests, the only means of ensuring our prosperity.” This passage also demonstrates that the loss of slave manpower was a crucial motivation for the protest. We have to keep in mind that even in the 1890s members of the elite class who illegally owned slaves lost them, due to legal actions instigated by their slaves or the colonial administration, and that this was one reason for the importance of the discussion at that time. 71 Western Echo (23 October 1886): 7. A similar letter appears in the Western Echo for 9 October 1886: 7. 72 Gocking accordingly refers to “a great deal of resentment” among the elites (Facing Two Ways, 61–62).

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Conclusion In summary, it is clear that newspapers have an enormous potential for research on the perspectives of local elites on slavery and abolition on the Gold Coast. Their articles, editorials, and readers’ letters reveal elites’ discussions and arguments and make it possible to identify the different groups participating in this discourse as well as the periods after 1874 when these themes were most important. Although we cannot yet identify certain authors, at least some of the editors can be named as important actors and opinion leaders. This knowledge also raises new questions about elites’ perspectives on slavery and abolition. Among these is the question of why compensation for the loss of slaves again became an important topic for elites at a time when there was no realistic prospect of a change in British policy. Likewise, other questions require considered response – for example, the degree to which judicial arguments against the legitimacy of abolition were a form of protest against British administration of the Gold Coast, and the degree to which they were only a means to an end. At the same time, information on those African abolitionists on the Gold Coast who are conspicuous in discussion but have not yet been identified needs to be analysed further. This all points to the fact that newspapers serve as invaluable sources of information on the social setting of ex-slaves on the Gold Coast between 1860 and 1900. Furthermore, the discourse on the question of slavery and abolition on the Gold Coast, the motives involved, and our forms of information about the heterogeneous group of elites all appear in a new light.

WORKS CITED Primary Sources National Archives, Kew, War and Colonial Department and Colonial Office (C O ) C O 100 series, War and Colonial Department and Colonial Office: Gold Coast, Miscellanea, Blue books of statistics Newspapers (British Library Newspapers, Colindale, London): African Times (1862–1902) Gold Coast Chronicle (1890–at least 1901) Gold Coast Independent (1895–1898) Gold Coast Times (1874–1885) Western Echo (1885–1887)

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Secondary Sources Akurang–Parry, Kwabena Opare. “Aspects of Elite Women’s Activism in the Gold Coast, 1874–1890,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 37.3 (2004): 463–82. ——. “Rethinking the ‘Slaves of Salaga’: Post-Proclamation Slavery in the Gold Coast (Colonial Southern Ghana), 1874–1899,” Left History 8.1 (2002): 33–60. ——. “Slavery and Abolition in the Gold Coast: Colonial Modes of Emancipation and African Initiatives,” Ghana Studies 1 (1998): 11–34. ——. “ ‘ We Shall Rejoice to See the Day When Slavery Shall Cease to Exist’: The Gold Coast Times, the African Intelligentsia, and Abolition in the Gold Coast,” History in Africa 31 (2004): 19–42. Doortmont, Michel R. The Pen-Pictures of Modern Africans and African Celebrities by Charles Francis Hutchison: A Collective Biography of Elite Society in the Gold Coast Colony (Leiden & Boston M A : Brill, 2005). Dumett, Raymond E. El Dorado in West Africa: The Gold-Mining Frontier, African Labor, and Colonial Capitalism in the Gold Coast, 1875–1900 (Athens & Oxford: Ohio U P , 1998). ——. “Pressure Groups, Bureaucracy, and the Decision-Making Process: The Case of Slavery Abolition and Colonial Expansion in the Gold Coast, 1874,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 9.2 (January 1981): 193–215. ——. “Traditional Slavery in the Akan Region in the Nineteenth Century: Sources, Issues, and Interpretations,” in West African Economic and Social History: Studies in Memory of Marion Johnson, ed. David Henige & Tom C. McCaskie (Madison: African Studies Program, U of Wisconsin, 1990): 7–22. ——, & Marion Johnson. “Britain and the Suppression of Slavery in the Gold Coast Colony, Ashanti, and the Northern Territories,” in The End of Slavery in Africa, ed. Suzanne Miers & Richard Roberts (Madison & London: U of Wisconsin P , 1988): 71–116. Gadzekpo, Audrey. “Women’s Engagement with Gold Coast Print Culture from 1857 to 1957” (doctoral dissertation, University of Birmingham, 2001). Getz, Trevor R. “The Case for Africans: The Role of Slaves and Masters in Emancipation on the Gold Coast, 1874–1900,” Slavery and Abolition 21.1 (2000): 128– 45. ——. “A ‘Somewhat Firm Policy’: The Role of the Gold Coast Judiciary in Implementing Slave Emancipation, 1874–1900,” Ghana Studies 2 (1999): 97–117. ——. Slavery and Reform in West Africa: Toward Emancipation in Nineteenth-Century Senegal and the Gold Coast (Athens & Oxford: Ohio U P , 2004). Gocking, Roger S. Facing Two Ways. Ghana’s Coastal Communities Under Colonial Rule (Lanham M D , New York & Oxford: U P of America, 1999). Grace, John. Domestic Slavery in West Africa: With Particular Reference to the Sierra Leone Protectorate, 1896–1927 (London: Muller, 1975).

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Haenger, Peter. Sklaverei und Sklavenemanzipation an der Goldküste: Ein Beitrag zum Verständnis von sozialen Abhängigkeitsbeziehungen in Westafrika (Basel & Frankfurt am Main: Helbing & Lichtenhahn, 1997). Jones–Quartey, K.A.B. A Summary History of the Ghana Press, 1822–1960 (Accra: Ghana Publications., 1974). Kimble, David. A Political History of Ghana: The Rise of Gold Coast Nationalism, 1850–1928 (1963; Oxford: Clarendon, 1971). Lovejoy, Paul E. Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge U P , 1983). McSheffrey, Gerald M. “Slavery, Indentured Servitude, Legitimate Trade and the Impact of Abolition in the Gold Coast, 1874–1901: A Reappraisal,” Journal of African History 24.3 (July 1983): 349–68. Newell, Stephanie. Marita: Or the Folly of Love: A Novel by A. Native (Leiden & Boston M A & Cologne: Brill, 2002). Omu, Fred I.A. “The Dilemma of Press Freedom in Colonial Africa: The West African Example,” Journal of African History 9.2 (1968): 279–98. Parker, John. “Ga State and Society in Early Colonial Accra, 1860s–1920s” (doctoral dissertation, University of London, School of Oriental and African Studies, 1995). ——. Making the Town: Ga State and Society in Early Colonial Accra (Portsmouth N H , Oxford & Cape Town: Heinemann, 2000). Perbi, Akosua Adoma. A History of Indigenous Slavery in Ghana: From the 15th to the 19th Century (Legon, Accra: Sub-Saharan, 2004). Rowand, Evelyn. “Press and Opinion in British West Africa, 1855–1900: The Development of a Sense of Identity Among Educated British West Africans of the Later Nineteenth Century” (doctoral dissertation, University of Birmingham, 1972). Zachernuk, Philip S. Colonial Subjects: An African Intelligentsia and Atlantic Ideas (Charlottesville & London: U P of Virginia, 2000).

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Fragile Modernities — History and Historiography in Contemporary African Fiction

F RANK S CHULZE –E NGLER

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share a close, at times even intimate relationship in the history of African letters. When, during the mid-twentieth century struggles against colonialism, African writers began to explore the potential of modern literature for challenging the long tradition of skewed images and misrepresentations of Africa established by European colonial discourse, history became a favourite arena for literary engagements with that discourse. Chinua Achebe, who famously demanded that African literature should help Africans to find out “where the rain began to beat us,”1 embarked on a project of fictional recuperation of African history in his first novel Things Fall Apart (1958) that contrasted the arrogant colonial dismissal of African cultures, societies, and histories with a portrayal of the complex inner life of an African village community before and after the colonial incursion. Achebe’s classic suturing of precolonial history and modern literature became a major landmark for the newly developing field of anglophone African writing, but it also became supplemented and eventually challenged by other writing projects that looked at precolonial history in a much more critical mode (such as Wole Soyinka’s 1960 play A Dance of the Forests) and that began to confront the realities of post-independence Africa and its contemporary history. The present essay examines articulations between historiography and literature in two contemporary African novels that explicitly focus on the paral1

ITERATURE AND HISTORIOGRAPHY

Chinua Achebe, “The Novelist as Teacher” (1965), in Achebe, Morning Yet on Creation Day: Essays (1975; London: Heinemann, 1977): 44.

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lels between writing fiction and writing history: The Stone Virgins by the Zimbabwean writer Yvonne Vera, published in 2002, and Measuring Time by the Nigerian author Helon Habila, published in 2007. Both novels not only engage with contemporary history but, in their own (and very different) ways, also reflect on the challenges involved in writing history in contemporary Africa. A major problem in this respect lies in the changing political and ideological functions of anticolonialism, which in many post-independence societies in Africa has transmuted from an ideology of liberation into an ideology of repression. While an older generation of African writers could base their engagement with African history on a relatively secure normative framework generated by the antagonism of colonialism versus anticolonialism (or European versions of African history versus African versions of African history), more recent African writing has seen itself confronted with complex trajectories of contemporary (post-independence) history and perplexing political and ideological landscapes where yesterday’s invocations of anticolonial solidarity have often turned into today’s affirmations of authoritarian oppression. As Evan Mwangi has argued, African literature has responded to this challenge by becoming “markedly self-reflexive” and by increasingly focusing its gaze “on local forms of oppression that are seen to parallel classical colonialism.”2 This creative engagement with new historical, social, and ideological constellations in post-independence Africa stands in marked contrast to the critical routines that continue to inform literary scholarship. Much contemporary literary criticism, particularly that generated within so-called ‘postcolonial studies,’ seems signally ill-equipped to follow contemporary African literature onto the contested terrain of post-independence self-reflexivity. All too often, ‘postcolonial’ critical energies are expended on rediscovering conflicts between colonizers and colonized or on deconstructing ‘European’ or ‘Western’ discourses of power, because these are the problematics on which ‘postcolonial’ theoretical and methodological resources that privilege the colonial as the prior reference point for contemporary literature and culture can most convincingly (and, we should admit, most easily) be brought to bear – and because many, particularly younger, researchers often seem to have no other resources at hand to guide their critical labours. As Eleni Coundouriotis has 2

Evan Maina Mwangi, Africa Writes Back to Self: Metafiction, Gender, Sexuality (Albany: State U of New York P , 2009): 1.

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shown in an impressive overview of theoretical approaches to the role of history in the African novel, privileging the colonial/anticolonial nexus in interpretations of contemporary African cultures and societies has a long tradition reaching back at least to Abdul JanMohamed’s Manichean Aesthetics (1983)3 and, even further, to the politics of radical anticolonialism in the era of anticolonial mass movements in Africa.4 More recently, this tendency has become even more pronounced as the signature tune of the postcolonial has come to dominate African studies. In his influential study On the Postcolony, Achille Mbembe has formulated this colonial imperative in the following manner: More than any other region, Africa thus stands out as the supreme receptacle of the West’s obsession with, and circular discourse about, the facts of “absence,” “lack,” and “non-being,” of identity and difference, of negativeness – in short, of nothingness. […] There, in all its closed glory, is the prior discourse against which any comment by an African about Africa is deployed. There is the language that every comment by an African about Africa must endlessly eradicate, validate, or ignore, often to his/her cost, the ordeal whose erratic fulfillment many Africans have spent their lives trying to prevent.5

In a similar vein, a study of “Memory and History in African Literatures” has recently argued that “African literatures are continually preoccupied with exploring modes of representation to ‘work through’ its different traumatic colonial pasts”6 and that in responding to the slings and arrows of this traumatic colonial history, African literatures appear to develop by a repetition of, a delayed iteration of and an obsessive return to history and the past.7

This colonial imperative in African studies has, of course, been hotly debated and also staunchly rejected. In a volume on “Postcolonial Identities in Africa” 3

Abdul R. JanMohamed, Manichean Aesthetics: The Politics of Literature in Colonial Africa (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P , 1983). 4 See Eleni Coundouriotis, “Why History Matters in the African Novel,” in Teaching the African Novel, ed. Gaurav Desai (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2009): 56–58. 5 Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: U of California P , 2001): 4, 5. 6 Tim Woods, African Pasts: Memory and History in African Literatures (Manchester & New York: Manchester U P , 2007): 1. 7 Woods, African Pasts, 6.

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published in 1996, Richard Werbner argued that an excessive focus on the legacies of colonialism could easily lead to a quietism with regard to Africa’s contemporary predicaments: Silence is complicity, mainstream postcolonial studies often remind us in rightly speaking out against the living force of our heritage of colonial racism. But what about the impact of and responsibility for state violence against internal ‘enemies’, genocide and quasi-nationalism? Who, among the diasporic spokespersons for postcolonial studies, puts that on the critical agenda?8

In the context of a critical debate on the ethics of African studies, Timothy Burke has more recently summarized the widespread notion within postcolonial studies that the postcolonial is essentially the colonial in a new setting: The problem of postcolonial Africa is treated by the majority of scholars, especially anthropologists and historians, as an extension of or continuation of the problem of the colonial, that the moral and political challenge of postcolonial society is subordinated to or situated within a modernity whose character is largely causally attributed to colonial intervention. Postcolonial misrule is not commonly regarded as an analytic question which poses a distinctive set of issues, or which lies on one side of an important break or cleavage from the colonial.9

On a more general level, beyond the scope of African studies, Amartya Sen has offered a devastating critique of attempts to tie individual, collective, and cultural “postcolonial identies” to an obsessive return to the colonial past: It cannot make sense to see oneself primarily as someone who (or whose ancestors) have been misrepresented, or treated badly, by colonialists, no matter how true that identification may be. […] to lead a life in which resentment against an imposed inferiority from past history comes to dominate one’s priorities today cannot but be unfair to oneself. It can also vastly deflect attention from other objectives that those emerging from past colonies have reason to value and pursue in the contemporary world.10 8

Richard Werbner, “Introduction: Multiple Identities, Plural Arenas,” in Postcolonial Identities in Africa, ed. Richard Werbner & Terence Ranger (London: Zed, 1996): 13. 9 Timothy Burke, “Eyes Wide Shut: Africanists and the Moral Problematics of Postcolonial Societies,” African Studies Quarterly 7.2–3 (Fall 2004), http://web.africa.ufl .edu/asq/v7/v7i2a12.htm (accessed 1 March 2012). 10 Amartya Sen, Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (2006; New York: W.W. Norton, 2007): 88, 89.

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The two novels discussed in this essay are excellent examples of a critical literary engagement with contemporary Africa that has more important things to do than “endlessly eradicate, validate, or ignore” Europe’s obsessions or to engage in “an obsessive return to history and the past.” Instead, they prod readers towards a rereading and reconceptualization of contemporary African history in a world of globalized modernity and, by implication, also throw up a number of challenging issues for African literary studies. Both texts engage with Africa’s current history by lending it a critical edge: they are committed to a deconstruction of grand narratives of history that have become new, cynical discourses of power in post-independence Africa. But both texts also seek to recount this history with a new, reconstructive impetus that attempts to write ‘usable pasts’ into being and that explores modes of understanding history that depart from the double aporia of postcolonial rewriting and nationalist myth-making. In both texts, this exploration of history goes hand in hand with a critical engagement with African modernities that emerged in confrontation with European colonial regimes and that have followed very specific trajectories after the demise of colonialism.11

“Cool livable places”: The Stone Virgins and the Demystification of ‘Patriotic History’ Yvonne Vera’s fifth (and last) novel The Stone Virgins, published just three years before her premature death in 2005, challenges prevalent perceptions of current history and powerfully intervenes in the politics of cultural memory in contemporary Zimbabwe. At the centre of its critical engagement with history and historiography lies an outspoken challenge to the dogma of ‘patriotic his11

For a discussion of “African modernities,” see Peter Probst, Jan–Georg Deutsch & Heike Schmidt, “Introduction: Cherished Visions and Entangled Meanings,” in African Modernities: Entangled Meanings in Current Debate, ed. Probst, Deutsch & Schmidt (Oxford: James Currey, 2002): 1–17; for more general attempts to understand modernity from a non-eurocentric perspective, see Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 2000); Partha Chatterjee, Our Modernity (Rotterdam & Dakar: South–South Exchange Programme for Research on the History of Development (S E P H I S ) & Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (C O D E S R I A ), 1997); and Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, “Multiple Modernities,” Daedalus 129.1 (Winter 2000): 1–29.

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tory’ and the ideology of the ‘Third Chimurenga’ (or Third People’s War) undergirding the oppressive policies of the Mugabe regime. Immediately after Robert Mugabe’s Z A N U (Zimbabwe African National Union) government came to power in 1980 in the wake of the collapse of the racist Rhodesian settler regime that had been defeated in the so-called ‘Second Chimurenga’ (the first Chimurenga having been the ultimately unsuccessful war against the British of 1896/97), internal divisions in the victorious ‘Patriotic Front’ composed of the nationalist parties Z A N U and Z A P U (Zimbabwe African Patriotic Union) and their respective guerrilla armies Z A N L A and Z I P R A led to violent attacks by former Z I P R A guerrillas (so-called ‘dissidents’) in Matabeleland. These revolts were brutally repressed by the notorious North Korean-trained ‘Fifth Brigade’ sent into Matabeleland to ‘restore order’ in what became known as ‘Operation Gukurahundi’ (‘Spring Rain’ or ‘Clear away the Rubbish’), a campaign of indiscriminate terror against the civilian population that left thousands dead and that – as Jocelyn Alexander and JoAnn McGregor put it in their contribution to a volume of essays on Democracy and Human Rights in Zimbabwe – led to a pervasive “feeling of alienation from the national body politic” in Matabeleland persisting to the present day.12 After an enforced period of ‘national unity’ in the 1980s and 1990s, the Mugabe government faced a major challenge in the late 1990s with the emergence of a popular democratic opposition and the founding of the Movement for Democratic Change (M D C ) led by Morgan Tsvangirai. As a response to this challenge, the Z A N U regime unleashed what became known as the ‘Third Chimurenga’: it expropriated the white farmers whose status had been protected under the settlement agreed upon during the independence negotiations, redistributed their land (often to party members and ‘war veterans’), and

12

Jocelyn Alexander & JoAnn McGregor, “Democracy, Development and Rural Conflict: Rural Institutions in Matabeleland North after Independence,” in The Historical Dimensions of Democracy and Human Rights in Zimbabwe, vol. 2: Nationalism, Democracy and Human Rights, ed. Terence Ranger (Harare: University of Zimbabwe Publications, 2003): 129. For an incisive account of the Matabeleland crisis and the long-tabooed massive human-rights violations during ‘Operation Gukurahundi’, see the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace in Zimbabwe, Gukurahundi in Zimbabwe (London: C. Hurst, 2007); for a journalistic account of political repression in contemporary Zimbabwe, see Peter Godwin, The Fear: Robert Mugabe and the Martyrdom of Zimbabwe (London: Little, Brown, 2001).

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began a campaign of ruthless political violence directed against the opposition.13 The Stone Virgins was the first novel to be published about ‘Operation Gukurahundi,’ and focuses in particular on the massacres in Kezi District in Matabeleland, where several thousand people were killed by Mugabe’s troops.14 Literature and history are thus very closely linked in Vera’s novel: by directly engaging with these traumatic events tabooed by the Mugabe regime, The Stone Virgins itself commits an act of fictionalized historiography, or, rather, stands in for an historiography yet to come in a society overpowered by an authoritarian regime foreclosing public debate on the country’s recent past. As many critics have noted, Vera’s polyphonic and multifaceted mode of narration is in itself a stringent comment on and performative destabilization of the monologic discourse of ‘patriotic’ history utilized by Zimbabwe’s authoritarian rulers.15 Yet Vera’s poetic novel is far more than just a fictionally disguised account of suppressed historical events. It also seeks to delegitimate the anticolonial ‘Third Chimurenga’ discourse that has become the legitimating ideology of power of the Mugabe regime and to open up new prospects of narrating African history. The most important of these arguably lies in the novel’s focus on ‘fragile modernity’ in twentieth-century Rhodesia /Zimbabwe. The novel be13

For an analysis of ‘patriotic history’ and ‘Third Chimurenga’ ideology as discourses legitimizing political repression in Zimbabwe, see Terence Ranger, “The Uses and Misuses of History in Zimbabwe,” in Skinning the Skunk: Facing Zimbabwean Futures, ed. Mai Palmberg & Ranka Primorac (Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 2005): 7–15; Preben Kaarsholm, “Coming to Terms with Violence: Literature and the Development of a Public Sphere in Zimbabwe,” in Versions of Zimbabwe: New Approaches to Literature and Culture, ed. Robert Muponde & Ranka Primorac (Harare: Weaver, 2005): 16–23, and Zimbabwe in Crisis: The International Response and the Space of Silence, ed. Stephen Chan & Ranka Primorac (London: Routledge, 2006). 14 See The Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace in Zimbabwe, Gukurahundi in Zimbabwe, and Anon., “Matobo Villagers Speakout on Gukurahundi mine burials,” The Zimdiaspora (2 August 2011), http://zimdiaspora.com/index.php/entertainment /enteratinment/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=6272:villagersspeakout-on-gukurahundi-bhalagwe-mine-mass-burials&catid=38:travel-tips&Itemid =18 (accessed 1 March 2012). 15 See, for example, Fiona McCann, “ ‘ The Past a Repast’: Past and Present in Butterfly Burning and The Stone Virgins by Yvonne Vera,” Commonwealth: Essays and Studies 31.1 (Autumn 2007): 59–68.

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gins with a highly poetic account of this fragile modernity in colonial Rhodesia, in the city of Bulawayo, the capital of Matabeleland. The historical narrative thus does not take its cue from the contrast between precolonial history and colonial oppression, or indeed from a mythologized history of a people’s collective resistance over more than a century, but from the rhythms of life characterizing a black urban modernity lived against all odds in what is manifestly still a white city in colonial Rhodesia: The city revolves in sharp edges, roads cut at right angles. At noon shadows are sharp and elongated. Streets are wide. Widest at intersections. In this city the edge of a building is a profile, a corner … ekoneni. The word is pronounced with pursed lips and lyrical minds, with arms pulsing, with a memory begging for time. Ekoneni, they say, begging for ease, for understanding. The corner of a building is felt with the fingers, rough, chipped cement. You approach a corner, you make a turn. This movement defines the body, shapes it in a sudden and miraculous way. Anything could be round the corner. A turn and your vision sees new light, nothing is obscured. You are as tall as these buildings sprouting from the ground. Ekoneni is a rendezvous, a place to meet. You cannot meet inside any of the buildings because this city is divided, entry is forbidden to black men and women, you meet outside buildings, not at doorways, entries, foyers, not beneath arched windows, not under graceful colonnades, balustrade and cornices, but ekoneni. Here, you linger, ambivalent, permanent as time. You are in transit. The corner is a camouflage, a place of instancy and style; a place of protest.16

Although set in an urban topography structured by the exclusionary logic of colonial Rhodesia, the vignettes of black city life that set the tone for the first part of The Stone Virgins do not evoke a woeful tale of racial oppression. The central images in this passage revolve around “transit” and “style”: the street corners, originally markers of exclusion from the ‘white’ interiors of built-up city space, become galvanizing points of a “sudden and miraculous” black modernity. Vera’s ‘history of the present’ thus begins with a poetic account of fleeting moments of sly urban civility lived against all odds ‘outside’ the architecture of racial exclusion. It is this transient modernity in late-colonial society – already explored in Vera’s previous novel Butterfly Burning – rather 16

Yvonne Vera, The Stone Virgins (Harare: Weaver, 2002): 10. Further page references are in the main text.

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than a precolonial Eden or an heroic anticolonialism that provides the ethical framework against which the ravages of post-independence civil war and state terror can be measured. The horrific climax of these ravages in The Stone Virgins is reached with the murder of Thenjiwe, a young woman living in Kezi, and the rape and mutilation of her sister Nonceba. They both become the victim of Sibaso, a former ‘freedom fighter’ who has become one of the ‘dissidents’ fighting against the Mugabe regime after Zimbabwe’s independence in 1980. With the figure of the disillusioned soldier mutated into a ruthless killer, Vera sets a character centre-stage who is the product of a culture of violence generated during protracted wars, thereby implicitly delegitimating the rhetoric of heroic armed resistance that the Mugabe regime has invoked to legitimate its own oppressive rule.17 Instead of being ‘rooted’ in the firm historical framework of one ‘freedom war’ after the other invoked by the state ideology of the ‘Third Chimurenga’,18 Sibaso seems to have lost individual and historical orientation through his war experiences: My name is Sibaso. I have crossed many rivers with that name no longer on my lips, forgotten. It is an easy task to forget a name. […] During a war we are lifeless beings. We are envoys, our lives intervals of despair, a part of you conceals itself, so that not everything is destroyed, only a part. The rest perishes like cloud. Independence, which took place only three years ago, has proved us a tenuous species, a continent which has succumbed to a violent wind, a country with land but no habitat. We are out of bounds in our own reality. (74)

Yet Sibaso is far from being depicted as a victim of circumstance only. Literally knocking his head against history as he hides away in ancient caves in the Gulati Hills, Sibaso attempts to become master of his destiny again by embarking on a course of cruel self-‘purification’ that echoes the Fifth Brigades murderous rhetoric of ‘cleansing’ disloyal Matabeleland:

17

On the significance of Sibaso as protagonist in The Stone Virgins, see Annie Gagniano, “Reading The Stone Virgins as Vera’s Study of the Katabolism of War,” Research in African Literatures 38.2 (Summer 2007): 64–76. 18 For an analysis of Vera’s subversion of ‘Third Chimurenga’ discourse, see Lene Bull Christiansen, “Yvonne Vera: Rewriting Discourses of History and Identity in Zimbabwe,” in Versions of Zimbabwe: New Approaches to Literature and Culture, ed. Robert Mponde & Ranka Primorac (Harare: Weaver, 2005): 203–15.

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When he stands his head hits against something heavy – he discovers that history has its ceiling. He is surprised. He has to crouch, and his body soon assumes a defensive attitude; the desire to attack. If he loses an enemy, he invents another. This is his purge. He is almost clean. He seems to have a will, an idea which only he can execute. Of course, this idea involves desecration, the violation of kindness. It is a posture both individual and wasteful. He cannot escape. He is the embodiment of time. (74, 75)

A central image in the novel is that of the Stone Virgins, female figures in ancient, ten-thousand-year-old rock paintings that Sibaso discovers in the caves he conceals himself in. In Sibaso’s power-delirious perception shaped by a liberationist war turned into a nightmare of violence, these stone virgins do not function as reassuring emblems of former greatness in African history (such as the ruins of Great Zimbabwe routinely invoked by ‘patriotic history’ as proof of Zimbabwe’s noble past meant to legitimate present-day authoritarian rule)19 but, rather, become uncanny embodiments of his own violent fantasies of power that will end with murder, rape, and mutilation. The Stone Virgins thus stand for an ossified vision of history, of hallucinated female purity and subservience, but also for the futile wish for historical solidity: Disembodied beings. Their legs branch from their bodies like roots. The women float, away from the stone. Their thighs are empty, too fragile, too thin to have already carried a child. They are the virgins who walk into their own graves before the burial of a king. They die untouched. Their ecstasy is in the afterlife. Is this a suicide or a sacrifice, or both? Suicide, a willing, but surely, a private matter? Sacrifice means the loss of life, of lives, so that one life may be saved. The life of rulers is served, not saved. […] It is true, everything in Gulati rots except the rocks. On the rocks history is steady, it cannot be tilted forwards or backwards. It is not a refrain. History fades into the chaos of the hills but it does not vanish. In Gulati I travel four hundred years, then ten thousand years, twenty more. The rocks split open, time shifts and I confess that I am among the travellers who steal shelter from the dead. (95)

As “disembodied beings,” the floating Stone Virgins are poetically linked to the decapitated body of Thenjiwe and the macabre dance of death Sibaso stages with both sisters: they form part of a continuum of violence that time

19

See Ranger, “The Uses and Misuses of History in Zimbabwe,” 10, 11.

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and again culminates in the destruction of women’s bodies. From these petrified maidens neither glory nor consolation is to be had. Solace, forgiveness, and reconciliation have an important role to play in the last section of the novel, however, which stages a long-drawn-out process of healing. Nonceba is brought to Bulawayo by Thenjiwe’s former lover Cephas, who turns out to be an historian working on a project of reconstructing the kraal of King Lobengula, a powerful nineteenth-century African ruler who governed the Matabele kingdom from his capital, Bulawayo. The Stone Virgins ends with a paragraph in which Cephas reflects on the interdependencies between private and public histories and on the possible uses of Zimbabwe’s past for its turbulent present: He must retreat from Nonceba, perhaps he has become too involved in replicating histories. He should stick to restorations of ancient kingdoms, circular structures, bee-hive huts, stone knives, broken pottery, herringbone walls, the vanished pillars in an old world. A new nation needs to restore the past. His focus, the bee-hive hut, to be installed at Lobengula’s ancient kraal in kwoBulawayo the following year. His task is to learn to recreate the manner in which the tenderest branches bend, meet and dry, the way grass folds smoothly over this frame and weaves a nest, the way it protects the cool livable places within; deliverance. (165)

While at least one critic has taken Vera to task for resorting to a conventionalist image of a romantic return to Africa’s precolonial history in this passage,20 a different picture arguably emerges once this passage is read in the context of the complex network of representations of history that extends throughout the novel. It is highly significant that the tentative restoration of fragile selves that closes the novel is set in the same location as the transient emergence of black urban modernity evoked in the first chapter of The Stone Virgins. In contrast to the imposing stone relics of Great Zimbabwe which the Mugabe regime has repeatedly misused as cornerstones of its ‘patriotic’ version of history, the reconstructed huts in Lobengula’s kraal and their design in a “manner in which the tenderest branches bend, meet and dry” allude to a different understanding of the uses of Africa’s past for its present. The “cool, livable places” invoked in the conclusion of The Stone Virgins do not signal back to a glorified or romanticized past, I would like to suggest, but to the notion of a fragile African modernity explored in the first forty pages of 20

See Kaarsholm, “Coming to Terms with Violence,” 16–23.

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the novel. They indicate an evanescent, provisional closure of a narrative that sets out from the promises of a late-colonial African modernity, traverses the traumatic post-independence era where these promises were cruelly disappointed, and arrives in an uncertain present where a monolithic account of African history is confronted by a polyphonic rendering of that history: what is implied is not the promise of national salvation but the hope of survival, of people as much as of the ethics of African modernity.

“The secret of their survival”: Measuring Time and the Transcultural Transformation of African History While different concepts of history and modes of historiography in contemporary Africa are an implicit concern of Vera’s novel, and Cephas, the historian, plays only a relatively minor role in the overall story of The Stone Virgins, the writing of history and the tribulations of an historian in contemporary Africa are the explicit subject-matter of Helon Habila’s Measuring Time. Habila’s novel revolves around a pair of twins who both dream of becoming great heroes but embark on very different life journeys: one brother, LaMamo, leaves his birthplace, the fictional small town of Keti in Northern Nigeria, to seek his fortune as a hero of African liberation, while the other, Mamo, falls ill as a child, stays behind in Keti, studies history, and eventually becomes a history teacher and the official historian of the Mai, the traditional ruler of Keti, who employs him to write a chronicle of his dynasty for an anniversary celebration. When Mamo first sets out on his project of writing local history, he comes across a book by a white missionary, Reverend Drinkwater, who many decades before wrote a “Brief History of Keti” full of the usual stereotypes of an underdeveloped culture direly in need of the white man’s helping hand. In response, Mamo develops a classical ‘writing-back’ approach and plans to write an Africa-centred history of Keti that would finally lend voice to Africans as the true subjects of history and tell the full truth about his home town: Mamo had made a draft of his follow-up essay, with the title, “A Plan for a True History of the Keti People,” which he now completed […]. It was twice the length of the first piece, mainly because he used a lot of local myths and legends to illustrate his point – they were the same myths and legends used by Drinkwater in his Brief History, but with a different reading to emphasize what he called “malevolent manipula-

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tion of history,” which he countered with “benevolent manipulation of history.” (186, 187)

But Mamo never comes to write that counter-discursive “True History” – he successively matures as an historian and eventually grows out of the writingback mould altogether. One strand in the novel that helps him to do so is the experiences of his brother LaMamo, whose dreams of becoming a great panAfrican hero of liberation are cruelly disappointed as he comes to realize that the idea of finally decolonizing independent Africa all over again has long since become a tool ruthlessly wielded by power-hungry elites who have turned anticolonialism into a new oppressive ideology. In his letters to his brother, LaMamo is initially full of admiration for this liberationist ideology and its political protagonists. On joining a training camp in Gaddafi’s Libya, he writes to Mamo: At night we have the political classes – important people come all the time to speak to us. They talk about African freedom, about capitalism and socialism and exploitation of people by other people and how Africa must be free, and we as volunteers must be willing to even give our lives to save Africa. It is really important because we cannot continue to live like slaves even after independence from colonization – look at many African countries, even our country Nigeria, our leaders are just puppets of the Western powers. That is what Charles Taylor says to us. He is one of the people that come to speak to us. Soon Gaddafi the President of Libya himself will come here. (80)

In the course of the novel, LaMamo becomes a mercenary fighting in many of Africa’s civil wars, until he ends up in Liberia, where he finally realizes that the idea of anticolonial greatness in postcolonial Africa that he has chased after for so many years is, in fact, a pipe dream that has turned him into the willing puppet of cynical new power elites: I’ve been in Liberia for over two years now, and so many things has happened, and not too many of them good. […] We came together three of us from Mali then to Ougadougou, we decide to leave the others in Mali with the Tuaregs because it was a fight that was not ending and we said what are we fighting for anyway? Samuel said in Liberia we can fight for money and be our own boss, and he also want revenge. […] He showed us his house, it has been burned down by fire, and the church where all his family were killed. […] When I saw him crying in the church I asked myself what all these fighting is for? I am a soldier for almost ten years now and I live by fighting but sometimes it doesn’t make sense. It is just crazy. (153, 154)

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Influenced among other things by his brother’s disillusionment, Mamo, the historian, begins to rethink his idea of historiography. He increasingly realizes how the history of his own small town, Keti, is linked to national, pan-African and even global affairs. As a teacher of history, he is no longer spell-bound by an afrocentric ‘counter-discourse’ but, rather, wants to generate interest in the manifold links that bind Keti to the wider history of Nigeria, Africa, and the world: He wanted to ask questions, not really to teach. He wanted to encompass all of history in one lesson, one hour, one sentence; he wanted to talk about the Berlin Wall, about Vladimir Lenin, about the slave trade and the American Civil War; about how their country, Nigeria, came to be named; of Martin Luther King; of Mandela on Robben Island; of the pyramids and the pharaohs in Egypt; about Plato and Aristotle and the Roman emperors; of Marie Antoinette and how she thought bread and cake were really not much different; of Hitler in his bunker and how ultimately good triumphs over evil; of Napoleon on St. Helena; of Chaka the Zulu king; of Mansa MnjsƗ; and of how all these things affected them directly; how a victory over tyranny and injustice anywhere and at any time was also a victory right here, right now. (105)

At the same time, he becomes aware of the fact that the lives of the ruling aristocratic family in Keti that he is to chronicle are deeply implicated in colonial history and in a present dominated by corruption, greed, and the thwarting of democratic aspirations. In a moment of professional despair marked by pronounced intertextual irony, Mamo questions the merit of his chronicles of the Mai, the ruthless Waziri who serves and manipulates him, and the ‘illustrious’ ruling family of Keti, in self-reflexive ruminations that echo the reflections of the District Officer in the last chapter of Achebe’s Things Fall Apart: And he asked himself almost derisively, What really is there to write about their lives? Their combined lives wouldn’t be worth more than a chapter in a decent book. And he thought of his brother, who now had only one eye, and he said to himself, I could write ten books about his life and times without the need for any padding. He also thought of Zara in South Africa, standing in a crowd, watching Mandela being sworn in, after he had spent twenty-seven years in prison, and he muttered to himself, “I could write a thousand books about that moment, that minute that he lifted his arm to take the oath of office.” (275, my emphasis)

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While a recent reading of the novel has taken this passage as proof that Habila “subverts the pretensions of colonial knowledge”21 and suggests that the text as a whole should be seen as a contribution to “the project of writing back to empire,”22 Measuring Time in fact provides a striking example of the exhaustion of classical ‘postcolonial’ concepts such as the writing-back paradigm and the futility of conventional attempts to reduce contemporary African writing to its ‘counter-discursive’ relationships to Europe or ‘the West.’ Mamo’s development as historian and his changing perceptions of history – rendered in the novel in a focalized narrative that invites the reader to share different ideas of history and models of historiography Mamo experiments with, including his own critique of his former delusions – mark an historical and literary trajectory that finally renders notions of ‘writing back to empire’ irrelevant.23 In the last section of the novel, Mamo develops a new concept of historiography that moves beyond the idea of writing back to Europe, beyond the historiographic concept of Plutarch’s “Parallel Lives” that he had toyed with for some time, and also beyond the false teleology of a second anticolonial liberation projected into Africa’s post-independence present. Mamo turns his back on the fantasy of the final, ‘true’ history and instead embraces an historiography based on the complex entanglements of individuals, an historiography that is ready to acknowledge even the contribution of British district officers and missionaries to the shaping of present-day Keti. Colonial individuals such as Graves (the British district officer who installed the new ‘traditional ruler’ in Keti, planted hundreds of trees that continue to keep Keti green and cool even today, fell in love with one of the first Mai’s beautiful wives later. and finally flung himself off a mountain-top) or the Reverend Drinkwater (the author of the notorious “Brief History of Keti” whose battle against native ‘heathen’ customs culminated in the prohibition of twin-killing that had 21

Kerry Vincent, “(Re-)Forming Stereotypes: Modes of Mimicry in Helon Habila’s Measuring Time,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 47.1 (2011): 45. 22 Vincent, “(Re-)Forming Stereotypes,” 42. 23 Curiously enough, Vincent himself acknowledges the fact that the writing back paradigm can no longer contain Habila’s text at the very end of his essay (“Rather than merely producing a counter-text that hazards being locked in a complicitous relationship with its colonial counterparts […] Habila posits a more cosmopolitan vision, however fragile,” 50). In the rest of his text, this insight is overpowered by the orthodoxies of postcolonial rhetoric and conventionalized notions of the ‘counter-discursivity’ of African literature, however, and remains inconsequential for the reading strategy of the author.

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been practised in Keti before and thus circuitously saved LaMamo’s and Mamo’s lives) are neither pushed into oblivion nor ‘written back to’, but inserted into a larger, African perspective that acknowledges not only the local past but also its articulations with pan-African and global history: In his mind he was now clear about what shape the book would take – it’d be in fifteen to twenty chapters, and each chapter would cover the life of one individual. […] He wouldn’t be seeking for parallels between lives, like Plutarch did, because he saw that as already given: all lives are already parallel; each life is comparable to another life regardless of circumstance. […] He didn’t know if the result would be a true history; he didn’t care. In the final analysis he’d be writing the book for himself. The first name on his list of persons was his father: because he still didn’t know who his father was, or what had driven him and others like him; then his brother, because if he really understood his brother, then he’d also come to understand himself, they were one person; […] Drinkwater, because in a way he owed him his life; the Mai, because Mamo had already gathered so much material on him, and because if he could demystify him, and others like him, then he could understand the limitations of tradition, and also its possibilities; the Waziri, because he was evil and every book should have at least one evil person in it; and Graves, because he would like to know what ran across his mind as he fell from Kilang Peak […] (358)

It is this new understanding of the past – based on a continental view of African affairs as well as on a self-confident insertion of colonialism into a wider framework of local history – that becomes the pivot of the last part of the novel and particularly of the final chapter centering on the performance of “The Coming,” a play ostensibly celebrating the arrival of Christianity in Keti almost a century before. Originally scripted by Mamo at the age of fourteen, the play has become something of a local tradition: it has been regularly staged every year and is now to be performed by a new generation of young amateur actors. As an adult historian, Mamo at first feels embarrassed about his juvenile dramatic efforts, and it is only after he has seen the next generation perform his play about the transformation of Keti’s history that he understands what the play about the coming of Christianity actually signifies to actors and audience alike: he suddenly realized why the people found the play so intriguing year after year, something he had failed to see before. To them the play was not about Drinkwater and his “conquest” of their culture by his culture,

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it was about their own survival. They were celebrating because they had had the good sense to take whatever was good from another culture and add it to whatever was good in theirs: they had done this before when they first met the Komda [the autochthonous indigenous population living in the area], and many times before that in their travel and migrations, in times earlier than even the oldest of them could remember. This was their wisdom, the secret of their survival. (380)

The sly civility at work in this performance is thus neither a belated example of ‘acting back to Empire’ nor, indeed, an instance of ‘postcolonial mimicry’ that undermines colonial values by ‘almost, but not quite’ enacting them on stage. What is at issue in the play, what the audience relates to, and what readers of the novel are invited to reflect upon is the transcultural transformation of African history. This history neither began with the coming of the Europeans nor ended with the demise of colonialism and has – from the very first moment of contact between the original indigenous population and the new wave of African settlers that were eventually to displace it – been characterized by adaptation, transformation, and the struggle for survival. To conclude: in coming to terms with literary representations of history, contemporary literary studies often enough opt for a discursive approach that sees history (and historiography) as nothing but textual constructs, explores the diegetic relationships between fictional and non-fictional modes of narrating history, and is mainly interested in how literary texts contribute to the making (or unmaking) of history as discursive construct. Whatever this approach may have contributed to the unsettling of historiographic discourses of power in general and to eurocentric narrations of colonial and imperial history in particular, it seems ill-equipped to face the challenges posed by increasing globalization and the concomitant interest in the global history of entangled modernities in historiography, literature, and literary criticism alike. In an essay on representations of history in postcolonial literature, Jana Gohrisch has summed up the current unease with critical deconstructive orthodoxies in the following manner: how can we conceptualize and study literary representations of history after chronology and causality have been revealed as supporting existing power-relations? Is it enough to replace the grand narratives with powerful local stories? Does anything come after the diversified ac-

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counts of history focusing on the perspective of disadvantaged social groups?24

In her essay, Gohrisch calls for a dialogue between cultural-exchange theory and postcolonial studies in order to overcome this impasse; indeed, it seems plausible enough to draw on selective strategies of cultural appropriation and on the history and current dynamics of transcultural connections for an exploration of the “overlapping territories and intertwined histories”25 that have emerged from several centuries of economic, social, and cultural globalization. As the two novels analysed here confirm, however, there is even more at stake in coming to terms with representations of history in contemporary African literature. It is not just that the analytical emphasis needs to “shift to the post/colonials to appreciate their initiative in handling conflicts instead of seeing them only react to outside influences”;26 what is at issue is the very idea of a generic postcoloniality – and, indeed, the habitualized notion of ‘postcolonial literatures’ – itself that seems a hindrance rather than an asset for the study of contemporary African literature. As this essay has shown, both Vera’s Stone Virgins and Habila’s Measuring Time have left the conventions of ‘postcoloniality’ – including the hackneyed idea that colonialism has not yet ended in Africa – far behind in their literary engagements with Africa’s recent past. In a decisive break with a normative historiographic framework predicated on the perpetuation of an anticolonial imperative, both novels investigate new trajectories of contemporary history, dissect the repressive functions of anticolonialism in present-day Africa, and explore the potential of fragile African modernities both as a mode of making sense of Africa’s past and as the ethical ground for a critique of its present inequities. In this manner, they not only address questions that are of vital importance for African history and historiography, but also confront African literary studies with an ethical and methodological challenge that can no longer be kept at bay by invoking ‘postcolonial Africa’ as a catch-all concept.

24

Jana Gohrisch, “Cultural Exchange and the Representation of History in Postcolonial Literature,” ejes: European Journal of English Studies 10.3 (December 2006): 233. 25 Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1993). 26 Gohrisch, “Cultural Exchange and the Representation of History in Postcolonial Literature,” 234.

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Habila, Helon. Measuring Time (New York: W.W. Norton, 2007). JanMohamed, Abdul R. Manichean Aesthetics: The Politics of Literature in Colonial Africa (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P , 1983). Kaarsholm, Preben. “Coming to Terms with Violence: Literature and the Development of a Public Sphere in Zimbabwe,” in Versions of Zimbabwe: New Approaches to Literature and Culture, ed. Robert Muponde & Ranka Primorac (Harare: Weaver, 2005): 16–23. McCann, Fiona. “ ‘ The Past a Repast’: Past and Present in Butterfly Burning and The Stone Virgins by Yvonne Vera,” Commonwealth: Essays and Studies 31.1 (Autumn 2007): 59–68. Mbembe, Achille. On the Postcolony (Berkeley: U of California P , 2001). Mwangi, Evan Maina. Africa Writes Back to Self: Metafiction, Gender, Sexuality (Albany: State U of New York P , 2009). Probst, Peter, Jan–Georg Deutsch & Heike Schmidt. “Introduction: Cherished Visions and Entangled Meanings,” in African Modernities: Entangled Meanings in Current Debate, ed. Probst, Deutsch & Schmidt (Oxford: James Currey, 2002): 1–17. Ranger, Terence. “The Uses and Misuses of History in Zimbabwe,” in Skinning the Skunk: Facing Zimbabwean Futures, ed. Mai Palmberg & Ranka Primorac (Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 2005): 7–15. Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1993). Sen, Amartya. Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (2006; New York: W.W. Norton, 2007). Soyinka, Wole. A Dance of the Forests (1960; London & Ibadan: Oxford U P , 1963). Vera, Yvonne. Butterfly Burning (Harare: Baobab, 1998). ——. The Stone Virgins (Harare: Weaver, 2002). Vincent, Kerry. “(Re-)Forming Stereotypes: Modes of Mimicry in Helon Habila’s Measuring Time,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 47.1 (2011): 42–51. Werbner, Richard. “Introduction: Multiple Identities, Plural Arenas,” in Postcolonial Identities in Africa, ed. Richard Werbner & Terence Ranger (London: Zed, 1996): 1–25. Woods, Tim. African Pasts: Memory and History in African Literatures (Manchester & New York: Manchester U P , 2007).

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C ROSSOVERS : H ISTORIOGRAPHY , F ICTION , C RITICISM

Historiographic Indian English Fiction — Indira Gandhi’s Emergency Rule in Midnight’s Children, The Great Indian Novel, and A Fine Balance

M ATTHIAS G ALLER

Emergency in India is a rosy, reforming, revolutionary experience and an enriching experiment in democracy under the existing circumstances; and its flowering success is full justification of the seed planted by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi at the rightest moment in history.1 A blanket of repression was cast over India by the emergency. About 110,000 people were arrested and imprisoned without trial. The emer-

gency period was the most substantial assault on the liberal democratic nature of India since independence.2

D

on Indira Gandhi’s emergency rule (1975–77) by the two political analysts J.S. Bright and Ramesh Thakur set the frame for a discussion of literary treatments of this phase in Indian history. While the three novels examined in this essay differ considerably in style and creative approach, they agree in their criticism of Gandhi’s use of dictatorial powers. As works of fiction, historical novels are subject to the paradox that their non-fictional subject-matter is the very opposite of the literary genre to which they belong. The boundaries between ‘documenting’ historical facts, forming ‘history’ into a conclusive narrative, and adding a particular interpretation, political bias or artistic appeal to it have 1

IAMETRICALLY OPPOSED JUDGMENTS

Jagat S. Bright, Emergency in India and 5+20-Point Programme (New Delhi: Pankaj, 1976): 3. 2 Ramesh Thakur, The Government and Politics of India (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995): 338.

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always been blurred; previous centuries have all but disregarded the difference between ‘reporting’ and ‘creating’ a literary past. There are, in this respect, striking similarities between medieval English historiography (Arthurian legend) and the ancient Indian epics (the Mahabharata). Contemporary historiographical fiction, however, openly admits the creative component of its narrative; still, it may cause controversy or even violent reactions, as was the case with Rushdie’s Satanic Verses or Mistry’s Such a Long Journey.3 The relationship between fiction and reality is far from easy to understand: can literature help us understand history or will novels written on historical subjects nurture half-knowledge and prejudice as they freely mingle fact with fiction? How can a novel reconcile its claim to historical accuracy despite its creative treatment of the subject? Before discussing representations of Indira Gandhi’s emergency rule in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Shashi Tharoor’s The Great Indian Novel, and Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance, a brief look at the events in question will be helpful.

Defending Democracy or Descending into Dictatorship? On 25 June 1975, India’s President Fakhrudin Ali Ahmed declared a state of National Emergency on account of the threat to security, which opened the way to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s running the country for two years with the use of dictatorial powers. P.N. Dhar, who wrote a book-length account of Gandhi’s premiership, was her principal secretary during the Emergency and therefore himself part of her government.4 Calling the Emergency “a severe setback in the political evolution of India” and a “tragedy,”5 he voices straightforward criticism. But it is wrong, he argues, to explain Indira Gandhi’s dictatorial rule simply in terms of her supposed greed for power; Indira Gandhi has been subject to both exaggerated praise in the wake of her successful leadership during the war against Pakistan and criticism during and 3

The Guardian reported on 19 October 2010 that Mistry’s Such a Long Journey was cut from a university reading list after threats from Shiv Sena, an extremist Hindu group that uses violence to intimidate opponents; Jason Burke, “Mumbai University Drops Rohinton Mistry Novel after Extremists Complain,” The Guardian (19 October 2010), http://gu.com/p/2kfa6 (accessed 10 September 2012). 4 Prithvi N. Dhar, Indira Gandhi, the ‘Emergency’, and Indian Democracy (New Delhi: Oxford U P , 2000). 5 Dhar, Indira Gandhi, the ‘Emergency’, and Indian Democracy, 223–24.

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after her time as Indian P M . The causes of national politics need to be sought in the system of the young republic as it evolved, in the gap between the form and the substance of democracy in India.6 One of the problems with the country’s newly created democracy was that the British parliamentary system had been adopted in a single step, whereas in Britain this system had evolved over centuries. Democratic systems, he argues, can be imported, but a political culture, which consists of inherited attitudes and behaviour, needs time to grow. Indian society, deeply rooted in religious traditions, was strained when secularism and a libertarian philosophy were adopted as its state policy.7 Another burden on the democratic institutions was the immediate past, the struggle against the colonial authorities. India’s aspiration to independence had been based on defiance of colonial laws and the rejection of authority, on a “carry-over from pre-independence techniques of protest against British rule.”8 In addition, India was riddled with a string of political crises in the 1970s: the Bangladesh crisis in 1971, the droughts in 1972–73, resulting in food shortages, the oil crisis in 1973, which necessitated unpopular measures to save the country from bankruptcy, rampant inflation, the Naxalite insurgency, large numbers of unemployed, and a series of strikes.9 In the early 1970s, the conditions for Gandhi’s premiership were undoubtedly difficult and the political crisis of 1975 leading to the state of emergency needs to be seen in the context of these events. Jayaprakash (JP) Narayan’s campaigns against Gandhi since 1974 and his calls for “radical change” made a common political understanding impossible.10 If we add Gandhi’s well-grounded fear of foreign involvement – Nixon’s hostility towards her was well-known and she had the fate of the Chilean Prime Minister Salvador Allende clearly before her – we can estimate the dangers she personally might have faced if she had simply stepped down. Indira Gandhi herself claimed that she had had no other option but to stay in power and take recourse to emergency rule: After my judgement in 1975 what could I have done except stay? You know the state the country was in. What would have happened if there

6

Dhar, Indira Gandhi, the ‘Emergency’, and Indian Democracy, 224. Indira Gandhi, the ‘Emergency’, and Indian Democracy, 227. 8 Indira Gandhi, the ‘Emergency’, and Indian Democracy, 230. 9 Peter Morey, Rohinton Mistry (Manchester: Manchester U P , 2004): 98–99. 10 Dhar, Indira Gandhi, the ‘Emergency’, and Indian Democracy, 252. 7

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had been nobody to lead it? I was the only person who could, you know. It was my duty to the country to stay, though I didn’t want to.11

Gandhi saw her country threatened by fascist groups alongside the Jayaprakash movement,12 just as her opponents experienced her authoritarian government as a threat to democracy. Her blind spot was certainly that she distrusted everybody except her son Sanjay.13 It was Sanjay Gandhi as the leader of the Youth Congress who organized the campaigns of civic beautification and forced sterilization, which aroused enough dissatisfaction to oust her in the 1977 elections. It was he who “believed not in convincing people but in getting things done by instilling fear among them.”14 Bipan Chandra concurs that it would be wrong to reproach Indira Gandhi for being undemocratic by nature or wanting to impose an authoritarian regime for the sake of permanent totalitarian rule. Her weakness as a political leader lay, rather, in the absence of strategic design; with her decision to resort to Emergency rule she was reacting to a specific political crisis rather than shoring up her own position in power.15 Strangely, soon after the Emergency had been declared, public support for the outspoken opposition movement led by JP Narayan collapsed. According to Dhar, the movement’s popularity had been exaggerated by the media.16 The Emergency was genuinely welcomed by large sections of the population, as it brought considerable immediate gains: no more strikes, industrial peace, improvements in public transportation, stable prices, and a rise in economic activity. The twenty-two-point programme promising land reforms, housing for the landless, irrigation projects, an end to bonded labour, the fight against tax evasion, better road transports and much more raised hopes among her followers. Bearing in mind the disastrous consequences of this programme for the poorest of the poor and the well over 100.000 political prisoners mentioned by Thakur, any praise of it, genuine or ironic, such as the following reference made by the narrator of Midnight’s Children, has a bitter taste: 11

Dom F. Moraes, Mrs Gandhi (London: Jonathan Cape, 1980): 220. Bipan Chandra, In the Name of Democracy: JP Movement and the Emergency (New Delhi: Penguin, 2003): 77. Jayaprakash Narayan demanded Gandhi’s resignation and set up a programme of social transformation. 13 Chandra, In the Name of Democracy, 199. 14 In the Name of Democracy, 205. 15 In the Name of Democracy, 82. 16 Dhar, Indira Gandhi, the ‘Emergency’, and Indian Democracy, 263. 12

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All sorts of things happen during an Emergency: trains run on time, black-money hoarders are frightened into paying taxes, even the weather is brought to heel, and bumper harvests are reaped; there is, I repeat, a white part as well as a black. 17

May we assume that the subjection of her country to a dictatorial regime was the necessary course to be taken by a responsible leader? Ramesh Thakur says no, arguing that it was flawed from the beginning as a transparent political measure to keep the Prime Minister in power and faulty in its execution, as it was selectively applied against her personal enemies.18 J.S. Bright’s partisan praise of the Emergency as “an enriching experiment in democracy” (quoted above) is exposed by Dhar as shameless propaganda: Family planning, a necessary measure in a nation whose population has risen in recent decades to more than one billion people, resulted during the Emergency in forced sterilizations among lower castes in order to fulfil government quotas. Another instance of the disastrous effects of a policy carried out under the iron fist of an authoritarian regime was the Delhi slum-clearance and resettlement programme. The wish to transform the capital into a modern city resulted in 120,000 jhuggi-jhopris in the slum areas of Delhi being demolished by bulldozers.19 The nearly 700,000 inhabitants were moved to resettlement colonies on the outskirts of the city, where neither infrastructure nor job opportunities were provided. The aim of this essay is to find out how this two-year period in Indian history is reflected in novels written after the events. These novels focus on aspects of reality that are deliberately overseen in ‘official’ accounts such as J.S. Bright’s, which claim to tell the collective history of the nation. Politicians base their decisions on population figures; Rushdie’s, Tharoor’s, and Mistry’s accounts of the slum clearances, however, give us an impression of what these drastic measures meant for the individuals concerned. Three different approaches to ‘reality’ can be identified: magical realism in Rushdie (1981); political satire in the guise of a retelling of classical Indian epic in Tharoor (1989); and the naturalistic plunge into sordid detail in Mistry (1996).

17

Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (1981; London: Vintage 2008): 606. Further page references are in the main text. 18 Thakur, The Government and Politics of India, 340. 19 Chandra, In the Name of Democracy, 208.

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Magical Realism and Historiography Salman Rushdie’s prize-winning novel offers the reader a fictive biography intricately linked with Indian history from the colonial past, through the birth of the new nation in 1947, to the new nation’s darkest hour, the two-year emergency rule under P M Indira Gandhi. The account given in Midnight’s Children is no less realistic for being superseded by magic. Critics have pointed to Rushdie’s debt to Gabriel García Márquez in terms of style: the fictive ‘reality’ and fantasy run into each other; the magical is present in the everyday.20 The novel was published in 1981 when Indira Gandhi was serving a second term as Indian P M after her electoral defeat in 1977 and subsequent re-election in 1980. In Midnight’s Children, the birth of the Indian nation on 15 August 1947 is reflected in the birth of the novel’s protagonist Saleem Sinai, along with hundreds of other children born in the first hour of the new nation’s existence. Saleem is sent a welcome letter by P M Nehru, and, owing to the circumstances of his birth, his destiny is linked with that of his “true birth-sister, India herself” (538). The generation of “midnight’s children,” endowed with extraordinary magical gifts such as telepathy and time-travel, are part of the promise of a new nation which has freed itself of centuries of oppression and has opened itself to diversity and hybridity. In the third part of the novel, however, when Indira Gandhi imposes her emergency rule on the subcontinent, the atmosphere turns pessimistic. Again, a child is born at the very instant of political change: Saleem and Parvati’s son Aadam, representative of a new generation of midnight’s children, has in fact been fathered by Saleem’s antagonist Shiva: He was born in Old Delhi … once upon a time No, that won’t do, there’s no getting away from the date: Aadam Sinai arrived at a nightshadowed slum on June 25th, 1975. And the time? The time matters, too. As I said: at night. No, it’s important to be more … On the stroke of midnight, as a matter of fact. Clock-hands joined palms. Oh, spell it out, spell it out: at the precise instant of India’s arrival at Emergency, he emerged. (586)

The colloquial style of this passage reflects the notion of an oral narrative tradition, reminiscent of ‘native’ Indian storytelling or the famous Arabian Nights. Saleem has suffered sterilization by Indira Gandhi, the “Widow with the particoloured hair” (604); his wounded and disfigured body has been seen 20

Abdulrazak Gurnah, The Cambridge Companion to Salman Rushdie (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2007): 100.

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as an allegory for the state of the Indian nation.21 Just like his father (3), Aadam is “handcuffed to history” (586), with his destiny chained to his country. He is not welcomed by Prime Minister Gandhi, as the narrator points out. Not only is the moment of his birth linked to the beginning of a new political era; the circumstances before and after are likewise mirrored in events on the national level. When the Prime Minister is found guilty of campaign malpractice by the Allahabad High Court on 12 June, Parvati enters labour (582); while JP Narayan and Morarji Desai push Indira Gandhi to step down, Parvati feels pushed by her child. During the first two years of his life, this little victim of politics even suffers from tuberculosis: “while the Emergency lasts, he will never become well” (590). In her discussion of Gandhi’s emergency rule in Midnight’s Children, Nicole W. Thiara points out that Rushdie’s condemnation is “considerably more far-reaching” than usual depictions in Indian historiography.22 Whereas Nehru’s India is seen as ushering in a promising start, Indira Gandhi’s warbased popularity is only briefly mentioned (583) and her premiership is only remembered for its dark side, the abuses committed during the Emergency. Indira Gandhi has come to believe that only she can lead and represent the Indian nation, as voiced in her election-campaign slogan: “Indira is India and India is Indira” (587). Having suffered the loss of his family and of his identity in the war with Pakistan, an illegal immigrant (542), stranded without money, clothes or qualifications among the outsiders of society, Saleem still rivals the “Widow” (588) as the individual chosen to represent the Indian nation. The large gap between his real-life insignificance and his high ambition to save his country makes him look like a parody of the Prime Minister23 rather than a national hero: Indira is India and India is Indira … but might she not have read her own father’s letter to a midnight’s child, in which her own, sloganized centrality was denied; in which the role of mirror-of-the-nation was bestowed upon me? (597)

Saleem claims to have uncovered the true reason behind her desperate move against the political opposition, of her abuses of power and infringements on 21

Kavita Daiya, Violent Belongings: Partition, Gender, and National Culture in Postcolonial India (Philadelphia P A : Temple U P , 2008): 44–45. 22 Nicole W. Thiara, Salman Rushdie and Indian Historiography: Writing the Nation into Being (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2009): 43. 23 Thiara, Salman Rushdie and Indian Historiography, 43.

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civil rights such as the “civic beautification programme” (599) or nasbandi (600): the truest, deepest motive behind the declaration of a State of Emergency was the smashing, the pulverizing, the irreversible discombobulation of the children of midnight. (597)

The “Widow” (588) cracks down on Saleem and the surviving members of the Midnight’s Children’s Council (M C C ) because of what they stand for: a new nation freed from centuries of oppression, a nation composed of individuals and based on the age-old Indian tradition of magic revived by their magical qualities. The magicians’ quarter around Old Delhi’s Friday mosque is stormed and destroyed by government’s troops (599); Saleem is discovered and abducted to the Widow’s Hostel (603) by his antagonist Shiva, for whom he was exchanged at his birth. There, he betrays the M C C over which he presided, that fearsome conspiracy which had to be broken at all costs – that gang of cut-throat desperadoes before whom an astrology-ridden Prime Minister trembled in terror. (606)

The sterilization programme is carried out with a vengeance on the fellowship of midnight’s children; not the usual vas- and tubectomies that could be reversed, but a full removal of testicles and wombs. The promise of the birth of the new nation on 15 August 1947 is thus destroyed (611), and the human representatives of this new beginning are robbed of their progeny and of their magical powers, just as the magicians’ quarter is raised to the ground. In their stead, Shiva, who has risen from being a son of a beggar to the status of an acclaimed war hero, fathers several children, first with high-society women, then with prostitutes. He thus fulfils the destiny implied in his name as both destroyer and procreator (615).24 It does not seem, though, as if Rushdie was writing in support of Gandhi’s political opposition, the Janata Morcha led by Morarji Desai and JP Narayan. They are frequently referred to in Book Three as her opponents, but not as a viable political alternative, and are glossed over without enthusiasm. The “intolerably ancient” (570) Desai’s most conspicuous quality seems to be his habit of drinking his own urine. The real alternative to the staleness of India’s political caste is found in the magicians’ quarter, among the “conjurers and 24

Shiva, the destroyer, is part of the Hindu trinity alongside Brahma the creator and Vishnu the preserver. Outside this trinity he may also represent procreation.

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contortionists and jugglers and fakirs” (539), a “truly subaltern alternative to Indira’s regime.”25 The loving description of their community led by Picture Singh does not fail to mention their dissensions. They represent all shades of Communism found worldwide and quarrel fiercely about these differences (557); the narrator remarks with sarcasm that their final destruction is brought about by weapons imported from Soviet Russia (600). Thiara mentions two narratives of the Emergency in Indian historiography, neither of which was dominant for long: the official discourse celebrating the Emergency as “a necessary step into a brighter future”26 and the second, unofficial narrative, a retelling of political events in works of fiction, which started soon after Gandhi’s loss of power in 1977.27 In 1980, when she was reelected, the abuses of power committed during the two-year Emergency period were quietly forgotten. Rushdie’s main impetus in his highly political novel on the country’s most recent history is to keep the memory of the abuses alive. His rendering of the circumstances is not unbiased, though: the blame for the family planning scheme and the “civic beautification programme” (599) is shifted from Sanjay to his mother, who stands out as the evil force behind all the abuses. By destroying an entire generation of midnight’s children, the Indira Gandhi of Midnight’s Children has betrayed her father’s legacy.28 The narrator’s personal antagonism to the Prime Minister is clearly felt.

Indian History as a Re-Writing of the Mahabharata In The Great Indian Novel, Shashi Tharoor has offered his version of twentieth-century Indian history in the guise of the epic tradition of the Mahabharata. The personalities who shaped the birth of the Indian nation and its first decades of independence are transformed into mythological characters. Mahatma Gandhi appears as Ganga Datta, Jawaharlal Nehru as Dhritarashtra, the blind king of Hastinapur, and Indira Gandhi as Priya Duryodhani, in the Mahabharata one of Dhritarashtra’s hundred children. Tharoor’s novel has

25

Thiara, Salman Rushdie and Indian Historiography, 46. Compare J.S. Bright’s eulogy on the ‘flowering success’ of Gandhi’s Emergency (quoted above). 27 Thiara, Salman Rushdie and Indian Historiography, 51. 28 Salman Rushdie and Indian Historiography, 54. 26

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been noted for its satirical tone, its parody and polemic,29 and for blurring boundaries in its equation of myth with historiography. P.K. Rajan, for example, has castigated the novel and its treatment of history as superficial, pointing out that a mythological rendering of history, however skilfully done, cannot hope to represent an epoch in its complexity.30 Vanashree Tripathi has expressed disappointment with Tharoor’s novel for failing to deconstruct or subvert the canonical Mahabharata in postmodernist fashion. It does not go beyond mere caricature, he argues, and appears “to be misinterpreting myth in the light of reality.”31 Hovering between historiography and a retelling of myth, between prose and verse, between pathos and satire, The Great Indian Novel is indeed unique as a work of fiction, a collage of themes, ideas, styles, and registers.32 Tharoor’s description of twentieth-century Indian history is a postmodern literary game with a kaleidoscope of narrative levels designed to point to the relativity of any concept of ‘truth‘. Mythology is fiction, but derives its popular appeal from the spiritual truth it breathes. Historiography claims to form past reality into a digestible narrative, but its ‘history’ is filtered through the mind of the historiographer. This novel, however, offers a postmodern approach to ‘history’ by way of rewriting it as a mythological narrative. This text openly admits to its character as a work of art; it employs intertextual reference, satire, and parody, switches between poetry and prose, and between politics, myth, and allegory. The narrator is the elder statesman Ved Vyas, whose judgement is warped due to his old age and his personal involvement with the rule of Priya Duryodhani.33 Her character is established early in the novel in Book V I I I , titled 29

Silvia Capello, “Shashi Tharoor’s The Great Indian Novel: Postcolonial Discourse through and with the Mahabharata,” in Indias Abroad: The Diaspora Writes Back, ed. Rajendra Chetty & Pier Paolo Piciucco (Johannesburg: S T E , 2004): 58. 30 P.K. Rajan, “History and Myth in Shashi Tharoor’s The Great Indian Novel,” in Changing Traditions in Indian English Literature, ed. P.K. Rajan (New Delhi: Creative, 1995): 159. 31 Vanashree Tripathi, “Polysemy at the Dead End: Shashi Tharoor’s The Great Indian Novel,” in Recent Indian Fiction, ed. R.S. Pathak (New Delhi: Prestige, 1994): 124. 32 Capello, “Shashi Tharoor’s The Great Indian Novel,” 58. 33 Although serving in the U N during most of his life, the author himself, like the narrator of his novel, was involved with Indian politics on the highest level: Shashi Tharoor served as India’s Minister of State of External Affairs from May 2009 to April 2010.

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“Midnight’s Parents” with obvious reference to Salman Rushdie’s novel. At the age of twelve, Priya invites her family to a picnic and prepares to poison her cousin Bhim. This attempt fails, however, because her victim happens to be bitten by a venomous snake whose bite neutralizes the poison served up by his juvenile would-be murderer. She has no qualms about murdering political rivals: “Even at the age of twelve, overkill was already her problem.”34 When the Indian Prime Minister Shishu Pal dies, Ved Vyas proposes to elect Priya his successor. He grossly misconceives her character and potential as a determined ruler, as he admits with the benefit of hindsight: We want a Prime Minister with certain limitations, a Prime Minister who is no more than any minister, a Prime Minister who will decorate the office, rally the support of the people at large and let us run the country. None of us can play the role as well as Priya Duryodhani can. She is easily recognizable, she is known as her father’s daughter, and she will be more presentable to foreign dignitaries than poor little Shishu Pal ever was. And if we ever decide we have had enough of her – well, she is only a woman. (318)

In Book X V I , “The Bungle Book – or The Reign of Error,” she becomes “a Frankenstein’s monster” growing out of control (347). Once confirmed in power, she acts with determination (342), ousting her political rivals and putting her own followers into key positions: Shri Ekalavya, who is made President, will later proclaim the Emergency at her instigation. Her election slogan “Remove Poverty” serves only to beguile voters and disguise her real intentions (352). Her hour of triumph comes with the Gelabi Desh (Bangladesh) War, when she succeeds in partitioning-off the eastern part of Karnistan (Pakistan). She is revered by her country’s citizens, who elevate her to the rank of a Mother Goddess. The detailed descriptions given in this book of Priya’s ascent from nominal to real power suggest that the author has inside knowledge of recent politics. The personification of democracy as “Draupadi Mokrasi” (261–62), a young woman given to bouts of ill-health whenever the Prime Minister amasses more power, enables allusions to the state of the nation. Draupadi starts as a beautiful girl, but appears plump when Priya Duryodhani is confirmed in her power; she runs a fever when Priya’s political rival Yudhishtir resigns from office, is bolstered with vitamins, feels dizzy, faints, and is diagnosed with asthma in reaction to Priya’s ascent. 34

Shashi Tharoor, The Great Indian Novel (New Delhi: Penguin, 1989): 155. Further page references are in the main text.

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Book X V I contrasts the Prime Minister’s lavish gestures of goodwill with the harsh reality of ordinary Indians who cannot see any change for the better in their lives. On the contrary, Priya Duryodhani abuses her power to beat and arrest trade unionists and quell peasant demonstrations. A string of alliterations – Priya uses her powers to “prohibit, proscribe, profane, prolate, prosecute or prostitute” political freedoms (357) – points to the technical side of her rule. The freedoms won by the national movement are personified as victims of her administration, which gradually declines into dictatorship. Book X V I I , “The Drop of Honey – A Parable,” describes the incidents that lead to the proclamation of the Emergency. The people rise up, and political opposition forms under the leadership of Jayaprakash Drona (JP Narayan) and Yudhishtir (Morarji Desai), who preach a fresh form of civil disobedience and request her removal, but fail to consolidate their movement. A court’s verdict finding her guilty of “corrupt electoral practice” seems trivial when compared with the far more weighty crimes committed by her government. Shakuni Shankar Dey (Sanjay Gandhi) becomes Priya’s political adviser, who urges her to use this opportunity for open conflict and declare an “internal Siege” (366), which would include the preventive detention of political opponents and censorship of the press (366). The term ‘emergency rule’ is deliberately avoided in this novel: Tharoor’s account of political events in the guise of a mythological narrative points to the distortion of reality in official versions of Gandhi’s rule. The Emergency, as this phase of Indian history is generally referred to, is just as euphemistic a term for her dictatorial rule as the image of the siege adopted from battle scenes in the Mahabharata. While her opponents demand her resignation, Priya’s adviser has crowds of peasants brought into Delhi to demonstrate in support of the government. Ved Vyas, who first put Priya into her position of power, comments favourably on the effects of her authoritarian rule: a socio-economic programme is announced, strikes and political demonstrations are banned, and habitual absentees report for work (369). He acknowledges the legitimacy of a government serving the common man effectively, even though the freedoms of the intellectual and political elite are curbed, and argues in utilitarian terms that “the purpose of democratic government was the greatest good of the greatest number.”35 The “old politician” (369) is won over in favour of emergency 35

The utilitarian principle, saying that “the good and happiness of the members, that is the majority of the members of any state, is the great standard by which every thing relating to that state must finally be determined” (Joseph Priestley, 1768) had been

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measures by the acceptance of non-political India. This argument, however, carries little conviction. The human-rights abuses committed under the cloak of emergency rule are mentioned as well. Vyas admits that political enemies are locked up without judicial justification and the poorest of the poor are subject to arbitrary sterilization programmes and displaced from their homes in the interest of slumclearance and urban renewal. Ordinary people do not profit from the suspension of the freedoms of the relatively privileged. Priya Duryodhani uses parliament to justify her dictatorial rule as derived from British parliamentary tradition; the rule of parliament, however, is democratically justified only so long as it represents the supremacy of the people. Tharoor’s experiment in writing a novel combining political history with mythology has been criticized for the confusion it creates for readers unfamiliar with the Mahabharata or contemporary Indian history or both. The purpose of this postmodern novel, however, is less to discuss the merits or demerits of Gandhi’s premiership than to point to the relativity of any historical narrative. History is always a literary construct, and the ancient myths are a source of ‘truth’ for literate and non-literate Indians. “Every Indian must for ever carry with him, in his head and heart, his own history of India” (373) – Vyas concludes that an objective perception of the nation’s state of affairs is not only hard to attain but also not required.

A Realist Depiction of ‘Real’ Suffering Rohinton Mistry’s depiction of the subcontinent as an inferno of squalor, corruption, and violence confirms the Western prejudice of India as a ThirdWorld country, despite its remarkable advances in information technology. A Fine Balance, published in 1996, is the most recent of the three novels discussed in this essay, and the one that, after Tharoor’s postmodern experiment with different narrative layers, offers a straightforward realist account of events in Mumbai during the months of emergency rule. Realism purports to represent the world as it is; this claim is reconciled with the fictive nature of a used in Great Britain and other European countries as an argument for the oppression of freedoms. The defeat of this principle by the concept of human rights, however, secured moral progress in European democracies. India risks falling behind into nineteenth-century oppression if she relies on political theories that were superseded in Europe a long time ago.

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novel plot by its promise to deliver a narrative that ‘mirrors’ the ‘real’ circumstances of the time.36 It recounts the lives of four main characters, who, despite their different backgrounds, become partners in their struggle to survive: Dina, a Parsi woman from a rich Mumbai family, who tries to uphold her independence against her domineering brother by running a small business; Maneck, a seventeen-year-old student, who stays with Dina as a boarding guest; and Ishvar and his nephew Omprakash (Om), who work for Dina as tailors after their family has been wiped out and their house burned down in an excess of caste violence. This chance community works as long as the fragile balance of poverty and economic opportunity, law and tolerance, prejudice and kindness, threat and safety is kept. This balance, however, is upset when the Prime Minister – never mentioned by name – has a state of emergency declared in 1975. Informed about the new political climate by Mrs Gupta, who runs a textile export company and supports the Prime Minister’s policies wholeheartedly, Dina dismisses emergency measures as “Government problems – games played by people in power. It doesn’t affect ordinary people like us.”37 Dina wishes to be left out of politics, and avoids siding with or opposing her manager’s political creed in praise of the benefits these tough measures will bring to the Indian economy. She believes in every individual’s opportunity to rise by hard work; as the plot unfolds, however, her naivety and the truth about social mobility in India are exposed. Emergency measures destroy Ishvar and Omprakash and lead to Dina’s economic failure and loss of independence. The novel’s analysis of its characters’ attitudes towards politics helps us understand how civil liberties were removed without any effective resistance. There are supporters (Mrs Gupta), connivers (Dina), and impotent victims (Ishvar and Om) whose misfortunes concern Dina only when it is too late. The widespread disregard of lower castes provides fertile ground for an authoritarian system which finally robs a well-to-do lady, such as Dina, of her home. 36

According to Stendhal, one of the pioneers of the realist movement, a novel is like a mirror being carried down a road, reflecting both the sky above and the dirt below (“Eh, Monsieur, un roman est un miroir qui se promène sur une grande route. Tantôt il reflète à vos yeux l’azur des cieux, tantôt la fange des bourbiers de la route”; Le Rouge et le Noir: Chronique du X I X siècle (Paris: Levavasseur, 1830), seconde partie, chapitre X I X ). (My boldface emphases.) 37 Rohinton Mistry, A Fine Balance (1996; London: Faber & Faber, 2006): 75. Further page references are in the main text.

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Chapter V tells the story of Maneck, the student lodger in Dina’s flat. He has been sent to the city by his parents to study, but feels uncomfortable in his student residence due to cockroaches, low-quality food, and sexual harassment. The only friendly encounter is with a fellow student named Avinash, who is politically active as President of the Students’ Union and who settles a conflict between students and canteen workers peacefully through negotiations with the catering service. However, this success prompts him to further engage in students’ affairs, tackling nepotism, bribery, the sale of exam papers, privileges for politicians’ families, government interference in the syllabus, and the intimidation of faculty members. Carried away by initial success, Avinash and like-minded students dream of a return to (Mahatma) Gandhian principles and back up the grass-roots movement of JP Narayan in opposition to emergency rule. Ridiculed by Rushdie and Tharoor, Indira Gandhi’s political opponents represent in this novel an alternative to misrule, at least to a group of idealistic students. Avinash’s activism stands in contrast to Maneck’s indifference. Like Dina, he feels uncomfortable discussing politics and listens passively to Avinash’s description of the events that preceded the declaration of emergency and the consequences for India’s democracy. Mistry thus contrives to sketch the political background of his novel without involving his central characters in political discussions. The impression we get is that the novel avoids direct criticism, but as events unfold, its main characters are more and more confronted with the effects of emergency politics on their lives. As lower-caste slum-dwellers, Ishvar and Om are hit by emergency measures in several instances. In chapter V I they are prompted to attend a rally with the Prime Minister. Despite the promise of free tea, snacks, and five rupees, party workers need to resort to threats to muster the required number of participants in the bus. The event turns out to be a carefully orchestrated propaganda show with garlands, grovelling speeches delivered by dignitaries, and rose petals showered from helicopters on the Prime Minister, who justifies the strict measures as necessary to fight the forces of evil. This propaganda show, however, fails to impress Ishvar and Om. They worry about the money they have been promised in return for their attendance and question the wisdom of holding a mass gathering during the hottest time of the day. Rajaram, hair collector and their neighbour in the slum, compares this rally appropriately to a circus: “we have clowns, monkeys, acrobats, everything” (263). Mistry spices the account of Gandhi’s election campaign with a highly symbolic incident: the success of the propaganda is seriously threatened when

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the Prime Minister’s eighty-foot cut-out begins to sway and topples slowly, face forward, onto the crowd, making people run for their lives to escape being crushed by Indira Gandhi’s image. The novel brings to the fore individuals at the bottom of society, such as the two low-caste tailors or slum dwellers, whereas politics on the national level, such as Indira Gandhi’s election campaign, fade into the background. The slum dwellers face the harsh reality of the government’s misapplied measures to eliminate poverty. As part of a city-beautification plan they are evicted from their homes by police, pushed into trucks, and transported to a work camp, where they are robbed of personal belongings, beaten, forced to work long hours at an irrigation project, poorly fed, and refused medical attention. Returning to their jobs in Dina’s flat, the two tailors are still hopeful and ready to work hard for the prospect of a better future. Threats from the outside bind the four central characters together and Dina even allows them to stay overnight to avoid another police kidnapping. Ishvar and his nephew, however, meet their doom when they return to their native village to arrange a marriage for Om. In chapter X V , “Family Planning,” they are abducted to a sterilization camp. Their fate is sealed when they meet Thakur Dharamsi, the man who earlier in the novel took his revenge on Om’s father Narayan for insisting on his right to vote. When Thakur, by now an eminent Congress politician, spots Om, he orders his castration, to ensure the extinction of the entire family. Meanwhile Ishvar has undergone sterilization, but the careless treatment leaves him with an infection which finally necessitates the amputation of his legs. When they return to Mumbai after months of recovery and loss of hope, they find Dina evicted by a ruthless landlord; they have to go begging for the rest of their lives, Ishvar crippled and Om castrated. Gandhi’s so-called fight against poverty robs the poorest of the poor of the only hope left to them after they have lost their family and home in caste violence. The absurdity of uncontrolled measures, government quotas, and the use of force in family planning is presented as having a devastating effect on the people concerned.

Conclusion: Modes of Representation Not surprisingly, authors of novels on Indira Gandhi’s emergency rule side with Ramesh Thakur’s denouncement of this phase of recent Indian history rather than with Bright’s praise of it. In the tradition of Charles Dickens or

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Victor Hugo, novelists tend to sympathize with ‘little’ people who struggle for their survival, with those who play no part in government decisions. It is more difficult to account for the differences in focus and style between the three novels discussed above. Their approaches to their subject-matter may be considered in the context of the respective novel, the authors’ literary output, and their biographies. Rushdie’s magical-realist depiction of the “Widow” reminds us of the representation of the founder of Islam as “Mahound” in The Satanic Verses, and the sufferings of the baby Aadam from emergency measures continues Saleem’s fate as the broken representative of a broken nation. Tharoor’s experiment in narrating history as mythology attests to the author’s broad education as well as creative mind; the result, however, a voluminous novel made up of eighteen books subdivided into 123 chapters and a plot which tends to get lost in an intricate web of mythological and contemporary references, is not easy to digest. Mistry’s realist novel is certainly much easier to access for the common reader. The detailed descriptions of the living conditions,mentality, and aspirations of the characters of A Fine Balance make us share their agonies and plunge emotionally into the jungle of contemporary cosmopolitan and rural Indian life. The feeling that Mistry’s novels have a powerful impact on readers has been confirmed by the protests from those whose primitivism he uncovers.38 Rushdie, Tharoor, and Mistry, three authors writing about their home country from the vantage point of the diaspora,39 have joined in condemning Indira Gandhi’s emergency policies as a step backwards into a repressive society. Whereas Mistry was attacked for misrepresenting India,40 Tharoor was criticized for using the venerable Mahabharata for a novel written in English, the language of the colonizer, and for adopting a tradition with which

38

See footnote 3 on Shiv Sena protests as reported by the Guardian. Indian writers such as Rushdie, Mistry, and Jumpa Lahiri moved to Western anglophone countries once their novels became prominent. Occasionally this move was necessary for reasons of safety (especially in the case of Rushdie), and, of course, intellectuals with a Western outlook feel more comfortable in a Western environment. The move away from the locations where their novels are set to countries where anglophone authors find a large readership, however, may have an effect on the focus of their literary production. 40 For criticism of Mistry’s representation of India, see Vera Alexander, “Rohinton Mistry,” in Indische Literatur der Gegenwart, ed. Martin Kämpchen (Munich: Text und Kritik, 2006): 369. 39

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he was not sufficiently familiar.41 The novels discussed in this essay contribute each in its own way to the ongoing discussion of the merits and demerits of Indira Gandhi’s premiership. Coming to terms with her troubled past is a prerequisite for India’s development on the path of democracy and the fight against poverty.

WORKS CITED Alexander, Vera. “Rohinton Mistry,” in Indische Literatur der Gegenwart, ed. Martin Kämpchen (Munich: Text & Kritik, 2006): 380–90. Bright, Jagat S. Emergency in India and 5+20-Point Programme (New Delhi: Pankaj, 1976). Burke, Jason. “Mumbai University Drops Rohinton Mistry Novel after Extremists Complain,” The Guardian (19 October 2010), http://gu.com/p/2kfa6 (accessed 10 September 2012). Capello, Silvia. “Shashi Tharoor’s The Great Indian Novel: Postcolonial Discourse through and with the Mahabharata,” in Indias Abroad: The Diaspora Writes Back, ed. Rajendra Chetty & Pier Paolo Piciucco (Johannesburg: S T E , 2004): 52–59. Chandra, Bipan. In the Name of Democracy: JP Movement and the Emergency (New Delhi: Penguin, 2003). Daiya, Kavita. Violent Belongings: Partition, Gender, and National Culture in Postcolonial India (Philadelphia P A : Temple U P , 2008). Dhar, Prithvi N. Indira Gandhi, the ‘Emergency’, and Indian Democracy (New Delhi: Oxford U P , 2000). Gurnah, Abdulrazak. The Cambridge Companion to Salman Rushdie (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2007). Mistry, Rohinton. A Fine Balance (1996; London: Faber & Faber, 2006). Moraes, Dom F. Mrs Gandhi (London: Jonathan Cape, 1980). Morey, Peter. Rohinton Mistry (Manchester: Manchester U P , 2004). Rajan, P.K. “History and Myth in Shashi Tharoor’s The Great Indian Novel,” in Changing Traditions in Indian English Literature, ed. P.K. Rajan (New Delhi: Creative, 1995). Rushdie, Salman. Midnight’s Children (1981; London: Vintage, 2008). Stendhal, Le Rouge et le Noir: Chronique du X I X siècle (Paris: Levavasseur 1830). Thakur, Ramesh. The Government and Politics of India (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995). Tharoor, Shashi. The Great Indian Novel (New Delhi: Penguin, 1989) 41

Tharoor admits that he is not a Sanskrit scholar and that he had to rely on Englishlanguage translations of the work; see his afterword on page 419.

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Thiara, Nicole W. Salman Rushdie and Indian Historiography: Writing the Nation into Being (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2009). Tripathi, Vanashree. “Polysemy at the Dead End: Shashi Tharoor’s The Great Indian Novel,” in Recent Indian Fiction, ed. R.S. Pathak (New Delhi: Prestige, 1994): 116– 33.

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Kaliyattam (The Play of God) by Jayaraj — Polymorphous and Postcolonial Poetics in an Indian Othello-Adaptation

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Any form of rigid social hierarchy is a form of oppression.1 Branded as impure from the moment of birth, one out of six Indians lives – and suffers – at the bottom of the Hindu caste system.2

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I N D I A N S C H O L A R of Renaissance literature Sukanta Chaudhuri perceptively writes,

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The Shakespearean presence in India is older and more complex than in any other country outside the West. That is owing to India’s long colonial history, and the presence of unusually receptive elements in the mother culture. The local culture of most states or regions could absorb Shakespeare within its inherent structure and, in turn, be reshaped and inseminated by Shakespearean influence.3

Indeed, Shakespeare translations, adaptations, and performance modes4 in India have had a long history, stretching back to the 1850s in colonial India, 1

Edmund Leach, “Caste, Class and Slavery: The Taxonomic Problem,” in Caste and Race: Comparative Approaches, ed. Anthony de Reuck & Julie Knight (London: J. & A. Churchill, 1967): 5. 2 Tom O’Neill, “Untouchable,” National Geographic Magazine (June 2003): 2. 3 Sukanta Chaudhuri, “Shakespeare in India,” Internet Shakespeare Editions, http: //web.uvic.ca/shakespeare/Library/Criticism/shakespearein/india.html (accessed 5 March 2002). 4 See, for instance, Nazmul Hasan, Shakespeare Translations in Nineteenth Century

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and ranging from reverential to increasingly deglamourized versions of the English playwright’s works.5 In this context of Indian Shakespeare adaptations, it is possible to talk, as Chaudhuri does, of “at least a dozen languages and cultural regions, each ramifying into many social groups and artistic practices, over 200 years and more.”6 Although Shakespeare adaptations in India have already received much nuanced critical attention, an analysis of the strategies of adaptation employed in the Othello movie Kaliyattam (The Play of God)7 by the South Indian director Jayaraj Rajasekharan Nair8 suggests that the concept of ‘poly-

Bengali Theatre (Dhaka: Bangla Academy, 1995); Sudipto Chatterjee & Jyotsna G. Singh, “Moor or Less? The Surveillance of Othello, Calcutta 1848,” in Shakespeare and Appropriation, ed. Christy Desmet & Robert Sawyer (London & New York: Routledge, 1999): 65–82; Shakespeare on the Calcutta Stage: A Checklist, ed. Ananda Lal & Sukanta Chaudhuri (Kolkata: Papyrus, 2001), or Shakespeare in Indian Languages, ed. Dodderi Aswathanarayanarao Shankar (Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 1999). In his study Colonial Transactions (Manchester: Manchester U P , 1995), Harish Trivedi traces the influence of English literature in India and vice versa, as the colonial influence has not been simply a one-way transaction. According to Trivedi, Shakespeare is the author who is still most commonly taught in “a great majority of the 186 universities in India” (21), yet he is no longer a narrowly national English writer since Indians have – also critically – engaged with his plays for a long time. 5 See Jyostna Singh, Colonial Narratives / Cultural Dialogues: Discoveries of India in the Language of Colonialism (London & New York: Routledge, 1996); Ania Loomba “Shakespeare and Cultural Difference,” in Alternative Shakespeares, ed. Terence Hawkes (London & New York: Routledge, 1996), vol. 2: 165–91; Cecile Sandten, “The Empire of Shakespeare in India: Deglamourised, Transformed, Greatly Shrunk,” in Shakespeare’s Legacy: The Appropriation of the Plays in Post-colonial Drama, ed. Norbert Schaffeld (Trier: W V T , 2005): 105–23. 6 Chaudhuri, “Shakespeare in India.” 7 Kaliyattam, dir. Rajasekharan Jayaraj Nair; perf. Suresh Gopi, Manju Warrier, Lal, Bijumenon, Bindu Panicker (India 1997; 130 min.). All subsequent references to Kaliyattam are based on the video release (Trivundram: Welgate Video, 2000). 8 Jayaraj has made thirteen films in Malayalam, the language of Kerala, and some films in Hindi. He is a keen Shakespearean and his best-known film in this regard is Kaliyattam. Rajita points out that “Jayaraj’s love affair with William Shakespeare continues with his latest, Kannagi – a story based on the bard’s ode to passion and war, Antony and Cleopatra,” in Rajita, “As Jayaraj likes it,” India Abroad (12 February

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morphism’ – a strategy of creating a variation of the source text without, however, changing the main textual encodings and structures – serves as a multivalent point of reference for the critical reception of the film. The idea of polymorphism can also be applied to a larger cross-cultural body of work on Shakespeare’s plays that depict the ‘Other’, and, as a case in point, replace the race issue with that of caste. Taking Stuart Hall’s notion for granted that “racialized discourse is structured by a set of binary oppositions,”9 it could be assumed that this also accounts for the discourse on caste. This essay will therefore argue for the productive role of polymorphism in the construction of the ‘othered’ subaltern. Jayaraj’s adaptation of Othello critiques the caste system within (Hindu) India, thus going beyond the depiction of the ‘Other’ in Shakespeare’s play – the fear of the foreigner, a black Moor in Venice, is replaced by internal strife and deep-seated prejudice within the Indian nation – the Othello-figure of Kannan is not a stranger but Indian, though designated as one of the “Untouchable” tribal indigenous10 people by the caste system in India. Accordingly, Kaliyattam puts a spin on what Thomas Cartelli has aptly termed the “Othello complex.”11 As Cartelli convincingly claims, “Othello has not only failed to unsettle or dislodge established racial stereotypes, but has played a formative role in shaping them.”12 Understood in the simplest terms, this ‘complex’ functions as an “anthropologized” racial construction in which the “assimilated savage” predictably “relapses into primitivism under 2002), www.indiaabroad.com/enterati/2002/feb/12jayraj.htm (accessed 5 Match 2013). 9

Stuart Hall, “The Spectacle of the Other,” in Discourse Theory and Practice: A Reader, ed. Margaret Wetherell, Stephanie Taylor & Simeon J. Yates (Thousand Oaks C A & London: Sage, 2001): 324–44. 10 I am aware of the Orientalist origins of terms such as ‘tribal’ or adivasi (the latter of which literally means ‘first people’). However, the term adivasi has been reclaimed by a number of ‘indigenous’ communities in India today. In official government reports, both terms have been used interchangeably, though in the Constitution of India, the term ‘Scheduled Tribe’ is the usage preferred to adivasi. According to the Kerala Development Report (New Delhi: Academic Foundation, 2008), the adivasi population in Kerala consists of 1.14 percent of its general population, with thirty-six major tribes (out of around 650 in total in India) living in different districts of the state. 11 Thomas Cartelli, Repositioning Shakespeare: National Formations, Postcolonial Appropriations (London & New York: Routledge, 1999): 121–68. 12 Cartelli, Repositioning Shakespeare, 123.

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stress.”13 In line with this idea, Dora Sales Salvador draws our attention to the notion of representation as one of the main consequences of political colonial expansion.14 Thus, the question of whether the “subaltern” in Jayaraj’s Othelloadaptation, “can speak” has to be asked with regard to Gayatri Spivak15 and the notion of self-representation, as the main character is using a polymorphic poetic, which is also central to the film’s function on the level of ‘myth.’16 Shakespeare’s Othello is the key element here because he is both a respected general in the service of Venice and the “old black ram.”17 In this instance, he is the stereotypical Other, who, in Frantz Fanon’s words, is “deracialized,”18 as he is an assimilated Christian who is publicly disgraced because he transgressed racial borderlines by secretly marrying Desdemona, the white aristocratic Venetian lady. 13

Michael Neill, “Unproper Beds: Race, Adultery, and the Hideous in Othello,” Shakespeare Quarterly 40.4 (Winter 1989): 393. Ania Loomba and Jyotsna Singh are the most important Shakespeare scholars in the South Asian context who critically assess Shakespeare’s legacy in India with a special focus on Othello; see Loomba, “Kathakali Othello,” The India Magazine 17.2 (January 1997): 26–33; Loomba, “ ‘ Local-manufacture Made-in-India Othello fellows’: Issues of Race, Hybridity and Location in Post-Colonial Shakespeares,” in Colonialism / Postcolonialism, ed. Ania Loomba & Martin Orkin (London & New York: Routledge, 1998): 143–64; PostColonial Shakespeares, ed. Ania Loomba & Martin Orkin (London & New York: Routledge, 1998); Jyotsna Singh, “Different Shakespeares: The Bard in Colonial / Postcolonial India,” Theatre Journal 41.4 (December 1989): 445–57; Singh, “Othello’s Identity, Postcolonial Theory, and Contemporary African Rewritings of Othello,” in Women, “Race” & “Writing” in the Early Modern Period, ed. Margo Hendricks & Patricia Parker (London & New York: Routledge, 1994): 287–99. 14 See Dora Sales Salvador, “Forms, Representations and Voices: Cultural Liminality in Vikram Chandra’s Fiction,” in (Mis)Representations: Intersections of Culture and Power, ed. Fernando Galván, Julio Cañero Serrano & José Santiago Fernández Vásquez (Bern & New York: Peter Lang, 2003): 57–73. 15 See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988), in Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, ed. Laura Chrisman & Patrick Williams (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994): 66–111. 16 See Hall, “The Spectacle of the Other,” 324. 17 This and all further quotations from Othello in this paper are taken from the Arden Shakespeare, edited by E.A.J. Honigman (1997; Walton-on-Thames: Nelson, 1998) and indicated according to act, scene, and line; here: I.i.87. 18 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin: White Masks tr. Charles Lam Markmann, foreword by Homi Bhabha (Peau Noire, Masques Blancs, 1952; tr. 1967; London: Pluto, 1999): 72.

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In what follows, I will present a postcolonial reading of the film Kaliyattam, which deploys the plot of Shakespeare’s Othello by offering important insights into the disruptive cultural and contemporary experience of outcast(e)s, Dalits, in a South Indian context. The film reveals essential parallels in connection with Othello, whose “troubling split or division within subjectivity can never be fully healed,”19 as Othello’s tragic ending and the many rewrites and spin-offs that have taken up this topic imply. Kaliyattam changes in focus as the race issue is replaced by that of caste, which works, however, according to similar stereotypical patterns. Apart from this geographical and socio-political shift, Kaliyattam is narrated against the backdrop of the traditional Indian art form Theyyam, and is set in Kerala, in south India. It is interesting to note that the film stands out among Shakespeare-film adaptations in India. This is due to the fact that Kaliyattam is an art-house film which nonetheless sells, and in addition does not hide the fact that the story of the film is based on Othello. Secondly, the film appeared on the crest of a wave of Shakespeare adaptations in the West, which are most paradigmatically represented by the work of one actor-director, Kenneth Branagh. Yet Kaliyattam went unacknowledged by Western film critics, nor did it enter the Western film scene as many other Indian productions (‘Bollywood’ films) have done. Kaliyattam presents a media transfer from play to feature film, in which the classic tale of racism and jealousy is presented in Malayalam, a South-Indian language. Thus, the film addresses a South-Indian, rather than a Hindi- or English-speaking, audience. Jayaraj may have changed dialogue, setting, and language, yet the underlying story which the film depicts can be recognized as being the same across cultures. It is the story of racism and, in this case, the repression of outcast(e)s, combined with the themes of jealousy, greed, and hierarchy, thereby presenting a subcontinental, postcolonial, and polymorphous re-inscription of Shakespeare’s play in an explicitly South-Indian geographical, cultural, and linguistic setting.20

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Hall, “The Spectacle of the Other,” 331. The setting of the film is an unnamed town in rural Kerala. The characters speak Malayalam and traditional art forms such as the culturally specific (to the region) Theyyam dance are depicted. 20

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However, the concept of ‘tragedy’, as it is conceived in the context of classical Western theatre, does not exist in Indian theatre as such.21 Consequently, in spite of the fact that Indian theatre includes tragic events and moments, tragedy – in the Aristotelian sense – does not exist.22 Nevertheless, the Indian ‘tragedies’ that were written around or after the 1940s are influenced greatly by Shakespeare’s works.23 Few regional-language tragedies, however, have intermedially referenced Shakespeare. Kaliyattam is an exception, being one of the Shakespeare adaptations from the 1990s in India in the genre of film.24 In Kaliyattam, the Othello-character, Kannan Perumalayan (‘Kannan’ also means ‘God’), falls in love with and marries the upper-caste Thamara (Desdemona), the beautiful daughter of the village headman. The cruel Paniyan (Iago), who plays a subordinate comic character in the Theyyam art form25 as represented in the movie and who belongs to Kannan’s dance team, sets the stage for the breakdown of this marriage, until Kannan ultimately kills Thamara by suffocating her with a pillow because he is consumed by insane jealousy. In accordance with the changed setting and milieu, Desdemona’s 21

Comment by Ganesh Devy in a private conversation at the Fifteenth Triennial

A C L A L S conference, ‘Strokes Across Cultures’, Cyprus, 6–11 June 2010. 22

As Ravi Chathurvedi shows, in classical Indian theatre tradition, i.e. in forms of modern folk and tribal theatre, interdisciplinary elements are being used extensively. See “Interdisciplinarity: A Traditional Aspect of Indian Theatre,” Theatre Research International 6.2 (July 2001): 164–71. 23 In his study New Sites for Shakespeare: Theatre, the Audience, and Asia (London & New York: Routledge, 1999), John Russell Brown seeks out new theatre productions and performances in Japan, Korea, China, Bali, and especially India and compares them to Shakespearean performance forms. In his study of Theatre and the World: Performance and the Politics of Culture (1990; London & New York: Routledge, 1993), Rustom Bharucha explores the intercultural possibilities of theatre culture in India. Along similar lines, Nandi Bhatia examines the colonial and imperial traces in Shakespeare adaptations in an Indian context; see Bhatia, “ ‘ Shakespeare’ and the Codes of Empire in India,” Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics 18 (1998): 96– 126, and “Imperialistic Representations and Spectatorial Reception in Shakespeare Wallah,” Modern Drama 45.1 (Spring 2002): 61–75. 24 See India’s Shakespeare: Translation, Interpretation, and Performance, ed. Poonam Trivedi & Dennis Bartholomeusz (Newark: U of Delaware P , 2005). 25 See J.J. Pallath, Theyyam: An Analytical Study of the Folk Culture, Wisdom, and Personality (New Delhi: Indian Social Institute, 1995), especially the section on Theyyam symbols and rituals, 59–80.

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handkerchief has been replaced by a red pattu (silk sari), which is linked to the intimate moments between Kannan and Thamara. As Kannan seems to be a highly respected person because of his occupation as a famous Theyyam dancer, his marriage to Thamara is apparently approved of by the village chief. However, just as in Shakespeare’s Othello, communication deficits between husband and wife as well as the social and patriarchal village order play an important role and eventually destroy the loving couple’s relationship. In the film, Cyprus becomes the hills; the fighting and military aspect is transformed into ritual dancing, race into caste, and Paniyan is a minor, whereas Kannan is a supreme Theyyam dancer, to reflect the relationship between Othello and Iago. The movie also serves the typical role model of superior husband and subservient wife which is still present in contemporary rural India (and not only there, of course). However, like Desdemona, Thamara transgresses established social boundaries as well as the strict patriarchal order, acting against her father’s will in order to marry Kannan, an ‘outcast’, as indicated also by his pockmarked face.26 In Othello, the Elizabethan and Jacobean ‘Occidental’ phobia about miscegenation, the fear of the sexual union of a black man and a white woman, which is associated with violence and perversion,27 is deeply inscribed in the

26

Facetious as this may sound, Kannan’s pockmarked face is probably a reference to the fact that ‘untouchables’ seldom have access to medical treatment. Interesting in this regard is also the Human Rights Watch report by Smita Narula, Broken People: Caste Violence Against India’s “Untouchables” (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1999), www.hrw.org/reports/1999/india (accessed 5 March 2013). 27 Othello is described as being ‘black’ throughout the play and is accordingly of greater, repulsive ugliness, as is stated by different characters, especially Iago and Roderigo, even before he enters the stage. The terms used to depict him are strongly discriminatory and underline Iago’s and Roderigo’s hatred of Othello. In addition, these terms also highlight the seemingly repulsive outer appearance of Othello: In Act I, Scene i, he is described as “the thicklips” (65), “old black ram” (87), “devil” (90), “Barbary horse” (110), “lascivious Moor” (124), or “extravagant and wheeling stranger” (134). During the Elizabethan and early Jacobean era, strangers, as Virginia Mason Vaughan states in her study Othello: A Contextual History (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1994), were considered a threat (see especially part one of Vaughan’s study, “Jacobean Contexts”). In Othello, the racial discourse regarding Othello and Desdemona’s supposedly ‘unnatural’ sexuality is brought into the open through racist assumptions put forward by Iago. Thus, the Venetians, voiced in the character of Iago,

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play. A similar pattern is used in Kaliyattam. It is Paniyan (Iago) who is obsessed with, among other things, the idea that the mixing of a woman of a higher caste and a casteless man is impossible. On another note, Joytsna Singh, for instance, criticizes Alyque Padamsee’s 1990 Othello adaptation on a Bombay stage because, except for one scene of Othello’s self-flagellation, which some saw in Islamic terms, Padamsee’s “magnificent” version did not engage with the racial politics that have a particular resonance in the West, but evoke little interest in India.28

This is not true for Kaliyattam, in which the emphasis is to a great extent on the caste conflict, in accordance with the plot’s original over-emotional, misdirected male jealousy. Thus, Cartelli’s “Othello complex” can, in this case, be also dubbed the ‘outcast(e)-complex’ in terms of the “psychological minus-value”29 of the outcast(e) in the specific Indian context that the film evokes. Generally speaking, many critics consider the caste system in India as one of the strongest racist phenomena in the world. In this framework, it is useful to take on board Gayatri Spivak’s ideas, which reveal that the subaltern cannot speak in the language that ‘we’ speak. The term ‘subaltern’ (the economically and educationally dispossessed) originates in the theory of Antonio Gramsci to describe the subordinated consciousness of non-elite social groups. In her famous essay, Spivak explains that the subaltern cannot be heard by the intellectual. This is because the intellectual’s interests are in conflict with subaltern desires, languages, symbolic systems, and sense of cultural expression. According to Spivak, the subaltern can only speak in certain ways. By representing Kannan, the main character in the film, on the one hand, as an outcast(e) and, on the other, as a virtuoso Theyyam dancer (in line with Othello’s position as general in the Venetian state), who thus wins over Thamara with his divine dancing, the director seems to be positing the notion that the subaltern is able to speak in his own voice by using a polymorphic poetic. In this context, Kannan is able to address a form of counter-discourse against his repression, yet simultaneously submits to and resists the given imagine the bedding of a Venetian virgin and an “extravagant and wheeling stranger / Of here and everywhere” (I.i.134–5) as something ‘unnatural’ (see I I I .iii.227–239). 28 Singh, Colonial Narratives & Cultural Dialogues, 147. For a review of this performance, see also Shakuntala Bharvani, “Review of Padamsee’s Production of Othello,” Afternoon Despatch and Courier (4 February 1991): 9. 29 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 41.

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situation. Thus, it would be possible to see Jayaraj as a ‘native informant’ who uses Shakespeare’s Othello to equip his protagonist with an outcast(e)’s voice as a reference to and critique of the continuous problems of India’s outcast(e)s. Theyyam is a popular ritual dance in Malabar, North Kerala, and stands metaphorically for God. It is a unique combination of dance and music, reflecting predominantly the Mavilan tribe in the Kolathunada region (especially Kanur and Kasaragod). Each year, Theyyam festivals take place in North Kerala, during which the villagers change into the costumes of the gods. After trance-like dances in lavish outfits, villagers are given the opportunity to settle current village business with the gods. Moreover, among devotees, Theyyams are said to have healing powers and a divine personality when representing the deity.30 Accordingly, in the movie, Kannan is a representative of one of the great gods when he performs the Theyyam. In the film, the Theyyam dance represents Othello’s great self-narrating and self-performing capacity to win over Desdemona and to arouse jealousy in Iago. Theyyams dance with a crown of hair (muti) frequently as tall as a coconut tree (some ten to twelve metres). In the film, Kannan is often presented as a Theyyam dancer in flashback scenes when his jealousy is ignited. There is also one scene in the film that shows a Theyyam festival in the village and in which Kannan seems to be the main dancer, as he is also shown in his costume (as well as in his private dress) in several scenes elsewhere. At the end of the film, Kannan (dressed as a Theyyam dancer) commits suicide like Othello, in this case by embracing the ritual fire of Theyyam after killing Thamara and Paniyan (Iago). He rushes into the fire in his heavy costume. Generally, the plot of the film correlates with Shakespeare’s Othello, along with the latter’s five-act structure. However, Jayaraj’s adaptation, which will be discussed with regard to the concept of ‘polymorphism’ as the most prevalent formal aesthetic device, offers many aspects that go beyond Shakespeare’s tragedy. One issue that needs mention is the underlying semantics of fire employed throughout the movie. In the first scene, a fire is burning, accompanied by the recurring thematic dramatic music with a choir and a crying and laughing singing voice which turns out to be Kannan’s theme. There are many obvious signs such as the drumming and the music, costumes, and par30

K.K.N. Kurup, Theyyam: A Ritual Dance of Kerala (Thiruvananthapuram: Director of Public Relations, Govt. of Kerala, March 1986), http://www.theyyam.com /theyyam.htm (accessed 5 March 2013).

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ticularly the distinct sign of the red sari, which indicates that something terrible is going to happen. Red is regarded as a very auspicious colour in India. So the red sari, along with Kannan’s character traits, represents the burning love between Thamara and Kannan. Yet it also – like the handkerchief in Othello – functions as the bait in Kaliyattam. A typical Indian feature that the movie uses is the dancing and singing of the loving couple in the changing, beautiful landscape of Kerala. They walk into the green mountains and reach Kannan’s house, where an elderly woman, probably Kannan’s servant or mother, welcomes the couple. Children come to the place in order to see and welcome Thamara. She talks to the children and is touched by them; Kannan does not like this, and tells her so, thus indicating Tamara’s upper-caste status. As in Othello, Kannan’s jealousy is ignited, and he increasingly relies on Paniyan (Iago), for want of “ocular proof.”31 What is most interesting, however, is the fact that Kannan appeals to the gods, all of whom appear in full Theyyam costume and start to dance on the rocks. In one of these scenes, there is a fire burning next to Kannan. He tries to talk to the gods but they turn around and disappear, leaving him to his own fate. When Kannan returns home, he finds that Thamara has lit all the candles in the house. Inside and outside, fire and music are always juxtaposed. At the end, when Kannan learns all about his own mistake, he brutally kills Paniyan, who is sitting by a fire with a big stone. This is accompanied by dramatic string music. Kanthan (Cassio) is led to Kannan, who is in his full Theyyam costume. Kanthan is thus restored to the dance team. Eventually, Kannan jumps into the flames, an act accompanied by his dramatic music with choir and a singing, crying, and laughing voice, as in the opening music of the film; in the fire we see a burning figure (Kannan) turning around and around until the music slows down and the fire leaves only sparks behind. The environment or setting always plays a signifying role in the film. Whenever Paniyan meets Unni (Roderigo), the two characters are shown in hiding places outside in the natural environment (sometimes at night). Kannan and Paniyan always meet and talk in the open, characterized by a medium long shot, a long shot, or an extreme long shot. When Kannan is presented in the open, it becomes clear that he is subject to the power of the gods. The scenes in which Paniyan appears are further characterized by ominous or dissonant dramatic string music which is used to underscore the ‘evilness’ of the 31

See the ‘temptation scene’ in Othello (I I I .iii).

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character. This music arouses tension as Paniyan goes about his scheming ways. It is also used in counterpoint to Thamara and Kannan’s love-song and frequently heard in combination with the music of jealousy with which Kannan is characterized. Kannan and Thamara, by contrast, are always presented in scenes which take place either inside or near Kannan’s house, except for the scene in which the couple is walking through a beautiful landscape after their wedding, or the scene of the village festival. The scenes inside the house are often characterized by a dim and gloomy light and by medium long shots. Most of the time, the two characters do not talk much, but in many scenes they move about slowly. Thamara always touches or tries to touch Kannan; by Hindu law, she would therefore be ‘unclean’ as an upper-caste woman. This touching of Kannan already shows her great love for him as well as her transgression of socio-cultural norms and religious codes. Their scenes are further characterized by the music of their love-song and frequently by slow motion. As for gender divisions, the woman /wife stays in and about the house, often with the camera focusing on the inside of, or looking out of, the dwelling. The man is outside, pursuing his tasks; Kannan’s perspective is often depicted via extreme long shots (or medium long shot when he has his visions). From the ‘temptation scene’ onwards, the movie is increasingly characterized by cuts, cross-cuts, and fast changing scenes, either between Thamara and Kannan, or between Paniyan and Kannan, all arranged as interstices during the festival. In spite of the fact that he quite clearly knows the primary and secondary colours and their interaction as part of his profession as a Theyyam dancer, Kannan chooses the red sari as a nuptial gift, which Tamara spreads out on the bed for their wedding night. This choice has to be interpreted as a signifier of their tragic ending, as red is, on the one hand, almost universally the colour of gods and passion and the second most dignified colour after gold, since it represents the noblest of the four elements, fire.32 As John Gage writes, “few colours have been so heavily freighted with symbolic resonances”;33 indeed, red is also the colour of “the pulsing blood and of fire, for the surging and tearing of emotions” and is associated with “blood, wounds,

32

John Gage, Colour and Culture: Practice and Meaning From Antiquity to Abstraction (London: Thames & Hudson, 1993): 89. 33 Gage, Color and Culture, 110.

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death-throes and sublimation.”34 Throughout the film, therefore, Kannan is associated with the colour red and its symbolic meanings. Kannan represents somebody who acts on impulse and who is prone to abrupt mood swings. He has a lot of compassion for Thamara and is easily persuaded by Paniyan to believe in her infidelity. At the beginning of the film, just like Othello, Kannan is very self-assured and confident. This character trait is increasingly replaced by his over-abundant jealousy as triggered by Pariyan’s false advice and plotting. The insertion of a typical Indian-film element such as Thamara and Kannan’s love-song also demonstrates the longing for utopian unity between reality and desire that, standing for caste and castelessness, interact in a dialectical mode. Yet it also introduces many new dimensions into the plot via the vision scenes of Kannan and his dance scenes, in which the Theyyam dance and rituals, as well as the musical interlude in the form of dance and pop song, are presented. The film as an audio-visual medium has a tendency to show rather than tell. Because Kaliyattam also uses some of the popular and traditional Indian-film aspects in the sense of a mix of melodrama, dance, singing, and violence,35 the film displays a polymorphic poetic that fuses Shakespearean tragedy with tribal cultural and artforms. It thus has recourse to a whole range of very distinctive filmic, mythic, and ritualistic idioms which are grounded in a South-Indian context. At the end of Kaliyattam, Kannan enlists his dance to commit suicide. The Theyyam performance, according to Kurup, is a harbinger of social justice and social equality, which, on the one hand, stands in contrast to the film’s underlying message and, on the other, supports the film’s deeper meaning: If Kannan and Thamara’s marriage is seen as a disturbance of the social order in the form of a transgression of strict caste boundaries, then the two lovers are punished for their taboo-breaking, with Kannan in particular – just like Othello – punished for his excessive blind jealousy. In exploring this point, it is helpful to turn to Kurup: The Theyyams are exclusively performed by the male members of the traditional caste groups such as Malayan, Vannan, Navilan, Pulayan, 34

Juan Eduardo Cirlot, A Dictionary of Symbols (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,

1971): 53. 35

Paniyan (Iago) tries to kill Kanthan (Cassio); he also kills Unni (Roderigo) and Cheerma (Emilia); Paniyan (Iago) is killed by Kannan (Othello) with a stone in a most brutal scene.

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Koppalan and Velan [. . . ]. These sections belong to the scheduled castes and dance and tribes. They are the sole-custodians of Theyyam art and dance. In that way it is the art of depressed castes. Naturally they belong to a poor economic background. As the artists belong to this particular social class, they commanded no status and position. According to the caste practices of Kerala they were “untouchables” and “unapproachables” for the high castes. Only during the time of performance their social degradation had been eliminated. The village festivals and other ceremonies provided the artists only occasional occupation. Like a bonded labourer he was attached to a group of village shrines and the cult centres of certain landed families.

The duration of the Theyyam performance suspends the status of the ‘untouchable’ dancers; when the performance is over, the dancers become ‘untouchable’ once again. By committing suicide in a Theyyam performance, Kannan departs from this world not as an ‘untouchable’ but as someone unmarked by the prejudices and divisions of the caste system. Interestingly, Jayaraj was strongly criticized for having used tribal arts supposedly only as a cultural artefact in the film. I would argue, however, that by using Theyyam in the way he does, the director contributes to the scrutiny of one of India’s most burning issues: the social injustice of the caste system, which is hypocritical in its treatment of those thus scheduled, both as human beings and as performers. Metaphorically speaking, it is ‘the play of God’ that destroys Kannan and Thamara’s love, as the English translation of the title of the film suggests. On a deeper level, Theyyam dancing, in a synthesis with Shakespeare’s Othello, constitutes a highly interesting form of postcolonial adaptation in the genre of film. The title of the film also refers to Agni, the god of fire. From the outset, the film establishes the imagery and centrality of fire. It is through fire that Kannan ‘learns’ about his assigned place in society. The film is full of echoes, repetitions, and reiterations of the word ‘kaliyattam’ (God) and, in this sense, ‘fire’. Verbally, the word and the imagery strike a dense pattern of resonances on the main theme of fire. Moreover, the word ‘Kali’ in Malayalam means ‘safety’. Thus, as Kurup indicates, it may also signify a sacred dance ensuring social or family security, which is ironically destroyed by Paniyan and, metaphorically speaking, as in Othello, by the rigid caste system of (Hindu) Indian society. Through the fire god Agni,36 who is worshipped in south-east India, 36

Agni is the Vedic God of fire, of the hearth and sacrifice, and therefore also represents a sacrificial priest. In the Ramayana it is said that after many adventures,

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the myth of Sita and Rama from the Ramayana is brought to mind. In contrast to Sita, Kannan as the impersonation of Othello runs in slow motion into the fire to meet his fate. He is literally on fire as he rushes to meet his doom in a Theyyam dance in full costume, and is eventually burnt to death. The film begins with the imagery of fire and climaxes in an orgy of fire that seems to engulf everything. Jayaraj’s Kaliyattam (The Play of God) can be viewed as an adaptation, but also a transformation, of Shakespeare’s Othello, with the plot of the latter taken over and enriched by so many South-Indian references, thus enunciating a postcolonial and polymorphic poetic. Jayaraj addresses the concept of the ‘subaltern’ as posited by Spivak. Since the film is made for an Indian and particularly South-Indian audience, as the language and setting suggest, Thamara and her group represent the “dominant indigenous groups at the regional and local levels,”37 whereas Kannan stands for the “subaltern class.” Nevertheless, he is able to ascend the social ladder: first, through his high standing as a Theyyam dancer and, secondly, through his marriage with Thamara. His social ascent, however, is counteracted by his fellow-dancer and closest friend, Paniyan. The competition between Othello and Iago in Shakespeare’s tragedy, which is also transported onto the level of racism between a black and a white man, is transposed in Kaliyattam to a competition between a virtuoso and a minor dancer. As the film is a predominantly Indian production, set in India, it depicts part of a subaltern group, the casteless, who are spoken for. Racial identity as a marker of ‘otherness’ in Shakespeare’s tragedy yields place in Jayaraj’s film to parallel markers of caste identity. With ‘caste’ rather than ‘skin colour’ providing the crucial index of difference, the film invokes (and articulates) some of the anxieties and traditional beliefs that continue to divide contemporary India. The issues it thereby raises – for instance, the interface between speech and identity, location and the self, marginality and power – transform Shakespeare’s tragedy into a contemporary, subconRama, Sita, and Lakshman return to Ayodhya where Rama ascends the throne. Sita, who was kidnapped by Ravana and had to live in his palace for a longer period of time, now has to prove her innocence in an ordeal by fire. But the fire god Agni lets her pass the test without any bodily harm. For the epic in English translation, see William Buck, Ramayana (Berkeley: U of California P , 1976) and R.K. Narayan, The Ramayana (New Delhi: Vision, 1996); for a concise presentation of facts combined with pictures of artefacts, see Anneliese Keilhauer, Hinduismus: Eine Einführung in die Welt des Hinduismus (Stuttgart: Indoculture, 1979): 96. 37 “Can the Subaltern Speak?” 79.

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tinental, and postcolonial tale. Curiously enough, Jayaraj’s movie also uses the concept of the stereotype for its dramatic purpose. Thus, the director also shows how the upper caste defines and controls the casteless person’s sense of himself as a marginalized identity. This is also or, rather, especially the case with the figure of Paniyan (Iago). In this sense, the film can be interpreted as a postcolonial and polymorphic adaptation of Shakespeare’s Othello. It is characterized by a diegetic (space– time) transposition38 which also reveals specific transcultural modifications in various ways – for instance, media change: From a sixteenth-century English drama to a twentieth-century film version, from the setting of Venice /Cyprus to the setting of Kerala village /solitary house, from the theme of race to the theme of caste, from self-narration and storytelling (Othello) to ritual dancing (Kannan). It is grounded in a specific national (India’s caste system), regional, and local culture (Theyyam; Kerala; Malayalam), as well as a specific filmic tradition (Bollywood) and, in this sense, has a standing as a work of art in its own right. The tale of Shakespeare’s Othello is adapted not only to mimetically reflect the experience of the ‘outcast(e)s’ in Indian society, but also as a filmic intervention that resists and challenges the apparently closed, formal, and rigid caste system. In this way, Jayaraj’s filmic intervention offers a critical reading of the ‘doubly’ marginalized.

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38

See Gérard Genette, Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree, tr. Channa Newman & Claude Doubinsky (La Littérature au second degré, 1982; Lincoln & London: U of Nebraska P , 1997).

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Cartelli, Thomas Repositioning Shakespeare: National Formations, Postcolonial Appropriations (London & New York: Routledge, 1999). Chathurvedi, Ravi. “Interdisciplinarity: A Traditional Aspect of Indian Theatre,” Theatre Research International 6.2 (July 2001): 164–71. Chatterjee, Sudipto, & Jyotsna G. Singh. “Moor or Less? The Surveillance of Othello, Calcutta 1848,” in Shakespeare and Appropriation, ed. Christy Desmet & Robert Sawyer (London & New York: Routledge, 1999): 65–82. Chaudhuri, Sukanta. “Shakespeare in India,” Internet Shakespeare Editions, http: //web.uvic.ca/shakespeare/Library/Criticism/shakespearein/india.html (accessed 5 March 2002). Cirlot, Juan Eduardo. A Dictionary of Symbols (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971). Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin: White Masks, tr. Charles Lam Markmann, foreword by Homi Bhabha (Peau noire, masques blancs, 1952; tr. 1967; London: Pluto, 1999). Gage, John. Colour and Culture: Practice and Meaning From Antiquity to Abstraction (London: Thames & Hudson, 1993). Genette, Gérard. Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree, tr. Channa Newman & Claude Doubinsky (La Littérature au second degré, 1982; Lincoln & London: U of Nebraska P , 1997). Hall, Stuart. “The Spectacle of the Other,” in Discourse Theory and Practice: A Reader, ed. Margaret Wetherell, Stephanie Taylor & Simeon J. Yates (Thousand Oaks C A & London: Sage, 2001): 324–44. Hasan, Nazmul. Shakespeare Translations in Nineteenth Century Bengali Theatre (Dhaka: Bangla Academy, 1995). Kaliyattam (The Play of God). Dir. Rajasekharan Jayaraj Nair; perf. Suresh Gopi, Manju Warrier, Lal, Bijumenon, Bindu Panicker (India 1997; 130 min.). Keilhauer, Anneliese. Hinduismus: Eine Einführung in die Welt des Hinduismus (Stuttgart: Indoculture, 1979). Kerala Development Report, Planning Commission, Government of India (New Delhi: Academic Foundation, 2008). Kurup, K.K.N. Theyyam: A Ritual Dance of Kerala (Thiruvananthapuram: Director of Public Relations, Govt. of Kerala, March 1986), http://www.theyyam.com /theyyam.htm (accessed 5 March 2013). Lal, Ananda, & Sukanta Chaudhuri, ed. Shakespeare on the Calcutta Stage: A Checklist (Kolkata: Papyrus, 2001). Leach, Edmund. “Caste, Class and Slavery: The Taxonomic Problem,” in Caste and Race: Comparative Approaches, ed. Anthony de Reuck & Julie Knight (London: J. & A. Churchill, 1967): 5–16. Loomba, Ania. “Kathakali Othello,” The India Magazine 17.2 (January 1997): 26–33.

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——. “ ‘ Local-manufacture Made-in-India Othello fellows’: Issues of Race, Hybridity and Location in Post-colonial Shakespeares,” in Colonialism / Postcolonialism, ed. Ania Loomba & Martin Orkin (London & New York: Routledge, 1998): 143–64. ——. “Shakespeare and Cultural Difference,” in Alternative Shakespeares, ed. Terence Hawkes (London & New York: Routledge, 1996), vol. 2: 165–91. ——, & Martin Orkin, ed. Post-Colonial Shakespeares (London & New York: Routledge, 1998). Narayan, R.K. The Ramayana (New Delhi: Vision, 1996). Narula, Smita. Broken People: Caste Violence Against India’s “Untouchables” (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1999), http://www.hrw.org/reports/1999/india (accessed 5 March 2013). Neill, Michael. “Unproper Beds: Race, Adultery, and the Hideous in Othello,” Shakespeare Quarterly 40.4 (Winter 1989): 383–412. O’Neill, Tom. “Untouchable,” The National Geographic Magazine (June 2003): 2–31. Pallath, J.J. Theyyam: An Analytical Study of the Folk Culture, Wisdom, and Personality (New Delhi: Indian Social Institute, 1995). Rajita. “As Jayaraj likes it,” India Abroad (12 February 2002), www.indiaabroad .com/enterati/2002/feb/12jayraj.htm (accessed 5 March 2013). Sales Salvador, Dora. “Forms, Representations and Voices: Cultural Liminality in Vikram Chandra’s Fiction,” in (Mis)Representations: Intersections of Culture and Power, ed. Fernando Galván, Julio Cañero Serrano & José Santiago Fernández Vásquez (Bern & New York: Peter Lang, 2003): 57–73. Sandten, Cecile. “The Empire of Shakespeare in India: Deglamourised, Transformed, Greatly Shrunk,” in Shakespeare’s Legacy: The Appropriation of the Plays in Postcolonial Drama, ed. Norbert Schaffeld (Trier: W V T , 2005): 105–23. Shakespeare, William. Othello, ed. E.A.J. Honigmann (1997; Walton-on-Thames: Nelson, 1998). Shankar, Dodderi Aswathanarayanarao, ed. Shakespeare in Indian Languages (Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 1999). Singh, Jyotsna. Colonial Narratives & Cultural Dialogues: Discoveries of India in the Language of Colonialism (London & New York: Routledge, 1996). ——. “Different Shakespeares: The Bard in Colonial / Postcolonial India,” Theatre Journal 41.4 (December 1989): 445–57. ——. “Othello’s Identity, Postcolonial Theory, and Contemporary African Rewritings of Othello,” in Women, “Race” & “Writing” in the Early Modern Period, ed. Margo Hendricks & Patricia Parker (London & New York: Routledge, 1994): 287–99. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, ed. Laura Chrisman & Patrick Williams (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994): 66–111. Originally in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson & Lawrence Grossberg (Basingstoke: Macmillan Education, 1988): 271–313.

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Trivedi, Harish. Colonial Transactions: English Literature and India (Manchester: Manchester U P , 1995). Trivedi, Poonam, & Dennis Bartholomeusz, ed. India’s Shakespeare: Translation, Interpretation, and Performance (Newark: U of Delaware P , 2005). Vaughan, Virginia Mason. Othello: A Contextual History (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1994).

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Othering Otherness — Stephen Muecke’s Fictocriticism and the Cosmopolitan Vision

D ENNIS M ISCHKE

Postcolonial Studies, Alterity and the Cosmopolitan Imagination

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in the West conceptualize their relation to alterity? Despite all efforts to overcome conceptual binaries of centre /periphery relations, the very notion of ‘otherness’ has never ceased to occupy a central zone of concern in the discipline’s manifold attempts to come to terms with the postcolonial world at large. The enigmatic centrality of alterity in postcolonial criticism has – at least since Edward Said’s Orientalism – turned on the question of how to avoid an understanding of ‘the Other’ that appropriates otherness into familiar categories of Western epistemologies, via metaphor, prejudice, or bias. The concern with alterity in postcolonial studies is thus not only exacerbated by half a millennium of Western colonialism and the pitfalls of a eurocentric vision; the troubling point that the notion of alterity poses to thinking in the West is and has always been the way thinking itself relates to otherness. In philosophical terms, alterity does not merely mean another person, culture or language; ‘the totally other’ is ultimately that which exceeds any understanding or designation. The paradox of alterity, in other words, is: how can one think the absolute Other without losing the otherness of the Other? Of course, this question is not a new one. It has not emerged in postcolonial studies alone. Already the phenomenological tradition discovered that an absolute Other could only be understood at the price of its radical otherness. OW DO SCHOLARS OF POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES

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Edmund Husserl famously stated that all philosophy is necessarily “egology.”1 Based on the Cartesian assumption that the thinking subject is the true starting point of all philosophical reflection and the sole fact of life that cannot be called into question by any thinking subject, Husserl developed the method of phenomenology as a philosophy of the self that, while trying to transcend its limitations, ultimately accepted the fact that thinking has to start with the self2. For Emmanuel Levinas, however, who was also strongly influenced by the phenomenological tradition, the entire enterprise of Husserl’s “egology” still operated very much like the Odyssey, always confined to a mere return to the self.3 So, despite the fact that many philosophies in the West have never convincingly managed to break out of this imperial odyssey to the self, one should not dismiss the fact that there have always been thinkers who have incessantly laboured to overcome precisely these impediments of an egocentric vision. Besides the work of eminent postcolonial thinkers such as Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and Dipesh Chakrabarty, who have addressed this problem from the margins of Western hegemonic centres in the twentieth century, an ‘internal’4 critique of Western egology can already be found in the historical lineage of thought that we call cosmopolitanism. Starting with the ancient philosophers Diogenes of Sinope, Zeno, and Cicero, proceeding to Kant, Rousseau, and the Enlightenment tradition, and arriving at recent thinkers of otherness and globalization such as Levinas, Habermas, Beck, and Held, to name but a few, there has long been an ancestry of scholars rooted in the epistemological apparatus of the metropolis that has tried wholeheartedly to 1

Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, tr. Dorion Cairns (Cartesianische Meditationen: Eine Einleitung in die Phänomenologie, 1929; The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960). 2 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 89–90. 3 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, tr. Alphonso Lingis (Totalité et Infini: essai sur l’extériorité, 1961; Pittsburgh P A : Duquesne U P , 1969): 102 and 176; For his critique of Western thinking as trapped in egology see also Entre Nous: Thinking-of-the-other, tr. Michael B. Smith & Barbara Harshav (London & New York: Continuum, 2006): 96. 4 I am deliberately using the image-schematic dichotomy of inside / outside here – well aware that it implies a centre / periphery relation – only for a lack of a better term and to suggest that as long as English – or any other Western language for that matter – serves as a lingua franca in postcolonial studies, the charge of ethnocentric bias will be incredibly hard to avoid.

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establish a “cosmopolitan perspective.”5 For only a truly cosmopolitan perspective, as Ulrich Beck has put it, offers a “dialogic imagination” that is capable of sustaining “the otherness of the other.”6 What Beck has in mind when he talks about a cosmopolitanism based on a “dialogic imagination” is the utopian capacity to accept the coexistence of contradictory ways of life in productive dialogue even if they seem incommensurable in practice.7 But how can one apply a “cosmopolitan vision” without indulging in hegemony and epistemological bias? Merely claiming a cosmopolitan vision does not eradicate the paradox of egology. As Timothy Brennan, for instance, has argued, dwelling complacently on an uncritical notion of cosmopolitanism as a “redemptive fantasy”8 may ultimately only sublate the imperial impetus of eurocentrism. Brennan notes: The telos of the imperial project is reached when the third-world subject is able to deconstruct the epistemic violence of colonialism only by way of Continental theory. What cosmopolitanism unconsciously strives for is a stasis in which the unique expression of the non-Western is Western reflexively and automatically.9

Without very cautious application, Brennan warns, also a cosmopolitan vision will always have the potential to become an imperial tool for what one might call ethnic ventriloquism. I am using the metaphor of ventriloquism here in reference to Mita Banerjee’s book Ethnic Ventriloquism: Literary Minstrelsy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, which, although operating in a different context, arrives at conclusions that are remarkably similar to Brennan’s diagnosis of Anglo-American cosmopolitanism. In her book, Banerjee presents the argument that much white Anglo-European identity-formation in the U S A (but, I would add, not exclusively there) has relied to an often underestimated and at times even hidden degree on “an ethnic midwifery that was never acknowledged as such, and that was never acknowledged as bearing a 5

Ulrich Beck, “The Cosmopolitan Society and Its Enemies,” Theory, Culture and Society 19.1–2 (April 2002): 17. 6 Beck, “The Cosmopolitan Society and Its Enemies,” 18. 7 As an example of conflicting positions that are to be brought into dialogue in a cosmopolitan vision, one could refer to such conflicting positions as liberal democratic freedom and religious fundamentalism. 8 I am indebted to Rüdiger Kunow for this term. 9 Timothy Brennan, “Cosmo-Theory,” South Atlantic Quarterly 100.3 (Summer 2002): 675.

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trace of ethnic agency.”10 In other words, a cosmopolitanism that functions in the mode of ethnic ventriloquism would integrate the identity-formations, cultural achievements, and products of other cultures into a globalized Western mainstream, while obfuscating – indeed, effacing – its true origins and creators. In fact, on closer inspection the historical trajectories of cosmopolitanism reveal aporetic qualities that are remarkably similar to “the wound of thought”11 posed by the notion of alterity.12 So, even after the recent revival of various notions of cosmopolitanism, the question remains: how can one attain and maintain a cosmopolitan vision without succumbing to the pitfalls of egology and ethnic ventriloquism? The answer that I want to propose in this essay is that a cosmopolitan vision cannot be established by theorizing alone. Instead, I would suggest that cosmopolitanism has to start with praxis. As an exemplary case of what I think comes close to a cosmopolitan praxis, I want to discuss the cross-cultural potential of Stephen Muecke’s ‘fictocritical’ work with Indigenous Australian cultures, particularly the Nyigina people, produced in collaboration with their Elder Paddy Roe. Muecke, currently professor of creative writing and cultural studies at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, has gained a considerable reputation in both fields through an often innovative combination of creative writing, anthropological fieldwork, and traditional scholarship. A linguist by training, Muecke has studied the stories and histories of Indigenous people across Australia and has helped to secure for important Aboriginal intellectuals such as David Unaipon the professional credentials they deserve. In doing so, however, Muecke has never relied too much on established academic conventions and has repeatedly challenged the institutional boundaries of disciplines and epistemes of Western thinking.

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Mita Banerjee, Ethnic Ventriloquism: Literary Minstrelsy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Heidelberg: Winter, 2008): 13. 11 Dieter Mersch, “Vom Anderen Reden: Das Paradox der Alterität,” in Ethnozentrismus: Möglichkeiten und Grenzen des interkulturellen Dialogs, ed. Manfred Brocker & Heino Heinrich Nau (Darmstadt: Primus, 1997): 27–45. 12 For a more detailed negotiation of the aporias of cosmopolitanism, see Dennis Mischke, “Assembled Togetherness: New Materialism and the Aporias of Cosmopolitanism,” Rhizomes – Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge 21 (Winter 2010), http://www.rhizomes.net/issue21/mischke.html (accessed 1 June 2013).

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In fact, Muecke’s research, I will suggest in the following, even constitutes a performative response to the reigning paradox of alterity. While not entirely devoid of a certain complicity in academic imperialism, it nonetheless constantly reflects the “ways of knowing” with which it operates. Muecke’s work is neither revolutionary in its own right nor something radically new. The reason I bring up Muecke’s work in the context of the present thematic connection is that the productive and cross-fertilizing potential of his deliberately undisciplined, cross-cultural, and creative writing has not received the attention it deserves, particularly with regard to the paradoxes of alterity in postcolonial studies. In an attempt to carry the insights of postcolonial studies into the practices of writing and research, Muecke argues that “postcolonial studies should investigate modes of inscription which are other than those of Western societies.”13 I wish is to reflect on these ‘other modes of inscription’ from the perspective of performativity, textuality, and alterity, in order to discuss the genre of fictocriticism as a promising praxis of a cosmopolitan vision.

Fictocriticism and Research Fiction: Undisciplined Writing in a Deterritorialized World Let me begin with a brief clarification of the concept of ‘fictocriticism’. Fictocriticism evolved into an established genre of academic writing predominantly in Australia and Canada, drawing on poststructuralist and especially feminist experiments with academic writing in the style of the écriture féminine. Fictocriticism, as Heather Kerr has pointed out, is a “re-contextualisation” of the postmodern struggle to escape the trinity of euro-, phallo-, and logocentrism in a postcolonial world. “Eschewing ‘academic prose’,” she writes, “for its odious (Western) imperial paradigm of ‘objectivity’, the research fiction writer will find that intellectual mastery must give way to the knowledges favoured in the New Humanities.”14 By ‘new humanities’ Kerr mainly refers to the intellectual transformations associated with the cultural turn and the widespread establishment of postcolonial studies during the late 1980s and 1990s, which might not appear remarkably new by now. The reason why I return to her article and the topic of fictocriticism she discusses, 13

Stephen Muecke, No Road (bitumen all the way) (Fremantle, W A : Arts Centre Press, 1997): 89. 14 Heather Kerr, “Sympathetic Topographies,” Parallax 7.2 (April 2001): 107–26.

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however, is that the newness of post-colonial studies which Kerr has in mind is indeed something that has yet to be established. When it comes to questions of institutionalization, the revision of curricula, and the inclusion of global literatures in the canons of Western national cultures, much has been achieved since the advent of postcolonial studies. When one looks at the issue of epistemology and – more important for my present purpose – the styles of writing and communicating in our discipline, not much has changed. While many authors writing about postcolonial topics in the West are, of course, very aware of their position as speaking subjects and do reflect on their situatedness very carefully, the epistemological apparatus with which they work remains the Western model of academic writing. While I do not seek to deny that academic writing needs acceptable standards and consensual rules, I ask whether the ways we produce and convey knowledge in cultural and postcolonial studies should not be more inclusive and open to other epistemological pathways. In this sense, Heather Kerr’s comment about fictocriticism’s being part and parcel of the ‘new humanities’ suggests many new aspects worth considering. Writing academically in a fictional style, she argues, is an act that avoids any authoritarian construction of knowledge by highlighting the subjectivity of thought and insight. Perhaps one even finds in fictocriticism what Deleuze and Guattari have stated about philosophy and the notion of the concept: The concept posits itself to the same extent that it is created. What depends on a free creative activity is also that which, independently and necessarily, posits itself in itself: the most subjective will be the most objective.15

Muecke goes one step further. In the fictocritical text “The Fall,” he claims: When criticism is well-written, and fiction has more ideas than usual, the distinction between the two starts to break down. […] Criticism uses concepts and fiction percepts. Philosophy, according to Deleuze, is about the invention of new concepts, which have the abstraction and flexibility to be taken up by others and used. Art, on the other hand, invents percepts, monumental perceptions if you like, which are just there, either they work or they don’t. They can stand alone.16 15

Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, tr. Hugh Tomlinson & Graham Burchell (Qu’est-ce que la philosophie, 1967; New York: Columbia U P , 1994): 11. 16 Stephen Muecke, “The Fall: Fictocritical Writing,” Parallax 8.4 (2002): 108.

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Here, I claim, Muecke makes a very important point that has been overlooked in recent cultural and postcolonial studies. After the rapid succession of turns and the introduction of ever-new theoretical paradigms, postcolonial studies in particular have focused almost exclusively on the creation of new concepts and have failed to create and communicate knowledge based on percepts. This is a crucial matter when it comes to dealing with the difficult problem of alterity and the creation of a truly dialogic and cosmopolitan imaginary in the field. In creating concepts and percepts simultaneously, Muecke’s writing project encourages us to respond to the conditions and dilemmas of a postcolonial world, not simply by making ideas travel but also by letting ourselves as academic subjects be moved by them. In this sense, Muecke neither seeks to arrive at general propositions nor tries to deduce general laws based on a form of stationary objectivity. On the contrary, the fictocritical writer embarks on his /her methodological journey from the singularity of a particular point of view.

Giving Travelling Theory a Momentum of Thought But what exactly is the merit of a research ‘fiction’ vis-à-vis the conventional procedures of cultural studies? What might be gained from a methodology that is neither oriented towards clarity, transparency, and disambiguation nor predicated on interpretation and hermeneutics? After the end of ‘grand narratives’, Muecke explains, fictocriticism sees its task in ‘deforming’ literature and narrative in a world marked by global transcultural imbrications, economic pragmatism, and new modes of reading and writing brought about by multimedia and network technologies.17 Yet, in what respect can a radical employment of small narratives maintain the production of knowledge in a comprehensible, viable, and ‘disciplined’ way? In a related debate, the Americanist Winfried Fluck has called attention to the fact that the recent growth of approaches in the humanities (both in quantity and in diversity), although desirable in principle, would engender “a dialectic of blindness and insight.”18 When “plurality becomes endless proliferation,” as he puts it, “the initial gain [of having multiple perspectives] 17

See Muecke, “The Fall,” 108. Winfried Fluck, “The Humanities in the Age of Expressive Individualism and Cultural Radicalism” in The Futures of American Studies, ed. Donald Pease & Robyn Wiegman (Durham N C & London: Duke U P , 2002): 211. 18

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threatens to become a loss”19. The result of this dialectic, which he calls “cultural radicalism,” becomes a spiral of overstatement which would eventually threaten the very possibility of professionalism itself. The major point of his argument is that academic modes of knowledge production in the humanities (but not exclusively there) have developed an intellectual “culture of expressive individualism [in which individual scholars are increasingly] concerned with the search for self-realization [through the] assertion of cultural difference.”20 This “cultural radicalism,” Fluck concludes, may increase the importance of the humanities for the self-realization of the individual, but on a larger scale it decreases the impact of the humanities for society as a whole. Interestingly, Stephen Muecke, too, acknowledges this dilemma of cultural radicalism. As a cultural critic clearly writing in a form of expressive individualism, he constantly reflects on his own dilemma of individualism in writing about Indigenous communities and the possible benefits his own work can have for the people he writes about. Tongue-in-cheek, he admits, in No Road : ‘I’m vulnerable’, I’m thinking half the time that being a plumber would be a whole lot more useful than doing Aboriginal studies. I mean, you can imagine turning up in some community in the NorthWest to fix the plumbing. That the people would see the point in doing. But the other? – ‘Hi, I’m a cultural critic, I’ve come to fix up your representations.21

This certainly is witty, entertaining, and thoughtful. But what kind of speech act is performed by a fictitious style of research that is based on punch lines and jokes? Is a serious use of language not precisely one of the defining features of research and does seriousness not ultimately form the horizon of expectation and the bedrock of trust and reliability on which the academy functions in a society? Put differently: is a ‘fictitious’ and in this sense obviously non-serious mode of writing seriously not a brute and paradoxical self-contradiction? Can one still trust such a stance? Muecke’s work simply turns this question around. As a white anthropologist working in the postcolonial landscape of Indigenous Australia, Muecke is always already writing within the paradox of alterity. How could he pos19

Fluck, “The Humanities in the Age of Expressive Individualism and Cultural Radicalism,” 211. 20 “The Humanities in the Age of Expressive Individualism and Cultural Radicalism,” 220. 21 Muecke, No Road, 91.

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sibly not write in a self-contradictory way? Very cogently, Muecke places more confidence in a methodology that does not trust itself too much, especially not if it originates in a metropolitan centre and moves to a ‘colonial margin’. Instead, Muecke is brave enough to look for a language and style of research that manage to do justice to the place in which they are supposed to work. In an article entitled “Criticism Without Judgement,” he explains: I speak of ‘keeping things alive in their place’ because it encapsulates what I have learned from Aboriginal elders in Australia about the maintenance of cultures; authors like Paddy Roe, David Mowaljarlai and David Unaipon. For them, singing, dancing, writing, or other forms of performance, are not communicative items created for distribution. They are more like ecological events, existing more spatially than temporally […]22

Particularly in his books Reading the Country: Introduction to Nomadology (1984) and Ancient & Modern (2004), Muecke construes his fictocriticism as a spatial and materialist approach to writing that focuses on the interstices of multiple global modernities. In this way, fictocriticism circumvents the always problematic thinking in temporal dimensions of achievement, development or advancement. Fictocriticism in this vein comes along as a toolbox and an invitation to keep on creating, communicating, explaining, and entertaining across cultural divides. In other words, Muecke’s writing and reading are an attempt to learn from Indigenous Australian cultures instead of merely studying them. In so doing, Muecke understands any intellectual endeavour as a movement in space, as a journey that one can embark upon with heavy intellectual and cultural baggage, but a journey that already includes the possibility that this baggage might simply be of no use where one is trying to go. As an anthropologist he urges his readers to “rely on the local guides” when covering foreign territories, both textual and factual.23 In Reading the Country, for example, Muecke brings his academic cultural baggage to Roebuck Plains in Kimberley, Western Australia to join Indigenous storyteller Paddy Roe and the Moroccan-Australian painter Krim Benterrak in a transnational assemblage to read Paddy Roe’s land.

22

Stephen Muecke, “Motorcycles, Snails, Latour: Criticism without Judgement,” Cultural Studies Review 18.1 (2012): 43. 23 Krim Benterrak, Stephen Muecke & Paddy Roe, Reading the Country: An Introduction to Nomadology (Fremantle, W A : Arts Centre Press, 1984): 21.

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Paddy Roe and his people have their intellectual baggage too, their culture and philosophies. Significantly, these are located in the country, the stories and songs are strung out across the Plains and are brought out as one moves along the tracks. Paddy Roe has an expression for the production of this culture: ‘We must make these things move’.24

To ‘make things move’ in this context means to create not only concepts that suggest a universal position of objectivity but also percepts that have the capacity to move other people, emotionally and intellectually. Applied to the praxis of writing a book about Paddy Roe’s land, the lesson Muecke learns is momentum: But we were still sitting in the camp at Coconut Wells. It was the tail end of the wet season and the country was still muddy and too difficult to drive across. This enforced stillness caused me to reflect on the potentially static nature of our project; the production of a white man’s artefact, a book. How could I make this thing move?25

Muecke’s project of bringing the fictocritical method to the study of Aboriginal cultures can thus be understood as an attempt to embrace the wisdom, knowledge, and different ways of creating knowledge in Aboriginal cultures and to move his own position as scholar rooted in the epistemic framework of the West closer towards dialogic rapport with the cultures he works with. In an article on “(Post)colonialism, Anthropology, and the Magic of Mimesis,” Graham Huggan, however, is not particularly ‘moved’ by Muecke’s fictocritical approaches. Referring to Reading the Country, Huggan questions Muecke’s attempt to juxtapose his fictocritical prose with Indigenous Australian wisdom: Is Muecke’s primary goal to mimic an Aboriginal way of seeing or is it to co-opt Aboriginal codes into Western theoretical discourse? The text that he co-produces is certainly nothing if not derivative; it effectively mimics Aborigines mimicking Deleuze and Guattari mimicking nomads.26

Paul Carter, too, criticizes Muecke for adopting a stance of mimicry that would “simply suppose there is a natural correspondence between this and the 24

Benterrak, Muecke & Roe, Reading the Country, 22. Reading the Country, 22. 26 Graham Huggan, “(Post)Colonialism, Anthropology, and the Magic of Mimesis,” Cultural Critique 38 (Winter 1997–1998): 99. 25

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‘nomadic discourse’ of the Aborigine.” This, Carter concludes, was “to be guilty […] of an imitative fallacy.”27 But does Muecke’s fictocriticism really fall prey to such a fallacy? What kind of imitative fallacy is Carter talking about here? Keeping form and content contingent upon each other is precisely what is at stake in fictocritcal writing, as I understand it. Is Carter’s charge directed at what J.L. Austin defined as “a parasitic use of language”?28 In his theory of speech acts, Austin famously distinguished between serious and non-serious scenarios of language use. He argues that a speech act can only gain illocutionary force and thus become a successful performative utterance when it is expressed in a proper context. Although the later Austin seems to have been aware of the fact that this context cannot be defined as easily as the early Austin had imagined, the case prompted Jacques Derrida to show that the very structure of writing is marked by that special case the early Austin wanted to exclude: the iterability of code. For Derrida, a sign is a sign only because it is always a citation or a grafting from another context, as he puts it. In Derrida’s terms, every sign carries with it a force of breaking with its context […]. No context can enclose it. Nor can any code, the code being here both the possibility and impossibility of writing, of its essential iterability (repetition / alterity).29

In speaking of the serious non-seriously, fictocriticism thus builds its very methodology on something that Huggan and Carter seem to be obsessed with avoiding at all costs: a performative contradiction. From the perspective of communication, therefore, fictocriticism starts from the abyss of language itself. It deliberately does so, I aver, not by avoiding a performative contradiction but by turning it into pragmatic use. After all, as Martin Jay has written, it makes no sense “to charge someone with performative contradiction, when such a crime is the original sin of all language.”30

27

Paul Carter, The Road to Botany Bay: An Exploration of Landscape and History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988): 348. 28 J.L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975). 29 Jaques Derrida, “Signature, Event, Context,” in Limited Inc (Evanston I L : Northwestern U P , 1988): 317. 30 Martin Jay, Force Fields: Between Intellectual History and Cultural Critique (New York: Routledge, 1993): 33.

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Responding to the Other: Estranging the Experience of Alterity “One common effect of this,” to use Stephen Muecke’s own explanation, was the collapsing of the ‘detached’ and all-knowing subject into the text, so that his (or your) performance as writer includes dealing with a problem all contemporary writers must face: how the hell did I get here?31

In other words, if every text always already implies a “force to break with its context,”32 then the very structure of writing is marked by what Derrida would characterize as an absent present. “The task of contemporary thought,” Muecke argues, “is to attribute a value to the strangeness of others, and to provide occasions for giving this value a force and usefulness.”33 In contrast to Derrida’s notion of écriture, fictocriticism does not imply that the uncertainty of writing as such should necessarily be thought of as an absent presence. On the contrary, fictocriticism reminds us that what we are looking at here can in fact be more of a surplus, a kind of excess. Thus, “the absent presence” that constitutes the mark of writing according to Derrida turns out to be merely epiphenomenal. It is always secondary to the presence of something else, something ‘other’. This ‘other’ of language is what constitutes its performativity, its momentum. The non-presence in Derrida then becomes a kind of co-presence, or pre-presence, of alterity that, to follow Emmanuel Levinas, always accompanies and even precedes every speech act, turning every statement into a response. In his chapter on alterity in No Road, Stephen Muecke quotes Marcia Langton’s definition of Aboriginality, which takes a similar stance. She writes that Aboriginality “only has a meaning when understood in terms of intersubjectivity, when both the Aboriginal and the non-Aboriginal are subjects, not objects.”34 “Within the much discussed problematic of otherness,” Muecke adds, 31

Muecke, “The Fall,” 108. Derrida, Limited Inc, 9. 33 Muecke, No Road (bitumen all the way), 22. 34 Marcia Langton, “Well, I heard it on the Radio and I saw it on the Television. . . ”: An Essay for the Australian Film Commission on the Politics and Aesthetics of Filmmaking by and about Aboriginal People and Things (Sydney: Australian Film Commission, 1993): 32. 32

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In the Hegelian dialectic of otherness, the other always falls victim in the encounter, where the mastering self has an appropriative movement towards the other […]. A number of alternative options have been offered to the Hegelian scenario – Todorov suggests that the primary human pair should be mother and child rather than combative males. Hélène Cixous yearns for a type of exchange in which each one would keep the other alive and different.35

In this connection, fictocriticism endeavours to enact a communicative situation in which the alterity of the other is not overwritten but maintained. Consciously or unconsciously, fictocriticism is here remarkably close to the way Levinas and Bernhard Waldenfels have conceptualized alterity. For Waldenfels, the predominant Western notion of the foreign and the stranger necessarily reduces the Other to a palatable version of the Self, hence robs it of its otherness. In contrast to this, a true and non-aporetic experience of alterity would demand an “estrangement of experience” itself.36 Such a radical questioning of self-consciousness and the self is what the radical empiricism of the fictocritical method ultimately implies. What Huggan and Carter fail to realize, from this perspective, is that what is at stake in Muecke’s work is precisely not mimicry in Homi Bhabha’s sense of “almost but not quite”37 but, rather, what Michael Taussig and Walter Benjamin have described as a mimetic faculty, the capacity to perceive “un-sensual similarities” and to turn the “experience of the foreign” into an “estrangement of experience”38 itself. Thus, if one assumes – as I do – that cosmopolitanism is in fact a utopian and experimental attempt to understand otherness without destroying or appropriating it, then fictocriticism definitely offers postcolonial studies a strategy worth exploring.

35

Muecke, No Road, 181–84. Bernhard Waldenfels, “Levinas and the Face of the Other,” in The Cambridge Companion to Levinas, ed. Simon Critchley & Robert Bernasconi (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2002): 65 (emphasis in original). 37 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (1994; London & New York: Routledge, 2007): 85. 38 Walter Benjamin, “Doctrine of the Similar” (“Lehre vom Ähnlichen,” 1933), tr. Knut Tarnowski, New German Critique 17 (Spring 1979): 65–69. See also Michael T. Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York & London: Routledge, 1993). 36

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WORKS CITED Austin, J.L. How to Do Things with Words (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975). Banerjee, Mita. Ethnic Ventriloquism: Literary Minstrelsy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Heidelberg: Winter, 2008). Beck, Ulrich. “The Cosmopolitan Society and Its Enemies,” Theory, Culture and Society 19.1–2 (April 2002): 17–44. Benjamin, Walter. “Doctrine of the Similar” (“Lehre vom Ähnlichen,” 1933), tr. Knut Tarnowski, New German Critique 17 (Spring 1979): 65–69. Benterrak, Krim, Stephen Muecke & Paddy Roe. Reading the Country: Introduction to Nomadology (Fremantle, W A : Arts Centre Press, 1984). Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture (1994; London & New York: Routledge, 2007). Brennan, Timothy. “Cosmo-Theory,” South Atlantic Quarterly 100.3 (Summer 2002): 659–91. Carter, Paul. The Road to Botany Bay: An Exploration of Landscape and History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988). Deleuze, Gilles, & Felix Guattari. What is Philosophy? tr. Hugh Tomlinson & Graham Burchell (Qu’est-ce que la philosophie?, 1994; New York: Columbia U P , 1994). Derrida, Jacques. Limited Inc (Evanston I L : Northwestern U P , 1988). Fluck, Winfried. “The Humanities in the Age of Expressive Individualism and Cultural Radicalism,” in The Futures of American Studies, ed. Donald Pease & Robyn Wiegman (Durham N C & London: Duke U P , 2002): 211–30. Huggan, Graham. “(Post)Colonialism, Anthropology, and the Magic of Mimesis,” Cultural Critique 38 (Winter 1997–98): 91–106. Husserl, Edmund. Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, tr. Dorion Cairns (Cartesianische Meditationen: eine Einleitung in die Phänomenologie, 1929; The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960). Jay, Martin. Force Fields: Between Intellectual History and Cultural Critique (New York & London: Routledge, 1993). Kerr, Heather. “Sympathetic Topographies,” Parallax 7.2 (April 2001): 107–26. Langton, Marcia. “Well, I heard it on the Radio and I saw it on the Television. . . ”: An Essay for the Australian Film Commission on the Politics and Aesthetics of Filmmaking by and about Aboriginal People and Things (Sydney: Australian Film Commission, 1993). Levinas, Emmanuel. Entre Nous: Thinking-of-the-other, tr. Michael B. Smith & Barbara Harshav (London & New York: Continuum, 2006). ——. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, tr. Alphonso Lingis (Totalité et Infini: essai sur l’extériorité, 1961; Pittsburgh P A : Duquesne U P , 1969). Mersch, Dieter. “Vom Anderen Reden: Das Paradox der Alterität,” in Ethnozentrismus: Möglichkeiten und Grenzen des interkulturellen Dialogs, ed. Manfred Brocker & Heino Heinrich Nau (Darmstadt: Primus, 1997): 27–45.

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Mischke, Dennis. “Assembled Togetherness: New Materialism and the Aporias of Cosmopolitanism,” Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge 21 (2010), http://www.rhizomes.net/issue21/mischke.html (accessed 1 June 2013). Muecke, Stephen. “The Fall: Fictocritical Writing,” Parallax 8.4 (2002): 108–12. ——. “Motorcycles, Snails, Latour: Criticism without Judgement,” Cultural Studies Review 18.1 (2012): 40–58. ——. No Road (bitumen all the way) (Fremantle, W A : Arts Centre Press, 1997). Taussig. Michael T. Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York & London: Routledge, 1993). Waldenfels, Bernhard. “Levinas and the Face of the Other,” in The Cambridge Companion to Levinas, ed. Simon Critchley & Robert Bernasconi (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2002): 63–81.

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The (Inter)Disciplinarity of Postcolonial Research U RSULA K LUWICK

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L I V E R P O O L U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S launched a new series, Postcolonialism Across the Disciplines. In their mission statement, the series editors, Graham Huggan and Andrew Thompson, originally sketched this new publishing outlet as an arena for “alternative directions for postcolonial studies”: N 2008,

The series aims to show how the field continues to innovate, both by widening its traditional range of activities and by encouraging fresh or recombined approaches to it. Despite gestures toward interdisciplinarity in the work of some of postcolonialism’s best-known critical practitioners much of the work currently being done today in colonial and postcolonial studies is much less ‘interdisciplinary’ than it frequently claims. […] Postcolonialism across the disciplines is in part an attempt to counteract the dominance in colonial and postcolonial studies of one particular discipline – English literary / cultural studies – and to make the case for a combination of disciplinary knowledges as the basis for contemporary postcolonial critique.1

Interdisciplinarity is equated with innovation here. This in itself is a value judgment, partly related, of course, to the particular publishing context in which this statement appears. As a mission statement it introduces the new series, seeking to demonstrate the need for its timely intervention, as well as to promote the series as a new and exciting home for cutting-edge research. But in addition, the association between interdisciplinarity and innovation 1

Graham Huggan & Andrew Thompson, “Postcolonialism Across the Disciplines,” Liverpool University Press (2008): http://www.liverpool-unipress.co.uk/html/category info.asp?idCategory=85 (accessed 20 November 2011).

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also suggests something about the current state of postcolonial research. It implies, and Huggan and Thompson proceed to spell this out, that interdisciplinarity is neither really being practised yet, nor has it gained wider currency in the field of postcolonial studies. Rather, what postcolonial critics have so far proclaimed as their interdisciplinary orientation has tended to amount to forms of “commodified versions of interdisciplinary practice that did little more than ‘neutraliz[e] the vocabulary from another discipline and tak[e] it to describe yet again what happens between reader and text’.”2 Huggan and Thompson stress their own commitment to fostering a more genuine form of interdisciplinarity by focusing on the varied disciplinary alliances they expect in their series. But what remains unclear from their mission statement despite their explicit preference for interdisciplinary research, is the form which interdisciplinarity is to take within the series. The series editors declare that “the series aims to be a seminal contribution to the field, spanning the traditional range of disciplines represented in postcolonial studies but also those less acknowledged.” Yet what is left open is whether interdisciplinarity is envisaged as a dialogue between books or whether it is individual authors that should approach their subjects in a rigorously interdisciplinary manner. A clearer picture emerges in Christopher Warnes’s introductory address to the inaugural conference of the Postcolonial Studies Association, reprinted in an abridged version in the P S A newsletter of August 2009. Warnes characterizes postcolonialism “as disciplinary intervention,” commenting on how “postcolonial literary studies” have helped formulate questions that open out on to broader cultural and epistemological considerations about the ways our modes of thought are conditioned by hierarchies which privilege terms like ‘white’, ‘western’, ‘male’, ‘rational’ over their others,” and highlighting the emergence of analogical concerns “in other disciplines.3

It is through this function as an umbrella term under which “postcolonial literary studies” and these “other disciplines” can meet that postcolonial studies 2

Graham Huggan, Interdisciplinary Measures: Literature and the Future of Postcolonial Studies (Liverpool: Liverpool U P , 2008): 10. Huggan is here quoting from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, The Post-Colonial Critic (London: Routledge, 1990): 55. 3 Christopher Warnes, “Introductory Address to the P S A Inaugural Conference (Abridged),” Postcolonial Studies Association Newsletter 4 (August 2009): 1, http: //www.postcolonialstudiesassociation.co.uk/assets/NewsDownloads/psanewsletterspec ialissue.pdf (accessed 20 November 2011).

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emerge “as an interdisciplinary, multi-focused field, [which] exists in this sense to correct disciplinary bias and blind spots.”4 Calls for a stronger presence of subjects other than English literature at future conferences, expressed in a number of contributions to the newsletter, indicate that the Postcolonial Studies Association is envisaged as a forum which enables communication between representatives of various disciplines.5 Interdisciplinarity, in this understanding, is less individual practice than a characteristic of the field as such. The opposite view emerges in the introduction to P T T S – Postcolonial, Transnational and Transcultural Studies – by the English, Postcolonial and Media Studies division at the University of Münster.6 Here, interdisciplinarity is seen as something that is necessary in order to approach postcolonial cultural production in an adequate form: Postcolonial, transnational and transcultural phenomena – such as the anglophone literatures from around the world – require new forms of reading. If cultures are considered open and dynamic systems, then cultural production requires interdisciplinary work that goes beyond compartmentalized disciplines. Thus, some of the most exciting work produced today crosses disciplinary boundaries between literatures, visual arts, minority studies, history, anthropology, political sciences and others.7

Here, interdisciplinarity is favoured as a form of interrogation and analysis in itself rather than as awareness of the coexistence of various disciplines and their individual research questions within one field. Indeed, interdisciplinarity 4

Warnes, “Introductory Address to the P S A Inaugural Conference (Abridged),” 1. See, for instance, Christine O’Dowd–Smyth, “P S A Inaugural Conference Attracts Top Delegates to W I T ,” conference report. Postcolonial Studies Association Newsletter 4 (August 2009): 2, http://www.postcolonialstudiesassociation.co.uk/assets /News Downloads/psanewsletterspecialissue.pdf (accessed 5 December 2011), and Patricia Little, “Postcolonial Studies: Still an Anglophone Empire?” Postcolonial Studies Association Newsletter 4 (August 2009): 5, http://www.postcolonialstudiesassociation.co.uk /assets/NewsDownloads/psanewsletterspecialissue.pdf (accessed 20 November 2011). 6 At the moment of writing, the P T T S team consists of Isidore Diala, Caroline Kögler, Marga Munkelt, Markus Schmitz, Mark Stein (Chair of English, Postcolonial and Media Studies), and Silke Stroh. 7 “P T T S : General Info,” P T T S : Postcolonial, Transnational and Transcultural Studies: University of Muenster: http://www.anglistik.uni-muenster.de/en/ptts/General /index.html (accessed 20 November 2012). Emphasis in the original. 5

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is not an arbitrary approach; rather, the literary and cultural products that form the subject of analysis themselves demand interdisciplinary competence as reading practice. This view appears to be shared by the research group Swiss Transnational and Postcolonial Studies (S T E P S ). On the website, S T E P S is characterized as “an interdisciplinary research group seeking to promote and facilitate critical, political and socially motivated research and teaching in the fields of Transnational and Postcolonial Studies in Switzerland.”8 The group’s9 declared “aim [is] to bring together researchers committed to the critical analysis of languages, literatures and cultures in transnational, diasporic and postcolonial contexts.” They want to foster interdisciplinary projects which allow a comparison of different geographical and cultural areas and hence contribute to critical evaluations of postcolonial terminology, national and (post)colonial histories and the analysis of present-day discursive struggles.10

As the mere fact that the very short mission statement contains three explicit references to interdisciplinarity by itself already suggests, the pooling of expertise from various disciplines is held to be essential to the critical analysis of postcolonial issues. What transpires through the juxtaposition of these diverse characterizations of the postcolonial field is a deep uncertainty about what interdisciplinarity implies and what it means. This missing consensus is also at the bottom of the discrepancy, highlighted by Huggan, between calls for interdisciplinary work and actual practice in postcolonial studies. He sees few “genuinely collaborative initiatives, of the sort pursued by, say, affiliated educational programmes or task-oriented ‘think-tanks’ and research teams.”11 Instead, Huggan criticizes the fact that interdisciplinary activity in the field has been restricted, for the most part, to individuals whose ideas and methods, borrowed freely from other disciplines, are retooled to meet the requirements of anti-imperialist critique.12 8

“About S T E P S ,” S T E P S : Swiss Transnational and Postcolonial Studies: http: //www.steps.unibe.ch/about.html (accessed 7 March 2013). 9 According to the website, the member of S T E P S are Danièle Klapproth, Daniel Rellstab, and Christiane Schlote. 10 “About S T E P S .” 11 Huggan, Interdisciplinary Measures, 6. 12 Huggan, Interdisciplinary Measures, 6.

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Such research, Huggan insists, is “interdiscursive rather than interdisciplinary,”13 and while he does not contest the usefulness of such work, he nevertheless sees the confusion of interdiscursive with interdisciplinary strategies as symptomatic of the practical shortcomings of postcolonial studies. But the preference for interdiscursive methods reveals another friction in the postcolonial field: a lack of consensus about what postcolonial research actually entails. While the P T T S website does not distinguish between postcolonial, transnational, and transcultural research as far as their interdisciplinary character is concerned, the introductory statement to be found on the website of the Department of New English Literatures and Cultures at the University of Frankfurt (N E L K )14 introduces a careful distinction between postcolonial studies and transcultural English studies, in which interdisciplinarity plays a key role: While “Postcolonial Studies” are necessarily organized within interdisciplinary frameworks and are hard to reconcile with the disciplinary architecture of more traditional subjects in the humanities or social sciences, Transcultural English Studies are based on a core competence in English literary and cultural studies.15

The domain of postcolonial studies, here, is seen as intrinsically interdisciplinary, and, as a consequence, it is understood to sit uneasily with the division of areas of research into university subjects and departments. The distinction between postcolonial and transcultural English studies thus reflects the pragmatics of universities, at least in a German-language context. But this distinction also defends the study of English-language literature – so often seen, owing to the manner in which it dominates much postcolonial research, as almost colonial in its own right – against the potential reproach of unoriginality or worse. Instead of arguing for a form of postcolonial research in which innovation can only come through interdisciplinary dialogue, the N E L K agenda defines the study of literature as a “core competence” of transcultural English studies. This approach is shared, though not as programmatically stated, by the Centre for Colonial and Postcolonial Studies at the 13

Interdisciplinary Measures, 6. The N E L K team currently consists of Astrid Erll, Sandra Heinen, Sissy Helff, Maria Elisabeth Hüren, Karin Ikas, Eva Jungbluth, and Frank Schulze–Engler, the director of the N E L K Department. 15 “Introduction,” N E L K Frankfurt: http://www.nelk-frankfurt.de/?page_id=2 (accessed 20 November 2011). 14

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University of Kent at Canterbury, which is based in the School of English and whose focus on English-language literature is implicit in the presentation of its research activities. And it is noteworthy, in this context, that the first volume of Postcolonialism Across the Disciplines, Huggan’s Interdisciplinary Measures, also takes literature as its main concern, though it sets it in relation to other disciplines. Dissatisfaction with the dominant position of (Englishlanguage) literature in the postcolonial field might be most pronounced among scholars of (English) literature themselves, but awareness and acknowledgement of one’s core discipline nevertheless remain crucial prerequisites of productive interdisciplinarity. Clearly, to think about the interdisciplinarity of their field also requires postcolonial researchers to ponder the disciplinarity of their subject, and to consider where they locate their own research – whether they see it as a contribution to postcolonial studies, to transcultural studies, to particular linguistic varieties of literary and cultural studies, and so forth. As the ongoing debate about the advantages and disadvantages of renaming the Association for the Studies of New English Literatures shows, people might place themselves very differently, and in relation to diverse disciplinary parameters, even when working on similar issues. In this spirit, the brief statements that follow contribute to the discussion surrounding postcolonial studies across the disciplines, rethinking both theoretical and pragmatic questions of interdisciplinarity, as well as of the disciplinary status and alliances of the field.

WORKS CITED “About S T E P S ,” S T E P S : Swiss Transnational and Postcolonial Studies: http://www .steps.unibe.ch/about.html (accessed 7 March 2013). Huggan, Graham. Interdisciplinary Measures: Literature and the Future of Postcolonial Studies (Liverpool: Liverpool U P , 2008). ——, & Andrew Thompson. “Postcolonialism Across the Disciplines,” Liverpool University Press (2008), http://www.liverpool-unipress.co.uk/html/categoryinfo.asp?id Category=85 (accessed 20 November 2011). “Introduction,” N E L K Frankfurt: http://www.nelk-frankfurt.de/?page_id=2 (accessed 20 November 2011). Little, Patricia. “Postcolonial Studies: Still an Anglophone Empire?” Postcolonial Studies Association Newsletter 4 (August 2009): 5, http://www.postcolonialstudies association.co.uk/assets/NewsDownloads/psanewsletterspecialissue.pdf (accessed 20 November 2011).

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O’Dowd–Smyth, Christine. “P S A Inaugural Conference Attracts Top Delegates to W I T ,” conference report, Postcolonial Studies Association Newsletter 4 (August 2009): 2–3. http://www.postcolonialstudiesassociation.co.uk/assets/NewsDown loads/psanewsletterspecialissue.pdf (accessed 20 November 2011). “P T T S : General Info,” P T T S : Postcolonial, Transnational and Transcultural Studies, University of Muenster: http://www.anglistik.uni-muenster.de/en/ptts/General/index .html (accessed 20 November 2012). Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. The Post-Colonial Critic (London: Routledge, 1990). Warnes, Christopher. “Introductory Address to the P S A Inaugural Conference (Abridged),” Postcolonial Studies Association Newsletter 4 (August 2009): 1–2, http: //www.postcolonialstudiesassociation.co.uk/assets/NewsDownloads/psanewsletters pecialissue.pdf (accessed 20 November 2011).

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Lessons for A-Disciplinarity — Some Notes on What Happens to an Americanist When She Takes Slavery Seriously

S ABINE B ROECK

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D E L I U S K A U F T E E I N E N N E G E R – that is, Mr Delius bought a Negro – is one of the very few sentences in the Bremen Staatsarchiv where the fact of slavery appears. In the context of the present collection, slavery as such might not appear as an irritation or misplaced item; however, what has an Americanist literary scholar got to do searching historical sources in a Bremen archive? And what does the Bremen archive have to do with slavery? I want to address these questions here by way of taking my own scholarly and intellectual trajectory of the last ten years as a case in point for the necessity, potential, and difficulties of moving beyond disciplinarity. The immediate occasion for my visit to the archive was the project ‘Tracing the Fabric of Slavery in Bremen’,1 funded by the Robert Bosch Stiftung D E N K W E R K series, which I have run with a group of Bremen highschool students over the past year. The project has involved students at Abitur-level in a recuperation of Bremen’s involvement in what the AfricanAmerican scholar Saidiya Hartman has described as the regime of modern enslavement,2 which extended far beyond the transatlantic orbit proper. In the case of the city and the merchant families of Bremen in the eighteenth century, this meant a massive investment in and entanglement with international enslavement networks in the economic realm, due to Bremen’s highly profitable agency in colonial trade with the American colonies (and, as of the 1

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http://www.fb10.uni-bremen.de/inputs/denkwerk.aspx See Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1997). 2

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late-eighteenth century, with the young republic), with islands in the Caribbean basin, and with Asian countries. Looking from the point of view of black knowledge of the Middle Passage, none of Bremen’s economic success and subsequent political power as a proud and independent civic entity in the global colonial trade system can be conceptualized adequately without recognizing the role that enslavement’s cargoization and reification3 of human beings of African origin played in the mechanics of plantation production in the Southern Hemisphere. However, even though Bremen’s investment in colonialism has been amply (and for the most part proudly) documented, no need to articulate colonialism with slavery has developed. The project thus invites university students and high-school pupils to reconsider Bremen’s local history by way of introducing them to original archival research and confronting them with academic research questions and scholarly perspectives that have had no place in mainstream high-school curricula. The Staatsarchiv, gate-keeper to the annals of a city that has boosted its early freedom and independence as a civil entity, but also its cosmopolitan merchant history, its profitable global trade legacy, and its political and economic transatlantic cooperation with the U S A , literally from the first hour, has carefully kept the record of Bremen overseas activities. Local historians have written extensive histories of the city, paying inevitable if often peripheral attention to the international role of Bremen merchants; they have compiled the histories of wealthy, politically prominent, and globally active Bremen families – the Deliuses, Wäthjens, Böses, and others – many of whom still play an eminent role in contemporary Bremen city life; the Bremen historian Konrad Schwebel, in his Bremer Kaufleute in den Freihäfen der Karibik, has extensively documented, albeit in wholly positivist manner, the Bremen connections to New-World plantation economies. With critical work such as Klaus Weber’s, it has been established that the emergence of merchant capitalism on the Continent – including from the regions that are now Germany – drew in all parts of the globe long before the properly imperial nineteenth century. However, slavery appears neither as an entity registered

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I am using Cesaire’s term, see Sabine Broeck, “Aufklärung,” in Wie Rassismus aus Wörtern spricht: (K)Erben des Kolonialismus im Wissensarchiv deutsche Sprache: Ein kritisches Nachschlagewerk, ed. Susan Arndt & Nadja Ofuatey–Alazard (Berlin: Unrast, 2011): 232–41.

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by the political and organizational logic of the Bremen archive nor in any studies based on that archival knowledge.4 From a white academic research perspective, this scarcity might seem innocuous enough, since the discourse on slavery has been relegated safely to the particular sub-genre of slavery historiography developed in the U S A and the U K (and sometimes by French and Dutch scholars). The almost complete absence of slavery in the post-seventeenth-century records of this northwestern city in the belated nation-state of Germany coheres with the German collective and public memory of Germany as a political, social, and cultural entity that did not figure as a major player in eighteenth- and early-nineteenthcentury colonialism and New-World slavery. What we did not expect to find, however, was a series of textual incidences in which slavery appears precisely to make the possible scandal of a ubiquitous presence of modern white practices of enslavism5 disappear. The very mention of slavery, that is, un-signifies black enslavement. The project of tracing modern enslavement on which I have embarked as a teacher and scholar of African-American literature, of the early modern transatlantic cultures of enslavement, and of the European ‘roots’ of slavery is the current outcome of a trajectory that has taken me beyond my proper discipline of American studies without landing me in the safe home of another disciplinary configuration, or at least in the comfort of organized project-bound interdisciplinarity. This project has made it necessary, as well as possible in the first place, to both broaden available knowledge of slavery, and its global embeddedness, and to enable a re-reading of a seemingly innocent white social environment like the city of Bremen. This possible turn has been evaded too often in literary and cultural studies’ ethnographic practices of studying ‘other’ cultures which leave the white gaze of European researchers, as well as the anti-black6 and colonialist positionalities and agendas of our

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Konrad Schwebel, Bremer Kaufleute in den Freihäfen der Karibik: von den Anfängen des Bremer Überseehandels bis 1815 (Bremen: Veröffentlichungen aus dem Staatsarchiv der Freien Hansestadt Bremen, 1995). 5 I am using this neologism to indicate the necessary semantic and political difference between ‘slavery’, which signifies an historical period that historiography has limited and located, and ‘enslavism’, characterizing the purposeful white practices and discourses committed to enslavement. 6 I am using ‘anti-blackness’ following Jares Sexton’s discussion of blackness in “The Social Life of Social Death: On Afro-Pessimism and Black Optimism,”

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own institutions (the university and the archive), entirely unquestioned. The following example will serve to illustrate the point. Und dann kaufte Herr Delius einen Neger – this sentence appears in a very involved narrative7 by August Hennings, a respected Enlightenment pedagogue–intellectual, whose purpose is to defend the entrepreneurial savvy and economic efficiency of Mr Delius’s money- and face-serving transactions in Savannah in the newly independent U S A in 1783, against what the rather partial narrator sees as unjustified charges of fraud and mishandling of capital by his Bremen companions at home. The text’s purpose is to recommend young Mr Delius as a paragon of civil and economic cosmopolitan risk-taking over and against the petty, parochial jealousies of his former companions – a tight fable of Enlightenment didacticism for a civilian public very much in need of this kind of instruction. The narrator struggles to represent Delius’s difficult dealings in the U S South in ways as un-dramatic and pedestrian as possible, so as to convince his local readers of the viability of these new economic perspectives, offering riches to continental merchants by way of export (cloth, linen, shipping emigrants) and import (the range of available plantation products). Herr Delius kaufte einen Neger. It is just this one sentence that might alert the enlightened reader to the excessive and scandalous fact of enslavement. But it might just as well not do so: its very appearance as predicative statement of an understood activity in the context of many other quotidian mercantile transactions represents the enslavement of a “sentient being”8 as an effortlessly understood fact of the entrepreneurial scope of human possibility in the young and free nation the narrator extols. Had it not been understood as ‘normal’ human activity – a sensible judgment shared, one is to assume, by Delius, the narrator /author of the report, and the text’s readers – the writers of this report could not possibly have produced just one banal sentence about it and then moved on to the next plot item. Only to readers already sceptical of modern historiography, or to the rare sensitive reader with ethical radar more finely tuned than the average disinvested German scholar or student, the InTensions 5 (Fall–Winter 2011), http://www.yorku.ca/intent/issue5/articles/jared sexton .php. 7 August Hennings, Annalen der leidenden Menschheit: in zwanglosen Heften (Hammerich, 1795), vol. 1: 39. 8 I am borrowing the distinction between ‘sentient being’ and ‘human’ from Frank Wilderson’s explorations of blackness as social death, in Wilderson, Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (Durham N C : Duke U P , 2010).

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sentence’s very language gives away what should be a monstrous impossibility for the narrator of this tale, the enlightened Mr Hennings: the equation, at this early point in time before scientific racism, of being a Negro and being a slave as grounded in the fact of the Negro’s inherent capacity and unquestionable quality of market fungibility.9 This sentence, if one cares to read it symptomatically as the alert sign of an anti-racist critique, bares the transaction of enslavement to its bone: Mr Delius paid money to obtain a Negro. The possibility given by the innocent syntax here, in which buying can nonchalantly figure as a transitive verb with a human being as its grammatical object, by way of its own logic renders the Negro, in the eyes of the unsuspecting white reader, as a non-human. The human actor in this transaction is the merchant, Mr Delius; the act of buying something is irrefutably a human action – being executed in the interest of and by the wits and money of the human, Mr Delius; human beings, in the Enlightenment world-view of the late-eighteenth century, are free, hence un-ownable; consequently, the Negro must be conceptualized as non-human, a thing the buying and selling of which causes no human compunction. In a literary-critical narratological register, one would say that, structurally speaking, readers of this text have been bound emphatically to Mr Delius as the focalizer of his human action, so that the text’s very terms of address repeat the historical thingification of the Negro: readerly attention is fixed on the evidently human act of buying, and necessarily repeats the abjection of the black life in question as one sales item among others. However, if you do look at the transaction as an act of violent enslavism, and take the perspective of the black in opposition to the transacted thingification, a series of unanswerable questions emerges: After the buying, then what? What happened to the Negro? Who was he, or she – because the Negro has no gender in this transaction? Did s/he go back to Bremen with Mr Delius? Did the Bremen man sell the Negro again? How did the German know how to own a sentient being? What did the Negro do as his property? Did any of Delius’s relatives or friends hear about this? How, if at all, did Delius talk about it? The archive, in this case as in so many others, offers silence and evasion in the very instant that it offers a tiny piece of information; seemingly inconsequential, at this point in Hennings’s narrative defending Herr Delius. Thus, vis-à-vis the machinery of enslavement, of accumulation and fungi9

A term quintessential to Hartman’s critical discussion of the enslaved being’s nonexistence as human; see Hartman, Scenes.

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bility, as Saidiya Hartman has called the modern production of enslavement, we need a methodology to find and a pedagogy to address the lacunae of those putative stories that have never been released from the hinterland’s subjunctive of what might have been. Foucault’s notion of counter-histories here falls flat. There are no human stories, however submerged or clandestine or indirectly expressed, because the enslaved beings are being registered in the annals ostentatiously as property and cargo and as such, are not audible to white historiography as human actors, if only in the cracks of state and collective memory. If there is no human to recuperate, there is – within the parameters of white knowledge – not even the possibility of the recovery of human speech. German intellectual elites insisted on the modern nineteenth- and earlytwentieth-century period as successor to pristine Enlightenment ideals which constituted the nation’s sane, rational, and civil legacy before the demise of Fascism – a narrative that even the most radical critique of Enlightenment, Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s Dialektik der Aufklärung, does not renounce. This cognitive limitation has entirely overwritten the early modern entanglements of those very Enlightenment pioneers, like Mr Delius, in New-World enslavism. Recently, German historians have begun to address the history of German colonialism in the nineteenth century. However, eighteenth-century global reaches into the regime of enslavement have been almost wholly neglected. That in turn means, of course (no historiography – no dissemination), that none of this has reached intellectual, educational or archival fields. The fact that the merchants of the Free City of Bremen engaged in overseas trade with sugar, coffee, cotton, and other so-called Kolonialwaren – a trade that was by necessity tied into the regimes of enslavism – was not a paradox for an emerging class of globally connected capitalist citoyens for whom the world turned on their own self-realization and on their own profit. Accordingly, the archives, museums, schoolbooks, and other institutions of public memory have remained undisturbed, and render the corpses for a second killing.10 Traces of black humanness – abjected from the civil purview of the early 10

Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother. A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007), illustrates this phenomenon effectively. I have used this phrase before in “Enslavement as Regime of Western Modernity: ReReading Gender Studies Epistemology through Black Feminist Critique,” in Black Women’s Writing Revisited, ed. Sabine Broeck (gender forum 22, 2008), http://www .genderforum.uni-koeln.de/blackwomenswriting/BlackWomenWriting.html.

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Bürger society bent on accumulating capital – are nil. There are no stories; there are voids, absent absences, to push Morrison’s point.11 The Neger that Herr Delius buys, and that the chronicler reports of without any pangs of conscience, remains an exceptional detail, an item pitching the researcher of slavery in the hinterlands into mourning and frustration. What one may collect in the gatekeeper institutions of regional and national history – for example, in the city and state archives of Bremen, in the Bremen Cotton Exchange, in local museums like the Focke Museum or the Überseemuseum – is an amorphous, serendipitous range of excessive, but buried and displaced details which do not cohere into a body of evidence at all; these haphazard assemblages, these remarkable incidences of textual indirection and ethical evasion, function in the archive as aggressively denied signification. Thus, the Neger in Herr Delius’s story gains paradigmatic weight: he carries absolutely no significance, arouses no narrative interest, has no point of view, and merits but one transitive sentence in an endlessly meandering story about Herr Delius’s trials and tribulations as young, up-andcoming but unjustly maligned entrepreneur trying to make a fortune in the young U S A , the independence and freedom of which the City of Bremen was one of the first political bodies to acknowledge. To find that sentence systematically, I aver, would have been impossible. This sentence was written – as a kind of scenic detail to characterize Delius’s resourcefulness – in order to get lost in the maze of a narrative, which does not engage the implications of Bremen merchant capital in slavery but celebrates the enlightened and shrewd, if at the time unrewarded, cosmopolitanism of a representative of one of Bremen’s oldest merchant families. So much for my archive fever. What will remain from this project is the challenge to draw conclusions for methodological and intellectual re-articulations of our work in the academy, if and when our work should be based on anti-colonial and anti-racist premisses. I see my project as a contribution to a research practice in dire need of being further theorized. The challenge I see is not so much inter-disciplinarity – which I take here to mean regulated processes of academic cooperation to address various subjects in their given plenitude and obviousness – as the pressure of a-disciplinarity. Instead, the difficulty arises because of the urgency for both willingness and ability to 11

See Toni Morrison’s riff on the intricate relationship between presence and absence of African Americans in U S -American literature in Playing in the Dark. Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 1992).

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follow a politico-ethically motivated trace, to pursue an understanding of modern enslavement’s global impact on and penetration of European, North American, Caribbean, and African societies in their various local and regional configurations, because research results, as my stilted example demonstrates, oftentimes have to be coaxed by way of a hermeneutics of absence. This hermeneutics will, by necessity, involve specific disciplinary methodologies, as it will have to embrace the reconstructive practice of literary imaginary testimony as well as the means of recuperative historical archaeology. But it will, on the other hand, have to go beyond the kind of disciplinary agnotology that has, on principle, relegated research of modern enslavement to the safe confines of transatlantic historiography or to African-American studies. The term ‘agnotology’ – a concept recently propagated by such U S scholars as Robert Proctor and Lorna Schiebinger,12 and circulating around a series of conferences and publications – means addressing (post)-Enlightenment white Western knowledge politics of structural, principled, and continuous evasion and suppression of certain ways, terms, and content of knowing that have not been contained within humanist paradigms. It assumes “willful ignorance” – Charles Mill’s corresponding term13 – to be a purposeful project. For the academy, this term, corresponding to Foucault’s discussion of canonical knowledge, suppressed knowledges, and counter-knowledges, entails the willingness to critique the absence of knowledge not as oversight, as the result of a perpetual teleological lack of ‘not yet knowing’, but as a (white) disciplinary politics of not knowing. That is to say, learning the lessons of the Middle Passage will implicate the scholar in an uneasy disloyalty to her discipline, to paraphrase Lilian Smith.14 To realize this agenda will be difficult even for tenured scholars, given the overwhelming prerogatives of keeping up with the discipline; to recognize the challenge it presents to young researchers and their need to gain a foothold in the academy makes it a formidable task for the disciplines to support their adisciplinary ventures and not to leave those endeavours to scholarly isolation.

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Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance, ed. Robert Proctor & Lorna Schiebinger (Stanford C A : Stanford U P , 2008). 13 See Charles Mills, “White Ignorance,” in Agnotology, 230–50. 14 Lilian Smith, quoted in Adrienne Rich, “Disloyal to Civilization: Feminism, Racism and Gynophobia,” in Rich, On Lies, Secrets and Silence (1978; New York & London: W.W. Norton, 1984): 278.

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WORKS CITED Broeck, Sabine. “Aufklärung,” in Wie Rassismus aus Wörtern spricht: (K)Erben des Kolonialismus im Wissensarchiv deutsche Sprache: Ein kritisches Nachschlagewerk, ed. Susan Arndt & Nadja Ofuatey–Alazard (Berlin: Unrast, 2011): 232–41. Hartman, Saidiya. Lose Your Mother. A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007). ——. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1997). Hennings, August. Annalen der leidenden Menschheit: in zwanglosen Heften (Band 1; Hammerich, 1795). Mills, Charles. “White Ignorance,” in Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance, ed. Robert Procter & Lorna Schiebinger (Stanford C A : Stanford U P ): 230–50. Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 1992). Proctor, Robert, & Lorna Schiebinger, ed. Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance (Stanford C A : Stanford U P , 2008). Rich, Adrienne. “Disloyal to Civilization: Feminism, Racism and Gynophobia,” in Rich, On Lies, Secrets and Silence (1978; New York & London: W.W. Norton, 1984): 275–310. Schwebel, Konrad. Bremer Kaufleute in den Freihäfen der Karibik: von den Anfängen des Bremer Überseehandels bis 1815 (Bremen: Veröffentlichungen aus dem Staatsarchiv der Freien Hansestadt Bremen, 1995). Sexton, Jared. “The Social Life of Social Death: On Afro-Pessimism and Black Optimism,” InTensions 5 (Fall–Winter 2011), http://www.yorku.ca/intent/issue5 /articles/jaredsexton.php Wilderson, Frank. Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (Durham N C : Duke U P , 2010).

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Postcolonial Studies as a Discipline — An External Perspective on Administrative Headaches

J ANOU G LENCROSS

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H I S C O N T R I B U T I O N I S I N F O R M E D by my recent position as coordinator of the interdisciplinary research initiative ‘Relations of Difference – Dynamics of Conflict in Global Perspective’ at Leibniz University, Hannover. This initiative brings together junior and senior researchers as part of a larger research group within the University, with an official status granted by the Presidential Executive Committee. Established at the end of 2009, this research initiative analyses the historical depth and variability of the processes whereby differences based on social and intersecting categories such as class, ethnicity, and gender are constructed against the background of the past and current interplay between world regions. Thus, until very recently, I was immersed in debates regarding interdisciplinarity, in both theory and practice.1 My position as former coordinator further explains why, in these comments, I focus on some of the implications of the (inter)disciplinary debate for postcolonial studies rather than on evaluating the current state of the art in postcolonial studies and properly engaging with the many external and internal controversies that characterize the field. In other words, this statement by an outsider contributes to debate by discussing criteria with which academic disciplines can be distinguished in theory as well as the possible advantages and disadvantages of being so categorized – or not – in view of the status this confers in university settings and vis-à-vis funding agencies. It is up to the 1

For further information on the research initiative, consult http://www.dac.unihannover.de.

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scholars in postcolonial studies to appraise their field’s performance and demands in view of these factors, if, that is, they consider them relevant. In Hannover, we know the challenges of interdisciplinary work very well. Serious efforts in this direction have been taken, as demonstrated by the involvement of other disciplines in the 2011 A S N E L /G N E L conference but also by the ongoing research collaboration between the departments of History and English on ‘Post-Slavery: Comparing the Caribbean and Africa’, partly funded by the German Research Council. But there is no question that this is a difficult task and one that is not helped by the way universities are institutionally structured, which in turn affects how we teach and do research. So maybe it is more fruitful to focus on the establishment of a new discipline instead of continuing the difficult and often tedious attempts at cross-fertilization between disciplines. But what does it take to be a discipline? How do we recognize one? My simplifying answer suggests that it takes a department to be a discipline. Universities are traditionally subdivided into departments representing specific academic disciplines. With interdisciplinarity becoming a buzzword as well as a postulate of many funding agencies in Europe and the U S A , it has become obvious that neither the buzzword nor the underlying idea of an academic discipline is well defined. In John Aram’s words, recognizing ambiguities in the concept of ‘discipline’ foreshadows the challenge of defining interdisciplinarity. Where elements are relatively stable, integrated and autonomous, interaction may be more easily perceived and defined.2

However, this is clearly not the case with disciplines that have evolved differently over time and space and are constantly subject to change. The O E D , meanwhile, hints at the broadest but vaguest meaning when defining an academic discipline as “a branch of learning or scholarly instruction.” This definition thus underlines how strongly a discipline is identified by virtue of higher-education student programmes in which a specific set of theories, methods, and concepts are crystallized and circulated. In the words of Armin Krishnan, “the academic discipline can [thus] be seen as a form of specific and rigorous scientific training that will turn out practitioners who have been

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John D. Aram, “Concepts of Interdisciplinarity: Configurations of Knowledge and Action,” Human Relations 57.4 (2004): 381.

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‘disciplined by their discipline’ for their own good.”3 This minimal working definition should help us for the moment to discuss the position of postcolonial studies in the current institutional setting of the university. If disciplines are institutionally represented by departments, then postcolonial studies are currently not a discipline. Google, at least, seems to suggest that there is no department of postcolonial studies anywhere in the world. That is quite extraordinary, given, for example, the number of departments of gender studies that have been established over the past twenty years.4 On a sub-departmental level, there are surely chairs of postcolonial studies as well as student programmes. The latter also exist at inter-departmental or, shall I say, interdisciplinary levels, often organized within the framework of centres, research, and reading groups, but often enough dominated by the respective language departments, despite long-standing calls “for more productive engagements with area studies, the social sciences, and minority studies.”5 Against this background, I argue that it will be difficult to justify the establishment of a new discipline so long as the language departments, and particularly English, dominate postcolonial studies. To the contrary, such an approach could mean a ‘dead-end’ in the face of new theories and methods addressing global power-relations, as many critics have underlined.6 Practioners, Frustrated with the materialist / discursive divide, the circularity of colonial discourse analysis itself, and the apparent failure of the field to engage with contemporary forms of imperialism, as well as transnational struggles / solidarity, [have recently thought] about how postcolonial studies could (or should) be modified, and even transformed, so as to become more historically and politically relevant.7 3

Armin Krishnan, “What are Academic Disciplines? Some Observations on the Disciplinarity vs. Interdisciplinarity Debate,” N C R M Working Paper Series (Southampton: E S R C National Centre for Research Methods, 2009): 5, http://eprints.ncrm .ac.uk/783/1/what_are_academic_disciplines.pdf (accessed 24 May 2011). 4 For a discussion of the relevance of spatial and historical factors in the “dissemination and production of knowledge,” see Giulia Calvi, “Global Trends: Gender Studies in Europe and the U S ,” European History Quarterly 40.4 (October 2010): 643. 5 Waïl S. Hassan & Rebecca Saunders, “Introduction,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 23.1–2 (2003): 19. 6 Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 2000): 137. 7 David Jefferess, Julie McGonegal & Sabine Milz, “Introduction: The Politics of Postcoloniality,” Postcolonial Text 2.1 (2006), http://postcolonial.org/index.php/pct /article/viewArticle/448/842 (accessed 30 September 2011).

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It is thus not only the level of sophistication in view of concepts, methods, and theories that matters and which Krishnan focuses on when he claims that if a discipline is called ‘studies’, then it usually indicates that it is of newer origin (post Second World War) and that it may fall short of [certain] characteristics. This would be typically lack of theorisation or lack of specific methodologies, which usually diminishes the status of a field of research. These ‘studies’ disciplines can either aim at remaining ‘undisciplined’, as women’s studies did in the 1970s, or they can engage in the process of their disciplinarisation and institutionalisation” [as gender studies did from the 1980s onwards].8

My point is that this process of disciplinarization could not be successful so long as the allegation that literature and cultural studies dominate discourse, theories, methods, and concepts persists. In this case, postcolonial studies will continue to have a hard time demanding anything more than the status of a field of studies within existing disciplines. Only when new forms of knowledge and critical-theoretical methodologies are woven together to the extent that they cannot be easily and straightforwardly traced back to existing disciplines may we speak of a new discipline. What does this mean for funding opportunities, though? Most funding agencies, in response to the university system, are subdivided into branches that attend to specific disciplines. The peer reviewers who scrutinize funding applications are deeply rooted in the habitus of their disciplines /departments. Despite all the fuss about interdisciplinary research, such structures and the personnel of funding agencies thus call into question their ability to evaluate interdisciplinary projects of the kind they ostensibly seek to fund. Funding agencies object to attempts at interdisciplinarity that in fact represent nothing more dangerous than disciplines borrowing from each other or adding several pieces of disciplinary research under one common theme – but is their own evaluating performance really that much more advanced? For the moment, (young) scholars in the humanities seem to have a better chance of getting a research grant, particularly in view of the dominant small or medium-sized schemes, if they have a strong disciplinary base with an institutional manifestation (not to speak of their influence in a university). Whether that continues to be English, French, or History, or if it will be a new discipline of postcolonial studies in the near future, depends in theory on the extent to which the accumulated specialist knowledge in postcolonial studies, its organization, 8

Krishnan, “What are Academic Disciplines?” 10.

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terminology, and methods can be shown to be sufficiently distinctive. In that case, the formation of a new department could mark the beginning of a new discipline. However, let us be frank here about some of the other motives and consequences involved. The institutional re-organization or re-branding of knowledge is seldom linked to purely scholarly considerations. The creation of more fashionable or larger fields of study such as postcolonial studies is often considered by the participating actors from different disciplines as a means to either extend their power or at least survive in ‘difficult’ university settings. However, let me conclude with Krishnan, who warns that “this strategy of fashionably reconfiguring disciplines could turn out to be just another path to extinction.”9

WORKS CITED Aram, John D. “Concepts of Interdisciplinarity: Configurations of Knowledge and Action,” Human Relations 57.4 (2004): 379–412. Calvi, Giulia. “Global Trends: Gender Studies in Europe and the U S ,” European History Quarterly 40.4 (October 2010): 641–55. Hardt, Michael, & Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 2000). Hassan, Waïl S., & Rebecca Saunders. “Introduction,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 23.1–2 (2003): 18–31. Jefferess, David, Julie McGonegal & Sabine Milz. “Introduction: The Politics of Postcoloniality,” Postcolonial Text 2.1 (2006), http://postcolonial.org/index.php/pct /article/viewArticle/448/842 (accessed 30 September 2011). Krishnan, Armin. “What are Academic Disciplines? Some Observations on the Disciplinarity vs. Interdisciplinarity Debate,” N C R M Working Paper Series (Southampton: E S R C National Centre for Research Methods, 2009), http://eprints.ncrm .ac.uk/783/1/what_are_academic_disciplines.pdf (accessed 24 May 2011).

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On the Challenge of De-Provincializing the University Classroom — Teaching African History from a Postcolonial Perspective

B RIGITTE R EINWALD

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A F R I C A N I S T H I S T O R I A N with a focus on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it goes without saying that the exploration of the meanings and repercussions of (post)colonialism is at the core of my research and teaching agendas. That is why I consider it a major challenge to sensitize both students and colleagues in the field of historiography to the reciprocity of the (post)colonial situation. The entanglement of intricately intertwined, transformative relationships that evolved from and shaped interactions among colonizers, colonized elites, and subalterns left deep imprints on societies and individuals on both sides. Whether this problematic but shared past is accounted for, refashioned in accordance with specific requirements, or simply dismissed, it needs to be investigated, not assumed. Whereas nobody would seriously contest the idea that African societies have been profoundly changed by “a series of European hegemonic projects”1 – to recall Frederick Cooper’s characterization of colonialism – the same cannot be said for the impact of the colonial experience on European polities and life-worlds. Consequently, to elucidate how and with what effect African agency intersected with European initiative, other than by acknowledging the continent as a mere 1

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Frederick Cooper, “The Dialectics of Decolonization: Nationalism and Labor Movements in Postwar French Africa,” in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. Frederick Cooper & Ann Laura Stoler (Berkeley, Los Angeles & London: U of California P , 1997): 409.

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provider of natural and human resources for the European modernizing project, is an intriguing aim of social and cultural research from the (post)colonial perspective. Based on my teaching experience of the last eight years at Hannover University, I consider it essential for my discipline to bring out into the open and engage with unrecognized assumptions and ways of thinking which impede an understanding of the (post)colonial encounter that accounts both for the historicity of the mutual exchange between ‘core’ and ‘periphery’ and for the various cultural forms through which all of the actors involved rework their experiences of a shared past according to the exigencies of the present. Uncovering these attitudes contributes to a comprehension of (post)coloniality as a shared structuring condition that resulted from unequal but intricately interlinked relations. Not only can this comprehension open up “possibilities of seeing how deeply colonies were woven into what it meant to be European”2 but it can also facilitate deconstructing persisting conceptions of Africa as archaic. Successors of ideological devices which formerly served to legitimate colonial intervention by duly differentiating the ‘modern’: i.e. contemporaneous European, from the ‘traditional’: i.e. ancestral African, these hard-dying archaisms – which are sufficiently well known from safari-themed coffeetable books and travel documentaries – account for the longevity of stereotypical retrogression through which the contemporariness of Africans is constantly denied. Thus, in teaching African history in the university and supervising doctoral research in this field, one should confront students and young scholars with African agency and contemporaneousness, which explains my strategic preference for materials, themes, and methodologies likely to enhance their awareness of these matters: urban history; modes and practices of popular culture; relations of gender, family, and generations; oral history; Africa in the Atlantic space; the concept of Africa; etc. I am significantly supported in this by long-established inter-regional and interdisciplinary research and teaching networks in Hannover, such as the study and research programme ‘Transformation Studies’, which draws on joint expertise pertaining to Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean in the fields of history, sociology, cultural anthropology, and religious studies as well as English, American and Hispanic studies. This broadened comparative focus enables us not only to critically 2

Frederick Cooper, “Conflict and Connection: Rethinking Colonial African History,” American Historical Review 99.1 (December 1994): 1527.

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reassess the historical depth and spatial scope of globalizing processes but also to stress their impact as seen from the perspective of polities in the global south. More operationally (though still informed by the objective of revising one-dimensional ‘north-bound’ concepts of (post)colonial relations), I and colleagues from the participating departments established, in 2009, the interdisciplinary Master’s programme ‘Atlantic Studies in History, Culture and Society’. The remainder of this statement illustrates how teaching practice can contribute to uncovering implicit attitudes, confronting students with the diversity and complexity of Africa beyond the “colonial library,”3 and promoting understanding through dialogue. ‘I have nothing to do with Africa because, after all, African history is not a subject in grammar school’ – Given the strong orientation of B A students toward teaching careers, they generally consider African history as a marginal subject of study.4 Changing this requires making African issues relevant – for example, by integrating them in courses on European history, which also has the benefit of strengthening students’ appreciation of the impact of global interaction in the making of Europe. A team-taught course on the Cold War in transnational perspective proved to be a valuable experience in both regards by providing the teachers with incentives for discussion across their respective research areas (e.g., Eastern European, Latin American, and African history). In a project seminar focusing on African exhibits in ethnographic museums, students studied the historical genesis of the concept of Africa in (post) colonial Germany and analysed the stereotypical function ascribed to African artefacts of bearing witness to a supposed primordial otherness. Designing African showcases themselves gave them an opportunity to learn how to cope with the intricacies of managing diversity and complexity. ‘Africans are either peasants or migrants who depend on our aid’. – University courses alone are not likely to deconstruct the long-lived (post)colonial imagery of sub-Saharan Africa as rural and deficient in economic, tech3

Valentin Y. Mudimbe, The Idea of Africa (Bloomington: Indiana U P , 1994). In their introduction to Listening to Africa. Anglophone African Literatures and Cultures (Heidelberg: Winter, 2012), Jana Gohrisch and Ellen Grünkemeier comment on the under-representation of Africa in the German E F L classroom – a situation that the volume’s essays by scholars from various disciplines such as history, linguistics, and literary and cultural studies seek to redress. 4

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nological, and human achievement. I contend that these deeply engrained mental reservations can be transcended only through confrontation with a variety of real-time situations. Accordingly, we promoted peer-group encounters between Hannover and Senegalese students in the context of an excursion to Senegal in 2010. Apart from being involved in an ongoing exchange via email, this initiative proved valuable insofar as Hannover students who prepare their Master’s theses on themes in West African history benefit from advice and documentary support from their counterparts in Dakar. A similar idea of promoting a kind of esprit d’équipe was the basis of a project initiated together with two Senegalese colleagues. We designed a joint M A course, ‘Strategies of Mobility and Migration in West African Societies’, which we intend to teach in turn at the Universities of Hannover, Dakar, and Saint-Louis. It was given a first try in the 2011 summer term at Hannover, where, during their stay as visiting scholars, my Senegalese colleagues taught and supervised my students. Team-teaching and small-team research will constitute core elements of another joint project between the department of sociology in Saint-Louis and the departments of history in Dakar and Hannover, which we expect the German Academic Exchange Service (D A A D ) to fund. It will establish joint teams of Senegalese and German graduate and postgraduate students who will meet on a regular basis during summer schools as well as archival and field-research trips. The objective is to promote exchange from an early stage in an academic’s career. However, it remains to be seen how, for instance, we will solve the problem of a practicable lingua franca – experience has shown that neither French nor English works for both students and young scholars. Second in line is the challenge to generate sufficient funds, especially for Senegalese students’ and young researchers’ mobility. ‘Partaking in a student exchange programme means enhancing my professional C V .’ – Apart from a general decrease in the number of our students who spend a semester or year abroad, I have observed a trend among those considering participation in an exchange programme of opting only for (Western) universities that are likely to upgrade their professional C V s. While there is nothing to be said against this in individual cases, this emerging preference for white anglophone academic milieux may be considered a symptom of a neo-parochialism which parallels, in an uneasy way, the digitally enhanced global interconnectedness established by Facebook and other social networks. Whether their users actually feel motivated to get over dichotomist perceptions of Self and Other or, rather, content themselves with navigating their own cultural backwaters may be subject to debate. Whatever the reasons

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given – deficient infrastructures, insecurity, or apprehension at being identified with the presumed global losers when opting for what is considered a less attractive university in Africa or Latin America – there is, in my view, urgent need for action to make study and research in the Southern Hemisphere more attractive for our students and young scholars, lest we fall back behind achievements in academic mobility realized between the 1970s and the 1990s.

WORKS CITED Cooper, Frederick. “Conflict and Connection: Rethinking Colonial African History,” American Historical Review 99.1 (December 1994): 1516–45. ——. “The Dialectics of Decolonization: Nationalism and Labor Movements in Postwar French Africa,” in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. Frederick Cooper & Ann Laura Stoler (Berkeley, Los Angeles & London: U of California P , 1997): 406–35. Gohrisch, Jana, & Ellen Grünkemeier, ed. Listening to Africa: Anglophone African Literatures and Cultures (Heidelberg: Winter, 2012). Mudimbe, Valentin Y. The Idea of Africa (Bloomington: Indiana U P , 1994).

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Studying Anglophone Literatures and Cultures in a World of Globalized Modernity — Notes on the ‘Frankfurt Experience’

F RANK S CHULZE –E NGLER

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are based on my own experiences of various phases of the institutionalization of the comparative study of anglophone literatures and cultures on a global scale, a field of studies that came into being as ‘Commonwealth Literature’ in the 1960s, became widely known as the ‘New Literatures in English’ in the 1970s and 1980s, was often (rather unfortunately, I believe) subsumed under the label ‘Postcolonial Studies’ in the 1990s and 2000s, and is today increasingly referred to as ‘Transcultural English (or Anglophone) Studies’. The vantage point from which I have witnessed much of the development and transformation of this field to which I have dedicated most of my professional energies over the last three decades or so has been the Institute of English and American Studies at Goethe University, Frankfurt. What follows may be read as a case study of the institutionalization and transformation of the comparative study of anglophone literatures and cultures at an institute whose members decided fairly early in the day to turn this field into one of the department’s specializations designed to strengthen its teaching and research profile. I will provide a brief account of this institutionalization and transformation with regard to (i) teaching, (ii) research, and (iii) interdisciplinary research collaboration, before ending (iv) with a few observations on the non-institutionalization of postcolonial studies and the ‘transcultural turn’. (i) With regard to teaching and curricular reforms, the ‘Frankfurt experience’ has unfolded as a ‘mainstreaming’ process that has moved the comparative study of anglophone literatures and cultures from a suspiciously eyed HE FOLLOWING REFLECTIONS

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fringe position to the very centre of the institute’s pedagogical profile. When Dieter Riemenschneider began to offer courses on anglophone African, Indian, and Caribbean literature and culture (soon to be followed by courses on Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) in the early 1970s (a time when most German universities still ran shy of offering courses on these subjects), quite a few members of the Institute of English and American Studies – and possibly quite a few students, too – probably considered this field a fairly exotic adjunct of dubious relevance to the institute’s curricular core concerns. Yet, by the early 1980s, both student demand for ‘new literatures’ courses and the growing research reputation of the new sub-department of anglophone literatures and cultures (known by the name of N E L K , based on the German acronym of Neue Englischsprachige Literaturen und Kulturen) led to an amendment of the Magister course of studies to include N E L K as an optional focus area. At the same time, N E L K courses (and Staatsexamen with a N E L K focus) also became a regular feature of the curriculum for teacher students. A further major step towards mainstreaming the comparative study of anglophone literatures and cultures that decisively brought to an end any residual notions of exoticism and marginality was the introduction of the new Bachelor’s programme in ‘English Studies’ in 2010, with N E L K as one of four evenly balanced areas of focus: in addition to the obligatory Introduction to literary studies, the N E L K Introduction (‘Introduction to Anglophone Cultures and the New Literatures in English’) is now the second-largest introductory course offered in the English-studies curriculum. The mainstreaming of anglophone literatures and cultures has become even more pronounced with the introduction of the new Master’s courses due to begin in the winter term 2013/14: apart from a Master’s in American studies, the Institute now offers a Master’s titled ‘Anglophone Literatures, Cultures and Media’, in which N E L K plays a particularly prominent role, and an interdisciplinary Master’s titled ‘Moving Cultures: Transcultural Encounters’ taught in English, French, Spanish, and German, a joint venture between N E L K and the Institute of Romance Languages and Literatures that includes optional courses in the social sciences, cultural geography, cultural anthropology, education, and religious studies. (ii) Research in the N E L K sub-department has also been part of this mainstreaming process: while, in the 1970s, a doctoral dissertation on African literature was undoubtedly regarded as a scholarly curiosity by many colleagues in the Faculty of Modern Philologies, research on a wide variety of anglophone literatures and cultures across the globe, often with a comparative and

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transcultural perspective, is today explicitly acknowledged as a significant contribution to the faculty’s research profile. Two methodological axioms have shaped research in the N E L K sub-department to the present day: namely, an emphasis on comparative perspectives on the world-wide network of anglophone literatures and cultures (rather than on national literatures and cultures); and critical dialogue with local and regional discourses (rather than a top-down application of theoretical models). Still, the N E L K research profile has also undergone significant transformations over the past decades. Most importantly, globalization theory, multiple modernities, transculturality, and transcultural memory have become increasingly important points of reference in recent doctoral and postdoctoral research. Rather than pursuing an ideal of inherently interdisciplinary ‘postcolonial studies’ cutting across disciplinary and linguistic borders (an ideal that is bound to remain an obfuscatory illusion rather than a productive methodology for researchers trained and institutionally embedded in English studies), much of this research (while indeed branching out into disciplines such as economics, sociology, political science, anthropology, media, and sound studies) has maintained a precise methodological focus on anglophone cultures and literatures. This has allowed it to avoid the epistemic trap of confusing anglophone literatures (e.g., in Africa and Asia) with national literatures, a trap that bedevilled Commonwealth Literature some decades ago and that (as I have argued elsewhere) continues to haunt many contemporary ‘postcolonial’ scholars in English departments who remain apologetic about the fact that they ‘only’ deal with anglophone material instead of devising sound methodologies for the transcultural study of English-language literatures and cultures.1 Much of the research conducted in the N E L K sub-department over the last two decades has directly confronted central tenets of postcolonial theory as well as of postcolonial studies, such as the widespread fallacy that ‘postcolonial’ literatures inevitably ‘write back’ to the former colonial centres or the equally widespread and unfortunate over-emphasis on colonialism and its legacies as the alleged key to understanding ‘postcolonial’ literatures and cultures. Instead, it has explored the complex social, cultural, and literary ensembles that anglophone literatures interact with in a multi-polar world of globalized modernity, 1

See Frank Schulze–Engler, “The Commonwealth Legacy: Towards a Decentred Reading of World Literature,” in Literature for Our Times: Postcolonial Studies in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Bill Ashcroft, Ranjini Mendis, Julie McGonegal & Arun Mukherjee (Cross / Cultures 145; Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2012): 3–14.

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grappling with issues such as the impact of globalization on Mori literature, forms and functions of transcultural memory in Indian and Pakistani writing, transcultural soundscapes in Asian-British music, the role of literary nongovernmental organizations in contemporary East African literature, ambivalent hospitality in twentieth-century British fiction, and post-postcolonial developments in Indo-English fiction, to name only a few recently completed doctoral and postdoctoral projects. (iii) The methodological focus on a sound philological disciplinary base in English studies has not prevented the N E L K sub-department from becoming involved in major interdisciplinary collaborative research projects. Quite on the contrary, the sustained interest in local and regional political and social contexts of anglophone literatures and cultures as well as the methodological focus on the significance of processes of transcultural negotiation in literature and other media for the constitution of social imaginaries has made it relatively easy to find collaborative partners among other disciplines at Goethe University. In recent years, two collaborative ventures (one that ultimately failed and one that is currently under way) have been of particular significance in this respect. ‘Urbanity in Africa’, a collaborative research centre jointly based at Goethe University, Frankfurt and the Technical University, Darmstadt, was to bring together expertise in African studies from Frankfurt and in urban research from Darmstadt. Although the proposal failed at the very last stage of the evaluation process, the four researchers from the N E L K sub-department who participated in this venture not only profited greatly from the twoand-a-half-year preparation process, but also managed to convince their colleagues from disciplines such as anthropology, political science, urban sociology, and architecture that cultural and literary studies were more than ‘icing on the interdisciplinary cake’: in the final stage of the proposal, one of the three areas of focus that were to structure research was dedicated to the construction of urban imaginaries, with cultural and literary studies playing a leading role. In 2012, a major research project based on cooperation between the Centre for Interdisciplinary African Studies (of which the author of these notes is currently Director) and the Centre for East Asian Studies at Goethe University entitled ‘Africa’s Asian Options (A F R A S O ): Frankfurt InterCentre Programme on New African-Asian Interactions’ and involving some forty researchers from six faculties and ten disciplines got the go-ahead from the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research. Once more the three N E L K researchers involved play an important role in the project officially launched in February 2013: one of the four areas of focus structuring

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the overall research project is concerned with ‘Transregional (Re)Conceptions of Space’, and the N E L K expertise in transculturality in general and transcultural memory in particular as well as in globalization and diaspora studies, but also its previous philological expertise in South Asian as well as East and Southern African literatures and cultures has quickly become one of the pillars of research in this area of focus. In addition, the author of these notes is joint project leader of the overall A F R A S O project. Interestingly enough, A F R A S O is explicitly concerned with the new dynamics unfolding in African-Asian social, economic, political, and cultural interactions rather than with Africa’s or Asia’s relations to Europe, and the methodological focus on transregionalism as a key category in reformulating area studies in a globalized, multi-polar world intersects strongly with long-standing N E L K research interests in transculturality and a critical dialogue with regional methodological and theoretical discourse in cultural and literary studies.2 (iv) These brief notes should suffice to show that what has been institutionalized in the N E L K sub-department in Frankfurt is decidedly not ‘postcolonial studies’ (although some colleagues in national as well as international contexts continue to find this statement somewhat facetious or even utterly ludicrous). While various aspects of postcolonial theory are regularly discussed and critically evaluated in N E L K seminars and research projects, the philological expertise on the complexities of anglophone literatures and cultures on a global scale, their interactions with local or regional modernities, and their transcultural features necessarily result in a great deal of scepticism with regard to sweeping (and often enough methodologically highly naive) categories such as ‘postcolonial literatures’, ‘postcolonial cultures’, or ‘the postcolonial world’. In retrospect, one of the advantages of building up this expertise in comparative anglophone studies lies in the development of philological competence. While it would be somewhat disingenuous to suggest that such competence is not also to be found in many English-studies institutions that perceive themselves in terms of postcolonial studies, the enormous success of postcolonialism in international academia has undeniably furthered the unfortunate emergence of ‘instant expertise’ based on a smattering of postcolonial theory applied to individual texts culled from long-standing literary traditions with complex historical, political, and cultural contexts of which researchers eager for their ‘postcolonial paper’ have little or no knowledge. In a sense, this may be regarded as the flip side of the abiding enthusiasm for an 2

For further details, see the Africa’s Asian Options website www.afraso.org.

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interdisciplinary self-invention in postcolonial studies, which often enough has gone hand in hand with a loss of philological expertise, including precise knowledge of local or regional histories, and critical as well as theoretical discourses. Finally, it is important to note that the ‘transcultural turn’ critically explored in the N E L K sub-department has – contrary to the predictions of some critics – not led to a ‘depoliticization’ of cultural and literary studies. It has, indeed, furthered scepticism with regard to obsolete binary models of ‘the West and the Rest’ recycled in various strands of postcolonial studies, including recent ‘decolonial’ theory with its under-complex notions of a ‘European modernity’ pitted against the victims of globalization. But it has also sharpened philological awareness of new, often puzzling constellations of power in formerly colonized parts of the world and of the sociocultural complexity in which contemporary anglophone literatures and cultures are embedded and that they in turn transform. In this sense, the institutionalization of the comparative study of anglophone literatures and cultures at Goethe University has arguably contributed to furthering the social relevance of contemporary philology – and will hopefully continue to do so in the foreseeable future.

WORK CITED Schulze–Engler, Frank. “The Commonwealth Legacy: Towards a Decentred Reading of World Literature,” in Literature for Our Times: Postcolonial Studies in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Bill Ashcroft, Ranjini Mendis, Julie McGonegal & Arun Mukherjee (Cross / Cultures 145; Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2012): 3–14.

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Postcolonial Readings in German Secondary Education E LINOR J ANE P OHL

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‘ S T R A N G E R S ’ provides rich ground encompassing notions of xenophobia, inter-cultural aspects of colonialism, perception of ‘Self’ and ‘Other’, and living in a global society with crosscultural relations. “Strangers” is the title which the Australian novelist Kate Grenville gives to the prelude of The Secret River (2005). This also is the title of a piece of creative writing completed in the senior English classroom as a pre-reading exercise to excerpts from the novel. The pupils write: HE CONCEPT OF

Everyone knows what it’s like to feel like a stranger. There are situations in life where you don’t have known people around you. Especially at the beginning of new sequences like starting school, university or moving to a new town. It feels uncomfortable. It’s pretty hard to move. You can say that for sure. If you move to a new flat or even a new city it can really be a pain in the arse. A whole lot to do and all the new impressions of your new surroundings. And all the new people are strangers to you. You need some time to assimilate to the new situation. In my life nothing is strange. I just sit in my nice, tiny house with a nice tiny smile on my face. I seldom leave Hanover. […] This summer I’ll go to Italy so I need to take a piece of my wallpaper, my pillow and a C D with sounds of my street with me.

Many sentiments are expressed here. Fear of the new and unknown, pain, the need for time to assimilate, the notion of safety. How can we help these pupils to cope with these feelings and the borders between safety and adventure which they are sure to encounter?

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In order to find answers, the reality of the German grammar-school classroom must first be outlined. It constitutes a highly heterogeneous body of learners with a wide variety of cultural backgrounds which can be exemplified by the following Grade-Eight English class with twenty-nine pupils, twenty of whom are of migrant descent. Fifteen children are from Turkish families and speak German and Turkish at home. Two of the Muslim girls wear a headscarf and do not participate in school swimming activities. Two boys come to afternoon classes late on a regular basis due to their religious commitments in the mosque. The families of these children do not allow them to attend school concerts which take place in the Evangelical– Lutheran Church across the road from school. Two boys have emigrated with their families from Sri Lanka to live in Hannover and speak German as a second language. One boy’s family is from Vietnam. One girl lived in Sweden for a number of years. One girl’s father is French; her mother is German; and she’s bilingual. Nine of the twenty-nine children are mono-lingual Germans. They constitute a minority group. These pupils, most of whom completed primary school in Lower Saxony, have been studying English as a second language for more than five years. From Grade Six it is compulsory for German grammar-school pupils to study a further foreign language. These pupils are thus not only learning English but have, in addition, been reading either French, Latin or Spanish for over two years. They speak German, yet the large majority of them have a command of a further language as a result of their family origins. This body of pupils perhaps reflects a cross-section of the surrounding community, a constellation not unusual in contemporary German society. Difference and diversity in this multi-lingual, multicultural group of young people is increasingly the cause of conflict, even xenophobic behaviour. The school principal has organized a team of teachers who work systematically on finding methods to cope with these issues. Some teachers train an extra-curricular team of mixed-aged pupils to become conflict mediators in the schoolyard. Others have organized a guest speaker on Islamic beliefs and culture, who was invited to address the teacher’s questions and to provide a platform for discussion. Strategies are being developed to deal with cultural conflict.

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Other teachers have worked on drawing up a school contract. This was introduced for the first time in August 2012 for each pupil and parent or guardian to sign, and for a teacher to counter-sign. The first sentence each pupil signs reads: ‘I am committed to respecting the dignity of others. I will not emotionally or physically hurt or exclude anybody’. This is intended as a means of supporting positive behaviour, creating awareness, and avoiding conflict situations. Pupils, parents, and teachers must recognize the privilege of freedom of expression we may exercise in this country, on the one hand, and the boundaries that must be drawn so as not to intrude on the freedom of others, on the other. The English-as-a-foreign-language classroom faces such challenges, yet provides an opportunity to deal with these issues on a new level through fictional texts that reflect the global English-speaking community. In Grade Five, pupils are introduced to the British-Indian textbook characters Nasreen and Emma, members of a patchwork family living in Greenwich, London. They learn about a Pakistani family meal in Grade Seven with Aunt Zeba, who speaks both English and Punjabi and lives in Liverpool. Muslim London is a focus in Grade Ten, with excerpts from The Buddha of Suburbia by Hanif Kureishi. Senior pupils study Irish literature such as A Star Called Henry (1999) by Roddy Doyle, which some would consider postcolonial. Ireland’s struggle for independence and the ‘Troubles’ are discussed. The historic moment at which Queen Elizabeth apologized for past relations is debated, as is President Obama’s visit to the Irish village of Moneygall, the birthplace of his greatgreat-great grandfather. They read Australian postcolonial literature and examine the historical relations between the first European settlers in Australia and the Aborigines. The pupils ask me if, as an Australian citizen, I feel guilty for what happened to the Stolen Generations. Then they ask themselves whether Germany has officially apologized for the Holocaust. They delve into their own past. The postcolonial texts are the trigger. Junior school thus begins with multicultural Britain and develops skills and language competence. Senior school continues with postcolonial texts and moves through cultural, social, and political issues. Pupils reflect upon their own lives and world. Postcolonial literature has, indeed, earned a legitimate place in secondary education and remains significant in the German multilingual, multicultural classroom.

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Transculturalism, living on borders, crossing boundaries and looking back from a new perspective are demands our pupils are confronted with in their everyday lives. The study of these transcultural themes and issues marked by encounters with different cultures is relevant and essential: essential in arousing interest in this multicultural student body; essential in fulfilling our commitment as teachers in providing them with an education and an understanding of the world they live in; and essential in the process of supporting the development of responsible and autonomous multicultural and multi-lingual members of European society. Successful classroom discourse on postcolonial issues and texts requires intensive planning and appropriate resource material. Basic background information and statistics on set topics are available for teachers preparing pupils for the Abitur. However, the sparse amount of time devoted to detailed work with texts is insufficient and cannot aspproach close individual examination of literary texts. Teachers need highly developed skills in order to analyse postcolonial material efficiently and to transfer it in a meaningful way in the classroom. Teachers require support in their work with this challenging material on top of the daily demands of juggling classes, meetings, marking, and lesson preparation. A beginning could be made with the next generation of teachers who are currently studying at universities. Covering postcolonial texts and studying postcolonial theory should be a prerequisite in the qualification process of English teaching so that future pupils in schools can benefit from the diverse opportunities this field has to offer. Methodological and pedagogical approaches to working with this material must be extensively researched and developed. Further meaningful topics and literary examples must be proposed, negotiated, and introduced into the curriculum. South Africa, exemplified in works by J.M. Coetzee such as Disgrace and Waiting for the Barbarians, can trigger marvellous opportunities for finding out about what postcolonial literature means and how it makes us think of ourselves. Postcolonial literature has rewritten the definition of what ‘strangers’ means. No longer are Indigenous Australian ‘brutes’ and de-valued ‘burdens’ to society but important, culturally wealthy, and productive citizens. No longer are black people ‘slaves’ or ‘savages’ but kings, presidents, and valued members of global societies. From postcolonial literature pupils can learn another way of thinking about ‘strangers’ in a multicultural global context that

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is in turn relevant in their very own lives. This classroom work can be a means of developing pupils’ awareness of new perspectives. Postcolonial perspectives, indeed, do provide the classroom with pedagogical opportunities that can help pupils with their understanding of themselves and their society. Thus, the aforementioned concept of ‘strangers’ is introduced to learners and put into historical and postcolonial context. Excerpts from Grenville’s The Secret River are part of an activity-based learning experience using heart, body, and mind. Once more, the same senior pupils write a short piece on ‘strangers’: In the last weeks my definition of strangers has changed a lot. […] I think it’s sometimes important to feel like a stranger. […] Feeling like a stranger is not comfortable but sometimes necessary to remind yourself where you come from and where you don’t come from.

We heard the pupils’ words at the beginning; this is what one of them says at the end. It signals a newly empowered way of thinking; a paradigm shift prompted by embedding postcolonial readings in the multicultural framework of schooling in Germany.

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Cross-Cultural Pedagogical Practices — Understanding the German Context

M ALA P ANDURANG

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is with an undergraduate college of the S N D T Women’s University in Mumbai, India, where I teach and live. My association with German academics was first established through my sojourn at the University of Magdeburg as a post-doctoral fellow under the aegis of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. I have since had the good fortune to attend three A S N E L conferences – each time with deep curiosity and a desire to pin down distinctive ‘German’ responses to narratives produced in English. As an Indian, my personal and collective past is directly tied to a complex range of experiences associated with the colonial and postcolonial aftermath of the British Empire. This is, however, not the case with the historical and cultural contexts of German society. Hence, I eagerly look out for (though do not always find) presentations offering insights into a unique reception situation, wherein the German reader mediates forms of cultural otherness through a linguistic ‘Other’: i.e. the English language. Given my peculiar quest, I was excited by the notion of a teachers’ workshop where four teacher-participants were invited to present their responses to the teaching and learning of literatures in English. The first paper in the workshop was titled “Postcolonial Literature: Incorporation in the Curriculum and in Practice” by Annika Bierwirth (from a secondary school in Sehnde, Lower Saxony). Within the Indian higher-education system, there is little provision for elasticity as far as prescribed texts are concerned. Secondary-school and undergraduate teachers cannot devise their own courses or choose the narratives that they would like to teach. Rather, they have to disseminate a centralized syllabus which is framed by the Board of Education either at secondary or higher-secondary level (that is, ten years and Y AFFILIATION

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twelve years of education respectively). Similarly, my own university draws up the curriculum for undergraduate teaching at its affiliated colleges, and this is revised once every five years. There is very little flexibility in terms of choice of narratives that can be used in the classroom, but the system also ensures that there is uniformity of output among thousands of Indian school goers who appear for the qualifying examination after ten /twelve years of education, as well as a common and consistent basis for evaluation. Ms Bierwirth put into perspective the parameters wherein the curriculum is framed in the Germany academic system. She pointed out that the German examination system is constantly undergoing change and is still ‘under construction’. The topics taught in school are dependent on the policies of individual federal states in Germany, while there are certain ‘learning contents’ defined by the Ministry of Education. These learning contexts are designed with the objective of honing basic communication skills, while at the same time conveying cultural aspects of the target language. The teacher can introduce innovative ideas or teaching practices through the choice of narratives that s/he makes – these can be films, novels, or short stories. This latitude is important, for, as Ms Bierwirth pointed out, it offers a point of entry for teachers to incorporate postcolonial literature or material related to postcolonial experiences. She then shared teaching strategies related to priority thematic areas for 2011: namely, ‘Ireland’, the ‘African-American Experience’, and ‘The Media’. She went on to discuss forthcoming innovations for 2013. Certain topics intended to form the framework for language lessons have been stipulated. These include: (a) National identity and ethnocultural/language diversity; (b) Individual and society – role and role conflict/ outsiders and counter-cultures; (c) Globalization – a global market and the world of work/effects on way of life; and (d) Science and technology – opportunities and risks. Once again, the teacher can select those texts which best illustrate the above broad-based themes. In order to share practical difficulties faced therein, Ms Bierwirth offered the example of dealing with the novel Q & A by Vikas Swarup. She pointed out that the pressure to complete the syllabus did not allow her, as the teacher, sufficient time to dwell on the context in depth. She also echoed the common burden faced by language teachers everywhere who are expected to incorporate elements of cultural studies into the teaching of the English language. How, then, does one set priorities? Do we spend time teaching students how to carry out a methodically written task, or do we focus on disseminating background information so that our students get the cultural context right? Having had to teach Chinua Achebe’s Things

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Fall Apart to first-year undergraduate Indian students as part of the language teaching curriculum, I was able to empathize with Ms Bierwirth’s dilemma. The second session was conducted by Reinhold Wandel (Otto von Guericke University, Magdeburg) on “Teaching India in the German E F L Classroom: Issues and Problems.” Given Professor Wandel’s personal involvement with the teaching of ‘India’ over a number of years, it is not surprising that he used the forum to passionately address cross-cultural pedagogical practices and problems. Professor Wandel began by tracing the German school system’s interest in India as part of the curricular structure of English as a foreign language (E F L ) and by discussing how this interest has led to a number of publications India-orientated E F L teaching materials. A canon of novels and stories to be taught at school has emerged which includes such texts as Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, Vikas Swarup’s Q & A, and Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger as well as textbooks with excerpts from novels by Salman Rushdie, Sashi Tharoor, and Bapsi Sidwa. There were three pertinent points that he raised with respect to the approaches that such publications entail. First, the notion of tokenism in a South Asian setting, which is inevitable when one has to choose one text or an anthology of short stories over the larger production of literary works that emerge from the subcontinent every year. Professor Wandel asked how a singular text such as Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s Heat and Dust could be taken to be representative of an intensely complex ‘Indian experience’. Secondly, he pointed out the tendency to access sources derived from the Indian diaspora based in Britain. Such texts deal with experiences of migrant communities in Britain rather than experiences of an ‘India proper’. He pointed out that students must be made aware of the fact that these are representations of diasporic life in multicultural Britain, rather than of the home country or culture. Lastly, he wondered whether academics were making any effort at all to understand the youth culture of contemporary India, which has recently undergone rapid change. He suggested that it would be worth our while to look at ‘light’ fiction, Indian youth magazines, and even cartoons. The analysis and discussion of Bollywood films might be particularly interesting in this context. Professor Wandel rightly suggested that German E F L experts who produced material on India often lack first-hand knowledge of contemporary Indian society, especially under the influx of globalization. Similarly, Indian experts who are often called upon to recommend material for such collections know little about the interests and passions of German youth. The natural solution, he suggests, is “a structured sharing by cross-cultural experts from both sides.”

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The third session was co-conducted by Ms Elinor Pohl (from a secondary school in Hannover) and Dr Jörg Heinke (from a secondary school in Kappeln), who also chaired the workshop. Ms Pohl shared interesting teaching– learning strategies that she has devised to introduce her students to multifaceted aspects of the Australian experience. The session was an interactive one, involving group work using excerpts from Kate Grenville’s The Secret River (2005), an historical novel about an Englishman transported to Australia as a convict in the early part of the nineteenth century. Each group was given a task which helped to pose important questions in the context of unfamiliar cultural signifiers. Although we did not have the time to make group presentations, the session offered a useful pedagogical tool which teachers could then adapt to texts of their choice. By the end of the workshop, I realized that, whatever the cross-cultural context, it is imperative for the teacher to understand that both teachers and students are inevitably conditioned by their own social, linguistic, and class environment. Such reading practices create an awareness of difference, yet at the same time they allow the student to consider the possibility of respecting and accepting that difference. Yet, despite all our sincere efforts, can we ever hope to totally bridge cultural gaps or to understand the ‘Other’ completely by means of an academically prescribed canon of ‘representative’ texts? The workshop demonstrated that the ‘marriage’ of cultural studies with English language teaching has both advantages and limitations. We must articulate these limitations in our classroom communications. In so doing, we will steer clear of the pitfalls of generalizations that defeat the very objective of using language teaching to promote a culture of pluralism.

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Teaching India in the German EFL Classroom — Issues and Problems

R EINHOLD W ANDEL

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E N G L I S H G 6 E D I T I O N for use in Bavaria, published in 2008 for students of Form Ten, is, to my knowledge, the first German E F L textbook featuring India on its cover. It presents two smiling Indian teenage girls dressed in velvet saris; the background shows the silhouette of the Taj Mahal.1 The textbook contains an extra unit, entitled “One Billion People,” which deals with India and covers thirty-four pages. This presentation of a South Asian setting is an obvious token of the fact that for the German E F L teaching professionals India has at last been ‘discovered’ as an English language region to be taken into account in the classroom.2 It goes without saying that this development has long been overdue. In recent years quite a number of German federal states have included the teaching of India in their new E F L curricula – at least as an option or an optional course. In some Länder, texts set in India – such as Prawer Jhabvala’s Heat and Dust in Lower Saxony or some selected postcolonial short stories in Baden–Württemberg – have even become set books for the school-leaving exam. This discovery and propagation of India in the field of ELT has led to a considerable India-orientated effort in the publication of E F L teaching material. There are numerous chapters on and references to South Asia in text1

ORNELSEN’S

English G – Gymnasium Bayern – Neubearbeitung, Band 6: 10. Jahrgangsstufe – Schülerbuch, ed. Hellmut Schwarz (Berlin: Cornelsen, 2008). 2 See Reinhold Wandel, “Still Some Way to Go. . . : Indian English Narratives in the German E F L -Classroom,” in Mediating Indian Writing in English: German Responses, ed. Bernd–Peter Lange & Mala Pandurang (Jaipur: Rawat, 2005): 86–109.

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books, compilations of short stories, editions of annotated Indian novels, numbers of various teaching journals presenting India – e.g., Der fremdsprachliche Unterricht – Englisch (March 2001), Englisch betrifft uns (2003), Praxis Englisch (February 2011), explorations and recommendations by E F L experts and methodologists such as the recent volume Teaching India for anglistik & englischunterricht (2008) edited by Oliver Lindner or the chapter “India: The Jewel in the Classroom” in the volume Teaching New English Cultures & Literatures (2010).3 How is the teaching and learning of India dealt with in these publications, in these anthologies and reference books? Which topics and contents, which literary sources are taken up? I shall evaluate the materials, suggestions, and recommendations available so far and shall indicate some trends and directions as well as some shortcomings. It is a personal view. I have tried to cover a wide range of books, brochures, units etc. Percentages and statistics, however, are not provided.

Focus on the Indian Diaspora Often, when the topic ‘India’ is tackled, films such as Bend It Like Beckham or East Is East are considered as valuable and exemplary teaching material; in the same way stories or novels by Hanif Kureishi, Meera Syal, Bali Rai, Monica Ali, and (in the American context) Jumpa Lahiri or Bharati Mukherjee are chosen for classroom discussion. These are doubtless interesting and motivating texts, but they tend to deal more with multicultural Britain and the U S A than with the South Asian subcontinent. Whereas in previous times the way to modern and independent India needed to take a detour via the Raj (Kipling, Forster’s Passage to India), today a similar detour is taken via Indians in Britain (or in the U S A ). The British in India have been replaced by the South Asian diaspora, and India, strangely enough, seems to be situated somewhere in the outskirts of Leicester or in London’s East End. This choice of cultural and geographical setting, in some instances, is not really pointed out as diasporic. Instead, it is subsumed under the (common) headline ‘India’ – and thus lacks a differentiated perspective. The issues and

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Oliver Lindner, “India: The Jewel in the Classroom,” Teaching the New English Cultures & Literatures, ed. Maria Eisenmann, Nancy Grimm & Laurenz Volkmann (Heidelberg: Winter, 2010): 59–72.

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problems of the Indian diaspora in Britain are not the same as the social and cultural features of ‘India proper’. On the other hand, these topics and issues set in multicultural Britain or the U S A are, arguably, easier to comprehend for German school students. The setting and the social environment are more familiar to them and their background, because they might know what the situation is like in some districts of German cities inhabited by minority groups. For example, problems between first- and second-generation immigrants or the marginalization of certain ethnic or religious communities are closer to their own experience, and thus the understanding of these texts is facilitated. Yet students must be made aware of the fact that these are presentations of diasporic life, of multicultural Britain, rather than of the ‘real’ India.

The ‘Highest Literary Achievements’ When looking at Indian literature selected for discussion with German students, it seems as if the concept of Kulturkunde with its emphasis on the most outstanding literary achievements – in accordance with the nineteenth-century Arnoldian ideas of Culture – has achieved an astonishing comeback. The teaching suggestions and the literary texts chosen almost exclusively keep to ‘the best and the most aesthetic that has been thought of and written by Indians in the English language’. A literary canon of the most valuable Indian novels and stories to be taught at school has been established, a canon that includes best-sellers such as Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, Vikas Swarup’s Q and A, or Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger. Textbooks contain excerpts from novels by Salman Rushdie, Shashi Tharoor, and Bapsi Sidwa. All of these works belong to ‘serious’ (high-class) literature. Some recommendations have, indeed, to be questioned, such as Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable, which most certainly has its merits as one of the outstanding works in Indian literature in English.4 But as it is set in the 1930s, it constructs a fictional India of seventy years ago. Although the Dalits are still discriminated against, the atmosphere of contemporary Indian life is in no way evoked in the narrative. As German students will, if at all, be exposed to

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Cecile Sandten, “Mulk Raj Anand’s Novel Untouchable. Literary and Political Issues in the E F L Classroom,” in Teaching India, ed. Oliver Lindner (Heidelberg: Winter, 2008): 51–68.

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a single Indian novel during their time at school, this exclusively historical perspective is, to put it mildly, problematic. Another recommendation is Altaf Tyrewala’s novel No God in Sight, which provides substantial and provoking insights into present-day Bombay society.5 The narrative structure, however, is very complicated, as the novel consists of a large number of brief segments or passages. This might turn out to be an almost impenetrable obstacle for younger readers in the E F L classroom. Rushdie’s short story “A Free Radio,” a favourite, strangely enough, among editors and experts, is set at the time of Indira Gandhi’s State of Emergency and focuses on her sterilization programme. In order to enable students to understand this story, the historical background must be thoroughly explained, annotations must be provided, and even a short introduction into the role and characteristics of Indian English needs to be given. Thus the amount of time spent on explaining the story’s background by far exceeds the time and energy needed to actually read and discuss the text. This raises the question of whether it is worthwhile dealing with a narrative with such a distant background. Generally, German E F L teachers, publishers, and methodologists keep to this established set of serious works. Only texts that have found world-wide acceptance produced by authors who have ‘made it’ are chosen. English translations from vernacular Indian literature,6 ‘light’ fiction, tales written for a young audience, stories from youth magazines or cartoons are hardly ever taken into consideration. Apparently such texts are not known, or they are beyond the horizon of German educators, despite the fact that the aim of English language teaching is no longer fixed on the appreciation of the highest aesthetic achievements, but should be directed at communicative competence. Also, considering this choice of texts, the reality of the student audience, their interests and life-style, are not really taken into consideration.

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See Marie–Luise Egbert, “ ‘ Hating the Outsider One Does Not Even Know’: Cultural and Linguistic Difference in Altaf Tyrewala’s No God in Sight,” in Teaching India, ed. Oliver Lindner (Heidelberg: Winter, 2008): 35–50. 6 Some examples that contradict this exclusion are short stories by the Urdu author Saadat Hasan Manto, who is paramount in his descriptions of people suffering under the sociopathological effects of partition. “Toba Tek Singh” is included in Short Stories from India, ed. Joybrato Mukherjee (Berlin: Cornelsen, 2005): 9–16; “The Assignment” is included in India – Unity in Diversity, ed. Reinhold Wandel (Berlin: Cornelsen, 2004): 44–47.

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Strange Uniformity This focus on valuable canonized texts has also led to a curious degree of constriction in the selection of short stories. The range of the stories and texts recommended and edited for the E F L classroom is extremely limited. There is an everlasting uniformity; the same texts appear over and over again. Rushdie’s “Good Advice is Rarer than Rubies” and “The Free Radio” are included in various anthologies.7 The stories “A Devoted Son” (Anita Desai), “Outsider” (Meher Pestonji), and “Nostalgia” (Bharati Mukherjee) can be found in collections edited by Joybrato Mukherjee, Butzko & Pangratz, and Rau.8 The eager German E F L teacher, searching for suitable material for his or her students, might look into or purchase several collections of Indian stories put on the market by different publishing houses, but will encounter the same texts. This unsound uniformity even reaches a level that is beyond the imagination of the ordinary reader or teacher: The anthologies Caught between Cultures (Klett), The Many Voices of English (Diesterweg),9 and One Language, Many Voices (Cornelsen) may have different titles, but they share the same selection of eleven stories, including Narayan’s “A Horse and Two Goats,” Rushdie’s “Good Advice is Rarer than Rubies,” and – in the context of the South Asian diaspora – “A Pair of Jeans” by Qaisra Shahraz and Hanif Kureishi’s “My Son the Fanatic.” This policy pursued by the publishing houses is explained by the fact that these stories are obligatory reading for the Baden– Württemberg Abitur (with its focus on colonial and postcolonial stories), and apparently each publisher wants its piece of the cake.10 Still, for the innocent

7

See Caught between Cultures. Colonial and Postcolonial Stories, ed. Ellen Butzko & Susanne Pangratz (Stuttgart: Klett, 2004); A Devoted Son and Other Indian Short Stories, ed. Ellen Butzko & Susanne Pangratz (Stuttgart: Klett, 2008); One Language, Many Voices. An Anthology of Short Stories about the Legacy of Empire, ed. Helga Korff & Angela Ringel–Eichinger (Stuttgart: Klett, 2005); Emerging India, ed. Rudolph F. Rau (Braunschweig: Diesterweg, 2010). 8 Short Stories from India, ed. Joybrato Mukherjee; A Devoted Son and other Indian Short Stories, ed. Ellen Butzko & Susanne Pangratz; Emerging India, ed. Rudolph F. Rau. 9 The Many Voices of English: An Anthology of Postcolonial Short Stories, ed. Rudolph F. Rau (Braunschweig: Diesterweg, 2011). 10 See, for example, India: Abi Workshop Englisch, ed. Marion Homer (Stuttgart: Klett, 2010).

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teacher this one-hundred-percent correspondence may come as an unpleasant surprise. Generally, then, Indian short-story writing is compressed into a very limited number of texts. Is this restriction and uniformity due to the fact that “good texts are rarer than rubies” (Oliver Lindner)?

Strange (?) Nostalgia for the Raj: Heat and Dust The novel propagated and distributed most widely in the past few years (by methodologists and by the publishing houses specializing in education) is the semi-colonial tale Heat and Dust by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (published in 1975). Both Klett and Cornelsen, the leaders in this commercial context, have produced an annotated version of the novel.11 Prawer Jhabvala is a distinguished author, specializing mainly in Western–Indian encounters and in portrayals of Americans or Europeans sojourning in the South Asian subcontinent. Heat and Dust may have its merits in linking and juxtaposing East and West and colonial and postcolonial times. But it is outdated and certainly has a romantic touch that tends to turn awkward. What, then, are the reasons for the astonishing success of this novel in the E F L classroom? Again, it is illuminating to experience how administrative rules and regulations determine the choice of reading material for advanced E F L classes. Heat and Dust was a set book for the school-leaving exam in Lower Saxony in 2010.12 This, as already intimated, explains the overwhelming interest of the publishing houses. There might be another line of reasoning. When approaching Indian life and cultures, it seems to be easier for us: i.e. for a German readership, to identify with a European character encountering and coming to grips with the ‘Other’ that is India. It makes it less difficult to bridge the cultural gap. In the case of the main character, Olivia (during the Raj), and the narrator (in the ‘hippie age’), there are figures presented in Heat and Dust that can mediate between the reader and the unfamiliar habits and customs of India. The 11

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Heat and Dust (Berlin: Cornelsen, 2006); Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Heat and Dust (Stuttgart: Klett Sprachen, 2008). 12 Reinhold Wandel, Heat and Dust: Teacher’s Manual (Berlin: Cornelsen, 2007); Paul Maloney, Heat and Dust: Interpretationshilfen (Berlin: Cornelsen, 2008), Monika Plümer & Anna Maria Lenhardt–Patz, Heat and Dust: Teacher’s Guide (Stuttgart: Klett Sprachen, 2008).

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protagonists are challenged by a new and unknown environment and experience it from an outside perspective that can be comprehended and followed by a Western readership.

(Bollywood) Films One of the most successful innovations in teaching India in the E F L classroom in recent years has been the presentation, analysis, and discussion of Bollywood films. ELT experts support the use of this genre, although usually only a few scenes in these films (or none at all) are in English. This trend accords with the general discovery and appreciation of Bollywood films in the West. The relevance of these films (and their topics) for an Indian identity – depicting and conveying Indian values and cultural patterns – is not to be questioned. Thus, they “constitute a valuable subject for classes”13 – despite the fact that the linguistic boundaries of E F L lessons are being transcended and the E L T potential is somewhat limited. Of course, learning how to read subtitles may be a commendable goal in itself. As for methodology, viewing and dealing with these films is a rather lengthy undertaking, often lasting over three hours. This might cause problems of organization and involve time-consuming arrangements. Is it worthwhile watching an entire film in class? It is, on the other hand, doubtful whether presenting some sequences only, as is sometimes suggested, can provide the necessary understanding of the film’s issues by the students.14 Following the recent vogue for media literacy in German E L T curricula, the presentation and treatment of non-Bollywood films has naturally also been encouraged. Movies that have been recommended in teaching suggestions or have found entry into chapters in textbooks – such as Salaam Bombay, Monsoon Wedding, Slumdog Millionaire, Mr and Mrs Iyer, Outsourced – might fit educational aims even more than Bollywood productions. In most of them, English is the medium, and often basic topics and social problems of Indian life are depicted in a less idealized and less kitschy way. Child poverty, the 13

Lucia Krämer, “Bollywood in the Classroom. Opportunities and Problems of Teaching Popular Indian Cinema,” in Teaching India, ed. Oliver Lindner (Heidelberg: Winter, 2008): 107. 14 See, for example, Gabriele Linke, “ ‘ I love my India’: Discussing Different Value Systems and their Cinematic Representations in the E F L Classroom,” in Teaching India, ed. Oliver Lindner (Heidelberg: Winter, 2008): 125–45.

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slum environment, religious tensions, and some sensitive issues concerning Indian families’ way of arranging marriages are openly presented and critically estimated, thus carrying ample incentives for productive classroom discussion and interaction.

Websites and WebQuests Another relevant new feature is the recourse to websites and to WebQuests, a fairly obvious trend in the age of information technology. Most suggestions are sound and proper. When challenging German school students with Indian marital policy, of course, the relevant websites, in which families search for suitable spouses for their sons and daughters, are referred to, and, indeed, they serve as a fruitful and interesting comparison to European or American dating systems on the web. The websites recommended by educational experts enhance intercultural awareness. They make use of jokes about stereotypes on India, present a view of Christmas, say, from an Indian perspective, and lay great store by a critical approach to Indian ideals and reality. But in the evaluation of websites to be chosen as potentially useful, there is a tendency to adhere to official (governmental etc.) websites. It may well be worthwhile consulting india.gov.in or the official links in the domain of tourism. Web domains of young people, however, such as Facebook, blogs, Indian chat rooms, websites of schools, of youth magazines etc. are hardly touched on.15 Thus, the reality of the South Asian subcontinent is once again revealed along official or semi-official lines, often in rather abstract terms. Backgrounds, social and cultural behaviour, interests and spare-time activities of young people, their style of interacting, and their habits and patterns of using information technology and other media seem to be of no concern.

Restriction to Facts and Figures as Well as to Serious Issues and Problems When India is approached, too much emphasis is laid on facts and figures and on serious issues and grave problems of Indian society and history along 15

One exception to this trend can be found in Gerlind Ströhlein, “Indien via World Wide Web,” Der fremdsprachliche Unterricht – Englisch 35 (March 2001): 14–20. In this article, Indian schools, fairytales, and women’s magazines are considered valuable topics for WebQuests.

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rather abstract, cognitive, almost academic lines – without the necessary orientation and approaches more suitable for teenagers. Of course, geography (and geographical knowledge) can be a first step to cross cultural borders, but it is not enough just to present a profile of India by means of listing facts and figures – and a map to go along with.16 Relevant topics such as Gandhi, the Raj, partition, call centres, the English language in India, the Mumbai metropolis or I T in Bangalore have found their way into units of textbooks and selections of texts and material focusing on South Asia. Quite frequently, the custom of arranged marriages is used as a point of entry into Indian cultures and traditions. This, I feel, is a really good choice. However, it cannot be done successfully within the limits of ten short sentences.17 We need authentic reports, tales recounting exemplary and typical situations, conflicts, real-life experiences, biographical sketches etc., conveyed in vivid and graphic modes. You can introduce the national epic Ramayana by means of a difficult text passage, but you might also do so by using a cartoon. When evaluating the pedagogical potential of the ‘Indian kaleidoscope’ in the E F L classroom, Laurenz Volkmann, an expert in the field of E L T , lists the following items:18 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

16

India between tradition and modernity India as a country of social contradictions India as patriarchal society /culture India as a country between multireligious tolerance and religious tensions India’s past as a British colony The use of English in India India and her diaspora Media re / presentations of India

To cite one example: Dieter–Herrmann Düwel & Jennifer von der Grün, “India Profile. Facts and Figures,” in India, ed. Dieter–Herrmann Düwel & Jennifer von der Grün (Englisch betrifft uns; Aachen: Bergmoser & Höller, 2003): 1–3. 17 See Hannah Haferkamp & Nicole Heils, “Don’t Wash Your Hair on Thursdays,” India – Between Tradition and Modernity (Praxis Englisch; Braunschweig: Westermann, 2011): 8–12. 18 Laurenz Volkmann, Fachdidaktik Englisch: Kultur und Sprache (Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 2010): 115–16.

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One fundamental factor is missing from this list: the everyday life of young Indians and the real-life experiences of the German teenagers’ peer group are completely ignored in suggestions about how to teach and tackle India. Judging from the material explored, it can be stated that in the context of teaching India in the German E F L classroom there are no or hardly any references to youth or girls’ magazines, to funny stories, to advice given by agony aunts, to educational tales, to stories written for a young audience – e.g., to generational conflicts or teenage discourse in general. Moreover, the experts’ and methodologists’ ‘Passages to India’ lack ‘lightness’ and humour. There are some exceptions, though: In the G 6 textbook English published by Cornelsen, on page 73 Nandita, a girl from Kolkata, talks about her everyday life. The India issue of Der fremdsprachliche Unterricht – Englisch (March 2001) contains comments on ‘Kissing in India’ (e.g., Indian teenagers get instructions on how to kiss. .. ), suggestions for young people on how to decorate their room, explanations about the use of henna and bindis – and a list of ‘dumb questions Indians are often asked’, e.g., Does India have cars? – No, we ride elephants to work.

Conclusion Recent trends in educational and methodological theory (emphasis on studentorientation and activity-/task-based language learning, understanding of culture as a whole mode of existence including everyday life, implementation of intercultural issues) have, it seems, not generally been taken into account by the editors of E F L materials on India. Above all, the reality, experience, interaction, interests, and use of media among German school students have been neglected. Often, young people are not provided with material that suits and motivates them. German E F L experts and teachers are too far removed from everyday Indian life and therefore lack both knowledge and experience of Indian reality (above all, of the reality of Indian youth). Canonical novels and films are easily available, while other materials, texts, journals for teenagers etc. are neglected, because it is difficult to get hold of them (and no attempts seem to be undertaken to overcome this deficiency). Indians, India experts, and Indologists, by the same token, are often unfamiliar with German youth, their ways of thinking, feeling, and interacting, their life-style and interests. In my experience, many Indian experts and academics are unable to look at their own country through the eyes of a stranger:

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i.e. they lack an outside perspective, unless they have spent a considerable amount of time abroad. A panel of cross-cultural experts from both sides, sharing an understanding of German youth, is required to invest a joint effort in improving the material on India being made available to (German) E F L teachers and to include issues that are of interest to German school students.

WORKS CITED Butzko, Ellen, & Susanne Pangratz, ed. Caught between Cultures: Colonial and Postcolonial Stories (Stuttgart: Klett, 2004). ——. A Devoted Son and other Indian Short Stories (Stuttgart: Klett, 2008). Düwel, Dieter–Herrmann, & Jennifer von der Grün. “India Profile: Facts and Figures,” in India, ed. Dieter–Herrmann Düwel & Jennifer von der Grün (Englisch betrifft uns; Aachen: Bergmoser & Höller, 2003): 1–3. Egbert, Marie–Luise. “ ‘ Hating the Outsider One Does Not Even Know’: Cultural and Linguistic Difference in Altaf Tyrewala’s No God in Sight,” in Teaching India, ed. Oliver Lindner (Heidelberg: Winter, 2008): 35–50. Haferkamp, Hannah, & Nicole Heils. “Don’t Wash Your Hair on Thursdays,” in India – Between Tradition and Modernity (Praxis Englisch; Braunschweig: Westermann, 2011): 8–12. Homer, Marion, ed. India: Abi Workshop Englisch (Stuttgart: Klett, 2010). Jhabvala, Ruth Prawer. Heat and Dust (Berlin: Cornelsen, 2006). ——. Heat and Dust (Stuttgart: Klett, 2008). Korff, Helga, & Angela Ringel–Eichinger, ed. One Language, Many Voices. An Anthology of Short Stories about the Legacy of Empire (Stuttgart: Klett, 2005). Krämer, Lucia. “Bollywood in the Classroom. Opportunities and Problems of Teaching Popular Indian Cinema,” in Teaching India, ed. Oliver Lindner (Heidelberg: Winter, 2008): 107–24. Lindner, Oliver. “India: The Jewel in the Classroom,” in Teaching the New English Cultures & Literatures, ed. Maria Eisenmann, Nancy Grimm & Laurenz Volkmann (Heidelberg: Winter, 2010): 59–72. ——, ed. Teaching India (Heidelberg: Winter, 2008). Linke, Gabriele. “ ‘ I love my India’: Discussing Different Value Systems and their Cinematic Representations in the E F L Classroom,” in Teaching India, ed. Oliver Lindner (Heidelberg: Winter, 2008): 125–145. Maloney, Paul. Heat and Dust. Interpretationshilfen (Berlin: Cornelsen, 2008). Mukherjee, Joybrato, ed. Short Stories from India (Berlin: Cornelsen, 2005). Plümer, Monika, & Anna Maria Lenhardt–Patz, Heat and Dust: Teacher’s Guide (Stuttgart: Klett Sprachen, 2008).

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Rau, Rudolph F., ed. Emerging India (Braunschweig: Diesterweg, 2010). ——. The Many Voices of English. An Anthology of Postcolonial Short Stories (Braunschweig: Diesterweg, 2011). Sandten, Cecile. “Mulk Raj Anand’s Novel Untouchable: Literary and Political Issues in the E F L Classroom,” in Teaching India, ed. Oliver Lindner (Heidelberg: Winter, 2008): 51–68. Schwarz, Hellmut, ed. English G – Gymnasium Bayern – Neubearbeitung, Band 6: 10. Jahrgangsstufe – Schülerbuch (Berlin: Cornelsen, 2008). Ströhlein, Gerlind. “Indien via World Wide Web,” Der fremdsprachliche Unterricht – Englisch 35 (March 2001): 14–20. Volkmann, Laurenz. Fachdidaktik Englisch: Kultur und Sprache (Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 2010). Wandel, Reinhold. Heat and Dust: Teacher’s Manual (Berlin: Cornelsen, 2007). ——. “Still Some Way to Go. . . : Indian English Narratives in the German E F L -Classroom,” in Mediating Indian Writing in English. German Responses, ed. Bernd– Peter Lange & Mala Pandurang (Jaipur: Rawat, 2005): 86–109. ——, ed. India – Unity in Diversity (Berlin: Cornelsen, 2004).

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Notes on Contributors

A N J A B A N D A U is Professor of Hispanic Literatures and Cultures at Leibniz University, Hannover. She was previously a junior professor at the Institute for Latin American Studies at the Free University Berlin (2005–11) and Feodor Lynen Fellow at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales Paris (2009–10). Her fields of research are the transatlantic circulation of knowledge in and through literatures and cultures in Spanish and French in the U S A and the Caribbean, representations of the Haitian Revolution 1791–1830, transnational and postcolonial literary and cultural studies, and gender studies. In 2011 and 2010, she co-edited volumes on the circulation of knowledge in the Caribbean (in Spanish) and across the Atlantic (in French). With Jeremy D. Popkin she is currently editing ‘Mon Odyssée: L’Epopée d’un colon de Saint-Domingue, par Jean-Paul Pillet’ (forthcoming in 2014). She has published a monograph on Chicana/o literature and criticism, Strategien der Autorisierung: Projektionen der Chicana bei Anzaldúa und Moraga (2004). In 2006, she co-edited (in English) a volume on this topic, followed by two co-edited volumes on the representation of civil war in 2007 and 2008. S A B I N E B R O E C K is Professor of American Studies (teaching Black Studies) at the University of Bremen. Her research commitment is to an epistemic critique of the coloniality of transatlantic modernity, in particular to studies of Western modernity as socio-political formation and the culture of (post-)enslavement. In this context, her work reconsiders and recuperates practices and texts of the (post)modern black diaspora. She has been a long-standing active member of the European American and African-American Studies communities. At present, she is President of the international scholarly organization Collegium for African American Research (C A A R ) as well as director of the University of Bremen’s Institute for Postcolonial and Transcultural Studies (I N P U T S ). She also leads a new research group, Bremen Black Studies, for doctoral students and postdoctoral scholars at the University of Bremen. Her

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two published monographs are Der entkolonisierte Körper (1988) and White Amnesia – Black Memory? American Women’s Writing and History (1999). She is currently working on a monograph entitled ‘Gender and Anti-Blackness’. S A R A H F E K A D U is an assistant professor in the English Department of the Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich. She studied comparative literature, English literature, and philosophy at the Universities of Tübingen and Warwick and at the Free University, Berlin, and completed her doctoral degree in English literature in Munich in 2010. Her main research areas are the literature and theory of modernism, postcolonial and globalization studies, and intermediality. She is the author of Musik in Literatur und Poetik des Modernism: Lowell, Pound, Woolf (2013). She also published several articles on the relationship between music and literature in Modernist writing and on Virginia Woolf’s aesthetic of resistance. Her current research project focuses on constructions of Eastern Africa in anglophone literature. M A T T H I A S G A L L E R studied English and French language and literature at Humboldt University, Berlin, Keele, and the Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich, where he graduated in 2002 with a teacher’s degree and, in 2003, with an M A . He worked on a PhD project on medieval English literature in Munich and Edinburgh from 2003 to 2006. Since 2006 he has taught English and French in secondary education; he spent a year abroad teaching English literature at Celal Bayar University, Manisa (Turkey), in 2009–10. J A N O U G L E N C R O S S (née Vorderwülbecke) studied history, political science, and German literature at the Universities of Hannover and Bristol. She finished her PhD in history at the European University Institute in Florence (Italy) in 2008 and then coordinated the interdisciplinary research initiative on “Relations of Difference – Dynamics of Conflict in Global Perspective” at Leibniz University, Hannover. Since 2012, Glencross has been working for a semi-public agency dealing with matters of adult education in the state of Lower Saxony (Germany). J A N A G O H R I S C H is Professor of English literature and the New Literatures in English at Leibniz University, Hannover, where she teaches British studies, with a focus on literature and culture from the eighteenth through to the twenty-first century, including postcolonial literatures in English. She has published two monographs in German, one on the Jamaican-British author Joan Riley, (Un)Belonging? Geschlecht, Klasse, Rasse und Ethnizität in der

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britischen Gegenwartsliteratur: Joan Rileys Romane (1994), and one on the representation of emotions in nineteenth-century English prose, Bürgerliche Gefühlsdispositionen in der englischen Prosa des 19. Jahrhunderts (2005). She writes in English on various aspects and periods of British literature as well as on black British, Caribbean, and West and South African literatures, and on popular culture and cultural exchange. In 2012, she co-edited Listening to Africa: Anglophone African Literatures and Cultures (with Ellen Grünkemeier). Her current research project deals with the emotional aspects of slavery and (post)emancipation in nineteenth- and twentieth-century British and Caribbean writing. E L L E N G R Ü N K E M E I E R is a research assistant in the English Department, Leibniz University, Hannover, where she teaches British studies with a focus on literature and its cultural, historical, and political contexts. In 2010, she completed her PhD on the South African H I V / A I D S epidemic and recently began working on a second book project that addresses political writing in nineteenth-century Britain. Her publications include the monograph Breaking the Silence: South African Representations of H I V / A I D S (2013) and a volume on postcolonial literatures and cultures, Listening to Africa: Anglophone African Literatures and Cultures (with Jana Gohrisch, 2012). J E S S I C A H E M M I N G S writes about textiles. She also writes about fiction that contains textiles, materials that remind us of textiles and other things, as long as they are interesting. She studied Textile Design at the Rhode Island School of Design, graduating with a B F A in 1999, and Comparative Literature (Africa /Asia) at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, earning an M A in 2000. Her PhD, awarded by the University of Edinburgh in 2006, was published under the title Yvonne Vera: The Voice of Cloth (2008). Jessica Hemmings writes articles and exhibition reviews for publications such as Crafts, Selvedge, and the Surface Design Journal. She has taught at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, the Rhode Island School of Design, the Winchester School of Art, and Edinburgh College of Art. In 2010 she edited a collection of essays entitled In the Loop: Knitting Now and has recently compiled The Textile Reader (2012) and written Warp & Weft: Woven Textiles in Fashion, Art and Interiors (2012). She is currently Professor of Visual Culture and Head of the Faculty of Visual Culture at the National College of Art & Design, Dublin.

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J A N H Ü S G E N is a doctoral student in the Department of History, Leibniz University, Hannover. His dissertation deals with the interaction of the Moravian mission and slave emancipation in the Caribbean. He conducted the research for the essay contained in this volume in the Moravian Archives, Herrnhut, Germany, and the Public Records Office, Colonial Office, London. J O H A N N E S S A L I M I S M A I E L –W E N D T studied cultural anthropology and cultural studies, sociology, and musicology at the University of Bremen. His doctoral dissertation is entitled “tracks’n’treks: Popular Music and Postcolonial Analysis.” Between 2010 and 2012 he was academic advisor at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin working on projects on ‘Global Prayers’ and ‘Translating Hip-Hop’. Ismaiel–Wendt teaches and gives sound-lectures on the aesthetics and sociology of electronic music. Since 2012, he has been Professor of Musicology at the University of Hildesheim. His current research focuses on performance as/and postcolonial knowledge-production. U R S U L A K L U W I C K is a lecturer in English literature at the University of Berne, Switzerland. She holds a PhD in English literature from the University of Vienna, where she was a lecturer in English literature and cultural studies from 2004 to 2007. Her main research interests include postcolonial and postmodern literatures, non-realist forms of writing, Victorian literature, and the representation of nature. She is the author of Exploring Magic Realism in Salman Rushdie’s Fiction (2011), and she is currently working on a second monograph dealing with the representation of water in Victorian literature. H E N N I N G M A R Q U A R D T is a research assistant at Leibniz University, Hannover, where he is working on a project researching (dis)continuities in twentieth-century South African literary and cultural history. He is currently completing his doctoral dissertation on family representations in Jamaican and South African literature. D E N N I S M I S C H K E has an M A in English and American Studies, Media Studies, and Cognitive Science from Potsdam University. He is a doctoral candidate in American Studies at the Ruhr University Research School in Bochum, where he is finishing a dissertation on cosmopolitanism and trust in nineteenth-century American literature. His general research interests include transnational cultural studies, global literatures in English, and material culture, as well as literary and media theory. He has been a visiting scholar at the Transforming Cultures Research Centre, University of Technology Sydney, and in the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the

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University of Minnesota. He currently works as a research assistant in American Studies and the New English Literatures at the University of Stuttgart. T I M O M Ü L L E R teaches American studies at the University of Augsburg. His research areas include modernism, ecocriticism, and African American and Caribbean literature. He is the author of The Self as Object in Modernist Fiction: James, Joyce, Hemingway (2010) and co-editor of English and American Studies: Theory and Practice (with Martin Middeke, Christina Wald, and Hubert Zapf, 2012) and Literature, Ecology, Ethics: Recent Trends in Ecocriticism (with Michael Sauter, 2012). Other publications include articles in Anglia, the Arizona Quarterly, and Twentieth-Century Literature. He has been E R A S M U S visiting instructor at Ege University øzm²r (Turkey) and has received research grants from the University of Pittsburgh, the British Library, and Yale. In 2012–13 he held a visiting fellowship at the Du Bois Institute, Harvard University, for research on his second book project, ‘The African American Sonnet’. M A L A P A N D U R A N G is Professor and Head of the Department of English, Dr B M N College, Mumbai. She is currently reviews editor of the Journal of South Asian Diaspora. Her publications include Postcolonial African Fiction: The Crisis of Consciousness (1997). She is editor of Articulating Gender (2000), Vikram Seth: Multiple Locations, Multiple Affiliations (2003), Mediating Indian Writing in English: German Responses (with Bernd–Peter Lange, 2005), Chinua Achebe: An Anthology of Recent Criticism (2006), Ngugi wa Thiong’o: An Anthology of Recent Criticism (2007), African Women Novelists: Re-imaging Gender (with Anke Bartels, 2010), and ‘Things Fall Apart: A Students’ Companion’ (forthcoming). At present, she is involved in a project titled ‘Wives, Mothers and Others: A socio-literary reconstruction of migration experiences of women from the Indian subcontinent to East Africa (1890–1960)’. C A R L P L A S A is Reader in English Literature in the School of English, Communication and Philosophy at Cardiff University. He is the author of Slaves to Sweetness: British and Caribbean Literatures of Sugar (2009), Charlotte Brontë (2004) and Textual Politics from Slavery to Postcolonialism: Race and Identification (2000). He is presently completing a book on literatures of the Middle Passage since 1945. E L I N O R J A N E P O H L , of British and Australian origin, has lived in Germany for the past fifteen years. She currently teaches English and music at the

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Gymnasium Lutherschule, a traditional but multicultural German grammar school in Hannover. B R I G I T T E R E I N W A L D is Professor of African History at Leibniz University, Hannover. She is especially interested in the economic, social, and cultural history of Western and Eastern Africa, in popular culture and media in urban milieux in West and East Africa, in gender, family, and generation in French Colonial West Africa as well as in Franco-African military history, migration, and transcultural processes. Her publications include monographs on West African World War veterans of the French colonial army, Reisen durch den Krieg: Erfahrungen und Lebensstrategien westafrikanischer Weltkriegsveteranen der französischen Kolonialarmee (2005), and on women in Senegal under French colonial rule, Der Reichtum der Frauen: Leben und Arbeit der weiblichen Bevölkerung in Siin /Senegal unter dem Einfluss der französischen Kolonisation (1995), as well as the edited volumes “Afrika hierzulande”: Eine Bilder-, Text- und Beziehungsgeschichte (2006), Space on the Move. Transformations of the Indian Ocean Seascape in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (with Jan–Georg Deutsch, 2002), and African Networks, Exchange and Spatial Dynamics (with Laurence Marfaing, 2001). S T E F F E N R U N K E L studied history and political science at Leibniz University, Hannover, where he received his M A degree in 2009. Researching for his doctoral dissertation on African perspectives on slavery and abolition on the Gold Coast, he spent time in several archives in Accra, Basel, Cambridge, London, and Oxford. He is currently working as a research assistant in the Department of History, Leibniz University Hannover. A N D R E A S A N D is a professor of English Linguistics at Trier University. Her main research interests are varieties of English (with a focus on postcolonial Englishes), language contact, English as a world language, and corpus linguistics. She published Linguistic Variation in Jamaica: A Corpus-Based Study of Radio and Newspaper Usage (1999). In addition, she was involved in the compilation of several corpora, such as the Jamaican subcorpus of the International Corpus of English, and is currently working on a ‘Corpus of Singapore Weblogs and a Diachronic Corpus of Singapore English’ (with Sebastian Hoffmann). C E C I L E S A N D T E N is a professor of English Literature at Chemnitz University of Technology, Germany. Her research interests are in postcolonial theory and literature, postcolonial children’s literature and literature for young adults,

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Indian English literature, black and Asian British literature, Shakespeare, and comparative perspectives, as well as adaptation studies, media transfer, and urban studies. Her publications include the monographs Broken Mirrors: Interkulturalität am Beispiel der indischen Lyrikerin Sujata Bhatt (1998) and her doctoral dissertation “Re-Reading Shakespeare in Postcolonial Literatures.” She has co-edited Industrialization, Industrial Heritage, De-Industrialization: Literary and Visual Representations of Pittsburgh and Chemnitz (with Evelyne Keitel & Gunter Süß, 2010), a volume on the city of modernity, Stadt der Moderne (with Christoph Fasbender & Annika Bauer, 2013), and a volume on ‘Detective Fiction in American Popular Culture’ (with Gunter Süß & Melanie Graichen, forthcoming). She is currently working on an interdisciplinary research project on postcolonialism in the metropolis. F R A N K S C H U L Z E – E N G L E R is Professor of New Anglophone Literatures and Cultures in the Institute for English and American Studies at Goethe University, Frankfurt. His publications include his doctoral dissertation on East African literature, Intellektuelle wider Willen: Schriftsteller, Literatur und Gesellschaft in Ostafrika 1960–1980 (1992), co-edited volumes of essays on African literature, postcolonial theory, and globalization, Transcultural English Studies: Theories, Fictions, Realities (with Sissy Helf, 2008), and the teaching of the New Literatures in English, Crab Tracks: Progress and Process in Teaching the New Literatures in English (with Gordon Collier, 2002), Beyond ‘Other Cultures’: Transcultural Perspectives on Teaching the New Literatures in English (with Sabine Doff, 2011), as well as numerous essays on African literature, comparative perspectives on the New Literatures in English, postcolonial theory, transnational culture, and the cultural dimensions of globalization. He is currently Director of the Centre for Interdisciplinary African Studies at Goethe University. M E L A N I E U L Z is a junior professor of art history at the University of Osnabrück. From 2000 to 2003 she was a research fellow in the graduate programme ‘Identity and Difference’ at the University of Trier, where she earned her PhD with a dissertation on the construction of masculinity and ethnic difference in Napoleonic history-paintings. From 2005 to 2007, she was a postdoctoral research fellow in the graduate programme ‘Slavery – Serfdom – Forced Labour’ at the University of Trier. In 2008 she was a research assistant in the collaborative research centre ‘Media and Cultural Communication’ at the University of Cologne. Her research interests cover the field of gender and postcolonial studies from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century. Her

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publications include the monograph Auf dem Schlachtfeld des Empire: Männlichkeitskonzepte in der Bildproduktion zu Napoleons Ägyptenfeldzug (2008) and, co-edited with Birgit Haehnel, Slavery in Art and Literature: Approaches to Trauma, Memory and Visuality (2010). R E I N H O L D W A N D E L has been a grammar-school teacher in Germany and Britain and a lecturer at Fu Jen University Taipei, Beijing Language Institute, and Berlin Technical University; he later taught E F L methodology at Otto von Guericke University, Magdeburg. His main fields of research (and his publications) include activity-based language learning, the use of drama in language education, intercultural learning, and India as a topic in the E F L classroom. T I M W A T S O N is an associate professor of English and director of the American Studies programme at the University of Miami. He is the author of Caribbean Culture and British Fiction in the Atlantic World, 1780–1870 (2008) and co-editor of a critical edition of Cynric Williams’s novel Hamel, the Obeah Man (2010). He is currently completing a book on anthropology and literature in the 1950s and 1960s.

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