the rings of saturn

PERENNIAL

EMPIRES Postcolonial, Transnational, and Literary Perspectives

EDITED BY

Chantal Zabus AND Silvia Nagy-Zekmi

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Copyright 2011 Chantal Zabus and Silvia Nagy-Zekmi All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Requests for permission should be directed to: [email protected], or mailed to: Cambria Press 20 Northpointe Parkway, Suite 188 Amherst, NY 14228 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Perennial empires : postcolonial, transnational and literary perspectives / edited by Chantal Zabus and Silvia Nagy-Zekmi. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-60497-740-0 (alk. paper) 1. Imperialism in literature. 2. Postcolonialism in literature. 3. Imperialism— History—20th century. 4. Imperialism—History—21st century. I. Zabus, Chantal J. II. Nagy, Silvia, 1953– III. Title. PN56.I465P47 2011 809’.93358—dc22 2010047331

To Kevin Dwyer and Nadir Zekmi

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TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Figures

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Introduction: The Everlasting Leviathan Chantal Zabus and Silvia Nagy-Zekmi

Part I: Post-War Representations of Empire

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Chapter 1: Postimperial Rural Histories and “Ironic Nostalgia” in W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn Lucienne Loh

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Chapter 2: Under the Sign of Sugar and Rum: Entitlement, Authority, and Authorship in Postcolonial England Jennifer P. Nesbitt

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Chapter 3: The Breadcrumb Trail: Nineteenth-Century Child Hauntings in the Novels of Peter Rushforth and Shirley Geok-Lin Lim Anca Vlasopolos

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Chapter 4: Disordered Identities: Virginia Woolf, Jacques Derrida, and the Problem of the Imperial I Andrea L. Yates

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Part II: Experimental Nations Globalized

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Chapter 5: Nationless Authors and Literature without Nations in Contemporary Francophone Writing of the Maghreb Valérie K. Orlando

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Chapter 6: Portuguese Immigrants and Luso-Descendants in France between Empires Martine Fernandes

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Chapter 7: The Future of an Ethics of Difference after Hardt and Negri’s Empire Zahi Zalloua

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Chapter 8: White Nation Fantasy, the Imperialistic Streak, and the Lingering Empire: A Contrapuntal Reading of Christopher Koch’s Fiction Jean-François Vernay 153 Part III: Half of Empire: The “Other” America

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Chapter 9: “Light” Colonialism in the Caribbean in the Context of Global Empire Building Kristian Van Haesendonck

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Chapter 10: Exhibiting Puerto Rico’s Colonial Status through the Fiction of René Marqués and Luis López Nieves Asima F. X. Saad Maura

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Table of Contents

Chapter 11: Web of Impunities: Narratives of Violence and Empire Building in Central American Literature Ana Patricia Rodríguez Part IV: Queering Empire

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Chapter 12: Morbid Symptoms: Imperialism, Desire, and Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo Patrick Robert Mullen

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Chapter 13: The Role of Sexuality in Nation Building: Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy and Timothy Mo’s The Redundancy of Courage John C. Hawley

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Chapter 14: The United States of Empire and the Coalition of the Willing Queer Paul Allatson

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Notes

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Notes on Contributors

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Index

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LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1. Queer Eye makes over Saddam Hussein.

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Figure 2.

Saddam Hussein bobblehead.

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Figure 3.


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Figure 4.


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EMPIRES

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INTRODUCTION

THE EVERLASTING LEVIATHAN Chantal Zabus and Silvia Nagy-Zekmi

The “e” word—that is, empire—suggests new forms of sovereignty that have toppled the nation-state and imperialism, which were engendered by the European powers during the process of colonization. According to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in their seminal work Empire (2000), which was appropriately released at the turn of this millennium, imperial is not the adjective best qualified to tag the new empire; imperial is passé, for “imperialism is over” (Hardt and Negri xiv). As Edward Said declared in Culture and Imperialism (1993), “imperialism as a word and an idea today is so controversial, so fraught with all sorts of questions, doubts, polemics, and ideological premises as nearly to resist use altogether” (5). Described as a “Leviathan,” with its clear Hobbesian connotations for an autocratic order of state, this monster of the deep, empire, has no adjectival form, no territorial center of power, no boundaries, no limits. It lies beyond nineteenth-century British reach or twentiethcentury American overstretch; it inhabits the globe.

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To account for this tentacular, insidious amorphous entity, Bernard Porter has coined the term superempire. Unlike Hardt and Negri, he locates this entity in America—an America that, though it shuns the traditional trappings of the word empire, aims “to remodel the world in her own image”; yet, like Hardt and Negri, Porter deems that this new configuration of empire in the form of “internationalist imperialism” is unprecedented; it may have originated as a new world order under the first Bush administration, but one thing is sure: “[the superempire] exceeds any previous empires the world has ever seen” (Porter 162). As a new paradigm of power, this superempire seems devoid of antecedents and is not beleaguered by anxieties of influence. Because they target the binary logic behind colonialist, sexist, and racist constructions, both postcolonial and postmodernist theories—principally based on Jean-François Lyotard’s critique of modernist master narratives, Jean Baudrillard’s cultural simulacra, and Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction of Western metaphysics—are useless, for they evade the “real enemy” (Hardt and Negri 211). The true enemy is, however, hard to fathom, for it takes such guises as globalization and capitalism,1 but this is a capitalism with a difference, straying from traditional conceptions, for it operates from an ill-defined location or nonplace of exploitation. So goes the argument in Hardt and Negri’s Empire. For Hardt and Negri, the work of a postcolonial theoretician and a cultural critic like Homi K. Bhabha is relevant only so far as it is symptomatic of “the passage to Empire” (145), just as the new fundamentalisms are part of the same etiology. Significantly, the founding monument of postcolonial theory—The Empire Writes Back (1989), by the “down under” troika, Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin—is not mentioned. In other words, writing—whether “back,” “forward,” or “sideways”—or simply literature, that most subjective discourse, is not part of Hardt and Negri’s political philosophy of the epochal shift toward empire. Interpreting exemplary texts, the essays in this volume provide a supplement to Hardt and Negri’s book by reviewing the transition from colonial to postcolonial discourse as a historical but essentially imaginary and narrative construct. Examples of past and current empire building,

The Everlasting Leviathan

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up to the recent “war on terror” (insidiously perpetuated by the Obama administration), are analyzed from a transnational perspective through a focus on the exchange of ideologies, the practice of nation building, as well as the concepts of state power, democracy, and antidemocracy—so as to expose the roots of empire formation and trace the continuum of empire building in the twentieth and even the twenty-first century. The latter spectrum and coverage illustrate the undeniable fact that there might be an empire à la Hardt and Negri out there, but more plausible is the existence of earthly empires, which seek rise to power again (albeit in diverse forms and with punctual justifications) and are truly perennial. They are clones of former Leviathans. This collection of fourteen articles falls into four parts, outlining the twentieth-century processes of empire building, even in subterraneous forms, from the end of the First World War to the onset of the twentyfirst century. Speaking on 18 May 1924 to a group called the Heretics, Virginia Woolf proposed that “in or about December, 1910, human character changed.… All human relations have shifted … those between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children. And when human relations change there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics, and literature” (Woolf 1:320–321). The present volume bears evidence to the continuity of such changes.

POST-WAR REPRESENTATIONS

OF

EMPIRE

Traditional empire and nation building provide the context for the scrutiny, in this study’s first part, of national identities and imageries, thereby deconstructing the modernist and post–World War I idea of the “nation,” often gendered as male and portrayed as ethnically homogeneous—as in the work of, among others, W. G. Sebald, Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, Barry Unsworth, and Peter Rushforth. Metropolitan centers of erstwhile imperial powers bear indelible traces of the histories of imperialism. Britain’s colonial legacy is thus everywhere evident in London, from the British Museum to the Indian restaurants that—according to some—have come to the rescue of the less palatable British cuisine. Urban landscapes

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are thus understandably the privileged loci of postcolonial literature and cultural studies, evidenced by the slew of theorization on multicultural London by, for example, Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy, and the creative success of Hanif Kureishi, Salman Rushdie, Zadie Smith, and Bernardine Everaristo. Englishness, the sort that inspires nostalgia for a lost imperial age, will never be the same. The same holds for “Frenchness,” or for any other European identity nostalgically yearning for the elusive “purity” of modernity, for the European countries upholding these identities must ultimately come to terms with their multiracial and multicultural dimension, with the “empire” at their doorstep. In the collection’s opening essay, Lucienne Loh ventures through the seemingly innocuous rural British landscape and excavates sediments of imperialistic history under the surface of, for instance, Suffolk in East Anglia. In approaching German writer W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn (1998), Loh introduces a working concept of her own alloy, “ironic nostalgia”—a variant of Paul Gilroy’s notion of “postimperial melancholy”—in order to account for the fact that in this nostalgia there is no harking after an illusory, idyllic past. Sebald provides the traditional material, including the manor home as a metonymy for Englishness, while stressing the fallen state of imperial splendor and further forcing the reader to acknowledge the sources of nostalgia. These sites of historical amnesia and the concomitant histories of the rural spaces beyond Britain’s shores—what Loh calls the “rural networks of empire”—make up both the violent histories of the British Empire and postcolonial immigrant subjectivities. Loh’s reading of rural Britain as mirroring the cultural production of empire recalls the materialist approach as articulated by James Clifford, Clifford Geertz, Arjun Appadurai, Edward Soja, and David Harvey. In her reading of British Barry Unsworth’s quasi-autobiographical novel Sugar and Rum (1999), Jennifer Nesbitt considers writer’s block as a symptom of a postcolonial logic of exploitation in and as culture: although the character of the author in Unsworth’s novel is denied the possibility of framing his own narratives, it is intimated that framing narratives about “others” is an innately exploitative act. In this end-of-millennium story,


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Unsworth compresses the conventions that separate narratives of the slave trade from narratives of World War II and from those of historical English entitlement. The climax of the novel joins all three narrative threads at a reenactment of the Battle of Brunanburh (an Anglo-Saxon battle allegedly representing the first truly “English” victory), during which heritage appears as a syncopated word and moral responsibility for “others” is deliberately shunned. Although many “others” have been singled out as members of “the oppressed” or the poor—what Hardt and Negri call “the multitude”— children have often been denied membership (2004, n.p.). While recalling the “discovery” of childhood in the long nineteenth century and the ensuing conflicts between children’s rights and so-called owners’ rights over children, Anca Vlasopolos focuses on the continuing strands of this conflict from entrenched nineteenth-century plots to late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century literary rewritings. Shirley Geok-Lin Lim’s Joss and Gold (2001) and Peter Rushforth’s Pinkerton’s Sister (2005) rework Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, and Rushforth’s Kindergarten (1980) revisits the Grimm Brothers’ fairy tale “Hansel and Gretel” (which portrays children as chattel or disposable goods) against the backdrop of two twentieth-century traumas, the Holocaust and terrorism. Building on the fracturing of identity caused by such traumas, Andrea Yates compares Jacques Derrida’s Monolingualism of the Other or the Prosthesis of Origin (1996) and Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas (1939). Both works stage the “self” as inexorably defined by the imperialist “other” and engage with an envisioned interlocutor—while representing empire through the relationship between the “proper name” and the “narrator,” between the witness and the signature. In imaginary dialogues that bear the traits of performativity, both Derrida and Woolf take up issues of national identity and citizenship.

EXPERIMENTAL NATIONS GLOBALIZED In the second part of this study, contributors move from the initial inquiry of the admittedly binary colonizer/colonized relationship to a

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more nuanced view that includes hybridity. This is the main characteristic of Homi K. Bhabha’s “politics of difference,” a concept which is instrumental in challenging the essentialism of modern sovereignty and to which Hardt and Negri oppose their globalization theory. Taking her cue from Algerian scholar Reda Bensmaïa’s apt phrase in Experimental Nations: Or the Invention of the Maghreb (2003), Valérie Orlando characterizes wandering Maghrebian writers as nomads inhabiting “experimental nations”: spaces unhindered by borders or state bureaucracies. Orlando argues that contemporary Algerian authors, such as Salim Bachi and Malika Mokeddem, consider the postindependence Algerian state more repressive than the former colonial French empire. The (f)ailing and corrupt nation-state is gradually replaced by a borderless, nationless space in which nomadic authors, like Edward Said’s secular intellectuals inhabiting an “exilic” space (Said 407), are able to reconfigure their idioms, history, territory, and community from “outside” their homelands. Thus, “writing becomes a home for those who have no homeland,” as Said would often argue, reiterating this idea from Adorno (Nagy-Zekmi, Paradoxical Citizenship xiii).2 The figure of the nomad is also key in Hardt and Negri’s genealogy of empire. Nomadism, along with exodus or desertion-as-resistance, is part of what they call “being-against,” a stance embraced by the early “against-men,” that is, the first antifascist deserters of treacherous European governments who have become tomorrow’s “multitude.” This “new nomadic horde,” or “new race of barbarians,” offers an alternative, which is that of the “counter-empire” (Hardt and Negri 210–214). The specter of migration looms large in this section inasmuch as this new nomadism also applies to the five million Portuguese immigrants in the world (as opposed to the ten million inhabitants of Portugal) who have emigrated, especially during the Salazar dictatorship. Although the Portuguese represent one of the main immigrant communities in France, they remain “invisible,” absent from public discourse because, as Martine Fernandes argues, they are seen as “good” immigrants, easily assimilated into French culture—as opposed to non-Western or non-European immigrants, such as Algerians, sub-Saharan Africans,


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or Antillais, who all too easily are identified as the “bad” immigrants. Such a manipulative opposition is an expression of contemporary French empire building. In her dialogic examination of Carlos Batista’s novel Poulailler (2005)—so named after the henhouse where the Franco-Portuguese narrator used to seek refuge as a little boy from his father’s violence and from French racism and where he turned himself into a hen—Martine Fernandes designates the henhouse as a metaphor for the loss of sovereignty and domestication suffered by Portuguese immigrants and their descendants in France as a result of Salazar’s dictatorship and French neocolonial politics. This political satire of French society is reminiscent of Voltaire’s “Dialogue du chapon et de la poularde,” in which castrated animals fall prey to exploitative humans, as does the emasculated Franco-Portuguese male in France. Such Kafkaesque metamorphosis also limns a discreet genealogy in Mozambican author Mia Couto’s denunciation of various imperialisms (e.g., Portuguese, Russian, American) in Terre Somnambule (1992) and in Beur writer Farida Belghoul’s Georgette! (1986). The fable, a traditional French genre that engages in political satire, becomes a powerful hermeneutic tool to denounce contemporary French imperialism. The Portuguese émigrés join Hardt and Negri’s “new nomadic horde,” which resurfaces at the end of Empire under the subchapter “Nomadism and Miscegenation.” These nomads appear as “figures of virtue, as the first ethical practice on the terrain of Empire” (362). Zahi Zalloua deems Hardt and Negri’s discussion of the nomad exceedingly romantic and asserts that this approach leaves undisturbed the alterity and exemplarity of nomadism. If the authors of Empire, he continues, rightly underscore the limits of a “politics of difference” à la Bhabha, calling attention to the ways “difference” can always be co-opted by the dominant doxa, Hardt and Negri ignore what Zalloua calls “an ethics of difference in the age of globalization.” Zalloua thus brings added nuance to the concept of difference by juxtaposing Hardt and Negri’s understanding of the idea with Edouard Glissant’s ethico-political injunction for the right to opacity and with Derrida’s Levinasian notion

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of a rapport sans rapport, which conjures up Levinas’ definition of “response-ability” (14). Even though Bensmaïa had only the Maghreb in mind when he came up with the concept of the “experimental nation,” nomadism is given an antipodean twist in the works of Australian novelist Christopher Koch, tales that invariably feature an adventurous and nomadic protagonist yearning for another land. Despite the fact that many of his novels are set in Asia, Koch may be thought of as a Caucasian writer clinging to the idea of a White Australia that pines for Europe, as attested in his last two books, Out of Ireland (1999) and The Many-Coloured Land (2002). Jean-François Vernay scrutinizes Koch’s Eurocentric fantasies as evidence of a lingering British Empire and of an interest in the “dying colonial world.” This form of nostalgia returns to the concerns of Loh’s opening essay.

HALF OF EMPIRE: THE “OTHER” AMERICA Inclusions and exclusions with respect to the realm of power are discursive and deliberate, as in the case of the Caribbean islands, Puerto Rico, and Central America, which belong to the “other” America and share unique racial and cultural patterns of hybridity that influence their political positioning between North and South America. The resulting economic, political, and cultural interrelations of agents involved in the process of empire building are also addressed in all three of the articles that make up this unit. Martinican writer Patrick Chamoiseau’s Goncourt Prize–winning novel Texaco (1992) examines the transformation of long-established colonialism in the Caribbean and its connection to the emerging global scape of empire at the turn of this century. Close scrutiny of essays by Antonio Benítez Rojo (Cuba), Caryl Phillips (St. Kitts), and Edouard Glissant (Martinique) reveals what Kristian Van Haesendonck wittily terms “light” colonialism in the broader Caribbean today. Van Haesendonck opposes the concept of light colonialism to Hardt and Negri’s idea of empire, which excludes the Caribbean region. Light colonialism, as a complex


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form of domination in times of globalization, also challenges the old dualism of colonizer versus colonized. With a note of lucid reproach, Van Haesendonck remarks that even Bhabha, who worries about global dynamics, refers neither to Martinique nor to the Caribbean as a whole in his introduction to the new edition of Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1954). For that matter, Bhabha does not include a discussion of the Caribbean in either Nation and Narration (1990) or The Location of Culture (1994). Instead he focuses, as Hardt and Negri do, on the global reach of contemporary imperialist ethics. Bhabha fails to see the history of the Caribbean as the history of the construction of empire. Along the same lines, Asima Saad Maura contends that, since the end of the Spanish-American War in 1898, Puerto Rico has occupied a liminal space between Spain, a ghostly empire with a burdensome HispanicCatholic past, and the more tangible Anglo-Protestant presence of the United States. Saad Maura focuses on two twentieth-century authors, René Marqués and Luis López Nieves, each of whom gives a different portrayal of the “true” meaning of invasion and empire formation, yet who both implicitly emphasize the similarities between, on the one hand, the Spanish colonization of the island and the treatment of the Taino and, on the other hand, North American conquering methods of (for instance) the Puerto Rican other. Like the Caribbean, Central America has been the site of ongoing phases of empire building since the arrival of Europeans in the Western hemisphere. Whereas agents of the Spanish crown colonized the region, Great Britain and the United States vied for possession of the isthmus well into the twentieth century. Ana Patricia Rodríguez reads Central America by its literature—European travelogues, anti-imperialist literary manifestos, agricultural-production and canal-zone novels, testimonios of resistance, and more recent texts responding to the crises caused by globalization —so as to unearth the weighty narrative of empire. She also makes a plea that Central America be added to the records of global empire, by reason of the region’s history as the locus of foreign military, economic, and political interventions and its key position in the global market economy at the outset of the new millennium.

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Rodríguez is thus concerned with the next phase of empire in the isthmus, the nebulous empire of globalization as first put forth by Hardt and Negri in Empire, as refined in their Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (2004), and as subsequently challenged by their detractors and interlocutors—including Paul Passavant and Jodi Dean in Empire’s New Clothes: Reading Hardt and Negri (2004), Gopal Balakrishnan and Stanley Aronowitz in Debating Empire (2003), and William I. Robinson in Transnational Conflicts: Central America, Social Change, and Globalization (2003). A growing body of isthmian literature—works by Uriel Quesada (Costa Rica), Claudia Hernandez (El Salvador), and Franz Galich (Nicaragua)—documents the crises faced by Hardt and Negri’s multitude, in isthmian works reread as the vogelfrei (without rights) masses of dispossessed Central Americans, hindered in their flight by the respective agendas of the Monroe Doctrine and (later) of neoliberalism—two cornerstones of empire building in the region.

QUEERING EMPIRE The last part of this study explores the trope of intimacy, specifically in the context of queer sexuality, in order to reimagine the colonized subject and further crisscross postcolonial studies and queer theory—two sites of unequal power relationships (Zabus). New readings of canonical modernist texts, such as Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo (1900), and the critical browning of queer studies through a reexamination of texts from India and Sri Lanka demonstrate that sexual dissidence has a voice in the building of nations in a postcolonial age, an age that cannot afford to ignore the secret interstices between nations or between genders. Reading homoeroticism in Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo, Patrick Mullen suggests that a violent homophobic epistemology legitimizes and enables a sanitized imperialist historical narration in the text. Additionally, he examines Conrad’s historical relationship with queer Irish radical Roger Casement, to whom Conrad promised a copy of Nostromo; Mullen’s reading of the relationship between the two men thus marks the


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particular intersections of the macropolitical lines of imperial force and the micropolitics of affect and desire in historical subject formations. By highlighting these connections Mullen points toward a much-needed reassessment of the interpenetration of colonialism and sexuality, timidly adumbrated by Robert Aldrich in Colonialism and Homosexuality (2003). Turning to Shyam Selvadurai in Funny Boy (1995) and Timothy Mo in The Redundancy of Courage (1991), texts that portray gay protagonists telling their own stories, John Hawley—who has already paid special critical attention to the queer postcolonial in, for example, Postcolonial, Queer: Theoretical Intersections (2001)—shows that whereas Selvadurai allegorizes the Sinhalese/Tamil divide as a gendered question of boys’ territory versus girls’ territory, Mo echoes the Indonesian/East Timor conflict by utilizing a protagonist and narrator who is similarly torn. In an essay in Queer Frontiers (2000), Peter Coviello surmised— after Susan Sontag’s intuition that “Apocalypse is now a long-running serial; not ‘Apocalypse Now’ but ‘Apocalypse from Now On’ ” (Sontag 88)—that in about November 1989, the concept of apocalypse changed and, by virtue of that change, all human relations have shifted. This idea brings full circle Virginia Woolf’s similar 1910 remark, referred to earlier in this introduction. Coviello further reasons: “[in 1989] the Berlin Wall fell; the Cold War … ended, and nuclear weapons … all but vanished” (Coviello 42). At that precise time, Coviello enthusiastically continues, the menace of AIDS unseated nuclear warfare as the defining apocalyptic threat to American health and security, a shift that shows how intimately bonded the nuclear and the sexual actually were, before the advent of AIDS gave to such bonding a ghastly quality of doom. Given the sexualization of nuclear warfare—evident, for instance, in the naming of an atoll Bikini, destined to be visited by an explosive Little Boy—and all the sexual metaphors used by victorious perpetrators of war and violence, it is no wonder that in December 2003, “a few days after the capture of Saddam Hussein by US forces,” Paul Allatson received an e-mail containing “a JPEG that features the former Iraqi dictator sitting in

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a chair, a silver beauty-salon apron covering his body, while around him stand … the various members of the popular US reality-TV show Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.” Feminizing the conquered is widely documented in colonial discourse, particularly in that of nineteenth-century imperial expansion. It is therefore fitting that such discourse should be revitalized during the Iraq war, thereby revealing an essential ideological trait in the attitude of Western “allies,” particularly in that of the United States. Some months later, Allatson “acquired what US collectors like to call a bobblehead or nodder, a small doll with a moveable head, made of a synthetic polymer resin, in this instance representing a uniformed Saddam Hussein with his trousers down around his ankles and a large missile painted in the colors of the US flag embedded in his exposed buttocks.” Despite the unusual and anatomically unlikely angle of penetration, it is hard to miss the allusion to the rogue state as a passive subject of insertion, an image that topples conventionally heterosexual paradigms of invasion. The volume suitably climaxes with Allatson’s essay, which he describes as a makeover show-and-tell that considers the resonances in the conjunction of the JPEG image and the bobblehead, “two queerly touched products of global pop culture, both of which also function as imperial-history military memorabilia.” That conjunction suggests, Allatson argues, that the recent coming out of the queer I in Queer Eye could never simply be a televisual “fairies’ tale”; rather, it is a metonymy for the consolidation of the then George W. Bush–led United States of Empire, which has undergone “a formidable combat fatigue–chic makeover since 11 September 2001.” The relationship between the war on terror and the Queer Eye’s war on terrible taste is revealed in the enforced proximity of disparate pop-cultural texts and objects, proximity that implicates a dominant queer purview in the operations of the state—what Allatson calls imperial queer. The United States of Empire, even under Barack Obama’s leadership, is indeed a caustic way of sexing up Hardt and Negri’s empire and relocating it on the human map of desire. Empire is here deflected from its common etymon to accommodate a plural grammar, complete with its erotic declensions.


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Thus, the essays here collected cover the advent of what the Bush dynasty termed the new world order based on past formulas of empire building and future plans for expanding spheres of influence. Under the Obama administration, the foreign policy agenda has remained virtually unchallenged, although the discourse has been toned down somewhat. However, “an unprecedented network of military bases” is emerging worldwide. The colonizing gesture is evident in the “myriad land-grabs and hundreds of billions of dollars spent to quarter troops around the world [that] persist far beyond Iraq and Afghanistan, and too far from the headlines” (Lutz). The novelty is that the monster’s tentacles are no longer visible; Leviathan has outlived the Hobbesian notion that tied its existence to the now obsolete nation-state.

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WORKS CITED

Adorno, Theodor. “On Writing.” Minima Moralia. Reflections from Damaged Life. Trans. E. F. N. Jephcott. London: Verso, 1978. Print. Aldrich, Robert. Colonialism and Homosexuality. London and New York: Routledge, 2003. Print. Coviello, Peter. “Apocalypse from Now On.” Queer Frontiers: Millennial Geographies, Genders and Generations. Ed. Joseph A. Boone, Martin Dupuis, Martin Meeker, Karin Quimby, Cindy Sarver, Debra Silverman, and Rosemary Weatherston. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000. 39–63. Print. Derrida, Jacques. “The Villanova Roundtable: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida.” Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida. New York: Fordham University Press, 1997. 3–28. Print. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000. Print. Hawley, John C., ed. Postcolonial, Queer: Theoretical Intersections. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001. Print. Levinas, Emmanuel. Proper Names. Trans. Michael Smith. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996. Print. Lutz, Catherine. “Obama’s Empire.” New Statesman. 30 July 2009. Web. 7 January 2010. . Nagy-Zekmi, Silvia, ed. Paradoxical Citizenship: Edward Said. 2006. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008. Print. Nagy-Zekmi, Silvia, and Chantal Zabus, eds. Colonization or Globalization? Postcolonial Explorations of Imperial Expansion. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009. Print.


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Porter, Bernard. Empire and Superempire: Britain, America and the World. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006. Print. Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. 1993. London: Vintage, 1994. Print. Sontag, Susan. AIDS and Its Metaphors. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1989. Print. Woolf, Virginia. “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown.” Collected Essays. Ed. Leonard Woolf. 3 Vols. London: Hogarth Press, 1966. 1:320–321. Print. Zabus, Chantal. “Out in Africa: Queer Desire in Some Anthropological and Literary Texts.” Comparative Critical Studies 6.2 (2009): 251–270. Print.

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PART I POST-WAR REPRESENTATIONS OF EMPIRE

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CHAPTER 1

POSTIMPERIAL RURAL HISTORIES AND “IRONIC NOSTALGIA” IN W. G. SEBALD’S THE RINGS OF SATURN Lucienne Loh

In the opening of The Rings of Saturn, the German writer W. G. Sebald reveals that in 1992 he set off on an extended walk across the Suffolk countryside in order to recover from a period of fatigue. In 1995 this walk became the inspiration for Die Ringe des Saturn—a beguiling mosaic of fiction, history, travelogue, biography, autobiography, myth, and memoir—incorporating tenuous histories which connect rural Suffolk to places as far afield as the Congo, China, and Indonesia. An English version of the text, The Rings of Saturn, followed in 1998 and met

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with the same widespread praise as Sebald’s first prose-fiction text published in English, The Emigrants (1996).3 The Emigrants predominantly explores the memories of displaced European Jews, whose stories—from the perspectives of narrators who are at once Sebald and not—established the tone of melancholic rumination so characteristic of Sebald’s work. Indeed, an overwhelming sense of desolation weighted with the burden of historical consciousness pervades all of Sebald’s texts. Critics of The Rings of Saturn have, in general, failed to comment on the backdrop for Sebald’s hybrid text, tending to neglect the relationship between the highly descriptive passages of the natural landscape and narratives of European imperialism.4 In a signal review, however, Boyd Tonkin asserts that “[b]ehind Suffolk’s bucolic façades, [Sebald] uncovers tales of imperial cruelty and natural calamity that explode the soft-focus delusions of our Heritage History” (Tonkin 96). Tonkin suggests that both the image of an idyllic countryside and a sense of heritage are mutually constitutive in creating false impressions that obscure a collective national amnesia shrouding the violent realities of Britain’s imperial past. Sebald attempts to address this historical elision by revealing that rural Suffolk’s innocuous landscape is pitted with persistent histories of cultural contact and conflict a world away from the seemingly halcyon image of East Anglia. This central paradox of The Rings of Saturn thus reveals a fundamental gap in the way Britain conceives of its imperial history. A discrepancy exists between the apparently benign and restorative rural landscape, dotted with country homes and stirring ruins, and the traces of the colonial violence that once supported British—and more broadly, European—imperialism. But this central paradox also implies other wider, if far less evident, contemporary social paradoxes. These concern Britain’s collective attempt to address not only the aftermath of imperial decline following the 1960s but also, imbricated within this, the legacies of empire’s triumphs in the form of the waves of immigrants who have transformed the nation’s landscape. Yet, even though Britain’s conurbations maintain a degree of racial tolerance and integration, large swathes of the country, predominantly rural in nature, continue to be

Postimperial Rural Histories and “Ironic Nostalgia”

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spaces where attempts at racial integration and diversity are rarely contemplated, largely ignored, and positively challenged. By offering alternative circuits of imperial commerce, capital, and consumption embedded in the history of rural Suffolk, The Rings of Saturn makes available different perspectives of British imperialism. These networks of imperial commerce and trade, routed through rural England, have been explored by a number of postcolonial critics, including Edward Said, Ian Baucom, and Paul Gilroy, who argue through a predominantly cultural-materialist lens that the preservation of the ideals of rural England depends on a disassociation from potentially compromising histories that would admit the roles of other cultures and countries. Raymond Williams’ The Country and the City (1973) articulates this argument in its most established form. Edward Said argues in his fundamental study, Culture and Imperialism (1993), that “Britain’s great humanistic ideas, institutions and monuments” are still celebrated “as having the power ahistorically to command our approval” (82). Said’s emphasis on the “power” of the ahistoric aura that surrounds Britain’s “humanistic ideas, institutions and monuments” suggests in part why these institutions continue to actively promote national pride and prompt international recognition. This power depends today on the residual memory of notions of civilization, notions that once justified wielding imperial might throughout British colonies and are recollected—again “ahistorically”—through the display of highly visible architectural façades. The splendors of Britain’s remaining manor homes continue to serve as iconic repositories of such memories. Through a reading of The Rings of Saturn, I argue not only that Sebald suggests that this power is sustained in the context of the English countryside precisely because these spaces persistently “command … approval” but also that he rejects any dehistoricized, idealized vision of these spaces. Sebald presents, through what I term ironic nostalgia, the material history within rural England that inspires imperial nostalgia. Placing images which continue to “command approval” against the wider circuits of imperial violence, Sebald simultaneously suggests that this nostalgia

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needs to be couched in irony. I argue that this irony is structured around Sebald’s consistent juxtaposition of the fallen state of imperial splendor with the historical violence that once propped up erstwhile displays of opulence. Nostalgia is often associated with indulgence in the pleasures of the past as a means to retreat from a corrupted present, but ironic nostalgia reveals that the past is always corrupted. The concept of ironic nostalgia therefore offers an alternative to what critics (e.g., Samuel) have called “soft-focus nostalgia,” a kind of history that panders largely to emotional responses to a lost past. The concept of ironic nostalgia that I apply to The Rings of Saturn addresses the racial marginalization of Britain’s immigrant communities in rural England. As a response to what Paul Gilroy calls “postimperial melancholy,” ironic nostalgia criticizes the material culture that nurtures nostalgia and resists the nationalist—and for Gilroy, racist—sentiments that nostalgia is commonly perceived to support in the British rural context (Gilroy, After Empire 107–109). Ironic nostalgia acknowledges the social and economic conditions, often linked to imperialism, that afford nostalgia itself, but it also undermines the fundamental role imperial nostalgia plays within the nation’s consciousness and identity. Ironic nostalgia thus resists the way in which the frequently conservative sentiment of nostalgia is harnessed to ideas of tradition and heritage in order to promote a sense of racial exclusiveness in rural England. Ironic nostalgia endeavors to address Gilroy’s argument that “what Orwell would have regarded as an authentically geo-pious Anglo patriotism, can, in fact, be” adapted to the demands of multicultural society” (After Empire 104) and nowhere is this patriotism more evident than in England’s pastoral consciousness. Sebald’s undercutting of a traditionally nostalgic attitude in The Rings of Saturn also reflects a struggle with his own German identity and the horrors embedded in Germany’s fascist past. The view of his own country’s history invariably taints Sebald’s vision of imperial history, doubtlessly a vision permanently marred by the consequences of the Nazis’ maniacal obsession with race and imperial ambitions. Sebald’s relationship to German history colors his relationship to the


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ways British imperial history is frequently glorified in the nation’s collective consciousness. Thus, in The Rings of Saturn, Sebald occupies multiple vantage points: he is simultaneously foreigner and local, tourist and resident—affording a vision that is intimately engaged yet critically detached. These particular perspectives are important in reminding readers that the occluded imperial histories Sebald reveals in rural Suffolk remain inconspicuous not only to most people who live in Britain but also to the thousands of tourists who come seeking an image of “authentic” England in the countryside. A sense of ironic nostalgia, therefore, can provide a more conscious perspective from which to view the superficial trappings of the frequently commodified displays of imperial history in rural England. In this essay, I apply the concept of ironic nostalgia to Sebald’s depiction of Somerleyton manor, a manor estate in Suffolk that he visited along his travels. Country estates and manor homes serve as important metonymies for Englishness, and I suggest that the enduring allure and pleasure of nostalgia paradoxically contribute to the elision of broader histories of imperial violence. Sebald’s presentation of the materiality of the manor home’s past not only suggests why the manor home continues to inspire imperial nostalgia but also offers a more culturally and historically inclusive way in which to understand the manor home. Ironic nostalgia is also a concept that attempts to redraw the lines of the exclusive national and racial affiliations traditionally associated with rural England and offers England’s minority communities a more historically and culturally inflected lens through which to view spaces that have traditionally dismissed their historical contribution and discouraged their participation. A close reading of the Somerleyton manor chapter in The Rings of Saturn, demonstrates that despite being viewed as cherished sites of national heritage and social tradition, English country homes like Somerleyton have histories that are predicated on the erasure of a complex matrix of sociopolitical imperial connections. Sebald suggests that these country manors serve as mausoleums for the alternatives pasts that demand recuperation. Although the Edwardian-Victorian period of the country

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home’s preeminence has long since passed, the manor home has been absorbed into the twentieth- and twenty-first-century national imaginary as part of a larger conservative social and cultural phenomenon seeking to secure rural England as the last bastion of “essential” England. In his second chapter, Sebald meditates on the halcyon days of the English manor house. He prefaces the details of his visit to Somerleyton Hall with a lingering gaze upon the Suffolk landscape, where “save for the odd solitary cottage there is nothing to be seen but the grass and the rippling reeds, one or two sunken willows, and some ruined conical brick buildings, like relics of an extinct civilization” (30). This image of a barren landscape with its “relics of an extinct civilization” goes against the vein of the idealized picture of the English countryside so often portrayed as the cornerstone of British culture and history. Indeed, manor homes and the countryside surrounding them serve as talismans of Britishness and stand as some of the most visible material representations of the nation’s history.5 Yet for Sebald, everywhere evident in this landscape are signs of a civilization on the decline and of a culture past its heyday. Paraphrasing Patrick Wright, Paul Gilroy has labeled the “country house and its tainted splendour an important signifier of the contemporary ruralist distillate of national life” (Gilroy, Black Atlantic 14). The pervasive air of decay which frames Sebald’s exploration of Somerleyton Manor establishes rural England as a space steeped in anachronistic practice but nevertheless glorified as a persistent cornerstone of English identity. Sebald reflects extensively upon his visit to Somerleyton Hall—a preserved relic of nineteenth-century industrial wealth in the form of a “dreamwork” mansion built by a self-made billionaire. The house seems formed out of flights of fancy: interiors lead imperceptibly into exteriors, and artifice merges with nature. But Sebald directs the reader’s gaze to the tainted façade of the mansion, pointing out, for example, that the Argand gas that once so brilliantly lit this pleasure palace was poisonous. As Sebald exposes more of the mansion’s history, he gradually reveals the circuits of lucre that sustained the height of the country-house system during an epoch congruent with the peak of nineteenth-century British imperialism.


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Regarded as one of the most lavish manors in England, Somerleyton reflected a material resplendence that once fueled the nation’s imagination; the place was maintained, as Sebald informs readers, by a certain Sir Morton Peto, who was “among the foremost entrepreneurs and speculators of his time.” Peto’s shrewd financial investments in colonial railway building in countries as diverse as “Canada, Australia, Africa, Argentina, Russia and Norway” (33), through his railway contracting firm, Messrs. Jackson, Brassey, Peto, and Betts,6 provided him with the financial clout to “crown his ascent into the highest social spheres by establishing a country residence, the comfort and extravagance of which would eclipse everything the nation had hitherto seen” (33). The extensive railway networks which the British built throughout their empire represented, of course, a key technology in Britain’s civilizing mission to bring modern industry to the colonies, but more importantly, the railway provided the means to transport the spices, sugar, tea, coffee, tobacco, gold, and silver that fed the mercantile profits that sustained the English social order during the nineteenth century (Williams 280). These tenuous and obscured connections between Somerleyton Manor and the colonies surface only through Sebald’s own investigations into Peto, but they are subtly downplayed as the spontaneous recollections of a casual observer wandering Somerleyton’s grounds. Successful entrepreneurs such as Sir Morton Peto thus built their own personal empires upon the backs of the colonies’ agricultural economies, many of which incorporated extensive systems of slave trade and labor. The investment of colonial capital in country estates by the likes of Peto was, however, absorbed into the national imagination as part of British inheritance. Yet these links to imperial violence that Sebald suggests in The Rings of Saturn remain occluded and suppressed. The manor façade still serves as an example of what Ian Baucom terms “authentic and auratic architectures of belonging” (17). Another reason, however, lies in the fact that, although the manor house represented demonstrable success at the apex of nineteenth-century English society and in time came to represent English heritage, the interior of manor homes came to represent national identity. Linda Colley argues that, from the early

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nineteenth century, private treasures came to be seen as British national heritage, and “only in Great Britain did it prove possible to flaunt the idea that aristocratic property was in some magical and strictly intangible way the people’s property also” (177). Colley thus argues that not only the manor home itself but also the interiors and the contents of these homes emphasize the country estate as a wholly English product rather than the result of multiple, international histories, even though, paradoxically, the interiors of manor homes often boast objects originating from well beyond England. Sir Morton Peto’s Somerleyton Hall brims with a surreal mélange of objects culled from the corners of the British Empire. Sebald observes that it is “full of bygone paraphernalia” and notices, for example, “[a] camphorwood chest which may have once accompanied a former occupant of the house on a tour of duty to Nigeria or Singapore” (35). He contemplates that the otherwise innocuous chest bears a colonial history and seems redolent of colonial diplomats packed off to far-flung reaches of the empire. Sebald thus presents images which may well inspire imperial nostalgia, yet his overall attitude to these images of nostalgia throughout The Rings of Saturn is refracted through the lens of irony—for not only do these nostalgic images erase complex imperial histories, but these displays of empire’s might now appear only as sad symbols of erstwhile power. The walls of Somerleyton also display “hussar’s sabers, African masks, spears, safari trophies, hand-coloured engravings of Boer War battles” (35), all of which are the spoils of colonial triumphs. Yet, the leveled histories encompassed by the objects in Sebald’s list reflect the tourist’s gaze, which consumes these objects only as country-house paraphernalia and imperial memorabilia, often failing to acknowledge the multifarious histories of violent colonial engagement that these objects signify. Looking elsewhere in The Rings of Saturn at the horrific exploitation enacted by European colonialism (most notably in the chapter on King Leopold II’s systematic colonization of the Congo), it becomes difficult to view these objects displayed in manor homes as innocent national treasures. This more nuanced understanding of rural imperial history echoes Walter Benjamin’s caveat for the historical materialist


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that “without exception, the cultural treasures he surveys have an origin which he cannot contemplate without horror” (256). In this light, these “cultural treasures,” so glorified as reflections of both imperial history and national heritage, take on a very different hue. Sebald thus enables readers to view objects of empire frequently steeped in nostalgia as instead ironically bespeaking a much wider history of imperial violence and exploitation. Redirecting the reader’s perspective regarding seemingly benign objects of imperial history, he insists that locating this history within the otherwise placid landscape of the countryside requires one to look for historical connections beyond the superficial trappings of beauty and antiquity that the English countryside traditionally inspires. The historical connections that Sebald encourages often destabilize any central or dominant historical vantage point from which to view imperial history. Sebald disturbs the way in which heritage and tradition are often couched as cohesive narratives. He comments that at Somerleyton, one is not quite sure whether one is in a country house in Suffolk or some kind of no-man’s-land, on the shores of the Arctic Ocean or in the heart of the dark continent. Nor can one readily say which decade or century it is, for many ages are superimposed here and coexist. (36)

The “heart of the dark continent” is obviously an allusion to Joseph Conrad’s notorious synecdoche for central Africa, and Sebald thus connects Somerleyton and the colonies explicitly. By drawing attention to the disjunctive and disparate histories represented by objects housed within Somerleyton, Sebald also disrupts the cohesive myth and linear narratives of national heritage that normalize the violent spoils of empire as part of British civilization. In addition to addressing occluded histories of imperial violence, ironic nostalgia functions through acknowledging the material sources for nostalgia. When Sebald first enters Somerleyton, he reflects that [t]he servants who kept all in good order, the butlers, coachmen, chauffeurs, gardeners, cooks, sempstresses and chambermaids, have long since gone. The suites of rooms now make a somewhat

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A tone of desolation seems to reverberate regarding the long-vanished manor staff, “who kept all in good order”: “the servants…, the butlers, coachmen, chauffeurs, gardeners, cooks, sempstresses and chambermaids.” Sebald notably takes the time to list a range of domestic positions in the manor home, suggesting potential material for imperial nostalgia by recollecting the extensive household that once sustained an English social order severely undermined in the wake of a declining empire. Yet simultaneously, Sebald underscores the fact that the image of the manor home’s “good order” depended on a vast machinery of domestic servitude. Furthermore, Sebald suggests that the extravagant interior life of the manor home could be a source of nostalgia for a bygone age of splendor and wealth, but he also accentuates the detail of the “disused, dispirited” rooms and the faded nature of the “velvet curtains and the crimson blinds.” A consistent understanding of the inevitable degradation of the material excess that supported the manor home lifestyle underscores any potentially nostalgic image. Sebald reflects this understanding in the particular image of the brimming “stairways and corridors … full of bygone paraphernalia.” Long detached from historical context, the interior of Somerleyton is reduced to a display of mere “paraphernalia”; the space is crammed with objects that no longer serve any purpose except to capture the fleeting attention of passing tourists. What I have termed ironic nostalgia is particularly well demonstrated by a passage in the Somerleyton manor chapter in which Sebald lists the extensive material objects he assumes were needed to sustain the manor home. Presented as yet another moment of spontaneous recollection, the images may well be drawn from Sebald’s own vast store of cultural knowledge, or they may perhaps be culled from research into the lifestyle of the nineteenth century’s landed elite, many of whom


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were industrialists who profited from the wealth of the British Empire (Williams 282). Sebald imagines that the upkeep of a manor home like Somerleyton would require, amongst other things, [f]urnishings, equipment and impedimenta of every description, the new piano, curtains and portieres, the Italian tiles and fittings for the bathrooms, the boiler and pipes for the hothouses, supplies from the market gardens, cases of hock and Bordeaux, lawn mowers and great boxes of whalebone corsets and crinolines from London. (31)

The “cases of hock and Bordeaux” and “great boxes of whalebone corsets and crinolines from London” are significant as images of conspicuous consumption, but Sebald’s detailed description also suggests the material underpinnings that can inspire nostalgia for a great period of material opulence. While offering this recollection, however, Sebald simultaneously foregrounds the circuit of trade and industry which lay at the heart of country-manor living by providing the explicit detail of the “olive-greenliveried steam train,” which delivered all these goods “from other parts of the country.” Imperial nostalgia assumes the erasure of such circuits of labor that once made these lavish lifestyles possible. Sebald, however, emphasizes the interconnectedness of the manor’s social structures and the industrial networks that once supported them. Ironic nostalgia simultaneously underscores rural England’s crucial role within the imperial metropolis as well as its dependency on the vast labor circuits of the colonial economy, even as evidence of this dependency was erased through displays of commodified wealth projected as “English.” Though this passage seems like a casual recollection, it represents the staging of a reenactment that certainly bears the hallmarks of nostalgia. Immediately following his description, Sebald rues: “[A]nd now there was nothing any more, nobody, no stationmaster in gleaming peaked cap, no servants, no coachman, no house guests, no shooting parties, neither gentlemen in indestructible tweeds nor ladies in stylish traveling clothes.” Even while Sebald admits that, for the country manor, all “[i]t

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takes [is] just one awful second … and an entire epoch passes” (31), his tone is not wholly infused with the pathos so commonly associated with nostalgia. Ironic nostalgia thus encourages consideration of the alternative histories that have been sacrificed so that the manor home might endure as a symbol of mourning for the loss of the Pax Britannica. The sense of ironic nostalgia that occurs in the text can thus be seen as critical of the kind of nostalgia for the past that erases the social and economic processes through which that traditional nostalgia is made possible in the present. I suggest that Sebald exposes the myth underlying notions of imperial history and national heritage—notions nurtured through such signifiers as the manor house. By making evident the circuits of imperialism in the Suffolk landscape, Sebald questions the collective histories and memories upon which the triumphs of imperialism were based; he thus reconfigures the spatial and temporal dynamics of imperial history. The Rings of Saturn calls into question the terms upon which current British identity is configured and projected abroad and, more importantly, the way in which rural Britain can—and should— incorporate a more encompassing, diverse vision of its history.


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WORKS CITED

Baucom, Ian. Out of Place: Englishness, Empire, and Locations of Identity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999. Print. Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Trans. Harry Zohn. Ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968. Print. Colley, Linda. Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837. London: Pimlico, 2003. Print. “Early Railways between New England and Canada.” Engineering News 4 August 1892: no pag. Web. 16 September 2007. . Gilroy, Paul. After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? London: Routledge, 2004. Print. ———. The Black Atlantic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. Long, J. J., and Anne Whitehead, eds. W. G. Sebald: A Critical Companion. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 2004. Print. Lowenthal, David. The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Print. McCulloh, Mark R. Understanding W. G. Sebald. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003. Print. Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Random House, 1993. Print. Samuel, Raphael. “Soft Focus Nostalgia.” Victorian Values: Historians Take Issue with Mrs. Thatcher. Supplement to New Statesman (27 May 1983): ii–iv. Print. Sebald, W. G. The Emigrants. Trans. Michael Hulse. New York: New Directions, 1996. Print.

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———. The Rings of Saturn. Trans. Michael Hulse. New York: New Directions, 1998. Print. Sontag, Susan. “A Mind in Mourning.” Review of Vertigo, by W. G. Sebald. The Times Literary Supplement. 25 February 2000. Web. 16 September 2007. . Tonkin, Boyd. “Swimming the Seas of Silence.” Review of The Rings of Saturn, by W. G. Sebald. Waterstone’s Magazine (Spring 1998): 90–99. Print. Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973. Print.

CHAPTER 2

UNDER THE SIGN OF SUGAR AND RUM ENTITLEMENT, AUTHORITY, AND AUTHORSHIP IN POSTCOLONIAL ENGLAND Jennifer P. Nesbitt

The title of Barry Unsworth’s 1988 novel Sugar and Rum hints at more salacious content than actually appears, and the book jacket of the 1999 paperback edition coyly states that Sugar and Rum is “tantalizingly semi-autobiographical.” In fact, the novel chronicles author Clive Benson’s struggle with writer’s block as he works on a novel about the slave trade. Benson’s unfinished novel establishes an immediate extratextual correspondence with the life of Unsworth himself, who later published a novel about the slave trade: Sacred Hunger shared the 1992 Booker Prize with Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient. Rather than pursue

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the proffered intimacy with a prestigious litterateur, however, I instead examine Sugar and Rum as an investigation of an author’s role in perpetuating imperial power beyond direct rule. The title Sugar and Rum is a reference to “Pity for Poor Africans,” William Cowper’s 1788 poem about collective societal guilt and apathy. In the novel, the poem is quoted as one of Benson’s sources for the slave-trade novel: “I own I am shocked at the purchase of slaves,…. / I pity them greatly, but I must be mum, / For how could we do without sugar and rum?” (as cited in Unsworth 94). The speaker in “Pity for Poor Africans” has dramatized the social coercion that limits speech: the speaker claims to “be mum” about slavery in order to please the community and preserve prevalent social norms but simultaneously speaks out against the practice. The sentiments in the poem echo the character Benson’s own sense of powerlessness as his research reveals that slavery still exists in the built environment of contemporary Liverpool and in the attitudes of its residents. In fact, he explains his writer’s block to a friend by claiming that the sheer enormity of slavery had silenced him: “it went on so long, I couldn’t think of it just as an historical episode” (221). Thus, Benson raises the same question Jane Marcus ponders in her recent essay collection Hearts of Darkness, namely, the question of “who may write safely about whom” (Marcus 58). Silence and speech are key concepts in Sugar and Rum; Unsworth juxtaposes them in order to highlight the links between artistic value and imperial power. Benson’s struggle with writer’s block in Sugar and Rum symbolizes his dawning awareness that his identity as an author rests upon his compliance with notions of appropriate literature and the silencing of “other” writers. Faced with writer’s block and living in a mediocre apartment in Liverpool, Clive Benson might not seem like a powerful figure. Nevertheless, he has counted on and traded on his status as an artist and cultural gatekeeper; he has accepted and benefited from his position as an author. Thus, Sugar and Rum fictionalizes a critique of the author-function as part of the discourse of imperialism. In a 1969 article, Michel Foucault coined the term author-function to describe an exemplary mode by which power relations can be identified in discursive structures. It is useful in

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this context because, according to Foucault, the designation author is “a privileged moment of individualization” (1623) which accords a subject power to regulate the status of discourse as truthful, sensible, or artistically valuable (1627). In the case of Sugar and Rum, Benson—as the embodiment of the author-function—is powerless not to be a cultural oppressor. This is so even when he consciously resists Thatcherism’s neo-imperial status quo, for he is complicit with this system inasmuch as he occupies the privileged subject position of author. Benson has already had one literary success, the novel Fool’s Canopy, and on the strength of this success, he has set himself up as a literary consultant. His right to trade on his position is initially confirmed by the enthusiastic response to his advertisement and perhaps also by the monumental seriousness of his planned novel about the slave trade. Thus, Benson derives his sense of self-worth and agency from his status as an author. Suffering from writer’s block, however, Benson learns that his identity does not originate with him but instead stems from his social functions as an author. One of those functions is the continuation of palliative narratives that excuse present-day England from responsibility for its slave-trading past. Confronted with sheer numbers, in terms of both years and pages of historical documentation, Benson begins to see himself as part of a continuing history of exploitation. His sense of “correspondence,” useful for “the literary mind” (Unsworth 13), begins to exceed its discursive boundaries; contemporary Liverpool becomes representative of a traumatic past. Immersed in research about the slave trade, Benson interprets the devastation in the urban landscape of Thatcher-era Liverpool as poetic justice, a direct result of the city’s role in the slave trade. Quoting liberally from Benson’s research, the novel details the ways in which this history is lived and relived, etched into the bones of Liverpool. Benson’s apartment, for example, is carved out of an eighteenth-century home, and it seems to shriek with the violence and suffering of slavery. For Benson, the “elegance” and “restraint” of the architecture—which, he admits, “please[s] and soothe[s] him”—requires a concomitant suffering: “that fear the black people must have felt, taken from their forest homes, thrust into the open, exposed to the wide sky, the terrible surf” (Unsworth 52–53).

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Suzanne Keen argues that Benson translates “historiographical problems” into “personal and social problems” (110): namely, writer’s block. According to Keen, this situation creates in Benson “an incommunicable hyper-specialization” that no one cares to understand (116). But the evidence in the novel suggests that whatever Benson’s problems with fictional narration, he is quite able to articulate the relevance of the past with respect to contemporary Liverpool. In fact, his ability to clearly and directly articulate the relationship alienates his natural audience: the educated, professional classes who might be expected to read novels of a serious stamp. Meeting up with a history master at a football match, for example, Benson speculates that the political sympathies of liberal statesman and Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone might have roots in his early exposure to the practical operation of slavery during his childhood. He claims that Gladstone, born “two years after the last legitimate slave ship sailed out of Liverpool” (Unsworth 41), would have been confronted with the detritus of the slave trade as a young boy: It is quite conceivable that little William Ewart, out with his nurse, pressing his nose against the shop window, would have seen strange metal objects, the purpose of which might have baffled him. What is that, nurse? That is a branding iron, dear, so they would know who the slaves belonged to. And that is a pair of iron handcuffs, and that is a thumbscrew in case they refused to eat or were otherwise recalcitrant. (Unsworth 42)

But the historian refuses to credit Benson’s narrative. This imagined reconstruction of a great man’s childhood is “fanciful” according to the academic, who claims to support “a balanced view” on which he does not elaborate (42). Frustrated by the historian’s denial, Benson elevates his rhetoric, comparing the death tolls of slavery to those incurred by the Nazis. He loses his audience entirely at this point: “Without replying the man began to walk away from him” (42). Later in the novel, Benson is again denied the authority to narrate when his version of events discomfits residents of present-day Liverpool. In this instance, Benson points out to a wealthy couple that their


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gracious eighteenth-century mansion was probably built with money from slaving. Admiring the house, he says: “Built on the proceeds of the slave trade of course, like all the big houses of that time round here” (Unsworth 168). His hostess rebukes him: “I’m glad you like the house, but it doesn’t seem to me to have anything much to do with the slave trade” (168). Her refusal to negotiate is categorical, a divorcing of the past from the present that absolves her from considering the possibility that her position is enabled by historical conditions. This silencing once again leads Benson to elevate his rhetoric. Later, during lunch, he lectures the other (mostly Conservative) guests on the Liverpool slave trade as “the best example of a property-owning democracy” (Unsworth 188). The guests greet his assertions with a “hush,” and then they turn the conversation (189); this collective politeness sentences Benson and his narrative to be understood as unreason and— worse—as incivility. The resistance of powerful, wealthy Liverpudlians to the voice of the artist may be comprehensible to Benson, who can see himself as a radical author speaking the unpleasant truth to those in power. But he still believes that he, as an author, deserves an audience. He is therefore puzzled by the resistance of those who should, according to him, understand his stories and agree with them. This problem is foreshadowed in the novel’s beginning, when Benson walks by the Yoruba Club, a nightclub, and thinks: “There was never anyone there when he passed, never any sign of life. What were the secret hours of the Yoruba?” (Unsworth 3). This wistful plea demonstrates Benson’s desire for a kind of knowledge he cannot attain through his research. He seeks to acquire it from the other, from the African and Caribbean immigrants who have been transformed from slaves into citizens as empire has taken its course. However much Benson desires to speak with the oppressed, his ability to speak is part of the author-function and, as such, an entitlement that silences other voices. An audience of the homeless, the mentally ill, the poor, or Black British is structurally limited in its resistance to his narration of their experience because of Benson’s presumption

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that these groups have not organized their own stories. For the first two-thirds of the novel, Unsworth shows Benson wandering the streets, telling his version of events to a series of unwilling, yet seemingly unresisting, listeners. In fact, he selects “human creatures who would listen to him without offering insult or launching into rival monologues of their own” (Unsworth 14). These people are “mainly men, mainly black, mainly out of work” (Unsworth 6). They are mostly silent in the face of his unrelenting narrative stream, emitting an occasional groan that Benson strives to interpret as agreement. But, as Carine Mardorossian has claimed in reference to Jean Rhys’ work, “the premises of the colonialist discourse do not falter and lose ground when the black subalterns speak but paradoxically when they are silenced and stereotyped” (Mardorossian 1072). Despite his good intentions, Benson silences and stereotypes others in order to guarantee that his own voice is heard. When one of his interlocutors does respond, this listener confirms both Benson’s inherent need to oppress and the silent resistance of listeners. Benson designates “a fattish, serene-looking middle-aged negro” (Unsworth 6) as an appropriately passive receptacle for his narrative, but the man rejects Benson’s chosen metaphor about the stages of life: “You talking about stages. No stages there, man. When he jump off, that the end of the story” (Unsworth 7). At this point Benson, much like the hostess of the luncheon discussed earlier, changes his tactic; he decides that his “smiling” companion is not feeling “very well” (7). Benson’s liberal desire to tell another story, combined with an authority to narrate of which he cannot divest himself, eventually produces writer’s block. He describes himself as “weary of his own fluency, his practised, unreliable voice, not sticking anywhere, not really engaged with anything” (Unsworth 15). This feeling of “not sticking anywhere” is Benson’s reaction to a failure with respect to his entitlement: he cannot impose his story on anyone. If Benson has begun to see writing as silence, he may be experiencing what Roland Barthes has called “the death of the author”: the dispersion of the author into the text, so that the author is subject to the text and its readers—the author is no longer the all-powerful generator (Barthes 1466–1468).


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Similarly, Benson’s declining power as a cultural gatekeeper demonstrates, by its absence, the role of the author-function as a limited-access identity. Benson, for example, dubs his literary-consultation clients “Benson’s Fictioneers” (Unsworth 9), a sardonic and somewhat derogatory name implying that these writers produce low-quality work compared to Benson’s own finely tuned—if currently nonexistent—prose style. They are pretenders who do not know enough about literature to know that their work is poorly executed. These writers, however, represent different kinds of social and economic oppression. They are Miss Jennifer Colomb, a well-groomed spinster who writes drama into her life with anachronistic historical romance; Hogan, a middle manager trying to understand his divorce and his redundancy by writing an endless autobiography; Carter, a patriotic retired builder who is unable to finish his six hundred-page novel; Anthea, an angry young poet in flight from her suffocating middle-class family; and Elroy Palmer, a young Black man with dreadlocks who writes science fiction. Excepting Palmer, Benson sees no merit in the work of any of the Fictioneers. Benson understands his job to be improving their writing, but improvement requires them to live up to his idea of authorship—it does not require Benson to recognize them as subjects of another narrative. In Carter’s case, this trap takes sartorial form. Benson wonders why Carter’s writing becomes “more and more muffled and meandering” as Carter begins to dress the part of a stereotypical author: “the black felt hat, the knee-length, ginger-coloured overcoat.… He had been reading literary theory too” (Unsworth 49). Carter, trying on the identity of author, loses his own voice. The Fictioneers, in turn, illustrate Benson’s investment in the monitory role of the author-function. They submit work, but they do not pay Benson regularly for his services: they acknowledge his right to critique and dismiss their work but they refuse to validate that right through the exchange of capital. As the novel progresses, they challenge his status as cultural arbiter with increasing frequency. For example, Benson is unable to identify “a very complicated pun” in one of Anthea’s poems, but Hogan gives a fluent and thorough explication of what he names and

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honors as “a feminist poem” (Unsworth 85). In acknowledging the value in each other’s stories, the two Fictioneers alter their subjectivity: they emerge from Benson’s cast of quirky characters to become more fully developed beings with interiority and flexibility. As Hogan interprets the poem, “his face [loses] some of that terrible stiffness” because his interpretation is validated by Anthea rather than dismissed, as would be usual with Benson. Likewise, the poet Anthea “look[s] at him [Hogan] like the first woman looking at the first man … ‘Are you a writer too?’ ” (Unsworth 85). These two Fictioneers lay claim to a subject position— “writer”—that Benson had denied them. Is this, perhaps, a new world order of writers? Howard and Anthea prove to be more adequate audiences for each other than Benson has been; rather than deferring to his authority, they begin to connect around him in order to validate their own stories. This new world order of authorship becomes specifically postcolonial in the case of Elroy Palmer, whom Benson deems his “most promising” Fictioneer (Unsworth 95). Palmer’s character represents the postcolonial author and his science fiction novel contains postcolonial themes. In Palmer’s novel, the hero Zircon is assigned to kill Jarrold, the hermaphrodite ruler of Planet Gareg, who insists that every object have straight lines and angles. Palmer initially impresses Benson with his “determination and a strong sense of literary vocation” (Unsworth 95), but Palmer refuses to allow Benson to make a protégé of him. Like the other Fictioneers, he challenges Benson’s criticism on all points. However, his resistance is less defensive than perfunctory; Palmer listens to both praise and criticism with a sense of a priori narration. Whatever Benson says, Palmer seems to have heard it before, as if he and Benson are enmeshed in a story that has already been told. During one meeting, Palmer responds to Benson’s critique with silence: “He said nothing in reply to Benson’s comment, merely nodded slowly in full agreement. There was a certainty about Elroy which was impressive” (Unsworth 95). Given previous evidence that Benson’s interpretations of the Fictioneers’ writings are limited, his assertions of “certainty” and “agreement” with regard to Palmer are suspicious. Certainly, his interpretation is open to other readings.


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Benson reads Palmer as his counterpart, the “other” writer, yet Palmer’s silent compliance masks a very different literary vision from that of Benson. Furthermore, Palmer does not bring his whole manuscript to Benson, refusing to surrender the whole story for inspection. Benson therefore must ask questions based on his own literary expertise, and Palmer uses these speculations to wrong-foot Benson. For example, when Benson compliments Palmer on a fight scene but suggests that killing Jarrold with a curved knife would be poetic justice, Palmer corrects him by filling in the backstory: “They talked a lot about it on Vekrona before Zircon set off…. They understood it had to be the right symbol.… Jarrold sentenced [sic] to die by his own excesses. He is killed by what he loves too much” (Unsworth 124). Jarrold, in other words, is killed not by resistance but by a deadly compliance. Moreover, the backstory suggests that the colonized have been talking for quite a long time—“they talked a lot about it on Vekrona”—about the logic of the imperialists. Palmer’s articulate self-possession eventually convinces Benson that he must acknowledge Palmer as a fellow author rather than a supplicant. When Benson concludes his consultancy, he offers to remain a resource for Palmer: “I would regard it as an honour,” Benson says (Unsworth 125). Although Benson genuinely means to help Elroy Palmer, he is also implicitly putting him off. This is evident in Benson’s judgment of the hero Zircon, judgment which may equally apply to Palmer: “Here was a man in the remote future, bubbling with lethal laughter, about to act, to break out, to restore the world” (Unsworth 125). The emphasis on “remote future” seems to augur a slow death for metropolitan cultural authority. The world in which Palmer might find an audience is yet to come, not least because of “the usual vagaries of grammar and syntax” in Palmer’s imperfect English (Unsworth 123). Contemporary publishing in the English language is brokered almost entirely through the major cities of the Western world, and as an industry it continues to require some adherence to standard English. Although Benson excuses this language as “Elroy’s language” and recognizes it as effective for his work (Unsworth 123), evidence in other parts of the book indicates that Elroy

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Palmer’s work will remain marginal. Benson’s recognition of a marginalized author in a marginal genre—science fiction—is a start, though his wish that the “other” restore the world seems utopian. However, the remote future of a single-author text is not the only future offered by Sugar and Rum. Another model, that of coalition, is offered through a parallel thread in the plot that involves Benson’s search for the truth about his experiences in World War II Italy. While in the military, Benson had played a woman in a cabaret-style show organized by Slater, his commanding officer, as part of an initiative to improve morale. Through a series of coincidences, Benson learns that Slater is now a wealthy businessman with aspirations to knighthood, living on a large estate outside Liverpool. He is still putting on shows, and his current production, contemporaneous with the novel’s setting, is a spectacle commemorating and reenacting the Battle of Brunanburh in the year 937. The site of the battle lies “somewhere between here [his estate] and the river,” by Slater’s reckoning.7 According to Slater, the battle represents the earliest manifestation of England’s national unity. “Athelstan was the first Saxon King to have effective rule over the whole of England,” Slater contends. “The army he was commanding was an English army … fighting as one nation to repel the foreign invader” (Unsworth 178–179). Slater’s vision of England is xenophobic and probably racist, and he is decidedly blind to the oppression and violence involved in creating “the whole of England.” As he had during World War II, Slater attempts to get Benson to perform for him—this time as a sycophantic journalist promoting the show for his old commander. Powerless to counteract Slater’s reconstruction of history, Benson turns from his role in the author-function and suggests a coalition between himself and the newly liberated Fictioneers with the aim of disrupting the spectacle. Though Benson initiates the plan, the Fictioneers quickly take over, leaving Benson breathless as they collectively spin out the plot: “ ‘Now wait a minute—’ Benson beg[ins]” (Unsworth 234). The apprentice writers become joint authors of the plan, and Benson soon surrenders his role as originator and arbiter to the imagination of the group. Together they stage a fake attack—a smoke


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bomb—on a pageant that “fakes” the history of England. They succeed, but the narrative takes pains to indicate the limits of this victory. The participants scatter afterward, and Slater’s “terrible … inextinguishable gaze” (Unsworth 246), momentarily blinded, will clearly soon return to its wonted position of observation, direction, and control. The novel ends by suggesting that collective action by artists may temporarily interrupt the use of art to maintain political power, but the relationship between art and power is easily resurrected. Sugar and Rum, then, tells the familiar story of resistance to and reassertion of control, but it does end without forcing the reader (or Benson) into “witnessing [Slater’s] resurrection” (Unsworth 246). This ending leaves Benson’s future as a writer in doubt, although his identity as an avatar for Unsworth is secure. History shows that Unsworth himself overcame his block and produced the novel Sacred Hunger in 1992. The link between Barry Unsworth and his fictional counterpart invites reflection on the author-function as a method of cultural control in postcolonial Britain. For example, the Booker Prize, awarded to both Sacred Hunger and The English Patient in 1992, has been criticized as exploiting a market for the postcolonial exotic in both content and authorship. Graham Huggan, among others, has claimed that the apparent “revisionist critique” of empire contained in many Booker-winning texts “masks a revivalist ideology” that, in fact, reinvigorates the power dynamics of colonization in the postcolonial period (420). Ironically, the company which established the prize, Booker McConnell, owes its initial prosperity to plantation monoculture in the Caribbean basin (Huggan 414–415). And yet, like Benson’s unwelcome narrations of the slave trade with respect to Liverpudlian history (Keen 112), Sacred Hunger seems like an unwelcome prize winner. It does not negotiate revision into revival, and it is not sexy. According to a review from The Independent, the novel— one and a half inches thick in paper and morose in tone—is “not really the sort of book one is inclined to pick up” (Rabinovitch and Quinn 17). The novel does not engage in the pyrotechnics of history and satire that are characteristic of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, nor does it

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contain the impressionistic romance of Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient. Certainly, Sacred Hunger did not see a Booker-related sales bump equivalent to that enjoyed by The English Patient (Todd 109). Sugar and Rum, published four years earlier than Sacred Hunger, anticipates this situation. In Sugar and Rum, Unsworth raises the questions of audience and cultural authority that swirl around the Booker’s ability to name, validate, and lionize an author. He asks what kind of books an author must write in order to fit into the established accounts of the British empire, and about which facts an author must be “mum”—to return to Cowper—in order to acquire the status and identity of an author. Through the figures of Benson’s listeners and the Fictioneers, Unsworth raises the question of what it means to claim the authority, however well intentioned, to tell someone else’s story. Sugar and Rum is also, above all, “semi-autobiographical,” but perhaps not in the sense that its book jacket intends. Because it partially textualizes the author Unsworth as Clive Benson, it invites a close reading of the role and function of literary institutions in maintaining or reiterating British dominance. Implicitly, it asks which voices are denied, obscured, or co-opted in order to preserve the name of author for a few. The question becomes not whether Elroy Palmer could ever win the Booker Prize, but when, why, and under what conditions his authorship would be validated. Would this validation signal the end of Jarrold’s empire, or just the beginning?


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WORKS CITED

Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” Trans. Stephen Heath. Image, Music, Text. New York: Farrar & Straus, 1977. Repr. in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. New York: Norton, 2001. 1466–1470. Trans. of “La mort de l’Auteur.” Le Bruissement de la Langue. Paris: Seuil, 1984. 61–67. Print. Foucault, Michel. “What is an Author?” Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977. Repr. in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. New York: Norton, 2001: 1622–1636. Trans. of “Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?” Bulletin de la Société française de Philosophie 63.3 (1969): 73–104. Print. Huggan, Graham. “Prizing ‘Otherness’: A Short History of the Booker.” Studies in the Novel 29.3 (Fall 1997): 412–433. Print. Keen, Suzanne. Romances of the Archive in Contemporary British Fiction. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 2001. Print. Marcus, Jane. Hearts of Darkness. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004. Print. Mardorossian, Carine. “Shutting Up the Subaltern: Silences, Stereotypes, and Double-Entendre in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea.” Callaloo 22.4 (1999): 1071–1090. Project MUSE. Glatfelter Library, Penn State York. Web. 22 May 2006. . Rabinovitch, Dina, and Anthony Quinn. “The Booker: Two for the Prize of One.” The Independent (15 Oct. 1992): 17. Lexis-Nexis Academic Universe. Glatfelter Library, Penn State York. Web. 9 March 2005. . Todd, Richard. Consuming Fictions: The Booker Prize and Fiction in Britain Today. London: Bloomsbury, 1996. Print. Unsworth, Barry. Sacred Hunger. 1992. New York: Norton, 1993. Print. ———. Sugar and Rum. 1988. New York: Norton, 1999. Print.

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CHAPTER 3

THE BREADCRUMB TRAIL NINETEENTH-CENTURY CHILD HAUNTINGS IN THE NOVELS OF PETER RUSHFORTH AND SHIRLEY GEOK-LIN LIM Anca Vlasopolos

During the nineteenth century, the “discovery” of childhood led to conflicts between those arguing for rights over children and those advocating nascent children’s rights. These conflicts, never resolved, appear in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century literary works by Peter Rushforth and Shirley Geok-Lin Lim. Lim’s first novel, Joss and Gold (2001), centers on children who are products of points of contact between cultures and who therefore embody in exacerbated ways colonial issues of ownership. Rushforth’s second novel, Pinkerton’s Sister (2005), brings the colonial mentality into the late nineteenth-century home, so that both White daughter and young Black servant become subjects of mastery

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exercised globally. Rushforth’s earlier novel Kindergarten (1980) sets the issue of children as chattel in the contexts of both the Holocaust and late twentieth-century political terrorism in which children are used as hostages. The British 1830s Parliamentary inquiries into the labor market and its exploitative use of children born into the lower social classes resulted in the 1833 and 1842 Factory Laws, a set of legislation that prohibited young-child labor and restricted older-child labor. At about the same time, agitation for women’s rights in the West began to raise questions about the disposition of children in cases of marital separation; so-called ownership of children presented a problem that has yet to be satisfactorily addressed. In the second half of the nineteenth century, prompted by the rise of the pseudosciences of anthropometrics and eugenics, the issue of mixed races became central to judicial, parliamentary, congressional, and cultural decisions about citizenship and rights. By the 1840s, the United States had already passed laws prohibiting miscegenation in response to rising numbers of mixed-race children. In the cases of colonial nations, contact between Europeans and colonized peoples both in colonized nations and at home had produced métissage. The national identities of such children became the subject of intense debate, and so it remains. Note, for example, the puzzlement of the British over the bombing of the London Underground on 7 July 2005, perpetrated by youths born and bred in England, and that of the French with respect to the unrest that led to loss of life and property in the fall of 2005, unrest that was fomented by young Muslims of North African descent native to France. The representations of childhood most relevant to children themselves were the multitudes of fairy-tale books available to children through sanitized versions of folktales produced in both France and Germany throughout the nineteenth century. The Grimm brothers’ tales, for example, introduced middle-class children to some common realities of poor children’s lives. Unsupervised childhood as depicted in “Little Red Riding Hood,” for example, may have seemed desirable to youngsters under the constant surveillance of servants, governesses, and other adults,

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but it also acquainted children with the predatory nature of the outside world, whether manifested in dangers lurking in the woods or simply in the social system that prevailed both within and outside the home. As for representations of children as pawns of empire, the plot of Puccini’s opera Madama Butterfly reverberates throughout the work of both Rushforth and Lim: the opera ends with the Japanese woman’s suicide, provoked in part because her mixed-race child is being claimed by her American husband, Benjamin Pinkerton, and his “real” American wife. In Rushforth’s Pinkerton’s Sister, the issue of children as property moves into the Pinkerton household itself, where the young Ben Pinkerton’s character is formed years before his travels to Japan. The novel’s controlling consciousness, however, is that of Ben’s sister, Alice. Foreshadowing the betrayal and child-snatching in Madama Butterfly, the novel unfolds like a detective story that leads to the disclosure that a White child and a Black child laborer are both being sexually used by the “master.” By contrast, Shirley Lim’s 2001 novel Joss and Gold addresses Puccini’s plot from a feminist perspective: métissage in the “Orient” is certainly a problem, but child nurturing—primarily by women of a newly formed nation such as Singapore—triumphs over societal constraints. Yet, even this feminist novel is haunted by the colonial past and the cultural memory of Madama Butterfly. These late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century novels, dependent culturally and intercontextually on past representations of children’s lives, lead to a consideration of the fate of children in today’s world; children’s race or nationality is still debated to their detriment and, more importantly, people have not stopped the practice of “owning” children. In both novels, as in Puccini’s opera, the fate of children is at stake, regardless of their status as either family members or domestic servants. The ineffectual motherhood of nineteenth-century plots, which Rushforth replicates in Pinkerton’s Sister, contrasts with the powerful mothering facilitated by a thriving postcolonial Singapore in Lim’s novel, a place where women have access to higher education and lucrative professions, and one child, at least, escapes victimization by the traditional trap of bartering and property claims.

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In his novel, Rushforth returns to the late Victorian era, and his narrator speaks from the dawn of the twentieth century. In fin de siècle New York, the “Shipping Merchant’s Daughter” (Rushforth 644), Alice Pinkerton, is not yet between Virginia Woolf’s “devil and the deep sea,” the choice between the home or a profession—the choice that was a woman’s lot: “Behind us lies the patriarchal system; the private house, with its nullity, its immorality, its hypocrisy, its servility. Before us lies the public world, the professional system, with its possessiveness, its jealousy, its pugnacity, its greed” (Woolf 74). Alice is caught only in the “private house,” where she becomes the “madwoman in the attic”8—except that, as she points out, the prison that holds Bertha (the imprisoned Creole madwoman) is not the attic but the third-floor schoolroom where the young, like the colonial subject, are taught acquiescence to patriarchy and capitalism. The schoolroom is also the place where the children’s rebellions, like Dorian Gray’s secret, can grow to monstrous proportions within the frame of that patriarchic, capitalistic apparatus. Alice becomes intimately familiar with the sacred tree of property, to which her father sacrifices her. The double domestic violence—perpetrated against the fourteenyear-old Black maid, Annie, by Mr. Pinkerton and against the young Alice (his oldest and plainest daughter) by both Pinkerton and his “friend,” as he is called in the text—leads to the thirty-five-year-old Alice’s elaborate fantasies of revenge. The book could be characterized as an avenger’s tragedy from a postmodern perspective, for the modes of revenge Alice dreams of range from variations on the revenge plots of Jacobean drama to collages of high culture, advertisements, music-hall songs, and drawing-room entertainments. The avenger comes to little good herself—in the end, she voluntarily enters a Weir Mitchell–type institution—yet she continues to identify herself as a writer. Given that Rushforth had contemplated Pinkerton’s Sister as the first of a quintet, this work foreshadows Ben Pinkerton’s trips to Japan as well as, provisionally, Alice’s liberation from her prison-house full of memories— recollections of Annie and Alice’s father, the indifferent younger sisters, the absent brother, the ineffective mother—and an inner extension of the violence of empire building through the Pinkerton merchant fleet.


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Although Annie’s presumed death following a botched abortion occurs early in the novel (giving a perfect rationale to Alice’s fantasies of murder and mayhem against perpetuators of patriarchy), the story of Alice’s abuse, which precipitates Annie’s, unfolds gradually as Alice undergoes therapy: electric shock, massage, cloud reading, hypnosis, dream analysis. It is in resistance to these treatments—and especially to the therapist—that Alice recovers from her trauma. At the age of ten, Alice is offered in exchange for monetary gain to the “friend” whom Papa brings home whenever Alice’s mother and younger siblings are away. Having become literally an object of trade, Alice is being tossed more and more brutally back and forth between the men; they have begun undressing her when Annie walks in. Annie immediately understands the situation and attempts to intervene with a single repeated phrase: “Please, sir” (Rushforth 536). The two young girls are then taken by the men to the Celestial City, the unfinished set for a summer entertainment production based on The Pilgrim’s Progress. Alice stays with the “friend,” who begins with a phrenological examination of her head and moves down her body while “she [is] stone. She [is] bronze. She [is] a figure in a statue” (541); Annie is forced to go elsewhere with Papa, who then puts her through this catechism: “What will happen if you tell anyone what has happened?” “The wind will get me, sir.…” “And will you ever tell anyone what has happened?” “No, sir.” “You cannot escape from the wind. You know that, don’t you? Wherever you try to go, whatever you try to do, the wind will always find you. Even a gentle wind, even a breeze, barely enough to ruffle the leaves on the trees.” (549)

The abuse of the two girls is repeated over the course of more than a year. Alice is assaulted only once after Annie’s death, but relief is slow in coming: “nothing was said, there were no promises made to let her know that she was now free, that she need not sit in unmoving silence for those hours, and—for a long time, on into the summer and the following

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fall, for a year, for years, for long after Annie had gone—she continued to expect that Papa would find her, when she was alone, and tell her that she was going to the Celestial City” (546). Familial rape, abuse of African-American servants, and bartering children as sexual objects are all themes that have been sensationalized to such an extent that victimization can become a vehicle for voyeurism and profit. But Pinkerton’s Sister resists this trend in two ways. First, its challenging allusive style discourages seekers of scandalous literature. But more significantly, Alice’s searing wit and excoriating fantasies indict a social class that is sustained by capitalist exploitation and domestic terror. When, for example, Alice visits her grandfather’s office as a young child, she immediately perceives the drive for mastery that underlies the family’s (and the nation’s) enterprise: “There were maps covered in red on the walls, though the red was coloring not the land but the seas, showing the routes of the Occidental & Eastern Shipping Company’s steamships, as if this was the element he controlled. ‘He’s in his element’ … as he ran his fingers across the Pacific Ocean with practiced ease, spinning the globe with a sweep of his hand. It was like being in the headquarters of some great general, the place where he planned his battles and conquests” (39–40). Alice’s writerly mind makes the connection between one of the company’s “wooden sailing ships,” the Iphigenia, and the virgin sacrifice required by warlike nations and fathers. She recalls Iphigenia’s lines, “Dimly I could descry / The stern black-bearded kings with wolvish eyes, / Waiting to see me die,” and wryly comments, “You just knew that The Bearded Ones would have been there. It was the sort of thing they hated to miss” (46). In therapy later, the mature Alice considers the Ten Commandments and comes to similar conclusions about the culture in which she is forced to live: “Honor—Should that be ‘Honour’? Would King James have spelled it ‘Honour’?—thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee. That was the Fifth Commandment. Thou shalt not kill. That was the Sixth. Odd that those two should be placed one beneath the other” (390). Alice’s


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gallows humor, supported by myriad allusions to both the great literary works and the popular culture of the West, reveals that the exceptionalisms of pedophilia and child barter are features of Western culture that have been exported to conquered lands. The mixed-race child in Lim’s Joss and Gold begins in unpromising circumstances but meets with a fate much kinder than do the children in both Pinkerton’s Sister and Kindergarten. In a self-reflexive parody of Madama Butterfly, Lim’s female hero, Li-An, becomes enamored of an American Peace Corps worker in Kuala Lumpur. Li-An is already married to a man who shares her ethnicity, a Malay Chinese named Henry Yeh. All the young people—whether students, activists, journalists, researchers like Henry, or lecturers like Li-An—become caught up in the crisis of 1969, when the Chinese minority wins the election and the Malay majority revolts. Many Malay-Chinese are murdered and others are driven into exile. To the Anglophile Li-An, who trembles at the beauty of English poetry, the nationalist argument sounds frightening and sterile: “She remembered Abdullah’s gentle patient voice explaining his vision of a single [Malay] people. For separation to be nurtured, there couldn’t be the possibility of love. Love broke down the purity of a vision of singleness. Hatred, then, was preferable to the breaking of the single self, to the possibility of a tearing down of race” (Lim 71). In response to the persecution of the Chinese minority, to Henry’s inattention to her, and to her Malay-Chinese friend Gina’s suicide after a failed relationship with a Malay Indian, Li-An begins spending time with Chester Brookfield. Chester attempts to radicalize her by mocking both her teaching English literature to “natives” and her idealism with respect to Malaysia. When she argues, “Give us a few more years and we’ll be a totally new nation. No more Malay, Chinese, Indian, but all one people,” he replies, “[Y]ou almost sound like an American” (35). As her relationship with Chester becomes secretive because Henry adjures that she should not spend time alone with the American, Li-An finds herself drawn to Chester, who introduces her to American poetry and current events, such as the US campus protests against the Vietnam

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War. On the fateful evening of May 13, they are together at Chester’s home when riots break out in Kuala Lumpur and a curfew is imposed. Henry is stuck at his lab, and Li-An at Chester’s apartment. Li-An and Chester engage in sexual intercourse for the first and, as it turns out, the last time. For Li-An, Chester’s lovemaking is a revelation of his feelings: “It was only then that she knew he loved her after all” (80). The aftermath is bitter. During that night, Henry’s father is murdered. The father’s “second wife”—that is, his mistress, Auntie—moves in with Henry and Li-An and remains frightened of being alone for the rest of her life. Li-An keeps waiting for Chester to take action so that she can free herself of Henry: “She knew [Chester] was planning something for them, something wonderful. No man could touch a woman as he had her without love, and love had inevitable consequences” (86). The consequences prove merely to be Li-An’s pregnancy and the awareness that she had mistaken good sex for love. Instead of a tearful and tragic farewell, however, Li-An chooses irony and silence. The second part of the novel presents Chester’s American life. Chester acquiesces to his wife’s demand that he undergo a vasectomy. A chance meeting with someone from his Malaysian past reminds Chester that he does have a child—with Li-An, somewhere in Asia—about whom he has heard only through friends because Li-An was resolute in not telling him about her pregnancy. As a result of his pressing desire for paternity, Chester manages to obtain a fellowship to Singapore, to which city he learns that Li-An has relocated. Chester’s return, however, affords him no claim upon the child, a plot twist that emphasizes the defeated position of American imperialism in Asia. This is no longer the world of Madama Butterfly but the hard-edged, ultramodern, multicultural megalopolis of Singapore, in which people of mixed race are not unusual and American men can no longer whisk away children they have fathered without the mothers’ consent. The remarkable arrangement in Li-An’s household (a family of only women, two of whom are professionals of the same age— although they are not lovers—and includes a grandmother figure who is not related by blood to the women or the child) is also thoroughly twenty-first century, without gothic shadows engulfing the girl Suyin.


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Yet Suyin’s childhood is not entirely free of the suffering visited upon children of uncertain origin whose bodies bear no clear marks of race that identify them as offspring of their parents. When Li-An gives birth to a baby with red hair and green eyes, Henry walks away from the hospital and never comes back. Li-An finds Henry’s actions incomprehensible. She believes that Henry would have had a beautiful, loving daughter if he had accepted the child, and events prove that Li-An’s perception is not just hormone-induced optimism, for motherhood can be reimagined and reenacted. Henry’s stepmother, Auntie, sides with Li-An—she never sees in Suyin any racial ambiguity, only beauty—and Li-An’s best friend, Ellen, becomes a second mother to the child. The four-female family relocates to Singapore, where Li-An obtains a high-level job in a financial corporation. Thus, Suyin grows up without a father but with two mothers and a grandmother. As for the world outside the home, Suyin is subjected to classmates’ racial taunts as well as to impertinent queries about her parentage; Li-An continually moves her to different schools in an attempt to spare the child pain. Yet Suyin—tall, beautiful, and bright—surrounded by Auntie’s assurances that the taunts are due to jealousy, seems to keep her interior life intact despite this violence. When Suyin’s American father arrives, Li-An (after some hesitation) allows Suyin to meet him, without telling her that Chester is her father. The child, aged eleven at this point, soon comes to the correct conclusion, but she remains calm and eschews melodrama, enjoying outings with Chester and looking forward to the fulfillment of his promise that she should visit the United States some day. Nevertheless, Chester’s daydreams of adopting Suyin are completely unrealistic. If his daughter were to come to the United States, she would arrive as a citizen of Singapore, in full possession of financial assets superior to those held by most young Americans. Chester’s fatherhood is thus irrelevant to Suyin’s identity. Moreover, when Auntie dies, Henry reappears on the scene as the executor of her will. He is remarried and has a baby daughter of his own, but he accepts the role of a surrogate father to Suyin. He picks her up from school, and after his appearance, the racial taunts from Suyin’s

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schoolmates cease—as if all that was needed was a man in the role of father to quell questions of origin and legitimacy. Henry grows close to Suyin, who is the only one of the women who understands the complicated arrangements that he is making on her behalf with her grandmother’s fortune, all of which has been left to Suyin. When Henry leaves for Kuala Lumpur, promising to return, Suyin fully expects him to remain in her life. She is also serene about Chester’s comings and goings, knowing that she will visit the United States at some point and perhaps even attend university there. As Li-An reflects in the end, “nothing she lived through was ever finally over. This thought struck her with a conviction that was oddly comforting” (264). It is not an unproblematic conclusion, however, for Li-An also reproaches herself: “Her daughter would have to count her blessings among women, for she had failed in one of the most important duties of a mother, which was to find a father for her child” (262). The ending for Suyin, however, is an extended family that includes not only two mothers and—for most of her childhood—a grandmother, but also two putative fathers. Each man has his own continental knowledge to offer without, however, being able to possess her. The operatic ending of Madama Butterfly, the child’s being torn from the dying body of his mother, is tempered in Joss and Gold to an “oddly comforting” postmodern conclusion about biological and invented kinship and about children choosing to love, choosing to stay, and—eventually—choosing to leave. In Kindergarten, his first novel, Rushforth examines the lives of children: in this book as in “Hansel and Gretel,” children are chattel that require disposal in times of crisis; like the girls of “Fitcher’s Bird” (the Grimms’ version of “Bluebeard”), children can also be repositories of the degeneracy of race and religion and thus destined for extinction in the crises of race and imperial dominion that gripped Europe on the eve of World War II.9 In a late twentieth-century twist, children in the present become pawns of political terrorism. In the Grimms’ tale and the modern version alike, the father is helpless to save the children from their fate, and the children who survive do so through their own resilience, thereby dispelling sentimental Victorian notions of childhood.


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The protagonist of Kindergarten is Corrie, the oldest of three sons of a schoolmaster father and a physician mother; the family lives in an English village, in rooms connected to the school. One day Corrie discovers in the music room a neglected door—rather like Bluebeard’s forbidden door—behind which are scattered old files containing school records and documents from the 1930s. Corrie makes this discovery only about a year after he discovers the true identity of his own paternal grandmother, Lilli Danielsohn, whom he had known previously only as Lilli. Corrie’s own identity comes into question with this new knowledge, especially as he begins to identify with the children who sought asylum in the English school during the 1930s: He had a secret, sort of, about himself.… he was Jewish, and he had not known it until two years ago. As Lilli was Jewish, then, by the rulings of Germany in the 1930s, he himself—Gentile and uncircumcised—was also Jewish, a Mischling, Second Degree, a child with one Jewish grandparent, descent through the female line being Jewish Law. It was something inside himself, something in his blood. (40)

Corrie also discovers that his grandmother had been a famous illustrator of children’s books, which were burned in 1933; she had come to England as a refugee. But “[l]ike the girl bound to silence in ‘The Six Swans,’ ” Lilli has hidden her past in silence. Only after her husband’s death does she begin to talk to her English family about her past. After a stroke that temporarily disables her, she begins a double process of recovery through painting and speaking. Lilli’s grandsons, who live a privileged life of high culture and of seeming serenity at the very school where hundreds of Jewish parents had attempted to send their children for refuge during the 1930s, find themselves—like children in fairy tales—bereft of their mother, temporarily without their father, and socially lacking the sense of safety that is often imagined as the ideal condition of childhood. The book is set during the Christmas season, a holiday celebrated in the boys’ home and in Lilli’s—regardless of the degree of their Jewishness. Their mother’s

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grave is within sight of the boys’ windows; pregnant with a fourth child, she had been murdered in a terrorist takeover at the airport in Rome the previous spring. Their father is in the United States, raising money for victims of terrorism. Their grandmother, Lilly, is preparing a German Christmas, “possibly inaccurate, a creation from books and research, not from memory” (40). The boys are riveted by the unfolding news on television of the Red Brigade’s assault on an elementary school in Germany, where children, along with some teachers, are being held hostage. One mother is shot to death trying to reach her child. In a contrapuntal pattern, Rushforth weaves together news reports of the unfolding hostage crisis, variants of “Hansel and Gretel,” fragments of the war letters pleading for asylum for Jewish-German children in the English school, and passages from other children’s tales, such as “Fitcher’s Bird” and “The Wolf and the Seven Little Kids.” The collage is a meditation on both the promise and the threat of these tales and of late twentieth-century life for children everywhere, seen through the children’s perspective and through the lens of the desperate Jewish construction of an ideal England from the distance of 1930s Germany. Corrie knows as he reads the postcards and letters from Germany in chronological order that he is “at the beginning of a story of which he already kn[ows] the ending” (112). Contrasting the Grimm brothers’ stories, in which “the innocent and pure in heart always seemed to triumph,” with Hans Christian Andersen’s inexorably dark endings, Corrie remembers being “drawn, compulsively, to read them [the Andersen tales] with engrossed attention”; his sorrow grows as he realizes “what the inevitable and unchanged end of the story would be”: “the little match-girl … frozen to death … the little mermaid melted into foam … the steadfast tin soldier and the ballerina” burned in the stove (112). The motif of burned bodies moves the story almost seamlessly from “Hansel and Gretel” to the Holocaust. In fact, a variation on “Hansel and Gretel” that appears in Kindergarten has the witch succeeding first in burning Gretel to death—having cut off the little girl’s tresses and having forced her to strip herself of her clothes and gold chain—and then in cooking Hansel: “She put Gretel’s


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chain and Hansel’s ring in the room with all the other jewelry, and then walked back to the kitchen, and towards the oven, drooling with anticipation. Today was going to be a feast day” (145). This inversion serves as a stark contrast to the German Christmas prepared by Lilli, who for the first time shows her grandsons a picture of her family of twentyseven, of whom she is the sole survivor. Corrie “thought of those in the empty room next door, rooms in which families sat quietly together, the doors closed against the outside world, a world which would force open those doors and destroy all that is found inside after it had taken what it wanted” (174–175). Yet, the doors of the boys’ home does not offer even the illusion of safety. The television screen ushers in the corpse of the mother who tried to reach her child, the hostage of so-called activists who mock the Holocaust as a myth. The music shop in London where the middle boy, Jo, bought a recording of the Saint Matthew Passion for his mother sold it cheaply because its box had been damaged by “an incendiary bomb” (76). Corrie remembers the trip on which the boys were taken to see Romeo and Juliet: Corrie spots a man in the next row leaving a package beneath the seat before disappearing from the theater; the boy sits in terror “as the Montagues and Capulets [are] reconciled with tears over the bodies of their children.” He is “thinking only of the green Marks & Spencer carrier-bag.… Beneath the surface of everyday life, nothing was as it seemed, and mutilation could lurk beneath the commonplace: a car, a pillar-box, an unattended parcel, an envelope with unfamiliar handwriting” (77). This is the world that humanity has made for its children. Despite the terrible circumstances of the mother’s murder, of the hostage children, of the not-so-distant past horrors of the Holocaust, and of the anticipated (if sometimes averted) horrors of the children’s tales, Kindergarten offers a more conciliatory view of humanity than the collage might suggest—a humanity united against empire and dominion. Jo tells his grandmother that in “The Wolf and the Seven Kids,” the miller, who suspects that the wolf means to harm someone by disguising himself in flour, nonetheless agrees to help the beast because he is afraid. Jo concludes, “That is what mankind is like” (178). His grandmother, in turn,

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points to the table laden with Christmas and birthday treats and shows Jo that the silver and the plates are the same as those in the photograph of her exterminated family. In the setting of their “impure,” non-Aryan home, Lilli tells the boys about the Germans who not only helped her recover some of her family’s possessions but who also took great risks to protect the persecuted people: “They were just our neighbours saying that something was wrong and should not happen, and some of them died for believing this” (182). The novel ends with the definitive version of “Hansel and Gretel,” in which the children defeat the witch and return to their father with riches from the witch’s store so as to avoid being abandoned in the woods during a future economic crisis (this is an effort toward self-preservation rather than a nod to the capitalist enterprise). Both Kindergarten and Joss and Gold offer a tempered, tentative, ironic optimism with respect to global humanity and a mixed, nonimperial space in which children, traditionally without rights, can find not necessarily a traditional home but nevertheless a locus for love and connection to humanity—in contrast to Rushforth’s more uncompromising vision in Pinkerton’s Sister, where there appears to be no such space. At the same time, all three contemporary novels insist on the huge burden of literary and historical tradition of the dispossession and exploitation of children: they do not allow readers to forget that the monsters in the home are fed by the monstrous apparatus of the global politics that inexorably govern the fates of children.


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WORKS CITED

Gilbert, Sandra, and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979. Print. Haase, Donald. “Children, War, and the Imaginative Space of Fairy Tales.” The Lion and the Unicorn 24.3 (2000): 360–377. Print. Lim, Shirley Geok-Lin. Joss and Gold. New York: Feminist Press, 2001. Print. Rushforth, Peter. Kindergarten. New York: Knopf, 1980. Print. ———. Pinkerton’s Sister. San Francisco: MacAdam/Cage, 2005. Print. Woolf, Virginia. Three Guineas. 1938. New York, London, San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1966. Print.

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CHAPTER 4

DISORDERED IDENTITIES VIRGINIA WOOLF, JACQUES DERRIDA, AND THE PROBLEM OF THE IMPERIAL I Andrea L. Yates

The problematizations of I that are at work in Jacques Derrida’s Monolingualism of the Other or the Prosthesis of Origin (1996) and in Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas (1938)10 consider how the self can be defined from the position of, or in relation to, the “other” in the context of a specific relation to empire. Both Woolf, a marginalized subject of the British Empire living in its capital , and Derrida, a subject of French colonization in North Africa, approach the problem of identity through a self/other paradigm that is defined through differing relationships to imperialism. This paradigm is structurally played out through a performative, dialogic relationship with an envisioned interlocutor, but these two texts are equally invested in considerations of the relationship between the proper

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name and the narrator. National identity, citizenship, and educational institutions are at issue for both authors as their texts perform arguments rather than pontificate on these issues. “How does one utter a worthwhile ‘I recall,’ ” Derrida asks in Monolingualism of the Other, “when it is necessary to invent both one’s language and one’s ‘I,’ to invent them at the same time?” (30). Despite the autobiographical narrative that comprises the text, Derrida’s attention to the invention of I has already set into crisis what it means to hear such a first-person account. And, inasmuch as he is also calling into question his very language, both the author and his mother tongue are deconstructed in radical ways. Woolf, in her 1938 polemic Three Guineas, creates her own kind of persona around the I of her text, and crucial to the explosion of the I for each thinker is its relation to the persona of the you. The critique of imperial alterity produced by reading Woolf and Derrida into one another has social and political consequences for what it means to be in the here and now.11 Woolf’s Three Guineas and Derrida’s Monolingualism of the Other do work explicitly that is done implicitly in such texts as Derrida’s The Post Card and Woolf’s The Years: they problematize the self/ other relationship (between persons as well as concepts), and through this problematization they develop a critical approach to the other that is crucial to being in the world. As an ostensive reproduction of an epistolary correspondence displayed under the heading “Envois,” The Post Card is a study in what it means to be “other.” Like Monolingualism, “Envois” enacts a performative, dialogic relationship with an interlocutor who remains unseen by the reader. Woolf considered her novel The Years part of the same project as Three Guineas. She records in her diary on 3 June 1938, “the end of six years floundering, striving, much agony, some ecstasy: lumping the Years & 3 G’s together as one book—as indeed they are” (Woolf, Diary 148). The Years, in fact, presents characterological figurations of concepts that she philosophizes in Three Guineas. In Monolingualism of the Other, as in Three Guineas, this critical approach to the other is specifically produced through a critique of empire in the rubrics of national identity and education.

Disordered Identities

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Derrida’s text explodes the issue of identity, for it relies on its author’s own self-identification(s) as a French/Jewish/Algerian colonial subject, even as it brings the notions of self and identification into crisis. The narrative proceeds autobiographically but always understands that identity “is not reducible to an abstract capacity to say ‘I.’ ” That is, the I that Derrida refers to is one that has been produced and informed by his status as colonized in relation to imperialism. Woolf’s narrative, meanwhile, addresses the singularity of the individual I with respect to the universal voice that empire assumes (male, educated, etc.) and the nationhood with which it is inextricably linked. As Derrida notes in The Gift of Death, “[o]nce I speak I am never and no longer myself” (Derrida, Gift of Death 60). The effects of calling attention to the self as self through language are set into sharp relief by Woolf’s The Waves, specifically, through the figure of Percival, the only main character in the novel who never speaks—that is, who has no relation to himself as I. In this novel, which represents the lives of seven friends through their varying first-person accounts, only Percival is spoken about but never speaks. This is interesting considering Percival’s position as a representative of the British Empire. Percival is a strong, well-liked man who travels to India while serving in the military, where he is thrown from a horse and killed. Thus, the character that most embodies established British ideals is given no language by Woolf, and those who are marginalized or, as Woolf will say in Three Guineas, outsiders—women, homosexuals, and immigrants, for example—are given language: they have a relation to themselves as I. Implicit in both Woolf’s and Derrida’s problematizations of identity is what Derrida calls the disorder of identity, which is caused, for example, by the ability and inclination of nations to impose their identities on and remove those identities from colonized subjects in the form of citizenship. This is significant for Woolf since Percival represents the British ideal of citizenship—male and upper class—and supports Imperial concerns in India. This issue is also a critical tool which highlights the assumptions made by and around conceptions of any way of knowing the self and hearing the other as I. Woolf questions the existence

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of separable characters in The Waves when she writes in her diary on 8 October 1931, “Odd that they [The Times] should praise my characters when I meant to have none” (47). This absence of characters implies that they—indeed we as readers—are separable from identity in some way. The voices in The Waves lack narrative form in that there is an absence of characterological description, which readers are likely to expect; Woolf wonders whether the book will “be a failure from the reader’s point of view” (Woolf, Diary 8). This absence of the kind of narration one might typically expect from a novel creates the feeling that there is no narrator at all and thus has the effect of troubling the reader’s perception of the I behind the text. Often read for biographical details and in contexts of feminist studies and (more recently) postcolonial studies, Virginia Woolf’s political and philosophical work is too often ignored—that is, the ways in which her fiction is conscious of and in dialogue with social and historical moments are frequently ignored. A notable exception is the work of Stephen M. Barber, who reads Three Guineas, together with Woolf’s diary and letters, in an antibiographical fashion and problematizes the reception of her thought. “For all of its presaging force, though, Woolf’s political philosophy is identified by contemporary readers with ideas immeasurably less original and radical than Foucault’s, not to mention her own” (Barber 41). Yet, Woolf’s fiction does critical work that is implicitly political and philosophical because it encourages—indeed demands—an attitude of critical questioning. Woolf asks readers to question the world around them and what it means to be in that world by encouraging ways of reading, ways of thinking, and therefore, ways of being that surpass the kind of acquiescence to the axiomatic social systems which the characters in her novels critique. But this works both ways—Woolf recognizes the need for hospitality of the other over any other need and the risk of forgetting that results in another kind of acquiescence, the kind that leads to fascism.12 That is, any blind or thoughtless patriotism can lead to tyranny. Woolf, like Derrida (though not as explicitly), prefers the concept of hospitality to the idea of tolerance. “Pure and unconditional hospitality,


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hospitality itself,” Derrida argues, “opens or is in advance open to someone who is neither expected nor invited, to whomever arrives as an absolutely foreign visitor, as a new arrival, nonidentifiable and unforeseeable, in short, wholly other.” “Tolerance,” for Derrida and—I argue—for Woolf, is “careful, circumspect hospitality” (Derrida, “Autoimmunity” 129). For this reason, reading Woolf and Derrida together is germane and productive: both recognize the need for hospitality and the danger of forgetting, two concepts that are crucial not only to reading their respective texts but also to reading the world. And a crucial part of this world is, for Woolf as for Derrida, a relationship to empire upon which identity is built. For Woolf, that identity is as an outsider, forged from within the seat of imperial power; for Derrida, it is the identity of an outsider who can never be fully understood from the position of an insider. Yet, the similarities of their thought regarding empire are more striking than the differences, and these similarities stem from the figure of the I. One of the devastating effects of Derrida’s death in 2004 is the end of his consistent reading of texts and events, of texts as events, and of events as texts. Yet in a way there is no end, since, as the continued relevance of Woolf illustrates, what can be learned from thinkers outlasts their biological lives—another reason the I is in a problematic relationship to the name. “Only the name can inherit,” Derrida writes of Nietzsche, “and this is why the name, to be distinguished from the bearer, is always and a priori a dead man’s name, a name of death” (Derrida, Ear of the Other 7). Obituaries of Derrida call him “abstruse”13 and note the controversy that followed, for example, the relationship of his thought to that of Paul de Man or the legacy of deconstruction, about which the Boston Sunday Globe declares, “Neither criticism nor ‘hard’ philosophy, yet sharing aspects of both, deconstruction is loved by neither” (Roth C5). Yet, as Marco Roth states in the same obituary, some people “assume, mistakenly, that Jacques Derrida’s death means we no longer have to grapple with his ideas”; that assumption is “mistaken” exactly because the distinction between the name and the bearer allows the signature, and with it the thought, to persist beyond itself (Roth C5). Because Derrida’s

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thought is not about what to think but about how thought works—how to be critical—it, like the name, can be carried beyond itself. In Three Guineas and Monolingualism of the Other, the use of I and you articulates the relationship of the self to the other that is crucial to both thinkers and to this study of them. Additionally, through the dialogue with a specific political or historical moment, each text is at once singular and universal: the self and the other, like the specific historical moment and those personal moments that exist outside of it, are separate but also connected. These moments cannot be used as a template to deal with other moments but other, future moments can be approached with the kind of critical attitude and recognition of a hospitable approach to alterity that allows readings of the here and now. In the first pages of Three Guineas, Woolf discusses the person to whom her letter is being addressed.14 “In the first place let us draw what all letter-writers instinctively draw, a sketch of the person to whom the letter is being addressed” (Woolf, Three Guineas 3). Here, Woolf acknowledges the significance of an other: “Without someone warm and breathing on the other side of the page, letters are worthless. You, then, who ask the question [to whom the first of her letters is addressed] are a little grey on the temples; the hair is no longer thick on the top of your head. You have reached the middle years of life not without effort, at the Bar; but on the whole your journey has been prosperous.” In addition to this physical description, an attitude is also assigned to this interlocutor: “There is nothing parched, mean or dissatisfied in your expression. And without wishing to flatter you, your prosperity—wife, children, house— has been deserved” (3). With her stylized invention of the persona of the imagined interlocutor, Woolf draws attention to the fact that each I is also a you, each self also an other—even if that other is also part of the self, as in the case of author/narrator/arranger. That is, the relationship that Derrida delineates between the bearer and the name is itself a relation of self and other. When Woolf, in Three Guineas, describes an envisioned interlocutor, she is in effect confirming that the reverse is also true; the other she is addressing will also envision her I and the gap between the vision and the actuality must always be understood to exist.


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She thus questions the connection between the I who narrates this text and the name that signs it. Three Guineas draws constant attention to the you with whom its arranger is relational, a strategic move that plays out in Derrida as well. “But, as you will point out, the daughters of educated men may have possessed another kind of influence—one that was independent of wealth and rank, of wine, food, dress, and all the other amenities that make the great houses of the great ladies so seductive” (Woolf, Three Guineas 14). This attention to the you, to the “other” as “other”— without whom the letter writing would be worthless—is evident in many other passages throughout the text; for example (when Woolf refers to her interlocutor directly), “[h]ere you will say in sober prose, was an opportunity to repay the debt” (Woolf, Three Guineas 28). Derrida begins Monolingualism of the Other with a similar method, as a dialogue between self and opponents in the context of a conference. It is possible to be monolingual (I thoroughly am, aren’t I?) and speak a language that is not one’s own. –That remains for you to demonstrate. –Yes, indeed. –In order to demonstrate something, it is first of all necessary to understand what one wants to demonstrate, what one wants to mean, what you dare to claim to mean where for such a long time, according to you, it would be necessary to think a thought that has no meaning. –Yes, indeed. But grant me then that “to demonstrate” will also mean something else, and it is this something else, this other meaning, this other scene of demonstration, that is important to me. –I am listening. What is the meaning of this attestation you are claiming to sign? (6)

The argumentative styles of both texts set into relief the self/other problematization that is played out in the texts’ content. Woolf focuses on groups within contemporary British society that she calls “daughters of educated men” and “outsiders” (two terms that are not necessarily mutually exclusive, for one can be either an outsider or a daughter of an educated man, or both), whereas for Derrida, the ownership of language

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is at issue. Both of these trajectories move toward a kind of national identity politics staged on the hyphen between public-private, self-other. Woolf begins her argument(s) by discussing the daughters of educated men, women whose fathers and brothers are given access to an educational world from which the women themselves are excluded. It would seem to follow then as an indisputable fact that “we”— meaning by “we” a whole made up of body, brain, and spirit, influenced by memory and tradition—must still differ in some essential respects from “you,” whose body, brain, and spirit have been so differently trained and are so differently influenced by memory and tradition. Though we see the same world, we see it through different eyes. Any help we can give you must be different from that you can give yourselves, and perhaps the value of that help may lie in the fact of that difference. (Woolf, Three Guineas 18)

It is crucial to note that Woolf is in no way positing an essential ontological difference. Rather, her argument revolves around the differences in educational availability and professional opportunity that inform experience. When she calls for a society of outsiders, she is referring to this differing experience. Woolf uses the public experience of the educated men in juxtaposition to the private world of their daughters, sisters, and wives in order to delineate ways of knowing national identity. Pointing out that a woman would become a foreigner if she married a foreigner and that she would not be allowed the means to protect herself (physically or legally), Woolf defines her understanding of an outsider. Therefore if you insist upon fighting for me, or “our” country, let it be understood soberly and rationally between us that you are fighting to gratify a sex instinct which I cannot share; to procure benefits which I have not shared and probably will not share; but not to gratify my instincts, or to protect myself or my country. “For,” the outsider will say, “in fact, as a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.” (Three Guineas 109)


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It should be noted that the use of the word instinct can be misleading, since elsewhere in the text Woolf spends time on the question of what instincts would be produced in a woman who had been raised and educated in the same way as a man. She suggests that the same type of instinct toward war, for example, might emerge if women were educated the way men have been, and she therefore questions the role and method of education. There is an otherness, then, not only in the letter-writing structure but also in the way that sexual difference is framed by society. In other words, Woolf implies that differences between men and women have been produced through educational practices and that these differences are directly related to understandings of national identity. Woolf thus makes sexual difference central to the issue of national identification. What does it mean, she asks, for one to identify with a nation that positions one as an outsider? Derrida uses the problematization of language, or the “mother tongue,” to similar effect in Monolingualism of the Other. His discussion is in large part propelled by the proposition with which he begins: “I have only one language; it is not mine” (Monolingualism 1). In his discussion of the identity of a French-Algerian and the (im)possibility of owning a language, Derrida, like Woolf, discusses what society makes available by way of education. He notes that in the educational system in Algiers, [a] particular interdict against Arabic or Berber languages was, as I recall, in effect, and let us provisionally retain this word “interdict.” For someone from my generation, this took several cultural and social forms. It was first of all something educational, something which happens to you “at school.” (Monolingualism 37)

Derrida points out that [t]he optional study of Arabic remained, of course. We knew it was allowed, which meant anything but encouraged. The authority of the National Education (of “public education”) proposed it for the same reason, at the same time, and in the same form as the study of any foreign language in the French lycées of Algeria. Arabic, an optional foreign language in Algeria! (Monolingualism 38)

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Woolf also notes that the difference between “not allowed” and “not encouraged” is minimal, and her statement—“[T]hough we see the same world we see it through different eyes”—seems “hospitable” to Derrida’s description of the relation of Algeria to France, which he calls a “place of fantasy … at an ungraspable distance. As a model of good speech and good writing it represented the language of the master. (What’s more I do not think I have ever recognized any other sovereign in my whole life)” (Monolingualism of the Other 42). Just as Woolf recognizes a master/slave dynamic that informs national identity politics—“Our country has throughout the greater part of history treated [woman] as a slave” (Three Guineas 108)—Derrida, too, identifies the political otherness operative within national identification(s). He might argue, however, that the physical proximity of the Woolfian outsider to the locus of power prevents the same kind of relation to the “master” experienced in a colonial context—for that outsider remains in some way within the empire, even if on the periphery. Derrida says that the child of Algeria and the child of a suburb of Paris may experience an “analogous phenomenon” but that “the other, in this case, no longer has the same transcendence of the overthere, the distancing of being-elsewhere, the inaccessible authority of a master who lives overseas. A sea is lacking there” (Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other 43). For Woolf, however, the physical actuality of a sea is not necessarily at issue. For an outsider who has no country and whose country is “the whole world,” otherness is less a function of place than of the social production that is an ineluctable part of the construction of any I. The outsider may seem to represent an antideconstructivist movement. It could be argued that in opposing itself to an “inside,” the outsider is preserving the kind of oppositional thinking that Derrida works against. Yet the outsider is rather the resource for a deconstruction. It is a gesture that works deconstructively by undoing other oppositions such as civilized versus barbarian or fascist versus democratic. Contemporary issues such as the so-called war on terror and bans on gay marriage all rely on the type of oppositional thinking upon which empires are built and which the thought of both Woolf and Derrida


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works to collapse.15 This oppositional thinking is rooted in a conception of the other, the problematization of which is essential to negotiating one’s own here and now. Inherent in the fiction of Virginia Woolf and the philosophy of Jacques Derrida—that is to say, in the philosophemes of both—is a politics that ruthlessly questions claims to identity. Derrida occupies a position of anti-identitarianism—the position of Woolf’s outsider—inasmuch as he recognizes the problems with claims of identity and sees the falsity of certain nationalistic claims (such as French citizenship, for example). The signatures of Woolf and Derrida extend beyond death because the aporias that they articulate advocate ways of living, thinking, and being responsible— and continue to send that signature as “Envois” into the world.

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WORKS CITED

Barber, Stephen M. “Exit Woolf.” Feminism and the Final Foucault. Ed. Diana Taylor and Karen Vintages. Chicago: Illinois University Press, 2003. 40–64. Print. Derrida, Jacques. “Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides. A Dialogue with Jacques Derrida.” Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida. Ed. Giovanna Borradori. Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Micheal Naas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. 85–136. Print. ———. Ear of the Other. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985. Print. ———. Gift of Death. Trans. David Willis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Print. ———. Learning to Live Finally. Brooklyn, NY: Melville House Publishing, 2007. Print. ———. Monolingualism of the Other, or The Prosthesis of Origin. Trans. Patrick Mensah. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998. Print. ———. The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Print. Doyle, Laura. “Introduction: What’s Between Us?” Modern Fiction Studies 50 (2004): 1–7. Print. Kandell, Jonathan. “Jacques Derrida, Abstruse Theorist, Dies in Paris at 74.” The New York Times 10 Oct. 2004, New England ed.: A1+. Print. Roth, Marco. “A Philosopher’s Presence.” Boston Sunday Globe 17 Oct. 2004: C5+. Print.


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Woolf, Virginia. Diary of Virginia Woolf. Vol. 5. Ed. Anna Olivier Bell. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1980. Print. ———. Three Guineas. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1966. Print. ———. The Waves. Ed. Kate Flint. London: Penguin, 1992. Print. ———. The Years. Ed. Jeri Johnson. London: Penguin, 1998. Print.

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PART II EXPERIMENTAL NATIONS GLOBALIZED

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CHAPTER 5

NATIONLESS AUTHORS AND LITERATURE WITHOUT NATIONS IN CONTEMPORARY FRANCOPHONE WRITING OF THE MAGHREB Valérie K. Orlando

Exiled Algerian francophone author Mohamed Mokeddem proclaimed in an interview that during the most violent years of the country’s civil war, fleeing Algeria was his ultimate goal: “J’étais prêt à partir n’importe où. Pas forcément en France, même si ma femme et mes enfants y vivaient déjà. On m’aurait annoncé: ‘Mohamed, tu vas à Ouagadougou’, je me serais dit: j’y vais, qu’est-ce que j’en ai à foutre? L’important, c’était de fuir la mort, de fuir ce pays” (Cholet, n.p.; I was ready to go anywhere. Not necessarily to France, even though my wife and kids were already there. If someone had said: ‘Mohamed, go to Ouagadougou’, I would have told myself: I’ll go, I don’t give a damn. The important thing was

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to run from death, run from this country).16 The author’s forced exile mirrors what many authors writing from the formerly colonized Maghreb (Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia) have experienced in the postindependence era. Algerian scholar Réda Bensmaïa draws attention to the fact that threatened Maghrebian authors like Mohamed Mokeddem realize that “intellectuals … have not always chosen to be in the place where they have landed” (Bensmaïa 163). Menaced and compromised by politics, religious fundamentalism, and economics, these authors come to the conclusion that only through writing can they “find the means of understanding what is happening to them and, at the same time, what was [or is] happening to their own countr[ies]” (Bensmaïa 163). These authors act without borders, as wandering nomads who write without states, preferring to adhere to the tenets of experimental nations: free spaces that are not hindered by borders or state ideologies (Bensmaïa 163). Because of the persecution, violence, and economic hardship at home, inhabitants of borderless nations renounce the homeland in order to embrace the unknown, wherein lies “the audacity of daring … representing change, … moving on, not standing still” (Said 62–64). Throughout Africa, economic and sociopolitical instability in formerly colonized nations has forced many authors into exile. Contemporary Maghrebian francophone authors Salim Bach (Algeria), Alec Baylee (Algeria), Taoufik Ben Brik (Tunisia), Tahar Ben Jelloun (Morocco), Rafik Ben Salah (Tunisia), Fouad Laroui (Morocco), Ahmed Manai (Tunisia), Leila Marouane (Algeria), Abdelwahab Meddeb (Tunisia), Malika Mokeddem (Algeria), Mohamed Mokeddem (Algeria), and many others are writers without nations. They often consider their postindependence homelands repressive and corrupt; they see no difference from the era of French occupation. In Amours sorcières (2003), a collection of short stories, Tahar Ben Jelloun captures the prevailing disappointment in the homeland, disappointment that the nationless author feels compelled to address: En observant ce cirque de la misère, nous n’avions plus envie de parler de nos histoires d’amour et de haine. Ce Maroc-là nous fait

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mal, on dit que c’est le résultat de plusieurs années de sécheresse, c’est aussi le résultat d’inégalités craintes, d’injustice sociale. (Ben Jelloun 114) When we observe this circus of misery, we no longer desire to talk about our stories of love and of hate. This Morocco hurts us; they say it’s the result of many years of drought, that it’s also the result of fearful inequality, of social injustice.

This drought is physical and climatic, but it is also metaphorical; the real and the figurative droughts together have rendered Morocco a fragile country adversely affected by global warming and by corrupt socioeconomic systems that have fostered increasing poverty since the 1970s. In recent years, many Maghrebian francophone authors have claimed that they live in exile without nations because the very ideals of nationhood and nationality have become problematic—even violent—for them. In the context of francophone writing, Christopher Miller points out in his work Nationalists and Nomads (1998) that “recent events have made issues of nationalism, nation, and nationhood come to the forefront of our attention with a force they have not had in a considerable amount of time” (118). Due to increasing sociopolitical instability in many regions of the postcolonial world, authors feel compelled to critique, reformulate and, in many instances, overtly challenge, original concepts of nationhood. Malika Mokeddem,17 who left Algeria in the 1990s because of threats made against her by the Front Islamique du Salut (FIS; Islamic Salvation Front), condemns the modern, postcolonial Algerian state for its failure to ensure the well-being and safety of its citizens. She repeatedly emphasizes this fact in her novel, La transe des insoumis (2003). Mokeddem proclaims that the author who dares to speak out is forced to act as a literary warrior against oppression: Je noircis des pages de cahiers, d’une écriture rageuse. J’en aurais crevé si je n’avais pas écrit. Sans ces salves de mots, la violence du pays, le désespoir de la séparation m’auraient explosée, pulvérisée. Les intégristes menacent de faire périr par le sabre ceux qui

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Malika Mokeddem’s entire oeuvre, including Le siècle des sauterelles (1992), L’interdite (1993), Des rêves et des assassins (1995), Les hommes qui marchent (1997), La nuit de la lézarde (1998), and Mes hommes (2005), reveals the violence and the atrocities meted out by various regimes both before and after Algerian independence. In many of her novels, Mokeddem is critical of the postcolonial state for doing little to protect its people, particularly women. Malika Mokeddem, like others writing from the Algerian diaspora, acknowledges that more than forty years after Algerian independence, the celebrated ideologies of liberation—defined by Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth—ring hollow. Such treatises call upon intellectuals and authors to promote the pure ideals of revolution and national culture through their writing and activism. Fanon’s proviso that “la revendication d’une nation” (claiming a nation) was essential in the early stages of nation building and helped the colonized people to make the transition from “une tribu [qui] se rebelle” (a tribe that rebels) to a collective unity. As many postcolonial authors note, however, his principal ideology left little room for individual, essentialist dissention from the collective ideals promoted by newly independent states (Fanon 201–202). Fanon stipulates that establishing “la légitimité de la nation” (the legitimacy of the nation) depends on the work of the indigenous intellectual—the writer, the journalist, the academic—who


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can contextualize, propagandize, and package the authenticity of the state—namely, its history and its future: [L]a revendication de l’intellectuel colonisé n’est pas un luxe mais exigence de programme cohérent. L’intellectuel colonisé qui situe son combat sur le plan de la légitimité, qui veut apporter des preuves, qui accepte de se mettre nu pour mieux exhiber l’histoire de son corps est condamné à cette plongée dans les entrailles de son peuple. (Fanon 201–202; emphasis mine) [T]he claim of the native intellectual is not a luxury but a necessity in any coherent program. The native intellectual who takes up arms to defend his nation’s legitimacy and who wants to bring proofs to bear out that legitimacy, who is willing to strip himself naked to study the history of his body, is obliged to dissect the heart of his people.

Maghrebian authors point out the paradoxical relationship between Fanon’s ideals with respect to unity and with respect to his emphatic appeal to intellectuals to shape the contours of the newly independent nation. They maintain that in order to “dissect the heart of the people,” the author must be ready, willing, and able to act as a free agent. His or her voice must be nonpartisan, located in the margins of the norm, and must thus remain on the periphery in order to objectively assess the inadequacies of this same nation. Increasingly, however, many Maghrebian authors of French expression (i.e., those who write in French but who are not French nationals) have recognized that their sociopolitical engagement does not come without a price. As they note, writing for the nation forces them to make a choice between promoting the official political platform of their respective governments and imparting the truth to their compatriots. Over the years, francophone writers across the Maghreb have remarked that promoting state ideology means, more often than not, renouncing freedom of expression. Frequently, nationalist discourse has been used to inspire ethnic pride and spur on cultural essentialism. Particularly in the 1980s, nationalist themes were resurrected as a means of reclaiming African nations’ individuality. As Miller aptly argues,

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“[i]t became necessary for critics to take positions ‘for’ or ‘against’ the idea of national literatures—to either support or refute the notion of a distinct Senegalese literature as opposed to an Ivorian literature, and so forth” (121). Therefore the authors found themselves either defending nationalism for the state on the grounds of ethnic and cultural purity or condemned for refusing to kowtow to official ideology (Miller 121). Historically essential for independence struggles across Africa, nationalist novels provided cornerstones for nation building. Algerian Kateb Yacine’s well-known novel Nedjma (1956) and Cameroonian Ferdinand Oyono’s Une vie de boy (1960) remain prime examples of revolutionary writing that contextualized the anticolonial movements that eventually ended colonialism. These works functioned as fundamental components in establishing national culture and in offering an antithèse to colonial hegemony, to what Fanon describes as “the logic of this insult that the white man has made against humanity” (Fanon 203). In the case of Algeria, Kateb’s novel galvanized francophone authors in their efforts to form a burgeoning nationalist, literary ideal that defined, in the words of Adrian Huannou, “the nation as a human group, as it forms a political community, establishes a definite territory or conglomerate of definite territories, and is personified by a sovereign authority” (Huannou 21–22). In the postcolonial era, many Maghrebian francophone authors protest that nationalist themes—which espouse collective unity as the basis for the founding of a nation and are evident in novels such as Mohammed Dib’s L’incendie (1954), Malek Haddad’s La dernière impression (1958), and Mouloud Mammeri’s La colline oubliée (1958)—have marginalized many minority groups. These authors promoted what Phyllis Taoua characterizes as an “African reality from within” (Taoua 155), yet they rarely championed other agendas or claims for political and cultural enfranchisement (e.g., the rights of women, of Berbers, or of other minority groups). Regarding their novels as tools for fostering revolution, authors drew upon and promoted Marxist ideology as a foundation for national unity and eventually for founding viable postcolonial nation-states. Later, postcolonial authors pointed out that the pure ideals


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of nationhood extolled in these earlier texts had been co-opted and manipulated by corrupt elites who had lost touch with the ideology of the early liberation movements. Maghrebian authors of French expression, whether living at home or abroad, cannot write anything but politically engaged literature. These authors, whether Algerian, Moroccan, or Tunisian, are always compromised by the politics, culture, and history of their nations. Over the past few years, francophone authors have increasingly renounced the original revolutionary ideals of early nations as those ideas have soured and given way to decrepit systems. Authors such as Salim Bachi (Algeria), Toufik Ben Brik (Tunisia), Faoud Laroui (Morocco), Mohamed Mokeddem (Algeria), and Abdelwahab Meddeb (Tunisia) are now national critics, condemning their home governments for corruption, economic instability, and egregious violations of human rights across the Maghreb and the African continent.18 Because they cannot morally or philosophically support the governments of their homelands, most Maghrebian francophone authors (certainly those from Algeria) have found themselves at some point living in exile. Ironically, France in the postcolonial era has regularly provided a safe haven from which to write. The exiled francophone author fulfills his or her responsibility to society in keeping with Jean-Paul Sartre’s belief that the role of the author must always be to act as an interpreter of signs in order “to deliver messages to … readers” (Sartre 33). Authors are first and foremost responsible for establishing a dialectique between themselves and the reader in order to éprouver (test) liberty. One cannot deny the power-loaded connotations of the verb éprouver. And, within the paradigm of exile, the French verb mandates to an even greater degree that authors feel, experience, meet with, suffer, test, and try their convictions. Through the power of words, the writer establishes an organic system of communication, a virtual state outside the borders of the stagnant and static rhetoric of governments. The author’s duty is to act as an intermediary whose goal should be to create a way of experiencing liberty in his or her text. This freedom should transcend the written page in order to engage society at large: “readers, like the author, recognize this

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freedom only to demand that it manifest itself” (Sartre 69). According to the Sartrean doctrine, the publicly committed—engagé—author steps outside of society and becomes a deterritorialized agent operating on the peripheries of state and homeland in order to effectively foster sociocultural change.19 The francophone author takes “flight on … line[s] of escape,” in the Deleuzo-Guattarian sense, toward other possibilities and virtual worlds without frontiers (Deleuze and Guattari, Capitalisme 87).20 Following these lines leads to endless possibilities that meld Africa with the West, indigenous languages with French, and myth with reality within the text. Linguistically, le style heurté described by Fanon and used by the francophone author subverts the French language.21 The linguistic registers of the exiled author living on the periphery of his or her homeland are peppered with words and views reflective of diverse languages and cultural references. French as spoken in the African diaspora is molded into something new and foreign, “rendering the French reader foreign in his own language” (Bonn 486). The French language for the francophone Maghrebian author is a means by which to express a plurality of sociocultural and linguistic registers—registers that are transferable to other readers across the African diaspora. Today this lingua franca is a vital tool in the formulation of an original literary consciousness that can only be fostered in a multicultural realm. The language of these authors represents “something more protean, changeable, and diverse, something able to cross linguistic and cultural boundaries precisely because of its ability to assimilate an ever-increasing diversity of speakers” (Stovall and Van den Abbeele 9). Authors writing without nations embrace a liberating milieu in which ideas about the postcolonial experience can be constructed and transmitted to millions across the francophone diaspora; no single perspective is dominant. For Maghrebian authors, the French language has furnished a means to look back and assess the home country through many lenses: the historical (colonialism, its predecessors, and its aftermath), the political (issues of corrupt elections, civil war, and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism), and the sociocultural (problems of poverty, economy, and human rights).


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The constraints of writing without nations situate exiled authors between two realms of hostility: the violence of the homeland and the xenophobic and even racist attitudes often present in the country of exile. The West, confronted with socioeconomic instability, has increasingly embraced new ideas of nationalism, relying on rhetoric that promotes— among other things—the idea of ethnic purity.22 Francophone authors living in France who write between Africa and Europe—for example, Moroccan Tahar Ben Jelloun, Tunisian Abdelwahab Meddeb, and Algerian Leila Marouane—appeal to ideals that challenge sociopolitical, cultural, and economic disparity on a universal level, both at home and in France. Their literary space, wedged between two cultures, is also excentric, peripheral, allowing the author freedom from one single language or national ideology (Hutcheon 41). In the context of ex-centricism, Linda Hutcheon proclaims that the contemporary writer “goes beyond self-reflexivity to situate discourse in a broader context” (41), as that writer destabilizes “systems … [that] order experience” (58). It is therefore within this border space that the francophone author explores a new consciousness, “une pensée autre,” as Moroccan philosopher Abdelkebir Khatibi calls it in his seminal study, Maghreb Pluriel (1983). Works by exiled ex-centric authors become driving forces of intellectual inquiry. They expose the failed states of postcolonial nations while at the same time challenging the importance of ethnicity and origin as defining one’s sense of place and claims on nationhood. Mohamed Mokeddem’s Nuit Afghane (2002) exemplifies the contemporary ex-centric novel. His work not only comments on the violence in Algeria of the 1990s but also alludes to the global conflicts of the present era between East and West, Muslim and Judeo-Christian, and Arab and Anglo-American-European: Iraq, Afghanistan, Gaza, and Lebanon. Forty years after Algeria’s independence, Mokeddem, like others writing from the Algerian diaspora, reveals the insidious collapse of a nation disassociated from its original revolutionary platforms.23 In the postcolonial era, Mokeddem’s conception of the Algerian nation is violent and chaotic: Algeria is a failed state. The novel evokes a “new literary consciousness” (Bensmaïa 6) that, hopefully, will aid in fostering change

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in Algeria—a country that merits, in the words of renowned historian Benjamin Stora, the construction of “a ‘new history’ [and] new books … in the memories of the present” (321).24 In Nuit Afghane, Mohamed Mokeddem (a documentary filmmaker as well as author) critiques the egregious violence that has turned postcolonial Algeria upside down. The author is one of the many Algerian journalists, writers, and intellectuals who in the 1990s were forced to flee to France and other parts of Europe in the face of threats made by the Front Islamique du Salut (FIS). In the early 1990s, the GIA (Groupe Islamique Armé), the armed faction of the FIS, openly declared war on intellectualism and “western ideology,” stating that its mission was to “ban all education in Algeria” (Stora 216). The GIA targeted schools, teachers, and students, slaughtering and maiming indiscriminately in its effort to eradicate what its members perceived as Western, neocolonial intellectualism. Their actions catapulted the country into chaos. “Ceux qui nous combattent par la plume périront par la lame” (Those who fight us with the pen will die by the blade) was a popular slogan publicized by the GIA during the worst years of slaughter (Baylee 19). Through the protagonist, Mohamed Mokeddem details his own haunted life of exile on the margins of Parisian normalcy, as he fights with his pen against the violence of his homeland. Autobiographical and surreal, Nuit Afghane melds myth into allegorical reality through a series of flashbacks, memories, and nightmares as experienced by the protagonist, Med. The author’s narrative, like his own life, is never tranquil or complacent. Rather, it vacillates between memory and imagination and past and present; he defines an identity split between two countries, two cultures, and two languages. Mokeddem’s life is one of a binational intellectual who loves and hates himself for his dual identity: Allez comprendre! Le binational, cet Algérien-français, par définition et par expérience, refuse son semblable et le méprise parce qu’il lui reflète cette identité d’origine qu’il rejette sciemment, qu’il renie, qu’il refoule.… Entre Français-algérien et Algérienalgérien, c’est toujours un combat entre chien et loup. (76)


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Come on, try to understand! The binational, this Franco-Algerian, by definition and experience, refuses and despises his mirror image because he reflects this identity that from the beginning he has wittingly rejected, that he denies, that he represses.… Between French-Algerian and Algerian-Algerian, it’s always a battle between dog and wolf.

Med is reminded of the painful legacy of the Franco-Algerian war and the impending solitude he will face in exile when he turns to the French embassy for a visa to France. He wonders what is worse: seeking exile in the country of the former colonizer or being beheaded by members of the FIS? Quelle douloureuse douleur que celle de supplier par le regard un homme qui vous fixe tout sourire, tout silence, de vous protéger en vous facilitant la fuite de votre propre pays, l’exil, alors qu’au fond, vous le soupçonnez lui peut-être, ou quelqu’un d’autre de sa famille, de son entourage, d’avoir froidement assassiné votre propre père, brûlé votre maison, chassé votre famille de ses terres pour la plonger dans l’ignorance, et vous n’osez pas le dire, l’Histoire, d’affirmer être un nouvel homme sans haine et sans rancoeur! (99) What painful pain to have to endure the gaze of a man who fixes you with a smile, silence, who protects you in facilitating your departure from your own country, exile, while all along, you suspect him, or someone from his family, his entourage, to have coldly assassinated your own father, burned your house down, chased your family off their land to plunge them into ignorance, and you don’t dare say anything, History, affirming that you are a new man without hate or resentment.

The novel contextualizes the reality of Algeria as a nation that is unable to cleanse itself of the subaltern versus colonizer yoke—the dialectical paradox of exploited and exploiters. Nuit Afghane represents an entire body of literature that would not exist if the situation in contemporary Algeria had not forced authors such as Mohammed Mokeddem, Salim Bachi, Alec Toumi Baylee, and Malika Mokeddem,

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as well as many others, into exile. The book compels readers to reflect upon the state of present-day Algeria, a country which Stora describes as “a tragedy behind closed doors”—a tragedy fueled by the many failures, “symptomatic signs,” of the postcolonial era (Stora 37). Since 1962 these failures have been manifest in economic ruin, fundamentalist insurgency, and civil war (Aresu 43). Mokeddem’s term nuit afghane is used to describe the absolute terror that affects both author and protagonist. The author’s autobiography and the protagonist’s story are fused together to define the schizophrenic reality that Algerians face every day. Med’s own reality vacillates between the present calm of Paris and the memories of the savagery and chaos of the bloody Algeria he left behind. His life mirrors Mokeddem’s own, caught in a liminal space on the edges of both France and Algeria (the author wrote the novel in the late 1990s). The story is representative of both the male autobiographical je—the I who recounts his story (Mokeddem’s and his hero’s) to Anne-Dominique, a reporter for La Dépêche de Nantes, in the present in the setting of a small Parisian apartment—and the il, standing for so many Algerians who are trapped by the spiraling violence in their homeland. The actions of this il, whose name readers finally learn on the penultimate page is Med, are dictated by bitter memories, scrutinized and assessed by the author in hindsight; he defines the past as “cet amalgame entre la réalité et le rêve” (13; this amalgam between reality and dream). Mokeddem methodically analyzes the physical and mental actions of a trapped man expecting a vicious death—a beheading that could come at any moment—by the sabers of the Islamic zealots who are perpetrating terror across the country. Med’s last weeks in Algiers, as he awaits victimization at the hands of the FIS, represents the autobiographical ruminations of Mokeddem’s own “cauchemar qui trouvait prolongement dans la pénombre de la chambre” (13; nightmare that lasted in the prolonging obscurity of the bedroom). The account is equally reflective of the postcolonial era’s characteristic oubli and of the horrors awaiting a people effectively quarantined in a country that has been run into the ground by terror, corruption, and manipulation: “Pour l’instant le


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monde s’accordait pour mettre l’Algérie en quarantaine, laissait sa population à la merci d’impitoyables et invisibles adversaires … attendait que les gens trouvent eux-mêmes une issue pour s’en sortir ou pour crever” (82–83; For the moment the world agreed to put Algeria in quarantine, leaving its population at the mercy of ruthless and invisible adversaries … waiting for the people themselves to find a way out or to die). Commenting on his work, Mokeddem affirms that Nuit Afghane is the story of a man enfermé entre quatre murs, qui a peur de mourir, qui a des cauchemars, des réminiscences. Qui voit son corps tomber en ruine. C’est terrible, pour un homme.… Ceux qui ont de l’argent peuvent laisser le corps foutre le camp. Mais un homme qui n’a pas d’argent, son seul capital, c’est son corps. Et quand il le voit tomber en désuétude, c’est le Malheur.25 closed in by four walls, who is afraid of dying, who has nightmares, memories. Who sees his body fall into ruin. It’s terrible for a man.… Those who have money can let the body go. But a man who doesn’t have money, his only capital is his body. And when he sees it fall into disuse, it’s Misfortune.

Upon returning to Algeria—having studied film in Baghdad during the Iran-Iraq war and subsequently published his first book, Fils de ta mère (1994)—Mokeddem was confronted by the Algerian military police. He was accused of being an Iraqi agent and was tortured. In 1994, as he was considering whether to make a documentary film about the life of the assassinated journalist and author Tahar Djaout, Mokeddem was threatened by the Front Islamique du Salut. At this moment, faced with an official state that would not protect him and a radical terrorist group that wished to kill him, Mokeddem decided to leave. For a time, the author lived on the streets of Paris, preferring a homeless life without work or income to the terror of life in Algeria. Mokeddem’s protagonist in Nuit Afghane, like the author himself, is conflicted by his desire to escape to France and to peaceful exile and his need to rectify the failure of Algeria, his home of terror. France-Isabelle

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Langlois emphasizes this conflict, stating that the novel is “the story of a man uprooted from his own country, Algeria, eaten, gangrened by the spiral of Islamic madness killing its people, and the suicidal abandonment of everyone, all the way up to the leaders.” Nuit Afghane replaces the terror in one violent Islamicized state, Afghanistan, with that in Algeria. It focuses on the daily fear of hundreds of Algerian citizens who prayed that FIS assassins would not appear at their doors. The cruelty of these zealous frères is rivaled by none, as Baya Gacemi points out in Moi, Nadia, femme d’un émir du GIA (1998). In her testimony, Nadia recounts the unimaginable brutality employed by Islamic jihadists in the 1990s: “La cruauté des ‘frères’ n’avait pas de limite. Leur cynisme non plus. Ils étaient tellement imprégnés de sang qu’ils ne savaient plus faire la part des choses” (93–94; The cruelty of the “brothers” had no limit. Nor had their cynicism. They were so saturated with blood that they couldn’t tell the difference between anything anymore). The urgency and the chaotic contours of Mokeddem’s narrative, told primarily through a series of flashbacks, transport the violence from one nation to another. At one moment, Med is in his Algerian apartment confronting a ghastly dream in which he witnesses his own beheading by FIS marauders: “La lame eut raison de la vertèbre cervicale. Le sang gicla. La tête se détacha du corps, s’éleva dans l’air, prit de l’altitude, flotta dans la chambre, accrochée aux doigts de son bourreau” (8; The razor hit its mark of the cervical vertebra. Blood spewed. The head came off the body, flew through the air, took altitude, floated in the room, stuck to the fingers of the executioner). The next moment, the protagonist is contemplating the bloody past from the safety and quiet of his Parisian abode, which he describes as calm, ordinary, and overlooking the Seine. Med’s exiled space is thus physically and literarily extradiegetic: he is never positioned in one place but rather relegated to an existence on the margins of two very different nations. The Parisian apartment functions as a lieu de mémoire where memories become increasingly more vivid than reality itself, a space in which the je and the il join in order to remember: “Il dit” (He said), writes Mokeddem, “c’est un miracle que je sois encore en vie!” (17; it’s a miracle that I am still living; emphasis mine).


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What truths do the memories compiled in Mokeddem’s extradiegetic space reveal? The author’s analysis of contemporary Algerian violence is complex and merits critique on many levels, from the societal to the personal. His examination of the physical manifestations of fear and its effects on the human body are most revealing; he documents Med’s physical decay, which is caused by terror. The narrative also proposes a universal commentary on contemporary violence across the globe, the result of the cultural clashes of today. Mokeddem questions whether or not humankind’s capacity to commit violent acts is inherent to the human condition. His terror-filled Afghan night is a universal possibility that could happen anywhere—in the Moroccan prison of Tazmamart, in the mountains of Afghanistan, in the cells of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, or in a New York police station. Barbaric acts are the potential of every nation that fails to adhere to the tenets of democracy. Torture, terror, and human suffering at the hands of fanatics, rogues, renegades and corrupt ideologues are the telling results of many failed states in the early twenty-first century. What are the results of terror and torture? During the hours he is imprisoned in his Algiers apartment, the protagonist’s body “falls apart” and becomes “gangrened,” decomposing before his very eyes. Med is forty years old, born as “un enfant de la Révolution, conçu à la hâte, né dans les montagnes, dans l’obscurité d’une grotte, de l’ignorance et de l’analphabétisme, de la peur de l’assaut des paras français, des bombes, du napalm et de la peste qui avalaient la terre, les hommes, la notion du temps” (69; a child of the Revolution, conceived in haste, born in the mountains, in the obscurity of a cave, in the ignorance of illiteracy, in the fear of the French paratroopers’ assault, of bombs, of napalm and of the plague that swallowed the land, men, the notion of time). His body, born in fear, is also dying of it, mirroring the same lethal path taken by his nation: “ceux que la Révolution avait sauvés de la nuit coloniale et émancipés, avaient mis le pays à feu et à sang depuis leur retour” (72; those whom the Revolution had saved from the colonial night and emancipated, had condemned the country to fire and blood since their return).

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Forty years after independence, Algeria too is decaying, an Algerian taxi driver explains to Med: “Y a plus de médicaments, plus de bouffe, plus de voitures, plus d’hommes pour nous défendre.… Plus on a peur plus on paye, mon fils, et quand ça merde vraiment, on lâche même sa femme et ses enfants” (79; There is no more medicine, food, cars, no more men to defend us.… The more we fear, the more we pay, my son, and when the shit hits the fan, we abandon wives and kids). It is a country where “aucun pays occidental ne délivrait de visa, ne donnait l’espoir d’en délivrer. Même les Arabes nos frères, même les Nègres … que l’Algérie nourrissait et habillait avec notre pétrole ne veulent pas de nous!” (82; no Western country will issue a visa, or give the hope of issuing one. Even the Arabs, our brothers, even the Blacks … whom Algeria fed and clothed with our oil don’t want us). Algeria is a country where all human dignity has been lost, where the police of the ruling regime, ironically the sons of the founders of independence, use the butts of guns to “picor[er] une tête, un oeil, un nez, une dent, un bras, un os, une parcelle intime du corps” (91–92; peck a head, an eye, a nose, a tooth, an arm, a bone, an intimate part of the body). Algeria is a country where the family’s body has been violated by the ultra-Islamicized fils, the FIS: “ils violent le frère ou la sœur pour décimer la famille entière” (118; they rape the brother or the sister in order to decimate the entire family).26 With each passing hour that he is shut away in his apartment, contemplating whether he should end his terror with a bullet from his own gun or await death at the hands of the FIS, Med’s body shrinks with each gaze into “ce maudit miroir” (102; this damned mirror). He asks himself if emigrating at the age of forty is possible. Lying on his bed, waiting, he contemplates his life, his hopes, and his fears: “Qu’avait-il réalisé, lui qui pensait révolutionner le monde?” (106; What did he accomplish, he, who hoped to revolutionize the world?). What is nationality? And what would he have done if Algeria hadn’t existed? Or, if he had not been born a man, would he have been “[u]n taureau dans une arène” (107; a bull in an arena) awaiting the same violent death he confronts as a human being? Fear forces his body to collapse on itself; “il diminua, se miniaturisa, devint mou, sans consistance” (it diminishes, becomes a


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miniature, soft, without substance), and at last he slips into a fetal state: “les fœtus se retranchent pour se suicider sans regret” (123; fetuses cut themselves away in order to commit suicide without regret). This state of becoming fetal, a state that Med desires, metaphorically relegates him to the beginning of all things—before nationality and identity, before colonialism, revolution, and civil war. Regression to nonbeing—to nothingness—is peace and the dawn of a new beginning. In the novel’s closing pages, Mokeddem’s character mulls over the randomness of identity and nationality. What would he have been if he had been born somewhere else? His cry is a universal one and it emanates from the most abject realm of humanity. Nuit Afghane forces readers to ask whether individuals are arbitrarily selected to live in violence, fear or prosperity. Is violence a defining characteristic of the human condition that will always be fostered by nations, states, armies, religious fundamentalism, and terror? Qui n’aimerait naître ou renaître dans un pays de liberté et de paix, de pain et de lait, sans fascistes, sans Arabes, sans Juifs, sans Slaves, sans Asiatiques, sans Africains, sans Européens, sans Américains, seulement des êtres humains et des bêtes, seulement. (123–124) Who wouldn’t want to be born or reborn in a country of freedom and of peace, of bread and of milk, without fascists, without Arabs, without Jews, without Slavs, without Asians, without Africans, without Europeans, without Americans, with only human beings and animals, only.

For Mokeddem, living without nations—on the ex-centric margins of two societies and cultures—is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, his solitary life offers only “le vide, celui de la solitude … le froid de l’exil” (138; the emptiness, that of solitude … the coldness of exile). Yet as he contemplates his memories of Algeria in his Parisian apartment, the author, like others enduring the same fate, realizes that life in the margins also means refuge. Exile offers the only platform from which, as an engagé—an activist author—he can “understand what is

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happening to [himself] and to [his] own country” (Bensmaïa 163). For Mokeddem, “[p]artir ailleurs” (Mokeddem 138–139), to leave his homeland for somewhere else, is the only way to make sense of his reality and, perhaps, of his stateless personhood. The works of Maghrebian authors written in exile, as epitomized by Mohamed Mokkedem’s Nuit Afghane, facilitate an understanding of the contemporary complexities confronting failed states. Through their engaged, thought-provoking, and critical perspectives regarding their postcolonial homelands, these nationless authors call attention to the plight of their fellow citizens, those left behind who cannot leave and who must continuously wrestle with the conflicts of the present.


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WORKS CITED

Aresu, Bernard. “Translations of Memory from Kateb to Sansal.” L’Esprit créateur 43.1 (Spring 2003): 32–45. Print. Baylee, Alek Toumi. “La question du ‘qui tue qui’ dans L’Imposture de mots de Yasmina Khadra.” Francofonia 12 (2003): 13–25. Print. Ben Jelloun, Tahar. Amours sorcières. Paris: Seuil, 2003. Print. Bensmaïa, Réda. Experimental Nations or the Invention of the Maghreb. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003. Print. Bonn, Charles. “La littérature algérienne francophone serait-elle sortie du face-à-face post-colonial?” Modern & Contemporary France 10.4 (2002): 483–493. Print. Cholet, Mona. “Mohamed Mokeddem.” Nova Magazine (2001): n. pag. Web. 22 May 2009. . Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Capitalisme et Schizophrénie: Tome 2 Mille Plateaux. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1980. Print. ———. Toward a Minor Literature. Trans. Dana Polan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. Trans. of Kafka: Pour une littérature mineure. Paris: Minuit, 1975. Print. Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. Constance Farrington. New York: Grove Press, 2005. Trans. of Les damnés de la terre. Paris: La Découverte: 1961, 2002. Print. Gacemi, Baya. Moi, Nadia, femme d’un émir du GIA. Paris: Seuil, 1998. Print. Huannou, Adrien. La question des littératures nationales en Afrique noire. Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire: Editions CEDA, 1989. Print. Hutcheon, Linda. Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New York: Routledge, 1998. Print.

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Khatibi, Abdlekebir. Maghreb pluriel. Paris: Denoël, 1983. Print. Langlois, France-Isabelle. “Nuit Afghane.” Rev. of Nuit Afghane, by Mohamed Mokeddem. Le Journal des Alternatives (1 Oct. 2002): n. pag. Web. 22 May 2009. . Miller, Christopher. Nationalists and Nomads: Essays on Francophone African Literature and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Print. Mokeddem, Malika. La transe des insoumis. Paris: Grasset, 2003. Print. Mokeddem, Mohamed. Nuit Afghane. Paris: Nicolas Philippe, 2002. Print. Said, Edward. Representations of the Intellectual. New York: Vintage Books, 1996. Print. Sartre, Jean-Paul. “What is Literature?” and Other Essays. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988. Trans. of Qu’est-ce que la littérature? Paris: Gallimard, 1948. Print. Stora, Benjamin. Algeria: 1830–2000. Trans. Jane Marie Todd. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001. Trans. of Histoire de l’Algérie coloniale 1830–1954; Histoire de la guerre coloniale, 1954–1962; and Histoire de l’Algérie depuis l’indépendance. Paris: Editions La Découverte, 1991–1995. Print. Stovall, Tyler, and Georges Van den Abbeele. French Civilization and its Discontents: Nationalism, Colonialism, Race. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2003. Print. Taoua, Phyllis. Forms of Protest: Anti-Colonialism and Avant-Gardes in Africa, the Caribbean, and France. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2002. Print.

CHAPTER 6

PORTUGUESE IMMIGRANTS AND LUSO-DESCENDANTS IN FRANCE BETWEEN EMPIRES

27

Martine Fernandes

Blind. The apprentice thought, “we are blind,” and he sat down and wrote Blindness to remind those who might read it that we pervert reason when we humiliate life, that human dignity is insulted every day by the powerful of our world, that the universal lie has replaced the plural truths, that man stopped respecting himself when he lost the respect due to his fellow-creatures. —José Saramago, “How Characters Became the Masters and the Author Their Apprentice” Finally I do not believe that it is possible to imagine a more ridiculous and at the same time more abominable, more extravagant, and more bloodthirsty species. —Voltaire, “Dialogue du chapon et de la poularde”28

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On 29 January 2004, the French newspaper L’Humanité denounced a case of human trafficking and slavery involving 350 Portuguese and 50 Malian persons working for French slaughterhouses.29 Although the Portuguese initiated colonial slavery in the fifteenth century, considering the history of Portuguese immigration—especially in France—it should come as no surprise that the Portuguese have themselves become victims of human trafficking in recent times. In his documentary Gens du Salto,30 José Vieira reminds readers that between 1960 and 1973, ten percent of the Portuguese population illegally immigrated to France, voting with their feet against the nearly half-century-long dictatorship of António de Oliveira Salazar (1928–1970).31 Although public opinion has forgotten it for the sake of European Union construction, Vieira calls attention to the fact that Portuguese immigrants in France have survived shantytowns, racism, illegal status, human trafficking, and exploitation. Following the emergence of postcolonial studies, Francophone literary studies of immigrant writing in France have focused primarily on immigrants from North and sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean, and Asia (e.g., Ireland and Proulx 2001). These studies not only give a limited representation of immigration to France but also tend to reproduce racist categorizations of immigrants. Like recent historical studies on postcolonial issues, these francophone studies begin from the preconception that European immigrants have integrated into French society.32 The Portuguese represent one of the largest immigrant communities in France, more than 800,000 people.33 However, as sociologist Albano Cordeiro has rightfully argued, they remain invisible—that is, absent from public discourse and often ignored by researchers—because they are perceived as “good” immigrants who are easily assimilated into French culture, as opposed to postcolonial immigrants, such as Algerian immigrants, who are perceived as “bad immigrants” according to Cordeiro (Cordeiro, “Les Portugais” 111). Despite the establishment of Portugal’s democracy in 1974 and Portugal’s entry in the European Economic Community in 1986, many Portuguese remain in France and have created thousands of organizations there to help them retain their cultural and national identity. As members of the oldest European

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nation, Portuguese immigrants in France have managed to “be integrated without integrating” (Cordeiro, “Les Portugais” 111), and as I have demonstrated elsewhere, some Luso-descendants have also begun creating a new minority identity (Fernandes, “Miki-le-toss ou comment” n.p.). Indeed, the Portuguese are not as closely connected to French culture as are Algerian immigrants, who, as historian Benjamin Stora has argued, have been wrongfully taken to symbolize the immigrant condition in France (Stora 7). The opposition established between so-called good and bad immigrants—together with their (in)visibility, which is inadvertently reproduced in postcolonial studies—may be seen as an expression of contemporary empire building.34 Against this (in)voluntary amnesia, French-Portuguese authors, such as novelist Carlos Batista, have started to recover the memory of Portuguese immigration to France. In his first novel, Poulailler (The Henhouse), Batista portrays the neurotic life of António Salgado, who is the son of Portuguese immigrants and who as a child sought refuge in the family henhouse. Divided into three parts (the shell, the white, and the yellow), this novel blends biographical, historical, and psychoanalytical writing in order to evoke the Luso-descendants’ cultural heritage as it is linked to Salazar’s dictatorship, to colonialism, and to immigration. Past and present economic exploitations become blurred as António, a security guard at the Vogue magazine offices, recalls his family’s past while he waits in line to visit an overpriced Parisian apartment. As he moves up the stairs, pretending to be a fashion magazine director, he slips into a philosophical reflection on the art of deception. Mia Couto used the hen metaphor in Sleepwalking Land to evoke war-torn postcolonial Mozambique and its people, who are caught between imperialist forces. Batista uses the same metaphor in a similar way to describe the “domestication” of the Portuguese people by French, Portuguese, and American (neo)colonial powers. His political satire of imperialism is reminiscent of that of the French philosophe Voltaire, especially the latter’s “Dialogue du Chapon et de la Poularde.” In this ironic fable, two castrated animals denounce the absurd and barbaric behavior of humankind, a trope which enables Voltaire to ferociously

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critique religion and the Roman Catholic Church. Humans, with their immoral, contradictory, and extremist religious behavior, are described as worse than animals, as monsters. In Poulailler, the narrator also refers to himself as a capon, a “neutered rooster” (157), and this hybrid narrator-hen, like the two emasculated Voltairian animals, falls prey to hypocritical humans who preach charity but who nevertheless kill him. This study examines how the fable—a genre that originated in socially dominated milieux (among communities of the poor and of slaves) and became the genre of choice for French political satire—enables Carlos Batista to condemn dehumanizing (neo)colonial practices.35

ANIMALS OF THE SEA: THE MEMORY OF SALAZAR’S DICTATORSHIP AND THE H ERITAGE OF THE P ORTUGUESE E MPIRE If I had never left I would be the same slave that I was before I left. Our memories, despite our slavedom, are not bitter. We never forget the country where we are born, the village where we are raised, the past which is our own. —Caroline Brettell, We Have Already Cried Many Tears: The Stories of Three Portuguese Immigrant Women

The Portuguese have been reluctant to write autobiographies and memoirs. According to historian David Higgs, “that reticence may be a product of the exaltation of modesty and humility in the folk culture, a lingering memory of fears of denunciation to the Inquisition (1536–1821) for sinful conduct, or the need to be cautious in Salazar’s Portugal with many informers operating for the secret police of the Estado Novo” (245). For writer Carlos Batista, born to Portuguese immigrants in 1968 in Etampes, France, Salazarism perpetuated such reticence, for it “weakened the spirit of a whole generation” (Martinez n.p.). But the fable, often used as a rhetorical tool to evade censorship, enables Batista to denounce the oppression of Salazar’s oppressive regime (which led to a massive exodus to France) and to portray the dehumanizing conditions in which the Portuguese people lived


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because of the close collaboration of the clergy and the school system with Salazar’s regime. Carlos Batista, like French-Portuguese author Alice Machado, strongly denounces the collaboration of school teachers and priests with the dictatorship. Though he ironically portrays Salazar as a ridiculous crayfish, strict and effeminate, “religiously protected by his faithful lobster, the cardinal of Lisbon” (73), Batista adopts a didactic tone to evoke Portugal’s history: “His regime killed, banished, censored. His regime didn’t want people, but docile mollusks” (74).36 Indeed, the Estado Novo strove to maintain Portugal in a “habitual state,” that is, to preserve its traditional socioeconomic structures based on agriculture and a ruling elite (Salazar 234). Salazar’s ideal is best described in Christophe Plantin’s (1514–1589) “Le bonheur de ce monde” (Happiness in this World), a poem that glorifies a simple life lived in self-abnegation and a copy of which the dictator kept in his office.37 In an effort to annihilate the values of the first republic (1910–1926), Salazar’s regime used education as the primary vehicle of propaganda and colonial indoctrination. In an effort to sustain Portuguese society’s hierarchy and nip any rebellious spirit in the bud (dans l’œuf), Salazar decreased the length of primary education from seven years to three, simplified the curriculum, increased religious education, and implemented harsh discipline (Mónica 300–330). This highly paternalist regime treated the poor (who would later become the emigrants) like children—or worse, like animals that had to be tamed. According to Maria Filomena Mónica: For Salazarism, for that matter, there was no reason to justify economic inequalities, which were inevitable and instituted by God.… Totally dependent on the teacher, socialized to obey, to bend, to praise, to solicit, to submit themselves, the children would more easily become the humble and respectful adults that the Estado Novo intended to create, once they reached adulthood.… The Estado Novo did not expect (and did not want) the poor students to manifest any initiative or imagination. What was expected from them was, on the contrary, the passive acceptance of privations and misery. (Mónica 133, 311, 329)

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In Poulailler, the narrator’s illiterate father is a product of the dictatorship; he “came out of a village school, where the authoritarian and vicious teacher distributed grades and blows with sticks according to the oranges that his flock brought him” (106). Blending the spaces of religion and school,38 the word ouaille (flock) highlights the character’s animalization and his internalization of the dictatorship’s values: My mother and I, we couldn’t go near him anymore. We were afraid. (But which family is not a hard or soft dictatorship?) … Lost in this breakable world, nourished with screams, I had the impression of being amputated from myself, of being a chicken without wings, a morbid animal, a bundle of nerves doomed to an anonymous torture. My eyes fixed on my hens, I understood that I was identical to them, that like them, I suffered in my internal organs from the same deficiency; I wanted to speak.… Inside my father, there was an agent of the Pide, at the service of Salazar. (Batista 34, 43, 73)

A double of Salazar, the authoritarian and emasculating father reproduces in his household the reign of fear that the PIDE (Polícia Internacional de Defesa do Estado) maintained in Portugal, the African colonies and, later, among the Portuguese in France. It is important here to emphasize the frequent efforts made by the Estado Novo to control the Portuguese and the colonized people. The 1930 Colonial Act, for example, reaffirmed the common destiny of the continent and the colonies and reinforced Salazar’s control over capital in the colonies: “As Minho or Beira are under the unique authority of the State, so is Angola or Mozambique or India” (Salazar 234–235). In a decree dated 10 March 1932, some 113 sentences were added to the texts of the Portuguese curriculum, statements that were meant to instigate patriotism and colonial fervor: “Your motherland is the most beautiful of all, it deserves all your sacrifices”; “If you knew what it costs to rule, you would like to obey all your life”; “In the family, the head is the father, in school the head is the teacher, in the State the head is the government” (Mónica 231). An ex-seminarian himself, Salazar considered religion, which had been a critical tool for European colonialists,


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the only useful basis of education for the poor. According to Mónica, “Salazar used religion to fight social mobility because it reinforced the values that corresponded to his ideal relationships between social classes: acceptance, forgiveness, humility, and hope for a better celestial life” (156). On this very point, Carlos Batista denounces people’s blindness and portrays them as gullible chicks that swallow anything: “Their clacks were useless, God was dead, and now only Father Salazar existed, the biggest deception, the poisonous saudade [nostalgia] placarded on all the country’s walls” (74–75). The clergymen of the time, portrayed as luxurious roosters, and the pope, “this swan butcher of Christian poultry,” are seen as the heirs of the Portuguese colonial church and of the Inquisition, which was officially established in Portugal in 1536 and later in the colonies.39 Portuguese immigration to France is deeply linked to Portuguese and French imperialism. Leaving his “village and his goats,” the unnamed father in Batista’s novel is a stereotypical, undocumented Portuguese emigrant who escapes from a socially ossified society and from military service in the war-torn African colonies.40 Batista describes Portugal’s effort to maintain the last European empire during the colonial wars in Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea (1961–1974) as a butchery of servile chickens in the midst of crocodiles and mercenaries (Batista106–108). In his masterpiece Os cus de Judas (South of Nowhere), Portuguese author António Lobo Antunes perfectly expresses the disorientation of Portuguese soldiers in Angola caught among different imperialist powers: With every wound from an ambush or a mine, the same distressing question occurred to me, product of the Portuguese youth movement, Catholic journals and the monarchist tabloids, nephew of catechists and an intimate of the Holy Family … now feeling as if I had been jammed into a powder keg: Who is killing us? The guerrillas or Lisbon—Lisbon, the Americans, the Russians, the Chinese, the whole fucking lot? Who is shitting on us in the name of interests that escape me, who stuck me in this asshole of the world full of red dust and sand. (Lobo Antunes 29)

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France supported the Portuguese colonial wars in Africa, especially after Portugal’s loss of Goa, its Indian colony, in 1961. Goa, which had been a Portuguese territory since 1510, was invaded by the Indian military in 1961, despite efforts in international diplomacy to settle this territorial dispute between India and Portugal. The UN Security Council drafted a resolution to condemn the Indian invasion, but it was vetoed by the USSR and Indian Goa was officially recognized. Let down by its Western allies, Portugal used the incident to its advantage by rallying support for its colonial wars in Africa. According to Willem Van der Waals, France supported Portugal and Salazar’s regime militarily, and the two countries entered a mutually beneficial relationship. Moreover, France received more immigrants from Portugal than any other neighboring country (Van der Waals 133). By writing about the roots of Portuguese immigration to France—that is, a colonial and dictatorial regime that benefited from the indifference with respect to colonial practices of other Western countries—Batista reminds readers that emigration is the result of a national and international history of domination. As Abdelmalek Sayad rightly notes in the first sentences of The Suffering of the Immigrant: “One cannot write on the sociology of immigration without, at the same time and by that very fact, outlining a sociology of emigration. One country’s immigration is another country’s emigration” (1).

IMMIGRANTS’ TALES OF HORROR: COWS, RATS, WOLVES, AND OTHER WILD ANIMALS In France, you were slaves. —José Vieira, La photo déchirée

Alice Machado, whose novels highlight the legacy of the Salazar dictatorship, explains the silence of Portuguese immigrants in France as a result of the actions of political police and of the trauma of the African colonial wars (Fernandes, “Alice” 191). Filmmaker José Vieira links this same silence to the feeling of shame and guilt surrounding


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the experience of immigration. In Poulailler, Batista denounces the economic conditions of immigration as well as French and Portuguese complicities with respect to economic policy and immigration agreements. If poor Portuguese felt like slaves in Portugal, their exploitation in France felt like a continuation of slavery. This is the case for António’s father: “Upon departing from Portugal, he did not imagine that by escaping his fate of colonizing soldier, he would have to undergo that of colonized serf” (Batista 115). Batista’s dark portrayal of immigrants’ odyssey from their homeland to France uses the animal universe of the fable in order to level criticism at the forces that have created the dire conditions of the immigrant’s plight.41 Leaving Portugal with nothing, the father is described as both a migrating bird and a rat leaving a sinking boat. But the illegal crossing of Spain—making “the jump”—with a group of other immigrants led by voracious smugglers completely dehumanizes him: trekking across harsh mountain terrain with little food or water, the father turns into a goat; transported in cattle trucks, he becomes livestock; sheltered in a sty, he transforms into a pig. Like vulnerable animals in the wild, the immigrants are surrounded by wolves—that is, by the Spanish police (Batista 111).42 Literally abandoned in France by the smugglers, the stranded father looks like “the flag of a caravel returning from India” (112–113). Alluding ironically to the Portuguese “discoveries” of new lands, Batista educates his readers about the history of Portugal while contrasting the glorified figure of the conqueror with the lessthan-glorious figure of the emigrant. The author criticizes contemporary Portuguese officials who associate emigration and conquest in a double attempt to conceal their historical realities. Instead of a heroic figure, the father is like Candide—the naïve Voltairian character faced with colonialism, slavery, and the Portuguese Inquisition—when he finds the shantytowns in France, which he had imagined as idyllic, and sees instead “[an] Eldorado of muddy corrugated iron inhabited by rats. Neither heat, neither electricity, nor running water. A true hen house” (Batista 113). The infamous shantytowns, particularly the one in Champigny (the Portuguese “capital” in France from 1956 to

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1972), remain an “essential component of the traumatic memories of the Portuguese immigration” (Volovitch-Tavares 42). The Portuguese were the only group of immigrants to establish communitarian shantytowns. Champigny’s shantytowns spread throughout four cities around Paris: Champigny-sur-Marne, Villiers-sur-Marne, Bry-sur-Marne and Noisy-le-Grand. In José Cardoso Marques’ documentary Champigny-surTage, living conditions in the shantytown are described in a letter of complaint written to the mayor by a French citizen evoking the smell, the dirt, and the noise associated with the place, reminiscent of Jacques Chirac’s infamous 1991 comments regarding Muslim and African immigrants.43 In Poulailler, the exploitation of the Portuguese in France is linked to the dictatorship’s legacy and to the Portuguese and French governments’ collusion regarding illegal Portuguese immigration to France. Historian Victor Pereira argues that Portuguese legislation forced the Portuguese to illegal courses of action (9–27), and sociologist Caroline Brettell mentions the strict Portuguese legislation regarding emigration in her study about Portuguese immigrants in the United States: Stiff regulations specified the following requirements before a passport for legal emigration was issued: employment in the country of destination guaranteed, support of the family that remained in Portugal assured, military obligations fulfilled, paternal consent where necessary, and a minimum degree of education (4 years of schooling). (Bretell 25)

In José Vieira’s documentary La photo déchirée, one witness complains: “Salazar didn’t want us to leave. He’d rather have us die of hunger than let us leave.” Afraid of losing the remittances sent back to Portugal by the immigrants if they took French nationality so as to receive French social benefits, Salazar asked France to increase their benefits in order to keep the money coming in from the immigrants because they would send a large part of their benefits and wages to their families and invested in Portugal by buying properties, building houses, and opening bank accounts. Salazar was able to finance part of


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the colonial wars with these foreign currencies pouring into the country. He also had the PIDE and the Portuguese consulates control them. PIDE informants were often recruited among the people in Portugal and sent abroad. Some PIDE informants were thought to be secretly present among the immigrants in France, even in the shantytowns. Informants or consulate officials who worked for the regime could provide Portuguese authorities with the names of political activists or anti-Salazarists. These people could then be arrested, tortured, and sent to penitentiaries in Africa if they returned to Portugal. They could also be assassinated in France, or such was the fear since the assassination of general Humberto Delgado by PIDE agents in Spain in 1965 (Delgado was a collaborator before he became a political opponent to Salazar). Whether justifiably plausible or not, fear of such brutal consequences explains, in part, the historical lack of political activism in the Portuguese community in France. Batista ironically points out that the immigrants “would reinflate the country with injections of currencies” (108–109). Indeed, the money sent back by Portuguese immigrants contributed to the war effort in Africa but also to the collapse of the Portuguese Empire, for these funds eventually surpassed colonial revenues: “From 1967 onwards contributions from emigrant remittances surpassed the colonies as sources of foreign exchange, and the contribution of the colonies to Portugal’s foreign earnings had been dwarfed by 1973” (Lains 254).44 Portuguese immigrants became for the Portuguese government a new empire. David Higgs argues that, after the loss of its colonies in 1975, Portugal began to “incorporate the Portuguese immigrants spread across the world in the imagining of an unbounded nation based on population rather than territory” (Higgs 274).45 The current Portuguese government’s efforts to finally recognize its Portuguese diaspora—for instance, through the creation of a Museum of Emigration and Communities or through the financing of Portuguese language and culture courses in schools abroad or online— seem to be a direct result of the dramatic decrease of immigrants’ remittances and investments in Portugal (Fernandes, “Miki-le-toss ou comment” n.p.). This decline started in the late 1990s. From 2000 to

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2009 the remittances decreased by approximately 40%, from 3.7 billion to 2.2 billion euros, according to the Bank of Portugal (n.p.). This decrease led Portuguese President Cavaco Silva to ask Portuguese immigrants for economic help during an official visit to Germany in 2009 (n.p.). Batista also criticizes France’s exploitation of undocumented Portuguese people: “The French government closed its eyes on illegal immigration (the art of life rests on deception).… In its eyes, that [the immigrant population] represented … [a] whole foreign army willing to sweat for the fatherland, to pay taxes, claiming neither nationality nor voting rights” (Batista 105–106). Alluding to the miserable pension of the narrator’s mother, who is forced to retire in Portugal (like many retired Portuguese immigrants who cannot afford to live in France anymore),46 the author denounces undocumented work. Like his retired mother, the narrator cannot afford to pay rent in Paris. Despite working in France their entire lives, many immigrants do not receive full retirement benefits because they were not declared by employers and/ or failed to pay income tax. As a result, many Portuguese immigrants choose to leave France after retirement and live in Portugal, where they often own a house. António therefore becomes a replica of his parents when he cannot afford an overpriced Parisian apartment. This circumstance is especially ironic considering that many French buildings, including lodgings, were built by a Portuguese workforce. When racist French workers in the novel loosen the wheel of the father’s bike, the man turns into a Kafkaesque monster bitten by ants: “I believe it is at that moment that my father became a monster” (Batista 45). Use of the fantastic enables Batista to represent the racism faced by Portuguese immigrants. Although Albano Cordeiro has shown that racism against Algerians in France has protected Portuguese immigrants by serving as a kind of lightning rod (“La communauté portugaise”), some Portuguese immigrants and Luso-descendants have been—and are still—targets of subtle and less subtle forms of racism.47 For literary critics Roger


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Bozetto and Arnaud Huftier, the fantastic enables authors to illustrate something “that cannot be articulated conceptually, or that cannot be represented” (54). I have argued elsewhere that some Luso-descendants who are building an ethnic identity in France refer to themselves as the Portuguese “race” (a raça portuguesa), a concept inherited from Portuguese colonialism and Salazar’s dictatorship (Fernandes, “Miki-le-toss ou comment” n.p.). Racism, a heritage of European imperialism, tragically participates in the Portuguese immigrant’s animalization. The concept of the Portuguese race is being used by some members of the French-Portuguese youth to express their pride in being Portuguese as a reaction to a history of racism and indifference toward the Portuguese community and other immigrant communities in France. However, this specific concept and, more generally, the concepts of race and racism, are a direct heritage of European imperialism and have been used to animalize, that is, to relegate colonized people and, by extension, immigrants, to an inferior status. The contemporary rhetoric of imperialism is visible in the metaphor of assimilation that continues to define immigrants’ lives in France. I have shown elsewhere that cognitive metaphors of identity are contested in novels by writers of Algerian origin (Fernandes “Si t’écoutes”). In Farida Belghoul’s Georgette!, for example, the fable genre enables the author to evoke the life of the seven-year-old daughter of Algerian immigrants in Paris who imagines herself as a frog eaten by her teacherogre. Through an analysis of the French Empire’s legacy in postcolonial France, Belghoul, like Batista, questions concepts of identity. In Poulailler, the male narrator becomes an impotent rooster (neither Gallic nor Lusitanian) on the verge of being eaten.48 More than a reflection on imperial aftermath in both Portugal and France, the metaphor of the chicken also enables Batista to offer a harsh critique of capitalism. Analyzing the relationship between humans and animals through the passage from traditional agricultural societies with familial henhouses to global societies and mass production, Batista offers a critique of neo-imperialisms that exploit humans and animals.

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OF CHICKENS AND MEN: LUSO-DESCENDANTS IN A GLOBAL CAPITALIST WORLD We are the indicators of their contradictions, their lies and even of their treason with respect to the memory of the people. A nail in the Achilles’ heel of the collective conscience.49 —Nacer Kettane, Le sourire de Brahim

Writers Alice Machado and Carlos Batista both portray Luso-descendants as antiheroes living between worlds. In Alice Machado’s Les silences de Porto Santo (2003), the narrator—Olivia—is on the verge of madness, haunted by dreams of the Angolan war, in which her fiancé disappeared. According to Machado, the dictatorship left a wound, a scar in Portuguese immigrants’ collective memory. For Batista, the immigration of António’s parents is responsible for his character’s initial crack: “Then my hatred went deep into me, buried itself in me, as if it were an egg to be brooded under my ravaged flesh” (Batista 38). In an interview, the author explained that “racism can destroy a child, whose development is as delicate as a chick. It creates adults who are neurotic and never fully engaged in life” (Martinez n.p.). Telling his story from the point of view of a chicken in the third part of the novel, Batista not only expresses the psychological violence perpetrated against children of immigrants but also condemns contemporary practices regarding animals. The narrator’s French teachers, heirs of the Third Republic and its colonial ideology of assimilation, are stereotypically racist; they call the narrator “Portos” and “codfish eater.”50 Criticized for its perpetuation of inequalities, the French school system is compared to the dishonest smugglers who abandoned António’s father. Alluding to the banlieues (poor suburban areas), Batista also condemns the rise of repression, especially against immigrants, and of mass manipulation by the media. France has become a totalitarian regime—an avatar of the Portuguese dictatorship—that promotes “mass hypnosis.” Seen as a nonhuman group, immigrants become scapegoats in an anonymous French society whose responsibilities are diluted: “It is true that for humans, the chicken is a sacrificial animal, a scapegoat” (Batista 169). Being timeless,


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the genre of the fable allows Batista to criticize the French government without naming anybody. Batista specifically criticizes the government led by conservative prime minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin between 2002 and 2005 and his apparent desire to “support a feudal power that totally turns me [Batista] into a slave” (Batista 169). He alludes several times to Raffarin’s infamous expression, France d’en haut, France d’en bas (high France, low France), and portrays the French government as the heir of the Ancien Régime. At the same time, he makes his own fable look like Jean de La Fontaine’s fables against Louis XIV. Indeed, history repeats itself as Batista blames capitalism for the social “split, or rather rupture,” between the rich and the poor (104). The depressed narrator paints a pessimistic portrait of contemporary France: an absurd Parisian rental market and rampant consumerism, pollution, and unemployment exist alongside fashion shows, luxury, and tasteless reality-television shows. As he spits in the face of the landlord who showed him the apartment, António seems to fall off the stairs and into a coma that leaves him amnesic: “If at least I could remember to which race I belong” (Batista 151). In a stylistic tour de force, Batista blends the world of humans and animals in the person of his narrator and questions definitions of origins linked to animalization. Indeed Batista, like Voltaire, denounces the barbaric treatments inflicted on animals including castration and tube-feeding, and especially those practices linked to capitalism and mass production. The author criticizes the American model of development—in particular, the development and use of genetically modified organisms—and the dissolution of identities in a globalized world dominated by American imperialism: “They want me to forget my origins, to become what they expect. Once conditioned, they will intern me with the others, without fear of rebellion. I will disappear in the masses and, like an automaton, I will pick at their transgenic corn without balking” (Batista 151). Elisabeth de Fontenay argues in her philosophical essay Le silence des bêtes: La philosophie à l’épreuve de l’animalité (1999) that the affirmation of the singularity of humans is always linked to a superiority that gives humans absolute rights over the animals. In Poulailler, the killing of a swan for consumption by Gypsies

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and the Muslim ritual of cutting animals’ throats51 pale in comparison to the Western mass extermination of chickens.52 Commenting on the industrial slaughtering of cattle and the mad-cow-disease crisis, Mondher Kilani argues that the revulsion at cannibalism separates humans and animals. Indeed, humans need to distance themselves from animals so that they can eat them in good conscience, that is, without seeing themselves as cannibals. This differentiation separating animals from humans came about in the nineteenth century as a result of the influence of Christianity’s role in European colonialism and its position on Darwinism. According to this viewpoint, animals have no souls and are excluded from the realm of the sacred. This separation “opened the way to a reification of the latter [animals] that went hand in hand with the serial processes of the industrial system” (Kilani n.p.). Indeed, colonialist ideology largely depended on the relationship established between animals and humans. In Zoos: Histoire des jardins zoologiques en Occident (1998), Eric Baratay and Elisabeth Hardouin-Fugier show that the creation of vast colonial empires enabled the expansions of zoos with the capture of exotic animals. Likewise, the works of Blanchard, Bancel, and Lemaire have shown that these empires produced the inferior “other” in theoretical terms through the triple articulation of positivism, evolutionism, and racism; they did so in practice, too, through the development of human zoos in France from 1877 to 1930. Central to Poulailler is Pascal Blanchard’s question, “Isn’t there a—deliberate or unconscious—willingness to legitimize the brutality of conquerors by animalizing the conquered?” Like Jean de La Fontaine, who opposed René Descartes with respect to the issue of animals’ souls, Carlos Batista defends both animals and humans—whether they are poor peasants, colonized people, immigrants, or children of immigrants— against brutal exploitation. In his movie Caché (Hidden), Michael Haneke reflects upon the colonial heritage of Algeria in contemporary France and specifically considers the issue of personal and public responsibility. In an interview, the director explained that he wanted to analyze the following question: “What did we suppress to be where we are?” Poulailler raises a similar


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question concerning Portuguese immigrants in France—and concerning immigrants in general—inasmuch as it forces readers to examine the relationships among imperialism, dictatorship, capitalism, and emigration and immigration. By calling into question the “civilized world, a big hoax” (Batista 136) in the context of capitalism, Batista highlights the continuity of humankind’s exploitation of nature, animals, and other human beings.

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WORKS CITED

Baratay, Eric, and Elisabeth Hardouin-Fugier. Zoos: Histoire des jardins zoologiques en Occident. Paris: La Découverte, 1998. Print. Batista, Carlos. Poulailler. Paris: Albin Michel, 2005. Print. Begag, Azouz. Un mouton dans la baignoire [A sheep in the bathtub]. Paris: Fayard, 2007. Print. Belghoul, Farida. Georgette! Paris: Barrault, 1986. Print. Blanchard, Pascal, Nicolas Bancel, and Sandrine Lemaire. “Ces zoos humains de la République coloniale.” Le Monde diplomatique. August 2000. Web. 6 June 2006. . ———, eds. La fracture coloniale: La société française au prisme de l’héritage colonial. Paris: La Découverte, 2005. Print. ———. Zoos humains, XIXe et XXe siècles. Paris: La Découverte, 2002. Print. Bozetto, Roger, and Arnaud Huftier. Les frontières du fantastique: Approches de l’impensable. Valenciennes, France: Presses Universitaires de Valenciennes, 2004. Print. Brettell, Caroline. We Have Already Cried Many Tears: The Stories of Three Portuguese Migrant Women. Cambridge, MA: Schenkman, 1982. Print. Caché [Hidden]. Dir. Michael Haneke. Sony Pictures Classics, 2005. Film. Cardoso-Marques, José Alexandre, dir. Champigny-sur-Tage: 30 ans après. Secam, Paris, 1987. Film. Chirac, Jacques. “Discours d’Orléans.” Institut National de l’Audiovisuel. 19 June 1991. Web. 6 January 2010. .


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Cordeiro, Albano. “La communauté Portugaise a été protégée jusqu’ici par le paratonnerre maghrébin.” L’Europe multi-communautaire. Spec. issue of IM’Média/Plein Droit 89/90 (1990): 116–118. Print. ———.“Les apports de la communauté portugaise à la diversité ethnoculturelle.” Hommes et Migrations 1210 (1997): 5–17. Print. ———. “Les Portugais, une population invisible?” Immigration et intégration: L’état des savoirs. Ed. Philippe Dewitte. Paris: La Découverte, 1999. 106–111. Print. Couto, Mia. Sleepwalking Land. London: Serpent’s Tail, 2006. Print. Fernandes, Martine. “Alice Machado, première écrivaine portugaise de langue française.” Ecrivains Francophones de l’Europe. Ed. Robert Jouanny. Spec. issue of Interculturel Francophonies 7 (June–July 2005): 187–204. Print. ———. “Mémoire des dictatures de Salazar et de Franco: Alice Machado et Mercedes Deambrosis, écrivaines françaises d’origine ibérique.” Paroles, langues et silences en héritage.” Ed. Caroline Andriot-Saillant, Dora Carpenter, and Nicole Thatcher. Clermont-Ferrand, France: Presses Universitaires Blaise Pascal, 2008. Print. ———. “ ‘Miki-Le-Toss, or How to Spot a Guèch in a Few Easy Lessons’: Tos Ethnic Identity in France through the Blogs of Young People of Portuguese Descent.” Hexagonal Variations: Diversity, Plurality and Reinvention in Contemporary French Studies. Ed. Alistair Rolls and Murray Pratt. Amsterdam: Rodopi, forthcoming. Print. ———. “ ‘Miki-le-toss ou comment repérer un guech en quelques leçons’: L’identité ethnique ‘tos’ en France à travers les blogs de jeunes Lusodescendants.” Portal: Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies 4.7 (2007): n. pag. Web. 6 June 2010. ———. “ ‘Si t’écoutes ton père, c’est la route tout droit’: Une analyse cognitive de l’identité culturelle dans Georgette! de Farida Belghoul.” Identités et altérités dans les littératures francophones. Ed. Driss

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Assaouï. Spec. issue of Dalhousie French Studies 74–75 (Spring/ Summer 2006): 59–73. Print. Fontenay, Elisabeth de. Le silence des bêtes: La philosophie à l’épreuve de l’animalité. Paris: Fayard, 1999. Print. Higgs, David, ed. Portuguese Migration in Global Perspective. Toronto: Multicultural History Society of Ontario, 1990. Print. Ireland, Susan, and Patrice Proulx, eds. Immigrant Narratives in Contemporary France. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001. Print. Jelen, Brigitte. “Immigrant In/Visibility: Portuguese and North Africans in Post-Colonial France.” Dissertation. University of California, Irvine, 2007. Print. Kenner, Robert, dir. Food, Inc. Magnolia, 2008. Video. Kettane, Nacer. Le sourire de Brahim. Paris: Delanoël, 1985. Print. Kilani, Mondher. “Crise de la ‘vache folle’ et déclin de la raison sacrificielle.” Terrain 38 (March 2002): no pag. Web. 24 May 2008. . Lains, Pedro. “An Account of the Portuguese African Empire, 1885– 1975.” Revista de História Económica, Journal of Iberian and Latin American Economic History 16.1 (1998): 235–263. Print. Lobo Antunes, António. South of Nowhere. Trans. Elizabeth Lowe. New York: Random House, 1983. Trans. of Os cus de Judas. Lisbon: Dom Quixote, 1983. Print. Machado, Alice. Les silences de Porto Santo. Paris: Lanore, 2003. Print. Martinez, Sandrine. “Carlos Batista: ‘Passeur de culture clandestin.’ ” Altérités. 2005. Web. 10 May 2008. . Mónica, Maria Filomena. Educação e sociedade no Portugal de Salazar: A escola primária salazarista (1926–39). Lisbon: Presença-Gis, 1978. Print.


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Muñoz, Marie-Claude. “Des Tos aux Luso-descendants.” Latitudes 5 (1999): 5–7. Print. Pereira, Victor. “L’état portugais en France et les Portugais en France de 1958 à 1974.” Lusotopie 10 (2002): 9–27. Print. Plantin, Christophe. “Le bonheur de ce monde”. Web. 6 January 2011. . Salazar, António de Oliveira. “A Nação na Política Colonial.” Discursos (1928–1934). Coimbra, Portugal: Coimbra Editora, 1935. 229–237. Print. Saramago, José. “How Characters Became the Masters and the Author Their Apprentice.” Nobel Lecture. Nobel Foundation, 7 December 1998. Web. 24 May 2007. . Sayad, Abdelmalek. The Suffering of the Immigrant. Cambridge: Polity, 2004. Print. Silva, A. E. Duarte, and Fernando Rosa, eds. Salazar e Salazarismo. Lisbon: Dom Quixote, 1989. Stora, Benjamin. “La guerre d’Algérie dans les mémoires françaises: Violence d’une mémoire de Revanche.” Esprit Créateur 43 (2003): 7–31. Print. Tiffin, Helen, ed. Five Emus to the King of Siam: Empire and the Environment. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007. Print. Timsit, Patrick. “The One Man Stand up Show.” Studio Canal, 2008. Television. Turner, Mark, and Gilles Fauconnier. The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic Books, 2002. Print. Van der Waals, Willem S. Portugal’s War in Angola, 1961–1974. Rivonia: Ashanti, 1993. Print.

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Vieira, José. Gens du Salto: Mémoires des Portugais qui ont fui vers la France dans les années 60. Paris: La Huit production, 2005. Print. ———. La photo déchirée: Chroniques d’une émigration clandestine. Paris: La Huit production, 2002. Print. Volovitch-Tavares, Marie-Christine. Portugais à Champigny: Le temps des baraques. Paris: Autrement, 1995. Print. Voltaire. “Dialogue du Chapon et de la Poularde.” Œuvres complètes, Mélanges IV. 1763. Web. 10 June 2006. .

CHAPTER 7

THE FUTURE OF AN ETHICS OF DIFFERENCE AFTER HARDT AND NEGRI’S EMPIRE 53

Zahi Zalloua

In their landmark work Empire, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri call for a reconfiguration of the field of political theory, arguing that critics must go beyond a “politics of difference” that has been “outflanked by [new] strategies of power” (138). Singled out in their analysis are postcolonial and postmodern thinkers who engage in a demoded—and dangerously ineffective—form of critique by continuing to privilege fluidity and hybridity in the struggle against “the binaries and essentialism of modern sovereignty” (138).54 Although Hardt and Negri themselves have downplayed the radicalism of their approach,55 their manifesto arguably makes the case for the urgency of theorizing globalization

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differently—that is, as empire. This renewed understanding, they contend, is the only way to come to terms with the complex and changing present reality and, subsequently, to find a more efficient mode of resisting the repressive, homogenizing elements of that reality: “In the face of the new forms of sovereignty, new strategies of contestation and new alternatives need to be invented” (Brown and Szeman 182). In this essay, I scrutinize and supplement Hardt and Negri’s understanding of difference through a reflection on the place of ethical theory in the conceptualization of new strategies of political resistance in a global era. Drawing on the works of Edouard Glissant and Jacques Derrida, I theorize and rethink the problematic concept of difference within empire, this “decentered and deterritorializing apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open, expanding frontiers” (Hardt and Negri Empire xii). Though the authors of Empire rightly underscore the limits of a politics of difference, calling attention to the ways difference can always be co-opted by dominant discourses, they do not adequately develop the ethical dimension of difference. They exclude from their analysis any discussion of its postcolonial and postmodernist inflections and devote fewer than ten pages of the five hundred–page volume to the politics of difference.56 This is all the more puzzling given Hardt and Negri’s own commitment to general questions of ethics and difference— albeit in their more Spinozistic and Deleuzian inflections—and to, more particularly, the deployment of the ethico-political figure of the multitude as the true subversive subject of globalization.57

FIGHTING

A

NEW ENEMY

The merits of Empire lie in its attempt to reconfigure the center/periphery model of analysis, and, more importantly, in its effort to complicate the identification by postcolonial theorists of globalization with neo-imperialism (or with the United States) by examining closely the ways repressive power currently functions. At the heart of Hardt and Negri’s critique is their contention that the nation-state is an outdated notion, one that belongs to a prior era of “modern” imperialist sovereignty that has been

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superseded by the new imperial sovereignty of an empire structured by the flow of capital. Any critique of globalization based on the assumption that nation-states are the primary loci of power is misguided: We insist on asserting that the construction of Empire is a step forward in order to do away with any nostalgia for the power structures that preceded it and refuse any political strategy that involves returning to that old arrangement, such as trying to resurrect the nation-state to protect against global capital. (Hardt and Negri, Empire 43)

No one is immune from the logic of global capital. Inside/outside and local/global dichotomies are, strictly speaking, illusory, since all people “feed into and support the development of the capitalist imperial machine” (Empire 45). It is therefore not only false but also counterproductive and damaging “to claim that we can (re)establish local identities that are in some sense outside and protected against the global flows of capital and Empire”—that is, to think of difference in terms of a particular locale resisting a general global trend (Empire 45). As a corrective to this misguided vision of the nation or of the local’s capacity for resistance, Hardt and Negri argue in Empire for a reconceptualization of globalization as a “regime of the production of identity and difference, or really of homogenization and heterogenization” (45). This understanding of globalization relies specifically on Foucault’s notion of biopower, which manifests itself through “an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugations of bodies and the control of populations” (History of Sexuality 140). In contrast to earlier models of power, Foucault’s conception underscores power’s productive or positive nature. As he writes in Discipline and Punish (1977), “[w]e must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it ‘excludes,’ it ‘represses,’ it ‘censors,’ it ‘abstracts,’ it ‘masks,’ it ‘conceals.’ In fact, power produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth” (194). Under a formulation borrowed from Deleuze that they call the “society of control” (Empire 23), Hardt and Negri uphold power’s productive principle—“[Empire] produce[s] not only commodities but also

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subjectivities” (Empire 32)—and extend the scope of Foucault’s analysis of the normalizing effects of power beyond disciplinary institutions (such as the prison and the asylum). In the “society of control,” along with its unprecedented “flexible and fluctuating networks,” the “normalizing apparatuses of disciplinarity” intensify, becoming more general, “more ‘democratic,’ ever more immanent to the social field, distributed through the brains and bodies of the citizens” (Empire 23). Given the nature and dominance of global power, described (again in Deleuzian terms) as an “imperial machine,” Hardt and Negri deny the possibility of transcendence, that is, of adopting a critical position from nowhere, the position of a subject uncontaminated by ideology; such an “external standpoint no longer exists” (Empire 34). A critique of empire must remain immanent and resist the temptation of transcendence. It is the failure to recognize that modern sovereignty has given way to empire that typically gives social critics the transcendental urge to posit a form of discourse that “could oppose the informational colonization of being” (Empire 34), the assimilative, instrumental rationality prevalent in American capitalism (Jürgen Habermas’ theory of communication can be seen as offering an alternative to capitalism’s model of assimilative rationality). The appeal to difference common to postmodernist and postcolonial circles seems to suffer from precisely such a sense of transcendence, a desire to embrace difference—the margin, the excluded other—en-soi (in it-self), outside of Western hegemony. One of the refrains of Empire is the need to know the “true enemy” (137). With the end of colonialism and the powers of the nation-state disappearing, the new enemy is empire, an enemy which nevertheless holds the promise of a better, more democratic future: The passage to Empire and its processes of globalization offer new possibilities to the forces of liberation .… Our political task … is not simply to resist these processes but to reorganize them and redirect them toward new ends. The creative forces of the multitude that sustain Empire are also capable of autonomously constructing a counter-Empire, an alternative political organization of global flows and exchanges. (Hardt and Negri, Empire xv)


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Globalization … is really a condition for the liberation of the multitude. (Hardt and Negri, Empire 52)

In other words, globalization is not an obstacle to overcome but a system to struggle with and transform (reinvent) on the plane of immanence. Rather than arguing for a politics of difference, for the “truth” of the other’s difference, postmodernist and postcolonial theorists would do better to recognize that they are playing into the hands of their enemies and perpetuating empire, which gladly celebrates difference: “This new enemy not only is resistant to the old weapons but actually thrives on them, and thus joins its would-be antagonists in applying them to the fullest. Long live difference! Down with essentialist binaries!” (Empire 138). Hybridity, then, the once-cherished strategy for combating identitarian boundaries and antagonisms, has become the new norm of globalization; as a result, hybridity as a concept has lost its critical edge. It can no longer serve as an effective means of resistance to the homogenizing force of empire, since it is neutralized and absorbed by the very system it purports to contest.58

SINGULARITY

AND

SOLIDARITY: THE MULTITUDE

It is not with the concept of hybridity itself that Hardt and Negri take issue, for they concede that appeals to a rhetoric of difference do have some limited value. In a gesture of reconciliation with respect to postcolonial critics—to whose claims they do not, as they say, seek to propose “a complete refutation” (Empire 156)—the authors of Empire suggest the possibility of reappropriating the truth or meaning of difference for an emancipatory end. Their point is rather that simply to preach difference (hybridity, migrancy, etc.) as a value is ineffective at best and complicit in the normalizing process at worst. In place of such an approach, they advocate something like a Nietzschean expression of will to power, an expression of the will’s capacity to interpret things differently. The notions of “difference, hybridity, and mobility” (or “truth, purity, and stasis,” for that matter) are “not liberatory in themselves,” as Hardt

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and Negri put it; rather, the “real revolutionary practice” lies in “taking control of the production of truth,” which alone “makes us free” (156). What is not Nietzschean about this vision, however, is its alleged democratic appeal. Hardt and Negri’s injunction to transform and appropriate the truth of hybridity, difference, and migration at “the level of production” follows a critique of the elitism of postcolonial theorists, clearly presenting itself as a democratic alternative: “In our present imperial world, the liberatory potential of postmodernist and postcolonial discourses … only resonates with the situation of an elite population that enjoys certain rights, a certain level of wealth, and a certain position in the global hierarchy” (Empire 156). It is the multitude who will be most receptive to this revolutionary call—but who is the multitude? The multitude is the new agent of change and resistance, the “new proletariat” of globalization (Empire 402). Unlike that of the traditional proletariat, the labor of the multitude is not confined to the factory; rather, their labor is said to be “immaterial” or “affective,” reflecting the shift from industrial to postindustrial capitalism. It is the type of labor that “immediately involves social interaction and cooperation,” a type of labor, for example, common in service industries: “Since the production of services results in no material and durable good, we define the labor involved in this production as immaterial labor—that is, labor that produces an immaterial good, such as a service, a cultural product, knowledge, or communication” (Hardt and Negri, Empire 294, 290). Revising the meaning of labor (and labor’s potential for revolt), Hardt and Negri define the proletariat of empire to include “all those whose labor is directly or indirectly exploited by and subjected to capitalist norms of production and reproduction” (Empire 52). What purportedly brings the multitude together, constituting them as a collective entity, is their will to contest: One element we can put our finger on at the most basic and elementary level is the will to be against. In general, the will to be against does not seem to require much explanation. Disobedience to authority is one of the most natural and healthy acts. To us it seems completely obvious that those who are exploited will resist and—given the necessary conditions—rebel. (Empire 210)


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This rebellion takes a new form appropriate to its new enemy: If there is no longer a place that can be recognized as outside, we must be against in every place.… Whereas in the disciplinary era sabotage was the fundamental notion of resistance, in the era of imperial control it may be desertion. Whereas being-against in modernity often meant a direct and/or dialectical opposition of forces, in postmodernity being-against might well be most effective in an oblique or diagonal stance. Battles against the Empire might be won through subtraction and defection. This desertion does not have a place; it is the evacuation of the places of power. (Empire 211–212)

Migration is, of course, a value long advocated by postcolonial theorists. “Postcolonial literary studies treat migration generally in terms of its epiphanies: new sight, new knowledge, a new understanding of the relativity of things. All of which, of course, must be true in many respects,” writes Andrew Smith (257).59 However, in Hardt and Negri’s account, the experience of displacement is no longer simply the privilege of the cosmopolitan elite (intellectual or writer), who recognizes “no necessary or eternal ‘belongingness’ ” (Hall, The Hard Road 10; qtd. in Bhabha, Location 177); nomadic migration—conceived here both as literal displacement and as figurative parallax—is potentially available to all, to any member of the multitude. It is at this important point—the point at which the authors pass from the exposition and critique of prior models to their proposed new means for effective resistance—that Hardt and Negri’s argument reveals both its potential and its lacunae. Critics like Homi Bhabha, who have effectively deployed migrancy as a strategic trope for the work of selfdisplacement, have taken issue with Empire’s portrayal of the nomadic multitude: “Nomadism and miscegenation appear here as figures of virtue, as the first ethical practice on the terrain of Empire” (Hardt and Negri, Empire 362; emphasis mine). This portrayal appears here as overly romantic and misguided in its view of human agency: “Migrants, refugees, and nomads don’t merely circulate. They need to settle, claim asylum or nationality, demand housing and education, assert their

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economic and cultural rights, and come to be legally represented within legal jurisdictions” (Bhabha, “Statement” 347).60 Following Etienne Balibar, one might raise the objection that in the global era, individuals find themselves not unified in their collective will but, on the contrary, “more isolated and less compatible, less univocal and more antagonistic” (Balibar 155). One may also wonder how Hardt and Negri imagine the multitude so free, given their emphasis on biopower. The answer, I believe, lies in their (selective) use of Foucault’s late work on “[t]he ethical care of the self ” (Hardt and Negri, Empire 91). In a brief section of their book entitled “Humanism after the Death of Man,” Hardt and Negri celebrate the emergence of a new creative humanism in the age of globalization, the dawn of a global humanism characterized by “the continuous constituent project to create and re-create ourselves and our world ” (92). Such a project is conceived here in terms of Foucault’s distinction between technologies of domination and technologies of the self. The former “determine the conduct of individuals and submit them to certain ends or domination” (Foucault, “Technologies” 225); they are identified with the ubiquitous mechanisms of normalization and the mode of subjectivization. The latter permit individuals to effect by their own means, or with the help of others, a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality. (Foucault, “Technologies” 225)

Migration as geographical displacement may not qualify as a technology of the self per se, but “corporeal and ontological migrations” do: In our contemporary world, the now common aesthetic mutations of the body, such as piercing and tattoos, punk fashion and its various imitations, are all initial indications of this corporeal transformation, but in the end they do not hold a candle to the kind of radical mutation needed here. The will to be against really needs a body that is completely incapable of submitting to command. It needs a body that is incapable of adapting to family life,


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to factory discipline, to the regulations of a traditional sex life, and so forth. (Hardt and Negri, Empire 216)

This vision of an unruly multitude, however—if not taken as purely rhetorical—clashes with Hardt and Negri’s earlier depiction of individuals who dutifully internalize the norms of their social fields, altering both their minds and bodies (23). Foucault, for his part, warns against this type of misreading, underscoring the internalization of practices rather than simply celebrating their invention: I would say that if now I am interested … in the way in which the subject constitutes himself in an active fashion, by the practices of self, these practices are nevertheless not something that the individual invents by himself. They are patterns that he finds in his culture and which are proposed, suggested and imposed on him by his culture, his society and his social group.61

If Hardt and Negri subscribe to a romantic vision of the subject as endowed with both free will and unfettered powers of self-creation,62 Foucault’s subject is bound by history and culture, from which that subject derives limited technologies with which to fashion itself. Despite their limitations, however, these technologies render possible critique— the type of critique that “will separate out, from the contingency that has made us what we are, the possibility of no longer being, doing, or thinking what we are, do, or think” (Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?” 46). And although such a model of self-care places the self (understood in European fashion) at the center of ethico-political change, the model is based on a conception of the subject as fundamentally relational: the subject is not an autonomous Cartesian substance but rather constituted as a relation to self. In Empire’s sequel, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire,63 Hardt and Negri have sought to clarify and expand on the concept of multitude, addressing more specifically the issue of the multitude’s solidarity. If Empire purports to elucidate the evolving nature of the new enemy, Multitude elaborates further the nature of Hardt and Negri’s new collective subject of resistance: the multitude as constituted

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by “radical differences, singularities, that can never be synthesized in an identity” (Multitude 335). The meaning of singularity here owes a great deal to Deleuze and should not be confused or conflated with the notion of (cultural) difference, evoked above in the discussion of the politics of difference. For Deleuze, a singularity is defined by its “internal difference,” meaning that it is univocal and (linguistically or culturally) unmediated, and not to be understood in terms of, for instance, sameness, analogy, or opposition.64 Deleuze states starkly that a singularity, ontologically speaking, inhabits “a world without others.”65 But what kind of ethics can emerge from Deleuze’s postidentitarian metaphysics? And how would it translate back into the political project of Empire and Multitude? An earlier text by Hardt on the work of Deleuze hints at a possible answer. In Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy, Hardt outlines ways of thinking about Deleuze (via Spinoza) ethically. Drawing from Spinoza’s notion of conatus (each thing’s inherent tendency toward self-preservation and activity66), Deleuze develops a dynamic, materialist ethics of affirmation and joy in which bodies, which are constantly interacting, seek to increase “active affections” and maximize “joyful passions” (Deleuze, Expressionism 246). Unlike Cartesian bodies, which are static and ontologically subordinate to minds, Spinozistic bodies are unruly—“infused with desire” (Hardt, Gilles Deleuze 100)—and the proper object of ethical study.67 Bodies interacting with one another can yield two results: joyful passive affections (resulting from an external body agreeing with my nature) and sad passive affections (resulting from an external body disagreeing with my nature). Whereas sad affections decrease one’s power to act, joyful affections increase it. This is, however, only the first moment in the ethical journey toward becoming active (the increase of one’s power). The second moment lies in the desire to comprehend the cause of the encounter itself (that is, to strip the encounter of its arbitrariness); “we are induced to form the idea of what is common to that body and our own” (Deleuze, Expressionism 282). Only when one forms or establishes what is common to the two bodies can one effectively move from being passive to becoming active.


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This might strike the reader as dangerously narcissistic: one’s concern for the other (to know the other) is really a concern to know whether the other will increase or decrease one’s own “force and positive affects” (Nesbitt 93). As if to block precisely such an interpretation, Hardt and Negri underscore the Spinozistic intertext by tying the common to the question of love. “Love,” as Spinoza formulates it, “is pleasure accompanied by the idea of an external cause” (Spinoza 312). The call for solidarity in global resistance as a political, collective act of love becomes a refrain for Hardt and Negri, strategically placed in the last pages of both Empire and Multitude.68 Here is the strong novelty of militancy today: it repeats the virtues of insurrectional action of two hundred years of subversive experience, but at the same time it is linked to a new world, a world that knows no outside. It knows only an inside, a vital and ineluctable participation in the set of social structures, with no possibility of transcending them. This inside is the productive cooperation of mass intellectuality and affective networks, the productivity of postmodern biopolitics. This militancy makes resistance into counterpower and makes rebellion into a project of love. (Empire 413)

The event that is much needed today—namely, a “radical insurrectional demand”—“will be the real political act of love” (Multitude 358). Love is an expression of profound generosity for Hardt and Negri—“we need a more generous and more unrestrained conception of love” (Multitude 351)—because it represents a shift from the concern with the increase of my power to act to a concern for our power to construct a new democracy: “Love does not end there [in the love for a particular other—spouse, mother, etc.]”; rather, “love serves as the basis for our political projects in common and the construction of a new society. Without this love, we are nothing” (Multitude 352; emphasis added). Hardt and Negri insist that this emphasis on shared projects never denies the difference—or rather, the singularity—of others. Their concept of love foregrounds multiplicity, tying love to the multitude

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itself: “singularity plus cooperation, recognition of difference and of the benefit of a common relationship. It’s in that sense that we say that the project of the multitude is a project of love” (Brown and Szeman 387). India serves as a test case for Hardt and Negri’s theory of the multitude; the country is an illustration of the ways to sustain the double demands of sameness and difference that are constitutive of Hardt and Negri’s “project of love.” Hardt and Negri deliver their message through a tale of two Italians in India. The first Italian writer is unable to translate his experience of India into his native language; frustrated, he is able to offer his readers only a tautology: “India is India.” The second writer absorbs the foreign culture and sees sameness everywhere. They are all like us, he says—“all the differences of India melt away and all that remains is another Italy” (Multitude 127–128). Then, Hardt and Negri proceed to describe what a true encounter with India would have looked like: India, however, is not merely different from Europe. India (and every local reality within India) is singular—not different from any universal standard but different in itself. If the first Italian writer could free himself of Europe as standard he could grasp the singularity. This singularity does not mean, however, that the world is merely a collection of incommunicable localities. Once we recognize singularity, the common begins to emerge. Singularities do communicate, and they are able to do so because of the common they share. We share bodies with two eyes, ten fingers, ten toes; we share life on this earth; we share capitalist regimes of production and exploitation; we share common dreams of a better future. Our communication, collaboration, and cooperations, furthermore, not only are based on the common that exists but also in turn produce the common. We make and remake the common we share every day. If the second Italian writer could free himself of Europe as standard, he could grasp this dynamic relation of the common. (Multitude 128)

Using Deleuze’s concept of singularity as internal difference, along with Spinoza’s more collective sensibility, stressing the dialogic impulse to communicate, Hardt and Negri expose and denounce the Italian writers’ Eurocentric biases. They go on to highlight ways that the multitude


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operates quite differently as a concept; they deploy an ethical relational economy that purports to respect the singularity of others: Here is a non-Eurocentric view of the global multitude: an open network of singularities that links together on the basis of the common they share and the common they produce. It is not easy for any of us to stop measuring the world against the standard of Europe, but the concept of the multitude requires it of us. It is a challenge. Embrace it. (Multitude 129)

In this optimistic model of solidarity, all types of differences are treated as singular differences: “The multitude is a multiplicity of innumerable internal differences that can never be reduced to a unity or a single identity” (Hardt and Negri, Multitude xiv). It is thus the hope of Hardt and Negri that the idea of the multitude will in practice rejuvenate the impoverished political left, overshadowed by the dominance of multiculturalism and identity politics (219–220). In this respect, if Empire stresses that difference is everywhere—and hence that there is no longer any need for a politics of difference—Multitude reframes the issue of difference around the idea of the common: “Insofar as the multitude is neither an identity … nor uniform, the internal differences of the multitude must discover the common that allows them to communicate and act together. The common we share, in fact, is not so much discovered as it is produced” (Hardt and Negri, Multitude xv). The evocation of poiesis (the act of creation) underscores the role of agency in the creation of correspondences between singularities (that is, in the fashioning of the multitude).

DIFFERENCE

AND

DISRUPTION

By foregrounding intersubjectivity, commonality, agency, and nonhierarchical relations, Hardt and Negri arguably leave no room for the unsettling character of difference. That is to say, difference remains, in their model, strikingly similar to what passes for difference in multiculturalism: a type of difference that tends to be essentializing rather than recalcitrant to understanding—and thus quite consistent with

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identitarian logic. The linguistic construction of the other, or the discursivity of difference, often goes unnoticed and unexamined in debates about multiculturalism; transparency and difference are by no means mutually exclusive here (hooks 173). Likewise, Hardt and Negri do not so much engage with the opacity or alterity of difference as recognize the other’s ontological equality. When a rapprochement is made (for the well-being of the multitude), it is made, seemingly, without any friction. In contrast to this harmonious model of the ethical encounter within the multitude, Edouard Glissant affirms—in a bold gesture that collapses any rigid distinction between the political and the ethical—his demand for “the right to opacity for everyone” (Glissant, Poetics of Relation 194). This right to opacity is foremost a call to resist the Western ideal of transparency: “We must fight against transparency everywhere” (Glissant, Caribbean Discourse 256). Glissant’s position at once confirms and complicates Hardt and Negri’s assertion that postcolonial and postmodern defenders of difference are complicit with their new enemy, empire. Conceptualizing resistance in terms of the subject’s relation to language, Glissant favors the cultivation of what he calls a forced poetics or a counterpoetics. At first glance, this may seem to represent a return to the old model of sovereignty, a yearning to protect the Antillean local against the Western global. But Glissant refuses precisely this formulation of the debate. He quite emphatically rejects the nostalgic desire to return to or regain an authentic language or identity. The Creole language, praised by many of Glissant’s contemporaries, is not an end in itself: “Creole is … a concession made by the Other for his own purposes in dealing with our world. We have seized this concession to use it for our own purposes … but having seized it does not make it into a means of self-expression” (Glissant, Caribbean Discourse 166–167). A genuine means of self-expression—that is, an authentic or “natural poetics” (120) reflecting Antillean locality—is not available to Glissant’s fellow Martinicans. Only limited strategies are available instead, strategies that recombine elements of the dominant discourse in order to unsettle it. Though he concurs with the authors of Empire in his demystification of locality as a site of true resistance, Glissant diverges from them in his


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interpretations of the nation-state and of difference. Unlike Hardt and Negri, Glissant does not contend that the nation-state has dissolved into the “smooth” space of empire (Glissant, Caribbean Discourse 190).69 Having witnessed firsthand France’s enduring hegemony in its excolonies,70 Glissant hesitates to do away with the idea of the nation-state. The boundaries of nation-states may have eroded under global capitalism, but this generalized condition of economic empire fails to account for the specificity of the Caribbean condition. As a response to France’s ideological presence in its départements d’outre-mer (overseas departments), Glissant’s counterpoetics operates within the dominant discourse (it takes place on the plane of immanence) at the level of representation and signification (it communicates and unsettles), and it functions as a means to both preserve and fashion (a relation with) cultural difference. Like Hardt and Negri, Glissant finds multiculturalism politically ineffective and inadequate to the task of challenging identitarian ideology; yet, he argues, there exists an alternative to the dominant model of “root-identity” (identité-racine) that does not rely for its efficacy on the effacement of specificity. Glissant names this alternative the poetics of relation. Similar to Lévinas’ ethics, which is defined as an interruption of the self’s conatus essendi,71 Relation problematizes the self’s selfsufficiency, simultaneously underscoring the rhizomatic or relational quality of identity (identité-relation/identité-rhizome) and the irreducible difference of the other:72 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari criticized notions of the root and, even perhaps, notions of being rooted. The root is unique, a stock taking all upon itself and killing all around it. In opposition to this they propose the rhizome, an enmeshed root system, a network spreading either in the ground or in the air, with no predatory rootstock taking over permanently. The notion of the rhizome maintains, therefore, the idea of rootedness but challenges that of a totalitarian root. Rhizomatic thought is the principle behind what I call the Poetics of Relation, in which each and every identity is extended through a relationship with the Other. (Glissant, Poetics of Relation 11)

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Yet unlike Deleuze and Guattari, whose concepts he freely appropriates, Glissant does not conflate the rhizome and the nomad: Deleuze and Guattari draw … a parallel between rhizomatics and nomadology. But nomadism “escapes” the effort of the peoples, who tormentedly seek roots.… The rhizome is not nomadic, it takes root, even in air…; but not being a root [souche] predisposes it to “accept” the other’s inconceivableness: the new, neighboring bud that is always possible.73

For Glissant, the desire for rootedness cannot simply be wished away, but it can—and should—be resisted when it helps perpetuate violence and domination. The desire’s persistence in contemporary political reality is undeniable. The example of Bosnia prompted him to note: “We will change nothing in the situation of the peoples of the world unless we change this imaginary [cet imaginaire], unless we change the idea that identity must be a single root, fixed and intolerant” (Glissant, Introduction 66). Relation fosters the conditions for hybridity—métissage or créolisation— conditions under which the hegemonic ideology of root identity can be disrupted: “If we posit métissage as, generally speaking, the meeting and synthesis of two differences, creolization seems to be a limitless métissage, its elements diffracted and its consequences unforeseeable” (Glissant, Poetics of Relation 34). Its logic is to degeneralize, to contest the homogenization of the cultural other: “Relation struggles and states itself in opacity.”74 Like Hardt and Negri, Glissant in Traité du toutmonde (1997) sees hybridity not as a concern limited to the postcolonial other or critic, but as a cultural phenomenon affecting the tout-monde (“the whole world is in the process of archipelagization and creolization” [194]) that demands new modes of thought: The archipelagic mode of thought suits the pace of our worlds. It borrows their ambiguity, fragility, and detours [dérivé]. It consents to the practice of diversion, which is neither flight nor renunciation. It recognizes the range of the imaginaries of the Trace, which it ratifies.… We become aware of what was


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continental, thick and weighing us down in the extravagant systematic thoughts that have governed the History of humanities to this day and that are no longer appropriate to our explosions, our histories, and our no less extravagant wanderings. Archipelagic thought, thoughts of archipelagoes, open these seas up to us. (Glissant, Traité 31)

Glissant tempers his euphoric and utopian affirmation of this worldwide process, however, with a sober call for vigilance against the homogenizing and totalizing tendencies of globalization: the danger of seeing “the whole-world” as a “totalizing socio-economic machine” (22). In Traité du tout-monde, he reaffirms his ideal of identité-relation, reiterating his ethico-political command to respect the other’s opaqueness: “I claim for all the right to opacity” (29).75 Without such respect, Glissant warns, the world will give way to “standardized dilution”—that is, to the flattening of cultural difference (192). With his concept of altermondialisation (alterglobalization; the French word for globalization is derived from world [monde], a term that evokes the globe’s inhabitants more than its geography), Derrida similarly foregrounds the continued need to consider globalization in terms of alterity and its preservation—the need to think of globalization otherwise (altermondialisation) than its current manifestation as a homogenizing capitalism that domesticates difference. In a brief essay entitled “Une Europe de l’espoir” (A Europe of hope), Derrida challenges the terms of the debate imposed by a hegemonic and arrogant American power that frames global struggle as a battle of good and evil. To this model Derrida opposes an engaged Europe, a “Europe that is more social and less mercantile” (Derrida, “Une Europe” 3) and that realizes the promises of the Enlightenment.76 Here, the term Europe does not refer to—or rather, is not limited to—a geographical space with fixed boundaries; it refers, rather, to a critical ethos based on the ideals of democracy, human rights, and freedom of thought:77 It is once again a question of the Enlightenment, that is, of access to Reason in a certain public space, though this time in conditions

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Like Glissant’s archipelagoes, which serve as a productive model for rhizomatic thought, Derrida’s Europe becomes a trope for a deconstructive mode of reading, “an example of what a politics, a reflection, and an ethics might be, the inheritors of a past Enlightenment that bear an Enlightenment to come, a Europe capable of non-binary forms of discernment” (Derrida, “Une Europe” 3). To read like a “European” (a subject position open to all—to Americans, for example, who draw their hope from the civil rights movement) is to contest what passes for moral clarity today. Against post-9/11 doxa and its resurrected rhetoric of good and evil, Derrida calls for a productive skepticism—a skepticism that does not entail paralysis and nihilism in the face of an individual’s “powerlessness to comprehend, recognize, cognize, identify, name, describe, foresee” (Derrida, “Autoimmunity” 94) but rather that provokes vigilance and self-critique, a more rigorous mode of analysis—one that resists the lure of moral absolutes and bears witness to the specificity and complexity of sociopolitical reality. Just as Foucault before him had defiantly refused the “blackmail of the Enlightenment”—that is, the notion that one is either for it or against it (Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?” 42)—so, on the one hand, Derrida’s valorization of a European Enlightenment may have surprised if not shocked some of his readers, especially those for whom the father of deconstruction is a nihilist, obscurantist, textual idealist, or more generally, an enemy of reason. On the other hand, this “turn” to the Enlightenment does not really represent a deviation in Derrida’s philosophical path. It is quite consistent with his demystifying critique of the yearning for purity, absolute (that is, ahistorical) meanings, or


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transcendental signifieds (ousia, eidos, consciousness, etc.). For Derrida, this critique takes place first and foremost at the level of language. As Iain Chambers puts it, “[i]f what passes for knowledge emerges within language, then, critical knowledge involves an exploration of language itself.”78 Thus, Derrida recognizes that his genealogical investigations— his denaturalization of key normative concepts (e.g., nature, culture, democracy)—never constitute a transgression in the pure sense of the term, as in a stepping outside of metaphysics: There is not a transgression, if one understands by that a pure and simple landing … beyond metaphysics, at a point which would be, let us not forget, first of all a point of language or writing. Now, even in aggressions or transgressions, we are consorting with a code to which metaphysics is tied irreducibly, such that every transgressive gesture reencloses us—precisely by giving us a hold on the closure of metaphysics—within this closure. (Derrida, Positions 12)

Nevertheless, despite (or because of) the impossibility of transcending the “closure of metaphysics,” Derrida tirelessly works to forestall what post-Marxists Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe call the desire for an “ultimate fixity of meaning” (112), rethinking creatively and critically (under erasure) the inherited concepts of metaphysics within that very tradition: “ ‘a mutation will have to take place’ in our entire way of thinking about justice, democracy, sovereignty, globalization, military power, the relations of nation-states, the politics of friendship and enmity in order to address terrorism with any hope of an effective cure” (Mitchell 283). Along these lines, Derrida’s appeal to the Enlightenment, then, is not to be understood as a wholesale acceptance of its reason but rather as a tactical use of its tools in an effort to reframe—or, better yet, mutate— the terms of current debates (about, e.g., globalization, democracy, cosmopolitanism, hospitality, hybridity, difference) and to prepare if not provide an urgent opening “to see the present as holding some ability to become-other” (Nealon 79).

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MAKING DIFFERENCE MATTER In the ever-expanding war on terror, a struggle that began after the publication of Empire and that continues to serve as a critical test case for Hardt and Negri’s claims, the question of cultural difference and its incomprehensibility is both urgent and perilous. An affirmation of absolute difference functions (or is intended to function) to block the West’s reifying gaze, but such an affirmation is also susceptible to co-optation by the imperial machine of empire. The Islamic other, for example, is indeed constructed as different in such a discourse—he or she is alien, savage, and less than human, not a hybrid mirror of his or her fellow global citizens. Such othering mechanisms also concretely demonstrate the risk of overemphasizing nonunderstanding, that is, Glissantian opacity or alterity. Derrida’s well-known statement that tout autre est tout autre (every other is wholly other) opens itself up to this (mis)interpretation (Derrida, Aporias 22). The utterance seems utterly devoid of any context; in the words of Peter Hallward, it actually singularizes the other, stripping him or her of facticity and historical specificity.79 In Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, Alain Badiou locates the source of this fascination—or rather, obsession—with difference in the philosophy of Lévinas, taking issue with Lévinas’ dominant, cult-like status in ethical circles and with his having almost singlehandedly framed all of ethical discourse in terms of an ethics of difference. Badiou scrutinizes, in particular, Lévinas’ contention that the other is radically other—“The Other comes to us not only out of context but also without mediation” (Lévinas, “Meaning and Sense” 53; qtd. in Badiou xxii)—contending that “[t]he other always resembles me too much for the hypothesis of an originary exposure of his alterity to be necessarily true” (Badiou 22). Badiou argues that, for Lévinas, the source of the other’s radical otherness must originate elsewhere, in an absolute other, which can, in the final analysis, only be God: “There can be no ethics without God the ineffable” (Badiou 22). Lévinasian ethics, then, turns out to be a religion, and if one is tempted to simply bracket the divine, thus secularizing, as it were, Lévinas’ ethics of difference,


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what one is left with is but a “decomposed religion,” nothing more than “dog’s dinner” (Badiou 23). Such an ethics of difference treats all others qua others abstractly and formally but distinguishes in practice between others who are like me and those who are not. As Badiou puts it, “[T]his celebrated ‘other’ is acceptable only if he is a good other.… That is to say: I respect differences, but only, of course, in so far as that which differs also respects, just as I do, the said differences” (24). Lévinas’ own resistance to giving any content to the form of the other is perhaps made most apparent in a radio interview with Shlomo Malkin and Alain Finkelkraut, broadcast shortly after the massacres of hundreds of Palestinians at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Israeli-occupied Lebanon in 1982. News of the massacres shocked the world and deeply disturbed the Jewish community, leading Malkin to ask Lévinas, “You are the philosopher of the ‘other.’ Isn’t history, isn’t politics the very site of the encounter with the ‘other,’ and for the Israeli isn’t the ‘other’ above all Palestinian?” Lévinas answered: My definition of the other is completely different. The other is the neighbor, who is not necessarily my kin but who may be. But if your neighbor attacks another neighbor, or treats him unjustly, what can you do? Then alterity takes on another character, in alterity we can find an enemy, or at least we are faced with the problem of knowing who is right and who is wrong, who is just and who is unjust. There are people who are wrong. (Lévinas, “Ethics and Politics” 293–294)

Lévinas’ response amounts to a dismissal of the question. Refusing to compromise on his ethics of (absolute) difference, Lévinas opts for uncharacteristic simplicity, a straightforward commentary on a complex political reality. Howard Caygill observes in Lévinas’ stance “a coolness of political judgement [sic] that verged on the chilling, an unsentimental understanding of violence and power almost worthy of Machiavelli” (1); whereas Michael Shapiro discerns in Lévinas’ comments a privileging of the Jew as the exemplary radical other and a “blind spot” (68)—that is, an inability to imagine any other in the position of exclusion and

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victimhood. For Lévinas, then, political choices, based on a criterion of religious and national sameness, ostensibly trump an ethics of unyielding openness. For other critics still, Lévinas’ position reveals more than Zionist ideology and a cold indifference to the plight of the Palestinians: it crystallizes the disjunction between theory and practice. “What Levinas is basically saying,” writes Slavoj Žižek, “is that, as a principle, respect for alterity is unconditional (the highest sort of respect), but, when faced with a concrete other, one should nonetheless see if he is a friend or an enemy. In short, in practical politics, the respect for alterity strictly means nothing” (106). Is Derrida, as well as Glissant, vulnerable to these same indictments against the viability of an ethics of difference? In Derrida’s case, the validity of this objection hinges on the meaning of wholly other. To put it as a question, what exactly does Derrida intend by tout autre est tout autre? When he affirms the radical alterity of the other, is he following Lévinas in asserting the transcendence of the other? In an earlier essay on Totality and Infinity, Derrida challenges precisely this aspect of Lévinas’ philosophy, “the dream of a purely heterological thought,” “a pure thought of pure difference” (Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics” 151), arguing that one’s exposure to the other always entails a degree of relationality; the other is not “infinitely other” but is always perceived as “other than my self” (126). Yet Derrida seems to have reversed his earlier position, insisting that “the structure of my relation to the other is of a ‘relation without relation.’ It is a relation in which the other remains absolutely transcendent. I cannot reach the other. I cannot know the other from the inside and so on” (Derrida, “The Villanova Roundtable” 14; emphasis added). This relationless relation (rapport sans rapport) is nevertheless a relation of some kind, a paradoxical one involving both a relation and a nonrelation to the other: it joins and disjoins. Thus, though he joins Habermas in his urgent plea for Europe “to defend and promote a cosmopolitan order on the basis of international law against competing visions” (Habermas and Derrida 294), Derrida can still legitimately warn against an uncritical investment in the idea of cosmopolitanism. For Derrida, the cosmopolitan spirit is not immune from critique but


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rather it is something that must be perpetually scrutinized and endlessly perfected: If we must in fact cultivate the spirit of this tradition (as I believe most international institutions have done since World War I), we must also try to adjust the limits of this tradition to our own time by questioning the ways in which they have been defined and determined by the ontotheological, philosophical, and religious discourses in which this cosmopolitical ideal was formulated.… What I call “democracy to come” would go beyond the limits of cosmopolitanism, that is, of a world citizenship. It would be more in line with what lets singular beings (anyone) “live together,” there where they are not yet defined by citizenship, that is, by their condition as lawful “subjects” in a state or legitimate members of a nation-state or even of a confederation or world state. (Derrida, “Autoimmunity” 130)

Cultivating “another cosmopolitanism,” after Seyla Benhabib’s book title—one that is responsive to those marginalized subjects of globalization, to those who “call out for another international law, another border politics, another humanitarian politics, indeed a humanitarian commitment that effectively operates beyond the interests of Nation-States” (Derrida, Adieu 101)—goes hand in hand with the task of rethinking democracy and its paradigmatic relation to the other: The demos is at once the incalculable singularity of anyone, before any “subject”…, beyond all citizenship, beyond every “state,” indeed every “people,” indeed even beyond the current state of the definition of a living being as living “human” being, and the universality of rational calculation, of the equality of citizens before the law, the social bond of being together, with or without contract, and so on. (Derrida, “Autoimmunity” 120) There is no democracy without respect for irreducible singularity or alterity, but there is no democracy without the “community of friends” (koína ta [sic] philõn), without the calculation of majorities, without identifiable, stabilizable, representable subjects, all equal. These two laws are irreducible one to the other. (Derrida, Politics of Friendship 22)

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The model of rapport sans rapport does justice to the two laws of democracy in respecting the other’s “incalculable singularity” while attesting to his or her equality with other citizens “before the law.” Derrida, then, does not so much correct his prior critical assessment of Lévinas as shift his emphasis here. What Derrida stresses in his later writings is the other’s irreducibility to a stable, identifiable status (status, for example, as a global citizen equal to all others)—rather than the other’s position beyond any comprehension whatsoever. There is always something surprising about the other, something that escapes our control, but this “absolute surprise [is] relative to what we were expecting” (Caputo 24). To be sure, Derrida’s hyperbolic language—not unlike that of Glissant—gives at times the contrary impression. Yet, rather than positing alterity and identity as absolute ideals (lacking any psychological, cultural, or linguistic mediation), Derrida rigorously works to problematize “politico-phantasmatic constructions” (Derrida, Monolingualism 23) of these categories, framing the construction of otherness as an ideological or political act. If Lévinas’ philosophy of the other, then—as it is elaborated in Totality and Infinity80—seems to offer either an unconditional (impossible) ethics or a (crude) pragmatic/nationalist/religious politics, Derrida’s philosophy of the other blurs the boundaries between ethics and politics, pointing to the imbrication of the two. When, for instance, Derrida objects to identity politics (a group “fighting for [its] own identity”), he does so not because of the idea’s reliance on an outdated politics of difference (Hardt and Negri’s complaint) or because of its fixation on the other qua other (Badiou’s complaint), but because identity politics fails to address the question of difference adequately: “Once you take into account this inner and other difference, then you pay attention to the other and you understand that fighting for your own identity is not exclusive of another identity, is open to another identity. And this prevents totalitarianism, nationalism, egocentrism, and so on” (Derrida, “The Villanova Roundtable” 13–14). Derrida does not so much reject the desire for recognition and identity (in) politics—“who could be against ‘identity’?” he asks—as call attention to the potential effects of its exclusionary


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logic: “Like nationalism or separatism, pro-identity politics encourage a misrecognition of the universality of rights and the cultivation of exclusive differences, transforming difference into opposition,” an opposition which “also tends, paradoxically, to erase differences” (Derrida, Paper Machine 119). Informed by a deconstructive model of identity, one that underscores the historically contingent and discursive character of identity, Laclau and Mouffe argue for a post-Marxist politics that recognizes the necessity of some fixed meaning—“a discourse incapable of generating any fixity of meaning is the discourse of the psychotic” (112)— while at the same time insisting on identity’s malleability “through the critique of every type of fixity, through an affirmation of the incomplete, open and politically negotiable character of every identity” (104). For Laclau and Mouffe, an alternative to the false choice between identity and nonidentity is needed because “neither absolute fixity nor absolute non-fixity is possible” (111). What is possible for politics and ethics, however, is a reduction in the rigid fixity of meaning. Glissant’s rhizomatic, or relational, model of identity gestures toward that possibility: We have passed from a belief in single root identity to the hope for rhizome identity. We must have the courage to admit that rhizome identity or identity-Relation is neither an absence of identity nor a lack of identity nor a weakness. It is a dizzying inversion of the nature of identity. But here again, the peoples are afraid of it. (Schwieger Hiepko par.14)

Likewise, Derrida urges his readers to move beyond the stale and predictable debate over sameness and difference, pointing out that relating ethically to the other is not a matter of opting for either a cannibalistic (purely assimilative) or a noncannibalistic (purely indigestible) mode of contact: “The moral question is … not, nor has it ever been: should one eat or not eat … but since one must eat in any case … how for goodness sake should one eat well [bien manger]?”81 In today’s empire, in which difference has seemingly lost its critical edge, Derrida’s ethico-political imperative to “eat well” reminds one that difference does still matter. Theorizing about difference, attending to the

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discursivity of difference, is not a nostalgic, regressive, and misguided move in a global era but a vital prerequisite for resisting the status quo. Although Hardt and Negri’s we of the multitude solicits and promotes positive encounters with radical differences, it tends in practice to occlude the sans of rapport sans rapport, transforming the asymmetrical relation to the other into a relation of solidarity based on commonality.82 The concept of the multitude does not so much deny or eradicate the other’s opacity as confine it comfortably, if ambiguously, within each singularity (internal difference). Glissant and Derrida, for their part, conceive of an ethics of difference in terms of the aporetic demands made upon any individual by the other: that is, the demand that one understand without reducing the other to an object of comprehension and the demand that one never dissolve the without of the relation without relation that interrupts any traditional subject-object relation. Responding to such demands in an age of empire requires both a willingness to engage in and interrogate one’s own relationless relations, as well as a readiness to question the authority and legitimacy of a global system that perpetuates hermeneutical complacency, produces facile hybrids, and celebrates difference only in order to better contain it.


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WORKS CITED

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———. The Logic of Sense. Trans. Mark Lester, with Charles Stivale. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990. Print. Derrida, Jacques. Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas. Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999. Print. ———. Aporias. Trans. Thomas Dutoit. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993. Print. ———. “Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides: A Dialogue with Jacques Derrida.” Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida. Ed. Giovanna Borradori. Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. 85–136. Print. ———. “ ‘Eating Well,’ or the Calculation of the Subject: An Interview with Jacques Derrida.” Who Comes After the Subject? Ed. Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy. New York: Routledge, 1991. 96–119. Print. ———. Le droit à la philosophie du point de vue cosmopolitique. Paris: Verdier, 1997. Print. ———. Monolingualism of the Other: Or, The Prosthesis of Origin. Trans. Patrick Mensah. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998. Print. ———. Paper Machine. Trans. Rachel Bowlby. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005. Print. ———. Politics of Friendship. Trans. George Collins. New York: Verso, 1997. Print. ———. Positions. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. Print. ———. “Une Europe de l’espoir.” Le Monde diplomatique 51.608 (2004): 3. Print.


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———. Traité du tout-monde. Paris: Gallimard, 1997. Print. Habermas, Jürgen. The Theory of Communicative Action. 2 vols. Trans. Thomas McCarthy. Boston: Beacon Press, 1984/1987. Print. Habermas, Jürgen, and Jacques Derrida. “February 15, or What Binds Europeans Together: A Plea for a Common Foreign Policy, Beginning in the Core of Europe.” Constellations 10.3 (2003): 291–297. Print. Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” Identity, Community, Culture, Difference. Ed. Jonathan Rutherford. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990. 222–237. Print. ———. The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left. London: Verso, 1988. Print. Hallward, Peter. Absolutely Postcolonial: Writing Between the Singular and the Specific. New York: Palgrave, 2001. Print. ———. “Deleuze and the ‘World without Others.’ ” Philosophy Today 41.4 (1997): 530–544. Print. Hardt, Michael. Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Print. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. The Commonwealth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009. Print. ———. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000. Print. ———. Labor of Dionysus: A Critique of the State-Form. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994. Print. ———. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: Penguin, 2004. Print. hooks, bell. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge, 1994. Print. Huggan, Graham. The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins. New York: Routledge, 2001. Print.


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Laclau, Ernesto. “Can Immanence Explain Social Struggles?” Empire’s New Clothes: Reading Hardt and Negri. Ed. Paul A. Passavant and Jodi Dean. New York: Routledge, 2004. Print. Laclau, Ernesto, and Chantal Mouffe. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. Trans. Winston Moore and Paul Cammack. London: Verso, 1985. Print. Lévinas, Emmanuel. “Ethics and Politics.” The Levinas Reader. Ed. Seán Hand. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989. 289–297. Print. ———. “Meaning and Sense.” Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings. Ed. Adrian T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996. 33–64. Print. ———. Otherwise than Being, or, Beyond Essence. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981. Print. ———. “The Paradox of Morality: An Interview with Emmanuel Levinas.” The Provocation of Levinas: Rethinking the Other. Ed. Robert Bernasconi and David Wood. London: Routledge, 1988. 168–180. Print. ———. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1969. Print. Mitchell, W. J. T. “Picturing Terror: Derrida’s Autoimmunity.” Critical Inquiry 33 (2007): 277–290. Print. Nancy, Jean-Luc. Being Singular Plural. Trans. Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000. Print. Nealon, Jeffrey Thomas. “Post-Deconstructive?: Negri, Derrida, and the Present State of Theory.” Symplokē 14.1–2 (2006): 68–80. Print. Negri, Antonio. The Savage Anomaly: The Power of Spinoza’s Metaphysics and Politics. Trans. Michael Hardt. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991. Print.

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Nesbitt, Nick. “The Expulsion of the Negative: Deleuze, Adorno, and the Ethics of Internal Difference.” SubStance 34.2 (2005): 75–97. Print. Passavant, Paul A., and Jodi Dean, eds. Empire’s New Clothes: Reading Hardt and Negri. New York: Routledge, 2004. Print. Schwieger Hiepko, Andrea. “L’Europe et les Antilles: Une interview d’Édouard Glissant.” Mots Pluriels 8 (1998): n. pag. Web. 28 February 2008. . Shapiro, Michael J. “The Ethics of Encounter: Unreading, Unmapping the Imperium.” Moral Spaces: Rethinking Ethics and World Politics. Ed. David Campbell and Michael Shapiro. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. 57–91. Print. Simek, Nicole. Eating Well, Reading Well: Maryse Condé and the Ethics of Interpretation. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008. Print. Smith, Andrew. “Migrancy, Hybridity, and Postcolonial Literary Studies.” Postcolonial Literary Studies. Ed. Neil Lazarus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 241–261. Print. Spinoza, Baruch. Ethics. Complete Works. Ed. Michael L. Morgan. Trans. Samuel Shirley. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Pub. Co., 2002. 213–382. Print. Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989. Print. Žižek, Slavoj. Organs without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences. New York: Routledge, 2004. Print.

CHAPTER 8

WHITE NATION FANTASY, THE IMPERIALISTIC STREAK, AND THE LINGERING EMPIRE A CONTRAPUNTAL READING OF CHRISTOPHER KOCH’S FICTION Jean-François Vernay

Christopher Koch, of German and Anglo-Celtic descent, is nowadays regarded as one of Australia’s leading novelists. His literary career showed great promise with the publication of his debut novel, The Boys in the Island (1958), and his internationally celebrated The Year of Living Dangerously (1978) was the first Australian novel to approach Indonesian culture comprehensively. His less successful second novel, Across the Sea Wall (1965), was nevertheless groundbreaking in its

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exploration of India. After its publication, he lived for extended periods in Spain, Italy, Germany, and England—a European experience that proved influential in shaping his adventurous and nomadic protagonists who yearn for other lands. Despite this turning-to-Asia period, which also includes novels such as Miles Franklin Award–winning Highways to a War (1995) and The Memory Room (2007), Koch can be thought of as a Caucasian writer clinging to the idea of a White Australia that longs for Europe, a characterization attested by Out of Ireland (1999) and The Many-Coloured Land (2002), books that explore the connections between Australia and Ireland. This chapter analyses Koch’s literary representations of Australia by questioning his whitewashed hybridity. The novelist’s Eurocentric fantasies, liberally sprinkled throughout his Asia novels, can be taken as evidence of a British lingering empire inasmuch as they foster and publicize imperialistic ideologies that may well rekindle colonial tensions and revive interest in the dying colonial world.

FANTASIES OF WHITE SUPREMACY: KOCH’S WHITEWASHED HYBRIDITY IN THE E VER -D YING C OLONIAL W ORLD Himself a hybrid (Koch, Year 10), Koch believes that identity is “dubious.” More than just a matter of genes, he defines it as “a sum total of many things.” Guy Hamilton and Billy Kwan are two hyphenated Australian characters in The Year of Living Dangerously who appear as “products of a dying colonial world” (Koch, Crossing 23). They share a sorry plight packed with incongruities: Both Billy and Hamilton are people who are half-and-half: Hamilton is half-Australian, half-English, Billy is half Chinese, half-Australian. Both of them really are people who don’t belong in any one world, and I wanted to show people in the transition period out of the colonial world which I grew up in, when we were part of the British Empire, into the new Asian/Pacific world. So Hamilton is never quite sure whether he is Australian or British.

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Billy is in the tragic situation of not being Chinese in terms of his heritage; he doesn’t even speak Chinese, but because he has a Chinese father everyone assumes that he’s a Chinese and his position is very ambiguous. (Koch, qtd. in Strauss 68)

Their status of in-betweenness raises many questions about the criteria that make someone truly Australian. If an individual needs to be born in Australia to be considered a “fair dinkum Aussie” in local idiom, Britishborn Guy Hamilton cannot claim to be a national. Should an Australian be someone (who has been) living in Australia? If so, globetrotters like Billy and Guy, though they have lived in Australia at one stage, might lose their Australian identity by spending time abroad. Should a true Aussie be quintessentially Caucasian? In this case, Billy would not fit in. Or, in the final analysis, should all these criteria be applied simultaneously in order to create a narrow definition that would restrict the pool of individuals recognized as distinctively Australian? The uneasiness experienced by both Guy and Billy originates from their being at the crossroads of two disparate cultures and has morphed into an identity malaise that ultimately ends in each character’s rejection of one aspect of his dual heritage. Indeed, despite the fact that Hamilton is “technically Australian” (he travels on an Australian passport), he still “regards himself as British” (Koch, Year 184). Similarly, Billy Kwan— born to a Chinese father and an Australian mother—rejects his Chinese heritage, which he feels is in conflict with his sense of identity: “Granted it can’t always have been easy being an AustralianChinese—but why do you reject your Chinese side? A great people—a great culture: why turn back on it?” … Allusions to his Chinese origins were permitted, but not a frontal assault on the subject.… “Only my father speaks Chinese, and he came out to Australia as a boy. I don’t speak it at all.” (Koch, Year 83) “My heritage isn’t China—my heritage is Europe, just as yours is. Tell me, what books did you read, Ham, when you were twelve years old? Sherlock Holmes? The Saint? The William books?” “All of those. Used to love them. Why?”

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The situation is steeped in sheer absurdity. As Billy Kwan has it, “[h]ow do I manage to belong to a culture I never grew up in?” (83). By discarding his Chinese heritage, Billy has psychologically maimed himself and will consequently lament the painful loss of what could have been an integral part of himself. However, things are not as simple as they might seem, for hyphenated Australians are forced to make a choice concerning their twin heritages in order to attain sanity and stability. If they cannot opt for one culture, characters like Billy Kwan are doomed to remain impersonators. Billy “played an upper-middle-class Australian or Englishman of the pre-war era. Yet sometimes he played a special role as an Asian: he was to go through Confucian Chinese and Japanese Zen phases. It was as though, since his race was double and his status ambiguous, he had decided to multiply the ambiguity indefinitely” (Koch, Year 67). Stephen FitzGerald has a different opinion altogether, as he believes people can embrace a dual heritage. He therefore recommends that such persons “ become successful chameleons … capable of changing form to adapt and survive in the locality, without compromising our Australianness or the values and ethical codes we live by” (FitzGerald 166). In other words, the postcolonial anxiety of living in the shadow of another culture that is deemed superior will be overcome when individuals merge their various cultural inheritances into a unique culture and aesthetics, a mixture that will help them depart from the former monolithic model. The trouble with Billy Kwan is that his various impersonations are the symptoms of an identity crisis. Destabilized and unable to cope with this experience of in-betweenness, Billy eventually meets a tragic fate. Admittedly, Koch’s whitewashed hybridity is a far cry from flaunting the cosmopolitan tradition at the core of Australia’s contemporary


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society. A feminist critic like Susan McKernan is even more radical in her appreciation of Koch’s writings when she states that his “use of exotic places, the female race and human deformity set him up for racism, sexism and general inhumanity” (McKernan 439). Anyone familiar with Koch’s male protagonists would almost certainly agree with McKernan’s opinion, given that these characters’ dual heritage is essentially European. Koch’s characters Francis Cullen and Robert O’Brien (whose names hint at Irish lineage), Robert Devereux (Irish-born, who then moved to Australia), and Richard Miller (of German descent), not to mention Guy Hamilton, Michael Langford (whose British filiation is obvious from his name), and Vincent Austin (of Scottish descent), are all the fruit of White Anglo-Saxon Protestant immigration. A cunning reading of such a coincidence points to what Ghassan Hage has termed White nation fantasy: This White belief in one’s mastery over the nation, whether in the form of a White multiculturalism or in the form of a White racism, is what I have called the ‘White nation’ fantasy. It is a fantasy of a nation governed by White people, a fantasy of White supremacy. (Hage 18)

In 1982 Helen Tiffin noted that Koch “seemed most conscious of the vestigial European inheritance and the increasing Asian perspectives in shaping the Australian spirit” (Tiffin 326). However, according to his more recent views, at a time when “there is a clear desire among the national leadership to bring about not only an economic ‘Asianisation,’ but also a cultural ‘Asianisation’ of sorts” (Ang and Stratton 317), the novelist unabashedly stresses the overriding importance of Australia’s European legacy: “We’re a South Pacific continent and we still operate on a basically European culture. We have a different set of traditions from those of Asian societies” (Koch, qtd. in Vernay 115). Indeed, despite his openly pro-Asian stance in interviews, Koch seems to give Europeans more than their due in his fiction and to regard Asians’ contribution to Australia’s demography as marginal; the parenthetical information in the novel Crossing the Gap (1987) supports

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this. The Australian, Koch says, “is now (if he is not Chinese, or an immigrant from South-East Asia) a European of mixed origins, dealing with a new hemisphere he has made his home (and in which he is at home), but which he has still to absorb fully into his unconscious” (Koch, Crossing 96). To be sure, Koch’s narratives could include more characters from various ethnic groups so as to give a more faithful representation of Australia’s melting pot. But at the same time this strategy of simply leaving out the cultural groups with which migrant, hyphenated, and ethnic writers themselves might more expertly deal prevents critics from finding fault with any form of misrepresentation. Some intellectuals dreading the appearance of a fragmented society have been staunch opponents of multiculturalism, but Koch’s view is altogether different. Skeptical at heart, he believes that a sense of sui generis identity should be preserved: “I’m not very interested in multiculturalism, I think it’s rather meaningless. I like individual cultures— and if you want to put them all in the pot and then mix it up you will end up with a mess” (Koch, qtd. in Vernay 115). A divergent viewpoint, such as Charles Taylor’s, for example, would consider multiculturalism “as involving the demand that ‘we all recognize the equal value of different cultures; that we not only let them survive, but acknowledge their worth’ ” (Taylor, qtd. in Hage 138). But, on the face of it, Koch’s fiction does not seem to support any such claim. Moreover, as he has stated explicitly, Koch does not welcome multiculturalism as a source of cultural enrichment. Koch’s rejection of multiculturalism will not help repudiate charges of Eurocentricism; indeed, it may even reinforce Australia’s age-old fear of cultural difference, which peaked with the White Australia policy aimed at barring non-Caucasian immigrants (especially Asians) from settling in Australia. The policy was intended as a safeguard against the degeneration of the White race, a phenomenon that was perceived as a major threat. According to Ang and Stratton, this nationwide policy, implemented in 1901 and officially abolished in 1972, “still persists in the imagined worlds of many Malaysians, Singaporeans and Indonesians as proof of Australian white racism” (335).


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EUROCENTRIC FANTASIES OF FEAR AND D ESIRE IN THE A SIA N OVELS Representations of Asia in Western consciousness traditionally fall into extreme categories: now the cradle of spirituality and an attractive destination for holidaymakers, now a barbaric and backward region—a breedingground for human baseness. What is more, India’s mysticism has become such a widespread cliché in the Western world that the locals, like Koch’s Indian character Sunder Singh (a tourist guide), are bound to grow irate when Ilsa Kalnins, Robert O’Brien’s girlfriend, states that “there is so much wisdom in Indian religion” (Koch, Across 71). Within this sacred dimension, the Koch protagonist’s pseudo-touristy journey in Asia naturally takes on religious overtones that might be construed as a mock-representation of the evangelization of colonized populations by colonizing societies. Central characters like Robert O’Brien, Guy Hamilton, and Michael Langford are making a pilgrimage, visiting ritualistically the country’s major sites, collecting relics (souvenir gifts), and finally embracing local customs, if not espousing the local language as Hamilton and Langford both eventually do. The East does not leave the Westerner unaffected. Mental representations of Asia in the Westerner’s mind’s eye remain subject to ambivalent feelings, oscillating between sanctification and demonization. Such fantasy scenarios are generated by a desire motivated by want of spirituality, and ignorance fosters the most grotesque speculations. Not surprisingly, the East/West opposition in Koch’s writings is framed in terms of mental health. The Western world unambiguously stands for rationality and stability—“The cool dry spaces of south-eastern Australia are sanity; they are home” (Koch, Year 87)—as opposed to the East, which has sunk into irrationality and instability: “India was chaos, and sudden horrors” (Koch, Across 95). This excerpt is even more persuasive: There is a definite point where a city, like a man, can be seen to have become insane. This had finally happened to Jakarta when we reached the seventeenth of August: Merkeda Day, and the end of Sukarno’s year. Amok is an old Malay word; and Jakarta had now run amok with classical completeness. (Koch, Year 221)

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In line with Saidian theory, the East stands out as an a contrario definition of the West, a mirror image of Europe that contributes to a binary opposition of West and non-West. Faithful to his dichotomous vision, Koch offers a double representation of Asia, a region that arouses as much fascination as it does aversion in the Australian imagination. One of Asia’s two faces is that of a seductive creature straight from a Western individual’s stereotyped glamorous vision of the “exotic.” As Sunder Singh has it, speaking of Caucasians, “all you people have this romanticism about Asia” (Koch, Across 61). Asia is adorned with the most magnificent flowers, the exoticism of which excites the traveler’s curiosity; the region is feminine and feminized, an allegory of the femme fatale, the significance of which will not be lost on readers. Even if at first Asia does not open up easily to the outside observer, remaining cryptic and inaccessible (if not entirely hidden)—“as though Indonesia could not be found” (Koch, Across 33), Koch’s Asia finally exposes itself in the guise of erotic entertainment fueling the bawdiest male fantasies. In this respect, Koch’s depiction of Asia as an invitation to concupiscence is rather clichéd. As Xavier Pons reminds readers, Many of the Western stereotypes about Asia had to do with sex—mostly male Orientalist fantasies that represent Asia as a submissive woman ever ready to pleasure the members of the superior race. Asian exotic difference has great sexual attractiveness while the sexual availability of Asian women seems endless. (Pons 306)

In a later book like Highways to a War (1995), Koch’s character Langford realizes that “Asia [is] disclosed to him for the first time, like a video show arranged for his pleasure” (68). India and Cambodia alike display themselves as desirable lands full of the promise of self-indulging fantasies, fantasies that incorporate the beauty of outlandish and exotic regions: “Singhalese music greeted them. Wild, wild, the voices of the howling singers, and the strange, twanging instruments; annunciation of the Asia of all desire!” (Koch, Across 86–87).


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The other face of Asia is that of a gargantuan, aggressive, and castrating monster which swallows up or mutilates the (semi-)Westerners who dare to challenge its authority and superiority.83 Such will be the fate of all rebels like Billy Kwan, Guy Hamilton, and Michael Langford who brave danger and hostility. Eventually, these three characters will be respectively broken, crippled, and crucified by the invisible malevolent force that seems to be lurking in Asia. This destructive force will utilize its full resources, natural and human alike, in order to neutralize its bold opponents. In this respect, the climate (for example) becomes a lethal weapon: the scorching heat is an overriding force that drives foreigners mad, when it does not inexorably crush them. In Highways to a War, the adjective malignant aptly conveys the paranoia of Caucasians who ascribe malicious intentions to a natural phenomenon: “the heat began to seem malignant to me, like a secret weapon of the Viet Cong” (Koch, Highways 173). The Year of Living Dangerously displays the same adjectival insistence: “Outside, the immense heat squatted like a malignant force, making these fragments of an alien civilization seem infinitely fragile; doomed” (Koch, Year 102). In a similar vein, the narrator of The Memory Room (2007) refers to the “atmosphere of warning” (200) which he senses in China. Billy Kwan’s downfall and Mike Langford’s disappearance imply that the Eastern world is the locus of a fall into a world of illusions and hallucinations and the point at which contact with a palpable reality is lost. Westerners, half-caste or not, all seem to lose their wits when they go East. In The Memory Room, first secretary Arthur Chadwick seems to qualify this claim, however, intimating that not all of Asia has a reputation for driving foreigners insane. Though Chadwick cannot bear the “paranoid regime” in China, he is still able to find salvation close by, as his advice to Derek Bradley makes clear: “My wife and I would go mad without our little trips to Hong Kong. Make sure you get some Hong Kong R and R yourself, now and then. It’s essential to one’s sanity” (Koch, Memory Room 137). However, such a simplistic tableau is not quite innocent, for this vision of a maddening Asia echoes, endorses, and even condones the notorious conviction that Europe was obliged to

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set itself on a civilizing mission. British colonization is thus shown as a well-ordered and rational force, beneficent interference that is justified inasmuch as it sanitizes so-called uncivilized Asian nations. These unflattering—if not deprecating—representations can be construed as a radical approach to the other as envisioned in the Australian psyche. Admittedly, however, Koch’s paternalistic proclivity is even more patent in his conquering visions of Asia.

CONQUISTADORS ABROAD: THE WESTERNER-IN-ASIA THEME Koch made good use of the Westerner-in-Asia theme with the publication of The Year of Living Dangerously in 1978, which launched a long list of Australian novels with similar stories. In Hotel Asia, Robin Gerster notes that traveling stories published in Australia by the end of the 1970s follow a set pattern (16). Most storylines start with an introductory scene at the airport. (Such scenes are largely absent from Koch’s novels, with the exception of The Memory Room, when—early in the second section—Vincent Austin meets his childhood friend Derek Bradley, who is arriving in China on a diplomatic mission.) Once in Asia, the characters are overwhelmed by their visual and olfactory perceptions as they face precarious living conditions, including poverty and poor health, circumstances that generate numerous and, more often than not, serious infections. The protagonists, struck by the intensity of colors, roam among the shanty settlements in which the hungry and begging local people feed on unappetizing and unwholesome food and use water sparingly. Because “Delhi-belly” is rife in India and bouts of “the dreaded Jakarta trots” are not uncommon in Indonesia, illness for Koch’s expatriate protagonists becomes a rite of passage in their peregrinations: O’Brien recovers from an infection by the end of Across the Sea Wall; Guy Hamilton becomes unwell after retreating from Jakarta’s urban life; and Mike Langford, strapped for cash, lies almost dying in a Singapore room until he is rescued. Interestingly, The Memory Room departs from this pattern in the sense that most descriptions of the city and of the countryside show a sanitized China. To be sure, North Chinese food is


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depicted as unappetizing for Derek, but there is no mention of its causing infections. As for poverty, it is so inconspicuous in this novel that it can only be revealed indoors, when Bradley and Austin pay a visit to the Lius, a family said to be “living in comparative luxury, by Peking standards” (Koch, Memory Room 153): The books gave the sitting room a civilized air, but the shabbiness of the apartment shocked him, and he felt a stab of pity. Here was the kind of courageous, self-respecting poverty that had almost vanished in the West; yet this was the home of the most eminent scholars in China. (154)

Another commonplace theme in such fiction is the use of a journalist as the central character (exemplified in Koch’s work by Guy Hamilton and Mike Langford); such protagonists confront Asia in an attempt to decipher its mysteries but end up joining a microcosm of expatriates. Hamilton and Langford both frequent distinguished public establishments aimed at entertaining Westerners. The Wayang Bar and Hotel Indonesia in The Year of Living Dangerously, along with the York Hotel Bar, the Cockpit Hotel, the Pearl of the Orient Bar, and the Foxhole Bar in Highways to a War, as well as Newsroom—the restaurant for correspondents in The Memory Room—all seem evocative of a colonialist ethos. The Continental Palace Hotel and Hotel le Royal in Highways to a War, not to mention the Peking Hotel in The Memory Room are likewise illustrative of such segregation. Admittedly, Robert O’Brien is not quite a journalist when he explores India, but he will eventually become a reporter once he returns home. As an undercover ASIS officer, Vincent Austin is but a minor departure from this stereotype because his profession, espionage, involves a great deal of investigation. Over the last four decades, Asia has become a coveted holidaymaking destination pandering to the tastes of a neocolonial clientele. Asia, a former third-world economic region is now sold cut rate to imperialistic travelers; it offers a low-cost lifestyle with “Everything for Nothing,” as advertized by the colonial slogan in the title of the second

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half of the 1982 edition of Across the Seawall. In Koch’s Asia novels, the East is regarded as a sexual fantasyland as well as a paradise for the consumption of illicit drugs. In The Year of Living Dangerously, Koch has elaborated on the neocolonial exploitation-of-the-East theme that he broached in Across the Sea Wall. The East becomes an exotic and erotic region where virtually all wishes are fulfilled. Most Westerners expect to indulge or in fact do indulge in sexual fantasies and deviations in this libertine and libertarian h(e)aven on earth. Viewed from a phallocentric perspective of the world and perceived as catering to the fantasies of patriarchal societies, Asia becomes the locus of all sorts of sexual obsessions and perversions, a large den of prostitutes who await domination by manly, hyperactive, and oversexed Westerners. As Vincent Austin notes, China does not disappoint any of these high expectations: You may smile, Brad, but I’m sure by now you’ve experienced the Australian politician abroad. The ones who come here are dreadful. This Fraser Government’s no better than Whitlam’s, in that regard. Would you believe that they expect us to pimp for them? And the businessmen are the same. They want girls, here in the most puritan society on earth! (Koch, Memory Room 117)

Because sexual activity is readily available, gay Wally O’Sullivan spoils himself with an abundance of food and sex, in contrast to his colleagues, who are described as “sex-starved” (Koch, Year 89). For psychiatrist Willy Pasini, “overeating and over-loving” (Pasini, La force 181) are closely related activities. Wally’s admission to the narrator—“I wish I were based in Singapore again.… I could send out from my room for the most beautiful boys—they deliver them there like hamburgers, Cookie” (Koch, Year 60)—heralds Pasini’s well-known statement that the lack of love is compensated by a binge-eating syndrome: “We live in an era of fast-food and fast-sex” (Pasini, Nourriture 52). In fact, most journalists in the novel are sex-obsessed and dispirited men in constant pursuit of the pleasure principle; they find solace in a sexploitation that


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they are not able to experience in their native countries. To quote Wally’s confession, The funny thing is, I never allowed myself at home. I only half admitted it to myself. You come here, and they’re available, and they’re almost like a new sex—so smooth and brown; like plastic.… I felt like André Gide discovering the beautiful Arab boys—you’ve read the journals? South-East Asia—the Australian queer’s Middle East. (Koch, Year 60)

Wally O’Sullivan’s love of boys is not the only instance of sexual indulgence in Koch’s work. In The Year of Living Dangerously, voyeuristic Kevin Condon is depicted as a fetishist who fancies large-bosomed women, whereas Pete Curtis, a compulsive lover, becomes a regular customer of the sex trade who remains unconcerned about sexually transmitted diseases. In La force du désir, Willy Pasini argues that sexual desire, which is no longer related to intimate emotions, has become a commodity. Indeed, the sexual odyssey of these Western journalists reveals not only an amalgamation of sex and love but also a multifaceted libertarianism that helps them break away from the misery and hardship of life in Asia. On another level, it is extraordinary that only Hindus are portrayed as androgynous in Across the Sea Wall because elsewhere Koch makes the broader statement that “[o]ur clear-cut male-and-female definition has begun to blur a little” (Hulse 20). But other Asian characters—for instance, Billy Kwan in The Year of Living Dangerously (portrayed by actress Linda Hunt in Peter Weir’s adaptation)—are likewise sexually ambiguous. Hamilton’s dwarf companion is compared to the dwarf Semar from Indian mythology: “the god in misshapen form, whose breasts are female, sitting in tears” (Koch, Year 204). Referring to Chinese cyclists, the narrator in The Memory Room observes that “[m]en predominated, but women wheeled by as well, shapeless and sexless in their humble blue cottons” (Koch, Memory Room 117–118). On the one hand, it may be that Koch’s Eurocentric gaze, unaccustomed to

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Asian features, failed to properly distinguish the sexual identities of Indian, Indonesian, and Chinese individuals while he was exploring Asia. On the other hand, Koch does not profess to be the mouthpiece of autochthonous populations, and perhaps his depictions should be seen for what they are—namely, perceptions of Asia from the point of view of an outsider. When asked in a 2003 interview whether The Many-Coloured Land (2002) was a nostalgic cry for beloved Europe, Koch replied: I’ve never dared to set a book in Europe. I went and lived in England for two years when I was 22-23, and I loved England, and loved Europe. I felt I’d been cheated by not being born there. But I eventually accepted my fate, for I could not escape being Australian. And a lot of Australians felt that way in my generation. Some of them stayed in Europe. I didn’t stay because I’m eternally divided: there are many things that I like here, particularly Tasmania and southern Australia generally. And I don’t believe, as a writer, that I can cut my roots. (Koch, qtd. in Vernay 117)

This repressed pull of Europe in Koch’s psyche, which returns between the lines of most of his novels, testifies to remnants of a lingering empire that had imprinted itself on his consciousness as he was growing up in the southern outpost of the British dominion. The latent longing is particularly obvious in the Asia novels, in which it is manifest in the hegemonic attitudes of Caucasian male protagonists—attitudes that cannot pass unnoticed. Depictions of the other, moreover, are clearly unflattering, and paternalistic and exploitative behaviors are indicative of the Westerners’ fantasies of dominating the East. To be fair, there are more glorious aspects in Koch’s fiction than this imperialistic streak. The postcolonial dimension—which has been explored by a cluster of scholars, including Amanda Nettlebeck, Paul Sharrad, and Helen Tiffin—is one of them.84 This double-sided vision illustrates the author’s ambivalent feelings of belonging to both Europe and Australia. These White nation fantasies have been clearly identified by some readers as off-putting and may now account for


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Koch’s currently more subdued role on the Australian literary scene. As Paul Sharrad puts it, “the kind of British-centred culture of his generation … is now seen as passé.”85 Immigrant writing, which reflects Australia’s identity as a multicultural nation, has been in favor for the last two decades and has taken a certain amount of attention away from Koch’s novels. Such a twist of fate can only be ascribed to the popularity of cultural studies, which began to flourish in Australia during the 1980s—a fashionable discipline whose adherents have unwittingly made writers subject to the passing whims of cultural change in scholarly criticism.

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WORKS CITED

Ang, Ien, and John Stratton. “Asianing Australia: Notes Toward a Critical Transnationalism in Cultural Studies.” Creative Nation: Australian Cinema and Cultural Studies Reader. Ed. Amit Sarwal and Reema Sarwal. New Delhi: SSS, 2009. 314–336. Print. FitzGerald, Stephen. Is Australia an Asian Country? St. Leonards, Australia: Allen & Unwin, 1997. Print. Gerster, Robin. Hotel Asia. Ringwood: Penguin, 1995. Print. ———. “A Legendary War.” Australian Book Review 173 (1995): 6–7. Print. Hage, Ghassan. White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society. Annandale, Australia: Pluto, 1998. Print. Hulse, Michael. “Christopher Koch in Conversation with Michael Hulse in London.” Quadrant 29.6 (1985): 17–25. Print. Koch, Christopher. Across the Sea Wall. 1965. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1982. Print. ———. The Boys in the Island. 1959. North Ryde, Australia: Sirius, 1987. Print. ———. Crossing The Gap. London: Chatto & Windus, 1987. Print. ———. The Doubleman. 1985. Port Melbourne, Australia: Minerva, 1996. Print. ———. Highways to a War. Port Melbourne, Australia: Minerva, 1995. Print. ———. The Memory Room. Sydney: Random House, 2007. Print. ———. Out of Ireland. Sydney: Vintage, 1999. Print.


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———. The Year of Living Dangerously. 1978. Port Melbourne, Australia: Minerva, 1996. Print. McKernan, Susan. “C. J. Koch’s Two-Faced Vision.” Meanjin 44.4 (1985): 432–439. Print. Pasini, Willy. La force du désir. Paris: Odile Jacob, 2002. Print. ———. Nourriture et Amour. Paris: Payot, 1995. Print. Pons, Xavier. Messengers of Eros: Representations of Sex in Australian Writing. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009. Print. Strauss, Dagmar. “Christopher Koch.” Facing Writers. Crows Nest, Australia: ABC, 1990. 65–77. Print. Tiffin, Helen. “Asia, Europe and Australian Identity: The Novels of Christopher Koch.” Australian Literary Studies 10.3 (1982): 326–335. Print. Vernay, Jean-François. “Illusion et réalité dans l’œuvre romanesque de Christopher John Koch.” Dissertation. Université de Toulouse-Le Mirail, 2004. Print. ———. “Repetition and Colonial Variation on the Europe Theme: An Interview with Christopher J. Koch.” Antipodes: A North American Journal of Australian Literature 17.2 (2003): 114–117. Print. ———. Water From the Moon: Illusion and Reality in the Works of Australian Novelist Christopher Koch. Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2007. Print.

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PART III HALF OF EMPIRE THE “OTHER” AMERICA

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CHAPTER 9

“LIGHT” COLONIALISM IN THE CARIBBEAN IN THE CONTEXT OF GLOBAL EMPIRE BUILDING Kristian Van Haesendonck

Frantz Fanon’s well-known announcement of the end of colonialism has taken—from today’s vantage point—an ironic turn. At the end of his book Les damnés de la terre (1963; The Wretched of the Earth), the writer from Martinique wrote that the time had come for Martinicans, and likewise all repressed people, to “shake off the great matter of night which has enveloped us, and reach for the light” (Fanon 235). Fanon hoped that the “night,” the dark times of European colonialism that had enveloped his people (for Fanon, mainly Black people), would yield to what he considered a point of light for Martinique: the moment of its independence, of the island’s liberation from colonial repression. Today, however, the result of decolonization is not quite what Fanon would have expected. Above all, since the end of the Cold War, colonialism

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has made its presence felt in a much lighter fashion. As I argue in this chapter, light colonialism is the general condition that characterizes the Caribbean today, and I illustrate its emergence through a concise reading of Texaco (1992) by Martinican writer Patrick Chamoiseau, a novel that won the Prix Goncourt, France’s most prestigious literary award. I briefly discuss how light colonialism operates in the contemporary Caribbean. From the outset, however, a theoretical problem must be recognized: light colonialism is a kind of colonialism whose conceptual vagueness is currently a major problem and needs to be analyzed carefully. One could say that the Caribbean resists being further studied, as if it were constantly blinding scholars, making them incapable of grasping its essence.

THE EMPIRE WRITES BACK …

AND

GOES GLOBAL

Indeed, although colonialism itself has never really been absent either in Martinique or in the broader Caribbean, it has undergone an important change. In former times, colonialism made itself visible through the often violent presence of the colonizer, but today, instead of having disappeared, it is merely much more difficult to comprehend because of its ambiguous effects, which leave even the most dedicated scholars puzzled. The very existence of light colonialism might, at first blush, sound like a contradictio in terminis or as an absurd statement tout court. But recent criticism regarding empire building points in the exact opposite direction and shows that what is happening on a global scale is not far removed from what was happening in the Caribbean long before globalization became a fashionable term.86 Like so many novels written by contemporary Caribbean writers in all languages, Chamoiseau’s novel Texaco (1992) can be read as something more than a mere historical account of Martinique and its Afro-Caribbean legacy and of the formation of the French Caribbean creolized city.87 The novel is above all a history of imperialism from the beginnings of slavery until the postmodern era of corporate control and mobility. As such, it can be seen as a case study of imperialism

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from its beginnings until its most recent manifestations. The narrator, Marie-Sophie Laborieux, focuses on Texaco, a shantytown near Martinique’s capital (Fort-de-France) that was founded after the major oil company Texaco abandoned the place and its workers when business began to stagger. The novel begins when an urban planner, referred to by Marie-Sophie as “the Christ,” arrives at Texaco. Aware of the fact that the urban planner has come not to bring peace but to raze the settlement in order to replace it with new housing projects, Marie-Sophie tells him her life story, hoping to convince him to save the town through her narration of its history. She then starts to recount nearly two hundred years of Martinique’s history. The name Texaco is significant, for it recalls the corporate character of new forms of dominance. After slavery had long gone, new forms of exploitation arose that went beyond the original French imperialist project: hard-core capitalist multinational oil companies as well as softer, more diplomatic (but fiercely trained) urban planners penetrated the field in search of new resources and benefits—at the expense of local people. Marie-Sophie, moreover, defines herself as a matador, a symbol of struggle for the local community and an emblem of resistance to the total absorption of the town of Texaco into the late capitalist order. Interestingly, since the late eighties—that is, decades after the heyday of European imperialist powers and a few years before the publication of Texaco—the very concept of empire has again been brought under scrutiny. Indeed, many books started to appear with the terms empire or imperialism on the cover. One of those works was Bill Ashcroft, Helen Tiffin, and Gareth Griffith’s The Empire Writes Back (1989), unanimously considered the postcolonial bible and which reintroduced the concept of empire to the field of postcolonial studies in the early nineties, in the wake of Edward Said’s publication of his groundbreaking work Orientalism (1978), which was followed by Culture and Imperialism (1993). A second major work that claimed the return of empire appeared a year before the 11 September 2001 attacks: Hardt and Negri’s Empire (2000), which would become a bestseller among academics in the United States and around the globe. Empire immediately gave rise to

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a series of critical readings. Many applauded the book (see for instance Balakrishnan), and Slavoj Žižek’s question—“Have Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri Rewritten the Communist Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century?” (2001)—did not go unnoticed. Such critics as Argentinian Atilio Boron, however, fiercely condemned the weaknesses of the work. The very fact that the book caused an academic uproar is significant since the—somewhat excessive—intellectual reaction is, I argue, a symptom of a general discontent that underlies postmodernity. Other critics, such as Homi K. Bhabha, have related the dynamics of imperialism in times of globalization to centuries-old colonialism. According to Bhabha, who is one of the main proponents of postcolonial theory, global decolonization is a fiction, for the old oppositions between colonizers and colonized are still firmly in place in the neoliberal era: It must seem ironic, even absurd at first, to search for associations and intersections between decolonization and globalization … when decolonization had the dream of a “Third World” of free, postcolonial nations firmly on its horizon, whereas globalization gazes at the nation through the back mirror, as it speeds towards the strategic denationalization of state sovereignty. (Bhabha, “Framing” xi)

Bhabha challenges the idea that globalization is equivalent to both decolonization and idealistic fostering of democracy around the globe. The creation of financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank has resulted in the firm establishment of dual world economies that make poor countries “vulnerable to the ‘culture of conditionality.’ ” In addition, these economies tend to “mask the ubiquitous, underlying factors of persistent poverty and malnutrition, caste and racial injustice, and the hidden injuries of class, the exploitation of women’s labor, and the victimization of minorities and refugees” (Bhabha, “Framing” xii). For all these reasons, Bhabha decided to publish a new edition of Fanon’s work, one of the most radical anticolonialist works written since Bartolomé de las Casas’ denunciation of the


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abuse perpetrated in the New World under Spanish colonial domination five centuries ago. Although intellectuals such as Fanon and Las Casas struggled for justice before the global village became a reality, Bhabha reminds readers that it is necessary for all academics (including literary and cultural critics) to formulate a real “critique of the configurations of contemporary globalization” (Bhabha, “Framing” xiii). In spite of the many benefits and opportunities it creates, globalization also has a repressive, frightening side that creates new divisions and dominations.

EMPIRE

AND THE

CARIBBEAN SPACE

In spite of the Caribbean’s condition of being the colonized space par excellence, is a study of the Caribbean appropriate in a volume on empire building? In fact, empire building does not exist in the contemporary Caribbean: it exists outside of it. If today the construction of an empire exists somewhere, it is elsewhere, in different places around the globe: there is no such process of construction in the Caribbean, for empires have inhabited the Caribbean continuously since Columbus’ discovery of La Hispaniola. Instead of construction, there has largely been continuity of imperial presence in the Caribbean. If the edifice of empire was being built anywhere long before its extension on a global level, it was certainly in the Caribbean, an area whose history has never been part of History, the Great Narrative of the West, which was written by European and North American colonial powers. Since its so-called discovery by a fairly unknown merchant from Genoa, the Caribbean has been ruled by various colonial powers and nationalities. It is necessary to remember that many of these powers (national or transnational) persist in the region, in contrast to, for instance, the definitive downfall of the great British Empire in the Middle East and Asia. Furthermore, I would argue that just as striking as the return of empire—of its powerful presence in current critical discourse—is the absence of one particular region from the debate. Concerned about the effects of imperialism in the aftermath of the colonial era, postcolonial studies present the Caribbean more than ever as postimperial, that is,

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as a decolonized entity. Even Bhabha, who worries (as many critics do these days) about global dynamics, refers neither to Martinique nor to the Caribbean as a whole in his introduction to the 2004 edition of Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1963). Instead he, like Hardt and Negri, focuses on the global reach of contemporary imperialist ethics. Moreover, Bhabha does not mention the Caribbean islands’ past and present (neo)colonial condition. Though he insists that real decolonization is an unfinished project, he does not ask himself what happened to empires in the Caribbean.88 Bhabha’s work (in contrast to Texaco) does not remind readers that, indeed, the history of the Caribbean is the history par excellence of the construction of empire. In this sense, Chamoiseau’s novel offers an interesting account of the different ways in which imperialism worked during different epochs. Additionally, one of the strengths of Texaco is that it manages to show the complexity of the current situation of light colonialism in times of globalization. The novel traces similarities between colonizer and colonized, for, as Dawson puts it, “[Texaco] reminds us of the structural similarities and mutual dependency of metropolitan and colonial cities. These parallels challenge the exclusive focus on the capitalist core that characterizes much of the recent literature on global cities” (Dawson 23). Texaco does not forget about local concerns, whereas in Bhabha’s writings and in the work of many others, the local has simply disappeared. In his attempt to reevaluate the importance of Fanon’s work, Bhabha (like most postcolonial readers of the Martinican intellectual) thus misses a chance to highlight Fanon’s own Caribbean background. In other words, one cannot properly value Fanon’s ideas of imperialism if the Caribbean context is ignored. A major reason for this absence has to do with the way current criticism deals with glocal politics. The success of globalization studies and the field’s impact on the phenomenon of (neo)imperialism is undeniable. However, the study of the dynamics of globalization per se is not the problem. Rather, the current obsession with all things global—perhaps the new critical fetish in cultural studies, second only to the concepts bearing the prefix post—makes the in-depth study of particular areas


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seem a waste of time. While observing the global forest, critics do not pay attention to the features of the trees that compose the forest (the relation of this metaphoric use with the forest pictured on the cover of Ashcroft’s Post-Colonial Transformation [2001] is coincidental and not intentional here, although the obsession with the global at the expense of the local applies to postcolonial studies). Although the Pax Imperialis in the Caribbean appears to be of little or no interest to critics, I argue that it is crucial for studying the region’s past and present in order to understand how everyone can (or perhaps will) be affected by ambiguous forms of domination (such as light colonialism) in a global empire.

THE CARIBBEAN: DECOLONIZED CHAOS? Another problem has to do specifically with the way in which the Caribbean has been approached in recent cultural criticism. Much of the recent research on Caribbean culture has focused on the powerful theories of two Caribbean-born intellectuals who define the Caribbean in terms of chaos: Antonio Benítez Rojo and Edouard Glissant. Although their theories are important postmodern attempts to appreciate the fragments of Caribbean cultural identity, they also dramatically shy away from the persistent problem of imperialism. The name of Cuban writer Benítez Rojo, author of La isla que se repite (1989), has become synonymous with the postmodern and postcolonial conceptualization of the islands of the region as a chaotic configuration that repeats itself—in fractal fashion—across the Caribbean basin.89 No matter how interesting chaos-theory is for formulating a contemporary cultural critique of the Caribbean, it has also had another important effect. I argue that the postmodern reading of the Caribbean as chaotic has, in many ways, diverted attention away from the problem of imperialism that has affected the region; reading the region this way makes one forget that the Caribbean was for centuries the colonial playground of both Europe and the United States. However, Benítez Rojo’s postmodern perspective on the Caribbean has been taken for granted by most critics of Caribbean culture and literature.90 Besides his

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ethnocentric view (taking his home island, Cuba, as a synecdoche for the entire Caribbean), Benítez Rojo rejects the idea that the Caribbean is, de facto, in a colonial condition; instead, he puts forward a view of the Caribbean as a decentered, chaotic, and postcolonial space where typical (cultural) features are repeated throughout the Caribbean archipelago. Edouard Glissant, writing from Martinique, where he was born, is known mostly for two major works: Le discours antillais (1981; Caribbean Discourse) and Poétique de la Relation (1990; Poetics of Relation). Like Benítez Rojo, Glissant draws on the concept of chaos but the former’s concept of repetitiveness is replaced here by the concept of relationality: the grassroots of Caribbean cultures link all the islands in such a way that it is impossible to trace the exact origins of each culture. Most importantly, both theories try to describe Caribbeanness in all its complexity: the Caribbean is not represented as a uniform, homogeneous block. Hence, chaos has become a key term in Caribbean cultural critique, for both authors insist on the fractal nature of the Caribbean. According to Glissant, these interrelations proceed by fractures and ruptures. The process of creolization, the dynamics that underlie the Caribbean chaos, foreshadows the complex process of mixing, clashing (éclatement), and hybridization on a global scale. The phenomena of éclatement and créolisation make the Caribbean unique for both authors. In sum, they see the Caribbean as a mirror for what is happening on a worldwide scale. Benítez Rojo’s and Glissant’s view of the Caribbean as a space that is chaotic and impossible to define—but where at the same time everything and everybody is interrelated—is extremely important: it suggests that what happens in the Caribbean “is occurring on a global scale today” (Gyssels n.p.), for globalization is a confusing, chaotic process that determines the daily lives of ordinary people. However, the Caribbean can function, I have argued, not only as a model of global chaos but, more importantly, as a case study of light colonialism, a “decaffeinated,” less repressive form of colonialism that determines the new world order, which I refer to here as global empire.91 Therefore, first the effects that globalization has had on the Caribbean must be considered. It is safe to say that the effects of globalization in


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the region are not fundamentally different from those in other parts of the world: rising spatial compression, increased communication, and a greater divide between the rich and the poor. A clear example of the latter is that Martinique and Puerto Rico are considered to be faring much better—in spite of persisting colonial ties to their “motherlands”— than, for instance, Haiti or the Dominican Republic, which, in the past decades, have gone (so the saying goes) from Guatemala to Guatapeor. Aware of this divide, Caribbean writers are not just complaining about the condition of the marginalized: they are also expressing true concerns regarding the general disappearance of real public participation in the new global order. In his book significantly titled A New World Order, Caribbean writer Caryl Phillips (born on the small island of St. Kitts, a former British colony) notes that in the new millennium, [t]he old static order in which a people speaks down to another, lesser, people is dead. The colonial, or postcolonial, model has collapsed. In its place we have a new world order in which there will soon be one global conversation with limited participation open to all, and full participation available to none. In this new world order nobody will feel fully at home. (Phillips 5)

Speaking from his own platform as someone educated under imperialist rule, Phillips’ hesitation to choose between either a colonial or a postcolonial model is significant. Although the writer does not refer specifically to the situation of the Caribbean, he clearly speaks from the position of the Caribbean, as the constant references to its culture and writers (e.g., Chamoiseau) in his book make clear. Phillips’ vision of a new world order is more Orwellian than optimistic inasmuch as he suggests that new mechanisms of control will be implemented in the present and the near future in and outside of the Caribbean. His view is close to Bhabha’s: as globalization tightens relations and compresses distance (through technological innovations) between countries and continents, there is no clear-cut difference (if any) between those who repress and those who are repressed, between colonizer and colonized. Does the new world order, in Phillips’ vision, erase the specific (neo)colonial situation

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that characterizes the Caribbean in a postcolonial world—that is, a world that has in theory been decolonized and where no center of power imposes itself on the Caribbean as it did under the European imperialism of the past centuries? When discussing the situation of the francophone Caribbean, Phillips is more explicit: “Martinique and Guadeloupe do not need to see themselves in the context of Europe, for there is already the ready-made illusion that they are Europe” (221). The so-called départements d’outre-mer are smoothly integrated into the European body thanks to distortion-free telecommunication technologies. Apparently fostering freedom, Orwellian forms of control lurk beneath the surface: Phillips announces a world where “nobody will feel fully at home,” but where each subject enjoys “limited participation” in the “global conversation.”92 How limited will this participation be? Akin to Phillips’ idea of empire as the new world order is the likewise Orwellian idea of a totally controlled society where democracy becomes a signifier that stands for any one of a number of possible interpretations. A good example of such criticism is On Nineteen Eighty-Four: Orwell and Our Future (2005), edited by Gleason, Goldsmith, and Nussbaum. According to the contributors to this volume, George Orwell’s theory, perhaps more than Aldous Huxley’s, is becoming more and more significant in today’s globalized world; the proximity of an Orwellian future seems to be materializing in the present, particularly with the global reach of telecommunications of all kinds. Although none of the contributors relates Orwell’s dehumanized worldview to the process of empire building, it is clear that the two are intertwined. At the very heart of the global empire, one or more key Orwellian issues are alive: among others, censorship and surveillance, the exhibition of (military or economic) power, and the absence or limitation of democracy and public space.

THE CARIBBEAN STATE

OF

EXCEPTION

Although most Caribbean writers do not express such Orwellian concerns for what looks like a “first world” anxiety, some writers, like Raphaël Confiant, do criticize the trap of technological progress because


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it does not automatically imply more freedom: the Internet, for instance, ties Martinique more firmly to France. Confiant declared in an interview with Julia Watts: “In fact we are trapped by electronics. Before it was absurd that Martinique depended on France, but as electronics minimize distances … People who are pro-France use this as an argument: it’s not a problem that there are seven thousand kilometers between France and Martinique because of fax and e-mail” (J. Watts 49). In his Le discours antillais (Caribbean Discourse), Edouard Glissant provides a more complex—but also a more opaque—view on technological progress than Confiant’s, a view Glissant calls the technical hegemony of the West. Glissant’s cryptic view regarding the importance of technological progress appears optimistic, but he is careful: technology means that the West has exchanged its position of being “sovereign by right” for one of being sovereign “by circumstance.”93 Furthermore, the issue of sovereignty by circumstance takes a dramatic turn when considered from the point of view of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. What does it mean when right is abandoned in favor of circumstance? In his State of Exception (2005), Agamben defines the postmodern condition of the subject as one in which circumstance plays a crucial role in defining sovereignty, since “the voluntary creation of a permanent state of emergency … has become one of the essential practices of contemporary states, including so-called democratic ones” (2). Glissant’s statement warns against such a state of emergency, in which a law can momentarily be suspended whenever the sovereign decides to suspend it. What if colonies can be (momentarily) “dressed” as postcolonies, that is, as apparently decolonized colonies, devoid of their dangerous substance? In Homo Sacer, Agamben defines the exception as follows: “We shall give the name relation of exception to the extreme form of relation by which something is included solely through its exclusion.”94 Moreover, the state of exception appears as the legal form of what cannot have legal form. As such, it allows the sovereign to commit any kind of abuse within a legal framework. In an interview, Phillips likewise suggests that the Caribbean is the embodiment of a paradox: it is an included exclusion determined by

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imperial law: “the sense of dissonance, the sense of being of something but not of something which was created by empire, has had a profound effect not just upon my life as a writer” (Phillips and Lively 2000). As subject of a colony, one is never fully a part of the imperial system; one always fails to become a full member of the imperial club: When I think of empire, I don’t think so much of conformity; I think of something slightly more pernicious: membership— which partly embraces the word “conformity.” But membership is pernicious. The first thing that the British did when they arrived in those countries is establish a club, and a club involves membership—some people are in it and some people are out of it. (Phillips and Lively n.p.)

To be a colonial subject is, to quote the title of a turn-of-the-millennium book on Puerto Rican politics, to be “foreign in a domestic sense” (Duffy and Marshall). Being wedged in between a colonial and a postcolonial condition, the Caribbean thus symbolizes such a liminal figure, a threshold in which the subject is adrift: to be Caribbean means to be both inside and outside, included in and excluded from society. Being Caribbean is being between the colonial and the postcolonial, and because of this very ambiguous position, it does not fit fully into either category. But in outlining his theory, Agamben mentions extreme examples of states of emergency like those in the Balkan states where genocides took place during the nineties, in the camps in Nazi Germany, and in the Guantanamo Bay detention camp.95 In addition to these dark colonial cases, I argue that lighter cases such as the Caribbean’s should be considered. The indistinguishable threshold between life (the colonized subject) and law (colonial law) operates in a much more efficient way in places where dark repression becomes light, when the formerly repressed slave himself becomes a consumer, free even to choose his political future on the global market. In the case of Puerto Rico, for example, one can say along with Flores that “colonialism has been taking on a new face as its economic and political legitimations become so thoroughly veiled by cultural and commercial ones, and


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the colonial subject is mostly visible as a consumer” (Flores 12). Besides its role in the dissolution of state organizations during the past decades, it can be argued that postmodernity has also heralded “the coming to light of the state of exception as the permanent structure of juridico-political de-localization and dis-location” (Agamben, Homo Sacer 38), which is much more strongly present in the Caribbean exception, where coming to light means also and foremost becoming light. Contemporary attempts by Caribbean critics to equate capitalism, globalization, and (neo)colonialism are significant but lack a more specific definition. Such forces are only defined in rather vague terms that apparently encompass everything the critic wants to include. A good example of such criticism is Ramon Grosfoguel’s term global coloniality, a phenomenon which is now, according to Grosfoguel, the dominant form of core/periphery relationships in the capitalist world economy. The concept of coloniality of power is useful here to transcend the assumption of both colonialist and nationalist discourses, which state that the end of colonial administrations and the formation of nation-states in the periphery have ushered in a postcolonial, decolonized world (Grosfoguel 6). Grosfoguel even goes so far as to state that the end of the Cold War intensified the processes of global coloniality. The idea of global coloniality is close to Hardt and Negri’s equally intriguing but nevertheless theoretically vague conception of empire. Grosfoguel’s perspective is close to Bhabha’s, since both stress the repressive side of globalization and the central role of capitalist institutions, particularly the IMF and the World Bank. Under global coloniality, the Caribbean region shares its specific condition with other globalized areas. However, scapegoating capitalism, as Grosfoguel does, is a bit too convenient: one might easily object that such conceptual vagueness is not favorable to further research; rather, it is a dead end that, like Hardt and Negri’s perspective, does not offer any real strategies or alternatives. The problem with such theories as Grosfoguel’s and Hardt and Negri’s is, as Boron puts it, that “in this pseudo-totality of the empire and in its unbearable emptiness, not only is there no theoretical space in which to distinguish between exploiters and exploited but also there is no room to conceive the dominant coalition as anything different from

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an undifferentiated gang of capitalists” (Boron 119). But Boron’s own view is equally problematic because he is nostalgic enough to ground all imperialism in the United States, whereas Hardt and Negri refute this idea. Thus, Boron misses the point, for he fails to see the importance of the very complexity in which capitalism operates today; if capitalism “vanishes in the translucent air of postmodernity” (Boron 119), it is only in appearance. He does not accept the idea that repression “becomes in a manner of speaking, invisible, just like US imperialism” (Boron 123). Although US imperialism is necessarily visible repression for Boron, he does not acknowledge the existence of more ambiguous forms of imperialism like light colonialism, which is not simply evil but doubtlessly also has an enchanting—even enlightening—face. It goes without saying that a similar trend can be seen in the contemporary phenomenon of postmodernism: everybody tries to define what it is, but none of the responses is really satisfactory; something is happening, but exactly what is happening is (as yet) impossible to identify. If, as Bhabha suggests, old oppositions are kept in place in times of globalization, they certainly make themselves visible in new fashions. Technological progress and new communication highways, for instance, give an attractive new face to Martinique and Puerto Rico’s third-world setting. They might even enforce the illusion for Martinicans of being truly European citizens, as Phillips suggests, instead of second-class citizens of Europe’s overseas playground, or for Puerto Ricans of being real Americans. But such technological progress does not address common social problems that persist in the Caribbean, such as unemployment and economic instability. In postmodernity, Hardt and Negri warn, “the legitimation of the imperial machine is born at least in part of the communication industries, that is, of the transformation of the new mode of production into a machine” (33). Although Caribbean literature does not (yet) provide an account of such an “informational colonization of being” (Hardt and Negri 34), it does locate the “imperial machine” not in the hands of a repressive French or North American state apparatus (obviously absent in the cases of Martinique and Puerto Rico) but in the structure of business corporations, the key players in globalization.


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With its title’s explicit reference to late twentieth-century corporate colonization, Texaco points to the urban settings of the local centers through which imperial power operates—that is, through which the metropolis, that wellspring of new technologies and capitalist ventures in the decentralized networks of empire, manages its colonial power.96 This corporate mobility has tripled in postmodernity: identities and goods have become fluid and exchangeable, and multinational corporations now create virtual centers—that is, nodal points of employment and, hence, of social life—that become marginalized as soon as the companies (a major oil company in the case of Texaco) decide to move to another place that better suits their financial needs. This is comparable to the fate of the so-called ghost towns, thronging with gold diggers in the nineteenth century and abandoned once the sources of wealth had dried up. Indeed, multinational corporations do not operate from a single center of power but rather because of the corporations’ swiftness and mobility in the postmodern era, from what Hardt and Negri call a “non-place” (190). The abandonment of the town of Texaco thus points to a global phenomenon that is visible on a larger scale and that mainly affects the formerly peripheral countries. Texaco has been transformed into a shantytown since the oil company left in the wake of a major thunderstorm that damaged its corporate infrastructure and facilities. Particularly significant in Texaco are the “Notes of the urban planner to the Word scratcher” (which are recurrent sections in the novel that interrupt the general narrative with what can be described as a theory of urban development) because they show how the modestly sized Caribbean city of Fort-de-France is soon to be transformed under the global empire. In addition, these notes constitute intimate moments of reflection that show a guilt-ridden individual, who compares his own practice of urban planning to transnational empire building, razing the environment and dehumanizing society: But the city is in danger; she becomes a megalopolis and doesn’t ever stop; she petrifies the countryside into silence like Empires used to smother everything around them; on the ruins of the

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Like Bhabha, Chamoiseau does not accept simplistic views that depict globalization as beneficial to everyone, as “an unproblematic means for escaping the oppressive center/periphery relationship, for it too can be a vehicle for domination” (R. Watts 119). This vision is valid for the broader Caribbean and not only, as Richard Watts suggests, for Martinicans. Are not Arubans or Puerto Ricans, though in different ways, all Caribbean subjects, regardless of their multiple locations, situated as it were between two worlds? Beyond the Commonwealth Caribbean people, should not the massive diaspora be considered—not only of Puerto Ricans and Arubans but also of Haitians and Dominicans—with respect to the United States? This phenomenon cannot be seen as a simple wave of immigration; it is informed by current global politics. It is one of the major proofs of global empire at work. The decentering of people and identities is, ironically, almost a Caribbean trademark. Diaspora and dislocation, in short, the creation of a nonplace is at the heart of the Caribbean colonial experience. With increased globalization, diaspora is bound to become common currency—albeit in much lighter ways than those witnessed in the often traumatic history of the Caribbean, of which Chamoiseau’s portrait of Martinican history is a prominent example. More specifically, he suggests that Texaco, an independent company until 2001, when it merged with the American multinational energy corporation Chevron, represents a type of corporate decentering that occurs in a smooth, nontraumatic way. But Texaco does not offer any alternatives to the new forms of repression that have emerged since the end of slavery. Other recent novels, however, do suggest how today’s global empire operates within the Caribbean and how the (post)colonial subjects who inhabited this twilight zone strategically overcome old and new forms of repression. For example, Sirena Selena vestida de pena (2000; Sirena Selena Dressed in Sorrow) by Puerto Rican writer Mayra Santos-Febres is a novel that


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features one of the most interesting figures of contemporary Caribbean literature: the cross-dresser. The cross-dresser functions as an allegory of the Caribbean, as an ambiguous reflection, conjugating both local colonialism and global empire. This figure symbolizes the glimmerish, attractive, seductive, “feminine” side, perhaps, of globalization; but at the same time, the cross-dresser is also the exact opposite: a repulsive, abject configuration in the symbolical order, society’s outcast (Van Haesendonck “Sirena Selena” 87). In addition, the cross-dresser is often a trickster in the tradition of Caribbean popular culture, a figure who survives extremely difficult situations through ingenious simulation.

POSTMODERN MAROONS FACING

THE

LIGHT

If a global empire is being modeled after an enchanting and disenchanting form of domination similar to the domination of Caribbean light colonialism, the role of the writer in the global empire will necessarily be limited, as is the role of the Caribbean intellectual. Moreover, all intellectual praxis will be possible within the same limits in which the Caribbean intellectual must operate, if what historian Pedro San Miguel suggests in his book Los desvaríos de Ti Noel: Ensayos sobre la producción del saber en el Caribe (2004) is considered. According to San Miguel, to survive as an intellectual under (neo)imperialist conditions is to be like one of the most famous characters that Caribbean popular culture and orature (oral literature) have produced: Ti Noel, the Haitian maroon and trickster who figures in important novels such as Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier’s El Reino de este mundo (1984; The Kingdom of this World). The trickster is, of course, one of the most fascinating characters of Caribbean popular culture and literature (in addition to Ti Noel, Anancy also deserves mention). Mimicry is the trickster’s primary artifice: by mimicking the master’s discourse, the trickster finds in simulation a way of survival without losing his/her dignity or humanity, although he/she often appears as a monster to the other’s gaze, as is the case with crossdresser Sirena Selena in Santos-Febres’ novel.

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According to San Miguel, the Caribbean intellectual is necessarily a trickster figure who lives in conditions of desvarío, a kind of madness that is productive and creative enough to allow the intellectual to fight long-established colonial conditions. The desvarío, a trope that toys with the master’s discourse, is one of the very conditions that make it possible to survive (rather than to live freely) as an intellectual in the Caribbean. Just like Ti Noel, the Caribbean intellectual lives in a constant state of delirium, for he thinks he can save the world by becoming a participant in a “kind of madness” (San Miguel 23). But the ability to shapeshift must not be seen as a weakness; rather, it is one of the Caribbean writer’s major strengths, since he or she also practices the art of being a maroon, not in the sense of a “fugitive slave” but of a desolately isolated person escaping skillfully from patriarchal and canonized discourses. Instead of distancing himself from the characters, Chamoiseau practices and thinks like a Ti Noel, although the characters in his own novels (like Texaco) are not tricksters: “As a writer he [Chamoiseau] consciously associates himself with the man on the plantation, who, after the white master has gone to sleep, creeps out into the night and begins to tell tales” (Phillips 224). To be a Ti Noel is not to reject the imperial powers but to maintain an ambiguous relationship with them. Furthermore, Chamoiseau in a way follows Glissant’s ideas on slave insurgencies (marronage): Chamoiseau is a follower of Glissant’s theories of marroonage, which holds that the runaway slave who opposes the system is the archetypal Caribbean folk hero.… The small-island rebel must remain, to some extent, dependent upon the “plantation” for food, women and friends. Out of this complex, ambivalent relationship to the power structure, the only way effectively to resist and affirm identity is to work both with the system and against it at the same time, to undermine it from the inside and the outside. (Phillips 226)

Of course, if imperial power goes corporate and global, making efficient use of technology, the writer may perhaps act like a postmodern maroon, but he is obviously not a runaway slave. It is significant that


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Chamoiseau, when discussing the role of cyberspace and contemporary telecommunications technologies, does not simply reject them; rather, like Glissant, he expresses an ambiguous fascination with them. Though the trickster figure is absent from Texaco, Chamoiseau returns to the trickster in Écrire en pays dominé (1997). More specifically, he is interested in the figure of the hacker, who functions as a trickster in a world that is becoming more and more virtual, but where real forms of domination are more active than ever.97 This fascination with hackers and tricksters does not simply reflect a Caribbean preoccupation with forging freedom within a repressive symbolic order: it also intimates what is probably yet to come in the global empire. The global inhabitant of this empire is being exposed to light ways of colonialism that characterize the (post)colonial Caribbean—that is, ways that are not always visibly repressive but in which everybody has limited participation, as Phillips sees it. Light colonialism should be taken seriously as in the other meaning of light; indeed, imperialism today functions less as an illuminating experience and more as a blinding light that prevents one from seeing clearly what lurks behind it.98 If it is indeed true, as critics in the wake of Hardt and Negri increasingly argue, that a planet-wide empire is being laid out—an empire that transcends the classic colonized subject—this means that trickster figures will become more and more present in the global order and may play an important role in other literatures.99 Hence, although critics do not lack interest in studying the importance of tricksters, the relation between these figures and global empire is in need of further analysis. To conclude, beyond the attractiveness of chaos theory in times of globalization, of éclatement, as Glissant puts it,100 the idea of a sprawling global empire should not be forgotten when studying Caribbean texts. Likewise, studies of empire should take the Caribbean case into account in order to learn about the dynamics of global empire. If sovereignty by circumstance now rules, the Caribbean state of exception may not provide a manual about how to live under imperial rule, but it does show that every subject (consciously or unconsciously) might be participating—to give a twist to Conrad—in the very heart of lightness of this global

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order. If the current dislocation of the subject is a global phenomenon as in Agamben’s view, the Caribbean state of exception has become the rule in what is being described as the order of global empire. Therefore, when an empire goes global or “light,” it does not simply become mad: there is a method in its madness, just as there is a fractal order in chaos. Contrary to what Fanon hoped for, perhaps this new empire is a chaotic configuration—but, in order to know its present condition, one cannot cling to old conceptions of imperialism and decolonization. The focus should not be on the differences between night and day. In times of light colonialism, one should pay attention to the complexity of the local chiaroscuro effects, which bring forth the new enlightenment on the global canvas.


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———. The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. Print. ———. Nation and Narration. London and New York: Routledge, 1990. Print. Boron, Atilio A. Empire and Imperialism: A Critical Reading of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. Trans. Jessica Casiro. London and New York: Zed Books, 2001. Print. Bracho, Edmundo. “El Caribe y la teoría del caos.” Quimera: Revista de Literatura 131–132 (1994): 55–61. Print. Brennan, Tim. At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. Print. Burnett, Christina Duffy, and Burke Marshall, eds. Foreign in a Domestic Sense: Puerto Rico, American Expansion, and the Constitution. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001. Print. Caldwell, Roy Chandler. “For a Theory of the Creole City: Texaco and the Post-Colonial Postmodern.” Ici-Là: Place and Displacement in Caribbean Writing in French. Ed. Mary Gallagher. Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 2003. 25–39. Print. Carpentier, Alejo. El reino de este mundo. Havana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1984. Print. Chamoiseau, Patrick. Ecrire en pays dominé. Paris: Gallimard, 1997. Print. ———. Texaco. Trans. Rose Myriam Rejouis and Val Vinokurov. New York: Pantheon, 1997. Trans. of Texaco. Paris, Gallimard, 1992. Print. Dawson, Ashley. “Squatters, Space, and Belonging in the Underdeveloped City.” Social Text 22.4 (2004): 17–34. Print. D’Haen, Theo, and Hans Bertens, eds. Liminal Postmodernisms: The Postmodern, the (Post-)Colonial and the (Post-)Feminist. Postmodern Studies 8. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994. Print.


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Hallward, Peter. Absolutely Postcolonial: Writing Between the Singular and the Specific. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001. Print. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000. Print. Hoeg, Jerry. “Cultural Counterpoint: Antonio Benítez Rojo’s Postmodern Transculturation.” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 6.1 (1997): 65–75. Print. Hynes, William J., and William G. Doty, eds. Mythical Trickster Figures: Contours, Contexts, and Criticisms. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1993. Print. Jordan, Jack. “I, We, and Historical Memory in Patrick Chamoiseau’s Texaco.” Society of Research on African Cultures (SORAC) Journal of African Studies 2 (2002): 55–62. Print. Landay, Lori. Madcaps, Screwballs, and Con Women: The Female Trickster in American Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998. Print. McCusker, Maeve. Patrick Chamoiseau: Recovering Memory. Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 2007. Print. Nnadi, Joseph. “Mémoire d’Afrique, mémoire biblique: La congruence des mythes du nègre dans Texaco de Patrick Chamoiseau.” Études Francophones 15.1 (2000): 75–91. Print. Phillips, Caryl. A New World Order: Essays. New York: Vintage International, 2002. Print. Phillips, Caryl, and Penelope Lively. “English Literature and Empire.” Fathom Knowledge Network. Columbia University. ‘Chapter and Verse’ Discussion in the British Library. 20 September 2000. Web. 7 June 2007. . Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993. Print.


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Zabus, Chantal. “Prospero’s Progeny Curses Back: Postmodern, Postcolonial, and Postpatriarchal Rewritings of The Tempest.” Liminal Postmodernisms: The Postmodern, the (Post-) Colonial and the (Post-)Feminist. Ed. Theo D’Haen and Hans Bertens. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994. 115–138. Print. Žižek, Slavoj. “From Politics to Biopolitics … and Back.” The South Atlantic Quarterly 103.2–3 (2004): 501–521. Print. ———. “Have Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri Rewritten the Communist Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century?” Rethinking Marxism 13.3 (2001): 190–198. Print.

CHAPTER 10

EXHIBITING PUERTO RICO’S COLONIAL STATUS THROUGH THE FICTION OF RENÉ MARQUÉS AND LUIS LÓPEZ NIEVES Asima F. X. Saad Maura

La literatura es una de las expresiones más exhibicionistas del mundo. Esto es así porque es un flujo de textos, y pocas cosas hay que sean tan exhibicionistas como un texto. —Antonio Benítez Rojo (1989)

Throughout the onslaught of time, writers have consistently memorialized and lifted the veil that covers up the sociopolitical trajectory of a people. Creative writers elaborate history into works of fiction that help readers understand and cope with realities that are often repulsive and beyond

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reason. Puerto Ricans have been shrouded in clouds of make-believe and stories of deception that appear in history books, the commercial press, or in radio and television broadcasts. It has been the task of writers to dispel those misty representations of events and awaken the conscience of the readers to all that has been hidden and forgotten for generations. Arcadio Díaz Quiñones labels the phenomenon of forgetfulness “the broken memory” (70), the act of eliminating all residue of the collective memory that is obtained with every colonial enterprise. It is at this point that a new type of literature becomes essential, one that does not allow people to sleep peacefully. Ana Lydia Vega’s name for the writer of such literature—for a sort of rescuer of truth—is historicida, literally meaning a killer of history, where history is understood as a rendering of manipulated facts (101). History is an official story made public and diffused by the powers that control the media in order to “manufacture consensus” among the population, as Herman and Chomsky attest. According to Vega, even though the facts of history cannot be rectified, they deserve to be reevaluated through fiction, which is the only clear and honest way of telling the truth. In “El oro de Colón,” Rosario Ferré brings to the fore the controversy surrounding the five hundredth anniversary of the “discovery” of the land now called Puerto Rico by the Iberians. Ferré simultaneously addresses the failure of the authorities who have established the celebration, as well as of the population who have accepted it, to recall the decimation of indigenous populations and the destruction of a civilization, as well as the tenacious debate of legitimacy that surrounds this yearly celebration. Díaz Quiñones, on the other hand, traces the citizen’s ability to choose between remembering and forgetting back to Socrates, for whom memory was the mother of the muses. Puerto Rican writers have been telling the other side of the story by recreating a history that is deemed by the authorities to be too harsh for public consumption. The only way in which the people of Puerto Rico can be reminded of their roots is via literature, a medium that allows for endless variations on a historical theme. Because it is unacceptable to denounce cultural and geopolitical crimes through the mass media, the

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fictional crimes set forth in a poem, short story, drama, or novel, though they represent real illegal and immoral acts, are usually met with a silent nod and the general agreement of the intellectual few and even, in some cases, of the masses. Should one consent, then, to Pablo Neruda’s eloquent, if not apologetic, explanation that the Spaniards took all the material wealth during their conquest of the New World, but that they left behind much more—namely, the Spanish language (77–78)? At first glance, one might be led to believe that writers have been using the same rich, precious, beautiful language for hundreds of years in order to revisit the historical past. However, a closer look leads to a recognition of the linguistic process of hybridization that has taken place as the colonizers’ language has been transformed through the incorporation and use of the indigenous lexicon. Examples of these phenomena can be found in the various chronicles of the Indies written by the Spaniards, and the same extends to contemporary writers who want to pay homage to that indigenous subaltern voice. Puerto Rico is the quintessential example of an externally owned territory. Not once but twice, Puerto Rico’s colonial history has repeated itself. In the Caribbean, Puerto Rico is the repeating island, to use the term coined by Antonio Benítez Rojo. In the context of the Cold War, the island became a symbol of unprecedented prosperity and modernity through private accumulation of capital investment and through tax shelters and perks for the transnational corporate establishment. The secret variable for Puerto Rico was the constant flow of revenue coming from the United States, revenue that was used to create a military and industrial infrastructure and to execute massive public works, such as roads, sewage and electrical systems, housing, schools, and hospitals. The miracle of the Puerto Rican boom was not a result of private initiatives, for there was strict state control of the economy at both the federal and local levels. Yet the Puerto Rican model of development was to be emulated by other emerging nation-states in the postcolonial world, particularly vis-à-vis the social-democratic or soviet aspects of the model that were in vogue at the time.101 Puerto Rico came to be known as La vitrina del Caribe (the display case of the Caribbean), an appellation used with

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deep pride by the true believers of the official story. Taking into consideration the disparity between the political reality, viewed as negative by those against the military presence of the United States, and the different ways in which it was “softened” to make it look beneficial to the people of Puerto Rico, it is not uncommon for Puerto Rican writers to resort to storytelling in order to stir citizens from their political slumber by assembling a coherent narrative from the shards and fragments of a broken memory. Through their fiction, René Marqués (1919–1979) and Luis López Nieves (1950–) address the importance of a critical reading of history by unveiling both the embellished memories of Puerto Rico’s HispanoCatholic past—a sort of phantom empire, seemingly forgotten—and the constant reminder of the Anglo-Protestant presence of the United States. Since 1898, there has been a division between advocates of independence (independendistas) and those who would like to see Puerto Rico as the fifty-first state of the North American union (unionistas). The arguments of either group seem to lack credibility inasmuch as the future status of Puerto Rico is an issue that lies squarely with the Congress of the United States, to which neither independendistas nor unionistas appear to grant any validity whatsoever. On this point, Ramón Grosfoguel notes [t]he unequal power relationships between Puerto Rico and the United States despite the fact that Puerto Rico is still under the territorial clause of the United States. Although the United States selectively confronts the lack of democratic and human rights around the world, it maintains a colonial administration in its “backyard” and refuses to organize a democratic referendum on Puerto Rico’s status. (5)

On the other hand, Puerto Ricans seem to be content with the formal trappings of a liberal democracy and a market economy that drives a wild, senseless consumer society, regardless of soaring socioeconomic disparities, high unemployment, and rampant criminality. It could thus be said that the people of the island are fragmented not only politically but also in their innermost selves: psychologically, geographically,


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historically, linguistically, and existentially. The building blocks of the national identity have jagged edges that do not fit seamlessly into the superstructure. There is a feeling of anomie, confusion, and denial among the general populace. To this day, the Puerto Rican case represents that of a people who have struggled to retain their language, cultural identity, and national dignity when the island was passed as spoils of war from one empire to another at the end of the nineteenth century. Colonial administrations have attempted to erase any desire in Puerto Rican citizens to ponder the past and so discover the reasons behind historical events. Governed for roughly four hundred years by Spain and for well over a century by the United States of America, Puerto Ricans are today divided into those who wish to remember and those who prefer to live in oblivion. Contemporary Puerto Rican literature describes the island’s transition from an agrarian society to a postindustrial wasteland, a shift that took place in less than fifty years. In the wake of such rapid change, generations of Puerto Rican islanders and immigrants to the United States alike attempt to hold on to traditional mores and language by remaining faithful to their Hispanic heritage. The array of historical accounts produced in literary writings since the early days of the nineteenth century, which contributed to the formation of Puerto Rico’s national identity, is substantial. René Marqués and Luis López Nieves are only two writers who have managed to retell history, each imbuing invasion, colonization, and empire formation with distinct meaning. The works of both authors set forth a profound sense of abandonment and tragedy at the moment of each particular occupation. In Marqués, the critical plot stays within the literary fictional realm, while López Nieves tears asunder the barrier between fiction and reality. With the publication of López Nieves’ work, readers actively demanded an investigation into a reality that was nothing other than fiction or, at best, wishful thinking. It all began within twenty-five years of the Spanish colonization of Puerto Rico, when Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo (1478–1557), the official chronicler of the crown, was already busy writing his Historia general y natural de las Indias (1526). The work comprises numerous

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books, the sixteenth volume of which Fernández de Oviedo dedicated entirely to Puerto Rico: he described in detail what to his foreign eyes appeared extraordinarily new—everything from flora and fauna to the inhabitants, their eating and working habits, their religious beliefs and rituals. Perhaps the most intriguing account is found in the eighth chapter, which records the 1510 drowning of a young Spanish soldier named Diego Salcedo, the man who unwittingly became proof of the invaders’ (that is, his own people’s) mortality. Decades later Juan de Castellanos (1522–1607), in his famous eulogies in praise of the European men who first set foot on the Indies,102 included a poetized version of Salcedo’s drowning in the eulogy dedicated to Puerto Rico’s conquistador, Juan Ponce de León—who had been appointed governor (adelantado) of the island by Charles V in 1508. This anecdote served as the core inspiration of the short story “Tres hombres junto al río” (Three men by the riverside), written by René Marqués.103 Thus, two seventeenth-century texts triggered Marqués’ imagination, and he recreated the account from the point of view of one of the natives of the island. The author gives voice to those who, under Spanish rule, never got a chance to speak, those who were never heard and who eventually perished.104 In all three versions of the event, the historicity of which is not in doubt, the inexperienced young Spanish adventurer roams unaccompanied through the lands ruled by Cacique Urayoan. Salcedo happens to be good bait for Urayoan, who has already made plans to test the immortality of the Spaniards by capturing one of the invaders and who therefore welcomes Salcedo into his village. After his visit comes to an end, the Cacique orders some of his men to guide the young soldier back home. Aware that the naïve Spaniard trusts them, Urayoan’s men offer to carry him on their shoulders when they reach the Guaorabo River (today Gurabo), lest his clothes get wet. As they cross the deepest part, the men hold Salcedo under the water and drown him: this action marks the first rebellion by indigenous people against their European oppressors. Marqués uses Fernández de Oviedo’s chronicle to create his story, which is told by an omniscient narrator who penetrates the mind of one of the native men. The author manipulates the incident so that Salcedo’s


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death simultaneously represents the natives’ revolt against the Spaniards and the dream of many Puerto Rican unionistas and independentistas to end the present-day colonial status of the island. By juxtaposing two different invasions and colonial governments, Marqués creates a hybrid text. He combines chronicle and epic poetry so as to present the sameness of two empires at the respective moments of conquering and colonizing—first of the Tainos by the Spaniards and second of the Puerto Ricans by the United States of America. In doing this, Marqués creates in a single story a double critique both of the Spanish crown and of later US hegemony in Puerto Rico in particular, as well as in the Caribbean in general. In other words, the sixteenth-century chronicle helps the twentieth-century author to elaborate a storyline in which two discrete periods coexist within a text: the Iberian-colonial era of the fifteenth century and the Anglo-American colonization of the present day. Furthermore, the story presents metaphorically the changes that took place in terms of the names given to Puerto Rico, the repeating island. In spite of the chronological distance, Marqués vividly evokes the historical drowning of yore. For instance, his story represents the Taino people’s fight for survival during the violent metamorphosis of their original Boriken into the island of San Juan Bautista,105 later called Puerto Rico.106 In addition, Marqués sets the stage for the collapse and deformation of that last island, Puerto Rico, when in 1898 it would endure yet another transformation though it kept the same name. Marqués’ tale serves as a warning to the island’s population that they should ward off the culture and political influences of the new US overlords. René Marqués’ short story describes the Spanish and North American invasions by means of a metaphor: billions of ants marching into the corpse of the young Spanish soldier as his body rapidly decomposes under the tropical sun. In the meantime, the Tainos stare at him, patiently waiting until they can prove his mortality (and thus that of all the colonizers). Marqués’ epigraph—“Mataréis al Dios del Miedo y sólo entonces seréis libres” (Thou shall kill the God of Fear, and only then shall you be free)—connects the two invasions and gives meaning to the end of the story. “Tres hombres junto al río” closes when a Taino triumphantly

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blows the fotuto (Taino for trumpet or horn) to announce the good news that the White man is not immortal, thinking that his “people shall be free.” The fact that the Taino never says those words out loud perhaps hints at Marqués’ political position, namely, the idea that the thought is not translated into action: Puerto Ricans have yet to set themselves free by rising above their own fears and insecurities—by taking responsibility in order to liberate themselves from their colonial existence. Unless and until self-assurance is achieved, political independence cannot and will not be attained. This thought goes hand in hand with Marqués’ view of Puerto Ricans as “docile,” as he argues in what is probably his most controversial essay.107 In Benítez Rojo’s La isla que se repite, the conquering agenda of the young Anglo-American nation is quite similar to that of Spain: “authoritarian, monopolistic, intolerant, proslavery, belligerent, racist” (2; my translation). Salcedo’s drowning, therefore, is parallel to Puerto Rico’s weakening: the island succumbs to the megapower exerted by US political and militaristic design. It is not surprising that López Nieves’ Seva, first published in the weekly newspaper Claridad (23–29 December 1983), caused great furor, for he presented it as the true version of the 1898 invasion of Puerto Rico by US forces.108 Like René Marqués’ “Tres hombres junto al río,” Seva is a hybrid work; both incorporate elements of preexisting texts. López Nieves juxtaposes real and fictional documents—letters, recordings of conversations, newspaper clippings, maps, and photographs—in such a way as to blur the lines between reality and invention. When it was first published, Seva toyed with Puerto Rican nationalistic sentiment, on the one hand, and the island population’s ingrained apprehension toward independence, on the other.109 López Nieves’ invented account, presented as historical fact, produced an upheaval, especially since he cited both real and forged letters from Nelson A. Miles, the most skillful US general and commander-in-chief of the US forces during the fateful month of July 1898. Among the many who have addressed the US invasion is Rosario Ferré, who recounts three different points of view in his essay “Tres versiones del desembarco.” The first version, being the official one, reports


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how the US military, led by the fifty-nine-year-old Miles, executed the most successful military incursion in history. Most historical documents report very few deaths during the attack. The second account details the generosity and hospitality of the Puerto Ricans (praising them for it), describing their eager welcoming party—including reports of the traditional flavorful arroz con pollo (rice and beans) and of the female Puerto Rican beauties openly displaying “Old Glory” with excitement and gratitude as the incoming soldiers approached. The third and last adaptation of the event, however, has an unusual and intriguing background: it is based on a document by writer Carl Sandburg (1878–1967), who had enlisted to fight in the Spanish-American War in Company C, also known as the Sixth Illinois Infantry.110 Ferré notes the writer’s different angle, his discontent with the invasion and with the reports that it had happened in a happy-go-lucky way. According to Sandburg, reality was quite different: misery reigned in various forms, for the incoming troops were tormented by mosquitoes, torrential rains, and mudslides, as well as by the unbearable tropical heat. Tasteless canned food, dried meat, and cheap whisky were all that was available—instead of savory Puerto Rican delicacies and the much-desired beautiful women. It is amidst this confusion about what really occurred that López Nieves’ Seva purports to transcend all the truths and lies ever told and presents yet a fourth scenario—which, to readers’ chagrin, is merely an invention. Historical facts indicate that the United States armada invaded Puerto Rico on 25 July 1898, entering through the bay off the shores of Guánica, a coastal town on the southern Caribbean side of the island. In his fictional version of events, López Nieves asserts that the real invasion took place two months earlier, at ten o’clock on the morning of 5 May, by way of Seva, the name López Nieves uses to designate the town on the easternmost part of the island. The settlement, he writes, was entirely wiped out and renamed Ceiba, which is, indeed, its true name. López Nieves’ novella has the citizens of Seva fighting fiercely against the intruders, winning back their land, and keeping their pride. To those who read the story in the newspaper in 1983, this “news” was healing evidence that Puerto Ricans had indeed put up a fight to defend

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their country from the troops under General Miles’ command. With this piece of writing, López Nieves exploded the idea (perpetuated by René Marqués) that Puerto Ricans are weak, submissive, and docile; he proposed instead that the islanders had fought and won in 1898 but were soon repressed and massacred by the attacker’s armed forces; the town of Seva was razed and hidden, buried under Roosevelt Roads, the largest US naval base in the Caribbean until it was abandoned by the Southern Command in 2004.111 As stated previously, in López Nieves’ version, the original name of Seva was replaced with Ceiba. A boy, ten years old at the time, was the only survivor of the alleged slaughter. In his nineties at the time of Seva’s publication, Mr. Ignacio Martínez was supposedly still hiding in fright of those who had assassinated his family and the entire community. López Nieves sent his text—consisting of an introductory letter and six attached documents—to Claridad’s chief editor, Luis Fernando Coss, requesting that it be published. It is important to understand that the author’s farcical text is nothing other than a ploy; consequently, a distinction must be made between López Nieves the author and López Nieves the fictional character in the author’s novelistic plot: the writer thus acts out two separate personae. He wrote and organized his story as if he were merely narrating what his (fictitious) friend Dr. Víctor Cabañas had told him. The documents accompanying López Nieves’ invented memo are (1) “original” letters from Cabañas’ personal journal, (2) “original” entries from general Nelson Miles’ diary, (3) a real map of Puerto Rico printed in 1896, (4) an “original” affidavit signed by Mr. Ignacio Martínez, (5) photos of Mr. Martínez and his shack,112 and (6) Mr. Martínez’s recorded testimony. Whether Claridad’s editor knew about López Nieves’ literary scam beforehand remains unclear; certainly, when the story went to print in December 1983, no mention was made of the fact that López Nieves had meticulously created and planned the whole story. The timeline of this story’s publication is another element to take into consideration. The manuscript was not published until 23 December 1983, although López Nieves had sent it to Coss on 15 October,


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stating that he had been keeping all the data. According to him, he had received Cabañas’ letters between 27 June 1978 and 17 January 1981. López Nieves explained that he had waited two years before going public because he had been hoping to hear again from Cabañas, who had now (López Nieves said) disappeared. Through the use of specific dates, López Nieves adds credibility to his fantastic chronicle; the interim of all those years are part of his playful creativity. In her introduction to the 2006 edition of Seva, Estelle Irizarry describes the author’s technique as a sort of “Chinese box” since the dates he gives serve to “hide” other historical facts (12). For instance, 1978 marks the tragic death of two youngsters who were framed and killed in cold blood by undercover agents in Cerro Maravilla, Puerto Rico’s highest mountain. Thus, the dates used by López Nieves in his novella are representative of the times during which intense investigations about this massacre were taking place. One change presented in Seva that contradicts the official story is the information reported in Miles’ (fictitious) “personal diary,” which López Nieves claimed to have been obtained by Víctor Cabañas during an interview with the general’s granddaughter, Peggy Ann Miles, whom López Nieves portrays as an old maid. This fabricated granddaughter was said to live alone, according to López Nieves’ account, on 8803 Edison Street in Alexandria, Virginia, barely twenty minutes away from Washington, DC, where Cabañas had been carrying out his research. This presumed finding is accompanied by authentic original photos of Miles and of various battleships of the time, including one of the USS Gloucester firing at the village of Guánica on 25 July 1898, the very day of the real invasion. To make his invented documents more believable, López Nieves added a fake handwritten (in English) portion of a page from the general’s fictional journal in which Miles confesses “the truth” about the massacre at Seva: Mission accomplished! Four days ago we took the enemy by surprise. Each and every one of the inhabitants of Seva. We took quick action but the extermination was not [very]113 easy, even

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Having given such “proof” of the events at Seva, López Nieves goes on to relate that he had received from his friend eighteen cassettes containing the recorded testimony of the only survivor—the now ninetytwo-year-old Ignacio Martínez—about that fatal day. López Nieves then specifies that those recordings came accompanied by an affidavit executed before an official notary and lawyer named Antonio Conde (51). At the end of Cabañas’ pursuit of the “truth,” and as he explains in his last letter to López Nieves, he was heading to the Roosevelt Roads Naval Base to dig up the buried ruins of the original town of Seva. Subsequently, Cabañas warns the author that his (Cabañas’) own life is at risk. Therefore López Nieves ends his account by demanding an official response: “Ahora le corresponde al gobierno explicar: ¿Dónde está el doctor Víctor Cabañas?” (55).114 Indeed, López Nieves the character is so frantic about his friend’s disappearance that the same reaction was triggered among the readers of Claridad. His pseudo-chronicle stirred up sentiments of indignation at the alleged deception and evoked feelings of patriotism and nationalism among Puerto Ricans from all political quarters. The commotion experienced throughout the island lasted weeks before the truth of the tale was made available to the public. The seamless blend of reality and fiction was unprecedented: lists of historical and invented facts mixed together; names of numerous persons real and fictitious, dead and alive; specific dates and names—every aspect of the work imparted amazing credibility to López Nieves’ invented report. Therefore the author, together with Claridad’s editor, had to appease the masses; it took months to placate the provocations in the wake of López Nieves’ canny literary swindle. Radio and television shows, newspaper articles, meetings at the University of Puerto Rico and other educational institutions were held to discuss the supposedly real events created by López Nieves. Fearing a violent outbreak, Coss wrote an editorial in which he clarified that Seva was nothing more than


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“un cuento,”115 a mere lie. But the revelation of the truth of the matter failed to pacify the people. How, then, is it possible to distinguish reality from fiction? Can such a distinction even be achieved? Is one to believe what one reads, hears, or even sees? In this day and age imagination is the limit inasmuch as fact and falsehood become but two sides of the same coin. For Hayden White, for instance, the difference between history and fiction “resides in the fact that the historian ‘finds’ his stories, whereas the fiction writer ‘invents’ his” (6). To the disappointment of many, the invented story of Seva and its aftershock can be traced to something as banal as wishful thinking. Nonetheless, for some Puerto Ricans, coming to terms with reality was difficult, and they preferred to conduct investigations about the supposedly massacred people of Seva and to continue writing about what they insisted were new discoveries. The impact of the piece was powerful: political marches and demonstrations took place; slogans and graffiti appeared all over the island extolling the militant and epic spirit of Seva and its people. Seva inspired poets and songwriters alike. No conversation was complete without a mention of Seva. In short, López Nieves’ Seva is one of the best examples of fiction that sparked a historical awakening.116 The allegory of the Spanish soldier, created from a historical account by Marqués as a symbol of empire’s vulnerability, continues to beckon the Puerto Rican psyche: that allegory is reflected in López Nieves’ Seva, a metaphor that represents the repressed desire of the island’s people for national sovereignty. Yet, reality strikes hard: there is no modern drowning of Salcedo nor any actual Seva cover-up to expose. In order to prevent history from repeating itself, conscientious development must take place; otherwise, Puerto Rico is destined to disappear, just as the Tainos vanished and Seva was figuratively destroyed. Puerto Rican society finds itself at an impasse. It must either become fully assimilated as part of the United States—the hope of estadistas—by giving up its Hispanic heritage and language, or it must assert its right to become a separate political entity, seek to survive in the global economy as a haven of cheap labor, and agree on a new geopolitical arrangement with

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the Congress that would allow for trade with the United States. The good intentions of many independentistas, who in their attempt to maintain a national identity tout the popular slogan ¡Despierta, boricua! (Wake up, Boricua!),117 could backfire. The only remains of boricua origin are mere memories preserved in archeological parks and museum exhibits, a nostalgic past captioned in history books and literary works, in folk tales, legends, and songs of struggle.118 As Fernández de Oviedo, Juan de Castellanos, René Marqués, López Nieves, and others toy with the words inherited from Spain, they exemplify the literary, historical, and historiographical elements in the constant flux of official lies and hidden truths perpetuated by the most powerful empire of current times. “Tres hombres junto al río” represents the circularity of time inasmuch as it attempts to make sense of Puerto Rico’s struggle to end its colonial status. Without knowing it, Fernández de Oviedo had planted the seed that centuries later would be sown by Marqués in order to obliterate the thin line between time and literary genres: two different epochs of the sixteenth and the twentieth centuries—along with history and story, reality and fiction—merged as a unified whole. The historical past—covered up, ignored, manipulated, and to some extent forgotten—ignited the imagination of both Marqués and López Nieves, moving them to convey a poignant political message and, in so doing, to put an end to its “silencing,” after the title of Trouillot’s 1995 book. Both authors, adopting the subaltern’s voice, reveal, criticize, and make public Puerto Rico’s mindset enslaved by the mighty dollar. Since its formation under Spain and its re-formation later under the United States of America, the dead by sword and fire have been the Tainos and their Puerto Rican descendants in all the wars of empire. The young Spanish soldier Salcedo stands not just as an invader but as a victim in the hands of the invaded. And, although his drowning may be representative of the choking of the island since its beginning, the fictional town of Seva embodies an already drowned Puerto Rico, buried in its own territory under a blanket of asphalt and lies. Fernández de Oviedo’s historical account serves as a metaphorical link for the repeated conquest and colonization of the same space.


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Puerto Rico is at a crossroads, and the people are not allowed to decide their own political destiny through transparent democratic processes. In the meantime, United States–led massacres, raids, incarceration, and assassinations of Puerto Rican leaders and militants of the independence movement have not ceased.119 The motions filed with the US Congress on behalf of the people of Puerto Rico requesting a plebiscite or referendum are usually annulled by the United States. The referenda of 1991 and 1998 were postponed indefinitely. Grosfoguel explains: Puerto Ricans are aware of the political and economic implications of becoming a neocolonial “independent” or “autonomous” territory, and fewer than 10 percent of the voters support either of these options. The neocolonial domination and exploitation of the so-called independent Caribbean islands by the United States symbolizes for many Puerto Ricans what the future may hold if the island becomes a republic. After [more than] one hundred years of colonialism, neocolonialism represents for Puerto Ricans an expropriation of social and civil rights achieved only through painful struggle under U.S. citizenship. (8)120

The only recourse left to Puerto Ricans consists in staying attentive to writers whose literary creations serve to exhibit realities that otherwise would not see the light of day. René Marqués and Luis López Nieves succeed in their representations of Puerto Rico—of its ecological blighted territory and the erosion of its consciousness—as the island straddles a colonial legacy of five centuries. However, unlike Marqués, whose Taino only thinks (and does not speak) and is therefore contemplative and passive, López Nieves portrays the people of Seva acting more closely to the description given by Oviedo: everyone together and fully determined to either kill the Spaniards or die in their attempt. At present, though, Puerto Rico is without a convenient culprit like Salcedo, just as the island is without a Seva that might awaken the boricuas to their own strengths and liabilities.

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WORKS CITED

Benítez Rojo, Antonio. La isla que se repite. Hanover, NH: Ediciones del Norte, 1989. Print. Castellanos, Juan de. Elegías de varones ilustres de Indias. Biblioteca de Autores Españoles, Vol. 4. Madrid: M. Rivadeneyra, 1847. Print. Collins, Susan M., Barry Bosworth, and Miguel A. Soto-Class. The Economy of Puerto Rico: Restoring Growth. Washington, DC: Brookings Institute Press, 2006. Print. Díaz Quiñones, Arcadio. La memoria rota. 2nd ed. San Juan, Puerto Rico: Huracán, 1996. Print. Fernández de Oviedo, Gonzalo. Libro XVI, Capítulo VIII: Historia general y natural de las Indias. Antología general de la literatura puertorriqueña, I. Madrid: Partenón, 1982. 8–10. Print. Ferré, Rosario. “El oro de Colón.” A la sombra de tu nombre. México, D.F.: Alfaguara, 2000. 75–81. Print. ———. “Tres versiones del desembarco.” A la sombra de tu nombre. México, D.F.: Alfaguara, 2000. 83–87. Print. Grosfoguel, Ramón. Colonial Subjects: Puerto Ricans in a Global Perspective. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Print. Herman, Edward S., and Noam Chomsky. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. New York: Pantheon Books, 1988. Print. López Nieves, Luis. Seva: Historia de la primera invasión norteamericana de la isla de Puerto Rico ocurrida en mayo de 1989. Hato Rey, Puerto Rico: Cordillera, 2003. Print. Marqués, René. “El puertorriqueño dócil.” El puertorriqueño dócil y otros ensayos, 1953–1971. San Juan, Puerto Rico: Cultural, 1993. 151–215. Print.


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———. “Tres hombres junto al río.” En una ciudad llamada San Juan. Río Piedras, Puerto Rico: Cultural, 1974. 19–25. Print. Neruda, Pablo. “La palabra.” Confieso que he vivido. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1974. 77–78. Print. Sandburg, Carl. Always the Young Strangers. New York: Harcourt, 1953. Print. Spivak, Gayatri. “Can the Subaltern Speak? Speculations on Widow Sacrifice.” Wedge 7/8 (Winter/Spring 1985): 120–130. Print. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press, 1995. Print. Vega, Ana Lidia. “Nosotros los historicidas.” Esperando a Loló y otros delirios generacionales. Río Piedras: Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1994. 101–111. Print. White, Hayden. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in NineteenthCentury Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973. Print.

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CHAPTER 11

WEB OF IMPUNITIES NARRATIVES OF VIOLENCE AND EMPIRE BUILDING IN CENTRAL AMERICAN LITERATURE Ana Patricia Rodríguez

And as the [Central American] region fell from international purview in the wake of pacification, and the social fabric deteriorated, poverty, marginalization, and a pandemic of crime, drug abuse, and interpersonal violence spread, symptomatic of structural contradictions in the social order that had not been resolved. Was this apparent post-bellicose social breakdown a vestige of the regional conflict? Or were explanations to be found in a set of new historical circumstances? —William Robinson (Transnational Conflicts 1–2)

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Since the arrival of Europeans in the western hemisphere, Central America has been the site of ongoing phases of capitalist empire building.121 Agents of the Spanish crown colonized the region and its people beginning in the early sixteenth century, whereas Great Britain and the United States competed for possession of the resources and territories of the isthmus well into the twentieth century.122 In the twenty-first century, Central America is yet again key in global economic expansion, especially after the ratification of the Dominican Republic–Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA-DR) on 7 October 2007 (Pacheco Alizaga; Moreno). With the passing of CAFTA-DR, the region became a part of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), thus producing a new cultural zone to be explored in this chapter (Vizentini and Wiesebron).123 Indeed, when one examines Central America through its cultural and literary production—postconquest indigenous transcriptions, European travelogues, national “local color” sketches, anti-imperialist novels, resistance testimonios, and more recent texts responding to the crises in the region caused by globalization—the weighty narrative of empire building becomes increasingly apparent. Through its literature, Central America may be read as a missing chapter in the record of global empire,124 especially given the region’s long history as a locus of foreign military, economic, and political interventions and its key position in the expansion of global capital in the twenty-first century (Robinson Transnational Conflicts; Dunkerley Pacification; Dunkerley Power). This chapter focuses, therefore, on a growing body of Central American literary texts produced under the weight of empire building in the region and charged with the task of representing local struggles, realities, and visions. Read as signs of Central America in times of empire, as the epigraph suggests, these texts represent the wide spectrum of a Central American society that is caught in an intricate web of violence, corruption, and impunity amidst local and global forces. Impunity, in this case defined as a lack of justice after the recent civil wars, genocides, and amnesty programs in Central America, has become a significant trope in Central American narratives. Because justice, truth,

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and power are under interrogation in everyday life, it is not surprising that much of recent Central American literature comprises crime fiction, thriller novels, and what I call justice-seeking genres, as well as other experimentations in writing, perspective, voice, and subjectivity, especially in the novel and short story genres.125 In this chapter, I examine particularly the imbrications of impunity, violence, and empire in Honduran writer Waldina Mejía’s La Tía Sofí y los otros cuentos (2002; Aunt Sofi and Other Stories) and in Salvadoran Claudia Hernández’s Mediodía de frontera (2002; Midday Border), as well as in the work of other contemporary Central American writers and critics. Representing the deleterious effects of empire on Central American societies, Mejía and Hernández (among others) use the genre of the short story collection, specifically the forms of the short story cycle, novel-in-stories, and the composite novel,126 to represent the social reproduction of impunity in local contexts in which all sectors of society are made complicit. Mejía’s and Hernández’s short story collections might be read as symbolic networks of discourses tightly organized around the trope of impunity. These collections manifest the ways form and content are negotiated in contemporary Central American literature.127

CENTRAL AMERICAN LITERATURE

IN

TIMES

OF

EMPIRE

Although Central America receives little critical attention in studies of the Americas and empire,128 it takes center stage here as I examine how the dispossessed multitude (Ferman; Hardt and Negri, Multitude) and the rising “transnational elite” (Robinson Transnational Conflicts) of Central America are made complicit in the (re)production of social networks, free trade neoliberal acts, imagined communities, and narratives of impunity. Critics of postwar Central American literary production have pointed out that complex structures of violence both permeate and shape many aspects of contemporary Central American economies, societies, and cultures, producing not only narratives of violence, cynicism, and general uncertainty for the region (Leyva; Cortez, “Estética del cinismo”; Castellanos Moya) but also critiques of the

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deteriorating state of life in Central America—for the great majority of its population—under neoliberal governance. In Latinoaméricanos buscando lugar en este siglo (2002), Néstor García Canclini defines neoliberalism in Latin America as “selective modernization” whereby entire regions and populations are subjected to the interests of an entrepreneurial elite class serving global banking, international investment, and transnational creditors (44).129 For García Canclini, it goes without saying that neoliberalism in Latin America is not concerned with serving the public interest(s); this is a position held, too, by many critics of neoliberal programs in Central America, as members of the public stand to lose jobs, basic social securities, and social agency: “For neoliberalism, exclusion is a component of modernization at the hands of the market” (44). In his book, in fact, García Canclini brings to the fore the effects of neoliberalism in Central America. He states that in Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, and Chile, levels of ingovernability, poverty, social unrest, and social corrosion are heightened, while “[i]n Central America, perhaps more severely than in other regions, famines showing the failure of economic policies and the waste of occasional international emergency aid renew the cycle of violence and ingovernability” (46). Furthermore, in Transnational Conflicts: Central America, Social Change, and Globalization, William I. Robinson argues that in Central America the “poor majority” is at the disposal of a transnational elite class bent on selling them to the lowest bidders of the global economy, in what expert witnesses have called “the race toward the bottom,” or what the Nicaraguan-Guatemalan cultural critic and writer Franz Galich argues is but an “ultra savage” form of capitalism preying on the poorest of Central Americans (Galich, qtd. in Mackenbach 2007). Moreover, in Free Trade for the Americas? The United States’ Push for the FTAA Agreement (2004), analysts of the FTAA underline the economic and social uncertainties that global policies will produce in Latin America, especially in regard to education, health, labor, and the (lack of) “social rights” of people in “small economies” such as those in Central America.130 It is thus clear that CAFTA-DR and the FTAA will be the economic driving force in Central America in the twenty-first century,

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further dividing the isthmus into compartmentalized tariff-free zones for corporate powers and free market areas serving the global economy. This is the newest cultural divide of the global empire (after Hardt and Negri’s formulation) unfolding in the present; within this empire, Central Americans continue to struggle for economic, political, social, cultural, and personal rights amid the onslaught of indiscriminate and unrelenting global socioeconomic forces. From this context of struggle emerge location-specific cultural and literary responses, as critics of neoliberal cultural politics have examined elsewhere (Yúdice; García Canclini; Masiello). Central American literature in the twenty-first century speaks, too, from these fissures, zones, and depositories of the global economy. Indeed, in the previously mentioned interview before his untimely death in 2006, Franz Galich explained that although Central American literature may show “the sore, the pustule, and the rot [of Central American societies],” it also manifests the workings of the “not so new [capitalist] system” in the region. According to Galich and others, Central American literature responds critically to local and regional social, political, economic, and cultural conditions and continues to play a crucial function in society (Aguirre Aragón). In fact, rather than diminishing in quality, quantity, and significance, Central American literature has undergone a kind of revival, experimenting in form and content and creating new spaces for critique and debate (Leyva). Central American literature, moreover, scrutinizes and remains skeptical of the effects of “ultra savage capitalism,” yet it also reacts against the “not so new system” and has the potential to provide critical analyses of power and to propose an aesthetic commitment to change, argues Galich (n.p.) Perhaps, at this juncture, this literature might be read as a literature of (in) civility, if not of protest, making way for the production of other forms of social discourse and positions, or what Hardt and Negri call “network power” and liberation (Empire, xii–xiii). The writers whose works are examined here challenge Central America’s status quo as well as its normalization of violence and impunity and participate in the construction of a contemporary Central American imaginary that challenges business as usual of free trade in the region.

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On the heels of the civil wars in Central America (1954–1996), a corpus of extreme and almost visceral literature has emerged. At times so over-the-top as to appear surreal, fantastic, or even forensic, this literature stages the apparent disarray, chaos, and violence of postwar Central American societies. Galich has identified this literature as critical neorealism, representing Central America’s “quick and dirty” absorption into a postmodern capitalist logic and its production of an aesthetic of violence. According to another Nicaraguan critic and writer, Erick Aguirre Aragón, this literature has experimented with the representation of “unacceptable horrors,” resulting at times in the production of self-referential texts or seemingly magical narratives (n.p.). Further, in “Estética del cinismo: la ficción centroamericana de posguerra” (2000; “Aesthetic of Cynicism: Central American Postwar Fiction”), cultural critic Beatriz Cortez lays the groundwork for examining aesthetic and discursive trends in postwar Central American literature, noting the new literature’s cynicism in representing “Central American societies in a state of chaos, corruption, and violence” (n.p.). For Cortez, Central American literature after the wars articulates a desencanto (disillusionment) with and questioning of social, political, and economic programs. Cortez explains that “the end of the civil wars in Central America made possible the reevaluation of a series of political projects that had not been questioned before, and also facilitated the reinvention of Central American cultural production” (B. Cortez, “Estética” n.p.). This new literature, she proposes, would be permeated and shaped by death, violence, and sexuality, as moral codes, social contracts, and political programs were successively disarticulated and dismantled. Through its use of a heightened “critical neorealism” or “dirty realism” (Ferman n.p.), postwar and more recent Central American literature represents the noxious conditions inhabited by the multitudes. As Galich would have it, this literature attempts to raise awareness and reinitiate the search for other imaginary solutions to the social crisis of Central America. Literature produced in the wake of the wars of the 1980s includes works by well-known Salvadoran writers like Manlio Argueta, who published a fictive memoir of personal reconstruction titled Siglo de

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O(g)ro (1997; The Age of Gold/Ogre), as well as works by writers who were coming of age during the war. Otoniel Guevara, in Despiadada ciudad (1999), explored the urban underworld of San Salvador and its inhabitants through poetry, and Jacinta Escudos wrote Cuentos Sucios (1997) and A-B-Sudario (2003), intimate metareflections on the writing process and the reconstruction of subjectivity after the demise of revolutionary narratives. Franz Galich’s own novel, Managua Salsa City (¡Devórame otra vez!) (2001; Managua Salsa City/Devour Me Again), represents the lawless criminal world of Managua at nightfall, while Horacio Castellanos Moya’s El Asco (2000; The Disgust) satirizes postwar Salvadoran national culture and its shiftless diaspora. Lety Elvir focuses on Honduran women’s daily lives and escapes in Sublimes y perversos (cuentos) (2005; Sublime and Perverse Stories). In the context of Costa Rica, the city was shown to be a site of homelessness, despair, and depravation in Fernando Contreras Castro’s Urbanoscopio (1997), in Sergio Muñoz Chacón’s Los Dorados (2000) and Urbanos (2003), and in Uriel Quesada’s Lejos, tan lejos (2004). In his introduction to a collection of short stories, titled Cicatrices: Un retrato de Centroamérica (2004), Werner Mackenbach ponders the condition of postwar Central America as represented in contemporary texts through images of “the violence of the cities, the struggle of genders, and the conflicts of individuals” (n.p.). As suggested by the title of Mackenbach’s anthology, the stories emerge from the cicatrices, the scars of the violence of the last several decades in Central America. The stories are populated by flightless wounded angels (Patricia Belli, Nicaragua, “Cicatrices”), hit men for hire (Eduardo Callejas, Honduras, “El francotirador”), victims of eating disorders (Roberto Castillo, Honduras, “Anita la cazadora de insectos”), estranged and sexually frustrated couples, embittered prostitutes, sufferers of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and other social outcasts of Central American societies—in sum, the microlives and subjectivities of an undifferentiated multitude. As a whole, the characters of these narratives carry the scars of their pasts. They are often wounded and crippled but never completely destroyed.

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POSTWAR TRAUMA REMIXED In Mediodía de frontera (2002; Midday Border/Frontier), Claudia Hernández develops a cycle of stories representing Salvadoran society in the violent aftermath of war, trauma, and psychic conflict. In a series of fantastic, forensic short stories, she juxtaposes images representing life and death, zoomorphic and anthropomorphic transfigurations, and rational and irrational discourses that converge in liminal zones—the uncanny, ordinary everyday times and spaces, such as the midday hour, the kitchen, and the side of the road. In Hernández’s stories, these familiar spaces are defamiliarized; they become the uncertain borders and frontiers of Central American societies—hence, the title and the representation of the condition of El Salvador in a transitional moment after a devastating civil war with long-lasting and violent residual effects. Written in sparse yet horrific detail, her stories are strewn with cadavers and body parts reconstituted in the kitchens of the living, little girls and women dramatizing their own deaths, and animals and humans metamorphosing into one another. In “Carretera sin buey” (Road without an ox), for example, a man who has run over an ox with his car on a road takes the place of the ox, transforming himself through his own castration into a beast of burden left on the side of the road for all to see as they pass by, perhaps alluding to the forlorn, disempowered state of Central American societies in recent times. In the collection’s title story, “Mediodía de frontera” (Midday Border), a dog holds vigil over a woman as she cuts off her tongue and commits suicide in the public bathroom of a border-inspection site. Drawn from Salvadoran legends wherein animals, such as the Cadejo dogs, mediate the passage of humans from one world to the next, the animals in these stories perhaps represent the alienation, dehumanization, and devaluation of contemporary human life on a par with that of other creatures in their deadly struggle for survival. In the first of a pair of stories titled “Hechos de un buen ciudadano (parte I)” and “Hechos de un buen ciudadano (parte II)” (Deeds of a good citizen, part I and part II), a man returns home to find a fresh female cadaver (bearing an uncanny resemblance to his mother) sliced up like

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a cow in the kitchen. Like “any good citizen,” the narrator explains nonchalantly, he puts an ad in the newspaper seeking the “owner of the cadaver of a young robust woman with good knees,” whom the narrator names Livid (Lívida) based on the expression on her face (16). This detail suggests that the young woman did not die peacefully nor willingly but horrifically and violently, a detail made even more pronounced and fantastic by the understated tone of the story: “She was abandoned in my kitchen, very near to the refrigerator, cut up and emptied of blood. For information, call 271-0122” (Hernández 16). In response to the newspaper ad, the narrator receives numerous calls: one person calls, needing to find a body to ease the pain of a family in mourning after the disappearance of a loved one; a second caller congratulates the narrator for “being a good citizen and picking up bodies” (17); a third party calls from the public health office advising him to take proper measures to prevent the spread of contagious diseases in the neighborhood (17); and a fourth call is from an older couple, looking for their daughter, “alive, not dead” (17; “viva, no muerta”). For a week, despite the rotting smell of the corpse, the narrator watches over the cadaver, cleaning it with balsamic oil and kitchen salt, and holding a private vigil for the unknown deceased, a detail that perhaps signifies a coming to terms with the real loss of all those killed, missing, and unclaimed in the aftermath of the last war. After much deliberation, the narrator finally decides against giving the body to the parents of the missing girl, not wanting to confirm their worst fear and destroy their hope for her return. Instead, he gives the cadaver to the first caller in an act of kindness that would ease the sadness of the family. Although they had been looking for a dead male relative and not a young woman by the name of Lívida, the narrator has a plan: When I called him, I suggested that he accept the cadaver in my kitchen and that we present it to his relatives as their dead loved one. Of course, we would seal the coffin so no one would know the difference between the bodies—that way we would do two favors: We would bury that girl and assuage his relatives, who could finally sleep peacefully. (17)

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Devoid of drama and emotion, Hernández’s narrators are calm, collected, and deadpan in the face of death, bringing to light the normalization of violence in a postwar society such as that of El Salvador. Indeed, in the second installment, “Hechos de un buen ciudadano (parte II),” the narrator tells of receiving more calls asking how he had resolved “the problem of having a cadaver in the house”; others seek his advice now that he has had “experience in the matter and was willing to help others, for he knew what it was like to be in such a situation.” Consequently, he opens his home to receive cadavers, which he places in his kitchen. The bodies are deposited there by others who, like himself, have found the bodies of those who had disappeared: “All who brought them told me the same thing: they had found them in their houses (in their entrances, in their bedrooms, in their halls) and they did not know what to do with them, so they brought them to me—a good citizen who had known how to treat with dignity the livid dead” (39, 41; emphasis mine). In this context, the word livid perhaps invokes the sentiment of indignation with respect to generalized acts of state-sanctioned injustices—characterized by impunity—in El Salvador. Expressed throughout these deadpan stories, indignation is a visceral response for which there are no words, one that literally turns the flesh purple. Livid indignation in Hernández’s short story cycle functions as the prevailing structure of feeling shared by Salvadorans who have witnessed great acts of violence against their own “good citizens”—hence the repetition of this appellation throughout these twin stories. Joined by other good citizens in recovering the “livid” bodies of the dead, the narrator shows them how to salt and preserve the bodies, to fill out forms required by the office of public health, to put ads in the newspapers seeking families for the deceased, and to receive the calls of grieving families. In the end, the narrator reports, thirteen of the twenty cadavers were claimed and buried by their families, while seven bodies remained in his care. These the good citizen washed to remove the excess salt, chopped up, frayed into fine threads of meat, and boiled in tomato stew, which he served at a shelter for beggars, indigents, and the elderly: “I served them abundant meat, as much as they desired. Even the dogs

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ate their share.… Thus, even in death the seven cadavers served their fellow man.” Recognized for his good deed, the burden of which he had accepted with humility, the good citizen explains to the public that he was “simply a normal man, who had done what any other citizen would have done” (41, 42). In the end, this cycle of stories represents the normalization of violence, death, pain, and impunity in Central American societies as well as the trauma in the lives and bodies of normal “good citizens” called to act in unnatural ways in the face of injurious acts against humanity. In a fantastic story with inexplicable elements, “Las molestias de tener un rinocerontes” (The Trouble With Having a Rhinoceros), Hernández revisits the recent wars, mixing incongruent images with allusions to violent acts, a method suggested by Aguirre Aragón for Central American neorealist literature: verging on the surreal, hyperreal, and fantastic. Hernández writes about a young man who upon losing his arm (in a war?) acquires a playful rhinoceros, thus calling attention to his condition of incompleteness. The narrator explains: It is uncomfortable to be missing an arm when you have a rhinoceros. It becomes even more difficult if the rhinoceros is small and playful, like mine. It’s a nuisance. The people of these pretty and peaceful cities are not used to seeing a guy with one less arm. The people of these pretty and peaceful cities are not used to seeing a guy with one less arm and one more rhinoceros jumping around him. You become a spectacle in boring cities like this one and you have to go through the city putting up with people looking at you, smiling at you, and coming up to you to talk about how beautiful your rhinoceros is. Sir, you didn’t buy it here, did you? (emphasis mine)131

In the context of postwar El Salvador, the juxtaposition of “one less arm” and “one more rhinoceros” situates this story in the realm of the fantastic or marvelous—the inexplicable harbored in everyday mundane experiences. Whereas the missing arm might allude to unspoken traumas (the reader never learns how the arm was lost), the appearance of the rhinoceros signifies the magnified spectacle of trauma endured

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in commonplace contexts. Such contexts require heightened modes of representation, such as the critical neorealism that has been identified with this literature, most notably by Mackenbach. The people do not ask the young man about his missing arm, for they do not want to hear another testimonial, another realistic narrative; but they do ask about the rhino: “Sir, you didn’t buy it here, did you?” Hernández thus interrogates and rejects realist representations of Central American societies, offering in their stead representations in which talking animals, livid cadavers, and living-dead people commingle. It seems almost natural that in “these pretty and peaceful cities” armless men walk around with playful rhinos. After decades of wars that have produced dismembered and tortured bodies, stranger things have been seen than a rhinoceros in the streets of “pretty and peaceful cities,” a phrase repeated twice in the opening paragraph of the story not merely to produce irony but also to heighten the effect of residual trauma resulting from the experience of extreme forms of violence and impunity. At the end of prolonged civil wars, the formal signing of the Peace Accords in El Salvador (1992) and Guatemala (1996) simultaneously ushered in an era of postwar reconstruction, reconciliation, and supposed healing in Central America. As shown in the case of Hernández’s cycle of stories and in the texts surveyed up to this point, Central American literature has preserved the memory of recent past violence and foretold the advent of the new empire in the region, most vividly signified by the incorporation of Central America into the FTAA. In the years immediately following the war, El Salvador was celebrated as an example of economic comeback and hailed as the phoenix rising out of the ashes of war and destruction in Central America—indeed, it was so for the elite Central American transnational class, as represented in Waldina Mejía’s La Tía Sofi y los otros cuentos. But Central American literary texts, as discussed in what follows, continue to tell the story of deep-set wounds, unhealed traumas, and unfulfilled promises. Remaining skeptical and weary of postnational social agendas, Central American literature casts doubt over the ideals, values, and identities inscribed in official stategenerated narratives that have long defined Central Americans. Steeped

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in a postwar desencanto (disillusion) with and disavowal of hegemonic and revolutionary narratives, Central American literary texts such as Hernández’s Midday Border scrutinize new social, political, and economic projects. In its representation of ongoing struggles for economic, political, social, cultural, and personal survival amid the onslaught of global forces, Central American literature wages war against the new empire.

TO LIVE AND DIE IN HONDURAS: WALDINA MEJÍA’S LA TÍA SOFI Y LOS

OTROS CUENTOS

Waldina Mejía’s La Tía Sofi y los otros cuentos tells the composite story of multiple layers of Honduran society that are complicit in the social production of violence, corruption, and impunity in postwar Central America. Every story in the collection, or the novel-in-stories, is tied to Don Pedro, the centerpiece of Mejía’s text and the source of a web of impunities that links his family and nation.132 A self-styled entrepreneur who runs a chemical factory in Honduras, Don Pedro (the eldest male son and patriarch of seven siblings) inherits and manages his family’s wealth, exploits thousands of workers in his factory, dumps toxic waste into the nearby rivers and pollutes the air of the poor neighborhood, pays hit men to kill, torture, and “disappear” his business partners and competitors, keeps and discards women at will, and breeds a family of miscreants who believe themselves to be above both the law and others. Don Pedro, in fact, is the source of much corruption in Honduras, for he forms part of a sociopolitical and economic network linking everyone from government and military officials to the housekeeper of his family mansion, who turns a blind eye to the dealings of the family in order to preserve her job. Divided into thirteen stories, the novel-instories is told through first-person narrations in which different members of society speak about their lives and their relationship to Don Pedro’s family. Mejía uses what she calls focalized narrator-witnesses to speak about other characters in her stories and to present details about them that would otherwise not appear elsewhere. Hence, every story is both

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specific and connected to the others, forming a web of narration in which each story remains self-supporting and independent (Mejía, personal communication). The interlocked narratives structurally revolve around the figures associated with Don Pedro’s family, and characters are individually introduced. In the first story, Maíquito (little Michael, Maícol, or Miguel), Don Pedro’s illegitimate son, is imprisoned for killing a foreign diplomat’s daughter in a botched armed car theft, although he claims the status of a political prisoner in his defense. Maícol is Don Pedro’s son by his one-time mistress Sofi, whose history is revealed in the second story, narrated by a niece who tells of Sofi’s beauty, her meeting Don Pedro, becoming his mistress, being abandoned by him, and eventually dying of AIDS. In the third story, Don Pedro’s accountant—in a drunken binge— discloses his boss’s business affairs, Don Pedro’s violation of workers’ rights in the factory, and his (mis)dealings with top officials in the country, especially at election time. The fourth story, “Helidora,” listens in on the gossip of two women who talk about their former school friend who slept with her bosses and eventually changed her name to Lisbeth Michelle and married Don Pedro. In the next story, “Dora Corazón,” Lisbeth reveals to a friend how she set up her husband’s mistress, Sofi, with another man and sent compromising pictures of Sofi’s affair to Don Pedro, leading to his abandonment of Sofi and Maícol, their son. In subsequent stories, readers learn that Don Pedro’s money actually comes from his great-grandmother, who inherited her parents’ house and land after she had pushed her sister into a flooded river, causing the sister’s death. From this point on, stories of the family’s depravity pour forth—such as the account of Don Pedro’s sister, Mery, who had a relationship with General Francisco of the Honduran Armed Forces, a man known to kidnap and torture people. Later, rumors spread that Mery is sleeping with her nephew Maícol, whom she adopted after Sofi’s death. In the remaining stories, readers encounter the dishwasher who witnessed Maícol’s armed robbery and assassination of the diplomat’s daughter in the first story, but who wishes to remain uninvolved and unidentified for fear of being “disappeared”; a friend of Don Pedro’s

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crooked accountant who drowns in alcohol his indignation about the corruption in Honduras; and Don Pedro’s wealthy nieces and nephews, who attend the public university and play at being Marxist revolutionaries but quickly return to their comfortable lives. Finally, in the last two installments of the novel-in-stories, a business partner of Don Pedro’s talks about his own kidnapping and torture at the hands of Don Pedro, who forced him to sell his business; and Don Pedro’s long-time housekeeper, Doña Esperanza, tells of keeping family secrets so that she and her children can remain employed by the family and so that she can eventually receive her pension. In the space of thirteen interconnected short stories, La Tía Sofi y los otros cuentos presents an “allegory of Honduran society” (Mejía 13) that reveals the complicity of various sectors, the corruption that provides social cohesion, and finally the degradation that structures the moral world of Central America in the twenty-first century. Read for common themes, Mejía’s La Tía Sofi y los otros cuentos— like Hernández’s Mediodia de frontera and other Central American narratives—is in many ways about the multitude of ever-growing national economic outcasts, the global reserve immigrant labor force pushed into migrancy, and the transnational elite who greatly benefit from the circulation of capital through the region. Pondering the state of postwar Central America, these short story collections have been produced in the nexus of local and global cultural forces and amid the effects of neoliberal developmentalist policies in Central America. Shaped by the “new conditions of global capitalism,” to use Robinson’s phrase (Transnational Conflicts 3), this literature articulates the deepest social and material anxieties and insecurities of a society grappling with past and present crises, and it treats the movement from one war to a more devastating one waged by global forces against the poor majority. In this period of new war, even the utopia of the day-afterthe-war has vanished for the majority of Central Americans. Thus, the empire-building literature of Central America gives insight into greater socioeconomic inequities and transformations through the lens of local cultural production.

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CONCLUSION In this essay, I have analyzed Waldina Mejía’s La Tía Sofi y los otros cuentos and Claudia Hernández’s Mediodía de frontera as critiques of the effects of neoliberalism on various sectors of Central American society—from the new “transnational elite” class to the most dispossessed of individuals, such as those working on the streets and those on the verge of (self-)destruction. These texts emerge from the unrelenting violence of neoliberalism, as played out in the lives of people in every sector of Central American society. The production of this literature suggests that the violence of neoliberalism has permeated all corners of the world, even the most hermetic subjective spaces, driving individuals to engage in violent acts. In these Central American texts, characters can only break out of their confines through drugs, internalized violence and torment, and ultimately death. In the context of neoliberalism at ground zero, suicide and homicide appear to be viable escapes for members of Central American society. As examined here, Central American literature responds to the economic realignment of the western hemisphere with texts that are fiercely self-reflexive about the demise of the sovereign subject, nation, and voice as recorded heretofore in realist and testimonial narratives. Produced in the wake of the consolidation of CAFTA-DR and the FTAA, Central American literatures today seems to have fractured into disparate microvoices, stories, and narratives that read as composite novels or short story cycles but that nevertheless provide critical visions of the neoliberalization—or rather, the near-annihilation—of dispossessed subjects. In Claudia Hernández’s and Waldina Mejía’s short story collections, readers encounter a genre of literature (short story cycles or novels-in-stories) that is increasingly being used in Central America to represent multiple voices and perspectives, sometimes connected by situation, place, and condition. Indeed, in her study of a corpus of narratives which were authored mostly by men and published at the same time as these Central American women authors’ works, Claudia Ferman claims that such texts represent the condition of “the new multitude of

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Latin America,” undifferentiated by gender, ethnicity, race, or sexuality, among other things. Empire knows no difference, for it absorbs vast territories and peoples. Can there be liberation in an undifferentiated multitude? According to Ferman, the prevalent discourses in these texts are but “symptomatic of the relationship between literary production initiated in the 1990s and the new social and economic conditions of the [neoliberal] period” in Central America (Ferman n.p.). Produced under the strain of Free Trade negotiations, neoliberal expansion, and empire building in Central America, the literature examined here speaks not only from the fissures of society but also from the spaces of misery, dispossession, and social decomposition occupied by the multitudes of Central Americans in the twenty-first century.

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WORKS CITED

Aguirre Aragón, Erick. “Novelando la posguerra en Centroamérica.” Istmo 9 (July–December 2004): n. pag. Web. 4 April 2010. . Arias, Arturo. “Central American Americans: Invisibility, Power and Representation in the U.S. Latino World.” Latino Studies 1.1 (2003): 168–187. Print. Booth, John A., Christine J. Wade, and Thomas A. Walker. Understanding Central America: Global Forces, Rebellion, and Change. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2006. Print. Buve, Raymond. “Conclusions.” Free Trade for the Americas? The United States’ Push for the FTAA Agreement. Ed. Paulo Vizentini and Marianne Wiesebron. London and New York: Zed Books, 2004. 197–208. Print. Castellanos Moya, Horacio. Recuento de incertidumbres: Cultura y transición. San Salvador: Tendencias, 1993. Print. Cortez, Beatriz. “Estética del cinismo: La ficción centroamericana de posguerra.” Paper presented at V Congreso Centroamericano de Historia, Universidad de El Salvador. 18–21 July 2000. Web. 4 April 2010. . Cortez, Mayamérica. Nostalgias y soledades. San Salvador: Editorial Clásicos Roxsil, 1995. Print. Dunkerley, James. The Pacification of Central America: Political Change in the Isthmus 1987–1993. London and New York: Verso, 1994. Print. ———. Power in the Isthmus: A Political History of Modern Central America. London and New York: Verso, 1988. Print. Elvir, Lety. Sublimes y perversos (cuentos). Tegucigalpa: Litografía López, 2005. Print.

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Ferman, Claudia. “Managua Salsa City: El fugitivo sujeto literario en Franz Galich.” Istmo 15 (July–December 2007): n. pag. Web. 4 April 2010. . Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). Rev. 3. 21 November 2003. Web. 4 April 2010. . Galich, Franz. “Notas para una posible teoría de la novela en Centro América.” Istmo 11 (July–December 2005): n. pag. Web. 4 April 2010. . García Canclini, Néstor. Latinoaméricanos buscando lugar en este siglo. Buenos Aires: Paidós, 2002. Print. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000. Print. ———. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: Penguin, 2004. Print. Hernández, Claudia. Mediodia de frontera. San Salvador: Dirección de Publicaciones e Impresos, Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y el Arte, 2002. Print. ———. Olvida uno. San Salvador: Indole Editores, 2006. Print. Kelley, Margot. “Gender and Genre: The Case of the Novel-inStories.” American Women Short Story Writers: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Julie Brown. New York: Garland Publishing, 1995. 295–310. Print. Leyva, Héctor M. “Narrativa centroamericana post noventa. Una exploración preliminar.” Istmo 11 (July–December 2005): n. pag. Web. 4 April 2010. . Mackenbach, Werner. “Después de los pos-ismos: ¿Desde qué categorías pensamos las literaturas centroamericanoas contemporáneas?” Istmo 8 (January–June 2004): n. pag. Web. 4 April 2010. .

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———. “¿Literatura light o escribir conscientemente? Entrevista a Franz Galich.” Istmo 15 (July–December 2007): n. pag. Web. 4 April 2010. . Mann, Susan Garland. The Short Story Cycle: A Genre Companion and Reference Guide. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1989. Print. Masiello, Francine. The Art of Transition: Latin American Culture and Neoliberal Crisis. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001. Print. Mejía, Waldina. La Tía Sofi y los otros cuentos. Tegucigalpa: Mega Print, 2002. Print. ———. Personal communication. 1 September 2007. Moreno, Raúl. The Free Trade Agreement Between the United States and Central America: Economic and Social Impacts. Trans. Anne McSweeney and Mark Lester. Managua: Ediciones Educativas, n.d. Print. Office of the United States Representative. CAFTA-DR Final Text. 20 March 2008. Web. 4 April 2010. . Orozco, Manuel. “Rethinking Central America and Free Trade.” Project Syndicate, University of California, Berkeley, 2004. Print. Ortiz Wallner, Alexandra. “Las batallas de la memoria: la novela centroamericana como lugar de sobrevivencia.” Istmo 15 (July–December 2007): n. pag. Web. 4 April 2010. . ———. “Transiciones democráticas / transiciones literarias: Sobre la novela centroamericana de posguerra.” Istmo 4 (July–December 2002): n. pag. Web. 4 April 2010. . Pacheco Alizaga, Carlos. “CAFTA, ALCA y PPP: Los riesgos de la subordinación económica para Nicaragua y Centroamérica.” Los

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(mal)tratados de Libre Comercio. Ed. Carlos G. Aguilar Sánchez. San José, Costa Rica: Departamento Ecuménico de Investigaciones, 2003. 167–182. Print. Pratt, Mary Louise. “The Short Story: The Long and the Short of It.” Poetics: International Review for the Theory of Literature 10.2–3 (June 1981): 175–194. Print. Prieto, Marta Susana. Animalario. Guatemala City: Letra Negra Editores, 2002. Print. Robinson, William I. “The New Right and the End of National Liberation.” NACLA Report on the Americas: Beyond Revolution: Nicaragua and El Salvador in a New Era 37.6 (May/June 2004): 15–20. Print. ———. Transnational Conflicts: Central America, Social Change, and Globalization. London and New York: Verso, 2003. Print. Tábora, Rocío. Cosas que Rozan. Tegucigalpa: Litografía López, 2001. Print. ———. Guardarropa. Tegucigalpa: Litografía López, 2001. Print. Torres-Rivas, Edelberto, ed. Historia General de Centroamérica. Vols. 1–6. Madrid: Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales, 1993. Print. Vizentini, Paulo, and Marianne Wiesebron, eds. Free Trade for the Americas? The United States’ Push for the FTAA Agreement. London and New York: Zed Books, 2004. Print. Witker, Jorge. “Social and Economic Rights within the Context of the FTAA.” Free Trade for the Americas? The United States’ Push for the FTAA Agreement. Ed. Paulo Vizentini and Marianne Wiesebron. London and New York: Zed Books, 2004. 94–105. Print. Woodward, Ralph Lee Jr. Central America: A Nation Divided. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Print. Yúdice, George. The Expediency of Culture: The Uses of Culture in the Global Era. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. Print.

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PART IV QUEERING EMPIRE

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CHAPTER 12

MORBID SYMPTOMS IMPERIALISM, DESIRE, AND JOSEPH CONRAD’S NOSTROMO Patrick Robert Mullen

To identify culture solely with lies is more fateful than ever, now that the former is really becoming totally absorbed by the latter, and eagerly invites such identification in order to compromise every opposing thought. —Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia We still do not yet know where the drive for truth comes from. For so far we have heard only of the duty which society imposes in order to exist: to be truthful means to employ the usual metaphors. Thus, to express it morally, this is the duty to lie according to a fixed convention, to lie with the herd and in a manner binding upon everyone. Now man of course forgets that this is the

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One of the challenges facing the critic of imperialism is the obfuscating effect that the projects of empire have on language. Imperial power distorts the language of common sense and infects the more specialized languages of various disciplines. It seems that nothing means what it ought to mean, and utterances that bear the hallmarks of truth ultimately smell like lies. In contemporary terms, one need search no further than the perpetual war on terror declared by George W. Bush, whose invocations of liberty, democracy, and patriotism “have a nightmarish meaning … all of them have a flavor of folly and murder” (Conrad, Nostromo 344). This imperial power over language and the difficulties that it poses for the critic are not new. In his seminal 1902 work, Imperialism: A Study, J. A. Hobson claims that a foundational difficulty in the analysis of imperialism stems from the ambivalence of the very term, for it is distorted and manipulated by political agents. Although the term maintains a “broad consistency” in its relation to its nearest “kindred terms”—nationalism, internationalism, and colonialism—it is nonetheless “elusive” and “shifty, [and] … the changeful overlapping of all four [terms] demands the closest vigilance of the students of modern politics” (Hobson 3). If this is so, then what vigilance is demanded of students of the modern literature of empire? The difficulties are compounded: these students must dissect the complex politics of empire as they also commit themselves to understanding the complexities of literary representation. At least two dangers await these critics: first, although oppositional

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ideological critique may speak the political truth to imperialist power, it can also feel like an impoverished engagement with the aesthetic. Even a critic as politically engaged as Edward Said cautions in Beginnings (1975) that when taking on the seemingly very political Joseph Conrad novel Nostromo (1903), readings that “overemphasize its political dimensions detract from the novel’s overall effect” (Said 134). Risking a second kind of danger, nuanced engagements with the instabilities of the aesthetic may in turn appear depoliticized and thereby complicit with hegemonic political forces. In The Political Unconscious (1981), Fredric Jameson explains that what is needed in relation to Nostromo is a critique that “allows us to think these two distinct realities [what we are calling aesthetics and politics] together in a meaningful way” (226). Working within the (perhaps) irresolvable tensions of these dynamics, this essay offers a reading of Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo in which the instabilities of the novel’s aesthetic representation are marshaled in the service of an anti-imperialist critique. I argue that a violent epistemology of homosocial desire both represents and enables the violent political and historical repressions that underlie the founding and the functioning of the new state of Sulaco. My argument does not expose the true story of the novel as a homoerotic romance but instead examines how the “epistemology of the closet” has proven “productive of Modern Western culture and history” in the case of Conrad’s novel by articulating forms of political consent and coercion (Sedgwick 68). The symptomatic critique of the text’s morbid narrative psychology thus brings into focus the political stakes of the novel.

AMBIGUOUS CHARACTER Not a work that engages actual historical events, Nostromo instead investigates problems of historicity. The novel does not examine historical fact but rather the complex alignment of economic, political, historical, and narrative forces that congeal within the production of history. Writing in his retrospective “Author’s Note” (1917) on Nostromo, Conrad explains that after finishing with Typhoon (1902) he had found himself emptied

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of artistic inspiration: “it seemed somehow that there was nothing more in the world to write about” (Nostromo 29). But then a new inspiration emerges. He describes the transformation of what is at first only a “hint” that comes to him “in the shape of a vagrant anecdote completely destitute of valuable details” (Nostromo 29). The facts of the anecdote—in which a man steals a lighter loaded with silver during an unnamed South American revolution—are not of particular interest to him. Instead, it is the “curious confirmation” of this anecdote in the biography of an American sailor that captures Conrad’s imagination (Nostromo 30). The confirmation of the crime is curious in that it is not a matter of reporting facts—the crime qua crime—but rather, the confirmation, revolves around a powerful focal ambiguity: the “cynical ruffian” of the tale both claims responsibility for the crime and at the same time maintains a web of deniability (Nostromo 29–30). This deniability stems from the “facts” first, that it remains impossible to prove that the lighter was not sunk in the turmoil of the revolt; second, that he maintains an impeachable character among the locals; and finally, that because he is a cynical ruffian, it is entirely possible that he has boastfully lied about absconding with the treasure of silver in the first place. Epistemologically, the dynamism of this character—who is to become the novel’s Nostromo—shuttles between the anonymity of doubt, rumor, suspicion, and crime on the one hand, and on the other hand, the sheer vanity of the historical figure, the braggart, the hero whose characteristics and actions circulate in the externality of “splendor and publicity” (Nostromo 348). Conrad considers that Nostromo—this doubly bound character who is both guilty and innocent, hidden and brazen, a scoundrel and a hero—might also organize a form of historical agency. Jameson frames this interest in the character’s historical agency as a wrenching “from the realm and categories of the individual subject to the new perspective of those of collective destiny” (Jameson 269). In this vein, the novel explores his economic “usefulness” (a concept that obsessively dominates the novel’s imaginary), his political effectiveness (as it is set in the “changing scenes of a revolution” [Nostromo 31]), and finally his

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regulation of masculine homosocial desire as it animates both the crime that haunts his psyche and the public romance of his heroic feats. Consider how Conrad describes the reinvigoration of his imagination as his plan for the novel began to take root: The curious confirmation of the few casual words heard in my early youth evoked memories of that distant time when everything was so fresh, so surprising, so venturesome, so interesting; bits of strange coasts under the stars, shadows of hills in the sunshine, men’s passions in the dusk, gossip half-forgotten, faces grown dim.… Perhaps, perhaps there still was something in the world to write about. (Nostromo 30)

Here the language of a recalled and thereby reanimated imperial adventure—a whole genre of young male adventure tales is evoked—is bound with the language of unresolved (literally a problem of the clarity of resolution in the dusk) homosocial or homoerotic passion. The novel links the development of this homosocial subjectivity to the political turmoil of postcolonial imperial struggles: It was only when it dawned upon me that the purloiner of the treasure need not necessarily be a confirmed rogue, that he could even be a man of character, an actor, and possibly a victim in the changing scenes of a revolution, it was only then that I had the first vision of a twilight country which was to become the province of Sulaco, with its high shadowy Sierra and its misty Campo for mute witnesses of events flowing from the passions of men short-sighted in good and evil. (Nostromo 31)

As the writing unfolds, the ambiguity of this “character”—ambiguity that stems from the passions of a doubly bound homosocial epistemology— buttresses the imperial world that gains hegemony by the end of the novel.

INTERREGNUM

AND

DESIRE

The first line of Nostromo opens both a narrative and a historico-political interregnum: “In the time of Spanish rule, and for many years afterwards,

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the town of Sulaco—the luxuriant beauty of the orange gardens bears witness to its antiquity—had never been commercially anything more important than a coasting port with a fairly large local trade in ox-hide and indigo” (39). Since the end of the Spanish colonial presence, the province and country have been in a sort of vacuum, “isolated from the world” (63). “The power of king and church was gone” (104). Jameson casts the novel as “the interrogation of a hole in time” (Jameson 264). In this unregulated situation, no governing power is able to organize the myriad elements that compete, clash, intersect, and struggle for expression and authority. This interregnum registers in the radical instability of the first section’s narrative: shifting temporal perspectives, changes in narrator, jerky transitions between passages, and an almost overwhelming number of events and forces competing to dominate the attention and direction of the text. These elements are described according to their specific powers, as the author refers not simply to their physical or psychological characteristics but also to their status as units and expressions of force. The natural geography of the Golfo Placido and the folkloric supernatural figures which haunt the Azuera peninsula are pitted against the power of the modern steam engine: “The variable airs sporting lightly with the vast semicircle of waters within the head of the Azuera could not baffle the steam power of [the Ocean Steam Navigation Company’s] excellent fleet” (Nostromo 43). Nostromo, according to Captain Mitchell, is a “sort of universal factotum—a prodigy of efficiency in his own sphere of life” (69). Nostromo, the Capataz de Cargadores, commands both the magical power of “the spell of that reputation” (51) and a daunting physical force. He exerts both of these forces in the management of his cargadores [dock workers]: “But if perchance he had to dismount [meaning that his presence and reputation were not sufficient motivators], then, after a while, from the door of that hovel or of that pulpería [a small grocery store], with a ferocious scuffle and stifled imprecations, a cargador would fly out head first and hands abroad, to sprawl under the forelegs of the silver-grey mare” (109). Sir John, the chairman of the railway board from London, and the railway’s engineer-in-chief

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merge to create a global force: “From the contact of these two personalities, who had not the same vision of the world, there was generated a power for the world’s service—a subtle force that could set in motion mighty machines, men’s muscles, and awaken also in human breasts an unbounded devotion to the task” (66–67). The silver mine that is the source of the treasure and will come to play a key role in the novel is described as “a power in the land” and, more famously, as a sort of selfgenerating political force, an “Imperium in Imperio” (120–121). Like Heart of Darkness (1899/1902), Nostromo is preoccupied with psychological and narrative forces. Two of the most powerful characters in this sense are Mrs. Gould and Nostromo, both of whom project potent forms of desire and significant ambiguities that affect both the diegetic world of the novel and the text’s narration. At the heart of Mrs. Gould’s “feminine intelligence” is a contradictory mix of sympathetic charm and imperialistic zeal: It must not be supposed that Mrs. Gould’s mind was masculine. A woman with a masculine mind is not a being of superior efficiency; she is simply a phenomenon of imperfect differentiation—interestingly barren and without importance. Doña Emilia’s intelligence being feminine led her to achieve the conquest of Sulaco, simply by lighting the way for her unselfishness and sympathy. She could converse charmingly, but she was not talkative. The wisdom of the heart having no concern with the erection or demolition of theories any more than with the defense of prejudices, has no random words at its command. The words it pronounces have the value of acts of integrity, tolerance, and compassion. A woman’s true tenderness, like the true virility of man, is expressed in action of a conquering kind. The ladies of Sulaco adored Mrs. Gould. “They still look upon me as something of a monster,” Mrs. Gould had said pleasantly to one of the three gentlemen from San Francisco she had to entertain in her new Sulaco house just about a year after her marriage. (Nostromo 86–87)

This passage presents a powerful yet deeply contradictory image of Mrs. Gould, who is both adored for her unselfishness, charm, and sympathy

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and seen as a monster bent on conquest. These contradictions are typical of Conrad’s discourse—contradictions that “overlay of psychoanalytically charged terms and ideological, public slogans” (Jameson 245). The passage also presents a deep-seated anxiety about language itself, stemming from language’s relation to action. Although Mrs. Gould’s intelligence is described mainly in terms of her linguistic capabilities—her compelling conversation—her true accomplishment seems to be in her ability to transform language into action: “The words [she] pronounces have the value of acts.” In this reading, it is not that she speaks no “random”—in the sense of inappropriate or inefficient (to call upon one of the passage’s evaluations)—words or phrases, but that her conversation escapes the contradictions of “random words” and, by extension, of all language and operates at the level of true “express[ion] in action.” Her feminine intelligence overcomes the tension between action and thought that plagues her husband. This reading allows for the decoding of the pleasantries exchanged with the gentlemen from San Francisco: they are effective actions taken in the economic conquest of Sulaco. Said has argued that Mrs. Gould succeeds in reconciling the antagonism between action and language: “The reconciliation between action and record is performed by Mrs. Gould, the only character in the novel with really accurate vision” (Said 107). He also admits, in his analysis of Mr. Gould, Martin Decoud, and Nostromo, that a certain dementia haunts such a powerful relation between language and action. Said unpacks Decoud’s analysis of Mr. Gould’s character in order to reveal that behind the strength of conviction (etymologically the term speaks both to conquest and language) lies dementia: “The real horror of this thought becomes apparent when one reflects on the impossibility of life without conviction. Life is authoritative action: action is based upon conviction: conviction is the molestation underlying dementia: therefore, life is dementia” (Said 119). Said examines this dementia in the unraveling of Decoud’s character on the Golfo Placido where his “lover’s illusion (which is a form of conviction whose aim is domination) … becomes less and less applicable to the terrifying solitude that underlies the life without action to which he is committed on the Isabel” (Said

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119–120). Although Said does not develop this aspect of his reading, the solitude that threatens Decoud’s illusion can also be read in positive terms as a form of homosexual panic in which he comes to realize that the only person to whom he is tied is not Antonia but rather, Nostromo. There is a similarly panicked and residual trace that haunts Mrs. Gould’s potentially true expression of conquering action in this passage; this trace is indexed in terms of gender and desire, specifically in the “imperfect differentiation” of the “woman with a masculine mind.” The “woman with a masculine mind”—a whole series of terms must be kept in view, including invert, lesbian, and homosexual—must be invoked only in order to be dismissed, a gesture of foreclosure that points to a deep anxiety in the text’s adoration of Mrs. Gould’s feminine persona. Also lurking in this woman with a masculine mind is a repressed historicity. Readers learn that she is “interestingly barren and without importance.” Interestingly barren certainly speaks to the mechanics of reproduction and to the fear that improper modes of desire and sexual identification threaten those mechanics. The phrase is, however, also economic and agricultural and, by extension, fully historical: to be barren is not to be essentially barren but rather to exist in historical conditions that do not allow for development, conditions that cannot generate “interest.” Recall that Sulaco itself is “barren” from the time of the Spanish Empire’s fall until the “interested” intervention of the steam-powered fleet of the Oceanic Steam Navigation Company (OSN). “A woman with a masculine mind” thus indexes not only abject modalities of desire, but also the historical potential not activated by the Goulds’ imperialist development of the mine. The power and romance of Nostromo’s character is sheer public spectacle. The first book ends with his famous encounter with his “pretty Morenita,” a meeting in which the two act out a flirtatious lovers’ quarrel that culminates with Nostromo’s gallant gesture. He allows her to cut the silver buttons from his coat and to keep them as a token of his affection. The scene seems to affirm the public’s love for Nostromo and Nostromo’s love both for his own image and for pretty women. Furthermore, the occurrence seems to consolidate his power over both his lover and the town.

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However, in the end, the theatricality of the event raises lingering contradictions. Nostromo is referred to in this episode both as “a perfectly incorruptible fellow” and as “the inconstant Capataz de Cargadores” (Nostromo 133). The interchangeability of the titles—along with the rapid playful switching between purported lies (“I don’t love thee anymore” [133]) and purported oaths (“I love thee as much as ever” [134])— intensifies the ambiguity of his character. Furthermore, even as the scene on one level confirms the power of Nostromo over both the crowd and the young woman, it also suggests their power over him. After all, he is goaded into responding to the demands of both. She is finally the active one who passes across his chest the knife’s “keen blade, and the impassive rider [Nostromo] jingle[s] in his palm the increasing hoard of silver buttons” (135). If Nostromo here, as elsewhere in the novel, is attempting to buy power and adoration with a “hoard of silver,” it is quite unclear what kind of exchange has actually taken place. In examining what I am framing as the ambiguity of Nostromo’s character, Said claims that Nostromo “lives outside his fame, which to our eyes seems a thing apart from him, as if great public reputation possessed its own authority. The man and his reputation have become completely distinct” (Said 101). But I suggest that, instead, Nostromo lives in the distinction itself, in the revolutions between the inside and outside, and that the most powerful mechanism for understanding this experience of distinction is the discourse of the closet. Before turning to how these ambiguous characters assume historical agency, consideration must be given to a final imbrication of power, repression, and desire that marks the interregnum in Sulaco. Not all of the competing psychological forces in the opening book are represented through structured subjectivities, perhaps most important among these is the mob. To call the mob a psychological force is in part a provocative anachronism; the mob is, after all, first and foremost a violent physical force with an unclear political status. The mob is described from Captain Mitchell’s perspective: [W]hile the mob which pouring out of the town, had spread itself all along the shore, howled and foamed at the foot of the building

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in front.… it was Nostromo, a fellow in a thousand, who at the head, this time of the Company’s lightermen, held the jetty against the rushes of the rabble … Sticks, stones, shots flew: knives, too, were thrown. Captain Mitchell exhibited willingly the long cicatrice of a cut over his left ear and temple, made by a razor-blade fastened to a stick—a weapon, he explained, very much in favor with the “worst kind of nigger out here.” (Nostromo 45)

The old republican Giorgio Viola later expresses his “contempt of the non-political nature of the riot” (48). Certainly within the classic structures of European class struggle—the Garibaldian framework of his evaluation—the composition of this mob does not attain to the category of the political. However, from a contemporary perspective, it is clear that the subaltern nature of this group—a residual product of the historical interventions of European colonialism and slavery and therefore not reducible to a simple dichotomy between natives and foreign intruders— may well have a political agency that is unimaginable by the text itself. What Conrad’s text is able to represent is the influence of desire on the subject’s description of this mob. Jameson claims that “[t]his attitude is more complex than simple racism in that it is invested with considerable fantasy attraction” (270). Although Mitchell’s description emphasizes fear, danger, and repulsion, there is already an element of adventure, of the pleasure of escape, of adoration for the figure of Nostromo that is intensified against the backdrop of a frenzied, racialized, violent mass. Indeed, Nostromo’s theatrical flirtation with the Morenita takes place within a very similar mass, “the crowd,” which is described in terms that closely echo the description of the mob: The throng thickened; the guitars tinkled louder; other horsemen sat motionless, smoking calmly above the heads of the crowd; it eddied and pushed before the doors of the high-roofed building, whence issued a shuffle and thumping feet in time to the dance music vibrating and shrieking with a racking rhythm, overhung by the tremendous, sustained, hollow roar of the gombo. The barbarous and imposing noise of the big drum, that can madden a

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The passages are remarkably reminiscent of one another: in both, Nostromo must contend with a sea-like and violent mass; both involve assembled action, whether it be rioting or dancing; both masses are racially mixed with (racist) references to colonized African components (“nigger” and “gombo”133) and thus are the residue of a long-range historical process; and both scenes end with a reference to a knife (Captain Mitchell’s face and Nostromo’s buttons). The power of this deep ambiguity with regard to the mob/crowd and thus to questions of both desire and politics infuses the history of the mine and the subjectivities that act as the mine’s agents: Mrs. Gould knew the history of the San Tomé mine. Worked in the early days mostly by means of lashes on the backs of slaves, its yield had been paid for in its own weight of human bones. Whole tribes of Indians had perished in the exploitation; and then the mine was abandoned, since with this primitive method it had ceased to make a profitable return, no matter how many corpses were thrown into its maw. Then it became forgotten. It was rediscovered after the War of Independence. An English company obtained the right to work it. (Nostromo 75)

This passage subtly unpacks the imperialist mindset as represented by Mrs. Gould. Although it starts within her consciousness (“Mrs. Gould knew”), it immediately shifts to the third person of historical prose—albeit a prose whose true active subjects (“lashes on the backs of slaves” and “its own weight of human bones”) are grammatically displaced by the passive voice of the sentence. The effects associated with this prose are set free in a sense; there is no knowing whether the horror invoked by the image is shared by Mrs. Gould or not. The passage then shifts again. With the sentence “Then it became forgotten,” the text reintroduces human psychology to its history but raises two particular questions: first, who has done the forgetting (Mrs. Gould? Others?); and second, what is forgotten—the murder of countless Indians or the mine itself? The mystery carries over to

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the sentence that follows and then is in a sense forgotten by the text itself as the “English company” is introduced in the last line. As the passage unfolds, this process of the repressive displacement (by the narration itself) of political events into a psychological state and into ambiguous grammar is repeated. After the nationalization of the mine—by a political movement that the novel reveals as corrupt—“Costaguana was made with difficulty to pay a beggarly money compensation to the families of the victims, and then the matter dropped out of diplomatic dispatches” (Nostromo 76). The term “victims” here on one level reflects the political allegiance of the narrative voice that sees those dispossessed of the mine during nationalization as victims. However, within the broader question of Mrs. Gould’s knowledge and the knowledge of the reader, the term must also reach back to the “corpses thrown into [the mine’s] maw,” and clearly these are not the victims that the narrative is referring to. Thus, these corpses have been forgotten at least twice in the explication of Mrs. Gould’s socalled historical knowledge. Said posits two underlying affinities that bind the novel: first, an “unflagging interest in the fortunes of Costaguana” and second, “that nearly everyone seems extremely anxious about both keeping and leaving a personal ‘record’ of his thoughts and action” (Said 100). The present unpacking of Mrs. Gould’s historical knowledge thus far seems to invert this: it registers a foreclosed interest and a personal record as interested in forgetting history as in remembering it. There is a final movement in this explication, all of which occurs within the space of a single very long paragraph. After tracing the mine’s history back to the murder of the Indians and then through the process of nationalization, the text recalls another decisive moment when the mine was again remembered. This moment of recall is the history of the famous Gould concession, in which the mine would be given to Charles Gould’s father in exchange for the forced tribute of “five years royalties on the estimated output of the mine” (Nostromo 76). Of interest is that the structure of this scheme revolves around the manipulation of an open secret: It was an ordinary Costaguana Government—the fourth in six years—but it judged its opportunities sanely. It remembered the

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PERENNIAL EMPIRES San Tomé mine with a secret conviction of its worthlessness in their own hand, but with an ingenious insight into the various uses a silver mine can be put to, apart from the sordid process of extracting metal from under the ground.… [Charles Gould’s father] was versed in the ways of governments. Indeed the intention of this affair, though no doubt deeply meditated in the closet, lay open on the surface of the document presented urgently for his signature. (Nostromo 76; emphasis mine)

The repression, displacement, and forgetting in the opening movements of this paragraph have emerged here as the open secret. Although the content of this secret is not immediately even an alleged homosexual identity, lurking beneath its petty and corrupt political form—bribery—is the knotted interweaving of politics and desire, as this study has tracked thus far. The language the passage uses to describe the political bribery of Charles Gould, Senior, is the same language of the open secret that in other contexts fuels forms of homophobic terrorism, as so adeptly investigated by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Sedgwick’s claims for the epistemology of homo/hetero definition are broad: “a whole cluster of the most crucial sites for the contestation of meaning in twentieth-century Western culture are consequently and quite indelibly marked with the historical specificity of homosocial/homosexual definition, notably but not exclusively male, from around the turn of the century” (72). I would argue that this passage, along with the broader discourse of historical knowledge in Nostromo, presents just such an indelible marking. The discourse of the closet becomes the discourse for the management and activation of a form of political ideology and becomes, as well, the organization for a kind of historical experience. This secret, which is both deeply mediated in the privacy of the closet and written on the surface of the document (which is both hidden and fully legible) organizes both the subjective psychic experiences of the Goulds in the intimacy of their marriage and the political ideology and force that their marriage projects in the management of the mine. Even the “sordid process of extracting metal from under the ground” suggests a certain psychic anality that is to be repressed by Charles Gould Senior’s signatory consent with

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the lie of the concession. This is not symptomatic of a dead (and therefore available) metaphoric. Rather, it points to the mutually implicated repressions of politics and desire in the opening book of the novel. Furthermore, the secrecy, repression, and displacement are sealed within Mrs. Gould’s historical knowledge.

“MEN’S PASSIONS

IN THE

DUSK”

In contrast to the novel’s opening, its next two books recount a fairly straightforward plot: the government of Don Vincente Ribiera is threatened by the uprising of General Montero, the minister of war, and his despotic brother, Pedrito. This revolt threatens to undermine the relative political stability that has to this point helped Charles Gould attract international interests—the British railway company and the American investor Holroyd—in the development project of the San Tomé mine. In a desperate measure to secure these interests, a scheme is hatched: a native son recently returned from Europe, Martin Decoud, and the incorruptible Nostromo, are to flee from Sulaco with a lighterful of silver. They are then to send the ingots north to Holroyd in San Francisco and thus assure the American investor of the reliability of his connections in Sulaco. Sulaco, the relatively isolated western province of Costaguana, will then declare its independence—to the enthusiasm of its American and European investors, who in return will help provide for the new state’s security. Significant parts of this plan fail. In particular, Decoud and Nostromo fail to reach open waters with the silver and are forced to beach their cargo on the largest of the harbor islands, the Great Isabel. Provisions are made for an alternative plan: Decoud is to remain with the silver and Nostromo will return to the mainland to sort out the political situation. However, before Nostromo is able to return, Decoud succumbs to the intense solitude of his situation and drowns himself, using four ingots of the silver as weights. Once Nostromo is able to make it back to the island, he finds that Decoud and the four ingots are missing. Nostromo realizes that he can no longer reveal the location of the treasure without

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jeopardizing his reputation, his most valuable possession. He sees himself as betrayed: he has attempted to assume the historical stature of the national hero, but the missing silver threatens this heroic status. He vows his revenge and plans to grow rich slowly by making surreptitious visits to the cached treasure over the coming years. Despite some violent detours, the Monterists do not take Sulaco, and the province successfully declares its independence. The novel ends at a time when the “people who had taken part in [the revolution] seemed to forget its memory and its lesson” (Nostromo 420). Although the founding of the state operates in some sense as the primary plot of the novel, a strange shift in narrative attention occurs. In particular, what seems like a historico-political tale, international in scope, narrows to become an intensely psychological tale. “Thus,” Said argues, “Nostromo is a novel about political history that is reduced, over the course of several hundred pages, to a condition of the mind, an inner state. It is like a trompe-l’oeil painting of a city that upon closer inspection turns out to be an anatomical drawing of the brain” (Said 110). The novel opens with an interregnum and ends under the sign of conquest: “the genius of the magnificent Capataz de Cargadores dominated the dark gulf containing his conquests of treasure and love” (Nostromo 465). The ascendancy of political power is thus entangled with the problems of passion and desire until the bitter end. What Said refers to as a reduction may be thought of as a more active form of displacement: just as the characters manage to effect a historical political action in the founding of the new state, the text seems unable to keep politics in view and sublimates its political concerns into a psychological investigation. Terry Collits has in a sense tried to counteract this narrowing by suggesting that the novel’s shift to the psychological should be seen within a larger epic structure that refuses such a narrowing (Collits 9). I take this shift as given and focus in this section of the essay on the relation between Nostromo and Decoud and the effects of this relation on the subsequent sections of the novel. As already discussed, despite all the invocations of his constancy, Nostromo’s character revolves around deep ambiguities. It is perhaps

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less surprising to find that such ambiguities mark “the son Decoud” (Nostromo 151), the dandy of the boulevards who has returned to play a role in the politics of his homeland. While away from Costaguana, Decoud has become a typical nineteenth-century Parisian dandy. As with Nostromo, his character pivots epistemologically from the recognition of his worldly superficiality to the lurking sense of an inexpressible subterranean core. Consider first his superficiality: As a matter of fact, he was an idle boulevardier, in touch with some smart journalists, made free of a few newspaper offices, and welcomed in the pleasure-haunts of pressmen. This life, whose dreary superficiality is covered by the glitter of universal blague, like the stupid clowning of a harlequin by the spangles of a motley costume induced in him a Frenchified—but most un-French— cosmopolitanism, in reality a mere barren indifferentism posing as intellectual superiority. (Nostromo 151–152)

Decoud embodies an open secret with regard to his origins and nationality both abroad and at home. C. Brook Miller has suggested that nationality as it appears here is the “fetish par excellence, an overvalued fiction of identity that was the locus of international tensions” for Conrad (22). The terms of Decoud’s cosmopolitanism are both legible and wrapped in discretion. The text explicitly invokes the term “open secret.” Readers learn that, at times, “[Decoud] condescended to write articles on European affairs for the Semenario, the principal paper in Sta Marta, which printed them under the heading ‘From our special correspondent,’ though the authorship was an open secret” (Nostromo 150). However, Decoud’s character is not defined simply by the open legibility of his glittering exterior. His psyche is also marked by an early and traumatic encounter with the beautiful Antonia Avellanos, who publicly unravels the young Decoud by speaking the unspoken critique of his decadent lifestyle: “On one occasion, as though she had lost all patience, she flew out at him about the aimlessness of his life and the levity of his opinions.… But the impression left was so strong … It was, he told himself, like a ridiculous fatality” (154).

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This “ridiculous fatality,” which is interiorized and set in opposition to his glittering superficiality, ultimately drives Decoud into a dark and complex web of intrigue: Decoud hatches the scheme for the independence of Sulaco with the consent of Mrs. Gould and behind the back of her husband. Under the cover of night, Decoud and Nostromo escape with the treasure into the solitude of the harbor. While in the harbor, the two end up sharing what is in many ways the novel’s climax, a climax that is kept hidden from all of the other characters except Mrs. Gould. Some critics have framed Decoud as the “debunker of secrets” (Acheraïou 56), but I believe that such a reading ignores Decoud’s intimate entanglement with secrecy and intrigue. The ultimate “fatality” of these secretive plots manifests itself in Decoud’s suicide: he uses the ingots of silver, which come to emblematize the entire metonymic chain of secrets, to drown himself in the oblivion of the harbor’s waters. In some sense, Antonia’s rejection initiates these events. Although the scheme for independence involves actions of an apparently political nature, the deeper motivation for Decoud’s actions arises from traumatized desire. Decoud explains it to Antonia as “this aim which, whether knowingly or not, I have always had in my heart—ever since the day when you snubbed me so horribly once in Paris” (Nostromo 172). Given the structure of this subjectivity—the dandy bachelor whose glittering exteriority hides the scar of a woman’s scorn, a scorn that sets in motion a fatal metonymic chain of secrecy—the open secret of this character for the contemporary critic is that the most salient frame of reference for its interpretation is the emergent discourse of the homosexual. As already mentioned, Conrad calls upon this discourse in the analysis of the ambiguity that structures the character of Nostromo in the “Author’s Note.” Similarly, the effects of a repressive homosocial epistemology are traceable in Mrs. Gould’s understanding of the mine’s history and the history of the Gould concession. The epistemological discourse of the homosexual again emerges as a key interpretive point of reference for Decoud’s and Nostromo’s relationship and the effects of this relationship.

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As with Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray, the fatality associated with Decoud’s secrecy obscures the legibility of his character. For example, when Decoud “comes out” to Costaguana—Don José Avellanos greets Decoud, “You have come out yourself! No less could be expected from a Decoud”—the true intentions of his journey are misread as an act of political dedication. Decoud, realizing that his presence in Sulaco has been misinterpreted, is left confused (Nostromo 155). But because of his dedication to Antonia, he chooses to submit to the misinterpretation and join the national cause: “The world was now informed: and the author’s appearance at this moment was like a public act of faith. Young Decoud felt overcome by a feeling of impatient confusion.… ‘I am inexpressibly grateful for your welcome; but why need a man be thanked for returning to his native country?’ ” (155). Although Nostromo listens to Decoud’s analysis of their situation during the escape with the silver, even he must accept that there is ultimately no way to decipher the meaning or intention of Decoud’s final actions: “ ‘But, then, I cannot know,’ he pronounced, distinctly, and remained silent and staring for hours” (412). The fatality of Decoud’s secrecy renders him illegible even to himself. When he finally finds himself alone on the island, far from the reflective consciousnesses of society, whether that of Paris or Sulaco, Decoud is no longer able to read his own meaning: “Solitude from mere outward condition of existence becomes very swiftly a state of soul in which the affectations of irony and skepticism have no place.… After three days of waiting for the sight of some human face, Decoud caught himself entertaining a doubt about his own individuality. It had merged into the world of cloud and water, of natural forces and forms of nature. Decoud lost all belief in the reality of his action past and to come” (413). The waters of the ocean seal the unknowable meanings of Decoud’s death “in the solitude of the Placid Gulf, whose glittering surface remained untroubled by the fall of [Decoud’s] body” (416). Although in a strict sense, the meaning of the suicide is unknowable, there is a definite effect that can be tracked. With Decoud’s suicide, he and Nostromo become irrevocably bound to one another. Decoud’s last thought before his death invokes Nostromo: “I wonder how that Capataz

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died” (416). Similarly, Nostromo maintains a unique relation to Decoud’s image and memory: “As might have been supposed, the end of Don Martin Decoud never became a subject of speculation for anyone except Nostromo” (412). The secret of Decoud and the silver structures Nostromo’s psychology and actions for the remainder of the novel. Indeed, whereas the life of the rest of Sulaco seems more and more removed from the intrigue that drove the founding of the state, Nostromo’s life seems more and more involved with managing the secret of the fate of Decoud and the silver. Jameson recognizes the importance of the connection between Nostromo and Decoud. He claims, “Nostromo is in other words not really a novel about political upheaval; the latter is itself only the pretext for that most fundamental event of all: the expedition of Decoud and Nostromo to the Great Isabel and the saving of the treasure, which is at one with the founding of the separatist Occidental Republic of Sulaco” (Jameson 272). This expedition transforms the relation between these characters. According to Jameson, this “single act that, given its complex historical effectivity, could result only from the combined actions of two heroes, or better still, from their synthesis into some new collective actant” (Jameson 272). Thus, Jameson recognizes the entanglement of the two characters, but he does not explore their synthesis explicitly in terms of desire. It is not just the treasure itself as either a financial boon or a personal failure that haunts Nostromo. Rather, it is the overdetermined relation that he has developed with the memory of Decoud. Consider the final secret meeting of Giselle and Nostromo: ‘Come nearer! Listen! Do not give me up, Giovanni! Never! … I will be patient!…’ Her form drooped consolingly over the low casement towards the slave of the unlawful treasure. The light in the room went out, and weighted with silver, the magnificent Capataz clasped her round her white neck in the darkness of the gulf as a drowning man clutches at a straw. (Nostromo 449)

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Certainly, this posture dramatizes Nostromo’s predicament, as he is torn between his connection to the silver and whatever affections he has for Giselle. Perhaps more acutely though, the invocation of a drowning man weighted down by silver ingots points to Nostromo’s almost total absorption of Decoud’s image and memory; where Decoud ends and Nostromo begins in this image is unclear. The political consequences of the men’s collusion in the scheme to shuttle the silver to safety have disappeared— the founding of the state happens without the general public’s knowledge of what has truly transpired. Instead, the secrecy of the relation between Decoud and Nostromo registers entirely within the discourse of triangulated romance that crowns the novel. That this secret relation has fatal consequences is clear: Nostromo is caught “cheating” with the treasure, and by extension with Decoud’s memory, when he is misrecognized by Old Giorgio and mistakenly shot. Decoud’s connection to the scene is emphasized rather than forgotten. As Linda, one of Old Giorgio’s daughters, investigates what she has heard, “she did not know where she was going. The tree under which Martin Decoud spent his last days, beholding life like a succession of senseless images, threw a large blotch of black shade upon the grass. Suddenly she saw her father, standing quietly all alone in the moonlight” (455). In a sense, Old Giorgio is not alone; he is standing over the body of Nostromo and in the shadow of Decoud. The full power of the connection between Decoud and Nostromo emerges in Nostromo’s final confession to Mrs. Gould. The scene is set up as the definitive revelation of the secret that has haunted Nostromo. As Dr. Monygham says, “I’ve always felt that there was a mystery about our Nostromo ever since [his involvement with the escape of the silver]. I do believe he wants now, at the point of death—” (459). The first thing that Nostromo establishes in his confession is that the secret is not that he has violated Giselle’s honor. The true secret is twofold: Nostromo is a thief, and he dies betrayed. His status as thief is clear enough. The problem of betrayal reintroduces the figure of Decoud, who is set in opposition to Giselle: “I die betrayed—betrayed by—” But he did not say by whom or by what he was dying betrayed. “She would not have betrayed

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PERENNIAL EMPIRES me,” he began again, opening his eyes very wide. “She was faithful. We were going very far—very soon. I could have torn myself away from that accursed treasure for her. For that child I would have left boxes and boxes of it—full. And Decoud took four. Four ingots. Why? Picardiai! To betray me? They would have said I purloined them. The doctor would have said that. Alas! It holds me yet!” Mrs. Gould bent low, fascinated—cold with apprehension. (Nostromo 459–460)

Nostromo’s confession ultimately reveals his intimate entanglement with Decoud. Decoud’s betrayal ties Nostromo’s destiny to the silver. Mrs. Gould’s reaction to the confession recalls the discursive dynamics of the coming-out scene. As with the earlier passage in which Mrs. Gould’s knowledge of the history of the mine reads much like the repression of that very history, so too Mrs. Gould’s “genius of sympathetic intuition” works to repress Nostromo’s confession (460). “She averted her glance from the miserable subjection of the dying man, appalled, wishing to hear no more of the silver” (460). More pointedly, when asked by Dr. Monygham about what has transpired, she consigns the entire episode to oblivion: “ ‘He told me nothing,’ said Mrs. Gould, steadily. The light of his temperamental enmity to Nostromo went out of Dr. Monygham’s eyes. He stepped back submissively. He did not believe Mrs. Gould. But her word was law” (460–461). First in the guise of historical knowledge and now in the guise of law, through the discursive dynamics of a closeted epistemology, Mrs. Gould has repressed the possibility of the political. Said locates the repression of the political in the monumental prosperity through which Captain Mitchell guides readers in the final section of the novel. Calling on both Nietzsche and Foucault, Said explains that “monuments, as Nietzsche once observed, provide one with the most insufficient and inaccurate of histories. And so goes the chronicle of Sulaco. It flourishes in its monumental prosperity, with its silver exports reaching every corner of the world, and excludes, in the manner described by Foucault, everything inimical to it” (Said 120). Said goes on to propose Mrs. Gould as a character who stands as a counterexample

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to this material historical censorship: “No one in Sulaco (except for Mrs. Gould) has second thoughts about the origins of Sulaco’s power and wealth: no one remembers Costaguana, no one really cares about Decoud’s death, no one worries much about the meaning of Sulaco’s independence” (Said 120). Though Said’s description of the forgotten origins of the new state certainly rings true, his exception of Mrs. Gould relies on its own moment of forgetting. After all, doesn’t Nostromo also remember all of these things and try to expose them in his confession— only to have Mrs. Gould knowingly repress them? When thought of as a pair, Mrs. Gould and Nostromo—the motherless woman and the orphan that no one really ever knows—recall what Sedgwick has dubbed the “topos of the omnipotent unknowing mother” and her closeted son who attempts to expose the secret of his identity only to have that exposure refused (Sedgwick 248). In the context of an analysis of Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu, Sedgwick writes, “Is it not the mother to whom both the coming-out testament and its continued refusal to come out are addressed? And isn’t some scene like that behind the persistent force of the novel’s trope, ‘the profanation of the mother’?… The result is that the mother has a power over whose uses she has, however, no cognitive control” (Sedgwick 248). Between Mrs. Gould and Nostromo there is a variation on these dynamics: a scene of testimonial that is cognitively refused, a sacralization of Mrs. Gould through a misreading of that refusal, and the power of this knowingly forgetful woman whose word carries the force of law. Unlike the “woman with a masculine mind” suggested in the development of Mrs. Gould’s historical knowledge earlier in the text, Mrs. Gould here makes a refusal that is anything but “barren and without importance” (Nostromo 86). Indeed, as refusal becomes manifest in the law of the new state, it is clear that within the complicated imperial politics of the text, Mrs. Gould’s refusal of the truth produces on an intimate level the kind of monumental historicization critiqued by Said. Both Said and Jameson see this complicated divulgence of secrecy in the novel as the impossible search for the origin that inscribes both

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the historical situation and the problem of history itself. Said explains— and, importantly, this is quoted by Jameson—that “instead of mimetically authoring a new world, Nostromo turns back to its beginnings as a novel, to the fictional, illusory assumption of reality: in thus overturning the confident edifice that novels normally construct, Nostromo reveals itself to be no more than a record of novelistic self-reflection” (Said 137). Jameson lends content to this self-reflexivity in terms of historical materialist analysis: “History, by its thoroughgoing demonstration of the impossibility of narrating this unthinkable dimension of collective reality, systematically undermines the individual categories of storytelling in order to project, beyond the stories it must continue to tell, the concept of a process beyond storytelling” (Jameson 279). My aim has been to suggest that the social regulation of desire is a key component in the historical foreclosures and productive subject formation that the novel charts in its narration of the founding of empire. Oppositional critique must, in this light, not simply address the macrodynamics of political violence and repression, but must also attend to the micropolitics of affect and desire as these intersect specific conjugations of economic, political, and psychic forces in the making of imperial history.

THE FRIENDSHIP OF JOSEPH CONRAD AND R OGER C ASEMENT In closing, I would like to point to a different conjugation of these forces in the life of the novel, specifically to the moment when Conrad writes to Roger Casement and offers Nostromo as a gift. The connections between Conrad and Roger Casement are an established part of biographical record. The men met in the Congo in 1890 and spent some three weeks living together at the Matadi Station of the Belgian Société du Haut Congo (Conrad, Collected Letters 5: 596). Conrad’s initial response to meeting the charming Irishman was very positive: “Made acquaintance of Mr. Roger Casement, which I should consider as a great pleasure under any circumstances and now it becomes a positive piece of luck. Thinks, speaks well, most intelligent and very sympathetic” (Conrad,

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Congo Diary 7). Casement would go on to become famous and then infamous—first for groundbreaking humanitarian investigations into the abuse of native populations in both the Congo and the Putamayo region of South America, then for his involvement with the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916, and finally for the scandal that followed the discovery of his homoerotic Black Diaries that dominated his trial for treason against the British state. Casement, defender of the defenseless and of the Irish Republican, was exposed as gay in these sexually explicit diaries, journals that he kept at various points throughout his career. Ruthless British prosecutors used the diaries to defame Casement and to prevent any successful appeals. They finally hanged him on 3 August 1916.134 Conrad’s response to the scandal that swept his friend’s trial was curious. Moving away from his initial endorsements, in the summer of 1916 Conrad claimed in a letter to Lady Ottoline that Casement “was looked upon as a rather enigmatic personality. But all that is an old story of which the last chapter has been closed” (Conrad, Collected Letters 5: 630). During the height of the scandal, at a moment in which prominent figures in Europe and the United States were working for Casement’s reprieve, Conrad wrote to New York lawyer and art collector John Quinn on 24 May 1916: He was a good companion; but already in Africa I judged that he was a man, properly speaking, of no mind at all. I don’t mean stupid. I mean that he was all emotion. By emotional force (Congo report Putumayo—etc.) he made his way, and sheer emotionalism has under him. A creature of sheer temperament—a truly tragic personality: all but the greatness of which he had not a trace. Only vanity. But in the Congo it was not visible yet. (Conrad, Collected Letters 5: 598)

In some sense, the reasons for the reversal of Conrad’s attitude for Casement are sealed by the grave. There is evidence to suggest that one of Conrad’s main objections was to Casement’s enlisting German help in the Irish struggle against the British, given that Conrad was not particularly sensitive to Irish claims in the first place and harbored a contradictory

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respect for the British. Even granting some ambiguity to Conrad’s attitude, in the context of this reading of Nostromo it is impossible to ignore the echo of the descriptions of Nostromo and Decoud in this sketch of Casement’s personality. The descriptions of Casement as “all emotion,” as “a creature of sheer temperament,” as “only vanity,” and also as an “enigmatic personality” clearly inscribe in a different kind of historical record the dynamics of a closeted knowledge and experience. These are all terms that encode, after the revelation of Casement’s sexuality, an initial suspicion on Conrad’s part concerning the legibility and distastefulness, of that purportedly “closeted” aspect of Casement’s psyche. Perhaps this response was in part a reaction against the previous warmth of his affections for Casement. A letter from 3 September 1904 to Casement himself offers an entirely different assessment of the scandalized Irishman’s importance to Conrad. My dear Casement, Forgive my apparent brutality. Your letter had been a great and valuable pleasure. And I answer it now, the moment I’ve finished the book whose writing in illness and trouble I am not likely to forget in a hurry. I am delighted to see You’ve accepted the Consulate in Lisbon, a post worthy of your usefulness. And I feel a great, strong longing to start and see you there. But at present I am only a half-liberated slave. I must not move away. A vague plan for leaving the Pent for the winter in existence—and perhaps then! Meantime You will not, I am sure forget me quite. The book appears end this month. I shall post you a copy. Now I am sending you an inscribed copy of Typhoon my latest so far. My wife sends her most cordial regards and I am Always Yours J. Conrad (Conrad, Collected Letters 3: 161–162)

Both for Conrad—whose desire is to visit Casement—and for the critic, this letter is a problem of location. Certainly, the pleasure and longing in the letter locate it within the overdetermined dynamics of male intimacy at the turn of the twentieth century. Casement’s known homosexuality

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and Conrad’s seemingly symptomatic and hostile responses to the revelation of his friend’s sexual desires and activities could help anchor a biographical reading of desire in the letter. The historical record can help locate another unnamed coordinate in the text: given its date, the book due to come out was, in fact, Nostromo. It is known (for instance, from Said’s analysis in Beginnings) that the writing of Nostromo was particularly anxiety-producing for Conrad. This letter might suggest that one of the ways of understanding that anxiety may be in relation to a personal struggle with the tensions between homosocial and homoerotic desire. Given my reading of Nostromo, I would like to suggest an alternative way to locate this letter. Rather than using the anxieties of desire that it inscribes in order to delineate the identities of these subjects, perhaps there is a way to bring into focus a historical relation to imperialism. At the same time that the emerging discourse of homosexuality was both producing and locating new forms of masculine identity in the compartmentalized double binds of homosocial and homoerotic definition, political theorists were proposing strikingly similar analyses of the psychology of the agents of empire. Hobson suggests in Imperialism: A Study that in the British example, a narrow class of imperially ambitious investors and speculators was able to project economic and political power in the name of the whole nation. He shows that imperialism was in no way easily linked to the obvious interests of “the people,” even as the consent of the people was necessary for its development. As the contradictions of this pattern both formed and were reshaped by particular subjectivities, it was not simple hypocrisy that allowed these agents to function but rather a novel form of “departmental” psychology. Hobson explains: “The psychical problem which confronts us in the advocates of the mission of Imperialism is certainly no case of hypocrisy, or of conscious simulation of false motives. It is partly dupery of imperfectly realized ideas, partly a case of psychical departmentalization” (296). This psychic structure is closely linked to the question of imperial language with which this essay began: “Imperialism has been floated on a sea of vague, shifty, well-sounding phrases which are seldom tested by close contact with fact” (Hobson 206).

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Hannah Arendt (developing many aspects of Hobson’s analysis) in The Origins of Totalitarianism introduces the bureaucrat and the secret agent as modern subjectivities specifically related to the development and projection of imperialist power. Both of these have particular relations to what can be thought of as an aspect of departmentalism, that is, secrecy. In describing the efficacy of the bureaucrat, she explains that informal influence was preferable to well-defined policy because it could be altered in case of difficulties. It required a highly trained, highly reliable staff whose loyalty and patriotism were not connected with personal ambition or vanity and who would even be required to renounce the human aspiration of having their names connected with their achievements. Their greatest passion would have to be for secrecy (“the less British officials are talked about the better”); for a role behind the scenes, their greatest contempt would be directed at publicity and people who loved it. (Arendt 213)

The secret agent, caught in an imperialist and protofascist “expansion for expansion’s sake,” also articulates power in terms of secrecy: “He was tempted only by the basic endlessness of the game [Kipling’s Great Game] and by secrecy as such. And secrecy again seems like a symbol of the basic mysteriousness of life” (Arendt 217–218). In describing how these dynamics work in the case of famous imperial secret agent, T. E. Lawrence, Arendt writes: The story of T. E. Lawrence in all its moving bitterness and greatness was not simply the story of a paid official or hired spy, but precisely the story of a real agent or functionary, of somebody who actually believed that he had entered—or been driven into— the stream of historical necessity and had become a functionary or agent of the secret forces which rule the world.… This, then, is the end of the real pride of Western man who no longer counts as an end in himself, no longer does “a thing of himself nor a thing so clean as to be his own” by giving laws to the world, but has a chance only “if he pushes the right way,” in alliance with the secret forces of history and necessity of which he is but a function. (Arendt 220–221)

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The dynamics of secrecy in Arendt’s line of inquiry involves the psychological and subjective organization of political, economic, and military power peculiar to the projects of imperial expansion. It is also clear that the violent epistemologies of homosocial and homoerotic definition that this essay has tracked map easily onto Arendt’s dynamics. Indeed, the distance between anonymity of the nameless functionary and the “moving bitterness and greatness” of Lawrence retraces the same set of contradictions and ambiguities that haunt Nostromo and Decoud.135 What can be taken from this brief introduction to Hobson and Arendt is that these novel subjectivities structured by secrecy and power should not be examined simply in terms of identity but also as individual forms of imperial agency. Thus, although the exchange between Conrad and Casement can certainly be used to locate the limits of their historical identities, one can also attempt to read through this exchange the intersection of forces that the exchange conjugates. In this light, Conrad’s anxieties both about “men’s passions in the dusk” that develop into Nostromo and the historical anxieties he registers in his changing responses to Casement point to the subjective management of lines of force. Conrad’s management of the novel suggests a form in which repressive manifestations of sexualized knowledge undergird the historical narration of the new state and at the same time sanitize the political violence perpetrated by the new state’s agents. In the fragmented affects of Conrad’s letters, the truth of imperial history emerges, refracted through the violent intersection of sexuality and the politics of friendship.

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WORKS CITED

Acheraïou, Amar. “ ‘Action is Consolatory’: The Dialectics of Action and Thought in Nostromo.” Nostromo: Centennial Essays. Ed. Allan H. Simmons and J. H. Stape. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004. Print. Adorno, Theodor. Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life. London: Verso, 2010. Print. Aldrich, Robert. Colonialism and Homosexuality. New York: Routledge, 2002. Print. Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt, 1976. Print. Collits, Terry. “Anti-Heroics and Epic Failures: The Case of Nostromo.” Nostromo: Centennial Essays. Ed. Allan H. Simmons and J. H. Stape. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004. Print. Conrad, Joseph. The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad: Volume 3, 1903–1907. Ed. Frederick R. Karl and Laurence Davies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Print. ———. The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad: Volume 5, 1912–1916. Ed. Frederick R. Karl and Laurence Davies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Print. ———. The Congo Diary. Ed. Zdzislaw Najder. New York: Doubleday, 1978. Print. ———. Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard. 1903. New York: Penguin, 1990. Print. Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Ed. and trans. Geoffrey Nowell Smith and Quintin Hoare. New York: International Publishers, 1971. Print. Hobson, J. A. Imperialism: A Study. London: Allen and Unwin, 1988. Print.

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Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981. Print. McDiarmid, Lucy. The Irish Art of Controversy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005. Print. Miller, C. Brook. “Holroyd’s Man: Tradition, Fetishization, and the United States in Nostromo.” Nostromo: Centennial Essays. Ed. Allan H. Simmons and J. H. Stape. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004. Print. Mullen, Patrick Robert. “Roger Casement’s Global English: From Human Rights to the Homoerotic.” Public Culture 15.3 (2003): 559–578. Print. Nietzsche, Friedrich. “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense.” The Philosophy Pages. Web. 10 Dec. 2010. . Said, Edward. Beginnings: Intention and Method. New York: Basic Books, 1975. Print. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991. Print.

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CHAPTER 13

THE ROLE OF SEXUALITY IN NATION BUILDING SHYAM SELVADURAI’S FUNNY BOY AND TIMOTHY MO’S THE REDUNDANCY OF COURAGE 136

John C. Hawley

Anthologies such as Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives (1997) demonstrate “the intertwined politics of gender/sexuality and race within the double context of both nationalism and feminism” (McClintock, Mufti, and Shohat 3), but most such apparently comprehensive collections generally shortchange the queer members of the societies under discussion. In the literature arising from these conflicts, though, a burgeoning development is, in fact, the role that an individual’s

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sexuality plays in the process of national (or ethnic) self-actualization.137 Discovering that one’s sexual orientation is nonnormative is difficult in the best of times, but when the very forces that once defined a world are called into question by civil war, the chances that an individual can confront questions of sexual identity and acceptable social role are made more difficult (Fernández Vasquez). Such a situation is central to Timothy Mo’s The Redundancy of Courage (1991) and Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy (1995), in which works the protagonists are coming to terms with their homosexuality. Compared to coming-out novels from the late twentieth century in the United States, some readers may be struck by the lesser role this focus plays in these novels; indeed, the insistent questions for Selvadurai and Mo are politically focused rather than gender and sexuality oriented, arising in one case from the conflict between the Tamils and Sinhalese of Sri Lanka in the 1970s and in the other from the invasion of East Timor by Indonesia in 1975.138 As with versions of feminism in the emerging world that seem timid or misguided to activists in the West, so too non-Western versions of queerness strike some as half-hearted. As with feminism, one must ask what the West might learn from these less obvious and less rigidly demarcated sexual struggles that contend with quite different histories and customs and that do so in a chaotic and deracinating political situation. In the world of Selvadurai’s novel, the child protagonist, Arjie, is oblivious to the larger historical backdrop against which his own narrative is enacted. He is a member of the Tamil community, descended from Hindu tea-plantation workers who were brought from India in the nineteenth century. His group is under increasing threat from the Buddhist Sinhalese, who outnumber the Tamils almost five to one. Selvadurai maintains an ironic distance from these harsh political facts as, on the one hand, he unfolds the various manifestations of civil strife that only later impinge on Arjie’s consciousness and as, on the other hand, he demonstrates through the analogy of Arjie’s life the forces involved in the social construction of gender—forces that mirror those in the world of politics (Silva). The boy grows up in a rich and privileged family, though he soon finds that the family’s wealth cannot insulate its members from danger. In

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that world, the child has a great deal of freedom to define himself (Mullins). As a precursor to the political story, Arjie sees the world divided into two camps, two “factions” that “struggled for power” (Selvadurai 3). But these factions are not political; they are gendered—the faction of the boys and that of the girls. Arjie finds himself naturally drifting to the latter camp, just as his female cousin Meena drifts to the boys’ camp. She plays cricket; he plays “bride-bride,” in which dressing as the central character becomes his reward for having imagined the role more compellingly than any of the others in his group. “The primary attraction of the girls’ territory,” Arjie narrates, “was the potential for the free play of fantasy” (3). Thus, the transgressive roles played by Arjie and Meena arise from their freedom to create something “prior” to canonized gender scripts. Sounding very much like the central character in Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman who, as a transvestite imprisoned in Argentina by a repressive government, passes the time rehearsing plots of romantic films and casting himself as the heroine, seven-year-old Arjie notes that he was able to leave the constraints of myself and ascend into another, more brilliant, more beautiful self, a self to whom this day was dedicated, and around whom the world, represented by my cousins putting flowers in my hair, draping the palu, seemed to revolve. It was a self magnified, like the goddesses of the Sinhalese and Tamil cinema, larger than life; and like them, like the Malini Fonsekas and the Geetha Kumarasinghes, I was an icon, a graceful, benevolent, perfect being upon whom the adoring eyes of the world rested. (Selvadurai 4–5)

His is clearly an egocentric empowerment, one naively grounded in cultural images that transcend both the politics that soon engulf his family and the sexual expectations that soon snuff out his imagined freedom. Significantly for the argument of this essay, Arjie’s lawless world is shattered by the arrival of Arjie’s female cousin, Tanuja, who has returned from abroad and brought back with her a brand of worldly wisdom that insists on orderly categories and regulated identities. Her arrival, he records, “marked the beginning of [his] exile from the world [he] loved” (5). “ ‘You’re a pansy,’ she said, her lips curling with disgust. We

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looked at her blankly. ‘A faggot,’ she said, her voice rising against our uncomprehending stares. ‘A sissy!’ she shouted in desperation. It was clear by this time,” he says, “that these were insults” (11). And this judgment gains greater force when Arjie is dragged, as it were, before his assembled larger family, who stare in silence at the boy dressed as a bride. With some irony, Arjie notes that “they gazed at me in amazement as if I had suddenly made myself visible” (13). “It was clear to me that I had done something wrong,” he writes, “but what it was I couldn’t comprehend” (17); nonetheless, unconsciously mimicking the bride he cannot be, he “picked up the edges of [his] veil and fled to the back of the house” (14). Eventually, Tanuja erases Arjie’s transgression by reasserting a comfortably binary view of sexual identity, taking up all the roles to which Arjie had grown accustomed, “claiming for herself the rituals [he] had so carefully invented and planned” (21). Agency is stripped from him. When he is pushed across the frontier into the boys’ camp and commanded to play cricket, he is emasculated in his teammates’ eyes by having his rights as a batter taken from him. Gradually, a future role in such a regulated society begins to materialize before his eyes: “There would be the loneliness,” he writes. “I would be caught between the boys’ and the girls’ worlds, not belonging or wanted in either. I would have to think of things with which to amuse myself, find ways to endure the lunches and teas when the cousins would talk to one another about what they had done and what they planned to do for the rest of the day” (39–40). Arjie has already been effectively sidelined by the others, rendered a clownish cipher in his society; categorized as something less than a man; he is not one from whom a serious role in the building up of the nation would be expected. He is constructed by his peers, in other words, as queer. One could imagine Timothy Mo’s novel The Redundancy of Courage as a sequel to Selvadurai’s coming-of-age account, since Mo’s protagonist is an adult gay male who has adjusted to his marginalization by society. Furthermore, protagonist Adolph Ng has become Machiavellian in his chameleon-like ability to make accommodations with respect to whatever power currently bears hegemony in his life. He literally makes accommodations, in fact, since he buys, refurbishes, and makes


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a handsome profit from a dilapidated hotel. In the novel, the building stands as a symbol of his attempt to find a symbiotic relationship with those who cannot take him seriously; the building (as well as the personal crisis) seems notably minor against the backdrop of a civil war— the hotel is a backwater waystation for the main players in life: the politicians, the soldiers, the masculine powerbrokers. Nonetheless, it is to this locus of personal struggle that readers’ attention is (almost defiantly) directed when Mo begins his narrative. Although Adolph Ng has long since come to terms with his sexual orientation, he takes up the personal struggle where Arjie leaves off: Mo has him reasserting himself as a participant in history, as a man of responsibilities in the definition of the future. And by telling the story of the war through the eyes of the marginalized man, silhouetting him against a backdrop of the foibles of all the other participants across the political spectrum (as only a gay hotel proprietor may be equipped to record), Mo renders nation building notably ironic, and in the process valorizes “person building.” To be sure, this is a move made by many cosmopolitan novelists who look with a jaundiced eye not only at the land of their birth but also at the limits of their adopted homelands—a move toward an internal politics in which sexuality plays a more consciously chosen role. Like Tanuja in Funny Boy, Ng is a product of globalization. He is, in fact, Mo’s representative of the migrant semi-intellectual, much like Mo and Selvadurai themselves: all three are men whose legal citizenship in a particular country no longer has the pull that it may once have had: educated in a private high school in Macao and then at a university in Toronto, Ng returns to Danu sufficiently enamored of the West but not loved by it and sets about making a home in a land that is no longer his home; Mo and Selvadurai are, similarly, globalized by their education histories.139 Ng finds himself awkwardly situated between nations—and, in the eyes of his peers, between sexes. As he puts it: I am a man of the modern world. The world of television, of universities, of advertising, of instant communications, made me what I am. It made me a citizen of the great world and it made

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The mocking self-aggrandizement and the Western overtones of John Bunyan (serving, one imagines, to endear him to his non-Asian readers and to alert them to his sophistication while also cajoling his Asian readers with a trickster’s slap at Christian missionaries) offer a thin veneer, indeed, as he continues. “A sense of being in a dream settled over me,” he says, my way of evading the struggle, minimising the disappointment, much as it would three years later when the malais invaded Danu. The reality of it, return to what I could only see as barbarism, the small, broken-down settlement at the back of beyond, only came home to me as I got on to the small prop lane that took me from Darwin to Danu. Then I felt numbed. I felt lost. It was not the home-sickness I’d felt in LA four years before, when I’d been bewildered and intimidated by uncertainty, the challenge of finding a niche, making an identity for myself in a vast, strange, and complex society. This was the sickness, the vertigo, and familiar nausea of knowing to a certainty that there was no place for me in the simple community to which I returned and that the man I aspired to be did not exist there. Could not.… The futility of my existence was a daily mockery. (28–29, 48)

In Toronto he had glimpsed not only his possible metropolitan self, but specifically his free, gay (and, perhaps, stateless) self. Back in Danu, he must renegotiate not only the terms of his sexuality but also of his nationality. In the course of telling the story, Ng insistently relegates his sexuality (and his agency) to the lesser and more inconsequential role that, he initially seems to agree, is demanded by the more immediate needs of those (real) men engaged in national self-definition. As proprietor of the hotel, he observes the developing struggle between two forces: the Amalgamationist Party, made up principally of fifty or sixty Malais


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and favoring integration with the larger neighbor (Indonesia), and the much more sizeable FAKOUM. The latter had previously existed as the Independence Party and, although it had had no unified political philosophy, had been quickly branded as communist. A third small party, the Federationists, favored simply remaining under colonial power. Ng concludes that the Amalgamationists are a fig leaf for the invading Malais, who use them as a legitimating “indigenization” of invasion and conquest. The reader judges that Ng’s sympathies are with FAKOUM, but this is never completely settled. When one FAKOUM member complains about in-fighting (“I don’t know what’s happening to us all, Adolph. Why are we at each other’s throats? We’re all Danuese”), Ng records the following: “I refrained from saying that I was not, that I was a Chinese, and treated as such, that I didn’t have a piece of the action.… I wasn’t actually a party member—the bastards had an unofficial Chinese exclusion policy” (58, 76). Thus, his alienation is grounded not only in his sexuality but also in his ethnicity. Adolph Ng undoubtedly begins as an alienated individual—“I had been standing as if I was some privileged witness, outside the events I was observing” (4)—and seems to end up in a similarly voyeuristic position: “I didn’t have a solid grasp of myself—I depended on other people and surroundings to cue me. So I wandered bizarrely, often with that feeling of standing outside myself as a separate and dispassionate watcher, that I had experienced the day the malais had invaded Danu” (406). But the reader recognizes—perhaps before the character himself does—that Ng has, in fact, changed. He may still describe himself as “separate and dispassionate,” but at the story’s end he is more integrated, as if his own constitution, if not his nation’s, has been written by events he has undergone and by the decisions he has taken. He is now living “without the terror” because “the invisible writing, the lineaments of me, which had been there beneath the surface all the time, became manifest. I accepted myself again” (406–407). He is no more accepted by his society as a “manly” player than before, but his self-acceptance is undeniable. An exploration of how this self-acceptance comes about and what it means offers a complex and somewhat contradictory view of the

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protagonist. In the course of the novel, after all, Ng changes sides more than once. Most of the time, the choice seems to be out of his hands, as he is captured by one side or the other and made to serve its purposes. But serve them he does, and he serves them both well. Near the end of the book, he must make a choice between supporting a FAKOUM member or protecting the life of the son of the military ruler in whose home he is currently serving: Ng makes the pragmatic choice, shooting and killing his former FAKOUM compatriot and thereby branding himself in his own mind as a traitor. But what he has done, in fact, is choose himself, having decided long ago that neither side much cares for him, for his ethnicity, or for his “perverse” sexuality. Whereas Selvadurai allegorizes the Sinhalese/Tamil divide as a gendered question of boys’ territory against the girls’ territory, Mo echoes the Indonesian/East Timor conflict by utilizing a protagonist and narrator who is similarly divided against himself and similarly at odds with the definitions of self that are unconsciously imposed upon him by the surrounding society. The fact that both writers choose gay narrators is notable and still unusual in portrayals of the Asian world. But each character is doubly marginalized, sidelined not only by his sexuality but also by his race: Arjie as a Tamil and Adolph Ng as a Chinese belong to hated minorities. Both men only gradually come to terms with this objectification. Stereotyped as soon as he takes over the failing hotel as a “typical” representative of his race, Ng muses: Up till then I’d had no place in the society, of Danu. I was uncategorisable.… Now I had found an identity, a place in the little society of Danu. It was not quite what I had desired, but there was no question that was how I was seen. I was a Chinese entrepreneur with capital. I was an exploiter. I was a provider of work. I was a parasite. I was hated. I was to be appeased. I was vulnerable. I was powerful. (51)

Remarkably, Adolph Ng shares this contempt for the Chinese, though he does so in his typically bemused (and perhaps gay) way: “I had arrived in the Chinese quarter,” he writes,


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that is, the district of the stores and repair shops. It was thronged with people, almost all of my own race. They didn’t want to leave their businesses unattended, were far more conscious of the risk of looting by the Danuese than of any threat posed by the invader. They—we—had been the ones who’d had the most to lose by Independence. Most Chinese didn’t give a damn about politics, independence or dependency, it was all one and the same to them. Except the colonial regime offered peace and stability, the given framework in which they could prosper without worrying about big things. (7)

The politics are irrelevant, it seems, not only because Ng’s sexuality allows him no mature role in society, but also because his race puts him in much the same position. But from Ng’s point of view, if not that of the Malais, ethnicity is likewise not an issue—his sexuality transcends even this demarcation; the same is true for the protagonist in Selvadurai’s novel. The homosexuality in both books remains a questionable ploy, not because it is unlikely or unnecessary for the telling of each tale but because what might be described by Western readers as its timidity could serve to further marginalize the homosexual characters. This is less true, though, of Selvadurai’s work. After all, his book ends just as the issue might become uncomfortable for readers, for the author, and for the character himself, who is quite young, still maturing and coming to terms with himself.140 In Mo’s novel, on the other hand, there seems less “excuse” for the fact that the narrator never falls in love. There is more than a hint of his infatuation with the man he ends up killing, but the only sexual encounters in the four hundred pages of text are peripheral, flitting by without development or apparent significance in the protagonist’s life. In fact, those that are mentioned are apparently pedophilic or sleazy: “She liked me, I think.… Once, we kissed but some of her thin brown hair got into my mouth. I wasn’t that interested and I think she was being kind. Afterwards I went to the men’s room at the railway station and had a shorter but more satisfactory encounter with a Turkish cab-driver. Do I startle you?” (28). The quick description of furtive

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encounters followed by the coy suggestion that the reader will think Ng has been naughty occurs several times throughout the novel. It is as if Ng wishes occasionally to prove to the reader that it is not merely the prissy observations and the attention to how things look that stereotypically mark the protagonist as a homosexual but, rather, the fact that he actually has some sort of sex life. Like Scheherazade, Ng thereby defers his narrative while seducing readers and pushing them away, remaining incontrovertibly queer but not, apparently, gay—by which I mean an adult who, in asserting that he has again accepted himself, also shows an interest in carrying on a loving relationship with another man as well as some ability to do so. Such an agenda seems to be beyond the scope of Mo’s novel, and there is no point in wishing he had written a different book. After all, Mo takes pains to put his protagonist through other rites of passage in order to move him from a position of ironic and distant observation of life to one of fairly convincing greater participation in, and commitment to, the life (dominated by heterosexuals) that is carried on around him. Early on, Ng is seen as somewhat effeminate: “I took deep breaths, inflating a puny chest,” he writes. “I decided I’d have to do some weight-lifting, like the boys in my magazines” (59). Despite this campy self-deprecation, Ng eventually leads troops into battle and teaches them to lay booby traps against the enemy. In his typical manner, he belittles the activity as simply a fit of pique: “I liked the spite,” he tells the reader. “Spite is for the weak and I knew myself to be weak. It was clever, and I was cleverer than the enemy. By far. In the most dramatic way it was a reminder to them of my existence. And I was in danger of forgetting who I was. It was a craft—mining, booby-trapping—that was peculiarly Chinese” (168). He refers to the Chinese as “my countrymen,” offering his race (rather than his gender) as the explanation for his apparently uncharacteristic macho behavior. This suggests the possibility that Mo is offering the reader an unreliable narrator who, for several reasons that may be more obvious to non-Western readers, cannot embrace and affirm a sexuality that is branded with the taint of Western decadence. It also suggests the


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possibility that Ng is waving the red flag of his Chinese ancestry as a distraction from what might otherwise jump off the page. After all, although Ng has every reason to distance himself from both political factions, he steps out of character (the self-serving pragmatic character that his narrative repeatedly insists upon) and volunteers, strangely enough, to lay the mines. He wishes to step outside politics, but it seems he does not wish to remove himself from the fighter who is leading this particular faction. In fact, when he first introduces the reader to Osvaldo Oliveira, to whom Ng devotes an entire chapter, he makes some strangely contradictory observations: “Ridiculous, I shall be the first to admit, but I felt there was a bond between us, however tenuous” (60)—or so he says, as if reading from the script of a soap opera. But in the next breath he assures the reader that this is not what it might seem: “in case you are wondering, no, I was not sexually attracted to him, although I was subject to his magnetism as much as anyone else.… I hope that I don’t sound like some swoony girl.… Like so many natural or born leaders, it was his control over himself which allowed him to command others.… But I think I got a glimmer, believe it or not, out of the corner of Osvaldo’s eye” (60–63). Ng speaks of this “control over himself ” (and, perhaps, over Ng), as if the narrator sees this as the highest attribute that one might attain; it is, presumably, a virtue that Ng has practiced much of his own life. And, after establishing beyond a shadow of a doubt that he will do anything to avoid getting involved with politics, Ng nonetheless volunteers his services as a mine layer, endangering his life in apparent romantic service of a doomed cause. His relationship with Osvaldo, imagined or not, becomes quite complex in Ng’s mind as the insurgency comes sputteringly to a halt and its leaders are executed or captured by the Malais. Ng is called in to identify the leaders of the movement, and Osvaldo, seeing what is about to happen, admits his identity so that Ng need not betray him. Then, in a final act of defiance, Osvaldo grabs Rebus, a Malais leader and his interrogator, and explodes a grenade that kills both men. Reflecting on the action, Ng speaks with the same fervor that one hears in the voice of Manuel

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Puig’s jailed homosexual, who also develops a political sensibility when he falls in love with a revolutionary: Bound, starved, beaten, [Osvaldo] thought of the future which no longer contained him but which he could still control. He knew what happened to men and women whose notion of themselves had become degraded; he’d seen how traitors worked with a special spite, with a fury that was reserved for themselves as they twisted the knife in the wound. He didn’t want to waste yet another that way; he didn’t want to make me a betrayer; he wanted to keep me, as far as he still could. And so he made it easy for me. He denounced himself. And if in the flamboyance of the act, the studied casualness of the greeting, he found a certain bitter amusement, why, he was still able to relish an irony and a situation. That was Osvaldo Oliveira and his greatness. (Mo 388–389)

Ng transforms Osvaldo’s dying act of defiance into a Liebestod, seeing in Osvaldo exactly what he most admires in himself: the ability to relish the irony of a situation. He has queered the revolutionary. In his suggestion that Osvaldo did not want Ng to be further “degraded,” the protagonist, consciously or not, is using the political act metonymically: he is making a plea for his own visibility as a full adult, homosexual though he may be, and as someone who has meant something to someone who is indisputably valorized in indigenous society—as if a marriage of sorts has taken place, not only between Adolph and Osvaldo, but also metaphorically between a Chinese member of society and an indigenous citizen. In the process, Timothy Mo fantasizes about an indigenous acceptance of the love that (still) dares not speak its own name. In Funny Boy, something similar is attempted with similarly truncated results. Like Adolph Ng, Arjie’s ethnicity is complicated. He is angrily identified by the Sinhalese as unmistakably Tamil, yet Arjie thinks that this is arbitrary and meaningless. “I didn’t even speak Tamil” (Selvadurai 31), he protests. His painful political consciousness follows upon, and greatly complicates, his sexual awakening. When he has a homosexual experience with a Sinhalese friend called Shehan, it is only in retrospect


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that the meaning of the act in society’s eyes gradually manifests itself to Arjie: “Then the meaning of what Diggy [another friend] had said hit me,” he says, and a realization began to take shape in my mind. A fact so startling that it made my head spin just to think about it. The difference within me that I sometimes felt I had, that had brought me so much confusion, whatever this difference, it was shared by Shehan. I felt amazed that a normal thing—like my friendship with Shehan—could have such powerful and hidden possibilities. I found myself thinking about that moment Shehan had kissed me and also of how he had lain on his bed, waiting for me to carry something through. I now knew that the kiss was somehow connected to what we had in common, and Shehan had known this all along. (256)

In their next encounter, the protagonist is apparently a bit more courageous, though Selvadurai has him drift off into unconsciousness rather than allow him to become explicit in his account of what happens between the two characters. In fact, the protagonist subsequently allows society’s full condemnation of his actions to define what he thinks of himself, even though it had seemed to him a natural action at the time. “Now I understood my father’s concern,” he writes, “why there had been such worry in his voice whenever he talked about me. He had been right to try to protect me from what he feared was inside me, but he had failed. What I had done in the garage had moved me beyond his hand.… Now I wished I had never invited [Shehan], never set eyes on him” (262–263). In a remarkably short time, however, Arjie makes an aboutface: “Shehan had not debased me,” he writes, “or degraded me, but rather had offered me his love. And I had scorned it” (269). This emotional dissonance quickly moves the protagonist to raise the larger political and ethical question that Adolph Ng never consciously presents: “How was it that some people got to decide what was correct or not, just or unjust? It had to do with who was in charge; everything had to do with who held power and who didn’t.… Was it not possible for people like Shehan and me to be powerful too?” (Selvadurai 274).

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The answer Arjie (like many homosexuals in adolescence) comes to is in the negative, and the next step is the embrace of marginalization as a lifestyle: “I was no longer a part of my family in the same way,” he narrates. “I now inhabited a world they didn’t understand and into which they couldn’t follow me” (284–285). This, as already mentioned, is the same alienated world that Ng inhabits but which he takes significant steps to reshape by assuming an agency that will force others to see him in a more respectful manner. As is fitting in a novel of adolescence, the political turmoil against which Selvadurai tells his story is only hinted at occasionally. But if the narrator’s relationship with Shehan marks the emotional climax of the novel, the Sinhalese burning to the ground of Arjie’s home marks the political climax, underscoring the national crisis swirling around the two adolescents.141 Significantly, the two storylines intersect at this very point. Arjie has known Shehan for seven months; following the burning, Shehan comes for a visit. “He was trying to cheer me up,” Arjie writes, and as I listened to him talk, something occurred to me that I had never really been conscious of before—Shehan was Sinhalese and I was not. This awareness did not change my feelings for him, it was simply there, like a thin translucent screen through which I watched him. (302)

The levels of naïveté dissolve slowly for young Arjie—first the sexual level, then the emotional, and finally the political. But their effect seems almost a harbinger of Adolph Ng’s guarded cynicism. Arjie is anything but cynical throughout the story, but at its end he has emotionally stepped back from his Sinhalese boyfriend enough to “watch him” through this translucent screen. When, a few days later, Arjie and his family leave Sri Lanka for safer climes, he shifts into sarcasm, noting that the thieving Sinhalese had even stripped the flowers from the trees: “These araliya flowers would probably be offered to some god as a pooja by the very people who had plucked them, in order to increase their chances of a better life in the next birth” (311). The loss of innocence, it seems,


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is complete—for the loss of Shehan is hardly acknowledged.142 Arjie’s account ends at about the point where Adolph’s begins. Both novels are legitimate examples of Frederic Jameson’s famous notion of national allegories, which he defines as follows: What all third-world cultural productions have in common, and what distinguishes them radically from analogous cultural forms in the first world [is that] all third-world texts are necessarily … allegorical, and in a very specific way: they are to be read as what I will call national allegories, even when, or I should say particularly when, their forms develop out of predominantly western machineries of representation, such as the novel.… The story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled structure of the public … culture and society. (Jameson 67)

Though there can be no denying Aijaz Ahmad’s criticism that such an interpretation is overly universalizing (Ahmad 104–112), one suspects that the choice of narrators in these two novels makes them, at least, good representatives of the theory—for, beyond the claims that can be made for the novels as cries for personal freedom amidst the threatened hegemony of any political juggernaut, the individual narrators seem especially appropriate as symbols for the nations in which they are living, nations in which self-definition is the issue at stake and in which one faction of the body politic cannot comfortably accept the demands of the other faction. Thus, for example, it is not only the sex life of Adolph Ng that causes him to feel out of place; it is his emotional life in general. Many times throughout the book he finds tears welling up in his eyes, but every such moment is inevitably followed by an assurance to the reader that this emotionalism does not represent his true (manly? Chinese?) self: “And then something strange happened,” Ng says when a female compatriot is killed in the line of duty. “My eyes filmed, the moisture pooled, and a tear ran down my cheek, just one. Which was weird because I didn’t feel at all sad but only concerned for myself. It would appear the body is nobler than the mind, its chemistry more simple” (303). Like his country, which is tearing itself to pieces—in both senses, ripping and producing

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tears—Ng seems at odds with his body. Neither will acknowledge the demands of its components, but the truth will come out. The tears seem in no way weird; indeed, the failure to acknowledge emotion is the truly disturbing denial that well serves both the sexually marginalized in their self-preservation and, perversely, the military regimes that enact brutal scenarios without compunction. There are practical limits to such allegories, though, as Rajiva Wijesinha points out. “What Timothy Mo’s narrative makes clear to us,” he writes, “is that identity is a construct, subject like any other construct to modification.… [Adolph’s] individual identity transcends the various adjustments it has to make. With regard to the nation, however, no such complacency is possible” (Wijesinha, “Timothy Mo” 28–29). Wijesinha goes on to point out, nonetheless, that the novel “presents a nationalistic movement that is dominated by mestizos, those of mixed blood” (30), thereby demonstrating that there is an “absence of absolutes with regard to identity” (31). But how does a postcolonial nation define its identity if its citizens are endlessly deferring their own? In this regard, another allegorical parallel suggests itself regarding the choice of a homosexual to represent the “voice” of this shifting definition of self. “I can accommodate myself to anything,” Ng tells the reader (Mo 124). This is certainly true: at one point he is the camp doctor (307); later, he remarks that he “was officially the gardener, but had come to fulfill also roles of secretary, comptroller of household, translator, interpreter, and stool-pigeon” (318). In short, he fulfills many of the roles of a fully developed society, as if Mo wishes to have him infiltrate all factions and social strata. And Ng does so as a homosexual. Even at the novel’s end, when Ng has escaped to Brazil in an apparent attempt to redefine himself, he finds, as Wijesinha seems to imply (Wijesinha, “Timothy Mo” 31), that he brings not only his sexuality but also his former nation with him: If I thought I could unmake my old self so easily I was a fool. I could not terminate Adolph Ng so conveniently. I was trying to accomplish within my own small person what the malais hadn’t


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been able to do to a nation. An identity and a history cannot be obliterated with a switch of a name or the stroke of a pen. I arrived in the vastness of a new country as what I thought a tabula rasa but there was writing underneath, the coded determinants of what I was and always would be inscribed in (what shall we say?) acetic acid or lemon juice which gradually browned and showed in the revealing action of sunlight. (Mo 406)

Finally, nation has defined him as fully as have his sexuality and his race—but, perversely, only when he had attempted to renounce that nation. Like his nation, Ng is a palimpsest that cannot be read superficially. As the protagonist of a novel of young adolescence, on the other hand, the “funny boy” Arjie is less successful at breaking the patriarchal (if not national) ties that bind him. As Andrew Lesk persuasively argues, “Arjie’s attempts at queer insurrection unwittingly mimic the repressive urges of (emerging) nation states” (33). In fact, as Lesk points out, the book really demonstrates that “attempts to change greater structures without attendant heightened self-awareness of one’s position simply lead to a perpetration of the existing regulatory political and social order—and the loss of home” (44). The “gradual browning” of queer writing is one of the interesting developments in postcolonial literature that these two books exemplify.143 In his strong reading of Funny Boy, R. Raj Rao argues against the application of Jameson to gay novels, noting that “homosexuality can never assume allegorical proportions” (124). He suggests that such novels “are validated instead by some feminist theories, especially Kate Millett’s that sees the personal as the political” (Rao 124). But one wonders whether or not the distinction must be so stark. It has been demonstrated that the lives of these two narrators remain their own creations, so to speak, for they have no self-affirming models of acceptability in their societies that allow them to be at once openly gay and masculine men of importance and social commitment (González Acosta 121–141). Nonetheless, each protagonist becomes politicized by his personal struggle as a sexual being, certainly, but also by his positioning within the national political struggle, even if both characters ultimately leave their native

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lands. Ng, at any rate, brings his “nation” with him to Brazil. Though Rao is correct to say that Selvadurai—and, for that matter, Mo—is writing novels against “the male fanatical self” (Rao 117), the choice of such narrators by writers whose own experiences are often analogous to those of their characters points to the politicizing of homosexuality as a symbol for new ways of building the nation. It is true, so far, that such new imaginings may be directed most compellingly at Western or expatriate audiences, as Wijesinha suggests in Breaking Bounds. But this situation is changing.144 In the groundbreaking collection of gay and lesbian writings entitled A Lotus of Another Color, Rakesh Ratti asserts that “homosexuality is as native to the Indian subcontinent as heterosexuality and cannot be dismissed as a Western import” (Ratti 13).145 The need for Ratti to make such an assertion emphasizes that novelists know full well that their personal politics have become an increasingly disruptive voice in nation building. Sexuality is a tool, a central feature of Selvadurai’s and Mo’s responses to the politics they skewer. Gays and lesbians are not as invisible as one may have once wished, the authors seem to be proclaiming, and they are defining nations even as they define themselves. The days are coming, and indeed may already be here, when it will not be necessary for them to leave those nations before they can be seen and heard—and elected to positions of authority.


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WORKS CITED

Ahmad, Aijaz. In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures. London and New York: Verso, 1992. Print. Fernández Vázquez, José Santiago. “The Quest for Personal and National Identity in Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy.” Commonwealth Essays and Studies 24.1 (Autumn 2001): 103–115. Print. Ghosh, Amitav. “The Greatest Sorrow: Times of Joy Recalled in Wretchedness.” Kenyon Review 25.3–4 (Summer/Fall 2003): 86–99. Print. González Acosta, Marta. “Class, Gender, Race and the Construction of Masculinity in Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy.” Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses 45 (2002): 121–141. Print. Gopinath, Gayatri. “Nostalgia, Desire, Diaspora: South Asian Sexualities in Motion.” Positions 5.2 (1997): 467–489. Print. Hawley, John C., ed. Postcolonial, Queer: Theoretical Intersections. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001. Print. ———, ed. Postcolonial and Queer Theories: Intersections and Essays. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001. Print. Ho, Elaine Yee Lin. “Satire and the National Body: Timothy Mo’s The Redundancy of Courage.” SPAN: Journal of the South Pacific Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies 42–43 (October 1996): 76–85. Print. Ismail, Qadri Mohammed. “Constituting Nation, Contesting Nationalism: Gender, Subalternity and Community in South Asia.” Dissertation Abstracts International, Section A: The Humanities and Social Sciences 59.10 (April 1999): 3823–3824. Print. Jackson, Peter, and Gerard Sullivan, eds. Multicultural Queer: Australian Narratives. New York: Haworth, 1999. Print. Jameson, Fredric. “Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism.” Social Text 15 (1986): 65–88. Print.

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Jayawickrama, Sharanya. “At Home in the Nation? Negotiating Identity in Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 40.2 (2005): 123–139. Print. Lesk, Andrew. “Ambivalence at the Site of Authority: Desire and Difference in Funny Boy.” Canadian Literature 190 (2006): 31–46. Print. McClintock, Anne, Aamir Mufti, and Ella Shohat, eds. Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Print. Mo, Timothy. The Redundancy of Courage. London: Vintage, 1991. Print. Mullins, Greg A. “Seeking Asylum: Literary Reflections on Sexuality, Ethnicity, and Human Rights.” MELUS: The Journal of the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States 28.1 (Spring 2003): 145–171. Print. Parivaraj, P. Shiva and Arun. Norfolk, UK: Gay Men’s Press, 1998. Print. Perera, S. W. “Some Responses to Colonial/Neocolonial Education in Funny Boy, Petals of Blood, and In the Castle of My Skin.” Sri Lanka Journal of the Humanities 26.1–2 (2000): 62–87. Print. Rao, R. Raj. “Because Most People Marry Their Own Kind: A Reading of Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy.” ARIEL 28.1 (1997): 117–128. Print. Ratti, Rakesh, ed. A Lotus of Another Color: An Unfolding of the South Asian Gay and Lesbian Experience. Boston: Alyson, 1993. Print. Selvadurai, Shyam. Funny Boy. London: Vintage, 1995. Print. Silva, Neluka. “ ‘Gendering’ the Nation: Literary Representations of Contemporary Sri Lankan Politics.” Translating Nations. Ed. Prem Poddar and Dominic Rainsford. Aarhus, Denmark: Aarhus University Press, 2000. 47–87. Print.


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Wijesinha, Rajiva. Breaking Bounds: Essays on Sri Lankan Writing in English. Colombo, Sri Lanka: Sabaragamuwa University Press, 1998. Print. ———. “Timothy Mo’s The Redundancy of Courage: An Outsider’s View of Identity.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 28.2 (1993): 28–33. Print.

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CHAPTER 14

THE UNITED STATES OF EMPIRE AND THE COALITION OF THE WILLING QUEER 146

Paul Allatson

In 2003, a few days after the capture of Saddam Hussein by US forces on 13 December, I received by e-mail a JPEG featuring the former Iraqi dictator sitting in a chair, a silver beauty-salon apron covering his body, while around him stand or kneel the various members of the popular US reality-TV show Queer Eye for the Straight Guy (fig. 1). Some months later, I acquired what US collectors like to call a bobblehead or nodder—a small doll with a moveable head, made from synthetic polymer resin—in this instance representing a uniformed Saddam Hussein with his trousers down around his ankles and a large missile painted in the colors of the US flag embedded in his exposed buttocks (see figs. 2, 3, and 4).

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FIGURE 1. Queer Eye makes over Saddam Hussein.

Source. JPEG credited to JD (December 2003). Circulated via e-mail.

This essay, a meditative show-and-tell makeover of sorts, springboards from the conjunction of these two queerly touched products of global pop culture, both of which also function as imperial-history military memorabilia. That conjunction suggests that the recent coming out of the queer I in Queer Eye could never simply be a televisual “fairies’ tale.” Rather, I want to suggest that the show—which has been aired and in some cases franchised in some thirty countries since its premier in July 2003 and has also spawned a number of spinoffs147—metonymizes the consolidation of the George W. Bush–led United States of Empire (USE),148 which itself has undergone a formidable combat fatigue–chic makeover since

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11 September 2001. With the world on its receiving end, Queer Eye ably represents the United States of Empire’s current economic and political stature, loved and loathed on a global level. The intimate relationship between the war on terror and the Queer Eye’s war on terrible taste that I explore in this essay is neither coincidental nor far-fetched. Rather, that relationship is betrayed in the very coincidence of disparate pop-cultural texts and objects that implicate a dominant and dominating queer purview in the operations of the state from which that purview emanates. Tentatively calling this purview imperial queer, my essay draws attention to the capacity of USE queer (and its representatives) to do two things: first, to enact colonizing and commodifying identity pressures; and second, to do so by replicating the identity-making protocols, national dreamscapes,

FIGURE 2. Saddam Hussein bobblehead.

Source. Author.

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and disciplinarian ambitions of the geopolitical state that dominates the global order in the early twenty-first century. Since the current global order is often described as late capitalism, it seems fitting to proceed by relating the televisual coming-out of the queer I to questions of class and liberation. In 1972 the French philosopher Guy Hocquenghem drew on Herbert Marcuse in order to provide a salient reminder of the links between class and homosexuality: If our society really is experiencing what Marcuse believes is a growing homosexualisation, then that is because it is becoming perverted, because liberation is immediately de-territorialised. The emergence of unformulated desire is too destructive to be allowed to become more than a fleeting phenomenon which is immediately surrendered to a recuperative interpretation. (94)

Hocquenghem argues that in the capitalist system’s drive to disarm the threat posed by homosexual desire, or as he puts it, “unformulated desire,” capitalism turns its homosexuals into failed “normal people,” just as it turns its working class into an imitation of the middle class. This imitation middle class provides the best illustration of bourgeois values (the proletarian family); failed “normal people” emphasise the normality whose values they assume (fidelity, love, psychology, etc.). (94)

Queer Eye at once confirms these prescient observations and amends them. The queer individual and ethos in the show are drafted into the service of the capitalist order. This means that, multiplication of I’s notwithstanding, the queer person and sensibility in Queer Eye amount to a libidinal irrelevance, of no actual account beyond TV-network ledger columns and a tally of heterosexuals whose unions are redeemed by the queer touch of the Fab Five. The capitalism that underwrites this transitory spectacle (along with its products that get regular walk-on roles and multiple ovations) thus equips its failed “normal” people with the means by which to turn working-class men (and their female partners) into an


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imitation of the consumerist middle class represented, in this instance, by the failed normal people themselves. This process of imitation and domestication can be put another way. David Collins, one of Queer Eye’s executive producers states: “The concept was basically five gay professionals in fashion, grooming, interior design, culture, food and wine coming together as a team to help the straight men of the world find the job, get the look, get the girl” (Idato 4). The official Queer Eye Web site, hosted by Bravo cable TV network (bravotv.com), expands on this brief by defining the Fab Five as talented, gay, and “determined to clue in the cluttered, clumsy straight men of the world.” The blurb continues: “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” is a one-hour guide to “building a better straight man”—a “make better” series designed for guys who want to get the girl, the job or just the look. With the expertise and support of “The Fab 5”—Ted Allen, Kyan Douglas, Thom Filicia, Carson Kressley and Jai Rodriguez—the makeover unfolds with a playful deconstruction of the subject’s current lifestyle and continues on as a savagely funny showcase for the hottest styles and trends in fashion, home design, grooming, food and wine, and culture.

In keeping with this “playfully deconstructive” mission, the Fab Five fulfill their weekly brief to steer the straight man away from gaucherie, from the unemployment-queue or “on-welfare” appearance, and—even more tellingly—from the ever-present danger of heterosexual-relationship failure. Each episode ends with the Fab Five sipping champagne in a spacious loft apartment beyond the financial means of many viewers. Nicely ensconced, they assess the success of their day’s work before providing a rundown of the products whose future sales provide the show’s raison d’être. Every week the outcome is the same: remade, the straight man will keep his woman or be in a position to attract one. Each week, the failed normal men primp and pimp for “heterosexuality not as an institution but as a political regime” (Wittig xiii). It is worth noting, moreover, that Queer Eye has two more specific, yet easily overlooked, roles to play in heterosexuality’s upkeep under

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late capitalism. First, by returning the improved straight men to their women and asserting that the health of these relationships now rests on an untrammeled consumerism, the show participates in what Adrienne Rich calls “the enforcement of heterosexuality for women as a means of assuring male right of physical, economic, and emotional access” (238). Second, Queer Eye’s masculinist and heteronormative parameters exclude the lesbian, rendering her an epistemological irrelevance in the show’s purportedly queer habitus, a discounting that Rich emphasizes is also a key tactic in the perpetuation of compulsory heterosexuality (238). It is arguable that the absence of the lesbian from the queer purview at work in Queer Eye is not surprising, given the long historical association between bourgeois consumption and gay male cultural typologies in the West and the concomitant exclusion of lesbians from those typologies. As numerous critics have noted, the Western lesbian has enjoyed neither the socioeconomic status nor the social visibility and subjective meaningfulness that would enable lesbian consumption on a par with that of gay men (Clark 187; Vicinus). At the same time, Queer Eye’s governing protocols of overt consumption are again unsurprising in that they announce a self-conscious and knowing positioning of the show’s queer rationale in a long Western historical continuum that not only embraces a homosocial aesthetic of worldliness and refined taste but also regards that aesthetic as the essential identificatory hallmark of the bourgeois gay subject himself. For proponents of that aesthetic, neither heterosexual men nor heterosexual women could be the “natural” bearers of that aestheticized and commodifiable subjectivity—hence the need for homosexual-led programs of aesthetic acculturation. At times, moreover, that aesthetic and the class credentials that provide the preconditions for this commodifiable subjectivity have enabled some homosexual men to take full advantage of the mobilities and privileges afforded by imperialism: they thus enjoy a measure of sexual license and access to “native” subjects and other commodities, living and inanimate, that would have been impossible at home.149 And yet there is another way of reading these continuities that does not simplistically or fixedly regard Queer Eye’s televisual function as the


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latest manifestation of a privileged Western gay-male consumerist tradition and aesthetic sensibility. This alternative reading would reassess that tradition’s “aesthetic” parameters as intimately tied to and politically curtailed by the historical-material evolution of both capitalism and imperialism and to the heteronormative assumptions underwriting both hegemonic systems in terms of their productions of subjects, values, and profits. This reading recognizes that the globalization of (homo)sexuality (to paraphrase the title of Dennis Altman’s 2001 study, Global Sex) and the rise of sexuality-based political agendas, from gay and lesbian liberation to queer activism, are themselves intimately and ambivalently linked to the “discovery” and subsequent evolution of (homo)sexuality since the late nineteenth century as yet another sign of the productive power of Western capitalism and imperialism alike. The historical lines of tradition and systemic power noted here raise the important question of what the queer in Queer Eye signifies, in both a subjective and a political sense. With its emphasis on product placement and sales and its weekly commitment to the superficial makeover of the heterosexual male in line with bourgeois US-gay-male ideals of taste, Queer Eye appears to have no semantic affinity with the queer described by Michael Warner. For Warner, queer functions as “an aggressive impulse for generalization; it rejects a minoritizing logic of toleration or simple political interest-representation in favor of a more thorough resistance to regimes of the normal” (xxvi). That antinormative resistance is crucial. As Murray Pratt and I have argued elsewhere, a radical queer critical approach is productive precisely because it contains the seeds of its own conceptual undecidability, if not dissolution, despite the critiques of identity manufacture and ascription driving that approach.150 That is, in its most radical form, queer announces an ambivalently deconstructive critical project that to varying degrees oscillates between utopic faith in its identificatory promises and acceptance of the inevitable impossibility of fulfilling such promises. This notion of queer amounts to a nonnormative critical sensibility that is anchored in, and yet exceeds, the realms of sexual identity and desire. The queer in Queer Eye, however, does not share these deconstructive ambitions to resist

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“regimes of the normal,” including those announced and embodied by queerness itself. But accepting that the queer of Queer Eye has nothing to do with radical queer enterprises would also seem to suggest that the show’s (homo)sexual ethos has nothing to do with prequeer gay liberation, either. As Dennis Altman argued in his influential Homosexual Oppression and Liberation (1971), the gay liberation movement that emerged in the United States “is much more the child of the counterculture than it is of the older homophile organizations; it is as much the effect of changing mores as their cause” (164). Neither queer nor gay liberational, but nonetheless purportedly homophilic, Queer Eye thus suggests that the once-subversive promises and aspirations of sexual liberation projects—from the 1960s through to the new millennium—are being comically ignored in the USE and, indeed, wherever the US model of buffed and accessorized male gayness exercises a “from drab to fab” monopoly. The only promises of the Queer Eye show are afforded by a compulsive brand-name shopping mania, a concomitant poverty of conversation, and a narcissistic concern with sanitized, homogenized, and blanched body surfaces and personalities. In this, the whitewash of the show’s sole non-Caucasian, Jai Rodriguez, speaks volumes, as José Esteban Muñoz notes when drawing attention to the way Queer Eye “assigns queers of color the job of being inane culture mavens” (102). Again Hocquenghem provides an explanation for this scenario of queer co-optation and disarmament: “As long as homosexuality serves no purpose, it may at least be allowed to contribute that little nonutilitarian ‘something’ towards the upkeep of the artistic spirit” (108). The queer who subscribes or succumbs to this logic occupies a social space of libidinal and political impotence. The tokenistic and therefore safe “upkeep of the artistic spirit” in Queer Eye thus threatens no orders. So tamed, the show’s queer purview becomes symptomatic of the slow but inexorable dismantling or discounting of the hard-earned rights and ethical decencies bequeathed by civil rights activists in what increasingly appears to be a distant golden era. Such programming marks the defeat of queer desire’s radical potential to reterritorialize capitalism’s


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structural ally, the heterosexual economy. Regarded this way, it is difficult to agree with critics who argue that the show homes in on the crisis at the very heart of heterosexuality itself (Torres 96) or that it is paradigmatic of the new metrosexuality (Rosenberg). Toby Miller, for example, rightly approaches the show as part of “a much wider phenomenon of self-styling and audience targeting” that at once reflects and exacerbates the body image woes of a North American straight masculine constituency (Miller, “Metrosexual” 115), while also symptomizing the cultural hegemony that personal, made-over reinvention now wields in the US national imagination (Miller, Makeover 125–136). Furthermore, some analysts have claimed that despite purveying a range of normative logics, Queer Eye, in fact, does (1) “trouble the normative gender and sexuality of the home, the premise of the show rendering gay men ‘natural’ domestic experts” (Gorman-Murray 230); (2) provide evidence of “the full complexity of identity formation under contemporary consumer capitalism” (Lewis, “He Needs” 308); and (3) even discursively generate nonnormative modes of desire via its construction of a new queer public culture (Pearson and Lozano-Reich). Such readings are welcome for their attentiveness to the unpredictabilities of the show’s reception. And yet, such claims appear to this viewer to gloss over the hapless fate of queer itself in the show and its “elision or equation of gayness with stylishness, its eradication of any female ‘queer’ perspectives, and its role in bolstering and maintaining a heterosexist economy” (Gill 157). Herein lies Queer Eye’s unqueer rub. As Hocquenghem argues, “far from putting an end to the exclusive function of reproductive heterosexuality, the actual dissolution by capitalism has turned the family into the rule inhabiting every individual under free competition. This individual does not replace the family, he prolongs its farcical games” (93). In Queer Eye’s particular traffic in “farcical games,” its enlisted queer individuals have no purpose but to playfully service the heterosexual unit and thus to safeguard the reproductive logic of capitalism. But in the particular instance of Queer Eye, the queerness on view has another purpose, which is nonetheless also related to the way that the queer subjects are permitted “to contribute that little non-utilitarian

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‘something’ towards the upkeep of the artistic spirit” (Hocquenghem 108) in the post–11 September 2001 historical-material moment. Here it is useful to return to the image that began circulating in cyberspace shortly after US forces captured Iraq’s former leader Saddam Hussein. Although neither the Fab Five nor the show’s producers endorsed or were probably responsible for the montage and its virtual circulations, the JPEG image is telling for what it says about the potential for co-optation in the queerness popularized and perpetuated by Queer Eye. The intended humor of the image rests as much on the apparently unexpected conjunction of the former Iraqi dictator and a televisualized notion of USE queer as it does on the ways by which the threat purportedly posed by Saddam to USE interests can be contained and disarmed by the queers and their cheerfully compliant makeover skills. Obviously, this is a complex image, and many readings can be drawn from it. But I cannot look at this montage without thinking of those now iconic photographs of US


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soldiers mistreating Iraqi prisoners of war held in Abu Ghraib prison, which began to dominate news coverage of the war in the early months of 2004. The many photographs of US military abuses released to the media featured US soldiers posing with naked prisoners piled into a human pyramid or arrayed naked wearing hoods, and at least one image featured a prisoner wearing a dark cape and hood, with wires attached to his finger tips. The images did not simply chronicle physical torture; they also indicated that torture involved forced semiotic makeovers of the prisoners themselves. If queerness in this JPEG is, at the very least, enlisted to do to Saddam what the USE military machine is attempting to do to Iraq itself—that is, make the country over in a more USE-friendly and unthreatening pattern—a notion of queerness also seems to be at work in the bobblehead souvenir of the US-led invasion of Iraq. The person from whom I purchased the Saddam bobblehead on eBay advertised the item with the following blurb: Looks like someone got caught with his pants down! Not only that, but a Star Spangled Bomb found its way to the GPS coordinates of “you know where.” The Saddam Hussein Bobble Head is made of ceramic polyresin and stands about 6 inches tall. The former dictator is going to have a hard time sitting down for a while. Perfect gift for your family member or friend currently serving the US Armed Forces.

The irony that inheres in this “perfect gift for your family member or friend currently serving the US Armed Forces,” stems from the fact that Saddam is figuratively and connotatively sodomized by the USE, despite the anatomically impossible angle of the embedded missile. The logic behind this bobblehead is, in part, determined by an activepassive matrix in which the threat signified and embodied by Saddam is emasculated and feminized through male penetration. The sodomite Saddam is at once rendered passive and pacified, his destructive aura queered, disarmed, and (one assumes) thereby dispensed with. Yet the neatly alliterative equation of Saddam and sodomy evident in this

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statuette is not a new phenomenon. As Jonathan Goldberg stresses, the “Saddam = Sodom(ite)” link was being made in the lead-up to the first Gulf War with T-shirts emblazoned with such phrases as “America Will not Be Saddamized” and “Hey Saddam, This Scud’s For You,” the scud aiming for the target of Saddam’s buttocks. Goldberg rightly stresses that the rhetoric at work in such image-texts is far from straightforward, even as their governing rhetoric confirms that “the productive value of sodomy … today should not be underestimated” (6). That point is iterated by Mark Driscoll, who sees in the “enunciative slide from ‘Saddam’ to ‘Sodom,’ used by almost everyone in the Pentagon, State Department, and mass media,” evidence of a homographetic reading of Saddam’s body as somehow literally inscribed queer (70, 71).151 In the US media, particularly the tabloids, he notes, “week after week the only news some North American citizens received concerned Hussein’s projected crossdressing, sadism and obsession with androgynous boys” (Driscoll 71).


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For Driscoll, the relentless tabloidization of a queer Saddam, which was to be repeated in hysterical media reports regarding Osama bin Laden a decade later, demonstrates that representations of transcultural complexity have been cleansed from the US tabloid industry. Moreover, that phenomenon itself assumes a key role in a broader process of “reverse postcoloniality” by which postcolonial advances across the globe since the 1940s have been rolled back at the behest of a rich “North” no longer willing to aid the development of the once-colonized “South” (Driscoll 71–72, 63). The Gulf War image-texts centered on Saddam thus evidence, as Goldberg states, “not only the complex overdeterminations of the present moment—confluences and conflicts within and between popular culture, the media, late-capitalist commodification, the military, the government—but also certain strange historic overlaps” (3). Goldberg argues that there is an incoherence to the Gulf War images of Saddam as “Sodom(ite)” that is explicable in terms of Foucault’s notion of sodomy as an “utterly confused” category: premodern and modern “regimes of sexuality” are at complicated work whenever the figure of the sodomite is invoked in this era—as in the bobblehead memento of the Iraq war. As a result, Goldberg argues, the queerness attributed to Saddam can variously signify bestiality, an inversion of a natural gendered order, feminization, a sexual molestation, confirmation of an Orientalist-derived discourse that locates the origins of sodomy in the Mediterranean and in Islamic cultures, a modern sexual identity, and a sexual-behavior pattern (which in itself is not a synonym for homosexuality) that invites detection and punishment. To this list can be added pedophilia, as exemplified by the Western media’s responses to Saddam Hussein’s television appearances with seven year-old Stuart Lockwood, one of a number of Westerners deployed by the Iraqi leader as “human shields” in the lead-up to the first Gulf War in 1991 (Foss 22–26).152 At the same time, the multivalent and unstable queernesses accruing to Saddam Hussein cannot signify in these multivalent ways without a willing penetrating agent, in which case the USE and its armed representatives are also potentially implicated in some (if not all)

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of the discursive and historical confusion that Goldberg, drawing on Foucault, reads into USE representations of Saddam Hussein from the Gulf War. The USE can only figuratively sodomize Saddam by itself being, in some way, more powerfully queer. One question that Goldberg poses after his discussion of Saddam as sodomite—and of the concomitant discursive slippage from that category to the equally confused category of homosexuality—seems particularly prescient here. Goldberg asks: “What place is sodomy assumed to have in the mind of the ‘America’ being addressed?” (5). That question may be reworded in light of the international popularity and reach of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy: “What place is queer assumed to have in the mind of the ‘America’ being addressed?” It is no coincidence that the Queer Eye show emanates from the United States, a country with its own powerful discourses of individual self-fashioning unconstrained by institutional limits and material history and of “America” as an exceptional national bastion of capitalist enterprise. The superficial work done by the Fab Five is meaningful in terms of these individualized national and economic narratives inasmuch as the group labors to sell the myth of—and grant access to—an individuated American Dreamscape. Since the Fab Five are the agents by which entry to the dream is managed, they provide a differently dressed parallel to those other representatives of the United States of Empire who are routinely authorized to uphold their state’s role as the nemesis of so-called rogue regimes. Indeed, when the most extroverted of the Fab Five, Carson Kressley, scrawls “Bad Taste Kills” on the door of one rogue target, that action makes it difficult to avoid the analogy between the war on terror and Queer Eye’s makeover agenda—an analogy the author of the Saddam/Queer Eye JPEG (perhaps unwittingly) also made. Both wars are conducted as just and righteous enterprises. Both require a dreamscape reasoning that can only recognize (US) good or good taste and (non-, un-, anti-American) evil or tastelessness. And both wars are predicated on and judged in terms of the market share and returns that the fighting forces (USE Ltd; Queer Eye Ltd) win over any competition.


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It is telling, in this context, that the US Department of Defense Web site welcomes site visitors with the following proud claims: Welcome to the Department of Defense! We are America’s … Oldest company Largest company Busiest company Most successful company With our military units tracing their roots to pre-Revolutionary times, you might say that we are America’s oldest company. And if you look at us in business terms, many would say we are not only America’s largest company, but its busiest and most successful.

Thus occluding its true function, the United States neatly rebrands its military industrial complex as a business. (Business success, it should be noted, is a key aspiration of the ostensibly nonviolent Queer Eye enterprise, as well.) Such historical-material and national resonances appear to trouble Michael Warner’s claim that queer culture “is not autochthonous,” given that it has “no locale from which to wander” (xvii).153 A popular gay bar in Sydney has the name Stonewall, borrowed from the famous gay bar in New York’s Greenwich Village, which in June 1969 was the site of a riot between the bar’s patrons and local police, and is now enshrined as a landmark event in US gay, lesbian, and transgender civil rights history. The adoption of the bar’s name in Sydney is a sign, at the very least, of the trans-Pacific influence and transnational importance of USE-derived queer histories in and on non-USE spaces and peoples. Clearly, some forms of queer can—and do—have USE locales from which to wander. This wandering is not simply an endorsement of Warner’s claim that, “Post-Stonewall urban gay men reek of the commodity,” for as he adds, “We give off the smell of capitalism in rut, and therefore demand of theory a more dialectical view of capitalism than many people have imagination for” (xxxi). To borrow from Hardt and Negri, the problem posed by that global

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nomadism lies in the extent to which some notions of queer not only are calibrated for empire but also align themselves with or benefit from it. In their discussion of the new postmodern and postnational age of empire, Hardt and Negri make a semantic distinction between imperial and imperialist. They suggest that the United States’ suitability for empire is not imperialist because it does not “spread its power linearly in closed spaces and invade, destroy, and subsume subject countries within its sovereignty” (182). Rather, the United States’ global dominance in the current epoch rests on the imperial qualities contained in its constitution. That document, Hardt and Negri argue, serves as a discursive blueprint for the United States of Empire’s current worldwide status. It is “the model of rearticulating an open space and reinventing incessantly diverse and singular relations in networks across an unbounded terrain” (182). Hardt and Negri’s assertion was penned before 11 September 2001 and before the subsequent invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. But even without 11 September, the distinction between imperial and imperialist may not be as clear cut, or as meaningful, as those authors claim. To make this statement is not to perpetuate a notion of imperialism as a monolithic species of hegemony that is imposed on passive peripheries and that is not (and cannot be) constantly resisted, its messages refashioned on local terrains with transformative implications for imperial and colonized locales alike. Rather, the globally circulating cultural phenomenon of the Queer Eye franchise suggests the need for alertness to the imperialist logic that may underwrite the claims made for and on behalf of queer, particularly when articulated in and from a base inside USE borders. Speaking of the tactics deployed in the 1990s by the US activist group Queer Nation, for example, Lauren Berlant and Elizabeth Freeman note that the group’s operations never quite escaped from “the fantasies of glamour and of homogeneity that characterize American nationalism itself ” (215), fantasies that undergird the United States of Empire’s interventions outside US borders. Queer Nation’s attempted queer resemanticization of public spaces, such as


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shopping malls, and its adoption of a faux corporate identity replete with logos and mission statements indicate that avowedly radical or counternational queer projects in the United States of Empire are nonetheless “bound to the genericizing logic of American citizenship, and to the horizon of an official formalism—one that equates sexual object-choice with individual self-identity” (Berlant and Freeman 215). Similar claims can be made of Queer Eye and its made-in-the-USEfor-export ethos, even as the show sharply diverges from the political agenda of Queer Nation in its resolute commitment to upholding the protocols of compulsory heterosexuality. The show thus epitomizes what Jasbir Puar calls the conjunction of US politics and sexuality, evident in the widespread use of the coming-out metaphor to signify the country’s resurgent and unabashed imperial brand, the abandonment of the imperial closet by “a proud American empire” (1). For Puar, this process is in part enabled by the rise of “homonationalism,” a new queer exceptionalism, “a brand of homosexuality [that] operates as a regulatory script not only of normative gayness, queerness, or homosexuality, but also of the racial and national norms that reinforce these sexual subjects” in the post-closet American empire (Puar 2). The highly popular Queer Eye package and its makeover promise of straight male reinvention have been sold to countries across the globe. Those countries include Australia, where a local production of the show was broadcast for the first time in February 2005. Interestingly, the Australian version, which replicated exactly the US format, was not popular with local viewers and was discontinued after airing for a mere three weeks. That failure, however, may simply indicate the paradoxical extent to which a local queer habitus has little (client state) capacity to resist the mass-mediating power of the USE queer paradigm. In Finland, too, the local version of the Queer Eye franchise was not popular with viewers, though for different reasons: audiences complained that the show was even more overt than the US original in its product placements and hard-sell marketing ethos. The paradox of both local reactions lies in the fact that the US version of Queer

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Eye survives, unscathed and untroubled by the failure of its franchised progeny, arguably because its own televisual power rests on its internalized enlistment and pimp-like domestication of queer—a coalition of the willing queer—in the service of the heterosexual economy, global capitalism, and, ultimately, the United States of Empire.


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Foss, Paul. “The Children’s Crusade.” Art and Text 38 (January 1991): 22–26. Print. Gill, Rosalind. “Postfeminist Media Culture: Elements of a Sensibility.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 10.2 (2007): 147–166. Print. Goldberg, Jonathan. Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992. Print. Gorman-Murray, Andrew. “Queering Home or Domesticating Deviance?: Interrogating Gay Domesticity through Lifestyle Television.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 9 (2006): 227–147. Print. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2000. Print. Hocquenghem, Guy. Homosexual Desire. 1972. Trans. Daniella Dangoor. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993. Print. Idato, Michael. “Pride or Prejudice?” Sydney Morning Herald 29 September–5 October 2003. TV Guide. 4–5. Print. Jagose, Annamarie. Queer Theory. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1996. Print. Lane, Christopher. The Ruling Passion: British Colonial Allegory and the Paradox of Homosexual Desire. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995. Print. Lewis, Tania. “ ‘He Needs to Face His Fears With These Five Queers!’ Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, Makeover TV and the Lifestyle Expert.” Television and New Media 8.4 (November 2007): 285–311. Print. ———. Smart Living: Lifestyle Media and Popular Expertise. New York: Peter Lang, 2008. Print. Miller, Toby. Makeover Nation: The United States of Reinvention. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2008. Print. ———. “A Metrosexual Eye on Queer Guy.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 11.1 (2005): 112–117. Print.


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Muñoz, José Esteban. “Queer Minstrels for the Straight Eye: Race as Surplus in Gay TV.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 11.1 (2005): 101–102. Print. Pearson, Kyra, and Nina Maria Lozano-Reich. “Cultivating Queer Publics with an Uncivil Tongue: Queer Eye’s Critical Performances of Desire.” Text and Performance Quarterly 29.4 (October 2009): 383–402. Print. Puar, Jasbir K. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007. Print. Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. Official Web site. Bravo Cable TV Network. Web. 6 Dec. 2010. . Rich, Adrienne. “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.” The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader. Ed. Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin. New York and London: Routledge, 1993. 227–254. Print. Rosenberg, Buck Clifford. “Masculine Makeovers: Lifestyle Television, Metrosexuals and Real Blokes.” Exposing Lifestyle Television: The Big Reveal. Ed. Gareth Palmer. London: Ashgate, 2008. 145–158. Print. Torres, Sasha. “Why Can’t Johnny Shave?” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 11.1 (2005): 95–97. Print. US Department of Defense. “DoD 101: An Introductory Overview of the Department of Defense.” 2002, updated version. Web. 6 Dec. 2010. . Vicinus, Martha. Introduction. Lesbian Subjects: A Feminist Reader. Ed. Martha Vicinus. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996. 1–12. Print. Warner, Michael. Introduction. Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory. Ed. Michael Warner. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. vii–xxxi. Print. Wittig, Monique. The Straight Mind and Other Essays. Boston: Beacon, 1992. Print.

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NOTES INTRODUCTION 1. For more detail on the issue of globalization, see our volume, Colonization or Globalization? Postcolonial Explorations of Imperial Expansion (2010). 2. The original text by Theodor Adorno is as follows: “For a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live” (51).

CHAPTER 1 3. Susan Sontag, in her review of Vertigo for example, mentions that “when The Emigrants appeared in English in 1996, the acclaim bordered on awe.” 4. See, for example, Mark McCulloh’s analysis in a short section within his main chapter on Rings of Saturn, entitled “Landscape as Setting and Character,” which merely states the importance of place as a character (McCulloh 62). Other examples are included in the essays under “Part II: Landscape and Nature” in the collection of essays edited by Long and Whitehead (31–58). 5. Speaking in particular about the public inheritance of great English houses, David Lowenthal argues that “[t]he British national legacy now embraces the entire countryside” (Lowenthal 66). 6. See “Early Railways between New England and Canada.” The report states that “Sir Morton developed through sheer perseverance and hard work, and very soon he became a leading building contractor, the largest employer of labor in the world and the constructor of large sections of the railways, not only in Britain, but in Denmark, Canada, the Argentine and Russia. He won many notable contracts, including those for the Houses of Parliament in London and Nelson’s Column.”

CHAPTER 2 7. Unsworth, Sugar and Rum 178. Slater continues, illogically insisting that geographical fact supports his version of events: “Just over there … Perhaps

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where those woods are now, perhaps even nearer. The location is disputed but I have gone carefully into it and I am convinced it was on our side of the river.”

CHAPTER 3 8. Rushforth is here referring to Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s groundbreaking feminist literary analysis of nineteenth-century texts, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. 9. For a discussion of the tropes of fairy tales and their effects on children, see Donald Haase.

CHAPTER 4 10. Laura Doyle’s “What’s Between Us?” is the introduction to the 2004 Modern Fiction Studies edition devoted to Woolf. Doyle notes the movement toward reading Woolf with attention to class and also notes the more recent trend toward postcolonial readings of Woolf’s work. “Beyond class, of course, there is another charged threshold between Woolf and others— that between the citizens of British Empire and non-English or colonized subjects” (4). There is also an echo of “not here, not now” that crowns Foster’s Passage to India. 11. Here and Now was Woolf’s original title for The Years and is a phrase often used by Derrida for the relevance of his discussions in, for example, the essay “Faith and Knowledge.” 12. This is developed in Woolf’s antiwar arguments in Three Guineas. Of the “figure of a man … called in German and Italian Fuhrer or Duce; in our own language Tyrant or Dictator,” Woolf argues that “we cannot dissociate ourselves from that figure but are ourselves that figure. It suggests that we are not passive spectators doomed to unresisting obedience but by our thoughts and actions can ourselves change that figure” (142). 13. Page 1 of the New York Times, Sunday, 10 October 2004. 14. In the context of Three Guineas, I am using the proper name Woolf to designate the narrator, the persona that constitutes the figuration of the I of that text. 15. In Derrida’s last interview, he proposes “the abolition of both the word and the concept of ‘marriage’ in the civil and secular code. ‘Marriage,’ [a]

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religious, sacral, heterosexual value, with its procreative intent, for eternal fidelity, etc., is the State’s concession to the Christian church, particularly in its monogamous dimension which is neither Jewish … nor Muslim, as is well known.” He prefers, instead a “contractual ‘civil union,’ a kind of generalized, improved, flexible pact without limitation to gender or number. As for those who want to be united in marriage in the traditional sense— for which by the way I have the utmost respect—they could do it before the religious authority of their choosing.” An English translation has been published as Learning to Live Finally (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House Publishing, 2007).

CHAPTER 5 16. All translations from French are my own unless otherwise indicated. 17. To the best of my knowledge, Malika is not related to Mohamed Mokeddem. 18. Some authors, although revolutionary and forward thinking as they devised solutions to new postcolonial sociocultural and political dilemmas, later came to wield state oppression themselves. Cameroonian Ferdinand Oyono is a prime example. As a revolutionary fighting for independence, he conveyed his ideals about freedom in his seminal work Une Vie de Boy, which criticized French colonial rule in the 1950s. Ironically, as Minister of Foreign Affairs and Culture and later as a representative to the United Nations, he was often criticized for supporting repressive measures legislated by the postcolonial government against authors who spoke out against the political regime of Cameroon. 19. Sociocultural change is meant here in the Deleuzo-Guattarian sense. See their work Capitalisme et Schizophrénie: Tome 2 Mille Plateaux. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1980. 20. Lines of flight is meant here in the Deleuzo-Guattarian sense. See their work Capitalisme et Schizophrénie: Tome 2 Mille Plateaux. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1980. 21. The term le style heurté is used by Frantz Fanon in Les damnés de la terre to characterize the writing style of authors and intellectuals. 22. We only need to consider the recent ethnic tensions and racial violence in the French banlieues (urban ghettos) for assurance that xenophobia and racism are still an integral part of the fabric of contemporary Europe. 23. There are many Algerian authors and playwrights who, writing from abroad, continue to contextualize the bloody reality of a failed nation. The most

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prolific and vocal in the 1990s and in the first decade of the twenty-first century have been Assia Djebar, Rachid Mimouni, Boulem Sansal, Malika Mokeddem, Yasmina Khadra (Mohammed Moulessehoul), Salim Bachi, Alek Toumi Baylee. There are, of course, many others. 24. The English translation of Stora’s work is an amalgam of three volumes published originally in French by Editions La Découverte in 1991/1993, 1994, and 1995, the titles of which are Histoire de l’Algérie coloniale 1830–1954; Histoire de la guerre coloniale, 1954–1962; and Histoire de l’Algérie depuis l’indépendance. In general, Algerian authors and filmmakers have been at the forefront in denouncing the failed Algerian state. Certainly, the films of Merzak Allouache (Bab el-Oued City; 1997), Nadir Moknèche (Viva Laljérie; 2003) and Rabah Ameur-Zaimeche (Wesh wesh, qu’est-ce qui se passe; 2001) are good examples of the sociocultural and political dissent voiced by the exiled Algerian diaspora. 25. Retrieved from on 6 June 2010. 26. This is, of course, a pun in French: fils (in French the l is silent), which means son, and FIS, which stands for Front Islamique du Salut, are pronounced identically. The correlation between the words has often been made by scholars, journalists, activists, and Maghrebian authors. These unworthy fanatical sons, the inheritors of the nation, have maimed, raped, and killed. See the work Madah-Sartre by playwright Alec Toumi Baylee, who openly condemns the sons of Islamic fascism.

CHAPTER 6 27. Luso-descendants is the official name given to children of Portuguese immigrants by the Portuguese government. For the history of the term, see Marie-Claude Muñoz. I would like to thank Dr. Thomas Hallock for reading and giving helpful comments on a draft of this article. I dedicate this article to the memory of Dr. David Carr, who read the first draft. 28. All translations are mine. 29. The link between human and animal exploitation is discussed later in this chapter. 30. The jump in the title People of the Jump: Memories of Portuguese who fled towards France in the sixties refers to the crossing of borders without the necessary documentation. 31. Salazar (1889–1970) became Minister of Finances in 1928 and was Prime Minister from 1932 until his death. He led the dictatorial regime referred to as the Estado Novo until 1968, when he suffered an accident, lost his

Notes

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33. 34.

35.

36. 37.

38. 39. 40.

41. 42.

43.

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faculties, and died in 1970. His successor was Marcelo Caetano, in power until 25 April 1974, when the Carnation Revolution instituted a liberal democracy. For instance, Ahmed Boubeker asserts that European immigrants became “good French people” (Blanchard, Bancel, and Lemaire, “La fracture coloniale” 184). For accuracy, most Portuguese in France should not be called “immigrants” but “residents” as they have lived in France more than thirty years now. For a discussion of the (in)visibility of Portuguese and Algerian immigrants in French society, see Brigitte Jelen’s dissertation, “Immigrant In/Visibility: Portuguese and North Africans in Post-Colonial France.” Another contemporary example is Pig Tales (1996) by Marie Darrieussecq, which denounces the economic and sexual exploitation of a female worker and her transformation into a pig. A misanthrope, Salazar never married, adopted two daughters and surrounded himself with women (sisters and a servant). “Avoir une maison commode, propre et belle, / Un jardin tapissé d’espaliers odorans, / Des fruits, d’excellent vin, peu de train, peu d’enfants, / Posséder seul sans bruit une femme fidèle, / N’avoir dettes, amour, ni procès, ni querelle, / Ni de partage à faire avec que ses parents, / Se contenter de peu, n’espérer rien des Grands, / Régler tous ses desseins sur un juste modèle, / Vivre avec que franchise et sans ambition, / S’adonner sans scrupule à la dévotion, / Dompter ses passions, les rendre obéissantes, / Conserver l’esprit libre, et le jugement fort, / Dire son chapelet en cultivant ses entes, / C’est attendre chez soi bien doucement la mort” (Plantin n.p.). See Mark Turner and Gilles Fauconnier’s linguistic theory of blending (2002). Voltaire also vigorously denounced the crimes of the Portuguese Inquisition and colonialism in his philosophical tale Candide. The military service was extended during the colonial wars from fifteen months to four years with two mandatory years in Africa. Many Portuguese went to Africa before emigrating. For further reading on appropriations of nature in colonial contexts, see Helen Tiffin (2007). Narrated in José Vieira’s documentary La photo déchirée, the taboo experience of undocumented immigration is compared to contemporary African immigrants’ crossings to Europe. During the RPR party meeting in Orléans on 19 June 1991, Jacques Chirac stated: “It is certain that to have Spaniards, Polish, or Portuguese working

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44.

45. 46.

47. 48.

49. 50.

51.

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in our country is less problematic than to have Muslims and Blacks.” Then Chirac denounced social injustice by arguing that White European immigrants work whereas North Africans unfairly collect social benefits. He compared a typical working French family with what he called a typical immigrant family, comprising a man with three or four wives and more than twenty children; the immigrant father does not work but receives government benefits. Chirac went on, “add to it the noise and the smell. And saying that is not being racist” (my translation). (Chirac, 1991 n.p.) Pedro Lains also mentions that the Overseas French-Portuguese Bank established in France (affiliated with the Overseas National Bank present in the Portuguese colonies and now ex-colonies) had a monopoly on the transfer of funds from France to Portugal because of a relationship developed with the French banking system during the African colonization by both countries (235–263). The official organ is called the Secretary of State for Portuguese Communities (Secretaria do Estado das Comunidades Portuguesas). Many male or female Portuguese who never bought a house in France cannot afford to pay their rent once they retire. Their retirement pension is low because they held low-paying jobs and in some cases because of years of working undocumented jobs. They leave France (their children and grandchildren) to live in their houses in Portugal. See, for instance, French comic Patrick Timsit’s skit about the Portuguese, which has been denounced by some as racist. The Barcelos rooster is an unofficial symbol of Portugal and the subject of a legend. It has become a cultural icon sold in most markets and tourist stores and is often found in Portuguese households. In the legend, a dead rooster started to sing in order to save a Galician pilgrim on his way to meet Saint James of Compostela; the pilgrim was being unjustly accused of a crime and was about to be hanged in Barcelos. To prove his innocence, the pilgrim told his judge that the dead rooster would sing, and indeed it sang. Nacer Kettane refers here to descendants of Algerian residents in France. Tos and Portos are typical French insults for the Portuguese in France. Tos is the reclaimed name used by some Luso-descendants in France to affirm their pride in their Portuguese heritage and nationality (Fernandes, “Miki-le-toss ou comment” n.p.). The issue of ritual Muslim practices involving animals is often used in the French political debate to demonstrate the impossibility of Muslim immigrants’ assimilation as well as their “lack of civilization.” In his essay “Un mouton dans la baignoire” (2007; A sheep in the bathtub), Azouz Begag

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refers to then interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy’s comments during a television show in February 2007: “I don’t want excised young women anymore, no more forcefully married young girls, no more slitted sheeps’ throats in the bathtub.” 52. See, for instance, the documentary Food, Inc. (2008) by Robert Kenner for a similar critique of the American food industry.

CHAPTER 7 53. A version of this essay was originally published in Symplokē 16.1–2 (2008): 220–245. 54. Slavoj Žižek praises Hardt and Negri’s work as “nothing less than a rewriting of ‘The Communist Manifesto’ for our time” (qtd. in Eakin B7), while Frederic Jameson calls it “the first great new theoretical synthesis of the new millennium” (qtd. in Eakin B7). 55. In a 2001 interview with Emily Eakin in the New York Times, Michael Hardt is on record as having said, “Toni and I don’t think of this as a very original book. We’re putting together a variety of things that others have said. That’s why it’s been so well received. It’s what people have been thinking but not really articulated” (qtd. in Eakin B9). 56. The subsection of Empire actually entitled “The Politics of Difference” comprises four pages. 57. Though most sustained objections to Empire as a viable mode of social critique have come from the left (see, for example, Paul A. Passavant and Jodi Dean’s collection Empire’s New Clothes: Reading Hardt and Negri), my approach engages the work from a poststructuralist and postcolonial perspective that stresses the interplay between ethics and politics. 58. Hardt and Negri are, of course, not the only ones who have drawn attention to the current neutralization of cultural difference. Complementing their insights, Graham Huggan’s Postcolonial Exotic, published one year after Empire, analyzes the co-optation of difference by the market forces of globalization. He asks: “How has the corporate publishing world co-opted postcolonial writing, and to what extent does the academy collaborate in similar processes of co-optation?” (viii). Postcolonialism may indeed reflect “an anti-colonial intellectualism that reads and valorizes the signs of social struggle in the faultlines of literary and cultural texts” (6), but it nevertheless needs to become aware of the ways “the global late-capitalism system of commodity exchange” is domesticating the meaning and representation of cultural difference: “postcolonialism needs a greater understanding of

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59.

60. 61. 62. 63.

64.

65. 66.

67. 68.

69.

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the commodifying processes through which its critical discourses, like its literary products, are disseminated and consumed” (18). Stuart Hall is perhaps exemplary of this tendency: “The diaspora experience as I intend it here,” he writes, “is defined, not by essence or purity, but by the recognition of a necessary heterogeneity and diversity; by a conception of ‘identity’ which lives with and through, not despite, difference; by hybridity. Diaspora identities are those which are constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew, through transformation and difference” (Hall 235). On the limits of the multitude as a subject of resistance, see also Ernesto Laclau’s “Can Immanence Explain Social Struggle?” Foucault, “The Ethics of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom” 11; emphasis mine. For a more nuanced reading of the late Foucault, see Hardt and Negri’s earlier work (1994) in Labor of Dionysus 12. Since then, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have published The Commonwealth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), the last work in the Empire trilogy. Deleuze draws his inspiration for the internal difference of each singularity from Spinoza’s definition of substance: “By substance I mean that which is in itself and is conceived through itself; that is, that the conception of which does not require the conception of another thing from which it has to be formed” (Spinoza 217). See Deleuze’s Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza. Qtd. in Hallward 1997, 531; see Deleuze 1990, 301–321. “Each thing, insofar as it is in itself, endeavors to persist in its own being” (Spinoza 283). In The Savage Anomaly, Negri underscores the dynamism of the conatus: “Conatus is the force of being, the actual essence of the thing, of infinite duration, and, at the same time, it is conscious of all of this” (146). As Hardt puts it, “Spinoza’s physics are the cornerstone of his ethics” (Gilles Deleuze 92). Love as an ideal receives a more sustained treatment in their latest work, Commonwealth, where, as in the two other volumes, it is evoked in the last pages of their study. Love, along with happiness and joy, plays a central role in Hardt and Negri’s “political program against misery” (Commonwealth 380). In Multitude, Hardt and Negri revisit and qualify their assessment of the current global order. In light of the unilateral US action in Iraq, which was

Notes

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71.

72.

73. 74.

75.

76.

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clearly based on national interests (thus reintroducing the prior paradigm of European sovereignty), Hardt and Negri now paint empire in more ambivalent terms, seeing it as a “tendency” (xiii) rather than a generalized condition free from imperialist logic. See also pages 59–60. This hegemony, Glissant argues, increasingly takes the more subtle form of technological domination: “Only technical hegemony (that is, the acquired capacity to subjugate nature and consequently to intoxicate any possible culture with the knowledge created from this subjugation and which is suited to it) still permits the West … to continue to exercise its sovereignty which is no longer by right but by circumstance” (Caribbean Discourse 76). “In the conatus essendi, which is the effort to exist, existence is the supreme law. However, with the appearance of the face on the inter-personal level, the commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’ emerges as a limitation of the conatus essendi. It is not a rational limit. Consequently, interpreting it necessitates thinking it in moral terms, in ethical terms. It must be thought of outside the idea of force” (Lévinas, “The Paradox of Morality” 175). “Relation has its sources in these contacts and not in itself” (Glissant, Caribbean Discourse 160). In his influential genealogy of the modern self, Charles Taylor’s notion of “webs of interlocution” similarly underscores the self’s dependence on others, situating it “in relation to those conversation partners who were essential to my achieving self-definition [and] in relation to those who are now crucial to my continuing grasp of languages and self-understanding” (36). Glissant, Le discours antillais 339; my translation. Glissant, Poetics of Relation 186. “For centuries ‘generalization,’ as operated by the West, brought different community tempos into an equivalency in which it attempted to give a hierarchical order to the times they flowered” (62). Glissant elaborates on this notion in the Traité: “I claim for all the right to opacity, which is not enclosure. I do this in reaction against numerous reductions to the false clarity of universal models. I do not need to ‘understand’ anyone, individual, community, or people, to ‘take it with me’ at the cost of suffocating it and therefore losing it in numbing totality that I would control, in order to accept living with it and taking risks with it” (29). For Derrida, this turn to Europe should not be understood as an expression of “Eurocentric illusions” or “pro-European nationalism” (“Une Europe” 3). In Le droit à la philosophie du point de vue cosmopolitique, he had precisely denounced Europe’s willful conflation of Eurocentrism

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77.

78.

79.

80.

81.

82.

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(nationalism) and universalism, the naturalization of its political hegemony through the ideological belief in its “special mission: not only to found history as such, and primarily as science, but just as much to found a rational philosophical history … and to ‘one day give laws’ to all the other continents” (27). This is, of course, not the one-dimensional Derrida depicted by Hardt and Negri. Their claim that “Enlightenment is the problem and postmodernism is the solution” simply fails to attest to the full force of Derrida’s critical dialogue with the Enlightenment (Hardt and Negri, Empire 140). Chambers 32. Earlier in his work, Chambers credits Derrida’s reflections on language, his “opening up the gaps of language, contesting its presumed unity and metaphysical authority” (29), for “ha[ving] provoked an extensive revaluation of political and cultural discourses, particularly in the area of subaltern studies and post-colonial criticism” (29). Take, for example, Homi Bhabha, for whom language is the site of political resistance: “It is the realm of representation and the process of signification that constitute the space of the political” (Location 190). “The singular, in each case, is constituent of itself, expressive of itself, immediate to itself. That the singular creates the medium of its existence means that it is not specific to external criteria or frames of reference” (Hallward, Absolutely Postcolonial 3). The later Lévinas of Otherwise than Being—who shifts emphasis from the face-to-face encounter as the paradigmatic ethical scene to the question of language—can arguably be read differently. Jacques Derrida, “ ‘Eating Well,’ or the Calculation of the Subject: An Interview with Jacques Derrida,” Who Comes After the Subject? ed. Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy (New York: Routledge, 1991), 115. “As an ethical practice,” writes Nicole Simek, “eating well seeks to overcome the binary oppositions of digestion and exclusion, or absorption and expulsion” (22). It is also a precarious and tentative response to the aporetic structure of obligation and hospitality, negotiating or navigating between the unconditional and conditional demands of the other. See Derrida, “Autoimmunity” 130. Simon Critchley makes a similar objection to Jean-Luc Nancy’s notion of being-with: “Thus, even given the radicality of Nancy’s rewriting of Being and Time, his conception of being-with constitutes what one might call a neutralizing of ethical transcendence or a flattening of the structure of ethical experience.… Nancy’s conception of being-with risks reducing

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intersubjectivity to relation of reciprocity, equality and symmetry, where I rub shoulders or stand shoulder to shoulder with the other, but where I do not face him” (251).

CHAPTER 8 83. The character Raymond Barton, Michael Langford’s childhood buddy and his biographer, says that “Asia had swallowed him [Michael]” (Koch, Highways to a War 3). According to Robin Gerster, this statement echoes the words of Labour Opposition leader Arthur Calwell: “Expressing a deep-seated fear of Asians that had been exacerbated by the actions of the Japanese during World War II, the Labour Opposition leader Arthur Calwell famously used the same image in 1964, in denouncing the military involvement in Vietnam on the grounds that he did not want to see more of his countrymen ‘swallowed by the quicksands of Asia.’ ” In “A Legendary War,” Australian Book Review 173 (1995): 7. 84. See Vernay, Water From the Moon: Illusion and Reality in the Works of Australian Novelist Christopher Koch (Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2007) for the postcolonial dimension in Koch’s novels and for a comprehensive bibliography of articles inspired by postcolonial theory dealing with Koch’s novels. 85. This statement is from a personal interview with Paul Sharrad conducted on 22 October 2003, the transcript of which is available in my doctoral dissertation entitled Illusion et réalité dans l’œuvre romanesque de Christopher John Koch.

CHAPTER 9 86. I use the term global empire to describe the global condition that others refer to as the new world order (e.g., Phillips) or empire (e.g., Hardt and Negri). I do not completely subscribe to any of these terms as they are described by those who have introduced them. Furthermore, in this chapter I use the term light colonialism to describe the particular condition of the Caribbean that needs to be critically studied in relation to empire building, since lessons can be drawn from the Caribbean case regarding how globalization operates and what alternatives are left for the inhabitants of the global empire. 87. See for instance Jordan, Nnadi, Caldwell, McCusker, and D’Hulst and De Bleeker.

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88. In other important works, such as Nation and Narration (1990) and The Location of Culture (1994), Bhabha also omits the Caribbean as a colonized space. 89. Antonio Benítez Rojo, La isla que se repite (1989). While the postmodern accepts that we are beyond the reach of the modern, at the same time it acknowledges its dependency on the latter, i.e., the impossibility of detaching itself from the modern. Contradiction is at the heart of the idea of the postmodern. The postmodern accepts the end of history and of the great narratives (e.g., identity, nation) but it recognizes that it cannot (yet) completely undo (or deconstruct) these narratives. The postcolonial generally refers to the existential condition of formerly colonized nations and territories. It attempts to respond to the question of the degree to which the process of “decolonization” has been achieved in these areas, and to identify what colonial remainders or traumas persist in the individual and collective memories of formerly colonized peoples. The postcolonial, however, does not take into account the more ambiguous, less explicit postcolonial cases such as Puerto Rico, Curaçao, Aruba, and Martinique, which are in every sense (politically, economically, culturally) wavering between a colonial and a postcolonial condition. There is a huge amount of bibliography on the postmodern and the postcolonial. For a discussion of the postmodern, see the unequaled Postmodern Studies Series (44 volumes) edited by D’Haen and Bertens (1989–2010), Bertens and Fokkema, as well as Best and Kellner; the history of postmodernism is provided in Bertens, Idea. For a discussion of the postcolonial, see Adam and Tiffin, Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, and Xie; on the relation between the Caribbean and the postcolonial, see Hallward’s chapter on Glissant in Absolutely Postcolonial, Shalini, and Zabus. Among the many works that explore the relation between the postmodern and the postcolonial, see Appiah and D’Haen and Bertens. 90. See, for instance, Bracho, Ette, Hoeg, and Schwieger Hiepko. 91. Decaffeinated is here understood in Slavoj Žižek’s sense: all dangerous substances have been removed (Žižek 507). 92. In Phillips’ view of an unhomely world there is a sound echo of Tim Brennan’s book At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now (1997). 93. “[T]echnical hegemony (that is, the acquired capacity to subjugate nature and consequently to intoxicate any possible culture with the knowledge created from this subjugation and which is suited to it) still permits the West, which has known the anxieties resulting from a challenged legitimacy, to continue to exercise its sovereignty which is no longer by right but by circumstance. As it abandons right for circumstance,

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95. 96.

97.

98.

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the West dismantles its vision of History (with a capital H) and its conception of a sacred Literature.” In Edouard Glissant, Le discours antillais (Paris: Gallimard, 1981), 76; emphasis mine. See Gyssels for a detailed analysis of Glissant’s concept of tout-monde (the name he uses to refer to our global village) and the role of technology in contemporary globalization. Agamben, Homo Sacer 18. According to Agamben, “Law is made of nothing but what it manages to capture inside itself through the inclusive exclusion of the exception: it nourishes itself on this exception and is a dead letter without it. In this sense, the law truly “has no existence in itself ”, but rather has its being in the very life of men. The sovereign decision traces and from time to time renews this threshold of indistinction between outside and inside, exclusion and inclusion, nomos and physis, in which life is originarily expected in law. Its decision is the position of an undecidable.” In Agamben, Homo Sacer 27. The status of Puerto Rico as inclusive exclusion is best visible in the renewing of Puerto Rico’s status as Free Associated State, related to the renewing of referenda on the status of the island. See Agamben, Homo Sacer 10, 38; State of Exception 4. “Today … the economic, commercial, cultural and financial Centers of the world tend to a dematerialized expansion into cyberspace.… Here the hypnosis is not directed towards a specific Centre as you live it now, but towards the magnetized zone of an entity that cannot be localised, a fog of values exuding from the totality of dominating Centres, and drifting-circulating within cyberspace” (“Aujourd’hui … les Centres économiques, commerciaux, culturels et financiers … tendent à une expansion dématérialisée dans le cyberespace. … Ici, l’hypnose n’est plus en direction d’un Centre particulier comme tu le vis en ce moment, mais la zone aimantée d’une entité inlocalisable, un brouillard de valeurs sécrété par l’ensemble des Centres dominateurs, et flottant-circulant dans le cyberespace”). Patrick Chamoiseau, Ecrire en pays dominé (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 219. “[H]ackers and cyberpunks are presented by Chamoiseau’s Old Warrior as cultural negationists—in the mold of the Guy Debord’s Situationists—who will not allow cyberspace to become the medium of global capitalist monoculture, yet are not attempting to impose a monoculture of their own.” R. Watts, “The ‘Wounds of Locality,’ ” 119–120. On the concept of light colonialism, see Kristian Van Haesendonck, ¿Encanto o espanto? Identidad y nación en la novela puertorriqueña actual.

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99. The trickster is a figure that has made its way into different literatures and cultures on the planet, ranging from Africa to America and Asia. On the trickster in American and American ethnic literature, see Landay, Madcaps, Screwballs, and Con Women and Smith, Writing Tricksters; for a study on the global presence of the trickster, see Hynes and Doty, Mythical Trickster Figures. 100. “I think that archipelagic places today, like the Caribbean, are places where the sea does not concentrate, but diffracts, where there is a very intense movement of shattering [éclatement]” (“Je crois que les lieux archipélagiques aujourd’hui, comme la Caraïbe, sont des lieux où la mer ne concentre pas, mais diffracte, où le mouvement d’éclatement est très grand”) (Glissant, Poétique de la relation 23).

CHAPTER 10 101. In his Colonial Subjects: Puerto Ricans in a Global Perspective, Ramón Grosfoguel offers a complete analysis of the colonial and political issues of the Island. 102. Castellanos’ work, Elegías de varones ilustres de Indias, was published in Madrid, though separately, in two installments: the first part in 1589 and, posthumously, in 1847, in Volume IV of the Biblioteca de autores españoles series. 103. Winner of the first prize for historical fiction in 1959. 104. In this respect, Marqués’ approach may be associated with Gayatri Spivak’s idea of the subaltern, though the Puerto Rican people do voice their opinions—unlike many subsistence peasants, farmers, and workers in the so-called developing world or third world. 105. This is the name given in 1493 by Christopher Columbus. 106. It was Ponce de León who, upon landing at the harbor, named it Puerto Rico, literally meaning “Rich Port.” Eventually, this became the official name of the entire island, and San Juan was chosen to be the name of the capital. 107. “El puertorriqueño dócil” (The docile Puerto Rican) was the winner of the Essay Prize by the Ateneo Puertorriqueño in 1960. 108. The publication of Seva may be compared to Orson Welles’ radio version of H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds (1898), the reading of which was broadcast on 30 October1938 as part of a Halloween special program, suggesting that Martians were indeed invading the United States; the original novel takes place in nineteenth-century England.

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109. This fear of independence was strengthened further after the Cuban exiles arrived in Puerto Rico fleeing Castro’s regime. Unconditionally allied to the United States, they received US citizenship swiftly, were able to vote in the island’s elections, and, unlike the majority of Puerto Ricans, were eligible for low-interest federal loans to help them start businesses and purchase homes. The Cuban vote is known to have favored the prostatehood party since the mid-1960s. 110. Carl Sandburg, prolific historian, journalist, poet, and novelist born in the United States, whose parents were Swedish, is famous for having won two Pulitzer Prizes. Ferré’s third rendering comes from Sandburg’s autobiography, Always the Young Strangers (1953). 111. Roosevelt Roads was built in 1943 and named in honor of the 32nd president of the United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt because, upon visiting Ceiba decades earlier, he fell in love with the area. The Navy made the decision to relocate Roosevelt Roads to Mayport, Florida’s naval station. This move was made effective on 31 March 2004. 112. Actually, the portrait of Martínez is blank, alleging the nonagenarian’s fear of retribution, decades later, by the US military forces. 113. This word is crossed out in the mock hand-written journal entry. 114. “It is now the government’s duty to explain: Where is Doctor Víctor Cabañas?” (translation is my own). 115. Cuento not only refers to the literary genre of the short story, but it is also used to mean what is not true; hence, Coss’ use of the word has a double entendre: a story, that is, a lie. 116. The edition of Seva in book form contains a second section comprising appendixes of photographs, essays, and articles that appeared in newspapers as well as poems and songs that were composed in honor of the supposedly vanquished. In the context of the novel, these extras appear to be as fictional as the story itself, if not more so. The 2007 edition of Seva (San Juan: Norma) includes critical and analytical essays written by scholars and academicians. 117. Boricua is the name given to the original inhabitants of Boriken, renamed Puerto Rico by the Spanish conquistadores. Being a Taino word, its spelling varies: Borinken, Borinquén, etc. Today, the term boricua is used interchangeably with puertorriqueño. 118. There is, however, a group claiming direct lineage from the Tainos whose members have organized themselves into “The Jatibonico Taino Tribal Nation of Boriken and the Government of the Jatibonico Taino People.” The group is listed on the US government Web site under Tribal

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Governments and can be accessed directly at its Web site, . 119. A recent incident was the killing of 72-year-old Filiberto Ojeda Ríos by federal agents who were attempting to serve a warrant for his arrest on 23 September 2005, a day that marks the 1868 creole revolt against Spanish rule in Puerto Rico. Ojeda Ríos was the leader of “Los Macheteros,” a group formed in the 1970s advocating Puerto Rico’s independence through armed struggle. He had been on the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s most-wanted list since 1990. Ojeda Ríos was shot in his own house during a violent confrontation with FBI agents and operatives of the Puerto Rican police, who cordoned off the premises and did not allow any medical attention for nearly twenty hours while the victim bled to death. 120. Congress, without a request from Puerto Ricans, granted US citizenship to the islanders on 2 March 1917, through the Jones Act. For more information about the complex Puerto Rican case, see also Collins, Bosworth, and Soto-Class, The Economy of Puerto Rico: Restoring Growth (Washington, DC: Brookings Institute Press, 2006).

CHAPTER 11 121. In Empire (2000), Hardt and Negri argue: “Empire is not a weak echo of modern imperialism but a fundamentally new form of rule” (146). Empire is not the extension of one nation (as imperialism might have been), but rather works in the service of decentered, free-flowing global capital (180) and power (190). 122. For comprehensive histories of Central America, see John A. Booth, Thomas W. Walker, and Christine J. Wade, Understanding Central America (2006); Ralph Lee Woodward, Jr., Central America: A Nation Divided (1999); and the monumental volumes of Edelberto Torres-Rivas, ed., Historia General de Centroamérica, Vols. 1–6 (1993). 123. The full text of the CAFTA-DR that was consulted was retrieved from the Office of the United States Trade Representative Web site. . 124. In Multitude (2004), Hardt and Negri mention in passing US military intervention and imperialism and Marxist armed struggles in El Salvador and Nicaragua.

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125. No one to my knowledge has examined the proliferation of short-story collections in the context of postwar, neoliberal Central American literary production. Most studies have focused on the return to experimentation with the novel form (Ortiz Wallner “Las batallas,” “Transiciones”; Leyva; Galich; Aguirre Aragón; Mackenbach “Después”). 126. Mary Louise Pratt, in “The Short Story: The Long and Short of It” (1981), proposes that short stories may be read as “fragments of a life” (182) and, when structurally connected in a text or collection, may form cohesive yet independent parts of a short-story cycle or composite novel giving insight into larger subjective and social conditions. As seen in Hernández’s and Mejía’s respective short story cycles, this genre may be “used to convey a particular social perspective too” (188), in this case perspectives and subjectivities associated with the multitude of Central America. 127. In The Short Story Cycle: A Genre Companion and Reference Guide, Susan Garland Mann explains that the most basic element of the short story cycle is that “the stories are both self-sufficient and interrelated” (15). Margot Kelley, in “Gender and Genre: The Case of the Novel-inStories,” further explains that the “novel-in-stories” (a term that she coins) and its precursor the “short story cycle” comprise “mutually enriching stories” that can stand alone but that form a larger narrative (297). Moreover, Kelley describes the novel-in-stories as stories bound by a structural “connectivity,” discussed in depth in my analysis of Mejia’s text. Here, I use Garland Mann’s and Kelley’s theorizing on the short story cycle and novel-in-stories to suggest that Hernández’s Mediodía de frontera and Mejía’s La Tía Sofi y los otros cuentos belong to these genres. Part of a larger trend in contemporary Central American literary production, other short story cycles and novels-in-stories include Rocío Tábora’s Guardarropa (2001; Wardrobe) and Cosas que Rozan (2001; Things That Scrape); Marta Susana Prieto Animalario (2002; Animalry); Lety Elvir’s Sublimes y perversos (cuentos) (2005; Sublime and Perverse Stories); and Claudia Hernández’s Olvida uno (2006; One Forgets). All of these texts written by Central American women are tied to particular local neoliberal conditions and represent the marginality of various subjects of the global economy. As Kelley suggests, this is the case for women who write novels-in-stories. According to Kelley, the novel-in-stories is a commonly used genre for relating issues of gender and subjectivity, as can be seen in Central American women writers’ focus on women, children, and other marginal subjects in their interlinked stories.

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128. In Empire, Hardt and Negri do not explicitly examine the case of Central America or its specific countries, although discussion of the expansion of global capital in local sites, the impossibility of the local to exist outside of empire, the (re)production of biopower at all levels in postwar societies, and the potential for the multitude (the former revolutionary masses) to become a new force of liberation in Central America (3–66; 102–103), to name only a few things, are certainly issues of empire worth considering. The levels of violence in Central American societies are but symptomatic of embedded social controls associated with a biopolitics of empire in local sites. 129. All translations in this section are mine. 130. See Raymond Buve, “Conclusions,” and Jorge Witker, “Social and Economic Rights within the Context of the FTAA.” Witker identifies “social rights” as those connected with economic rights to be protected by the state. As such, social rights include, at a minimum, “the right to work under fair and favourable conditions”; “the right to social security (unemployment insurance, sick leave, etc.)”; “the right to an adequate standard of living, which implies access to food, housing and health services”; “the rights of the elderly and other vulnerable sectors”; and “the right to education and the benefits of culture” (Witker 97–78). Expanded to a collective level, social rights refer to the rights of ethnic, religious, and linguistic minorities to defend, preserve, and transmit their identities to new generations; of communities to have access to cultural heritage, natural resources, and self-determination; and on a more planetary level, the universal “right to peace and the right to a healthy environment” (97). Witker makes clear that the global economy and attendant national neoliberal governments hardly observe and protect the social rights of people. Witker concludes that “there are more human rights violations of all kinds in the less developed countries, especially in regard to economic and social rights” (98), precisely because they are tied to a market economy wherein “efficiency [is] the supreme value” (98). That people do not have adequate access to food, work, fair wages, health, education, culture, and other social rights can be rationalized within market performance. 131. “Que a uno le haga falta un brazo es incómodo cuando se tiene un rinoceronte. Se vuelve más difícil si el rinoceronte es pequeño y jugetón, como el mío. Es fastidioso. La gente de estas ciudades bonitas y pacíficas no está acostumbrada a ver a un muchacho con un brazo de menos. La gente de estas ciudades bonitas y pacíficas no está acostumbrada a ver a un tipo con un brazo de menos y a un rinoceronte de más saltando a su alrededor. Un se vuelve un espectáculo en las ciudades aburridas como ésta y tiene

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que andar por las calles sorportando que la gente lo mire, le sonría y hasta se acerque para platicar de lo lindo que está su rinoceronte, señor, no lo compró acá, ¿verdad?” (Hernández 9). 132. In “Gender and Genre: The Case of the Novel-in-Stories” (1995; 304), Margot Kelley suggests that novels-in-stories are held together by thematic and structural tensions: each story preserves its autonomy yet is connected to the larger whole of the text. Waldina Mejía also explains that La Tía Sofi y los otros cuentos is precisely a “novela-cuentos” (personal communication, 1 September 2007), a novel-in-stories, presenting multiple perspectives and voices to approximate a larger narrative. In the case of Honduran society, the larger narrative is that of social crisis, impunity, corruption, and violence connecting all the characters in the stories and underlying all facets of life.

CHAPTER 12 133. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word comes from patois and is of Angolan origins. Though it refers colloquially to varieties of okra used in stews or to the stews themselves, it seems reasonable that in Conrad’s text it refers to some kind of plant that has been dried in order to be used as an instrument. 134. Casement has been a key figure in twentieth-century Irish cultural and political life. Interest in Casement outside of Ireland has also grown substantially in recent years. For a recent discussion of Casement and an introduction to Casement scholarship see Lucy McDiarmid, The Irish Art of Controversy and Patrick Robert Mullen, “Roger Casement’s Global English: From Human Rights to the Homoerotic.” 135. Robert Aldrich even suggests a sociological dimension to this connection in his historical survey in Colonialism and Homosexuality.

CHAPTER 13 136. An earlier version of this essay appeared in Tamkang Review 30.4 (Summer 2000): 117–134, and is here reprinted, with some modifications, with the kind permission of that publication. 137. See Elaine Yee Lin Ho; Qadri Mohammed Ismail. 138. For example, the date of Indonesia’s invasion of East Timor, December 7, is echoed in the novel as the date of the Malais’ invasion of Danu.

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139. See also S. W. Perera. 140. Nonetheless, the novel’s comparatively tame treatment of sexual situations raised hackles in the Sri Lankan press and was condemned as immoral; for something a bit bolder, see Parivaraj’s Shiva and Arun. 141. This essay emphasizes the imbrication of sexuality and nation, but for a discussion of the importance of the loss-and-recreation of “home,” see Sharanya Jayawickrama. 142. Nor, it seems, is it acknowledged by Amitav Ghosh, who analyzes the story principally as a nostalgic reminiscence of an Edenic nation from which the hero has been expelled by ethnic strife—passing over the entrance into a sexual “nation” that the tale presages. 143. See my Postcolonial, Queer and Postcolonial and Queer Theories. 144. See Gayatri Gopinath. 145. See also Peter Jackson and Gerard Sullivan, eds., Multicultural Queer.

CHAPTER 14 146. Earlier versions of this essay have appeared as “Queer Eye’s Primping and Pimping for Empire et al.,” Feminist Media Studies 4.2 (Summer 2004): 210–213; and as “Making Queer for the United States of Empire,” Australian Humanities Review 38 (April 2006): no pag. Web. I would like to thank Maureen McMahon and Murray Pratt for their specific input as well as the participants in the Sexual Revolutions Symposium at the University of Wollongong in December 2004 for their feedback and commentary. 147. Those countries include Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Ireland, Malaysia, the Philippines, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, the UK, Venezuela, and many more. Local versions of the Queer Eye franchise have appeared, with varying degrees of audience support, in Australia, Denmark, Finland, Italy, Spain (Operación G), and the UK. In the US, Queer Eye debuted on the cable network Bravo on 15 July 2003 and ran until 2007. The most notable spinoff has been Queer Eye for the Straight Girl, while the British version has also been shown on US TV (Lewis, Smart Living 86, n. 1). 148. My use of USE, as opposed to USA, is intended as a sardonic comment on the longstanding debates in American Studies, and in the United States more broadly, about the imperial nature of the United States since its inception. As my usage makes clear, I stand on the side of those who accept the USA’s imperial credentials.

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149. For elaborations, see Lane; Aldrich. 150. For an overview of this particular trend in queer theory, see Jagose. 151. The term homographesis was developed by Lee Edelman in his 1994 study Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory. 152. My thanks to Jonathan Bollen for drawing my attention to the article by Foss. 153. Indeed, the claim is at odds with the positions taken by many of the contributors to the volumes Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism (Cruz-Malavé and Manalansan) and Passing Lines: Sexuality and Immigration (Epps, Valens, and Johnson González).

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Paul Allatson is the head of the International Studies Program in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Technology, Sydney. He has published widely in the areas of Latino studies; new American studies; Latin American studies; and cultural, sexuality, media, and literary studies. He is the author of Latino Dreams: Transcultural Traffic and the U.S. National Imaginary (Rodopi, 2002) and Key Terms in Latino/a Cultural and Literary Studies (Blackwell, 2007), and is coeditor with Jo McCormack of Exile Cultures, Misplaced Identities (Rodopi, 2008). He is the founding editor of the multilingual PORTAL: Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies (utsEpress). Martine Fernandes is an agrégée and doctor from the University of California, Berkeley, and Paris IV-Sorbonne. She is an assistant professor of French at the University of South Florida, St. Petersburg, and specializes in francophone and contemporary French literature. She has published Les écrivaines francophones en liberté: Farida Belghoul, Maryse Condé, Assia Djebar, Calixthe Beyala (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2007) and articles in L’Esprit Créateur, Dalhousie French Studies, Expressions maghrébines, and Nouvelles études francophones. She also contributed to Des femmes écrivent la guerre (ed. Frédérique Chevillot and Anna Norris), Paroles, langues et silences en héritage (ed. Caroline Andriot-Saillant), and Emerging Perspectives on Ken Bugul (ed. Jeanne-Sarah de Larquier and Ada U. Azodo) with essays on Nina Bouraoui, Alice Machado, Mercedes Deambrosis, and Ken Bugul. Her current research focuses on Portuguese immigrant writing and film in France and the memory of the Salazar dictatorship. John C. Hawley is a professor and former chair of the English Department at Santa Clara University in California. He is the author of Amitav Ghosh: An Introduction and the editor of thirteen other volumes—most recently, LGBTQ America Today; India in Africa, Africa in India: Indian Ocean Cosmopolitanisms; and (with R. Krishnaswamy) The Postcolonial and the Global. He is president of the US chapter of the Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies and associate editor of the South Asian Review. Lucienne Loh is currently an associate lecturer at Brunel University and Royal Holloway, University of London, where she teaches a range of courses in postcolonial studies, contemporary literature, and culture and critical theory. Her monograph “Cosmopolitanism and Nostalgia: Thinking and Feeling Beyond

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the Metropolis” is currently under consideration by Palgrave Macmillan, and she is embarking on a postdoctoral project examining dissident writing in the twenty-first century. She is associate editor of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing and book review editor for British and anglophone fiction for Contemporary Literature. She is also a member of the Executive Committee of the Postcolonial Studies Association and coedits the association’s newsletter. Jennifer P. Nesbitt is an associate professor of English at Penn State York, where she teaches British literature, women’s literature, and postcolonial studies. She has published Narrative Settlements: Geographies of British Women’s Fiction between the Wars (University of Toronto Press, 2005). Currently, she is working on “Rum Histories,” a study of rum and the trope of intoxication in novels of decolonization. Early work from this project has been published in Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature and in ARIEL. Her work has also appeared in Twentieth-Century Literature, The Journal of the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society, The Journal of Negro History, Clues, and in the collection Post-Colonial Perspectives on Women Writers from Africa and the African Diaspora. Asima F. X. Saad Maura teaches at the University of Delaware and holds a BA in philosophy and Hispanic studies from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Puerto Rico, an MA from the Universidad de Puerto Rico, and a doctoral degree from the University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests include the meeting of cultures from the first transatlantic voyages upon and beyond the so-called discovery of the “New” World through the more recent Cuban, Dominican, and Puerto Rican diasporas. She has published a fully annotated edition of Lazarillo de Tormes (1554; Stockcero 2007) and has published articles on diverse topics in various literary journals; her critical edition of Bernardo de Balbuena’s poem Grandeza mexicana (1604) is currently in press with Cátedra publishing house in Madrid. Patrick Robert Mullen is an assistant professor of English at Northeastern University. He has published articles in Novel, Public Culture, and Critical Quarterly. He recently completed a book entitled The Poor Bugger’s Tool: Irish Modernism, Queer Labor, and Postcolonial Politic (Oxford University Press, forthcoming). His first book, Novel Management: Capital and Literary Form at the Turn of the Century, was published by Oxford University Press in 2009. Silvia Nagy-Zekmi is a professor of Hispanic and cultural studies in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, as well as director of the Center


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for Arab and Islamic Studies at Villanova University. She has taught both undergraduate- and graduate-level courses on Latin American and Middle Eastern / North African literature, in addition to courses on cultural studies and theory—particularly postcolonial theory, which has informed her research of the past decade. This inquiry into postcolonial theories led to the publication of Paralelismos transatlánticos: Postcolonialidad y narrativa femenina en América Latina y Africa del Norte (1996; Trans-Atlantic Parallelisms: Postcoloniality and Writing by Women in Latin America and North Africa); as well as the publication of edited volumes, such as Le Maghreb Postcolonial (2003), Paradoxical Citizenship: Edward Said (2006), and Moros en la costa: Orientalismo en Latinoamérica (forthcoming from Iberoamericana/Vervuert/Verlag), and Colonization or Globalization? Postcolonial Explorations of Imperial Expansion (2010; with Chantal Zabus)—in addition to several articles on the subject. Her latest co-edited volume with Karyn Hollis is Truth to Power: Public Intellectuals In and Out of Academe (2010). She has published several other volumes on Latin American literature and culture; among them is Democracy in Chile: The Legacy of September 11, 1973, coedited with Fernando Leiva (2005), which was awarded the Arthur P. Whitaker prize for best book in Latin American studies. She is currently working on a book-length project titled The Postcolonial Condition: Representations of Nationhood, Identity, and Ethnicity in Latin America. Valérie K. Orlando is an associate professor of French and francophone literatures in the Department of French and Italian at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is the author of four books: Nomadic Voices of Exile: Feminine Identity in Francophone Literature of the Maghreb (Ohio University Press, 1999), Of Suffocated Hearts and Tortured Souls: Seeking Subjecthood Through Madness in Francophone Women’s Writing of Africa and the Caribbean (Lexington Books, 2003), Francophone Voices of the ‘New Morocco’ in Film and Print: (Re)presenting a Society in Transition (PalgraveMacmillan, 2009), and Screening Morocco: Filmic Depictions of a Changing Society (Ohio University Press, 2010). She has written numerous articles on francophone women’s writing from the African diaspora, on African cinema, and on French literature and culture. Ana Patricia Rodríguez is an associate professor of US Latina/o and Central American literatures in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Maryland, College Park. She graduated with a PhD from the University of California at Santa Cruz. Her research focuses on US Latina/o and Central American literary and cultural production, transnational popular culture,

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and (post)trauma studies. Her most recent book, Dividing the Isthmus: Central American Transnational Literatures and Cultures (the University of Texas Press, 2009) examines narratives of economic, symbolic, and human excess in Central American isthmian and diasporic texts. She is currently working on a second book project, tentatively titled “Same Story, Different Endings”: Trauma and (Post)Memory in the Salvadoran Diaspora, wherein she explores the construction of traumatic and diasporic memory of Salvadorans in the United States in film, music, performance, testimonios, and other narrative practices. Kristian Van Haesendonck has taught Spanish and Latin American literature and culture in the United States at Princeton and Villanova and is currently a researcher in comparative Latin American, Spanish, and Caribbean literatures at the Centre for Comparative Studies, University of Lisbon in Portugal. He graduated in Romance languages from the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium and obtained his PhD in Latin American literature from Leiden University in the Netherlands. Dr. Haesendonck is the author of ¿Encanto o espanto? Identidad y nación en la novela puertorriqueña actual (Frankfurt-Madrid: Vervuert-Iberoamericana, 2008), a comparative study of contemporary Puerto Rican novels and has published articles on Caribbean literature and culture. Jean-François Vernay is the author of Water from the Moon: Illusion and Reality in the Works of Australian Novelist Christopher Koch (Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2007) and of a conspectus of the Australian novel, Panorama du roman australien des origines à nos jours (Paris: Hermann, 2009), now available in translation. He is also a co-guest editor of Antipodes: A North American Journal of Australian Literature. Special Issue: Fear in Australian Literature and Film (2009). Anca Vlasopolos is a professor of English and comparative literature at Wayne State University. She has published The New Bedford Samurai (2007), which received the Literature for the Environment Award; Penguins in a Warming World (2007); No Return Address: A Memoir of Displacement (2000), recipient of the YMCA Writer’s Voice Grant for Creative Non-Fiction, the Wayne State University Board of Governors Award, and the Arts Achievement Award; and The Symbolic Method of Coleridge, Baudelaire, and Yeats (1983). Her other published works include over thirty scholarly articles and book chapters on literature, theatre, and film; the poetry chapbooks Through the Straits, at Large and The Evidence of Spring; and a detective novel, Missing Members (trans. Miembros Ausentes, Madrid, 2008). She is the author of over two hundred poems and short stories, as well as of Arts at an Exhibition and The Poetry


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Harmonium, a music and poetry compact-disc collaboration with composer Christian Kreipke and poets Carol Carpenter and Suzanne Scarfone. Andrea L. Yates, PhD, teaches literature and critical theory at the University of Rhode Island. Her work has appeared in the journal Virginia Woolf Miscellany and in the essay collection After Beckett. She is currently completing a book manuscript entitled Virginia Woolf and Jacques Derrida: Between Literature and Philosophy. Chantal Zabus holds the IUF (Institut universitaire de France) Chair in Postcolonial Comparative Studies and Gender Studies at the Universities of Paris XIII and Paris III-Sorbonne Nouvelle. She is the author of Between Rites and Rights: Excision in Women’s Experiential Texts and Human Contexts (Stanford University Press, 2007); The African Palimpsest (Rodopi, 1991; enlarged edition 2007); and Tempests after Shakespeare (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). She has also edited Le secret: Motif et moteur de la littérature (with Jacques Derrida, Louvain, 1999); Changements au féminin en Afrique noire: Littérature et anthropologie, 2 volumes (L’Harmattan, 2000; Italian trans. 2003); Fearful Symmetries: Essays and Testimonies Around Excision and Circumcision (Rodopi, 2009; 2nd edition forthcoming, 2011); and, with Silvia Nagy-Zekmi, Colonization or Globalization? Postcolonial Explorations of Imperial Expansion (Lexington Books, 2010). She is currently researching homosexualities in African literatures. Zahi Zalloua is an assistant professor of French at Whitman College. He is the author of Montaigne and the Ethics of Skepticism (2005). He has also edited an issue of L’Esprit Créateur (Spring 2006) entitled Montaigne and the Question of Ethics and coedited, with Nicole Simek, a special issue of Dalhousie French Studies on representations of trauma in French and francophone literature (2007). Previous publications address questions of literary theory, interdisciplinary approaches to philosophy and literature, experimental fiction, and gender studies in a range of articles on early modern and modern authors, including Louise Labé, Agrippa D’Aubigné, Pierre de Ronsard, Denis Diderot, Stendhal, Jean-Paul Sartre, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and Marguerite Duras. He is currently writing a study on unruly fictions in modern French texts.

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INDEX

Afghanistan 13, 87, 92–93, 310 Agamben, Giorgio, 183–185, 192–193, 329 Algeria Algerian authors, 6, 79–80, 84–95, 319–320 Algerian immigrants, 100–101, 110–111, 321–322 Algerian state, 6, 80–82, 87 Franco-Algerian war, 89 See also Derrida, Jacques alterglobalization Altermondialisation, 137 alterity, 7, 64, 68, 134, 137, 140–144 See also Lévinas, Emmanuel and Derrida, Jacques Andersen, Christian, 58 Angola, 104–105, 112, 119, 335 animal(ization), 104, 111, 113 See also Batista, Carlos Arabic, 71 archipelagization, 136 See also Glissant, Edouard architecture, 25, 35 Asia American imperialism in Asia, 54 Asianization, 157 the-Westerner-in-Asia theme, 162 Kuala Lumpur, 53–54, 56 See Koch, Christopher Singapore, 26, 49, 54–55, 158, 162, 164 assimilation, 111–112, 322

Australia Australianness, 156 author author-function, 34–35, 37, 39, 42–43 death of, 38, 45 See also Barthes, Roland autobiography autobiographical, 4, 33, 44, 64–65, 88, 90 Barthes, Roland, 38, 45 See also author Batista, Carlos Poulailler, 7, 101–116, 118 Battle of Brunanburh, 5, 42 belongingness, 127 Ben Jelloun, Tahar, 80–81, 87, 97 Benítez Rojo, Antonio, 8, 179–180, 193,196–197, 199, 201, 206, 214, 328 See also Edouard Glissant Bensmaïa, Réda, 6, 8, 80, 87, 96–97 Berber, 71, 84 Bhabha, Homi K., 2, 6–7, 9, 127–128, 147, 176–178, 181, 185–186, 188, 193, 195, 326, 328 Black British, 37 Bluebeard, 56–57 Booker Prize, 33, 43–44, Boron, Atilio, 176, 185–186, 194 Boricuas/Boriken / Borinquen, 117, 205, 331

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34

346 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34

PERENNIAL EMPIRES

British empire, 4, 8, 26, 29, 44, 63, 65, 154, 177, 318 broken memory [la memoria rota], 200, 202 Bush, George W., 2, 12–13, 242, 296 Cacique, 204 Central American Free Trade Agreement-Dominican Republic (CAFTA-DR), 218, 220, 232, 236, 332 capitalism, 2, 50, 86, 97, 111, 113, 115, 124, 126, 135, 137, 185–186, 220–221, 231, 291, 298, 300–303, 309, 312, 319, 323 Caribbean Caribbean Discourse, 134–135, 149, 180, 183, 325 Caribbean island, 8, 178, 213 Caribbean literature, 186, 189, 342 Caribbean region, 8, 185 Casement, Roger relation with Joseph Conrad, 10, 260, 264–266, 269, 271, 335 Castellanos, Juan de, 204, 212, 214 Ceiba, 207–208, 330–331 Central America, 217–224, 227–229, 231–234, 236–237, 332–334 Chamoiseau, Patrick Texaco, 174–175, 178, 187–188, 190–191 chaos theory, 179, 191 child(ren) child abuse, 51–52 child barter, 52–53 child labor, 48–49 child nurturing, 49 child snatching, 49

child(ren) (continued ) children’s rights, 5, 47, 49 as hostage(s), 48 mixed-race children, 48–49, 53 See also pedophilia citizenship, 5, 48, 64–65, 73, 143, 213, 277, 313, 331, 337 U.S. Citizenship, 311, 332 civil war, 66, 79, 86, 90, 95, 218, 222, 224, 228, 274, 277 class, 36, 39, 48, 52, 65, 105, 156, 176, 220, 228, 267, 298–300, 318 Cold War, 11, 79, 173, 185, 201 colonialism colonial administrations, 185, 202–203 colonialist discourse, 38 See also light colonialism colonization, 1, 9, 14, 26, 43, 63, 124, 162, 205, 212, 322 See also decolonization colony, 106, 181, 184 “coming out”, 12, 262–263, 274, 296, 298, 311 See also gay(ness) Congo, 19, 26, 264–265 Conrad, Joseph Nostromo, 242–269 consumerism, 113, 300 cosmopolitan(ism), 139, 142–143, 257 Creole, 50, 134, 188, 332 Creolization, 136, 180 cross-dressing, 189 Cuba, 8, 179, 189, 331 cultural identity, 179, 203 decolonization, 173, 176, 178, 186–187, 192, 203, 328 See also colonization

Index deconstruction, 2, 67, 72, 138, 299 See also Derrida, Jacques de las Casas, Bartolomé, 176 Deleuze, Gilles, 86, 123, 130–132, 135–136 See also Glissant, Edouard Derrida, Jacques On Algeria, 65 Monolingualism of the Other, 5, 63–64, 68–69, 71–72, 144 The Gift of Death, 65 diaspora, 82, 86–87, 109, 188, 223, 320, 324 dictatorship, 6, 100–104, 106, 108, 111–112, 115 difference rhetoric of difference, 125 domestic violence, 50 East Timor, 11, 274, 280, 335 El Salvador, 10, 224, 226–228 empire global empire, 9, 173, 179–180, 182, 187–189, 191–192, 218, 221, 327 lingering empire, 154, 166 Portuguese empire, 102, 109 Spanish empire, 249 England (British) factory laws, 48 See rural England Estado Novo, 102–104, 320 See also Salazar Estadistas, 211 ethics, 7, 9, 122, 130, 135, 138, 140–142, 144–146, 323 Eurocentricism, 8, 132–133, 154, 158–159, 165, 325 European imperialism, 20, 111, 182

347

exile, 53, 79–81, 85–92, 95–96, 275, 320, 331 fable, 7, 101–102, 107, 111, 113 fairy tales, 57, 318 Fanon, Frantz The Wretched of the Earth, 9, 82–84, 86, 173, 176–178, 192, 319 fantastic, 110–111, 209, 222, 224– 225, 227 fascism, 66, 320 Fernández de Oviedo, Gonzalo, 203–204, 212 Fitzgerald, Stephen, 156 France in relation with Algeria, 48, 72, 79, 85, 87, 89–91, 321–322 in relation with the Caribbean, 135, 174, 183, 187 in relation with Portugal, 6–7, 100–102, 104–113, 115 freedom of expression, 83 Front Islamique du Salut (FIS), 81, 88–90, 92, 94, 320 Free Trade Areas of the Americas (FTAA), 218, 220, 228, 232, 334 Foucault, Michel on the author-function, 34–35, 66 on biopower, 123–124 on the care of the self, 128–129 on the Enlightenment, 138 on monuments, 262 on sodomy, 308, 397 gay(ness), 11, 72, 265, 277–278, 280, 282, 289–290, 299–303, 309, 311

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34

348 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34

PERENNIAL EMPIRES

gender, 3, 10–11, 223, 233, 249, 273–275, 280, 282, 303, 307, 309, 319, 333, 335 Glissant, Edouard Altermondialiation, 137, 191, 325, 329 Discours antillais (Caribbean Discourse), 7–8, 122, 135, 180, 183, 325, 328–329 Poetics of Relation, 134, 136, 142, 144, 146, 179–180, 325, 330 rhizome, 136, 138, 145 right to opacity, 140 See also Benítez Rojo, Antonio; Deleuze, Gilles; and Guattari, Félix globalization, 2, 6–7, 9–10, 60, 72, 121–126, 128, 137–139, 143, 174, 176–178, 180–181, 185–186, 188–189, 191, 218, 237, 313, 317, 323, 327, 329, 341 Grimm (the Brothers), 5, 48, 56, 58 Grosfoguel, Ramón global coloniality, 185, 202, 213, 330 Guattari, Félix, 86, 135–136, 319 See also Deleuze, Gilles Gulf War, 306–308 Habermas, Jürgen, 124, 142 Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri Empire, 1–2, 6–8, 10, 121–129, 131, 134–136, 144, 175–176, 178, 185–187, 191, 221, 309–310, 323–324, 326–327, 332, 334 multitude, 5, 10, 129, 131–133, 146, 214, 324–325, 332

Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri (continued ) See also Glissant, Eduard and Deleuze, Gilles heterosexuality, 12, 282, 290, 298–301, 303, 311–312, 319 Hispanic heritage, 203, 211 Holocaust, 5, 48, 58–59 homonationalism, 311 homosexuality, 11, 266–267, 274, 281, 289–290, 298, 302, 307–308, 311, 335 homosociality, 243, 245, 254, 258, 267, 269, 300 Honduras, 229, 231 hospitality, 66–67, 139, 207, 326 hostage(s) children as hostages, 48, 58–59 Huggan, Graham, 43, 323 human rights, 85–86, 137, 202, 334 Hussein, Saddam See Saddam Hussein Huxley, Aldous, 182 hybridity hybrid (text), 20, 102, 205–206 hybridity (creolization), 6, 8, 121, 136, 139–140, 146, 154, 156 hybridization, 2, 180, 201 identity concept of identity, 4–5, 63, 65–67, 111, 130, 133, 144–145, 269, 278, 301, 303, 324, 328 ethnic identity, 101, 111 identity malaise, 34–35, 39, 43–44 national identity, 22, 24–25, 30, 64, 70–73, 88, 95, 100, 154–155, 167, 179, 203, 283, 288

Index identity (continued ) root-identity (indentité-racine), 135 sexual identity, 254, 263, 274, 276, 307 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 176, 185 immigration, 100–101, 105–108, 110, 112, 115, 157, 188, 321 imperialism American imperialism, 113, 186, 242, 300, 310 British imperialism, 179, 182, 267 French imperialism, 101, 105, 111, 115, 174, 178–179, 191–192 Neoimperialism, 122, 177–178, 332 independence, 6, 80, 82, 84, 87, 94, 173, 202, 206, 210, 213, 252, 255–256, 258, 263, 279, 281, 319, 331–332 India, 3, 10, 53, 65, 104, 106–107, 132, 154, 159–160, 162–163, 165–166, 252, 274, 290 indigenization, 279 Indonesia, 11, 19, 153, 158, 160, 162–163, 166, 274, 279–280, 335 invasion, 3, 9, 12, 106, 203, 205–207, 209, 274, 305, 310, 335 Iraq War, 12, 91, 307 irony “ironic nostalgia”, 4, 21–23, 27–30 Islamic Salvation Front (Front Islamique du Salut a.k.a. FIS), 81, 88–90, 92, 94, 320 Israel, 141 Jameson, Fredric, 243–244, 246, 248, 251, 260, 263–264, 287, 289, 323

349

Jewishness, 57–58, 65, 141, 319 Jones Act [1917], 332 Khatibi, Abdelkebir Maghreb pluriel, 87 Koch, Christopher, 8, 153–167, 327 (de) La Fontaine, Jean, 113–114 La Vitrina del Caribe (The Showcase / Display Case of the Caribbean), 201 labor, 25, 29, 48, 126, 176, 211, 220, 231, 317 Laclau, Ernesto, 139, 145 language Arabic, 71 Berber, 84 Creole, 50, 188, 332 mother tongue, 64, 71 Lebanon, 87, 141 Lévinas, Emmanuel, 7–8, 140–142, 144, 325–326 light colonialism, 174, 178–180, 186, 189, 191–192, 327 Lim, Shirley Geok-Lin Joss and Gold, 5, 47, 49, 53 lingering empire See empire Little Red Riding Hood, 48 Liverpool (slave trade in), 34–37, 42 López Nieves, Luis, 9, 202–203, 206–213 Luso descendants, 101–113, 117 Madama Butterfly (Puccini), 5, 49 Maghreb, 6, 8, 80, 85, 87 Malay Chinese, 53–54 Malaysia, 53–54, 158, 336

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34

350 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34

PERENNIAL EMPIRES

marginalization, 22, 217, 276, 286 Marqués, René, 9, 202–206, 208, 211–213, 330 Marroon(s), 190 Martinique, 8–9, 173–175, 178, 180–183, 186, 328 master/slave dynamic, 3, 49, 72, 189–190 media, 112, 138, 200, 305–307 Mejía, Waldina, 219, 228–232 memory, 21, 49, 58, 70, 88, 101–102, 200, 202, 228, 256, 260–261 Métissage, 48–49, 136 See also hybridity, creolization Miles, (General) Nelson A., 206–209 Mokkedem, Malika la Transe des insoumis, 6, 80–82, 89, 320 Mokkedem, Mohamed Nuit afghane, 6, 79–80, 85, 87–93, 95–96, 319 mother tongue, 64, 71 Mouffe, Chantal, 139, 145 See also Ernesto Laclau Mozambique, 101, 104–105 multiculturalism, 4, 22, 54, 86, 133–135, 157–158, 167 multitude As new proletariate, 5–6, 10, 122, 124–125–129, 131–134, 146, 219, 222–223, 231–233, 324, 333–334 See Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio nation nation-building, 3, 82, 84, 277, 290 national culture, 82, 84, 223

nation (continued ) national dignity, 203 national identity, 5, 25, 64, 70–72, 100, 203, 212 nationalism, 22, 53, 73, 81, 83–84, 144, 185, 206, 288 nationhood, 65, 81, 85, 87 white nation fantasy, 157 Neorealism, 222, 228 New World Order, 2, 13, 40, 180–182, 327 Nietzsche, Frederich, 67, 125–126, 242, 262 Nomadism, 6–8, 80–81, 127, 136, 154, 310 nostalgia, 4, 8, 21–23, 26–30, 105, 123 Obama, Barack, 3, 12–13 Ondaatje, Michael, 33, 44 opacity, 7, 134, 136–137, 140, 146, 325 See also Glissant, Edouard and “right to opacity” oppositional thinking, 72–73 Orwell, George, 22, 181–182 Palestine, 141–142 Pasini, Willy, 164–165 pedophilia, 53, 307 See also children periphery, 72, 83, 86, 122, 185, 188 Phillips, Caryl, 8, 181–184, 186, 190–191, 327–328 Ponce de León, Juan, 204, 330 Portugal, 6, 100, 102–111, 322 Portuguese (immigration), 6–7, 100–115, 320–322, 339 postcolonial postcolonial anxiety, 156

Index postcolonial (continued ) postcolonial authors, 82, 84 postcolonial theory, 2, 122, 125–127, 176, 327 postmodern(ism), 2, 50, 56, 121–122, 124–127, 131, 134, 174, 176, 179, 183, 185–187, 190, 222, 310, 326, 328 postwar (disillusion, reconstruction), 219, 222–223, 226–229, 231, 333–334 Puerto Rico, 8–9, 181, 184, 186, 200–213, 328–332 queer, 10–11, 27, 165, 273–274, 282, 284, 289, 298, 301–312, 337 Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, 12, 295–312, 336 race, 22, 48–49, 53–56, 111, 156–158, 160, 220, 233, 273, 280–282, 289 rape, 52, 94, 320 reality TV, 12, 295 referendum, 202, 213 resistance, 6, 9, 37–38, 40–41, 43, 51, 122–123, 125–127, 129, 131, 134, 141, 175, 210, 218, 301, 324, 326 rhizome, 135–136, 145 See also Glissant, Edouard rogue regimes, 12, 308 rural England, 21–24, 29 Rushdie, Salman Midnight’s Children, 4, 43 Rushforth, Peter, 3, 5, 47–51, 56, 58, 60, 318 Saddam Hussein, 11–12, 295–297, 304–308

351

Said, Edward, 1, 6, 21, 80, 160, 175, 243, 248–250, 253, 256, 262–264, 267 Salazar, António de Oliveira, 6–7, 100–109, 111, 320 Salcedo, Diego, 204, 206, 211–213 Salvador (El), 10, 219, 222–224, 226–228 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 85–86 Sedgwick, Eva Kosofsky, 243, 254, 263 Sebald, W. G., 3–4, 19–30 sexuality, 222–223, 249, 254, 258, 266–267, 269, 273–290, 298–299, 301–303, 307–308, 311–312, 319, 321, 336 See also homosexuality, heterosexuality, queer shantytowns, 100, 107–109, 175, 187 singularity (as internal difference), 65, 113, 125, 130–133, 143–144, 146, 324 See also Deleuze, Gilles Sinhalese, 11, 274–275, 280, 284, 286 slave trade, 5, 25, 33–37, 43 sodomy, 305–308 solidarity, 125, 129, 131, 133, 146 See also multitude Spanish empire, 9, 177, 201, 203–205, 207, 211, 218, 245–246, 249, 331–332 Spanish-American War [1898], 9, 207 Spinoza, 130–132, 324 See also Deleuze, Gilles Sri Lanka, 10, 274, 286, 336 subaltern, 38, 89, 201, 212, 251, 326, 330

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34

352 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34

PERENNIAL EMPIRES

suicide, 49, 53, 95, 224, 232, 258–259 Tainos, 9, 205–206, 211–213, 331–332 Tamil, 11, 274–275, 280, 284 See also Sinhalese terrorism, 5, 48, 56, 58, 139, 254 See also War on Terror Texaco, 8, 174–175, 178, 187–188, 190–191 Thatcherism, 35 therapy, 51–52 tolerance, 20, 66–67, 247 torture, 91, 93, 104, 109, 228–231, 305 trauma, 5, 35, 51, 106, 108, 177, 223–224, 227–228, 257–258, 328 Unionistas, 202, 205 United States of America, 186, 188, 201–203, 205, 207, 211–213, 218, 220, 265, 274, 302, 308–310, 331, 336

United States of Empire (USE), 296–297, 308, 310–312, 336 Unsworth, Barry, 3–5, 33–44 US Department of Defense, 309 Vietnam War, 53, 327 Voltaire, 7, 99, 101, 113, 321 War on Terror, 3, 12, 72, 140, 242, 297, 308 Westerner the-Westerner-in-Asia theme, 162–167 Wilde, Oscar, 259 Woolf, Virginia, 3, 5, 11, 50, 63–73, 318 World Bank (The), 185 World War I, 3, 143 World War II, 5, 42, 56 Yacine, Kateb, 84 Žižek, Slavoj, 176, 323, 328