Caring for Community: Towards a New Ethics of Responsibility in Contemporary Postcolonial Novels

182 Pages·2018·0.825 MB·English

by  Marijke Denger

Caring for Community
Caring for Community: Towards a New Ethics of Responsibility in
Contemporary Postcolonial Novels focusses on four highly acclaimed
publications in order to argue for a new understanding of community and
its ethical framework in recent literary texts. Traditionally, community has
been understood to function on the basis of individuals’ readiness to establish
relationships of reciprocal responsibility. This book, however, argues that
community and non-reciprocity need not be mutually exclusive categories.
Examining works by leading contemporary postcolonial authors and
reading them against Judith Butler’s post-9/11 concept of global political
community, the book explores how concrete acts of responsibility can be
carried out in recognition of various others, even and precisely when those
others cannot be expected to respond. The literary analyses draw on a rich
theoretical framework that includes approaches to care, hospitality and
the ethical encounter between self and other. Overall, this book establishes
that the novels’ protagonists, by investing in an ethics of responsibility that
does not require reciprocity, acquire the agency to envisage new forms of
community. By reflecting on the nature and effect of this agency and its
representation in contemporary literary texts, the book also considers the
role of postcolonial studies in addressing highly topical questions regarding
our coexistence with others.
Marijke Denger is a Post-Doctoral Assistant in the Department of English
at the University of Bern, Switzerland.
Routledge Research in Postcolonial Literatures
Series editors:
Donna Landry and Caroline Rooney
Edited in collaboration with the Centre for Colonial and Postcolonial
Studies, University of Kent at Canterbury, this series presents a wide
range of research into postcolonial literatures by specialists in the field.
Volumes will concentrate on writers and writing originating in previously
(or presently) colonized areas, and will include material from non-anglo-
phone as well as anglophone colonies and literatures.
Olive Schreiner and African Modernism
Allegory, Empire and Postcolonial Writing
Jade Munslow Ong
Narrating Postcolonial Arab Nations
Egypt, Algeria, Lebanon, Palestine
Lindsey Moore
Critical Branding
Postcolonial Studies and the Market
Caroline Koegler
Anglo-American Imperialism and the Pacific
Discourses of Encounter
Edited by Michelle Keown, Andrew Taylor and Mandy Treagus
Popular Postcolonialisms
Discourses of Empire and Popular Culture
Edited by Nadia Atia and Kate Houlden
Marxism, Postcolonial Theory and the Future of Critique
Critical Engagements with Benita Parry
Edited by Sharae Deckard and Rashmi Varma
The Body, Desire and Storytelling in Novels by J. M. Coetzee
Olfa Belgacem
Caring for Community
Towards a New Ethics of Responsibility in Contemporary Postcolonial Novels
Marijke Denger
Related Titles
Postcolonial Life-Writing
Culture, Politics, and Self-Representation
Bart Moore-Gilbert
For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com
Caring for Community
Towards a New Ethics of
Responsibility in Contemporary
Postcolonial Novels
Marijke Denger
First published 2019
by Routledge
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Contents
Acknowledgements vii
List of Abbreviations x
Introduction: Community “Beyond the Borders” 1
Anachronous Liminality and the Question of
Agency 6
Reconsidering Community in Contemporary
Postcolonial Novels 14
Caring for Community: Towards a Non-Reciprocal
Responsibility 20
1 Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient: From a
Crumbling Villa to a Porous Community 34
From the (Marginal) Desert to (Liminal) Tuscany 34
Literary Mediation, Spectral Intervention and a
Triad of Care 40
A Metonymic Community and Its Porous Ties 48
2 “Building the New”? Untimely Community in
Nadeem Aslam’s The Wasted Vigil 59
Liminality, Care and a “Fellowship of Wounds” 59
Considering Ties and Facing Reciprocity 66
Thwarted Hospitality and the Spectral Third 74
3 Michelle de Kretser’s The Lost Dog: From Unwanted
History to Unconditional Hospitality 86
Impossible Communities in Urban Space 87
History, Heritage and the Spectral in a ‘Postcolonial’
City 91
Braving the Bush: From a Lost Dog to a New
Community 102
vi Contents
4 Spectral Agency and the Ghostly Self: Towards an
Unconditional Community in Wendy Law-Yone’s
The Road to Wanting 114
Braving Burma: Minority Politics and the Politics of
Community 115
From the Ghostly to the Spectral: Community and
the Road to Wanting 125
Spectrality and the Rite of Passage: Forging a New
Approach to Community 134
5 Rethinking Community and Its Borders in Contemporary
Postcolonial Literatures 143
Responsibility as Indulgence 148
Race, Class and the Privilege of Responsibility 152
On Ethics and Aesthetics in Postcolonial Literatures 155
Works Cited 162
Index 168
Acknowledgements
Writing about community would, for me, not have been possible without
the support of several smaller and wider communities whose hospitality
and care encouraged me to begin my project and supported me through-
out what has become a truly rewarding process.
I first began writing about the novels analysed in this book as part of
my doctoral research, conducted at the University of Bern’s Department
of English, as well as the Graduate School of the Humanities (GSH) of
the university’s Walter Benjamin Kolleg. During my time as a doctoral
candidate, I was generously funded within a Swiss National Science
Foundation grant, which also supported my Visiting Training Fellowship
at the University of Kent, Canterbury. I am grateful to Prof. Dr Donna
Landry and Prof. Dr Abdulrazak Gurnah for welcoming me to the School
of English and the Research Centre for Colonial and Postcolonial Studies
at Kent and for ensuring, together with their colleagues and (doctoral)
students, that my research stay was a thoroughly inspiring one. I would
also like to thank Wendy Law-Yone for reaching out in response to my
work on her writing, for inviting me to London and, in turn, taking up an
extended invitation to the University of Bern. Her kindness and interest
in my thoughts on literature and community have never failed to encour-
age me.
With regard to the University of Bern and its research and teaching com-
munities, I cannot emphasise enough how lucky I have been to work in
such a stimulating, supportive environment. My time at the GSH allowed
me to continuously develop my academic profile. However, it is my col-
leagues, my peers and senior scholars at the Department of English—and
in particular the Modern English Literature section—whom I have to
thank most. Always happy to take the time to discuss my ideas or to read
my work in progress, it is they who helped me to reappraise my approach
to the relations between self and other and to the significance of a new
ethics of responsibility in contemporary postcolonial literatures. Without
their care for the communities that have driven along my work for such
a sustained period of time, this book would not have taken shape the
way that it has. In particular, I would like to thank Dr Imtraud Huber,
viii Acknowledgements
PD Dr Ursula Kluwick, Dr Zoë Lehmann Imfeld, Dr Nicole Nyffenegger
and Dr Kathrin Scheuchzer for their constructive criticism during many a
(peer) review colloquium. I am very grateful to Prof. Dr Thomas Claviez
for agreeing to become my second examiner and for his invaluable scru-
tiny of the theoretical underpinnings of my dissertation. Most of all,
however, I am indebted to my supervisor, Prof. Dr Virginia Richter, who
gave me the opportunity to become part of Bern’s English community in
the first place. It is her encouragement and support, her critical feedback
and her continuous willingness to engage with my questions and con-
cerns, despite her manifold other obligations, that really made possible
the writing of my dissertation and, ultimately, this book. For this and
many other things, I cannot thank her enough.
For more than ten years, my husband has provided me with the care and
consideration that is such an essential aspect of any kind of community—
a community that, in our case, went from two to four members during
the writing of what has become this monograph. To my husband and our
respective parents, I owe a huge amount of thanks for the support offered
me, offered us, during this time. For the opportunity to combine my love
for literature with my love for my very own community, I count myself
lucky every day.
Excerpts from The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje, copyright
© 1992 by Michael Ondaatje. Used by permission of Alfred A.
Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a
division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Any
third party use of this material, outside of this publication, is pro-
hibited. Interested parties must apply directly to Penguin Random
House LLC for permission.
Copyright © 1992 by Michael Ondaatje. Reprinted by permission of
Michael Ondaatje.
Excerpts from T he English Patient by Michael Ondaatje. Copyright ©
1992 by Michael Ondaatje. Reprinted by permission of McClelland
& Stewart, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited.
Excerpts from The Wasted Vigil by Nadeem Aslam reprinted by per-
mission of the publishers, Faber and Faber Ltd.
Excerpts from The Wasted Vigil by Nadeem Aslam, copyright ©
2008 by Nadeem Aslam. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf,
an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division
of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Any third
party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohib-
ited. Interested parties must apply directly to Penguin Random
House LLC for permission.
Acknowledgements ix
Extracts from The Lost Dog: A Novel by Michelle de Kretser, pub-
lished by Chatto & Windus, reprinted by permission of The Random
House Group Limited © 2008.
Extracts from T he Lost Dog: A Novel by Michelle de Kretser. Copy-
right © 2007 by Michelle de Kretser. Reprinted by permission of
Little, Brown & Company.
Extracts from T he Lost Dog: A Novel by Michelle de Kretser (Allen
& Unwin, 2009), fi rst published in Australia in 2007 by Allen &
Unwin, reproduced with the permission of Allen & Unwin Pty
Ltd.
Extracts from T he Road to Wanting by Wendy Law-Yone, copyright
© Wendy Law-Yone, 2010, fi rst published in Great Britain in
2010 by Chatto & Windus, reproduced by permission of Susanna
Lea Associates Ltd. on behalf of the author.
Extracts from P recarious Life by Judith Butler reprinted by permis-
sion of the publishers, Verso.
Copyright © 1995 From The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-
Structure by Victor Turner. Reproduced by permission of Taylor
and Francis Group, LLC, a division of Informa plc.
Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care by
Tronto, Joan, copyright © 1993. Reproduced with permission of
Routledge in the format Book via Copyright Clearance Center,
Inc.
Parts of Chapter 3 appeared earlier in my article “Michelle de Kret-
ser’s The Lost Dog : History and Identity in the Metropolis of
Melbourne”, published in Re-Inventing the Postcolonial (in the)
Metropolis , eds. Cecile Sandten and Annika Bauer, copyright ©
2016 by Koninklijke Brill NV. Reproduced by permission of the
publishers.