Nationality Between Poststructuralism and Postcolonial Theory: A New Cosmopolitanism

206 Pages·2005·0.805 MB·English

by  Philip Leonard (auth.)

Nationality Between
Poststructuralism and
Postcolonial Theory
A New Cosmopolitanism
Philip Leonard
Nationality Between Poststructuralism and Postcolonial
Theory
This page intentionally left blank
Nationality Between
Poststructuralism and
Postcolonial Theory
A New Cosmopolitanism
Philip Leonard
© Philip Leonard 2005
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2005 978-1-4039-1912-0
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in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published 2005 by
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Leonard, Philip, 1967–
Nationality between poststructuralism and postcolonial theory : a new
cosmopolitanism / Philip Leonard
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Contents: Cosmopolitan locations – Before, across and beyond : Derrida,
without national community – New concepts for unknown lands : Deleuze
& Guattari’s non-nationalitarianisms – Atopic and utopic : Kristeva’s
strange cosmopolitanism – In the shadow of shadows : Spivak, misread-
ing, the native informant – To move through, and beyond,
theory : Bhabha, hybridity, and agency.
1. Criticism–History–20th century. 2. Nationalism in literature. I. Title.
PN94.L46 2005
801(cid:2).95(cid:2)0904–dc22 2005049750
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05
Contents
Acknowledgements vi
Chapter 1 Cosmopolitan Locations 1
Chapter 2 ‘Before, Across, and Beyond’: Derrida, Without
National Community 20
Chapter 3 ‘New Concepts for Unknown Lands’: Deleuze
& Guattari’s Non-Nationalitarianisms 51
Chapter 4 ‘Atopic and Utopic’: Kristeva’s Strange
Cosmopolitanism 76
Chapter 5 ‘In the Shadow of Shadows’: Spivak, Misreading,
the Native Informant 103
Chapter 6 ‘To Move Through – and Beyond – Theory’:
Bhabha, Hybridity, and Agency 127
Notes 157
Bibliography 182
Index 193
v
Acknowledgements
This book has benefitted enormously from the assistance, support, and
guidance that friends and colleagues have generously given. For their
help I should like to thank Steven Connor, Dan Cordle, Dick Ellis,
Lynne Hapgood, Bernard McGuirk, and Greg Woods. John Marks,
Douglas Smith, Patrick Williams, and Dave Woods carefully read ver-
sions of some of the chapters here, and their suggestions were
extremely welcome. I am especially grateful to Leslie Hill, whose gen-
erosity made the impossible possible. Students who opted for my final
year modules ‘History and Culture’ and ‘Poststructuralist Debates’
allowed me to work through some of the ideas explored here, and the
Department of English and Media Studies at The Nottingham Trent
University granted me the study leave that allowed this book to be
completed. I wish to thank both Emily Rosser Helen Craine, and Paula
Kennedy at Palgrave for their editorial support and advice. This book
could not have been written without Sam Haigh’s untiring support.
An earlier version of Chapter 3 appeared in National Identities, 5: 2
(2003).
vi
Earth, yield me roots
Shakespeare, Timon of Athens
1
Cosmopolitan Locations
When Terry Eagleton, in a review of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s A
Critique of Postcolonial Reason,declares that Spivak’s ‘flamboyant theo-
retical avant-gardism conceals a rather modest political agenda’1 he
rehearses the allegation, made repeatedly since the late 1970s, that
poststructuralism indulges in a ludicism that prevents it from offering
a compelling critique of the social, the political, and the cultural.
Poststructuralist theory, Eagleton tells us, is caught up in a ‘self-
theatricalizing’2 introspection; its notion of resistance permits little
more than a vigilant complicity with dominant institutions, and its
theory of cultural power fails to provide a convincing analysis of
social systems and the injustices embedded within them. These claims
tellingly reiterate other work – by other critics, as well as Eagleton –
that excoriates poststructuralist theory for being unsystematic, ahis-
torical, rarified, abstruse, or banal; for being, in other words, a diver-
sion from properly effective forms of radical critique.
Eagleton’s ‘In the Gaudy Supermarket’ does, however, have more to
offer than earlier hostile responses to poststructuralism, since this essay
sees poststructuralism’s political significance as something that is now
tied to debates in postcolonial theory. According to Eagleton, critics
like Spivak and Homi Bhabha may well be ‘devotees’3 of earlier post-
structuralist thinking, but for him their work is distinctive because it
illuminates the path out of dark and cabbalistic writing by poststruc-
turalism’s high priests. Again, Eagleton’s claims here are not without
precedent. Benita Parry, Aijaz Ahmad, Arif Dirlik, and Bart Moore-
Gilbert have each identified what they see as poststructuralism’s social,
cultural, and political failings, and conclude that it displays little
concern for cultural emancipation, is inattentive to class-struggle, and
disregards revolutionary nationalism.4 These criticisms often turn on
1
2 Nationality Between Poststructuralism and Postcolonial Theory
the belief that poststructuralism construes all social experience and
cultural phenomena as a form of textuality: colonialism and postcolo-
niality, according to these responses, are treated by poststructuralism
simply as a discursive simulation, with the materiality of imperial
oppression – and the responses it engenders – becoming, in effect, less
important than fictions of empire.
Like Eagleton, critics such as these also believe that certain theorists
– most notably Spivak and Bhabha – take poststructuralism in different
directions when they question the cultural violences that are associated
with imperialism, colonialism, and postcoloniality. According to these
readings, poststructuralism becomes politicized only when postcolonial
theory reconfigures it as an instrument for theorizing the uneven dis-
tribution of power across national and international systems. Some of
the most influential developments in postcolonial theory are seen to
surface either as a prudent departure from, or as a selective amplifica-
tion of, poststructuralism’s narrowly textual concerns; common to
both readings is the idea that postcolonial theory possesses a critical
trajectory that is conspicuously absent from poststructuralism.
Poststructuralist theory, as a result, is viewed as a static, schematic, and
systematic tradition – one hardening ‘into theoretical dogma’5– that
neither concerns itself with intercultural violence nor reflects on its
own status as metropolitan theory. Poststructuralism ‘itself’ and
‘before’ postcolonial theory, it would seem, has nothing to say about
colonial power, postcoloniality, globalization, transnationality, anti-
colonial resistance, or minority discourses.
I The ends of Europe
Nationality Between Poststructuralism and Postcolonial Theory begins from
the premise that such a genealogy relies on an unsustainable distinc-
tion between poststructuralist and postcolonial theory. One concern
here is to show that Spivak and Bhabha are not the only ‘poststruc-
turalists’ who rethink culture by challenging the uneven distribution of
global power, since Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari, and Kristeva each
draw attention to the fissures that open up in the articulation of
national identity. The contention that is most commonly associated
with work that shuttles between poststructuralist and postcolonial
theory – that grave uncertainties disarticulate the West’s assertions of
its historic and international authority – also needs to be seen in the
thinking of those, like these theorists, who are often construed as nar-
rowly ‘poststructuralist’ and somehow pre-postcolonial. They too insist