Readings of the Particular: The Postcolonial in the Postnational (Cross Cultures 89)

277 Pages·2007·1.01 MB·English

by  Anne Holden Ronning

Readings of the Particular
The Postcolonial in the Postnational
C ross
Readings in the Post / Colonial
ultures
Literatures in English
89
Series Editors
Gordon Collier Hena Maes–Jelinek Geoffrey Davis
(Giessen) (Liège) (Aachen)
Readings of the Particular
The Postcolonial in the Postnational
Edited by
Anne Holden Rønning and
Lene Johannessen
Amsterdam - New York, NY 2007
The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of
“ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for
documents - Requirements for permanence”.
ISBN-13: 978-90-420-2163-1
©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam – New York, NY 2007
Printed in The Netherlands
Table of Contents

Introduction vii
PRELUDE
WENCHE OMMUNDSEN
Have Culture, Will Travel:
Cultural Citizenship and the Imagined Communities of Diaspora; A Fiction 3
I NOVELS AND THEIR BORDERS
PRISCILLA RINGROSE
‘Beur’ Narratives of Self-Identity:
Beyond Boundaries and Binaries 21
ALAN FREEMAN
Allegories of Ambivalence:
Scottish Fiction, Britain and Empire 39
UTE KAUER
The Need to Storify:
Re-inventing the Past in André Brink’s Novels 57
JOHAN SCHIMANSKI
The Postcolonial Border:
Bessie Head’s “The Wind and a Boy” 71
DAVID BELL
The Intimate Presence of Death in the Novels of Zakes Mda:
Necrophilic Worlds and Traditional Belief 93
ULLA RAHBEK
Controlling Jean Rhys’s Story “On Not Shooting Sitting Birds” 107
II PERFORMING POSSIBILITIES
ASBJØRN GRØNSTAD
Isaac Julien’s Looking For Langston
and the Limits of the Visible World 119
EVELYN LUTWAMA
Western Theatrical Performance in Africa
and Gender Implications 133
ANNE NOTHOF
Imagining a Nation:
The Necessity of Producing Canadian Drama 145
SUSAN KNUTSON
The Mask of Aaron:
“Tall screams reared out of the Three Mile Plains” –
Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus and George Elliott Clarke’s
Black Acadian Tragedy Execution Poems: 157
KRISTINA AURYLAITĖ
Crossing the Boundary, Donning a Mask:
Spatial Rules and Identity in Daniel David Moses’
and Tomson Highway’s Plays 171
III POETIC SITES OF INTERTEXTUALITY
GEOFF PAGE
I Think I Could Turn Awhile 185
ERIK FALK
How to Really Forget:
David Dabydeen’s “Creative Amnesia” 187
CHARLES ARMSTRONG
Many Masks, Big Houses:
Yeats and the Construction of an Irish Identity 205
RUBEN MOI
Transtextual Conceptualizations of Northern Ireland:
Paul Muldoon vs Seamus Heaney 217
JACQUELYNNE MODESTE
(Un)Masking Possibilities:
Bigger Thomas, Invisible Man, and Scooter 229

Notes on Contributors 245
Index 249
Introduction

T
HIS COLLECTION OF ESSAYS has been assembled with the
aim of throwing light on transculturality and the identities and
masks that people put on, in writing as much as in life. It is a
follow-up to the first Norwegian collection of essays on colonial and post-
colonial writing, Identities and Masks,1 published in 2001. In an increas-
ingly global world, all of us are becoming transcultural in some form or
other. This is far from a new phenomenon, but illustrative of the problem-
atic and scale of contemporary border-crossings.
As the world turns postnational, postcapitalist, transcultural and even
post-human, what position is left for the postcolonial? If it is true, as
Negri and Hardt claim in Empire, that our time is characterized by “a de-
centred and deterritorializing apparatus of rule that progressively incor-
porates the entire global realm within its open, expanding frontiers,”2
where in this description does the postcolonial fit? One can understand
those who see postcolonial studies and theories in a state of crisis; who
perceive the overlap with globalization theories and methodologies as
detrimental to the continued development of the area. In addition to this,
postcolonial studies have come to encompass such a wide range of in-
quiries that it can be difficult to see what the field really is. Coupled with
an increasingly market-driven academe, one may have some sympathy
with Graham Huggan when he says that, “like other commodified terms

1 Identities and Masks: Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, ed. Jakob Lothe,
Anne Holden Rønning & Peter Young (Kristiansand: Høyskoleforlaget, 2001).
2 Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge MA: Harvard UP,
2000): xii.
viii READINGS OF THE PARTICULAR (cid:118)
used largely for academic purposes, postcolonialism has taken full advan-
tage of its own semantic vagueness.”3 Arif Dirlik’s criticism is more disci-
plinary and ideological:

It is tempting, and not entirely misleading, to suggest that the post-
colonial is what postcolonial intellectuals do, and postcolonial
intellectuals in our day represent a wide range of intellectual and
political positions unified only by a common interest in the politics
of cultural identity. Conversely, it would seem that the very de-
ployment of the vocabulary of postcolonial criticism is sufficient
qualification for postcolonial identity, further complicating the
politics of postcoloniality. This may be quite in keeping with the
spirit of overcoming boundaries and binarisms, but the intellectual
confusion it creates is self-evident.4

Dirlik may have a point. The confusion he refers to resides in an interest
that often seems based on nothing more that locating and identifying
mechanisms and structures of power-relations and oppression. In addition,
we should remember that the location of the postcolony and its discourse
is, and perhaps always was, uncertain, encompassing both the colony in
its process of self-construction and the relationship it inherits and must
negotiate with the former colonizer. The idea of the national is, moreover,
itself becoming increasingly difficult to comprehend and define; the pro-
venance of the aesthetic accordingly comes up against complex concep-
tual, epistemic and cultural boundaries. Finally, the “Empire,” hovering
above cultural production as at once homogenizing and diversifying, still
awaits consistent responses. In a situation where power-relations and cul-
tural governance are mixed up in questions of Empire and the market-
place, the exact nature and function of the postcolonial is far from clear.
And yet, in the midst of postnationalism, postcapitalism, globalization
and occasionally extreme forms of cultural relativism, the particularities
and significance of regions and their histories and discourses persevere.
The past decade is certainly not lacking in illustrations of their manifes-

3 Graham Huggan, The Post-Colonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London:
Routledge, 2001): 1.
4 Arif Dirlik, Postmodernity’s Histories: The Past as Legacy and Project (Bos-
ton MA: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000): 8.
(cid:118) Introduction ix
tations, beyond any answerable presupposition. Theories and methods of
globalization may have much to offer, but in their global reach they also
have limitations. Theirs is by definition a “top–bottom perspective,” but,
however spectacular such a bird’s-eye view, it can only rarely give an
accurate or complete picture. This is where postcolonial theories may yet
have something to offer, despite the deplorable situation Dirlik describes.
Key elements in colonial and postcolonial discourse and criticism have
always involved a focus on belonging, on identity, on expressing, explain-
ing and analyzing present and past dynamics between peoples and cul-
tures. Historically, these considerations arose out of social and political
realities of specific times and places, relying heavily on knowledge of the
particularities of location and the complex discourses thus refracted. This
still underlies postcolonial literatures and theories, even if they are some-
times subsumed under more general parameters. In the concern with the
particular, postcolonial theories shed light on processes of cultural global-
ization on a fundamental level. Engaging with and problematizing issues
of transculturalism and the refraction of local cultural practices in the dia-
spora, postcolonial literature and theory are a corrective and complement
to the grand narratives of globalization.
We use the word ‘transcultural’ to emphasize the increasing complex-
ity of the realities postcolonial theories engage with, the very same com-
plexity that made “Empire” possible, and one that has assumed a geogra-
phical and demographic dimension unimaginable fifty years ago. Marie
Louise Pratt explains transcultural as describing “how subordinated or
marginal groups select and invent from materials transmitted to them by a
dominant or metropolitan culture.”5 She also stresses the fact that she sees
transculturation in terms of “co-presence, interaction, interlocking under-
standings and practices.”6 The prefix ‘trans-’, then, suggests an ongoing
process that privileges the dialogic principle over the monologic.
The process of transculturation and the focus on the particularities of
the realities underlying various locations form the background for this

5 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (Lon-
don & New York: Routledge, 1997): 6.
6 Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 7.