Smith, Andrew Murray (2001) Migrant fictions: theorising the writing and reading of Nigerian stories

369 Pages·2011·15.54 MB·English

Smith, Andrew Murray (2001) Migrant fictions: theorising the writing
and reading of Nigerian stories by expatriate authors and publics. PhD
thesis.

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Glasgow Theses Service
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Migrant Fictions: theorising the writing and reading of
Nigerian stories by expatriate authors and publics.
Andrew Murray Smith.
A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy to the
department of Sociology, University of Glasgow.
August, 2001.
© Andrew Smith, 30th August 2001.
Acknowledgements
Bourdieu is absolutely right, no piece of cultural work, including this thesis, is ever the
product of an individual's solitary labour. I am happy to accept responsibility for any
mistakes and misconstrued positions that may be found in this dissertation. But I have been
increasingly aware of the fact that the production of it, in every sense, is indebted to a huge
group of people, many of whom I can't thank individually here. Many of whom, in fact, I
don't even know. All the same, there are some names that deserve naming.
I am, first of all, grateful to the department of sociology, University of Glasgow and to the
Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland for the grants which enabled me to carry out
my research in Nigeria. The following people gave me a great deal of help, practically and
otherwise, in setting up the trip, co-ordinating reading groups and in other ways during my
time in Africa: Paul Todd, Richard Rickus, Taiwo Ogundare, Isaac Lar, Yohanna Gandu,
Omafume Onoge, Ashiedu Ogboli. There are many other people who gave their time freely
during my visit, who discussed things with me and who showed me a great deal of hospitality.
A particular word in this respect to my friends at the ECWA guesthouse, Isaac Dawam and
Aikeh Ruvo, to Samson Adeshina and to Kanchana Ugbabe for her kindness.
Thanks go to all those who took part in formal interviews, filled out questionnaires, answered
letters and allowed me to use their essays as part of my research. In particular therefore,
thanks to those who organise the expatriate Nigerian groups in Glasgow for letting me intrude
on their meetings and for helping distribute material to their members. I am also very grateful
to those who run the adult education courses around Glasgow and elsewhere, working in the
least prestigious educational arena. Keith Hammond, organiser of the pre-access courses,
helped me get involved and his enthusiasm and interest has been important to me. The
students I have worked with in these sessions have always been challenging and thoughtful
and I am indebted to them for very many insights. I have been grateful on many occasions for
the help of the secretarial and so-called 'auxiliary' staff of Glasgow University, and for the
conversations and comments of the teaching staff and post-graduates of the department of
sociology. In this respect, specific thanks to Fred Cartmel whose initial suggestion it was to
take a Scottish novel to Nigeria and also to Prof. Douglas Gifford of the Scottish Literature
department for recommending Consider the Lilies. Dr. Stephanie Newell, then at Cambridge
University, has given me much appreciated help and advice. Thanks also to Kath Main and
the members of the Fife reading group for willingly taking part in this research.
I have been backed up, encouraged and challenged by friends, flatmates, team-mates, non
academic work colleagues and family members. Thanks to all of them, sorry that I can't give
everyone the individual credit due. Fellow survivors of the Lilybank basement Ricardo, Youn
and Des have been friends through the last four years, lowe them a great deal. The same
applies to my brother, Phil, for support when I really needed it, and for his friendship. To
Rose Porter also, many thanks for help and concern that has been there, constantly, for as long
as I can remember.
To my Mum and Dad, Joyce and David Smith, once again gratitude seems insufficient. This
thesis would not have been begun or fmished without them. Because of them, my idea and
sense of home is one that is wholly positive: I know that many people are not this fortunate. I
also know many postgraduates who have not fowld themselves enjoying a good relationship
with their supervisor. Bridget Fowler has given her help and time more graciously and with
more goodwill than I had any right to expect. She never once pulled academic rank, or stinted
on sharing her ideas and enthusiasm, I am very much in her debt.
Frantz Fanon, from an admittedly different situation writes: 'love is an incontrovertible fact
which must be reckoned with.' I am very grateful for the love, shown in many different ways,
of all those mentioned and unmentioned above. Thank you.
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Abstract
This thesis is about the inter-relationship between migrancy and narrative. It is based
on research carried out among expatriate Nigerians, studying the stories that they told
of their time abroad and of their relationship with Nigeria. It is also based on research
examining the cross-cultural reception of two contrasting novels in various parts of
Scotland, and in Plateau State, Nigeria. The thesis argues that western cultural theory
from the 1980s forwards has tended to celebrate migrancy in general, and the migrant
intellectual specifically, in a way that privileges homelessness over residence, and in a
fashion which allocates an undue voluntaristic power of achievement to acts of
imagination, ignoring the delimiting effects of class position and economics on
individual subjects. This aggrandisement of the migrant, it is argued, is part of a long
standing western romantic tradition in which the outsider is seen to hold a unique,
vatic perspective on social life. While there is some sociological truth in such a
proposition, the research presented here demonstrates how such a dominant
intellectual attitude exerts a pressure against the production of fiction written locally
in Africa, for African readers. It also demonstrates how the privileging of the
distanciated perspective can give the cue for migrancy to become, in itself, a form of
symbolic capital held over and against the sedentary local. In both of these cases what
appear to be purely cultural effects - changes in perspective and attitude - are at the
same time disguised expressions of an economic privilege. The contribution of this
dissertation then, is to examine these cultural questions from a materialist position and
to suggest how it has come about that even in its discussion of migrancy, the
deterritorialization of identity, and the death of the nation, western cultural theory has
managed to re-enforce its own hegemonic and institutional grip.
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Contents Page
Page
Introduction. 6
Research. 12
Ground-plan. 17
Methodology. 21
Chapter 1: The New Romantics. 26
Amos Tutuola and unspoiled utterance. 27
Bhabha's avenging migrants and the re-valuing of homeless ness. 38
Homelessness and severance. 46
Okri: dream, text, world. 51
Conclusion. 63
Chapter 2: The Migrant and the Strategic. 65
Edward Said and the migrant position. 65
Strategic essentialism. 74
Fanon and nationalism. 83
Conclusion. 93
Chapter 3: Migrancy, Alienation and Cultural Work. 95
Writing, labour and the Nigerian field of cultural production. 95
Alienation and migrant fiction. 104
The critique of postcolonial theory. 116
The re-valuing of alienation. 127
Conclusion. 132
Chapter 4: Migrancy and Alienation in Nigerian Fiction. 142
Crusoe, Marx and Ekwensi. 143
Alienation in Nigerian fiction. 151
Narrative indirection and the 'literature of despair'. 159
Migrancy in women's writing. 167
Conclusion. 177
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Chapter 5: Migrant Narratives and Symbolic Capital. 181
The fetishisation of the imaginary. 182
The inevitability of the uninevitable. 191
Migrancy and symbolic capital. 202
Migrant narratives. 211
Conclusion. 217
Chapter 6: Imaginative Knowledge and lVIigrant Fiction. 220
Critical distance and re-plotting the story. 224
'Imaginative geography'. 233
Reader responses and homologies of position. 241
Conclusion. 247
Chapter 7: 'Because they bring the story home'. 251
Local readers. 253
The hinge of hegemony. 262
Non-readings and distinction. 270
Nigerian readers and Consider the Lilies. 284
Conclusion. 292
Conclusion: Fictions and Migrancy. 297
Appendix 1: Historical Sketch 311
Colonialism in Nigeria 312
Missionary influence in Nigeria 316
The transfer of power 318
Precolonial Integration 321
Recent History 325
Conclusion 329
Bibliography 337
List of Tables and Figures
Page
Table 1: Asylum applications from Nigeria and decisions on applications. 188
Table 2: Occupations of incoming persons to the UK. 188
Table 3: Familiarity with Nigerian authors among Nigerians. 254
Figure 1: The Nigerian field of cultural production. 280
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Introduction.
More than anything else, this is a thesis about distance. It does not take a great deal of
preliminary reading to appreciate the degree to which the phenomenon of migration
has become a major preoccupation for contemporary social theory and cultural
criticism. On the one hand, especially within literary studies, migrant producers of art
and literature are now centrally important, not only because their works are key
objects of analysis, but also because they are, in their own right, often definitive
contributors to debates over cultural resilience, the meeting of traditions, the narrating
of memory and other related questions. Notwithstanding the fact that many of the
emblematic names of the modernist movement wrote from and about exile, it is the
powerful and arguably rejuvenating presence in the Western cultural market of writers
with origins or ties in the ex-colonial nations that has made migrancy such a
overwhelming motif in current literary debates.
Beyond culture in this more restricted sense, within the broad fields of social
science and within a kind of amorphous, interdisciplinary 'theory', it is commonplace
for interventions to begin by pointing out the qualitatively new levels of human
movement within countries and across the world as a whole. From this stem a wide
variety of discussions, focusing especially on the effect of these migrations on ideas
of the public sphere, on nations and their imaginaries, and on the vexed question of
identity. This latter term in particular has become part of the provenance of that body
of writing given the name 'postcolonial' theory and, although I hope that what follows
will demonstrate a willingness to engage broadly with various critical positions, it is
this field that is primarily approached below. Postcolonial theory, as a name, may well
seem an unwarranted generalisation, and a cursory scan through anyone of the many
introductory readers available does raise questions about exactly what are the
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lineaments that define this critical sub-field. Many of the essays collected in such
volumes are devoted directly or tangentially to this puzzle of definition itself.
Nevertheless, the term does have a titular use in academic courses and conferences
and as the selling point of those collections referred to above, and so I have employed
it as if it were unproblematic in this thesis. It is, nevertheless, a particular version of
postcolonial studies that it is my primary point of engagement and this deserves some
initial explanation.
Identity is, as suggested, a fraught and rather overbearing contemporary
critical issue. It would be hard to imagine Raymond Williams, for example, writing a
new edition of Keywords in 2001 without including a section on a term so idiomatic
to the language of departments in the humanities and social sciences. If he were to do
so, he would be required to point out the rather complex etymology of the word, and
the confusing fact that its origins can be discerned in two Latin terms: identitas,
indicating the sameness or continuity of a thing, but perhaps also identidem, which
refers, with an apparent contradiction, to the repetition or reassertion of a quality or
nature. Usefully, this abbreviated history also provides us with a thumbnail sketch for
the poststructural critique of the human subject whose argument, similarly, is that that
which asserts itself as a thing in itself achieves its unitary image only as a discursive
effect. In other words, only by an assumption of historical sameness whose very
reiteration undermines its statement of continuity. On a closer inspection, the critic
will disclose lines of internal division, dissimilarity and even outright conflict within
this supposed sameness as well as tactics of 'othering' which help produce the illusion
of coherence even as they reveal its impossibility. In the case of the individual this
disclosure might be made courtesy of a post-Freudian analysis of consciousness, but
in the context of the nation and its narratives it is a culturalist or discourse focussed
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branch of postcolonial theory that has sought to reveal the repressed fractures in
(primarily Western) conceptual orders.
In this, migration is often put forward as both the catalyst for the project and,
paradoxically, a key piece of prosecuting evidence. The migrant is held to reveal, in
the case of our national 'bodies', the limits that will afflict any project of cultural
imagination. They do this because their presence forces two linked revelations: firstly,
of the similarities that problematise our ideas of difference (e.g. the migrant practices
and habits - culinary, spectacular, artistic etc. - that become part of British culture).
Secondly, and conversely, of the differences that mark the fail-point of the liberal
democratic idea of complete similarity (e.g. the way in which the hope of full
assimilation has its bluff called by the continued attachment of migrants to prior or
distant cultures). This dual exposure is staged individually for the migrant as subject.
Where this subject is an artist or writer, their written or painted work can be adduced
as critical evidence of this different sameness. In short, migration generally and the
migrant subject specifically, are read to reveal a phenomenon of distance. The
distance of us from ourselves, the distance of a culture from its own self-image.
In the work that follows I try, from a position of broad sympathy with the
historical materialist tradition, on the one hand, and from the disciplinary perspective
of sociology on the other, to engage productively with deconstructive postcolonial
criticism and its discussion of migrancy and migrant cultural expression. Crucially I
have sought to plan and conduct social research as the foil - both the putting to work
and confounding - of theory. I will give a short delineation of this research in a
moment, but before I do so, a statement of what constitutes my central contention.
As I have said, the question is one of distance. In the context of migration this
obviously means many things: the expatriate's sense of exile, the cultural gap that
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