Pub Date : 2004-09-01DOI: 10.1177/0021989404047046
M. Fenwick
Among the great dangers of every revolution, success is surely the most pernicious. The academic and institutional revolution occasioned by postcolonial (post-colonial?) studies is not exempt. Having successfully carried the theoretical day and secured a place in both the syllabuses and teaching faculties of virtually every university, post-colonialism (postcolonialism?) has become home to, and perhaps even dependent upon, a number of what can only be called canonical maxims. Post (with or without the hyphen) colonialism is about questioning accepted truths; it is dedicated to opening up new fields of inquiry in old literatures, and to providing a space for previously ignored voices; it is anti-hegemonic, anti-hierarchical and anti-canonical. It is not post-structuralism; it is – or ought to be – politically committed. Above all else, post/colonialism (to dispense with the hyphenated/non-hyphenated debate altogether) is dedicated to the proposition that the world cannot be rightly or properly understood according to the old imperialist terms of “us and them,” centre and margin, right and wrong: binary opposition is to be abandoned, and a more flexible and relational form of understanding and interpretation is to be embraced. What are we then to make of the proposition, frequently made and surprisingly, rarely (if ever) questioned, that in post/colonial literature, metaphor is to be shunned and metonymy embraced? One would think that as two of the most dependable workhorses of twentieth-century literary criticism their role would have received careful and full attention from the promulgators of any new revolutionary way to apprehend texts. But this has not been the case: rather than striving for a relational and Crossing the Figurative Gap
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Pub Date : 2004-09-01DOI: 10.1177/0021989404047043
Eric D. Smith
Now translated into nearly half a dozen languages, Robert Antoni’s My Grandmother’s Erotic Folktales (2001) has eclipsed in sales his previous two novels,1 the first of which, Divina Trace, was awarded the 1992 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and is now hailed as a landmark achievement in contemporary Caribbean fiction. In fact, an upcoming US edition of Divina Trace gestures toward the considerable international success of the more popularly accessible Folktales by featuring not the familiar black Madonna and child of the Overlook paperback edition, but a sensual female nude, recalling the (dubious) eroticism of the latter novel. Thus, critics of Folktales’ mainstream success have accused Antoni of abandoning the high literary aspirations of his prior novels and pandering to western tastes through an appeal to Caribbean exoticism. One internet reviewer charges that Folktales has, in fact, “none of the dignity and grace” of Antoni’s previous books and that this “long-awaited third book comes as a bit of a surprise and a disappointment”.2 The implication that Antoni’s latest book is somehow a sell-out, however, invites us to look more closely at the way exoticism functions as a discourse in Folktales. I offer that Antoni’s latest book might be profitably read alongside the concept of what Graham Huggan has termed “strategic exoticism”, in which exoticist codes of representation are appropriated by the postcolonial writer and then cunningly redeployed as either a means of subverting those codes or laying bare inequities of power.3 With My Grandmother’s Erotic Folktales, Antoni certainly stages a conspicuously Pandering Caribbean Spice
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Pub Date : 2004-09-01DOI: 10.1177/0021989404047042
Y. Gooneratne
It should surprise no one that Leonard Woolf titled the second volume of his five-volume autobiography, Growing. This is the volume that covers the seven years Woolf spent as a British civil servant in Sri Lanka (then Ceylon), and in those seven years he not only grew in years and experience, but significantly outgrew the assumptions about Britain and its Empire with which he had confidently embarked from Tilbury Docks on the P. & O. Syria in October 1904, taking with him into an unknown, exotic, tropical world his ninety volumes of Voltaire, three bright green flannel collars, and a wire-haired fox-terrier named Charles to assist him in his task of helping to rule the British Empire. “The complete selfconfidence of the British imperialist”, Woolf was to write later of his years in Ceylon, “was really rather strange”. While on leave in England in 1912, Woolf took the “icy plunge” back into his old life, re-entering the circle of his Cambridge friends, and eventually marrying Virginia Stephen. But although the old life might have seemed familiar at first, it was not the same. The world had changed, and so had Woolf. His seven years as a servant of imperialism had disillusioned him about many concepts that he had never questioned in 1904: imperialism, for instance, and even the nature of civilization itself:
伦纳德·伍尔夫(Leonard Woolf)将他的五卷自传的第二卷命名为《成长》(Growing)，这不足为奇。这个体积涵盖了七年伍尔夫作为一个英国公务员的花在斯里兰卡(然后锡兰),在那些七年他不仅多年来成长和经验,但明显超越了这一假设英国和它的帝国,他自信地开始从蒂尔伯里码头p & o .叙利亚在1904年10月,带着他进入一个未知的,奇异的,热带地区的九十卷伏尔泰,三个明亮的绿色法兰绒项圈,还有一只名叫查尔斯的铁丝毛狐狸梗，以协助他完成帮助统治大英帝国的任务。“英国帝国主义者的完全自信，”伍尔夫后来在锡兰写道，“真的相当奇怪”。1912年，在英国休假期间，伍尔夫“冰冷地跳入”他的旧生活，重新进入他的剑桥朋友圈，并最终与弗吉尼亚·斯蒂芬结婚。但是，尽管过去的生活起初似乎很熟悉，但它并不相同。世界变了，伍尔夫也变了。在为帝国主义服务的7年里，他对许多他在1904年从未质疑过的概念感到失望:例如，帝国主义，甚至是文明本身的本质;
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Pub Date : 2004-09-01DOI: 10.1177/0021989404047049
Michael Mitchell
The Yekuana people, Carib speakers living around the Paragua River in Venezuela, who in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries undertook breathtaking journeys to Kijkoveral and Georgetown and were known to Richard Schomburgk1 as “Maiongkong”, tell in their creation epic Watunna of the first man Wanadi and his dark brother Odosha, an embodiment of evil, deception and death. In the third phase of creation Odosha pursues Wanadi from the centre of the universe in Kushamakari to the edges of the material world. At each stage of the journey Wanadi creates diversions to hold Odosha up; first there are rapids in the rivers stocked with game, then entire cities full of riches designed to make Odosha think he has found Wanadi and entered heaven. Thus he creates the village of Angostura, populating it with a race of whites called Iaranavi. When this fails to deter Odosha he creates Amenadiña (Georgetown), from which traders will later bring the murderous Kanaima. Finally, when Odosha continues his pursuit, Wanadi constructs his ultimate creation Kahu Awadiña, a city of mirrors and glass at the edge of the universe:
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Pub Date : 2004-09-01DOI: 10.1177/0021989404047050
S. Mathur
In 1905 Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, a young Bengali reformist, wrote a short story entitled “Sultana’s Dream”. Dubbed “a terrible revenge!” (against men) by her husband, who proudly arranged for its publication in The Indian Ladies’ Magazine,1 this short utopian tale of gender role inversion forcefully articulated Hossain’s views regarding the power of modern education to transform the position of women in contemporary Muslim society. Nearly a century later, Manjula Padmanabhan wrote Harvest (1996) for “the Alexander S. Onassis Public Benefit Foundation International Competition for a new, original, unproduced, unpublished play which ‘deals with the problems facing Man on the threshold of the 21st century’”.2 This dystopian play, which won first prize in the competition, forcefully articulates the author’s concerns regarding the neocolonial implications, especially for third-world women, of economic globalization. 1996 also saw the publication of Amitav Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome, a novel that explores in fictional form the omissions and commissions of the discourse of modern science that has been subjected to extensive critique by both feminist and postcolonial theory in the past couple of decades. Not surprisingly, its overt engagement with the history of science, combined with a temporal span that includes the future, has led The Calcutta Chromosome to be characterized as a work of science fiction. The label of science fiction, however, could be applied with equal justification to “Sultana’s Dream” as well as Harvest, not only because of Caught between the Goddess and the Cyborg
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Pub Date : 2004-09-01DOI: 10.1177/0021989404047048
J. Smithies
Upon its publication in 1940 E.H. McCormick’s Letters and Art in New Zealand immediately became a landmark in his country’s cultural landscape. Indeed, the book remains one of the most significant ever written in New Zealand. This “lucid and invaluable”1 text garnered only one negative review for over thirty years and remained in print for half a century, establishing the author as the first professional critic of New Zealand literature. McCormick’s work provided a basis for both literary and cultural reflection on New Zealand, and has the added significance of being the chief accomplishment of the 1940 Centennial Celebrations. Written in a period of both local and global upheaval, and with governmental backing, Letters and Art contains a surfeit of information for literary historians interested in the institutional and aesthetic origins of New Zealand identity. Revealingly, the key to understanding the book lies in the author’s exploration of what he believed was an ambiguous and troubling relationship between New Zealand and the outside world. Caught between the heady critical world of modernist Europe and exile in the South Pacific, McCormick posited that his situation was analogous to that of New Zealand culture generally. In doing so, he advanced a thesis that has yet to be resolved. Perhaps surprisingly given his background, Eric McCormick found himself thrust into the centre of the European melting pot in 1931 when he moved to England to attend Cambridge University. The decade to follow would witness unprecedented social, economic and political turmoil: a global economic depression; the rise in Marxist and Socialist ideology on the Left and Fascist tendencies on the Right; civil war in Modernism or Exile?
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Pub Date : 2004-09-01DOI: 10.1177/0021989404047051
J. Bouson, Margaret Atwood
In a biotechnological world in which the “boundaries between science fiction and science fact are fast collapsing”, corporations can own, patent, and commodify technologically designed species, and while some scientists are attempting to clone human beings, “others imagine concocting chimeras that are half-human, half-ape for medical and experimental purposes”.2 If the “postmodern adventure” in science “strives to overcome all known limits, subverting boundaries such as those that demarcate species”, it also “steers us into an alleged ‘age of biological control’”.3 Moreover, even as a heedless “gene rush” is now underway, the genetic sciences, write Best and Kellner, all too often exhibit “a dangerous one-dimensional, reductionist mind-set that is blind to the social and historical context of science and to the ethical and ecological “It’s Game Over Forever”
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Pub Date : 2004-06-01DOI: 10.1177/0021989404044732
M. Quayum
An article that examines Tagore's perception of the philosophy of nationalism and why he was opposed to it at a time when nationalism was the most universally accepted political institution in the world -- East and West.
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Pub Date : 2004-06-01DOI: 10.1177/0021989404044734
Dave Gunning
In this paper I am concerned to address some of the ways in which contemporary black British literature has been located in relation to a national framework. I do not want to deny that this literature can be seen to illuminate identities that have their roots in international traditions and global cultural forms. However, I wish to take issue with the apparent reluctance among literary critics in this area to accept the use of the nation as an explanatory tool in analysing these works. It is my contention that an understanding of any material anti-racist politics articulated in these texts can only be achieved when placed within the context of the actual discursive practices of the state and civil society of the nation at any given time. I intend to address some of the problems attached to the increasingly popular analytic model of the transnational. While this model may be seen to provide a way of discussing the specificity of individual nations in a way that other conceptions of globalization or postcolonialism fail to achieve, in practice one can frequently still detect a failure to assert fully the materiality of the national space to the degree that a viable conception of transnationality would seem to require. To demonstrate the need for an idea of the nation when analysing anti-racism in black writing in Britain, I intend to present a critique of one of the most influential non-national analyses of black identity: Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic. In showing how this model may not be able to explain particular instances of anti-racist discourse, I hope to present a case in which the importance of the nation-state to expressions of anti-racist
在这篇论文中，我关注的是当代英国黑人文学与国家框架的关系。我不想否认，这种文学可以被看作是阐释了植根于国际传统和全球文化形式的身份。然而，我想对这一领域的文学评论家明显不愿意接受使用民族作为分析这些作品的解释工具提出质疑。我的观点是，对这些文本中所表达的任何材料的反种族主义政治的理解，只有放在任何特定时间国家和公民社会的实际话语实践的背景下才能实现。我打算讨论一些与日益流行的跨国公司分析模型有关的问题。虽然这一模式可能被视为提供了一种讨论个别国家特殊性的方式，而其他全球化或后殖民主义的概念无法做到这一点，但在实践中，人们仍然可以经常发现，未能充分主张国家空间的物质性，以达到可行的跨国概念似乎需要的程度。为了证明在分析英国黑人作品中的反种族主义时需要一个国家的概念，我打算对保罗·吉尔罗伊(Paul Gilroy)的《黑人大西洋》(the black Atlantic)这一最具影响力的非国家的黑人身份分析之一提出批评。为了说明这个模型可能无法解释反种族主义话语的特定实例，我希望提出一个案例，说明民族国家对反种族主义表达的重要性
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Pub Date : 2004-06-01DOI: 10.1177/0021989404044738
Rachel Trousdale
Salman Rushdie’s novels contain a scathing critique of the failure of pluralist intellectuals and politicians to live up to their rhetoric. By emphasizing the fragmented and incomplete form cosmopolitanism takes in India, Rushdie shows how those who claim to promote unity are, in fact, complicit in the creation of communalism and violence. The examples Rushdie treats are taken from the political life of the city of Bombay, but, I will argue, the critique global: while Rushdie subscribes to the ideal of a productive, inclusive cosmopolitanism, he shows that his ideal, when only partially achieved, can have terrible, unintended consequences. In The Moor’s Last Sigh, Camoens Da Gama advocates an impossible ideal: he is a Communist and attempts to bring Leninism to Cochin, but he is unwilling to abandon his life of privilege. When tasked with his inconsistency, he says that he wants everyone to live the same life of luxury: ‘‘Cabral Island for all,’’ he says, speaking of his luxurious home. The impossibility of Camoens’s goal (Cabral Island naturally depends upon a fleet of servants for its upkeep, and the money to pay them comes from the capitalist ventures of the Da Gama spice trade) suggests why Rushdie’s idealistic characters fail: their dreams are only superficially inclusive. To Camoens, ‘‘Cabral Island’’ takes precedence over ‘‘for all’’. Rushdie’s examination of inclusivity, which is only partial, of Cabral Island Communism, suggests that such partial solutions only make the problem of inequality worse, destroying what they were designed to preserve.
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