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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Pub Date : 2004-06-01DOI: 10.1177/0021989404044736
K. Renk
She suggests the narrow line between magic and science that mesmerized the Victorians. Victorians dabbled in occult practices, such as telepathy, séances and mesmerism, even while they struggled to accept Darwinian science and its earthly ramifications. They also practised spiritualism while the Empire magically spread itself around the globe. Victorian anthropologist Andrew Lang’s explanation of the relationship between empire and the occult casts light on the period’s wedding of science and pseudo-science: ‘‘As the visible world is measured, mapped, tested, weighed, we seem to hope more and more that a world of invisible romance may not be far from us’’. Lang implies that as the British reached the limits of exploration, after they had weighed, mapped, and claimed as their own more than their share of the globe, the only frontier left to explore and map was the invisible world.
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Pub Date : 2004-06-01DOI: 10.1177/0021989404044742
Mark Williams
In one of Janet Frame’s early stories, ‘‘Swans’’, a family very like the author’s travels by train to a favourite holiday beach. But, lacking the assured guidance of the father who must work, they go to the wrong beach. Although the day is full of pleasures, a dark presence hangs over the holiday. A sick cat has been left at home and a sense of mortality insinuates itself into the minds of the children convinced that their choice of beach was fortunate:
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Pub Date : 2004-06-01DOI: 10.1177/0021989404044740
MaryEllen Higgins
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Pub Date : 2004-06-01DOI: 10.1177/0021989404044737
T. Wagner
Towards the end of Rex Shelley’s A River of Roses (1998), the ageing heroines discuss cross-cultural love affairs in 1966. As part of Singapore’s Eurasian community, they have inherited a legacy of intermarriages and, in the turmoil of the war, they have engaged in further dalliances across cultures. Yet, as they critically view the new opportunities and problems that the next generation has to face, they find that their discussion of ethnicity, culture and racial hybridity boils down to one thing: money and, with it, the newly forming class-divide that is premised on capital alone. Monetary accomplishments have led to the submergence of issues of religion and race. This is not to say that money did not play a vital role in earlier fictions of the region. The centrality of commerce had indeed informed fictions of the British Straits Settlements – now Singapore and parts of Malaysia – ever since East India Company employees produced both fiction and non-fictional writing about the region that was emphatically inflected by a mixture of exotic Orientalism and late-eighteenth-century economic theories to generate a pervasive Romantic commercialism. The most intriguing shift in recent representations, however, is a new awareness of the power that money and, by implication, the class-division based on money, holds in the Straits’ past and present fictions. The comparison of crosscultural relationships in A River of Roses demonstrates this growing emphasis on monetary values rather than on cultural or racial hybridity:
在雷克斯·雪莱(Rex Shelley)的《玫瑰河》(A River of Roses, 1998)的结尾，两位上了年纪的女主人公讨论了1966年的跨文化爱情。作为新加坡欧亚社区的一部分，他们继承了异族通婚的遗产，在战争的动荡中，他们进一步参与了跨文化的调情。然而，当他们批判性地看待下一代必须面对的新机遇和问题时，他们发现，他们对种族、文化和种族混杂的讨论归结为一件事:金钱，以及随之而来的、以资本为前提的新形成的阶级鸿沟。货币方面的成就使宗教和种族问题被淹没。这并不是说金钱在该地区早期的小说中没有发挥至关重要的作用。自从东印度公司的雇员创作了关于英属海峡殖民地(现在的新加坡和马来西亚的部分地区)的小说和非小说作品以来，商业的中心地位确实为小说提供了素材。东印度公司的员工创作了关于该地区的小说和非小说作品，这些作品受到了异国情调的东方主义和18世纪晚期经济理论的强烈影响，产生了一种无处不在的浪漫商业主义。然而，在最近的表现中，最有趣的变化是，人们开始意识到，在海峡两岸过去和现在的小说中，金钱以及由此隐含的以金钱为基础的阶级划分所具有的力量。《玫瑰河》中对跨文化关系的比较表明，越来越多的人强调金钱价值，而不是文化或种族混杂:
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Pub Date : 2004-06-01DOI: 10.1177/0021989404044733
Derek Wright
A marked feature of Nuruddin Farah’s first trilogy Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship was a penchant for refracting political strife through the prism of domestic relations and positing the family as a negative model and source for developments in the nation at large, a tendency which is still evident in his recent writing. In Farah’s non-fiction book about Somali refugees, Yesterday, Tomorrow (2000), a former high school principal traces her nation’s collapse into gun-slinging civil anarchy back to the imbalance of the patriarchal family, notably its glorification of male prowess from an early age, and in the novel Secrets (1998), the third volume of his second trilogy, the grandfather Nonno claims that the looming civil strife ‘‘would not be breaking on us if we’d offered women-as-mothers their due worth, respect and affection’’. In this second trilogy the focus shifts from biological to adoptive families and from filial and sibling relations to the orphaned child, a key figure who poses searching questions about the origins of identity and the relative merits of ‘‘legitimate’’ and ‘‘illegitimate’’ families and of involuntary ‘‘natural’’ or ‘‘blood’’ ties and freely chosen emotional bonds (calling into doubt the values invested in these terms). These changes notwithstanding, the family-nation nexus remains a constant and continuing thread in Farah’s fiction, whether the household model is the traditional genetic one of the first trilogy or the adoptive quasi-family (which is seen to generate stronger devotions and fewer dysfunctions than its biological counterpart) in the second. In the latter sequence the mirroring of civil by domestic discord and the hazarding of explanations
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Pub Date : 2004-06-01DOI: 10.1177/0021989404044743
Ranka Primorac, Pauline Dodgson-Katiyo
Wilson Katiyo’s life was marked by returns. The Zimbabwean writer died of cancer last year far from the troubled country of his birth – but not before visiting Zimbabwe one last time to say his farewell. Decades earlier, as a young man in colonial Rhodesia harassed by the police for his involvement in political activities, Katiyo had left the country with the help of expatriate friends. He returned after independence, only to leave again in the late 1980s. His fiction – the novels A Son of the Soil (1976) and its sequel Going to Heaven (1979) – also tells of an interrupted series of circlings. The novels’ hero Alexio journeys from country to city and back, and is finally forced to leave his homeland altogether. He dreams of a return but the narrative leaves him in England (the ‘‘heaven’’ of the second novel’s title), suspended between the inside and the outside, the present and the future, home and the west. Katiyo could hardly have anticipated the manifold resonance his story would have with many Zimbabwean lives today. Wilson Katiyo was born in Mutoko on 19 February 1947 and attended Fletcher High School in Gweru. In 1965 – the year Ian Smith’s government unilaterally declared Rhodesia’s independence from Britain – he left Rhodesia for Europe. He lived first in England (where he studied chemistry at London University’s Queen Mary College), and then in France and Switzerland. After independence, he returned to Zimbabwe and had a variety of temporary jobs, including working as an industrial chemist and as a producer in the Ministry of Information’s film unit. He became the first post-independence editor ofMoto magazine and worked as assistant director on Chris Austin’s 1983 film The House of Hunger.
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Pub Date : 2004-06-01DOI: 10.1177/0021989404044735
Andrew Teverson
Aijaz Ahmad’s polemical critique of Salman Rushdie’s Shame (1983) in In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (1992) remains one of the most provocative denunciations of Rushdie as a political thinker yet to be published. Despite a thriving industry of Rushdie-orientated criticism, however, literary critics have yet to assess the full significance of Ahmad’s arguments, or to offer a persuasive defence of Rushdie’s position. This is not for lack of commentary, affirmative or negative, on the various positions developed by Ahmad in In Theory. Critics have responded fulsomely to his condemnation of Rushdie’s representation of women in Shame and to his interrogation of the privileging of Rushdie’s works in metropolitan intellectual orthodoxies. Both these arguments, however, are, for Ahmad, rooted in more fundamental political objections to Shame that, whilst they are often rehearsed, have yet to receive a sustained response. In Jaina Sanga’s recent book on Rushdie, for instance – excellent as it is in many ways – Ahmad’s arguments are summarized, but no detailed reply is made to them; an omission that is surprising, given that Sanga’s own broadly poststructuralist view of Rushdie’s political significance as a writer would seem to demand a defence of Rushdie against Ahmad. For Sanga, Rushdie’s re-utilization of old colonial metaphors can be politically effective because it is a means of ‘‘problematizing entrenched versions of reality’’. For Ahmad, however, such an argument is flawed. Change is effected by transformations in economic relations and the only thing that can be helpful, in the context of ongoing neo-colonialism in the third world, is not a challenge to conceptions of ‘‘reality’’, but a global transformation in the ownership
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Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Fall on Your Knees (1996), an emotionally rich and often surprising and disturbing saga of four generations of the Scottish-Lebanese Piper-Mahmoud family, has so far been interpreted as a Canadian magic realist text, a critique of Canada’s official policy of multiculturalism and a deconstruction of hegemonic discourses about gender and race, and as a demonstration that race is a socially constructed concept, rather than a biologically significant one. None of these interpretations, however, has mentioned the numerous links which MacDonald’s text has with Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, although these have been acknowledged by the author herself in an interview with Eva Tihanyi:
{"title":"A Madwoman in a Cape Breton Attic: Jane Eyre in Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Fall on Your Knees","authors":"Pilar Somacarrera","doi":"10.1177/002198904043286","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/002198904043286","url":null,"abstract":"Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Fall on Your Knees (1996), an emotionally rich and often surprising and disturbing saga of four generations of the Scottish-Lebanese Piper-Mahmoud family, has so far been interpreted as a Canadian magic realist text, a critique of Canada’s official policy of multiculturalism and a deconstruction of hegemonic discourses about gender and race, and as a demonstration that race is a socially constructed concept, rather than a biologically significant one. None of these interpretations, however, has mentioned the numerous links which MacDonald’s text has with Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, although these have been acknowledged by the author herself in an interview with Eva Tihanyi:","PeriodicalId":44714,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF COMMONWEALTH LITERATURE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2004-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/002198904043286","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"65353476","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Bharati Mukherjee is arguably the most celebrated writer of the Asian immigrant experience in North America. She has honed the multiple (dis)locationsof her personal biography, which itself has been described as a text in ‘‘a kind of perennial immigration’’, into a literary and cultural poetics that she hopes would constitute ‘‘a revisionist theory for contemporary residency and citizenship’’ in the United States. ‘‘I see in the process of immigration’’, she asserts, ‘‘the stage, and the battleground, for the most exciting dramas of our time’’. Congruent with her professed aim ‘‘to redefine the nature of American and what makes an American’’ through her cultural narration of the nation, Mukherjee calls herself ‘‘not an Indian writer, not an exile, not an expatriate’’, but ‘‘an immigrant . . . [whose] . . . investment is in the American reality, not the Indian’’. Lying at the heart of Mukherjee’s cultural politics is her espousal of the ‘‘immigrant’’ aesthetic, integral to which is a rejection of fixed conceptions of national-cultural identity. In elucidating her ‘‘immigrant’’ poetics, Mukherjee describes her narratives as ‘‘stories of broken identities and discarded languages’’ that, nevertheless, represent her characters as fired by the ‘‘will to bond [themselves] to a new community’’. Significantly, it is this ‘‘will to bond’’ to a new narrative of identity that distinguishes Mukherjee’s ‘‘immigrant’’ from her ‘‘expatriate’’, whom she says is involved in ‘‘an act of sustained self-
{"title":"“Immigrant” or “Post-colonial”? Towards a Poetics for Reading the Nation in Bharati Mukherjee’s The Tiger’s Daughter","authors":"S. Gabriel","doi":"10.1177/002198904043288","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/002198904043288","url":null,"abstract":"Bharati Mukherjee is arguably the most celebrated writer of the Asian immigrant experience in North America. She has honed the multiple (dis)locationsof her personal biography, which itself has been described as a text in ‘‘a kind of perennial immigration’’, into a literary and cultural poetics that she hopes would constitute ‘‘a revisionist theory for contemporary residency and citizenship’’ in the United States. ‘‘I see in the process of immigration’’, she asserts, ‘‘the stage, and the battleground, for the most exciting dramas of our time’’. Congruent with her professed aim ‘‘to redefine the nature of American and what makes an American’’ through her cultural narration of the nation, Mukherjee calls herself ‘‘not an Indian writer, not an exile, not an expatriate’’, but ‘‘an immigrant . . . [whose] . . . investment is in the American reality, not the Indian’’. Lying at the heart of Mukherjee’s cultural politics is her espousal of the ‘‘immigrant’’ aesthetic, integral to which is a rejection of fixed conceptions of national-cultural identity. In elucidating her ‘‘immigrant’’ poetics, Mukherjee describes her narratives as ‘‘stories of broken identities and discarded languages’’ that, nevertheless, represent her characters as fired by the ‘‘will to bond [themselves] to a new community’’. Significantly, it is this ‘‘will to bond’’ to a new narrative of identity that distinguishes Mukherjee’s ‘‘immigrant’’ from her ‘‘expatriate’’, whom she says is involved in ‘‘an act of sustained self-","PeriodicalId":44714,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF COMMONWEALTH LITERATURE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2004-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/002198904043288","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"65353594","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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