Literature,Critique,and Empire Today

Bama’s work in Tamil has for the first time brought to focus the lived experience of the Dalit Christian community that has been pushed to the margins of Indian society. Dalit Christians are doubly victimized, first because of their religion and second because of their caste, and Bama’s work captures and articulates this. However, the Dalit Christian specificity of the author tends to be underplayed and her work is read unproblematically as Dalit literature. There is also a tendency among critics to introduce a split in Dalit Christian subjectivity, rendering the Dalit and Christian elements of identity as separate spheres. This paper seeks to problematize such hegemonic readings and situate Bama’s work in the historical, theological, and social contexts of Dalit Christianity.

The scarification in Aké is invested with major significance apropos Soyinka’s ideas on African subjectivity. Scarification among the Yoruba is one of the rites of passage associated with personal development. Scarification literally and metaphorically “opens” the person up socially and cosmically. Personal formation and self-realization are enabled by the Yoruba social code brought into being by its mythology. The meaning of the scarification incident in Aké is profoundly different. Determined by the form of autobiography which creates a self-constituting subject, the enabling Yoruba socio-cultural context is elided. The story of Soyinka’s personal development is allegorical of the story of the development of the modern African subject. For Soyinka, the African subject is a rational subject whose constitution precludes the splitting of the scientific and spiritual which is a consequence of the Cartesian rupture. The African subject should be open to other subjects and the object world. Subjectivity constituted by the autobiographical mode closes off the opening up symbolically signalled by scarification.

White is for Witching is the vampire story Helen Oyeyemi conceived whilst reading Dracula and, despite its modern setting, it shares generic features and thematic concerns with this nineteenth-century gothic novel. Both can be described as narratives of reverse colonization, as described by Stephen D. Arata, which highlight fears that Englishness will be contaminated by the immigration of racial “others” into England. This article shows how Oyeyemi develops the genre through the introduction of Yoruba tropes, such as abiku, aje, and ancestors, not to create a new subgenre of “Yoruba gothic”, but to draw attention to the cycles of immigration, co-existence, and integration that have always existed in English history. In this way, White is for Witching forms a counter-narrative to the notion of racial purity associated with English nationhood that was crystallized during the colonial period and persists in the present through immigration policies informed by an “imperial ideology”.

This paper argues that David Chariandy’s Soucouyant and Edwidge Danticat’s “Nineteen Thirty-Seven” utilize marvellous realism as a literary technique when representing Caribbean folkloric elements from the diaspora. With this in mind, this article will begin by pointing out the differences between the terms magical realism and marvellous realism within the Latin American Boom writing of the 1950s. These two literary concepts should not be considered as being synonymous because of the different artistic motivations that condition these kinds of writing. As will be seen, in the two particular cases of the soucouyant and the lougarou, these magical elements serve to revise and rewrite the history of colonial and postcolonial women that were persecuted and discriminated against in their countries of origin due to gender and class prejudices. Thus, Chariandy and Danticat use the supernatural as an allegory for the haunting memories of a whole community. In these diasporic works, magic will vanish in favour of a rational explanation for those phenomena where a series of familial and historical traumas will manifest accordingly. The transformation of marginal women into supernatural figures assists the authors in reinterpreting and abating violence and trauma. Therefore, it is suggested that marvellous realism helps writers who have had similar experiences of diaspora to find a balance between two cultures and two different systems of belief: one based on faith and the other on rationalism.

This paper argues that V.S. Naipaul and Andrea Levy revise migrancy as a literary intervention into contemporary British discourses of cultural heritage and patriotism. Official, state-sponsored constructions of heritage and patriotism are closely intertwined to form an insular British national identity. In Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival (1987) and Levy’s Fruit of the Lemon (1998), migrancy not only denotes the deterritorialization and displacement of people but also the travel and transformation of ideas, or what Edward Said calls travelling theory. The concept of migrancy itself travels in the journeys undertaken by the narrators of these two novels. It gains a critical force that contests the insularity of British heritage discourse while also affirming the intersecting and ineluctable presence of people of colour from Britain’s former colonies in the history and cultural make-up of Britain itself.

Literary representations of Morocco sometimes challenge specific colonial, national, and nationalist epistemologies. The work of Paul Bowles, in particular, problematizes conventional categories, not only through the extra-national yearnings of protagonists of his fiction, but also due to the hybrid products of collaborations with Moroccan artists. This article grapples with the contested status of an author profoundly engaged with non-Western epistemology and experience, yet susceptible to Orientalist desire. I focus on Bowles’ novels Let It Come Down and The Spider’s House and then on ways in which the author participated in the emergence of a postcolonial Moroccan body of “texts”. Edward Said’s contrapuntal methodology (2004) and the notion of teleological retrospect (Currie 2007) provide an analytical framework, and Said’s emphasis on labyrinthine and occluded literary relations a rationale for analyzing contexts beyond those directly affected by British colonialism. I argue that Bowles increasingly deprivileges expatriate sensibility and anticipates a critical rereading of colonial history; it is also underpinned by an ambivalent view of writing. While his Moroccan corpus repeatedly enacts the difficulty of “telling the other”, it is nevertheless thematically, structurally, and philosophically invested in the challenges of transcoding, translation, and transvaluation. As such, it illuminates interfaces between colonial discourse, late modernist expatriate/travel writing, and early postcolonial production.

Breath by Tim Winton is an Australian surfing narrative. As a postcolonial novel, the novel’s absence of indigenous representation and its portrayal of the central female character, Eva Sanderson, solicit a reading that attempts to make sense of the intersections between gender and race central to many such texts. In this paper, I explore the representation of Eva and provide a feminist reading of the novel that re-considers its racialized, gendered, and nationalist dimensions. It is Eva, I suggest, who provides the potential for reconfiguring white surfing masculinities, but whose over-determined masculinization and often misogynistic representation within the patriarchal logic that structures the work, hinder attempts to realize this potential. This attempt is further restricted by the text’s erasure of indigenous people from the landscape.

This article examines the science-fictional aspects of Rushdie’s 2002 novel Fury, focusing on the cyberspace narrative at its centre. I suggest that Rushdie engages with the enabling potential of cyberspace, only to finally reject it in favour of a return to the “real”. Fury questions the science-fictional or cyberspace option as a vehicle for previously unimagined artistic freedom. The protagonist, Malik Solanka, finds he cannot overcome personal and collective “fury” by “living in the electricity”. The science-fictional cyber narrative he creates collapses into the “real”, leaving Solanka disillusioned by his dream of artistic freedom and total control. Rushdie presents the allure of cyberspace narrativity as a seductive but dangerous means of artistic escape, and questions cyberspace’s offer of total artistic freedom. Solanka’s disillusionment thus mirrors Rushdie’s sceptical stance towards cyberspace and its possibly redemptive potential. The novel’s ending signifies a qualified return to the “real” and a rejection of the dream of an ultimate “elsewhere” in cyberspace. Solanka’s return home to London and to his son, Asmaan (sky), envisions a different form of futurity, to be found in the next generation. This promise for a possibly better future is represented by Solanka’s estranged son, whom he longs to reencounter in person, rather than in the disembodied technological realm of cyberspace.