Showing papers in "The Journal of Commonwealth Literature in 2006"

Bama’s Karukku: Dalit Autobiography as Testimonio:

Abstract: This essay argues that Dalit autobiographies must be treated as testimonio, atrocity narratives that document trauma and strategies of survival. Using Bama’s Karukku as a case-study, it explores the shift between the generic conventions of individual life-writing and collective biography in this text. It analyses the strategy of witnessing in Bama’s narrative, arguing that she functions as a witness to a community’s suffering, and calls upon readers to undertake “rhetorical listening” as secondary witnesses. This act of recording trauma and witnessing, the essay proposes, is one of subaltern agency.

Imagining the Nation: The Role of Singapore Poetry in English in “Emergent Nationalism”

Abstract: Anglophone poetry has played a central role not only in the development of a national literature in Singapore in the first few decades after independence, but also in the articulation of a kind of ...

Cosmopolitanism at Home: Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines

Abstract: What does it mean to be at home in the world? This essay explores how modern cosmopolitanism might paradoxically emerge through an embrace of domesticity and kinship. I argue that cosmopolitanism should be less invested in a traditional idea of feeling “at home” in the world and more committed to recognizing “the world” through the home. As Amitav Ghosh's fiction illuminates the intimacy between the familial and the foreign, his work suggests that a robust cosmopolitan sensibility requires close attention to the energies of domestic life. As Ghosh's work teaches us to understand the home and the world as collaborative rather than competing realities, his concern for home enables a contemporary cosmopolitanism that critiques masculinist and imperialist visions of world citizenship.

Chance and Gesture in Zadie Smith's White Teeth and The Autograph Man: A Model for Multicultural Identity?

Abstract: After showing how White Teeth enacts a dialectic between determinism and chance from which the latter emerges as the winner, the article investigates how such a metaphysic affects Zadie Smith's notion of identity in The Autograph Man where identity becomes a series of gestures through which, individually, we make pragmatic self-presentations. At the same time, an identity is also produced for us socially, which never matches our own self-presentation. Thus social relations are informed by a dynamic of chance and instability and conducted through a process of interpretation and misinterpretation which, dependent as it is on communication, may actually enhance the prospect of social communion. While this model of identity is particularly fitted to postmodern, multicultural society, its origins in Epicureanism and its literary affinity with comedy suggest that Smith's notion of identity owes more to the comedic inclination of novels than to any political imperatives.

“Life in the Diaspora is Often Held in a Strange Suspension”: First-Generation Self-Fashioning in Hanif Kureishi's Narratives of Home and Return

Abstract: Hanif Kureishi has consistently interrogated the concept of home in his writing, especially in texts produced between 1981 and 1997, the period in which he most actively considers issues of race, ethnicity, nationhood and diaspora. Critics of Kureishi's work have generally examined notions of home and identity formation in relation to his second-generation South Asian British characters, but have rarely paid sustained attention to the development of such ideas through his first-generation figures. Thus, beyond some insightful readings of individual South Asian immigrants in a few key texts, Kureishi scholarship currently lacks a fuller discussion of the important, enduring role played by the first generation across his oeuvre; of female migrants; and of the more problematic aspects of these representations. This article addresses such gaps by exploring first-generation selfhood in relation to home (as both nation and domestic space) and return throughout Kureishi's writing, positing reasons for his compul...

Representations of the Oil Encounter in Amitav Ghosh’s The Circle of Reason

Abstract: This article analyses the handling of generic form in the middle section of Amitav Ghosh’s The Circle of Reason (1986), a section which has hitherto received little critical attention and which some readers find puzzling. In particular, it examines two literary modes used by Ghosh in representing a fictional Middle Eastern state: the picaresque and social realism. This well-demarcated textual focus forms the foundation for larger points about Ghosh’s writing, his critique of contemporary capitalist values and Western imperialism. Additionally, the article adumbrates ways in which Ghosh’s critique of the Oil Encounter can be connected to recent political developments, such as the so-called "war on terror". It is also a significant contribution to writing on oil. Colonial sugar, spice, and even cod have all received due attention, while oil, the author suggests, remains woefully under-discussed, given its determining role in contemporary economies.

“Relax and Enjoy the Show”: Circensian Animal Spaces in Australian and Latin American Magical Realist Fiction

Abstract: The Western circus tradition provides a particularly relevant framework for representations of animals in magic realist fiction, since magic realism and the circus are both closely related to Bakhtin's idea of the carnivalesque. Conceptualized as “circensian spaces”, the circus' influence on magical realism manifests itself as what Foucault calls “heterotopias”, “other spaces”, which are inherently contradictory, polyphonic, and “impossible to think”. As the circus traditionally represents, reinforces and at the same time subverts Western conceptualizations of animals, this discussion focuses on the relationship between Linnaean taxonomy and circensian spaces in Peter Carey's Illywhacker, Richard Flanagan's Gould's Book of Fish, Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude and Isabel Allende's The House of the Spirits. This article examines the significance of circensian animal spaces within the Australian and Latin American contexts, and discusses why “circensian animals” may be particularly su...

Entering the Oppressor’s Mind: A Strategy of Writing in Bessie Head’s A Question of Power, Yvonne Vera’s The Stone Virgins and Unity Dow’s The Screaming of the Innocent

Abstract: In this article, Bessie Head’s A Question of Power (1974), Yvonne Vera’s The Stone Virgins (2002) and Unity Dow’s The Screaming of the Innocent (2003) are read as examples of texts in which women writers explore from within the minds and motives of fellow-African, male figures who perpetrate crimes and cruelties against women in their respective postcolonial societies. It is argued that, by doing so, these authors employ a strategy of both acknowledging (“owning”) and analysing the evils against which they simultaneously protest by their vivid portrayal of the harm done to women or girls by such men. Writing of this kind is seen as a form of social action through the authors’ employment of “illocutionary force” (Maria Pia Lara’s phrase). Following the introduction, the individual social setting and the texture of writing in each text is analysed in turn, while correspondences with the other two novels are briefly noted in the conclusion.

Terror as white female in Mudrooroo's Vampire Trilogy

Abstract: Mudrooroo’s vampire trilogy, The Undying, Underground and The Promised Land was published at the end of the last century amid an unrelenting public questioning of the author’s claim to Aboriginal heritage through a matrilineal link. The Gothic narratives feature a white female vampire named Amelia (an anagram of Lamiae), whose violent acts of penetration and (dis)possession act as metaphors for the colonial invasion of Australia by the British. The article reads the trilogy mainly through Barbara Creed’s theorization of the monstrous feminine and examines the ways in which Mudrooroo presents his post-conquest female vampire as castrating and all-consuming. It also argues that it is possible to see Mudrooroo’s female monster as a textual representation of the legendary soulless mother who would devour her own son to feed her sense of self and reality - with all the connotations of the author’s discredited claim to Aboriginal identity this implies.

White Natives? Dan Roodt, Afrikaner Identity and the Politics of the Sublime

Abstract: The aesthetic of the sublime and its political effects have not been investigated extensively in postcolonial studies. In the case of South Africa, it has been deemed–following an influential argument by J.M. Coetzee–to have played a minor role. Yet the evocation of landscape as sublime is significant for understanding the complex processes of identity formation that are involved in particular instances of colonial settlement. This article pays attention to a troubling version of the sublime evident in the controversial Afrikaans-language activist Dan Roodt's evocations of the Karoo landscape. In Roodt's writing, the sublime can be read as an attempt to deal with the otherness not only of the landscape, but also of its inhabitants. It tends, in his case, to have a dehistoricizing effect in questioning the autochthony of local black inhabitants of the landscape while uneasily attempting to assert white rights over it.

Taking the Waters: Abjection and Homecoming in The Shipping News and Death of a River Guide

Abstract: This article compares recent figurations of the Canadian island of Newfoundland with those of the Australian island of Tasmania through close analysis of two significant contemporary novels. It argues that E. Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News and Richard Flanagan’s Death of a River Guide construct Newfoundland and Tasmania as havens from the disorienting effects of postmodernism. Utilizing a psychoanalytic theoretical frame drawn from Freud’s work on the uncanny and Kristeva’s thesis on abjection, the essay investigates how the two narratives bring their misfit protagonists back to the islands of their forefathers to undergo a traumatic but effective “process” of homecoming. The article concludes, however, that Proulx’s novel, in particular, exemplifies the pitfalls of what James Clifford calls “the symmetry of redemption”.

Central and East Africa

Abstract: It has become almost impossible to talk about East African writing without feeling haunted by the Sudanese-Ugandan writer and critic, Taban lo Liyong’s now (in)famous declaration that the region was a ‘literary desert’. Recently, Lo Liyong conceded that indeed the region was no longer a desert, although it was yet to yield a quality crop of writings. The issue of quality is a recurrent one, especially with regard to popular literature, a category that has historically been a subject of heated debate in the region. Questions of the relationship between popular literature and canonical literature have continued to exercise East African writing, both creative and critical. In a sense then, debates around quantity and quality provide an appropriate starting point for discussing East and Central African writing during 2004–05. Compared to Southern Africa, the volume of publishing in the region has remained low over the past two years. This is often blamed on the now ubiquitous ‘lack of a reading culture’; although perhaps the reading culture has more to do with economic factors than attitudes. However, even the narrow segment of the population with a significant disposable income is often seen to lack a passion for reading outside of primary educational material. On their part, publishers seem to take these dominant market patterns into consideration, and it is instructive that a huge volume of publications in 2004–05 in this region took the form of textbooks. Despite this, the last two years saw an upsurge of new and small publishing houses such as Mvule Africa in Kenya and MPB Publishers in Tanzania. This is remarkable in a market that has for decades been dominated by big multinationals including Longman, Oxford University Press, Heinemann and Macmillan, and the equally large local ones including East African Educational Publishers and Jomo Kenyatta Foundation. The emergence of small local publishers has served to broaden access to

Writing Singapore Gay Identities: Queering the Nation in Johann S. Lee's Peculiar Chris and Andrew Koh's Glass Cathedral

Abstract: Taking as its object of study Johann S. Lee's Peculiar Chris (1992) and Andrew Koh's Glass Cathedral (1995), this essay considers the ways in which the relationship between queer identities and (trans)nationalism is construed in two Singapore “coming out” novels. How does their status as writing emerging from a particular postcolonial urban site inflect the significance of their literary-stylistic choices? What kinds of affiliations are affirmed, what ties are disavowed? While the thematization of homosexuality in the Singapore context does not automatically make such texts “subversive”, gay writing brings sharply into focus the problematics arising from a confluence of nationalist and global discourses–in this case, globalized notions of a transnational gay identity originating largely from the West. Drawing on and explicitly announcing their participation in a larger body of gay protest literature, these texts offer a valuable opportunity for reflecting on how transnationalism might enable queer subject...

Rajaratnam’s Tiger: Race, Gender and the Beginnings of Singapore Nationalism:

Abstract: Singapore’s future Minister for Foreign Affairs, Sinnathamby Rajaratnam, wrote a significant and neglected body of short stories while studying Law in London in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Under the influence of his London contemporaries such as Mulk Raj Anand, Rajaratnam’s stories do imaginative work that prepares the ground for decolonization. In engaging with Malayan nationalism, they inevitably encounter the problematics of imagining a nation from the complex legacies of a colonial plural society. Thus, while the stories construct a gendered social imaginary, in which a feminized tradition is relegated to the private sphere of culture, they are troubled by the category of “race” and through a series of elisions fail to imagine a multiracial polity. The uneasiness provoked in a contemporary reader by the stories, however, is useful in challenging hegemonic categorizations of race in contemporary Singapore, particularly in the tightened “racial governmentality” of the nation-state from the 1980s onw...

Benang, This “Most Local of Histories”: Annexing Colonial Records into a World without End:

Abstract: This article examines Kim Scott’s novel Benang as a counter-history and an ethics of speech, which participates in a regeneration of Nyoongar cultural knowledge. Scott appropriates colonial records into his textual topography to expose the ideology behind their neat genocidal script. However, he suggests that although the fight against oppression is paramount, to strengthen Nyoongar culture one must not only attend to the pain of history, but also nourish that which has revitalized, and continues to revitalize, one’s community. Scott’s textual strategy reveals that his counter-history is not dictated by Western logic. Rather he gains his authority from a (continuing) world that is beyond colonial reason. Scott has composed Benang both to question the adequacy of the novel, and the English language, to represent Indigeneity, and to propose a style of writing that generates new speaking positions for Indigenous people.

In the Bedroom: The Formation of Single Women’s Performative Space in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions:

Abstract: This article addresses the formation of female intellectual subjectivity in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Bildungsroman, Nervous Conditions. Written just five years after Zimbabwe became an independent nation, Nervous Conditions critiques government representations of females as physical labourers confined to domestic space, thus functioning as a counter-narrative to that limited national imaginary. The article rethinks concepts of resistant agency that other critics of the novel employ in their readings of the protagonist, Tambu. It argues that resistance, like any other concept, has a history, and that because Tambu is not a Western creation, Western ideals of freedom and individuality cannot account for the heroic aspects of her behaviour. Reformulating Judith Butler’s concept of subject formation, it develops ways of reading agency outside the binary logic of subordination and subversion, suggesting that agency develops unevenly on a continuum between complete compliance and complete resistance to norms. It al...

“Some Further Being”: Engaging with the Other in David Malouf’s An Imaginary Life:

Abstract: This article is most concerned with analysing the role of the other in Malouf’s fiction. It briefly considers Malouf’s relationship with history and postcoloniality before engaging in a close reading focused on Malouf’s personal grammar and figurative patterns. The argument demonstrates that Malouf’s style orients itself toward transformation: the grammar is active, movement-oriented, and the figures notably hybrid or syncretic. Text-making thus reveals itself as a principal path of approach to the other. Identification, as portrayed in psychoanalytic theory, presents itself as another path, especially in relation to imagination and dreams. The essay recognizes that a full apprehension of the other is not perhaps possible, although moments of contact and revitalizing exchange clearly are. Brief examination of the relation between otherness and the broader social world follows, giving attention to questions of gender. Extending beyond its exclusive consideration of An Imaginary Life, the essay concludes by...

Language Politics in Dev Virahsawmy's Toufann, a Postcolonial Rewriting of The Tempest

Abstract: This article is located at the crossroads between language and literature which postcolonial studies is beginning to confront. I explore language politics in a postcolonial context through an analysis of codeswitching in Dev Virahsawmy's Toufann (1991), a rewriting of Shakespeare's The Tempest in Mauritian Creole. I argue that in Virahsawmy's play the prominent juxtaposition of different languages, over and above different registers, fulfils important metaphorical functions. I investigate, in particular, how the strategic deployment of languages by Virahsawmy not only affects the perceived identity of his characters and his own narrative voice, but also interacts with the wider ideological framework within which he writes. Finally Virahsawmy's codeswitching strategy sheds light on the enabling if persistently ambivalent role of Shakespeare in a postcolonial context.

Surviving History: Kerri Sakamoto interviewed by Pilar Cuder-Domínguez

Abstract: Japanese-Canadian writer Kerri Sakamoto is the author of two novels. The Electrical Field (1998) won the Commonwealth Writers Prize Best First Book award and the Canada-Japan Literary Award. One Hundred Million Hearts followed in 2003. In this interview she talks to Pilar Cuder-Dominguez about how she started writing and about her current projects. She discusses the topics and issues she is most concerned with–particularly the internment of Japanese Canadians during World War II and its lasting consequences, and how they came together in the two novels she has published to date. Sakamoto mentions those writers whose work has most influenced her own and describes what it means to be a Japanese-Canadian Sansei writer.

The Ugly Americans: Gender, Geopolitics and the Career of Postcolonial Cosmopolitanism in the Novels of Santha Rama Rau

Abstract: This essay tracks the career of postcolonial cosmopolitanism and its gendered embodiments using Santha Rama Rau’s Cold War novels, Remember the House (1956) and The Adventuress (1970). Rama Rau’s heroines, Indira Goray and Catalina Gomez, flirt with geopolitics of a post-war world that appears to offer them new freedoms. They flirt, too, with the possibilities of transnational affiliation and become schooled in very different experiences of “new womanhood” in the context of decolonization. What the heroines and the novels share is a preoccupation with America and Americans, who appear to hold the promise of a new, borderless future. The essay examines Rama Rau’s ambivalence about the virtues of the US as a Cold War superpower, registering some claims about the fate of the female postcolonial novelist in the process.

Risk and Resilience in Catherine Bush’s Minus Time

Abstract: In its preoccupation with the prospect of harm and its determination to avoid risk, what has been variously called our culture of fear, trauma, or warning presumes particular views about human beings, our future, and what we take to be the good life. Catherine Bush’s novel Minus Time provides an intriguing context in which to consider these views and the obsessions in which they are grounded. The novel’s main protagonist, Helen Urie, is a young woman consumed by anxiety and estranged from her family, the world, herself. While she imagines her astronaut mother, Barbara, suspended in space, caught in a state of pure isolation, Helen is suspended in time, unable to commit herself to an independent course in life. Bush masterfully conveys a sense of the pace and panic of modern existence and the unnerving effects these have on Helen, convincingly tracing Helen’s efforts to overcome her scepticism and discover new sources of enthusiasm and trust.

A Question of Belonging: Reading Jean Arasanayagam through Nationalist Discourse

Abstract: Jean Arasanayagam’s writing, arising from a unique confluence of what can be considered minoritized identities in Sri Lanka (Burgher and Tamil), provides critical insights into the ways in which a marginalized consciousness seeks to carve a niche for itself within an exclusive, majoritarian nationalist discourse. Such minority self-fashioning is often seen in terms of a paradigm of resistance that deconstructs the dominant or hegemonic national discourse and renders identity mobile and fluid. However, we argue that Arasanayagam’s writing, rather than being “post-national”, is heavily invested in the idea of national belonging. Through close readings of a selection of poems, drawn from her earliest published work to recent writing, we explore the ambiguities and contradictions arising out of Arasanayagam’s desire for a self-identity in what can be loosely termed a Sri Lankan national imaginary.

Keeper of the Creative Flame: Suchen Christine Lim interviewed by Mohammad A. Quayum

Abstract: In this interview, the distinguished Singaporean novelist Suchen Christine Lim discusses her formative years as a writer, her process of writing and how she came to write her four novels–Ricebowl (1984), Gift from the Gods (1990), Fistful of Colours (1993) and A Bit of Earth(2001)–in an overwrought state, feeling “infected with the writer's virus”. She also explains why and how she came to write in the English language, how she divides her allegiance between Malaysia, the country where she was born and spent her childhood, and Singapore, the country she later chose to make her home; and why place, memory and history are such important, recurring themes in her fiction. Finally, she talks about the position of the writer in Singapore and how its “good life” poses a threat to his/her creativity; the state of women in the region and in her own fiction; and how regional critics could invigorate the literary scene with more originality and “informed criticism” rather than merely dwelling in the shadow of their ...

J.M. Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K and the Thin Theory of the Good:

Abstract: As elsewhere in J.M. Coetzee’s fiction, Michael K’s body is a central repository of signification. His life-threatening thinness operates as a supple metaphor for the novel’s ambivalent relationship with liberal doctrine. As a marker of the staggering cost of K’s commitment to self-determination, it highlights the suffering that attends a liberal prioritization of freedom over welfare. Yet in spite of its unflinching acknowledgement of liberalism’s limitations, the novel anchors its deepest moral convictions in Kantian and Rawlsian liberal doctrine. Coetzee’s quarrel with communitarianism and qualified endorsement of liberal values are traced back to the complicity he sees between communitarian discourse and the theoretical underpinnings of apartheid. Life & Times of Michael K exposes the alliance between communitarian and consequentialist ethical principles, and reveals the ways in which these principles abet oppression and exploitation by prioritizing the maximization of good outcomes over the claims of...