Comparative Postcolonialisms

© Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 23:1&2 (2003)

Introduction1

WAÏL S. HASSAN & REBECCA SAUNDERS

Part I: The Project of Comparative(Post)Colonialisms

It is widely acknowledged that the publication ofEdward Said’s Orientalism, now in its twenty-fifth anni-versary year, inaugurated the field of postcolonial stud-ies, which has since become the most dynamic and ex-panding sector in Anglo-American Englishdepartments.2 The institutional custodian of what hasbeen considered as the cultural instrument of imperialdominance (from Macaulay’s project of English educa-tion in India to Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s abolition of theEnglish Department at the University of Nairobi andGauri Viswanathan’s uncovering of the colonial roots ofthe English literature curriculum in Britain itself),3 Eng-lish studies is almost inconceivable today without post-colonialism: not only has it become impossible to dis-cuss Victorian and modernist writers like Jane Austen,Charles Dickens, Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, andothers without reference to empire, but writers likeShakespeare, Chaucer, and earlier medieval authors arealso being reread from postcolonial perspectives.4 Therevolutionary curricular and institutional change spear-headed in the late 1960s by Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, whosecontribution to this collection throws an unsuspectedlight on the politics of English in independent Kenya,appears now to have been a bold but ultimately futile actof resistance to the cultural imperialism of English, animperialism that has reestablished itself all the morefirmly—some might argue—by devouring its others inthe name of postcolonialism.5

This perception has been reinforced by the fact thatafter Orientalism, the most prominent theoreticians ofpostcolonialism have been Anglophone academics fromformer British colonies, teaching in English departmentsand writing about predominantly English-language texts,and whose theoretical formulations rarely acknowledgethe historical and linguistic specificity of their frame ofreference. One of the striking ironies of postcolonialstudies, for instance, is that colonial discourse analysisbegan with several theorists who studied colonialism inthe Arab world: Albert Memmi (in Tunisia), FrantzFanon (in Algeria), Said (in the Levant). However, thework of those critics led to the development, in the1980s and 1990s, of a sophisticated theoretical appara-

tus that rarely takes Arabic literary and cultural produc-tion into account. Rather, the latter has remained largelythe province of Middle East studies departments,rooted as they are in the kind of scholarship critiqued inSaid’s Orientalism. Theorists have since then paid consid-erable attention to South Asian, African, and Caribbeanliteratures, debated the postcolonial status of Irish andScottish literatures, redefined settler colonialism in Can-ada, Australia, and New Zealand as postcolonial, whilesome have argued that mainstream U.S. literature “isparadigmatic for post-colonial literatures everywhere.”6

Brian Edwards’ contribution to this collection proposesa more nuanced postcolonial approach to Americanstudies, and Liam Connell’s article intervenes in the de-bates surrounding Scottish literature. What those widelydispersed “emergent” or “new” literatures have incommon is that they are written in English and oftendesignated in ways that either reinscribe colonial rela-tions in terms of neocolonial cultural dependency(“Commonwealth,” “New Literatures in English”), orrewrite histories of conquest as narratives of nationalliberation. This Anglocentric focus of postcolonialstudies has, ironically, preserved the primacy of Englishand established both British colonialism and British lit-erature as a frame of reference, even in areas where thecanon has indeed expanded, so that, for instance, onlyAnglophone African, Caribbean, and Indian writers arestudied and taught in English departments, while theircompatriots who write in other languages tend to beneglected. Precious little is said about vibrant oral lit-eratures in, for instance, Gikuyu, Hausa, or Wolof, orgreat literate traditions in Arabic, Bengali, Hindi, orUrdu—all of which have obviously been impacted byEuropean colonialism. As a result, Anglophone post-colonial literature is a highly selective field (imagine asyllabus on postcolonial studies that does not includeChinua Achebe or Salman Rushdie, most often read inreference to writers like Joseph Conrad). Hence the ar-gument that Anglophone postcolonialism has become amimic canon that functions effectively to reinforce neo-colonial hegemony.

Francophone literatures of the Caribbean, West andNorth Africa, and the eastern Mediterranean have beenmade to play a similar role to that of Anglophone lit-

Hassan & Saunders: Introduction 19

eratures. Francophone literatures have made small incur-sions into French departments, where they occupy amarginal space and tend to be read through the theo-retical prisms of postcolonial theory (refracted nowthrough Edouard Glissant and Abdelkébir Khatibirather than Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak), but withno reference to non-Francophone literatures from thosesame countries. Symptomatic of this cooptation is, forexample, the interesting fact that Arabic literature ofFrench expression by Maghrebian and Levantine writersis occasionally incorporated in Francophone studies,housed as it is on the margin of the French curriculum(and is therefore part of “postcolonialism”), with noreference to Arabic language literature from the samecountries. Madeleine Dobie’s contribution to this col-lection elaborates on the situation of French in theMaghreb. By the same token, Arabic language texts aretaught in Arabic or Middle East studies departments,often with little attention to colonial history, and rarelyusing the conceptual tools developed by postcolonialtheory.7 As for Arabic writing in English, Dutch, Ger-man, and Hebrew, it appears nowhere on the radarscreen of the respective language departments. Patternsof intensified immigration since WWII have multipliedsimilar cases of African and Asian writing in Europeanlanguages, at the same time that the institutional organi-zation of literary studies continues to divide and con-quer the world conceptually.

The dilemmas of postcolonial studies that suggestedthe topic of this first “literary issue” of ComparativeStudies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East aresummed up below. Though not by any means an ex-haustive list of questions about the definition, scope,procedures, and institutional setting of what is by now acomplex and variegated field, these are at least someissues that comparative and interdisciplinary approachesto postcolonial studies can help clarify. The articles se-lected in this special issue, discussed at length in Part IIof this introduction, address some of these concernsand raise other questions as well.

First, postcolonial studies professes to make the bal-ance of global power relations central to its inquiry, yetseems to inscribe neocolonial hegemony by privilegingthe languages (and consequently the canons) of themajor colonial powers—Britain, and to a lesser degree,France. Even substantial colonial and postcolonial writ-ings in other European languages such as Dutch, Ger-man, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish, are no less ex-cluded from postcolonial debates than texts written inthe languages of the colonies: Arabic, Bengali, Hindi,and Urdu, not to mention the oral literatures of Africa,Native Americans, and Australia’s Aborigines, whichpose a serious challenge to postcolonial theories basedon poststructuralist notions of textuality. Carl Niekerk’sand Ignacio Tofiño-Quesada’s contributions to this col-

lection examine aspects of Dutch and Spanish colonial-ism, respectively. All of this calls for comparative ap-proaches to postcolonial studies, since the discipline ofcomparative literature defines itself by resisting themonolingualism of the national literature paradigm, aswell as for more productive engagements with areastudies, the social sciences, and minority studies. Suchengagements would allow postcolonial studies to movebeyond monolingualism and narrow textualism by re-claiming its broad discursive and methodologicalgrounding in those fields. Many of those fields, particu-larly anthropology, comparative literature, history, Mid-dle East studies (the immediate object of Said’s cri-tique), and political science have undergone majortransformations over the past twenty-five years, underthe impact of multiculturalism and cultural and post-colonial studies. As regards literature, the specific focusof this collection, the interface of postcolonial studiesand comparative literature as a discipline has begun tounsettle and transform the latter. By contrast, postcolo-nial studies began with Said’s comparative approach tothe critique of Orientalism, but has since then becomeincreasingly monolingualized and monologized. Thus,while postcolonial studies has offered its own models ofcomparison, such as the paradigm of “writing back,”8

such models are indifferent to comparative literature’ssine qua non principle of multilingualism, which is seenhere as an antidote to the Anglocentrism of postcolo-nial studies.

Second, the radical project of postcolonial studies hasbeen diffused through two paradigms of literary study,each housed within a distinct institutional structure: oneis the national literature department as the custodian ofthe national literary canon, a paradigm that privileges“high literary traditions,” “major authors,” and periodstudies approaches to enshrined “masterpieces” in thecase of the “major” Western traditions; the other para-digm comprises the predominantly social science focusof area studies, in which literature plays a reflectionistrole as proto-anthropology, proto-history, or proto-sociology, in the case of “developing countries” and“lesser taught languages.” In conjunction with women’sstudies and minority studies, postcolonial theory has,without a doubt, done much to unsettle both models:Western national canons have been expanded and theirassumptions questioned, and the imperialist premisesand practices of area studies have been challenged. Awhole library of scholarship in almost every field testi-fies to this achievement, as do the innumerable ways inwhich curricula and professional associations havechanged across the humanities and social sciences. Nev-ertheless, the institutional structures of national litera-ture and area studies departments have survived, andthey have to a large extent succeeded in compartmen-talizing the burgeoning work of postcolonial studies.

20 Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 23: 1&2 (2003)

The increasingly Anglocentric focus of postcolonialstudies since its inception is due in part to this institu-tional influence, especially as postcolonial studiesthrived in English departments. This situation calls notonly for comparative and interdisciplinary approaches topostcolonial studies, but also specifically for analyses ofthe ways in which institutional structures reify the radi-cal potential of postcolonial studies.

Third, the “postcolonial” is itself a far from stablecategory; indeed, the studies which call the category ofthe “postcolonial,” and even the term itself, into ques-tion are so numerous and varied in their assumptionsand foci that they have themselves become an integralpart of postcolonial studies. One cannot, for examplediscuss Said without reference to Aijaz Ahmed’s critiqueof Orientalism, Spivak without Benita Parry, or Bhabhawithout Abdul JanMohamed.9 However, some clarifica-tion of what is meant here by “(post)colonialisms” isnecessary. The parenthetical enclosure of the “post” in“(post)colonialisms” is intended to emphasize the dis-junctive temporality of the term, and the plural form ofit is less amenable to the homogenization which certaintheorizations of the field have effected. Just as colonial-ism took different forms in different parts of the worldand under different conditions, it also followed differenttemporalities, as colonized states achieved independenceat different times or in fact have continued to be colo-nized both geographically and/or through variousforms of neocolonialism. In other words, to think of“(post)colonialisms” is to take seriously the limitationsastutely exposed by Ann McClintock and Ella Shohat,among others, in regard to the linear, temporal, andhomogenizing logic of the “post” in “postcolonial,” andwhich contribute to rendering the category less reflec-tive of postcolonial realities than an emanation ofpostmodernism.10 At the same time, “(post)colonial-isms” preserves the priority accorded to the trauma ofcolonial history which is covered over in the hegemonicconcepts of “Commonwealth” and “Francophonie,”erased in phrases like “emergent literatures,” “new lit-eratures in English,” and “Anglophone world literature,”and by-passed in the politico-economic focus both ofthe Three Worlds Theory and contemporary theories ofglobalization.11 And unlike paradigms of literary studythat privilege a national canon or an ethnic or racial mi-nority, postcolonial studies focuses on a singular globalhistorical phenomenon, the development and spread ofEuropean colonialism under the auspices of the world-wide expansion of capitalism. Given the historical scopeof the field, it is clear that the term “postcolonial,” withits implicit postulation of the linear logic of progress, itsprivileging of formal independence as a historical turn-ing point to the neglect of patterns of continuingdominance, and the uniformity which the singular formof the word projects on imperialized societies, is inaccu-

rate. But it is no more inaccurate than other categoriesof literary history like “Middle Ages,” “Renaissance,”“Enlightenment,” “Romanticism,” and so on. Its valueultimately is not so much a function of its descriptiveaccuracy as its convenient designation of a field of in-quiry. In that sense, “(post)colonialisms” is not intendedas yet another trendy term with a fancy spelling, but as areminder that the category is inherently multiple, dis-junctive, and heterogeneous (despite institutional andtheoretical homogenization, streamlining, and monolin-gualization), and that therefore it is best understoodfrom comparative perspectives—that “postcolonialism”should be understood and practiced as “comparative(post)colonialisms.”

Fourth, the dialogic interface of comparative litera-ture and postcolonial studies would allow us to negoti-ate, from comparative perspectives, some of the yet un-resolved tensions in the field, such as the question of itsscope. Postcolonialism has been stretched so thin bothhistorically and geographically as to reach a crisis ofidentity: should it concern itself with all empiresthroughout history—from Alexander the Great to thepresent—and with all forms of empires, from the Brit-ish and French to the Ottoman, Byzantine, Abbasid, andRoman? Distinctions between settler colonies like Aus-tralia, Canada, New Zealand, the United States, SouthAfrica, and Israel on the one hand (and there are ofcourse significant differences among them as settlercolonies), and say, Palestine, Algeria, Nigeria, Indonesia,or Ireland, on the other hand (also with vast discrepan-cies as well as continuities among them as societiescolonized from the outside), were erased by some theo-rists of the field. Lital Levy explores the complexities ofthe Palestine/Israel situation in her contribution to thiscollection. More recently, some critics have attempted todefine “post-Soviet” literatures as postcolonial bystressing parallel hegemonic tactics of European colo-nial empires and the Soviet Union. Powerful argumentsnow define the Soviet Union as a colonial empire andthe literatures of the former Soviet states as postcolo-nial.12 Adrian Otoiu’s contribution to this collectiontakes up this issue in relation to Romanian literature.The problem of the theoretical scope of the field isfurther complicated in view of the considerable institu-tional success of postcolonial studies, which hastempted scholars in many fields to appropriate its tools,especially where questions of hegemony are concerned.While comparative approaches to postcolonial and post-Soviet studies would be valuable, there is an unstatedrisk in much of the discussion, namely that of erasingthe fundamental link between modern Western Euro-pean colonial empires and the rise of global capitalism,a link that defined economic exploitation in the colonialage and has continued to define the neocolonial orderthrough the Cold War and after. Redefining the Second


World as postcolonial in the post-Cold War period en-tails the suppression of the history of antagonism be-tween capitalism and communism upon which colonialand Soviet hegemonies are based, respectively, and con-flates problematically what used to be called the Secondand Third Worlds. And while comparative studies ofdifferent kinds of imperial orders would be valuable,comparatism should not be based on eliding the distinc-tions between capitalist and communist empires—orbetween either and, say, theocratic ones. Such theoreticalslippage results from inadequate attention to the mate-rial history that gave rise to distinct and competing eco-nomic orders, and to their attendant, antagonistic ide-ologies, as well as to perceived institutional rewards forjumping on the bandwagon of a lucrative field. The re-markable institutional success of postcolonial studiesthreatens ultimately to liquidate the field’s relevance ifthe postcolonial is allowed, whether under the guise ofcomparatism or as a result of postcolonial theory’s uni-versalist pretensions, to designate everything, and there-fore nothing. Comparatism should not become a licensefor conflation.

Fifth, the fact that some strands of postcolonial the-ory are partly responsible for such homogenizing con-flation calls for an examination of the function of post-colonial theory (as part of the triad of “postcolonialstudies,” the wide umbrella covering work in severaldisciplines; “(post)colonial literatures,” the branch ofpostcolonial studies which is the primary focus of liter-ary studies; and “postcolonial theory,” which purportsto define “the postcolonial” using conceptual tools de-rived from any combination of Marxism, psychoanaly-sis, feminism, and poststructuralism). One advantagethat postcolonial studies as a field enjoys in comparisonto categories like “Commonwealth,” “New Literaturesin English,” or “Anglophone world literature” is its af-filiation with a specialized set of theoretical propositionsthat not only recognize the limitations of Westernknowledge, but make of those limitations an object ofanalysis. Without underestimating this distinctive merit,one can argue that it does not follow that postcolonialtheory as a critical and pedagogical prism enables theproduction of non-Eurocentric knowledge of post-colonial literatures, any more than the older paradigms;that indeed, in its very attempt to challenge Westernepistemology, postcolonial theory sometimes homoge-nizes Asia and Africa in more subtle ways than the olderparadigms or colonial discourse itself.13 Without adoubt, postcolonial theory has been able to provideconceptual and ethical frameworks for Western readersin which to interpret European colonial literature andcertain kinds of postcolonial texts that address colonialhistory along a number of specific trajectories chartedby poststructuralist and postmodernist theory. Post-colonial theory unveils the limitations, as well as the per-

sistence, of hegemonic discourses, and is therefore ahealthy reminder of the existence of other worlds out-side of Western modes of thought and representation.But this is also where postcolonial theory can be themost mystifying, for the moment it pretends to standfor or to subsume those other worlds, it begins to re-enact the Eurocentric limitations of its founding theo-ries: Marxism, poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, andfeminism. By the same token, the vast majority of Asianand African literary works that thematize the impact ofEuropean colonialism simply do not fit within the para-digms of resistance privileged in postcolonial theory. Inconcentrating on texts written in English and French atthe expense of enormously varied literatures in other,especially non-European, languages, postcolonial theoryhas privileged “writing back,” diaspora, migration, bor-der-crossings, in-betweenness, and hybridity as the de-fining features of a so-called “postcolonial condition.”Surely these phenomena are not limited to the history ofEuropean colonialism; migration, border crossing, andhybridization are as old as humanity itself. In that sense,their definitional value within postcolonial theory hasbeen greatly exaggerated and never rigorously or suffi-ciently examined, since anybody and everybody anytimeanywhere are products of these processes, which defineall human communities. While such issues are importantin the colonial context, without a doubt they are alsoimportant in all other cultural and historical contexts,even though Western cultural theory has relied on es-sentialist assumptions about identity. The West’s discov

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ery of hybridity as a result of the deconstruction of themetaphysics of presence—a great achievement in it-self—has oddly enough led postcolonial critics locatedin the West to claim hybridity as the defining feature ofa discursively privileged postcolonial sublime. And aseveryone—from North America to Western and East-ern Europe—clamors to prove their hybridity, now per-ceived as a passport to institutional privi-lege—everybody becomes postcolonial . TheEurocentrism of postcolonial theory, its projection ofpostmodern Western obsessions onto the rest of theworld, and its definition of the rest of the world interms of postmodern epiphany, may be overcome byopening the field not only to comparative literature, butalso to interdisciplinary methodologies that rigorouslyinterrogate the limits of postcolonial theory from themultiple perspectives of African, Asian, and NativeAmerican philosophies, histories, worldviews, culturalmemories, social realities, economics, and politics. Thiswould safeguard against postcolonial theory’s currentreinscription of the model according to which the Westfurnishes universal theoretical paradigms while the restof the world yields the objects of analysis. Unmaskingthe hubris of this theoretical imperialism requires thehistoricization and delimitation of postcolonial theory’s


universalist claims from comparative and interdiscipli-nary perspectives.

The theoretical impulse for the project of this collec-tion has been to attempt to salvage the radicalism ofpostcolonial studies from some of the blunting effectsof institutional and disciplinary stratification, namelyhegemonic monolingualism and conceptual homogeni-zation of imperialized cultures. These two effects haveresulted in part from the mixed blessing of postcolonialstudies having found a rather hospitable institutionalhome in English departments, which served for a longtime after the inception of English studies in the nine-teenth century to reinforce British cultural imperialismboth in the colonies and eventually in Britain itself. Inthis institutional setting, postcolonial studies has func-tioned ambivalently both to expose and undermine thecultural imperialism of English, at the same time that itbegan itself to become increasingly Anglicized andmonolingualized—that is, to reinforce the hegemony itostensibly aims at undermining—and to construct auniform image of the so-called “postcolonial world”and the “postcolonial condition,” whose curricular cor-relatives are the prevalent paradigms of “Anglophonepostcolonial” and “‘Anglophone world literature,’ in thesingular.” The emergence of postcolonial theory fromwithin this institutional setting, and in relative isolationfrom or indifference to the immense historical and lin-guistic variety of colonial experiences and their literaryexpression, paradoxically contributed to this monolin-gualization and homogenization of postcolonial studies,even while serving to provide conceptual tools withwhich to “dismantle the father’s house.”

Comparative literature’s principle of multilingualismand methodological prioritization of cultural and lin-guistic contexts are seen here as the logical corrective tothe homogenizing monolingualism of postcolonialstudies under the auspices of English studies. Yet as the1993 Bernheimer report on the status of the disciplineacknowledges, comparative literature itself has deepEurocentric roots, both intellectually and institutionally,as well as a historically uneasy relationship with extra-literary forms of cultural expression, or what has be-come the domain of cultural studies.14 Indeed, the re-port calls for new paradigms of comparative literaturethat would reflect the contributions of postcolonial andcultural studies, calls that have been debated vigor-ously.15 As Emily Apter argues, “many of the territorialskirmishes emerging within [comparative literature] to-day have to do with the way in which postcolonial the-ory has, in a sense, usurped the disciplinary space thatEuropean literature and criticism had reserved for them-selves.” Nevertheless, she continues, “postcolonialism isin many respects truer to the foundational disposition ofcomparative literature than are other more traditionaltendencies and approaches (including biography, influ-

ence study, national literary history, formalism, rhetoricalanalysis). With its interrogation of cultural subjectivityand attention to the tenuous bonds between identity andnational language, postcolonialism quite naturally inher-its the mantle of comparative literature’s historical leg-acy.”16 This is true only when “postcolonialism” is un-derstood and pract iced as “comparat ive(post)colonialisms,” and the argument illustrates themutually transformative potential of the dialogic inter-face of postcolonial studies and comparative literature.While this is not the place to engage in the wide-rangingdebates about the future of comparative literature, a fewremarks concerning the impact of postcolonial studieson comparative literature are particularly relevant to theproject of this special issue.

Comparative literature’s methodological emphasis onthe points of contact between nations was an outgrowthof nationalism as the ideological brainchild of theEuropean Enlightenment. This ideology fostered as-sumptions about the equivalence of language and cul-ture as determinants of discrete national traditions, andprovided the rationale for national literary canons thatlater on came to be studied in separate language de-partments. This model falters outside the orbit of “ma-jor” European nation-states (England, France, Germany,Italy, Spain, Russia), whose literatures have been the tra-ditional fare of comparative literature departments.Modern Arabic, for instance, is a supra-national litera-ture produced by writers from twenty-two nations, yet ismost often regarded by its writers, readers, and scholarsas a single tradition. Conversely, India, a single nationwith sixteen official languages, has national literatures indozens of languages. More complicated is the case ofAfrica, where for historical, sociological, and linguisticreasons, it makes less sense to speak of national literarytraditions than of regional geographical groupings suchas West, East, North, or Southern African literatures; orof ethnic or language-based traditions such as Wolof orGikuyu literatures, which are sub-national; or categori-cally of oral literature.

Comparative literature seeks to bridge nations andcultures by emphasizing the study of multiple languages,yet the discipline has been historically Aristotelian in itsapproach to comparing literatures in different languages,each of which represents a distinct national and culturaltradition: one language, one nation, one literature. Withthe rapid proliferation of literary canons within English(for example, African, Caribbean, South Asian, African-American, Native American, Asian-American, Arab-American, Australian.), and the emergence also of Ara-bic, African, and Asian writing in Dutch, French, Ger-man, Hebrew, and a host of other languages, it is im-possible not to conceive of alternative paradigms to theones that the discipline has historically privileged—suchas studies of influence, period studies (within European


literatures), and national literary history. New paradigmsmay include work across languages but within the sameliterary and cultural tradition—for instance comparisonsof Arabic or African literature in different languages, aswell as comparisons of different literatures written in asingle language, for example comparative studies of An-glophone Nigerian, Indian, Arabic, and African-American literatures. Ipshita Chanda’s contribution hereexemplifies this approach. This last scenario should byno means de-emphasize the importance of multilin-gualism, but such studies in which the rigorous practicesof comparatism are brought to bear on different litera-tures within the same language are important as a cor-rective to the homogenization that currently pertainsunder the rubric of “Anglophone postcolonial” or “An-glophone world” literature, categories that purport toname a single tradition. Such new models of compara-tive literature are the logical outcome of the recent tra-jectories of postcoloniality, migration, and globalization,as well as developments in literary and critical theory.For while the very idea of “comparison” presupposesthat there are distinct things to be compared, analyses ofrace, class, gender, nationalism, and subjectivity havedemonstrated that what used to be considered as theunified subjects of self, nation, culture, and civilizationare inherently split, hybrid, ambivalent, and contradic-tory, that their Aristotelian self-identity is always anideological construct—albeit no less effective to theexercise of material power under the auspices of na-tionalist, fundamentalist, imperialist, and/or neo-Orientalist notions of identity (such as SamuelHuntington’s “clash of civilizations” thesis), as the ter-rorist attacks of 11 September 2001 and the U.S. re-sponses to them continue to demonstrate.

And yet the challenge facing postcolonial studies to-day is how to hold on to the findings of contemporaryliterary and critical theory while resisting the vulgar sortof deconstruction that—lacking comparative literature’scareful attention to the construction of its object ofstudy within its cultural and linguistic contexts—woulddissolve historical and cultural coordinates of identityinto a sort of undifferentiated negative ontology thatfunctions effectively to homogenize the world on thelevel of discourse, and to trivialize or mask the exerciseof material power. The bankruptcy of that tendencywas already visible by the mid-nineties, and has becomeindisputable today. The intellectual relevance of post-colonial studies in the near future will depend on howthe field takes stock of this situation.

Part II: Some Comparative (Post)Colonial Cross-roads

Comparative reading of the various local circum-stances analyzed by contributors to this special issue ofCSSAAME opens up a number of productive sites of

inquiry and testifies to the value of approaching post-colonial studies from a comparative perspective. Thesecond part of our introduction, therefore, (rather thansummarizing individual essays) aims to explore severalfrequently-crossed intersections in them. These thematicjunctions, which materialize and rearticulate from localperspectives a number of the theoretical issues raisedabove, are the congested gathering points of questionsconcerning language, non-identity, property, and tempo-rality.

Consistently, the essays in this volume call attentionto both the sociopolitical force and the complexity oflanguage distinctions. While they all recognize thedegree to which language choice, competency, andemployment are instruments of power, they alsodemonstrate just how varied such effects can be: thatEnglish in Scotland, Nigeria, or India; Tamazight inNorth Africa; Hebrew in Israel; or Romanian in EasternEurope all carry different historical baggage, beardistinct and sometimes consequential social nuances.Madeleine Dobie, for example, in her essay“Francophone Studies and the Linguistic Diversity ofthe Maghreb,” points to the way that multilingualsubjects in North Africa may choose language based ona finely-tuned series of cultural and affectivecalculations: French or English for its associations(however problematic) with modernity or human rights;Arabic for its associations with Islamic and Arabidentity; a Berber dialect for its associations with thedomestic, regional resistance, or local roots. AdrianOtoiu, in “An Exercise in Fictional Liminality: ThePostcolonial, the Postcommunist and Romania’sThreshold Generation” shows how the Romanianlanguage in differing provinces of the same regionbecame perceived alternately as a colonial language ofrepression, an indigenous language restored to itsappropriate status, and a threatened native vernacular.

Language use has often enough been an instrumentof domination inflected through class, nationality orethnicity; in (post)colonial contexts, it has often beenracialized, charged with being the bearer of culture, themark of one’s “nativeness” or “Europeanness.” Anaccent or mismanaged idiom could, and in manycontexts still does, entail significant social and materialeffects. Put otherwise, if language is the house of being,as Heidegger suggests, it affords some very diversekinds of accommodations. Who, after all, is supposed toaccommodate whom? Abdellatif Laâbi’s recognition ofthe non-reciprocity of languages, invoked by Dobie,reminds us that certain languages (primarily non-European ones) are regularly asked to bear the costs ofaccommodation, and that speakers of Europeanlanguages are likely to find themselves much more athome in those accommodations. As Laâbi points out, ifthe underlying principle of Francophonie is the


promotion of cultural diversity, this obligation shouldextend to metropolitan France as well, where theteaching of Arabic, for example, is minimal and evenaffectively discouraged by the myriad effects of racism,by immigrants’ desires for their own and their children’sassimilation, by the clear advantages of beingunequivocally français(e) de souche. Dobie suggestivelyextends Spivak’s ever-fruitful question “Can theSubaltern Speak?” to include the inquiry: and if so, inwhat language(s)? In what language will s/he be heard,responded to, accommodated?

As Ipshita Chanda notes in her essay, “The Tortoiseand the Leopard, or the Postcolonial Muse,” in manycontexts, adopting a national or global language may bea matter of survival, of finding a job, or gaining accessto vital services. It has become particularly urgent toreflect on this fact in relation to English as a “globallanguage:” consenting to the global status of Englishsets up some very straightforward equations about whohas greater or lesser access to the “global.” While facilityin English clearly carries social and material advantagesthat ought to be considered in institutional and curricu-lar decisions, an unreflective endorsement of the globalstatus of English may also function as a mechanism ofexclusion, replicate global inequities, or contribute to thecultural and economic hegemony of the Anglophoneworld.17 In short, language facility can be both empow

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ering and oppressive; the difficulty is that sometimes it isboth at the same time. Indeed, the power operations oflanguage do not break down into a simple bifurcation ofa dominating colonial language and a dominated colo-nized one, as postcolonial theory has sometimes imag-ined. Chanda’s essay demonstrates that a single languagemay have very different effects in different contexts, asdoes English, for example, in India (with its long historyof script culture) as compared to Nigeria (with its em-beddedness in oral culture). Comparative methods, sheargues, need to be extended in terms of this recognition,and postcolonial studies would benefit from compara-tive analyses of individual colonial languages in theirdiffering sites of deployment.

A further problem signaled by a number of this vol-ume’s essays is that while academic institutions, and thepostcolonial analyses practiced in them, are largely ori-ented around distinct national language categories, thisorganization bears little relation to actual language prac-tice across the globe. As Liam Connell points out in“Modes of Marginality: Scottish Literature and the Usesof Postcolonial Theory,” many locales, and even somenations, are not distinguished by language. And as bothDobie and Otoiu observe, many nations are crossed bymultiple languages. These facts bear several significantconsequences. As Connell shows, it may entail institu-tional marginalization or a conflation of (for example)“literature in English” with “English literature,” and

hence inattention to local specificities. In his essay “Pre-posterous Encounters: Interrupting American Studieswith the (Post)Colonial or, Casablanca in the AmericanCentury,” Brian Edwards analyzes another pressing ex-ample. While U.S. literature is both undistinguished by anational language and crafted in multiple languages, ithas often been disciplined in ways that emphasize itsconnections with England rather than with the Ameri-cas, Africa, or Asia, that ignore work in other languages,and, as Edwards argues, in ways that institutionally dis-courage comparative, multilingual, multi-sited work. Thediscipline of “American studies,” which tends to turninward in search of context, has thus contributed, heargues, to the construction of American exceptionalism.

There exists a significant discrepancy, moreover, be-tween the kinds of fluency exercised by multilingualsubjects and the kinds of fluency demanded, andstructurally reproduced, in the academy. In part a legacyof the West’s investment in language as a carrier of (na-tional) culture, the institutional regulation of languageuse stands in rather stark contrast to the kinds of lan-guages called for in modern experience which, asChanda examines in the contexts of India and Nigeria,include “link languages” and pidgins, as well as alterna-tive conceptions of competence and comprehension.This recognition should certainly lead us to considerhow such languages, particularly characteristic of post-colonial societies, are institutionally disciplined and withwhat effects. How do academic programming, the disci-plinary organization of departments, or the content ofspecific curricula participate in the maintenance of co-lonial (or “first” and “third” world) distinctions? Whenwe teach language—or about language—what are weteaching students to express? What are we teachingthem to hear or accommodate? What class or racial dis-tinctions are we reproducing? To what degree do lan-guage programs which fetishize grammatical and pho-netic mastery institutionalize the logic that a) it’s betternot to mess with another language than to speak it withan accent or make an error; and b) it’s preferable (andmore marketable) to speak one second language flaw

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lessly than to work in several with the possibility of er-ror? To what extent does guarding against faux amis keepus from having any ami(e)s at all?

The problem, indeed, is even denser than this. Whenwe consider the equivalence that hermeneutics has longmaintained between error and foreignness, the degree towhich error has been regulated as pathology (as whatmust be contained, restrained, regularized, punished, oreliminated); that error (from Latin erre) signifies not onlyfault but wandering and thereby associates itself withpeople (as much as ideas) that move, travel, immigrate;that absence of mastery, trial and error, are often thequotidian experience of immigrants, transnational peo-ples, and residents of multilingual societies; and that


regulating epistemological and linguistic foreignness hasbeen a key strategy for disciplining foreigners; we findourselves in a position to ask to what extent our institu-tional ordering of language is about keeping the bar-barian—which in this case may be the multilingual post-colonial subject—at the gates.18 Perhaps it is worthrecalling that the notion of syntax derives from themilitary; a taxis is an arrangement of soldiers; suntasseindesignates not only the act of arranging and organizing,but commanding, assigning, imposing punishment, as-sessing for taxation. If language is, by its very nature, anorder, it is also and irreducibly a regulative systemthrough which power is produced and directed.

This is not an argument for lowering standards inlanguage curricula, but a recognition that academiclinguistic discipline is at odds with much of themultilingual world in which “errors” are routine, and inwhich, by an alternative standard, many taxi drivers orshopkeepers in postcolonial societies are morelinguistically adept than those who hold advanceddegrees from Western language and literaturedepartments. This is a dilemma in which comparativeliterature might well intervene. Insofar as it allows forthe possibility of working in multiple languages (eventhose not fully mastered), and insofar as it privilegesmultilingual ability over “native fluency,” comparativeliterature might be a site where institutional linguisticsegregation, its defilement anxieties, and social effectsmight begin to be dismantled. Acknowledging thisdiscrepancy between language in the academy and in theworld might also function as a corrective to existingcomparative literature programs, which have a tendencyto draw already proficient multilingual students, and tointimidate or discourage those not yet fluent in a secondor third language. Perhaps multilingual ability needs tobe construed as a goal, rather than a precondition, ofcomparative literature programs and programmingshould make greater allowance for the process oflanguage acquisition.

And error, by the way, has its uses—a fact not lost onthis issue’s contributors, who explore the strategic usesof, for example, impropriety, interruption, mistransla-tion, irresolution, and absurdity. Wandering outside theborders of decorum, certainty, metaphysical logic, sig-nificance, and civility: what might one see from suchsavage territory? What tactical advantages might suchdigressions offer? These essays suggest, in various ways,that such outlands might be precisely the sites fromwhich (neo)colonial domination can be most powerfullychallenged; that impropriety might function as the serv-ice entrance through which an alterity enters the knowl-edge that empires produce about themselves. In the co-lonial context, being reasonable and avoiding errorshave largely been a matter of running the colony moreefficiently. As Carl Niekerk reminds us in his essay,

“Rethinking a Problematic Constellation: Postcolonial-ism and its Germanic Contexts (Pramoedya AnantaToer/Multatuli,” even exercises in self-critique have of-ten been ways of refining and legitimating colonialpractice. Indeed when we take into account the fact thata central maintenance technique of colonial regimes hasbeen relegating to meaninglessness and impropriety thethought, beliefs, and knowledge systems of native peo-ples, the need not only to heed “errors,” but to developcritically errant practices, becomes pressingly evi-dent—if indeed, we want to hear the subaltern speak.

Edwards proposes one such practice—a strategy ofcritical interruption, an enabling indiscipline thatinterrupts dominant accounts of canonical texts, makesway for archives of suppressed intertexts and contexts,takes seriously intratextual interruptions, and disruptssyllabi designed around national literatures with textsfrom elsewhere. In broader terms, he argues that such apractice implies that American studies could profit fromgreater interruption by postcolonial studies, by payingattention to how America and its cultural products areunderstood elsewhere. Similarly, American studies mightproductively interrupt postcolonial studies by examiningcolonialism, independence movements, and postcolonialnations in a global context that includes Americanforeign politics, the cold war, and neocolonial economicrelations. Such interruptions and the uneasiness theyentail, may indeed be necessary for opposing the critical“common sense” of the moment. Otoiu examines thenecessity of such hermeneutic improprieties in thecontext of Ceaucescu’s Romania, where one had tolearn, in effect, to read erroneously, to interpret officialdiscourse as signifying the inverse of what it said.Artists in this milieu, where circumventing censorshipwas paramount, developed textual practices that obscureas much as express meaning and that require suspensionof “normal” reading practices. Characterized by liminalcircumstances, borderline personalities, unresolveddilemmas, and contradictory indications, this literatureinhabits those undisciplined spaces that totalitarianregimes and colonial reason are anxious to cleanup—restore to metaphysical and social order—and thatthe politically and aesthetically creative transform intooppositional opportunities.

In “License to Write: Encounters with Censorship,”Ngugi wa Thiong’o offers an example of theopportunities that can be produced by absurdity: here ofthe Kenyan censorship board, for which subversive texts(by, for example, Marx, Lenin, Castro, and Mao) weredeemed innocuous if published by a Western press.Such reasoning, precisely because it is unreasonable,proves itself highly useful. As does anotherimpropriety—mistranslation—here analyzed by LitalLevy in “Exchanging Words: Thematizations ofTranslation in Arabic Writing from Israel.” While


translation has often functioned as an instrument ofcolonial domination—as a way of distinguishing selffrom other, producing the colonial subject andadjudicating value and truth—Levy analyzes a revealingscene of (mis)translation in which shared roots (bothlinguistic and historical), rather than clearlydiscriminating self from other, are the source of bothconfusion and an errant truth. By not performing theprescribed translation Sa‘id, the main character of EmileHabiby’s novel, The Pessoptimist, twists his interlocutors’meaning into something else—into a significance thatnot only ostensibly bears the author’s message, butfunctions as a mordant critique of Israeli nationaldiscourse.

Translation is, to be sure, a language issue significantto numerous (post)colonial contexts. But in this case, tohear Habiby’s double-edged meanings, in which Hebrewand Arabic routinely interrupt each other, requires amode of reading that is tantamount to sustained transla-tion. Thus, contrary to conventional notions of transla-tion as a process applied externally to a completedsource text, translation in this case, as Levy contends, issomething that takes place within an original. To bor-row from de Man’s elaboration of Benjamin, it adducesin the original “a mobility, an instability, which at firstone did not notice.” Translations “disarticulate [and]undo the original, they reveal that the original was al-ways already disarticulated.”19 From this perspective,translation becomes a reading strategy, or fluidity ofmind; it is conceived less in terms of equivalence than ofnegotiation, wandering (erre), or play. In this it resemblesthe hybrid and errant linguistic practices of many mod-ern speakers which may glide without apparent disjunc-tion back and forth between French and Arabic (inNorth Africa or Paris) or Spanish and English (in theAmericas)—speaking habits in which languages are in-distinguishably entangled and it is often the entangle-ment itself which produces meaning. Equally significantin the scenes of translation Levy examines is the recog-nition that language does not always comply withmeaning or intent, that one regularly finds one’s ownlanguage(s) allegorical, foreign, in need of translation,and that wordplays are also powerplays.

And that is why, at least in part, the literary becomesan issue. As Ngugi’s narrative shows, both the Britishcolonial government and the independent Kenyan state,however inadvertently, have testified to the subversiveand influential nature of literature, the former bybanning artistic products perceived to supportindependence, the latter by raiding the author’s library,imprisoning him, and denying him access to books andwriting materials. In this climate of censorship,producing conformity to state ideology, as well ascolonial and national subjects that are useful, obedient,and well-regulated, is accomplished by eliminating

deviant ideas and unregulated knowledge, which largelymeans suppressing writing. Literary texts are clearlyperceived to introduce unnecessary risk into theprocesses of governability. And this risk, as theRomanian writers discussed by Otoiu also recognized, isa space of possibility. Indeed both Ngugi’s and Otoiu’sessays remind us that literary texts do have politicalimpact, that we should not be too quick to dismiss theliterary as socially irrelevant, not be so adamant aboutthe distinction between the material and the discursivethat we overlook their complicity.

But language questions also exceed literature. Whilelanguage and literature played an undeniable role inprocesses of colonization, colonization cannot andshould not, as Connell argues, be reduced to a matter oftextuality. As he demonstrates in the case of Scotland, amaterialist and historicized analysis renders a quite dif-ferent picture of Scotland than that portrayed by literarycritics anxious for Scottish literature to be included inthe postcolonial canon. Dobie makes a related point inthe case of North Africa, where language choice hasdominated the concerns of literary intellectuals at theexpense of other pressing issues like high illiteracy ratesor the political suppression of Berber languages. Liter-ary texts, as much as social discourse, are embedded in amuch larger context that, as this volume’s contributorsrepeatedly emphasize, calls for transdisciplinary analysis.Understanding the postcolonial necessitates simultane-ous investigation of discursive, materialist, historical,political, and cultural factors, as well as their bearings oneach other. Again, this might be a place where the al-ready transdisciplinary emphases of comparative litera-ture programs, a number of which have recently ex-panded into literature and cultural studies departments,might play a key role in postcolonial studies. As theBernheimer report emphasized a decade ago, the “com-parative” in comparative literature should include:

comparisons between artistic productions usuallystudied by different disciplines; between various cul-tural constructions of those disciplines; betweenWestern cultural traditions, both high and popular,and those of non-Western cultures; between the pre-and post-contact cultural productions of colonizedpeoples; between gender constructions defined asfeminine and those defined as masculine, or betweensexual orientations defined as straight and those de-fined as gay; between racial and ethnic modes of sig-nifying; between hermeneutic articulations of mean-ing and materialist analyses of its modes ofproduction and circulation; and much more.20

In addition to the complexity of (post)colonial lan-guages, this collection of essays also evinces numerousinstances of a strange non-identity haunting(post)colonial circumstances. While postcolonial criticshave long recognized (and either positively or negatively


valued) the doubled nature of colonized subjectivity—interms of méconaissance, double consciousness, split sub-jectivity, hybridity, or métissage—this volume focuses lesson this now well-established version of non-identitythan on the double construction of colonial powers andon the diverse and specific forms such doubleness maytake: political strategy, terminological confusion, inter-ested misrecognition, lamentable quandary. IgnacioTofiño-Quesada, for example, in “Spanish Orientalism:Uses of the Past in Spain’s Colonization in Africa,”demonstrates how Spain adeptly exploited a doubleidentity in its arguments for colonization in Africa, bothparading its Islamic past to claim an “inherent Africanvocation” and suppressing it to emphasize the Catho-lic(izing) mission of its colonial projects. Connell showssomething quite different in the case of Scotland, whichhas been construed as both an integral part of Englandand an English colony. If less calculated, the termino-logical confusion subtending Scotland’s dual identity isno less ideologically interested than the double-dealingsof Spain. Interpreting Scotland as an English colony,Connell argues, endows Scottish texts with the “post-colonial aura” (and thus a certain institutional capital) atthe same time that it absolves Scots of their own par-ticipation in empire and blurs the distinction betweencolonization and imperialism.21

According to Edwards, the double identity of theU.S.—its misrecognition of its own global image—islargely repressed and often invisible in American studies,which has paid scant attention to how “American-ness”is understood and recoded elsewhere. More specifically,its lack of engagement with postcolonial studies haseffaced the role of the U.S. in processes of decoloniza-tion, the neocolonial economic relations it has estab-lished with putatively “postcolonial” nations, and theforms of domination obscured by its promises of lib-eration. While the split identity of the U.S. remainslargely unacknowledged, the ambiguity, in-betweenness,or liminality that have often been used to describe theBalkans are not only well-recognized, but nearly alwayslamented. Otoiu signals the way this doubleness hasbeen pathologized, seen as an abnormality or stigma, asan imitation of, or transition to, Western cultural im-peratives. Here, double-identity is not perceived as em-powering, but as lack or indeterminacy, as the indignityof being “not yet” or “not quite” European. The West-ern media’s clutching onto the unequivocal events of1989 are a symptom, he suggests, of this uneasinesswith ambiguity.

Two further modalities of double constructionemerge from these essays. One is displacement, a termwhich is oriented toward two locations—a proper placeand an alien, figural, or erroneous one, and a termwhose demographic and psychoanalytic nuances followit everywhere. Otoiu examines the displacement of

meaning in Romanian fiction and society, the doublecoding and encrypted references that insist that realmeaning is elsewhere. In a communist-controlled era,allegory and parable were compulsory, as was a kind oftraining in double-codedness, an ability to signify andtranslate what couldn’t be said. Exiles in significationrather than in space, such double constructions func-tion, Otoiu contends, as correctives to those strands ofpostcolonial theory that have assumed literature to be atransparent representation of society. Niekerk analyzesanother mode of displacement, that of colonial blame,arguing that while critical attitudes towards competingcolonial powers may bear certain truths, they were alsooften a legitimation technique for one’s own colonialpolicies, a method for localizing and containing critique,for displacing it from colonialism in general to the un-enlightened policies of another colonial power or theabuses of a corrupt official. A way of exculpating one-self by reproaching the other, such critiques functionedto justify the critical nation as the more progressive andbenevolent colonizer. If the former of these two ver-sions of displacement (Otoiu’s analysis of meaning) is alesson that understanding necessarily entails readingelsewhere, the latter (Niekerk’s analysis of blame) insiststhat it begins at home. Put otherwise, elsewhere may bemore familiar than one realized and home unrecogniza-bly foreign.

A second form of doubleness addressed in this col-lection is appropriation, a process of making one’s own, arenting of a dominant order’s cultural property or a pig-gybacking on its power. As both Michel de Certeau andRoss Chambers theorize such appropriation, it is of adifferent order from the “making one’s own” of coloni-zation, precisely because it is a tactic of the non-propertied, of those for whom a property’s use is con-sidered improper or inappropriate.22 While arguablybearing certain similarities to Bhabha’s notion of mim-icry, appropriation is not just an acting, but a taking andusing, particularly for purposes other than that forwhich an object was intended.23 Ngugi’s innovative useof toilet paper (for composing Devil on the Cross) is anexcellent case in point. Niekerk elaborates another in-triguing example of such appropriation: contemporaryIndonesian author Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s creativereuse of a novel by Multatuli, a Dutch colonial official.As Niekerk shows, Toer rehabilitates Mutatuli’s text andcharacters to explore the role of the progressive intel-lectual in processes of transculturation, to reinterpretMultatuli’s relevance to Indonesian independence, tocritique both colonial and native forms of power andknowledge, and to trace the etiology of globalization.Multatuli’s novel becomes both his own and another’s,the text it has always been and something else entirely.

Edwards’s essay considers the multiple reappropria-tions undergone by Casablanca—as name, city, film,


icon, obscur objet du désir. If Hollywood took Casablancafrom Morocco and remade it in its own image (the film,shot entirely in California, bears little resemblance to theMoroccan city), going so far as to try to copyright thename, Moroccan film director ‘Abd al-Qader Laqt‘a,repatriating Casablanca (the city) and reappropriatingCasablanca (the film), inventively siphons off the im-mense cultural capital of the Hollywood production,reorienting the American plot for his own purposes. Hisfilm, entitled Love in Casablanca, visually cites both Casa-blanca (the city) and Casablanca (the film), to produce animaginative misreading of the latter, one in whichAmerica is stuck in a suffocating morality, moribundtraditions, and oppressive censorship, and in which Mo-rocco, by contrast, is vibrant, liberal, and modern. Thecultural appropriations described by both Niekerk andEdwards are, hence, constructions of a non-identity thatwork with, through, and against the colonizer’s property.

But the very notion of “property” should give uspause; it is hardly a self-evident principle. Indeed strug-gles over property rights, implicit or explicit—and overthe very meaning of property—appear persistently inthe essays that follow: struggles over territory, resources,and power to be sure, but also over language, thought,and history. To own property means more than merelyto possess or use it, it is to have a legitimate right tosuch possession and use, and the provenance of suchlegitimation constitutes a large part of such contentions.Both Dobie’s and Chanda’s essays demonstrate the de-gree to which processes of (de)colonization have been astruggle over the ownership of language: over who hasthe right or responsibility to use a given language, towhom it “belongs,” who determines its proper use, who“owns” the context that controls its meaning. In somecases, colonial and national subjects may find themselvescompletely dispossessed of the right to a given lan-guage—as Dobie notes in Algeria and Ngugi in Kenya,Spain, Hawaii, and the Americas. In these instances, us-ing a language where it does not belong is criminalized;violaters may pay with imprisonment, even death. Ngugiexamines a related form of regulation—of the legiti-mate possession of thought. His analysis of censorshipshows the multiple ways that thought, as well as themeans of its production and exchange, can be confis-cated: from the physical destruction of a theater, library,or writing materials, to withdrawal of funding for edu-cation, to simple intimidation and discouragement. Whohas access to books, the media in which to express andexchange ideas, and the freedom to do so not onlyregulates the economy of intellectual property but sug-gests that Ngugi’s youthful belief in a need for a “li-cense to write” is often metaphorically, even when notliterally, true. For Niekerk, the question is over whoowns a particular species of thought—that is, rationality.Does it belong to the West? Was the deed drawn up in

the Enlightenment and handed down through genera-tions of Europeans? Is it proper in some places andimproper in others?

Tofiño-Quesada describes an intriguing struggle overpossession of the past: at the same time that Europe wasreclaiming Spain’s Muslim past and taking possession ofa conveniently located mecca of Orientalism, an ultra-Catholic Spain was laying claim to the same past forChristendom, narrating a history temporarily and illicitlypurloined by Islam. The incident of Santa Cruz de MarPequeña, to which Tofiño-Quesada refers, is, further, acogent example of the way in which geographic andsymbolic territory become inseparably fused: it is notuncommon for struggles over meaning to materializeinto battles over space. This fusion of the geographicand the ideological is also legible in the Israeli policy ofchanging place names from Arabic to Hebrew (noted byLevy), and the astonishing 1942 advertisement (cited byEdwards): “The Army’s Got Casablanca—and So HaveWarner Bros!” Beneath both these cases of geo-ideological (con)fusion, it should not be overlooked, liebloody conflicts over land and material resources.

The complexity of this relation between the symbolicand material is evinced in two strangely contradictoryscenes of (dis)possession in the essays that follow.These scenarios (one analyzed by Levy, the other byChanda) disclose how this relation not only managesnational territories, but also regulates personal belong-ings, legitimating possessions through, for example, citi-zenship, local codes of belonging, or social and eco-nomic standing. Levy interprets a scene from SamirNaqqash’s I, They and the Split in which the narrator’sfamily, Iraqi Jews, having succumbed to pressure toemigrate to Israel, appear before the denaturalizationboard. At the very moment that their identity and na-tionality are being confiscated, the official doing so in-advertently addresses them as compatriots. The strikingcontradiction of this moment calls attention to howsymbolic possession (here of membership in the“imagined community”) may occlude the reality of ma-terial dispossession (of home, personal property, andcitizenship rights). Chanda analyses a different set ofcontradictions between the symbolic and material. Re-flecting on the circumstances of a character from Arun-dati Roy’s novel, The God of Small Things, she notes theway in which the colonizer’s discourse offers Veluthaideological redress for his untouchable status withWestern notions of individuality and human rights at thesame time that the material practices of colonizationdeprive him of the possibility of realizing those goals.While one hand generously dispenses a liberal ideology,the other tightly grips the resources that would allow itspromises to materialize.

Critical in postcolonial realities, property struggles arealso increasingly widespread in the institutionalized


practice of postcolonial studies. The confrontation ofthe national organization of language and literature de-partments with an increasingly transnational body ofcultural productions has given rise to numerous suchstruggles. Connell, for example, investigates the forma-tion of Scottish literature as an object of study, whichimplicitly claims ownership over texts and demandsconceptual repatriation of writing from the empire ofEnglish literature. Dobie notes that North African textsare less often assigned in conjunction with sub-SaharanAfrican studies than with the Middle East or French.And Edwards, posing the “preposterous” question whythey aren’t on American studies syllabi, asks us to con-sider the larger issue of how the “proper place” of textsis determined. What, for example, makes a text “Ameri-can”? Should national ownership of texts be assignedon the basis of language? the citizenship of an author?the place where s/he writes? the subject of the text? Forwhom is it proper to write about “American-ness”? Be-yond and between the confines of such national catego-ries, moreover, is a growing body of “homeless texts”written in more than one place, by exiles, migrants, mul-tilingual or transnational authors.24 Whose culturalproperty are they? Such border skirmishes are not with-out consequences; they have considerable impact on theformation of (trans)national identities and the distribu-tion of institutional, and (more distally) of global, re-sources.

Furthermore, as a number of contributors to this vol-ume make clear, postcolonial theory itself has, in multi-ple disciplines, become a significant form of institutionalcapital: drawing on postcolonial discourse increases thevalue of one’s scholarship. It makes it more visiblewithin the institutional economy of ideas, more attrac-tive to curricular investments, and more marketable topublishers. Here, another proprietary conflict has pre-dictably broken out over what regions and disciplineshave the right to draw on postcolonial theory. On theone hand, critiques of the applicability of postcolonialtheory to the dizzying array of contexts to which it hasbeen “applied” have been crucial in combating the fal-lacy of a “one size fits all” postcolonialism and chal-lenging the terminology of postcolonial theory that has,in its abstraction, often obscured distinct material andhistorical circumstances. These are issues that are centralto Connell’s critique of the way in which postcolonialtheory has been deployed in relation to Scottish litera-ture. Such discussions have also illuminated the verydifferent colonial policies of the competing Europeanpowers, the diversity of policy implementation in vari-ous regions, and the theaters—cultural, political, mili-tary, religious, economic—in which colonial dominationhas been played out. On the other hand, such quarrelshave sometimes devolved into a kind of policing opera-tion of the borders of histories and disciplines, a sur-

veillance of proper use, that, one suspects, has largely todo with control of cultural capital and that at times be-gins to resemble the segregation obsessions of coloniallogic. Both Edwards and Otoiu make arguments forhow recent research on (post)colonial histories andlogics may provide—rather than a reductive or mono-lithic paradigm—a rich repository of contextual knowl-edge, theoretical tools, and modes of inquiry that teachus much about elsewhere.

We noted above the proprietary claims that nations,colonial as well as postcolonial, make on the past. Ed-wards turns our attention to the significance of a pro-prietary claim on the present: Henry Luce’s 1941 proc-lamation of “the American Century.” If exceptionallypresumptuous, Luce’s edict is by no means alone inclaiming possession of time through naming it. Levynotes the differing names given to the 1948 war, forexample, which Israelis call the “war of independence”and Palestinians name “the calamity.” If such nomina-tions are gestures of possession (even when they arerecognitions of dispossession), they are also acts of in-terpretation and bringing them into dialogue (as op-posed to merely adjudicating between them) may proveto be a fertile hermeneutic resource. Edwards considersthe following example: insofar as the postcolonial is atemporal category, it coincides with the period else-where known as “the cold war”; bringing these temporalparadigms into conversation reveals aspects of both ofthem that otherwise remain obscured. Otoiu mounts asimilar argument for the “postcolonial” and the “post-communist.”

It is perhaps little wonder that “timeframes” shouldbecome such contested commodities for, as this collec-tion of articles demonstrates, temporality and the waysit is packaged play a significant role in (post)colonialhistories and power relations. Modernity, particularly asreified against tradition, underdevelopment, or the“Third World” is one temporal category that has been acentral participant both in colonization and in deter-mining available options for decolonization. The con-flation of the culture of European modernity (of in-dustrialized, urban, secular society) with the temporalconcept of modernity (the present)—a conception un-derwritten by theorists such as Hegel, Marx, and We

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ber—establishes a temporalized global geographygraded in terms of “development.” The teleologicalconception of modernity as inevitable trajectory,moreover, which functioned as a major ideological con-stituent of colonialism, can be located in only slightlyrevised form in much of postcolonial development dis-course and the language of globalization: if all societiesare naturally moving toward modernity, the argumentruns, some are clearly moving more sluggishly than oth-ers and advanced, developed, civilized societies bear theduty to lead the benighted and backwards into the light


of the present. The contributors to this volume ap-proach these temporal inequities from several distinctperspectives: Edwards, borrowing Michael Hanchard’sterms, examines how temporal registers are racialized.Chanda investigates how fictional characters carry thesigns of “modernity” and “tradition,” as well as howgenerational differences between postcolonial writersmay entail differing conceptions of such temporal des-ignations. Connell shows how the equation of “under-development” with the (post)colonial can work in re-verse: subtending claims for Scotland as a colony, hecontends, are changes in the British economy that, inthe late 1970s and 1980s, had a disproportionate effecton Scotland, leaving the region “behind” in develop-mental terms.

In a suggestive scene examined by Levy, Sa‘id, theaforementioned character in The Pessoptimist, mistrans-lates time, mistaking German “acht” for Hebrew“e(k)hat.” Such a temporal confusion, of course, putsone out of step with the rest of the world, off schedule,too early or late; it is a confusion that messes up theorder of things, an error that upsets a fundamental or-ganizational and disciplinary principle of society. Butperhaps that is precisely the point; perhaps temporalerror—refusing to “get in step” with a hegemonic mod-ernity—is a tactic for challenging (neo)colonial order.This is a suggestion that Edwards develops under thesign of the “pre-post-erous,” a term that literally means“in the wrong order.” If being out of order is routinelypathologized—preposterous also comes to mean contraryto nature, common sense, and reason—it may also af-ford a moment in which colonial renditions of the natu-ral and reasonable (everywhere inflected by conceptionsof temporality) can be effectively disputed.

Language, non-identity, property, temporality: theseemerge as several productive sites of inquiry when post-colonial studies is considered comparatively. But wehave only scratched the surface of these themes andthere are also many others that need to be explored;these elaborations we leave to this volume’s contributorsand to those who, we hope, will continue this discussionin the future.

NOTES1Part I of this introduction is the work of Waïl S. Hassan;

Part II is by Rebecca Saunders.2Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978).3See Thomas Babington Macaulay, “Indian Education:

Minute of the 2nd of February 1835,” in Macaulay: Prose andPoetry, ed. G. M. Young (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1952),719-30; Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics ofLanguage in African Literature (Nairobi: Heinemann Kenya,1986); Gauri Viswanathan, The Masks of Conquest: LiteraryStudy and British Rule in India (New York: Columbia UniversityPress, 1989).

4See, for example, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, ed. The Postcolonial

Middle Ages (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), and ThomasCartelli’s Repositioning Shakespeare: National Formations, Postcolo-nial Appropriations (New York: Routledge, 1999).

5This is the logic of Aijaz Ahmed’s critique of postcolonialstudies. See his In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London:Verso, 1992) and “The Politics of Literary Postcoloniality,”Race and Class 36:3 (1995): 1-20.

6Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, The Em-pire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures(London: Routledge, 1989), p.2.

7Hassan has raised these issues in "Postcolonial Theory andModern Arabic Literature: Horizons of Application," Journalof Arabic Literature 33:1 (2002): 45-64. Some passages fromthis article have been reproduced here.

8See Ashcroft et. al.9Aijaz Ahmed, “Orientalism and After,” in In Theory, 159-

219. Benita Parry, “Problems in Current Theories of ColonialDiscourse,” in Oxford Literary Review 9.1-2 (1987): 27-58. Ab-dul R. JanMohamed, “The Economy of Manichean Allegory:The Function of Racial Difference in Colonialist Literature,”in “Race,” Writing, and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates (Chi-cago: University of Chicago Press, 1986): 78-106. See alsoArif Dirlik, The Postcolonial Aura: Third world Capitalism in theAge of Global Capitalism (Boulder: Westview Press, 1997), E.San Juan, Beyond Postcolonial Theory (New York: St. Martin’sPress, 1998), Anouar Majid, Unveiling Traditions: PostcolonialIslam in a Polycentric World (Durham: Duke University Press,2000), and Rukmini Bhaya Nair, Lying on the Postcolonial Couch:The Idea of Indifference (Minneapolis: University of MinnesotaPress, 2002).

10Anne McClintock, “The Angel of Progress: Pitfalls ofthe Term ‘Post-Colonial,’” in Social Text 31/32 (1992): 84-98.Ella Shohat, “Notes on the ‘Post-Colonial,’” in Social Text31/32 (1992): 99-113.

11Interestingly, like the Three Worlds theory, the term“postcolonial” also originated in the field of political theory,as Aijaz Ahmad points out in “The Politics of Literary Post-coloniality,” p. 1. On the category of “Third World Litera-ture,” see Ahmad's In Theory, 43-71 and 90-122. Bart Moore-Gilbert provides an excellent account of the emergence ofthe categories of “Commonwealth Literature” and “Post-colonial Literature” in Postcolonial Theory (London: Verso,1997), 5-33.

12See, for instance, David Chioni Moore’s “Is the Post- inPostcolonial the Post- in Post-Soviet? Toward a Global Post-colonial Critique,” PMLA 116:1 (January 2001): 111-28.

13See Hassan, "Postcolonial Theory and Modern ArabicLiterature: Horizons of Application," 47-56.

14Reprinted in Charles Bernheimer, ed., Comparative Litera-ture in the Age of Multiculturalism (Baltimore: The Johns Hop-kins University Press, 1995): 39-48.

15The range of reactions to the report, from alarmed towelcoming, is represented by the critical responses to it in-cluded in Bernheimer, ed., Comparative Literature.

16Emily Apter, “Comparative Exile: Competing Margins inthe History of Comparative Literature,” in Bernheimer, Com-parative Literature, 86.

17See Ronald Judy’s pertinent comments on English lan-guage instruction in Tunisia and the World Bank’s surrepti-


tious involvement therein. “Some Notes on the Status ofGlobal English in Tunisia,” boundary 2, 26:2 (1999): 3-29.

18These theoretical associations are analyzed in RebeccaSaunders, ed., The Concept of the Foreign: An InterdisciplinaryDialogue (Lanham, Md: Lexington Books, 2002).

19Paul de Man, “Conclusions: Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Taskof the Translator,’” The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: Uni-versity of Minnesota Press, 1986), 84. De Man, significantly,describes this movement of disintegration and fragmentationof the original as “a wandering, an errance, a kind of perma-nent exile if you wish, but it is not really an exile, for there isno homeland, nothing from which one has been exiled” (92).Benjamin’s essay on translation, “The Task of the Transla-tor,” can be found in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans.Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 69-82.

20Bernheimer, ed., Comparative Literature, 42.21The term (and a measure of the irony) is borrowed from

Dirlik, The Postcolonial Aura, chap. 3.22See Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans.

Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press,1984) and Ross Chambers, Room for Maneuver: Reading (the)Oppositional (in) Narrative (Chicago: University of ChicagoPress, 1991).

23See Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York:Routledge, 1994), chap. 4.

24This useful term is borrowed from Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi’s book, Refashioning Iran: Orientalism, Occidentalism andHistoriography (New York: Palgrave, 2001).


Francophone Studies and the Linguistic Diversity of the Maghreb

MADELEINE DOBIE

Among the criticisms often leveled at postcolonialtheory has been the complaint that, despite its manifestconcern with the conditions of cultural production, as abody of thought it has often supported generalizationsabout the history of European colonialism and the geo-political and cultural forms that have emerged since its-dissolution.1 There are several dimensions to this cri-tique, perhaps the least well-developed of which is theobservation that while postcolonial theory purports tocomment on contemporary global reality, it has generallyemphasized the experience of the former British colo-nies. Postcolonial theory crystallized in the English de-partments of British and American universities aroundthe critical interpretation of a core group of English-language texts. This process was stimulated by the workof a few key theorists, many of whom—Edward Said,Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, Abdul JanMohamed,Sara Suleri, for example—write in English and share apersonal experience of the cultural and linguistic legacyof the British Empire. It would be unfair to suggest thatpostcolonial theory privileges the English language;rather—perhaps more insidiously—it has progressivelyadopted English as a lingua franca. Though well attunedto the modalities of language, its exponents have beensurprisingly indifferent to the political and cultural orderof languages. One of the consequences (and also one ofthe causes) of this critical monolingualism has been thata relatively small number of English-language writersfrom Third World nations have attained the status ofrepresentative figures. As Aijaz Ahmad observed over adecade ago in his response to Fredric Jameson’s muchdebated essay “Third World Literature in the Era ofMultinational Capital,” literature in Asian or Africanlanguages is only erratically translated into Europeanlanguages, and “the upshot is that major literary tradi-tions…remain…virtually unknown to the Americanliterary theorist. Consequently, the few writers who hap-pen to write in English are valorized beyond measure.”2

Alongside Gayatri Spivak’s now famous question, “Canthe Subaltern Speak?” it has therefore become necessaryto raise a complementary question about how the globaldistribution of power affects the power of representa-tion: “In what language(s)?”3

An answer to the linguistic universalism of postcolo-

nialism is offered by the loosely parallel concept of fran-cophonie, a term that designates the use of French in theformer colonies of Africa, Asia, and the Americas, andwhich is perhaps most commonly used to refer to theliterary use of French in these regions, and the criticalstudy of this literature. Where postcolonial theory hasbeen largely indifferent to linguistic diversity, francophonieis grounded in the historical and cultural specificity ofthe French language. This difference of approach canbe situated within the wider political and economiccontext of French efforts since World War I to establisha bastion of resistance to American-centered globaliza-tion. As in the political arena, a progressive merging ofhorizons would no doubt be salutary: Francophonestudies could benefit from further exposure to theglobal outlook and intense theoretical questioning thathas characterized postcolonialism, while postcolonialstudies would certainly be enhanced by the attentivenessto linguistic specificity that has characterized francophonie.

Historically, the term francophonie has denoted severaldistinct albeit related practices and ideas. In the wake ofdecolonization, France sought to maintain a sphere ofinfluence through the preservation of political and eco-nomic relations with its former colonies. Emphasizing acommonality of language and implicitly of culture, fran-cophonie served as an ideological framework for the pres-ervation of these ties. It was given institutional realitythrough the creation of several government bodies; no-tably, the Agence de coopération culturelle et technique (1970),which dispatches French educators and technical per-sonnel to the former colonies, and encourages culturalexchanges between France and these countries and theOrganisation internationale de la francophonie, which since1986 has organized biennial summits that bring togetherrepresentatives from fifty-six member-nations. One ofthe principal objectives of these multinational meetingsis of course to promote the status of French as a worldlanguage.4

Built around the premise that nations in differentparts of the world share beliefs and values for which theFrench language is the medium, francophonie was essen-tially an outgrowth of the French tradition of univer-salism. In recent years, however, francophonie has comealso to denote a different kind of relationship between

Dobie: Francophone Studies 33

France and its former colonies. The official institutionsof francophonie, responding to political forces within met-ropolitan France and also to pressures exerted by themember nations of the OIF, have increasingly embraceda rhetoric of multiculturalism, emphasizing less the uni-versality of culture than the diversity of the Fran-cophone world. This ideological shift corresponds tothe ways in which, over the last two decades, the idea offrancophonie has evolved in academic discourse. Re

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sponding to the work of writers from the Caribbeanand Africa, literary scholars, particularly in NorthAmerica, have emphasized, not the decisive imprint ofFrench on world culture, but rather how France andFrench have been decentralized and decentered by colo-nial expansion. The Algerian writer Kateb Yacine oncewrote that “l’écrivain algérien de langue française a en-core un rôle à jouer, ne serait-ce pour lutter contre lafrancophonie” [The Francophone Algerian writer stillhas a role to play, even if it is only to fight against fran-cophonie]. The polemical relationship to French to whichYacine gives voice has been central to the developmentof Francophone studies over the last two decades. Inthe contemporary academy, as in the literary market-place, the concept of francophonie serves as a frameworkfor the exploration of cultural diversity. Notably itmakes possible a comparative reading of French, Afri-can, Asian, Canadian and Caribbean texts that wouldhave been unimaginable just a few decades ago. Theproblem hidden in plain sight at the heart of this projectis, of course, that the organization of a literary corpusaround a single language does not provide a naturalframework for the study of diversity.

In this essay I want to revisit the relationship betweenfrancophonie and linguistic diversity in the specific contextof the Maghreb. I will focus, not on the use of Frenchby individual writers, or on national linguistic policies(both widely debated in the past, particularly in the1970s and 1980s when the survival of French in thisregion seemed less certain), but on the place accorded toplurilingualism within Francophone studies as an ex-panding critical field. It seems to have become some-what unfashionable to raise, in critical studies ofMahgrebian literature, the issue of the language of ex-pression. This reticence is understandable to the extentthat this question has been amply debated in the past, atleast insofar as state-controlled policies or the choices ofindividual writers are concerned. However, I believe thatit is productive at this juncture to reconsider, in a moreself-reflexive way, the past and future role of literarycriticism as a mediating discourse in this context.

The scholarly classification of an international corpusof texts on the basis of their common use of French isnot necessarily tinged with Eurocentrism. French iswidely used in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean, and it iscertainly legitimate to study the literature associated with

this practice, as well as to consider texts of differentregions together on the basis of their common languageand shared colonial history. However, this critical ap-proach becomes Eurocentric if in the process theseworks’ affinities with other regions, cultural traditions,and, perhaps most fundamentally, other languages, areobscured. Francophone literature and the critical worksdevoted to it have recognized and responded to thisproblem by imagining and describing decentralized ex-changes, hybrid subjects, and bicultural literary forms.However, as francophonie has expanded as a critical field ithas devoted increasingly less attention to the “cohabita-tion” of French with other languages and the culturalheritages that they transmit. It is perhaps significant inthis regard that many of the major theoretical paradigmsdeveloped within Francophone studies—the conceptsof creolité and relationality, for example—have emanatedfrom the French Caribbean, where French is usedalongside variants of Creole but not alongside a pre-colonial language. In a plurilingual environment such asthe Maghreb, however, the relationship between fran-cophonie and the practice of other oral and written lan-guages raises questions of a different scale.

Attempts to describe the linguistic diversity of theMaghreb generally fall short of the mark. In the pre-colonial period, classical Arabic, employed in religiousdiscourse, literary writing, and political administration,coexisted with Maghrebian Arabic dialects—largelythough not exclusively oral—and Berber, which fallsinto several groups, the principal branch being Tamaz-ight. With the colonial occupation of Algeria (from1830), Tunisia (1881), and Morocco (1912), Arabic wassystematically displaced by French, which became thesole language of government, administration and (secu-lar) education, and thus the language of the literateelites. The process of linguistic deculturation was mostpronounced in Algeria, where from 1938 to 1961 Arabicwas classified by law as a foreign language. With inde-pendence (for Morocco and Tunisia in 1956, for Algeriain 1962) standard Arabic, a modernized version of clas-sical Arabic, was quickly and often heavy-handedly im-posed as the national language, particularly in thespheres of public administration and primary education.

As the sociologist Gilbert Grandguillaume observes,the policy of arabicization was devised to remedy thealmost total absence of public discourse in Arabic in thewake of colonial rule.5 As such, it required radical meas-ures such as the recruitment of school teachers fromEgypt and other Middle Eastern nations to counteractthe shortage of indigenous speakers of classical Arabic,a policy that at least in the short term had a negativeimpact on educational standards because the differencesbetween Egyptian and Maghrebian dialects renderedcommunication between students and teachers difficult.At its most pernicious, arabicization led to the mar-

34 Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 23:1&2 (2003)

ginalization and even to the suppression of regionallanguages: the chair in Amazigh studies at the Universityof Algiers was abolished in 1962, shortly after inde-pendence; at the same university, the courses of Mou-loud Mammeri, Algeria’s most celebrated Berber scholarand writer, were cancelled in 1973; and in 1976 the Fich-ier périodique, a journal that published research on Berberlanguages in Kabyle with French translation, wasbranded “regionalist” and “subversive” and banned.6Almost from the outset, Berber speakers in Algeria andMorocco reacted against the linguistic and cultural ho-mogeneity demanded by the post-independenceauthorities.7 Between 1957 and 1960 in Morocco, Ber-bers (who constitute about 45% of the population) ri-oted against the conservative, pan-arabist Istiqlal rulingparty. Algeria has witnessed a similar series of protestsdemanding cultural recognition, notably the PrintempsBerbère [Berber spring] of 1980, and the Grève du cartable[schoolbag strike] of 1994. In recent years the Algeriangovernment has taken small steps toward the acknow

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ledgement of Berber, for example by creating the HautCommissariat de l’Amazighté (HCA).8

Arabicization did not bring an end to the use ofFrench in either government or education. In both sec-tors French was too deeply implanted, and the logisticaldifficulties of reintroducing Arabic too great, for awide-scale transition to be quickly achieved. In fact, aseducational opportunities and access to the media in-creased, more Maghrebians than ever before were ex-posed to French. Today, multilingual Maghrebians fre-quently use different languages in different socialcontexts. A multilingual Moroccan might speak Tamaz-ight at home with his or her family, read books andnewspapers in French, and use Arabic at the mosqueand in interactions with strangers. These practices areintertwined with deep-rooted cultural and personal atti-tudes. For example, French remains widely associatedwith modernization, science, and technology (though inthis last domain it is gradually being displaced by Eng-lish), with the discussion of topics considered taboo inMoslem societies (notably sexuality), and to some extentwith individual freedom and human rights. Arabic ex-presses Muslim and Arab identity, and T amazight islinked to ideas of regional autonomy, autochthonousculture, and, because it has been suppressed by the state,resistance to the authoritarian post-independence re-gimes. These cultural and affective charges have beendescribed by a number of prominent Maghrebian writ-ers. The Algerian author, Assia Djebar, for example,writes in her 1985 novel L’Amour, La Fantasia that youngAlgerian girls of her generation required four languagesto express their desire: French for their secret letter-writing; Arabic for their stifled prayers to Allah; Lybico-Berber to communicate with the mother-goddesses ofpre-Islam; and the silenced language of their bodies.9

In the period after independence the continued use ofFrench in certain sectors of economic, political, andcultural life was represented as an interim strategy, anecessary bridge between the linguistic order of thecolonial era and the postcolonial establishment of a na-tional language. Writing in 1986, Jacqueline Arnaud, oneof the founders of Maghrebian literary studies inFrance, looked back to the period immediately after in-dependence and asserted that “en attendant la moderni-sation de la culture arabe…le français pouvait servir delangue des sciences, de la logique, de la culture mod-erne” [Until Arab culture modernized…French couldserve as a language of science, logic, and modern cul-ture].10 Later in the same work she observed in a similarmanner—though this time in the present tense—that“En attendant que mûrisse la langue nationale, que s’yintègrent les parlers maternels…ces écrivains continuentd’écrire en français” [while they wait for the nationallanguage to ripen, for mother tongues to fuse withit…these writers continue to write in French].11 Theshift in tenses between these two passages is revealingbecause it points to the fact that over the course of thedecades following independence the linguistic terraindid not change radically. Given that this state of affairsstill pertains today it is necessary to ask whether writingin French can still reasonably be viewed as a transitionalstrategy.

The question of why write in French, and how, hasbeen a dilemma of Francophone writers from manyregions, as well as a central theme of the critical litera-ture devoted to their work. This reflection has takenmany different guises. The theorists of relationality andcréolité, Édouard Glissant, Jean Bernabé, Rafael Confiantand Patrick Chamoiseau, have propounded a poetics oflinguistic and cultural hybridization. The notion of theinterlangue, language inhabited by translation or by thespeaker’s anchorage in a mother tongue, has been illus-trated by Ivoirian Ahamadou Kourouma’s novel, LesSoleils des Indépendances [The Suns of Independence] (1968), inwhich Malinké images are rendered in French.12 TheMoroccan novelist, poet, and essayist AbdelkébirKhatibi has underscored the intrinsic value of a positionthat is neither inside nor outside the French languageand the ideological traditions which it has served, butrather occupies an interstitial space between identity anddifference. In his essay Maghreb pluriel [The MultifariousMaghreb] (1983), Khatibi uses the expression bi-langue (bi-language), to express the fact that languages are alwaysinhabited by other languages, that translation occurswithin as well as between them, not least because wordsrefer not only to things but also, and more immediately,to other words.13 This deconstructive purchase is narra-tivized in Khatibi’s allegorical novel, l’Amour bilingue[Love in Two Languages/Bilingual Love] (1983), in which abilingual Maghrebian narrates the story of his passion


for a mysterious French woman, symbol of the Frenchlanguage.14 In a different vein, Assia Djebar representswriting in French, which she has called the “langue ad-verse,” the adverse language or language of the colonialadversary, as the booty of colonial rule.15 For her as formany Maghrebian writers, writing in French constitutesa double strategy of subversion directed against boththe former colonial power and the patriarchal andauthoritarian regimes that have governed since inde-pendence.

Integral to each of these reflections on the poeticsand politics of Francophone writing is a belief that theFrench language does not constitute a unified wholebounded by a set of rules and conventions establishedin Metropolitan France, and, by extension, that French

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has expanded beyond its affiliation with a single nation.In a statement that has become something of a mantrafor postcolonial thought, Salman Rushdie observes inImaginary Homelands that the English language is nolonger the property of the English. A parallel convictioninhabits the work of many contemporary Francophonewriters. The prominent Québecois critic Lise Gauvinsummarizes this view in L'écrivain francophone à la croiséedes langues [The Francophone Writer at the Crossroads of Lan-guage], a collection of interviews with Francophone writ-ers.16 Asking what Québecois, Belgian, African, and An-tillean writers have in common—what lends unity to thevirtual space of francophonie—Gauvin proposes that theyshare a “surconscience linguistique,” a linguistic hyper-consciousness that forces them to “penser la langue”(think language).17 She characterizes this hyper-conscious relation as:

une conscience de la langue comme d’un vaste laboratoire depossibles, comme d’une chaîne infinie de variantes dont les seuleslimites sont un certain seuil de lisibilité, soit la compétence dulectorat, mais d’un lectorat à provoquer autant qu’à séduire.[a consciousness of language as a vast laboratory ofpossibilities, an infinite chain of variables whose onlylimits are a certain threshold of lisibility, for instancethe competence of the readership—a readership thatis to be provoked as much as seduced.]18

However, this characterization gives pause for thought,because this limit to the postcolonial reinvention ofFrench constitutes a genuine impasse. In the nations ofthe “Francophone world” there are many readers whocannot read French. There are also many citizens whocannot read: estimated adult literacy rates hover ataround 50% in Morocco, 60% in Algeria, and 65% inTunisia. Given these realities I would like to cite a dif-ferent reflection on the use of French, a paper deliveredby Mohammed Ennaji, a prominent Moroccan sociolo-gist and economist, at the recent conference La Fran-cophonie et la diversité culturelle vues du Maroc [Francophonieand Cultural Diversity as Seen from Morocco], held in Rabatin February, 2001. Ennaji writes,

Je pars de la crainte qui me ronge d’être au rangd’acteur marginal enseignant en français à des étudi-ants qui sont plus sensibles à une autre langue, à leurlangue, et surtout, pensent autrement. En un mot jem’interroge sur la pertinence de mon discoursacadémique en ma qualité de francophone….[I start from the gnawing fear that, by teaching inFrench to students who are more responsive to an-other language, their language, and who, above all,think otherwise, I am only a marginal actor….]19

(He goes on to argue that Arabic should in the long-term become the vehicle of research in the Maghreb.)

I quote this passage because it communicates in a di-rect way the difficulty confronted by intellectuals work-ing in a multilingual environment where language choicecarries social and political implications and conse-quences. Ennaji expresses the concern that by teachingin French he might fail to reach his young students, orworse, might alienate them. The political ramificationsof teaching and writing in French in the Maghreb have,of course, sometimes been very grave. In 1998 themembers of the Algerian National Assembly, renewinga commitment made in 1992, voted unanimously tocontinue the process of Arabicization, and to imposepenalties on the use of any other language in a publiccontext. Their radical decision resonates strongly withthe events of the decade of violence that followed thesuspension of national elections in 1991, during whichseveral French-language writers, including most promi-nently the poet Youssef Sebti and the novelist and jour-nalist Tahar Djaout, were assassinated for their defensein French of views perceived as anti-Islamic and associ-ated with Western society and politics. In an interviewwith the BBC that has since become notorious, the Ara-bic-language writer Tahar Ouettar commented that “lamort de Tahar Djaout n’est pas une perte pour l’Algérie,mais une perte pour sa famille, ses enfants, et la France.”[The death of Tahar Djaout is not a loss for Algeria, buta loss for his family, his children, and France], a state-ment that has been widely interpreted as a condemna-tion of Djaout’s use of French. In the face of nationalpolicies of arabicization whose objective has been theimposition of a limitative template of national unity,and more recently, in Algeria, in the face of ideologi-cally-driven violence, the continued practice of Frenchhas constituted, in and of itself, a defense of multicul-turalism. But as in every political context, there is ashort and a long-term perspective to consider, and it islegitimate to wonder whether over the long term therole played by French in this regard will ultimately favorthe development of multiculturalism, or contribute tothe reinforcement of polarized cultural identities.

At this juncture I want to emphasize that in callingattention to the social and political polarization ofFrench and Arabic I do not mean to trivialize the theo-


retical meditation on writing in French undertaken byKhatibi, Djebar, and other Maghrebian writers. Culturaldecolonization clearly requires the dismantling of mythsof cultural integrity, notably the identification of lan-guages with nation states that is itself a legacy of Euro-pean colonialism, and particularly of the Jacobinist idealof centralization. It is also true that for many Maghre-bian writers French is less a chosen language than a me-dium imposed by education, by exile, by the dangersinvolved in writing on certain topics in Arabic, or simplyby the logistics of publishing and the legitimate desire toreach a wide audience. But I do want to observe that inthe critical literature devoted to the Maghreb these tex-tual meditations are prioritized, while other linguisticissues and options, notably the prevalence of illiteracyor the choice to write in Arabic, are afforded less atten-tion. This disproportion is reflected in the somewhatnaïve optimism of Lise Gauvin’s suggestion that theFrancophone reinvention of French is limited only bythe competence of readers.

To some extent this perspective reflects a wider ten-dency of Francophone and postcolonial theory to ex-plore social and political questions primarily through theinterpretation of literary texts. Postcolonial critics haveoften been inattentive, or at best selectively attentive, tothe specific geopolitical and linguistic circumstances inwhich texts are produced, and instead have emphasizedwhat Terry Eagleton terms the “unstable textual politicsof production.”20 The rejection of deterministic think-ing that identifies a one-to-one relationship between“text” and “context” has clearly been one of the mostsignificant contributions of literary theory. However, ithas sometimes generated a countervailing culturalismthat reduces economic and social relations to poetics. Inthe context of Francophone studies, this shift emergesin the subtle yet insistent suggestion that the problem oflanguage choice is somehow resolved within the Fran-cophone literary text.

One of the first comprehensive studies of Fran-cophone Maghrebian literature was Jean Déjeux’s Situa-tion de la littérature maghrébine de langue française (1982),which covers the period from 1920 to 1978.21 Déjeuxdevotes a chapter of this overview to the dilemma ofwriting in French, and presents a number of short textsin which Mahgrebian writers reflect on what it meansfor them to write in the colonial language. Somewhatcuriously, however, Déjeux opens this chapter by settingaside the practice of bilingualism and the decision towrite in Arabic as matters of sociological rather thanliterary interest. This foreclosure is in fact a fairly stan-dard feature of surveys of Francophone Maghrebianliterature—Jacques Noiray similarly begins the sectionof the multivolume Littératures francophones devoted tothe Maghreb by defining his corpus through the exclu-sion of Arabic-language works.22

One interesting deviation from this critical tendencyis Charles Bonn’s Littérature algérienne de langue française etses lectures (1974), which includes alongside the interpre-tation of texts the results of a survey of reading prac-tices that examines the use of languages by differentdemographic groups.23 The key insight of this combi-nation of literary with sociological analysis is the recog-nition that language-choice is an issue of readership aswell as a dilemma of writing, and that it has a differentforce for readers who possess relatively limited literacyskills than for writers who are often well-educated andfamiliar with a wide range of cultural references. Itwould perhaps be productive to repeat this survey nowin order to gauge, thirty years on, the comparative ratesof growth of French and Arabic and the correspondingtrajectory of reading practices.

The critical separation of Arabophone from Fran-cophone works has occasionally been accompanied by amildly justificatory discourse. Attempting to explain whythey are examining (only) Maghrebian writing in French,critics sometimes veer unconsciously towards the sug-gestion that French is in some respect culturally supe-rior, more enlightened, more universal. Charles Bonnwrites, for example, that “la littérature algérienne en-gagée de langue française, en s’ouvrant à l’universel,même si elle militait pour la patrie, brisait le corde de lacité musulmane et de ses valeurs d’un autre âge” [politi-cally engaged Algerian literature in French, by openingitself to the universal, even if it fought for the nation,broke the bounds of the Moslem city and its archaicvalues].24 More recently and far more subtly, in the In-troduction to Maghrebian Mosaic: a Literature in Transition,a recent collection of essays devoted to North Africanliterature in French, the respected American critic Mil-dred Mortimer writes:

When Albert Memmi’s Anthologie des écrivains maghré-bins d’expression française appeared in 1964, the Tunisianwriter was convinced that literary production in thecolonizer’s language would shortly disappear. Afterall, the three countries proclaim Arabic as their lan-guage and embrace Arabo-Islamic culture…. Al-though Arabic-language literature has been growingin the Maghreb since independence, few MaghrebianArabic-language texts have been translated intoFrench or English. Beyond North African borders,Francophone Maghrebian texts are better knownthan their Arabic-language counterparts. Ironically,works published in Paris…offer the writer a greaterdistribution of possibilities…. Thus, more than threedecades after Memmi’s anthology was published anddespite the Tunisian writer’s dismal prophecy, Fran-cophone Maghrebian literature is still alive and welland “cohabits” with Arabic-language texts.25

It is somewhat surprising, in a work devoted to post-colonial culture, to find the unequal economic and cul-


tural power of Europe and North Africa represented asa matter of irony, but in this instance inattentiveness tothe actual material relationship between the continents isnecessary in order to cast Francophone Maghrebianwriting in the role of the tenacious underdog. In a dif-ferent vein, though with similar effect, Françoise Lion-net, one of the most insightful theorists of Fran-cophone cultural hybridity, writes in her contribution tothe volume Comparative Literature in the Age of Multicultur-alism that “knowledge of nineteenth-century Europeanliterature and painting is just as important as familiaritywith Arabic to appreciate [Assia] Djebar’s works.”26 Thepoint made here is fair, but the phrasing effects a sur-prising reversal, given that readers of Djebar are actuallyfar more likely to be conversant with European paintingthan to know either standard or colloquial Arabic.

Critical studies of Francophone literature have ac-corded very little attention to examples of literary bilin-gualism, translation, and comparatism in Maghrebianliterature, despite the fact that many Maghrebian writershave exercised their linguistic consciousness by writingin both French and Arabic, or by translating betweenthe two. Kateb Yacine, who came to prominence withhis Francophone novel, Nedjma (1957), later turned todialectal Arabic and the theater, writing plays, beginningwith Mohammed, Take Your Suitcase (1971), whose targetaudience was illiterate Algerians. Another prominentcase is that of Rachid Boudjedra, the sometime enfantterrible of Algerian letters, who began his career inFrench, but who in the 1980s began to compose in Ara-bic, producing, almost simultaneously, his own Frenchtranslations.27 There are also several notable examples ofliterary translation between Arabic and French. For ex-ample, the poet and essayist Abdellatif Laâbi has trans-lated into French several Arabic-language poets, and theMoroccan novelist Tahar Ben Jelloun has published ananthology of Arabic and French Moroccan poetry sug-gestively titled La mémoire future [Future Memory],28 andtranslated Mohamed Choukri’s celebrated novel Khubzal-hafi [For Bread Alone], though it is perhaps sympto-matic that this novel was “discovered” and translatedinto English by the American writer Paul Bowles severalyears earlier. 29

An early model of literary bilingualism in the arena ofpublishing was furnished by the Moroccan journal Souf-fles, which between 1966 and 1971 under the direction ofAbdellatif Laâbi and Abrajham Serfaty, published essaysand poetry by Maghrebian writers, and served as anoutlet for avant-garde literature that broke with thethemes and forms espoused by the first post-independence generation of writers. Rejecting themonoculturalism of the post-independence regimes,Souffles espoused a multiculturalist ideal of the Maghreband strove to enact this ideal by publishing, from 1968,texts in Arabic alongside texts in French. In their pro-

logue to the double issue 10-11 the editors of Soufflesaddress the reasons for this juxtaposition:

Par cette confrontation des productions littéraires dans lesdeux langues, nous voulons remettre en question une du-alité artificielle qu’on tendait jusqu’à maintenant à appro-fondir et instaurer par la même occasion un débat, un dia-logue que beaucoup ont cherché à éviter par mauvaise foiou par intérêt.[By this confrontation of literary productions in bothlanguages, we wish to call into question an artificialduality that until now has generally been deepened,and at the same time to stimulate a debate, a dialoguethat many have tried to avoid out of bad faith or in-terest.]

In the subsequent issue this dichotomy is explored againin the context of a discussion of the role of the intel-lectual:

il existe une dichotomie dangereuse entre intellectuelsarabisants et francisants. Ce fossé d’incom-municabilité tend d’ailleurs à s’élargir, vu le statu quoculturel dans lequel se confine le pouvoir en matièred’enseignement et d’arabisation. Cette ambiguïté en-tretenue est un premier obstacle que l’intellectuelconscient devra surmonter.[there is a dangerous dichotomy between intellectualsworking in French and Arabic. This gulf of incom-municability is moreover widening because of thecultural status quo which the authorities maintain inthe area of education and arabicization. This endur-ing ambiguity is a first obstacle that the intellectualmust overcome.]

The authors proceed to argue that French should serveas an interim device, with Arabic acknowledged as theultimate vehicle of Moroccan culture.

Several points emerge from these passages. The deci-sion to publish in two languages is presented as a rejec-tion of both state-imposed monoculturalism and thecolonial legacy of French cultural hegemony. It is alsoportrayed as the staging of a confrontation that intel-lectuals, whether for political, cultural, or personal rea-sons, have generally preferred to avoid. Finally, the in-clusion of Arabic texts by editors whose ownintellectual formation was conducted predominantly inFrench reflects a conviction that there should be a slowtransition from French to Arabic. The striking similari-ties between this position and the one articulated byMohammed Ennaji some thirty years later reflect theprescience of the Souffles team but also, unfortunately,the continued reality of linguistic polarization.

Change in this context will depend to a considerabledegree on the resolution of a number of basic materialproblems. While literacy rates remain low and there isrelatively little indigenous publishing of creative litera-ture and humanistic and sociological writing, intellectu-als will continue to write in French, often for a French


public. But some hope is on the horizon. The recentgrowth in both Algeria and Morocco of bilingual pub-lishing houses and journals reflects a heightened con-sciousness of the problem, and a renewed desire tobridge the linguistic divide. In Morocco, Éditions leFennec, a publishing house that works in cooperationwith Synergie civique, a movement for literacy and socialreform led by Le Fennec’s director Layla Chaouni andsociologist Fatema Mernissi, has published a number ofworks bilingually.30 In Algeria, Éditions Barzakh simi-larly publishes in both French and Arabic. In an inter-view conducted in July 2000 with the newspaper LibreAlgérie, Barzakh’s co-founders, Selma Hellal and SofianeHadjadj, discuss their decision:

…aucune exclusion sur le plan de la langue…rendrecompte aussi bien d’une écriture en langue arabe qued’une écriture en langue française, précisément pourarriver à casser les cloisons, cette espèce d’étanchéitéqui existe entre ces deux mondes pour faire en sorteque des francophones puissent avoir accès à une lit-térature Arabophone et vice versa.[No exclusion in relation to language…we reviewwriting in Arabic as well as writing in French, in or-der to break down the divides, the kind of impene-trable barrier that exists between these two worlds,so that Francophones can have access to Arabic-language literature and vice versa.]

Hadjadj observes that the most dynamic Algerian lit-erature unfortunately remains work published in Parisby expatriate writers, a corpus that to his mind inevitablyreflects a particular cultural perspective. Arguing for theneed to reappropriate Algerian literature, Hellal states:

Nous avons l’ambition de nous réapproprier uneécriture qui a eu tendance à se décentrer versl’étranger, notamment vers la France… Finalement iln’y a qu’une littérature qui représente l’Algérie, c’estcelle de l’étranger, francophone, et qui a fini par êtrebiasée parce qu’elle s’adresse à un lectorat français.[Our ambition is to reappropriate a literature whosecenter has generally been abroad, notably in France.Really there is only one literature that represents Al-geria—it is produced abroad, in French, and it hasended up being biased because it is directed towardsa French readership.]

Interestingly, however, Hadjadj also says that he feelsmore affinity with Arabophone than Francophone writ-ers because he finds them to be more global in outlook,more engaged, for example, with Latin American cul-ture, less rooted in a single national tradition.31 WhereasCharles Bonn in 1974 tied openness to universal con-cerns to the use of French, writing in Algeria in 2000,Hadjadj perceives a global outlook in Arabic-languagetexts. The transition from “universal” values to “global”awareness, underpinned by the argument that the call to

universalism has often masked Eurocentrism, has ofcourse been one of the central concerns of recent cul-tural theory. In this instance, where the relative culturalpositioning of French and Arabic-language writers is atissue, we are reminded that it is inherently problem-atic—albeit seductively easy—to advocate globalizationwhile remaining within a Eurocentric perspective.

Another illustration of the recent impetus for linguis-tic and cultural translation is the Moroccan journal Pro-logues, which reviews academic books in the social sci-ences with the aim of bringing academic debates beforea general reading public. It has enjoyed a successful run,with a number of issues from the 1990s going into re-print. In its manifesto the editors state that by publish-ing in French and Arabic, Prologues

contribue…à briser l’isolement qu’imposentl’enfermement dans une langue (souvent dans lalangue arabe, où le nombre des publications resteplus limité et d'un accès plus difficile). A ce titre, elleest devenue face à l’avalanche de littératures intégristeet nationaliste, l’organe qui diffuse des discours“autres.” 32

[contributes…to the breakdown of the isolation im-posed by the enclosure in one language (often inArabic, in which the number of publications remainsmore limited and less accessible). It has therefore be-come, in the face of the avalanche of fundamentalistand nationalist literature, the organ that disseminates“other” discourses.]

Finally, the recent rise in interest in plurilingualism andbilingual publishing has been acknowledged in a numberof recent books and events, for example the interna-tional conference Lire, écrire et éditer en Méditerranée [Read-ing, Writing and Editing in the Mediterranean] held in Aix-en-Provence in October 2000.

Despite this burgeoning of bilingualism in the do-main of publishing, the language barrier remains inplace in the crucial sphere of higher education. InNorth Africa, France, and the United States, French orFrancophone and Arabic literature are still almost exclu-sively taught in separate degree programs, with littleroom for crossover.33 This is particularly surprising andparticularly problematic in North Africa, where a con-siderable proportion of the student population is multi-lingual.34 In France and North America the recent bur-geoning of Francophone studies, a field in whichcultural diversity is valorized, should have supported thedevelopment of a more far-reaching critical multicultur-alism, but the monolingual framing of the field has in-stead tended to reaffirm the separation of French andArabic literatures. For example, there are no seriousstudies in which, for example, Mohamed Choukri is readalongside Driss Chraïbi, or in which the impact of therhythms of classical Arabic poetry on French prose and


verse is analyzed in depth.35

The ideal framework for the study of French andArabic language Maghrebian texts is perhaps compara-tive literature, which emphasizes comparatism and de-mands knowledge of several languages. However, asCharles Bernheimer notes in his report to the AmericanComparative Literature Association of 1993 (repub-lished in the volume Comparative Literature in the Age ofMulticulturalism), comparative literature programs stilltypically emphasize mastery of the languages and lit-eratures of “Europe and Europe’s high cultural line-age.”36 Though the use of translations has broadenedthe horizons of these programs, continued expansion isobviously contingent on their availability. To date, rela-tively few Arabic-language Maghrebian works have beentranslated, both because Maghrebian literature has notentered the mainstream of Arabic literature, and, para-doxically, because it has been somewhat eclipsed by thestrong tradition of Francophone writing. Bernheimer isperhaps right to say that the best currently availablestrategy for broadening the linguistic and geographicalparameters of literary study is the recruitment of facultyfrom non-European literature departments to teach orco-teach courses in comparative literature programs. Iwould also propose, rather more controversially, thatpostcolonial awareness should open us to the possibilityof teaching Arabic, Vietnamese, or Wolof alongsideFrench within Francophone studies programs, a stepthat would bespeak a new level of reciprocity in theintercultural dynamic of francophonie. In an essay entitled“Pour une éthique de la francophonie” [For an Ethics ofFrancophonie] Abdellatif Laâbi argues that there is a needfor greater linguistic reciprocity. He observes that al-though the old mentality of francophonie has been over-taken by a new emphasis on multiculturalism, this logichas not been extended to the teaching of Maghrebianlanguages, even to the children of immigrants, withinmetropolitan France:

La volonté de contribuer à la diversité culturelle dumonde, maintes fois affirmée par les instances offi-cielles de la francophonie et même par le pouvoirpolitique, devrait s’appliquer en toute bonne logiqueà la France également. C’est ce que j’appellerais leprincipe de la réciprocité. L’exemple qui me tient leplus à coeur…est celui du statut des languesmaghrébines. Quand on connait la place exception-nelle que le français occupe aujourd’hui de ce côté-cide la Méditerranée…on ne peut que s’étonner del’effort modeste qui est consenti en France pour queles langues maghrébines prennent la place quidevrait être la leur, notamment dans l’enseignement.[The desire to contribute to the cultural diversity ofthe world, often affirmed by the official representa-tives of francophonie and even by the politicalauthorities, should logically be applied to France too.

When one is aware of the exceptional place thatFrench occupies today on this side of the Mediter-ranean…one can only be astonished by the modestefforts made in France so that Maghrebian lan-guages take their rightful place, notably in the do-main of education.]

This kind of change in pedagogical practice would alsorequire a shift in the conceptual apparatus of the field.Like postcolonial theory, Francophone studies have em-phasized cultural hybridity, drawing attention to thecontemporary multiculturalism of French both in met-ropolitan France and the former colonies. This empha-sis should now be complemented by a messier, less cir-cumscribed model of hybridity that offers someresistance to the institutional drive to deploy French as aframing device, and also acknowledges the relevance ofmultilingualism to the project of multiculturalism.

It is perhaps helpful, in closing, to compare the per-spective from which Francophone studies approachesMaghrebian writing with an outlook that emanates froma different historical and geographical position. In thevolume Writing and Africa, Anissa Talahite argues that“North African writing offers a perspective that cannotbe strictly confined within the geographic boundaries ofNorth Africa. From a linguistic and cultural point ofview it is part of Arabic literature.”37 This characteriza-tion may seem surprising given that it is offered in avolume devoted to African literature, but in fact it re-minds us that literary works can always be explored inrelation to several interconnecting contexts and tradi-tions. To argue for the study of Francophone textsalongside Arabic and Berber works is not, therefore, toadvocate a model of literary study in which geographicalrather than linguistic boundaries are recognized as theparameters of a unified whole, but rather to assert theneed for a more radical relationality that draws the fullconsequences of the emphasis on hybridity andintercultural contact that has been a central theoreticalconcern of Francophone studies.

NOTES1See, for example, Robert Young, White Mythologies: Writing

History and the West (New York: Routledge, 1990), esp. 150-152. The problem of generalization is one that Young raisesin relation to several postcolonial theorists, but it is most fullyexplored in his discussion of Homi Bhabha’s attempt to pro-vide a general theory of the ambivalence of colonial dis-course.

2Aijaz Ahmad, “Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and theNational Allegory,” Social Text 17 (Autumn 1987), 5.

3"Can the Subaltern Speak?: Speculations on Widow Sacri-fice,” Wedge 7/8 (Winter/Spring 1985), 120-130.

4This policy has been accompanied by the passage of a se-ries of domestic legislative measures, notably the Loi Toubonof 1993, whose objective was to defend the integrity of theFrench language by imposing penalties against the use, in


France, of English and anglicisms.5Gilbert Grandguillaume, Arabisation et politique linguistique

(Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 1983), 9.6On this interdiction see Grandguillaume, 113.7In Tunisia only 1% of the population speaks a Berber lan-

guage.8This shift in policy is perceived by some as a strategy of

containment rather than as a genuine step toward the cultiva

-

tion of linguistic pluralism.9Assia Djebar, L’Amour, La Fantasia (Paris: Jean-Claude

Lattès, 1985), 203.10Jacqueline Arnaud, 57.11Arnaud, 120.12Edouard Glissant, Le Discours antillais (Paris: Editions du

Seuil, 1981); Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, and RafaelConfiant, Éloge de la créolité (Paris: Gallimard, 1989); AhmadouKourouma, Les Soleils des indépendances (Montreal: Presses uni-versitaires de Montréal, 1968).

13Abdelkébir Khatibi, Le Maghreb pluriel (Paris: Denoël,1983).

14Abdelkébir Khatibi, Amour bilingue (Montpellier: FataMorgana, 1983).

15See, for example, Assia Djebar, “Ecrire dans la langue ad-verse,” interview with Marguerite Le Clézio, ContemporaryFrench Civilization 19:2 (Summer 1985): 230-244, and “Dufrançais comme butin,” La Quinzaine littéraire 436 (March1985).

16L'écrivain Francophone à la croisée des langues: Entretiens (Paris:Editions Karthala, 1997).

17Lise Gauvin, L'écrivain francophone à la croisée des langues, 6-10.

18Gauvin, L'écrivain francophone à la croisée des langues, 10.19The proceedings of this conference can be read in html

form at www.confculture.francophonie.org.20Terry Eagleton, “In the Gaudy Supermarket,” review of

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Post-colonial Reason: aHistory of the Vanishing Present, London Review of Books 21:10(May 1999).

21Jean Déjeux, Situation de la littérature maghrébine de languefrançaise (Algiers: Office de la Publication Universitaire, 1982),75-138.

22Jacques Noiray, Littératures francophones, volume 2 (Paris:Belin, 1996), 11.

23Charles Bonn, Littérature algérienne de langue française et seslectures: imaginaire et discours d’idées (Sherbrooke: Naaman, 1974).

24Bonn, Littérature algérienne de langue française et ses lecture,110.

25Maghrebian Mosiac: a Literature in Transition, ed. MildredMortimer (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2001), 4.

26Françoise Lionnet “Spaces of Comparison” in Compara-tive Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism, ed. Charles Bern-heimer (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995),171.

27Boudjedra has recently returned to writing directly inFrench.

28La Memoire future: anthologie de la nouvelle poésie du Maroc(Paris: Maspero, 1976).

29Mohamed Choukri, Le pain nu, translated by Tahar BenJelloun (Paris: Maspero, 1980).

30For example, Le harcèlement sexuel est un crime/Attaharoch aljinsi jarimah [Sexual Harassment is a Crime] (Rabat: Le Fennec,2001).

31This interview can be read online at the Algerian Planet-dz website: <w w w.planet-dz.com/ACTU/2000/juillet/en-tretien_ed_barzakh.htm>.

32Prologues is difficult to find in the United States but the listof contents for each issue and the editors’ manifesto can beaccessed at: <www.ned.org/grantees/Prologues>.

33Courses in Arabic literature tend to emphasize the Egyp-tian and Eastern Arabic traditions rather than Maghrebianliterature, because these are considered more purely “Arab”and more continuity is perceived between the pre- and post-colonial periods.

34An exception is the Université Libre de Tunis whose Fac-ulty of Arts, Letters, and Human Sciences privileges the mul-tilingualism of its students and emphasizes the mastery ofthree languages (French, Arabic, and English) and translationamong them.

35The Literary Review (Winter 1998), has published an issuetitled “North Africa: Literary Crossroads,” a selection ofMaghrebian French, Arabic, and Berber poetry translated intoEnglish, edited and presented by Eric Sellin, one of relativelyfew critical attempts to consider the region as a literary whole.

36Charles Bernheimer, Comparative Literature in the Age ofMulticulturalism), 40.

37Anissa Talahite, “North African Writing,” in Writing andAfrica, ed. Mpalive-Hangson Misiska and Paul Hyland (NewYork: Addison Wesley Longman, 1997), 13-31, my italics.


Modes of Marginality: Scottish Literature and the Uses ofPostcolonial Theory1

LIAM CONNELL

Although not widely regarded as an example of apostcolonial literature, several attempts have been madeto apply the theoretical perspectives generated by post-colonialism to Scottish literature as a national body ofwriting. This has largely taken two forms. In the firstinstance there have been several explicit attempts to usea postcolonial terminology to explain the prevalentformal characteristics of Scottish literature and to offernew perspectives on Scottish literature’s relation to themainstream of literature in English.2 There has alsobeen a second and substantially more prominent strandof critical engagement with postcolonial theory thatmight be described as a catchphrase criticism, which hasseen critics loosely apply the terminology of postcoloni-alism without any extended explanation of its suitabilityand without a sustained application of the theoreticalmethodologies from which these terms derive. Despiteits strengths, Robert Crawford’s Devolving English Litera-ture is indicative of this last approach. Although he ap-plauds Edward Said’s Orientalism for offering a sugges-tive methodology for examining “cultural difference,”3

his work continues to treat Scottish literature as a coher-ent and a priori entity with no sensitivity to the fact thatit might also constitute “a system of representationsframed by a whole set of forces” that excludes the pos-sibility of such difference.4

While the former strand of criticism often displays acareful effort to assess the utility of postcolonial theoryfor Scottish literary studies, both approaches appear toshare certain motivations and assumptions about Scot-tish literature and about the nature of postcolonial the-ory, which illuminate the political limitations of post-colonialism’s endless translation into new andunforeseen contexts. In order to demonstrate this, thisarticle will argue that the use of postcolonial theory inrelation to Scottish literature forms a strategic effort toraise the profile of Scottish literary studies within thecontext of its institutional marginalization as an area ofstudy within British and North American universities. Itwill be suggested that, because the growth of postcolo-nialism within English studies has outstripped the studyof Scottish literature, critics working on Scottish litera-

ture have increasingly sought to link their work to post-colonialism in order to persuade a wider academiccommunity that their research is relevant to the mainconcerns of the discipline. However, while English lit-erature’s homonymic conflation of writing in Englishand writing by the English allows it to be defined incosmopolitan terms, Scottish literature is denied thesame eclectic absorption of international writers be-cause its coherence is defined by a political concept ofScottishness: because “Scottish” is not a language, Scot-tish literature is always literature from Scotland. As aresult, the inclusion of postcolonial subject matter in thestudy of Scottish literature requires a rationale beyondits inclusion in the syllabus of English studies. Becausethey often write in English, so-called postcolonial writ-ers can be studied within an “English literature” degreeprogram without significantly impinging upon the waysof reading other English-language writers even if thehope is always that this will lead to a general reassess-ment of all writing. By contrast, the inclusion of post-colonialism in the study of Scottish literature must ei-ther perform some form of Saidian discourse analysisof the racial politics of Scottish texts or indicate theextent to which Scottish authors are postcolonial bydemonstrating a degree of cultural marginalizationwithin Anglocentric British political structures. Ironi-cally, in order to position Scottish literature closer to thecenter of critical work in English studies at the institu-tional level, critics have been required to constituteScottish literature as something on the margins of thiswork at the political level. The neglect of Scottish lit-erature as a subject area is therefore explained by refer-ence to a social marginalization in common with authorsfrom the former British colonies.

This conflation of critical and social marginalizationmay result from postcolonialism’s central concern toaccount for a cultural component in the systems ofdomination that resulted from colonization. Althoughthe attention of postcolonial cultural explanations isfrequently to literary techniques, their basis is funda-mentally political and requires the use of political termi-nology. This shift from the textual to the political is ap-


parent in many of the attempts to account for stylisticsimilarities between Scottish and so-called postcolonialtexts, whereby critics offer material, rather than literaryexplanations, for this resemblance. Most commonly, theadoption of postcolonial theory to analyze Scottishtexts sees critics explain Scottish literature’s formalproperties in terms of a history of English colonizationof Scotland (often flagged as a precursor to British im-perialism). The designation of Scotland as an Englishcolony is highly controversial and displays a dazzlingconfusion of textual and social forms of exclusion. Thisessay attempts to explain why this formula has becomeso prevalent in recent years and suggests three maincauses: first, changes to the Scottish economy and toBritish political structures, which made such an expla-nation more palatable to Scots than it was earlier in thetwentieth century; second, developments in the econ-omy of the university as an institution which prioritizedacademic publication and made the marketability ofresearch a more pressing concern; and finally, a struc-tural nationalism in the concept of Scottish literaturethat conceives the relationship between Scottish andEnglish culture in antagonistic terms, and which identi-fies liberationist nationalism as quintessentially post-colonial. This sense of postcolonialism derives from aterminological confusion over the meaning of its politi-cal vocabulary, chiefly in blurring the concepts of colo-nization, which constitutes the variegated practices ofeconomic extraction and territorial settlement by onestate over another, and imperialism, which constitutes aglobal system of development in which capital is in-creasingly internationalized. Although colonization wasa significant means of advancing imperialism it was notthe only means. The danger of confusing these twoterms is that it tends to depict all forms of social exclu-sion as equivalent and obscure the continuing signifi-cance of imperialism in constructing economic ine-qualities at the international level.

In describing the conceptual developments in Scot-tish studies this essay relies heavily on a political andeconomic analysis rather than literary criticism. This isdue in no small part to the working assumption thatliterary meaning is mediated by certain formal institu-tions, particularly in the context of academic analysis.Therefore, in order to understand how a term like thepostcolonial comes to be meaningful, it is insufficient toaddress the nature of the writing that this term purportsto include. Rather it is necessary to look at the mecha-nisms through which this term is given meaning;mechanisms that constantly need to negotiate the mate-rial conditions in which literary production takes place.In recent years critics of modernist writing have begunto examine a range of institutions that facilitated thecanonization of Modernism.5 A similar analysis of theinstitutional and economic contexts that have allowed

the proliferation of postcolonial studies needs to beconducted by postcolonial critics. This is particularlypressing in light of the way that the increasing textuali-zation of postcolonialism’s analysis can be seen to havedomesticated many of the terms of its critique. Thereliance upon social and political analyses in this essay ispartly intended to assess what is gained from deployingpostcolonialism as an analytic framework, both in rela-tion to Scotland and in general. There is always the dan-ger that postcolonialism simply exoticizes writing fromother cultures and seals off the curricular space whereAfrican, Asian and Caribbean writers can be discussed.6Yet, what differentiated postcolonialism from previouscategories such as Commonwealth literature was itspoliticization of writing as it spoke to the power rela-tions between metropolitan and non-metropolitan po-litical and economic spaces. Regardless of its attentionto the literary, Said’s Orientalism was concerned to tracehow textuality facilitated the “West’s” continuing domi-nance of the “East” in social and political terms. How

-

ever, because of the disciplinary specialization that in-forms the structure of most academic institutions, thejuxtaposition of political and textual explanations pre-sents difficulties for a teacher wishing to introduce stu-dents to postcolonialism. In literary studies, the desire tointroduce postcolonialism into a general literary degreeprogram often requires that the sociopolitical questionsunderpinning a postcolonial analysis become secondaryto its curricular function in facilitating the study of cer-tain types of texts. This may be particularly true as post-colonialism is extended to an increasing number ofcontexts, the consequence of which is a need to relyupon theoretical models that lack a materialist specificityin favor of a general applicability. Nevertheless, even ifunspoken, political concerns remain the subtext of theuse of postcolonial methodologies for textual analysis.As such, it becomes necessary to ask how appropriatethe language of colonialism is for any particular histori-cal context. Answering this question, necessarily, re-quires the sort of social and political analysis that will beoffered here. Yet the intent in doing so is not to deflectattention from literary characteristics so much as to in-dicate how a particular manifestation of such character-istics relies upon certain ways of understanding the po-litical and economic conditions governing literaryrelations.

Was Scotland Colonized?Bearing in mind such concerns, it is appropriate to

note that although postcolonial theory is often seen asapplicable to contexts that are not colonial, or at leastnot obviously so, the assertion that Scotland was colo-nized by England has been an important component inthe application of postcolonialism to Scottish literarystudies. While controversial this claim appears to have a

Connell: Modes of Marginality 43

gained a certain popular currency in contemporary dis-cussions of Scotland, with commentary in major na-tional newspapers describing Scotland as “England’sLast Colony” and the Scots as a colonized people.7 Aca-demic studies have mirrored such bold assertions ofScotland’s status as an English colony. For instance, in a1997 account of teaching “Scottish and PostcolonialStudies” as part of the degree in English literature atStirling University, Douglas Mack celebrated the “intel-lectual excitement” his students felt “as a picture beganto emerge of Scotland as a society which has been bothcoloniser and colonised.”8 This claim is supported byliterary rather than political comparisons with Mackreading textual characteristics as the transparent repre-sentation of social formations. As such it exhibits all ofpostcolonialism’s problematic slippage between thetextual and the political. In a more recent example, ex-ploring the “Celtic connections” between Scotland andIreland, Ellen-Raïssa Jackson and Willy Maley identified“colonialism” as the source of “historical and political”parallels between these countries and claimed, “Scottishand Irish critics have long recognized the degree towhich, in a British context, colonialism begins athome.”9 Typically, Jackson and Maley offer nothing tosubstantiate this claim at the material level, seeminglyviewing colonization as primarily a cultural phenome-non. Moreover, this assertion is somewhat superfluousto the content of their essay, which involves an inter-esting comparison of Scottish and Irish linguistic ex-perimentation.10

This type of explicit statement about Scotland’s colo-nization is present even in work that displays a theoreti-cally nuanced use of postcolonial writing. For example,an essay by Berthold Schoene uses Homi Bhabha’s no-tion of a “third space” to challenge the concept of acoherent Scottishness, attributing the adoption of thesymbols of Highland Scotland by Anglicized LowlandScots to their need for a Scottish cultural-particularity asa component of modern nationalism. Yet, for all itssubtlety, Schoene’s attempt to offer a cause for theseevents reverts to the sort of unsubstantiated descrip-tions of English imperialism already described. Schoeneargues that events like the Highland Clearances (theforcible dispossession of feudal tenants from Highlandlands) were “instigated by England, eager to expand itssphere of influence even to the most remote regions ofthe British Isles,” and interprets this as part of a “colo-nial enterprise,” which “operated at the command ofthe English imperial centre.”11 In the absence of anyexplanation of how this “command” was exercised,England’s dominance over Scotland is assumed abso-lutely yet remains curiously disconnected from otherimportant contemporaneous developments within theBritish state, such as the end of Absolutism and the de-velopment of a more identifiably modern political appa-

ratus.12

In other critical work the use of a colonial model forScottish history is employed more obliquely. For exam-ple, in his wide-ranging book on Scottish culture, CairnsCraig, employs Frantz Fanon’s description of psychicdisruption in Black Skin, White Masks to help understandScottish identity in a culture that purportedly over-values English versions of Britishness. Although notexplicitly claiming that Scotland was a colony, Craig as-sumes that the cultural response to its political settle-ment is the same. He goes further:

If the Scots were indeed, as is often claimed, thebackbone of the Empire, it is perhaps because onlybefore the eyes of the backward could they play withsuccess, the role of fully achieved civilised British-ness to which they aspired.

It is not by our colour that we have stood to berecognised as incomplete within the British context,it is by the colour of our vowels: the rigidity of classspeech in Britain, the development of Received Pro-nunciation as a means of class identity, is the directresponse of a dominant cultural group faced by asociety in which the outsiders are indistinguishableby colour.13

By aligning his colonial imagery with the politics of“class speech in Britain,” Craig disguises the degree towhich his analysis racializes Scots as the Other to Brit-ain’s “dominant cultural group.” The apparent desire toabsolve Scots from their participation in Empire leadsCraig to depict their role as the product of their mar-ginalization at home. To that end, he appears to repeatJackson and Maley’s claim that England’s colonizationof Scotland was a necessary precursor to Britain’s out-ward colonial expansion. Yet such claims could similarlybe made for English working-class participants in theBritish Empire, and Craig’s singling out of Scots leadshim into a racial metaphor that constitutes nonstandardScottish speech patterns as equivalent to the chromaticdifferences central to colonial racial typographies. Whilethe physical attributes used for racial categories are par-tially the constructs of racially-normative political hier-archies, skin tone remains an organic attribute thatforms a poor counterpart to the socially constituted andhighly mutable properties of speech. By equating, ap-parently unproblematically, Scots’ linguistic incomplete-ness in a British context with the racial “backwardness”of colonized populations, Craig implicitly identifiesScottishness as an organic marginality that debars themfrom constituting Britain’s ruling elite.

Fairly typical of the use of postcolonial theory in re-lation to Scottish literature, these accounts appear todemonstrate a need to claim political domination in or-der to explain the nature of Scottish writing.14 Certainly,the issues they address are not simply literary ones andtheir use of the language of colonization seems intent


on proving that Scots have been historically unable toplay “the role of fully achieved civilised Britishness”because of the marginalization of Scotland by an Eng-lish-centered British elite. Yet, tellingly, the writing thatthis narrative seeks to elucidate is often highly canonicalwithin a tradition of English literature. In order to rec-oncile this canonicity with the colonial narrative ofScotland’s political domination and to constitute Scot-tish literature as a coherent area of study, it becomenecessary to rewrite the canonical status of individualScottish authors as a form of misrecognition, wherebythey are mistaken as “English” due to the incorporatingtendencies of a dominant English culture intent onclaiming for itself a monopoly on cultivation. LikeScots’ participation in the British Empire, Scottish textssuch as James Thomson’s “Rule Britannia” can be iden-tified as the product of Scots’ desire to appear “civi-lised” in the face of cultural-hierarchies that refuse torecognize Scottishness as capable of civilization.15 Post-colonialism may help to explain the appropriation ofScottish texts as “English,” and a theory such asBhabha’s notion of mimicry might go some way to de-scribing this process.16 However, despite Bhabha’sdeeply postmodern theoretical orientation, his conceptof mimicry depends upon an underlying assumptionabout the political inequalities of the two cultural sys-tems at play within it: assuming a group of politicallydisenfranchised practitioners of the dominant culturalforms. In order to reclaim texts by Scots from Englishliterature and to situate them in a wholly Scottish tradi-tion, it is therefore necessary to locate the canonizationof Scottish authors within a system of inequalitywhereby Scottishness is subordinate to Englishness asan ideal of normative Britishness. From this startingpoint a great deal of recent criticism on Scottish litera-ture has concentrated upon the disruptive consequencesof the, apparently, enforced adoption of English modelsof civilized culture in Scotland at the expense of nativecultural formations.17

Emblematically, the focus of these accounts has beenon the use of language, with the adoption of StandardEnglish leading to the suppression of Scottish languagevarieties such as Gaelic or Scots.18 However, linguisticstandardization in and of itself is not an indication ofcolonization and cannot justify the claims that Scotlandwas colonized. A comparable analysis would be the sug-gestion that England had been colonized by itself be-cause large portions of the English population speaknonstandard versions of English. Revealingly, althoughcommentators have long lamented the loss of localEnglish cultural variety in the wake of a centralizingnational standard, they have not found it necessary toframe this complaint in colonial terms. Indeed, one ofthe weaknesses of Scottish postcolonialism is that itsconcentration upon the construction of Scottish lin-

guistic inferiority leaves critics blind to the social exclu-sion of the English working class. This is perhaps mostobvious in a tendency to conflate English (as a languagevariety) with Standard English, a tendency that perhapsoriginates in Hugh MacDiarmid’s seminal essay “Eng-lish Ascendancy in British literature.”19 This serves toenhance the self-Othering tendencies of the colonialnarrative in Scottish studies by designating StandardEnglish a foreign tongue in Scotland, rather than an of-ficial variety of local speech as in England. This confla-tion may also serve to emphasize the distinctiveness ofScotland and England as internally coherent and mutu-ally exclusive ethnic groups by distinguishing culturalstandardization within Scotland from a general processof cultural standardization consequent upon the mod-ernization of the United Kingdom as a whole. By ob-scuring a similar history of cultural incorporation withinEngland itself, the suggestion that this process consti-tutes the English colonization of Scotland performs anationalist function by transforming the modernizationof Scotland from an endogenous process of develop-ment into an exogenous form of oppression.

As has been shown already, regardless of the con-centration on culture, this analysis depends upon theassertion of English colonization of Scotland in mate-rial terms. However, these accounts are rarely accompa-nied by any detailed analysis of the material conse-quences of this supposed colonization. This may bebecause, in contrast to their effect upon cultural life inScotland, the processes of modernizing the Scottisheconomy had highly varied disruptive consequences forScottish social formations and were, for the most part,limited when compared with the impact of similarevents in more readily identifiable colonial contexts. In-deed, a proper review of the material conditions ofScottish history makes a colonial definition somewhatdifficult. While it has proven hard to define, one ofcolonization’s constant features has been the transfer ofindigenous control over social organization to the colo-nial power. In the case of Scotland almost the reverse istrue. Following the Union of 1707, and even more soafter 1746 when the threat of Catholic revolt had beensuppressed, Scotland retained comparatively high levelsof autonomy relative to any international comparison,including that with many of the minor “nations” ofEurope.20 Scots continued to serve at the highest levelof government both in Britain’s imperial possessionsand, in ways crucial to the present argument, withinBritain itself. In India, Scots served as governor generalfrom 1785 to 1786, 1807 to 1813, and 1847 to 1856, aswell as a six-month period in 1823. More importantly, interms of any notion that England colonized Scotland,Scots were continually elected to represent English andWelsh constituencies in the British parliament, includingsixty members of parliament between 1760 and 1790.21


At the time of writing this paper the British prime min-ister was born and educated in Scotland while in thecabinet Scots hold the posts of chancellor of the ex-chequer, Northern Ireland secretary, Scottish secretary,secretary of state for transport, lord chancellor, andleader of the House of Commons.22 Scotland has alsohistorically produced a large professional class in occu-pations such as engineering and medicine. So, while Ox-ford and Cambridge produced only 500 medical doctorsbetween the years 1750 and 1850, Scottish universitiesproduced 10,000, many of whom went to work in Eng-land as well as in the British colonies.23 In order to claimthat Scotland was colonized it is necessary to ignorethese material indicators that suggest that, as a whole,Scotland benefited greatly from the processes of mod-ernization following the union with England, and, in-deed, that these were processes over which Scots them-selves exercised considerable control.

The Provenance of a Colonial Analysis of ScotlandIt is understandable that academics working in literary

studies should concentrate on the cultural features ofScottish history rather than the materialist history de-scribed above. Yet this concentration makes the use of aterm like colonization problematic because of its clearlymaterialist basis. To understand this contradiction it ishelpful to chart the recent provenance and the growingacceptance of a colonial analysis of Scottish history.Furthermore, the effort to account for its growingcredibility offers revealing evidence about the politicalsignificance of a postcolonial reading of Scotland.There are arguably three main reasons behind the in-creasing adoption of this political model as a way ofexplaining Scotland’s relationship to the British Union:an increasing divergence between the Scottish economyand the politically powerful economy of southern Eng-land combined with a geographical divide in electoralterms; changes in the economy of British universitiesthat have increasingly required researchers to address aninternational market; and the suitability of a colonialanalysis to the nationalist paradigms of Scottish litera-ture coupled with the decline of more traditional, politi-cal explanations of a materialist kind.

Changes in the political-economy of ScotlandThe argument that England had colonized Scotland

was voiced during the 1920s by an early Scottish nation-alist organization, the Scottish National League (SNL).At that time most Scots, including other nationalists,rejected their interpretation of Scottish history,24 due inpart to a comparison with another “English” colony,Ireland, which many Scots viewed as the site of unpatri-otic revolt and the source of deleterious Catholic immi-gration. Additionally, while the SNL’s left-wing languagemade their claims unpalatable to the Scottish middle

class, they also failed to persuade Scottish socialists be-cause they rejected conventional Marxist explanationsthat “would imply that the Scots had been dividedagainst themselves.”25 Finally, and perhaps most impor-tantly, the SNL view was rejected because it involved acriticism of an Empire that, despite the excesses of theFirst World War, had not yet been discredited. As thissuggests one of the first conditions for a colonial inter-pretation of Scottish history was the development of amore general embarrassment about Britain’s imperialhistory in the context of decolonization following theSecond World War.26

After the war, however, the political climate in Britainwas principally concerned with social democratic reformleading to a consensus over state-led corporatism, whichdid much to foster pro-Unionist sentiments amongScots. A major component of this political consensuswas the development of a range of Britain-wide gov

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ernmental and civil structures, which constructed politi-cal and social networks between Scotland and England.For example, the development of strong national tradeunions, which often negotiated national (i.e. British)conditions of service, saw Scots and English membersorganized politically for their common benefit. Likewise,the development of a UK-wide welfare state concen-trated attention on the benefits of a large-scale publicsector made possible by political union. Connectionssuch as these tended to diminish the significance of aseparatist politics in Scotland and made a colonial inter-pretation of the Union less likely. This was to changeduring the late-1970s and 1980s, however, as this politi-cal model came under increasing strain from global eco-nomic contraction and an associated policy of reducedpublic expenditure, instigated under a Labour govern-ment by the International Monetary Fund and main-tained by subsequent right-wing administrations. In thiscontext, a belief in the failure of an interventionist stateled to the implementation of government policies thatdirectly undermined those institutions that had helpedto produce Unionist ties in Britain. So, for instance, theConservative Governments of 1979 to 1997 combinedfiscal austerity with a policy of removing the provisionof social services from the public to the private sector,thus devolving control and provision of these servicesfrom a single, national, organization to numerous locallycontrolled, private companies. As a corollary, concertedlegislation designed to systematically weaken trades un-ions saw the progressive marginalization of these pow

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erful Britain-wide organizations from the political proc-ess. Not only did such legislation diminish the level ofroutine institutional contact between Scotland andEngland, but it was also, in itself, widely unpopular inScotland, not least because regional economic disparitiessaw the north of Britain, including Scotland, dispropor-tionately affected by the changing character of the Brit-


ish economy. Higher levels of unemployment and socialdeprivation as a product of economic “rationalization”created a greater need for the public services now beingcut. Similar disparities in the economies of northern andsouthern Britain in the early 1990s, saw the governmentpursue an economic policy intended to cool economicoverheating in the south of England at a time when theScottish economy appeared to be in need of stimula-tion. In crude terms, this unevenness in the Britisheconomy produced a comparable electoral disparity,with the industrial north increasingly voting for the par-ties of opposition while the Conservative Party wassustained by votes in the south. In the 1987 and 1992general elections the Conservative Party formed thegovernment due to votes in the south of England, butclaimed only ten and eleven seats respectively out of apossible seventy-two Scottish seats. Thus, although itwas the leading party in Scotland, the British LabourParty remained the opposition in the British parliament.

These changes resulted in political conditions amena-ble to a colonial interpretation. Although northernEngland experienced similar conditions, the historicalseparateness of Scotland (a distinct kingdom until 1603and with a separate parliament until 1707) allowed thedisparities in the British economy to be interpreted innationalist terms. For instance, cities in northern Eng-land like Liverpool, Manchester, and Newcastle, all withLabour majorities in electoral terms, had similarly suf-fered from the government’s economic policies. How

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ever, unlike Scotland, they were unable to narrate thesetendencies as government by a foreign power. While thisremains a minority interpretation in Scotland, the factthat many Scots came to see these conditions as inher-ent to a British political system is apparent in the wide-spread support for electoral reform and for a devolvedScottish parliament. It is perhaps also revealing that aScottish national identity routinely outweighs those whofavor independence or vote for nationalist candidates.27

This implies that, whatever their voting intentions, Scotsare increasingly willing to interpret Scotland’s relation-ships with England in nationalist terms, seeing Scotlandas a separate and culturally distinct entity from the restof the UK. Accordingly, the sociologist David McCronehas identified a rise to prominence of colonial descrip-tions of Scotland with concerns about the externalcontrol of the Scottish economy and a rise in a nation-alist interpretation of Anglo-Scottish relations.28

Changes in the Economy of British AcademiaMcCrone remains skeptical about the empirical basis

for such claims,29 and he has suggested that this ten-dency “has largely been abandoned by academics.”30 IfMcCrone is correct about the social sciences, this doesnot appear to hold true for literary critics who havetaken to the colonial model with increasing vigor since

the early 1990s. This perhaps suggests something im-portant about the use of the terminology of colonialismin the respective disciplines, with the social sciences de-manding a more analytically exact definition of coloni-zation than their colleagues in the liberal arts. What italso seems to indicate is the presence of other motiva

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tions for the adoption of a colonial methodology inliterary studies. Central to these is, arguably, the natureof funding for the humanities within the British univer-sity system. While the need to demonstrate the signifi-cance of social science research is as great as for thehumanities, the apparently empirical basis of their re-search and the ability to link this work to topical areas ofgovernmental policy provides more tangible evidencefor this significance than research in the humanities canclaim. One indication of this fact may be the relativelylong history of Britain’s Economic and Social ResearchCouncil when compared to the Arts and HumanitiesResearch Board, which was only recently granted asimilar status. For research in the humanities the mainarbiter of significance remains publication by estab-lished publishers and refereed journals. Significantly,while the Scottish Universities are technically funded byan autonomous Scottish organization, the ScottishHigher Education Funding Council (SHEFC), the for-mula that this body uses to determine funding remainsdeeply entwined in UK-wide systems for auditing aca-demic quality. Chief among these is the Research As-sessment Exercise (RAE), which judges, among otherthings, academic publications on their level of “na-tional” (i.e. British) and “international excellence.”About seventy-five percent of the SHEFC’s funding forresearch is based upon the scores institutions receive inthe RAE.31 Within a context where academic mono-graphs and articles in internationally recognized journalsare prized most highly, no academic working in the UKcan ignore the need to address an international, and es-pecially a North American, audience when seeking pub-lication.

This has created a problem for academics working onScottish literature. Like “Commonwealth” or “Postcolo-nial” literature, the main means of including ScottishLiterature within the University syllabus continues to bewithin departments of English literature. There is, forexample, only one department of Scottish Literature inthe UK, Glasgow University’s Department of ScottishLiterature, founded in 1972 out of the Department ofScottish History and Literature. The structures of theRAE seem likely to exacerbate this situation because,although the Department of Scottish Literature has be-come increasingly discrete within the structures ofGlasgow University, it is required to submit itself as partof the provision of English Language and Literature inthe RAE. Unlike postcolonialism, however, Scottishliterature has not been successful in establishing itself as


a major component in the university study of Englishliterature. Over the last ten to fifteen years most de-partments of English literature have attempted to offersome provision in postcolonial writing and a significantproportion of academic appointments in British “Eng-lish” departments advertise a desire for candidates witha specialization in postcolonialism. By contrast, thestudy of Scottish literature has remained a minority pur-suit, even within Scotland. The consequence of this hasbeen to limit the potential for publication of academicmaterial on this subject to a small number of forums.For example, in 1994 the interdisciplinary journal Scot-lands was launched by St Andrews University’s ScottishStudies Institute, adding to the well established Studies inScottish Literature, published by the University of SouthCarolina, and the Scottish Literary Journal, published bythe Association for Scottish Literary Studies (ASLS) asserious academic publications with space dedicated forwork on Scottish literature. However, by 2000 this newjournal had merged with the Scottish Literary Journal toform the Scottish Studies Review, effectively reducing thenumber of publications dedicated to publishing aca-demic articles on Scottish literature to its pre-1994 level,from which it is possible to infer that the academic in-terest in Scottish literature does not justify three majorjournals. In addition, the interdisciplinary focus of thisnew journal further reduced the annual space dedicatedto the publication of Scottish literary scholarship. Overthe same period, several journals dedicated to publishingmaterial on postcolonialism have been successfullylaunched, such as the online journal Jouvert and Interven-tions published by Taylor & Francis.

Further indication of the relative interest in postcolo-nial and Scottish literary studies is provided by the at-tention that they have received in panels at recent MLAconventions. At the 1997 convention in Toronto, onlyone panel explicitly addressed a Scottish author: Session294, “Alasdair Gray: Word, Image, Nation.”32 By con-trast, twelve panels contained “postcolonialism” in theirtitle, which is to say nothing of sessions that were con-cerned with issues of colonialism or anticolonial theory,such as the Session 296, “Frantz Fanon and/as CulturalStudies,” or Session 632, “‘Benevolent’ (Pre)Colonial-ism.”33 To survey the MLA sessions for 1997 is to gain asense of the prominence of issues concerning colonial-ism, anti-colonialism, postcolonialism, globalization,nationalism, and identity: it is not to gain the sense thatthere is a great deal of interest in Scottish literature, ir-respective of its relevance to many of these issues. Thisis compounded by a sense that, in the US at least, thereis a general misunderstanding of the particularity ofScottish literature; the session on Gray is listed themati-cally under the “general” subcategory of “Other Lit-erature in English” rather than as “Twentieth-CenturyBritish Literature.”34 If not English literature, Scottish

writers must form part of British literature if the term isto signify anything at all. If the separation of Scottishwriters from Britishness at the MLA convention indi-cates a recognition of their difference from the main-stream of British literature in ways that critics of Scot-tish literature have claimed, it does not indicate a clearunderstanding of Scottish literature’s particularity.Moreover, the minor status of Scottish literature withinthe MLA convention is further illustrated by the factthat the convention included seven panels in the “Irish”subcategory of “Other Literature in English.”35 Thissuggests both a comparably widespread interest in Irishwriting and a corresponding attentiveness to its distinc-tive qualities.

The MLA convention remains an instructive indicatorabout the extent of interest in Scottish literature as anarea of study, and because of the increasing internation-alization of academic study within Britain, it plainlyforms part of the disciplinary context for any suchwork. It is therefore revealing that since 2000 critics ofScottish literature, in attempting to raise the profile ofthe subject, have organized within the MLA a separateScottish literature discussion group, which has madethat organization more attentive to the distinctiveness of“Scottish literature” as a strand of “Other Literature inEnglish.”36 However, an examination of the extent towhich Scottish writing was represented at the 2001 con-vention indicates that Scottish literature still remains farbehind postcolonialism in terms of a wider academicinterest. The convention program does list two panelsunder the Scottish literary subcategory: “The Meaning(s)of History in the Scottish Enlightenment ” and “Lan-guages and Enlightenment.”37 Nevertheless, comparedto the still abundant papers and panels addressing issuesof postcolonialism, colonialism, empire, globalization,and nationalism, Scottish literature remains marginal tothe convention program.

The disparity in the fortunes of these two areas ofstudy suggests a motive behind the use of postcolonialtheory in relation to Scotland. It seems plausible thataligning Scottish literature with postcolonialism hasbeen part of a strategic attempt to borrow postcoloni-alism’s fashionability in order to provide a wider audi-ence for Scottish literary criticism. To support such anassertion it is noteworthy that attempts to utilize post-colonialism in relation to Scottish literature are oftenprefaced by claims about the value of this connection:either insisting that it opens up fresh insights for post-colonial studies in general38 or castigating postcolonialtheorists for consigning the study of Scotland to an“academic ghetto” by ignoring its “less immediatelyvisible cultural differences” in favor of “groups mostobviously typified as ‘other.’”39 Such claims are not en-tirely without merit because questions of identity andnationalism have been central to Scottish culture for the


better part of a century. It has, therefore, been possibleto claim that the development of Scottish postcolonial-ism is intended to broaden these debates by situatingthem in an international context. Precisely this argumentwas made by Douglas Mack whose praise for his owncourse in “Scottish and Postcolonial Studies” wasframed by the desire to open up comparisons betweenScottish texts and literature outside the national tradi-tion.40 Yet, the associations that his article goes on tomake raise serious questions about their descriptivevalue and suggest that his main intent is to encouragethe study of Scottish literature in a wider range of aca-demic contexts. Mack’s article appeared in ScotLit, thepamphlet of the ASLS the explicit purpose of which is“to promote the study, teaching and writing of Scottishliterature, and to further the study of the languages ofScotland.”41 Mack’s article contributes something to-ward these aims by seeking to entwine the study ofScottish literature with the study of English literature’sgrowth area. Indeed, Mack explicitly links the “devel-opment of Scottish literature as a separate discipline” to“recent developments in the teaching of ‘English’ as auniversity subject…which have involved a questioningof the old Imperial assumptions that lay behind the tra-ditional canon.” As proof of this claim, Mack seems tosuggest that the textual features of postcolonialism werealready apparent in Scottish literature by offering com-parisons between James Hogg’s 1824 Confessions of aJustified Sinner and Salman Rushdie’s 1988 Satanic Verses,or between Hogg and Chinua Achebe. What is moststriking about these comparisons, despite Mack’s enthu-siasm, is their radical dehistoricizing of the textual fea-tures that purport to characterize postcolonialism cou-pled with an insistence upon a correspondence betweenthe social formations of nineteenth-century Scotlandand twentieth-century Nigeria or India. What is perhapsthe most significant feature of such comparisons is theprofessional advantage they offer to Mack who has de-voted a considerable proportion of his career in thestudy of Hogg and is the editor of many recent editionsof his work.42

The Paradigms of Marginality in a Scottish ContextIf the congruence between professional interests and

academic inquiry are especially apparent in Mack’s desireto conjoin postcolonialism and Scottish literature, thegeneral use of postcolonialism in Scottish literary stud-ies may constitute a similar response to the institutionalmarginalization of Scottish literature relative to the pro-liferation of postcolonial theory. This may be somethingthat is equally apparent in all the increasingly diverseuses of postcolonial theory: among the panels at the2001 MLA convention, for instance, was a panel on“Postcolonial Chaucer.”43 Nor is this suggestion espe-cially new, being at least reminiscent of Anne McClin-

tock’s suspicion about the “academic marketability” ofpostcolonialism.44 The point here, however, is not tosimply reiterate the frequent accusation that postcoloni-alism is becoming an “industry.” Such claims clearly ide-alize the immunity of other academic writing to themarket, and it seems more accurate to suggest that allacademic study is susceptible to this type of strategicadoption of critically fashionable modes of inquiry inorder to position itself closer to the center of academicdiscussion. Nevertheless, it does seem necessary to askwhat consequences arise from a particular framing ofany critical investigation and, in particular, what politicalconsequences arise from the use of postcolonial criti-cism in general, with especial attention to the materialcontexts in which such criticism is and can be written. Itis precisely these questions that motivate the presentessay.

What is interesting about the institutional marginali-zation of Scottish literature is the frequency with whichit is read as the product of Scotland’s social marginali-zation. Given the degree to which postcolonialism’s po-litical analysis seems to depend upon the concept ofmarginality, this slippage may be a reason behind theadoption of a colonial analysis of Scotland in and ofitself. As already suggested, much of postcolonial theorypresupposes geopolitical inequalities even if its concernis ostensibly textual. The assumption of an article likeMack’s is clearly that the marginalization of Scottishliterature within the formal educational contexts isequivalent to those sorts of global inequalities. It is alsoa major thesis of Robert Crawford’s much celebratedDevolving English Literature. Indeed, the idea that Scottishliterature developed at a tangent to the English canon asa result of the peripheral status of Scots in an English-dominated British Union is a mainstay of much moderncriticism on Scottish literature let alone attempts to linkit to postcolonialism. It is worth restating that this viewof Scotland does not mesh easily with the material factsof British history. If the social marginalization of Scot-land remains contested, it is worth noting that the de-velopment of Scottish literature can be seen to haveproduced its own marginalization in an academic con-text.

To understand this point it is necessary to identifywith more specificity how Scottish literature can be un-derstood as marginal to English studies at an institu-tional level. This claim is made problematic by the obvi-ous fact that many Scottish authors appear to be highlycanonical. Again the MLA convention provides usefulevidence of this. While, in 2001, the discussion of Scot-tish literature as an identified area of study was limitedto only the two panels sponsored by the Scottish Lit-erature Discussion Group, discussion of Scottishauthors took place in other papers and panels withoutreference to their nationality. A three paper panel on


“Historical Discourses: The Case of Scott” makes noreference to Scott’s nationality, while a paper on RobertLouis Stevenson is included in a panel on “VictoriansAbroad” (a topic which emphasizes his Britishnessrather than his Scottishness). The inclusion of paperson Scottish authors as part of the general study of Eng-lish literature indicates a certain canonical status forthese authors. A more persuasive example might betheir routine inclusion in anthologies of English litera-ture. For instance, Arthur Quiller-Couch’s Oxford Book ofEnglish Verse, which is clearly a central text for the con-struction of an English canon, included a fairly broadrange of Scottish authors.45 Likewise, Philip Larkin’sOxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse includes anumber of Scottish authors.46 What is clear from this isthat a distinction needs to be made between Scottishauthors, who are often highly canonical, and Scottishliterature as a whole, which can appear marginal in termsof the structural attention it receives within educationalinstitutions. While it is not the case that Scottish authorsremain outside the canon, the degree to which thesetexts are identified as part of a definable Scottish tradi-tion is extremely limited.

In a claim such as Mack’s assertion that the develop-ment of Scottish literature was anti- (post) canonicalthese two concepts are elided, suggesting that the mar-ginality of Scottish literature is equivalent to the mar-ginalization of Scottish authors. Importantly, this can beseen as a necessary feature for the construction ofScottish literature as a curricular area. In order to recon-cile the canonical status of individual Scottish authorsand a view of Scottish literature as English literature’smarginalized Other, this canonicity has had to be trans-formed into an act of incorporation tantamount tocultural colonization (even where that term is not used).Writers like Sir Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson, oreven James Hogg, therefore, become marginal by beingpositioned as a representative of Scottish literature intoto. In this way, their absolute centrality to English lit-erature obscures their connections to the writing of aseparate Scottish tradition, connections that only theindependent study of “Scottish literature” can reveal.The development of Scottish literature as a separatediscipline, then, partly produced its marginality to themain body of an English tradition by reconfiguring howcanonicity should be understood. Significantly, this as-sertion involved a reconception of the very nature ofcenteredness within English literature as a subject.

From its inception, the formal study of English lit-erature has maintained an uneasy balance between acosmopolitan linguistic definition (as literature in Eng-lish) and a particularistic nationalist definition (as litera-ture of the English). Notably, Scots have historicallyplayed an important part in developing the cosmopoli-tan conception of the discipline by adapting a Scottish

rhetorical tradition, grounded on the study of classicaltexts, to the study of vernacular writing. Recent criticalaccounts of these developments have read them as the“Scottish invention of English literature.”47 Despite thiscontribution, however, the development of Scottishliterature as a conceptually discrete area of study effec-tively reconfigured English literature as a narrow, na-tionally based tradition, which had incorporated writingfrom its “peripheries” at the cost of “any role” for thatwork “within the culture from which its creator de-rived.”48 The formation of Scottish literature as an ob-ject of study saw the articulation, both explicit and im-plicit, of a nationalist rationale that claimed ownershipover the writing of Scots and demanded a conceptualrepatriation of that writing from English literature. Indoing so it fixed nationality above aesthetic character asthe primary organizational concept for tradition anddenied English literature the linguistic definition thathad permitted the cosmopolitan inclusion of interna-tional writing, effectively demanding that English lit-erature became a nationalist phrase in Scottish litera-ture’s own image.

Undoubtedly, this narrower definition of English lit-erature had always been in place, and the proliferation ofpostcolonialism within literary study has been facilitatedby, and responsive to, the nationalist function that thestudy of literature has played. There are several well-known accounts of the role that the study of Englishliterature played in the maintenance of colonial govern-ance.49 Nevertheless, the arguments for the independentstudy of Scottish literature forcefully reify this concep-tion by recasting English literature’s cosmopolitanism asan aggressive assertion of the cultural domination ofmarginal social groups by an Anglocentric elite. Moreo-ver, despite the insistence that the teaching of Englishliterature in Scotland represented a form of “internalcolonialism” or English “cultural imperialism,” there isan unresolved paradox in Scots’ continuing identifica-tion of Scottish education as one of those “nationalinstitutions” that gives Scotland “a distinctive inflectionthat is more than regional.”50 Scottish education is askedto stand both as the marker of Scottish nationality andthe site of England’s domination of Scotland.

The roots of this contradiction are, arguably, imbed-ded in precisely the sort of institutional and economicimperatives that have contributed to the emergence ofScottish postcolonialism. While Scottish literature un-questionably requires a fully conceived geopolitical no-tion of Scottishness for its realization,51 the institution-alization of that category has also been the product ofthe active lobbying of Scots along fairly traditional na-tionalist lines. From its inception, the formal study ofScottish literature as a discrete disciplinary specializationhas been accompanied by the explicit claim that suchstudy was necessary to preserve the national––and often


“racial”––particularity of Scotland.52 What is also clearis that such arguments often served as an attempt toinsulate autonomous Scottish educational institutionsfrom further competition with their English counter-parts by developing explicitly Scottish curricular areas ofstudy.53 To that end, the strategic adoption of postcolo-nial theory within Scottish literature as a form of self-promotion fits neatly into a history of institutional ad-vancement that involved the development of minorityareas of study.

More saliently, the nationalist structure of Scottishliterature as a subject area has been instrumental inreading the institutional marginalization of Scottish lit-erature as the marginalization of Scotland in socialterms. This relates directly to the use of colonization todescribe the political settlement between Scotland andEngland. To that end, one explanation for the relativelyrecent development of a colonial reading of Scotland isthe relative novelty of Scottish literature as an area ofstudy, the widespread interest in this subject area datingfrom the late 1960s at the earliest. It needs to be reiter-ated, however, that the use of colonization in relation toScotland is deeply antimaterialist and unhistorical in theliberal sense. Appropriately, few of the accounts ofScotland’s social marginalization employ much materialevidence of this process. This apparent antimaterialismseems to be a consequence of the nationalist paradigmfor Scottish literature. Because a nationalist interpreta-tion insists that Scotland is epistemologically as well asstructurally discrete from England, the development ofa Britain-wide cultural standard is interpreted as evi-dence of the diminution of Scottish particularity, whichhas been read as Anglicization. The turn to postcoloni-alism seems to have aided this analysis, in providing alanguage in which this Anglicization can be understoodin systematic ways––as colonization. This has been en-couraged in turn by the increasing attention to culture inpostcolonial analysis and to a consequent imprecision inthe use of postcolonialism key terms, terms that origi-nated in a political rather than a cultural critique. Thisshift is characterized in the degree of interchangeabilityof imperialism and colonialism as terms, whereby theorganized process of colonization, encapsulating thevaried processes of occupation and economic exploita-tion, subsumes the systematic internationalization ofcapital by which Lenin defined imperialism.54

Arguably, the elision of these two terms in postcolo-nial studies and the development of a colonial narrativefor Scotland share a common cause, which could besummed up as the retreat from materialist, in particularMarxist, explanatory paradigms within academic study.There are obvious and good reasons for this. The col-lapse of the Soviet bloc at the end of the Cold War,widely interpreted as the defeat of Marxism more gen-erally, appeared to invalidate many of its diagnoses.

Likewise, Marxism's privileging of class was challengedby the increasingly significant political interventions ofthe women's movement and racial groups who pointedto the neglect of race and gender as determinants ofsocial inequality. In terms of imperialism, the econo-mism of Lenin’s definition undoubtedly underestimatedthe degree to which imperialism was a form of govern-ment and a form of culture with nationalist and racistjustifications, as well as being overly schematic about thestages of capitalist development. Yet, the rejection ofhis definition does not appear to have suggested a con-sistent alternative, and this has led to a frequent blurringof the distinction between imperialism and colonization.Fatally, this conflation obscures capitalism’s continuingmonopoly of production at an international level, de-flects attention away from its role in producing the cul-tural consequences that the term “postcolonialism” wasconceived to critique, and tends to identify the end ofimperialism with the process of decolonization therebyposing bourgeois nationalism as the most likely sourceof liberation.

The equation of a supposed cultural marginalizationwith an assumed social marginalization is characteristicof the failure to distinguish imperialism from coloniza-tion as processes, which resides in a comparable confu-sion of two different meanings of the concept of de-velopment in relation to both colonization andimperialism in the Marxist sense. While developmentpossessed a cultural meaning within European coloniza-tion, whereby European culture was posed as the devel-oped alternative to non-European savagery, it also func-tioned, and continues to function, as an index ofproductivity within capitalist economics. In these eco-nomic terms development is more than solely a colonialabstraction, and many anti-imperialist theories havesought to explain how development continued to servean imperialist purpose after colonization.55. However, asthe equation of cultural and structural transformationsin postcolonial readings of Scottish literature exemplify,these two senses of development are often collapsedinto one.

It seems likely that the justifications for colonization,which described a civilizing mission in terms of culturaldevelopment, were the forerunners to the justificationsof international capital, which transformed this missioninto economic terms: the Oxford English Dictionary datesthe sense of development as a synonym for evolution tothe 1840s, whereas its use in relation to the economicdevelopment of a “region or people” belongs to thetwentieth century.56 Nevertheless, the continuing legiti-macy of an economic meaning for “development” indi-cates that these two senses of the word are not com-mensurate with one another, since an economicconception of the term no longer appears to need anexplicitly racial rationale for its justification. The value in


treating colonization and imperialism as analytically dis-crete is that it brings more clearly into focus the sort ofconnections between Scotland and colonial territoriesthat Scottish critics have tried to identify. The connec-tion here is imperialist rather than colonial, character-ized by the processes of modernization. The concept ofmodernization is helpful here because it proposes aninterpretative structure, which understands social differ-entiation as the product of systemic patterns of eco-nomic activity. As such it becomes possible to explainthe processes of standardization in Scotland without theneed to interpret this as the product of social marginali-zation so often phrased as colonization. For example ifwe define imperialism economically, we are able to ex-plain the similarities between colonization and the ex-pansion of native bourgeois cultures within the bordersof European nation-states as characteristics of the gen-eral pattern of capitalist development. The apparentsimilarities between the imposition of British culturewithin the British colonies and the development of lin-guistic standards within Britain (in England as well as inScotland, Ireland, and Wales) can be understood as theneed to facilitate the development of capital withoutrecourse to a questionable framework of marginality. Italso allows us to identify continuities between nine-teenth-century empire building and the, so-called neo-imperialism of the late twentieth and early twenty-firstcenturies.

The Place of Postcolonialism in Scottish LiteraryStudies

The developments in the study of Scottish literaturethat have been described here suggest a number ofthings. To the degree that the economics of academicwriting have become internationalized, the conjunctionof Scottish and postcolonial studies indicates a global-ization of literary study in general. This may, indeed, betrue of the general interest in postcolonialism in what-ever context it is found. Concern with this tendencyundoubtedly has textual significance, and work such asGraham Huggan’s discussion of what sort of textualitycan be marketed as marginal is helpful in charting thenature of these developments.57 However, the global-ization of literary study also requires attention to thepolitical and economic contours of access, distribution,and inequality. While the presence of the market in aca-demic institutions within Britain may appear to havebecome more conspicuous than it was during much ofthe twentieth century, the economics of education stillconstruct significant inequalities between the G11economies and the rest of the world. For all the mar-ginalization of Scottish literature as an area of study,Scots clearly sit on the privileged side of such a division.

If postcolonialism, as an area of literary study, is toaddress the sort of political and economic inequalities

within which the global perspective of academic writingis implicated, critics needs to ensure that they acknowl-edge the social and political consequences of its analysisas they refer to ever more diverse scenarios in postcolo-nial terms. In advancing the sort of political critique thatis foundational to postcolonialism, postcolonial analysisneeds to retain a genuinely interdisciplinary approach.Because of its strong tendency to ally textual analysiswith political diagnosis, postcolonial studies must re-main sensitive to the political and economic aspects ofthese theories as well as their cultural concerns. Thisrequires teachers and scholars to seek, where possible, toexpand the curriculum in ways that acknowledges theimpact of other disciplines upon our understanding ofthe meaning and significance of texts: to guard againstthe tendency to privilege practical criticism over thebroader claims of postcolonialism. As an example ofwhat such criticism might involve in relation to Scottishliterature, an article by Douglas Gifford, which attrib-utes difficulties in obtaining texts by Scottish authors tothe concentration of the publishing industry in London,may be more helpfully postcolonial than more recent at-tempts to paint Scotland as England’s colonizedOther.58 It seems likely that the historical role of the textin literary studies as a discipline has been influential inlimiting the amount of writing that uses Gifford’s ap-proach, and has encouraged critics to make the muchmore frequent claim that Scottish literature is postcolo-nial.59 However, as has been suggested, this formulationalso has its roots in the increasing imperative to publishwith the centripetal consequences that arise from this.The more that postcolonialism is consolidated as a wayof talking about texts, the greater the advantage in link-ing its methodologies to an ever-expanding range ofresearch interests. Likewise, the enduring nationalizationof literary study, and the importance of canonization tothis model––both as an assault on a supposedly Anglo-centric canon and as an attempt to constitute an alter-native Scottish tradition––has encouraged a narrative ofmarginality within Scottish literature studies. Yet, as if toprove the need for more interdisciplinary modes of in-quiry, Scottish claims to institutional marginalizationhave been unable to resist reading this marginalization insocial terms, seemingly without a sufficiently materialistexplanation of how this is constituted and where itssignificance lies. The left wing origins of many of theterms of a materialist analysis––such as the Marxist cri-tique of imperialism––will be unpalatable to many. Thechallenge to them is to develop alternative explanationsof the material consequences of the concepts that theydeploy. The insertion of the word “cultural” in front ofimperialism or colonization cannot be an excuse forignoring the political and economic basis of such con-cepts. Cultural colonization does not exist––indeed,cannot exist––independently of systems of economic


production. For Scottish literary studies what is urgentlyrequired is a materialist explanation of how Scots wereable to benefit economically and politically from thestructures of the Union and how certain characteristicsof Scottish cultural distinctiveness were able to survivein the face of increasingly normative forces of culturalstandardization. Such an explanation would include rec-ognition of the fact that certain cultural forms, such aswritten language, were more susceptible to standardiza-tion than others as a result of modernization’s need forrepeatable skills. Such an explanation would also have toaccept that the nationalization of this process is not, ornot immediately, the product of modernization so muchas a mode of resisting or accommodating moderniza-tion. The similar tendencies to cultural standardizationin Scotland and in England suggest that, insofar asScottish nationality was a feature of this process, itarises from Scots’ ability to conceive of themselves as anation rather than England’s identification of Scotlandas a foreign nationality in need of assimilation. Certainly,Scottish literary criticism has been far too willing to ac-cept the immanence of “Scottish literature” withoutconceding it constructedness or charting the processesand motivations behind such construction. This is cer-tainly surprising given how frequently the idea of “Eng-lish literature” is identified as construct within suchcriticism. Postcolonialism does seem to provide the in-struments for such an analysis, but these instrumentsneed to be employed with more sensitivity to their limi-tations in a Scottish context. The problem then, per-haps, is not the conjunction of Scottish literature andpostcolonial theory, but the readiness to apply postcolo-nialism and, in particular, its key terms divorced fromtheir politically specific origins as an easy shorthand formore complex issues.

NOTES1This paper is dedicated to the important work of the Bir-

mingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, whichceased as a result of its untimely closure during the summerof 2002.

2Michael Gardiner, “Democracy and Scottish Postcolonial-ity,” Scotlands 3, no. 2 (1996): 24-41; Ellen-Raïssa Jackson andWilly Maley, “Celtic Connections: Colonialism and Culture inIrish-Scottish Modernism,” Interventions 4, no. 1 (2002): 68-78;Stuart Murray and Alan Riach, “A Questionnaire,” SPAN 41(1995): 6-9; Berthold Schoene, “A Passage to Scotland: Scot-tish Literature and the British Postcolonial Condition,” Scot-lands 2, no. 5 (1995): 105-122; and Berthold Schoene-Harwood, “'Emerging as the Others of Our Selves'––ScottishMulticulturalism and the Challenge of the Body in Postcolo-nial Representation,” Scottish Literary Journal 25, no. 1 (1998):54-72.

3Robert Crawford, Devolving English Literature (Oxford: Ox-ford University Press, 1992), 3.

4Edward W. Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin Books,1978), 3.

5Kevin J. H. Dettmar and Stephen Watt, eds., MarketingModernisms: Self-promotion, Canonization, Rereading (Ann Arbor:University of Michigan Press, 1996); Lawrence Rainey, Institu-tions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture, The HenryMcBride series in Modernism and Modernity (New Haven andLondon: Yale University Press, 1998); and Ian Willison, War-wick Gould, and Warren Chernaik, eds., Modernist Writers andthe Marketplace (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996).

6Graham Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Mar-gins (London: Routledge, 2001).

7Ewen MacAskill, “Welcome to England’s Last Colony,”The Guardian, 30 November 1996, 19; and Jeremy Paxman,“The English,” The Observer, 20 July 1997, 18.

8Douglas Mack, “Can Anything Good Come Out of Naz-areth?,” Scotlit 16 (1997): 4-5.

9Jackson and Maley, “Celtic Connections,” 69, 76, 77.10Elsewhere, in a similar essay, Maley critiques Marilyn

Reizbaum’s suggestion that Irish and Scottish writers shareliterary similarities, but leaves uncommented her suggestionthat “they have comparable ‘colonial’ histories with respect toEngland.” Willy Maley, “'Ireland, Verses, Scotland: Crossingthe (English) Language Barrier',” in Across the Margins: CulturalIdentity and Change in the Atlantic Archipelago, ed. Glenda Nor-quay and Gerry Smyth (Manchester: Manchester UniversityPress, 2002), 13-30 (13, 14); and Marilyn Reizbaum, “Canoni-cal Double Cross: Scottish and Irish Women's Writing,” inDecolonizing Tradition: New Views of Twentieth-Century 'British'Literary Canon, ed. Karen R. Lawrence (Urbana: University ofIllinois Press, 1992), 165-90.

11Schoene-Harwood, “‘Emerging as the Others of OurSelves,’” 59.

12Tom Nairn, The Break Up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-Nationalism (London: New Left Books, 1977).

13Cairns Craig, Out of History: Narrative Paradigms in Scottishand British Culture, Scottish Dimensions (Edinburgh: Polygon,1996), 12.

14A notable exception is Stuart Murray and Alan Riach’s“questionnaire” in the journal SPAN, which seeks to open updebate about postcolonialism’s suitability in a Scottish con-text. Murray and Riach, “A Questionnaire.”

15Crawford, Devolving English Literature, 50-51.16Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Rout-

ledge, 1994).17Cairns Craig, ed., The History of Scottish Literature, vol. 4

(Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1987); Crawford, De-volving English Literature; Robert Crawford, ed., The Scottish In-vention of English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1998); and Alan MacGillivray, ed., Teaching Scottish Lit-erature: Curriculum and Classroom Applications, Scottish Languageand Literature, vol. 3 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,1997).

18Scots is the name given to the Scottish dialectical Anglo-Saxon similar to Northumbrian English, which was identifiedas a separate Scottish language by Gavin Douglas at the be-ginning of sixteenth century.

19Hugh MacDiarmid, “English Ascendancy in British Lit-erature,” The Criterion 10 (1931): 593-613.

20Lindsay Paterson, The Autonomy of Modern Scotland (Edin-


burgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1994).21Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837 (New

Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992), 49.22The Labour Party, “The Labour Party––Members of the

Cabinet,” 2002, <http://www.labour.org.uk/membersofcabinet/> (29 May 2002).

23Colley, Britons, 123; and Neil Davidson, The Origins ofScottish Nationhood (London: Pluto Press, 2000), 94.

24Richard J. Finlay, Independent and Free: Scottish Politics and theOrigins of the Scottish National Party 1918-1945 (Edinburgh:John Donald Publishers Ltd, 1994), 35, 40.

25Finlay, Independent and Free, 37.26A more precise date might be 1956, with a shift in atti-

tudes following the Suez Crisis and the realization that Britainno longer dictated its own policy on international matters.

27Alice Brown et al, The Scottish Electorate (Basingstoke:Macmillan, 1999), 64-70.

28David McCrone, Understanding Scotland: the Sociology of aStateless Nation (London: Routledge, 1992), 35, 49.

29McCrone, Understanding Scotland, 55.30Davidson, The Origins of Scottish Nationhood, 106.31SHEFC, “The Scottish Higher Education Funding Coun-

cil: Funding for Research 2001-2002,” 2002, <http://www.shefc.ac.uk/content/shefc/research/General/HowSHEFCFundsResearch01-02.html> (10 December 2002).

32PMLA, “Program of the 1997 Convention, Toronto,Canada, 27-30 December,” PMLA 112, no. 6 (1997): 1201-1544(1298).

33PMLA, “Program of the 1997 Convention,” 1348.34PMLA, “Program of the 1997 Convention,” 1237-8.35PMLA, “Program of the 1997 Convention,” 1239.36PMLA, “Program of the 2001 Convention, New Orleans,

27-30 December,” PMLA 116, no. 6 (2001): 1518-1888 (1547).37PMLA, “Program of the 2001 Convention,” 1560.38Jackson and Maley, “Celtic Connections,” 68.39Crawford, Devolving English Literature, 3.40Mack, “Can Anything Good Come Out of Nazareth?”41The Association of Scottish Literary Studies, “ASLS: In-

dex,” 2002, <http://www2.gla.ac.uk/ScotLit/ASLS/ Frame-set.html> (11 July 2002).

42Stirling University, “Staff Index,” 2002, <http://www.english.stir.ac.uk/staff/douglas_mack.html> (27 July 2002).

43PMLA, “Program of the 2001 Convention,” 1635.44Anne McClintock, “The Angel of Progress: Pitfalls of

the Term Post-Colonialism,” in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: a Reader, ed. Patrick Williams and LauraChrisman (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993),299.

45These include: the Anonymous Ballads, Sir Robert Ay

-

toun, John Barbour, Robert Burns, Allan Cunningham, JohnDavidson, William Drummond, William Dunbar, Jean Elliott,James Graham (Marquis of Montrose), Robert Henryson,James Hogg, James I, Andrew Lang, Alexander Montgomerie,Baroness Nairne (‘Carolina Oliphant’), Allan Ramsay, Alexan-der Scott (?1527-?1590), Sir Walter Scott, Robert Louis Ste-venson, James Thomson (1700-1748), and James!Thomson(“B.V.”). Arthur Quiller-Couch, ed., The Oxford book of Englishverse: 1250-1918, New ed. (London: Book Club Associates,

1968).46These include: John Davidson, Edwin Muir, Hugh

Macdiarmid, Robert Garioch, Norman MacCaig, W. S. Gra-ham, Iain Crichton Smith, and Douglas Dunn. Philip Larkin,ed., The Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse (Oxford:Clarendon Press, 1973).

47Crawford, Devolving English Literature, 16-44; Crawford,The Scottish Invention of English Literature. For my reservationsabout this argument see Liam Connell, “The Scottish Invention ofEnglish Literature ed. R. Crawford. 1998,” Textual Practice 13,no. 3 (1999): 561-4.

48Craig, Out of History, 19.49Harish Trivedi, Colonial Transactions: English Literature and

India, new ed. (Manchester: Manchester University Press,1995); and Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: LiteraryStudy and British Rule in India (London: Faber and Faber, 1989).

50Crawford, The Scottish Invention of English Literature, 7, 1.51Glenda Norquay and Gerry Smyth, eds., Across the Mar-

gins: Cultural Identity and Change in the Atlantic Archipelago (Man-chester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 7.

52Advisory Council on Education in Scotland, SecondaryEducation (Edinburgh: HMSO, 1947), 170-183; Glasgow Her-ald, “Chair of Scottish History: Disposal of Exhibition Sur-plus: £15,000 Presented to Glasgow University,” Glasgow Her-ald, 17 January 1913, 10; and H. J. Hanham, Scottish Nationalism(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969), 185, 126-8.Depressingly, despite its formation after the typical Romanticspread of European nationalism, Scottish nationalism hasdisplayed all the racially-essentialist features of this tradition.Nairn, The Break Up of Britain.

53George Elder Davie, The Crisis of the Democratic Intellect: theProblem of Generalism and Specialisation in Twentieth-century Scot-land (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1986), 9; and Donald Carswell,“The Scottish Universities and Some Other Considerations,”The Modern Scot 6, no. 4 (1931): 54-57 (55-6).

54N. [V. I.] Lenin, Imperialism: the Last Stage of Capitalism(London: Communist Party of Great Britain, 1916).

55Kwame Nkrumah, Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Impe-rialism, ed. Chinua Achebe, African Writers Series (London:Heinemann, 1968); and Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdevel-oped Africa, rev. ed. (London: Bogle L'Ouverture, 1988).

56The Oxford English Dictionary, 2d ed. (Oxford: Oxford Uni-versity Press, 1989), development 3.b and e.

57Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic.58Douglas Gifford, “In Search of the Scottish Renais-

sance––The Reprinting of Scottish Fiction,” Cencrastus 9(1982): 26-30.

59This is apparent even in Gifford’s own writing, seeDouglas Gifford and Neil McMillan, “Scottish literature andthe Challenge of Theory,” in Teaching Scottish Literature: Cur-riculum and Classroom Applications, ed. Alan MacGillivray, Scot-tish Language and Literature, vol. 3 (Edinburgh: EdinburghUniversity Press, 1997), 3-24.


License to Write: Encounters with Censorship1

NGUGI WA THIONG’O

It was a debate about censorship that made me turnto writing. I was sixteen, in the last year of my primaryeducation, and I had just been introduced to Dickensand Stevenson by one of my teachers. I came from arural community in colonial Kenya; books were a raresight in our lives. For me and my friends who were usedto oral stories around the fireside in the evenings, it wasquite a discovery that people could actually tell storiesthrough writing. And such interesting stories too, thatone did not have to wait for the evening to hear; onecould read them, as I most certainly did, at any time ofday and night and even under the desk in class during aboring lesson. For me these writers were a special cate-gory of beings. I wanted to join their company. Outsidethe classroom, I shared my secret desire with one of thestudents, with whom I also shared books that came myway. And why not? was his response. It was then thatthe debate began.

I believed that one needed a license to write, that ifone wrote without some kind of formal permission, onewould be arrested and most certainly be thrown intoprison. If teachers needed training and a certificate inorder to teach, why not writers? But my friend had adifferent view and said that one did not need a license towrite, that there was no way one could be imprisonedfor writing books. This exchange took place in 1954 andlater, the following year, he and I went to differentschools. He went to a teacher training college and I wentto secondary school. As far as I was concerned, that wasthe end of our unresolved debate. But my friend neverforgot the exchange and in his first year, his first act wasto write a story, which he called a book, in order toprove to me that one did not need a license to write.

That was in colonial Kenya, then seething under astate of emergency declared by the British colonial statein 1952, in its fight against the Mau Mau guerrilla strug-gle for independence. As part of its anti-nationalistfight, the British colonial state had banned songs,dances, books, and newspapers that were deemed to beon the side of the independence movement. Althoughthis did not become apparent in our debate, my ownconcerns may have been derived from that environmentof censorship. My friend never went beyond the firstchapter, but he had made his point. He had not askedfor anyone’s permission to write his unfinished book.

Although he never finished the book, he did completehis training program and became a licensed teacher.Most important, he was not arrested and imprisoned forhis unfinished, unpublished book.

I was to recall that debate when the police of an in-dependent Kenya came for me at midnight on Decem-ber 31, 1977. Their first act was to raid my home library.They collected any books with titles that bore the wordssocialism or politics. But what seemed to make themhappy was their seizure of my typescripts of the playNgaahika Ndeenda [I Will Marry When I Want], whoselicense to perform at Kamiriithu Community Educationand Cultural Center, Limuru, had been withdrawn bythe state six weeks earlier. The debate kept recurring inmy mind when I was stripped of my name and anyrights to books and writing material at Kamiti MaximumSecurity prison. All incoming and outgoing letters hadto go though a prison censor.

Under those circumstances, I could not help but re-flect on censorship and the free circulation of ideas,recalling the debate my friend and I had engaged intwenty-five years before. We did not give it the namecensorship, but our exchange had been about the basicissue that underlies the question of censorship: the rightto freely express and receive ideas.

Censorship is an act of regulating the shape, form,and content of ideas by a religious or secular authoritywith powers to initiate and carry out punitive measuresin the name of a higher moral good of a group, com-munity, or nation. It involves the evaluation of an intel-lectual product by a set of moral needs. At the Univer-sity of Jena, in accordance with the tradition of aGerman state in the nineteenth century, one of the rul-ers proclaimed that what he wanted from the universitywas not educated men, but obedient subjects. Quite of-ten, the authority is the one that defines the moral need.It becomes the sole judge of the correct relation of theoffending ideas and practices to the authorized moralneed. The end is clearly to control the conduct andopinions of a community through a regulation of theirintellectual diet so as to bring about conformity to anestablished norm of political beliefs and ideologies.Censorship becomes the means of containing an op-posing view, especially one that seems to challenge an

Ngugi: License to Write 55

existing view of the desirable moral order.This is well illustrated in the play The Life of Galileo,2 in

which Brecht dramatizes the struggle between thePtolemaic and the Copernican systems. Galileo, with thenewly invented telescope, is able to prove the truth ofthe Copernican system—that the earth is not the fixedcenter of the universe. He returns to Florence with thebelief that once the pope and the defenders of the oldsystem look through the telescope, they will be able tosee the truth for themselves and hopefully abandontheir old belief in the immutability of the earth. Someof the experts look and argue fervently against whatthey see. Others refuse to look through the telescope.Galileo pleads: “Gentlemen, I beseech you in all humil-ity to trust your eyes.”

It is his friend Sagredo who later enlightens Galileo,showing him that censorship has more in common withthe fear of truth than the defense of truth:

SAGREDO: Galileo, I see you setting out on a fear-ful road. It is a night of disaster when a man sees thetruth. And an hour of delusion when he believes inthe commonsense of the human race. Of whom doesone say “he’s going into it with his eyes open”? Ofthe man on the path to perdition. How could thosein power leave at large a man who knows the truth,even though it be about the most distant of stars?Do you think the Pope will hearken to your truthwhen you say that he is in error, and yet not hear thathe is in error? Do you think that he will simply writein his diary: January the tenth, 1610—Heaven abol-ished?3

We tend to think of censorship too often in terms ofthe secular powers of the erstwhile communist regimesand right wing dictatorships of the twentieth century.But in fact historically, religious institutions and ortho-doxies have been the censorious sites of those intellec-tual diets deemed harmful to the faith and morality oftheir adherents. The Index Librorum prohibitorium (Indexon Censorship) of the Catholic Church initiated in 1559by Pope Paul IV, with its list of prohibited texts, becamethe model for those lists so beloved by colonial andpostcolonial powers.

Censorship, whether carried out by religious or secu-lar institutions, has as its immediate and main objectivethe prevention of the consumption of an intellectualproduct in the form of words, exhibitions, or perform-ances; that is why lists of the forbidden become theprincipal form in which censorship expresses itself. Thisis also the form that conjures up images of a group ofmen sitting down in half-lit corridors of power withscissors or pencils in their hands ready to rule and cutout the undesirable word in a newspaper or undesirableimage on celluloid. This is the form that is replete withabsurdities and comical contradictions satirized in JamesThurber’s story of the land of “The Wonderful O,”

where the letter “o” is banned from the alphabet. Youcan see the consequent disaster: good and god becomegd.; orange becomes range.

In her paper “Stage and the State: The Censorship ofRichard II”,4 Ruth Underhill tells of the censorship ofparts of Shakespeare’s Richard II in the reign of QueenElizabeth I. All plays at that time had to be approved bya court-appointed master of the revels. Three editionsof Richard II were published without the abdicationscene, a phenomenon not dissimilar to that of the cen-sorship of Shakespeare in the reign of Haille Sellassie ofEthiopia. In a production of Julius Caesar, it was notBrutus who stabs Caesar, but Caesar who stabs Brutus,for how could a monarch with claims to divinity die atthe hands of a common mortal?

Some of the absurdities arise from the fact that thecensors cannot possibly have the time and the staminato read all the books and watch all the videos being pro-duced. In Banda’s Malawi, the censorship board becamethe main underground distributors of forbidden videos.The members would sometimes take home the juiciervideos to show and titillate a trusted few, and of course,the trusted few had their own trusted few. Later, theboard imploded under the weight of its own contradic-tions. To simplify their tasks, such boards are oftenguided by key words that become the signal for placingthe work on a prohibited list. This can result in a cen-sorship board prohibiting a book which is actually fa-vorable to the regime. The South Africa apartheid re-gime once banned Anne Sewell’s book Black Beauty, thestory of a horse, because of the implication that blackcould be beautiful. There, the word black was the signal.The Kenyan government simplified its task by simplyoutlawing all books published in Peking. So, in theeighties, we had the absurdity of people being sentencedto long prison terms if they were caught with a text byEinstein if the book was published in China, particularlyPeking. But the same work was presumably harmless ifit was published by any of the Western publishinghouses. Marx, Lenin, Castro, and Mao, published by say,Harvard University Press, were safe to read; but thesame texts became revolutionary and subversive if theycarried a Chinese imprint. The police who raided myhome library were looking for Chinese publications ofbooks that bore any titles with politics, socialism, andliberation.

When my novel Matigari became known in 1986, peo-ple started talking about the hero as a seeker of truthand justice. The Moi regime, thinking that the peoplewere talking about a real live character, sent the police toarrest Matigari, the main character. Later the regimebanned the book.

The absurdity can also come from the victims of cen-sorship. There is a poem by Brecht on the subject ofburning books which satirizes such a situation. The


poem tells of a certain regime that once commandedthat all books with harmful knowledge be burned pub-licly. But one of the best writers, one whose works hadalways been critical of the regime, was dismayed to findhis books were not on the list of those to be burned.

. . . He rushed to his deskOn wings of wrath, and wrote a letter to those inpowerBurn me! he wrote with flying pen, burn me! Haven’t mybooksAlways reported the truth? And here you areTreating me like a liar! I command you:Burn me!5

In its attempts to prevent the consumption of the intel-lectual product, censorship can go beyond this legalisticform of lists of books to be banned and burnt. Censor-ship can reach out to the means of realizing the intel-lectual product. A regime, an authority, can bar access tothe performance space, for instance. This can take crudeforms. In 1982, the Kenya Moi regime literally lockedthe Kamiriithu performers out of the National Theater;the University of Nairobi, then outlawed the group. OnMarch 12, 1982, the regime sent three truckloads ofarmed police to raze to the ground the open-air theaterbuilt by the villagers. But barring access to the perform-ance space can also take the less crude form of with-drawing public funds for the arts. Mayor Guliani ofNew York exemplified this form when he threatened towithdraw funding for the Brooklyn Museum because heobjected to certain items in the exhibition. A regime canalso bar access to the means for literary produc-tion—pen and paper for instance. I experienced this atKam_t_ Maximum Security Prison where I ended upwriting my novel, Devil on the Cross, on toilet paper. Butoutside the prison walls, for instance where publishinghouses are controlled by the state, the allocation of pa-per can determine the subject matter for intellectualproduction. It happened in many of the communistregimes in the East. It happened in many publishingbureaus of the colonial regimes in Kenya, Zimbabwe(then Rhodesia), and South Africa, where the colonialstate only funded the production of books by Africansif the writers shied away from politics.

Now, one of the most important means for the pro-duction of knowledge is language; the suppression anddevaluation of languages is one of the surest ways toprevent the realization of the product of intellect. InFascist Spain, non-Spanish languages, for instance Eus-cara, were driven underground. Some time ago I wasinvited to give a few lectures in the Basque countrywhere I was told the most harrowing stories of parentsteaching their children the languages forbidden byFranco’s fascist regime, often risking their own lives tokeep their languages alive. When Africans were cartedfrom Africa to America and the Caribbean islands, the

first act of intellectual suppression was the repression ofAfrican languages. At the assimilation of Hawaii intothe United States in the nineteenth century, the Hawai-ian language was banned until 1978. The same hap-pened in colonial Africa. The books and newspapersbanned in Kenya at the time that I was having that de-bate were only those written in African languages. Inpostcolonial Kenya, the same hostility toward Africanlanguages continues, and part of the reason I was put ina maximum-security prison was the fact that I wrote inan African language.

Intellectual production in the world today is domi-nated by a handful of European languages. This is bestexemplified in the operations of the United Nations.Part of my joy in being at New York University wastheir willingness to house and fund a journal in the Gi-kuyu language, Mutiiri. NYU also supported the recentand first ever conference on writing in African lan-guages, held at Asmara, Eritrea in January 2000—out ofwhich came the Asmara Declaration in which Africanscholars and writers from different parts of the conti-nent affirmed their belief that African languages havethe right, the duty, and the responsibility to speak forthe continent.

But we should not forget the political and economicenvironment, which often means that a given commu

-

nity and social class is unable to produce ideas, eitherbecause of the economic restraints, or because of thepolitical environment of the repression of democracy.

Let me now touch on one more form in which agiven regime can adversely affect the production ofknowledge: controlling the body of the producer. Thisis often a by-product of the climate of political repres-sion in general. Throughout history, intellectuals havebeen hounded into prison, exile, or death. I can think ofthe better known cases such as the execution of Socra-tes in ancient Athens, the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, theburning of nonconformist intellectuals during theSpanish Inquisition, or the lesser known cases, the kill-ing of writers in apartheid South Africa and Idi Amin’sUganda. I cannot think of a single country in the his-tory of ideas where intellectuals have not escaped prisonor death by flight to other countries. Even Plato had totemporarily flee to Egypt. Aristotle fled Athens, sayingthat he was not going to let Athens offend twice againstphilosophy. Jesus and Mohammed also took flight toother countries. Controlling the body of the producer isnot only an attempt to prevent further realization of theintellectual production on the part of the affected intel-lectual, but also an exemplary warning to the populationas a whole. The affected intellectual is made an exampleof what would happen to other rebels against theauthorized norm.

One could argue that there has always been a strugglebetween forms of censorship and forms of a restless

Ngugi: License to Write 57

search for knowledge. The biblical story of Adam andEve in the Garden of Eden in some ways exemplifiesthis struggle. Note that the forbidden fruit is literally theone that grows on the tree of knowledge. In that case,the choice confronting Eve is that between authorizedbliss in the Garden of Eden and the risky business ofknowing. The development of ideas begins with thedesire to know and to try out that which has not beentried before. Development of human society, at least theintellectual part of it, begins with the desire to bite theforbidden fruit, and this desire and willingness to do sohas always been part of the make-up of those at thefrontiers of knowledge.

Among the books that slipped through the prisoncensor at Kamiti Maximum Security Prison was Aris-totle’s Metaphysics, and in it I came across a statementthat I held onto in my prison days. Aristotle argues thatthe investigation of truth was both hard and easy. “Anindication of this is found in the fact that no one is ableto attain the truth adequately, while on the other hand,we do not collectively fail, but every one says somethingtrue about the nature of things, and while individuallywe contribute little or nothing to the truth, by the unionof all, a considerable amount is amassed.” He goes onto say that “we should be grateful, not only to thosewith whose views we may agree, but also to those whohave expressed more superficial views; for these alsocontribute something, by developing before us the pow

-

ers of thought.”6 This must be one of the earliest de-fenses of diversity and tolerance for contradictory viewsand positions. “Do I contradict myself?” asks Whitman,and he accepts this as part of his reality. Mao tse Tungonce talked of a hundred thoughts contending so that ahundred flowers could bloom.

I love the image of the flower, for it is expressive ofthe beauty of diversity, but also, the essential equality onwhich diversity must be founded. For no flower is reallymore of a flower than another flower because of itsdifferent color, shape, or size. A flower is also a productof a process—the roots, trunks, and branches—but it isalso the beginning of a new process, for it is the flowerthat carries the seeds for a new tomorrow.

Given the nature of development as a struggle be-tween what has been and what will be, I believe thatthere will always be forms of censorship as the old tryto conserve what is, particularly through the instrumentof the state as a centralized authority, and the new try tore-form what is already there. So there will always be astruggle between the tendency towards conformity andthe tendency towards reformation. But while censorshipmay not end, it must surely be put on the defensive forit to justify itself on the bar of reason, necessity, democ-racy, and that principle so well enshrined in Article 19 of“The Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”

Everyone has the right to the freedom of opinionand expression, this right includes freedom to holdopinions without interference and to seek, receive,and impart information and ideas through any mediaand regardless of frontiers.7

I believe that art as an embodiment of the possible isessentially at variance with censorship. Universities arenot there to produce obedient subjects, but seekers oftruth who subject even the call for obedience to rigor-ous scrutiny. Universities should institutionalize thestruggle for the opening of the frontiers of the possiblein the enhancement of human freedom in equality anddiversity.

I find the words of Aleksandr Solshenitsyn in his1967 “Letter to the Fourth Congress of Soviet Writers”instructive not only for literature but for knowledge ingeneral.

Literature cannot develop in between the categoriesof “permitted” and “not permitted,” “about this youmay write” and “about this you may not.” Literaturethat is not the breath of contemporary society, thatdares not transmit the pains and fears of that society,that does not warn in time against threatening moraland social dangers—such literature does not deservethe name of literature; it is only a façade. Such a lit-erature loses the confidence of its own people, andits published works are used as wastepaper instead ofbeing read.8

My friend was right after all; one must never need a li-cense to think, and we all have to work toward a worldin which no one needs a license to think, write, and cir-culate ideas.

NOTES1Based on the keynote address given on September 15,

2000 at the Symposium on Censorship organized by the De-partment of Art and Public Policy, TISCH, NYU.

2Bertolt Brecht, The Life of Galileo in Bertolt Brecht Plays,trans. Desmond I Vesey (London: Methuen & Co. Ltd, 1961),I: 229-334.

3Brecht, Galileo, scene 4, 265 and scene 3, 257.4Ruth Underhill, “Stage and State: The Censorship of

Richard II,” Individual Studies, 1995, [electronic text], Depart-ment of English, University of Victoria.

5Bertolt Brecht, “The Burning of the Books,” Bertolt Brecht:Poems 1913–1956, ed. John Willet and Ralph Manheim withthe co-operation of Erich Fried, trans. John Willet (NewYork: Routledge, 1998), 294.

6Aristotle, Metaphysics, <http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/a/a8m/book2.html>, [Book II, Chapter 1, 1.

7United Nations, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights,Article 19, 15.

8Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, Cancer Ward, “Letter to the FourthCongress of Soviet Writers, May 16, 1967”, trans. NicholasBehell and David Burg (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,1969), vii-xii; quote on ix.


Rethinking a Problematic Constellation: Postcolonialismand its Germanic Contexts (Pramoedya Ananta Toer/Multatuli)

CARL NIEKERK

It often has been remarked that the field of post-colonial studies has been dominated by scholars whosehome base is in English literary history,1 and that thissituation is undesirable. A focus on other, non-Britishcolonialisms, so the argument goes, is needed. But why?Such a focus could be productive for an understandingof the history and contemporary socio-political dynam-ics of parts of the postcolonial world outside of theCommonwealth and, to some extent, also of the formercolonial powers that once dominated them. From aglobal perspective, for example, relatively little is knownabout the history and culture of Indonesia, particularlyif one compares it with, for instance, its “biggerbrother” India. This has no doubt something to do withthe fact that English never played a very prominent rolein Indonesia or the Dutch Indies. The desire to rectifysuch an imbalance should in itself legitimate a call for abroader focus for postcolonial studies. But there areother good reasons for introducing a comparative com-ponent. In the colonial era, a critical attitude toward acompeting power often helped legitimate a national co-lonial policy. There may be something disingenuousabout this “critique” of colonialism; it may not alwaysbe very informed, it may be dominated by nationalisticor racist concerns, but at times it may also refer to ex-isting abusive practices. If this is the case, such a critiqueis useful for those interested in a critique of the histori-cal practices of colonialism in all its shapes. But thephenomenon of competing colonial powers allows foryet another form of criticism. A colonial power maycensor its own citizens in their criticism of colonialpractice, but it also may allow the circulation of writingscriticizing the colonial policies of another, competingpower. In fact, this may have been the reason for theinternational popularity of one of the texts that I willdiscuss, the novel Max Havelaar by the nineteenth-century Dutch realist Multatuli.

In addition to its focus on the Commonwealth, thereis another problematic aspect of postcolonial studiesthat is also widely acknowledged by its practitioners, but

at the same time has remained to a large extent unre-solved. It has been said that postcoloniality is the con-struction of “a relatively small, Western-style, Western-trained group of writers and thinkers, who mediate thetrade in cultural commodities of world capitalism at theperiphery.”2 Is that really so, or do we, as Western intel-lectuals, simply privilege the literature of those who, atleast to some extent, are familiar with metropolitan so-cieties themselves, because we think that any other typeof literature is too sentimental, too primitive in itsideological alliances, or, in other words, not good litera-ture? And if there exists another postcolonial literature,not written in English or primarily oriented towardWestern standards, how can such a literature contributeto a more complex understanding of the postcolonialcondition or even to a rethinking of some of postcolo-nial theory’s basic assumptions?

The following essay attempts to deal in a productiveway with the challenges posed by the two self-critiquesmentioned above, both of which are articulated withincontemporary postcolonial studies, and seeks to developalternative strategies. I will make the argument that thereare indeed good reasons to look at the Germanic con-texts of colonial and postcolonial literature. There cer-tainly seems to be a need for such research. In post-colonial studies, there has been a call for the“provincialization” of Europe.3 In the first place, such acall refers to the attempt to break with the explicit orimplicit Eurocentric focus of postcolonial research. Butthat is not necessarily its only programmatic conse-quence. It can be argued that a provincializing ofEurope is only possible if we are aware of the homoge-nizing function of a Eurocentric perspective and paymore attention to differences existing within Europe.Understood in either sense, however, the concomitantagenda is not entirely unproblematic. A call for moreawareness of the local and temporal particularities ofcolonial thinking should not be used, for instance, toexempt some European nations from Europe’s colonialpast, as has been done in the recent past in the case of

Carl Niekerk: Rethinking a Problematic Constellation 59

Germany’s colonial heritage.4 It is no doubt a conse-quence of the more global consciousness introduced toliterary studies by postcolonial theory that an interest in“marginality” has become much more prominent. How-ever, it is important to distinguish among different mar-ginalities. If in the following my aim is to show thatthere exists a body of local knowledge that can contrib-ute to a better understanding of the history of the post-colonial world, I do not mean to equate the differentclaims of marginality that could result from such a pro-gram. Claiming that there is a specifically Germanic co-lonial literary and non-literary discourse does not meanthat there is an inherent value to the reconstruction ofthat discourse. Moreover, the question of why it mightbe important to reconstruct such a discourse itself alsoneeds to be raised.

In a thematic issue of the New York Times Magazinefrom 18 April 1999, dedicated to the stories of theclosing millennium, the contemporary Indonesianauthor Pramoedya Ananta Toer published a contribu-tion on Multatuli’s Max Havelaar. That Toer (born 1925)picked a largely forgotten novel, first published in 1860by the Dutch colonial official and author Multatuli(1820-1887), as his text of the millennium is highly in-teresting. Pramoedya Ananta Toer is a prolific postcolo-nial author whose first language is not English andwhose intellectual and artistic development have takenplace largely independently of the West—not necessarilyby his own choice. Toer first was imprisoned in 1947 bythe Dutch during the fight for Indonesia’s independ-ence; later in 1965, he was arrested and exiled to Buruisland until 1979 by the Indonesian authorities. Untilvery recently he lived under house arrest in Jakarta. Thebook Toer discusses in his essay, Max Havelaar (1860),was written by the erstwhile Dutch colonial officialEduard Douwes Dekker, who chose as his pen name“Multatuli” (Latin for “I have suffered much”). Toer’sessay is interesting because it approaches postcolonial-ism and colonialism simultaneously as global phenom-ena and from a highly localized perspective. In his essay,and also in the cycle of novels entitled Buru Quartet,Toer traces the processes of transculturation5 that oc-curred as Indonesian nationalism began under Dutchrule. As such, Toer offers something that comes close toan outside perspective on the West—not by makinggeneral assumptions, but by looking very concretely atthe exchanges of cultural materials and practices in aspecific (Germanic) colonial context. Toer explores therole of the progressive intellectual in this process oftransculturation, and the questions he asks and the an-swers he gives are unorthodox.

Toer’s article has the provocative title “The BookThat Killed Colonialism: As the West Clamored forSpices, the Novelist ‘Multatuli’ Cried for Justice.”6 In a

nutshell, Toer offers a history of European colonialismin Southeast Asia. He points out that Europe’s interestin the Indonesian territories was initially based on a de-sire for spices. Religious conflict is for Toer a secondaryphenomenon, only resulting from the West’s attempt toestablish business interests in the East. By the nine-teenth century the Dutch try to establish a system offorced cultivation of sugar, coffee, tea, and indigo inorder to guarantee its economic interests in the East,while turning all of Java “into an agricultural sweat-shop”.7 The importance of Multatuli’s Max Havelaarconsists in two facts: first, for the first time a Dutchcolonial official, who was supposed to implement thenew policy, protests the new developments blamingboth Dutch colonial policies and the indigenous powerstructures they capitalize on. Second, Multatuli writes abook about Dutch colonial abuse that potentially can beread by a broad, international audience. At the begin-ning of the main narrative line of Multatuli’s novel, theprincipal character Max Havelaar moves with his wifeand child to Lebak, a remote and poor district of theDutch Indies, in order to assume a position as assistantresident of that district. Many of the problems Havelaarencounters have to do with the specifics of his officialposition. As assistant resident, Havelaar is the highestlocal Dutch official in a subdistrict, and he works inconjunction with the local regent, a Native who is amember of local nobility. In contrast to the colonialstrategies of other powers, the Dutch chose to use theexisting pre-colonial hierarchies rather than to imposetheir own organization in the East Indies. This had littleto do with respect for the relatively advanced organiza-tion of the indigenous society, and much to do with thefact that the Dutch lacked the manpower necessary todevelop their own administrative structures. Due to hisattempts to protect the lives and rights of the abusedlocal population, soon after his arrival Havelaar gets intotrouble with both the native regent and his Dutch supe-riors. In essence, the novel is a report of the eventsleading to Havelaar’s suspension and subsequent de-parture from the Dutch Indies. Max Havelaar was, asToer points out, of great importance in Indonesia’s fightfor its own independence; the book was a “weapon toshame the Dutch Government in Indonesia”8 into in-troducing reform, and it set into motion a developmentwhich would eventually end the Dutch colonial regimeover Indonesia.

At first sight, Toer’s essay seems to be an embarrass-ment for postcolonial studies. If anything, postcolonialtheory has taught us to mistrust the tradition of colonialliterature of which Multatuli is a representative, in par-ticular when this type of literature claims to be critical.9Most colonial literature was written by intellectuals whosaw themselves as critical, even though their writings inpractice ended up legitimating colonial practice. Mary


Louise Pratt writes about “anti-conquest,” meaning“strategies of representation whereby European bour-geois subjects seek to secure their innocence at the sametime as they assert European hegemony.”10 Indeed,Eduard Douwes Dekker personifies the ambiguities ofcritical colonial literature in an almost exemplary way.He disapproves of the Dutch colonial regime, especiallybecause it tolerated practices of unpaid labor, theft, andmurder from the side of the Native chiefs. But Dekker’smotives for standing up for the Javanese natives are du-bious at best. E. M. Beekman, in his pathbreaking workon Dutch colonial literature from the East Indies, men-tions “personal and psychological” reasons that mayhave motivated Dekker’s behavior,11 a statement thatdoubtless represents a consensus in contemporaryMultatuli scholarship.12 Dekker was a colonial adminis-trator accused of financial mismanagement before herequested an honorable discharge in 1856 (these eventsare described more or less accurately in Max Havelaar).Dekker was a highly ambitious man, but not psychologi-cally stable. He fought for the rights of Natives andwomen, but his high moral stances did not keep himfrom gambling and womanizing. Dekker liked to playthe masochist; he saw himself as someone who had tosuffer for the common good. Above all, in spite of hisharsh criticism, Dekker never really questioned the prin-ciple of colonialism: “Dekker was an imperialist all hislife, notwithstanding his very real concern for thedowntrodden Asians.”13 Even when Multatuli, at the endof Max Havelaar, threatens to “hurl klewang-whettingwar songs into the hearts of the poor martyrs to whomI have promised help, I, Multatuli,”14 he means primarilyto persuade the Dutch to improve the conditions for thenative population of the Indies within the colonialstructure, and not to call for independence, even thoughsome of the contemporaries of Multatuli may have readthese words this way.15

However, one can wonder whether questioning Mul-tatuli’s motives for writing Max Havelaar is the mostproductive way of dealing with his life and work from apostcolonial perspective. Whatever the man’s motiveswere, once his text was published, its own existence be-gan. Dutch colonial literature starts with Max Havelaar,16

and it is interesting that this beginning is simultaneouslya highly critical account of Dutch colonialism. Manylater colonial writers (Couperus, Daum, Du Perron),some of them quite prominent, have attempted to copyMultatuli’s critical impulse (and inadvertently may alsohave copied its ambiguities). This basic critical attitudeled to a mode of writing virtually unknown in other na-tional traditions of colonial literature. But the interna-tional as well as the national reception of Max Havelaarmade it clear that the book was loved for its critical at-titude toward colonial politics and the discourses thatlegitimated them. Max Havelaar has often been com-

pared to Uncle Tom’s Cabin for this reason. This shouldmake us suspicious. Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a powerful textcriticizing racial discrimination, but outside the UnitedStates it was mostly read as critical of the U.S., and notnecessarily as a text that in any way had anything to dowith racial relations in Europe. Indeed, maybe Mul-tatuli’s Max Havelaar was at one point part of world lit-erature17 not only because it was critical of colonial ex-cesses, but also because his criticism could beinterpreted as a specific response to the colonial abuseof one specific nation, and not to colonialism in general.Localizing Multatuli’s criticism can cause it to lose atleast part of its critical impetus.

But Toer’s strategy of approaching colonialism froma local perspective is different from the one sketchedabove. By reading Multatuli in the context of Indone-sia’s battle for independence, Toer suggests that there is,in contrast, a genuine critical and political impetus be-hind Max Havelaar.18 Toer’s interest in Multatuli is ap-parent in writings beyond his essay for the New YorkTimes. Max Havelaar and historical knowledge about thelife of its author in the Dutch East Indies and his repu-tation play a role in Toer’s cycle of novels, Buru Quartet.19

As I will show in the following, a far more differentiatedimage of Multatuli’s relevance for the Indonesianmovement of independence emerges in this cycle ofnovels. Toer’s Buru Quartet is a fictional account of thelife of the high school and medical school student,journalist, and political prisoner Minke, and it covers theperiod from 1898 to approximately 1920. The story ofMinke is based on the life of the early Indonesian na-tionalist and journalist Tirto Adi Suryo (1880-1918).20

Toer first narrated and then wrote the cycle of novelswhile interned on Buru Island (1969-1979).

The influence of Multatuli is ubiquitous in BuruQuartet. In the first volume we learn that Minke, whenhe publishes his first writings, chooses the pen nameMax Tollenaar (1:109). This name is a clear reference tothe protagonist of Multatuli’s novel, and this is laterpointed out to him; people will assume, Minke’s Euro-pean friend the journalist Ter Haar says, that “you arethe spiritual child of Multatuli” (2:259). Minke does notobject to such a characterization. He has learned aboutMultatuli in school from his teacher Magda Peters—something his Dutch friends initially refuse to believe,but then explain with the assumption that his teachermust be a member of a radical, anti-colonial movement(1:139ff.). Later Minke reconstructs one of Magda Pe-ters’s lectures about Multatuli for his class:

Miss Magda once told us the story of Multatuli andhis friend, the poet-journalist Roorda van Eysinga:They lived in tension because of their beliefs andtheir struggles to improve the fate of the people ofthe Indies, against both all-European and all-Nativeoppression. For the sake of the people of the Indies,


who knew nothing of the world, those two ended upin exile, without comrades who visited them, withouta single hand stretched out in aid, Minke. (1:189)

It is interesting that Magda Peters, Minke’s teacher, usesthe term “exile” to characterize Dekker’s situation afterhe leaves the Indies. Eduard Douwes Dekker was notborn in the Dutch Indies; he came there to seek em-ployment with the colonial bureaucracy at the age ofeighteen. Still Minke’s teacher seems to assume that thetie between Dekker and the Indies is strong enough tomake his repatriation to the Netherlands a case of “ex-ile.” There is a second intriguing piece of information inPeters’s characterization of Multatuli. She portrays himas fighting against European and Native abuse of poweralike. Such a statement can be debated. Multatuli criti-cizes the colonial regime’s tolerance of abuses of powerby the Natives. One could therefore argue that the rootsof the problem, according to Multatuli, lie in hierarchi-cal structures inherent to Native culture and not in thecolonists’ attitudes. The fact that Multatuli fights allforms of abuse, independent of the perpetrators, is ofcourse very much part of the image Multatuli tries tocreate for himself; but is this not a simplification of hisown role?

Toer’s Buru Quartet is not always entirely positiveabout Multatuli. At times it becomes clear that Minke’sadmiration for the author stands in the way of his owndevelopment as a writer. He is, for instance, reproachedthat his “outlook on life is so heavy, so serious, just likeMultatuli” and that he has no humor (2:179). Multatuli’smegalomaniac tendencies are also recognized in BuruQuartet when Minke remembers “how Multatuli hadbeen accused by the colonial newspapers of wanting tobe a white emperor ruling over the peoples of the In-dies, independent of the Netherlands” (3: 303). Minkeclearly disapproves of such a characterization of Dek-ker’s ambitions, but there is a historical basis for thisstory. Dekker’s niece and erotic interest Sietske Abra-hamsz notes in her memoirs that Dekker confessed toher that he wanted to become “Emperor” of the Indies,and that he would make her his “crown princess”.21

Toer’s texts document connections between contem-porary postcolonial literature and the colonial literaryhistory of at least one Germanic country. Before Ielaborate further on the exact nature of these connec-tions and the literary traditions behind them, I want tointerrupt my argument to look briefly at theoretical ormeta-theoretical attempts to trace and reflect on thespecific Germanic contexts of postcolonialism. Whatlegitimates a specific “Germanic” perspective on post-colonialism? At first sight, German and Dutch colonial-ism are very different. Dutch colonialism can be tracedback to 1595, when the first expedition, four ships, leftAmsterdam for the East Indies. Not much later, in 1601,

the Dutch set up their first trading post in Sumatra.22

Indonesia gained official independence in 1949; theother major Dutch colony, Surinam, became independ-ent in 1975. In contrast to the Dutch, the Germans havea very brief colonial history. Germany possessed anumber of territories, mainly in the southern half ofAfrica, from 1884 through 1919 when it lost its colonialterritories in the wake of the end of the First WorldWar.23 Dutch colonial history is long; German colonial-ism is but a passing phase. But are the differences soextreme? For a long time (until the beginning of thenineteenth century), Dutch colonialism consisted mainlyin the attempt to maintain trading posts; there was noactual occupation of territories. Until it went bankruptin 1799, Dutch colonial policies were in fact determinedby the V.O.C. (United East Indies Company) and werenot primarily a matter of the Dutch government. Theconquest of what is now Indonesia started in the earlynineteenth century and lasted until the second decade ofthe twentieth century. The Dutch struggled with the“problem” that they did not have the manpower to oc-cupy large territories like the East Indies, even if theywere employing representatives of other nationalities intheir colonies. Like the Germans, the Dutch saw them-selves as the underdogs of international colonialism,outsmarted by the major European colonial powers.Both emphasized that their mission was to bring civili-zation to the uncivilized.

What I propose in the following is an experiment. Iwill approach Dutch colonial literature with the help ofGerman theory. This presumes certain intellectual andhistorical continuities. Some of the earliest writings onthe Dutch Indies were by Germans who worked for theDutch government (Rumphius, Junghuhn).24 In the caseof Multatuli’s Max Havelaar, the impact of German onDutch culture is clearly visible; for instance, in the ex-emplary function the work of Heine has for Multatuli25

or in the fact that Multatuli makes a German, FritzStern, into one of the narrators of Max Havelaar (arather unlikely construction, since Stern seems early inthe novel to have little knowledge of Dutch).26 Never-theless, it is clearly important to Multatuli to use a repre-sentative of the German cultural tradition as a mediatorfor the story of Max Havelaar; as a representative of acountry without colonial past or present, one can expectStern to be an objective, but informed outsider.27 Dek-ker himself, later in life, chose to leave the Netherlandsand to live in Germany. This may have had something todo with financial or legal troubles that he was facing inthe Netherlands,28 but it may also point to his affinityfor the German writing of his time which, in compari-son to Dutch literature, was politically more explicit.

Postcolonial theory has never been very popular inGermany and other Germanic countries. In the case ofGermany29—and the same goes for the Scandinavian


countries—this doubtless has something to do with thefact that the country had only a brief colonial history. Inthe case of the Netherlands, this theoretical skepticismcan be explained by its reluctance to deal with its colo-nial past,30 and especially, just after the German occupa-tion of the Netherlands, with Indonesia’s battle for in-dependence in the late 1940s, an event that has left scarsin the Dutch national historical memory. A furthercomplication is that theoretical debates, especially in theGerman-speaking countries, were dominated by trendsthat led away from issues in which postcolonial criticstend to be interested. Without a doubt, German intel-lectuals reacted in general with profound skepticism topoststructuralism and to the diverse waves of postmod-ern thought at the roots of much of postcolonialthought. In fact, attempts to develop something like aGerman identity in the theoretical debates dominatingliterary and cultural discourses of the past two decadeswere dominated by an anti-poststructuralist and anti-postmodern attitude. The heir of the Frankfurt School,Jürgen Habermas, emphasized the legacy of the En-lightenment and its legitimative resources in his attemptto secure the legacy of modernity against its postmod-ern and poststructuralist critics.31

This emphasis on the Enlightenment is also apparentin the few theoretical attempts in German cultural stud-ies to deal with Germany’s colonial past. In his bookEnlightenment or Empire, Russell Berman asks whether itis fair to equate the Enlightenment with imperialism, orwhether there is a critical side to the Enlightenment’sprogram that evades such an equation and rejects impe-rialism. Berman thinks he has located this more criticalside of the Enlightenment by distinguishing between“alternative rationalities, the object of one being thecontrol and domination of nature—the fully mapped-out globe—the object of the other maintaining an inter-est in alternative regions of human experience,”32 Thesecond form of rationality is, for Berman, closely tied tothe emancipatory potential of the Enlightenment (40and 64), the recognition of alterity leads the Europeansubject to relativize its own value judgments and worldview. For Berman, this dualism within the Enlighten-ment is personified by the differences between the re-sponses of the Englishman Cook and the German For-ster to their encounter with the Natives of the SouthIsland of New Zealand during Cook’s second majorexploratory voyage (1772-1775). Cook’s sole interest isin producing a map of the visited territories which is tobe as precise as possible; he pursues a form of instru-mental rationality that, in the end, is interested in ex-panding the British empire. Forster, in contrast, repre-sents the emancipatory potential of the Enlightenment,its humanistic side. He is interested in knowledge not asa tool for eventually conquering unexplored territories,but as a goal in itself. According to Berman’s argumen-

tation, this second strain in the Enlightenment’s pro-gram exonerates German colonialism, at least partially.33

He sees a connection between Germany’s own “liminalsituation” and its interest in alterity as an “object of het-erophile desire”.34

These are highly problematic assertions. The claimthat one form of marginality—Germany’s liminal posi-tion in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-centuryEurope—more or less automatically leads to a sympa-thetic identification with those representing other mar-ginalities (for instance, those falling victim to Europeancolonial expansion) is especially difficult to defend. Incolonial history, there is little factual evidence to back upsuch a claim. The marginal role of Germany in theWest’s colonial past was tied to a desire to catch up withother colonial powers, which without a doubt led to adiscarding of humanitarian principles in countries likeNamibia.35 But there are other problems with Berman’sargument. One wonders whether the critical attitudetoward colonial abuse is so typical for the German En-lightenment alone, since the Enlightenment was a Euro-pean, and not just a German occurrence. Furthermore,as Susanne Zantop has shown in detail, it has alwaysbeen part of the rhetoric of German colonialism toclaim that Germans would be better colonists than oth-ers.36 In spite of all its critical ambitions, Berman’s studyfollows this pattern of argumentation exactly. Berman’smain problem in his attempt to resolve the issue of theEnlightenment’s engagement versus colonial abuse isthat he tries to resolve it on a discursive level alone, andhas little interest in everyday colonial practice.37

In spite of the problematic aspects of Berman’s textfrom the perspective of postcolonial theory, there is avery compelling question at the core of his book. Whatwas the practical meaning of the emancipatory, progres-sive side of the Enlightenment’s program in the colonialcontext? Much attention has been paid to the dialecticalstructures underlying the Enlightenment in the West, tothe tendency of emancipatory reason to ally itself withinstrumental reason, and to the potential for rationalityto become its own totalitarian mythology. But whatabout the impact of the Enlightenment’s program onthe relationship between Europeans and non-Europeansin the colonies?

When Toer addresses the progressive and emancipa-tory side of the heritage of the West, he indeed meansthe intellectual, cultural and political heritage associatedwith Europe’s Enlightenment. There is no doubt thatthe clearest historical manifestation of this legacy is theFrench Revolution with its ideals of liberty, equality, andfraternity; Minke learns about them in school fromMagda Peters (1:128). It is the journalist Ter Haar whopoints out that, taken literally, the ideals of the Frenchrevolution are valid everywhere—even if France itself


has not proven this, by keeping colonies of its own, asMinke points out (2:267). Minke declares himself anunambiguous believer in the “spirit and ideals of theFrench Revolution,” even though he is aware of the factthat he is, at least partially, cheating himself in his ideal-ism, since he has not succeeded in giving up all the“comforts and pleasures” he owes to his family back-ground (2:186ff.). Multatuli is also here; he can be seenas one of the defenders of this political heritage of theradical Enlightenment. He has great admiration for Na-poleon, Voltaire, and Rousseau.38 In terms of literaryhistory, in particular the similarities to Rousseau and alsoHeine are striking; all of these men were highly indebtedto the Enlightenment, but pushed the Enlightenment’sprogram with a certain Romantic fervor.

Most examples of Minke’s appropriation of Multatulithus far have been from volumes 1 and 2 of Buru Quar-tet. Volume 3, entitled Footsteps, is where we encounterthe first attempts to come to an independence move-ment. Multatuli also plays a significant, although muchmore ambiguous role in this volume. He is discussed inconnection with Minke’s encounters and visits with Jo-hannes Benedictus Van Heutsz (1851-1924). As a gen-eral in the colonial army, Van Heutsz conquered Aceh(the northern part of the island Sumatra) and therebyfinished one of the longest lasting military conflicts ofDutch colonial history (1873-1904).39 It is estimated thatthe campaign in Aceh cost approximately 70,000 livesamong the Native population.40 After Van Heutsz wasappointed Governor-General of the Dutch Indies in1904—with support of the liberal party, as Toer re-minds us—he incorporated the last remaining inde-pendent territories to form the territory of what wasonce the Dutch Indies and is now Indonesia. For this hewon much praise in the Netherlands; even today therestill exists a Van Heutsz monument in Amsterdam, al-though the bust of the former colonial hero has beenremoved.41

Van Heutsz is the ultimate personification of militantimperialism in Indonesia’s history; his name is associatedwith some of the worst atrocities against the Nativepopulation during the colonial period. Yet in Buru Quar-tet, we are acquainted with another side of Van Heutsz.As Governor-General of the Indies, Van Heutsz wantsto surround himself with Native intellectuals like Minke,and he even turns out to be an admirer of Multatuli. Welearn that Van Heutsz gives Minke books by Multatuli(3:139), and he claims to want to know Minke’s opinionabout them: “What do you think of Multatuli’s writings?outstanding, don’t you think?” (3:225) The context ofVan Heutsz’s question is important. He discusses Mul-tatuli right after making a statement criticizing the “con-servativism of the priyayi”—the class of high Nativeofficials targeted by Multatuli in Max Havelaar. Eventhough this may mean over-interpreting Van Heutsz’s

words, one could conclude that the general has a one-sided view of Multatuli’s colonial criticism. Minke re-sponds with a non-committal remark on Multatuli’sstyle, after which Van Heutsz goes into more detailabout his interest in Multatuli:

I don’t think anyone can truly understand the Indieswithout having read Multatuli. And if you don’t un-derstand the Indies, then you don’t know what it isyou have to do for the Indies. In the past many peo-ple criticized and ridiculed his works. They werebackward colonials. He understood the Indies andthe Netherlands of his time. He understood thespirit of his times. But, Mr. Minke, the Indies haschanged since the time of Multatuli. As has theNetherlands itself (3:226).

What does Van Heutsz mean when he says he is inter-ested in “understanding” the Indies? Such an “under-standing” has immediate practical consequences. Onlywhen one understands the Indies does one know whatone has “to do.” Such a statement should be understoodin terms of colonial policy; “understanding” the Indiesand its population means having the ability to run thecolony more efficiently and to produce larger profits.Knowledge is power. Multatuli’s name as well as hiswritings are co-opted by those in power. The regimeseeks to create the illusion that it has worked on theproblems identified by Multatuli. Footsteps often empha-sizes that the message those in power want to send is:“The dark ages of Multatuli are past.” (3:390) By men-tioning the name “Multatuli,” those in power can por-tray themselves as humanitarian, as open for Nativeconcerns, and as modern. Van Heutsz does not counthimself among the “backward colonials”; he sees him-self as a forward-looking colonial.

One of the points Toer is making here is that in thecolonial context all forms of knowledge can be abused,even those types of knowledge gained with good inten-tions. It is impossible to distinguish emancipatory frominstrumental forms of Enlightenment as Berman wouldlike to do; in colonialism a progressive agenda can easilybecome a tool of subjugation. But that is not all; thereare indications that for Toer the Western idea of litera-ture as a whole is problematic. When Van Heutsz,shortly before stepping down as governor-general andleaving for the Netherlands, reproaches Minke that hehas not written any short stories for a long time, andthat such stories “are a much more valuable and long-lasting contribution to writing in the Indies than[Minke’s] piece on boycott, for example, will ever be” (3:318), he defends a concept of culture which the text inthe meanwhile has declared obsolete. Minke has made aconscious choice in favor of journalism and against fic-tion. A connection with Multatuli’s writing is madewhen, in the same conversation, Van Heutsz asks Minkewhether he will abandon his pen name forever. The dis-


cussion of Multatuli in the context of Minke’s intellec-tual encounters with Van Heutsz illustrates a point madeearlier by Nyai Ontosoroh, Minke’s first mother-in-law,whom he calls “Mama.” In Child of all Nations, NyaiOntosoroh had warned Minke that colonialism is notsomething that can be understood unless one has livedit: “[The word ‘colonial’ is] something that must be notonly explained but also experienced. You will never un-derstand by reading alone. I’ve tried to find it in diction-aries, Child, three dictionaries. All in vain.” (2:82). It isnot just the idea of culture that is questioned in BuruQuartet, it is the idea of discursivity itself. Through lan-guage, by thinking through all possible explanations ofwhat colonialism is, we will never get to the core ofwhat colonialism means. The gap between the con-structions meant to grasp what colonialism is and colo-nialism as a lived reality will always be there. On thelevel of thinking alone, we will never be able to fullypenetrate what it really is.

Although it seems important to Toer to point out thatDekker suffered personally for his political stances (see1:189), he also openly breaks with Multatuli. This ismost clear when one compares the narrative organiza-tion of Max Havelaar with Buru Quartet. Toer’s BuruQuartet reverses the narrative structure of Multatuli’sMax Havelaar on a formal level. Edward Said has writtenof a “far from coincidental convergence between thepatterns of narrative authority constitutive of the novelon the one hand, and, on the other, a complex ideologi-cal configuration underlying the tendency to imperial-ism.”42 Not just the colonial novel, but Western litera-ture of the nineteenth and early twentieth century ingeneral aims for a narrative authority that is “normativeand sovereign” and above all “self-validating in thecourse of the narrative.”43 The narrative structure ofMultatuli’s Max Havelaar is highly complex; there areseveral narrators—all with their own agendas and not allof them reliable—and it is not always clear who isspeaking when.44 One could say that Multatuli attemptsto break through the normative patterns of the novel towhich Said refers. However, at the end of Max Havelaarthe real narrator, Multatuli, “stands up” and, by reveal-ing himself to be Max Havelaar, authenticates thestory.45 This confirms the “self-validating” narrativestrategy to which Said refers. Toer makes clear that thenarrative form of the Buru Quartet is influenced by MaxHavelaar. For instance, Multatuli’s inclusion of the storyof “Saïjah and Adinda”46 in Max Havelaar promptsMinke to write about colonial abuse in his own time(2:120). Toer, in turn, then breaks open the linear narra-tive in order to integrate one of Minke’s writings intohis text, the story of Surati (2:131-57). In the end,though, the Buru Quartet reverses the narrative structureof Max Havelaar. In the beginning, Multatuli’s novel isnarrated by the most inauthentic voice—the first narra-

tor is the “coffee broker” Batavus Droogstoppel, “No.37 Lauriersgracht, Amsterdam,”47 who has no directknowledge of the narrated event and has no interest inany truth that might be an obstacle to the coffee trade—and it ends with the “authentic” voice of Multatuli. Inthe first three volumes of Buru Quartet Minke functionsas narrator. The last volume, House of Glass, takes up theevents after Minke has been exiled, and is narrated byPangemanann, the Native police commissioner chargedwith Minke’s case. Multatuli’s self-identification as MaxHavelaar at the end of the novel of the same name be-speaks the Enlightenment’s confidence that truth willeventually reveal itself if we, narrator and reader, workhard enough to find it. Toer’s Buru Quartet achieves theopposite effect; at the end there is no narrator who tellsus that he personally guarantees the truth of his story.Instead we witness how the truth is systematically dis-torted, how history is consciously rewritten. Truth is afiction; any attempt to read a teleology into historicaldevelopments is futile. Toer fundamentally questions theEnlightenment’s program and its ambitions.

But if it is not the legacy of the Enlightenment, whatis the exact nature of the utopian model presented inBuru Quartet?

Toer’s Buru Quartet should be read as part of currentdebates about postcolonial theory, because Toer offersunconventional perspectives on post-colonialism or,more specifically, on what seem to be established posi-tions within contemporary post-colonial studies. Toer’stext, as I will show in the following, allows for an inno-vative reading of some of the key concepts of contem-porary postcolonial theory. Postcolonial scholars, forinstance, have argued that there is a direct link betweenglobalization and the “economic, cultural and politicallegacy of Western imperialism.”48 Toer acknowledgesthis connection by stressing the ubiquitous influence ofthe sugar industry on colonial politics and on the func-tioning of the press, or by describing how Nyai Ontoso-roh loses her business to the inexperienced relatives ofMellema, her former boss, lover, and business partner.The story of the Japanese prostitute Maiko (1:169-177)shows that the international trade in women is a sideeffect of globalization.

However, there is another, more positive side to glob-alization that Toer takes very seriously. The titles of thefirst two volumes of Buru Quartet—This Earth of Man-kind and Child of all Nations—have a programmaticfunction within the cycle; Minke describes himself onceas “a child of all nations, of all ages, past and present”(2:169). Globalization may be a side effect of globalcapitalism; it also at least potentially allows for an ex-change of information all over the globe. And this as-pect attracts Minke. “Learn from ideas that aren’t Euro-pean!” he admonishes himself (2:77). He is particularly


interested in countries with independence movements:It was not only from Europe that so much could belearned! This modern age had provided so manybreasts to suckle me—from among the natives them-selves, from Japan, China, America, India, Arabia,from all the peoples on the face of this earth. (2:169)

Globalization cannot be understood exclusively assomething that concerns the colonizer and the colo-nized—the Netherlands and the Indies—alone. By defi-nition “globalization” has something indeterminate anduncontrollable in it, in particular when it concerns theflow of information. This flow of information can po-tentially also reach the furthest villages, if there are peo-ple who are willing to function as mediators. The jour-nalist Kommer reminds Minke that his idol Multatulipromised to have his work translated into Native lan-guages, if the Dutch would not read it (2:113),49 and thathe, Minke, should follow this example.

As the above quote from the second volume of BuruQuartet makes clear, Toer’s re-evaluation of “globaliza-tion” also has consequences for his understanding of“modernity”; it is the “modern age” that has made glob-alization possible. The Dutch journalist Ter Haar di-rectly links that modernization and the dominant role ofcapitalism—“What people call the modern age, Mr.Tollenaar, is really the age of the triumph of capital”(2:259) —and he warns Minke against embracing mod-ernity. Undeniably, however, the term “modern” alsohas positive connotations for Minke. This is clear in theintroduction to the second chapter of volume one, inwhich Minke as narrator at a later age reflects on devel-opments in his youth, and addresses the popularity ofthe word “modern”:

Modern! How quickly that word had surged forwardand multiplied itself like bacteria throughout theworld. (At least, that is what people were saying.) Soallow me to use this word, though I still don’t fullyunderstand its meaning. (1:18)

The above quotation follows a section in which Minkewrites enthusiastically about trains, cars, and above allabout innovations in the printing process that allows forthe easier reproduction of photographs. “Modern,” inother words, is understood here in the sense of mod-ernization; it is significant that Minke emphasizes thoseaspects of the modern world that concern increasedmobility and the exchange of information. In volumethree of the Buru Quartet, Footsteps, he will not only buyhis first bicycle with a similar enthusiasm, but also profitfrom the innovations in printing techniques by starting anumber of publications for Natives. Increased mobilityof the Native population and the fact that Minke’s pub-lications are reaching it make the foundation of new,“modern” organizations possible (3: 260).

For Minke, the issue of modernization has not only asocietal, but also a philosophical dimension which also is

addressed in Buru Quartet. Minke argues consistently forthe freedom and autonomy of the individual, and triesto further his own intellectual development by anymeans available. He fights for education and freedom ofinformation for all. Throughout the Buru Quartet, Minkebattles existing hierarchies in colonial society—and heseems relatively indifferent to the issue of whether thesehierarchies are the products of European domination orNative tradition. Furthermore, he is adamant aboutabolishing existing inequalities between men andwomen. Underlying his ideas is a firm belief in rational-ity; in the introduction to the second chapter of volumeone, which I have quoted before, he states unequivo-cally: “I put my trust in scientific understanding and inreason” (1:19). Such a statement reads like an unambi-guous endorsement of the Enlightenment’s program,but it is not. For one thing, the ideal articulated byMinke here is meant to be utopian, and is not bound toa specific time or place. Although certain ideas arerooted in a particular culture, that does not mean theycannot be appropriated and radicalized by other cul-tures. But if Minke does not refer here to a Westernstyle of rationality, what does the text intend to articu-late?

Toer’s position is not entirely isolated within contem-porary postcolonial theory, . One of the defining con-troversies in recent anthropology concerns CaptainCook—the same figure to whom Berman refers in orderto understand English versus German colonial dis-course. At the core of the debate about Cook are theexact circumstances of his death. The prominent cul-tural anthropologist Marshall Sahlins has claimed thatthe Hawaiians considered Cook to be their white godLono, and that when he did not fulfill their expectations,they turned against him.50 Sahlins’s colleague GananathObeyesekere questions this conclusion. According toObeyesekere, Sahlins has a reductive view of non-European peoples and cultures; non-Europeans suppos-edly naively believe in their myths and rituals, whileEuropeans act rationally, according to Obeyesekere’sview of Sahlins’s line of argumentation.51 Obeyesekereclaims in contrast that the Hawaiians acted rationally;according to their own form of practical reason, theyassumed the white men arriving again were up to nogood. It is incorrect, according to Obeyesekere, to see“rationality” as a purely Western, culture-bound given—as a product of the Enlightenment, in other words. In-stead, his notion of practical rationality rests on the ideathat humans everywhere, on the basis of their biology,have “perceptual and cognitive mechanisms” in com-mon.52 Obeyesekere is aware of the radical stance such“universalist” assumptions imply, but he considers thema fair alternative to the Eurocentric views of Sahlins.53

There are interesting parallels between Obeyesekere’sargumentation and the claims that Toer makes in Buru


Quartet. Toer essentially argues that rationality and aconcomitant model of modernity are not necessarilyWestern privileges. For Toer, the Western Europeancultural legacy can never be normative, because it hasfailed to speak for all of humanity and is intertwinedwith abusive colonial practices that contradict its hu-manistic agenda. This does not mean, however, thatconcepts such as modernity and rationality are com-pletely useless for Toer. On a programmatic level, Toer’snovels propose an appropriation of key concepts likeglobalization, modernity, and rationality in order to re-functionalize these ideas in the interest of the subalternsubjects in the colonial and postcolonial worlds. LikeObeyesekere, Toer embraces a kind of universalism—together with a fair dose of skepticism—in order tooffer a political and societal agenda for those relegatedto the margins of postcolonial globalism.

I began this paper with the argument that the con-temporary practice of postcolonial studies could benefitfrom approaches putting more emphasis on the impor-tance of local perspectives. A provincialization ofEurope, for which postcolonial studies has called, isonly possible if we, first, take into account the differ-ences within Europe and, secondly, if we seriously at-tempt to find an outside perspective on Europe at thesame time. I hope that my deliberations above haveshown that the current interest in European colonialliterary history can be productive if we relate these co-lonial narratives to the lives of those living in postcolo-nial societies today. I have chosen to work with Indone-sian and Dutch examples to illustrate this principle, butit could be done with examples involving Germany’scolonial heritage too, even though the available materialis much more limited. I hope to have made clear that ascholarly interest in colonial literary traditions can belegitimate if we focus on those cultural materials inwhich postcolonial and colonial literatures intersect. It iscrucial, in other words, to make a connection betweencolonial literature on the one hand and the history andpresent of those who live in the former colonies on theother. Making the intellectual traditions that inform theWest part of the debate seems to me unavoidable. Theexistence of processes of transculturation betweenEurope and its others is a fact; there is no reason todeny it. Buru Quartet also argues, however, that in theend, Minke—and the tradition of non-Western intel-lectuals he represents—does not need Europe; weshould take this conclusion seriously.

While an emphasis on local transformations of colo-nial discourse is constitutive for Buru Quartet, Toer’s ar-gument is finally about globalization. Minke consistentlysearches for a negotiation of the local with the global.He is aware of the fact that his ideas are at least partiallydetermined by the place where he grew up and by the

time in which he lives, but when he describes himself as“a child of all nations, of all ages, past and present”(2:169) he makes clear that he wants to use his localknowledge to contribute to knowledge about a moregeneral, global condition—one could say about thepostcolonial condition. It is possible to apply Minke’sinsight to the state of postcolonial studies today; in fact,here too Toer formulates an interesting polemical point.If all knowledge is local and global knowledge can onlybe the product of an ongoing process of negotiation,this has consequences for the way postcolonial criticsposition themselves. Neither Western postcolonial crit-ics nor their non-Western counterparts—the author-intellectual living in the postcolonial world—are neces-sarily in possession of the truth. One could read this asan argument for the recognition of the hybrid nature ofall knowledge about the postcolonial condition, butToer understands the term in quite a different way frommost of contemporary postcolonial theory. While post-colonial theory emphasizes the aspect of difference inhybridity, Toer emphasizes increased mobility, globalism,and the chances this offers. His notion of globalizationgoes hand in hand with the idea that humanity, one wayor another, needs to negotiate its internal differences.

It is possible to read “The Book That Killed Coloni-alism” as an example of the processes of negotiationmeant by Toer. Toer starts his essay with an anecdoteabout Agus Salim, Indonesia’s first ambassador to Eng-land, who at a reception for diplomats in London in thelate 1940s is asked about the strong smelling clove-cigarette he smokes. Salim answers that the clove oncewas once “one of the world’s most sought-after spices”and the reason why the West colonized the world.54 It isAgus Salim’s statement that, for Toer, turns into an im-petus to rethink global history from a perspective thatcomes from those formerly colonized. Such a rethinkingof global history also appropriates neglected parts ofWestern intellectual history; Max Havelaar is “now analmost unknown literary work,” (112) but can be rele-vant, if interpreted in the context of Indonesia’s colo-nial past. It takes a certain attitude of irreverence towardthe Western intellectual tradition to re-think it in such away. Toer’s essay also reaffirms the importance theauthor attributes to the processes of globalization setinto motion by colonialism. Through contacts betweenpeoples and cultures previously unaware of one another,the new globalism enables new educational opportuni-ties and the chance for former colonies to determinetheir own fate.55 Thus, according to Toer, in spite of allthe misery colonialism has produced, globalism facili-tates a learning process that involves the West, but by nomeans limits itself to the West, and eventually turns itselfagainst the hierarchies of colonialism. Interpreted in thisway, globalism does not just react against colonial orneo-colonial practices; it also is critical toward “separa-


tist nationalism,” advocating instead what Said describesas a “more integrative view of human community andhuman liberation.”56 Such an ideal profits from the in-sight that “the history of all cultures is the history ofcultural borrowings. Cultures are not impermeable …”57

Minke’s statement about his identity as a global citizenin Buru Quartet does not merely indicate a need to nego-tiate geographical, spatial differences, but also the needto bridge temporal gaps. What does this mean for BuruQuartet as a whole? Is it maybe too reductive to readBuru Quartet as a report on Indonesia’s colonial historyalone? The critical potential of Toer’s novel lies not ex-clusively in the fact that it analyzes Indonesia’s colonialpast in detail, but the Indonesian present as well.Suharto’s government understood this clearly. Not onlydid it place Toer under house arrest after he was re-leased from Buru Island, but in 1981, shortly after theirpublication the year before, the first two volumes ofBuru Quartet were banned by the Indonesian govern-ment.58 Globalization did not stop with the end of thecolonial era, and its ties with global capitalism werenever severed. What was true in the colonial era may stillbe true today.

NOTES1“[W]hat is circulated as ‘postcolonial theory’ has largely

emerged from within English literary studies. The meaning of‘discourse’ shrinks to ‘text’, and from there to ‘literary text’and from there to texts written in English because that is thecorpus most familiar to the critics.” Ania Loomba, Colonial-ism/Postcolonialism (New York: Routledge, 1998), 96).

2Kwame Anthony Appiah, “The Postcolonial and thePostmodern”, in The Postcolonial Studies Reader, eds. Bill Ash-croft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (New York: Rout-ledge, 1995), 119; see also Loomba, Colonialism/ Postcolonialism,246.

3Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism, 255ff.4See my discussion of Russell Berman’s Enlightenment or

Empire? below.5Marie Louise Pratt develops the concept of “transcultura-

tion” to describe the interaction, in the so-called “contact-zone,” of dominant and subjugated culture, of the metropolisand the periphery, of empire and its subordinated subjects.Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transcultura-tion (New York: Routledge, 1992), 6.

6Pramoedya Ananta Toer, “The Book That Killed Coloni-alism: As the West Clamored for Spices, the Novelist ‘Mul-tatuli’ Cried for Justice,” New York Times Magazine (18 April1999): 112-114. Toer is not the only one who embraces Mul-tatuli from a postcolonial perspective; see for instance thefollowing passage in Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism:“During the nineteenth century, if we exclude rare exceptionslike the Dutch writer Multatuli, debate over colonies usuallyturned over their profitability, their management and misman-agement, and on theoretical questions such as whether andhow colonialism might be squared with laissez-faire or tariff-politics; an imperialist and Euro-centric framework is implicitlyaccepted.” Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York:

Vintage, 1994), 240). Unfortunately, Said does not elaborateon his statement.

7“The Book That Killed Colonialism,” 114.8“The Book That Killed Colonialism,” 114. In contrast,

other Indonesian intellectuals have relativized the impact ofMax Havelaar on Dutch colonial policies; the book did, forinstance, not stop further Dutch conquests (Aceh, Bali, Lom-bok); see Subagio Sastrowardoyo, “Max Havelaar di tengahmasyarakat Indonesia” [Max Havelaar in de Indonesischesamenleving], in Studi Belanda di Indonesia/Nederlandse studiën inIndonesië, e. Kees Groeneboer (Jakarta: Djambatan, 1989), 23,24, 32.

9In contrast to Toer’s very positive evaluation of Multatuli’swork, the reception of the first Indonesian translation of MaxHavelaar, published in 1972, was not very enthusiastic. One ofthe reviewers called the work important for Dutch literaryhistory, but of little importance for Indonesian readers. See“Petisi Sjaalman-Dekker,” in Tempo (5 August 1972): 49; seeGerard Termorshuizen and Kees Snoek, Adinda! Duizendvuurvliegjes tooien je loshangende haar. Multatuli in Indonesië (Leiden:Dimensie, 1991), 21. In 1987—100 years after his death—Multatuli was again the object of debate in Indonesia when afilm from 1975 based on Max Havelaar was released by theIndonesian authorities for public performance, a symposiumon his work was organized at the Universitas Indonesia, and aDutch book on Multatuli by Willem Frederik Hermans ap-peared in translation. A representative sampling of the re-sponses by the press to these events (Termorshuizen andSnoek, Adinda! 69-113) shows how conflicted Indonesiansfeel about Multatuli. His work was seen as pervaded by colo-nial prejudices and self-centered; but it also is acknowledgedthat he was important for the first generation of Indonesiannationalists, who lived during colonization and read MaxHavelaar in school. Also, the critical potential of his writingsfor postcolonial Indonesia was recognized. This is clear inUmar Nur Zain’s “Max Havelaar” (Termorshuizen and Snoek,Adinda!, 85-89), a fictional dialogue of a narrator, Cemplon,who is visited by Havelaar in 1987. Havelaar is astonishedover the enormous economic progress made by Indonesia,which leads him to believe that the country has left behind theabusive practices of the past, while in reality the narrator hasto admit things look a lot more like the colonial days of Mul-tatuli than at first seems to be the case

10Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 7.11E. M. Beekman, Troubled Pleasures: Dutch Colonial Literature

from the East Indies 1600-1950 (Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 1996), 222.

12See the summary of secondary literature on Multatuli byHermans, Nieuwenhuys, and van ‘t Veer in the recent biogra-phy of Multatuli by Dik van der Meulen, Multatuli: Leven enwerk van Eduard Douwes Dekker (Nijmegen: Sun, 2002), 321-28.

13Beekman, Troubled Pleasures, 225.14Multatuli, Max Havelaar or the Coffee Auctions of the Dutch

Trading Company (London: Penguin, 1987), 320. A “klewang” isa Malay sword.

15See van der Meulen, Multatuli, 415.16To be more precise, Max Havelaar is the first Dutch novel

about colonial life attracting a major readership. Texts aboutthe Indies had been published earlier (see Beekman, Troubles


Pleasures, 80-201), but none of them made an impact on thepublic sphere that in any way was comparable to the responseto Multatuli’s novel.

17This period seems to have lasted until approximately1940. In my own experience, those outside the Netherlandswho received at least some higher education before 1940 arein general familiar with the author, title, and content of thebook.

18Before Indonesia’s independence, Multatuli’s name wasassociated with those of prominent nationalists. See Pramoe-dya Ananta Toer, “Multatuli, Sebuah Kenangan” (‘Multatuli, aMemoir’), <http://www.geocities.com/Broadway/Orchestra/9632/ mulatuli.html>. In this autobiographical text written in1986—I assume to celebrate the hundredth anniversary ofMultatuli’s death in the following year—Toer retraces the ori-gins of his interest in Multatuli. Even though Toer’s parentsread Dutch and owned Dutch books they did not speak ofMultatuli. When Toer first encounters the name, in schoolduring extracurricular activities, he responds rather negatively.He cannot imagine that anything good can come from a(former) official of the Dutch government. After the begin-ning of the Japanese occupation, Toer moves to Jakarta andstarts to read Multatuli, including his lesser known works,while visiting a friend who lives in a secondhand bookstorefull of Western books from Europeans sent to the camps. Onthe advice of his teacher, he then also starts to read old pa-pers and magazines, and from those he learns that virtuallyevery nationalist leader had been interested in Multatuli. It isimportant to Toer that Multatuli was concerned with theplight of the common man. However, after independence,Multatuli’s reputation is seen as more problematic; when Toerin 1959 proposes to celebrate Dekker’s hundred and fortiethbirthday (1960) with a statue and a lecture, his initiative is notappreciated and is put on hold. In 1964, Toer is one of thefounders of the Multatuli Literature Academy—an institutionthat ceases to exist one year later when Sukarno’s regime isoverthrown. While in exile on Buru Island, Toer learns fromone of the few newspapers to which he has access that theIndonesian-Dutch co-production, the film Max Havelaar, hadbeen banned in Indonesia.

19In the following, all references to Buru Quartet list the vol-ume number first, and then the page number. 1 = This Earth ofMankind, The Buru Quartet, vol 1, trans. and aftrw. Max Lane(London: Penguin, 1996); 2 = Child of all Nations. The BuruQuartet, vol 2, trans. and intr. Max Lane (London: Penguin,1996); 3 = Footsteps. The Buru Quartet, vol 3, trans. and intr. MaxLane (London: Penguin, 1996); 4 = House of Glass. The BuruQuartet, vol 4, trans. and intr. Max Lane (New York: Morrow,1996).

20See Max Lane, “Introduction” (3:9), and Chris GoGwilt,“Pramoedya’s Fiction and History: An Interview With Indo-nesian Novelist Pramoedya Ananta Toer,” The Yale Journal ofCriticism 9:1 (1996), 147-164, here p. 151.

21Beekman, Troubled Pleasures, 214.22Beekman, Troubled Pleasures, 49.23A complete overview of German colonial history can be

found at <http://www.dhm.de/lemo/html/kaiserreich/aussen politik/kolonien2/>. The Germans also possessed colo-nies in Papua-New Guinea, the Marshall Islands, West Samoa,

Micronesia, and China (Kiautschou).24Beekman, Troubled Pleasures, 80-116 and 147-201.25See the integration of a poem by Heine in Max Havelaar,

145-47.26Multatuli, Max Havelaar, 43.27Susanne Zantop, Colonial Fantasies: Conquest, Family, and

Nation in Precolonial Germany, 1770-1870 (Durham: Duke Uni-versity Press, 1997), 38-40, who points out that Germans of-ten conceived of themselves as “intellectual arbiter[s]”, as“objective” and “moral” outsiders in relation to other Euro-pean nations’ colonial adventures, who had a right to speakfor indigenous populations.

28See van der Meulen, Multatuli, 511.29See for instance Zantop, Colonial Fantasies, 6-8.30It is interesting to note that the major study on Dutch

colonial literature was published first in English and by ascholar working in the United States: E. M. Beekman, Trou-bled Pleasures: Dutch Colonial Literature from the East Indies 1600-1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).

31Jürgen Habermas develops the most detailed account ofthis argument in his book The Philosophical Discourse of Moder-nity (Cambridge ,Mass.: MIT, 1990).

32Russell A. Berman, Enlightenment or Empire: Colonial Dis-course in German Culture (Lincoln: Nebraska University Press,1998), 48; see also 40.

33See for instance the following statement toward the endof Berman’s study: “If there is a feature that characterizes thediscourse of colonialism in Germany, it is, not exhaustively tobe sure but frequent enough, the capacity to recognize andappreciate—appreciate even at the moment of colonial ap-propriation—the other culture” (Enlightenment or Empire, 235).

34Berman, Enlightenment or Empire, 135. For Berman’s argu-ment of the moral superiority of German colonialism it alsoseems important that, instead of “succumbing to violent de-colonization, it was dismantled by the treaty of Versailles,which transferred the colonies to the victors of the FirstWorld War.” (Enlightenment or Empire, 125)

35See for instance Helmut Walser Smith, “The Talk ofGenocide, the Rhetoric of Miscegenation: Notes on Debatesin the German Reichstag Concerning Southwest Africa, 1904-14,” in The Imperialist Imagination: German Colonialism and ItsLegacy, eds. Sara Friedrichsmeyer, Sara Lennox, and SusanneZantop (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998),107-123. Smith points out that the term “Konzentration-slager” was used in the colonial context to refer to prisoncamps for the native population (111). By 1907 the Germanshad killed more than 60 percent of the original population ofsouthern and central Namibia (“Introduction,” The ImperialistImagination, 14).

36Zantop, Colonial Fantasies, 6-8.37Berman’s claim that “the Enlightenment, at least in For-

ster’s version, generates a decidedly anticolonialist politics”(Enlightenment or Empire, 56) remains entirely unsubstantiated.

38See also Beekman, Troubled Pleasures, 211, 216, 222- 224.The fact that Multatuli was an “arch-rebel” makes it hard topin him down politically, as Beekman shows (225).

39Beekman speaks of a “long and brutal war” (204). Detailsof this war are discussed in volume one of the Buru Quartet,


when Minke talks to his friend Jean Marais who served theDutch colonial army in the Aceh war (1:55-63).

40See <http://www.absofacts2.com/cultuurarchief/data/0111vanheuts zmonument.htm>. In total it is estimated thatthe conflict in Aceh took about 100,000 Indonesian and30,000 European lives (see <http://www.groene.nl/2000/0026/ jb_heutsz.html>.

41For a history of the Van Heutsz monumentsee: <http://www.antenna.nl/wvi/nl/ic/vp/atjeh/heutsz/vn1.htl>,<http://www.antenna.nl/wvi/nl/ic/vp/atjeh/heutsz/groen1.html>and <http://www.absofacts2.com/cultuurarchief/data/0111 van-heutszmonu ment.htm>.

42Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vin-tage, 1994), 70.

43Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 77.44A detailed analysis of the complex narrative structure of

Max Havelaar can be found in Beekman, Troubled Pleasures,234-240.

45Multatuli, Max Havelaar, 317.46Multatuli, Max Havelaar, 255-277.47Multatuli, Max Havelaar, 19.48See also Bill Ashcroft, Post-colonial Transformation (New

York: Routledge, 2001), 208.49See Max Havelaar, 319.50Marshall Sahlins summarizes his theory in How “Natives”

think: About Captain Cook, for Example (Chicago: Uinversity ofChicago Press, 1996), 1-15. A summary of the controversycan be found in Adam Kuper, Culture: the Anthropologists’ Ac-count (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 177-200.

51See Gananath Obeyesekere, The Apotheosis of CaptainCook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific (Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1997), 220.

52Obeyesekere, The Apotheosis of Captain Cook, 21.53“There is virtually no one, from Franz Boas onward, who

really believes that natives are biologically different fromEuropeans. But this universalist assumption cannot bebrought directly into our writing nowadays because it essen-tializes human beings, and ‘essentialism’ is a dirty word. In-stead, we have moved in the reverse direction and have cele-brated difference; thus each culture is different, and we haveproclaimed a doctrine of cultural relativism to rationalize thatdifference” (Obeyesekere, “Afterword: On De-Sahlinization”in The Apotheosis of Captain Cook, 232). Kuper discusses theSahlins-Obeyesekere controversy in the context of contempo-rary anthropological theory (Culture, 190-200).

54Toer, “The Book that Killed Colonialism,” 112.55“I include [the story of Agus Salim] here because it

touches on what I would argue are the two most important‘processes’ of this millennium: the search for spices by West-ern countries, which brought alien nations and cultures intocontact with one another for the first time; and the expansionof educational opportunities, which returned to the colonizedpeoples of the world a right they had been forced to forfeitunder Western colonization—the right to determine theirown futures” (112).

56Said, Culture and Imperialism, 216.57 Said, Culture and Imperialism, 217.

58See GoGwilt, “Pramoedya’s Fiction and History,” 148and 150.


Preposterous Encounters: Interrupting American Studies with the(Post)Colonial, or Casablanca in the American Century

BRIAN T. EDWARDS

What did these devils want? Precisely why had they come? [The Americans] said that they had cometo help the people and to search for water, that there was gold underneath the sands and that theywould extract it and distribute it among the people, but what did any of that have to do with theirbooks or the questions they asked?

‘Abd al-Rahman Munif1

Is it rude, in company, to interrupt? Not a socialquestion, of course, but a field question—namely, hownot to be properly disciplined? The same question, re-phrased: when is critical preposterousness warranted?

This essay responds to critical impasses in the en-counter of American Studies and postcolonial studies:competing assertions that the United States is from thestart postcolonial versus denials that it has ever or yetundergone decolonization and institutional disincentivesand disciplinary impulses against comparative, multilin-gual, and multi-sited work. Drawing its urgency fromthe multiple emergencies made visible and exacerbatedby 9/11/01, especially the pedagogical and institutionalcrises that follow that rupture, the essay argues for a“preposterous encounter” of the two critical ap-proaches, one which productively harnesses the energiessignified by the word preposterous, a word which etymol-ogically yokes the pre- and the post-. Such an encounterfocuses on unraveling the pernicious uses of tempo-ral/spatial/linguistic manipulation named by HenryLuce’s phrase “the American century” and performedby his 1941 essay of the same title, a manipulation thatis the hallmark of U.S. cultural production representingthe foreign since 1941 and the place of U.S. culturalproduction in globalization. In its first half, this essayoutlines a series of tactics of critical interruption of“Americanist” work, which despite frequent attempts atpolitical resistance is paradigmatically bound within anexceptionalist circle of its own making. Insisting on theinseparability of the cold war and the postcolonial pe-riod, I argue that accounts of U.S. cultural productionsince entry into WWII—which announces the U.S. riseto global power status that marks the last six decadesand is the catalyst for the more rapid globalization ofthe U.S. economy—are severely delimited by not fol-

lowing the global presence of that cultural productionand the ways in which those texts and, in turn, “Ameri-canness” are understood and recoded abroad. In theessay’s second half, I discuss an exemplary and influen-tial text—the 1942 film Casablanca—and understand thefilm’s own manipulation of time/space/language andthe silent wrenching apart of an historically demonstra-ble confederation of African American and North Afri-can during the 1930s and 40s as a performance of thelogic of Luce’s so-called “American century.” By sum-moning a Moroccan archive of critical and creative re-sponses to Casablanca as a tactic against such a manipu-lation, I attempt to stage the type of “preposterousencounter” of American Studies and postcolonial stud-ies discussed earlier and interrupt American(ist) under-standing of the film in particular and the critical im-pulses in the study of U.S. cultural production ingeneral.

Preposterous EncountersConsiderations of the state of postcolonial studies in

2003 can’t help but consider the relationship of thatdiverse field to the interdisciplinary field of AmericanStudies.2 It’s a conversation that goes both ways. A dec-ade after Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease’s influentialcollection Cultures of United States Imperialism made thestatement that American Studies had to return to thequestion of empire repressed at its founding, and theeditors’ own various projects and publications, it hasbecome less possible to avoid the consideration of U.S.global power within studies of U.S. literature and cul-tural history.3 In the postcolonial camp, eight years afterJenny Sharpe’s much cited Diaspora essay attempted fi-nally to settle the question “Is the United States Post-colonial?” those who find themselves working on post-

Edwards: Preposterous Encounters 71

colonial formations and subjectivities are similarly un-able to avoid a deeper engagement with U.S. politics andcultural production. Sharpe’s intervention addressedboth academic fields: “I want us to define the ‘after’ tocolonialism as the neocolonial relations into which theUnited States entered with decolonized nations.”4 In thisregard, an engagement with U.S. global “relations,”broadly considered, would be crucial for postcolonialistsand would necessitate a rewriting of the scholarly andtheoretical account of that postcolonial cultural pro-duction which had previously seemed to be respondingonly to the experience of European colonialism, albeitin complex ways (e.g., India, the Maghreb, Vietnam), bytaking into consideration the expanding matrices of po-litical power and cultural influence within which all so-cial and cultural production of the past six decades op-erates.

Such an understanding of postcolonialism also impli-cates twentieth-century Americanists, who by this defi-nition would need to engage seriously the history ofEuropean colonialism and the double-edged role of theU.S. in the decolonization period from at least the 1940sin order to properly historicize and contextualize allpost-1941 cultural production by U.S. citizens and resi-dents (whether they work in English or not), as well asby those artists, writers, and scholars who creatively en-gage or critique U.S. politics and cultural productionfrom outside the U.S. Robert Young’s recent reminderthat the transition from colonialism to postcolonialforms of domination is “at the heart of the struggle forglobal mastery in the Cold War” is consonant with thisclaim because it rightly links the U.S.-Soviet contest withthe political struggle for and within Europe’s formercolonial holdings and the cultural formations thatemerge in the wake of that contest.5 Among its manyramifications, considering the cold war inseparable fromthe postcolonial period encourages studies of post-1941U.S. culture to consider the frequent representations ofthe foreign in U.S. literature and film in a different, morenuanced light. The well-noted frequent representationsof foreignness in 1940s and 50s culture—in everythingfrom science fiction films about alien invasion to Bibli-cal epics set in the Middle East to Orientalist costumedramas and musicals to noir’s obsession with conta-gion—should be seen not only as reflections of fears ofthe Soviet threat, third terms of a cold war binarism,but also as ways of figuring the diverse theaters in whichthe cold war was played out.6 Crossing disciplinary bor-ders we must recall that all those “third terms” have hadvery real histories and were affected by very real en-gagements and interventions by the U.S. state, whichthrough its own apparati (the station chiefs and diplo-matic corps of the State Department and the culturalarms of the USIA and USIS and the scholars and pro-

grams they funded) was simultaneously figuring andjudging the foreign and basing U.S. policy on thosejudgments.7 The critiques and creative recodings ofAmerican political and cultural projects that emergefrom these diverse locations—such as ‘Abd al-RahmanMunif ’s Mudun al-Milh [Cities of Salt] novel trilogy and‘Abd al-Qader Laqt‘a’s film al-Hubb fi al-Dar al-Baida[Love in Casablanca], which I discuss below—are thusdeeply linked to the American figurations of the foreignthat are (a part of) their own context as cultural produc-ers working in North Africa and the Middle East; theymay no longer be considered outside the terrain ofAmericanist work.

Despite important interventions by Pease, Kaplanand Sharpe, for the moment the conversation of post-colonial studies and American Studies is still tentativeand lacks a sustained method. There are disciplinaryroot causes that have thus far limited a more seriousengagement. For American Studies, the difficulties ofescaping the exceptionalist logic and over-reliance onthe nation-form at the foundation of the field duringthe early cold war are strongly reinforced by the disincli-nation to work in languages other than English andcontexts outside the United States.8 Such a disinclinationunwittingly forces the majority of American Studiesscholars and students to look inward for evidence withwhich to disrupt hegemonic patterns of exclusion ratherthan to “break the magic circle between text and con-text, to hold in suspension those conditions whereby theprogressivist formulas of American studies would—naturally, as it were—underwrite a rhetoric of emancipa-tion,” as the British scholar Paul Giles puts it in his ar-gument for a transnational, virtual approach to Ameri-can Studies.9 For postcolonial studies, disciplined bydepartments of English (via hiring practices and thetraining of graduate students, both of which are power-ful tools for perpetuating an inclination within a field),U.S. literature has been considered extraneous—or evendangerous—to a field that has relied on its revision andexpansion of the British canon.10

Elsewhere, on a smaller scale, a parallel situation isevident. As French departments in the U.S. respond tochallenges to their own survival and relevance via theinstitutionalization of positions in francophone studies,the colonial pattern is repeated, and comparative workin Arabic and its regional dialects, Vietnamese, Wolof,Bambara, and other languages of sub-Saharan Africa,etc., is rare. The institutionalization of francophonestudies positions in U.S. French departments is ofcourse an ironic twist because it is the loss of theFrench language’s cachet as the global language of di-plomacy—a downgrading that is directly related toFrance’s loss of its colonial empire—that has hurt en-rollments. Further, the divvying up of much of the non-


European world by the already extant academic pro-grams and departments—French gets sub-Saharan Af-rica and the Maghreb, Vietnam and parts of the Carib-bean; English gets India and East and South Africa; andAmerican Studies (or the Americanist branch of anEnglish department) gets Latina/o studies, AsianAmerican, and African American studies—not only re-peats the colonial ordering of the world, but also en-courages us to miss by devaluing that literary productionthat doesn’t fit this order. In the case of the Maghreb,for example, not only is literary and cultural productionin Arabic barely studied in the U.S.—considered mar-ginal to Middle East studies programs, when they existat all, and disciplined out of French departments’ inter-est in the Maghreb—but the important body ofMaghrebi cultural production in Tamazight (Berber)languages and increasingly in English—more startlingand theoretically and historically complex—is unknown;we think we already know where the boundaries of “an-glophone African writing” end.11

Like American Studies, postcolonial studies is an areathat has been deeply concerned with questions of thegeographic and institutional locations of the critic andthe intellectual history of the field’s creation and propa-gation.12 Yet a conversation that relates the developmentof the two fields to one another has not yet been staged.Its major scenes: the formation of American Studiesafter WWII in relation to cold war politics (fueled byright wing money and organized by leftist faculty, asituation which led to what Paul Giles calls “a consensuscriticism of the consensus”); the further retrenchmentof English departments and the dominance of NewCritical and then deconstructive paradigms; the power-ful unsettling of those paradigms (by now mostly de-tached from American Studies) by the “internal critique”of Edward Said’s work Orientalism.13 This is obviously asketch in very broad strokes, but my impulse to relatethe two subfields to each other and within cold warcultural politics is a gesture toward unseating the disci-plinary assumptions that have restricted both from amore intense engagement with each other. My approachseeks to remind us of the question of institutions towhich the work of Edward Said repeatedly draws ourattention.14

The need to address the rippling effects of 9/11 onour work in the classroom and the academic journal isurgent. In the terms of the trade, left-leaning Americanacademics tend to imagine 9/11 as the hyperbolic colli-sion of the disenfranchised subjects of the new worldorder with the U.S. as global and neocolonial power,staged from the start in a postnational symbolic register(World Trade Center as symbol of multinational tradeversus the Pentagon as symbol of U.S. military) and aspostmodern media spectacle. But a theoretical under-

standing of that scenario that does not affect ourteaching and research methods leaves us poorly pre-pared for the post-9/11 generation of U.S. universitystudents. With the final shattering of the enabling myththat the Atlantic and Pacific oceans leave the (continen-tal) U.S. at some special remove from global conflict, anew generation of American and U.S.-based studentswill increasingly find themselves rejecting the return ofthe cold war binarism that has emerged as the Bush ad-ministration’s preliminary response. They will eventuallysee that response as one that parodies and exaggeratesthe very object the postnational al-Qaida terrorist net-work and its confreres hold up as their target. (In theMuslim world itself, the U.S. propaganda films aboutAmerican Muslim bliss and Radio Sawa’s blend of Bush-administration propaganda and pop music offer imme-diate parodic examples of the U.S. government’s sim-plistic understanding of their part of the world.15) U.S.students are finding that they do not have to reject pa-triotic sentiment in order to critique the binary globallogic that has already demonstrated its own impossibil-ity; but where to go from there? The conversation ofAmerican Studies and postcolonial studies must providea method and an inspiration to our students or elsedemonstrate the university classroom’s own irrelevanceor—a still worse possibility—render ineffective com-mitted scholars and activist students. Timothy Brennanhas recently called for a reinvigoration of postcolonialstudies and urged practitioners to focus on the relation-ship of culture to the capitalist system, to practice clar-ity, and to make visible the unpayment and other sys-temic acts of violence by the state that culturalproduction has rendered invisible.16 And if the post-colonial canon has become overly familiar on syllabi andin journal publications, as Neil Lazarus has contended, arefreshed examination of the global flows of peoplesand cultural production will help both American Studiesand postcolonial studies break out of the fictitious bor-ders they have been disciplined into and return to con-cerns that have eluded both.17

I opened with the promise (a threat risked, followingDerrida) of undisciplined interruption.18 When doesinterdisciplinary work, the current championing ofwhich should give us pause, become a refusal to be dis-ciplined and therefore socially risky? The cutbacks andhiring freezes that university humanities departments arebeginning to implement, after the bursting of the eco-nomic bubble that had seduced many of us into think-ing that ten percent annual returns were a safe bet,makes crossing disciplinary lines seem all the more at-tractive from a budgetary point of view. And in the faceof the overwhelming corporatization of the university,interdisciplinarity might even seem to be the campusanalog to globalization, where profit (cost cutting) is the


motive for crossing borders, while making sure theycontinue to exist on paper (and websites), and wherelocal resistance (departmental integrity) might seem theappropriate response. However anachronistic the na-tional literature programs—including “English”—mayat this point be, they may be maintained within the in-terdisciplinarity I am urging as strategic essentialisms, toco-opt and redirect a phrase of Gayatri Spivak, even aspedagogical tools.19 But only when they are marked bytruly comparative syllabi, reading lists, and scholarshipthat highlight the inventedness of the national literarytraditions and the ways in which they have buttressedthemselves against global flows of peoples and resistedthe linguistic and epistemic challenges represented bythose flows.

The necessary analog and the approach informing mystatement is to be found in critical work on globaliza-tion, where the nation is a “tolerated anachronism,” asDonald Pease has put it.20 Pease, whose massive projectfor a postnational(ist) American Studies has brokenmuch ground, alerts us to the theoretical intricacies ofthe encounter. Pease argues that globalization (as aneconomic and cultural system) and postcolonialism (it-self not singular) differ radically in their understandingof the nation’s change in status. Whereas postcolonial-ism narrates resistance to transnational capital and fre-quently critiques the nation as the state’s mystification,sometimes offering new national narratives strategically,globalization narrativizes the processes by which transna-tional capital manages national populations, thereby ac-commodating capital belatedly. This process reproduces“the collective illusion that the state is an imaginativecorrelate of an individual’s desires,” that is, the worldshe or he wants rather than a world imposed by thestate, and silently reclaims national narratives as instru-ments of state rule. We might wonder about the efflo-rescence of a colonial nostalgia within U.S. popularculture during the 1990s—some major examples includethe Hollywood film versions of The English Patient andThe Sheltering Sky, the J. Peterman clothing catalog withits colonialist anecdotes and sketches, the sophisticatedurban clothing stores Banana Republic and Anthropolo-gie, and the faux colonialist interiors of chain storessuch as The Bombay Company and Ralph Lauren afterthe 1990 Safari campaign—all of them especially sen-sual sites. Following Pease’s framework, we can under-stand this nostalgia for a colonial encounter the U.S.never had, in the wake of the break up of the SovietUnion and the shift in the global economy, as a processthat helped establish the U.S. state and its major corpo-rate apparati as global managers, accomplished by pro-ducing and benefiting from sensual fictions of the older(colonial) order in which the imperial state was alliedwith desire. In any case, for Pease, the postnational as

critical site offers a wedge against such processes andnames “the complex site wherein postcolonialism’s re-sistance to global capital intersects with the questions theglobal economy addresses to the state concerning thenation’s continued role in its management.” Inspired bythe delineation of this complex site, let us return tocampus and interdisciplinarity—we should henceforthcall it “postdisciplinarity.” We must be able to accountfor the ways in which the political resistance and activ-ism that animates many workers in American Studiesand postcolonial studies in their scholarship intersectswith the management of those areas by literature de-partments and disciplines in ways that are enfeebling.This may be the place that what I’m calling postdiscipli-narity diverges from the corporate university’s impulsetoward “interdisciplinarity”: the latter supports the tra-ditional humanities departments and the apparati thatmaintain their “integrity” (especially via tenure review,which structurally privileges remaining within a field orsubfield), and by interdisciplinarity seeks merely tospread those faculty resources thin to get maximumvalue and mask the fact that temporary labor is doingthe lion’s share of the teaching. To champion postdisci-plinarity is surely not to dispense with academic rigor,with deep knowledge of an area or region, or with dis-ciplinarily distinct approaches to a region or topic; infact, it’s to call for the impossible task for young schol-ars to seek the depth of a traditional area studies ap-proach across multiple contexts.21 Before it is possible toachieve that depth, not to consider national/disciplinaryborders, blockades, or even check points is crucial todoing the work of the post-9/11 moment. Even then,and surely in the meantime, tactics are needed.

We are working during a moment of emergency, ormore accurately, multiple moments—simultaneous andyet radically disjoined from one another—multipleemergencies. Urged by a sense of emergency, and thepromise-threat of the coming emergency that the post-9/11 generation will pose, I propose interruption as acritical tactic for literary studies. I mean various, relatedtactics of interruption: interrupting dominant accountsof texts with various suppressed or forgotten archives;locating interruptions within literary texts (whether nar-rative interruptions or the interruption of “foreign”languages and etymologies within the language of thetext); locating the interruptions that certain occludedtexts when reintroduced cause to a national literature(and the enabling fiction of the national literature); in-terrupting the presumption that national literatures andcultures operate in a single, coherent language (this isespecially true and rich with regard to the Maghreb, oneof my own areas of research, and also resonates withthe movement to reconsider U.S. literatures in multiplelanguages); and with reference to the concept of global


Englishes, interrupting the idea that the English in-creasingly employed around the globe is firm evidenceof the Americanization of the world or that globalEnglishes are transparent to Anglo-Americans (andwhen they are not, that it is not evidence of the “error”or “improper” usage by those who are manipulatingEnglish).22

Interruption as pedagogical tactic for AmericanStudies: what happens when Arab texts are allowed tointerrupt an “American literature” syllabus? Is ‘Abd al-Rahman Munif ’s great trilogy Mudun al-Milh [Cities ofSalt]—a Tolstoyan epic published in the 1980s that rei-magines the encounter of American oil interests andtheir scouts with the Arabian peninsula and the recrea-tion of the tribal villages and chieftains into what wouldbecome the Gulf states and a corrupt monarchy—a partof the U.S. literary tradition? If one says, “Of coursenot! (Preposterous!)” is the answer based on the nation-ality of the writer (he lives in exile, his books banned inSaudi Arabia), the language of its composition (“Ameri-can literature,” that constructed thing, must be in Eng-lish, perhaps, but what about “literatures of the U.S.,” aphrase coming into prominence?), or the location of itscomposition (never a reliable marker)? And since literarytraditions are the things of class syllabi and anthologies,by which the state apparati and institutions render in-visible the rupture between the demographic make upof those living within the national boundaries and theidea of the nation useful to the state,23 the interruptionperformed by the inclusion in the “American literarytradition” of Munif ’s representation of American proj-ects and personalities is considerable.

A preposterous encounter, then, that of AmericanStudies and postcolonial studies, from the start. But herethe preposterousness is enabling, rather than being thestakes of the debate. My adjoining of pre- and post-attempts to sidestep the critical impasse resulting from aseries of debates about the applicability of the term“postcolonial” to American literature. I refer to thehackles raised when Lawrence Buell claimed that Anglo-American literature after the revolution of 1776 mightbe thought of as postcolonial and Anne McClintock’sdenial that the United States has yet undergone decolo-nization.24 Prepostcolonial, then? (These are importantdiscussions, but we must not become mired in them.) Byhighlighting the pre-post-erousness of this critical en-counter, I mean to move us away from the impulse toencapsulate totalities and create neat periodizations ofand around the U.S. cultural experience and move to-ward the multiple temporal registers and spatial rupturesthat Arjun Appadurai and others in the Public Culturecollective have taught us to see were always in operationsimultaneously in the U.S. and globally.25 “Preposterous-ness” emphasizes the time lag at the center of accounts

and representations of U.S. imperial designs since thelate nineteenth century, and especially since 1941, andattempts to redirect or unravel those manipulations viacritical interruptions such as those I’ve outlined above.26

(Employing the word surely does not mean that such acritical encounter is “absurd,” by any means; rather thatit places itself in opposition to the critical “commonsense” of the time.) Seizing the force of the preposter-ous—I’ve always felt a powerful torque at the center ofthe word—is itself of course yet another tactic by whichto interrupt and redirect dominant discussions about“the American century.”

Following CasablancaPerhaps the most influential representation of U.S.

empire is the descriptive term “the American century,”as Life magazine editor Henry Luce dubbed the centuryand everything in it in 1941. Ten months before thebombings at Pearl Harbor, Luce’s editorial for Life,quickly published as a small book, was an argument forsupport of U.S. entry into World War II. For Luce, thepromulgation of American “principles” was an impera-tive America could not refuse: “America is responsibleto herself as well as to history, for the world environ-ment in which she lives. Nothing can so vitally affectAmerica’s environment as America’s own influenceupon it.”27 If such an “environment” confused moralwith economic goals, what is intriguing about Luce’sargument is his nomenclature. For Luce, U.S. isolation-ism was not possible in the twentieth century; yet inter-nationalism for Luce means that the world becomes“our” world, an “American” world, an “American cen-tury.” The time-lag of that phrase, the way that thespatial remove of other parts of the globe are figured astemporal—the century has a nationality placed on it—isLuce’s own interruption, which is productive for his ar-gument against those who would avoid or delay entryinto the war. This is repeated in Luce’s naming of theentire century some four decades in, an act that reachesbackwards temporally, just as his adjective reaches out-ward geographically. Luce’s is an act of such authorialconfidence that it recalls Gertrude Stein and her playfulyet cutting pronouncements from within the early 1930son which writers belonged to the nineteenth and twenti-eth centuries, irrespective of chronology. The temporaland special manipulation of Luce’s gesture—preposter-ous in the usual sense of the word, summoning more ofits power from Luce’s own institutional and economicbase than from his rhetorical interruption—is the tacticby which he succeeds in promulgating his terminologyand its logic. The time lag is Luce’s space-clearing ges-ture.28

A critical interruption of the logic of “The American


Century” as it permeates outward through so much U.S.rhetoric about, and cultural representations of, the in-ternational space requires unhinging the easy assump-tion of American temporality as perquisite of globalsupremacy. In the case of Luce’s essay, it is important tonote, the manipulation of space via an American time isunderstood as partially created by American culturalproduction—and more largely by what Luce will call“imagination.”29 And for Luce American cultural pro-duction already was international before the Americanpeople (as represented by the readers of Life, his targetaudience) were ready to engage, or “imagine,” the for-eign and is thus summoned to justify the logic of hisargument. Luce’s examples—American slang, jazz, Hol-lywood film, and U.S. technology—reveal that by “in-ternationalism” Luce means the export of U.S. culturalproducts rather than a mingling of cultural forms; theseexamples suggest the linguistic manipulation central tohis project (that the linguistic register, like the temporalone, must be American). The second half of this essayattempts to stage a critical interruption of the com-pounded logic of the various manipulations of “theAmerican century,” by which I now mean the logic ofan internationalism bound up in an exceptionalist un-derstanding of “America,” which applies as much to thekind of American Studies I have critiqued in the firstsection of this essay as it does to Luce. I will do so hereby reading a major and exemplary American representa-tion of the United States’ international role: Casablanca.The interruption is staged in part by following the filmthrough an archive of foreign responses that re-imagineand creatively recode the American text.

The time lag of geographic manipulation is central tothe 1942 war film Casablanca, a major text of “theAmerican century,” one that might be said to enact it.30

When Rick asks, “Sam, if it’s December 1941 in Casa-blanca, what time is it in New York?” the time lag of thequestion, like that in Luce’s “American century,” is mo-bilized as an argument for American engagement andinternationalism. The explicit point of Rick’s rhetoricalquestion is that in retreating to Casablanca—a placeimagined here to be in a different temporal register—hehad meant to leave behind the world (“Of all the ginjoints in all the towns in all the world, she walks intomine,” he will say a couple of lines later). And yet innaming a specific and charged moment (December1941, the month of the Pearl Harbor bombings, roughlya year prior to the film’s release) and given the widelynoted political parable of the film, the implicit point ofRick’s loaded question is that Americans abroad, such asRick, know already before the Pearl Harbor bombingsthat the U.S. can no longer afford to be on a differenttime zone from the rest of the world—“I bet they’reasleep in New York. I bet they’re asleep all over Amer-

ica,” Rick says after his rhetorical question—and mustengage immediately in the global conflict. But Rick’squestion also suggests that Pearl Harbor will reorganizeU.S. participation in the war and the world and reorientthe center of both to an American time frame. It will bean American century, in Luce’s sense.

Sam’s response to Rick’s question is to say, “My watchstopped,” which is suggestive of the conservative racialpolitics of this hypercanonical film, a film that masquer-ades as liberal.31 In this context, Sam’s line provides avivid representation of what Michael Hanchard hascalled “racial time,” namely “the inequalities of tempo-rality that result from power relations between raciallydominant and subordinate groups.” Hanchard arguesthat racial time has operated as a “structural effect uponthe politics of racial difference” and is one of the waysthat racial difference, the materiality of which is elusive,neither reified and static nor mere social construct, hasmaterial effects on individual and group interaction.32

When coupled with Sam’s trademark song “As TimeGoes By” invoking the “fundamental things” against the“speed and new invention” of the present, a song thathe repeats on demand “again” and again, both the lyricsand the repetition further identify him with temporalstagnation. Here, performing at the center of Rick’sCafé Américain, the expression of racial time silentlyplaces Sam in the imagined temporal register of thoseMoroccans who live in Casablanca, invisible within thefilm. This is the very same register Rick was seeking inhis flight to Casablanca from a France associated withIsla—the subsequent scene will be a Paris flashback se-quence ending with Rick (and Sam) abandoned by Isla atthe train station under a big clock. If Rick expected orhoped that Casablanca would remain on a differenttemporal register, however, both the “world” and Islahave found him and made him redirect that temporalregister back toward Europe (and on the level of thepolitical parable I discussed above, bring Casablancatemporally into “the American century”). But the scriptof Casablanca will not permit Sam to move temporally,and he remains on the old Casablanca time.33

The complex yet readily apparent ways in which Casa-blanca brackets or suppresses concerns of gender andrace—Ilsa’s infamous willingness to allow Rick to thinkfor the two of them and Sam’s participation in what canonly be called the film’s slave economy via the subplotof whether he will or won’t consent to work at the BlueParrot for Signor Ferrari (Sydney Greenstreet) for dou-ble the pay—is a way of distracting viewers from a morepotent possibility repressed by the film. Namely, thatSam as a racialized subject of U.S. colonialism mightenter into a conversation with the colonized Moroccansubjects who are relegated to the film’s background.


Such conversations did in fact take place when AfricanAmerican writers and artists such as Josephine Baker,Claude McKay, and Jessie Fauset traveled to North Af-rica in the 1920s and 1930s and were well known viaFauset’s articles on Algiers for The Crisis in 1925,McKay’s autobiography A Long Way From Home (1937),and suggested by Baker’s film Princesse Tam-Tam (1935),shot in Tunisia. More immediately, the interest that Afri-can Americans had in the war in Africa had been sug-gested by left-leaning African American journals andpress, such as The Negro Quarterly, in the early 1940s.34

Such a confederation might have exposed or made morevisible by compounding the various hypocrisies of “thegood war,” specifically the segregation of U.S. troopsand the alliance of the U.S. with the French colonialbureaucracy in North Africa even while the U.S. spreadpropaganda in North Africa describing the Four Free-doms and the Atlantic Charter.35 The potential for sucha diasporic confederation of African American andNorth African haunts Casablanca and emerges evenwhile it is apparently suppressed by the time lag ofRick’s question and the racial time of Sam’s response.

“Casablanca” names the peculiar collusion of U.S.cultural production and post-1941, postcolonial foreignrelations, a major and precise moment when U.S. textsbecome worldly in a new way. It is, no less, a word thatWarner Brothers thought they held a copyright on and,in an extreme version of representation-as-ownership,went so far as to claim as much in 1946 when the MarxBrothers were filming A Night in Casablanca.36 We areless shocked by that claim—shocked!—when we con-sider that from a marketing point of view, WarnerBrothers itself had early on sought to confuse its owncorporate interests with geopolitics.37 The surpriselanding of the U.S. Armed Forces at Casablanca (andelsewhere on the Moroccan and Algerian coast) on 8November 1942, the initial operation of the North Afri-can campaign, and the media it occasioned, was thecatalyst for Warner Brothers to speed up production oftheir film and reschedule its premiere several monthsearly—Thanksgiving 1942—to take advantage of theshifting war coverage. The ad campaign celebrated War-ner Brothers’ “split-second timing,” in yet another mo-ment when geographic space clearing was named astemporal break. The same ad boasted “the Army’s GotCasablanca – and So Have Warner Bros!” under a photo-graph of a stopwatch.38 And while the film enjoyed asuccessful general release in January 1943, defining theword “Casablanca” in American terms for millions ofcinemagoers, Franklin Roosevelt was in Morocco for theCasablanca Conference, meeting on the side with SultanMohammed V, who represented a people still andthroughout the war under a French-administered Pro-tectorate. That meeting, according to the late Sultan’s

son, King Hassan II, who himself ruled Morocco from1961 until his death in 1999, was a particular inspirationfor the independence movement. (Indeed, in 1943, aMoroccan organization calling itself the Roosevelt Clubwas founded to help Moroccan political elite meet sen-ior members of the U.S. military and was active afterWWII in the independence struggle.)39 According toHassan, who was then a fourteen-year-old prince héritier,Roosevelt as much as promised his father that collabo-ration with the Allied effort would have dividends.“Sire,” F.D.R. reportedly told Mohammed V in 1943,“given the effort which Morocco—in so far as it is aprotectorate—has agreed to give to defend the cause ofpeace, I can assure you that ten years from now yourcountry will be independent.”40

What seems clear now is the ways in which Roose-velt’s implicit deal sets the stage for the postcolonialrelations between Morocco and the U.S., shifting theparadigm of global power from the colonial model gen-erally accepted in 1943 to something different. ThatRoosevelt does so while employing a familiar invocationof “racial time”—the injunction by the dominant groupfor the subordinate group to wait for one’s rights, whereFDR’s grandiloquent promise of independence in adecade is also a deferral of the immediacy of the Mo-roccan claim—suggests the continuity of colonial waysof addressing the African that will persist in the post-colonial period. Prior to the November 1942 landings, inclassified reports, U.S. intelligence services had predictedthat after the war the Moroccan sultan would be ready“to throw himself in the arms of Mr. Roosevelt. Pro-vided Mr. Roosevelt will accept him and his country.”41

The point is not only that the Office of Strategic Serv-ices (OSS) was investigating such matters, but also that itunderstood national protection to be the stakes ofglobal domination, while FDR was already imaginingpostcolonial forms of patronage. Similarly, as WilliamHoisington has shown, Resident-General CharlesNoguès was concerned that anti-French sentimentamong Moroccans left the field open for the establish-ment of a U.S. protectorate.

What Casablanca the film renders invisible is the wayin which the strategic alliance of the United States andthe French regime that controlled the colonies in NorthAfrica—criticized by left leaning journalists during thewar; justified by historian William Langer in 1947 as“Our Vichy Gamble”; yet named within Casablanca itselfas “the beginning of a beautiful friendship”—was notonly expeditious for war goals, but also redefines themeaning of the war and the postwar settlement itself.42

Post-WWII articles in the U.S. popular press that re-ported on the return of ex-GIs to North Africa estab-lishing businesses that would sell the products intro-duced to the local population during the North African


campaign of 1942-43 furnished such a redefinition ex-plicitly. Under titles such as “Young Man, Go to Casa-blanca” and “We’re Invading North Africa Again,” thepopular press redefined the earlier military campaign incorporate terms, now mobilized within cold war inter-ests: the development of “underdeveloped regions” un-der Truman’s Point Four program.43

Although Casablanca (the film) is an especially tempt-ing site for tracing a dialectical relationship betweencultural production and foreign relations, for reasonsI’ve begun to suggest, I don’t want to take for grantedan easy relationship between cinematic text (including itsmarketing and reception, even in the case of this mas-sively popular and influential film) and U.S. foreign andeconomic policy. Much work in American Studies leavesunderexamined the supposed dialectical relationshipbetween cultural production and what is called the po-litical, whereby literary and cinematic texts either reflectthe ideology of a period, or they help to inform it evenwhile being informed by it. As an alternative, then, andas a parry in staging the encounter of American Studiesand the postcolonial that I have described in the firstsection of this essay, let me outline some critical inter-ruptions in reading Casablanca that might get us beyondsuch an impasse. First is to extend the critical interrup-tion I’ve begun to develop above: paying attention to theonly named “Moroccan” character in the film, “Abdul”the doorman (Dan Seymour), and the ways in whichSam and Abdul are not in conversation—in other wordsthe diasporic confederation that isn’t allowed to formand the resulting invisibility of contacts and connectionsbetween African Americans and North Africans beforeand during WWII. To do this fully involves a closereading of certain scenes in the film, which I don’t havethe space to develop here, and archival work that pur-sues the historical connections and contacts that didoccur between these populations.44 A second set of in-terruptions plays out some of the postdisciplinary workI have called for, moving beyond the linguistic and na-tional boundaries to which American Studies work gen-erally restricts itself. To do so is to follow the significantpresence of Casablanca—a film made in a Warner Broth-ers lot, one whose screenplay erroneously places thecoastal city of Casablanca in the desert (despite the mapin the opening sequence) and employs no Moroccancharacters, language, or actors—in Morocco itself.

Though anyone who has been to Casablanca wouldrecognize the 1942 film’s ignorance of specificities ofthe place, reproductions of the film’s poster grace cine-mas and cafés across Morocco.45 In the large hall of theCinéma Renaissance, on the Avenue Mohammed V inthe capital Rabat, one watches projected films throughthe parentheses of two giant wall paintings: a toweringreproduction of the Casablanca poster on one wall and,

on the facing wall, an image of the poster from Josefvon Sternberg’s Morocco (1930), another film shot en-tirely in California. Whether the film being projected isfrom Hollywood, Morocco, or Egypt (the three mostlikely provenances for films screened at the Renaissance,with the lion’s share from Hollywood), the location ofthe cinema theater itself is marked as Moroccan, andMoroccan cinema might in turn seem to be marked asoriginating with these two Hollywood inventions of theplace.46 But rather than understanding the frequent re-minders of Casablanca in Morocco as a culturally inse-cure search for external validation of the country’s placein (cinema) history further evidence of Hollywood’shegemony we might begin to see Moroccan representa-tions of Casablanca as critical interruptions in a variety ofcontexts. References to Casablanca and Morocco allowMoroccan cultural producers to refer to the classic pe-riod of cinema—which corresponds to the height ofFrench colonial control of Morocco (1912-56)—with-out reference to the French and their own powerful rep-resentations of Moroccan culture.47 In this sense, Hol-lywood representations of those years are obvious anddistant fantasies and offer a less threatening site thanthose more elaborate and proximal French representa-tions of Moroccan reality—in literature, history, anthro-pology, etc.—that Abdallah Laroui so trenchantly cri-tiqued in his revisionist History of the Maghrib.48 Payingattention to Moroccan responses to Casablanca is thus afruitful site for students of postcolonial Moroccan cul-tural production because it triangulates the postcolonialMoroccan response to the powerful French legacy, andis its fuller context. Those responses affirm that post-colonial Moroccan cultural production—francophoneor arabophone—from the start is operating in a globalcontext in which the U.S. is deeply present as a liberatingalternative and, simultaneously, as a new form of domi-nation. If after leaving the Cinéma Renaissance, youtravel south on Mohammed V, passing Rue Patrice Lu-mumba, you’ll eventually come to Avenue Franklin Roo-sevelt.

In the context of American Studies, cultural studies,and film and media studies, Moroccan representationsof Casablanca interrupt both Western criticism of Casa-blanca and, more generally, a tacit sense of the overde-termined relationship of American representations ofthe foreign to the actual foreign (in this case, of Casa-blanca to Casablanca).49 Attending to Moroccan repre-sentations of Casablanca disrupts the operating liberalassumption within much of American Studies and filmstudies work that the export of U.S. cultural production,especially popular culture, is unidirectional, unchal-lenged, and fully legible. I will confine the remainder ofthis essay to this particular set of critical interruptions.In what follows, to be clear, I will not be suggesting that


Moroccan recodings of Casablanca are acts of culturalresistance. As Brian Larkin has pointed out, addressingAfrican studies and media studies, “concepts of resis-tance…often depend on a reductive binary distinctionbetween oppression and resistance. The effect of this isthat phenomena that cannot be neatly organized withinthat binary distinction then fall out of view.”50 In hisarticle, Larkin discusses the popularity of Bombay Hindifilms in northern Nigeria in the 1990s and the influenceof Indiana cinema on the very popular and controversialHausa littatafan soyayya [love stories], a pamphlet-typemarket literature. In so doing, he highlights the circula-tion of media within and between non-Western coun-tries and how such media flows disrupt “the dichoto-mies between West and non-West, coloniser andcolonised, modernity and tradition,” instead creatingwhat he calls “parallel modernities.” This is Larkin’s in-terruption of academic accounts of transnational mediaflows that assume a Western provenance for all mediathat circulates transnationally, an assumption that Larkinargues necessarily deprivileges those modernities that donot fit the model (Larkin’s project is in this sense akin toHanchard’s elaboration of “Afro-Modernity” discussedabove), and tends to ignore texts that do not fit theirdisciplinary models as well as the practices of actualaudiences. While the case I am discussing involves Mo-roccan engagement with a Western cultural import—aparticular American film—and not Moroccan popularinterest in non-Western media forms and products (animportant part of a larger understanding of Maghrebipopular culture), I refer to Larkin’s discussion to empha-size the ways in which accounts of parallel modernitiesmay productively upset a dichotomous and dichoto-mizing understanding of transnational cultural flows.Following Casablanca to Casablanca, Casablanca takes onand sheds a variety of meanings, sometimes standing asalternative to French representations of Moroccothereby triangulating the references of postcolonialcultural production, sometimes as a synecdoche forAmerican fantasies of the Maghreb (or Western fanta-sies in general), then again recoded as canonical film textin order to buttress a new vision of Moroccan contem-porary society.

The cover illustration for a book by one of the mostprolific Moroccan film scholars, Moulay Driss Jaïdi, is astarting point, perhaps an idiosyncratic one. On thecover of Jaïdi’s Public(s) et Cinéma, published in Rabat, aCasablanca film poster (in its French incarnation) domi-nates the page, somewhat confusingly, however, sincethe work itself is a detailed sociological study of audi-ence makeup and attitudes toward cinema going amongdifferent demographic groups in the Moroccan city.51

The relationship of the cover image to Jaïdi’s bookwould appear to be that the audiences surveyed in the

book itself were drawn from the city of Casablanca. Butthe shorthand of quoting Casablanca to refer simultane-ously to cinema and to Casa, as Moroccans call the city(or Dar al-Baida, as it is known in Arabic), announcesJaïdi’s subtle interruption of the film’s lack of attentionto the particularity of the city itself. The careful andelaborate attention paid in Jaïdi’s book to Casablanca ascinematic city, as a city of cinema going, with its chartsand careful distinctions between which groups in Casa-blanca watch which foreign films and which watch Mo-roccan films, seems to run against the complete lack ofMoroccan particularity signified by Casablanca. Onewonders: does the careful attention to Casablancan cin-ema-goers in the book itself silently critique the lack ofattention to Moroccans at all in Casablanca?

If the choice of an image for Jaïdi’s cover furthersuggests some anxiety about Casablanca’s power to de-fine contemporary Casa to the rest of the world, thosewho live in Morocco and have any contact with thetourism industry—the largest or second largest sourceof foreign income in the 1980s and 90s—are well awareof the Western-created fantasies that most internationaltourists (at least those from Europe, the U.S., Australia,New Zealand, and Japan) bring with them.52 Rather thanresist these stereotypes, the Moroccan tourism industryhas generally adopted the strategy of performing thestereotypes and profiting off the performance.53 Bycountless accounts in U.S. and European newspapers,business travelers and tourists from around the worldcome to Casa looking for Casablanca, only to be frus-trated. Sometime in the mid-1980s, the CasablancaHyatt Regency decided to profit from that frustration,and opened “Bar Casablanca,” a piano bar that looselyrecreates the ambiance of the film and is decorated withfilm stills and poster reproductions from Casablanca andstaffed by Moroccans wearing Bogartesque trench coatsand fedoras and 1940s French colonial uniforms.54 Apiano player plays the obvious song on request. Notonly does the bar profit from the foreign business trav-elers who come looking for “Rick’s Café Américain”from the film, satisfying the need they have—and willsatisfy nowhere else in the city—to find “the real” be-hind the fiction, but the staffing of the bar also inter-rupts, retroactively, and recodes the film itself. This ispartially done by satirizing Warner Brothers’ casting;here Moroccans play all the roles. If Moroccans playBogart, they also play the roles of Renault and theFrench police; the pianist has been a Lebanese, anEgyptian, and an African American, at various times andfor various tenures. And as I’ve suggested above, WarnerBros.’ refusal to pay attention to the Moroccan popula-tion either in plot or casting is the aversion of a danger-ous alliance in the film, one not addressed in the hugebody of film criticism on Casablanca, which has the ef-


fect of silencing by erasing from the historical archivethe alliance of African American with North African.55

Bar Casablanca, in which the piano player is the focalpoint, doesn’t let us forget that alliance. Here in BarCasablanca the frequent repetition of the song “AsTime Goes By,” rather than an example of postmoderntimelessness and placelessness, is the Moroccan site’scontinual interruption of the filmic meaning of thesong where it signified Sam’s inability to dispense withracial time. It is made here newly dynamic.

The further interruption of the Bar Casablanca is thatit relocates the site represented by Casablanca from a U.S.narrative of WWII imagined from afar (or, alternatively,depending on one’s position, from the nether world ofHollywood nostalgia) to the geographically located,postcolonial Casablanca. This happens daily when tour-ists and visitors enter the bar and is further propagatedby occasional travel articles in the foreign press and byforeign travel guidebooks. Occasionally, Bar Casablancareaches out itself: in November 1992, on the fiftiethanniversary of the film (and of the Operation Torchlandings), the Casablanca Hyatt held a large party, flyingfrom London the winner of a trivia contest, and furtheridentifying itself as the “real” location of the film. TheMoroccan tourism industry, which after the 1991 GulfWar dropped off precipitously and remained low forseveral years despite the fact that Moroccan troopsjoined the U.S.-led alliance against Iraq, itself knows thatsuch identification is important. As Abderrahim Daoudi,Casablanca’s then-director of tourism, said in 1992:“There’s no similarity; the movie was filmed entirely in astudio. But it had an enormous impact. Every day,somewhere in the world, it’s shown…. It’s an excellentpublicity ad.” 56 A decade later, a Moroccan beer com-pany is latching onto the mystique with CasablancaBeer; its motto: “the legendary beer from the legendarycity.” Casa itself was not of course legendary before1942; it is an elaborate French construction of the earlytwentieth century, as Gwendolyn Wright has shown, andmade “legendary” by the American film.57 The Moroc-can beer company invents a tradition by piggybackingon an American one.

If Bar Casablanca relocates Casablanca to Casablanca,the Moroccan critical interruption is yet more complexwhen ‘Abd al-Qader Laqt‘a brings the Bar Casablancainto his feature-length film, al-Hubb fi al-Dar al-Baida(Love in Casablanca).58 In an important scene, Laqt‘ainvokes the 1942 film and reorients its plot and powerfor his own purposes. His critical interruption of theHollywood film reveals its presence in postcolonial Mo-roccan filmmaking and the ways in which a Moroccandirector can disorient an American understanding ofCasablanca. It is in this latter regard a major creative re-coding of a major work of American culture, yet one

that is virtually unknown in the U.S., including in filmstudies and cultural studies discussions of Casablanca.Yet Laqt‘a is ultimately not (primarily) interested in in-terrupting American understandings of the film, thoughmy discussion of his film in this essay implicates him inthat process. I’m not suggesting that Laqt‘a doesn’t haveextra-Moroccan aspirations for his films; indeed a recentfilm of his has been shown in a couple of internationalfilm festivals. But in Al-Hubb fi al-Dar al-Baida, his firstfeature length film, Laqt‘a incorporates Casablanca withina film directed at a Moroccan audience. His recoding ofCasablanca is in the creative service of an argumentabout contemporary Moroccan culture.

Part of the local (i.e. national) dimensions of Laqt‘a’sproject here emerges from the mechanics of distribu-tion of Moroccan film. Laqt‘a’s choice to make the filmin the Moroccan dialect of Arabic inhibits it from “trav-eling” fluently across the Arab world, on the one hand,or to Europe on the other.59 Egyptian Arabic, con-versely, travels much more easily across the Arab worldand the Arab diaspora; Laqt‘a might also have made thefilm in French had he been primarily interested in dis-rupting Western imagination of Casablanca. Al-Hubb fial-Dar al-Baida is not officially distributed outside ofMorocco. Though it is well known in Morocco, it isn’treadily available inside the country due to the ways inwhich Moroccan video clubs and film distribution out-lets operate; it is much easier to purchase a Hong Kongaction film, an Egyptian film, or a dubbed copy of anAmerican film in a Moroccan video store than a copy ofa Moroccan film. Al-Hubb fi al-Dar al-Baida occasionallyplays on 2M, a Moroccan television station. The copy ofthe film I viewed was a duplication of a duplication of atape made from Moroccan television. Still, circulating insuch fashion and via its repeated showings on 2M, thefilm exhibits a significant presence in the media cultureof Morocco.

In the film, Seloua (Mouna Fettou) is a young womancaught between two men. Trying to extricate herselffrom an affair with an older lover, Jalil, she becomesinvolved with a young photographer, Najib. In one ofthe many scenes filmed in readily recognizable Casa-blanca locations, Seloua and Najib walk into the BarCasablanca and sit down to have a drink. The camerafocuses on a poster from Casablanca hanging on the wall,then pans down to the couple. Najib asks Seloua if she’sseen the film; Seloua says no. Najib recounts the film’sbasic plot, but in a way that serves both Najib’s pur-poses and al-Hubb fi al-Dar al-Baida’s concerns. “It’s a bitold, from about the 50s,” Najib says, speaking in Mo-roccan darija (colloquial Moroccan Arabic), clearingspace for his own version of the American film via atemporal displacement, relocating the Hollywood filmby a decade.60 He’s seen it in a ciné-club, he says, a


comment which naturalizes the fact of viewing theAmerican film as something typically Moroccan. “It’sthe story of a woman who loves two men,” Najib says.Seloua looks down, feeling the immediacy and relevanceof the plot to her own situation. “She finds herself in adilemma,” Najib goes on, “whether to go back to herhusband or with her lover.” Seloua, bothered, embar-rassed, and intrigued, suggests taking a closer look at thefilm stills mounted on the wall. The camera cuts to filmstills posted on the wall, lingers over them, and thencuts back to a shot of the couple approaching the pho-tographs. The film thus distinguishes its own relation-ship to Casablanca from that of the characters in thescene; Casablanca is being used doubly. That Najib’s un-familiar synopsis of the film is idiosyncratic and re-volves around his own interests is confirmed by the stillson the wall, which include a portrait of Humphrey Bo-gart and Ingrid Bergman as Rick and Ilsa and represen-tations of a couple of other scenes, but which don’tdepict Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid), Ilsa’s husband inCasablanca. “A shame,” Najib says, turning the lack of astill of Laszlo to his advantage, “that the husband isn’there.” Seloua asks about the resolution of the woman’sproblem. “In the American cinema,” Najib explains byway of an answer, “the woman goes back to her hus-band, rather than follow her lover. The cinema has topreserve traditions in order to avoid problems with thecensor.” He steps away to see if he can get the pianoplayer to perform music from the film, and Seloua re-gards the stills alone. As she focuses her attention on aheadshot of Bogart, she hallucinates and imagines thevisage of Jalil peering between the photos, as if re-flected in the glass from a position behind her. Startled,she glances over her shoulder; seeing no one, she looksback at the photos. Again, Jalil’s face appears. Visually,Jalil’s face overlaps Rick’s (Bogart’s), and the viewer ispresented with a palimpsest of images from al-Hubb fial-Dar al-Baida and Casablanca, where the older film is thebackground upon which the Moroccan film plays. Thisvisual palimpsest figures and orders the narrative pal-impsest that Laqt‘a’s dialogue stages.

If the story told in al-Hubb fi al-Dar al-Baida aboutCasablanca seems a misreading of the American film, it isclearly a productive one for Laqt‘a. In this, the director’sfirst feature length film, the older film is summoned upas support for the director’s plot and his daring andcontroversial representation of a sexually liberatedyoung Moroccan woman. That Laqt‘a brings Casablancainto his own film might suggest his own sense of belat-edness, or an anxiety of influence in making a film set inCasablanca after Casablanca. If so, we might see Laqt‘a asresponding to that anxiety productively through an actof creative misprision, with the visual palimpsest ofJalil’s and Rick’s faces representing dramatically a textual

haunting. Whether or not we accept a psychoanalyticanxiety of influence, however, or imagine a differentparadigm of quoting/recoding, Laqt‘a’s retelling ofCasablanca is a significant creative act. It is clear inLaqt‘a’s recoding of Casablanca, which recasts theAmerican film as pertaining to an older and outdatedcultural moment, that the local and contemporary refer-ent is the more immediate concern. In this sense, in thecreative imagination of the film, al-Hubb fi al-Dar al-Baida pertains to a dynamic and modern Moroccan cul-ture and Casablanca to an American one stuck in mori-bund traditions. Moroccan audiences who view Casa-blanca after al-Hubb al-Dar al-Baida, or who visit BarCasablanca for that matter, cannot help but view theearlier text(s) through the lens of the later film. Thisitself is a key interruption of both Moroccan andAmerican national narratives and rewrites contemporaryMorocco as young, vibrant, and modern, and the U.S. asantiquated and outmoded.

Laqt‘a and his films have been controversial withinMorocco because of their frank treatment of sexualityand their uncompromising look at the less appealingside of Casablanca life. Casablanca—his version of Casa-blanca— lends Laqt‘a narrative authority to make hiscontroversial films about Casablanca, both because ofthe American film’s international cultural capital andLaqt‘a’s own ability to manipulate its plot/meaning.61

Further, the American film provides him with a defensefor refusing to conform to Moroccan cultural traditions,in a manipulation that is yet a further interruption ofAmerican accounts of American culture. When Najibtells Seloua that the happy resolution of Casablanca isforbidden by American cinema’s requirement to stickwithin “traditions” else be censored, he both recounts atruth about U.S. cinema from its classic period and inter-rupts American accounts of the U.S. as liberal and mod-ern. Najib employs the word taqalid, a word that trans-lates as “mores” or “traditions,” and one that implies“blind adoption, unquestioning following.”62 It is ofcourse well known in the U.S. that Hollywood has al-ways operated under various production codes, particu-larly enforced during WWII.63 But in this scene of al-Hubb fi al-Dar al-Baida, the image presented of Americancinema is of an institution bound blindly to “tradition,”and of a country that censors that which errs from con-servative morality. American society and cinema isimagined in the dialogue as more conservative than thatof contemporary Morocco, a place where such a filmmight be made. American self-presentation in the inter-national scene, particularly in comparison to a MuslimArab country, is surely bucked by this marvelous scene.And because I insist on incorporating Laqt‘a’s text intoAmerican cultural and film studies accounts of Casa-blanca and of American Studies accounts of U.S. cultural


production that represents the foreign, Laqt‘a’s inter-ruption of Casablanca becomes an interruption ofAmerican exceptionalism, both as national narrative andacademic practice. American exceptionalism, as I havebeen arguing, is itself another name for AmericanStudies until it has had its preposterous encounter withthe postcolonial.

The End of the BeginningThe danger of bringing a globalized American Stud-

ies into the postcolonial studies conversation is that thelatter will be colonized by the former, in a way that mir-rors the neocolonial apparatus of U.S. empire and thatwill further limit attention to local languages and pe-ripheral cultural formations that challenge the nationform buttressed silently within globalization. JennySharpe, whom I invoked at the start of this essay, enun-ciates the problem: “Although characterizing America as‘postcolonial’ is intended to displace the cen-ter/periphery binarism belonging to colonial systems ofmeaning, its effect has been to reconstitute the marginsin the metropolitan center.”64 C. Richard King, survey-ing the rejection of the inclusion of the U.S. in post-colonial studies by certain eminent critics, calls for astrategic and provisional usage of the terminology andtheories of postcoloniality, one that doesn’t abandon the“uneasiness associated with theorizing and examiningpostcoloniality in American culture.”65 While I am inagreement with both of these critics, I hope it is alsoclear that I am not suggesting that the U.S. is “postcolo-nial” at all; rather that it participates deeply in the post-colonial context. The comparative, interdisciplinarywork I am suggesting is of course difficult, but in itsabsence U.S.-based scholars who bring together post-colonial studies and American Studies can only repeatthe nationalist logic of the early cold war period and, Ibelieve, fall into the traps to which King and Sharpealert us.

The preposterousness of the U.S. in postcolonialstudies is a recognition that in the post-1941 periodthere are simultaneous impulses on the part of U.S.cultural producers and members of the state departmentand government apparatus toward an affinity with de-colonizing nations based on a shared sense of freedomfrom former colonial domination (no doubt learnedthrough the major texts of the nineteenth century, suchas Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman, which exhibit atension with European literature and cultural forms) andthe strong impulse toward neocolonial domination,repetition-with-a-difference of the European colonialempire. It is important to keep the pre- (which is also aneo-) and the post- simultaneously in mind here in ordernot to fall into the trap of proclaiming an exceptionalist

U.S. form of imperialism (except that all historical casesand trajectories are exceptional in some way). Criticalpreposterousness, in this case, allows us to move towardan engagement with the institutions that the currentstate of emergency requires of us. And before you writeoff such a project as preposterous, let me remind youthat the antonym to “preposterous” Microsoft Word 7.0provides—disciplined again by the right click button sonear at hand––is “sensible.” Will interruption and criti-cal preposterousness allow us to escape the “commonsense” of our moment?

NOTESSome of the ideas presented in the first section of this es-

say were worked through in talks delivered during 2002 atColumbia University, UC Berkeley, a Northwestern School ofCommunication summer institute on media and globalization,and the MLA meeting in New York. I’d like to thank JonathanArac, David Damrosch, Dilip Gaonkar, Jay Grossman,Dorothy Hale, Eric Naiman, Harsha Ram, and Gayatri Spivakfor invitations to speak and/or thought provoking questionsand comments. My gratitude to Kate Baldwin, Brian Larkin,Sadik Rddad, and the journal’s outside reader for helpfulcomments on the essay. I am grateful to Rebecca Saunders forher detailed and thoughtful editorial comments and sugges-tions.

1‘Abd al-Rahman Munif, Cities of Salt, trans. Peter Theroux(New York: Vintage, 1989), 287.

2In using the adjective “American” rather than the moreaccurate “U.S.” to describe this field, I am following the majorassociation of the field—the American Studies Association(ASA; it is revealing that there seems never to be confusionwith the other major association that uses the same acronym,the African Studies Association)—as well as most academicdepartments and programs. I capitalize “Studies” in order tosignal a resistance to the naturalization of the adjective“American.” When I use the noun “Americanist,” I am alsofollowing usage within the ASA and English and history de-partments. Tensions in the naming of the field are themselvesrevealing about the difficulty of evading its nationalist foun-dational logic. Despite the fact that some of the most impor-tant and theoretically useful work emerging from the field hasengaged the question of the United States’ southern bordersand comparative American cultures and in spite of occasionaldebates within the ASA about changing the name of the as-sociation, the name still stands. For a less heralded study thatreminds American Studies of Canada and makes an argumentabout the border as contact zone and “transnational ‘home’”for leftist thinkers, see Caren Irr, The Suburb of Dissent: CulturalPolitics in the United States and Canada during the 1930s (Durham:Duke University Press, 1998).

3“Imperialism has been simultaneously formative and dis-avowed in the foundational discourse of American studies.”Amy Kaplan, “Left Alone with America: The Absence ofEmpire in the Study of American Culture,” in Cultures ofUnited States Imperialism, ed. Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease(Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 5. Among the proj-ects I am referring to are Donald Pease’s New Americanist


series published by Duke University Press; several special is-sues of boundary 2 edited by Pease; and the annual summerinstitutes on American Studies at Dartmouth College directedby Pease and Robyn Wiegman. See also a special issue ofCultural Critique edited by Robyn Wiegman, “The Futures ofAmerican Studies,” Cultural Critique 40 (1998). In C. RichardKing’s edited collection, Postcolonial America (Urbana: Univer-sity of Illinois Press, 2000), Rachel Buff ’s essay “InternalFrontiers, Transnational Politics, 1945-54: Im/Migration Pol-icy as World Domination,” is most exciting in its activation ofarchival work. Buff juxtaposes U.S. immigration and federalIndian policy in the early cold war and constructs an argu-ment about U.S. hegemony that accounts for the diverse (andrelated) movements across national and tribal borders. Incontrasting the restrictions on immigration imposed by a con-servative Congress in 1954 (the McCarran-Walter Act) and aliberalized policy that allowed third world workers to enter theU.S. (the Bracero Program, 1946-64), she concludes that U.S.policies of the post-war period “sort immigrants into ‘politi-cal’ and ‘economic’ groups consonant with the United States’political and economic alliances in the post-war internationalarena.” During the same period, the so-called “Terminationpolicy” with regard to treaties with American Indians and anew interest and permissiveness toward development in nativelands of the American West activated the vocabulary of civilrights against claims of native organizations. Elena Glasberg,“On the Road with Chrysler: From Nation to Virtual Em-pire,” in Postcolonial America, stages an encounter of AmericanStudies and postcolonial theory and outlines a reading of avirtual Antarctica presented in a 1994 Chrysler ad that dem-onstrates the “contradictions and complicities between trans-national virtual empires and national-colonialist formations”(158).

4Jenny Sharpe, “Is the United States Postcolonial? Trans-nationalism, Immigration, and Race,” Diaspora 4:2 (1995): 181-200. Sharpe’s essay is also in King’s collection, where it standsas a formative text in the crossover.

5Robert J. C. Young, Postcolonialism (Malden: Blackwell Pub-lishers, 2001), 59.

6See my “Yankee Pashas and Buried Women: ContainingAbundance in 1950s Hollywood Orientalism,” Film & History31:2 (2001): 13-24, which argues that Hollywood musicals andepics set in North Africa and the Middle East were not merelyescapist entertainments, but in fact constitute a key part ofearly cold war rhetoric. The article also advances a hypothesisabout the relationship of the cold war to the Gulf War andresulting attitudes toward the Arab world and its diaspora inthe U.S.

7For an argument about representations of the foreigner inideas about the nation and its foundation, see Bonnie Honig,Democracy and the Foreigner (Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress, 2001). Honig’s excellent work of political theory fo-cuses on the foreigner within the national space (as founder,as immigrant, as citizen) rather than the foreign space abroad.

8The exception to this complaint is of course the field ofLatina/o studies, which, not coincidentally, has for some timebeen productively concerned with theoretical questions ofborders, especially linguistic and national. See Gloria

Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera (San Francisco: Spin-sters/Aunt Lute, 1987); and José David Saldívar, Border Mat-ters: Remapping American Cultural Studies (Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 1997).

9Paul Giles, Virtual Americas: Transnational Fictions and theTransatlantic Imaginary (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002),263. Giles’s interest in virtualization as a critical process, em-phasizes “reflection and estrangement” and a comparativeangle of vision (in his case, the U.S. and Great Britain) bywhich to denaturalize the assumptions framing cultural narra-tives of the U.S. and “how its own indigenous representationsof the ‘natural’ tend to revolve tautologously, reinforcingthemselves without reference to anything outside their owncharmed circle” (2). See also Rebecca Saunders’s trenchantcritique of Stanley Fish’s understanding of text and context, atheory of reading that relies on a public “purified” of for-eigners and that leads away from the denaturalization of thetext by alternative contexts. Rebecca Saunders, “The Agonyand the Allegory: The Concept of the Foreign, the Languageof Apartheid, and the Fiction of J. M. Coetzee,” Cultural Cri-tique 47 (Winter 2001): 215-64, esp. 221-23.

10There are of course many accounts of the emergence ofthe field of postcolonial studies. For a useful overview, seeKalpana Seshadri-Crooks, “At the Margins of PostcolonialStudies” (1995), reprinted in The Pre-Occupation of PostcolonialStudies, ed. Fawzia Afzal-Khan and Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks(Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 3-23.

11My essay “Fanon’s al-Jaza’ir, or Algeria translated,” Paral-lax 8:2 (April-June 2002): 99-115, examines Frantz Fanon’sAlgerian writings and the ways in which Fanon incorporatesArabic words and etymologies into his French prose, a proc-ess that both destabilizes French as a national language andperforms the disappearance of the local; and which under-lines his more explicit argument about revolutionary commu-nication. In so doing, I address the relationship of Fanon’stexts on the Algerian struggle for independence to processesof globalization of language, both the global French thatFanon imagined/staged and the global English that he wit-nessed emerging and to which he testified.

12Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study andBritish Rule in India (New York: Columbia University Press,1989); and her essay “The Naming of Yale College: BritishImperialism and American Higher Education,” in Cultures ofUnited States Imperialism, ed. Kaplan and Pease, offer majorexamples of the interest in excavating the colonial connec-tions of literary field of study and their implications on U.S.institutions. See also Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “ResidentAlien,” in Relocating Postcolonialism, ed. David Theo Goldbergand Ato Quayson (Malden: Blackwell, 2002).

13Giles is adapting a phrase coined by Nina Baym in 1981to characterize classic American authors valorized by LionelTrilling and the Americanist literary establishment at the time.Nina Baym, “Melodramas of Beset Manhood: How Theoriesof American Fiction Exclude Women Authors,” AmericanQuarterly 33:2 (1981), 129. For accounts of the founding andhistory of the field of American Studies, see Sigmund Dia-mond, “The American Studies Program at Yale: Lux, Veritas,Pecunia,” Prospects 16 (1991): 41-55; Gene Wise, “‘Paradigm


Dramas’ in American Studies: A Cultural and InstitutionalHistory of the Movement,” American Quarterly 31:3 (1979),293-337; Michael Denning, “The Special American Condi-tions’: Marxism and American Studies,” American Quarterly38:3 (1986): 356-80. See also Richard Ohmann, “English andthe Cold War,” in Noam Chomsky, et al., The Cold War & theUniversity (NY: The New Press, 1997). “Internal critique” isSharpe’s phrase regarding Said, in distinguishing the field ofpostcolonial studies from minority studies in U.S. Englishdepartments, despite sometimes shared texts. Timothy Bren-nan very usefully places Said’s Orientalism in the post-Vietnammoment, marked for Brennan by the “powerless propheticanarchism” of beat poetry and the counterculture, the “plain-tive radical liberalism” of C. Wright Mills, and “reputable, butslandered traditions of American communism, made tooth-less by Cold War prejudices.” Brennan argues that with Orien-talism, Said was able to “manage an American critique that fellinto none of these categories while drawing on all of them.Its intellectual importance was a matter of its positionalfreshness, not only its geopolitical or racial location.” TimothyBrennan, “The Illusion of a Future: Orientalism as TravelingTheory,” Critical Inquiry 26:3 (Spring 2000), 577.

14Paul Bové highlights the importance of Said’s work as in-stitutional critique and analysis of the U.S. state: “Said’s writ-ing is very much an analysis of the American deployment ofpower in the world and, as such, of the American institutionalarrangements for producing ‘knowledge’—which in this caseconsists merely in systematic representations guided by theinterests of its producers.” Despite Said’s crucial interven-tion—or perhaps because of the ways it unsettles assump-tions of an easy relationship between state and civil society socentral to and so unexamined by American Studies work,which according to Bové “tends to make all intellectual workinto a commitment to will alone, into a politics of truth de-fined totally by representative and representational categoriesof struggle”—Bové sees Said’s work as not embraced byAmerican Studies. Paul A. Bové, “Can American Studies BeArea Studies?” in Learning Places: The Afterlives of Area Studies,ed. Masao Miyoshi and H. D. Harootunian (Durham: DukeUniversity Press, 2002), 206-30. Brennan, “The Illusion of aFuture,” makes the point that from the time he composedOrientalism Said was more interested in the question of insti-tutions than of discourse.

15For a summary of the propaganda films, see Jane Perlez,“Muslim-as-Apple-Pie Videos are Greeted with Skepticism,”New York Times, 30 October 2002, A1. Radio Sawa and someArab responses are reported in Felicity Barringer, “U.S. Mes-sages to Arab Youth, Wrapped in Song,” New York Times, 17June 2002, A8.

16Timothy Brennan made his comments during his pres-entation at the “Postcolonial Studies and Beyond” conferenceheld at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, April 2002.

17Lazarus made his comments during his presentation atthe “Postcolonial Studies and Beyond” conference held atUniversity of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, April 2002.

18Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other; or the Prosthesisof Origin, trans. Patrick Mensah (Stanford: Stanford UniversityPress, 1998), 77 n. 3. The context of Derrida’s comment is his

discussion of the language of the other and the “promisedsentence,” which I find useful in my project of unsettlingdisciplinary boundaries with comparative work and an atten-tion to the language of the other. My “Fanon’s al-Jaza’ir, orAlgeria translated” incorporates a brief discussion of theDerrida text.

19For the context of Spivak’s phrase, see Gayatri Chakra-vorty Spivak, The Post-Colonial Critic, ed. Sarah Harasym (NY:Routledge, 1990), 107.

20Donald Pease, “National Narratives, Postnational Narra-tion,” Modern Fiction Studies 43, no. 1 (1997), 1-23. See alsoRonald A. T. Judy, “On the Politics of Global Language, orUnfungible Local Value,” boundary 2 24:2 (1997), 101-43.

21Bové, “Can American Studies Be Area Studies?” providesan extended critique of American Studies scholarship andparadigms; he elaborates the intellectual work that Area Stud-ies does for the state and outlines the logical and practicalimpossibility of American Studies doing such work. Im-manuel Wallerstein has argued that one of the unintendedconsequences of cold war area studies was that many U.S.faculty were “radicalized, politically and intellectually, by thecontact with the area.” Wallerstein, “The Unintended Conse-quences of Cold War Area Studies,” The Cold War & the Uni-versity (NY: The New Press, 1997), 227.

22See Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and theProduction of History (Boston: Beacon, 1995). See Werner Sol-lors, ed., Multilingual America: Transnationalism, Ethnicity, and theLanguages of American Literature (NY: New York UniversityPress, 1998); and Marc Shell and Werner Sollors, eds., TheMultilingual Anthology of American Literature: A Reader of OriginalTexts with English Translations (NY: New York University Press,2000). On global Englishes, see especially Ronald A.T. Judy,“Some Notes on the Status of Global English in Tunisia,”boundary 2 26:2 (1999): 3-29.

23Thus the conservative function of U.S. multiculturalismwhen it remains domestically bound, when it insists on Eng-lish as the only language of U.S. literature, and when it keepsLatino and Asian populations represented by a text or two onthe Am. lit. syllabus, or a single faculty member added on tothe faculty by the administration in response to student pres-sure. On the last point, see Richard H. Okada, “Areas, Disci-plines, and Ethnicity,” in Learning Places: The Afterlives of AreaStudies, ed. Masao Miyoshi and H.D. Harootunian (Durham:Duke University Press, 2002), 190-205.

24Lawrence Buell, “Postcolonial Anxiety in Classic U.S. Lit-erature,” American Literary History 4, no. 3 (fall 1992): 411-42; arevised version, in which Buell responds to some of his crit-ics, appears in Amritjit Singh and Peter Schmidt, eds., Postcolo-nial Theory and the United States: Race, Ethnicity, and Literature(Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000), 196-219.Anne McClintock, “The Angel of Progress: Pitfalls of theTerm ‘Post-Colonialism,’” Social Text 31/32 (1992): 84-98.

25Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions ofGlobalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,1996). See also Hamid Naficy, The Making of Exile Cultures:Iranian Television in Los Angeles (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 1993).

26I do not mean to suggest that this temporal/spatial ma-


nipulation is unique to U.S. cultural representations of theforeign or originates with WWII, even if Hollywood cine-matic representations of the foreign are especially engaged inthis sort of manipulation. (The linguistic manipulation is a bitmore nuanced and does shift in the post-WWII period in partbecause of the globalization of technologies such as cinema,TV and the so-called Information Superhighway.) In her finediscussion of the concept of the foreign(er) within globaliza-tion, Rebecca Saunders reminds us of the temporal disparitiesthat mark European modernism and modernity: “[I]n thistemporalized geography of modernity, to be foreign means tobe backward, dependent, immobilized in time past.” ForSaunders, what changes within globalization is that the “globalforeigner” becomes marked as representing “pathologicalstability within, and intractable obstacle to, global imperativesof mobility and speed.” Saunders, “Uncanny Presence: theForeigner at the Gate of Globalization,” Comparative Studies ofSouth Asia, Africa and the Middle East 21:2 (2001), 91.

27Henry Luce, The American Century (NY: Farrar & Rinehart,1941), 24.

28This is a somewhat different sense of “time-lag” thanthat propounded by Homi Bhabha in his essay “The Post-colonial and the Postmodern,” which I discuss in note 49below.

29“American internationalism…will take shape,” Luce pre-dicts, “by imagination.” He goes on: “As America enters dy-namically upon the world scene, we need most of all to seekand to bring forth a vision of America as a world powerwhich is authentically American and which can inspire us tolive and work and fight with vigor and enthusiasm.” Luce, TheAmerican Century, 35.

30Major studies of Casablanca include Robert Ray, A CertainTendency of the Hollywood Film: 1930-1980 (Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1985), with a long chapter on Casablanca,explores film language and the film’s fusion of Western andromance genres; Aljean Harmetz, Round Up the Usual Suspects:The Making of Casablanca—Bogart, Bergman, and World War II(New York: Hyperion, 1992) places the production details intheir historical moment and provides much useful informa-tion; Leslie Fiedler’s “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, HuckHoney,” in An End to Innocence (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955) isa classic reading; Robert Gooding-Williams, “Black Cupids,White Desires: Reading the Recoding of Racial Difference inCasablanca,” The Black Columbiad: Defining Moments in AfricanAmerican Literature and Culture, ed. Werner Sollors and MariaDiedrich (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), areading of racialized coding of desire and difference in Casa-blanca, is a major and crucial critical intervention that openedup readings of the film.

31Howard Koch, Casablanca: Script and Legend (Woodstock,N.Y.: Overlook Press, 1973), 94. My use of the word “hyper-canonical” alludes to Jonathan Arac’s brilliant study of Huck-leberry Finn and its fate within cold war U.S. literary studies,whereby the more troubling and persistent problems of thepresent were located in the literature of the previous century,celebrated, and thereby imagined resolved. See Arac, “Criti-cism between Opposition and Counterpoint,” boundary 2 25:2(Summer 1998) special issue “Edward W. Said,” ed. Paul A.

Bové, 55-69. See also Gooding-Williams, “Black Cupids,White Desires.”

32Michael Hanchard, “Afro-Modernity: Temporality, Poli-tics, and the African Diaspora,” Public Culture 11, no. 1 (Winter1999): 253. Hanchard’s delineation of what he calls Afro-Modernity—“the selective incorporation of technologies,discourses, and institutions of the modern West within thecultural and political practices of African-derived people tocreate a form of relatively autonomous modernity distinctfrom its counterparts of Western Europe and North Amer-ica”— is consonant with the moves I make in following Casa-blanca to Casablanca below. In that regard, I would especiallylike to invoke Hanchard’s sense that Afro-Modernity “is nomere mimicry of Western modernity but an innovation uponits precepts, forces, and features” (247).

33The association of Morocco—and Sam via too close anidentification—with stopped clocks resonates with earlierAmerican Orientalist representations of the Maghreb. See mydiscussion of Edith Wharton’s association of stopped clockswith national immaturity in her 1920 travelogue In Morocco, anassociation that I argue Wharton brings into The Age of Inno-cence (1920) and its critique of U.S. political isolationism andgender segregation. Brian T. Edwards, “The Well-Built Wallof Culture: Old New York and Its Harems,” The Age of Inno-cence (Norton Critical Edition), ed. Candace Waid (New York:W.W. Norton, 2003), 482-506.

34See, for example, John Pittman, “Africa Against the Axis,”The Negro Quarterly 1:3 (fall 1942); and Kweku Attah Gardiner,“African Opinion and World Peace,” The Negro Quarterly 1:4(Winter-Spring 1943). The former article noted the relevanceof U.S. wartime involvement in Africa to African Americanconcerns and noted that that the African American press was“extremely alert to African questions.” The latter article,written by a contributor identified as a native of Gold Coastresident in the U.S. for eight months, took the mainstreamU.S. press to task for ignoring the people of North Africa incoverage of the North African campaign and for refusing todiscuss the workings of colonialism in Africa or to poll Afri-can opinion about the war in Africa.

35The Atlantic Charter declared U.S. “respect [for] the rightof all peoples to choose the form of government underwhich they will live.” In March 1948, the U.S. Department ofState Policy Planning Staff referred—in a memorandum thenclassified as “Top Secret”—to the spreading of these docu-ments among the “native inhabitants” as “propaganda” meant“to create a favorable atmosphere for our forces” and notedthat such wartime activity was now “in part responsible forthe recent spur to North Africa[n] nationalism and for thepresent unrest in the area.” Foreign Relations of the United States,1948, vol. 3, Western Europe (Washington, D.C.: GovernmentPrinting Office, 1974), 684.

36With characteristic brilliance, Groucho Marx suggestedhis entity’s control of the word “brothers” and ended thestand-off. Groucho Marx, The Groucho Letters: Letters from andto Groucho Marx (NY: Simon and Schuster, 1967).

37I am layering allusions in this sentence in order to suggesta contemporary analogue. The allusions are of course toCaptain Louis Renault (Claude Rains) in Casablanca and to


White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card’s eerie statementregarding the Bush administration’s aggressive advocacy of aninvasion of Iraq only after Labor Day, 2002, even though thedecision had been made earlier in the summer—“from a mar-keting point of view, you don’t introduce new products inAugust.” Elisabeth Bumiller, “Bush Aides Set Strategy to SellPolicy on Iraq,” New York Times, 7 September 2002, A1, A6.

38Italics in the original. For a reproduction of the ad, seeHarmetz, Round Up the Usual Suspects, 265.

39C.R. Pennell, Morocco since 1830: A History (New York:New York University Press, 2000), 263.

40My translation of “‘Étant donné, sire, l’effort que le Ma-roc a consenti, en tant qu’État protégé, pour défendre la causede la paix, je peux vous assurer que d’ici dix ans votre payssera indépendant.’” Hassan II, La mémoire d’un roi: Entretiensavec Eric Laurent (Paris: Plon, 1993), 18.

41U.S. Office of Strategic Services, Research and AnalysisBranch, Morocco (Washington, D.C., 1942), quoted in WilliamA. Hoisington, Jr., The Casablanca Connection: French ColonialPolicy, 1936-1943 (Chapel Hill: University of North CarolinaPress, 1984), 284 n. 73. Hoisington mentions discussions be-tween Sultan Mohammed V and other top Moroccan leadersof “ending the French protectorate and creating some jointprotectorate or inter-Allied mandate in which the UnitedStates and Britain would share authority with France andSpain.”

42In a foreword to his war correspondence, dated August1943, Kenneth Crawford addressed this relationship. For “lib-erals of all shades,” according to Crawford, the U.S. govern-ment’s collusion with French colonial bureaucracy was “disil-lusioning and distressing,” and part of “a series of fatal moralcompromises”: “Some of them argued that, in winning thebattle for North Africa, we had lost the moral values forwhich the war was being fought.” Kenneth G. Crawford, Re-port on North Africa (NY: Farrar & Rinehart, 1943). For discus-sion of William Langer’s Our Vichy Gamble (NY: Knopf,1947), see Irwin M. Wall, The United States and the Making ofPostwar France, 1945-1954 (NY: Cambridge University Press,1991).

43Richard Toledano, “Young Man, Go to Casablanca,”Harper’s Magazine (September 1948). Demaree Bess, “We’reInvading North Africa Again,” Saturday Evening Post (18 June1949). Point Four was an extension of the Marshall Plan.

44I extend my reading of Casablanca in these directions anddiscuss the work of McKay, Baker and Fauset in my forth-coming book Morocco Bound: Disorienting America’s Maghreb.

45Harmetz points out that the Casablanca production teamborrowed sets from The Desert Song (the Warner Brothers re-make of the 1929 Warner Bros. film by the same title), whichhad just finished shooting before Casablanca’s shooting began.According to Frank Miller’s Casablanca: As Time Goes By (At-lanta: Turner, 1992), a commemorative edition, Warner Bros.’research department did see photographs of French colonialarchitecture (noted by Otero-Pailos).

46For a compelling ethnography of cinema-going in north-ern Nigeria that theorizes the cinema house’s particularity, andemphasizes the locatedness of cinema-watching, see BrianLarkin, “Theaters of the Profane: Cinema and Colonial Ur-

banism,” Visual Anthropology Review 14:2 (1998-99): 46-62.47See Paul Rabinow, French Modern: Norms and Forms of the

Social Environment (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989), particularlythe chapter “Governing Morocco.”

48Abdallah Laroui, The History of the Maghrib: An InterpretiveEssay, trans. Ralph Manheim (Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress, 1977).

49Considerations of Casablanca’s relationship to the city arecommon in travel guides and the popular press, where a Nexissearch turns up many short travel articles over the last coupleof decades by Americans gone searching for Casablanca inCasablanca. A repetition of this pattern occurs more subtly inacademic considerations of Casablanca that are entranced bythe prospect of finding “postmodern” repetitions of Casa-blanca in Casablanca. Jorge Otero-Pailos begins an article onFrench colonial architecture and Hollywood cinema setbuilding with a reference to the Casablanca Hyatt, which heclaims “could be anywhere in the world.” He misses any senseof Moroccan particularity to the Moroccan quoting of thehypercanonical film. The traveler in the narrative with whichOtero-Pailos begins his article is “probably an American,”who looks intently at a “young professional woman…sippinga Martini,” while a bartender, whose nationality is not named,“quietly smiles” at the American’s stare. The placelessness ofthis “postmodern” place is made possible by the critic’s aver-sion of his eye from the Moroccan staff of the bar; the pianoplayer to whom journalists invariably refer is replaced in thisarticle by an “almost imperceptibl[e]…PA system” playing“As Time Goes By.” Thus, Otero-Pailos unwittingly replicatesthe racialized logic of Casablanca’s structuring love triangle, thesmiling Moroccan bartender now in the place of the desex-ualized “cupid” Sam (see Gooding-Williams, “Black Cupids,White Desires,” for a reading of Sam as cupid). Jorge Otero-Pailos, “Casablanca’s Régime: The Shifting Aesthetics of Po-litical Technologies (1907-1943),” Postmodern Culture 8:2(1998). Homi Bhabha, in his essay “The Postcolonial and thePostmodern,” similarly confuses the city of Casablanca withthe logic of the film, though Bhabha equates “Casablanca”(inconsistently italicized) with a Western conceptualization offixed time. In a discussion of structures of temporality,Bhabha distinguishes between the temporality of Tangier andthe fixity of time in Casablanca. What becomes clear is thatTangier for Bhabha is equated with Barthes’s invocation ofthe city in The Pleasure of the Text and Casablanca with the lineof dialogue “Play It Again, Sam” (famously not in the film)and the lyrics of “As Time Goes By” (written by HermanHupfeld in 1931 for a Broadway play, recorded in the thirtiesby Rudy Vallee, but made famous by Dooley Wilson’s rendi-tion in Casablanca). Bhabha doesn’t of course trace the lyricthrough its various incarnations; rather he writes in the“Tangiers or Casablanca?” section of the essay: “There is,however, an instructive difference between Casablanca andTangiers. In Casablanca the passage of time preserves theidentity of language; the possibility of naming over time isfixed in the repetition: ‘You must remember this….’” Therepetition of “Casablanca,” for Bhabha, is “an invocation tosimilitude,” whereas “Tangiers [via Barthes] opens up dis-junctive, incommensurable relations of spacing and tempo-


rality within the sign.” Bhabha, The Location of Culture (NY:Routledge, 1994), 182. Though Bhabha’s delineation of time-lag challenges the concept of historical agency and politicalcritique outside of theory, I think it fair to take him to task forcollapsing these two major and vibrant cities, with markedlydifferent (yet intertwined) political histories, with two textsthat are so unconcerned with the specificity of their popula-tions as subjects or subjectivities. It is precisely from withinthe political and cultural histories of those populations—thepolitical and cultural particularities of the International Zoneperiod in Tangier; the crucial turning point in the Moroccanstruggle for independence emerging from Mohammed V’s1947 visit to Tangier; the rapid and enormous populationboom in Casablanca since its establishment by the French as aport in the early twentieth century—that critiques of Westernfixity of time emerge, as I am attempting to show.

50Brian Larkin, “Indian Films and Nigerian Lovers: Mediaand the Creation of Parallel Modernities,” Africa 67, no. 3(1997); reprinted in The Anthropology of Globalization, ed. Jona-than Xavier Inda and Renato Rosaldo (New York: Blackwell,2002), 353.

51Moulay Driss Jaïdi, Public(s) et Cinéma (Rabat: Al Majal,1992).

52For an account of economic pressures on Morocco todevelop the tourist industry in the late 1980s, see FrancisGhiles, “Desert Kingdom Sells Itself as Tourist Oasis,” TheFinancial Times (London), 9 February 1989, I:8. A less heraldedand significant portion of the tourist economy (not discussedby Ghiles) is that of Gulf Arab men, who bring with them adifferent set of cultural stereotypes about Morocco, namelythat it is a liberal Muslim Arab country where alcohol andprostitution are openly tolerated.

53This differs noticeably from the Tunisian tourism indus-try, which takes an apparently nationalist approach and sati-rizes Western stereotypes (through its many silly camel t-shirtsand toys) while presenting a corrective image of Tunisia inmuseums. Algeria aggressively discouraged foreign tourism inthe 1990s, both in policy and in practice, with its “no visas, novisitors” policy. In 1997, Libya began marketing itself forinternational tourism, emphasizing its Mediterranean beaches.

54In the early to mid-1980s, Hyatt Regency purchased andremodeled the former “Hôtel Casablanca,” itself built in the1970s, on what is now known as Place des Nations Unies,abutting the medina. The Casablanca-theme bar was not a partof the earlier hotel. For early press accounts of the bar, seeJudith Miller, “From Soup to Stew, A Gastronome’s Oasis,”New York Times, 31 August 1986, sec. 10, p. 12; ChristopherWalker, “Casablanca’s Dream of Humphrey Bogart Fades asTime Goes By,” The Times (London), 23 May 1989.

55This parallels the historical amnesia regarding AfricanAmerican interest and involvement in the Soviet Union. KateBaldwin recovers what she calls the “Soviet archive of BlackAmerica” and thereby remaps “Black Atlantic” models oftransnationalism in Kate A. Baldwin, Beyond the Color Line andthe Iron Curtain: Reading Encounters between Black and Red, 1922-1963 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002).

56Quoted in Terril Jones, “As Time Goes By, CasablancaLure Grows,” Chicago Sun-Times, (9 January 1993), sec. 2, p. 23.

57For discussions of French colonial architecture as inter-pretation of Moroccan culture and means of political control,the major texts are Gwendolyn Wright, The Politics of Design inFrench Colonial Urbanism (Chicago: University of ChicagoPress, 1991) and Rabinow, French Modern.

58Al-Hubb fi al-Dar al-Baida, written, directed, and edited by‘Abd al-Qader Laqt‘a (Abdelkader Lagtaa); cinematographyAbdelkrim Derkaoui; starring Ahmed Naji, Mouna Fettou,Mohamed Faouzi (Cinestar [Morocco], 1991).

59Morocco has a population of approximately 31 millionpeople and is a significant market in itself.

60My translations from colloquial Moroccan Arabic.61Indeed, in panning Laqt‘a’s 1999 film Les Casablancais,

Karim Al Amali complains that Laqt‘a exploits the equationof Casablanca with the romance of cinema, due to its asso-ciation with Casablanca, and yet fails to justify locating his ownexposition of social problems in the particularity of contem-porary Casablanca. Al Amali’s formulation is complex; heestablishes Casablanca as a film thoroughly detached from Mo-roccan reality, yet one which is “the true performance of spe-cialists in the ‘cinematic dream.’” Al Amali critiques Laqt‘aharshly for leaving behind the realm of cinematic dream(which would include nightmares as an antipode), and moving“simply to a gratuitous hatred” for his subject. Karim alAmali, “De la Romance au Cauchemar,” Maroc Hebdo, 393 (12-18 November 1999), 35.

62Hans Wehr, A Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic, ed. J.Milton Cowan (Beirut: Librarie du Liban, 1980), 786.

63For discussions of U.S. censorship of wartime films andjournalism, see John Morton Blum, V Was for Victory: Politicsand American Culture During World War II (NY: Harcourt BraceJovanovich, 1976); and George H. Roeder, Jr., The CensoredWar: American Visual Experience During World War II (New Ha-ven: Yale University Press, 1993).

64Sharpe, “Is the United States Postcolonial?” in King, Post-colonial America, 107-8.

65King, Postcolonial America, 9.


An Exercise in Fictional Liminality: the Postcolonial, thePostcommunist, and Romania’s Threshold Generation

ADRIAN OTOIU

Five Questions and a RealizationIn the late 1990s I was working on a critical study on

the fiction of the so-called “Generation of the Eight-ies,”1 an informal literary group who made their debutin the mid-1980s, and whose experiment in prose andpoetry was to alter Romania’s literary landscape in thedecade to come.2 Practicing a self-styled “textualist en-gineering,” blending intertextual games with a zest for“live broadcasts” of unmediated reality, and deliberatelyblurring the borderline between fiction and fact, therepresentatives of the Generation of the Eighties (that Iwill subsequently refer to as “G80”) have earned criticalacclaim as the first practitioners of postmodern writingin Romania.3 Uneasily placed at the threshold of tworegimes, the group was the last significant literary gen-eration produced in Romania’s forty-year period ofcommunist dictatorship and the first to confront theunsettling ambiguities of the postcommunist era. Underthe impact of this dramatic political change, most G80writers, such as Mircea Nedelciu, Gheorghe Crãciun,Cristian Teodorescu, and Viorel Marineasa, have gradu-ally abandoned much of their textualist experimentationand self-referential games (often suspected of escapism)and have turned towards a more overt and straightfor-ward grasp of reality. The monolithic appearance of thegroup’s beginnings has dissolved into an array of idio-syncratic styles. Such changes have rendered earlier criti-cal perceptions obsolete; the labels tagged to theirnames now seemed no longer appropriate. “Textualism,”the all-encompassing label of the group’s beginnings,4no longer applied to those G80 writers who had tradedradical experiment against more reader-friendly writing.If “textualism” seemed too small an umbrella, then“postmodernism” was too wide a critical tarpaulin underwhich the group’s identity was lost,5 as was its humanistengagement in the quest for sense within the senselessconfines of dictator Ceausescu’s Romania. It is preciselythis redefinition of the human in hard times that “theNew Anthropocentrism,” a term coined by AlexandruMusina, attempted to cover,6 yet not without overstating

the scope of this “anthropogenetic performance.”7

Other theorists insisted on the group’s anti-hermeneuticrealism and described G80 fiction as reiterating the so-called “prose of authenticity” that had been practiced byseveral great inter-war novelists like Mircea Eliade.8

Growing out of my dissatisfaction with all these ill-matched labels, my critical enterprise aimed to identify amore precise and flexible concept that would cut acrossthe variety of G80 fictional modes. I also meant to shiftthe focus from the group’s center to its fringe zones,insisting on its marginal or provincial figures (such asPetru Cimpoesu, Viorel Marineasa or Florin Slapac), onits “lost stars” (like Constantin Stan or Mihai Mãniutiu),on its lone wolves (unaffiliated figures like Dan Grãdi-naru or Ovidiu Hurduzeu) and on older mavericks thatthe group annexed as “precursors of G80” (StefanAgopian, Bedros Horasangian). All these expansionsand focus shifts did but further complicate the alreadydiverse landscape I was attempting to describe. Wasthere any invisible thread to tie together all this seem-ingly irreducible variety of G80 writing? Was there anycommon figura mentis of the Generation of the Eighties?

An intriguing aspect of G80 literature is that it en-compasses both textual experimentation and a form ofraw realism tagged “authenticism.” Most critics usedthese “incompatible” modes to divide the Generationinto “textualists” and “authenticists.”9 Yet most G80authors fall into both groups. How could it be possiblethat the aesthetics of authenticity should be based on apoetics of textual manipulation? Authenticity and textual-ism seemed to be polar opposites, never to meet—likethe two sides of a sheet of paper. I wrote the two wordson the two sides of a strip of paper that lay on my desk.Never to meet, indeed.... except... except if one twiststhe strip into a Möbius band! I pasted two ends andformed the well-known band, and now both wordscould miraculously meet on the same surface. This wasit: in order to coexist, the incompatible ingredients ofG80 poetics needed a different type of space. A surfacein a different geometry, where oppositions as authenticity


vs. textualism should be dissolved. A geometry to replacethe logic of either/or with that of both/and. A thresholdspace, neither in, neither out. Threshold. Limen, theLatin for threshold. The word sparked a flash of seren-dipitous10 realization:Liminality–that’s what unites the Generation of the Eighties!

Indeed—as this exclamation (the first in my series)implied—everything about the Generation of theEighties suggested liminality and its plethora of associa-tions: ambiguity, hybridity, transgression. Liminality is akey term of postcolonial theory, used by theorists suchas Homi K. Bhabha to describe “the in-between spaces”of cultural ambiguity where diasporic and migrant iden-tities, hovering in the indecision of in-betweenness, areshaped. Postcolonial theorists re-valorize the thresholdand the interstice, purging it of its negative connotationsof hesitation and vacillation, and affirm it as a privilegedspace of cultural renewal. Hybridity had undergone asimilar process: no longer a despicable debilitating mix-ing of bloods and races, its potential for regenerationhas now come to the forefront.

Many G80 stories are located in threshold spaces, inno man’s lands; their protagonists are either borderlinepersonalities or deliberate declassés self-relegated to thegray zones of society, caught in dilemmatic situationsthey prefer to leave unresolved. Moreover, the narrativestrategies of these texts tend to disorient readers byplacing them in the liminal spaces of indecision. Thenarrator’s position suggests a similar hesitation; as nar-rators alternatively strengthen and relax their control oftheir narrative, they are both insiders and outsiders inthe stories they unfold, staying both visible and invisi-ble.11 Once I had discovered the optics of liminality, thehitherto blurred landscape of G80 fiction suddenly ap-peared with great clarity and coherence. And indeed theidea of essential liminality of G80 writing was to be-come the conceptual backbone of my future book.

The flipside of my triumphant recognition was a se-ries of questions that attempted to contemplate a widerpicture:

Is there anything liminal in Romania’s wider context (be ithistorical, geographical or cultural) that might account for theliminality of G80 narratives?

Which led me to a second question about the legitimacyof my method:

Since liminality is chiefly a concept used in postcolonial theory,are we entitled to use it outside the postcolonial sphere?

The question was echoed several months later when, ona Budapest-Stuttgart plane, I read a chapter in AnthonyK. Appiah’s My Father’s House whose title, “The Post-modern and the Postcolonial,”12 promised an explora-tion of the possible relationships between these twoample paradigms of the contemporary age. Reunitedsuperficially by the same delusive prefix, yet divided by adifferent way of confronting reality imaginatively, the

postmodern and the postcolonial seemed to defy suchcomparison. Yet Appiah identified the similarities: “thepost in postcolonial, like the post in postmodern is the postof space clearing gesture;”13 besides, even if for dis-similar reasons, both paradigms are postrealist, in thesense that they are (in Ihab Hassan’s terms) anti-mimetic.14 I found the last argument particularly apt todescribe a similar aspect of postcommunist fiction: in-deed its postrealism amounted to the rejection of so-cialist realism. But then I wondered if one could drawsuch parallels; my third question was an extension ofthe previous one:

Is the “post” in postcommunist the same as the “post” in post-colonial?

On arrival, I flipped the book shut and told myself thatthere was no better chance to find an answer to thisquestion than to plunge into the seminar on The Trans-latability of Cultures for which I had come. But as I wassoon to discover with disappointment, the cross-culturaldialogue that the seminar fellows were trying to establishonly ping-ponged between nationals from the formercolonies and representatives of the former colonialpowers, while it simply ignored us, the few scholarsfrom the former Eastern block. My appeal for a dia-logue that should include issues relevant to the post-communist world was met with a shrug or a frown. WeEastern Europeans felt that in the perfectly choreo-graphed volley exchanged between the former colonizerand colonial subject every movement had been carefullyrehearsed, every new coinage carefully minted. It wasnot, as I had first thought, that Eastern Europe simplydid not seem to be on the map of cultures worth trans-lating. The real reason for this exclusion was the lack ofa shared language. Our colleagues from South Africaand England were united by the common theoreticalidiom of postcolonial discourse that invited commonreflections. We were no more capable to conceptualizeour recent traumatic communist past than to describethe dilemmas of postcommunist transition. We soondiscovered that we even had this language problemamong ourselves. One American colleague noted theabsurdity of the situation as reflected in our eveningsout: while the former colonizers and colonized werediscussing postcolonial matters over a glass of Swabianwine at “Mon Repos,” the few postcommunist fellowssat isolated from one another on park benches anddrank nothing but thin air. So then my fourth question:

Why is postcommunist theory such a feeble companion voice inthe dialogue with the postcolonial?

When, years later, together with some of the StuttgartSeminar fellows I organized a summer course aiming todeal specifically with the relationship between postcolo-nial and postcommunist ethnicity,15 we noted that the“language problem” still existed among ourselves. De-spite their common post-totalitarian legacy, the Latvian

Otoiu: An Exercise in Fictional Liminality 89

could hardly find common theoretical ground with theArmenian or the Croatian. Moreover, some of the Rus-sians felt incriminated when we tried to describe theUSSR as an imperial and possibly colonial power. Hencemy fifth and last question:

Why is postcommunist theory so fragmented and so slow toemerge?

As one can easily note, my recognition and the ques-tions it entailed are landmarks of a route that took mefrom a serendipitous intuition of the liminality of recentRomanian prose to the acknowledgement of the liminalin postcolonial theory and then to the possible relationbetween the postcolonial and the postcommunist. Imoved from one local observation to a wider contextand then to an even wider comparison. It was not a de-ductive route, but an inductive one.

But even when venturing to the wider context, I triedto keep my initial bearings, for my main interest is toquestion the common application of liminality to post-colonial realities, to assess the validity of its modifiedapplication to postcommunist contexts and eventually topropose my own model of liminality, which is anchoredin narratology and reception theory, as defining the de-liberately ambiguous construction of both the narratorand the narratee in fictions that cultivate not justthreshold spaces but also threshold discourses. Since abetter understanding of my approach would require adeductive rather than inductive route, let me now retracemy steps backwards and spool my questions in reverse.

Postcommunist theory and its DiscontentsWhy is postcommunist theory so fragmented and so slow toemerge?

The dramatic events of 1989—the fall of the BerlinWall, the Velvet Revolution in Prague and the Romanianblood bath—put an end to forty years of red nightmarethroughout the former Eastern Block by means of abrutal yet symbolic act: on Christmas Day, in a casernein Wallachia, after a mock trial worthy of Alfred Jarry’sUbu Roi, the execution squad not only shot NicolaeCeausescu, Romania’s Dracula redivivus, but seemed toaim at a larger evil, as if to “nail down the vampire be-fore the sun sets and he learns to fly again” (as the pro-tagonist of Julian Barnes’ The Porcupine muses).16 Thevampire of totalitarianism once nailed down, many ofits subjects would have expected to witness its thoroughand meticulous dissection. For the average citizen thisamounted to a “trial of communism,” while for the in-tellectual this would mean a rationalization and con-ceptualization of both the pre-1989 stasis and thepost-1989 transition phase. However, in most of thecountries of Central and Eastern Europe the dissectionof recent history never thoroughly occurred.

Many intellectuals had also expected that the demiseof Soviet-inspired communism would be lavished with

the same amount of scholarship as the one thatemerged in the wake of the collapse of the colonialsystem. In other words, many thought that the problemsof the former Soviet block were to inspire theoreticalconstructions as encompassing and widely applicable tothe variety of local contexts as were postcolonial studiesto the dissimilar experiences of Nigeria, India, Morocco,or Haiti.

However, none of this happened. A lot of primarywork was done to recover captivity narratives, Gulagpoetry, oratures of displaced populations, diaries of thedisgraced bourgeois intelligentsia, as well as more elabo-rated samizdat texts and so-called “drawer literature”; thecritical analyses that tried to deconstruct this painfulhistory remained confined to certain geographical areas,without consistent efforts to extend this reflection tothe whole ex-communist block. In other words, Post-Soviet Studies did not intersect with Balkan and EasternEurope Studies. Mikhail Epstein and Chingiz Aitmatovalike stay focussed on Russia alone. Vladimir Tismãne-anu’s critique concentrates on Romania, while SlavojZizek’s critique of ideology only occasionally touchesthe Slovenian soil. Even Maria Todorova, whose seminalImagining the Balkans17 opens the widest perspectives forsuch a comparative reflection, remains strongly an-chored in the reality of South-Eastern Europe.

One explanation for this paradoxical lack of conver-gence might be that, since they had been yoked togetherand forced to revolve on the same orbit for so manydecades, the countries of the now exploded “Sovietblock” have been struggling to follow their own courseindependently, that it is only natural that such a cen-trifugal thrust should ensue after so many years of cen-tripetal coercion. Besides, one feels that the considerableanalytical effort already deployed was not doubled by asimilar synthetic work. Generalizations are scarce, as areelaborations of critical utensils of wide applicability.The discourse that might enable this shattered landscapeto coalesce into a coherent picture is yet to be articu-lated.

Why is postcommunist theory such a feeble companion voice in thedialogue with the postcolonial?

It is obvious that in the thirteen years since the fall ofthe Berlin Wall the yet-to-be-coalesced discipline ofpostcommunist studies has failed to produce a theoreti-cal construction that should have acquired the intellec-tual force, cultural prestige, and scholarly coherence thatpostcolonial studies have in the Western world. Thereare several reasons for this failure. One could blame iton the irreducible complexity and variety of nationalsituations in Eastern Europe. Indeed, no country here islike the other. Take the cases of language balance in thepre- and post-1989 period in three countries with sig-nificant Romanian populations: Romania, Moldavia, and


Ukraine.Romania’s case is the least ambiguous: during the

communist regime, the Romanian language—mothertongue to some 90 percent of its 23 million inhabi-tants—was not threatened by a colonial language, exceptfor a few years in the Stalinist period, when (with Soviettroops stationed there until 1959) Russian became thelanguage of scientific and technical communication. Forthe three decades that followed, the official policyslightly deviated from the Soviet line, earning Ceausescuthe bogus fame abroad of a reformist maverick, while infact he grew increasingly despotic at home. Posing as aninternational mediator abroad, Ceausescu was oppres-sively nationalist in Romania. Even if his xenophobianever resulted in solutions as violent as the displacementof the Romanian-German ethnics from Banat to theBãrãgan lowlands that had occurred in the mid 1950s,18

the dictator initiated a low-profile program of assimila-tion of ethnic minorities that resulted in a restriction oftheir educational and cultural rights. Population dis-placements from the poorer regions of Oltenia orMoldova to the wealthier Transylvania were triggered byeconomic incentives rather than force, and their hiddenaim was to dilute the non-Romanian component of thismulti-ethnic province. To many of these ethnic groupsin Transylvania, Romanian became the language of theoppressor. After 1989, the adoption of alternative lan-guages in public administration in Transylvania was metwith hostility by the majority, which also regarded withsuspicion the suggestion of a multicultural solution tothe province’s multi-ethnic mix.

Moldavia or Bessarabia, a traditional province ofRomania, was annexed by the Soviet Union in 1940 andduring the process of Sovietization that ensued, a quar-ter of a million Moldavians were deported, ethnic Rus-sians were settled in the region, the Cyrillic alphabet wasimposed on the Moldavian language, and Russian be-came the official language. Between 1989 and 1990,Moldavia regained its independence, its language andthe Latin alphabet. The complicated ethnic mix left inplace by the Soviet policy of denationalization and Rus-sification had a violent backlash in the 1990s, fuelingethnic tensions, and a war with the self-proclaimed stateof Transdniestr. The newly regained prominence of theso-called Moldavian language (a subdialect of Roma-nian) has been constantly challenged by Moscow-backedRussian ethnics.19

Even grimmer was the lot of Bukovina, the north-eastern province of Romania annexed by the SovietUnion in 1947. After the demise of the USSR, the newlyestablished state of Ukraine has struggled to assert itsnational identity at the expense of minimizing culturaldifference, thus continuing the policy of assimilation ofethnic minorities perfected by the Soviet Union. Iso-lated, despised, denied cultural rights, and not even rec-

ognized as an ethnic group, the Romanian communityof Bukovina is facing imminent cultural extinction; theRomanian language of this community, which survivedfor decades downgraded to the status of household andparochial patois, seems likely to disappear shortly.

Thus, in these three provinces—Transylvania, Bes-sarabia, and Bukovina—the same language, Romanian,is in turn perceived as a colonial language that stiflescultural difference, an indigenous language regaining itsdignity, and a native vernacular pushed into oblivion.These examples epitomize the insolvable diversity ofsituations, which is probably one of the main causes forthe failure of this part of Europe to coalesce its multi-farious experience into a synthetic theoretical reflection.

One more footnote to this dispersion: theorists ofpostcolonialism, despite the diversity of their ethnicbackgrounds, ended up largely writing in English orFrench and working in Western universities; hence thefeeling of homogeneity-in-diversity that one has abouttheir writing. The theorists of postcommunism write ina diversity of languages among which translations areseldom made; this is why synthetic or contrastive ap-proaches–like Victor Neumann’s recent comparativestudy on the history of the political thought in Centraland Eastern Europe20–fail to cross physically the veryborders that they successfully transgress and obliteratetheoretically. The remarkable editorial work led by thereflection group The Third Europe in Timisoara21 hasbeen struggling to assert the idea of a Central Europeanidentity, by making available to the reader a vast varietyof texts created in this half-mythical “Mitteleuropa”; yet,since their publications are in Romanian, their reader-ship is necessarily confined to speakers of this language.

Thirteen years after the demise of the Eastern Block,a lucid spectator can not help noting that the recenthistory of this large part of Europe is sinking back intoa sort of dubious, Huntingtonian gray zone. It is sad butprobably natural that, in this age when the Great Narra-tives were proclaimed dead, there should be no “masternarrative” left to account for the recent fates of some115 million inhabitants (or nearly 200 million, if oneincludes the Soviet split-ups from Vilnius to Odessa).While postcolonial studies swelled up considerably toinclude nations such as Canada or Ireland, whose colo-nial past is anything but recent (then why not medievalEngland, as Jeffrey J. Cohen suggested), the postcom-munist states are lingering in limbo disputed amongcompeting disciplines that fail to encompass them all.Thus post-Soviet studies seem to be a better definedfield, yet they omit the whole of Eastern Europe, whileBalkan and Southeastern European studies ignore eve

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rything to the north of the Danube. Well representedworldwide, Slavic studies might seem to do better justiceto the prevailing Slavic population of the region, but stillleave aside between 35 and 47 million people that speak


languages belonging to the Finno-Ugric (Hungarians),Romance (Romanians and “Moldavians”) or Balticgroups (Latvians, Lithuanians, and Estonians). Such ex-clusion is not simply regrettable, but could turn out tobe damaging, as Baudrillard put it in a form that ishalf-prophetic, half-playful: “this thawing of the Eastcould prove to be harmful in the long run and, like car-bon gases in the higher layers of the atmosphere, maycreate a political greenhouse effect, a rewarming of hu-man relations on the planet through the melting downof Communist ice fields and thereby flood the shores ofthe West.”22

A Dilemmatic Encounter: The Postcommunist andthe PostcolonialIs the “post” in postcommunist the same as the “post” in postcolo-nial?

In purely historical, economic and societal terms, thecolonial experience and the communist experiment havedistinct profiles that cannot be conflated. The ideologiesthat put them into orbit are obviously different. Coloni-alism is rooted in capitalist ideology whereas the com-munist experiment claims to represent a final transcen-dence of capitalism. The former produced a rhetoric ofdifference, constructing the Other as antagonisticallydifferent; the latter employed an egalitarian discourseand purportedly aimed to abolish all difference. Raceand ethnicity issues are central in the colonial order, butseldom appear in the official communist agenda. How

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ever, one should beware of the misleading rhetoric ofcommunism, a rhetoric whose terms must often be readin reverse: the oxymoronic “fight for peace” meant ag-gressive armament; another unlikely pair, “democraticcentralism” amounted to ubiquitous state control anddespotism; the flipside of egalitarian rhetoric was politi-cal cleansing and the Gulag.

I would argue moreover that different historicalforces may end up producing similar effects. From theeconomic and political standpoint, ancient Rome, theso-called “classical” Aztec age, and the British(neo)classical period have little in common; yet we usethe same term (“classical”) to define them, thus ac-knowledging our intuition that their architecture, litera-ture, and arts have much in common, even if they wereinspired by dissimilar realities. Consequently I do notthink it is illegitimate for us to analyze these effects bymeans of similar conceptual tools. Indeed if two dis-eases happen to produce the same symptoms, we tendto describe those symptoms in the same terms.

Postcommunist studies should emerge not as a sub-sidiary of postcolonial studies—for their respectivecontexts are far too different—but as a discipline capa-ble of entertaining a fruitful exchange of ideas withpostcolonial theory. Therefore, postcolonial and post-communist studies should intersect not in order to pro-

duce reductionist approaches to their object, but to en-rich the effectiveness of their critical perceptions bywidening their respective contexts. Such cross-pollinations and theoretical hybridizations can but bene-fit both these fields of reflection.Since liminality is chiefly a concept used in postcolonial theory, arewe entitled to use it outside the postcolonial sphere?

In this age of endless chains of semantic appropria-tions, borrowing from ever more remote disciplines iscommon. One cannot help noticing the enormous ex-change of terminology between disciplines that bearonly distant resemblance. I think we have every right toborrow postcolonial terminology and even to adapt it toour needs as long as it casts a new light on the realitieswe scrutinize. Thus a term like hybridity is not the prop-erty of postcolonial theorists any more than that of thebiologists that first circulated it. Neither was it first putinto use in cultural theory by Homi Bhabha, but byLatin American commentators of the phenomena ofmestizaje, indigenismo, diversalite, creolite, and raza cósmica.23

The career of liminality is even more complicated. De-spite its air of novelty, liminality—a concept often con-fused with “limit condition,” marginality, or limes24—isin fact near centenary. It was in 1908 that Arnold vanGennep25 derived it from limen (Latin for threshold) andmade it the pivotal term of his analysis of the rites ofpassage; these would consist of three stages: (1) theseparation or pre-liminal stage, when the person or thegroup detaches itself from an order of the point of so-cial structure; (2) the threshold or liminal stage, when thesubject of the ritual is in an ambiguous position, nolonger a member of the old order, and not having yetattained the new one; and (3) the reaggregation orpost-liminal stage that marks the insertion into the newsocial order.

“Rediscovered” in the late sixties by the anthropolo-gist Victor Turner, liminality was to become the focalpoint of his studies on ritual.26 Turner suggests that thevery identity of the liminal subject is paradoxical andambiguous: “Liminal entities are neither here nor there;they are betwixt and between the positions assigned andarrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial.”27

In this phase of “no longer/not yet” the ambiguity istotal: the liminal subjects are neither dead nor alive, andsimultaneously they are both dead and alive; their sex,rank, or social position are equally equivocal. One ofTurner’s main suggestions, later to be developed by Mi-hai Spariosu,28 is that, in the liminal phase, the antago-nistic tensions between polar opposites are neutralizedin an almost impossible balance.

Homi Bhabha adopted the limen to describe the“in-between spaces” where the strategies of identity areelaborated,29 the “initiatory interstices,” the “boundary[that] becomes the place from which something beginsits presencing,”30 or (with a metaphor reshaped after


Clifford Geertz)31 “the amniotic structure of culturalspacing—a watery skin if ever there was one—a “dif-ference” that is at once liminal and fluid.”32 Even ifBhabha confines its applicability to the point of contactof two cultures (diasporic, migrant, postcolonial) andthe equivocal identities it generates, his notion of limi-nality is disturbingly apt to characterize the EasternEuropean space.

Stalled in In-betweenness: Romania and the Bal-kansIs there anything liminal in Romania’s wider context (be it his-torical, geographical or cultural) that might account for the limi-nality of G80 narratives?

“What an extraordinary episode, this thawing of thecountries of the East, this thawing of freedom!” JeanBaudrillard’s words seem to echo the engrossment ofthe public imagination in the events of 1989, but thenturn to a cautionary tone: “But what becomes of free-dom once it is thawed out? A dangerous operation thatmay produce some rather ambiguous results.”33 Indeed,one has the feeling that 1989 was one of the few unam-biguous moments in the recent history of the former“Soviet satellites.” This short-lived moment of exhilara-tion surfaced amidst a sea of historical and geopoliticalambiguity.

In a chapter dealing with self-designations of the Bal-kan nations, Maria Todorova noted as amazingly recur-rent the perception of “the state of transition, com-plexity, mixture, ambiguity” that was resentedthroughout history as “an abnormal condition” or “astigma.”34 This transition is to be read both spatially andtemporally. Geographically, it refers to “the featurecommon to all Balkan nations, the self-perception ofbeing a crossroads of civilizational contacts, of havingthe character of a bridge between cultures,”35 that is,between East and West, Islam and Christianity. Tempo-rally, it represents “a bridge between stages of growth,”where the Balkans seem to be suspended over a civiliza-tional gap in a never-finished movement, appearing notjust as “backward,” but also as “half-made” and “semi-developed.”36

Located geographically outside the Balkan peninsulaproper, Romania shares many civilizational features withthis region, as authors like Mircea Muthu have longdemonstrated.37 Yet to a great extent, Balkan and Bal-kanism remain designations that most Romanians rejectwith indignation. Opinion leaders in both the academicsphere and the media tend to identify the proximity ofthe Balkans as a historical mishap rather than an op-portunity, and identify Balkanism with Byzantinescheming and institutionalized corruption. Whether theyidentify themselves with the Balkans or with the moreappealing space of Mitteleuropa, the Romanians stillview their position in Europe as peripheral. Lucian

Boia’s interpretation of Romania is that of a “border-land of Europe,”38 which is “at the same time Balkan,Eastern, and Central European, without fully belongingto either of these divisions,”39 a perception shared byanother historian, Neagu Djuvara, who places Romania“between the Orient and the Occident.”40

Perceptions of Romania (or rather of its central-western province of Transylvania) as a part of Mitteleu-ropa also imply a similar peripherality. Cornel Ungure-anu polemically prefers a “Mitteleuropa of the periph-eries” over a “Central Europe” that is not only “a rapedOccident” (as Kundera put it) but also a space ampu-tated of its margins. A periphery that, paradoxically, “as-sumes the condition of the Center.” 41 In his controver-sial The Clash of Civilizations, Samuel Huntington42 alsoplaced Romania in a no man’s land: its Western part,Transylvania is still a part of Western Christianity, whileMoldova and Wallachia are undeniably a part of EasternChristianity, the Carpathian ridge marking the dividebetween two civilizations.

Not only a threshold between the Orient and the Oc-cident, but also a defensive frontier of the latter—this ishow Romanians perceive their historical role. This led tothe partly self-victimizing, partly self-heroicizing mythof “the sacrificed nation” that now suffers economicallybecause it assumed the historical role of “defendingEuropean civilization.”43 Typically, the Balkan nationsbemoan “having sacrificed themselves to save Europefrom the incursions of Asia,”44 a sacrifice that resultedin “the perpetual Balkan lament of in-betweenness,”45

translated into the metaphor of a bridge over the chasmbetween civilizations.

A book that is inevitable in this discussion is MariaTodorova’s Imagining the Balkans, a study of imagology(or xenology, as Munasu Duala-M’bedy termed it) that isprobably one of the few attempts to relate postcolonialtheory to an area traditionally excluded from its sphere.In this dense, fact-packed, and inspirational volume,Todorova draws a panorama of the successive layers ofperception of the Balkans that led at the beginning ofthe twentieth century to their negative stereotyping andstigmatizing as the “powder keg” of Europe, the back

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ward, violent and nationalist “excrement of Europe.”Solidly anchored in documentation of amazing vastness,Todorova never yields to the temptation of facile simpli-fication and advances only cautiously into generaliza-tion.

Todorova uses Edward Said’s Orientalism as a scaf-folding to erect her own arguments, but soon adopts acritical attitude toward it, which prevents her study frombecoming but another epigonic rewriting of this classicof postcolonial theory. Gauging the Balkans against theSaidian yardstick, Todorova records more differencesthan similarities. Thus, unlike the abstract and idealizedOrient, the Balkans display historical and geographical


concreteness; such concreteness could feed neither es-capist reverie nor become a metaphor of the forbidden.While “there was an explicit relationship between theOrient and the feminine,”46 the Balkans possess “a dis-tinctly male appeal,”47 a repulsive and primitive mascu-linity. Even the faintest resemblance between the two isdismantled in its finest shades: the mystery that seems,like the Orient, to pervade the Balkans is “but the re-flected light of the Orient.”48

If the relationship between the West and the East isone of opposition and antagonism, the Balkans are feltas a transition, a degradé of the West, because, as To

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dorova insists, Orientalism implies “a difference be-tween types,” whereas, “Balkanism treats the differenceswithin one type.”49 This is why “unlike Orientalism,which is a discourse about an imputed opposition, Bal-kanism is a discourse about an imputed ambiguity.”50 Ina memorable phrase, Todorova shows that, while orien-talism is a way of confronting the Other, Balkanismengages with “the incomplete self.”51 Superbly phrasedand supported by a wealth of argument, the logic of thedemonstration is impeccable. And yet, I find surprisingthat Todorova fails to fully exploit the in-betweenness, am-biguity, and transition she so perceptively describes. Iwould argue that these characteristics of the Balkanscould be collapsed into a term that is almost absentfrom her discourse, but which comprises them all: limi-nality.

Actually Todorova mentions liminality in one instancealone: when she tries to align “the ambiguity of transi-tional states” to one of the three terms: liminality, mar-ginality, and the lowermost. Todorova prefers to identify thelowermost as best illustrating the Balkans. The lower-most—describing “the shadow, the structurally despisedalter-ego”52—enables her to develop her idea of thestigmatized self as the typical negative imago of the Bal-kans. Nevertheless, I will argue that it is liminality thatcoincides almost perfectly with her description and hasthe advantage of relating to similar conceptions in post-colonial theory. Liminality, hybridity, and ambiguity—keywords in postcolonial studies—might provide fruitfulpoints of intersection between postcolonial theory andpostcommunist realities as well as a vantage point forthe contemplation of Romania’s recent history.

“The former Soviet republic of Moldova…is acountry in a limbo,” is the striking line that opens thepresentation of this country in the Lonely Planet guide.53

While this assertion could apply equally well to almostany country in Eastern Europe, it is Romania that seemsto be the next best match. For Romania seems to havesecured its place in the limbo of a liminal n ei-ther-nor—neither fully Oriental, nor altogether Western.Romania’s liminal condition in terms of its geographicalposition, civilizational makeup, and historical role isdoubled by a similar “threshold” condition of compla-

cent ambiguity in terms of its contemporary economy,politics, and national psyche. Still lingering in the am-biguous gray zone of the “failed states,” Romania’seconomy could be said to be both capitalist and com-munist and, therefore, stalled in a threshold space whereopposites meet and coexist without annihilating eachother. Paradoxically, the country is in transition to amarket economy but still seems to be stagnating. It has afunctional democracy and yet has been shattered peri-odically by crises of anarchy (such as the miners’ foraysto Bucharest in 1990, 1991, and 1999). It is an oasis ofmulticultural harmony in the midst of nations torn byethnic hatred, which nevertheless has been the theaterof violent interethnic conflict (Târgu Mures 1990, re-peated conflicts with the Roma minority). Hybrid de-mocracy, hybrid economy, double-coded discourse, am-biguous position.

Hybridity, double-codedness, and ambiguity were in-gredients of everyday life under the Ceausescu regime,when experience was double-coded from the earliestage. Six-year-old children already knew that theCeausescu vilified at home as the-ogre-that-cuts-gas-and-electricity was unmentionable at school, where thesinister Mr. Hyde turned into a benign Dr Jekyll, “mostbeloved son of the nation” and “magisterial Helms-man.” Such a training in double-codedness was to de-velop in children the schizoid skills needed for survivalas adults. Almost every phrase of the official discoursehad to be read in the negative: “systematization of thevillages” meant indiscriminate demolishment ofchurches and farms and ghettoization of the farmers;“modernization of the Bucharest downtown area” wasthe official euphemism for razing hectares of old Ro

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manian architecture to erect instead the nightmarish“House of the People”; “free elections” amounted tothe confirmation of a single candidate of the only party.

The blurred borderline between the public and pri-vate spheres also placed people’s lives on the edge ofsurvival: the party “demographic policy” required gyne-cological control of every female patient; home con-sumption of electricity, gas, and food was strictly regu-lated by means of artificially-induced shortages; phoneswere bugged, typewriters were recorded with the police,home videos were regarded as a threat to “communistethics.” To the eyes of the Westerner, such deprivationsand invasions of privacy should have made life simplyimpossible. Yet, the Romanians survived, either by cir-cumventing the rules, or by adapting to them, whilesneering at their absurdity. However, this survival wasnot without a cost. The national virtue of non-violenceoften turned into resignation and fatalism. The typicalnational sport, “a face haz de necaz”—literally “to laughover one’s misery”—is responsible for the mushroom-ing of thousands of political jokes (probably the mostsucculent of Eastern Europe); while showing that the


Romanians were fully aware of the Ubuesque absurdi-ties of the regime (after all, the creator of the theater ofthe absurd, Eugène Ionesco, was of Romanian origin),these also vented out anger and frustration to the pointthat the whole pressure of misery was exhausted; this isprobably why Romania had the scantiest samizdat litera-ture, and the smallest number of dissidents. Thereforethe “skills” required for survival—ranging from theschizoid internalization of double-codedness to theparanoid fear of informers—left indelible marks on thepsyche of every citizen.

Artists were no exception. They were even more ex-posed, as the Chinese-style “cultural revolution” initi-ated by Ceausescu in the early seventies attempted toforce them into the role of party propagandists, eager topraise the “socialist achievements” and to support thecult of personality. Patriarchal, nationalist, xenophobic,and rudimentarily mimetic, the doctrine of “socialistrealism” seemed inescapable. Yet, artists survived too,but not without paying a price. The ideological censorshad a long list of banned words against which theygauged manuscripts; the list of unpalatable words in-cluded everyday terms that bore any reference to thechronic shortages that plagued the country: meat, oil,candy, heat. The mere mention of the “lover’s flesh” wasa crime, for the word “carne” (meaning both flesh andmeat) was blacklisted. When the official “suppression ofcensorship” was announced in the ‘80s, this euphemismconfirmed Romanians’ worst fears: now it was publish-ers who turned down every manuscript that containedtraces of subversion, whether real or imaginary. Soon itwas the writers themselves who stopped submittingsuch “hopeless” manuscripts; and before long they evenstopped writing such manuscripts, thus reaching theperverse stage of “self-censorship.”

Another way to flout censorship was to use allegory,parable, and encrypted reference to point to politicalrealities, therefore using double-codedness again. Suchromans à clef were the real bestsellers of the eighties andthey implied complicity with a reader who was both ableand willing to decipher such intricate Aesopian refer-ence. Sometimes a mere shift of period sufficed toevade censorship; the fad for the “novel of the obses-sive decade” allowed many authors to point to the evilsof the present by relegating them to the Stalinist fifties;often the reference was pushed further back, as in AlVlad’s Summer Chill54 (where a presentation of Hitler’scultural policy is a transparent allusion to Ceausescu’ssimilar practices), or in Ioan Grosan’s One Hundred Yearsat the Gates of the Orient55 (where the degraded politicalmores at the court of an imaginary Wallachian prince ofthe seventeenth century hint at contemporary Byzantinescheming).

The 1989 moment suddenly promised to resolvethese ambiguities, but soon afterwards they emerged

again. Eva Hoffman noted the paradoxical “acceptanceof ambiguity” in post-1989 Bulgaria, Hungary and Ro

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mania.56 Indeed, after 1989, Romania traded one type ofambiguity for another. Until then, the country was ap-plauded by the West as the maverick of the Easternblock (on account of Ceausescu’s refusal to join thetroops that invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968), when infact a severe crackdown on dissident voices and severeinfringements of human rights had long been the norm.After Romania’s dubious revolution!(itself another typeof equivocal event—half spontaneous popular uprising,half coup d’état concocted by second-line apparatchiks)the country has slipped back into a quagmire of ambi-guities and contradictions: a faltering market economycohabits with massively subsidized state-owned indus-trial mammoths; multiethnic Transylvania has been per-ceived as both an island of stability not affected by the“Balkan powder keg” syndrome, while it was also thescene of serious multiethnic trouble involving the Hun-garian minority and the Roma population; Romanianshave grown increasingly aware of their European voca-tion, while still waiting for an official “entrance toEurope.”

When someone inquires which of these contrastingcountries is Romania in reality, the best answer onecould give is: both. Romania is both a Balkan Land ofDracula “at the Gates of the Orient,” and a Europeannation. It is both modern and Western-oriented (thepolls indicate the greatest popular sympathy for NATOand the EU among CEE candidate states) and backwardand Oriental (even if this “Balkanism” is perceived herenegatively as part of a burdensome historical legacy);the Romanians feel they inhabit “some kind ofno-man’s land, not European at all, but not Asiatic atall.”57 It is both unitary and fragmented; tolerant andintolerant; capable of change and mired in stagnation;the transition to a market economy and democracy isboth too slow and too violent; these perceptions are notalways merely an effect of different viewpoints, or dif-ferent moments; very often they are simultaneous.

Just as in the case of postcolonial nations or of dias-poric groups, postcommunist identities are often pain-fully dilemmatic, fragmented and inevitably hybrid. TheHungarian-Romanian ethnics of Transylvania experi-ence the dilemmas of “hyphenated” ethnicity: neitherRomanian in spirit nor fully Hungarian, they often feelbetrayed by both states. The blue collars would stick tocommunist-style slipshod work, while expecting capital-ist-like wages; the white collars expect communist-stylesubsidies, while earning capitalist dividends; in the eyesof the government, the coal miners of Jiu Valley are,ironically, both “pillars of democracy” (when used as aparamilitary group to clamp down on the students’anticommunist demonstration in 1991) and “expend-ables” (as the first to be made redundant on the dictates


of the IMF); the farmers love their land as much as theirancestors did, but leave it by the thousands to workSpanish or Portuguese land; my students scorn politicsbut dream about careers in diplomacy, they don’t readnewspapers but wish to work in the media; the Transyl-vanians consider themselves different from their south-ern compatriots, yet react violently at any plan of re-gional devolution. Until today the official discourse hasremained split-tongued: thus, as the latest news revealed,the committee designed to expose the undercoveragents of the former secret police—the much fearedand seemingly ubiquitous Securitate—has slowly turnedinto a black hole where every Securitate-related documentmysteriously disappears.

Steeped in Fictional Liminality: The Generation ofthe Eighties

With such a long log of social ambiguity, politicaldouble-talk, and geostrategic liminality, it is no surprisethat G80 authors, themselves placed on the thresholdbetween two historical paradigms, should have devel-oped a type of literature!that abounds in hybrid identi-ties and threshold spaces. T h e Woman inRed—doubtlessly the most significant contribution topostmodern literature wrought by this generation, anovel written in the late 1980s by an unlikely trio con-sisting of a novelist, Mircea Nedelciu, and two culturalcritics, Mircea Mihãies and Adriana Babeti58—wouldcome closest to both Todorova’s and Bhabha’s notionsof the transitory or liminal. Borderlines of every sort(physical, class-defined, internalized, real, or imaginary)crisscross the trajectory of the book’s heroine, AnaCumpãnas-Sage, a Romanian peasant from Banat whoemigrated at the beginning of the last century to theUnited States, where she thrived as the patron of aspeakeasy cum brothel in the Prohibition era, and was re-corded by history and the tabloid press alike as themysterious informer who led to the police’s shooting ofthe (in)famous gangster John Dillinger in Chicago. Anais a perfect example of diasporic identity, able neither toattain to fully accepted American-ness, nor—once ex-pelled from the United States—to slide back into heroriginal Romanian-ness.

In the fluid geography of the early twentieth century,the borderlines are moving—in Europe along the fis-sures of the crumbling empires, and in America bypushing westward the pioneers’ frontier. The Banat re-gion is a center turned margin.59 The Midwest is a mar-gin turned center. Enjoying a freedom of movementwhose mere mention in the 1980s was subversive, theBanat people of 1910 move along these moving fron-tiers, initiating one of those periodic migrations of thepoor. Ana Cumpãnas, Anghelina-Hellen, Ioan Y., andAlexandru Suciu cross the fluid frontier of the Atlanticonly to discover, beyond Ellis Island, another frontier,

that of a hegemonic culture, which—in Lévi-Strauss’terms recycled by Zygmunt Bauman—is anthropophagous,“annihilating the strangers by devouring them..., smoth-ering cultural or linguistic distinctions; forbidding alltraditions and loyalties except those meant to feed theconformity to the new and all-embracing order.”60 Evenso, they remain neither-nors, dubious marginals: Helen ishumiliated by her xenophobic colleagues, the lawyer hasno clients, Ioan Y. is a perpetual hand at the conveyorbelt, and Ana’s business slides towards the edge of le-gality. Ten years later, despite her enviable wealth, Ana’sassimilation is still incomplete, and “her English is a sortof Negro-French,”61 as another immigrant notes.

On her first trip back to Romania, Ana is shocked todiscover—along with the newly traced border with Ser-bia—several freshly erected barriers of a very differentnature. Her mercantile in-laws become strangers to her,as she “feels that between them there is a frontier,…amoving frontier that surrounds her tighter andtighter.”62 Her youth love, Liviu, has become a doctor,and thus “his leap to a world unattainable to her erecteda barrier against her.”63 The proliferation of these ex-ternal barriers causes the fracture of the character’smoral axis, who feels that “her inner frontier had brokenfor ever.”64 The fissure affects Ana’s ethical being, andthat “limit embedded in one’s soul”65 between moraland immoral is suspended. “The border,” notices MirceaNedelciu in his only solo partition in this novel, “is butthe man’s interior dimension, which, once lost, is unre-coverable.”66 Her moral de-territorialization once trig-gered, Ana returns to America and lets herself beguided by a uniquely pragmatic compass, which soonends up in her association with the Mob.

When the police begin to pester her, Ana tries to buyher peace by turning in Dillinger. Turned overnight into“Dillinger’s Delilah,” the apocalyptic whore and mediaheroine, Ana has trespassed unwillingly another line, theone defining the prerogatives of the police. Blamed forhaving compromised the American justiciary myth, anuncomfortable witness, Ana soon confronts the otherface of the reaction to strangers, the anthropoemic, that of“vomiting the strangers” and “expelling [them] beyondthe frontiers of the managed and the manageable terri-tory.”67 Expelled back to a “homeland” which is nolonger home, Ana lives as a perpetual exile in her nativeBanat. A rich American for the Banat people, just as shehad been a suspect European for the Americans, unableto rediscover her true self in a real homeland, Ana ishurled into a space of indeterminacy—in thein-betweenness—“that place outside every border, wherenothing is called home.”68

Outside unidimensional borders, there are bidimen-sional frontiers, not lines, but spaces of unreclaimedsovereignty, such as “those weird border zones betweenthe boarding lounge and the airstrip,” which are located


“inside the country and not at its edge.”69 This might beread as an allusion to a transgressive type of literatureprivileged by the three authors. In the bleak paranoidisolation of 1987 Romania, they conceive literature as away of going “beyond the imaginary lines guarded by…watchtowers, uniformed people, and weapons.”70

A similar obsession with borderline situations occursin The Waiting Lounge by Bedros Horasangian.71 A soli-tary tourist is arrested in an almost Tarkovskian “fron-tier zone” at the Danube for his simply “looking sus-pect,” and his relentless interrogation by suspiciousofficers triggers a flow of long-suppressed memories.Beyond the political implications of the incident in thefrontier zone, this episode points to another type ofinterstice, the one between the immediacy of the presentand the ever mediated access to the past. This meditativehero is in quest of a vantage point that might enablehim to experience simultaneously the present and thepast, that is, to see beyond “the blurred borders, theliving flesh of the past”72 or to penetrate “the inertialspace between the [photographic] image and memory’sspace.”73

Liminal characters abound in the prose of the G80group. Mircea Cãrtãrescu’s novellas are peopled withandrogynes, twins, doppelgängers, narcissistic figures,and teenagers caught in the crisis of becoming adults.Some, like REM or Travesty,74 read like ample rites ofinitiation, where the identity of a novice is suspended,and his relentless trial mixes opposites: tenderness andcruelty, divine pride and humiliation, bliss and horror. InThe Twins,75 Andrei, a genialoid and recluse teenager, istormented by an unrequited love-hate for the frivolousGina, and their long-deferred erotic prelude, consumedin a backroom of the Antipa Museum of Natural His-tory, generates an enormous energy that brings all thepaleontologic exhibits back to a hallucinating life, whiletheir final and apocalyptic love-making is sheer atomicfission that causes the two lovers to swap sexes; Andreibecoming Gina, and vice versa, with the reader eventu-ally realizing that the “failed androgynous” has longbeen inscribed in the very names of the heroes [An-drei+Gina=Andr(o)Gyn(e)].

Often such characters are inscribed as mediators be-tween two worlds. Such a character in Petru Cimpoesu’srecent novel Simion liftnicul76 claims to be able to con-verse directly with God and, to the consternation of hisneighbors, he decides to move both his place of wor-ship and his home to the only location that enables himto physically depart the misery of a larval humanity, andthat connects him with a higher entity: therefore hesquats in the elevator.77

The reader frequently encounters characters whosesocial status is uncertain—marginals, misfits, déclassés;these once secondary characters now occupy the focalpoint of the narratives. The marginalized elderly in

Daniel Vighi’s novel December at 1078 live in the dilapi-dated blocks at the periphery and are suspicious of theother marginals (homeless, hobos, handicapped) orequivocal categories (the new farmers, colons of the sub-urbs). The typical marginal in Mircea Nedelciu’s prose isthe orphan, a socially unfixed individual, oscillating be-tween random part-time jobs. A curiously frequent pres-ence is that of the voluntary déclassé (what I would call aself-unmade man), the individual who opts for a precariousexistence, the enigmatic solitary who refuses to play bythe rules; such characters are frequent in the fiction ofCristian Teodorescu, where they seem to extract somesecret pleasure from their dishonor. Acvila Baldovin inG. Cusnarencu’s Memory Tango79 quits his family to be-come a philosophizing tramp. A victim of intolerantideological watchdogs, the academic from “The CrystalGlobe” by Rãzvan Petrescu80 relishes his fall and ex-plores the liminal space of imminent death. The in-scrutable and reluctant George from The Bodiless Beautyby Gheorghe Crãciun81—a university graduate who pre-fers to perform menial jobs—becomes the reader’s Ver-gil, a stalker between the real world and the fictional one.

Yet these liminal spaces, hybrid characters, and tran-sitory phenomena do not exhaust the inventory of tex-tual liminalities. Indeed their presence should be seen asextending beyond the physical world recreated by thetext to the text itself, that is, to the way the narrator ma-nipulates the story s/he unfolds. At this point we haveto part with Bhabha, as we have reached the limit of hisdefinition of liminality. His in-betweenness turns out to bea concept used at only half of its potential. Especiallywhen one intends to analyze liminality in literary texts,one discovers that Bhabha’s approach to the text en-ables one to map a repertory of liminal spaces and limi-nal identities only as represented by the text. That is, itforces us to consider the text as a wholly transparentwindow onto physical reality; or a faithful mirror, anunambiguous piece of evidence, an unquestionabledocumentary trace. It compels us to discuss the repre-sentation of reality in the same terms we would discussreality itself: in anthropological, sociological, or politicalterms. What is left aside is the nature of the representationitself, the textual strategies it mobilizes, the narrativeinstances it stages, and the discursive practices it puts towork. Bhabha seems strangely uninterested in the tex-ture of the discourse itself, as if he were (mis)taking thecanvas for the picture on it. Marjorie Perloff critiquesBhabha for assuming that “the artwork has, evidently,no more than instrumental value, illustrating and exem-plifying the political and ideological thesis of the criticwho happens to find it of use.”82

Several cultural theorists have attempted to provideliminality with a definition that could deal with its spe-cific presence in the arts. The first was Victor Turnerhimself, whose later books expanded his observations,


by describing liminality and marginality as overall condi-tions of artistic and philosophical creativity83 and bylinking the liminoid to ritual-like situations in modernsocieties (sport, performance). Mihai Spariosu’s bookThe Wreath of Wild Olive: Play, Liminality and the Study ofLiterature attempts to turn liminality into a condition ofart itself. Liminality, insists Spariosu, should be dissoci-ated from marginality, as the former describes a neutralrelationship, whereas the latter refers to an antagonisticrelation. Unlike marginality, liminality “may open accessto new worlds” and “may initiate new worlds” by tran-scending the dialectics of margin and center.84 InSpariosu’s view, liminality becomes a place to which lit-erature seems to turn after it has exhausted the ago-nic—the principle of antinomy and belligerence repre-sented by Schopenhauer and Nietzsche—in order torediscover the pacified spirit of the non-agonic, the ire-nic.

Another intuition of the liminal occurs in a recentstudy by Wolfgang Iser85 that defines fictionalizing—theprocess by means of which a text acquires its fictionalcharacter—as including frontier transgression, installa-tion into an in-between space and the simultaneity of po-lar opposites, also called doubledness. While acknowledg-ing the elegance of Spariosu’s theory and the precisionof Iser’s construction, I would argue that they tend touse liminality as a model for almost any form of seriousart. This amounts to diluting the term excessively andstripping it of its potential for defining a particular typeof art endowed with a special internal dynamism.

My contention is that liminality may manifest itself atthe discursive level whenever the narrator adopts a strat-egy of an “impossible” location in the simultaneousspheres of both/and or neither/nor. Both outside and in-side the narrative. Both objective and subjective. Neitherfamiliar nor remote. Such a logically improbable posi-tion seems to be the secret dream expressed by manynarrators of the G80 group. Bedros Horasangian seemsfascinated by the idea of such an impossible equilib-rium: “he would like to… place himself in a cusp of in-flection, the point where a curve changes its gradient, thisis how they put it in mathematical analysis, [i.e.,] a statusof unstable balance.”86 The algebraic figure of the cusp ofinflection is a scientific metaphor that points again at themagical point where contrary tensions are—if only for abrief moment—in a precarious and peaceful balance.This indicates a simultaneous temptation of narrativedistance and proximity, an oscillation between the con-trary seductions of indifferent detachment and arbitraryinterventions into the diegesis.

Similarly, the novel The Woman in Red w as “engi-neered” by its narrative team as a Leviathan-like novel,made of seemingly incongruous ingredients and aimingto perform quasi-incompatible functions. A good illus-tration of Ihab Hassan’s principle of hybridization87—a

notion located in a different sphere from Bhabha’s hy

-

bridity—the novel was designed to be “a documentarynovel,” an evenly-dosed and sophisticated mélange of factand fiction. Its recipe was to observe the principle of“neither-nor/both-and,” which would accommodateotherwise irreconcilable ingredients: mythical perma-nence and “the illogical logic” of fashion, Broch’s mod-ernist gravity and Vonnegut’s postmodern gusto,88 boxoffice and succès d’estime.

But, one might wonder, how could such quixoticgoals ever be achieved? It is a matter of narrative strat-egy. The full answer would consist of a long inventoryof textual practices, of which I will analyze just two:

Placing the Narrator in Liminal Space: Free Indirect DiscourseTraditionally, narratorial discourse has two alternative

for the representation of the character’s speech andthought. This occurs either by using direct speech andproviding the reader an ad litteram transcription of thecharacters’ words; or by using indirect speech and byrelating or summarizing the original dialogue. In directdiscourse the narrator’s presence seems to fade, givingway to the characters’ voices that can be heard in theiroriginal sound. In indirect discourse, instead of theoriginal dialogue, what we hear is but a narrative of thisdialogue, which is reformulated in the narrator’s ownwords.

In between these two standard types of discourserepresentation comes a third, a hybrid form that seemsto defy logic and whose paradoxical character has beenchallenging linguists and narratologists: free indirectdiscourse. Linguistic or pragmatic approaches to freeindirect discourse89 define it as a mixed code of repre-sentation, where elements pertaining to indirect dis-course coexist with those specific to direct discourse.Such a hybrid that could be tagged a grammatical anom-aly is nevertheless fully acceptable in fiction90 and haseven been described as one of the proofs of a text’sfictionality.91

The following sample, taken from Dan Grãdinaru’smock-historical story “Ignatius of Loyola and Voltaire,”epitomizes almost every characteristic of free indirectdiscourse. A slightly senile and ludicrously enamouredVoltaire prepares an extravagant banquet for the lady ofhis dreams:

Under the chandelier teeming light like a tamedblaze, there were Maréchal Richelieu, the Earl ofLauzun, the brothers d’Argenson, the Count Pont-de-Veyle, with their wives, and before him, resplen-dent—a gleaming ruby—Olympie. What a joy! He wasto regale her! He was to... Next to the cutlery and crock-ery arrayed like chess pieces before the game, theguests rested in expectation of the culinary battle.Twelve sorts of wine! She would hardly believe it! And no lessthan thirty-two hors-d’oeuvres! She wouldn’t believe her eyes,


oh mon Dieu!.… Fresh foie gras, caviar, brain with as-pic and custard, cheese (how many sorts, Jeannot?), carpin sauce, Vienna pâté, and then, surprise! the appetizerhe himself had concocted. A relish! Olympie peepedat him through her eyelashes powdered with too ef-fulgent a light. Oh, Olympie, his white jewel, his treasure!Beholding her pick about the food with her teeny-weeny finger lifted in the air and her almond-shapedeyes green like the sea at Calais... oh, now everything eve-rything was possible! With the memory of an evening like this,one could live happily one hundred years from now!92

The voice that opens the passage, the blasé voice of ahighlife chronicler, soon seems to tune in a differentwavelength. The detached enumeration of the guests isinterrupted by passionate exclamations that don’t seemto belong to the same worldly reporter. This other voice,which I highlighted in italics—the voice of the elderlyVoltaire, chuckling with glee, heated with anticipa-tion—is never reproduced in direct speech, yet it ismore full-bodied than in indirect speech. Its presence isstill mediated by the narrator: Voltaire is still referred toas he, his words are in the past tense, quotation marksare absent (as is the rule in indirect discourse). And yetthe character’s idiolect slowly permeates the narrator’sdiscourse; even if muffled by the tense and person shift,every sign of this contagious orality is there: the oldman’s Gallicisms, exclamations, questions, hesitations,interruptions, endearments, and speech stereotypes. It isas if the sober narrator slowly became contaminatedwith the old man’s jubilation, and came to share Vol-taire’s admiration for Olympie and his culinary jouissance.

Whether we call this effect “coloring,” “reflectorisa-tion,” or “contamination” (as Franz Stanzel does), freeindirect discourse is best described by Roy Pascal’s “dualvoice theory” as the merger of two voices (rather thantheir alternation) that results in a hybrid discourse ofuncertain paternity in which the character’s voice main-tains the full range of its expressivity, while the narratormaintains a limited control of the text. My own readingof free indirect discourse is that it performs a form ofventriloquism, a verbal masquerade (that betrays eithernarratorial empathy or auctorial irony for the character)in which the speaker’s identity becomes blurred, oscil-lating in the liminal interstice between the narrator andthe character.

This device is significantly frequent in G80 fictionand seems to indicate the desire to undermine the es-tablished role of the narrator by means of ambiguiza-tion. Free indirect discourse becomes the privileged wayof transcribing limit situations (the panicked thoughts ofa drowning man in a novel by Bedros Horasangian floodthe hitherto calm narrative discourse)93 or psychologi-cally liminal states, like the following case of a womanseized by a heart attack in a tramway:

[a] Why her, why doesn’t he go? [b] She collapsed

on the only vacant seat. [c] Like a whale, like aleech, that’s how they see her. Don’t they sit? Whyshouldn’t they? [d] Then a blue shadow hoveredtoward the driver along the vast aisle. [e] And whenthe chicken soup simmers, she rings at Sanda’sdoor, the chicken on the plate, pushes the dooropen—why don’t you make a stew with it, she says,for I got soup. Sanda—a limp, another one, takesthe plate, the chicken’s steaming, [f] a smell ofrusted iron and wickerwork, [g], oh, no, not this. [h]She tilted her head backwards, took a long breath.It was abating. The hand, turned blue, was still lyingon her chest—[i] and then what’s next?94

Despite the first impression, there is still a logic in thisdelirious discourse. This logic can only be perceived ifwe acknowledge the presence of more than a single per-spective. I have segmented the text so that we can fol-low these perspectival fluctuations. At the beginning [a]the perspective is interior: Rodica reproaches her loverfor using her in his black-marketeering; then [b] thewoman’s collapsing under the first symptoms of a heartattack is seen from the outside; [c] we return to thewoman’s interior monologue, in which she resents thehostility of the passengers; [d] to the eyes of the deliri-ous woman, reality distorts itself, the tramway car di-lates, and a passenger transmogrifies into a floatingshadow; [e] shattered by her fear of death, Rodica recallsher bringing food to the moribund neighbor next door;[f] a return to the reality of the tramway; [g] “oh, no, notthis” is Rodica’s inner shriek at a new pang in the heart;[h] as the pain abates, Rodica observes her body as if itwere an outlandish object and [i] is worried of the pos-sibility of another attack.

Two extreme perspectives are conflated here: a non-participatory camera-view and a highly subjective self-scrutiny. Both are equally frustrating to the reader. Theformer fails to produce an explanation of the woman’sunusual behavior captured in its mere exteriority, whilethe latter is totally absorbed in hypochondriac self-surveillance. The usual difference in pronoun regime (shefor the exterior view, I for the inner one) does not occurhere, as the woman’s words are only approximated innarrativized interior monologue. More than a mere al-ternation of viewpoints, this seems to be an attempt tocreate simultaneous plurifocality.

“The dialogue re-naturalizes itself after it hasundergone reductive transcriptions, reconstitutions,reinventions and constructions in the order ofsignification.”95 How is this possible—the reader mightreact at the paradox of Mircea Nedelciu’sstatement—how could a dialogue revert to its pristinenaturalness once it has been manipulated? Well, this ispossible only if we depart the sphere of what Bakhtincalled the monologic and adopt the plural logic of thedialogic. Even without mentioning it, Nedelciu’s plea is


steeped in Bakhtinian heteroglossia.96 The fictional textshould always revert to natural dialogue, which Nedelciudefines as “the use—within the same short text—ofseveral types of transcription (hence of severalideologies).” The internal dialogism of such “democratictexts” renders them capable of engaging in a “dialoguewith the dominant ideology of the society in which theauthor lives”.97 Thus, the leader of the G80 grouprelates a matter of poetics to ideology. And, since histext was written at the acme of Ceausescu’s totalitarian(and hence monologic) rule, the subversive undertoneof this invitation to dialogue could hardly be overstated.There was no question of “several ideologies” inCeausescu’s regime. Nedelciu’s whole text is a plea forinterrogative texts that might generate “a naturaldialogue between all the participants and [that] admitsno ‘mere assistants.’”98

Placing the Reader in Liminal Space: Second-person NarrativeJust as narrators are frequently made ambiguous in

G80 fiction by their positioning in the hybrid form offree indirect discourse, their listeners too are ambiguatedwhen they appear inserted in the texture of the so-calledsecond-person narrative. In the prose of Mircea Nedelciu,Cristian Teodorescu, or Stefan Agopian, this unusualtype of narrative has a systematic presence. Nedelciu, alover of self-imposed hurdles, experimented with sev-eral short stories written entirely in the second person.Teodorescu’s novel The Secrets of the Heart traces thefootsteps of a mysterious declassé that is constantly re-ferred to as you, even if no further clues for his identifi-cation are given . In many other G80 texts the you-narrative occurs on shorter stretches and sometimestends to be nothing but a stylistic stereotype.

The function of this type of narrative (which is curi-ously absent from major theories of focalization) iscommonly regarded as aiming “to involve the reader inthe narrative.”99 This critical fallacy is based on the as-sumption that every use of you presupposes the exis-tence of a communicational context, in which the read-ers have to identify themselves with this you. However,the instances of you implying direct address to the readerare relatively rare. Most of them are parodic rewritingsof eighteenth century interpellations of the reader, aswhen the chronicler in Ioan Grosan’s historiographicpastiche One Hundred Years at the Gates of the Orient flat-ters the reader: “If you well remember, belovedReader—and we do not see what could hinder you fromremembering: for you have distributive memory, you arecultivated and self-taught.”100

You remains a pronoun that may invite multiple iden-tifications. Based on Capecci, Hantzis, Bonheim andMcHale,101 I would suggest the following typology ofthe narrative you: (1) you denoting the narratee, that is,the fictional character addressed by the narrator; (2) you

denoting the implied reader, i.e., the reader as imagina-tively constructed by the author; (3) you as the narrator,often in specular introspection or narcissistic self-address; (4) you as generic person, in the instances ofimpersonal formulations used in proverbs, as a collo-quial substitute for the pronoun one (as in “You cannever know”), or as procedural you;102 (5) you as adramatized character who is not addressed but designatedby this pronoun.103

The first four forms are widely represented in G80fiction. Cãrtãrescu’s adolescent characters often plungein narcissistic self-interpellation; the narrators’ “collec-tive” in Grosan’s parodic science fiction or historicalnovels repeatedly pleads with the reader; Al Vlad andHorasangian’s heroes passionately confess to their es-tranged partners. Much of this betrays communicationgone amiss: in Al Vlad’s “The Telephone,” a young manargues with his dead lover; in George Cusnarencu’s“What are the Names of the Four Beatles,” a middle-aged disk jockey at an FM radio station fails to capturethe attention of a younger audience; in Nedelciu’s “Mo-reno-style Provocation,” the communication lines be-tween two victims of the 1977 earthquake (a disabledyouth and a trauma victim) are broken; in Horasangian’sThe Waiting Lounge, the victim of secret-police abuse ab-surdly appeals to the humanity of his former torturer ina letter that is never sent; even diaries seem to speak to adefunct version of one’s self, as in Cãrtãrescu’s “REM.”

It is however the fifth type that reveals the extraordi-nary potential for ambiguity of you-narrative. I wouldeven argue that it is only this type that deserves thename “second-person narrative.” This is a paradoxicalyou, for it is placed outside a communicative context; youhere no longer serves to address but to designate a char-acter, in the way the pronouns he or she do. This specialtype of narrative tends to insinuate itself into third-person contexts. The opening of Mircea Nedelciu’sshort story “Christian the Traveler” introduces a char-acter in conventional third-person narrative: “Gezawashes the kettle, pours two cups of cold water, addstwo teaspoons of coffee, two of sugar, turns on thegas” and so on. Then the narrator switches to whatseems to be the procedural second-person (Morrissette’s“cookbook you”): “now you should perform the not-so-simple task of holding the hot handle of the kettle”; yetthe impersonality of this mode slowly fades away as thetext accumulates details that are too minute to refer to ageneric you: “now you should poor it into each cup, twice,while you hear the water running in the bathroom.” Ifthe readers felt like identifying themselves with thisseemingly impersonal you, the identification becomesunlikely when further details point at Geza who sips hiscoffee while he musingly watches his friend tenderlyhugging her baby: “You taste the coffee,... you smile as ifyou understood something and knew it well, though you


know yourself that you don’t understand anything.”104

Therefore this you points at Geza, though without ad-dressing him. Any other possibility of identification is tobe ruled out: this you is not the narrator, who is a distinctactor always speaking in the first person.105 To furthercomplicate the situation, Geza is sometimes referred toas he. Since this you is not systematic, whenever it occursthe reader will feel the tingle of interpellation, quickly towane as the you points again at the character.

Another story by Nedelciu, “The Tundra Chrysan-themum,” experiments programmatically with multiplesecond-person mode. A young tourist guide is asked byan elderly Norwegian tourist to locate the woman withwhom he had had a brief romance many years ago,during the Soviet-inspired World Youth Festival held in1958 in Bucharest. The guide’s failed excursion intosomebody else’s past dramatizes the tragic differencebetween personal history and collective history in theStalinist era. In a deliberately confusing way, the fiveactors of this drama are all called you (you Marcel, youSorina, you Mom, etc.) and this might suggest that op-pressive History calls all its victims by the same name.And that the reader could at any time become such avictimized you.

The following text by Ovidiu Moceanu, speaking of afrontier world, places the reader her/himself at the fluidfrontier between you and he, both pointing in fact at thesame character:

He could hear the puff of the same locomotive, hecould see the same engine drivers and conductorsin the stations. It was a frontier world, still un-charted, you pass across it and you feel liberated ifyou see the station of L., you plunge into oblivionand you surface after a while, amazed at what youdiscover...106

The volatile pronominal makeup of Gheorghe Crãciun’searly stories repeatedly reverts to second person when-ever the narrator’s self-analysis reaches a certain level ofintimacy; it is as if, whenever the narrator plunges intothe hero’s psyche, the emotional temperature raised andthe pronoun you, acting as an affective marker, betrayedthis sudden empathy. Thus, in a scene where a youngman returns home from the army, the narrator seems toforget that his hero used to be “a third person”: “and inyour soul there was such a yearning such a restlessness torecover your small civilian liberties.”107

We have to concede that, however unlikely this seemsin linguistic terms, this you is devoid of communicationalvalue, as it does not result from allocution. Since every-day experience does not prepare us for such an aberrantuse of you, we always tend to identify ourselves as itstargets, an identification quickly to be frustrated by thetext. One could provide dozens of similar examples inG80 fiction (some of them running book-length), whichall display the same deceptive scenario. The you of such

problematic fictions tends to be extremely versatile andunstable, reverting itself easily to either the impersonalyou or the reader-addressed you. Such semantic instabilityis deliberately cultivated by G80 artists to induce thestrategic disorientation of the reader. This dilemmaticyou might be described as a pivotal pointer that can rap-idly shift its reference, pointing at the nearly completegamut of narrative actors, from the narrator to the im-plied reader. The liminality of second-person narrativeswould be this very rejection of clear-cut choices and theestablishing of an intermediate zone where a pronouncan point almost simultaneously at actors whose rolesare otherwise antagonistic.

The most spectacular case of liminal insertion iswhen the heterodiegetic narrator (the narrator exteriorto the story) encounters either his reader or the charac-ters he himself has shaped. A sheer scandal in the orderof formal logic, such an encounter implies a transgres-sion of the borderline separating the characters’ worldfrom the narrator’s sphere. Metalepsis is the name givenby Gérard Genette to this type of narratological quan-tum leap.108 As Constanza Del Rio Alvaro aptly pointsout, “metaleptic jumps . . . always involve a confusionbetween sign and referent, reality and fiction” as “theyflaunt the artificiality of art by undoing the hierarchybetween outside and inside, high and low, narratingsubject and narrated object.”109

In Mircea Cãrtãrescu’s “REM,” a group of childrenplay weird games that end up by altering the reality theypretended to mimic; in the ultimate game of this rite ofinitiation one of the children penetrates into the enig-matic REM, that is, an apartment room of the distant1980s (the game takes place in the 1960s), where ayoung man whose description points at Cãrtãrescu him-self is writing feverishly the very story we have beenreading. In other stories by the same author the fiction-ality of the world characters live in is revealed to them,which amounts to a warrant of invulnerability (in “TheRoulette Player”) or eternal participation in beauty (inTravesty).

If many of the metalepses that occur in G80 fictionare merely ironic-nostalgic denouncements of literaryconventions, some suggest much graver concerns. In-deed, characters are held captive by their fictional worldsin a way that hints at their authors’ much more real cap-tivity. Characters can escape their fictional world nomore than the writers who shaped them can escape theirreal one. And if this world is the oppressive country-sized prison of totalitarianism, the plea of Ioan Gro-san’s heroes in One Hundred Years at the Gates of the Orientand the hopeless answer given by their narrators be-come even more dramatic. Published in serialized formin a magazine that discreetly defied the CommunistParty line, Grosan’s tale of the seventeenth century poetand courtier living in a world of Byzantine intrigue at


the Gates of the Orient that is strangely reminiscent ofcontemporary times was abruptly and brutally discon-tinued by censorship. Having to improvise an ending,the author suddenly abandoned the hitherto facetioustone of this half-Oriental, picaresque fable and let hischaracters express a despair which was not just theirs,but also that of a whole nation in 1988, the darkest yearof Ceausescu’s rule:

Now we just cannot proceed with our story. Orrather...it’s not that we cannot...but we may not.…Time fades behind us, and it darkens ahead of us, thetimes begin to rumble and to shatter and our frail epicconstruction is halted mid-way.... Over the places, overthe characters and over the Aesopian language thatmade them possible falls the gray dust of forebodedcatastrophe. . . . Our heroes have strayed and, despiteour will, we can no longer bring them home, forcingthem to eternal exile. Metodiu and Iovãnut wave at usin despair from afar and, if there were more silence,we might hear their voices:“Don’t let us go! Take us home!”Would they be consoled if they could hear our faintwhisper in response: “Nor do we fare well here, waitfor us, we are going to join you.”?110

Placed in a uniquely ambiguous space—in a countrydeeply rooted in the in-betweenness of the Balkans andthe peripherality of Mitteleuropa—conditioned by anequivocal history and born at the threshold of two his-torical paradigms, the Generation of the Eighties hassucceeded to turn all these circumstances to their ad-vantage and produced a literature that feeds creativelyfrom the very ambiguity that so many deplore as part ofRomania’s handicap. They assumed their liminal condi-tion in many ways, cultivating hybridity and double-codedness, and exploring the potential for ambiguityoffered by the very nature of fictional narrative.

The present study has attempted to test the validity ofseveral postcolonial concepts in the critical explorationof this literature and to suggest that similar comparativeinroads could be made into other literatures of thepostcommunist space. I intended to move beyond themere observation of liminality in the world evoked byfiction and to discover liminal situations in the way nar-rators, readers, and characters are made to operate inG80 fiction. This, of course, represents an extension ofliminality beyond the limits acknowledged by postcolo-nial theorists. If these extensions of liminality to narra-tology might prove fruitful suggestions to colleaguesworking in postcolonial or literary studies, then thisstudy will have reached its aim.

NOTES1This research resulted in my doctoral thesis entitled

“Transgressive Strategies in the Fiction of the Generation ofthe Eighties” (Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, 2001)

and was subsequently published as a two-volume study, con-sisting of Trafic de frontierã: Strategii transgresive în proza generatiei’80 (Frontier traffic: Transgressive Strategies in the Fiction ofthe Generation of the Eighties) (Pitesti: Paralela 45, 2000) andOchiul bifurcat, limba sasie: Alte transgresiuni în proza generatiei ‘80(The Forked Eye and the Squinting Tongue: Other Transgres-sions in the Fiction of the Generation of the Eighties, II)(Bucharest: Paralela 45, 2003).

I wish to express my gratitude to my dissertation supervi-sor, Professor Ion Pop, from Babes-Bolyai University Cluj,whose empathic and irenic guidance secured this research asmooth takeoff. Dr. Rebecca Saunders encouraged me to per-severe with the present article despite the difficulty of “ex-plaining” Romania to a foreign readership, and my heartfeltthanks go to her as well.

2The core of the group coagulated in the late 1970s aroundtwo literary circles in Bucharest: Cenaclul de luni (The MondayLiterary Circle), led by literary critic Nicolae Manolescu, re-united poets like Mircea Cãrtãrescu, Liviu Ioan Stoiciu, Alex-andru Musina, Mariana Marin, Florin Iaru, Traian T. Cosovei,and Romulus Bucur, while Cenaclul Junimea (The “Youth” Lit-erary Circle), led by Ovid Crohmãlniceanu, was the meetingpoint of young fiction writers such as Mircea Nedelciu,Gheorghe Crãciun, Gheorghe Iova, Cristian Teodorescu, IoanGrosan, Sorin Preda, Adina Keneres, and Nicolae Iliescu. Asecond nucleus crystallized in Cluj-Napoca, Transylvania,around the Echinox literary magazine, led by Ion Pop andMarian Papahagi; the Echinox group, whose aesthetics dif-fered in many points from that of the Bucharest groups, in-cluded novelist Alexandru Vlad and poets Ioan Muresan, IoanMoldovan, Marta Petreu, Aurel Pantea, and Augustin Pop. Athird nucleus was formed in the western city of Timisoara,grouping authors with a regional penchant, such as DanielVighi and Viorel Marineasa.

As the movement gained impetus, the Generation of theEighties produced its own critics (Radu Gh. Teposu, Gh.Iova, Ion Bogdan-Lefter, Radu-Cãlin Cristea, Mircea Mihãies,Al. Cistelecan and Virgil Podoabã), some of whom tended toretrospectively enlarge the definition of the group by enroll-ing in it authors who had hitherto been unaffiliated, “maver-icks” of the older generation, like Stefan Agopian, BedrosHorasangian, or provincials like Petre Cimpoesu, FlorinSlapac, and Dan Grãdinaru. As the group snowballed bymeans of such annexations, it also lost much of its initialgusto for “textualist” experiment. Both tendencies furthercomplicate the efforts to accommodate all of them withinone single coherent paradigm.

3The English-speaking reader might sample these writerlypractices in several anthologies, such as: The Phantom Churchand Other Stories from Romania (Pittsburgh: University of Pitts-burgh Press, 1996); Ion Bogdan-Lefter, ed., Romanian Fiction ofthe ’80s and ’90s (Pitesti: Paralela 45, 1998); Andrei Bodiu,Romulus Bucur, and Georgeta Moarcãs, eds. Romanian Poets ofthe ’80s and ’90s (Pitesti: Paralela 45, 1999).

4Textualism was variously defined as “the awareness oftextuality” (Vasile Andru), “the awareness of language” and“the preference for the text as an open structure” (GheorgheCrãciun), “a signifying practice in the manner of the Tel Quelgroup” from Roland Barthes to Julia Kristeva (Radu Gh.Teposu). These definitions have been collected in the anthol-


ogy compiled by Gheorghe Crãciun, Competitia continuã:Generatia ’80 în texte teoretice (Pitesti: Editura Vlasie, 1994); seein the above-mentioned anthology: Vasile Andru, “Prozã simodernitate,” 217; Gheorghe Crãciun, “Arhipelagul ’70-’80 sinoul flux,” 214; Radu Gh. Teposu, “Cu ochii deschisi, petarâmul unei alte paradigme literare,” 203).

5Surprisingly for the Western reader, in Romania (as inmany other Soviet satellites) postmodernism was regarded asa radical and anti-dogmatic term that undermined the stiflingconventions of socialist realism. Its pluralism, its openness, itsgusto for hybridization, and its tendency to destabilize estab-lished norms by means of Bakhtinian carnivalesque rever-sals—all this had an extraordinarily subversive potential. Thismight explain why in the Eastern block the postmodern para-digm was seldom viewed as the sterile parlor game of endlessself-referentiality that was deplored by some Western critics.

In the first theoretical discussions on postmodernism,hosted by an issue of Caiete critice of 1986, the young genera-tion of critics used the term as a touchstone to gauge artists’value as innovators. Attracted by the term’s internationalprestige, several critics hastened to monopolize it to the bene-fit of the G80 group alone. Later on this exclusivist appro-priation was subdued, but even extended definitions of Ro

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manian postmodernism continue to view the G80 group ascentral in any such definition. In his major study Postmodernis-mul românesc, which aims to redefine the literary canon of thepost-1990 era, Mircea Cãrtãrescu still sees his generation-fellows as making up the hardcore of Romanian postmod-ernism. More recently, the youngest generation of criticsseems more relaxed in defining Romanian postmodernism assignificantly stretching outside the confines of the G80 group.See: Radu Gh. Teposu, Istoria tragicã & grotescã a întunecatuluideceniu nouã (Bucharest: Eminescu, 1993); Mircea Cãrtãrescu,Postmodernismul românesc (Bucharest: Humanitas, 1999);Carmen Musat, Perspective asupra romanului românesc postmodern(Pitesti: Paralela 45, 1998); and Mihaela Ursa, Optzecismul sipromisiunile postmodernismului (Pitesti: Paralela 45, 1999).

6A similar approach reads later G80 fiction as “a prose ofexistence” that managed “to extricate itself from the theoreticaldeadend it had itself created” (see Ion Bogdan Lefter, “Intro-ducere în noua poeticã a prozei,” in Crãciun, Competitia con-tinuã, 230).

7The “writing [process] as anthropogeny” is described byVasile Andru, “În dialog cu proza nouã,” România literarã (2April 1987): 14.

8This is the position adopted by Gheorghe Crãciun in nu

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merous articles and best epitomized in “Autenticitatea cametodã de lucru,” Astra (April 1982): 4.

9See such typologies in Radu Gh. Teposu, Istoria tragicã andMircea Cãrtãrescu, Postmodernismul românesc.

10This quaint word would deserve a full study of appliedpostcolonial theory. Serendipity and serendipitous are words thatepitomize perfectly the Westerners’ appropriation of the Ori-ent to serve their own aims. Maybe the fact that the Westneeded to import this term from the East also suggests that,in the Western tradition of thought, chance is seldom ac-knowledged to play a role in scientific discoveries. This is onemore sample of the rationalist legacy of the Enlightenment:empirical observation, deduction, ratiocination, and calcula-tion are the only neat pathways to the Truth. Chance discov

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ery (like that triggered by Newton’s apple) is a mere accident,a reminder of our superstitious backbone and therefore is notto be relied upon. And since hazard is no pillar of discoveryin the Western world, one should borrow an exotic word toname it. This is how Serendip, the former name of Ceylon,contemporary Sri Lanka—home of Horace Walpole’s legen-dary Three Princes of Serendip who were the champions ofchance discovery—became the root of these extravagantnames.

11My intuition of the essentially liminal character of thesefictions might stem in my sharing the same dual optics of aninsider-outsider. My own position as a novelist is that of anoutsider to the G80 group who was subsequently “adopted”and granted an insider’s position that I preferred to decline.

12Anthony, K. Appiah, My Father’s House: Africa in the Phi-losophy of Culture (New York: Princeton University Press,1992). See especially the chapter entitled “The Postcolonialand the Postmodern,” 137-155.

13Appiah, “The Postcolonial and the Postmodern,” 149.14What the postmoderns reject is, in my view, the modern-

ist claim to a total, all-round representation of reality (includ-ing its secret symbolism, its shorthand of consciousness, andits occult correspondence between the layers of reality,epitomized by Joyce’s ambition to capture “an all-round char-acter”). Appiah, however, argues that what postcolonial artistsreject is the “convention of realism” that had been legitimatedby “the national [African] bourgeoisie that took the baton ofrationalization, industrialization, bureaucratization in thename of nationalism”, and which, “by 1968, had plainlyfailed” (150).

15The course bore the title “Cultural Diversities East andWest: Postcolonialism, Postcommunism, and Ethnicity” andwas organized between July 22 and August 3, 2002 at theCentral European University in Budapest. The teaching team(consisting of six scholars from Malta, Mexico, USA, Hun-gary, and Romania) urged the 25 students (who came fromcountries as diverse as Indonesia, Latvia, Nigeria, Armenia,South Africa, Ukraine, and Bosnia-Herzegovina) to reflect onthe possible local variants of Orientalisms (such as Russia’simaginative recreation of the Caucasus as a different Other),on the similarities or differences between postcolonial andpostcommunist contexts, and on minority politics in the NISand CEE region. The course syllabus is accessible online at<http://www.ceu.hu/sun/SUN%202002/>.

16This is how Stoyo Petkanov, the former President of animaginary post-communist state, modelled on Bulgaria’s To

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dor Zhivkov, reacts apprehensively at the news of Ceausescu’sexecution: “Nicolae. They shot him. On Christmas Day too....Just like that, nail down the vampire . . . nail him down, quick,this is Romania, thrust a stake through his heart, nail himdown.” Julian Barnes, The Porcupine (London: Picador, 1992),17.

17Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 1996).

18This painful episode was thoroughly researched by twoG80 novelists from Banat and recorded in two impressivecollections of oral histories: Daniel Vighi and Viorel Marin-easa, Rusalii ’51: Fragmente din deportarea în Bãrãgan (Timisoara:Marineasa, 1994) and Deportarea în Bãrãgan: Destine, documente,reportaje (Timisoara: Mirton, 1996).


19This is not just a matter of academic debate, but one ofpolitical pressure. The presence of the Russian FourteenthArmy, stationed at the edge of Moldova (despite the agree-ment for its withdrawal signed in 1994), only complicates thissituation. Claiming to protect the Russian ethnics of Moldova,the Fourteenth Army supported the proclamation of the Re

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public of Transdniestr (a phantom state that was not recog-nized by any state in the international community) and sup-plied the local militia with weapons during theMoldovan-Transdnestrian conflict of 1992.

20Victor Neumann, Ideologie si fantasmagorie (Iasi: Polirom,2001).

21It is not without interest to note that both Timisoara andBanat (the westernmost province of Romania whereTimisoara is located) are good examples of harmonious muti-ethnic cohabitation; now a borderland province, Timisoara ishome to Romanians, Hungarians, Germans, Roma, Jews,Serbs, and Greeks.

22Jean Baudrillard, “Thawing of the East,” Trans. CharlesDudas (York University, Canada), http://ctheory.aec.at/a-thawing_of_the_east.html> (10 September 2000); originallypublished in French L'Illusion de la fin: ou La grève des événements(Galilée: Paris, 1992).

23“Although hybridity has been a perennial feature of artand cultural discourse in Latin America—highlighted in suchterms as mestizaje, indigenismo, diversalite, creolite, raza cósmica—ithas recently been recoded as a symptom of the postmodern,postcolonial and post-nationalist moment.” See: Robert Stam,“Hybridity and the Aesthetics of Garbage: The Case of Bra-zilian Cinema,” in Estudios Interdisciplinarios de la America Latineu el Caribe: Cultura Visual en America Latina, Enero-Junio 1998,9:1.

24While I cannot develop these distinctions here, liminality,as a condition that transcends the agonistic logic of the mar-gin and reconciles the two zones it touches, is different from alimit (that is reached and eventually overcome), a margin (thatdefines two mutually exclusive spaces), or the limes (the forti-fied wall that protects—and hence defines—a space). For athorough discussion of the difference between liminality andmarginality, see Mihai Spariosu, The Wreath of Wild Olive: Play,Liminality and the Study of Literature (New York: SUNY Press,1996), 38. For Spariosu, marginality is agonistic, whereas limi-nality is neutral “A margin can be liminal, but a limen cannotbe marginal…. Liminality can both subsume and transcend adialectic of margin and center” (38).

25Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage (Chicago: Univer-sity of Chicago Press, 1960).

26Victor Turner, The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of NdembuRitual (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967); Victor Turner,The Drums of Affliction: A Study of Religious Processes Among theNdembu of Zambia (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968); VictorTurner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Chicago:Aldine, 1969).

27Victor Turner, The Ritual Process, 95.28 See Part Two of Mihai Spariosu’s The Wreath of Wild

Olive, “Literary Thematics and Ludic-Irenic Hermeneutics”.29Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge,

1994), 216-219, 1.30Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 5.31More exactly, he states in The Uses of Diversity that “For-

eignness does not start at the water’s edge but at the skin’s.”32Homi K. Bhabha, “One of Us,” in The Translatability of

Cultures: Proceedings of the Fifth Stuttgart Seminar in Cultural Stud-ies 03.08-14.08.1998, ed., Heide Ziegler (Weimar/Leipzig:Verlag J. B. Metzler, 1999), 133.

33Baudrillard, “Thawing of the East.”34Todorova, Imagining the Balkans, 58.35Todorova, Imagining the Balkans, 57-8.36Todorova, Imagining the Balkans, 16.37Author of a recent treatise on “Balkanology,” Mircea

Muthu has brought a lifelong contribution to the develop-ment of South-East European studies in Romania, a disci-pline that attempt to go beyond the “deprecatory category ofBalkanness” dissected at length by Todorova (See Imagining theBalkans, 46-9).

38Hence the title of his book designed to “explain” Roma-nia to a Western audience: Romania: Borderland of Europe (Lon-don: Reaktion Books, 2001).

39Lucian Boia, România, tarã de frontierã a Europei (Bucharest:Humanitas, 2002), 14.

40See Neagu Djuvara, Între Orient si Occident (Bucharest:Humanitas, 2001).

41Cornel Ungureanu, Mitteleuropa periferiilor (Iasi: Polirom,2002), 375, 376.

42Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Re-making of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster), 1996.

43See Lucian Boia, Istorie si mit în constiinta româneascã (Bu-charest!: Humanitas, 2002), 85.

44Todorova, Imagining the Balkans, 59.45Todorova, Imagining the Balkans, 49.46Todorova, Imagining the Balkans, 13.47Todorova, Imagining the Balkans, 14.48Todorova, Imagining the Balkans, 15.49Todorova, Imagining the Balkans, 19.50Todorova, Imagining the Balkans, 17.51Todorova, Imagining the Balkans, 18.52Todorova, Imagining the Balkans, 18.53Nicola Williams, Romania & Moldova (Hawthorn: Lonely

Planet, 1998) 442.54Al Vlad, Frigul verii [Summer Chill] (Bucharest: Editura

Militarã, 1985).55Ioan Grosan, O sutã de ani la portile Orientului: Roman istoric

foileton [One Hundred Years at the Gates of the Orient: SerializedHistorical Novel] (Bucharest: Editura Fundatiei CulturaleRomâne, 1992).

56Quoted in Todorova, Imagining the Balkans, 59.57Malcomson, quoted in Todorova, 49.58Mircea Nedelciu, Adriana Babeti and Mircea Mihãies, Fe

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meia în rosu [The Woman in Red] (Bucharest: Cartea româneasca,1990).

59Banat is nowadays Romania’s westernmost region, butuntil 1918 was a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

60Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodernity and Its Discontents (Cam-bridge: Polity Press, 1997), 18.

61Nedelciu et. al., Femeia în rosu, 205.62Nedelciu et. al., Femeia în rosu, 128.63Nedelciu et. al., Femeia în rosu, 128.64Nedelciu et. al., Femeia în rosu, 134.65Nedelciu et. al., Femeia în rosu, 385.66Nedelciu et. al., Femeia în rosu, 384.


67Bauman, Postmodernity and its Discontents, 18.68Nedelciu et. al., Femeia în rosu, 135.69Nedelciu et. al., Femeia în rosu, 12.70Nedelciu et. al., Femeia în rosu, 366.71Bedros Horasangian, Sala de asteptare [The Waiting Lounge]

(Bucharest: Cartea româneasca), 1987.72Horasangian, Sala de asteptare, 492.73Horasangian, Sala de asteptare, 409.74Mircea Cãrtãrescu, Nostalgia (Bucharest: Humanitas,

1997); Travesti (Bucharest: Humanitas, 1994).75A section of Cãrtãrescu’s Nostalgia.76Petru Cimpoesu, Simion liftnicul (Bucharest: Compania,

2001).77The very title of the novel contains an untranslatable

pun: in the Christian Orthodox tradition, Simeon Stâlpnicul isa saint whose penance consisted of standing on the top of apost, hence his name, which is derived from stâlp (post) + thesuffix nic. Using the same suffix, Cimpoesu invented a newhalf-parodic name for his “saintly” character: lift (elevator) +nic, that is Simion liftnicul, a grotesque coinage to the ear of anyRomanian.

78Daniel Vighi, Decembrie, ora 10 ( B u charest: Eminescu,1997).

79George Cusnarencu, Tangoul Memoriei (Bucharest: Alba-tros, 1988).

80Rãzvan Petrescu, Eclipsa (Bucharest: Cartea româneasca,1993); see his short story “Globul de cristal”.

81Gheorghe Crãciun, Frumoasa fãrã corp (Bucharest: Cartearomâneasca, 1993).

82Marjorie Perloff, “Cultural Liminality / Aesthetic Clo-sure?: The ‘Interstitial Perspective’ of Homi Bhabha,” 1998,online: http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/authors/perloff/bhabha.html(7 December 2002).

83Turner, The Ritual Process, 128-9.84Spariosu, The Wreath of Wild Olive, 39.85Wolfgang Iser, “The Significance of Fictionalizing,” in

Anthropoetics III: The Electronic Journal of Generative Anthropology,2 (Fall 1997/Winter 1998), http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/humnet/anthropoetics/ap0302/iser_fiction.htm (8 February2001).

86Horasangian, Sala de asteptare, 362 (emphasis mine).87Hybridization is one of the ten principles that, according

to Hassan, define the postmodern. See Ihab Hassan, “Plural-ism in Postmodern Perspective,” in Exploring Postmodernism,eds., Matei Cãlinescu and Douwe Fokkema (Philadelphia:John Benjamins, 1990).

88Nedelciu et. al., Femeia în rosu, 38, 40.89See Monika Fludernik, The Fictions of Language and the

Languages of Fiction: The Linguistic Representation of Speech andConsciousness (London: Routledge, 1993); Ann Banfield, Un-speakable Sentences: Narration and Representation in the Language ofFiction (London: Routledge, 1982); Jon K. Adams, Pragmaticsand Fiction (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1985); andSchlomith Rimmon-Kenan, Narrative Fiction: ContemproaryPoetics (London: Routledge, 1999), 110-16.

90Adams, Pragmatics and Fiction, 18.91Shari and Bernard Benstock, “The Benstock Principle” in

The Seventh of Joyce, ed., Bernard Benstock (Bloomington: Indi-ana University Press, 1982), 18.

92Dan Grãdinaru, Patru povestiri (Cluj: Dacia, 1986), 124-5

(emphasis mine).93Bedros Horasangian, În larg (Bucharest: Eminescu, 1989),

64-77.94Adina Keneres, Rochia de crin (Bucharest: Albatros, 1985),

75 (my segmentation).95Mircea Nedelciu, “Dialogul în proza scurtã,” in Crãciun,

Competitia continuã (Pitesti: Vlasie, 1984), 289.96Under the name of “interferential diphonous construc-

tion,” defined as a discourse hovering at the boundary be-tween narrative and “the hero’s word,” free indirect discoursewas one of the main pillars of Mikhail Bakhtin’s heteroglossiaand dialogism. See Mikhail Bakhtin, Problemele poeticii luiDostoievski (Bucharest: Univers, 1970), 307.

97Nedelciu, “Dialogul în proza scurtã,” 274.98Nedelciu, “Dialogul în proza scurtã,” 289.99This is the common assumption among Romanian critics.

Even narratologists like Irene Kakandes and Louis Oppen-heim still maintain that the second-person addresses thereader in an irresistible invitation to take part in the narrative.See Irene Kakandes, “Narrative Apostrophe: Case Studies inSecond Person Fiction,” doctoral dissertation, Harvard Uni-versity, 1991; Louis Oppenheim, Intentionality and Intersubjectiv-ity: A Phenomenological Study of Butor's La Modification (Lexing-ton: French Forum Publishers, 1980).

100Ioan Grosan, O sutã de ani de zile la Portile Orientului (Bu-charest: Editura Fundatiei Culturale Române, 1992), 47.

101Bonheim considers that the pronoun you may indicate infictional contexts: (a) the addressee (either placed inside oroutside the fictional world), (b) a dramatized I, (c) a neutralvalue. Capecci distinguishes four forms: (a) “generalized you,”(b) “specific external you,” (c) “specific internal you,” and (d)“you as I under disguise,” where “internal” stands for “extra-diegetic” and “external” for “intradiegetic.” Hantzis describesthe following values for the fictional you: (a) dramatized char-acter, (b) self-addressing narrator, (c) narratee; Hantzis is theonly theorist who identifies a “dramatized character.”McHale’s typology is the most complicated, yet of his eighttypes several seem either superfluous or partly overlapping.See Helmut Bonheim, “Narration in the Second-Person,” inRecherches Anglaises et Américaines, 16 (1983): 69-80; JohnCapecci, “Performing the Second Person,” in Text and Per-formance Quarterly, no. 1 (1989): 42-52; Darlene Marie Hantzis,“‘You Are About To Begin Reading’: The Nature and Func-tion of Second Person Point of View in Narrative,” doctoraldissertation, Louisiana State University, 1992; Brian McHale,Constructing Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1992), 89-109.

102Morrissette distinguishes several subtypes: the travelogueyou, the cookbook you, the courtroom you, and the journalisticyou. See Bruce Morrissette, “Narrative ‘You,’ in ContemporaryFiction,” Comparative Literature Studies, 2:1 (1965): 1-24.

103This typology is discussed at length in a chapter of mybook Ochiul bifurcat, limba sasie (Pitesti: Paralela 45, 2003), 189-237.

104Mircea Nedelciu, Efectul de ecou controlat (Bucharest:Cartea româneascã, 1981), 18-9.

105The distinction is obvious here: “He is, no doubt, slightlyin love with Luiza, and, as I am sure that he wouldn’t recog-nize it, I can even say that he is very slightly in love,” Nedel-ciu, Efectul de ecou controlat, 14.

106 Ovidiu Moceanu, Fii binevenit, cãlãtorule (Cluj: Dacia,


1986), 115 (my emphasis).107Gheorghe Crãciun, Acte originale, copii legalizate [Original

Papers, Authenticated Copies] (Bucharest: Cartea româneascã,1982), 76 ([my emphasis).

108See Gérard Genette, Figures III (Paris: Seuil, 1972), 238-43.

109Constanza Del Rio Alvaro, “Narrative embeddings inFlann O’Brien’s ‘At Swim-Two-Birds”’, Miscelánea: A Journal ofEnglish and American Studies (Universidad de Zaragoza) 1994,16.

110Grosan, O sutã de ani la portile Orientului, 260-1.


Exchanging Words: Thematizations of Translation in ArabicWriting from Israel1

LITAL LEVY

When two languages meet, one of them is necessarily linked to animality. Speak like me or you arean animal.

Abdelfattah Kilito, “Dog Words.”

I lived in the outside world…for twenty years, unable to breathe no matter how hard I tried, like aman who is drowning. But I did not die. I wanted to get free but could not; I was a prisoner unableto escape. But I did remain unchained.

How often I yelled at those about me, “Please, everyone!…Please help me!” But all that came frombeneath my moustache was a meowing sound, like that of a cat.

Emile Habiby, The Pessoptimist.

One time, when I was a little boy in a dishdashah, I was walking on the outskirts [of town] and raninto a group of bullies. ‘A Jew, a Jew, come on, let’s beat him up!’ They surrounded me. ‘Hey, I’mnot Jewish, I swear!’ They said to me: gawwad, you pimp, if you don’t even know how to speak Mus-lim, if you’re speaking Jewish, how are you not a Jew?2

Samir Naqqash, I, They, and the Split.

In a brilliant lecture delivered in French at a confer-ence on bilingualism held in Rabat (November 1981),the Moroccan literary critic Abdelfattah Kilito intro-duced his audience to the figure of the mustanbih—theBedouin lost at night who imitates the barking of dogs.3The mustanbih appropriates this “canine idiom” only inorder to induce the “real” dogs on the fringes of camp-sites to bark back, thereby guiding him back to humansociety. But what if—muses Kilito—if, upon his return,the mustanbih finds that he cannot re-appropriate humanlanguage—that try as he might, he can only continuebarking? This question quickly proliferates into a verita-ble labyrinth of the hypothetical, a dizzying trajectory ofpossibilities. What if the mimic begins to identify withdogs, to take on the full range of canine behaviors?How does the tribe deal with him then? What if ourmimic is in fact neither dog nor human but a monkeypretending to be a human pretending to be a dog? Andunderscoring all these “dog words,” the unstated butpivotal question: Where do we draw the line betweenmimicry and transfiguration—between pretending andbecoming?

“‘Like’ does not make an identity,” Kilito asserts. It isthe grotesqueness of mimicry, its kinship to bestiality,that surfaces from these allegorical, fable-like rumina-tions—a reading of the postcolonial mimic that quite

diverges from the later postulations of Homi Bhabha.4We find here not a redeeming or recuperating hybridity,but the threat of an impending and irreversible defeat:“The state of bilingualism does not evoke the image oftwo adversaries approaching one another, armed withnets and tridents. In this case, one of the gladiators isalready on the ground and getting ready to receive thedeath blow.”5

But what matters, for our purposes, is that he has notyet received it. The fates have not yet been closed. Isbilingualism, then, an indefinite wait for a coup de grâcethat never comes? In the (artificially prolonged) inter-vening moment that still separates the triumph of onegladiator from the annihilation of the other, I will con-sider other possibilities for the meeting of languages incolonial and post-colonial contexts. These possibilitiesarise from the prose of two writers who have chosennot to adopt the language of the Other (i.e., not to barkin the dark), but rather, to enfold the Other within theirown idiom, to incorporate the life-and-death strugglebetween the two gladiators into the story they tell. EmileHabiby and Samir Naqqash, both native speakers ofArabic, both writing in Israel, both drawing on what areessentially vanished histories in Palestine and Iraq, bothusing language to insist on an identity that has been ren-dered impossible by the logic of the State of Is-

Levy: Exchanging Words 107

rael—and more broadly, by the tortured logic of the(post)colonial Middle East with its unassailable bi-narisms of Hebrew and Arabic, Arab and Jew—engagetranslation inside their texts as a creative alternative tobarking, as a mode of resistance to the authority thathas displaced them from their pasts and their homes.My reading of their work will probe the relationship oflanguage to authority in both external (institutional) andinternal (linguistic) forms. Along the way, I will considerthe implications of their writing for how we think abouttranslation, literary bilingualism, and the colonial para-digm of Israel/Palestine.

Translation Theory and the Bilingual TextKilito’s emphasis on the power differential that must

already exist in any situation of bilingualism is corrobo-rated by an emerging body of work on translation inpost-colonial contexts, generally between “Third World”and “metropolitan” languages.6 These studies have radi-cally re-evaluated the relationship between text andtranslation, interrogating the standard metaphors offidelity and equivalence and opening the field up to con-sideration of the empirical power relations imbricated inany linguistic or cultural exchange. For instance, Te

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jaswini Niranjana7 and Samia Mehrez8 point out in theirrespective studies that George Steiner and critics likehim, who locate translation within the ostensibly univer-sal tradition of “humanism,” overlook the inequities ofexchange in colonial paradigms, in which translationoperates to the material benefit of the dominant (colo-nial or imperial) power.9 If Walter Benjamin’s classic1923 essay situated translation in the lofty realm of themetaphysical, emphasizing the always fragmentary na-ture of any one language in relation to the “greater” or“pure” language,10 these recent works are much moreconcerned with the gritty relations between those differ-ent fragments, the here-and-now of social, economic,and political uses and functions of language. Languagein this body of scholarship is never distant from thedialectic of authority and resistance: the meeting (orclash) of languages in colonial and post-colonial condi-tions has been widely credited with producing hybrid-ized literature that breaks down the “monologized”discourse of nationalism and cracks its authority.

Those researches, however, focus on the politics oftranslation as a process applied to a text rather than aprocess that takes place within it. Some readings of Ben-jamin’s essay have stressed that any act of writing is al-ready a translation. In this sense, “translation” impliesthe transfer of an “Ur-text”—a discrete body ofthought that exists in an abstract, meta-linguistic state (àla Benjamin’s “pure thought”)—into an actual (andtherefore only approximate) written code.11 This ap-proach moves the “original” text one step further backin the creative process, but without fundamentally modi-

fying the concept of translation as the transposition ofone internally homogenous symbolic system into an-other. On the other hand, studies of hybrid texts, whichfocus on the “impure” language of the source text, havenot generally utilized the concept of translation to talkabout narrative. The many studies of the “hybridized”language of postcolonial texts (the writings of SalmanRushdie and the various North African beur writers be-ing oft-cited examples) analyze their impact on the“major” language and its literary culture, while assumingthat language inside the narrative (i.e., language as usedand perceived by the narrator and characters) maintainsits normal mimetic of a transparent medium. Thus wefind that the linguistic innovations and transgressions ofthese Francophone and Anglophone writers are usuallyeither celebrated or criticized as the contamination, in-filtration, bastardization, or hybridization of one lan-guage—the r e c e i v i n g (“host” or “major”) lan-guage—rather than viewed as explicit and consciousnegotiation between distinct languages taking place withinthe writing of the text.12

Samia Mehrez insightfully draws attention to the in-tra-textual role of translation in Arab Francophonewriting, asserting that “by drawing on more than oneculture, more than one language, more than one worldexperience, within the confines of the same text, post-colonial anglophone and francophone literature veryoften defies our notions of an ‘original’ work and itstranslation.”13 To describe such works she proposes thenotion of the “double” text, one that can be decodedonly by the bilingual reader conversant in both culturesand traditions, and whose reading can therefore be“none but a perpetual translation.”14 But while Mehrezadduces the translation process as essential to the de-coding of the “double” text, she does not identifytranslation as an integral dynamic of the narrative codeitself.

It is at this point—with the internal dynamics of the“code”—that my study picks up the thread. Our pointof departure is that colonial and post-colonial contextsproduce narratives that may self-consciously engage andproblematize their own linguistic hybridity by explicitlythematizing the negotiation between different linguisticstrands. In such texts, the relationship of the language(s)to the colonial structures of power not only informs thenarrative implicitly, but also comes to the fore in thenarrative as part of its thematic material. Translationthen operates inside the narrative both in the traditional,pragmatic sense (in terms of the conversion of lan-guage) and in a derivative, metaphorical sense, as thenarrative symbolically “converts” the contested struc-tures of power through strategic, intentional momentsof linguistic or communicative slippage. In the lattercase, translation is less a discrete operation and more acontinuous state of mind in which the elbow room be-


tween two languages, or between the message intendedby the speaker and the message received by the listener,becomes a space of maneuver and of latent resistance.

This study will focus on these thematic functions oftranslation and code-switching within two heteroglossicArabic works, where they appear in the narrative as liter-ary topoi and in the meta-narrative as ideological sub-texts. We will see how deliberate textual applications oftranslation and interlinguistic tensions serve as 1) a vehi-cle for disrupting the dominant/colonizing state dis-course and ideology, inverting their truth value; and 2) ameans of contesting history both as event and as narra-tive. Finally, by making so much of their meaning con-tingent on communicative failure—in other words, byintentionally obstructing the transparency of languagewithin the narrative—these texts also demonstrate howthe referential or mimetic function of language in thenarrative may be meaningfully destabilized in contextswhere languages (and language choice) are fraught withideological import and tension.

Habiby and Naqqash in a Colonial ContextThe two texts in question and the proximity of the

languages being thematized within them diverge fromthe typological relationship between hegemonic andindigenous languages found in many colonial and post-colonial contexts. Most studies of translation in(post)colonial contexts examine the interaction of in-digenous non-European languages with those of thecolonizing powers. Likewise, scholarship on the bilingualtext has drawn primarily on Anglophone and Fran-cophone literatures and, to a lesser degree, on minoritywriting in the Americas and the Caribbean. These pro-clivities would seem to indicate a degree of institution-alization of the discourse, and ironically enough, a cer-tain Eurocentrism (in the literal sense of the word) ofits conceptual outlook.15 This study of Emile Habibyand Samir Naqqash will consider translation strategies,and particularly the subversive potential of translationand mis-translation, between two non-metropolitan lan-guages and even between “standardized” literary Arabicand a minority Arabic dialect.16 As we shall see, the rela-tionships particular to these languages—Hebrew andArabic in Habiby, the Iraqi Jewish dialect and literaryArabic in Naqqash—lend themselves to thematic ma-nipulation in ways that the more typical models do not.The history and nature of interaction between the lan-guages in question also diverges from the dominantmodel in that their contact does not originate with colo-nization, but far predates it, and in that the dominantlanguage is not associated with empire nor with itspedagogical apparatus (as was the case throughout Indiaor Algeria, for instance). Israel/Palestine is a uniquecolonial context, and these two works are written byindividuals who occupy different positions within Is-

rael’s multi-tiered ethnic and religious hierarchy. Inshort, the relationship of the languages to one another,the positions of the two authors relative to the state(and as follows, to each other), and finally, the relationof all these to models of coloniality and postcolonialityneed to be probed further before we can continue to thetexts themselves.

As writers of Arabic, both the Palestinian Habiby andthe Iraqi-Jewish Naqqash occupy exceptional placeswithin the Israeli literary spectrum. The writers of Ara-bic literature in Israel belong to two small groups, onecomprising Palestinian Arabs who became citizens ofthe state (the so-called “’48 Arabs”)17 and the second,slightly smaller group consisting of bilingual Jewishwriters from Iraq who settled in Israel after the estab-lishment of the state and at some point, past or present,published in Arabic.18 In juxtaposing Habiby andNaqqash, I imply a certain connection (albeit a looseone) between their respective projects that transcendstheir different affiliations.19

The foremost point of tangency is, of course, theirchoice of language. These two writers work not in theacquired, dominant language (Hebrew) but rather, inArabic, their mother tongue, in a society where it hasbecome a secondary, minority language. Viewed incomparative context, this paradigm is analogous neitherto the Algerian writer of French (who uses the languageof the “Other”) nor the Algerian writer of Arabic (whouses the majority tongue). Furthermore, although bothHabiby and Naqqash have produced heteroglossic nar-ratives embodying hierarchical linguistic configurations,those configurations themselves are far from identical:while Habiby’s Arabic narrative portrays Hebrew as thedominant (colonizing) tongue, in Naqqash’s work it isthe colloquial dialect of the Iraqi Jews that is dominatedby standard/literary Arabic (and, to a lesser degree, bythe Muslim colloquial dialect and by Israeli Hebrew).Hence, in juxtaposing these two authors, we mightquestion the assumption of a stable, generalized orderof languages within a particular national setting.20 Itcould be argued that Habiby is writing about Hebrewand Arabic within Israel, whereas Naqqash is reallytalking about dialects and literary Arabic relative to an-other context—that of Jews in Iraq. But in fact, inreading Naqqash we are broaching two or even threecontextual frameworks. Naqqash is an Iraqi Jew writingin Israel (already a transnational context). As a Jewwriting in Arabic in the post-1948 Middle East, how

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ever, his project defies not only the dominant culturalorder of Israel, but that of the whole region, Israel andthe Arab world alike. (Perhaps the only thing that Israeland the Arab world agree on is the dichotomization of“Jew” and “Arab.”) Hence we need to think about therelationship between the languages of his narrative interms of all three frameworks: Naqqash as a Jew in Iraq,


as an Iraqi in Israel, and as an Arab Jew in a polarizedMiddle East.

To read Habiby, we must consider the nature of therelationship between Hebrew and Arabic. Both are “mi-nor languages” in relation to the European metropolis;they are also closely related descendants of the sameSemitic language family, sharing a number of cognates(a point which will prove important in my analysis ofHabiby’s novel). Jews and Arabs have a shared historyand culture in collective memory, as exemplified by theintensely productive literary interaction of Arabic andHebrew in mediaeval Andalusia.21 With both a philol-ogical kinship and a joint literary past, then, Hebrew andArabic in their current, colonial nexus present a horizonof thematic possibilities quite distinct from that of the“X-ophone” model. In particular, the idea of a decep-tive closeness (as opposed to the sense of remoteness thatgenerally characterizes relations between metropolitanand indigenous languages) permeates Habiby’s work andis also indicative of the actual (physical) proximity be-tween the speakers of Hebrew and Arabic in Is-rael/Palestine.

If sociolinguistic context forms the first major pointof divergence from the more common Fran-cophone/Anglophone model, sociopolitical contextconstitutes the second: North Africa and the subconti-nent are in the post-colonial phase, whereas Is-rael/Palestine is still locked in conflict. In the currentdeadlock, there are no realistic prospects of decoloniza-tion, and although within the 1948 boundaries Jews andArabs alike hold citizenship and nominally equal rights,the position of the latter is incontestably that of sec-ond-class citizens. As a neo-colonial power, Israel is anexceptional case, having never employed within its 1948borders the absentee landlord model on which(post)colonial theory was largely based, yet adopting amix of the “landlord” and “settler” models in the terri-tories occupied since 1967.22 We must also take into ac-count that Jews have a historic connection to the landwhich, while it should not be confused with (or used tojustify) the colonial-style land-grab that took place, doeslend a vast wealth of cultural sources, references, andallusions to the writers currently working within its bor-ders. That is to say that the long tradition of Jewish at-tachment to and writing about the land, itself quitegenuine and legitimate, and the set of iconic images andphrases that have grown up around this tradition, aremobilized in the service of Zionism but may also serveironic or subversive purposes, as represented by bothHabiby and Naqqash. This too may be unique: I cannotthink of a similar example of a symbolic tradition cen-tered around the land being colonized that far predatesthe colonial moment.

Joseph Massad discusses the simultaneity of the co-lonial and post-colonial phases within Israel/Palestine in

terms of a “settler colonialism” which, “being a variantof colonialism, presents us with different spatialities andtemporalities as regards a diachronic schema of coloni-alism, then post-colonialism.”23 He points to South Af-rica, the U.S., and Rhodesia as other examples “wheresettler-colonists declared themselves independent [initi-ating the “post-colonial” phase] while maintaining colo-nial privileges for themselves over the conquered popu-lation [extending the ‘colonial’ phase].”24 Massadcorrectly notes that simply calling the territory in ques-tion “Palestine” is to “refer to it as a colonized space inboth the pre-1948 and post-1948 periods,” whereas tocall it “Israel” is to recognize the realization of the Zi-onist project post-1948. Who in this schema occupieswhich position is a matter of multiple relativities:“Mizrahic Jews would have a more difficult task charac-terizing the nature of the space and time they inhabitowing to their dual status of being (internally) colonizedvis-à-vis the Ashkenazim with colonizer privileges vis-à-vis the Palestinians.”25 While Massad’s article does nottake up the place of the Occupied Territories currentlyunder military administration in this colonial schema, weshould consider here that Israel within its ’48 bordersrepresents what Massad calls the “‘post-colonial’ col-ony” even as it exercises direct rule over, and coloniza-tion of, another, foreign territory. In this sense it is as ifwe imported a mini-Algeria into South Africa. As such,any analogy between Israel and other colonial contextscan be partial at best.

How, then, to characterize these two writers in rela-tion to this anomalous colonial paradigm (as well as toone another)? The late Habiby, who remained in hisnative Haifa and became an Israeli citizen after 1948,represented the Israeli Communist Party in the Knesset;his much-publicized acceptance of the 1992 Israel Prizefor Literature generated considerable controversythroughout the Arab world.26 Yet Habiby never ceasedto identify himself with Palestine, in the sense both of apersonal history and a political cause. Not surprisingly,critics of Arabic tend to classify him as a “Palestinian”writer while for critics of Hebrew, he is an “IsraeliArab.” The preoccupation of his fiction with the plightof Palestinians (whether in the 1948 borders of Israel,in the Occupied Territories, or in Lebanon) is reasonenough to call Habiby a “Palestinian writer” even whileacknowledging his deep connection to Israeli society.His writing can be comfortably classified as engagingthe colonial dynamics within Israel, whether we locate itwithin the rubric of “colonial” or “post-colonial” lit-erature.

Naqqash’s case is more complex: on the one hand, asa Jewish writer in the Jewish state, he ostensibly sharesthe privileges of the ruling majority. The reality, how

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ever, is that as a self-declared “Arab Jew” working inArabic, he falls quite between two chairs.27 In Israel he


has almost no reading public, and hence no interestedcommercial publishers; as for publishing abroad, it isnearly inconceivable that any reputable Arab presswould publish the works of an Israeli Jew.28 Virtuallyunknown both within Israel and abroad, Naqqash lacksany measure of institutional support or public recogni-tion (while Habiby enjoyed widespread recognition,critical acclaim, financial success, and—perhaps mostimportant of all—access to publishers and readersthroughout the Arab world). Naqqash himself rejectsthe ideological basis of Israeli identity by claiming thathe is in exile from Iraq, a claim that stands in direct op-position to the normative paradigm (which associatesthe diaspora with exile and Israel with “redemption” inthe form of a quasi-religious repatriation).

All this is perhaps sufficient to classify Naqqash as adiasporaic writer or a writer in exile. But his exile beingthe direct result of colonial intervention in Iraq and Pal-estine, I argue his status as a colonized writer as well.This is a point that has not yet been sufficiently theo-rized in writings on the coloniality of Israel/Palestine: itis not only a matter of Mizrahi Jews being “internallycolonized,” as Massad puts it,29 but of the fact that theirdislocation is the joint product of Zionism and Euro-pean colonial politics in the region. Naqqash, as an Iraqi,was colonized by the British. He was then broughtagainst his will to Israel, which itself had been doublycolonized by Britain and by Zionism. As someone whodeclares himself an Iraqi—whatever that may mean tohim—and lives in Israel as a citizen of that state, he isnot altogether different from a (non-Jewish) writer whodeclares himself Palestinian and lives in Israel as a citi-zen. Without disregarding Naqqash’s position of privi-lege relative to his Palestinian-Israeli colleague, we cansay that his similarly anomalous status in the Israelilandscape establishes an additional point of tangencyfrom which we may draw comparative insights.

In this light, we can read Habiby’s Al-Mutasha’il [ThePessoptimist]30 and Naqqash’s Ana wa-ha’ula’ wa-l-fisam [I,They, and the Split]31 as texts that defy easy categorizationinto either the “colonial” or the “postcolonial” rubric,but that explicitly engage the problems of authority andidentity at the heart of (post)colonial discourses. Thesetwo Arabic works, written in Israel but informed bymemories of Palestine and Iraq respectively, both dealwith the transition from life in an Arabic-language soci-ety to life in Israel and with the process of “translation”the protagonists themselves undergo in order to copewith life in exile.32 Both works also bring the mindset oftranslation into the language of the writing, and demandit of us in the reading. Manipulating translation, I argue,enables the writers to expose the relationship of lan-guage to authority and thus to reclaim their own histo-ries, transcending barriers both cultural and political.

False Friends: Mistranslation as StratagemHabiby is best known for his signature work Al-

waqa’i‘ al-gharibah fi ikhtifa’ Sa‘id abi al-nahs al-mutasha’il(The Strange Facts in the Disappearance of Sa‘id the Ill-fatedPessoptomist). This satirical novel chronicles Palestinianlife in Israel through the misadventures of the haplesshero Sa‘id, who (having been rescued from an impossi-ble situation by benevolent space aliens) now relays hisstory through a series of letters dispatched to an un-named narrator.33 The story of Sa‘id’s “strange facts”commences shortly after the 1948 Israeli-Palestinian war(referred to by Israelis as the War of Independence, andby Palestinians as the nakbah or “calamity”), when wefind Sa‘id amongst the scores of Palestinians seekingrefuge in Lebanon. Before long, however, Sa‘id decidesto leave his mother and sister behind in Tyre and returnto the “inside.” Having infiltrated the border, Sa‘id pre-sents himself before the Israeli military authorities,claiming sanctuary in the name of an Israeli official withwhom his father (killed in the war) had collaborated.

The authorities detain Sa‘id overnight in an ‘Akkamosque, where his former headmaster gives him an im-promptu “history lesson” on the numerous conquestsof Palestine. The following day, an Israeli army driverconveys Sa‘id to his hometown, ushering him into hisnew life with the words “ahlan wa-sahlan fi medinat yisrael”[Welcome to the medinah of Israel]—which our dis-traught protagonist misinterprets to mean that the Is-raelis have changed his beloved city’s name from“Haifa” to “Israel.” Only much later does he come tounderstand the source of his error: the word ma-DI-nahmeans “city” in Arabic, but in Hebrew, the same word,with a slight shift in voweling and stress (me-di-NAH),connotes “state.”34

The obvious irony of an Israeli using the standardArabic greeting (ahlan wa-sahlan) to “welcome” a Pales-tinian refugee to his own, now-occupied land is furthercompounded by Sa‘id’s misinterpretation. On the levelof the narrative, this blunder characterizes Sa‘id’s ex-treme naiveté. The same blunder, however, also func-tions on the level of meta-narrative as a strategic com-munication aimed directly at the reader: Sa‘id’smistranslation subtly transforms the intended messageof the driver into the implied message of theauthor—the latter bearing the real truth value withinHabiby’s economy of meaning. Indeed, we find consis-tently throughout the novel that it is not the narrative’sportrayal of the Israelis themselves so much as Sa‘id’sfailure to correctly understand them—and in this par-ticular instance, to understand their name for theircountry (medinat yisrael)—that conveys the essence of hisencounter with his new colonial reality. Habiby’s ma-nipulation of the cognate madinah/medinah exemplifieshis narrative strategy: from here, the tale that unfolds isone of slight shifts, of double entendres, in which appear-


ances of familiarity are misleading. As an opening ex-ample, then, this brief vignette of Sa‘id and the Israelidriver humorously but pointedly introduces the newIsraeli state from a Palestinian perspective, alludes toIsrael’s very real policy of changing place-names fromArabic to Hebrew,35 and nods to the linguistic proximitybetween Hebrew and Arabic that will be so central tothe spirit of this remarkable text.

This novel (henceforth referred to as The Pessoptimist),while written in literary Arabic and sprinkled with thecolloquial Palestinian dialect, depends as much on itsHebrew backdrop as on the Arabic of the narrative tomake its meaning. Much of the novel’s dialogue consistsof conversations between Sa‘id and his Israeli-Jewishinterlocutors, which presumably take place in Hebrewbut are reported to the reader in Arabic. Furthermore,Sa‘id’s direct addresses to the reader and conversationswith Palestinians are often interlaced with references toHebrew and to Israeli material culture. Habiby himselfwas a Palestinian who, after 1948, became an Israeli citi-zen and one of Israel’s political and literary luminaries;who wrote both in Hebrew and Arabic but maintained adivision of labor, using Hebrew for his journalism andpolitical essays and Arabic for his fiction.36 His multi-layered linguistic and social background shapes thecontext for The Pessoptimist; the driver’s hybrid Arabic-Hebrew “welcome” is not atypical of Israeli speechpatterns of those years, and the cutting humor of thescene would be instantly recognizable by any reader,whether Jewish or Palestinian, in Israel.

While such moments of “play” between Hebrew andArabic are interspersed throughout the novel, in eachcase it is not simply language, but actual, material sur-vival that is at stake: these verbal exchanges are powerplays as much as they are wordplays. The representationof linguistic negotiations (i.e., translation and mis-translation) between the two languages becomes an in-ternal literary strategy, deployed first in order to exposethe colonial mechanisms of power, and then to subvertthem. This, I contend, is far from underdetermined: insuch a work, written under bilingual conditions and inwhat is, from the Palestinian perspective, a colonialcontext, translation between the two languages cannottake place without some degree of political confronta-tion. At the same time, however, the relationship estab-lished between Hebrew and Arabic in this novel is notone-dimensional. Habiby repeatedly emphasizes theproximity and interrelation of the two languages, andthe transactions between them are far more multivalentthan a straightforward critique or denunciation of thehegemonic language and discourse would allow.

One could, in this regard, even say that the operativemetaphor in this book is the false cognate. The“madinah/ medinah” confusion is a classic example offaux amis, i.e., false friends—and in fact The Pessoptimist as

a whole is rife with false friends, not restricted to thelinguistic variety. Co-opted into the Israeli security appa-ratus as an informer, Sa‘id soon finds himself sur-rounded by a league of false friends: the secret serviceagent Adon Safsarshik, Sa‘id’s would-be savior; Sa‘id’sown boss Ya‘qub, an Arab-Jew; the “Big Man” to whomboth Sa‘id and Ya‘qub must answer. They also include,among other minor characters, the nameless Israeli sol-dier in the station at ‘Akka who tells Sa‘id that he vol-unteered for the army in order to “fight feudalism,” thathe “likes Arabs,” and who promises that when the war isover, the State will build kibbutzim for Arabs, which, hesays, will “rely on liberated young men like [Sa‘id] whospeak a human language” [sa-yuqimun li-na kibutsatya‘tamidun fi-ha ‘ala amthali min ash-shubban al-mutaharririnal-ladhina yutqinun lughah insaniyyah].37 To this remarkabledeclaration, the soldier adds “shalom” in Hebrew—whichSa‘id promptly translates into the English “peace,”“proving my humanity” (Arabic: mu’akkidan insaniyyati.)38

The soldier then laughs and replies “salaam, salaam” inArabic—charitably extending the linguistic boundariesof humanity so as to include the Arabic-speaking(though apparently “liberated”) Sa‘id.

Of course, Habiby’s representation of such discoursemimics the double-talk and hypocrisy of the establish-ment. But this kind of verbal chicanery presumes trans-parency both of the language and of the implicit rulesof the game—an assumption that Sa‘id repeatedly foils.Instead, he takes the rulers at their very literal word. Inone such scene, set at the conclusion of the 1967 “SixDay” war, the Voice of Israel broadcast calls for all “de-feated Arabs” (in Arabic “al-‘arab al-mahzumin”) to flywhite flags from their houses. The announcer is obvi-ously addressing the inhabitants of the newly-conqueredWest Bank, but Sa‘id, listening in Haifa, is unsure which“defeated Arabs” he means. To be on the safe side, heties a white cloth to a broomstick and props it on hisroof. When his boss Ya‘qub arrives furiously demandingan explanation, Sa‘id protests that he meant only todemonstrate his loyalty to the state. Ya‘qub retorts thatthe higher-ups have interpreted his action as an insur-rection, explaining: “That announcer was telling theWest Bank Arabs to raise white flags in surrender to theIsraeli occupation. What did you think you were up to,doing that in the very heart of the state of Israel, inHaifa, which no one regards as a city under occupa-tion?” to which Sa‘id indignantly replies “ziyadat al-khayrkhayr” – “you can’t have too much of a good thing!”39

His self-declared patriotism notwithstanding, Sa‘id’smisinterpretation of the announcer’s directives quicklylands him in Shatta prison.

Through such faulty and overly literal interpretations,Sa‘id inverts the official state discourse so that it ends upmeaning the opposite of what its spokespersons intend.In this world, where the idiom of the conquerors is first


used to control and then to justify that control, Sa‘id’slinguistic failures are a symbolic corrective: by not un-derstanding, by not performing the desired translation,our hapless hero re-bends this warped reality to con-form to his own stubborn innocence. And in keepingwith the cultural tradition of the fool who doubles asprophet, his linguistic tomfoolery doubles as ethical cri-tique.

Mistranslation thus works diagetically in the text toneutralize the discursive power of the master’s language(and it should be noted that from 1948-1966—much ofthe time period portrayed in The Pessoptimist—the “’48Arabs” were under direct military administration, so thispower is far more than symbolic). Anuradha Dingwaneyidentifies the subversive potential of mistranslationwhen she describes the “between” space of translationand cross-cultural texts as “that space from withinwhich the (colonized) native deliberately (mis)translatesthe colonial script, alienating and undermining itsauthority.”40 But what distinguishes this situation fromthe gamut of colonial encounters is the kind of interac-tion specific to Arabic and Hebrew: Sa‘id’s mode ofresistance is neither a blind nor an arbitrary misunder-standing of the language of the Other due to its utterincomprehensibility. As we saw in the “m adinah/medinah” example, it obtains not from the distance, butrather, from the proximity between the two languages.As Michaela Wolf notes:

For Bakhtin…hybridity describes the process of theauthorial unmasking of another’s speech through alanguage that is “double-accented” and “double-styled.” A “hybrid construction” is an utterance thatbelongs, by its grammatical and compositionalmarkers, to a single speaker, one that actually con-tains within it two utterances, two manners ofspeech, two styles, two “languages,” two semanticand axiological systems. Bakhtin . . . showed thatfrequently even one and the same word belongs simultane-ously to two languages or two belief systems that intersect in ahybrid construction. It is through this hybrid construction thatone voice is able to unmask the other within a single discourse.It is at this point that authoritative discourse becomes un-done.41

The thematic potential of the “hybrid construction” ismilked by Habiby throughout the novel to make a pointnot only about Palestinian life under Israeli rule, butabout the instability of language itself, particularly whenit is pressed into the service of essentializing or totaliz-ing discourses. Not only can language come to “mean”something other than what the speaker intends, butcognates and shared roots can cross the delineatingboundaries of language and national identity, therebydestabilizing the distinction between Self and Other. Wesee this point well-illustrated in a passage that spoofs thehyperbole of nationalistic and militaristic language in

both Hebrew and Arabic. During Sa‘id ’s overnight stayin the Jazzar mosque in ‘Akka (Acre) just before his re-turn to Haifa, his former headmaster gives him a briefhistory lesson on the numerous conquests of Palestine.Reminding Sa‘id that ‘Akka was liberated from the Cru-saders by the Mamluk leader Qalawun in 1291, he adds:“His military title was al-Alfi, meaning ‘the Thousander’[…].” When Sa‘id asks if the rank of Aluf for the Israeligenerals is derived from Qalawun’s title, the headmasterreplies: “God forbid, my son. No. That is derived fromthe word for a leader of a thousand men, a term used inthe Bible. Oh, no! These aren’t Mamluks or Crusaders.These are people returning to their country after an ab-sence of two thousand years.” To this explanation Sa‘idresponds: “My, what prodigious memories they have!”42

The headmaster concludes:Anyway, my son, people have been talking for twothousand years in terms of thousands—generals of athousand men, men slain by the thousands, the Alfi’sand the Aluf’s and so on. There is nothing on earthmore holy than human blood. That is why ourcountry is called the Holy Land” [Ala kulli hal, yabni,dhalla al-hadith yajri, mundhu alfay sanah, ‘ala l-uluf,qadatun al f iyun, aw aluf iyun, wa-qatla bil-uluf. Laysahunaka ‘ala l-ard àqdas min dami l-insan, wa-li-dhalikasummiyat biladuna bil-muqaddasah].43

The irony of this passage is trenchant, but what gives itits stylistic punch is the repetition of the ishtiqaqat, ormorphological derivations, of the triliteral root alif-lam-fa(Arabic)/alef-lamed-feh (Hebrew). Habiby plays with theroot between the two languages, in two antitheticalcontexts—one the Mamluk router of the Crusaders; theother, the term for an Israeli general—to satirize suchoverblown language (“thousands and thousands of...”).In the original, this fast-paced and highly exaggeratedrepetition of the a-l-f root comically defamiliarizes it andrenders both the Hebrew “Alfi”s and the Arabic “aluf”sabsurd (although it should be noted that in Arabic, thepassage sounds funnier than it looks—a testament to theperformative quality of the text). Habiby also invokesthe trope of “two thousand years” [alfay sanah] so centralto Zionism’s narrative of return; the headmaster’s em-phasis on the abstract “thousands” does not directlynegate, but rather, relativizes and deflates the Zionistnarrative as but one particular moment in an infinitesi-mally grand historical sweep (as opposed to the definingand definitive moment). Likewise, by telling Sa‘id that itis the blood of the anonymous victims of history thathas put the “Holy” into the Holy Land, the headmasterde-centers Zionism’s exclusive, Judeo-centric claim onthe Biblical primacy and sanctity of the land. “[S]incethe facts of ‘history’ are inescapable for the post-colonial, since attention to history is in a sense de-manded by the post-colonial situation, post-colonialtheory has to formulate a narrativizing strategy in addi-


tion to a deconstructive one.”44 Here Habiby’s narrativ

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izing strategy uses the shared linguistic history of Arabicand Hebrew to parody (and hence interrupt) eitherside’s singular claims to what is in fact a common geo-graphic territory and history. But to arrive at this mean-ing—to understand the passage’s ideological func-tion—one must be familiar with both cultural discoursesand their symbolic resonances, as per Mehrez’s notionof the “double” text.

The doubleness of the text (and the demands it con-sequently places on the reader) are underscored in achapter entitled “First Lesson in Hebrew” [al-dars al-awalfil-lughah al-‘ibriyyah]. Here, Sa‘id relates how during hisearly days back in Haifa, wanting to know whether hecan still catch a bus, he needles his memory for the rightHebrew phrase to ask for the time. He finally asks a pas-serby, who shouts back “Acht.” Sa‘id recalls: “I was nodummy and remembered that ‘acht’ means ‘eight’ inGerman. So I…continued on foot toward the Valley ofNasnas [sic],45 having made up my mind to learn He-brew.”46 Any reader who knows Hebrew immediatelyapprehends the source of Sa‘id’s error: “ehat” (pro-nounced by most Israelis as “ekhat”), meaning “one,”could easily be confused by a non-Hebrew speaker withthe German “acht.” (Unfortunately, Le Gassick’s transla-tion elides the Hebrew subtext altogether; perhaps it waslost on the translator!)

From these episodes we can conclude that Sa‘id is notexactly an unreliable so much as an “uninformed” nar-rator. As such, to make sense of the narrative, we read-ers must fill in the gaps by knowing what Sa‘id doesn’t.In some cases, this knowledge is linguistic: this last pas-sage, for example, requires us to work backwards fromSa‘id’s mis-translation (acht) to reconstruct the originalHebrew (ekhat). In other cases (such as that of the whiteflag incident), our privileged knowledge is of the mes-sage that the authorities think they are conveying toSa‘id. There we readers have to negotiate between thediscourse as presented to Sa‘id and his interpretation ofit: in other words, between the message sent and themessage received. For it is in these “between” spacesthat the message of the author filters through.

But at other moments in the narrative, Sa‘id seems toslip out of his dimwitted role and assume the knowingvoice of the author. In one such instance, Sa‘id contin-ues his narration of the “acht” incident by explaininghow he teaches himself Hebrew; it takes over ten years,he tells us, before he is able to deliver a public address.He then adds:

But what is strange is that now a quarter centurylater the soapmakers of Nablus were able to learnHebrew perfectly in less than two years. When oneof them switched to the manufacture of marble tileshe hung up a sign in easily read Kufic script of Ara-bic, saying that his premises made shayesh, followed

by his own magnificently prolix and distinctivelyArab name: shayesh, of course, is the Hebrew wordfor marble. This is not merely a case of necessitybeing the mother of invention; it is also a matter ofthe financial interests of a country’s elite who caredso little who ruled them politically that they appliedin practice the Arabic proverb: Anyone who marriesmy mother becomes my stepfather.47

The marked change of tone (from loony to level-headed, confounded to critical) seems to signal a shiftfrom Sa‘id to Habiby’s voice, and with this slippage, thethematic representation of language and translationtakes on a different valence. Elsewhere, Sa‘id/Habibyacknowledges that translation is a means of materialsurvival; in a long discussion of the “virtues of the Ori-ental imagination,” the Arab waiters in Tel Aviv hotelswho “translate” their names into Hebrew are cited asproof of this fertile “imagination.”48 (This form ofmimicry calls to mind Kilito’s mustanbih, lost in the de-sert and forced to bark in order to survive; barking maybe a necessity, but it still reduces him to being an ani-mal). In this case, however, translation to Hebrew is de-picted as no more than a gratuitous measure reflectingunabashed opportunism. The authorial voice links lan-guage directly to national identity, and essentializes it asbeing either pure or impure (disloyal). Translation in thispassage is the offender, leading to an impure linguisticadmixture and compromising (if not betraying) the na-tional cause. The Arabic proverb makes only too explicitthe fidelity/infidelity metaphor embedded throughoutthe passage.

But this authorial intervention is not the only coun-terpoint to Sa‘id’s gullibility and passivity. Habiby alsooffers us Sa‘id’s son “Walaa’.”49 Where Sa‘id uses trans-lation to adapt and survive—and while his mistransla-tions serve to “unintentionally” resist the conquerors’propagandizing agenda—his son Walaa’ rejects suchcomplicity and instead joins the fida’iyyin [guerilla fight-ers]. Eventually, trapped in an ambush by the state secu-rity forces, he walks into the sea and disappears beneathits surface, directly followed by his mother. Even theopposition between father and son is manifested in thenarrative as a matter of linguistic transformation: thefida’iyyin with whom Walaa’ throws in his lot are trans-lated into the fada’iyyin, or extraterrestrial beings, whocome into the story to rescue Sa‘id from his own impos-sible situation. All in all, the difference between salva

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tion through active, real-life resistance, on the one hand,and passive fantasy/insanity, on the other, turns out tobe a matter of switching the soft “d” (dal) to the velar-ized “D” (Daad) and the short i to short a.50 This pro-nounced similarity lends itself to a number of possibleinterpretations: is Habiby saying that father and son arereflections of one another, that the solution througharmed resistance is as elusive as rescue by space aliens?


Or is he perhaps commenting on the arbitrariness oflanguage itself?

Language is also thematized throughout the novel inother ways, with revealing chapter headings such as“Sa‘id Changes into a Cat that Meows”51 and “The Ul-timate Tale: The Fish that Understands All Languages”[Ahkir al-hikayaat hikayat as-samak al-ladhi yafham kull al-lughat].52 The latter comes as a kind of postscript to thenarration of Walaa’s escape into the sea and presumedsuicide. Following the loss of his son and wife, Sa‘idreturns to the site regularly to fish and to silently call tohis son, “hoping always for some response.” He relates:

One day a Jewish boy who had sat down unnoticedbeside me surprised me with the question, “In whatlanguage are you speaking, Uncle?”“In Arabic.”“With whom?”“With the fish.”“Do the fish understand only Arabic?”“Yes, the old fish, the ones that were here when theArabs were.”“And the young fish, do they understand Hebrew?”“They understand Hebrew, Arabic, and all lan-guages. The seas are wide and flow together. Theyhave no borders and have room enough for allfish.”53

The point being conveyed here doubtless needs noelaboration. What is interesting is how this utopia isimagined: Sa‘id describes freedom as a kind of linguisticuniversality in which translation is obviated, renderedcompletely unnecessary. In sum, translation is hardlyvalorized in these passages: at best, it is tolerated as ameans of survival, at worst condemned as selling out. Inany case, the need to translate is a symptom of the im-possible situation in which Sa‘id lives, and as such it(along with the situation as a whole) is wished away.

With these “old fish” and “young fish” in mind, let usconsider the real-life translation history of the text andits double interaction with critics on both sides of thelanguage divide. As noted, Habiby wrote all his works offiction in Arabic, and The Pessoptimist has become abenchmark of modernism in Arabic literature. At thesame time, it is a text that made a deep impression inIsraeli cultural consciousness through its Hebrew trans-lation. More to the point, as we have seen, the Arabicnarrative is itself deeply engaged with Israeli social real-ity54 as well as with Hebrew, the language of the state.All these elements contribute to its “doubleness,” and tothe challenge it poses to the reader. A brief survey ofthe extant scholarship on the book suffices to revealthat knowledge of only one language (i.e., Hebrew orArabic) allows for only partial comprehension of thetext’s incredibly lush, multi-layered, and allusive fabric.

Hebrew literary critics writing on The Pessoptimist fo-cus on its transmission into Israeli culture via Hebrew

translation, construing Habiby’s oeuvre as part of thecorpus of Hebrew literature.55 Along with the works ofPalestinian writing in Hebrew, Habiby’s works have beentreated in more sociological than literary terms, inspiringstudies on “Arab-Israeli identity” and of the politics ofreception rather than close textual analysis.56 Israeli crit-ics have, moreover, tended to give Habiby’s work a be-nign reading curiously unmatched with its sardonic,darkly humorous tone.57 This naturalization of Habiby’swriting most likely stems from two sources: his visiblerole in Israeli cultural and political life, and the fact theHebrew translations, carried out by Anton Shammasunder Habiby’s own supervision, were published innear-simultaneity with the Arabic originals. But a readingwholly based on those two factors belies the fact thatThe Pessoptimist, like Habiby’s other literary works, waswritten in Arabic; that it draws on the classical traditionof the maqamah; that it is in deep dialogue with Arabicsources (replete with references to and intertextual usesof the turath, or classical tradition, including frequentand liberal references to the likes of al-Mutanabbi, al-Ma’arri, Ibn Arabi, and also modern poets such asSamih al-Qasim), and finally, that it has been thoroughlydigested by the Arabic reading public as a Palestiniantext.58

Criticism by Arabic-reading scholars has treated thetext in more directly literary terms, but, for its part, failsto address the Hebrew linguistic and cultural dimensionsof the text.59 For example, Samia Mehrez, who has ar-gued convincingly for the “double” status of the Fran-cophone Maghrebi text, does not make this connectionregarding The Pessoptimist in her own (albeit considerablyearlier) study of irony in the novel.60 As a result, most ofthese studies give short shrift to the polyvalent characterof the narrative. A comparison of the two most recentEnglish-languages articles on The Pessoptimist—onewritten by a graduate student in Beirut and the other byan Israeli professor in the U.S.—reveals that while botharticles devote a weighty portion of their space to re-viewing earlier criticism of Habiby, they consult noteven a single common source. Given the availability ofmuch of this critical material in English, it is strikingthat neither author has utilized the scholarship gener-ated by the “other” side.61

But perhaps this, too, is symptomatic of the problemof “claiming Habiby.” The code-switching connectedwith the publication history of Habiby’s works blurs thedistinction between original and translation in such away that he can be viewed by one school as a Palestinianwriter of Arabic and by the other as an Israeli writer ofHebrew. The questions surrounding the linguistic iden-tity of his oeuvre could perhaps be productively com-pared to cases of other well-known bilingual writers,such as the Algerian Rachid Boujedra, who writes inboth Arabic and French and a number of whose works


are of disputed linguistic origin. These questions are, ofcourse, also symptomatic of the general condition ofhybridity or doubleness we encounter in the texts them-selves.

Naqqash and Double MarginalizationThe group of Palestinians writing in Israel is com-

plemented by a number of Jewish authors from Arabcountries who continued to work in Arabic after emi-grating to Israel. Of this group, Samir Naqqash is theyoungest and by far the most prolific writer, havingpublished over three collections of short stories, threeplays, one book of novellas, one short and four full-length novels.62 Naqqash considers himself in exile fromIraq, which he left in 1951 at age thirteen, and makes nosecret of his alienation from his surroundings in Israel.63

In fact, we find much less Hebrew in Naqqash’s worksthan in Habiby’s. While that may seem counter-intuitive,it is actually not surprising given that the late Habibywas a vigorous participant in political and cultural life inIsrael, whereas the virtually unknown Naqqash (whorecently moved to England) rejected his linguistic andcultural milieu in Israel in order to maintain his Iraqiidentity. The thrust of bilingual energy in Naqqash’swriting is not between Arabic and Hebrew, but rather,between the colloquial Jewish Baghdadi dialect and fus’ha(literary Arabic).64 This use of the Jewish Baghdadi dia-lect is the distinguishing characteristic of Naqqash’swork; to my knowledge, he is the only writer ever toemploy the dialect in fiction.

Iraq, until the mid-twentieth century, was the site ofwhat linguist Haim Blanc describes as an “unusuallyprofound and sharply delineated dialectical cleav

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age…corresponding to the three major religious com-munities, namely the Muslims, the Jews, and the Chris-tians.”65 The Jewish dialect itself is said to be abouteighty percent comprehensible to an Iraqi Muslim orChristian, but it is marked by a noticeably different pho-nology and by its richly heteroglossic lexicon of loanwords and expressions from Hebrew and Aramaic, aswell as Persian and Turkish. For centuries it functionedas the private language of the Jews of Iraq, and now,with the community’s dispersion to Israel and the West,it is a dying tongue. In the double interests of mimesisand linguistic preservation, Naqqash uses the dialect torepresent the speech of Jewish characters in his works.Additionally, he freely employs the Muslim Iraqi dialectand, in the section of the narrative set in Israel, Hebrewwords and phrases. To the general Arabic reader unfa-miliar with all three colloquial idioms, this linguisticmishmash presents a formidable challenge. In response,Naqqash has devised an unusual, if cumbersome, sys-tem: for every potentially mystifying passage he appendsa fus’ha translation, and often additional commentary, inthe lower margins of the text. Visually, the effect is

striking, with the bottom margin often extending up-wards well into the page. (This elaborate text-commentary structure is also vaguely reminiscent ofJewish and Muslim scriptures with their marginal com-mentaries.) The glosses, while of uneven helpfulness,66

provide a fascinating example of the author steppingout of his or her own fiction to supply the reader withinformation for filling in contextual gaps; collectively,they imply a certain textual culture or outlook inde-pendent of the narrative. The margin, in this way, be-comes a kind of third space in the text, one that medi-ates between the world of the narrative and the world ofthe reader.

That there should be so much distance between thetwo that this compensation is even needed speaks alsoof marginalization in its political sense. One could saythat Naqqash, as a self-defined Arab Jew, takes his sym-bolic revenge on the history from which he was ejectedby putting the Jewish dialect in the narrative and itstranslation in the margin. Alternatively, he might havetried translating inside the narrative, by trying to pro-duce a language that would retain the flavor of certain“colloquial” [‘amiyyah] expressions but still be user-friendly for the general Arab reader. But Naqqash makesno such concessions, refusing to translate himself into amore marketable idiom and demanding instead that thereader use the margin to translate. This is, perhaps, aradical example of Mehrez’s observation that the read-ing of a hybrid text cannot be other than a perpetualtranslation.

Like Habiby, Naqqash thematizes interlinguistic ten-sions. His novella Ana wa-ha’ula wa-l-fisam [I, They and theSplit]67 follows the protagonist, a young Jewish boy inBaghdad, through the gradual deterioration of Jewishlife in Iraq during the forties and his unwilling emigra-tion to Israel in the early fifties.68 Language in this no-vella is profoundly linked to communal identity, firstthat of the Jews in Iraq and then that of the Iraqi immi-grants in Israel. The first half of the story, set in Bagh-dad, pivots around a cast of secondary characters withGurji Chilwiyyah, the narrator’s feared and hated relig-ion tutor, at the center. The teacher’s repeated com-mand of “Iqa’!”69—“Read!” haunts this part of the text(not to mention the narrator’s life) as a menacing trope.In the midst of his description of one of the dreadedTorah lessons, the narrator digresses into a recollectionthat well demonstrates both the story’s stratified lin-guistic texture and its thematization of language andidentity: “I read; about the promised land I read. But Iam in Iraq and it is here that I live and breathe and learnand dream, and plan for the future. And during theholidays, there is the shaking of hands, and the mur-muring of lips: ‘Tizku le-shanim rabuth. Inshallah sana alakha-bi-rushalim.’”70 When we refer to footnote twenty-six,we find: “A traditional greeting exchanged by Iraqi Jews


since time immemorial, which means: may you live longand may we celebrate next year in Jerusalem.” We thenreturn to the narrative: “Even our partner Hussein Al-‘Alaywi, who has been speaking of the impending lib-eration of Palestine, heard this holiday greeting from myuncle’s naïve wife and scowled, checking his rage in acircumspect silence.”71

I have translated the literary Arabic into English andretained the Judeo-Arabic in the original in order toconvey the experience of the general Arab reader. Herewe see the interpolation of Hebrew (“tizku le-shanimraboth”) and Judeo-Arabic (“sana alakh a-bi-rushalim”) intothe fus’ha (literary Arabic) narrative. In the narrative, theMuslim partner, who doesn’t know that this is merely aholiday greeting, understands the literal meaning of theJudeo-Arabic expression but fails to translate it correctlyinto its idiomatic usage. Instead, he hears a political sen-timent supporting Zionism. In contrast to The Pessopti-mist, here the mistranslation does not reveal a deepertruth; rather, it dramatizes the rise in intercommunaltensions that eventually leads to the narrator’s ejectionfrom his native Baghdad. It is no accident that Naqqashchooses this particular expression to make the point;within Jewish culture, anyone, no matter how secular,would immediately recognize the phrase “Next year inJerusalem.” We see a double (both textual and meta-textual) irony here in that the banality of the expressionis lost not only on the Muslim character, but presumablyon the reader too: hence the explanation in the mar-gins.72 Naqqash’s footnote may also serve as an implicitcriticism of the Zionist project which did, in fact, per-form the ultimate over-literalization of this ages-oldfigure of speech. (In this respect, one could say that theidiomatic/figurative translation is not so much “lost on”as “stolen from” the reader.)

Translation in the margins thus works in tandem withthe narrative to realize Naqqash’s goal of representinghis idiom faithfully while facilitating its decoding: it is away of defying extinction even as it acknowledges itsinevitable advance. This, too, recalls Niranjana’s obser-vations concerning the relationship of translation andhistory:

The postcolonial desire to re-translate is linked to thedesire to re-write history. Re-writing is based on anact of reading, for translation in the post-colonialcontext involves what Benjamin would call ‘citation’and not an ‘absolute forgetting.’ Hence there is nosimple rupture with the past but a radical rewriting ofit.73

The desire to re-write history holds as true for the the-matic content of Naqqash’s (largely autobiographical)fiction as for his linguistic revisionism. And the two arecertainly interrelated: re-inscribing the language of IraqiJews into the canon of Arabic fiction is one means ofre-inserting Iraqi Jews into the historical narrative itself.

As the narrative continues, things grow steadilyworse. As but one anti-Jewish measure adopted duringthe government-sponsored repression of the Jewishcommunity, teaching Hebrew is made illegal, and GurjiChilwiyyah arrested. The situation becomes increasinglyintolerable until the narrator’s family finally reaches thedevastating conclusion that “there is really no future forJews here [in Iraq]” [Ma di-yitla‘ darb. Rah nisaqqat wi-nimshi. Fi‘alan ma khallu lil-yahudi ba‘d ‘ayshah hinah].74

Reluctantly, they go to sign up for the tasqit (the denatu-ralization of Jews registering for emigration)75 poign-antly depicted by Naqqash in a passage remarkable forits portrayal of the contradictory reactions on the partof Muslim and Jew alike:

We take our nationality to the Meir Tweig syna-gogue and sign our names. There the bureau for de-naturalization crouches in wait. The high-ranking of-ficer sits on a table, carrying out orders. The peoplelose their identities—they dispense of them voluntar-ily. No…rather, they leave them to be torn up againsttheir will. And once again the puzzle is solved andmade insoluble. Only a bit of time has elapsed andwe have already become people without nationality oridentity. The officer who has just stripped us of ourintimaa’ and torn us up by the roots gazes at us som-berly, asking “Haven’t you heard the news?”

“No, why, did something happen?”With a grim face, as brother complaining to

brother: “What? You haven’t heard yet? Queen ‘Aliadied.”

Stripped of identity…yet the faces grieve. And theintimaa’ sticks its neck out from deep within the gutsand weeps over the contradiction’s human remains.76

The incongruity of the Iraqi officer addressing the Jewsas members of the imagined community of the nation,during the very moment of their denaturalization, is jarringindeed. Intimaa’—a word without exact equivalent inEnglish—connotes the feeling of membership, belong-ing to and affiliation with a collective. Here, it is pre-cisely in relation to the imagined national communitythat Naqqash invokes the term. Even as the officerstrips the Jews of their citizenship, he reflexively contin-ues to view them as members of the polity, expressed byNaqqash in terms of a familial relationship (“asbrother…to brother”); conversely, even in their disen-franchised condition the now-stateless Jews continuenaturally to “imagine” themselves part of the samecommunity. Yet the narrator also simultaneously recog-nizes the paradox of their deeply ingrained intimaa’ (asIraqis) in a nation that has rejected them (as Jews). Atthe end of the passage, it is not the denaturalized Jewishcitizens who are weeping for their departed queen, butthe intimaa’ itself that now weeps over its abandonedsubjects. Their identities fragmented by this paradox, thepeople are reduced to ashla’ [disjointed parts of corpses]


in the construct “ashla’ al-munaqadah” [the human re-mains of the contradiction]. This is another moment inwhich the text’s meaning emerges through the gap be-tween the message sent and the message received. Here,however, the gap obtains not from a disjunction be-tween two languages, but directly from the disjunctionbetween language and the authority that informs, under-scores, and authorizes it. In this case it is the changedrelationship between sender and addressee relative tothis authority that creates the communicative breach: theofficer (an agent of the state) speaks the Muslim dialectof Iraqi Arabic, comprehensible to both parties, but hismessage at the moment of utterance is based upon afaulty premise concerning the narrator’s family (thatthey are full citizens, required as such to identify withthe monarchy and other national symbols). Thus thestatement itself is rendered false.

The narrator watches as one by one, the entire cast ofsecondary characters that peopled the earlier part of thestory (and his childhood) leaves for Israel:

Baghdad is being emptied of her Jews. The syna-gogues are emptied of their worshippers; theschools, of their pupils, and the hospital of its visi-tors and patients. And the clubs and the playgroundsand the prophets’ tombs, all are empty and deserted.The city is sad and gloomy in her stillness, and hersilence speaks the most eloquent of languages.77

The story follows the narrator and his family throughtheir own final moments in Baghdad and then resumeswith their arrival in Israel. From this point on, it is in-fused with the narrator’s bitter disappointment as heencounters successive neighbors and acquaintancesfrom Baghdad and emphasizes each one’s dramatic fallin socioeconomic status. This process of disillusion-ment culminates in the re-discovery of Gurji Chilwi-yyah, the Torah teacher, now a bum on the streets ofJerusalem (whence the story ends). In one passage nar-rated entirely in Iraqi Jewish dialect, “Albert” (Frenchpronunciation), a formerly prosperous merchant whomthe narrator describes as a big barrel of a man, explainsto his incredulous listeners the circumstances by whichhe has become a beggar:

I can’t stand being hungry and not having some-thing to eat. One day I was walking in Tel Aviv. Iwent into a restaurant and said, bring me a fish. Hesaid, head or tail? So I said, what’s this head or tailbusiness? Just bring the whole fish! He brought me afish just about as long as my hand, and I finished itoff in one bite. Yaba, how much? He said ‘sixteenlira.’ A fish the size of my hand, sixteen lira –sixteendinars! Two or three months go by like this, and thelast of my money runs out. I want meat, there’s nomeat…no chicken…no eggs. And I’m hungry, and Iwant to eat! Some Ashkenazi nearby us [in the tran-sit camp] was raising a couple of chickens…. I don’t

know where the mamzer got them from. I open thedoor of my hut and I gather a little barley and callout to the chickens. This one walks inside and I shutthe door and grab her. The knife is ready. No sooneris she in my hand than I dispatch her. Then I say tomy wife Hanina, ‘Hanina my girl, don’t besad—today fate has brought us something good toeat.’So…? How did you become a beggar?One day I was walking down the road. It was in thewinter and was raining—you haven’t yet experiencedthe rain here. It rains like mad. I ducked into an alleyto wait for it to stop. I just happened to put out myhand to see whether or not it had stopped raining,and a coin falls in my palm! So I left my hand rightwhere it was until it filled up with coins. Then Icame home and said, ‘Hanina, I found myself somenice work. Better than sitting around doing noth-ing.78

Thus far we have analyzed passages written primarily infus’ha, with brief interpolations in Judeo-Arabic in thefirst case and in the Iraqi Muslim dialect in the second.In this last passage, however, the entire narration iswritten in Jewish dialect. An incredibly literal renditionof the dialect’s particular idioms and cadences, Albert’sspeech is transcribed phonetically to the degree that itmakes little sense until read aloud (and at many points,until it is compared with the fus’ha translation in themargins). Without pathos, and with only a modicum ofirony, Albert explains his new “profession” as the prod-uct of a misunderstanding. The entire monologuehinges on the cultural and social disorientation of thenewly-arrived Iraqi Jews vis-à-vis the veteran, primarilyAshkenazi (European-Jewish) Israelis; but this tension isalluded to only obliquely, as the character is speakingwith other Iraqi immigrants, whom he assumes share hisviewpoint. How does Naqqash manage to convey allthis within the fus’ha translation in the margins, directedat the general, non-Jewish Arabic reading public?

A close reading of both the ‘amiyyah version and itsfus’ha translation reveals some informative choices. Al-bert, who has been in Israel longer than the narrator andhis family, translates the Israeli pound (“lira”) into theArabic “dinar” (used in Iraq), emphasizing the inordinateexpense of food in the new country relative to the onethey have left behind. Thus, while the exchange rate inAlbert’s explanation (“sixteen lira—sixteen dinars”) isone-to-one—an exact equivalence—it is also shown tobe a false equivalence, in the sense that the buyingpower of the dinar in Iraq is so much greater than thatof the lira in Israel. The logic of this “false equivalent”in Albert’s translation of monetary values is thus similarto the logic of the false cognate: even (or especially)when things seem to be familiar—to make sense—theyare essentially different, and they confound.79


When Albert refers to his money running out, the‘amiyyah calls it “flus” [money] while the translation refersto “darahim” (the plural of dirham, in many Arab coun-tries a smaller denomination of money than the dinar);later on, referring to the coins that drop into his hand,both the ‘amiyyah and the fus’ha use “qirsh,” a linguisticrelic of the Ottoman era (source of the Hebrew grush),now the smallest denomination of coins in many Arabcountries, such as Egypt. This use of particular and fa-miliar denominations of money locates the passagewithin a distinctly Arab material frame of reference (butinterestingly, not one associated directly with either Is-rael or Iraq).80

In reference to the neighbor, the ‘amiyyah versionreads: “aku fed wehid ashkenazi jighanu amghabi kam jiji.Maghaf minayn jibu il-mamzer.” This version uses two He-brew terms: “Ashkenazi” (Jew of European origin ordescent) and “mamzer” (bastard). Mamzer is a traditionalterm of disparagement in Jewish Baghdadi dialect,where it is still closely linked to its original, legal-religious meaning; in Israeli Hebrew usage it connotessomething closer to “scoundrel,” usually uttered with anundertone of admiration for the subject’s wiliness. Butwhether Albert is using the term in the Iraqi Jewish orthe Israeli sense, in either case, the general Arab readerwould be completely unfamiliar with the term. When welook at the fus’ha translation of those two sentences, wefind: “yujid bi-jiwar sarifatina al-khamiyyah, rajul shiknaziyurabbi ‘adadan min ad-dajaj. La adri al-laqit min ayna atibihim.”81 A number of points bear mention here. First,the fus’ha translation adds “sarifatina al-khamiyyah”82 (ourmakeshift hut), which the original leaves implicit. Sec-ond, “Ashkenazi,” which in Israeli Hebrew is a neutralterm but which Albert uses as an “Other-ing” colloca-tion, is rendered in the margins as “shiknazi”—which, inMSA (Modern Standard Arabic), has a slightly deroga-tory connotation. (Had Naqqash wished to choose avalue-neutral term, he could have written “rajul yahudiurubi” [European Jewish man] or something similar.) Inchoosing shiknazi, Naqqash conveys to the reader whatis arguably a stronger sense of Other-ness and perhapsdistaste than emerges from the original (where it is im-plicit in the socio-cultural context if not the actual lan-guage). Third, we find that mamzer has been translatedinto fus’ha as “laqit,” the (very) classical Arabic term for“foundling.” The register of this word is oddly formaland elevated in comparison with mamzer; although laqitis used in a similar sense in ‘Abbasid literature, it is not aterm of disparagement in today’s parlance (‘amiyyah andstandard Arabic both have other terms to convey “bas-tard” as an insult). No real sense of consistency, then,issues from Naqqash’s choices: shiknazi lowers the reg-ister, while laqit raises it considerably and fails to conveythe nuances of the term in Hebrew or Jewish dialect.What we can say is that these various adaptations—the

addition of the reference to the tent-hut for context, theArabization of “Ashkenazi,” and finally the replacementof a Jewish term with strong cultural associations with a“non-ethnic” classical epithet—all demonstrate both thedegree of verisimilitude in the original ‘amiyyah and theefforts Naqqash expends in accommodating the readerthrough a translation that is as much cultural as it is lin-guistic. This is truly a “double text” not only in that itstraddles two worlds, but that it is literally written (andread) in two languages.

Conclusion: Towards an Intra-textual Theory ofTranslation

We have seen how The Pessoptimist and I, They, and theSplit incorporate counter-histories—such as the school-master explaining the history of Palestine to Sa‘id, orNaqqash’s Arabic-language, Iraqi-Jewish perspective on“absorption” into Israel— into their narratives. InNiranjana’s words:

Perhaps post-colonial theory can show that we needto translate (that is, disturb or displace) historyrather than to interpret it (hermeneutically) or“read” it (in a textualizing move)…The post-colonialdesire for “history” is a desire to understand thetraces of the “past” in a situation where at least onefact is singularly irreducible: colonialism and whatcame after. Historiography in such a situation mustprovide ways of recovering occluded images fromthe past to deconstruct colonial and neocolonialhistories.83

Habiby and Naqqash’s writings both perform this func-tion, challenging official Zionist historiography as wellas the now socially-internalized narratives that hold Pal-estinians accountable for their own displacement andsuffering, and that deny or downplay the reality, his-toricity, and normality of Jewish life in Arab countries,as well as the multiple levels of loss most Arabic-speaking Jews encountered upon arrival in Israel.Naqqash’s novella also challenges the elision of theJewish presence from Arab national narratives. In bothtexts, the means to this recovery process is the author’screative use of language and languages. Each narrative,furthermore, depicts the strategies of life in exile as akind of auto-translation or code-switching in a hostileworld, recalling Niranjana’s equation of “hybridity” with“living in translation.”84 Yet these two texts also demon-strate considerable differences in the authors’ relation-ships to language, which stem from their respective re-lationships with the past and the decisive moment ofrupture. The Pessoptimist takes place ex post facto, after1948; the “before” is depicted as a period of harmonybetween Sa‘id and his human and linguistic environ-ment, followed by the “after” of life in Israel in whichthe narrative’s wacky events are set. By contrast,Naqqash’s story takes place both in Baghdad and in Is-


rael and traces the deteriorating status of the Jews inIraq. Naqqash therefore portrays linguistic tensions inboth the “before” and “after” periods, and whatchanges is the context; when he’s in Iraq, learning He-brew is forbidden and the Jewish dialect of Arabic ismisunderstood or derided by the Muslim majority, butwhen he’s in Israel, it is Arabic that is the scorned andrepudiated tongue.

As a result, translation within these texts takes differ-ent forms. In Naqqash, the heteroglossia and intricatecultural references necessitate the textual crutch of themargins, which mediate between the internal world ofthe narrative and the external world of the reader. Inadmitting (and perhaps emphasizing) the linguisticopacity of his narrative, Naqqash sacrifices literary con-vention in order to insist on and valorize a historic prin-ciple: the once-pluralistic character of Baghdad, now allbut forgotten. His obsession with recording the linguis-tic minutia of this vanished world verges on fetishiza-tion. In face of Israeli national discourse, his writing isnot post-Zionist but rather, nostalgically “pre-Zionist,”intent on resuscitating the Iraqi-Jewish ambiance in itsfullness—and on not admitting the present into thisrecreated world, but for the margins.

In Habiby we see a pronounced interaction betweenArabic and Hebrew in the narrative, with an emphasisnot on linguistic equivalence or transparency, but onmisinterpretation. Through the “between” spaces of thenarrative, this Arabic novel first encodes, and then ef-fectively re-writes the language of Israel from a Pales-tinian insider’s perspective. At the same time, even as hereveals the myriad ways in which the Israeli military andsecurity services brutalize, dispossess, and exploit theremaining Palestinian population, Habiby’s choices ofanecdote, idiom, and above all, his thematic use oftranslation and wordplay between Arabic and Hebrewall conclusively demonstrate one point: that the twopeoples, like their histories, cultures, and languages, areirrevocably intertwined. This is not necessarily a hopefulobservation, but it is an incontrovertible reality.

These works suggest an understanding of translationwhere it is not only something that happens after thestory ends, but is a crucial part of the narrative itself;where it generates plot and meaning; a theory of trans-lation in which it is not equivalence, but the necessarylack thereof, that reveals and delivers the actual truthvalue of the statement. These are texts in which nearlyany statement may have a double meaning; in whichlanguage is not a transparent medium so much as ametaphor for itself,85 an inside joke between author andreader, delivered at the character’s expense. Habiby’s useof mistranslation in particular is also a project of desta-bilizing linguistic referentiality. To borrow the terms ofJakobson’s verbal communication model, we can saythat here meaning is conveyed not through the successful

delivery of the message from addresser to addressee,but through its failure.86 In the thematic representation ofcommunicative breakdown, we see language recognizingits own inevitable fiction, acknowledging how tenuous isthe absolute link between symbol and referent, how eas-ily it is obstructed: “As Barbara Johnson points out,translation ‘has always been the translation of meaning.’The idea that signified and signifier can be separatedinforms the classical conception of philosophy as wellas translation.”87 This kind of disruption in the signify-ing function serves not only to intervene in authoritativediscourses (as exemplified by the targeted misread-ing/re-writing of hegemonic historical narratives), butin essentialized, proprietary notions of language itself.In transgressing the boundaries between languages,translation crosses the demarcating lines of geography,identity, and culture. Translation thus becomes a meansof engaging not only the barriers between people, butthe barriers within them. In these and doubtless manyother bilingual texts, translation works inside the narra-tive to negotiate between different languages and cul-tures, between author and reader, and even between theconflicting layers of affiliation and identity that theauthor brings to the text.

NOTESThanks to ‘Abbas al-Tonsi, who read this article’s first in-

carnation (in pencil-written, eraser-smudged Arabic, for aCASA seminar); to Professor Chana Kronfeld and the mem-bers of her translation seminar at U.C. Berkeley for graciouslyreading and discussing an earlier article-length version; and toNaomi Seidman for references to theoretical materials. I alsothank Margaret Litvin and the anonymous reviewer ofCSSAAME for their invaluable comments and suggestions.

I am dedicating this article to the memory of ProfessorMagda M. Al-Nowaihi, who passed away on 4 June 2002 atage 44, after a lengthy battle with cancer. As devastating as heruntimely death is to so many, her indomitable spirit and sharpintellect continue to inspire the work of all those privileged tohave studied or taught with her. This article is no exception.

1The title indicates that the writing in question was pro-duced within the 1948 borders by two writers who are citizensof the State of Israel. Yet I would not call this writing itself“Israeli” without further qualification (Palestinian, Arab-Jewish, Iraqi, etc.). The problematic nature of such appella-tions in the Israeli-Palestinian context is discussed later in thepaper.

2The character speaking here is, in fact, a Muslim. The bul-lies probably don’t believe him because certain elements ofhis speech are characteristic of the Jewish dialect (e.g., the useof “ana” rather than “aani” [sounds like aah-nee] for “I”). Tothe reader familiar with Iraqi Arabic, these small differences inphonology convey much of the story’s meaning.

3The lecture, “Les mots canins,” appears in English as “DogWords,” trans. Ziad Elmarsafy, in Displacements: Cultural Identi-ties in Question, ed. Angelika Bammer (Bloomington and Indi-anapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994). The epigram quotedat the top of this article appears on p. xxvii. Note also that the


morphology of the word mustanbih indicates not that the mus-tanbih is a “barker” but that he is “one who follows [the soundof] barking.”

4Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Rout-ledge, 1994), 85-92.

5Elmarsafy, Displacements, xxvii.6The relationship of language and power in postcolonial

contexts has been extensively theorized by Tejaswini Niran-jana and others, including (but by no means limited to) AlfredArteaga, Jacques Derrida, Emily Apter, and Auradha Ding-waney. In Siting Translation: History, Post-structuralism, and theColonial Context (Berkeley: University of California Press,1992) Niranjana investigates the relation of language toauthority through an historicized reading, tracing the com-plicity of translation in producing colonial subjects, and in-deed in producing “history” itself, as “the problematics oftranslation and the writing of history are inextricably boundtogether” (42). In considering how the “discourses of educa-tion, theology, historiography, philosophy, and literary transla-tion inform the hegemonic apparatuses that belong to theideological structure of colonial rule” (33), she uncovers “thedesire of colonial discourse to translate in order to contain(and to contain and control in order to translate, since sym-bolic domination is as crucial as physical domination)” (34).The contributors to Arteaga’s volume An Other Tongue: Nationand Ethnicity in the Linguistic Borderlands (Durham: Duke Uni-versity Press, 1994), building on the work of Bakhtin andBhabha, examine the transmission of culture between selfand Other while foregrounding the hybrid linguistic characterof the post-colonial text. See also Jacques Derrida’s TheMonolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin (Stanford:Stanford University Press, 1998); Between Languages and Cul-tures: Translation and Cross Cultural Texts, eds. Auradha Ding-waney and Carol Meir (Pittsburgh: University of PittsburghPress, 1995); Rethinking Translation: Discourse, Subjectivity, Ideology,ed. Lawrence Venuti (New York: Routledge, 1998), and Rain-ier Grutman, “Metaphor of Translation,” Routledge Encyclopediaof Translation Studies, ed. Mona Baker (Routledge: London,1998), 149-160. Finally, see also the special issue on “Transla-tion in a Global Market” in Public Culture 13:1 (2001).

7 Niranjana, Siting Translation, 59.8Samia Mehrez, “Translation and the Postcolonial Experi-

ence: The Francophone North African Text,” in RethinkingTranslation, 121-138, 121.

9See also Lydia Liu, ed. Tokens of Exchange: The Problem ofTranslation in Global Circulations (Durham: Duke UniversityPress, 1999), especially “Introduction,” 1-12.

10Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” in Illumi-nations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York:Schocken Books, 1986). Along these lines, Benjamin com-pares the original and translation to fragments of a vessel:“[A] translation, instead of resembling the meaning of theoriginal, must lovingly and in detail incorporate the original’smodel of signification, thus making both the original and thetranslation recognizable as fragments of a greater language,just as fragments are part of a vessel” (78). Benjamin evendescribes the act of translation as the “liberation” of a textfrom its imprisonment in language, its release into the height-ened realm of “pure language” where it is not subject to the

restraints of the signification process, and its re-inscription(or, if you will, its re-incarceration) into another linguisticcode (80). Finally, he recognizes the reciprocal relationship ofthe translation to the original, saying that languages are “pow

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erfully affected” by translation and crediting translation withprolonging the life of the original text by giving it reincarna-tions. (81). This, of course, is a much richer approach thanthat allowed for by the old metaphors of fidelity and equiva

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lence. But by decontextualizing the concept of language andconsigning it to the lofty realm of the metaphysical, Benjamincreates an artificial division of the text from the world: hisconceptualization of the translator’s work seems to assumethat all languages enjoy equal status in the world, and that thetranslator is also unaffected by the pressures and forces thatgovern relations between his or her own language and that ofthe text. In terms of postcolonial thought, the fundamentalproblem with Benjamin’s essay is that there is no “pure lan-guage”: that we, as authors, as readers, and as translators, can-not think, let alone write, in terms untainted by the powerrelations governing the world in which we live, the only realitywe can know—a reality constructed for and digested by us inthe categorically imperfect medium of language. (I shouldalso note that Tejaswini Niranjana’s reading of Benjamin’sessay [Siting Translation, Chap. Three] focuses on his concernwith historiography and historical materialism. But while sheis able to draw out these undercurrents from the text byreading the essay alongside many of Benjamin’s later writingsand drawing parallels, these concerns are not overtly ex-pressed in the essay itself.)

11See, for instance, Paul de Man’s “Conclusions: WalterBenjamin’s ‘The Task of the Translator,’” in Yale French Studies69: 1985, 25-46 (also in The Resistance to Theory [Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press, 1986], 73-105). De Man dis-tinguishes between the poet and the translator by saying thatthe poet has “some relationship to meaning, to a statementthat is not purely within the realm of language[…] he has toconvey a meaning which does not necessarily relate to lan-guage,” whereas “The relationship of the translator to theoriginal is the relationship between language and language,wherein the problem of meaning or the desire to say some-thing, the need to make a statement, is entirely absent. Trans-lation is a relation from language to language, not a relation toan extralinguistic meaning that could be copied, paraphrased,or imitated” (Yale French Studies, 34). In other words, oncesomething is in language, it is already no longer original. Forde Man, then, the “original” text is already translated, andscholars and critics of writing “kill the original, by discoveringthat the original was already dead” (36). So while the act ofwriting is already an act of “translation,” this renders transla-tion itself a non-vital process of repetition (as opposed tocreation). Benjamin’s “translator” is, in my view, actually muchcloser to de Man’s “poet” in that s/he must work backwardsfrom the original and reconstruct the “pure meaning” that hasbeen locked into language. Octavio Paz takes the opposite ofde Man’s view in “Translation: Literature and Letters,” (trans.Irene de Corral), in Theories of Translation, eds. Rainer Schulteand John Biguenet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1992), 152-162, where he says that “translation and creationare twin processes… there is constant interaction between thetwo, a continuous, mutual enrichment” (160). As for the poet


and the translator, Paz states: “The translator’s starting pointis not the language in movement that provides the poet’s rawmaterial but the fixed language of the poem. A language con-gealed, yet living. His procedure is the inverse of the poet’s: heis not constructing an unalterable text from mobile characters;instead, he is dismantling the elements of the text, freeing thesigns into circulation, then returning them to language”;translation, therefore, is an “ inverted parallel of poetic crea-tion” (159; my emphasis). The result is not a “copy” but a“transmutation” (160). Paz also says that “each reading is atranslation” and that reading in general is “translation withinthe same language” (159). For Paz, even all speech originatesfrom translation: “When we learn to speak, we are learning totranslate: the child who asks his mother the meaning of aword is really asking her to translate the unfamiliar term intothe simple words he already knows. In this sense, translationwithin the same language is not essentially different fromtranslation between two tongues, and the histories of all peo-ples parallel the child’s experience” (152). The key word hereseems to be unfamiliar. Any unfamiliar speech necessitatestranslation, and any process of interpretation (such as read-ing) is therefore an act of translation—i.e., transforming theunfamiliar into the familiar. In Habiby and Naqqash, the ideaof unfamiliarity is manipulated for thematic purposes. Thecharacters’ attempts at grappling with the unfamiliar andtranslating it into their own idiom often lead to instances ofmisunderstanding and mistranslation within the text and pro-duce the “correct” translation of the author’s meaning withinthe meta-text. (See also endnote 66).

12 Assia Djebar, for instance, ruminates at length within hernarrative upon her own relationship with the French languageand what it means to be “writing the enemy’s language” inFantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade, trans. Dorothy S. Blair (Lon-don: Quartet Books, 1985), esp. 213-217, but it appears as akind of digression in the voice of the author, outside theworld of the narrative (plot, characters, etc.); elsewhere, sherepresents Arabic within the French prose but does not the-matize the interaction of Arabic and French within the worldof the narrative (see, for example, 202).

13Mehrez, “Translation and the Postcolonial Experience,”122.

14Mehrez, “Translation and the Postcolonial Experience,”122-124.

15Likewise, translation and market forces have codified acertain, select roster of post-colonial writers for Western con-sumption. In her introduction to the special issue of PublicCulture on “Translation in a Global Market,” Emily Apternotes: “The constraints imposed by what is available in trans-lation in part determine the content of the transnationalcanon, which contributes another layer of complexity to thevalue-laden selection process of authors and serves as partialexplanation for why ‘global lit’ courses tend to feature similarrosters of non-Western authors…The most obvious explana-tion—that these and other writers among the ‘happy few’ areselected because they are universally acclaimed, excellent writ-ers—obviously fails to fully account for their predominance”[Public Culture 13:1 (2001): 2].

16In “Balkan Babel: Translation Zones, Military Zones,”Emily Apter discusses the movement of translation studies in

the direction of transnationalism, which she sees as reducingits dependency on mediation through the major Europeanlanguages: “In the field of transnational translation studies,the ramifications are clear: rather than a major language actingas the general equivalent between two or more minor lan-guages, the translation process is now conceptualized as oc-curring within a field of the minor”—e.g. direct translationbetween “minor” languages like Tagalog and Ogoni. “BalkanBabel: Translation Zones, Military Zones,”Public Culture 13:1(2001), 66. In another article in the same issue of Public Cul-ture (“Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Sozaboy: The Politics of ‘Rotten Eng-lish’”), Michael North writes, “Translation seems by definitionan international issue, and the translatability of a text seemsto be relevant only when that text travels outside the nationalboundaries within which it was created. But these assump-tions depend on a national model for which there are virtuallyno pure examples in the contemporary world, because eventhe most homogenous societies have significant minority lan-guages. In many countries where there is no true majoritylanguage at all, the very existence of a national literary me-dium depends on the possibility of translation….” (96). Inthe cases of Habiby and Naqqash, translation within the texttakes place between minor languages and between dialects. Atthe same time, the relative position of Arabic as a majority vs.minority language is reversed within the narrative time andthe geographic space in which the narrative transpires. That is,Arabic in Palestine becomes a minority language after 1948.Habiby’s novel includes references to pre-1948 Palestine,when Arabic is still the majority language. Naqqash’s narrativebegins in Iraq, where Arabic is the majority language, andends in Israel, where it is the minority language. Hence bothworks, while written in Israel, reflect transnational situationsin which the relative status of the languages in question un-dergoes a dramatic reversal.

17This group includes Habiby, Anton Shammas (whotranslated Habiby into Hebrew), Naim ‘Ariede (also a bilin-gual writer), Samih al-Qasim, Riyad Baydas, Salman Massalha,Siham Daoud, and Atallah Mansour, who is widely cited asthe author of the first Hebrew novel by a Palestinian [Be-orhadash, In a New Light, 1966]. For a more detailed discussion of“Arab-Israeli” or “Palestinian-Israeli” writers, including thequestions of audience, politics of publishing and marketing,etc., see Ami Elad-Bouskila, Modern Palestinian Literature andCulture (Portland: Frank Cass, 1999), esp. chaps. 1 and 2.

18These include Anwar Shaul, Shalom Darwish, YitzhaqBar-Moshe, Sasson Somekh, and the youngest of the group,Samir Naqqash. While Israeli critics have demonstrated a mi-nor fascination with the talented handful of bilingual Arabwriters in their midst, they have devoted scant attention to thebilingual Jewish writers from Iraq. A more well-known groupof Iraqi Jewish novelists who publish in Hebrew, including EliAmir, Sami Mikhael, and Shimon Ballas, has garnered consid-erably more notice.

19This juxtaposition would strike many scholars of Hebrewliterature and Israeli culture as counterintuitive; while there area number of studies on “Arab-Israeli writing,” and a few onwriting by Mizrahi and Sephardi authors, I cannot recall hav

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ing seen an entire study devoted to Arab writing produced inIsrael, let alone in comparative context. Israeli scholarshipmaintains a fairly rigorous ethnic-based division between its


various groups of writers (a point to be discussed in furtherdetail later in the paper).

20For instance, Michael North points out that while use ofEnglish by African writers has been roundly criticized as the“worst possible solution,” for a writer such as the NigerianSaro-Wiwa, who is the “native speaker of a language with nowritten literature and no public presence in Nigeria,” Englishrepresents the least oppressive alternative: “To write in Khana,the language of the Ogoni, would have made him unreadableto all but an infinitesimal handful of Nigerians. And the alter-native, to write in one of Nigeria’s major languages, wouldhave been for him a more grievous imposition than English…Saro-Wiwa takes exception to Ngugu’s position [on writingin English] because for him as a member of a minority groupEnglish provides an alternative to a linguistic oppression thatis far more immediate and threatening.” “Ken Saro-Wiwa’sSozaboy,” 100. In other words, the status of English vis-à-visindigenous languages is far from consistent across the spec-trum of ethnic groups in the nation.

21For a fuller accounting of this phenomenon and its rele-vance for Middle Eastern Jewish writing today, see AmmielAlcalay, After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture (Min-neapolis: University Minnesota Press, 1993).

22See also Daniel Boyarin, “Zionism, Gender, and Mim-icry,” in The Pre-Occupation of Postcolonial Studies, eds. FawziaAfzal-Khan and Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks. (Durham: DukeUniversity Press, 2000), 234-265, for a provocative re-readingof Zionism’s conceptual/ideological foundations throughpost-colonial theory. Borrowing from Homi Bhabha’s writingon mimcry, Boyarin contends: “Herzl’s Zionism, I argue con-troversially, is almost, but not quite, colonialism. There are toomany ‘striking features’ that ‘betray its colored [Jewish] de-scent.’ [Bhabha, 89]. Just trying to figure out what might bethe mother country of Zionism immediately reveals theproblem. Zionism, moreover, was anything but the instru-ment of an attempt to spread Jewish culture or Judaism toother peoples. Yet, in its discursive forms and practices, Zi-onism is very similar to colonialism. The plan was not forJewish Palestine to be a colony but for it to have colonies”(256). Boyarin’s central point is that becoming a colonizerwas, for Herzl, the ultimate means of “normalizing” the Jewas European and male. Joseph Massad corroborates this ob-servation in an essay in the same collection: “[E]uropean Jewsand gentiles alike viewed European Jews as Europeans (only)insofar as they were/are undertaking a colonial venture.” Jo

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seph Massad, “The ‘Post-Colonial’ Colony: Time, Space, andBodies in Palestine/Israel,” in The Pre-Occupation of PostcolonialStudies, 311-346; 316.

23Massad, “The ‘Post-Colonial’ Colony,” 311.24Massad, “The ‘Post-Colonial’ Colony,” 311.25Massad, “The ‘Post-Colonial’ Colony,” 312.26Habiby was born in Haifa in 1919, and died there in

1996. In the preface to Salma Khadra Jayyusi and Trevor LeGassick’s English translation of the novel, Jayyusi writes ofHabiby: “A founding member of the Israeli Communist Partyand a leading Arab Journalist, Habiby…was elected threetimes to the Israeli Knesset, or Parliament, on the Communistlist, and has been editor in chief of the leading Arab periodi-cal inside Israel, the bi-weekly, Al-Ittihad (Unity), on whose

pages he has published a large number of editorials revolvingaround social and political issues. As a writer of fiction, how

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ever, Habiby became known on a pan-Arab scale with hiscollection of short stories on life in Israel after the 1967Arab-Israeli war, Stories of the Six Days (1969). However, it ishis novel The Secret Life of Saeed, the Ill-Fated Pessoptimist [note:Jayyusi and LeGassick’s translation of the title, as it appearson the cover, omits the “Ill-Fated”] (Haifa, 1974) that has wonhim the greatest acclaim.” Emile Habiby, The Secret Life ofSaeed the Pessoptimist, Trevor Le Gassick and Salma KhadraJayyusi, trans., 2nd ed. (New York: Interlink Books, 2002), xii.

27An extensive interview with Naqqash appears in Keys tothe Garden: New Israeli Writing, ed. Ammiel Alcalay (San Fran-cisco: City Lights Books, 1996), 100-111. On why he writes inArabic, Naqqash says: “I think that someone who professes tochange from one language to another loses all direction. Idon’t think it’s possible to write in a language that was taughtto you at the age of twenty or twenty-five nor do I think it is awise thing to attempt. Naturally, I prefer the language that Ican express myself best in…The issue of [representing]speech was definitely something I was aware of. In Arabic,you can convey various levels of spoken language in a waythat you cannot in Hebrew. There are also personal obstaclesand reasons why I went into the Arabic language in such greatdepth and these are connected to the new reality here and thetrauma we underwent. This resulted in a kind of roadblockbetween me and not only the language but everything that isIsraeli which has lasted until the present” (107-108). He lateradds: “A Jew who writes in Arabic presents all kinds ofproblems to everyone, yet I am simply continuing to write inmy own language” (110). In a Hebrew article published inMifgash, an Israeli journal devoted to promoting interculturalJewish-Arab contact, Naqqash writes: “Arabic is the first lan-guage I grew accustomed to when I learned to speak; it be-came my second nature, I love it and am devoted to it evenafter having immigrated to Israel at age twelve, where I filledin my missing vocabulary, and it is my most powerful meansof expression… Besides all that, it is a language known for itsperfection and rich heritage; if we compare it to Hebrew,which was dormant for thousands of years, then revived andreturned to development a short time ago, we find that it[Arabic] is more beautiful and richer by several fold.” (SamirNaqqash, “What Do You Want from Me? I’m Protecting MyAutonomy!” quoted in Ami Elad Bouskila, “Arabic and/orHebrew: The Language of Arab Writers in Israel,” in Israeliand Palestinian Identities in History and Literature, Kamal Abdel-Malek and David Jacobson, eds. [New York: St. Martin’sPress, 1999], 133-158, 138).

28As a result, Naqqash had to self-publish his first book.Most of his later works were published by the Association ofJewish Academics from Iraq (a non-commercial press). Apress run by Iraqi exiles in Cologne that calls itself manshuraatal-jamal in Arabic and al-Kamel Verlag in German publishedone of Naqqash’s books, The Angel’s Genitalia. This press,which publishes works by Iraqi dissidents and refugees, hasalso recently brought out an Arabic translation of a collectionof Hebrew stories by Iraqi-Israeli writer Shimon Ballas.

29For a fuller explanation of this collocation (Mizrahim as“internally colonized”) see also Joseph Massad, “Zionism’sInternal Others: Israel and the Oriental Jews,” Journal of Pales-


tine Studies 25:4 (Summer 1996) and Ella Shohat’s “Sephardimin Israel: Zionism from the Standpoint of its Jewish Victims,”Social Text 19/20 (Fall 1998), 1-35.

30Emile Habiby (also spelled Imil Habibi): Al-waqa’i‘ al-gharibah fi ikhtifa’ sa‘id abi al-nahs al-mutasha’il (Cairo: Dar Shu-hdi, n.d.).

31Samir Naqqash, Ana wa-ha’ula’ wa-l-fisam: majmucah qisas‘iraqiyyah (Tel Aviv: Jamicah tashjiac al-abhath wa-l-adab wa-l-funun, 1978); idem, I, They, and the Split: A Collection of IraqiStories (Tel Aviv: Association for the Promotion of Research,Literature, and Art, 1978).

32Vicente Rafael describes translation in this sense as “in-volv[ing] not simply the ability to speak in a language otherthan one’s own but the capacity to reshape one’s thoughtsand actions in accordance with accepted forms,” a processthat involves “either affirmation or evasion of the social or-der.” Quoted in Rainier Grutman, “Metaphor of translation,”Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, 149.

33Throughout the novel, the means of the letter’s deliveryis never explained. An epilogue, however, adds: “The gentle-man who received these strange letters wishes to inform youthat when they reached him they bore the postmark of Acre.And so it was there that he pursued their author. Finally thetrail led him to the mental hospital within the city walls, onthe seashore” (161). The “gentleman” does not find himthere, but the hospital does locate a name similar to Sa‘id’s:“Saadi al-Nahhas, known as Abu al-Thum, referred to bysome as Abu al-Shum,” who, it is revealed, had died a yearearlier” (162). (In another play on translation and on doublemeanings, “thum” is the Arabic for “garlic” and “shum” itsHebrew cognate, which in Hebrew can also mean “none” or“nonesuch”—i.e. Abu al-Shum may not really exist.) The nar-rator continues: “And so the gentleman who received thosestrange letters left that place. It is now his hope that you willhelp him search for Saeed. But where should one look?”(162). This absurdist digression concludes with a parableabout a madman who misleads a lawyer into searching forburied treasure, and in the meantime, occupies himself bypainting a wall with a brush dipped into a bottomless bucket.When the lawyer returns empty-handed and perplexed, themadman invites him to help him with the painting. The lastsentence enigmatically concludes: “The point is, gentlemen,how will you ever find him unless you happen to trip rightover him?” (163).

34 Habiby, 92. See also Samia Mehrez, “Al-mufaraqah ‘indaJames Joyce wa-Imil Habibi” (“Irony in Joyce’s Ulysses andHabibi’s Pessoptimist”), ALIF 4 (Spring 1984): 33-54, 46.

35Along these lines, Arteaga emphasizes the role of lan-guage not only in reinforcing but in creating the colonial real-ity: “Any monologism, with its drive toward a unitary andself-reflec(x/ct)ive discourse, discriminates Self from Other,but in the colonial situation, it radically differentiates theidentities of colonizer and colonized….The colonizer’s lan-guage and discourse are elevated to the status of arbiter oftruth and reality; the world comes to be as the authoritativediscourse says.” Alfred Arteaga, ed., An Other Tongue: Nationand Ethnicity in the Linguistic Borderlands (Durham: Duke Uin-versity Press, 1994), 16. This is only too true in the Israeli-Palestinian context, where different historical “realities” down

to the level of different place-names for the same sites com-pete for primacy in determining the contours and, indeed, thedaily stuff of lived experience.

36His literary oeuvre includes a collection of stories, Sudasi-yyat al-ayyam as-sittah wa-qisas ukhrah [The Sextet of the Six Daysand Other Stories], 1969) and three novels, The Pessoptimist(1974), Ekhtayyeh (1985), and Sarayyah bint al-ghul [Sarayyah,Daughter of the Ghoul], 1991).

37Habiby, 91. In Le Gassick’s translation: “They would de-pend heavily on ‘liberal’ young men like myself who knew acivilized language well” (41). “Lughah insaniyyah” can be trans-lated as a “human,” “civilized,” or “humanistic” language; inthe Arabic it conveys something of all three meanings.

38Habiby, 91. In Le Gassick: “He said, ‘Shalom,’ and I an-swered, ‘Peace,’ showing how civilized I was” (42).

39 Habiby, 163; translations are Le Gassick’s, 122.40 Dingwaney, Between Languages and Cultures, 9.41Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by

M.M. Bakhtin, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist,Michael Holquist, ed. (Austin: University of Texas Press,1994), 304-5, quoted in Michaela Wolf, “The Third Space inPostcolonial Representation,” in Changing the Terms: Translatingin the Postcolonial Era, Sherry Simon and Paul St. Pierre, eds.(University of Ottowa Press, 2000), 133 (emphasis mine).

42 All quotations in this paragraph are from Le Gassick, 24.43Based on Le Gassick’s translation, 24, with some addi-

tions (emphasis is mine).44 Niranjana, Siting Translation, 37-38.45This is a mistake in the Le Gassick translation; the neigh-

borhood of Haifa is called Wadi Nisnas, not “Nasnas.”46Le Gassick, 48.47Le Gassick, 49.48“And don’t forget Shlomo in one of Tel Aviv’s very best

hotels. Isn’t he really Sulaiman, son of Munirah, from ourown quarter? And ‘Dudi,’ isn’t he really Mahmud? ‘Moshe,’too; isn’t his proper name Musa, son of Abdel Massih? Howcould they earn a living in a hotel, restaurant, or filling stationwithout help from their Oriental imagination […]?” (Le Gas-sick, 101); in Arabic: “Wa-an-nadal shlomo, fi afkham fanadiq tilabib, a-laysa huwwa sulayman bin munira, ibn haritna? Wa-dudi, a-laysa huwwa mahmud? Wa-moshe, a-laysa huwwa muusa bin ‘abd al-masih? Fa-kayfa la yartaziq ha’ula fi funduq aw fi mata‘m aw fi ma-hatat benzin, law-la al-khayal ash-sharqi? “ (Habiby, 141). This toorecalls Rafael’s observation that translation of this kind in-volves “either affirmation or evasion of the social order.”

49The name Walaa’ means “loyalty” or “fidelity,” while Sa‘idmeans “happy” (“Pessoptimist” in Arabic is Habiby’s neol-gism, “mutasha’il,” – a combination of mutafa‘il (optmistic) andmutasha’im (pessimistic). In the story, Sa‘id chooses the name“Walaa’” to please his Israeli boss, who disapproves of thename “Fat’hi” (victorious) originally proposed by the child’smother; see Roger Allen, The Arabic Novel: An Historical andCritical Introduction, 2nd ed. (Syracuse: Syracuse UniversityPress, 1995), 217.

50See also Roger Allen’s discussion of this wordplay in TheArabic Novel, 214.

51The chapter reads:I lived in the outside world…for twenty years, unable to


breath no matter how hard I tried, like a man who isdrowning. But I did not die. I wanted to get free but couldnot; I was a prisoner unable to escape. But I did remainunchained.

How often I yelled at those about me, “Please, every-one! I groan at the burden of the great secret I bear on myshoulders! Please help me!” But all that came from be-neath my moustache was a meowing sound, like that of acat.

Eventually I came to believe in the transmigration ofsouls.

Imagine your soul, after your death, entering a cat andthis cat being resurrected and roaming around your house.Then imagine your son, whom you love so dearly…andyou calling him, meowing to him again and again, while hetells you again and again to shut up. Finally he throws astone at you. This makes you retreat, reciting to yourselfthe words of our great poet al-Mutanabbi in the gardensof Buwan in Persia: “In face, hand, and tongue astranger.”

That’s how I’ve been for twenty years, meowing andwhimpering so much that this idea of transmigration hasbecome a reality in my mind. Whenever I see a cat, I feeluneasy, thinking that this might be my mother, may hersoul rest in peace. So I smile at it and pet it, and even ex-change meows with it (Le Gassick, 76).

The Arabic uses “harah” for “cat” and “tamu’” for (she) me-ows, and “mua’ al-harah” for “the meow of a cat” (Habiby,122).

52Habiby, 148.53 Le Gassick, 114.54For example, in a chapter called “The Story of the

Golden Fish,” Sa’id recalls: “Since I realized that birth controlwas a proof of loyalty, we had no more children. And when-ever our secret became too heavy to bear, I declared my loy

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alty, whether I was asked to or not. I had regarded myself asan introvert until they sent us in a delegation to Europe andhad us take along lots of tambal [sic] hats to present to ourJewish brothers there, along with talk of milk and honey, themarrying of spinsters, and the cure for cancer. I presentedthem with my shirt, pants, and all my underwear, keepingnothing hidden but my secret” (Le Gassick, 97). This passagecannot be fully appreciated without familiarity with the kova’tembel (which Le Gassick mistakenly transcribes as “tambal” ).This floppy, brimless hat, shaped like the top of a mushroom,became an iconic symbol of “pioneering” life in Israel in theearly years of statehood. (The word tembel idiomatically means“fool,” “dunce,” or “idiot,” in Israeli Hebrew). Habiby bril-liantly weaves this cultural icon into his parodic passage de-tailing Sa‘id’s loyalty to the state.

55See, for instance, Rachel Feldhay Brenner’s “‘HiddenTranscripts’ Made Public: Israeli Arab Fiction and Its Recep-tion, Critical Inquiry, 26:1 (Autumn 1999), 3 of electronic ver-sion, and “The Search for Identity in Israeli Arab Fiction:Atallah Mansour, Emile Habiby, and Anton Shammas,” IsraelStudies 6:3 (2001), 95. Brenner’s explicit focus is on the trans-mission of these authors’ works into Israeli Hebrew culture.She acknowledges, but does not pursue, the status ofHabiby’s works as Arabic novels. In first presenting him, she

notes briefly that his works “were originally written in Arabicand translated by Shammas under Habiby’s supervision”(“’Hidden Transcripts’ Made Public,” 3, electronic version),then proceeds to group his writing with the other, Hebrew-language texts: “The exceptional combination of genre,authors’ nationality, and language suggests that a particularkind of intention motivates these texts: to present Israeli Arabautobiographical narratives to a Hebrew-speaking Jewishaudience. The authorial intention, the raison d’être, of this actof writing is inextricable from the identity of the targetedreader […]” (3). Given that Habiby wrote the texts in Arabic,how does he share in the linguistic aspect of this “exceptionalcombination”? Indeed, the statement implies that “the tar-geted reader” of a major twentieth-century Arabic novel suchas The Pessoptimist is the Hebrew-speaking Jewish audience.Certainly, Habiby had this audience in mind when writing thenovel; but it is equally evident that it is aimed at least at much,if not more, at the Arab reader. Elsewhere, Brenner notes thatin Sarayah, Daughter of the Ghoul, Habiby “draws the attentionof his Hebrew reader to the status of his fiction as a trans-lated text when…he steps out of his narrative to questionwhether Shammas could adequately translate a particularlycomplex pun from Arabic into Hebrew” (3); in her later arti-cle, she underscores the fact that “Habiby’s oeuvre reached theIsraeli readership in Hebrew translation” and focuses on thequestion of why Habiby would “knowingly endanger hisreputation, friendships, and the readership in the Arab worldto enter the world of the Israeli Jewish majority through thespecial effort of translation” (“The Search for Identity in Is-raeli Arab Fiction, 96). These are pertinent considerations;however, Brenner’s analysis of Habiby’s novel proceeds with-out further regard for them.

56Shammas’s novel is the only exception to this rule—thatis, the only literary work by a Palestinian in Israel to be readclosely and analyzed from theoretical perspectives not re-stricted to the issue of the author’s identity.

57This point is discussed insightfully by Brenner. In sum-marizing the response of Israeli critics to Habiby’s work and,especially, to the decision to grant him the Israel Prize forliterature, she concludes: “Despite their claim to approachHabiby apolitically, the appreciations of his work disclose asubtext no less programmatic than the negative responses ofhis Arab critics. Israeli Jewish liberals interpret Habiby’s writ-ing as a benevolent satiric representation of human folly, as-sociating it with satiric humanist literature, such as Voltaire’sCandide and Jaroslav Hasek’s The Good Soldier Schweik. Thismove allows the liberal left to see Habiby’s prize as a victoryof justice over political and national differences. The criticalemphasis on Habiby’s ‘back door’ message, his ‘sof-tened…description of Arab life in Israel under military rule,’and his humanism places [sic] Habiby’s work in the context ofuniversal moral values” ( “‘Hidden Transcripts’ Made Public,”5, electronic version).

58Interestingly enough, Habiby himself supplies many ofthe intertextual references himself in the form of occasionalfootnotes in the text (which, while it is far less a prominentfeature of the text than in Naqqash, could still be interestingto compare to the latter’s extensive footnoting system). Forone instructive exploration of intertextuality in The Pessopti-mist, See Anna Zambelli Sessona, “The Rewriting of the Ara-


bian Nights by Imil Habibi,” Middle Eastern Literatures 5, 1 (Jan2002), 29-48, which discusses applications of Alf layla wa-layla[A Thousand and One Nights] in the novel. Akram Khater’s“Emile Habibi: The Mirror of Irony in Palestinian Litera-ture,” Journal of Arabic Literature 24, 1 (March 1993), 75-94,focuses on how “Habibi uses the tool of laughter to reclaimthe identity of the Palestinian-Israelis from the throes of thehegemonic State, historical amnesia, and mindless material-ism” (76), but also treats stylistic issues such as the genericsimilarity between Habiby’s narrative style and the Arabicmaqamah, and Habiby’s use of traditional linguistic structuressuch as saj’ (rhymed prose) “in ways that seem to bring outthe absurd as much in the style as in the image” (90). In hisbrief commentary on the novel, Edward Said also notes itsuse of irony, which, in his view, makes it “unique in Arabicliterature,” and claims that it “sketches the complete pictureof Palestinian identity as no purely political tract can.” TheQuestion of Palestine (New York: Vintage Books, 1980), 153.See also Mehrez, “Irony in Joyce’s Ulysses and Habibi’s Pessop-timist,” 42, and Roger Allen’s discussion of the novel (TheArabic Novel, 209-222, esp. p. 213); both mention Habiby’s useof the maqamah, in addition to other stylistic and intertexualfeatures. Faysal Darraj’s “Imil Habibi: tiqniyyat al-hikayah wa-binaa’ al-sira al-dhatiyyah” [Emile Habiby: The Technique of Story-telling and Autobiographical Form] (Majallat al-Karmel, 52 [Summer1997]) focuses on autobiography as a structuring principle inHabiby’s oeuvre. Finally, see Maher Jarrar, “A Narration ofDeterritorialization: Imil Habiby’s The Pessoptimist,” MiddleEastern Literatures 5, 1 (Jan 2002), 15-28 for a reading ofDeleuze and Guattari’s Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature andThe Pessoptimist.

59As a case in point, one might consider Le Gassick andJayyusi’s numerous errors in transliteration of Hebrew termsand their consistent omission of explanations of these termsor of other Hebrew references (the edition includes numer-ous footnotes for Arabic terms and for references to Arabicliterary and historical figures).

60Mehrez, “Irony in Joyce’s Ulysses and Habibi’s Pessopti-mist.”

61I am referring here to Jarrar, “A Narration of Deterrito-rialization,” and Brenner, “The Search for Identity in IsraeliArab Fiction.” (Brenner quotes Mahmoud Darwish, EdwardSaid, and ‘Azmi Bishara on Israel/Palestinian identity issuesand on Darwish’s relationship to Hebrew, but her investiga-tion of responses to Palestinian writing in Israel does notyield any sources outside of the Israeli sphere.)

62Naqqash’s other works include: Al-Khata’ (The Mistake,short stories) (Jerusalem: Al-Ma’arif [1971]); Al-Rijs [T h eAbomination, a novel] ([Jerusalem], 1987); Fi ghiyabihi [In HisAbsence, a play] (Shefaram: Al-Mashrik, 1981) Hiyakat kullzaman wa-makan [Tales of Any Time and Place, stories] (Tel Aviv:Association for the Promotion of Research, Literature, andArt, 1978); Nazulah wa-khayt al-shaytan [Tenants and Cobwebs, anovel] (Jerusalem: Association for Jewish Academics fromIraq, 1986); Yawma habilat wa-ajhadat al-dunya [The Day the WorldWas Conceived and Miscarried, four novellas] (Jerusalem: al-Sharqal-‘Arabiyyah, 1980); Awrat al-mala’ika [The Angles Genitalia, anovel] (Cologne: al-Kamel Verlag, 1991). This list is not ex-haustive.

63See Alcalay, Keys to the Garden, 107-108.64What I refer to here as fus’ha is also known variously as

“classical Arabic” (although modern literary Arabic is not,strictly speaking, “classical”) and as “Modern Standard Ara-bic” (MSA). Essentially it is the common written mediumshared by the entire Arab world (used in speech only in veryformal situations). While ‘amiyyah (spoken, or colloquial, Ara-bic) differs greatly from region to region, fus’ha is mutuallycomprehensible to all literate Arabs. Fus’ha is traditionallyafforded greater respect than ‘amiyyah due to its proximity tothe Arabic of the Qur’an and to the language of the classicalreligious, scholarly, and literary traditions. In other words,fus’ha, as the language of religion and learning, occupies a farhigher status than ‘amiyyah (which is popularly not even con-ceived of as a “real” language).

65Haim Blanc, Communal Dialects in Baghdad (Cambridge:Harvard University Press-Center for Middle Eastern Studies,1964), 3.

66In her pioneering study on Iraqi Jewish writers, NancyBerg opines that “[t]he gloss does not necessarily make[Naqqash’s] text accessible to the Iraqi, much less the non-Iraqi. Naqqash’s fellow Iraqi-born writers have expressedtheir own difficulties in reading his work.…Yitzhak Bar-Moshe [another Iraqi-Jewish writer of Arabic] declares hiscolleague’s work to be ‘unreadable’ and ‘not enjoyable,’ due tothe effort it demands. In an interview he described readingNaqqash’s writing as a Sisyphian task, every book a dictionary.‘I know the words, but kill me if I know what is the context,how does he use it here, why?’” Nancy Berg, Exile from Exile:Israeli Writers from Iraq (Albany, N.Y.: State University of NewYork Press, 1996), 55. Naqqash himself says of his writing:“Spoken dialogue is much more trustworthy and exact thandialogue written in literary language. And this is one of thedifficulties that makes some of my work virtually unreadable.So that I find myself forced to add translations below thedialogues. I myself don’t even know how I got to this point ofbeing able to use the language of each character, regardless oftheir social standing.…As I said, our house was a kind ofmeeting place for many different kinds of women and men.My mother and my aunt in their respective professions knewmany Muslim women of all classes and they were always ourguests so I had the opportunity to hear and absorb all ofthese different dialects and styles and I would listen to themand it sunk in” (Alcalay, Keys to the Garden, 107.)

67The term “fisam” literally means “split” or “fissure,” butthe same root in a different morphological pattern (“infisam”)denotes schizophrenia. The sense in which Naqqash uses itconveys something of both: he is discussing both the splitbetween Muslims and Jews in Iraq that develops during thetime period in which the story is set, and the sense of ruptureit causes in the narrator’s identity, as expressed in the follow

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ing passage: “And I, eleven years old, hear the [anti-Jewish]cries and taste bitterness. The struggle taking place inside me,between the two men of different opinions, intensifies. Thecrack of the fisam (fissure) widens and its lines are bloody, [butthey] melt away overnight” [Wa-ana fi al-hadiyyah ashrah,asma‘ al-hutaf, wa-amdugh al-‘ulqam. Wa-as-sira‘a fi dakhlibayn ar-rajulayn, al-mukhtalifin fi ar-ra’i yashtaddu. Sada’ al-fisam yitas‘a wa-khututu damawiyyah timsi wa-tasih] (167).


Later, after the narrator’s family has registered to leave, weread: “And we are fragments [shatat] being pulled by the twosides of the fisam: Belonging and not belonging [intimaa’ wa-laintimaa’]” (182).

68A summary of the historical developments that form thebackdrop to Naqqash’s novella appears in Charles Tripp’s AHistory of Iraq (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,2000):

These events were the prelude to the eventual disappear-ance of the large and long-established Jewish community inIraq.…The establishment of the British Mandate for Pales-tine simultaneously with the British Mandate for Iraq hadmade the position of the Jewish communities in the newIraqi state peculiarly invidious. It was not long before theJews in Iraq were being accused of serving both the Britishauthorities in Iraq and the Zionist project in Palestinewhich the British Mandate had facilitated. During the1930s, with the outbreak of the Arab revolt in Palestine andthe heightening of pan-Arab and anti-Zionist agitation inIraq, press attacks on the Jews became ever more vehe-ment. Some Jews in Baghdad were physically as-saulted.…Public attempts by the leadership of the Jewishcommunity to impress upon their fellow countrymen thatthey were by no means supporters of the Zionist enterprisein Palestine carried little weight when contrasted with theaccusations emanating from the Arab nationalist circles ofthe Muthanna Club. With official encouragement from thearmy officers who dominated Iraqi politics in the late1930s, the charges levelled against the Jewish community inIraq made no distinction between Zionist and Jewish iden-tities, vilifying both in terms of an imported anti-semitismthat also exploited local sectarian prejudices. This was apotent mixture, the violent results of which were seen inthe Farhud [pogrom] of 1941 [in which some 200 Jews werekilled, far more raped and maimed, and Jewish propertylooted and destroyed]. For many Jewish Iraqis it was anominous indication not only of their vulnerability in Iraq,but also of the apparent indifference of the authorities,both Iraqi and British, to their fate.…It was at this juncture[in 1949] that the Iraqi security services uncovered a Zionistnetwork in Iraq which was helping Iraqi Jews emigrate toIsrael. This in turn led to extensive arrests in the Jewishcommunity and increased suspicion, effectively barringyoung Jewish Iraqis from employment by the state or in theprofessions. For many in the Iraqi Jewish community it ap-peared that there was indeed no future in Iraq itself sinceneither their community leaders nor any international bodywas willing or able to defend their rights as Iraqi citizens.Encouraged both by successive Iraqi governments and bythe Israeli authorities, the vast majority of the communityof over 100,000 took advantage of a 1950 law allowingthem to renounce their Iraqi citizenship and to leave Iraqforever. By 1952 the community had virtually ceased to ex-ist, much of its property had been expropriated by the Iraqigovernment and only a few thousand Jews remained inIraq. (124-126; see also 105-106 on the farhud).”

In “imported anti-semitism” Tripp is referring to the pro-Axisorientation of influential members of the Iraqi political andmilitary leadership and to the agitation of Nazi propagandistsin Iraq during the 1930s; a failed coup by these elements in

1941 led to the farhud and to British re-occupation.69The imperative “Read!” should be “Iqra’” (or “Iqgha” in

the Jewish dialect), but the teacher apparently either has trou-ble pronouncing the missing consonant or idiosyncratically“swallows” it when saying the word.

70Naqqash, 131. All translations of Naqqash in this essayare mine.

71Naqqash, 131-132.72In a way this is an anomalous example of the double text,

because the double text’s implied reader would be conversantin both cultures, but here the implied reader is obviously as-sumed not to have access to both.

73 Niranjana, Siting Translation, 172.74These words are spoken in the Muslim dialect, as a mem-

ber of the narrator’s family explains to a Muslim familyfriend. The full quote reads: “There’s no way around it [lit: nopath will appear]. We’ll sign up and go. They really haven’t leftany life for a Jew here” (168).

75The tasqit refers to the forfeiture of citizenship under theDenaturalization Law, passed by the Iraqi parliament onMarch 2, 1950, which essentially gave the Iraqi Jews one yearto register to leave the country legally provided that they giveup their Iraqi citizenship. The day after the law expired, theparliament in secret session passed another law decreeing thatall the possessions, holdings, and assets of Jews who hadsigned up were to be “frozen,” i.e., nationalized, and pass intothe hands of the government. This wealthy community of130,000-140,000 was thus rendered destitute overnight. Formore background on the tasqit, see Nissim Rejwan, The Jews ofIraq: 3,000 Years of History and Culture (London: Weidenfeldand Nicolson, 1985) and Moshe Gat, The Jewish Exodus fromIraq, 1948-1951 (Portland: Frank Cass, 1997).

76Naqqash, 168.77Naqqash, 170.78 Naqqash, 185-186.79Of course, the linkage between unfamiliarity (foreign-

ness) and error is well represented throughout both this textand The Pessoptimist. In The Concept of the Foreign: An Interdisci-plinary Dialogue (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2003), (NewYork: Lexington Books, 2003), Rebecca Saunders theorizesthe connection between foreignness and error, investigating“the relationship that hermeneutics draws between foreign-ness and error and the manner in which foreigners may beidentified by linguistic or social errors, as well as the compo-nent of (potentially random) movement within foreign-ness…and the way foreignness shares with madness the char-acteristics of both wandering and untruth” (45). Certainly thelast part of the quotation would be especially applicable to thecharacter of Sa‘id. But the idea of the false cognate, or falseequivalencies, is an interesting twist on Saunders’s linkage offoreignness and error, as it is a difference masquerading as asimilarity—hence its propensity to cause error is that much lessobvious, and more insidious.

80His use of this particular term is especially striking giventhat in Iraq of that time, the equivalent currency was “fils”while the Israeli equivalent is “agurah” (plural “agurot”), and theidiomatic Israeli Hebrew word for a very small monetary de-nomination would be “grush” or “pruta.”

81Naqqash, 186.


82“Khamiyya” is an unusual adjective, perhaps invented byNaqqash; the term from which it seems to be derived,“kham,” is itself already an adjective that means “unworked,unprocessed” or “linen, calico.” Hans Wehr, A Dictionary ofModern Arabic, 3rd edition, J. Milton Cowan, ed. (Ithaca: Spo-ken Language Services, Inc., 1976), 224; my guess is that heuses the term here in the sense of crude, unformed (hence“makeshift”).

83Niranjana, Siting Translation, 39, 41-42.84Niranjana, Siting Translation, 40.85What I mean here is that the language of these texts is in-

fused with a meta-awareness of itself as language, which I seeas having a metaphorical function; a self-conscious idiomfashioned to imply that it has a consciousness—that it“knows” its shortcomings, that it recognizes its own functionin the signification process—is no longer “language” in thesense of an idiom that performs its referential function trans-parently and unconsciously, but can only be a metaphor forlanguage in that sense—the difference between representing andbeing, as it were. (Of course, in the case of literature, no lan-guage is so naïve; usually, however, it is styled to “trick” thereader into thinking it is acting transparently, while here, thatcrucial pretense is itself abandoned). This idea also has paral-lels in theories of translation: “Sometimes the translated textitself is viewed as a metaphor for the foreign text, as whenGregory Rabassa argues that “a word is nothing but a meta-phor for an object or … for another word,” and that transla-tion is a “form of adaptation, making the new metaphor fitthe original metaphor” (1989: 1-2). For Rabassa, translation isthe piecing together of metaphors, in order to construct an-other entity which is also a metaphor: metaphor as a meta-phor for translation” (Rainier Grutman, “Metaphor ofTranslation,” 149).

86Roman Jakobson, “Closing Statement: Linguistics andPoetics,” in The Stylistics Reader: From Roman Jakobson to the Pre-sent, Jean Jacques Weber, ed. (London: Arnold, 1996), 10-35,esp. 13.

87Niranjana, Siting Translation, 55.


The Tortoise and the Leopard, or the Postcolonial Muse

IPSHITA CHANDA

Colonizers’ Language/Colonized Language: TheIssues at Stake

“You taught me language . . .” assumes that Calibanhad no language earlier because he had no language thatProspero could understand. One wonders what his lan-guage of communication was before. Does this implythat he did not communicate at all, or that he did so likea non-human? Now that Caliban has learned Prospero’slanguage and even won Bookers and the Nobel using it,does this imprecation still hold true? This brings us tothe importance and power of intelligible language whilealso asking the salient question, intelligible to whom?These are questions that inform the writing of litera-tures in the colonizers’ language and the teaching ofthose literatures in institutions of the once colonized. Iwould like to argue, however, that these questions thatstem from a literary issue are not confined to literatureat all––the power and status of the colonizers’ languagein the once-colonized country works in complex andsubtle ways that permeate the postcolony’s social andeconomic structures. Indeed, the politics of languageand its playing out in the interstices of daily life maywell be said to characterize the descriptive term post-colonial, a reality that cannot but inflect the work of theacademic located in these areas.

In an attempt to understand and theorize these poli-tics, this paper addresses the process of reading the lit-eratures in the language of the colonizer written by thecolonized. In all colonized societies, oral and/or writtentraditions of verbal art existed before the colonizersarrived with their language and the specific structures ofsocialization based on this language as well as particularhierarchies derived from it. In order to understand theprocess of production of literatures in the colonizers’language in these societies and offer certain speculationson the communities of reception that these processesinterpellate, it is necessary, therefore, to consider therelations between orality and literacy and their implica-tions for development and progress, at the basis ofwhich lies the idea of civilization predicated upon writ-ing and written documentation. I will attempt to showthat these fundamental issues, relating to the contextand process of producing literatures by the colonized inthe colonizers’ language, have a crucial bearing upon the

academic discipline of literature as it is taught in univer-sities of postcolonial/third world location and else-where. As an academic located in India, working on andteaching the literature of Nigeria—two countries thatshare an erstwhile colonizer and its language—it is ofinterest to me to see how these similar structures oper-ate in two geographical contexts, in two different literarysystems. Both of these are underpinned by a colonialpast that bequeathed not only a common educationaland cultural policy that included a tradition of languageand literature, but also social hierarchies of opportunityand access structured by these policies. This reality leadsme, located as I am, to ask whether the seamless singu-larity of an “English” literature is adequate to study thevarieties of English available across the globe. On theother hand, are the rubrics of “postcolonial literatures”or the offensively titled “third world literatures” ade-quate in methodology? While it is intuitive that the textsfrom different geopolitical areas, even if written in thesame language, must be differently inflected, this is of-ten ignored in many English literature syllabi in mycountry that pride themselves on opening the canon toinclude, say, Chinua Achebe. A comparative approach tothe study of an English text from India, ArundhatiRoy’s God of Small Things,1 and one from Nigeria,Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah,2 enables us to identifythe similarities and differences that their respective liter-ary systems represent. Thus before I turn to the actualtask of reading the texts that will form the focus of thepaper, it is imperative to locate them in the context ofthe histories of two differing yet related repertoires ofcolonial practice. Such an approach exposes the fallacyof homogeneity and thereby interrogates the labels“English literature,” “postcolonial literature,” and “thirdworld literature.”

In what follows, I first construct a framework for theteaching of English in India and Nigeria with respect tothe cultural and educational policies of the British colo-nizers in both these areas. Then I locate the texts at theinterstice of these policies and the indigenous oral tra-ditions, exploring the position and influence of bothupon the production of an Indian and Nigerian literarysystem, within which the specific texts to be read can besaid to function. Next, the reading of the texts com-pares two literary systems and the position of the colo-

Chanda: The Tortoise and the Leopard, or the Postcolonial Muse 129

nizers’ language in each. I explore the negotiations rep-resented in the texts between the language-world con-structed through colonial policy and continued by post-colonial educational policies, and the “vernacular” worldthat existed before the coming of the colonizers. Thishelps one to discern the effects of each upon the other,thus delineating the dynamics of the literary process inthe colonizers’ language and its position within the liter-ary system of the postcolony. Within this frameworkarise the following questions: Written as these literaturesare, in a global language, what is their status in thecommunities of their origin, and in the global commu

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nity? What are the epistemological issues involved inreading them? To whom are they addressed and bywhom? Ultimately, I would like to raise a question thatseems so obvious that we often forget to answer it inour practice: What is the function of the colonizer’slanguage as the vehicle of postcolonial writing? I amarguing that the use of English in postcolonial writing isa political maneuver that must be recognized, for to ab-stract English from its sociohistorical specificity into therealm of the “universal” that literature so easily be-comes would be a strategic silencing at worst, and a na-ïve obfuscation at best. This is the position from whichthe following readings proceed.

Colonizers’ Languages and Colonial HistoriesAt the climax of the Nigerian nationalist movement,

Charles Buxton, commentator on colonial affairs, re-animated the shared history that a common educationpolicy bestowed upon the subjects of the British em-pire: “The educated Indian––the babu––was regardedwith precisely the same mixture of contempt and jocu-larity as the educated African of today. Yet what hashappened? In less than half a century those babus hadbecome the statesmen of India. They were still a mi-nority but without their consent and cooperation wecould no longer carry on the government of India atall.”3 Macaulay’s dream of a class that would act as in-termediary between the colonizer and the vast mass ofthe colonized seemed to act as a facilitating mechanismfor the theory of Indirect Rule that the British exercisedin African colonies. Richard Hailey,4 whose monumentalAfrican Survey (1938)5 investigated the working of thisconcept espoused by West African colonial administra-tor Lord Lugard, raised a pertinent question: “Can we besure of the continuance of that degree of acquiescencein our rule which is a necessary condition of adminis-trative progress?” Hailey had no doubt about the way inwhich this was to be ensured––rather than “constitutionmongering” it would be more worthwhile to “identifypotential elites who could be trained to assume enlargedresponsibility of the colonial state . . . (these) nativeauthorities (could become) direct heirs of colonial sov

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ereignty.”6 Given this confession, it is evident that the

experiments tried out in India were brought to fruitionin Africa––one might well see ominous signs, precursorsof homogeneity implied in the current discursive label“postcolonial.”

One difference was clear to the colonizers, how

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ever––the difference predicated upon literacy. At thetime of colonial contact, most of sub-Saharan Africadid not possess script culture. India, however, had a tra-dition of documented literature that predated Christian-ity and, as the nineteenth-century Indologists7 discov

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ered, had participated in exchanges with the “classical”Greek world from which European civilization claimeddescent. It was difficult to write off the Indians as quitethe same kind of barbarians as the Africans. I shall ar-gue that the existence or absence of script culture andits implication in colonial cultural policies are importantinfluences on the Anglophone literature of Nigeria andIndia. These influences are generic as well as thematic asI shall attempt to discern in the two texts that we hereconsider––Chinua Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah andArundhati Roy’s God of Small Things.

English came to the Igbos and the Bengalis much be-fore it arrived in the rest of Nigeria and India, respec-tively. In the latter case, Calcutta was the first city of theempire where English literature as a discipline began itsjourney.8 But as Roy herself tells us, the arrival of St.Thomas at Calicut and the conversion of high-casteBrahmans in Kerala to Christianity underwrites her text.The Igbos too adapted easily to the Christianizing influ-ences of the missionaries as well as to the language it-self––certainly more easily than the Islamic nations ofnorthern Nigeria.9 This may well explain the nature ofnationalist leadership provided by the Igbos. It couldalso clarify the reasons for the Igbo-dominated bureauc-racies of British-ruled and then independent Nigeria.This led to the transfer of power to the Northernersbeing seen as the wisest option by the British. The gene-sis of the Biafran conflict within a decade of Nigeria’sindependence had its roots in the cultural and politicaldecisions taken by the colonizers.10 These considerationsare important to keep in mind while reading Achebe’swork––but one might wonder how they relate to thework of someone who belongs to the following genera-tion like Roy, who was born after Indian independenceand who would be more influenced by the policies ofthe Indian government than by those of the colonizers.An explanation for this might be found in a review ofthe status of English in the postcolonial India.11

The status of English as a language of power in Indiaduring the first fifty years of its independence remainedthe same as in the days of the Raj. The genesis of“modern” India––which is largely English-literate In-dia––is a discontinuous but identifiable process that be-gan with the policies put in place by the colonizers anddifferently inflected by the largely Western ideals of


progress and development espoused by succeeding po-litical parties who came to power through the democ-ratic system. Whether these parties were given the man-date to pursue these ideals by their rural and agriculturalelectorate is a matter that is only now being questionedin public. Writers of Roy’s generation were products ofthat developing, modernizing, and increasingly globalIndia. How does this historical context resonate in liter-ary texts both explicitly and implicitly? That is our mainconsideration in the following section.

Entering the World of the Colonized When young Adela Quested, as well meaning as they

come, wanted to see the “real India,”11 in E. M. For-ster’s A Passage to India12 the collector, Mr. Turton, sentout invitations to a bridge party. It is easy to identifythose Indians who were invited. Adela’s and Mr. Tur-ton’s “real India” was a partial construction based oncolonial policies, and the creator of the whole scenario,Edward Morgan Forster, was one among the very fewcolonials who were acutely aware of this. Forster knewthat there was, within the same geographical borders,another India besides the India that spoke and under-stood English. Perhaps as the natural outcome of hissexual orientation that made him so sensitive to the me-chanics of marginalization, Forster not only noticed butalso recorded the presence of the magnificent Punkha-wallah in the Chandrapore courtroom and the crowds inthe bazaars, who, he was careful to point out, were notinvited to fraternize with the English. That Forstercould record their presence without the usual descriptiveapparatus that characterized the Gunga Dins on the onehand and the barbaric hordes on the other lay at theroot of the curious, diffident non-answer to his ques-tion, “Can an Indian and an Englishman be friends?”13

With such a start, it is but a step to asking, which Eng-lishman, and which Indian, in a pair of societies so intri-cately divided along lines of caste. In fact, Roy is quitecapable of delineating these divisions, in both the SyrianChristian community in which her novel is set, and inthe larger history of the communist movement in Ker-ala, where the events in the story occur. Velutha, thesmall man, the mombatti or the tallow stick,14 so tospeak, is almost reminiscent of Forster’s Punkhawallahin physique and sex appeal––but with one variation. Heis an educated Untouchable, one who can not only sensethe historical injustice meted out to him, but also dis-cern the means of redress offered by an ideology thatwas instrumental in forging European modernity. He isperhaps the result of independence, though there is noevidence of that fact because, as Roy tells us again andagain, the landlords who owned his father did him fa-vors as a way to ensure his and his children’s endlessloyalty, much before independent India officially out-lawed Untouchability. But this is a crucial piece of in-

formation, this difference between Velutha and his fa-ther, who is the one to go to the mother of his mistress,Ammu, and offer her the glass eye that she had arrangedto have made for him, out of a sense of shame for whatVelutha had done. In his view––ironically, his “view”was constructed literally and metaphorically by visionmade possible by the landlord class––the sin of theUntouchable Velutha’s sexual liaison with her divorceddaughter could only be expiated if he told her the truthand returned the eye she had given him. But Velutha’sattitude was a quiet defiance. Velutha had traversed thatdivide between Touchable and Untouchable, which isseen here as quintessentially Indian, and reached, even ifhe could not formulate it in his mind, the category ofhuman––quintessentially liberal-modern-Western, andcertainly put into circulation in India through the colo-nizing structures. This was what the independence ofIndia had achieved––it had institutionalized these im-ported structures in the name of democracy withoutensuring or even caring whether they could function. Inour experience, independence in a colonized state is ac-tually a colonially defined concept, copied from thecolonizers’ system almost without adaptation. It taughtVelutha his natural rights, but it did not engineer a soci-ety that would recognize them. As Roy assiduouslypoints out:

communism crept into Kerala insidiously. As a re-formist movement that never overtly questioned thetraditional values of a caste-ridden extremely tradi-tional community. The Marxists worked from withinthe communal divides never challenging them, neverappearing not to. They offered a cocktail revolution.A heady mix of eastern Marxism and orthodox Hin-duism, spiked with a shot of democracy.15

Did Velutha know this, or did he come to recognize ittoo late when he had tampered with the laws of love,through his relationship with the Syrian Christian land-lord’s divorced daughter? It is not the responsibility ofliterature alone to provide answers––but as Ikem, thewriter in Anthills of the Savannah says, “A novelist mustlisten to his characters who after all are created to wearthe shoe and point the writer where it pinches.”16 Thisassumes that the writer can “hear” the same language asthe characters, and for the postcolonial writer in thecolonizer’s language that is an avowedly difficult propo-sition. Roy is eminently capable of diagnosing this con-dition:

Chacko told the twins that though he hated to admitit, they were all Anglophiles. . . . Pointed in the wrongdirection, trapped outside their own history and unableto retrace their steps because their footsteps had beenswept away. He explained to them that history was likean old house at night. . . . To understand history,”Chacko said, “we have to go inside and listen to whatthey’re saying. And look at the books and the pictures


on the wall. And smell the smells But we can’t go in,Chacko explained, because we’ve been locked out. . ..Our dreams have been doctored. . . . We belong no-where. We sail unanchored on troubled seas. Our sor-rows will never be sad enough. Our joys never happyenough. . . . Our lives never important enough to mat-ter.17 The self-pity of these ramblings, typically brim-ming with middle-class despair, leaves no possibility ofthinking that this might not be wholly true or even gen-erally applicable. The world that is available to Rahel andEstha at the outset is such a world, and the language inwhich they learn it, and by extension other worlds, be-longs to this available one. Here we are in a world writ-ten in English, understood in English, and striving towrite several worlds that have no access to English. Thatis the task of the colonized writer using the colonizer’slanguage.

So, if we ask whether the Forsterian invitation ex-tended to Velutha, the answer in Roy’s text will be no.Roy recognizes Velutha, his past, his betrayal by historyand by his own society––and that, for her, is the sourceof tragedy. In “post”colonial, literate India, a text likeRoy’s might only record this betrayal. This is not Velu-tha’s text; it is the text of Rahel, Estha, their motherAmmu or even their family. Velutha exists; he acts; thepeople from whose perspective the story is told aresympathetic to him––but here seems to be a classic caseof the subaltern not being able to speak. What he sayscannot be heard by those in whose world he finds him-self because in the only language they speak his experi-ence is an unfamiliar one, the experience of the Other.His motives are known only to himself, as are his feel-ings. His world, the hut where his crippled brother liesall day, where he carves wooden toys for the children, isa refuge whose true potency lies in the fact that it is for-bidden. In other words, the writer of this text, like manyothers, takes the characters she can speak as/for to visitthose whom she cannot speak as/for, thereby displayingtheir (and her own) rejection of the hierarchies that tra-ditional Indian society enforced. Both she and the char-acters she can speak as/for therefore enunciate theirposition on the side of modernity, opposed to the su-perstitions and the prejudices that neither they nor theharbingers of modernity, the colonizers themselves, canunderstand or condone. It also gives rise to the un-charitable speculation that Velutha exists in this text inorder to ensure that this modernity has the opportunityto set itself against prejudice and superstition, therebyproving its credentials and vindicating itself.

This is not to argue that these hierarchies and preju-dices are part of some pristine tradition that must beapproved only because they are apparently “Indian.”Rather, it is to state the obvious––the perspective of thewriter and a set of her characters is limited by the lan-guage in which she and they have thought through these

categories, a language that opposes tradition with mod-ernity and then aligns the bad and the good accordingly.Velutha, the reader might argue, also shares in this dif-ferentiation. And the reader would be right––Velutha’stragedy is in fact an alienation from this world and hisspurning by the new world that he has identified as onethat will redress the injustice done to him. In fact, that isthe only role that Velutha can play in a text of this sort,and his end is the only end that can be envisaged forhim in such a text. But this conclusion still does not an-swer the question whether, in a text where he can beheard, this would necessarily have been the case. Are thelikes of Velutha fulfilled only when they are accepted bythe world of modernity? How do they negotiate successin such a world, or are they condemned to die as Velu-tha does in this text?

Roy’s intentions are clear from the quote she usesfrom John Berger at the head of the text, “No longercan a single story be told as if it is the only one.” But itcan be counterposed with another from Martin Heideg-ger18 “Language speaks, man listens, but he can’t heareverything.” Heidegger underlines the necessity oftranslating oneself into the thought of the other lan-guage. In the postcolonial situation, however, the otherlanguage is often the Other’s language too––and despitethe best intentions of the writer, hearing is overlaid byhistorical and social factors. The technology of writingserved initially to fix texts in a single authoritative ver-sion, grant the privilege of authorship denied in thefluidity of the oral milieu, but in fashioning the book asa thing, an artifact, writing as technology also puts con-straints on the one who writes. This constraint Roy ac-knowledges: “for practical purposes in a hopelesslypractical world . . .”(Roy 34). The story has to beginsomewhere and continue until the last page arrives. Thisis not the oral situation of the marketplace or the fire-side; this is not even the endless tale of the Kathakalithat Roy contrasts to the commercial tourist-beguilingtruncated editions, of classics made easy for “importedattention spans.”19 Even with the best of intentions, themany-layered world that the postcolonial writer choosesto represent is contained in a single language. And it isagain, of necessity, a world that may not function in asingle linear causality or according to a single linear timescale, but as it is a written world, it must begin and end,even if does not have a designated middle. And so, thewriter works with these constraints––and her virtuositylies in her manipulation of them. For, all the worldviewsand discourses jostling for space in the single-story-multiply-told cannot be given equal space and equalvoice, despite the writer’s intentions. It is her voice andher judgment of worth that finally arranges these dis-courses into a hierarchy––and in the unraveling of thishierarchy lies the postcolonial writer’s assessment of herchosen language.


To address this issue, perhaps we can turn to two epi-sodes in Achebe’s text. The Oxford-educated poet andjournalist Ikem Osodi is currently the editor of the Na-tional Gazette, a position that carries with it consider-able power, the power that the press is supposed towield in a democracy. Except that in Kangan, the ficti-tious state in which Achebe sets his story, a constitu-tional head of state has just declared himself Presidentfor Life, supposedly in the best interests of the country.In the “Referendum” that follows this professedly re-luctant self-elevation, Ikem’s home province of Abazonis the only one that does not oblige by voting in favor ofLife Presidentship. The reason for this is enunciated bythe Old Man who comes with the delegation of Abazo-nians to meet the Life President when their region iswracked by a drought after the President has stoppedthe laying of water lines there, following their No vote.He says,

When we were told two years ago to vote for the BigChief so that he could rule for ever and ever and allkinds of people we had never seen came running inand out of our villages asking people to say yes, Itold my people: we have Ossodi in Bassa. If hecomes home and tells us that we should say yes, wewill do so because he is there as our eye and ear. Isaid: if what these strange people are telling us istrue, Osodi will come or he will write in his paperand our sons will read it and know it is true.20

Ikem is English-educated, but he remains a son of Aba-zon. Indeed they look upon him as their eye and ear,someone who is, through his education, capable of in-terpreting modernity for them, in order to facilitate theirsurvival in changing times. The Abazonians are smallmen, traditional and perhaps full of prejudices––butthey are survivors who will not succumb to tragedywithout struggle. And like practical people who use allthe strategies at their disposal in times of war, they haveno qualms about using English and the person who candeal in it as weapons for their own survival. As the sameold man explains, “A dancing masquerade in my townused to say, It is true that I do not hear English butwhen they say Catch am nobody tells me to take myselfoff as fast as I can.”21 The very use of English here isdifferent from the usual, and this reveals a conceptualapparatus that underlies the very act of cognition itself,rooted in orality rather than in a script culture––theword for understanding and knowing (which we nowrealize are inherently “literate” terms, so to speak) is“hear.” Knowing or understanding a language or, byextension the world-view encapsulated by it, is beingable to “hear” it. This hearing is necessary for survivaleven when the milieu has changed.

African writers in colonizers’ languages have beenconscious of taking a step into uncertainty by usingthese languages. For them, these are not only different

languages, but different orders of living. For example, inthe Senegalese Cheikh Hamidou Kane’s L’aventure Am-bigue,22 a novel about the coming of the French schoolto the Diallobe peoples, the elders of the communitydecide to send the future prince, Samba Diallo, toFrance to be educated so that he may learn from thecolonizers the art “of being victorious even when youare not in the right.”23 The colonizers’ language has itsuses and those uses cannot be denied any longer. Thenegotiations made with the language of power under-write the strategies of survival. There is a specific rolefor those who can communicate in the colonizer’s lan-guage. This underwrites their use of this language andcircumscribes the content and form of all such commu

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nication. In Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Matigari24 too, all theworkers on the plantation contribute to send one oftheir sons to the white man’s school––the fact that heturns into a comprador, betraying his own people andfurthering his own ends shows that he is an ingrate whohas not fulfilled his responsibility to his benefactors.And so, those like Ikem or Chris or Beatrice in Achebe’stext who have learned to use the language with facilityhave a duty to the country, to the mass of the peoplewho have neither the means nor, if their duty is fulfilled,the need to acquire a foreign tongue.

Achebe’s position in the language debate in Africanliteratures is illustrated by the responsibilities he outlinesfor the English-educated elite in this text. And in theprocess, he outlines the responsibilities of the anglo-phone African writer as well. As the two taxi driverswho come to meet Ikem say:

But na for we small people he de write everytime. I nosabi book but I sabi say na for we this oga de fight,not for himself. He na big man. Nobody do fuckall tohim. So he fit stay for him house, chop him oyibochop, drink him cold beer, put him airconditioner andforget we. But he no do like that. So we come salutehim.25

This may be contrasted with the position of the Englishlanguage and those proficient in it in Roy’s text. At theoutset it must be stated that there is no homogenousKerala, no seamless Syrian Christian community, notypical traditional landlord family in the text––there isnone of the ironic exoticization of the locales of one’schildhood that has become an irritating feature in Indianwriting in English. The differences that wrack the worldshe writes about and their interaction that sets up achain of events slowly entwining around one anotherand then branching out, hydra-headed into directionsbeyond the control of single causes or effects or con-trols, weave the texture of reality in the novel. However,as Strathern26 points out,

The West forever tries to access (the counterworld ofconcrete individuals and natural forms and stubbornnon-linguistic forms) through composing and decom-


posing language itself––to trick it into revealing theunintended. . . . Among the images pressed into theservice of critical reflection is the tenacious Westernsense that experience gives the individual access to avantage point from which to apprehend the con-strained nature of the world. Seen as an amalgam ofconflicting and alternative elements, the internal het-erogeneity of social life provides the spaces throughwhich the critic can slip. It is not that individuals andexperiences are free from constraints themselves(clearly they are artefacts dependant on certain dis-courses). Rather one instance, one set of values, pre-cepts, images––is ever equivalent to the whole of per-ceived reality. The non-equivalence of language (orculture) to life is the starting point. . . . This suggests amultiplication of possible forms where refiguringmust always depend on another perspective. . . . (The)west has an investment in the metaphor of languageas carrier of culture and culture texted like a lan-guage.27

The colonizer’s language is called upon to perform thisfeat in the texts written in it––access the worlds foreignto it and then translate them for those who read thatlanguage, and often enough, none other. These textstherefore have to deal with recalcitrant realities that can-not be contained by the conceptual worlds of that lan-guage yet must somehow be expressed in it. It is a slip-pery path that writers must tread, and their negotiationsreveal the compromises that are inherent in their ownpositions, even while they attempt to extend themselvesinto these recalcitrant realities. For Roy’s protagonistRahel, the love-affair with the English language beginsprecociously as her mother reads her Kipling, her Rho-des scholar uncle makes her look up meanings of wordsthat must then be looked up in turn, and her great auntinsists on perfect “per NUN see ya shun” for all Englishread, including Shakespeare. No wonder then that theEnglish visitor to Kangan, Achebe’s fictitious Africanstate admits, “I understand that the best English iswritten these days by either the Africans or the Indians.And that the Japanese or Chinese are not too far be-hind.”28 No wonder also that Rahel’s English cousinSophie, despite being born and brought up in Englandand being older by two years than Rahel and her twinEstha, has no idea what their grandaunt is talking aboutwhen she quotes from Ariel’s song in The Tempest. Raheland Estha not only are conversant with the canon, eventhe popular English of Elvis Presley and Sound of Musicare part of the language-world they inhabit. It is com-pletely unintentional, perhaps, but the mockery that un-derlies the Keralite pronunciation of Comrade Pillai’sniece as she recites “Lochinvar” or his son who de-claims, “Friends Romans Countrymen . . .” is contrastedwith Rahel and Estha’s facility for the language, carefullynurtured by their family members. It is true that they

also have a Malyalam teacher, and they are suitably dis-gruntled when the Australian missionary Miss Mittenadmits she has no idea that Malyalam is a language––shethought people in Kerala spoke Keralese. But the storytold from the perspective of a pair of children whohave grown up nurtured on the English language sati-rizes both the Indian usages as well as the Indian pro-nunciation. This position inadvertently mirrors theauthor’s own. In her hybrid, fittingly postcolonial prosesprinkled with local witticisms and Hindi usages, thefailed anglophiles come in for criticism only becausethey have tried to internalize the language and failed, yetdo not know the extent of their failure––or they haveinternalized too well like Chacko, the Rhodes scholaruncle, who is forever metaphorically wedded to the“mother country” in his inability to consign to the pasthis English ex-wife. The writer is none of these, andthere is an ambiguous silence about Rahel, Estha andAmmu, their mother, whose choices in life, it might besaid, led to the children’s language ability. This ability isitself a shield against the world that harshly judges thedivorcée and her fatherless children. The extent of thisharshness is intensified by their grandparents’ wealth (towhich they and their mother have no claim, as they haveno “Locusts Stand I”), their ability to read the languagebackwards and their mother’s discovery of sexual pleas-ure with the Untouchable Velutha, when society de-mands that she, as a failed wife, remain celibate. Itwould be reading too much to categorize the traditionalworld that does not traffic in English, or at least fails todo so if it tries, as evil. Yet it is this world, cunning,conniving, hypocritical, and without a facility for Eng-lish, that oppresses both Velutha and Ammu and herchildren, in various degrees. In this Roy is representativeof a generation that hungers to reconnect with its rootsbecause they have, four decades after independence,discovered the subterfuge of mental colonization longafter the political reality has been transformed. But howis this connection to be made? Because it is overlaid by alanguage they have learned well, the past is now nolonger accessible in any other language. Ammu’s chil-dren are surely part of the generation whose “mothertongue” cannot but be English––their father is a Ben-gali, their paternal grandfather an Oxford Blue, theirmother a Syrian Christian from Kerala. The language ofcommunication at home, though nowhere is it men-tioned in the novel, can only be the “link language” thatthe colonizer brought in order to bind the varied coun-try together. The culture that this hybrid Englishspawns, then, is the culture of a “modernity” that asksfor progress, agitates for rights of Untouchables,women, and minorities, but more often than not in alanguage and from a conceptual repertoire inaccessibleto those groups. One is reminded of an early essay,“The Novelist as Teacher,” in which Achebe says:


Because of our largely European education we maybe pardoned for thinking that the relation betweenEuropean writers and their audience will automati-cally replicate itself in Africa. We have learnt fromEurope that a writer or an artist lives on the fringe ofsociety. . . which in turn looks on him with suspicionif not hostility . . . I am assuming of course, that awriter and his society live in the same place.29

Two questions arise immediately. First: is this a condi-tion that exists in all postcolonial literatures written inEnglish? We can further complicate this question byasking if there are differences across colonies ruled bydifferent European powers and, therefore, heir to differ-ent literary systems and colonial policies of educationand culture. But here we will consider only the case ofEnglish, not from a mistaken assumption that becausethey are written in English, a Nigerian novel and an In-dian novel must be basically similar––an assumptionthat underlies the inclusion of both such novels in therevamped English literature courses of many an Indianuniversity. For one thing, the status of pidgin inAchebe’s text, and in the work of many other Nigerianwriters, merits consideration. As language is a marker ofclass in the postcolonial situation, so the taxi drivers,Gelegele market women, people who live in the ruralareas speak this language that they have forged out ofthe encounters between their own and the language thatthe colonizer tried to use as a divisive force and a sourceof power. In a sense this is a creative subversion of amechanism of power of which many Nigerian writershave made maximum use. The historical reason for thismay be that a particular class of people, especiallyamong the urban Yoruba, had to develop a means ofcommunication to facilitate trade, their chief means oflivelihood. In a Nigeria forced into being by colonialadministrative convenience, where Igbas and Ijaw,Hausa and Yoruba had to live side-by-side as Nigeriandespite their manifest cultural and linguistic differences,what else could have been the common language ofcommunication? In Wole Soyinka’s30 plays like The Roador The Beatification of Area Boy, set in the underbelly ofmodern urban Africa, pidgin is almost the linguafranca––it is definitely the language of the people. An-other possibility is that a vast number of ordinary peo-ple who may not have come into contact with English incolonial times did so following the oil-boom in Nigeria.Besides these factors, from the time that Christianityspread in the area that later became Nigeria, there wasthe production of chapbooks written in what can becalled “incorrect” English that fueled the huge Onitshamarket book trade in Igboland. These books were writ-ten in English ostensibly, but their idiom and theirgrammar owed more to the locally spoken language thanto the King’s (or Queen’s) English. The beginnings ofEnglish writing in Nigeria31 may have had a consciously

correct yet idiomatic writer like Achebe himself, but italso included a consciously incorrect Amos Tutuola anda Chief Fagunwa, who used the Roman script to writeThe Forest of a Thousand Demons in Yoruba. In Anthills ofthe Savannah, the central characters who returned fromEngland to be employed in powerful positions speak inpidgin quite unselfconsciously. Ikem is even involvedwith Elewa, whose mother sells tie-dye cloth in the Ge-legele market and therefore cannot speak anything elsebut pidgin. There is no hierarchization of English andnon-English here, though there remains the satirizing ofthe anglophiles like Beatrice’s father and the naïve stu-dent who turns obedient Life President, His ExcellencySam himself. While the former is presented as a domes-tic and professional tyrant, Sam’s rise over his one-timefriends, Chris and Ikem, is reminiscent of the suc-cumbing of many postcolonial African states to an indi-vidual’s lust for personal power. Perhaps this is the be-ginning of the process that produces, almost twentyyears later, the issues of democracy corrupted for per-sonal ends, the lie of independence, that Rahel identifiesand her creator decides to struggle against. But in themeantime, the means of the struggle, the very terms onwhich the struggle must be understood and the strate-gies framed, have changed, such that now the languagein which she must frame them is permeated with theapparatus of modernity. This apparatus, needless to say,needs correct English to decipher and operate.

The difference between Achebe’s and Roy’s textsoutlined above is predicated upon two different culturalhistories, two different applications of colonial policy(albeit by the same colonizer) and two different literaryhistories in the colonizer’s language in two separate lo-cations. It is also predicated on the difference betweenthe vitality and availability of the oral milieu in the livesand minds of British-educated writers in each country. Iwould argue that the distance between the oral and liter-ate traditions is greater in the Indian situation, for sev-eral reasons. There already existed a distance histori-cally––the accessibility of education and literacy inSanskrit existed long before the coming of the colo-nizer. The colonial encounter, in some places supportedthis education, and in others created an elite througheducation in English. The colonial language as well asthe colonial religion were used in some cases to escapethe entrenched indigenous divisions and in others tofurther accentuate those divisions. As Roy points out inthe case of Christian converts of the higher caste andthe lower caste in Kerala:

Twenty per cent of Kerala’s population were SyrianChristians, who believed they were the descendantsof the one hundred Brahmins whom St. Thomas theApostle converted to Christianity when he travelledEast after the Resurrection. Structurally, Marxismwas a simple substitute for Christianity.32


When the British came to the Malabar, a number ofParavans, Pellayas and Pulayas . . . converted toChristianity and joined the Anglican Church to es-cape Untouchability. . . . It didn’t take them long torealise that they had jumped from the frying pan intothe fire. They were made to have separate churches,with separate services and separate priests. . . . AfterIndependence they found they were not entitled toany Government benefits like job reservations, orbank loans at low interest rates, because officially, onpaper, they were Christians and therefore casteless.33

The distance from the oral milieu grew gradually andrelative to the penetration of script culture––the firstgeneration of English literates were closer to the oralmilieu than the second generation of their children,even as the first generation were further from it thantheir own parents who had perhaps been educatedmainly in the local language. In the case of Africa, how

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ever, this relative distance was shorter than in the Indianmilieu. Primarily, this was because in African coloniesthe oral milieu persisted until the colonizers had enteredthe areas and established the structures of differentia-tion, which occurred, especially in the case of rural ar-eas, at a much later date than in India. The establish-ment of European spheres of influence did not occursystematically until the Berlin Conference of the mid1880s, and the span of colonial statehood was muchshorter than in India. The spread of the colonial lan-guage was, therefore, also comparatively more restricted,and those who came within its grasp were as muchrooted in the oral milieu as those who were outside ofit. Writers of Achebe’s generation were certainly closerto the oral milieu than those of Roy’s, but in the formercase, the status of English was also inflected by the ex-pectations of the oral or “vernacular” milieu of thewriter’s society and the writer’s conscious attempts tofulfill those expectations. One might say that the shorterperiod of colonial rule in Africa did not really give Eng-lish a chance to “settle” and become internalized in largeparts of British ruled Africa. This was not the case,however, with French, where the policy of “assimila-tion” was strictly enforced to create black French citoyens,in roughly the same period of time. In contrast toAchebe’s milieu, in Roy’s case, not only is the writermore historically distanced from the oral milieu, but herclass position is also underpinned by this distance. Heridentity is, in fact, constructed on the basis of both lan-guage use and the hierarchy of opportunities and accessthat her class position makes available to her. Therefore,even in a delicately sensitive delineation of differenceand hybridity like Roy’s, there is the possibility of exoti-cization or of satire when the “good tradition” and the“bad tradition” are depicted. The reason is that theauthor does not live in the same world as do most ofher Indian characters. Similar criticisms have been made

about Achebe as well, for much the same reasons, withrespect to his failure to delineate gender ideology andrelationships among the Igbo before the coming of thecolonizers. Nzegwu argues that Achebe’s representationof gender and relationships is more Christianized thanthe reality of Igboland.34 This has led to a mistakenportrayal of gender organization among the Igbo. Asimilar argument can be made against most Indian writ-ers in English: that the milieu they are familiar with islimited by the cultural politics of colonization, andwhen they attempt to step beyond that limitation, theyproduce the user-friendly, essentialized India of thebestsellers.

The second question is: what then does one expectfrom the English writer in a postcolonial society? To thelatter, Achebe’s poet-journalist Ikem Osodi had replied,when asked to give solutions to problems that he diag-nosed in Kangan: “Writers do not give prescriptions,they give headaches.”35 But ultimately, it is Achebe him-self who has a few strategies to offer to the likes ofBeatrice, Chris, and Ikem—strategies that they realizeare available to them as British-educated elites who holdpower in the capital city of Bassa, far removed from thehardships that the rest of the people face, both in theless affluent streets of Bassa and in the rural areas alongthe Great North Road. As the taxi driver Braimoh says,“To succeed as small man be no small thing.”36 Andindeed the novel abounds in characters who actuallysucceed as small men, whether in Bassa or in drought-ravaged Abazon. These are characters who have chosensurvival above all, and in their choice, not heroic, notearth shattering but simple and quotidian, they are thestuff from which the texture of this text is woven. “Theworld belongs to the people of this world and not toany caucus, however talented.”37 At different points inthe text, each of the three characters who are membersof the elite face a reality different from the one that theyare used to. For Ikem and Chris, it comes once whenthey are castigated by Beatrice at different points. In theend, indeed, Beatrice and Elewa survive, as does Ikem’slittle daughter, named Amichiena. This is a man’s name,but the friends who gather around to name her do notcare. The meaning of the name, “the path shall notclose,” is more important than its gender. And the giv

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ing of a man’s name to a woman is only the culminationof what Beatrice had pointed out to both Chris andIkem in the early stages of the novel: “It is not enoughthat women should be a court of last resort because thecourt of last resort is a damned sight too far and toolate.”38 This is only part of the issue, however; the dele-gation from Abazon, the taxi drivers of Bassa, the ur-chins in the market, are in an unenviable situation, buttheir primary concern is to survive amidst insurmount-able odds. This is where the contrast with Roy’s relent-less tragedy is even starker. The children who grow up


in Roy’s somber world of divisions, exploitation, anddomination learn its true colors too soon addingpoignance to the tragedy initiated by the Love Laws.There is no way out in Roy’s text––hence Estha’s liter-ally mute acceptance and the despair in Rahel’s eyes thather American husband misunderstands because

he didn’t know that in some places like the countryRahel came from various kinds of despair competedfor primacy. And that personal despair could neverbe desperate enough. That something happenedwhen personal turmoil dropped by at the waysideshrine of the vast violent, circling driving ridiculousinsane unfeasible public turmoil of a nation. ThenBig God howled like a hot wind and demanded obei-sance. Then Small God. . . . came away cauterized,laughing numbly at his own temerity. Inured by theconfirmation of his own inconsequence, he becameresilient and truly indifferent. . . . Because WorseThings had happened. In the country that she camefrom, poised between the terror of war and the hor-ror of peace, Worse Things kept happening.39

There can be no argument with this because the verytone of these pronouncements will easily translate intothe never-to-be-argued-with stuff of myths and legends.The use of capitals––perhaps a satirical ploy, perhaps aconscious effort to actually mythologize––adds to thissense that a final verdict has been uttered and a finalexplanation given, which will resonate throughout time.Why do Velutha, Ammu, the children misjudge thestrategies of survival; why do they fail to see what isengulfing them? Is it Velutha’s education, whether inMalayalam or English, that misleads him? Is the episodeof marriage enough to turn Ammu into an incurablecynic and thereby render her vulnerable? Neither ofthem fit into the real world they inhabit, but they do notknow it; they trust too much and cannot discern theworse things that are about to befall them.

Yet Kangan is no stranger to Worse Things. One ofthe two male characters at the center of the novel Ikemis eliminated in state custody, and the other, Chris, diesfarcically on the Great North Road. Despair is not inshort supply in a country where there is a Life Presidentwho can withhold development from people as punish-ment for not voting for him, a country where the presi-dent is “lost,” but that does not faze the people, for “Wego make another President. That one no hard.”40 Whatis it then that prompts the riotous naming ceremony atthe end, where Elewa’s uncle is moved to comment“You young people what you will bring the world to ispregnant and nursing a baby at the same time. . . . In youyoung people our world has met its match. Yes! Youhave put the world where it should sit.41” And despitethe death of her father before she is born in the after-math of a coup, the little girl mothered by Elewa andnamed by the whole group is “the daughter of all of

us.”42 The despair that darkens Roy’s text, the hopeless-ness in Ammu’s unfulfilled dreams and her lonely,wretched death, the uncontrollable onrush of fate likethe dark waters of the Meenachal seem a world awayfrom the naming ceremony in which the disease ram-pant in Kangan is not only acknowledged, but a cure issought as well:

We have seen too much trouble in Kangan since thewhiteman left because those who make plans makeplans only for themselves and their families. . . . I saythere is too much fighting in Kangan, too much kill-ing. But fighting will not begin unless there is first athrusting of fingers into eyes. Anybody who wants tooutlaw fights must first outlaw the provocation of fin-gers thrust into eyes.43

This is the qualitative difference between the worlds ofthe two texts––democracy has survived in India for fiftyodd years, but the Indian writer who writes in Englishcannot see the way forward. Nigeria has had a civil war,secession, oil wars, public executions, exiled writers, as-sassinated writers and military dictatorships, yet some-how, the writer finds a path to clear.

Whose World? Whose Text? Whose Language?Elspeth Probyn points out:

We understand experience from the categories whichhave emerged from the experience of it. But if weexplore how these categories came to be producedhow we are constituted through our experience, howwe came to be gendered, raced, classed through ex-perience, we may open up space for systemic under-standing of process. We can see how our experienceand understanding of who we are are always knownand interpreted through the discourses and repre-sentations available to us. . . . [Our] positions [are]constantly shifting, but limited by structure.44

There seems to be some kind of structural limitationthat characterizes the work of even a writer as percep-tive as Roy, and this limitation has to do with the experi-ence of language and history. For Achebe, the world ofthe small man is a world to be learned from––it cannotbe experienced first hand, but without taking it into ac-count, the society in which the British-educated writerfinds himself does not exist.

The English language, or at least the version of it thatIndian writers use, consciously highlights the distancebetween “bad” and “good” English. In the case of In-dian writers in English, this translates into the degree ofcompetence the character exhibits in using the Englishlanguage, which in turn shows her position in the textualhierarchy. Good English users, like Roy’s Ammu and herchildren, are generally focalizers of the story, the posi-tions that the author takes as her own. Others are, quitesimply, “others.” Therefore there exists no middle spacelike the pidgin of Achebe, where there is no hierarchy


based on correct and incorrect usage of the colonizer’slanguage. This, I have argued, is the result of genera-tions of English literacy in India, and the role of thatliteracy in the class hierarchy. The colonizers manipu-lated this literacy hierarchy with the introduction oftheir own language and created a difference based onthe ability or inability to use the language as they didthemselves. The cultural distance of an English-educated writer from the existing oral milieu is thereforecomparatively greater in semi-urban India than it is in asociety like Achebe’s where script culture entered laterand did not find an existing hierarchy based on literacyupon which to graft its divisive tactics. These differencesare refracted in the worlds that the writers from theseregions mediate in their texts. Even when they use thesame language, in some cases, as in Roy’s, the writer’sapprehension of the world of the text is even uninten-tionally that of a person who understands certain reali-ties but with reference to a world-view different fromthe one within which these realities exist and have con-text-specific meanings Perhaps this is why Roy’s aware-ness of the Worse Things does not involve the per-sonal––there is a conflict between the large and thesmall, indeed an intimidation of the concerns of thelatter by the gigantic indifference of the former. Perhapsone hears the echo of the Marabar caves once more,where “pathos piety courage” are all reduced, the“boom, (where) everything exists, nothing has value.”45

In relation to India, that is symptomatic of the uncom-prehending mess/muddle/mystery that is the universe.This is the stereotypical India—ancient, mythical, legen-dary, and above all devoid of people who live, breatheand survive despite the so-called Worse Things.

I have argued that this India of the English writer’sexperience is quirky, idiosyncratic, even magicallyreal––but it is not the India that inhabits the literatureswritten in other Indian languages. In contrast, the Nige-rian writer in English presents a society that is a living,breathing organism, exercised by small ordinary fearsand hopes, vices and virtues. Is this because India is anancient civilization, because it is rich in (documented)philosophical traditions, because it truly embodies animpersonal historical or mythical force? By this time, thediscerning reader will note that all these descriptions areparaphrases of Orientalist or Indologist essentializa-tions, brought into currency in the nineteenth centuryand still deployed by a certain variety of scholarship.Does the Indian writer in English belong to theseschools and accept their formulations? Or is it that hereducation in the colonizer’s language has provided herwith a conceptual apparatus that, even against her will,must filter all her experience and its mediation?

Speaking in the Colonizers’ Language:The Postcolonial Muse

To me, as an academic firmly entrenched in a univer-sity in the “developing world,” in an Indian departmentof comparative literature, this is the most crucial theo-retical and ethical issue in the discourse of postcoloni-alism in general, and postcolonial literature (in singular)in particular. The language of postcolonial literatures isan issue indeed, but it is not language alone––rather it iswhat the language taught to us by the colonizers hasrevealed to its users, and as a result, what it has shielded.In terms of orality, we might say that this language hastaught us to hear only certain things and rendered usdeaf to others. Are courses in postcolonial literatures,even in the plural, equipped to animate the unheard?Where, within the single language that we use for purelyfunctional purposes, is the space for most of us whoselives are lived in more languages than one? A “thirdworld”/“postcolonial”/“developing world” person in-habits more language-worlds than one, and if the Indianwriter in English does not feel comfortable in more thana single one of these, despite her best intentions, sheruns the risk of essentializing the unknown or intenselypersonalizing the intimate. But the personal, whethertragic or farcical, is in the final analysis, written in thefabric of history. Changes in this script can only beauthored by history’s shifting movement––or thesechanges can themselves act as deep, tectonic forces thatredirect history’s flow. As the Old Man from Abazonsays,

When we are young and arrogant we all imagine thatthe story of the land is easy, that every one of us canget up and tell it. True we all have little scraps of talebubbling in us. But what we tell is like the middle ofa mighty boa which the foolish forester mistakes fora tree trunk and settles on to take his snuff . . . .46

The writer, the teller of stories, is chosen by Agwu, thegod of diviners and healers, who chalks the writer’s eyeand dips his tongue in the brew of prophecy. Thus theteller of stories becomes

. . . the liar who will sit inside his thatch and see themoon hanging in the sky outside. Without stirringfrom his stool he will tell you how the commoditiesare selling in the marketplace. His chalked eye willsee every blow in a battle he never fought.47

Does the writer command the story then? Are we allfolds in the imagination of some author or other, doesanything exist outside the telling, outside narration?

The story is our escort. Without it we are blind.Does the blind man own his escort? No, and neitherdo we the story. Rather it is the story that owns anddirects us. It is the thing that makes us different fromcattle; it is the mark on the face that sets one peopleapart from others.48

Does the text written in the colonizer’s language convey,these marks of difference that sets “one people apartfrom others”? Does it engage with the indispensable


relationship between the small and the big, the forceddivisions of the “personal” and the “public”? If it does,its language matters little. And if the critic who readsthese texts and the teacher who teaches them has accessto tools and strategies that can unpack this relationship,then by all means the postcolonial literature courses arevalid forms of knowledge. However, if the texts them-selves do not hear the multilingual resonances in theworlds they purport to inhabit, if they, despite the bestintentions of their authors, hear the “other” through theframe of the “self,” one language through auto-translation into another, then there is every reason towonder at their status as national literatures.

I am bemused by the great efforts of the teachingmachines of the West to encapsulate, literally, the expe-rience of multicultural societies with the different de-grees of implication within various structures of colo-nial rule and different political agendas, manipulated tofit into artificial models. What is of further and deeperconcern is the attempt by single literature departmentswithin universities in my own country to twist them-selves into untenable positions where literature is namedonly by the language in which it is written. I have arguedin what has gone before that the language may be indis-pensable to literature, but it is not the only element of atext. Language is the medium––and in teaching bothRoy and Achebe as parts of an English literature course,we do no better than the well-meaning but naïve ho-mogenization that is inherent within the categories of“Third World Literature” or “Postcolonial Literature.”Indeed, adding an ‘s’ to those designations does not ab-solve us or solve anything––it does not even begin toaddress the issues that a comparative methodology musttake as its starting point. The variety of the locations inwhich the English language is used must be consideredin their cultural and historical specificity, even while ac-knowledging that the language is English. Is it the sameEnglish? And is it the same postcoloniality? And mostcrucially, is it postcoloniality at all? It is only a compara-tive methodology that can ask and even begin to answerthis question, and it is the question I raise with regard tonot only English literature as discipline in my country,but also postcolonialism as a discipline in Western uni-versities. How “post” is colonialism if the structures ofmeaning and the conceptual apparatus that animate itare still wedded to the colonizers’ worldview? It is notonly a question of language use: even within texts in thecolonizers’ language there are differences, which I haveattempted to explore. The question is one of methodand ethics––if postcolonialism as reading strategy canonly proceed by way of a comparative methodology,what is the rationale for the separateness of Englishliterature and/or postcolonialism? Why not call it com-parative literature instead? The survival of various dis-ciplines is a matter of power and turf––perhaps this

matters more than changing realities. Is it possible toignore the specificities of various “third” world, and byextension various “post”colonial locations, in order toposit some Grand Theories about either? In our attemptto pluralize and allow everyone a voice, are we not sub-suming all the voices into the centralized hegemonicGrand Design, which had silenced them in the firstplace? Any postcolonialism must necessarily be com-parative––it cannot and need not be all encompassing,but it must locate its objects of study and then locateitself.

Yet this is a prescriptive stance––as an inhabitant ofa postcolonial society it would be more pertinent to askwhat ethical and political concerns I bring to my peda-gogical practices in dealing with texts written aboutpostcolonial societies in the colonizer’s language. Whatwould I point out to my students as the task of the“post”colonial writer in the colonizer’s language? Whichis the muse that presides over the creation of thesetexts? Addressing these questions involves ethical impli-cations for the writing and teaching of literatures of“post”colonial societies in locations both metropolitanand peripheral. The Old Man of Abazon tells the storyof the leopard that had been stalking the tortoise for along time.

Finally he caught up with him and said, “prepare todie”. The tortoise asked for some time to preparehimself. The leopard saw no harm in granting thiswish. Then the tortoise went into strange action onthe road scratching with hands and feet and throwingsand vigorously in all directions. “Why are you doingthat?” asked the puzzled leopard. The tortoise re-plied: Because even after I am dead I would wantanyone passing by this spot to say, yes, a fellow andhis match.49

The struggles of the gods of small things who mustsurvive keep a nation, a people, a society alive. But if thepostcolonial writer in the colonizer’s language does nothave the means or the medium to connect with thesepersonal struggles that sustain the larger world wherethe god of big things rules, if she cannot discern therelationship between these two worlds and mistakes itfor mere domination on the one hand and coweringacceptance on the other, she is left with nothing butdespair, nothing more or less than tragedy. This is a ro-mantic, individualized reading of the many divisions, themany differences and the many injustices that make upthe fabric of a society where past hierarchies are butoverlaid by present, indigenous ones by foreign––a soci-ety that one may well describe as postcolonial. How itcame to be, how it functions, how it makes and unmakesstructures of meaning are questions that postcolonialwriters and critics in the colonizers languages have takenit upon themselves to answer. The Kathakali dancerswho stopped in the temple at Ayemenen even in the low


season of June did so because despite having to per-form for the “imported attention spans” of the foreigntourists at resorts, they felt the need to practice their artin its fullness simply in order to survive. So at the tem-ple there, despite their ragged, tired unglamorous acces-sories, they performed entire cycles. Ayemenen was nota ritually important temple, but it was adopted by thedancers as they saw it as a survival strategy. Like thetortoise, even as they faced the inexorable power of theBig Things that were choking the life out of them, theydid not want history to record that they had given inwithout a struggle. And outside her text, Roy herself hasbecome identified with at least one such struggle wherethe postcolonial state’s ideology of progress and devel-opment seems to have met its match. The small men, inthis case, have taken on the god of big things and held itat bay for many years now. Does this struggle not merita novel? Or shall we accept that English, the language ofthe colonizers has nothing “post” colonial aboutit––that it still colonizes the minds of its users, espe-cially those who use it well? Can the postcolonial writer,after all, speak for herself even when she uses the colo-nizers’ language? Or does the latest version of Empirestill speak in her voice?

NOTESSpecial thanks to the editors, without whose tireless efforts

and constant encouragement, this essay, to misquote Roy,would not have been this essay.

1Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things (Delhi: India Ink,1997). All quotations are from this edition and are cited in thetext as God with page numbers following.

2Chinua Achebe, Anthills of the Savannah (New York: An-chor Books Doubleday, 1987). All quotations are from thisedition and are cited in the text as Anthills, with page numbersfollowing.

3Charles Buxton quoted by J. Coleman, Nigeria: Backgroundto Nationalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960),185. Besides this, several instances of the India factor can befound in contemporary Nigerian history; for instance RichardHailey, whose survey of West Africa explored the working ofLugard’s concept, is quoted in Coleman, Nigeria as saying thatin 1937, “one encounters a class which more definitely re-sembles the Indian politician type than can be seen in the restof Africa.” The West Africans themselves are aware of thesimilarities. The League of Coloured peoples founded in 1931records in its proceedings the exhortation by H. O. Davies,“We should follow the example of India—the only way out isfor the Africans to cooperate and make sacrifices in thestruggle for freedom” quoted in Coleman, Nigeria, 203.

4Richard Hailey, Native Administration in the British Afri-can Territories 1950–53, vol. 4 of A General Survey of theSystem of Native Administration, 1st ed. (London: His/HerMajesty’s Stationary Office, 1954).

5Hailey, Native Administration.6Richard Hailey, “Native Administration and Political De-

velopment in British Tropical Africa” (NAPD, chap. 1, sub-mitted as cyclostyle March 1941 C.O. 047/21/47100/1).

7See for instance S. N. Balgangadhara, “The Heathen inHis Blindness,” Asia, the West and the Dynamic of Religion (Lei-den: E. J. Brill, 1994).

8This process is described from the Indian point of view inG. Vishwanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and BritishRule in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989);and specifically with reference to Bengal in S. Bandyopadhyay,Gopal-Rakhal Dwanda Samas Upanibeshbad o Bangla Shishu Sa-hitya (Calcutta: Papyrus, 1990).

9On the establishment of Christian churches in Igbo landand the reactions to it, see J. E. Flint, “Nigeria: The ColonialExperience From 1880–1914” in Colonialism in Africa1870–1914, vol. 1, ed., P. Gann and H. Duignan (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press,1962), 220–259. See also Continu-ity and Change in African Culture J. Herskovitz and W. Bascomeds. (Chicago: University Press, 1965).

10For accounts of the divisive colonial policies in Nigeriaand their effects, see H. L. Bretton, Power and Stability in Nige-ria: The Politics of Decolonisation (New York: Fredrick A. Praeger1962); K. Post and M. L. Vickers Structure and Conflict in Nigeria1960–1966 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1973).

11For the position of English in India, see P. Dasgupta TheOtherness of English (Delhi: Sage, 1993); for the extent of “in-tegration” of the colonizers’ languages in African societies,see V. Klima, K. Legere and P. Zima, eds., Culture and Integra-tion Dissertations Orientales, vol. 36 (Prague: Oriental Insti-tute Academia, 1976).

12E. M. Forster, A Passage to India ed. O. Stallybrass (Har-mondsworth: Penguin, 1982), 48.

13Forster, A Passage to India, 132, 315-6.14Roy, The God of Small Things, 88.15Roy, The God of Small Things, 66.16Achebe, Anthills of the Savannah, 19.17Roy, The God of Small Things, 52.18Martin Heidegger, On the Way to Language (New York:

Harper & Row, 1971), 71.19Roy, The God of Small Things, 229.20Achebe, Anthills of the Savannah, 116.21Achebe, Anthills of the Savannah, 117.22Cheikh Hamidou Kane, L’aventure ambigue (Paris: Juillard,

1977).23Kane, L’aventure ambigue, 52.24Ngugi wa Thiong’o Matigari (London: Heinemann Edu-

cational Books, 1987).25Achebe, Anthills of the Savannah, 25.26M. Strathern, Reproducing The Future: Essays on Anthropology,

Kinsip and the New Reproductive Technologies (Manchester: Man-chester University Press, 1992).

27Strathern, Reproducing The Future, 85.28Achebe, Anthills of the Savannah, 57.29Chinua Achebe, “The Novelist as Teacher” in African Lit-

erature and the Universities, ed. G. Moore (London: Heinemann,1965).

30Wole Soyinka, The Road in Collected Plays, vol. 1 (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 1973) and The Beatification of AreaBoy (London: Methuen, 1995).

31For the tradition of prose in Nigerian literature, see B.Lindfors, ed., Critical Perspectives on Nigerian Literature (London:


Heinemann Educational Books, 1979). See also I. Okpewho,The Epic in Africa (New York: Columbia Columbia Press,1979) and Myth in Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1983). D. O. Fagunwa, The Forest of a Thousand Demons,trans. Wole Soyinka (London: Nelson, 1968). Amos Tutuola,Palm-Wine Drinkard (London: Grove Press, 1958).

32Roy, The God of Small Things, 66.33Roy, The God of Small Things, 74.34Nkiru Nzegwu, “Hidden Spaces, Silenced Practices and

Igba N’rira,” West Africa Review (October 2002).35Achebe, Anthills of the Savannah, 148.36Achebe, Anthills of the Savannah, 179.37Achebe, Anthills of the Savannah, 215.38Achebe, Anthills of the Savannah, 84.39Roy, The God of Small Things, 19.40Achebe, Anthills of the Savannah, 179.41Achebe, Anthills of the Savannah, 209-10.42Achebe, Anthills of the Savannah, 212.43Achebe, Anthills of the Savannah, 212.44Elspeth Probyn, Sexing the Self (New York: Routledge,

1993), 17.45Forster, A Passage to India, 160.46Achebe, Anthills of the Savannah, 114.47Achebe, Anthills of the Savannah, 114.48Achebe, Anthills of the Savannah, 114.49Achebe, Anthills of the Savannah, 116.


Spanish Orientalism: Uses of the Past in Spain’sColonization in Africa1

IGNACIO TOFIÑO-QUESADA

The arrival of Moorish troops on the Iberian Penin-sula in 711 would change forever the perception that theinhabitants of that territory had of themselves and ofothers. For almost eight centuries, there was a continu

-

ous Muslim presence in the Iberian Peninsula, and thatpresence and the exchanges with Islam that it allowedshaped the way the territory developed through history;how it was created; how it presented itself and was per-ceived by others; how it spoke; and how it related to itsneighbors, both European and African.

Before the Muslim arrival, there had been differentreligions on Iberian soil, mainly Judaism and Christianityof varying denominations. The majority of the popula-tion followed Arianism until the conversion to Catholi-cism of King Recaredo and the Council of Toledo in587; from that moment until the arrival of Islam, theruling classes would be orthodox Catholics. Muslimconquest was mainly a change in the ruling elites: thenew rulers would be Moors, but that did not necessarilymean that all of a sudden the population of the Penin-sula converted to Islam. In a very different approachfrom that of eight centuries later in 1492, Christians andJews were allowed to continue with their faith, sincethey were both Peoples of the Book (dhimmi). Only pa-gans (mainly peoples in the North who had not beenchristianized) were persecuted. This situation, which hasbeen labeled convivencia, the coexistence of three mono-theistic religions, continued during the entire Muslimrule of Spain. While some historians see it as a goldenage of cultural exchange and religious tolerance, othersdescribe it as a period of turmoil and difficulty.2 Itwould probably be better to think of it as a sociologicalexperiment: Christians would be under Muslim rule or,later on, have Muslim subjects; Muslims would havenon-Muslim subjects (although they were prepared forthat since the Prophet had already described how totreat them), and, in time, they would have to deal with anon-Muslim ruler (something that had never happenedbefore and would be a site of theological and politicalcontroversy); and, finally, Jews would find a kinder ruleruntil they were expelled by the Catholic Kings.

The Spanish Middle Ages are, then, a very interestingperiod, and the difficulties and problems faced by thepeople would eventually have a literary reflection. Asoptimistic as one would like to be about convivencia, thefact is that literary portrayals often relied on stereotypesand caricatures:3 Jews were accused of the death ofChrist and consequently criticized for that as well as fortheir wealth, real or imaginary, whereas Muslims weredescribed either as barbaric infidels and invaders or asexotic sybarites. Castilian “romances” included all sortsof non-Christian characters, but they did not considerquestions of race. Spanish Muslims were described byCastilian sources as evil, but as physically human, not asgiants or as a monstrous race as would be the case withrepresentations of sub-Saharan Africans.4

For Christians fighting to conquer territory fromMuslims, the unity of the majority of the Iberian Penin-sula under a single monarch in Visigoth times very soonbecame a sort of foundational myth: a Christian nationwhich had to be restored. This idea has been used toread Visigoth Spain as the natural origin of a unifiedChristian state, momentarily disrupted by a Muslim in-vasion, which struggled for survival during the Recon-quista period, and was reborn with the Catholic Kings.Linguistic and cultural differences were convenientlyerased and subordinated to religion, which stands out asthe epitome of the Spanish people: one country, onemonarch, and one faith. Not surprisingly, the conquestof Granada, the last Moorish kingdom, and the expul-sion of the Jews from Spanish territory, go hand inhand. In 1492, Catholic and Spanish became synonymsand have remained so for the majority of Spaniards,despite some modern efforts to see the Moorish pres-ence in the Peninsula not as a foreign invasion, but aspart of the very fabric of the Spanish state.

Spain had been the site of a social experiment (Islamin Europe), and it has ever since looked back at thatmoment either to despise or glorify it. It has been themeasure against which all new social experiments havebeen evaluated. Thus, for instance, when the Spaniardssailed and discovered what they thought to be the In-


dies, they described the American Other as the Otherthey had seen at home; Cortés labeled the Mayan tem-ples mezquitas (mosques), because that was his referencefor an alien faith.

The Moor has had a continuous presence in theSpanish imaginary,5 but in the nineteenth century, a newphenomenon started to develop. Its European neigh-bors began to perceive Spain, a poor and developingcountry at the time, as a new Other, largely because ofits Muslim past. This fact, united with the loss of all itsAmerican colonies and the majority of its Asian andAfrican ones, was perceived as a collapse by the Spanishintellectual classes, which started to rethink their as-sumptions about national identity. The famous question¿qué es España? [what is Spain?] was constantly posedafter the events of 1898,6 and some found an answer inthe Visigoth myth of a Catholic monarchy ruling over acountry undivided by religious or linguistic borders. In-tellectuals such as Menéndez Pidal provided a scholarlybasis for a tradition that considered the Muslim periodas a mere parenthesis in Spanish history and Castile asthe very heart of the true Spain.7 Medieval epics wereread by intellectuals and used by politicians as historicaltruths; for example, they portrayed el Cid as an ultra-Spanish and ultra-Catholic hero, forgetting that the realRodrigo Díaz also served in Muslim armies againstChristian kings, as was quite common at the time.

These ideas about an eternal Catholic-Spanish soulwere applied to the African ventures of Spain in thenineteenth and twentieth century. Spanish colonialism inAfrica, though limited, relied heavily on myths that hadbeen perpetuated through history. The Reconquista, theAmerican expansion, and even the 1936-1939 Civil Warwere read as religious wars to fight evil and bring thetrue light of Christianity to all peoples. At the sametime, another set of myths was also incorporated intothe colonial discourse: one that recognized the Muslimpast of Spain and capitalized on European conceptionsof Spain as part of the Orient. The aim of this paper isto highlight the impact of different ideas of Spain onSpanish colonization in Africa during the twentiethcentury and the manipulative use of the past by Spanishcolonizing authorities in Morocco and EquatorialGuinea.

Spanish OrientalismPostcolonial theory and criticism have opened up new

ways of approaching literatures hitherto neglected orlittle studied by critics. Works coming from differentparts of the former British and French colonies havebeen incorporated into the curriculum of metropolitanuniversities and can no longer be ignored by scholarsworking in French or English departments. In addition,the term “postcolonial” has been expanded to includesituations that historically belong to the colonial period

but are read as sites of resistance and anticolonial strug-gle.8 This approach, focused on opening the canon tonon-European literary works, parallel to the struggle forrecognition of women’s or gay and lesbian writing,eventually engendered a critique of the white, male,Western approach to non-Western cultures and literarytraditions, which was largely a matter of dominating andcolonizing them. With the work of Edward Said, thislatter approach was labeled “Orientalism,” a conceptthat criticized the reductionist European vision of theOrient, especially the Middle East.

As useful and seminal as it has been, Said’s notion ofOrientalism is limited insofar as it focuses only on therelationship between Self and Other (the former beingEuropean metropolitan centers and their cultural pro-ductions, the latter being Asian or African territories andtheir cultural productions) and does not take into ac-count the complexities of European state formation norattempt to explain the images of themselves that Euro-pean countries projected on their colonies. Said draws apicture of Western countries that is culturally homoge-neous and is not always a fair description of the ten-sions existing in the metropoles. In a sense, he estab-lishes a sort of “orientalism in reverse,”9 wherecolonists’ cultures are described in terms of essence andimmutability. Because he starts his analysis in modernity,moreover, he cannot account for phenomena that havetheir origin in remoter times, as I try to demonstrate inthe case of Spain.

If Said’s notion needs expansion and clarification tobe appropriate to the Spanish context, most moderndiscussions of Spain need revision as well. Most arebased on intra-peninsular factors such as language orterritory and seldom take into account the external rela-tionships that shaped the configuration of the state.This perspective recognizes a central nationalism (tradi-tional, Catholic, and identified with Castile since theGeneración del noventa y ocho and several peripheral nation-alisms (mainly Basque, Catalan, and Galician) with dif-ferent degrees of articulation and political affiliations;the discourse on the state revolves around the relation-ship between these entities10 and often forgets thatwhen the time came to go abroad and colonize, Cata-lans, Basques, and Galicians went hand in hand withCastilians, as nationals of the metropole.

This external perspective (the image of Spain seen asa homogeneous unity outside its borders), not based onlanguage but on religion and race, is rarely present incontemporary political discussion or literary works inSpain; the only writer who addresses it seems to be JuanGoytisolo. In order to begin to articulate this externalperspective, I want to develop the concept of “SpanishPeninsula,” which, drawing on and revising Said’s work,describes Spain from the outside as it was seen and per-ceived by non-Spaniards. This perspective is necessarily

Tofiño-Quesada: Spanish Orientalism

double: it includes both European accounts of Spain asthe Orient and the literature of those from Spain’sshort-lived African colony in Equatorial Guinea.

Foreign travelers found in nineteenth century Spainan Orient à la carte: exotic enough to be interesting, butnot so different as to be considered completely alien.Spain could not become a colony, but it certainly couldbe orientalized through travel writing and literature, asindeed it was. Prosper Merimée’s Carmen and Washing-ton Irving’s The Alhambra: Tales of a Traveler, for exam-ple, transformed ultra-Catholic Spain into a mythicalMuslim space, exotic and foreign.

This paradox is at the heart of Spanish Orientalism,the narrative of a country that Orientalizes and indeedcolonizes the Other (in this particular case, in Africa),but which is described as Oriental itself. This is a verydifferent case from that of France or England and re-quires a more nuanced analysis of Orientalism. In orderto study the theorization of Spanish colonialism in Af-rica and its relation to Spanish history, I will follow thenotion of “hispanotropicalismo” proposed by GustauNerín,11 but will expand it to include not only the Ori-entalizing of the Other and the Spanish colonization ofAfrica, but also the fact that Spain was perceived for along time as the Orient within Europe.

Nerín describes five particular features of Spanishcolonial discourse, features that construed a justificatorydiscourse employed to legitimize African expansion andto distance Spanish from British or French colonialism(labeled “coloniaje,” as opposed to good old Spanish“civilización”), especially during Franco’s dictatorship:“total absence of racist attitudes; innate African voca-tion of Spaniards; missionary tendency of the Spanishnation; lack of economic exploitation of the colonialterritories, and presence of mestization.”12 For me, themost interesting are the second and the third of Nerín’scharacteristics, because they are the two sides of a his-torical coin that has its origin in the Muslim presencefrom 711 to 1492. They are the recognition that Spainwanted both to exploit its Islamic past (in the image ofan innate African vocation) and to efface it (in the imageof the Christian nation and its missionary ambitions).

Any colonial power has developed, over time, somekind of discourse to justify the invasion of a foreigncountry to exploit it economically. Unlike German colo-nization which, as Russell Berman has demonstrated,functioned as a way out of Idealism,13 the Spanish casewas quite different: Spanish Orientalism included theOrientalizing of the Other and the assumption of theSelf as Other. At a time when Western Europe was re-discovering its Muslim past, Spain harbored ultra-Catholic sentiments based on the suppression of theIslamic past. This Islamic past has been used when use-ful and discarded when inconvenient, sometimes even atthe same time. This seems to be the case with African

colonization: Spain could claim an inherent African vo

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cation, which embraces the Islamic past, and at the sametime claim a Christianizing mission which largely deniesIslamic influence.

During the 1880s, foreseeing the end of Spanishventures in the Americas and Asia, a group of men,mostly adventurers and geographers, started to thinkabout the state of Spanish colonial possessions in Africaand asked the government for a prompt intervention inWestern Sahara and the Gulf of Guinea in order tokeep alive the Spanish presence in those parts of theworld. The Spanish colonialist intellectuals of the nine-teenth century were worried because they saw that Spainwas losing the battle over Africa; other European coun-tries were getting a slice of the cake, and they wantedtheir share too. However, instead of using the rhetoricof civilization and modernization, they played the cardof an inherent Spanish vocation in Africa, which con-stitutes one side of Spanish Orientalism. While the civi-lization, modernization and Christianization argumentcould be made by other European nations, the Africanvocation argument was unique to Spain; Spanish Orien-talism worked two ways: it both allowed the inherentvocation argument and capitalized on European’s exoti-cized, Orientalized fantasy of Spain. Their argumentwas that Spain was indeed part of Africa because of itshistorical links to the continent and its geographicalproximity to it. Joaquín Costa14 expressed it in a verygraphic way when he wrote:

Spain and Morocco are two parts of a geographicalunit, sort of a river basin whose borders are the Atlasin the south and the Pyrenees in the north…. TheStraits of Gibraltar are not a wall that separates onehouse from another; on the contrary, it is a dooropened by Nature to communicate two rooms of thesame house. [España y Marruecos son como las dos mitades deuna unidad geográfica, forman a modo de una cuenca hidrográfica,cuyas divisorias extremas son las cordilleras paralelas del Atlas alSur y del Pirineo al Norte…. El Estrecho de Gibraltar no es untabique que separa una casa de otra casa; es, al contrario, unapuerta abierta por la Naturaleza para poner en comunicación doshabitaciones de una misma casa].15

In December 1883, the Sociedad española de africanistas ycolonistas was founded in Madrid, and its membersstarted very soon to lobby the government for a moreactive presence in the African continent. Their interestswere, of course, economic and political, but they usedanother, uniquely Spanish argument about the Muslimpast. Since Morocco founded a civilization in Spainduring the Middle Ages, it was Spain’s “providentialmission” to promote a civilization in Morocco.16 Theinnate African vocation of Spaniards existed, however,primarily in the dreams of some romantic expeditionar-ies and in the interest of the generals who won the1936-39 Civil War, most of whom had been serving in


Northern Africa and saw the Muslim past as an excuseto defend Spanish expansion in Africa and, therefore,their jobs and privileges.

A good example of this kind of attitude towards Af-rica is the affair of Santa Cruz de Mar Pequeña, a for-tress supposedly built in 1476 by Diego García de Her-rera in the Western Sahara and later abandoned.17 Thisincipient African expansion of the Catholic Kings, thestory went, soon gave way to the fight against the Turksin the Mediterranean and to the American conquest, andthe fortress and its exact location were completely for-gotten. Only in the nineteenth century did the Spanishgovernment, after several requests from geographicalsocieties, take steps to claim Spanish sovereignty overthe territory. After several treaties and misunderstand-ings between the government of Madrid and the Mo-roccan sultanate, the assumed location of the old for-tress was designated to be in Ifni (south of modernAgadir), but the question was dropped again becausenobody was able to corroborate the exactitude of thislocation. Finally, on 6 April 1934, Colonel Capaz disem-barked at Ifni and, on the basis of the alleged formerfortress, proclaimed Spanish sovereignty over the terri-tory. The town was not returned to Morocco until1969.18

Spanish presence in Morocco, based on this ideologi-cal manipulation of the Peninsula’s Islamic past, wasshort lived and left little visible imprint on Moroccancultural life. We have, thus, few Moroccan cultural prod-ucts in Spanish. Nevertheless, there is much histori-ographical information on Spanish colonialism inNorthern Africa, especially during the 1936-39 SpanishCivil War and the subsequent Francoist dictatorship. Acurious anecdote illustrates the usefulness of the Islamicpast: in 1937, General Franco requested the Delegationfor Indigenous Affairs, located in Tetouan (Spanish Mo-rocco), to organize a sea pilgrimage to Mecca for localMuslims. The departure was scheduled for 21 January,but a Republican plane bombarded the port, and thetravel had to be postponed. Francoist propaganda usedthe incident to highlight the antireligious zeal of the“red government paid by Moscow”19 and the need tostrengthen the links between Spanish rebels and Moroc-can armies in order to fight a common crusade againstCommunism and atheism. It is curious, to say the least,to find such a strong defense of Islam orchestrated byFrancoist troops, who claimed to fight for a ChristianSpain “soiled by the Communist atheism of the Repub-lican government.”

The Other Side of the Coin: Equatorial GuineaAfter the conquest of Granada, attempts to go on

with territorial expansion further south (the Canary Is-lands, Santa Cruz de Mar Pequeña) came to a halt withthe discovery of America and the threat of the Turks in

the Mediterranean. Africa was forgotten. Nevertheless,in her testament, Isabel of Castile asked her heirs to goon with the conquest of Africa, with the help of theChurch, and this request was to be a token of SpanishOrientalism several centuries later, not least in its in-scription of the Catholic Church as a colonialist agent.20

No matter how important the Muslim presence in thePeninsula, the fact is that after 1492 Catholicism was atthe core of Hispanidad. The Church was a major actor insociety and controlled education, so much so that, whilein continental France and its colonies schools createdFrenchmen and women, in Spain and its colonies theycreated orthodox Catholics. This distinction is impor-tant because it necessitated downplaying Spanish Ori-entalism—the kind of discourse that saw Spain as hav

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ing strong ties with Muslim Africa—and foregroundingSpain’s Christianity. While Spanish Orientalism couldwork in Morocco, where a system of indirect rule wasimplemented, it did not work in Equatorial Guinea,where Spanish colonists faced, rather than a strong re-ligion like Islam, a kinship structure that they felt theyhad to destroy to “civilize” the natives.21 Hence it wasCatholic missionaries that were the primary agent ofcolonization in Equatorial Guinea.

Equatorial Guinea is a unique country for several rea-sons: the only Spanish colony in Sub-Saharan Africa, itwas colonized quite late, although it had formally be-longed to Spain for centuries. It obtained its independ-ence quite late as well (1968) and is today the onlySpanish-speaking country in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Spain suffered from a kind of schizophrenic identityin which it was both “self and other,” both Christianand Moorish/Islamic, and it transmitted this duality toits colony, which became simultaneously traditionallyAfrican and Christian Spanish. The paradox that in-formed the action of its colonizer (using the past anddenying it at the same time) has informed the identity ofthe country. The Spanish legacy (language, legal andeducational system, cultural production) and a ferventCatholicism are elements that form Equatorial Guinea’sidentity. These two elements, and their relationship withan African past that surfaces every now and then, gohand in hand and show up in very interesting ways inEquatorial Guinea’s literature in Spanish.

Both Spanish and Equatoguinean fiction dealing withEquatorial Guinea tend to be first person narrations orhistorical novels: reality and fiction intertwine in a his-torical travel that allows the reader to follow the evolu-tion of the territory and its relationship to Spainthrough the work of its writers.22 The four novels that Iwant to discuss, although written by black Equatoguine-ans, are largely obliging with the colonizer, and most ofthem seem to show little critical spirit. Written in perfectCastilian standard (with some African words thrown inevery now and then as if to give local color to the nar-


ration), they are the story of a subdued communityruled by strong forces, either colonial or dictatorial.

The arrival of the Congregation of the Sons of theImmaculate Heart of the Blessed Virgin Mary(Claretians) to the Spanish territories in the Gulf ofGuinea in 1883 signals the Hispanization of those ter-ritories.23 The Claretians remain the most stable sign ofthe Spanish presence in the region, and the Equa-toguinean people accepted Catholicism, although theydid not totally forget their ancient beliefs. The mission-aries’ presence and the importance of religion through-out Equatorial Guinea’s literature can be followedthrough its literature in Spanish because many of itscharacters are either missionaries or priests and becausethey so closely follow the evolution of Guinean history.

The first literary works in Spanish by EquatorialGuineans can be found in La Guinea Española, a news-paper published by the Claretian missionaries at theirseminary of Banapá,24 but the first novel written by ablack Equatoguinean was Leoncio Evita’s Cuando loscombes luchaban, published in 1953.25 An “ethnographi-cal” novel, it tells a story of slavery and tribal fights thatare resolved with the help of an American missionaryand two Spanish adventurers. The editor was the Insti-tuto de Estudios Africanos, a branch of the ConsejoSuperior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC) devotedto the scientific study of the colonial possessions ofSpain in Africa. Although an Equatoguinean wrote thenovel, it is essentially Spanish: its language, its attitudes,and its point of view are those of the colonizer. At atime when Senghor and Fanon were publishing and co-lonialism was being widely criticized, Evita offers anapology of the colonialist action of Spain in the Gulf ofGuinea. Contrary to what was happening in Morocco,where Spaniards played the card of their Islamic pastand their “African vocation,” here they are described ina very different way. We find here the erasure of thepast: no exotic heritage, no golden age; just pure andsimple colonization, a colonization that is somehow ac-cepted by the natives, the author among them.

Somewhat different is a short story entitled La últimacarta del padre Fulgencio Abad, CMF, by Maplal Loboch,published in 1977.26 It is the letter of a Claretian mis-sionary to his superior, a narrative that describes theefforts the missionaries have developed to evangelizethe island on which he lives. Although no name is givento the territory in the story—a sign that the descriptioncould be applied to any part of EquatorialGuinea—textual hints help to identify it. For example,the appearance of names of real missionaries (such asJoaquim Juanola or Isidro Vila) and the indication thatthe missionary expedition left Santa Isabel (modernBata) on 12 August allow one to assume that the terri-tory described is the island of Annobón: the Claretiansarrived on Annobón on 19 August 1885, and the two

above mentioned priests were sent to that island.27 Thisstory in the form of a letter represents a second stage inEquatorial Guinea’s colonial history. By the 1920s, theClaretian missions were fully functioning and Hispani-zation was being implemented: baptisms, communions,and Catholic marriages had been performed, and themissionaries, many of whom were of Catalan origin,had built a school. Nevertheless, Loboch’s fictionalClaretian is not convinced of the goodness of all thisand feels that much of the missionaries’ efforts has beenuseless. He asks for forgiveness from his superior be-cause he doubts his faith and wonders whether heshould have left the comforts of white civilization tominister to “savages” (“sons of Ham”), whose only ac-tivity is “to drink and to fornicate while their womenwork in the fields.”28 The missionary tendency of theSpaniards seems to backfire, and we find in this novel areturn of the repressed: the negated African past dieshard and keeps surfacing in spite of the efforts of theCatholic missionaries. The novelist still chooses thevoice of a white Spaniard, but he appropriates it anduses it to criticize the Spanish administration.

The end of Francoist colonization and the independ-ence of the country in 1968 is the period covered in Lastinieblas de tu memoria negra by Donato Ndongo-Bidyogopublished in 1987.29 The novel, whose title is inspired bySenghor’s Chants d’ombre, is the story of an Equa-toguinean seminarian who decides to leave his career inthe Spanish priesthood and to go back to Guinea tohelp in the construction of the new nation. In order todo so, he must confront his superior, the representativeof metropolitan power. The novel follows the seminar-ian’s memory as he describes the missionary school heattended in Guinea, the Spanish presence in his country,and the division between his father (who followed theteachings of the Spanish priests) and his uncle (whotaught him traditional practices). The protagonist, whoremains nameless all along, is a soul divided in a battlebetween Catholic Spain and traditional Africa.

Like the protagonist, who went to the Peninsula tocontinue his studies, many Equatorial Guineans, afterindependence, went to Spain to study, with the intentionof returning to Guinea after they had completed theirdegrees. But their dreams were cut short when, in 1970,all political parties were suppressed in Guinea and thebloody dictatorship of Macías Nguema began, whichprevented them from returning. By 1973, almost aquarter of the country’s population was living in exile(125,000 exiles and refugees according to Liniger-Goumaz).30 In 1979, Teodoro Obiang Nguema, Macías’snephew, led a coup d’état, the infamous “golpe de libertad,”and hopes were renewed among the Guinean popula-tion. This moment is the setting for the novel El párrocode Niefang by Joaquín Mbomio Bacheng published in1996.31 Again the story of a priest, the novel tells the


tale of Padre Gabriel, released from Macía’s prisonsright after the former dictator, “that son of Satan,”32 hasbeen detained and condemned to death. After leavingthe prison, Gabriel returns to his community in Bata,where he is received as a hero, but has doubts about hisvocation that he shares with Cardinal Sindona, an envoyfrom the Vatican. The Vatican official dismissesGabriel’s doubts and tells him that his beatification isassured after his death, but that first he will be conse-crated as a bishop. But Gabriel visits his hometown,Niefang (formerly Sevilla de Niefang), where he meetswith traditional African magic and with his lover, Sole-dad, who he eventually impregnates right after thePope’s visit to Equatorial Guinea in 1982. Once again,we find a priest in the center of the conflict that op-poses local traditions and European colonization: thesame way that Spaniards claim an “African past” in Mo-rocco and deny it in Equatorial Guinea, Equatoguineanslearn to manage the conflict of opposing traditions. Thepriest has excellent relations with the Vatican, but keepsup a sexual relationship with a childhood friend.

This novel is the last stage in a series of literary de-pictions of the intimate relationship between EquatorialGuinea’s history, Spanish colonization and the CatholicChurch. While an independent country, EquatorialGuinea, like many of its neighbors, has inherited itsborders, its language, its religion, and some of its cus-toms from the colonizer’s presence in its territory. In-deed, it deploys this very heritage to create a differenti-ated ident i ty : the Spanish paradox ofappropriation/negation of the Other to define the Selfwas transplanted to the colony and lives on in the men-tality of the African writers who use Spanish as theirmeans of expression.

Manipulation at the Core of HispanidadSpain rediscovered its Islamic past during the nine-

teenth century when foreign travelers started to describethe country as an exotic and oriental place. That out-sider vision did not exactly fit the inner idea of oneChristian nation under God that had helped create themodern state under the Catholic Kings. However, it wasuseful and came at the right time: the Afro-Moorish pastwas the perfect alibi to justify Spanish expansion in Af-rica and was indeed used in the colonization of North-ern Morocco and the Western Sahara. The only problemwas that, in order to use it, ideologues had to minimizethe Catholic tradition that was inherent to the very ideaof Spain. Some authors see in this Spanish attitude acommitment to “opening the dialogue and exchangewith the East for the purpose of learning about the selffrom the Other,”33 but the fact is that the exotic Otherwas either assimilated as the religious self in Catholicismor expelled as the unassimilable Other.

Colonization in Equatorial Guinea followed quite a

different pattern. There were neither Islamic brother-hoods nor previous cultural links to be invoked, so theMuslim past was conveniently erased to give way to anultra-Catholic colonization under the auspices of theClaretian order. Nevertheless, the manipulation of thepast that is located at the core of Spanish Orientalismseems to have been transplanted to Equatoguineanidentity, as we have seen in the novels discussed above.

In Spain, the contradiction between the Islamic pastand the Catholic present is an ongoing conflict, andboth elements are used and rejected when convenient,no matter that they are largely in opposition to eachother. In Equatorial Guinea, we find a similar pattern:the African past and the postcolonial Catholic presentare accepted or rejected anytime, often at the same time.Ndongo’s novel, Las tinieblas de tu memoria negra offers avivid metaphor for this conflict in the first communionof the protagonist.34 He confesses in the afternoon andknows that he has to fast until Mass next morning, butcannot resist the temptation to eat and devours a seriesof African dishes (lamb with peanut sauce, yam, tapi-oca) during the night. During the communion Mass,which seems to last forever under a burning sun, hefeels guilty and, in a psychosomatic move, vomits theHoly Communion wafer. Catholic guilt is intertwinedwith colonial images in this scene, where the white ofthe protagonist’s suit is stained by the blackness of sin,and the little Guinean seems incapable of living up toEuropean standards. More than an example of theproblems posed by European colonization in Africa, theprotagonist represents a new case of the paradox thatinforms Spanish Orientalism: the child who vomits thewafer eventually leaves his country to pursue a career asa priest in Spain. But neither Spain nor the priesthoodcan keep him; in the end, he returns to Africa. Like theSpanish colonizers, who traveled to Africa with theirMuslim/Catholic past, the Equatoguinean protagonistcarries two stories as well: one African, one Spanish;wherever he goes, the other follows….35

NOTES1I thank Rebecca Saunders, co-editor of the journal, for

her invaluable help on the shaping of this article. It is not aquestion of politeness but of mere justice: without her help,advice, and patience, I would have never been able to showthe potential of my arguments.

2The discussion about the role of the Muslim presence inthe shaping of the concept of Spain was one of the mainarguments in the polemic between historians Américo Castroand Claudio Sánchez Albornoz. Castro considered that theconcept of Spain was born in the interaction of the threecommunities present in medieval Iberia (Jews, Muslims, andChristians), while Sánchez Albornoz took into account pre-Muslim history and considered that there was a Spanishnessthat was somehow affected but not modified by the Musliminvasion.


3See Dwayne E. Carpenter, “Social Perception and LiteraryPortrayal: Jews and Muslims in Medieval Spanish Literature,”in Convivencia: Jews, Muslims, and Christians in Medieval Spain, ed.Vivian B. Mann. Jerrilynn Denise Dodds, and Thomas F.Glick (New York: G. Braziller, 1992), 61-81.

4See Louise Mirrer, Women, Jews, and Muslims in the Texts ofReconquest Castile (Ann Arbor: The University of MichiganPress, 1996).

5See María Soledad Carrasco Urgoiti, El moro de Granada enla literatura (del siglo XV al XX), (Madrid: Revista deOccidente, 1956).

6“The events of 1898” or “el desastre del noventa y ocho”refers to the Spanish-American War and the loss of Cuba,Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, which ended the Spanishcolonial rule in America and Asia. These events had a tre-mendous impact on the Spanish public for several reasonsand are still remembered in Spain as “el desastre de 1898.”

7See María Eugenia Lacarra, “La utilización del Cid en laideología militar franquista,” Ideologies and Literature 3, (1980):95-127.

8The medievalists’ use of postcolonial theory heavily de-pends on this concept of the postcolonial in or before theactual colonial domination. For an example, see JeffreyJerome Cohen ed., The Postcolonial Middle Ages (New York: St.Martin’s Press, 2000).

9I follow Sadik Jalal al-Àzm’s terminology: Sadik Jalal al-Àzm, “Orientalism and Orinetalism in Reverse,” in Oriental-ism. A Reader, ed. Alexander Lyon Macfie (New York: NewYork University Press, 2000), 217-238.

10Even today, twenty-five years after the end of the Fran-coist dictatorship, there is discussion on how the state shouldbe defined, how different linguistic communities be treatedand how they should be represented in the government of thestate.

11Gustau Nerín i Abad, “Mito franquista y realidad de lacolonización de la Guinea española,” Estudios de Asia y África32.1, (1997): 11.

12Nerín, “Mito franquista,” 12.13Russell A. Berman, Enlightenment or Empire: Colonial Dis-

course in German Culture (Lincoln: University of NebraskaPress, 1998).

14Joaquin Costa was one of the prime advocates and potentsymbols of a broad social movement for modernizationthrough geographical restructuring called regeneracionismo. Hewas involved in the theoretical discussions about Spanishpresence in Africa, although he later changed his mind andrecommended selling all colonies and leaving Africa. Hiswritings have been invoked time and time again by a widevariety of social groups.

15Joaquín Costa, quoted in Azucena Pedraz Marcos,Quimeras de África. La Sociedad española de africanistas y colonistas.El colonialismo español de finales del siglo XIX (Madrid: EdicionesPolifemo, 2000), 145.

16Pedraz, Quimeras, 245.17See Pedraz, Quimeras, 28-29, 103-127, 292-301 and Jesús

F. Salafranca Ortega, El sistema colonial español en África (Mélaga:Editorial Algazara, 2001), 303-309.

18This affair recalls the evolution of the dispute between

Spain and Morocco over the Perejil island (next to Ceuta).During the summer of 2002, the Spanish population discov

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ered this uninhabited enclave of 13.5 hectares when it was“invaded” by Moroccan troops. Madrid launched an attack torecover it, only to later agree to remove its troops as long asMorocco neither claimed sovereignty over the island nor oc-cupied it. The Spanish government did not even discuss thehistorical doubts about the sovereignty of the island or thefact that it had been abandoned by the army, and Spanishnewspapers fueled the patriotic sentiments of a populationwho, in general, did not care at all about a territory of whichthey had never heard.

19María Rosa de Madariaga, Los moros que trajo Franco…. Laintervención de tropas coloniales en la guerra civil (Barcelona:Ediciones Martínez Roca, 2002), 348.

20Pedraz, Quimeras, 31.21Nerín, “Mito franquista,” 21.22I will not discuss literature written by African Spaniards,

but their work poses very interesting questions. BecauseEquatoguinean writers did not use literature as an anticolonialtool, on which grounds can we differentiate between a mem-oir written by black Equatoguineans exiled in Spain for mostof their life and something written by white Spaniards born inEquatorial Guinea who spent their lives in Africa?

23M’baré N’gom, “Caminos de África: espacio colonial yliteratura en Guinea Ecuatorial,” in Caminería hispánica. Actasdel II Congreso de caminería hispánica, ed. Manuel Criado de Val(Madrid: Aache ediciones, 1996), 436.

24Its first issue appeared in 1903 and was published untilthe independence of the country in 1968. See M’baré N’gom,“The Missing Link: African Hispanism at the Dawn of theMillennium,” Aracne@Rutgers: Journal of Iberian and LatinAmerican Literary and Cultural Studies 1.1, (2001), <http://www.scc.rutgers.edu/arachne/vol_1ngom.htm>.

25Leoncio Evita, Cuando los combes luchaban: Novela decostumbres de la Guinea española (Madrid: Consejo Superior deInvestigaciones Científicas, 1953).

26Maplal Loboch, La última carta del padre Fulgencio Abad,CMF (Madrid: URGE, 1977). CMF stands for Congregatio Mis-sionariorum Filiorum Immaculati Cordis.

27Eduardo Canals, El padre grande de Guinea: Armengol Coll yArmengol. Misionero y obispo (Barcelona: Claret, 1993), 101.

28Loboch, La última carta, 175.29Donato Ndongo Bidyogo, Las tinieblas de tu memoria negra

(Madrid: Editorial Fundamentos, 1987).30Max Liniger-Goumaz, “Guinea Ecuatorial: diecisiete años

de la segunda dictadura nguemista (1979-1996),” Estudios deAsia y África 31.3 (1996), 56.

31Joaquín Mbomio Bacheng, El párroco de Niefang (Malabo:Centro Cultural Hispano-Guineano, 1996).

32Mbomio, El párroco, 12.33Julia A. Kushigian, Orientalism in the Hispanic Literary Tra-

dition: In Dialogue with Borges, Paz, and Sarduy (Albuquerque:University of New Mexico Press, 1991), 3.

34Ndongo, Las tinieblas, 80-87.35I recently came across a very interesting article (“El

himno nacional tiene su origen en una composición andalusídel siglo XI,” Webislam, 190, <http://www.webislam.com/


numeros/2002/190/0190.html>) that affirms that the Span-ish national anthem, the Marcha granadera, could be a varia-tion on a musical composition from the ninth century by IbnBayya, also known as Avempace. I am not a professional mu

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sician, so I cannot judge the accuracy of this claim, but thefact that it has been made reveals that the Muslim past con-tinues to surface in Spanish cultural life.

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Comparative Postcolonialisms