Postcolonial Literature: Problems with the Term

"Postcolonial Literature" is a hot commodity these days. On the one hand writers like Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy are best-selling authors; and on the other hand, no college English department worth its salt wants to be without a scholar who can knowledgeably discourse about postcolonial theory.

But there seems to be a great deal of uncertainty as to just what the term denotes. Many of the debates among postcolonial scholars center on which national literatures or authors can be justifiably included in the postcolonial canon. Much of the discussion among postcolonial scholars involves criticisms of the term "postcolonial" itself. In addition, it is seldom mentioned but quite striking that very few actual authors of the literature under discussion embrace and use the term to label their own writing.

It should be acknowledged that postcolonial theory functions as a subdivision within the even more misleadingly named field of "cultural studies": the whole body of generally leftist radical literary theory and criticism which includes Marxist, Gramscian, Foucauldian, and various feminist schools of thought, among others. What all of these schools of thought have in common is a determination to analyze unjust power relationships as manifested in cultural products like literature (and film, art, etc.). Practitioners generally consider themselves politically engaged and committed to some variety or other of liberation process.

It is also important to understand that not all postcolonial scholars are literary scholars. Postcolonial theory is applied to political science, to history, and to other related fields. People who call themselves postcolonial scholars generally see themselves as part of a large (if poorly defined and disorganized) movement to expose and struggle against the influence of large, rich nations (mostly European, plus the U.S.) on poorer nations (mostly in the southern hemisphere).

Taken literally, the term "postcolonial literature" would seem to label literature written by people living in countries formerly colonized by other nations. This is undoubtedly what the term originally meant, but there are many problems with this definition.

First, literal colonization is not the exclusive object of postcolonial study. Lenin's cla���ssic analysis of imperialism led to Antonio Gramisci's concept of "hegemony" which distinguishes between literal political dominance and dominance through ideas and culture (what many critics of American influence call the "Coca-Colanization" of the world). Sixties thinkers developed the concept of neo-imperialism to label relationships like that between the U.S. and many Latin American countries which, while nominally independent, had economies dominated by American business interests, often backed up by American military forces. The term "banana republic" was originally a sarcastic label for such subjugated countries, ruled more by the influence of the United Fruit Corporation than by their own indigenous governments.

Second, among the works commonly studied under this label are novels like Claude McKay's Banjo and Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart which were written while the nations in question (Jamaica and Nigeria) were still colonies. Some scholars attempt to solve this problem by arguing that the term should denote works written after colonization, not only those created after independence; but that would be "postcolonization" literature. Few people understand the term in this sense outside a small circle of scholars working in the field.

Third, some critics argue that the term misleadingly implies that colonialism is over when in fact most of the nations involved are still culturally and economically subordinated to the rich industrial states through various forms of neo-colonialism even though they are technically independent.

Fourth, it can be argued that this way of defining a whole era is Eurocentric, that it singles out the colonial experience as the most important fact about the countries involved. Surely that experience has had many powerful influences; but this is not necessarily the framework within which writers from--say--India, who have a long history of precolonial literature, wish to be viewed.

For instance, R. K. Narayan--one of the most popular and widely read of modern Indian writers--displays a remarkable indifference to the historical experience of colonialism, a fact which results in his being almost entirely ignored by postcolonial scholars. V. S. Naipaul is so fierce a critic of the postcolonial world despite his origins as a descendant of Indian indentured laborers in Trinidad that he is more often cited as an opponent than as an ally in the postcolonial struggle.

In fact, it is not uncommon for citizens of "postcolonial" countries to accuse Americans and Europeans of practicing a form of neocolonialism themselves in viewing their history through this particular lens. Postcolonial criticism could be compared to the tendency of Hollywood films set in such countries to focus on the problems of Americans and Europeans within those societies while marginalizing the views of their native peoples.

Fifth, many "postcolonial" authors do not share the general orientation of postcolonial scholars toward engaging in an ongoing critique of colonialism. Nigerian writers Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka, for instance, after writing powerful indictments of the British in their country, turned to exposing the deeds of native-born dictators and corrupt officials within their independent homeland. Although postcolonial scholars would explain this corruption as a by-product of colonialism, such authors commonly have little interest in pursuing this train of thought.

Although there has been sporadic agitation in some African quarters for reparations for the slavery era, most writers of fiction, drama, and poetry see little point in continually rehashing the past to solve today's problems. It is striking how little modern fiction from formerly colonized nations highlights the colonial past. Non-fiction writers often point out that Hindu-Muslim conflicts in South Asia are in part the heritage of attempts by the British administration in India to play the two groups of against each other (not to mention the special role assigned to the Sikhs in the British army); yet Indian fiction about these conflicts rarely points to such colonial causes. A good example is Kushwant Singh's Train to Pakistan (1956) which deals directly with the partition of India from an almost exclusively Indian perspective.

Indeed, "postcolonial" writers often move to England or North America (because they have been exiled, or because they find a more receptive audience there, or simply in search of a more comfortable mode of living) and even sometimes--like Soyinka--call upon the governments of these "neocolonialist" nations to come to the aid of freedom movements seeking to overthrow native tyrants.

Sixth, "postcolonialism" as a term lends itself to very broad use. Australians and Canadians sometimes claim to live in postcolonial societies, but many would refuse them the label because their literature is dominated by European immigrants, and is therefore a literature of privilege rather than of protest. According to the usual postcolonial paradigm only literature written by native peoples in Canada and Australia would truly qualify.

Similarly, the label is usually denied to U.S. literature, though America's identity was formed in contradistinction to that of England, because the U.S. is usually viewed as the very epitome of a modern neo-colonial nation, imposing its values, economic pressures, and political interests on a wide range of weaker countries.

The Irish are often put forward as an instance of a postcolonial European people, and indeed many African writers have been inspired by Irish ones for that reason. Yet some of the more nationalist ones (like Yeats) tended toward distressingly conservative--even reactionary--politics, and James Joyce had the utmost contempt for Irish nationalism. It is not clear how many Irish authors would have accepted the term if they had known of it.

Although postcolonial theory generally confines itself to the past half-century, it can be argued that everyone has been colonized at some time or other. Five thousand years ago Sumer started the process by uniting formerly independent city-states, and Narmer similarly subjugated formerly independent Upper and Lower Egypt. Rushdie likes to point out that England itself is a postcolonial nation, having been conquered by Romans and Normans, among others.

Not only is the term "postcolonial" exceedingly fuzzy, it can also be argued that it is also often ineffective. A good deal of postcolonial debate has to do with rival claims to victimhood, with each side claiming the sympathies of right-thinking people because of their past sufferings. The conflicts between Bosnians and Serbs, Palestinians and Jews, Turks and Greeks, Hindu and Muslim Indians, and Catholic and Protestant Irish illustrate the problems with using historical suffering as justification for a political program. It is quite true that Europeans and Americans often arrogantly dismiss their own roles in creating the political messes of postcolonial nations around the world; but it is unclear how accusations against them promote the welfare of those nations. In addition, when they are made to feel guilty, countries--like individuals--are as likely to behave badly as they are to behave generously.

It may make American and European scholars feel better to disassociate themselves from the crimes of their ancestors (which are admittedly, enormously bloody and oppressive, and should be acknowledged and studied--see resources below), but people struggling for freedom in oppressed nations are more likely to draw inspiration from the quintessentially European Enlightenment concept of rights under natural law than they are to turn to postcolonial theory. Similarly, European capitalist market theory is far more attractive to most people struggling against poverty in these nations than are the varieties of socialism propounded by postcolonial theoreticians.

"Postcolonial" is also a troublesome term because it draws some very arbitrary lines. South African writers Athol Fugard and Nadine Gordimer are often excluded from postcolonial courses, although their works were powerful protests against apartheid and they have lived and worked far more in Africa than, say, Buchi Emicheta, who emigrated to England as a very young woman and has done all of her writing there--because they are white. A host of fine Indian writers is neglected simply because they do not write in English on the sensible grounds that India has a millennia-long tradition of writing which should not be arbitrarily linked to the British imperial episode.

Of those who write in English, Anita Desai is included, though she is half German. Ngugi wa Thiong'o is included even though he now writes primarily in Gikuyu. Bharati Mukherjee specifically rejects the label "Indian-American," though she is an immigrant from India, and Rushdie prefers to be thought of as a sort of multinational hybrid (though he has, on occasion, used the label "postcolonial" in his own writing). Hanif Kureishi is more English than Pakistani in his outlook, and many Caribbean-born writers living in England are now classed as "Black British." What determines when you are too acculturated to be counted as postcolonial: where you were born? how long you've lived abroad? your subject matter? These and similar questions are the object of constant debate.

In fact, postcolonial theoretician Homi Bhabha developed the term "hybridity" to capture the sense that many writers have of belonging to both cultures. More and more writers, like Rushdie, reject the older paradigm of "exile" which was meaningful to earlier generations of emigrants in favor of accepting their blend of cultures as a positive synthesis. This celebration of cultural blending considerably blurs the boundaries laid down by postcolonial theory.

In practice, postcolonial literary studies are often sharply divided along linguistic lines in a way which simply reinforces Eurocentric attitudes. Latin American postcolonial studies are seldom explored by those laboring in English departments. Francophone African literature is generally neglected by Anglophone African scholars. Because of these failures to cut across linguistic boundaries, the roles of England and France are exaggerated over those of the colonized regions.

It can even be asked whether the entire premise of postcolonial studies is valid: that examining these literatures can give voice to formerly suppressed peoples. This is the question asked by Gayatri Spivak in her famous essay, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" Using Antonio Gramsci's arcane label for oppressed people, she points out that anyone who has achieved enough literacy and sophistication to produce a widely-read piece of fiction is almost certainly by that very fact disqualified from speaking for the people he or she is supposed to represent. The "Subaltern Group" of Indian scholars has tried to claim the term to support their own analyses (a similar project exists among Latin American scholars), but the nagging question raised by Spivak remains.

It is notable that whenever writers from the postcolonial world like Soyinka, Derek Walcott, or Rushdie receive wide recognition they are denounced as unrepresentative and inferior to other, more obscure but more "legitimate" spokespeople.

This phenomenon is related to the question of "essentialism" which features so largely in contemporary political and literary theory. Usually the term is used negatively, to describe stereotypical ideas of--to take as an example my own ancestors--the Irish as drunken, irresponsible louts. However, protest movements built on self-esteem resort to essentialism in a positive sense, as in the many varieties of "black pride" movements which have emerged at various times, with the earliest perhaps being the concept of "négritude" developed by Caribbean and African writers living in Paris in the 1930s and 40s. However, each new attempt to create a positive group identity tends to be seen by at least some members of the group as restrictive, as a new form of oppressive essentialism.

Faced with the dilemma of wanting to make positive claims for certain ethnic groups or nationalities while simultaneously acknowledging individualism, some critics have put forward the concept of "strategic essentialism" in which one can speak in rather simplified forms of group identity for the purposes of struggle while debating within the group the finer shades of difference.

There are two major problems with this strategy, however. First, there are always dissenters within each group who speak out against the new corporate identity, and they are especially likely to be taken seriously by the very audiences targeted by strategic essentialism. Second, white conservatives have caught on to this strategy: they routinely denounce affirmative action, for instance, by quoting Martin Luther King, as if his only goal was "color blindness" rather than real economic and social equality. They snipe, fairly effectively, at any group which puts forward corporate claims for any ethnic group by calling them racist. Strategic essentialism envisions a world in which internal debates among oppressed people can be sealed off from public debates with oppressors. Such a world does not exist.
Similarly, "strategic postcolonialism" is likely to be a self-defeating strategy, since most writers on the subject publicly and endlessly debate the problems associated with the term. In addition, the label is too fuzzy to serve as a useful tool for long in any exchange of polemics. It lacks the sharp edge necessary to make it serve as a useful weapon.

However, those of us unwilling to adopt the label "postcolonial" are hard put to find an appropriate term for what we study. The old "Commonwealth literature" is obviously too confining and outdated as well as being extremely Eurocentric. "Anglophone literature" excludes the many rich literatures of Africa, for instance, written in European languages other than English, and taken in the literal sense, it does not distinguish between mainstream British and American writing and the material under discussion. "New literature written in English" (or "englishes" as some say) puts too much emphasis on newness (McKay is hardly new) and again excludes the non-English-speaking world. "Third-world" makes no sense since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Communist "second world." "Literature of developing nations" buys into an economic paradigm which most "postcolonial" scholars reject.

The more it is examined, the more the postcolonial sphere crumbles. Though Jamaican, Nigerian, and Indian writers have much to say to each other; it is not clear that they should be lumped together. We continue to use the term "postcolonial" as a pis aller, and to argue about it until something better comes along.

more article about literature and postcolonialism

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Problems with the Term PostcoloniaL

"When," an Indian friend of mine (with a progressive cast of mind and a firm conviction in the idea of technological advancement) asked in exasperation, "does the state of postcoloniality end?" Questions of the same order have been plaguing literary scholars for a while, and a number of profound thinkers and theorists have done their best to abolish the term "postcolonial" altogether. In articles first published in 1994 in the journal Social Text, both Ella Shohat and Anne McClintock point out that "postcolonialism" never really existed except as a designation of convenience, and that it is no more, in essence, than colonialism attached to a "post-" (and straining at its tether to reassert its modes of thought).

In an essay of more than a decade earlier Salman Rushdie made a seemingly parallel argument: he, too, sought to banish an insufficient term, "Commonwealth," which according to him creates an "exclusive ghetto" whose effect is to change the meaning of English literature into "something far narrower, something topographical, nationalistic, possibly even racially segregationist." Rushdie went on to point out that "at best, what is called 'Commonwealth literature' is positioned below English literature proper," placing "Eng. Lit. at the center of the world and the rest of the world at the periphery," a situation which inverts priorities and obscures more fundamental literary issues. (I paraphrase Rushdie's angry essay, "'Commonwealth Literature' Does Not Exist" Imaginary Homelands 61-70.)

There is a distinction, however, between Rushdie's denunciation of "Commonwealth" and the no less passionate attacks of recent critics on "postcolonialism." For Shohat and McClintock the thing described by the offending word is no more real than the world mapped by colonialism, while for Rushdie it is not the thing described (to which he permits a tangible existence) but the concept represented by the term itself which is an insidious "chimera." Rushdie's essay is replete with references to writers -- Indian, Latin American and African -- who do share a certain commonality of experience, and throughout he is a celebrant of what he calls a "transnational, cross-lingual process of pollination" (69) -- what the Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin terms, with no less approbation, "polyglossia" Bakhtin introduces the concept of polyglossia in his early essay "Epic and Novel" (The Dialogic Imagination 12), although he elaborates on its import only in his longer works (61-67).) Indeed, even in his fictions Rushdie seems to delight in the word "mongrel," a term he associates particularly with the grand melange that is India, but which can be applied more broadly to a polyglot state.

The occasion for my embracing "mongrel," however, is not Rushdie's predilection for it, but its use in 1996 by an Australian politician to describe the offspring of parents of mixed race. As a term which has already won some celebrity in other contexts, and one which would easily encompass such freckled monsters as Joyce and Yeats in the same polyglot potpourri (and those poor creatures could only wish they were postcolonial), it seems to have no less a ring to it than other fortunate pejoritives like "Impressionist" or "Fauve," and surely could be adopted with no less felicity than Aimé Césaire's "négritude." Moreover, the program for a theory of mongrel literature is already present, albeit in a form I do not find entirely acceptable, in Rushdie's essay:

. . . if we were to forget about "Commonwealth Literature," we might see that there is a kind of commonality about much literature, in many languages, emerging from those parts of the world which one could loosely term the less powerful, or the powerless. The magical realism of the Latin Americans influences Indian-language writers in India today. The rich, folk-tale quality of a novel like Sandro of Chegem, by the Muslim Russian Fazil Iskander, finds its parallels in the work-for instance-of the Nigerian, Amos Tutuola, or even Cervantes. It is possible, I think, to begin to theorize common factors between writers from these societies-poor countries, or deprived minorities in powerful countries-and to say that much of what is new in world literature comes from this group. This seems to me to be a "real" theory, bounded by frontiers which are neither political nor linguistic but imaginative. [69-69]

Where I think Rushdie falters in his definition is in vacillating in his choice of umbrella under which his writers shelter, at one moment an economic and political one, at another "imaginative." Interestingly, long before Rushdie placed the writers from the margins at the center of "what is new in world literature," Mikhail Bakhtin had made rather similar claims about the distinctive and innovative qualities of novelistic discourse; for instance, in "Epic and Novel" (The Dialogic Imagination 11-12).

------
[The essay, which is Part One of Anthony R. Guneratne's "Virtual Spaces of Postcoloniality: Rushdie, Ondaatje, Naipaul, Bakhtin and the Others," has been adapted, with kind permission of the author, from the no-longer extant NUS site on which the original paper for the First Conference on Postcolonial Theory appeared. [External Link] = linked materials not in the original print version.GPL]

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Gayatri Spivak: The Trajectory of the Subaltern in My Work

Columbia University Professor Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, is one of the leading literary theorists and cultural critics of our times. She takes issue with Western intellectuals' account of their inability to mediate the historical experience of the working classes and the underprivileged of society. Series: "Voices" [9/2004] [Humanities] [Show ID: 8840]

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Book Review: "Dominance without Hegemony"

I admire Edward Said for his brilliant work on debunking the myth of western hegemony by his study "Orientalism". His work has opened our mind that the dichotomy of western and eastern in fact was designed by the west to describe a tradition, both academic and artistic, of hostile and deprecatory views of the East by the West. Through this work, Said highlights the inaccuracies of a wide variety of assumptions as it questions various paradigms of thought which are accepted on individual, academic, and political levels.

If you are interested in post-colonial studies, besides reading on Said's book, you may be interested to see one of the important book which discussed about the history of the colonial state in South Asia, especially India. "Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India" by Ranajit Guha.

Aside from its obvious relevance to Indian history, Guha's book is a brilliant example of revolutionary historical method, new perspectives on nationalist history, and theoretical inventiveness in the procedures of historical research.
--Edward W. Said

Short description about the book

What is colonialism and what is a colonial state? Ranajit Guha points out that the colonial state in South Asia was fundamentally different from the metropolitan bourgeois state which sired it. The metropolitan state was hegemonic in character, and its claim to dominance was based on a power relation in which persuasion outweighed coercion. Conversely, the colonial state was non-hegemonic, and in its structure of dominance coercion was paramount. Indeed, the originality of the South Asian colonial state lay precisely in this difference: a historical paradox, it was an autocracy set up and sustained in the East by the foremost democracy of the Western world. It was not possible for that non-hegemonic state to assimilate the civil society of the colonized to itself. Thus the colonial state, as Guha defines it in this closely argued work, was a paradox--a dominance without hegemony.

Dominance without Hegemony had a nationalist aspect as well. This arose from a structural split between the elite and subaltern domains of politics, and the consequent failure of the Indian bourgeoisie to integrate vast areas of the life and consciousness of the people into an alternative hegemony. That predicament is discussed in terms of the nationalist project of anticipating power by mobilizing the masses and producing an alternative historiography. In both endeavors the elite claimed to speak for the people constituted as a nation and sought to challenge the pretensions of an alien regime to represent the colonized. A rivalry between an aspirant to power and its incumbent, this was in essence a contest for hegemony.

See also the review from Harvard University Press,

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Bisexuality, Queer Theory and Mary Dorcey's Biography of Desire: An Outlaw Reading

by Paula R. Pratt, Assistant Professor of Humanities, Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane

Hearing the term "post-colonialism" spoken in an Irish context we would most likely expect the reference point to lie somewhere within the greater portion of the twentieth century, following the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1921 (Irish 88). Until the last decade or so, these expectations would most likely be met.

More recently -- and especially in the fields of women's studies, gender studies, gay and lesbian studies and, indeed, Irish studies -- such a reference might also be heard in discussions of topics such as gender, sexuality, identity, difference, etc. Post-colonial, in these contexts, might be used by those envisioning a time (sooner rather than later, it might be hoped) when the hetero-normative occupiers of the sexual landscape would fold up their tents, de-commission their weapons, and steal away into the mists . . . leaving behind, simply, humans who would be, in Ellen Barnett's words, "free to love whomever they choose in whatever manner that works best for them" (qtd. in Rust 238).

Assuming that this vision is not to be realized any time soon (some might conjecture that the paramilitaries in Northern Ireland would sooner hand in their weapons than society remove heterosexuals from their role as "protectors" of sexual "normality"), we are left with the present set of complexities surrounding the juxtaposition of heterosexuality and "everything else." But, how to discuss these complexities? What terms to use? It seems that, as soon as one term is proposed and takes its place in the critical lexicon, it is deconstructed and replaced with another, or others. A constant process of clarification, narrowing, inclusion, etc.

For example, "sexual liberation" becomes "women's liberation," which becomes "feminism," then "feminisms" or "womanism." Similarly, "homosexual" is clarified by "gay" and "lesbian," and then, more recently, by the introduction (or re-introduction) of a term that seems to have become the canopy under which are gathered the above-mentioned "everything else," namely: queer.

At this point it might be useful to summarize some of the various definitions of this term, both in its popular reclamation by gays and lesbians from the realms of insult, and in its appearance in theoretical parlance within the last decade. Because my time is short, and the exploration of definitions multi-layered, I'll briefly say that the critical use of the term usually references the sense of diversity and fluidity among and within various sexual behaviors and identities, either lying along some sort of continuum or scattered across the (colonised) sexual landscape, having in common their deviance from the heterosexual "norm." I do also want to clarify that this description only covers the specific use of the term "queer" in a sexual context, and does not include its wider use to describe other "deviancies" and/or "differences."

I would like to focus my remarks this morning on Mary Dorcey's novel, Biography of Desire, in order to show how this story helps to shed further light on bisexual identity, which has been -- and still is -- perceived as deviating from both ends of the homosexual/heterosexual polarity. Judith Butler speaks to this: "Identity categories tend to be the instruments of regulatory regimes, whether as the normalizing categories of oppressive structures or as the rallying points for a liberatory contestation of that very oppression" (qtd. in O'Driscoll 31).

It is my observation and experience that many bisexuals (and some of them in the Irish queer community) have initially hesitated to identify as such for fear of being seen as betraying or diluting the effectiveness of the gay/lesbian political agenda, because of that part of their identity which encompasses the heterosexual attraction.

Dorcey's novel contributes to the understanding of this hybridity and its resonances by constructing a biography, not of a "queer" love affair, but of the human experience of attraction and desire: desire awakened, diminished, and reawakened, with all the attendant vagaries involved. Dorcey herself shies away from the label "lesbian writer," and prefers to wear the distinction of "Irish," if any. Nonetheless, in an interview published in Lesbian and Gay Visions of Ireland, she did address the topic of sexual "deviancy" in the Ireland of her youth and young adulthood:

The word 'homosexual' was not spoken or written in Ireland before the 1970's. The word 'gay' didn't exist. I had never heard of a bisexual. I had never seen one or spoken to one. So how did I manage to become one? [28]

Later in the same interview, she clarifies the evolution of her own "identity" by connecting it to desire: "I am lesbian because I have loved women more than men. That is, I have loved women more deeply, more completely. . . . I think I was born bisexual and chose to become a lesbian when I fell in love with a lesbian . . ." (30).

It might be said that it was just this sort of "hybridity" in Dorcey's own identity -- the rather fluid movement from bisexuality to lesbian identity -- that gave birth to the narrator of the "biography": Katherine, a married (presumably straight) woman, who has fallen in love with Nina. The novel is actually made up of two narratives, beginning with the story of Nina, an Irish lesbian partnered (for seven years now) with Elinor, mother of 8yr. old Lizzie. Nina has just received a diary, dropped through her letterbox, written by Katherine, an American woman living in Dublin, with whom she's had a year-long affair. The two had broken off their relationship, and Katherine had gone back to Boston to be with her dying father, but has returned to Ireland, having accepted that all was ended, only to be met at the airport by Nina. Katherine has written in the diary during the week she spent in a rented house by the sea in Clare, where she went to wait for Nina to make her "final" decision: whether to stay with Elinor or leave her to be with Katherine.

It is the diary that contains the other narrative. Katherine wrote it, ostensibly, to pass the time while she waited, alone in the house just outside a small crossroads town. She explains in a note to Nina, slipped into the middle of the book: "When I wrote this I didn't intend to show it to you but now it seems the best way of communicating. I want you to know what I've lived through in the past week, alone here, waiting for you. Please be patient. I want you to read it from start to finish. Begin at the beginning and don't make a final decision until you reach the end. Promise me?" (Dorcey 7).

We read the narratives in alternating chapters, set in different time frames. Katherine's story moves through her eight days of relative solitude, while Nina's is set in Dublin, during the two days following her receiving the diary. Both narratives contain portions of flashback, recounting the women's pasts and, especially for Katherine, the stories of their sexual awakening and development. The biography, however, belongs to Katherine, while for Nina the current time frame and events are more crucial, as she confronts the necessity of deciding which woman to choose.

Katherine's identity, more complex than Nina's, is revealed over the first few of her chapters, as we learn that she was born in the U.S. to Irish emigrant parents, but was sent back to Dublin to boarding school, and eventually married Malachy, an Irishman, with whom she has had two sons. At the time she met Nina -- and fell instantly in love -- she was, in her words, "A secondary school teacher, a mother, a wife, a nice middle-class girl who married a nice middle-class man. I know how well I fulfill the stereotype" (44).

As Katherine considers, in retrospect, whether she had only done what had been expected of her in the Ireland of the 1950s, or whether she had truly loved and been attracted to a man, she finds herself defending her current attraction to Nina in front of an imagined court (which would, of course, judge her fitness as a mother, given her new "identity"). She admits that "from my earliest years I . . . loved boys. Does that make it better or worse? But however confusing, [or] contrary, I'll indulge myself with the truth . . . and state categorically that the first person I loved was of the male sex" (153). She anticipates a common criticism leveled at bisexuals by lesbians: "They [lesbians] want to believe that a married woman in her middle thirties who falls in love with another woman must have been essentially lesbian to begin with. . . . [They] describe me as 'latent' or 'closeted'. They suspect women like myself of playing it safe -- denying our real nature until we've established ourselves in the conventional roles of wife and mother" (57).

She does admit that in the beginning of her marriage she had gloried in the approval of her "normal" union: "The whole world encouraging, applauding. . . .A handsome couple. The joy of life. . . . Proud of being at last that amazing ordinary thing -- a woman. And . . . fucking was not only the living proof of it but the very core, its nature and foundation" (61). But she again answers the charge: "I was genuinely attracted to all the men in my life. I want to say that at the outset. . . . I was entirely and contentedly heterosexual" (57).

It is significant that nowhere in her narrative, written a year after falling in love with Nina, does she refer to herself as a lesbian, even though she does admit to previous relationships with women. In fact, in her retrospective account of the "biography" of her various desires, it is clear that she was attracted to both boys and girls. Differently, it is true, but truly attracted and, in some cases, in love.

Her failure to name this female/female attraction lesbian is worth noting, given that such an admission would probably be expected by Irish society, and would certainly be acceptable to her newly-found community of Nina's friends. Neither, however, does she name her identity as bisexual. Rather, she asks: "Did I fall in love with you or fall in love with women? Did I grow tired of Malachy or tired of men? I'm not sure I can (or want to) answer any of these questions" (57). Her ambivalence is authentic, given the relative lack of public acknowledgment of bisexuality as a "real" identity.

None of this introspective question of identity is overt, of course. Dorcey is, after all, writing about desire. Nor does her text have the heavy-handed sense of "place" which has often burdened Irish literature. Still, the particular Irish setting, and Katherine's "American/Irish" identity are subtly used to foreground her psychic exploration.

Dorcey has purposely placed Katherine in a farmhouse in Clare, a county marked by isolated landscapes, where she will have "all the time in the world," as the Irish would say -- time she never had in her life as a wife, mother and teacher -- for herself. The environment in which Dorcey places her melds with her wish to come to terms with her authentic self, separate from her husband (or Nina). Referring to the quite literal "pull" which the mucky ground has on her as she walks, she remarks: "Everything here seems to have an independent life. A will of its own" (53). And it is her purpose for coming to that place to record what has happened and, if possible, why. To chart the "metamorphosis, [the] long journey . . . out of one life, as an ordinary wife and mother, into a new, totally unexpected world or a new way of being in the old world"(38).

As well, the shifting, moving, fluid nature of the west-country atmosphere mirrors Katherine's uncertainty about the direction of that journey. She speaks of the process of writing the "biography" in terms suggestive of the paths she walks to the crossroads and back each day: "To travel [this] arduous journey, stumbling from one hour to the next, from one foothold to another. Arriving at what seems a vantage point to discover only another cliff-face, the path sliding from under foot" (365). It is also no accident that Dorcey has created Katherine as an American, born of immigrant parents, who has emigrated back to the land of their birth. This particular journey parallels the other sexual one that she has taken, which she describes to Nina:

The culture you live in is so different from mine. It was at times as if we were from different countries, meeting in one foreign to us both and then deciding to go to the native country of one. In this scenario, I was the emigrant. I left my people and went to live with yours. [162]

As the week progresses, however, and Nina's life back in Dublin becomes even more complicated, the physical landscape and weather seem to merge with this new emotional territory, as she vents her anger and frustration at the unraveling of her plans: "Good Christ, what a crazy, god-forsaken bloody place! What am I doing here? I will go mad if I stay much longer" (222).

Katherine does soon leave, and the events taking place in Nina's life mean that she goes on to Galway, there to rejoin her family and hope for a further meeting with Nina. Whether that happens, however, is not as significant, as what Katherine has learned about herself in this week. By drawing her as neither heterosexual nor homosexual, but as bisexual -- a mix of both -- Dorcey configures Katherine's humanity at the core of her identity. She is thus able to say to Malachy, when he shows up to plead with her to leave Nina:

"I can't fit any of what's happened to me in the last months into your words. Into the words I had for my life before this happened. But I'm not the woman I was when this life was right for me. And I can't fit back again. I've been changed forever. It's not just about love or happiness. It's about a way of being in the world, a vision, a sense of communication and sharing. . ." (270]

Similarly, in words that balance these, she writes to Nina at the end of the biography: "Whatever happens between you and me, there's no going back. Even if I were never to see you again, I am changed forever by my love for you" (363).

And Katherine even faces the probability that she will have no relationship with anyone: "Maybe I'd be better off alone. Without man or woman," since it might be preferable to "end relationships while they still have the glow of perfection" (318). Whatever does happen between Katherine and Nina, Katherine can say, in the end, that: "I do feel that things work out for the best, if we are honest and true to our deepest natures. I don't believe in sacrifice or unnecessary suffering" (339).

Because of the time factor for this morning's presentation, I have limited my comments about identity to those concerning Katherine's experience, which I believe to be that of a bisexual woman. There is far more to say about Nina, about her choice in the end, and about the Irish characters that interact with Katherine in Clare. I do, however, want to conclude by returning to Sally O'Driscoll's article, in which she makes a distinction between what she sees the ambiguity of the term queer, due to its popular and theoretical usages, and what she feels is a clearer term, outlaw, used by Alison Jaggar in 1989.

People who experience conventionally unacceptable, or what I call 'outlaw,' emotions often are subordinated individuals who pay a disproportionately high price for maintaining the status quo. . . . Outlaw emotions are distinguished by their incompatibility with the dominant perceptions and values." [qtd. in O'Driscoll 34]

O'Driscoll further refines her use of the term by distinguishing between "outlaw theory," which is static, and "is the framework of the interpretation" and "outlaw theorizing," which describes the "outlook of the interpreter" (37).

I would consider the work I have begun in this paper to be an outlaw reading of Dorcey's novel, since I sense that my interpretation of Katherine as a bisexual narrator would be somewhat "incompatible" with some "dominant perceptions" within Irish studies, women's studies, and certainly gay and lesbian studies. My sense of this comes from comments heard in workshops, papers dealing with "lesbian literature" at Irish studies conferences, etc.

One such incident took place at a women's studies conference in 1997 at Trinity College Dublin, in a workshop around the topic of sexual identity. One young woman from Galway managed to come out as a bisexual for the first time, during the discussion. The facilitator proceeded to dismiss her contribution by saying that she (the facilitator) didn't give a lot of credibility to bisexuality, adding that, when she hears the term, all she can imagine is a group of men and women "romping about in the bushes together."

I would see Mary Dorcey's novel -- aside from the contribution it has made to Irish literature (indeed to the reshaping of contemporary Irish literature) -- as also and primarily making a contribution to the shaping of the perceptions and understanding of bisexuality in all its richness and humanity.


Works Cited

Bravmann, Scott. Queer Fictions of the Past: History, Culture and Difference. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1997.

Dorcey, Mary. Biography of Desire. Dublin: Poolbeg, 1997.

Hutchins, Loraine and Lani Kaahumanu, eds. Bi Any Other Name. Boston: Alyson, 1991.

"Interview with Mary Dorcey." Lesbian and Gay Visions of Ireland. Eds. Ide O'Carroll and Eoin Collins. London: Cassell, 1995. 25-44.

Irish Almanac and Yearbook of Facts 1997: Facts and Figures North and South. Donegal, Ireland: Artcam, 1997.

Jagose, Annamarie. "Queer Theory." Online. Australian Humanities Review. Internet. 31 Mar. 2001. Available http://www.lib.latrobe.edu/AHR/archive/Issue-Dec-1996/jagose.html

Newitz, Annalee and Jillian Sandell. "Bisexuality And How To Use It: Toward a Coalitional Identity Politics. Online. Bad Subjects. Issue 16, Oct. 1994. Internet. 2 Apr. 2001. Available http://eserver.org/bs/16/Sandell.html

O'Driscoll, Sally. "Outlaw Readings: Beyond Queer Theory." Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. 22 (1997): 30 -- 55.

Rust, Paula. Bisexuality and the Challenge to Lesbian Politics: Sex, Loyalty and Revolution. New York: NYUP, 1995.

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Source: http://www.scholars.nus.edu.sg/landow/post/poldiscourse/casablanca/pratt2.html

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Binarisms and duality: magic realism and postcolonialism

Suzanne Baker Although the term "magic realism" has been in use for over 60 years, there appears to be little critical consensus concerning its definition. While "realism" itself is a chronically unstable term, realist writing is usually understood to be that which draws on a set of narrative conventions designed to create the illusion that the story on the page is "real" or "true" and corresponds in some direct way to the ordinary world of day-to-day life. The term "magic" is equally contentious, arousing on the one hand, notions of harmless trickery and good-luck charms, and on the other, images of the supernatural and the fantastic. The oxymoron "magic realism" thus represents a complex and problematical critical concept.

The term "magic realism" first appeared in the context of art, being coined by the German art critic Franz Roh to describe the work of post-Expressionist artists in the mid-1920s. Roh claimed that these artists were painting ordinary objects through "wonderstruck eyes" seeing in such objects a "magical" re-creation of the world.1 These magic realist painters looked at everyday objects and life around them and attempted "to portray the strange, the uncanny, the eerie . . . aspects of everyday reality."2 While their aim was to shake habitual perceptions of their surroundings, they did this not by introducing elements of the fantastic into their work, but rather by showing that there were different ways of perceiving everyday objects.

Since the 1950s and 1960s the concept of magic realism has increasingly been associated with Latin American fiction. It is important, however, to distinguish between magic realism in art and magic realism in literature. While Roh coined the term in the context of the art world, to describe a specific way of portraying the mystery inherent in everyday reality without raising questions about that reality, magic realism in literature is "writing that works both within and against the aesthetics of realism."3 Where normal, plausible, everyday events co-exist on the same level as supernatural, extraordinary and even fantastic events whose authenticity is never questioned.

In her book, Magical Realism and The Fantastic, Amaryll Chanady explains that magic realism is characterised by two conflicting but autonomously coherent perspectives, one based on an "enlightened" and rational view of reality and the other based on the acceptance of the supernatural as part of the everyday world.4 Thus the central concept of magic realism in literature is its insistence on the co-existence of the magic and the real. While a narrator of the fantastic dispenses with the laws of logic and the physical world and recounts an action which may be absurd or supernatural, a narrator of magic realism accepts most or all of the realistic conventions of fiction but introduces "something else," something which is not realistic, into the text. These elements are not highlighted for shock value, but are woven in seamlessly. Magic realism, therefore, belongs neither entirely to the realm of fantasy nor to that of empirical reality. Despite the presence of fantastic events, however, it is always linked with the "real" world, grounded in recognisable reality through social, historical and political references.

The presence of an objective and dispassionate narrator who maintains a tone of complete equilibrium throughout the story is another intrinsic feature of magic realism. While the reader need not believe in the possibility of the extraordinary events narrated, the characters and, above all, the narrator must believe that all the events recounted are equally real. The narrator cannot raise questions or treat the events as puzzling.

Magic realism in literature is not confined to Latin America alone. Canada, for instance, has produced a significant body of magic realist writing (Robert Kroetsch and Jack Hodgins are prime examples) together with considerable critical theorizing about the concept itself. While little has been written about magic realism as a narrative mode in Australian fiction there are certainly texts in which elements of magic realism can be found. A story called "The Bookkeeper" by Strephyn Mappin is one example.5 Here we find a bookshop owner whose grandmother suddenly begins to devour all the T.S. Eliot books in the store, eventually rolling herself in the torn pages into a kind of cocoon from which she emerges as a butterfly. Grant Caldwell's short story "Nemesis For Daddy" tells of the unexpected disappearance of a man from his home and the subsequent retrieval of his body limb by limb.6 For example, one arm is found hanging by its hand from a tree in the park, and his torso is found floating in a hotel swimming pool. All the parts are all still alive, however, and the body is surgically rejoined and topped with a papier m‡chŽ head until the real head can be found. In both these examples, despite the rather "fantastic" and unbelievable events recounted, realist details abound. They obviously occur in a recognizably "real" world and neither the narrator nor the characters express any kind of amazement at the occurrence of such unlikely events.

In the context of postcolonial writing, however, what can magic realism offer? The term "postcolonial" is as problematic as "magic realism," but broadly speaking, postcolonial writing encompasses a wide range of discursive practices which resist colonialism and colonial ideologies. Undoubtedly notions of identity, history and perspective are important to postcolonial writers, but perhaps the most dramatic effect of the colonization process is that the colonized are forced to occupy two conflicting worlds or spaces, referred to by Linda Hutcheon as a duality of "post-colonial doubled identity and history."7 In the Australian situation for example, colonisation effectively created a duality of worlds for the indigenous population. The "reason" and "logic" of European intellectual tradition collided with the "mysterious" and "mythic" perspective of the Aborigines. The settler colonists too were faced with the imposition of an imported world-view onto a new, and in many ways, alien physical space. In both instances the two worlds may be incompatible in many ways, but the colonized cannot avoid defining their identity in terms of the dual worlds or spaces they are forced to inhabit.

It seems, therefore, that Canadian critic Robert Wilson's ideas about the spatial effects of magic realism might be particularly useful in the context of postcolonial writing. Magic realism, he points out, creates a "space in which the spatial effects of canonical realism and those of axiomatic fantasy are interwoven . . . in magic realism, space is hybrid (opposite and conflicting properties are copresent)."8 Wilson calls this phenomenon "dual spatiality" and refers to Robert Kroetsch's novel, What The Crow Said, to illustrate his point.9 The hybrid nature of Kroetsch's space, he claims, "becomes apparent in the natural way in which abnormal, experientially impossible, and empirically unverifiable events take place."10 Kroetsch begins by establishing common features of spring in Alberta when he writes: "The crocuses bloomed in spring as they had always bloomed, the buffalo beans cracked yellow, the violets and the buttercups and the shooting stars took their turn." But a magic-like fold soon creases this even surface. Vera Lang is raped by a swarm of bees. Where the bees come from, why they choose Vera for their Queen, how she can conceive a child from this impregnation: these are not questions that are asked. Indeed, Wilson suggests, "it is as if there are two worlds, (wholly distinct, following dissimilar laws) which interact, interpenetrate, and interwind, unpredictably but in a fully natural manner."11

The opening up of hybrid space in magic realism makes it difficult to conceive of the "real" as a single world with a single set of rules or laws. In the context of postcolonial writing then, magic realism points to the inherent problems created by the imposition of a bizarre and UN-real European world-view onto the local reality of the colonized. In the Australian situation, texts by Aboriginal writers, Mudrooroo and Sam Watson, can be seen to align with Wilson's notion of "dual spatiality." In Mudrooroo's story, Master of the Ghost Dreaming, the colonial world of displaced Aboriginal people and displaced Europeans is described in realistic detail and presented in a matter-of-fact way by the narrator.12 The same manner of narration is used to describe the Aboriginal shaman's powers of metamorphosis which see him transform himself into a spider and into a goanna, see him change the direction of the wind, and see him conjure up Dreamtime companions. Within this magic-like fold the Aboriginal shaman undertakes a spiritual journey to wrest control from the pale-skinned invaders, the "ghosts." These eruptions of magic realism into the smooth surface of the text, these "abnormal, experientially impossible, and empirically unverifiable events" accord with Wilson's notion of hybrid space.13

Similarly, Sam Watson in The Kadaitcha Sung interweaves supernatural events with realistic racial conflict in urban Brisbane.14 Watson's novel clearly presents two distinctive and conflicting spaces or world-views. The recognizably "real" contemporary world is depicted through a narrative which links the brutal suppression policy of the Queensland government to the present living conditions of urban Aborigines. Erupting into this world is an epic-like narrative of Aboriginal cosmology linking the ancestral beings to people of the present and even incorporating the arrival of the white intruders into their ideological framework. A conventional western world-view is carefully detailed while at the same time the narrator introduces another level of reality, that of suspicion and myth, which is inexplicable according to the logic and reason of Western thought. To borrow Wilson's words, the two worlds "interact, interpenetrate and interwind"15 so that spirits, demons and sorcery figures mingle with "real" people of different races in overlapping periods of time.

In both these texts, the reader is clearly offered two systems of possibility, one that aligns with European rationality and another which is incompatible with a conventional Western world-view. Magic realism does not create imaginary worlds. What it does create, through its "dual spatiality," is a space where alternative realities and different perceptions of the world can be conceived. Discourses of colonialism position the Aborigines as objects to be studied, observed and spoken about. The imposed social and political systems of Western culture effectively denied a space in which Aboriginal voices could speak for themselves. The possibility of a "dual spatiality" provided through the deployment of magic realism provides one space where Aboriginal voices can speak and be heard.

Stephen Slemon is one critic who has drawn attention to the proliferation of binarisms and dualities operating within settler cultures, binarisms such as Europe and its other, colonizer and colonized, and the West and the rest, for example. Slemon also suggests that magic realist narrative recapitulates a dialectical struggle inherent within the postcolonial culture.16 The binary oppositions, he continues, undergo a process of dialectical interplay which undermines the fixity of borders between them, foregrounding the gaps, absences and silences produced by the colonial encounter. Binarisms of white and non-white, civilized and barbaric, colonizer and colonized, vocal and silent, centre and periphery are all present in both Mudrooroo's and Watson's novels. In Master of the Ghost Dreaming, for example, the Superintendent of the Government Mission for Aborigines and his wife represent the civilized, white, colonizing power. While the Superintendent firmly believes in the divine right of the Empire to bring light to the dark world of the natives, the reality of his mission of enlightenment is seen somewhat differently by the Aborigines themselves. Instead of enlightenment, colonization destroys the Aborigines' food chain and brings an end to traditional patterns of living. When their task becomes too daunting, the missionary and his wife seek oblivion through either rum or laudanum. The Aborigines in contrast draw on sustaining traditions from the past to cope with their present physical and spiritual displacement. Who then are the barbarians?

As I mentioned earlier, magic realism has been described as "writing that works both within and against the aesthetics of realism," and postcolonial writing, I would suggest, is writing that works both within and against the effects of colonialism. The hybridity of both modes of writing indicates strong possibilities for an interweaving of their agendas. Magic realism contests the restrictions of colonial space by opening up a "dual spatiality," thus making problematic any notion of a single unified world-view or reality. As Chanady notes, the enabling of new and multiple perspectives on events "allows us to see dimensions of reality of which we are not normally aware."17 Magic realism, with its "eruptions of spatial folding" raises questions about the nature of the worlds we inhabit. Stephen Slemon claims that magic realism"s strength is that it encodes "a concept of resistance to the massive imperial centre and its totalizing systems," and further, that the deployment of magic realism in literature can "signify resistance to central assimilation by more stable generic systems."18 In opposition to straight-forward, rational and controlled order which is the dominant style of imperialism, magic realism mixes fantasy and reality, fact and myth, while resisting classical expectations of closure and unity. While some postcolonial writers will continue to adhere to the realist mode of representation in order to depict actual conditions and experiences, it seems certain that others who wish to avoid the inscribed colonial values inherent in the realist mode may opt for the subversive possibilities of magic realism to challenge the restrictions of a circumscribed colonial space.

Murdoch University

Notes

1 Enrique A. Imbert, "Magical Realism in Spanish-American Fiction," International Fiction Review 2.1:1.

2 Seymour Menton, Magic Realism Rediscovered, 1918-1981 (Philadelphia: Art Alliance Press, 1983), 13.

3 Lori Chamberlain, "Magicking the Real: Paradoxes of Postmodern Writing," in Postmodern Fiction: A Bio-Bibliographical Guide, ed. L. McCaffery (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1986), 17.

4 Amaryll B. Chanady, Magical Realism and The Fantastic: Resolved Versus Unresolved Antinomy (New York & London: Garland Publishing, 1985).

5 Strephyn Mappin, Heart Murmurs (Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1989).

6 Grant Caldwell, The Revolt of The Coats (North Ryde: Angus & Robertson, 1988).

7 Linda Hutcheon, "Circling the Downspout of Empire: Post-Colonialism and Postmodernism," ARIEL 20:4, 154.

8 R. Rawdon Wilson, In Palamedes' Shadow: Explorations in Play, Game and Narrative Theory (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1990), 204.

9 Robert Kroetsch, What The Crow Said (Toronto: General Publishing, 1978).

10 Wilson, 205.

11 Wilson, 205.

12 Mudrooroo Nyoongah, Master of the Ghost Dreaming (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1991).

13 Wilson, 205.

14 Sam Watson, The Kadaitcha Sung (Ringwood: Penguin Books, 1990).

15 Wilson, 205.

16 Stephen Slemon, "Magic Realism as Post-Colonial Discourse," Canadian Literature 116 (Spring 1988): 12.

17 Chanady, 27.

18 Stephen Slemon, 10.

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*This article is content of Journal of the South Pacific Association for Commonwealth
Literature and Language Studies Number 36 (1993), Edited by Michèle Drouart.
*Link source: http://wwwmcc.murdoch.edu.au/ReadingRoom/litserv/SPAN/36/Baker.html

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