Lawson Welsh, Sarah

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2011 wordsSection 3: Literary Re-routings: Ethics, Aesthetics and the Postcolonial CanonIntroduction to “Literary Re-routings”This final section explores the multiple ramifications of the disjunction between the aesthetic of the literary and the ethical-political drive of postcolonial studies, addressing the question posed by Elleke Boehmer’s opening essay: in what sense can postcolonial writing be political and aesthetic, both at once? Boehmer suggests that although there can be no clearly defined postcolonial aesthetic postcolonial texts should be approached in aesthetic as well as politically-engaged terms, if only to highlight the ethical impact that appropriately used forms (modes, stances, sets of motifs) can generate. It is, in many ways, a ‘daring’ position. A centuries-old debate defines the aesthetic more generally as a philosophical response to works of art and the evaluation of different types of perceptual experience or, as in Boehmer’s essay, as a consideration of the formal characteristics and qualities of literary texts (the aesthetic as poetics). But despite an impressive roll call of thinkers (Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, Croce, Benjamin, Adorno, Eagleton) the current status of the aesthetic in the literary is not high.   As Boehmer notes, the category of ‘the aesthetic’, and critical readings which privilege the aesthetic qualities of postcolonial literary texts, are either elided or else seen only in opposition to texts and readings which more clearly privilege the ‘engaged’, politicised or ethical nature of postcolonial literary production. This tension prevails despite a number of influential thinkers arguing, after Marx, for a more complex and imbricated relationship between the aesthetic and the political: the ‘aesthetication of politics’ (Benjamin 1968) and, more recently, ‘the ideology of the aesthetic’ (Eagleton 1990). Indeed, the Adornian notion of the aesthetic being always already   ideological is acknowledged by both Boehmer (xxx) and Poyner (xxx) in their essays. In the western academy at least, readings of literary texts primarily in terms of their aesthetic qualities have arguably not been in vogue since the New Criticism of the 1930s to 1950s, so far-reaching have been the effects of the theoretical turn, and, in particular, the influence of post-structuralism, in literary studies.Indeed, as Bennett, Grossberg and Morris note, ‘the aesthetic is itself often qualified by the modifier “merely” or ”purely” to indicate […] a despised sphere of social irrelevance, the fussiness of the often-denigrated aesthetes, or […] the purity and autonomy of a realm of freedom and disinterestedness (as envisaged by Kant, for example) where pleasure and a liberated imagination can roam’ (2005: 2.). The latter Kantian position, as Boehmer suggests, presents a particular sticking point for ethically grounded postcolonial criticism in its seemingly problematic take on aesthetic judgements as purely subjective, a matter of the imagination rather than understanding; moreover, Kant’s formulation of aesthetic satisfaction as ‘purely disinterested’ and therefore theoretically universal, seems, likewise, to contradict postcolonial studies’ stress on cultural specificity and the impossibility rather than possibility of ‘freedom and disinterestness’ of this kind. Within postcolonial studies, aesthetic considerations in the analysis of literary texts have implicitly been considered a western ‘middle-class’ indulgence, and there has been a reluctance to approach the postcolonial literary text primarily as writing, rather than as some kind of a ‘tract’ or ‘manifesto’ for a higher ideal. Boehmer’s questions are therefore both timely and important. Must an interest in historical context preclude the demands of literary form? Is a literary text (whether postcolonial or otherwise) reducible to historical, social or political frames of reference, or do considerations of generic voice and connotative language play a significant part in how texts construct their meanings within, but not exclusive to, these frameworks?In considering rerouting as a ‘repeating on the present’, Boehmer echoes Trotsky’s advice: ‘Those who cannot defend old positions will never conquer new ones’ (Trotsky 1926: 222, cited in Williams). Her article traces the decades-long debate between the political and the aesthetic in postcolonial studies, itself an extension of earlier disputes about the ‘engaged’ or, contrariwise, purely aesthetic, function of literature. From Kant through Adorno to Gikandi, Parry and Young, through writers as diverse as Ben Okri, Derek Walcott, Achmat Dangor and Yvonne Vera, Boehmer teases out what a postcolonial aesthetic might be – or, indeed, whether it can be at all.  As Patrick Williams argues of the need to defend older positions, including this ‘ideologically suspect category of the aesthetic’, the ‘call for the elaboration of a postcolonial aesthetics could be seen both as something of a re-routing, and also as a re-rooting’.’ (Williams xxx) Likewise, in tackling the contentious opposition between the aesthetic and the ethical in postcolonial criticism, Boehmer’s essay takes up Diana Brydon’s call in this volume for theorists and critics to enter ‘into uncomfortable dialogues both within their own disciplines and trans-disciplinarily’ in order that the postcolonial can re-route itself ‘as a “rhizomatic” paradigm, an interpretive framework that can inform not only a particular area of inquiry, but wider public projects’  (Section 2 introduction xxx).The subsequent essays in this section take up some of the possibilities thrown open by Boehmer’s article and its initial question of how an ethical stance might be embodied within an aesthetic. In their different ways, the contributors to this section embody Robert Spencer’s call in this volume for ‘a critical practice that takes seriously George Steiner’s insight that ‘[t]o read well is to take great risks. It is to make vulnerable our identity, our self-possession’ (Steiner 1967: 29). As Boehmer suggests, it is only by embracing (rather than evading) the problems and potentialities of the aesthetic that the ethical and political objectives of postcolonialism are to be fully realised.  .Nowhere is the question of how the ethical is embodied within aesthetic forms more relevant than in historical contexts of trauma. And if the question of whether any more poetry can be written after Auschwitz resounded with a particularly dreadful impact at the end of WWII, post-apartheid South-Africa poses a similar question today. Jane Poyner’s and James Graham’s articles both interrogate the extent to which it is possible invest in ethically post-apartheid literary texts. Thus, Poyner’s essay argues that, despite a marked ‘inward’ turn of much post-apartheid fiction, and a proliferation of autobiographies and confessionals, the need to rediscover and bear witness to a suppressed and censored past is as urgent as ever. Drawing on several South-African novels (Coetzee’s Disgrace, Achmat Dangor’s Bitter Fruit, Nadine Gordimer’s The House Gun and Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to our Hillbrow) Poyner explores fictional representations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and public notions of truth-telling and confession. She points to the need to ‘re-route’ to reconceptualize the private/ public dichotomy - now that the limitations of protest literature are apparent, and shows how these novels offer an implicit critique of the TRC and public notions of truth. What they propose, she suggests, is a new ethical investment of the private as a corrective by which to critique and re-form the public domain. The literary ceases to be merely a politically invested ‘weapon of struggle’: rather, in the canon of much post-apartheid fiction, it becomes an aesthetic-ethical position which can effectively ‘speak the truth to power’. A rather different ethical investment – that of a postcolonial social ecology - is identified by James Graham, in his analysis of Nadine Gordimer’s Get a Life. Drawing on Huggan and Tiffin’s (2007) definition of a postcolonial environmental ethic (reimagining the nature of the human and place of the human in nature), Graham examines the political sense of representation to which he contrasts the aesthetic mandate to re-present the environment or social group in language. Alert to the new interface between postcolonialism and environmentalism, Graham contends that Gordimer’s problematizing of ‘people-centred environmentalism’ has implications for the interdisciplinary aspirations of postcolonial studies and signals a welcome de-coupling of globalisation from what he tentatively identifies as an alternative social ecological vision to that of neoliberal development.Deborah Madsen’s essay widens the scope of enquiry to the US and to the disciplinary fields of American Studies and American Ethnic Studies, in which the ‘place of postcolonialism is conspicuous by its absence but its relevance is hard to miss.’ Madsen takes as her textual locales the Hollywood film Crash (2004) and selected poems by Anishinaabbe writer and scholar, Gerald Vizenor, in order to discuss the implications of different theoretical conceptualizations of US national and ethnic identity. These include the figure of the ‘un-American’ (the individual who is in but not of America), the diasporic citizen of questionable national affiliation’, Michael Novak’s notion of the ‘unmeltable ethnic’ (1972) (e.g. the Native American), and Aihwa Ong’s concept of the ‘Flexible Citizen’ (1999). Madsen demonstrates the role that Postcolonial Studies has played in re-routing American Studies away from its roots in US nationalism and the white nation state; her argument raises some important questions about the ethics and future of American Studies and other nation-based academic disciplines when held in tension with currently hegemonic transnational, cosmopolitan models of literary study (see Ashcroft, Gikandi, Spencer in this volume).Madsen’s essay complements Nirmala Menon's call for ‘… a more provisional, contingent and nomadic textual canon’ (Menon xxx). In Menon’s essay on the postcolonial canon, the larger ethical-political investment of the discipline is scrutinized, including its assumed representativity of postcolonial literatures. Menon critiques the silent identification of postcolonial literature with a body of works which are predominantly written in English, to the exclusion of the rich vernacular literatures of the diverse multicultural, multilingual spaces of Asia and Africa. This, she contends, limits an understanding of postcolonial subjectivities, but also perpetrates yet another kind of ‘epistemic erasure’, even more disabling for being effected in the name of these very subjectivities. Menon recommends that the discipline widen its theoretical and critical approaches to encompass literatures written in different languages, and modulate its discussions of hybridity, cosmopolitanism or subalternity in accordance with these texts’ own engagements with them. Louar’s article reroutes the now familiar postmodernist approach to interrogating marginality by reflecting on postmodernism’s blindness to and neglect of the intersecting marginalities of postcolonialism and sexuality, an area of critical concern inaugurated by Frantz Fanon in his 1952 Black Skin: White Masks. She argues that the ‘ways in which various politics of identity – queer and postcolonial criticism – have pervaded literary studies under the aegis of politically subversive theoretical discourses’ have ironically foregrounded ‘a fundamental conflict between singular, discrete, individual marginal experiences and the identity categories and configurations established by these very discourses’ (xxx). Louar recognizes that the epistemological and political project of queer theory has always involved an entanglement of the aesthetic and the political; as a result, the mapping and discussion of the discursive construction of colonial sexualities has only occurred in the most limited ways (e.g. in terms of sexual tourism and male queer ‘othering’ of the cultural other from a European perspective). Moreover, it has meant that the imaginary communities (white, black, queer, straight) constructed by such theoretical discourses have repeated exclusion of   certain artistic individuals according to differing ideological and cultural codes of ‘outsidership’. Louar’s focus is the much-neglected Algerian poet, Jean Senac, assassinated in Algier in 1973, whose mentor was Albert Camus. Louar enquires into this neglect by contrast to the canonization by postcolonial critics among others of fellow queer writer, Jean Genet, who was also engaged in radical political activities.  Louar attempts to reroute theory in the direction of the affective as she posits a new critical category of the ‘unrequited lover’ closely linked to the land as a new model of subjectivity and offers in her reading an ‘alternative to both the colonial/postcolonial and queer narrative of Jean Senac’. Works CitedBenjamin, W. (1968) ‘The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’ in W. Benjamin Illuminations. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World.Bennett, Grossberg  & Morris (2005) New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Oxford: Blackwell.Eagleton, T. (1990) The ideology of the aesthetic. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.Huggan, G. & Tiffin, H. (2007) ‘Green Postcolonialism’, Interventions 9.1: 1-11.Steiner, G. (1967) Language and Silence: Essays, 1958-1966, Harmondsworth: Penguin.Trotsky, L. [1926] (1966) In Defence of Marxism, place publication? New Park Publications. PAGE  1

Introduction to Section 3: Literary Reroutings, ethics, aesthetics and the Postcolonial canon.

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Introduction to Section 3: Literary Reroutings, ethics, aesthetics and the Postcolonial canon.

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