Literary Theory 2019

• How can a postcolonial national consciousness be developed w/o falling into (isolationist) nationalism? 
• How can a national consciousness be “the all-embracing crystallization of the innermost hopes of the whole people” rather than reflecting the aspirations of the “underdeveloped middle class”?
• Influenced by Marxism, Fanon is aware of its Eurocentric roots (cp. Stuart Hall).
  -> Requires modification

• Sadly, the mission of the local, degenerate bourgeoisie is not to transform the nation. It is on the line between the nation and a rampant capitalism, masked as neo-colonialism.
• Fanon castigates the national bourgeoisie for lacking the characteristics that were responsible for colonialism in the first place! 
• Rather than acting in an “organic” way (cp. Gramsci), the local middle class feels more affiliation with the former colonizers class and actually prolongs the hegemony of the colonizers, becoming the overseers of their old colonial masters. 
• This means: instead of funding the new and takings risks, the middle class overtakes the old which prolongs the hegemony (dominance) of colonialism

1. extreme localism: “re-tribalisation” of Africa (1578)

2. The idea of African unity: “African unity, that vague formula, yet one to which the men and women were passionately attached, and whose operative value served to bring immense pressure to bear on colonialism, African unity takes off that mask and crumbles into regionalism inside the hollow shell of nationality itself” (1583).

It complicates the development of national unity is the fact that Africa, as a very diverse continent, is home to many different tribes. Therefore, there is the danger of re- tribalization which makes it extremely difficult for tribes to think in similar ways (e.g. in terms of a nation-wide economy).

• Too Cosmoplitan - panafrican transcending boundaries, want to take on european culture, identity is split, there are multiple cultures

• OR

• Too local - retribalisation

• Fanon is aware of how important culture is to forge a nation (Marx neglects role of culture)

“Every effort is made to bring the colonized person to admit the inferiority of his culture, which has been transformed into instinctive patterns of behavior, to recognize the unreality of this ‘nation,’ and, in the last extreme, the confused and imperfect character of his own biological structure... Within the framework of colonial domination there is not and there will never be such phenomena as new cultural departures or changes in the national culture” (1587).

the “frenzied fashion” in which the intellectual takes on the culture of the occupying power

vs.

the stereotyped formalism of the uneducated masses

• “On National Culture” is the fourth chapter of The Wretched of the Earth.
• The section deals with the legitimacy of the claims of Nation which Fanon draws a link between nationalism and culture. 
• Native intellectuals are drawn to the idea of a universal black culture because they learned to value universalism in their European-focused educations: “The native intellectual will try to make European culture his own.”
• Fanon sees becoming a Europhile native intellectual as attractive but doomed.
• According to Fanon, rather than imitate European culture or promote a global black culture, native intellectuals must realize their culture is national.
• Aural storytellers can create a new form of culture, but it has been suppressed by colonialism (Marx argued that art belongs to the superstructure and cannot transcend its base... But storytellers do the transcend base).

• Cultural emancipation is required. New culture must be liberated to be “alive” again.
• “The struggle for freedom does not give back to the national culture its former value and shapes; this struggle which aims at a fundamentally different set of relations between men cannot leave intact either the form or the content of the people‘s culture. After the conflict there is not only the disappearance of colonialism but also the disappearance of the colonized man.”(1592)
• In view of the detrimental state of the educated middle class it is not clear who can bring this cultural renewal about. -> “small number of honest intellectuals” and “civil servants” (1584) 
• "combat literature": a writing that calls upon the people to undertake the struggle against the colonial oppressor. Fanon uses the example of Algerian storytellers changing the content and narration of their traditional stories to reflect the present moment of struggle against French colonial rule

• Building a nation + inter-national consciousness = contradiction

• Wretched of the earth - Proletariat supposed to build a nation

  ●  scars, oppression, No education / resources -> connected to Foucault's concept of power and knowledge
   
• “The nation gathers together the various indispensable elements necessary for the creation of a culture, those elements which alone can give it credibility, validity, life, and creative power. In the same way it is its national character that will make such a culture open to other cultures and which will enable it to influence and permeate other cultures” (1592).
• This conjunction of the national and the international seems unrealistic.
• At the same time, it seems smug and patronizing from a first world-perspective to insist on deconstructing the notion of national consciousness.

• 7^thgeneration chicana focusing on ethnic and sexual identity which have both been suppressed
• Rejection & negation of Chicano/as 
• Stolen land, personhood, self-respect
• Fear, distance, contempt of Gringos
• Mexico as a double: shadow of the US, doppelganger of the Gringo’s psyche
• Negotiates between wanting to have an identity and not being constrained by it

The colonizers have projected upon the colonized what is other in themselves. Otherness is ‘outsourced’ to cleanse one’s identity: Forbidden desires, unacknowledged fears and taboos are projected upon the other.

• She has European / authochthonous roots and is lesbian in macho chicano culture
• Sexuality is marginalised
• The machismo is a response to the deprivation & suppression of Chicano culture: deep sense of racial shame

• (women are safety valves to let go of the frustrations of colonizations for men)

• Oppression becomes fear which becomes intolerance / violence 

• How can you strip off an identity if you don’t have one?
  If you have an identity imposed on you by colonizers, you are just shedding the identity of the colonizer, you must create your own identity to shed it and create the new identity

• Anzaldúa tries to turn hybridity into something fruitful without ignoring the suffering that it also entails.
• Attempt to abolish the very norms that have defined what counts as normal, authentic, true.
• Need for a new masculinity (cp Cixous?)
• “Men, even more than women, are fettered to gender roles. Women at least have had the guts to break out of bondage. Only gay men have had the courage to expose themselves to the woman inside them and to challenge the current masculinity.”
• The border / La frontera between Mexico and the US serves as metaphor for her existence and experience.
• Argues against “identity politics” as the concept of identity has normative aspects: stability, authenticity
• At the same time: deep desire for just this stability

• Anzaldúa advocates a “global race” (mestizaje), a cosmic race that includes and transcends all races. This new mestiza consciousness, in her view, would also have to be “una conciencia de mujer” (2212)
• Borderland existence is defined as both a burden and an opportunity, a pathology that defies of norms.
• Cp. Cixous and Irigaray: femininity as openness toward the other, “Deconstruct, construct.”
• Before identity can be compromised and deconstructed, made to open toward others, it first needs to be created and reclaimed

Cosmic race, mestizaje, global race:

• Cosmopolitan (transcends all races)

• No exclusion

• Female consciousness (danger of essentialism): exists in men and women

• Painful and enriching

• Moves between identities and criticizes both

• Turning into an alternative norm that

• Need to be flexible

• Requires a tolerance (identities become contradictory)

• Born into Palestine before Israel in 1947. Educated in Egypt and the United States.
• Often considered the founder of postcolonial theory in the Humanities.
• His influential book Orientalism (1978) analyzes the processes of transference and projection involved in imagining the ‘other’, in this case the version of the Orient created by French and British colonizers in the later 18th and 19th c.
• Repertory of images that keep coming up when we think of the East and that make it difficult or impossible to address the subject freely: sensual women, mystery, despotism, monsters
• Variety of sources: cp. New historicism (also: Foucault and Gramsci as important influences)

• “The Orient is almost a European invention” (1991).
• However, Said’s point is not that Orientalism constitutes a bunch of lies, but that it forms an artificially coherent discourse that informs the political domination of the Orient through the West.
• “Orientalism ... is, rather than expresses, a certain will or intention to understand, in some cases to control, manipulate, even to incorporate, what is a manifestly different world.”

• “(…)Without examining Orientalism as a discourse one cannot possibly understand the enormously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage – and even produce – the Orient.”

► Foucault’s concept of discourse, but with the belief in “the determining imprint of individual writers” on discourse formation (2008) vs. Foucault’s contention that authors aren’t authorities, but rather vessels of discourse.

• Orientalism is “not an airy European fantasy about the Orient, but a created body of theory and practice in which, for many generations, there has been a considerable material investment.” (1995)

► Gramsci’s concept of hegemony as cultural leadership: the image of the Other is created and used to keep the colonized in place.

• The discourse is shaped by the exchange with power political (as with a colonial or imperial establishment), power intellectual (as with reigning sciences like comparative linguistics or anatomy, or any of the modern policy sciences), power cultural (as with orthodoxies and canons of taste, texts, values), power moral (as with ideas about what ’we’ do and what ’they’ cannot do or understand as ’we’ do)”

• Educated in Mumbai and Oxford
• One of the most prominent thinkers of postcolonialism
• Important publications: Nation and Narration, The Location of Culture
• It is useful to consider his relation to Said in terms of a trajectory (Verlauf). 

Cp. Elaine Showalter’s distinction between two different phases of criticism as reference for Bhabha: 
(1) feminist criticism as treatment of women in literature by men vs. 
(2) focus on the works by women themselves.

► Said’s Orientalism as phase 1

► Bhabha’s focus on the subject-position of the colonized as phase 2.

• At the same time, he doesn’t exclude the subject position of the colonizer because he sees the two as radically interrelated.
• Said’s structuralist vs. Bhabha’s poststructuralist approach: Said primarily concerned with binary opposition of central self and decentralized other. Bhabha criticizes binarism, arguing that positions are more ambivalent.

• Master and slave exist in a structure of mutuality to each other: without slave no master and vice versa.
• Fable of class reversal: The slave to some extent controls the master in as much as the latter depends on him for his skills. The situation continues to reverse itself.
• Saussurian binarism: We can know things only negatively, never positively.
• Orientalism and Western identity: Europeans know themselves negatively as the not-other.
• Bhabha criticises Said’s use of Hegel’s master-slave opposition; where in Saussurian terms each of the opposites only “mean” by opposition to the other (in a negative way). Instead, Bhabha suggests the concept of ambivalence.

• Describes both the attitude of the colonizer and the colonized.
• Colonizer: 2 phases of historical experience:

1. Warren Hastings: “going native” (18th century): Local administrators are encouraged to learn everything about the languages and the customs of the natives while keeping an iron grip on them.

2. Charles Grant: missionary phase (19th century): insists on instilling standards of Englishness in the natives.

- Thomas Babington Macaulay’s “The Minute of Indian Education” (1835): education of Indians strictly acc. to English model

- Colonized: co-optation (Indian missionary Anud Messeh) vs. hybridity (Bible-readers under the tree, who accept Christianity on their own terms) 

• Bhabha accredits neither a stable and impermeable identity, the colonised are thus never completely and utterly under the authority of the coloniser, but both identities intrude into each other.
• Thus, hybridity takes away the colonised from their own culture and puts them in an in-between space.
• With this approach, Bhabha combines Derrida’s notion of différance with the concept of disfigurement (Freud), as he deconstructs the identity of English authenticity.

• Hybridity as “double consciousness” of the colonized hovering between complete submission to authority (while still including the difference of displacement) and submission on one’s own terms.
• The concept of hybridity assumes that when we talk about colonizers and colonized, we are not thinking about two different and impermeable identities. 
  -> Bhabha complicates Said’s binary structure.
• Not just distinction between the (English) norm and the ‘other’, but hybridity calls the very concept of (stable) identity into question.
• The ‘presence’ of colonial power can never be assumed. It can only be made visible through “effects” and “traces”.
• It also cannot be “original” because it is marked by belatedness and displacement, dislocation, repetition.
  -> Bhabha combines Derrida’s idea of différance with Freud’s concept of Entstellung (disfigurement) from his analysis of dream-work
• Hybridity develops in the blanks and fissures created through dislocation.

• The colonial power comes with its own “rules of recognition” that can make its culture both ‘present’ and ‘transparent’.
• But recognition through the colonized is disturbed by two factors:

(1) through the displacement / dislocation of culture and

(2) through the hierarchization of society in the colonial regime: The distinction into ‘them’ and ‘us’ does not allow a “stable unitary assumption of collectivity” among the colonized, but forces them into “doublethink”.

• colonial discourse: point when, faced with the hybridity of its objects, the presence of power is revealed 
  -> If the effect of colonial power is seen to be the production of hybridization rather than the command of colonialist authority or the silent repression of native traditions, then an important change of perspective occurs.
• In this way, Foucault might argue, power carries within itself the roots of its own subversion.
• Hybridity constitutes a potential source of resistance but at the expense of the colonized culture. 
  -> between cultural identities.
• Bhabha tries to avoid the notion of cultural erosion or deprivation of culture by arguing that all culture is basically hybrid -> Emphasizes that culture is never homogenous.

• Lacan: ‘The effect of mimicry is camouflage, in the strictly technical sense. It is not a question of harmonizing with the background but, against a mottled (gesprenkelt) background, of being mottled – exactly like the technique of camouflage practised in human warfare.’” (1181/2)
• Bhabha: mimicry is the effect of the doubling that takes place when one culture dominates another.
• Mimicry encouraged by colonizers, but mimicry with a difference: imperfectperformance of Englishness (a bit ridiculous).
• Mimicry as a tool of resistance
• Outdoing the colonizers at their game: Joseph Conrad’s novels (written by a Pole)

• Educated in Calcutta and the United States
• Strongly influenced by Derrida, French theory, and Gramsci
• Avoids any kind of final closure for her argument since it would result in the exclusion of other opinions
• essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1985/1999)

• those of low economic status, outside the power structures of a given society, without access to social mobility, with an “ambiguous relation to power” – subordinate to it but never fully consenting to its rule” (2194)
• subaltern women as ‘doubly’ subaltern: women without a voice

• Roots in Marx’s 18th Brumaire, where he discusses class formation. Small, isolated, dispossessed peasants do not constitute a class for themselves and are therefore incapable of asserting their class interests: 

“They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented.”

• Spivak notes the “mistranslation” from the German: not “cannot represent themselves”, butcannot get their interests acknowledged / made to count (im eigenen Namen geltend machen).
• Spivaks question: “On the other side of the international division of labor from socialized capital, inside and outside the circuit of the epistemic violence of imperialist law and education supplementing an earlier text, can the subaltern speak?” (2199)
• Cp. Said’s project of Orientalism, but the strata of power at work are more multiple, less binary than in Said’s case.

1. Dominant foreign groups, which includes colonial powers such as the English and French, international powers such as the Americans and the Russians as well as international corporations;

2. Dominant indigenous groups at the national level. This includes Indian politicians and business interests: national government and national business;

3. Dominant indigenous groups at the regional and local level

4. The people: particularly, the subaltern class

• Spivak argues that female intellectuals must play the role of the organic intellectual and speak for the subaltern.
• She is aware of risk of ventriloquism (für jemand anderen reden) in this act of representation.
• Representation is always misrepresentation (cp. Said)
• “decipherment in an academic institution =/= not necessarily “speaking” of the subaltern. (this decipherment is linked to power, cp. Foucault)
• For the moment: best option available

Political action often necessitates essentialism of one sort or another. -> Important to be aware of the issue

• Young woman committing suicide
• The family considers various (unlikely) reasons, accidentally “discovering” the reason: political activism, her inability to commit the murder delegated to her)
• To Spivak’s frustration, no-one in the closer family wanted to look into the matter, they could and would not read the gesture as an act of resistance. Spivak diagnose a “failure of communication” 
• possible that the political motivation for suicide was hushed up because it was shameful
• Irregularities: Spivak was no outsider, Bhaduri was solidly middle class.
• Spivak: answers this by calling all women subaltern, but women of colour (of the subaltern class) doubly subaltern
• Criticism: Imposition? Is it really legitimate to ‘throw’ all women – regardless of class – into the same (metaphorical) box?
• Conclusion: Spivak takes many hermeneutic libertiesin deciphering what she calls the unacknowledged “physiological inscription of her body” (2205): such as rewriting of sati-suicide or a “hegemonic account of the fighting mother”-figure.
• Is the political intellectual Spivak perhaps using (and abusing) Bhaduri’s story for her own ends?

• Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990)
• One of the most radical proponents of the idea that gender roles are a matter of performance rather than just culturally prescribed ideology.
• To say that gender is performative is to say that it can be adapted in performance similar tothe way an actor interprets a theatrical role.
• Butler develops this idea in response to what she considers to be a misguided turn to essentializing notions of identity in US-American and European feminism.

• Men have reason, women do not = Sexism
• the statement is also philosophically wrong in Butler’s view: The relation between the sexes and between masters and slaves is not determined biologically
• it is socially determined, through repeated acts of domination and subjection as well as through performances of identity by both men and women that conform to the dominant distribution of gender roles.

• Desire to forge bonds of solidarity -> relying upon the category of woman -> false promise of eventual political solidarity
• risk of rendering visible a category which may or may not be representative of the concrete lives of women. 
• Spivak: feminists rely on operational essentialism, a false ontology of women as a universal in order to advance a feminist political program. She suggests it could be used for strategic purposes.
• Butler: it is one thing to use the term and know its ontological insufficiency and quite another to articulate a normative vision for feminist theorywhich celebrates or emancipates an essence, a nature, or a shared cultural reality which cannot be found.

• Butler counters strategic essentialism with a constructivist approach to gender
• Task: to examine in what ways gender is constructed through specific corporeal acts, and what possibilities exist for the cultural transformation of gender through such acts.  
• Strongly influenced by Derrida and Lacan, but most importantly by the late Foucault:
  cp. his History of Sexuality, where he argues that the notion of sexual identity is a very late cultural addition. Before that: sexual practices unrelated to identity (‘sodomy’, i.e., sexual practices between men, were considered as a political crime) 
• Cp. Also Cixous and Anzaldúa 

• Butler deconstructs the central assumption of feminist theory: the dichotomy between sex (as biological given) and gender (as cultural prescription),which also reflects the dichotomy between nature and culture.
• Sexed bodies cannot signify without gender -> the apparent existence of sex prior to discourse / culture is itself a cultural construct. 
• Butler’s main claim is that not even sexual identity is something natural since what counts as natural is also defined by culture: 
• naturalness is “constitutedthrough discursively constrained performative actsthat produce the body through and within categories of sex.” (2489) 
• Useful to differentiate between ‘sex’ as anatomical fact and ‘sexual identity’ / ‘sexual orientation’. 

With the quote that “being a lesbian is what I have been,” Butler argues that identity is not inherent, but performed.

The repeated performance of an identity however leads to the “sedimentation” of identity. Thus, “being” is the result of performance, of agency.