Raymond Williams through Sri Lankan eyes- Part-9

In the last few columns I had attempted to examine the indubitable strengths of Raymond Williams as a supremely gifted cultural critic and how we can learn from his example. As with most other intellectuals and thinkers, Williams has his share of deficiencies, blind spots and limitations. One such drawback was his inability to engage seriously the question of colonialism and how it affected cultural production.

In today’s column I wish to explore this conspicuous absence in Raymond Williams’ writings and see how we can remedy the situation in our own endeavors as Sri Lankan writers and critics and assiduous readers. To be sure, Williams, in his later writings, did allude to imperialism and colonialism; however, these references were somewhat perfunctory and there wasn’t in evidence a serious engagement with questions of colonialism and post-colonialism and their relationship to the production of culture.

Raymond Williams, no doubt, was a very astute and committed critic of literature and culture. However, he worked largely within the confines of the British cultural tradition; he did not make a serious attempt to situate the British tradition and British modes of cultural production in the larger global context. Edward Said, who was a great admirer of Williams made the following observation.

‘Williams is a great critic, whose work I admire and have learned much from, but I sense a limitation in his feeling that English literature is mainly about England, an idea that is central to his work as it is to that of most scholars and critics.’ Said has pointed out that although Williams has demonstrated cogently the importance of novels as social texts, he was not able to make the connection between the English novel and the empire. In order to counter this trend, Said wrote an important book titled Culture and Imperialism in which he pointed out the complex intersections of empire and the production of culture.

He was interested in showing that ‘the literature itself makes constant reference to itself as somehow participating in Europe’s overseas expansion.’ Clearly Said was able to open up an avenue of inquiry in the way that Raymond Williams was not able to do

Creative literature

In this regard, Said’s work Culture and Imperialism is extremely important. In it, he examines the nature of the subtle relationship that existed between empire-building and creative literature. He points out how the justification and rationalisation of empire-building was deeply and unarguably embedded in the Western cultural imaginary.

By examining such novels as Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Albert Camus’ The Outsider, he demonstrated how literature and politics cooperated directly and obliquely, knowingly and unknowingly in propping up the edifice of empire. This is indeed an area that Raymond Williams has not paid attention to. I will discuss Edward Said’s achievements in this regard, as opposed to that of Williams’, later in this column.

The two terms imperialism and colonialism are often used interchangeably. This is hardly surprising in view of the fact that they share a great semantic field in common. However, it is important to recognise the fact that there are certain subtle discriminations that need to be made regarding the use of these two words. As Edward Said and others have pointed out, the term imperialism signifies the theory, practice, and attitudes and values of a dominant metropolitan power ruling over a distant territory. Colonialism, on the other hand, which is a consequence of imperialism refers to the establishment of settlements on distant territories. Said observes, ‘in our time colonialism has largely ended; imperialism…..lingers where it has always been, in a kind of general cultural sphere as well as in specific political, ideological, economic and social practices.’ Although colonialism has ended nominally, it is indeed a fact that neo colonialism is alive and well.

In recent times, post-colonial theory has begun to influence the academy not only in Western countries but also in Asian and African countries in interesting ways. As we examine Raymond Williams’ relation to colonialism and imperialism, and his failure to engage them deeply, it might be useful to examine briefly the aims, achievements and limitations of post-colonial studies.

It has begun to inflect the trajectories of growth in many disciplines such as literary studies, anthropology, history, political science and sociology. At first glance, the germ post-colonial studies might convey the impression that it is a straightforward and easy to understand concept. It is after all, the study of what follows after colonialism. However, the apparent simplicity of this concept serves to mask a complex of contradictory images. Above all, it doesn’t pay attention to the rival notion of neo-colonialism.

Very often, in discussions of colonialism, the two terms are conflated, and it is important, in my judgment, that we disentangle them. Such a move is necessary if we are to make use of post-colonialism as a productive analytical tool.

It seems to me that, basically, there are two important ways in which to conceptualise post-colonialism; each carries with it a number of intellectual strands. The first is that it is a period marker, it signifies a historical phase, it is that which follows colonialism. This is somewhat problematic and of limited value. Neo-colonialism, too, follows colonialism. What is the difference between post-colonialism and neo-colonialism? The second is to examine it as a style of thinking, a mode of re-imagining, a form of analytical representation. This second gloss, it has to be said, contains its own share of ambiguities, but it has the merit of shining a light on a several critical issues that demand re-thinking.

Post-colonial studies grew out of a body of writing that examined colonialism. There are, to be sure, diverse scholars representing diverse disciplines who are generally herded together into this capacious concept of post-colonialism studies.

However, it needs to be pointed out, that the term post-colonial studies post-colonial theory is employed largely to reference a type of cultural analysis or a distinct way of making sense of the way we make sense, largely inspired by modern European theory. Theorists such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes and Pierre Bourdieu have played a significant role in shaping the directions of post-colonial theory. What is interesting to note in this regards is that while Marxism, some decades ago, focused attention on some of the issues that seem to interest post-colonial theorists, that endeavor seems to be underplayed in the formulations of post-colonial theorists. Indeed, this intrusion of French high theory has generated a great deal of controversy regarding the future growth of this field of study.

It is evident that post-colonial studies has a strong and undeniable South Asian connection. Critics such as Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, Partha Chatterjee, Arjun Appadurai, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Gyan Prakash, who are all Indian by birth have contributed significantly to the evolution of this field.(I have had the pleasure of having extended conversations with many of them.)

The field of post-colonial studies, as we understand the term today, is largely the creation of Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha. In 1978, Edward Said published his path-breaking book Orientaliam, which was to exert a deep and profound influence on the rise of post-colonial studies and the distinctive critical approach to colonial texts that characterise it. Spivak once called ‘Orientalism’ the source-book of post-colonial studies. Gayatri Spivak made a concerned effort to extend this avenue of inquiry into newer territories by drawing on deconstruction, feminism and Marxism.

Homi Bhabha, in a series of dazzling essays, compelled us to re-think the fraught encounter between the coloniser and colonised paying close attention to the many and complex layers of meaning embedded in it. While these three scholars were responsible in large measure for shaping this field, it has to be conceded that Frantz Fanon in the sixties paved the way for the emergence of this field by highlighting boldly and imaginatively some of the central issues that post-colonialist theorists were to deal with later.

Legitimate criticism

To be sure, post-colonial studies has come in for its share of legitimate criticism. The Turkish-born Arif Dirlik and Filipino-born E. San Juan, who teach in the United Stares, and the Indian scholar Aijaz Ahmad, among others, have mounted a scathing attack on practitioners of post-colonial studies and their research agendas. Critics of post-colonial studies contend that it is too closely linked to Eurocentric ideas. And that it is far more preoccupied with claustrophobic battles of abstraction within the metropolitan academe than the stark and pressing realities of colonized countries. They argue that it displays a worrying elitism as reflected in the impenetrably dense prose preferred by some of the practitioners of this discipline. The perceived lack of serious engagement with the respective histories of colonized societies is also a matter of concern. All these doubts, misgivings grow out of real deficiencies in the writings of post-colonial studies practitioners. In addition to these weaknesses, I wish to focus on another lack, not adequately articulated, namely, the evident unwillingness of post-colonial theorists to deal with indigenous writings. There have been a few exceptions such as Gayatri Spivak’s insightful essays on Tagore and Mahasweta Devi. I have always maintained that if post-colonial studies is to become a powerfully consequential mode of cultural critique, it is important that its adherents address issues of local writing in indigenous languages.

In countries such as India there is a vast body of important writing produced in indigenous languages, and Indian scholars of post-colonial studies should pay close attention to it. In the case of Sri Lanka, for example, post-colonial theorists must engage seriously the pre-Independence writings of Piyadasa Sirisena, Munidasa Cumaratunga, Anagarika Dharmapala, Ven. S. Mahinda etc. It is my contention that they present a valid counterpoint to the general drift of post-colonial theory.

Another area that merits close consideration is the way English novels are studied within the larger framework of imperial and colonial expansion. In its heyday, Britain had the largest number of colonies, and the relationship between the literature produced in Britain and its efforts at empire-building should be an object of study. Edward Said pioneered this exploration.

The ways in which the British empire was constructed in English novels and how empire became a reflector and shaper of the colonial imagination is a topic that invites sustained study. By examining carefully the language, plot structures, representational strategies and the ideology of these novels one can acquire a deeper understanding of the dynamics of imperialism and colonialism. A work like Said’s Culture and Imperialism is exemplary in this regard.

In this study Said points out how works of literature were responsible for producing a system of domination that involved more than guns and soldiers – a sovereignty that exercised control over texts, images, forms, and the very imagination of the dominators and dominated. The outcome was the emergence of a vision that affirmed not only the right of the dominators to rule but their sacred duty to do so. Said however, goes in to point out that this vision did not go unchallenged.

There was in evidence an adversarial strain in the writings of some indigenous writers who were the victims of this colonisation. By focusing on the works of writers such as Salman Rushdie, Aime Cesaire and Chinua Achebe, he indexes the resistances mounted by these writers. This was a vital step in the process of reclaiming the right of self-determination in history and literature for indigenous peoples. Said’s line of approach has much to offer practitioners of post-colonial studies.

Let us now return to Raymond Williams and find out how and why he failed to located English novels in the larger discourse of imperialism and colonialism in the way that Edward Said has. Williams was not unaware of the implications of colonialism, but he did not proceed to draw out their implications. Unlike most other English literary critics, William was able to examine novels as social texts.

Paragraphs such as the following illustrate this point. ‘The paradox of Jane Austen is the achievement of a unity of tone, of a settled and a remarkably confident way of seeing and judging, in this chronicle of confusion and change. She is precise and candid, but in a particular way. She is for example more exact about income, which is disposable, than about acres, which have to be worked.

Sources of income

Yet at the same time she sees land in a way that she does not see other sources of income. Her eye for a house, for timber, for the details of improvement, is quick, accurate, monetary. Yet money of other kinds, from the trading houses, from the colonial plantations, has no visual equivalent; it has to be converted to these signs of order to be recognized at all.’

Raymond Williams is deeply conscious of the economic contexts of fictional representation. He even recognizes the existence of colonial plantations. However, their meaning is not examined or explained in detail in relation to fictional strategies in a way that critics like Said have been able to do. Let us examine the way in which Said talks about Jane Austen. ’My contention is that by that very odd combination of casualness and stress, Austen revels herself to be assuming (just as fanny assumes, in both senses if the word) the importance of an empire to the situation at home. Let me go further. Since Austen refers to and uses Antigua as she does in Mansfield Park, there needs to be a commensurate effort on the part of her readers to understand concretely the historical valences in the reference…’

He then goes on to assert that, ‘according to Austen we are to conclude that no matter how isolated and insulated the English palace (e.g. Mansfield Park) it requires overseas sustenance. Sir Thomas’ property in the Caribbean would have had to be a sugar plantation maintained by the slave labor (not abolished until the 1830s); these are not dead historical facts but, as Austen certainly knew, evident historical realities.

Before the Anglo-French competition the major distinguishing characteristic of western empires (Roman, Spanish, and Portuguese) was that the earlier empires were bent on loot, as Conrad puts it, or the transport of treasure from colonies to Europe, with very little attention to development, organisation, or systems within the colonies themselves ; Britain ad to a lesser degree, France both wanted to make their empires long-term, profitable, ongoing concerns, and they compared in this enterprise, nowhere more so than in the colonies of the Caribbean, where the transport of slaves, the functioning of large sugar plantations, and the developments of sugar markets, which raised the issues if protectionism, monopolies, and price – all these were more or less constantly, competitively at issue.’

Edward Said, in evaluating the worth of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, makes the following relevant comment.’ Having read Mansfield Park as a part of the structure of an expanding imperialist venture, one cannot simply restore it to the canon of great literary masterpieces – to which it most certainly belongs – and leave it at that. Rather, I think, the novel steadily, if unobtrusively, opens up a broad expanse of domestic imperialistic culture without which Britain’s subsequent acquisition of territory would not have been possible.’

Here we get a sense of how Edward Said goes about bringing in questions of imperialism and colonialism to the evaluation of Jane Austen’s fiction. What critics like Said and others who follow his path seek to do is to make visible certain invisible or unspoken aspects of novels by underscoring the importance of the interconnections between national identity, economy and imperial expansion. The interplay between the local and global in Austen’s novels – an aspect hitherto barely discussed – is highlighted in interesting ways; for example in Mansfield Park, as Said points out, the immense Antigua holdings of Sir Thomas are vital to the continuing viability of Mansfield Park.

The mistakes and blind spots of Raymond Williams should alert us as Sri Lankan writers and readers and critics to the importance of including colonialism in our frameworks of analysis. Williams, as I have shown in my earlier columns, was a superb cultural analyst.

Traditions

However, he confined his analyses to the traditions and social formations associated with the British nation-state. He did not bring in the issues of imperialism and colonialism into his literary and cultural analysis in the way that Said has done. In his important works of cultural investigation such as Culture and Society and The Long Revolution there is no mention of colonialism and imperialism. Only in his study The Country and the City does he broach these important issues.

For example, in The Country and the City he makes the following observation. ‘the model of the city and the country, in economic and political relations, has gone beyond the boundaries of the nation-state…..what was happening to the city, the metropolitan economy, determined and was determined by what was made to happen in the country; first the local hinterland and then the vast regions beyond it, in other people’s lands.’ This is indeed an interesting insight; however, he does not expand on it in his other works of cultural analysis. Williams did concede that the relationship between the decline of the rural areas of England and the expansion of colonial rule was closely linked. He fails to examine the interconnections between British imperialism and British culture. It is indeed in this area that Edward said excels; he has demonstrated the importance of that link most persuasively.

To be continued