The impact of Post-Colonial Theory on literary productions

Continued from last week.......

Interviewed by Ranga CHANDRARATHNE

The following is the second part of the Montage interview with Hawaii-based Sri Lankan academic Professor Wimal Dissanayake. In this insightful interview, Prof. Dissanayake further explains intricate issues associated with post-modernism and post-colonial writings. Among other things, he explains the works of pioneering work of post-colonial theorists, particularly, highlighting their failing to recognise the importance of indigenous languages and literature.

Professor Wimal Dissanayake

Q: How would you explain the work of scholars such as Frantz Fannon who in his book 'The Wretched of the Earth' (French: Les Damn's de la Terre) first published in 1961 examines the psychological effects of colonization looking at Algerian struggle for independence. How important it is to understand Fannon's work in the context of post-colonial studies?

A: Frantz Fanon has played a profoundly significant role in shaping the field of post-colonial studies. Although Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha are generally referred to as the Holy Trinity of post-colonial studies, it is the body of writing produced by Frantz Fanon that initially galvanized the thinking of post-colonial theorists. His books like "The Wretched of the Earth","Black Skin, White Masks" have had a deep impact on revolutionary thinking in general. Homi Bhabha referred to Fanon as the purveyor of transgressive truth. Drawing on the work of such thinkers as Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Sartre, Frantz fanon combined psychoanalysis and social exploration to highlight the nature of colonialism, its harmful impact on the psyche of colonized and the need for people in the developing world to liberate themselves from this mind-set.

A book like "The Wretched of the Earth" had an electrifying effect on the champions of counter culture in the 1960s, and later on post-colonial studies, because Fanon points out powerfully and cogently the nature of colonial desire, and the abject dependency it promotes as well as the complexities of colonial otherness. Unlike Derrida's, or Lacan's, or some of Foucault's writings, Fanon's work is easy to read. Passages such as the following give an indication of Fanon's preferred style and binary rhetoric. "The black man has two dimensions. -- one with his fellows, the other with the white man. A Negro behaves differently with the white man and with another Negro. That this self-division is a direct result of colonial subjugation is beyond question."

If one wants to study post-colonial theory deeply, it is important to start with the writings of Frantz Fanon. At times he was guilty of untenable reductionisms and misleading hyperbole. Despite these weaknesses, Fanon is an inspiring writer who merits close and sustained study.

Q: In reading even thinly, we come across the work of Homi K Bhabha What's Bhabha's contribution to post-colonial theories and particularly considering his work such as Nation and Narration? (Routledge, 1990 and The Location of Cultures, Routledge, 1994).

A: Homi Bhabha is an extremely influential theorist of post colonial textuality. I know him quite well, having participated with him in conferences in London, Honolulu etc. Once I was the discussant to a paper that he presented on the nature of victims. Bhabha is not an easy writer to read; he is extremely demanding. However, the effort to read him carefully is fully worthwhile. His books such as "The Location of Culture and Nation and Narration" have raised a plurality of issues that are vitally connected to post-colonial studies.

Let us consider a book like "Narration and Narration." It urges us to re-think the question of nationhood in interesting and complex ways. The concept of nation, to be sure, has received much scholarly attention. Scholars such as Elie Kedourie, Benedict Anderson, Ernest Gellner, Eric Hobsbawm, Anthony Giddens, Partha Chatterjee, Anthony Smith, have written on this topic with great insight. What is interesting about Homi Bhabha's book is that he has sought to adopt a newer approach. What he is seeking to achieve is to demonstrate the fact that all nations are narrated into existence. The stories that each nation tells about itself constitutes its reality. In fashioning this approach, Bhabha is of curse drawing on the formulations of his post-structuralist mentors.

He starts the book by making the following statement. "Nations, like narratives, lose their origins in the myths of time and only fully realize their horizon in the mind's eye. Such an image of the nation 'or narration might seem impossibly romantic and excessively metaphorical, but it is from these traditions of political thought that and literary language that the nation emerged as a powerful historical idea in the west. An idea whose cultural compulsion lies in the impossible unity of the nation as a symbolic force". Benedict Anderson also focused on the cultural significatory elements of nationhood. But Bhabha goes beyond that.

To answer your question about Homi Bhaha's contribution to post-colonial theory, it is indeed very significant. He put into circulation concepts such as hybridity "mimicry" disavowal" third space - that have become the stock in trade of post-colonial studies. While extending the range of Edward Said's interests, Bhabha also pointed out his weaknesses. Bhabha, of course, has his share of drawbacks. He is caught in a kind of unproductive textualism which does not allow him to deal with material and economic forces adequately. These, we need to recognize, are very important forces connected to and which activate post-colonialism. One also gets the impression that he is unduly wedded to the analytical categories and vocabularies of interpretation forged by post-structuralists.

Q: Speaking about key texts on postcolonial literary theories, how important to read and learn from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's work such as "Can the Subaltern Speak?" (Originally published in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg's Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (1988) highlights her concern for the processes whereby postcolonial studies ironically reinstate and rehearse neo-colonial imperatives of political domination, economic exploitation, and cultural erasure.

It is evident this western post colonial scholars are largely mono-lingual academics and they have no idea about local languages or to speak even about basic literary features of a former colony looking at local text. Is this assumption true?

A: Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is another post-colonial theorist who has had a profound impact on the growth of this field of inquiry. She sees herself as a Marxist, feminist and deconstructionist. She gained great fame as the translator of Jacques Derrida's book "Of Grammatology", and later went on to publish such books as In Other Worlds, The Post-Colonial Critic, Outside in the Teaching Machine and A Critique of Post-colonial Reason.. She is a very close reader of texts who has succeeded in making use of the approaches and investigative procedures associated with deconstruction to good effect.

Gayatri Spivak's essay "Can the Subaltern Speak" that you referred to is one of the most widely cited essays in literary and cultural studies. Cary Nelson once told me so. This is a remarkable essay. This essay raises a number of important questions related to problematic of representation, power and subaltern consciousness. She raises the question, "can we touch the consciousness of the people, even as we investigate their politics? With what voce-consciousness can the subaltern speak?"

Other related questions are - How can the elite investigator or writer avoid the very real problem of presenting himself or herself as the authoritative representative of subaltern consciousness? Are the subalterns condemned to a perennial state of invisibility and inaudibility? Should they be eternally at the mercy of metropolitan academics and activists, however well-meaning they may be? These are very important and compellingly significant issues. Some have raised the question Can the elite hear? Are we looking at the wrong sites for understanding subaltern consciousness?

In response to your question, it needs to be said that many of the post-colonial theorists do not have either the linguistic competence or desire to deal with indigenous texts. Gayatri Spivak is different. She knows her Bengali well. She has translated some of the short stories of the revolutionary Bengali writer Mahasweta Devi into English and has written critical essays on her work. In addition, Spivak knows her Sanskrit. Her book, "A Critique of Post-colonial Reason" bears testimony to this fact. Once she told me that one of her first jobs in the United States was to teach Sanskrit at the University of Iowa. In one of my conversations, on the concept of agency, she pointed out the Sanskrit notion of "katruthvaya" comes very close to it. In fact in my book in Sinhala on modern literary concepts I used the two Sanskrit terms "kathruthvaya" and "karakathvaya"; alternatively to convey the idea of agency.

As I mentioned last week, one of the problems with post-colonial theory is that it does not pay adequate attention to the ever expanding corpus of indigenous writings. After all, they form the real centre of post-colonial textuality. This charge cannot be levelled against Gayatri Spivak. Apart from her fluency in English, French and German, she is also well-versed in Bengali, Hindi and Sanskrit. If post-colonial theory and post-colonial studies are to be more productive and clear newer terrains of inquiry, it is very important that vernacular writings should be accorded due respect.

Q: Could you give us a few samples of novels that in your view represent post-colonial literatures?

A: There are many works, written both in English as well as native languages that display characteristic features associated with post-colonial literature. Some of the best writing has emerged from India. African writers, too, have produced a significant body of work in this regard. For example, a writer like Ngugi wa Thiongo is important in this regard. The question of post-colonial literature and fiction needs to be explored in a wider canvas. Writers like Raja Rao, R.K. Narayan, Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Amos Tutola, Ngugi wa Thingo, Salman Rushdie, Amiav Ghosh, Rohinton Mistry, Arundhati Roy, M.G. Vassanji, to mention a few who have written in English, deserve careful study. The connections between post-colonial theory and fiction are complex and multiple. There are important linguistic, cultural, ideational, ideological issues that have to be disentangled and unpacked.

Let me cite the work of one Indian-born novelist, Amitav Ghosh. He is not as well-known as he should be in Sri Lanka. He has written a number of novels such as The "Shadow Line", "The Glass Palace", "The Hungry Tide and Sea of Poppies" that focus on a set of important issues related to post-colonial literature. Among them are the interplay of localism and globalism, the nature of cosmopolitanism, colonialism and culture, the emergence of new subject-positions and so on. Ghosh is also a trained anthropologist, and this experience has enabled him to explore issues of colonialism and culture with a great degree of sensitivity and understanding.

Q: So far we have been discussing issues related to post-modernism, post-structuralism, post-colonialism in terms of Western ideas, concepts and theories. Given the fact that Asia possesses a number of rich intellectual traditions, are there any similarities between Asian concepts and these Western theories that we have been discussing?

A: That is a very important question. I can cite a number of Asian texts that bear an uncanny resemblance to some of the theories we have been discussing. Let me highlight two examples, one from India and the other from Japan. One thing we must be clear about is that these European theories and Asian theories emerge from distinctly different knowledge-bases and cultural traditions. It is also important that we avoid falling into the trap of thinking that Asian theories anticipated the European ones. With these caveats in mind, let me cite the example of the Indian philosopher Nagarjuna, His work "Mula Madhyama Karika" contains many propositions on self, language and time that bear a remarkable resemblance to post-structural thinking. His main point was that reality is a linguistic construct and that relativity is vital aspect of cognition. I have published some academic papers on this subject.

The second example is from Japan. If we take a Japanese thinker like Dogen, who represents the essence of Zen culture, we see important parallels in his writings contained in Shobogenzo and post-structuralist thinking. He focused on language and play, scepticism, the constructions of self, problems of representation and communication, reading of nature as text, that remind us of some of the preoccupations and paths of inquiry of post-structuralists and post-modernists. While there are clear similarities and affinities of interest, we must not rush to make simple comparisons. By doing so, we might end up by comparing apples and oranges.

(Readers' comments and or feedback are welcome: [email protected])