Worlds Within: National Narratives and Global Connections in Postcolonial Writing

By Vilashini Cooppan

Worlds Within tracks the changing forms of novels and nations against a long, postcolonial twentieth century. While globalization has sometimes been understood to supersede national borders, this book distances itself from before-and-after sequences in order to trace the intersection between national and global politics.

Drawing from psychoanalytic and deconstructive accounts of identity, difference, and desire, Worlds Within explores the making and unmaking of ideas of nation, globe, race, and gender in the late imperialism of Joseph Conrad, the anticolonial nationalism and nascent Third-Worldism of W. E. B. Du Bois and Frantz Fanon, and the decolonizing nationalisms and postcolonial cosmopolitanisms of novelistic descendants, such as the Indian and Indo-Caribbean writers Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh, V.S. Naipaul, and David Dabydeen, the anglophone and francophone African writers Chinua Achebe, Nggi wa Thiong'o, Assia Djebar, and Tsitsi Dangarembga, and the Cuban postmodern novelist and theorist Severo Sarduy. Across this global field, national identity is subtended by transnational affiliations and expressed through diverse and intersecting literary forms.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Release date: Oct 8, 2009
• ISBN: 9780804772501

Book preview

e9780804772501_cover.jpg

Cultural Memory

in

the

Present

Mieke Bal and Hent de Vries, Editors

Worlds Within

National Narratives and Global Connections in Postcolonial Writing

Vilashini Cooppan

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

© 2009 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.

All rights reserved.

This book has been published with the assistance of the

University of California, Santa Cruz.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cooppan, Vilashini.

Worlds within : national narratives and global connections in postcolonial writing / Vilashini Cooppan.

p. cm.—(Cultural memory in the present)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

9780804772501

1. Nationalism and literature—History—20th century. 2. Postcolonialism in literature. 3. Literature, Modern—20th century—History and criticism. I. Title. II. Series.

PN56.N19C66 2009

809’.933581—dc22

2008049942

Table of Contents

Dedication

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Preface

1 - Introduction: Inner Territories

2 - National Imaginaries, Global Flows, and Uncanny Repetitions: Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and the Postcolonial Novel

3 - The Soul of Nationhood: W.E. B. Du Bois and the Psychic Politics of Place

4 - Ghostly Forms: Race, Nation, and Genre in Frantz Fanon

5 - New Nations, New Novels

6 - My Nation, My Object: Severo Sarduy’s Fantasmatic Cuba

Postscript: Remapping the Nation - The map was in my head.

Notes

Index

Cultural Memory in the Present

For Graham

Acknowledgments

In writing this book, I have been fortunate to have the assistance and encouragement of many people and institutions. A dissertation fellowship at Stanford University’s Humanities Center under the directorship of Charlie Junkerman and Wanda Corn provided a stimulating environment of good company and active thinking in which to begin to test some of these ideas. Herbert Lindenberger and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht in the Stanford Department of Comparative Literature and Ania Loomba in the Department of English insightfully guided the dissertation. Ania followed this project from first word to last, helping me to imagine its future and in turn offering her model of a passionate postcolonial scholarship that thinks beyond borders while keeping race, gender, class, and nation close. Suvir Kaul also lent his keen, meticulous ear to many accounts of this project and regularly reminded me, as only friends can, of its stakes. A University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship, under the warm and thoughtful guidance of Susan Gillman at the University of California at Santa Cruz, allowed me to start to conceive the dissertation as a book.

At Yale University, I am grateful to the Morse Junior Faculty Fellowship for a year’s support of writing time and to my colleagues across the university for years of their support, fellowship, and inspiration. In my own Department of Comparative Literature, I thank Pericles Lewis, Ann Gaylin, Alex Woloch, Tyrus Miller, Catherine Labio, Ala Alryyes, Richard Maxwell, and Alex Beecroft for their good companionship as fellow teachers; Michael Holquist for his big vision of world literature and belief that my own capacities could match it; and Roberto González-Echevarría, Peter Brooks, and David Quint for reading parts of this manuscript at the right time, and with the right questions. My friend and colleague Katie Trumpener very generously read all of the manuscript, on two occasions, and helped me to see what mattered most in it. Her appetite for new texts, new ideas, and a Comparative Literature to encompass them has been an inspiration. Sara Suleri Goodyear, in whose English classroom I first encountered postcolonial studies, taught me again as a supportive colleague, co-teacher, and gracious reader of an early draft. I am also grateful to Hazel Carby, Michael Denning, Paul Gilroy, Vera Kutzinski, Christopher Miller, Arjun Appadurai, and Carol Breckenridge for in various ways opening the spaces for my thinking, and for reading and listening to my thoughts with acumen, encouragement, and friendship. Alicia Schmidt-Camacho and Stephen Pitti did all this and more; they were the best of comrades.

At the University of California at Santa Cruz, I have been fortunate once again to have Susan Gillman as my friend, interlocutor, and reader. Chris Connery also read the manuscript with a salutary sense of the big picture. Rob Wilson read it twice and made each reading count, for which I thank him. David Marriott generously invited me to participate in a symposium on Fanon at The Center for Cultural Studies, offered a sharp reading of a long chapter that helped me to reshape and refine, and has been a companion in many of the questions I have pursued. I also thank many more colleagues in Literature, Carla Freccero especially, other colleagues in the programs in Feminist Studies and the History of Consciousness, and finally my students, for the intelligence, insight, and friendship that have livened the past few years. I owe a special debt to Jody Greene for making both this manuscript and my time in Santa Cruz so much better. I am grateful to the President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program for again supporting my work, this time as a faculty member at the University of California, and the Institute for Humanities Research at Santa Cruz and the Literature Department for course relief time. The Center for Cultural Studies at Santa Cruz, under the directorship of Chris Connery and Gail Hershatter and now Carla Freccero, and The Center for the Study of the Novel at Stanford, under the directorship of Franco Moretti and Margaret Cohen and now Alex Woloch, created rich local environments that stimulated and supported my thinking. I am grateful to Franco, Margaret, and Alex for reading different parts of my work so generously and to both Centers for invitations to present it. I also thank the other institutions and individuals who have included me in panels, conferences, anthologies, and special journal issues. The careful editing of David Kazanjian, David Eng, Susan Gillman, Alys Weinbaum, Robert Gooding-Williams, and Dwight McBride certainly improved portions of this book. Robert Barsky, David Damrosch, Rob Nixon, Lisa Lowe, and Stathis Gourgouris read the manuscript as well, with kind encouragement and smart, nuanced suggestions. Norris Pope, Emily-Jane Cohen, Sarah Crane Newman, and Tim Roberts at Stanford University Press have been supportive, attentive, and patient in all phases of this process, and Cynthia Lindlof was a meticulous and gracious copyeditor.

This book owes a great debt to a group of extraordinary women who have sustained it, and me, for many years. Sandhya Shukla and Debarati Sanyal have been interlocutors, readers, models, and friends whose voices echo throughout my thinking. Linda Garber, Barbara Blinick, Elizabeth Wahl, and Pamela Cheek have been great companions in academia. Noa Wheeler and Sumana Cooppan provided the most material of aid—bibliographic assistance and loving childcare. Several other talented young women also cared for my children over the years and literally made my writing possible. Laurie Grunebaum helped to make it happen, and I thank her.

Finally, I thank my parents and grandparents, whose journey from apartheid South Africa to Australia, Canada, the United States, and back to a free South Africa taught me that identity is lived in motion over a global map, and that nations can always change. My sisters, Yashmin and Sumana, my cousin Kalyani, and my children, Kabir and Rohan, provided comfort, distraction, and delight; the best reminder that writing happens while we live. My greatest thanks and deepest love go to my partner, Graham Boyd, for his belief in this book, his care for me, and his extraordinary vision of a world in which all changes are possible.

Acknowledgment of Previous Presentations and Publications

Parts of this manuscript were delivered as talks at the Modern Language Association conference (1994); "Écrit/Ecran en Afrique Francophone, Script/Screen in Francophone Africa: Ousmane Sembène, Assia Djebar, at the University of Victoria, Canada (1994); Transnational Racializations: Psychoanalysis, Slavery, Post-Coloniality, at the Center for Cultural Studies, University of California at Santa Cruz (1997); the American Studies Association conference (1999); One Hundred Years of The Souls of Black Folk, at Northwestern University (2003); the American Studies Association conference (2003); the American Comparative Literature Association conference (2005); States of Emergency: Alternative Temporalities and U.S. Studies, at the University of Wisconsin at Madison (2006); Fanon: A Symposium," at The Center for Cultural Studies at Santa Cruz (2006); and as invited lectures at the University of California at Santa Cruz, at Davis, and at Irvine (2003), and at Yale University (1998, 2003).

Portions of Chapter 3 appeared in "The Double Politics of Double Consciousness: Nationalism and Globalism in The Souls of Black Folk," Public Culture 17.2 (2005): 299–318 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), special issue on W. E. B. Du Bois, ed. Robert Gooding-Williams and Dwight McBride; and in Move On Down the Line: Domestic Science, Transnational Politics, and Gendered Allegory in Du Bois, in Next to the Color Line: Gender, Sexuality, and W. E. B. Du Bois, ed. Susan Gillman and Alys Eve Weinbaum (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 35–68. Portions of Chapter 5 appeared as "Mourning Becomes Kitsch: The Aesthetics of Loss in Severo Sarduy’s Cobra," in Loss: The Politics of Mourning, ed. David Kazanjian and David Eng (Berkeley: The Regents of the University of California, The University of California Press, 2003), 251–77. They appear here by permission.

Note on Translations

All translations in this book are mine, unless otherwise acknowledged. For the reader’s convenience, where an established English translation exists of a French or Spanish work, I cite both the translation and the original.

Preface

This book explores the realm where the territories of the political meet the terrain of the psyche. Its major concerns, nationalism and psychoanalysis, might well be charged with obsolescence in the contemporary world, the price of an almost myopic focus on the levels of the bounded and the particular (territorial sovereignty, individual psychosexual development) at a moment when, by most accounts, we are going ever more global, connecting ever more intricately to the world outside ourselves, and living our lives in the increasingly larger light—or longer shadow—of global culture. Such indeed, was the import of a question posed to me many years ago, when this project was in its infancy. But why work with psychoanalysis? my interlocutor demanded. It is, after all, a dying field. The question that began as a demon and persisted as a ghost became, in the end, a gift. For it predicted, long before I knew it, that Worlds Within would find its animating concern in tracing the spectral afterlife of ideas, events, and narratives that, far from dying, are always living on.

Psychoanalysis, Jacques Derrida has famously charged, is a body of thought coextensive with the proper name of Sigmund Freud (or, if one admits heretics, Freud and Jacques Lacan), a theory that seeks and finds itself everywhere.¹ Like the imperialism with which Derrida links it, psychoanalysis proposes a description of a bounded territory (self rather than colony) and then extends it into a model of worldwide span. But psychoanalysis (again like imperialism) has also been subject, from those very corners in which it took up residence, to contestation of a sort for which end is hardly the right term. Freud’s psychoanalysis is not that of the colonial ethnopsychoanalysts who explained empire through the dependency complexes of natives, nor that of Frantz Fanon, feminism, postcolonial theory, and critical race theory. This historical dynamism, to borrow a term from Fanon, lends psychoanalysis the uncanny aura of something that is outmoded and contemporary, dead yet ghostly alive, gone but not gone.² If psychoanalysis is dead, it is dead in the same sense that empire is past. As Nicholas Dirks says, The postcolonial world is one in which we may live after colonialism but never without it.³

Nationalism, too, lives in this limbo. Critically visible and conceptually potent for much of the past two decades in studies of the nation’s invented traditions, imagined communities, and discursive instantiation, nations and nationalisms have more recently been regularly dismissed as largely residual forms in the era of globalization. Derrida, for example, claims that nationalism, even in its worst and most sinister manifestations, those that are the most imperialistic and the most vulgarly violent, has emerged as a "universal philosophical model, a philosophical telos that today stands arrested, caught at the crossroads between this intensification of so-called international exchanges, and this exasperation of national identities and identifications."⁴ The rapid flows of capital, persons, goods, information cultures, and languages across national borders, coupled with the increasing power of various stateless actors, from the transnational corporation to the regional economic market to the diasporic community to the terrorist cell, have undeniably reshaped the political and imaginative construct of the nation. But just because the global international has altered the nation does not mean it has rendered it obsolete, a mere analytical archaism withering away before our eyes. For as a host of late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century political events attest, from the rise of ethnic nationalisms in the new Europe to the spread of newly imperial nationalism in the post–9/11 United States to the ongoing work of decolonization through popular nationalisms in the societies of the South, nation-states remain a major, perhaps inescapable, container for contemporary politics, ambitions, and transformations.

More than entombing the nation, the present enjoins on us the task of reanimating it. This means learning to see nations in more places and in more ways, as less bounded by their borders and more inextricably connected to all that seems to lie outside them, as well as all that lies inside: the alien, the unheimlich (uncanny), the other within. Finally, this project entails rethinking what Derrida calls the telos and topology of nationalism, a task for which I have enlisted both psychoanalysis and narrative theory. Beneath the image of a progressivist march of nation-state politics congenitally fixed on territoriality and dead-ending now in the flows of the global present lies a history in waiting, the history of how national identities and identifications have themselves been made through movement. Nations, this book argues, are fantasmatic objects knotted together by ambivalent forces of desire, identification, memory, and forgetting, even as they simultaneously move within, across, and beyond a series of spatial and temporal borders (us/them, territory/flow, present/past, life/ death). The space of nations is never simply their own. What the structure of national identification conceives of as the outside—the world beyond the border, the cultural other outside the compact—is in fact always already inside, always already present in the very moment and process of national formation.

Worlds Within seeks to recover the structuring presence of both the psychic inside and the global outside within a series of national narratives that range the globe, span the past century, and, not least of all, bring the outside in and the inside out. It further explores how the global is a kind of inside, an imaginary of cross-cultural connection and movement that has been mobilized to express various national identifications and disidentifications, from the adopted imperial Englishness of the Polish émigré Joseph Conrad and the Trinidadian colonial V. S. Naipaul, to the anticolonial nationalism and Third-Worldism of the African American W. E. B. Du Bois, the Martinican Fanon, and the West and East African novelists Chinua Achebe and Ngũgἷ wa Thiong’o, to the postcolonial national-cosmopolitanism of the Indian writers Salman Rushdie and Amitav Ghosh, the South African writer J. M. Coetzee, and the Cuban writer Severo Sarduy, and the global feminist revisions of anticolonial nationalism in the northern and southern African novelists Assia Djebar and Tsitsi Dangarembga. Several of these writers betray a certain distance from the place into which they were born and a powerful pull toward other places, be they imperial centers, emergent new nations, or regional alignments. The majority of these writers are exiles, border-crossers, migrants, cosmopolitans, and global citizens, while a few stay put and write their nations from within their borders. Regardless of their individual physical locales, all of the writers surveyed here reveal something about the nation’s psychic locale—that incessant movement between distinct spaces, times, and attachments through which national identification (and disidentification) comes into being. So Du Bois’s African America is bonded to the preslavery Africa he recalls and the independent Africa he dreams; Fanon’s colonized Martinique is redeemed by his vision of a free Algeria; Sarduy’s image of postrevolutionary Cuba crystallizes from the perspective of his French exile, poststructuralist loyalties, and Indo-Tibetan exotic-erotic; and Conrad’s adopted Thames runs straight to the Congo while, at a later stage, literary descendants of Conrad like Achebe, Naipaul, Dabydeen, Rushdie, and Ghosh think their respective postcolonial localities—Nigeria, Trinidad, Guyana, India—in relation to the metropolitan other of England and English.

As a point of attachment, the nation is a moving target. It emerges here across several historical periods, geographical locales, and political histories, always against the backdrop of the global modernity produced by colonialism, imperialism, and their aftermath and always subtended by mobile networks of political desire and identification. Global modernity, like the nation-form it disseminates, is marked by spatial and temporal discontinuity, unevenness, and overlapping. This book explores these breaks and joinings, as well the shifting linkages of the nation concept to the identity categories of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and class, in the interests of situating the nation form itself (more than national literatures or national writers) as the object of comparative criticism. In this effort to world the nation, I have found it necessary to cross several borders, including critical ones. Worlds Within thus traces a series of ghostly encounters, from both sides of the imperial divide, between nationalism, psychoanalysis, narrative textuality, and the deconstruction whose method cuts across them all. I have explored several instances in which it is possible to suture psychoanalytic models of longing to national, and global, discourses of belonging. My aim has not been to present a unified psychoanalytic model of national identification or the nation form, or stand-alone psychoanalytic readings of emblematic national-global texts, but rather to explore how national identification and national narrative work. The reading of the one reveals the operation of the other in all their mutual variety and difference. The work of national identification and the making of that heterogeneous entity, the subject of national desire, is sedimented, I argue, into narrative form. Hence this book’s guiding concern with narrative modes of connection, especially those exploited by the novel.

The book begins with a series of encounters between the critical study of nations and nationalism and globalization theory, between psychoanalysis and nationalism, and between psychoanalysis and deconstruction, in which the nation surfaces as an especially contested term. The introductory chapter also traces the temporal structures that emerge from these couplings, focusing on the plots of recursivity and return (psychoanalytic uncanniness, deconstructive spectrality), as well as the linear plots that animate notions of nationalism’s self-actualizing teleology (bildung ) and fuel the attachment of the nation form to the genre of the novel and the mode of allegory. Elaborating a model of national desire that cuts across these linear plots, the chapter turns to fantasy, fantasm, mourning, and melancholia in order to explore the range of temporal and spatial connections on which national identification depends. The imperial and postcolonial national novel provides one record of these connections, as I argue in a concluding discussion of Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981), a national novel in global form.

Chapter 2 explores the convergence of imperialism, nationalism, and psychoanalysis through a reading of what is arguably postcolonial criticism’s most iconic allegory, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899). The novella shares with the Freudian uncanny an oscillating temporality that renders the present continuous with the past and the self coincident with the other. The convergence of these two fin-de-siècle fables of civilization and its discontents reveals the heart of the West, the soul of Europe expressed in two of its most powerful, most exported, subjectifying stories. But when explored in other places and other times, in conjunction with other narratives about the formation of society and self, their convergence exposes a significantly more diffuse, polycentric, and differentiated zone. Conrad’s discourse of British national imperialism is itself constantly invaded by the space and time of a global elsewhere, while Conrad’s literary descendants uncannily repeat this process in reverse, recasting England from its imperial peripheries. These rewritings of Heart of Darkness further describe the changing forms of both nations and novels, from the resistant realism of Achebe’s portrait of a cultured and deeply historical precolonial Africa in Arrow of God (1964), to the mournfully introspective narration that marks Naipaul’s nostalgia for a lost European imperialism in A Bend in the River (1979), to the narrative discontinuities through which Dabydeen chronicles a multiethnic, diasporic, and postimperial London in The Intended (1981).

If literary texts are subject to a ghostly life of return and reanimation, so too are the narratives of nation and psyche. Du Bois, the subject of Chapter 3, initially translated nineteenth-century German romantic nationalism into his own racial nationalism even as he fractured any symmetry between race and nation with the psychic construct of double consciousness. The pre-psychoanalytic language of the psyche that Du Bois draws on describes a black self located simultaneously within the United States and without it, both in the sense of lacking the nation and lying beyond it, in such extranational places and times as ancient Egypt, precolonial Ethiopia, and the resurgent black world of Du Bois’s dreaming. The divisions and connections of double consciousness are mirrored in the formal strategies of Du Bois’s polygeneric manifesto, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), and writ large in his social realist romance, Dark Princess (1928), and final trilogy, The Black Flame (1957–61). Du Bois’s straddling of racialist, nationalist, anti-imperialist, and diasporic allegiances illustrates one of this book’s central tensions: the simultaneous pull between territorialization and deterritorialization, between a concept of identity rendered isomorphic with place and emblematic of race and nation, and identity reconceived as that which evades place per se and constitutes an altogether different kind of being, at once more interiorized and more diffused. Du Bois’s famous figure of a color line that belts the world expresses one vision of this identity,⁵ strikingly different in its lateral energies and transverse networks from the recursive-repetitive loop of the uncanny, yet ghosted nonetheless by the haunted work of racial memory and the allegorical figuration that is, for Du Bois, one of its formal modes.

Fanon also turns to the troubled plots of racial and national time, and similarly considers the range of possible forms through which they may be either surmounted or achieved. Chapter 4 explores the ghostly continuities between Fanon the Martinican-born psychiatrist and Fanon the anticolonial Algerian nationalist. It finds in both a common engagement with the topological limitations of territory, both colony and nation, by means of the oscillatory temporality of consciousness, including the racial consciousness Fanon attempts to get beyond in Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and the national consciousness espoused in The Wretched of the Earth (1961). The ghostly form of form links Black Skin’s polyvocal, polyphonal interrogation of race in the colony, richly illustrated with colonial and anticolonial novels, poems, plays, and films alongside its case histories and philosophical-psychoanalytic debates, with Wretched’s invocation of nation in the postcolony. Wretched is both a manifesto and a conjuration, a call for a resistant internationalism born of anti-imperial nationalism yet also coexisting with it in the peculiar style, and form, of the ghost. Through a reading in dialogue with Derrida’s Specters of Marx (1993), I argue for Fanon’s body of work as a model of fantasmatic nationalism, nationalism that incorporates outside into inside, globe into nation in such a way as to suggest that those externalities were always there from the beginning. Far from tarring Fanon with an outmoded particularism, restoring nationalism to a figure more lately embraced as cosmopolitan, Chapter 4 attempts to account for the ghostly forms, including what I call the ghostly generic forms, through which identitarian desires are expressed in national and global eras. With his heterogeneric writing, Fanon, like Du Bois, brings an expanded sense of the various forms, modes, and styles through which the nation is written. Chapter 5 considers the African novel from independence onward as one genre in which the heterogeneity and heterochronicity of Fanon’s form return. As the work of the Kenyan novelist, playwright, and essayist Ngũgi, the Algerian feminist novelist and filmmaker Djebar, the Zimbabwean feminist novelist Dangarembga, and the postmodern South African novelist Coetzee show, the postcolonial novel has a particular capacity to capture the multiplicity of time, place, and language that is the peculiar cast of the postcolonial nation, in which liberation is still an unfinished project and loss remains the nation’s dominant mode.

Chapter 6 returns to the novel of nationalism, as irreverently deconstructed by the expatriate Cuban-turned-French poststructuralist Sarduy. Breaking with a broadly national-allegorical tradition of Latin American literature, Sarduy’s poststructuralist, post-Boom novel Cobra (1972) undermines the discourses of both identity and territory by charting the global wanderings and multiple metamorphoses of a Cuban drag queen en route to India and Tibet. In Sarduy’s playful transculturation of the French nouveau roman (new novel) to the Cuban national novel, and of the theoretical apparatus of Lacanian psychoanalysis to the Spanish language and a distinctly orientalist imaginary, lies yet another model of the changing relationship between psychoanalysis, nationalism, and the novel on the global stage. This chapter, like earlier ones, also turns to the Freudian models of mourning and melancholia in order to consider Sarduy’s parodic-performative novelistic kitsch as a different kind of response to national loss and another expression of national desire that gets at its object from afar, in the style of anamorphosis. The book concludes with a postscript devoted to subcontinental portraits of national memory, mourning, and movement in Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988) and Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines (1989). Here, as throughout the book, I consider the possibilities of thinking the nation through the practice of fantasmatic cartography—the mapping of national and global territories of belonging through an analysis of the psychic work of longing. While this work has continuities with the analysis of loss undertaken by trauma theory, it stops short of turning loss into the meaning or outcome of the national project per se. Nations, variously imperial, anticolonial, and postcolonial, are structured by loss, but they nonetheless remain.

I have characterized Worlds Within as a book concerned with explanatory ideas, historical events, and cultural narratives that, far from dying, are always living on. The book takes spectral uncanniness both as its theoretical occasion and its formal model. I have organized the argument around the rhythms of repetition and return. Each chapter is conceived as a chronological arc, beginning with a literary or theoretical masterplot (Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Du Bois’s double consciousness, Fanon’s divided racial-colonial subject, Sarduy’s vintage nouveau roman) and then proceeding from that point of origin to various reworkings. In the case of Conrad and his postcolonial inheritors, the novel recurs and is reanimated in novelistic form. In other cases, an initial theoretical elaboration is followed by a fictional quickening, as in the transition from the race manifesto of The Souls of Black Folk to the allegorical romance of Dark Princess, or the pairing of Fanon’s theory of nationalism with postcolonial African novels. The passage from Sarduy’s Cobra to the exegeses of its novelistic strategy afforded by Sarduy’s theoretical writings reverses this trajectory. The net effect of these narrative arcs is to confirm the uncanniness of an exemplary body of postcolonial literature, of an implicit historical zone (imperialism and its aftermath), and of a specific narrative of literary history that emerges from this crossing and recrossing of distinct literary spaces and times. I aim to trouble a series of definitional borders, beginning with the line between nationalism’s territories and psychoanalysis’s interiors and extending to those that would divide the national from the global, the fictional from the theoretical, and the novel from the generic ghosts that are the substance of its continued life. Manifesto and romance, epic and tragedy, like the modes of allegory and parody, all surface in these pages. Through tracing their apparitions and their returns across a long twentieth century, I hope to show the many ways in which narrative representation makes political identification possible, particularly the simultaneous coexistence of national and global identifications.

Beneath the formal structure and critical preoccupations of this book, with its many movements back and forth and in and out, there also exists a set of questions posed from movement and addressed to method. In answering them, I have thought of movement as method. If the nation, the novel, and psychoanalysis do indeed draw our gaze in two directions at once—inward to their imaginary psychic territories and outward to their global reaches or, on a different axis, backward to their hegemonic histories and forward to their postcolonial afterlives—what can we learn from such double vision? Understood as an epistemological response to the philosophical condition of living after (a condition as old as it is new), and mobilized as a particular lens on literature, politics, and identity in the period stretching from late imperialism to postcolonial diaspora, seeing double is the guiding method of this book. For just as no map, including those of literature’s cartographers, can be drawn with straight lines or single planes alone, so no act of reading can proceed without circling back to familiar territories, times, and texts, and thus retracing the tracks of a different, and double, life for the future.

1

Introduction: Inner Territories

Troubled Territory: Thinking the Nation in an Era of Globalization

The history of nations, writes Étienne Balibar, beginning with our own, is always already presented to us in the form of a narrative which attributes to these entities the continuity of a subject.¹ As defined by Balibar, the nation form owes its existence to a retrospective illusion, a fiction of collective identity produced by a regular movement from the present into the past and paralleled by a spatial equivalent. Paraphrasing J. G. Fichte’s foundational essay on becoming national, Addresses to the German Nation [Reden an die Deutsche Nation (1808)], Balibar writes: the ‘external frontiers’ of the state have to become ‘internal frontiers’ or—which amounts to the same thing—external frontiers have to be imagined constantly as a projection and protection of an internal collective personality, which each of us carries within ourselves and enables us to inhabit the space of the state as a place where we have always been—and always will be—‘at home’ (95). For Balibar the legacy of colonialism intensifies this relation as immigration from former colonies into the former metropoles effects a literal interiorization of the exterior that reproduces racialized practices of internal exclusion, alongside an exteriorization of the interior resulting from the formation of postcolonial states throughout the immense periphery of the planet (43). Often invoked to explain such excesses as cultural nationalism, ethnic chauvinism, and new racism, the unification of subject and nation and of interiorization and exteriorization described by Balibar also reorients us to the nation’s other history as a project of plural attachments, including the border-crossing blurring of global and national identifications that has been described as cosmopolitics and linked to projects of liberation.² Thinking through the subject, and lingering on its propensity to mix up the realms of inside and outside, past and present as it constructs the narrative of identity, can we rethink the nation as an entity made through movement? To do so, we must first revisit the scene of nationalism.

Grounded and bounded by the problematics of territory and identity, nationalism seems to find its central tenet in a freezing isomorphism, from European romantic nationalism’s organic symmetry of soil and character, to imperial nationalism’s attempt to consolidate its power by quite literally mapping identity onto space on the conference tables of Europe, to anticolonial nationalism’s call for the restoration of occupied lands to their original inhabitants, to the mystified and mythified homeland that articulates postcolonial nationalism at home and in the diasporic abroad. Of course, not all nations can lay claim to a state, by which I understand the governmental, juridical, and economic structures attached to territory, nor can individual states assume the linguistic, religious, ethnic, and cultural homogeneity of those within their borders, or even that all of their subjects will live within their borders. Alternative spaces to the territorialized nation-state exist—the multiethnic cosmopolitan crossroads, the transnational ethnic imaginary, the regional bloc, the world-system, the network, the new social movements based in identities that cross national borders (green, antiglobalization, feminist, queer), others grounded in the local, and, of course, the ubiquitous global sensibility. Just as contemporary globalization theory espouses, in Anthony D. King’s words, the rejection of the nationally-constituted society as the appropriate object of discourse, or unit of social and cultural analysis, and to varying degrees, a commitment to conceptualising ‘the world as a whole,’ these various alternatives to the nation-state reach out to the history of global connection. ³ If some critics understand globalization, with its pluralizing flows of culture and capital, to herald what Kenichi Ohmae calls the end of the nation-state,⁴ others argue that the standardizing reign of global capital has created new degrees of inequity among and within nations and ever more virulent forms of nationalism, including state corruption, ethnic genocide, and new imperialism. Paul Smith situates globalization’s mobile utopia, a kind of isochronic world wherein the constrictions of time and space have been overcome, as capitalism’s millennial dream, a form of capital accumulation that derives from the moment of direct imperialism and is in many respects the continuation of colonialism and imperialism by other means.⁵

Seemingly homogenizing and hegemonizing, a Deleuzian smooth space of flows in which capital finds its mirror image and most potent prefix, the term global is for many critics inseparable from the globalization and globality that together function, in R. Radhakrishnan’s account, as a descriptive totality that disallows the very chronotope of the ‘outside.’ Radhakrishnan, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and others have proposed, by way of Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger, the terms world, worlding, and worldliness as alternative ways to name the rich heterogeneity, coevality, and interconnectedness of human experience, much as other critics have hastened to rehabilitate cosmopolitanism’s strictly European roots for newly mobile critical uses.⁶ As I understand it, global names the transverse networks of influence and exchange that interrupt and cut across the fictive linearities of national history and the fictive homogeneities of national subjectivity, while also locating those mobile subjectivities and histories within the world-systems of imperialism, nationalism, and capitalism. To use, as this book will, global to designate the extranational is both to keep alive the history of modern capital that is the motor of empire and its aftermath, and to resist the notion that capital is the only object that global processes can designate and that wholesale homogenization is the only way in which they can work. If global names the world dreamed by Euro-American capital expansion, it also names a cultural and psychic process of connection, of making sense of some bounded identity, some home, by reaching out to something that seems to lie beyond it.

The globalization whose economic stranglehold we need to resist is not entirely synonymous with the global we need to theorize. As a process that encompasses both sameness and difference, compression and expansion, convergence and divergence, the concept of the global has less to do with universals than, as Stuart Hall points out, with how the global/ local reciprocally re-organise and re-shape one another.⁷ Marked by this kind of relational thinking, the best theories of globalization engage both economic and cultural processes and refuse to antinomize their effects as either heterogenizing or homogenizing. Still less do they imply that globalization entails the wholesale transcendence of national forms and imaginaries, choosing instead to explore how local and national cultural practices contest the putative universalism of transnational capitalism.⁸ Finally, these theories resituate globalization not as a particular end point in time, modernity’s final form, but rather as a process of connection that regularly intercalates one time and one space with others, reaching all the way back from the present to the nineteenth-century capitalist expansion of imperial nations to the fifteenth-century formation of a world-system dominated by European mercantilist states and divided into core and peripheral zones, for Immanuel Wallerstein, and even earlier to the eras of non-European hegemony under the Chinese, Islamic, Indo-Persian, and Egyptian empires, for scholars such as Andre Gunder Frank. For Hall, globalized timespace is multiply differentiated and conjunctural, cut across by a series of transverse, transnational, transcultural movements and the double inscriptions of colonial and metropolitan times, while for David Harvey and Ulf Hannerz, globalized timespace is uniformly accelerated and interconnected. Wallerstein and other world systems theorists describe a constant and nonsynchronous collision between the developed and developing world over some five hundred, perhaps five thousand, years of human history.⁹ For the sociologist Roland Robertson, globalization is a historically deep, conceptually double, cultural process characterized by the interpenetration of the universalization of particularism and the particularization of universalism, with the practical result that "the idea of nationalism (or particularism) develops only in tandem with internationalism."¹⁰

This book traces a politics of relationality within which the national and the global are tandem ideas, twinned identifications, and doubled dreams. Even as postcolonial criticism labors to recognize the work of continuing empire in the global movements of capital and culture, it should not cede the concept of the global to hegemony alone. Nor should it dismiss all that is opened by the possibility of reading political ideologies, whether globalization or the nation that globalization is erroneously understood to have ended, precisely as dreams: forms of imagining shaped by the peculiar timespace of memory, fantasy, and desire and structured, as Freud intuited, by a curiously double logic of signification. Writing in his 1918 case history, From the History of an Infantile Neurosis, Freud observes how his patient’s dream puts an imaginary and desirable converse in the place of the historical truth. These phantasies, therefore, corresponded exactly to the legends by means of which a nation that has become great and proud tries to conceal the insignificance and failure of its beginnings.¹¹ Nations, like subjects, say what they wish were true (a glorious past, a childhood in which they reigned supreme), not what is or was true. Following Freud’s injunction to interpret dreamwork by opposites, we might trace the futurity that haunts the nation’s pastness, the differences that subtend the discourses of national unity, and the global affiliations that puncture national borders, not just under late twentieth-century globalization but over the course of the nation form. This is not an account of some universal structure (all nations, all subjects) but rather an exploration of changing articulations of the logics of interiorization and exteriorization, subjectivity and nationality at distinct moments in the history of imperialism, decolonization, and postcolonialism. Such relational, conjunctural, and double reading charts a middle ground through postcolonial studies, which has often split between those whose postnationalist and postmodernist orientations lead them to privilege cosmopolitanism, diaspora, migration, and hybrid forms of subjectivity, culture, and textuality, and those who voice an oppositional investment in the nation and other besieged particularisms, such as race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality, operating within and against global capital.¹² To recover the nation in its global forms and through its subjective and narrative modes is to engage both these traditions. Finding the different times and spaces, modes and meanings of what has passed as global, whether empire’s sway, anti-imperialism’s Third World, or postcolonial diaspora’s flows into former imperial centers, helps to chart ideologies of nationhood across what I will call, with debts to Giovanni Arrighi, the long postcolonial twentieth century.

Defined as the basic temporal unit in the analysis of world-scale processes of capital accumulation, Arrighi’s long century names a place and time characterized by three common factors: continuity, change, and flow.¹³ The four century-cycles of his thesis (fifteenth- to early seventeenth-century Venice, late sixteenth- to eighteenth-century Amsterdam, mid-eighteenth- to early twentieth-century London, and late nineteenth-century to present-day New York) are each distinguished by (1) a continuity between capitalism and the state; (2) a change born of the fact that each successive state was larger and more powerful than its predecessor; and (3) the structuring flows of capital passing from declining to rising centers. In this accumulative and expansionist mode, Ian Baucom argues, the past finds itself not simply succeeded by the present but incorporated into it, rendered curiously contiguous and contemporaneous in the style of Benjaminian history or Freudian melancholia. Capitalism’s modernity thus becomes a movement in which accumulation and accretion, speculation and melancholy, exchange and repetition provide, in Baucom’s words, plot and counterplot of the long twentieth century.¹⁴ Elsewhere Baucom defines global form as a strictly regulated flow dynamics that balances the relentless centrifugal distributions of capital with their inevitable centripetal return to a seat of high finance.¹⁵ In Arrighi’s account of successive rise and decline, Baucom discerns an end of history that happens not once but serially and a spectral counternarrative of the global formulated as the following law: expansion contracts . . . contraction enriches . . . and enrichment haunts (162). This haunting effect is as visible in global finance capital, whose spaces of flows find their dematerializing, dedifferentiating logic of exchange troubled by the return of cultural, spatial, and temporal difference, as in genre. Glossing Fredric Jameson’s foundational argument in The Political Unconscious (1981), Baucom casts genre as a cognitive space of flow: an epistemological structure that, as it achieves a (generally metropolitan) hegemony, is capable of expanding its range of address and subordinating virtually every corner of the globe to its designs but that, when it does so, and so helps to define the specifically historical ideology of its age, finds its articulations haunted by a ghost language that subordinates its ideology of the present age to the ideology ‘of all the dead generations’ (163). Baucom understands Jameson’s historicism, like Derrida’s deconstruction and globalization theory, to function as critical instances of the law of global/generic form, according to which conceptual coinages first expand, then contract, and finally haunt, with the end result of crafting global literary studies themselves in the style of finance capital. With debts to each of these critical models, in this book I attempt to trace a form of being global and thinking globally in which it is the idea of the nation that expands, contracts, and haunts, and in which the ghost language of both nation and genre invites the practice of comparative postcolonial studies.

Premised on the interrelation of continuity, change, and flow over a block of time, as well as on an internal logic of return, the long postcolonial twentieth century I envision is predicated on a certain continuity between capitalism, the state, and the nation across the periods of imperialism, anticolonialism and decolonization, neocolonialism, and postcolonial diaspora. Such a century necessarily also describes a change in the nature, reach, and imagined character of the nation form—expanding for empire, aligning for anticolonialism, emerging for decolonization, decaying for neocolonialism, disembodying for postcolonial diaspora. Seen thus, the long postcolonial twentieth century would have to be conceived as a swath of space and time structured by flows. These are flows not just of persons (colonials and revolutionaries, ex-colonials and cosmopolitans) and of capital, but also of ideas, of desires, and of expressive forms, the novel in particular, that combine to create, sustain, and represent nations. To think the nation as a spectralized flow is to go against the grain of its modern ideal, understood as a spirit of collective identity and zone of governmentality bonded to a bounded space, a linearized historical time, and a singular citizen-self. It is also to contest the notion that we are, in the era of globalization, entirely beyond nations and national identifications. Like ghosts, they keep coming back in the course of the still unfinished long twentieth century.

As Anne McClintock has observed, the category of the postcolonial