Literature

Abstract

intervention. In the twentieth century it is best known as an extreme ele­ ment of American culture, which often flirted with the Republican Party. Both English and American entities still exist but the word is also used for sexual radicals. I write this soon after the murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, who news reports often typify as a “radical libertarian.” His latest film released was on Islamic oppression of women but his last film completed was on the gay liberationist and anti-immigration politician, Pirn Fortuyn. That liberation and “anti-immigration” should be so linked must seem strange. Perhaps the possibilities of liberation as we have known it in the twentieth century are gone. The postcolonial liberation struggles have resulted in Zimbabwe, Cuba, Vietnam, Turkmenistan, none of which is exactly the poster child for freedom. Women’s liberation leaves women still enslaved by childcare. Black liberation leaves African-Americans as relatively poor as they were forty years ago. Gay liberation seems to have worked at some levels but a high percentage of those who have worked for “gay lib” now oppose the gay marriage that the rest of gay—and straight— society sees as the sine qua non ofgay liberation. Liberation might be not a hope but an antique. For some, van Gogh’ s libertarianism is an alternative. For the rest of us the best response to Fortune’ s wheel is perhaps “mud­ dling through.” Terry Goldie York University Literature Who may dare improve upon Raymond Williams’s dexterous mapping, in Keywords (1976), of the socio-political morphings, through centuries, of the term literature and its connotations? Not me, certainly, though I feel compelled by Williams’ s example(s) to attempt a provisional update/ addendum. Williams’s reading of literature observes that the term began to be applied in the 1770s, in Germany, to denote the oeuvres of nations and their author-citizens (185). Post-modernism and deconstructive critiques evacuate concepts of “nation” and “citizenship” and “author(ity).” In addi­ tion, electronics-based, corporate capitalism, or “globalization,” ensures that countries and nation-states (excepting the militarist United States and 40 | Clarke Russia, Islamist Iran, revolutionary Cuba, and proto-superpower China) cannot exercise any genuine sovereignty beyond the police coercion (sup­ pression) of their worker-citizens. (Capital “flows” beyond borders, but labour “pools” within them.) For these reasons, along with the monitored migration of skilled workers, entrepreneurs, professionals, and intellectu­ als from ex-colonies to imperial métropoles, it is chic now to speak of “deterrioralized literatures” and “exilic writers.”The concept of a “national literature,” say, of Canada, or France, or Brazil, or Iraq (for that matter), must now be treated warily. However, countries continue, somehow, to exist (as anyone who pays taxes must concede), and degrees of “national” (multi)cultures, local practices, laws, languages, and governance structures (including armies) also persist. Moreover, while every “national literature” (perhaps none more so than that ofCanada) boasts numerous writers born offshore, these writers also assume (depending on length of residency) aspects of the “host” or “adoptive”culture. For example, Austin Clarke is a Barbadian—Bajan—writer by birth, but he is also now a “Canadian” one, as any comparison of his work with those of intra-Caribbean authors will reveal. In sum, the idea of a national literature is less stable now than it seemed to be in 1976, but it can hardly be accounted a fiction. Another major shift in our conception of literature has been its expan­ sion to the arts of orature—or “oral literature.” Coined in 1983 by three Nigerian critics—Chinweizu, Onwuchekwa Jemie, and Ihechuckwu Madubuike —orature denotes the form of literature most amenable to imple­ mentation by socio-politically marginalized, racial and religious minorities, and post-colonial peoples, many of whom may never “get into print,” but almost all ofwhom readily “come to voice.”Thus, “Dub”poets, Spoken Word poets, Hip-Hop rhymesters, Calypsonians, singer-songwriters (including the 2004 Nobel Prize for Literature nominee Bob Dylan), “storytellers” (hear Lousie—Miss Lou—Bennett of Jamaica), folklore presenters, orators (Malcolm X, Angela Davis, Fidel Castro, etc.), and even stand-up comics, may now be considered creators ofliterature, especially once their recorded, performance texts are published. Other...