Neocolonial Discourses Research Articles

Semiologies of Travel: From Gautier to Baudrillard (review)

David Scott. Semiologies of Travel: From Gautier to Baudrillard. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004. ix + 235 pp. ISBN 0-521-83853-3, $75.00. Scott begins his account of nineteenth- and twentieth-century French travel literature by pointing out how "the quest for the new and the different is paradoxically accompanied by a nostalgia for an integrated semiotic system" (2). In support of his point that, after the nineteenth century, this nostalgia has become "an integral part of the appeal of the exotic," he quotes from my Exotic Memories: Literature, Colonialism, and the Fin de Siècle (Stanford UP, 1991), noting that part of the underlying project of exoticism is to recover a "'concrete apprehension of others that is [ . . . ] typical of traditional communities but has been [ . . . ] eliminated from our own'" (2; Scott's ellipses). While understandably pleased at the positive reference to my book, I was nonetheless puzzled by those two ellipses. Had I really made such an authoritative statement about "traditional communities" and their difference from "our own"? It turned out that my original claim was rather less emphatic: what I had actually said was that the project of exoticism is to recover a "concrete apprehension of others that is (or so the critics of modernity hypothesize) typical of traditional communities but has been, or is being, eliminated from our own" (9). Minor as they might appear, these two edits are in fact symptomatic of major problems with Scott's book. Most notably, by dropping my cautionary parenthetical aside about "the critics of modernity," Scott signals his commitment to having familiar ideological assertions regarding the relation between tradition and modernity stand as truth claims rather than hypotheses. While such assertions are doubtless central to the exoticist project, it is by no means certain what bearing, if any, they have on reality—or, indeed, whether the concepts upon which they depend, such as "modernity" and "tradition," are anything more than cultural phantasms that have for centuries now provided an extraordinarily convenient way of figuring our dominant relation to (those we insist on perceiving as) "others." Very occasionally, Scott does acknowledge the phantasmatic dynamics of the literary tradition he is examining. He admits early on, for instance, that "the comparative stability of other, non-European cultures and civilizations is partly illusory" (6; my italics), and in a very brief "Conclusion" he belatedly identifies several of the "mythologising structures" at work in travel writing (211–12). But from beginning to end of this book what most strikes one is the author's decided unwillingness to question the basic assumptions that have shaped the tradition of French exoticism from Gautier to Baudrillard— [End Page 436] a tradition that he at points rather grandly identifies as "modern travel writing" tout court (56). Scott consistently treats exoticist tropes as veritable signs of the real: he would appear to have no desire to distance himself from the ideological vision of the world promoted by a handful of self-conscious critics of modernity whom he believes "offer the deepest insight into the other" (187). Thus, we find him making many an unironic appeal to such things as "the millennial stability enjoyed by other civilisations—Indian, Chinese—and the numberless so-called primitive societies of the Americas and Australasia" (6), or to "the fundamental clash between modern western culture and the immemorial systems of the East" (68). While this lack of critical distance has disturbing political ramifications (as we will see at the end of this review article), its most obvious consequence is that the author spends much of the book describing what he ought to be analyzing. Instead of the critical interrogation of colonial and neo-colonial discourse to which several decades of postcolonial criticism have now accustomed us, the author most often contents himself with offering elaborate paraphrases of how the writers under consideration have themselves described and analyzed the "other" worlds to which they were drawn "as a real and viable alternative or complement to the known, western, system" (13). This lack of analysis...

Posts and Pasts: A Theory of Postcolonialism (review)

KEVIEWS into a discussion ofburial rituals as well as a careful account ofthe Orientalist paléographie work ofthe 1870s. Each chapter within the three sections hinges on a surprising and productivejuxtaposition that combines comparisons between texts that share a historical connection with those whose connection is forged in the reader's mind. After the chapter centering on the Assyrian epic comes one that emerges from a reading ofAztec court poetry. A third chapter is inspired by Congolese novelist Mbwil a M. Ngal's reconsideration ofViconian historiography in the 1970s. After the chapters on circulation, Damrosch then undertakes the matter of translation. Using as his starting point an ancient Egyptian lyric, he moves from assessing "the complex dynamics oftransmission" to laying out with care the "irreducible problems that translation always faces" (147). With two further prime examples, the visions ofthe thirteenth century German mystic Mechthild von Magdeburg and the "littérature mineure" ofDeleuze's Kafka, Damrosch presents the complex network oflinguistic and cultural exchanges which both challenge and enrich the process of translation and the text itself. The final third of the book involves dissemination, the ways in which works have and might travel. The case of P.G. Wodehouse's international marketing success epitomizes Damrosch's theory that a key element in becoming world literature is the extent to which an author has "subtly delocalized" (212) his text thereby making translation itselfonly a further step in an already undertaken circulation. With Wodehouse, Rigoberta Menchu, and Milorad Pavic as his foci, he suggests that some texts are worldly from their very inscription. Throughoutthis "masterwork," ifone dare use such a term, Damrosch engages with critics as varied as Northrope Frye and Edward Said and refuses, with the exception ofthe strong presence ofGerman language texts as a spine, to study any sortofregional orhistorical chauvinism. The study is entirelycollégial, whetherto the editors ofthe Norton anthologies ofworld literature or to critics ofparticular authors. This is no small achievement in the often competitive and market-driven world ofmaking and distributing anthologies. Beyond its clarity and grace ofstyle, its breadth and depth ofknowledge, Damrosch's book is not only humanistic in the best and widest sense, it is also humane, profoundly concerned with how we read, think, and teach about literature. One would expect exactly such an approach form the author of We Scholars in a text that enables and refines the work ofreaders as different as endowed chairs ofliterature and sophomore undergraduates. Elizabeth M. Richmond-GarzaUniversityofTexas atAustin ALFRED LOPEZ. Posts andPasts: A Theory ofPostcolonialism. Albany: State University ofNew York Press, 2001. 274 pp. In her now seminal essay "The Angel ofProgress," Anne McClintock inaugurated the criticism of the concept-word "postcolonial" by doubting that the world's countries "share a single 'common past', or a single common 'condition,' called 'the postcolonial condition'." She was also wary ofthe fact that "the term 'postcolonialism ' is, in many cases, prematurely celebratory" (Social Text 10.2-3 [1992]: 87). In his remarkable first book, Posts and Pasts: A Theory ofPostcolonialism, Alfred J. López opens with a reexamination of many similar criticisms that followed, arguing against the postcolonial as a concept /academic practice, which he groups under three headings: a) "objections to the term 'postcoloniaP as a Vole 28 (2004): 158 THE COMPAKATIST discreet epistemological category"; b) "questions ofpostcolonial agency and the subaltern"; and c) "questions ofpostcolonial hybridity and the critique of hegemony ," which interrogates the efficacy ofpostcolonial academic discourse and its role in relation to colonial and neocolonial discourse. These criticisms, López argues, share "the conviction that postcolonial studies unnecessarily privilege Western theorizations at the expense ofa politics ofresistance." López counters with a defense ofthe postcolonial both as a useful heuristic and as a discipline. Again, he structures his response to criticism around three claims: a) the postcolonial goes beyond the economic and the historical to encompass class, gender, race, ethnicity, language, and geography; b) "the postcolonial is not simply an idealism or an essentialism"; and c) "at its best, postcolonialism does not lack historical specificity." It soon becomes evident that the book sides with theorists who speak for those "third spaces" where subjectivities are not easily fixated, especially in terms of dualities. For López...

Payback Time: Neocolonial Discourses in Peter Bacho's "Cebu"

Filipino American writers share similar narrative strategies for critiquing neocolonialism, strategies which may be broadly understood as the dialogizing of otherwise authoritative discourses of Western European and imperialism. They repeat the words used to legitimize Spanish and rule over the Philippines not to mimic and accept their alleged truth, but to expose their function in absorbing Filipino Americans into a white vision of transnational capitalism and racial hierarchy. (1) When colonial discourses reside in the language of the neocolonial subject, dialogization further implicates these discourses in the construction of neocolonial order and exposes them as obstacles to Filipino American representation and agency. In Peter Bacho's Cebu (1991), the first novel about a Filipino American who identifies primarily with localities, (2) colonial discourses of Spanish Catholicism and historical pedagogy pervade the disrupted bildungsroman of a young priest struggling to repress his sexuality and deny his Filipino legacy. The colonial discourses constituting the narrative voice hybridize the Filipino American subjectivity; their dialogizing through tragedy exposes these discourses as cultural tools for assimilating Filipino Americans into imperial culture. In my reading of Cebu, I locate the discourses' plot corollary in the imperial theme of innocence. Ben Luccro, the assimilated Filipino American protagonist, attempts to secure his sexually and historically freighted innocence. He aligns himself with Spanish and colonial discourses represented by, respectively, celibacy and historical amnesia, and he evades what he perceives as a foreign Filipino discourse represented by utang na loob, or reciprocal indebtedness. Tragedy ensues as Ben tries to separate the mutually constitutive discourses of imperialism and gets entangled in the logical and violent consequence of utang na loob: revenge. I conclude with a brief discussion of what Bacho proposes as an alternative discourse of Filipino American representation and agency. Resisting Development: The Bildungsroman as a Genre of Imperialism US Filipinos, observes Oscar V. Campomanes, have not produced enough best-selling or retrievable bildungsroman and narratives of 'becoming American,' with all the troubled quests that such essentially developmentalist emplotments represent (Gonzalez & Campomanes 77). (3) Cebu maintains this pattern of troubled developmental narratives. If the ethnic bildungsroman features a US-born protagonist who attempts to resolve his ethnic identity crisis by visiting his parents' homeland to discover his Old World roots, in Cebu the protagonist goes to his parents' homeland, rejects its culture, experiences an identity crisis which not explicitly ethnic, then flees back to the US. A Bildung, writes Franco Moretti, is truly such only if, a certain point, it can be seen as concluded: only if youth passes into maturity, and comes to stop there (26). But Cebu ends with the protagonist's perceived innocence failing to pass into self-awareness. Bacho himself has noted this Filipino resistance to bildung and contrasts Filipino American literature with Asian American literature, which he claims at the very least holds out hope of resolution: such hope often missing from the fiction of Filipino writers. Given the penchant of many Filipino writers to use in their works Substantial doses of and Filipino American reality, it hardly any wonder that success such an elusive goal. instead, such writers tend to celebrate the protagonist's decision to act as we readers applaud the choice while bracing ourselves for the inevitable disappointment or demise. (Tragic 5) The Philippine and Filipino American reality in which Bacho locates the tendencies of Filipino American plots towards tragedy the Philippines' history of Spanish and colonialism and its present neocolonial dependency on the United States. …

Indigenous youth and ambivalence in some Australian films

An old and familiar stranger has recently appeared in a number of prominent Australian films. This stranger is the figure of the Indigenous Australian youth, and it appears in films including Rabbit-Proof Fence, Australian Rules and Beneath Clouds. This article reviews the treatment of young Indigenous people in these texts, focusing on the work that they, as symbolic figures, are asked to do in these films. This article does not set out to make judgements about the quality, successes or adequacy of these three films in relation to their treatment of the topic of Indigenous youth. Rather, it focuses on the different ways each film uses Indigenous youth to problematise neo-colonial discourse and taken-for-granted ideas about youth.

Identity, Self-Loathing and the Neocolonial Condition in Patrick McCabe's The Butcher Boy

Patrick McCabe's novel is set in a small Irish town at the beginning of the 1960s, a turbulent time in the world at large (as references to the Cuban Missile Crisis and potential nuclear war underscore) and more specifically in neocolonial Ireland.1 The departure of the colonizer leads to a state of indeterminacy that is dictated by two conflicting impulses: to embrace the tenuous promise of prosperity left in the wake of the colonizer, or to “imagine” a unified past and reclaim a necessarily idealized “identity.”2 The struggles of Francie Brady in The Butcher Boy invoke both neocolonial Ireland's anguished residual relationship with the colonizer and its search for nationhood. Francie's ambivalent relationship with the community, his search for identity, his lack of a sense of history combined with an idealization of the past, his fascination with the life led by the Nugents as adopters and representatives of dominant culture values, and finally his own self-loathing all mirror the country's neocolonial condition. McCabe's novel, in effect, attempts to stretch neocolonial discourse to its limits, calling into question both notions of nationhood and cultural hybridity.

Race as the Missing Variable in Both the Neocolonial and Self-Determination Discourses

Race as the Missing Variable in Both the Neocolonial and Self-Determination Discourses

The Magic of Africa: Reflections on a Western Commonplace

This paper suggests that a genealogy of European conceptions of African magic still needs to be written. It focuses on a specific Western commonplace, one that pictures Africa as the dark heartland of magic and while at the same time saying that this occult core is difficult or dangerous to write about. The analy- sis of a number of different texts in which this commonplace emerges suggests that this recurrent fear of an African occult core is part of the Western engagement with the occult in Africa through its translation as witchcraft. The translation of African magic as witchcraft threatens European understandings of self and other just as much as this translation is an attempt to contain the African occult within imperial, colonial, or neocolonial discourses. These different attempts to write about the occult in Africa suggest that this threat of translation cannot be con- tained; a recent text even suggests that it extends itself to unsettling our sensory perception of the world around us. The magic of Africa requires a still more radi- cal engagement than Africanist anthropology has produced thus far.

"Between Worlds": Reading Jeannette Lander's Jahrhundert der Herren as a Postcolonial Novel

This article examines Jeannette Lander's novel Jahrhundert der Herren in the context of postcolonial and travel literature. It offers a close reading of the text and traces the conflicting discourses the main protagonist, a young German woman, confronts in settling down in Sri Lanka. It argues that the protagonist is on the one hand able to critique the (neo)colonial masters' discourse, alluded to in the title of the novel, but that she also remains deeply implicated in it through her identification with the concepts of bourgeois subjectivity and progress, which ultimately hinder her from developing a dialogic, reciprocal relationship with Sri Lankan culture. (MS)