Decolonizing the Literary Imagination

Preface

This book project was conceived as a materialist critique of Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogism in relation to specific postcolonial, cross- cultural situations drawn from travel writing, novels, and works of ethnography from the mid- twentieth to the early twenty- first century, set in Africa, India, Egypt, and Europe. It is the result of revisiting and reworking the PhD project I carried out between 2012 and 2016 at the Centre for Cultural, Literary and Postcolonial Studies (CCLPS) at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) under the supervision of Dr Amina Yaqin.

As a philosophy graduate in European institutions (in Italy and France), my initial scope when I embarked upon my PhD was mainly theoretical. I started my research project by inquiring into some of the most influential frameworks developed by postcolonial criticism between the 1970s and the 1990s to explain the complexities intrinsic to colonial and postcolonial representations. Through the analysis of case studies taken from travel writing, ethnographies, and novels, I sought, in the first place, to illuminate a critical space beyond the habitual oppositions that have often characterized the field: colonizer vs colonized; self vs other; anthropologist vs native; Western vs Third World; European vs Oriental; semantic privilege vs semantic occlusion; object vs subject; monologic ex¬pression vs polyvocality.

Contemplating the most prominent epistemological paradigms and concepts elaborated by Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Homi Bhabha in the twilight of the post- war period to interpret the for¬mation of postcolonial identities became a pretext to look for a way of, or even to elaborate a model for, transcending their blind spots. In this regard, Mikhail Bakhtin’s complex and stratified theory of dialogue presented it¬self as a useful methodology to apply to the critical reading of postcolonial representations. My argument is that Bakhtin’s critical enterprise provides us with a rich and still understudied framework that can be used to view questions of epistemology and power- knowledge structures that underpin the so- called postcolonial representation of subjectivities, communities, and nations in new ways that allow us to better mediate and demystify the forms of domination that postcolonial discourses have often attributed to them – as well as to shed new light on the aesthetics of the text.

My point of departure for this project was theoretical. I started from Spivak’s enquiry on subalternity, which she has been working on since the 1980s, when she published her essay ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’¹ Thus, I retraced Spivak’s notion of subaltern agency, which she drew from the work of the Subaltern Studies Group of Indian historiographers. These historians operated in the context of Indian colonial history by reading texts from the Raj against the grain in search of signs of the agency of the Indian peasantry. One of the problems faced by the group was: how does the historiographer give a voice or agency to those sections of the colonized who participated in anticolonial resistance? Faced with the impossibility of ascertaining the peasants’ view directly – in the absence of speech ac¬tivity on their side – they were forced to document peasant consciousness indirectly, by considering the effects of insurgency on authority.

Active in the 1980s, the Subaltern Studies Group was influenced by the scholarship of Erik Stokes and Ranajit Guha and committed to writing a new historical narrative for India and South Asia. The term ‘subaltern’, how¬ever, was originally drawn from the work of Italian historiographer Antonio Gramsci. In the context of Indian colonial historiography, it designated the social classes that, although instrumental, had been underrepresented in the accounts of the Raj, such as the Indian peasantry. By looking at the work of Indian colonial historiographers, Spivak elaborated her notion of the subaltern, defining it as a figure that is discursively incapable of self- expression and therefore needs to be represented by others. The sub¬ordination of this figure is declinable in terms of class, caste, age, gender, or in any other way.

With regard to representation, imperialism and imperial history are seen by Spivak as forms of epistemic violence. Imperialism is interpreted as a type of discourse that has constructed the world in specific terms for both the colonizer and the colonized, requiring the colonizers to see them-selves in their world as marginal to the colonizers’ centrality. Historically speaking, this process has coincided with the construction of a type of history in which the structures of discursive knowledge have fostered the representation of the colonial subject as the Other.

In Spivak’s interpretation, through the construction of imperial his¬tory, the West has produced the ‘worldling’ of the Third World according to specific interests and a specific agenda. The violence of imperialist epi¬stemic, social, and disciplinary ‘inscription’² gave rise to the intellectual need for a project that could retrieve the perspective of those who could not contribute a representation of themselves to dominant discourses.

As it met the intellectual need for a model of history from below, Spivak found the work of the Subaltern Studies Group to be useful. The group’s anti- essentialist approach offered an alternative perspective on his¬tory, as it attempted to reconstruct the arduous pathway to independence from the Raj by focusing on the agency of the Indian peasantry, rather than viewing independence as the culmination of the struggles of leaders such as Mahatma Gandhi or Jawaharlal Nehru. By including in her inquiry the project of the Subaltern Studies Group, Spivak intended to oppose the work of many Western and even postcolonial historians who – by reading resistance almost exclusively as a product of nationalism and therefore ignoring other histories – had ended up reinforcing the imperialist narra¬tive and duplicating its exclusions and occlusions. Nonetheless, she became aware of all the limitations encountered by a historiographic project that attempted to reproduce the rebel consciousness indirectly, through the subject- effects and rare inscriptions found in the texts of the Raj, rather than through the direct evidence of the voices of the Indian peasantry or interventions made by the peasantry as a historical actor. The paradox the group encountered was that, in attempting to give the subaltern a voice, it ended up paradoxically silencing him or her.

The intellectual group’s attempt to theorize an alternative history to the dominant one resulted in only a partial, unsatisfying achievement. This impasse turned the investigation of subalternity and agency in a represen¬tative context into a controversial and open- ended debate, to which Spivak has returned throughout her critical journey, from ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ to her more recent consideration of the native informant in her book A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (1999).³

But who is the subaltern, and what is at stake when we talk about the impossibility of its representation? To answer this question, we need to consider the dual meanings of representation ‘speaking for’ and re- presenting, or ‘portraying’. Whereas the first meaning is mostly relevant in the political arena, the second is employed in the domains of art and philosophy. The evidence of these two different meanings and the inter¬play between vertreten [speaking for] and darstellen [portraying] can be found in a passage from Karl Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.⁴ At a primary level, as Neil Lazarus has put it, the subaltern is ‘a discursive figure that is by definition incapable of self- representation’.⁵ By looking at the second meaning of representation, that is, ‘speaking for’ (vertreten), the subaltern can be identified as a figure who lacks agency in a collective, and therefore political, sense.

It was in seeking to transcend the impasse in which Spivak found herself in relation to her intellectual preoccupation with the problem of agency, and particularly subaltern agency, that I began to engage in a dialogue with twentieth- century Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin’s complex, though relatively unpopular, critical theory of art and the creative process.

This book aims, obliquely, to engage in an intellectual dialogue with Spivak’s critical approach to the problem of subalternity. Although Spivak drew on the work of the Subaltern Studies Group of Indian historiographers in their attempt to recover forgotten, marginal histories, in the context of colonial India, and although she was aware of the weakness inherent in the group’s methodology, she was not able to conceive of any alternative or supplementary strategy that could have helped retrieve the subaltern consciousness more effectively from the texts of the Raj, besides a wide and undifferentiated use of deconstruction.⁶ As critic James Wood put it, deconstruction ‘proceeds on the assumption that literary texts, like people, have an unconscious that frequently betrays them: they say one thing but mean another thing: their own figures of speech (metaphors, images, fig¬urative turns of the phrase) are the slightly bent keys of their unlocking’.⁷

While these are the theoretical underpinnings of this book, it has un¬folded as a more complex and nuanced reflection that attempts to trace a multifaceted, lively, and geopolitically specific genealogy of postcolonial – and ultimately multicultural – identities through the critical reading of lit¬erary and ethnographic works set in various geographical locations (Africa, India, Europe), by providing a historical excursus on disciplines such as anthropology and forms of writing such as the novel and ethnography, showing how the discursive and representational strategies of these forms have developed over time in tandem with important historical transitions. In each representational context, I will enquire into the nature of the intri¬cate relationship between the writer and his or her subjects of representa¬tion, as well as enquiring into the relationship between the writer and his or her social, cultural, and political environment.

My argument, throughout this book, is that the dialogic perspective can serve as an invaluable tool in the practice of literary criticism, as it offers an original reading method that enables us to enquire into the na¬ture of the literary and cultural representation in question, and the power relations that are implied in the process of ‘writing about a people’. In the postcolonial context, this means demonstrating how the artwork unravels the complex mechanisms and interplay of power- knowledge relations be¬tween subjects (the primary relation we will look at is that between the writer and his subjects of representation), which are further complicated by issues of race, gender, religious, national, and political identity that naturally arise in such contexts. It is my hope that the postcolonial en¬quiry will adopt dialogic reading as a multifaceted interpretative practice to disclose newness and freshness in texts, enabling us to reconfigure the power relations operating in them. This critical exercise must be based on the awareness that the interpretation that results from the enquiry into representation is never monolithic or one- dimensional and, therefore, never definite or absolute. While this may place the act of interpretation on unsolid and unstable ground, it nonetheless ensures that it is not sub¬ject to fundamentalist tendencies and clear- cut positions. I hope that the case studies at the centre of this book can serve as an example of the cre-ative possibility of re- reading texts by shedding light on their – more or less fully formed – counter- hegemonic aspect.

Throughout this work, I will offer nuanced critical readings of post¬colonial representations by revoicing the dialogues that are present in these texts, both literally, in the form of speech acts, and metaphorically, by enquiring into the mimetic relationship between author and hero. When speech events are not present in the text, I will consider other discursive strategies, such as laughter, parody, and irony, that signal the recreation, by the author, of a complex discursive space that highlights that his or her semantic authority – that is, his or her ability to create meaning in the text – is being challenged to a considerable degree by the emergence of multiple voices. The employment of these strategies, I argue, represents a break from the typical modes of the so- called colonial text, in which the narration developed exclusively according to the author’s perspective and ultimately reflected his authorial and monologic point of view.

Although it originated mainly in theoretical debates, this book, be¬yond the enclosed field of postcolonial literary studies and literary critique, could be helpful to people interested more broadly in the nuanced politics and poetics of storytelling. The dialogic perspective could serve as a tool for students of disciplines concerned with this typically human practice, ranging from literature and philosophy to history, media, marketing, and film and theatre studies. Considering Bakhtin investigated what it meant to reproduce polyvocality and pluralism in a literary text in the middle of the Soviet era, an era that curbed individual, economic, and political lib¬erties, we could ask ourselves what his insights into dialogue, polyvocality, and pluralism mean when applied to mediums as diverse as film, theatre, the media, marketing, and, of course, literature, nowadays, at a time when the dream of fully fledged liberal democracies seems to be waning, and pluralism and differences of all kinds have given rise to a spectrum of new authoritarianisms and fundamentalisms.

1See Gayatri Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, in C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), pp. 271– 313.

2Ibid.

3See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Towards a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).

4See Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte [1852] (reprint; Rockville, MD: Serenity Publishers, 2008).

5See Neil Lazarus, ‘Disavowing Decolonization’, in Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the Postcolonial World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 109.

6Deconstruction is a mode of critical reading whereby one level of a text’s meaning generates other meanings – a form of intertextual analysis that aims to generate newness from traditional texts. Developed by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930– 2004), this methodology has been appropriated by many post¬colonial critics, who have tried to make a more extended use of it and tailored it to postcolonial contexts.

7James Wood, ‘Introduction’, in Serious Noticing: Selected Essays (1997– 2019) (New York: Vintage, 2019).

Acknowledgements

This book has been years in the making. I would like to express my sincere thanks to the people and spaces that have supported the development of this project, from the initial draft to the book in its current form. Firstly, my thanks to the supervisory committee that provided guidance as I car¬ried out my PhD at the Centre for Cultural, Literary, and Postcolonial Studies at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) between 2012 and 2016: Dr Amina Yaqin, Dr Caroline Osella, and Dr Kai Easton. Your cross- disciplinary input, drawing on South Asian and African literature and anthropology, helped to broaden the initial, and overly theoretical, scope of this book. Thank you. I am also grateful to Professor Stephen Morton and Professor Ruvani Ranasinha at King’s College for offering insightful feedback during my viva examination, helping to bring additional clarity to this research, and thereby enabling this project to further unfold. I wish to express my gratitude to the SOAS Library, with its generous collection of books, and the Doctoral School in Gordon Square, Bloomsbury, for accommodating me during my long hours of study as a PhD candidate. I would like to thank the team at Peter Lang for making this book a reality, especially Laurel Plapp, whose enthu¬siastic feedback on this project and graceful support throughout the pro¬cess were greatly appreciated. I am also grateful to copy editor Michael Garvey for his keen eye for detail, his useful and kind suggestions, and his work on the language and trimming down the text where necessary.

I’m grateful to my friends, for their support and for touching my life in so many ways: Hashim Momani, Susan Sciama, John Philpott, Mattia Berto, Donata Calestini, Gaia Sprocati, Marco Molinari, Alice Toso, Nicolò Cristante, Claudio Vettraino, Max Santalucia, Riccardo Baldini, and Ashokan Nambiar. To my spiritual teachers Ayala Gill and Max Strom, for grounding my spirit and fostering my interest in non- duality, which has obliquely informed this work. To Eric Asare and my colleagues at Camden Gateway for the gift of space and time, and for providing an oasis of peace and a convivial community in central London! I am grateful to the Venice Querini Stampalia Foundation and my friend Riccardo Gritti for allowing me to use their picturesque reading rooms overlooking the canals of Venice to carry out my writing and research. A word of thanks to my family, Toni Guarnieri, Matteo Guarnieri, and Anna Sacerdoti, for their continuous support and for providing an unconventional anchor of safety throughout my life.

To Ngugì Wa Thiong’o, whom I had the privilege of hearing and meeting at the Incroci di Civiltá literary festival in Venice a few years ago. He was an obvious influence on this book’s title. Finally, I would like to thank my many literary and philosophical inspirations from across the centuries for supporting me in my journey towards becoming a story¬teller: William Shakespeare, Leo Tolstoy, Dante Alighieri, Virginia Woolf, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Tom Stoppard, Charles Dickens, Derek Walcott, Caryl Phillips, Zadie Smith, Paul Gilroy, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Gabriel García Márquez, Toni Morrison, Tishani Doshi, and many others, including, of course, Mikhail Bakhtin. Your work is so important to me.

To the reader – thank you for tuning in.