Author's Roundtable: Stefan Helgesson, “The Writing of Colonial Time”
Response by Dara Goldman

Monday, April 22, 2013

posted under , , , , , , , by Unit for Criticism
[On April 8, 2013 the Unit of Criticism and Interpretive Theory in collaboration with INSPIRE and the Trowbridge Office on American Literature, Culture, and Society held an Author’s Roundtable hosting Stefan Helgesson (Stockholm University) to discuss a chapter of his current book project on temporality and postcolonialism, with responses from Dara Goldman (Spanish, Italian & Portuguese, Latino/Latina Studies, Gender and Women’s Studies, Director of Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies), Ken Salo (Urban and Regional Planning), and Matthew Nelson (Comparative & World Literature). Below is the second of the two blogs on the event and features Goldman’s response.]

Written by Dara Goldman (Spanish, Italian & Portuguese, Latino/Latina Studies, Gender and Women’s Studies, Director of Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies)

Helgesson engages in a critical and highly productive analysis of the question of time—and narrative time in particular—in postcolonial studies and the humanities more broadly. As he asserts, the scholarly debate in postcolonial studies around these questions has tended to assert the difference of non-Western temporalities and assess this difference as either fundamentally positive or negative. In order to elucidate and begin to move beyond this binary, Helgesson turns to the analysis of literary texts. He cogently argues that literature has the capacity to encode, decode, and intervene in the articulation of temporal difference. Rather than simply recreate hegemonic modes, denounce their hegemony, or celebrate their alterity, these texts can offer a rich landscape of paradoxes, contradictions, displacements, dilatios, erasures and violences that emerge when a set of rhetorical temporal modes is mapped onto a lived historical experience of time and space.

I would like to offer a few comments or suggestions as to how this discussion might be developed or explored further. In particular, the specific examples Helgesson examines tend to emphasize or highlight the ability of literature to complicate questions of temporal difference. In their particular construction and deployment of their respective chronotopes, the narratives he analyzes interrogate questions of simultaneity and notions of progress. I would like to introduce two examples that I believe encode, instead, the very failure of the recuperative historical project and explore what they might add to the discussion of how literature and narrative might advance our thinking about temporal differences.


In his articulation of this temporal hermeneutics, Helgesson has given us a rich set of theoretical bibliography to work with—and I suspect that my colleagues may offer some additional tools—so I will refrain from expanding the corpus to extensively. I would like to mention, however, that work on temporality in gender and sexuality studies has made some highly compelling interventions about the underlying assumptions and interpellations that are often embedded in conceptualizations and representations of time. (See the work of Patricia Parker, Patricia Murphy, Jack Halberstam, and Lee Edelman.)

I also wanted to mention the role of positivism in Latin America. Nineteenth-century Latin American writers and intellectuals engaged with positivism, almost to the point of a fetishistic obsession. Both as a Latin American writer and through his military training, Euclides da Cunha would have had extensive contact with these discussions, and this contact undoubtedly influenced his thinking about time, temporal trajectories and their sociocultural implications.

Turning now to more recent work, there is an extensive (all too extensive, perhaps) critical and theoretical bibliography that deals with the writing of time and temporality in Latin America (Carlos Alonso, Néstor García Canclini, Roberto González Echevarria, Walter Mignolo, Aníbal Quijano, Julio Ramos, Silviano Santiago—just to name the ones that came to my mind most frequently as I read) The inclusion on any/all of these would undoubtedly enhance and deepen the theoretical argument.

I will leave those as a mere suggestion, however, and devote the rest of my time to comments that might be of greater interest and productivity for our collective discussion of narrative time. I would like to touch upon two literary examples that I hope, along with the readings offered by Helgesson, will help to think about the role of narrative in engagements with postcolonial temporalities and of the temporal hermeneutics his work proposes.

The first of these examples is The Lost Steps by Alejo Carpentier. In this 1953 novel, Carpentier charts the trajectory of a disillusioned composer who is charged with a mission to track the lost origins of music, a journey that leads him to travel to South America, into the jungle, and eventually to take up residence in an indigenous community he finds in the Northern Amazon. Lest you should have any doubt as to the relevance of this work to our discussion, the Amazon.com entry for the English translation summarizes the novel as follows: “A composer, fleeing an empty existence in New York City, takes a journey with his mistress to one of the few remaining areas of the world not yet touched by civilization-the upper reaches of a great South American river. The Lost Steps describes his search, his adventures, and the remarkable decision he makes in a village that seems to be truly outside history.”

This protagonist’s experiences involve a concatenation of adventures with precarious modes of transportation and unreliable infrastructure (the eruption of a local revolt and the loss of power at the hotel leads to an invasion of the building by all manner of insects and snakes) and a serial progression through various sexual partners who prove strangely elusive at the end of which he finds himself in the remote indigenous village that is—indeed—able to reveal the secret/lost origins of music. The newly inspired composer attempts to record his findings and produce a musical piece that showcases this newfound historical understanding, but he is frustrated by the lack of paper or writing implements and must attempt to record his notations on local leaves, animal skins, and other available materials. When the rains finally subside, he leaves the jungle to procure additional supplies. As he attempts to return to the village to complete his tasks, however, he finds he is unable to locate the path along the river that will take him to the village. He finally realizes (with the help of the local individual steering the boat) that the water level of the river has now risen significantly, and the markings on the trees he had been using to navigate are now completely submerged and invisible.

The Conradian “horror” of the epistemological impasse in this case stems from the moment of anagnorisis, the realization that any attempt to “discover” and “recover” the lost secrets of one’s past in this location is doomed to failure: in the end, this place requires an understanding and relationship with the cyclical temporalities of nature that he does not possess. More importantly, perhaps, the local residents have no investment or interest in the temporal reconstructions that casts them in a Fabianesque narrative of non-coevalness in which the remote village must play the role of a living diorama that conveniently performs a historical past that can be witnesses, accessed, and mined for its lost treasures in the present. Carpentier presents this story as a melancholic tale of insuperable loss and tragic hubris; in doing so, however, he also ultimately underscores how the particular landscape and subjects of the South American jungle compellingly resist being neatly inserted into the “northern visitor’s” history.

The other example I would like to present is not one from my own purported regional area of expertise, but one that can be compellingly read—against the grain—in terms of how narrative encodes issues, encounters, and disencounters of postcolonial temporality: the film Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2011). (The film is based on a novel published in 2004 that I have not read, so my comments refer to the film adaptation only.) The film offers the rather charming tale of a group of British retirees who travel to Jaipur, India in order to ameliorate the effects of personal/financial failures at home and gain access to a fresh start and a higher standard of living than they could afford in England.

View of Jaipur, India.
Of course, the conditions they encounter do not meet their expectations (is not “what they were sold”). It turns out that the proprietor, Sonny Kapoor (played by Dev Patel) has launched his new business venture—the “Best Exotic Marigold Hotel”—in an attempt to save his dead father’s beloved hotel from sale and probable destruction. Despite set-backs, disappointments and cultural conflicts, desires—amorous and financial—are ultimately fulfilled in the film. One retiree eventually abandons the enterprise (and her husband) to return to recently restored financial security back home. The rest settle in to life in Jaipur and become a resource that helps India negotiate its insertion into the global economy as a major competitor. One resident secures work as a “cultural consultant” at a local call center, helping the workers learn how to better engage in appropriate small talk and banter in order to gain the interest of their target consumers. Another resident agrees to take over as financial manager at the hotel in order to rescue Sonny from his apparently erstwhile disastrous mismanagement of the hotel’s books. Of course, the epitome of a good transcultural, capitalist love story, financial success is “coupled” with greater cross-cultural understanding and the resolution or rectification of past romantic/familial mis-steps: the mis-matched couple of retirees separates, freeing the husband to initiate a relationship with the more compatible fellow resident of the hotel, and Kapoor finally stands up to his mother, winning the opportunity to continue running the hotel and marry the woman he loves.

Perhaps most tellingly, Graham Dashwood is a gay man who had been plagued by the memory of how his first homosexual encounter led to the shaming and financial ruin of his lover and his family: when he lived in India years earlier as a young man, he had become involved with the son of the family who worked in domestic service for his family. When the relationship was discovered, the family was promptly dismissed and ejected from the household. Dashwood is able to locate his long-lost first love, and he finds that the man is happily married (to a woman who seems to know about and understand the affair), has had a good life, and remembers Graham fondly. Shortly after this reunion, which demonstrates that his desire to atone for past mistakes was apparently unnecessary, Dashwood peacefully slumps over and dies in a chair in the hotel’s main courtyard.

In this way, on several registers the film depicts (celebrates even) a naïve desire in which imperial/colonial subjects seek to recover and rewrite their own history through a return to the (former) site of conquest, colonization, and empire building. As with a “Generation of '98” writer in Spain, they seem to be earnestly and desperately seeking answers to the question of “where did it all go so wrong” and “how can we (re)set it right?”

I would like to suggest that both of these examples illustrate how narrative can encode the aporia Helgesson examines in highly suggestive and productively destabilizing ways; on the level of plot, the literary archive of temporal inscriptions may often point towards facile and/or reductionists ways of resolving, suturing, or “filling in” those aporias. Nonetheless, Helgesson’s argument compellingly point toward how this archive can be mined in the service of a postcolonial rethinking of transcultural time in/across/beyond the so-called Global South. The work of writers such as Euclides da Cunha, Olive Schreiner, and Thomas Mofolo offer complex negotiations of temporality that both reflect and challenge established understandings of progress, failure, nostalgia, and utopia. At the same time, works such as the ones I have presented here can be juxtaposed with Helgesson’s examples in order to illustrate how narratives can seek to resolve and reduce—as well as to exacerbate—the complexities of temporal differences.

Read more

Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture at 25: Closing Roundtable
Ericka Beckman

Wednesday, February 20, 2013

posted under , , , , , by Unit for Criticism
[On February 8, 2013 the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory held its spring symposium "Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture at 25.” Below are remarks by closing roundtable participant, Ericka Beckman (Spanish, Italian & Portuguese/Comparative & World Literature)]

Written by Ericka Beckman (Spanish, Italian & Portuguese/Comparative & World Literature)

Closing Roundtable from left to right: Greenberg, Ali, Beckman,
Hansen, & Nelson



I. The persistence of the economic

One of the tendencies that Marxism and Interpretation of Culture sought to correct was the Marxist tradition’s frequent reduction of the cultural to the status of the epiphenomenal. The essays in this volume, drawing from Marxist thinkers like Gramsci and Althusser, as well as from poststructuralist theories of language, proposed ways of integrating culture into Marxist analysis. Twenty-five years after the publication of this milestone volume, in times of unprecedented capitalist crisis, the power of the economic seems to have returned with a vengeance (if it had ever waned). In this context, we are forced to renew our engagement with questions of political economy. At the same time, the ontological questions lurking within the value form acquire renewed urgency. How is it possible for trillions of dollars in fictitious capitals to arise and disappear in the course of a financial crisis? These questions, of course are not unique to our own era. One of Marx’s key insights was that the value of commodities and money in capitalist societies is simultaneously objective and immaterial, creating real relations between people that take on the distorted appearance of a relationships between things. Then as now, the economic is not the site of incontrovertible reality, but a site of representation and interpretive struggle, an insight that is perhaps best grasped from within the conjuncture of widespread capitalist crisis. In our present, it feels as though we have never been more subjected to the dynamics of capital, while at the same time the flimsiness of economic science seems never to have been more readily apparent.

In a different vein, our traditional understandings of ‘the economic’ might need to be revised for times of unrelenting capitalist crisis. Classical Marxist analysis, of course, posited that what made capitalism different from non-capitalist social formations (such as feudalism, for example) was that domination took on a non-coercive form. Of course, violence and coercion have always been integral to capital accumulation, in ongoing waves of “primitive accumulation,” or what David Harvey calls “accumulation by dispossession." In the present age of permanent crisis, war, and state of exception, it seems that coercion has taken on an even more prominent role in accumulation, and that it will continue to do so in the future (Here I am thinking especially of Gopal Balakrishnan’s essay on the stationary state). Hence we should think about what it means to live in an era in which economic relations become increasingly diffuse and pernicious, while at the same time buttressed by increasingly violent forms of state power.

II. The persistence of the ‘Third World’/Global South

Laura Chrisman brought up the relative absence of the Third World in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (with the notable exception of Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?”), and the complete absence of African histories intellectuals. Other papers today have also remarked on the continued marginalization on non-Western histories and contexts within Marxist debate, and provide us with different ways of approaching this problem. David Kazanjian, for example, argues that texts written by social agents in Liberia or Mexico, usually treated as instances of “the concrete” in opposition to “the universal” of high (European) theory, should themselves be read as attempts to theorize the very meaning of freedom. Shu-Mei Shih boldly charts narrative “arcs” (the plantation, the global 60s) unstructured by Euro- and U.S.-centric literary canons to uncover new relations between far-flung people and places. Laura Chrisman advocates that we turn to the literature of the Comintern, read within the framework of uneven and combined development, as a healthy countermeasure against the commodification of postcolonial studies.

The question of Global South in Marxist theory seems especially important today, as Tariq O. Ali remarked, because of the triumphalist discourses of capital emanating from countries such as India, China and Brazil. It very well might be that in these countries there is a sense that capitalism is on the rise, and not in decline, although I do not doubt that bust will follow boom sooner or later. It is still worth noting, though, that this is perhaps the first time that capitalism can be grasped as “healthy” in a country like Brazil, in contrast with the United States. With this apparent reversal of accepted reality, it’s too early to tell if we are witnessing a real historical shift or just a blip on the screen on the longue durée.

III. Crisis

This brings me to a final word about crisis. Writing of the Mexican peso debacle of 1982, the anthropologist Claudio Lomnitz refers to “present saturation” as one consequence of crisis, “characterized by a reluctance to socialize viable and desirable images of a future.” I would say that our crisis-ridden present is likewise marked by a sense of saturation, in which we are aware –sometimes sharply, sometimes dimly—of the catastrophic consequences of capitalist globalization, and yet reluctant or unable “to socialize viable and desirable images of the future.” And yet there is reason for hope. Even Forbes magazine, no organ of the Left, seems to understand that new vocabularies and imaginaries are being forged: “If the Occupy movement does nothing else, it has at least introduced a new set of terms into the American vocabulary to talk about the distribution of wealth in America. Until recently, most average people had no idea how wealth was distributed in the country; most people had a vague idea of a wealthy minority, but they rarely grasped the full extent of income disparity between classes." The shift in words and ideas permitted by Occupy Wall Street, the Chilean students’ movement, and the Arab "Spring" just may help us imagine new forms of social life beyond capitalism. The promise of the imagination—as expressed in different social expressions ranging from social movements to art—is one of the lasting insights of Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, twenty-five years after its publication.
 Read more

Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)
top

total visits to date | come back again

© Kritik - Adapted from code by Jack Book and Dezinerfolio