Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths & Helen Tiffin:
The Empire writes back. Theory and Practice in Post-colonial Literatures.
  Londres, Routledge, 1989, 246 p.

     Extraits

Le concept et la théorie

Qu’est-ce que les littératures post-coloniales?

This book is concerned with writing by those peoples formerly colonized by Britain, though much of what it deals with is of interest and relevance to countries colonized by other European powers, such as France, Portugal, and Spain. The semantic basis of the term 'post-colonial' might seem to suggest a concern only with the national culture after the departure of the imperial power. It has occasionally been employed in some earlier work in the area to distinguish between the periods before and after independence (`colonial period' and 'post-colonial period'), for example, in constructing national literary histories, or in suggesting comparative studies between stages in those histories. Generally speaking, though, the term `colonial' has been used for the period before independence and a term indicating a national writing, such as `modern Canadian writing' or `recent West Indian literature' has been employed to distinguish the period after independence.

We use the term `post-colonial', however, to cover all the culture affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization to the present day. This is because there is a continuity of preoccupations throughout the historical process initiated by European imperial aggression. We also suggest that it is most appropriate as the term for the new cross-cultural criticism which has emerged in recent years and for the dis­course through which this is constituted. In this sense this book is concerned with the world as it exists during and after the period of European imperial domination and the effects of this on contemporary literatures.

So the literatures of African countries, Australia, Bangla­desh, Canada, Caribbean countries, India, Malaysia, Malta, New Zealand, Pakistan, Singapore, South Pacific Island coun­tries, and Sri Lanka are all post-colonial literatures. The litera­ture of the USA should also be placed in this category. Perhaps because of its current position of power, and the neo-colonizing role it has played, its post-colonial nature has not been generally recognized. But its relationship with the metropolitan centre as it evolved over the last two centuries has been paradigmatic for post-colonial literatures everywhere. What each of these litera­tures has in common beyond their special and distinctive regional characteristics is that they emerged in their present form out of the experience of colonization and asserted them­selves by foregrounding the tension with the imperial power, and by emphasizing their differences from the assumptions of the imperial centre. It is this which makes them distinctively post-colonial.

(pp. 1-2).

Justification du terme.

One of the first difficulties in developing a wider comparative approach to the literatures has been that of finding an appropriate, name to describe them. Some early attempts at a name which indicated the world-wide range of English writing never found general acceptance: for example, Joseph Jones's word ‘terranglia’, which he employed to describe all writing in english throughout the world (Jones 1965). The term 'Commonwealth literature' which also emerged in the 1960s, although it secured much readier acceptance, nevertheless had geographical and political limitations. It rested purely on the fact of a shared history and the resulting political grouping. In its loosest form it remained a descriptive term for a collection of national literatures united by a past or present membership of the British Commonwealth. But through its relatively widespread acceptance it opened the way for more rigorous concep­tions which also postulated a common condition across all former colonies. For a long while these existed, or coexisted, if sometimes uneasily, under the umbrella of `Commonwealth literature'.

Several attempts have been made to find a politically and theoretically more appropriate name for such literatures than ‘Commonwealth literature’ (see Tiffin 1983). The limited and pejorative term `Third World literatures' has been used in some university courses, but the most popular contenders have been 'new literatures in English' and, most recently, 'post-colonial literatures'. Although the first avoids the inclusion of any reference to colonialism, and therefore may be more acceptable nationalists wishing to de-emphasize the colonial past, it is vague and misleading in other ways, implicitly privileging a European perspective in areas like India or Africa, and provid­ing theoretical direction or comparative framework. It also has the disadvantage that it compares the literatures to ‘old’ literature in English, without alluding to the hegemonic power of the British tradition.

The term ‘colonial literatures’ might focus on what is shared the writing and therefore suggest the direction in which to proceed theoretically, but the connotations of the term are politically unacceptable to territories which have gained their independence. 'Post-colonial' seems to be the choice which both embraces the historical reality and focuses on that relationship which has provided the most important creative and psycho­logical impetus in the writing. Although it does not specify that the discourse is limited to works in english, it does indicate the rationale of the grouping in a common past and hints at the vision of a more liberated and positive future. In practical terms, the description we adopt - 'post-colonial' - is less restrictive than 'Commonwealth'; it shares with 'new litera­tures in English' the ability to include, for example, the english literature of the Philippines or of the United States as well as that of 'pakeha' (white) or Maori writing in New Zealand, or that of both Blacks and whites in South Africa.

However, the term 'post-colonial literatures' is finally to be preferred over the others because it points the way towards a possible study of the effects of colonialism in and between writing in english and writing in indigenous languages in such contexts as Africa and India, as well as writing in other language diasporas (French, Spanish, Portuguese). The litera­ture of Ireland might also be investigated in terms of our contemporary knowledge of post-colonialism, thus shedding new light on the British literary tradition. Even so, better terms may still emerge. In his comparative study of the literatures of Quebec and the Black diaspora, Dorsinville, for example, used the term 'post-European'. Although this has not so far been used extensively in critical accounts of the field its political and theoretical implications have much to offer.

 (pp. 23-24).

Centre et périphérie

English vs english

Language

One of the main features of imperial oppression is control over language. The imperial education system installs a `standard' version of the metropolitan language as the norm, and mar­ginalizes all `variants' as impurities. As a character in Mrs Campbell Praed's nineteenth-century Australian novel Policy and Passion puts it, `To be colonial is to talk Australian slang; to be ... everything that is abominable' (Campbell Praed 1881:154).Language becomes the medium through which a hierarchical structure of power is perpetuated, and the medium through which conceptions of `truth', `order', and `reality' become established. Such power is rejected in the emergence of an effective post-colonial voice. For this reason, the discussion of post-colonial writing which follows is largely a discussion of the process by which the language, with its power, and the writing, with its signification of authority, has been wrested from the dominant European culture.

In order to focus on the complex ways in which the English language has been used in these societies, and to indicate their own sense of difference, we distinguish in this account between the `standard' British English inherited from the empire and the english which the language has become in post-colonial coun­tries. Though British imperialism resulted in the spread of a language, English, across the globe, the english of Jamaicans is not the english of Canadians, Maoris, or Kenyans. We need to distinguish between what is proposed as a standard code, English (the language of the erstwhile imperial centre), and the linguistic code, english, which has been transformed and sub­verted into several distinctive varieties throughout the world. For this reason the distinction between English and english will be used throughout our text as an indication of the various ways in which the language has been employed by different linguistic communities in the post-colonial world.'

The use of these terms asserts the fact that a continuum exists between the various linguistic practices which constitute english usage in the modern world. Although linguistically the links between English and the various post-colonial englishes in use today can be seen as unbroken, the political reality is that English sets itself apart from all other `lesser' variants and so demands to be interrogated about its claim to this special status.

In practice the history of this distinction between English and english has been between the claims of a powerful `centre' and a multitude of intersecting usages designated as `peripheries'. The language of these `peripheries' was shaped by an oppres­sive discourse of power. Yet they have been the site of some of the most exciting and innovative literatures of the modern period and this has, at least in part, been the result of the energies uncovered by the political tension between the idea of a normative code and a variety of regional usages.

(p. 7-8).

L’émergence de l’Anglais comme discipline académique coïncide avec celle de l’impérialisme colonial : Centre et Périphérie.

The historical moment which saw the emergence of `English' as an academic discipline also produced the nineteenth-century colonial form of imperialism (Batsleer et al. 1985: 14, 19-25).­ Gauri Viswanathan has presented strong arguments for re­lating the `institutionalisation and subsequent valorisation of English literary study [to] a shape and an ideological content developed in the colonial context', and specifically as it developed in India, where:

British colonial administrators, provoked by missionaries on the one hand and fears of native insubordination on the other, discovered an ally in English literature to support them in maintaining control of the natives under the guise of a liberal education.

(Viswanathan 1987: 17)

It can be argued that the study of English and the growth of Empire proceeded from a single ideological climate and that the development of the one is intrinsically bound up with the development of the other, both at the level of simple utility (as propaganda for instance) and at the unconscious level, where it leads to the naturalizing of constructed values (e.g. civilization, humanity, etc.) which, conversely, established `savagery', `native', `primitive', as their antitheses and as the object of a reforming zeal.'

A `privileging norm' was enthroned at the heart of the formation of English Studies as a template for the denial of the value of the `peripheral', the `marginal', the `uncanonized'. Literature was made as central to the cultural enterprise of Empire as the monarchy was to its political formation. So when elements of the periphery and margin threatened the exclusive claims of the centre they were rapidly incorporated. This was a process, in Edward Said's terms, of conscious affiliation pro­ceeding under the guise of filiation (Said 1984), that is, a mimicry of the centre proceeding from a desire not only to be accepted but to be adopted and absorbed. It caused those from the periphery to immerse themselves in the imported culture, denying their origins in an attempt to become `more English than the English'. We see examples of this in such writers as Henry James and T.S. Eliot.

(p. 3-4).

La diversité périphérique contre l’exotisme

(L’exotisme gomme les différences entre périphéries au profit de celles avec le Centre)

Theories and models of post-colonial literatures could not emerge until the separate colonies were viewed in a framework centred on their own literary and cultural traditions. Victorian Britain had exulted in the disparateness of its empire, but in representing that empire predominantly as a site of the exotic, of adventure and exploitation, it had defined it as a contrastive element within the British world-view. Differences between colonies were subordinated to their common difference from Britain. Thus the comparative gestures of journals like Black and White (1891-1911) which purported to juxtapose different colonies, never escaped from the metropolitan-colonial axis.

Colonial education systems reinforced this axis by providing in-school `readers' (for example, the Royal Reader Series in the West Indies, or the Queensland Readers in Australia) a norma­tive core of British literature, landscape, and history (Brown­ing's thoughts in exile, Wordsworth's daffodils, Sir Philip Sidney's chivalry) and a sprinkling of colonial adventure which often asserted British values against a hostile physical or human environment (Stanley's explorations, Newbolt's desperate cricketers). It required the aggression of nationalist traditions to break this pattern of inevitable reference to Britain as a standard and to provide space for the consideration of the literary and cultural patterns the colonies shared.

Three principal types of comparison have resulted, forming bases for a genuine post-colonial discourse. These are compari­sons between countries of the white diaspora - the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand - comparisons between areas of the Black diaspora, and, thirdly, those which bridge these groupings, comparing, say, literatures of the West Indies with that of Australia.

(p. 18-19)

D’une écriture temporelle à une écriture spatiale : modalités de l’hybride selon Homi Bhabha et al.

Theories proposed by critics like Homi Bhabha and writers like Wilson Harris or Edward Brathwaite proceed from a consideration of the nature of post-colonial societies and the types of hybridization their various cultures have produced. In much European thinking, history, ancestry, and the past form a powerful reference point for epistemology. In post-colonial thought, however, as the Australian poet Les Murray has said, ‘time broadens into space' (Murray 1969). Works like Joseph Furphy's Such is Life (1903), Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children (1981), G.V. Desani's All About H. Hatterr (1948), the novels of Wilson Harris, and many others; all deliberately set out to disrupt European notions of `history' and the ordering of time. Novels like Patrick White's Voss (1957), or poem se­quences like Francis Webb's `Eyre All Alone'( 1961) or Leichhardt In Theatre (1952) run European history aground in a new and overwhelming space which annihilates time and imperial pur­pose. Received history is tampered with, rewritten, and realigned from the point of view of the victims of its destructive progress. The same is true of Raja Rao's Kanthapura (1938), V. S. Reid's New Day (1949), and Rudy Weibe's The Temptations of Big Bear (1973). In all these texts the perspective changes to that of the `Other'.

Homi Bhabha has noted the collusion between narrative mode, history, and realist mimetic readings of texts. Taking V.S. Naipaul's A House for Mr Biswas as his example, Bhabha demonstrates the dangers of the way in which readings of post-colonial works as socially and historically mimetic foster their reabsorption into an English tradition, domesticating their radicalism by ignoring the important colonial disruptions to the `English' surface of the text (Bhabha  1984a). Similarly, the St Lucian poet, Derek Walcott, in his essay, `The muse of history', takes issue with what he regards as the West Indian writer's obsession with the destructions of the historical past, and makes a plea for an escape from a prison of per­petual recriminations into the possibilities of a `historyless' world, where a fresh but not innocent `Adamic' naming of place provides the writer with inexhaustible material and the potential of a new, but not naive, vision (Walcott 1974b).

The West Indian poet and historian E.K. Brathwaite pro­poses a model which, while stressing the importance of the need to privilege the African connection over the European, also stresses the multi-cultural, syncretic nature of the West Indian reality. Similarly, for the Guyanese novelist and critic, Wilson Harris, cultures must be liberated from the destructive dialectic of history, and imagination is the key to this. Harris sees imaginative escape as the ancient and only refuge of oppressed peoples, but the imagination also offers possibilities of escape from the politics of dominance and subservience. One of his most important images for this process is provided by the folk character of Anancy, the spider man, from Akan folklore. Anancy can and does take many forms in his transplanted West Indian setting, but for Harris he provides the key to an imagina­tive recrossing of the notorious `Middle Passage' through which the slaves originally crossed from Africa to the Caribbean (Harris 1970a: 8ff; see also Brathwaite 1973:165-7). The trick­ster character 0f the spider man, like the limbo `gateway' of the Middle Passage, offers a narrow psychic space through which radical transformation may occur. Mixing past, present, future, and imperial and colonial cultures within his own fiction, Harris deliberately strives after a new language and a new way of seeing the world. This view rejects the apparently inescap­able polarities 0f language and deploys the destructive energies of European culture in the service 0f a future community in which division and categorization are no longer the bases of perception.

In The Womb of Space (1983) Harris demonstrates the ways in which this philosophy can be used in the radical reading of texts, for, like Jameson, he is able to draw out the creative multi­cultural impulses inevitably present below the apparently an­tagonistic surface structures of the text.' Hence, Harris argues that although, on the surface, post-colonial texts may deal with divisions of race and culture which are apparently obdurately determined, each text contains the seeds of `community' which, as they germinate and grow in the mind of the reader, crack asunder the apparently inescapable dialectic of history. In Harris's formulation, hybridity in the present is constantly struggling to free itself from a past which stressed ancestry, and which valued the `pure' over its threatening opposite, the `composite'. It replaces a temporal lineality with a spatial plurality. The complication of time meeting space in literary theory and historiography, with its attendant clash of the `pure' and the `hybrid', is well illustrated by the contradictions that have arisen in the Canadian situation. In Canada, where the model of the `mosaic' has been an important cultural determi­nant, Canadian literary theory has, in breaking away from European domination, generally retained a nationalist stance, arguing for the mosaic as characteristically Canadian in con­trast to the 'melting-pot' of the USA. But the internal percep­tion of a mosaic has not generated corresponding theories of literary hybridity to replace the nationalist approach. Canadian literature, perceived internally as a mosaic, remains generally monolithic in its assertion of Canadian difference from the canonical British or the more recently threatening neo­colonialism of American culture.' Alternatively, it has striven for outside recognition by retreating from the dynamics of difference into the neo-universalist internationalist stance. Where its acute perception of cultural complexity might have generated a climate in which cross-national or cross-cultural comparative studies would be privileged, little work of this kind seems to have been done.

Post-colonial literary theory, then, has begun to deal with the problems of transmuting time into space, with the present struggling out of the past, and, like much recent post-colonial literature, it attempts to construct a future. The post-colonial world is one in which destructive cultural encounter is changing to an acceptance of difference on equal terms. Both literary theorists and cultural historians are beginning to recognize cross-culturality as the potential termination point of an apparently endless human history of conquest and annihilation justified by the myth of group `purity', and as the basis on which the post-colonial world can be creatively stabilized. Nationalist and Black criticisms have demystified the imperial processes of domination and continuing hegemony, but they have not in the end offered a way out of the historical and philosophical impasse. Unlike these models, the recent approaches have recognized that the strength of post-colonial theory may well lie in its inherently comparative methodology and the hybridized and syncretic view of the modern world which this implies. This view provides a framework of `difference on equal terms' within which multi-cultural theories, both within and between societies, may continue to be fruitfully explored.

The various models by which texts and traditions in post­colonial literatures are discussed intersect at a number of points. However, place is extremely important in all the models, and epistemologies have developed which privilege space over time as the most important ordering concept of reality. In the same way the poles of governor-governed, ruler-ruled, etc. are inverted and the concept of dominance as the principal regu­lator of human societies is recognized but challenged. Likewise, language localizes and attracts value away from a British `norm' eventually displacing the hegemonic centrality of the idea of `norm' itself. Finally, the `double vision' imposed by the historical distinction between metropolis and colony ensures that in all post-colonial cultures, monolithic perceptions are less likely.

(p. 34-37)

 

Littérature et dépendance

La Négritude, avatar d’une philosophie occidentale binaire ?

Despite these qualifications, race-centred critiques of Black writing and of writing by Europeans about Black societies have been influential within post-colonial discourse. The concept of Négritude developed by the Martinican Aimé Césaire (1945) and the Senegalese poet and politician Leopold Sedar Senghor (Senghor 1977) was the most pronounced assertion of the distinctive qualities of Black culture and identity. But in making this assertion it adopted stereotypes which curiously reflected European prejudice. Black culture, it claimed, was emotional rather than rational; it stressed integration and wholeness over analysis and dissection; it operated by distinctive rhythmic and temporal principles, and so forth. Négritude also claimed a distinctive African view of time-space relationships, ethics, metaphysics, and an aesthetics which separated itself from the supposedly `universal' values of European taste and style. The danger was that, as a result, it could easily be reincorporated into a European model in which it functioned only as the antithesis o£ the thesis of white supremacy, a new `universal' paradigm.

Wole Soyinka makes precisely this point in his analysis of Négritude in Myth, Literature and the African World:

Négritude, having laid its cornerstone on a European intel­lectual tradition, however bravely it tried to reverse its concepts (leaving its tenets untouched), was a foundling deserving to be drawn into, nay, even considered a case for benign adoption by European ideological interests.

(Soyinka 1976:134)

As Soyinka perceives it, this is inevitable given that Négritude embraces the essential binary nature of the western philo­sophical tradition.

Sartre ... classified this colonial movement as springing from the intellectual conditioning of the mother culture; he rightly assumed that any movement founded on an antithesis which responded to the Cartesian `I think, therefore I am' with `I feel, therefore I am' must be subject to a dialectical determinism which made all those who `are' obedient to laws formulated on the European historical experience. How was he to know, if the proponents of the universal vision of Négritude did not, that the African world did not and need not share the history of civilisations trapped in political Manicheisms.

(ibid.:135-6)2

(p. 21-22)