Postcolonial Fiction and Colonial Time
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University of Massachusetts Amherst ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst Doctoral Dissertations Dissertations and Theses July 2017 Waiting for Now: Postcolonial Fiction and Colonial Time Amanda Ruth Waugh Lagji University of Massachusetts Amherst Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2 Part of the African Languages and Societies Commons, Other English Language and Literature Commons, and the Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonial Studies Commons Recommended Citation Lagji, Amanda Ruth Waugh, "Waiting for Now: Postcolonial Fiction and Colonial Time" (2017). Doctoral Dissertations. 914. https://doi.org/10.7275/9983687.0 https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2/914 This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Dissertations and Theses at ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. 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WAITING FOR NOW: POSTCOLONIAL FICTION AND COLONIAL TIME A Dissertation Presented by AMANDA RUTH WAUGH LAGJI Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Massachusetts Amherst in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY May 2017 Department of English © Copyright by Amanda Ruth Waugh Lagji 2017 All Rights Reserved WAITING FOR NOW: POSTCOLONIAL FICTION AND COLONIAL TIME A Dissertation Presented by AMANDA RUTH WAUGH LAGJI Approved as to style and content by: _______________________________________ Stephen Clingman, Chair _______________________________________ Asha Nadkarni, Member _______________________________________ Britt Rusert, Member ____________________________________ Randall Knoper, Department Head Department of English DEDICATION Shpirti im ACKNOWLEDGMENTS One of the highlights of finishing this dissertation project is the opportunity to thank publicly the many people to whom I owe thanks. I want to thank Stephen Clingman especially, not only for his supportive excitement for this project, but also for the timely reminder: “Claim your space.” I thank Asha Nadkarni for her thoughtful suggestions, encouragement, and contagious belief in my abilities over the years. Both Stephen and Asha were instrumental presences at every milestone—from advisory committee to areas exam, prospectus to defense. I thank Britt Rusert for not only for her willingness to serve on the committee, but also her feedback on the earliest version of my introduction; those insights helped me to shape the entire project going forward. Other members of the English department faculty have also indelibly shaped this project and my career, but I am especially thankful for the feedback, support, and advice given by Laura Doyle, Rachel Mordecai, Suzanne Daly, Mazen Naous, Jane Degenhardt, Nick Bromell, and Donna LeCourt. I appreciate the comradery that various instantiations of the “writing group” provided over the years, and especially its core members: Carly Houston Overfelt, Heather Wayne, and Lauren Silber. I was fortunate to present my work at the 2016 “Waiting as Cultural Practice” interdisciplinary conference in Paderborn, Germany. I thank the conveners, Christoph Singer and Olaf Berwald for the incredible opportunity to discuss waiting across disciplinary, geographical, and national boundaries. I am also indebted to conversations occasioned by the African Studies Association conferences, Northeast Modern Language Association conferences, and the Modern Language Association conferences as well. A v special thank you to Andrew van der Vlies for allowing me to quote from his forthcoming book, Present Imperfect: Contemporary South African Writing, in chapter 4. Over eight years in the Pioneer Valley, I have been fortunate to form communities and find friendships in diverse places, and I recognize just a few of those meaningful relationships here: Anna Rita Napoleone, Razvan Sibii, Steph Kent, Iris Chelaru, and Colin Sweeney; Megan West and “Badger” Bergmann; Nicolas Sansone, Kate Walker, Scott Schneider, Keith Bailey, Steve Kallaugher, and Kris Newhall; Christopher Hennessey, Anthony Gregory, Lauren McCarthy and Daniel LaChance. I am grateful for my family—near and far, close and extended—for support in many forms over many years: my parents Dawn and Bill, and my sisters Kristen and Danielle. And finally, thank you to Genti Lagji for reminding me that there is life to be lived beyond the words on a page and outside the covers of a book. Faleminderit, zemra ime. vi ABSTRACT WAITING FOR NOW: POSTCOLONIAL FICTION AND COLONIAL TIME MAY 2017 AMANDA RUTH WAUGH LAGJI, B.A., DICKINSON COLLEGE M.A., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Ph.D., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Directed by: Professor Stephen Clingman This dissertation examines the temporalities of waiting in global Anglophone fiction, reinvigorating waiting as a modality that can be at turns debilitating, strategic, calculating, and meditative. By arguing for the centrality of waiting to the experience of postcoloniality, my dissertation challenges the dominant narrative of the twentieth century as a time only of acceleration and movement. In the introduction, I draw from social scientific studies of waiting, as well as philosophies of time, mobility studies, and history, to create a robust framework of waiting as a cultural practice and privileged analytical concept for scrutinizing colonial and postcolonial regimes of time. In chapter 1, I argue that V.S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River and Nadine Gordimer’s July’s People literalize the spatiotemporal metaphor “waiting room of history” to achieve very different ends. Maureen’s refusal to wait any longer in July’s People rejects the apartheid temporalities that condition that “waiting room,” whereas Salim’s refusal to wait in A Bend in the River ultimately reproduces the waiting room model of history—to which, in Naipaul’s view, certain occupants of the globalized, postcolonial world will always be relegated. In chapter 2 I read Alejo Carpentier’s Kingdom of This World and J.M. Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K vii through the lens of marronage; the protagonists’ labor and their “idleness” become newly legible as resistive waiting. I explore the temporal dimensions of waiting and disillusionment following political independence in Anita Desai’s Cry the Peacock and Ayi Kwei Armah’s Fragments in chapter 3. In chapter 4, I link waiting with healing and reconciliation after apartheid and civil war using Ndebele’s Cry of Winnie Mandela and Ishmael Beah’s Radiance of Tomorrow. I conclude my dissertation with a reflection on the significance of waiting in the post-9/11 world, such as in the rhetoric of preemptive military strikes that frame national security in terms of refusing to wait. As my dissertation argues, the temporal dimensions of waiting are not only implied in the discourses of colonial administration and anticolonial nationalisms, but are also deployed in strategic and political expressions of resistance, and remain central to the formation of geopolitical realities. viii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...................................................................................................v ABSTRACT ...................................................................................................................... vii LIST OF TABLES ............................................................................................................. xi INTRODUCTION ...............................................................................................................1 CHAPTER 1: THE WAITING ROOMS OF V.S. NAIPAUL AND NADINE GORDIMER .............51 Projects and Promissory Notes: Continuities of Waiting ......................................54 Conrad’s Heir: Naipaul’s African Fiction..............................................................57 Colonial Relics: Father Huismans and Raymond ..................................................67 “I will wait for the rest of my life”: Indian-Africans Abroad ................................74 Temporal Dimensions of Waiting During the Interregnum ...................................82 Broken Watches: Dismantling the Waiting Rooms of History ..............................95 2: MAROONED TIME: DISRUPTIVE WAITING AND IDLENESS IN CARPENTIER AND COETZEE ......................................................................................99 Timelessly Recurrent: Reading the Revolutionary Maroon ................................102 Flight, Freedom, and Formulations of Time: Maroon Characteristics ................108 Countertemporalities of Kingdom: History, Circularity, and Flight ....................114 Idle Time: Laboring Against the State in Michael K ...........................................121 Lines of Flight: States of Freedom in Marronage ................................................141 3: GENDERED TIMESCAPES OF WAITING: PATIENCE AND URGENCY IN ARMAH’S FRAGMENTS AND DESAI’S CRY, THE PEACOCK ...........................145 Postcolonial Novels of Disillusionment...............................................................145 Engendering Timescapes: Patience and Urgency ................................................150 Waiting Impatiently: Timescapes of Accra .........................................................155 Efua, Naana, and Juana: A Challenging Patience ...............................................168 ix “Now” is Here: Fierce Urgency in Cry, the Peacock ..........................................171