Introduction Uncommon Wealths in Postcolonial Fiction

HELGA RAMSEY–KURZ AND MELISSA KENNEDY

HE HISTORICAL FACT OF EMPIRE is the incontrovertible raison d’être of postcolonial studies. Less commonly acknowledged by the discipline, T however, is the capitalist drive for profit that lies at the heart of empire. The lack of attention to wealth is surprising, given that the enormous gains yielded by the colonial enterprise were, and still are, far from invisible. In as- sembling essays by postcolonial literary critics who address the concept of wealth depicted in fiction, this collection fleshes out a terrain of great potential. The task of ‘following the money’ which takes place in these essays not only illuminates the history of wealth, in colonial extraction of labour and resources, accumulation, and circulation, but also maps the transformation from colonial to neocolonial and neoliberal forms of capitalism in which modern-day di- visions of ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ clearly follow those of the colonial period. Even so, postcolonial scholars have eschewed inquiry into what, in their view, is a typically Western and intrinsically capitalistic ambition, highlighting instead unique, culture-specific structures of social value and modes of exchange. In keeping with their commitment to challenging received (Western) accounts of success and progress, critics have focused on the damage caused by coloniza- tion. This has directed attention away from the winners of the European race for overseas territories, and the wealth these contained, to its victims: the colonized as well as their offspring, generations still afflicted by a legacy of long-term ex- ploitation, dispossession, and subjugation. The project of giving voice and visi- bility to the casualties of capitalism has moved subalternity and abjection as intrinsically postcolonial configurations of poverty to the centre of postcolonial discourse and practically eclipsed the beneficiaries of imperialist expansion. Despite its rootedness in Marxist critique, postcolonial discourse has thus 2 UNCOMMONWEALTHS IN P OSTCOLONIAL FICTION 7 omitted to document and study affluence not only as an expected but also as an actual and lasting outcome of colonial domination. To be sure, as the gap between rich and poor is seen to be widening, in both the richest nations of the world, such as the USA and, say, Germany and in the developing world, including China, India, Nigeria, and South Africa,1 postcolo- nial analysis may for the first time be aligned with the mainstream rather than with the marginalized. Yet its emphasis on local resistances to and negotiations of ’s ideologies has held back inquiry into the global pervasiveness of capitalism and the appropriation of capitalist social relations into pre-exist- ing cultural practices and social hierarchies. In tacitly upholding received as- sumptions of a capitalist West (or North) hoarding enormous riches in its metropolises, the discipline resists engaging with the presence of moneyed elites in all parts of the world and analysing their local and transregional, national and international influence. A focus on wealth and the wealthy further reveals the validity of reintroducing the concept of class into the discourse of exploitation and thus correcting the impression of its obsolescence that post- colonial critique’s concentration on the cultural specificity of socio- has produced. The ground for such shifts of focus in postcolonial analysis has been well pre- pared by such emphatic critics of neoliberalism as , Mike Davis, , Stuart Hall, , Doreen Massey, Ellen Meiksins Wood, Michael Rustin, Saskia Sassen, and .2 It is not surprising that most of these critics are based in the USA and that many of them have a special inter- est in global as sites of . The very concreteness of wealth concentration in urban spaces enables a way of thinking about affluence

1 See, for example, , Capital in the Twenty-first Century, tr. Arthur Goldhammer (Le capital au XXI siècle, 2013; Cambridge MA: Harvard UP/Belknap Press, 2014). 2 See Noam Chomsky, from Profit over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order (New York: Seven Stories, 1999) to Requiem for the American Dream: The Principles of Concentrated Wealth and Power, ed. Peter Hutchinson et al. (New York: Seven Stories, 2017); Evil Paradises: Dreamworlds of Neo- liberalism, ed. Mike Davis & Daniel Bertrand Monk (New York: New Press, 2008); Nancy Fraser, Scales of Justice: Reimagining Political Space in a Globalizing World (New York: Columbia UP, 2009); Stuart Hall, “The Neo-Liberal Revolution,” 25.6 (2011): 705–28; Stuart Hall, Doreen Massey & Michael Rustin, After Neoliberalism?: The Kilburn Manifesto (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2015); David Harvey, The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism (London: Pro- file, 2010); Ellen Meiksins Wood, Empire of Capital (New York: Verso, 2003); Saskia Sassen, Expul- sions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy (Cambridge MA: Harvard UP/Belknap Press, 2014); Joseph Stiglitz, The Great Divide: Unequal Societies and What We Can Do About Them (New York: W.W. Norton, 2015) and Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the (New York: W.W. Norton, 2010).