Critical Cosmopolitanism and Stereoscopic Vision in the Global

Home , Country Nation, Harriett Gilbert, Imaginary Homelands, Nadine Gordimer, Salman Rushdie, Wizard of the Crow

LARGE WORLDS/SMALL PLACES:

CRITICAL COSMOPOLITANISM AND STEREOSCOPIC VISION IN THE GLOBAL

POSTCOLONIAL NOVEL

ASDGHIG KARAJAYERLIAN

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements

For the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Dissertation Adviser: Dr. Kurt Koenigsberger

Department of English

CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY

May, 2010 CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY

SCHOOL OF GRADUATE STUDIES

We hereby approve the thesis/dissertation of

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candidate for the ______degree *.

(signed)______(chair of the committee)

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(date) ______

*We also certify that written approval has been obtained for any proprietary material contained therein. DEDICATION

To my parents, Nver Apelian and Haroutioun Karajayerlian, who taught me that education is the key; and to my sister Suzanne, who was there to see me through.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments………………………………………………………………. 3

Abstract…………………………………………………………………………. 5

Chapter I: Viewing the World Stereoscopically: Globalization, Cosmopolitanism,

and the Postcolonial Novel, an Introduction………….………………… 7

Chapter II: Revolution or Evolution: Paths to Globality and Problems of

History in V.S. Naipaul’s Magic Seeds…………………………………. 42

Chapter III: Imagining the Routes: Global Mobility and Cosmopolitan

Commitment in Nadine Gordimer’s The Pickup………………………… 78

Chapter IV: Between America and the Antipodes: Millennial Culture and

its Discontents in Salman Rushdie’s Fury………………………………. 106

Chapter V: Where Marxism, Feminism, and the Occult Meet: Cosmopolitan Resistance in the Global ‘Corporony’ in Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Wizard of the Crow……..... 138

Epilogue: Critical Cosmopolitanism as Stereoscopy and Beyond……………… 173

Bibliography……………………………………………………………………. 180

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

First and foremost, I would like to thank my advisor, Kurt Koenigsberger, for guiding me through this dissertation project from its very early stages of inception in

Lebanon, and for tirelessly supporting its various stages of development. My thanks go to my committee members: William Marling, whose feedback on the individual chapters was greatly helpful; Thrity Umrigar, whose insights and constant encouragement helped me overcome the obstacles in the writing process; Gilbert Doho, whose enthusiasm for the project motivated me. The diversity and richness of views among my dissertation committee members helped me broaden my own literary and critical horizons. I thank all my teachers at Case Western Reserve, most notably, Mary Grimm, for supervising my

PhD comprehensive exams; Athena Vrettos, for helping me at a crucial stage in my studies; Christopher Flint and Todd Oakley for their interest in my scholarly progress. I would like to acknowledge the Arthur Adrian Dissertation Fellowship I was granted in

2006 from the English Department, and the generous teaching assistantships offered to me there over many years. An acknowledgment is due also to the Lebanese University

Scholarship program, with which assistance I completed my Master’s degree at Case.

I thank my family—Mom, Jon, Jacqueline, Annie, Suzanne, Seta, and my brother- in-law Zadig—for their unwavering support and loving care; and I hope to become a worthy role-model for Selina and Steve Aintablian. A heartfelt thank you goes out to my fellow graduates and friends at Guilford House and from the Case community who have been on this path before me and along with me—I know I will cherish our camaraderie for many years to come. There are, finally, a number of people whose moral and practical support has been invaluable: May Maalouf, Ahmad Salam, Zahi Ramadan, Mariyanne

Rofaiel, Jeanine el-Maasri Wehbe, Tony Masri, and Joanna el-Maasri—I am deeply grateful to you for being my champions and confidants.

Large Worlds/Small Places: Critical Cosmopolitanism and Stereoscopic Vision in the Global Postcolonial Novel

Abstract

ASDGHIG KARAJAYERLIAN

This dissertation looks at the new developments in the politics and narrative style of the global postcolonial novel in the most recent works of Salman Rushdie, Nadine

Gordimer, V.S. Naipaul, and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, namely, Fury, The Pickup, Magic

Seeds, and Wizard of the Crow, respectively. I note that in varying degrees, these narratives enact a form of commitment to the postcolonial world that is critically cosmopolitan, situated between a liberal ideology of common humanity and a postcolonial outlook championing resistance. This critical cosmopolitanism moves from a discourse of dislocated subjectivity in postcolonialism to one of the multiply-linked subjectivities of globalization. It does not shun the liberatory potential of global discourses, such as modernity, human rights, and feminism, and it does not hold the

“national” as the sole form of resistance to global inequities and the neocolonial threat of a globalized world. In fact, the distance found in these narratives from locality, nativity, and cultural specificity, unsettles the condition of postcoloniality and the binary dynamics of imperial centers and (post)-colonial peripheries, notions that are at the basis of established interpretive paradigms for postcolonial narratives.

Taking critical cosmopolitanism as my critical paradigm, instead, I expose in these narratives a desire for globality, namely for a convivial culture and a non-

fragmented world, which is attentive nonetheless to the new power relations and the tensions existing in the act of reconciling the local with the global, such as in ethnic conflicts, the plight of illegal immigrants and global strangers, the hegemony of the global “society of the spectacle,” and the various activisms on behalf of the global poor and the dispossessed. I contend that the global postcolonial novels in this dissertation envision the “large worlds” that are at the global forefront always in relation to the “small places” that are within and beyond national demarcations and often below visibility. This double and complex view of globalization, which I denote as stereoscopic vision, fashions a mutually informing critique that surpasses the nation, imperial world-views, and postcolonial geopolitics. It expands onto the world and generates its literature in an era of accelerated globalization.

Viewing the World Stereoscopically: Globalization, Cosmopolitanism, and the Postcolonial Novel, an Introduction

“The ambition of extracting a universal from a particular no longer moves us. The very matter of all of those places and the minute or infinite detail and the inspiring combination of all their particularities ought to be set down. To write is to awaken the savor of the world.” —Edouard Glissant, “The Unforeseeable Diversity of the World”, (294)

“It gives you—what shall I say—stereoscopic vision, so that you can simultaneously look at two societies from both the inside and the outside. And I think the tensions in that are quite useful; they strike sparks.” —Salman Rushdie, Interview with Jean W. Ross, 1982, (5)

Discussing his own experience of being a diasporic Indian writer in England writing in the Anglophone tradition, the postcolonial writer Salman Rushdie in an interview in 1982 notes the stereoscopic vantage of perception his strategic placement in society has afforded him. In a position both belonging to and distanced from English and

Indian societies, Rushdie describes the experience of a tension in the grasp of reality that was nonetheless productive and illuminating. As Rushdie writes elsewhere, his experience of migration and expatriation, and the discontinuities it had produced in his life, reveal to him that “human beings [do] not perceive things whole… [they are] cracked lenses capable of fractured perception [;] partial beings, in all the senses of that word” (“Imaginary Homelands” 12). Nonetheless, Rushdie’s “fractured perception” is not a disruption or a loss in vision, but a unique vantage of perception, which results in the displaced writer achieving a stereoscopic vision instead of chasing a tenuous “whole

sight” (19).

Rushdie’s pronouncements of his sight and insight into multiple cultures, as the

epigraph shows, propagate a distinct type of cosmopolitanism, which negates older

cosmopolitan aspirations for global mapping and whole sight. Moving away both from

older forms of cosmopolitanism, such as planetary humanism, worldliness, or universal belonging, and from stances that are reactionary to the global and dismissive of its potential in postcolonial thought, Rushdie’s stereoscopic vision suggests a critical cosmopolitanism. An alternative to an unattainable planetary sight or insight, this critical cosmopolitanism challenges notions of objective truth and absolute Reason, both of which are nowadays accused by postmodern and postcolonial thinkers alike of leveling out the differences between cultures and sliding into ethnocentric generalizations1.

Instead, it critically negotiates a plurality of truths and a multiplicity of differences, accessing and compressing distances rather than leveling out differences, or heralding a cultural universality in the world. It enhances one’s world-view, as it does with Rushdie, by affording one a position of both an insider and an outsider, and enabling a partial attachment to both the cultural or societal inside and the outside. In today’s globalized world, this partial identification and cosmopolitan distance from the cultural inside, I contend, allows for a stereoscopic accessing of the local and the global matrices of belonging that make up the subject’s world nowadays. Indeed, Rushdie’s stereoscopic vision is an emblem of a critical cosmopolitan space of negotiation between his locality—variously understood as his race, nationality, ethnicity, and roots in the East— and his global identification with the cultures and the routes he has traversed in the West.

In this dissertation, I explore “stereoscopic vision,” as a critical cosmopolitan style of contemporary fictional narrative in the global postcolonial novel. In particular, I argue that an attention to stereoscopy, both in our reading practices and as an operative metaphor in narrative, resolves a crucial problem in our understanding of present-day

1 Some of these Eurocentric generalizations are castigated as part of the myth of grand narratives, such as that of progress and universality. For further details, see Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979), and Edward Said, Orientalism (1979). 8

postcolonial novels, which have marked a shift in their ideology in the context of an intensified experience of globalization. The millennial novels of the four major postcolonial writers in this dissertation, Salman Rushdie, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Nadine

Gordimer, and V.S. Naipaul—respectively, Fury (2001), Wizard of the Crow (2005), The

Pickup (2001), Magic Seeds (2003)—do not operate within the standard postcolonial modes of “writing back to empire” or of rewriting the nation that their earlier work usually evoked. Rather, the stereoscopic in them reveals a dual or layered narrative that negotiates multiple cultural and socio-political localities, namely the near and far places or the large worlds and small places, and adopts the claims of the small

(local/postcolonial particularities and allegiances) and the large (global cultural patterns and widespread modernity) in equal measure in a context informed by the accelerated globalization of culture. This stereoscopic style of narrative, along with the critical cosmopolitan ideology it advances, I argue, ultimately displays an important and much- needed method of looking at and perceiving the world today—one that paves the way for an equitable globality, or a truly borderless and convivial cosmopolitan existence.

My dissertation makes a two-pronged intervention in the ongoing discussions about cosmopolitanism and postcolonialism. By reading the above-mentioned novels within a critical cosmopolitanism framework, I reject both readings that adopt a universalist cosmopolitan lens and those that look at them from a purely postcolonial perspective. The idea of cosmopolitanism re-appeared in the late nineteenth century as an ideal of “cultivated detachment,” enabling one to go beyond one’s locality/ nationality and access the world at large from a non-biased, disinterested Arnoldian standpoint

(Anderson 3-4). In this view, if only one could put aside one’s interests, “cultivate a

reflective distance from one’s original or primary cultural affiliation,” one would be able to reach a universal epistemology that united humanity across the board (63). Some of the narrative exponents of detachment are realism and omniscience in point of view that were popular as literary methods at the time (63).

In contrast, the stereoscopy that I argue is a style of critical cosmopolitanism in postcolonial narratives does away with the dubious “universality” of human experience and the objectivity needed to reach it, and emphasizes the import of the local in the cosmopolitan equation. In Bruce Robbins’ terms, the “actually existing cosmopolitanisms” of today do not bespeak an ideal of detachment but “a reality of re- attachment, multiple attachment, or attachment at a distance” (in Cheah and Robbins 3).

Within the context of globalization, cosmopolitan multiple attachments denote both a cultural plurality but also a sense of commitment to both the local and the global, as opposed to for example an aesthetic experience or non-committal. As Kwame Anthony

Appiah explains in his notion of “partial cosmopolitanism,” a cosmopolitan does not abandon local allegiances in favor of the world or an ideal of objectivity; while certainly not endorsing “the nationalist who abandons all foreigners,” he or she doesn’t identify either “with the hard-core cosmopolitan who regards her friends and fellow citizens with icy impartiality” (xvii). Critical cosmopolitanism, in short, is to attempt to have “the world” and affirm one’s locality too; and moreover, to note, as is the task of any critic, all the ways in which these two experiences converge and diverge, or inform and contradict one another.

Critical cosmopolitanisms in the novels examined in this dissertation, I argue, share in a sort of non-binary thinking that also challenges postcolonial critiques. Such a

thinking is expressed in the edited volume Cosmopolitanism (2002), by Carol

Breckenridge, Sheldon Pollock, Dipesh Chakrabarty and Homi Bhabha, who reject the

long-established mentality of the binary: “either First or Third world: either communism or capitalism; either planned economies or free markets; either the secular or the sacred; either class politics above all other differences or a betrayal of the spirit of History itself”

(589). The critics discuss existing cosmopolitanisms as vernacular forms of survival between cultures rather than universal or singular belonging, “ways of living at home abroad or abroad at home- ways of inhabiting multiple places at once, of being different beings simultaneously, of seeing the larger picture stereoscopically with the smaller”

(11). In this light, the stereoscopic vision that endows Rushdie’s writing with “new angles at which to enter reality,” is an expression of his critical cosmopolitanism. That is,

Rushdie identifies the Indian writer who has a “plural and partial” identity, who straddles and sometimes falls between cultures, and looks from both the inside and the outside, as

one who produces a three-dimensional view of reality (15). But while Rushdie’s notion

of the stereoscopic is applied to the migrant or the diasporic individual, who is poised in

between two cultures and geographies, I expand to include in the concept, the experience of people in globalized times who straddle the local and the global from within the same locale and against a backdrop of a history of colonialism, all facilitated by the proliferation of the globalizing forces of technology, mass media, and transnational capital that have become widespread.

The novels treated in this study share commonalities in outlook and ethos that go beyond national and postcolonial specificities. They challenge both the mainstream cosmopolitan and the purely postcolonial by deploying varieties of stereoscopy -

implying a duality of vision and a multiplicity of attachments – whose terms exceed the

dynamics of migration, experiences of dislocation, and the center-periphery colonial

geography.

Foremost, these novels spotlight distinct “large” and “small” places as dual

objects of their narratorial or character-based observational concern and critique. Large and small, in Bruno Latour’s terms, denote degrees of connectedness in a networked world, with “large” and “small” respectively standing for ‘more’ and ‘less’ connected places (2). It is important to note that these terms are not to be taken as de-facto markers of cosmopolitical imagination, with large implying somehow the higher or clearer view, or the “global” standing in for an older universal transcendence; and small implying the narrow, which is invariably also the “local.” As Latour writes,

All places are equally local—what else could they be? But they are hooked up

differentially to several others. Apart from those links, we are all blind. Thus, it’s

the quality of what is transported from place to place that creates asymmetries

between sites: one can be said to be ‘bigger’ than some other, but only as long as

connections are reliably maintained. It’s never the case that one site is more

universal, more encompassing, more open-minded than any other, in and of itself.

(2)

Accordingly, the “large” and “small” points of reference by which each of the narratives constructs its partial and multiply-linked world-view of contemporary globalization comprise millennial New York and a South Pacific “Lilliput-Blefuscue” in Fury;

metropolitan South Africa and an unnamed Arabian desert-village in The Pickup; postcolonial London and India’s provincial regions in Magic Seeds; a model African

“global city” by the name of Eldares and its bordering slums in Wizard of the Crow. As a result, these novels cannot be read within any single national paradigm of belonging, or even as part of the center-periphery postcolonial dynamics. Is Fury, which contemplates

America, an American narrative and part of American literature? Is it a part of

postcolonial literature depicting, say, the imperial connection between American Empire

and the “Lilliput-Blefuscue” postcolony, or the condition of the migrant in the

metropolis? Close attention to the text reveals that none can be an adequate

categorization. Is Wizard of the Crow a novel about postcolonial Africa? Not exclusively.

In fact, Ngũgĩ himself has openly said that the “mental location [of this novel] is situated in many parts of the world” (qtd. in Rodrigues 167). Wizard of the Crow depicts the condition of dictatorships in the less powerful countries of the world, the so-called

“Global South,” no matter whether or not these are postcolonial countries in the strict sense of the word. The same could be said of The Pickup, which surpasses the South

African national context and journeys to the Arab world, comparatively reflecting on both along the way; and Magic Seeds, which shows a dual examination of mass movements in a postcolonial globalized London setting and in a remote, rebel-based

Indian interior. The “centers” and “peripheries” are various here, and no postcolonial paradigm adequately describes the dynamics of these narratives.2

Additionally, in contradistinction to the defining postcolonial themes of migration and dislocation, for example, these novels present global themes of de-territorialization

2 Bart Moore-Gilbert has best summed up the new cosmopolitical condition in the following words: Insofar as the ‘centre’ is just as heterogeneous and unstable, in terms of its class, gender and even (now) ethnic identities, as the ‘periphery’, the matrices of oppositional alliance have become potentially almost infinitely complex, so that various groups can at one time be part of the ‘centre’, at other times of the ‘periphery’ and, at moments, of both simultaneously. (194)

and multiply-situated subjectivity in distinct figures, such as global strangers in Magic

Seeds, masquerading nomads in The Pickup, resigned puppeteers or puppets (as a parody

of autonomous global subjects) in Fury, and witches and wizards in Wizard of the Crow.

These figures embody new global subjectivities that have arrived with globalization, in

characters who escape national definitions and actively contemplate their place in the

world at large; in other words, these do not speak from only the position of the national or the displaced, but from that of the critically cosmopolitan.

These figures, in other words, embody less the condition of postcoloniality, which

is based on the idea of imperial centers and peripheries and the condition of dislocation it

creates in subjects who are poised in between, than that of a global condition emerging

beyond and across a background of a history of colonialism and aftermaths. This does not

mean, however, that such characters/figures do not resist the new power structures that

govern their worlds, the ones they inhabit and traverse. On the contrary, all of them

practice postcolonial resistance strategies to battle widespread hegemony. Therefore, the

novels under discussion attempt to look beyond the condition of postcoloniality but also

to critically negotiate the professed globality of present times.

Before discussing the marked transition of concern in these novels from

postcoloniality to globality, however, we need to note that the validity of postcoloniality

in Anglophone novels has come under great scrutiny in the first place, especially the one

depicted by various cosmopolitan-identified authors. For example, Graham Huggan has forcefully dismissed the cosmopolitan strain of postcolonial literature that he argues is situated firmly in global publishing markets. To him, the postcoloniality that the works

“translate” is nothing but a commodification of the so-called Third World “under the sign

of the exotic” (viii). Postcoloniality, Huggan points out, is complicit in the same imperial

mechanisms it purports to attack and resist (1). It is the turning of a “perceived

marginality” into a “valuable intellectual commodity” (viii).

Indeed, critiques in this last vein are numerous, most known among them being

Timothy Brennan’s Salman Rushdie and the Third World, which continues to dominate

discussions on Salman Rushdie’s narrative politics. Brennan’s main thesis is that humane cosmopolitan writers such as Rushdie hold political positions only to the extent that these can be easily transferrable into aesthetic modes and become issues of “style,” which is

“that perpetual flight from a fixed national and ideological identity” (142). According to

Brennan, the popularity of Rushdie as a “peripheral writer” comes from his literary practices complying largely with metropolitan tastes and agendas; as such, like others, his

“cosmopolitanism violates an important Third-World rhetorical mode [of writing]” (40).

Nadine Gordimer has also had her share of critics who find her empathetic

representations of the blacks in South Africa reductive and ill-informed (see Kathryn

Wagner’s Rereading Nadine Gordimer). Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o has recently been added to

this list, with the appearance of criticism that censures his dark representations of African

leadership as only confirming the largely biased Western views. Perhaps, V.S. Naipaul

has had the lion’s share of criticism and outrage from postcolonial critics who see him as

having taken as much advantage as he can from his condition of postcoloniality, shoddily

representing Third World societies along the way (see Rob Nixon’s London Calling: V.S.

Naipaul, Postcolonial Mandarin). While taking these critiques to heart, I argue that a

contentious postcoloniality is not and must not be the only framework within which these

writers’ works are understood and judged.

A critical cosmopolitan framework casts a less reductive light on these writers’

multiply-situated commitments. This dissertation aims to avoid the critiques of postcoloniality as exoticized and exoticizing, mainly because it understands postcoloniality as something other than an exclusive or even primary frame for the geopolitical work of twenty-first century writing. While not indicating a descriptive condition, however, the postcolonial still has a bearing in these novels in that it provides an analytical tool and a theoretical lens, one that exposes and sets right the various blind-

spots of global thinking. Huggan himself makes a distinction between postcolonialism as

“largely localized agencies of resistance” and postcoloniality as “the global condition of

cross-cultural symbolic exchange” (ix). For Huggan, though, the reality of the

marketplace is such that the former is “inextricable linked” with the exoticizing and

commodifying tendencies in the latter (ix). Huggan’s premise seems to bear on the novels

taken up here, to the extent that the cosmopolitanism of the writers in this dissertation

expresses its open aspirations for the condition of globality. Naipaul, for example, has

openly endorsed a “Universal Civilization”3. Rushdie has also promoted an engagement

of the “world beyond the community4.” And Gordimer has upheld an “internationalism”

that is based in a discourse of universal human rights5. Yet these forms of

cosmopolitanism, I contend, do not necessarily constitute the Western or first world

views. They do not signify an absence of commitment with regards to the postcolonial

world, even though they challenge the nation as the locus of community and neocolonial

resistance. As Bruce Robbins argues, an understanding of “the particular, the local, and

3 V.S. Naipaul “Our Universal Civilization.” The Writer and the World: Essays, 503-517. 4 Salman Rushdie “Imaginary Homelands,” in Imaginary Homelands, 19. 5 Nadine Gordimer, Interview with Hala Halim, Al-Ahram Weekly Online, and Living in Hope and History. 172.

the specific” as the sole viable sites of agency is a false one when contemplating

contemporary forms of globalization, for it shows a misplaced “nostalgia for a collective

subject-in-action that is no longer so easy to localize” (“Comparative Cosmopolitanism,”

in Cosmopolitics, 253). Local resistance in the form of the nation, as Robbins asserts, is

no longer the most viable antidote to the inequalities of global power.

If we were to give the postcolonialism of these writers the benefit of the doubt, we

can see that today the agency of the postcolonial in which these writers invest can be

understood in terms of a valuable “set of reading practices” which is in the words of Bart

Moore-Gilbert,

[…]preoccupied principally with analysis of cultural forms which mediate,

challenge or reflect upon the relations of domination and subordination—

economic, cultural and political—between (and often within)nations, races,

cultures, which characteristically have their roots in the history of modern

European colonialism and imperialism, and which equally characteristically,

continue to be apparent in the present era of neocolonialism. (Moore-Gilbert 12)

As a critique of power structures, postcolonialism has not played itself out completely. In

reality, the field’s investment in resistance theory is constantly being reinvented outside

the strict binary of imperial centers and peripheries and can be made to complement other

theoretical frameworks. The flexibility of its critical edge is evidenced by the

proliferation of theoretical volumes signaling new directions for it in the third millennium

(most notably, Relocating Postcolonialism edited by Theo-Goldberg and Quayson, 2002;

and The Pre-Occupation of Postcolonial Studies, edited by Afzal-Khan and Seshadri-

Crooks, 2000). Indeed, postcolonialism constitutes one of the frames of the stereoscopic

negotiation of the world and of the locations of power and resistance in globalization found in the novels I study. Therefore, I read the critical cosmopolitanism of these novels as a nuanced commitment, one situated between a liberal ideology of globality, common humanity, universal human rights, etc., and a postcolonial inheritance that champions difference and resistance.

More closely, by exploring Rushdie’s, Gordimer’s, Naipaul’s and Ngũ gĩ’s twenty-first century narratives, I examine how these critically cosmopolitan novels engage a widespread “global culture,” and what the relevance is in them of the

“postcolonial” as a mode of experience and a worldview on the imaginative configurations of the “global.” In recent years, postcolonial critique of the dominant center from the margin, particularly the critique of Eurocentric universalisms as the cultural basis of imperialism, has contributed much to the development of contemporary cosmopolitan discourses, especially in current globalization theories, with an attention to postcolonial experience. As Revathi Krishnaswamy states in the introduction to the edited volume, The Postcolonial and the Global, “what seems relatively new about current globalization theory is its postcolonial content: the vocabulary of deterritorialization, migrancy, difference, hybridity, and cosmopolitanism” (3).

Communion between these two fields has in turn necessitated a reexamination of both. In a special issue of the South Atlantic Quarterly titled “Anglophone Literatures and

Global Culture,” (2002) Susie O’Brien and Imre Szeman voice the need for a reexamination of postcolonial studies in light of global changes, noting that “the institution of English has been rocked by global changes for which prevailing models of cultural criticism have not quite prepared us” (623). They note that postcolonial studies finds

itself challenged by globalization theory and global cultural studies, which replace the

center-periphery model at the core of the Postcolonial with alternative non-binary understandings of global power (606-9). O’Brien and Szeman emphasize, however, that postcolonialism’s longstanding engagements with globalization, as manifest in the colonial and neo-colonial eras, make it an unavoidable area of study in any critical discourse of globalization and literature (605). Moreover, they agree, like Krishnaswamy, that the terms of postcolonialism provide a crucial framework and vocabulary for an understanding of the global, even when its ideology is threatened by the claims of a leveling globalization (607). “Authenticity, hybridity, margins,” they write, “[…] are all names for antinomies that postcolonial studies has identified but has been unable to resolve because of its commitment to a worldview that understands globalization as simply ‘neo-imperialism:’ something new, but not different in kind from earlier moments of global capitalist expansion and exploitation” (607). If the neo-imperial reading of the world no longer holds in globalization, then the contemporary postcolonial novel needs to be (re-)read for the kinds of commitments it embodies. Were critical cosmopolitanism to be taken as the new framework for understanding these narrative commitments, then the question is how it will address the postcolonial paradoxes, as O’Brien and Szeman pose, of “authenticity, hybridity, and marginality”?

One possible answer comes in Rushdie’s “Commonwealth Literature Does Not

Exist” (1983). In this essay, which predates Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin’s popularization of the postcolonial nomenclature in The Empire Writes Back (1989),

Rushdie censures “the folly of containing writers inside passports” (67). He notes that the

national categorization of literatures within Commonwealth Literature was a false

premise that promoted the “bogy of authenticity’ (67), because Indians did not write

about an “Indianness” per se, and there was not much link between Anita Desai, writing in the tradition of the novel of sensibility, and other “Indian” writers, including himself

(68). Rushdie sees more in common between him and writers like Gabriel Garcia

Marquez, Jorge Luis Borges, and Milan Kundera than with any other writers. He concludes by posing the following: “If we were to forget about Commonwealth

Literature, we might see that there is a kind of commonality about much literature, in many languages, emerging from those parts of the world which one could loosely term

the less powerful, or the powerless” (68). Rushdie’s corrective is that literary frontiers

should be purely imaginative: not national, political, or linguistic; and what needs

attention are the “imaginative affinities” shared by writers rather than their nationality

(70). Such a premise validates the inclusion in this dissertation of Nadine Gordimer, who

has never left South Africa and is identified with a white liberal minority, beside the work

of the three migrant metropolitan writers whose past works have defined the postcolonial

on three continents. One example of the imaginative affinities Rushdie cites is the

technique of magic realism which is shared by writers from Latin America to Africa to

Southeast Asia; I propose another affinity in the stereoscopic vision shared by Rushdie,

Ngũgĩ, Gordimer and Naipaul as a common narrative stance in their millennial fiction.

Rushdie’s essay makes an intervention in an earlier moment, one in which the

English academy defined the scope and reception of the Anglophone literatures of its

previous colonies, to the end-result that it encouraged a “ghetto” mentality whose

purpose was to “divide” (66). It is a critical commonplace that The Empire Writes Back

leveled the Anglophone literary field, picking up on Rushdie’s critical observations and

introducing the notion of postcolonial literatures as literatures of the formerly colonized world characterized by their collective anti-imperialist ideology. From a moment of advanced globalization, it seems to me that Rushdie’s essay offers insights that yet have to be explored by the well-intentioned proponents of the postcolonial. This dissertation follows Rushdie when he writes that the “imaginative affinities” that create a kinship in some literary works have more to do with relations of power and powerlessness than with restrictive postcolonial geographies. The imaginative affinities could well surpass the postcolonial situation proper. Indeed, all four novels in this dissertation are involved in mapping the structures of domination and subordination that obtain in the age of globalization, and thereby explore forms of resistance that might be adequate to confronting inequities of power in their new articulations.

Stereoscopic vision as an “imaginative affinity” of the novels analyzed in this dissertation is made manifest in the narratives as a form of double consciousness that destabilizes the binary categories of “self” and “other” in their largest senses, and generates reflections and self-reflections in which the strict boundaries of self and other blur. My theory of stereoscopy as narrative double-consciousness owes much to the work of Rebecca Walkowitz. In Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation (2007),

Walkowitz sees a link between critical cosmopolitanism and other critical practices, like critical internationalism and critical globalization, in that all of them engage in practices of “double-consciousness, comparison, negation, and persistent self-reflection” (2).

Walkowitz explains that critically cosmopolitan narratives participate in modernity and at the same time display “an aversion to heroic tones of appropriation and progress, and a suspicion of epistemological privilege, views from above or from the center that assume a

consistent distinction between who is seeing and what is seen” 6 . In other words, they

endorse partial vision. Walkowitz’s book is a pioneering study of the critical

cosmopolitan style of the modernist narratives of European moderns like Virginia Woolf

and James Joyce as well as contemporary immigrants like Rushdie, Kazuo Ishiguro, and

W.G. Sebald, whose works “generate specific projects of democratic individualism on the

one hand, and of antifascism or anti-imperialism on the other” (4). The perspective of this project accords with Walkowitz’s emphasis on discounting singular metropolitan views from the top and the unequivocal “progress” of modernity. However, the stereoscopic vision that engenders a critical cosmopolitanism in the novels I study differs from

Walkowitz’s modernist style, which she elaborates as one that “registers the limits of perception and of the waning of a confident epistemology, the conflict between the exhaustive and the ineffable, the appeal of the trivial, the political consequences of uniformity and various-ness in meaning, the fragmentation of perspectives, and the disruption of social categories” (20). Instead of merely foregrounding the limits of perception in metropolitan accounts, stereoscopy introduces the idea of plurality, accessing the views from the margin, from the local and small places, and projecting fragmented perspectives stereoscopically to engender a vernacular cosmopolitanism.

What is more, its treatment of political engagement, on either the global or local postcolonial level, is more pronounced and more openly thematized than it is within the

“experimental tones” and “analytic strategies” defining modernist methods (2l).

6 2. Walter D. Mignolo’s conceptualization of critical cosmopolitanism, for example, adopts a stance that negates the metropolitan and centralizes peripheral perspectives, as a counter-strategy to the cosmopolitan narratives that have been written from the perspective of modernity, disregarding modernity’s crucial counterpoints. Mignolo calls for a critical cosmopolitanism that would “re-conceive the world from the perspective of coloniality” (“The Many Faces of Cosmo-Polis” 159). My use of the stereoscopic as a metaphor of critical cosmopolitanism endorses plural views, seeing the world from the perspectives of coloniality and what is beyond it. 22

Translating into a narrative style of self-reflection and a double-consciousness

that is garnered from multiple places, the critical cosmopolitanism of these works,

therefore, bypasses issues of authenticity. On the other hand, the imaginative affinity of

stereoscopic envisioning shared by geographically and historically diverse writers recasts

marginality outside proper postcolonial boundaries. The question that remains is how

stereoscopy compares with the last of postcolonial’s terms, that is, hybridity. According

to Homi Bhabha, hybridity represents the “Third Space” whose intervention “makes the

structure of [cultural] meaning and reference an ambivalent process, [and] destroys [the]

mirror of representation in which cultural knowledge is continuously revealed as an

integrated, open, and expanding code” (“Cultural Diversity and Cultural Difference”

208). Bhabha goes on to contend that “such an intervention challenges our sense of

historical identity of culture as a homogenizing, unifying force, authenticated by an

originary Past, kept alive in the national tradition of the People” (208). Obviously, like

double-consciousness, hybridity is a force of resistance that unsettles imperial discourses

and categorizations. However, where hybridity is strictly understood as a syncretic

cultural flexibility and a challenging in-between-ness, double-consciousness denotes also the power relations that presuppose cultural contacts and which dictate cultural choices and practices. In Rushdie’s words excerpted in the epigraph, stereoscopy as a form of double-consciousness highlights a “tension” in the cultural negotiation that “strikes sparks.” It is an act not of reconciliation as much as of upsetting monocular views that discount difference, even ones that take difference as their basis for a cosmopolitan world-view. It is the perpetual consciousness and awareness of an “other” that is not necessarily a part of one’s cultural repertoire.

Double-consciousness, comparison, negation, and self-reflection, which describe narratorial and character-based strategies of reading in the novels, ultimately denote a style of interpretation that is both “generalist” and “specialist,” to use David Damrosch’s words for world literatures today, which themselves come to be seen as functions of modes of reading in the world enhanced by the globalizing practices of circulation, translation and mass production. To Damrosch, world literature suggests an act of refraction of cultures in their travel and circulation between nodes denoting cultures of origin and cultures of destination. In these undertakings, original contexts are somewhat diffused and new meanings are attached, but the point is never to reduce a culture to the dictates of universal humanism; rather, to keep the push and pull relationship between the two foci of the ellipses formed by the generalist and the specialist reading, which prevents the complete disconnection or distortion of texts or cultures (281-303).

Damrosch sees this kind of interaction creating a sort of conversation between cultural insiders and outsiders, between local knowledge and worldly interaction of a literary text; and as such, it becomes cosmopolitan (286-7). An instantiation of double-consciousness in these novels is precisely these kinds of negotiations they make between worlds and places other than their immediate environment. These narratives then are part of world literature.

For these novels, participating in world literature in Damrosch’s sense would mean that they engage in depicting or translating the local and the global from a particular locality and within a context of globalization. Similarly, O’Brien and Szeman assert that all recent literatures are a literature of globalization, because globalization connotes a sovereign world-order that has no center and no outside (608-11). And a

distinction in favor of a literature, postcolonial or otherwise, thematizing globalization becomes redundant. While these generalizations make sense, the novels I examine are not merely local literatures that avail themselves to global audiences, but global postcolonial novels that are critically cosmopolitan. One can distinguish, for example, between literatures (of globalization) that are localized, that is, those that encode the “global” unwittingly while concerned with a particular locality, and others that self-consciously expand their literary horizons beyond the local and the immediate and even beyond constraining notions of “place.”7 Moreover, there is also the difference between the merely transnational and the cosmopolitan: all contemporary literatures, postcolonial or otherwise, may contain elements of the transnational, but not all of them are cosmopolitically committed.

The works in this dissertation belong to the second category; they are global postcolonial fictions because they examine world-conditions and cultural continuums existing globally, in multiple locations, in a critically cosmopolitan manner. In this sense, they capture the cosmopolitan spirit of cultural expansiveness and at home-ness abroad.

For instance, Gordimer’s novel opens in South Africa, the subject of all her previous fictions, but then follows its protagonists to an imaginary and unnamed Islamic village from which the illegal worker Ibrahim comes. Gordimer first expands her literary vision

“beyond the nation” to include the predicaments of immigrants, legal and illegal, who have poured into post-apartheid South Africa. By following her privileged female protagonist to Ibrahim’s marginalized village, Gordimer establishes a sense of global

7 In describing the narratives as going beyond notions of place, I am referring to the fact that all four novels include imaginary settings that intend to typify global conditions rather than the particularities of real-life places. Naipaul’s novel is the only one that is set in India; however, his descriptions are focused on the Maoist movement that resides in the Indian interior, a place outside mainstream society, on the margins. 25

community in the novel in the figure of the global nomad, and highlights the global

routes and the nature of the “border” that manages mobility and prosperity in

globalization.

I also settle on this particular grouping of novelists who share imaginative

affinities, and not others, because their collective oeuvres offer a diversity of

“postcolonial” literary representations. Apart from being at the forefront of “the

postcolonial” as it emerged in the 1980s and ‘90s in the wake of The Empire Writes Back,

the writers in this dissertation sum up cultural practices and textual politics that run the

gamut of so-called postcolonial thought and cosmopolitan stances: from Rushdie’s all-out

embrace of cultural hybridity and liberalism to the anti-colonial polemics and neo-

colonial threat raised by Ngũgĩ; from Naipaul’s caustic indictment of “Third World

traditionalism,” to the empathetic articulations of difference and alternative modernities

in Gordimer. To posit the relationship between the globalization of culture and the

postcolonial literary imagination, I focus on their narratives that transcend local concerns

and specific or singular national contexts to expose a “global” condition early in the new

millennium, specifically in Fury, The Pickup, Magic Seeds, and Wizard of the Crow.

The global postcolonial narratives in this dissertation construct an ethos of

globalization that emphasizes the fuzzy shape of world-borders today, one that does not categorically (and thus ethnocentrically) deny the proverbial border (such as in various universalisms), but which scrutinizes the conditions of its surpassing or transgressing,

while aware of the political and historical realities that control these activities. They

engage critically, in other words, with globality, scrutinizing the prevailing feeling that

the world has become a newly-integrated inclusive whole.

My dissertation explores thus a double consciousness that is both globally and

postcolonially-informed in the works of the four writers. This has crystallized in the

critiques these narratives present of the local and the global from a position of both

belonging and distance. In the narratives, such double-consciousness and self-reflexivity is most clearly captured in the rhetorics of vision and visuality. Several visual devices and metaphors enable characters and narrators to attain a vantage of perception. In

Wizard of the Crow, for example, the wizard’s mirror is primarily an instrument of divination and magic fighting the powers/institutions of globalization, as especially felt in the lives of the local people, but it becomes also a device for postcolonial self-reflection, as a way to look inside the postcolonial Aburirian and censure the greed for power disguised in him as national and postcolonial self-affirmation. In Fury, Malik Solanka is preoccupied with registering the hegemony of the spectacle and the loss of the real in millennial culture, extending from America to a remote postcolonial location on the far side of the world. However, it also looks both locations in the eye, critiquing the degeneration of a culture of resistance in them into a form of aversive puppetry and violence.

In The Pickup, it is the omniscient narrator cast as a voyeur of sorts, who reads her South African compatriot’s inner thoughts and feelings continuously while only hint at her Arab lover’s point of view indirectly. This novel, I argue, attempts to present the other while keenly aware of the partiality of cosmopolitan views. It holds stereoscopy to be the antidote to imperialist mappings of other worlds. In employing a stereoscopic comparative vision at the level of characters, namely in the South African heroine Julie, and at the level of the narrator, in presenting Ibrahim’s challenge to Julie’s liberal views,

the novel attempts presenting two distinct cultural worlds without the one that is closer to

the author’s culture appropriating and stifling the other. Characteristically, it is vision

rather than voice that preoccupies the narrative, for cross-cultural communication in the form of conversation and listening to the other is negated from the start, and it is only with Julie’s contemplation of the desert, representing Ibrahim’s locality, that the narrator is able to understand Ibrahim’s nomadism, and subsequently Julie’s as well.

In Magic Seeds, it is Willie Chandran’s belated envisioning of the possibility of cosmopolitan identification that the novel presents. Although Chandran as the global stranger is able to deploy a stereoscopic vision that interprets globalization, and especially the blind-spots of mass movements, he remains trapped in history, unable to fashion a viable identity for himself. His is a state that in many ways reflects the author’s inability also to embrace an equitable globality, one that is inclusive of all. Nonetheless,

Chandran’s critique of the many places he journeys in the East and West from a position

of a stranger’s belonging and unbelonging denotes a self-reflexivity that is new in

Naipaul.

The stereoscopic framework I employ to interpret a critical cosmopolitan turn in these global postcolonial novels is by no means undifferentiated. My ordering of chapters will be based on the degree of critical cosmopolitanism the stereoscopic reveals in each work, with Magic Seeds occupying the back end of the axis and Wizard occupying the

front or lead in critical cosmopolitanism.

Theoretical Foundations

The critical cosmopolitan narratives I study engage with globality by establishing

links between local and transnational cultures and experimenting with cosmopolitan

mutuality vis-à-vis postcolonial alterity, giving way to new imaginations and engagements of global power that animate their cosmopolitanism. The way in which post-cold war globalization is registered in the narratives enables us to gauge notions of

globality more critically and more skeptically. On the other hand, interactions with

global, transnational cultures in these narratives also shed an important light on the

possibility of a cosmopolitical global culture. Thus they qualify both the postcolonial

critical models emphasizing postcoloniality and the global models celebrating globality.

In describing this move from postcoloniality to a critical globality in the said

narratives, I heed arguments made in global and postcolonial theories regarding

globalization and cosmopolitanism. In particular, the notion of globality has become the

point of contention in arguments addressing globalization in its post-cold war and post- imperial shape. Postcolonial critics, in general, have resisted the idea because it signals a global expansion of Western modernity, which is irreconcilable with the critique of liberalism that postcoloniality reveals. In the opposite camp, theorists of globalization have emphasized globality’s newness, its departure from historical modernity—from aspirations of modernity for cultural uniformity and “evolution” towards Enlightenment

“universals.” In The Global Age, Martin Albrow defines globality as a spatially- expansive concept, “an evocation of a concrete wholeness or completeness of existence embracing humanity rather than dividing it” (83). Globality in this view stages the interconnectedness of the world as a whole rather than its geopolitical divisions from previous imperialist eras. As ways of seeing and being in the world, these competing discourses of globality and postcoloniality are integral to collective self-definitions today, and their negotiation forms the basis of literary imaginations that engage globalization.

How does the global postcolonial novel embrace “globality,” one may ask; and how does

the ideology of the postcolonial narrative, no longer sustainable, change as a result? The

obvious answer that this dissertation endorses is that it becomes critically cosmopolitan

In this section, I will examine the theoretical foundations of critical cosmopolitan thought, as a global ethics that has been articulated from both a global point of view and a postcolonial one. Cosmopolitanism, as John Tomlinson describes, is a “cultural disposition” that makes individuals “simultaneously universalists and pluralists” (“The

Possibility of Cosmopolitanism,” 194). Within a world-view of imperialism or neo- imperialism, such definitions of the cosmopolitan risk being seen as hegemonic—with all things Western comprising the universal, and the non-Western, barred from configurations of global culture, relegated to a position of “otherness”; and depending on the degree of liberalism, either suppressed or tolerated. Pluralism in this case forms an antithetical binary with universalism, and as such is an untenable prospect for cosmopolitanism.

Contrary to this view, Tomlinson contextualizes cosmopolitanism in globalization, which he argues marks a paradigmatic shift in global power: “The idea of

‘globalisation’ suggests interconnection and interdependency of all global areas which happens in a far less purposeful way [than imperialism]… The effects of globalisation are to weaken the cultural coherence of all individual nation-states, including the economically powerful ones—the ‘imperialist powers’ of a previous era” (Cultural

Imperialism 175). Furthermore, the dissolution of national cultures does not lead unequivocally to a global cultural homogenization. Indeed, in his introduction to a critical volume titled Global Culture, Mike Featherstone maintains that the likelihood of a (fully)

“integrated global culture” is “as far a possibility as the creation of a world-state” (1).

Therefore, in anticipating globality, cosmopolitanism upholds the ideal of an

interdependent globalized culture while forgoing the premise of a singular and locatable

“universal.”8 It also demands, according to Tomlinson, that one replace the

imperial/postcolonial cultural binary with a single cultural system that is heterogeneous

and diffuse.

In Tomlinson’s view, the globalization process in itself does not “engender a

cosmopolitan disposition” (186). Neither, Tomlinson asserts, do forms of deterritorialization such as “hybridity,” “mobility”—to which I add, transnationality and diaspora—ensure cosmopolitanism (205). Situated somewhere on the scale between a

“radical universalism” and a “radical pluralism,” Tomlinson’s cosmopolitanism is an

active macro-ethical practice, which nonetheless

[…] must have a grasp of the legitimate pluralism of cultures and an openness to

cultural difference. And this awareness must be reflexive—it must make people

open to questioning their own cultural assumptions, myths and so on (which we

otherwise might be disposed to regard as ‘universal’). So the point is that the two

parts of the disposition [universalism and pluralism] should not be seen as

antithetical and antagonistic but as mutually tempering and thus disposing us

towards an ongoing dialogue both within ourselves and with distanciated others.

(195)

Tomlinson’s version of cosmopolitanism indeed affirms globality in facilitating

an expansive cultural dialogue and mutuality between the “Self” and global “Others.” It

8 A good example of this is Walter D. Mignolo’s idea of “diversality,” a view of the world as having many centers and many universals, which is part of a critical cosmopolitan agenda. 31

also departs from older notions of cosmopolitan detachment, objectivity, and universality.

Tomlinson argues not only of the inherent structural flaw of these abstractions, but also

of their impracticality. “We cannot expect people,” he explains, “to live their lives within

a moral horizon that is so distant as to become abstract: the cosmopolitan ethic may have

to be, in a rather literal, but positive, sense, ‘self-centered’” (196).

One model of cosmopolitanism practiced on the local level is identified in

America’s growing “solidary individualism” (Berking), in which case “the building of self-identity depends on an increasing reflexive awareness of relations with others” (206).

Evidently, by emphasizing plurality and self-reflexivity, Tomlinson’s cosmopolitan addresses the Postcolonial’s historical “suspicion” of Western aspirations and intentions for the global (188). It does not, for example, prefer the global over the local (understood as the agency of the everyday, of immediate community, or within a nation). Tomlinson’s definition of cosmopolitanism as an “ethical glocalism” underlines the importance of both the global and the local (194). By the same token, however, it doesn’t deny global modernity’s potential for promoting ethical values, for affirming difference, plurality, and non-Western cosmologies either. As a result, cosmopolitanism, Tomlinson believes, could become “a generalizable cultural stance” (188).

Tomlinson’s ideal of cosmopolitanism heeds the postcolonial, but it is also important to consider arguments for the cosmopolitan that come from postcolonial critics themselves. Here, I refer to the compelling case Homi Bhabha makes for a “vernacular,” partial type of cosmopolitanism. Skeptical of globality, the “vernacular” focuses on forms of minoritization derived from the experience of immigrant, refugee, exilic, and diasporic

peoples, who also form the hallmark of a global community today.9 To compare,

Bhabha’s main objection to Tomlinson’s generalizable cosmopolitan ethics would be to its confidence in liberal “individualism.” Bhabha’s vernacular cosmopolitan challenges any form of sovereignty, whether cultural or individual. As he notes, the Western

“individual” connotes a “self-fulfilling, plenitudinous personhood,” whereas the colonial/ postcolonial subject sustains a “split-self” that inherently accommodates an (imperial) otherness. This he calls an instance of “living-in-difference,” for the experience of colonization coerced its subjects to cultivate social identifications that were non-identical to their cultural selves, and in which processes of cultural translation and negotiation were a necessary mode of survival (21). This “ethic of survival” in modernity reflects the spirit of cosmopolitanism for Bhabha. Therefore, the “de-centered self,” and not the sovereign individual, becomes inherently cosmopolitan:

The “de-centering of the self” was the very condition of agency and imagination

in [the] colonial and postcolonial conditions, and it becomes more than a

theoretical axiom; it becomes a protean, everyday practice, a way of living with

oneself and others while acknowledging the “partiality” of social identification: it

becomes part of one’s ethical being in the sense that such a “de-centering” also

informs the agency through which one executes a care of the ‘self’ and a concern

for the ‘other,’ in the late Foucauldian sense. (21)

Vernacular cosmopolitanism positively diverges from Western and liberal worldviews and foregrounds a certain type of identification stemming from the colonial experience and central in contemporary globalization. For example, a similar case of discrepancy in

9 This case was made in a conversation with John Comaroff in 1998, which was transcribed and later published under the title, “Speaking of Postcoloniality in the Continuous Present: A Conversation.” 33

social and cultural identification is happening today in the West as part of what Bhabha

calls a “common postcolonial predicament” (24). Minority identities, such as diasporic

communities, are posing a challenge to the limits of liberal multiculturalism by virtue (or

vice) of their double citizenship: a political citizenship still bound to the nation and the

state, but a cultural citizenship that is transnational and often conflictual with mainstream

culture (24-5)10. Bhabha sees in this conflict of a “split” citizenship an opportunity for a

cosmopolitan solution, one that replaces the Eurocentric sovereignty of Western culture

(or individual) with the hybrid and convivial culture (or subject) of postcoloniality.

Bhabha’s theory of minority or vernacular cosmopolitan gains its momentum

from history and material realities while Tomlinson’s cosmopolitan disposition or affect

remains at present a nascent ideal. However, that does mean that the vernacular

guarantees mutuality, as Bhabha himself acknowledges in downplaying the problem of

regressive identity politics equally emerging from experiences of colonialism and current

migratory practices. Nonetheless, the vernacular unsettles the easy and unself-conscious

espousal of the ideological and political categories of Western liberalism without paying attention to the exclusivist and violent histories which accompanied it. In a sense,

Tomlinson’s West–originated and Bhabha’s postcolonial theories of the cosmopolitan can be reconciled: the former’s idea of multicultural self-reflexivity finds its first

challenge in the latter’s postcolonial dismissal of the categories of “Rationality, Progress,

Rule, and the State” of late modernity (24).

10 Bhabha discusses the incident of Rushdie vs. the Bradford Mosque as a prototypical example of such conflicts. He argues that “the real challenge may be to work out the historic and cultural modalities of this double and disjunctive inscription of the political and the cultural citizen, a citizen who is part of the same geographic territory, but belongs to different temporalities of cultural and customary tradition and vice versa” (25). 34

Furthermore, the ambition for more genuine forms of multiculturalism in both

theories deconstructs the imperial binaries of a past era. Where postcolonialism makes its

mark in cosmopolitan thinking is in offering an “optic” or optique based on a concrete

historically-defined experience. Bhabha himself makes this rearrangement in the definition of the postcolonial by shifting it from a “label,” a fact, to a “locus for theoretical and political reflection” (30). And along with Carol Breckenridge, Sheldon

Pollock and Dipesh Chakrabarty, in Cosmopolitanism, he articulates the political

relevance of the postcolonial, arguing that all talk about globality “still falls short of

rendering the postcolonial paradigms of justice and redistribution obsolete in the face of

[purported] choice, opportunity, and enterprise” (4).

A third alternative that has emerged of recent and that negotiates the two stances

in the cosmopolitan debate is the possibility of alternative modernities. Dilip

Parameshwar Gaonkar defines an “alternative modernity” as one that rejects an either/or

logic and fashions a way of “thinking through and against Western modernity” by

expanding the angle of vision globally, going beyond the West, and articulating a

“difference that would destabilize the universalist idioms [of Western modernity],

historicize the contexts, and pluralize the experience of modernity” (15). This view does

not transcend modernity as much as allow one, to adopt one premise Krishnaswamy

considers, to “enter and exit modernity on [one’s] own terms” (3). It also converges with

new theorizations of modernity as having become both extensive and deterritorialized in

our globalized world, and as a probable result, also non-imperialistic.

In Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Appadurai defines

that “global culture” today is not a set of fixed objects that have global relevance and

travel most conventionally from imperialist centers to peripheries. Rather it is a

dimension, more precisely, as a series of fluid dimensions across the world that are

“complex,” “overlapping” and “disjunctive with respect to one another” (32). Basing it

on the vast circulation of peoples (migration) and images (media) across world borders

today, Appadurai puts forward a “global cultural economy” that operates upon five

different trajectories or scapes: ethnoscapes (flow of people), mediascapes (of images),

technoscapes (of technologies), financescape (of funds), and ideoscapes (of ideologies)

(33). Both images and people in this economy are in a constant move and undergo

constant flux as they travel. They form “mobile” and “unpredictable” relationships (4),

which become part of a global de-territorialized imaginary. Therefore, they expose an

“unforeseeable diversity of the world,” to use Edouard Glissant’s title in the epigraph.

By characterizing “global culture” in terms of open cultural landscapes, Appadurai points

to a degree of ambivalence as well as local autonomy in the way global cultural exports

are received and appropriated in different locations. While he deems that access to the

global is always agency-conferring, in that it enables people to imagine11 connections

with distant worlds and challenge local sovereignties, Appadurai qualifies it by stating

that the “work of the imagination is neither entirely emancipatory nor entirely

disciplined” (4). He clarifies further that global cultural scapes “are not objectively given

relations that look the same from every angle of vision, but rather,[…] deeply

perspectival constructs, inflected by the historical, linguistic, and political situatedness of

different sorts of actors” (33). The positional, perspectival, and political-collective

11 Contrary to fantasy, imagination in Appadurai’s sense is an everyday social affect that connects people and cultivates a sense of belonging. Extrapolating on Benedict Anderson’s concept of the nation as an imagined community, Appadurai claims that worlds, just like nations, can be imagined too.

inflections of global culture point to its ambivalence, for it can create a feeling of global

conviviality as equally as it can lead to global conflict and violence. It is this last stance

that seems to inform the postcolonial novels that form my case studies in this dissertation.

The four novels in this dissertation, thus, meditate on a wide range of global

issues across the world that are focalized from particularized locations, in India, Africa,

the Middle East, America, London, and other imaginary archetypal sites. Each of these

locations projects a distinct scene of globalized conditions depending on its positional

logic. Rushdie’s Fury meditates on the ethnoscapes and mediascapes of a globalized

world that extend between a “multicultural” America and an embattled Third World

island-nation in the South Pacific. Gordimer’s The Pickup is also concerned with global

ethnoscapes and financescapes as they present themselves in post-apartheid South Africa

and a marginal desert-village in the Middle-East, or North Africa. Naipaul’s Magic Seeds

is particularly interested in ideoscapes that mobilize revolutions transnationally, between

Europe, the Far East, and a rebel-controlled Indian interior. Finally, Ngũgĩ’s Wizard of

the Crow presents a searing critique of the financescapes that subjugate Africa and the

‘Global South’ to the capitalist markets of a neo-liberal world.

The Question of Vision and Stereoscopy

A word is necessary about the precedence of vision in my dissertation over other

epistemologies. In fact, vision, in general, and global vision in particular have been

objects of condemnation in much of literary theory, from the French Poststructuralists to

postcolonial thinkers12. The novels I read in this dissertation include cosmopolitically

mobile characters who are heavily invested in what I have called acts of stereoscopic

12 For further information, see Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (1993), and Frantz Fanon, “The Fact of Blackness.” In Black Skin, White Masks (1952). 37

vision, in recording their observations and perceiving the worlds they encounter in

relation to other worlds. “Vision” in the title of the dissertation implies both a literal

sense of visuality or observation and an epistemic sense of perceptiveness and insight.

Rushdie’s protagonist Malik Solanka offers a descriptive account of the minutest details

of metropolitan New York while trying to discern the continuities between this global

commodity culture and an ethnic strife at the other end of the world. Gordimer’s narrator

follows her protagonists through South Africa and the Middle East in order to get insights

into alternative modernities that resist global capitalism. Naipaul’s protagonist Willie

Chandran enacts a stranger’s de-familiarized vision to expose the blind-spots of both liberal activism and the grand narratives of revolution for social regeneration. Ngũgĩ’s crow-wizard Kamiti wa Karimiri discerns in his magic mirror the pitfalls of globalization and the decentralization of global power, as well as contemplating alternative cosmopolitan solutions.

Although the question of vision, the power of sight to yield the truth, has proven to be a contentious one, it is the aim of this dissertation to suggest that stereoscopy, being an emblem of wholeness or three-dimensionality, carries within it a critique of imperial top views, emphasizing both self-reflexivity and contextualization. In fact, its reliance on multiple points of view undercuts the currency of any unified, truth-yielding visionary imperium, what Mary Louise Pratt has dubbed in satirical terms “the-monarch-of-all-I- survey” view. In her book, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, Pratt has described the faculty of sight in the context of nineteenth-century white travelers as being in the “main gesture of converting local knowledges (discourses) into European national and continental knowledges associated with European forms and relations of power”

(198). In Pratt’s argument, the removed top-view is also the one from the (cultural) outside, of European travelers, that is always also an imperial view. While not discounting Pratt’s premise, I hold stereoscopy to be a vision that overcomes imperiality by holding the local foreground and the global background in a mutually constitutive relationship, one that informs a critical cosmopolitan outlook.

On the other hand, there are also cosmopolitan critiques today that show global vision as productive and necessary. In Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress,

Bruce Robbins rejects the notion that cosmopolitan sight, or any metropolitan view, flatly leads to negative power, or even that “affective intensity and the faculty of sight are mutually exclusive” (69). He encourages a new type of cosmopolitanism based on

“think[ing] about universals in terms of unequal power rather than solely in terms of cultural difference, [and] mak[ing] visible the common or universalizing ground that we already occupy, whatever our necessary insistence on difference” (77). Robbins asserts that cosmopolitanism means “to learn how to exercise power, rather than simply to protest its exercise by others, and to do so at altitudes that may seem uncongenial” (77).

By underscoring the multiplicity and interactivity of plural and partial views, Rushdie’s stereoscopic vision, and the operative metaphor in the narratives of the four writers in this dissertation, approximates a sense of wholeness of vision that is dialogic and critically cosmopolitan.

The stereoscopic, with its combination of distance and subjectivity seems to be an apt metaphor for a type of a world-vision approximated and provisionally achieved by multiple subjective and overlapping points of view. Indeed, cosmopolitanism shares with stereoscopic projection or vision such identical logic; instead of a static “universal”

image, both adopt a dynamic interplay of multiple perspectives that reflect “small” and

“large,” near and far, figure and ground relationships. Both locate the promise of

globality (wholeness, three-dimensionality) within a plural and partial vision. Therefore, I

adopt stereoscopic vision to designate in the narratives the deployment of multiple points

of view, Western, Eastern, postcolonial, feminist, etc, and the juxtaposition of diverse

world-images emerging from disparate locations that tackle neocolonial oppression and

global choice on an equal footing. This stereoscopic vision, I argue, yields a multi-faceted understanding of the world, one that introduces the idea of plurality into the equation of the universal; in other words, it constructs a critical cosmopolitan view.

As shown earlier, a critically cosmopolitical view veers away from notions of the

“West” or of metropolitan places as more global (or Universal) and “Third-World” spaces as limited to their particularities (local). Instead, it opens the door for the non-

West to have a potentially universal relevance, or to put it more accurately, for the

Western and the postcolonial to become equally situated perspectives, with neither higher up than the other in the order of universality, but both as mutually-informed and informing spatial and epistemological categories.

In other words, it seeks out connections between large worlds and small places.

Multi-faceted and wider in scope, critical cosmopolitanism recognizes and addresses multiple cultures and worldviews in the capacity of each to inform the other in a shared culture of globality. The critical cosmopolitan narratives in this dissertation on the one hand expand and qualify Western notions of cosmopolitan belonging by borrowing models from the postcolonial world; on the other, they advocate a more expansive identity for postcolonial subjects inhabiting a globalized world. Inasmuch as the

postcolonial informs contemporary cosmopolitanism, rendering it more inclusive and truly global, cosmopolitanism, in these narratives, seeks to free minority subjectivities from ethnocentric attachments to identity while pondering their democratic integration into the promise of globality. The global postcolonial narratives in this dissertation promote diversity, tolerance, and broad-mindedness as equally as they do self- criticalness, cultural revision, and renewal, situating thereby their cosmopolitanism in the transitional space from postcoloniality to globality.

Revolution or Evolution: Paths to Globality and Problems of History in V.S. Naipaul’s Magic Seeds

So now in the streets of the Tanners he began re-living the stages of his descent in the past year. From the desolation and real scarcities of a broken-down estate house in an abandoned Portuguese colony in Africa; to the flat in Charlottenburg in Berlin which at first had seemed to him a place looted and bare and unkempt and cold, speaking of post- war neglect, and full of earlier ghosts he could scarcely imagine; to the airport town in

India, to the Riviera Hotel, to the Neo Anand Bhavan, to the guerilla camp in the teak forest, and now this shock of the tanneries in a small town he didn’t know and wouldn’t be able to find on a map: separate chambers of experience and sensibility, each one a violation with which he in the end would live as though it was a complete world.

–V.S. Naipaul, Magic Seeds, (58)

The protagonist of Naipaul’s 2003 novel Magic Seeds represents like other of

Naipaul’s heroes a migrant sensibility whose partial attachments between the East and the

West create for him a dilemma of belonging, as the epigraph shows. In this chapter, I read Willie Chandran’s dilemma as not simply reflecting a personal or postcolonial tragedy of dislocation or displacement, but rather as presenting the critical cosmopolitan challenge of achieving globality or a single-world consciousness in the new millennium.

In contemplating the possibility of globality in the world, Naipaul exposes a dark side to globalization and its illusory promises of mass liberation, by depicting two varied but equally ineffective proletariat “revolutions” in the West and the East, in sites that foreground alterity rather than globality and shared culture. As the epigraph relates, the aftermaths of colonialism, ghosts of global wars, and ongoing Third-World guerilla

movements all underline the import of history and the fragmentation of ‘experience and

sensibility’ in the world, aspects that would upset any easy ideals of globality.

By foregrounding several places across a background of contemporary

globalization, Magic Seeds presents a nuanced view of civilizational progress and social

activism, generating a critical cosmopolitan outlook that is based on a double or

stereoscopic view. Critical cosmopolitanism is an affect of belonging to both home and

abroad, engendering an identity that is plural and multiply-attached, and a way of seeing

the world that is informed by the local and the global, as per Carol Breckenridge et al.’s

definitions of the concept in Cosmopolitanism (2001). I argue that stereoscopic view in

Magic Seeds not only functions as a geographical marker, between England and the

Indian provincial landscape, but also propagates a dual worldview, one that departs from both mainstream cosmopolitan and strictly postcolonial resistance outlooks; it thereby casts a more comprehensive light on Naipaul’s critiques of the postcolonial world, which

are often deemed as imperialistic. In this chapter, I will explore such a stereoscopic vision

and the critical cosmopolitanism it suggests in Magic Seeds as they are contextualized in

the figure of the stranger that the protagonist embodies and in his journey from blindness

to vision, albeit it is a vision achieved belatedly. By exploring the intricacies of this

developing vision, I show a turning point in Naipaul’s oeuvre, from controversial and unforgiving critiques of the crippling cultural traditionalism of postcolonial societies, to a

critical cosmopolitanism that generates a global consciousness and ponders the cultural dynamics of empowerment and disempowerment, and advancement and degeneration in

an era of globalization beyond civilizational dichotomies but not beyond the spirit of history, and especially colonial history.

************************

Magic Seeds is a sequel to the 2001 novella, Half a Life in which Willie Somerset

Chandran, named by his father after William Somerset Maugham, leaves his father’s

ancestral home in India to find his place in the world, running away from the shame of

his mixed-caste background and rebelling against his father’s ascetic life in an ashram.

After a brief spell as a writer in London, he drifts with his girlfriend to her Portuguese

colony in Africa, and abandons it later as it is on the brink of an independence war,

feeling that he had been living an inauthentic life, half a life, and a life of “passing” (10).

In Magic Seeds, newly arrived in Berlin and taken refuge with his sister Sarojini, Willie

is urged to quit a life of passivity and hiding, embrace his part low-caste origins and

commit to the class or caste struggle in India. By now middle-aged, Willie joins the ranks

of an underground movement in the Indian interior thought to be serving the cause of the

poor. His journey in the rebel-dominated territory proves confusing, at times terrifying

and ultimately futile, and Willie subsequently escapes back to the West to face his final

disillusionment. Unlike his namesake, Willie Somerset Chandran is unable to find a

spiritual enlightenment, neither in the East or the West, nor in between, and remains

incapable of reconciling the worlds which he feels attached to by birth, education, and

experience, or of envisioning a path for himself in the world.13 In an era of intensified

globalization, instead of a ‘complete world’ of social and cultural integration, Willie

Chandran’s journeys yield a vision of only division and fragmentation, and the violation of his sensibility.

13 It is alleged that Maugham was influenced by India which he visited while writing The Razor’s Edge, a post-first world war novel about the protagonist’s journey from the heights of materialism in Europe to a spiritual enlightenment in India. 44

The themes of social fragmentation and civilizational divides which pre-occupy

Magic Seeds have not been new in Naipaul’s oeuvre, at least not since the publication of

A Bend in the River (1979). This novel explores the cosmopolitan crossroads of African,

Indian, and Western civilizations in a small town in East Africa at a time of great flux and nationalist uprising, and charts its Indian protagonist’s gradual and deliberate abandoning of his history and homestead and his “making a dash for the bounties of the universal civilization in Europe and North Africa,” as Chinua Achebe had pointedly surmised (90).

The universal civilization that Achebe references here is the one that Naipaul celebrated in his New York Library lecture, as located in the post-imperial West and characterized by “the extraordinary attempt of this civilization to accommodate the rest of the world and the currents of that world’s thought” (516). Such a claim has caused the ire of many postcolonial thinkers, like Achebe who has deemed Naipaul’s cosmopolitanism as an apology of sorts for Western neo-imperialism and its exclusionary and Eurocentric propagations of global culture. One of the aims of this chapter is to qualify arguments that attack Naipaul’s belief in the “universal civilization” by illuminating his critical cosmopolitanism which partakes in both the West and the East and is committed to both home and abroad, and to the import of history, especially in his latest novel to date,

Magic Seeds.

A key to understanding Naipaul’s critical cosmopolitan shift in Magic Seeds lies in examining the novel’s dual or stereoscopic examination, of the global and the local scenes, in terms of both sight and insight. Stereoscopy, in this novel, is a form of non- hierarchical vision that manifests itself in the narrative as double-consciousness and self- reflexivity. These two are considered the mainstays of a cosmopolitan style, according to

Rebecca Walkowitz in Cosmopolitan Style. Particularly the two—stereoscopic vision and critical cosmopolitanism—come together in the figure of the multiply-situated yet globally homeless stranger that Willie Chandran embodies. As Willie admits, he was

“always someone on the outside” (2), a stranger used to “not being at home anywhere, but looking at home (74). Indeed, the stranger engages the global and the local, the modern and the postcolonial, from a dual standpoint of belonging and non-belonging to each, and as a result negotiates an individualism based on eclectic cultural choices from home and abroad. Zygmunt Bauman has theorized the stranger as an ‘undecidable’ rather than an ‘opposition,’ a figure that unsettles the false separation of a cultural “outside” from an “inside,” of chaos from order, one whose presence signals the characteristic ambivalence of modernity (56). K. Anthony Appiah sees the stranger as key to theorizing an inter-subjective and cosmopolitan code of ethics. And in Stereotyping: the Politics of

Representation, Michael Pickering highlights the stranger’s potential for opening up possibilities of cultural advancement “through cultural dialogue and translation, through being receptive to encounters in the creative contact zone between ‘near’ and ‘far’” (216).

All of the above reveal the stranger to be a figure that has a double-consciousness which yields a critical cosmopolitan outlook, operating in a “continual contact zone between belonging and un-belonging,” to use Pickering’s words (204).

The same critical cosmopolitanism pervades Magic Seeds in Willie Chandran’s stranger’s vision of a postcolonial globalized London and the Indian interior. However,

Willie does not start out with this critical cosmopolitan vantage. Chandran’s journey from blindness to insight, from monocular sight to stereoscopic vision takes place in stages.

And his awakening to the possibility of a critical cosmopolitan identification is achieved only belatedly, as his words some 200 pages into the narrative attest:

It is terrible and heartbreaking that this way of seeing and understanding has come

to me so late. I can’t do anything with it now. A man of fifty cannot remake his

life. I have heard it said that the only difference between the rich and the poor in

a certain kind of economy is that the rich have money ten or fifteen or twenty

years before the poor. I suppose the same is true about ways of seeing. Some

people come to it too late, when their lives are already spoilt. I mustn’t

exaggerate. But I have a sense now that when I was in Africa, for all those

eighteen years, when I was in the prime of life, I hardly knew where I was. And

that time in the forest was as dark and confusing as it was at the time. I was so

condemning of people on the course. How vain and foolish. I am no different

from them. (230-1)

The valuable “way of seeing” that Willie realizes has come to him late is the stereoscopic possibility, which is a perception that operates on two levels of identification: the global and the local, without the conflict between the two leading one to cancel the other. It is a dual vision that escapes a binary mentality. Willie’s dilemma throughout is in his inability to identify with the localities he traverses and his looking at them always from the outside.

The stereoscopic metaphor embedded in the narrative, as the above quotation clarifies, answers to accusations made by critics regarding Naipaul’s deep-seated prejudices against postcolonial societies remaining veiled behind a façade of cosmopolitan disinterestedness. At the helm of this critical backlash is Rob Nixon, who

has censured Naipaul’s travel narratives for their assumed “cosmopolitan clear-sighted- ness” posited against “the dimmed perspectives of locals,” and argued that the certainty and moral certitude of Naipaul’s vision was squarely Eurocentric (81). In Magic Seeds, what seems to lend weight to these critiques is the unsettling wholesale censure of mass movements, which may suggest that Naipaul unequivocally accepts the global capitalist status quo, and privileges an individualist rather than a nationalist collective ethos.

Indeed, at the end, Willie realizes “there [was] not one thing [i.e. a resistance politics] that [was] an answer to the ills of the world and the ills of men” (237); in other words, the idea of progress was to be achieved based on a Western model of a cultural evolution towards a shared globality. However, Willie also undermines this possibility by foregrounding the formidable impact of history in the experience of the sub-classes he meets on his journey both in India’s rebel territory and London’s Council Estates and, and as he realizes in the excerpt above, in himself as well. By exploring this stereoscopic dimension in the narrative, one can note both a narrative that is non-hierarchical or

Eurocentric and an author who is a rather ambivalent observer, with partial and often conflicted commitments to both a globalized world and the postcolonial condition.

The epiphany of an identification with the postcolonial world comes to Willie

Chandran as he is in a London training centre, in the company of men like the “big black or mixed man from the West Indies who had worked his way up and was immensely pleased to be in this cosmopolitan company,” the Malaysian Chinese who ran an Ali

Baba construction business, meaning acted as a Chinese front for a Muslim business, and a Pakistani religious zealot (230-1). At a lecture given on “the houses of the poor in every culture” (233), and in the company of these men, Willie realizes two things: first, his

ignorance about the world and his own history, and secondly, his connection to the people who were caught in the same trap of history, unable to break loose from its impositions and injustices, and evolve. Willie is particularly critical of the postcolonial world’s one-way relationship with global culture. He sees that all the members at the training centre, himself included, were like the Pakistani businessman; they

had been sent by their countries or companies to get at knowledge that had for a

long time been unfairly denied them for racial or political reasons but was now, in

a miraculously changed world, theirs to claim as their own. And this newly

claimed knowledge confirmed each man in the rightness of his racial or tribal or

religious ways. Up the greasy pole and then letting go. The simplified rich world,

of success and achievement, always itself; the world outside always in

disturbance. (235)

Although Willie sees himself as distinct from these figures, especially in his refusal of the caste system, throughout the narrative, he is also cast in an unsympathetic light, especially with regards to his fondness for the easy life; at the beginning of the narrative, he describes his comfort zone to be that of the “tourist with no demands and no anxiety” and enjoying “the Patrick Hellman shop in Berlin” and “the oyster and champagne bar in the KDW” (26). His preferences, I argue, reflect the extent to which his identity is formed in reaction to his colonial roots and historical deprivation. And therefore, the point from his epiphanical identification with the company of men in the training workshop would seem not to be Willie’s awakening to his postcoloniality or his final reconciliation with the people from his own background. Unlike the title, there are no magical turning points to Willie’s dilemma of belonging, and no overnight change of hearts to Naipaul’s critique

of the postcolonial world for that matter. Rather, the point seems to be Willie’s critical identification with their dilemma and his realization of the problem of history which has made postcolonial sensibility, including his, reactionary and conflicted by a sense of self- assertion and entitlement, traits which only make for short term successes and in the end only serve the global status quo of the rich. As Willie early on intuits, it was always the

West’s ‘simplified world of success and achievement’ juxtaposed to ‘the outside world’ of war and conflicts.

Initially, Willie feels he inhabits the “outside” space of the stranger, removed from both colonial and national-postcolonial dynamics. He sees his revolt against the

Indian caste system as something uncharacteristic for an Indian, and reflecting his estrangement from his own culture, and his shedding of traditionalism for a cosmopolitan identification. This cosmopolitanism, which many critics accuse Naipaul of having co- opted, however, is readily exposed as faulty and a reductive understanding of history.

Willie is disabused first by Sarojini and then by Joseph; the latter acts in the narrative as a

“station manager” for the guerrilla, much like Conrad’s in the colonial order of Heart of

Darkness. In Berlin, Sarojini explains to Willie that his detachment from his cultural milieu comes not out of a critical faculty but rather out of a colonial complex. Sarojini chides Willie for being passive but explains it as part of a “colonial [caste] psychosis,”

(2), wherein the British imperial propaganda had consolidated the Hindu as the “servile” races and left indelible psychological scars in many generations to come. Sarojini points out that the history they learned in schools was written by an Englishman, and that the

Indians’ ideas about themselves came from the distorted portrayals of them done by colonialists.

Willie’s journey becomes an attempt at expelling the colonial self-view from his psyche and exercising a critical cosmopolitan outlook. This outlook would engage the local, understand it first from both a position of belonging and a position of distance, in order to fashion a vision of regeneration that is neither superficially global, and therefore self-defeating, nor reactionary to the global and thereby restrictive. One of the ways

Willie attempts to reconnect with his culture is by his proverbial giving up of Hemingway for Gandhi. He strives to emulate the Mahatma by patterning his life after the latter’s.

Egged on by Sarojini, Willie strives for activism and to place himself in the world, and like the Mahatma, “to think… how as a stranger he was going to inject himself into a local situation, where there were already many better-educated leaders” (21). As a result, he journeys to the revolutionary Indian countryside and witnesses a Maoist (Marxist) rebellion against the structures of neo-colonial (State-backed) caste oppression, a revolution turned into guerilla warfare.

At the first station, Joseph, a university lecturer who recruits Willie at the start of his journey, introduces him to a slice of forgotten history, which comprises the various invasions, including the Islamic ones, which had subjugated rural India and enslaved and destroyed its population over many centuries. For Joseph, who is a Christian, the Indian predicament was beyond repair, for the weight of history was too oppressive to allow any outlet toward salvation: “you have no idea of the extent to which the victors won and the losers lost here” (41). Especially in comparison with the Africans who “knew who they

[were],” Joseph sees the Indians having lost all their original character and become molded in the shape that their oppressors divined for them (36). Joseph’s sense is that the

Indian subclasses had lost a sense of their past to ever be able to reclaim it post- independence.

Both Sarojini and Joseph offer insights that Willie only receives passively at first.

Yet, like Willie they are also engulfed by colonial history, for both are portrayed as having found solutions or resistances that are self-defeating or flawed visions. Joseph tells Willie that the caste peasants, whom he calls the “cricket people” (41) were beyond hope, that their past lords had oppressed them to the point that they were mentally, spiritually, and physically destroyed. Now that these past lords had departed to the cities, the only philosophy feasible was the complete annihilation and starting anew of the countryside: “I would love nothing better than to see a revolution sweeping everything away” (39). Joseph’s reactionary fundamentalism in these words reveals him to be as detached from the real sufferings of the poor and unconcerned about their lives and humanity as the middle-classes whom he ostensibly opposed.

In a parallel way and on the opposite extreme, Sarojini’s cosmopolitan activism is a global stance that is self defeating. Sarojini deems guerilla warfare a “miracle” (6), a sign of the Indian “servile” races confronting (imperial) history and righting its wrongs.

The Tamils who were selling roses in Berlin, she tells Willie, supported the revolution back home and thereby had “thrown off a great weight of history” (7). However, as

Willie’s journey “deeper in the forest” and into the Indian interior shows, the local reality of the revolution was very far from Sarojini’s global view of it. For Sarojini, revolutionary activism was part of a cosmopolitan identity; “if everybody had said that, there would never have been any revolution anywhere. We all have wars to go to,” she tells Willie (3). She and Wolf travel and study the “politics of revolution” by filming

documentaries, and finding in all proletariat revolutions an ideal form of correcting

history’s wrongs and of celebrating the subalterns (9). While with their cameras and

documentary narratives, they aestheticize the revolution, Willie engages the local, on-the-

ground nuances of the revolution—how, for example, within the Indian setting, a historical awakening had also produced subjects who fell prey to history, forever rising and falling, evolving only to collapse again in their quest for historical retribution.

Willie’s negative experience in the revolutionary camp provides a critique of Sarojini’s and her husband Wolf’s version of cosmopolitanism.

One of the clearest statements on Willie’s evolution from blindness to a critical cosmopolitan (in-)sight is made in his final statement on the Indian peasants. Even though Willie notes that the peasants’ uncooperative behavior clashed with the revolutionaries’ attempts to empower them, his statements are imbued with sympathy garnered by a stereoscopic perspective that places them in a wider context:

It was hard to associate them with the bigger crimes and the crimes of passion for

which some of them are being punished. Abduction, kidnapping. I suppose if you

were a villager you would see them as criminal and dangerous, but if you see

them from a distance, as I still see them, although I am close to them night and

day, you would be moved by the workings of the human soul, so complete within

those frail bodies. Those wild and hungry eyes haunt me. They seem to me to

carry a distillation of the country’s unhappiness. I don’t think there is one single

action which can help. You can’t take a gun and kill that unhappiness. All you can

do is kill people. (167)

The emphasis on both a critical distance and sympathy indicates Willie’s

cosmopolitanism as informed by both local conditions and the global configurations of

power. He reads the villagers not simply as victims of caste or imperial oppression but as

forever marginal characters in the global world order, their marginalization due to their

distance from and strangeness to global modernity, which is a more pressing problem at

hand.

Willie is able to attain this view through placing the Indian Interior in a wider-

world contemporary context, which provides him with cognates in other places by which

he reads the local situation across a global background of change and inequality.

Early on, Willie has a historical sense of the existence of two worlds: “One world was ordered, settled, its wars fought. In this world without war or real danger people had been simplified… In the other world people were more frantic… [and] while they stayed outside a hundred loyalties, the residue of old history tied them down; a hundred little wars filled them with hate and dissipated their energies” (10). Upon his return to an altered England, however, he realizes that there existed parallels between the conditions of the lower classes in both worlds on a global scale, and that activisms in the form of

Marxist revolution in India and socialist reform in England’s welfare culture had become counterproductive measures, failing to provide a true regeneration of the populace.

Willie’s friend Roger, in the final third of the narrative, also exposes the façade of social progress in the London council estates, the subsidized municipal dwellings designed for the “poor of the parish.” Instead of the social relief and independence they were intended to offer their working-class population, these estates have witnessed the dissolution of families and personal accountability, evoking as Roger says, “an exact

moral parallel of Dickens’ world….concealed by the bright paint of the council houses, the parked motorcars, and our too easy ideas of social change” (276). The socialist revolution in England professes not only a cultural decline but also a nurturing of a culture of alterity in the name of mass empowerment. Roger views the vanishing of the servant classes in post-imperial England and their reappearance in the council houses, not as a sign of their empowerment of the lower classes, but as a disintegration of the bonds of social cohesion and family life. In an analogy about Victorian houses, he describes the servants as having constituted the backbone of the middle-classes for years; literally, they were the ones who kept their manors in order. When the servants left, the enormous properties were vacated and were likely to be turned into hotels, catering the capitalist and transnational crowds. The middle-classes which held together the fabric of society had been weakened thus both by an alienating professional class and a taxing lower-class whose welfare fell upon them to maintain. In this context, Roger exposes the ineffectiveness of the welfare state: “our ideas of doing good to other people, regardless of their need are out of period, a foolish vanity in a changed world. And I have grown to feel…that the nicer sides of our civilization may have been used to overthrow that civilization” (276). Like the titular “magic seeds,” global revolutions in the name of social improvement cultivated only myths of regeneration.

Magic Seeds exposes the illusion of progress in mass movements, for instead of a convivial culture of globality that could offset the extreme capitalist development in metropolitan life, Willie finds them to generate egregious cultures of entitlement, corruption, fanaticism, and idleness. It warns against the dangers of imported global ideologies and quick-fix solutions that like the magic seeds in Jack’s fairytale in the end

only point to the unbridgeable expanses that exist between the roots, the predicament of the small and the local, and the giants at the top, the condition of the globally mobile.

One of the reasons for the failure, according to the narrative, is the effect of global discourses of modernity, their dire consequences, in local settings. The reliance of the

Indian revolution on abstract, imported Maoist ideas detached from local realities and historical particularities renders it a deeply flawed vision, while the socialist solutions in

England are also detached from the real lives of the dwellers of the council-estates. For

Naipaul, the crucial point left out of the philosophies of liberating peasants’ lands and supporting the poor found in class and caste revolutions concerns the aftermath of revolutions and the likelihood of these classes to integrate into a convivial global culture.

In the Indian countryside, Willie Chandran initially joins Kandapalli’s “revolution

from below,” a Maoist movement involving the peasants in the liberation of their lands

from feudal and neo-colonial lords. However, feeling like he had veered off course, he

finds himself within a guerilla wing of the revolution. The critique centers on this

corrupted version of revolution. Kandapalli the great teacher-reformer remains an absent

figure in the narrative, and is rumored to have ended in a deranged state pasting

children’s pictures in a scrapbook. What the guerilla movement does is increase the social

and economic gap between the villagers and the metropolitan middle-classes. As the

revolution progresses, the rebels’ mission of reform clashes with the prerogatives of the

villagers, so that even as the village lands are liberated, the peasants remain hesitant to

claim ownership, fearing that the change would cause the dissolution of the “old ways”

anchoring their identity and preserving harmony in the village (120). The revolution does

not prepare for the subalterns’ advance into a common culture of globality but only

represses their alterity and subjectivity. The poor remain trapped in their backwardness and become the subalterns of the global world order.

Naipaul does not see any regenerative potential in a people’s revolution; even at the top, Kandapalli stands as a tragic figure whose ideal of global revolution is undermined by local facts. Writing about the Naxalite-Maoist rebellion of India in his non-fictional account, India: A Wounded Civilization, Naipaul cast “Naxalism [as] an intellectual tragedy, tragedy of idealism, ignorance, and mimicry” (82). Upon the publication of Magic Seeds, Naipaul once again explained the guerilla movements in

India as an “intellectual folly”:

They believe revolution is the answer. They have no idea what would follow

revolution, and in fact where they liberate these areas they become centres of

tyranny. They blow up the bridges, they cut the telephone wires to the world

outside. So the peasants who should have been liberated are really imprisoned as

in the old feudal days. It is an intellectual folly these guerrilla movements, they

have nothing to offer." (Naipaul, BBC interview with Harriett Gilbert)

Willie reads the moral dissolution of the guerilla not simply in terms of crass criminality but a tragic result of self-defeating ideological borrowings fed by abstract ideas and global mottos: “The revolution had nothing to do with the village people we said we were fighting for. We talked about their oppression but we were exploiting them all the time… our ideas and words were more important than their lives and their ambitions for themselves” (167). Most of the revolutionaries whom Willie encounters come from low- caste backgrounds but have climbed the social ladder and made it big in the cities. The over-zealous son-in-law of Joseph works for a pharmaceutical company, and Willie

thinks that he has already “won his revolution” (40). Willie describes all of the revolutionaries in the same light, as “middle-class” individuals who have won their personal revolutions and are too far from the villagers and the subaltern condition.

In this way, Magic Seeds critique s the revolution for its ideological and intellectual blind-spots. In one scene, the rebels are debating about global questions of landlordism and imperialism. The narrative focalized through Willie reports:

They might debate, for instance, with great seriousness, whether landlordism or

imperialism was the greater contradiction. One man might become vehement

about imperialism—which in the setting really felt far away—and afterwards

someone might say to Willie, ‘He would say that, of course. His father is a

landlord, and when he is talking about imperialism, what he is really saying is,

“Whatever you people do, stay away from my father and family.” (140)

The fact that some of the rebels are both villagers and landowners shows the bogusness of the revolution. The revolution’s decline into power politics and corruption is thus an inevitable consequence of its purposelessness. As Willie gets involved deeper into the movement, he witnesses stage by stage the descent of the revolution into pure criminality:

There was to be a renewed emphasis on the old idea of liquidating the class

enemy. Since the feudal people had long ago run away, and there was strictly

speaking no class enemy left in these villages, the people to be liquidated were the

better off. The revolutionary madman Willie and Keso had met had spoken of the

philosophy of murder as his revolutionary gift to the poor, the cause for which

week after week he walked from village to village. Something like this

philosophy was brought into play again, and presented as doctrine. Murders of

class enemies—which now meant only peasants with a little too much land—were

required now, to balance the successes of the police. (143)

Violence and destruction are repackaged as revolutionary gift, as if they were the civilizational gifts in discourses of colonialism. As a means of historical retribution, the revolution thus had become a breeding ground for a radical alterity.

Naipaul depicts radicalism as a paradoxical outcome of an expansive rights culture in global times. The Indian masses had awakened to history, to its ravages and injustices, yet as Naipaul diagnoses in his non-fictional account of the 90s, India: A

Million Mutinies Now, this awakening had been not entirely felicitous:

To awaken to history was to cease to live instinctively. It was to begin to see

oneself and one’s group the way the outside world saw one; and it was to know a

kind of rage. India was now full of this rage. There had been a general awakening.

But everyone awakened first to his own group or community; every group thought

itself unique in its awakening; and every group sought to separate its rage from

the rage of other groups. (420)

The “million mutinies,” as Naipaul characterizes them, signaled an ambivalent mass awakening, because the individual mutinies were initiated and paradoxically undermined at once by the pervasive doctrinal, religious, and regional radicalisms that fed into these mutinies, “the beginnings of self-awareness… the beginnings of intellectual life, already negated by old anarchy and disorder” (India: A Million Mutinies Now 517). In a conversation with Roger, Willie warns of this radical rise of the untouchables:

In many parts of India it’s the big issue nowadays. What they call the churning of

the castes. I think it’s more important than the religious question. Certain middle

groups rising, certain top groups being sucked under. The guerilla war I went to

fight in was a reflection of this movement. A reflection, no more. India will soon

be presenting an untouchable face to the world. It won’t be nice. People won’t

like it. (207)

The middle-class revolution Willie joins is a mere ‘reflection,’ or a corrupted version of the people’s will-to-revolution, but it warns that an inevitable caste revolution was imminent; and once underway, it would not necessarily take on a globally modern ethos.

At one level then, Naipaul critique s the global revolution of the middle-class

Maoist-Marxists for not truly speaking for the peasants and for not having a viable regenerative vision. At another, he also offers a critique at the local level by de-idealizing the peasants and their third world conditions, for “the village had its full share of criminals, as limited and vicious and brutal as the setting, whose existence had nothing to do with the idea of labor and oppression” (128). In Naipaul’s censure of the peasants, there is an incipient critique of debased forms of Marxist ideology that discount the impact of culture on the subject’s emancipation and focus solely on empowerment in

economic terms. For Naipaul, as his lecture on the Universal Civilization suggests, culture is an important factor in the advancement of societies and the empowerment of

the poor both in the East and the West. For the postcolonial world specifically, it proves indispensable because a history of conquests and colonialism and continuous warfare, both internal and external, has left a profound effect there, so that any talk of cosmopolitan globality needs to take into account the enduring disparities between

Western modernity and the cultures of others or the other-ed.

Naipaul draws parallels between India and England and constructs a stereoscopic

view. After his disenchantment and release from jail, Willie returns to England and sees a

world changed with waves of multicultural and immigrant populations pouring into

London on one hand, and an unparalleled “property beanstalk” of capitalist development

rising above society on the other. Willie finds these to be illusive signs of global

progress. The materialism ensuing from global evolution in the form of property

development and financial expansion have taken an extreme turn heralding their own

implosion, while mass movements and the welfare state have done little to rehabilitate the

poor. For Roger, for example, socialism and high taxes led to the destruction of families:

“This idea of families (rather than family) passed on values from one generation to the

next. These shared values held a country together; the loss of those values broke a

country up, and hastened a general decline (244). These activisms, both violent and peaceful, represent the illusive magic seeds.

It is significant that while Roger views the families as holding together the fabric of society and its middle-class values, his grievance is directed solely at the lower classes.

He downplays the responsibility of the upper strata of society, of the capitalist class to

which his banker friend Peter belongs and whose “property caper” has landed him in a

legal mess. Roger individualizes Peter, albeit in a portrait of an “egomaniac” (207), yet

the council estates of the welfare state are stereotyped in terms of “parasitic slave growths

on the main body” (251). The biased overtones of this imagery are disturbing, and

reviewers have not spared Naipaul in ascribing to him Roger’s ostensible bigotry.

Nonetheless, singling out the phrase and reading it out of context distorts Roger’s point,

which is more analytical than imperialist. Roger describes the uniform flat blocks of council estates as an epitome of a “deliberate socialist ugliness”:

The theories of socialist ugliness have to be taught. People have to be trained to

think that what is ugly is really beautiful. Ancilla in Latin means a nurse, a slave

girl, a maid, and these ancillary council estates, meant to give the poor a kind of

independence, quickly developed into what they had to be: parasitic slave growths

on the main body. They feed off general taxes. They give nothing back. They

have on the contrary become centres of crime. (251)

The fact that their dreary manifestation is an outcome of deliberateness calls attention to the reprehensibility of the (welfare) state more than of the council-estate population itself.

Even if deemed chauvinistic, Roger’s descriptions illuminate the condition of these classes as not having been truly empowered, so to speak. The gaps in the socialist vision of progress are such that ideas of social rehabilitation have liberated the poor from dire poverty yet have not reintegrated them into a common convivial culture. The London

(socialist) revolution carried out under more peaceful conditions acts as a foil to the

Indian setting, and stands as a cautionary tale wherein none of the desired goals of revolutionaries were carried out.

Naipaul’s vision underscores a common predicament of poverty globally, critiquing the various large-scale philosophies of activism and empowerment in the East and the West (Naxalism, Socialism, etc). He creates a parallel between the Indian backwoods and contemporary London, between small places and large worlds, so to speak, by showing how in each the grand narratives and collective identity politics hold subjects captive to forces they cannot control. Willie’s struggles shed an important light

on Naipaul’s vision for the third world cosmopolitan. Willie realizes (too late) that his

struggles for identification on native terms, of locating a “true place in the world for him”

(238), have led him astray and prevented him from living a productive life. This move

away from national-collective attachments is not complemented by an embrace of

cultural difference and cosmopolitan diversity, an aspiration sometimes, erroneously I

argue, attributed to Naipaul. Sympathetic critics often describe a transition in Naipaul

from an earlier alienated and displaced point of view to a culturally diverse and plural

cosmopolitanism, from a poetics of cultural loss to multicultural celebration14. But the shift is formal, in method of presentation only15. The detachment of identity from exclusive notions of place and belonging in Naipaul’s oeuvre calls for a different kind of cosmopolitanism, one that goes beyond facile endorsements of multicultural existence and conviviality. Instead of difference, such cosmopolitanism emphasizes contact, advocating an evolutionary model of a multilaterally constructed yet commonly shared

‘Universal’ culture, a model Naipaul has openly championed in his lectures16.

Naipaul’s critical cosmopolitanism is a space that explores the common ground

between the East and West, without either settling for an easy relativism of values or

admitting to globality as a neutral universal fact regardless of one’s place in the world. In

“Our Universal Civilization,” (2001) he hails the advent of the universal civilization,

14 Both Anjali Gera and Timothy Weiss make claims to this effect. Additionally, Nixon notes a positive “shift in orientation and tone” (169) in Naipaul’s later works on India, seeing their inclusion of the voices of others and Indian viewpoints as a sign of Naipaul relinquishing at last his “imperious eye” to a more attuned ear (171). 15 Helen Hayward writes, “India: A Million Mutinies Now represents a departure from the techniques of the earlier works, in that it is not governed by an over-wheening authorial voice which issues judgments and directs responses. Instead, a composite portrait of the multifariousness of Indian reality is assembled by means of an accumulation of the varied viewpoints of Naipaul’s numerous interviewees. Naipaul, is not of course, absent from the book; he seeks to relate his interviewees’ experiences to his own, occasionally interposing personal observations. He casts himself in an editorial role in relation to his material: he asks questions and connects the various strands. His own views are implied by the nature of his inquiries” (135). The Enigma of VS Naipaul: Sources and Contexts. New York, N.Y: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. 16 “Our Universal Civilization,” New York Library Lecture, 1990. 63

perhaps prematurely. As Chinua Achebe has claimed, the imbalance of stories from the

West and the East in global culture is no proof of a universal civilization, but an index of the work still ahead for postcolonial writers to start a genuine conversation and achieve an equitable globality. It is important, nonetheless, to point out that in Naipaul’s definition of the universal civilization, the condition for achieving this civilization is set forth first in abstract terms before being attributed historically to the West or what is known today as its globalized culture: a universal civilization is any civilization that has the strength to accommodate or ponder over what would potentially oppose or unsettle its core beliefs. According to Naipaul, any cosmopolitanism that divorces itself from self- critique and an acute awareness of history is flawed, because some of the worst threats to cosmopolitanism, in his view, are committed when history has been replaced with total ideology within public consciousness, such as in the case of Islamic fundamentalism.

Magic Seeds marks a departure from Naipaul’s earlier novels regarding the

“Universal Civilization” by focusing more centrally and more critically on the possibility of achieving globality, as seen from not only a local but also a global point of view, not only from a position of a detached observer but from that of a participant. It presents some of these threats in global mass movements, such as critiques of power that are insufficiently critical of their own limitations within a local setting or of history, and of ability to render the subalterns, so to speak, equal agents in global politics and culture.

Willie’s vision is informed by the stranger’s sensibility of the East and the West, in England and India. It is both distanced and dialogic, immersed within each culture yet accessed from an analytical distance, continually negotiating the proximal and distant points of view. This vision offers a stereoscopic view of selfhood and otherness, seeing

the self (or the other) in the interface between an insider’s and outsider’s perspectives, in

the interaction between local and global knowledges. Poised between the multiple worlds

that frame his worldview—his mixed-caste Hindu roots, Western education, and

numerous travels between “center” and “periphery”— Willie neither adheres to parochial

commitments of the self (heritage, roots, etc) nor entertains an indifferent relativism with

respect to others. When asked by Bhoj Narayan for the reasons he has returned to India to

become a rebel like himself, Willie answers: “I had a strong idea that my place was in

this world here” (59). Although he identifies his home as a liberated India, Willie

approaches this new found sense of belonging not with the native’s adherence but from

the skeptical standpoint of a stranger. Within the movement, for example, he cannot

shake the feeling he is among strangers, people who are criminal, there “in various ways

to revenge themselves on the world” (52).

Although Willie is made to appear a failed figure, a character unable to

understand his history and shape his destiny until it is too late, a flaw that Naipaul

stereotypically deems Indian in character, his paradoxical ability to stand apart and

critique this identity renders him a more complex figure, evoking version of his author as

both the local Hindu man of allegiance to his Indian community and the ex-Caribbean

global traveler turned British subject and world-writer in English. 17 Willie’s stance is

also Naipaul’s, who has said that India for him has been a “difficult country”: in his

words, “It isn’t my home and cannot be my home; and yet I cannot reject or be indifferent

to it; I cannot travel only for sights. I am at once too close and too far... in India I know I

17 In an interview with Derek Walcott, Naipaul said: “I do not think one can ever abandon one’s allegiance to one’s community, or at any rate to the idea of one’s community. This is something I feel must be said” (6). Sunday Guardian (Trinidad), 7 March 1965, 5, 7. Reprinted in Conversation with VS Naipaul. Ed. Feroza Jussawalla. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997. 65

am a stranger” (India: A Wounded Civilization x-xii). Naipaul’s stereoscopic stance negotiates both the global and the local, a position of outside and inside, one of belonging

(not a tourist) and critical distance (not his home).Therefore, one can say that Willie embodies an imagined alter ego of Naipaul, were the latter not a successful world famous author. And Willie’s failings then are less indicative of Naipaul’s diminution or dismissal of Indianness and more reflective of his investment in and responsibility toward his ancestral land in the form of self-critique. Like Willie, Naipaul has been “at once too close and too far” to India. Writing in India: A Million Mutinies Now (1990), Naipaul

noted,

I grew up with my own ideas of the distance that separated me from India. I was

far away from it to cease to be of it. I knew the rituals but couldn’t participate in

them; I heard the language, but followed only the simpler words. But I was near

enough to understand the passions; and near enough to feel that my own fate was

bound up with the fate of the people of the country. (490-1)

And like Naipaul, Willie feels his fate is tied up with that of the people in India. He

embarks on his journey to India, “full of… mission, full of the revolution in his soul”

(26). But upon witnessing the violence and futility of this insurrection, his critical eye

soon overturns myths and platitudes about liberation and the oppressed. In gradual steps,

from small town, to village, to the teak forest, the stranger in Willie is disillusioned with

the cause and after he is coerced into randomly killing an “enemy” farmer, Willie

concedes that he is simply “among maniacs” (145).

The initial Gandhian pilgrimage is made to parallel Marlow’s phantasmagoric

journey into the heart of Otherness, taking Willie deeper in the Indian interior, through

towns and fields and woods, to places he cannot find on a map. He descends into a

nightmare and feels “undone” by India: “He could see no pattern, no thread. He had

returned with an idea of action, of truly placing himself in the world. But he had become

a floater, and the world had become more phantasmagoric than it had ever been” (155-6).

The fusing of Gandhi’s paradigm of liberation with Conradian irony and phantasmagoria

is significant; Willie’s pilgrimage narrates India’s postcolonial awakening and critiques

it. Willie’s journey does not rise up to the grandeur of Gandhi’s pilgrimage, but neither

does it descend to the grand horrors of imperialism, in all but one scene. The scene is that in which Raja, a weaver-caste Marxist sympathizer, is killed is one of few moving scenes in the narrative that also graphically depict the horror of revolution in the Indian countryside: “And when the shot was fired, and Raja’s head became a mess, the elder brother’s eyes popped as he stared at the ground. That was how they left them, the elder

brother, staring and pop-eyed next to the home-made looms” (88). More than anything,

this scene shows Naipaul’s concern for the predicament of the poor and the

disempowered, for those who remain defenseless in the face of both global imperial

forces and local revolutionary tides.

In the local context, Magic Seeds simply underscores the political inefficiency of

modern-day revolutions in India. If Heart of Darkness had shown how a “noble” idea

could turn into colonial “horror,” Magic Seeds shows that where there is no vision,

passions easily turn into “obsessions” (IWC 100). Regardless of differences in

“orientation and tone” (Nixon 159), there is a cosmopolitan constant between Naipaul’s

earlier and later travel impressions, which demands a critical and historical attention to

the local amid an expansive global identification. Through Willie’s stranger’s sensibility,

we can see Naipaul as the writer who is interested in individualizing the revolution, in

exploring its personal and psychological faces manifest in India. His depiction runs the

gamut of passions, philosophies, and attitudes existing within and amidst the revolution,

from the noblest to the most ineffective, the banal and the criminal. In one of the scenes

of rebels contemplating surrender, Einstein explains to Willie:

We have to get some politicians on our side. They would like to claim the credit

for getting us to surrender. They would negotiate with the police or us. It might

even be the man I planned to kidnap. That’s the way the world is. People are now

on this side, now on that…Close your mind to nothing… From now on, just

remember this: you have done nothing. Things happened around you. Other

people did things. But you did nothing. (147-8)

The apparent lack of responsibility for one’s actions is compounded by the self- centeredness and insularity of the movement on one hand and the manipulation of

“justice” by the police on the other. Willie reflects:

Most of my time in the movement, in fact nearly all my time, was spent in

idleness. I was horribly bored most of the time. I was going to tell Sarojini in that

semi-comic letter that I didn’t write how little I had done, how blameless my life

as a revolutionary had been, and how idleness had driven me to surrender. But the

superintendent has quite another idea of my life as a guerrilla… He wouldn’t

believe that things merely happened around me. He just counts the dead bodies.

(155)

The revolution’s polarized nature and indifference are magnified. In the words of a life-

time rebel describing his peripatetic life: “You can’t make yourself part of the life of the

village. After another day or two I am off. I don’t want my host to get tired of me and tip

off the police. In this way every day flows past, and every day is like every other day. I

feel the life I am describing is similar to that of a high-powered executive” (132). The

narrative is ironic of his revolution being a mere version of global capitalist mobility.

Magic Seeds casts the rebel cause as an enterprise, of a middle-class activism imposing its vision on rural India. Naipaul’s portrayal of the minute daily activities of the rebels reveals a movement so involved in internal drama, rebel discipline and imperialist attitudes that it merits charges of idleness and ineffectiveness.

Questions of representativeness are at the forefront of Magic Seeds. Naipaul’s vision heeds the pitfalls by enacting a cosmopolitan and balanced treatment of his subjects of representation. In fact, Naipaul’s realism, his idea of the writer as “the communicator; the molder, rather than the man of imagination” helps us more closely scrutinize his engagement of history and commitment to uncovering the course of “a disordered and fast-changing world.”18 Naipaul goes against the grain of postcolonial

thinking in showing that there are no grand narratives of power and resistance that can

explain contemporary reality. The collective rhetoric of colonial-imperialism and those of

mass liberation are an anachronism in a globalized world. As Dagmar Barnouw

elaborates, Naipaul approaches the postcolonial condition as a “two-way process” in which both the oppressors and the oppressed have a responsibility: “The view of the interdependencies contrasts starkly with post-colonialist scenarios of collective guilt

versus collective celebration of Third World cultural values, no matter how damaging

they may have proved to the lives of real people” (10).

18 Interview with Adrian Rowe-Evans, Transition: The Anniversary Issue, (1971), 1997: 203. 69

It is also imprecise to consider Naipaul’s cosmopolitanism as complicit in first

world or Western hegemony, as Nixon holds. Summing up Naipaul’s oeuvre as the

challenge of understanding strangers, Barnouw claims that Naipaul’s “level-headed

acceptance of social and political power” (xiv) is a sign of a Third World mode of

intervention. For those in positions of disadvantage, empowerment is contingent upon

more than a politicization of identity and of local difference; it is achieved not simply by

resisting power but also by envisioning ways to get access to it. Barnouw argues that

“Naipaul cannot be expected to share the American intellectual’s vision of cultural

critique as cultural ‘activism,’ because he cannot share its certainties”: “His ‘direct’

looking, too ‘violent’ for some readers, comes out of an observational detachment and a

patience, hurried, as it were, by a quick analytical irony” (7). In fact, Naipaul himself has

concurred that any “seeds of regeneration” in the postcolonial world can only be arrived

at via the “most brutal sort of analysis,” the sort that leads to “action which is not based

on self-deception.”19

Naipaul’s vision could be aptly described as endorsing an activism from below.

Such activism is informed by an ethics of observational detachment that takes precedence

over customary forms of postcolonial attachment. In a recent conversation with the editor

of Times of India20, Naipaul defended the self- analytical bent in his work by employing

this comparative logic:

You know that in India the reaction to my books on India has been tepid. The

overall assumption is that I must not be critical of where I come from. This is a

good liberal attitude. The advanced countries are expected to produce self-

19 Interview with Adrian Rowe-Evans, 199. 20 Interview with Dileep Padgaonkar,1983; reprinted in VS Naipaul: An Anthology of Recent Criticism. Ed. Purabi Panwar, 2003. 70

analysis, critical literature. The retarded countries are expected to produce

literature which praises the existing order… When I began to write my first books

in a gentle, comic vein I came in for much criticism. And I responded by saying, I

don’t think any English writer would ever say, ‘Mr. Dickens writes with disregard

for his country. He ridicules England, his background. He must create nice

characters.’ But they will say all this about my work” (59).

The parallel that Naipaul creates between himself and Dickens is significant, not only because Magic Seeds includes an incisive criticism of the poor in contemporary England, but also because the text’s cosmopolitan ethos derives from a stranger’s vision that emulates Victorian practices of detachment, or critical distance, which heralded the advent of modern times. In her study of Victorian literary practices and forms such as realism, irony, and omniscient narrative, Amanda Anderson argues that detachment was a

Victorian ideal of self-criticalness that met a certain modern need for cosmopolitan engagement and understanding. Anderson shows that Victorian detachment and present- day cosmopolitan self-reflexivity and multiple attachments both aspire toward an ethical

“universality” by attempting to “transcend partiality, interests and context” (31).

Naipaul’s cosmopolitan detachment coincides with modern practices of transcendence. But unlike Western practices, it does not look to the postcolonial world for a comforting difference or otherness with which to affirm its own celebratory multi- culture and convivial values, thus participating in what Graham Huggan calls “the global commodification of cultural difference” (1). More critical than self-congratulatory, it is directed at the beliefs and values operative in developing societies, and seeks to arrive at an evaluative understanding of them. No doubt, Naipaul’s cosmopolitanism is vulnerable

to accusations of Eurocentrism in that critical distance and observational detachment are

historically modern and Western tenets and thus privilege a Western epistemology over eastern and postcolonial ways of knowing. However, Anderson explains that the new

cosmopolitanisms, unlike modern detachment, privilege more “self-consciously

pluralistic conceptions of detachment over hierarchical, exclusive, or insufficiently self- critical ones” (30). One can say that instead of detachment, Naipaul’s derives his critical edge from deploying points of view that come from his multiple attachments between the

East and the West.

In its representational philosophy, contemporary cosmopolitanism is more oriented toward particularities and multiple viewpoints, due to a cultivated historical sense and awareness of the situated quality of the critical act. This may also be achieved by contextualizing vision, foregrounding both the observer and the observed, which is exactly how Naipaul’s rhetoric functions in India: A Million Mutinies Now. It includes a multitude of voices and features various characters narrating their own experiences and observations of contemporary India. Dialogue and detail take priority over authoritative and de-contextualized commentary such as that in the earlier India: A Wounded

Civilization (1979). Magic Seeds fictionalizes postcolonial India in a like manner, in a less hierarchical and more reflective narrative method. Willie’s limited omniscient narrative provides an experimental rather than an objective mode of knowing. His over active and reflective inner-voice is characterized by patent indecision and tendency for constant revision, which propels its cosmopolitan agenda. Willie frequently calls to question his visual authority: “When I first saw Bhoj Narayan I saw him as a thug. But then I became friendly with him and lost that vision. When I first saw Ramachandra,

handling his gun with his small bony hands, I saw him as a killer and a fanatic. Now

already I am losing that vision of him. In this effort of understanding I am losing touch

with myself” (114). At face value, this means that attachments get in the way of a

realistic assessment of character. However, it is more likely, given Willie’s continued

estrangement from these rebels, that Naipaul highlights the challenge of cosmopolitan identification, a challenge that renders an understanding of self and others a matter of a radical questioning and revision of one’s sense of identity.

The text of Magic Seeds engages local narratives of selfhood and exploits the unique vantage point of the stranger, self-consciously exemplifying the provisionality and incompleteness of knowledge of self and other, without compromising cosmopolitan aspirations for expansive identification and conviviality. Willie’s interactions with Bhoj

Narayan, Raja, Ramachandra, and Einstein, perform cosmopolitan dialogue while still being rooted in local debates inherent to India. Bhoj Narayan and Raja have risen above their assigned position in life, above the poverty and disadvantages of their caste; they are driven by ambition and upward mobility. But instead of the individualist’s route of work and productivity, they choose the collective road of activism and revolution to shake up the system and overturn the oppressive status quo. Willie sees Bhoj Narayan’s and Raja’s predicaments, their lives and untimely deaths, as potential wasted amid delusions of power and self-worth. In the long and arduous road to progress, Bhoj Narayan and Raja have taken short cuts. Like Jack’s magic beanstalk, their upward mobility is bound to get axed at the root and come collapsing. This is classic Naipaulian view, favoring individual over collective self-determination. However, Willie also acknowledges the fact that he is

“looking at [the situation] from [his] own point of view”: “Everything was the point for

Narayan…He felt himself to be a man” (96).

There is a sense in which attention to dialogue and detail in the narrative allows

characters to engage questions of justice, change, reform and progress in the manner of

open debate between rival points of view. Willie’s and Ramachandra’s conversations, for

example, take up the debate between the old and new ways in India. Ramachandra’s

contempt for the poor’s passive acceptance of other’s riches clashes with Willie’s

perception of their stance as a preservation of sorts of their identity. While Ramachandra

points to “old manners and fine old ways [as] equip[ping] people for slavery,” Willie

ponders whether “old ways are [not] part of people’s being”: “If the old ways go, people

will not know who they are, and these villages, which have their own beauty, will

become a jungle” (120). The narrative does not endorse either view and both seem to

have a point. Ramachandra’s advocacy of violence and Bhoj Narayan’s courting of terror,

albeit severely criticized in the narrative, bespeak the rage that Naipaul attributes to

India’s awakening to history.

Naipaul’s cosmopolitanism builds on Anthony Appiah’s ideas that provide

directives against talk of “objective values” (Cosmopolitanism xxi). Appiah writes: “The

positivist picture gets in the way of the cosmopolitan project, when it leads people to

overestimate some obstacles to cross-cultural understanding while understanding others”

(18). This is because the positivist picture “generalizes too quickly from one kind of belief: beliefs about the properties of particular concrete things that you can see, hear, touch, smell, or feel” (23). Appiah concurs that not all beliefs correspond to facts and evidence out there; some correspond to values that “guide our acts, thoughts, and our

feelings” (25). Yet Naipaul does not discount the possibility of a common ground that

can go beyond a static view of beliefs and values. Thus the bi-focality and double-

consciousness, which I have discussed in relation to stereoscopic vision in the narrative,

on the one hand reveal a subjective quality and attention to values and beliefs that Appiah

here brings to critical attention; and on the other, they point to the dynamism and

evolution in societal values, and the constant recreation of culture, especially as these

practices pertain to advancing a viable politics of empowerment for the disadvantaged of

the world, whether in India’s interior or Britain’s council housing estates.

Naipaul is also keenly aware that money as an agent of imperial power overrides

cultural, racial, and ethnic particularities. One of the scenes in the novel that highlight

Naipaul’s vision of cosmopolitanism as distinct from Western mimicry is the ceremonial

finale of the wedding between a West-Indian African diplomat’s son to a girl from the old English aristocracy. Marcus’s one wish in life is to clear his ethnic identity from his lineage to Africa, bleach out his blackness, through interracial marriages. Magic Seeds alludes to Trollope’s Vanity Fair and a specific instance where a rich English merchant is

considering a marriage between his son and a “mulatto” heiress from the Caribbean. The

symbolic scene of the marriage of the West and the postcolonial world in a quasi-

cosmopolitan gesture is satirized as a carnival of sorts and lampooned as harking back to the days of slavery. Roger comments on the loud African drum beats in the wedding,

“It’s meant to stun you. I don’t know what it tells you about the occasion we’ve just left. I imagine music like that being played on Dutch slave plantation in Surinam in the seventeenth or eighteenth century. Played on a Saturday or Sunday, to reconcile the

slaves to Monday morning and giving some Dutch artist an idea for a plantation night- piece. I’ve seen a painting like that” (293).

The cosmopolitanism expressed in Magic Seeds, I argue, is critical precisely because it is also self-reflexive: it offers a critique both of global capitalism and its neo- imperial effects, and of its cosmopolitan resistances today embodied in proletarian, socialist, and multicultural revolutions. By unearthing the “repressed” global truths, such as the rise of radicalisms in postcolonial societies and the superficial socialist progress of a developed West, it exposes the lack of viable visions for social regeneration in these movements, thought to resist the global in its imperialist effects. Such a critique of global millennial culture spanning over a global landscape shows a critically cosmopolitan politics rather than a purely postcolonial ideology.

With Magic Seeds, Naipaul moves from a hierarchical and static gaze upon the postcolonial world to a more dynamic, stereoscopic view that encompasses both global and local views, and a globalized world between England and India, critiquing parallel and interactive relationships between these locations. The novel’s final response is ironic: there are no magic seeds that can annul history; one can only move beyond it and forge a global mode of survival, a critical cosmopolitanism. Willie achieves a critical cosmopolitan stereoscopic outlook—however, this comes only at the end, and admittedly when it is too late for him to make a change in his life. Magic Seeds, therefore, I conclude, is an ambivalent work that both upholds the potential of the critical cosmopolitan position and undermines it by exposing the very obstacles that stand in the way of its realization, namely the problem of history that cannot be done away with. Both

Willie Chandran and Naipaul emerge as figures caught in this self-acknowledged

dilemma. Notwithstanding this ambivalence, however, the acknowledgment of the missed possibility for a more critical cosmopolitan identification reflects Naipaul’s own belated acknowledgment of the rigidity of wholesale endorsements or censures of entire civilizations he had done in previous works. In this move, I locate the critical cosmopolitan turn in Naipaul as evidenced in Magic Seeds.

Imagining the Routes: Global Mobility and Cosmopolitan Commitment in Nadine Gordimer’s The Pickup

In the previous chapter, I explored stereoscopy as an interpretive framework that

facilitates a critical cosmopolitan view of the world in Magic Seeds, one which goes

beyond civilizational divides and calls for a widespread global regeneration of culture.

This view compares England’s peaceable socialist revolution to India’s violent

awakening of the masses to show the folly of revolutions in both, and their incapability of

rendering economically and culturally integrated societies and, subsequently, a whole world. The stranger is enabled with this vision by virtue of both belonging to and being at

a distance from his immediate societies, albeit the extent of his vision to be liberating is

underplayed while the problem of history is magnified. In this chapter, I explore

stereoscopy in The Pickup in a slightly different way; in this novel, the inside and outside

views with regards to a society do not consolidate in one figure but they are a narratorial

function that negotiates, without being authoritative, the often contradictory views

embodied by culturally diverse characters in the novel. The omniscient narrator shares

along with the protagonists flickers of insight and moments of epiphany which display

stereoscopic vision at its premium. The stereoscopic in The Pickup emphasizes the de-

territorialized, peripatetic, and culturally mobile vision of the global nomad, embodied by

the narrator and the two protagonists despite their imagined routes towards globality

remaining dissimilar and divergent throughout.

In an early scene in The Pickup (2001), Julie Summers, the privileged white

protagonist takes her foreign “friend”—the undocumented laborer and soon-to-be

deported “Abdu”—to her father’s Sunday lunch in his suburban house outside the city,

which appears to be South Africa’s Johannesburg. There, she ponders the imminent

departure to Australia of some of her father’s and his new wife’s friends, who talk of their migration as a kind of “relocation.” She forms a mental stereoscopic image that casts the white couple in the global background as informing her lover Abdu’s foreground; they are “her father’s kind of people—who may move about the world welcome everywhere, as they please, while someone has to live disguised as a grease monkey with no name” (49). The global background stands for an image of globality, in which identity is expansive and mobility unconstrained by political-national barriers, while the foreground shines a spotlight on Abdu, whose real name is Ibrahim Ibn Musa, revealing a postcolonial subject who is denied mobility and advancement in the world.

This first instance of stereoscopic viewing of multiple points of location, global and local, enables Julie to lay bare the paradoxes of globalization, by juxtaposing the

globalized world of limitless choice, opportunity, and mobility to the experience of small

or marginal places, where certain subjectivities are cast as others of the global order. It

thus enacts a kind of cosmopolitanism that challenges views of the world “from above

“or “from the center” that are confident of the march of progress in globalization, in a

way similar to Rebecca Walkowitz’s discussion of the critical cosmopolitan style of self- reflexive modernist narratives (2). Gordimer’s use of a dual and layered optique, which navigates both global patterns and local particularities, is significant. I argue in this chapter that The Pickup enacts a critical cosmopolitanism, thinking beyond the South

Africa nation to contemplate wider contexts. It does this through its deployment of a stereoscopic vision, which provides a critique of the extent of the globality professed in an age of globalization by drawing out its limits and highlighting the dynamics of the local and the reality of the border, both geopolitical and cultural. I explore stereoscopy as

both a narrative point of view which engages multiple localities or cultures (South Africa, and subsequently Ibrahim’s village in the Arabian Desert), and also an outlook that negotiates Julie’s liberal ideas of globality with Ibrahim’s postcolonially-informed lived experiences and aspirations that challenge these views.

*********************

The Pickup achieves its critical cosmopolitan outlook through its stereoscopic narrative which highlights a vision that challenges monological views. From the opening lines to the end, the narrative is facilitated by a first person narrator who appears in the first chapter and a few other instances, and threads the narrative so lightly that “she”

(presumably) could be easily mistaken for the author herself. Yet she is a subjective observer who is able to freely access and ponder the predicament of her subjects of observation. At the beginning, we find her contemplating a woman, Julie, in a busy city street, with her car broken down, seeking help; she says:

There. You’ve seen. I’ve seen. The gesture. A woman in a traffic jam among

those that are everyday in the city, any city. You won’t remember it, you won’t

know who she is. […] But I know because from the sight of her I’ll find out—as a

story—what was going to happen as the consequence of that commonplace

embarrassment on the streets: where it was heading her for, and what. Her hands

thrown up, open. (4)

A few chapters later, the narrator repeats: “You’re not there; I’m not there: to see…” and resumes to tell Julie’s tale (24). The narrator, therefore, does not merely record reality but rather augments her observations with critical insight, thereby at times discovering the truth from a cosmopolitan distance and through the sheer power of sight or insight and at

other times dismissing this potential and emphasizing the limits of global vision. What emerges from this kind of criticality is a kind of a de-privileging of authoritative, centered narrative vision and an underscoring of subjective point of view. Throughout, a reader is made aware that the characters are engaged by the narrator and not simply represented. However, this engagement is coupled with an absence of an authoritative meta-discourse which allows for the liberal vision identified in each of Gordimer, Julie, and the narrator not to stifle other perspectives in the narrative. In other words, while the narrative tries to stand above the perceived cultural differences between Julie and

Ibrahim, representing them and their journeys, it also leaves room for a challenging Other view that remains not fully understood by her. This is the stereoscopic quality, in which the possibility of alternative views is present, juxtaposed with Julie’s and Gordimer’s views. The narrator, after all, is not a grounded figure but appears a nomadic figure, mobile and peripatetic, and weaves her narrative by closely following Julie’s journey of disillusionment and enlightenment, juxtaposed to Ibrahim’s similar journey made in the opposite direction.

At the beginning of the novel, the narrator observes Julie Summers’s car breaking down in the middle of a busy inner-city street of Johannesburg. Julie, like other of South

Africa’s post-apartheid liberal generation has renounced her family’s affluence and moved to a “modest apartment” in a racially-mixed neighborhood. When her car breaks down, however, she becomes engulfed on the one hand in a barrage of insults, coming mostly from white male drivers rushing through the inner-city speeding to their destination in the fast-paced environment of global times. On the other hand, she gets directions from “unemployed black men who beg by waving vehicles into parking bays,”

in hopes of receiving a tip. She imagines the two parties as making up “clustered

predators round a kill” (3). The image that is stressed is of Julie with her “hands thrown up, open,” in a gesture of “surrender” and resignation (3-4). This prelude which acts as a

motif of Julie’s eventual resignation from the nation, South Africa, toward a

cosmopolitan identification, highlights the divides and hostility in society that have not

been repaired even though they can no longer be charted onto a political reality.

The Pickup takes place in the context of post-apartheid South Africa where

obvious political and cultural barriers have been lifted and the majority of Blacks have

inherited the State. The country has also opened its borders to Africa, admitting flocks of

immigrants, legal and illegal, who pour into it every day. This has been a subject of great

public debate in the last decade, and to date, over a million undocumented migrant

laborers have been deported from South Africa; indeed, most South Africans have been

unfavorable towards relaxed immigration policies and support deportation or the

withholding of most rights from non-citizens.21 As Sue Kossew describes, the illegal immigrants of cities like Johannesburg have become the subject of “national resentment

and xenophobia” (par .1). The Pickup is set in this environment of transition in South

Africa from an apartheid state to a globalized place. In one of the scenes, the narrative

focalized through Julie’s consciousness registers this environment in ambivalent terms:

“Crazed peasants wandered from the rural areas [who] gabbled and begged in the gutters

outside. Hair from a barber’s pavement booth [that] blew the human felt of African hair

onto the terrace. Prostitutes from Congo and Senegal [who] sat at tables with the

confidence of beauty queens” (6). The divisions that were along racial and cultural lines

21 These issues have been played out exhaustively in the SA media in recent years. From On Borders: Perspectives on International Migration in Southern Africa, ed. David A. McDonald, 2000, 196-217. 82

have disappeared and Johannesburg districts now boast of mixture of peoples from all

over the country and Africa. However, the description of the dismal conditions reveals

the new divisions that are being propagated, which are mainly socio-economic. In her

essay on The Pickup, titled “Post-apartheid Johannesburg and Global Mobility,” Emma

Hunt explains the new reality, stating that like its predecessor the apartheid city, the global city signifies a “divided space with huge disparities in wealth and occupation”

(105).

This new economic/class apartheid in The Pickup, according to Emma Hunt,

extends also onto a global scale between “Westernized” countries, like South Africa with its capitalist centers in the big cities, and “non-Westernized” countries, like Ibrahim’s

desert homeland, shorn of opportunity, development, and change (106). Hunt’s reading is in line with Gordimer’s pronounced politics expressed in an interview with Hala Halim, which was reported in the latter’s column in Al-Ahram Weekly. In this interview,

Gordimer talks of a new “world order” as “one in which a ‘cosmic gap’ exist[ed] between

the prosperity of the US and ‘the poorest of the world population.’” She advocates an

“internationalism,” a term preferred over the more metropolitan-sounding cosmopolitanism, as a possible way to reform “globalisation,” being “‘the kind of thing that globalisation [was] supposed to be standing for, had it not been confined to capitalism and dominated by the big powers [...] accommodating the world to their own needs’” (“Continental Drift,” Al-Ahram Weekly Online). In The Pickup, Gordimer’s internationalism goes beyond the promotion of a cultural globality towards a material globality, defined by opportunity and wealth redistribution globally.

In her journey of disillusionment with post-apartheid liberation and the promises of globalization, Julie is led, by chance, to a nearby garage and to Ibrahim, the new

Other, so to speak, that will enlighten Julie’s and the narrator’s understandings of both

South Africa and the world. Ibrahim is an Arab migrant with a university degree in economics from his country. In South Africa, however, he goes disguised as Abdu, a car mechanic, and works illegally after his work permit expires. An unlikely romance blossoms between the couple and shortly after Ibrahim faces deportation, Julie accompanies him as his wife to his native village bordering the desert, most probably in

North Africa. But when Ibrahim after tireless attempts finally gets an entry into the

United States, having fully enlisted Julie’s help and her contacts, Julie decides to stay behind in the village in which she finds her new home. Ibrahim seeks to affiliate himself at all costs with the world of Julie’s father and his friends, as they represent progress with a capital P— “Making business,” he tells Julie, “That’s not bad, that is the world.

Progress. You have to know it” (62). To Julie, however, that is the world of “the same new-old humiliations that await [Ibrahim], doing the dirty work they don’t want to for themselves, taking the hand-out patronage of the casino king… as the chance of being the

Oriental Prince, quaint way-out choice of the mother’s daughter. That’s it. That’s reality”

(266). The inconclusive ending leaves open the possibility of Ibrahim’s return and the validation of the couple’s cross-cultural love.

Julie and Ibrahim present two different visions and versions of globality, and they highlight Gordimer’s commitment to a cosmopolitanism that is both global and critical in its scope; in other words, it transcends the South African context proper and informs itself with multiple outlooks and differential views coming from across the board. A

commitment to global cosmopolitanism marks Gordimer’s first attempt to extend the

scope of her narrative beyond the “nation,” and engage the world and the “abroad.” This

shift, however, appears not so much a turning point in her literary politics as a

continuation and a development of it in the post-apartheid context. Most of Gordimer’s

previous novels, which fall under the purview of a literature of commitment22, have engaged the history of the apartheid in South Africa, standing as witnesses to the dynamics of domination and subalternity in society. So much so, in his study of

Gordimer’s novels, Stephen Clingman has described Gordimer’s realism as a narration of

“history from the inside.”23 The insider’s view, in Clingman’s articulation, suggests

Gordimer’s political commitment to the South African nation, as her “home,” and at the

same time acknowledges the subjective partiality of Gordimer’s “historical

consciousness”, the “limits, silences, and disjunction” in her representations that cross the

boundaries of race, culture, and class and explore black and white subjectivities alike

under the apartheid regime (167-8). In these narratives, Gordimer contemplates a non-

racial nation as an identity that would resist imperial whiteness and unite the whites and

blacks of South Africa.24 The Pickup transfers such a commitment to a transnational

realm and advances a cosmopolitanism that is committed to both home and abroad

22 For Gordimer, commitment in literature means an articulation of the people’s struggle in political and historical ways, but in recent years, she has stressed the idea that commitment does not exclude the literary and creative qualities of fiction. In “Turning the Page: African Writers and the Twenty-First Century” she writes: “[T]he characteristic of African literature during the struggle against colonialism, and latterly neocolonialism and corruption in post-colonial societies, has been engagement—political engagement. Now unfortunately, many people see this concept of engagement as a limited category closed to the range of life reflected in literature […]. Engagement is not understood for what is really had been, in the hands of honest and talented writers: the writer’s exploration of the particular meaning his or her being has taken on in this time and place. For ‘real’ engagement, for the writer, isn’t something set apart from the range of the creative imagination” Living in Hope and History: Notes from Our Century, 31. 23 “History from the Inside: the Novels of Nadine Gordimer” 167-8. 24 In her study of minority Anglophone women writers and national identity, Louise Yelin argues that Gordimer’s novels contemplate a nonracial South African identity engendered by democratic citizenship and membership beyond the color line. In From the Margins of Empire: Christina Stead, Doris Lessing, Nadine Gordimer. 85

subjectively, exploring the links between them in a globalized context and contemplating

a critical cosmopolitan identity that is attuned to differences while seeking a global

common ground at a most generalized level, in “a humanist discourse of rights founded

on the unique and inviolable presence of ‘human’ personhood,” to use Carol

Breckenridge et al.’s phrase (5).

Such a critical cosmopolitanism surpasses both mainstream cosmopolitan

pronouncements and also their postcolonial critiques. In fact, Julie’s journey shows both

a turn to the postcolonial to resist the neo-imperial effects of global power and a critical cosmopolitan identification that would go beyond the postcolonial condition and seek a cultural globality. The narrative attempts to show the limitation of postcolonialism by

showing its ineffectiveness in battling the new power structures emerging in the new

South Africa, and the need to go beyond dichotomous thinking. The Pickup is therefore

critical of new and old forms of power and its corruption and imagines ways to overcome

it.

An instance of this is the party scene, in which Julie notes that the white couple’s

relocation is not their first time. She interrogates notions of territorial identity: “Where to

locate the self?” she asks, challenging the easy conflation of a person’s “home” with his

or her homeland (47). She points out that like Abdu-Ibrahim, the white South Africans at

the party and everyone but the black lawyer Motsamai, were once immigrants themselves

in the country, if not to say imperial settlers. Thereby, the restrictions placed on Ibrahim’s

immigration reveal a neocolonial form of Othering. Gordimer here links the idea of (re-)

locating the self to finding one’s identity not in a native land or origin, but in the enabling

“human solution” of immigration, which is an act of “discover[ing] and tak[ing]

possession of oneself” (48). Yet, as she suggests, the “nuance” between the terms

“relocation” and “immigration” unfolds a mountain of political and historical difference between those who can freely cross borders and change locations and others who cannot.

The couple’s travel to Australia, or even Julie’s journey to Ibrahim’s village for that matter, has none of the constraining circumstances that Ibrahim’s migration to the West has.

Indeed, Ibrahim’s whole existence is weighed down by the bureaucracy of first world immigration processes. He considers rejection simply a fact of life: “He knows the form, the content, the phraseology; it is the form of the world’s communication to him…Out. Get out. Out” (53). Ibrahim’s entrapment, his undercover existence is due to his lack of means, both monetary and statutory, by which to claim a sense of belonging in a novel context. Whereas cosmopolitanism is commonly thought to be a form of cultural mobility and openness to difference, Gordimer underlines the asymmetrical power relationships and hierarchies that bar some from attaining this kind of expansive identification. Rather than mere openness to cultural diversity, Gordimer here seems to be advocating a cosmopolitanism that promotes a non-universalist rights culture, one that not only acknowledges differences but also engages with the intricacies and political dynamics of these differences and endorses a cultural development through such engagements, much like what Carol Breckenridge and others have outlined in describing critical cosmopolitanisms as “ways of being multiple places at once”, and “of being different beings simultaneously” (11).

With Julie, Gordimer tests the possibility of a globality that denotes an “ethic of mutual enrichment,” as she has said, one that “value[s] differences” and underlines the

“development of human potential” outside national and political sovereignties (“Living in

a Frontierless Land: Cultural Globalization,” 209). Julie’s journey shows a move away

from a superficially global or a capitalist world order toward a local existence marked by

difference, in an attempt to realize a more authentic belonging in the world and achieve

an at home-ness abroad. Informed by postcolonial notions of difference and hybridity, it

seeks to destabilize the boundaries of the modern nation and Western culture. On the other hand, in Abdu-Ibrahim’s unfazed quest for the West at the risk of his loss of his cultural roots and nation, The Pickup also contains an alternative view that challenges

Julie’s (and Gordimer’s) liberal ideas. His journey challenges Julie’s postcolonial turn, by

embodying a postcolonial subjectivity that enacts neither postcolonial resistance and

assertions of difference nor a cosmopolitan identification that is achieved in cultural

terms. Ibrahim’s cosmopolitanism differs from the political stance that postcolonialism

has mapped for its subjects; it is a “cosmopolitanism from the margins,” to use Bruce

Robbins’ term in reference to non-elite and non-metropolitan postcolonial worldviews

(101). It enacts a desire for globality that Simon Gikandi calls a “material” rather than an

“ethical” globality, one in which individuals “do not seek to occupy the interstitial spaces

between nations and cultures, but to leave what they consider a failed polity for a

successful one” (“Globalization and the Claims of Postcoloniality,” 643). As Bruce

Robbins has expressed with pathos, “Those who urgently need to ‘change their lives’ do

not speak lightly of progress, even if they rightly distrust the universalized, inevitabilist

gradualism that has been its freque nt ideological form” (112). It is a universalism beyond

differences that nonetheless fits in the rights culture that Gordimer’s non-fiction

propagates. A discourse of rights based on the idea of personhood beyond any cultural,

racial, or ethnic categorizations, as Breckenridge et al. have defined, is a critical

cosmopolitanism that supports the stereoscopic view, by accommodating both home and

abroad, liberal and other predicaments, postcolonially-informed and globalist

worldviews.

At home, The Pickup’s reflection on the post-apartheid era at home is tinged with

a disappointment that also undergirds Julie’s disillusionment and eventual departure from

South Africa. The failure is attributed in broad terms to the defeat of a liberal potential to

realize the material justice that was to follow racial equality in South Africa. In an essay

written in 1990, when the structures of apartheid were starting to erode, Gordimer points

out that the culture of resentment in South Africa needed healing in objective material

terms. Racial equality was but one step towards attaining a healthy and just society; the larger question was economic justice. As she states, in South Africa, “people of all races

have committed themselves to the black struggle for freedom, recognizing it as their own;

Now we need a politics that will nurture material justice before we can hope to live in

peace” (145). However, this liberal potential is especially defeated in the capitalist expansion witnessed in post-apartheid era of globalization.

Along the same lines, the defeat of humanist ideals is mourned in The Pickup in

the tale of Julie’s uncle, Dr. Archibald Summers. To Julie, he is Archie, the lovable

Gulliver, the father figure, the man defiant of class and ethnic barriers, whose

understanding of love is an ethics of “the self […]become the other” (73). Archie,

however, is falsely accused of sexual harassment by a female patient who is looking for monetary compensation. In Archie’s analysis, the “revenge” that the patient was seeking was due to a deep-seated resentment felt toward all men for the irreparable damage done

to her by one man (236). Whichever the case, this plotline that remains tangential is

symbolic of the vulnerability of liberalism to the belligerent materialistic culture that

defines the post-apartheid in South Africa.

Furthermore, in the post-apartheid, even the blacks with access to power are depicted as sell-outs. The defense lawyer Hamilton Motsamai, a character from a

previous Gordimer novel (The House Gun), has traded his practice in the law for a

lucrative consultancy post in the financial sector. As part of Julie’s father’s elite circle of

friends, Motsamai is at home in the Northern Suburbs; and when Ibrahim and Julie

consult him over Ibrahim’s deportation order, he is quick to dismiss any chance of

Ibrahim reclaiming his status in the country. Ironically, Motsamai offers his sympathy by

relating his own struggles under the apartheid regime:

—I know how it is. Man, my people were turned back at emigration and

immigration gates. Many years, centuries. Myself, when I was young. When I had

the opportunity of going abroad for further study. The Sixties—it took three

years—always yes-no, yes-no—for the papers finally to be refused. Exit permit.

One way—out and don’t come back—that’s the stamp I had to take then— (80).

Motsamai’s cosmopolitan outlook rightly draws parallels between his history and

Ibrahim’s predicament, for the latter embodies not only the “other” in terms of culture

(Arab-Muslim); but like the black South African in the apartheid era, the other also in

race (non-white) and class (poor). Yet, indirectly, the narrative bears an ironic attitude in

showing how the postcolonial or resistance politics that enabled the likes of Motsamai to

overcome racial injustice have now enabled these same subjects to become part of a

parallel system of oppression and injustice.

The Pickup shows how cultural and ethnic resistance politics are no longer viable

antidotes to the socio-economic disparities within cosmopolitan Johannesburg. An

alternative politics it considers is cosmopolitanism, which according to Bruce Robbins is

to “learn to act as well as think on a trans-national scale” (77). For Robbins, a universal common ground exists outside questions of culture: “[t]hinking about universals in terms of unequal power rather than solely in terms of cultural difference, makes visible the common or universalizing ground that we already occupy, whatever our necessary insistence on difference” (77). This kind of cosmopolitanism also partly addresses

Ibrahim’s predicament, and it is what connects the two postcolonial localities like the

Arab village and the new South Africa under the umbrella of Gordimer’s global cosmopolitan commitment, which puts forward a philosophy of equal power and rights alongside that of mutual cultural enrichment.

Critical cosmopolitanism in The Pickup sees beyond liberal ideas of tolerance and

acceptance of the other; what it advocates is a commitment that challenges liberal gestures of listening to the Other in favor of vision, engagement, and activism. This is evident in the scene in which the narrator describes the inner-quarters of the city where

Julie’s favorite hangout, the EL-AY café, is located. First of all, although this café boasts a global image echoing the initials of the world’s most cosmopolitan cities, LA, the dismal conditions and the destitution of the cosmopolitan crowd outside, as I mentioned above, undercut any cosmopolitan atmosphere created within the café and among its

liberal clientele. Among them are Julie’s friends at the “the Table,” a group of young

bohemians who have chosen to “distance themselves from the ways of the past” and

become each other’s “elective siblings” (23). The group’s cosmopolitan members come

from culturally diverse backgrounds, and are open to other cultures and religions, like one member who has adopted Buddhism as “a faith that is a way of life not a bellicose ethnicity” (15).

Initially, Julie finds her sense of belonging with the members of “The Table.”

Besides being her surrogate family, “The Table” is also the forum that voices Julie’s liberal protest against the capitalist takeover in the post-apartheid. One of the members reflects on the conditions critically, discussing the subject of the diluted class solidarity, or the Brotherhood: “What happened to the Brotherhood, I’d like to ask? Fat cats in the government. Company chairmen. In the bush, they were ready to die for each other…— now they’re ready to drive their official Mercedes right past the Brother homeless here out on the street” (20). The consensus that informs the group’s liberal politics is that even though the majority blacks got their democratic rights in the post-apartheid, there was little change in the status quo, for the divisions were simply being reproduced now on a non-racial basis. However, “The Table” is also an emblem of the post-ideological age, in which liberal self-critique does not translate into liberal activism; the resistance politics that motivated the anti-apartheid liberal struggle is now reduced to resigned philosophical arguments and impotent protests that the narrative ironically describes in one instance as

“indignation [that] went back and forth across the cappuccino” (57). Alternatively, as

Emma Hunt notes, “The Table” could be considered as just another “exclusive” place, for despite Ibrahim’s ready acceptance into it, his membership is described as being

‘sponsored’ by Julie (108).

With Ibrahim’s introduction to it, the relevance of this table as a place of activism and resistance is called to question, and Julie’s alienation and awareness of the limits of

her liberalism to combat privilege heighten. When asked at “The Table” about the

capitalist corruption of the racial and class solidarity in South Africa, Ibrahim simply

reflects that those who are given choice would choose upward mobility and individual

self-interest: “No chance to choose then. Nothing else. That porridge and for each one, the other. Now there is everything else. Here. To choose” (21). For Ibrahim, the world is

divided between those who had choice and those who were denied it (21). “The Table” is dismissive of Ibrahim’s views on the promises of capitalist progress, but the heavy irony

that the narrative maintains against the members of the Table highlights the very limits of

their ability to understand and moreover accept Ibrahim’s views as something more than

misguided or uninformed pronouncements. In some way, Ibrahim does represent the

urgency of the plight of those who are denied choice and opportunities in the world. It is

only when Julie abandons “The Table” and goes to the desert-village that she realizes that

the ostentatious renunciations of privilege shared by the members of “The Table” were

like playing at reality, and that even her ex-servants’ quarters shed-of-a-house was a

“doll’s house” (164).

The village skews the imperial status quo and for the first time, Julie experiences

the self as estranged:

[S]he was somehow strange to herself as she was to them: she was what they saw.

That girl, that woman had lived all her life in the eyes of black people, where she

comes from, but never had had from them this kind of consciousness of self: so

that was what home was. She was aware of it with an intrigued detachment. And

it meant that when she went forward to his family in this state, with him, the son

who belonged to them, she could do so offering herself in an emotional

knowledge: if she was strangely new to them, she was also strangely new to

herself. (117)

Prior to her move, Julie’s consciousness of home as a place where one’s subjectivity is centered and sovereign had never been disrupted, despite decades of anti-apartheid struggle and then liberation in South Africa aimed at overthrowing white hegemony and domination. Julie’s feelings make an astute comment on the limits of a multiracial democracy solution in South Africa, for although it had brought about equality among blacks and whites, it had neither shaken up the system in which the whites were “at home,” nor imagined a sustainable means to prevent older social hierarchies from being reproduced in new forms.

In Ibrahim’s village, Julie’s cosmopolitanism transforms from a liberal ideal of love and tolerance of the other to a critical cosmopolitan discourse of belonging and identity. The Pickup contains a William Plomer poem, “Another Country,” which is repeated at several junctures in the narrative, marking each time Julie’s maturation of self and cosmopolitan politics. The poem reads:

Let us go to another country Not yours or mine And start again. To another country? Which? One without fires, where fever Lurks under leaves, and water Is sold to those who thirst? And carry dope or papers In our shoes to save us starving? Hope would be our passport The rest is understood Just say the word. (89)

The lines, Julie repeats to Ibrahim, express a desire for a cosmopolitan existence undefined by national-political divisions, even as they consider the challenges involved in

this cosmopolitan gesture. The supreme ideal of love which to Julie and Uncle Archie is a state of “the other becoming the self,” is also a cosmopolitan idea of finding a non- hierarchical neutral ground of mutuality and morally superior existence. The pledge of leaving “home” and starting anew, the cosmopolitan gesture, is made in a single utterance: just say the word. Accompanying Ibrahim to his home in the desert, Julie aspires to live out this belief that human potential can overcome barriers and divisions, even if it only has hope as a means. The second instance the lines appear in the narrative, they come right before Julie and Ibrahim leave for the latter’s native country, and this is where Julie makes her commitment. In the third instance, it is as Ibrahim readying to leave for America asks Julie to call upon her father for money. The narrative reads:

“Your father./ She stared in alarm./ Just say the word./ No. No. no./ Your father. He can pay for the tickets there and have them sent to you. That is the way. We will pay back”

(222-3). The gap in understanding highlights cultural difference as the challenge that goes to the core of her identity. It also affirms my point that Gordimer’s vision is never made to be transcendent. In fact, it is only limited vision that one can attain, and it is in the negotiation of these, as the narrator does, that a critical cosmopolitan view lies. In the fourth and final instance, the words are repeated when Julie has found a “Home” in the desert and an identification with the Mother (Ibrahim’s mother) leading her to change her mind and stay behind.

To Julie, the desert is constant; it is “Always” (229); “out of time, eternity”;

“Nullity [… ] purity: detachment from the greedy stirring of growth” (172). It negates progress and development and offers a spirituality missing in the new South Africa. Julie finds in the desert an “other” to the alienating effects of a global capitalist culture, as it

offers her a space where she can shed the privilege she has taken for granted all her life.

The desert is also a feminine space; characterized by silence, it suggests the pre-symbolic

order of unity with the Mother. It is in this symbolic feminine space and in solidarity with

Ibrahim’s family’s female members that Julie finds her belonging. The nature of this

belonging has been a subject of disagreement between critics. Emma Hunt asserts that

the “quest for belonging finally demands a return to the concept of place, but not

necessarily to the space defined by the nation’s borders” (105). While not national, this

place is like the “archetypal” desert singular, specific and with a “strong identity” (110).

In “Postcolonialising Gordimer: The Ethics of ‘Beyond’ and Significant Peripheries in

the Recent Fiction,” Ileana Dimitriu is skeptical that the desert signifies a place, so to

speak. Neither local nor global, the desert “is outside of any social space, including that

of the North African village itself” (171). Rather, Dimitriu explains, it is “a multivalent,

hybrid device in the mental exploration of the material conditions, as it opens new

awareness in Julie of an increasingly sterile relationship between her husband and

herself” (171). Dimitriu explains that Gordimer’s “new emphasis” on the abroad in The

Pickup is “an exploration of locality (South Africa) in relation to multiple networks of,

and intersections with, other margins of the world, whether 'third-world-margins' or

'margins-in-centres'” (166). While I agree the desert is not a singular space, I argue that it

represents to Julie a possibility of hybridity. Taken as an emblem of a pure feminine

space, it promises an alternative to both the backward locality of the Islamic village and

to the corporatist spirit of global capitalism.

Within the vicinity of the desert and with the female members of Ibrahim’s family in the village, Julie finds a solidarity that resists global capitalism and is not defined by

middle-class privilege. Within the same environment of sisterhood, on the other hand,

Julie instills ideas of feminism, especially advocating Maryam’s, Ibrahim’s sister’s, right to education. Julie does not so much as find a local existence or her place in Ibrahim’s homeland as find in it a possibility to navigate both worlds. As she tells Ibrahim, “There is another way, not the surrogate succession to the Uncle Yaqub’s vehicle workshop, not the dirty work waiting in some other, the next country—here, a possibility: his favorite dream-word: ‘there are possibilities’… Here, you can have it both. The mute desert and the life-chorus of green” (213-4). Her hopes of bringing the “success” of her father’s world onto the pure, non-corporatized space of the desert-village translate into a plan to buy and develop a rice concession in a nearby oasis, even though Ibrahim quickly dismisses the scheme, pointing out that the fields were not a source of livelihood, but were maintained through the profit made by international arms-deals to which they served as a cover.

In the desert-village, Julie witnesses the far-reaching effects of global capitalism first hand. In the village marketplace, she sees her world’s invasion in the third- and fourth-hand commodities that are “dumped” there as technological “goods,” and the acquiescent way in which the villagers consumed the “hideous” items (126-7). The brief fantasy of roles being reversed she had entertained at her arrival gradually fades as she becomes aware, through Ibrahim, that her privilege and her right of choice have never been interrupted. However, instead of shunning her privilege or pretending to do so as in her days with “the Table,” Julie also learns how to put privilege to use and empower others. She teaches English to schoolchildren and the girls in the village, so that they can

“improve their chances in the world” (170). This is a sober cosmopolitanism that does not

react to Western culture as a mechanism of imperialism but considers it a source of

empowerment; it is an example of “learn[ing] to exercise power, rather than simply to

protest its exercise by others, and to do so at altitudes that may seem uncongenial,” as

Robbins eloquently puts (77).

Interestingly, Julie’s cosmopolitan activism is analogous to that of the young

generation in the village who dream of a nation that is modernized and Islamic at the

same time. The young educated class is described as “want[ing] change, not the rewards

of Heaven. Change in the form it already had taken for others in the old century, change

for what it was becoming in this new one. To catch up!” (176). One of them talks about

the need to “cross-fertilize Islam with the world” (177). The nation envisioned by them is

one that offers an alternative modernity, in the same way that Julie’s cosmopolitanism

aspires for a hybridity that can traverse both the local and the global.

Gordimer locates in cosmopolitanism a politics of wider belonging and a

mobility/plurality of identity that can defy both Eurocentric and reactionary postcolonial

views. Her cosmopolitanism is both locally-grounded, and at the same time seeking a

globality that is not skewed towards the West and its culture. Nonetheless, Julie’s

cosmopolitan renewal in the village, her consciousness of the cultural common ground

between self and other, does not reflect the ideological dimension of The Pickup entirely.

The Pickup is a global novel because it allows room for other views to emerge besides

Gordimer’s preferred ones, even though these views do not seem supported by the

narrator. Julie’s post-colonially-informed politics of globality is undermined in the

narrative by important challenges made by Ibrahim. With a subject like Ibrahim, The

Pickup covers the diversity of the postcolonial world and points to the ineffectiveness of

any politics that reduces it to fit a single ideology.

To Ibrahim, the desert-village is an absence of all possibility. Unlike his friends,

he does not identify with it as his country: “I can’t say that—‘my country’—because

somebody else made a line and said that is it. In my father’s time they gave it to the rich

who run it for themselves. So whose country I should say, it’s mine.” (15). And neither

does he subscribe to their nationalist-reformist cause: “But within Ibrahim, something

drew back appalled at the submission of his brothers: the future of this place the world

tried to confine him to was not his place in that world. The company of brothers in

frustration salved his own, but this secret refusal, his refusal, roused in him strongly as

any sexual desire” (179). According to Dimitriu, Ibrahim is an individual whose damage

is “beyond healing”; he is “scarred by cynicism and mistrust” and by the lived effects of

global neo-colonialism (171). This is a view that largely emerges from the narrative,

especially with Julie’s more prominent thoughts of the predicament awaiting him in the

West and the comments of the LA café literati. Yet, the narrative makes Ibrahim before

anything else an individual surpassing racial, cultural, and political definitions, and

seeking a better life than the one allotted to him in the village, a humanist theme often

missed by postcolonial criticisms. He is the individual who desperately seeks freedom

and choice in the world, both of which he is denied constantly. The narrative makes a

reader consider the validity of Ibrahim’s cosmopolitan identification with the Western

world beyond simplistic notions of hegemony and imperialism. Indeed, through

Ibrahim’s challenges to Julie’s views, the reader also becomes aware that Julie’s conviction of having achieved an existence in the village outside the materialistic

corruption of the global culture may also be misguided. The elegant suitcase that is never unpacked stands perhaps as a gently mocking reminder of Julie’s footloose standing in the desert-village.

The cosmopolitan journeys of Ibrahim and Julie follow oppositional trajectories, into/out of the West, yet they similarly point to the figure of the global nomad who no longer finds an adequate representation of the self in the nation or the culture and displays a desire for an alternative existence and the right to seek self-fulfillment. This final stereoscopic view is communicated through Ibrahim in a moment of heightened confusion, in which he attains a critical cosmopolitan clarity; the narrative reads:

[Ibrahim] shuns the desert. It is a denial of everything he yearns for, for him. And

if he should remember—the enthusiasms of some of the members of The Table—

his next derision could be that her decision was a piece of sheltered middle-class

Western romanticism. Like picking up a grease-monkey…Confusion is singing in

his ears? But what is the confusion? No confusion: I should know that. Like me.

Like me she won’t go back where she belongs. Other people tell her she belongs.

She looks for somewhere else. (262)

Ibrahim casts himself and Julie as cosmopolitans in search of forms of attachment that yield a more authentic identity and belonging. Such cosmopolitanism finds its common ground in the universal right of humans to freedom and choice. It seeks globalism in a material wholeness and oneness of the world.

In this globality, the cosmopolitan self’s communion with the other is inevitably subjective, partial, and challenged by differences. In The Pickup, Gordimer not only acknowledges the cultural divides but also thematizes them, a move that shows her

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attempt to escape Eurocentric representation by creating many centers in the narrative.

For example, the gap between Julie’s and Ibrahim’s perceptions of the world and each

other is never bridged. Ibrahim sees the place he comes from as “backward,” and insists

on getting out at any cost and making his way to the world of “progress” and “success,”

while Julie finds the possibility of redemption in the village. Ibrahim makes numerous

attempts to explain to Julie his desire to leave, among them the utter absence of

opportunity and the corruption of the ruling elite in his country, yet Julie cannot see his

immigration to the West as a step anywhere but to his own further humiliation. In turn,

Ibrahim cannot see Julie’s stay in his homeland as anything but a Bourgeois whim for

adventure that will fade in no time and be abandoned. Gordimer underlines the material

differences that create an unbridgeable gap between Julie’s and Ibrahim’s worldviews.

She remedies the asymmetries of power by advocating human rights as the basis of a

global community. This is what Robbins calls a cosmopolitanism based on a “dirty” or

impure universalism (75).

The question of a non-Eurocentric negotiation of multiple localities and cultures

is not only on the level of the characters in The Pickup but also on the level of the author.

In tackling a different socio-political world and namely an Islamic culture, Gordimer

stands the charge of repeating imperial stereotypes and writing from the above unaware

of own limits in knowing the Other . In Rereading Nadine Gordimer, Kathryn Wagner makes such a critique about the biases that are left unchecked in Gordimer’s realist narrative (73). She writes in relation to the author’s oeuvre:

[I]t is noteworthy that despite the frequent complexity of Gordimer’s narrative

technique, and particularly of her deployment of point of view, no meta-discourse

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emerges to contradict the distorted perspectives [esp. those that idealize and

simplify the black world]… The pervasive tone of the narrative voice is one of

dispassionate reportage or documentation of ‘reality’ and its submerged biases

arguably unintentionally reflect the subjective distastes and enthusiasms of the

author herself” (66).

It is true that the cultural dialogue squarely rests on a global narrative vision articulated

from a distance and that both characters’ journeys risk acting out the stereotypical, the

one an Orientalist romantic fantasy about the desert and the other naïve dreams about a

Western utopia. However, the construction of the narrative from characters’ self-

reflection and mutual reflection shows that Gordimer employs a subjective, non-

authoritative point of view in the novel to advance a critical cosmopolitan negotiation, which is not so much about the “attainment of Truth” but about “the pursuit of questions,” as she has said about her aim as a witness writer (Halim, Al-Ahram Weekly

Online). Indeed, Gordimer advances a narratorial imagination that is non-cartographic, and the Arab locality, for example, is left unnamed. Julie herself, as I argue, does not romanticize the village as much as find in it a possibility to fashion an alternative existence; ever aware of the superficial vision of tourists and Western imperial travelers before her, she fights hard not to become a “Hester Stanhope, and the man Laurence,

English charades in the desert, imperialism in fancy dress with the ultimate condescension of bestowing the honour of wanting to be like the people of the desert”

(198).

The narrator of The Pickup entertains no fantasies about the Arabian locality in which Julie finds her haven. At the same time, however, the narrator’s dispassionate

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description, to use Wagner’s charge, is more complex and in a way anticipates the criticism. The narrative reads:

[Ibrahim] named a country [Julie] had barely heard of. One of those partitioned by

colonial powers on their departure, or seceded from federations cobbled together

to fill vacuums of powerlessness against the regrouping of those old colonial

powers under acronyms that still brand-name the world for themselves. One of

those countries where you can’t tell religion apart from politics, their forms of

persecution from the prosecution of poverty, as the reason for getting out and

going wherever they let you in. (12 emphasis mine)

It is unclear whether the description is Julie’s or the narrator’s. Given Julie’s ignorance of the place though, it likely to be the narrator’s critical view, foregrounding the village as the place from which Ibrahim is trying to escape. There is little romanticization or even an over simplification in this representation. The words stand as a perspective that are later overturned through Julie’s journey to the actual place, which inform the narrator’s view. A significant scene that exposes one of the stereotypes engendered by theoretical activisms involves Julie witnessing a Bedouin girl in the desert. Julie understands that the

Bedouin woman’s black head and neck scarf served as a protection against the sun and the dangers of melanoma, rather than a mark of subservience to imposed laws of decency

(P 172). In this one instance, Julie’s local cosmopolitanism overturns feminist beliefs that mistakenly view the hijjab as a religious and patriarchal oppressive measure rather than a custom of survival derived from and addressing a local environment.

In his study of Gordimer’s fictions, Dominic Head observes a move in Gordimer towards a dialogical postmodernist perspective. Gordimer’s novels, he argues, occupy a

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‘border’ position between “postmodernist expression” and the realist and modernist influences characterizing her career, where the border is between a modernist monological perspective and a postmodernist dialogical de-privileging of such unifying perspectives (184). Stereoscopy in The Pickup is derived from both an absence of meta- discourse and by challenging monological perspectives or discourses. The narrative

achieves this by blurring the lines between narrator and characters, and with the absence

of speech markers which renders it unclear where the characters’ speech or inner

perceptions end and narrative commentary begins. As V.V. Vološinov has claimed about

the relationship between narrative style and authority, a narrative constructed through the

merging of the discourse and inner thought of the characters with those of the narrator

reflects an author who “cannot bring to bear against their subjective position a more

authoritative and objective world” (121). The subjective, non-authoritative position

allows the narrator to substitute an overarching comment, or meta-discourse, with

negotiation.

The Pickup promotes the development of a global community but without

reducing it to a singular vision of globality, whether cultural or ethical, and not by

adopting a postcolonialist mapping of the world. Gordimer even chooses not to name the

Arabian village in the desert and moreover imbues the place with differentiation, her aim

being to elaborate on a global condition rather than produce essentialized first-world

knowledge and representation of the Third World “Other”. In all this, Gordimer pushes

the limits of liberal thinking and humanism to consider the plight of those who remain

“Others” beyond and within the borders of their decolonized nations. And while the

question of difference is left an open-ended one in the novel, like the potential of lasting

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love ensuing from a casual pickup, it is the rights of humans for individual self- fulfillment that take precedence and urgently need examination according to Gordimer; that is, if any cosmopolitical attempt is to be made to reconcile, in the words of Seamus

Heaney, “hope” and “history” in the twenty-first century. One way, the text of The

Pickup suggests, is to entertain a stereoscopic view of the world, to see the world from multiple, diverse, and reciprocal points of view and to foreground against the background of everyday globality, the localities of under-privilege within and beyond the nation that remain hidden from visibility.

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Between America and the Antipodes: Millennial Culture and its Discontents in Rushdie’s Fury

Something was amiss with the world. The optimistic peace-and-love philosophy

of his youth having given him up, he no longer knew how to reconcile himself to

an increasingly phoney (he loathed, in this context, the otherwise excellent word

“virtual”) reality. Questions of power preyed on his mind.

–Salman Rushdie, Fury, (7)

Whereas stereoscopy in Gordimer’s The Pickup reveals a non-authoritative narrative that

negotiates two contradictory views of globality, one seeking the global and the large world and the other finding refuge in the small or local and its resistance; in Fury,

stereoscopy highlights a view that underlines the common predicament of culture

between the global and the local, the large and the small, in globalization, without

overstepping the particularities of these places. Instead of masquerading nomads who

seek to reinvent the self, Rushdie puts forward resigned puppeteers and puppets that

exemplify the substitution of a reinvigorating culture of resistance with a culture of

spectacle that negates the humanist ideals of freedom and autonomy.

As he walks the streets of New York City on a hot summer day at the dawn of the

third millennium, Salman Rushdie’s protagonist of Fury (2001), Professor Malik

Solanka, muses over the degraded reality that is captured in the epigraph. Described as a

retired Anglo-Indian “historian of ideas” and famed doll-maker, who has abruptly left

England for America, Solanka, we later discover, has abandoned his family after finding

himself one night on the verge of murdering his wife while in a drunken stupor. As a

result, the narrator suggests, Solanka “sublimates” his “secret sadness” and

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uncontrollable fury into the public sphere (7). As he traverses the landscape of

metropolitan New York, he contemplates the masses and their relationship to the city’s

frenzied consumer culture and the excesses of capitalist production, envisioning them as

puppets steered by invisible “puppet-masters”: “the high ones…the never encountered

but ever present kings of the world… the petulant, lethal Caesars...” (7-8). Although

Solanka’s fury, magnified in his solitary refuge in New York, is rooted in personal,

psychological, and vocational crises, I read it as channeling a larger crisis subsuming all and associated with the effects of global modernity on the everyday lives of individuals and collectivities: “While we marionettes dance,” Solanka wonders, “who is yanking our strings?”(8) Here, Solanka is aware also of his own subjection to a kind of puppetry, which is his loss of self-determination.

The environment in which Solanka imagines his predicament to be situated approximates Guy Debord’s “society of the spectacle,” where an image-based, industry- driven culture of global modernity renders subjects passive consumers of counterfeits and mechanical ideals. Debord writes that “[i]n societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation” (7). He defines a culture of spectacle as that based on “an affirmation of appearances and an identification of all human social life with appearances” (9). I argue in this chapter that Rushdie finds such a reality not only to be part of a globally-identified world, as in New York, but present in the most marginal of places in the world, which the narrative accesses through Solanka’s journeys.

The narrative projects the crisis of culture both onto America, the heart of global

modernity, and also as it unfolds, to a tiny peripheral South Pacific nation, a “Lilliput-

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Blefuscue” of the global age engulfed in a violent revolution in the various quests for self-determination among its divided citizenry. One of the distinctive qualities of this local revolution is that its rebels don the puppet masks of a famous global pop cultural phenomenon, which Solanka has authored, and thus highlight their own puppetry, much like their counterparts in New York, even though unlike the latter they are resisting the power structures of a global world order. This is subtle way in which the narrative establishes a link between the large worlds and the small places in globalization. And a stereoscopically enhanced reading that notes the parallels established between the local and the global, amid their differences, reveals the critical cosmopolitanism of Rushdie’s vision in Fury.

By navigating both America and the antipodes, Fury deploys a stereoscopic connective reading of the world from multiple locations, “home” and “abroad,” postcolonial and global modern, underlining the simultaneity of the experience of global modernity, but without forgoing local particularities, and interrogating on both levels the limits of agency inherent in the consumption of global culture and the elusive freedom of the individual in millennial times. Such a stereoscopic vision is a hallmark of contemporary cosmopolitanisms, which Carol Breckenridge et al. define as “ways of being at home abroad, abroad at home, ways of being multiple places at once, of being different beings simultaneously, and seeing the larger picture stereoscopically with the smaller” (11). This chapter will explore Fury’s critical cosmopolitanism in its stereoscopic engagement with global culture; I will first anaytically chart the critique of the large world that the protagonist’s visual rhetoric in New York unfolds, and then show how the same critique is applied to a postcolonial location, challenging thus the criticism

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that Rushdie’s engagement of global power are either squarely postcolonial and anti- globalist or the opposite, uncommitted to the East and to the postcolonial world. They are rather, as I show, stereoscopic and critically cosmopolitan.

**********************

Modeled on other famous fictional flâneurs, namely James Joyce’s Leopold

Bloom and Saul Bellow’s Mr. Sammler, Rushdie’s Solanka strolls in the streets of the

metropolis deconstructing its every aspect and making reflective associations interfused

with personal history. From the very first scenes, however, Solanka’s cosmopolitan

reflections are global in scope, in that they stereoscopically contextualize America within

the wider world. The dandyish Solanka gripes:

In all of India, China, and Africa, and much of the southern American continent,

those who had the leisure and wallet for fashion, or more simply, in the poorer

latitudes, for the mere acquisition of things—would have killed for the street

merchandise of Manhattan, as also for the cast-off clothing and soft furnishings…

America insulted the rest of the planet… by treating such bounty with the

shoulder shrugging casualness of the inequitably wealthy. (6)

Solanka critiques American affluence and a global inequity but more centrally America’s detachment from the reality of the rest of the world. As he observes the “mishmash” of the world’s traditions in New York, particularly in a “fortune-cookie”-type inscription of a Greek epigram on an Assyrian Church, Solanka notes that “such plundering and jumbling of the store-house of yesterday’s empires, this melting pot or métissage of past

power, was the true indicator of present might” (43). New York “in the highest hour of its

hybrid omnivorous power” had become “a greater deity,”—a new empire, “a city of half-

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truths and echoes that somehow dominate[d] the earth” (44). It is intriguing that to one

like Rushdie who has pioneered notions of hybridity and mélange as mechanisms of

renewal and resistance, New York’s hybrid culture would appear an instance of imperial

domination. It is also paradoxical for a person like Solanka, who has actively sought

refuge in America to absolve himself from the furies of his past, to rid himself of “the

whole useless baggage of blood and tribe” (51), and “break with his recent and remote

past” (62), to shun the cosmopolitan self-invention he sees in New York and interpret it as might that remains hidden behind the celebrated façade of cultural syncretism.

However, a telling observation is made by Solanka when he explains the American

branding of worldly objects with a national prefix and “own”-ing them, such as in the

case of American Psycho, Buffalo, Graffiti, or Dream, etc, as a mark not only “of an odd

insecurity” but also of a “capitalist” enterprise (55-6).This is a privatization of the hybrid

cosmopolitan, witnessed in Solanka’s New York, and it reflects the extent to which a

mechanism of cultural resistance such as hybridity or syncretism has been co-opted by

capitalist enterprise and rendered spectacular and devoid of real power.

Moreover, Solanka’s stereoscopic vision foregrounds America’s casual

incorporation of the rest of the world as squarely self-centered. Rebecca Walkowitz

identifies such criticality as an attribute of modernist internationalism or

cosmopolitanism, which manifests in narratives as “an aversion to heroic tones of

appropriation and progress [in modernity], and a suspicion of epistemological privilege,

views from above or from the center that assume a consistent distinction between who is

seeing and what is seen” (2). In her chapter on Rushdie, she relates the scene where

Solanka meets an over-enthusiastic New York advertising copywriter who has come up

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with the slogan, “The sun never sets on American Express International Banking

Corporation” and asks Solanka without a hint of irony whether a “Britisher” like him

would get insulted by the bold comparison of corporate America to his country’s

“glorious past” (Fury 35-6). Walkowitz points out that “Rushdie asks his readers to

notice, as the copywriter does not, that the problem with the slogan is not its mix-up of

national cultures, or of epic diction and commercial jargon, but rather its failure to

acknowledge both the history and the critique of global conquest” (161-2). As such,

critical cosmopolitanism underlines “a need to reflect on the uncommon histories of

international contact” (162). Like other critical discourses, critical cosmopolitanism,

according to Walkowitz, posits “double-consciousness, comparison, negation, and

persistent self-reflection” as the foundations of its global inquiry (2). Solanka’s

stereoscopy, which I argue is the dominant epistemology in Fury, affords a similar kind

of multiply-linked and layered cosmopolitan vision. But apart from a double

consciousness in the interpretation of history, it also looks at the present, namely

widespread spectacular culture, from the vantage of a multiply situated subjectivity.

Rushdie himself has claimed such a stereoscopic vision be the nearest equivalent

to a “whole” vision that one can achieve without sliding into ethnocentrism. In his well-

known essay, “Imaginary Homelands,” Rushdie proclaimed that the ‘whole sight’ of

Reason was a myth that led to Eurocentric truths and generalizations, because, as he said, human beings were “partial” beings, with “cracked lenses capable only of fractured perceptions” (12). Nonetheless, the partiality of vision in the case of diasporic subjectivities provided a vantage: “Indian writers in these islands, like others who have migrated into the north from the south, are capable of writing from a kind of double

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perspective; because they, we, are at one and the same time insiders and outsiders in this

society. This stereoscopic vision is perhaps what we can offer in place of ‘whole sight’”

(19). To write from the position of the diasporic outsider-insider—that is, from multiple,

partial points of view, offered “new angles of vision” into reality that registered the plural

cultural negotiations between the global modern and the postcolonial or local, between

the East and the West. In Fury, Rushdie writes America in a similar way, from a position

of partial belonging, as one who is affiliated to America but not exclusively to it; Rushdie has said in an interview that Fury narrates the US not from the insider’s viewpoint, “in the way of people who have lived here all their lives,” but from the vantage point of an

“informed outsider [who is] part of an Indian diaspora in which people now think of themselves in another way—as an Indian and also an American.”25 Solanka’s

stereoscopic vision reflects the blind-spots of global discourses circulating at the heart of

global modernity in New York. Thus, it foregrounds the local and the “mix-ups,” which

can also denote the mistakes in metropolitan cosmopolitanisms with respect to the elision

of histories (Walkowitz); in addition, it also meditates on the nature of contemporary

power (and resistance) on a global scale, seeing it as one acting on both Western and

postcolonial subjectivities. Indeed, the trope of puppetry in the narrative is extensive,

applying both abroad and at home.

“Life is fury. Fury—sexual, Oedipal, political, magical, brutal—drives us to our

finest heights and coarsest depths. Out of furia comes creation, inspiration, originality,

passion, but also violence, pain, pure, unafraid destruction, the giving and receiving of

blows from which we never recover,” Solanka reflects as he scrutinizes the city and his

own personal fury (30). A self-sustaining equally creative and destructive unit, fury

25 Salman Rushdie. Interview with Steinberg Sybil. Publishers Weekly. 16 July 2001. Vol. 248, Issue 29. 112

appears an inescapable, unbreakable cycle of conflict—a cry of despair as “loud and life- shattering as a Munch scream” (184). This is the affect that Solanka projects onto New

York, where he arrives at the height of America’s global dominance but also, as the novel suggests, in its early stages of decadence and cultural decline. In broad satirical strokes, millennial New York is painted as a decadent Rome, “a gladiatorial arena” with its own

“bread and circuses” culture; with

a musical about lovable lions, a bike race on Fifth, Springsteen at the garden with

a song about the forty-one police gunshots that killed innocent Amadou Diallo,

[… ]Hillary vs. Rudy, [...] a movie about lovable dinosaurs, the motorcades of

two largely interchangeable and certainly unlovable presidential candidates

(Gush, Bore),[…] and even a literary festival; plus a series of ‘exuberant’ parades

celebrating the city’s many ethnic, national and sexual subcultures and ending

(sometimes) in knifings and assaults on (usually) women (6).

By including the parenthetical and understated asides in his reflection on New York,

Solanka exposes the facades of multicultural coexistence and development, as bearing underneath them signs of decadence, internal contradiction, and muted socio-political tensions. The quotation above mimics the fast-paced language of news media and cable

TV and their dissemination of meaning in New York in the form of a bricolage, of unrelated pieces of news that are successively shown on screens and magnify “reality.”

America here approximates s a version of the “society of the spectacle,” in which the line between the real and representation is so blurred that subjects experience life as entirely mediated by images and from behind screens, passively absorbing reality rather than actively participating in it. Debord explains:

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The more [the spectator] contemplates, the less he lives; the more he identifies

with the dominant images of need, the less he understands his own life and his

own desires. The spectacle’s estrangement from the acting subject is expressed by

the fact that the individual’s gestures are no longer his own; they are the gestures

of someone else who represents them to him. (16)

Indeed, in Solanka’s description, reality appears as though mediated and transmitted through a series of images projected from the screens of cable TV networks, which place the trivial, the political, and the socially tragic on an equal footing and broadcast it as entertainment media. Solanka qualifies such a reality through his satire and his parenthetical asides. The spectacle thus exerts control over the individual and the collective by creating an illusion of community and meaning that paradoxically ensures the subject’s separateness and internal isolation (16).

In millennial times, what the society of the spectacle produces, as Fury shows, is an unattainable, perverse ideal of perfection and progress defined in mechanical terms.

The narrative employs several tropes to describe global subjectivity as controlled, de- politicized and lacking an ownership of the self, most notably the metaphor of the

American “rudderless self” (184), and the recurring figure of the puppet in the narrative.

Rushdie’s cynical reading of a “disintegrated contemporary reality” (89), in other words, of the society of the spectacle, in New York, locates an American-led empire based in a self-centered capitalist culture and market values. Solanka reflects:

Might this new Rome actually be more provincial than its provinces; might these

new Romans have forgotten what and how to value or had they never known?

Were all empires so undeserving, or was this one particularly crass? Was nobody

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in all this bustling endeavor and material plenitude engaged, any longer, on the

deep quarry–work of the mind and heart? O Dream-America, was civilization’s

quest to end in obesity and trivia…. (86-7)

As the quotation shows, American postmodernity reflects a consumer, image-driven culture, wherein the pursuit of happiness or self-fulfillment, cornerstones of the

“American Dream,” has transmogrified into a giant or monster of marketing, of counterfeits, trivialities, and quick fixes. The “industry of culture” (24), the narrator deems, had done away with forms of community and collective struggles of society of the past eras, producing instead “a new breed of apparatchiks” who are engrossed in cultural reifications, celebrification, and wars of definition and exclusion (24). This culture- industry also anchors human development and happiness in a tautological notion of individualism; it is eternally engaging in narcissistic self-reflection and “instructing the rootless self to root itself in itself” (183). Solanka imagines “all around him the American self… re-conceiving itself in mechanical terms, but… everywhere running out of control”

(183). With the image of puppetry and dysfunction, Fury presents the American version

of “progress” that is hitched to the “powerful communications” of the information age as

an illusory sign of development, and a central blind-spot in an American-led global

modernity.

In Fury’s critique of America, there is a critical cosmopolitan stance that is

concerned not with an anti-imperialist agenda, but rather with casting global subjectivity

in terms of puppetry. Fury does not approach global power from a postcolonial critical

angle but from one in which imperialism in the old territorial sense of centers and

peripheries is dismissed in relation to the contemporary world of globalization, of plural

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belongings and blurred borders. What emerges is a new view of power as being less

directed and centered but all the more controlling of individuals’ lives, which is

understood in terms of Debord’s “society of the spectacle.” Solanka’s own predicament is

presented as a case in point in the narrative.

Solanka shares with the postcolonial subject his migrant subjectivity and global

displacement, for his childhood can be traced back to Bombay at the Methwold Estate,

his education is from King’s College, Cambridge, and his career transpires in the

international sphere of global media and popular culture, with his base being first in

London and then in New York. Far from being the underprivileged postcolonial subject,

Solanka is a creator of popular media content that disseminates value worldwide. Hence,

he is not an “other” to global modernity; on the contrary, not only is he a participant in the global modernity that finds its microcosm in New York, but he is also a generator of global culture. As his back-story provides, his doll Little Brain, for example, had become

an icon for the new generation and propelled him to celebrity. Little Brain is said to have

been an interrogator of the “Great Minds” of human civilization in her own BBC show,

called The Adventures of Little Brain. Later, Solanka with a team of “Webspyders”

creates the internet fable “The Coming of the Puppet Kings,” inspired by the real-life

events of Lilliput-Blefuscue, as well as by characters from New York. Ironically, this tale

about the revolt of cyborg puppets against their oppressors, for equal rights, is

appropriated by none other than the Indo-Lilliputian FRM (FILBistani, or Free Indian

Lilliput-Blefuscue, Revolutionary Movement) on whom it was modeled in the first place.

The movement consumes this global cultural commodity, appropriating its value of equa l

rights, however not to further its just cause, but as a means for its leader Babur to

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advance his “bully-boy tactics” (228). With the Puppet Kings, Rushdie puts forward an

emblem of global culture in the age of Internet that is not imperialistic in the postcolonial

sense, not unidirectional but open to new interpretations and appropriations in new

contexts.

As Arjun Appadurai argues in Modernity at Large: the Cultural Consequences of

Globalization (1998), a consequence of globalization is the change in the circulation of

culture, wherein the spread of Western modernity enables local contexts the world, as

each place “annex[es] the global into [its] own practices of the modern” (4). Appadurai

agrees with others that global modernity no longer connotes a homogenization of world

culture or imperialism in the territorial sense, but he points out that “globalization

involves the use of a variety of instruments of homogenization (armaments, advertising

techniques, language hegemonies, and clothing styles) that are absorbed into local

political and cultural economies, only to be repatriated as heterogeneous dialogues of

national sovereignty, free enterprise and fundamentalism” (42). The FRM’s power to

disrupt global narratives, by absorbing and subverting global culture, dismisses the

possibility of cultural imperialism in a similar way. It underlines the existence of an

extensive global power in instruments of cultural dissemination that nonetheless objectify

and colonize. Indeed, Appadurai acknowledges that while global modernity and its

various channels of dissemination confer agency upon all participants, the question of

whether they promote freedom remains an open and elusive one (7). As the FRM

misappropriate Solanka’s global fable that is massively marketed and globally distributed

over the World Wide Web, the narrative registers this anxiety about the nature of global

power, showing that the FRM’s garnering of agency by consuming the global culture of

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rights marketed by the Puppet Kings tale does not and cannot serve the cause of freedom

in the specific Lilliput-Blefuscan context, as I will discuss later in the chapter.

Moreover, the disempowerment is by no means restricted to the East or the

postcolonial world. It also pertains to subjects in the West. As a metropolitan subject who

authors cultural products disseminated globally, Solanka’s apparent centrality with respect to global modernity does not imply his freedom, for part of his crisis and refuge in New York stems from the way his art has been manipulated, as Little Brain’s creative control is passed from him to a group of marketers with capitalistic interests in mind. The back-story of Solanka’s character includes the animated doll’s so-called “outgrowing” of her creator, and her transformation in the eyes of Solanka into an “ungrateful Franken- doll,” to be banished once and for all from his life (101). Initially, Little Brain is created by Solanka to be an inquisitive “Spinoza,” a “spiky-haired time-traveling girl-Basho,” who takes on great thinkers like Galileo, and whom she challenges in regards to his deference to political/religious authority. She tells him defiantly: “Man, I wouldn’t have taken that stuff lying down…If some Pope had tried to get me to lie, I’d have started a

[…] revolution” (17). Fury relegates Little Brain’s David-Goliath confrontations to an earlier cultural moment, however. In millennial culture, Little Brain’s resistance is undone as she has been absorbed by the mainstream and turned into an innocuous but lucrative brand name, a narcissistic subject of her own reality show, Brain Street. She is emptied out of intellectual content, since she is deemed too highbrow, and turned into a commodity for popular consumption. In other words, instead of representing a real thing, she has become a counterfeit image that responds to nothing but its own self- perpetuation.

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Little Brain’s story can be seen as an example of how Rushdie’s depiction of

contemporary global culture approximates what Guy Debord and the Situationists have

called a “society of the spectacle.” The modern spectacle, a function of a capitalist mode of production, defines a social relationship between people mediated by images and reached a stage where “the commodity has succeeded in totally colonizing social life”

(21). As Debord explains, “Commodification is not only visible [at this stage], we no longer see anything else; the world we see is the world of the commodity” (21). To escape this domination by the spectacle, Solanka abandons Little Brain and moves on to experiment with the electronic world of authorship, seeing it as a potentially more liberating medium, one that can bypass the market constraints dictated by production companies. He authors the digital tale of the puppets with loose endings and multiple possibilities. The work, as Mila, one of the Web-spyders and his sometime lover tells him, becomes more “cooperative,” and Solanka retains a creative control over it (178).

Soon, however, the Puppet Kings, like Little Brain, become objects of commercialization, when the company starts selling merchandise and T-shirts on its website; but more dangerously, they also become the inspiration of the FRM fundamentalists’ coup that usurps Solanka’s control over his creation and distorts its premises.

Even to the devotee of fictional formalism, Fury displays a central autobiographical connection with the author’s career post- The Satanic Verses, especially his experience of the multiple local and global forces that fueled what is known as the

Satanic Verses controversy. Many reviewers have seen the correspondence in a bad light, noting for example a sense of solipsism and “zeal for self-glorification” in Fury, which is judged overall to be concerned more with celebrification, success, and self-

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justification than with any social satire (Kumar 34). In “Salman Rushdie’s

‘Unbelonging’: Authorship and the ‘East’ in Fury,” Sarah Brouillette reads the Puppet

Kings-Lilliput Blefuscue (-Satanic Verses controversy) connection, in line with the critical consensus, as revealing Rushdie’s anxiety about the global literary market. She writes that “Solanka critiques not the commodification of culture but the lack of authorial control granted him as a major producer of texts of a global market for world culture”

(82). In regards to the fate of the Puppet Kings, “Solanka mourns that he cannot control the dissemination and impact of the narratives that make up the Puppet Kings. He cannot decide to what movements they lend a voice, or to what purpose they are put. The price of involvement in the creation of culture—esp. culture of obvious political relevance—is the potential for dangerous appropriations and entanglements of one’s work with real violence” (103).

The tension Brouillette finds is between self-articulation, on the one hand, and on the other, both market constraints and meanings in the real world that have “little to do with the meaning of his literary works” (110). Brouillette points out the doubling technique in the life-imitates-art twist of the Puppet Kings, wherein Rushdie is linked to

Solanka, Solanka to his creation, the mad cyberneticist Akasz Kronos, and the latter to

Babur, who impersonates him by wearing his mask. This masking, Brouillette claims, in turn links Babur to the fundamentalists of the world from the ‘East’ who erased

Rushdie’s “identity” by misinterpreting and misappropriating his work, specifically, The

Satanic Verses (110). She thus sees the novel as enacting a symbolic “leave-taking” from the East, one accompanied by a circuitous justification.

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I disagree with Brouillette’s reading by deeming Solanka’s anxiety, his fury, not a reflection of Rushdie’s anxiety about authorship merely, but about the widespread society of the spectacle, and his acute ability to see it though acts of reflection, self-reflection, and creative reflection in the fable of the Puppet Kings. The eclipse of self-determination by the mechanisms of global power, like the media and the culture industry, what

Appadurai variously calls global instruments of homogenization and hegemony, pertains to both Solanka’s and the FRM’s predicaments, much as they did to those of the New

York crowds. Both Solanka and the antipodean rebels are the puppets of global modernity and the millennial society of the spectacle, in which the distinction between the real and the counterfeit is blurred, and an ideal of mechanical-ness and perfection instilled in the place of the real and the human. Solanka finds himself embroiled along with his Indo-Lillian love interest Neela in the Lilliput-Blefuscue struggle, which is loosely based on the 2000 turmoil in Fiji,26 and features a modernized Indian diaspora

and a traditional paternalistic native culture.

The historical resonances with the actual Indian community of Fiji cast the Indo-

Lilliputians (Indo-Lillys) and their leader Babur, as an oppressed minority that after

generations of citizenship, not to mention indentured service in the country, are still

denied equal rights of ownership, in particular land ownership in the postcolonial

country. Nonetheless, despite the antipodean manifestation of fury exemplifying a

subversive consumption of global culture which slides into fundamentalism, it all the

same enacts a form of puppetry that features a less docile subjectivity than in the West

26 An op-ed column written by Rushdie and appearing in the June 2000 issue of the New York Times, also included in Rushdie’s collection of non-fiction, Step Across the Line, discusses the Fijian coup in terms not unlike those of the Lilliput-Blefuscue coup-countercoup in Fury. In addition, Sarah Brouillette confirms this connection in “Salman Rushdie’s ‘Unbelonging’: Authorship and the ‘East’” (99). 121

but an equally controlled one by the instruments of control that Appadurai mentions.

Babur and the FRM rebels are less the fundamentalist villains or the Barbarian “Others” of global modernity than they are its children, and along with their counterparts in New

York reveal the flip side of global modernity. In fact, they are like the string-free puppets of Solanka’s fable whose culture of mechanical perfection ultimately pushes them out of control and becomes a context for violence and bloodshed.

The Puppet Kings Web tale provides, in the narrative, a link between the

American and the antipodean sections, and could be read as the interpretive bridge of

Solanka’s global stereoscopic vision of millennial culture (and its discontents). Although the main plotline of the Puppet Kings is inspired by the predicament of the Indy-Lillies, the puppets themselves in the fable are modeled after the characters Solanka meets in

New York: The Three Society Girls, the Blackballed Golfer, The Traumatized

Quarterback and The Human Spiders. The puppet kings are said to have six “high

Kronosian values” identified as “lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, multiplicity, and consistency” (164). Clearly, these values are ones identified in millennial culture and have their roots in global modernity. However, in the fable, Rushdie further analyzes these values, as each having a double positive and negative limit: “grace” and

“amorality” for lightness; “efficiency” and “ruthlessness” for quickness; “precision” and

“tyranny” for exactitude; “clarity of action” and “attention-seeking” for visibility; “open- mindedness” and “duplicity” for multiplicity, “reliance” and “obsessiveness” for consistency (164-5). In their revolutionary coup under the banner of Let the Fittest

Survive (167), the Puppet Kings therefore do not abandon modernity for its fundamentalist alternatives; they only become further subjected to its value- system,

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playing out the moral ambivalences inherent in it and enacting the negative limits of the global modern.

The same can be said about the revolutionaries in Lilliput-Blefuscue who don the

Puppet Kings’ masks. The Lilliput-Blefuscue segment in Fury, in fact, looks to metropolitan global modernity and tests it at the antipodean margins, highlighting questions of truth and power, might and right; as Solanka reflects:

When the possessor of truth was weak and the defender of the lie was strong, was

it better to bend before the greater force? Or, by standing firm against it, might

one discover a deeper strength in oneself and lay the despot low? When the

soldiers of truth launched a thousand ships and burned the topless towers of the

lie, should they be seen as liberators or had they by using their enemy’s weapons

against him, themselves become the scorned barbarians (or even Baburians)

whose houses they had set on fire? What are the limits of tolerance? How far, in

the pursuit of right, could we go before we crossed a line, arrived at the antipodes

of ourselves, and became wrong? (188)

Solanka’s words make an unequivocal statement against fundamentalisms of all kinds that suppress the truth. However, they stand also as an example of Rushdie’s non- divisive thinking, evident in his critique of the limits of might on the one hand and of those of tolerance on the other. In both the Puppet Kings saga and the FRM plight, it is the line that these globally modern subjects have crossed that concerns Rushdie, wherein their pursuit of a liberal right has given way to an exercise of might. In a lecture given at

Yale in 2002, titled “Step Across this Line,” Rushdie claimed that “at the frontier, there has always been the threat, or, for the decadent culture, even the promise of the

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barbarians” (357). But with America’s role as “the closest thing… to a new imperial

power”—and its globalizing “post-frontier self”—what were once fixed borders have become in “an age of mass migration, mass displacement, globalized finances and industries,” less visible, shifting and permeable, though still “snaking across the world”

(365). Lilliput-Blefuscue seems to be an incarnation of one such place at the frontier of global modernity, both a specific place in the Antipodes and an avatar of a global condition which magnifies the crisis of the global subject. Rushdie’s “permeable post-

frontier thesis” offers a critical explanation of a world of globality, of open networks and

a shared global culture, where the still persisting and newly-drawn invisible borders of global power call for cosmopolitical examination.

In this light, the FRM Indo-Lillys are less representatives of an essentialized and localized “East” than they are the global counterparts of metropolitans in the West. They are descendents of the “mimic men” of European colonialism, which created a dilemma of modernity in their postcolonial nation. Their struggle for equal rights is an unquestionable premise of citizenship within the modern state, an “inalienable right,” yet it can only be achieved at the expense of the traditional, collectivist culture of the Elbees’ that is caught up in the whirlwind of market globalization. The novel places political concern for the “East” in the form of highlighting the cultural clash, not between imperial selves and colonial others, but between two postcolonial cultures, the Elbees and the

Indo-Lillys, two minorities. Rather than interrogating agency on the local level, Rushdie is interested in placing the postcolonial predicament within this tiny island-nation in a historical and global context and as part of a narrative of contemporary globalization.

Neela, who is an Indo-Lilly herself, clarifies the struggle as a paradox and expresses her

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divided loyalties to the causes of both sides. Neela’s words are worth quoting at length,

because they embody the cosmopolitical complexity with which Fury engages the

contemporary postcolonial world:

This isn’t just a question of ethnic antagonism or even of who owns what…. The

Elbee culture is really different, and I can see why they are afraid. They’re

collectivists. The land isn’t held by individual landowners but by the Elbee chiefs

in trust for the whole Elbee people. And then we Big Endia-wallahs come along

with our good business practice, entrepreneurial acumen, free-market

mercantilism and profit mentality. And the world speaks our language now, not

theirs. It is the age of numbers, isn’t it? So we are numbers and the Elbees are

words. We are mathematics and they are poetry. We are winning and they are

losing: and so of course they are afraid of us, it’s like the struggle inside human

nature itself, between what’s mechanical and utilitarian in us and the part that

loves and dreams. We all fear that the cold, machine-like thing in human nature

will destroy our magic and song. So the battle between the Indo-Lillys and the

Elbees is also the battle of the human spirit and, damn, with my heart I am

probably on the other side. But my people are my people and justice is justice and

after you’ve worked your butts off for four generations and you’re still treated

like second-class citizens, you’ve got a right to be angry. (158)

Fury engages the postcolonial world in the context of contemporary globalization.

Neela’s “age of numbers” is a reference to capitalism and economic globalization that have facilitated a common global culture, but one increasingly managed by market forces, alienating images of “progress,” and a “mechanical” model of subjectivity. As a

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symbol for “the mechanization of the human” (182), the puppet, a central trope in the novel, pertains to cultures in both the West and the East, and it raises questions of agency, freedom, and development at the beginning of the 21st century. Its conception of imperial authority differs from a modern imperialist model that constructs the West as

“Self” and the East as an external “Other.” Puppetry as subjectivity is diffuse and widespread across the East and West, and just like the string-free puppets of the fable, governed by forces of global modernity that remain invisible and unidentified by

Solanka, apart from being linked to the petulant Caesars who occupy the high up places in the world.

Brouillette is critical of Rushdie’s dismissal of the Indo-Lilly struggle and turning it into a fundamentalist Baburian mis-appropriation of global popular culture: “Fury makes no attempt to justify or explain the political program of the FRM, but rather emphasizes the way revolutionary movements can be seamlessly incorporated into global popular culture, like the Puppet Kings Web phenomenon, as well as how revolutionary movements in turn appropriate the global culture in ways cultural producers never have imagined” (103). Because Fury does not narrate the local (the FRM political program),

Brouillette deems it to be a symptom of Rushdie’s trading of serious postcolonial engagement for self-involved postmodern parody. On the other hand, Stephen Morton in

Salman Rushdie: Fictions of Postcolonial Modernity, clarifies Rushdie’s positioning of the FRM , stating that “[b]y characterizing the FRM as supporters of a free market ideology led by a nefarious dictator called Babur rather than a left-wing struggle for the minority rights of Indo-Lilliputians, Rushdie could be seen to comment on the ways in

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which contemporary liberation struggles are increasingly shaped and influenced by

America’s global economic and military hegemony” (129).

The novel’s trope of string-free puppetry, I argue, best explains the politics behind the FRM depiction in Fury. As puppets, the FRM are an emblem of Rushdie’s post-frontier thesis, where subjectivities are de-territorialized but managed by global capitalism and its cultural ethos, and as I point out by the global “society of the spectacle.” The following words about the political implications of global spectacularity from Debord resonate with the historical roots of the crisis of self-determination in

Lilliput-Blefuscue:

The society that bears the spectacle does not dominate underdeveloped regions

solely by its economic hegemony. It also dominates them as the society of the

spectacle. Even where the material base is still absent, modern society has already

used the spectacle to invade the social surface of every continent. It sets the stage

for the formation of indigenous ruling classes and frames their agendas. Just as it

presents pseudo-goods to be coveted, it presents false models of revolution to

local revolutionaries. The Bureaucratic regimes in power in certain industrialized

countries have their own particular type of spectacle, but it is an integral part of

the total spectacle, serving as its pseudo-opposition and actual support. Even if

local manifestations of the spectacle include certain totalitarian specializations of

social communication and control, from the total standpoint of the overall

functioning of the system, those specializations are simply playing their allotted

role within a global division of spectacular tasks. (28 author’s emphasis)

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Rushdie then can be seen to be mourning the impossibility of viable resistances and

revolutions in the postcolonial world, especially in the particular contexts of the Lilliput-

Blefuscues of the world. Whatever their agenda, the FRM do not represent the East but

are the surrogates of global capitalism and its spectacular society, and Rushdie seems to

be critiquing this totality rather than their fundamentalism or their failure to become part

of a global culture and civil society. A reading like this contradicts the usual criticisms of

Rushdie that decry the writer as non-committed to the postcolonial or the Third World cause.

One such critique comes from Timothy Brennan in At Home in the World:

Cosmopolitanism Now, which censures cosmopolitanism in contemporary literary

practice like Rushdie’s for hastily deploring “the dichotomy of ‘colonizer and

colonized’” in favor of “a shift from binary otherness to a single, internally rich and

disparate plurality” (2). Brennan argues that such a move promises a negative utopia,

because it wrongly assumes and dismisses Third World subalterns as having “not yet

theorized their own emergence in a common world culture” (4), when global culture only

means American culture, values, and way of life (9). Based on this, Brennan argues that

the West’s values of “freedom,” “justice,” and “equality” must correspond to

“liberation,” “indigenous,” and the “people,” in the Third World, all linked to the project

of nationalism. Even though he acknowledges that historically, Third World nationalist

projects have not yielded the best results, he simply concludes that “these ideas and

words remain vital today because there is simply nowhere else to go” (317).

Brennan’s arguments about global culture as American and imperialistic, while

Third-World alterity as the only viable resistance to it, lose their momentum when one

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considers the effects of globalization, past and present, as having already created globally modern and hybrid subjects in much of the world. Bruce Robbins puts it best when he states that the locating of desirable agency for postcolonial peoples in “the particular, the specific, [and] the local” proves a futile gesture, because “hidden in the miniaturizing precision of ‘locality’, with its associations of presence and uniqueness, empirical correctness, complete experience, and accessible subjectivity, has been the nostalgia for a collective subject-in-action that is no longer easy to localize” (252-3, emphasis mine).

This is exactly the case with the FRM whose belonging is contested between the East and the West. Clearly, for Rushdie, the question of Third World agency and sovereignty does not belong outside a domain of global culture, merely because the latter as it stands nowadays has an American quality. What needs engagement is precisely this global culture that has become extensive. In Fury, Rushdie underscores the puppetry of collective movements of liberation, which are often poised to the advantage of the imperial status quo. Contrary to Brennan’s charge of a not fully-embraced postcolonial responsibility, Rushdie’s cosmopolitanism is a full-fledged engagement with global responsibility.

By viewing global power in terms of a global society of the spectacle, Fury is not merely bringing to light the postcolonial predicament in global modernity, but subverting the dominant global culture in the world altogether at home and abroad. One of the interesting commonalities the narrative highlights is the existence of violence, bigotry, and extremism in the West. Fury’s distinction between agency and freedom, that is

Rushdie’s critique of spectacular culture, also pertains to America, and is seen most clearly in the story of the murder of three New York socialites that Solanka learns about

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from newspaper headlines. Bindy, Sky, and Ren are murdered by their millionaire boyfriends of the S&M club (to stand supposedly for, single and male). The murder, as

Solanka describes it, comes across as an attack on the Pax Americana, because the women are the highest image of its culture of liberalism; being “freer than any women in any country in any time” and “the first generation of young women to be truly in control, in thrall neither to the old patriarchy nor to the man-hating hard-line feminism… they could be businesswomen and flirts…they had it all—emancipation, sex appeal, and cash”

(74). Their killings appear an act of conquest: one of them, we are told, “died because her killers were too scared of her sexual fury to let her live” (202).

In “American Culture Meets Postcolonial Insight: Visions of the United States in

Salman Rushdie’s Fury,” Rodney Stephens reads the women’s predicament through the lens of the Internet fable, “The Coming of the Puppet-Kings,” in which Solanka depicts them as puppet-dolls come back to enact the “The Revolt of the Living Dolls.” Stephens argues that the women are part of the new “classes of oppression” spawned by American imperialism (352). Their savage murders evoke the brutal legacies of the American frontier and create a “rationale for revolt,” a fate Rushdie’s postcolonial insight presents as a caveat to American empire (352). Yet it seems Rushdie complicates the women’s subjectivity as not victims of white male American imperialism but the highest emblems of the authority of the spectacle:

These living dolls, these stringless marionettes, were not just “dolled up” on the

outside. Behind their high-style exteriors, beneath that perfectly lucent skin, they

were so stuffed with behavioural chips, so thoroughly programmed for action, so

perfectly groomed and wardrobed, that there was no room left in them for messy

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humanity. [They] represented the final step in the transformation of the cultural

history of the doll. Having conspired in their own dehumanization, they ended up

as mere totems for their class, the class that ran America, which in turn ran the

world, so that an attack on them was also an attack on the great American empire,

the Pax Americana itself… (74).

Outwardly, the women appear liberated, hailed and empowered, authors of their life- narratives until violated and terminated by an oppressive patriarchy. But the narrator insists on an alternative point of view, Solanka’s own, which casts their bodies and minds as controlled by the global trend for mechanical perfection. Their identities ultimately contribute to their own dehumanization; they have become string-less puppets in thrall to the hegemony of spectacular culture. Here, one can see Rushdie’s stereoscopy in action.

Whereas any American discourse of feminism views the incident as a universal case of women’s oppression by a white patriarchy, Solanka’s vantage provincializes such

Western claims to universality, to provide alternative views coming from a position of difference. By their own complicity, the women become the natural victims of the corruption and a decline under spectacular culture.

The story of the African-American war correspondent turned New York pulp writer millionaire, Rhinehart, is another example of the domination of the spectacle.

Rushdie’s Rhinehart is described throughout the novel as a cosmopolitan, who has crossed the frontiers of race, and to whom “being black’s just not the issue anymore”

(151). His world is one of possibilities, as he runs in the richest and most privileged circles of Manhattan. The darker side of Rhinehart’s story, however, is that he is in thrall to spectacular culture. Rhinehart’s marriage to a white woman by the name of

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Bronislawa, who is in every way Rhinehart’s antithesis, was a way of raising his social

status, much in the way of acquiring property, or, more aptly here, an image. Solanka’s description of their union, before their bitter separation and divorce battle, is telling of the seductive power of the spectacle or image: “They had been a beautiful, perfectly- contrasted ebony- and-ivory couple, she long, languid, pale, he equally long, but a pitch- fork black African-American”—he a man with “so much energy”; she with “so little”

(54). Solanka describes Rhinehart as seduced by “his desire to be accepted into the white man’s club,” which “was the dark secret from which the anger comes” (58). Rhinehart’s desire is to be a part of the S&M elite club, as the last frontier to cross in order to reach greatness. It is, however, the members of this club who later pin him in a murder-suicide ploy and implicate him in the society girls’ murder. Neela, perhaps more accurately, sees

Rhinehart’s competitive desire to reach the inaccessible “Caesars” as enslaving him;

Rhinehart’s life had stopped belonging to him, and he had become a puppet of the

“Caesars in their Palaces” (150).

In Fury, Solanka parallels Rhinehart’s predicament with his own, seeing the latter’s “self-loathing” and “fury” a “mirror of his own” (58). Solanka had come to

America with hopes to “erase his back-story,” and become “free of attachment” (44), and

“to receive the benison of being Ellis Islanded, of starting over” (51). Solanka’s enactment of the American Dream is described in terms of Fitzgerald’s treatment of it in

The Great Gatsby; Solanka had come to the “country whose paradigmatic modern fiction was the story of a man who remade himself—his past, his present, his shirts, even his name—for love; and here in this place from whose narratives he was all but disconnected, he intended to attempt the first phase of such a restructuring” (79, emphasis

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mine). Yet, the attachments do not go away and Solanka is haunted by his past, by the

city beside the Arabian Sea, by his traumatic childhood; and perhaps his union with the

Indo-Lilly Neela is a route back to the East from which he had never really parted. But in

America, like Rhinehart, Solanka is unable to resist the seduction of the image, the

culture-industry, of the society of the spectacle, and feels compromised by his own greed.

Rushdie also connects Rhinehart’s and Solanka’s disintegration to that of the city, in a move that makes an important statement about Solanka’s identification with and relationship to America:

But perhaps, his was not the only identity to be coming apart at the seams. Behind

the façade of this great age of gold, this time of plenty, the contradictions and

impoverishments of the Western human individual, or let’s say the human self in

America, were deepening and widening. Perhaps the wider disintegration was also

to be made visible in this city of fiery, jewelled garments and secret ash, in this

time of public hedonism and private fear. A change of direction was required.

(86 emphasis added)

Why, one would ask, does Solanka find refuge in a city in which he finds a flawed utopia? Given also Solanka’s habitual condemnations of “US policy in Central America” and “US policy in Southeast Asia” that his friend Rhinehart mentions (68), it is surprising then that he flees to New York at all. Is Fury an anti-American text, Rushdie’s critique of

American imperialism? Or is there a more ambivalent relationship that is suggested by the narrative?

Morton claims that Rushdie’s employment of a “discourse of rage” is a belated use of a twentieth century “structure of feeling,” at odds with the condition of

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postmodernity characterized by the “waning of affect,” as per Frederic Jameson’s

theorizations (125). Morton proceeds to argue that Fury’s critique is actually resigned to

American global hegemony and is less politically charged than some of Rushdie’s previous novels. Solanka’s refuge in New York, for example, is contradictory to his indictment of America, and seems ultimately to be signifying his utter lack of agency.

Morton considers Fury anticipating Rushdie’s tacit consent and ambivalent stance toward

American militarism in the Middle East post 9/11 (121). I agree with Morton about

Rushdie’s depiction of the subject’s utter lack of agency in a society of the spectacle, yet

Rushdie’s description of America cannot be understood adequately within the affect of rage and it is also less postcolonially positioned. Rushdie, through Solanka, acknowledges that “what’s wrong is wrong [about America],” but he depicts Solanka’s refuge in America in more nuanced terms. As in the difference between classical fury, described by the narrator, and full-blown rage, Solanka’s (and by extension Rushdie’s) attribute for America is ambivalence and despair experienced within its borders. The ranting that characterizes the narrative can signify postcolonial anger or a postmodern hyperbole. Solanka also identifies his own relationship to America in terms that connote the structure of desire, namely in seduction, compromise, and the guilt of complicity:

Yes, it had seduced him, America; yes, its brilliance aroused him, and its vast

potency too, and he was compromised by this seduction. What he opposed in it he

must also attack in himself. Everyone was an American now, or at least

Americanized: Indians, Iranians, Uzbeks, Japanese, Lilliputians, all. America was

the world’s playing field, its rule book, umpire and ball. Even anti-Americanism

was Americanism in disguise, conceding as it did, that America was the only

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game in town and the matter of America the only business at hand; and so, like

everyone, Malik Solanka now walked its high corridors cap in hand, a supplicant

at its feast; but that did not mean he could not look it in the eye. (87)

A closer attention to the narrative, moreover, reveals Rushdie’s critique of America as personal and made from a position of belonging. Even as Solanka censures America, there is a strong sense he considers it expressing a global desire, however pathological that may be, and seeing America as the highest yet by no means an exalted embodiment of global subjectivity today. Hence we are given the words: ‘what [Solanka] opposed in

[America], he must attack in himself.’ In one of Solanka’s lighter episodes in New York, a passer-by’s phone conversation reveals his love-hate relationship with his wife, and

Solanka, overhearing this, ponders that the man’s words describe as well a larger relationship to America, which also explains his seduction by it. As the quotation spells out, “Everyone was an American now,” by which the narrator suggests that metropolitan

New York identity had become a model of an expansive global subjectivity in millennial times.

What is the change in direction, then, that Rushdie seeks in global culture represented by New York metropolitan identity? Contemplating the tragedy of the three society girls, Solanka realizes that their fury, which in turn reflects his own and in general also that engendered by millennial culture, was “one they could not articulate, born of they, who had so much, had never been able to acquire: lessness, ordinariness, real life” (202 emphasis mine). This is the critique of the society of the spectacle that runs throughout the narrative of Fury. It is, as the Puppet Kings fable thematizes, “the fight to the death between the counterfeit and the real” (173). This critique is enclosed in

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the narrative on a symbolic level as well, as the battle between the small and the large,

the human and the giant, the resistance of Little Brain or Lilliput Blefuscue and the

spectacular authority of global modernity, the artistic and the commercial.

Both Little Brain in The Adventures of Little Brain and the digitally authored

futuristic tale of The Puppet Kings, feature the struggle of the small and the humane

against the giant and the commercial, and the reduction of global subjectivity to a form of puppetry in the face of the forces and forms of market capital. After detailing discrete minutiae of New York’s global culture, the narrative in the first pages of Fury offsets

America’s imperial gigantism with the miniaturized Dutch dollhouses, that of an old empire which were now museum-ized. Inspired by the shift in scale and the modesty about human endeavor it embodied, Solanka creates his famous doll Little Brain. In On

Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, and the Collection,

Susan Stewart explores the “miniature” and the “gigantic” as “discourses of the self and

the world [that] mutually define and delimit one another” (xii). The miniature “is a

metaphor for the interior space and time of the Bourgeois subject; the gigantic … for the

abstract authority of the state and the collective, public, life” (xii). Little Brain is a

symbol of the small, in that she represents human agency in a global context, against

imperial powers and knowledges.

What also offsets New York’s imperial dimensions in the novel is another small

entity, the embattled island-nation nicknamed Lilliput Blefuscue located on “the other

side of the world.” Like Little Brain, Lilliput-Blefuscue represents the age-old question of

human scale and power, yet enacts its drama in a post-imperialist, post-colonial world, where power was more elusive and diffuse. In one of the early scenes, Rushdie employs

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E.F. Schumacher’s famous economic dictum of the 70s “small is beautiful,” describing a doll of the famous economist in the Dutch museum of the Rijk civilization. The dictum is a warning against the loss of the human element in a mechanical, profit-driven culture.

Particularly influenced by Gandhi’s decentralized economic program in the Indian villages, Schumacher’s theory proposes the combating of ethnocentrism by advocating economics based on small scale: “Man is small and therefore, small is beautiful. To go for giantism is to go for self-destruction.” (150). It is interesting and telling, however, that

Rushdie amends the statement to “small was beautiful,” perhaps in order to underscore the total absence of the possibility of the freedom of the human, the local and the small, in a society of the spectacle.

If Fury sends any message, it is that the society of the spectacle is extensive.

Whether in the East or the West, this global power is internalized, manifesting outwardly as development and perfection but containing within a latent propensity to corruption and pure violence. Like the puppets’ value code, the global modern moves seamlessly between the positive and negative limits of rationality, exemplifying the way grace, precision, and reliance on the one hand and amorality, tyranny, and obsessive tendency on the other are differential expressions of the same Janus-faced individualist ethos. Fury deconstructs the ideals of global modernity by showing their ambivalent nature, and it enacts a critical cosmopolitanism based on a stereoscopic vision negotiating the global and the local, America and the Antipodes.

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Where Marxism, Feminism, and the Occult Meet: Cosmopolitan Resistance in the Global ‘Corporony’ in Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Wizard of the Crow

Ngũgĩ’s Wizard of the Crow (2005) is the last work this dissertation examines to explore the intricacies of a stereoscopic vision in it. Unlike Fury, in which stereoscopy highlights a common predicament of culture extending from America to the Antipodes,

Wizard lends itself to a stereoscopic reading that highlights the internal divisions in

nations engendered by global capitalism, between the rich and the poor, the powerful and

the dispossessed. Whereas Fury emphasizes the puppet as an emblem of a resigned global

subjectivity in a spectacular commodity culture, The Wizard finds in the figure of the

wizard or the witch a subjectivity that both criticizes and locates potential in

globalization, especially in regards to the small and marginal places. The wizard’s mirror

is one device that generates a critical cosmopolitanism, informed by a stereoscopic

negotiation of transnational allegiances with critiques of global modernity, and

fashioning an eclectic resistance from global Marxist and Feminist activisms, on the one

hand, and local Occult forces, on the other.

In an interview upon the publication of Wizard of the Crow, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o

talked about his novel as an epic about contemporary Africa, fictionalized in the Republic

of Aburiria, and moreover as a global epic that encompassed the condition and

experience of people in “many parts of the world”; “[a]lthough it is based on an

imaginary African country,” he explained,

some of the actions [in Wizard of the Crow] touch on India, and there are even

sections, although not extended ones, that mention Brazil, Bahia….So it is located

in an imaginary African country, but its mental location is situated in many parts

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of the world. In a sense it is an extension of my previous novels, but in other

senses it is also a break. (Rodrigues 167)

Wizard of the Crow could be read as a novel about Africa, but it is also a cosmopolitan

meditation on contemporary globalization and its professed globality, or a single-world

existence. Its protagonist, Kamiti, has the magical abilities of flight and divination; in his

crow-like form, he journeys around the world and back in history—“from the pyramids

of Egypt and Great Zimbabwe; Benin and Bahia and on through the Caribbean to the

skyscrapers of New York”—in search of the “sources of [black] power” (494). He is also

a graduate of an Indian university who believes that Aburirians “should strengthen ties

with India because some of [Aburiria’s] citizens are of Indian origin” and because

Indians shared in the struggle for African independence (55-6). Upon his flights, Kamiti

sees the widening gap between the privileged and the poor in Aburiria, wherein large

patches of “shacks stood side by side with mansions of tile, stone, glass, and concrete”

(39). Wizard marks a break with some of Ngũgĩ’s previous works, which focus solely on the African nation. In emphasizing a connection and solidarity with India, and spotlighting the disparity between the rich and the poor within the nation, the novel

shows a cosmopolitanism that is culturally diverse, more expansive than Pan-Africanism

and decidedly non-celebratory. Informed by the realities of a “Global South,” or places in

Asia, Africa, and South America that are exploited by global capital but denied its

privileges, this cosmopolitanism is critical of Euro-American articulations of a

contemporary globality.

In this chapter, I explore a critical cosmopolitanism in the narrative of Wizard of

the Crow that is based in a discourse of trans-nationality yet champions a resistance to

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old and new forms of global domination. Following the recent theorizations of contemporary cosmopolitanisms as “ways of being at home abroad, abroad at home” and

“of seeing the larger picture stereoscopically with the smaller” (Breckenridge et al. 11, emphasis original), I argue that Wizard derives a cosmopolitan resistance to global power from a negotiation between the local (African) and the global as cultural and political categories, a negotiation that rejects an either/or logic and fashions an “alternative modernity,” or a way of “thinking through and against Western modernity” by expanding the angle of vision globally, going beyond the West, and articulating a “difference that would destabilize the universalist idioms [of Western modernity], historicize the contexts, and pluralize the experience of modernity” (15)27. In doing so, critical cosmopolitanism in Wizard displays a nuanced relationship to a culture of globalization; on the one hand it critiques it and on the other it acknowledges and participates in the democratic possibilities that emerge from it. This relationship is brought to light in the revived folk tale of the Wizard of the Crow, which Ngũgĩ adapts. As Peter Geschiere has noted, the resilience of discourses of witchcraft in contemporary Africa signals a type of modernization that is not premised on Western notions of disenchantment28. Similarly,

Kamiti’s wizardry is syncretic, part African oral and part modern discourse, which runs in parallel with a Marxist politics represented by Nyawira’s underground Movement of the Voice of the People. What emerges from the narrative, and what I explore in this chapter, is a stereoscopic picture that spotlights the “Global South” internally, in terms of

27Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, “On Alternative Modernities,” 15. 28 In The Modernity of Witchcraft, Geschiere notes: “To many Westerners, it seems self-evident that the belief in witchcraft or sorcery is something “traditional” that will automatically disappear with modernization. But this stereotype does not fit with the actual developments in Africa today. Throughout the continent, discourses on sorcery and witchcraft are intertwined, often with quite surprising ways, with modern changes. Nowadays, modern techniques and commodities, often of Western provenance, are central in rumors on the occult” (2).

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its linkages, and externally as interconnected to the world, bringing to focus extant sites of both oppression and resistance in globalization. 29

*********************

Set at the end of the Cold War, Wizard narrates the transition of Aburiria (a fictionalized Africa nation) from the neocolonial order of the cold-war era to the new transnational order of global capitalism. The transition is charted satirically in the trials and tribulations of Aburiria’s ailing dictator, known as The Ruler, whose illness stands metaphorically for his waning power and desperate struggle to maintain his tyrannical hold on the country in the face of global change. Taking the counsel of his Minister of

Foreign affairs and right-hand man, Machokali, the Ruler pursues the project of Marching to Heaven, a modern-day tower of Babel, conceived by Machokali as a supreme scheme that will consolidate the Ruler’s divine rule over the land amid the transition and herald

Aburiria’s arrival upon the global stage and onto a regional prominence by giving its capital Eldares the image of a global city. For its funding, the aid of a thinly-veiled World

Bank called the Global Bank is solicited— to no avail. The Ruler, who had hitherto enjoyed absolute power and declared himself synonymous with the country, finds his aspirations held hostage by the whims of Global Bank bureaucrats who stall the funding

29 Ngũgĩ has written in “The Cultural Factor in the Neo-Colonial Era,” of the importance of exploring the ‘links that bind’ countries. He proposes a politics that is informed by a similar notion of a stereoscopic dialogue between places in the Global South and the West: … for the third World peoples an even more important requirement is the linkages of their struggles. In this respect the notion of south/south dialogue should go beyond the level of sentiment and wishes. Economic exchanges and cooperation can strengthen the links that bind. But quite as important as political dialogues and economic exchange is the cultural factor. The literatures of ‘Third’ World peoples of Asia, Africa and South America for instance have a lot to learn from each other. Cultural exchanges at the people to people and institutional levels are vital. This culture is not in contradiction with the democratic tradition in the literature and culture of Western peoples. I am thinking of a tri-partite cultural dialogue and exchange between the people of Asia, Africa, and South America, on the one hand, and between the peoples of AASA and those of the West, on the other. (Moving the Center 56). 141

and hold against him the undemocratic image that Aburiria projects to the world. Their

actions contrast sharply with the full support and backing the Ruler had received from the

West in the days of the Communist threat. At length, a special envoy from America

makes clear the new and more imperialistic agenda devised for Aburiria and being

bartered through the Marching to Heaven deal:

We are in the post-cold war era, and our calculations are affected by the laws and

needs of globalization. The history of capital can be summed up in one phrase: in

search of freedom. Freedom to expand, and now it has a chance at the entire globe

for its theater. It needs a democratic space to move as its own logic demands. So I

have been sent to urge you to start thinking about turning your country into a

democracy… What we are saying is this: many parties, one aim—a free and

stable world where our money can move across borders without barriers erected

by the misguided nationalism of the outmoded nation-state. The goal is to free up

the resources and energies of the globe. All your countries and peoples will

benefit. (580)

The envoy’s words are reminiscent of Kwame Nkrumah’s 1965 statements on the

duplicity of finance capital in exacting neocolonial exploitation under the guise of

development, democracy, and freedom. In Neo-colonialism: The Last Stage of

Imperialism, Nkrumah wrote: “The essence of neocolonialism is that the State which is subject to it is, in theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of international

sovereignty. In reality, its economic system and thus its political policy is directed from

outside (ix). In an early scene in Wizard, the neocolonial face of globalization is shown

with heavy irony. When told about the monetary loans promised to Aburiria by the

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Global Bank, Kamiti mistakes the acronym GB for Great Britain (71). This verbal error foreshadows the imperialistic operations of this supranational institution and hallmark of globalization. Aburiria eventually shifts from a dictatorship into a democracy, mockingly known as Baby D, which is said to have magically emerged from the Ruler’s “pregnant” belly. However, it remains subjugated to the West through the surreptitious workings of the Global Bank, which succeed finally in rendering Aburiria “a voluntary corporate colony, a corporony, the first in the new global order,” as its self-proclaimed new leader

Titus Tajirika, now known as Emperor Titus Flavius Vespasianus Whitehead smugly declares (746). Ngũgĩ imagines the effects of globalization as neutralizing the boundaries of nation-states and eventually producing a single “corporate globe divided into the incorporating and the incorporated” (746).

In this corporate globe, local governments are subjugated through the hegemonic and depersonalized forces of global capital, with which Western governments align themselves. Any possibility for an alternative system is annulled by the weakening of nation-states and dissolution of national borders, as the words of the envoy suggest.

According to Joseph Stiglitz, former chief economist and vice president of the World

Bank, the opening up of the world to a global market economy serves the West more than the rest, even though the institutions of globalization, like the World Bank, are put in place to eradicate world poverty; for “even when not guilty of hypocrisy, the West has driven the globalization agenda, ensuring that it garners a disproportionate share of the benefits, at the expense of the developing world” (Globalization and its Discontents 7).

Globalization creates through its global institutions “a system that might be called global government without global governance, one in which few institutions—World Bank,

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IMF, the WTO—and a few players—the finance, commerce, and trade ministers, closely

linked to financial and commercial interests—dominate the scene, but in which many of

those affected by their decisions are left almost voiceless” (21-2).

With the sacrifice of the Ruler and Tajirika’s subsequent rise to power, Aburiria

makes the transition finally into an “imperial democracy” (754), losing all semblance of a

nation-state governed locally and publically and capable of placing barriers to the

imperialism of global capital. As a nation, Aburiria’s chance for autonomy post-

independence is forever lost. This loss is portrayed as a loss of voice, and in the case of

the Ruler, also the development of a strange bodily disease referred to as SIE or self-

induced expansion that goes out of control. SIE is symbolic of the destructive or self-

destructive excesses of capitalism and greed on the social body. The only source of

resistance emphasized in the novel is that of vision, a global vision that would expose the

invisible power structures new in globalization. When Kamiti addresses the public in the

identity of the Wizard of the Crow, he imparts such a global vision in “a long parable of

how humans surrendered control of their own lives to a blind deity with a double-barreled

name of M&M, or money and market, and how Africa’s independence muted to

dependence” (681). He tells the people of his visionary cosmopolitan flight and what he

saw: “Around the seventeenth century, Europe impregnated some in Africa with evil.

These pregnancies gave birth to the slave driver of the slave plantation, who mutated into the colonial driver of the colonial plantation, who years later mutated into the neocolonial pilots of the postcolonial plantation. Is he now mutating into a modern driver and pilot of a global plantation?” (681).

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At first instance, then, Wizard could be read as a postcolonial work par excellence

writing back to empire, or more precisely, to neo-imperialism. In light of the emphasis on

the threat of a continued Western oppression in the global era, many critics and reviewers

have read Wizard as an unequivocal postcolonial critique of globalization. In “From the

National to the Global: Satirical Magic Realism in Ngũgĩ’s Wizard of the Crow,” Joseph

McLaren argues that Wizard suggests a continuity between the colonial and the new

global orders: “Ngũgĩ updates the colonial analysis to a global one in which NGO’s in

place of missionaries and privatization of states is likened to the action of the British and

Dutch East India companies” (154). The privatization of states is clearly satirized in the

new emperor Tajirika’s ambitious project of a re-envisioned Marching to Heaven in the

GLOBE INSURANCE CORPORATION: THE TALLEST BUILDING IN AFRICA: A

REAL MARCHING TO HEAVEN (WOC 762). Built on the Aburo-Asian Gautama’s

confiscated land, what was to be a symbol of an old dictator’s personal might and will-to-

power becomes an index of capital’s faceless and impersonal monopoly of power in

Aburiria, and the resumption of a racialist mentality in the global corporony.

A postcolonial critique is further stressed with Kamiti’s self-proclaimed status of a “postcolonial witch doctor” (405), analyzing the psychology of colonial difference and neocolonial oppression. Two of his patients, Tajirika, businessman, common crook, and eventual emperor of Aburiria, and the Ruler, suffer from a literal loss of voice, which epitomizes the way in which the operations of global capital are corrupting, and following Stiglitz, strip people in the “Global South” of their voice and autonomy.

Coming upon an unforeseen source of bribe money in the Tajirika’s case, and after the

Ruler is denied the funds from the Global Bank and realizing his own expendability as a

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Black African leader within the power structures of the post- cold war era, both Tajirika’s and the Ruler’s speech gets stuck on the word Corwar, and repeat it endlessly. Corwar which is actually the Swahili “korwo” is a pun of sorts. It alludes to the cold war and means “if [only],” a term that the Wizard parses as a deep-seated inferiority complex about black identity caused by centuries of racism, and manifesting itself as a wish to have been born white and European—in the image of past colonizers and white American power players, the heirs of global capital.

The critical cosmopolitan narrative that Wizard writes is about the continued neocolonial practice and its attendant racism under the new guise of globalization. In

Nyawira’s words, “shit is shit, even by another name… the battle lines may be murky, but they have not changed” (756). In emphasizing a continued oppression, Wizard may be considered an extension of Ngũgĩ’s previous works, most notably Devil on the Cross

(1982) and Matigari (1986) written during the height of neo-colonialism in Africa. Yet

Wizard’s critique of globalization does not shun the global modern completely, nor does it uphold the dream of a socialist revolution which will give birth to the African nation, whose tragic impossibility the above-mentioned novels lamented. Unlike Ngũgĩ’s previous novels, the politics of resistance in Wizard marks a break. Because Wizard deems contemporary globalization as more ambivalent, it explores agency on a cosmopolitan cultural level as capable of combating the underhanded forms of oppression on the local level.

This agency is based on feminine precepts of solidarity, survival and renewal. In his speech, Kamiti continues pointing out the effects of neocolonial oppression, but he hails the rhetoric of defiance, hope, and endurance found in the song of women:

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But Africa impregnated its own breed, which made our people sing, Even if you

kill our heroes, we women are pregnant with hope of a new lot. Therefore, don’t

cry despair at those who sold the heritage; smile also with pride at the

achievements of those that struggle to rescue our heritage. … Just as today is born

of the womb of yesterday, today is pregnant with tomorrow. What kind of

tomorrow is Aburiria pregnant with? Of unity and murderous divisions? Of cries

or laughter? Our tomorrow is determined by what we do today. Our fate is in our

hands.” (681)

One of the feminists, Nyawira, whose name means “work,” articulates in more concrete terms the work that lies ahead, a struggle that centers on a culture of rights and equality applied within the nation and beyond:

Those who want to fight for the people in the nation and in the world must

struggle for the unity and the rights of the working class in their own country;

fight against all discriminations based on race, ethnicity, and color, and belief

systems; they must fight against all gender-based inequalities and therefore fight

for the rights of women in their home, the family, the nation, and the world….”

(428)

Nyawira puts forward a universal model of resistance, a Marxist-feminist political model uniting people across national, racial, ethnic, and cultural lines. This is evidenced in the penultimate scene when Kamiti discovers that the movement boasts the membership of the “Aburo-Asian” Dr. Patel (759). Whereas stereotypical views of the Indians in East

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Africa have been that they are agents of imperialism and colonial middle-men30, Nyawira

explains their presence in Africa in more cosmopolitan terms:

Like black Aburirians, some [Indians] work with the forces of repression, while

others toil on the side of the people. This was also true in our anticolonial

struggle, but the regime tries to suppress this knowledge. Anything pointing to

people being able to unite across race and ethnic lines is suppressed so that people

may not realize the sources of their strength and power. (760)

On the other hand, Nyawira also points out the flaws in the political concept of black

solidarity based on the visible “fact of blackness,” in Frantz Fanon’s famous

formulations. To Kamiti’s preachings of black unity, she presents the challenge: “all too

often the appeal to blackness glosses over the valley between opposing positions. Even

the extreme black rightists with anti-working people’s agendas are now claiming their

share of victimology” (732). Nyawira’s words point to a more nuanced view of the

African condition and of the anachronism of anti-colonial rhetorics of African and Pan-

African nationhood in the contemporary struggle. She resists the global corporatism in

Aburiria with a materialist outlook that notes, like Kamiti, the discrepancies between the

rich and the poor, between the State and the peasant-worker classes, within the nation.

She advances in the narrative a discourse of liberation that is similar to Fanon’s directive

of nation-building as the stepping stone toward an international consciousness—“far from

keeping aloof from other nations,” Fanon writes, “it is national liberation which leads the

30 In “Shops and Stations: Rethinking Power and Privilege in British/Indian East Africa,” Savita Nair writes that “it is important to keep in mind that Indians in East Africa not only originated from different Indian regions… than their counterparts in South Africa, but also that the socioeconomic classes of Indians varied. Kenya’s Indian population included those who became merchants and professionals and who grew into commercial livelihoods from agricultural backgrounds. Thus, out of a heterogeneous community of interests and desires came heterodox reactions to and by colonial authority.” (79)

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nation to play its part on the stage of history. It is at the heart of national consciousness

that international consciousness lives and grows” (Wretched of the Earth 248). In her

descriptions of Marching to Heaven, Nyawira sees the project as a global monster that

will eat away at the weak body of the nation:

Marching to Heaven will swallow our land. Where shall we take shelter from the

sun and rain? It will snatch water from the mouth of the thirsty and food from the

mouth of the hungry. Skeletons will people our country. How shall we get back to

the body, the mind, and the soul of the nation? (209)

And her politics represented by the Movement of the Voice of the People puts great stock

in the power of engagement and collective organization, supported by the nurturance of a

strong nation. But unlike Fanon, she advocates a multi-ethnic nation, which includes the

multiple cultures of people in the Global South. Fanon believed in a strong national

resistance culture joining the struggle against imperialism31. In her underground headquarters, Nyawira and her movement, in contrast, show Kamiti the heritage that motivates their liberatory politics: a displayed collection of carvings of deities from the four corners of the world, including those of “black and related people” (760, emphasis mine).

Wizard updates Fanon, who has been a major influence on Ngũgĩ, by opening up

to a cosmopolitan culture of global modernity, marked by the democratic ideals of

universal justice and human rights and activisms such as most notably, Western

31 In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon insists that every culture has to be first and foremost national; and this culture, particularly in the case of a decolonized Africa, will then be endowed with “productiveness, homogeneity, and substance” (155). He talks about the failure of the colonized intellectual who cannot wrench himself from his plural, syncretic, and cosmopolitan cultural attachments, and thereby advocates a “universal perspective” (156). In his advocacy of a national homogeneous culture, Fanon elides the question of diversity within the nation, the historical and regional movements of different people in it. 149

feminism. This rethinking of the sources of resistance is fictionalized in the scene in which Nyawira, who seems to be speaking for a political Ngũgĩ, reads Devil on the

Cross, while Kamiti looks on (63). The gesture of looking back at Ngũgĩ’s own work suggests a sense of revision; and its significance is worth exploring. Like Wizard, Devil

incisively critiques the entrepreneurial spirit and free market mentality of capitalism,

associated with the spread of Pentecostal Christianity and its logic of accumulation; for

capitalism had empowered an idle African Bourgeoisie and rendered them easy parasites

on hard-working peasant-producers. The story dramatizes a feast of “thieves and robbers”

that takes place in a cave, wherein representatives of the wealthy and propertied class pay

homage to the workings of capitalism by competing for the title of the cleverest and

greediest among them. As James Ogude notes, the newly independent ruling classes, such

as bureaucrats and employers, make up Ngũgĩ’s devil of (neo)-colonialism, whose defeat

will give birth to the socialist nation. On the other hand, Wizard, as Simon Gikandi notes

in his review-essay, is not a “national epic” or an “allegory of the nation,” such as those

that represent a Third world or a postcolonial mode of writing; “its size and global setting

notwithstanding, it is not about the liberation of nations and polities, but it is a story, like many African folktales, about the simple human desire for [the individual’s] freedom”

(169). Wizard, therefore, could be viewed as a contemporary cosmopolitan epic about the triumph of humanity over the divisive forces of tyranny. Gikandi points out that unlike the “utopian narrative” in Ngũgĩ’s mid-career novels, Wizard does not culminate in an

“epiphanic moment of revelation” or a “resolution at the moment of closure”—such as a luta continua… (Petals) or “Victory shall be ours!” (Matigari) (169). In fact, even after

Kamiti’s speech mobilizes the people, all they do is dance and sing songs about unity,

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forming a protective shield around the Wizard and The Limping Witch (Nyawira). In

addition, the final scene of the novel is affirming of the love which blossoms between

Kamiti and Nyawira, who evade the State police, and of the celebration of life granted to

them by AG Gathere, the unspoken hero of the novel. As such, Wizard, written in a post-

revolutionary age, makes “minor gestures of life and love” as Gikandi puts it (164).

The narrative of Wizard articulates a politics not of revolution but of survival in

cosmopolitan terms. This cosmopolitanism is critical, deriving its resistance by bringing

the local African in conversation not only with the global South (namely India) but with

the global modern (the West), and defending its culture of rights while censuring its

blind-spots of continued exploitation. It seeks agency and a form of everyday resistance

to the invisible and impersonal forces of oppression in global culture from within this

culture. In Wizard, the initial devil is the dictatorship exemplified in the person of the

Ruler, who after succumbing farcically to auto-explosion emerges in a lizard-like devilish frame. On the other hand, the global transition is characterized as more ambivalent, bringing about multiple and ubiquitous “ogres” of global capitalism as well as multiple demons who become agents of resistance to neocolonial exploitation and herald change rather than domination. Identified by the chapter headings, these agents of resistance are in succession: power demons, queuing demons, male demons, female demons, rebel demons, bearded demons. The strong sense in the narrative that oppression in the new global order is de-centered, invisible, beyond the mere person of the Ruler or the bounds of the nation, is countered by a sense of resistance and agency as everyday cultural practices bringing about a slow change in Aburiria amid the new possibilities of the global transition.

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One of the characteristics that mark the transition of power is the dictator’s

vulnerability in the face of global and foreign forces of change. The dictator is depicted

as one who has not only absolute control over the country but also absolute control over

meaning and truth within Aburiria. He has cut off the people from a sense of their

history; erecting statues of himself in all the cultural sites, and dictating everything from

the news, to schoolbooks, to the official history—to Time itself. He is given to declaring

any day of the month and any month the 7th and hence his birthday. He has been able

even to crush the Communist revolutionaries by coercing them into joining his regime;

the radical journalist Dr. Luminous Karamu-Mbu-ya-Ituika, who “used to breathe fire

and brimstone at imperialism, capitalism, colonialism, neocolonialism” (21), is said to

have dropped his revolutionary pen to become the Ruler’s official biographer. The

Ruler’s power is supported by his intelligence forces that are known as the M5 and made

up of several cabinet ministers who have maximized their surveillance capabilities by

literally enhancing their powers of sight, speech, and hearing. Of them, Machokali,

Sikiokuu, and Big Ben Mambo have undergone plastic surgeries to enlarge their eyes,

ears, and tongue respectively, by means of which they maximize state surveillance,

control all media, and dictate official versions of the truth, in other words propaganda.

Mingled with a sense of the outlandish, the dictatorship exerts a terrorizing manipulation

of human agency, as clear in one of popular terms in Aburiria, SID, self-induced

disappearance that describes a situation in which someone “is disappeared.”

In the transition to the post cold-war world order, and due to the opening up of independent Aburiria to global visibility, cracks open in the Ruler’s absolute reign. As insurgencies would no longer be possible to crush in stealth, under the radar of global

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media, the battle on both the Ruler’s and the people’s sides becomes less about power in the crude sense and more about control over meaning and public opinion, both local and global. A war of images in civil society ensues. The Ruler feels compelled to bolster his image locally, to gain the favor of his people, and globally to sway the international community, in this case, representatives of Western countries, diplomats, and most importantly investors who come to Aburiria to attend the announcement and dedication ceremonies of Marching to Heaven. On his public birthday celebration and subsequent visit to the holy places of worship in Aburiria, the Ruler performs acts that mimic the

Biblical story of Jesus Christ, such as entering the city square on a donkey, to project himself as a paternal savior of the nation. He promises to feed the multitude, most of whom are suffering from malnutrition (Kwashiorkor), from his special “birthday cake,” but the gift turns out to be the blueprint of Marching to Heaven rather than human sustenance. In the dedication ceremony of Marching to Heaven, he enlists schoolchildren to sing and dance in praise of the Ruler in front of Western envoys, and marshals the native population onto the site in a frenzy of queues, to be projected “to the world as the very picture of a nation lining behind its leader’s vision” (162).

These are the public performance spaces through which the State tries to exert its control and garner power, both locally and globally. It is from these same spaces that

Nyawira and her movement finds ways to unsettle the picture. Instead of an open confrontation and opposition, Nyawira and her women of the resistance group act out a feminist subversion. During the ceremonies, they enact an ancient and obscene carnival- like dance of women as a protest against the project of Marching to Heaven; on another occasion, they disrupt a ceremony by dispersing fake snakes amid the crowd, creating

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fear and chaos. Throughout, their operations from within the masses dominate the global

space created by the Global Bank mission and the media surrounding it, and with this

defy the Ruler. What is significant here is that though Nyawira and her movement openly

oppose the Global Bank mission as a menace, she is ever aware of the paradoxical

relationship she has with this hallmark of globalization: recalling the incident to Kamiti,

she notes: “Some of our people, mostly women, mixed with others at the site days earlier.

In the glow of overwhelming attendance, we planned to champion democracy and

denounce dictatorship in broad daylight, and the promised presence of the Global Bank

made things easier for us. How ironic! Democratic space guaranteed by the bank we

opposed!” (246, emphasis added).

Globalization in this case is an enabling force and it creates a “democratic space”

in the Global South, in which local resistances defy the structures of domination by

gaining access to the global.

Wizard charts the dictator’s eventual loss of his grip over the control of reality and truth in Aburiria as a result of the latter’s opening up to the world and to a global culture.

In Modernity at Large: Cultural Consequences of Globalization, Arjun Appadurai argues that the fact of modernity being “at large” in the world today has caused profound changes in the everyday social life of individuals, no matter where they live. Due to the flow of images and ideas, ideologies, and people, everyday social life is no longer bound by local tradition (or in this case controlled by official truths propagated by the dictatorship), but is open to the work of the imagination. Appadurai states that “the imagination has become a collective, social fact” (5), which gives agency to the individual by “creat[ing] ideas of neighborhood and nationhood, of moral economies and

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unjust rule, of higher wages and foreign labor prospects [and becoming a] staging ground

for action, and not only an escape” (7). A global rather than national imagination is

translated into Wizard as a form of resistance.

In one of the underdeveloped yet significant strands of the plot, this global

imagination is all too evident. At the end of the novel, the “bearded spirits,” who are

initially the five riders sent to all corners of the nation, like those in the Book of

Revelation whose return signals the Day of Judgment, come back and claim the Ruler’s

body. Although their return is not quite utopian, as the struggle continues with Tajirika’s

reign, what is significant about these bearded “demons” is that they revive the memory of

a minor figure that appears briefly in the New York section of the novel. He is the

historian, Professor Materu, in exile in New York, whose beard had caused much alarm

to the Ruler and come to signify the power that contained the downfall of his rule. Materu

who has been jailed in Aburiria and then released into exile for writing the book People

Make History, Then a Ruler Makes it His Story (20), has joined protestors on the streets

of New York, identifying themselves as the “Friends of Democracy and Human Rights in

Aburiria” (483-4). He represents the diaspora and its cosmopolitan population or

intellectuals, whose return like the five riders in the Book of Revelation will bring about

the second coming. Professor Materu makes a striking resemblance to Ngũgĩ himself,

especially that a similar jail sentence had ensued from the Moi dictatorship in Kenya after

the publication of Ngũgĩ’s Petals of Blood, which is about the Mau Mau role in the war of independence. In this sense, Wizard seems to be the first of Ngũgĩ’s novels to be tapping into a diasporic agency directly.

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Another way the narrative engages modernity and global culture is by placing the women’s cause at the center of the struggle. At the symbolic center of the narrative, there is Rachael, the Ruler’s wife, who has challenged the Ruler’s authority by questioning his conduct with the young girls of Aburiria. As a result, she is confined to a perpetual house arrest, restricted to a mansion where the clocks have been suspended, and is thus written out of Aburiria’s history. While Rachael is the symbol of women being written out of power due to their threat to the patriarchy, Nyawira is the representative of empowered women writing themselves back into history. According to her, the hierarchy of oppression in the world is as such: “black has been oppressed by white; female by male; peasant by landlord; and worker by lord of capital. It follows that the black female worker and peasant is the most oppressed” (428); she therefore seeks sources of power that would impose gender equality and justice in the domestic sphere as the basis of an egalitarian nation; as she tells Kamiti, “the condition of women in a nation is the real measure of its progress” (253). One of these sources is the “people’s court” in which women take justice into their own hands (435).

Another of these women is Jane Kanyori, an ordinary bank employee, who exacts her revenge from John Kaniuru, Nyawira’s ex-fiance and then Minister of several offices, by “white-mailing” him. Initially, Kaniuru manipulates her into helping him launder large sums of money from Marching to Heaven and frame Sikiokuu for it. Through her

“foolish attachment to paper,” as she calls it, she documents the process and keeps proof of Kaniuru’s embezzlements. She ends up with a large monetary settlement after her

“marriage” and divorce from Kaniuru. Her resort to legality, which is identified as something white, is her way out of the submission she was forced into: “What do you

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think that silence is the name of a woman?” she tells Kanuiru, “It is not my name. But I don’t talk much. For instance, it is only my lawyer and a few other people who know that

I came home” (712). Yet another female character whose transformation the narrative traces is Vinjinia, Tajirika’s wife and epitome of middle-class womanhood. A socially and politically passive woman living within the protective confines of her Golden

Heights villa, Vinjinia eventually breaks away and traverses the treacherous terrains of the slums of Eldares to reach the wizard and to save her family. Though unable to break loose from her middle-class notions of propriety and duty, she nonetheless defies her husband’s patriarchal authority by not betraying Nyawira’s identity and by maintaining a secret “solidarity with people she had thought evil, people who, despite her disagreement with their politics, she now saw as humane and generous at heart” (632). She questions

“the truths she had taken for granted, like the fairness of the government and solidarity of the religious” (303). Although Vinjinia’s awakening is incomplete, the point seems to be in her ability to exercise solidarity with women with different ideological leanings.

Vinjinia and Jane are two examples of women shedding their traditional roles and embracing a modernity that celebrates their strength and protects their rights.

Although the narrative of Wizard does not register any epiphanic moments or victorious resolutions, in that the finale points to a cyclical restoration of imperial power with Tajirika’s succession, there is a marked difference in this return that foreshadows a slow defeat. Emperor Tajirika, who has been beaten up several times by the women of

Nyawira’s “People’s Court” and conned out of his (unearned) fortunes by the Wizard, is no match for either of the Wizard’s powers, Nyawira’s Marxist organization or for the awakening of the masses in queues that turn to protests demanding their “voice back”

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(645). The phenomenon of queues is shown to be one that grows organically in society.

Started by a single sign in the country announcing job vacancies, it is shown as the

natural outcome of a population suffering from a chronic unemployment crisis and

rushing at opportunity. Ultimately, it becomes a Marxist manifestation of the people’s revolt.

But not all sources of resistance in Wizard are derived from the modern and are

global in scope. Wizard cultivates a local and indigenous imagination to resist the

imperialism of global capital; in Kamiti’s witchcraft, there is a local form of political

activism and a cultural rehabilitation that coexist with Nyawira’s modern politics. It

offers a vision that can not only see through the blind-spots of global modernity and the

neocolonialism of capital but also offers an alternative modernity that escapes the hegemonic structures implicit in them. It is noteworthy that this vision comes to Kamiti when he is in his lowest state and closest to the land and to the common people’s predicament in Aburiria, literally passed out in a garbage pile from the hunger and thirst

of days. As he undergoes an out-of-body experience and turns into a crow, Kamiti has a unique aerial vision which affords him “from his vantage point […] a bird’s-eye view of the northern, southern, eastern, western and central regions of Aburiria” (38). This critical cosmopolitan view confirms that what is marketed as “global progress” benefits only a small segment of the native population, leaving out the majority of the working and poor classes. The narrative pits this against the global vision of Machokali, who is deemed

“far-sighted,” and finds Marching to Heaven a boon for the country and a symbol of globality, both of which prove to be false by the end. Machokali’s global vision facilitated by his surgically enlarged eyes is an example of a superficial limited vision

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that claims to see far, especially when compared with the stereoscopic vision embodied by Kamiti’s crow that is in touch with the local and the global as they intersect in

Aburiria.

Kamiti’s wizardry is a kind of a visionary cosmopolitan politics “from below;” it is stereoscopic discourse that can see the local and the global bi-focally, from the inside of each and in relation with each other. In the Modernity of Witchcraft, Geschiere explains, “[Witchcraft] is a language that ‘signifies’ the modern changes; it helps one to understand new inequalities, unexpected and enigmatic as they are, as seen “from below”; it promises unheard-of chances to enrich oneself; and it can serve as a guide to find one’s way in the networks of modern society, reproduced on a much wider scale than the familiar relations at home” (24). Witchcraft acts as a guiding power in periods of uncertainty and change, such as the global transition in Aburiria. Upon meeting his first clients, the Wizard is repeatedly asked to attend to the problems of global expansion, particularly to interpret and help manage the impact of the Global Bank fund and the social repercussions of projects like Marching to Heaven. He is asked to stabilize ruthless competition and the inequalities in wealth which mark the corrupt neocolonialist regime.

In a word, the Wizard is a creation of global processes, a local deity that is invoked as a panacea to help the people deal with the immense changes happening in the global transition in Aburiria.

In using the device of witchcraft, Ngũgĩ employs African orality, as he has done in his previous novels, as a local resistance to global (neocolonialist) oppression.

However, he gives this trope both a cosmopolitan appeal and an ethical character.

Kamiti’s witchcraft is a discourse of spiritual revival based on a cosmopolitan vision that

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negotiates between the local and the global to impart liberating philosophy. This vision is

augmented by a persuasive rhetoric which shares in Eastern and Christian spiritual

traditions and enacts a “global conversation of the deities,” such as that common to the

African landscape and cosmopolitan history (760). For example, Kamiti’s belief in

Karma as a deed “containing within it a potential power” explains mysticism as the

presence of a universal justice immanent in the world: “A good deed repeated

accumulates the good, and its potential power will affect the future as a beneficial

influence. Each person has his own karma, his own potentiality for good or evil. Like the

chi among the Ibo” (210). More than any other religion, Wizard of the Crow turns to

Buddhist and Hindu philosophies, in order to construct its spiritual worldview. Eastern

philosophy allows Ngũg ĩ to modernize the African discourse of witchcraft by laying its

foundations in regional spirituality. In addition, Eastern philosophies offer Ngũgĩ a better

interpretation of the historical predicament of Africa. The epic of the Mahabharata, to

which there are many references in the narrative, is a story that pertains well to both the

colonial histories and neocolonialism of Africa, and maintains a salutary balance between

political commitment and a cosmopolitan politics of transcendence. The epic recounts a

kingdom or civilization that falls, retreats into exile, and once again renews itself32. The

Pandavas to whom the kingdom rightfully belongs are defeated in fateful game of dice and are exiled into the forest, from where they emerge after fourteen years to reclaim what was stolen from them and restore their divine right to power. Their period in the forest is characterized by meditation and communion with the gods, which ends with the attained knowledge that they “must commit to the struggle.” However, this struggle

32 All references to the epic, unless otherwise noted, are from the Peter Brook film production of the Mahabharata from 1989. 160

requires as much a spiritual-intellectual engagement as the art of combat. On the battlefield, the god Krishna advises the anxious warrior Arjuana to fight without desire, to act but remain free of every attachment. Detachment here means an embrace of collective duty without the motive of individual interest or self-interest. In this, the Hindu epic locates the freedom from divisive allegiances to country, nation, or ethnicity in the name of self-assertion and identity politics.

Some of the same spirit of duty, detachment, and humanity pervades Wizard of the Crow. Weary of society’s greed and hatred, Kamiti retreats into the forest in defeat, resigned to the way of the world and to his fate. Through an ecological metaphor, the narrative unfolds the history of colonial exploitation in Africa and its continuation in global times. The forest was once wild and rich and peopled with various animals and trees, but was not “threatened by charcoal, paper, and timber merchants who cut down trees hundreds of years old” (201). The alliance between global capitalist giants and local comprador elite merchants had a simple slogan: a loot-a continua (201). Kamiti’s journey towards committing to the struggle hinges on the single question that Nyawira raises to him in the forest:

You are drawn to the ministry of wounded souls, I to the ministry of wounded

bodies. I may not know which is the better ministry. But this I know: human

beings are free to choose how they use the gifts given to them by God, nature,

sun, fate, call it what you like, I mean the transcendent power that you say

governs our lives, whether to use it to seek personal salvation or a collective

deliverance. (212)

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There are parallels between Kamiti’s thought and the central message of The

Mahabharata. The Hindu emphases on the power of thought and non-violence 33, on

connectedness, non-attachment, and selfless action appeal to Ngũgĩ’s ethical

individualism based in communal duty and freed from material or territorial attachments.

At the end of The Mahabharata, the victorious Pandavas, for example, abandon the

conquered riches and “take the path of detachment towards the land of peace”

(Chakravarti 127). It is noteworthy that Wizard of the Crow exposes the struggle for

justice in The Mahabharata from the point of view of the subaltern, despite the story of

the Pandavas representing the struggle for reclaiming autonomy and rightful power.

Kamiti recounts to Tajirika the story of Ekalaivan who is a son of the poor and an archer

that rivals Arjuana in skill. Ekalaivan is disabled by Drona, Arjuana’s teacher, in order to

stem the competition between the sons of the rich and the poor and affirm Arjuana’s

superiority (WOC 382-3). Ngũgĩ’s modernizes this Hindu allegory of the human

condition for global times as the unspoken story of the Global South.

The brand of modernity Ngũgĩ writes in Wizard is an alternative to that of the

West and the global in that it incorporates the African occult and regional beliefs. Based

on regional spiritual beliefs, Kamiti assigns money a spiritually foul value; he stigmatizes

it as containing the rot of death in it. On the other hand, the supernatural element or

magic in the narrative seems to be a vehicle for Ngũgĩ for fashioning a visionary politics

of alternative modernity and a discourse of healing in global times which oscillates

between the mystical and the real. As Gikandi notes, witchcraft, a local device, “enters

33 This is a controversial point, as a lot of Western readings center on the battle scenes between the Pandavas and Kurus that make up the Bhaghavad Gita. Yet as Chakravarti points out, the Bhaghavad Gita should be read in its proper context, as part of the larger work of the Mahabharata, In The Ethics of the Mahabharata. 162

Ngũgĩ’s novel primarily as an idea. Having used this idea as a starting point, Ngũgĩ moves his narrative to other worlds, including everyday life, the landscape of the media and song of Pentecostalism, street gossip, Indian philosophy, and even intellectual debates about globalization and postcoloniality” (161).

Another central device is the mirror that Kamiti uses to see the truth. Kamiti asks his patients simply to reflect upon themselves when looking at it. Kamiti acts as a facilitator of his patients’ inner narratives, anfd his mirror of self-reflection encourages postcolonial Africans to reflect on their desires, fears, complexes, and have their self- critique lead them toward the cure. This is clear in the trials of the devout Mariko and

Maritha who in old age find themselves out of love and in the grips of temptation, as they see it, possessed by “the Devil.” As a magical cure, Kamiti offers psychological counsel on ways to rekindle sexual desire. The wizard bases his divination on the (Fanonian)

“philosophy that illnesses of the mind, soul and body were bred by social life” (275).

Besides being an interpreter of global change, an economic leveling force in society, the

Wizard is also a spiritual-historical healer and a cultural rehabilitator. Indeed, Nyawira impersonating the Wizard tells Vinjina that “the most potent [magic] is the magic within you” (306) — meaning, in context, the power of questioning authority.

The creative use of orality and magic in Wizard of the Crow finally becomes a form of political activism. In “Orality and the Literature of Combat” Mazrui and

Mphande argue that Ngũgĩ’s later novels adopt the Fanonian directive of updating oral and traditional forms to fit the national struggle; with Petals of Blood, they write, Ngũgĩ starts “explor[ing] orality as a creative process rather than a received tradition” (236). As the struggle in Wizard goes beyond the bounds of nation or combat, orality is fitted to a

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politics of empowerment on the cultural intellectual cosmopolitan level. In a recent

interview with Salon magazine, Ngũgĩ emphasized a turn in his novels from a literature of (national) combat to more creative and universal forms of cultural resistance, such as in turning to popular imagination or folktales. When asked the following questions, “How has your notion of your work's purpose changed over the past 30 years? Do you see fiction differently than you did in the political upheavals of the 1970s?” he answered:

I used to think of fiction as being able to effect change immediately. I still believe

that fiction in the larger context of literature does intervene in social struggles but

I take larger view. Literature as art, a product of imagination, is also more

essentially food for the imagination. Imagination is an integral art of the human.

Imagination needs art to keep it alive.

Gikandi explains that Wizard could be read both as a local story about the dictatorship of

Daniel arap Moi in Kenya, to which he finds numerous subtle references in the narrative, and as a global “allegory of power and its excesses” in the postcolonial world and in any modern dictatorship (166). This narrative’s orientation towards the global cosmopolitan and local political is the essence of the stereoscopic that I am discussing in this chapter, and it reveals Ngũgĩ as a writer who is multiply linked to many worlds, to specific localities and global experiences. Moreover, Wizard advances a politics of intervention that is not specific to the postcolonial world, summed up by Gikandi as power resisted by creative and critical cosmopolitan culture: “[T]he leader’s goal is to be the omniscient master of the world, ruling it by his whims and desires, even turning power itself into a master narrative. For his part, the novelist counters the phantasmal world of power by confronting it with the work of the imagination and complicating the meaning of the real”

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(164). This brings us to the question of how the work of the imagination, the spiritual-

magical storytelling in Wizard, could disrupt forces of tyranny and oppression, whether

local or global?

Gikandi points out the possible connection between Wizard’s satirical and

hyperrealist confrontation of the demon of power and the assault on Ngũgĩ and his wife upon their visit to Kenya in 2003. In this way, for Gikandi, Wizard stands as proof, albeit manifested tragically, of the power of the imagination and the “avant-garde” to “interrupt and transform the narrative of real life” (165). I would like to explore also the inherent agency of hyperrealism, of storytelling and the imagination in the context of Africa and the Global South. One can say that the battle of images in Wizard is complemented with the battle over meaning-making as well. Structurally, the narrative has two major frames: the narrator’s and A.G. Gathere’s, who is the gregarious Constable nicknamed “the attorney general of storytelling.” Oftentimes, a plotline starts in one frame and is completed in another. Gathere is the first to encounter and spread the word about the appearance of the Wizard of the Crow in the community.

Through his hyperbolic part factual-part imaginative fashion of storytelling, he inadvertently consolidates the Wizard’s legendary status and authority within the community. At the end, he is also the one who helps the Wizard—Kamiti—and Nyawira dodge the State bullets aimed at them. Gathere has a heroic function in the narrative because he challenges the State and its manipulation of media; through him, Ngũgĩ points out the power of storytelling which, to use Gikandi’s words, interrupts and transforms the narrative of real life. In addition, his hyperrealism also subverts the official “reality”

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dictated by the dictatorship. This is a point that Kumkum Sangari in similar lines explores in her essay about magical realism in the third world as a form of political action.

In “The Politics of the Possible,” Sangari writes that the non-mimetic mode of some “Third world” narratives, like Rushdie’s and Marquez’, which she calls “marvelous realism,” is more politically subversive than the postmodern “skepticism about meaning” and slippage of the meaning of the ‘real’ ascribed to it (157, 161); she explains its political function in the context of “the problem of truth” in neocolonial regimes and dictatorships, in which the “real” is distorted and manipulated to such extents that even the most surreally brutal reality is seen to be, and can be, a possibility:

If the real is historically structured to make invisible the foreign locus of power, if

the real may thus be other than what is generally visible, if official versions are

just as visible and visibly “real” as unofficial versions, and if even potentially real

is a compound of the desired and the undesirable, then marvelous realism tackles

the problem of truth at a level that reinvents a more acute and accurate mode of

referentiality. The brutality of the real is equally the brutality and terror of that

which is immanent, conceivable, potentially possible. Besides, if the furthest

reaches of imaginary construction alone can equal the heinous deformations of the

real, then marvelous realism must exceed mimetic reflection in order to become

an interrogative mode that can press upon the real at the point of maximum

contradiction. (163)

The metaphor of witchcraft in Wizard is, as Sangari claims, such an instrument of political interrogation that problematizes the real, and interferes with the “official” truths of the regime. Besides A.G. Gathere’s unofficial storytelling, the entire narrative of

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Wizard divides between the official and unofficial versions of truth and reality, made by the Regime and countered by the Wizard of the Crow in partnership with Nyawira’s movement respectively. These could be noted in the image of Christ that the dictator promotes for himself in the community, and in the Wizard’s healing powers that are deemed divine; as Gathere says of the Wizard that he “is human yet more than human.”

In addition, witchcraft as a form of divining is capable of exposing the loci of power and oppression, kept hidden by the State; for witchcraft is a discourse “that explain[s] each and every event by referring to human agency” (Geschiere 22). Through the powers of interpretation and divination ascribed to witchcraft, “all sorts of events, especially those that Westerners call ‘natural’ disasters or chance are [interpreted as] direct consequences of human acts” (Geschiere 22). Sangari writes that “Marvelous realism answers an emergent society’s need for renewed self-description and radical assessment”;

[It] displaces the established categories through which the West has construed

other cultures either in their own image or as alterity, questions the Western

capitalist myth of modernization and progress, and asserts without nostalgia an

indigenous preindustrial realm of possibility. (162)

The indigenous pre-industrial possibility is captured by both Kamiti’s mystical discourse of the Occult and Nyawira’s Marxist activism, and by the end neither is averse to modernity. The Wizard, a product of folktale and so of a local imagination, is first impersonated by Kamiti as he fatefully falls into its role, but it eventually turns into a gender-fluid partnership between him and Nyawira, where prophecy and occult forces

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join ranks with a politics of engagement and collective organization. The narrative

emphasizes the fact of Kamiti’s and Nyawira’s partnership.

By this, Wizard seems to be suggesting that Nyawira’s politics of the global

powerful and powerless is insufficient, and that polemics can bring about change only

when reinforced with a cultural rehabilitation, a resurrection of local deities/demons as a bulwark against the materialistic sweep of globalization. Nyawira queries: “Politics is about power and how it is used. Politics involves choosing sides in the struggle for power. So on which side are you?” To which, Kamiti responds: “Must one always be on this side and that side? I believe in humanity divine, indivisible. We all need to look deeply in our hearts and the humanity in us will be revealed in all its glory. Then greed and the drive to humiliate others will come to a halt” (87). The narrative suggests that both the political and spiritual dimensions are indispensable, and that a binary logic of limiting choices can be transcended by a stereoscopic partaking on two levels or planes of existence, local postcolonial and global cosmopolitan. The Wizard–crow’s mystical visionary and Nyawira’s materialist realist discourses unsettle Euro-American claims of global progress by exposing the condition of Africa as a part of the “Global South” and mobilize the people against both a local dictatorship and the neocolonialism of global capitalism. At the same time, they are cosmopolitan discourses that de-privilege nativist or culturally nationalist agendas of the postcolonial as the sole forms of resistance to

Western hegemony, instead partaking in global modern forms of resistance as equally as in local or indigenous ones.

Ngũgĩ’s aim is to shatter the binary set up between the African local and the global modern, suggesting the stereoscopic interconnection between the local and the

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global. This is explicitly stated in an essay written two decades before Wizard of the

Crow. In the “Universality of Local Knowledge,” Ngũgĩ critique s Eurocentric anthropological discourses, which articulate the local African as something internal, essential and unaffected by global modernity. He emphasizes the dynamism of local cultures, in that they are always configured in a universal or global context and develop

“in an external environment with other societies.” “This contact can be one of hostility, indifference, or of mutual give and take,” he states, reminding the reader of the history of universal contact through institutions of domination, such as slavery, and the adverse effects of political and economic domination and resistance that have spurred an oppositional development of the trajectories of the local and the global (27). Nonetheless,

Ngũgĩ intimates a future bridging of cultures, between the global modern and African

postcolonial:

In a situation of flux, the effective use of the delicate skills of navigating our way

through may very well depend on whether we are swimming against or with the

currents of change or for that matter whether we are clear in what direction we are

swimming, towards or away from the sea of our connections with our common

humanity. Local knowledge is not an island unto itself, it is part of the main, part

of the sea. Its limits lie in the boundless universality of our creative potentiality as

human beings” (29).

A critical cosmopolitan negotiation of the postcolonial and the global can be forged in an

environment of democratic contact and exchange. In most of Ngũgĩ’s previous novels,

this was an impossibility. As Abdul JanMohamed explains, the Manichean

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(compartmentalizing) effects of colonialist ideologies continuing into neocolonialism have impacted greatly the development of African modernities:

The option to emulate the Europeans puts the native in a double bind: if he

chooses conservatively and remains loyal to his indigenous culture, then he opts

to stay in a calcified society whose developmental momentum has been checked

by colonization. If, however, the colonized person chooses assimilation, then he is

trapped in a form of historical catalepsy because colonial education severs him

from his own past and replaces it with the study of the colonizer’s past. Thus

deprived of his own culture and prevented from participating in that of the

colonizer, the native loses his sense of historical direction and soon his initiative

as well. The limited choice of either petrification or catalepsy is imposed on the

African by the colonial situation; his subjugation and lack of political power

prevent him from constructively combining these two cultures and leave him

more vulnerable to further subjugation. (5)

Whereas polarized modes of seeing and thinking about the postcolonial world have been a historical necessity, it is no longer in a contemporary globalized world where alternative modernities abound. A cosmopolitan politics dissolves this dichotomy by multiplying the worlds that one is looking at and challenging the hegemony of

Eurocentric worldviews through a Global subaltern or Southern dialogue. In the case of

Wizard of the Crow, this dialogue involves ancient Sanskrit and Eastern cosmologies,

African mythologies, as well as Western rationalism. Maintaining the nation as a socio- political unit of identity, the narrative of Wizard of the Crow forgoes the (Manichean) aesthetics of (post-) colonial victimhood, cultural authenticity, or nativism.

170

Even the use of Gikuyu in Wizard of the Crow Ngũgĩ emphasizes as shaping rather than shying away from a global discourse. In an interview upon the publication of

Wizard of the Crow in the Gikuyu language, Ngũgĩ positioned himself as a global interpreter who spoke from and to an African regional context:

When you write in a marginalized language, it does not mean that you are not

going to talk about this world. You must talk about globalization, about labor,

about the global movement of capital, or the operations of capital that are strong

enough to act as police in our own countries. These issues are there, no matter

which language you are using. The question of language has to do with the point

from which you view a certain phenomenon. We look at the same world, but

depending on the point from which we look, we see a different world. (Rodrigues

163)

Grounded in the people’s language, the narrative of Wizard holds up an enabling mirror that does not reflect “truths” but performs them creatively, imagining the links and mutuality between Africans and other populations of the global South. Wizard of the

Crow is Ngũgĩ’s first novel to articulate not only the cultural influences of the India but also the political implications the Indian presence in Africa; Ngũgĩ undersco res the colonial commonalities between Africans and Asians and calls for a spirit of trans-ethnic inclusiveness and membership in the democratic nation as well as a cultural dialogue. In

Gautama, the Indian owner of Mars Café (who shares with the Buddha his first name),

Ngũgĩ creates a character in touch with his spirituality yet alienated from the social fabric of Aburiria. Gautama’s dreams of space as the last resort for humanity show the extent to which Aburirian society has marginalized him. After his prosperous business is shut

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down by the envious Tajirika, who deems Indians as opportunists getting in the way of

African prosperity, Gautama is seen sitting cross-legged like the Buddha underneath a tree and delivering the following wisdom:

Oh, if only we would stop hate and wars we would inherit not just earth but the

universe. Listening to what the universe is telling us is the only way for the

nations of this earth to come together and find union with life. (765)

The final statement on cosmopolitanism comes rather lightheartedly from India, whose

cultural and spiritual heritages, afford a path of cosmopolitan renewal in Africa. Ngũgĩ’s

lighthearted ending of his novel, in contrast with previous novels, is already a sign of his

politics moving away from postcolonial Manichean-ism to a realm of global possibilities

that heed local particularities. On the other hand, perhaps the narrative makes its

strongest statement against a politics of nativism in the Ruler’s manipulation of an

extreme politics of cultural difference, where he justifies his rule as an alternative to democracy that is based on African forms of government (581). The narrative satirizes the

Ruler’s pamphlet Magnus Africanus, written “to cure the people of the stresses of

modernity” and prescribing “a march backward to the roots of an authentic unchanging

past,” which includes among other things an unquestioning obedience and wife-beating

(622).

In its capacity to write about the world from an African point of view, Wizard of

Crow writes a critical cosmopolitan narrative about the Global South, weaving an

alternative modernity capable of resisting domination by negotiating between the global

modern and the local, between a Marxist realism and the mystical Occult.

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Epilogue: Critical Cosmopolitanism as Stereoscopy and Beyond

In this dissertation, I have elaborated on how a stereoscopic reading of Rushdie’s

Fury, Gordimer’s The Pickup, Naipaul’s Magic Seeds, and Ngũgĩ’s Wizard of the Crow highlights a critical cosmopolitan style in these narratives. I use the word style to mean, as Rebecca Walkowitz has done in Cosmopolitan Style, an “attitude, stance, posture, and consciousness” (2). Critical cosmopolitanism, more precisely, manifests itself as a double-consciousness between global and postcolonial allegiances, as well as a double critique of both from both a position of belonging and distance, which thereby modifies both the postcolonial and traditionally cosmopolitan fields in a culture of intensified globalization. In the narratives at hand, such a critical cosmopolitanism is enabled by the visual metaphor of stereoscopy, which is a vision that accesses the local and the global, and displays meaning in the interface of multiply-situated world-views.

Even though the argument of this dissertation finds stereoscopy displaying an imaginative affinity between the diverse works of these authors, it does not consider it a uniform narrative device; rather it is one appearing in a variety of forms and usages in the narratives I study. In Magic Seeds, stereoscopy is embodied in the figure of the peripatetic stranger who is in-between the cultures he traverses. This cosmopolitan figure is able to commit to and critique the postcolonial predicament of the rebels. Yet, ultimately, he remains a conflicted figure who cannot negotiate a critical cosmopolitan identification that partakes of both the global and the postcolonial.

In The Pickup, stereoscopy is presented in the juxtaposition of the world-views of two nomadic figures who fall in love but whose journeys towards a more cosmopolitan identification lead them down opposing paths, away from each other. The novel explores

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several possibilities, but remains ambivalent as to whether it is possible to achieve a

critical cosmopolitan identification that can negotiate the extremes of a postcolonial

predicament in the desert with that of a capitalist modernity of the West.

In Fury, stereoscopy is presented in the narrative move in between the heart of the

global in New York and an antipodean periphery. Stereoscopy in the narrative gradually

shows the parallels in the predicaments of people in a globalized culture in these two

locations. In the emblem of the puppet, Rushdie shows that the agency of the global

individual is superficial and that a culture of resistance is impossible in the society of the

spectacle. The figure in the middle, the professor-intellectual is able thus to identify with both “worlds” in a critical cosmopolitan way, showing attachments to both and critiquing the loss of the real in both.

In the Wizard of the Crow, the wizard’s divinations and the entire narrative politics embody a stereoscopic logic, partaking in both global modernity and African and regional local culture to fashion resistance methods that are viable in a globalized world.

The mirror stands as a device of cosmopolitan reflection and self-reflection, critiquing the pitfalls of each of globalization, as it manifests itself in the Global South, and of postcolonial ideologies that unintentionally mask the real problem of greed and power

behind the rhetoric of reclamation and self-assertion.

Not only in their novels, but also in their essays, Rushdie, Gordimer, Naipaul, and

Ngũgĩ have been vocal about literature’s relationship to a cosmopolitical culture. As far

back as Imaginary Homelands, Rushdie warned writers of the dangerous pitfall of

adopting a “ghetto mentality”; he emphasized that “[t]o forget that there is a world

beyond the community to which we belong, to confine ourselves within narrowly defined

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cultural frontiers, would be,… to go voluntarily into that form internal exile which in

South Africa is called the ‘homeland’” (“Imaginary Homelands,”19). He sought to argue

that “there [was] a kind of commonality about much literature, in many languages,

emerging from those parts of the world which one could loosely term the less powerful,

or the powerless” (“‘Commonwealth Literature’ Does Not Exist” 68); and that much of

what [was] new in world literature [came] from this group” (69). In this wider

postcolonial grouping, Rushdie identified “a real theory [of literature], bounded by

frontiers which are neither [strictly] political, nor linguistic, but imaginative” (69).

More recently, Gordimer in her essay “Living on a Frontierless Land: Cultural

Globalization,” advocated the exploration in literature of a Global South, of “untapped

South-South opportunities and—above all—affinities, that Eurocentric colonial attitudes

ignored and denied” (212). She asked: “How, in national specificity, does each country

go about moving beyond itself to procreate a culture that will benefit self and others?”

(212). She also invited Europe and North America to partake in this initiative, because

“even the riches of Western culture” as she put it, were “limiting, in the context of a

global culture” (213).

Naipaul already has been identified with a peripatetic writerly persona, which for

the large part has chronicled postcolonial societies. Even though in his well-known

lecture “Our Universal Civilization,” Naipaul looked to Western civilization for a model

of universality, his discussion was anti-essentialist, treating universality from a historical perspective and as a contemporary possibility. For Naipaul, the human endeavor for progress is not geopolitically or socio-culturally restricted and even modernity is not exclusive to the West (for example, the case of alternative modernities):

175

The universal civilization has been a long time in the making; it wasn’t

always universal; it wasn’t always as attractive as it is today. The

expansion of Europe gave it for at least three centuries a racial tint, which

still causes pain. In Trinidad I grew up in the last days of that kind of

racialism. And that, perhaps, has given me a greater appreciation of the

immense changes that have taken place since the end of the war, the

extraordinary attempt of this civilization to accommodate the rest of the

world and the currents of that world’s thought.

In this sense, the “our” in the title of the mentioned essay more accurately refers to what

is shared globally of ideas, tenets, and ideals that cannot be contained in any fixed belief

system and that have become democratized in an age of globalization.

Finally, even Ngũgĩ, who is well known for his call for the abolition of English departments in East Africa some time ago, has advocated in “Borders and Bridges:

Seeking Connections between Things” seeing the “connections” between African, Asian,

and Latin literatures and literatures of the West, in order to be able to “meaningfully talk

about differences, similarities, identities.” As he reasoned, “[T]he border, seen as a

bridge, is founded on the recognition that no culture is an island onto itself. It has been

influenced by other cultures and other histories with which it has come into contact.” For

Ngũgĩ, “[t]his recognition [was] the basis of all the other bridges… to build across our

various cultural borders” (124).

The global postcolonial writers’ call for a literary globality, as I’ve shown above,

draws many parallels with the recent academic talks about a World Literature replacing

the old and increasingly unsustainable divisions under “national literatures.” The 2001

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PMLA Special Topic issue, Globalizing Literary Studies (Jan), was dedicated to the

discussion of this critical orientation in the Western academy of the twenty-first century

toward transnationalism and World Literatures.34 A major critical work appearing in the

last decade provides important insights into what the domain of a world literature

contains. Michael Valdez Moses’ The Novel and the Globalization of Culture (1995)

strives to look at various literatures, postcolonial and otherwise, through a global

connective lens. Moses reads novels from the First and the ‘Third World’35 to underscore

the common culture of global modernization and dilemmas of a “post-historical

existence” that these “global modern novels” express (xiii). In novels such as Thomas

Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge and Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Moses

finds parallel struggles between vanishing pre-modern, traditional ways of life and the

onset (“onslaught” xvi) of global modernity led by the forces of progress and global

capitalism. At the center of both, there seems to be an “individual human actor struggling

against [history’s] overpowering flow” (xvii). Moses thus argues that postcolonial

literatures do not pose a radical alternative to global modernity but that they are

“distinctive and extremely significant reflections of its rise and diffusion” (xiii). He

further proves this by exploring the cosmopolitanism in Achebe’s work; its departure

from representing purportedly African values to instead incorporate Greek and Classical

elements that find relevance in Igbo culture.

34 Unfortunately, the claims of the postcolonial were often left unexamined in these considerations. In “Globalit Inc, or, The Cultural Logic of Global Literary Studies,” Ian Baucom highlights such exclusionary and culturally asymmetrical tendencies, and cautions against the potential assimilationist ambitions of this project. 35 Moses acknowledges that his use of the term “Third World literature” conflates important distinctions within diverse literatures and is “imprecise;” nonetheless, he employs the term as a “shorthand” for non- Western, non-European works, and states that when necessary pertinent differences are pointed out, 203, n.1. 177

Moses’ thesis employs the cosmopolitan thought of African philosophers such as

Anthony Appiah, particularly in emphasizing that values and beliefs are not uncritically

transmitted but subject to “trans-cultural comparison, rational argumentation and discursive clarification” (118). Nonetheless, his global culture appears to be a homogenizing universal culture of Western modernity that has attained a worldwide reach. In other words, Moses does not adequately explore the cultural vicissitudes and the questions of difference that arise from cosmopolitan contacts and that today inform renewed notions of multiculturalism. Another criticism of Moses’ work is that his focus on the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries renders his totalizing dismissal of

Eurocentrism a rather contentious premise, given of course the height of European colonialism and conquest of the Third World at the time.

On the opposite extreme, there is Homi Bhabha who has suggested that “[t]he study of world literature might be the study of the way in which cultures recognize themselves through their projections of ‘otherness.’” (449). In “The Home and the

World,” Bhabha proposes a definition of world literature along these lines:

Where the transmission of ‘national’ traditions was once the major theme of a

world literature, perhaps we can now suggest that transnational histories of

migrants, the colonized, or political refugees—these border and frontier

conditions—may be the terrains of World literature. The center of such a study

would neither be the ‘sovereignty” of national cultures, nor the ‘universalism’ of

human culture, but a focus on those ‘freak displacements’—such as Morrison and

Gordimer display—that have been caused with cultural lives of postcolonial

societies. (449)

178

In both views, world literature explores the potentially connective thread in literatures

produced today in a culturally and politically interconnected world. My thesis of the

stereoscopic suggests that the two models, Moses’ extremely globalist and Bhabha’s

squarely postcolonial approach to world literature, could meet in a critical cosmopolitan

style, which the global postcolonial novels in this dissertation display. The model of world literature they suggest is one that is centered on a style of vision that traverses an interconnected world from the standpoint of an aspired for globality, critically examining the predicaments of the local and the global in it, along with the convergences and divergences between these two localities and conditions. It has been one of the central points of this dissertation to show how beyond cultural specificity and national contemplation, critical cosmopolitan narratives are interlinked in mapping the global order critically and engaging its global culture stereoscopically from multiple points of reference. While stereoscopy is one metaphor that implies a critical cosmopolitan style, there may be many others that equally denote styles of global engagement with the world that produce a global world literature in our globalized times.

179

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