BUCKNELL REVIEW Bakhtin and the Nation Edited by the San Diego Bakhtin Circle BARRY A. BROWN CHRISTOPHER CONWAY RHETT GAMBOL SUSAN KALTER LAURA E. RUBERTO TOMAS F. TARABORRF.T.LT DONALD WESLING Lewisburg Bucknell University Press London and Toronto: Associated University Presses © 2000 by Associated University Presses, Inc, Associated University Presses 440 Forsgate Drive Cranbury, NJ 08512 Associated University Presses 16 Barter Street London WC1A 2AH, England Associated University Presses P.O. Box 338, Port Credit Mississauga, Ontario Canada L5G 4L8 The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1984. (Volume XLIH, Number 2) 0 N' ISBN 0-8387-5447-3 ISSN 0007-2869 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA Contents Notes on Contributors 9 Introduction: Bakhtin and the Nation T h e E d it o r s 11 Underground Notes: Dostoevsky, Bakhtin, and the African American Confessional Novel D a l e E. P e t e r s o n 31 Cultural Emancipation and the Novelistic: Trubetzkoy, Savitsky, Bakhtin G a l in T ih a n o v 47 Heroic Poetry in a Novelized Age: Epic and Empire in Nineteenth- Century Britain S i m o n D e n t it h 68 Epic, Nation, and Empire: Notes toward a Bakhtinian Critique C o l in G r a h a m 84 “In the Mouths of the Tribe”: Omeros and the Heteroglossic Nation M a r a S c a n l o n 101 Bakhtin: Uttering the “(Into)nation” of the Nation/People E. S a n J u a n J r. 118 The Scriptible Voice and the Space of Silence: Assia Djebar’s Algeria P e t e r H it c h c o c k 134 Silence, Censorship, and the Voices of Skaz in the Fiction of James Kelman J. C. B ittenbender 150 Chronotopes of an Impossible Nationhood A n t h o n y W a l l 166 CONTENTS National Allegory or Carnivalesque Heteroglossia? Midnight’s Children’s Narration of Indian National Identity R o b e r t Be n n e t t 177 Notes on Contributors Robert Bennett is a graduate student in English literature at the University of California at Santa Barbara. He is writing a dissertation on the beat generation and its influence on post-World War II Amer­ ican literature. His theoretical essay, “Post-National Cultural Carto­ graphies: Theorizing Imagined Communities beyond the Jurisdic­ tion of the Nation State,” appeared in Powerlines III. J. C. Bittenbender is an assistant professor of English at Eastern College in St. David’s, Pennsylvania. His interview with the Scottish poet Robert Crawford appeared in the summer 1997 issue ofJanus. Simon Dentith is a reader in English at Cheltenham and Glouces­ ter College of Higher Education, England. He is the author of Bakh- tinian Thought: An Introductory Reader (1995). He has published widely on nineteenth-century topics, including Society and Cultural Forms in Nineteenth-Century England (1999). Colin Graham is a senior lecturer in English literature at the Uni­ versity of Huddersfield, England. His recent publications include Ideologies of Epic: Empire, Nation, and Victorian Epic Poetry (1998) and Ireland and Cultural Theory (1998, coedited with Richard Kirkland). Peter Hitchcock is a professor of literary and cultural studies at Baruch College and the Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York. Among his books are Dialogics of the Oppressed (1993) and Oscillate Wildly: Space, Body, and Spirit of Millen­ nial Materialism (1998). D ale E. Peterson is a professor of English and Russian at Amherst College and associate editor of Massachusetts Review. His essay, “Re­ sponse and Call: The African American Dialogue with Bakhtin,” ap­ peared in American Literature 65 (1993). His forthcoming book of 9 10 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS comparative studies is tided Up from, Bondage: The Literatures of Rus­ sian and African American “Soul. ” E. San Juan Jr. is a professor and chair of the Department of Com­ parative American Cultures at Washington State University. His re­ cent works are Hegemony and Strategies of Transgression, From Exile to Diaspora, and Beyond Postcolonial Theory. He is completing a book on the intersection of race, ethnicity, and nationalism tided The Racial Imaginary. Mara Scanlon is an assistant professor of English at Mary Washing­ ton College who reads Bakhtinian theories in dialogue with various twentieth-century writers, including Ezra Pound. H. D., Djuna Barnes, and Anne Stevenson. She has recently published on Afra- Caribbean poet Grace Nichols. Galin Tihanov is a junior research fellow in Russian and German intellectual history at Merton College, Oxford. He holds doctorates from the Universities of Sofia and Oxford. He has written exten­ sively on the history of ideas, literary theory, and comparative litera­ ture and is the author of two books on Bulgarian literature and of a forthcoming book on Lukacs and Bakhtin. Anthony W all is Head of the Department of French, Italian, and Spanish at the University of Calgary where he teaches contemporary French and Quebecois literature. He has published severed works re­ lated to Bakhtin and his thinking: A Broken Thinker (1998), How to do Things with Bakhtin in German (1999), and a translation, from the German, of Renate Lachmann’s Literature and Memory: Intertextuality in Russian Modernism (1997). Introduction: Bakhtin and the Nation HE end of the century is marked by historic changes in nation­ states and in the concepts of the nation and of nationalism. T The essays in this volume give to the reader an inquiry into the prob­ lem of the nation with, and sometimes surpassing, the help of Rus­ sian philosopher Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin. Bakhtin died a quarter century ago, and much has happened since in history and in scholarship, so it is not unusual that we exceed our guiding thinker; it is in any event in the spirit of Bakhtin that we refuse to be disciples even as we try to think with his categories. In line with current debates and scholarship on the nation, na­ tional identity, and nationalist projects, we have found it useful to divide the topic into three general categories: 1) the nation as a cul­ tural entity; 2) the nation as a civil state; and 3) the nation within the global community of nations—the issue of the transnational. Ac­ cording to modernization theorists Ernest Gellner and Eric Hobs- bawm, the nation is the first modern form of collective identity. That is, nationness is based on a communal sense of shared traditions and beliefs, instead of merely a community founded within geopolitical boundaries. Following on from Gellner and Hobsbawm is Benedict Anderson’s influential concept of the nation as an imagined com­ munity: while generating new scholarship, including passionate ref­ utations, Anderson’s book reminded scholars of all the ways in which identity is developed and kept going, in a kind of collective unconscious of a nation’s citizens. The scholarship spurred by Anderson’s book tries to break with traditional forms of thinking, which looked to the past to track the foundations of political institu­ tions through one kind of history of great men. Much cultural criti­ cism today takes up such aspects of the nation as everyday life, popu­ lar culture, and the marginal voices often ignored by dominant narratives.1 While thinking about the nation as a cultural entity allows other­ wise marginal figures, often not seen as participants in the creation of the nation, to become visible and powerful agents, we cannot lose sight of the fact that the nation has been and remains a civil and political institution. The state plays a role in forming any national 11 12 BAKHTIN AND THE NATION identity. This process of identity-building often originates and re­ mains within the boundaries of the nation, for example in the vari­ ous nationalist projects in Europe in the early twentieth century; at other times, such projects are also exported to other cultures, other nations, through colonialism. Today questions are being raised about a supposed crisis of the nation; that is, its disappearance due to the rapid expansion of huge companies and electronic networks, the famous global community. This transnational community is created, the argument runs, by a new kind of economic base which simultaneously produces and commercializes technological advances. Indeed for many writers, such as Leslie Sklair and Masao Miyoshi, the boundaries of the na­ tion (and of national literatures) become rather meaningless in our age of global economy and a borderless electronic information su­ perhighway.2 Technology, as in other centuries, is perceived by many as the means to accelerate communication to the point of shattering na­ tional and ethnic identities. The rise in the use of mass communica­ tion, specifically increased use of the Internet, is often now seen as an opportunity for the creation of an utopian community, of easy speech between people from all parts of the world. When we begin to think with terms like transnationalism and globalization, the de­ bates surrounding nation as a) cultural entity and b) civil state will lose their centrality. Nevertheless, we see a countervailing force: transnationalism fuel­ ing the export and import of national and cultural identities, and therefore maybe even reinforcing those distinctions. More specifi­ cally, such an understanding of the global community is related to the general theme of migration and migrant cultures: the possibility of a portable national identity. Perhaps as Etienne Balibar has said with respect to nationalism, the concept of nation never functions alone, but is always part of a chain in which it is both the central and weak link.3 As our editorial group prepared to usher in the essays that follow here, we became certain of one general postulate: any comprehensive study on the nation must be interdisciplinary, and should explore intersections of race, class, and gender in the forma­ tion of national identities and power structures.