TRANSOCEANIC StUDIES Ileana Rodriguez, Series Editor National Consciousness and Literary Cosmopolitics Postcolonial Literature in a Global Moment WEIHSIN GUI THE OHIO StATE UNIVERSITY PRESS • COLUMBUS Copyright © 2013 by The Ohio State University. All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gui, Weihsin, 1978– National consciousness and literary cosmopolitics : postcolonial literature in a global mo- ment / Weihsin Gui. p. cm. — (Transoceanic studies) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8142-1230-1 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8142-9332-4 (cd) 1. Nationalism and literature. 2. Nationalism in literature. I. Title. II. Series: Transoceanic studies. PN56.N19G85 2013 809'.93358—dc23 2013017115 Cover design by James A. Baumann Text design by Juliet Williams Type set in Adobe Minion Pro Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American Na- tional Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. ANSI Z39.48-1992. 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 CONTENTS Acknowledgments vii Introduction Constellations, Critical Nationality, and Literary Cosmopolitics 1 Chapter 1 Articulating Adorno with Postcolonial Critique: Fanon, Said, Spivak 15 Chapter 2 “More English than English”: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Negation of National Nostalgia 38 Chapter 3 “The Possibilities of the New Country We Are Making”: Transnational Fragments and National Consciousness in Derek Walcott’s Writing 78 Chapter 4 “Not Monological but Multilogical”: Gender, Hybridity, and National Narratives in Shirley Geok-lin Lim’s Writing 121 Chapter 5 Ethnographic Tactics and the Cosmopolitical Aesthetic in Contemporary Malaysian Fiction 162 Conclusion Nation, Narration, Negation 198 Works Cited 201 Index 211 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS his book grew out of a dissertation written for my PhD at Brown T University where I had the pleasure and privilege of being taught and mentored by Olakunle George, Timothy Bewes, and Rey Chow. Nancy Arm- strong, Leonard Tennenhouse, and Khachig Tölölyan also offered invaluable advice and encouragement during my years at Brown, and I am especially grateful to John Marx, who read almost every word of this book’s early drafts and gave direct and trenchant critiques. My fellow graduate students Jacque- line Wernimont, Wendy Lee, Emily Steinlight, Asha Nadkarni, Chris Lee, David Babcock, Daniel Block, Raymond Sultan, and Chris Holmes made my time there much more sociable and enjoyable. The collegiality and friend- ship of Charles Wharram and Suzie Park saw me through a rather difficult time in a strenuous environment. At the University of California River- side, I am thankful for the guidance and support of my department chair Deborah Willis and the intellectual and social exchanges I have had with my colleagues Susan Zieger, Traise Yamamoto, Vorris Nunley, Carole-Anne Tyler, George Haggerty, Mariam Lam, Henk Maier, and Annmaria Shima- buku. UCR’s Center for Ideas and Society, directed by Georgia Warnke, awarded me a residential fellowship in the spring of 2012, during which I completed this book and formulated a new intellectual project. My parents, Gui How Meng and Aik Poh Hong, and my sister, Crystal Gui, have always supported me half a world away in Singapore. Last but certainly not least, I am extremely grateful for the affection and companionship of Connie Chow and those “woofingtons” Holly and Milton. vii INTRODUCTION Constellations, Critical Nationality, and Literary Cosmopolitics Distance is not a safety-zone but a field of tension. It is manifested not in relaxing the claim of ideas to truth, but in delicacy and fragil- ity of thinking. —Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia 127 his book is concerned with the conjunctions of national conscious- T ness and literary cosmopolitics in a global moment rather than making a case for or against the nation from political, economic, or anthropological perspectives. Drawing on the aesthetic theory and negative dialectical think- ing of Frankfurt School critic Theodor Adorno, I argue that postcolonial literary form and style negates the homogenizing and exclusionary impulse of a unitary national identity and helps us recognize nationalism as a critical constellation of political, economic, and cultural forces that make up a social formation. Even with the increase in flows of people, capital, and culture around the globe, nations have not withered away. This is nothing new; as the editor of a recent anthology on nationalism remarks rather tiredly, “by now it is practically axiomatic that obituaries of the nation are premature” (Burton 1). This book takes a different tack by arguing that, after the heyday of anticolonial independence in the Third World and the establishment of postcolonial literature and its academic corollary—postcolonial studies—as distinct fields of writing and research, literary texts and their authors in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries evince a critical national con- sciousness particular to their individual sociocultural contexts, and that in a global moment this national consciousness is dynamically engaged with both local cultural formations and transnational cultural flows. This engagement 1 2 • Introduction with what lies beyond the nation’s symbolic and territorial boundaries is a lit- erary cosmopolitics—the imagination and representation of sustained politi- cal engagement between local and translocal cultural particularities through fiction and poetry. In using the term global moment as opposed to globaliza- tion, I wish to connote a spatial and temporal conjunction rather than an existing economic process or condition. A moment is both a rotational force as well as an instant in time, and it is against the backdrop of a sweeping force field of narratives of cultural and economic globalization that we see the intersections of national consciousness and literary cosmopolitics rather than the establishment of a triumphantly postnational moment in literature, cul- ture, and world politics. Narratives of cultural and economic globalization, or globalism, may reveal spaces of minority discourses and counternarratives and refigure the national imaginary as a complex weave of negotiations and multiple identifications, but they do not lead to a definitive repudiation of the nation either as a unit of analysis or as a social formation. The persistence of tropes and figures of national consciousness in literary texts, together with the loosening of the hyphen between nation and state in contemporary world politics, suggests that nationalism is a salient cultural and political movement and that the nation remains a contested space worth thinking, feeling, and writing about. A cosmopolitical perspective on nationalism considers how “the tight- ness or laxity of the hyphen between nation and state is an important histori- cal factor in the evaluation of the aims of nationalism and their compatibility with normative cosmopolitanism” (Cheah, “The Cosmopolitical—Today” 31). Thus, in contrast to the normative cosmopolitanism of radical, global culture espoused by proponents of globalism, cosmopolitics asks us “to turn our critical focus on the mutating global field of political, economic, and cultural forces in which nationalism and cosmopolitanism are invoked as practical discourses” (31). This critical focus on the mutual imbrication of national and transnational forces in a constantly changing global framework helps us recognize that while globalization is a useful concept with which to broaden interpretations of national and postcolonial literatures, it “doesn’t displace or replace existing institutions and practices once and for all; too much of the discourse on globalization has failed to remember the force and power of the residual at every moment of the dominant” (O’Brien and Sze- man 609). By rethinking nationalism not as national identity but as politi- cal consciousness and cultural critique constituted through and inextricably bound with cosmopolitical engagement, postcolonial literature goes against the grain of celebratory narratives of cultural and economic globalization or globalism. Constellations, Nationality, and Cosmopolitics • 3 Globalism and Postnationalist Discourse In the last two decades, scholars in the social sciences and humanities have argued against the nation as a framework for critical analysis and emphasized the priority of global cultural flows and their corresponding transnational intersections with social and cultural formations at the local or subnational level. I call such arguments that foreground the global in cultural and lit- erary studies “globalism,” as distinct from social and economic theories of globalization that observe and analyze the workings of information technol- ogy, the movement of migrant and diasporic populations, and the flexible accumulation of finance capital across the borders of nation-states. I distin- guish between these two strands of thinking about the global to more clearly delineate the specific focus of this book, which is an examination of national consciousness and literary cosmopolitics rather than a study of economic and demographic flows and movements. Drawing on the ideas of traveling cultures and routes of exchange devel- oped in anthropology by James Clifford (1997), scholars both in the social sciences and in literary studies have challenged the authority of the nation- state and nationalism by emphasizing the decentralizing force of cultural fluidity through concepts such as