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Translation, the Hoax, and the Postcolonial Novel in a Global Age By Christopher Robert Holmes B.A., Bates College, 1996 M.A.T., Brown University, 2000 M.A., Middlebury College, 2005 Dissertation Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English at Brown University PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND MAY 2012 © Copyright 2011 Christopher R. Holmes C.V. Christopher Robert Holmes Born Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, July 18, 1974. Education Ph.D Brown University, Department of Literatures and Cultures in English, 2011 M.A. Middlebury College, Bread Loaf School of English, 2005 M.A.T Brown University, Department of Education, 2000 B.A. Bates College, East Asian Languages and Literatures, cum laude, 1996 Publications 2011. “What the World Leaves Behind: Ready-Made Translations and the Closed Book in the Postcolonial Novel.” Literature, Translation, and Geography: The New Comparative Horizons. Ed. Stefan Helgesson. New York: Cambridge Scholars Press. Teaching Experience Teaching Fellow, Brown University, Department of English Prizing the Postcolonial (British/Anglophone Literature, 1969-present), Spring 2008 Critical Reading and Writing: The Academic Essay, Fall 2007 Instructor, Brown University, Summer Studies Program “Putting Ideas into Words” (Composition), Summer 2006, 2009 “The Essay” (Composition), Summer 2007 Teaching Assistant, Brown University, Department of English “The Rise of Realism in American Fiction.” Professor Stuart Burrows, Fall 2010 “Writing War.” Professor Ravit Reichman, Spring 2006, 2011 “Modern Fiction and Photography.” Professor Stuart Burrows, Fall 2006 Honors and Fellowships The President's Award for Excellence in Teaching, Brown University, 2010-2011 Johannesburg Workshop on Theory and Criticism, University of Witwatersrand, July 2011 Edward T. and Theckla Jones Brackett Fellowship, Brown University, 2009-2010 Mellon Graduate Workshop Fellowship, Brown University, 2009-2010 Roland G. D. Richardson Fellowship, Brown University, 2008-2009 Summer Fellowship, Brown University, 2006-2008 University Fellowship, Brown University, 2005 iv Acknowledgements This dissertation came to me as a surprise. A trip to Uppsala, Sweden in June of 2008 for a conference entitled “Literature, Geography, and Translation: The New Comparative Horizons” brought to first bloom the seeds of this project. My initial interest had been in pursuing a dissertation on the influence of poststructuralism on style in the postcolonial novel. The initial steps towards a stylistic analysis of Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang left me feeling like there was an ineffable event of style that was impossible to pinpoint in the rhetorical tropes and syntactical flourishes I was so interested in investigating. Were it not for the valuable insights on my Carey work by participants in the Uppsala conference, I would have pursued a large-scale work that would have left me unsatisfied. I was lucky enough to find two interlocutors in Sweden who continue to be sounding boards for the dissertation on translation, and all my subsequent work on postcolonial and world literature. To Stefan Helgesson and Ania Spyra, I owe a great debt for the generosity with which they advised me, and continue to shape my work, even from a far. Completed dissertations never happen in a vacuum. While the writing often happens alone, the revision and rewriting happened for me in the company of a collegial and supportive grad school cohort at Brown University. In that nurturing environment, I found friends and co-conspirators who joined me at the latest and earliest hours at the Rock, the RISD library, the Sci Li, and endless coffee shops around Providence and Boston. In particular, the members of my dissertation writing groups were a constant source of humor and deft criticism at the prickliest moments of my writing process. Corey McEleneyDaniel Block, Wendy Lee, Sarah Osment, Stephanie Tilden, and Magali Armillas-Tiseyra shared so v much of their own work over the course of these past six years, and you will find evidence of their fingerprints and marginalia, even under erasure, on every page of this project. Khristina Gonzalez and I had the rather madcap idea of throwing in a application for a Mellon Graduate Workshop Fellowship in 2009-10, and to our utter surprise and consternation, we were awarded the Fellowship for a seminar entitled, “The Politics Form: Practices of Misreading.” Together we forged a pretty wonderful year of seminars and invited speakers despite our total lack of experience in any such venture. Our invited plenary speakers exceeded our every expectation, and Rebecca Walkowitz (Rutgers) and Jacques Lezra (NYU) capped off what was a seminal moment in my graduate career. The final project drew on the wealth of Brown’s graduate and faculty scholarship to drive our own projects, and I learned from that micro-example what a faculty committee could be at its best. I relied so regularly on the consul of friends at Brown that there are too many to mention here. I will say that my days of writing with Rebecca Summerhays, Laurel Rayburn, Wendy Lee, and Sarah Osment were some of the finest hours in an often-overwhelming six years. I thank them for long line of conversations that made my thinking clearer and my life infinitely more satisfying. And of course, my two brilliant classmates, Corey McEleney and Jay Zysk, were a constant source of support and friendship. Without the hours of readings, debates, theory groups, and social times away from the work, there would be no dissertation, only resignation. To my committee, I offer my most sincere thanks for everything they have done for me. To Ravit Reichman for modeling such extraordinary teaching, and reading my work with such an elegant eye for argument, and her infinite catalogue of Modernist theory, always on the tip of her tongue; to Paul Armstrong who cuts through the most opaque theory with a vi clear mind and great sense of the important moments in what and how we read; to Rey Chow and her ability to ask the biggest, hardest, and most important questions of my work and to consul me on life as a academic; and to Olakunle George who shaped this project at every turn, and who taught me that literature always speaks back to theory, and often with more to say, it was his stewardship of my writing that helped me grow the most, even when others doubted me that I will remember and treasure; to each, all my thanks and my gratitude. May I someday return some of these debts. vii Table of Contents Vita iv Acknowledgments v Introduction: Translation in the Age of Obama 1 Chapter 1: What the World Leaves Behind 21 Chapter 2: The Afterlife of Forgery 69 Chapter 3: Turning Japanese 122 Chapter 4: With His Back to Africa 182 Epilogue: The Novel Without Translation 246 Bibliography 252 viii Translation, the Hoax, and the Postcolonial Novel in a Global Age: Introduction President Mau Mau: Translation in the Age of Obama En route to what would become one of the more embarrassing openings of a presidential campaign in US history, Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the House during the Clinton administration, offered some historical context for the presidency of Barack 1 Obama. Barack Obama’s candidacy and subsequent first term as president had, for Gingrich, been one of the great con jobs of American history: “What if [Obama] is so outside our comprehension, that only if you understand Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior, can you begin to piece together [his actions]?" Gingrich asked. "That is the most accurate, predictive model for his behavior." “This is a person who is fundamentally out of touch with how the world works, who happened to have played a wonderful con, as a result of which he is now president,” Gingrich added. “I think he worked very hard at being a person who is normal, reasonable, moderate, bipartisan, transparent, accommodating -- none of which was 2 true,” Gingrich continues… “He was authentically dishonest.” (2010) Gingrich explains that by sheer cunning and forgery Obama had convinced voters in the United States that he shared their cultural traditions and values, all the while envisioning a world as only a Kenyan resisting British imperialism could. How did Gingrich come to this astonishing conclusion? According to his logic—a logic that proves less marginalized than one would hope—he simply read history through just the right lens, and found a historical 1 Grier, Peter. 2011. “Is Newt Gingrich’s Presidential Campaign the Worst Ever?” Christian Science Monitor Online. http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/The-Vote/2011/0610/Is-Newt-Gingrich-s-presidential- campaign-the-worst-ever 2 Huffington Post http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/09/12/gingrich-obama-kenyan- worldview_n_713686.html Gingrich was expanding on comments made by the conservative public intellectual Dinesh D’Souza in a special issue of Forbes magazine devoted to “How Obama Thinks.” D’Souza referred to Obama as the “last anticolonial” in a historical moment where colonialism is dead. Dinesh D'Souza, 09.09.10, 05:40 PM EDT Forbes Magazine. September 27, 2010 1 context through which to translate Obama into our Mau Mau president.3 I’ve reproduced Gingrich’s fallacious argument in order to lay the groundwork for a theory of cultural translation that requires precisely this kind of con job. I’m not, of course, referring to Obama’s success as a political figure as a con, but rather to Gingrich’s hoax of essentializing identity and cultural knowledge as a particular lens through which the world is understood. There are two acts of reading here. One that describes Gingrich’s context for understanding Obama’s worldview: a translation from Kenya. The other describes reading translation according to absolutes of origin whereby Obama is Kenya. The predicament of the latter shares the anxiety that Rey Chow notably described in the Western scholar discovering “the discomfiting fact that the natives are no longer staying in their frames” (1994, 28).4 To take Gingrich at his word would be to assume that Obama has taken the presidency in order to delegitimize the United States and more generally the West’s cultural and political power in the world.