FORECLOSING OTHERS in CULTURAL REPRESENTATION By

FORECLOSING OTHERS IN CULTURAL REPRESENTATION By HUEI-JU WANG A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 2006 Copyright 2006 by Huei-ju Wang This document is dedicated to my sisters, Huei-Fen Wang and Huei-Rung Wang. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank my committee members for guiding me through the dissertation process. I am especially grateful for the hours Professor John P. Leavey spent with me patiently guiding me through some of the questions and problems I had encountered researching my project, as well as the thoughtful written comments he provided for my earlier drafts. The dissertation also benefited from the verbal and written comments given by Professor Philip Wegner and Professor Malini Johar Schueller. Those comments provided me with ways to extend my working theoretic framework and further expand my intellectual horizon. I am also grateful to have Professor Robert Hatch as my reader. My gratitude also goes to teachers whose writings and pedagogy helped pave the foundation for my dissertation. Lastly, the love and sacrifices my sisters made to further my education are indispensable. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ................................................................................................. iv ABSTRACT...................................................................................................................... vii CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION: THEORIZING SPIVAK’S RECONFIGURATION OF THE NATIVE INFORMANT...............................................................................................1 Foreclosed Native Informant in About Schmidt............................................................5 Spivka’s Critique of the Native Informant and its Reconfiguration...........................11 Native Informant and Accumulation by Dispossession..............................................23 2 PASSING IN COOPER’S THE PIONEERS: NATIVE INFORMANTS, PATRONYM AND PRIVATE PROPERTY.............................................................38 Native Informants and Dispossession.........................................................................45 Passing, Patronym and Patrimony ..............................................................................52 Mourning of the Passing.............................................................................................68 3 MELVILLE’S CONSCRIPTION AND SUBVERSION OF THE ORIENT AS “NATIVE INFORMANT” IN MOBY DICK .............................................................75 Conformist, Subversive or Both? ...............................................................................86 The Levant as the Foreclosed Native Informant.........................................................93 Comic and Subversive Orientalism ............................................................................97 Egyptian Revival and Critique of Egyptology..........................................................105 4 SPECTRALITY IN CONRAD’S NOSTROMO: THE SAN TOME MINE, FOREIGN CAPITAL AND THE NATIVE OTHER ..............................................115 Haunting and Hauntology.........................................................................................119 Foreign Capital and the Sulaco Railroad..................................................................132 Foreclosure of Indigenous History and Perspectives................................................136 v 5 CONCLUSION: ZHANG YIMOU AS NATIVE INFORMANT/CULTURAL TRANSLATOR IN THE AGE OF GLOBALIZATION .........................................162 Native Informant-cum-Cultural Translator for the World Cinema ..........................169 Transnational Chinese Cinemas and Native Informant ............................................182 LIST OF REFERENCES.................................................................................................196 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...........................................................................................205 vi Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy FORECLOSING OTHERS IN CULTURAL REPRESENTATION By Huei-ju Wang May 2006 Chair: John P. Leavey Jr. Major Department: English This dissertation investigates the representation of racial Others in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick and Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo. The project appropriates Gayatri G. Spivak’s critique in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason of the invocation and foreclosure of the “native informant” in Western epistemology and David Harvey’s argument in The New Imperialism that “accumulation by dispossession” has long been the lynchpin of the capitalist mode of production in its geographic history. First examining American director Alexander Payne’s film, About Schmidt, in which a retired American man wrote letters to his adopted son, an African boy in Tanzania, it argues that the political unconscious of invoking and foreclosing the non-Western Other is still being practiced in the Western cultural production. It then proceeds to examine the three novels produced during the 19th and early 20th century capitalist society when the history of accumulation of Western capital based on the expropriation of the natives had been ideologically justified as regrettable but inevitable, as part of capitalist development and progress. It thus examines the dialectical link vii between accumulation of capital and the dispossession of the native Other in The Pioneers and Nostromo. It also explores the conscription of the Islamic Orient in Moby Dick and Melville’s subversion of conventional Orientalism by his refusal to explain the Oriental Other. It finally explores the possibility of self representation of non-Western Others in the age of globalization by looking at Chinese director Zhang Yimou’s role as native informant/cultural translator. It argues that even in his film, Not One Less, that deals with the problem of rural poverty and migration in contemporary China, the figure of (young) migrant worker is still being invoked and foreclosed. viii CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION: THEORIZING SPIVAK’S RECONFIGURATION OF THE NATIVE INFORMANT The age of capital is also the age of Other. After all, the primitive accumulation of Western capital is based on the colonization of non-Western Others, and the accumulation of modern capital relies on its irreducible Other, wage labor, whose surplus labor is the source of profit. The expansion of capitalism as the dominant world system after the fall of Soviet Union in 1991 makes the world more interconnected and dependent of each other while under the tighter control of transnational capital. It also makes the structure of what David Harvey calls in The New Imperialism “accumulation by dispossession” more essential to the system’s survival and rejuvenation. As unfettered capital intensifies its search for its Other, cheap labor, both at home and abroad, it is called on to deal with the question of Other. While globalization of capital and migration of labor create tensions among workers of different races, ethnicities and nationalities competing for the limited jobs available, mass consumption of Other in the form of commodities, both in the North and the South, results in huge profit for capital. How to theorize and represent various Others that have been systematically marginalized in or excluded from the Western mode of representation regulated by gender and sexual norms and sustained by racial and class hierarchies thus becomes one of the urgent and difficult tasks facing progressive knowledge workers and activists both inside and outside of the universities. It is especially so in the age of the Internet when the “imagined communities” of Others claim their own space both on-line and off-line to challenge the 1 2 dominant norms of gender, sexuality and race as well as the hegemony of capital and to demand social justice for all. A significant number of literary and cultural critics have sought over the years to intervene in Western discourse that in the process of representing Self by way of its racial/ethnic Others had produced a hierarchy between the master (Self) and the native (Other). Among them, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has recently put the spotlight on the figure of the native informant, a marginal figure she re-examined in her book A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, in her efforts to deconstruct such a hierarchy and to advance a theory of radical alterity. The targets of her critique included the three influential European Enlightenment thinkers Kant, Hegel and Marx, and other historical and cultural narratives. In doing so, she said she hoped to enable a new politics of reading that confronted head-on what she called “sanctioned ignorance,” an allusion to indifference in the West to the history of the Western colonization of the globe, including Asia, Africa and America. Her call for the re-examination of the figure of the native informant was largely prompted by a developing trend in postcolonial discourse that has increasingly relied on two prominent figures, the hybrid migrant and the postcolonial, to examine the social and cultural logic of globalization of finance capital. The shift, in her view, runs the risk of displacing the figure of the native informant. More troubling for her is that these two figures were also found to have masqueraded

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