Postcolonial Migrancy and the (Im)Possibility of the Nation
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UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI'I LIBRARY RETURN OF THE NATIVE: POSTCOLONIAL MIGRANCY AND THE (IM)POSSIBILITY OF THE NATION A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE DIVISION OF THE UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI'I IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN POLITICAL SCIENCE DECEMBER 2002 By Jorge Luis Fernandes Dissertation Committee: Sankaran Krishna, Chairperson Michael Shapiro Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller Cynthia Ward Manfred Henningsen iii © Copyright 2002 by Jorge Fernandes iv For Gabriel v ACKNOWLEDGEMENT The migrant's life is a life of debts. I owe my first debt of gratitude to my parents, Elisa and Adolfo, from whom I have learned the infinite possibilities of a migrant existence. To RUi, To. Leo. and Maggie, I could not have hoped for better fellow travelers. My thanks also to Lori, Ed. Yuri. Kenji. Chiyoko, and Sunao for making me feel welcomed. I owe an enormous intellectual debt to Sankaran Krishna, Michael J. Shapiro, Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller, Cynthia Ward, Manfred Henningsen. Kathy Ferguson. Nevzat Soguk, John Witeck. Noenoe Silva, Eric Ishiwata, Konrad Ng, and Gina Pusateri. If every traveler has a gUiding star, Sasha has been mine. I could not have found my way through this dissertation without her. vi ABSTRACT The refusal of the native's entelechy assumes two distinct forms. In the first, the native is a prop in a colonial mise-en scene. As colonial travelogues attest, though present, the native seldom rises above the threshold of recognition. His proximity to nature is so total as to defy recognition. In the second, the native is recognized only insofar as his proximity to nature renders him an anchor in an evolutionary meta-discourse. The native's presence is interpreted as validating a taxonomic scheme that produces Europeans as a genus apart. In both representational forms, the negation of the native's potentiality is imbricated in the construction of the nation as the site of identity and difference through an organic discourse that transforms territory into an epiphenomenon of landscape. Post-World War II movements of capital and populations across national borders have profoundly altered conceptions of the political. These dislocations have introduced ever-widening social and political imaginaries that challenge the nation- state's function as the locus proper of sovereignty. Consequently, the native's symbolic import, as a concept-metaphor that moors identity to the nation, is disrupted. Using postcolonial migrancy not only as a concept that denotes spatial movement, but as a philosophical disposition, the dissertation interrogates the consequences for the nation and the vii narratives of difference it enables when they encounter the postcolonial native as a nomad whose presence denatures the link between nation and identity. The dissertation argues that encounters between nation-states and postcolonial migrants result neither in the total enclosure of the natives nor in the evisceration of the nation. Rather, the encounter gives rise to a fractal politics that resists the sedimentation of identities into established political and cultural communities. The recursive structure of migrancy results in complex political formations. These are always already in the process of being deterritorialized, engendering associations and movements that exceed the narrow bounds of the nation-state. viii TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements .......................................... .. i v Abstract v List of Figures x Chapter 1: Introduct ion 1 Chapter 2: "Forget the Alamo!": An Eulogy for Cal iban 21 Season of Anomie 26 Speaking in Tongues 42 Cutting Off the Snake's Tongue 56 The Migrant as Sycorax 62 Forget the Alamo 82 Conclusion: Beyond Home and the World 92 Chapter 3: Can the Postcolonial be Cosmopolitan 94 The Return of Cosmopolitanism , 98 Cosmopolitanism and the Language of Colonialism 119 A Haunted Cosmopolitanism 136 Conclusion 147 Chapter 4: Ebola Takes to the Road: Mobilizing Virus in Defense of the Nation-State 150 Of Mallon, McCarthy, and Matshimoseka: Constructing the Social Being 157 The Wall of Disease 191 How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Virus 213 Conclusion: From New Jersey with Love 232 ix Chapter 5: Of Multicolored Ghosts and Polyglot Avatars: The Restructuring of the Post-Colonial Discursive Space in Amitav Ghosh's The Calcutta Chromosome 236 Amos Tutuola and the Metaphysics of the Bush 242 In a Feverish State 248 The Novel and the Passport 257 The Frontier in the Colonial and Post-Colonial Imaginary 270 Another Reason 295 Conclusion: The Mirror in the Labyrinth 306 Chapter 6: "Fuzzy Aggregates·: The Fractal Politics of Migrancy 309 Of Police and Politics 313 Being at Home in a Fragmented World 317 Conclusion: Fragmentary Politics 322 References 324 x LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: Sam and Pilar at the drive-in 91 Figure 2: A walk into the sunset 127 Figure 3: Motaba reconciles Sam and Robby 213 1 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION 'Your story isn't going anywhere,' mum said, in the dark. 'A story is not a car,' dad replied. 'It is a road, and before that it was a river, a river that never ends. ,1 My dissertation takes its title, Return of the Native, from Thomas Hardy's 1878 novel.' Unlike Hardy'S returning native, however, the native with whom I am concerned is a nomad. My subject is thus neither nativism as a marker of belonging nor of entitlement, but the native as a haecceity.3 I am interested in the native's self-referential/self-identical quality as a source of terror that disrupts the post-imperial socia-political order. For insofar as the native's haeccity presences a resistance to an enfolding into the self/same, the European imperial project sought to contain the native's affirmative difference through narratives of social evolution, which construe differences between Europeans and natives not as qualitative, but as 1 Ben Okri, Songs of Enchantment (New York: Anchor Books, 1993), 266. 2 Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). 3 For a discussion of haecceity, see Gilles De1euze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 260 265. 2 quantitative: it is not a difference of species, but of genus. In these taxonomies, nations are enclosures that preserve striated fields of difference: they are the loci of foundational identities. Late-modern migrancy disrupts these formations. Postcolonial native migrants challenge the nation's production of negative difference. Through a series of themes that I will elaborate below, my dissertation interrogates what happens to the nation and the narratives of difference it enables when they encounter the native as a nomad whose presence denatures the link between nations and identities. The refusal of the native's entelechy takes two distinct forms. In the first, as Mary Louise Pratt suggests, the native is a prop in the colonial mise-en-scene. This, she contends, explains why natives are too often invisible in Western travelogues. 4 In these works, the native's proximity to nature is so total as to defy recognition. In the second, the native is recognized only insofar as his proximity to nature renders him an anchor in the evolutionary meta-discourse. Put differently, representations of the native's actions and instincts validate a taxonomic scheme that produces Europeans as a genus apart. In both representational forms, the erasure 0 f the nat i ve' s potentiality is imbricated in the construction of the nation as See Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and 3 the site of identity and difference through an organic discourse that transforms territory into an epiphenomenon of landscape.' In the canon of narratives that subsume identities to landscapes, Hardy's Return of the Native is singularly important. Serialized at the height of British imperial expansion, it offers a fully developed articulation of landscape as an organic entity that actively inscribes itself on its inhabitants. Egdon heath, the novel's landscape, is as much a character as Diggory Venn or Eustacia Vye. The novel's protagonists are not only rooted to the heath, but are defined by their relationship to it. Their feelings for Egdon oscillate between two extremes: Vye abhors every aspect of the heath, while Clym Yeobright, the novel's returning native, immerses himself in its every detail. However positioned to the heath, Hardy represents his characters' temperaments and relationships as extensions of the heath's ontology. Egdon heath has two distinct roles in the novel. First, it demarcates a national, socia-political space by addressing the social and political possibilities of Victorian England. For Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992). 5 As Eve Darian-Smith argues, the notion of territory, articulated both in terms of frontiers and boundaries, were and continue to be inscribed in terms of the landscape's natural features. Mountains, rives, and other topographical markers are often cited as the natural borders of a nation-state. See Eve Darian-Smith, Bridging Divides: The Channel and English Legal Identity in the New Europe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 71-76. 4 Eustacia, the tragic heroine, the heath exists in a metonymic relation to a marriage market that limits her choices and binds her to her own personal hell. 6 She is caught in a "paradox of personal identity": she would not be who she is were it not for her dream of escape. 7 The impossibility of her social mobility defines her as a tragic character and inextricably binds her to the heath. Second, the heath speaks to an imperial disquiet. Against an earlier, sacred cartography, colonial movements away from Europe were fraught with danger." Foremost among these was the inherent threat of the loss of self. Colonial narratives evince this fear in the recurring trope of insanity. A byproduct of a confrontation with the Lacanian Real, an encounter with an "Other" that "escapes governing by the sociosymbolic order," colonial zones of encounter were often portrayed by Europeans as spaces of madness.