Maps of Empire a Topography of World Literature
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Maps of Empire A Topography of World Literature KYLE WANBERG UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Bu!alo London © University of Toronto Press 2020 Toronto Bu!alo London utorontopress.com Printed in the U.S.A. ISBN 978-1-4875-0684-1 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-4875-3495-0 (EPUB) ISBN 978-1-4875-3494-3 (PDF) Cultural Spaces Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: Maps of empire : a topography of world literature / Kyle Wanberg. Names: Wanberg, Kyle, 1980– author. Series: Cultural spaces. Description: Series statement: Cultural spaces | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200207547 | Canadiana (ebook) 20200207571 | ISBN 9781487506841 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781487534950 (EPUB) | ISBN 9781487534943 (PDF) Subjects: LCSH: Literature, Modern – 20th century – History and criticism. | LCSH: Cartography in literature. | LCSH: Imperialism in literature. | LCSH: Colonization in literature. Classification: LCC PN770.5 .W36 2020 | DDC 809/.04 – dc23 This book has been published with the assistance of Liberal Studies at New York University. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario. To Elizabeth, without whose patience and love I could not have completed this book. To Silas and Miro, who have brought so much joy and distraction in the process. Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction: Cartography and the Space of World Literature 3 1 A Portmanteau of the Nation in Imīl Habībī’s The Pessoptimist 18 2 The Literary Space of Authority in Camara Laye’s Le Regard du roi 43 3 Imperial Palimpsest or Exquisite Corpse: Yambo Ouologuem’s Le Devoir de violence 68 4 Disorientation and Horror in Sadeq Hedayat’s The Blind Owl 94 5 Orality and the Space of Translation in the Pima Ant Songs 125 Afterword: Decolonizing Literary Space 148 Notes 155 Bibliography 173 Index 187 Acknowledgments There are many debts I have incurred during the writing of this book. I would like to express my gratitude to friends, family, and colleagues who have supported me as I was researching and writing. Nasrin Rahimieh’s wonderful ideas and humour are a constant inspi- ration to me. Chapter 4 owes much to her research, conversation, and her generous invitation in 2011 to participate in a colloquium on The Blind Owl. George Lang’s shrewd insights into the character of orality and the history of post-colonial criticism have provided much food for thought (and thought for food), and he has been very helpful in steer- ing me towards venerable scholars in Indigenous and African literary studies. Elizabeth Gelber has given her time and patience in reading the many drafts of this book, and argued with me over the important parts. Sharareh Frouzesh, Emily Selove, and Hassan Hussein have all generously reviewed drafts or sections of the manuscript in the course of its many iterations. Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan (a!ectionately, Radha) has long been an important interlocutor, helping me to better understand the worldly work of literary and cultural criticism and the importance of socially conscious forms of criticism that confront the challenges of unevenness and disparity. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o has been an inspiration in his fierce struggle to transform the condition of Indigenous language groups around the world. He has also been a friendly and generous teacher, whose work and thought continue to a!ect my thinking about the leg- acies of colonialism, especially in covert forms that are too often over- looked because they have become internalized or come to be taken for granted. Gabriele Schwab also enhanced my thinking with ideas about the psychological impact of colonialism, informing my understanding of the transgenerational e!ects of oppression. x Acknowledgments Virgil Lewis, Pamela Munro, and Marcus Smith kindly welcomed me into their Pima language study group at UCLA. Their protracted teaching and friendship made possible my research on the Ant Songs. Virgil’s singing was an inspiration. Benita Parry has not only been an important model for scholarship, but has generously read and commented on these chapters in various drafts. Her sharp critical insights have been very helpful to me, and have continually reminded me of the urgency of anti-imperial criticism. Institutionally, I have received intellectual or financial aid for the pro- ject from the University of California Interdisciplinary Psychoanalytic Consortium, the School of Liberal Studies at New York University, the Institute for World Literature, and the University of California, Irvine. Thanks also to Mark Thompson, the reviewers, and the editorial board at the University of Toronto Press, whose work and comments have helped immensely. My students have provided me with many important conversations about theoretical and literary questions over the years. Thanks also to friends who have been examples of intellectual inquiry, and whose con- versations echoed in my head as I was constructing the book, including Hoda El-Shakry, Leah Feldman, Mark Schiebe, Luis Ramos, Molly Mar- tin, Travis Tanner, Maya Mikdashi, and Khodadad Rezakhani. Because I cannot thank all of those people who have given me moments of in- sight or been sources of inspiration over the years, I would at least like to register their tremendous impact on me. I hope I continue to learn from you. Lastly, I want to thank my parents and siblings, who have been a great source of comfort and support, and who have always been there for me. MAPS OF EMPIRE A Topography of World Literature Introduction Cartography and the Space of World Literature In the aftermath of the Second World War the wave of liberation move- ments that defined the mid-twentieth century can be seen reflected in a changing map. Territorial exchanges after the war and the independ- ence movements across the colonized world led to changes in the names of countries, national languages, and the lines of demarcation found on maps. The character of nations was also in flux, along with identities within them. These conditions also had a significant impact on exiles, refugees, and migrants who traversed borders or who became victims of the new maps. These transformations were both real and imagina- tive, a!ecting cultural as much as political realities. This book investigates how literary spaces are organized in tandem with spaces of empire and reorganized through and after liberation events in unique but related ways. Geographical changes that accom- panied the formation of new nations in the post-colonial era reorgan- ized spaces of representation and interpretation in literature, especially with respect to how literature is engaged with the world and its politics. Reflecting political and literary engagements that cut across di!erent experiences and spaces of conflict and struggle, the particular works of literature I read in this book o!er di!erent approaches to such themes as pastiche, subversion, authorship, orality, and authority. The works I discuss here are each entangled in histories of recep- tion that attempt to make the text conform to certain cartographic, or mappable, models of relation. That is, spaces depicted within a text are extracted and reframed in the process of the work’s reception by critics according to established histories and relations of power. These imagined “maps” are designed to speak to dominant conceptions of space and identity, especially by grounding identity in strict relational terms such as North/South, East/West, Indigenous/settler- colonial. The tensions set up within and between the following chapters, 4 Maps of Empire therefore, follow from the way in which the texts work to subvert and defy the very terms by which they might be made most legible and marketable to a general audience. I have chosen texts that explicitly trouble assumptions about how research in area studies traditionally organizes and delimits space. The chapters examine di!erent thoughts and representations on the connections and disconnections between identity and cartography. Reading these works on their own terms requires resisting the spatial rubrics that would flatten identities and historical relations in order for them to be more easily digested. Yet the works explored in this book not only produce cartographies that conform or clash with dominant modes of organizing space. They also reflect richer topographies, creating various layers and echoes that can be too simply overlooked. The Territory of Cartography ... In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satis- fied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Fore- bears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography. – Suarez Miranda, Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV, Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658 [Jorge Luis Borges “On Exactitude in Science”]1 Maps have a strange, paradoxical fate in this Borges fragment. A map remains useful only as long as it reduces in scale the territory it repre- sents. Its infidelity, then, is part of what makes it serviceable: di!erences between the map and the territory imbue the map with meaning. The absurd idea of a map that is drawn to the scale of its territory empha- sizes the true function of the map: to reduce in scale while drawing on particular details favoured by the map-makers or their patrons.