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. In other words, the idea of the map is to create a version of the world in miniature, reduced to two dimensions, with lines of demarcation that stand for an idea of place. The trajectory of Borges’s cartographic project reaches its zenith when the map-makers, grown dissatisfied with the inadequacy of those maps Introduction 5 of reduced scale, create a map whose extensions correspond exactly to the material dimensions of the empire. Thereby, the map is brought to perfection, as the representational relationship between the map and territory coincide. Yet by the same token, the map becomes obsolete.2 It is not incidental that Borges chose the ideal of the cartographic project as a map of empire. There is something quixotic about the imperial desires of the cartographers to chart the space of the empire with a perfectly accurate representation of that space. It acts as a fable warning against the pitfalls of overestimating the power of this form of representation. The map has always been a major organizing princi- ple for the way imperialism has been spatialized, imagined, and repro- duced. In The Cartographic State, Jordan Branch argues that the visual representation of political power as represented through territories, borders, frontiers, and rival blocs of power has had a significant role to play in politics. According to Branch, political power has adapted to the representational form of the map rather than the other way around.3 The sustained impact of the map on relations and distributions of power plays a significant role in the history of colonialism and the liberation movements of the twentieth century. These movements mark a disruption of the process by which geographical space was moulded by imperial desires. They reworked the maps of empire but, unlike the succeeding generations in Borges’s fragment, did not abandon them altogether. Cartography remains a powerful and at times intrusive model for imagining not just historical developments, territorial or adminis- trative political centres of control, and forms of sovereignty, but also present-day demarcations of di!erence.4 The map represents a demon- stration and imposition of power, organizing territory into centres and peripheries, freezing the shifting dynamics of the space charted, and flattening irregular details. While maps of the known world have been produced for millennia, they took on a privileged role charting the nation, its centrality, and the borders that defined it during the early rise of European nationalism that coincided with the European Renais- sance. Then, from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (note that Borges dates his fragment from 1658), they began to play a central role in European projects of imperial expansion.5 Maps had become the instruments of empire. Since then, maps have continued to shape social and cultural ideas of national or imperial a#liation. In the twentieth century, nations across the world that achieved liberation from imperial domination often renamed territories and places named under colonial rule, which had in turn replaced earlier place names. This process redefined post-colonial 6 Maps of Empire space. The coordinated remapping was one that not only took place in the practice of drawing and redrawing new maps. It also had an impact on cultural life and its forms of representation, including the reorgan- ization of space within literary imaginations. According to Jonathan Bishop Highfield, “The very act of looking at a piece of land transforms it into landscape, because the viewer layers the physical piece of topog- raphy with cultural assumptions and personal associations. Looking at land through the eyes of a colonizer creates one type of landscape, while seeing the same land with postcolonial or anticolonial eyes cre- ates a di!erent landscape, one with potential beyond the stripping of timber and minerals to feed the growth of an empire.”6 Literature that is tied to a sense of place, recreating and reimagining the cultural and social possibilities of that place, has this very transformative potential. This is particularly significant for understanding the period of mid-twentieth-century struggles against colonialism and the challenges they presented to imperial powers. As maps were being redrawn to reflect newly liberated states, internal struggles in post-colonial and settler-colonial spaces were being buried or obfuscated within the new order. Writers from colonized and occupied spaces questioned the necessity and ethics of their histories as empire “wrote back” to the self-ordained centres of the world.7 And, of course, the uncertainties about space were also reflected in the work of literary scholars and in the audiences trying to understand how to read work by colonized peo- ples and writing from former colonies. It is no coincidence that this period closely coincides with the inception of the discipline of com- parative literature, which increasingly saw its task as coming to terms with the complexities of a multi-nodal network of literary voices in a decentred world.

The Cartographic Imagination

“Maps of empire” can refer to any cartographic representation that is produced to chart territories belonging to an imperial domain, or ter- ritories that serve the ends of imperial expansion, such as places des- ignated for future conquest. These actual maps play an important role in statecraft for adherents and strategists of war, and can have dire consequences for the populations that inhabit their spaces. As we have already seen, such maps contain structural biases; for example, unless appointed for the purpose of suppressing such challenges to their power, most maps drawn up by administrators of the imperial powers during the colonial period give no evidence of insurgencies, uprisings, or rebellions. But maps that serve or represent empires in structurally Introduction 7 biased ways need not be “real” in a physical sense. In Imīl Habībī’s The Pessoptimist, one character claims the ability to “see the flags of state even when folded up insid