Nation, World, Event in Postcolonial Anglophone and Postimperial British Literatures
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INTERNATIONAL NATIONALISMS: NATION, WORLD, EVENT IN POSTCOLONIAL ANGLOPHONE AND POSTIMPERIAL BRITISH LITERATURES By Hugh Charles O‘Connell A DISSERTATION Submitted to Michigan State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY English 2011 ABSTRACT INTERNATIONAL NATIONALISMS: NATION, WORLD, EVENT IN POSTCOLONIAL ANGLOPHONE AND POSTIMPERIAL BRITISH LITERATURES By Hugh Charles O‘Connell International Nationalisms explores the literary and critical discourses surrounding the concepts of the nation and nationalism in the postcolonial, global conjuncture through a particularly comparativist—or what Edward Said calls a contrapuntal—approach. Therefore, as opposed to theorizing a particular nationalist genre, the nationalist Bildungsroman (after Pheng Cheah) or all of ―third world‖ literature (after Fredric Jameson), the project instead focuses on nationalism as an ideologeme, or an integral ideological structuring unit that runs across the literatures of the decolonizing period. In doing so, the project is especially invested in the way that different textual representations of nationalism expose and explore the ramifications and disputations over the content of the nation and the national, and, in the process, produce a series of overlapping and inter-related nationalisms not just in the decolonizing nations, but in the former metropole as well. As such, the dissertation is comprised of a series of comparative readings across Anglophone postcolonial and postimperial British literatures that uncover possibilities for engaging with discourses of the nation and nationalism as a series of overlapping utopian and limiting imaginings in the period between decolonization and globalization. Without endorsing or rejecting the concept of nationalism as such, this project instead seeks to understand how nationalism, far from disappearing during the period of global capitalism, continues to find expression and assume new forms in contemporary literature under the pressures of globalization. The dissertation thus begins by tracking the development of the postcolonial nationalist project in the decolonizing states through a consideration of postcolonial nationalist Bildungsromane such as Ayi Kwei Armah‘s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong‘o‘s Petals of Blood and their development of a postcolonial nationalism that privileges difference and becoming, thus providing a critical reinterpretation of Frantz Fanon‘s call for a ―national consciousness that is not nationalism [which] is alone capable of giving us an international dimension.‖ The chapter ends with a consideration of its adaptation by metropolitan literature, as in David Caute‘s post-imperial novel, The Decline of the West, and emphasizes the ideological role that decolonization has played in the UK‘s own concerns over postimperial national identity. The second chapter takes up the issue of postcolonial immigration to the UK and the development of a postimperial British bureaucratic nationalism. This chapter explores the spaces of the welfare-state in relation to postcolonial immigrant fiction, arguing that these spaces formed a begrudging, agonistic space of postcolonial recognition that is counter-balanced and delegitimized by a rising English cultural nationalism. From here, the project turns to contemporary Anglo-British fiction in the third chapter and the development of exclusionary forms of English and British nationalisms that seek to redefine national prestige in the face of immigration and globalization. Finally, the project culminates with the consideration of postcolonial and postimperial science fiction and its development of a radical utopian project of postnationalism that attempts to transcend the ideological terrain of the global late capitalist conjuncture as a world system. This larger comparative framework allows both for a more nuanced consideration of the social-cultural relationship as well as the formal literary developments of what are often thought of as disparate genres and traditions. Copyright by HUGH CHARLES O‘CONNELL 2011 To Sarah Hamblin v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS First and foremost, I would like to thank my committee. My co-chairs, Scott Michaelsen and Salah D. Hassan, provided the intellectual support and encouragement to push my ideas in new directions. Likewise, Justus Nieland and Zarena Aslami provided insightful and probing readings of every draft along the way. I‘d also like to thank the Department of English for their continued support and for the opportunities they provided me with. Thanks also go to my family (Mom, Bob, Pat, Holly, Tim, Jeanne, Riot and Myojo) for their constant encouragement. Finally, I‘d like to thank Sarah for her patience and kindness, and whose intellectual acumen and humor made this project possible. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF FIGURES……………………………………………………………………………..viii INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………………………...1 NATIONALIST DISPUTATIONS CHAPTER ONE…………………………………………………………………………………32 ―NATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS WHICH IS NOT NATIONALISM‖: NATIONALIST IDEOLOGEMES AND POSTIMPERIAL LITERARARY POSSIBILITIES The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born; Petals of Blood; The Decline of the West CHAPTER TWO……………………………………………………………………………….103 THE BRITISH ARE COMING! POSTIMPERIAL RETRENCHMENT AND POSTCOLONIAL IMMIGRATION IN (EX-) COLONIAL LITERATURE The Lonely Londoners; Adah’s Story; The Black Album CHAPTER THREE…………………………………………………………………………….165 STAKING A PLACE FOR THE NATION: POST-THATCHERISM, GLOBALIZATION AND POST-9/11 COSMPOLITANISM The Black Album; England, England; Saturday CHAPTER FOUR………………………………………………………………………………224 ALIEN TERRAFORMING AND INTERPERSONAL TRANSFERENCE: UTOPIANISM, POSTCOLONIAL SF AND THE POSTCONTEMPORARY LONGING FOR FORM Evolution’s Shore; Kirinya; The Calcutta Chromosome CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………………………………284 NATIONAL SPECTERS, NATIONAL SPECULATIONS, NATIONAL APOLOGIAS WORKS CITED………………………………………………………………………………..292 vii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1 The Calcutta Chromosome Character Chart…………………………………………..279 viii Introduction: Nationalist Disputations The novel is the private history of nations. – Henri Balzac (qtd. in Brennan ―National‖ 64) The work of art, in its ludic, pointless, gratuitous, self-grounding, autotelic, self- determining way, offers us a foretaste of how many men and women might themselves exist under transformed political conditions. Where art was, there shall humanity be. – Terry Eagleton (―Communism‖ 104). I begin with these quotes from Balzac and Eagleton concerning the role of the novel in political life since they bring to light a tension that pervades this project. On the one hand the novel is seen as a national compendium; it encompasses the disparate experiences, subjectivities, and discourses that comprise nation-ness (the nation, nationalism, the national), solidifying them into something that approaches the objectification of the nation as it is bounded in the form of the closed world of the novel. As such, it is history not as empirical or neutral process, but as narrative, as a politicization of the past as a ―useable past,‖ to think in Terrance Ranger‘s terms. In this sense, the novel serves as both grounds for and proof of a substantive national culture. But, on the other hand, Balzac reminds us that it is a private history. As such, there is a sense that the novel is then confiding something to its reader, and perhaps the most powerful secret that it confides is exactly this composite nature of the nation. Thus it highlights how easily the supposedly empirically or naturalized nation devolves into so many disparate entities, tentatively 1 held together by the narrative. This revelation is coupled with the fact that every history as such, also stands as an oblique record of omission, as a reminder of what has not been included. In this sense, then, forms of nation-ness can only be grasped through narrative and recourse to the past in which the materials of the past are instrumentalized into a coherent identity form, but one which is always imagined and thus reveals at the same time the composite nature of the form itself. Given the conventions of the novel as a bearer of a particular ―political unconscious‖ and a ―strategy of containment‖ that brings various discourses together into a textual unity, this pastness is consolidated as the conceptual grounding of a particular present that is then projected towards the future as the living nation. In this way the novel, as the secret history of the nation, accords with Tom Nairn‘s conception of nationalism‘s operation: […] through nationalism the dead are awakened, this is the point – seriously awakened for the first time. All cultures have been obsessed by the dead and placed them in another world. Nationalism rehouses them in this world. Through its agency the past ceases being ‗immemorial‘: it gets memorialised into time present, and so acquires a future. For the first time it is meaningfully projected on to the screen of futurity. (Faces 4) Nairn, then, gestures towards the second quote in my epigram in which Eagleton notes that literature is not only a repository of the past endlessly and ideologically projected in the form of futurity as constancy. Instead, as captured in the original context of Nairn‘s quote, the nation- state can also function as a sign of radical break, whether from the vestiges of absolutism, from imperial rule, or from the impositions of globalization. In this sense, futurity has little to do with constancy and instead functions as a form of utopianism.