Colonial Trauma, Utopian Carnality, Modernist Form

Understandings of trauma in the colonial context fall largely into two strands. A therapeutic strand endorses the potential for “healing” from colonial trauma in the present, postcolonial era but fails to grasp how much this era reprises the toxins of colonialism itself. This view implicitly encourages the once-colonized to align themselves with the purported “health” of postcolonial modernity. An anti-therapeutic strand grants the need for a critique of the postcolonial but generalizes the historically specific toxins of that era to any and all social orders—hence making it difficult to imagine social change. Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things provide more historically astute and dialectical accounts than the theoretical models offer. These examples of postcolonial historical fiction are modernist in form; they explore distinct yet homologous types of domination (slavery and the slave trade on one hand, exploitation colonialism in India on the other) through a similar set of representational techniques. These techniques are crucial to the novels’ political astuteness. The books’ temporally disordered forms at once record the fragmentations and devastations visited on the colonial body and provide intimations of an alternative, erotic futurity in which those bodies will have been made whole.

Introduction

The Introduction lays the theoretical groundwork and historical frame for the main chapters. It engages debates on materialist vs. poststructuralist approaches to postcolonial studies; on the utopian imagination; on expanding the black Atlantic frame of reference to include the Indian Ocean; on the Anglophone biases of postcolonial studies and how these implicate the discipline in contemporary capitalism; on the genesis of the historical novel in the nineteenth century; and on the cycles of finance capital to which the postcolonial inflection of historical fiction is a response. Theorists discussed include Giovanni Arrighi, Ian Baucom, Walter Benjamin, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Frederic Jameson, and Georg Lukács.

The Politics of Hybridity-Mimicry in Hari Kunzru’s The Impressionist and Marlene van Niekerk’s Agaat

This chapter critiques the continued influence of Homi Bhabha’s theories of hybridity and mimicry in the colonial context, while putting Bhabha’s ideas into dialogue with those of Roberto Retamar. Hari Kunzru’s The Impressionist and Marlene van Niekerks’ Agaat offer nuanced revisions of both theorists’ positions. They elaborate versions of hybridity and mimicry that are intensely attuned to the interplay between historical forces and subjective experience; they grasp the limited yet real agency of colonized selves in fashioning responses to colonial power; and they situate colonialist textuality in a dynamic relation both to extra-discursive institutions of domination and to subjective interiority. These shared commitments result in fictional historiographies that emphasize the politically variable effects of hybridity-mimicry rather than the inevitable subversion described by Bhabha or the linguistic guerrilla warfare outlined by Retamar.

From National Bildung to Postcolonial Transnationalism

This chapter links colonialism, nationalism, and transnationalism/cosmopolitanism to the genre of the Bildungsroman. The chapter’s theoretical reference points are Joseph Slaughter’s Human Rights, Inc. and Pheng Cheah’s Spectral Nationality: two influential critical works that offer incommensurate analyses of the Bildungsroman in relation to postcolonial nationalism (and the transnational). I show how Patrick Chamoiseau’s Texaco and Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows offer more fruitful accounts of these matters than both theorists. The novels complicate Cheah’s emphasis on the emancipatory potential of national Bildung by revealing the transnational assemblages that precede and exceed the nation’s formation. But they also resist the account of transnationalism identified by Slaughter, in which apparently cosmopolitan commitments disguise the continued coercions of Bildung as a disciplinary technique for subject-formation. Finally, each novel attends to the corporeal dimension of cosmopolitan solidarities and, in Shamsie’s case, links that corporeality to linguistic translation and the concept of the untranslatable.

Cartographies of the Untimely in Postcolonial Historical Realism

Barry Unsworth’s Sacred Hunger and Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies develop cognitive-affective maps of empire that reveal its totalizing ambitions. They deploy realist techniques to do so while displaying an intense self-consciousness about such techniques’ limitations. The maps they draw link the Atlantic world (and slavery) with the Indian Ocean (and indentured servitude). This angle of vision moves the historical novel’s frame of reference beyond both the nation and the mono-oceanic paradigms that have emerged as alternatives to nation-based understandings. Finally, and drawing especially on the work of Dipesh Chakrabarty, the chapter shows that the novels retrieve from historicist time the inassimilable, heterotemporal residues of utopian alternatives to the colonial, which draw upon while radically refashioning “premodern” and pre-secular modes of affinity.

Tragedy, Romance, Satire

This chapter challenges David Scott’s contention that we should shift from Romance to tragedy in recounting the history of colonialism’s overcoming. This shift in genre means, for Scott, moving from a pre-Foucauldian understanding of power to a Foucauldian view in which the institutions of colonial modernity produce the colonized subject—and hence, cannot be meaningfully overthrown. J. G. Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur and Marlon James’s The Book of Night Women subvert Scott’s oppositions and reveal the limits of his prescriptions. Farrell’s text develops a satirical form that, in its depiction of the Indian Mutiny, exposes British power-knowledge as an ideological mystification for which there is indeed an “outside”—namely, the Indians’ insurrectionary agency. James’s text shows how power on the colonial plantation relied on the spectacle of the scaffold rather than the insidious tentacles of disciplinary power. The scaffold functioned to prohibit both full humanity and interracial “love,” Enlightenment promises that only the violence of slave rebellion could hope to fulfil.

Afterword

The Afterword recapitulates the book’s main ideas and discusses some of the paths not taken, especially theoretically. It reiterates the value of postcolonial historical fiction’s effort to anatomize the colonial past and retrieve from that past the residue of utopian futurity. The chapter grants the fruitfulness of a recent turn toward sociological models in postcolonial studies—especially those derived from Pierre Bourdieu—while reaffirming the book’s commitment to a dialectic of critique and utopian recovery. It argues, finally, that the trenchant critiques of colonialism in postcolonial historical fiction make the genre’s utopian visions rigorous, hard-earned—and hence worthy of continued investment.