You ll find no finger posts to point you to our place : Mapping the Literary and Critical Terrain

Transcription

1 You ll find no finger posts to point you to our place : Mapping the Literary and Critical Terrain EVELYN O CALLAGHAN In this introductory reflection on our literature, I would like to suggest some ways in which we might revisit the question of where is here, as part of the project of remapping the Caribbean. The call for papers for the 25 th Anniversary Conference on West Indian Literature sets out the terms of reference for such a project: Our original focus on Anglophone literature has expanded to include the wider Caribbean and its diasporas, as well as other forms of cultural expression like music, film, and digital technology. This broadening signals the development of urgent debates on the significance of terms like Caribbean versus West Indian, on what defines a Caribbean or national text or a Caribbean writer, on what constitutes the canon or marks the parameters of literary criticism and theory, on who is the Caribbean subject and indeed, where is the Caribbean (my emphases). I have highlighted a few of the key terms: the wider Caribbean and its diasporas; Caribbean or national (referring to a text/writer); what constitutes the [Caribbean] canon;

2 You ll find no finger posts to point you to our place 21 what are the parameters of [Caribbean] literary criticism and theory. Now rearrange the format to ask a question: does current theorizing of Caribbean literature and its so-called canon implicitly polarize the terms Caribbean diaspora and Caribbean national (writer/text)? Are we witnessing a remapping of the Caribbean literary and critical archive that privileges inclusivity, that insists on the empowering potential of crossing borders of language and culture (the theme of a recent issue of the journal Small Axe) and embraces hybrid diaspora subjectivities? Or are we engaged in a remapping which critiques such poetics of displacement as hegemonic globalization in the guise of cosmopolitanism and insists on re-emphasizing the importance of the local, the particular, the nation state? In thinking about these questions, I am going to draw on (and quote extensively from) an entirely promiscuous corpus of sources which-- fortuitously or not--have recently demanded my attention: two books, a conference paper, a doctoral dissertation and several online scholarly notices. Let me start with a conference paper by Elvira Pulitano, Caribbean Dis/locations in the Work of Jamaica Kincaid and Caryl Phillips, part of a book length study entitled Cartographies of Displacement: Writing Diaspora in Anglophone Caribbean Literature. The title, obviously, speaks directly to my theme. For Pulitano, writing which maps dislocation, displacement--as in the work of Kincaid, Phillips, V. S. Naipual and Michelle Cliff--problematizes easy notions of belonging and suggests, with Benítez-Rojo, that it is impossible to assume a stable identity for the Caribbean. Instead such texts convey a sense of belonging that significantly re-maps Western notions of territory and identity. This belonging is ambiguous, as identity is not predicated on a particular native place, or relationship--in Stuart Hall s terms--to some sacred homeland. Diaspora decentres the individual: so Phillips, for example, is of, and not of St. Kitts, the Caribbean, Britain, and African-America. In fact, he firmly rejects attempts to fix and reduce identity to unpalatable clichés of nationality or race (2001, 6) even as he attends to issues of race, contested histories and marginality. Volume 18 Number 2 April 2010

3 22 EVELYN O CALLAGHAN Diaspora discourse then is not defined by essence or purity, but by the recognition of a necessary heterogeneity and diversity; by a conception of identity which lives with and though, not despite, difference, by hybridity (Hall, 402). For Pulitano, writing that constitutes cartographies of displacement evinces a transformative quality in that even as it maps the division and alienation of dislocation, it also records encounter, interconnectedness and interaction among those who share a common condition of serial journeying---as slaves, indentured servants, refugees, migrants, asylum seekers and so on. Acknowledging transnational movement as normative and the concomitant dissolution of notions of fixed origins, underpins the rubric of a call for papers for another conference, Rerouting the Postcolonial (hosted by the University of Northampton): We live today in an increasingly mobile world of global forces, accelerated flows of migration, exile and transnational movement which, according to Homi Bhabha, cause those 'genealogies of origin that lead to the claim for cultural supremacy and historical priority' to be contested. Diaspora theory draws attention to the fact that the paths or ROUTES open to people through increased migration, dislocation and relocation, even the temporary inhabiting of new spaces offered by cosmopolitan travel and tourism, contribute to a critique of ROOTS, of fixed origins and traditional identificatory structures such as family, society and nation. Another more Caribbean-focused source also uses the rhetoric of diaspora theory. Soliciting essays for a volume entitled Constructing Vernacular Culture in the Trans-Caribbean, the editors suggest that: With the growth of global migrations and the dissemination of new ethnic visibilities in Trans-Caribbean spaces, migrating cultures as well as host cultures can be conceived as becoming even more hybridized than they are already. The Caribbean, which has been a crucible of permanent migration since the Journal of West Indian Literature

4 You ll find no finger posts to point you to our place 23 early modern of European conquest and slavery [sic], remains uniquely positioned to spur dynamic processes of hybridization engendered in American in-between spaces and transatlantic trajectories. the editors and authors strive to understand the evolving Trans-Caribbean as a discontinuous, displacing and displaced, transnational space. One of the themes suggested for exploration is the reinvention of the concept of Caribbeanness as transgressing geographic, national, ethnic, cultural, linguistic, literary, ideological, religious, sexual and gender boundaries. And this speaks to precisely the first kind of remapping I referred to above: a cartography of Caribbean literary and critical production that insists on the empowering nature of crossing borders of language and culture and embracing hybrid diaspora subjectivities. Returning to the Conference on West Indian Literature, one notes similar concerns with the emergence of Caribbean diasporas in Europe, North America and elsewhere [which] highlight the evolving transnational and transcultural construction of Caribbean identity as well as a global trend towards greater cosmopolitanism and multiple belongings. Indeed, conventional definitions of home and belonging, here and there, boundaries and fixed borders have been radically challenged... Here, then, is the (historically contextualized) theoretical space in which we find ourselves situated and within which we are to talk about the evolution of Caribbean literature and its impact on identity formation. The focus suggests that previously noted: on the nation and transnation ; on transnational subjects making new homes and migrant identities in diasporic texts ; on making the global local and the local global. Earlier, I used the phrase poetics of displacement which perfectly describes the literary productions emanating from the kind of diaspora discourse I have been trying to outline. The term poetics of displacement is borrowed from yet another of my random sources, a Volume 18 Number 2 April 2010

5 24 EVELYN O CALLAGHAN 2005 UWI (Mona) PhD dissertation by Joan Miller Powell entitled Hybrid Inventiveness: Caryl Phillips Poetics of Displacement. Like Pulitano s, this study makes the case for privileging displacement and dislocation as the constitutive condition of contemporary experience and narrative. Miller Powell argues that Phillips s work offers the transformative possibilities of displacement and diaspora even as it maps the brutal consequences of crossing the spatial/ cultural/ racial/ social boundaries which characterize the Black Atlantic experience; and it does so without indulging in any sentimental attachment to unitary notions of black identity and belonging. Reading the evolution of Phillips narrative form from conventional realism in his earlier work, to a postmodernist... sensibility in...[its] metaphysical revision and interrogation of literary and historical representations of Black and Jewish diasporic subjects in the later fictions, Miller Powell claims that Phillips hybrid inventiveness conflates the postmodernist decentering of stable identities with postcolonial concerns (race, empire, marginality, contested histories). Hence Phillips s achievement lies in a synthesis of political and literary strategies. Synthesizing literary and political strategies is central to my penultimate reference, Shalini Puri s The Caribbean Postcolonial. Puri, however, comes at hybridity and diaspora quite differently from those cited thus far. Her text references the other theoretical trend which, I sense, is currently operating in the remapping of the Caribbean: One that interrogates assumptions behind a poetics of displacement, queries whether cosmopolitanism is not just rampant globalization in sheep s clothing, and posits the need for renewed focus on the Caribbean local, the particular and the (problematic but still very powerful) nation-state. Puri s angle initially resembles that of Alison Donnell who acknowledges the importance of diaspora discourses, theoretical and literary, but expresses reservations about the increasing centrality of migratory subjectivities in postcolonial literary discussions and the perceived preference for dislocation over location, rupture over continuity, and elsewhereness over hereness (83). Puri agrees that discourses of syncretism and hybridity (so crucial to diaspora Journal of West Indian Literature

6 You ll find no finger posts to point you to our place 25 theorizing) are indeed central to Caribbean poetics, and serve as necessary correctives to purist, essentialist, and organicist conceptions of culture (19). But quite various Caribbean practices of hybridity, she feels, have been appropriated by the metropolitan academy and flattened out into an unquestioning celebration of the principle of hybridity. In so doing, she counters, fundamental political concerns... can recede from view in the theoretical construction of hybridity [for example, in Bhabha s work] as a principle of difference abstracted from historical specificities (25). A self-avowed Marxist critic, Puri is interested in addressing the tension between the poetics and the politics... of particular hybridities (25). Hence, hybridity understood as multicultural inclusivity may be used in the service of assimilationist politics, and cultural hybridity symbolized by the global village provide an enabling discourse for the aggressive economic expansion of capital (4). If, then, discourses of hybridity are not to become simply an intellectual version of we are the world equally well-intentioned, equally inaccurate... [they] should recontextualize migrancy (40). For Puri, this recontextualization means considering what cultural hybridity might mean in the local context and how it is used politically in the promotion of social equality. Her study, then, seems to diverge from the general principles of what I have been calling diaspora theory/discourse. Puri calls into question the supposed shift from identity formation firmly linked to the nation-state towards the notion of a transnational subjectivity. Whilst rejecting cultural nationalism, she nonetheless points out that since invocations of cultural hybridity have been crucial to Caribbean nationalism (6) it is difficult to posit an innate opposition between hybridity and the nationstate. Emphasizing that hers is not simply a reaction to the vehemently post-nationalist academy, nor an attempt to reinstall the nation-state or nationalism as privileged categories of cultural analysis, she suggests that transnationalist agendas are not best served by simply denying the power of the nation-state (6). Instead, she theorizes the possibility of what she terms progressive nationalisms. Contrary to celebrations of placelessness (in diaspora critical and creative writing) Puri argues that Volume 18 Number 2 April 2010

7 26 EVELYN O CALLAGHAN place and location matter politically and materially (9). Further, the intimacy of the global village does not in itself betoken equality with the West or the breakdown of a hierarchical relationship between global and local. Alison Donnell, in Twentieth-Century Caribbean Literature, shares many of Puri s concerns. For example, Puri demonstrates that Paul Gilroy s otherwise exemplary theory of the Black Atlantic (exemplary because of its explicitly political investment in narratives of equality and emancipation (28) is flawed because ultimately black America is the basis of his model. As a result, transatlantic hybridity is framed as a resource for metropolitan minority reconstruction (29) while subordinating expressions from the Caribbean, Africa and Latin America. Donnell likewise notes the strong influence of a black diaspora critical framework in Caribbean literary studies since the early 1990s and the role of Gilroy s Black Atlantic model in redressing the excesses of nationalism and cultural nationalism: In the twenty-first century, claims of national identity and those of place of habitation have multiple permutations and so the Caribbean is seen to epitomise the hybrid, syncretic, mobile, deterritorialised cultural space so favoured by postcolonial theorists (78). Donnell, however, wants to resist this theoretical orthodoxy. Like Puri, she argues that the discourses of migrancy, transnationalism and transatlanticism... have become associated with a liberatory poetics that does not, in fact, have much to do with actual political change (80). Black diasporic criticism has also tended to read black women s writing and subjectivity as transnational and migratory (131); but in effect, Donnell argues, the attempt to map African-American theory onto a Caribbean context... does not speak adequately to the diverse ethnic groups within the Caribbean who do not share the African past and whose Indian, Chinese or European histories and traditions are given no discussion (135). Further, the splicing of African-American history and theory into the narrative of Caribbean women s writing marginalizes alternative--and more locally focused--caribbean theoretical perspectives (137). Puri devotes much of her last two Journal of West Indian Literature

8 You ll find no finger posts to point you to our place 27 chapters to exploring the marginalization of Caribbean hybrid (such as African/Indian) cultural forms in postcolonial, African and Indian diaspora studies and posits a dougla poetics endorsed by Donnell s text. Both point out that discussion of Caribbean women s writing has tended to overlook Indian-Caribbean literary and critical insights. Like Puri, Donnell queries the implied claim that interest in the nation state is both outdated and regressive (77). Donnell s aim is to go against the flow of Black Atlantic studies by focusing on writings that contest the seemingly naturalized version of Caribbean identity as always elsewhere, works that are clearly located and concerned with dwelling (79). Convincingly, she demonstrates the value of such a strategy with reference to the work of Erna Brodber which, she suggests: demonstrates that home in this case is not that which is static, originary and regressive against which the fluid, multiple and liberatory condition of migration or diaspora can define itself...the Caribbean...is shown through Brodber s work to be simultaneously rooted and routed...to be informed by a perspective and identity that is both here and elsewhere. (108) Both here and elsewhere : this seems a sensible resolution of the (perhaps artificial) dichotomy I have set up. Diaspora discourse has indeed changed the way we conceive of the Caribbean and Caribbean literary production. But it is by no means normative for everyone in the Caribbean. We still face cases here where influences from elsewhere are feared and/or vilified. There carries negative markers, whether it refers to another Caribbean country ( as in the case of current Barbadian suspicion of Guyanese immigrants, official and otherwise) or the more foreign there of North America (the source of moral corruption, degenerate attitudes toward sexual preference, HIV AIDS and so much else). Despite such resistance to the influences of elsewhere, few would openly argue for a return to isolationist national and ethnic purisms in Caribbean politics or literary criticism. Volume 18 Number 2 April 2010

9 28 EVELYN O CALLAGHAN Personally, I would agree with Caryl Phillips comments in a recent interview: the great strength of Caribbean literature has been its lack of national, and to a large extent international, borders. It's enabled it to grow outside while speaking to inside, and flourish inside and reach outside too. Surely Caribbean migration means that 'here' is pretty much everywhere, and I'm not just talking about postwar migration. I mean Rhys, CLR [James], etc.... I often feel that other countries with 'strong' national literatures Britain, France, USA, Canada are increasingly looking to the micro-model of Caribbean literature to see how you can still have a coherent 'national' literature that rises up above geography. It doesn't seem to me that now is the time for Caribbean literature to start retreating to clumsy and reductive essentialisms and door-slamming. It's only a strong and self-confident literature that can operate with the door open and ajar. On the other hand, Donnell, Puri and others have exposed the ways in which Caribbean literature may be appropriated under catch all terms (world literature, postcolonial literature, Black Atlantic writing), often having its own specific and rooted concerns flattened out in the process. Further, Donnell argues that Caribbean writers like Brodber, Senior and Lovelace outline in their fictions a located cosmopolitanism (113), right here at home. I will always remember the impact of Lloyd Best s 1994 Elsa Goveia Memorial Lecture at Cave Hill, in which he casually asserted that the Caribbean is the original global village. Long before James Clifford s assertion that we are all Caribbeans now, Best evokes the region as historically rooted in contradictions, schizophrenic in its political, economic and social structures. The achievement was that early on, and not necessarily by choice, Caribbean people learned to live with this doubleness, thus normalizing the unhomely and--as centuries went by--incorporating it into Caribbean literature. Such located cosmopolitanism, as Donnell demonstrates, serves as a corrective to the theoretical discourses of diasporic Journal of West Indian Literature

10 You ll find no finger posts to point you to our place 29 criticism that are generally less interested in the historical residues of injustice, violence and loss than in the new identity categories and cultural flows that these historical processes have set in motion (128). Let me now ditch the binary model: the choice I have set up between reading literary maps with other maps overlaid, attending to overlapping and shifting borders versus using a magnifying glass to correct and add features to specific quadrants that have been misrepresented or ignored. There are many ways of thinking about remapping the Caribbean. A retrospective of the documented history of West Indian literature shows how the contours have been consistently altered, how the maps have been contested. At a very obvious level, once invisible women writers have been inserted into the literary archive, albeit not unproblematically. Women have also inserted themselves into Caribbean theoretical and critical cartographies. But if the chart of canonical writers is no longer weighted overwhelmingly towards men, it is also fair to say that future maps are pushing gender boundaries and constructs into new territories as Caribbean masculinity studies and queer theory gain currency. Donnell s study is an excellent overview of other ways in which Caribbean literary historiography can be challenged and its lines redrawn. Her re-reading of what she terms critical moments in the history of Anglocreole Caribbean writing revisits texts and writers omitted at particular moments from that literature as well as suggesting alternative critical moments not yet documented. What can be considered properly Caribbean within critical discourses, she asserts, has changed and will change over time in response to evolving political exegencies. New works of critical intervention now challenge some of what has been left in--and left out--of the canon (162). Staying with the cartographical trope, I was interested to view online a project initiated by Peter Hulme and two colleagues at the University of Essex. It is entitled American Tropics: Towards a Literary Geography and the rationale is outlined thus: Volume 18 Number 2 April 2010

11 30 EVELYN O CALLAGHAN Most literary history is governed by language or nation state. Neither approach can do justice to the complexity of the literary history of the Americas, especially to those areas where more than one European power (and therefore language) had influence. This project therefore approaches literary history in a completely different way, focused on place. It defines the American Tropics as a broad region (from Charleston to Bahia) where the plantation cultures flourished. From within that region it chooses... places on which to focus [Colón, Cuba, New Orleans, the Haiti- Dominican Republic border] giving intensive consideration to the writing. ( /index.htm) Whilst I would certainly balk at their broad remit, it is useful to consider another remapping of Caribbean literature that once again returns us to here ; not here in terms of a nation, or even a set of nations bound by language, but in terms of connection to place, connection to landscape. Landscape, of course, is always more than land: as Donnell reminds us, in the work of many Caribbean writers the connection to place is not only about being able to locate oneself in relation to geography but also in relation to history (109) Remapping the Caribbean may indeed mean a closer look at geography: at topographical and other kinds of visual representations, at ecological contexts, at borders beyond beaches, interrogating what such representations encode, and the aesthetic and historical contexts--global in provenance--that shaped them. You ll find no finger posts to point you to our place," says the narrative voice in Erna Brodber s Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home (1980). I wish us all inspiration, generosity, rigor and vision as we embark on the job of finding, checking and if necessary erecting new finger posts to our place in Caribbean literary history. Journal of West Indian Literature

12 You ll find no finger posts to point you to our place 31 WORKS CITED Best, Lloyd. Historiography and Society in the Caribbean Colonies of Exploitation. 12 th Annual Elsa Goveia Memorial Lecture, The University of the West Indies, Cave Hill (October 13, 1994). Print. Donnell, Alison. Twentieth-Century Caribbean Literature: Critical Moments in Anglophone Literary History. London: Routledge, Print. Hall, Stuart. Cultural Identity and Diaspora. Colonial Discourse & Postcolonial Theory: A Reader. Eds. Patrick Williams & Laura Chrisman. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, Print. Miller Powell, Joan. Hybrid Inventiveness: Caryl Phillips Poetics of Displacement. PhD Diss, Department of Literatures in English, The University of the West Indies, Mona Campus, Print. Phillips, Caryl. A New World Order. London: Vintage, Print Correspondence with E. O Callaghan (February 8, 2006). Pulitano, Elvira. I am of, and not of, this place : Caribbean Dis/locations in the Work of Jamaica Kincaid and Caryl Phillips, The Society for Caribbean Studies Annual Conference Papers, Sandra Courtman, ed. Vol. 6 (2005) < Puri, Shalini. The Caribbean Postcolonial: Social Equality, Post-Nationalism and Cultural Hybridity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, Print. Volume 18 Number 2 April 2010