Postcolonialism Revisited , livre ebook

Postcolonialism Revisited
Writing Wales in English
CREW series of Critical and Scholarly Studies General Editor: Professor M. Wynn Thomas (CREW, Swansea University )
This CREW series is dedicated to Emyr Humphreys, a major figure in the literary culture of modern Wales, a founding patron of the Centre for Research into the English Literature and Language of Wales , and, along with Gillian Clarke and Seamus Heaney, one of CREW s Honorary Associates. Grateful thanks are due to the late Richard Dynevor for making this series possible.
Other titles in the series
Stephen Knight, A Hundred Years of Fiction (978-0-7083-1846-1)
Barbara Prys-Williams, Twentieth-Century Autobiography (978-0-7083-1891-1)
Kirsti Bohata, Postcolonialism Revisited (978-0-7083-1892-8)
Linden Peach, Contemporary Irish and Welsh Women s Fiction (978-0-7083-1998-7)
Chris Wiggington, Modernism from the Margins (978-0-7083-1927-7)
Sarah Prescott, Eighteenth-Century Writing from Wales (978-0-7083-2053-2)
Hywel Dix, After Raymond Williams: Cultural Materialism and the Break-Up of Britain (978-0-7083-2153-9)
Matthew Jarvis, Welsh Environments in Contemporary Poetry (978-0-7083-2152-2)
Harri Roberts, Embodying Identity: Representations of the Body in Welsh Literature (978-0-7083-2169-0)
Postcolonialism Revisited

Writing Wales in English
KIRSTI BOHATA
Kirsti Bohata, 2004 Cover image: WeleRith...Island Heart (2002-3) Oil on Canvas, Collection Beti George. Photograph, Pat Aithie.
First published in 2004 by the University of Wales Press. Reprinted 2009.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 or under the terms of a licence issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency Ltd, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London, EC1N 8TS. Applications for the copyright owner s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to The University of Wales Press, 10 Columbus Walk, Brigantine Place, Cardiff, CF10 4UP. www.uwp.co.uk
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-0-7083-1892-8 e-ISBN 978-1-78316-355-7
The right of Kirsti Bohata to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77, 78 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
For Bren and Vlad
C ONTENTS
General Editor s Preface
Acknowledgements
1 Theoretical Contexts
2 Stereotypes of Alterity: Race, Sexuality and Gender
3 En-gendering a New Wales: Nationalism, Feminism and Empire in the Fin de Si cle
4 The Battle for the Hills: Politicized Landscapes and the Erasure of Place
5 Devices of Otherness ? Code-switching, Audience and the Politics of Language
6 Hybridity and Authenticity
Notes
Bibliography
G ENERAL E DITOR S P REFACE
The aim of this series is to produce a body of scholarly and critical work that reflects the richness and variety of the English-language literature of modern Wales. Drawing upon the expertise both of established specialists and of younger scholars, it will seek to take advantage of the concepts, models and discourses current in the best contemporary studies to promote a better understanding of the literature s significance, viewed not only as an expression of Welsh culture but also as an instance of modern literatures in English world-wide. In addition, it will seek to make available the scholarly materials (such as bibliographies) necessary for this kind of advanced, informed study.
M. Wynn Thomas CREW (Centre for Research into the English Literature of Wales) Swansea University
A CKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Many people have helped me over the course of the research and writing of this book, and I would like to thank friends and colleagues who have offered welcome encouragement and invaluable advice. I am indebted to Professor M. Wynn Thomas for his expertise, generosity and for his ability to inspire and without whom this book would not have been written. I would also like to thank Jane Aaron, Tony Brown, Ann Heilmann, Ursula Masson, Christopher Meredith and Jeni Williams for their help over the last few years. I am grateful to Tim Chamberlain, at Exisle Press, Auckland, for help in locating some New Zealand texts and to Eddie Morgan and Rhys Huwyn for help with translation. Most of all, however, my love and thanks to Ian Jones, for his support and tolerance.
I would like to acknowledge the support of the University of Wales, in the form of a bursary, which enabled me to carry out the bulk of this research. Parts of this book have previously appeared, in an earlier form, in the following publications: Welsh Writing in English: A Yearbook of Critical Essays 6 (2000); Nations and Relations: Writing Across the British Isles , edited by Tony Brown and Russell Stephens (Cardiff: New Welsh Review, 2000); Rhys Davies: Decoding the Hare , edited by Meic Stephens (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2001); Women s History Review 11, 4 (2002); A Tolerant Nation?: Exploring Ethnic Diversity in Wales , edited by Charlotte Williams, Neil Evans and Paul O Leary (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2003); The Journal of New Zealand Literature (2003). I am grateful to the editors and publishers for permission to incorporate those materials into this study.
I would like to thank Gwydion Thomas for allowing me to quote from a number of R. S. Thomas s poems ( 2001 Kunjana Thomas) including: Out of the Hills , A Peasant , A Priest to His People , The Airy Tomb , and A Labourer , from The Stones of the Field (Carmarthen: The Druid Press, 1946); Valediction from An Acre of Land (Carmarthen: The Druid Press, 1952); The Last of the Peasantry , from Song at the Year s Turning (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1955); Green Categories , Absolution , On Hearing a Welshman Speak and Meet the Family from Poetry for Supper (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1958); A Welsh Testament , Those Others , Too Late , and Portrait from Tares (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1961); Afforestation from The Bread of Truth (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1963); Reservoirs from Not That He Brought Flowers (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1968). All these poems are reproduced in Collected Poems 1945-1990 (J. M. Dent, 1993). I am also grateful to Meic Stephens for permission to quote from Harri Webb s Above Tregaron , from The Green Desert : Collected Poems 1950-1969 (Llandysul: Gomer, 1969), Meic Stephens.
1
Theoretical Contexts

Postcolonial criticism bears witness to the unequal and uneven forces of cultural representation involved in the contest for political and social authority within the modern world order. Postcolonial perspectives emerge from the colonial testimony of Third World countries and the discourses of minorities within the geopolitical divisions of East and West, North and South.
Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture 1
Postcolonial perspectives emerge, Homi Bhabha declares in the quotation above, from the colonial testimony of Third World countries . Bhabha s use of terminology such as Third World and especially his references to geopolitical binaries of East and West, North and South now seem dated. Within the mainstream of postcolonial studies these simplistic categories have long since been challenged. Furthermore, from wherever postcolonial perspectives first emerged they have been quickly recognized, and postcolonial theory embraced, in quarters that have sometimes surprised and even angered orthodox postcolonialists. But if the second part of Bhabha s quotation highlights how far postcolonial studies have travelled in the past decade, then the first sentence (which places an examination of the unequal and uneven forces of cultural representation at the centre of postcolonialism) is testimony to the enduring and pressing relevance of such perspectives today.
What postcolonialism offers, in addition to a collection of complex theoretical tools, is a network of thematic concerns to which post-colonial writers return again and again. These are often bound up with specific anti-colonial struggles, the articulation of structures of domination (internal and external), the decolonization of the mind (to use Ngugi s phrase), and so on. In its engagement with cultural, geographical, political, gendered, sexual and temporal specificities, postcolonial writing (be it creative, academic or political) may be read as forming complex discourses which deconstruct and reimagine personal, cultural and national identities. The wide appeal of postcolonialism is surely due in no small part to this concern with shifting identity, with re-membering the self, and is of immediate relevance to and for a nation such as Wales, which has relied in recent centuries on a fairly self-conscious imagining of nation. It is therefore not surprising that the concerns of postcolonial writers and theorists from elsewhere chime so resonantly with the concerns of a significant number of writers from Wales. Before going on to engage with some examples of Welsh writing in English more closely, this chapter offers a brief introduction to some of the ways in which we might approach the notion of a postcolonial Wales and offers some preliminary observations on the way the Welsh model might be seen to challenge some postcolonial orthodoxies.
Postcolonialism refers, primarily, to the study of colonial/post-colonial (that is, post-independence) 2 situations. Postcolonial studies encompass history, economics, colonial and imperial discourses, the condition of colonized peoples, strategies of decolonization, and so on; literary criticism directly engaged with post-colonial writing in any language, but most commonly in a European language; and