Post-Colonial Literatures , livre ebook

Post-Colonial
Literatures:
Expanding the Canon
Deborah L. Madsen
Pluto PressPost-Colonial
Literatures
Expanding the Canon
Edited by
Deborah L. Madsen
Pluto P Press
LONDON • STERLING, VIRGINIAFirst published 1999 by Pluto Press
345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA
and 22883 Quicksilver Drive,
Sterling, VA 20166–2012, USA
Copyright © Deborah L. Madsen 1999
The right of the individual contributors to be identified as
the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance
with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 0 7453 1515 1 hbk
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Post-colonial literatures : expanding the canon / edited by Deborah L.
Madsen.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 0–7453–1515–1 (hbk)
1. Commonwealth literature (English)—History and criticism.
2. Literature and society—English-speaking countries—History—20th
century. 3. American literature—Minority authors—History and
criticism. 4. English literature—Foreign countries—History and
criticism. 5. English literature—20th century—History and
criticism. 6. Decolonization in literature. 7. Ethnic groups in
literature. 8. Minorities in literature. 9. Canon (Literature)
I. Madsen, Deborah L.
PR9080.P55 1999
820.9'9171241—dc21 99–21628
CIP

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Printed in the EC by TJ International, PadstowContents
1 Beyond the Commonwealth: Post-Colonialism and
American Literature 1
Deborah L. Madsen
2 Post-Colonialism in the United States: Diversity or
Hybridity? 14
Karen Piper
3 Ethical Reading and Resistant Texts 29
Patricia Linton
4 Fractures: Written Displacements in Canadian/US Literary
Relations 45
Richard J. Lane
5 The Rhythm of Difference: Language and Silence in
The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith and The Piano 58
Marion Wynne-Davies
6 Locating and Celebrating Difference: Writing by
South African and Aboriginal Women Writers 72
Gina Wisker
7 Coming in From the Margins: Gender in Contemporary
Zimbabwean Writing 88
Pauline Dodgson
8 The Memory of Slavery in Fred D’Aguiar’s Feeding the Ghosts 104
Gail Low
9 ‘Versioning’ the Revolution: Gender and Politics in Merle
Collins’s Angel 120
Suzanne Scafevi POST-COLONIAL LITERATURES
10 Erupting Funk: The Political Style of Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby
and The Bluest Eye 133
Alan Rice
11 Afro-Hispanic Literature and Feminist Theories: Thinking
Ethics 148
Rosemary Geisdorfer Feal
12 Chicano/a Literature: ‘An Active Interanimating of
Competing Discourses’ 164
Candida N. Hepworth
13 Border Theory and the Canon 180
Debra A. Castillo
14 Racialism and Liberation in Native American Literature 206
Lee Schweninger
15 Ants in the System: ‘Thinking Strongly’ about Native
American Stories 218
Robert Gregory
List of Contributors 226
Index 229Acknowledgements
The editor and publishers are grateful to Baobab Press for permission
to quote from Chenjerai Hove’s novel Bones (Harare, 1988) and Yvonne
Vera’s novel Without a Name (Harare, 1994), and HarperCollins Publishers
Inc. for permission to quote from Barre Toelken’s essay ‘Seeing with a
Native Eye’ in Seeing with a Native Eye, ed. Walter Holden Capps,
copyright Walter Holden Capps, 1976.
vii1
Beyond the Commonwealth:
Post-Colonialism and
American Literature
Deborah L. Madsen
Despite a great deal of discussion about metaphors of centre versus
margin and metropolis versus outpost or offshoots, the post-colonial
canon remains comprised both of privileged texts and also of privileged
national and regional literatures: the English-language literatures of
Africa, India, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South-East Asia, and the
Caribbean. It is obvious from its geo-literary composition that the
development of this body of writing as ‘post-colonialism’ arose out of
earlier models of ‘Commonwealth Literature’ and the ‘New Literatures
in English’ and ‘World Literature in English’ paradigms. The reinvention
of these models under the term ‘post-colonialism’ has, then, involved
the negotiation of a very considerable historical legacy. Contemporary
post-colonial theory and criticism comprises a diverse field which does,
however, reveal two dominant approaches: the text-led criticism
deriving from Commonwealth literary studies and the highly theoretical
discourses that are indebted to poststructuralism in particular and in
general a whole range of contemporary critical theorizing. It is the
criticism of texts that has come to operate largely within an inherited
definition of what constitutes the post-colonial, with theory operating
as a kind of meta-discourse that assumes a given canon of post-colonial
texts. This inherited definition, derived as it is from Commonwealth
literary study, omits reference to the ethnic literatures of the United
States as making a significant impact upon thinking about and
representations of post-coloniality as a transnational condition. These issues
are taken up in more detail below in terms of the state of post-colonial
study and the potential of a comparative literary methodology to offer
a fruitful way forward.
12 POST-COLONIAL LITERATURES
I should hasten to say that it is not only ‘Commonwealth’ or
‘postcolonial’ critics but Americanists as well who seek to distinguish
American literature from the emerging canon of post-colonial literature
and keep the two quite distinct as areas of knowledge. I have heard
expressed repeatedly the objection that there is nothing ‘post’-colonial
about the situation of Native American peoples, who remain as
thoroughly colonized now as at any time in the past. However, it seems
to me that in this respect Native Americans have much in common with
Australian Aboriginal peoples and New Zealand Maoris, who in exactly
the same ways are threatened with erasure by a dominant white settler
culture. It is this kind of comparative thinking that informs this volume.
The writings gathered here cover a range of issues, authors and national
literatures in order to contextualize the ethnic literatures of the United
States as part of the developing field of post-colonial studies. Each
chapter deals with a specific area, problem or theme, providing coverage
of the post-colonial field and also working to integrate a broader
conception of North American literatures (beyond only the Canadian)
into the existing post-colonial paradigm and incidentally to enrich
conceptions of what is American literary expression.
The motive driving these individual writings and the book as a whole,
then, is the desire to revise and expand the post-colonial paradigm to
accommodate the contributions of such colonized peoples as Native
Americans, Chicano/as, Afro-Hispanic and African-American peoples.
The chapters are arranged in a sequence that develops its own logic to
emphasize precisely this project. Abstract theoretical issues around
multiculturalism, reading practices and resistant texts that are so much
a part of contemporary thinking about post-colonialism are raised by
Karen Piper and Patricia Linton in the opening chapters. The chapters
that follow then pursue the particularity of post-colonial writing
through consideration of key national and ethnic literatures, and the
most significant writers within each of these areas: Patricia Linton’s
discussion of the Native Canadian writer Thomas King is followed by
Richard Lane’s consideration of US–Canadian literary relations. Marion
Wynne-Davies then turns to key ‘white’ Australian and New Zealand
texts and Gina Wisker takes up the ‘black’ post-colonial in her chapter
on Australian Aboriginal and black South African women writers.
Zimbabwean women writers provide the focus of Pauline Dodgson’s
chapter; the issues of slavery and the black diaspora are taken up first
by Gail Low in her discussion of Fred D’Aguiar’s work, then Suzanne
Scafe in her chapter on Merle Collins, and then in Alan Rice’s chapter
on Toni Morrison. The focus of the book shifts perceptibly to America
in the chapters that follow Alan Rice. Rosemary Feal links the black and
Hispanic discourses of America in her discussion of Afro-Hispanic
writing. The position of the colonized Hispanic peoples of the UnitedBEYOND THE COMMONWEALTH 3
States is considered in the two chapters that follow: Candida Hepworth
on Chicano/a writing and Debra Castillo on the theory and writing of
the US–Mexican border. The collection concludes with an appropriate
focus on the most obviously colonized ethnic group within America:
the indigenous peoples who, we are reminded, do not form a
homogenous group. The comparative methodology offered by
postcolonialism provides a challenging point of departure for consideration
of the nature of Native American literary expression. Lee Schweninger
looks at the issue of racialism as a part of the substance of Gerald
Vizenor’s Chippewa expression, and Robert Gregory offers an overview
of story-telling as a Native, as opposed to Western, expressive form.
Gregory ends his discussion with the example of Thomas King, the
Native North American writer with whom Patricia Linton began, thus
bringing the argument of this book full circle, uniting the Canadian
Commonwealth with the American post-colonial and demonstrating
the power of this union.
The design of the book attempts to represent the post-colonial
literatures of North America in relation to more familiar (British
Commonwealth) post-colonial areas, such as Caribbean, Australasian
and African writing, and in relation to the theoretical framework of
postcolonial studies. In what follows I would like to consider some of the
details of this theoretical framework, especially issues that appear as
motifs throughout the book, beginning with the rationale offered for
the exclusion of the United States from the par