by Manjit Handa
The exploration of history, nationalism, identity, myth and legends raises some queries and possible answers and conclusions concerning national consciousness/ nativism, which are significant to the study of any colonial and postcolonial writer.
A recent discussion of nativism condenses many current reproofs of cultural nationalism for its complicity with the terms of colonial discourse, citing its claims to ancestral purity and inscriptions of monolithic notions of identity as evidence of the failure to divest itself of the specific institutional determinations of the west. Although, allowing the profound political significance of the writings of the decolonized themselves, as subjects of a literature of their own, Anthony Appiah’s critique, which is principally directed against its current forms, extends to older articulations. In exposing the operation of a “nativist topology”—inside/ outside, indigene/ alien, western/ traditional—it installs a topology of its own, where the colonizer is the dynamic donor and the colonized is a docile recipient, where the west initiates and the native imitates. Thus, while the reciprocity of the colonial relationship is stressed, all power remains with western discourse. For example, “the over determined course of cultural nationalism . . . has been to make real the imaginary identities to which Europe has subjected us” (qtd. in Parry, “Resistance Theory” 177).
The rhetoric of “intact indigenous traditions” and the very concept of a colonial personality and a colonial past, thus, are European inventions; the colonized intellectual is Europhone, immersed in the language and literature of the colonized countries. These statements could be modulated without underplaying or obscuring a necessary registration of western discursive power. Europe’s fabrications of colonial countries were deflected and subverted by the colonized discourses in a way; any colonial country’s identity is the product of refusing Europe’s gaze and returning its own colonial look; Europhone colonials transgress their immersion in European languages and literatures, seizing and diverting vocabularies, metaphors and literary traditions.
The occasion for Appiah’s case against nativism is for countries which have been colonies and which invite censure for taking an unqualified position on cultural autonomy—but its object is a critique of cultural nationalism’s entrapment in a reverse discourse: “Railing against the cultural hegemony of the West, the nativists are of its party without knowing it. Indeed the very arguments, the rhetoric of defiance that our nationalists muster are . . . canonical, time tested . . . . In their ideological inscription, the cultural nationalists remain in a position of counter identification . . . which is to continue to participate in an institutional configuration—to be subjected to cultural identities they ostensibly decry . . . . Time and time again, cultural nationalism has followed the route of alternate genealogizing. We end up always in the same place; the achievement is to have invented a different past of it.” (qtd. in Parry, “Resistance Theory” 178)
The effect of this argument is to homogenize the varieties of nationalisms and to deny both originality and effectivity to its reverse discourses. Such a contention is disputed by Partha Chatterjee’s study which is appropriate enough. It encourages selective citation in the interest of relegating nationalist thought as mimetic and while recognizing the inherent contradiction of its reasoning within a framework of knowledge, serving a structure of power, it seeks to repudiate and is concerned to establish its difference; “ ‘Its’ politics impel it to open up that framework of knowledge that presumes to dominate it [the colonizer’s nationalism], to displace that framework, to subvert its authority, to challenge its morality” (qtd. in Parry, “Resistance Theory” 178). And all colonial literature is voicing precisely this viewpoint of Chatterjee. Fanon too believes that writings or “literature of combat” as he calls them, are important for they, take up arms on the side of the people (the colonized) and only such writings mould the national consciousness “giving it form and contours and flinging open before it new and boundless horizons” (The Wretched of the Earth 193).
But then, there are the issues of virulent nationalisms which have been wakened from their long slumber giving rise to an orgy of multi-cultural, ethno-entropic, postcolonialist politics of “identity”. The word “nation” presumably carries within it the idea of birth from a single source, implying the reproduction and proliferation of a people from a mythical, single source, a “father” and/ or “mother”. Thus, nationality connotes, if it is not identical with, ethnicity. An ethnic population presumably shares “blood”, or “genes”, which reinforces that elusive concept of “self” or “identity”, almost in the sense of being a part of a hive. That is to say, it is implied that an ethnicity contains some unique set of genes which, although mixed with other genes, imparts recognizable characteristics such as skin color, “Jewish” noses or “Germanic-Aryan” blond hair. But, since it has always been possible for people to mate and reproduce across “blood” or “genetic” lines and even travel across boundaries—this unity of “shared blood” or “genes” is problematic. It is very much possible that the any nationalism that we boast of could have been tainted long back. What are we left with then? Shared customs, language, ideas, beliefs—hypothetical, identical genes. This too is usually, but not always, tied to a specific sacred land—Israel for the Jews, Japan for the Japanese, Ireland for the Irish. It is here that certain citizens of nation-states can also be seen to be “citizens” of the Metastate—or the new multi-cultural state as Sol Yurick observes (“The Emerging Metastate” 216). What is the discourse, then, demanded of those like expatriate writers who permanently inhabit the Metastate?
It is required that one speak in the ultimate representational language, a discourse whose texts have been assigned magical, indeed alchemical power, a discourse which is given the power to reconvert not only the earth, but the entire cosmos, into an empyrean inhabited by all powerful angels who strive to live in relative immortality—pure capital?
What is still to be asked then is, what are the mentalities and imaginations, the day to day practices, the language, the logic of those who inhabit the Metastate, in contradistinction to those who—living in the “infernal realms”—stupidly insist on affirming their anti-progressive, contra-universal “identities”, their “differences”, their “cultures”? Are they purely a class, or do they have a culture, which is to say, a way of life, a language assumed to have sacred properties, a set of ritualized, day-to-day practices, which sets them apart? Are they within their own sacralized, underlying essentialist, religiously based mystique of identity, those who are “culture-bound”, counter-“Western”, counter-capitalist people? But let us remember that when gain is calculated, the same mathematics is used regardless of cultural differences.
At the heart of the Metastate lies a hidden theory of sacrifices, of eating, not of flesh and blood, but of life transmuted into energy (Yurick, “Metastate Versus the Politics of Identity” 216-217). The verso of these epiphanies to a future transcending ethnicity and nationalism is a measured demystification of Europe’s spiritual adventure undertaken at the expense of the rest of the world, as well as a call that the oppressed should slough off enslavement to its values by recognizing the failure of its claims. As Fanon suggests, “Let us try to create the whole man, whom Europe has been incapable of bringing to triumphant birth” (The Wretched of the Earth 253).
In turning away from Europe as a source and model of meanings and aspirations, Fanon’s last writings look not to the fulfillment of the Enlightenment’s ideals within the existing order, but to decolonization as the agency of a transfigured social condition; hence, holding instead, that vision of the anti-colonial struggle as a global emancipatory project and projecting the radical hope of oppositional humanism. What is less certain is whether the time for transnational politics had come when Fanon was writing, whether it has now, and whether the prospect of his post-nativist whole man is one that wholly delights (Parry 193).
A colonial and post colonial writer has established his own domain, revivified the language and brought much needed luster to a position known for its undistinguished occupants. He is the one forging ahead on the frontier of writing, less as the conscience of his race, than as the new voice of a decentered and disseminated culture. However, it must be confessed that he does also represent his race as the voice of the “native” land that had formerly been repressed even in that country’s renowned literature. He has learnt all his lessons, colonial and post colonial, but the question that one would be tempted to ask now is—has the colonizer realized his duties?
References
Appiah, Kwame A. In My Father’s House. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.
Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. Constance Farrington. London: Penguin Books, 1963.
Parry, Benita. “Resistance Theory/ Theorising Resistance or Two Cheers for Nativism.” Colonial Discourse/ Postcolonial Theory. Eds. Francis Barker, Peter Hulme and Margaret Iversen. Manchester University Press, 1994.
Yurick, Sol. “The Emerging Metastate Versus the Politics of Ethno-Nationalist Identity.” The Decolonization of Imagination: Culture, Knowledge and Power. Eds. Jan Nederveen Pieterse and Bhikhu Parekh. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995. 204-224.
