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State University of New York Press - Jaime Hanneken

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174 pages

English

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Imagining the Postcolonial is the first book dedicated to comparative analysis of Latin American and francophone postcolonial identity. Jaime Hanneken examines the disciplinary, theoretical, and political stakes involved in postcolonial identification in non-anglophone cultural spheres through readings of José Lezama Lima and Édouard Glissant's poetics of place, the symbolic value of Paris in modernista writing and in Congolese Sociétés des Ambianceurs et Personnes Élégantes (sape) rituals, and the scandals surrounding Rigoberta Menchú and Yambo Ouologuem. Hanneken argues that reorienting comparative critique to the priority of the object of study can transform rather than replicate existing conceptual formats of postcoloniality.
Introduction: Latin Americanism, Francophone Studies, and Identity Thinking

1. Double Articulation and Wishful Thinking

2. José Lezama Lima and the Gnosis of American Expression

3. Édouard Glissant’s Archipelic Thought and Second Nature

Excursus: Poetics and Place from Autochthony to Globality

4. Mikilistes and Modernistas in Paris: Consuming Modernity’s Capital

5. Minor Truths: Menchú and Ouologuem in the Multicultural Metropolis

Afterword: Commitment to the Negative

Notes
Works Cited
Index

Sujets

Latin American

Spain

Latin America

Spain (groupe)

Caribbean

Portugal

France

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Publié par	State University of New York Press
Date de parution	27 avril 2015
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781438456232
Langue	English

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Imagining the Postcolonial
Imagining the Postcolonial

D ISCIPLINE , P OETICS , P RACTICE IN L ATIN A MERICAN AND F RANCOPHONE D ISCOURSE
JAIME HANNEKEN
Published by
STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS
Albany
© 2015 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
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State University of New York Press
www.sunypress.edu
Production, Laurie D. Searl
Marketing, Kate R. Seburyamo
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hanneken, Jaime, 1978– author.
Imagining the postcolonial : discipline, poetics, practice in Latin American and Francophone discourse / Jaime Hanneken.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-5621-8 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4384-5623-2 (ebook)
1. Postcolonialism in literature. 2. Comparative literature. 3. Latin America—In literature. 4. French-speaking countries—In literature. I. Title. PN56.P555H36 2015 809'.93358—dc23 2014023235
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Introduction: Latin Americanism, Francophone Studies, and Identity Thinking
1 . Double Articulation and Wishful Thinking
2 . José Lezama Lima and the Gnosis of American Expression
3 . Édouard Glissant’s Archipelic Thought and Second Nature
Excursus: Poetics and Place from Autochthony to Globality
4 . Mikilistes and Modernistas in Paris: Consuming Modernity’s Capital
5 . Minor Truths: Menchú and Ouologuem in the Multicultural Metropolis
Afterword: Commitment to the Negative
Notes
Works Cited
Index
I NTRODUCTION
Latin Americanism, Francophone Studies, and Identity Thinking
For those of us writing today, a full generation after “postcolonial” first gained popular usage in English departments as a descriptor and then a category of literature and culture, it is not considered particularly insightful to assert that postcolonial studies is at a crossroads—or, to put it in starker language, in crisis, even “dead.” 1 Although conjecture on the end of the postcolonial from the past decade or so has appeared to imbue critical exchange with a renewed sense of urgency, in effect, one could argue that institutionally it has always moved along an axis of crisis and that it is precisely because of this movement that humanistic scholarship persists in discussing things in postcolonial terms at all. 2 Early polemics over the semantic and political intrigue or the rightful historical and geographic purview of the term are, in this sense, inseparable from more current concerns about its function as an organon of critique, in that both attempt to manage the conceptual identity of the postcolonial—what the postcolonial is as well as what it does.
This book deals with both senses of postcoloniality’s identity: It reassesses some of postcolonial critique’s common assumptions in its encounter with Latin American and francophone discourse, two areas that have largely remained on the sidelines of postcolonial studies’s historical and critical panorama. The analyses I undertake here are thus preoccupied not only with the predilect themes and problematics of postcolonial identity in cultural and literary expression but also with disciplinarity’s stakes in that identity, which are determined by the institutional and geopolitical places that house Latin Americanism and Francophone Studies as much as by the residual proprieties of postcolonialism as a metropolitan, anglophone, and twentieth-century construct. My analyses attempt to track these features simultaneously in theoretical approaches, regional historic cultural paradigms, and practices of recognition and valuation, keeping in mind how the same discursive properties work in tandem in each sphere. Through a combined inquiry into discipline, poetics, and practice, comparison may be able to pair the nominal or semantic decentering of the postcolonial—which has already removed a number of barriers to considering ecumenically what the postcolonial “is”—with a theoretical shake-up that has been slower to arrive.
Prospects of Postcolonial Comparison
It cannot be denied that the metacritical interrogation of what the postcolonial “is,” both as a project and as a corpus, has substantially dynamized its faculties: Some twenty-five years after it first circulated in English departments to theorize literary and cultural practices common to recently decolonized populations of the anglophone world, the postcolonial serves more as an intersectional site where scholarship on colonialism and imperialism in an ever-larger number of historical moments and places, read through the lenses of anthropology, geography, area and ethnic studies, feminism, and languages and literatures, finds common ground. So strong is the impetus to use the postcolonial label as a tool of comparison, in fact, that it has the aura of an antidote to pessimism about the term’s continued usefulness. Many roundtables, edited volumes, and conference panels that ponder the death of postcolonial theory seem to find the answer in interdisciplinary conversations and strategic or radical adaptations of its reticulation. 3 A central focus of postcolonial comparativism is the dialogue among marginalized or “minor” areas of study: In this vein of research one finds, for example, Françoise Lionnet and Shu-Mei Shih’s volume Minor Transnationalism or Gayatri Spivak’s essays in Other Asias , both of which are dedicated to excising Europe and the United States as the ground of comparative intelligibility. Their projects are aligned with Comparative Literature’s own reformulation into what Rey Chow has called “post-European Comp. Lit”: This entails wresting analysis from the European “grid of reference,” where the non-European becomes visible only as an ancillary element, and learning to “judg[e] the value of things horizontally, in sheer approximation to one another” (298).
My comparative study of francophonist and Latin Americanist uses of the postcolonial stems from a conviction of a piece with the post-European vision of these critics. But if we are to take seriously the assertion, implicit in the horizontal grid Chow speaks of, that comparison is good when it changes the operational as well as the thematic mode of the postcolonial—not just what it means but also how it means—then bringing these areas together must involve a new way of engaging their specificities: In other words, comparison should not simply add more examples to the same list of traits and practices readymade for the postcolonial; it must aim above all to transform the concept itself for the better. This is not the same as sizing up the differences between Latin Americanist, francophone, and mainstream postcolonial ideas about imperialism or opting between global and local theory. Rather, my objective is to mobilize those elements of the texts examined here that defy the equalizing gesture associated with the postcolonial in order to think the postcolonial against its identifications. For a provisional definition of the fundamental problematic of postcolonial identity as equivalence —both the individual equivalence invoked between people or things and their representations and the ordering of heterogeneous elements into uniform constituencies for knowledge, control, and exchange—it is useful to recall Graham Huggan’s influential distinction between postcolonialism and postcoloniality. 4 The first term refers to “a local assemblage of more or less related oppositional practices” ( The Postcolonial Exotic 6) that “posits itself as anti-colonial, and that works toward the dissolution of imperial epistemologies and institutional structures” (28); the second is “a global apparatus of assimilative, institutional/commercial codes” (6) that “is more closely tied to the global market, and that capitalises both on the widespread circulation of ideas about cultural otherness and on the worldwide trafficking of culturally ‘othered’ artifacts and goods” (28). Signaling the differences between the postcolonial’s two main “regimes of value”—in Bourdieusian terminology, the mechanisms by which various agents and institutions assign and endorse cultural capital—serves the larger purpose of unmasking how each is bound up with the other: The point, in Huggan’s words, is “that in the overwhelmingly commercial context of late twentieth-century commodity culture, postcolonialism and its rhetoric of resistance have themselves become consumer products” (6).
Huggan’s phrasing, to my mind, captures the core issue of contemporary debates in anglophone postcolonial studies. But one need not assume an exceptionalist stance to acknowledge that paradigms like Huggan’s “postcolonial exotic” grasp only partially the tensions of value-coding underlying the postcolonial tenor of Latin American and francophone discourse. The categories of postcolonialism and postcoloniality set up by Huggan, sedimented in multiple generations of Third World literature mass-produced for anglophone multicultural audiences, pertain to an established structure of recognition that gathers representatives of a territory coextensive with nineteenth-century British imperial holdings, who are groomed to frame their craft within a set of problematics—politics of language and translation, travails of decolonization, migration, racial and religious difference—that bind them collectively to the post