The Imperfect Longing

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I gave a conference paper on (Re)Mapping the Black Atlantic at DePaul University in 2013. It was on the anniversary of Paul Gilroy’s seminal work The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness. I spoke on Sam Selvon’s short novel The Lonely Londoners and the idea of a desiring language – one that Frantz Fanon named as the urgency of ‘reciprocal recognitions.’ The conference paper was published just a month ago in African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal, a British journal.

The full-text of the article is here!
“The imperfect longing: Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners and the dance of doubt.”

The Idea of Europe

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One of my favorite seminars to teach at Hampshire is a close study of the contemporary European novel. Of course, I have to be very selective and attend to the limitations on text length imposed by a 14-week semester. Each time that I have offered this seminar, I switch up the novels. It keeps me on my toes and it also energizes me around new subtexts emerging from European literature. I always begin with Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia. Students can immediately engage with Karim Amir’s announcement that he is “…a funny kind of Englishman.”

We’ve moved around quite a bit in this seminar since 2009. Michel Houellebecq’s The Elementary Particles. Caryl Phillips’s Foreigners. Andrea Levy’s Small Island. Christoph Ransmayr’s The Last World. W.G Sebald’s The Immigrants. David Grossman’s See Under: Love.

The current reading list for the seminar has been quite stable. Apart from Kurieshi’s novel, I’ve included  Elfriede Jelinek’s The Piano Teacher, Imre Kertész’s Fatelessness, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go and Orhan Pamuk’s The White Castle. 

Future novelists that I want to include will expand what we  understand as European literature. In this case, I am thinking about the paucity of women writings in the seminar. One of my lazy reasons relies on the extravagant page count of many novels by women writing Europe:  Zadie Smith, A.S. Byatt, Sarah Waters, Anita Desai, for example. In the next offering, the seminar will focus on how women writers conceive of Europe. This brings me into territories that allows a deeper historical sensibility to emerge – one that is gendered, raced and classed.

Toni Morrison on Language

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The language must be careful and must appear effortless. It must not sweat. It must suggest and be provocative at the same time. It is the thing that black people love so much—the saying of words, holding them on the tongue, experimenting with them, playing with them. It’s a love, a passion. Its function is like a preacher’s: to make you stand up out of your seat, make you lose yourself and hear yourself. The worst of all possible things that could happen would be to lose that language. There are certain things I cannot say without recourse to my language. It’s terrible to think that a child with five different present tenses comes to school to be faced with those books that are less than his own language. And then to be told things about his language, which is him, that are sometimes permanently damaging. He may never know the etymology of Africanisms in his language, not even know that “hip” is a real word or that “the dozens” meant something. This is a really cruel fallout of racism.
“The Language Must Not Sweat,” Toni Morrison (New Republic, March 21, 1981)

Thanks to my colleague Dr. Sonya Donaldson for bring this passage to me.

My Upcoming Seminars

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Fall 2014
Reading Generically: Modern Short Prose
Disturbing the Peace: Baldwin, Morrison, and a Black Literary Tradition

Spring 2015
Representing Reality: The Literature of Kleist and Kafka
The Idea of Europe: Readings in the 20th Century Novel

Fall 2015
Writing from the Diaspora: Readings in Contemporary Women’s Fiction
Reading Generically: Weird Fictions

Spring 2016
An Introduction to Literary Studies: 20th Century Caribbean Literature
Narrative Frustration

Identity as Cultural Production in Andrea Levy’s ‘Small Island’

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This is an article that was published in 2012 after a truly rigorous peer review process.

Identity as Cultural Production in Andrea Levy’s Small Island

Abstract:
Andrea Levy’s Small Island (2004) presents a counter-history of the period before and after World War II (1939-1945) when men and women from the Caribbean volunteered for all branches of the British armed services and many eventually immigrated to London after the war officially ended in 1945. Her historical novel moves back and forth between 1924 and 1948 as well as across national borders and cultures. Levy’s novel, written more than fifty years after the first Windrush arrival, creates a common narrative of nation and identity in order to understand the experiences of Black people in Britain. Small Island—structured around four competing voices whose claims of textual, personal and historical truth must be acknowledged—refuses to establish a singular articulation of the experience of migration and empire. In this essay, I focus on discrete moments in the “Prologue” in Levy’s Small Island in order to think through the formation of discursive identity through the encounter with others and the necessity of accommodating difference. Small Island forecloses the possibility of addressing modern multiculturalism as a purported ‘happy ending’ in light of Levy’s formulation of the Windrush moment as disruptive, violent, and overwhelmed by flawed characters. Yet, through the space of writing, she also invites the reader to experience moments of encounter and negotiate the often competing claims on nationhood, citizenship, and culture.

 

 

On Stuart Hall, the Humanities and Humanism

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I need to process this but I must first offer it to you….
A terrific essay by Rebecca Wanzo of Washington University:
On the Passing of a Black Intellectual

As Hall once framed the argument in a discussion of his own field, “against the urgency of people dying in the streets, what in God’s name is the point?”

and later in the same essay:

As Stuart Hall once argued, “there is all the difference in the world between understanding the politics of intellectual work and substituting intellectual work for politics.” Being an intellectual does not stand in place of marching in the streets and legislative transformation. But with black history month upon us again, I think it is important to remember black thinkers who battled valiantly against naturalized narratives of racism, and to honor lesser-known teachers and writers who opened their students’ minds to worlds they had not imagined.

Which brings me to my favorite quote from Hall, whose work on popular culture is some of the most important scholarship in the field. In the essay “What is this ‘black’ in black popular culture?” he says that popular culture is not “the arena where we find out who we really are.” Instead, it is “where we discover and play with the identifications of ourselves, where we are imagined, where we are represented, not only to the audiences out there who do not get the message, but to ourselves for the very first time.”

Stuart Hall Died Today

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This is the obituary of the cultural critic and sociologist published today in The Guardian. A good document that explores some of the same themes that I do in my article on Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londonders. That is, the ‘familiar stranger,’ a trope that is the inheritance of diasporic peoples from the German sociologist, Georg Simmel. I’d like to link to a document that Hall wrote about the troubles with global capitalism and the New Left, The Kilburn Manifesto: our challenge to the neoliberal victory.

An important part of Hall’s work was in his leadership of the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies (closed in 2002) or British cultural studies. As a member of the Windrush generation, Hall departed Jamaica to attend university in England at Oxford. A Rhodes Scholar, he was in a different category than many other immigrants to Britain after WWII. He was a student-scholar rather than a member of the working class explosion of the immigrant population. However, Hall never kept that aspect of his political commentary far from his own identity and, in fact, embraced the strangeness of his own presence in England.

As I have written elsewhere, Hall made the observation that diaspora is a central part of the intellectual work on race and ethnicity and, as such, is one of the critical sites on which the question of cultural identity is articulated. Here, I cite Hall’s own words:

Having been prepared by colonial education, I knew England from the inside. But I’m not and never will be ‘English.’ I know both places intimately, but I am not wholly of either place. And that’s exactly the diasporic experience, far away enough to experience the sense of exile and loss, close enough to understand the enigma of an always-postponed ‘arrival’ (87).

Hall connects his move from Jamaica to England to Georg Simmel’s concept of the ‘familiar stranger.’ Alienation or deracination is the archetypal post-modern and post-colonial condition: Increasingly, it’s what everybody’s life is like. So that’s how I think about the articulation of the postmodern and the postcolonial. Postcoloniality, in a curious way, prepared one to live in a ‘postmodern’ or a diasporic relationship to identity…Since migration has turned out to be the world-historical event of late modernity, the classic postmodern experience turns out to be the diasporic experience (88).

From Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. London: Routledge, 1996 as cited in Empire Windrush: Fifty Years of Writing about Black Britain [London: Phoenix Books,1999, ed. and intro. Onyekachi Wambu]

Stuart Hall

The “Unhomely”

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Much of my writing and teaching gravitates toward the idea of the unhomely. I take it from Homi Bhabha and Martin Heidegger as cited in the introduction to Bhabha’s The Location of Culture:

To be unhomed is not to be homeless, nor can the ‘unhomely’ be easily accommodated in that familiar division of social life into private and public spheres. The unhomely moment creeps up on you stealthily as your own shadow and suddenly you find yourself… taking the measure of your dwelling in a state of ‘incredulous terror.’ And it is at this point that the world first shrinks… and then expands enormously… The recesses of the domestic space become sites for most intricate invasions. In that displacement, the borders between home and world become confused:  and, uncannily, the private and the public become part of each other, forcing upon us a vision that is as divided as it is disorienting.

—

Although the ‘unhomely’ is a paradigmatic colonial and post-colonial condition, it has a resonance that can be heard distinctly, if erratically, in fictions that negotiate the powers of cultural difference in a range of transhistorical sites.

 

Narrating the Nation

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From “Introduction: narrating the nation” by Homi K. Bhabha, in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha

Nations, like narrative, lose their origins in the myths of time and only fully realize their horizons in the mind’s eye. Such an image of the nation–or narration–might seem impossibly romantic and excessively metaphorical, but it is from those traditions of political thought and literary language that the nation emerges as a powerful historical idea in the west. An idea whose cultural compulsion lies in the impossible unity of the nation as a symbolic force. This is not to deny the attempt by nationalist discourses persistently to produce the idea of the nation as a continuous narrative of nation progress, the narcissism of self-generation, the primeval present of the Volk. ….

What I want to emphasize in that large and liminal image of the nation with which I began is a particular ambivalence that haunts the idea of the nation, the language of those who write of it and the lives of those who live it. It is an ambivalence that emerges from a growing awareness that, despite the certainty with which historians speak of the ‘origins’ of nation as a sign of the ‘modernity’ of society, the cultural temporality of the nation inscribes a much more transitional social reality.

Benedict Anderson [in his book Imagined Communities ] expresses the nation’s ambivalent emergence with great clarity:

The century of the Enlightenment, of rationalist secularism, brought with it its own modern darkness…[Few] things were (are) suited to this end better than the idea of nation. If nation states are widely considered to be ‘new’ and ‘historical’, the nation states to which they give political expression always loom out of an immemorial past and…glide into a limitless future. What I am proposing is that Nationalism has to be understood, by aligning it not with self-consciously held political ideologies, but with large cultural systems that preceded it, out of which–as well as against which–it came into being. (19)

The nation’s ‘coming into being’ as a system of cultural signification, as the representation of social life rather than the discipline of social polity, emphasizes this instability of knowledge….In Hannah Arendt’s view, the society of the nation in the modern world is ‘that curiously hybrid realm where private interests assume public significance’ and the two realms flows unceasingly and uncertainly into each other ‘like waves in the never ending stream of the life-process itself’. No less certain is Tom Nairn, in naming the nation ‘the modern Janus’, that the ‘uneven development’ of capitalism inscribes both progression and regression, political rationality and irrationality in the very genetic code of the nation. This is a structural fact to which there are no exceptions and ‘in this sense, it is an exact (not a rhetorical) statement about nationalism to say that it is by nature ambivalent.’

History and Movement

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Times would pass, old empires would fall and new ones take their place, the relations of countries and the relations of classes had to change, before I discovered that it is not the quality of goods and utility which matters, but movement; not where you are or what you have, but where you have come from, where you are going, and the rate at which you are getting there. – C. L. R. James in Beyond a Boundary (1963)