Chris Bongie
Department of English
Queen’s University
bongiec@qsilver.queensu.ca
Put me in a room with a great writer, I grovel. Put me in with Roseanne, I throw up.
–Jamaica Kincaid1
When Tina Brown asked Roseanne Barr to serve as guest consultant for a special women’s issue of The New Yorker in 1995, Antiguan-American novelist Jamaica Kincaid made her negative feelings crystal clear. She trashed Brown’s protégé in the most emphatic of terms–as my epigraph demonstrates–and eventually severed her decades-long ties with The New Yorker, accusing Brown of transforming that once venerable journal into “a version of People magazine.” In the following pages, I argue that Kincaid’s hostile reaction represents something more than an individual fit of pique on the part of a notoriously irascible and opinionated writer; rather, her nausea at the thought of being forced to occupy the same physical and textual space as Roseanne has much to tell us about the vexed, and very under-theorized, relations between postcolonial cultural producers (be they creative writers or academic theorists) and what is still often condescendingly referred to as mass culture. Kincaid’s testy comments direct us toward the surprisingly uncharted territory in which postcolonial and cultural studies (don’t yet) meet.
The one-sided confrontation between Kincaid and Roseanne can be read as emblematic of a failed dialogue between postcolonial and cultural studies. In Kincaid, we have a respected author of such postcolonial (or Afro-diasporic) “classics” as Annie John and In a Small Place, someone frequently lionized by critics as a writer who “speaks to and from the position of the other” (Ferguson 238). In Roseanne, we have a U.S. TV icon, someone who has also accumulated her fair share of academic plaudits from critics in disciplines such as women’s and cultural studies who have lauded “her subversive potential as a source of resistance and inspiration for feminist change” (Lee 96) or the way her show “potentially helps restore class visibility to the overwhelmingly middle-class world of television” (Bettie 142). While Roseanne may never have read Kincaid, the postcolonial author obviously feels that she has ingested enough of this media icon to pass definitive judgment on the degraded form of culture she represents: only those with “coarse and vulgar” taste, like Tina Brown, could possibly be drawn to such a nauseating figure as Roseanne.2
Revealingly, in voicing this negative evaluation of Roseanne, Kincaid seems compelled to preface it with the positive counterweight of groveling at the feet of a “great writer.” Kincaid has thus staked out a double position: one of power and contempt as regards the abject white woman she is condemning, but also one of deference to and emulation of an unnamed, unsexed, and unraced “great writer.” How are we to explain the hostility to an icon of mass culture on the postcolonial writer’s part, and the willingness to grovel before the idea of literary greatness? Both this hostility and this willingness must, at first blush, strike us as decidedly unexpected, given the strong tendency in postcolonial circles to question the legitimacy of the hierarchical thinking upon which Kincaid’s intertwined evaluations of Roseanne and great writers depends. As stated, a natural reaction to these comments would be to write them off as sports of Kincaid’s querulous nature that tell us nothing about postcolonial studies, its literatures, and its theories. I will, by contrast, be pursuing an “unnatural” counterargument based on the following intentionally provocative hypothesis: Kincaid’s double position, and the value judgments generating it, are in fact exemplary of the foundational bias of postcolonial literary studies, of its deep-rooted sense of distinction from the “coarse and vulgar” world of mass consumption.
The tension between popular culture and great writing evident in Kincaid’s evaluation of Roseanne by no means exhausts the nuances that can be read into her one-sided attack. The binary opposition Kincaid draws is complicated by the fact that she is herself a writer whose books have gained no small success in the literary marketplace. If Kincaid is not “popular” in the same sense that Roseanne is “popular,” she nonetheless has a proven track record as a bestselling author: she is a writer who not only generates “serious” articles by postcolonial critics but also frothy interviews in such places (ironically enough) as People magazine, and who has been deemed “worthy” of inclusion in a series like Critical Companions to Popular Contemporary Writers, where she takes her place beside the likes of Stephen King, Anne Rice, but also, intriguingly enough, Toni Morrison (see Paravisini-Gebert). Postcolonial and Afro-diasporic Kincaid may well be, but that has not stopped her from finding a place in the literary mainstream: or, to put it another way, she is (or, more exactly, can be read as) a middlebrow writer, one who takes some stylistic and ideological chances in her work but who also writes in such as a way as to be capable of pleasing a relatively broad audience. Kincaid’s distinction between the “great” writer and the “vulgar” mass media star cannot stand alone: it must be understood in conjunction with this second opposition between two different types of popularity, the middlebrow and the lowbrow.
Are these two types of popularity as easily separable from one another as one might wish (at least if one were a postcolonial defender of Kincaid), or is there a troubling complicity between them that needs to be thought through and perhaps even embraced? Might not the dramatic rejection of Roseanne on Kincaid’s part itself be nothing more than an anxious attempt–unconscious, calculated, or a mixture of both–to forestall any serious consideration of her own “popular” success, to fence off her own identity as a cultural producer from Roseanne’s, vaccinating herself against the latter by aggrandizing a sense of distinction that might ultimately be attributed to little more than the narcissism of small differences? Might not her middlebrow popularity be part of the very same media “buzz” as the lowbrow version she so disdainfully rejects?
This possible complicity, or (dis)connection, between two forms of popularity–what René Girard would refer to as their “double mediation”3–generates a second set of questions that needs to be addressed in tandem with those surrounding our initial opposition between “vulgar” popularity and “great” writing. How and where do the lowbrow and middlebrow modes of popularity intersect? Does it make any sense to speak of a writer like Kincaid as exemplifying the “middlebrow postcolonial,” given the apparent tension between the assimilative connotations of the first term and the resistant ones of the second? If there is such a thing as the middlebrow postcolonial, how is its popularity (or its potential for popularity) processed by postcolonial literary studies? What about the “lowbrow postcolonial”: is there such a thing (or such a process of reading), and if so, what is its relation not only to its middlebrow double but to the mass popularity of media icons like Roseanne or Jackie Collins?
Furthermore, to raise one last set of questions that has to be factored into the mix, what is the relation, or lack thereof, between all these forms of popularity (mass, lowbrow, middlebrow–or what I will be referring to collectively as the “inauthentically popular”) and that long-cherished ideological construct, a truly popular culture created and consumed by what Frantz Fanon was so fond of referring to as “the people”? Ideally neither degraded masses nor lowbrow or middlebrow consumers, the people–legitimate custodians of a traditional past or inspiriting lifeblood of a revolutionary future–might presumably be thought to have better and more “authentic” things to do with their time than watch Roseanne or read Annie John. In the failed dialogue between Roseanne and Kincaid, where are the people situated, presuming they even exist?
The three sets of questions I have just asked lay out a clear set of overlapping oppositions–the postcolonial versus the popular; the middlebrow versus the lowbrow, with specific reference to the postcolonial; and the inauthentically popular versus the “authentically popular”–that I will be addressing in the following very preliminary account of the foundational bias of postcolonial literary studies and its anxious and under-theorized relation to the empirical question of popularity. In the next section, I expand on the first of these questions, attempting to smoke out the bias toward great, or at least not bad, writing in postcolonial studies by briefly examining the case of a neglected Martiniquan novelist, Tony Delsham; in the section after that, I discuss the far-from-neglected Guadeloupean novelist Maryse Condé by way of expanding upon the distinction between the low-, the middle-, and the highbrow, and its unacknowledged importance to academic readers of postcolonial texts. After these two case studies, I conclude–aided by Graham Huggan’s groundbreaking The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (2001)–with some general considerations regarding what, if anything, cultural studies, with its concerted focus on the popular (in all its many forms), can contribute to our understanding of postcolonial studies, and indeed, to postcolonialism’s self-understanding. Will it help us imagine a room in which Roseanne and Jamaica Kincaid can meet with a new-found respect for one another, or at least without throwing up? And, to anticipate my unlikely point of arrival in this article, can we (re)imagine a place for the “great writer” in that very same room–if not at its center, then at least still within hearing of the less strained, more productive dialogue between cultural and postcolonial studies that I advocate in the following pages?
I. Pop Goes the Postcolonial: On (Not) Reading Tony Delsham
The idea for this article came to me in the summer of 1999, while doing research in Martinique. I found myself passing an idle hour in Fort-de-France’s most upscale bookstore, perusing the impressive amount of Caribbean literature and history for sale there. Two items on the bookshelves especially caught my attention. The first of these was a prominent display devoted to Dérives–a recently published novel by Tony Delsham, editor of the Martiniquan weekly Antilla. I have provided a brief account of Delsham’s novel elsewhere (“Street” 246-51), but the issue that I want to raise here revolves around Delsham himself, and his place–or lack thereof–in accounts of French Caribbean literature in particular, and francophone literature in general (to say nothing of that even broader and more nebulous discipline, postcolonial literary studies4). For many years now, Delsham has been among the most popular and visible writers in the French Antilles, if one judges popularity by the criterion of number of books sold.5 Given the fact of Delsham’s popularity, the question I found myself asking (and it is a question Delsham himself has repeatedly posed) is why no one pays any attention to him in francophone–much less postcolonial–studies, when so much critical ink has been spilled during the past decade over other prominent writers from the area like Edouard Glissant, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Maryse Condé.6 Surely, I asked myself, the popularity of Delsham’s many novels, which consistently deal with local issues close to the heart of his Antillean readers, tells us as much or more about the culture as do those other, sometimes more experimental but often very accessible narratives that have acquired an ever-growing reputation in France and North America? Surely a novel like Dérives is in many respects as, or even more, relevant an example of Martiniquan literature than, say, Chamoiseau’s Prix Goncourt-winning Texaco? I then found myself asking a question that is the obligatory rhetorical starting point of so much postcolonial literary criticism: why is a particular author ignored by the critical orthodoxy, and what nefarious circumstances are promoting the marginalization of this author and others like him?
One obvious factor in Delsham’s critical neglect doubtless involves the way his novels are marketed. A signal difference between Delsham and most of the luminous bodies in the firmament of Antillean literature is that the likes of Glissant and Condé benefit from their association with well-established Parisian publishing houses, whereas Delsham is self-published and the distribution of his books is largely a local affair, limited to the French Caribbean and certain parts of Paris; so, at a purely logistical level, it is hardly surprising he has been ignored.7 (To take this difference as a critical point of departure is, to be sure, to beg the question of how and why those other authors gained access to Parisian firms in the first place, and I will return to this question in my later discussion of the “certain quality” of Condé’s work.) The “indigenous” nature of the production and circulation of Delsham’s novels certainly helps explain his neglect, although one can easily imagine it becoming a major source of interest for some critics, who might want to take up Delsham’s cause and argue that this immersion in the local makes him more “authentic” than writers who have acquired an international audience. Complaints about the latter, cosmopolitan writers have, indeed, been repeatedly voiced in certain quarters in Martinique: the nationalist Guy Cabort-Masson has, for instance, lambasted Patrick Chamoiseau for complying with exoticizing Western notions about the Caribbean and “not writing for Martiniquans” (199). Such writers could well be regarded as appealing to “the ersatz nostalgia on which mass merchandising increasingly draws” (Appadurai 78). With his self-publishing and self-marketing approach, Delsham might conceivably be viewed as less subject to the collusions and compromises of this exoticizing nostalgia, and thus altogether more popular in the most positive (“authentic”) sense of the word since he has established a privileged relationship with a local readership–a readership that would not (at least according to this line of argument) be confused with the “assimilating” masses but that, rather, would be construed as forming part of the “oppositional” people, anchored in their “native” context and at a purifying distance from the global literary market and its ersatz commodities. For such critics, Delsham’s popularity in the French Caribbean might well be considered a vital source of distinction. The “writer as local hero” is, like the “writer as tragic exile,” the sort of script that postcolonial studies can live with–indeed, the sort of script it demands–and were a sociological consideration of production and consumption the only factor in deciding who is and is not worthy of being consecrated at the hands of postcolonial critics, it seems likely that Delsham would by now have been salvaged by a string of academics indignant at his marginalization.
Sociological considerations of this sort are not, however, the only factor in such decisions (indeed, it is part of my argument that such considerations are nowhere near as important as they should be to postcolonial studies). There are certainly any number of other reasons that might help explain why Delsham, despite his wide popularity in the French Caribbean, has not attracted any critical attention. To cite just one of these reasons, Delsham might well be viewed as falling short of postcolonialism’s decided “preference for perfect political credentials” (Donnell 102): notwithstanding his repeated stress on the need for class justice and his championing of a trendy cause like Créolité, the conciliatory position he consistently preaches in his novels and in his countless editorials for Antilla–where he styles himself an “advocate of love,” one stridently opposed to angry nationalists who argue their case at “the tribunal of history, which is the refuge of the castrated” (1 January 1999, 6)–does not offer the incendiary agenda that would be immediately attractive to francophone and postcolonial critics programmed to sing the praises of a “denunciatory tradition.”8
Delsham’s conciliatory “advocacy of love” may not be likely to win him a lot of fans amongst the advocates of denunciation, although one can certainly make the argument that his emphasis on cross-cultural understanding and “normalization” fits in with a recent turn toward “radically nonracial humanism” in postcolonial studies (Gilroy 15). However problematic his ideological positioning, though, it certainly cannot account in and of itself for the silence regarding his work: after all, a lot of ink has been spilled over V. S. Naipaul by critics who find his opinions on matters postcolonial utterly reprehensible. There must, in short, be a far stronger reason for Delsham’s exile from the mainstream of francophone criticism–a reason, I would argue, that extends well beyond the relatively narrow confines of French Caribbean literary studies and provides a conceptual base for the geographically wide-ranging but amorphous disciplines of francophone and, a fortiori, postcolonial studies. That reason, to put it bluntly, is this: Tony Delsham might be an energetic journalist, but he is a decidedly bad novelist.
Although it is a critical commonplace in postcolonial studies to lament the way in which marginalized writers have been misidentified as “bad” by uncomprehending elitist (neo-)colonialcritics, one would, to put it mildly, have to exercise a great amount of ingenuity in order to salvage Delsham’s novels on the basis of their literary value and exercise upon them in good faith any of the multitude of interpretive strategies through which a book’s “literariness” (or even its angry or sly resistance to Eurocentric ideas of “literariness”) can supposedly be confirmed. Delsham’s novels are so manifestly sub-literary that it is hardly surprising critics have ignored the rapidly proliferating mass of historical novels and romans à thèse he has produced and that they have, instead, devoted their critical energies to self-evidently “good” writers like Glissant, Chamoiseau, and Condé.9
Or, I should immediately add, these exclusionary practices are hardly surprising in a critical environment where any kind of premium is placed on literary value and where, indeed, the very fact of popularity (be it middlebrow or lowbrow) might be viewed with an Adorno-like suspicion. Hardly surprising, that is to say, if one has not abandoned oneself to the ostensibly “democratizing” insight–so prevalent in a lot of self-satisfied canon-bashing over the past several decades–that the very idea of literary value is nothing more than a cultural construction. Hardly surprising, if one has not fully absorbed what John Frow has isolated as “one of the fundamental themes of work in cultural studies”: namely, that to place the critical spotlight on popular culture is an excellent way of demonstrating the non-existence of its supposed antithesis, high culture, and of thereby showing us “that no object, no text, no cultural practice has an intrinsic or necessary meaning or value or function; and that meaning, value, and function are always the effect of specific social relations and mechanisms of signification” (61). Hardly surprising, in other words, if one remains committed to seemingly outmoded assumptions about the legitimacy of hierarchical distinctions between the good and the bad, the innovative and the conventional, masterworks and trash.
What is surprising, though, is that most of what we know as postcolonial studies actually takes place precisely in this value-affirming critical context–a context that some would call dated, Eurocentric, and (thus) morally reprehensible, but that I will simply refer to in more neutral terms as modernist. Postcolonial studies as one of the last redoubts of modernism? Postcolonial studies as fundamentally opposed to, rather than in accord with, a cultural studies ever intent on voiding texts of “intrinsic or necessary meaning or value or function” by privileging the “coarse and vulgar” likes of Roseanne or her pop-literary equivalents? Postcolonial critics as latter-day Adornos, turning their noses up at mass culture and groveling, à la Kincaid, in the presence of the highly serious and the complex, the unpredigested and non-standardized? This scenario might seem to fly in the face of “common sense” (which may well be another way of saying that it radically contests the dominant–at least in academic circles–“postcolonial ideology”10), but it seems to provide the only plausible explanation for how a popular writer like Delsham could be so dramatically shunted to the margins of an ostensibly margin-hugging discipline like postcolonial studies.
Two recent critiques of postcolonial theory can help us lay the foundation for an understanding of how this unlikely scenario might have come about: Emily Apter has disapprovingly commented on “postcolonial theory’s resistance to injecting itself with contemporaneity” (213), while Robert Young has pointed to the ways in which, largely due to Said’s textualist misappropriation in Orientalism of Foucault’s praxis-oriented idea of discourse, colonial discourse analysis has degenerated “into just a form of literary criticism that focuses on a certain category of texts” (394). Taken together, Apter’s critique of postcolonialism’s (and specifically Bhabha’s) insistence on the ways in which “‘time-lagged’ signification” continues to be “written out in postcolonial modernity” and Young’s critique of the bias toward texts (as opposed to everyday practices and material conditions) in colonial discourse analysis point the way toward an explanation for Delsham’s invisibility as an object of critical study. As a prerequisite for gaining institutional status in the 1980s, a geographically free-floating concept such as the “postcolonial”–even more open than its predecessor, Commonwealth studies, to the accusation of being little more than an empty abstraction–required something to unify it. While it might have seemed logical for this unifying force to have been supplied simply by “lived experience” and the geopolitical realities of colonial and postcolonial practice (as Young insists), the primary emphasis in fact came to be placed on the text, a text that could take any material form (postcolonial literature, painting, music, etc.) but that had to be read, and read in a certain “time-lagged” way, a modernist way. Lacking a “secure” grounding in any specific cultural territory,11 postcolonial studies anxiously, and anachronistically, attempted to find a home for its “unhomely” self in (a modernist idea of) the text–an idea inseparable from evaluative criteria that were elsewhere being seriously questioned by the relativizing outlook of both postmodernism and cultural studies.
What does this modernist idea of the text entail? As I see it, when it comes to the identification and positive evaluation of cultural texts, the twin directives of modernism were as follows: aesthetic resistance (promoting stylistic difficulty) and political resistance (promoting social radical change). While the preference might well have been for an ideal fusion of the two (as in Brechtian theatre, for instance), style and politics could, needless to say, be seen as superficially at odds with one another, as the modernist extremes of art for art’s sake and agitprop demonstrate. Notwithstanding this potential for division, the two directives had in common an emphasis on the production, and productivity, of resistance which ensured they would be if not always open allies then at least secret sharers. Not surprisingly, given postcolonial theory’s explicit origins in the anti-colonial movements of the early- to mid-twentieth century, the two main strands of that theory replicate this double directive of modernist thinking: on the one hand (the “high seriousness” hand), we have “master thinkers” like Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha, and on the other (the “resistance” hand), we have “engaged intellectuals” like Aijaz Ahmad and Benita Parry, with certain pioneering critics like Said occupying the vast middle ground between these two extremes.12 A similar broad distinction might be made by way of accounting for many of the seminal figures in postcolonial literature: a Wilson Harris or a J. M. Coetzee on the one hand, an Ngugi wa Thiong’o or a Michelle Cliff on the other, with a foundational figure like Chinua Achebe vacillating somewhere between these two poles.
The question is not so much what separates these two sides, but what holds them together, presuming anything does, and it has been my contention that one of the primary factors enabling their coming together as part of the supposedly emancipatory field of postcolonial studies is an inability to come to terms with “compromised,” inauthentically popular texts, as well as the audiences who take pleasure in consuming them.13 Regardless of one’s gut-level reaction to this admittedly schematic claim regarding the modernist/textualist underpinnings of postcolonial studies, it is obvious that a general account of this sort overlooks a number of essential distinctions in its attempt at conveying a sense of the “whole” picture (to cite only a few: the distinction between postcolonial theory and postcolonial literary studies, between postcolonial literature and other forms of cultural production, between postcolonial cultural production and other material practices, etc.). There are obvious problems with any unified account of postcolonialism–even if the very idea of postcolonial studies necessitates a belief in some such unity. For that reason, at this point in the article, having made a general and pointedly polemical claim about the foundational bias of postcolonial studies, I should clarify that what I say in the following section about the “middlebrow postcolonial” is most specifically addressed to the biases of postcolonial literary studies. However, before turning to my discussion of Maryse Condé as a writer who in many respects exemplifies this under-theorized “problem,” I must add one last nuance to my account of how modernism and its biases continue to structure our reception of postcolonial literature: namely, an hypothesis regarding how these biases have adapted to the relativizing inroads of postmodernism.
If there is something startling about my basic argument in this article, it is in large part because the modernist biases upon which I have insisted have been not only occluded but also attenuated in the reception of postcolonial texts. As modernism segued into postmodernism and its absolute meta-narratives became ever more relativized, modernist boundaries between the “authentic” and the “inauthentic” could not, given the openly hierarchical nature of such distinctions, be simply asserted as of old. If, for instance, the dual directives of modernism legitimized two very different but related types of ideal audience–on the one hand, the estranged intellectual still capable of appreciating highbrow texts in the wasteland of degraded “mass” culture (Adorno listening to atonal music) and, on the other, the “people” capable of resisting the threat of massification and answering the call either of the ancestral past (Senghor’s Africans) or the revolutionary future (Fanon’s Algerians)–it is now virtually impossible to envision such audiences without being accused of elitism, on the one hand, or idealism, on the other. What happened as the modernist meta-narratives gave way was that the boundaries demanded by these narratives shifted down (in the case of the first, elite audience) and across (in the case of the second, popular audience): in the most extreme, hyper-populist instances of this shift, the very idea of any distinction between “brows” gets erased, everything becoming part of the postmodern mix (the downward shift), and the idea of the popular ceases to be riven in two, the mere fact of popularity becoming the central point of critical interrogation and, often, cause for celebration (the crosswards shift).
Up to a point, postcolonial literary studies has gone along with this relativizing tendency: first, by assimilating the middlebrow and the highbrow, while nonetheless continuing to exclude the lowbrow from its field of vision; second, by continuing to celebrate authentic popularity, while tacitly accepting, without interrogating, the inauthentic popularity that is defined by market forces rather than by the resistant desires of the “people.” Postcolonial literary studies ostensibly writes back against the hierarchical distinctions of the “Western” canon and renders audible the silenced voices of marginalized peoples; in fact, in its unstated reliance on a high/middlebrow vision of literature and its reluctance to take inauthentic popularity into serious account, it perpetuates a watered-down version of canonical thinking and only bothers to give a voice to the “people” when they say, do, and consume the “right” thing. In the following discussion of Maryse Condé, I attempt to flesh out this claim with specific reference to the “problem” that middlebrow popularity poses the postcolonial ideology.
II. (Ab)errant Revisionism: Maryse Condé and the Middlebrow Postcolonial
To introduce my account of Condé as a middlebrow popular writer, I must return to that same Fort-de-France bookstore where I first came across Delsham’s Dérives. The display for his novel was not the only item that got me thinking that day about the possible (dis)connections between popular writing and the ostensibly populist but surreptitiously elitist field of postcolonial studies and its unavowedly modernist vision of literature. On one of the shelves reserved for inexpensive paperbacks, I noticed Condé’s La migration des coeurs (1995), a Caribbean reworking of Wuthering Heights. Translated into English by her husband Richard Philcox as Windward Heights in 1998 (with an impressive array of blurbs on the back cover from a “wide” range of sources such as The New York Times Book Review, the Village Voice, Black Issues Book Review, and the Multicultural Review), this novel indulges in one of postcolonial literature’s most time-honored discursive moves: revising a European novel from the colonial era. As I flipped through its pages I thought to myself, with no doubt reprehensible cynicism: “Well, here’s a text that’s guaranteed to generate its fair share of essays by critics intent either on trumpeting the resistant virtues of postcolonial revisionism or on questioning the author’s decision to entangle herself in colonial narratives (a passionate but superficial difference of critical opinion that, as René Girard taught me, hides an underlying identity of outlook).”
As I mused over the article-generating text in my hand, my attention was drawn to a nearby novel that was, like Condé’s, published by Robert Laffont in the Pocket format, and that thus bore–superficially at least–a rather close resemblance to Condé’s. What I was looking at, it turned out, was Marie-Reine de Jaham’s Le sang du volcan (1997), second in a trilogy entitled L’or des îles that chronicles the entirety of Martiniquan history. Although it is a well-known critical assumption that one should not judge a book by its cover,14 I could not help being struck by the fact that, at least up to a point, Condé and de Jaham were being marketed in a surprisingly similar fashion (see Figure 1).
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Figure 1
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On the one hand, Condé: among the most respected francophone Caribbean writers, someone who long ago became a “consecrated” author, in Bourdieu’s sense of the word (75-78, 120-25). And on the other…de Jaham: a writer perhaps best described as the Jackie Collins of French Caribbean historical fiction, a decidedly second-rate but prolific Martiniquan writer of the béké (native white) caste who has lived most of her life in France, and whose first novel, La grande béké (1989), caused a good deal of scandal amongst her caste when it came out and proved popular enough that it was eventually made into a movie for French TV (1997; director, Alain Maline). What could these two writers possibly have in common aside from their French Antillean origins?
“Not much of anything!” would be the obvious response. In terms of identity/politics, the differences seem self-evident: in Condé, we have a “black” woman who, despite her migrant life, has solid “roots” in her “native” land, is on the right side of the political fence when it comes to the issue of Guadeloupe’s independence, and yet uses her novels not as an excuse for making blunt political statements but rather as a forum for posing complex and irresoluble problems15; in de Jaham, we have a “white” woman who has lived most of her life in Paris and whose novels, notwithstanding the scandal they initially caused in béké circles, astoundingly repeat many of the ideological assumptions of nineteenth-century “creolist discourse,”16 redeploying any number of long-established clichés (both positive and negative) about Martinique and the central role of the békés in shaping the island’s history, and offering narrative closure in the form of straightforward appeals (in a novel like Le maître-savane, the sequel to La grande béké) to the healing virtues of political autonomy for the islands, albeit always within the framework of the French nation. Very different writers, in short. Indeed, even the marketing similarities that initially struck me are, if one takes a closer look, only “skin-deep”: for instance, the exoticizing cover images that accompany both texts are supplemented, in de Jaham’s case, by the word “roman,” which–as a perusal of the novel’s back pages shows–marks the fact that it belongs to a series featuring writers such as Collins and Danielle Steel; there is no equivalent list at the back of Condé’s Laffont novels, presumably signaling the distinctive as opposed to generic nature of her romans (which would also appear to legitimize using a smaller print font for her novels than for de Jaham’s). To acknowledge “differences” such as these does not, however, absolve us from thinking through the evident similarities in the paratextual material out of which, alone, our awareness of those differences emerges17; these similarities locate the two texts, and their authors, in an uncomfortable relation made possible by their relative marketability and draw our attention to the under-theorized affinities and antagonisms of lowbrow and middlebrow popularity in a postcolonial context.
Given Condé’s preeminent status as a francophone writer, to think of her and de Jaham as occupying significantly overlapping spheres of production, circulation, and consumption seems almost heretical, and yet why should this appear such a strange coupling to us? One could certainly argue for specific points of intersection between these two prolific novelists–for instance, the way that de Jaham’s career trajectory seems almost parodically to mirror Condé’s, debuting with a scandalous first-person narrative and then moving on to recuperative historical sagas, just as Condé launched her career as a novelist with Hérémakhonon and went on to write the Segu cycle–but such arguments are of much less interest than the plain fact that both women are among the bestselling francophone writers with a Caribbean pedigree, each “worthy” of being marketed in Laffont’s Pocket collection, and each ubiquitous in Antillean bookstores.
After all, Condé is not simply a writer venerated by (primarily) North American francophone and postcolonial critics. She is also, like Kincaid, the author of accessible novels that have frequently (especially in France, and especially in the 1980s) found a broad, and in the case of the multi-volume Segu diptych, an indisputably bestseller audience. A novel like I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem (1986; trans. 1992), has made a significant impact on everyday readers in the States, finding its way into the substantial and growing market for informative fictional texts about the Afro-diasporic experience. Condé’s novels get reviewed in all the right places in France, and translations of her work are discussed in such places as USA Today and the Washington Post.18 The structural finesse and linguistic experimentation of many of her novels notwithstanding, they are, if not page-turners à la de Jaham, nonetheless, to cite the blurb from the Multicultural Review on the back of Windward Heights, “engaging and well-written book[s] that [are] difficult to put down.” In sum, Condé is in many respects the very model of a middlebrow writer, with all the stylistic restrictions, political ambivalence, and capacity for success in the literary and academic market that this adjective entails. Such is the cultural capital attached to the name of a consecrated writer like Maryse Condé in North America, however, and such are the a priori assumptions about the “value” of francophone and postcolonial literature in general, that no discussion of her as a popular writer, a writer of marketable middlebrow fiction, can take place: the consensus must be that she is producing valuable literary work, and this value must at all costs be abstracted both from the market forces that are so obviously at play in the promotion and dissemination of her novels amongst the greater public and from the elitist dynamics of the creation and promotion of aesthetic distinction at work in the academic culture industry, which has a clear stake in securing and legitimating her identity as “postcolonial subject,” especially now that she has become such a powerful figure in the U.S. academy, the very embodiment of la Francophonie. One could hardly wish for the doyenne of francophone studies to be anything less than a “great writer,” after all!
And yet the (middlebrow) popularity of Condé’s novels (like that of any number of similar crossover writers such as Kincaid, Edwige Danticat, Arundhati Roy, etc.19) permits us to pose the unsettling question that has so often been asked by the practitioners of cultural studies: “What’s so great about great?” One answer to this question leads in a skeptical, relativizing direction that undermines the foundations upon which Condé’s distinction, and that of all writers, rests: “There’s nothing truly great about great, it’s all a conspiracy–or, more neutrally, the arbitrary product of institutional practices, contingent upon ideological imperatives and the like.” As someone who has never been wholly able to understand why my colleagues make such a fuss about Condé, I am sympathetic with this skeptical approach to answering the question. And yet, this question is a double-edged one: it allows not simply for the debunking response to which we have latterly become accustomed, but also for the same old response that people like F. R. Leavis used to haul out when talking about the “great tradition.” And this same old response, which undergirds Kincaid’s groveling comments about the “great writer,” is also–let me now strategically admit at the midway point of this article–of no small relevance to me! As someone who has read a lot of Condé and de Jaham, it seems self-evident to me that the former is a better writer than the latter, which makes it imperative to identify those features of her work that do make it, if not “great,” then at least greater than de Jaham’s. It is this double imperative, of skepticism and affirmation with regard to literary greatness, that I am ultimately arguing for in this article. This imperative becomes particularly visible when examining the interstitial terrain of the middlebrow, for to identify a text as middlebrow is, by virtue of its in-between condition, to acknowledge that its greatness is troubling; any stable conception of its actual worth is troubled by our sense that it is neither unequivocally “great” nor unequivocally the opposite of that, and for this reason we are forced to put into question and to (re)affirm its literary value.
As this article progresses, I will return to this double-edged imperative, but for now more needs to be said about the way Condé’s place in the francophone and postcolonial literary canon has been achieved without any serious consideration of her popularity. Critics have, obviously, not gone so far as to deny the fact of Condé’s popularity; they have simply ignored it. If her husband and translator Richard Philcox is, understandably, not shy about pointing out “the duality of Maryse Condé’s books–the way they attract both the ‘greater public’ and those in universities” (229), critics have consistently proven unwilling to interrogate the double-dealing nature of her work: they will mention the popular reception of her novels only in passing (more frequently, though, they will insinuate a case for the admirable unpopularity of her work by stressing the indifferent or hostile reception of her first effort, Hérémakhonon), and then quickly move on to consider the supposedly more subtle ways in which these novels attract them. And yet it is precisely the entanglement of these two forms of attraction that most needs addressing if the true distinctiveness of Condé’s work, the “duality” of which Philcox speaks, is to be understood amidst the welter of elitist claims for its distinction–claims based on the assumption of its “high serious” and/or “resistant” nature as francophone and, a fortiori, postcolonial text.
To flesh out this general scenario regarding Condé’s critical reception, it is worth pausing here to discuss in detail one random but highly influential example of a critic (mis)understanding Condé’s double identity by imposing modernist criteria of evaluation on her work: Françoise Lionnet’s exemplary 1993 account of La traversée de la mangrove (1989), the novel of Condé’s that–no doubt because of its quasi-Faulknerian array of relaying narrators and its “subversive” incorporation of Creole into a French text–has proven most popular with the critics, generating any number of articles praising its “polyphonic” or “mosaic” poetics, its “nomadic” and “relational” politics, its construction of an “authentically” creole or hybrid identity, and so on.
Lionnet’s reading of this novel identifies it as an example of a “new Antillean humanism,” and stresses the way it embodies in textual form Condé’s “return” to Guadeloupe in the mid-1980s after decades of self-imposed exile in Africa and France. According to Lionnet, this return involved a recovery on Condé’s part of her connection to authentically popular culture: she had, as Lionnet puts it, finally recognized “the value of the Creole language, of the indigenous dances and tales which […] require acceptance ‘on their own terms’” (71-72). After her wanderings abroad, Condé was now, with Traversée, in a position to ask “how a writer might derive sustenance from the sources of popular culture in order eventually to represent this milieu better and touch the readers who belong to it”; her new and more “humble” attitude toward her native land was generated by a “desire to come to a better understanding of the lived experience of culture, to return to the oral traditions of a once disparaged–because poorly understood–popular tradition” (72). In statements like this, we find the sort of appeal to the authentically popular with which postcolonial studies is at ease: a return to such things as “indigenous dances and tales” and “oral traditions” would appear to be just the thing to purify Condé of whatever contamination she might have incurred only a few years before in France as a result of the bestselling popularity of the Segu novels, to say nothing of remedying her regrettable lack of humility when it came to “the readers who belong” to Caribbean popular culture.20
Indeed, Lionnet draws an emphatic line in the sand between those bestsellers and Traversée when she makes the claim–based largely on Condé’s liberal sprinkling of Creole throughout the text–that the latter novel has only one “true” audience, an audience presumably immersed in the “lived experience” of “popular tradition”:
Although published in Paris, like her previous books, Traversée is not written for a French public; for the first time, Condé seems to have a truly Caribbean audience in mind. Creole words and expressions are translated at the bottom of each page, but this was done after the fact, as a favor to the French reader and on the recommendation of Condé’s editor. (73-74)
This astounding statement perfectly exemplifies the anxieties produced among (though seldom articulated by) academic critics at the mainstream success of Segu–especially among those of a hybridizing bent such as Lionnet who are not likely to be attracted to the Roots-y dimensions that critics of another, essentialist stripe might be tempted to valorize in their own (mis)readings of Condé’s bestselling historical romance about Africa. In the most manichean of fashions, Condé’s “true” readership is reduced here to the happy few, and any paratextual gestures toward an other readership–such as providing French translations of “Creole words and expressions” (of the sort commonly found, for instance, at the bottom of the pages of de Jaham’s novels)–is written off as being simply a “favor” to the wrong sort of reader and, moreover, the responsibility not of Condé herself but of a misguided editor evidently not attuned to the virtues of “defamiliarization and estrangement on the level of language” that Lionnet argues, in explicitly modernist terminology, are this novel’s central feature (180). The postcolonial novelist is here attractively (and stereotypically) presented as both a powerful, beneficent figure, one who magnanimously bestows “favors” on an alien public for whom she is not writing, and a distressingly victimized individual, one who is subject to the inane “recommendations” of a foreign editor.
This clear distinction between a relevant and an irrelevant readership is supported in the rest of Lionnet’s account of the novel by a veritable battery of modernist assumptions and rhetorical moves. Her éloge of “oral traditions” is, for instance, doubled by an inflated emphasis on the (admittedly ambiguous) centrality of the writer in this novel.21 Her account of the ways in which Condé is inscribed within (good) traditions–not just “popular tradition” but also “the great tradition of European realism and humanism” as well as “that of nineteenth-century peasant literature” (76)–is supplemented by a repeated emphasis on the utter novelty of Condé’s enterprise, not only in terms of her own trajectory as a writer (the novel points us in an “entirely new narrative direction, the appropriation of a new locus of identity, the implementation of what might almost be called a new poetics” [75-76]) but also in terms of the history of literature itself (“she opens up the literary field to currently unexplored thematic and stylistic possibilities” [84]). Finally, her account of the novel’s undeniable emphasis on fragmentation is argumentatively linked to the idea that the text provides readers with a model for how to live: it demonstrates how Guadeloupeans’ “solutions to the problems of postcolonial life are sufficiently rich and nuanced to serve as a model for others” (77), and how fragmentation serves “as a basis for the construction of cultural models appropriate to the contexts of postcolonial creolization” (79).
Lionnet’s reading of Condé is modernist almost to the point of parody, and so it is not surprising that many of its key elements have been put into question by other critics: Mireille Rosello has, for instance, ably critiqued the “insular” model of a return to the native land that generates Lionnet’s “line in the sand” rhetoric about Condé’s readership (186); Lydie Moudileno has shown how the ambiguously central role of the writer in Condé’s Traversée is actually part of an ironical trajectory in which, by the early 1990s, writers come to have less and less of a role to play, exemplary or otherwise, in her novels (141-71); and Maryse Condé has herself so often claimed that she is not interested in providing rules or models of any sort in her novels that appealing to her as a writer of exemplary “solutions to the problems of postcolonial life” seems wildly beside the point. One can argue against many of the specifics of Lionnet’s analysis (or praise her for being honest enough to situate Condé in what, from a postcolonial perspective, must be the disreputable “great tradition” of European humanism, even if she is at pains to clarify that Condé’s novel is humanism “with a difference”). From our perspective, though, we need only point out the extent to which the exclusionary logic of Lionnet’s account of Traversée, and its convenient distinction between the right and wrong sort of readers (those, as it were, who impose or read the footnotes and those who do not), is generated by the anxiety about the relation between inauthentic popularity and literary value that I have been arguing haunts postcolonial literary studies. A text’s existence in the literary marketplace and its possibly complicitous relation to the desires of the buying public (regardless of where that public is located) are precisely what postcolonial literary critics have an extremely hard time envisaging and what they exile to the unspoken margins of their own self-styled “minoritarian” readings.
It is, to put it in more concrete terms, an easy thing for such critics to read the front cover blurb for Windward Heights (taken from a USA Today review) and feel overcome by a Kincaid-like nausea: “Exotic and eloquent […] Condé takes Emily Brontë’s cold-climate classic on obsessive love and makes it hot and lush.” The only “logical” reaction, from a postcolonial perspective, to such a fawningly effusive claim is to argue that it expresses an impoverished conception of the text, or even an act of deception promoted by insidious marketers and other such cultural mediators who have understood nothing about the work they are editing or reviewing. To speak of “co-optation,” “misappropriation,” “neo-exoticism” when faced with a blurb of this sort is postcolonial common sense, and for me to make the claim that this commonsense evaluation lacks any sense would simply be to replace one form of critical bad faith with another: nausea in the face of the USA Today review’s claims is, to a degree, a legitimate reaction, but there is also a degree of exactness to its “hot and lush” evaluation of Windward Heights, as there is to the Village Voice‘s by no means dismissive claim that the novel offers up a “monsoon of melodrama.”
Now, although my discussion of Condé up to this point might make it seem as if I am simply mounting a cranky attack on her abilities as a writer and using the fact of her relative popularity as part of an argument against the consecrated status she has achieved in francophone and postcolonial circles, what I am actually doing here is teasing out the preconditions for such a status and the exclusionary strategies of reading through which it is constructed. If the drift of my argument seems critical of Condé’s work, that has less to do with my own ambivalence toward her work than with the fact that the only way to tease out the implicit modernist hierarchies at work in postcolonial literary studies is explicitly to adopt such a perspective, openly to entertain the possibility that distinctions between the “great writer” and lesser writers, and between the various levels of “brow,” might actually provide a (doubtful) ground for evaluating texts. Postcolonial literary studies requires “greatness” of its writers, but cannot openly formulate this requirement because that would put into question its non-elitist self-presentation, its insistence that the postcolonial (to quote Lionnet’s totalizing claims about the Antillean subject’s imaginaire) “can be successfully articulated only through nonlinear, egalitarian, and nonhierarchical cultural relations” (79). By contrast, I think we have to begin seriously to question what is great (and perhaps also not so great) about a writer like Condé, what distinguishes her from other writers and allows us to say with relative certainty that she is better than de Jaham or Delsham.
What allows for this relative certainty? What is the “certain quality” that makes Condé more marketable (and teachable) than someone like Delsham, not quite as marketable (and very much more teachable) than de Jaham, and when all is said and done quite possibly more worthy of being taught and marketed than either of these writers? Viewed from a hostile perspective (of the sort that might, say, valorize Delsham for publishing his novels in the Caribbean rather than France), Condé’s marketability and teachability could simply be interpreted as the result of having fallen prey to the most dangerous of compromises, of having sacrificed her indigenous “opacity” to the nefariously cosmopolitan forces of Parisian publishing houses and the U.S. academic marketing circuit. Such a perspective would be a very limited one indeed, reducing not only Condé but virtually the entire roster of mainstream postcolonial writers to the status of literary Quislings. No, this “certain quality” of Condé’s does not (simply) have to do with betrayal and compromise; it has at least as much to do with how “good” her books are as with how “good” they are perceived as being by certain people (notably, publishers and academics). With my deliberately double-edged phrase “a certain quality,” I am referring both to something that is certain in the sense of indisputable (“established as a truth or fact to be absolutely received, depended, or relied upon; not to be doubted, disputed, or called in question; indubitable, sure” [OED]) and to something that is questionable in all sorts of ways (“of positive yet restricted (or of positive even if restricted) quantity, amount, or degree; of some extent at least” [OED]). The indisputable nature of this quality allows us to maintain that Condé is a better writer than de Jaham; its restricted nature renders her subject to an array of relative judgments that will be inflected by a complex set of cultural, ideological (etc.) assumptions. The two degrees of certainty–absolute and relative–cannot be disentangled from one another, which means that any critical discussion of a book’s worth will largely be a matter of expressing and analyzing (differing) perceptions of that worth (be those perceptions generated by individuals or what Frow refers to as “valuing communities”); however, this does not mean that to speak of a text’s real, as opposed to perceived, worth is simply nonsensical (as the relativizing insights of some extremist forms of cultural studies might suggest).
I will return in the final paragraphs of this article to the need for retrieving a necessarily contingent sense of a text’s real literary worth, but what needs to be pointed out here is simply that postcolonial literary studies has been reluctant to acknowledge its own investment in the “certain quality” it demands of its authors: lumping the highest of the highbrow in with the most middling of the middlebrow in a common ground that only seems all-inclusively horizontal rather than exclusively vertical until one starts thinking about popular texts such as Delsham and de Jaham’s that are excluded from its field of vision, it fails to address the (need for) distinctions upon which it is founded. Pointing out this commitment to a “certain quality” forces us to think about the (dis)connections between popularity and the resistant value ascribed to particular texts by postcolonial critics. To what extent are they compatible and where do popularity and (a modernist conception of) value part ways? What is at stake in tacitly privileging the latter over the former when they do part ways? And what would happen if we were to reverse this bias, and start taking the former as, or even more, seriously than the latter?
A crossover writer like Condé is all the more appropriate for thinking through questions about the (dis)connections between the popular and the postcolonial because she has herself, in both her critical pronouncements and novelistic practice, often made a (necessarily contradictory) case for both inauthentic popularity and literary value. On the one hand, unlike so many of her critical advocates, she has willingly acknowledged the ways in which her own work incorporates elements of the inauthentically popular,22 and somewhat less willingly interrogated her own status as a bestselling author.23 On the other, she has time and again proved willing to deploy an evaluative language that openly distinguishes between “good” and “bad” writers in an old-fashioned way that can only be an embarrassment in the ostensibly plural world of “nonlinear, egalitarian, and nonhierarchical cultural relations” for which, a critic like Lionnet would argue, she is laying the foundations in her novels: nowhere, for instance, is a Kincaid-like willingness to distinguish between the good and the not-so-good more evident than when she unfavorably compares a popular (middlebrow) writer like Isabel Allende to Gabriel García Márquez: “I cannot say that I consider Isabel Allende a major writer. It seems to me that as a writer, she is less comprehensive, less accomplished than García Márquez” (Pfaff 128). Examples of this double emphasis abound in her work.
Condé thus occupies a double position with regard to the value of the popular, exhibiting a self-conscious acceptance and questioning of it. Indeed, such self-consciousness is one of the hallmark features of Condé’s novels and contributes in no small part, I would argue, to their “certain quality,” their ability to attract ostensibly very different readerships. Self-consciously occupying the middlebrow ground where different attitudes toward the value of literature troublingly meet, her work addresses, and takes its distance from, both inauthentically popular and academic audiences–a trend especially pronounced, I would suggest, since the late 1980s. Indeed, if I might venture a chronological thesis regarding the development of Condé’s oeuvre, it appears to me that her novels of the 1990s, following upon her bestseller successes of the previous decade and simultaneous with her belated immersion in and consecration by the U.S. academy, have increasingly become a meditation on what place, if any, the popular (in all its many forms, “authentic” and “inauthentic”) can have in what she herself once referred to as the “bourgeois and elitist” genre of the novel,24 and how that place might disrupt the ideological expectations such novels generate among her various audiences, especially those of academic readers singlemindedly intent on treating her as a postcolonial writer who “speaks to and from the position of the other.” In writing self-consciously middlebrow novels, Condé plays with and disarms the expectations of her academic audience, producing visibly hybrid texts in which the inauthentically popular and the “highly serious” intersect in unexpected ways in terms of both content and form (unexpected, at least, within the framework of the postcolonial ideology).
Condé’s novels of the 1990s can be read as self-consciously invoking any number of time-honored ideological and narrative commonplaces of postcolonial literature, but in a page-turning format that troublingly evacuates them of their supposedly “resistant” value. From my perspective, this is where the real value of Condé’s novels resides–particularly those written over the past decade: in their ability to put into question, by packaging the postcolonial and the mainstream together in unmistakably middlebrow texts, the academic strategies of reading according to which they ostensibly demand to be read. To be sure, it is not just those strategies of reading that are troubled by these hybrid novels: a logical consequence of the double position Condé self-consciously occupies is that the postcolonial dimensions of her text will trouble other strategies of reading, “subverting” the expectations of her mainstream audiences by forcing them in a comprehensive and accomplished fashion to address normally marginalized cultural differences (race, class, gender, language, etc.). Such arguments can (and no doubt must) be made, although to be effective they require greater sensitivity than is usually found in postcolonial literary studies regarding the ways in which mainstream audiences–increasingly familiar with the basic ideological assumptions of postcolonial studies–may well expect a degree of subversion and estranging frissons of difference from the postcolonial novels they consume. However, familiar arguments about the postcolonial subverting the mainstream, valid as they might be, merely serve to confirm the foundational bias I have been critically examining here; more interestingly, the self-consciously middlebrow positioning of Condé’s novels forces us to think that familiar process of “subversion” in reverse, from the postcolonial to the mainstream, and in so doing, puts into question–without necessarily eliminating–that bias.
Nowhere, to return to the point of departure for my reflections on Condé, is this playing with the expectations of academic audiences, this middlebrow hybridization, more evident than in Condé’s decision to revise a classic nineteenth-century British novel like Wuthering Heights. As the controversy surrounding Alice Randall’s recasting of Gone with the Wind as The Wind Done Gone shows, revisionism is now a commonplace move: be it the Tara plantation, or going back to Manderley and telling Rebecca’s side of the story, revisionism has become the intellectual property of even the most nondescript and inconsequential writers, to say nothing of an efficient way to acquire instant media “buzz.” The revisionist move, such an attractive option for postcolonial writers in the past, has become so familiar, so obvious, so calculated, it might be argued, that little or no case can be made for its “innovative” or “resistant” possibilities. In the specific case of Wuthering Heights, the move is a doubly familiar one inasmuch as over the past decade critics have, predictably enough, shown an increasing penchant for reading Brontë’s novel through a postcolonial lens, asserting boldly that “Heathcliff’s racial otherness cannot be a matter of dispute,”25 and scouring the text for references to faraway places. How are we to respond to such a familiar, and commercially canny, move on Condé’s part?
The first of two obvious responses to this question is this: blithely disregard the unoriginality of the revisionist move and unself-consciously pursue the “let us compare Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea” type of approach that has generated so many scholarly articles over the past few decades and that, even more vitally, guarantees the presence of texts like Windward Heights on any number of course syllabi (mine included); fixate on similarities with and differences from the originary text; chart the ways in which Condé is rewriting the Victorians; and take sides on the eternal question as to whether or not stressing the entanglement of the colonial and the postcolonial is ultimately a politically useful move. The second obvious response to this unoriginality is this: recognize it and simply refuse to play such a well-rehearsed game. How much eventually gets published on this novel will in large part depend on which of these two options wins the day: my own guess is that Migration will find its fair share of exegetes, but that misgivings about the unoriginality of its revisionist move will ensure that it appears less frequently than Hérémakhon and Traversée in Condé bibliographies.
A third response is possible, though. What if one were to acknowledge the unoriginality of this revisionist move and take it as one’s point of departure for an appraisal of the novel? What if one were to read, and valorize, it as strategically unoriginal? As will become clear in the concluding section of this article, such a recourse to the “strategic” is not without its problems (and its predictability), but it does seem to me a provisionally useful way of negotiating the impasse described in the previous paragraph. The blatant unoriginality of Condé’s move puts into question, without simply doing away with, the resistant and counterdiscursive energies conventionally associated with the revisionist subgenre of postcolonial literature. What work can this subgenre still perform if it has become so formulaic? That is the question, it seems to me, Condé is boldly forcing us to address with this novel, and the asking of that question is greatly facilitated by the sheer readability of Migration, which signals the text’s ready availability to middlebrow readers for whom its genealogical connection to Wuthering Heights will not necessarily form the primary point of interest or interrogation, but who might be drawn, rather, to such things as the presence of romance motifs (the pleasures of the “hot and lush”) or “universal” themes (the profundities that, to quote from the review of Windward Heights in the Chicago Tribune, make us “think about the kinds of emotions that have moved human beings throughout our existence”).
Condé takes the master narrative of postcolonial revisionism, which has caused so many critics over the past several decades to go into spasms of high seriousness every time a name like Caliban, Ariel, or Bertha Mason gets mentioned, and strategically redirects it toward the commodified double ground of the (middlebrow) popular, where the pleasures of the text mingle (un)easily with its profundities, the “low” appeals of romance with “high” insights into the human condition. The novel’s culturally specific (Caribbean, womanist, etc.) aspects, upon which any attempt at reading the text as “purely” postcolonial must in large part rely, prove inseparable from pleasures and profundities that are far less culturally specific: this doubling and displacement of the overtly postcolonial contents of the novel, similar to the way its revisionist form cannot be detached from an awareness of its formulaic nature, serves to relocate Migration in a commodified (middlebrow) popular context that substantially voids, without erasing, whatever resistant values one might originally have wished to associate with its revisionist gesture. If one were to give a specific name to this process of doubling and displacement that Condé’s strategic unoriginality renders visible, it might well be pastiche, in Fredric Jameson’s unflattering sense of the word as the monstrous postmodern double of the parody he continues, in modernist fashion, to valorize.26 Following the lead of Condé herself, who once described Tituba as “a pastiche of the feminine heroic novel” (Pfaff 60), we might well read Migration as a pastiche of the postcolonial revisionist novel: a work that, by self-consciously exiling postcolonial revisionism to the mainstream, refuses to play along with the evaluative distinctions that undergird the postcolonial ideology, forcing us to confront the modernist limits of that ideology, while continuing to inscribe, weakly, the memories of resistance that it assumes.
From the very first words of Migration, Condé signals the aberrant nature of her revisionist gesture, refusing to meet the understandable (from a postcolonial perspective) expectation that her work will contest its colonial antecedent–as can be seen from the novel’s amiable dedication “À Emily Brontë qui, je l’espère, agréera cette lecture de son chef-d’oeuvre. Honneur et respect!” (Migration 7; translated by Philcox as, “To Emily Brontë, who I hope will approve of this interpretation of her masterpiece. Honour and respect!” [Windward n.p.]). This is hardly the sort of antagonistic relationship that one would expect from a revisionist novel, and any reading of Condé’s lecture of Brontë must take this unexpectedly “respectful” dedication as its point of departure. In interviews, Condé herself has stressed her lifelong “passion” for the novel (Anagnostopoulou-Hielscher 75), and while this passion could easily be read as the sign of an affinity between two women marginalized both by their gender and their provincial/colonial origins (Yorkshire/Guadeloupe), a reading of the epigraph that stressed only solidarity between marginalized women, while valid up to a point, would fail to account for the ways in which this solidarity gets mediated by Condé’s appeal to the “chef d’oeuvre”–an appeal to the elitist idea of the “masterpiece” that would certainly have struck a sympathetic chord with the Leavises, who were themselves great fans of Wuthering Heights.27
From the outset, then, we are forced to confront a number of elective affinities that divert us from a conventionally postcolonial reading of the revisionist text: it is not subversion but passion that is highlighted here. This passion is generated both by aesthetic and affective evaluations–evaluations that, on the one hand, rely upon the category of the “masterpiece” and that, on the other, arise out of the sort of readerly engagement that has made Wuthering Heights such a widely consumed and loved novel. (It is this same engagement, to draw a relevant point of comparison, that has made so many an academic reader of Jane Austen anxious about the ways in which Janeites appropriate her work.28) The amiable dedication to Migration, pointing us toward the literary value of Brontë’s “masterpiece” and signalling the author’s own affective ties to it as a reader, destabilizes the generic assumption that, as a postcolonial revisionist, Condé must have a bone to pick with Brontë’s colonial-era novel. As the inclusion of the Creole greeting “honneur et respect” in the epigraph suggests, the novel’s Caribbean content does not in any dramatic way contest the novel’s aberrant affiliation with its precursor but itself forms part of it. Condé has simply provided Wuthering Heights with new “migratory” contexts (Caribbean, womanist, etc.) that supplement but do not militate against her predecessor’s novel. Condé once remarked of Segu that it “is not a militant novel, and until people understand that I don’t write such novels, they will not comprehend my writings at all” (Pfaff 52); in pastiching the postcolonial revisionist novel, aberrantly channelling its militant energies in a mainstream direction, Condé forces this understanding upon her academic readers, while clearing a space for her other readers.
The all-too-familiar revisionist strategy pastiched in Migration, to be sure, hardly exhausts its postcolonial resonance: indeed, the novel very evidently lends itself to being read as exemplifying another narrative strategy that is decidedly more au courant in postcolonial circles. If Migration is an aberrant work of revisionism, as argued above, it is also an errant one, blatantly confirming Condé’s investment in the virtues of “errance,” a dominant theme in her novels of the 1990s (speaking of Desirada [1997], for instance, she noted that when reading it “one comes to the conclusion that wandering [errance] is an essential ground for creativity” [Anagnostopoulou-Hielscher 73]). This privileging of errancy is clearly relevant to the diasporic, anti-essentialist turn of so much recent work, literary and critical, in postcolonial studies, which has seized upon metaphors like nomadism and migrancy by way of insisting upon the virtues of tracking routes rather than exploring roots.
Indeed, it is precisely through a structural emphasis on errancy that Condé most visibly establishes the pastiche-like nature of her revisionist gesture in Migration: where the first third (Part I) of the novel sticks quite closely to a straightforward transposition of the Wuthering Heights story onto the Caribbean, with the requisite racial recoding (e.g., Condé’s light-skinned Catherine finds herself torn between a black Heathcliff, Razyé, and a béké Linton, Aymeric de Linsseuil29), the last two-thirds (Parts II-V) of the novel rapidly loses touch with its Victorian predecessor, scrambling the latter’s second-generation plot and wandering into “new” territory that seems of little or no relevance to (a rewriting of) Wuthering Heights. Brontë’s novel ceases, at some point, to matter: it proves neither a destiny to be lamented (as in Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea) nor contested (as in Césaire’s A Tempest); quite simply, it becomes something that goes forgotten, and the reader waits in vain for a “return” to the obvious pattern of similarities and differences between colonial text and postcolonial counter-text that obtained in Part I of the novel and that held out the promise of some contestatory significance to the revisionist gesture–a promise the novel declines to keep, as it wanders away from its premises and becomes, as it were, just another Maryse Condé novel.
There will be no such “return” to the original, modernist assumptions of postcolonial revisionism, as Condé clarifies by her blandly obvious intertextual references to the idea of returning in various chapter headings, which are ironically undercut by what actually happens in these chapters. The closure sought by Heathcliff/Razyé in the final chapter of Part I, “Le temps retrouvé,” is not attained: Part II opens onto the second-generation story, initiating the novel’s errant drift away from its predecessor text. His son Razyé II’s “Retour au pays natal,” to cite the title of the novel’s penultimate chapter, proves equally unsatisfactory: his return to Guadeloupe fails to provide him with the catharsis and the anchor he was seeking. In Condé’s open-ended migratory world, there would thus appear to be none but the most highly ironized of places for standard modernist endings of the sort offered by Proust and Césaire, and her emphasis on errance and displacement is certainly in tune with the privileging of hybridity (Bhabha), relationality (Glissant), etc., in postcolonial theory of late. The way that Condé’s novel migrates away from its point of origin, away from both Wuthering Heights and the generic assumptions of postcolonial revisionism, might be read as an allegory for the process through which the colonial condition and the postcolonial response to it become slowly but surely erased, opening out onto a “new” world of errancy in which some of the old world’s key assumptions about the value of categories like “nation” and “race” have come to appear as errors. An errant world, then, but also a more human world–for it is assuredly the case that we only gain a sense of the humanity of Condé’s characters once we cease to read them as representative figures, as racialized embodiments of a text that has a revisionist point to make. The differences upon which colonial discourse and postcolonial counterdiscourse depend blind us to this common humanity, and as Condé’s novel errantly progresses, increasingly detaching itself from the revisionist script to which it initially seemed attached, it opens our eyes to what might be out there “beyond” the framework established by colonial discourse and perpetuated by postcolonial responses that, in directly contesting this discourse, cannot help remaining implicated in its inhuman vision of the world.
This possible opening beyond the all-too-familiar concerns of that complicitous entanglement of colonial and postcolonial that I have elsewhere dubbed the post/colonial seems akin to what Paul Gilroy, in Against Race: Identifying Political Culture Beyond the Color Line, has identified as the opportunity made visible by the current crisis in raciological thinking. For Gilroy, that crisis has created the grounds for envisioning a “planetary humanism” in which “out-moded principles of differentiation” will have lost their value–a humanism in which we might exercise a renewed sensitivity to “the overwhelming sameness that overdetermines social relationships between people and continually betrays the tragic predicaments of their common species life,” and in which we might learn how to value “the undervalued power of this crushingly obvious, almost banal human sameness, so close and basically invariant that it regularly passes unremarked upon” (29). As Gilroy knows full well, his insistence on “the possibility of leaving ‘race’ behind, of setting aside its disabling use as we move out of the time in which it could have been expected to make sense” (29) will be branded by many as utopian at best and irresponsible at worst by those who, in his words, capitulate “to the lazy essentialisms that postmodern sages inform us we cannot escape” (53). Without taking sides on that issue, or raising the question of what, if any, relation there might be between the “overwhelming sameness” valorized here and the nightmarish scenario of homogenization that haunted modernist critiques of mass culture and that continues to feed into our understanding of the possible effects of globalization, I would simply like to conclude my discussion of Condé’s novel by noting that if its errant narrative movement seems to point in the direction argued for by Gilroy, it nonetheless cannot help pointing back toward the very thing that it is putting into question by pastiching: namely, the resistant tenets of postcolonial revisionism.
The novel’s final chapter, after all, is entitled “Retour à L’Engoulvent,” and this final return takes us back, if only in translation and with the greatest ambivalence, to the revisionist return to Wuthering Heights that was Condé’s apparent point of departure in Migration and that the errancy of the last two-thirds of the novel seems to overturn. The two points–forward into the future and back into the past–meet here at novel’s end, cancelling each other out in the undecidability, the willed pointlessness, of the novel’s concluding sentence: it has finally become clear to Razyé II, who has moved back into L’Engoulvent (Wuthering Heights), that his dead wife Cathy, supposedly the daughter of Catherine and Aymeric, was almost certainly the daughter of Catherine and his own father Razyé. This unprovable if altogether likely scenario casts doubt on the future of his and Cathy’s daughter, Anthuria, fruit either of a legitimate cross-cultural interracial union or an unwitting act of incest.
Il [Razyé II] s’absorbait dans la pensée d’Anthuria. Une si belle enfant ne pouvait pas être maudit. (Migration 337)
[He was absorbed by the thought of Anthuria. Such a lovely child could not be cursed. (Windward 348)]
It is with this fragment of free indirect discourse–the narrator’s statement translating the character’s anxious question, which is masquerading as a statement–that Condé’s novel ends. This is no ending at all. It is only the beginning–an errant beginning that may or may not be “cursed” by the past and its erroneous legacies. Whom are we to believe? The narrator who seemingly asserts? The character whose nervous question is masked by a defiant assertion? The author who both asserts and questions? How we answer this unanswerable question will, unquestionably, depend upon how much belief we can place in a truly postcolonial future, one liberated from the accursed, inhuman entanglements of the post/colonial. But, if we as readers can only answer, provisionally, one way or the other, the strength of Condé’s strategic unoriginality, her (ab)errant revisionism, is that it forces us to acknowledge the weakness of our every response to that question of belief. If such a questioning of belief is, as I believe it to be, what constitutes the “greatness” of literature, then Condé is, when all’s said and done, the “great” writer she is unquestionably assumed to be. To emphasize the middlebrow dimension of her work is not, appearances to the contrary, to deny her greatness as a writer: it is simply to suggest that we have been looking for it in all the wrong places, not in the mainstream where her work is so clearly, if uneasily, situated, but in an other, less compromised place inhabited by our modernist precursors that can now be nothing more or less than an exotic memory which has yet, for better and for worse, to go forgotten.
III. A Spectre of Value: Living On the (Literary) Margins of Cultural and Postcolonial Studies
My reading of Condé’s Migration as a self-consciously (ab)errant “pastiche” of postcolonial revisionism has allowed me to do what, as a literary critic, I am most comfortable doing: namely, arguing for the value of certain literary texts on the grounds that they are somehow “different” from other, less intellectually provocative works. I have tried to factor the (middlebrow) popularity of Condé’s work into my argument, to show that her novel needs to be read less as a manifesto for some postcolonial imaginaire than as a “hot and lush” text that, as so much old-fashioned literature was once said to do, “makes us think about the kinds of emotions that have moved human beings throughout our existence”; I have tried to highlight the ways in which the novel’s popular appeal needs to be factored in by academic readers who are all too likely to overlook or dismiss it as not integral to an understanding of what she’s really doing. But in arguing for the strategic unoriginality of her revisionist gesture in Migration I have, clearly, caved in to the same logic generating, say, Lionnet’s fervent desire to read Condé as someone who provides “model” texts for the postcolonial critic to valorize. I have wandered (indeed, erred) quite a distance from the questions posed at the outset of this article regarding the problematic place of the popular in postcolonial studies. My take on Migration may or may not capture the duplicitous way that it engages with multiple–academic and inauthentically popular–audiences, but it most certainly does not resolve the question of what to do with the likes of “lesser,” and seemingly less self-conscious, writers such as Delsham and de Jaham. The argument outlined in the preceding paragraphs is a way of salvaging Migration for an academic audience (and for me!), rescuing it in a paradoxical sort of way from its “nauseating” exile in the mainstream. It is a way of saying, “Hey look, Condé is producing work of literary value after all, even if that value cannot be disentangled from other values that help generate its inauthentically popular, middlebrow appeal; she’s being serious precisely by putting into question the ‘high seriousness’ of postcolonial studies and its by-now predictable commitment to tired ‘old’ strategies of textual resistance such as revisionism, or its equally predictable appeals to ‘new’ strategies such as errancy that are still very much in vogue. All of which helps explain why she’s a self-evidently better writer than Delsham and de Jaham.”
But if my valorization of self-conscious textuality and the “certain quality” of Condé’s novels does not help us value Delsham and de Jaham, then does it really help us understand the (middlebrow) popularity of a writer like Condé? The fact that my account of Condé as pastiche artist par excellence would not work for these lowbrow writers puts into question, ultimately, the work I have just argued it might do for her; in the final analysis, I have continued to privilege Condé against cultural producers like Delsham and de Jaham, falling prey to the “creator orientation” that has informed so many critiques of mass culture (Gans 75), and placing a seemingly critical but ultimately narcissistic emphasis in my reading of her on the ways in which Condé plays (along) with the academic reader. In the preceding account of Migration, the text, the author, and a certain type of reader win out, and the concerted emphasis on issues of consumption, production, circulation, and regulation upon which cultural studies insists, and that my article initially seemed to promise, has gone by the wayside, as have many of the readers in Fort-de-France and Pointe-à-Pitre, to say nothing of those whose daily diet of prose includes USA Today.
To explore the (dis)connections of the popular and the postcolonial must surely take postcolonial studies in other, less author-/critic-oriented directions of the sort toward which cultural studies has been pointing for several decades now. We need, for instance, to take the insights of reception theory more fully into account and to place a new emphasis on the consumption of (what we label as) postcolonial texts in both their “place of origin” and the transnational literary marketplace: what sorts of pleasure, for instance, do these various audiences take from their readings of Delsham, de Jaham, or Condé? Such questions can only be answered by the type of empirical inquiry exemplified, say, by Janice Radway’s ethnographic approach to popular romances, albeit nuanced by the powerful objections lodged against her by the likes of Ien Ang, who rightly criticized Radway’s Reading the Romance for its failure to take account of “the pleasurableness of the pleasure of romance reading,” bogged down as it is in elitist feminist (in the context of this article, read elitist postcolonial) meta-narratives which assume that “the pleasure of romance reading is somehow not real, as though there were other forms of pleasure that could be considered ‘more real’ because they are more ‘authentic,’ more enduring, more veritable, or whatever” (527). The pleasurableness of this pleasure, or the absence thereof, will certainly differ depending on the location(s) in which a text is read, which in turn will inevitably affect evaluations of its quality, but the important point to register is that neither this pleasurableness nor these judgments can be understood without sociological research of the sort that is so markedly absent from postcolonial literary studies and its implied but rarely theorized reader, who is more often than not nothing more than the critic’s idealized self-portrait, or his/her phantasmagoric portrait of the Other.
This emphasis on consumption will need to be supplemented by an increased attention to the production and circulation of postcolonial texts (both literature and theory), which would begin to take into account such things as: the mutually implicated relations of aesthetic, philosophical, political (etc.) values and market values; the many ways in which postcolonial texts are commodified and distributed in an increasingly globalized market; which “marginal” books get adopted on course syllabi and what this has to tell us about the role of canon-formation in the ostensibly anti-canonical field of postcolonial studies; how the “postcolonial card” plays (or does not play) in current university hiring practices, and so on. In short, one would have to highlight the ways in which the postcolonial has become possible not simply as an object of textual interpretation, or of pleasurable (or not) consumption, but as an object of no small value to the literary and academic marketplace alike.
To be sure, if the dominant postcolonial ideology renders the asking of such unpopular questions about various types of popularity difficult, it has certainly not rendered them impossible. Over the past decade, there have been sporadic attempts at inserting such questions into the mainstream of postcolonial studies. For example, it is somewhat, if not entirely, in this spirit that Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, the oft-maligned Australian authors of The Empire Writes Back (1989), remark in the introduction to the final section of their Post-colonial Studies Reader (1995), entitled “Production and Consumption,” that they have included this section of mostly outdated articles “to stimulate the production of more current assessments of the material conditions of cultural production and consumption on post-colonial societies,” which is, they add, “one of the most important and so-far largely neglected areas of concern” in postcolonial studies (463-64). I suspect that the increasingly sullen reception of these pioneering Australian critics may well have something to do not only with their supposed privileging of “literary hybridity” at the expense of “histories of subjection,”30 but with their receptivity to the idea of opening postcolonialism up to these empirical studies–studies that would inevitably put into question not only the individualist cult of the author/critic and the fetishization of textuality that is at the heart of so much work being done in postcolonial studies (their own included) but also the mechanical emphasis on subversion and resistance that so easily flows from the pens of those critics who can neither honor nor respect the dubious complicities that inauthentic popularity necessarily involves. Moreover, the admittedly limited emphasis of Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin on “the material conditions of cultural production and consumption,” as well as the hostility directed toward them in certain postcolonial circles, may well be related to their status as settler colony critics (like myself) who have grown up in nation-states where it is difficult, if not impossible, to think (or imagine one is thinking) outside the boundaries of “mass” society and the forms of popularity it engenders, and where the fact of widespread literacy, leisure time, and purchasing power ensures that, in the case of the literary field, prestige-invested forms of cultural production such as novel-writing cannot be simply cordoned off from the dynamics of inauthentically popular consumption.31
Be that as it may, it is out of this particular milieu that the most extended and energetic intervention dealing with the popularity of the postcolonial has recently emerged: Graham Huggan’s The Postcolonial Exotic, which comprehensively confronts many of the issues that crystallized for me around the figures of Delsham and Condé in that Fort-de-France bookstore. Huggan’s book constitutes a giant step toward breaking the relative silence surrounding the imbrication of postcolonial studies and the marketplace: taking as his starting point the question “How has the corporate publishing world co-opted postcolonial writing, and to what extent does the academy collaborate in similar processes of co-optation?” (viii), he offers “a speculative prolegomenon to the sociology of postcolonial cultural production” (xvi), very much along Bourdieuvian lines. The key move Huggan makes in order to raise the problem of the marketability of the postcolonial is to identify the postcolonial field of production as occupying “a site of struggle between contending ‘regimes of value’” which he denominates postcolonialism and postcoloniality (5). The latter, in Huggan’s usage, is a “value-regulating mechanism within the global late-capitalism system of commodity exchange,” an “implicitly assimilative and market-driven” regime, while the former is “an anti-colonial intellectualism that reads and valorizes the signs of social struggle in the faultlines of literary and cultural texts” and “implies a politics of value that stands in obvious opposition to global processes of commodification” (6). Rather than being simply at odds, these two regimes of value are “mutually entangled” and “bound up with” one another, which means that “in the overwhelmingly commercial context of late twentieth-century commodity culture, postcolonialism and its rhetoric of resistance have themselves become consumer products” (6). This does not mean that the one is simply reducible to the other, the “good” opposition to the “bad” assimilation, but that they cannot be told apart from one another, any more than the local can be kept separate from the global: as a result of this entanglement, “postcolonialism needs a greater understanding of the commodifying processes through which its critical discourses, like its literary products, are disseminated and consumed” (18).
Huggan subsumes these processes under the category of the “postcolonial exotic,” the exotic being “the perfect term to describe the domesticating process through which commodities are taken from the margins and reabsorbed into mainstream culture” (22). In a wide array of case-studies, he mercilessly analyzes the workings of this postcolonial exotic, and the inseparability of postcolonialism and global commodity culture to which it bears witness: examining such things as the Heinemann African Writers Series, Indo-chic, the Booker Prize, multiculturalism, ethnic autobiography, tourist novels, and the Margaret Atwood Society, he maps out the innumerable ways in which “the language of resistance is entangled, like it or not, in the language of commerce” (264). Faced with this entanglement, in which it becomes virtually impossible to distinguish between co-optation and complicity, the choice facing writers and critics “may be not so much whether to ‘succumb’ to market forces as how to use them judiciously to suit one’s own, and other people’s, ends” (11). As Huggan suggests throughout, following Appadurai’s lead, this “succumbing” to the market will not necessarily produce the negative, homogenizing scenario one might expect since “global processes of commodification may engender new social relations that operate in anti-imperialist interests, empowering the previously dispossessed” (12), and “anti-imperialist resistance is not necessarily diminished when ‘resistance’ itself is inserted into global-capitalist networks of cultural consumption” (262). This is the positive message that, doubtfully (“may engender,” “is not necessarily diminished”), emerges from Huggan’s consideration of postcolonialism’s complicity with the market-driven regime of postcoloniality: “lay[ing] bare the workings of commodification” through which the postcolonial makes itself heard (and is made to be heard) will, perhaps, not simply result in identifying a symptomatic “mode of consumption” but make possible “an analysis of consumption” that, somehow, will challenge us to respond differently to it in the future (264).
Huggan is understandably vague about what that future and its differences might look like, preferring to concentrate on the contemporary symptoms of the postcolonial exotic, that “pathology of cultural representation under late capitalism” (33). It is refreshingly clear that he is skeptical of those who, faced with “the spiralling commodification of cultural difference,” wish (like Aijaz Ahmad) “to disclaim or downplay their involvement in postcolonial theoretical production, or to posit alternative epistemologies and strategies of cultural representation,” or others who “might wish to ‘opt out’ of, or at least defy, the processes of commodification and institutionalisation that have arguably helped create a new canon of ‘representative’ postcolonial literary/cultural works” (32). If hero(in)es there are in his account of postcolonial writers responding to the dilemma posed by the postcolonial exotic, they are those who “have chosen to work within, while also seeking to challenge, institutional structures and dominant systems of representation […] [and] have recognised their own complicity with exoticist aesthetics while choosing to manipulate the conventions of the exotic to their own political ends” (32). These writers engage in what he calls “strategic exoticism,” “strategic marginalization,” and so on: for instance, someone like Vikram Seth–even if, or precisely because, his novels are not brooded over by the academic culture industry with the same intensity that Rushdie’s are, lacking as they do “the aura of self-conscious intellectual sophistication that might encourage, as it has certainly done for Rushdie’s work, the type of theoretically informed research that is a current requirement of the academic profession” (75)–is a novelist we can learn from because of the way that a work like A Suitable Boy “anticipates its own reception as a technically proficient blockbuster novel that seeks (and inevitably fails) to encapsulate a deliberately exoticised India,” and is aware of “the metropolitan formulae within which it is likely to be read and evaluated, and to some extent […] plays up to these, challenging its readers by pretending to humour them, to confirm their expectations” (76).
Time and again Huggan has recourse to this idea of “strategic exoticism” as a way of reconciling popularity and aesthetic value, and it is a version of this double game that I myself could not help playing in my own analysis of Condé, even if my invocation of her “strategic unoriginality” was put forward not in order to point out the ways in which she might be challenging her “blockbuster” reader (as Huggan argues Seth is doing) but, rather, the ways in which she plays up to the formula of postcolonial revisionism and the expectations it generates amongst an academic readership only to challenge those elite readers by implicating that formula in the “troubling greatness” of a middlebrow text. Notwithstanding this difference in focus, it is clear that my account of Condé fits in well with Huggan’s general portrait of “postcolonial writers/thinkers […] [as] both aware of and resistant to their interpellation as marginal spokespersons, institutionalised cultural commentators and representative (iconic) figures” (26). As to what the political value of the awareness and resistance exemplified by strategic exoticism is, Huggan has no easy answers (and nor, as should be apparent from my analysis of Condé, do I): as he points out, if strategic exoticism is “an option,” it is “not necessarily a way out of the dilemma” posed by postcolonialism’s always-already insertedness into “global-capitalist networks of cultural consumption” (32). Aside from confirming a sense of Condé’s or Seth’s “worth” as writers (a “worth” that their popularity does not preclude, even if the two may be inseparable from one another), one might well ask what such arguments as his or mine ultimately achieve.
This eternal question of the political value of literature, and its doubtful relation to the aesthetic value that both Huggan and I seem interested in preserving, is the familiar (no doubt, for some readers, all-too-familiar) territory to which my questions regarding the (dis)connections of the popular and the postcolonial have led me. Of what real help, or hindrance, is it to “know” that Condé is a better writer than Delsham? Can such “knowledge” benefit us in any way, or is it simply part of an obnoxiously hierarchical mode of thinking that prevents social justice from flowering on the face of this earth? What are the consequences of foregoing such “knowledge” and attempting to consider someone like Condé on “equal” terms with cultural producers like Delsham and de Jaham? It was precisely this leveling move–putting Roseanne and Jamaica Kincaid in (different parts of) the same room, as it were–that provided my point of departure in this article, and it is the sort of move without which cultural studies, with its concerted focus on the popular and the “ways of life” that give meaning to this popularity, would not exist. The cultural studies move, valorizing what might from an elitist perspective be regarded as inferior trash, is one–I started out by arguing–that postcolonial studies needs more effectively to incorporate into its repertoire if it is to go beyond the sort of sanctimonious vomiting and unseemly groveling to which Jamaica Kincaid seems prone. Identifying and breaking down the unspoken boundaries in postcolonial studies that separate the likes of Delsham and de Jaham from other more “accomplished” (but often glaringly middlebrow) writers would be a way of expanding the field in both a more democratic and a less homogenizing way, and thereby enhancing the field’s egalitarian and heterogenizing agenda. More democratic, because of its greater inclusivity. Less homogenizing, because issues of material production and consumption could now be foregrounded, supplementing the fetishization of certain authors/texts (who are inevitably found to have little more to say, politically speaking, than that “resistance to colonialism, capitalism, etc. is good, although not always easy”) with more of a sense of the diverse and overlapping cultural contexts (local, regional, global) in which these authors/texts operate. As Huggan’s study ably shows, the “postcolonial” as an institutionalized field of study has been constituted exotically, in complicitous relation to global markets and metropolitan audiences (a complicity that it has tried its best to ignore), and leveling the playing field of postcolonialism might enhance an awareness of other (e.g., regional) markets and other (non-metropolitan) audiences, offering if not a way out of the dilemma that his analysis of the postcolonial exotic and its conflicting regimes of value situates us in, then at least some refreshingly new perspectives on it.
All well and good. But what are we to make of these new perspectives that a cultural studies approach might offer postcolonial studies? What, for instance, will ethnographical accounts of actual reading communities and consumption patterns in the French Caribbean produce? What will a sociologically precise account of marketing strategies in the French Caribbean as compared to France result in? What will be the effect of treating writers like Delsham and de Jaham to the sort of extended analyses afforded writers like Glissant and Condé? What, in short, do we gain by making a place for the inauthentically popular in postcolonial studies? This, of course, is a question that cultural studies itself has had to ask repeatedly, after its foundational act of deconstructing the idea of the inauthentically popular and learning to take any and all forms of popularity seriously. One dominant response has been to (over)value what had previously been devalued, as in the work of John Fiske who, as Jim McGuigan points out, “merely produces a simple inversion of the mass culture critique at its worst, […] never countenancing the possibility that a popular reading could be anything other than ‘progressive’” (588). For many, however, this celebratory blanding out of the popular (or, more exactly, of the social relationships that are constituted by and mediated through the popular), in which it is treated as being in and of itself valuable and resistant, appears as “a deterrent to Cultural Studies’ overall political and ethical project”–a radical, or at least progressive, project which requires that the popular be, in Stuart Hall’s terms, “rearticulated” as part of a “hegemonic struggle” (Le Hir 125-26).32
In 1981, at the end of his “Notes on Deconstructing the Popular,” Hall vividly summed up this “overall political and ethical project” of cultural studies and its relation to the popular when he explained that the latter is “one of the places where socialism might be constituted. That is why ‘popular culture’ matters. Otherwise, to tell you the truth, I don’t give a damn about it” (453). Thus, from Hall’s perspective, the popular has value, but only after it has been evaluated according to the criteria of the larger political project in which (his) cultural studies situates it. Hall’s was, and still is, a fine and honest response to the disturbing question that the popular poses cultural (and by extension postcolonial) studies, and yet of course it also lends itself, over twenty years later, to no small degree of historical irony by virtue of its desire to constitute “socialism”: not just because a modernist, future-oriented meta-narrative such as the constitution of socialism has become increasingly difficult to credit, but because it was precisely around this time that the initial, primarily class-based project of British cultural studies had begun to be challenged by other related projects with a different/differing primary focus on issues such as gender, sexuality, and ethnicity. The irony goes further, though, because if these other projects put into question and “interrupted” the foundational biases of cultural studies, they also appeared to have the potential to rescue it: their “progressive,” if not necessarily socialist, agendas brought a fresh energy to cultural studies and promised a way out of the impasse it had reached by the 1980s, what with the failure of neo-Gramscianism to stay the ongoing tide of Thatcherism on the one (practical) hand and of rampant relativism on the other (theoretical) hand, the endless and seemingly irresoluble arguments between symbolic and economic approaches to culture, the growing dominance of an uncritically “celebratory” approach to popular culture, the institutionalization of cultural studies in America (analogous to what Huggan has referred to as the recent “Americanisation of the postcolonial” [271]), and so on. All of these were signs of an impasse that cultural studies had reached, the flagging of its “overall ethical and political project,” which led, and continues to lead, many of its practitioners to look beyond the original class parameters of the project and take a feminist turn, a queer turn, or a postcolonial turn as a way around that impasse.
These signs are still with us, of course, and as my analysis of the postcolonial ideology has suggested, the postcolonial turn (which shaped a great deal of Hall’s own later work, be it added) in many respects leads not forward but back into the sorts of questions–notably, about the value of the popular–that cultural studies started out asking in the first place. Perhaps this circling (or more optimistically, spiraling) back is what has led Simon During–who, in his several accounts of the “global popular” over the past decade, has been one of the very few critics to have stressed the (dis)connectionsof the popular and the postcolonial–to state in the 1999 updated introduction to the second edition of his Cultural Studies Reader that “transnational cultural studies” is “eroding so-called ‘postcolonialism,’ first nurtured in literary studies, which was so important a feature of the late 1980s and early 1990s intellectual landscape,” but which (according to During) seems to be less able to deal, at least on its own terms, with the increasingly urgent issues surrounding globalization (“Introduction” 23). Will transnational cultural studies somehow synthesize the concerns of both cultural studies and postcolonialism, finally, and show us the way out of the failed dialogue that I have described in this article? One can, I suppose, always hope! But what needs to be kept in mind, as a new wave of transnational cultural studies hits the academic beaches, is that this hope for a “way out” is only thinkable, and hence only possible, within the terms of the original project that generated both cultural studies and postcolonial studies–a project committed to “hegemonic struggle” and, accordingly, committed to (that is, biased toward) certain values and not others. During exemplifies this commitment, for instance, when he argues at the end of his introduction that “engaged cultural studies” is a field “embracing clearly articulated, left-wing values” (27). It is only from a clearly articulated position such as this that the political value of the popular can be discerned and disengaged from other values that may or may not be compatible with it.
To be sure, finding a stable ground upon which to make such evaluations has become an increasingly hard thing to do in a postmodern era increasingly sensitive to the contingency of all values. One might well ask, and it would be an entirely legitimate question, why those “left-wing values” During holds so dear should be of any value to those who might be interested in, say, popular culture but not in the “political and ethical project” that legitimizes the study of it. From a radically skeptical perspective, there is no way around this relativizing question, but there are certainly solid enough responses to it, as Stanley Fish argued recently in the pages of The New York Times when he responded to a reporter who had asked him if the events of 9/11 meant the end of postmodern relativism, since such a position leaves us “with no firm basis for either condemning the terrorist attacks or fighting back.” Fish noted that so-called postmodern relativism simply argues against “the hope of justifying our response to the attacks in universal terms that would be persuasive to everyone, including our enemies,” but that it in no way precludes taking action based upon our own convictions. “We can and should,” he stated, “invoke the particular lived values that unite us and inform the institutions we cherish and wish to defend”; these values provide us with “grounds enough for action and justified condemnation in the democratic ideals we embrace, without grasping for the empty rhetoric of universal absolutes to which all subscribe but which all define differently.” With this argument Fish “resolves” the superficially irresoluble question of postmodern relativism, clearing a space for actions based upon value-judgments and effecting that “arbitrary closure” without which, as Hall has repeatedly argued, “politics is impossible” (see, e.g., “Cultural Studies” 264). Yet, in resolving this question, Fish rather spectacularly begs the question of who “we” are, and offers what could easily be construed as a justification of the U.S. invading impoverished nations such as Afghanistan and Iraq to which neither Hall nor During, I suspect, would subscribe, notwithstanding the fact that both men are equally sensitive to the difficulties of pursuing the hard road to (socialist) renewal in a world, as Hall is fond of putting it, “without final guarantees.”
It is precisely this lack of “final guarantees” to which, I argued at the end of my discussion of Condé, “great” literature so troublingly alerts us, displacing our certitudes and replacing us in other wor(l)ds, wor(l)ds where fictions become possibilities but never realities. That is, no doubt, a high-sounding albeit sincerely held belief about the value of literature; one can imagine any number of less ethereal counterarguments regarding what makes literature of value, but the important point to register is that valuations of some such sort are an inescapable feature of literary studies. To put oneself in the shoes of a practitioner of cultural studies, as I did at the beginning of this article, is to take one’s distance from such aesthetic and ethical evaluations, to relativize them and gain a sense of their limits (and also, of course, in the context of my own argument, to gain a sense of how those limits are, unavowedly, inscribed within a field such as postcolonialism, which shares an uneasy border with both literary and cultural studies). It is important to have a sense of the limits of what one values, no doubt, but as Fish suggests, it can also be worth defending those limits. When During states that postcolonialism was first nurtured in “literary studies” but is now being eroded by “transnational cultural studies,” he seems almost to imply that the tainted genealogy of postcolonialism might account for its supposed erosion. Literary studies, it would appear, cannot catch up to the incitements of globalization. Its seemingly residual status and elitist history (implicated, as it has been, not only in hierarchical assumptions about aesthetic value but in the material dynamics of colonization) explains very well why, as Huggan puts it, “some of the most recent work in the [postcolonial] field gives the impression of having bypassed literature altogether, offering a heady blend of philosophy, sociology, history and political science in which literary texts, when referred to at all, are read symptomatically within the context of larger social and cultural trends” (239). The foundational bias of literary studies toward “great” works could not be clearer, and it is not surprising that even the sub-field of postcolonial studies devoted to literature might wish to avoid any but the most condemnatory reckoning with this bias.
I have argued throughout this article that such a bias does inf(l)ect postcolonial studies in a variety of ways, regardless of its flatteringly egalitarian self-image; however, I have purposefully developed a supplementary argument that this bias is not something which, once unmasked, can or should be simply jettisoned. Rather, this bias must be explored more openly and, from my own perspective as a literary critic, with a measure of belief in the value of literature, not just as a model or a symptom but as the troubling other of contemporary (and self-evidently “progressive”) disciplines such as postcolonial and cultural studies–in short, with a measure of belief that literature and the greatness it troublingly promises is indeed something we might “cherish and wish to defend,” notwithstanding or precisely because of the cautionary distance it allows us to take from those other, more pressing beliefs that, however provisionally, must ground the “political and ethical projects,” socialist or otherwise, about which we give a damn. As we learn to listen in on the as-yet failed (but, we must hope, ultimately successful) dialogue between Roseanne and Jamaica Kincaid, the “great writer,” I would suggest, not only is but must remain present in our minds, exiled from the mainstream of cultural and postcolonial studies that beckons us, a spectre of value haunting the margins of a new center to which neither that writer, nor we literary critics, can ever return but toward which we can yet, perhaps, migrate.
Notes
I would like to thank Rey Chow and Katie Trumpener for some useful feedback in the early stages of this project, as well as Carine Mardorossian, Grace Moore, Susan Weiner, and Robert J. C. Young for reading and commenting on drafts of the article.
1. Quoted in Seabrook 33 (from Newsweek 18 Sept. 1995, 10). For the comment about People magazine, see Kincaid’s interview with Salon magazine (<http://www.salon.com/05/features/kincaid2.html>).
2. In the Salon interview, discussing Brown’s enthusiasm for Roseanne, Kincaid laments “the coarseness of it, the vulgarity,” and expresses a desire to “rescue [Brown] from her coarseness. She’s actually got some nice qualities. But she can’t help but be attracted to the coarse and vulgar. I wish there was a vaccine–I would sneak it up on her.”
3. Discussing how the “passionate divisions” of Restoration France (aristocracy versus bourgeoisie, political right versus political left, etc.) hide “the modern tendency to identity,” Girard notes that “double mediation is a melting-pot in which differences among classes and individuals gradually dissolve. It functions all the more efficiently because it does not even appear to affect diversity. In fact, the latter is even given a fresh though deceptive brilliance” (122).
4. In this article I use “francophone” and “postcolonial” as relatively interchangeable terms. While not wishing to deny significant differences between these two catch-all labels and the worlds to which they (supposedly) refer, I do not believe that these differences greatly affect the argument I am developing here: the same foundational bias is at work in both fields of study (by virtue of their geographically free-floating nature, as explained later in this section).
5. According to Gilles Alexandre, owner of the Librairie Alexandre in Fort-de-France and an important cultural mediator in the French Antillean literary scene, only Césaire sells more books than Delsham in Martinique (Césaire’s popularity being in large part attributable to school sales). Delsham’s status as Martinique’s bestselling novelist is common knowledge on the island, although any full account of his popularity would obviously need to be backed up by statistical research.
6. As just two randomly chosen examples of Delsham’s neglect, it can be noted that there is not a single index entry on him in the recent An Introduction to Caribbean Francophone Writing: Guadeloupe and Martinique (Haigh), and that at the 4th International Conference on Caribbean Literatures, held in his native Martinique (November 2001), not a single paper addressed Delsham’s work.
7. For Delsham’s own account of how he came to publish and distribute his own work, see the opening autobiographical chapters of his Gueule de journaliste (15-88).
8. This phrase provides a “cri de guerre” for Keith Walker’s Countermodernism and Francophone Literary Culture (1999). According to Walker, “colonialism entailed not only the power to annex and exploit other races, but also to textualize the racial Other […] . It is this textualization against which francophone narratives must always work” (13, emphasis added). In its totalizing and exclusionary claims about what francophone narratives “must always” do, this categorical assertion exemplifies–to the point of parody–the postcolonial ideology that I am analyzing here.
9. One could spend a lot of time analyzing the ways in which Delsham’s novels fail both to meet the standard criteria for positively evaluating literary texts or to contest those criteria in a knowingly postcolonial fashion. Necessary as such a discussion might be for “proving” my commonsense claims (widely echoed in Martiniquan literary circles) about Delsham’s dubious relation to what has come to be known as “literature,” such an account is beyond the purview of a general position paper like this.
10. Here, I am echoing Jerome McGann’s influential account of “the Romantic ideology,” and his argument about how “the scholarship and interpretation of Romantic works is dominated by an uncritical absorption in Romanticism’s own self-representations” (137).
11. The existence of identifiable nation-states and regions–the Caribbean, Latin America, West Africa, etc.–or longstanding cultural groupings within a nation-state or region–Afro-Americans, Aboriginals, etc.–greatly facilitates a coming-to-terms with the inauthentic popularity that forms such a sticking point for a “time-lagged” postcolonial studies, even if these readily identifiable territories or groupings are, under pressures of globalization, becoming ever more indissociable from geographically and culturally diffuse “ethnoscapes,” in Appadurai’s terms (that is, increasingly mobile landscapes of “persons who constitute the shifting world in which we live: tourists, immigrants, refugees, exiles, guest workers, and other moving groups and individuals” [33]). If a text can be located within a particular territory, then–no matter how lowbrow or how market-driven–it can be read, positively, as forming an integral part of a culture’s “way of life”; indeed, this is how cultural studies came about in the first place, as a way of (re)defining the parameters of the British nation-state. To be sure, though, the “problem” of popularity that I am identifying with postcolonial studies does not simply disappear when one finds a home for the inauthentically popular within the limits of a particular national or cultural grouping: one need only think, for instance, about the ways in which, in Afro-American studies, Terry McMillan and Toni Morrison both are and are not thinkable in one and the same space to get a sense of how this “problem” persists even in ostensibly less abstract contexts than that of the “postcolonial” or “francophone.” For an exemplary reading of this dilemma in the context of Asian-American literature, see Wong.
12. Graham Huggan, among others, confirms this account of the double directives generating postcolonial theory, which “might be seen as the provisional attempt to forge a working alliance between the–often Marxist-inspired–politics of anti-colonial resistance, exemplified in the liberationist tracts of Fanon, Césaire and Memmi, and the disparate, allegedly destabilising poststructuralisms of Derrida, Lacan, Althusser and Foucault” (260). In Huggan’s description, however, there is at work both an historical and geographical opposition (non-European writers from the 1940s and 1950s versus European writers from the 1960s and 1970s) that I would dissolve by referring both sides of the equation back to a modernism that took worldwide root amongst intellectuals and artists in the 1920s and 1930s.
13. As Simon During has noted, “‘postcolonialism,’ with its emancipatory conceptual overtones, only obscures analysis of the rhythm of globalization”: the emergence of what he has dubbed “the global popular” is a phenomenon with which “postcolonial thought” must be uncomfortable since it is difficult for such thought “to concede the colonized’s partial consent to colonialism” (“Postcolonialism” 343, 347; see also his “Popular Culture”).
14. The role of such paratextual material in (pre)determining a text’s meaning is, however, of vital importance; for a discussion of this role in a postcolonial context, see Huggan’s discussion of how cover design sets up “an initial horizon of readerly expectations that is subsequently confirmed or, more likely, modified in the narrative that follows” (168).
15. As Condé frequently notes in her interviews, “I have never in my life written a political tract. But there are always errors in interpreting my writings because people think I have done so. They always look for militant or positive heroes, and I never portray any” (Pfaff 88).
16. On “creolist discourse,” see my reading of the 1835 plantation novel Outre-mer by the béké Louis Maynard de Queilhe in Islands and Exiles (287-316). For a brief but effective comment on how de Jaham’s first two novels express the “ideological self-perception of the béké,” see Macey (45).
17. For a pioneering consideration of paratextual material in earlier Condé novels, see Massardier-Kenney (250-52).
18. As a glance at a bibliography of Condé shows (Pfaff 144-65), the review (along with the interview) is the preferred forum for discussion of her novels–another telling sign of the middlebrow nature (or at least reception) of her work.
19. On the way in which “critiques of middlebrow culture have been persistently gendered,” see Radway 872. The particular relevance of middlebrow writing to women as a way of subverting gendered hierarchies is not an issue that I can explore here, but it is worth thinking about Condé in the context of Deidre Lynch’s remark that “many women writers, conscious of the gendering of these categories [‘classics’ and ‘trash’], have been more interested in collapsing the boundaries that separate the literary and the popular than in policing them” (23,n13).
20. In a 1982 interview, for instance, Condé arrogantly commented, “In my opinion, no writer has ever spoken to the West Indian people, because our people do not read. Certain ideas may reach them through newspapers or television. But let’s not delude ourselves: West Indians have only vague idea of novels and poetry collections published in Paris by West Indian authors” (Pfaff 38). Condé voices a very limited understanding here of what it means to “read” in a highly literate location like the French Antilles, and I would certainly agree with Lionnet that she becomes more “humble” in this regard after the early 1980s.
21. “Condé appropriates the technique of the novel within the novel to reflect upon the role of the writer as outsider, and of the outsider as catalyst or pharmakon, both poison and antidote, dangerous supplement, chronicler, and aide-mémoire of the community” (Lionnet 75).
22. In one of her interviews with Françoise Pfaff, for instance, she happily described Segu as “a commissioned work” and noted the way in which it depends upon many of the formulas of lowbrow popular writing: “I followed the rules for that type of novel: coincidences, sensational developments, dramatic turns of events, and unexpected encounters. Like everyone else, I had read Alexander Dumas’s works, such as The Three Musketeers and Twenty Years After, as well as many other cloak-and-dagger novels. In French literature there is a whole tradition of adventure novels with surprise happenings” (49).
23. Given her own understandable investment in presenting herself as a “good” writer, it is hardly surprising that Condé’s relation to her own popularity is not straightforwardly positive. This ambivalence is evident, for instance, in her comments about the differences between her reception in France and the United States:
In France, writing a bestseller causes somewhat of a misfortune for the author. You have a hard time disengaging yourself from the image of an easy book that appealed to a large readership but was perhaps not very good as a literary work […]. [Whereas Americans don’t label one that way] because they think a best-seller is a good thing. It only means that the book appealed to a lot of people, and there is nothing wrong with that. Here, I don’t feel it is infamous to have written a bestseller like Segu. And besides I don’t know whether Segu is a bestseller in the United States. It is simply a book considered to be very important among certain African-American sectors. Segu hasn’t had the notoriety in the United States that it had in France. (Pfaff 106)
Condé’s claim that Americans “think a best-seller is a good thing,” like so many of her sweeping cultural assertions, may or may not be true; more to the point, in the context of my argument, is that serious consideration of this “good thing” is beyond the scope of the postcolonial ideology: the critical
scrutiny
that Condé associates with her reception in France is one that, given the occlusion of inauthentic popularity in discussions of postcolonial literature, she is unlikely to face in the United States.
24. Explaining her preference for novel writing in an interview, Condé once remarked, “the novel seemed simpler to me [than writing plays that could “reach illiterate people in Africa and the West Indies”] because it acknowledges that it is bourgeois and elitist. Literate people have access to novels. Books are sold in stores and you need money to acquire them. Authors have no illusion. They know that they will be read by a limited circle of people that they can almost anticipate” (Pfaff 37).
25. Maja-Lisa Von Sneidern, quoted in Stoneman (152). For an overview of this postcolonial turn in Wuthering Heights criticism, see Stoneman (150-55).
26.
Pastiche is, like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique, idiosyncratic style, the wearing of a linguistic mask, speech in a dead language. But it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without any of parody’s ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter and of any conviction that alongside the abnormal tongue you have momentarily borrowed, some healthy linguistic normality still exists. Pastiche is thus blank parody, a statue with blind eyeballs […]. (Jameson 17)
In my own critical work, I have repeatedly tried to rework this account of pastiche in more positive terms: see, for instance,
Islands and Exiles (374-75).
27. Q.D. Leavis’s comments about the Brontës, in her Fiction and the Reading Public (1932), are worth citing here as a prime example of the sort of modernist distinctions upon which postcolonial literary studies genealogically, if surreptitiously, depends: “The emotion exhibited in Wuthering Heights, unlike the emotion exhibited in Jane Eyre, has a frame round it […] [I]t is the Charlotte Brontës, not the Emilies, who have provided the popular fiction of the last hundred years” (quoted in Stoneman 131).
28. As Deidre Lynch points out, in a discussion of the anxieties produced by Austen’s “popularity and marketability,” Janeite is “the term that Austen’s audiences have learned to press into service whenever they need to designate the Other Reader in his or her multiple guises, or rather, and more precisely, whenever they need to personify and distance themselves from particular ways of reading, ones they might well indulge in themselves” (12).
29. Where Brontë’s Catherine asserts “it would degrade me to marry Heathcliff, now” (121), Condé’s elaborates: “Je ne pourrai jamais, jamais me marier avec Razyé. Ce serait trop dégradant. Ce serait recommencer à vivre comme nos ancêtres, les sauvages d’Afrique!” (Migration 20) [“I could never, never marry Razyé. It would be too degrading. It would be like starting to live all over again like our ancestors, the savages in Africa!” (Windward 13)].
30. For a typical critique, see Gandhi 167-70.
31. It is no coincidence that the case studies I have been considering in this article come from the French Antilles: relatively affluent islands with high literacy rates (over 90%). If the rare attempts to think postcolonialism and cultural studies together have generally originated from settler colonies such as Australia, it is also not by chance that recent efforts in this vein have been greatly facilitated by expanding “postcolonial” territory (traditionally identified with Africa, the Indian Subcontinent, the Caribbean) to include hitherto peripheral locations such as Hong Kong and China; see, for instance, the series of essays on Hong Kong “postcolonial cultural studies” collected in Cultural Studies 15.3-4 (2001).
32. Le Hir, I should note, is simply paraphrasing those (like Meaghan Morris) who make this critique of Fiske-style populism. For the quotation from Hall, see Le Hir (128).
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2. I would not be able to say--nobody would--what its exact numerical value is. It does not have an exact numerical value in the way rational numbers do: that is, it cannot be exactly represented (only approximated) by a finite, or an infinite periodical, decimal fraction and, accordingly, by a regular fraction--by a ratio of two whole numbers. It is what is called an "irrational number," and it was the first, or one of the first, of such numbers--or (they would not see it as a number) mathematical objects--discovered by the Greeks, specifically by the Pythagoreans. The discovery is sometimes attributed to Plato's friend and pupil Theaetetus, although earlier figures are also mentioned. It was an extraordinary and, at the time, shocking discovery--both a great glory and a great problem, almost a scandal, of Greek mathematics. The diagonal and the side of a square were mathematically proven to be mathematically incommensurable, their "ratio" irrational. The very term "irrational"--both alogon (outside logos) and arreton (incomprehensible) were used--was at the time of its discovery also used in its direct sense. (117-18)