Session 1 Irlam

7/27/2019 Session 1 Irlam

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In this presentation I trace schematically certain lineages of postcolonial

theory back to the Caribbean. I shall suggest why the Caribbean archipelago

should be approached as a privileged space from which to address methodological

questions raised by postcolonial theory. I shall also outline several of the principal

issues and questions that postcolonial theory attempts to address.

When I began preparing this lecture in the Hotel Vedado, to be presented to

faculty and students at the University of Havana, I quickly realized that I did not

know where to begin, but it then occurred to me that this bewilderment

(aturdimiento) was itself a function of a postcolonial predicament. [For reasons that

would have been clear to my intended audience, members of the academic

community of the University of Havana, and because I believe, following Fanon's

directive (epigraph above), that postcolonial theory is obliged to mark its

temporality and "shelf-life," I have deliberately retained the markers and tense of

my principal audience as well as the medium of address in which it was initially

intended. This also serves to remind the reader of his or her own estrangement

from this text, a reminder of otherness that nevertheless does not entirely foreclose

legibility altogether. One final note: this lecture never took place, in the end it had

no audience at all -- it had to be cancelled at the last moment because the

University of Havana abruptly closed on the day it was scheduled to mark the 40 th

anniversary of the death in 1959 of one of the Revolutionary heroes, Camilo

Cienfuegos. Students were to spend the afternoon participating in parades to the

Malécon to cast flowers into the sea where Camilo's plane is reported to have

crashed and my presentation became one late casualty of the revolution!]

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Postcolonial theory in its simplest definition may be described as a

theoretical discourse that arises from conditions that follow the era of European

colonialism. While obviously not necessarily limited to European colonialism,

postcolonial discourse is typically associated with the historical movement of

decolonization that swept across the globe following World War II. Postcolonial

theory in a more expanded definition responds principally to the long era of

European conquest and subordination of non-Western peoples around the globe.

More broadly still, postcolonial theory is among those critical discourses that

answer to:

the principle of some responsibility, beyond all living present … beforethe ghosts of those who are not yet born, or who are already dead, bethey victims of wars, political or other kinds of violence, nationalist,racist, colonialist, sexist, or other kinds of exterminations, victims of the oppressions of capitalist imperialism or any of the forms of totalitarianism.3

The term "post" in post-colonial, as Anne McClintock has cautioned, should

never be understood to imply that the era of colonialism is now somehow past.

Rather, postcolonial theory is to some extent an acknowledgement of the failure of

decolonization as I think Gayatri Spivak has remarked somewhere. Postcolonial

theory analyzes the more complex and insidious forms of neo-colonialism and

cultural imperialism that have replaced colonialism and that continue to thwart the

independences of new nations long after the old flags and anthems have been

replaced. Postcolonial theory, then, emerges from the historical process of global

decolonization that characterizes world history following the collapse of the British

and French empires in the aftermath of World War II.

Postcolonial theory is above all a reflection on difference, and as such is a

discourse about the Other, but it is also, and more importantly, an address to the

Other. Postcolonial theories attempt to address the circumstances of marginalized,

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exploited or subaltern values and the social groups that become stigmatized by

those values in any social configuration. Colonial society, by virtue of its highly

visible and reified structures of power and exploitation and its intensely arbitrary

ideological configurations, provides a valuable heuristic tool for the analysis of

cultural and ideological effects determined by racial and ethnic inequalities in any

society. Postcolonial theory is primarily an analytical discourse about the specific

racial, anthropological and sexual others procured within the colonial encounter,

but very frequently finds itself engaged to reflect upon the general philosophical

category of Otherness and its modalities, too. Postcolonial discourse attempts to

analyze the situation or conditions of production that determine the colonial Other.

Fanon offers us an acute sense of these alienating processes of production when he

writes, "the black soul is a white man's artefact."4 What we undertake as

postcolonial theorists is an analysis of the entire "eco-system" comprising the

anthropological Other. This sphere of investigation includes patterns of migration in

an internationalized labor market as well as movements across and between

various cultures and between "metropolis" and "periphery." This perspective

commits us to explore a wide diversity of quite different social, economic, political,

cultural and linguistic forces of production in a transnational environment that by

definition cannot ever be fully or adequately mapped, as I shall explain below.

Postcolonial theory, however, strives for a discursive relationship in which the

Other is not objectified as merely a site of investigation and knowledge. It must

therefore also be an address to the Other. As a critical discourse, it cannot pretend

to offer a total and universal form of knowledge about the postcolonial Other, nor

saturate its sphere of investigation with meaning. Instead, postcolonial theory

strives to make visible the mobilities that prevent it closing on some putative ‘truth’

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of the postcolonial condition as well as the shifting and "occasional" situations of its

address. This difficult intellectual project is, it seems to me, integral to what

differentiates postcolonial theory from earlier forms of colonial discourse analysis.

In one respect, the pronoun provides an excellent metaphor for postcolonial theory

(and pronouns are seldom metaphors for anything). Pronouns belong to that unique

linguistic category called by Roman Jacobsen and others shifters, that is, words

whose use is governed by determinate grammatical rules, but whose meaning or

content is entirely context-dependent, altering its reference according to the

perspective from which it is used. Postcolonial theory must seek to adapt its

parameters to its changing situations and circumstances in precisely this way.

Furthermore, because postcolonial theory takes the form of an address to the

Other as a gesture of inclusion, hospitality and respect; because it strives to create

a place for the voices in the margins and to enable the subaltern to be heard, it

necessarily possesses the grammatical structure of a question. Postcolonial theory

is committed, within an acute awareness of the obstacles and discursive limitations

of doing so, to a retrieval of the ‘voice’ of the dispossessed, those who, in Homi

Bhabha's words "have suffered the sentence of history" -- as well as the history of

the Sentence.5 And this commitment is not made because the postcolonial theorist

believes that one possesses the right to represent the Subaltern (a charge of

intellectual imperialism periodically leveled against postcolonial theory), or even

that one finally can enable the subaltern to speak (Spivak), or that one naively

believes as David Harvey supposes, that an "authentic nobility of purpose somehow

attaches to conditions of total degradation" and that "it is only the impoverished,

the marginalized and the repressed who have the capacity to transcend their state,

tell us plain truths and lead us into the promised land," though such a "romantic

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turn" would not be a bad motive for attempting to retrieve the voices from the

margins.6 Nietzsche disabused us of such an expectation a long time ago when he

noted that suffering is not a guarantee of truth.

One turns to the downtrodden and marginalized Other, to the ‘wretched of

the earth’ because that recognition of the Other, however flawed, is the first step

toward alleviating the alienation and reification of the Other, or worse yet, the

scotomization of the Other under the conditions of capitalist modernity. One of the

great accomplishments of capitalism has been the routine objectification of labor.

The first labor of postcolonial theory must therefore be to counteract that

objectification through recognition. At the same time one turns, with one's own

vulnerabilities, to the Other for recognition. But obviously the first recognition that

must occur is that recognition does not take place all at once. Rather, it is a

process; it is the effect of a slow, often awkward and continual negotiation with the

Other. One cannot even state with any certainty or recognize when this recognition

might have taken place, as if there were some determinate milestone to pass,

some determinate content to be verified and recognized. Rather, the very

framework, existence and duration of the negotiation itself, irrespective of its

content, in large measure constitutes the apparatus of affirmation and recognition.

Furthermore, as Butler writes in another context, "The power relations that

condition and limit dialogic possibilities need first to be interrogated. Otherwise, the

model of dialogue risks relapsing into a liberal model that assumes that speaking

agents occupy equal positions of power and speak with the same presuppositions."7

Postcolonial theory is therefore engaged by a continuing commitment to

imagine the Other to whom it speaks. It is therefore always under an ethical

imperative to couch its "knowledge" as provisional, hypothetical and fundamentally

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heuristic rather than asserting a perfect understanding and mastery of its fields of

inquiry. This is why postcolonial theory must retain the form of a perpetual question

or permanent hypothesis. It is always a colloquy awaiting affirmation, contradiction

or even refusal by the Other, and, like a tempo behind every assertion and

hypothesis, repeating one, underlying question: "Is this your name?"8 Postcolonial

theory, therefore, strives to sustain an open, critically self-reflexive and dialectical

relation to the Other, leaving enough room for responses to its questions and

standing open to correction. This encounter bears obvious analogies finally with

the process of critical reading. When one takes up an unfamiliar text for the first

time, one cannot prevent oneself from bringing preconceptions and previously

tested strategies of interpretation to the process; however, if one wishes to be a

responsive and responsible reader, one necessarily needs to be prepared to

suspend those preconceptions and leave the text sufficient room to "talk back," to

challenge and to transform those interpretive strategies with its own knowledge

and its own idioms.

PRECURSORS

I wish briefly to trace the origins of postcolonial theory and differentiate this more

recent discursive emergence from two closely-related discourses that preceded it:

A) Anti-colonial literature

B) Colonial discourse analysis

A. Anti-colonial literature and discourse is perhaps best represented by Césaire's

Discourse on Colonialism (1956) and Fanon's works. Postcolonial theory differs

from anti-colonial discourse to the extent that the latter (during the period from

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roughly the 1920s to the 1960s) was always focused on very specific political

and social objectives: the liberation of colonized peoples, the achievement of

political independence. The political movements, anti-colonial struggles and

revolutionary wars that witnessed the liberation of Africa, subcontinental India,

the Indonesian archipelago and south-east Asia from French, British and Dutch

imperialism constituted the political horizon of that discourse. Its objectives

were the end of European domination as well as a political sovereignty and

nationhood typically modeled on the example of the European nation-states.

Many of the works of this period form the intellectual foundations of postcolonial

theory but this emergent theoretical formation also works to show the

limitations in many of the models of identity, culture, economic rationalization

and statehood adopted from the West by these new nation-states. These

adoptions were to make them very vulnerable to predatory neo-colonial

practices as the postcolonial era has amply demonstrated. It is precisely to

these miscarriages of the project of decolonization that postcolonial discourse is

attempting to respond. The instabilities that still plague most of Africa, Latin

America, Indonesia and the Middle East can be traced back to inadequate

models of economic, political, national and cultural development.

B. Colonial discourse theory is an older model of postcolonial theory, but again, as

the name suggests, it is occupied primarily with the literary, cultural and

ideological expressions of the colonial period. This is not to say that postcolonial

theory does not also address works of the colonial period, but there are some

significant differences. Apart from its historical focus, colonial discourse analysis

is also methodologically limited. Very broadly speaking its approach to the

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materials of the colonial period is hampered by rather dated formal and

thematic analyses of literary works. Postcolonial theory on the other hand

attempts to displace or problematize purely thematic approaches to textual

meaning by emphasizing elements of contradiction, rupture and silence in the

colonial text. Moreover, whereas colonial discourse analysis tended to originate

in the metropolitan and colonial academies sympathetic to the anti-colonial

struggles (among those whom Albert Memmi described as ‘the colonizer who

refuses’), postcolonial theory has been initiated and developed by postcolonial

intellectuals themselves (Said, Guha, Spivak, Ngugi, Appiah, Prakash, Bhabha, to

name a few). Most importantly, however, the conception of colonial and

postcolonial identities by postcolonial theory occurs with the hindsight of a

powerful intellectual revolution in Europe since the 1960s which I shall

summarize simply as the recognition of the sign.

INTELLECTUAL ORIGINS OF POSTCOLONIAL THEORY

During the 1960s, through the innovative work in structural anthropology

undertaken by Claude Lévi-Strauss, there was a progressive discovery of the sign

(and with it all the disruptive characteristics of writing) as a consequence of

returning to the work of Ferdinand de Saussure. This is a well-known history. The

sign was discovered to be not merely the inert and exterior representation of an

interior consciousness, but rather, formative of that consciousness as a structure of

differences. The sign is a technology both composing and decomposing the

autonomy of the fully self-conscious self at the same time. As Derrida writes, "We

are dispossessed of the longed-for presence in the gesture of language by which we

attempt to seize it. … The speculary dispossession which at the same time

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institutes and deconstitutes me is … a law of language. It operates as a power of

death in the heart of living speech … this power … inaugurating speech, dislocates

the subject that it constructs, prevents it from being present to its signs…."9 It is

this subversive and invisible double (consolidating, dispersing) movement of the

sign that has determined what is generally called ‘the linguistic turn’ in critical

theory, a turn whose movement is embedded in the very conception of postcolonial

theory as a discourse. In short, two broad historical developments have converged

to synthesize the set of discourses now called postcolonial criticism or theory:

i) The physical displacement of the imperial subject from the offices of colonial

power through the struggles of oppressed and colonized peoples following

the collapse of European imperialism during World War II -- the first

independence celebrations in this modern cycle occurred in India in 1947,

just two years after the war.

ii) The intellectual displacement of the Enlightenment subject managed through a

broad set of discursive forces (philosophical, literary, political, sociological) in

the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. It is Freud's

displacement of a unitary concept of consciousness, Marx's displacement of

unitary conceptions of capital and commodity, and Saussure's critique of the

unitary conception of the sign that have together made this revision and

displacement of Enlightenment rationality imperative. Here again, this crisis

of European subjectivity and Enlightenment rationality was made palpable by

the catastrophic collapse of Europe in the 1940s, a crisis eloquently analyzed

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by the Frankfurt School intellectuals, Horkheimer and Adorno in their 1944

Dialektik der Aufklärung.

To a considerable degree, the seeds for the collapse of Enlightenment

rationality were first sown in the colonial context. In this respect the colonial space

stands in an analogous relation to the letter. Intended to be merely an inert and

mimic reflection of imperial power, the colony instead acquires an uncanny,

disruptive agency of its own. Just as writing is at once the possibility and death of a

unitary consciousness, so the colony is at once the possibility and nemesis of the

imperial subject. Enlightenment rationality was predicated upon an intellectual and

material mastery of a Nature that had been instrumentalized and objectified. By

extension, others conceived of simply as natural resources to be instrumentalized

and exploited found themselves caught within this same circuit of mastery (other

races, ethnicities, women, laboring classes, animals). As Ashcroft et al. eloquently

put it in The Empire Writes Back :

The idea of ‘post-colonial literary theory’ emerges from the inability of

European theory to deal adequately with the complexities and varied culturalprovenance of post-colonial writing. European theories themselves emergefrom particular cultural traditions which are hidden by false notions of ‘theuniversal.’ … The political and cultural monocentrism of the colonialenterprise was a natural result of the philosophical traditions of the Europeanworld and the systems of representation which this privileged. …Paradoxically … imperial expansion has had a radically destabilizing effect onits own preoccupations and power. In pushing the colonial world to themargins of experience the ‘centre’ pushed consciousness beyond the point atwhich monocentrism in all spheres of thought could be accepted withoutquestion.10

In short, from the moral sleep of European imperialism were spawned monsters

that reason would never master. Imperialism created for European intellectual

discourses an entirely new set of epistemic objects, hybridities, syntheses,

contradictions and forms of difference that it was simply unable to comprehend

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within existing frames of understanding (logocentrism, ethnocentrism,

homogeneity, racial and cultural superiority, etc.). Derek Walcott eloquently

describes the miscarriage of European Word in the Caribbean when he comments

on the lack of a "language for the bush" and speaks of "a conflicting grammar in the

pace of our movement."11 The Enlightenment's failure to grasp the concept of

difference as anything other than a deviation from the Same became evident in the

staggering violence and violation of imperial conquest. Imperialism was at once the

creation and undoing of the European subject.

GEOGRAPHICAL ORIGINS OF POSTCOLONIAL THEORY

Currently, postcolonial discourse is overwhelmingly associated in the North

American academy with a post-Hegelian and post-Enlightenment intellectual

heritage and with Middle Eastern and South Asian studies.12 This perspective has

prevailed to such an extent that one critique of postcolonial theory has argued that

the very concept of postcoloniality was invented by deracinated South Asian

intellectuals trying to legimitize their place in the Western academy.13 What an

overemphasis on this South Asian etymology of postcolonial theory altogether

overlooks of course is the constitutive place of the Caribbean.

The Caribbean in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as nobody needs

reminding, was the great rehearsal studio for the techniques of imperialism that

were later to go global. It holds a pre-eminent place in the history of European

imperialism and if one examines closely the intellectual roots of postcolonial theory

one finds the most recurrent name is Frantz Fanon, followed by others such as

C.L.R. James, V.S. Naipaul, Aimé Césaire, George Lamming, Derek Walcott, and

Edouard Glissant. This is not even to mention the illustrious group of writers and

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cultural commentators from the Spanish Caribbean (from José Lezama Lima and

Fernando Ortíz to Benítez-Rojo) whose absence from North American postcolonial

discourses represents a lamentable linguistic chauvinism in a theoretical discourse

with global aspirations.

The Caribbean, we have been inclined to forget, is the cradle of European

imperialism and the "origin" of capitalist modernity. It has been persuasively

argued by Eric Williams and others that the extraction of surplus value from the

Caribbean through the plundering of resources and the exploitation of African slave

labor during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries amassed a primitive accumulation

that was to bankroll the spectacular rise of European industrial and geo-political

development. As Fanon has written more expansively, "Europe is literally the

creation of the Third World."14 The huge surplus of capital in seventeenth-century

Holland and eighteenth-century England precipitated the need to find new markets

and set in motion the expansion of European power across the planet. However, at

a social level, the Caribbean became a theatre of racial, linguistic and cultural

exchange never previously possible. An unstable, fluid community of adventurers

and nomads, slaves and sailors, buccaneers and bawds circulated through the

Caribbean archipelago producing new social and cultural configurations with every

encounter. Here is produced on a scale vaster and more multifarious even than its

precursor, al-Andalus, a ‘community of others’ where individuals from quite alien

linguistic, spiritual and cultural backgrounds needed to improvise ways to

communicate with each other.15

[If, even hypothetically, one can posit the normative form of the nation-state

as a community founded upon a shared ethnic, linguistic, racial or religious idea,

the hegemonic expressions of European nationalisms,]The ‘community of others’ is,

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on the contrary, a motley, mongrel group of peoples, cultures and societies who,

without common origins, without linguistic and cultural homogeneities or

continuities, without common norms, as a consequence of the powerful

displacements first wrought by capitalism (what goes by the name of the Triangular

Trade) find themselves thrown together, "marooned" in an archipelago where they

must improvise and fashion new cultural practices and new frameworks for

conceiving a society paradoxically only unified by heterogeneity and difference.

[the principle of minimal equivalence (Laclau) that constitutes the liminal

criterion for a "normative" community, even, in many instances, the recognition of

a minimal, common humanity is altogether missing here; instead, the origins of

such a society are purely contingent, and its rationale totally lacking, procuring a

world of strangers arbitrarily congregated by the forces of history and now facing

the formidable historical task of improvising a community together.]

C.L.R. James, in a variety of essays, has linked the distinguishing ‘modernity’

of the Caribbean in multiple alienations. If one scholar can characterize modernity

as a period of "immense demographic upheavals, severing millions of people from

their ancestral habitats, hurtling them halfway across the world into new lives,"

then the Caribbean is the first region to live this defining, modern experience.16

Modernity begins with the erasure of national origins in the inherently immigrant

and exilic composition of the entire community and with the pioneering of modern

industrial techniques of surplus-value extraction in the ubiquitous Plantation. James

writes:

The sugar plantation has been the most civilising as well as the mostdemoralising influence in West Indian development. When three centuriesago slaves came to theest Indies, they entered directly into the large-scale agriculture of the sugarplantation, which was a modern system. It further required that the slaveslive together in a social relation far closer than any proletariat of the time. ...

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Negroes ... from the very start lived a life that was in essence a modern life. That is their history.17

Elsewhere, James insists, "we are essentially an international people. We have no

native civilisation."18 It is therefore the shared experience of cultural rupture, loss of

history and the alienation from any and all traditions that has forged the defining

modernity of the Caribbean. Caribbean societies find themselves unified around a

certain persistent and irreducible Otherness within their boundaries and it is this

core of lack or strangeness within, this self-difference which qualitatively

distinguishes the Caribbean from the conventional poetics of nation-making in

Europe, typically (or at least wishfully) founded on principles of linguistic, national

or ethnic homogeneity.

Throughout the remainder of this presentation, I shall appeal to the qualities

of strangeness, opacity and unintelligibility to characterize the constitutive modality

of absence that founds Caribbean subjectivity and more broadly distinguishes

postcolonial subjectivity, for whom I wish to claim the Caribbean as a precursor and

a metaphor, in this era of the ‘vanishing present.’ Any history of the vanishing

present needs to begin in the Caribbean if not al-Andalus.19

If postcolonial critique is to offer an alternative to Enlightenment rationality,

which was always based on a reduction of the Other to an object of Knowledge and

a set of knowable attributes, it must advance with lively recognition of the opacity

of the Other and therefore with a readiness to be surprised by the Other and a

quickness to revise its hypotheses. Enlightenment rationality, of which ‘colonial

knowledge’ is a distinctive subfield, is predicated upon a commitment to making

the other transparent and readable through multiple techniques of observation,

surveillance and scientific investigation. Postcolonial theory must surrender this

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desire for transparency and a fully-developed knowledge. It therefore cannot ever

become a properly-formed epistemology, but rather becomes instead an ethical

discourse. It is not exclusively a knowledge about the other, but also a mode of

relation to the Other. It must be an etiquette before becoming an anthropology of

the Other. Here, though one must once again envisage the displacement of the

notion of etiquette conceived as a set of shared rules of conduct for codifying a

given situation. Etiquette here must involve an alertness to the responses of the

Other and a readiness to alter one's assumptions. It does not signify adherence to a

predetermined social script.

ENLIGHTENMENT RATIONALITY AND CULTURAL UNINTELLIGIBILITY

The consequences of a theory of the opacity of the Other, or what Benítez-Rojo calls

the "furtive locus" of the Other, leads us to analyze the indispensable value of

intelligibility in Enlightenment rationality.20 Enlightenment rationality is predicated

upon the pursuit of intelligibility as its highest epistemic objective, seeking to make

the object of inquiry fully and transparently present to the act of consciousness.

There is no room for shadows in the Enlightenment studio. Such a rationality ideally

yields a set of stable, knowable identities. This culminates in the ideal of self-

knowledge according to which one becomes a fully transparent and comprehensible

object for oneself -- the moment of full self-consciousness in which one apprehends

oneself as consciousness. Freud problematized this transparency of the subject

long ago when he formulated the necessity of the Unconscious. Postcolonial theory

attempts to apply the same insight to knowledge of the racial and anthropological

Other. The Other in colonial knowledge is bound to remain in a place analogous to

the unconscious -- disrupting and disturbing the sovereign subjectivity raised

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against it. The Caribbean archipelago is the geography in which these nomadic,

transnational and transitional "phenomena" are first encountered in modern history

and their irreducible complexity remains a challenge to existing nomenclatural

strategies.21 The Caribbean constitutes the "definitive" (the necessity for the scare-

quotes should now be clear) community of others, a community in which one never

precisely knows who one's neighbor is. Consequently, the acknowledgement that

an irreducible residue of unintelligibility or invisibility eludes the gaze of knowledge

and constitutes the capacity for the Other to surprise us, to bewilder us, to

confound us must somehow be inscribed in the structure of postcolonial knowledge,

a knowledge that is predicated upon an irreducible absence of the postcolonial

subject.

On Monday afternoon, Professor Yolanda Wood invited us to attend her class

and since I understand no Spanish, I passed 2½ hours in a state of total

bewilderment. The class was of course unintelligible to me, but that bewilderment

in the company of a language that I could not understand became itself a source of

understanding about one of the abiding predicaments of the Caribbean. Whatever

its pedagogical intentions, the class had an unintended pedagogical function in my

own repetition of the moment of encounter in which new cultural contacts have

been founded. The class became a metaphor for other modes in which different

cultures, or even different identities within a common culture remain opaque to

each other. Dr. Wood joked on Tuesday that Cubans spend all their time trying to

understand the complexities of Cuban reality without much success. There is a

serious point in that remark. Opacity or unintelligibility is a constitutive

characteristic of cultural expression -- the Tower of Babel casts its shadow over

every epistemic venture. The intricate cultural ecologies of the Caribbean yield

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many varieties of difference and heterogeneity, and therefore many instances of

cultural invisibility. If for a moment we can even imagine medieval Europe as a

space of relatively stable and enduring identities, those mythic ethnic and linguistic

unities towards which all the nationalisms of Europe have nostalgically appealed,

the Caribbean, in contrast, has been a geography of displacement since the

sixteenth century. It is the archetypal space of immigration, exile, demographic

mobility, diaspora, nomadism. It yielded and still yields a world where identities are

in a state of perennial flux and are constantly being revised in new encounters and

improvised to confront new challenges. It is precisely this process that keeps the

culture in motion and prevents its identity from ever crystallizing into a reified,

recognizable entity. All these characteristics shape the world of postcolonial

culture. Shifting once more to the Enlightenment rhetoric of light and shadow,

visibility and invisibility, we can reread Homi Bhabha's poignant evocation of the

milieu of the postcolonial subject and the community of others, "Gatherings of

exiles and émigrés and refugees; gathering on the edge of ‘foreign’ cultures;

gathering on the frontiers; … gathering in the half-life, half-light of foreign tongues

… lonely gatherings of the scattered peoples…."22

The unintelligibility that constitutes the postcolonial Other must not be

confounded with an earlier, colonial discourse of exoticism which romanticizes

some image of the ‘mysterious east’ or ‘inscrutable Other,’ although those

commonly repeated colonial testimonies bear symptomatic witness to the aporia

that the cultural Other represents. This unintelligibility derives from a determinate

intersubjective and transcultural positioning of the Other in a context that is never,

in the final analysis, fully totalizable by any act of consciousness or discourse of

knowledge. No epistemic discourse can fully totalize the entire constitutive

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"ecology" which synthesizes and gives to us the anthropological or cultural Other. It

is this recognition that led Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth to abandon a

conception of national culture as an intelligible, knowable and reproducible

phenomenon. This is not the place to offer a detailed reading of Fanon's

remarkable analysis of national culture, but a few indications will suffice. He writes:

The native intellectual who comes back to his people by way of culturalachievements behaves in fact like a foreigner…. He wishes to attach himself to the people but instead he only catches hold of their outer garments. Andthese outer garments are merely the reflection of a hidden life teeming andperpetually in motion. That extremely obvious objectivity which seems tocharacterize a people is in fact only the inert, already forsaken result of frequent … adaptations of a much more fundamental substance which itself is continuously being renewed… Culture has never the translucidity of custom … for custom is always the deterioration of culture.23

With this stark interpretation of culture in terms of outer and inner, shell and

kernel, manifest and hidden, culture and custom, Fanon challenges the

transparency and intelligibility of the cultural artifact conceived by Enlightenment

rationality and articulates precisely the invisibility or unintelligibility that I am trying

to make apparent. Fanon continues:

The artist who has decided to illustrate the truths of the nation turnsparadoxically toward the past and away from actual events. What heultimately intends to embrace are in fact castoffs of thought, its shells andcorpses, a knowledge which has been stabilized one and for all.24

Finally, Fanon argues for a different conception of the cultural as a recondite and

inscrutable mode of becoming, a process that will demand different epistemic

values to approach it, "It is not enough to get back to the people in that past out of

which they have already emerged; rather we must join them in that fluctuating

movement which they are just giving shape to … It is to this zone of occult

instability where the people dwell that we must come."25 This determination closely

echoes Adorno and Horkheimer when they remark that "To speak of culture was

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always contrary to culture."26 The phrases ‘‘hidden life’’ and ‘‘occult instability’’

indicate this zone of opacity or unintelligibility that composes the postcolonial

milieu and to which any discourse of knowledge has an ethical obligation to defer.

In the process of making these observations, Fanon discovered that French Algeria

was in the process of becoming part of the Caribbean archipelago. Since that time a

lot more of the world has joined that archipelago and has begun to confront us with

the same cultural dilemmas and conundra first posed by the Caribbean. It has thus

become necessary to broaden our perspective to think instead in terms of

postcoloniality.

Retrieving Fanon's passing insight into the constitutive function of opacity in

the calculus of identity, Edouard Glissant has appropriately defended the "right to

opacity" and made this a defining predicate of his own theoretical articulations of

the Caribbean and of the wider postcolonial archipelago whose dispersed center it

is. Let us then review Glissant's conception of cultural opacity…. INSERT PAGES ON

GLISSANT [Rawls, "veil of ignorance"]

The Caribbean has always lived in this zone of occult instability vividly

figured by the inscrutable and unpredictable path of the hurricane. It is a region

appropriately associated with the mysteries of the Bermuda Triangle and of voodoo

and santeria -- it has always eluded the intrusive knowledge of the West. And

Havana, it seems is the proper capital of this endemic impropriety, this refusal to

constitute oneself as an object, this elusive Caribbean. Havana concentrates within

itself this occult identity of the Caribbean, an identity that can never be fully known

or totalized because of the breadth of shifting forces that compose the multiple

locations of the Caribbean and the permanence of Havana within those mobile

calculations of geo-political force: touch one place in the web and the entire web

21



shudders and moves. And I do not have this elusive identity of Havana on my own

witness, but appeal to the testimony of the Cuban writer, Miguel Barnet.

The other afternoon, sitting at the Hotel Inglaterra, I chanced upon a

quotation that provided the starting point for this talk that didn't know where to

begin. It will crystallize the argument I have been making as only poetry can,

underscoring the partial invisibility or unintelligibility of the postcolonial Other

within the field of knowledge. This is also, luckily for you, the only Spanish you will

have to suffer from me this afternoon. Miguel Barnet observes:

"La Habana tiene zonas que nadie ha visto"

Echoing Fanon's suggestive word "zone" across the Caribbean, what Miguel Barnet

evokes with the precision of poetry is this sense of the constitutive absence of the

city (and Havana, I suggest, is a concentration of that larger totality called the

Caribbean) to the demand for visibility and intelligibility. Countless histories,

geographies, demographic data, statistics, public records, newspaper articles, legal

documents, museums and archives will never fully determine the proper context of

intelligibility that will allow Havana to be "seen" at last in all its truth. The truth of

Havana hides. And it is there for any tourist to see on the terrace of the Hotel

Inglaterra! Miguel Barnet, the "native informant" assures the tourist at the start of

the trip that he or she will always fail to see Havana. La Habana thus becomes the

current name for the legendary city that remains the true capital of the Caribbean:

El Dorado.

This resistance to intelligibility, this zone of occult instability (which is never

to say that the Caribbean or its capital, Havana, is entirely unintelligible), is what

composes the Other and constitutes its capacity to surprise us and to lure us into

the interpretive embrace.

22



POSTSCRIPT

The inspiration for this paper arose from a number of different encounters and

conversations during my few days in Havana. As I noted earlier, a class taught by

Dr. Wood became for me the site of a quite different pedagogy. Late in the night

before this address I was in a state-sponsored Havana dance-club. I spoke to a

young woman there who introduced herself as Nairobi. Although she wasn't

altogether sure where Nairobi was, she had been given that name she explained

after her father had fought with the Cuban forces against South Africa during the

war in Angola. It commemorated his service in Africa. In that ugly, colonial reality,

her father and my countrymen might have killed each other in the Caprivi Strip or

in southern Angola. Instead, I was here in Havana making conversation across

broken languages with a young woman who bore the memory of a conflict and a

continent that she had never seen, but which I had once called home. This stark

compression of what once had seemed impossible degrees of separation into a

transitory ‘communion of others’ epitomizes the postcolonial reality and the zones

of occulted instability where postcolonial criticism begins.

23



ENDNOTES:

24



1 I use "occasional" in the sense in which we speak of occasional poetry, literary expressionsmeant to memorialize and monumentalize specific historic events. Here, of course, the occasionswere principally the anniversary of Cienfuegos's death, my arrival in Havana for the first time andthe historical collaboration between two universities and two nations still technically divided bythe rancors of the Cold War. I invoke the concept of "occasional" and monumental inscription,mindful of everything Derrida has written on this head in his essay, "Schibboleth: For Paul Celan"in Midrash and Literature. Ed Geoffrey Hartman and Sanford Budick (New Haven & London: Yale,1986).2 I use the term Other to refer principally to a cultural, racial or anthropological Other, themodalities of Otherness commonly associated with postcolonial preoccupations. I do not mean toevoke Lacan's concept of the Other with this usage.3 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx , trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York and London: Routledge, 1994),xix.4 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin White Masks, (New York: Grove, 1961), 14.5 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 172.6 David Harvey, Justice, Nature & the Geography of Difference (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 101.7 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London and New York:Rotuledge, 1990), 15.8 One should be mindful here of Derrida's observation in "The Supplement of the Copula" andelsewhere that the assumption of being is precomprehended in such a question. One shouldallow room for the possibility that the postcolonial other may surprise us with a response thatdoesn't fit either the conditions of being or naming such as they have been determined in theWestern philosophical tradition. But this impasse precisely indicates the terms on which thedialogue should be conducted.9 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology . Trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976),141.10 Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice inPost-Colonial Literatures (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), 11, 12.11 Derek Walcott, "What the Twilight Says: An Overture," Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970), 37.12 Among the principal intellectuals and works that have defined postcolonial theory andliterature for the North American academy are Edward Said, Orientalism (1978), the SubalternStudies historians in India (Ranajit Guha, Partha Chatterjee), Gayatri Spivak, In Other Worlds andmost recently, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, Sara Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India,Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Worlds and his numerous novels, Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest , Jenny Sharpe, Allegories of Empire and Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (1992).13 Arif Dirlik, The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism," CriticalInquiry 20 (Winter, 1994): 328-56.14 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove, 1961),102.15 José Buscaglia-Salgado, Impossible Nations (Minneapolis: Minnesota, forthcoming) makes abrilliant argument for the importance of medieval al-Andalus as the prototype of Caribbeansociety, one which indeed later reproduced its class and social structures in the Hispano-Caribbean.16 Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity , (New York:Penguin, 1982), 16.17 C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins, (New York: Vintage), 392.18 C.L.R. James, At the Rendezvous of Victory , 143.19 Gaytri Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Towards a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).20 Antonio Benítez-Rojo, The Repeating Island (Durham: Duke University Press, 1992),21 "Phenomenon" is defined, among other things, by the Compact Oxford English Dictionary as "1.a. In scientific and general use: A thing that appears or is perceived or observed … applied chieflyto a fact or occurrence, the cause or explanation of which is in question. … 3.Something verynotable or extraordinary; a highly exceptional or unaccountable fact or occurrence"22 Bhabha, Location, 139, my emphasis.23 Fanon, Wretched of the Earth. (New York: Grove Press, 1962) 223-224; my emphasis.



24 Fanon, ibid., 225.25 Fanon, ibid., 22726 Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment . Trans. John Cumming (New

York: Continuum Press, 1987), 131.

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Session 1 Irlam

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