UNDERSTANDING POST-COLONIAL IDENTITIES UNDERSTANDING POST-COLONIAL IDENTITIES: IRELAND, AFRICA AND THE PACIFIC EDITED BY DELE LAYIWOLA INSTITUTE OF AFRICAN STUDIES UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN NIGERIA Ibadan S e fs r 2001 SEFER BOOKS LTD 2, Alayande Street House 3, F Close Bodija Estate, 5th Avenue, Ibadan, Festac Town, Nigeria Lagos, Nigeria Tel. (234) 02-8105250 Tel. (234) 01-880872 E-mail < sefer @ skannet.com.ng> First published, 2001 © Dele Layiwola, 2001 ISBN 9 7 8 - 35753 - 0 - 9 Typeset at Helicon Press, Ibadan Printed by Oluseyi Press Ltd, Ibadan Dedication To the sweet memory of friends who departed at a moment’s wink; for which reason our debt of gratitude to them remains unpaid: Anthony Avoseh, 1958 - 1982 C.L.R. James, 1901 - 1989 Samuel Beckett, 1906-1989 Tom Murphy of Barr Errach, Eire, 1947 -1992 Motola Johnson, 1903 -1 999 Daniel Ayodele Carew, 1933 -1 999 Charles Barber, 1915-2000 v Preface The basis for the present anthology goes back to 1988 when a group of Africanists at the University of Ibadan thought that the debate about post-coloniality had yet to represent the balance of gender in its realistic proportion. It was then decided to institute a series of debates whereby the discourse of post-coloniality could reflect, in all its shades, its impact on women, children and the disabled. In actual fact, no area of subaltern studies (including the seminal disciplines of gay and gender studies) is complete without a comprehensive implication of other components of minor (or children’s) studies and the study of other disabled, disadvantaged social groupings. Disability would then mean those subjects of challenge or affliction, including dyslexics and schizophrenics, the physically blind or lame or indeed anyone or group with the tendency to be ignored, taken for granted, ‘abused’ or ‘looked down upon’. It is true that the different fields of study endeavour which articulate the predicament of the ‘historically subjugated’, for want of a better term, have done their individually diverse researches in comparative isolation. But the time has come to bring the micro­ disciplines together to ‘sum up’, as it were, the present state of the field. From the various centres spin off the centrifugal equivalents of margins or peripheries. And within the interstices of this broad inter­ disciplinarity, there are often complementary as well as contradictory ‘appearances’ which have to be harmonized for the better understanding of macro-cultures, sub-cultures and the mind-boggling world of spatially indefinable territories created by consumerist patterns in industrial states and in modernity. The twenty-first century, without a shadow of doubt, will be a world predicated upon trans­ territoriality and transnationality. Ironically within the broad challenges of the transnational will also emerge an attendant periphery or clusters of peripheries seeking to hold on to their own narrow, self-enabling but marginal nationalities even within the more developed economies of the world. VII There would, therefore, appear to be a certain constructuration of reality as defined by the study of minors and minorities in concept and in scale. Where a margin or periphery is blurred or undefined, then the centre itself is inchoate and amorphous. In any case, for as long as the struggle over and about territories or resources and space have subsisted, for so long have there been a centre of torque between that which is pulled and twisted and that which pulls it. Our first conceptual framework of this notion at Ibadan was to experiment with women in a certain economic context; women and access to credit in the various banks and finance houses. These have tended to be the mushrooming indices of most newfangled, monetized economies of the modem third world. But this has often turned out to be a constant factor among macro-nationalities in the developed world. The brass tacks are the groundswell of evidence on who has access to what; especially with regard to loans, credit and finance. Or is this not the bottom line between the rich and the poor? Our thoughts at the time coincided with those of other well-known institutions who funded the one issue of African Notes devoted to that phase of the project. Beyond the purview of minted commerce would be the shift to the cloudy superstructure of ideas - what is the nexus of control in the merchandising of ideas, the academy, research, arts and science? Who controls what and who dominates or manipulates the resources of science, technology and research? It has always been axiomatic that whoever is wise to dominate the intellect and the academy - the resources of mind - would create the dominant culture(s) of the century. It then means that one form of mastery or dominion in one field generates the basis for dominance in a myriad others. This is the dynamics of how culture is molded and redefined every micro-hour in our world. Those cultures thereby create their peripheries of identities. The matter may be a little more complex than I have defined here but the operational pattern is sure to be along the outlines of such relations. The whole field of post-colonial studies, at its most profound, does not dwell on peoples and individuals (for there are no post­ colonials by physiognomy!) but on the cultural relations and relativities that define our lives in the language of exchange. The whole rhetoric of viii culture, anarchy and ideology relate more to what people do than to human beings as beings in themselves. We are all conceived as commodities of exchange, gain or pilferage. What makes one white, black, yellow, Irish, Jew, disadvantaged or prosperous is, therefore, largely based on which side of the exchange one has been historically conditioned to pitch one’s tent. On another level, as in the case of gender, it is that ideological underpinning which assigns one to the invented notions of what one is thought to be. The whole world of ideas is thus governed by the notorious obsession with inventions, creations and recreations of matter, ideas and persons in the material world and assigning arbitrary tags on to them. On a more complex level, the tagging is not even done by the inventor but by a different set of self-appointed, self-acclaimed professionals who take on the ‘product’, by second remove, and create their own myths and legends in the scheme of invented nomenclature. But even those of us who come, by virtue .of industrialization, to consume and assimilate the products have our ways of creatively ‘digesting’ them. This complex nexus of contradictions continues to ensure that the debate around post-colonial studies may take on different tags depending on the dynamics of the generation. There, certainly, can be no dearth of argumentation and discourse over new or fallow territories. Years after the seminars in Ibadan, I was fortunate to be visiting the University of Ulster at Coleraine in County Derry, Northern Ireland during the 1995/96 academic year. It was there that Professor Robert Welch accosted me with the idea of organizing a conference on post- coloniality at the Armagh campus of the Queen’s University of Belfast. The terrain was not familiar but I later learned that Dr G.A. Baird, Secretary to the Academic Council, was to negotiate a modest grant to keep me in an alcove office of the old infirmary, now housing Armagh campus. I was to work on and broker the conference within five months without the chance of an extension beyond the sixth month. The toll was phenomenal on the one-man conference faculty! The manager of the one-building campus, Gary Sloan, and his assistant, Tess Hurson, were to be my primary hosts. They left me with a personal computer IX and a fax machine. The congenial community of Armagh became my real host. The international symposium took place at Armagh on the 30th of September, 1996. For the event Dennis Brutus, humanist and poet-laureate, fore-sent the opening poem, “Some Defiant Flicker” . The symposium was a further distillation of our Ibadan experiments. All through the period, the Collection Development Librarian at Ibadan, Mrs Adejoke Scott-Emuakpor, gave invaluable library and bibliographical support. Mr C.G. Sloan of Colby Park, Belfast, assisted by Mr John Nixen, helped with logistics. Messrs Ciaran Carson and Damian Smyth both helped to source further supplementary conference funding from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. The unique experiences of Irish scholars and bards added a particularly illuminating texture to our understanding, which had hitherto been based on what the African Studies cabal at Ibadan initiated. 1 am grateful to Dr. Tim Cribb of Churchill College, Cambridge who ensured that Declan Kiberd attended the conference. Dr Lapsley’s distinctly varied experiences brought colour to the Armagh conference. So did the contributions of all the other scholars represented in the present anthology. The Very Revefend M.A. Cassidy kindly made the inimitable Robinson Library available for crucial sessions of the meeting. To join the Ibadan and Armagh papers, 1 have brought others whose interest I had enlisted all along. 1 am grateful that Bill Ashcroft, Dan Baron Cohen and ‘Marisa’ Turano honoured their promises to contribute to an anthology on the subject. I thought that a whole new area of twenty-first century territoriality was the ubiquitous, even notorious, Internet which as a branch of informatics, has now established its own hegemony over men, women and society. It promises to liberate as much as it threatens to stifle. The expository balance which a male scholar and a female media executive brought to bear on the present anthology blazes a trail of its own. And it is my hope that extended discourses will emerge in the future to harness the liberating resources of the web and cyberspace for the benefit of societies emerging from economic stagnation, social x depression, political repression and the scourge of shifty-eyed cartels of underdevelopment. It is clear from Folorunso's paper that the industry and technology of print which Ijave dominated civilization during the last five centuries are beginning to adapt to informatics in a way not thought of before now. Afterall, it is this escritorial advantage that often delineates societies of self-invention from those of Homer and orality. The fact that one dominates the world with an authorial T and the other answers with a disempowered ‘we’ in the factories and the market places makes all the difference. This is the import of Dennis Brutus’ assertion at the Armagh conference that “Colonialism, these days, is accomplished not with military precision but with the precision of the pen whereby a dash of the pen or a touch of a computer button can move vast amounts of capital over mind-boggling distances between the north and south only in a few seconds.” But the jostling for space, which Tipton discusses also, liberates and enforces the T on territory of the ‘ours’ beyond the threshold of the ‘mine’. Information and technology, as our millennium testifies, liberates across cultures and guarantees new forms of identity paradigms. It is the full responsibility of our humanity to own up for the use to which the Internet is put or subjected. By way of methodology, the collation here is not based on topics or geographical grouping. Rather, the criteria are more on certain inter- textual affinities in the temperament and exposition of the authors and their papers. For a place like Ireland, a certain feeling of nostalgia was inherent as in nationalistic African literatures of the 1950s and the 60s. But this is further complicated by the fact that the language of expression had been English all along, so that it is not so much to discover a tongue as to discover a voice. Those literatures of Africa from Equiano, Fagunwa, Tutuola, Mphalele, Achebe, Soyinka, Samkange, Nwapa, Okara and many others often had, at times remotely, the search of a new tongue as their focus. Those of Ireland were making efforts to retrieve a voice once lost or muffled. But common to both traditions is the search for a true vision and re­ definition in a world constantly re-invented by forces external to their dreams. Against a stable and configured past is the murky, somewhat xi inchoate present, out of which little sense can be made for reconstruction. W.B.Yeats, more than any other, envisaged a reconstruction from the historical pedigree of Plotinus to the time of Parnell that can be sufficiently consistent, articulate and modern. The present state is that of unease which prompted one of the speakers at the Armagh conference to remark that: “Apart from the mutual experience of a temperate climate, Ireland shares nothing else with Western Europe.” Strong words, but a paradoxical truth. There is the sense of ambiguity and a forcible attempt at definition, which is the hasis of unease in the contributions, which emphasizes the notion of ambiguity. Declan Kiberd best alludes to it in the deracine status of Fanon who, in Martinique, thought himself French and white, only to be seen as West Indian when he arrived to his studies in France. The self is tom between the way it is, or thinks it is, and the way it is seen or invented by the forces without. Much of what we see in the second section is the notion of masks and shadows as in the contributions of Toland, Lapsley, Thacker, Kiberd, King, Davies and Graham. For Graham, it is ephemera - transient and short-lived and written off in pamphlets, calendars and graph(itti). Toland, King and Lapsley bring particular, socialized and concrete examples to bear on the complexity of the concept of status and citizenship in space, time and idea. The pressures on Irish social life and literature are tangible and there is in this fact a certain puzzle. Interminable creativity - direct, effluent - is fostered under this life-threatening pressure. The artist in that social and material situation lives almost at the brink of self­ dissolution with art and creativity as the substitute for the life he would never live, and the fulfilment he may never attain. This is a truly tragic imagination, fecundating darkly but profoundly; this also is the homestead of muses. He is a knowing citizen, constantly uprooted as he is planted in a geographical milieu to which he believes himself tied for good. This, in classical Irish parlance, is a person of the sidhe. The flavour of the literature, whether it is British or Irish in content, is truly unique as it is startling. Even in the analysis of Beckett by Davies, it is the story of an art in search of culture and rootedness, the effort of an xii epical hero mired in the boglands. There is nothing in my analysis, which points at despair; rather, all that is said is that the human condition, with or without a natural identity, is a complex, inviolable web. Its literature reflects this complexity but, in a certain way, redolent with a deceptively simplistic, seductive logic. More concretely, as realized literature in performance, James King portrays it as exhibiting a palpable tension between the stage and its audience, between reading and writing, and between image and reflection. The section designated as Pacific/Atlantic comprises three very interesting but different papers. The style and logic of the papers are as far apart as the expanse of the seas mentioned. Of the three contributors, only Ashcroft is permanently based in the South Pacific area. But then his paper picks on the whole of the Commonwealth rather than the Pacific Rim alone. His paper is an incisive criticism of the concept of the empire as a self-proclaimed modem o f ‘high’ culture confronting the popular culture of America. He argues, quite convincingly and with verve, that the bearing and proclivity of English Language/Literature education is a direct derivative of the cultural domination of colonialism. He links, with typical perspicacity, the thesis of the colonial officer, Thomas Macauley, with the ostensibly more intellectual preoccupation of Mathew Arnold and Sir Henry Newbolt. He concludes with the over-arching thesis that the future of English masquerading as the proxy of model cultural studies is doomed to extinction within the next century. The cultural and scientific evolution along his backyard in China, Japan and Southeast Asia probably further sharpens his focus with this prognostication. It is quite interesting and path-breaking that an Australasian could see the Commonwealth in this perspective. One could argue that afterall, the geography of his location, livelihood and mother tongue places him nearer the heart of the empire. But his perceptual tangent brings him closer to Africa, India or the Caribbean. The only point of departure is that the analysis of culture as art and as a way of life is conceptually predicated on the chirographic idea of art as ‘written’ rather than equally as ‘spoken’ or performed. That section balances this with the novel example of scripting, textual decoding and performance that Dan xiii Baron Cohen enunciates in his development theatre for the facilitated and the facilitator. Quite coincidentally, this experimental theatre was conducted from a workshop in New South Wales bringing a spatial, but not a temporal relationship, with Ashcroft’s contribution. Turano, writing originally in Italian, describes her paper as an analysis of literary anthropology. She subtly portrays a certain state of asphyxia-inducing memory where caste, class and property play a prominent role. Maybe this derives from the displaced physicality of Henrique Texeira de Sousa, the author himself, who leaves Cape Verde to live as an exile in Lisbon. This is presented as a notion of conceptual as well as material transformation or displacement. This concept originates a set of centripetal motions within a periphery, which continually gravitates towards a centre as in the travel, return, death, and rebirth of its denizens. The section on Africa is an aggregation of all the foregone, which have been more largely debated in the sphere of post-colonial theorizing in the last three decades. The womanist response of Chesaina from Kenya is a most welcome inclusion. The same for the area of praxis as represented in art history by Adepegba and in Literature by Wumi Raji. Fresh and original as Kasule’s contribution is, he exaggerates - perhaps for effect - the European marginalization of a writer like Wole Soyinka whose writings are so compelling and cosmopolitan that they cannot be successfully ignored. In conclusion, the whole notion of an empire essentially creates an oasis of mixed inculturation in which people mingle to recreate, re­ negotiate and reaggregate insularity, notional purity or ethnic supremacy. The empire, in bringing units together on terms of unequal relationship creates a false cultural pool ostensibly for self-enrichment but with an inadvertent, in-built notion of self-abnegation. From the very point of unequal relationship, there is set up, due to imbalance, an instant centrifugal pull towards an undefined periphery; attempting to re-define a new territoriality or balance or even re-validate the slalus quo ante. This is similar to the laws of motion that Isaac Newton so well described. From the nexus of these counterbalancing effects xiv emerge new alliances, acculturation and transnationality. The post­ colonial is therefore the summary of polyphony. In the words of Ashcroft: Curiously, their marginalization and exclusion from the canon has provided the ground for a much more heterogeneous conception of the cultural text. The empire dies; a new, alternative empire is bom; long live the empire! Ibadan, Nigeria Dele Layiwola Easter, 1997 xv CONTENTS Preface vii PART ONE: The Pacific; the Atlantic: Oceans of the Middle Passage 1. Post-Coloniality and the Future of English — Bill Ashcroft 1 2. Reflections Upon Theatre-For-Development: The Facilitator — Dan Baron Cohen 23 3. A Voice from the Diaspora: llheu de Conienda, A Novel of Memory. — Maria Rosaria T urano 34 PART TWO: Ireland North and South: Art in a Territory full of Memory and Nostalgia 4. On National Culture: White Skin, White Masks? — Declan Kiberd 44 5. John Toland: Irish Skin, British Mask? — Philip McGuiness 51 6. The Northern Irish Dilemma: A Personal Reflection on Post-Colonial Influences and Experiences. — David Lapsley 60 7. Indoors/Outdoors/Abroad: Ambivalent Spaces in Jean Rhys. — Andrew Thacker 72 8. A Theatre of the Oppressed. — James King 90 9. Samuel Beckett on the Theme of ‘No Culture’. — Paul Davies 100 XVII 10. Punch Drunk: Post-Colonialism, Theory and the Irish Cultural Ephemera. — Colin Graham PART THREE: Africa: A Continent Within 11. The Subject-Object Imperative: Women and the Colonial Question in Three West African Novels. — Dele Layiwola 12. The Prison-House of Language: the Audible Silence in Joseph Conrad’s Heart o f Darkness. — Dele Layiwola 13. History and Post-Colonial Identity in George Lamming’s Season o f Adventure. — Wumi Raji 14. - Split Identity and the Attendant Perspective Tangle in Post- Colonial African Art forms. — Cornelius Adepegba 15. - Negotiating Presences or Squatting on the Verandahs of Post-'isms’. — Sam Kasule 16. Women’s Voices and Gender Pedagogy in Post-Colonial Kenya — Ciarunji Chesaina PART FOUR: Informatics and the Battle for Spaces 17. Information Technology and Post-Colonial Africa. — Femi Folorunso 18. The Politics of Location in Cyberspace: Notes of a Media Practitioner. — Gemma Tipton xviii SOME DEFIANT FLICKER Some last flicker of defiant vitality gutters in the collapsing husk - a despairing lunge of shrinking sexuality reaches with skeletal fingers, disarticulated, arthritic for my fissioning skin from a cavernous skull shrunk to calcined thinness eyes glare, plead, twinkle in appeal, denunciation: halloween’s pumpkin mask of play, horror and grisly humor. All Saints and the unavailing reprise of All-Souls, doomed and damned. Seattle: 9/20/96 Dennis Brutus 4.30 am xix FART ONE THE PACIFIC; THE ATLANTIC O ceans o f th e M id d le P assage 1 POST-COLONIALITY AND THE FUTURE OF ENGLISH Bill Ashcroft One hundred years ago a Jewish medievalist was appointed the first English lecturer at Cambridge. Two years before that, the English school had been established at Oxford, although it wasn’t until 1917 that the first Oxford 'Chair of English placed the final imprimatur on a discipline which had gained a strategic authority in the cultural dominance of the British empire. The discipline of English, then, is extremely recent, and my proposition is that it will not last another hundred years, — that in 2096 it will not exist. This essay attempts to ask why. Why has a subject which has performed such a central function in the discursive and hegemonic dominance of empire such a limited future? Why has a subject which has inscribed not only the professional identities of generations of scholars and teachers, but also the cultural identity, the cultural aspiration of a very large part of the globe doomed to extinction? The answer of course lies in its origin and the very nature of its power. But an important subsidiary question is: “How our we to locate our own professional enterprise, that is, how are we to locate ourselves, at this mid-point in its history?” “What do we think we are doing?” We, all of us, whether students or teachers, are so engrossed in the task of gaining control of our subject that we cannot see how it has invented us. We have become the object of our subject, for that is its discursive function, to construct us into social identities which gain not only their character but even their substance from the professional task which has fixed us and the disciplinary ideology which has interpellated us. Nowhere is this more obvious than in those individuals most effectively socialized by the discipline, its professional elites. Perhaps nowhere is it more obvious than in the discipline of English itself, with its manifest 1 impression of antiquity, its air of cultural pretension, its assumption of cultural value. Perhaps nowhere is it more obvious than in those centres of disciplinary and cultural power (‘Oxbridge’ et al) where antiquity and prestige go hand in hand. The professional identities we construct have a lot to do with the way we perceive this demise. From my point of view, of course, the end of English is far from being a gloomy prospect, because it demonstrates a dynamism that this discipline of textual study may have in spite of itself. The unravelling of English has been occurring for quite some time on two fronts: firstly the Arnoldian idea of Culture of which the discipline is based is being replaced by a broader sense of cultural textuality, a breaking down of the distinction between ‘high and popular’ in cultural analysis; secondly the monolithic unity of aesthetic and cultural assumptions which has provided its canonical authority has been challenged by the vast array of post-colonial literatures in English which have emerged as a direct result of cultural colonization. These two developments have been firmly deployed in the last ten years or so around the discourses of Cultural Studies and post-colonialism, and I want to propose that not only do the interests of post-colonialism and the emerging discipline of Cultural Studies converge, but that they have been linked from the very beginning of the study o f ‘English’. When we examine the surprisingly recent development of this field called English Literature we discover how firmly it is rooted in the cultural relationships established by British imperialism. Not only is the very idea of ‘Culture’ a result of the European political subjugation of the rest of the world, but the construction of Europe itself is inextricably bound up with the historical reality of colonialism and the almost total invisibility of the colonized peoples to European art and philosophy. A question asked by many people is: “Why has cultural studies developed out of English departments?” The answer is simply that the discipline of English was conceived, initiated and implemented as a program of cultural study. Virtually from its inception it existed as a promotion of English National Culture under the guise of the 2 advancement of civilization. Most histories of cultural studies focus on the work of Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams and E.P. Thompson in the fifties and sixties, and the establishment of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in 1964. But 1 want to suggest that in fact the founding document of cultural studies is Lord Macaulay’s Minute to Parliament in 1835. This document, Guari Viswanathan tells us, signified the rise to prominence of the Anglicists over the Orientalists in the British administration of India. The Charter Act of 1813, devolving responsibility for Indian education on the colonial administration, led to a struggle between the two approaches, ultimately resolved by Macaulay’s Minute, in which we find stated not just the assumptions of the Anglicists, but the profoundly universalist assumptions of English national culture itself. “We must educate a people who cannot at present be educated by means of their mother-tongue”, says Macaulay, with breathtaking confidence. The claims of our own language it is hardly necessary to recapitulate. It stands pre-eminent even among the languages of the west. It abounds with works of imagination not inferior to the noblest which Greece has bequeathed to us; with models of every species of eloquence... with the most profound speculation on metaphysics, morals, government, jurisprudence, and trade .... Whoever knows that language has ready access to all the vast intellectual wealth which all the wisest nations of earth have created and hoarded in the course of ninety generations. The advancement of any colonized people could only occur, it was claimed, under the auspices of English language and culture, and it was on English literature that the burden of imparting civilized values was to rest. It worked so well as a form of cultural studies because “the strategy of locating authority in the texts of English literature all but 1 1 Thom as M acaulay. "M inute on Indian Education" (1836) in Bill Ashcroft. Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin (eds), The Posi-C olonial Studies Header (London: Routledge. 1995), p. 428. 3 effaced the sordid history of colonialist expropriation, material exploitation and class and race oppression behind European world dominance”.2 English literature “functioned as a surrogate Englishman in his highest and most perfect state.”3 One could add that without the profoundly universalist assumptions of English literature and the dissemination of these through education, colonial administrations would not have been able to invoke such widespread complicity. Consequently, English Literature became a prominent agent of colonial control. Indeed, it can be said that English literary study really began in earnest once its function as a discipline of cultural studies had been established, and its ability to ‘civilize’ the lower classes had thus been triumphantly revealed. To locate the beginning of English at the moment of Macaulay’s Minute is to some extent to display the provisionality of beginnings, for this beginning is preceded by a significant prehistory in the emergence of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres in Scotland and the teaching of literature in the Dissenting Academies. The explicit cultural imperialism of English is preceded by a different cultural movement issuing from the desire, in Scottish cultural life of the eighteenth century, for ‘improvement’, the desire for a civilizing purgation of the language and culture, a removal of barbaric Scottishisms and a cultivation of a ‘British’ intellectual purity.4 This movement within Scotland towards improvement and civilization which led to the birth of the subject we now call English is very different from that movement initiated by Macaulay’s Minute which actively propagated English throughout the empire. But the two movements reflect a dynamic which has continued in the post-colonial world to the present. This Scottish movement of improvement and purification is centripetal, self directed, focused on the centre as object; the movement initiated by Macaulay is centrifugal, outward moving, enfolding, seeing the centre as subject. *1 ! Oauri Viswanalhan. "The Beginnings of English Literary Study in India', Oxford Literary Review (9 I & 2, 1987). p. 22 ’ Ibid. p. 23 1 See Robert Crawford. Devolving English Literature (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992) 4 Now the crucial thing is that English literature is not just the historical confluence of these centripetal and centrifugal movements which resulted in the institutionalisation of English, but the fact that the emerging discipline is one site amongst many others in the colonized world of their continual circulation and interaction. Because we are used to seeing the course of empires as centrifugal, outward moving, imposing cultural values through a domination of cultural institutions and a coercion effected through cultural discourse, we overlook the fact that the continual centripetal movement towards improvement, betterment and self creation, towards a ‘proper language’, a ‘global economy’, ‘international standards’ - the cultural identification initiated by the colonized themselves - is a much more pervasive operation of hegemonic affiliation. The further complication is that each of these processes of cultural circulation generate their own forms of resistance. But as a focus of desire, English literature operated as a very dense and over determined site for both these movements of cultural identification. Scotland and India model two processes of hegemony which continue to operate in the post-colonial world to the present, confirming English literature as the embodiment of universal, transcendent values, the site of an aesthetic prominence, and the object of cultural desire. The ideological function of English can be seen to be repeated in all post-colonial societies, in very different pedagogic situations. Literature, by definition, excluded local writing. The matter was put succinctly by Edmund Gosse commenting on Robert Louis Stephenson’s return to Samoa. "Samoa might be a nice place to visit but it cannot be the place to write. A two mile radius of Charing Cross is the area I suspect.” 5 George Lamming talks about the effect of this in his essay, “The Occasion for Speaking”, in which he says that the recognition in America and the considerable financial rewards this brought his writing were of little consequence compared to the 5 Thanks to Roslyn Jolley for this information. 5 recognition by the literary establishment in London.6 If we think this is out of date, consider the symbol chosen by the ‘Image Committee’ of my Australian university to advertise post-graduate degrees in English in 1997 - a picture of Elizabeth IPs coronation crown. The conviction of literature’s efficacy in imparting Culture to its readers found in Matthew Arnold its most influential voice. His book. Culture and Anarchy,7 was concerned with the growth of philistine culture which was’ accelerating with the spread of literacy and democracy, thus eroding the separation between the ‘cultured’ and the masses. State sponsorship of education was to be the mechanism by which culture could be preserved and extended to resist the descent towards an increasingly mechanical and materialist civilization. The ‘civilising’ function of the study of literature was now harnessed in earnest to preserve English national culture in Britain. The link between the idea o f ‘civilization’, the idea of a unitary English national culture, and the prestige of antiquity became focused in the discipline of English, in which an arbitrary and ostensively indicated set of cultural and aesthetic values were held to be universal. Clearly the prestige of English goes hand in hand with a particular view of culture - a particular form of culturalism. This is one, as Raymond Williams elaborates, in which ‘Culture’ is regarded as ‘Art’ rather than a ‘way of life’. So as a form of cultural studies, the discipline of English, the repository of civilized and universal values depends heavily on the interpretation of ‘Culture and value which Arnold formulated. But the force and tenacity of Arnold’s influence lies in the fact that he created a vocabulary of criticism which entered the language and even today manages to take a firm hold of cultural discourse. This is why in Australia in the I980’s a Professor of the History of Ideas, Eugene Kamenka, could say, quite unselfconsciously: 6 George Lamming, The Pleasures o f Exile (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Univ. Michigan Press, 1992) p. 26 7 Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarcliv (1869) ed. J. Dover Wilson, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1969) 6 Culture rests on the motto that nothing human is alien to me; it thrives on admiration for, and emulation of, the best that has been thought and said, felt and done anywhere... For culture is not only firmly international in its nature and effects, it makes people and peoples ‘transcend’ themselves and their seemingly narrow, time and space-bound capacities.8 It would be hard to find a more succinct recapitulation of the Amoldian myth of culture. This essay, so resonantly couched in Amoldian vocabulary, demonstrates, a century and a half later, the stunning success of the project of cultural studies initiated by Macaulay’s Minute. Culture elevates; it is universal, transhuman, unassailable. The cultures of the Nigerian, the Sri Lankan, the Barbadian (or indeed the Canadian or Australian) are completely suppressed. The conflation of the ‘best cultural values that civilization has to offer’ and English literature, (i.e., the ‘culture and civilization’ form of culturalism) is present from Macaulay through Arnold, but it is in the Newbolt Report that it becomes an issue of national policy. From a post-World War I fear, among other things, of the power of Teutonic scholarship, and particularly of its tradition of philology, Henry Newbolt was commissioned in 1919 to conduct an enquiry into the state of English. The report, published in 1921 as The Teaching o f English in England, became a best-seller and established the study of English literature firmly at the centre of the English and colonial education systems. The language of the report makes it clear from which springs it drew ideological sustenance. ...what we are looking for now is not merely a means of education, one chamber in the structure which we are hoping to rebuild, but the true starting point and foundation from which all the rest must spring....9 If we use English literature ‘ Eugene Kamenka, 'Culture and Australian Culture'. Auslralian Cultural History 3 (1984), p. I. * Great Britain. The Teaching o f English in England Being the report o f the departmental committee appointed by the president o f the board o f education to 7 as a means of contact with great minds, a channel by which to draw upon their experience with profit and delight, and a bond of sympathy-betwter the members of a human society, we shall succeed, as the best teachers of the Classics have often succeeded in their more limited field.101 * Ian Hunter has suggested that English was not so much a means of ideological control as a moral technology," something we find emphasised in this report, but 1 would suggest that in practice the moral technology was heavily in the service of ideology: the two cannot be extricated. The moral dominance of English thus so powerfully confirmed in the twenties provided a fertile ground for the influential culturalism of F.R. Leavis. If we can characterize English culturalism as an emerging struggle between two definitions of culture, (which Raymond Williams terms ‘art’ or ‘way of life') we find it most acutely expressed in Leavis. For him, a common culture, that of the pre­ industrial organic community, and its continuing echo in the legacy of the English language, becomes pitted against modem industrial civilization in both its capitalist and communist forms. In Leavis’ programme the literary intelligentsia were to be mobilized against philistine modernity, calling into their service the universal cultural values embodied in English. The thirties and forties became a watershed in this struggle between high and popular culture, largely, I think owing to the increasing cultural dominance of America. It is commonplace these days to cast Leavis in the role of villain. But in terms of the cultural struggle being engaged over English his position was extremely complex. Macaulay had already initiated the link between ‘high’ culture and the English tradition by grandly announcing the roots of English literature as extending somehow back to Classical times. But in inquire into the position o f English in the educational system o f England Committee chaired by Sir Henry Newbolt, (London: H.M. Stationery Office, 1921), p 14. "’ Ibid, p. 15 11 Ian Hunter, “English in Australia". Meanjin' Vol 47 no. 4 (Summer) 1988 pp. 723- 744 8 Leavis the defence of the unified pre-industrial English became a defence of high culture against (largely American) popular culture. Leavis and Denys Thompson’s Culture and Environment in 193312 and Q.D. Leavis’ Fiction and the Reading Public in 193213 represented major assaults by the Scrutiny school. In essence Leavis voices a cultural struggle between two imperial powers. And while America gained control over popular culture (to the extent that it could be said that the popular culture of the world today is American popular culture) Europe, and in English speaking colonies, England, maintained firm control over High Culture. In some respects Leavis’ battle reflects the predicament of decolonising countries trying to carve a cultural space for themselves against an overwhelming imperial presence. The difference was that the long history of cultural study in Britain and the shared dominance of European philosophical and cultural values meant that it operated from a position of power. The armory in the battle consisted of weapons from the Amoldian vocabulary - mass culture versus Culture, the shallow versus the deep, the popular versus the timeless, the local versus the universal. If the world could not resist the dominance of American popidar culture, the Arnoldian view of high culture still holds sway at a level almost too deep to be expunged. Ironically, the manifestly culturalist operation of English Studies throughout the Empire generated a sense of local writing in the colonies as densely culturally grounded. Indeed, this cultural localism was the repeated cause of the exclusion of local writing from English Literature. Consequently, the very success of the ideological project of English literature, the success of its function as a moralftechnology, the success of its embodiment o f the rhetoric of empire is the source of its demise. From this watershed period the program of English cultural studies embodied in English takes two directions: literary criticism becomes dominated by New Criticism, which, although it has its roots1*5 12 F.R Leavis and Denys Thompson, Culture and Environment: the Training o f Critical Awareness (London: Chalto & Windus, 1933). 15 Q.D. Leavis. Fiction and the Reading Public (London: Chatlo & Windus, 1932). 9 in Richard’s Practical Criticism, is in fact an American inspired interpretative method by which imperial or English national cultural values are expunged from the reading of texts. Whereas Richards’ scientific and psychological reading experiments, by not producing a coherent methodology or school, seemed marooned in English cultural history, it became the intellectual energy behind the division of English into cultural studies and new criticism. New Criticism, of course, builds upon Richards’ scientism and Leavisite textual analysis to confirm literature as a discrete discourse devoid of even the cultural implications of traditional historical scholarship. Most curiously it comes to confirm the imperialist notion of Literature because it elides the cultural differences between texts. A form of criticism that can be said to have had a post-colonial impetus14 15 ended up with a strongly canonical effect. In a sense the door clanged shut on the culturalist dimension of literary studies with the advent of this meticulous and text-absorbed methodology. Whatever our view of Leavis there is no questioning the fact that he took the culturalist dimension of English seriously. For the Scrutiny school, what people read was intimately bound up with the rest of their cultural experience. New Criticism didn’t affect canonical notions since it could simple be performed on all the usual texts, as could deconstruction which followed it in the seventies.15 It did in fact confirm canonical 14 New Criticism can be seen to be a product o f an American attempt to establish the legitimacy o f its literary canon against the dominance of the English tradition. As Kenneth Dauber asserts, the Americans, lacking a tradition, and distrusting literature as an institution, could never believe in the reality o f received 'categorizations’. New Criticism methodized the disbelief, 'to force us to begin again with each work'. Kenneth Dauber, 'Criticisms o f American Literature', Diacritics 7 (March, 1977). 15 In fact we can trace Lacan's critique of Saussure to the fifties, and locate the origins of Deconstruction during a time when New Criticism was dominant. But the popularity of post-structuralism in America (and the English-speaking world) can be generally dated from the 1969 symposium at Johns Hopkins University entitled 'The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences o f Man’ at which Derrida delivered his seminal paper. ‘Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse o f the Human Sciences'. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato (eds), The Structuralist Controversy (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins, 1970) 10 notions of value because great texts were those which offered themselves to extensive textual analysis. As far as academic literary criticism was concerned, the catastrophic consequences of New Criticism, and its heir, Deconstruction, were that literary theory and literary criticism as practised in the academy ‘for the most part isolated textuality from the circumstances, the events, the physical senses that made it possible and render it intelligible as the results o f human work.’ 16 These apparently radical methodologies served increasingly over the next thirty years,to cut the literary text off from cultural considerations. Their inevitable consequence has been to confirm that literature, as an example of something called high culture, is marginal to the everyday concerns of society. While New Criticism quickly rose to prominence in America during this time the struggle over the interpretation of culture remained unresolved in Britain, The concept of the Great Tradition remained firmly entrenched alongside the upstart New Criticism owing mainly to the resilience of the Arnoldian critical vocabulary and the success of the Newbolt inspired placement of English at the centre of the British and colonial education systems. It was as though the dual character of culture as it exists in culturalism became divided at this time between the culturalist contestants. While English remains the repository of high cultural values, of the notion of culture as art, its inability and unwillingness to account for the culture, the way of life, of the vast majority of English society leads to the emergence of British Cultural Studies in 1957, the founding text of which is Richard Hoggart’s The Uses o f Literacy1 in which we can see the interests of the ‘culture and civilization’ school of Leavis transforming into the interests of cultural studies. Raymond Williams’ publication of Culture and Society in 1958,18 revealing, as it does, the link between cultural products and cultural relations, probably had a more profound influence on the development *1 16 Edward Said, The World, the Text and the Critic (New York: Vintage, 1983), p. 4 11 Richard Hoggart, The Uses o fL iteracy (London: Chatto& Windus, 1957). '* Raymond Williams, Culture and Society 1780-1950 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1958). 11 of British cultural studies than any other text. Like Hoggart, Williams reveals a complicated relationship with Leavisism, since he uses literary analysis which also hinges on a nostalgic feel for the culture being analysed. But in Williams the three fundamental questions of cultural studies come together: What is culture? What is the text? What is the relation between culture and ideology? For the first question Williams gives some impressive definitions: Culture is ordinary: that is the first fact. Every human society has its own shape, its own purposes, its own meanings. Every human society expresses these in institutions, and in arts and learning. The making of a society is the finding of common meanings and directions, and its growth is an active debate and amendment under the pressures of experience, contact and discovery, writing themselves into the land.19 Culture is a description of a particular way of life, which expresses certain meanings and values not only in art and learning but also in institutions and ordinary behaviour. The analysis of culture, from such a definition, is the clarification of the meanings and values implicit and explicit in a particular way of life, a particular culture.20 The analysis of culture, then, is the ‘study of relationships between elements in a whole way of life’, attempting to ‘discover the nature of the organisation which is the complex of these relationships’.21 The most crucial aspect of Williams’s analysis, I think, is the bringing together of the two notions of culture resident in culturalism, a feature which is not entirely taken up by the developing discipline of cultural studies, where an interest in the lived cultures of particular classes was quickly overtaken by an intense interest in the mass media. But the next two questions did not become theorized until Raymond Williams, 'Culture is Ordinary' in Resources o f Hope'. Culture, Democracy, Socialism (London: Verso, 1989). 20 Ibid. 311 21 Raymond Williams. The Long Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), p 63 12 the encounter between culturalism and structuralism. Nor did this book invoke the question which has become the most energetic one in recent cultural studies beyond the British model: What are the politics of cultural difference? It is obvious then that the event which many take to be the birth of British cultural studies, the establishment of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in 1964, had a very long gestation. Thomas Babbington Macaulay’s chickens had now finally come home to roost. It is no accident that Stuart Hall, director from 1969, is West Indian; for the liminal perspective of the colonized becomes very useful for seeing the problematic division in English culturalism and the affiliative network by which the State commands cultural production. With this in mind we might even say that British Cultural Studies is a major example of the process of 'transculturation’ outlined by Pratt,22 a circulation of a marginalized post-colonial perspective back into English cultural life; a recirculation of the idea of the irrelevance of a canonical English literature to cultural life in general. However, the very strong focus of Cultural Studies upon popular culture and the mass media reveals the way in which the binary division of English culturalism still operates implicitly in British Cultural Studies. POST-COLONIAL CULTURAL STUDIES Criticism throughout the English speaking world was affected both by the Culturalist rationale of English Studies and by the rise of New Criticism. But the writing itself seemed to occupy a different site because the division between culture as art and culture as a way of life becomes immediately eroded when colonized peoples appropriate cultural discourses such as literary writing. It is eroded because in these cultures such a distinction between definitions of culture becomes a deeply ontological one. For these societies, culture as timeless, universal and authoritative is simply unattainable except by a process of the most parodic mimicry in which the imperial centre embodies all !! Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992). 13 cultural aspirations. As Kamenka makes very clear, if culture is universal it must exclude your specifically regional art. The glowingly humanist credo - 'nothing human is alien to me’ - only operates by incorporating an extensive array of quite specific exclusions; for you cannot have Culture that is Ugandan, Australian or Canadian. Post­ colonial literatures, by definition, cannot be great or universal; so they become much more obviously an aspect of a 'way of life.’ Post-colonial cultural discourses of all kinds problematize the distinction between culture as ‘art’ and cultures as ‘ways of life’ and indeed problematize the concept of culture itself. For when decolonizing countries appropriate cultural discourse they must either appropriate the whole of its universalist ideology and become, for instance, 'more English than the English’, or appropriate it in a way that confirms all intellectual and artistic discourse as aspects of the way of life, strands of the cultural texture, intimately and inextricably connected in the textual fabric of the society. Curiously their marginalisation and exclusion from the canon has provided the ground for a much more heterogeneous conception of the cultural text. Post-colonialism and cultural studies share a commitment to textual materiality. Roland Barthes’ view of the text as a methodological field distinct from the work which can be held in the hand, is a very useful basis for the analysis of culture. The text which only exists as the movement of a discourse ‘is also experienced only in an activity of production’. Barthes’ metaphor of the text as a network which issues from innumerable centres of culture23 demonstrates that textual ity cannot be confined to discrete cultural productions. So, in a sense, the notion of textuality as a semiotic field, a tissue field, of quotations, is a natural ally of the view of culture as a network of practices - a “way of life”. But it is also an ally of that tendency Edward Said called the 'worldliness of the text’. 24 For although the text is an infinite deferment, without source or origin, it is still the a Roland Barthes, ‘From Work to Text’ (1971) in Rick Rylance (ed.), Debating Texts (Milton Keynes: Open University, 1987), pp. 117-122. 14 Said. Ibid., pp.31-53. 14 fabric of those human lives in whom the political realities of cultures are worked out. Writing itself is affiliative rather than filiative with experience; it ‘counters nature’. But in this affiliation with the social world, this production of experience. Said sees one of the most resonant confirmations of the text's worldliness. What continues to hold concepts like 'literature' in place is a massive structure of cultural power; directed in educational, publishing and economic institutions. Post-colonial literary critics quickly come to realise that they are constantly thrown into conflict with this ideologically and institutionally buttressed category of literature because of its roots in the universalist ideology of English culturalism.25 Almost by definition, writing in post-colonial societies becomes inextricable from a network of cultural practices; exclusion from canonicity confirms its worldliness. In its engagement with the culturalist myth of ‘literature’ then, post-colonialism brings to cultural studies its own well established concepts of diversity, particularity and local difference. The global term ‘culture’ only becomes comprehensible as a conceptualisation of local ‘cultures’. Consequently the egregious distinction between ‘High’ and ‘popular’ culture, is traversed by the much more energetic and contested politics of cultural difference. Cultural Studies, on the other hand, tends implicitly to support this distinction since it tends to funnel cultural analysis into the complex but circumscribed fields of mass media and popular culture. The issue of cultural difference, particularly as it is mediated in textuaiity suggests that in most cultures there is no supportable distinction between ‘high’ and ‘low’ -- culture is culture. Thus we may see more clearly that notions of high culture are the simple, and not always hidden, agents of cultural imperialism. 'T h e subterranean power and lenaciiy o f this ideology comes back lo us every time we introduce a text like Things Fall Apart lo the evaluative framework o f students. 15 A very good example of this can be found in recent work on Samoan culture.26 Analysis of the textual construction of culture in contemporary Samoa involves an examination of language use in law courts and village judicial meetings, written literature, music, drama, radio, television, oratory. Each one of these categories consists of both formal and informal domains, but even the most formal textual domain is intersected with hybrid cultural forms of discourse which diffuse any potential for hierarchical stratification. At no point, either in the production or consumption of culture can a clear distinction of ‘high’ and ‘low’ be made, not only because the hybrid is so dominant but because this very hybridity makes it difficult to locate writers or readers, performers or viewers, producers or consumers in any fixed social hierarchy. The Samoan example suggests that the division of culture between ‘art’ and ‘way of life,’ between ‘high’ and ‘low’ collapses in post-colonial societies because the social and institutional frameworks which buttress this distinction are less clear. Post-colonial cultural studies tends to recognize the way in which intellectual endeavour is compromised and contained by State power as it is mediated through intellectual work. Bringing to mind Adorno’s thesis of the state production of culture, Edward Said says: To a great extent culture, cultural formations, and intellectuals exist by virtue of a very interesting network of relationships with the State's almost absolute power.27 This is a set of relationships about which all contemporary left criticism, according to Said, and indeed all literary study, remains stunningly silent. On the contrary, nearly everyone producing literary or cultural studies makes no allowance for the truth that all intellectual work occurs somewhere, at some time, on some !