Framing Theory: Toward an Ekphrastic Postcolonial Methodology

Prologue: By Way of a Frame

I begin with a simple image, that of the frame; an image to which I will return repeatedly over the following pages, as the central structural conceit of the spatial metatheory of postcoloniality I shall propose. As a visual model for the “classical” postcolonial discourse theories that have given rise to such often-cited notions as cultural hybridity, mimicry, and “writing back,”¹ the notion of the frame, I argue, offers a powerful conceptual tool for negotiating the operational difficulties of such models of postcolonial criticism, for which neither their originators nor their more recent critics are able fully to account. In particular, I will suggest that what Paul Duro identifies as the frame’s “tendency to invisibility” in critical discourse (1) provides us with an apparatus for locating the ever-shifting sites of agency in the complex critical operations of poststructuralism-inflected postcolonial criticism, which I shall argue has a tendency to efface its own presence even as it performs its work.

I hope that from my discussion will emerge an impression of a body of theory that—despite significant real and apparent differences between individual approaches and practitioners—is paradigmatically ekphrastic in nature, governed always by a temporalizing, narrativizing impulse in its radical unsettling of the “works” of fiction, colonialist history, and modernity. Given the size and scope of this essay, it will necessarily be theoretical for the most part, rehearsing its central arguments by aligning observations concerning the semiotics of the frame with current postcolonial critical positions. In the last section of the essay, however, I will sketch out my theoretical formulations in a more practical manner, by providing and then analyzing my own reading of an ekphrastic fiction that operates within postcolonial and counter-discursive paradigms—an example, therefore, that will seek to be at once critical and metacritical.

The Mona Lisa Smile Syndrome: Theory at the Limits of Representation

My opening suggestion that the frame constitutes a “simple image” is immediately complicated through a consideration of the frame’s tendency to invisibility. Attempting to conjure a mental picture of the frame necessitates also conjuring what might lie inside and outside it. Whether the frame is mounted on a gallery wall or demarcates the limits of a movie screen, the image that we have brought to mind almost certainly contains a work, some form of representation, which it presents for our attention. The frame, then, though it is not the work, is indissociable from it; presents it in a certain manner, in a certain light; and draws attention to the relationship between the work and its setting. The frame serves as the principal example of what Jacques Derrida terms a parergon: “neither work (ergon) nor outside the work [hors d’oeuvre], neither inside nor outside, neither above nor below, it disconcerts any opposition but does not remain indeterminate and it gives rise to the work” (1987, 9). A parergon, for Derrida, fulfills the role of “a supplement outside the work, [which] must, if it is to have the status of a philosophical quasi-concept, designate a formal and general predicative structure, which one can transport intact or deformed and re formed according to certain rules, into other fields, to submit new contents to it” (55). From these descriptions, it may readily be seen that literary theory in general occupies a space with respect to the literary work closely analogous to that of the frame with respect to the visual art object: it lies outside the work, but supplements it (I will return to Derrida’s use of this term and its particular relevance to my model later); it produces cognitive structures that can be taken to the work in order to enhance reading in the light of new contents. More simply, the primary function of theory—perhaps even its only function—is to give rise to (certain readings or aspects of) the work.

This much can be said of literary theory in general as frame, manifested in its dualistic positioning between interior and exterior, which lends it the mediating role that gives rise to...