A User's Guide to Postcolonial and Latino Borderland Fiction

Notes

NOT E S Chapter Three 1. In Fictions of India: Narrative and Power Peter Morey critiques Jameson for collapsing different Indias into one Third World imaginary space. “If we consider the ‘Indian national allegory’ less as the story of the nation in a finite, self-contained textual space than as the proliferation of stories that go to make up India, we enrich our understanding of cultural diversity beyond the bounds of that often negative social unit privileged above all others in the rise of capitalism ” (185). However, Morey falls into the trap of reading postcolonial novels as allegories of what he identifies as an “ongoing narrative of India” as played out “on the bodies of their central characters in a landscape ribbed by a railway which conveys those bound for their own undiscovered countries” (ibid.). 2. Though Bhabha’s formulation lacks even a modicum of common sense, he has been followed by many. R. Radhakrishnan theorizes the nation as narration to theorize a “radical postponement of identity” in the celebration of “displaced hybridities” (54). And R. Radhakrishnan’s Bhabha-like move to identify all colonial power structures as discursively constructed leads him to posit a textual resistance and destabilizing of “the sovereignty of nationalism” (54). On one occasion, he confuses narrative fiction with historical and ontological fact to conclude of one of Amitav Ghosh’s earlier novels, Shadow Lines, that it is “real precisely because [it is] imagined” (62). And although Meenakshi Mukherjee does not participate in this conflation of the imaginary with the real and the real with the imaginary, Mukherjee nonetheless reads the novel in reductive terms. In The Perishable Empire: Essays on Indian Writing in English, Mukherjee writes, for example, that “the reality represented in the novel is not an unmediated reflection of what actually existed, but an ideological reconstruction moulded by an implicit political agenda in which language has . . . a determining role” (9). 3. In White Mythologies Robert Young begins to level a similar critique against Bhabha’s formulation of a subaltern inter dicta textual resistance to colonialism as erasing real political agency in the world (149–152). It is also note- 156 Notes to Pages 71–72 worthy that almost all poststructuralist postcolonial critics and cultural studies practitioners refer only to de Saussure (whose Course in General Linguistics is based on notes taken by several of his students who had attended the various series of lectures he gave on the subject between 1907 and 1911), as if linguistic studies had made no significant progress since the beginning of the twentieth century. It is very doubtful that the great majority of “theories” developed by poststructuralist postcolonial critics and cultural studies practitioners could have even been formulated if they had resorted to contemporary linguistic science as represented, for instance, by Noam Chomsky. 4. In a short, erudite, and witty essay titled “Pascal’s Sphere,” Jorge Luis Borges traces the history of godlike metaphors, from Xenophanes of Colophon (sixth century BCE) to Blaise Pascal (1623–1662). In the last chapter of the last book of Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel this metaphor is expressed as follows : “That intellectual sphere, whose center is everywhere and whose circumference nowhere, which we call God” (cited in Borges, 7). Borges identifies just such a period when Rabelais wrote this—that of the late Renaissance—as the moment when such a metaphor was applied to the universe as a whole and when “men felt lost in time and space” (8). He elaborates: “In time, because if the future and the past are infinite, there cannot really be a when; in space, because if every being is equidistant from the infinite and the infinitesimal, there will not be a where” (ibid.). Borges concludes his essay writing, “Perhaps universal history is the history of the diverse intonations of a few metaphors.” (9). Interestingly, Michel Foucault’s conception of power is identical to this metaphor : “Power is everywhere; not because it embraces everything but because it comes from everywhere” (93–94). Now, if power “comes from everywhere,” it cannot have a “where.” Power thus becomes a mystical entity and a mystical concept. 5. The home in postcolonial novels is for Rosemary Marangoly George a site that expresses “the ideological struggles that are every day in the construction of the subjects and their understanding of home-countries” (3). Home functions as another localized epistemological space whereby the reader can decode identity formation based on gendered and racialized inclusion and exclusion discursivities and where the postcolonial family (characterized...