Breaching the Body's Boundaries: Abjected Subject Positions in Postcolonial Drama

Breaching the Body's Boundaries: Abjected Subject Positions in Postcolonial Drama JOANN E TOMPKINS POST COL ONIALISM A N D SUBJECTIVITY As postcolonial countries and regions around the world travel the endless path towards decolonization - specifically the re-evaluation of power relations established by imperialism - theatre continues to be a site where the colonizer/ colonized binary can be manipulated to disempower imperial inscriptions. Such devices as strategic silence. storyteJling, music and song, costume, and the tactical manipulations of time and space' offer ways of articulating in dislocated colonial subjects what David Attwell terms "notions of identity [that] are always positional, contingent, liminal, and dialogic."2 A contingent, liminal identity is, for a colonized subject, a useful tool for manipulating power relationships and relocating one's self in a subject position(s) of one's own choosing. This manipulation and relocation of an imperially imposed identity is, of course, part of the ongoing agenda of colonized subjects across the former British Empire, including settler colonies (Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and, in some contexts, South Africa),3 the occupation colonies (Africa, the West Indies, India, South and South-East Asia), and "colonies" that do not fit comfortably into either category, such as Ireland. Homi K. Bhabha is probably the best-known - albeit controversial - critic to argue for positional or dialogic postcolonial identities. Multiple or positional notions of identity are central to Bhabha's theories of ambivalence: positing that the colonized subject and the colonizer are both able to occupy several speaking positions, Bhabha asserts that the colonized subject can gain access to a greater range of subversive possibilities than the inevitably constraining binary "colonizer/colonized" would suggest. Basing his theories partly in psychoanalysis, Bhabha argues that colonialism itself resembles a psychoanalyzable subject. Bhabha is not the first postcolonial critic to employ psychoanalysis: Frantz Fanon and Oscar Mannoni found it a useful tool in the Modern Drama, 40 (1997) 502 Breaching the Body's Boundaries 50 3 1950Sand 1960s to read the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized .4 Psychoanalysis continues to be relevant to discussions of identity politics since, as Judith Butler notes in a different context, it is impossible in psychoanalysis to achieve a fully recognized identity.' Psychoanalysis can, then, act as an ideal theoretical tool for analysing the multipositioned subject and multiplicitous identities that are integral to contemporary postcolonial, feminist, and queer theories, theories that are predicated on shifting, othered, and/or multiple senses of self. Bhabha figures the location of that which is repressed (for instance, the colonizer's fetishized desire for the "other") is a particularly valuable site for the colonized subject's resistance to colonial authority and agency: "the lack which the colonial subject had to experience in relation to the metropolis ... could be turned into a space of subversion, liberation and agency.'>6 Such subversion enables Bhabha to read the colonized subject as pushing, crossing, and dismantling the boundaries that the colonizer 's discursive power has erected. This interstitial space of the border is the location of ambivalence, of the possibility of the "in-between."7These manipulations ostensibly enable the colonial subject to cross the boundaries of subjectivity and, hence, authority with ease. By exploring another possible site for ambivalence, and by employing another psychoanalytic concept - the abject - I would like to interrogate the border-crossing phenomenon that Bhabha has developed to question the ease with which the ideal colonized subjects are able to pass from one sphere or state to another.s While I concur with the political significance of Bhabha's project (which he shares with most postcolonial critics) of deconstructing a predetermined, unified identity for the over-arching category of the colonized subject, I am concerned here with the ways in which .the colonial subject's abject complicates both structurally and theoretically the fluidity that most postcolonial critics automatically ascribe to colonial subjects traversing borders . The theatrical situation by which I would like to investigate this subject positioning is the staging of several actors to play the same character, various aspects of one subject. My examples are Louis Nowra's Summer ofThe Aliens (from Australia),9 Brian Friel's Dancing at Lughnasa (Ireland),'· and John Kneubuhl's Think of a Garden (Samoa...