The Politics of Home: Postcolonial Relocations and Twentieth-Century Fiction (review)

This book is described on the jacket as a study of the "multiple relocations in literatures in English in the twentieth century." The most detailed discussions, however, are of Indian literature in English. The only non-Indian writers of fiction discussed in any depth are Joseph Conrad and M. G. Vassanji (of East Indian origin but raised in East Africa and now living in Canada—a good example of relocations). This reader also wonders why, given the author's interest in identities not defined by national boundaries, there is no mention of her own transnational journey. The "photograph from the author's collection" on the dust jacket would seem to identify her as Indian, but she speaks at one point of "we in the west" (172) and she teaches at the University of California.

Rosemary George sees global literatures in English as a diverse but interconnected field. She wants to erase the categories of "us" and "them," asserting that "colonial subjects" should be read as referring to both the colonizers and the colonized. We are all, she believes, "postcolonials." Rosemary George also wants to avoid suggesting that any value might be universal, a concept which she seems to equate with a Western male bourgeois perspective. She excuses herself for a rather uncontroversial generalization (that many versions of home in contemporary cultures have a common pattern of exclusion of outsiders) because it might seem to imply a "universal humanism" (18). Yet is any defense of human rights merely a reflection of bourgeois humanism, in applicable to non-Western cultures? As I was reading The Politics of Home, a National Public Radio broadcast in the background was talking about the Chinese dissident Wei and his defense of a universal standard of human dignity. When Rosemary George says, in her reading of Conrad, that Lord Jim's action in abandoning a ship full of passengers is a crime in the eyes of Marlow's seaman's code or the code of Jim's pastor father, and continues by stating that Marlow's code is "deeply enmeshed in the ideology of colonial/capitalist exploitation" (83), we may wonder what moral code would not find abandoning passengers criminal. Rosemary George is aware of her dilemma: "How does one work toward reading internationally and thinking globally without the aid of universalisms? There are no easy answers" (129).

Such admissions of the difficulties of her enterprise are frequent; she is looking for a critical approach based not on male certainties, but female questioning. She sees literature as a search for viable "homes," and homes are less divisive, less fixed (even more "female" in orientation, she suggests) than nations. Her attack on Fredric Jameson's essay "Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism" is a good example of her approach. She deflates both Jameson's reading of Third-World texts through very American eyes as if there were a singular "Third-World" culture, and also his "masculine romanticism of form and content" in Third-World literature, which she sees as a contemporary version of Lukács's epic era, where "man, community and nature are one" (114; her emphasis). She has no difficulty in showing how parochial, incomplete, and masculine Jameson's approach is.

The Politics of Home is a series of essays often rather loosely tied to the theme of "home." The most detailed chapters are those dealing with literature written about India by women, either the English "memsahibs" of the Raj or the elite Indian women novelists of the later twentieth century. Rosemary George reads the work of the British "lady novelists" as showing how women developed an authoritative self because they had an important, if indirect, political role in the colonization of India. It is, however, surprising to claim when writing of a country that had produced Jane Austen, George Eliot, and the...