Resisting Alterities: Wilson Harris and Other Avatars of Otherness (review)

The contributions to Resisting Alterities: Wilson Harris and Other Avatars of Otherness are divided into three units, of which only those in part one, framed by Harris's lectio dotoralis, "Resistances to Alterities," delivered on the occasion of his receiving the Honoris Causa Degree in Modern letters from the University of Macerata, explicitly engage with Harris's work. "Intermezzo: The Writer's Voice" (a clutch of poems by different hands and a selection from Harris's The Mask of the Beggar) and part two (composed of ten essays) are predominantly concerned with analyses of alterity that have, at best, an indirect relationship with Harris's work, indebted as they are to the larger body of theoretical and exegetical work on alterity as a site of/for resistance that we have come to associate with postcolonial scholarship. Furthermore, except for a few contributions (Covi on Jamaica Kincaid and Jacobs on "South African Fiction after Apartheid"), the essays in part two address, primarily, white (European) subjects' engagement with, and elaboration of, alterity. This engagement appears in a variety of guises: through the interrogation of canonical literary subject matter and languages (Villa on "The Representation of Schopenhauerian Pessimism in Late-Nineteenth-Century Britain"; Tomlinson on "Objectivism"; and Fazzini on "Edwin Morgan's Science-Fiction Poems") and of minority racial or sexual identity (Moressi on "Nancy Cunnard's Otherness"; Whyte on "Queer Readings, Gay Texts"), and through the specification of a desired (English) egalitarian and inclusive patriotism that opposes an ethnocentric and exclusive nationalism(Williams on "Billy Bragg, Kipling, and Ressentiment"). Bassi's essay, "Resisting Jews," through its analysis of "allosemitism" (that is, "the tendency to represent the Jew invariably as other"[210]) and "the dialectic of assimilation," wonders whether now that "the civilization that persecuted [Jews] has finally integrated them [. . .] their allure as a minority [is] gone for good" (210). And Pajalich's contribution, "Alterities and Amnesia," recognizing that the cultural debate on alterity has reached an unprecedented high point" (243), wonders why, while "equality in terms of religion, ethnos or culture" is both sought and celebrated, "economic spoliation and subjugation" remain unaddressed (246).

Pajalich is on the mark: otherness and engagements with otherness as inherently resistant have, indeed, come to occupy center stage in scholarly discussions so that we now have access to a substantial archive that celebrates what I have elsewhere labeled a dissident common sense. While I cannot regret the proliferation of such engagements, I do wonder how many more of these will be allowed until cynicism and exhaustion set in even as the subjects constituted as other are buttressed even more securely in their otherness. This volume's insistence on dispersing and pluralizing what counts as alterity so that it is no longer anchored in representations of the racialized or colonized subject, however, goes some distance in ameliorating the latter concern. Harris's call "for deep-seated cultural change that would alter [hegemonic] ways of seeing and thinking" ("Resisting Alterities" 4) is interpreted by this volume's contributors as an injunction to refuse the "conquistadorial pattern of symmetry" that pits "the Self [against an] Other, Man [against] Woman, Virgin [against] Whore" to articulate instead "cross-culturalities," "the stranger within ourselves," hybrid or translated subjectivities (Camboni 14; 12; see also Pozzi 21–22).

Analogously, the term resistance and the multifarious ways in which it is presented render the concept ambiguous, embedded within and even sometimes complicit with that which it opposes. Thus, the phrase "resisting alterities" carries the burden (often simultaneously) of both resistance to and resistance of otherness. What should be recognized, however, is that although the essays in this volume authorize their investment in "syntactical and thematic ambiguities" ("Introduction" x) as the means by which they oppose what they view as the dominant tendency to embrace the "facile binarism of Europe and its Others, the West and the Rest, colonizer and colonized" ("Introduction," xii), their take on resistance is part of the majority thinking...