Textual Politics from Slavery to Postcolonialism: Race and Identification (review)

Textual Politics from Slavery to Postcolonialism: Race and Identification by Carl Plasa. Houndsmill: Macmillan, 2000; New York: St. Martin's, 2000. 172 pp. ISBN 0-312-23004-4 paper

The very words post and colonial have a vexed relationship and anyone who puts them together would do well to define their connection. Carl Plasa's vision of the postcolonial is very general, acknowledging the "a cautionary note" with regard to the idea of "post," and emphatically including "the discourses which helped to sustain slavery, colonialism [. . .]."

This study is rather similar in structure and broad conception to Moira Ferguson's Colonialism and Gender Relations: From Mary Wollstonecraft to Jamaica Kincaid: East Caribbean Connections (New York: Columbia UP, 1993), and Plasa acknowledges Ferguson as an earlier critical decolonizer of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park. His own text is also like Ferguson's in organizing a group of texts chronologically and round a particular theme. In his case, the texts are The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano . . ."; Mansfield Park; Jane Eyre; Wide Sargasso Sea; The Bluest Eye; Nervous Conditions (Ferguson discusses not only Mansfield Park, but Wide Sargasso Sea, texts by Mary Wollstonecraft and the Antiguan Methodist reformers the Hart sisters, and as a contemporary presence, Jamaica Kincaid's Annie John). All but one of Plasa's texts are written by women, but his emphasis, unlike Ferguson's, is not primarily gender but rather race, slavery, and colonialism and the ways in which gender might relate to those.

His secondary sources are familiar to anyone who knows postcolonial or feminist theory, including Fanon, Lacan, Bhabha, Gates, Gilroy, Gilbert, and Gubar): it is a pity that so much postcolonial theory/criticism cites the same small group of authorities. Plasa's writing sometimes suffers from a numbing ponderousness, also unfortunately not uncommon in postcolonial theory and criticism: "The Interesting Narrative stands in an acute and disruptive tension with the taxonomies of racial difference [. . .]" (13); "However, it is not only that colonialism (literally absent at one level) is transformed by Jane Eyre into a consequential presence at another, that of figuration, but that it is also figured by Bronte's text" (73).

Nevertheless his arguments are interesting and well explored. His analysis of Equiano's self-representation as a cleverly subversive antiracist tactic and of implicit dialogues with other texts in Morrison and Dangarembga are particularly interesting, especially as he extends his theme of corporeality as a metaphorical battleground for representations of gender and race. Some of his material on Austen, Jane Eyre, and Rhys is familiar ground, but in those chapters he deftly explores the "colonial unconscious," slavery as metaphor and race as fantasy, (the last particularly neatly identified in Wide Sargasso Sea). His discussion of the relation between Lacan and Fanon is useful and succinct and points to a theoretical intertextuality that stands behind the fictional texts.

Like Ferguson's, Plasa's study is impressive in its close textual readings, and indeed they have their own intertextual relationship. For example, Ferguson mentions that Wollstonecraft's review of Equiano's The Interesting Narrative . . . reveals that Wollstonecraft accepted received (British) opinion about Africans. Wollstonecraft is not mentioned in Plasa, but his argument that "the most dramatic effect" of Equiano's text is to "confront the English with an image of themselves that is hopelessly contradictory", is even more interesting in the light of Ferguson's remark and discussion of Wollstonecraft. I recommend reading Ferguson's discussion of Austen, and Rhys alongside Plasa's, for similar reasons, and Plasa's discussion of Bronte as a frame for Ferguson's discussion of Rhys.

Plasa's study emphasizes the ways in which we create ourselves as texts in response to previous texts: since race is in fact a fiction, and yet has been acted upon so often to literally define life and death, we cannot see the close analysis of racial fictions as anything other than crucial.