Out of Africa: Literary Globalization in the Winds of Change

At some point in my 1960s high school years in Papua New Guinea (PNG) there was a visit from a United Nations delegation. I can recall two things from the time: dimly, the mutterings of hostile planters and concerned missionaries about being pushed into things the natives weren't yet ready for, and, more vividly, an encounter with one member of the UN team—Kenyan minister Tom Mboya, the biggest, roundest black person I'd ever laid eyes on.

As with most childhood memories, the ones that last are subjective, and tangential to realpolitik. But in later years, if we don't succumb to mythologizing them in some private drama, reflection on their actual meaning can throw informative light on social movements that official histories don't always record. Of course, one aspect of history that Mboya's visit highlights is the subsequent tragedy of internecine fighting in African states and the decline of participatory government under violent autocracies—the deaths of Joshua Nkomo, Patrice Lumumba, and Mboya himself. Another is the globalization not often mentioned that persisted in subtle forms through the era of colonial empires into the period of decolonization.

If I stop to ask myself how, as a white schoolboy, I came into contact with a delegate of the Afro-Asian bloc of the UN in Port Moresby, I would have to say, "Through the missions." My parents, while not directly engaged in missionary work, were with the church, and it was on one of his "off days" that Mboya—a good mission product, like so many of the new nationalizing elites of the third world—attended service and a reception at the Port Moresby branch of the London Missionary Society. He was OK; he was "one of us," a good native. If only he hadn't become political and started to tell us what we should be doing sooner than we wanted to hear it!

The slight parody of unspoken attitudes at the time masks a more serious historical point: within and beyond political structures of Empire, there were networks that operated globally, even as they worked toward a breakup into separate nation-states. And, as Gauri Viswanathan has pointed out in the context of India, literature was one of these systems, working in tandem with, or as a cultural substitute for, missionary outreach. ¹ Mboya was in what was then the Territory of Papua New Guinea not just because he was part of an international postwar political process, but also because he represented the modernizing effects of globalizing literacy motivated by evangelical missionizing.

The literary history of what first became known as Commonwealth Literature has been formulated as a series of national or regional developments in opposition to the Eurocentric globalizing forces of Empire. We only have to look at early overviews of the field to see how the stress on national identity or regional cultural specificity (later characterized as created out of "writing back" to an imperial center) tended to eschew other more complex models. ² Frequently the discussion was based on the problems of creating a local literary tradition out of "nothing"—either no written culture of one's own if one were an educated indigene, or no local culture that a settler could recognize or claim as his or her own. ³

In representing history beyond the literary field, theorists tell a common tale of growth from Empire, to nationalist decolonization, to a Three-Worlds model of the globe. This is followed by a critique of such tales of growth, which moves through Emmanuel Wallerstein's 1974 enunciation of a unified "world system" theory to contemporary models of multinational corporations ruling the globe in a dispersed postmodern, postnational era. ⁴ It is arguable in general that each phase of this progression operates systematically within its own particular mode, but it is equally the case that no single phase is either autonomous or internally...