Using the Master's Tools: Resistance and the Literature of the African and South Asian Diasporas (review)

Among the many and enduring research issues for diaspora-studies scholars are resistance, identity, and politics. Of these, the most prominent are resistance and identity, with a focus on race and theory. Although the postcolonial literatures of Africa and South Asia developed from the colonial experience, these literatures refuse to be limited by the requirements of externally established colonial analytical traditions. This situation engenders the inauguration of original research programs and, in the case of identity studies, the exploration of diaspora-based theories about the arts, society, life, and experience of the indigenous populations.

This book examines the intersections among the resistance literatures of the Caribbean, Africa, and South Asia. Needham combines the multifaceted strengths of the postcolonial theorists engaged in the search for a viable paradigm that frames diasporic experiences while explaining the variety of adaptation and resistance strategies that continue to confound students of postcolonial legacies globally.

Using an oblique reference to Audre Lorde's (1984) now famous assertion, "The master's tools cannot destroy the master's house," Needham counters that it is impossible to destroy the master's house without acquiring full and adequate knowledge of the master's tools. According to Needham, resistance is unproductive if one has no knowledge of that which needs to be resisted in the first place. Using examples from C. L. R. James, Salmon Rushdie, and Ama Ata Aidoo, Needham shows how inhabiting the metropole, even when one is not of it, enables diasporic peoples to replay dominant European sketches of the ex-colonial and reverse Europe's gaze to enable the necessary retracing of steps to those roots that engender wholesome identities.

The book is divided into three parts. Part 1 uses the works of C. L. R. James (the Caribbean) and Salman Rushdie (the Indian subcontinent) to examine the nature of marginality, processes of subjugation, and marginalization of the colonized. Part 2 engages the works of Ama Ata Aidoo (Ghana) and Michelle Cliff (Jamaica) and their efforts to speak directly to the African-descended woman's direct responses to the impact of the European gaze on Africa and Africans. Part 3 concludes with a close look at the problems of hybridity engendered by the inability of biracial individuals to claim a specific geographic space as a result of their necessary and different allegiances to their biological and cultural families.

In Part 1, Needham looks at C. L. R. James' The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution and Beyond a Boundary and Salmon Rushdie's Midnight's Children and Shame. Starting with James, she shows how the delinking of colonized people's social experience from the colonizers' writing of history, made it difficult for ex-colonials to productively assess the new and imposed identity. Needham insists that by retelling the story of Toussaint L'Ouverture, James appropriates that history by laying claim, from the margins of the metropole, to the impact of the Enlightenment on French history. In Beyond, he follows up with an exploration of cricket, a British pastime and sport that emphasizes fairness, honesty, and sportsmanship. James emphasizes the extent to which the Caribbean peoples adhere to the rules that guide fair play, even when they are aware of the colonizers' continued efforts to misapply rules and misappropriate power. Eventually, it is the ex-colonials' refusal to allow the contamination of local knowledge bases by colonial practices that enables their movement toward resistance. But such efforts are also the sources of the crisis of identity that ex-colonials suffer. As a result of the need to understand the metropole and maintain a viable self, ex-colonials have to "replay" the images that the metropole imposed on the colonized during colonization.

However, as with the need for honesty and fair play, it is difficult to...