The Long Space: Transnationalism and Postcolonial Form (review)

In his previous books, Peter Hitchcock has discussed the political implications of the work of Mikhail Bakhtin (Dialogics of the Oppressed [1993]), the philosophical and political importance of oscillations (Oscillate Wildly [1999]), and the relationship between transnational literature and globalization (Imaginary States [2003]). His newest book, The Long Space: Transnationalism and Postcolonial Form, brings together all of these subjects, finding in Bakhtin's chronotope a useful tool for describing the work of transnational literature in resisting the pull of globalization, a resistance accomplished in part through a refusal to cease oscillating. Hitchcock urges his readers to reconsider nothing less than fundamental assumptions about the relationship between time and space in postcolonial writing. His approach to this task is one that highlights a frequently ignored subgenre of postcolonial fiction and models a compelling set of theoretical approaches that emanate from his reworking of Bakhtin's chronotope-the "long space" of the book's title.

Hitchcock sees in extended postcolonial fiction—trilogies, quartets, and the like—the clearest demonstration of postcolonial literature's intervention in the received understanding of time and space. Most importantly, it is in these works that he sees writers refusing to endorse the idea of a decisive split between the colonial and postcolonial eras and instead offering a protracted engagement with the complexities and contradictions of decolonization. As part of this effort, he also registers the persistence of local, alternative temporalities within these texts. For Hitchcock, the influence of time is an issue not only of content but also of form—for both fiction and for the nation itself. As he puts it: "The long space says that the nation needs time . . . and even if the novel, or the seriality of novels, cannot tell time in quite the same way, extended postcolonial fiction comes closest to figuring the nation's abstract expression: it is coextensive with nation ontology as abstraction" (7).

The structure of Hitchcock's book is crucial to his project. The Long Space includes an eponymous introductory chapter and one chapter each on the extended fictions of Wilson Harris, Nuruddin Farah, Promedya Ananta Toer, and Assia Djebar. The four writers at its center hail from widely disparate geographical and cultural locations—Guyana, Somalia, Indonesia, and Algeria, respectively. Yet Hitchcock's approach is one that seeks to demonstrate the related attitudes, tendencies, and experiences of these writers implicitly rather than explicitly by offering close readings of the works in question within their cultural and political contexts. The synthesis comes in his overarching argument that the transnational is best understood as emerging not from a sense that different local histories are "the same" but from a shared dissatisfaction with '"posts" or "eras"' and the idea of history as linear, the influence of these shared dispositions being observable on the level of form (29). As part of this effort to contexualize, he devotes a somewhat surprising amount of space to biographical detail. In the end, though, by directly confronting the frequently traumatic history of the writers of extended postcolonial fiction, he is able to show how this history both explains and fails to explain the form and content of their writing.

After the introduction, Hitchcock turns to Wilson Harris's Guyana Quartet, which he sums up as "a long space of both dialogical and dialectal elements" (88). For Hitchcock, Harris's famous difficulty is less an obstacle to be overcome than a welcome sign of its transnationality. As he explains: "For postcolonial writing opacity remains a necessary risk to problematize the almost inexorable logic of incorporation that girds Euramerican cultural discourse on the South" (51). In this vein, he goes on to celebrate the oxymorons and contradictions in the Quartet, as well as Harris's privileging of the cyclical and the mythical.

In his chapter on Nuruddin Farah's Blood in the Sun trilogy, Hitchcock invokes Bakhtin's "vnenakhodimost' (outsideness, outsidedness, or what Tsvetan Todorov terms extopy)" (91) and dwells at length on the various ways in which "outsideness" surfaces...