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Diaspora 6:2 1997 Homes and Postcoloniality Aparajita Sagar Purdue University The Politics of Home: Postcolonial Relocations and TwentiethCentury Fictions. Rosemary Marangoly George. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. To be at home is to have the sense of a terrain—spatial, epistemological , cultural—which one expects to navigate with smoothness and ease. But homes, like other civic institutions, are sites for producing and reproducing bodies, borders, subject positions, discourses and ideologies, mechanisms of surveillance and discipline . Because of the formidable emotive charge it carries, the idea of home tends to erupt without warning in non-domestic sites where it might be least expected: the supposedly public sphere of Empire and nation, for instance. On the other hand, as the work of variously located postcolonial feminists has shown, women, who have been aligned with home and domesticity across various cultures, have won entry into the public sphere often only after this sphere is recast as “home.” With home and the outside so readily exchanging positions, each site can potentially borrow from the disciplinary regimes of the other, its systems of coercion and blandishment, punishment and reward. Both home and the outside, then, are categories that are mutually constitutive and contingent, lacking a content that can be fixed or known in advance of their manipulation in a specific discourse. Whether the home is seen as a refuge or a prison, is it feasible any longer to project it as the site of unique pleasures, unique terrors, or unique subversive energies? If we think of postcoloniality and diaspora as formations characterized by displacements and dispersions, by the continual unpicking of seams and borders, homes and homelessness inevitably become of special interest. What are the passports to various homes, the initiation rites, the evidence that one belongs or will learn to belong; what are the mechanisms to keep out strangers, thieves, intruders, housebreakers ? And given home’s discursive propensity to crop up everywhere, is “homelessness” ever a possibility? Crucial insight into these questions comes in Rosemary Marangoly George’s recent book, The Politics of Home: Postcolonial xxxxxxxxxxxx 237 Diaspora 6:2 1997 Relocations and Twentieth-Century Fictions. Home is an especially inspired choice of focus in this work, which makes a timely and compelling intervention in postcolonial literary and cultural studies. Spinning the category of home in a wide variety of contexts, the book shows how persistently and radically it can reconfigure such formations as Empire, nation, and diaspora, not to mention acts of reading and theorizing. The book constructs a riveting and impeccable argument about the permeability and interplay between the domestic and other economies and their shared preoccupation with questions of discipline and punishment, surveillance and knowability, inclusion and exclusion. Throughout, it emphasizes the elasticity and astonishing compass with which the term “home” operates in sites as varied as contemporary cultural theorizing; colonial women’s writings on home; the cultural practices and acts of reading that Joseph Conrad and then Fredric Jameson have enabled and disenabled; English-language privileged Indian feminist writing of the seventies and eighties; and contemporary accounts of third world immigration and diaspora. As George says at one point, her project is to present “‘the self,’ ‘nation,’ ‘homelessness,’ ‘belonging,’ and ‘(post)colonial subjects’ as dynamic, multi-faceted constructs—at best, fictions that we employ to feel at home” (170). Through the lens of home, issues ranging from the Freudian uncanny to Jameson’s national allegory acquire new tints; and less weighty tropes such as states of rest, waiting and leave-taking, movement and travel, even luggage, begin to resonate with new figurative possibilities. A project with so wide and innovative a scope calls for especially rigorous historicization, and the book does not fail on this point. Reading an astounding range of postcolonial and colonial high and popular literatures through each other, George remains attentive throughout to their historical specificity and their material conditions of possibility. In her intertextual approach, George does not see literary figures or discourses in isolation, nor is she especially interested in conducting an “influence” study in which points of origin and derivation can be isolated. Instead, she focuses on genealogies, finding unexpected points of contact and departure: between the colonial English memsahib’s art of...

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