Nationality Between Poststructuralism and Postcolonial Theory: A New Cosmopolitanism PDF
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Nationality Between Poststructuralism and Postcolonial Theory A New Cosmopolitanism Philip Leonard Nationality Between Poststructuralism and Postcolonial Theory This page intentionally left blank Nationality Between Poststructuralism and Postcolonial Theory A New Cosmopolitanism Philip Leonard © Philip Leonard 2005 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2005 978-1-4039-1912-0 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2005 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-51445-8 ISBN 978-0-230-50385-4 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9780230503854 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Leonard, Philip, 1967– Nationality between poststructuralism and postcolonial theory : a new cosmopolitanism / Philip Leonard p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. Contents: Cosmopolitan locations – Before, across and beyond : Derrida, without national community – New concepts for unknown lands : Deleuze & Guattari’s non-nationalitarianisms – Atopic and utopic : Kristeva’s strange cosmopolitanism – In the shadow of shadows : Spivak, misread- ing, the native informant – To move through, and beyond, theory : Bhabha, hybridity, and agency. 1. Criticism–History–20th century. 2. Nationalism in literature. I. Title. PN94.L46 2005 801(cid:2).95(cid:2)0904–dc22 2005049750 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 Contents Acknowledgements vi Chapter 1 Cosmopolitan Locations 1 Chapter 2 ‘Before, Across, and Beyond’: Derrida, Without National Community 20 Chapter 3 ‘New Concepts for Unknown Lands’: Deleuze & Guattari’s Non-Nationalitarianisms 51 Chapter 4 ‘Atopic and Utopic’: Kristeva’s Strange Cosmopolitanism 76 Chapter 5 ‘In the Shadow of Shadows’: Spivak, Misreading, the Native Informant 103 Chapter 6 ‘To Move Through – and Beyond – Theory’: Bhabha, Hybridity, and Agency 127 Notes 157 Bibliography 182 Index 193 v Acknowledgements This book has benefitted enormously from the assistance, support, and guidance that friends and colleagues have generously given. For their help I should like to thank Steven Connor, Dan Cordle, Dick Ellis, Lynne Hapgood, Bernard McGuirk, and Greg Woods. John Marks, Douglas Smith, Patrick Williams, and Dave Woods carefully read ver- sions of some of the chapters here, and their suggestions were extremely welcome. I am especially grateful to Leslie Hill, whose gen- erosity made the impossible possible. Students who opted for my final year modules ‘History and Culture’ and ‘Poststructuralist Debates’ allowed me to work through some of the ideas explored here, and the Department of English and Media Studies at The Nottingham Trent University granted me the study leave that allowed this book to be completed. I wish to thank both Emily Rosser Helen Craine, and Paula Kennedy at Palgrave for their editorial support and advice. This book could not have been written without Sam Haigh’s untiring support. An earlier version of Chapter 3 appeared in National Identities, 5: 2 (2003). vi Earth, yield me roots Shakespeare, Timon of Athens 1 Cosmopolitan Locations When Terry Eagleton, in a review of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s A Critique of Postcolonial Reason,declares that Spivak’s ‘flamboyant theo- retical avant-gardism conceals a rather modest political agenda’1 he rehearses the allegation, made repeatedly since the late 1970s, that poststructuralism indulges in a ludicism that prevents it from offering a compelling critique of the social, the political, and the cultural. Poststructuralist theory, Eagleton tells us, is caught up in a ‘self- theatricalizing’2 introspection; its notion of resistance permits little more than a vigilant complicity with dominant institutions, and its theory of cultural power fails to provide a convincing analysis of social systems and the injustices embedded within them. These claims tellingly reiterate other work – by other critics, as well as Eagleton – that excoriates poststructuralist theory for being unsystematic, ahis- torical, rarified, abstruse, or banal; for being, in other words, a diver- sion from properly effective forms of radical critique. Eagleton’s ‘In the Gaudy Supermarket’ does, however, have more to offer than earlier hostile responses to poststructuralism, since this essay sees poststructuralism’s political significance as something that is now tied to debates in postcolonial theory. According to Eagleton, critics like Spivak and Homi Bhabha may well be ‘devotees’3 of earlier post- structuralist thinking, but for him their work is distinctive because it illuminates the path out of dark and cabbalistic writing by poststruc- turalism’s high priests. Again, Eagleton’s claims here are not without precedent. Benita Parry, Aijaz Ahmad, Arif Dirlik, and Bart Moore- Gilbert have each identified what they see as poststructuralism’s social, cultural, and political failings, and conclude that it displays little concern for cultural emancipation, is inattentive to class-struggle, and disregards revolutionary nationalism.4 These criticisms often turn on 1 2 Nationality Between Poststructuralism and Postcolonial Theory the belief that poststructuralism construes all social experience and cultural phenomena as a form of textuality: colonialism and postcolo- niality, according to these responses, are treated by poststructuralism simply as a discursive simulation, with the materiality of imperial oppression – and the responses it engenders – becoming, in effect, less important than fictions of empire. Like Eagleton, critics such as these also believe that certain theorists – most notably Spivak and Bhabha – take poststructuralism in different directions when they question the cultural violences that are associated with imperialism, colonialism, and postcoloniality. According to these readings, poststructuralism becomes politicized only when postcolonial theory reconfigures it as an instrument for theorizing the uneven dis- tribution of power across national and international systems. Some of the most influential developments in postcolonial theory are seen to surface either as a prudent departure from, or as a selective amplifica- tion of, poststructuralism’s narrowly textual concerns; common to both readings is the idea that postcolonial theory possesses a critical trajectory that is conspicuously absent from poststructuralism. Poststructuralist theory, as a result, is viewed as a static, schematic, and systematic tradition – one hardening ‘into theoretical dogma’5– that neither concerns itself with intercultural violence nor reflects on its own status as metropolitan theory. Poststructuralism ‘itself’ and ‘before’ postcolonial theory, it would seem, has nothing to say about colonial power, postcoloniality, globalization, transnationality, anti- colonial resistance, or minority discourses. I The ends of Europe Nationality Between Poststructuralism and Postcolonial Theory begins from the premise that such a genealogy relies on an unsustainable distinc- tion between poststructuralist and postcolonial theory. One concern here is to show that Spivak and Bhabha are not the only ‘poststruc- turalists’ who rethink culture by challenging the uneven distribution of global power, since Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari, and Kristeva each draw attention to the fissures that open up in the articulation of national identity. The contention that is most commonly associated with work that shuttles between poststructuralist and postcolonial theory – that grave uncertainties disarticulate the West’s assertions of its historic and international authority – also needs to be seen in the thinking of those, like these theorists, who are often construed as nar- rowly ‘poststructuralist’ and somehow pre-postcolonial. They too insist
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