Making Subject(s): Literature and the Emergence of National Identity.(Review)

ALLEN CAREY-WEBB. Making Subject(s): Literature and the Emergence of National Identity. Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies Volume 4. New York, London: Garland Publishing, 1998. Pp. xiv + 242. $55.00.

Carey-Webb's book is a piece of cultural research which studies how literary texts construct authority and subjectivity. The book is organized in two parts plus a theoretical introduction. In the first part Carey-Webb writes about seventeenth-century European theater, comparing Lope de Vega's El nuevo mundo descubierto pot Cristobal Colon and Shakespeare's The Tempest. The second part addresses the twentieth-century third world novel, with one chapter about Les bouts de bois de Dieu by the Senegalese Ousmane Sembene, and the other about Midnight's Children by the Indian Salman Rushdie. Working with a very heterogeneous group of texts, he uses different theoretical approaches in order to understand the links between them. The final result is both enlightening and risk-taking, even, sometimes, breath-taking. We have only to notice that Carey-Webb not only compares different national literatures, but also different cultural perspectives (First World versus Third World), different epochs (seventeenth century versus twentieth century), different ways of telling (and presenting) stories (theater versus novel), and different discourses (colonial and post-colonial).

Carey-Webb's reflections start from the controversy among Fredric Jameson, Aijaz Ahmad, Prasad Madhava, and others about the rhetorical nature and agency of Third World Literature and the concept of the Third World novel as a necessary representation of national history (national allegory). Making Subjects is about how modern literature establishes national identity, and the critique of nation making is the common ground which allows the author to compare a wide range of cultural elements mentioned above: perspectives, epochs, ways of telling, and discourses. The book's introduction elaborates Benedict Anderson's thesis (in Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism) about how human subjects become capable of imagining themselves part of a national community that they defend wholeheartedly, even though it is abstract and repressive. According to Anderson, the development of a capitalist marketplace for printed books in European vernacular languages in the context of a massive, urban, anonymous, "clock time" form of culture makes possible the socio-semiotic process: to become national.

Carey-Webb's analysis is especially attractive for readers interested in drama. He searches for the historical place and socio-semiotic function of early modern European drama in the cultural economy, arguing that

 
   the true antecedents of what we would today describe as a national 
   conscious begin to appear in the sixteenth century. John A. Armstrong 
   argues that in this period profound economic, religious, and linguistic 
   developments were matched with an increasing centralization and 
   bureaucratization of the state apparatus (14). 

Carey-Webb points out that in a society not yet fully literate, theater was a primary ...