East African literature and the politics of global reading.

Publication: Research in African Literatures

Publication Date: 01-JAN-08

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COPYRIGHT 2008 Indiana University Press

ABSTRACT

This article uses M. G. Vassanji's first novel, The Gunny Sack, to consider the compatibility of postcolonial theory and academic treatments of globalization. The first section of the essay suggests that recent accounts of globalization do not employ a sufficiently complex historical narrative of international exchange, especially with respect to East Africa and nineteenth-century Indian Ocean trade. As a reading of The Gunny Sack reveals, European imperialism and North Atlantic capitalism were not the only, not even the primary, means of facilitating a transcontinental cultural milieu in East Africa. Postcolonial theory's attention to historical nuance and narrative ambivalence may offer tangible benefits to accounts of globalization. The second part of the essay turns the tables, arguing that globalization theory may help postcolonial literary studies better understand its position as an academic enterprise with transnational affiliations. In particular, postcolonial theorists need a greater awareness of how we produce and circulate knowledge in a global academic context. The Gunny Sack's clear marking as a text about a marginal community speaks to some of the contradictions embedded in the field of postcolonial studies, conditions that are directly related to the emergence of a global publishing industry.

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In Empire, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri argue that postcolonial theory has reached an impasse because it fails to grasp, much less adequately critique, the emerging system of world sovereignty commonly called globalization. Most accounts of the postcolonial ignore the fact that "Empire," as they call it, "is not a weak echo of modern imperialisms but a fundamentally new form of rule." Because postcolonial theory continues to analyze and contest imperialist forms of power, which have been substantially reconfigured or discarded in our global times, it tends to offer "a very confused view" of postimperial geopolitics; while its practitioners continue pointing to hybridity as a strategy of resistance, the forces of global power have happily incorporated the celebration of cultural difference into new disciplinary structures. As a consequence, the leading practitioners of postcolonial theory "remain fixated on attacking an old form of power and propose a strategy of liberation that could be effective only on that old terrain." It remains a "very productive tool for rereading history, but it is entirely insufficient for theorizing contemporary global power" (146). In their estimation, postcolonial theory is something from which scholars of globalization can learn, but recent political and economic developments have left postcolonial studies unprepared to assess the political contradictions of our current world.

Postcolonialists have offered a surprisingly muted reply, effectively ceding the discourse of contemporary world politics and culture to critics of globalization. Postcolonialism is rapidly becoming a historical discipline, with many of its prominent figures, far from mounting a counterattack, gladly joining forces with Hardt, Negri, and the growing legion of transnational theorists. Social scientists have been theorizing the declining political and economic sovereignty of the nation-state for almost twenty years, but such thinking has recently become widespread in the humanistic disciplines, too. In literary studies, for example, Amtiva Kumar recently proposed the heuristic "World Bank Literature" as an alternative, implying that the rubric "postcolonial" does not sufficiently register the impact of relatively new, supranational organizations such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Anthony Appiah, Wai Chee Dimock, Andreas Huyssen, Fredric Jameson, and Gayatri Spivak, in addition to hundreds of less prominent intellectuals in the humanities, have all contributed to ongoing debates about the cultural and philosophical ramifications of globalization.

An important consequence of this transition is the way we now think about the "history" of globalization as a material process and as a critical practice. Many scholars working on globalization now prefer to think of imperialism as an undeveloped form of economic, political, and juridical power, a kind of immature form of globality. As Immanuel Wallerstein summarizes, from about 1750, there "began a process of steady incorporation of Africa into the capitalist world-economy whose first stage was that of informal empire and whose second stage was that of colonial rule." According to Wallerstein, one of the earliest and most influential theorists of globalization, Africa was once outside the world-capitalist system, which originated in Europe and gradually enlarged its sphere of influence through the creation of formal empires. Decolonization in the African continent, however, did not suspend its incorporation in the world-capitalist system, but instead signaled "the completion of this historic process" whereby the entire globe is brought under one economic regime (62). In this light, nationalist independence movements in Africa and the colonized world actually hastened the complete immersion of the continent in the globalized capitalist economy. As Mohammed Bamyeh puts it, "[C]apitalism no longer needs the support and tutelage of an imperialist state" (64). In these accounts and many others, unfettered capitalism (originating in Western Europe and purified by the United States) systematically envelops the entire world, first through direct political domination, but now increasingly through indirect forms of coercion and control. (1)

Hardt and Negri have extended this historical narrative by transforming postcolonial theory into an intellectual precursor of sorts, a lower order of analysis that ought to give way to more contemporary and sophisticated accounts of world politics. Postcolonialist interpretations of political inequity, they argue, "fail to recognize adequately the contemporary object of critique." Whereas an earlier generation of anticolonial writers, such as Aime Cesaire and Frantz Fanon, provide valuable diagnoses of "modern" sovereignty during the age of imperialist rule, postcolonial theorists of more recent vintage "mistake today's real enemy" (137). Thinkers such as Homi Bhabha, and even Edward Said, respond to the now-defunct world of "modern" sovereignty, a world of Manichean binaries (colonizer v. colonized, white v. black) that no longer exists. Though Hardt and Negri freely acknowledge their debt to anticolonial thinkers, they are far more suspicious of postcolonial theory's ability to generate accurate accounts of the contemporary environment because its practitioners remain fixated on outdated forms of political organization.

Because the word globalization conjoins several distinct, perhaps incompatible, Meanings--the term refers to a "real," historical process as well as a branch of academic inquiry and critique, especially the critique of global capital--the utility of the term is far from straightforward. The usefulness of the concept is even less transparent in the context of literary studies, where the languages of and literatures written in Arabic, English, French, and Swahili, as Africanists are well aware, have been transnational for quite some time. In this essay, I use M.G. Vassanji s first novel, The Gunny Sack (1989), to pose a series of questions about the status of narrative, both fictional and academic, in an age of global cultural production. The novel traces four generations of a South Asian family who migrate from the west coast of India to East Africa in the late-nineteenth century, travel and work throughout Tanzania, the coastal islands, and Kenya during the colonial period, before eventually making their way to North America after Tanzanian independence. The novel's story of international migration allows us to complicate recent academic accounts of globalization and to question the compatibility of postcolonial theory and scholarly accounts of globalization. By considering the implications of recent work on transnationalism for the study of marginalized, hybrid literary traditions, I want to revisit some of the fundamental premises of globalization theory as well as reflect on the cultural conditions in which postcolonial fiction participates in the emerging field of global culture.

Although leading proponents of globalization theory, such as Wallerstein, Saskia Sassen, Anthony King, David Harvey, Anthony Giddens, and Arjun Apparduai, in addition to Hardt and Negri, represent a wide range of disciplinary concerns, critical approaches, and political commitments, their work can mobilize a surprisingly rigid and teleological historical explanation of globalization .(2) I have already outlined a skeletal version of this narrative: first comes European imperialism, then independence movements and so-called Third World nationalisms, followed by the collapse of the Soviet empire and the creation of truly global economic, political, and cultural systems. At the most basic level, postcolonial scholars should be wary of this narrative of globalization because it privileges the moment of European exploration and imperial conquest as the originary site of a transnational polity. Instead, I will be using The Gunny Sack to offer a slightly less schematic account of globalization, to think of Indian Ocean traffic as an alternative, precolonial site of transnational contact. East Africa is an ideal site to perform this kind of cultural scholarship because it is at once historically and manifestly global--it has a long history of trade and migration throughout the Indian Ocean before and during the colonial period--and also marginal within the auspices of North American academy--East Africa is one of the places that literary theory attuned to globalization promises to open up for study.

My point, then, is not to label globalization theorists Eurocentric or sloppy scholars, but to use this as an opportunity to reflect on the ways that we produce, circulate, and attach value to critical models and systems of knowledge. Bringing academic accounts of globalization into dialogue with novels like The Gunny Sack may create a space wherein scholars can make transparent their narrative politics. My technique for clearing this space is to reverse the orientation of our reading practices, to use fictional narrative as a tool that can reveal the blind spots of our theoretical apparatus by subjecting this historical narrative to more scrutiny. Offering this engagement with globalization theory from the discursive position of postcolonial studies makes a good deal of sense because one of postcolonial theory's outstanding legacies is a sophisticated understanding of narrative in historical context and as a political instrument.

My key term for critiquing globalization theory's narrative of world history is ambivalence, one of the most useful analytic concepts of postcolonial studies. Globalization theory's understanding of political, economic, and cultural progress is deeply ambivalent about, and even haunted by, its own story of historical evolution. Hardt and Negri s explicit desire to supercede postcolonial theory depends on turning the moment of European imperialism into an immature or nascent form of global sovereignty--a system that leads ineluctably to the world capitalism of today. By ceding a formative place to European imperialism in the narrative of globalization, however, transnational theory has a tendency to grant imperialism a narrative coherence and perdurability it never attained on its own terms. Just as narratives of imperial conquest and domination are always overdetermined by the...

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