As an Irishman, Stephen’s position is much more fluid than the simplistic compartmentalization of “duped” and “duping dupes” as described by Fanon. There is no tension between the renouncement of being black to becoming whiter and the rejection of white influence and sticking to being black. The issue of being a colonized European also seems to exempt him from the Prospero complex as documented in Fanon’s work.
In Joyce’s work as well as Fanon’s, one aspect of colonization is consistent in both cases -- that of language’s effect on culture. As Fanon writes, “to speak means . . . to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization” (17 - 18). Such a empowerment in education that allows the colonized to gain power to either fight his colonizers (which unfortunately is still mired by his use of the coloniser’s language) or renounce his origins of the colonized (yet still problematic because he will never be a fully evolved human in being a pure white).
With this power attained by education to be wielded in either directions of the duping paradigm as laid out by Fanon, we find that Stephen is an anomaly. Such powers that Fanon describes as both constructive and destructive (Fanon 29), are turned inward in Stephen’s case. His self-flagellation to achieve some epiphany to transcend his conflicted self of Irish/English is perhaps due to his being different from the Russian/German and the Negro (Fanon 34). Unlike the rest of the Europeans, he has no other language or stature outside the metropole, precisely because it is his motherland where he, like the Negro, will have to derive value from. Yet unlike the Negro, he has a culture, a civilization and a “long historical past” (34), by virtue of Ireland being a part of Europe before being Unionised. I believe that it is this uber liminality that causes the anomaly of inward, self-violence by the weapon inherited from the coloniser.
Showing posts with label Weiquan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Weiquan. Show all posts
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
Fragmented Interiority of Empire and Self-Destructive Tendencies
Jackson’s survey of the Union’s internal composition of divisive and volatile nationalisms, with its negotiations of tensions of state oppression and movement towards social advancement to and from the Empire and Ireland, forms the backdrop of Stephen’s modernist anxieties in Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. For Stephen, the volatile anxieties of his nationalism in such a milieu can only be transcended in a certain pathway. The Hegelian dialectic of power relations that stratifies the colonies to the Empire, then possibly reflected in the internal colonization of Ireland, and its anxiety of living within such a paradigm (as Stephen experiences) can only be shaken off with a modernist transcendence - art.
This aim to achieve transcendence from the political and economic power relation between Ireland and the Empire is one of self-destructivity and violence within the Self. We see that Stephen, in his escape from the haunting of his double-crossing countrymen, seeks multiple forms of “self-flagellation” to either expunge his internal conflicts or to heighten his consciousness to a transcendent level. Stephen’s obsession in the death of the Irish martyr Parnell, and the scenario of how his Irish compatriots had sold him out to his death, reflects what Jackson summarises as the “volatile, and unpredictable political culture” of Ireland (Jackson 152).
On the cultural perspective, Stephen’s achieving an epiphany after sleeping with a prostitute, subsequently subverted by his extreme devoutness followed by another epiphany and then once again subverted by his disillusionment and the leaving of the Order show a constant debunking of possible pathways of transcending the milieu of ambiguity of Ireland and the Irish Self. Stephen’s journey show that to escape the slightest “British experience of Empire” (152) as detailed in Jackson’s chapter, the artist must then exile himself from the machine of the Empire totally, and how that is not possible even in a self-destructive mode.
This aim to achieve transcendence from the political and economic power relation between Ireland and the Empire is one of self-destructivity and violence within the Self. We see that Stephen, in his escape from the haunting of his double-crossing countrymen, seeks multiple forms of “self-flagellation” to either expunge his internal conflicts or to heighten his consciousness to a transcendent level. Stephen’s obsession in the death of the Irish martyr Parnell, and the scenario of how his Irish compatriots had sold him out to his death, reflects what Jackson summarises as the “volatile, and unpredictable political culture” of Ireland (Jackson 152).
On the cultural perspective, Stephen’s achieving an epiphany after sleeping with a prostitute, subsequently subverted by his extreme devoutness followed by another epiphany and then once again subverted by his disillusionment and the leaving of the Order show a constant debunking of possible pathways of transcending the milieu of ambiguity of Ireland and the Irish Self. Stephen’s journey show that to escape the slightest “British experience of Empire” (152) as detailed in Jackson’s chapter, the artist must then exile himself from the machine of the Empire totally, and how that is not possible even in a self-destructive mode.
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
Sexuality in Exigency
We see in Woolf’s Jaffna account the figures that obviously reflect the Stoler’s description of European women in the colonies. A “Jane Austen character”, Woolf describes Mrs. Lewis as a archetypal female of the Victorian Social Realist novel (42). Likewise, it is due to such characters that Stoler describes to have “contructed the major cleavages on which colonial stratification would rest” (56), “as bearers of a redefined colonial morality” (57). Her attempted matchmaking of Woolf with Mary can also be seen as the microcosmic replication of the colonial state’s directive that European men in the colonies would need to be married to a European woman to keep them in check.
Yet, the absence of the wife figure in Woolf’s account in Jaffna provokes suspicion. It might be presumptious to say it, but perhaps like most European men in the colonies, he indulges in prostitutes to relieve sexual tensions/pressures of living in the colonies (68), and the marriages of his generation in Jaffna are described to be bleak and sad (70), for Dutton and Miss Beeching’s marriage is described to be falling apart (74). Where then, is the European wife, or the native concubine that Stoler prescribes for men in the colonies?
Woolf’s platonic lying together on the sand with Gwen, juxtaposed with the lax (immoral?) upbringing of the two girls by their widowed mother (102), shows him to be deviating from Stoler’s chapter description of European men in the colonies as “innocent but immoral men”, needing “racist but moral women” (56). But what Woolf’s silence on his sexuality in the Jaffna account means the abovementioned or is simply glossing over the norms of colonial sexual politics, his encounters of colonial representations of sexualty largely subscribe to the economical and political exigencies.
Yet, the absence of the wife figure in Woolf’s account in Jaffna provokes suspicion. It might be presumptious to say it, but perhaps like most European men in the colonies, he indulges in prostitutes to relieve sexual tensions/pressures of living in the colonies (68), and the marriages of his generation in Jaffna are described to be bleak and sad (70), for Dutton and Miss Beeching’s marriage is described to be falling apart (74). Where then, is the European wife, or the native concubine that Stoler prescribes for men in the colonies?
Woolf’s platonic lying together on the sand with Gwen, juxtaposed with the lax (immoral?) upbringing of the two girls by their widowed mother (102), shows him to be deviating from Stoler’s chapter description of European men in the colonies as “innocent but immoral men”, needing “racist but moral women” (56). But what Woolf’s silence on his sexuality in the Jaffna account means the abovementioned or is simply glossing over the norms of colonial sexual politics, his encounters of colonial representations of sexualty largely subscribe to the economical and political exigencies.
Monday, October 20, 2008
Escaping the Interior Struggle
Stoler’s work Sexual Affronts and Racial Frontiers discusses how state machinations in policies both at home and out in the colonies are intertwined with the internal turmoil of the European in the colonies. In the face of “inclusionary impulses” and “exclusionary practices” (514), the case studies in Stoler’s article straddle the middle grounds of imperialist racism and colonial nationalism. Perhaps the best figure in Orwell’s Burmese Days to embody the interior conflict in the colonialist psyche is Flory. His interior frontier that is constantly challenged and negotiated, becomes what is of interest to us.
An European who sees through the hypocrisy of the colonial enterprise in Burma, Flory despises the pukka sahib characters and attitude, and at the same time has already internalized the imperial racism of the Orientals. Almost committing métissage with Ma Hla May, Flory’s character remains too “European” to tarnish his reputation and his lineage with an interracial marriage. His search for a European bride who will not develop the mentality and attitude of a pukka memsahib reflects his “inclusionary” attitudes and appreciation of the Burmese culture, untarnished by the “culture system” of colonialism.
Flory’s criterion for his bride, and his desire to groom Elizabeth into his ideal bride, show a microcosm of the “inclusionary impulses” and “exclusionary practices” of the colonial government on the colonized populace. On the interior front, the lack of that ideal bride, since Elizabeth rejects him and he exists in a colonized landscape devoid of further opportunities, causes him to become incomplete in his desire to straddle the métis divide. The failure in his negotiation of the interior frontier by having a family that is an extension of his individual, and thereby a retort to the colonial enterprise’s model, leads him to a path of escapism viable only (in his view) by suicide. But is suicide that only option of rebellion and yet having the natural, innate instinct of establishing a family unit?
An European who sees through the hypocrisy of the colonial enterprise in Burma, Flory despises the pukka sahib characters and attitude, and at the same time has already internalized the imperial racism of the Orientals. Almost committing métissage with Ma Hla May, Flory’s character remains too “European” to tarnish his reputation and his lineage with an interracial marriage. His search for a European bride who will not develop the mentality and attitude of a pukka memsahib reflects his “inclusionary” attitudes and appreciation of the Burmese culture, untarnished by the “culture system” of colonialism.
Flory’s criterion for his bride, and his desire to groom Elizabeth into his ideal bride, show a microcosm of the “inclusionary impulses” and “exclusionary practices” of the colonial government on the colonized populace. On the interior front, the lack of that ideal bride, since Elizabeth rejects him and he exists in a colonized landscape devoid of further opportunities, causes him to become incomplete in his desire to straddle the métis divide. The failure in his negotiation of the interior frontier by having a family that is an extension of his individual, and thereby a retort to the colonial enterprise’s model, leads him to a path of escapism viable only (in his view) by suicide. But is suicide that only option of rebellion and yet having the natural, innate instinct of establishing a family unit?
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Insidious Absorption?
Chapters 1 to 18 of Orwell’s Burmese Days was, in my honest opinion, are the most painfully racist writing I have read. In fact, in shifting the reader’s perspective between the omniscient narrator, Flory and the other characters, Orwell’s writing insidiously aligns the reader with the racism, even though the surface text is revolting in its raw prejudice, and shows the reader how he has been tricked into it.
Perhaps how Orwell’s writing subtly allies the reader with the imperial racism of the text is the description of the landscape. This can be clearly seen in the way Flory’s perspective of the wretched landscape is continued from the omniscient narrator’s introduction of the township to the reader (14-15). From the “scorched and khaki-coloured” maidan, the “wastes of paddy fields” and the “blackish hills” (14), Flory’s description of the place in his loneliness (of suitable European companionship) is simply a “bloody” hole improvised into a song as he “switched at dried-up grasses with his stick (15).
The about-turn comes when Flory describes gardening as the “greatest consolation” in Burma, which includes how phloxes, African marigolds and zinnias grow in the land (84). Interestingly Flory starts saying how he loves “that somber yellow colour [of] the maidan”, when Elizabeth remarks “what a perfectly divine view you have”(85).
And what else can we say about the racism in Orwell’s writing when not just the landscape is preferential to the enjoyment by Europeans, but animals as well? Flory’s dog Flo, upon meeting Elizabeth, tries to get her attention by “frisking” around her (84). The most hilarious line I have found is perhaps this:
Whether Orwell can be qualified as a racism by our terms and conditions in this present day, there is no doubt that his writing is obviously showing us the most extreme sense of racism, and perhaps in revealing it to us in this way, parodying it cleverly.
Perhaps how Orwell’s writing subtly allies the reader with the imperial racism of the text is the description of the landscape. This can be clearly seen in the way Flory’s perspective of the wretched landscape is continued from the omniscient narrator’s introduction of the township to the reader (14-15). From the “scorched and khaki-coloured” maidan, the “wastes of paddy fields” and the “blackish hills” (14), Flory’s description of the place in his loneliness (of suitable European companionship) is simply a “bloody” hole improvised into a song as he “switched at dried-up grasses with his stick (15).
The about-turn comes when Flory describes gardening as the “greatest consolation” in Burma, which includes how phloxes, African marigolds and zinnias grow in the land (84). Interestingly Flory starts saying how he loves “that somber yellow colour [of] the maidan”, when Elizabeth remarks “what a perfectly divine view you have”(85).
And what else can we say about the racism in Orwell’s writing when not just the landscape is preferential to the enjoyment by Europeans, but animals as well? Flory’s dog Flo, upon meeting Elizabeth, tries to get her attention by “frisking” around her (84). The most hilarious line I have found is perhaps this:
“She always barked at strange Orientals, but she liked the smell of a European.”
Whether Orwell can be qualified as a racism by our terms and conditions in this present day, there is no doubt that his writing is obviously showing us the most extreme sense of racism, and perhaps in revealing it to us in this way, parodying it cleverly.
Tuesday, October 7, 2008
To Live and Die in Colonial Difference
To live and die in the landscape of colonial difference, the elephant is the metaphor of the liberty and historicity of the colonized. The villagers’ living in servility to the European law of their land is the elephant’s submission to be chained when in “must”, their useful deaths (to justify the European’s killing of the elephant) if trodden by the elephant becomes the elephant’s own death to justify the European’s worth in the larger context of the colonial enterprise and his respect demanded of the colonized.
Just as Chatterjee’s argument sketches the colonised’s need to be similar to the coloniser and yet maintain internal differences, we see in Orwell’s short narrative the nationalism that Chatterjee prescribes to be vaguely forming. The Burmese live the compartmentalized lives as dictated by the Europeans, but at the same time unveil the similarities of the European to their own selfish needs when Orwell’s narrator, in killing the elephant for his selfish ends, see the Burmese selfishly interested in the elephant for its flesh.
Do we then think of it as how Chatterjee plays with the “[turning]” of “tables”, that colonialism was brought on by the way the Burmese behave and might have in the past, or is it a symptom of “culture system” that the colonizers have manipulated the way the colonized behaved to suit their progression? The elephant then, in being killed by the European and consumed by the Burmese, lives the life of Chatterjee’s “historical theory” personified, an interaction of the indigenous history and the European history of the colonial state.
Just as Chatterjee’s argument sketches the colonised’s need to be similar to the coloniser and yet maintain internal differences, we see in Orwell’s short narrative the nationalism that Chatterjee prescribes to be vaguely forming. The Burmese live the compartmentalized lives as dictated by the Europeans, but at the same time unveil the similarities of the European to their own selfish needs when Orwell’s narrator, in killing the elephant for his selfish ends, see the Burmese selfishly interested in the elephant for its flesh.
Do we then think of it as how Chatterjee plays with the “[turning]” of “tables”, that colonialism was brought on by the way the Burmese behave and might have in the past, or is it a symptom of “culture system” that the colonizers have manipulated the way the colonized behaved to suit their progression? The elephant then, in being killed by the European and consumed by the Burmese, lives the life of Chatterjee’s “historical theory” personified, an interaction of the indigenous history and the European history of the colonial state.
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
The Captive White Man
I was immersed in Marlow’s narrative of Jim’s state of flux without an anchored centre, moving from port to port as the memories of the Patna catches up with him. And just as he seems to be anchored, figuratively and literally, the heroics of his adventures at Doramin’s Bugis stronghold throw up an analogy that provoked my thoughts on his Hollywood cinema-style road to fame á la Rambo.
Marlow describes Jim as a “captive in every sense”. He even goes as far to say that he was also “captivated” by Dain Waris. He describes Dain Waris as “open to the Western eye” but at the same time embodying the “mystery of unrecorded ages” (164). From this I infer that Dain Waris serves as perfect specimen of the cultured native, and yet a better European than most real ones. The two characters’ fascination in Dain Waris then directs our attention to their gravitation towards an amalgamation of both Occidental and Oriental categories as prescribed by Edward Said – and yet their continued “captivity” in those separate roles.
This complicates the relationship of the European and the Asian that is viewed through a lens of binary oppositions, for Dain Waris and Jim are figures in the liminal middle ground of these two polarities. And perhaps, for a way to reach the middle ground, violence must be exacted. Jim the Occidental assures himself a space in the midst of the Orientals by violence in leading the attack on Sherif Ali’s fort, and Dain Waris the Oriental gains recognition by the Occidental by being instrumental in the war effort (169).
But still, their basic differences in ethnicity render their positions in this hybrid class unequal in power. Jim the Occident-turned-Hybrid obviously holds more power over Dain Waris the Oriental-turned-Hybrid. The shackles of “captivity” remain.
Marlow describes Jim as a “captive in every sense”. He even goes as far to say that he was also “captivated” by Dain Waris. He describes Dain Waris as “open to the Western eye” but at the same time embodying the “mystery of unrecorded ages” (164). From this I infer that Dain Waris serves as perfect specimen of the cultured native, and yet a better European than most real ones. The two characters’ fascination in Dain Waris then directs our attention to their gravitation towards an amalgamation of both Occidental and Oriental categories as prescribed by Edward Said – and yet their continued “captivity” in those separate roles.
This complicates the relationship of the European and the Asian that is viewed through a lens of binary oppositions, for Dain Waris and Jim are figures in the liminal middle ground of these two polarities. And perhaps, for a way to reach the middle ground, violence must be exacted. Jim the Occidental assures himself a space in the midst of the Orientals by violence in leading the attack on Sherif Ali’s fort, and Dain Waris the Oriental gains recognition by the Occidental by being instrumental in the war effort (169).
But still, their basic differences in ethnicity render their positions in this hybrid class unequal in power. Jim the Occident-turned-Hybrid obviously holds more power over Dain Waris the Oriental-turned-Hybrid. The shackles of “captivity” remain.
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
“Mistah Conrad--he dead.”
Achebe’s essay on the Western Romantic imagination that is still pervasive and continued today paraded Conrad as a “bloody racist” to prove his point. Picking on the misogynistic representation of the Africans in terms of language (the lack of it too) and culture, Achebe argues that Conrad is perpetuating the racism through the ineffective “cordon sanitaire” of Marlow in HOD.
What is problematic about Achebe’s An Image of Africa is that he polemises the readership of HOD to the faction of Conrad scholars and supporters, and those of his view that Conrad is a misogynist. Are we supposed then to take up sides too? If we were to take Roland Barthes’ view in The Death of the Author, that we have to replace the author as “the only person in literature” with us, the readers, then we have to kill off Conrad, even Achebe, in this matter as we decide for ourselves what to make of HOD.
I agree with Achebe that Conrad might have been viewing Africa through tainted lenses, but can I fault him for being a historical being conditioned by the society that he had existed in? My own reading of HOD is that Marlow’s narrative to the rest of his company travelling on the Thames is more concerned with the moral degradation of the colonizer as he becomes absorbed into the world of the colonized as a god or superior being. The misogyny, sidelined as they are, paints Marlow as the racist, and not Conrad. Barring any other texts in Conrad’s canon or personal information, I believe that HOD by itself does not serve as incriminating evidence of Conrad’s racism.
(words:274)
What is problematic about Achebe’s An Image of Africa is that he polemises the readership of HOD to the faction of Conrad scholars and supporters, and those of his view that Conrad is a misogynist. Are we supposed then to take up sides too? If we were to take Roland Barthes’ view in The Death of the Author, that we have to replace the author as “the only person in literature” with us, the readers, then we have to kill off Conrad, even Achebe, in this matter as we decide for ourselves what to make of HOD.
I agree with Achebe that Conrad might have been viewing Africa through tainted lenses, but can I fault him for being a historical being conditioned by the society that he had existed in? My own reading of HOD is that Marlow’s narrative to the rest of his company travelling on the Thames is more concerned with the moral degradation of the colonizer as he becomes absorbed into the world of the colonized as a god or superior being. The misogyny, sidelined as they are, paints Marlow as the racist, and not Conrad. Barring any other texts in Conrad’s canon or personal information, I believe that HOD by itself does not serve as incriminating evidence of Conrad’s racism.
(words:274)
Tuesday, September 2, 2008
Intellect and the Violence Capital
Reading the last ten chapters of Forster’s Passage to India and Fanon’s On Violence, I could not help but notice that even after minor triumphs and victories in the resistance of the colonized against the colonizers, the intellectuals relapse into a mode of complicity with the oppressors. Escaping the direct rule of the British in Chandrapore to a state of autonomy, Mau, ruled by a Rajah and advised by the British, Godbole and Aziz remain shackled to the whims of British “advice” on developing education and administration.
Fanon explains how the educated Native traverses the “good versus evil” space of the Manichaean colonial world. This “colonized intellectual” does not make intellectual gains by assimilating the oppressor’s culture and education, but merely “pawn[s] some of his own intellectual possessions”(13). By having the colonizers’ intellectual training, such a colonized individual moves upwards into a middle-ground between the colonizers and the colonized. Aziz and Godbole likewise perform such a role as described by Fanon. They find their existence incongruent with the masses, and yet not really British. Aziz thinks “I am an Indian at last”, but at the riverside celebrations he finds himself detached and watching afar with Ralph Moore. Godbole experiences a collective belonging with the Indian masses at the Temple’s ceremony of Shri Krishna’s birth, yet reverts to a sense of an “individual clod”(282). Both characters’ sense of individualism is described by Fanon to be the effect of hegemony by the colonizer (11).
Does such intellect then give the educated Native a false sense of representation? In his angry ranting throughout On Violence, Fanon seems to be aware of such a painful truth that the end of it, he is representing the rights of his land and his people in the language of the colonizers. The fact that he can only put through his argument eloquently in French is another violence that is within his own class, within himself. While Fanon describes the colony as a “compartmentalized world” that is “divided in two” and inhabited by different species”(5), this may be the linguistic violence that sets the educated Native apart from his brethren, apart from the cultural and physiognomical differences dividing the colonized space into three general compartments of the savage Native, the educated Native and the White man.
This then leads on to how the middle compartment of the educated Native acts as a damper to the resistance of the savage Native against the colonizers. Fanon describes the educated Natives to be opportunistic and self-preserving. Yet, such capitalist leanings are less evident in Aziz and Godbole. Sure enough, Aziz has to mind the upbringing of his children Godbole has to earn his keep, but their bourgeoisie ambitions and the need to represent the colonized become a violence in the Self of the educated Native.
But one thing is for sure, that the fragmentation of the colonized social strata prevents the pooling of resources for resistive violence. Fanon describes the capitalist colonizers’ vast violence capital to be overwhelming and seemingly infinite, as compared to the Natives’ primitive and puny violence capital. Short of an all-out attrition war, the resistances of the colonized by violence seem doomed before any action. The mediating, negotiating educated Native class functions to prevent that apocalyptic attritional suicide, as well as the continued pipeline to the siphoning of violence capital from the colony to the metropolis. This leeching is described by Fanon to be how “Europe’s well-being nad progress were built with the sweat and corpses of blacks, Arabs, Indians and Asians”(53). The tax collection and trade in Forster’s colony space serve as the parallel to such transfers of capital.
Thus, the control and usage of violence capital and hegemonising of educated Natives can be seen as a form of capitalist enterprise. In fact, more important than the economic measures to derive the dollars and cents from the colonies, colonial powers are seen to be economizing the values of the violence capital to retain the power politics of the colonization machinery, as such strategies ensure the continued profitability of controlling the colony.
- Weiquan
Fanon explains how the educated Native traverses the “good versus evil” space of the Manichaean colonial world. This “colonized intellectual” does not make intellectual gains by assimilating the oppressor’s culture and education, but merely “pawn[s] some of his own intellectual possessions”(13). By having the colonizers’ intellectual training, such a colonized individual moves upwards into a middle-ground between the colonizers and the colonized. Aziz and Godbole likewise perform such a role as described by Fanon. They find their existence incongruent with the masses, and yet not really British. Aziz thinks “I am an Indian at last”, but at the riverside celebrations he finds himself detached and watching afar with Ralph Moore. Godbole experiences a collective belonging with the Indian masses at the Temple’s ceremony of Shri Krishna’s birth, yet reverts to a sense of an “individual clod”(282). Both characters’ sense of individualism is described by Fanon to be the effect of hegemony by the colonizer (11).
Does such intellect then give the educated Native a false sense of representation? In his angry ranting throughout On Violence, Fanon seems to be aware of such a painful truth that the end of it, he is representing the rights of his land and his people in the language of the colonizers. The fact that he can only put through his argument eloquently in French is another violence that is within his own class, within himself. While Fanon describes the colony as a “compartmentalized world” that is “divided in two” and inhabited by different species”(5), this may be the linguistic violence that sets the educated Native apart from his brethren, apart from the cultural and physiognomical differences dividing the colonized space into three general compartments of the savage Native, the educated Native and the White man.
This then leads on to how the middle compartment of the educated Native acts as a damper to the resistance of the savage Native against the colonizers. Fanon describes the educated Natives to be opportunistic and self-preserving. Yet, such capitalist leanings are less evident in Aziz and Godbole. Sure enough, Aziz has to mind the upbringing of his children Godbole has to earn his keep, but their bourgeoisie ambitions and the need to represent the colonized become a violence in the Self of the educated Native.
But one thing is for sure, that the fragmentation of the colonized social strata prevents the pooling of resources for resistive violence. Fanon describes the capitalist colonizers’ vast violence capital to be overwhelming and seemingly infinite, as compared to the Natives’ primitive and puny violence capital. Short of an all-out attrition war, the resistances of the colonized by violence seem doomed before any action. The mediating, negotiating educated Native class functions to prevent that apocalyptic attritional suicide, as well as the continued pipeline to the siphoning of violence capital from the colony to the metropolis. This leeching is described by Fanon to be how “Europe’s well-being nad progress were built with the sweat and corpses of blacks, Arabs, Indians and Asians”(53). The tax collection and trade in Forster’s colony space serve as the parallel to such transfers of capital.
Thus, the control and usage of violence capital and hegemonising of educated Natives can be seen as a form of capitalist enterprise. In fact, more important than the economic measures to derive the dollars and cents from the colonies, colonial powers are seen to be economizing the values of the violence capital to retain the power politics of the colonization machinery, as such strategies ensure the continued profitability of controlling the colony.
- Weiquan
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
Fractured Identity and the Road to Partition
Levine's Britain in India reflects the historical fact that the Indian population in British India was as diverse as the Princely States on the Indian subcontinent before the East India Company annexed them and ruled them with a one-size-fits-all governance. In Forster's Passage to India, the diversity of cultures between Indian Hindus, Indian Muslims, Indian Sikhs and more are simplistically categorised as "Indians" by the British, especially the British women accompanying their husbands to colonial postings in British India. Not being in touch with the administration of the settlements, the women's aversion to contact with the Indians (Forster 39) show the rift of understanding between the colonised and the colonisers. With such insentivities and the trial of Aziz for the attempted rape of Adela as a catalyst, the riot in the subsequent acquital of Aziz brings to the foreground the previously simmering undercurrents of interracial tensions. These tensions do not merely exist in the plane between the British and the Indians, but with the the Indian population, the Indian Hindus and the Indian Muslims. The majority-Muslim mob that riots outside the courtroom and the hospital show the fragmented Indian culture. Suspicions between the ethnic groups within the Indian population can be seen when the mob confronts Dr Panna Lal, an Indian Hindu doctor, outside the hospital and demands the release of Nureddin (238).
The interracial tensions are true historical facts and are very much alive in the present day. While the setting for Passage to India maybe fictitious, there are two links to the present geography of India. Chandrapore's nearest similarity in name, Chandragarth in the northwestern edge of India, is located close to the border clashes with Pakistan in the present day, and the state of Bihar where Forster is said to have based his narrative on, suffers prejudice from the people of more centralised Indian states. In the historical and geographical sense, Forster chronicles the history of British India's development up to 1924, the publication date of the book. What Levine describes in Britain in India supports the larger facts of government policies and history in Forster's narrative, and Forster's zooming-in on the everyday life of the community in Chandrapore gives the history more human and emotional description.
But Forster's narrative foreshadows many issues arising from the British India diaspora that the colonial offices in London would never have predicted. The insensitive handling of racial issues and the subsequent Partition of Punjab to Pakistan and India caused intercommunal violence and a huge displacement of Hindus and Muslims uprooted to cross the borders. There were many other displacement of the Indian population under the British's haste in drawing the boundaries for post-independence Pakistan and India. Such violence, in the tensions against the British in the mutinies and among ethnic groups in the civil wars, show the fragmented loyalties of the Indian population. There will be too many compartments if we were to categorise the identities of the "Indian" (which, in Passage to India, is shown impossible). From the basic ethnic groups, the Indian subcontinent has too many of them, as the Subaltern had got mixed up with in his entreaty to send in the Army (191). And then from these, throw in the categories of religion and the loyalties to British/Mogul Emperor descendancy/Hindu Prince descendancy. We get a seemingly infinite number of permutations that render India a complex web of identities from before Forster's writing to beyond our lives. The issue here is how the Modernist anxieties of the individual is equal in both the British and the Indian. Of course I would like to point out that at the outset the Indian has more to worry about since the flux to the cities (advanced to modernity by the British) would include more diverse racial and cultural differences than the British moving into any European city.
Forster's work, in my opinion, addresses all of us living in the postcolonial era, all the way back from 1924. Like Aziz and his compatriots, and any other historical being in this milieu of the Commonwealth, are our identities also manufactured by the British Empire to be this complex and subjective?
The interracial tensions are true historical facts and are very much alive in the present day. While the setting for Passage to India maybe fictitious, there are two links to the present geography of India. Chandrapore's nearest similarity in name, Chandragarth in the northwestern edge of India, is located close to the border clashes with Pakistan in the present day, and the state of Bihar where Forster is said to have based his narrative on, suffers prejudice from the people of more centralised Indian states. In the historical and geographical sense, Forster chronicles the history of British India's development up to 1924, the publication date of the book. What Levine describes in Britain in India supports the larger facts of government policies and history in Forster's narrative, and Forster's zooming-in on the everyday life of the community in Chandrapore gives the history more human and emotional description.
But Forster's narrative foreshadows many issues arising from the British India diaspora that the colonial offices in London would never have predicted. The insensitive handling of racial issues and the subsequent Partition of Punjab to Pakistan and India caused intercommunal violence and a huge displacement of Hindus and Muslims uprooted to cross the borders. There were many other displacement of the Indian population under the British's haste in drawing the boundaries for post-independence Pakistan and India. Such violence, in the tensions against the British in the mutinies and among ethnic groups in the civil wars, show the fragmented loyalties of the Indian population. There will be too many compartments if we were to categorise the identities of the "Indian" (which, in Passage to India, is shown impossible). From the basic ethnic groups, the Indian subcontinent has too many of them, as the Subaltern had got mixed up with in his entreaty to send in the Army (191). And then from these, throw in the categories of religion and the loyalties to British/Mogul Emperor descendancy/Hindu Prince descendancy. We get a seemingly infinite number of permutations that render India a complex web of identities from before Forster's writing to beyond our lives. The issue here is how the Modernist anxieties of the individual is equal in both the British and the Indian. Of course I would like to point out that at the outset the Indian has more to worry about since the flux to the cities (advanced to modernity by the British) would include more diverse racial and cultural differences than the British moving into any European city.
Forster's work, in my opinion, addresses all of us living in the postcolonial era, all the way back from 1924. Like Aziz and his compatriots, and any other historical being in this milieu of the Commonwealth, are our identities also manufactured by the British Empire to be this complex and subjective?
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