Lorna Burns

Becoming-postcolonial, becoming-Caribbean: Édouard Glissant and the poetics of creolization

Critical responses to ‘creolization’ have tended to characterise it as a process of synthesis and adaptation engendered by the colonisation of the Caribbean. While this suggests a certain exclusivity to the New World experience, this essay exposes the broader significance of creolization theory for postcolonial studies: tracing the developing critical application of the term through the writings of creolization’s foremost theorist Edouard Glissant, highlighting the way in which his articulation of a whole-world field of Relation intersects with European philosophies of immanence, particularly those of Spinoza and Deleuze. Arguing that Glissant develops a poetics that is both immanent and specific, I challenge Peter Hallward’s critique of postcolonialism’s singularising tendency and develop an alternative approach to the singular based on Derek Attridge’s revisioning of the term as the new. This will be shown to shed further light on Glissant’s assertion that what distinguishes creolization is not intermixing per se but the creation of an unpredictable, original form.

Revisionary “-scapes” of globality in the work of Wilson Harris: introduction

Throughout a literary career spanning more than 50 years (2010 marked the 50th anniversary of the publication of Palace of the Peacock), the Guyanese novelist Wilson Harris has maintained a reputation as a writer of singular, often opaque prose comparable, perhaps, to the writings of William Blake, James Joyce or William Faulkner, but, nevertheless, distinct from the main current in contemporary postcolonial writing. Indeed, although a number of Harris’s critics have exposed the commonalities between Harris and such postcolonial writers as Wole Soyinka, Alejo Carpentier and Toni Morrison, such comparative analyses remain focused on Harris’s relation to individual authors rather than the interests he shares with the broader tenets of postcolonial studies in general. Similarly, studies exploring the theoretical underpinnings to Harris’s writings on identity and difference, creoleness, creativity and the collective unconscious have failed in many respects to reflect the breadth of his philosophical vision. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, critical responses to his work identified Harris’s indebtedness to a philosophical tradition that includes Karl Jaspers, Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre (C.L.R. James), Hegel (Gregory Shaw) and the psychoanalytical theories of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung and R.D. Laing (Michael Gilkes, Sandra Drake). Meanwhile, critics have continued to grapple with Harris’s conception of “the unfinished genesis of the imagination” (Harris, Essays 248– 60), stressing the importance of the link between language and landscape, partialities and gestation in Harris’s cosmologically oriented poetics (Hena Maes-Jelinek, Nathaniel Mackey). While acknowledging the significant contribution made to our contemporary understanding of Harris’s dense writings by such critics, the essays collected here sound new directions in Harris studies and attempt to both reinvigorate the current field and establish a new agenda for future scholarship. This special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing on Wilson Harris situates the author’s writing within the context of recent and emerging debates about the globalizing world and the work of postcolonial literatures. In recent years, the Caribbean has come to be seen as a forerunner in the history of globalization through (forced) migration, cross-cultural contact, the rise of the global economy and creolization (Sheller 174). While Harris’s work is rightly regarded as an important precursor to such contemporary concerns, much work remains to be done in terms of considering how the interrogation of multiple, intersecting spatialities and disjunctive temporalities in Harris’s writings

Philosophy of the imagination: time, immanence and the events that wound us in Wilson Harris’s Jonestown

In his fictional recreation of the People’s Temple massacre, Jonestown, Harris presents us with a protagonist who counter-actualizes the trauma that wounds him, living creatively out of the event and constructing an alternative present-future. Drawing on Deleuzian philosophy, this essay argues for a re-conceptualization of Jonestown in terms that evoke not only Deleuze’s philosophy of time and immanence but also his distinction, via Nietzsche, between active and reactive forces. By means of a character (Francisco Bone) who embraces the power of transformation, creation and difference-in-itself, Harris demonstrates the value of active forces that do not depend on external recognition or dialectical negation in order to be for a postcolonial philosophy of the imagination.

Introduction: Navigating Differential Futures, (Un)making Colonial Pasts

In the fifteen years that have followed Robert Young’s seminal rereading of the epistemic and physical violence of colonialism as a desiring-machine’s production, coding and re/deterritorialization of colonial desire, drawing on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari to ‘think through’ (Young 1995, p. 173) postcoloniality, few have followed Young’s lead and ventured into the difficult domain of Deleuze and the postcolonial. Christopher Miller’s application of Deleuze and Guattari’s nomad and rhizome as conceptual tools for theorizing the (post)identity politics of postcolonialism has perhaps come closest to setting the parameters of a Deleuzian postcolonial analysis: today both nomadology and rhizomatic thought continue to find privileged resonance with the work of postcolonial theorists and critics (cf. Glissant 1997; Huggan 2008, pp. 28–30; Miller 1998). Without denying the relevance of these terms to postcolonial studies, this volume promotes a more fundamental alignment of the fields of Deleuzian thought and postcolonialism. In doing so, it forms part of a growing awareness within postcolonial studies of the critical potential of this dialogue, as evidenced by the recent work of Simone Bignall and Paul Patton — in both their co-edited volume Deleuze and the Postcolonial (2010) and their individual works Deleuzian Concepts (Patton 2010), and Postcolonial Agency (Bignall 2010) — as well as by the work of contemporary literary scholars including Mrinalini Greedharry (2008), Ronald Bogue (2010), Eva Aldea (2011), and, of course, as we shall see, Peter Hallward in his Absolutely Postcolonial: Writing between the Singular and the Specific (2001).

Postcolonial Singularity and a World Literature Yet-to-Come

Abstract This article considers the challenge posed by Gayatri Spivak to rethink world literature along postcolonial lines as an ethical encounter with alterity. Read in this way, Spivak participates in a reframing of world literature that retains the critical gains made by postcolonial theory and suggests that the work of world literary analysis ought not necessarily be de/prescriptive (classifying and ordering) but might involve a contestation of the power relations that structure the world. In developing this argument, I draw on four further perspectives: Pascale Casanovas problematic assertion of literary singularity in The World Republic of Letters; Fredric Jamesons theorization of “third world literature” as counterpoint to Casanovas limiting understanding of national literature; Gilles Deleuze, who offers a way to rethink world literature in a process of becoming; and Édouard Glissant, whose work proposes a “relational” vision of difference that, like that of Spivak, demands an ethical, imaginative response to literature as literature.

Beyond the Colonized and the Colonizer: Caribbean Writing as Postcolonial ‘Health’

The critical block generated by Peter Hallward’s appraisal of the state of contemporary postcolonial studies, Absolutely Postcolonial, had, until recently, foreclosed on the potential of a productive dialogue between postcolonial and Deleuze studies. On the one hand, postcolonial critics found in Hallward’s valorization of specificity a further confirmation of the increasingly dominant neo-Marxist strand of postcolonial analysis. On the other hand, Deleuze scholars were (and continue to be) unable to accept the Hallwardian, or more precisely Badiouian, account of Deleuzian thought, specifically in relation to his glossing of the ‘singular’ or virtual (cf. Bignall 2010; Claire Colebrook in Alliez et al. 2010). As a result, certain key lessons of Absolutely Postcolonial have failed to impact on the study of postcolonial literatures, while the interrogation of postcolonial concepts from a Deleuzian perspective has been a long time coming. While I believe that there are strong grounds for challenging Hallward’s characterization of the ‘singular’ as a monistic, substance-like ‘mode of individuation [that] proceeds internally, through a process that creates its own medium of existence or expansion’ (Hallward 2001, p. xii), to move wholly in the opposite direction, towards an increased specificity, and thus to insist on reducing the work of literature to that of political discourse, is to miss the point of Hallward’s reading.

Uncovering the marvellous: Surrealism and the writings of Wilson Harris

To date, critical analyses of the impact of surrealism on the development of Caribbean literature have tended to restrict their focus to the francophone Caribbean. This article outlines the wider dissemination of surrealism through a focus on the writings of Wilson Harris. Harris’s appropriation of a number of surrealist tropes is revealed through a comparative reading of his novels Palace of the Peacock and The Ghost of Memory with Pierre Mabille’s surrealist work Mirror of the Marvellous.