Michael Niblett

Postcolonial studies and world literature

A spectre is haunting the discipline of postcolonial literary studies – the spectre of “world literature.” If the materialist strand of postcolonial studies developed from a political grounding in the anti-colonial liberation movements of the late 20th-century (Lazarus, Postcolonial Unconscious 21–32), the re-emergence of “world literature” in the first decade of the 21st century parallels the ascendancy of neo-liberal capitalism and its attendant discourses, just as its first emergence in Goethe’s cosmopolitan Weltliteratur and Marx and Engels’s anticipation of a literature superseding “national one-sidedness” paralleled the 19th-century expansion of the world market (Marx and Engels 84). In the last two decades, the fields of comparative and postcolonial literary studies have belatedly acknowledged an epistemological crisis in their failure to address the historical changes in the world-system characteristic of late capitalism. However, their engagement with these changes has taken place predominantly under the banner of “globalization” discourses largely detached from critique of the world economy or through humanist modes of “worlding” literary criticism. The latter approach has involved extending the scope of metropolitan literary studies to include work from diverse literary traditions: “world literature” as the canon writ large (D’haen 152–53) or as those transcendent works that achieve “universal” recognition. North American literary comparativists such as Damrosch, Lawall, and Prendergast have presented “world literature” as an invaluable form of cultural capital – construed as a vital corollary to humanist cosmopolitanism – for the new “global” elites. Other embattled comparativists defending the linguistic boundaries of their discipline, such as Emily Apter in Against World Literature, have argued against world literature on the grounds of the “incommensurability” and “untranslatability” of texts from different linguistic traditions, criticizing the perceived “oneworldedness” of world-systemic approaches that insist on the totality of a singular capitalist modernity (Apter, “On Oneworldedness”). However, materialist scholarly approaches to worlding literary criticism have also emerged. These are more interested in critique of the underlying structures and conditions produced by the international division of labour, this serving as the “political horizon” of all literature (Brown 3). Encomiums to globalization as heralding a rising tide of prosperity that would equalize conditions between all in the “global village” have proved resoundingly hollow, as evidenced by the savage assaults launched on the livelihoods of the poor and the powerless in the wake of the global financial crisis. The world remains subordinated to the systematic logic of capitalist imperialism: it might be one world, but

The caribbean novel since 1945 : cultural practice, form, and the nation-state

How fiction, its forms, and its evolution reflect countries in the midst of postcolonial change The Caribbean Novel since 1945 offers a comparative analysis of fiction from throughout pan-Caribbean, exploring the relationship between literary form, cultural practice, and the nation-state. Engaging with the historical and political impact of capitalist imperialism, decolonization, class struggle, ethnic conflict, and gender relations, Michael Niblett considers the ways in which Caribbean authors have sought to rethink and renarrate the traumatic past and often problematic postcolonial present of the regions peoples. This work pays particular attention to how cultural practices, such as stickfighting and Carnival, and religious rituals and beliefs, such as Vodou and Myal, have figured in reshaping the novel form. Beginning with the post-WWII period, when optimism surrounding the possibility of social and political change peaked, The Caribbean Novel since 1945 interrogates the trajectories of various national projects. The scope of Nibletts analysis is varied and comprehensive, covering both critically acclaimed and lesser-known authors from the Anglophone, Francophone, and Hispanophone traditions. These include Jacques Roumain, Sam Selvon, Marie Chauvet, Luis Rafael Sanchez, Earl Lovelace, Patrick Chamoiseau, Erna Brodber, Wilson Harris, Shani Mootoo, Oonya Kempadoo, Ernest Moutoussamy, and Pedro Juan Gutierrez. Mixing detailed analysis of key texts with wider surveys of significant trends, this book emphasizes the continuing significance of representations of the nation-state to contemporary Caribbean literature. Michael Niblett, Warwickshire, United Kingdom, is research fellow at the Yesu Persaud Centre for Caribbean Studies at the University of Warwick in Coventry, United Kingdom. He is the coeditor of Perspectives on the Other America: Comparative Approaches to Caribbean and Latin American Culture.

“When you take thing out the earth and you en’t put nothing back”: Nature, Form and the Metabolic Rift in Jan Carew’s Black Midas

This article examines Jan Carew’s 1958 novel Black Midas and its mediation of the environmental legacies of the colonial penetration of Guyana. I suggest that the ecological changes wrought by the forcible integration of the Caribbean into the capitalist world-system constitute a “trauma” that, like the traumas of slavery and the decimation of the indigenous peoples, haunts literary texts from the region. The article focuses in particular on the impact of what John Bellamy Foster, following Marx, calls the metabolic rift — the rupture in the interaction between human beings and the earth caused by the antagonistic relationship capitalism sets up between town and country, or metropole and colony. I argue that the generic discontinuities and formal quirks of Carew’s novel can be read as mediating the structural limits to development imposed by ecological imperialism and the metabolic rift, the dynamics of which imprint themselves on the aesthetics of the text.

The “impossible quest for wholeness”: sugar, cassava, and the ecological aesthetic in The Guyana Quartet

This article explores how Wilson Harris’s aesthetic of the environment mediates both the specificity of Guyana’s topography and the dynamics of the capitalist world-ecology. Emphasizing Harris’s engagement with Amerindian cosmology, I suggest that his work seeks to drive beyond the specific form of the nature–society dialectic instantiated under capitalism. Arguing that literary forms are the abstract of specific socio-ecological relationships, the article considers how the novels of The Guyana Quartet register a tension between conflicting ecological complexes, one associated with the cultivation of the cash crop sugar, the other with the staple crop cassava. These conflicting ecologies become the structuring principles for opposing aesthetic modes: the aesthetics of sugar, mediating the impact of plantation capitalism on Guyana; and the aesthetics of cassava, as an aesthetic of the socio-ecological totality.

“It’s the mass that counts” : striking energies in working-class fiction

Abstract This article considers the way in which the political ecologies of coal and oil overdetermine the representation of labour struggles in Ellen Wilkinson’s Clash (1929) and Ralph de Boissière’s Crown Jewel (1952). The historical strikes around which these novels are organized were sparked by conflict over working conditions in, respectively, the coal industry in the UK and the oil industry in Trinidad. Analysing the relationship between the energies generated by mass strike action and the narrative energetics of fiction, the article explores how Wilkinson and de Boissière reshape the novel form in their efforts to represent working-class life.

Belaboring Masculinity: Ecology, Work, and the Body in Michel Ponnamah’s Dérive de Josaphat

This article explores the pressures exerted on traditional conceptions of masculinity as a result of increasing unemployment in male-oriented jobs following the neoliberal restructuring of the world economy. Given the lack of scholarship focused specifically on the transformation of Indo-Caribbean masculinities in this period, the article takes up Rhoda Reddock’s injunction that we look to Caribbean literature and popular culture as a vital repository of information on such changes. Through an analysis of Michel Ponnamah’s novel Derive de Josaphat (1991), I consider the relationship between the decline of plantation agriculture in Martinique, the dislocation of masculinist identities, and the reworking of the masculinist narrative tropes through which nationalist discourse has tended to be articulated in Martinique.

Strange Correspondences: Late Capitalism and Late Style in the Work of Wilson Harris and John Berger

Abstract:This article compares the late work of Guyanese author Wilson Harris with that of English writer and critic John Berger. Taking Theodor Adorno’s reflections on late style as its point of departure, it situates the unconventional aesthetics of both writers in relation to the changes in society and experience unleashed by late capitalism. The essay focuses on Harris’ The Ghost of Memory (2006) and Berger’s From A to X (2008) to argue that the novels’ formal logic registers the pressures generated in the era of late capitalism by the unfolding dynamics of the neoliberal regime of accumulation and the fallout from the increasing financialization of the world-economy since the 1970s. Both texts protest the radical simplification of human and extra-human nature central to finance capital’s drive to transform all of reality into generic income streams. Harris and Berger both emphasize the need to revitalize the sensorium; overcome the Cartesian separation of mind and body and society and nature; and maintain the possibility of an alternative mapping of global community.

Natural disasters and Victorian empire: famines, fevers and the literary cultures of South Asia; Different shades of green: African literature, environmental justice, and political ecology

novella “Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha”). In each case, his meticulous analysis of the context and politics enriches his reading of the text. In fact, one of the fortes of this impressive and scrupulously researched book is its interdisciplinarity, and the way that Ratti moves between the lenses of social and cultural criticism, political theory and literary criticism, to flesh out how it is in literature that the work of the postsecular is actually taking shape. The coda, though succinct, is powerful, and attests to the newness and provocativeness of these thoughts in the Indian and Sri Lankan context. The book also deserves praise for the author’s involvement with the project at more than just the literary and theoretical levels. This is reflected in the stories and anecdotes that Ratti reproduces, as well as in the style of writing. The photographs that precede each chapter (taken by the author) are both illustrations of, and apt commentaries on, the content that he discusses in the accompanying chapters. One of the greatest achievements of the book is perhaps the way in which it raises uncomfortable questions about the significance of certain values that we do not question (such as the desirability of secularism, or the enchantment of religion), and forces us to rethink and rework those values. The book remains, to borrow a sentence from the author, “not a manifesto for a new beginning; it is a courageous and modest imagining of how to make a difference” (210): Ratti’s book is a compelling demonstration of this imagining.

Disturbers of the peace: representations of madness in anglophone Caribbean literature

become the testing ground for theories of cosmopolitanism. This approach produces tightly structured and clearly presented arguments on the texts’ politics of cosmopolitan belonging in relation to specific strands of theory. However, this approach can also lead to reductive and schematic readings of the novels and the theories, which are represented as standing or falling together. In her analysis of Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence, for example, Sasser argues that the novel’s denunciation of particularism and endorsement of “universal cosmopolitanism” fails on the level of narrative and therefore suggest “the inadequacy of [universal cosmopolitanism] in general, since if fictional flesh cannot sustain it one has little hope for what it offers actual people” (109). Though at times heavy-handed in relating the theory to the literary texts, Sasser’s monograph constitutes a valuable and thought-provoking contribution to postcolonial and cosmopolitan studies.

Contemporary Caribbean writing and Deleuze: literature between postcolonialism and post-continental philosophy

range of analytical models provided by psychoanalysis (Lacan, Fanon, Gracchus), postcolonialism (Bhabha, Spivak), gender theory (Irigaray, bell hooks) and formal theories of autobiography (Lejeune’s pact). She thus conclusively demonstrates the originality and diversity of the writers’ treatment of their subject matter, setting apart, for example, a Haitian-Canadian-Floridian such as Laferrière from the French citizens of the DOMs whose engagement with history and psychological repression are perforce of a different nature. In addition, her focus on the power of landscapes and the ferocity of climatic events rounds out a study that is a pleasure to read. I regret, however, that the ubiquitous Bhabha is the only theorist of hybridity who is invoked, whereas linguists, anthropologists and sociologists of creolization would have much more to add to this conversation. Stuart Hall’s approach to hybridity would have been relevant, as would de Certeau’s notion of subversion, Joan Dayan’s contributions to race discourse, and H. L. Gates Jr’s concept of “signifying” which can complicate in interesting ways the notion of recognition. There also seems to be a contradiction in that Hardwick first endorses the inadequacy of language to represent the trauma of the Middle Passage, as in the discussion of the grandmother’s speech in Gisèle Pineau’s L’Exil selon Julia (155), but later suggests that the role of literature, particularly in the Haitian contexts of violence and repression, “is to find ways to express unpalatable truths” (180) such as the destruction wielded by the Duvalier dictatorship. An alternative mode of representation, literature communicates through its poetics and potentialities what historiography cannot, as readers of Toni Morrison know. A longer discussion of literariness would have been useful, especially in relation to the “documentary” aspect of memoir genre and to the ethics and poetics of intimacy, such as in Laferrière’s invocation of his “tranquil” childhood lived under dictatorship but in the protective presence of his grandmother in L’Odeur du café. These theoretical concerns aside, this is a welcome and important contribution to both genre studies and francophone postcolonial criticism. Louise Hardwick’s meticulous research, balanced approach and lucid prose merit serious consideration from specialists of the region.