5 Commonwealth Countries and New Literatures in English

Prof. Ipshita Chanda

The aim of this module is to locate the idea of the ‘commonwealth’ as a collective with a common history and shared language, in the contemporary postcolonial world and understand how this category influences our understanding of literatures written across the world in the shared language, i.e English.

1.  Commonwealth

In the 20th century, Britain was at the head of a group of former dominions and colonies named the “British Commonwealth of Nations”. But in the course of the century, Britain’s empire was dismantled. The relationship between Britain and the dominions where British settlers lived (as opposed to colonies where they ruled ‘indirectly’ through English educated ‘natives’  changed in the first half of the century. Independent nation-states emerged from colonial control into sovereignty.

Before the ‘world’ wars, Britain regularly held ‘colonial conferences’ with heads of colonies and dominions. In 1907, these were renamed the ‘imperial conferences’. After the second ‘world’ war, these were renamed Commonwealth Conferences. The British monarch was the symbolic head of the commonwealth, without any political authority over the member nations. Now the commonwealth exists as a community of sovereign nations , which were once part of the British empire. Its membership is not compulsory for these nations – they belong to this group by choice.

The 1971 Singapore Declaration of Commonwealth Principles commits the 54 member states to democracy, world peace, non-racialism and consensus-building amongst member nations. Though the Commonwealth of nations has no constitution or legal authority, as a body it does exert its moral authority. For example, after the institutional murder of Ken Saro Wiwa, an environmental activist and writer from the Oil Rivers area of Nigeria, the Commonwealth suspended the member nation, Nigeria. However, Saro Wiwa’s fight was against the extraction of oil by Shell, a British multinational, which had the support of the government. The assassination of Saro Wiwa was the result of the complicity between the neocolonial state and global capital emerging from Britain, the head of the commonwealth. Effectively, the Nigerian government as well as the multinational were guilty of this murder – but the contradiction of the ‘commonwealth’ system is clear in that the relations of exploitation between colony and colonizer are obscured by the supposed sovereignty of the nation state.

Neocolonialism ie., colonization by capital rather than by nation-states, makes nonsense of the idea of “common’ and ‘shared’ resources. The power hierarchy established by colonization and strengthened by the language-culture of English, is thus inadequately, even erroneously represented by the idea of ‘commonwealth’.

2. Literature and the ‘common’ wealth

When Tagore won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913, the citation read :”he has made his poetic thought expressed in his own English words a part of the literature of the west “ Critics have interpreted this as the breaching of the wall between Asian and European literary conventions, the emergence of a ‘new’ literature in English “independent of British and American “ (Macleod, 2003). That the book was a translation by Tagore himself from the original Bengali, was not taken cognizance of. IT appeared as if the book was originally written in English and hence contributed to the tradition of English literature, albeit from a different land. This reflects the impulse behind the nomenclature “commonwealth” : appropriation of the literatures of different cultural nationalities under the rubric of “commonwealth” because of their use of a common language. We will consider the implications of this in the rest of the module.

Formation of the Field

Such literature, written in and about the colonies by the colonized, was first refered to as Colonial Literature. After the Westminster Conferences (1926 and 1930), the statute giving dominion status to settler colonies Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa, changed the name to Dominion literature, but this excluded India.

In the 1930’s, the university of Uppsala organised a series of lectures and monographs on the subject of Anglophone writing in colonies. From 1940 onwards, the Commonwealth Literary Fund of Australia supplied scholars who offered a series of ten lectures on this topic to universities which engaged them annually.

In the 1950s the term Commonwealth was used as a descriptive, non-political term to identify “literature in English from countries and colonies that had had a historical connection with Great Britain” (Macleod, 2003). In 1957, a conference on Commonwealth Literature was convened at Leeds, and in the same year, a new section, Section XII, for consideration of literatures in the ‘commonwealth’ was established. A survey of the literatures of these areas, followed in 1961, entitled “The Commonwealth Pen: An Introduction to the Literature of the British  Commonwealth”. The journal of Commonwealth Literature was established in 1965 by Oxford University Press.

Critiques

Henry Louis Gates condemned the “not-so-latent imperialism” in the naming of the field. He complained that these are “extra-literary designations symbolic of material and concomitant political relations rather than literary ones”.

The alternatives suggested to the label Commonwealth were World Literatures Written in English, New Literatures (see Module 1 for a discussion of this issue) and Postcolonial Literatures.

The debate was open by 1971, at the international conference of the Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies at Kingston in Jamaica, where the advocates of Black Power questioned the validity of using western standards to judge local forms. The advocacy of a Nation language and rejection of Imperial language by Edward Kamau Braithwaite (1984, 5-6), followed this conference.

Some critics, like John Mcleod (2010), feel that the ‘commonwealth’ phase is the first period in the history of ‘post’colonialism. The idea of the commonwealth can be seen as a move towards the “de-nationalisation” of English (See Module 1) as discussed by Viswanathan (2015). Excluding the literatures of Ireland and Wales, which ironically resisted the cultural hegemony of England, ‘commonwealth’ literature demanded a “comparative approach (to) the common concerns and attributes that these manifold literary voices (had)” (Mcleod 2010 ). Though it appears as if the establishment of the commonwealth changes the hierarchy and paternalistic relation between Britain and the colonies to a relation of filial equality, scholars caution that is is”a sanitized vision of international fraternity which masks the exploitative and painful realities of British colonization and its legacies”. Commonwealth Literature in the singular has been criticised for projecting unity in diversity

– the unity being privileged over the diversity . The ‘common’ inheritance also foregrounded the influence of Britain through culture and language, and literature is a living example of this influence . IN castigating what he calls “colonialist criticism”, Chinua Achebe shows that the inherent assumption in this happy grouping of the literary manifold, was that the satndards for judging this diversity were emphatically Western, if not exclusively English (Achebe Colonialist Criticism)

3.  INFLUENCE OF ‘COMMONWEALTH’ ON LITERARY STUDIES

‘Nationalism’ as a Literary Category

A.L.McLeod (2003) recounts the emergence of literature in these areas as simultaneous with the emergence of what he calls “a truly nationalist sentiment”, opining that the “smaller colonies” like Malta or Fiji have no literature because they do not yet have a “sense of national identity, no cause to espouse, no common goal” (ibid 8). The problems with this approach are first, the assumption that “literature” is necessarily written, and written in English. That these societies had, prior to colonization, literatures or oratures in their own languages, escaped – and still escapes – advocates of the view that literature, English, civilization and nation are synonymous. The second problem is the imposed idea of nation related to a single canonical literature and to a single – coloniser’s – language. It is to the detriment of the institution of English in the former colonies that this view is still espoused by many scholars who participate in the theoretical reduction and conflation of literature, nation and history, following this idea floated in 1961, by English critics and scholars.

3.2. Aesthetic Standards

The first editorial of the Journal of Commonwealth Literature reflects on its name and says that it is “a convenient shorthand which should on no account be construed as a perverse underwriting of any concept of a single culturally homogenous body of writings to be thought of as Commonwealth literature”. But the inner contradictions surface almost immediately as the editorial goes on to say “ All writing takes it place within the body of English literature… and becomes subject to the criteria of excellence by which literary works in English are judged”. No doubt the critics felt that they were giving the writers of non-English origin equal respect by judging them on the same standards to be used for the great literature in English, with no thought at all to the existing traditions of writing and literature as well as orature and verbal arts in the colonies. The existence of other languages and their literary heritage did not seem to figure in these theoretical delineations of the field. Rather, they attempted to limit the appreciation of literature and structure literary taste according to civilized, imported standards. This implies that even while paying lip-service to the unique features of each colony and emphasizing the difference of history and culture which often compromised the ‘common’ resources of English, votaires of ‘commonwealth literature’ tried to unify these differences through the common – and assumed superior – standard of English.

So, as MacLeod (2003) points out, “Commonwealth Literature is a subset of canonical English literature evaluated in terms derived from the conventional study of English that stressed the values of timelessness and universality”.

3.3 Universalism and Liberal Humanism as critical categories

AS Norman Jeffares put it, a commonwealth writer does not want to be judged for his representation of the place or history of his own country, but as a good writer (whose work) transcends borders, whether local or national , whether of the mind or the spirit” (in McLeod 2013). The problems with this view are firstly, Jeffares’ assumption of the aims of the ‘commonwealth writer’ – why should he (she?) not want to represent his own land and its history ? And why should his representation of these not contribute to the diversity of the ‘universal’ : why should we assume that the route to universality is through the  transcendence of the local by English, which is presumed as global ?

Secondly “colonialist critics” as Achebe would call them, like Charles Larson or William Walsh, admitted the existence of the ‘colonial’ or ‘commonwealth’ writer because he was able to provide, for example “a metaphor for the damage universal in mankind” ( Walsh , 1973). Hence Lamming’s work did not shake the colonial world from out of its stupor or challenge the very premises of cultural imperialism by writing “back” to the empire. The empire, in its ‘commonwealth’ guise, simply did not want to encounter difference and engage with it. Its response to the writing of the colonized was to evaluate it according to what were expressed as universal human truths, available preferably in the English canon. The value ascribed to these truths derived from standards of western criticism, based on  western  literary models and theories but they were presented as ‘universal’.

AS Chew (1995) points out, a paradox sits at the heart of commonwealth literature : though it proclaims itself as a ‘free association of mutually cooperating nations” (1995:32), “it is drawn together by a shared history of colonial exploitation, dependence and interchange” (ibid). These tendencies which erase differences in the name of a higher commitment to humanity and an assumed equality despite the reality of global economic exploitation, together  form the discourse of “liberal humanism’. Critics who take this position argue for a formal equality of all literatures written in English, but gloss over the substantive inequality historically created by neocolonialism and global capitalism. The professed equality of literatures in English is a corrective to the previous Orientalist hierarchy, instituted by the colonial powers in the first encounter with the culture of the Other which they named ‘native’. This first encounter was followed by a more benign paternalistic approach which admitted the humanity of the colonized, and on the basis of that humanity alone, lifted him out of his context of traumatic colonial encounter as if it had never happened and hence did not figure in the imagination or reality of writers from the colonies.

4.POSTCOLONIALISM

The eliding of difference was questioned by the ‘post’colonial critics, many of whom happened to be individuals from the former colonies, located in the academic institutions of the metropolis and intent on bringing the literature from their own land into the curriculum of their institutions. Thus, the birth of the ‘postcolonial’ discourse was a reaction to the universalizing liberal humanist tendencies of the ‘commonwealth’ critics and of the hierarchy in western academia, where pedagogy was limited to the work of the metropole.

There was a change in the attitude towards the writing emerging from the colonies. The first phase of ‘commonwealth’ literature emphasised a transcendental unity that raised the work to ‘universality’ whereas in the next phase, an acceptance of diversity and difference, marks the shift from the discourse of commonwealth to the discourse of the ‘post’colonial.

DIFFERENCE – HYBRIDITY

From the start, in the discourse of postcolonialism difference has been related to the theories of subjecthood and ‘otherness’ that emanated from various strands of continental philosophy. The post-structuralist and postmodern theories problematise the unified subject. For example, the theory of hybridity proposed by Homi Bhabha (1983; see also Bhabha 1994), emphasizes the indeterminacy and ambivalence that characterizes the ‘post’colonial condition where the subjecthood cannot be reduced to an “idealist intentionality”. Invoking the Manichean struggle described by Fanon (1952) in Black Skin White Masks, Abdul Jan Mohammad (1985) accuses Bhabha of fetishizing this contradiction that is at the core of the colonial identity. He criticizes Bhabha for asserting the unity of the “colonial subject (both colonizer and colonized)”. According to Jan Mohammad, the obfuscations of theorists like Bhabha show the “ deliberate if at times subconscious imperialist duplicity”. Aijaz Ahmed (1995)  and Arif Dirlik (1994) also criticize Bhabha for ignoring the material reality of colonial and postcolonial societies and for homogenizing the colonized through the trope of ‘hybridity’.

Besides, ‘hybridity’ is a condition that characterizes the migrant rather than the native. In the circumstances, the postcolonial critic, located in western academia, wanting legitimacy for her interest in the canon beyond English or Europe, wanting to bring her ‘native’ literatures into the curriculum, can describe her situation with the term ‘hybridity’ . The migrant intellectual can function as a ‘native informant’ to western academia, and emulate the colonizer in interpreting the culture of the colonized for western consumption.

4.2. Orientalism

Orientalism is defined by Edward Said as a ‘style of thought based on an ontological and epistemological distinction’” (95) between the Orient and the Occident. Describing the imaginary representations of the Self and the Other created with the Orientalist geographies produced by Oriental Studies Edward Saïd comments:

To build a conceptual framework around a notion of Us-versus-Them is, in effect, to pretend that the principal consideration is epistemological and natural—our civilization is known and accepted, theirs is different and strange—whereas, in fact, the framework separating us from them is belligerent, constructed, and situational (2004 : 24)

The imperial conquest of “non–white” countries was intellectually justified with the fetishization of the Eastern world, which was effected with cultural generalizations that divided the peoples of the world into the artificial, binary-relationship of “The Eastern World and The Western World”. This dichotomy identified, designated, and subordinated the peoples of the Orient as the Other—as the non–European Self. The process of fetishization of people and things is a function of Orientalism, which the colonialist ideologue realises with three actions: (i) Homogenization (all Oriental peoples are the same folk); (ii) Feminization (Oriental people are the lessers in the East–West binary relationship); and (iii) Essentialization (a people reduced to the artificial essence of universal, innate characteristics); thus, the praxis of Othering reduced to cultural inferiority the people, places, and things of the Eastern world, which then justified colonialism by establishing the West as the superior standard of culture

Identity

George Herbert Mead’s classic text, Mind, Self and Society (1934) established that social identities are created through our ongoing social interaction with other people and our subsequent self-reflection about who we think we are according to these social exchanges. Mead’s work shows that identities are produced through agreement, disagreement, and negotiation with other people. We adjust our behaviour and our self-image based upon our interactions and our self-reflection about these interactions.

In phenomenology, the terms the Other identifies the other human being, in his and her differences from the Self, as being a cumulative, constituting factor in the self-image of a person; as his or her acknowledgement of being real; hence, the Other is dissimilar to and the opposite of the Self, of Us, and of the Same. The Constitutive Other is the relation between the personality (essential nature) and the person (body) of a human being; it is the relation of essential and superficial characteristics of personal identity that corresponds to the relation between opposite, but corresponding, characteristics of the Self, because the difference is inner-difference, within the Self Individuality and Cultural Identity.

We may think of the modern “humanistic individual” as functioning on three different  planes:   the individual is a subject , the possibility and the source of experience and…of knowledge; the individual is an agent and the individual is also the self formed at the intersection of a number of social identities. As a theorist of Culture Studies, Grossberg(1996)  emphasises that identity is “entirely an historical construction.” As Fanon says of his consciousness of race :

I already knew that there were legends, stories, history, and above all historicity… I was responsible at the same time for my body, my race, for my ancestors.

Subjectivity, identity and agency are constructed temporally. (Grossberg 100) . But he  argues that subjectivity is also spatial by “ taking literally the statement that people experience the world from a particular position— recognizing that such positions are in space rather than (or at least as much as in) time.” This assertion opens the way for scholarship on migration and diaspora as influencing the construction of subjectivities, and inaugurates the study of literature as reflective of and documenting these subjectivities. Cultural location is literally taken in this formulation, and hence space rather than time becomes the primary category of analysis.

CRITIQUES OF IDENTITY POLITICS

Lois McNay (2008) argues that identity claims that are at the heart of many contemporary social movements are represented as demands for recognition in the context of an over- simplified account of power. Although theorists of recognition typically start from a Hegelian model of the subject as dialogically formed and necessarily situated, they too quickly abandon the radical consequences of such a view for subject formation. The subject of recognition becomes both personalized and hypostatized—divorced from the larger social systems of power that create conditions of possibility for particular “identities” (2008: esp. 1– 23).

Brown (1995) traces the genealogy of identity politics to liberal humanism, and to the rise of global capital which is widening the gap between the ‘marginalised’ and the ‘centre’. The institutionalization of North American academic radicalism creates incentives for  intellectuals to overlook their own class privilege, and focus instead on other identities (in turn divorced from their economic inflections).

Poststructuralist challengers charge that identity politics rests on a mistaken view that certain core essential attributes define a person’s identity, over which are imposed forms of socialization that cause her or him to internalize other nonessential attributes. This assumes a metaphysics of substance ie, that a cohesive, self-identical subject is ontologically (if not actually) prior to social existence (Butler 1999). This view of identity misrepresents both its ontology and its political significance. The alternative view offered by poststructuralists is that the subject is itself always already a product of discourse, which represents both the condition of possibility for a certain subject-position and a constraint on what forms of self- making individuals may engage. Identity is not abstract, ie separable from its conditions of possibility. Any claim to identity, whether individual or group-based, must organize itself around a constitutive exclusion. SO, in fact, identity politics means asserting an identity that is cast as authentic to the self or group – an identity that in fact is defined by its opposition to an Other. Reclaiming such an identity as one’s own merely reinforces its dependence on this dominant Other, and further internalizes and reinforces an oppressive hierarchy. Hence Brown also points to the dangers of ressentiment (the moralizing revenge of the powerless)

Writing Back

The editors of the 1989 volume, “The Empire Writes Back : Theory and Practice of POstcolonialism define the term ‘post-colonial’ to discern the effects of the imperial process upon culture “ from the moment of colonization to the present day….. a continuity of preoccupations throughout the historical process initiated by European imperial aggression. (EMPIRE intro)”. They also suggested ‘post-colonial’ as “the most appropriate as the term for the new cross-cultural criticism which has emerged in recent years and for the discourse through which this is constituted.” (ibid). What these literatures had , beyond “ their special and distinctive regional characteristics” their emergence in the present form “out of the experience of colonization and asserted themselves by foregrounding the tension with the imperial power, and by emphasizing their differences from the assumptions of the imperial centre”.

Thus the commonality of language has been left behind and the focus is on the nature of colonial contact and resulting cultural imperialism achieved through English education and English literature as a core of that humanist education. The ‘colonial’ Englishman and the ‘English-educated’ native were locked in an ambiguous relationship – neither could entirely reject the other`. In Wole Soyinka’s “Death and the King’s Horseman”, Elesin Oba is to accompany the dead Alafin of Oyo to heaven by committing ritual suicide. His son Olunde, who has been sent abroad to study medicine at the insistence of the local Collector Pilkings and his wife Jane, hears of the Alafin’s death and knows he must return to bury his father. But Elsin is unable to perform his ritual duty – and Olunde follows tradition in taking the place of his father – despite the western scientific education he commits the cardinal sin of taking a life given by god. But Olunde is not Chrsitian; he tells jane Pilkings, “ Do you think  I took nothing with me when I went ?” implying that his beliefs are not aligned to what he is supposed to have learnt in the west, but what he gained consciousness within and of, the world into which he was born .

INDIAN ENGLISHES

The title of the collection came from Rushdie who made ‘Indian English’ marketable. But there is no one version of Indian English, and never has been. The distinct voices of R.K.Narayan and Mulk Raj Anand were put under a single category by virtue of their common language, and distinct ‘difference’ from that common language. Though English education made writing in the language possible, the English was inflected with the speech rhythms and vocabulary and idioms of the local langauge . The student will understand this distinct register of English if she reads books like I.Allan Sealy’s Trotternama (set in 18th century Lucknow), Kiran Nagarkar’s Ravan and Eddie (early 70’s Bombay), Chetan Raj Sreshtha’s King’s Harvest, set in North Bengal, Hansda Sowvendra Sekhar’s The Adivasi will not dance ( in the ‘tribal’ areas of the state of west Bengal). She will have to discover through reading whether English can be , as Achebe claimed it could be, shaped to bear the burden of the experiences that it hitherto was not exposed to. The plurality of India is testified to be the fact that English does bear the burden of many languages even while adhering to a common tradition of themes and forms which it draws from multiple sources : inherited texts from the classical Indian literature, predating India, ie Sanskrit, and from the local orature  and written literature, from the tradition of English literature as well as Perso-Atabic literary cultures, ie the literatures of those who came to India.

REVISING THE CANON

Besides this, the rewriting of many canonical texts, novels from the Great Tradition , shows that the once-colonised are returning to the canon that shaped their literary sensibility. Amongst them are Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, and the ‘African” novels of Joyce Cary, Coetzee’s rewriting of Robinson Crusoe as Foe, Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea, Bronte’s Jane Eyre from the perspective of the mad woman imprisoned in the attic. These are examples of the response of the Anglophone literature of the former colonies to the literary system and language culture that was imposed upon them by the colonial process.