Françoise Král - Critical Identities in Contemporary Anglophone Diasporic Literature-Palgrave Macmillan (2009)
Françoise Král - Critical Identities in Contemporary Anglophone Diasporic Literature-Palgrave Macmillan (2009)
Diasporic Literature
Also By Françoise Král
Françoise Král
Senior Lecturer in English
Université Paris 10, Nanterre, France
© Françoise Král 2009
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First published 2009 by
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Contents
Acknowledgements ix
Introduction 1
vii
viii Contents
Notes 161
Bibliography 174
Index 187
Acknowledgements
The research for this book has been supported by a number of institu-
tions. I am particularly grateful for a study leave awarded by the CNU
(the French National Committee of Universities) and a grant awarded
by the SAES (the French Society for English Studies). My research has
also benefited from the time I spent at the University of Texas at Austin
where I taught postcolonial literature. I have also received the support
of the CREA (Centre for Research in English Studies) in my current
department at the Université Paris 10 Nanterre, and in particular of
Wilfrid Rotgé and Emily Eells.
I would like to express my thanks to Claire Bazin, my onetime super-
visor for her support and encouragement.
I am also grateful to the late Michel Fabre, as well as to Gérard Celli
who played such a decisive role, at an early stage, in the direction which
my research projects have taken and whose guidance over the years has
been immensely valuable.
I would like to express my very warm thanks to Meredene Hill,
Crystal Webster, Clare MacManus and Simone Rinzler, for their sup-
port and friendship, to Delphine Reffet who provided a most conveni-
ent writing retreat, as well as to Matthieu Guillot for his patience and
encouragement.
Two people in particular have been especially helpful in seeing this
book through to publication; Jean-Jacques Lecercle who encouraged and
nurtured the first impetus to write and Sam Coombes, who made sure
that the manuscript actually made it out of the drawer. I am grateful
to both of them for their careful rereadings and the rigorous eye which
they have cast over my manuscript. My very warm thanks to Sam for
the gift of patience, time and accuracy.
A special thought goes to wee Juliet who faithfully accompanied me
to the library whilst the maunscript was still in preparation and was
born shortly after its completion.
My deepest thanks go to Geneviève Král for years of unwavering
support.
Some of the material included in Chapter 2 appeared in Philip Roth
Studies whose editors have kindly granted permission to reproduce these
extracts.
ix
x Acknowledgements
1
2 Critical Identities
at both an individual and a national level as well as their role in the for-
mation of new models of identification. Conversely, the multiplication
of contact zones and the broad spectrum of situations resulting from
migrations have forced theorists to make room for new categories and
increasingly pay attention to hybridity (Bhabha), mestizaje (Anzaldua),
interstitiality and hyphenation (Mishra).
This contextual shift has been paralleled with a critical reappraisal of
the notion of identity. Not only has the essentialist conception of iden-
tity come under criticism with deconstructionism, the link between
identity and authenticity has also been the object of much speculation
and has been interrogated to such an extent that today, it has become
difficult to apprehend identity independently of identity construction
and the mechanisms it involves; in other words, identity has gradually
come to be apprehended in its artificiality rather than per se.
The turn of the twenty-first century is thus a paradoxical time when
identity still occupies pride of place while being on shaky ground; its
unreconstructed parts continue to haunt the field of literary studies
with the recurrence and perseverance of a spectre to the point where it
almost seems that the more identity is under threat, the more it resur-
faces. The same paradox is mirrored in the diversity of literary produc-
tion. While new voices have emerged, which have become more visible
thanks to the appearance of new labels like Black British literature and
the literature of the South Asian diaspora, to name only two, the genre
of the global novel points in the opposite direction. With its deterrito-
rialized characters who not only roam the world at their ease but who
sometimes seem to have jettisoned all cultural moorings, the global
novel not only offers new models of togetherness and citizenship, it
also reflects an actual change in the way some diasporians negotiate
their double belonging and cope with the de facto in-betweenness of
their condition.
The starting point of this book is an interest in the disjunctive phe-
nomena inherent in the diasporic experience as well as a concern
relating to the fact that the figure of the migrant has been presented
as emblematic of the postmodern, post-industrial condition, a sort of
epiphenomenon and heightened version of the consequences of post-
modernity. Much as it is tempting to subscribe to this correlation, the
canonization of the migrant as an emblematic figure of the twenty-first
century is problematic. Not only does this view constitute a romanti-
cized vision of immigration, one that is far from being representative of
all im/migrants but more clearly associated with those whom Appadurai
(1996) has called the diaspora of hope, it also betrays a certain political
Introduction 3
a potential political entity (Hardt and Negri). A large part of this chap-
ter draws on the findings of the Frankfurt school (Axel Honneth but
also the second generation with figures like Emmanuel Renault) and
proposes close readings of certain texts, in particular Zadie Smith, in
the light of their ideas. This chapter also engages with the revival of
an interest in the ethics of cosmopolitanism (Appiah, 2007) and dis-
cusses the pertinence of this largely Western concept in relation to the
diasporic subject.
Chapter 6 focuses on the role and representation of languages – more
specifically the mother tongue and English, the language of the host
country. Because immigration often involves a move to a new linguis-
tic context, the role played by language in the experience of immigra-
tion and in the shaping of a new identity is of paramount importance.
Language proficiency is thus the first aspect, both chronologically and
in terms of importance, not only because it plays a key role in the actual
integration of the immigrant, but also because it affects the sense of
belonging he might or might not develop, independently of object-
ive markers of integration. The question of language, bilingualism and
‘bilanguaging’ in English-speaking diasporic populations needs to be
recontextualized on various levels, among which: the way diasporic
subjects relate to both their mother tongue and the language of the host
country; the postcolonial situation and the use of English to write back
at the centre; the current status of English at the turn of the twenty-
first century, and the question of the function and future of national
languages in an increasingly transnational world. In the first section, I
analyse how the redefinition of the balance of power between Britain
and its colonies has affected and is affecting the way diasporic popula-
tions relate to the English language, no longer seen as a tool of domin-
ation. This forces us to rethink the genealogy of linguistic postcolonial
legacies and in particular the status of English as a ‘stepmother tongue’
(Skinner, 1998). This situation is best reflected in the works of female
writers from the south Asian diaspora like Monica Ali or Jhumpa Lahiri
who often suggest the liberating function of the English language as
an instrument of social reinvention which allows women to emanci-
pate themselves from the yoke of patriarchal societies. This change
however does not solve the problem of the incapacity of the English
language to become more than a conveyor of meaning and bear the
burden of the diasporic experience. In the second section, on bilin-
gualism and bilanguaging, I discuss the way the two or more languages
coexist and in particular the de facto compartmentalization which
assigns the mother tongue and English, the adopted language, distinct
10 Critical Identities
functions. The second half of the chapter approaches the issue of the
hybridization and ‘créolisation’ of the English language in a diasporic
context from a radically different perspective from that of postcolonial
studies and examines the changes brought to the English language by
the diffraction of the site of enunciation and the growing number of
non-native speakers of the language but also of people who use it only
in a work context, as is more and more often the case with the devel-
opment of transnationalism and corporate capitalism. While the lat-
ter contribute to what linguists like Jean-Jacques Lecercle have called
the instrumentalization of the English language, diasporic writers no
longer reappropriate and abrogate it, but take an active part in a process
of encyclopaedic cross-fertilization of the language in a manner close to
what Edouard Glissant has referred to as ‘créolisation.’
1
Paradigmatic Shifts and New
Orientations in Diasporic Studies:
Mapping the Site of Intervention
11
12 Critical Identities
One should nonetheless be wary and weary of the fact that this muta-
tion, which seems to have affected the genre as a whole, is partly the
result of a redefinition of the genre’s outlines, or as some would argue a
blurring of its contours, which have been made to embrace, sometimes
quite opportunistically, an ever-increasing body of texts, whether it be
novels written by first or second generation immigrants, or novels by
writers who only have a distant connection to the diasporic experi-
ence. The centripetal inclusion of an ever-growing number of new cat-
egories into the diasporic corpus and of texts which seem to have been
absorbed into a terminological vortex2 pre-empts any serious claim
that the genre as such has dramatically evolved, while reviving the
long-lasting debate of how to define diaspora. The initial issue of how
one defines ‘diaspora’ and of the extent to which the term should be
stretched has always been a bone of some contention and the contro-
versy lies in its etymological ambiguity. When used in the etymological
sense (from the Greek dia meaning ‘through’ and speirein meaning ‘to
scatter’) it can apply to virtually any form of immigration, to any con-
text and runs the risk of becoming an empty shell, a concept devoid of
real pertinence and which may even lead to gross overgeneralizations. 3
Today one can still distinguish between two trends in critical literature
dealing with issues related to diasporic populations, those which use
the term diaspora in a strict sense and distinguish between migrants,
exiles, expatriates, refugees (Cohen, 1971; Safran, 1991; Tölölyan, 1991)
and those who use the term diaspora as a metaphor (Appadurai, 1996;
Bhabha, 1990, 1994 and Hall, 1990).4
This taxonomic divide does not only link up with methodological
issues but with a more profound divergence as to the meaning of dias-
pora and its very nature, as contextual rather than essential, as well as
to its potential paradigmatic nature. The spread of the idea of diaspora
as metaphor, which came to the forefront with theorists like Stuart Hall,
Paul Gilroy (first with There Ain’t no Black in the Union Jack and then with
The Black Atlantic) or Homi Bhabha, corresponds both to the decline of
the Jewish or Armenian paradigms of diaspora and their emphasis on
the return journey, as well as to a parallel move from the bipolar model
featuring home country and host country to a tripolar one, which no
longer foregrounds the point of origin or return but the middle ground,
as in Bhabha’s theorization of the third space. In previous models, like
that put forward by Safran in the first issue of Diaspora: A Journal of
Transnational Studies (1991), the experience of diaspora revolves mainly
around the point of origin. Safran tendered the following definition
as a reaction against the framework devised by the Scheffer-led school,
Paradigmatic Shifts and New Orientations 13
which to him lacked specificity and left the term diaspora open to
metaphoric interpretations:
in focus and move away from the polarities to the in-between space has
been the cornerstone of many studies focusing on phenomena linked
to cross-fertilization and the re-encoding of certain cultural practices.6
But, to restrict our scope to the field of literary studies, this move has
paved the way for a better understanding of the condition of liminality,
whether it be on an existential, epistemological or political level.
In the passage by Levi and Weingrod I referred to at the beginning
of this chapter, the diasporic condition is redefined in positive if not
(over) optimistic terms as a privileged vantage point of cutting edge
experience. This view of diaspora, whose supposed iconicity should not
mask the fact that it is mainly applicable to certain categories of privi-
leged diasporians only rather than to the bulk of exiled migrants unable
to return to the homeland, mimics the vibrancy of a certain type of
diasporic condition – envisaged as an interstice brimming with new
possibilities – which constitutes a heightened form of the postmodern
condition. In the following sections I propose to discuss both the epis-
temological and political implications of this reading of diaspora as well
as discuss the a-politicalness of liminality.
Liminality as metaperspective
of bounded identities as critics like Sudesh Mishra are only too aware:
Many diasporists, to their credit, are aware that while the border pro-
motes democratic porosity and fusion, it also facilitates reactionary
identity formations, identifications, dangerous disavowals of other-
ness (the anti-hybrid values of the Muslim patriarch married to an
English woman, as depicted in the film East is East, comes to mind)
and nostalgia for racially pure domains. (Mishra, 2006, 87)
Yet the subversive potential of liminality as vantage point does not system-
atically materialize into powerful political agency as Laclau and Mouffe
are only too aware, and in the same way the situatedness of diasporic
margins does not confer them a supplement of political efficacy.
18 Critical Identities
There is now a world culture, but we had better make sure that we
understand what this means. It is marked by an organisation of
diversity rather than by a replication of uniformity. No total hom-
ogenisation of systems of meaning and expression has occurred, nor
does it appear that there will be one any time soon. But the world has
become one network of social relationships, and between its differ-
ent regions there is a flow of meanings as well as people and goods.
(Hannerz, 1990, 237)
26
Identity, Interstitiality and Diaspora 27
assistant, nor do you as a Greek Cypriot, for example, and you can
always refute such identifications in the name of another description
which, because it is more individuated, may ring more truthfully to
you. Or most commonly, you will skate across the several identities
which will take your weight, relying on the most useful for your
purposes of the moment; like Hanif Kureishi’s suave character in the
film My Beautiful Launderette, who says impatiently, ‘I’m a profes-
sional businessman, not a professional Pakistani.’ (Riley, 2000, 16)
American Jews are less intimidated by Gentiles than they were when
I began publishing in 1950s, they are more sophisticated about anti-
Semitism and its causes, and altogether less hedged-in by suffocat-
ing concepts of normalcy. This isn’t because they have been socially
blinded by the illusory gains of assimilation, but because they are
not so preoccupied as they once were with the problematical nature
of assimilation, and are justifiably less troubled by ethnic dispar-
ities in the new American society of the last fifteen years – a society
created by a massive influx of over twenty million people far less
assimilable than themselves, about eighty-five per cent of them non-
Europeans, whose visible presence has re-established polygenesis as
a glaring and unalterable fact of our national life. When the cream
of Miami is the Cuban bourgeoisie, and the best students at MIT are
Chinese, and not a candidate can stand before a democratic presi-
dential convention without flashing his racial or ethnic credentials –
when everybody sticks out and doesn’t seem to mind, perhaps Jews
Identity, Interstitiality and Diaspora 31
are less likely to worry too much about their sticking out; less likely
in fact to stick out. (Roth in Milbauer and Watson, 1988, 4)
Not a word about Algeria, not a single one concerning its history and
its geography, whereas we could draw the coast of Brittany, and the
Gironde Estuary with our closed eyes. (Derrida, 1996, 44)
Identity, Interstitiality and Diaspora 33
And did you know that Eduard Kremer, who was the drawer of the
1567 map, introduced numerous distortions, thereby altering our
34 Critical Identities
notion of the world and its size, did you? Africa, in Kremer’s map,
is smaller than Greenland. These maps, which bear in mind the
European’s prejudices, are the maps we used at school when I was
young and, I am afraid to say, are still being reprinted year after year
and used in schools in Africa. Arno Peter’s map, drawn four hun-
dred years later, gives more accurate proportions of the continents:
Europe is smaller, Africa larger. (Farah, 1986, 229)
This example points to the fact that the mapping of a new identity (in the
actual and metaphorical senses of the term) forces the child to redefine
home versus non-home; but it also leads him to reposition his former self
and his nation in relation to the new map of the world imposed by coloni-
alism. This repositioning of the colonized subject therefore takes place on
two levels: the personal level of individual colonial subjects; but also on
that of national identity and the way it is unsettled and destabilized in a
colonial context (even if the second level reflects back on the first one).
This repositioning is not only instantiated by the didactic discourse of
school books but also finds its way into the colonized’s psyche through
the imaginary, and in particular through colonial literature, which
reaches beyond the confines of the classroom and follows the child into
the social sphere of home. The notion of ‘social sphere,’ which I borrow
from Denise Riley,9 proves a useful conceptual tool showing how the
dichotomy home/school, native culture/colonial culture, home edu-
cation/formal education, vernacular languages/English, described by
Ng̃ug̃i Wa Thiong’o in Decolonising the Mind, is not as watertight as it
may seem, but allows for a certain form of permeability between the
two spheres of home and colonial culture.
In The Politics of Home, Postcolonial Relocations and Twentieth-Century
Fiction, Rosemary Marangoly George remarks on the function of the
home as part of a politics of self-definition and as instrumental in
articulating group identity. She also analyses how the blending of colo-
nized populations into a crowd without homes and without a topo-
graphical inscription of their presence or individuality can work as a
strategy of desubjectification. In colonial novels such as the incipit of
E. M. Forster’s novel A Passage to India, the fact that Indians are pre-
sented as part of a mob and as homeless can be seen as biased and
as instrumental in the shaping of an imagery of the native as already
deterritorialized and not fully rooted into the land.
led to believe that the absence of a ‘self/home’ that resembles the ‘self/
home’ born of western individualism signals the absence of alternative
notions of subjecthood. There are no ‘ordinary’ subjects; just faceless,
outhoused ‘boys’ or excessively bejewelled or painted rajahs and chiefs.
It is significant that the novels written by Indian sub-continentals and
Africans in the postcolonial era, often establish as their protagonist,
the ordinary citizen with his/her sometimes modest, but nevertheless
potent notions of home. (Marangoly George, 1999 [1996] 24)
And of course, the fact that the concept of terra nullius10 played a crucial
part in legitimating the colonization of Australia at the expense of the
indigenous population is an apt reminder of the importance of repre-
sentations of the occupation of the land by the colonizer (Reynolds).11
If memory and territoriality are key elements in the process of cultural
reassignment brought about by colonization, they culminate in the redef-
inition of a lineage and a genealogy which brings about a forced inclusion
of the colonial other. The history of colonialism is replete with episodes
in which the land was renamed and native place names were replaced
by Western names, testifying to the presence of the colonists. Natives
themselves were sometimes renamed, as if renaming them was the first
step towards a conversion to Western values and lifestyle (Goldie, 198912).
This issue has also figured abundantly in literary works. In his 1983 novel
Doctor Wooreddy’s Prescription for Enduring the Ending of the World, Colin
Johnson (who later took the name Mudrooroo13) wrote about the first con-
tacts between natives and settlers in Tasmania. One of the key moments
in the novel is the renaming of the natives by Robinson, the missionary
figure inspired from George Augustus Robinson.14 The ceremony, which
is recounted with a good deal of irony satirizes the assimilationist drive of
missionary discourse which culminates in the reinvention of a mythical
genealogy which includes the natives:
He marched his short, plump body to the end of the line and stared
into the face of Wooreddy. ‘You were the first to follow me’, he mur-
mured and then declared: ‘I name you Count Alpha!’
‘Count Alpha, good Commandant Robinson, good’, fawned
Wooreddy. In his numbness he did not care if he was renamed Mister
Brown. (Mudrooroo, 1983, 139)
their cultural heritage and revive the past by giving themselves the
names of Aboriginal warriors who tried to put up resistance to the
colonists:
I’ve decided that we should drop our white fellow names and have
Nungar names. [...] From now on I’ll be known as Sandawara. I’ve told
you about him and how he fought the white man to a standstill up
north. We’re just like him and his men and women. His struggle is
now our struggle. [...] You Greg, you’ll be called Ellewara. He was a
great man, the one who came before Sandawara. It was him that got
the tracker to take up arms against the invaders. You are like him in
lots of ways. (Mudrooroo, 1987 [1979] 117–18)
two selves – or not, and manages to ‘negotiate’19 between them, his dual
nature lingers on as a constitutive feature inscribed at the heart of the
diasporic subject. As Linda Hutcheon aptly puts it:
In this passage drawn from his autobiography Out of Place Edward Said
points out two key features of diasporic identity. The first, which is
not specific to diasporic identity, but could apply to identity in gen-
eral, is the link between identity and representation, and the fact that
identity exists not only in pre-designated definitions but also in rela-
tion to a process of self-definition and representation. This idea links
up with Stuart Hall’s definition of identity as ‘a “production”, which is
never complete, always in the process, and always constituted within,
not outside, representation’ (Hall, 1990, 223).20 But Said also stresses the
44 Critical Identities
instead of moving away from them. In recent years I have been struck
by the broadening of the scope of the novelist Philip Roth for example,
who, as some critics have remarked, has moved away from a focus on
identity as exclusively linked to that of the Jewish community in the
US to embrace diverse issues related to other diasporas.21 In the follow-
ing discussion of his novel The Human Stain, I propose to discuss the
articulation between novels written by diasporic subjects and issues of
interstitiality and in particular to show how this type of novel addresses
the issue of the semiotics of interstitiality which is raised in contempor-
ary diasporic texts.
The Human Stain can be read as an indictment of existing identity
definitions and in particular the constraints of monolithic categories
denounced by Homi Bhabha. This novel spans a broad spectrum of
characters of various ages and origins – both ethnic and social – who
all struggle through an identity crisis. The story of the protagonist,
Coleman Silk, takes us back to the days of the colour bar in a segre-
gated community in America and chronicles the life of a child of Afro-
American descent, whose white skin allows him to pass for white but
forces him to relinquish every aspect of it and to sever all ties with his
family. The other characters who stem from various cultural and eco-
nomic backgrounds, raise other issues linked to identity. Among them
is Delphine Roux, a French-born academic who comes to realize that
despite her theoretical and practical knowledge of American culture,
her mastery of the language and her academic credentials, she will
always remain an outsider, the ‘poor misunderstood foreigner’ (Roth,
2001 [2000] 277), unable to relate to people at a personal level.
On closer analysis, despite the complexities of the characters’ person-
alities, each one of them seems to represent a certain definition of iden-
tity in the sense that each character has a specific way of defining not
only his/her identity but also the way identity should be established.
Mark, Coleman Silk’s son, voices his need to know where he comes from
in order to understand who he is. In a passage recounting Mark’s child-
hood, the narrator insists on his longing for origins and on his need to
know the story of his family.
This was the story he told Iris as well. All of it was invented for Iris.
[...] And the only one never satisfied was Mark. ‘Where did our great-
grandparents come from?’ Russia. ‘But what city?’ I asked my father
and mother, but they never seemed to know for sure. One time it was
one place, one time another. There was a whole generation of Jews
like that. They never really knew. The old people didn’t talk about
Identity, Interstitiality and Diaspora 47
it much, and the American children weren’t that curious, they were
het up on being Americans, and so, in my family as in many fam-
ilies, there was a general Jewish geographical amnesia. All I got when
I asked, Coleman told them, was the answer ‘Russia.’ But Markie said,
‘Russia is gigantic, Dad. Where in Russia? Markie would not be still.’
(Roth, 2001 [2000] 176)
This myth of origins, fabricated by Coleman for the benefit of his son
Mark, points to the importance of geographical roots as a prerequis-
ite for identity. Unlike his father, who has severed all links with the
past and whose fake identity has forced him to reject his family and
to commit a matricide – at least symbolically – Mark craves roots. This
example allows Roth to suggest a first definition of identity as tethered
to a place, a conception which involves a clear topographical mapping
of one’s origins.
A more problematic definition of identity as involving a complex
negotiation between existing definitions – and antagonistic ones – is
introduced into the novel through the character of Delphine Roux.
Although the novel is replete with references to her exotic Frenchness,
which seems to set her off as a cultural stereotype, her identity grad-
ually emerges as slightly more complex and brings into tension three
different definitions of identity. But because these three definitions
foreground monolithic identities, they fail to apprehend the complex-
ities of her multi-layered self, which combines her cultural heritage (the
‘given’) and what I shall refer to as ‘the chosen.’ For example we learn
that her mother became for her:
She was still seething at the thought of the viciousness that could
make of this dreadfully disadvantaged woman who had already lost
everything a toy, that could capriciously turn a suffering human
being like Faunia Farley into a plaything so as to revenge himself on
her. (Roth, 2001 [2000] 195)
50
Interstitiality, Authenticity, Postmodernity 51
the countries where they are to be found. In recent years, their non-
conformity with existing definitions of national identity has become
hard to ignore; so have the dissenting voices which have started to chal-
lenge openly the limits and parameters of Englishness, such as that of
Andrea Levy and her rather daring claim that ‘[i]f Englishness doesn’t
define me, then redefine Englishness’1 (Levy in Jaggi, 1996, 64). Writers
like Levy or Kureishi have not only voiced the claims of disenfranchised
minorities to become integrated into the national definition of identity.
They have also stressed the need to interrogate the very definitions of
identity inherited from the nation state and to rethink the way land/
race/language/culture have been aligned. It is in this sense that Kureishi
calls for ‘fresh ways of seeing Britain’:
It is the British, the white British, who have to learn that being
British isn’t what it was. Now it is a more complex thing, involving
new elements. So there must be a fresh way of seeing Britain and the
choices it faces: and a new way of being British after all this time.
(Kureishi, 1986, 38)
This need has been widely reflected in the literatures from the
diasporas where diasporic characters have started not only to come
centre stage but also to challenge and destabilize white middle-class
ones, ultimately prompting them to reconsider the boundary between
self and other. Mark Stein has remarked that ‘[t]he black British novel of
transformation [...] has a dual function: it is about the formation of its
protagonists as well as the transformation of British society and cultural
institutions’ (Stein, 2004, 22).
This issue needs to be recontextualized in various ways. Specific
answers to the development of diversity need to be taken into account,
but the question also calls for a more in-depth discussion of the two
poles around which debates on identity have crystallized in the last
decades: postmodernity and its questioning of fixed and monolithic
patterns of identity, but also authenticity. Indeed, one of the questions
that have emerged in recent decades is how these new identities, ever
in the making and evolving as they are, link up with postmodern iden-
tities. Iain Chambers conceives of postmodern identities as decom-
posed and recomposed,2 as engaged in a process of definition which
resembles ‘an open-journey without a goal’ involving ‘a continual fabu-
lation, an invention, a construction in which there is no fixed identity
or final destination’ (Chambers, 1994, 25). The link between these new
identities in the making, corresponding to de facto new ethnicities in
52 Critical Identities
Now that, in the postmodern age, you all feel so dispersed, I become
centred. What I’ve thought of as dispersed and fragmented comes
paradoxically, to be the representative modern experience! This is
‘coming home with a vengeance!’ ... I’ve been puzzled by the fact that
young black people in London today are marginalized, fragmented,
unenfranchised, disadvantaged and dispersed. And yet, they look as
if they own the territory. Somehow, they too, in spite of everything
are centred, in place: without much material support, it’s true, but
nevertheless they occupy a new kind of space at the centre. (Hall in
Appignanesi, 1987, 44)
But the link between identity and postmodernity also needs to be inter-
rogated in relation to the way identity constructions have been affected
by what I have called in the previous chapter the crisis of the grand
narrative of identity, a crisis which has shaken the foundations of the
notion of authenticity, even if, as I shall argue in the following discus-
sion, things are not as simple as they seem.
In a famous passage quoted by Iain Chambers in his Migrancy,
Culture, Identity, Chicano novelist Arturo Islas suggests that ‘the increas-
ing nomadism of modern thought’ and ‘the loss of roots’ have gen-
erated a ‘waning of the grammar of authenticity’ (Islas in Chambers,
1994, 18–19):
thought. [...] Faced with a loss of roots, and the subsequent weaken-
ing in the grammar of ‘authenticity,’ we move into a vaster land-
scape. Our sense of belonging, our language and the myths we carry
in us remain, but no longer as ‘origins’ or signs of ‘authenticity’ cap-
able of guaranteeing the sense of our lives. They now linger on as
traces, voices, memories and murmurs that are mixed in with other
histories, episodes encounters. (Islas in Chambers, 1994, 18–19)
to that of hooks, I mean to suggest that this issue has led to the devel-
opment of two radically opposed views, but also that this debate goes
beyond the black/white Eastern/Western divide. The approach advo-
cated by Gilroy is not the product of a Western theorist engrossed in
abstractions but that of a black theorist attempting to understand the
construction of blackness by whites, to trace its historical development
and examine various answers provided by black artists and writers
who have succeeded in undermining White discourse (Gilroy, 2000b).
This allows Gilroy to evidence the role played by blacks in modernism
(Gilroy, 1993). What interests me is that Gilroy refuses Afrocentrism
as much as he rejects Eurocentrism when he examines the use of the
concept of authenticity in movements of vindication of black identity
(Gilroy, chapter 3). For him, the root of the problem is the rigidity of the
‘pseudo-biological definition of national cultures,’ a rigidity which is
not only to be found in the discourse of the West but also in other forms
of ethnic absolutism, such as Afrocentrism. Rather than fighting the
rhetoric of Western absolutism or merely inverting this category, Gilroy
interrogates the workings and construction of such definitions.
Gilroy’s scepticism also has the merit of refusing any form of radic-
alism, even when radicalism seems like a politically valid answer to
centuries of oppression. In this respect, his interrogation of the cluster
nation/culture/race goes further than bell hooks’s strong positioning
against the ethnic absolutism of the West which fails to undermine
the faulty logic of imperialist discourse, and can be reproached with
fighting colonial and imperial discourse with the same tools they used,
a shortcoming other critics have noted. Suleiri for example has writ-
ten that: ‘[r]ather than extending an inquiry into the discursive pos-
sibilities represented by the intersection of gender and race, feminist
intellectuals like hooks misuse their status as minority voices by enact-
ing strategies of belligerence that at this time are more divisive than
informative’ (Suleiri, 1995, 142). But the issue is not as simple as it may
seem and we are immediately faced with a major difficulty, namely that
the limits of postcolonial theoretical discourse become apparent when
politically vexed terrains are its focus.
In order to illustrate this point I would like briefly to discuss a case of
resurgence of the notion of authenticity which to me illustrates the idea
that if the linearity of narratives has been disrupted and the notion of
authenticity questioned, it tends to resurface in certain areas where this
gesture is legitimized – or at least thought to be legitimate – because of
the political situation. In Australia, in the years that followed the Mabo
Treaty, which called into question the notion of terra nullius, which had
justified – to some at least – the colonization of Australia by the white
settlers and the subsequent appropriation of native territory, a most
interesting case came to the notice of theorists not only in Australia
but also abroad. In 1996, an article published in The Australian Magazine
(Laurie, 1996) threw into question the identity of leading Aboriginal
writer Mudrooroo4 on the grounds that recent genealogical research
carried out by his sister seemed to indicate that he was not ‘truly’
Aboriginal.5 What could have remained a trivial story was thrown
into the spotlight and triggered off a heated debate among critics and
indigenous writers alike as well as among political activists. Although
some indigenous writers supported Mudrooroo, the bulk of indigenous
56 Critical Identities
writers did not side with him. One of the reasons given has to do with
traditional conceptions of the transmission of the indigenous cultural
heritage: in traditional Aboriginal culture, which is oral, only indigen-
ous people are allowed to pass stories and legends down to others, and
they are only permitted to do so within the community. The fact that
Mudrooroo was not a true Aborigine made him unfit for this task. This
case fosters debate and prompts a great deal of questions on various
planes: ethical, political, theoretical, to mention only a few and also
questions the role and responsibility of Western critics. In other words,
should the Western critic argue against the blood-based definition of
identity which resurfaced in the course of the debates, when aboriginal-
ity was defined in terms of blood quantum, or let the indigenous popu-
lation, already weakened if not decimated by colonization, decide on
their own issues. A good understanding of what is at stake in this debate
requires that the incident be recontextualized in the broader context of
the land claims of the 1990s. In the years that followed the Mabo treaty,
many indigenous communities started to lay claim to lands to such an
extent that many white Australians became afraid of losing their lands.
We can easily imagine what doubts the existence of ‘untrue’ Aborigines
could have introduced into the minds of both white Australians and
Black Australians. To the latter, the controversy over a ‘pass for native’
writer was embarrassing since the Mudrooroo episode could be used as
an excuse to undermine certain land claims under the pretext that all
Aborigines were not true Aborigines. This may explain why, independ-
ently of ancestral beliefs, Aborigines were more or less forced to draw
the line between true Aborigines and those who pass for Aborigines,
therefore brandishing the argument of authenticity and reviving a fatal
definition of race based on blood. What this case points to, and the
reasons why I find it so interesting is precisely because it seems to lead
to the following paradox: it is right for the oppressed to argue his case
in any way he chooses, preferably in his own terms, even if this implies
resorting to a category of race reduced to the lowest common denom-
inator. The Western critic therefore finds himself in a difficult position
which results in the following dilemma: condemning authenticity
when it is used as an argument by the oppressor but condoning it when
it is employed by the oppressed to bolster up their case.
The predicament theorists are faced with today is therefore to rethink
identity independently of the notion of authenticity, but without
reducing it to abstract polarities as the more radical post-structuralist
approaches have tended to do. As Homi Bhabha has noticed, one of
the consequences of studies focusing on counter-discursive strategies is
Interstitiality, Authenticity, Postmodernity 57
that self and other have become two poles, two abstract signifiers, inter-
related, interdependent (the self needs the other in order to be truly
himself). In the process, self and other have been stripped of their onto-
logical depth. In The Location of Culture, Homi Bhabha writes that
This section and the following one deal with texts by and about second
generation immigrants. Although the term ‘second generation immi-
grants’ exists in many languages as a way of referring to children born
in contexts of immigration, it nonetheless remains problematic and
ambiguous because of the gesture it implies and which introduces
doubts as to the child’s belonging. As Hanif Kureishi remarks in his
essay entitled ‘Bradford’, the term introduces a discontinuity in the
child’s representation of his identity and doubts as to the continuity
between the country of his birth and his sense of belonging.
Not only does the term ‘second generation immigrants’ cast doubts over
the second generation immigrants’ sense of belonging, it also confronts
them, rather violently with the idea of im/migration and displacement
in a rather ironic way since these people may not have been outside the
national frontiers of their country of birth. The label itself, through its
epistemic violence, generates a form of alienation as well as a more pro-
found sense of destabilization and ‘un-settlement’.
In this section I propose to discuss some of the mechanisms at play
in the shaping of identity in the case of second generation immigrants
and focus on the difference between first and second generation immi-
grants through an analysis of Andrea Levy’s novel Fruit of the Lemon.6
The following discussion will focus respectively on the questioning
of the alignment land/race/language/culture in the novel, and on the
strategies of reinvention of the self.
The issue of identity is first introduced through Faith, the protagon-
ist, a black girl born into a family of immigrants from Jamaica. Faith’s
case provides a good illustration of Kureishi’s reference to the way
second generation immigrants find their sense of belonging in Britain
questioned by the fact that they are constantly labelled as ‘second gen-
eration immigrants’. The identity crisis undergone by Faith is all the
more unexpected as she grew up in London, in a rather cosmopolitan
environment, and seems a perfectly happy Black Briton. There are how-
ever a series of proleptic events which cast a shadow over her integra-
tion and which point to the emergence of racial issues, like her being
turned down for a job with the BBC, or witnessing a scene of racial
violence. But the real event which constitutes a turning point in her
quiet life as a young Brit, is when she is asked by a friend of a friend, in
the countryside, where she is from. When she gathers that ‘London’ is
not the expected answer, she then hears herself say ‘Jamaica,’ a place
she has never been to, a place which her parents keep referring to as
‘the homeland’ without sparking the faintest interest in their daughter.
What the question of her origins and the friend of a friend’s reaction to
her first answer (London) actually imply is a continuity between land/
race/language/culture. This definition has its origins in the definition
of the nation state; yet this theoretical alignment of notions, which
have become increasingly hard to define, let alone pin down, persists
Interstitiality, Authenticity, Postmodernity 59
is a matter of finding a voice or style that does not violate one’s several
components of identity’ (Fischer in Clifford and Marcus, 1986, 196).
Despite the light tone of the narrative, there is more to Mona’s iden-
tity crisis than a tale of a teenager who witnesses the first signs of
puberty. Mona’s problem is precisely the opposite; she does not wit-
ness any change in her body when those of her friends start changing
dramatically, thereby stressing the racial difference between her Asian
body and that of her friend Barbara:
But she doesn’t look like, say, Barbara.[...] Barbara’s is the body Mona
is still waiting to grow into. Her breasts, for example, are veritable
colonies of herself, with a distinct tendency toward independence.
Whereas Mona’s, in contrast, are anything but wayward. A scant
handful of each, hers are smooth and innocent – the result, you
might think, of eating too much ice cream. They meld into the fat
under her arms. [...] How can she let her legs go natural when they
already are natural? [...] She feels condemned to be straight and nar-
row. [...] She will one day discover that it is great to be nonhairy. [...]
Plus that she is yellow and beautiful – baby boobs, hammy calves,
and all. (75–6)
‘Of course I like it here, I was born here,’ Mona says. ‘Is Mona Jewish?’
She laughs. ‘Oy!’ ‘Is she American?’ ‘Sure I’m American,’ Mona says.
‘Everybody who’s born here is American, and also some people who
convert from what they were before. You could become American.’
But he says no, he could never. ‘Sure you could,’ Mona says. ‘You only
have to learn some rules and speeches.’ ‘But I Japanese.’ (14)
Interstitiality, Authenticity, Postmodernity 65
Japanese (?) male calling for (is this prejudiced?) somewhat inscrutable
but probably profound reasons. Although who knows, maybe also/just for
language practice (English) [...] Given caller’s depressed state of mind, prob-
ably ought also to have explored caller attitude toward hari-kiri, even if
that’s a stereotype. (70) (Italics in the text)
They are just smitten with the educational opportunity before them –
that golden student-teacher ratio – and also with the dumb majesty
of the landscaping. Three giant azaleas they have now, not to say
a rhododendron the size of their old bathroom, and in addition, a
topographical feature of forsythia. Two foothills of the forsythia,
they are moved to address immediately with hedge clippers (feeling
quite hardy and pioneering, Westward ho! And all that), only to dis-
cover that to render your forsythia into little can shapes in this town
is considered gauche. (3–4)
This passage, which describes the Changs’ promised plot of land, com-
bines references to several founding myths of America like the garden
of Eden, the land of plenty, the frontier and the settlement. It is as if the
Changs, who are successful in the race for success, had become more
American by appropriating the dreams of the host country and being
part of its mythology in the making.
It is in this context, when Chinese immigrants start to weigh heavier
in the scales that the novel is set, which leads Mona’s parents to dis-
agree on an important issue: should they mark their difference or try
Interstitiality, Authenticity, Postmodernity 67
and blend in, for it may well be that one day they will be less conspicu-
ous than other, more visible minorities. ‘This is Mona’s theory about
her parents: that Ralph thought they should live in their own little
world, whereas Helen thought they should be a minority, though, and
especially an outspoken one.’ (52). Interestingly enough, this idea that
minorities eventually blend into the American melting pot is not unlike
what Philip Roth said in an interview I cited in Chapter 2. And in the
case of the Chinese community, it turned out to be true.
Another point I would like to raise concerns Mona’s original solution
to her identity crisis, which is to convert to Judaism. Gish Jen herself
has suggested that the book has gone too far in some respects but not
far enough in others (Jen in Hanis, 1996). It seems to me that the ques-
tion of Jewish identity could have been developed in a more convincing
way, not as one of Mona’s whimsical ideas but as a paradigm of identity
definition. The question of the Jewish experience defined as paradigm
for identity has been a moot point for a number of years and has led to
heated debates between those who think that the Jewish condition is an
interesting prism through which to articulate and transcend race, cul-
ture, and languages (Bloom, 1999), and those who criticize it (Steiner,
1998)12 for fear that it may lead to an instrumentalization of Jewish
identity. However, for Mona and her friends, becoming Jewish is seen
more in terms of freedom, the freedom to take on an identity which
you may choose to hide or claim, which is less ‘marked’ (racially speak-
ing) and yet which allows you to assert your right to be different. Naive
though it may seem – and actually is – Mona’s definition of identity is
a distorted representation of the agenda of the American dream where
one can supposedly become whatever one chooses and where ‘con-
sent’ prevails over ‘descent,’ to draw on the terminological distinction
advanced by Werner Sollors (Sollors, 1986). But for Mona, being Jewish
is also synonymous with an inclusive identity rather than an exclusive
one: ‘Jewish is American,’ Mona says. ‘American means being whatever
you want and I happen to pick being Jewish.’ (49) Despite the novel’s
optimism, Gish Jen suggests a rather pessimistic vision of the American
melting pot, for in Mona communities follow different agendas and
interaction between them is superficial and illusory.
Prior to closing this discussion of Mona, I would like to return to
Gish Jen’s critical stance with respect to the American melting pot.
Mona touches upon one of the great paradoxes of the American con-
text and shows that the vindication of identity has crystallized around
the notion of ethnicity, and has been strengthened by identity pol-
itics. At the same time, identity politics has contributed to a sort of
68 Critical Identities
The squad has helped Alfred find a new place; they’ve helped him
find a new car. He doesn’t have to stay with some white folk like a
charity case.
‘We shall have our manhood’, quotes the Estimator. ‘We shall have it
or the earth will be levelled by our attempts to gain it.’
‘What’s this ‘we?’ says Seth. (205)
The Estimator’s speech (Alfred’s Black friend) takes up the agenda of the
Black panthers and gives a new meaning to the personal pronoun ‘we’:
it no longer refers to the collective ‘we’ implied by multiculturalism, in
which Mona and her friends believe – but to the members of specific
communities who chose to cater for themselves. If the novel ends on
a rather positive note, with an image of mixity suggested by Mona’s
marriage with Seth and their having a child, the situation is far from
satisfactory and suggests a bitter acknowledgement of the failure of the
American melting pot which threatens to become a salad bowl.
Despite his parents’ attachment to Indian culture and the fact that he
was brought up as an Indian boy with close links with the Asian commu-
nity, Vassanji considers Kenya home. In other words, his idea of home is
neither where he now lives nor where his family originally came from,
but where he grew up. Moreover, for him, there seems to be no contra-
diction between being of Indian origin and considering Kenya as home,
which suggests the possibility of double belonging as well as the idea
that identity is not exclusive and rooted only in one culture.
Unlike his grandfather who grew up in India and experienced the
unsettling experience of immigration and displacement with the know-
ledge that there is a place where he belongs, Vassanji, like Vikram, the
protagonist of The In-Between World of Vikram Lall does not have a place
he can go back to, hence his need to create such a place of origin in
writing. For him writing is a way of immortalizing the life of the twice
displaced who grew up as foreigners in the country of their birth and
found themselves uprooted before they even had a chance to cast their
roots in East Africa. It is also a way of giving some kind of official exist-
ence to a hyphenated population, the Asian immigrants, who did not
find their place in the grand narrative of colonialism any more than
they did in the anti-colonial struggle and whose twice peripheral life in
Africa was likely to be forgotten after they left the country.15
Much of the interest of the novel lies in the handling of the character
of Vikram Lall and his kaleidoscopic identity torn between his cultural
70 Critical Identities
heritage and his experience in Africa. His case invites a profound inter-
rogation of what exactly constitutes identity; is it ethnicity, origins or
experience? Although he was born into a family of Asian immigrants
who try to cling to their traditions and habits and remain Indians away
from India, Vikram grew up in Kenya and has never been to India. To
him the very thought of having to go visit his parents’ home country is
awe-inspiring and his childhood memories include gruesome anecdotes
of life in India like his father’s story of sitting in a cab whose back seat
was covered in excrement. There is a fundamental difference between
the way Vikram and the way his parents relate to Kenya, in particular
his mother who thinks of her life away from her home country as exile
rather than immigration. Born and bred in Peshawar, which became a
Pakistani town after the partition, Mrs Lall knows that she cannot go
back to her home city and lives her life in Kenya as if it were some kind
of exile.
When Rama’s exile was the subject of the stories, it was never far
from our consciousness that Mother and her brother shared a deep
sense of exile from their birthplace, Peshawar, a city they would
never be able to see again because it had been lost to Pakistan. And
since Peshawar was the ancestral home also of my dada Anand Lall,
the rest of our family could somehow share in that exile, though not
with the same intensity. (93)
I do recall that being different, in features, in status, was not far from
my consciousness. I was also aware that he was more from Africa
than I was. He was African, I was Asian. I was smaller, with pointed
Interstitiality, Authenticity, Postmodernity 71
Our people had sweated on it, had died on it; they had been car-
ried away in their weary sleep or even wide awake by man-eating
lions of magical ferocity and cunning, crushed under avalanches
of blasted rock, speared and macheted as proxies of the whites by
angry Kamba, Kikuyu, and Nandi warriors, infected with malaria,
72 Critical Identities
The fact that his family helped build railway lines in itself is note-
worthy for it is a form of settlement which is not rooted in the land
and yet allows the land to be explored, while at the same time symbol-
izing their relation to the British Empire and their role as instruments
in the expansion of their territories. Although Vikram delights in the
contemplation of the picture of his grandfather, he has some awareness
that some of the things he was told by his parents may well be untrue
(‘I don’t know if such rails ever existed, with the Punjabi signatures
upon them, but myth is more powerful than factual evidence, and in
its way surely far truer’, 16). Yet whether or not they actually existed,
these signatures have become part of a collective imaginary and as such
have become as real as reality itself for they have become instrumental
in the shaping of their collective identity as Asian immigrants. In this
sense we can say that although Vassanji often stresses the need to write
history, his books are not limited to a factual rendering of established
episodes; much of their interest lies in their understanding of the role
of self-representation. Vikram even imagines a second photograph, an
imaginary one which emerges as the first one – the real photograph –
recedes to the background. This second photograph which is obviously
a materialization of Vic’s fantasies represents his grandfather, no longer
as a reserved character, a frail man in an awkward posture, but as a set-
tler who contemplates the landscape as if he owned the land, and as if
this land had become his new home.
I imagine him six years later, at the end of his second contract, seated
atop a small pyramid of steel sleepers at the Nakuru railway yard,
with a companion or two perhaps, chewing on a blade of grass or
lunching on daal and rice from the canteen. [...] I see this turbaned
young Indian who would be my dada saying to himself, This valley
has a beauty to surpass even the god Shivji’s Kashmir, and the cool
weather in May is so akin to the winters of Peshawar... (18)
Unlike the imaginary tale of his imaginary African mother, this narra-
tive of successful settlement allows Vic to find some sense of belonging,
as well as providing a paradigm for identity construction in the case
of double diasporas, one which lies in the ability to bear witness to
their presence in a new land and to the family’s imprint upon the land.
Interstitiality, Authenticity, Postmodernity 73
75
76 Critical Identities
to face it in the text, to make clear that (in spite of my original and
I suppose somewhat Proustian ambition to unlock the gates of lost
time so that the past reappeared as it actually had been unaffected
by the distortions of memory), so that my India was just that: ‘my’
India, a version and no more than one version of all the hundreds of
millions of possible versions. I tried to make it as imaginatively true
as I could, but imaginative truth is simultaneously honourable and
suspect, and I knew that my India may only have been one to which
I (who am no longer what I was, and who by quitting Bombay never
became what perhaps I was meant to be) was, let us say, willing to
admit I belonged.
This is why I made my narrator, Saleem, suspect in his narration;
his mistakes are the mistakes of a fallible memory compounded by
quirks of character and circumstance, and his vision is fragmentary.
It may be that when the Indian writer who writes from outside India
tries to reflect that world, he is obliged to deal in broken mirrors,
some of whose fragments have been irretrievably lost. (Rushdie,
1991, 10)
Rushdie’s idea of diasporic literature does not imply that diasporic lit-
erature should be considered as merely fictional and severed from real-
ity; after all, ‘the broken mirror may actually be as valuable as the one
which is supposedly unflawed’, Rushdie adds (Rushdie, 1991, 11). But it
shows a certain awareness of the limitations of the diasporic perspec-
tive, at once less up-to-date but still accurate, a ‘long geographical per-
spective’ (Rushdie, 15).
Rushdie’s definition offers an interesting alternative to existing def-
initions stressing the archaeological dimension of diasporic literature
as unearthing and preserving fragments of the past. Among them is
Vijay Mishra’s notion of the ‘fossilization’ of the mother country (to
him, diasporic literature is a ‘fossilized’ fragment of an original nation
that seeks renewal through a ‘refossilization’ of itself (Mishra in Nelson
1992, 4)). We can also think of Emmanuel Nelson’s idea of an ‘aesthetics
of reworlding’:
Another pattern is the disjunctive one which brings into tension myths
and narratives of failed integration. Such myths and narratives expose
the disjunction and dissonance between Western discourse and the
actual experience of the diasporic subject.
The role of language, which I propose to concentrate on in the
last section of this chapter, is all the more important as in recent
years, some anthropologists and sociologists have resorted to meta-
phors to describe recent changes in the new world geography, like
Zygmunt Bauman who has devoted a large part of his work to study-
ing the workings of the ‘liquid modern times’ we live in. They have
also openly addressed the role and impact of language in the shap-
ing of new territorialities, bringing physical geography and human
geography closer together. This move does not originate in the idio-
syncrasy of language-loving sociologists, but reflects a new fact of
contemporary life: that our experience is less and less original – in
the sense of first hand – and is increasingly supplanted by previous
knowledge conveyed though discourse and disseminated thanks to
the growth of communication technologies (Appadurai, 1996). The
last section of this chapter will focus on two aspects of these develop-
ments, the role of language in the reconfiguration of space and the
coming together of new communities, and the process of re-encoding
at work in language and its political implications. The first part of the
discussion draws on the analysis of ‘non-places’ by Marc Augé, which
I propose to use as an entry point to analyse Hari Kunzru’s novel
Transmission, and in particular the forming of virtual communities
which do not originate in geographic continuity and physical prox-
imity but in language. In Non-Places, Introduction to an Anthropology
of Supermodernity, Marc Augé has analysed the role of language in
the creation of the transitional places of supermodernity where lan-
guage is omnipresent and takes the place of human beings, but where
it also creates a parallel world made of virtual places, which oper-
ate independently of actual geography, in and through language.
This discussion of the role of language will then lead me to focus
more specifically on the political role played by languages in terms
of re-encoding. This particular point, which draws on Deleuze and
Guattari’s analysis of deterritorialization and the fluxes of capital-
ism aims at showing how language operates along similar lines, in
particular when notions such as mobility are being redefined by the
logic of global capitalism. In recent years for example, the notion of
mobility has increasingly become equated with geographic mobility
rather than with social mobility.
Shaky Ground, Territorialities and Diasporic Subject 79
contribute to the success of consumer society. In the same way that the
spaces of postmodernity are the product of a convergence of discourses
and a rechannelling of images – authenticity becoming a marketable
good or an incentive to buy – their representations in diasporic litera-
ture are also the product of several influences, which they represent
and denounce. There is a lot more to them than nostalgic recreations of
the past; they are at a crossroads of influences, ranging from the immi-
grant’s wish to appropriate or reclaim his country, to a description of
how the West is still preying on it, exploiting it even further.
The following discussion seeks to examine how the representation
of places in Monica Ali’s novel Brick Lane – not only the homeland but
also the host country – is not just the expression of some misplaced
nostalgia and longing for the past, but is part and parcel of a strategy
of packaging and marketing, not only of the margins but also of the
centre, which is derived from the re-creation of space in postmodern-
ity. Rather than constituting distinct discourses, the avatars of colo-
nial discourse are recycled and rechannelled, as is the nostalgia of the
migrant, the two converging in a sort of postmodern reinvention of
space which Ali hints at through the image of the snowglobe, an image
which stresses the artificiality and mock authenticity of postmodern
simulacra of spatiality.
The image of the snowglobe is introduced into the novel through the
character of doctor Azad, who appreciates the soothing effect that these
objects have on him ‘It’s calming,’ he remarks, ‘everything settle[s]
back down’ after the storm (361). What seems to matter is not so much
the specificity of the landscapes featured, and which are not described,
as the paradigmatic meaning of a world immune to change, as well as
the idea of preserving a place the way it used to be. In this sense, the
snowglobe becomes endowed with several meanings throughout the
novel. The idea of preservation evokes the nostalgia of the immigrant,
an idea which is hammered home through various other objects like
the Bengali objects Chanu keeps in a showcase, as if to isolate them
from their London surroundings and preserve them from the passing
of time. It is also evoked through the references to the way Chanu
still thinks of his country, as a place which ‘ranks Number One in the
World happiest survey’ (290). This statement, which he found on the
internet, is debunked by Hasina’s letters in which she tells her sister
Nazneen of women beaten, raped, exploited and disfigured by their
husbands who throw acid at them. Fossilizing the country is there-
fore presented as a natural strategy of survival for the immigrant, even
though it may get in the way of a successful integration into the host
Shaky Ground, Territorialities and Diasporic Subject 81
Rather than listing all the figures of speech associated with the
Orient – its strangeness, its difference, its exotic sensuousness, and
so forth – we can generalize about them as they were handed down
through the Renaissance. They are all declarative and self-evident;
the tense they employ is the timeless eternal; they convey an impres-
sion of repetition and strength; they are always symmetrical to, and
yet diametrically inferior to, a European equivalent, which is some-
times specified, sometimes not. For all these functions it is frequently
enough to use the simple copula is. (Said, 1995 [1978] 72)
in one. And yet, because they straddle two cultures, they sometimes
find themselves ‘fall(ing) between two stools’ as Rushdie puts it in
Imaginary Homelands (15). As such they like the reassuring quality of
a world immune to change, which is what the snowglobe ultimately
represents. As Hewinson has argued, this preservation of the past is
crucial to preserve the self:
of life in Brick Lane,4 but rather to expose the workings of the simulacra
of touristy London Nazneen herself falls prey to.
Brick Lane juxtaposes two ‘Englands’: that of Brick Lane and its immi-
grants who sometimes have never ventured beyond the confines of the
Asian district, and the ‘sights’, Buckingham Palace and Covent Garden,
where tourists go. Ali’s characters seldom get to see what they have never
ceased to consider to be the ‘real England’, England as it is marketed
and advertised – no longer by the propaganda of colonialism but by
the tourism industry. At the end of the novel, when Chanu starts plan-
ning the family’s return to Bangladesh, Nazneen stares nostalgically at
a mug whose picture features an English country house. Although she
has been in England for several years, she has never seen a house like
the one on her mug and still entertains the idea that the ‘real England’
is out there somewhere:
Days of the Raj restaurant had a new statue in the window: Ganesh
seated against a rising sun, his trunk curling playfully on his breast.
The Lancer already displayed Radha-Krishna; Popadum went with
Saraswati; and Sweet Lassi covered all the options with a black-
tongued, evil-eyed Kali and a torpid soapstone Buddha.
‘Hindus?’ said Nazneen when the trend first started. ‘Here?’
Chanu patted his stomach. ‘Not Hindus. Marketing. Biggest god of
all.’ The white people liked to see the gods. ‘For authenticity’, said
Chanu. (375)
Behind the desk sat the receptionist. Above her a row of clocks, relics
of the optimistic 1960s, displayed the time in key world cities. New
Delhi seemed to be only two hours ahead of New York, and one
behind Tokyo. Automatically Arjun found himself calculating the
shrinkage in the world implied by this error, but, lacking even a best
estimate for certain of the variables, his thoughts trailed away. For a
moment or two the image hung around ominously in his brain, the
globe contracting like a deflating beach globe. (Kunzru, 2004, 6)
Arjun is soon to realize that the world has not become a global village;
distances may have been reduced, but this has not solved the problem
of mobility altogether.
There is a similar image in Kiran Desai’s novel The Inheritance of Loss
and it serves a similar purpose. The character of Sai, Jemumbhai’s grand-
daughter, has ordered an inflatable globe from the national geographic
society. Yet the letter never gets to her remote Nepali village and the
promise of the globe – and metaphorically of holding the globe in her
hands – is fulfilled much later, once she has forgotten about it.
When Arjun finally arrives in the US, the first contact with the
Promised Land is not really up to his expectations. After he has found
out that there is no job lined up for him, he is in for another shock
when he realizes that he has been exiled to a distant city suburb. As he
does not own a car in a country whose urban geography has been rede-
fined according to the principle of ‘deconcentration’ (Gottdiener, 1995)
he finds himself miles away from downtown, with a sense of alienation.
In other words, the fact that he does not own a car in a country where
mobility is both an organizing principle and a founding myth causes
Arjun to experience a second frontier beyond the official one, an invis-
ible line which separates immigrant workers who barely make a living
Shaky Ground, Territorialities and Diasporic Subject 87
from the happy few, those who have ‘made it big’ and have found a
place in the centre, either in the city itself or in a more glamorous sub-
urban area.
This confrontation of postmodern myths, or more generally of the
doxa of postmodernity with the actual experience of immigrants, is a
common trope of homecoming narratives. These narratives often deal
with characters whose experience of immigration is not entirely success-
ful, not to say entirely disastrous, which leads the characters to make
the impossible decision to return home to their family and friends,
admitting to the fact that they have not succeeded. Kiran Desai’s The
Inheritance of Loss, is a good example of such texts. At the end of the
novel, Biju, the protagonist of the contemporary narrative of immigra-
tion7 finds himself destitute. He returns to India with less money than
he had, and has to face his father dressed in a frilly yellow dress he has
nicked from a clothes line after some thieves have deprived him of his
belongings. Kiran Desai thus literally rewrites the rags-to-riches nar-
rative into a riches-to-rags one, thereby exposing the hidden part of
the triumphalist rhetoric of earlier texts which, because they celebrate
the im/migrants’ capacity to adapt, often forget to question the actual
values of the West. Indeed, such novels do not limit themselves to inter-
rogate the feasibility of migration or the validity of postmodern myths.
They sometimes go so far as to interrogate the Western ethos, as we
shall see in the next chapter.
The theory put forward by Appadurai in this book revolves around the
notion of ‘scape.’ His starting point is the observation that in the last
decades of the twentieth century, new technologies – in particular com-
munication technologies – have come to play a central role in the lives
of millions of people throughout the world and have evolved from their
initial instrumental function in the workplace to make their way into
millions of households, thereby blurring the frontier between the public
sphere and the private sphere, the workplace and the sphere of domes-
ticity. The fact that the internet – perhaps the paradigmatic example
Shaky Ground, Territorialities and Diasporic Subject 89
More people than ever before seem to imagine routinely the possibil-
ity that they or their children will live and work in places other than
where they were born: this is the wellspring of the increased rates
of migration at every level of social, national, and global life. [...]
Those who wish to move, those who have moved, those who wish
to return, and those who wish to stay rarely formulate their plans
outside the sphere of radio and television, cassettes and videos, news-
print and telephone. For migrants, both the politics of adaptation to
new environments and the stimulus to move or return are deeply
affected by a mass-mediated imaginary that frequently transcends
national space. (Appadurai, 1996, 6)
These terms with the common suffix – scape also indicate that
these are not objectively given relations that look the same from
every angle of vision but, rather that they are deeply perspectival
constructs, inflected by the historical, linguistic, and political situ-
atedness of different sorts of actors: nation-states, multinationals,
diasporic communities, as well as subnational groupings and move-
ments [...]. These landscapes thus are the building blocks of what
(extending Benedict Anderson) I would like to call imagined worlds,
that is the multiple worlds that are constituted by the historically sit-
uated imaginations of persons and groups spread around the globe.
(Appadurai, 1996, 33)
If we try to visualize his scapes and the way they spread through-
out the globe, we find ourselves faced with a map where everything
revolves around major cities and world capitals, to the detriment of less
influential areas. Each scape originates in one of the main cities of the
world, and reaches out to other regions, not on the basis of geograph-
ical continuity, but on the basis of economic opulence and influence.
The fact that the scapes seem to extend far into remote areas of the
globe, like the mediascape, and reflect the culture and representations
of the wealthy and influential participants, is bound to generate iron-
ical juxtapositions. Let us imagine a group of girls in Tamil Nadu watch-
ing an American soap opera and trying to understand the predicament
of Western girls with eating disorders. The gap which separates the two
worlds not only challenges the view that the world has become one glo-
bal village where people all share in the same cultural representations
thanks to the mediascape, but clearly points to the limitations of com-
munication technologies and the supposed transparency of images.
Another aspect which is left out of Appadurai’s global map is the dif-
ferential mobility which results from one’s access or lack of access to
modern technologies or means of transport, an idea which is present
in several contemporary novels, like Kunzru’s Transmission or Desai’s
Inheritance of Loss. In Transmission, the idea of differential mobility is
evidenced in the tension between ‘the sublime mobility of those who
travel without ever touching the ground’ and ‘the forced motion of the
shopping-cart pushers, the collectors of cardboard boxes.’ (45).11 Such
differential mobility not only generates a divide between those who
follow the land and those who literally hop from one city to another, it
also leads to an erosion and virtual disappearance of in-between spaces
which are no longer on the global map of international exchanges.
This idea is also present in Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss, where
it is expressed through a topography in two layers which reflects the
asymmetry of power relations.12
The question which is raised, ultimately, is that of the impact of these
virtual communities on real ones. The example of Chanu in Brick Lane,
who hopes to bypass the rules of the local by surfing the internet, shows
not only the illusory quality of the virtual world but also points to the
potentially harmful consequences of these technologies and of the vir-
tual communities they help generate. Not only do they fail to be fully
empowering, they may also encourage individuals to be less involved
in the local fabric. Monica Ali’s novel seems to suggest that new tech-
nologies give us access to other contexts but do not change our daily
lives and that as such, virtual communities are not valid substitutes
92 Critical Identities
for real ones. At best, they may generate a fleeting and transitory sense
of kinship but in the long run they do not have what it takes to be
real communities. As Bauman observes, the main difference between
real communities and the would-be communities of the liquid modern
world comes from the reciprocity or lack of reciprocity between mem-
bers of a community, and the idea of commitment. While real commu-
nities are based on the principle of reciprocity between individuals, the
virtual communities which characterize postmodernity result from a
fleeting convergence of desires and a confluence of interests. This con-
vergence is limited to a certain temporality and is based on the fact that
one can discontinue at any time. What makes them appealing is pre-
cisely the fact that they seem to have the advantages of existing com-
munities without their shortcomings; one can feel part of them without
feeling tied down:
In this fourth and final section I wish to discuss the role of language
in the reconfiguration of space. The following discussion draws on the
work of anthropologist Marc Augé and on his reflections on the role
of language in the creation of the non-places of supermodernity. In
his book, Augé distinguishes between traditional places, which were
defined according to a pattern of continuity between land, commu-
nities and individuals (land = society = nation = culture = religion)
and what he calls the new places of supermodernity. These places are
not real places where people come into contact naturally, but places in
between, transitional places like airports or train stations where people
come into contact, or seem to do so only superficially.
a whole mass of relations, with the self and with others, which are
only indirectly connected with their purposes. As anthropological
places create the organically social, so non-places create solitary
contractuality. Try to imagine a Durkheimian analysis of a transit
lounge at Roissy! (Augé, 1995, 94)
systematic use of e-mails to get in touch with people who work in the
adjoining cubicle. Every attempt made by Arjun to get in touch with
someone directly is taken as an intrusion into their private sphere.
Isolation and an overall absence of contact have become the norm:
Everyone left their phones on voice mail and most wore headsets
while they worked, creating a private space that was, according to
custom, violated only in an emergency. Interaction was via e-mail,
even if the participants occupied neighboring cubicles. This made
sense to Arjun. Personal space is valuable. [...] Interrupting someone
to talk to them is a way of pushing your query to the top of their
stack. It overrides someone’s access controls and objectively lessens
their functionality, which was as close to an engineering definition
of rudeness as he felt he was ever likely to come. (54)
Week by week, Arjun learned more about himself. His Dungeons &
Dragons alignment turned out to be Lawful Good. His penis was of
average size. He was not a secret Mac user, though his lack of famil-
iarity with sex toys and his inability to recall an occasion where he
dressed up in leather or rubber clothing to please his man rated him
‘an old-fashioned gal.’ His twelve lattes and nine Cokes a day habit
also bracketed him a ‘high-level caffeine addict.’ Worried, he sent
an e-mail to a support group, who mailed back suggesting he drink
fewer caffeine-containing beverages. (55)
lived for the past twenty-three years, Bauman has experienced political
fluidity, the freedom to move to a country whose political orientations
one feels comfortable with. Yet the fluidity he refers to in his works is
not political fluidity but that promoted by capitalism: that of free trade
and anti-protectionist rules. For Bauman, this fluidity is manifold and
generates a series of consequences for society but also for the individual:
loss of bearings, disintegration of the family unit, of social ties and local
networks, to list just a few.
Bauman’s starting point is his observation of the changes in people’s
living conditions which took place in the twentieth century and in par-
ticular the way globalization has had a negative effect on many aspects
of people’s lives. Bauman is interested in the way precarious conditions
have affected and continue to affect the family unit and the social
structure of given societies.15 In The Human Cost of Globalization, he
argues that human beings have become commodified and that capit-
alism has led them to see their lives as a series of episodes rather than
a progression towards a goal; they have become used to the idea that
things are constantly changing, that nothing is solid anymore and that
they should cease to yearn for stability in a world where the motto is no
longer to settle down but ‘always to adapt’. All the things that used to
act as bearings for the individual (his job, his family unit and his role in
society, etc.) have become fleeting and unreliable, hence the metaphor
of fluidity. As Bauman explains, a fluid needs to be contained; it is not
enough to give it a shape, it needs to be held in place, which requires
continuous effort.
This analysis leads Bauman to conclude that in a context of constant
mutability of forms, it becomes increasingly difficult to keep track of
changes and understand the forces at stake. In the long run, continues
Bauman, solidity is bound to become an obsolete word, a signifier with-
out a signified and when it no longer refers to something, people will
naturally forget what it meant. This scenario is not unlike the ‘natural’
disappearance of words in Orwell’s dystopia 1984, in which words no
longer referring to concepts or notions in existence fall into oblivion
and then totally disappear. Bauman himself refers to Orwell’s famous
dystopia when he explains that what is truly striking is that this state
of utter precariousness has not been imposed by a totalitarian regime
but has been chosen freely in the name of freedom (freedom to travel,
freedom of trade, etc.).
Contrary to most dystopian scenarios, this effect has not yet been
achieved through dictatorial rule, subordination, oppression, or
Shaky Ground, Territorialities and Diasporic Subject 97
Amongst the issues which have emerged from recent studies on trans-
nationalism, globalism and the new world order is the idea that global-
ization has potentially made us all denizens if not citizens of the world
in a way eighteenth-century theorists of cosmopolitanism could never
have anticipated (Appiah, 2006). Not only are our mental horizons con-
siderably broader (Appadurai, 1996), our deeds and decisions have an
impact which reaches far beyond our national frontiers, as the current
debates about global warming and starvation seem to indicate. And yet
the passage from ‘the local tribe’ to what Anthony Appiah (2007) calls
‘the global tribe’ is far from being an altogether smooth one. If we have
undeniably gone more global – at least the privileged fringes of our
societies have – and can now project ourselves beyond the closed cir-
cle of family and locally contracted ties, the phenomenon has shown
its limits. The rise of nationalist voices and the revival of regional cus-
toms and ways of life are symptomatic of the limits and difficulties of
such dramatic tension between the local and the global which char-
acterizes life today (Bayart, 1996) in a world where local solidarities
often outshine global ties and where the global community sometimes
seems more like fiction than reality, a matrix of potential encounters,
a network of randomly constructed links, episodic and fleeting, non-
committal and changing, than real relations that bind members of a
community together.1 Theorists of postmodernity and Bauman in par-
ticular have evidenced the changes brought in a liquid modern world
where relationships are affected by the dissolving framework of sites of
encounter, leading to a casualization of ties and solidarities. The form-
ing of new vectors of sociability and in particular of networks – a term
no longer connoted negatively as tantamount to the modus operandi of
secret organizations but restored to a more positive sense – has not only
99
100 Critical Identities
Arendt, 1967 [1951] 299). Following up on the more sceptical and real-
istic path opened by Burke and Hobbes, Arendt denounced the unen-
forceable quality of human rights and their provisionality: the rights
of man, she argues ‘supposedly inalienable, proved to be unenforceable
[...] whenever people appeared who were no longer citizens of any sov-
ereign states’ (Arendt, 1967 [1951] 293).
This chapter is concerned with issues of ethics in the meta-society
of today’s transnational world. Indeed, one of the key questions raised
by such a radical redefinition of man’s relation to others within and
outside a given community is the question of the ethos of the global
community. What is the ethos of a world where locally contracted ties
seem to be dissolving, whereby affecting our bearings, the way we stand
but also our sense of duty to others? All these issues crystallize around
a central one: the question of whether twenty-first century man will
remain local or turn global, whether he will manage to translate his eth-
ical self into the broader context and reinvent an ethics for the global
world or simply become a-moral, unethical and detached. In the case
of diasporic people, the question cuts two ways. One of the key issues
of course is how their rights can be guaranteed outside the national
frontiers of their homelands. Another aspect involves their redefinition
as political and ethical subjects in the host country away from the com-
munity they were born into, when confronted with other values and
political systems. How can they take an active part in the shaping of
a social network, find their place in a new polis so that they do not
become global citizens, unattached, deterritorialized and uprooted, but
also without any political role or impact? In my introduction to this
book I briefly referred to the genre of the global novel whose perman-
ently uprooted characters seem to buttress the idea that we are all going
to become citizens of a liquid world and roam the world, free of all
ties and responsibilities. However in recent years, an increasingly large
number of authors have started to raise the issue of the im/migrant’s
political role and of his ethical involvement towards both the home
and the host country. Novels by Ali, Gurnah, Rushdie and Smith are not
only about the self-centred reinvention of an identity abroad or the per-
sonal fulfilment linked to immigration; they also address, sometimes
quite explicitly, the question of what migrants can do for the home and
host country; they intuit the potential danger inherent in the thrilling
rebirth of a new self, without a past but also without a family or com-
munity they are accountable to and who can afford to freely enjoy the
newly gained freedom of a slightly surreal life in a different country and
in a different language in which things never sound exactly the same.
102 Critical Identities
principles societies have set for themselves and which have acted as
a cornerstone from time immemorial. Naturally enough these values
resist the homogenizing varnish of globalism to reveal deeply ingrained
specificities. They resurface in situations of temporary but also long-
term if not permanent displacement and sometimes clash violently
with those of the immigrant’s host country.
This clash of conflicting world-views which come into contact in the
diasporic experience is an important motif of the emerging trend of
homecoming narratives to which I have referred in previous chapters.
These novels go one step further than earlier immigration novels in
their representation of the flaws of the West, insisting on the discrep-
ancy between its discourse and the reality of everyday life. Not only do
they confront myths of rebirth and regeneration in the new land to the
bleak reality of immigration, they also offer a critical and sometimes
scathing reassessment of its core values which they oppose to that of
the homeland. In so doing, they often point to the dramatic erosion of
values, in particular of family values which they contrast with the per-
sistence of traditional bonds and solidarities between members of an
extended family in their home country.
Abdulrazak Gurnah’s2 novel Admiring Silence, for example, addresses
the issue of the responsibilities of diasporic subjects towards their fel-
low countrymen.3 When leaving home and family behind, keeping his
new life and ties in England a secret from his family back home, the
protagonist decides to relinquish the duties he had towards his relatives
in the home country and embrace the self-oriented ethos of the West.
Yet, this novel which recounts the story of a reasonably well-integrated
immigrant, concludes with a rather unexpected twist, the protagonist
returning to the home country not so much out of some sense of nos-
talgia as from a sense of ethical commitment and belief in long-lasting
ties. His break-up with his partner, who is also the mother of their child
makes him realize the extent to which his life in the UK was superficial,
precisely because he did not have any strong commitment outside this
limited family circle, nor any real place in society despite the number
of years he had spent there.
Caryl Phillips’ novel A Distant Shore expresses a similar concern for
ethical issues which manifests itself in a duty to remember the forgot-
ten victims of illegal immigration. The novel, which opens on a graphic
description of the protagonist’s cellmate’s painful death in an atmos-
phere of total indifference throws into relief the plight of asylum seek-
ers who are deprived of the most basic of human rights and left to rot
away on the prison floor. But Phillips also dramatizes the ethical breach
104 Critical Identities
Each time I opened my eyes I heard Mum crying. I was a coward who
had trained himself to forget. I accepted from people. From Mr and
Mrs Anderson. I was no longer ‘Hawk’. I was no longer my mother’s
Gabriel. It was Solomon who learned of Mike’s death. It was Solomon
who was lying in a warm bed in a strange room among these kind
people. It was Solomon. I was Solomon. (297)
Disjunction, Ethics and the Diasporic Subject 105
After this outburst, Malik Solanka lets Ali know that Urdu is his mother
tongue and that he has understood everything the cab driver has said.
First, the driver refuses to admit that his words were actually insults,
before acknowledging that they indeed were. He ends up excusing him-
self before finally agreeing that he did not really mean what he said:
‘Sahib, if you heard it, then it must be so. But sir, you see, I am not
aware.’ Solanka lost patience, turned to go. ‘It doesn’t matter’, he
said. [...] As he walked off along Broadway, Beloved Ali shouted after
him, needily, asking him to be understood. [...] ‘it means nothing,
sahib. Me, I don’t even go to the mosque. God bless America, okay?
It’s just words.’ Yes, and words are not deeds, Solanka allowed, mov-
ing off fretfully. Though words can become deeds. If said in the right
place and at the right time, they can move mountains and change
the world. Also, uh-huh, not knowing what you’re doing – separating
deeds from the words that define them – was apparently becoming
an acceptable excuse. To say ‘I didn’t mean it’ was to erase meaning
from your misdeeds, at least in the opinion of the Beloved Alis of the
world. (66–7)
One of the most noticeable aspects of this passage, apart from the lin-
guistic creativity of Ali Manju, is the implication of speech and the
disjunctive process obviously at work in this warped discursive situ-
ation. When he thinks that Solanka cannot understand him, Ali utters
an impressive list of insults in Urdu. But when he realizes that Solanka
has actually grasped the meaning of what he said, Manju apologizes
and almost begs Solanka not to retain such a bad impression of him.
It is as if there were two Alis, the aggressive one who advocates racism
and fundamentalism, and the nice village boy who can be obedient
and respectful when speaking to members of his community on the
radio. In a way it is also as if there were two Urdus, the Urdu spoken
with friends and family and which is still meaningful, and loaded with
affective connotations, and the Urdu spoken in front of foreigners,
which provides Ali with a sphere of linguistic freedom and uncensored
108 Critical Identities
private expression. This example shows how in this specific context the
mother tongue can become a responsibility-free zone where the immi-
grant can express himself but where he can also say literally anything
without being accountable for it (1). Not only is this situation com-
pletely artificial, it is one seldom encountered in real life where words
are necessarily part of a communication scheme. They are uttered and
received as such, and met with certain reactions at the receiving end.5
What happens when Solanka speaks to Ali in Urdu is that he revital-
izes the mother tongue, reinscribing it into a context where it actually
makes sense and triggers reactions. In other words, Solanka restores a
real situation of communication rather than an artificial one like that
in which the immigrant may find himself when he speaks in front of
people who cannot understand his language. (2)
(1)
S (L1) – Message (L1) – Receiver (L2)
(2)
S (L1) – Message (L1) – Receiver (L1)
severed from affects and ethics. In other words, it can become merely
instrumental and devoid of depth so that words can circulate on the
surface and convey meaning without striking an emotional chord in
the speaker.6 It can remain at the outer limits of consciousness to such
an extent that it can easily say almost anything since the emotional and
moral implications seem to belong to another realm, as I shall discuss
further in the next chapter on language and the diasporic subject.
To return to my initial question, ‘what happens to the immigrant as
an ethical and political subject?’, the example of Fury provides one of
the more enlightening examples of the disjunctive process generated
by bilingualism. In this novel, rather than focusing on the incredible
fluidity of meaning which is self-produced and multi-faceted like in
The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Rushdie imagines the potential incoher-
ence of individuals whose words become divorced from their thoughts
and sense of ethics. Fury thus expresses the necessity of reconnecting
words and meaning, signifiers with affect and ethics, and to revitalize
languages which, when severed from their initial context can cease to
make sense and cease to appeal to the full humanness in each of us.
Although English is represented as some sort of lingua franca, what is
stressed is not so much the commonality between speakers as the differ-
ences. The verbal vignettes and the fragments of conversations that are
interspersed throughout the novel form a kind of auditory quilt which
evokes the ruggedness of linguistic clashes through the widespread use
of English; they emanate from split selves who say one thing and think
another, and this constitutes a heightened form of linguistic schizo-
phrenia (Deleuze, 1998).7
If they pinpoint the clash between two sets of ethical values and raise
the alarm as to the diffraction of in-betweeners as ethical subjects, such
novels also address the key difficulty and probably main challenge
facing the meta-community of today’s transnational world, that of try-
ing to come up with an ethics for this meta-community and conceive
of rights as human rights rather than merely as the rights endowed by
citizenship or residence in a given country.
In the introduction to this chapter I have briefly referred to the recur-
rence of this issue ever since the eighteenth century; its timeliness in
the twentieth century was largely demonstrated by Hannah Arendt in
her book The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) in which she historicizes
110 Critical Identities
In the Gandhi Café, a little after three years from the day he’d
received his visa, the luckiest boy in the whole world skidded on
some rotten spinach in Harish-Harry’s kitchen, streaked forward in a
112 Critical Identities
slime green track and fell with a loud popping sound. It was his knee.
He couldn’t get up.
‘Can’t you get a doctor?’ He said to Harish-Harry after Saran and Jeev
had helped him to his mattress between the vegetables.
‘Doctor!! Do you know what is medical expense in this country?!’
‘It happened here. Your responsibility.’
‘My responsibility!’ Harish-Harry stood over Biju, enraged. ‘You slip
in the kitchen. If you slip on the road, then who would you ask,
hm?’ [...]
‘Without us living like pigs,’ said, Biju, ‘what business would you have?
This is how you make your money, paying us nothing because you
know we can’t do anything, making us work day and night because
we are illegal. Why don’t you sponsor us for our green card?’ (187–8)
but also more broadly. Or in Monica Ali’s novel Brick Lane, Chanu’s
disappointment with the internet and the promise it seemed to offer
of belonging to a broader community leads him to invest himself in
a more modest project, that of building up a collection of books in
Bengali; in other words, his involvement in local projects promoting
the home culture is more symptomatic of a failure to find his place in a
broader structure than a statement in favour of particularism and com-
munitarianism. In both cases, what comes out is not so much the help-
lessness of the characters, as the expression of the difficulties they have
in translating whatever social and political voice they might have into
a new context. This question, which is ultimately linked principally to
the semiotics of the social fabric, connects up with that of their social
status and the difficulties they might have in translating that status
into a new system where the codes of social validation and recognition
are different.
From which it follows that before envisaging the global level of the
world citizen, the question of reterritorialization needs to be addressed
according to several stages, the first one being how one reterritorializes
oneself in the host culture, not only solving whatever identity issues
one might have but asserting one’s existence as a citizen, with a social
status and a voice. Indeed, there is no point in imagining oneself a
citizen of a global village when one does not even feel like a full mem-
ber of a given community. Only then, when this political grounding is
achieved can the second stage take place. In other words, the idea of a
‘global tribe’ is neither an obsolete question nor a utopia, but it requires
a political reterritorialization as a prerequisite.
The question of social reterritorialization also implies two pre-
requisites: first, that the migrant should understand the core values of
the society he is trying to become part of. By the term ‘core values’
(Smolicz)9 I am referring to studies which have tackled the issue of the
specificity of the ethos of a given society and analysed it in terms of
a combination of values essential to it (Driedger, 1975). Interestingly
enough, the fact that the core values are so deeply ingrained in the im/
migrants makes the grammar of integration opaque if not unreadable,
and the perfect integration of the immigrant a lot more difficult than it
might seem, and not only tied to language skills or professional skills.
The second parameter involved is the translation of one’s social value
into the host culture, a process which, because of the irreducibility of
the core values of both cultures involved (that of the im/migrant and
that of the host country), requires that one not only acts the way one
used to in one’s home culture but succeeds in translating one’s social
116 Critical Identities
arrange to meet up at her place, Samad is surprised to hear that she lives
in Harlesden, as he had imagined that she had a flat in a nice area like
‘ “West Hampstead” or at least “Swiss Cottage” ’ (164).
The second level of social recognition identified by Renault is that of
work, since one’s professional status testifies to one’s role and position
in society. Like so many characters in diasporic fiction, Samad experi-
ences the cruel discrepancy between his self-image and his social status
and feels that what he believes to be his intrinsic value has not been
recognized as it should. Unable to verbalize his frustration, he starts
daydreaming at the restaurant where he works, imagining himself bear-
ing a placard that says:
This silent outburst, which expresses the complexity of identity and the
frustrations linked to the fact that certain facets of it have been effaced
by the experience of immigration, combines various time-frames: the
past as the tense of nostalgic remembrance, which provides some com-
fort to the frustrated soul, and the future with its yet unfulfilled ambi-
tions, whose role is to balance off the mediocre quality of the present
moment. It also combines the different spheres of recognition we have
mentioned: family and friends but also work, and establishes a corres-
pondence between them.
Last but not least, there is the sphere of national recognition, where
Samad fails to find himself on an equal footing with British-born citi-
zens. Samad, who fought during the war and defended the host country
suffers from having been written out of history. The episode of the chil-
dren’s visit to Mr Hamilton, an ex-army man is quite revealing since
Hamilton refuses to believe that Samad (Millat’s father) fought in the
war: ‘I’m afraid you must be mistaken,’ said Mr Hamilton, genteel as
ever. ‘There were certainly no wogs I remember [...] what would we
have fed them?’ (172). Samad’s role during the war is therefore erased
twice: first by his son, who accidentally uses the verb ‘play’ instead of
‘fought’, as if war was some kind of game, and then by Mr Hamilton.
This explains why Samad, in a desperate attempt at leaving some mark
118 Critical Identities
When Rajnu passed the book to his uncle, Samad felt his fingers tin-
gle and, looking at its cover, shape and colour, saw that it was all he
had dreamt of. It was heavy, many paged, bound in a tan leather and
covered in the light dust that denotes something incredibly precious,
something rarely touched. [...]
Mangal Pande fired the first bullet of the 1857 movement. His self-sacrifice
gave the siren to the nation to take up arms against an alien ruler, cul-
minating in a mass-uprising with no parallel in world history. Though the
effort failed in its immediate consequences, it succeeded in laying the foun-
dations of the Independence to be won in 1947. For his patriotism he paid
with his life. But until his last breath he refused to disclose the names of
those who were preparing for, and instigating, the great uprising. (258–9)
(Italics in the text)
In his analysis, Renault also draws our attention to what he calls the
crisis of the patriarchal model, by which he means that when immi-
grants from traditional societies fail to achieve a certain degree of social
recognition, or when they simply fail to do very well for themselves,
this ultimately undermines their role as patriarchs. In Zadie Smith’s
novel, Samad’s authority is challenged on several occasions, but what
comes across as the most telling example of the loss of his patriarchal
aura, is expressed through his son’s rejection of the name his father
gave him and symbolically of his lineage and cultural heritage (‘I
GIVE YOU A GLORIOUS NAME LIKE MAGID MAHFOOZ MURSHED
MUBTASIMIQBAL!’ [...] ‘AND YOU WANT TO BE CALLED MARK
SMITH!’ (151)). This crisis is presented by Smith as one of the origins of
the quest for new solidarities second generation immigrants often turn
Disjunction, Ethics and the Diasporic Subject 119
People had fucked with Ranil, when he sat at the back of the class
and carefully copied all teacher’s comments into his book. People
had fucked with Dipesh and Hifan when they wore traditional dress
in the playground. [...] But no one fucked with any of them any
more because they looked like trouble. They looked like trouble in
stereo. (232)
problem with Hardt and Negri’s thesis is not so much what he sees as
the superficiality of their line of argumentation which to him does
not make sense, since one is never against everything, all the time.
It is also the fact that the heterogeneous components which Hardt
and Negri see in the multitude as a category leave little if no room
for common ground which is necessary for political action to take
place.
This question of the common language occupies centre stage in
Laclau’s political paradigm and in his understanding of populism.
Laclau stresses the importance of having a collective language which
leaves room enough for mutual understanding and acceptance. In his
analysis of the logics of the formation of collective identities in On
Populist Reason, Laclau focuses on how the smaller unities which he
calls the ‘demands’ can gather or unite into the group. A crucial role
is played by what he calls the system of ‘equivalential links’ and the
‘floating signifiers’ whose function is to make the apparition of a com-
mon language and of a common voice possible. ‘The transition from
individual to popular demands operates [...] through the construction
of equivalential links. [...] This plurality of links becomes a singularity
through its condensation around a popular identity’(Laclau, 2005, 94).
For Laclau, all the demands are subsumed by an overarching demand
which can only act as the emergent overarching one precisely because
of a line of antagonism (‘the dichotomic frontier’) which helps the
demands develop some awareness of their commonality. Without this
line of demarcation, the demands would remain isolated and fail to
coalesce into a whole.
Laclau’s thesis not only identifies a key mechanism in the construc-
tion of group identity, it also points – in the negative – to one of the
reasons why the global class of immigrants has failed to materialize as
a group so far. Not only is the line of equivalences difficult to find in
such a culturally diverse mosaic of people, the dichotomic frontier has
become blurred and hazy. The circulation of a global culture everyone
shares in but which represents different degrees of proximity to centres
of power tends to blur the boundaries between rich and poor countries
in the global world order and tone down the differences in terms of
hierarchy. The illusion of belonging to an imaginary community and of
sharing in with a supranational culture, which we discussed in the pre-
vious chapter in relation to Arjun Appadurai’s scapes, and in particular
the ‘mediascape,’ is precisely what is problematic since it renders the
whole picture difficult to read and neutralizes the impetus to fight for
greater political and economic rights.
122 Critical Identities
125
126 Critical Identities
Another reason has to do with the fact that because Nigerian children
were taught English at school, Gı̃kũyũ remained the language spoken at
Language(s) and the Diasporic Subject 127
The way a diasporic subject relates to both mother tongue and father
tongue9 is a complex matter which does not involve personal criteria
only (such as gender or social status), even if the importance of these
criteria should not be played down but is constantly determined by
the political situation and the balance of power between the two coun-
tries the immigrant is related to. In this sense, the redefinition of the
relation between Britain and its colonies in the postcolonial era and
the way the two countries are perceived by the diasporas plays a cru-
cial role. This redefinition of the ‘lignes de force’ between Britain and its
former colonies has had a direct impact on the way immigrants situate
themselves in relation to the two languages they inhabit. More gener-
ally, it prompts a reassessment of the dichotomy mother tongue/father
tongue.
One of the most eloquent definitions of a father tongue to my know-
ledge is that given by Marlene Nourbese Philip in her poem ‘Discourse
on the Logic of Language’ (M. Nourbese Philip in Morrell, 1994, 136).
A Canadian writer of Caribbean origin, who now lives in Canada, in
a country whose status was comparable to that of a colony, Nourbese
refers to English as a father tongue, a language whose function is to
carry a symbolic order but not to express affect, generating in the
bilingual subject a tension between the language of affect, the mother
tongue and the language imposed on him/her, in a situation of domin-
ation: the father tongue.
English
is my mother tongue.
132 Critical Identities
English is
my father tongue.
A father tongue is
a foreign language,
therefore English is
a foreign language
not a mother tongue
[...]. (M. Nourbese Philip in Morrell, 1994, 136)
The style and structure of this poem suggest the extremely painful
process which consists in unearthing the mother tongue and make it
resurface from beneath the father tongue. In the accompanying jour-
nal she kept when working on ‘She Tries Her Tongue’, Nourbese Philip
describes the process which consists in unearthing the mother tongue
from beneath the father tongue which will ultimately allow her to get
to what she calls the ‘essence’:
For M Nourbese Philip, English is not only a father tongue which has
imposed a new signifying system and fails to express affect; it also
bars access to the mother tongue which one has to literally dig up and
‘mine for,’ a metaphor which not only suggests erasure and oblivion but
also burial and links up with the history of slavery which underpins
Nourbese’s work on both a thematic and a formal level. The expres-
sion ‘mother tongue’ is to be taken at face value,10 and this continuity
mother/tongue/language inscribes language at the heart of the body as
both a physical and a cognitive activity.
Language(s) and the Diasporic Subject 133
In the same way that power relations between colonizing nations and
their colonies have evolved, the status, role and representation of the
English language have changed and the whole genealogy of linguistic
legacies needs to be re-evaluated. In the next section I propose to discuss
how English has not only ceased to be a father tongue but is increas-
ingly seen as a stepmother tongue, an outside element added without
it threatening the organic whole and whose relation to the speaker is
potentially more distant.
In the introduction to this chapter I have put forward the idea that the
question of bilingualism and what it implies in the diasporic subject has
been greatly overlooked in the existing critical literature, for reasons I
shall discuss in more detail in the next section. One such reason which I
would like to mention in passing, however, is the spread of a conception
of language as an instrument of communication, which has become
prevalent even among linguists as Jean-Jacques Lecercle has argued
(Lecercle, 2004). One thing that strikes me is that if postcolonial debates
have focused on the epistemological and ontological consequences of
the imposition of a new language, which suggests that the importance
of languages and languaging has been fully taken on board, the wide-
spread use of the term ‘code-switching’ in relation not only to diasporic
populations but also to Westernized populations like the Indian middle-
class is quite disturbing and to a certain extent bars access to what I
consider to be one of the keys to understanding the way hybrid iden-
tities survive in two cultures and are renegotiated by them in a diasporic
context. There is a lot more to this renegotiation than a mere blurring
of languages and cultures. The following discussion of bilingualism and
bilanguaging hinges on this hypothesis: in the process of renegotiation,
cultures and languages are not mixed, they do not blend, but are accom-
modated in different capacities. In other words, the diasporic condition
shows the limits of bilingualism in the classical sense of the term, not
because equal mastery of two languages is impossible, nor because the
asymmetry of the bilingual subject is the reflection or a more general
asymmetry linked to the power struggle of the two countries whose lan-
guages are spoken by the diasporic subject (Mignolo, 2000) but because
the diasporic subject, for personal or historical reasons, assigns each lan-
guage to a specific task for the simple reason that he cannot relate to
the two languages in the same way. It is in this sense that although the
postcolonial framework has lost some of its validity in the context of
diasporic studies, the conception of language which underpins theories
such as that of Wa Thiong’o remains not only valid but needs to be reas-
serted or else there is a risk of lapsing into thinking that language is but
an instrument. As Alton Becker put it in an essay on languaging, there is
a lot more to languaging than simply learning a new code:
other language somehow does not carry the same emotional charge; its
words do not resonate in the same way as their equivalent in my mother
tongue. Hence Derrida’s claim that
Not speaking in one’s mother tongue. Living with resonances and rea-
soning that are cut off from the body’s nocturnal memory, from the
bittersweet slumber of childhood. Bearing within oneself like a secret
vault, or like a handicapped child – cherished and useless – that lan-
guage of the past that withers without ever leaving you. You improve
your ability with another instrument, as one expresses oneself with
algebra or the violin. You can become a virtuoso with this new device
that moreover gives you a new body, just as artificial and sublimated –
some say sublime. You have a feeling that the new language is a res-
urrection: new skin, new sex. But the illusion bursts when you hear,
upon listening to a recording for instance, that the melody of your
voice comes back to you as a peculiar sound, out of nowhere [...]. Thus,
between two languages, your realm is silence. By dint of saying things
in various ways, one just as trite as the other, just as approximate, one
ends up no longer saying them. (Kristeva, 1991, 16)
Like Kristeva’s silent polyglot, who bears his mother tongue within
himself like a handicapped child, Moushumi gradually realizes that a
third space and a third language cannot make up for the void left by the
denial of her cultural heritage and that the empowering phase is soon
followed by the bitter realization that the new language cannot allow
her to reach a stage of ontological plenitude.
To a certain extent, the example of Lahiri’s novel is a good illustration
of the first part of Derrida’s position on language, namely the determin-
ism exerted by the mother tongue and its role as a constitutive element.
Another point which needs to be discussed is the locus of the idiosyncrasy
of the mother tongue. Is the message delivered in the mother tongue dif-
ferent because of one’s ability or lack of ability to convey it in another
language, or does this difference have to do with the idiosyncrasy of lan-
guages? Derrida’s reflections on translation and the fact that something is
necessarily lost along the way in the passage from one language to another,
suggests that languages are by essence untranslatable, although the word
‘essence’ falls short of expressing the contingent element constitutive of
this idiosyncrasy and linked to the fact that languages are different also
because they are rooted in different histories and contexts and have borne
142 Critical Identities
There are at least two levels of interpretation possible when reading this
passage. The first level plays on its comic tone and could be paraphrased
as follows: the clucky old father is losing his marbles and starts confus-
ing things. He is no longer able to distinguish between first and second
degree and is taking his wife’s mock threat seriously. Yet there is a second
level of understanding, more serious and almost tragic: this poor old man
who has known oppression and has lived in a traumatic context where
Russian has become closely associated with it, is brought back to these
painful memories by the mere resonance of words uttered in Russian.
Interestingly, the second interpretation counts as much as the first one
and highlights the affective dimension of language in a tragic-comic
mode. It could be summed up as follows: any utterance retains an affect-
ive charge linked to the language it is uttered in, and this affective charge
goes far beyond the signifier. The affective load of the country of origin is
carried to another country, even if the context is radically different.
In the first movement of this section, we have established the suprem-
acy of the mother tongue and discussed Derrida’s assertion that we are
first and foremost monolingual, even though there is a certain form of
polyglossia which I have decided to leave aside for the time being. Indeed,
at this stage, the question which needs to be answered is how to articu-
late this position, taking into account the fact that some of us live in two
languages. In other words, the question which needs to be addressed is
that of the distinction between bilingualism and bilanguaging.
The difference between bilingualism and bilanguaging is a matter
of both location and degree, in the sense that individuals may be said
to be bilingual, when they ‘have’ two languages, but the idea of real
bilingualism, as we have seen, is something more and refers to the pos-
sibility of being at home in two languages, immersed in their culture
and history. And since one can only have one home, bilanguaging is by
necessity linked to the situation of individuals who live what Mignolo
or Anzaldua refer to as the border experience. In her preface to La
Frontera, Gloria Anzaldua describes the situation and the language of
the frontera [border] in the following terms:
This is what Deleuze calls using the language in the minor mode, in the
musical sense of the term – bringing it close to imbalance through the
use of ‘dynamic combinations in perpetual disequilibrium.’
if the first degree meaning were heard at the same time as the second
degree; it is in this sense that language is ‘reiterated’, meaning that it is
given in two modes, the figurative and the abstract. For example, even
though our exiled speaker understands the meaning of idioms such as
‘raining cats and dogs’, the actual cats are always more present to him
in his mind’s eye, than to the native speaker of the language who no
longer sees them.
To return to my discussion of bilingualism, now that we have estab-
lished that the nature of the interaction between languages is not akin
to a displacement of the borders of each language but is rather like tun-
ing to another mode, I would like to discuss more specifically what
exactly happens in the bilingual experience of diasporic subjects. In
the course of this chapter, not only have we established the primacy
of the mother tongue, we have also established the importance of the
resonance of a language in relation to the context in which it was heard
or uttered as well as the fact that what happens in two languages is
not exactly similar but different in terms of mode, whether it be in
the Deleuzian terminology of major or minor modes or in my analogy
with the polyphonic mode. Drawing on Deleuze, in the next section,
I propose to discuss the way in which bilingual subjects do not mix
languages, although they like the odd cross-linguistic play-on-words or
occasionally indulge in games of code-switching. But they assign each
language, the mother tongue and the adopted language, different func-
tions, or rather they find themselves using different languages in differ-
ent areas of their lives and activities. In the example of Jhumpa Lahiri’s
novel and our discussion of the case of Moushumi, we have discussed
the fact that the affective proximity, or on the other hand the distance
a language gives us, can be used to accommodate certain situations, for
example by putting emotionally stressful situations at a distance. This
aspect of the diasporic experience, which I refer to as the de facto com-
partmentalization of language, is therefore a constitutive element of
diasporic identity and life.
and that political independence has gone hand in hand with a search
for new role models, from which it results that the postcolonial era is no
longer haunted by the spectre of colonialism but yearns for that of glo-
bal culture. Yet if English has thrived and become the global language
we all know, it can be argued that this American English ‘overshadows
the English’s legacy as the language of the British Empire’ (Mignolo,
2000, 255) and in the process, UK English has lost a lot more than its
symbolic capital.
The recent changes in the status and nature of the English lan-
guage are not only linked to the rivalry between UK English and
American English but to a larger movement of diffraction of speakers
of the English language throughout the world and the subsequent
redefinition of the divide between Anglophones and English-
speaking people, even though this dichotomy needs to be further
qualified as we shall see in the course of our discussion. It is a fact
that English has ceased to be principally the language of a nation,
and it is estimated that the number of those who use it for conveni-
ence as a lingua franca now outnumbers by perhaps three to one the
total population of all native speakers (Ostler, 2005, 458). As I have
mentioned in the introduction to this chapter, English has become
the language of at least four groups of people to different extents: the
native speakers, speakers of former British colonies where English is
the official language – a group which can be subdivided into people
of Anglo-Saxon descent and people who have received a formal edu-
cation in English and who have grown up in two languages – a third
group which includes the diasporas to the English-speaking world,
for whom English has become the language of everyday life, and a
fourth group comprised of people who use it for work purposes. In
The Stepmother Tongue, John Skinner offers several paradigms which
account for the different combinations of situation to be found in
the postcolonial world.
An interesting paradox is that if the spread of the English language as
the world’s global language has generated fears as to the consequences
for other languages and local cultures, the strengthening of its strategic
position has taken place over a period of time when its common usage
had started to change, whereby I do not mean the new uses introduced
by the new Englishes like Singlish but the more profound modifications
I shall discuss later on in this section and as a result of which English
itself might be the language under threat.
The idea of the world’s first language being under threat is not
altogether obvious and requires some clarifications. In Le Discours
Language(s) and the Diasporic Subject 151
Antillais writer and theorist Edouard Glissant wrote the following about
the defence of languages:
It is through this defence of the language that one can oppose stand-
ardization, a standardization which would come for example, from a
global usage of American English in its most basic form. What I am
saying is that if ever this standardization were to become the norm
worldwide, it isn’t only the French, Italian or Créole languages that
would be under threat; the English language itself would be under
threat, for English would cease to be a language with its obscur-
ities, its weaknesses, is victories, its flights of fancy, its dynamism,
its reversals of fortune and its variety; it would cease to be the lan-
guage of the rural man, the language of the writer, the language of
your average docker. All of this would disappear, the language would
cease to be a living language so as to become a sort of international
code, an Esperanto. If the English language were my language, I
would be worried about the universalization and the standardiza-
tion of American English. (My translation)
living language, which is beyond the scope of this study but which I
would like to touch on briefly and discuss in relation to the ‘créolisa-
tion’ and hybridization of languages. The notion of ‘living language’
has always been problematic and lent itself to radically different inter-
pretations and definitions which reflect changes in the way culture is
envisaged, either as fixed or as diverse and hybrid (Serres). Rather than a
rigorous discussion of this broad topic, the following reflection is meant
to pinpoint some of the issues at stake and put them into perspective in
terms of chronology. In his Letters to the German Nation, Fichte gave his
own definition of a dead language, a definition which is radically differ-
ent from the way we generally oppose living languages and dead ones
today, according to the dichotomy: languages still in use/languages no
longer in use. For Fichte, a dead language was a language with broken
and mixed traditions. The fact that this language was still in use, or
had ceased to be used, was not a valid criterion. What mattered was
its level of purity and the way it had preserved itself from any inter-
ference with other languages. Since French was cut off from its Latin
roots before becoming a language in its own right and English became
a mixed language following the Norman conquest, German was for him
the only language through which a continuous link with the past could
be traced back to immemorial times (Fichte, 1808).
If we now combine Fichte’s definition of dead languages (as mixed, as
opposed to living languages as pure) and the commonly accepted def-
inition (languages which are no longer in use as opposed to languages
still in use), we are confronted with the following paradox: despite its
vitality and ever-renewed diversity, English would be, in Fichte’s eyes,
a dead language. If we now return to Glissant’s conception of a living
language as one which is rooted in a given society, which bears wit-
ness to its texture and resonates with the multiple voices and accents
of its people, we can wonder to what extent English is still one and
the same language, whereby I do not mean contextually and with ref-
erence to the very types of new Englishes, but structurally, in its very
common usage. I thus propose to shift the discussion to the internal
changes brought into the workings of the English language by the
people who use it as a mere instrument of communication, whereby I
do not mean the native speakers of the English language or those for
whom English has become one of the constitutive elements of their
‘doubleness’ (Hutcheon) but the ever-expanding group of those who
use English professionally. The following discussion seeks to evidence a
double movement at work in the redefinition of the linguistic contours
of the English language: the erasure of its opacity and of its linguistic
Language(s) and the Diasporic Subject 153
language – not only for the English language or the French language –
but also for languages in general. The position rests on the assumption
that language is instrumental, that its function is to convey a message,
and that everything else comes second. This is not the case, and what
The Sun’s translation mistake goes to show is that words cannot be
translated independently of the culture they are rooted in. In his ana-
lysis, Lecercle shows that English itself falls victim to what amounts
to a vast movement of instrumentalization of languages, a movement
initiated by the media but also by certain linguists who consider lan-
guage as an abstract system of words and grammatical rules. Lecercle
writes that ‘to attack the history-culture nexus, the cultural past that
is inscribed in the English language, out of which the English lan-
guage is made, presupposes a conception of language as tool and lin-
gua franca, a simple instrument for the transmission of information
and knowledge, without depth or past.’ (Lecercle, 2004 [2006] 4–5).
As a consequence, the death of languages ultimately amounts to the
death of cultures, which is the reason why it is important to fight the
disappearance of languages, a process which may go unnoticed if we
think that this is just about languages when in actual fact it is about
saving the diversity of cultures and protecting them from economic
but also political hegemony. Lecercle’s example points to a more gen-
eral phenomenon which is the gradual loss of the wealth, texture and
complexity of the language for communicational purposes, a move
which makes Orwell’s novel 1984 almost prophetic, as if English today
had become like newspeak,17 a new language reduced to its bare bones
and whose opacity has been erased to counteract political subversion.
In real life, this opacity does not necessarily serve the same purpose;
one of its main functions is to act as the corollary of communication
with a view to achieving a certain efficacy.
The supremacy of the English language today therefore leads to the
following paradox: although English reigns supreme, it has become for
many people synonymous with globalization and is used in an almost
mechanical way, without evoking the culture it was initially rooted
in. Because it has become a universal language, English is used, trans-
formed and restricted to specific areas; in other words, it is instrumen-
talized and cut off from the affective substratum of the speakers who
adopt it and contribute to it spreading. As Mignolo observes: ‘A curi-
ous paradox is that as English becomes more detached from its own
territory, its grounding is superseded by a transnational dimension’
(Mignolo, 2000, 250).
Language(s) and the Diasporic Subject 155
Encyclopaedia 1 Encyclopaedia 2
Author → ↔ ← Reader
Text
zone of friction
between
E1 and E2
Language 1 Language 2
and to a certain extent works on it when using it. Besides, the language
used by the immigrant is never used in the exact same way as his mother
tongue. From which it results that if communication has become the
touchstone of our postmodern era, language is not as transparent as it
seems – reassuringly enough – and that there remains a certain opacity
of meaning linked to the fact that language – and the English language
in particular – has not yet become the detached decontextualized tool
some would like it to be. To a certain extent, this phenomenon is quite
similar to an implosion of the centre, of a cultural core when it comes
into contact and is even partly appropriated by other cultures.
The representation of English in diasporic fiction offers a wealth
of information which easily disrupts the idea that the language of
colonization continues to exert the same form of cultural domin-
ation it has exerted for the most part of the twentieth century. Not
only has queen’s English ceased to be the only linguistic norm in the
Anglophone world, the language itself has been stripped of its cul-
tural substratum and has become endowed with new representations.
There are two ways of looking at this phenomenon. The first consists
in lamenting the loss of the purity of the English language and in
denouncing its bastardization. But another consists in rejoicing at the
fact that this rhizomatic development of Englishes is an antidote to
homogeneity.
What is ultimately at stake in the way one envisages language is the con-
tinuity between the individual/language/nation. In my examination of
Derrida’s position on languages I have stressed the emphasis he places
on the mother tongue as the primary site of enunciation, in so far as
the mother tongue is tied to the socio-historical nexus we are rooted in.
However, there is another dimension to his reflections which is the fact
that there is always an element of polyglossia in a person’s monolingual-
ism. To a certain extent, this idea runs through the work of Deleuze and
of Glissant who develops it in Le Discours Antillais when he writes that
161
162 Notes
to a promised land where they can start anew. The term diaspora of hope
would probably apply to some of the characters of Gish Jen’s novels Mona
in the Promised Land or Typical American, who lead comfortable lives in the
US, have set up their own businesses, and whose children have access to a
good education. It could also apply to the characters of Monica Ali’s book
Brick Lane, which portrays migrants who are not particularly well-off but
who have more or less found a place in society, and still have the possibility
of going back to their home country. The diaspora of terror includes mainly
immigrants who leave their country because the political situation has
become intolerable, as in Gurnah’s novel Admiring Silence (1996) or Caryl
Phillips’s A Distant Shore (2004) which deals with the lesser-known narra-
tive of illegal immigrants. Unlike immigrants of the diaspora of hope, they
know that the return to the homeland is almost impossible and live in a
state of permanent exile.
11. This panel discussion was organized by the University Paris X, Nanterre
on 26 March 2007. Three South Asian writers were invited: Abha Dawesar,
Ruchir Joshi and Githa Hariharan.
12. At the last conference of the EACLALS held in Venice (March 2008) Chris
Abani, a writer of Nigerian origin who has lived in the United States for the
past seven years shared a similar anecdote. He referred to very negative reviews
of his writings on the United States while critics praised the authenticity of
those dealing with his homeland, which he has left for quite some time.
13. For further reference to Rushdie’s imaginary homelands see Victor Ramraj
in Bruce King (ed) New National and Post-colonial Literatures: An Introduction.
Ramraj writes that ‘It is thus not surprising that Rushdie’s work, and quite
often the work of exiled writers, is not realistic. The premises of realism,
which have to do with consolidation or metonymy, are inadequate to express
the voice of the periphery, of a vision shaped by two ontologies’ (208).
14. Manuel Castells draws a distinction between what sociologists have called
role sets and identity. Identity involves self-representation (Castells, 1997).
As a consequence, the term black woman does not evoke the same thing
in twentieth-century America as it does in twenty-first century British
society.
4. This idea is also found in contemporary diasporic literature. In the novel
Mona in The Promised Land by Gish Jen, the Chinese characters are said to be
‘the new Jews’, on account of their education and success story. ‘For they’re
the new Jews after all, a model minority and Great American Success. They
belong in the promised land’ (Jen, 1997 [1996] 1). (See Chapter 3)
5. In this chapter as in the rest of the book, I shall use the term ‘interstice’ in
a way which differs from its usual acceptance and follows redefinitions of
the term by Bhabha (1996) and Chambers (1994). Although the word ‘inter-
stice’ suggests a certain emptiness, a void between two places, the inter-
stice in which the identities of diasporic populations are formed and then
develop is not a void, but is too full, as though brimming with overlapping
definitions.
6. This coinage refers to the imposition of a new self onto the colonized
population.
7. The idea of a ‘palimpsestual’ layering of narratives in the colonial con-
text is developed by Robert Young in Colonial Desire in his discussion of
the concept of deterritorialization developed by Deleuze and Guattari in
A Thousand Plateaus. ‘Decoding and recoding are too simplistic a grafting of
one culture on to another’, writes Young, who then goes on to suggest that
‘we need to modify the model to a form of palimpsestual inscription and
reinscription’ (Young, 2002 [1995] 173).
8. This aspect is studied at length by Rosemary Marangoly George in her book
The Politics of Home.
9. Denise Riley uses this notion to analyse the role of women in society beyond
the divide of home/political life. The social sphere, which refers to a femi-
nized area of operation which extends into public space, is different from
the ‘political’ masculine sphere (Riley, 1988, 51).
10. Until 1993 when the Mabo treaty acknowledged the indigenous occupation
of Australia, the settlement of Australia by colonists had been deemed legit-
imate on account of the fact that the country did not belong to anyone and
was not inhabited (in the sense that nothing had been built by the indigen-
ous population).
11. In Dispossession, historian Henry Reynolds traces the development of the
various representations of the indigenous population of Australia from
the first accounts of the settlement such as the log books of explorers or
the notes written by missionaries.
12. In Fear and Temptation, Goldie analyses the issues at stake in the act of
naming and renaming colonized land – not only by giving Western names
but also by giving native names to new settlements in an attempt at mak-
ing the presence of colonists legitimate, as if they were part of a natural
filiation.
13. It is worth mentioning that Colin Johnson later changed his name, first
to Mudrooroo Nyongah then later to Mudrooroo Narogin, and then to
Mudrooroo as a protest against white Australia. Other writers, including
Kath Walker (who took the name Oodgeroo) made the same choice. (For
further reference to Mudrooroo see Chapter 3.)
Notes 165
1978 where he has lived ever since. It comes as no surprise that his novels –
in particular Amriika, No New Land and The in-between World of Vikram Lall
should deal with alienation, in-betweenness and unbelonging pushed to
their radical end.
15. In an article entitled ‘The Migrant Experience in East African Asian Writing’,
Peter Simatei explains why the Asian community did not find its place in
the grand narrative against colonialism:
The framing of the anti-colonial struggle mainly as an African’s rebel-
lion against the colonial regimes may have contributed to discouraging
the equally progressive members of the non-African peoples in partici-
pating in such struggles. And yet the Asian community were unwilling
to take part in the destruction of a system that seemed to favour and
even sustain their prized cultural exclusivity. In other words, the Asian
tendency towards cultural exclusivism was certainly in harmony with
the colonial policy of separate development of different communities.
(Simatei, 2004, 18)
different nature; it is no longer a quest for the past and for one’s origins, but
for a future full of promises, one which takes Arjun Mehta, a young com-
puter programmer to the United States, where he hopes to have his share of
the American Dream. It is a novel which constantly brings myth face to face
with reality, commonly received ideas with bare facts and as such provides
a good example of the diasporic text as a magnifying lens, a mode of ‘inter-
pretative in-betweenness’ (Radhakrishnan, 1996, 1–2).
7. The novel runs two narratives of immigration in parallel, one in the 1980s
in the United States, the other one in the 1950s in England. This juxtapos-
ition of two narratives allows Desai to explore different angles and oppose
the American situation to that of the United Kingdom.
8. Appadurai writes that ‘the new global cultural economy has to be seen as a
complex, overlapping, disjunctive order that cannot any longer be under-
stood in terms of existing center-periphery models (even those that might
account for multiple centers and peripheries’ (Appadurai, 2003 [1996] 32).
9. The word encyclopaedia, used by Lecercle in Interpretation as Pragmatics is
to be understood in the sense of a set of representations. This notion of
encyclopaedia comes from Umberto Eco, who uses it in contrast to the term
‘dictionary’, that denotes the system of lexical semantics in a given lan-
guage. See Eco, 1984.
10. In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson studied the development of
print capitalism and evidenced its role as an important parameter in the
creation of communities, in particular national communities.
11. Kunzru’s novel revolves around three main characters, Arjun, Leela, a
Bollywood star and Guy Swift, a successful English businessman. Their
place in the social hierarchy allows them to relate differently to mobil-
ity. Guy Swift literally hops from city to city while Arjun is limited to
the crawling pace of the less well-off. They sometimes find themselves in
the same place without ever coming into contact, and it is as if their lives
were on separate tracks. In other words, the world described in the novel
is not only divided horizontally between peripheries and centres, but also
vertically.
12. Above, the restaurant was French, but below in the kitchen it was
Mexican and Indian. [...]
Biju at Le Colonial for the authentic colonial experience.
On top, rich colonial, and down below, poor native. Colombian, Tunisian,
Ecuadorian, Gambian.
On to the Stars and stripes Diner. All American flag on top, all Guatemalan
flag below (Kiran Desai, 21).
13. Augé takes up De Certeau’s distinction between the two. The place being
space occupied by human beings and bearing the marks of human
settlement.
14. In Liquid Modernity, Bauman refers to the respective definitions of liquids
and fluids given by the Encyclopaedia Britannica, but goes on to use the two
terms as synonymous, and deploys the idea of fluidity as the leading meta-
phor for the ‘present stage of the modern era’ (2).
15. I would like to point out that Bauman anticipates the argument that flu-
idity is not peculiar to postmodern times and that it is also one of the
170 Notes
3. Okara’s position showed great foresight, in the sense that he was able to pre-
dict the emergence of an African English, which would have its place among
other forms of postcolonial Englishes such as Australian, New Zealand and
Canadian English (Okara, 1963; see Wa Thiong’o, 1997 [1981]).
4. This issue is still a bone of contention today. In Imaginary Homelands,
Salman Rushdie stresses the need to use English (‘to conquer English may
be to complete the process of making ourselves free’, (Rushdie, 1991, 17),
but this English ‘needs remaking for our own purposes’ (17)).
5. The phrase ‘stepmother tongue’ used as a title and key concept by John
Skinner aptly sums up the love/hate relationship that binds the inhabitant
of a formerly colonized country to the language of political domination.
6. It is a fact that languages are disappearing at the worryingly fast speed of
one language every fortnight. Specialists even calculate that by the end of
the twenty-first century, half of the 5000 existing languages will have dis-
appeared (Crystal, 2000; Nettle and Romaine, 2000). This phenomenon,
which is linked to the disappearance of cultures absorbed by others, goes
almost unnoticed, as if we took it for granted that this was a natural phe-
nomenon. The term ‘glottophagia’ coined by Calvet aptly describes the
phenomenon but seems to suggest that there is no way of stopping this
linguistic gluttony.
7. In India, the hierarchy elite/non-educated people linked to the use of spe-
cific languages was already in existence before the colonial era since a rela-
tively small number of people could master Sanskrit.
8. Nicholas Ostler remarks that by the late fourteenth century, French had
been dropped as a medium of education in England ‘as a needless barrier to
vernacular understanding’ (Ostler, 2005, 467).
9. In this chapter I shall use the terms ‘mother tongue’ and ‘father tongue’
to designate the language spoken at home, as opposed to the language
imported by colonization, a dichotomy which often corresponds to the lan-
guage of affect as opposed to the language of cognitive activity. However,
this dichotomy will be questioned later on in the chapter.
10. Some of her poems describe the tongue of the mother cleaning the child.
These very visual passages lay emphasis on the way language is a bodily
activity as well as a cognitive one since language is expressed through the
body; it is an extension of the body and bears witness to its physicality.
11. Monica Ali has recently published her second novel Alentejo Blue (2006).
12. As for Chanu he clearly reduces the English language to its instrumental
function: ‘You see, when the English went to our country, they did not go
to stay. They went to make money, and the money they made, they took it
out of the country. They never left home. Mentally. Just taking money out.
And this is what I am doing now’ (Ali, 2004 [2003] 174).
To him English remains the language of cultural domination and repre-
sents a form of cultural capital he aspires to.
13. The case of Gogol’s name is even more complex since his name is neither
American nor Indian but Russian. For further discussion of the name issue,
see Munoz, 2008.
14. Although bilingualism is often seen as something positive, which may even
help children develop meta-linguistic abilities, it has for many years been
thought to have negative consequences on the intellectual development
Notes 173
174
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Index
Achebe, Chinua, 126, 149 Desai, Kiran, 39, 77, 86, 87, 91,
Ali, Monica, 39–44, 77, 79–84, 91, 111–13 passim
101, 115, 123, 133, 135, 146 diaspora
Anderson, Benedict, 94, 163 concept, 5, 11, 12, 16, 18, 38
Anzaldua, Gloria, 128, 143, 144 diaspora of despair, 163
Appadurai, Arjun, 1, 2, 12, 20, 26, 39, diaspora of hope, 2, 163
78, 88–90 passim, 99, 121, 123 diaspora of terror, 163
Appiah, Anthony, 9, 99, 100–2 diasporic imaginary, 11, 68, 69
Arendt, Hannah, 100, 101, 109, 110, 113 experience of diaspora, 37–44 passim,
Augé Marc, 8, 78, 92–4 127, 161, 163
authenticity, 7, 22, 27, 36, 41, Du Bois, W.E.B., 15
51–6 passim, 61, 63, 73, 79,
80, 82, 84 Eagleton, Terry, 20, 97, 100, 102
Eco, Umberto, 55
Bachelard, Gaston, 33 English language, 128–30 passim,
Badiou, Alain, 102 133–5, 144–54, 157
Bauman, Zygmunt, 3, 16, 78, 92, 95, Englishness, 51
96, 99, 100, 112, 113 ethnicity, 53, 55, 68, 70, 71
Bayart, Jean-François, 1, 99 Eugenides, Jeffrey, 38, 39
Bhabha, Homi K., 1, 6, 12, 18, 45, 46,
56, 57, 90 Fanon, Frantz, 59, 61
bilanguaging, 9, 125, 128, 136, Black Skin, White Masks, 51
143, 144 Farah, Nuruddin, 33, 34
bilingualism, 8, 9, 105–9, 126–8, father tongue, 131
133–8, 140–8, 159, 172, 173
Brah, Avtar, 13, 19 Garcia, Cristina, 135, 146–9
Burke, Edmund, 100, 101, 110 Geertz, Clifford, 25
Butler, Judith, 65 Gellner, Ernest, 53
Gilroy, Paul, 12, 13, 15, 50, 54
Chambers, Iain, 1, 51 Black Atlantic, 53, 60, 73
Chamoiseau, Patrick, 153 There Ain’t no Black in the Union
Clifford, James, 7, 53 Jack, 12
code switching, 136 Glissant, Edouard, 4, 10, 128, 150,
cosmopolitanism, 20, 100, 101, 102 151, 152, 153, 155, 158, 159
créolisation, 10, 50, 129, 152, 153 Goldie, Terry, 55, 139
Crystal, David, 4, 128, 172 Gottdiener, Mark, 79, 80, 86, 93
Gurnah, Abdulrazak, 77, 101
Deleuze, Gilles, 109, 131, 144, Admiring Silence, 103
145, 155
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari, 73, Hagège, Claude, 4, 128
97, 110, 146, 158 Hall, Stuart, 12, 15, 43, 52, 60, 62
Derrida Jacques, 32, 60, 128, 131, 137, Hardt, Michael, 9, 102, 120, 121,
141–3 passim, 158 122, 124
187
188 Index