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Overview
‘Post-Multicultural Writers as Neo-Cosmopolitan Mediators’ argues the need to move beyond the monolingual paradigm within Anglophone literary studies. Using Lyotard’s concept of post as the future anterior (back to the future), this book sets up a concept of post-multiculturalism salvaging the elements within multiculturalism that have been forgotten in its contemporary denigration. Gunew attaches this discussion to debates in neo-cosmopolitanism over the last decade, creating a framework for re-evaluating post-multicultural and Indigenous writers in settler colonies such as Canada and Australia. She links these writers with transnational writers across diasporas from Eastern Europe, South-East Asia, China and India to construct a new framework for literary and cultural studies.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783086641 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Anthem Press |
| Publication date: | 02/01/2017 |
| Series: | Anthem Studies in Australian Literature and Culture , #1 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 166 |
| File size: | 558 KB |
About the Author
Sneja Gunew has taught in England, Australia and Canada. She has published widely on multicultural, postcolonial and feminist critical theory.
Read an Excerpt
Post-Multicultural Writers as Neo-cosmopolitan Mediators
By Sneja Gunew
Wimbledon Publishing Company
Copyright © 2017 Sneja GunewAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78308-664-1
CHAPTER 1
WHO COUNTS AS HUMAN WITHIN (EUROPEAN) MODERNITY?
In the midst of new ideological polarizations, we are struggling to find ways of imagining configurations and legacies that remind us of the everyday hybridity, creolization and métissage of our global relations. In this chapter, I argue for making a case for peripheral cosmopolitanisms in order to complicate a commonsense equation of cosmopolitanism with the elitist practices often associated with phrases such as "citizen of the world." Such webs of cosmopolitan connections are often mediated by and rooted in an inescapably local and even parochial context, beginning with a body disciplined by visceral and affective regimes of foods, languages and familial rites that may include the metaphysical or spiritual (Wise and Velayuthan 2009).
I will focus the vast reach of "cosmopolitanism" through the question of who counts as European, offering some examples of how "europeanness" circulates with different meanings in various discourses historically and today. Addressing some of the global meanings of "E/european" means acknowledging that Europe continues to function as an imperial or colonial metaphor that evokes modernity and civilization, and, in the words of Fernando Coronil, that "the West is often identified with Europe, the United States, us, or with that enigmatic entity, the modern Self" (1996, 52). Indeed, Neil Lazarus (2002, 44) describes the West succinctly as an ideological category masquerading as a geographical one. When Europe is made synonymous with the "West," as, for example, in postcolonialdiscussions, or their neocolonial incarnation in the War on Terror, we need to be much more specific concerning these versions of occidentalism that are often wheeled in to function as convenient binary opposition to equally suspect forms of orientalism. For example, the relatively new entity of the European Union (EU) could be described as an attempt to create a "commonwealth" that transcends or creates an excess to the nation (Balibar 2004, 2007; Buruma and Margalit 2004; Todorov 2005). In its initial expansion, the European Union included those hitherto marginalized as the outer reaches of what was traditionally seen as comprising "Europe," and thus made legible the hybrid nature of the West and of Europe . This insight in turn provokes retroactive reverberations with respect to colonial histories, including those of settler colonies. What did and what does "European" signify in these contexts? What metonymic logic is being invoked here? For instance, Dubravka Ugresic has many sardonic things to say about the marketing impetus that regularly pigeonholes her as a "Croatian" writer and exemplifies in all her work the dimensions of what this chapter attempts to evoke through the term "vernacular cosmopolitanisms" ("Europe, Europe," 2007, 111–112). In short, my study asks whether the concept of peripheral and vernacular cosmopolitanisms gives us useful tools for teaching the imbrications of the global and the local in our pedagogical enterprises, which include the national, the postnational and the intranational as conduits for acknowledging these wider networks of relations.
Patchwork Selves and Modernity
The concept of "the West" as it is used in postcolonial theory [...] has no coherent or credible referent. It is an ideological category masquerading as a geographic one, just as — in the context of modern Orientalist discourse — "Islam" is an ideological category masquerading as a religious one. (Lazarus 2002, 44)
Considerations of who counts as European often slide into questions of "whiteness," and critiquing "whiteness" has loomed large over the past few years in North America and, increasingly and differently, in the settler colonies. One of the problems has been that whiteness studies have to some degree contributed to reifying, rather than disaggregating, concepts of the "Western subject" and of what constitutes European/Western so-called civilization. Attempting to dislodge the apparently "universal epistemological power" of whiteness(Wiegman 1999, 150) benefits from scrutinizing those terms traditionally used to describe the supposed contributions of European/Western "civilization": cosmopolitanism, rationalism, universalism and so forth. Within this cluster, "cosmopolitanism" has been redeployed by those grappling with the rise of ethnic absolutism and the hardening of nationalisms where cosmopolitanism presents a way to rethink globalization in terms of intranational and postnational relations. Critical cosmopolitanism is being used to reconfigure relationships between nationalisms and globalization and to counter the rise of various forms of fundamentalism across the world (Appadurai 1996, 2001; Appiah 2006; Breckenridge et al. 2002; Cheah and Robbins; Derrida 2002; Gilroy 2004, 2005). In the past, terms such as multiculturalism were used to track the complex dimensions of cultural differences, but, in general, because multiculturalism has become associated for too long with state management of difference, other terms were sought and cosmopolitanism has emerged as a way to set up new paradigms to counter the bleakness often associated with globalization. One thinks, for example, of Ulrich Beck's "Cosmopolitan Manifesto" (1998). In the words of Helen Gilbert and Jacqueline Lo, "new cosmopolitanism, as an explanatory model of an ever-evolving global citizenship, needs to engage with the more performative, embodied conceptions of the term as it might apply to peoples, groups, cultures and practices" (2007, 12).
In the current global order, who would have predicted that familiar binaries would resurface with such a vengeance and that they would seek their origins in such constitutive old myths of East and West as Islam and Christianity? Accompanying these binaries are claims made on behalf of the "modern self" as having a privileged access to modernity that includes the moral high ground of being more civilized and more ethical, as disseminating "democracy," for example, by means of military crusades. This version of the "modern self" also includes the consolidation of "interiority," that is, of having an interior life (as distinct from a "premodern" self which is apparently all surface).
A compelling allegory of that "modern self" may be located several centuries ago: Dr. Frankenstein's nameless Creature, man-made out of recycled body parts provided by those who were not given the opportunity to will or sell their organs for those purposes. In the contemporary warfare of insults and counter-insults as to whether one identifies cultures as postcolonial, decolonized or neocolonial, this text bears the imprimatur of Gayatri Spivak's famous contention that it does not reproduce the axiomatics of imperialism and is not caught up in the reproduction of (European) female individualism (2003, 316). While much has been written about this text, I would like to trace the manner in which it addresses "europeanness" at the beginning of the nineteenth century. In what could be described as a posthuman quest for an authorized version of the human, we note that the Creature acquires language by eavesdropping on the refugee, Safie, the "sweet Arabian," who turns out indeed to be Turkish. The text that teaches the Creature and Safie about history and social relations is Volney's Ruins of Empire , a telling title catapulting us into the present moment that includes, in the Creature's summary, a series of racial stereotypes and culminates in "the discovery of the American hemisphere" where both he and she wept "over the fate of its original inhabitants" (Shelley 1969, 119). The Creature acquires language more quickly than Safie (who continues to have an accent since her learning takes root in not quite as virgin a territory as that of the Creature, that is, she already sprouts another language). As in the case of his predecessor Caliban, language generates ontological questions within the Creature: what am I? And hints of its own monstrosity and anomaly, "Was I then a monster?" (Shelley 1969, 120).
If James Whale's famous film of the 1930s figured the Creature as an allegory of the working-class poor during the Depression, it is as easy to see him now in his hovel adjacent to the De Laceys' cottage as an abjected subaltern excluded from full humanity, even though, according to textual conventions, he manages to speak in the first person. As for Safie, we learn her Christian Arabic mother taught her to seek "independence [...] forbidden to the female followers of Mahomet" (Shelley 1969, 124), and she escapes her stereotypically conceived orientalist despotic father by fleeing to generically European territory. Meanwhile, the Creature has learnt to be (or be a simulacrum of) the human — acquiring language and affect, but unable to parley this into reciprocity: he feels, he weeps, but no one weeps for him. He becomes completely alienated and disaffected and vows revenge on the species. The species can certainly be categorized as humanity, but is not necessarily exclusively European in the sense we would give it today.
This reading is designed to illustrate that "Europe" is most usefully grasped as a metaphor (Coronil 1996) in this text. Indeed, it takes some searching to figure out exactly where the events are meant to be taking place or in which language — the De Laceys speak French, for example, so this is the language the Creature learns, but it appears to be interchangeable with English, as the frame text of Capt. Walton writing to his sister in England makes clear. The difference in this instance is predominantly one of class in that the class inhabited by the author, Mary Shelley, was one where facility in French, German and Italian (and undoubtedly Latin) was assumed. In other words, the "modern self" of that period aspired to the condition of a cosmopolitan elite defined by its relatively effortless mobility. Arabs, as a generic term that included the Turks, was also clearly a rather fuzzy category. Safie's father is described as being imprisoned in Paris because "his religion and wealth, rather than the crime alleged against him, had been the cause of his condemnation" (Shelley 1969, 122). The reader is also told that "all Paris was indignant" at the imposition of this sentence. Nonetheless, the state pursues him and ruins the De Laceys for helping him escape. So today's ferociously escalating opposition coded as Christianity versus Islam is not necessarily recognizable here.
Citing the example of this early nineteenth-century text reveals the historical instability underpinning the "modern self" and helps emphasize that this concept has never been consistently rooted in a particular nation or language and rested in no fixed understanding of what constituted "europeanness." In the nineteenth century, a kind of provisional stability resided in class positioning, and this was accessible to "Arabs" also, as exemplified by Safie's wealthy father. However, the "modern self" that prevails at present involves incursions into what constitutes (non-) europeanness (as well as (non-) whiteness) and the ethical and historical legacies any of these entail. Tracing those histories includes consideration of attempts to frame cultural difference through a variety of terms ranging from multiculturalism to transculturalism and cosmopolitanism, the last underpinned by both orientalism and occidentalism. All could be described as subtended by a thematics of contamination that destabilizes all the categories mentioned, something that may be more clearly discerned when analyzed in those settler colonies that comprise the heart of former empires, the ineptly named new world where "hapa" and mixed-race multiple allegiances guide the auto-ethnographies of even Indigenous subjects. For example, I have argued that the field of whiteness studies is radically reorganized when Indigeneity is placed as the central signifying difference rather than the black–white relations constituted by African Americans (Gunew 2007). Like Safie and the Creature, the hapless original inhabitants of the Americas (Native Americans) return much more robustly to these discussions than as mere haunting presences. But how do terms such as European or Western acquire their meanings within specific histories of colonial settlement? Here it helps to touch on an earlier term: multiculturalism.
"European" as Floating Signifier in the Settler Colonies
The central argument in my previous book Haunted Nations (Gunew 2004) is that multiculturalism is a term that acquires very different meanings depending on the local and national contexts and histories within which it circulates. Much the same may be argued in relation to the meaning of "European."
In Australia, the immediate postwar migration was overwhelmingly European in the geographical sense, though it included many who originated from Eastern and Southern Europe rather than what was deemed to be the more desirable recruiting ground of Northern Europe. Indeed Europe-in-diaspora was far from the homogeneous entity so complacently cited in the ideology I encountered as I grew up. As I argued in Haunted Nations, the "Europeans" comprising my parents and others like them were displaced by a version of "Europe" that I was able to identify as British only many decades later, or, more accurately, as Anglo-Celtic because of a particular colonial history (including a class history) of migration to Australia. This appropriation resulted precisely in excluding what is usually designated as "continental Europe" with its proliferation of languages other than English.
In the 1970s, a state policy of multiculturalism appeared to make room for these other histories, cultures and languages that comprise a settler colony. Interestingly, at this juncture we also have the rise in Australia of an attention to Indigeneity. But this version of Indigeneity often amounted to a non-Indigenous struggle over who could claim the authority of autochthonous primordialism that functioned to shore up an entitlement to a particular version of nationalism. As Benedict Anderson (1983/1991) reminds us, nationalism is always imagined, and in these settler nations, ethnicities who rendered their ethnicity invisible and foundational dominated over those who were labeled "ethnics." Recognition that migratory diasporas have cut across many nation-state boundaries and that multicultural societies are an empirical reality is acknowledged in most parts of the world. But what set apart the multiculturalism of Australia and Canada as settler colonies was that in varying degrees, at least for a time, they incorporated multiculturalism in their descriptions and definitions of the nation. That rhetoric to some degree persuaded and convinced outsiders who did not see the embedding of this multiculturalism in localized meanings. At the same time, multiculturalism as designation was increasingly viewed with some suspicion as tarnished with a history of coming into being as a state apparatus designed to manage (in the sense of containing) varied demographics. My previous book explores some of the issues associated with the complex dynamics between postcolonialism and multiculturalism in Australia and Canada and shows them to be at odds with generalizations contained in contemporary analyses emanating, for example, from the United States. Indeed, it is clear, for example, that the ways in which the term European is invoked by some US critics hearkens back to and derives its substance from the US register of a white supremacist discourse marshaled against an African American history of slavery (Gordon and Newfield 1996, 86ff.). Broadly speaking, this is intimately tied to the different colonial histories of these settler colonies from that of the United States.
One way to clarify these differences is to consider the importance of Indigeneity. Vijay Mishra and Bob Hodge (1993) make an influential distinction between what they term "complicit and oppositional postcolonialisms" that arises out of debates concerning whether settler colonies such as Australia, New Zealand and Canada are ethically entitled to call themselves "postcolonial" given their continuing oppression of Indigenous peoples. Mishra and Hodge prefer to reserve the term postcolonial for the struggles of the Indigenous peoples in these countries who continue internal battles against the descendants of settler colonizers, as well as the migratory diasporas that came later . In contemporary debates on citizenship and whether Australia will become a republic severing itself from the British monarchy, the grounds on which these debates are conducted are charged with old histories referring back to a specific legacy of colonization. What has not perhaps been observed as readily is that Australian multiculturalism itself can be productively analyzed as an idiosyncratic manifestation of (rather than a departure from) this colonial history. While analysts outside Australia were persuaded that its description of itself as a multicultural nation was a move designed to erase the claims and histories of the Indigenous peoples (Povinelli 2002), one could also argue that recent events in relation to refugees and asylum seekers have revealed the fissures in this rhetoric and demonstrate that there never was any widespread or substantive commitment, even in the 1980s, to this rhetoric of multiculturalism. In Australian discourses, I would maintain, "European" continues to mean Anglo-Celtic .
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Post-Multicultural Writers as Neo-cosmopolitan Mediators by Sneja Gunew. Copyright © 2017 Sneja Gunew. Excerpted by permission of Wimbledon Publishing Company.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments; Introduction. The World at Home: Post- Multicultural; 1. Who Counts as Human within (European) Modernity?; 2. Vernacular Cosmopolitans; 3. The Serial Accommodations of Diaspora Writings; 4. Indigenous Cosmopolitanism: The Claims of Time; 5. The Cosmopolitanism in/ of Language: English Performativity; 6. Acoustic Cosmopolitanism: Echoes of Multilingualism; Conclusion. Back to the Future and the Immanent Cosmopolitanism of Post- Multicultural Writers; Notes; Bibliography; Name Index; General Index.
What People are Saying About This
“Sneja Gunew reads post-multicultural literatures to examine the lives of those who risk an escape across razor-wired borders or who live in conditions of colonial occupation: the neo-cosmopolitans. Her questions shatter the familiarity of global English and unsettle the complacency of those who read and think within its hallucinated universality.” —Margery Fee, Professor of English, University of British Columbia, Canada
“It is minoritarian authors in their marginalized status who put into crisis the major concepts of national culture and globalization: this incisive yet capacious argument about cosmopolitanism is pursued here through an astonishing range of writings, from the northern to the southern hemisphere. Sneja Gunew’s book is one with which all future transnational literary studies will have to reckon.” —Rey Chow, author of Not Like a Native Speaker: On Languaging as a Postcolonial Experience
“Sneja Gunew takes us on a compelling elliptical tour of neo-cosmopolitan writers who force attention on alternative understandings of spatialities and temporalities that are urgently needed. This book will be of interest to social and cultural theorists who refuse to accept the ‘anti-multicultural’ politics that reject any recognition of differences that matter.” —Anne-Marie Fortier, Professor, Sociology Department, Lancaster University, UK
“This brilliant book zooms into the lifeworlds that are made manifest in migrant literature and zooms out to survey the widest possible horizons for living with difference. Once again Sneja Gunew’s writing takes us to the frontiers of cultural theory and diasporic cultural production; this time with the concept of cosmopolitanism she shines a penetrating light on the emergent forms of identity and the complex entanglements that are shaping the world.” —Nikos Papastergiadis, Professor of Media and Communication, School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne, Australia
“Through insightful commentaries on marginal, indigenous, diasporic, migrant and refugee writings of world literature, Sneja Gunew, one of the finest readers of multicultural writing, makes the case that what was left out of multiculturalism was its cosmopolitanism, its ways of negotiating between national cultures and the planetary. This book is an exceptional corrective to the neglect of cosmopolitanism in theories of multicultural writing.” —Vijay Mishra, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Murdoch University, Australia
“This book offers a most timely reappraisal of (neo)cosmopolitanism, challenging existing theories with a new idea of the citizen of the world. Thoughtful and thought-provoking at once, Sneja Gunew’s exemplary readings of an astonishing array of literary texts make a powerful case for a more ethical engagement with global culture.” —Helga Ramsey-Kurz, A.o. Univ.-Prof., Department of English, University of Innsbruck, Austria
“Going ‘back to the future’ in order to reinsert the (neo-)cosmopolitan element that somehow went missing from multiculturalism when it was institutionalized in Canada and Australia, Sneja Gunew charts a new vision for world literature, at the same time speaking powerfully to the ethical challenges facing contemporary cultural politics.” —Wenche Ommundsen, Research Professor, School of the Arts, English and Media, University of Wollongong, Australia
“It is genuinely exciting to read this new book by one of the most important and incisive critics of Australian and Canadian literature today. Sneja Gunew brings her characteristically eloquent and erudite gaze to bear on the conceptual and practical schemas opened up by the frictions and overlappings of the domains of neo-cosmopolitan, post-multicultural and world literature. In the process she transforms these terms and the settler literatures to which she applies them. This book will become a necessary read for anyone working in the field.” —Brigitta Olubas, Associate Professor of English, School of the Arts and Media, University of New South Wales, Australia
“This is a dazzling book. In theory it presents a polemical intervention in debates about neo-cosmopolitanism in contemporary literary and cultural studies. In practice it puts this theory to work in a series of readings that invite us to read, teach and critique across the emerging expansive field of planetary literature. Generally critics do one or the other of these things, but here Sneja Gunew creates conversations about the diverse 'English' accents that animate contemporary literature and theory.” —Gillian Whitlock, Professor, School of Communication and Arts, University of Queensland, Australia
“Theoretically rigorous and compellingly personal, this is a comprehensive intervention in the interdisciplinary fields of mobility studies. Gunew’s rearticulation of an ‘acoustic cosmopolitanism’ is a particularly apt approach that reverberates across the many multilingual contexts of literary studies today.” —Françoise Lionnet, author of Le Su et l’incertain: Cosmopolitiques créoles de l’océan Indien/The Known and the Uncertain: Creole Cosmopolitics of the Indian Ocean and Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures, Comparative Literature, and African and African American Studies, Harvard University, USA