Revisiting Resistance Literature—Writing in Juxtaposition

Boehmer, Elleke

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-90341-5_3

Elleke Boehmer²

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Abstract

Chapter 3, ‘Revisiting Resistance literature’, explores the different poetic and yet also postcolonial possibilities of resistance writing, as first laid down by Barbara Harlow in 1986, and looks in particular at the device of juxtaposition as a striking if subtle instance of structural and linguistic resistance, or of writing-becoming-resistant. The chapter begins by asking how postcolonial literary works might go about resistance now, thirty and more years on from the publication of Harlow’s Resistance Literature, and proceeds by discussing this work alongside two contrasting successor texts, the poststructuralist-inflected The Empire Writes Back (1989) by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, and Neil Lazarus’s later, materialist The Postcolonial Unconscious (2011). The second part of the chapter considers juxtaposition as a way of shaping new creative possibilities in both texts and readers. Juxtaposition in writing demands of the reader a constant bridging across and zigzagging back and forth, and hence entails an especially suggestive process in the postcolonial field. The chapter closes with two examples of writing-becoming-resistant: Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958), and Nelson Mandela’s contemplative life and reading on Robben Island in the 1960s and 70s.

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Notes

1.
David Damrosch, What Is World Literature? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), p. 300.
2.
J.M. Coetzee , Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 10.
3.
Barbara Harlow, Resistance Literature (London: Methuen, 1987). See also the review, Erin Hurt, ‘Resistance Literature’, E3W Review of Books 8 (Spring 2008). Accessed 30 January 2017.
4.
Harlow , Resistance Literature, p. 78. See also pp. 28–9.
5.
Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back (London: Routledge, 1989); Neil Lazarus, The Postcolonial Unconscious (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
6.
Pound’s poem reads:Verse
Verse The apparition of these faces in the crowd: Petals on a wet, black bough.
Ezra Pound, ‘In a Station of the Metro’, Lustra of Ezra Pound with Earlier Poems (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1917), p. 50.
The single impression of a crowd in the Metro station is famously evoked for the reader through the juxtaposition of two very different images in unlikely yet evocative and meaningful combination—the crowd, and blossom glistening on a bough, as in a Japanese painting.
7.
Warsan Shire, ‘In Love and In War’, Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth (London: Flipped Eye Publishing, 2011), p. 34.
8.
On resistance conceived as a process of ‘stepping back’, in Johan Galtung’s formulation, see also Elleke Boehmer and Dominic Davies, ‘Literature, Planning and Infrastructure: Investigating the Southern City through Postcolonial Texts’, JPW 51.4 (2015): 395–409; and the discussion about protest and related poetry in chapter 8, the concluding chapter to this book.
9.
In relevance theory, these would be cast as its ‘implicatures’. See Terence Cave, Thinking with Literature: Towards a Cognitive Criticism (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). See also chapter 1 in this book.
10.
Franco Moretti, Distant Reading (London: Verso, 2013), pp. 38–40. For Moretti , nonsynchronism encodes difference.
11.
With the term otherwise I am activating connotations of contrariness and waywardness, as in behaving ‘otherwise’.
12.
See Elleke Boehmer and Alex Tickell, ‘The 1990s: An Increasingly Postcolonial Decade’, Journal of Commonwealth Literature 50 (2015): 325–52.
13.
Edward Said, Orientalism (New York and London: Pantheon Books, 1978); Culture and Imperialism (London: Cape, 1993).
14.
Harlow , Resistance Literature, p. xvii.
15.
Harlow , Resistance Literature, p. 12.
16.
Harlow , Resistance Literature, p. 16.
17.
Benita Parry, ‘Reconciliation and Remembrance’, in Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist Critique (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 185.
18.
Harlow , Resistance Literature, p. xix.
19.
Parry , ‘Beginnings, Affiliations, Disavowals’, Postcolonial Studies, pp. 4–9.
20.
Lazarus , The Postcolonial Unconscious, p. 35. Not insignificantly, Lazarus’s debut monograph on the Ghanaian writer Ayi Kwei Armah was entitled Resistance in Postcolonial African Fiction (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1990).
21.
Though Lazarus’s introduction infers a broad front of ‘pomo-postcolonialist’ critics and commentators he does not enumerate who Bhabha’s ‘unilateralist’ proponents might be (The Postcolonial Unconscious, pp. 12, 15, 21). However, from Lazarus’s footnotes and other of his commentaries, we can construe that this opposition includes critics like Dipesh Chakrabarty, Leela Gandhi, Ania Loomba, Sangeeta Ray, and Robert Young (p. 186).
22.
Homi K. Bhabha, ‘The Postcolonial and Postmodern: The Question of Agency’, in The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 175.
23.
Lazarus , The Postcolonial Unconscious, p. 22.
24.
Lazarus , The Postcolonial Unconscious, p. 35.
25.
Lazarus , The Postcolonial Unconscious, p. 19.
26.
Lazarus , The Postcolonial Unconscious, p. 35.
27.
Lazarus , The Postcolonial Unconscious, p. 18.
28.
Lazarus , The Postcolonial Unconscious, p. 17.
29.
Lazarus , The Postcolonial Unconscious, pp. 19, 22.
30.
Robert J.C. Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001); and Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). The quotation is from Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction, p. 4.
31.
Graham Huggan, The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
32.
Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), p. 303.
33.
Parry , ‘Reconciliation and Remembrance’, p. 9.
34.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (London: Heinemann Educational, 1986); Graham Huggan, Interdisciplinary Measures: Literature and the Future of Postcolonial Studies (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008), p. 13.
35.
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1965), p. 36; Parry , ‘Beginnings’, Postcolonial Studies, p. 10.
36.
Ato Quayson, Calibrations: Reading for the Social (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003).
37.
As Parry , ‘Resistance Theory/Theorizing Resistance’, Postcolonial Studies, p. 39, reminds us. Parry is referring to Hall’s essays ‘New Ethnicities’, ‘Minimal Selves’, and ‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora’, published in 1988, 1987 and 1990, respectively.
38.
Derek Attridge, The Singularity of Literature (London: Routledge, 2004). We will again consider Attridge’s concept of literary singularity in chapter 8.
39.
Nicholas Harrison, Postcolonial Criticism: History, Theory, and the Work of Fiction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003).
40.
J.M. Coetzee , ‘The Novel Today’, Upstream 6 (1988): 2–5.
41.
Flora Nwapa, Efuru (London: Heinemann, 1966); Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Purple Hibiscus (Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, 2003).
42.
Ahdaf Soueif, ‘Reflect and Resist’, Guardian Review (13 June 2009): 18.
43.
On ‘zigzagging’ as a mode of reading choreographed by juxtaposition, see my Indian Arrivals, 1870–1915: Networks of British Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), chapter 5 in particular.
44.
Frank Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), p. 2; Dinah Birch, ‘Plasticity’, Times Literary Supplement 5, Issue 5575 (2010): 11.
45.
J.M. Coetzee , Disgrace (London: Secker & Warburg, 1999); Gayatri Spivak, ‘Ethics and Politics in Tagore, Coetzee , and Certain Scenes of Teaching’, Diacritics 32.3–4 (December 2004): 18.
46.
Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2015), pp. 3 and 6–11 in particular.
47.
Paul Gilroy, After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Nature? (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 77, 45, 42.
48.
Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘Belatedness as Possibility: Subaltern Histories, Once More’, in The Indian Postcolonial: A Critical Reader, eds. Elleke Boehmer and Rosinka Chaudhuri (London: Routledge, 2011), pp. 163–76.
49.
Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (London: Heinemann, 1958). My readings here and in chapter 6 draw on the later 2001 Penguin Classics edition of the novel, as reflected in Works Cited. On the subject of going between, we might also consider how novels about the colonial incursion and subsequent disruption, like Things Fall Apart, but also Tayeb Salih’s slightly later Season of Migration to the North (first published in Arabic in 1967), both discussed again in later chapters, have been taken up in other postcolonial contexts suffering different yet related forms of cultural displacement. See Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North, trans. Denys Johnson-Davies (1969; London: Heinemann, 2003).
50.
Achebe , Things Fall Apart, pp. 70–80.
51.
Achebe , Things Fall Apart, p. 130, inter alia.
52.
See, for example, Anthony Sampson, Mandela: The Authorised Biography (London: HarperCollins, 1990), pp. 542–5, 556–8; Elleke Boehmer, Nelson Mandela: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 178–81.
53.
See Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom (London: Little, Brown, 1994), pp. 540, 556–8, 582–5; Sampson, Mandela, pp. 286, 329.
54.
Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, p. 585.
55.
The French philosopher, Jacques Derrida, memorably evoked Mandela’s invocation of the pure spirit of the law in a 1986 essay. Appealing over the heads of his judges, representatives of a debased law, Derrida noted that Mandela stood for a higher justice. ‘[Setting] himself against the code within the code’, he became the ultimate expression of the rationalist legal traditions associated with the Enlightenment. Jacques Derrida, ‘Admiration de Nelson Mandela, ou, Les lois de la reflexion’, in Pour Nelson Mandela (Paris: Gallimard, 1986).
56.
Mandela in Long Walk to Freedom, p. 558, writes about keeping his legal skills ‘sharp’ by giving legal advice in prison.
57.
J.M. Coetzee and Arabella Kurtz, The Good Story: Exchanges on Truth, Fiction, and Psychotherapy (London: Harvill Secker, 2015), pp. 133–5.
58.
See Elleke Boehmer, ‘Madiba Magic: Nelson Mandela’s Charisma’, Political Leadership, Nations and Charisma, eds. Margit Wunsch and Vivian Ibrahim (London: Routledge, 2012), pp. 161–70, and ‘Postcolonial Terrorist: The Case of Nelson Mandela’, Parallax 37 (2005): 46–55.

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Elleke Boehmer

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Boehmer, E. (2018). Revisiting Resistance Literature—Writing in Juxtaposition. In: Postcolonial Poetics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90341-5_3

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90341-5_3
Published: 28 June 2018
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