Abby Estillore

 December 11, 2009

Essay 1:  Postcolonial Studies And The Novel

Almost all of the literary texts I’ve read as an undergraduate and now as a graduate student were mostly novels inscribed in the canon called “The Classics” along with tidbits of poetry and various scholarly criticisms about these texts.  And throughout my undergraduate studies, reading and responding to a novel were the central focus of the Literature courses.  Literary Theory was my first and official introduction to stepping out of the texts.  It forced me to look at the novel as a genre that did not really have its so-called set of rules as opposed to poetry.  I have not yet heard of a work on, say, “Rules of the Novel.”  We dealt briefly on Bakhtin’s “Theories of the Novel,” and I wish that several more class discussions were devoted to it.  Even so, I did appreciate thematic discussions regarding Self and Other, gender, and race, to name a few, when it came to the colonial-postcolonial identity.

After having read the required readings for our class, I often wondered about Objective 2—how to theorize the novel as the defining genre of modernity, both for colonial and postcolonial cultures.  I admit that I took for granted the qualities that qualify a text as a novel because common knowledge tells us that a novel has an author, a narrator, and characters engaging in dialog with each other.  The keyword here was dialog, allowing conflicts to arise, themes and motifs to progress the narration, and a resolution to either reveal the overall “thesis” of the work and/or to leave us to our interpretations and insights.  The class discussed in extensive manner colonial and post-colonial themes surrounding our readings, but accepted the genre of the novel as something that enabled the workings of dialogs and narratives.     

According to the Postcolonial Studies at Emory Website (http://www.english.emory.edu/Bahri/Novel.html), “the representational power of the novel, its ability to give voice to a people in the assertion of their identity and their history, is of primary importance to postcolonial writers and scholars.”  Consequently, the novel provided the marginalized groups a voice with which they can identify and validate.  The heteroglossic quality of the novel allowed access to the diverse histories, social representations, and versions of “selves” to be in dialog with each other.  How best to represent and appropriate experiences of the colonized people depend on who authors the story, what language to express, and how to organize plot structure.  There is the issue of narrator (un)reliability and the plurality of meanings coming from differing points of view in the novel.  In reading the required novels in the course, not once did I think to question Marlowe’s tale in the Heart of Darkness or Jasmine’s grueling journey into America in Jasmine.  I trusted the narrators to tell me their version of the truth.  As a woman, I sympathized with Jasmine’s plight.  As a novice pupil in post-colonial studies, I yearned to know more about Marlowe’s journey into the jungles of Africa and what makes Africa the “Dark Continent.”  As a teen, much of what I knew about Africa came from Hollywood’s depiction of its jungle or desert landscape, uncivilized behaviors (primitivist and heathens), and as a safari, a place oriented toward animals and wildlife.  Much older now, I am well aware of stereotypes perpetuated on Africa through different forms of media, and I am more open-minded to doing research on my own in order to dispel close-minded and negative portrayals of its people.         

On writing, W. Somerset Maugham once said, “There are three rules for writing the novel.  Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”  With craft, creativity, and diligence, novel writing is something that writers learned how to write.  The novel has a less restricted form as opposed to poetry—written in lines, verses, rhymes, etc.  It gives voice to the voiceless so that a story may be told and validated.  In telling his or her tale, the teller gains authority over the text.  No single voice can contain the narration.  There are multiple points of view surrounding the narratives that give rise to plurality of meanings, interpretations, and insights.  For example, an unnamed narrator and Marlowe’s storytelling in Heart of Darkness are points of view that remain open for debate.  I remember a discussion in class about how the unnamed narrator retold Marlowe’s tale of his tale of going into the African jungle, of Kurtz, of the conversations he encountered in the journey.  We, as readers and audiences, are likened to listen and watch behind a two-way mirror.  The unnamed narrator’s version is refracted as the tale is told to us.  He authors Marlowe’s authoring of his journey into Africa and meeting Kurtz.  The natives are de-authorized; we learn from the narrator’s retelling of Marlowe’s observations and from Kurtz’s perspective.  The phrase “heart of darkness” is the term Marlowe uses to describe Africa, but this wouldn’t have been possible if the notion of Africa as “Dark Continent” did not exist.  There had to have been the idea that dark equaled inferior as well as savage and primitive.  Colonial-Postcolonial Studies can open up discussions about where and how these derogatory adjectives have stemmed.

In my midterm, I was intrigued by the Self-Other and had, for the most part, privileged the left side of the binary, Self/Other.  However, this course presented another argument of the intertextuality, exchange, dialog of two opposing things.  That to wish the other away was just as similar to perpetuating stereotypes over which was superior or inferior.  Instead, looking at the relationship of Self-Other as ideas in dialog with each other rather than wishing the other away, extended the colonial and postcolonial discussion to include social markers of race, gender, class.  This topic is still constantly in my mind as I try to “view” the heteroglossic nature of the novel from a “two-way window” of my initial reading and class discussion.  The in-between/boundary connected the Self-Other binary to reveal the need for each other to coexist and, perhaps, to balance competition (?).  After writing about this topic, it has prompted me to continue a research in this field especially when the oppressed and marginalized have to occupy the side of the Other as usual, as always, just because according to the dictates of patriarchy.

My first research posting was the result of the midterm topic on Self-Other.  I saw similarities of the idea of viewing, listening, speaking, and reading from the two-way window of my mind with film representation.  I saw how the male gaze applies to the way we view spectacle and spectator in film, how we control who/what gets our attention while viewing.  I wasn’t quite aware of film studies and theory until I read about literary works adapted into films.  The Self-Other dichotomy still continues to be an obvious topical argument for how a specific medium gets privileged over the other.  What are some of the organizing principles that create this act of privileging?  Identity formation?  Colonial attitude regarding those “different” from us, them?  Us vs. Them?  Color codes?  Gender?  The emergence of voice becomes a trope of power and authority for the voiceless.  Film representations of Other participate in perpetuating and dispelling stereotypical images in an effort to educate viewers, to expose racist attitudes, to undermine hegemonic structures that debilitate groups that are unlike us.  I will never look at movies the way I used to—merely a passive receiver of information.  Rather, I want to be an active participant who questions hierarchies and underlying assumptions and strive to find acceptable solutions to these issues that I can live with.

In regards to women’s position in patriarchal society, texts such as Jasmine and Lucy were the works that I found myself questioning the construction of a woman’s identity as a transnational migrant in the United States.  Since I am a transnational migrant myself, I can relate to some of their experiences especially in terms of identity formation.  Fitting in with the crowd, ideals of Western beauty vs. exoticism, language barriers, tradition vs. modernity – are some of the issues I still struggle with in my adult life.  As a younger person, I wasn’t concern about language barriers or tradition/modernity.  If I talked a certain way and someone didn’t agree, tough.  There are ways to do things and things I prefer to do my way.  In any case, ideals of Western beauty and exoticism were merely pictures of Hollywood and what America stood for me when I was in my teens.  With the media’s strong emphasis on ideals of women’s bodies and beauty, I was again intrigued to write my second research posting on the construction of beauty and exoticism. 

What defines a woman’s beauty and how this ties into exoticism is deeply rooted in the phallogocentric paradigms of what woman should be.  Furthermore, this topic made me wonder about the plight of the postcolonial woman dealing with not only her identity, but with the representation of her body.  In Jasmine, Jasmine evolved from one name to another through the men she encountered and had a relationship.  In the process of renaming, Jasmine’s identity was always in a constant blur as well as the stigmas that came with representation of being a postcolonial woman.  Western beauty is what?  Based on the lightness of her complexion?  Marilyn Monroe-sque figure of a woman?  Jasmine couldn’t fit into this image but the men in her life adored her.  This admiration stems from expressing the repressed desire to want something outside, the “charm of the unfamiliar.”  As a postcolonial woman, Jasmine came to be exoticized and even eroticized because of the “charm” she embodied. 

Throughout the class presentations, the Self-Other binary was a constant principle that delved further in our preconceived attitudes about “Us and Them,” men/women, race, social class, etc.  One particular discussion was regarding the tradition vs. modernity of intrinsic to a culture.  I have observed that the U.S. has the tendency to want to “intervene” where certain cultural practices do not align with their thinking or expectation.  The class argued both sides, but did not come to a universal solution.  Instead, the class occupied that liminal space, the in-between/boundary area where neither sides stayed or left.  The conversation would pick up from where it left and the dialog thus begins again.

To conclude, I want to quote from Karen Daniel’s first posting in the 2008 final exam.  “Who’s to say where to draw the line and when the negatives outweigh the positives?”  Rather than wishing one side away, it would be more of an enriching learning experience to have oppositions involved in a dialog, an exchange of thoughts and insights.  Colonial-Postcolonial Studies help to accomplish this goal.  It is here to stay.