Literature,Critique,and Empire Today

This essay tracks the career of postcolonial cosmopolitanism and its gendered embodiments using Santha Rama Rau’s Cold War novels, Remember the House (1956) and The Adventuress (1970). Rama Rau’s heroines, Indira Goray and Catalina Gomez, flirt with geopolitics of a post-war world that appears to offer them new freedoms. They flirt, too, with the possibilities of transnational affiliation and become schooled in very different experiences of “new womanhood” in the context of decolonization. What the heroines and the novels share is a preoccupation with America and Americans, who appear to hold the promise of a new, borderless future. The essay examines Rama Rau’s ambivalence about the virtues of the US as a Cold War superpower, registering some claims about the fate of the female postcolonial novelist in the process.

Anglophone poetry has played a central role not only in the development of a national literature in Singapore in the first few decades after independence, but also in the articulation of a kind of national consciousness, a rhetorical rehearsal for an emergent nationhood. Examining the works of poets Edwin Thumboo, Goh Poh Seng, Arthur Yap and Lee Tzu Pheng - the first four Anglophone winners of the Cultural Medallion for literature, the Singapore government’s highest cultural award - we see attempts to address nationhood not only in the thematic and stylistic projects of these poets, but also in the institutional support it receives from the government and the resonances between the poetic and official articulations of nationalism. Although this Anglophone and poetic nationalism (at some odds with the plebeian, carnivalesque and dialogical nationalism associated with novelistic narratives) clearly has its limits in a multilingual and multicultural new nation, it leaves an indelible impact on the early development of Anglophone literature and culture in Singapore.

In this article, Bessie Head’s A Question of Power (1974), Yvonne Vera’s The Stone Virgins (2002) and Unity Dow’s The Screaming of the Innocent (2003) are read as examples of texts in which women writers explore from within the minds and motives of fellow-African, male figures who perpetrate crimes and cruelties against women in their respective postcolonial societies. It is argued that, by doing so, these authors employ a strategy of both acknowledging (“owning”) and analysing the evils against which they simultaneously protest by their vivid portrayal of the harm done to women or girls by such men. Writing of this kind is seen as a form of social action through the authors’ employment of “illocutionary force” (Maria Pia Lara’s phrase). Following the introduction, the individual social setting and the texture of writing in each text is analysed in turn, while correspondences with the other two novels are briefly noted in the conclusion.

Jean Arasanayagam’s writing, arising from a unique confluence of what can be considered minoritized identities in Sri Lanka (Burgher and Tamil), provides critical insights into the ways in which a marginalized consciousness seeks to carve a niche for itself within an exclusive, majoritarian nationalist discourse. Such minority self-fashioning is often seen in terms of a paradigm of resistance that deconstructs the dominant or hegemonic national discourse and renders identity mobile and fluid. However, we argue that Arasanayagam’s writing, rather than being “post-national”, is heavily invested in the idea of national belonging. Through close readings of a selection of poems, drawn from her earliest published work to recent writing, we explore the ambiguities and contradictions arising out of Arasanayagam’s desire for a self-identity in what can be loosely termed a Sri Lankan national imaginary.

This essay argues that Dalit autobiographies must be treated as testimonio, atrocity narratives that document trauma and strategies of survival. Using Bama’s Karukku as a case-study, it explores the shift between the generic conventions of individual life-writing and collective biography in this text. It analyses the strategy of witnessing in Bama’s narrative, arguing that she functions as a witness to a community’s suffering, and calls upon readers to undertake “rhetorical listening” as secondary witnesses. This act of recording trauma and witnessing, the essay proposes, is one of subaltern agency.

In its preoccupation with the prospect of harm and its determination to avoid risk, what has been variously called our culture of fear, trauma, or warning presumes particular views about human beings, our future, and what we take to be the good life. Catherine Bush’s novel Minus Time provides an intriguing context in which to consider these views and the obsessions in which they are grounded. The novel’s main protagonist, Helen Urie, is a young woman consumed by anxiety and estranged from her family, the world, herself. While she imagines her astronaut mother, Barbara, suspended in space, caught in a state of pure isolation, Helen is suspended in time, unable to commit herself to an independent course in life. Bush masterfully conveys a sense of the pace and panic of modern existence and the unnerving effects these have on Helen, convincingly tracing Helen’s efforts to overcome her scepticism and discover new sources of enthusiasm and trust.

Mudrooroo’s vampire trilogy, The Undying, Underground and The Promised Land was published at the end of the last century amid an unrelenting public questioning of the author’s claim to Aboriginal heritage through a matrilineal link. The Gothic narratives feature a white female vampire named Amelia (an anagram of Lamiae), whose violent acts of penetration and (dis)possession act as metaphors for the colonial invasion of Australia by the British. The article reads the trilogy mainly through Barbara Creed’s theorization of the monstrous feminine and examines the ways in which Mudrooroo presents his post-conquest female vampire as castrating and all-consuming. It also argues that it is possible to see Mudrooroo’s female monster as a textual representation of the legendary soulless mother who would devour her own son to feed her sense of self and reality - with all the connotations of the author’s discredited claim to Aboriginal identity this implies.

This interview with South African author Damon Galgut examines responses to his Booker short-listed novel, The Good Doctor, and the effect that being short-listed for the award has had on his career. He discusses his twenty-five-year career, which, after a very early start at a young age, has been erratic. The author discusses his opinions on “the new South Africa”, and its challenge to South African fiction, post- apartheid and post-anti-apartheid. And he shares his thoughts on his love for, and ongoing relationship with, India.