Postcolonial Melting Pot - Book Report/Review Example

Running Head: POSTCOLONIAL MELTING POT Postcolonial Melting Pot [The [The of the Postcolonial Melting Pot In The Buddha of Suburbia, the space of performance, shifting from one margin to another, repeatedly destabilises the controlling narratives that define ideas of centre. Unsurprisingly, most commentators have tended to see Kureishi's sympathies as lying with the underdog. But such is the indeterminate subjectivity of both films-the contradictoriness of their characters, their unresolved ethical dilemmas, their wryly tragicomic representation of conflicted histories and divided allegiances-that they end up striking an ironic attitude to their own radicalism. Kureishi's approach questions the alleged righteousness of rioting and is less confident about its capacity to facilitate and constitute popular revolt. To a large extent the differences in attitudes between Johnson's dub poetry and Kureishi's film are both cultural and geographical. Whereas Johnson's teenage years in Brixton exposed him to the cruel realities of London's racism, Kureishi's suburban upbringing kept many of the problems of the city at bay. (Krishnaswamy, 1995, 125-46) Kureishi's visions of London seem more akin to those of the migrants of the 1950s rather than their children. Kureishi spent his childhood in Bromley, Kent, a suburb to the southeast of London, often experiencing discrimination and hostility as someone perceived to be of 'mixed race'. He did not grow up like Johnson as part of a wider black community radicalized by its experiences of racism. Lonely in the suburbs and often discriminated against, Kureishi has remarked that his early life left him frustrated and stimulated the longing for the perceived excitements of Central London, marked by the threshold of the River Thames: for us the important place, really, was the river. And when you got on the train and you crossed the river, at that moment there was an incredible sense that you were entering another kind of world. And being in the suburbs, we could get to London quite easily on the train - about fifteen or twenty minutes - but it was a big jump And so, for me, London became a kind of inferno of pleasure and madness. (MacCabe 1999:37) This inferno is very different from the apocalyptic urbanscapes of Johnson's dub poetry. It is a visitor's view of London, part fantastical, part compensatory for the stasis and gloom of the suburbs. The popular creative endeavours of London's youth are imaged as the source of this enticing Promethean 'inferno of pleasure and madness'. As Karim Amir puts it in Kureishi's first novel, The Buddha of Suburbia (1990), which is significantly cleaved in two sections titled 'In the Suburbs' and 'In the City': There was a sound that London had. It was, I'm afraid, people in Hyde Park playing bongos with their hands; there was also the keyboard on the Doors's 'Light My Fire'. There were kids dressed in velvet cloaks who lived free lives; there were thousands of black people everywhere, so wouldn't feel exposed; there were bookshops with racks of magazines printed without capital letters or bourgeois disturbance of full stops; there were shops selling all the records you could desire; there were parties where girls and boys you didn't know took you upstairs and fucked you; there were all the drugs you could use. (1990:121) The alleged freedom, multiracial tolerance, cultural novelty, sexual licence and narcotic adventurousness of the city find musical expression in the bongos of Hyde Park and, significantly, in the music of The Doors. Indeed, in citing their song, 'Light My Fire', the passage emphasizes London's popular-cultural Promethean possibilities in sexual terms as a form of 'longing'. This also reminds us that some of Kureishi's most important means for expressing the city's subversive agency include sexuality and youth, deemed key elements of that inferno of pleasure and madness. The increasing body of work emerging from an intersection of postcolonial and queer theory suggests, however, that performativity may yet become a central concept for the understanding both of colonial strategies of physical oppression/regimentation and postcolonial identity formation. (Clifford, 1986, 98-121) The Buddha of Suburbia, set mostly in London and its dreary south-eastern suburbs, is suffused with the decadent atmosphere of post-emancipated 1970s Britain. Kureishi captures very well the contradictions of the decade: its often caustic combinations of conservative prudery and newfound sexual permissiveness; of inbred racism and self-congratulatory multicultural openness; of residual belief in the nurturing role of the traditional family and increased awareness of the anarchically hedonistic pleasures of individual experimentation. London seems merely staid. In this sense, Kureishi's novel fails to clear a space for its nominally transgressive energies, arguably falling back instead on a reinscription of the manufactured cultural hierarchies, dictated largely by the fashions of the moment, that its ebullient performances of queer identity-sexual, ethnic, socio-political, national-had done their best to demystify, expose to ridicule and undo. Perhaps it is appropriate, then, that Karim's last role is in a shoddy, if financially viable, British soap opera; for in his acting career to date, he has been nothing if not a prisoner to repetition. But then again, as his brother, who is the first to congratulate him, tells him in what might well pass for the novel's ambivalent motto, 'We can't pretend we're some kind of shitted-on oppressed people. Let's just make the best of ourselves' (Kureishi 1990:268). And maybe Karim, always the performer, will. Among postcolonial literature produced by non British writers, the utopian visions of a hybridized and multicultural London to be found in the fiction of Colin MacInnes draw upon singing and dancing which were bringing old and new Londoners together in the 1950s influenced by Caribbean calypso, American pop, African music and jazz. In the energies, encounters and social relations subsequently suggested, each writer found the inspiration for daring, hopeful projections of London where the city's divisive architecture of power was effectively contested. (Butler 1990:25) The difficulties faced by newcomers to London in securing decent accommodation and employment have been well documented and the resultant picture is often gloomy, with their efforts often thwarted by racism and prejudice on the part of landlords and employers. Several postcolonial writers bear witness to the racism, violence and torment they and others experienced during the decade, and offer a bleak, sombre view of the city that demythologizes the colonial myth of London as the heart of a welcoming site of opportunity and fulfilment for those arriving from the colonies. Yet despite the cruelty of urban life experienced by newcomers, London is also daringly imagined as making possible a utopian social blueprint where the prejudices and hostilities encountered on the street might be conquered. At the heart of such utopian visions - which appear in postcolonial London writing of the decade but are rarely acknowledged - resides the festive spirit of popular cultural life considered to facilitate alternative forms of contact beyond divisive social categorization. The literature produced during 1950s turn frequently to calypso for the resources which influence a vision of London as something other than the terrifying experience of objectification, economic hardship, racism and loneliness. In his novels City of Spades (1957) and Absolute Beginners (1959), Colin MacInnes, an enthusiast of music hall, pop songs and teenagers, offers visions of an inclusive, cosmopolitan London built upon the emergent popular cultural activities of the city's African and Caribbean newcomers, yet threatened by economic hardship, police hostility and - in Absolute Beginners - race riot. Each writer is engaged in a double activity of presenting London as both 'place' and 'space': bearing witness to forms of urban authority which attempt to secure London's newcomers in a certain mapping of the city, but also prizing the agency of those whose determined attempts to open new spaces in London expose the city's plasticity and deliver it up to the democratizing possibilities of spatial creolization. Yet there are important differences. Whereas Selvon's visions of London stem from an ultimately sympathetic and knowledgeable care for the Caribbean folk in London, MacInnes's work, despite its anti-racist aspirations, struggles initially to overcome a series of problematic and objectifying representations of black peoples in London. (Lazarus, 1999, 56-60) Only in the closing paragraphs of his masterpiece, Absolute Beginners, does a potentially progressive popular cultural vision seem to emerge. MacInnes was, of course, a very different figure from Selvon. He had arrived in London at an earlier moment and as a consequence of a very different history. Whereas Selvon wrote from within the communities he depicted and attempted to mobilize the language of the folk which was also his own, MacInnes's visions of London were voiced from a position of displacement from both the language and the people about whom he wrote - African and Caribbean newcomers, London's affluent and energetic youth. (Clayton, 2003, 119-23) In a parallel fashion, however, MacInnes discovered in popular cultural activity in post-war London the potential for envisaging social change in the city, and he too dared to project utopian visions of London as a way of contesting prejudice and violence. He frequently celebrated London as a repository of dreams and applauded the city's seeming malleability: Considered purely as a creation of man, London is a largely shameful shambles; considered as a place in which men may freely dream, it is one of the happiest cities in the world. To give shape to this poetic mess - to form, in his mind's eye, the private city of his own imagination - each Londoner can create, in his thoughts, a city entirely his own. (MacInnes, 1962: xviii) MacInnes's remark is ostensibly a comment about the uncoordinated architecture of London which makes certain places, such as Trafalgar Square, seem 'higgledy-piggledy' and guilty of 'spiritual confusion' (xviii). Spectators must make what they will of London's diversity and muddle. But it also describes a creative process which is at the heart of his London novels, especially City of Spades and Absolute Beginners. In MacInnes's London fiction, inflexible and officious attitudes are countered with a new vitality, derived almost entirely from the popular cultural activities of migrants and the young. The battles which ensue, frequently between authority and youth, reveal MacInnes's London to be a contested space of conflict and creativity. (Larsen, 1995, 1-19) The popular cultural activities of music and dancing were suggestive to MacInnes as potentially composing a new London where racial prejudice, often supported by state authority, might be vanquished. (Moore, 1997, 12-15) He was particularly inspired by the American pop music and jazz that he encountered in places such as the Paramount and the bars and clubs of Soho. Youth offered a subterranean, sub cultural vitality which cheerfully rejected the officious world of adult authority. In the late 1950s MacInnes was one of its most important advocates. MacInnes praised those willing to step outside their immediate social circle and write about the lives of others. This involved writers eschewing detached 'research' and willingly changing their lifestyles: 'The writer of one group who aspires to describe another in fiction has thus to assimilate himself somehow to it by hazard or, more perilously, intention' (MacInnes, 1979:226). MacInnes was excited by the changes he saw in London after the war and lived, sometimes perilously, among its new peoples, patronizing its liveliest cosmopolitan spaces. (Wachinger, 2002, 31-33) He was no stranger to the Paramount, upon which he based the Cosmopolitan club in City of Spades, and also frequented the Mangrove Restaurant which became a cause clbre in 1969. One of the anonymous interviewees cited in Notting Hill in the Sixties recalls MacInnes's visits to the Notting Hill restaurant Fiesta One, which opened on the corner of Ledbury Road and Westbourne Park next door to a popular calypso club: MacInnes's enthusiasm for the vibrant new London emerging in Soho and Notting Hill was inflected by his private predilections, especially his sexual attraction to black men, and this must be balanced against his public support of new migrant communities. The Trinidadian film-maker Horace Ov, a friend of MacInnes, regards him as 'the first white to speak honestly to blacks, as an equal' (Gould 1993:220). Yet there was another side to MacInnes's benign interest in black men which tended towards negrophilia, regarding them as either sexual objects or noble savages. It is unwise to read MacInnes's novels as little more than narrative vehicles for thinly veiled statements of his own opinions or for ideology at large. As we shall see, the subjective, hallucinatory elements of his fiction, although much overlooked, are vital. In his novels MacInnes both projects and interrogates his vision of the youthful cosmopolitan London he loved. His fiction facilitates an important degree of critical self-consciousness and self-questioning often missing in his essays. MacInnes's novels are much more subjective and artful than is often assumed, and engender an important third dimension unavailable in his non-fiction. For this reason they mediate an important analytical vision of postcolonial London in the late 1950s perceived from a position poised ambivalently inside and beyond the cultures and communal spaces they depict. (Nancy, 1095, 40-59) One of the genres to which the novel ceaselessly refers is eighteenth and nineteenth-century travel writing on the West Indies. The function of the travel genre in the ideological management of "race" and empire has been effectively demonstrated by several critics. The title Voyage in the Dark is suggestive of the "voyages," journals, "eyewitness accounts," "histories," and letters of eighteenth-century European writing on the West Indies. It can be read as a rcit de voyage from the periphery to the centre. The Other voyages into the dark centre of the Self and returns the gaze. Percy Adams observes that "the story with a naive but astute foreign observer was one of the most popular fictional forms of the eighteenth century" (Naipaul, 1990, 54-60). Anna, who is "naive but astute," always already the Other, remains outside of the English culture in which she is a stranger. Like the European texts and narrators, who assumed their own transparency, Anna's text appears straightforward and innocent. If "race," that is, blackness, is contagious and mobile, the borders must be firmly guarded. This is achieved through legal, social, and discursive institutions that indissolubly link property to propriety and preach a system of decorum inseparable from the ideological construction of "race" and class. For Hester, the Englishwoman, who received most of the money from her husband's West Indian estate, Anna is a nigger because of a wide and slippery range of attributes: her "unfortunate propensities", her West Indian accent, her proximity to black people growing up in the West Indies, her coloured relatives, and her lack of financial security. Hester's discourse incorporates the contamination of the West Indian Creoles due to their proximity and sexual interaction with black people, "miscegenation," the superiority of the English over the Creole, and the maintenance of discursive boundaries to counter or nullify biological connections. (D'Costa, 1996, 390-404) Through the use of reverse discourse, the Rhys text probes the mystification of class divisions, which is central to the imperializing project's construction of the English domestic subject over and against the peripheral Other. The narrator says: "The ones without any money, the ones with beastly lives. Perhaps I am going to be one of the ones with beastly lives. They swarm like woodlice when you push a stick into a woodlice-nest at home. And their faces are the colour of woodlice" (Rhys, 1982, 26). The narrative portrayal of poor white people as repulsive West Indian insects rewrites the textual production and containment of the black Other as animalistic and inhuman in precursory European texts.( (Low, 2002, 21-38; Berne, 1991, 20) In Voyage in the Dark, the protagonist returns to the West Indies through death. In their dying, the Creole self is evacuated into a black collectivity in the form of a carnival of rebellion. In the original ending of Voyage in the Dark, blackness is simultaneously figured as collective enunciation and as a rewriting/recuperation of Zola's diseased heroine. The Creole's return to the West Indies can only is imagined through writing as a form of discursive self-destruction, as death. This may indicate Rhys's awareness that the logic of the Creole mode of subjectivity, dependent as it is upon the structures and ideology of European colonialism and imperialism, becomes unravelled in a postcolonial Caribbean. Such a subject cannot any longer exist. The white West Indian, to remain alive, must negotiate a new relationship in terms of the socio-political structures in place in the West Indies. References Berne Suzanne. Review of Jean Rhys' Life and Work, by Carole Angier. New York Times Book Review, 30 June 1991, 20. Butler, J. (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York: Routledge. Clayton, D. and Gregory, D. (eds) (2003) Colonialism, Post colonialism and the Production of Space, Oxford: Blackwell. 119-23 Clifford, J. (1986) 'On Ethnographic Allegory', in J. Clifford and G. Marcus (eds), Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 98-121. D'Costa Jean. "Jean Rhys 1890-1979." In Fifty Caribbean Writers, edited by Daryl Dance, 390-404. New York: Greenwood Press, 1986. Gould, T. (1993) [1983] Inside Outsider: The Life and Times of Colin MacInnes, London: Alison and Busby. Krishnaswamy, R. (1995) 'Mythologies of Migrancy: Post colonialism, Postmodernism and the Politics of (Dis)location', Ariel 26, 1:125-46. Kureishi, H.(1990) The Buddha of Suburbia, London: Faber & Faber. Larsen, N. (1995) 'DetermiNation: Post colonialism, Post structuralism, and the Problem of Ideology', Disposition 20, 47:1-19. Lazarus, N. (1999) Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the Postcolonial World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 56-60 Low, G. (2002) '"Finding the centre" Publishing Commonwealth writing in London: the case of anglophone Caribbean writing 1950-1965', Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 37.2, 21-38. MacCabe, C. (1999) 'Interview: Hanif Kureishi on London', Critical Quarterly, 41.3, 37-56. MacInnes, C. (1962) London: City of Any Dream, London: Thames and Hudson. MacInnes, C.(1969) Visions of London: City of Spades, Absolute Beginners, Mr Love and Justice, with an introduction by Francis Wyndham, London: MacGibbon and Kee. MacInnes, C.(1992) [1959] Absolute Beginners, London: Allison and Busby. MacInnes, C.(1993) [1957] City of Spades, London: Allison and Busby. MacInnes, C.(1999) 'London in Hanif Kureishi's films: Hanif Kureishi in interview with Bart Moore-Gilbert', Kunapipi, 21.2, 5-14. Moore-Gilbert, B. (1997) Postcolonial Theory: Contexts, Practices, Politics, London and New York: Verso. 12-15 Naipaul V. S. "Without a Dog's Chance." In Critical Perspectives on Jean Rhys, edited by Pierrette Frickey, 54-66. Washington, D.C.: Three Continents, 1990. Nancy Hemond Brown, "Jean Rhys and Voyage in the Dark." London Magazine, 25 April 1985, 40-59. Rhys Jean. Voyage in the Dark. New York: W. W. Norton, 1982. Wachinger, T. (2000) 'Trapped in Between. Postcolonial Englishness and the Commodification of Otherness in British Narratives of Hybridity', Ph.D. dissertation, University of Munich. 31-33 Read More