University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

The world in the nation: Migration in contemporary anglophone and francophone fiction; 1980-2010

(USC Thesis Other)

The world in the nation: Migration in contemporary anglophone and francophone fiction; 1980-2010

PDF

Download a page range

Download transcript

Copy asset link

Request this asset

Transcript (if available)

Content THE WORLD IN THE NATION: MIGRATION IN CONTEMPORARY ANGLOPHONE AND FRANCOPHONE FICTION; 1980-2010 by Oana Sabo A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (COMPARATIVE LITERATURE) May 2011 Copyright 2011 Oana Sabo ii Table of Contents Abstract iii Introduction: Contemporary Migrant Fiction and the Ethics of Form 1 Chapter 1: Marketing British Multiculturalism: Hanif Kureishi‘s and Zadie Smith‘s Redefinitions of Britishness 25 Chapter 1.1 Hanif Kureishi and ―A New Way of Being British‖ 46 Chapter 1.2 Staging Ethnic Identity in The Buddha of Suburbia 51 Chapter 1.3 Zadie Smith and the Marketing of British Multiculturalism 62 Chapter 1.4 White Teeth: Britishness at the End of the Millennium 70 Chapter 2: South-Asians in America: Meena Alexander‘s and Kiran Desai‘s Cosmopolitical Fictions 87 Chapter 2.1 Meena Alexander as a South-Asian Diasporic Writer 100 Chapter 2.2 Fault Lines: From Diasporic Dislocation to ―Claiming America‖ 109 Chapter 2.3 The Shock of Arrival and Ethnicity in America 117 Chapter 2.4 Kiran Desai and the South-Asian Diaspora 127 Chapter 2.5 The Messy Map Versus the Glorious Orb: The Inheritance of Loss 138 Chapter 3: A Central and Eastern European Francophonie: Milan Kundera and Andreï Makine as ―World Writers in French‖ 152 Chapter 3.1 Milan Kundera and the Ethics of the Novel 166 Chapter 3.2 La Lenteur and L’Identité: From National to Global Novels 177 Chapter 3.3 Andreï Makine and Literary Bilingualism 198 Chapter 3.4 Le Testament français: Between Nostalgia and Satire 209 Chapter 4: De-ethnicizing Migrant Literature in Québec: Régine Robin and Dany Laferrière‘s Fictions 224 Chapter 4.1 Régine Robin, an ―Allophone Writer from France‖ 233 Chapter 4.2 La Québécoite and Migrant Writing in Québec 238 Chapter 4.3 Dany Laferrière, an ―American‖ Writer 252 Chapter 4.4 Je suis un écrivain japonais and the Ethics of Labeling 260 Conclusion 266 Bibliography 274 iii Abstract This dissertation examines fictional works from the 1980s to the present by migrant and diasporic writers in Western Europe and North America. My project aims to make a significant intervention in postcolonial and world literature studies by exploring migrant authors‘ literary identities from the perspective of the ethics of reading. I employ ethics not as a philosophical, but rather as a literary category to refer to migrant writers who reject fixed literary labels. Because Hanif Kureishi, Zadie Smith, Kiran Desai, Milan Kundera and Dany Laferrière, among others, do not fit neatly into national literary traditions, but rather display multiple transnational affiliations, I ask: What does it mean for such authors to be viewed as ―national‖ in the context of recent theorizations of global literatures? Conversely, what happens when they are considered ―world‖ writers, as their texts are produced and circulated at both national and global levels? I argue that, because migrant authors struggle against rigid literary classifications, they propose a flexible conception of literary identity as poised between the national and the global. Using narrative strategies such as intertextuality and multilingualism and exploring the legacies of the British and French empires, they connect their works to other literary traditions, constructing a relational model of literature that blurs discrete literary classifications. This model illuminates Western European and North American colonial and neocolonial ties to South Asia, Africa, the Caribbean and Eastern Europe, highlighting the boundaries that power relations maintain. As counter-hegemonic texts, these works pose questions of ethical and political responsiveness and responsibility by placing readers and critics in empathetic subject positions and compelling them to make transnational connections. 1 Introduction Contemporary Migrant Fiction and the Ethics of Form What does it mean, today, to be a British, American, or French author? How should one classify a mixed-race writer who writes about ethnic minorities in England, such as Hanif Kureishi, but who is born in Britain? Or a South-Asian immigrant author in the United States, such as Kiran Desai, who wins a British literary award – the Man Booker Prize? Similarly, how does one categorize a Haitian-born author who shuttles between Montreal and Miami, and who writes about North America in French, as Dany Laferrière does? Or Milan Kundera, a Czech author who switches to French in his later career, and even publishes one of his French-language novels first in Spanish translation? This project examines such ―border-crossing‖ authors and works from the 1980s to the present that do not fit neatly into national literary categories, because they display multiple literary affiliations. As immigrant and diasporic writers in Western Europe and North America, these as well as other authors, such as Zadie Smith, Meena Alexander, Régine Robin, and Andreï Makine, mix several cultures and languages, and consciously draw on multiple literary traditions in their fictional texts. In this way, they compel readers and critics to view their works within a larger historical and literary context, rather than within distinct national literatures. Through the formal properties of their texts – including intertextual references, formal juxtapositions, irony, parody, and a postmodern fragmented style – these authors encourage cross-cultural and trans-historical connections, suggesting that nationality, ethnicity, and language-based classifications are inappropriate lenses for reading literature in an age of migration. All these immigrant 2 and diasporic authors unsettle literary taxonomies through their ethnic background, location, chosen literary language, and the themes of their books. Even though they do not entirely transcend the categories of national literature, they blur the boundaries between them. They disorient the conventions of cultural specificity and national literature by adding new experiences, such as the plight of transnational labor, colonial education in the Caribbean, or life under the Duvalier regime in Haiti, to narratives of British, American, French and Québécois culture, while also placing these experiences in countries other than the UK, the US, France, and Québec. In this way, contemporary immigrant and diasporic authors broaden conceptions of national literature, traditionally based on the nineteenth-century association between language and nation, and re-define national literary categories as multiethnic and multilingual formations. The title of the dissertation, ―The World in the Nation,‖ aims to capture migrant authors‘ crucial role in opening up national categories to global networks, in which they participate through fictional texts that circulate beyond their cultures of origin or countries of residence. This title also suggests that these authors‘ works blur the boundaries between ―the nation‖ and ―the world‖ or between local and global viewpoints and experiences, both emphasizing and destabilizing local viewpoints. On the one hand, their texts engage with the conventions of French, British, American and Québécois literatures and address directly these countries‘ colonial or hegemonic relations to other parts of the world. It matters that Hanif Kureishi is of Pakistani-British origin, and that he invokes British imperial history when he tries to carve out a space for newly emerging South-Asian voices in Britain in the 1970s. Or that 3 Dany Laferrière‘s awareness of Haiti‘s postcolonial connections to both France and the United States shapes his literary allegiance to Québec, a non-hegemonic space. In a similar way, the fact that Milan Kundera hails from a formerly Communist country, and that he is often classified as a Czech political dissident, informs his conception of literature as an autonomous space par excellence, that is, as a space where authors can give free rein to their imagination. In other words, these writers always speak from a situated position, and their localized literary identity, albeit plural, enables them to propose a conception of world literature that highlights power imbalances, heeds the voices of subalterns, and proclaims authors‘ freedom to cross cultural, national, and linguistic boundaries. On the other hand, immigrant authors also respond to the global networks of contemporary literature. Since the rise of postcolonial studies and literatures and of discourses on multiculturalism in the Global North in the 1980s, the ethnic identities and the writings of migrant intellectuals in the North American and Western European literary establishments have been highly celebrated and even commodified. 1 Immigrant and diasporic writers have increasingly found themselves toeing the line between complicity in a literary market that exoticizes alterity and far-off cultures, and contestation of the hegemonic histories and legacies of their countries of residence, including the classification patterns of writers originating from colonial peripheries. 1 For more information on the rise of postcolonial fiction as a cultural commodity, and the marketability of postcolonial self-consciousness to cosmopolitan readers see, in particular, the following two studies: Graham Huggan. The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins. London and New York: Routledge, 2001; and Sarah Brouillette. Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. 4 Furthermore, the 1980s also witnessed the emergence of migrant literature as a cultural commodity, as perhaps best exemplified by the works of Salman Rushdie. More recently, what one may call ―the rise of world literatures‖ in the North American academy and beyond reflects the increasing need to bring global perspectives to the theory and praxis of literature. I shall return to these points. This is just to underscore the fact that the authors of my literary corpus react to the changes taking place in the production, circulation, and reception of contemporary literature. In their texts, they engage critically with notions of authenticity and the roles of cultural representativity that immigrant and diasporic writers are often expected to take on, and struggle with narrow literary taxonomies, such as ―immigrant,‖ ―minority,‖ or ―national‖ writers, asking to be read within a global context. Collectively, they tell a story of blurring literary distinctions and mixing literary categories in an attempt to contest and move beyond identity politics. Because these authors move flexibly between local and global experiences and viewpoints, I ask a twofold question. What does it mean for these writers to be viewed as British, American, French, and Québécois authors in the context of recent theorizations of world literatures? Conversely, what happens when they are considered world writers, as their texts are produced and circulated at both national and global levels? I argue that, because immigrant and diasporic authors struggle against rigid literary classifications, they propose a fluid and flexible conception of literary identity as poised between the national and the global. By mining the gaps between discrete literary classifications and appealing to discrepant readers, these writers illuminate what is left out in a vision of 5 contemporary migrant literature as simply divided between ―national‖ and ―world‖ literary texts. Using narrative strategies such as intertextuality and multilingualism in their texts, and exploring the legacies of the British and French empires, they connect their works to other literary traditions. In this way, they construct a relational model of literature that blurs discrete literary classifications. This model illuminates Western European and North American colonial and neocolonial ties to South Asia, Africa, the Caribbean and Eastern Europe, highlighting the boundaries that hierarchical power relations erect and maintain. As counter-hegemonic texts, these works open up questions of ethical and political responsiveness and responsibility by placing readers in empathetic subject positions and compelling them to make transnational connections. And yet, feelings of empathy and transnational solidarity are not always enabled by these fictional texts. On the contrary, some works resort to postmodern narrative strategies such as irony, the multiplication of narrative frames, and the fragmentation of narrators‘ subjectivity in order to discourage mimetic readings. I find that the feelings of closeness or distance these texts encourage or prevent readers to have emerge as much from the content and style of these texts as from their genre. My chosen fictional works range from mimetic realist novels (such as those of Hanif Kureishi, Zadie Smith, Kiran Desai, and Andreï Makine) and postmodern experimental novels (such as Milan Kundera‘s and Régine Robin‘s) to (fictional) autobiographies (as illustrated by Meena Alexander‘s memoirs and Régine Robin‘s and Dany Laferrière‘s pseudo- autobiographies). In the case of postmodern narratives, the writers most often play with the boundary between author and narrator in order to suggest that the text is not meant to 6 be an authoritative and authentic reflection of the author‘s biography. Overall, through their choice of the novelistic genre, these writers suggest that its heteroglossic form enables them to draw on different literary traditions at length. Indeed, several of the authors I study are also theorists of the novel: Kundera and Robin have also written essays and book-length studies of the novel as a protean and even ethical form. 2 For me, the most salient aspect of writers‘ generic choice is that it allows them to construct a theory of affiliations to other authors and texts. Through numerous intertextual references to other literary traditions, these authors suggest that their fictional texts should be read in light of the transnational relationships their texts forge. Therefore, in my close analysis of these fictional texts, I highlight books‘ literary style, by which I mean the aesthetic strategies authors employ in order to intervene into the politics and ethics of labeling. What interests me in the texts I discuss are precisely the ways in which authors use formal strategies to create a set of affiliations which, in many ways, seeks to guide readers and critics in their interpretations. Whether through a tongue-in-cheek title and theme such as Kundera‘s Identity, a novel that is meant to escape easy categorization, or through juxtapositions of differently situated narratives in Kiran Desai‘s Inheritance of Loss, these fictional texts prompt readers to empathetically cross boundaries and establish transnational connections to other subjects and cultures, while they also deter them from 2 See, for example, Milan Kundera, L’Art du Roman. Paris: Gallimard, 1986; Les Testaments trahis. Paris: Gallimard-Jeunesse, 1995; Le Rideau: Essai en sept parties. Paris: Gallimard, 2005; Une Rencontre, Paris: Gallimard, 2009; and Régine Robin, Le Réalisme socialiste: une esthétique impossible (1986); Le Deuil de l’origine: une langue en trop, la langue en moins (1993); Le Roman mémoriel: de l’histoire à l’écriture du hors-lieu (1989). 7 reaching a level of intimacy that may verge on cultural appropriation. For example, in describing the predicament of a minority character as a victim of ethnic violence in White Teeth, Zadie Smith employs cinematic language in a humorous way, which diminishes the seriousness of the situation and the illusion of mimetic realism. But the opposite phenomenon is evident as well. Some writers give readers a sense of local color by inserting foreign, often italicized words in their texts, while also using strategies that attempt to diminish the effects of cultural distance. For instance, Czech or Hindi words are followed, in Milan Kundera‘s and Meena Alexander‘s texts, by an explanation of their meaning for their Western or international readers. Even when Régine Robin depicts the linguistic Babel that Montréal was in the 1980s, the cacophony of languages in her text is hardly unfamiliar to readers situated in multicultural societies like Canada. The proximity of migrant writers and their works to the Western European and North American literary traditions is thus due to the fact that they write in genres and styles that are considered ―Western.‖ They also use narrative strategies, such as postmodern self-reflexivity, that are not entirely subversive of hegemonic structures, as the latter is also a market-friendly style highly commended by Western critics. In this sense, migrant authors, who are often part of the intellectual elites of their countries of origin, are often accused of complicity in the literary market that rewards them for producing work that is, to some extent, culturally similar to their countries of residence. I take up this issue in my analysis of the writings of Central and Eastern-European authors in France, who blur literary distinctions because they are neither completely assimilated French authors not exotic enough to be deemed foreign writers. In an Anglophone 8 context, I also analyze the ways in which the privileged economic status of postcolonial authors is believed to diminish their critical or politically transformative potential. There is thus a tension between postcolonial authors‘ speaking on behalf of subalterns and their acquiring of symbolic and economic capital in the Global North. Two recent studies are helpful in understanding the co-optation of such migrant postcolonial intellectuals by a global literary market, and the imbrications between aesthetic practices and material histories in their literary works. Graham Huggan‘s The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (2001) is one of the pioneering attempts to theorize the fetishization of difference as a global cultural phenomenon that is integral to postcolonial studies. The Man Booker Prize, which is but one manifestation of this phenomenon, rewards former Commonwealth writers for their works‘ exotic appeal to Western audience. As Huggan put it, minority writers ―capitalized on [their] perceived marginality while helping to turn marginality itself into a valuable cultural commodity‖ (viii). Focusing on case studies of authors such as Chinua Achebe, V.S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, and Hanif Kureishi, among others, Huggan argues that postcolonial writers are not merely co-opted by a literary market that exoticizes their difference, but also critical of it by self-reflexively representing this phenomenon in their works (xi). Although he insists on authors‘ critique of exoticizing practices at work in the reception of their works in the Global North, Huggan does not acknowledge the extent to which self-reflexivity itself may be a narrative strategy that leads to writers‘ critical and commercial success. He also seems to doubt the subversive 9 potential of postcolonial writers‘ ―strategic exoticism‖ (xi), leaning instead towards their predominantly complicit stances. In her recent study of the material history of authorship, Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace (2007), Sarah Brouillette also regards today‘s literary culture as irreversibly commodified and takes the idea of postcolonial complicity in the literary market further by suggesting that postcolonial authors are ―profoundly complicit and compromised figures,‖ who construct their literary careers with respect to a specific political location (4). Brouillette argues that reading postcolonial literary texts in light of their authors‘ biographies enhances readers‘ textual interpretations. Focusing on the works and literary careers of Derek Walcott, J. M. Coetzee, Zulfikar Ghose, and Salman Rushdie, Brouillette shows how these authors participate in the construction of their literary identities, while at the same time displaying anxiety about the commodification of their works in a global literary marketplace, and about the political locations of their discrepant readerships. In response to poststructuralist theories of the death of the author, Brouillette resurrects the figure of the postcolonial author as an active and prominent participant in the global circulation and reception of his or her works, which s/he seeks to control through self-conscious literary strategies. I concur with Huggan‘s study of the global commodification of postcolonial fiction and with Brouillette‘s examination of postcolonial authors as attempting to wrest control from readers. However, while I agree that my chosen writers cannot be considered outside of a global literary marketplace, I also argue that they attempt to resist exoticizing readings of their works by eliciting ethical readings based on the 10 multiplication or unsettling of their texts‘ clear locations. Whereas Brouillette examines the ways in which postcolonial authors seek to control their critical reception in the country of their residence, I ask what happens when we read these texts with more than one location in mind. Even though she mentions, but does not examine extensively, the figure of the reader, she privileges the figure of the author and biographical readings of their works. While the global biographies of my selected authors no doubt play a significant part in their texts‘ construction of reader figures, I seek to shift the vector from the figure of the author to that of the reader, asking: who are the implied readers of fictional texts that cannot be related to a single location? I thus seek to highlight the author-reader connection in order to better examine the production and circulation of migrant literature at both local and global levels. *** Each chapter of my dissertation focuses on a different authorial positioning: ―Black-British‖ in the case of second-generation immigrant authors born in Britain of mixed-race parents, diasporic and ―cosmopolitical‖ South-Asian immigrant writers in the United States, ―Euro-Francophone‖ authors from Central-Eastern Europe in France, who are half-assimilated as white and culturally similar writers, and finally, ―nomadic‖ authors in Québec, who reject any association of literature with ethnicity or location. They all employ different literary strategies that encourage different modes of reading and willfully appeal to discrepant readerships. The first half of my project examines fictional texts that highlight readers‘ necessary awareness of the ways in which ethnically marked authors are commonly read. 11 Thus, in the first chapter, despite being British-born and writing within the tradition of English literature, Hanif Kureishi and Zadie Smith were hailed as ethnic minority writers or as exemplary of British multiculturalism. In their novels, they critique ethnic or multicultural labels by constructing figures of readers as consumers of exotic Pakistani and Indian cultures. The texts thus distinguish themselves by the audiences they would rather not have: exoticizing and essentializing readers, whom the works abundantly satirize. By shifting the novels‘ locations between England and India, Jamaica, and the United States, and drawing on the literary traditions of these particular countries, Kureishi‘s and Smith‘s novels warn readers against monolithic interpretations of their novels through the lenses of minority literature or the British multicultural novel, exposing reading practices that are linked to Britain‘s uneasiness in dealing with its social and demographic changes in the wake of postcolonial migration. The second chapter, which focuses on South-Asian American immigrant writers, examines the figure of the politically engaged or activist reader. As postcolonial authors who stress the material histories of immigrants and power inequalities in a neoliberal present, Meena Alexander and Kiran Desai aim to sensitize their readers to the plight of subaltern subjects. To this end, they explore the connections between aesthetics and politics. They address critically the legacy of British and American colonialism and imperialism, and encourage modes of reading that uncover power imbalances inherent in interconnected histories and cultures. The second half of the dissertation turns to reader figures constructed by Francophone literary texts. The third chapter addresses the works of Milan Kundera and Andreï Makine who, unlike their Anglophone counterparts, seem unconcerned with 12 politically transformative readings of their texts. Praising the beauties of the French language and culture, they revive a canonical corpus of French as well as European authors with whom they intentionally associate. Kundera‘s and Makine‘s affinities to their continental literary predecessors urge readers to adopt a ―supranational‖ perspective that situate these authors within a European literary tradition, rather than simply those of their home or host countries. The writers I examine in the last chapter, which focuses on Québec, push this beyond-the-nation reading lenses even further when they dismiss all ethnic, national, or other identity-based categories in favor of readings that view them as simply writers. Régine Robin and Dany Laferrière fashion themselves as literary nomads, whose style, themes, and global bibliographies cannot be attached to any particular location. Their texts construct the figure of the de-territorializing reader, who must acknowledge constant border-crossing as a necessary condition for contemporary migrant literature. Despite addressing different readerships, all the authors I consider in this study take issue with modes of reading that valorize identity politics, which are sanctioned by the contemporary celebrity and literary prize culture. They propose instead a more flexible conception of literary authorship and readership that takes into account the shifting locations of texts, authors, and readers. I argue that, in emphasizing a new model of contemporary British, American, French and Québécois literature that defines itself through its global affiliations, the authors I explore rewrite the literary histories of their home and host countries as well as the history of world literature. This is the extent of their interventions, which have clear political limitations, as all these writers, even if they narrate subaltern experiences in their 13 texts, are elite intellectuals who write from a position of privilege. In fact, when by means of literary style, authors explore the relationship between aesthetics and politics, the fact that they lend different weight to the two terms of the equation is what ostensibly distinguishes the two parts of my dissertation. This impression stems from my deliberately asymmetrical choice of texts and the theories that inform the two parts – Anglophone and Francophone, composed of two chapters each. In the first half of my study, postcolonial theory informs my discussion of Anglophone writers, who wrestle with the Euro-American colonial legacy, including critical expectations that immigrant and diasporic authors serve as authentic and authoritative representatives of their ethnic groups. In the second half, I focus first on Francophone authors who are not connected to France by historical ties, but by elective affinities. Other immigrant writers, by choosing to immigrate to Québec, eschew the issue of the French empire as well. In contrasting the two parts, I aim to underscore how power plays out differently in an Anglophone context, where literary texts focus on colonial memory and power inequalities, than in the specific Francophone context I examine, where authors‘ concerns seem to be primarily aesthetic, but where market imperatives are at stake, too. My overall argument is that literary identity is negotiated differently in the four bodies of writing I explore. Immigrant and diasporic authors in Britain and the United States grapple with ethnic markers, as exemplified by the taxonomies of Black-British, Indian-American, or South-Asian American literature, which these writers fit, but also exceed. France does not classify authors along axes of differentiation such as ethnicity, race, or literary generation, but attempts to culturally assimilate foreign writers – a task 14 Central and Eastern European authors find easier, due to their Europeanness. In the case of Québec, immigrant writers are semi-assimilated, as the term ―néo-Québécois,‖ which they find derogative, both incorporates them into Québécois literature and underscores the fact that they are later arrivals, who thus distinguish themselves from old-stock Québécois writers. Even though these four case studies differ in terms of the distinct positioning of their authors, they are connected by the themes of migration and diaspora. I have chosen Britain, the United States, France, and Québec because these are countries of immigration, whose different immigrant legislation shapes perceptions of particular ethnic groups and the culture they produce. At the same time, except for Québec, the three other countries I focus on represent colonial and neo-liberal powers, whose languages have attained global status. English is the lingua franca of global affairs, while French still has the reputation of being the language of diplomacy and culture. In choosing fictional works in two major world languages, I seek to highlight the global networks of contemporary literature. Both parts of my dissertation explore immigrant and minority productions in transnational contexts. The authors themselves self-reflexively construct multiple literary locations for themselves, associating themselves with numerous literary models from other literary traditions, thus blurring neat canonical distinctions. I privileged fictional works that, by mixing up different cultural traditions within a single literary text, and by participating in other literary traditions, seemed to be testing the boundaries of national literatures. They emphasize questions of comparison, that is, the fascinating relationship texts have with other authors and texts. For my comparative method, which establishes 15 horizontal links between four different immigrant corpuses within distinct nation-states, I am indebted to Françoise Lionnet‘s and Shu-Mei Shih‘s concept of ―minor transnationalism,‖ which they employ to refer to the cultural practices and networks of communication that minoritized cultures produce within and across national boundaries, and that exceed the parameters of the binary model of above-and-below (Minor Transnationalism 8). As they state, ―[t]he minority and the immigrant are constitutive of the national in its status as the object of interior exclusion‖ and also ―constitutive of the transnational … through its double engagement with their difference and sameness, exclusion and inclusion‖ (12-13). Indeed, the works I discuss participate not only in the national literatures of authors‘ home and host countries, but also in a heterogeneous body of literature that circulates beyond national contexts, which some critics define as world literature (Damrosch 4). I discuss Anglophone and Francophone fictional texts in relation to recent debates on world literature in American and French academic circles in an effort to revise dominant paradigms of world literature. I argue that a theorization of a world literature centered on immigrant narratives requires a critique, or a correction, of such paradigms, even as these narratives written in global languages and published in major cultural centers circulate more easily in a global literary marketplace. This critique is more immediately visible in the case of the Anglophone immigrant texts of my corpus. The term ―Anglophone‖ is a vexed one, as in the context of postcolonial studies it draws 16 attention to the study of the now outmoded term ―Commonwealth‖ literature. 3 Nonetheless, I use it to denote a heterogeneous category of English-language texts by authors who are aware of the status of English not only as a colonial, but also as a global language. My use of the term ―Francophone‖ 4 refers specifically to the attempt of the signers of the manifesto to redefine the francophonie movement by the 2007 manifesto for a world literature in French. It foregrounds the role of French as a global language (English is not the only global vernacular) and highlights fictional texts that are not typically considered Francophone: Central-Eastern European and Québécois texts. Again, the particular ―Anglophone‖ and ―Francophone‖ contexts shape conceptions of world literature in English and in French differently. In the first part of the dissertation, I focus on multicultural and postcolonial narratives in which the other is exoticized, appropriated, and commodified. The authors I study struggle against ethnic-based readings of their literary identities and works, revealing hidden agendas in reading practices, which are directly related to the cultural legacies of colonial histories in the Global North. Even if these diasporic and immigrant authors bring ―the world‖ into their fictional texts, showing Britain and America to be part of larger global networks, they attempt to rewrite British and American literature in a way that accounts for the histories and voices of gendered and racialized subjects. 3 For further critiques of the term ―Anglophone,‖ see Peter Hitchcock, ―Decolonizing (the) English.‖ South Atlantic Quarterly 100.3 (Summer 2001): 749-71. Although the term traditionally exemplifies literature in English produced outside of Britain, Hitchcock uses it to refer to those literary productions written within Britain, especially by immigrant, minority, and diasporic writers. 4 For a detailed argument about the changing concept of francophonie, see Muriel Barbéry et al. ―Pour une ‗littérature-monde‘ en français.‖ Le Monde. 16 March 2007. [2 November 2009] <http://www.etonnants- voyageurs.com/spip.php?article1574>. 17 Moreover, by writing critically about Britain and the United States in relation to their colonial and neoliberal projects in South-Asia and the Caribbean, these authors theorize their migrant narratives as a world literature that heeds the material histories of immigrant and diasporic groups and power inequalities within a late capitalist context. Their view of world literature thus differs from previous conceptions. Recent debates on world literature have underscored the transnational circuits of movement within which texts are produced, disseminated, and received. Scholars have thus conceptualized world literature through the emergence of generic patterns across cultures (Moretti 2000), through translations across geographical and linguistic borders (Damrosch 2003), or networks of symbolic capital in a world republic of letters (Casanova 2004). However, by understanding literature primarily through transnational circuits of movement and cultural exchange, world literature scholars overlook that which is less mobile, local, or national. The works of Kureishi, Smith, Alexander, and Desai foreground precisely the difficulties of border-crossing for some immigrant subjects, even though some of the formal properties the authors employ might associate their texts with fashionable poststructuralist theories. The second half of the study shifts to French-language fictional texts by immigrant writers in France and Québec, a move which by no means intends to replicate the traditional hierarchy wherein English is the primary global language and French comes second. In fact, the ongoing role of French as a global language is the very subject of Milan Kundera‘s and Andreï Makine‘s novels, which openly praise the beauties of the French language and culture, and engage intertextually with a corpus of canonical French 18 authors with whom they wish to be associated. Since French is neither their native language nor the official language of their home countries, I show that Kundera and Makine position themselves in a locale aligned to their literary interests. That is, they wish to leave behind their image as Central and Eastern-European political dissidents and writers and to be viewed as French, European, and even world writers – given the connotations of autonomy and universality that the French language and culture has (Casanova 87). In both of the particular Anglophone and Francophone contexts that I study, immigrant and diasporic authors actively intervene in the politics and ethics of their literary reception. Thus, to show how ethnically marked authors seek to control their reception at both local and global levels, Chapter 1 turns to Hanif Kureishi and Zadie Smith, whose novels The Buddha of Suburbia (1990) and White Teeth (2000) are concerned with redefining Britishness by depicting hybrid and multicultural London, yet in a way that highlights the ways in which British multiculturalist discourses operate through the exoticization of ethnic subjects. The story of their critical reception shows that they are turned into ethnic representatives of Pakistani and, respectively, Jamaican cultures when, ironically, they are born in Britain and only loosely connected to the countries of their parents‘ ancestry. The tension between authors‘ market reception and their self- positioning as unhyphenated British writes stems, I argue, from their use of the multicultural novel and readers‘ expectations that this genre should represent positive changes in turn-of-the-century Britain. However, close attention to the authors‘ narrative strategies reveals that they contest identity politics. Kureishi uses the trope of the 19 performativity of ethnic, gender, and class identity to suggest that his literary identities are fluid and plural, whereas Smith inserts many instances of irony in her novel to show her critique, rather than her celebration of British multiculturalism. As I show, the authors do not wish to be viewed as minority writers, but as British authors. British writers they are, but they are equally the inheritors of both British and non-Western literary traditions. I thus argue that through intertextual references, they connect their novels to South-Asian and Caribbean bodies of writing in order to critique demands of authenticity and ethnic representativity placed on minority writers. In this way, they also reconfigure national literary categories, showing that British literature is inextricably linked to other literary corpora. In particular, by engaging directly with global histories (such as the effects of British colonialism in South-Asia and the Caribbean), and by circulating beyond national contexts, these so-called ―multicultural‖ or ―minority‖ novels unsettle the boundaries of British literature, connecting it to world literature. Whereas the first chapter explores what may be perceived as ―intra-national‖ or ―minority‖ authorial positionings, even though I argue that this ethnic lens is reductive of Kureishi‘s and Smith‘s complex literary identities, Chapter 2 examines Meena Alexander and Kiran Desai, two diasporic or cosmopolitan authors, whose postcolonial narratives can be more readily associated with world literature. The chapter looks closely at Alexander‘s memoirs Fault Lines (1993) and The Shock of Arrival (1996) and at Desai‘s novel The Inheritance of Loss (2006) in order to argue that these texts offer a politically- committed vision of contemporary literature, which might, however, be tempered by the authors‘ belonging to intellectual elites in India and the United States, positions from 20 which they purport to speak for subaltern migrants. I argue that their national and international affiliations inflect the literary style of their texts, which seeks to unsettle fixed locations and blur literary boundaries. Alexander‘s fault line motif and Desai‘s narrative juxtapositions suggest that the fragmented identities of postcolonial subjects cannot be captured by simplistic taxonomies. Indeed, the authors‘ global biographies position them somewhere between Indian, American, South-Asian American, and world literatures. However, because they underscore that their plural identities are shaped by the British and American colonial and neoliberal histories, which they critique in their works, I regard them as ―cosmopolitical,‖ rather than merely cosmopolitan authors. I borrow this term from Bishnupriya Ghosh‘s study When Borne Across: Literary Cosmopolitics in the Contemporary Indian Novel (2004), which focuses on diasporic writers whose texts, which address colonialism, migration, nationalism, and lingering racism, invite politically and ethically-aware reading practices. In this spirit, I argue that Alexander‘s and Desai‘s works highlight subaltern migrants‘ unequal subject positions within a late capitalist context and their racialization in the Global North. Their texts thus encourage readers to adopt an activist stance and uncover transnational patterns of affinity as well as inequity in the world. Whereas postcolonial Anglophone authors are interested in an engaged or cosmopolitical type of literature, Francophone authors from Central and Eastern Europe, which are the subject of Chapter 3, offer a different literary model. As white Europeans who are culturally similar to the French and who tackle a sensitive subject – the apparent decline of contemporary French culture, which they ostensibly deny – the authors can 21 penetrate the French cultural establishment more easily than postcolonial Francophone authors. While I critique Kundera‘s and Makine‘s Franco-centric views of Europe and their neglect of questions of race in their texts, I also contend that what appears as a very literary stance (that is, Kundera‘s embrace of art for art‘s sake and Makine‘s pandering to French critics by extolling French literature) is in fact a political positions. I argue that, as much as the authors visibly fashion themselves as French and European writers, they also attempt to destabilize their positions as Czech, Russian, and French authors. More specifically, I focus on Kundera‘s first two French-language novels, which I read as a diptych, to argue that the author both plays with and disables views of him as a Czech dissident writer. If in La Lenteur (1995) he still addresses his well-known Czech themes, building on his literary reputation even before his emigration to France, in L’Identité (1997) he delocalizes the plot, suggesting that the novel can be read as a global text. By writing a novel with an ironically vague title, which taunts readers to try to capture his literary identity, Kundera also re-affirms his belief in authors‘ freedom to create works that transcend a single location. In turn, Makine is also hyper-aware of the two local contexts with which he can be associated. In his pseudo-biographical novel Le Testament français (1995), he blurs the boundary between author and narrator to tell the tale of an aspiring Russian writer who succeeds in France, but only by exoticizing himself as an Eastern-European author. Makine thus critiques exoticist reading practices at the core of French cultural institutions, showing that critical and commercial success in France depends on writers‘ capacity to fit within neat taxonomies. 22 The same refusal to tell a coherent story about immigrant authors‘ literary identities and the location of their texts is the focus on my fourth and last chapter. I first turn my attention to Régine Robin‘s fictional autobiography La Québécoite (1983), whom I‘ve chosen because it triggered interest in issues of migration, language, nation, and identity in Québec, and led to the coining of the category écriture migrante, or migrant writing, in the 1980s. Using literary strategies such as the fragmentation of narratives, subjectivities, and urban space, Robin points out the obstacles to integration even for white privileged subjects such as herself. Even though Robin, a writer of Polish- Jewish origins, was raised in France and writes solely in French, she is unconcerned with the role of French as a global language or with Québec‘s status vis-à-vis French culture. Instead, she creates a hybrid text that mixes French, English and other languages as well as intertextual references to other literatures, to assert authors‘ freedom to tackle any topics they please. La Québécoite could be viewed as part of the Québécois, Canadian, French, North American, and Jewish literary traditions, but primarily distinguishes itself through its refusal to be neatly classified according to ethnic, linguistic, or geographic labels. In a similar way, the novels of Haitian-born author Dany Laferrière share Robin‘s firm anti-taxonomical aims. Comment faire l’amour avec un Nègre sans se fatiguer (1985), plays on racial stereotypes at work in North America, while Je suis un écrivain japonais (2008) overtly mocks contemporary critics‘ tendencies to classify ethnically- marked authors. By exploding racial stereotypes and literary taxonomies, Laferrière proposes a mode of writing and reading contemporary literature that shifts away from identity politics – an attempt not entirely successful, as the author continues to rely on 23 ethnic markers to make his point, as exemplified by the very title of his second novel, ―I am a Japanese Writer.‖ In contrast to Kundera and Makine, who purposefully showed their elective affinities to France in their texts, Robin and Laferrière seem to eschew major concerns about the current crisis of French language and culture, embedding their French-language texts within the cultures of the American continent (Canada, the United States, and the Caribbean). I therefore argue that they create ―Francophone‖ works that no longer focus on the centrality of France, but are bilingual, multilingual, or multinational. I read these four authors against recent debates on the concept of francophonie, specifically the 2007 manifesto Pour une littérature-monde en français, which attempted to decouple French- language literature from the center, and more generally the association of literature with a specific location. The signers of the manifesto claimed that Francophone literature no longer denotes writing produced outside of France, and that any author writing in French produces ―Francophone,‖ or rather, ―world literature in French.‖ My chosen immigrant authors in France and Québec represent two atypical case studies of Francophone literature because they force a reconsideration of French-language works produced by authors from regions not usually deemed Francophone (the Czech Republic and Russia have no visible linguistic and cultural ties to France, while Québec has always constituted a distinct case). I argue that these authors represent a Central-Eastern European model and a North-American model of francophonie, which are predicated on authors‘ cultural similarity and linguistic choice (Kundera and Makine), and their embrace of 24 multilingualism (Robin and Laferrière) – a model that also critiques the power connotations implied by the notion of a world literature ―in French.‖ In this dissertation, I have brought together contemporary immigrant and diasporic writers from four parts of the world, who write in two major languages, and who challenge methods of critical reading based on national and minority models of literary culture. I have argued that through their literary style, these authors struggle, to varying degrees, with literary taxonomies, and that in their texts, they propose engaged and ethical readings that seek to move away from such classifications. Even though these writers cannot entirely trigger a shift towards the ―post-national,‖ ―post-ethnic,‖ or ―post- identity‖ – which represent new taxonomies in themselves – they propose a mixing of literary categories, languages, and traditions and a mode of reading that disables neat distinctions. By arguing that contemporary migrant texts should be read across several geographies of production and translation, I am particularly invested in new methods of critical reading based not on national or ethnic literary-critical paradigms, but on writers‘ plural and constructed literary affiliations. In this project, ―The World in the Nation,‖ I focused on fictional works that bring the world directly into the texts themselves, thus unsettling national, linguistic, and literary distinctions. They can be considered works of world literature if they are read as part of several literary traditions at once. 25 Chapter 1 Marketing British Multiculturalism: Hanif Kureishi’s and Zadie Smith’s Redefinitions of Britishness Young black people in London today are marginalized, fragmented, unenfranchized, disadvantaged and dispersed. And yet … they occupy a new kind of space at the centre. -- Stuart Hall, ―Minimal Selves‖ Today … the British as a whole come in a range of models. -- Robert J. C. Young, ―Ethnicity as Otherness in British Identity Politics‖ In recent decades, immigrant and minority writers have redefined British literature in ways that have led to a widespread view of the experiences they narrate as thoroughly British. The hailing of Hanif Kureishi, Zadie Smith, Hari Kunzru and Monica Ali, among others, as quintessentially British writers at the end of twentieth-century and the beginning of the twenty-first century shows that end-of-the-millennium Britain now conceives of itself as a multicultural society that accommodates ethnic others and celebrates cultural differences. What contributed to this portrait of twenty-first century multicultural and ostensibly tolerant Britain was a steady influx of immigrants from the former colonies after the dissolution of the British Empire. 5 The arrival of the ship 5 While historically speaking, Britain has always been hybrid, the arrival of a steady influx of immigrants from the Caribbean, South Asia, and Africa after the Second World War has radically changed the cultural and racial mix of Britain. At the invitation of the Macmillan government and encouraged by the 1948 British Nationality Act, formerly colonized subjects emigrated to the Mother Country, whose ideals of Englishness they have internalized through the system of colonial education. However, once there, they were regarded as outsiders due to their racial and ethnic differences. The arrival of Empire SS Windrush in 1948 on the English coast is one such historical marker that signals the beginning of the Caribbean migration to England. In novels such as The Emigrants (1954) and The Lonely Londoners (1956), George Lamming and Sam Selvon portrayed England as a hostile place for the newly arrived Windrush 26 Empire Windrush at Tilbury in 1948, bringing Jamaican immigrants to the UK, marks the beginning of postcolonial migration to Britain and the rise of ―black-British‖ multicultural writing. Indeed, Caribbean, African, and South-Asian immigrant writers and their British-born descendants, while struggling with racist attitudes and anti- immigrant legislation, have gradually altered homogeneous conceptions of British culture, acquiring a central voice with which they depict their experiences of migration. Paradoxically, even as they occupy central positions on the literary and artistic scenes, their voices remain intrinsically tied to a sense of their alterity vis-à-vis Britain, even in the case of second-generation immigrant writers who were born and educated in Britain, such as Kureishi and Smith. 6 This chapter examines Hanif Kureishi and Zadie Smith as representative case studies of second and third-generation immigrant authors who interrogate rigid literary taxonomies such as national and ethnic minority literature through their ambivalent authorial positioning. Preferring to be seen as unhyphenated English authors, rather than as cultural representatives of their respective ethnic groups, they search for a way of immigrants, who were regarded as racial and cultural outsiders. It is their exclusion by the mainstream society that prompted these writers to reclaim ground in England and rewrite the center. 6 Such writers have come to signify Britishness precisely through their difference from traditional conceptions that view national identity as homogeneous, often by staging their alterity for British audiences. Their marginality can, however, be successfully appropriated by shifting narratives of the nation. In this sense, the integration of these writers into the British literary tradition has often occurred at the cost of the commodification of their ethnic difference by the British literary market. One of my contentions in this chapter is that Hanif Kureishi and Zadie Smith both contest their exoticization as ethnic writers and partake in the fashionable trend for multicultural fiction. Thus, in order to claim a more inclusive notion of Englishness, Kureishi stresses his Pakistani-English origin and self-reflexively portrays Asian-British characters‘ complicity with Western capitalist values. Smith, in turn, is said to embody the quintessence of Britishness at the end of the millennium on account of her mixed-race ancestry and portrayal of multicultural themes in her novels. 27 being British that incorporates them into the folds of the nation-state, albeit in a way that does not homogenize their individual differences or commodify their ethnic identities. 7 In this way, I argue, they do not transcend literary taxonomies, but rather unsettle the distinctions between them, underscoring the necessity for an ethics of labeling of non- white authors in Britain. That is, ethical readings would acknowledge authors‘ freedom to tackle any topic they wish and to affiliate themselves with any literary tradition, irrespective of their ethnic background. In the following analysis, I will explore how, in drawing on the fashionable genres of postcolonial and multicultural fiction, 8 Kureishi and Smith not only situate 7 The phenomenon of immigrant and diasporic writers who resist ethnic canons is quite widespread. For instance, Kureishi‘s novel Intimacy (1998) figures an Eastern-European immigrant protagonist and concerns a universal issue such as a London writer‘s marital breakdown, rather than race or ethnicity; yet it has elicited postcolonial readings on account of Kureishi‘s South-Asian ancestry. Similarly, Kazuo Ishiguro has been called a ―postcolonial‖ and an ―Asian-British‖ writer, even if his works do not openly tackle Asian immigrant themes and his Japanese ethnicity does not reflect a British ex-colonial situation or a collective diasporic experience in Britain. Writers such as these have often critiqued the demand that minority writers give voice to their respective ethnic communities, claiming that biographical readings marginalize and depoliticize their works and non-white writing in general. As Kureishi puts it, ―A novel like Zadie Smith‘s White Teeth can be a huge hit now whereas we used to be described as ‗Commonwealth Literature.‘ To be located in that way is a form of ghettoisation‖ (qt. in Yousaf 9-10). Echoing Rushdie‘s standpoint in ―Commonwealth Literature Does Not Exist,‖ Kureishi suggests that such labels obscure the extent to which non-white writers belong culturally to ―the West‖ as well as their ―imaginative affinities‖ with writers from other literary traditions (Rushdie 70). Literary categories such as these and ethnicity- based awards such as the Man Booker Prize (a colonial award designed for writers of Commonwealth origin) clearly influence the reception of their works. Other awards, such as the Orange Prize for Fiction, designed for female writers, turn authors such as Zadie Smith and Andrea Levy into unwilling spokespersons for women. If writers‘ roles as cultural, ethnic, or gender representatives is reductive, their wish to be viewed as ―mere‖ writers, as belonging to a universal idea of literature, may equally be too broad a rubric, as it overlooks the extent to which they are also products of their time and respond to the current historical, cultural, and ideological context. 8 The fictional depiction of multicultural London has become a genre in itself. For a comprehensive treatment of the theme in novels by Black and Asian British writers, see Susanne Cuevas, Babylon and Golden City: Representations of London in Black and Asian British Novels since the 1990s. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag, 2008. See also the ―postcolonial London‖ issue of Kunapipi (1999) edited by John McLeod; Sukhdev Sandhu‘s London Calling: How Black and Asian Writers Imagined a City (2003); and John Clement Ball‘s Imagining London: Postcolonial Fiction and the Transnational Metropolis (2004). 28 themselves within the English literary tradition, but also challenge widespread views of British multiculturalism as a predominantly positive phenomenon. As ironic commentators on English society, the authors are at once chroniclers and critics of British multiculturalism. They view the latter as inextricably linked to Britain‘s colonial history and the overlooked material histories of immigrant communities, rather than simply to harmonious inter-ethnic relations in post-colonial Britain. I argue that Kureishi‘s The Buddha of Suburbia (1990) and Smith‘s White Teeth (2000) stage a tension between these two conflicting views on contemporary multicultural England. Both novels re-conceptualize Englishness by stressing the way in which immigrant cultures challenge essentialist versions of English national identity, creating a hybridized culture which is, however, marked by race, gender, and class inequalities. The carnivalesque humor present in both Kureishi‘s and Smith‘s depictions of present-day England has elicited critical views of the novels as celebrations of cultural hybridity. 9 I suggest instead that heeding the ironies and ambivalences of their texts as well as the intertextual references to non-British literary traditions illuminates the authors‘ critical views of inter-cultural and race relations in England, which force readers to take a retrospective look at the history of the British Empire and its aftermath. In this 9 Kureishi‘s and Smith‘s local interventions into the cultural politics of Margaret Thatcher‘s and Tony Blair‘s Britain are appropriated by the literary market in ways that de-emphasize the history of British colonialism and the racialization of postcolonial subjects in England that the authors examine critically in their texts. Publishers, critics, and reviewers highlight the novels‘ celebratory and comic portrayals of cultural hybridization and hail the writers as representatives of British multiculturalism so as to promote the image of England as a tolerant, multiracial society both within and outside of Britain. Kureishi and Smith refuse the role of cultural ambassadorship for either Britain or Pakistani- and Jamaican-British communities. They position themselves as unhyphenated British writers who heed the particular histories of Britain and its ethnic minorities, and who are simultaneously attached to England and their respective ethnic communities. 29 way, one cannot consider the Englishness of the authors without taking into account their ethnic background as well as the colonial and diasporic histories of South Asians and Caribbeans, respectively. They could be viewed simultaneously as British, ethnic minority, and South Asian and Caribbean writers as well as ―world writers‖ who resist narrow literary classifications. Because they are British-born yet non-white, Hanif Kureishi and Zadie Smith fit imperfectly within the tradition of what is called ―English literature‖ – unlike Kazuo Ishiguro who, albeit of East-Asian ethnic background, is more readily identified with the English literary tradition. As ―black-British‖ writers, they stand at once inside and outside of British literary culture. On the one hand, they are English authors who write about contemporary England and whose literary references anchor their fictional texts in the English literary tradition. On the other, their ethnic backgrounds as well as the immigrant themes of their novels place them in the category of British multicultural fiction, a rising genre associated primarily with ethnic minority authors, albeit now embraced by mainstream writers as well. 10 Interestingly enough, Kureishi and Smith are 10 One example of British authors writing about immigrant themes is Rose Tremain, who in her novel The Road Home (2007) tackles the theme of Eastern-European immigration to the UK, in the same vein as Ukrainian-born Marina Lewycka in her two novels A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian (2005) and Strawberry Fields (2007). One can speculate that by embracing topics that are conventionally regarded as ethnic or minority, mainstream writers such as Tremain interrogate the validity of ethnic literary categories and the idea of ethnic writers as authentic representatives of their cultures. They also show that the theme of inter-ethnic relations in the wake of immigration holds a central place in twenty-first-century British society, being no longer considered the province of minority writers. Lewycka, for instance, has the merit of signaling a newly emerging topic in contemporary British literature. The recent phenomenon of Eastern European migrants harvesting strawberries in Western European countries has been well documented in the media, but not so much in British fiction. The newness of the book thus resides in its literary representation of a new type of migrant in the context of the expansion of the European Union and the shifting of its geo- political borders. In carefully rendering the voice of each character, the author also individualizes and humanizes illegal immigrants, who are most often discussed in terms of statistics. Moreover, Lewycka 30 considered British and minority writers at once – positions that do not appear incompatible in any way. While both authors are placed within national literary categories, the slippage between mainstream and marginal identities becomes significant in the tension between the authors‘ self-positioning and their classification by literary critics. More exactly, Kureishi and Smith construct their authorial personae as British, but in a way that is free of the burdens of cultural representativity usually placed on ethnic writers. In contrast, British critics celebrate authors‘ hyphenated identities in order to showcase Britain‘s transformation into a multiracial society. In both instances, ethnicity is the site of struggle for literary meanings. Kureishi and Smith are thus celebrated as British multicultural writers who chronicle positively the current state of the English society. In their fictional works as well as interviews, however, they reject the positions of ―black-British‖ or multicultural writers, as these labels place upon them certain expectations associated to ethnic fiction and thus reduce the complexity of their authorial positions. I contend that, in addition to engaging thematically with British themes and drawing stylistically on the English literary tradition, the authors and their texts also enter into conversation with the cultures and histories of Britain‘s former colonies and can thus be read as part of the South-Asian and Caribbean literary traditions, respectively. 11 In supplements the more familiar journey of northbound immigrants from the Global South with westward migration from Eastern Europe and Asia. In bringing together illegal labor from three continents and depicting their unfolding relationships, she connects different geographies of migration in a globalized labor market, showing that just as globalization creates new social and economic divides, it also enables migrants to transcend class and ethnic barriers by creating a sense of community. 11 I am aware that ―South-Asian‖ and ―Caribbean‖ literary categories are highly heterogeneous, comprising subcategories of national writings that are hybrid, as well, given the amount of racial, cultural, and religious 31 this sense, they challenge insular representations of Britain by exploring the world beyond the borders of the nation. Even though their novels focus on first and second- generation immigrants in England, the attitudes of the protagonists are largely informed by cultural patterns in their homelands (as in the case of Anwar in The Buddha or Suburbia) or by a sense of belonging to distant generations whose self-identity had been shaped by British colonialism (for example, Irie Jones in White Teeth). Kureishi‘s and Smith‘s intertextual dialogues with the cultures of their parents offer a more global sense of what Englishness signifies today and encourage a more flexible understanding of contemporary immigrant and diasporic writers in England. I thus argue that the versatility of Kureishi‘s and Smith‘s authorial positions and the plurality of interpretations their texts engender render their works less easily commodifiable as ethnic or multicultural fiction. In their attachment to several cultural and geographical contexts, and in their construction of texts that can be read with more than one location in mind, Kureishi and Smith propose a model of plural literary affiliations that blurs strict categorizations and allows for multiple interpretations. For instance, Kureishi‘s The Buddha of Suburbia can be read in the context of several mixtures in those regions. I consider that interpreting Kureishi and Smith as being in dialogue with Pakistani and Jamaican literatures and cultures is productive for what it illuminates about the countries‘ (post-)colonial relations to England, rather than for the texts‘ inscription into new national canons. For studies of the concepts of ―South Asian‖ and ―Caribbean‖ literatures, see Nasta, Susheila. Home Truths: Fictions of the South Asian Diaspora in Britain. New York: Palgrave, 2002; Sanga, Jaina C. (ed.). South Asian Literature in English: An Encyclopedia. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2004; Ranasinha, Ruvani. South Asian Writers in Twentieth-Century Britain: Culture in Translation. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007; Birbalsingh, Frank (ed.). Frontiers of Caribbean Literature in English. New York: St. Martin‘s Press, 1996; Irele, Abiola F. and Simon Gikandi (eds.). The Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature. Cambridge, U.K.; New York: Cambridge UP, 2004; Figueredo, D.H. (ed.). Encyclopedia of Caribbean Literature. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2006. 32 corpuses of writing. By mapping the cultural, social, and political climate of the late 1970s, it is indebted to the ―condition of England‖ novels, exemplified by Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Brontë and others, and the ―working class fiction‖ of the 1950s and 1960s, represented by authors such as John Braine, David Storey, and Alan Sillitoe. In tracing the characters‘ journeys from suburbia to a multi-ethnic London, it also belongs to the genre of multicultural fiction. Yet part of the hero‘s identity quest takes place in the United States, which enables him to continue his process of self- transformation. As a Bildungsroman, then, it can be placed within the European tradition of writers such as Voltaire, Stendhal, and Flaubert, but it equally resonates with Tom Sawyer and The Catcher in the Rye. Its American setting is also a venue for exploring the marketing of the hero‘s Englishness to American audiences. Therefore, it equally fits into the genre of postcolonial fiction that portrays the dominant culture‘s fetishization of ethnic others and the latter‘s complicity in or resistance to their commodification. Given Kureishi‘s half-Pakistani background and the novel‘s exploration of postcolonial tropes such as cultural hybridity, diaspora, and the consequences of British colonialism, The Buddha can also be read as a ―Pakistani novel in English‖ (Hashmi 63) or, more broadly, as South-Asian fiction in English. An obvious mosaic of literary references, The Buddha does not resolve these category issues neatly in the end as a way of eschewing rigid literary classifications. Instead, it raises questions about the appropriate and ethical ways of reading such texts: should one privilege literary themes, setting, genre, or writers‘ ethnic identities when confining texts to particular categories? 33 Zadie Smith similarly draws on distinct cultural traditions. As a ―British‖ novel, White Teeth depicts convivial relations among different ethnic communities in multicultural London. However, read as ―Caribbean,‖ 12 the novel foregrounds the trajectories of immigrant protagonists from Jamaica and their difficult integration in a hostile England. A reading of the text as ―South-Asian‖ would emphasize instead the narrative thread following postcolonial characters whose Indianness is a constant reminder of the dissolution of the British Empire. While each of these national or regional perspectives is equally valid, the complexity of White Teeth becomes evident when readers forge cross-cultural connections between these discrepant narratives – when, in other words, they read the nation as a microcosm of different ethnicities and cultures. In this sense, a reader well-versed in several cultures would be able to construe contemporary British multiculturalism as the outcome of interrelated waves of immigration from different continents. To this effect, Smith prefaces her novel with the epigraph ―What is past is prologue‖ from The Tempest, 13 which prefigures the themes of historical continuities with a colonial past and of the importance of roots in the postmodern construction of immigrant identities. At the same time, White Teeth broadens Shakespeare‘s view of the past and of English literature as one that should necessarily include less canonical and ethnically different authors. 12 For an analysis of Zadie Smith‘s White Teeth as a Caribbean novel, see Dalleo, Raphael. ―Colonization in Reverse: White Teeth as Caribbean Novel.‖ Tracey L. Walters (ed.). Zadie Smith: Critical Essays. New York: Peter Lang, 2008. 91-104. 13 Interestingly enough, Smith does not mention it as a citation from Shakespeare, but as a museum inscription in Washington, D.C. – which might illustrate the expanding borders of English literature. 34 Given the authors‘ plural literary affiliations, my central questions regard the politics of their location. Does Kureishi belong to ―English literature? Immigrant literature? Anglo-Indian writing? Pakistani literature? British-Asian literature?‖ (Stein 1998: 76-77). Or, if he is a ―black-British‖ writer, is he ―black‖ in the same way as Jamaican-British Zadie Smith? Moreover, can Smith, whose novels have been interpreted as British, Caribbean and Jewish, also lay claim to the cultural identities of the Chinese and African-American characters she portrays? Or do these authors, by writing about communities not their own, mark a shift in contemporary literature towards what David Hollinger calls the ―postethnic‖ – a category predicated on voluntary affiliations that release them from the burden of representing minority communities (3, cf. 116)? I argue that Kureishi‘s and Smith‘s flexible authorial positions articulate a literary identity that is at once culturally specific (after all, they write about England and their ethnic communities) and broad enough to challenge narrow literary taxonomies and a British identity politics that requires immigrant and minority writers to act as spokespersons for their ethnic communities. The new focus on ―black-British‖ writing in general and the grouping of Kureishi and Smith under this banner in numerous critical studies suggests that contemporary British literature has not entered a post-ethnic stage yet. I find it useful to dwell here on the history of the term ―black-British‖ 14 in order to shed light on the cultural context that shapes Kureishi‘s and Smith‘s works and to which 14 The seemingly oxymoronic nature of the term ―black British‖ sparked numerous debates about the appropriateness of the category, which was critiqued by some as either too homogeneous for the diversity 35 the authors respond. The widely-debated term ―black-British,‖ which emerged in the 1970s, denoted ―a distinct literary identity‖ (Bentley 9) that captured the tension between the two sides of the hyphen – that is, race and nationality. The authors are British by birth but non-white and, from the perspective of homogeneous conceptions of Britishness, fall between rigid classifications, being placed at once within and outside of mainstream Britain. The notion of present-day Britain as homogeneous and white, prevalent in certain nationalistic discourses such as Powellism in the 1960s, is a cultural construct, since the UK is, by its very nature, a multicultural formation and has never been completely white. Ever since the sixteenth-century, the homogeneity of Britain has been contested by the Scots, the Irish, and the Welsh, and plagued by class and gender differences long before the arrival of post-1945 immigrants. As Stuart Hall puts it, ―There have always been many different ways of being ‗British‘‖ (qt. in Hesse 217). Due to this interaction with difference in various historical periods, the Other is a constitutive part of British identity. The ostensibly oxymoronic term ―black-British‖ aimed to capture precisely the Other‘s dwelling within the former colonial center, reflecting the new multiethnic make-up of Britain in the wake of postcolonial migrations from Africa, South-Asia, and the Caribbean. But more important, it was linked to the politics of cultural representation by minority authors. Coined in the 1970s and 1980s, at a moment of black experiences in Britain, or too restrictive by others, since the creative imagination supposedly transcends racial boundaries. For debates about the appropriateness of the category ―black-British,‖ see David Dabydeen, ―On Not Being Milton: Nigger Talk in England Today.‘ Maggie Butcher (ed.). Tibisiri. Mundelstrup: Dangaroo Press, 1989: 121-35; Fred D‘Aguiar, ―Against Black British Literature.‖ Tibisiri: Caribbean Writers and Critics. Ed. Maggie Butcher. Coventry: Dangaroo, 1989. 106-114; Kwame Dawes, ―Negotiating the Ship on the Head: Black British Fiction.‖ Wasafiri 29 (Spring 1999): 18-24, and John McLeod, ―Some Problems with ‗British‘ in a ‗Black British Canon.‘‖ Wasafiri 36. (Summer 2002): 56-59. 36 when blackness, as a collective identity, denoted resistance to homogeneous conceptions of Englishness, the term later acquired connotations of hybrid identity. This hybridity, however, continued to mask the racialization of ethnic groups in Britain. In his influential essay ―New Ethnicities‖ (1988), Stuart Hall traces this shift in black cultural politics from strategic essentialism (black as a political identity) to the pluralization of ethnic identities (Black and Asian-British) (442). In the first phase, black cultural representations were based on essentialist alliances between different ethnic groups and strove to correct their marginalization in dominant regimes of representation. In the second phase beginning with the late 1980s, black cultural producers recognized that positive representations did not do away with essentialist binaries, so they tackled instead the heterogeneity of black subject positions and cultural identities, articulating them in conjunction with the related categories of class, gender, and ethnicity. According to Hall, the cultural representations of new ethnicities aimed to reconfigure ethnic identity in terms of different and flexible positionalities. Despite Hall‘s fluid conception of identity, the celebration of difference, such as in the emerging discourse of British multiculturalism in the late 1970s and early 1980s, still placed ―the burden of representation‖ on ethnic writers (Mercer 214). A necessary political and cultural gesture in the first moment, the demand for positive representations reduces black-British writers to the role of cultural representatives of their respective ethnic communities, hence to the position of minority subjects, even as they ―occupy a new kind of space at the center‖ (Hall 1987: 44). Furthermore, if minority writers assumed center stage, they did so under exoticized forms, an issue Hall‘s essay does not 37 directly address. I thus suggest that Hall‘s discussion of the shifting politics of representation in British culture needs to be examined not only in relation to the changing discourses of race and ethnicity since the 1970s, but to the commodification of difference as well. Hall‘s paradigm is helpful in situating Kureishi‘s early works between the two moments of cultural representation, as depicting non-essentialized, flexible Asian-British identities and bringing them into the mainstream. Kureishi is best known for his critical and irreverent treatments of race and sexuality in the 1980s and 1990s in his novels and plays. He made a career by writing about Asian-British identities, all the while claiming to be a mainstream British writer, a move prompted by his attempts to counter the racism and marginalization he had experienced growing up in 1960s‘ England. By being among the first to introduce Asian-Britishness as a literary topic and re-articulating Englishness in relation to the identities of the country‘s ethnic others, Kureishi contributed to an expanding market for ethnic fiction in Britain, which included younger writers such as Zadie Smith. In contrast to Kureishi‘s construction of a rebellious authorial persona, Smith is the literary darling of the British literary establishment, being widely acclaimed for her young, black, and female authorial persona. Clearly, in her case, not only her hyphenated (Jamaican-British) but also her gendered identity is subject to commodification. 15 15 Not only ethnicity but also gender functions as a cultural commodity, providing writers with symbolic capital as well as the burden of representation. Writers‘ willingness to accommodate mainstream demands and cater to exotic tastes undoubtedly factors into the celebrification of some third-generation female immigrant writers, or, on the contrary, their marginalization in literary and critical circles. In Home Truths, Susheila Nasta draws attention to the invisibility of writings by Asian-British women writers in critical 38 Furthermore, Smith‘s depiction of contemporary Britain is most often viewed as a mimetic representation of an increasingly tolerant society, which is marked by a sense of ―conviviality‖ (Gilroy xv) and hybridity ―as part of the practice of everyday life‖ (Moss 11) – an optimistic state of affairs Smith is actually skeptical of. Whereas in his early works, Kureishi is critical of the cultural politics of the 1980s, when Asian-British writers were marginalized in cultural representations, Zadie Smith writes in a context when the centrality of marginal cultural productions obscures the extent to which their works and literary personae are resistant to the imperatives of the literary market – a point the opening epigraph from Hall‘s ―Minimal Selves‖ fails to underscore sufficiently. The authors‘ depiction of cultural mixtures in present-day Britain had been construed, especially in Smith‘s case, as a celebration of British multicultural society. As I argue, this reception is due, in part, to the authors‘ use of the genre of multicultural discourse since the 1980s and 1990s, despite the emergence of presses such as Virago or The Women‘s Press in the early 1970s in the wake of black and third world feminist movements (184). As Nasta explains, some received insufficient critical attention because they refused to pander to a British literary market‘s penchant for exoticist cultural representations. Thus, despite the plethora of novels written by women such as Suniti Namjoshi, Leena Dhingra, Ravinder Ranhawa, Attia Hosain, Farhana Sheik, their works were sidelined by the publishing industry because they did not follow the trend of postcolonial or multicultural fiction. While this may be true, writers‘ accommodating or resistant narrative strategies do not fully account for their celebrity status. Third-generation writers such as Atima Srivastava, Leena Dhingra, Zadie Smith, Monica Ali, Andrea Levy and Sunetra Gupta, among others, emerged in the 1990s in the context of a burgeoning British celebrity culture, a heightened interest in South and British Asian cultural artifacts, and a youth market in the literary and publishing world, where young and photogenic female writers are more profitable marketing material than their older male counterparts. To nuance writers‘ gendered and racialized receptions, one could compare the excessive media attention accorded to Zadie Smith and Monica Ali to another black British female writer, Andrea Levy, whose novel Small Island (2004) has also won the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the Orange Prize for Women‘s Fiction, and the Whitbread Book of the Year award. Levy‘s limelight paled in comparison to Smith‘s and Ali‘s because she was ―[n]ot funky, not Oxbridge and not particularly young,‖ therefore ―she doesn‘t fit the template‖ (Brace). Levy has been writing books about black British characters and themes since the 1980s, but British publishers distrusted her possible commercial success, thinking that her fiction would only appeal to black readers. It is only lately, in light of changes in the literary market, that her novels have received critical acclaim. 39 fiction. Increasingly written by immigrant and mixed-race authors, multicultural novels tend to depict inter-ethnic relations in predominantly urban settings, such as postcolonial London, which has the greatest concentration of ethnic communities. Furthermore, this genre constitutes, in Dominic Head‘s definition, ―the appropriate legacy of the imperial past‖ (9), since it tackles unresolved issues such as lingering racism towards ethnic minorities and anxieties about ethnic and cultural hybridization, which the English society is still reluctant to confront. These novels‘ portrayal of ethnic diversity is often taken to denote positive shifts in the multiethnic make-up of post-imperial Britain, while their authors are said to represent their ethnic communities. Multicultural fiction often serves as a cultural commodity that is meant to showcase Britain‘s progress from a colonial empire to a multiethnic nation that values its ethnic others. I argue, however, that Kureishi‘s and Smith‘s novels do not merely celebrate end-of-the-millennium tolerant Britain, but are also critical of this optimistic discourse. Their novels portray British multiculturalism 16 as a site of struggle between the celebration of postcolonial hybridity and the need to attend to the legacy of British colonialism. In his article ―Marketplace Multiculturalism,‖ M. K. Chakrabarti comments on this phenomenon, arguing that multicultural texts make for highly marketable local 16 In Britain, the debates about multiculturalism aimed to manage diversity, being primarily concerned with the assimilation and then integration of ethnic minorities, and later on, with the valorization of their cultural differences. Liberal responses to British multiculturalism contested this celebration because it obscured ongoing forms of racism and failed to engage with Britain‘s unresolved postcolonial issues, such as conservative circles‘ perception of post-1945 immigration as a threat and their anxiety about ethnic mixtures. As Barnor Hesse shows in his study of multicultural Britain, the post-war genealogy of British multiculturalism is located in successive liberal responses to postcolonial immigration and in the redefinition of British national identity (6). Proponents of liberal multiculturalism thus reacted against Enoch Powell‘s rearticulation of Britishness as culturally incompatible with foreigners and against his expulsionist policies, such as the one epitomized by the injunction to ―Keep Britain White‖ in the late 1960s (Hesse 6). 40 material because they present a consumer-friendly image of England as accommodating of difference. As he puts it, ―instead of Hanif Kureishi […], today‘s literary establishment has chosen to elevate such preferred ‗ethnic‘ writers as Monica Ali, Hari Kunzru and Zadie Smith because they stop short and deliver the type of multicultural society we want to see. They are the type of multicultural society we want to see – mixed race, highly educated, not too dark or alien – and so they are put forth as the authentic voices of a new generation‖ (par. 50). Implicit in Chakrabarti‘s critique of the workings of the literary market is a contestation of third-generation multicultural writers themselves, who ostensibly cash in on the fashion for ethnic literature and fail to interrogate sufficiently the historical and social formations that produced them (par. 18). His own reading of Smith‘s White Teeth and Ali‘s Brick Lane underscores the authors‘ co-optation by the latest literary fashions, failing to see the novels‘ satire on multiculturalism. 17 Though I find Chakrabarti‘s point about the commodification of this type of fiction insightful, I contend that Kureishi and Smith also develop a critical multiculturalism in their novels. More specifically, The Buddha of Suburbia and White Teeth underscore the ambivalences of Empire by employing tropes such as culturally unstable identities, bisexuality, and racial hybridity. In my close reading of the two novels, I pay attention to the authors‘ narrative strategies, which include the 17 See previous note. Chakrabarti comments on Monica Ali‘s Brick Lane in the following way: ―opening the narrative to the troubled reality of British multiculturalism would have violated the basic dictate of the Zadie Phenomenon as seen by the publishing industry: the financial pull of the potential bestseller demands that a writer beset her characters with such familiar, mainstream problems as adultery rather than engage with the unfamiliar, distasteful, dark side of multiculturalism – the real multiracial, multiethnic, multicultural society that the majority of us do not want to see‖ (par. 39). 41 performativity of identity in Kureishi‘s novel, and irony in Smith‘s case, as well as an array of protagonists who embody both sameness and otherness to the British nation and escape fixed classifications. Interestingly enough, the novels of Kureishi and Smith have the same anti- taxonomical aims, even though the authors belong to different generations of immigrant writers in Britain. Because they both claim to be unhyphenated British authors, challenge ethnic labels, and argue for artistic freedom, I treat them comparatively. Yet I also underscore the fact that they operate within distinct cultural contexts, and thus consider them representative case studies of second and third-generation immigrant writers. 18 Emerging in the 1970s, Hanif Kureishi is well-known for bringing uncharted Asian- British experiences into the mainstream. His pioneering work served, along with Salman Rushdie‘s, as a model for later Asian and black British writers, including Zadie Smith, who was called ―the next Salman Rushdie‖ (Lowe 166). An equally popular figure, 18 In my view, the concept of literary generations is problematic, as it denotes a heterogeneous category that does not distinguish between different writers‘ age, arrival in Britain, ethnic provenance, or the literary topics they address. It also conceals writers‘ cross-generational and cross-cultural affiliations. Approaching migrant and minority writers as three distinct generations reveals their cultural and political agendas vis-à-vis notions of Englishness and of the English literary canon. However, distinctions should not obscure the extent to which works of different generations of writers overlap, act as bridges, and respond to each other‘s. Thus, the first, ―Windrush‖ generation of immigrant writers who came in the 1950s and 1960s from West Indies, such as George Lamming, Samuel Selvon, and Wilson Harris, associated themselves with decolonization and nationalist struggles in their parts of the world. They were less concerned with reclaiming an English identity and national space, relying instead on transnational and diasporic connections to the political and cultural movements of their native countries. They were viewed as foreigners who mediated between native and English cultures. Unlike them, second-generation writers of the 1970s and 1980s were born and bred in Britain and focused on local issues such as multiculturalism, race, sexuality, and the redefinition of national identity. The works of black-British writers such as Caryl Phillips, Hanif Kureishi, Timothy Mo, Kazuo Ishiguro and Bernadine Evaristo redefined Britishness not by ―writing back‖ to the center, but by ―re-writing Britain‖ from the perspective of cultural insiders and for British as well as minority audiences (Ranasinha 190). This represents a literary tradition to which third- generation mixed-race authors such as Hari Kunzru, Atima Srivastava, Monica Ali, and Zadie Smith belong. For a further problematization of the generational approach to black British writers, see Mark Stein, Black British Literature: Novels of Transformation. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2004. 42 Smith is one of the most hyped British writers of the twenty-first century and a model for categorizing other novelists such as Monica Ali and Hari Kunzru – both described as ―the new Zadie Smith‖ (Lowe 172). Furthermore, Smith‘s literary consecration is partly due to a laudatory review from none other than Salman Rushdie, who equally praised Kureishi‘s work. The vector of legitimation thus goes from past to present generations of writers, but it also works within the same generation, where a writer like Smith can serve as a template for subsequent authors and their different kinds of writing. 19 Moreover, younger generations not only respond to their postcolonial forebears, but also position themselves in relation to the English canon. Thus, from a certain angle that focuses on the seductive concept of generations, the following family tree seems to obtain. If first- generation immigrant writers distance themselves from English notions of literary value, ―minority‖ writers such as Hanif Kureishi detach themselves from their immigrant predecessors by writing from a position of cultural insiders, while still struggling against marginalization. Third-generation Zadie Smith places herself both in relation to the English literary tradition and to second-generation writers like Rushdie and Kureishi, whose works paved the way for a wider public recognition of ethnic minorities in Britain and self-reflexively illustrated the overvaluation of ethnic identity. 19 In his article ―Marketplace Multiculturalism,‖ M. K. Chakrabarti argues that successful commercial multicultural fiction in Britain is a genre largely inaugurated by Zadie Smith and the hype surrounding her debut novel. He contends that White Teeth serves as a blueprint for Monica Ali‘s Brick Lane, which ostensibly borrows from the narrative pattern and tropes Smith employs and paints a portrait of contemporary London that is largely devoid of social and racial conflicts. While there are obvious parallels between the two narratives, to regard Ali‘s text as a pale copy of Smith‘s trend-setting novel is to disregard not only Brick Lane‘s narrative particularities and portrayal of a yet unchronicled Bangladeshi community against a background of poverty, marginalization, and racism in London, but also White Teeth‘s critique of British multiculturalism. 43 The advantage of a generational approach to the novels of Kureishi and Smith is that, read together, they offer a vision of Britain‘s continuities as well as transformations in the past few decades, while they also shed light on the changing contexts of literary production and consumption in Britain as well as globally. In examining the shift from a politics of representation in the 1980s (exemplified by Kureishi) towards a politics of hybridity and conviviality at the beginning of the 21 st -century (illustrated by Smith) in relation to Stuart Hall‘s theory of ―new ethnicities,‖ I underscore the similarities between the two moments in British cultural politics. Both the struggle for more minority cultural representations in the first moment and the representation of commodified minority experiences in the second are negotiations over cultural and economic capital 20 and, most important, over writers‘ artistic freedom to depict any topic without being categorized according to ethnic, gender, or generic taxonomies. 20 The struggle over who may accrue symbolic and economic capital was at stake in the controversies surrounding the protests from minority communities over the film premiere of Kureishi‘s My Beautiful Laundrette in New York City. My Beautiful Laundrette was picketed by the Pakistan Action Committee in New York City because of alleged negative representations of Pakistanis. They disputed Kureishi‘s right to authoritatively portray them since he had allegedly distanced himself from his Pakistani roots. That a writer who was not Pakistani enough accrued cultural capital by tapping into fashionable Asian-British themes was considered unethical. Ironically, the controversy propelled Kureishi, like Rushdie, towards celebrity. Zadie Smith has been the target of criticism along the same lines: ―Even if the cultural capital of being black in Britain has risen considerably in certain contexts, what does it say about the politics of representation that Zadie Smith can cash in on this but the people living in the North London suburbs whose lives she so carefully depicts cannot?‖ (Donnell 16). What is at stake in the case of all these celebrity writers is not only (or not so much) the (positive or negative) fictional representations they put forth, but their status as a cultural class that accrues symbolic and economic capital from minority representations, while the communities they portray remain disenfranchised. At the same time, the larger issue at stake is precisely artists‘ freedom to depict whatever pleases them. In another controversy, the Mexican filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón pointed out the prejudices in the reception of non-white artists. When asked why his movie Y tu mamá también did not depict the poor of Mexico, he answered that that was a racist question, since filmmakers from rich countries would never be questioned about what they do not do. 44 Paradoxically, Kureishi and Smith both make ethnic identity a principal concern in their works and challenge the confines of ethnic writing, trying to decouple biological heritage from the creative endeavor. Kureishi, for example, may have benefited from the emergence of the ―Great Immigrant Novel‖ by the late 1980s (Moore-Gilbert 108), but by charting an Asian-British niche experience that has not been previously mapped out in literary terms, he also aims to correct a gap in British cultural representations. I thus regard him as a linking bridge between the two moments of cultural representation delineated by Stuart Hall. The author‘s references to South Asian culture include exoticist clichés such as arranged marriages, Eastern mysticism, diasporic nostalgia for roots; but by representing them, he also exposes Western readers‘ Orientalist tendencies. In stating that ―I want to feel free to not only be an Asian writer‖ but ―a writer who is also Asian‖ (McCabe 52), Kureishi purposefully makes his ethnic origin incidental to his artistic career. In turn, Zadie Smith benefits from the hype surrounding her first novel, yet she also protests against readings of White Teeth as ―merely‖ an optimistic celebration of British multiculturalism, which she actually critiques in her text for overlooking ongoing racism against postcolonial immigrants. Because both Kureishi and Smith connect their portrait of multicultural interethnic relations in England to the global picture of British colonialism, I regard their fiction not only within local contexts – as ―English,‖ ―multicultural,‖ or ―ethnic minority‖ texts – but as transnational novels as well. In my readings, therefore, I foreground the rootedness of the two authors and their texts, which offer responses to contemporary British ethnoscapes. At the same time, I 45 explore how their texts‘ local representations are received and reshaped through routes that connect them to other national or regional bodies of writing to which they allude through intertextual references. I suggest that, by staging dialogues between diasporic and literary roots and routes, 21 the novels attempt to reconfigure national literary categories. More specifically, I contend that reading the two authors and their texts through diasporic lenses, as both national and world writers, helps counteract the literary market‘s appropriation of these texts as presentist celebratory representations of end-of- the-century Englishness, a view that clearly obscures the authors‘ interventionist critiques. 21 I am indebted for these terms to James Clifford‘s Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. 46 Hanif Kureishi and “A New Way of Being British” Novelist, playwright, screenwriter, film director and essayist Hanif Kureishi is best known for his comic and provocative portrayal of racial and sexual politics in 1970s‘ and 1980s‘ Britain in his novels The Buddha of Suburbia (1990) and The Black Album (1995), and his screenplays for My Beautiful Laundrette (1986), Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1988) and London Kills Me (1991). Kureishi received an Academy Award nomination for best original screenplay for My Beautiful Laundrette in 1987 and was also listed on Granta‘s ―20 Best Young British Novelists‖ in 1993. His Buddha also won The Whitbread Award for best first novel and was adapted as a miniseries for the BBC. The author‘s explorations of the sexual permissiveness of the 1970s and the anti-immigrant backlash of the 1980s constitute his trademark, so much so that critics have expressed disappointment when he abandoned immigrant subject-matter in favor of exploring generic themes such as marital betrayal, father-son relationships, ageing and psychoanalysis in Intimacy (1998), Gabriel’s Gift (2001), The Body (2003) and Something to Tell You (2008). Asked in an interview why he had retreated from ―the Paki thing,‖ Kureshi replied that ―I couldn‘t think of anything new to say about that. I was no longer a Paki – I was a writer. I was living in a different kind of world by then. And you have to find new subjects‖ (Sawhney par. 16-17). Self-admittedly, his literary interests have shifted from writing ―books about race … books about radical Islam … books about what‘s going on in this society‖ to books ―concerned with the individual‖ (Sawhney par. 15-16). Kureishi‘s thematic shift reflects not only his ability as a writer to adapt to the Zeitgeist, but also the idea that the theme of Asian-Britishness shouldn‘t 47 necessarily be associated with the author‘s ethnic identity. While such a move may be particularly unexpected in a writer who has come to represent Asian-British authorship, it also calls into question critics‘ tendency to read minority writers through ethnic lenses. In chapter 3, we will see a similar development, where Milan Kundera‘s switching from Czech to French and embracing new themes in his latest works echo Hanif Kureishi‘s own move away from ethnic themes in his recent novels. Kureishi‘s background as half-English and half-Pakistani has elicited ethnicity- related labels such as a ―black British artist‖ (Ray 189); a ―hyphenated Anglo-Asian author‖ and an ―insider-outsider‖ (Kaleta 7, 37); a ―minority‖ (Ranasinha 6); ―ethno- English‖ (Schoene 111); ―immigrant‖ (Sen 62); ―post-migrant‖ (Lee 3) as well as ―postcolonial‖ and, after his permutation, ―postethnic‖ writer (Stein 2004: 120). Despite being born in London and insistently locating himself within English culture, Kureishi is often seen as a cultural outsider, to the point of being called an immigrant and asked about his assimilation to England. When critics do acknowledge the author‘s Englishness, they emphasize his ethnic difference, expecting him to be a spokesperson for the Asian-British communities he writes about. Like many other non-white writers in Britain, Kureishi was thus hailed as ―the cheeky poster-boy of multi-racial Britain‖ (Tonkin par. 15) or, like Zadie Smith later on, as ―the very essence of British multi- culturalism‖ (Taylor par. 1). Kureishi contests these labels as being inadequate categorizations of his literary identity and work. For example, even if, like Rushdie, he is concerned with first-generation postcolonial migration to London and with portraying the city as a site of multiculturalism, he is not an immigrant writer, or a mediator between 48 South Asian and British cultures. He rejects the position of fashionable in-betweenness and insists on being considered an English writer: ―People think I‘m caught between two cultures, but I‘m not. I‘m British; I can make it in England. It‘s my father who‘s caught‖ (qt. in Pally 53). In another interview, he states: ―we are part of English literature […] I‘ve always written about England, usually London. And that‘s very English […] Everything I write is soaked in Englishness, I suppose‖ (qt. in Kaleta 3). Kureishi predicates his claims to Englishness on his English education, his geographical and cultural remove from Pakistan, and his difference from first-generation immigrants like his father. Yet he was still viewed – at least in the first phase of his career – as an ethnic minority author because of British society did not immediately recognize the mixed-race other as a constitutive part of British identity. In contrast to homogeneous conceptions of the nation, Kureishi depicts his Pakistani identity as altogether compatible with his Englishness in his autobiographical essay ―The Rainbow Sign‖ (1996). The writer re-defines his English identity relationally, by way of a detour to Pakistan. Being at a geographical remove from England enables him to look at English culture through Pakistani eyes and, conversely, to observe Pakistani culture from the perspective of a Westerner. Yet the two sides of his identity have not always carried the same import for him. The author initially tried to deny his Pakistani self while growing up in racist England in the mid-1960s – an era when Enoch Powell‘s anti-immigrant speeches fueled both racism and individual acts of physical violence against Pakistanis, making them ―a risible subject in England‖ (73). As he critiques the mainstream British society‘s anxieties about mixed ethnic identities, ―I 49 wasn‘t a misfit; I could join the elements of myself together. It was the others, they wanted misfits; they wanted you to embody within yourself their ambivalence‖ (75). Kureishi‘s comment echoes Edward Said‘s view that the West ambivalently conceives of the Oriental Other as both ―distant‖ and ―relatively familiar‖ (Orientalism 21). Interestingly enough, it is by acknowledging the Pakistani connection that Kureishi discovers his Englishness: ―It is strange to go away to the land of your ancestors, to find out how much you have in common with people there, yet at the same time to realize how British you are …‖ (99). Oscillating between the two cultures, he defines each by that which the other lacks. 22 Thus, if his Westernized education prevents his full integration into Pakistani culture, his literary identity as a successful playwright in London‘s literary world has no value in a radical Muslim country that distrusts secular principles. In this sense, English and Pakistani cultures are opposite yet complementary, and even if he concludes that ―I couldn‘t rightfully lay claim to either place‖ (81), he eventually defines himself in relation to both. If English and Pakistani cultures form the two halves of his identity, then, Kureishi recognizes himself as the product of their embedded histories: ―The two countries, Britain and Pakistan, have been part of each other for years, usually to the advantage of Britain. They cannot now be wrenched apart‖ (102). By historicizing and politicizing the nature of the two countries‘ connection, Kureishi critiques insular definitions of Englishness. He contends that England should 22 Interestingly enough, in his study on Cuban-American culture Life on the Hyphen: The Cuban-American Way (1994), Gustavo Pérez Firmat explores similar fluctuations. Like the generation of Cuban-Americans who belong wholly to neither Cuban nor American culture, Kureishi occupies a marginal position in relation to both English and Pakistani cultures. However, rather than feeling a misfit, he chooses to inhabit the hyphen, claiming both sides as his cultural identity. 50 come to terms with its colonial history and postcolonial mass migration to the center: ―It is the British, the white British, who have to learn that being British isn‘t what it was. Now it is a more complex thing, involving new elements. So there must be a fresh way of seeing Britain and the choices it faces: and a new way of being British after all this time‖ (101-102). As a mixed-race author simultaneously attached with British and Pakistani cultures, Kureishi embodies this new, hybrid Britishness. In the following analysis of Kureishi‘s novel, I argue that, in its celebration of hybridity and fluid identifications, The Buddha of Suburbia establishes terms for a new Britishness, adopting a more flexible perspective on notions of diversity and multicultural interaction. Through the structuring trope of the performativity of identity, the novel satirizes the vogue for ethnic literatures, challenging the rigid confines of such categories. Due to its intertextual references to English, Western European traditions, the literature of empire, and postcolonial immigrant literature, the novel is not only English, but also enters into dialogue with other transnational or diasporic texts which also address Britain‘s (post)colonial history. 51 Staging Ethnic Identity in The Buddha of Suburbia The Buddha of Suburbia (1990) explores the ambivalent ways in which first and second-generation Indian immigrants attempt to negotiate their identities in 1970s England in a climate of racism towards ethnic minorities, fueled by imperialist nostalgia and anti-immigrant feelings. The 1970s England was a period of deep uncertainty punctuated by the marches of neo- and anti-Nazi movements that culminated in the rise of the New Right under Thatcherism. While this socio-political climate constitutes the backdrop of the novel, Kureishi foregrounds ethnicity, sexuality, and youth subcultures as ambivalent sites that pose alternatives to monolithic definitions of the nation. The novel abounds in situations and characters that challenge essentialist definitions of self and other, insider and outsider, by playfully oscillating between and occupying both positions. The central trope through which the protagonists are able to inhabit another subject position while retaining their identity are Karim Amir‘s theatrical performances wherein, although British-born of Indian and English parentage, he is cast in the roles of Kipling‘s Mowgli and of a marginalized immigrant, being thus forced to conform to British stereotypes of ethnic others. Karim‘s father Haroon is also complicit in the commodification of marginality as he impersonates a Buddhist for a suburban audience of avid consumers of Oriental exotica. In both cases, the protagonists‘ ethnic difference at once calls for exclusion and stereotyping in an English culture that relies on notions of racial purity and represents cultural capital that enables them to move from the suburbs to London and thus re-center their marginality. 52 The potential of marginality to signify both ethnic others‘ objectification by the dominant culture and their overturning of clichéd representations is one of the central arguments Graham Huggan makes in his innovative study of the marketing of postcolonial authors. In The Postcolonial Exotic (2001), he introduces the notion of ―staged marginality‖ to characterize the process by which marginalized individuals or social groups are moved to dramatize their ‗subordinate‘ status for the benefit of a majority or mainstream audience. Staged marginality is not necessarily an exercise in self-abasement; it may, and often does, have a critical or even a subversive function. (87) In The Buddha of Suburbia, the protagonists‘ parodic performance of Indianness for English audiences highlight essentialist notions of Indian and English cultural identity by showing the extent to which it is flexible, inhabitable by anyone, and adaptable to the needs of discrepant audiences. However, in contrast to Huggan‘s belief in minority performances‘ subversive impact, I argue that their transformative potential is kept in check by the existence of class and racial boundaries within the nation-state. The novel‘s opening introduces the central theme of bicultural identity and the anxieties of the seventeen-year-old protagonist vis-à-vis what constitutes Englishness: My name is Karim Amir, and I am an Englishman born and bred, almost. I am often considered to be a funny kind of Englishman, a new breed as it were, having emerged from two old histories. But I don‘t care – Englishman I am (though not proud of it), from the South London suburbs and going somewhere. Perhaps it is the odd mixture of continents and blood, of here and there, of belonging and not, that makes me restless and easily bored. (3) Karim‘s definitional insecurity stems from his awareness of the politics of labeling in England and of English misperceptions of mixed-race subjects like him. Karim‘s nickname is ―Creamy‖ (54) and he describes himself as ―more beige than anything‖ 53 (167). He is ―almost‖ an Englishman, ―but not quite‖ (Bhabha 86), and this qualifier, uttered almost as an afterthought, serves to interrogate an ossified concept of Englishness. The first-person narration is certainly apposite in a novel that is often read as a Bildungsroman, yet the introductory paragraph does more than merely formulate Karim‘s uneasy feelings about ―belonging and not‖ and his yet uncertain destination. 23 The confessional mode of the Bildungsroman frames the narrative as a form of address to implied readers under whose eyes a tale of identity quest and ethnic self-fashioning is about to unfold. Intra-textually, Karim‘s ―staging‖ of his identity, to borrow Huggan‘s term, occurs in front of theater audiences whose cultural and ethnic background greatly shapes his own self-definition. The main trope of performance conveys a relational mode of identity construction. Karim‘s stage performances are thus designed to elucidate not what Englishness signifies tout court, but how it is constructed in relation to ethnic minorities, how labels work, and what kinds of power relations they instantiate. Power plays out at the level of cultural representations whereby authenticity, affixed to culture, sells in front of national as well as international audiences. Both Indian and English protagonists commodify their ―own‖ culture to achieve professional success and gain celebrity status. Thus, Karim‘s father Haroon deliberately emphasizes his ethnic difference when he realizes that it can advance his professional goals. A naturalized Indian immigrant in Britain since the 1950s, Haroon never learns to navigate the suburbs, retaining and even cultivating a lost and innocent look meant to elicit 23 For a study of the Bildungsroman as the central genre of black British literature, see Mark Stein, Black British Literature: Novels of Transformation. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2004. 54 English women‘s sympathy and he cashes in on his ethnic difference when speaking on Oriental philosophy at the parties of his mistress Eva Kay. Haroon, ―a renegade Muslim masquerading as a Buddhist‖ (16), as Karim calls him, ―was hissing his s‘s and exaggerating his Indian accent. He‘d spent years trying to be more of an Englishman, to be less risibly conspicuous, and now he was putting it back in spadeloads‖ (21). In front of an adulatory audience, Haroon manufactures an Indian identity, using the entire paraphernalia of ethnicity, such as ―a red and gold waistcoat and Indian pyjamas‖ (31). Haroon‘s exotic image elicits British stereotypes of Indian culture from his suburban audience, who imagines him arriving on ―a magic carpet‖ and with ―his camel parked outside‖ (12). While he is subjected to an Orientalist imaginary, Haroon equally ―commodifies Orientalism,‖ profiting from his public‘s interest in Eastern spirituality (Yu-Chen 11). Through the narrative of Haroon‘s social ascension, Kureishi satirizes the figure of the reader as consumer of exotic cultural objects. As Huggan eloquently puts it, Haroon‘s metamorphosis is ―a double-edged weapon, exposing the fraudulence of his middlebrow suburban public, […] but at the same time advertising his own complicity with the larger consumer society‖ (97). His ethnic impersonations are propelled by the logic of the marketplace, as he and Eva are aware that fashionable minorities can make their way up the social ladder with the right marketing strategies. Haroon is both a beneficiary and a pawn in Eva‘s social climbing game, as she exoticizes and authenticates his Indianness, by linking it to the far-away space of the subcontinent. When Haroon explains to her the constructed nature of his connection to his country of origin, pointing out that ―We old Indians come to like this England less and less and we return to an 55 imagined India,‖ Eva responds in a classical liberal multicultural manner: ―‗But this is your home‘ … ‗We like you being here. You benefit our country with your traditions‖ (74). By satirizing British liberal multiculturalism in Eva‘s and the suburban audience‘s responses, Kureishi highlights the limited positions available to immigrant or ethnic minorities in Britain: primarily as exotic others, forced to enact authenticity and manufacture ties to their cultures of origin, and as depoliticized rainbow figures or resources for cultural and economic enrichment. The exoticized minority subject is not only treasured for its commodity value, but s/he is also invested with cultural authority, with the ability to speak for the ethnic or immigrant communities s/he belongs to. Karim, by virtue of being mixed-race, is asked by the stage directors Jeremy Shadwell and Matthew Pyke to represent Indian culture, to which his access is in fact mediated by his father and the Indian diasporic community in London‘s suburbs. Yet, their demand that Karim engage complicitously with Orientalist stereotypes of ―his‖ culture triggers the hero‘s identity crisis, as he starts to reassess his allegiances to both English and Indian cultures and see an opportunity for hijacking those cultural stereotypes for creative self-invention. Karim locates himself as neither entirely Indian, nor British, nor in a tragic in-between, but as simultaneously belonging to both. Yet in his hybrid self-construction, Karim wrestles with the lingering racism of the English society, which projects on him its own ambivalences of empire. On the one hand, he is made to feel a misfit on account of his South Asian ancestry, being called ―wogs and nigs and Pakis and the rest of it‖ (53). On the other, his Indianness proves to be a marketable identity that ensures his upward mobility. Furthermore, Karim‘s liminal 56 ethnic identity is articulated in conjunction with his in-between gender and class identities. Karim is bisexual, an identity that he describes as ―unusual‖ (55), to underscore the way he does not fit within heteronormative conceptions of Englishness. His trajectory from the suburbs to London also mirrors his social rise. However, despite his attempts to ―lose [his] accent‖ (178), Karim realizes he can never belong to the upper class, as he has neglected his education, and as social origins are ―in the blood‖ (134). The novel thus captures the protagonist‘s struggle to fit in a society which leaves no available position to minorities other than the role of authentic and exotic Other. Thus, when the director Shadwell asks Karim to impersonate Mowgli, he links the hero to a literary text that is a product of colonial nostalgia and to an English Orientalist imaginary that underscores his foreignness. Just as Kipling‘s Mowgli moves between two worlds, Karim is expected to embody a racial and cultural in-betweenness, even though he is English. As Shadwell suggests, Karim‘s destiny is ―to be a half-caste in England … belonging nowhere, wanted nowhere‖ (141). Ironically, for all his bicultural identity, Karim identifies with Englishness and, furthermore, his suburban identity contradicts dominant audiences‘ associations of racial others with far-off lands. Shadwell underscores this ostensible paradox: ―Everyone looks at you, I‘m sure, and thinks: an Indian boy, how exotic, how interesting, what stories of aunties and elephants we‘ll hear now from him. And you‘re from Orpington‖ (141). As authenticity adds value to commodities, Karim has to manufacture a cultural tie to India and practice ―an authentic accent‖ (147). After all, Mowgli was born in India, not Orpington, as Shadwell tells him, while also reminding him that ―you have been cast for authenticity and not for 57 experience‖ (147). Whereas ethnic subjects‘ representation of their experience is automatically deemed authentic, Shadwell‘s distinguishing between two tropes that are usually conflated in discourses of ethnic representation shows his awareness of their constructed nature. However, Shadwell‘s exoticist discourse obscures the fact that whiteness is in fact a construct as well, a point which Karim fails to seize. Shadwell‘s demand for authenticity from a London-born actor is predicated on the logic of commodity, that is, on his belief that ethnic authenticity has exchange value. At first, Karim fails to see that the ideal of authenticity reproduces imperial power structures wherein the Indian figures as an exotic object: ―despite the yellow scarf strangling my balls, the brown make-up, and even the accent, I relished being the pivot of the production‖ (150). Therefore, he gives in to his objectification by internalizing dominant expectations of authenticity. Only later, when he parodies his allegedly authentic Indian accent by slipping into cockney, does he transform himself from an exotic object into a self-aware subject. On the one hand, in slipping between two cultural identities, Karim attempts to de-authenticate identity; on the other, he comes to recognize that the ―Eastern‖ identity represents a site of ambivalence, as it shores up ―the West.‖ The constructedness of national identities and their commodity value surface again in the episode of Karim‘s New York tour. Karim‘s performances of Indianness in England are echoed by his friend Charlie Kay‘s performing of Englishness to re-invent himself as punk celebrity Charlie Hero in America: ―He was selling Englishness, and getting a lot of money for it‖ (247). Unlike Charlie, who drops his posh accent and uses cockney as a 58 marker of English authenticity, Karim‘s options for self-reinvention may be more limited due to his phenotype. Karim may well highlight the constructedness of identities and the commodification of difference in current regimes of representation, but in truth, whiteness as a political position of power is unavailable to him. The only protagonist endowed with some transformative potential is Jamila. More politically aware than Karim, Jamila belongs to the radical fractions of British society, who are deeply committed to activist struggles. She reads avidly North American feminist figures and civil rights activists such as Angela Davis, Sylvia Plath, Malcolm X and James Baldwin. Jamila resists not only British racism, but also patriarchy, as she refuses the arranged marriage her father forces her into, and she also rejects conventional notions of identity and traditional gender roles by living in a commune and turning bisexual. She represents an alternative mode of immigrant subjectivity that contests objectification and victimhood within the British society. Whereas Jamila‘s radicalism contrasts sharply with Karim‘s mild activist consciousness, Kureishi depicts other subject positions available to the immigrant. For instance, Jamila‘s father Anwar rejects English culture and falls back on nostalgic conceptions of Indian identity. In turn, Haroon displays racist attitudes towards Indians, whom he dislikes because of the complex Indian-Pakistani history. Moreover, Changez – whose name, in French pronunciation, suggests adaptability – embraces cultural assimilation and is not only racist, but also elitist, dismissing low-class Pakistanis and Indians alike. By capturing these various immigrant voices, Kureishi refuses to privilege one subject position. 59 The novel‘s ending captures immigrant characters‘ oscillation between several subject positions by underscoring the tension between the exhilarating sense of change in a multicultural, hybrid Britain and the limitations to such changes for racialized subjects. In the end, Karim rejects Charlie‘s cosmopolitan model and returns to England, where class structures and racial prejudices continue to be a stumbling block to fluid identities and to protagonists‘ ability to de-center fixed postions. He can situate himself neither fully in England nor in the US, therefore his identity struggle continues. Even if his next role is in a British soap opera that does not deal with ethnic themes, Karim still needs to confront the power relations that have determined his previous ethnic positions and will continue to shape the cultural and political climate of the 1980s, with its attendant commodification of ethnicity under Thatcherism. The novel ends on the eve of Margaret Thatcher‘s election in 1979 with Karim‘s rather indecisive stance: I could think about the past and what I‘d been through as I‘d struggled to locate myself and learn what the heart is. […] And so I sat in the center of this old city that I loved, which itself sat at the bottom of a tiny island. I was surrounded by people I loved, and I felt happy and miserable at the same time. I thought of what a mess everything had been, but that it wouldn‘t always be that way. (283-84) This indeterminate ending fails to solve the tensions inherent in the hero‘s identity negotiation between his sense of the endless possibilities for self-invention in London and his awareness that, for ethnic subjects like himself, there are limits to integration. In my view, in placing himself at the center, Karim affirms his belonging to England. As a British-born, second-generation immigrant, he attempts to locate himself and de-center that space, as in conventional immigrant narratives. 60 Kureishi‘s novel thus challenges the immigrant genre and its representations of the immigrant subject as permanently uprooted and politically transformative. Karim may claim his place in a hybridized England that is accommodating of difference, but inter-ethnic tensions are not settled personally or nationally by the end. Because Karim‘s identity negotiation continues beyond this end point, the novel also deflates expectations of the Bildungsroman genre, where the identity quest of the protagonist allegedly culminates in his or her greater self-understanding. The Buddha is thus a generically hybrid text that is at once an immigrant novel, a multicultural urban novel that chronicles turn-of-the-century multiracial London as the site where diverse identities are performed, and an English novel as well. As Kureishi declares in his interviews, he comes from the English literary tradition, which he abundantly references in The Buddha. 24 British audiences can recognize allusions to the ―condition of England‖ novels by Dickens and Thackeray, but also in later novels by Forster, H. G. Wells and Orwell, who are directly cited in the text. The ―condition of England‖ is one of Jamila‘s major concerns and is also the subject of Pyke‘s play. To better chronicle the transition between the hippie culture of the 1960s, with its interest in India, to 1970s punk rock and the rise of Thatcher‘s Conservative Government in 1979, the novel equally draws on texts dealing with British youth subcultures, such as Colin McInnes‘s Absolute Beginners (1959) and Anthony Burgess‘s A Clockwork Orange (1963). The text‘s thematic concern with class identity and social mobility also associates it with the ―working class fiction‖ genre of the 24 The Buddha of Suburbia‘s English literary models have been well-documented by critics. See, in particular, Kenneth C. Kaleta, Hanif Kureishi: Postcolonial Storyteller. Austin: U of Texas P, 1998 and Bart Moore-Gilbert, Hanif Kureishi. Manchester and New York: Manchester UP, 2001. 61 1950s and 1960s, which foregrounded class identity in texts by John Braine, Alan Sillitoe, and David Storey. Yet Karim‘s trajectory from suburbanite to metropolitan and later cosmopolitan actor provides only one mode of reading. Kureishi likens Karim‘s social ascension to immigrants‘ acquisition of a second language in their host country: Eleanor‘s ―hard words and sophisticated ideas‖ appear to them ―a second language, consciously acquired‖ (178). By grafting an immigrant sensibility on the English theme of class, Kureishi reworks the English novel to accommodate the experiences of immigrant communities in postcolonial London. An obvious model is Salman Rushdie‘s Satanic Verses, where postcolonial subjects‘ mimicry and identity performance at once subvert and comply with Englishness. Gibreel Farishta, a Bollywood superstar, and Saladin Chamcha, a voice impersonator, ―tropicalize‖ London (Satanic Verses 354), but their performances are equally appropriated by a metropolitan image-making industry. Like Rushdie‘s novel, The Buddha of Suburbia is a generically hybrid text that should be read in light of the intertwined history of Britain and its others, and their attending tensions in the present. Because it narrativizes the global, Buddha is not merely a text about multiethnic London, but also a world novel in which the re-definition of Englishness is inseparable from the context of Empire. As he draws on English as well as other literary traditions, Kureishi is, I argue, not only an English writer, but a world writer as well. The Buddha can thus be read side by side with White Teeth, to which I will now turn, in order to illustrate the ways in which contemporary narratives of migration participate in redefinitions of national literary traditions as well as in transnational conversations with other bodies of literature. 62 Zadie Smith and the Marketing of British Multiculturalism Because Zadie Smith writes in a context that is different from Kureishi‘s, I analyze the reception of the Jamaican-British author and her novel White Teeth in light of recent changes in British cultural institutions. The rise of British celebrity culture in the past three decades and of literary authorship that is deeply involved in the dynamics of literary markets help explain the hype surrounding Smith and her novel. I argue that Smith‘s reception as well as her self-contradictory reactions to her market positioning stem primarily from British critics‘ genre-based expectations of immigrant fiction. Like Kureishi, Smith uses the conventions of the multicultural novel critically not only to depict a hybrid English society at the end of the twentieth-century, but also to critique its exoticization of immigrant others. By exploring the tension between the branding of Smith as a British multicultural author and her own resistance to the commodification of her authorial image and of White Teeth, I will show that literary labels are still in place when ethnically-marked texts are produced and disseminated and discuss the possibilities of authorial intervention in the contemporary market for British fiction. In her recent study Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace (2007), Sarah Brouillette specifically addresses the commodification of immigrant and diasporic authors, arguing that postcolonial writers are profoundly compromised figures who can no longer position themselves independently of contemporary commercial culture. Their status as successful postcolonial authors in Anglophone markets depends on their attachment to specific geographical locations in the Global South as well as on highly saleable self-conscious gestures on their part. That is, in their works, they engage 63 in acts of authorial self-construction that register anxiety about the commodification of their local identities and their texts‘ consumption in light of their biographies by predominantly cosmopolitan, Anglo-American audiences. Brouillette views Salman Rushdie, J. M. Coetzee, and Derek Walcott as interstitial writers who are simultaneously connected to native and metropolitan locations and self-reflexively problematize the ethical burden of representing Third World cultures for cosmopolitan audiences. In contrast to these authors, Zadie Smith does not face the same charge of betrayal of her native community that is implicit in cosmopolitan migrant positions, because she is British-born. Like Kureishi, she seeks mainstream recognition as a British writer, not as a minority representative; yet critics associated her with minority writing. The story of Smith‘s reception, which I discuss below, exemplifies the difficulty for ethnically marked authors to escape ethnic classifications. Unlike any other emerging young female writer in Britain, Zadie Smith captured British and international media attention, becoming a global literary celebrity upon the publication of her debut novel White Teeth in January 2000 in Britain and in April 2000 in the United States. As one Observer reviewer commented, ―She‘s young, black, British – and the first publishing sensation of the millennium‖ (Merritt par. 1). Other reviewers considered her ―the ultimate marketable author‖ (Feay par. 7), ―the perfect publishing package‖ (Dodero par. 2), a ―poster girl for the interracial themes‖ (Elkins par. 1), since she disseminated the idea of a new, multiethnic Britain and of a Britishness whose defining characteristic, hybridity, was an ―ordinary,‖ everyday, phenomenon (Moss 11). British-born of a Jamaican mother and an English father, Smith was a Cambridge 64 undergraduate when she started writing her prize-winning novel in 1997, at the age of twenty-one. Before the novel‘s publication, she enjoyed some amount of literary publicity, as her short story ―Stuart‖ was published in The New Yorker‘s ―Millennial Fiction‖ issue at the turn of 1999/2000 and an extract of White Teeth was showcased in the Fall 1999 issue of Granta magazine. Rumor has it that she cashed £250,000 in advances from publishers Hamish Hamilton on the basis of less than 100 pages of the novel and that Salman Rushdie himself helped her land a book contract. His favorable appraisal of the novel as ―an astonishingly assured debut, funny and serious‖ on the back cover arguably helped boost its sales and consecrate its author. The novel has won major literary prizes (some of them commonly awarded on the basis of ethnicity and gender), 25 selling over a million copies to English-language readers. It was translated into more than twenty languages, adapted for television, and broadcast on Channel 4 in 2002. As the above-mentioned critical and commercial reception shows, Smith‘s lionization as a truly multicultural icon was the result of a strategic marketing not only of White Teeth, but also of the author herself as a spokesperson for the immigrant communities she writes about. The potential of ethnic as well as gendered identity to serve as a cultural commodity was seized upon when branding Smith‘s authorial image. White Teeth benefited from shrewd packaging strategies that marketed Smith‘s ethnicity, gender, and youth: the dust jacket of the first hardback edition of White Teeth displays a 25 White Teeth won the Commonwealth Writers' First Book Award, the Whitbread First Novel Award, the Guardian First Book Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction, and 2 EMMA (BT Ethnic and Multicultural Media Awards) for Best Book/Novel and Best Female Media Newcomer. It was equally shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction (awarded to women writers), the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and the Author's Club First Novel Award. However, it did not win the Man Booker Prize, the most prestigious British literary award. 65 bespectacled Zadie Smith with an Afro hair style that establishes a direct connection between the author‘s half-Jamaican ethnic background and the content of her novel, earning Smith the label of ―black, bookish babe‖ (Hattenstone par. 2). Foregrounding Smith‘s Afro-Caribbean origins not only serves to legitimize the immigrant and multicultural content of her novel, but also frames White Teeth as ethnic or minority fiction targeted towards both minority and mainstream audiences. In subsequent editions, there is a shift from exotic ethnicity to ethnic indeterminacy (Head 106). On the jacket of the 2001 paperback edition, Smith wears long, straight, dark hair and no glasses – an ethnically ambiguous look that enables her to pass as British or even Asian. According to this marketing strategy, Smith‘s revamped authorial image ostensibly aims to expand its niche readership, targeting not only British and Afro-Caribbean audiences, but an ethnically diverse readership base and stand out for more than just ethnic issues. Endowed by the publishing industry with such versatile or indeterminate traits, small wonder Smith has been considered, in turn, as British, Caribbean, black-British, and especially as ―the epitome of multicultural Britain‖ (Head 107). Zadie Smith‘s authorial image as a young, black-British, and female writer is appropriated at both national (the UK) and global (the US) levels. In Britain, the marketing of Smith‘s authorial image is closely related to the rebranding of national identity. As Sean O‘Hagan suggests in The Observer, ―[s]he seems at times to have been the product of a collective wish fulfillment by a British press which needed an attractive, young, black, female literary starlet to fulfill some notion of a newly progressive multiracial Britain where race riots, the BNP and the Stephen Lawrence murder were 66 unfortunate aberrations‖ (par. 5). In a climate of the rebranding of Britishness, it bodes well for Britain to appear as an open, tolerant, multicultural society, but this concerted emphasis on the peaceful cohabitation of various ethnic communities deflects attention from Britain‘s need to engage with its colonial past and racism towards postcolonial subjects in the present. Thus, in the promotion of Smith‘s local identity and novel abroad, what appears as a sign of societal transformation is in fact a marketing strategy focused exclusively on England‘s present and its hybrid cultural and ethnic texture, to the detriment of the post-colonial routes that created that multicultural present. Paul Gilroy‘s diagnosis of England as being in a melancholic state in the aftermath of decolonization provides a helpful explanation of Smith‘s critical reception. In Postcolonial Melancholia (2004), Gilroy characterizes the present mood in parts of Britain as an inability to mourn the loss of its imperial power and prestige and its fear of losing its national and cultural identity. For Gilroy, contemporary British culture is one of alienation from and disavowal of colonial history. Once melancholia is supplanted by mourning, a new image of the nation, which can accommodate its colonial dimensions, will be produced (105). He suggests that the fate of Britain‘s multicultural future lies in a culture of ―vernacular conviviality‖ (139), which he defines as ―the processes of cohabitation and interaction that have made multiculture an ordinary feature of social life in Britain‘s urban areas‖ (xv). However, he admits that Britain‘s convivial culture, manifested at the level of ordinary, everyday encounters among different ethnic groups, and best articulated in popular culture, harbors utopian potential, as it does not preclude forms of racism and xenophobia. Moreover, Gilroy proposes to look at the 67 history of postcolonial immigration to Britain and Europe not in terms of diversity and multiculturalism, but through the prism of racism, since ―[t]he racisms of Europe‘s colonial and imperial phase preceded the appearance of migrants inside the European citadel. It was racism and not diversity that made their arrival into a problem‖ (150). Whereas for Gilroy racism prevails over the triumphs of diversity, Smith does not make such a clear choice, presenting racism and diversity as the double outcome of post-war migration. As she explains in an interview for The Observer, ―I think the relationships in the book are something to be wished for, but I think they might exist now, and certainly in the future, with the amount of mixing up that has gone on. My generation, and my younger brother‘s generation even more, don‘t carry the same kind of baggage‖ (Merritt par. 12). At the same time, she warns against readings of her novel along exclusively optimistic lines, because that may give a false sense of the perfection of British society. Smith‘s vision of multiracial Britain is ambivalent in that it both envisages hopes for the future and mounts a critique of the vacuous celebration of diversity without any acknowledgement of ongoing racism. White Teeth thus oscillates between utopian scenarios of vernacular conviviality that transcends racial boundaries and visions of failed multiculturalism that fetishizes ethnic difference. Whereas in Britain the labeling of Zadie Smith as a multicultural writer serves the needs of a literary establishment still uncertain about how to accommodate diversity, in the United States, issues of British Empire and postcolonial migration to the colonial center are of little concern. As I suggest, the different receptions of Smith in the UK and the US stem from interrelated author and genre-based expectations with which Anglo- 68 American critics evaluate the author. Thus, British media stressed the author‘s Jamaican- Englishness to promote the concept of a new, multicultural, race-conscious Britain, whereas American reviewers regarded her as a black writer who depicted black experience in London, rather than British multiculturalism, and found her treatment of the Afro-Caribbean protagonists insubstantial. In the first case, Smith‘s hyphenated identity is celebrated inasmuch as it represents a larger, more diverse ethnoscape in contemporary Britain. As in liberal discourses on multiculturalism, the political gesture of conferring wide recognition to a mixed-race author in order to promote a nation-state‘s cultural image entails the depoliticization of her ethnic identity through commodification. In the second case, Smith figures not as a pan-ethnic representative within the nation-state, but as a transnational symbol of black peoples. In both instances, ethnicity proves to be an elastic sign that can be maneuvered into suiting different cultural and political agendas. As a mixed-race author supposedly in tune with the realities of the multiethnic London community she depicts and hails from, Smith is invested with authenticity and authority over cultural representation. The branding of an ―authentic‖ authorial persona predicated on her English location and mixed-race ethnicity is inextricably linked to the promotion of her novel. Thus, readers are encouraged to relate the novel‘s themes (the search for roots, hybrid identities, and inter-ethnic relations in postcolonial London) to the author‘s bicultural identity. Anxious about the commodification of her authorial image, Smith has protested against reductive biographical readings of White Teeth, refusing the role of ethnic representative the Anglo-American media have ascribed to her. 69 Author-based readings may be, to a certain extent, warranted in the context of the rebirth of the author 26 and a celebrity literary culture that highlights authors‘ personalities along with their books. As I argue, however, the narrative strategies of White Teeth open up the possibility of reading contemporary migrant narratives beyond their local settings or their authors‘ location. In other words, by foregrounding cultural and genetic indeterminacy at a thematic level, challenging generic conventions of multicultural fiction, and grounding her novel in several other literary traditions, Smith attempts to forge transnational connections to other texts written elsewhere, which enlarge her novel‘s apparently localized representation of Britain. By linking the experiences of the immigrant protagonists to South Asia and the Caribbean, she expands the boundaries of the British multicultural genre and of British literature as well. Through these transnational literary affiliations, which de-localize the novel and require its readers to view it as part of several bodies of writing, Smith attempts to forestall identity-based readings of her novel and herself as an author. 26 For a re-valuation of the figure of the contemporary author, see Sarah Brouilette, Postcolonial writers in the global literary marketplace. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. 70 White Teeth: Britishness at the End of the Millennium Like Hanif Kureishi‘s The Buddha of Suburbia, Zadie Smith‘s White Teeth paints a portrait of intergenerational tensions between immigrant parents and their British-born children. Smith explores the present-day multicultural London through the interactions of three families of different ethnic backgrounds: Archie and Clara Jones, an English- Jamaican couple, Samad and Alsana Iqbal, who are Bangladeshi immigrants, and Marcus and Joyce Chalfen, a middle-class English family of Jewish descent. Smith‘s depiction of the simultaneously convivial and tense relationships among the three families appears to be a successful recipe for a melting-pot narrative that purportedly aims to underscore the ordinariness of British multiculturalism at the end of the twentieth-century. Indeed, one reason for the immense popularity of the novel was its optimistic view of race- relations in turn-of-the-millennium England, and a very comic one at that. 27 Anglo-American critics have generally construed the novel as a fictional representation of present-day England wherein, give or take a few intercultural conflicts, different ethnic communities coexist peacefully and enrich mainstream British culture with their traditions. For instance, in his New York Times review, Anthony Quinn comments that ―White Teeth, for all its tensions, is a peculiarly sunny novel. Its crowdedness, its tangle of competing voices and viewpoints, betoken a society struggling toward accommodation, tolerance, perhaps even fellowship‖ (par. 13). Christina Patterson also writes that the novel ―reflects the cheerful multiculturalism of the area and 27 See Smith‘s PBS interview, in which she discusses her novel‘s literary strategies. ―An Interview with Zadie Smith.‖ Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). 10 Dec. 2008. <http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/teeth/ei_smith_int.html>. 71 presents it as a microcosm of a Britain approaching the millennium‖ (par. 4). For Caryl Phillips, Smith celebrates ―this helpless heterogeneity‖ in her novel, which he characterizes as ―a dazzlingly complex world of cross-cultural fusion in modern-day London‖ (par. 2). Ruth Elkins regards the novel as ―an epic tale of multicultural post- colonial Britain,‖ in which ―prejudice exists, but tolerance appears in equal measure, and racist violence is only mentioned briefly and at second hand‖ (par. 3). Simon Hattenstone writes about the novel‘s treatment of racism along the same lines: ―White Teeth reflects a new generation for whom race is the backdrop to daily life rather than the defining characteristic of existence‖ (par. 11). Such celebratory readings overlook the ironies of the novel, which contextualizes Britain‘s multicultural present as the outcome of its colonial past and presents numerous instances of interethnic relationships that do not work as well as of lingering British racism towards first-generation immigrants and their offspring. The discourse on British multiculturalism, as Stuart Hall explains, is ―a post- Second World War, post-colonial, phenomenon,‖ whose type and scale have challenged the notion of Britain as ―a unified and homogeneous culture until the post-war migrations,‖ and have posed ―the multi-cultural question‖ (―Conclusion‖ 217-18). As Barnor Hesse also points out, it is largely an essentialist concept that relies on a binary dynamic between a majority British culture and immigrant or minority ones (Un/Settled Multiculturalisms 10). White Teeth is a critique of liberal multiculturalism as defined in terms of ethnic communities‘ unproblematic assimilation to the homogeneous majority culture or their segregation along cultural lines. It proposes instead a vision of 72 multiculturalism as a site of struggle between immigrants‘ ―roots‖ and their ―routes‖ away from their homelands, as well as the mundane interaction between ethnic groups outside of educational or governmental parameters (Clifford 12). In that sense, it closely mirrors Paul Gilroy‘s notion of ―an ordinary, demotic multiculturalism‖ that stems from ―routine, everyday exposure to difference,‖ and which can articulate opposition to the public domain from below (Postcolonial Melancholia 99). But if ordinary interactions such as these are what shape present-day London, ethnic groups‘ diasporic ties to their native cultures also help illuminate the current context. The novel‘s preoccupation with genealogies of origin, which are carefully examined and eventually dismissed as irrelevant, is evident in its use of tropes of roots, teeth, and family trees, with their rhizomatic implications that go beneath the surface or beyond present time and space. Structurally, the novel‘s use of parallelisms, repetitions, or ―reruns‖ (White Teeth 135) underscores the extent to which the multicultural present is inflected by the colonial past, inviting readers to reflect critically on continuities and changes in post-war Britain. For example, the trajectories of second-generation immigrant protagonists echo those of their parents, who pass on their old mistakes and dilemmas of identity and belonging. Smith writes: [A]ncient ley-lines run underneath these two journeys – or … this is a rerun. … Because immigrants have always been particularly prone to repetition – it‘s something to do with that experience of moving from West to East or East to West or from island to island. Even when you arrive, you‘re still going back and forth; your children are going round and round. (135-36) Immigrants‘ journeys do not simply end in the host country, but rather describe to-and- fro movements that both provide anchoring points and prevent them from feeling utterly 73 uprooted. As James Clifford explains in his Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century, one is never simply a rootless migrant (36). For him, the relationship between roots and routes is one of constant negotiation, and the meaning of travel always harks back to a point of origin. By exploring the tension between roots and routes, the novel defies generic expectations of immigrant representations as linear narratives with definite starting and ending points in characters‘ migrant journeys. Plot-wise, the novel presents several failed experiments with roots (historical, familial, cultural, and biological) and ideas of cultural purity. It also projects a utopian moment in the future when roots become meaningless because conceptions of race and ethnicity will have altered. White Teeth oscillates therefore between asserting the relevance of cultural origins and embracing the concept of fluid identities. The predicament of being in-between cultures is captured by the experiences of first- and second-generation immigrant protagonists. Samad Iqbal constantly laments the loss of Bangladeshi cultural identity in England, ―a place where you are never welcomed, only tolerated‖ (336). He decides to ―create for his boys roots on shore, deep roots that no storm or gale could displace‖ and sends one of his twins to Bangladesh to grow up as a ―real Bengali, a proper Muslim‖ out of a conviction that England poses a threat to their cultural and religious identity (161-62; 179). His futile attempt to prize Bangladeshi from English culture is ironically undone by Magid‘s returning ―more English than the English‖ from a place in a subcontinent which has already been shaped in England‘s image. Magid embraces secular Englishness and enlists his knowledge in Marcus Chalfen‘s genetic engineering project, which is the epitome of Western culture. In 74 contrast, his brother Millat joins a militant group, KEVIN (―Keepers of the Eternal and Victorious Islamic Nation‖), which urges, among other things, ―to purge oneself of the taint of the West‖ as a retort to racial discrimination in England (367). Yet Millat continues to model his behavior on Hollywood movie heroes, and besides Allah, it is Brando, De Niro, and Pacino who also belong to his pantheon. Smith suggests that neither mimicry, nor resistance based on false ideals of purity and authenticity is the key to negotiating East-West differences, but rather a more flexible model of identity that accommodates both roots and routes. Smith further explores the ostensible incompatibility between Eastern and Western values through protagonists‘ reactions to the burning of Rushdie‘s Satanic Verses. Samad understands the conflict as being ―a matter of protecting one‘s culture, shielding one‘s religion from abuse,‖ while his wife Alsana questions the notion of cultural ―ownness‖ or purity (WT 195). Looking up the word ―Bengali,‖ Alsana underscores that Bengalis are descendents of Indo-Aryans who migrated to South Asia from the West: ―Oi, mister! Indo-Aryans … it looks like I am Western after all! … Do you think anybody is English? Really English? It‘s a fairy-tale!‖ (196). Alsana‘s comment reveals the historical embeddedness of all cultures, so that returning to one‘s roots to find purity is an illusory project. While the book burning episodes prompts Alsana to reflect on hybridity as an increasingly ordinary fact of life, the same event ignites Millat‘s anger at a writer whose book he has never read and whom he condemns for siding with the West, oblivious of the fact that his identity, like Rushdie‘s, is a hybrid of Western and Eastern cultures. Millat 75 is ―neither one thing not the other, this or that, Muslim or Christian, Englishman or Bengali; he lived for the inbetween‖ and his accent is a hybrid fusion of ―the rounded tones of the Chalfens and the street talk of the KEVIN clan‖ (291). He belongs to a street gang, Raggastani, which is ―a kind of cultural mongrel‖ that ―spoke a strange mix of Jamaican patois, Bengali, Gujarati, and English‖ and whose ethos mixed the principles of Allah, Bruce Lee, Black Power, kung fu and a desire for violence against those who marginalize them (192). Like Kureishi, Smith foregrounds youth countercultures as sites of ordinary hybridity, of fusion between different cultures, languages, and religions. However, this positive synthesis is overshadowed by ethnic protagonists‘ consciousness of power imbalances. Millat, as much as he helps create a working multiculture, is also a victim of his plural cultural allegiances. He uses the book burning as a pretext to vent his anger at the prejudices and racial stereotypes of a society where he will be marginalized on account of his racial difference: ―he knew that he, Millat, was a Paki no matter where he came from; that he … worshiped elephants and wore turbans‖ (194). As a Muslim male, Millat knows he can be racially profiled as inherently dangerous. His simultaneously participatory and marginalized position vis-à-vis mainstream culture serves to nuance the novel‘s portrait of British multiculturalism, which seems to allow for countervailing tendencies. Thus, Islamic fundamentalism represents both an increasingly ordinary and a threatening aspect of contemporary British society, as evidenced by the Satanic Verses Affair‘s reinforcement of cultural barriers. Smith‘s intertextual reference to ―the Rushdie Affair‖ equally represents a moment of authorial self-consciousness, which can be read in the light of Smith‘s wide 76 media acclaim and of her novel‘s reception. Just as The Satanic Verses was typecast as blasphemous based on a few selected passages – as Samad says, ―I don‘t need to read it. The relevant passages have been photocopied for me‖ (195; original emphasis) – White Teeth‘s reviewers singled out its optimistic and comic tone in order to deliver a particular positive message about the changing face of contemporary Britain. But as careful attention to elements of the plot reveals, for first and second-generation protagonists, England is far from being a ―Happy Multicultural Land,‖ as British multiculturalism refers not only to a convivial and hybrid culture, but also to an ongoing struggle against prejudice and discrimination (384). The following passage captures multiculturalism‘s ambivalent connotations: This has been the century of the great immigrant experiment. […] Yet, despite all the mixing up, despite the fact that we have finally slipped into each other‘s lives with reasonable comfort … it is still hard to admit that there is no one more English than the Indian, no one more Indian than the English. There are still young white men who are angry about that; who will roll out at closing time into the poorly lit streets with a kitchen knife wrapped in a tight fist. (271-72) British and Indian colonial histories may be interlocked now, and hybrid postcolonial identities may be the norm, especially among second-generation immigrants, but racism and anti-immigrant acts of violence persist. Smith critiques liberal multiculturalism in its exoticist and educational forms that, under the veneer of celebrating diversity, obscures racism and the lack of genuine cultural interaction. The sense of ethnic cultures as commodities that are to be consumed is reinforced by Magid and Millat‘s music teacher‘s exotic appreciation of Indian music. As a pedagogical tool, multiculturalism is satirized in the episode when Irie, Millat, and Magid are sent to offer food to a war veteran during their school‘s Harvest Festival. The example illustrates how second-generation 77 protagonists are targets of British racism, as well, as Mr. Hamilton recounts his war experiences in Congo when ―the only way I could identify the nigger was by the whiteness of his teeth … And they died because of it, you see?‖ (144). Biological associations of white teeth with black subjects are undone, however, by the example of Clara‘s prosthetic upper teeth, which she lost in a biking accident, thus disproving the racist stereotype. Besides referring to biological roots, the trope of teeth also alludes to historical ties, as Mr. Hamilton‘s racist response to multicultural school experiments is the outcome of British colonialism in Africa. The extension of Britain‘s imperial past into its multicultural present, as revealed in Glenard School‘s failed exercise in promoting religious diversity, is echoed by another experiment gone wrong. It involves the patron of the school, Sir Edmund Glenard, and his shipping hundreds of Jamaicans as cheap labor force to London to be schooled in the British work ethics in exchange for their teaching the British their religion. This episode, which ends with Jamaicans being stranded in England and which explains the colonial origins of migration, is presented as a digression during Irie‘s, Millat‘s, and Joshua Chalfen‘s meeting with the school principal after being caught smoking marijuana. The principal, inspired by the legacy of Sir Glenard, after whom the school is named, tries another experiment by sending Irie and Millat to be educated by Joshua‘s parents in an ostensibly more stable environment: ―Bringing children of disadvantaged or minority backgrounds into contact with kids who might have something to offer them. And there could be an exchange, vice versa‖ (156). The juxtaposition of nineteenth and twentieth- century times highlights a historical irony, namely that ―the multicultural present is both 78 product and repetition of the nearly erased Caribbean-based past‖ (Dalleo 99). Britain‘s present is thus linked to the wider globe in a way that underscores its colonial history. That Britain cannot be conceptualized as discrete, as its history is enmeshed with those of the Caribbean, South Asia, and Africa, is also conveyed by Irie Jones‘s miscalculated search for cultural purity and failed attempt to connect to her Caribbean roots. Irie admires the Chalfens to the point of desiring to identify with them: ―She wanted their Englishness. Their Chalfenishness. The purity of it‖ (272-73). Ironically, the Chalfens are third-generation immigrants and their quintessential Englishness is belied by their concealed Jewish roots. A further irony is that being Jewish renders them quintessentially diasporic. In recent theorizations, diaspora ―etymologically suggests the (more positive) fertility of dispersion, dissemination, and the scattering of seeds‖ (Braziel and Mannur 4). Through this biological metaphor, diaspora signifies the explosion of origins, the rhizomatic expansion of roots. The Chalfens‘ well-recorded family tree spans several centuries, yet as a family they live an insular life: they ―didn‘t need other people. […] they were all perfect‖ (261). Their dull perfection is contradicted however by their need of ―brown strangers‖ to revitalize them (271). In contrast, Irie‘s family tree is indeterminate, the outcome of myths and hearsay rather than historical records. To counteract her family‘s lack of family documents, Irie attempts to reconnect with her Jamaican heritage via family photos in her grandmother‘s house. She conceives of identity as a palimpsest, in which her newly discovered Jamaicanness can replace the Englishness she has been avidly pursuing. By imagining Jamaica as ―[a] blank page‖ (332) – that is, as an isolated, self-sufficient island, rather than as part of a global network 79 predicated on historical ties – Irie is unaware that she reproduces the island mentality and the colonial imaginary of the English and risks erasing the colonial history connecting the two countries as well as the history of Caribbean immigration to the ‗Mother Country.‘ 28 In her attempt to retrieve a fixed and pure identity, Irie ironically uproots herself from her mother‘s home. Eventually, she realizes that there will be no need to make a choice between Jamaican and English cultures or between her child‘s fathers, Millat and/or Magid. Of indeterminate parentage, Irie‘s daughter will pose a problem of categorization, as she ―can never be mapped exactly nor spoken of with any certainty‖ (437). Irie anticipates a time in the future when ―roots won‘t matter anymore because they can‘t because they mustn‘t because they‘re too long and they‘re too tortuous and they‘re just buried too damn deep‖ (WT 437). Speaking of her female protagonist, Smith asserts, ―[t]he reason Irie gets to the center of the book is not really about her, but about a certain idea of indeterminacy, which is in a lot of writing of my generation of my peers, about the center always being slightly displaced …‖ (O‘Grady 107). Smith may well suggest that indeterminate identities will be the model for a new Britishness where distinct genetic traces become irrelevant because of all-pervasive interracial mixtures, but her placing Irie in the Caribbean at the end of the novel may prove otherwise. Irie‘s ironic return to her Jamaican roots she has been searching for in England reaffirms the importance of origins in the construction of contemporary identities and underscores the 28 Andrea Levy‘s novel Small Island (2004) is the narrative of the ―Windrush generation‖ of Caribbean immigrants to England in the late 1940s and the British hostility to the newcomers. The title is a pun on both Jamaica and England as small islands – Jamaica is small as a country and in the aftermath of the loss of Empire, England has become a small island again – that prove in the end interconnected. 80 novel‘s utopian aspect. However, that such a scenario is likely in the near future is already suggested by Smith‘s displacement of the centrality of Englishness. In White Teeth, Englishness is no longer the dominant model, but represents one ethnicity among many others. Its representative, Archie Jones, is a feeble character whose actions are determined not by free will, but by flipping coins. The novel‘s opening and closing with Archie reinforces the idea of indeterminacy, an idea which I extend from the novel‘s themes and characters, to its use of genre and intertextuality. A plurivocal text that borrows from different literary traditions, White Teeth resists easy categorization. These multiple affiliations purposefully unsettle the novel‘s fixed location as a minority, or at best, an English text. Even though the novel is primarily indebted to the English tradition and is very much a London book depicting protagonists‘ suburban lives, I argue that ethical readings should also heed the novel‘s global aspects. More precisely, ethical readers would interpret the text as a multi-layered novel that probes Britain‘s postcolonial legacies, in addition to exploring the country‘s multicultural present. White Teeth is not only a multicultural English novel, but also a part of the Caribbean and South-Asian diasporic literary traditions on which it draws. As an English novel, White Teeth is Victorian in form and, due to its satirical depiction of character types and social problems in urban settings, has earned comparisons to Dickens, Austen, and George Eliot. It also recalls Lawrence Sterne‘s and Salman Rushdie‘s playful styles through the use of diagrams, charts, and digressions, and in the episode when Millat breaks his nose while looking at his twin brother‘s own broken nose in the family photograph. Like Kureishi‘s The Buddha of Suburbia, it 81 depicts multiculturalism comically and satirizes the middle classes. In her own review of White Teeth for the Butterfly magazine, Smith self-admittedly borrows from and rewrites the English literary tradition, presenting her novel as the outcome of ―some truly inspired thieving: Smith doing Amis, Smith doing Rushdie, Smith doing Kureishi, Winterson, Barnes, Auster, Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster‖ (qt. in Mason 83). Like Kureishi, Smith acknowledges that ―No writing is more influential on me than the English tradition‖ and sees herself as ―a child of the English canon‖ (qt. in Casado Gual 38). The author thus responds to her English literary precursors in an attempt to claim her rightful place among them. At the same time, Smith affiliates White Teeth with other Anglophone traditions. More precisely, she re-routes her novel‘s London-based plot towards other spaces and histories such as Bangladesh, colonial Jamaica, Eastern Europe and, through the Chalfens, the Jewish diaspora. Protagonists‘ memories of these places shape the present, cement existing friendships, and inflect their identities. All these elements form an entangled web, wherein Britain is redefined as part of other countries, cultures, and identities, more specifically, as part of its former colonies. One could argue, then, as Jan Lowe does in his article ―Colonization in Reverse: White Teeth as Caribbean Novel,‖ that the novel‘s tackling of the theme of Britain‘s colonial relationships with Africa, Asia and the Caribbean ―gives it a stake in the literatures of those‖ (166). Indeed, by depicting Jamaican and Bangladeshi protagonists and illuminating their cultures‘ relation to Britain, White Teeth should also be read as part of the Caribbean and South Asian literary traditions. At the same time, as ―a book that purports to speak authoritatively to a wide range of ethnic experience‖ (Head 106), it could be ascribed to the category of ―black- 82 British‖ literature, which traditionally subsumes representations of Caribbean-British and Asian-British experiences. As I argue, viewing black-British cultural productions as not only intra-national, but also diasporic, enables one to eschew interpretations of texts such as White Teeth solely through national and ethnic lenses. A similar conclusion can be reached when underscoring the novel‘s connection to Caribbean. In his article ―Colonization in Reverse: White Teeth as Caribbean Novel,‖ Raphael Dalleo argues that ―White Teeth deploys tropes and participates in the debates characteristic of Caribbean literature, and is itself a Caribbean novel‖ (91). Focusing his analysis on instances that celebrate cultural hybridity, especially in Smith‘s portrayal of youth culture in ―a London that is British and Caribbean and South Asian and American all at the same time‖ (93), Dalleo contends, along Paul Gilroy‘s line of argument, that cultural and linguistic mixtures are the true signifier of end-of-the-century London, rather than the institutional policies of multiculturalism. For example, the availability and the mixture of different cultures are well illustrated by the jargon of Millat‘s street gang Raggastani. Equally, during their visit to Mr. Hamilton during the Harvest Festival, Irie, Magid and Millat engage in a ―taxing‖ game ―whereby one lays claim, like a newly arrived colonizer, to items in a street that do not belong to you‖ (140). Millat, a Bengali- British, speaks in a Jamaican accent: ―Cha, man! Believe, I don‘t want to tax dat crap … I tax dat‖ (140). The children‘s taxing objects they would like to own is likened to immigrants‘ laying claim to England and its language, colonizing the country in reverse and creolizing English. White Teeth could thus be situated in a Caribbean-British literary tradition alongside novels like Sam Selvon‘s The Lonely Londoners (1956), whose 83 immigrant protagonist places himself in the center of London and creolizes English. Dalleo gives a careful reading of instances of cultural hybridity in White Teeth, but while creolization is undoubtedly a defining trait of the Caribbean, it is not restricted solely to that space, emerging in other contact zones shaped by colonization. Read from the angle of hybridity, the novel does fit into writing by Caribbean-British authors such as Sam Selvon, George Lamming, Beryl Gilroy, V. S. Naipaul, Caryl Phillips, and Andrea Levy. Yet even when the narrative digresses to Caribbean settings, Smith portrays Jamaican characters‘ relationship to English colonizers and especially their interaction with other ethnic protagonists in their North London neighborhood. She is interested in depicting primarily a postcolonial England where not only Caribbean, but also South-Asian and Jewish characters dwell. Smith thus rewrites Britishness as a hybrid identity that is the outcome of all these intertwined histories. White Teeth is also indebted to South Asian diasporic fiction. Through her ―rollicking verbal pyrotechnics‖ (Quinn par. 6) as well as the novel‘s themes and scope, Smith pays homage to Rushdie‘s fiction. White Teeth glosses over 150 years of history and several continents in an ebullient and encyclopedic fashion reminiscent of Rushdie‘s prose. In fact, its dust cover carries Rushdie‘s glowing review of the novel as ―an astonishingly assured debut, funny and serious,‖ that is ―about how we all got here – from the Caribbean, from the Indian subcontinent […] – and about what ‗here‘ turned out to be.‖ Rushdie highlights diasporic routes, to the detriment of roots (the novel‘s main trope), and the creative potential of displacement, thus aligning Smith with immigrant and global writers such as himself, even if Smith is not an immigrant, but a North 84 Londoner by birth and very much attached to her Willesden community. 29 In an interview, Smith rejects her comparison to Rushdie, deeming it ―racist nonsense‖ and declares: ―I think I have brown people in my book, and so does Salman, and so does Hanif Kureishi. So it‘s a genre …‖ (Hattenstone par. 12). White Teeth, whose dust jacket, like Hanif Kureishi‘s Buddha of Suburbia, markets cultural difference by displaying bright colors and ethnic motifs, certainly fits into a genre that has become a highly saleable commodity. Smith draws on the conventions of urban British fiction, especially by postcolonial and black-British authors like Rushdie, Kureishi, and also Caribbean-British Sam Selvon, but in contrast to them, her multicultural London is no longer an exotic place, but a mundane reality achieved through historical shifts. Both the past and the present are significant, and the novel‘s chapter titles contain twin historical dates, suggesting that the colonial past overshadows and is indispensable to understanding the postcolonial present; yet the balance seems to sway in favor of protagonists‘ present-day encounters with difference. For instance, Smith dedicates a full chapter to the story of Samad‘s ancestor Mangal Pande, an ostensible hero in the Indian Mutiny of 1857. As a postcolonial migrant, Samad negotiates his identity in England by way of his connection to this episode from Indian history. Yet through its endless recounting, Pande‘s story becomes a devalued currency that is of interest to no one. Therefore, Samad‘s identity is best forged in contact with the other English, Jewish, and Afro-Caribbean protagonists. Because White Teeth intertwines the local and the 29 As Smith declares, ―The people in White Teeth are immigrants. I‘m not an immigrant, so it‘s a different experience‖ (PBS interview par. 16). 85 global in its exploration of multiethnic London and of the identities of its protagonists, it is interested in depicting a global multiculturalism, showing how Britain is now ―a globalized locality‖ (Tew x). White Teeth simultaneously offers a template for a new Britain and cautions against easy definitions. In the last chapter, Smith self-reflexively connects her critique of the marketing of her authorial persona with the project of rebranding Britain by having her multi-ethnic cast of characters occupy a rebranded corporate space. The Exhibition Room at the Perret Institute in central London, where Marcus Chalfen‘s genetically modified mouse is on display, is depicted as ―a clean slate; white/chrome/pure/plain […] neutral […]; a virtual place where their business […] can be done in an emptiness, an uncontaminated cavity‖ (428). Yet the very idea of neutrality, purity, or a new beginning is belied by the cacophony of voices and designs of the interconnected protagonists. Thus, Marcus Chalfen with his genetic engineering project, Millat‘s KEVIN Islamic fundamentalist gang, Joshua Chalfen‘s animal rights group, and Hortense Bowden‘s Jehovah‘s Witnesses form a chorus of dissonant voices that sharply contrast with the homogeneous corporate space they occupy. With their roots planted in their native cultures, but also in their commitment to building convivial interethnic relationships in present-day London, Jamaican-, Bangladeshi-, and Jewish-English protagonists re- conceptualize ―Britain as diaspora space‖ (Hesse 11), setting it in contrast to the corporate space that has been emptied out of difference. And so, the answer to Smith‘s question of how immigrants and minorities fit into the space of Britain is suggested in the text by people‘s answers to the Perret Institute‘s consumer-style questionnaire: 86 people can finally give the answers required when a space is being designed, or when something is being rebranded, a room/furniture/Britain (that was the brief: a new British room, a space for Britain, Britishness, space of Britain, British industrial space cultural space space) […] they know what they want, especially those who‘ve lived this century, forced from one space to another like Mr. De Winter (né Wojciech), renamed, rebranded, the answer to every questionnaire nothing nothing space please just space nothing please nothing space (429) Their answer to the questionnaire is in fact their refusal to offer clear-cut answers that the checking of boxes requires and to embrace the ideal of porous space with no boundaries. Thus, it is tempting to read the rebranding of ―a space for Britain, Britishness‖ in the novel as a mise-en-abyme of the critical reception of Smith and her novel: a British author and a British novel. Against critical attempts at easy categorization, the author attempts to re-brand herself as a writer sans frontières, unmoored by considerations of ethnicity, gender, or age, yet no less British, and her novel as a British novel, yet so much more. If we consider its very ending, then, just as the mouse, considered ―certainty in its purest forms‖ (405), escapes from its glass cage, White Teeth refuses to be categorized according to narrow labels. All in all, Zadie Smith is a British as well as a Caribbean author and she also anchors herself in the Indo-Anglian tradition that Salman Rushdie helped consecrate. She deliberately inhabits a spectrum of differently staged identities, being at once a successor of the English canon and a singular voice within the English tradition. Like Hanif Kureishi, Smith is not a postcolonial liminal figure caught between two cultures, but a writer who is simultaneously at home in the nation and in the world. 87 Chapter 2 South-Asians in America: Meena Alexander’s and Kiran Desai’s Cosmopolitical Fictions ―I‘m an Indian writer; I‘m also an American writer. It‘s all a question of multiple boundaries and affiliations‖ -- Zainab Ali and Dharini Rasiah, ―Meena Alexander‖ ―Being part of the Indian diaspora … gives one a precise emotional location to work from, if not a precise geographical one. -- Sophie Rochester, ―Exclusive Interview with Kiran Desai‖ During the past five decades, South-Asian diasporic writers have occupied an increasingly prominent place on the global literary scene. 30 Writing in English and receiving prestigious literary awards such as the Pulitzer Prize (Jhumpa Lahiri, 2000) and the Man Booker Prize (Kiran Desai, 2006), they belong to cosmopolitan elites both in their home and host countries. Even as they narrate the experience of immigration and diaspora as well as the economic imbalances inherent in late capitalism, their socio- economic and cultural capital places them at a remove from the lives of the downtrodden they seek to represent, in both senses of the word. 31 As the creation of privileged, rather 30 The resurgence of interest in Indian writing in English was spurred by the publication of Salman Rushdie‘s Midnight’s Children in 1981 and the 50 th anniversary of India‘s independence in 1997. For a more detailed consideration of the conditions that led to the global marketability of South-Asian writing in English, see Graham Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London and New York: Routledge, 2001) and Bishnupriya Ghosh, When Borne Across: Literary Cosmopolitics in the Contemporary Indian Novel (New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London: Rutgers UP, 2004). 31 See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak‘s ―Can the Subaltern Speak?‖ for her discussion of the two senses of ―representation‖ in politics and in art, esp. pp. 70-75. 88 than subaltern voices, their texts function, at least on one level, as cultural commodities that cater to literary tastes and demands in the Global North, making available unfamiliar local cultures and experiences, but in a language recognizable to Western audiences. Meena Alexander and Kiran Desai are well aware of the risks of complicity inherent in acts of literary representation from a privileged position; however, they seek to narrate the diasporic experience of displacement and immigration in politically and ethically significant ways that do not merely aestheticize these experiences, but rather underscore the power imbalances inherent in such journeys. In so doing, they depart from theoretical studies of diasporic and immigrant subjects that tend to celebrate their border-crossing mobility and hybrid cultural identity (Hall 1990, Gilroy 1992, Appadurai 1996, Clifford 1997). To this end, they resort to formal strategies such as fragmentary structures that underscore the disjunctures inherent in global flows and in racialized, gendered, and classed migrations. This chapter explores Alexander‘s and Desai‘s works as diasporic texts that underscore power inequalities and the material histories of disenfranchised immigrant or diasporic subjects by way of their formal aesthetics. Diaspora, by intertwining rootedness and rootlessness and embodying the tension between the national and the global, is well-suited to illuminate both the disjunctures and the connectivities in the postcolonial and neoliberal world that Alexander‘s and Desai‘s texts and biographies bring out. For the authors, diaspora provides an alternative to national, minority, and transnational subject positions and underscores the complexities of their cultural belonging. As South-Asian diasporic writers, Alexander and Desai do not fit neatly 89 within an Indian literary tradition, since they write in a global language rather than vernacular idioms, or within ethnic literary studies in the U.S.A., since traditionally, Indian-American works have not been part of an Asian-American aesthetics. They cannot be viewed as simply cosmopolitan, detached writers, as they are the products of British colonial history and employ the language of the former colonizer ambivalently. Because Alexander and Desai address this Euro-American imperial legacy critically and illuminate subalterns‘ unequal subject positions within a late capitalist context, I regard them as ―cosmopolitical,‖ as opposed to ―cosmopolitan‖ writers. They use their positions as diasporic writers rooted at once in their home and host cultures to uncover transnational patterns of affinity as well as inequity in the world. I argue that diaspora assists them in their cosmopolitical endeavor. In their texts, the trope of diaspora represents both a socio-political phenomenon and an aesthetic form that bridges national as well as transnational experiences. In this way, their texts represent a relational model of contemporary fiction that shuns discrete literary classifications, illuminating the interconnections of nations and cultural spaces, while also revealing the boundaries that hierarchical power relations erect and maintain. In both writers‘ narratives, borders represent a central trope. Alexander‘s fault line motif and Desai‘s formal juxtaposition of different narratives underscore the gaps between the poor and the well-off, between illegal immigrants and cosmopolitan travelers. More specifically, in Fault Lines: A Memoir (1993) and The Shock of Arrival: Reflections on Postcolonial Experience (1996), Alexander employs an aesthetics of fragmentation that reflects the multiple dislocations of her diasporic self during her 90 immigrant journeys. She equally fragments her prose by using poetry, which she considers a more difficult genre to grasp by non-elite or non-academic readerships, thus seeking to render her works less easily commodifiable. Similarly, in The Inheritance of Loss (2006), Kiran Desai uses a fragmentary structure that shifts between different times and spaces and an overall dark and somber tone in order to emphasize the idea that immigration is a difficult and unheroic movement predicated on a rift between home and host lands. At the same time, by writing her novel in the genre of realism, Desai distances herself from ostensibly exoticizing narrative strategies such as magical realism, which she employed in her debut novel Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard (1998), and the subsequent charge of the commodification of South-Asian cultures commonly incurred by South-Asian diasporic writers. The formal aesthetics of the authors‘ texts, which address colonialism, nationalism, diaspora, and neoliberalism, are a way of conjoining the writers‘ literary concerns with their socio-political ones. More specifically, by depicting present-day India and America in relation to histories of colonization and racialization, Alexander and Desai go beyond merely presentist approaches, forcing readers to delve into colonial and imperial history in order to understand their authorial subjectivities and their texts. In this sense, their works not only represent the experience of immigration and diaspora, but also entail political and ethical responsiveness and responsibility on the part of readers and critics. The latter are compelled to make transnational connections between past and 91 present times, and ―First World‖ and ―Third World‖ 32 locales to understand their imbricated relations. These texts forge what Rajini Srikanth terms ―a reticulate consciousness,‖ that is, ―an awareness of oneself as part of an extensive network of the globe‘s inhabitants‖ and, I would add, along the lines of her argument, of the nation-state as part of a larger geopolitical configuration (The World Next Door 10). In this respect, Alexander‘s and Desai‘s own diasporic identities, which are the products of such interconnected, if violent histories, and inform the writing and reading of their works, equally serve as starting points for larger perspectives and networks. Their diasporic subjectivities as writers who move between several countries and their texts‘ representations of the ways in which diaspora engages with the nation show us how both social formations are embedded and shaped within a larger postcolonial and cosmopolitical framework. Through their renewed attention to narrative form as well as their thematic focus on the material histories of diasporic subjects, Alexander and Desai attempt to re- politicize the genre of diasporic narratives. In their texts, diaspora is not merely an abstract condition of textual liminality and cultural ambivalence, but also a socio-political phenomenon that refers to the material histories of people displaced as a result of colonialism or neoliberal capitalism. The authors‘ concerns for subaltern struggles and global inequities affiliate them to a corpus of ―cosmopolitical‖ South-Asian writers with shared literary and political agendas. In her recent study When Borne Across: Literary 32 I use the categories ―First World‖ and ―Third World,‖ which obviously lack theoretical validity, as political constructs. 92 Cosmopolitics in the Contemporary Indian Novel (2004), Bishnupriya Ghosh delineates a corpus of such cosmopolitical South-Asian writers, among them Salman Rushdie, Vikram Chandra, Amitav Ghosh, Upamanyu Chatterjee and Arundhati Roy, whose literary aesthetics are inextricably linked with a politics that ―critique[s] capital flows, hegemonic political and military flanks, and the violence of nation states towards subaltern groups‖ (5). In their local struggles as activists as well as their fictional works, such writers strive to intervene into nationalist and global cultural dialectics by privileging local contexts and vernacular Englishes. The social and linguistic specificity of their works requires acts of cultural translation on the part of non-Indian readers, who are ―borne across‖ cultures and languages and compelled to imagine transnational connections (Ghosh 12). In Ghosh‘s view, the untranslatability or partial rendering of South-Asian local and linguistic contexts impedes the easy commodification of such works. Thus, these works are at once co-opted by the global market, being consumed as popular fiction, and at the same time resistant to the metaphorization of the struggles and the material histories of subalterns. As ―cosmopolitical‖ writers, Alexander and Desai are not unlike other South- Asian diasporic writers who are attempting to move away, although not always successfully, from an aestheticization of diasporic experience towards a more politically engaged narrative. 33 (Arundhati Roy, Amitav Ghosh, or Zulfikar Ghose, for example, 33 South-Asian diasporic writers such as Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh, Meena Alexander, Bharati Mukherjee, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Amit Chaudhury, Arundhati Roy, Pankaj Mishra, Jhumpa Lahiri and Kiran Desai, among others, form a highly heterogeneous corpus. Their visions range from assimilationist mindsets (Bharati Mukherjee), to staunchly diasporic self-locations as alternatives to assimilation (Meena Alexander), to critiques of globalization and the West (Arundhati Roy, Amitav 93 produced works that critique globalization, de-center the pre-eminence of North American culture, and challenge dominant assumptions about ethnic and minority literary productions). However, my point is that, taken together and seen from a generational point of view, Alexander and Desai exemplify a recent attempt in diaspora studies to move beyond representations of identity construction. Although they do not abandon identity concerns entirely, Alexander and Desai attempt to shift their focus from diasporic subject formation to the material histories and lives of diasporic individuals and groups – a shift that diaspora scholars such as Braziel and Mannur as well as Pnina Werbner have cogently addressed (Theorizing Diaspora 9, ―Introduction: The Materiality of Diaspora‖ 6-7). Alexander and Desai lay emphasis not only on the ways in which diasporic identities are constructed, but also how such identities are lived and practiced by diasporics in their host lands. Even though Alexander is largely concerned with her own diasporic identity and self-positioning in a global context, at the crossroads of several cultures and languages, she also explores how identities are raced, gendered, and materially experienced under unequal socio-economic circumstances in her host country, the United States. She holds U.S. multiculturalism responsible for creating the imperative for diasporic authors to position themselves in gendered and ethnic terms, an act of self-definition that would not be necessary in India. To rigid conceptions of identity and to ethnicity-based classifications of literary narratives, she offers her multiple and mixed ethnic affiliations Ghosh). Most often, their works function ambivalently as both contestatory of and complicit in the global circuits and production and reception. This latter sense of conjoined complicity and contestation equally applies to Alexander and Desai. 94 as an Indian, American, South-Asian American, Asian-American and diasporic writer. By confounding the boundaries between these taxonomical categories and situating herself flexibly within and between these subject positions, she aims to intervene into the politics of literary classification. At the same time, she suggests that the limit to such acts of self-invention is the diasporic writer‘s raced and gendered body. In turn, in The Inheritance of Loss, Desai charts the experience of transnational labor in the global present, which has not been mapped out extensively in literary terms. Like Alexander, she tackles the politics of belonging and the patterns of inclusion or exclusion of diasporic subjects in both India and the United States, which hinge on their economic and cultural capital. Desai‘s teasing out of shared diasporic experiences across geographical and temporal borders is the result of her realization that her Americanness is inconceivable without her Indianness, that as an Indian diasporic writer in the U.S.A. she is indebted to both cultures. She enacts this awareness of plural cultural affiliations in her novel by mapping connections to other identities in other times and places. Thus, textual readings of Inheritance would ideally heed the historical and cultural imbrications of nation-states as well as their construction of boundaries. Alexander and Desai are aware of the salience of national geo-political and literary borders. While foregrounding diasporic movements and subjectivities that are informed by multiple, cross-cultural allegiances, they stress the difficulties of border crossing for subalterns and the ways in which diasporics are gendered, raced, and classed in their host countries. They suggest, therefore, that the experience of diaspora and transnationalism is greatly determined by economic and symbolic capital. For instance, if 95 Alexander can cross geographical borders unproblematically due to her privileged position in the academic and literary world, she is equally placed into particular ethnic literary traditions in the United States because of her racial difference. In Desai‘s novel, the indigent status of illegal immigrants prevents them from assimilating into mainstream American society or from entering into their own diasporic communities, so that they remain outsiders to their own ethnic groups. While the authors‘ approaches to the treatment of diasporic subjects within their host countries have their merits, in that they show how national and ethnic minority categories are created and reinforced by unequal power relations, they should equally be viewed within the context of the globalization of English-language diasporic and postcolonial fiction. In spite of their literary cosmopolitics, then, Alexander and Desai cannot eschew the global cultural and linguistic structures of power that facilitate the circulation and consumption of their texts. Whereas the formal aesthetics of Fault Lines, The Shock of Arrival, and The Inheritance of Loss may enable Alexander and Desai to deflect exclusively commercial readings of their texts, the two writers equally participate in the market for commodifiable immigrant and diasporic literature, by tackling topical contemporary themes and holding privileged positions as diasporic writers and academics (Alexander is a reputed postcolonial scholar as well as poet and novelist whose works have received numerous awards, and Desai is the recipient of the prestigious Man Booker Prize). Therefore, far from attempting to recuperate their writing as solely critical of global hegemonic structures, I argue that they should be seen within the context of the 96 resurgence of interest in South-Asian writing in the last few decades and its implicit co- optation by a global literary marketplace. This renewed interest in South-Asian literature in English, or what Bishnupriya Ghosh calls ―a Renaissance in Indian Writing in English‖ (When Borne Across 3), is due to numerous social, historical and cultural factors. One such aspect is that South-Asian Americans have recently become more visible on the American cultural and political scene, especially in light of the post-1965 immigration 34 to North America. While South- Asians have immigrated prior to the twentieth century, as well, the post-1960s generations belong mostly to the professional class that benefited from an English colonial education in South-Asia and thus have a different story of immigration and minoritization in the U.S.A. than Asian-Americans. They represent middle and upper class writers who thematize colonial and postcolonial history, multiculturalism, and hybrid identities. The advent of postcolonial studies and literatures in the 1980s and 1990s, with their attendant valorization of such literary tropes, has increased South-Asian writers‘ international appeal. So has the institutionalization and awarding of national and global literary prizes such as the Man Booker to postcolonial writers such as Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy and Kiran Desai, among others. Rushdie, the recipient of the 34 South-Asian immigration patterns to the United States are often viewed as non-evolutionary and uneven: the first Sikh farmers who arrived on the West Coast between the end of the nineteenth-century and the first two decades of the twentieth, were followed by the bourgeois population arriving in the 1970s via East Africa and Canada. After 1965s, South-Asian immigrants consisted mostly of a large professional population of doctors, engineers, and educators. Lastly, South-Asian students, computer engineers, and software specialists represented the final wave of immigrants from the late 1980s onwards. For accounts of South-Asian immigration to U.S.A., see Gita Rajan and Shajlia Sharma, New Cosmopolitanisms: South Asians in the US (13-14) and Samir Dayal, ―Min(d)ing the Gap: South-Asian Americans and Diaspora‖ (240-41). 97 1981 Booker Prize for Midnight’s Children, has set the trend for Indian writing in English, creating ―a highly prescriptive set of assumptions‖ about what the language, style, and genre of South-Asian literary texts should be (Orsini 319). Furthermore, the 50 th anniversary of India‘s independence in 1997, as well as the New Yorker double issue on Indian fiction on 23 and 30 June 1997 has equally contributed to the resurgence of interest in Indian writing in English. To these factors, one could add the fact that South- Asian writers employ English, a global language, for predominantly North American readerships. Even when they translate local cultures to non-Indian audiences, the global images circulated by the media render those cultures partially recognizable. 35 As ―Indian Writing in English‖ becomes a global commodity, being the product of global demand and the markets for postcolonial or multicultural Anglophone literature, cosmopolitical texts such as Alexander‘s and Desai‘s seem essentially compromised. Yet, as I contend, their differentiation from purely commercial or popular consumption resides, to a large extent, in the ethical reading practices the texts encourage in their discrepant audiences. That is, their texts narrate the experiences of diasporic individuals and groups and sensitize readers to their discrepant material histories. In her article on the materiality of diaspora (2000), Pnina Werbner argues that diasporic aesthetic practices ―materialize diasporas as transnational communities of co- responsibility, imaginatively grounded in ideas about a shared past/future‖ (7, original 35 Another factor explaining the global success of South-Asian diasporic writers may be attributed to changing readerships, increasingly accustomed to mass media images of far-off cultures. For example, while V. S. Naipaul attracted an older kind of cosmopolitan, urban readership who needed to have a sense of (post)colonial history, the younger generation of South-Asian diasporic writers such as Jhumpa Lahiri or Chitra Divakaruni appeal to more global and diverse audiences who are somewhat familiar with images of the ―Other‖ conjured up by the media. 98 emphasis). In Giving an Account of Oneself (2005), Judith Butler contends that every narrative about the self entails responsibility towards others. In Alexander‘s and Desai‘s fiction, responsibility should be construed not so much as a demand to account for oneself and one‘s actions, but as an opportunity to respond ethically to another subject and reflect critically on the social and discursive structures that shape our understandings of Self and Other. Alexander‘s and Desai‘s use of narrative form and rhetorical address to multiple audiences enable them to develop their political and ethical aesthetics. They juxtapose or connect experiences separated in place and time, both highlighting and unsettling their boundaries. Their own experience as diasporic writers who blur national categories shapes their vision of contemporary fiction as one that narrates encounters between individual and collective subjects in local, national, and transnational situations. Therefore, in what follows, I will show how each writer‘s diasporic identity, which bridges several cultural spaces and literary categories, serves as a catalyst for inter-ethnic and transnational connections. The authors‘ multiple affiliations impact the formal aesthetics of their texts, which juggle several different perspectives on immigration, nationalism, postcoloniality, and underscore the fragmentations in the world. Their juxtapositions and parallels between these different worldviews invite readers to perform an act of translation, that is, to envision how situations in one part of the world resonates with similar circumstances elsewhere. In particular, Fault Lines, The Shock of Arrival, and Inheritance of Loss translate local situations across global contexts, showing how an understanding of nationalism and minority conflicts in India might shed new light on 99 multiculturalism in the United States and vice versa, and asking us to respond to and take responsibility for events happening elsewhere. Their fictions are cosmopolitical not because the writers are able to cross borders and see the complexities inherent in their diasporic locations, but because they contend that national and transnational affiliations are inextricably linked to ethical and political responsiveness and responsibility that their texts open up. Diaspora, understood in Werbner‘s sense of co-responsibility and Butler‘s shared responsiveness, offers a way of linking fiction with the material histories of immigrant and diasporic groups, one the one hand and, on the other, with the cosmopolitical questions that arise in the rhetorical address between selves and others. 100 Meena Alexander as a South-Asian Diasporic Writer Meena Alexander, a prolific poet, novelist and scholar, hails from northern India, from an upper-class family who moved to Khartoum, Sudan, when she was five. Alexander travelled back and forth between Sudan and India, went to England to study, and after four years returned to her native country. In 1979, she emigrated to the United States with her Jewish-American husband. As this brief biography shows, Meena Alexander seems to be the prototype of the postmodern nomad or the postcolonial liminal subject. She has lived in several countries, has grown among many religions (Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism), speaks multiple languages (Malayalam, her native tongue, Hindi, Arabic, Tamil, French, and English) and is conversant with both Western and non-Western literary traditions. Her global background casts her as a multiply displaced – or multiply located – writer, working in the gaps between – and at the confluence of – several nation-states, cultures, and languages. In fact, one of the central themes in her work is the fault line, which she explores from various angles: from her own diasporic subjectivity as criss-crossed by the memories of different spaces and languages, to racial and gendered inequalities and tensions in multiethnic societies, and her juxtaposition of various literary genres to represent a layered, more complex, reality. Alexander understands herself as a diasporic in the U.S.A. in relation to both India and Sudan, shifts between poetry, fiction, and memoir, while also lacing her prose with poems and literary criticism, and writes in an English language inflected by the rhythms of the other languages she speaks. 101 Alexander‘s autobiography Fault Lines: A Memoir (1993) and her collection of essays and poems entitled The Shock of Arrival: Reflections on Postcolonial Experience (1996) map a geography of dislocation, reflecting the writer‘s search for self-definition in the context of such multiple identifications and cultural allegiances. Alexander has a very spatial sense of self, which is evident in her utilization of metaphors such as compass, collage, palimpsest and fault lines to describe what living in diaspora means to her. For instance, situating herself in America entails her simultaneously reaching out to her Indian past: ―I put out both hands as far as they will reach. My right hand reaches through the mirror with no back, into a ghostly past … . But my left hand stretches into the present‖ (FL 7). Alexander‘s body is a compass or a map where East and West, past and present, meet and often collide. Through these spatial images that connect her present with her past and home with host land, Alexander expresses the tension between ―roots‖ and ―routes‖ inherent in diasporic subject positions (Clifford 3). For example, in the ―Katha‖ chapter of Fault Lines, she describes herself as ―torn apart‖ by two different types of memories or ways of relating to the past (29). One memory reconnects her to her family in India, recreating the sense of the safe, self-enclosed space of home, and gives her a genealogy consciousness: ―[a] life embedded in a life, and that in another life, another and another‖ (FL 29). Another memory brings up the shifting spaces of her childhood, the numerous cities she has been in and out of, which are ―scraps of space‖ that she pieces together to make ―a patchwork garment fit to wear‖ (FL 30). Their memory stretches up to the present and inflects Alexander‘s diasporic identity: she ―has no home, no fixed address, no shelter;‖ she is ―a nowhere creature‖ (FL 30). This 102 memory of diasporic fragmentation and dispersion, rather than superseding that of the wholeness of home, is juxtaposed to and coexists with the latter. Thus, Alexander conceives of herself as a patchwork woman, a collage of spaces and memories, as layer upon layer adding up to what she calls ―a palimpsest of self‖ (Ali and Rasiah 71). Her texts express the rift between rootedness and feeling unhoused, between a single geography and a plurality of spaces. Alexander, who mediates and exists in the tension between these multiple spaces, describes herself as ―a mass of faults […], a woman cracked by multiple migrations;‖ (FL 2); and, in the same vein, she affirms: ―I am the fault line, the crack that marked the dislocation‖ (SA 15). Through the structuring motif of fault lines, which evoke the cracks in the earth revealing disturbances after an earthquake and lend the title to her memoir, Alexander suggests the impossibility of getting a clear hold of place and of a single, uncomplicated identity for diasporic subjects such as herself. What is interesting about Alexander‘s diasporic location is that she situates herself precisely in the divide not only between the national and the transnational, which is a well-known positionality in recent theorizations of diaspora studies (Braziel and Mannur 8), but within nation-states, as well. The implication of this local-global dialectic is that, on the one hand, Alexander‘s ―border existence‖ (FL 114), which springs from her consciousness of difference, forecloses both a nostalgic return to her roots, on the one hand, and an unproblematic assimilation in the United States, on the other. That is, in India, her consciousness of growing up female, ―dark-skinned‖ and a Syrian Christian reinforces her sense of marginality, despite her socially privileged family and her English 103 education (FL 49). Within the Unites States, her ethnicity sets her apart from both white Americans and Asian-Americans – the minority group that arguably subsumes South- Asian Americans. Aware that her diasporic location prevents her from being Indian, Asian-American, or American in any simple way, Alexander embraces instead a poetic subjectivity that aims to intervene politically in the world and render national and ethnic affiliations moot. However, while she clings to this cosmopolitical and postnational ideal, she is forced to acknowledge that ―[n]ationality, too, that emptiest and yet most contested of signs, marks us‖ and that ―in America … any self I had would be insuperably marked as Indian‖ (SA 1, 143). Therefore, her concern in Fault Lines and The Shock of Arrival is to explore, from the threshold of inclusion, her plural identifications and the way her overdetermined identity counteracts reductionist demands of classification, on the one hand, and becomes a basis for shared connections on national and transnational levels, on the other. To express her lack of ―fit‖ within national and ethnic minority spaces, Alexander portrays herself as a ―No Nation Woman‖ (SA 116) and asks ―What does it mean to carry one‘s house on one‘s back?‖ (FL 193) in order to indicate not so much her lack of national allegiances or an unattached, nomadic identity, but rather her refusal to be slotted into monolithic national or ethnic categories. Diaspora allows her to embrace multiple positionalities and forestalls any simple reading of her national belonging. As she explains in an interview, ―I‘m an Indian writer; I‘m also an American writer. It‘s all a question of multiple boundaries and affiliations‖ (Ali and Rasiah 79). Thus, she is not simply Indian, as she might be classified on account of her birthplace, or American in an 104 assimilationist way, à la Bharati Mukherjee; but rather, both these identities are illuminated by her transnational journeys and her experiences as a South-Asian diasporic in America. Self-admittedly, her current geographical location greatly shapes her literary aesthetics, as she considers the United States ―a place where I can see geographical complexities, the questions of border crossings‖ (Rustomji-Kerns 26). This conception of the U.S.A. signals her rejection of parochial understandings of location and her vision of her Americanness as closely tied to several other nations, such as India and Sudan, among others. As Rajini Srikanth puts it, ―[t]he globe is her field of vision, the U.S. merely the place from which she writes‖ (The World Next Door 246). Alexander suggests, therefore, that her Americanness should be understood in a transnational context, even as she attempts to ground herself in the U.S. through writing. The way in which Alexander ―claims‖ America not as an immigrant, but as a diasporic subject, by retracing connections to her Indian female ancestry and to September 11, 2001, a U.S.-based event of global resonance, however, will be the focus of my next two sections. However, before considering how diaspora inflects Alexander‘s conception of her home and host countries, I would like to ask: What does it mean, for Alexander, to be living and writing in the United States, transnationally connected to postcolonial India and historically to British colonialism? How do her ―liminal‖ texts, which address global dislocation and psychic fragmentation and are written by a ―border‖ intellectual and prize-winning writer residing in the U.S., speak on behalf of those living in the interstices of society? How are the modes of production and reception of Alexander‘s texts related to her marginality and hybridity? 105 The relation between geography and writing obviously raises the question of the positionality and status of diasporic South-Asian intellectuals in the United States, particularly the symbolic capital diaspora carries within North American academia. Alexander‘s elite background and class privilege appear to belie her self-construction as a tragically split diasporic individual and minority subject exposed to patterns of racialization in the U.S., placing her squarely within the structures of power and academic privilege of her host country. Alexander is Distinguished Professor of English at Hunter College and the Graduate Center at the City University of New York and her poetry and essays have been widely anthologized in journals. Fault Lines was chosen as one of Publishers Weekly‘s Best Books of 1993, while the second edition of Fault Lines was commissioned by the well-known Feminist Press at the City University of New York and prefaced by Ngugi wa Thiong‘o. Furthermore, her novel Nampally Road (1991) was named the Editor‘s Choice in the Village Voice and favorably reviewed in Los Angeles Times and Publishers Weekly, The Shock of Arrival (1996) garnered positive comments from Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak, and her poetry volume Illiterate Heart won a 2002 PEN Open Book Award. Fault Lines presents telling instances, whether during Alexander‘s childhood or her cosmopolitan travels back to India, when the writer‘s elite status is juxtaposed to that of lower-class children in India and Indian labor diasporics en route for the Persian Gulf. However, she de-emphasizes such self-reflexive moments in the representation of her identity construction, choosing instead to foreground the way her racialized and gendered body poses a problem of integration and is subject to discrimination in America. While 106 Alexander‘s emphasis on the body necessarily points towards a history of exclusion and discrimination against ethnic and immigrant groups in the U.S., it equally shifts attention away from the manner in which the celebration of difference is constitutive of U.S. academia and in which the writer might capitalize on it. In one rare self-reflexive instance that admits of complicity, Alexander‘s ―good English‖ is regarded by American friends as symbolic capital that would help secure a good academic position (FL 112). Moreover, the fragmentary aesthetics of Fault Lines and The Shock of Arrival, which conjoins postmodernist, postcolonial, and border theories, foregrounds a seemingly discursive construction of diasporic identity, aligning Alexander with postcolonial figures such as Homi Bhabha. The writer‘s use of palimpsest and collage as both narrative structures and identity tropes turn her texts as well as her subjectivity into aesthetic objects of sorts. Alexander‘s patchwork identity, which is a metaphor for cultural hybridity, and her borderline self-location serve indeed to avoid essentializing, totalizing narratives of self. Yet in its apparently aestheticized self-construction, it recalls Bhabha‘s theory of liminality as an interstitial passage between fixed identifications and a privileged textual space accessible to cosmopolitan intellectuals (The Location of Culture 148). Furthermore, unlike other ―border‖ intellectuals such as Gloria Alzaldúa, who mixes English, Spanish, and Nahuatl in Borderlands/La Frontera (1987), Alexander writes in fairly standard, albeit lyrical, English, despite claiming to appropriate the colonizer‘s language so that it ―bends and sways to the shores of other territories, other tongues‖ (FL 11). Her careful explanation of vernacular terms such as ―chapatis, flat 107 whole-wheat pancakes‖ (FL 54) to North American audiences establishes her texts, at least partially, as cultural commodities geared towards consumption in the Global North. I argue that, even though Fault Lines and The Shock of Arrival generally lack a more straightforward acknowledgment of the co-optation of postcolonial writers and scholars by hegemonic structures in the North American academy, Alexander espouses a cosmopolitical aesthetics that aims to re-write the American literary tradition in a way that accounts for the histories and voices of gendered and racial Others. In contrast to Bhabha‘s articulation of a liminal space between national constituencies, which fails to engage the material conditions of colonized and diasporic subjects, Alexander stresses the historical processes of racialization in the U.S., striving to re-envision American society as a ―contact zone‖ 36 between different ethnic groups. Such a bifocal approach aligns her with Gayatri Spivak‘s argument about postcolonial intellectuals residing in the Global North, who embody the tension between co-optation by and contestation of hegemonic structures. According to Spivak, writing and teaching about marginality entails the risk of solidifying marginal or ―Third World‖ identities and thus of ―becoming complicitous in the perpetration of ‗a new Orientalism‘‖ (Outside in the Teaching Machine 56). However, Spivak argues, even if they speak from a space of privilege, postcolonial intellectuals are ―natives, too,‖ and they at once critique and inhabit a power structure (Outside 60). In her preoccupation with writing ethnicity from a privileged position, Alexander exemplifies what Spivak calls ―the deconstructive predicament of the 36 I am indebted to Mary Louise Pratt‘s term that denotes ―social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination‖ (Imperial Eyes 4); however, by diasporic ―contact zones,‖ I refer to the interactions not between colonizer and colonized, or Europeans and South Asians, but between immigrants, diasporics, and ethnic minorities. 108 postcolonial‖ (Outside 64). Through her at once privileged and racialized position in the U.S., Alexander tests the boundary between inclusion and exclusion. The fact that she navigates easily between ―ethnic,‖ ―national,‖ and ―diasporic‖ or ―transnational‖ categories should not be construed merely as a mark of academic privilege, but rather as a strategy that prevents analyses of her location as simply South-Asian diasporic, Asian- American or American, which would overlook her shared experiences with different ethnic subjects or groups and the gaps between national or ethnic constituencies and literary traditions, where she actually situates herself. Therefore, turning to Fault Lines and The Shock of Arrival, I will explore how Alexander‘s postcolonial and transnational background compels readers to re-consider her location within national and ethnic literary corpora as unstable. The author‘s initial exploration of the fault line motif as both aesthetic form and socio-economic phenomenon in 1993 is entirely pertinent to the twenty-first century, where the globalization of violence is simultaneously accompanied by ethnic, religious, cultural and political fragmentation. By exploring how terrorist and anti-minority violence cuts across local, national, and global levels and by searching for formal ways of translating violence, Alexander blends art and life, seeking to re-define what form means for contemporary literature. 109 Fault Lines: From Diasporic Dislocation to “Claiming America” Fault Lines: A Memoir (1993) traces Alexander‘s trajectory from her Kerala childhood, marked by the luminous figure of her maternal grandfather Ilya Kuruvilla, to her years in Khartoum, Sudan, and her involvement in the feminist and political struggles of the 1970s, to her studies in England, and her eventual emigration to New York City. Yet the unfolding of these events is not rendered in a linear fashion, according to the conventions of immigrant or ethnic autobiographies (as in Bharati Mukherjee‘s novels, for example), but it is rather a collage of conflicting memories, strung together by the logic of association of ideas, each chapter both adding a new element to the writer‘s self- portrait and restating the same few themes from different angles. Thus, she explores diasporic identity formation, her ambivalent relationship to English, her racialized and gendered experiences in India and America, as well as the way in which writing can serve as an imaginary dwelling for diasporic writers. However, at the heart of these interrelated themes lies Alexander‘s attempt to define her diasporic self in the context of postcolonial migration and her search for an aesthetic form that can capture her living in diaspora. On one principal level of reading, Fault Lines explores the way in which diasporic subjectivity is constituted in literary texts, particularly through the writer‘s struggle with form. As Alexander states in an interview, ―I‘m always living on the borders of something. It‘s a struggle for form, and I try to figure out what fits‖ (Ali and Rasiah 89). In particular, she is looking for an aesthetic form that could reconcile diasporic and national paradigms as well as Western and non-Western literary traditions and translate violence and trauma in a global age. For Alexander, form is a way of bringing together 110 the different threads of her diasporic life and of underscoring the processes of gendering and racialization she underwent when crossing and re-crossing the borders of India, Sudan and the United States. Alexander‘s diasporic travels, which could be considered cosmopolitan to some extent, are, however, also marked by her awareness and experience of racial and gendered discriminations. Therefore, the fault lines in her texts represent both a structural motif and a metaphor of power inequalities predicated on gender, race, and class differences. Her use of postmodernist fragmentation and hybridity tropes dispels the notion of a coherent and stable bourgeois subjectivity, however appealing that may be to a diasporic subject longing to reconnect to their roots. At the same time, she is aware that her resorting to poststructuralist discourses to portray herself as a postcolonial woman writer registers a tension between Western and South-Asian forms of subjectivity. Alexander conceives of herself as a blend of both and she uses spatial form to convey this idea. Thus, as I contend in this section, paying attention to the relation between the form and the content of her memoir offers insight into the way the writer ―fits‖ or inscribes herself in various literary traditions. Through the narrative form of the second edition of Fault Lines (2003), Alexander reveals her constantly shifting sense of self in the wake of multiple geographical displacements and the pressures of writing ethnicity in the United States. The revised and expanded edition of Fault Lines is constructed as a palimpsest, through a layering of place and time. The first, 1993 edition traces Alexander‘s diasporic subjectivity at home nowhere. She writes to make sense of her multiple dislocations, hence the centrality of the tropes of home and homelessness, which are familiar to 111 postcolonial readers. In the coda to her revised edition of her memoir, entitled ―Book of Childhood,‖ Alexander recasts the initial portrait of her diasporic identity in a new light, by revealing herself as the victim of her grandfather‘s abuse during childhood. Whereas previously, the trope of diasporic displacement ―had served [her] as an emotional counter for a darker truth, bitter exfoliation of self‖ (FL 238), constituting ―the tactics of self- evasion‖ (FL 271), in her second edition she traces a different self, dislocated for different reasons than migration, and thus shows how diaspora constitutes only one possible optic through which to read her text. Alexander‘s first edition may have attracted primarily diasporic and postcolonial readers, who resonated with ―the tale of dislocation‖ – as the author reflects on her book‘s reception (FL 238). The second edition, which narrates her coming to grips with her Americanness in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks, diversifies her diasporic readership, appealing to American and global, post-9/11 audiences, as well. Alexander‘s tailoring of her new memoir to multiple audiences suggests that her preferred mode of self-definition is transnational and that any national or ethnic classifications might be too narrow in scope. For example, in her article ―‗No Nation Woman‘ Writes Her Self,‖ Lavina D. Shankar discusses the two editions of Alexander‘s memoir in relation to the writer‘s constantly shifting sense of self and her relationship to America, which she claims as home in the wake of September 11, 2001. Using trauma theory, Shankar draws a parallel between public and private trauma, the first triggering the latter, and contends that Alexander‘s poetic response to 9/11 enabled her to tap into the repressed memories of her childhood incest and to claim America. Even though 112 Shankar acknowledges the contradictions, overlaps, and interconnections between the two editions of Alexander‘s memoir, she ascribes Alexander‘s memoir to the tradition of ―claiming America‖ in Asian-American and South-Asian American literature, whereby immigrant subjects move from diasporic displacement to integration in the host country by embracing, while also altering, its norms and values (80). While the thematics of Fault Lines text may echo those of Carlos Bulosan, Maxine Hong Kingston, Bharati Mukherjee, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Chitra Divakaruni, Alexander prefers the position of unassimilated diaspora. As she states, ―In Manhattan, I am a fissured thing, a body crossed by fault lines. […] What is my past to me, here, now at the edge of Broadway? Is America a place without memory‖ (FL 182). In contradistinction to Mukherjee‘s vision of immigration as desirable assimilation, Alexander does not seek to erase her past as a condition for her embracing of America. From her bodily dislocation arises her need to invent a grandmother figure who would ―allow [her] mouth to open, permit [her] to speak‖ and re-connect her with the tradition and ancestry line she has lost as a result of her journey to the U.S. (FL 15). In this way, Alexander re-envisages the border not simply as a fault line, but rather as ―a rhizomatic network‖ that casts her Americanness in light of her Indianness (Dayal 242). Her ―American‖ texts are informed by a particularly postcolonial sensibility and by her consciousness of traversing borders, therefore they should be seen in the context of a postcolonial geography and history. 37 By linking 37 When asked if she considered herself a postcolonial writer, Alexander retorts that ―History answers for me. […] … what else should I be?‖ (―Rights of Passage‖ 15). She suggests that postcolonial history cannot be bracketed when viewing the identity of writers from former colonies. At the same time, she critiques the way in which hegemonic categories tend to solidify postcolonial authors‘ identities, for example, when 113 postcolonial India and immigrant or multiethnic America, Fault Lines complicates simple notions of a writer‘s or text‘s location. Alexander‘s revision of her diasporic identity (as represented in the first edition of her memoir) and her self-fashioning as ―American‖ (albeit in a way that projects her ethnic American story onto a larger cultural and political level, turning it into a global ethnic autobiography) aims to forestall strict analyses of her location. To this end, in deconstructing her prior self, Alexander chose to write an expanded version, rather than an altogether distinct book. To indicate that the two editions should be read side by side, on the contents page, she also repeats some of the chapter headings, creating a self- doubling effect that is entirely apposite for her self-scrutinizing project. As she describes it, Fault Lines is ―a book that is eating itself up from the inside and revising itself‖ (Shankar 2008: 34). This deconstructive process works by addition, rather than substitution; therefore, Alexander remains diasporic, while she is also an American as well as an ethnic minority writer – in light of her engagement with Asian-American aesthetics. The palimpsest structure of her second memoir conveys an image of the author as belonging simultaneously to diasporic South-Asian, American, and Asian- American cultural and socio-political spheres. Moreover, her concern for the escalation of global violence and the way it impacts the nation and the place of ethnic minorities in the U.S. transcends the autobiographic voice speaking solely for herself. She thus relates national and minority issues to a transnational context of global terror and changes in Western critics label her a ―postcolonial writer,‖ ―a left leaning writer,‖ or ―a feminist writer‖ (―Rights of Passage‖14). 114 national policies such as the racial profiling of certain ethnic minorities in the wake of September 11, 2001, projecting an image of America as both ―a place where you can invent yourself‖ and ―a place where, ethnically, you‘re racialized‖ (FL 86). The way in which Alexander counteracts an unproblematic claiming of America and an ostensibly aestheticizing mode of identity construction is by focusing on the materiality of her body. As she says, ―if I write dazzling, brilliant lines filled with conjuring tricks, all the sortilege of postmodernism and forgot the body, what would that be like?‖ (FL 200). Hers is not only a discursive re-invention that immigration enables for some postcolonial writers, but also a discovery of the limits of such recreation in the host land for black and brown subjects. She represents her racialized body in terms of the destruction that living in diaspora causes to her body‘s wholeness and as well as her subversion of power structures: ―What should I write with? Milk, blood, feces, spittle, stumps of bone, torn flesh? Is this mutilation? […] Sometimes I think I write to evade the names they have given me‖ (FL 73). Even if her text follows the Euro-American tradition of writing the body, what distinguishes her from fellow feminist writers is the consciousness of her postcolonial and racial identity. For Alexander, writing the body is inextricably linked with hijacking the colonial language she writes in. As she puts it, English is ―a pale skin that has covered up [her] flesh,‖ which she needs to tear in order to ―speak out [her] discrepant otherness‖ (FL 73, 118). Out of her desire to affirm her postcolonial hybridity, as an adolescent, she changed her given name ―Mary Elizabeth,‖ which carried a colonial connotation, to ―Meena,‖ an over-determined name in Sanskrit, Urdu, and Arabic. Even if, by stripping her name of the colonial burden, Alexander 115 asserts her power of renaming herself and critiques hegemonic labels, her race and gender identity poses an obstacle to her self-translation and she remains ―what my body made me: female, Indian, Other‖ (FL 114). As she writes, I can make myself up and this is the enticement, the exhilaration, the compulsive energy of America. But only up to a point. And the point, the sticking point, is my dark female body. I may try the voice-over bit, the words-over bit, the textual pyrotechnic bit, but my body is here, now, and cannot be shed. (FL 202) Whereas Alexander casts her racialized and gendered body as a locus of exclusion and discrimination in the U.S., she does not fully gauge the extent to which these very aspects as well as class constitute symbolic capital in the academe. Her postcolonial texts, which struggle with colonial burdens and canonical labels, are subject to insertion into and cooptation by a literary and academic market that privileges postcolonial tropes. As an instance of Alexander‘s lack of self-reflexive critique, she juxtaposes her writing out of ―the pain of no one knowing my name […] and the sense that I am living in a place where I have no history‖ (FL 182) with the precarious lives of a group of illiterate Indian laborers bound for the Persian Gulf, who wear their name and destination on a slate hanging from their neck. Even if the namelessness of the immigrant is their common denominator, their difference hinges on class and education. While Alexander‘s question ―Who will tell their names?‖ (FL 181) shows her empathy towards the fate of the downtrodden, it also betrays her power position as one who can speak for the disenfranchised, to change her name and challenge given labels. It is from such an educated position that Alexander is able to correct a misnomer when her daughter draws a picture of her grandparents as ―[b]one-and-arrow Indians‖ because her teacher called her a Native Indian. Alexander gives her daughter and her classmates a history lesson, 116 insisting that they are ―a different sort of Indian‖ (FL 173). By situating herself apart from other minority groups, she underscores the importance of not collapsing ethnic differences and of acknowledging that minority groups in the U.S. have distinct histories. At the same time, both Native Americans and South-Asian Americans are ―caught in the cross-fire of the white man‘s naming patterns‖ (FL 174). They share a history of racial discrimination in the U.S. and this is what equally enables inter-ethnic coalitions. Thus, Alexander‘s preferred mode of identity construction is relational, and even if she insists on being viewed as South-Asian diasporic, in defining what ―being Indian and living in the United States‖ is, she needs ―that sense of something shared, a special displacement, an exile,‖ ―a way that I share with lots of others here‖ (FL 175, 200). In Fault Lines as well as in Shock of Arrival, diaspora is a point of departure for the examination of a range of local and transnational affiliations. 117 The Shock of Arrival and Ethnicity in America Like Fault Lines, the collection of poetry and prose The Shock of Arrival (1996) is written in a fragmentary style and centered on diasporic dislocation. The prose pieces either introduce the next poem or are self-contained. Each piece can be viewed as an echo chamber for other pieces, wherein themes resonate with each other and places, cultures, and histories are connected. In this text, written ―under the sign of America‖ (SA 1), Alexander explores ethnicity in the present, in America, from the position of a postcolonial woman writer of the South-Asian diaspora. She revisits many of the themes she examined in Fault Lines, such as language, gender, memory, identity and diasporic dispersal. However, what brings her fragmented pieces together is her cosmopolitical concern with the way in which literature and art can represent global violence. To this end, Alexander underscores points of connection between the racialization of women in former colonies and colonial centers, the silencing of minority cultural representations in the U.S. A. in earlier historical periods and the political censorship of engaged writers and artists in India, as well as the ways in which non-Western and Western literary works inform each other to create resistant hybrid forms. In The Shock of Arrival, Alexander espouses an aesthetics of negativity and violence that aims to contest the dominance of white hegemonic culture. She thus suitably makes anti-colonial, anti-patriarchal and anti- canonical resistance the central trope of her text and a basis for interethnic and transnational alliances. In its preoccupation with re-conceptualizing ethnicity – in particular South-Asian American identity – in a multicultural United States, The Shock of Arrival represents 118 Alexander‘s authorial positioning in relation to both white Americans and other minorities. The author attempts to anchor herself in American culture by writing her book in the hope that ―it might give me the right to be in America‖ (63). Even though Alexander claims America discursively, through literature, she does so in a way that highlights her inadequate fit as a postcolonial woman writer within canonical literary forms. As she muses, ―I have no tradition here. What can I draw on?‖ (SA 198). Despite asserting her lack of a literary tradition in America and her need to invent ―a form that springs out without canonical support‖ (Maxey 187), Alexander reveals her literary affinities with a number of male American writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, and Wallace Stevens, who have eulogized America and its multiethnic nature or have endorsed characteristics that are deemed typically American such as self-reliance, the celebration of ethnic diversity, and the struggles for self- definition. Thus, in an essay entitled ―In Whitman‘s Country,‖ she declares that ―I cannot imagine myself in America without Whitman‖ (186). Significantly enough, in the same essay, she claims America and her rights as a citizen about to vote through a book of Whitman‘s she is holding in her hand. She embraces and sanctions Whitman‘s definition of the self as a mixture of identities and of the national space as marked by cultural and ethnic diversity as well as Emerson‘s ―notion of a ceaseless present‖ (SA 142) and Wallace Stevens‘ conception of ―the imagination as a violence from within that presses against the actual‖ (FL 195). Yet what differentiates her from these white male American writers is her race and gender consciousness. She is aware that her writing is shaped by postcolonial history and needs to draw on her past to reconfigure her ethnicity 119 in the present. Thus, her retort to these white male writers is that ―we acknowledge your power but turn your insight around,‖ that in order to redefine ethnicity, ―we need the bodily self, […] a speech that acknowledges rage, a postcolonial utterance that will voice this great land‖ (FL 195-96). Whereas she wishes to be regarded as belonging to American society, she simultaneously insists on being incorporated in a way that does not erase her difference. As a minority subject, then, Alexander pits hybrid identities and horizontal relations to other ethnic minority groups against the homogeneity of American culture. As she writes, In our multiple ethnicities as Asian Americans, we are constantly making alliances, both within and outside our many communities. In order to make up my ethnic identity as an Indian American, I learn from Japanese Americans, Korean Americans, Chinese Americans, African Americans, Native Americans, Hispanic Americans, Jewish Americans, Arab Americans. And these images that slip and slide out of my own mind jostle against a larger, shared truth. And my artwork refracts these lines of sense, these multiple anchorages. (SA 128) As a hyphenated writer, Alexander shares with ethnic Others her multiple cultural belonging and her racialization in her host country. She affiliates herself culturally with different minority groups because for her, their art struggles with Eurocentric and xenophobic American society. 38 Slipping between Asian-American, South-Asian American, and Indian identifications, she underscores not so much ethnic demarcations, 38 See also Alexander‘s essay ―Is There an Asian-American Aesthetics?‖ where she states that ―For me, an ‗aesthetics of dislocation‘ is one component of an Asian American aesthetics. The other is that we have all come under the sign of America. In India, no one would ask me if I were Asian American or Asian. Here we are part of a minority, and the vision of being ‗unselved‘ comes into our consciousness. It is from this consciousness that I create my work of art. Because of this dialectical element there is a ‗violence‘ involved for me even in the production of the work of art …‖ (26). 120 but rather shared experiences. 39 For example, in a section on a contemporary Asian- American exhibit about conditions of passage, the meaning of arrival in America, and the way art grapples with society, Alexander presents Asian-American art works as essentially ―born out of dislocation‖ and resistant to ―the universalizing notion of America as a vast, unified culture, seamless, equitable‖ (SA 152, 162). While the writer celebrates the diversity and heterogeneity of Asian American art in order to show that there are no monolithic ethnic identities as postulated by U.S. liberal multiculturalism, she does not dwell on multicultural debates in American academia. 40 Particularly pertinent to her examination of how minority groups are positioned vis-à-vis white Americans is the debate on the extent to which the celebration of cultural diversity remains oblivious to racism, as it postulates equality among cultures, rather than races. At the same time, a critical multiculturalism takes into account cultural differences not only among different minorities, or among minority and dominant groups, but also within the same culture or ethnic group. She appears to gloss over the differences in social position among South-Asian Americans themselves ostensibly out of a desire to underscore the ongoing patterns of exclusion of immigrant and diasporic others from American society, especially in a post-9/11 climate. Instead, she dwells on a hierarchical 39 See Lavina D. Shankar and Rajini Srikanth‘s A Part, Yet Apart: South Asians in Asian America for debates on whether the category of South-Asian American literature should be viewed as belonging to Asian American literature or as a self-standing category. See, especially, Samir Dayal‘s essay in this collection, ―Min(d)ing the Gap: South-Asian Americans and Diaspora‖ as well Lavina Shankar‘s ―Postcolonial Diasporics ‗Writing in Search of a Homeland,‖ published elsewhere, for arguments that situate Meena Alexander outside of the Asian American literary tradition. 40 For debates about discourses on multiculturalism in North America, see David Theo Goldberg (Ed.). Multiculturalism: A Critical Reader. Oxford UK and Cambridge USA: Blackwell, 1994, and Avery F. Gordon and Christopher Newfield (Eds.). Mapping Multiculturalism. Minneapolis/London: U Minnesota P, 1996. 121 model of minority-majority relations and on minorities‘ contestation of hegemonic cultural practices, but she does not interrogate the extent to which the postcolonial trope of resistance is often accompanied by complicity in the dominant society‘s celebration of ethnic diversity. 41 Her resistant aesthetics aims to ―evoke a chaos, a power co-equal to the injustices that surround us‖ and avoid being ―bought in, brought in, our images magnified, bartered in the high places of capitalist chic‖ (FL 195). However, despite her attempt to counter the literary market‘s commodification of minority works, The Shock of Arrival, subtitled ―Reflections on Postcolonial Experience,‖ as well as Fault Lines engage with the fashionable trope of postcoloniality and are often taught in literature courses in American universities. Alexander‘s failure to explore more deeply how difference could be an asset in academia or to acknowledge that liberal multiculturalism has in fact arisen in a context in which culture has become commodified, might stem from her vision of diasporic writers as necessarily engaged politically. For instance, confronted in an interview with the claim that postcolonial writers ―have been sanctioned by the academy,‖ Alexander insists on the ongoing currency of resistance ―at a time when the world is splintering into ethnicities‖ (Bahri 37). Her reluctance to acknowledge postcolonial writers‘ co-optation by hegemonic power structures betrays her anxiety about the commodification of postcolonial texts and exemplifies the predicament of 41 See Graham Huggan‘s The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (2001), where he discusses the vogue of postcolonial fiction in Euro-American academia and argues that contemporary postcolonial texts are simultaneously resistant to and complicit in power structures. He underscores the imbrications of ―postcolonialism,‖ with its agenda of anti-colonialist resistance, and ―postcoloniality‖ as the global condition of capitalism and depicts the postcolonial field as occupying the site of struggle between these two regimes of value. In the present-day context of commodity culture, the trope of resistance has become subject to commodification (6). 122 postcolonial and minority writers in the Global North who have to grapple with dominant expectations of them as ethnic representatives or as necessarily adopting the conventions of ethnic fiction. 42 Even though she foregrounds shared political goals among diverse minority groups, rather than the tensions or socio-economic imbalances within the same ethnic group, Alexander‘s concern for a working civil society and for the struggle for rights and recognition is not limited to the American nation-state. Rather, she affirms the continuous relevance of coalitional identifications at a transnational level as well, and forges global alliances with writers whose anti-colonial and feminist works have shaped her own and have envisioned a more tolerant world. What she shares with this transnational corpus of writers is a cosmopolitical vision of social justice and equality, which ―transcends individualism‖ (FL 203). Among her numerous cultural and literary models, Alexander is indebted to Indian women writers such as Toru Dutt and Sarojini Naidu, feminists of color including bell hooks, Audre Lorde, and Gloria Anzaldúa, Assia Djebar, minority writers in and outside of America such as W.E.B. Dubois, Toni Morrison, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, as well as Salman Rushdie, Ngugi wa Thiong‘o and Franz Fanon, whose barbed wire imagery inspired her fault lines metaphor and her resistant aesthetics. V. S. Naipaul is another literary model whose novel The Enigma of 42 Alexander does not consider herself an easily marketable, popular, writer. As she states, ―I really feel that I write stuff that is not easy to read … because it is always politically a bit edgy. […] I am not going to change. I am not going to exoticize what I write. I don‘t want to dilute it. my writing comes out of my vision. I would like to think that I can keep on writing what I need to rather than what people need me to write‖ (Rustomji-Kerns, 26). However, as I have shown throughout the chapter, hers is a complicit position, nevertheless. Elsewhere, she writes about ethnicity as the result of ―a pressure, a violence from within‖ that comes into being in circumstances where host cultures or market imperatives require minority writers to define themselves (Fault Lines 202). 123 Arrival has informed her title. For Alexander, to arrive in America constitutes a point of departure for affectively relating to subjects who bear the burden of a similar history and for constructing her identity at the confluence of narratives, in the interchange of stories about self and other, home and abroad. Drawing on both marginal and canonical sources, minority as well as white authors, Alexander asserts throughout her text that her literary identity is hybrid and that she belongs to several cultural and literary traditions. Hers is a multicultural, multigeneric, and transnational text that borrows from multiple literary traditions and rejects strict taxonomies. In an interview, for instance, Alexander depicts her work as displaying ―a constant pattern of a spiral or a mandala‖ that has at its center ―an intense self-reflection‖ and from that center ―there is an extraordinary expansion of concern for other people‖ (Rustomji-Kerns 20). She thus proposes inter-connections and lateral identifications, a de-centering of the self through an attention and rhetorical engagement with Others. Alexander blends diasporic and multicultural concerns in her position as a writer located on fault lines, who bridges the global and the local and traces connections between cultures separated in space and time. More exactly, her espousal of cultural pluralism within the nation-state, as related to the U.S. discourse of multiculturalism, and of transnational plural identifications across ethnic and cultural lines serves as model of diasporic praxis. For example, in a piece that muses on the destruction of the Babri Masjid in India in December 1992, Alexander critiques the way the Indian diasporic community in New Jersey responded to the violence of Hindu extremism, underscoring 124 the danger of upholding fixed notions of cultural identity. By embracing identity conceptions based on the destruction of difference and forgetting the multiethnic nature of Indian society, Indian diasporics in the United States failed to relate to the predicament of minorities in their home country. Alexander condemns such claims to a single cultural identity, suggesting that diasporas should be conceived, in Pnina Werbner‘s words, as ―transnational communities of co-responsibility‖ (7, original emphasis). Their duty is both responsiveness to and responsibility towards transnational minorities as well as the minority struggles within their host country. As she asks, ―Can the democratic struggles in India work into an understanding of multiculturalism in the United States?‖ (SA 83). Alexander thus suggests that issues such as ethnic or cultural tensions within nation-states could be illuminated by taking into consideration a transnational context and similarities between experiences separated geographically and temporally. That places disjointed in space can coexist in time, and that their juxtaposition may reveal unsuspected symmetries, is also the idea underscored by Alexander‘s poem ―Kabir Sings in a City of Burning Towers,‖ written in the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, 2001. In order to picture her life as a postcolonial writer in post-9/11 America and in the context of the changes brought about by the ―war on terror,‖ she imagines being encouraged by Kabir, a reputed poet who preached tolerance among religious groups in India, to see the world not as a limitless globe, but as a small place where violent events echo each other. As he tells her, ―in times of grief / our rolling earth / grows small‖ (FL 288). Linking thus secularist struggles in India between Hindus and Muslims and the climate of racial profiling based on ethnicity and religion in the U.S.A, Alexander contends that the two 125 experiences are interconnected by the shared feeling of vulnerability in the face of fundamentalist acts of terror. Whereas she foregrounds inter-ethnic coalitions and transnational networks, she equally suggests that solidarity may be naïve or utopian in a political moment when the privileging of multiplicity or diversity is at odds with increased ethnic fragmentation and militarized borders. For instance, in depicting the climate of fear in the wake of the attacks, Alexander stresses the ways in which South-Asian Americans have ceased to identify with their own group as well as other minorities such as Arabs by displaying American flags on their houses and front yards. Patriotic acts of identification, inasmuch as they diminish the extent of minorities‘ cultural and religious incompatibility with the values of American society, restrict cosmopolitical ways of imagining human relationships and the world. Against such a view, Fault Lines and The Shock of Arrival invite imaginative and affective responses to experiences occurring locally as well as afar. By juxtaposing instances of violence in different parts of the world, they compel readers to seek connections and imagine how the struggle in one part of the world informs an understanding of inter-ethnic tensions in another location. They envision diaspora as a network that not only links home and host country but inflects inter-ethnic relations within the nation-state as well. In their title, content, and form, Fault Lines and The Shock of Arrival capture Alexander‘s plural sense of identifications with ethnic minority, national, and transnational subjects and cultures. In other words, Alexander‘s liminality as a diasporic is carried over to her host country and her texts explore the lack of ―fit‖ within national 126 boundaries and literary categories. Alexander‘s self-positioning at the intersection of American, Asian-American, and South-Asian American categories opens up the possibility for a transnational reflection on issues of diasporic identity, community, and transnational responsibility. As in Desai‘s The Inheritance of Loss, which I will discuss in the following section, Alexander‘s diasporic positioning as a writer who belongs to several cultural spaces at once, and her textual juxtapositions of instances of violence in different parts of the world are meant to elicit ethical responsiveness and responsibility on the part of readers and critics. Such strategies put forth a politically-committed vision of contemporary literature, even as they underscore the limitations of cosmopolitical fiction in forging connections in the current political climate and contesting power structures in the context of commodification of postcolonial and migrant literature. 127 Kiran Desai and the South-Asian Diaspora In The Inheritance of Loss, Kiran Desai also conjoins aesthetics and politics. Through her novel‘s attention to formal disjunctures that highlight the geographical and psychological fragmentations triggered by diasporic journeys, Desai blends her aesthetic and material concerns. This thematic conjunction can be seen in the novel‘s juxtaposition of two parallel stories: the first recounts the Nepali-Indian minority‘s demands for statehood in the Himalayan town of Kalimpong during the mid-1980s, while the second follows the trials and tribulations of an illegal Indian immigrant in the United States, where he joins a transnational labor force toiling in the basement kitchens of New York City‘s ethnic restaurants. Ostensibly disjointed, the two narratives are interlinked by issues of class and ethnic minority status in national as well as diasporic contexts: both the Nepalis‘ insurgency within the Indian territory and Biju‘s illegal sojourn in the U.S.A. are spurred by a desire to redress power imbalances between ethnic majority and minority groups as well as the haves and the have-nots among Indians themselves. Biju‘s immigrant journey to the United States also echoes Judge Jemubhai Patel‘s journey to England as a youth in colonial times, as both characters feel alienated in their host lands and eventually return to India. By interweaving colonialism, nationalism, and globalization, the novel invites readers to think critically about immigration and global capitalism that can be traced back to the heyday of European colonialism. Kiran Desai‘s own comments about the structure of her novel illuminate her vision of contemporary literature as a mode of address that elicits responsibility from readers, encouraging engaged, or activist, ways of reading. Furthermore, her remarks 128 about her literary style are implicitly connected to her sense of being a South-Asian writer living in diaspora and the way this affects her understanding of her country of origin. Although she resides in the United States, Desai has not given up her Indian passport (Rochester par. 11). ―Being part of the Indian diaspora‖ is extremely important for Desai both personally and professionally, because it ―gives one a precise emotional location to work from, if not a precise geographical one‖ (Rochester par. 12). The emotional location and significance of Desai‘s diasporic subjectivity help us understand her struggle with the structure of The Inheritance of Loss, which appears to be propelled by affective associations rather than a carefully-crafted plot. As she states: I had no idea how to structure this book. And I wrote in every direction, with each character leading to the others. […] There are a million different stories that can spin out of it all, and so many emotional, historical patterns that go on over generations. […] The emotional parallels and historical parallels draw the narrative forward. (Donadio 172) Through the novel‘s circular structure and constant flashbacks that illuminate protagonists‘ lives in the present, Desai suggests that immigration cannot be represented in simple, linear narratives of progress from one country to another. Instead, narrating immigrant journeys entails heeding their ramifications well beyond the present moment and the host country. As a narrative that spills out of spatial, temporal, as well as generic bounds, The Inheritance of Loss reverses the conventional narrative of immigration predicated on a teleological movement of progress from home to host land and ending with the successful assimilation of protagonists therein. Exploring, in contrast, the difficulties of integration faced by Indian immigrants due to xenophobic attitudes in the U.S.A., hierarchically structured Indian diasporic communities, and their own nostalgic 129 constructions of home, the novel portrays contemporary immigration as well as the tensions and conflicts within the South-Asian diaspora in the U.S.A. Thus, the novel‘s indeterminate spatial and temporal structure, far from being a shortcoming in its overall construction, is actually an effective mode of driving home the point that immigration and diaspora have far too often been rendered in celebratory ways and that one possible alternative mode of representation is through fragmentary and disconnected narratives. In The Inheritance of Loss, immigration – a broken journey – requires an equally divided mode of narration, one that vacillates between visions of the wholeness of home and the fragmentation of immigrant subjects and diasporic communities in the host country. Desai herself recognizes what she calls a loss of ―a vision of wholeness‖ inherent in her own diasporic journey from India to England and the United States. The implications for her writing about transnational issues are that ―[she] would have half- stories and quarter-stories, but [she] wouldn‘t have a whole story in that entirely contained single world‖ (Wachtel 99). Desai‘s writing a novel about Indian immigrants in the United States entailed her physical and thematic return to India to tell the other half of the story. As she elaborates in an interview, her attempt to write a story about a single world that was ―close to [her], and close to New York [where she lives], set in the present‖ was not complete ―without India‖ (Donadio 168). Furthermore, her own diasporic subjectivity turned out to be only the starting point to a larger perspective involving her immediate and extended family ―traveling back and forth between India and the Western world‖ such that ―the book quickly took [her] back to India and made [her] feel much more Indian‖ in unexpected ways (Donadio 168). While Desai does not 130 wish to resettle permanently in India, her abiding familial, social, and cultural, connections to India, together with her novel‘s representation and interrogation of Indian national and transnational identities, correspond to important features of diasporic communities and subjectivities noted by other scholars (Tölölyan 1996, Clifford 1997). For Desai, diaspora and immigration remain incomplete narratives without their contextualization as the outcome of historical forces such as British colonialism and American neo-imperialism, which help explain the formation of Indian diasporic groups in England and the United States. The formal juxtaposition between labor diasporas in India and the United States that are the outcome of colonialism and neoliberalism underscores not only the geographical, socio-economic, cultural, and linguistic borders within as well as across nation-states, but also raises the possibility of transcending them. Thus, the novel‘s ―form‖ and ―content‖ are not only related synecdochically, but are also conflated so as to prompt readers‘ reflection on the historical patterns inherent in past and present migrations and the material histories of diasporic groups. Readers are invited to migrate textually between the novel‘s different times and locales, and, through this act of cultural translation, to understand the present through the perspective of the past, and view India via its relation to England and the United States, and vice versa. The novel‘s structure and the reading practice it encourages creates ―a reticulate consciousness‖ (Srikanth 10), which is a feeling of belonging to both national and transnational individuals and groups. Paradoxically, through structural fragmentation, The Inheritance of Loss tells a shared, global story of displacement and dispossession. Because it advocates both 131 rootedness and rootlessness in the construction of the diasporic identities of the protagonists and it forces a rethinking of the relation between their home and host land in the colonial past and the global present in a way that heeds the intertwined histories of several countries, The Inheritance of Loss bespeaks of the experience of diaspora. As a disaporic narrative, the novel enables Desai to draw parallels between the lives of disenfranchised peoples in different parts of the world; hence it affords her an enlarged, cosmopolitical perspective on historical interconnections that was missing in a narrative like her debut novel. Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard (1998) tells the story of a post- office clerk, Sampath Chawla, who climbs into a guava tree to retreat from the world not so much for spiritual reasons, as to escape from his daily responsibilities and family ties. Sampath, who is the most exotic protagonist in a cast of no less peculiar characters, is a daydreamer who is taken as a wise guru, becoming the center of attention of a small community in rural India. The novel flirts with magical realism, as Sampath morphs into a guava by the end. Through its linear plot, setting, characters, and use of standard English rather than Indian vernaculars, the novel presents an exotic vision of India, domesticating Indian culture for a Western audience. Furthermore, the circumscribed setting of the novel in a small village eschews the politically, religiously, and culturally complex realities of postcolonial India, and thus, as Desai asserts, this kind of novel can no longer be written by diasporic writers. Desai feels that her first novel had ―a sort of sunnier, more optimistic light,‖ but, when embarking on The Inheritance of Loss, she thought that contemporary globalization was not ―a moment in the world where [she] can write a totally optimistic, sunny story‖ and hence felt ―forced to write in a very realistic 132 way‖ (Wachtel 106, 100). As a cultural commodity, Hullabaloo demands no interpreting effort on the part of Western readers, who view the novel‘s version of India as exotic enough to trigger Orientalist interest in difference and too familiar to require gestures of transnational responsibility. In contrast, because of its ever-shifting locales and time periods that may pose some difficulty to readers, The Inheritance of Loss does not lend itself to commodification in the same way that Hullabaloo does. A simultaneous reading of the narrative parallels of The Inheritance of Loss reveals power imbalances at a transnational level and the similarities between the disenfranchised lives of differently located groups, be it ethnic minorities in India or illegal immigrants in the United States. The representation of such disenfranchised lives – whether they are categorized as subaltern, native, minority, or immigrant – in a literary work by a diasporic writer living in a metropolitan country poses a dilemma which, however, can be instructive in our understanding of Desai‘s diasporic subjectivity and its effect on her novel. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, in a discussion of nineteenth-century literary texts by both British and South-Asian women, argues that ―[a]ttempts to construct the ―Third World Woman‖ as a signifier remind us that the hegemonic definition of literature is itself caught within the history of imperialism‖ (A Critique of Postcolonial Reason 131). Even a work that is ―critical of imperialism‖ cannot ―turn the other into a self, because the project of imperialism has always already historically refracted what might have been an incommensurable and discontinuous other that consolidates the imperialist self‖ (Spivak 130, original emphasis). It would seem, then, that any metropolitan literary project that tries to inaugurate a full minority or immigrant self in the fullness of its lived experience 133 and historical condition is bound to fail, unless, as Spivak cautions, we modify the framework within which we understand the production and reception of the text. Desai‘s The Inheritance of Loss, which interweaves colonialism, nationalism, diaspora, and globalization, has done more than recover or represent the lives of people who have lived and are living in these historical forces and socio-cultural formations. As a ―postcolonial subject‖ who to tries to ―resist a mere celebration of global hybridity,‖ Desai ―anthropologize[s] the heritage of the Euro-United States more deliberately‖ (Spivak 157). This account of Desai‘s writing helps us understand the idea of inheritance in the novel‘s title not as an unquestioning embrace of Euro-American history and values, but as a critical reading of its continuing effects in our contemporary world marked by inequalities, suffering, and loss on psychic, social, and cultural levels. Desai‘s novel requires what Spivak calls a ―deconstructive reading‖ that ―does not privilege the text of life as an obligatory object of investigation‖ and compels the reader to understand that ―it [the process of reading] is part of the text being read, written otherwise and elsewhere‖ (154). Such a deconstructive reading does not, as some critics of theory might assume, privilege a transcendent or detached readerly or writerly position, but instead recalls what Rajini Srikanth describes as a ―reticulate‖ or networked consciousness that often appears in the work of South-Asian diasporic writers (10). While ―a ready cosmopolitanism can be an alibi for geopolitics‖ that is complicit with the exploitation of global capital, Desai‘s diasporic subjectivity, expressed through her novel, sets up reticulate connections to multiple social and cultural texts being written otherwise and elsewhere (Spivak 419). 134 These connections suggest that she can be positioned within a strand of cosmopolitical (as opposed to cosmopolitan) writing among diasporic South-Asian writers. Critics have intensely debated the dialectic between complicity in and resistance to the dictates of the global literary market or, more precisely, between migrant literary aesthetics and material practices in the case of Indian diasporic writers who choose English as the language of their literary expression and who travel back and forth between India, Western Europe, and North America. For such writers, the label ―Indian writing in English‖ or, as Bishnupryia Ghosh explains, ―IWE (a traditional literary- critical category that hegemonically references all South-Asian writing in English),‖ captures their difference from India-based authors employing vernacular languages and lacking the global readership English-language writers enjoy (When Borne Across 2). Due to their involvement in global circuits of literary production, such South-Asian writers have incurred charges of complicity with hegemonic structures and betrayal of cultural communities in their respective nation-states. 43 Kiran Desai, for one, acknowledges that, as part of a class of Westernized Indians, she feels somewhat foreign to India‘s vernacular cultures and that the English language facilitates her works‘ global dissemination to readers and consumers of postcolonial and 43 This has been a staple critique of postcolonial, multicultural, and cosmopolitan writers by Gayatri Spivak, Aijaz Ahmad, Timothy Brennan, Bruce Robbins, and Rey Chow, among others, who underscored the discrepancy between culture and politics, and the extent to which the celebration of ethnic and cultural diversity obscures ongoing racism and class imbalances. See Gayatri Spivak, ―Can the Subaltern Speak?‖ in Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (eds.), Colonial Discourse and Post-colonial Theory. A Reader. New York, NY: Columbia UP, 1994; Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures. London; New York: Verso, 1992; Timothy Brennan, At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1997; Bruce Robbins, Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation. Minneapolis and London: U of Minnesota P, 1998; and Rey Chow‘s Ethics After Idealism: Theory, Culture, Ethnicity, Reading. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1998. 135 global fiction. For a privileged writer like her, immigration implies not only the break-up of community and family ties, which she considers a marker of Indianness, but equally an opportunity for self-fashioning in the host country. As she states, ―[t]he vocabulary of immigration, of exile, of translation, inevitably overlaps with a realization of the multiple options for reinvention, of myriad perspectives, shifting truths, telling of lies — the great big wobbliness of it all‖ (Rochester par. 12). Thus, the story of immigration can also take on positive aspects of creative re-definition, especially in the case of postcolonial and immigrant intellectuals residing in North America and Western Europe. For the underclass, however, being an immigrant is not ―almost … an artistic challenge,‖ as Desai puts it elsewhere, but a constant struggle for survival and recognition (Wachtel 97). While Desai, as a South-Asian diasporic writer shuttling between India and the United States, cannot fully eschew complicity in the type of immigrant writing that is highly celebrated in a global literary marketplace today, her political and literary agenda affiliates her to what Bishnupriya Ghosh describes as a body of ―cosmopolitical‖ South- Asian writers who share political and ethical concerns for local communities and subaltern struggles. Even though Desai is not explicitly an activist like many of the writers Ghosh examines, the category of ―cosmopolitical writing‖ is nevertheless apposite to her novel because of her exploration of the destructive effects of colonialism and late capitalism on minority groups in both India and the United States. Examining illegal immigrants in New York City in the 1980s as well as the descendants of nineteenth-century indentured Nepalis who had been brought by the British to work on Indian tea plantations and now form a sizable minority in Kalimpong, she suggests they 136 share a history of economic migration and dispossession. Speaking about the globalization of poverty, Desai remarks: ―[t]he same class that‘s poor in India is poor in New York and is poor in the West. There is a huge class divide that has not been addressed and that persists across borders‖ (Wachtel 101). By underscoring the similarities between minority and immigrant subjects in India and the United States, The Inheritance of Loss raises the cosmopolitical question of how to accommodate the Other within the nation-state, and this question of accommodation or assimilation is central to the relationship between diasporas and their countries of residence. However, as poverty and marginality cut across national borders, the novel asks readers to imagine transnational collectivities. In the U.S.A., for example, destitute Indian protagonists join an underclass of immigrants of different ethnic origins rather than their own South-Asian communities because those communities consist of middle- and upper-class students and professionals who do not wish to associate with poor illegals. Thus, the break-up of mono-ethnic diasporas along capital lines in the global present also creates possibilities for interethnic relations. In this way, Desai re-conceptualizes the Indian diaspora not only in relation to different diasporic groups but also in the context of global capitalism, complicating earlier theorizations of it, such as Vijay Mishra‘s. In his essay ―The Diasporic Imaginary: Theorizing the Indian Diaspora,‖ Vijay Mishra explains the formation of the Indian diaspora in terms of two interlinked yet successive movements. The labor diaspora of classic capitalism, which he terms ―the diaspora of exclusivism,‖ is marked by the displacement of Indian indentured laborers to the Caribbean and East and South Africa during British colonialism (422). The second, 137 post-1965 diaspora ―of the border,‖ is formed through late twentieth-century immigration to former colonial centers and is characterized primarily by mobility (422). In contrast to Mishra‘s clearly periodized Indian diaspora, Desai depicts it as spatially and temporally over-determined. She historicizes her Indian protagonists‘ diasporic journeys to highlight the symmetries between Indian diasporas in the colonial past and in the neoliberal present, showing how late capitalism, like colonialism before it, operates along a similar logic of exclusion and exoticization of the racial other. At the same time, the movements of Indian diasporic protagonists to England in the 1940s and to the U.S. in the 1980s are differently marked by class hierarchies. For Desai, the Indian diaspora is thus temporally specific and internally divided. Registering the differential politics of location, the novel‘s formal juxtaposition of different spaces, time periods, and diasporic subjects underscores not only shared histories but also the boundaries between the haves and the have-nots in both India and the United States. Through the central trope of borders, and at the level of the plot, Desai explores diaspora as a socio-political formation in the context of Nepalis‘ and Indians‘ negotiation of their relationship to both their home and host countries. At the same time, the language she employs to highlight their class differences and difficulties of transcending geographical and social borders paints a hybrid picture that blends East and West, English and Hindi. This hybridity gestures to the novel‘s own diasporic status as a text that is indebted to both Indian and American cultures and that demands readers to travel, as Desai does, between two cultural and linguistic spaces. 138 The Messy Map Versus the Glorious Orb: The Inheritance of Loss The Inheritance of Loss examines geographical, socio-economic, cultural, linguistic, and religious borders both as political constructs and discursive categories. By exploring the way protagonists attempt to draw, maintain, or dismantle borders, the novel challenges rigid constructions of citizenship that rely on ideas of cultural authenticity and ethnic purity. In one narrative strand, for instance, Desai depicts postcolonial India via political events taking place in Kalimpong, a small Himalayan town during the mid- 1980s. The insurgent nationalism of the Indian-Nepalis, who are ―fed up with being treated like the minority in a place where they were the majority,‖ enables her to map the pervasive effects of both colonialism and globalization (10). The Nepalis‘ claim to an independent state, which existed in reality but did not result in the creation of Gorkhaland, is predicated on a quest for cultural purity and authenticity, hence on a violent disengagement by the local Nepalis from an elite of Westernized Indians. However, while Nepalis pit notions of purity against Anglicized Indians‘ contamination by the West, they use a Western cultural imaginary to construct their national identity. The Nepalis, depicted as ―these unleashed Bruce Lee fans in their American T-shirts made-in-China-coming-in-via-Kathmandu,‖ are ―mostly just boys, taking their style from Rambo,‖ who mimic Hollywood movie heroes (173, 323-24). Their quest for a homeland is interwoven thus with a search for masculinity and adulthood and couched in terms of an American-based culture industry. By showing the extent to which Nepali identity is mediated by the global circuits of culture, the novel parodies claims to ―pure‖ or ―whole‖ spaces and identities. Such notions are inconceivable in a region where the 139 Indian-Nepalis‘ identity is inextricably linked to that of the Nepalis across the border. As one character puts it, ―It‘s an issue of a porous border is what. You can‘t tell one from the other, Indian Nepali from Nepali Nepali‖ (144). The novel satirizes the Nepalis‘ futile attempt to draw neat identitarian or geographical borders in a territory where, historically, borders have continuously been redrawn by successive powers-that-be: Here, where India blurred into Bhutan and Sikkim … it had always been a messy map. […] A great amount of warring, betraying, bartering had occurred; between Nepal, England, Tibet, India, Sikkim, Bhutan; Darjeeling, stolen from here, Kalimpong plucked from there – despite, ah, despite the mist charging down like a dragon, dissolving, undoing, making ridiculous the drawing of borders. (10) In attempting to define themselves in culturally authentic and pure terms, the Nepalis overlook the fact that they themselves constitute a labor diaspora closely connected to a history of British colonialism. They seek to create a map based on the containment of space in a territory that has been, in turn, colonized by the British, disputed by neighboring states, and recently penetrated by Western culture. By satirizing the Nepalis‘ map-making attempts, the novel suggests that diasporic self-definition needs to take into account a larger context, in this case, colonial and regional politics. The novel willfully paints a messy map of Kalimpong as a heterogeneous and cosmopolitan place inhabited by poor and well-off Indians, Nepalis, a Swiss priest, two Afghan princesses, and immigrants who travel to New York City. With a history of colonialism and immigration to the West, it is a place that refuses to be captured in monolithic or authentic ways, by way of strict references to either local traditions and vernacular cultures or a detached, transcendent cosmopolitan subjectivity. Speaking of her attempt to represent Kalimpong, 140 Desai explains that she ―was fighting to create a sense of place while also undoing anyone‘s claim upon it as being sole, firm or integral‖ (Rochester par. 13). If evocative descriptions of lush landscapes and regional food and cultural artifacts add local flavor to the narrative, the English language and culture are a strongly felt presence, as well. This is evident, for instance, in a passage that employs English and Hindi signifiers to suggest the double reality Sai, the judge‘s granddaughter, is acquainted with in her Westernized convent education: ―cake was better than laddoos, fork spoon knife better than hands … English better than Hindi‖ (33). As Sai learns, English and vernacular languages and cultures represent hierarchical yet coexisting facets of Kalimpong, and by implication, India. Desai‘s portrayal of the imbrication between local and Western cultures and languages points to this hybrid reality, which is also a linguistic reality for diasporas. 44 The novel‘s English is interspersed with Indian vernacular words, exposing non-Indian readers to cultural difference. However, they are untranslated and italicized to underscore their foreignness in an English-language text and place some distance between the novel and Western readers, preventing them from appropriating it. Thus, the role of what Evelyn Nien-Ming Ch‘ien calls ―weird English‖ 45 is to call 44 Desai‘s refusal to confine herself to portraying elements of the local culture in exclusive terms can also be read in the context of Indian diasporic writers who are pitted against Indian regional writers and charged with inauthenticity. Insisting on mixtures and fluid borders, Desai reacts against the demands of authenticity placed on non-regional writers by Indian and metropolitan readers, attempting to do justice to India‘s complexity by dismantling the idea of writing about it authentically. For a polemic in favor of the freedom of South-Asian writers to tackle any literary subject, whatsoever, see Vikram Chandra. ―The Cult of Authenticity: India‘s Cultural Commissars Worship ‗Indianness‘ Instead of Art.‖ 45 In Weird English, Evelyn Nien-Ming Ch‘ien argues that the use of hybridized English and vernacular words in the works of immigrant and postcolonial writers such as Vladimir Nabokov, Maxine Hong Kingston, Arundhati Roy, and Salman Rushdie is a newly embraced linguistic style and a politically resistant act against hegemonic, global English. 141 attention to the partial translatability of local Indian culture and the way in which Desai‘s representation impedes Western readers‘ cosmopolitan consumption (6). 46 The tension between the familiar and the foreign, between local culture and transnational, cosmopolitan culture, which is rendered available through Indian subjects‘ relation to English, is further explored through the depiction of an anachronistic Anglophile elite in Kalimpong. On the higher end of the hierarchical scale is the misanthropic Judge Patel, whose admiration for the English and contempt for the Indians render him ―a foreigner in his own country‖ (32). His internalization of English superiority, which prevents him from forming meaningful bonds during his study years in England in the 1940s and continues to inform his life upon his return to postcolonial India, has transformed him into a stridently ambivalent subject with ―the fake English accent and the face powdered pink and white over dark brown‖ (193). He lives with his granddaughter and his cook in a house that is a remnant of colonialism, having been built by a Scotsman through the exploitation of poor Indians. The Judge‘s convent-educated granddaughter Sai has inherited his Anglophilia. As an English- rather than Hindi- speaker, she is ―an estranged Indian living in India,‖ unable to communicate fluently with the cook and transcend the social differences between them: ―their friendship composed of shallow things conducted in a broken language … . The brokenness made it easier 46 Jhumpa Lahiri‘s fiction is a useful counterpoint to Kiran Desai‘s novel and its linguistic strategies as an example of cosmopolitan, rather than cosmopolitical work. Lahiri, who presents herself as an interpreter of Indian culture for the Global North, describes her fiction-writing process as an act of cultural translation (qt. in Joel Kuortti 206). However, because it does not pose significant difficulties to readers unfamiliar with Indian culture, her ―translation‖ appears so subtle as to cancel cultural difference altogether and thus lends her cross-cultural texts to commodification. 142 never to go deep, never to enter into anything that required an intricate vocabulary …‖ (230, 21). Whereas access to the English language situates Sai firmly within a small class of Anglophiles, it also leads her to a revelatory encounter with texts that make her see herself through colonizers‘ eyes. If, as a marker of identity, language indicates Sai‘s social privilege, literature also assists her in her identity quest. Sai is an avid reader who explores old issues of the National Geographic, with their exotic portrayal of far-off places, as well as numerous travel accounts in India in order to locate herself in the world. Such travel narratives bring her to the realization that ―certain moves made long ago had produced all of them: Sai, judge, Mutt, cook …,‖ that she is a product of colonialism, and that there is a pattern of similar journeys into which she can insert her own life story (217-18). An excerpt from The Indian Gentleman’s Guide to Etiquette unsettles Sai‘s identification with Englishness by alluding to the racial inferiority of Indians to Europeans and teaching them to be racially self-conscious. Despite Sai‘s pretense of superiority, the Guide interpellates her as the racial other: ―Although you may have acquired the habits and manners of the European … identify yourself with the race to which you belong‖ (218). Reacting with anger to such old-fashioned texts that situate her within racial, cultural, and spatial confines, Sai explores, in contrast, her National Geographic Inflatable Globe, where she maps Biju‘s journey from India to New York for his father the cook, in an attempt to understand her place in a world that operates by power asymmetries: They looked at the deserts, the mountains, the fresh spring colors of green and yellow, the snow at the poles; somewhere on this glorious orb was Biju. They searched out New York, and Sai attempted to explain to the cook why it was night there when it was day here, just as Sister Alice had demonstrated in St. 143 Augustine‘s with an orange and a flashlight. The cook found it strange that India went first with the day, a funny back-to-front fact that didn‘t seem mirrored by any other circumstance involving the two nations. (20) Sai‘s inflatable globe symbolizes the power of globalization to penetrate the remotest corners of the world and to trigger the dispersal of immigrant populations to metropolitan centers. Along with the Western capitalist world zooming in on small places, the novel offers the obverse perspective of looking at the world through national lenses. Because Sai reads the globe with an enlarged perspective in mind and seeks to transcend national and racial borders, she is a figure for the novel‘s cosmopolitical readers. Usually associated with Anglo-American audiences located in the global North, cosmopolitical readers pay attention to differences and forge conversations across spaces, cultures, and ethnicities. Even though Sai belongs to a privileged class, her consciousness of Indian colonial history and her own racial identity prevents her from engaging in exoticized readings of the Other. In following Biju‘s journey to the U.S. on her globe, Sai also understands diasporic dispersal in socio-political terms; thus, she represents a foil to the Indian sisters Lola and Noni, whose romanticized and cosmopolitan sensibility render them oblivious to the harsh lives of the Nepalis in Kalimpong and for whom diaspora carries primarily literary connotations. Lola and Noni‘s Westernized way of life, which consists of living in a French- named cottage ―Mon Ami,‖ importing British products, reading English-language fiction, and listening to the BBC, spells out their foreignness in Kalimpong, which they treat as a barbaric place in need of civilization. Through these preoccupations, the sisters conceive of themselves as romantic adventurers in a wild and exotic landscape, much like the 144 characters in the travel narratives that they too read. However, they are not in tune with their surroundings, like the Swiss dairyman Father Booty, but use their cultural and economic capital to build social barriers against the less educated and well-off. The sisters are passionate consumers of epic accounts of British-Indian history, such as M. M. Kaye‘s The Far Pavilions, or of the end of the British Raj, such as Paul Scott‘s The Raj Quartet, and they equally enjoy Anthony Trollope, ―all of Jane Austen,‖ as well as Amit Chaudhuri and ―Mahashveta Devi, translated by Spivak‖ (Inheritance 50, 239). They read books written by both Indian and English authors, but they prefer writers who identify with their place of origin to those who explore foreign topics and territories: ―they didn‘t like English writers writing about India; […] it didn‘t correspond to the truth. English writers writing of England was what was nice‖ (217). Reading A Bend in the River, Lola considers Naipaul ―strange. Stuck in the past. […] Colonial neurosis, he‘s never freed himself from it,‖ while Noni wonders, ―After all, why isn‘t he writing of where he lives now? Why isn‘t he taking up, say, race riots in Manchester‖ (52). The sisters critique Naipaul for dwelling too much on colonial subject-matter rather than embracing Englishness, but they miss the irony that they are not unlike a certain vision of Naipaul, stuck on notions of India as a backward country and of English culture as that which could redeem them from Kalimpong. As readers of both English fiction and Indian writers who write in or are translated into English by postcolonial critics, Lola and Noni could also be viewed as members of Desai‘s audience who are wholeheartedly invested in the consumption of authentic English and Indian cultures. On the one hand, Desai satirizes an Indian 145 readership that is obsessed with the romantic idea of native culture, because it associates writers‘ identity with their place of origin, calling into question the authenticity of Indian writers residing abroad. On the other, the sisters‘ exoticization of local culture also serves as a warning against Western readers‘ own romanticizing tendencies. In this way, she equally addresses Western readers who presumably exoticize Indian or South-Asian literary texts, seeing them as opportunities for cultural enrichment, but disregarding the material histories that produced them. This romanticization of the diasporic or ―Third World‖ Other is perhaps an unintended consequence of cultural theories of diaspora that privilege mobility and hybridity over and above the material and social connections and difficulties faced by diasporic communities, a pitfall Desai‘s novel eschews successfully. The novel‘s preoccupation with the re-drawing of maps and the reading of inflatable globes invites reflection on possible ways of being in the world for diasporic subjects shaped by hegemonic and global forces. The protagonists who engage in acts of reading the nation-state as well as the wider world represent various models of subjectivity; yet neither the nationalist claims of the Nepali-Indian minority for an independent state and authentic culture nor the Indian sisters‘ cosmopolitan propensities towards embracing the world, while neglecting unequal socio-economic realities in Kalimpong, are apposite self-defining and self-locating strategies, as they privilege either national or global formations. In contrast, Desai favors a diasporic, cosmopolitical consciousness embodied by Sai, who reads the nation as always already imbricated politically and culturally in the world and acknowledges the effects of global powers on smaller nations. Hers is a networked consciousness that keeps several locations in mind 146 and teases out their historical connections and the power relations they reveal. In this sense, Sai can be read as Desai‘s narrative consciousness. Indeed, Desai‘s concern is to trace, in the spirit of Srikanth‘s ―reticulate consciousness,‖ Ghosh‘s cosmopolitical writing, as well as Naipaul‘s work, parallels to minoritized others across nation-states. In this way, the author‘s status as a South-Asian diasporic subject becomes a point of departure for a broader, critical cosmopolitical engagement. For Desai, Naipaul is a positive authorial figure and one of her decisive literary models who has woven together ―the parallel experience of people from African, Latin American and Asian countries, [and] their relationship to the West‖ (Rochester par. 22). What she appreciates about Naipaul is the way in which ―for him no story is seen in isolation, the big wars pervert the smallest places‖ (Rochester par. 22); in other words, a relational way of representing ethnic minorities, immigrants, and diasporic communities, an end which she attempted to achieve in both parallel strands of her novel. If in her India-based section, Desai maps the relations of the nation-state to its nationalistic diasporic groups as well as the transnational aspirations of its cosmopolitical elite, in the U.S.-based narrative, she explores the ―contact zones‖ 47 between different immigrant, ethnic, and diasporic subjects. Such horizontal relations represent an alternative to mainstream assimilation, diasporic community formation in the U.S.A., and nostalgic constructions of the homeland for illegal immigrants who live between the cracks of nation-states. However, these are fragile and fraught relations, governed by the unequal distribution of global capital, which is deemed responsible for the break-up of 47 See note 7. 147 community ties: ―You lived intensely with others, only to have them disappear overnight, since the shadow class was condemned to movement‖ (112). Therefore, the novel‘s cosmopolitical project is to conceive of diaspora networks despite, or because of, such tenuous inter-ethnic bonds. Desai‘s portrayal of Indian immigrants and diasporics in New York City is a starting point for enlarging diasporas‘ borders through thinking about other ethnic disenfranchised subjects, and thus for conceptualizing broader cosmopolitical engagements in the age of global capitalism. By highlighting the illegality of immigrants, Desai contends that mobility is a cosmopolitan dream that is unavailable to cheap transnational labor that may cross geographic borders, but cannot traverse social and economic ones. Not surprisingly, there are no cosmopolitan or cosmopolitical readers among the immigrant protagonists in New York City. For the non-citizen classes who do not possess a secure immigrant status, cosmopolitanism remains an unattainable ideal. Despite New York‘s countless opportunities for reinvention, illegal immigrants‘ version of the city is not a cultural one, but rather that of overcrowded basements and minimal wages. Their shared experience of poverty and marginality prevents them from entering their own ethnic communities that are economically fragmented and they become part of a transnational and cross- ethnic labor class. However, diasporic protagonists‘ nationalist investments and reliance on national stereotypes render difficult such transnational and cross-ethnic solidarities. For example, upon his arrival in the United States, Biju is simultaneously confronted with the global dispersal of Indians and the Indophobic attitudes it engenders: ―From other kitchens, he was learning what the world thought of Indians: / In Tanzania, if they could, 148 they would throw them out like they did in Uganda. / In Madagascar, if they could, they would throw them out,‖ and the same treatment applies to Indians in Nigeria, Fiji, China, Hong Kong, Germany, Italy, Japan, Guam, Singapore, Burma, South Africa, and Guadeloupe (86-87). What is missing from this list is not only the Indian diaspora of the East and the South Pacific, but also that of South and North America, particularly the United States. This omission is presumably due to received images of the highly educated, socially mobile post-1965 Indian diasporics in the United States, which contrast starkly with global cheap labor. Biju‘s awareness of this Indian diaspora, inaccessible to him because he cannot cross class and caste barriers, complicates his sense of the pervasiveness and contiguity of Indian diasporic communities. The way in which the Indian diaspora is fragmented along lines of capital is reflected by the split identity of its protagonists. For instance, the hyphenated names of desis such as Harish-Harry, Dhansukh-Danny, Gaurish-Gary, and Jayant-Jay suggest ―a deep rift‖ in their identity and the ambivalence of living between two cultures (164). In the case of Harish-Harry, such double-consciousness is opportunistic, as he ―tried to be loyal to so many things that he himself couldn‘t tell which one of his selves was the authentic, if any‖ (164). Ironically enough, Harish-Harry displays a bicultural identity, but he fails to embrace diversity in practice, as his running of his Ghandi Café, ―an all- Hindu establishment. No Pakistanis, no Bangladeshis,‖ is predicated on the exclusion of other South-Asian groups and the ruthless exploitation of illegal immigrants like Biju (155). He thus endorses a parochial definition of diasporic identity and community. As Pnina Werbner explains, diasporics can also ―support ethnicist, nationalistic, and 149 exclusionary movements‖ (―Introduction: The Materiality of Diaspora‖ 6). Because he insists on patriotic connections with his homeland, Harish-Harry exemplifies the parochial nationalism characteristic of some diasporic subjects and contrasts sharply with the transnational diaspora to which Biju belongs. The economic imbalances between desis and illegal Indians are echoed by the gaps between ―First World‖ patrons and ―Third World‖ illegal labor working in Manhattan‘s restaurant kitchens. These disparities are translated into the hierarchical structure of ethnic restaurants, where center and periphery exist as two sides of the same coin: ―Above, the restaurant was French, but below in the kitchen it was Mexican and Indian. And, when a Paki was hired, it was Mexican, Indian, Pakistani‖ (23). The restaurant names, such as ―Le Colonial,‖ replicate colonial conquest, making a parody of cultural authenticity. Under the banner of multiculturalism, class divides and the material aspects of immigrants‘ labor get erased. The iterative language suggests that the increasing presence of black and brown illegal workers in First World locations is an ongoing phenomenon. It also connotes the interchangeability of expendable labor, as indeed Biju repeatedly gets fired, losing the few fragile bonds he managed to make. This language of accumulation does not reveal the relationships between diasporic subjects of different ethnic backgrounds, who replicate East-West divides and the racism inherent in those relations. For example, upon meeting a Pakistani immigrant, Biju falls back on national stereotypes and allows the India-Pakistan conflict to interfere in their relationship. When he encounters Saeed Saeed, a Muslim immigrant from Zanzibar, whom he admires for his buoyancy and ability to sabotage immigration laws, Biju is 150 forced to reconsider his relation to difference: ―Saeed was kind and he was not Paki. Therefore he was OK? […] / Therefore he liked Saeed, but hated the general lot of / Muslims?‖ (85-86). In confronting his own racial prejudices, Biju discovers that in spite of the racial and religious differences that separate him from his fellow immigrants, they all share the experience of struggling with colonial powers and racialization in the U.S. In that sense, Biju‘s story is the story of many other ethnic or diasporic individuals and groups. His newly found interethnic bond raises the ethical and political questions of how to relate to diasporic others and to what extent the cross-ethnic diaspora in the United States can be a site of contestation to hegemonic powers in the global present. As the novel‘s ending seems to suggest, the answer to these questions hinges on issues of class status and cultural capital. Torn between his realization that he will live a precarious and alienated life as an immigrant worker in the United States and his desire to reconnect to his family and community, Biju returns to India. His decision is based on a romanticized image of India as the place where he could retrieve the plenitude he had lost through immigration. He thus hopes to put an end to diasporic displacement, which condemns immigrants like him to ―have their hearts always in other places, their minds thinking about people elsewhere; they could never be in a single existence at one time‖ (342). Biju‘s return to the nation-state is contrasted to Sai‘s realization that India is too small a place for her, that her life will be comprised of many complex intersecting narratives and anchored in many locations. For her, ―Life wasn‘t single in its purpose … or even in its direction […] Never again could she think there was but one narrative and that narrative belonged only to herself, that she might create her own mean little 151 happiness and live safely within it‖ (355). With the perspective of Sai‘s cosmopolitan travel comes her cosmopolitical responsibility for and world-scale engagement with Others, acts which, as a poor migrant worker, Biju finds difficult to perform. Whereas Sai feels she belongs to a larger world, Biju‘s diasporic consciousness is one of exclusion and discrimination. The ending, which juxtaposes Biju‘s and Sai‘s opposite movements back to and away from the nation-state, underscores once more the deep rift on which Desai‘s ideological vision of diaspora and immigration is predicated. She warns readers against exclusively celebratory views of diaspora, as narratives of cosmopolitan and plebeian migrations should not be collapsed. At the same time, Biju‘s and Sai‘s contrasting perspectives on transnational journeys and on the nation-state as a place of refuge and of departure for larger spaces, respectively, constitute inextricable aspects of the same phenomenon. In other words, Desai contends that when we think of diaspora in the present global context, we should envision not only the possibilities for aesthetic self- invention and creative insights, but the costs of dislocation, as well. The Inheritance of Loss engenders awareness of power imbalances inherent in global capitalism and encourages reading practices that necessarily heed the discrepant material histories of immigrant and diasporic groups. By reserving the promise of future travel and wider vision not to Biju, but rather to Sai, a member of India‘s cosmopolitan elite, Desai acknowledges the limits of transnational mobility. Therefore, The Inheritance of Loss both asserts the significance of transnational connectivities and a cosmopolitical consciousness and displays self-awareness about the limits of diasporic border-crossing. 152 Chapter 3 A Central and Eastern European Francophonie: Milan Kundera and Andreï Makine as “World Writers in French” European: one who is nostalgic for Europe. -- Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel It‘s no surprise to find the authors in this volume, collected under the broad banner ―European,‖ voicing a consistently ornery resistance (with variations): ―Well, yes, I am European, Slovakian, actually, but I am also an individual, and what really matters to me is Nabokov, Diderot and J. G. Ballard.‖ -- Zadie Smith, Preface to Best European Fiction 2010 In the post-1945 period, postcolonial and immigrant authors from the former French colonies have redefined French literature by hybridizing French language and culture and critiquing their self-assumed centrality. In spite of their French-language works, they were incorporated into a distinct body of writing called ―Francophone,‖ 48 which incorporates works generally produced outside of the Hexagon. One of the central tropes of postcolonial literature in French is the relationship of colonized subjects to the 48 Generally, ―French‖ and ―Francophone‖ literatures are viewed as distinct literary corpora and the distinction is predicated on authors‘ racial origins. That is, in France, white authors and sometimes European authors such as Beckett, Ionesco, and even Kundera are considered ―French.‖ See, for example, David Murphy, ―A la recherche d'une littérature francophone et postcoloniale: Réflexions sur les enjeux de la comparaison.‖ Francophone Postcolonial Studies. 4.2 (Autumn-Winter 2006): 28-41. For definitions and studies of Francophone literature, see Jean-Louis Joubert, Littératures francophones depuis 1945. Paris: Bordas, 1986 and Littératures francophones du monde arabe. Paris: Nathan, 1994; Michel Tétu, La Francophonie. Histoire, problematique et perspective. Montréal, Québec: 1992; Jean-Marc Moura, Littératures francophones et théorie postcoloniale. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1999; Michel Beniamino, La francophonie littéraire Essai pour une théorie. Paris: L‘Harmattan, 1999; Christiane Ndiaye (ed.), Introduction aux literatures francophones: Afrique, Caraïbe, Maghreb. Montréal: Les Presses de l‘Université de Montréal, 2004; Michel Tétu (ed.), Francophonie en Amérique: quatre siècles d échanges Europe-Afrique-Amérique: Québec, 26-29 mai 2003: actes du colloque. Québec: CIDEF-AFI, 2005; Farid Laroussi and Christopher Miller (eds.), ―French and Francophone: the Challenge of Expanding Horizons.‖ Yale French Studies 103. (Spring 2003). See also Issues 2&3 of International Journal of Francophone Studies 12 (2009). 153 French language, which they often hijack in order to resist the colonial center. Yet Francophone postcolonial authors such as Maryse Condé, Aimé Césaire, Assia Djebar, Kateb Yacine, and Tahar Ben Jelloun do not constitute the object of my study. Instead, I turn to writers from another periphery, Central and Eastern Europe, whose writings trace a different relationship to the French language, but a power-based relationship, nonetheless. In recent years, Central and Eastern European immigrant authors published fictional works in French that challenged and expanded the notion of francophonie. 49 Their re-evaluation of this concept occurs at a time when France itself critiques the literary and political tenets of francophonie in the recent manifesto for a world literature in French, which is the context for my analysis of these writers, and which I shall discuss 49 Francophone literature does not usually accommodate works by Central and Eastern European writers such as Milan Kundera, Vassilis Alexakis, and Andreï Makine, because their countries were not French colonies and French is not the official language. For example, the Francophone literatures of Eastern Europe, Québec, Latin America, and South-East Asia (represented by authors such as Eva Almassy, Rodica Iulian, Oana Orlea, Ana Novak, Eduardo Manet, Hector Bianciotti, Anna Moï, Linda Lê, François Cheng, Dai Sijie, and Gao Xingjian) are missing from the title of Christiane Ndiaye‘s study Introduction aux literatures francophones: Afrique, Caraïbe, Maghreb (Montréal: Les Presses de l‘Université de Montréal, 2004). With the exception of Romania, perhaps, one does not usually think of the Czech Republic, Russia, and Greece as Francophone countries, even though historical and cultural connections between France and these respective countries have been noted. Thus, Makine underscores the idea that the eighteenth-century Russian aristocracy was Francophile, while Kundera‘s interest in France is due to the influence of Surrealism on Czech literature. Alexakis, whose connection to France is the outcome of educational opportunities, is Francophile in spirit, as his works do not fit the traditional definition of Francophone literature. Furthermore, for this group of Eastern European immigrant authors in France, writing in French validates their European identity. For writers such as Jorge Semprun, Romain Gary, Agota Kristof, Panaït Istrati and Brina Svit, the ideal of Europe takes the form of a shared cultural heritage. However, they differ in their treatment of the French language, as not all of them perceive French as a boon that enables them to better integrate in France, as Kundera and Makine do. For a geographically broader consideration of Francophone authors, see Anne-Rosine Delbart, Les exiles du langage: Un siècle d’ecrivains francais venus d’ailleurs (1919-2000). Limoges: Pulim, 2005; Alison Rice, ―Francophone Postcolonialism from Eastern Europe.‖ International Journal of Francophone Studies 10. 3 (2007): 313-328; Roxana Verona, ―In the Francophone Zone: The Romanian Case,‖ Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature 52 (2008): 115-125; Tijana Miletic, European Literary Immigration into the French Language: Readings of Gary, Kristof, Kundera and Semprun. Amsterdam; New York: Rodopi, 2008. 154 later. For Central and Eastern European authors, French represents neither a colonial language nor the official language of their home countries, but rather, it is their chosen literary language. They praise the French language and evoke a bygone moment when French culture was at its peak. This open admiration – as well as the fact that they write into an established tradition of Eastern European authors who immigrated to France, such as Eugène Ionesco, Emil Cioran, Julia Kristeva, and Tzvetan Todorov – arguably grants them easier access to French publishing opportunities and even to literary prizes. All in all, the case studies of Milan Kundera and Andreï Makine reveal the power structures at work within cultural industries. Namely, crossing cultural barriers in Europe and being consecrated as French and European authors is largely dependent on writers‘ use of the French language. In contrast to the postcolonial Francophone model, then, the case of Central and Eastern European immigrant authors demonstrates that their literary identities are closely linked to their elective affinities to French language and culture, rather than to their geographical or historical ties. At the same time, these authors engage with questions of power in their fictional texts. Even though they are not ―cosmopolitical‖ writers like Meena Alexander and Kiran Desai, who defend a politically engaged notion of literature, Kundera and Makine regard formal experimentation and playfulness as inextricably linked to the challenging of cultural stereotypes and the blurring of hierarchies in a European cultural space. In this chapter, I focus on the works of Czech-born Milan Kundera and Russian- born Andreï Makine because they blur the distinction between ―French‖ and ―Francophone‖ literature through their unstable authorial positions. Their Central and 155 Eastern European origins as well as their aspirations to ―European‖ and even ―world‖ literary status equally complicate the dichotomy between the French and outsiders implicit in the notion of political and literary francophonie. In this way, they defy easy classification within French, Central and Eastern European, and Francophone studies, respectively. As bilingual and bicultural – hence ―extraterritorial‖ (Steiner viii) or ―translingual‖ (Kellman ix) 50 – authors, they invite comparative readings within several literary traditions. More specifically, because they were born outside of France, they were not fully accepted as ―French‖ authors, at least in the initial stages of their careers. Nor do they fit easily within Czech and Russian literatures, as expatriates who write in French. Furthermore, their use of French may make them Francophone, yet Kundera has a particular status (that of an idiosyncratic Central European writer who thematizes life in Communist Czechoslovakia) and Makine, as a Russian expatriate who draws heavily on Russian culture, does not usually appear in Francophone studies. They also differ from Francophone postcolonial authors because they are white Europeans 51 who are, to a large extent, culturally similar to the French, do not openly denounce French culture as a 50 In his Extra-Territorial: Papers on Literature and the Language Revolution, George Steiner explores the ―extraterritoriality‖ of multilingual writers such as Nabokov, Kafka, and Beckett – that is, their linguistic and cultural ―unhousedness‖ (viii). His portrayal of exilic and immigrant authors as ―wonderers across language‖ (11) resonates with Steven G. Kellman‘s concept of ―translingual‖ writers (ix). In his study The Translingual Imagination (2000), Steven G. Kellman examines literary translingualism as ―the phenomenon of authors who write in more than one language or at least in a language other than their primary one‖ (ix), citing Milan Kundera and Andreï Makine among well-known translinguals. 51 For the purposes of this chapter, and since there is no particular geographical feature that might serve as a natural demarcation between Europe and Asia, I will consider the Western part of Russia ―European.‖ By writing in French, Makine claims a European cultural heritage as well, even if he and Kundera differ on the exact borders of (Eastern) Europe. For a definition of an extended notion of Europe including European Russia, see also Gérard Delanty, Inventing Europe: Idea, Identity, Reality. New York: St. Martin‘s Press, 1995, p. 148. 156 culture of oppression, do not address questions of race in their writing or write in a colonial language. Located at the ―fringes of francophonie‖ 52 (Rice 319), but at the center of French literature, Kundera and Makine seem to occupy an intermediary position on the French literary scene between fully recognizable French writers, on the one hand, and Francophone postcolonial authors, on the other. My overall argument is that Milan Kundera and Andreï Makine represent a Central and Eastern European model of francophonie, which emphasizes immigrant writers‘ literary allegiances to France, rather than their postcolonial connections, and which deliberately validates their European identities. 53 The literature written in French by Central and Eastern European authors who do not have a postcolonial relation to France has been dismissed as ―non-Francophone‖ on grounds of its higher degree of assimilation to French literature, despite the fact there is a legacy of French cultural imperialism, especially in ―Francophone‖ countries such as Romania. It is my contention, however, that the newly emerging notion of francophonie, as delineated in the 2007 manifesto Pour une littérature-monde en français, can accommodate writers from Central and Eastern Europe thanks to their challenging of literary classifications and the French politics of cultural and linguistic assimilation. The manifesto, whose anti- 52 Even through Central/Eastern Europe is often viewed as a borderland with respect to Western Europe, and despite Kundera‘s and Makine‘s common historical experience of Communism and exile, this region is geographically and linguistically heterogeneous; therefore, the authors also distinguish themselves as individual writers whose literary particularities are implicitly overlooked by regional literary labels. 53 The literature produced in Central and Eastern Europe is ―postcolonial‖ not in relation to France, but to the former Soviet Union. See David Chioni Moore‘s article ―Is the Post- in Postcolonial the Post- in Post- Soviet? Toward a Global Postcolonial Critique‖ (PAMLA 116.1 (2001): 111-128), in which he makes the case that the territories under former Soviet occupation can be called ―postcolonial.‖ 157 taxonomical principles I will examine below, offers an interesting context for the exploration of Kundera‘s and Makine‘s works, as both the signers of the manifesto and the two authors seek to enlarge the notion of French literature. The particularity of Kundera and Makine, however, is that they simultaneously defy and rely on national literary taxonomies. As geographically, culturally, and linguistically mobile writers, 54 they belong to several literary traditions at once. At the same time, they deliberately ground themselves in French culture. As writers hailing from formerly Communist countries, they regard French as the language of freedom, culture and civilization, and romanticize France as the ideal ―republic of letters‖ (Casanova xii) in a way that does not heed the apparent decline of its cultural power over the past decades. They thus seem to uphold a universalist notion of French culture. Because of the old-fashioned notion of French universalism, 55 which underscores at once 54 Both writers are flexible in their authorial positionings. Kundera published his works in both Czech and French and also translated a few of his novels into French, claiming these translations to be as authentic as the original Czech-language versions, thus giving his oeuvre continuity and blurring the boundaries between original and translation, Czech and French literature. Even when Kundera stopped employing Central European themes in his French novels, his reputation as a Czech political dissident long accompanied his integration into French culture. Andreï Makine is similarly seen as an in-between figure, or a cultural mediator of sorts: a Russian writer of French expression who wins prestigious French literary prizes and makes bilingualism and East-West relations staple themes in his texts. 55 The concept of universalism originates in the French Revolution of 1789 and in Enlightenment philosophy, with its values of science, reason, and progress. The French Republic was the embodiment of such universal principles, becoming a political model for other emerging nation-states elsewhere and disseminating them through the civilizing mission during the French colonial project. In fact, Enlightenment universalist principles often served to legitimate the development of France as a colonial power. What is known as ―l‘exception française‖ [French exceptionalism] rests on the fact that the principles of the French Revolution were deemed applicable not only to the French, but on a planetary level as well. France‘s exceptional nature thus consisted in the association between its specificity as a nation- state and its universal role as a civilizing force in the world. One implication of this universalist ideology for immigrant, diasporic, or minority people living in France was that, in order to become French citizens, they had to assimilate, since universalism recognized no individual differences on a political level, but instead stressed the ideal of the abstract individual, or the homogeneous, universal citizen. This concept was obviously problematic because it overlooked gender differences (it is a well-known fact that women 158 the cultural specificity of France and its transnational status, Kundera and Makine can appear both ―French‖ and ―European,‖ or world writers. What is interesting in Kundera‘s and Makine‘s cases is the fact that another category intervenes between their ―national‖ identities (be they Czech, Russian, and/or French) and their ―world‖ literary status. They are ―European‖ writers – a label that denotes a multinational model of identity, which contributes to the difficulty of their classification, particularly in a cultural climate marked by uncertainty about what constitutes Europeanness. 56 As the second epigraph of the chapter shows, the umbrella could not vote in eighteenth-century France). In the wake of decolonization and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, which triggered massive migration to France from the former French colonies and Central and Eastern Europe, French universalism no longer holds as an ideal. Universalism, with its assimilationist model, was also put in crisis by the Anglo-American models of multiculturalism and of globalization. Such changes in the world order also impacted the shift from French as a universal imperial language to French as a bulwark against American globalization and the hegemony of English as the language of communication, science, and scholarship. This brief synopsis was gleaned from the following studies: Emmanuel Godin and Tony Chafer (eds.), The French Exception (New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2005); Max Silverman, Facing Postmodernity: Contemporary French Thought on Culture and Society (London & New York: Routledge, 1999); William Kidd and Siân Reynolds (eds.), Contemporary French Cultural Studies (London: Arnold, 2000); Roger Celestin and Eliane DalMolin, France from 1851 to the Present: Universalism in Crisis (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Margaret A. Majumdar, Postcoloniality: The French Dimension (New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books). 56 For some studies on European history and literature, see Jacques Derrida, L’Autre cap. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1991. [The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe. Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael B. Naas. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1992], De l’hospitalité. Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1997 [Of hospitality. Trans. Rachel Bowlby. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2000; and Cosmopolites de tous les pays, encore un effort. Paris: Editions Galilée, 1997 [On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. Trans. Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes. London and New York: Routledge, 2001]; Gérard Delanty, Inventing Europe: Idea, Identity, Reality. New York, NY: St. Martin‘s Press, 1995; Cris Shore, Building Europe: The Cultural Politics of European Integration. London: Routledge, 2000; Stuart Hall, ―In But Not of Europe‘: Europe and its Myths.‘ In Luisa Passeini (ed.). Figures d’Europe: Images and Myths of Europe. Brussels: P.I.E.- Peter Lang, 2003. 35-46; Etienne Balibar, We, the People of Europe?: Reflections on Transnational Citizenship. Trans. James Swenson. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 2004; Michael Bruter. Citizens of Europe? The Emergence of a Mass European Identity. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005; Andrew Wachtel, Remaining Relevant After Communism: The Role of the Writer in Eastern Europe. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2006; Susan Rubin Suleiman, ―Introduction: The Idea of Europe.‖ Comparative Literature 58.2 (2006): 267-70; Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2007; Nele Bemong, Mirjam Truwant, and Pieter Vermeulen. Re-thinking Europe: Literature and (Trans)national Identity. Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2008; Edward 159 term ―European‖ cannot be defined without referencing more specific – local or national – identities; at the same time, despite connoting a layered identity, it represents just another label that obscures the singularity of identity. Yet, I find this overdetermined term to be useful in discussing Kundera‘s and Makine‘s multiple affiliations. Whereas the manifesto on world literature in French, which focuses on the French-Francophone dichotomy, does not account for such a ―regional‖ or ―continental‖ identity, I argue that the two authors‘ visions of Europe help us understand their own complex positioning within an enlarged, transnational cultural context, and as part of a network of other European literary works. In that sense, I suggest we should view the authors through a triple perspective: as French, European, and world writers. The notion of a European cultural identity is ambivalently deployed in the authors‘ texts. On the one hand, Kundera and Makine wish to be viewed as European – a larger category within which Eastern Europe gets erased, however. On the other, they also highlight their national origins, in an attempt to put the regions they originate from on a European cultural map. They seem to make irrelevant and erect cultural borders at once – an ironic gesture perhaps, since in the European Union borders are both easily crossed and reinforced. Indeed, European identity is notoriously difficult to define because geographically, there is no clear demarcation between Europe and Asia; historically, there have been both strong homogenizing forces (Christianity, the Reformation in parts of Europe, colonialism, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia) and Ousselin, The Invention of Europe in French Literature and Film. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. 160 divisions; and politically, the European Union currently excludes nation-states that are geographically situated within Europe. Thus, Europe simultaneously denotes a loose geographical concept, an identification with Christendom (although not in France), and a transnational political organization. Theories of Europe range from elitist views of Europe as culturally homogeneous and deeply rooted in Latin Christendom, humanist values, and liberal democracy, to notions that stress the differences, discontinuities, and the political, social, economic and cultural tensions within Europe. These two main conceptions illustrate the tension between a vision of Europe as a cosmopolitan ideal of unity and an alternative to the nation-state, on the one hand, and a view that acknowledges the significance of national particularities, on the other. As I suggest, any conceptualization of Europe in the era of the European Union needs to take into account the simultaneous tendencies towards unification and fragmentation. That is, Europe is not only a unified political concept, but also fraught with crises, such as the French and Dutch rejection of the EU draft Constitution in 2005, the potential inclusion of Turkey, the economic threats to national job markets posed by Eastern European immigrants after the enlargement, and the recent expulsions of Roma groups from France. It is important to emphasize that the particularity and the paradox of Europe is that the nation-state is the condition of possibility for the supranational concept of the EU (e.g., the European identity that the European Community attempted to fashion was based on national symbols: the flag, the anthem, and the passport). Therefore, European identity is at once continental or regional and national or local – that is, a European is also Belgian and Flemish or Walloon, etc. 161 In contrast to this dual point of view, Milan Kundera‘s and Andreï Makine‘s conceptions of Europeanness appear elitist, because they defend a primarily cultural and Franco-centric vision of Europe, which is anchored in Renaissance humanism and Enlightenment cosmopolitanism. They are not concerned with the continent‘s increasingly policed borders, the multiethnic make-up of most European societies, or the political and religious rights of minority groups. Rather, they sanction a conservative, if still popular, notion of Europe understood as a cosmopolitan community of great canonical European writers, whose literary inheritance they revive and claim through their own writing. For example, as Kundera states, the European is ―celui qui a la nostalgie de l‘Europe‖ (L’Art du Roman 159) [―one who is nostalgic for Europe‖ (Art of the Novel 129) 57 ]. Similarly, he asserts nostalgically that ―L‘Europe des Temps modernes n‘est plus là. Celle dans laquelle nous vivons ne cherche plus son identité dans le miroir de sa philosophie et de ses arts‖ (Le Rideau 187) [―The Europe of Modern Times is gone. The Europe we live in no longer looks for its identity in the mirrors of its philosophy and its arts‖ (The Curtain 160)]. The authors‘ somewhat obsolete cultural vision of Europe is at odds with the geo-political model of a present-day Europe that is now struggling with the rise of far-right movements and anti-immigrant backlash in some of the traditionally most tolerant European countries. Yet, as I argue, their fictional works call for a compromise between the two versions of European cultural identity. Kundera and Makine contend that present-day Europe, with its socio-economic crises, 57 Page numbers for the French quotations refer to Milan Kundera‘s L’Art du roman (Paris: Gallimard, 1986). English page numbers refer to The Art of the Novel [trans. Linda Archer] (New York: HarperPerennial, 2000). 162 needs the cosmopolitan, humanistic, ethical, albeit utopian vision of Europe represented by the predominantly French literature they try to revive and emulate. In defending the ideal of French and European canonical literature, Kundera and Makine attempt to create a space for artistic freedom. They passionately defend the role of literature in challenging narrow identity labels that obstruct the literary singularity of authors and their texts. Their novels illustrate the ways in which literature subverts attempts to enlist it in the articulation of single identities, addressing the ethical potentiality of literature to challenge narrow modes of identity construction. At the same time, however, they show how literature is engaged in the construction of national, regional, and global identities. Because their fictional texts operate on these two levels, I suggest that Kundera and Makine underscore the ethics and politics of literary labeling of foreign authors writing in French, while they rely on their affiliation with French culture to validate their ―European‖ and ―world‖ literary identities. Even if the authors‘ view of Europe might seem conservative, their evoking of a borderless European culture, or a shared cultural heritage within the space of Europe, is in keeping with the project of the European Union, which aims to abolish cultural (if not national) borders, and to incorporate discrete nations into the folds of a continental political entity. At the same time, I find that Kundera‘s and Makine‘s views resonate with the goals of the manifesto for a world literature in French, whose signatories underscore the global prestige and reach of the French language. As I contend below, the two writers not only unwittingly support a concept of world literature in French, but also enlarge it to include French- language works from Central and Eastern Europe. 163 On March 16, 2007, a multi-national group comprised of forty-four French- language authors, including Tahar Ben Jelloun, Edouard Glissant, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, Dany Laferrière and Wajdi Mouawad, signed a manifesto entitled Pour une littérature-monde en français, which was published in Le Monde des livres and subsequently republished as a book by Gallimard, under the direction of Jean Rouaud and Michel Le Bris. The manifesto‘s goals are threefold: first, to decouple the French language from France; second, to change the inward turn of current French literature by opening it to the outer world; and, lastly, to do away with the old concept of political francophonie, which carries colonial connotations and implies a devaluation of French- language literature produced outside of France. Instead, the authors suggest that once the colonial pact is broken, ―la langue délivrée devient l‘affaire de tous‖ (par. 8) [the freed language becomes everyone‘s affair 58 ]. In their understanding, French is no longer tied to geographical location and (post)colonial history, but to authors‘ literary choice – that is, any French-language writer can produce ―French‖ literature. By stating that French is the prerogative not only of native writers, but of anyone who makes it the language of their literary expression, the authors of the manifesto seek to account for the heterogeneity of French-language literature. This, however, implicitly highlights the global reach of French, which is employed as a cultural retort to the dominance of the English language. In emphasizing the global sweep of the French language, the authors of the manifesto do not, however, discuss the seemingly ongoing nineteenth-century link between language and national identity, and the way French 58 This and all subsequent translations of the manifesto are mine. 164 continues to carry connotations of power. Even though French is no longer a colonial language, littérature-monde en français still carries, in its very title, the French language around the world. 59 Furthermore, by professing the death of francophonie, they seek to dismantle the center-periphery model in which France holds cultural supremacy and imparts its cultural values to its former colonies. As they assert, ―le centre, ce point depuis lequel était supposée rayonner une littérature franco-française, n‘est plus le centre. […] le centre … est désormais partout, aux quatre coins du monde. Fin de la francophonie. Et naissance d‘une littérature-monde en français‖ (par. 1) [The center, that point from which a Francophone-French literature was supposed to shine, is no longer the center. […] the center … is now everywhere, in the four corners of the world. End of francophonie. And birth of a world literature in French]. The emergence of a world literature in French, which deems itself transnational and pluricentric, signals ―l‘acte de décès de la francophonie‖ (par. 7) [the death certificate of francophonie]. What the writers of the littérature-monde manifesto attack is a political notion of francophonie, which connoted France‘s imposition of its language and culture on its colonies and the categorization of 59 The persistence of particular languages in debates on world literature (―in French‖ as well as ―in English‖) prompts me to ask the question of whether one can have a monolingual world literature, and if so, in which language? What would a world literature in Esperanto, the language of no one, look like? My view is that any association of major languages to the concept of ―world literature‖ preserves, and needs to take into account, existing power hierarchies. Even though Kundera and Makine critique certain aspects of French politics and culture, such as the country‘s assimilationist policies, their status as world writers in French is due, in part, to their writing in a global language. Thus, I agree with Pascale Casanova‘s argument that a writer should always be situated in a world literary space, but his or her position depends on the place of the national literature(s) to which s/he belongs in that hierarchical space. At the same time, however, by including Czech and Russian words in their French-language works and insisting on their bicultural literary identities, the authors show that the concept of littérature-monde en français cannot be divorced from world writing in other languages. 165 French-language literary works according to the binary of center and periphery, or ―French‖ and ―Francophone,‖ respectively. Instead, they highlight the literary or etymological sense of francophonie, which contests this literary hierarchization and proclaims the use of French as the common denominator of and the sole criterion for classifying distinct literary texts. Yet to me, the manifesto‘s newly established division between the political and the literary poles of francophonie appears to be an artificial one. The authors‘ choice to write in French and to affiliate their works with French and European literature as well as the dissemination of their works in a world literary marketplace is closely tied to the difficulties faced by writers who employ non-global languages and publish in small nations in acquiring international renown. Their works thus situate the concept of ―world literature‖ in relation to the French publishing industry, rather than to theoretical and pedagogical concerns, which dominate world literature debates in the US academy. Moreover, even though it was presented as a Copernican revolution (par. 1), the de- centering of France‘s postcolonial clout and the re-routing of its culture towards multiple peripheries is not an altogether novel idea. Anti-colonial and post-colonial resistance has long been a central trope in postcolonial studies in the North American academy. Nor is the writers‘ shift in focus from the nation to the world a new phenomenon, since transnational studies in the Global North have already signaled this change of perspective. Furthermore, the authors of the manifesto present contemporary French literature as linked to society, which allegedly represents a point of departure from the solipsistic and formalist tendencies of French literature, as exemplified by the Nouveau 166 Roman. Yet the link between literature and society has been recently explored in Anglophone academic and critical circles, notably in the debates about cosmopolitanism, which theorized the connection between socio-political phenomena such as migration and diaspora and their literary representations. 60 In that sense, the manifesto for a world literature in French can be seen as a belated acknowledgement of the changing social- ethnic realities of twenty-first century France. 61 While the binary between post/colonial center and periphery that the manifesto emphasizes and seeks to dismantle is applicable to postcolonial Francophone as well as Anglophone authors, my claim in this chapter is that Central and Eastern European writers like Milan Kundera and Andreï Makine are also ―world writers in French,‖ but in a different way. What makes their cases distinct from postcolonial Francophone authors is the fact that their works and identities are not ―decentered‖ (Cazenave 24). Rather, their writings are characterized by cultural merging with the center. In their works, they fashion a European cultural identity through narrative strategies that can be easily interpreted as uncritical celebration of French culture. In my close readings, however, I highlight the contestatory work I argue their novels are also doing. Through their multiple affiliations, they envision a non-hierarchical vision of literature, as their own 60 See chapters 1 and 2. 61 If the manifesto of world literature in French is not entirely derivative of the model of world literature in English, it certainly sanctions the latter‘s inclusion of ethnically non-British writers such as Salman Rushdie, Hanif Kureishi, Kazuo Ishiguro and others. Yet in praising the more inclusive Anglophone model, it overstresses the centrality of marginal voices in the English-speaking literary world and overlooks the extent to which English-language minority and diasporic writers are also exoticized and slotted into ethnic literary categories. As I have shown in the first two chapters, these writers‘ centrality is simultaneously accompanied by an insistence on their minority and ethnic identities. 167 idea of Europe attempts to dismantle the binary between France as the cultural center and the Central and Eastern European periphery. They are French and European through their cultural heritage, while also belonging to the Central and Eastern European literary traditions. They can be situated between French and Francophone literary categories, belonging to both. The concept of littérature-monde en français thus allows us to conjoin the ―French‖ and the ―Francophone‖ labels, instead of regarding them as separate categories. A ―world writer in French,‖ then, would be someone who is not only geographically and culturally mobile, but rather one who attempts to escape fixed labels. In what follows, I will examine the ways in which Kundera‘s and Makine‘s biographies as well as the narrative strategies of their novels underscore a notion of identity that exemplifies their status as simultaneously French and outsiders. The authors blend form and content in order to challenge the taxonomical impulses through which readers and critics interpret their texts. As I will show, the ludic and carnivalesque structure of Kundera‘s novels La Lenteur and L’Identité, the formal and thematic bilingualism in Makine‘s Le Testament français, as well as the novels‘ numerous intertextual references blur strict literary classifications. Milan Kundera and the Ethics of the Novel The following section examines Milan Kundera‘s depiction of an unstable notion of identity in his recent novels La Lenteur and L’Identité. As a European genre that plays with expectations of mimetic realism, mixes genres and blurs reality and fiction, the novel – by its very structure – complicates any stable conception of identity and resists simplistic interpretation and classification. In La Lenteur and L’Identité, I claim, 168 aesthetic form is inextricably linked to Kundera‘s attempt to contest fixed literary categories through which readers and critics view his works. But the novels constitute more than a mere authorial retort to the author‘s critical reception, they also delineate a vision of contemporary literature that raises questions related to hermeneutic practices – more specifically, to an ethics of reading immigrant authors and their texts. As I contend, the narrative strategies of La Lenteur and L’Identité are precisely the site where Kundera locates issues of literary identity and ethical responsibility. Kundera‘s remarks about the inherent characteristics of the European novel are closely tied to his sense of being a transnational writer whose literary identity cannot be easily captured by narrow ethnic or national labels. La Lenteur and L’Identité show their indebtedness to a European literary tradition primarily through formal means. They employ irony, parody, and the carnivalesque in an attempt to topple hierarchies and distance themselves from the mimetic realist tradition. They also include intertextual references to French and European literary texts, juxtapose different viewpoints, and blur reality and fiction, in order to suggest that they cannot be interpreted on a single level. Therefore, they ask readers to juggle all the different perspectives and see beyond what formal binaries might suggest. In this attempt to escape narrow literary categories, Kundera himself serves as a role-model reader, since he makes connections between different time periods and literary traditions as well as cameo appearances in his own novels under the guise of a narrator who guides readers‘ interpretations. On the one hand, the author invites readers to enter into a purely ludic space where what awaits them is aesthetic pleasure, rather 169 than ideological lessons; on the other, he seeks to control readers‘ and critics‘ interpretations by cautioning them against engaging in stereotypical and exoticist reading practices – a gesture that betrays his anxiety about being misinterpreted or commodified. This tension between the ostensible autonomy of his novels and the author‘s own market- consciousness suggests that Kundera uses the generic characteristics of the European novel, as he understands it, both to construct for himself a European literary identity rooted in French Enlightenment culture and to undermine critical attempts at having his novels articulate a singular identity. Even though Kundera claims his fictional texts to be autonomous, his constant extra- and intra-textual interventions that attempt to control his critical reception suggests that one cannot ignore his authorial voice. 62 Kundera‘s biography helps explain, to a 62 While Kundera aligns literary identity with linguistic choice and cultural affiliations, these have been viewed reductively in different reception contests. Thus, he went from being seen as a ―protest writer‖ to an ―exile writer‖ and, after his migration to France, to ―a French writer who delineates the contemporary trends of what may be a universal literature today‖ (Bessière 1). To some Czech critics, for instance, who are attuned to the complexities of his Czech-language novels, the author‘s latest novels written in French seem unconcerned with Czech realities and present, furthermore, a language boundary. Thus, upon the publication of L’Art du roman, his first French-language text, Kundera was considered a betrayer of Czech culture and language and accused of proclaiming himself a French writer (Woods 151). British criticism similarly reproached Kundera for not continuing to write about contemporary Czech life and embracing instead France and French culture, therefore for not being an authentic representative of his culture of origin (Woods 168). Moreover, his French affiliation seems at once an odd and exotic choice and does not fare well in Britain, where French writers are associated with pretention and intellectualism, whereas Czech fictional works are more commercially successful than French ones. Other critics underscore Kundera‘s in-between status and the fact that he is ―not quite French and no longer quite Czech‖ (Woods 152). Under the labels of a Central European political dissident or of a French-language postmodern writer, Kundera seems an easier-to-categorize writer. Faced with reductive literary criticism, Kundera is one of the contemporary writers who intervenes in the politics of his literary reception most vociferously at both extra-textual and intra-textual levels – that is, by explaining his novelistic theories in his essay collections, inserting his authorial voice in his novels, and translating his Czech novels into French. While I examine his theories of the novel and his authorial interventions in the body of the chapter, I would like to add a note on Kundera‘s translations here. Kundera‘s self-translation of his works into French between 1985 and 1987 goes hand in glove with his anxiety about being misinterpreted and mistranslated at a cultural level. Considering the French translations of his Czech works as stylistic and linguistic betrayals of the original texts, he gives authoritative versions, 170 great extent, his authorial self-positioning as a European writer and his conception of literature as ideologically neutral, which he developed in his collections of essays on fiction, L’Art du roman (1986) [The Art of Fiction] and Le Rideau (2000) [The Curtain]. As the author of numerous essays, poems, and novels, Kundera was renowned in Soviet- occupied Czechoslovakia well before his immigration to France in 1975, having been dismissed from his teaching post at the Prague Film Academy. Even though some critics have underscored the author‘s collusion in the Communist regime and his ability to publish his works uncensored, his reputation as a dissident writer far exceeded these critiques, to the point that he vocally rejected the image of a politically engaged Central European writer. For instance, the successful publication in France of his novel La Plaisanterie (1967) [The Joke] triggered Kundera‘s own protests against ideological readings of the novel. 63 Despite the author‘s attempts to ―correct‖ the reception of his book, this and his other ostensibly political novels such as The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979) and The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) helped create Kundera‘s legend and, if only partially, facilitated his integration into French literary circles. This occurred at an ideologically favorable time for Kundera, when the echoes of wherein he chooses to leave out details pertaining to Czech culture that would not be transparent to a French readership. He thus takes on the role of a cultural mediator, while his translations amount to an actual re-writing of the content of his books. In excising his literary output of the 1950s and the 1960s from his ―oeuvre,‖ he rewrites his own biography. In translating them into French, he renders them ―French‖ novels that have the same authentic value as the original texts. For a detailed analysis of Kundera‘s self-translations, see Michelle Woods, Translating Milan Kundera (2006). 63 See Kundera‘s preface to Michael Heim‘s 1983 translation of The Joke (1967) and the sixth chapter of L’Art du roman, where he railed against the politicization of his novel The Joke, informing readers to read it not as an anti-Communist manifesto, but rather as the story of an individual‘s struggle against Communist ideology. 171 the 1968 Prague Spring in France, French leftists‘ projection of their ideal of engaged literature onto the East in the wake of May 1968, and the international renown of exilic writers such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn helped frame Central and Eastern European writers as political figures (Rizek 166). 64 To disengage himself from dissident-types and from the political and historical context of his native country, Kundera insists that his novels should not be read ideologically. He constructs an image of his oeuvre as exclusively preoccupied with aesthetic and universal issues, which are likely to resonate with numerous readers, regardless of their cultural or political background. In this way, he seems to suggest that his novels lend themselves to universal readings that transcend the parochial framework of a particular national culture and political context. Kundera‘s view of his novels as transnational and autonomous (Le Rideau 77) stems as much from his anxiety about being narrowly categorized, as from his high esteem for this particular literary genre. In L’Art du roman, for example, he opposes ―l‘esprit du roman‖ (29) [―the spirit of the novel‖ (The Art of the Novel 14) 65 ] to totalitarian ideas that reduce a work of art to a single truth. By contrast, the novel connotes complexity, ambivalence, and openness. For Kundera, ―le roman tout entier n‘est qu‘une longue interrogation‖ (49) [―the whole novel is nothing but one long interrogation‖ (AN 31)] and ―une méditation sur l‘existence 64 See also Jean Bessière‘s explanation of Kundera‘s success in France as being due to the political climate post 1968: ―From 1968 onwards, the French socialist and communist parties were allies and produced a programme commun de la gauche‖; after Kundera becomes a French citizen in 1981, the French political leaders promoted ―[un] socialisme à visage humain‖ (3). ―The Reception of Milan Kundera in France.‖ Kosmas: Czechoslovak and Central European Journal 17. 1 (Fall 2003): 1-14. 65 This and all subsequent translations are taken from the English edition of L’Art du roman (Trans. Linda Asher, New York: Grove Press, 1988), abridged as AN. 172 vue au travers de personnages imaginaires‖ (106) [―a meditation on existence as seen through the medium of imaginary characters‖ (AN 83)]. Its role is not to reflect reality mimetically, but rather to inquire and experiment. In this sense, it is also ―le territoire du jeu et des hypothèses‖ (101) [―the realm of play and of hypotheses‖ (AN 78)] and is, furthermore, ―né … de l‘esprit de l‘humour‖ (194) [―born … of the spirit of humor‖ (AN 160)]. However broad his definition of the novel may be, Kundera‘s conception serves two purposes. First, by defining the novel as a space for play and artistic experimentation, he casts himself as a European author – that is, as the inheritor of a European novelistic tradition that developed in Western Europe in the Renaissance with Cervantes and Rabelais and culminated in the eighteenth century with the rise of the novel (Testaments trahis 75). Second, in rejecting the historical frame of the Cold War, he suggests that the novel is incompatible with totalitarian, monolithic ideas, and necessarily exceeds narrow ideological contexts. On the contrary, as a genre that displays a spirit of openness and tolerance, it should best be seen within wider cultural contexts, such as the history of the European novel, which the author deems superior to other civilizations (L’Art 179-180). One should criticize Kundera‘s singling out of the novel as the genre that best illustrates the spirit of complexity, irony and playfulness, and that embodies a European cultural essence of sorts. His novelistic vision is undoubtedly Eurocentric, essentialist, and elitist – since in both L’Art du roman and Le Rideau, his corpus of great canonical novelists are primarily white European male writers such as Rabelais, Diderot, Flaubert, 173 Sterne, Joyce, Kafka and Musil. 66 Nevertheless, Kundera‘s grounding himself in a European literary history and his holding his works accountable only to ―l‘héritage décrié de Cervantes‖ (L’Art 32) [―the depreciated legacy of Cervantes‖ (AN 20)] is an understandable and necessary gesture in the context of the Cold War political and cultural climate. His insistence on aesthetics enables him to contest his commodification as a Central European political dissident, or at least pre-empt it, since the label is no longer applicable to him in the context of the fall of the Soviet Union and the eastward expansion of the European Union. Instead, Kundera fashions himself as a European writer concerned with existential questions and the issues of literary identity, and of language as always already foreign to itself in his French-language novels La Lenteur, L’Identité, and L’Ignorance. 67 La Lenteur, for example, is not only written in standard French, but is also about the power of language to assign a particular identity to others and to structure worldviews. L’Identité, in turn, similarly revolves around the capacity of writing to blur the distinction between Self and Other. In both novels, reading and writing are flexible, protean acts that are intimately tied to adopting different subject positions and a multiplicity of viewpoints. Such an explosion of perspectives that the two novels open 66 Moreover, as proof of his elitism, Kundera makes no mention of immigrant writers from the former French colonies and obliterates the social and political realities of immigration in contemporary France as well as the ways non-white foreign writers have changed French and European literature. 67 In L’Ignorance (2000), the third novel of his French-language cycle, Kundera explores immigration and exile not so much as socio-political phenomena, but rather as contexts that raise existential questions related to identity, nostalgia, forgetting, and language. The Czech protagonists return from Western Europe not out of obligation, but by personal choice, and thus experience ethical responsibility towards their own country and history. Even though the novel‘s themes may seem to echo those of La Lenteur and L’Identité, I do not discuss L’Ignorance because it is not directly concerned with redefining French identity; rather, it is a polemical exploration of the idea – and the impossibility – of exilic return. 174 up counters monolithic points of view. Kundera‘s La Lenteur and L’Identité therefore are not only fictional texts that tackle particular themes relevant to present-day French society, but also meta-novels of sorts that draw attention to their own writing process. Furthermore, the novels‘ post-modern self-reflexivity is another reason for their successful reception. Jean Bessière attributes the success of Kundera‘s works in France to four features that resonate with French literary culture: ―irony, explicit references to literature, taste for complex forms, and ethical arguments‖ (1). Indeed, within his own novels, Kundera intervenes in the guise of an ironic narrator who evaluates the course of the plot, praises or dismisses characters‘ actions, and generally prevents readers from engaging in mimetic readings. Moreover, his reviving of an older European tradition wherein the novel asks existential questions and French language and literature hold a central role equally makes him an appealing writer in France. What is interesting about Kundera‘s authorial position is that he situates himself both within and outside of the French literary space and, through his use of French, can claim both cultural specificity as a French writer as well as international status, due to the connotations of universalism French language and culture have carried since the Enlightenment. Kundera aspires to European literary status not only by writing in a global language and situating himself in French culture, but also by de-provincializing his Czech texts, that is, by claiming that Central Europe belongs culturally to Western Europe. In his understanding, the literature produced by Czech, Polish, and Hungarian authors has always already embraced and displayed European cultural values. His detachment from the Czech literary tradition and his claim to French literary status can 175 thus be seen as a stepping stone towards internationalizing his oeuvre, as he is aware that an author‘s position in the global literary marketplace depends on his distancing himself from the context of national literature. Placing his works in a transnational framework and in relation to other major texts enables the author to avoid what he calls ―le provincialisme des petits‖ (Rideau 51) [―the provincialism of small nations‖ (Curtain 37)]. For Kundera, provincialism, whether exhibited by small or large nations, represents ―l‘incapacité (ou le refus) d‘envisager sa culture dans le grand contexte‖ (Rideau 51-52, original emphasis) [―the inability (or the refusal) to see one‘s own culture in the large context‖ (Curtain 37)] – that is, to view it as participating in world culture. As he states, ―le grand contexte de la Weltliteratur [est le] seul capable de faire apparaître la valeur esthétique d‘un roman‖ (Le Rideau 51, original emphasis) [―the large context of world literature [is] the only approach that can bring out a novel‘s aesthetic value‖ (Curtain 36)]. Even though he uses Goethe‘s coinage, Kundera does not clearly define the concept of ―world literature,‖ but one can infer from his generally elitist view of literature that these aesthetically valuable works are highly canonical. His merit, however, is that he does not see authors such as Cervantes, Sterne, and Kafka as national authors, but in a supranational context, as European and world writers. As Pascale Casanova explains in The World Republic of Letters, one way in which writers from small nations can accede to world literary status is by embracing a language and culture endowed with connotations of universality and autonomy. Throughout the centuries, French has had the reputation of being the quintessential ―language of literature,‖ while nineteenth-century Paris was considered the center of the 176 world republic of letters (64). As Casanova explains, ―French literary space, having imposed itself as universal, was adopted as a model: not insofar as it was French, but insofar as it was autonomous – which is to say purely literary. In other words, French literary capital does not belong solely to France, but to all nations‖ (87). Kundera appears to share Casanova‘s Franco-centric vision of literature, in that he views French as a language endowed with great literary capital and French literature as autonomous. One way in which he denationalizes his works is by detaching himself from specific historical, political, and market forces, and inventing himself as an author who endorses the notion of literary freedom – arguably, a market-conscious move on his part. We should not forget that Kundera is not only a highly intellectual writer, but a best-selling novelist as well (L’Identité, for instance, was a New York Times notable book). Yet, even though he appears to pander to French critics‘ tastes (through his choice of Enlightenment culture and love for French canonical literature), he challenges the readers to question cultural stereotypes. Therefore, I do not regard Kundera‘s market-awareness and his knowledge of the French horizon of expectations as incompatible with his attempts to resist being narrowly categorized by the literary market. As I will show in the following close readings of his novels, the postmodern aesthetic of his novels is not only commercially successful, but also a locus for engagements with the politics and ethics of literary labeling. More specifically, I contend that the novel‘s tendency towards the metafictional, its ludic style, and carnivalesque humor allow for dissonant viewpoints, which relativize interpretation and eschew reductionist readings. 177 La Lenteur and L’ Ident i té: From National to Global Novels La Lenteur (1995) is the first novel Kundera has written directly in French. Like L’Identité (1997), it differs from his earlier Czech-language novels in terms of both style and content. It is shorter, written in simple, concise language, and uses a fragmentary style, where disparate events are juxtaposed in no particular order. The novel thus deliberately disorients its readers, dissuading them from searching for coherence or from attempting to establish any hierarchies of value. The ideal reader then needs to juggle different narrative fragments and differentiate between different authorial personae, as Kundera is at once the author of his novel and a character within the plot. The blurred identity of the author-narrator is precisely what makes him lose his credibility as a reliable narrator. In the absence of a guiding narrative voice, the novel offers different, at times conflicting perspectives on the same events. Furthermore, La Lenteur depicts French situations and characters, which prompted some critics to classify it under the rubric of Kundera‘s ―French cycle‖ (Boyer-Weinmann 11, Ricard 210). This label may indeed signal a shift in Kundera‘s thematics toward an exploration of contemporary French society. Yet it also overstates the differences between his Czech-language and French-language novels, since in the latter the author employs his well-known method of developing existential ideas through themes and variations. 68 In La Lenteur, as much as in L’Identité, Kundera explores identity from multiple angles: not only the individual identity of his protagonists, as defined relationally and often in the nebulous boundary between self and other, but literary identity as well. The 68 On themes and variations, see Kundera‘s comments in Testaments trahis (199). 178 two novels abound in intertextual references to European literature, inviting readers to situate the texts in a larger cultural context that encourages transnational conversations. More specifically, Kundera weaves his analysis of Vivant Denon‘s novella Point de Lendemain and Choderlos de Laclos‘ Liaisons Dangereuses into his novel La Lenteur, where he also evokes Franz Kafka‘s ―Metamorphosis‖ through the story of a Czech entomologist, while in L’Identité, he alludes to Edmond Rostand‘s Cyrano de Bergerac. He thus rewrites European literary works from his own idiosyncratic point of view. Or, as Michelle Woods asserts, ―he is writing into a European homeland but with a ‗foreign‘ style‖ (21). He takes on the role of cultural mediator between East and West and enlarges the European literary tradition by inserting himself as a Central European author in it. Kundera‘s own literary identity can be understood in relation to these intertexts, as his self-representation is predicated upon his elective affinities, rather than his ethnic or political background. In and through his novels, Kundera represents himself not simply as a Czech dissident writer or a French author, but more generically as a novelist who is in dialogue with other great figures of European and world literature. It is their aesthetic legacy he continues and contributes to. By emphasizing transnational literary history, wherein he believes one should necessarily situate authors and their works, Kundera critiques ways of reading contemporary literature according to national or ethnic labels, proposing instead aesthetic values as the sole criterion for categorizing fictional texts. 179 In La Lenteur, Kundera juxtaposes two conceptions of France and French identity, one nostalgic, the other satiric. The first is represented by eighteenth-century literature, which he paints as an ideal of literary autonomy and experimentation. The second one is contemporary French society, with its cult of celebrity and its strategies of assimilation of foreign cultural elements. I suggest that this juxtaposition highlights the dichotomy between universality and aesthetic autonomy, which eighteenth-century libertine literature seemingly embodies, and that of cultural and linguistic assimilation and cooptation by the French literary market – a tendency that contemporary French literature exemplifies. However, even though Kundera appears to sanction this binary model in his books on literary criticism L’Art du roman and Le Rideau, I contend that the narrative strategies he uses in La Lenteur invite ironic readings in which readers interrogate the binaries Kundera attempts to set up. The novel starts with the author-narrator ―Milanku‖ and his wife Véra (the actual name of Kundera‘s wife) traveling to a château outside of Paris, where he writes a novel called La Lenteur. Through the walls of his room, he sees the events taking place at the entomology conference the château is hosting and turns them into fictional material. The narrator is neither completely foreign nor an insider, evoking Kundera‘s ambivalent authorial positioning within the French literary establishment. This mise-en-abyme structure and the quintessential French setting both help the plot unfold and enable the author-narrator to bring up another journey to the very same château undertaken by the protagonists of Vivant Denon‘s eighteenth-century novella Point de Lendemain. Kundera thus structures his novel by juxtaposing two different centuries and worldviews, 180 which represent the past and the present, or two distinct conceptions of France – one idyllic, the other present-day and culturally depleted. Private and public spheres, slowness and speed, anonymity and fame are not only thematic opposites, but also define the identities and experiences of the eighteenth and twentieth-century protagonists. In Denon‘s novella Point of Lendemain, the one-night affair between Madame de T. and the young knight develops with deliberate slowness, following specific rules dictated by the art of conversation. In other words, Madame de T.‘s seduction of the unnamed knight is mirrored by her slow and artful conversation: ―Tout ce que dit madame de T. est le fruit d‘un art, l‘art de la conversation, qui ne laisse aucun geste sans commentaire et travaille son sens‖ (Lenteur 43) [Everything Madame de T. says is the fruit of an art, the art of conversation, which lets no gesture pass without comment and works over its meaning‖ (Slowness 31) 69 ]. Rhetoric and aesthetics alone appear to give shape to the content of their discussion and to steer the course of events. Thus, in his characteristic style, Kundera insists on the artfulness and even artificiality of the lovers‘ conversation rather than on its nature as a social activity: ―Tout est arrangé, fabriqué, artificiel, tout est mis en scène, rien n‘est franc, ou, pour le dire autrement, tout est art; en ce cas: art de prolonger le suspense, encore mieux: art de se tenir le plus longuement possible en état d‘excitation‖ (Lenteur 48) [―Everything is composed, confected, artificial, everything is staged, nothing is straightforward, or in other words, everything is art; in this case: the art of prolonging the suspense, better yet: the art of 69 This and all subsequent translations of La Lenteur are taken from the English-language edition, Slowness (Trans. Linda Asher, New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1996). 181 staying as long as possible in a state of arousal‖ (Slowness 36)]. Their conversation-cum- seduction is a carefully orchestrated spectacle, which they put up for their own pleasure as well as for Madame de T‘s husband. It is first and foremost an aesthetic act that not only aims to defer pleasure, but also makes no claim on the future: ―Concevoir leur rencontre comme une forme fut tout particulièrement précieux pour eux vu que leur nuit devait rester sans lendemain et ne pourrait se répéter que dans le souvenir‖ (Lenteur 51). [―Conceiving their encounter as a form was especially precious for them, since their night was to have no tomorrow and could be repeated only through recollection‖ (Slowness 38).] Madame de T.‘s and the knight‘s amorous encounter is so much more memorable as it remains a private affair. Kundera suggests that there is no moral to their story, and that, in the absence of any utilitarian purpose, the whole point lies in Madame de T.‘s ironic awareness that she is merely playing a game. In contrast, the twentieth-century French society appears as a reversed reflection of Denon‘s world. Here, speed and forgetting define protagonists‘ words and actions. For instance, politicians Berck and Duberques, who are called ―dancers,‖ are in constant search of limelight. A dancer, in Kundera‘s definition, ―ne désire pas imposer au monde telle ou telle organisation sociale … mais occuper la scène pour faire rayonner son moi‖ and ―être plus moral que les autres‖ (Lenteur 29; 39) [―his desire is not to impose this or that social scheme on the world … but to take over the stage so as to beam forth his self‖ and ―to be more moral than anyone else‖ (Slowness 19, 28)]. They practice ―le judo moral‖ (Lenteur 29, original emphasis) [―moral judo‖ (Slowness 19)], a strategy that consists in showing they are more moral than their opponents. Interestingly enough, 182 Kundera‘s choice of the term ―rayonner‖ brings up the colonial imagery of France as spreading its cultural influence to the four corners of the world, which may indeed be a veiled allusion to the universalist principles of the republic. 70 This thirst for a moment of glory extends even to the Czech scientist, who encounters Western Europe for the first time after living for a long period under the Communist regime in his country. He poses as a political dissident, while in reality he evinced cowardice. His pride in his false heroism derives from his consciousness of having participated in historical events at their most violent: ―la fierté du savant tchèque est due au fait qu‘il n‘est pas monté sur la scène de l‘Histoire n‘importe quand mais à ce moment précis où elle était éclairée‖ (Lenteur 77) [―the scientist‘s pride is due to the fact that he stepped onto the stage of history not at just any random moment but at the exact moment when the lights came up on it‖ (Slowness 61)]. His feeling of election is risible, because he does not see the ephemeral nature of historical events, or at least of their coverage in the mass media. The same penchant for the spotlight is evinced by Vincent, a young entomologist whose attempt to seduce a young typist yields opposite results than in the case of those of Madame de T. and her chevalier. Vincent‘s almost-seduction of Julie is a parody of the eighteenth-century pursuit of pleasure, as it ends in Vincent‘s 70 Kundera‘s word choice inadvertently recalls the terms used by the writers of the manifesto for a world literature in French to describe the image of France as a hub that dispensed its lights on the formerly colonized countries, which are the spokes: ―le centre, ce point depuis lequel était supposée rayonner une littérature franco-française, n‘est plus le centre. Le centre jusqu‘ici, même si de moins en moins, avait eu cette capacité d‘absorption qui contraignait les auteurs venus d‘ailleurs à se dépouiller de leurs bagages avant de se fondre dans le creuset de la langue et de son histoire nationale‖ (par. 2, emphasis mine). 183 simulated intercourse in front of a bewildered audience and his subsequent speeding back to the city on his motorcycle. The gap between eighteenth and twentieth-century sensibilities is exemplified not only thematically in the passage from the age of secrecy to that of the spectacle and celebrity, but in the novel‘s setting and tone as well. The transformation of the château from a private place to a public conference venue is reflective of the rise of a celebrity culture, a phenomenon which the author-narrator decries. He wonders nostalgically: ―Pourquoi le plaisir de la lenteur a-t-il disparu? Ah, où sont-ils, les flâneurs d‘antan?‖ (Lenteur 11-12) [―Why has the power of slowness disappeared? Ah, where have they gone, the amblers of yesteryear?‖ (Slowness 3)]. The nostalgic tone Kundera uses when he depicts his eighteenth-century narrative thread contrasts with his satiric portrait of contemporary French society. Thus, French characters such as Berck, Duberques, Vincent, Immaculata, and even the Czech scholar are all mocked for their pursuit of fame and of a fawning audience as well as for their seriousness in dealing with public situations. What makes them risible is their unawareness that their most serious gestures, such as the politicians‘ engagement in noble socio-political projects, are just pretences meant to attract greater attention. The French characters‘ obliviousness to the irrelevance of their lives contrasts sharply with Madame de T.‘s and the knight‘s knowledge that their love affair unfolds in the absence of any seriousness or any witnesses – ―Point d‘auditeurs‖ (Lenteur 183) [―No audience‖ (Slowness 156)]. That the eighteenth-century figures as a mirror in which the twentieth-century sees itself distorted is further illustrated by the example of Vincent, who admires the 184 Marquis de Sade and attempts to replicate the experience of his characters as well as of Denon‘s protagonists during his walk in the park with Julie. Yet he fails by slipping into lyricism, as he overlooks the rational spirit of the eighteenth-century and the fact that libertine literature consisted in the analysis of pleasure, rather than its mere celebration. By resorting to poetic metaphors – such as likening the moon to a ―trou du cul‖ (Lenteur 118) [―the ass hole‖ (Slowness 98)] – Vincent becomes guilty, according to the judgmental author-narrator, of lyricizing the female body. His language, which evokes Rabelaisian humor, contrasts with the witty repartees between Madame de T. and the knight. The author-narrator expresses his dissatisfaction with Vincent, who edulcorated the libertine spirit of the eighteenth-century: ―Ah, ce déplacement est regrettable, pénible à voir! Continuer à suivre Vincent sur cette voie me deplaît‖ (Lenteur 119) [―Ah, this displacement is regrettable, painful to see! I dislike following Vincent along that path‖ (Slowness 98)]. This self-reflexive comment suggests that Vincent is a puppet in the hands of an omniscient author-narrator, while at the same time he seems to escape the latter‘s control by deviating from his ascribed path. By using the voice of a highly critical narrator who draws attention to the metatextual aspect of the novel and prevents readers from empathizing with its characters, Kundera underscores the constructedness of his novel and its non-mimetic, playful, and experimental nature. Through these metatextual comments, which interrogate the principle of aesthetic pleasure for pleasure‘s sake that La Lenteur seems to have embraced so far, Kundera invites ironic readings of his novel. Aligning La Lenteur with the spirit of the eighteenth- century libertine literature, Kundera suggests in fact that his novel, like Denon‘s Point de 185 Lendemain, is an apology not simply of hedonism, but of its analysis. 71 Similarly, I contend, La Lenteur should be read as ―[un] roman de la pensée‖ (Brulotte 212) – that is, as ―a thinking novel,‖ which is not simply an entertaining narrative, as the author-narrator claims it to be. At a certain point in the narrative, for instance, Véra tells ―Milanku‖ about the perils of literary experimentation. When she has nightmares about the novel he is composing in his imagination, Véra warns the author that he takes a risk by abandoning seriousness, as he puts himself at the mercy of literary critics: Tu m‘as souvent dit vouloir écrire un jour un roman où aucun mot ne serait sérieux. Une Grande Bêtise Pour Ton Plaisir. J‘ai peur que le moment ne soit venu. Je veux seulement te prévenir: fais attention. […] Le sérieux te protégeait. Le manque de sérieux te laissera nu devant les loups. Et tu sais qu‘ils t‘attendent, les loups. (Lenteur 110-111) [You‘ve often told me you wanted to write a novel someday with not a single serious word in it. A Big Piece of Nonsense for Your Own Pleasure. I‘m frightened the time may have come. I just want to warn you: be careful. […] Seriousness kept you safe. The lack of seriousness will leave you naked to the wolves. And you know they‘re waiting for you, the wolves are. (Slowness 91)] Satirizing the expectations of his critics that he should produce a serious book unlikely to be misinterpreted, Kundera purports to do the opposite, by writing a whimsical experiment for his sheer amusement. Yet, as I argue, La Lenteur is a novel with an ethical agenda, as it raises the question of how to interpret a fictional text in a way that does not reduce it to one single aspect. Thematically, the novel illustrates the notion of multiple perspectives by exploring two alternative responses to the idea of (non- )seriousness: an eighteenth-century libertine viewpoint and a contemporary French 71 As Kundera writes, ―la vraie grandeur de cet art ne reside pas dans une quelconque propaganda de l‘hédonisme mais dans son analyse‖ (La Lenteur 18) [―the true greatness of that art consists not in some propaganda or other for hedonism but in its analysis‖ (Slowness 8).] 186 perspective. On the one hand, in stating that no word is serious in his novel, the author- narrator deconstructs his own text. His use of humor, 72 irony, and parody assist him in his goal, as they destabilize established literary hierarchies. As a ludic space par excellence, the novel offers readers the illusion of being the realm of all possibilities. Thus, in Kundera‘s words, the novel is ―[un] territoire où le jugement moral est suspendu‖ (Testaments trahis 17, original emphasis) [―a realm where moral judgment is suspended‖ (Testaments Betrayed 7)]. As he explains, ―Suspendre le jugement moral ce n‘est pas l‘immoralité du roman, c‘est sa morale‖ (Testaments 18, original emphasis) [―Suspending moral judgment is not the immorality of the novel: it is its morality‖ (Testaments 7)]. Yet, on the other hand, Kundera‘s authorial self-insertions in the narrative and his firm grasp on its development suggest a carefully choreographed narrative. Therefore, even though the author depicts the novel as a space from which all seriousness is banished, La Lenteur is nevertheless a serious novel that is very rigorously organized and even didactic at times. Veering between playful experiment and serious enterprise, then, Kundera‘s novel asks to be seen as staunchly resistant to reductive interpretations. In La Lenteur, Kundera makes irony the means of an ethical perspective. Despite his above-mentioned comments in Testaments trahis, one could read his novel as a moral 72 For an analysis of humor operating as a tool of power in La Lenteur, see John Phillips‘ article ―‗L‘insoutenable légèreté du rire:‘ Laughter and Power in Milan Kundera‘s La Lenteur and Vivant Denon‘s Point de Lendemain.‖ John Parkin and John Phillips (eds.). Laughter and Power. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2006: 147-158. Phillips contends that in the novel, humor is dark, rather than Rabelaisian, celebratory laughter, being rather indebted to a Central and Eastern European tradition represented by Franz Kafka and Nikolai Gogol (148). According to Phillips, humor is, in Kundera‘s understanding, a distinctly modern attitude in which all beliefs are relativized, all fixed ideas called into question, all self-importance deflated by exposure to competing perspectives. 187 tale about the risks of cultural stereotyping and monolithic readings. The ethical responsibility of the novelist is to unmask hidden agendas in the process of reading and readers‘ and critics‘ tendencies to exoticize foreign authors. The episode of the Czech scientist attending an entomology conference in France provides a good opportunity to probe the contrasts between Central and Western Europe and to underscore the exoticization of the Central European other in France. The Czech scholar is interesting to his French peers inasmuch as he embodies the stereotype of the Eastern European political dissident, thus becoming the object of an ―intra-European Orientalism‖ (Kovacevic 641). He reminds them of a political period and geographical region they prove to know little about, as they mistake Prague for Budapest, thus considering the distinct histories of Eastern European countries interchangeable. They also call Eastern Europe a huge concentration camp, thus conflating Communism with the Holocaust. The irony of the scientist‘s identity is that his dissident image in France is based on his false self-image, that of having been a brave opponent to Communism in his country. In reality, he proved too cowardly to resist the real opponents of the regime. He himself plays by Westerners‘ exotic stereotypes, taking great pride in his national and working class origins. Thus, in his desire to seize a moment of fame, he forgets to deliver his speech. Through this protagonist, Kundera satirizes those who overemphasize grand historical narratives to the detriment of individual, idiosyncratic stories. In other words, the story of the Czech scientist‘s inner conflict between acquiescence in and resistance to the actual dissidents is much more interesting than his embodying ethnic or national stereotypes. By advocating singularity and critiquing stereotyping tendencies, Kundera 188 suggests that generic concerns such as the scientist‘s moral dilemmas and inner struggles, which actually dictate his subsequent identity more than his being Czech, may be lost on readers and critics if they interpret this story through the prism of national identity or geographical origins. One could easily regard the Czech scientist as Kundera‘s alter ego, since the writer tends to resist the leveling force of history in determining his literary identity, proposing instead individual stories as criteria for inclusion in literary categories. At the same time, Kundera does not completely relinquish his literary affiliation with Central Europe, since it is precisely this literary heritage that prevents him from being assimilated as a ―French‖ author. 73 The story of the Czech entomologist could be viewed as a subtle allusion to Kafka‘s ―Metamorphosis‖ due to the protagonist‘s national origin, profession, as well as the theme of identity as always already in flux. Continuing this biographical reading, Kundera‘s imperfect fitting within the French literary establishment is further rendered on a linguistic level, notably through the French secretary‘s spelling difficulties, which highlight the lack of comprehension between the French and the Czech. The entomologist‘s exoticism is thus underscored by his unpronounceable name, Čechořipsky, which the secretary mispronounces as ―Chipiqui‖ and ―Chenipiqui‖ (Lenteur 72). Moreover, he discovers that, on his name tag, they placed French circumflex accents on the wrong letters instead of Czech diacritics, as in ―Cêchôripsky,‖ 73 Kundera, for one, considers France his ―patrie littéraire‖ [literary homeland] (qt. in Rizek 179). France is therefore not the land of his exile, as the author states that he can leave it freely and return to his native country anytime. Moreover, he displays his difference from the French by inserting Czech words or alluding to Central European literature, in order to show his imperfect integration and impossible encapsulation into rigid literary traditions. 189 which sends him into a linguistic explanation of Jan Hus‘s reforming of Czech orthography (Lenteur 72). The simplification, or rather purification, of the Czech language is a humorous allusion to the French obsession with the defense and promotion of their language as well as a critique of French assimilationist strategies. The Czech scientist is understandable as a foreigner in a French context only when he is either exoticized or assimilated – a process emblematized by the appropriation of his name using French orthographic marks. In this way, Kundera underscores readers‘ complicity in the reification of the Eastern European other. Through its references to Central and Eastern Europe, La Lenteur serves as a veiled critique of French linguistic protectionism. However, it is also an apology for the use of French, as Kundera‘s open admiration for eighteenth-century French prose shows. Whereas Kundera is a writer at home with French literature, his bringing Central Europe back into his novels can also be read, I suggest, as an attempt to destabilize his identity as a French writer. His novel does not settle on any specific literary identity, be that French, Czech, or European, yet it clearly embraces them all. France of the past, contemporary France, Central European history – all these images resonate with each other in Kundera‘s novel. In fact, the term the author-narrator used to describe Choderlos de Laclos‘ novel Liaisons Dangereuses is an apposite one for La Lenteur as well. Kundera‘s own novel is itself a ―coquille résonnante‖ (Lenteur 20) [―a resonating seashell‖ (Slowness 10)], where temporally removed periods mirror each other. In the closing pages of the novel, the knight and Vincent meet and fail to communicate, as Vincent hurries to get back to the city and lacks the patience to hear the 190 knight‘s story. In bringing the characters together, Kundera ends on a note of ambiguity, blurring the line between past and present, or eighteenth and twentieth centuries, allegorized by Vincent and the knight. The author suggests that twentieth-century French culture bears no comparison to the eighteenth-century one and that it needs the legacy of previous centuries in order to flourish. The literary identity of La Lenteur thus lies neither solely in its eighteenth-century literary affiliations nor in its twentieth-century ones, but is constituted somewhere in between. That is, all these intertextual references connect the novel to European literary history, enlarging its cultural and historical context. La Lenteur then illustrates the way in which it is possible to fashion a literary identity that is at once singular and inextricably tied to that of other writers and their texts. L’Identité, as its very title suggests, offers another variation on the theme of identity. It explores identity from the prism of romantic relationships rather than ethnicity or culture, as in La Lenteur. The main protagonists, Chantal and Jean-Marc, are catalysts for the author‘s rather schematic exploration of self-doubling, aging, death, and the relational nature of love. Yet they also help channel the plot towards the story of two individuals, rather than towards cultural allegories. The narrative may be more straightforward, but Kundera relativizes and complicates perspectives through his well- known narrative strategies. The novel thus abounds in instances of ambiguity, misrecognitions, misunderstandings, confusions between reality and dream, and between self and other. Such techniques allow readers to question the identity of the protagonists 191 and become aware that L’Identité is a multi-layered narrative which offers numerous possibilities for interpretation. Kundera presents the relationship between Chantal and Jean-Marc as one that allows them to free themselves from social constraints and show their multiple identities to each other. Their many-faceted selves contrast starkly with the one coherent identity society requires them to adopt; hence, their relationship is a haven into which they retreat from the world, not unlike what happens in Point de Lendemain, where the two lovers also seek escape via erotics. For Jean-Marc, who has always considered himself a social outcast, Chantal represents the opportunity to live a more financially secure life. For Chantal, Jean-Marc represents her only connection to the world, especially after the death of her child. With her lover, she is freed from the obligation of being what others expect her to be. Chantal has several faces, between which she cannot or does not want to choose, since this will force her to adopt a coherent and conventional identity. As Chantal admits, ―j‘ai deux visages. […] Avec toi, je porte le visage qui se moque. Quand je suis au bureau, je porte le visage sérieux‖ (L’Identité 39-40) [―I‘ve got two different faces. […] With you, I wear the scoffing face. When I‘m at the office, I wear the serious face‖ (Identity 27) 74 ]. Bringing up the tropes of seriousness vs. playfulness again, Kundera underscores the danger of succumbing to seriousness, that is, to the lack of flexibility and self-awareness. This danger is represented by Chantal‘s job for a marketing agency which advertises idealized images of identity, a work she detests because it reduces the mystery of identity. Moreover, the agency‘s commercials go so far 74 This and all the subsequent English translations of L’Identité refer to the 1998 Harper Flamingo edition. 192 as to strip sexuality of all privacy, such as when Chantal is made to watch a publicity spot in which a camera films the sexuality of a fetus (L’Identité 71) – a possible allusion to the surveillance society in Kafka‘s works. Aware that she might not be able to keep both her masks for a long time, Chantal fears that the day will come when she will have only one face, the serious one. That moment arrives indeed when the first anonymous letter announces that she is the object of a stranger‘s gaze. The stranger‘s words awaken her sense of physical beauty but also her consciousness of aging. In fact, the very opening of the novel prefigures the theme of mistaken identities and the loss of one‘s unique identity. While searching for Chantal on the beach of a small town in Normandie, Jean- Marc mistakes the physical appearance of his beloved for another woman‘s. His misrecognition underscores the extent to which Chantal, whom he regards as unique, resembles other women. In turn, walking down the beach, Chantal feels that she has lost her individual power of attraction and that ―Les hommes ne se retournent plus sur moi‖ (L’Identité 33) [―Men don‘t turn to look at me anymore‖ (Identity 21)]. To dispel Chantal‘s fear of becoming invisible to other men, Jean-Marc starts writing her anonymous love letters that he signs with the acronym ―C.D.B‖ (L’Identité 122), which stands for Cyrano de Bergerac. Like Edmond Rostand‘s 1897 play, L’Identité is based on the confusion of identities, and like Rostand‘s protagonist, who declares his love for Roxane under a false name, Jean-Marc dons the mask of a stranger who writers letters to his beloved. This game, however, endangers their relationship, as it imposes on Chantal an identity she is reluctant to adopt – that of a vulnerable woman susceptible to men‘s seduction games. As the object of someone else‘s gaze, Chantal starts wearing feminine 193 clothes and jewelry, as her seducer suggests, and hides her love letters in her drawer. For Jean-Marc, this act of secrecy diminishes Chantal‘s uniqueness, rendering her similar to countless other women who seek to conform to feminine standards of beauty. She thus becomes unrecognizable to Jean-Marc: ―Cette Chantal-là ne se ressemble pas; cette Chantal-là n‘est pas celle qu‘il aime; cette Chantal-là est un simulacre‖ (L’Identité 141) [―That Chantal is unfamiliar; that Chantal is not the woman he loves; that Chantal is a simulacrum‖ (Identity 113)]. As the narrator continues, ―Si Chantal est un simulacre, toute la vie de Jean-Marc en est une‖ (L’Identité 132) [―If Chantal is a simulacrum, then so is the whole of Jean-Marc‘s life‖ (Identity 105)]. Because Jean-Marc derives a sense of identity from Chantal, and vice versa, any change in their relationship could make him slip into marginality at any time. His identity can thus be reversed into non-identity. He claims he had always felt an affinity for the beggar on their street, whom he refers to as his ―alter ego,‖ and whom Chantal suspects at one point as the author of the letters (L’Identité 108). His other double is, of course, Rostand‘s protagonist. In Kundera‘s postmodern identity games, Jean-Marc becomes a simulacrum of Cyrano de Bergerac himself. Like La Lenteur, which blurs the line between author and narrator, L’Identité plays with notions of authorship. Both Jean-Marc and Cyrano de Bergerac take on secret identities as the anonymous authors of love letters. The nebulous border between self and other is also explored in the blurring of the boundary between reality and dream. This technique has repercussions on narrative form, as readers are unable to specify at which moment the mimetic realist narrative acquired an oneiric twist. Thus, after 194 arriving in London, Chantal slips into the fantasy of a nightmarish orgy, and she also wakes up from a nightmare at the end of the novel. At this point, it becomes clear that the final part was Chantal‘s dream, and if the novel is sure to end with Jean-Marc‘s gentle words, it is uncertain at exactly what point reality was replaced by the dream. As the narrator wonders, Qui a rêvé cette histoire? Qui l‘a imaginé? Elle? Lui? Tous les deux? Chacun pour l‘autre? Et à partir de quel moment leur vie réelle s‘est-elle transformée en cette fantaisie perfide? […] Quel est le moment précis où le réel s‘est transformé en irréel, la réalité en rêverie? Où était la frontière? Où est la frontière? (L’Identité 206) [Who dreamed this story? Who imagined it? She? He? Both of them? Each one for the other? And starting when did their real life change into this treacherous fantasy? […] At what exact moment did the real turn into the unreal, reality into reverie? Where was the border? Where is the border? (Identity 167)] The novel never answers these questions because, in fact, it does not matter whether Chantal‘s dream started at the exact moment when Jean-Marc wrote her the first letter, or when she discovered Jean-Marc to be the author of the letters, or when she took the train to London. What is significant is that such a nebulous border exists in the first place. Kundera‘s blurring of the line between reality and dream, or between the plot and characters‘ fantasy, is one strategy that prevents the novel from being reduced to simple interpretations. In fact, Jean-Marc‘s metaphor of life as ―l‘arbre des possibilités‖ (L’Identité 134) [―the tree of possibilities‖ (Identity 107)], could well be extended to the novel itself. Although the motif of the border is a recurrent one in Kundera‘s Czech-language novels, where he explores political and historical boundaries, in L’Identité, he tackles it 195 from a different angle. Thus, the geo-political border between Central and Western Europe, or between Communism and Western democracy, is replaced by the thin line between dream and reality, but also between self and other. For instance, woken up from her nightmare, Chantal gazes at Jean-Marc for fear she might lose or misrecognize him. As she tells him, ―Je ne te lâcherai plus du regard. Je te regarderai sans interruption‖ (L’Identité 207) [―I‘ll never let you out of my sight again. I‘m going to keep on watching you and never stop‖ (Identity 168)]. Her identity is preserved in the gaze of Jean-Marc, and that is why, having lost sight of him in London, Chantal forgets her name and slips into a nightmare. As Hana Pichova remarked, ―By abandoning the historical/political setting, by abolishing borders, Kundera creates space for the exploration of the individual‖ (112) – a movement not unlike Hanif Kureishi‘s, which I have explored in Chapter 1. However, the novel‘s ethical implications are closely linked to its aesthetics as well. As a formal strategy, the borderlessness of the text may change readers‘ perceptions of the novel as a mimetic genre with a linear plot, and of the identity of the protagonists as coherent and easily graspable. This idea is valid for the literary identity of the novel and of its author as well, which may be at once generic and culturally specific. Whereas La Lenteur explored Central European identity in its relation to France, L’Identité is almost entirely stripped of such precise cultural references. Even though Central Europe is not present in the novel as a geo-political and historical entity, its literature is. For Kundera, oneiric literature is inextricably linked to Franz Kafka‘s works, which have greatly shaped the author‘s conception of the novel as ―le lieu où 196 l‘imagination peut exploser comme dans un rêve‖ (L’Art du roman 27) [―the place where the imagination can explode as in a dream‖ (Art of the Novel 16)]. In fusing reality and dream, Kundera claims Kafka‘s aesthetic heritage. The author not only regards Kafka‘s works as a supreme example of aesthetic autonomy (Art of the Novel 117), but also as literary transnationalism. For Kundera, Kafka is a writer of European, rather than national caliber, and his own allusions to Kafka‘s work aim to enlarge the context within which L’Identité is being read. Even though the novel makes overt references to French literature, is written in French and set in a small town in France, one could argue that L’Identité is focused, more generically, on human individuality. As a love story between two individuals, Chantal and Jean-Marc, it transcends cultural borders and is likely to resonate with readers from different geographical locations. In this sense, L’Identité could well be viewed as a global novel or, as Hana Pichova writes, as Kundera‘s ―borderless novel par excellence‖ (112). Interestingly enough, it was precisely the novel‘s spare setting, modest plot, and cultural translatability that attracted negative criticism. French critics, for instance, felt that their expectations of cultural exoticism were not being met, since Kundera seems to have abandoned his well-known themes such as Communism and Central European identity. Instead, his French protagonists and his musings on the advertisement industry in contemporary France lack the necessary cultural distance expected from foreign French-language writers. As one critic complains about Kundera, ―As a Frenchman, he bores us‖ (Verecky qt. in Hruby 41). This comment illustrates a reception problem Kundera attempts to correct in L’Identité, namely, the fact that his Czech identity and the 197 themes of his Czech-language novels are still being read into his latest works. L’Identité, then, addresses – at least on one level – the problem of the literary market‘s exoticization of foreign writers, and their demands that non-French writers display some exotic difference so that they can be more easily categorized. By interpreting the novel as being about a love story between two individuals, rather than two French people, thus seeing it as a text that does not reference a particular cultural territory or target a specific national audience, I contend that one reads L’Identité ethically. All in all, by placing La Lenteur and L’Identité in dialogue with different national as well as European literary texts, Kundera expands the framework of his novels, preventing them from articulating a single, distinct identity. For instance, while La Lenteur is at its most French through its thematic illustration of the idea of literary autonomy, it also gestures towards a larger context by alluding to world writer Franz Kafka. In that sense, I view Kundera as a ―world writer in French‖ – or as ―un écrivain- monde en français,‖ as the signers of the manifesto Pour une littérature-monde en français would say. This notion indicates his simultaneous belonging to and transcending of French literature, and situates him in a larger context where the French language is not the sole province of French writers but of foreign writers as well. 198 Andreï Makine and Literary Bilingualism By virtue of writing in French and drawing on a canonical French tradition, I suggest Makine should also be viewed as a world writer in French. He straddles the line between Russia and Europe, reclaiming both cultural spaces and unsettling the border between East and West, which Kundera passionately defends. Whereas Kundera purposefully associated Soviet-occupied Central Europe 75 with Western European culture 75 Milan Kundera published his article ―A Kidnapped West, or The Tragedy of Central Europe‖ in France in 1984. For the author, Central Europe was not just a collection of small and vulnerable nations, but also, and especially, it was the intellectual and artistic center for the Western civilization and the last stronghold of the intelligentsia. He thus argued for the importance of Czech culture to an already declining Western European civilization, claiming that the Czech Republic, ―a kidnapped country‖ (218), situated ―culturally in the West and politically in the East‖ (219), belongs culturally to Western Europe, from which it has been severed during the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia. One can regard Kundera‘s arguments as a market-conscious move: had he written in Czech and associated himself with national culture, he would not have acquired French, European, and world literary recognition. By explaining the Czech context to Western audiences, his essay at once established his cultural affiliation to the West and led to a consolidation of the politicized image of Kundera as an engaged writer. However, rather than carrying the geo-political connotations Mitteleuropa has, ―Central Europe‖ is primarily a cultural concept, and a monolithic one at that. Thus, the shortcoming of Kundera‘s essay is that the author overstates the cultural affinities and historical commonalities between Western and Central Europe, overlooking the power struggles within both regions. For example, he contrasts Western and Eastern Europe as two opposing civilizations, overlooking the fact that Western Europe, and France itself, is split along ethnic, cultural, and religious lines as a result of large-scale immigration from former colonies. Moreover, just as the identity of Western nations in constantly changing, Central European countries are characterized by heterogeneity and power struggles as well. In saying that Central Europe belongs to the West, Kundera disregards the significant ways in which Central European countries have been shaped by the Soviet Union‘s political system. Moreover, he also overlooks the cultural connections between Russian and Czech culture, in that the Czech Republic also shares a Slavic language, while other Eastern European states are culturally indebted to Western Europe. Romania, for instance, on which Kundera dwells only briefly, uses a Romance language, has been historically considered Francophone; it therefore belies Kundera‘s constructed model of border-drawing. For the purpose of my argument, however, the merit of his concept of Central Europe consists in his attempt to transcend national cultural boundaries by constructing a regional cultural identity and decoupling cultural from geo-political borders. For studies on Central Europe and Mitteleuropa, see Milan Kundera, ―The Tragedy of Central Europe,‖ The New York Review of Books 31.7. (April 26, 1984): 33-38. In Gale Stokes (ed.). From Stalinism to Pluralism: A Documentary History of Eastern Europe Since 1945. New York: Oxford UP, 1991. 217-23; Robin Okey. ―Central Europe / Eastern Europe: Behind the Definitions.‖ Past and Present 137 (Nov. 1992): 102-133. September 15, 2010. http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0031- 2746%28199211%290%3A137%3C102%3ACE%2FEEB%3E2.0.CO%3B2-S; Jacques Le Rider, La Mitteleuropa. Paris: PUF, 1994; Timothy Garton Ash, ―Does Central Europe Exist?‖ The New York Review of Books 33.15 (October 9, 1986). September 16, 2010. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1986/oct/09/does-central-europe-exist and ―The Puzzle of 199 and viewed Soviet cultural productions as totalitarian and monolithic in meaning, Makine interrogates such a clear-cut boundary. Even though he is a Russian writer shaped by the Soviet educational system, he wrote a very Western European novel, Le Testament français, wherein he employed the same narrative techniques as Kundera. Written in highly literary French and drawing on French canonical literature, the novel can be read as part of the French literary tradition. At the same time, by employing Russian themes and characters, it also expands the limits of that national tradition by incorporating foreign or Eastern cultural elements. In that sense, Makine represents an interesting juxtaposition to Kundera, as he both complements the Czech-born writer and expands his and the French literary establishment‘s conceptions of the boundaries of contemporary French and European literature. The literary trajectory of Russian-born Andreï Makine, who is now considered a French author, differs considerably from that of Kundera. Makine started writing novels only after fleeing to Paris in 1987. Because he emigrated during the era of glasnost, that is, a few years before the fall of Communism, the French do not regard him as a political dissident, as they view Kundera. Moreover, his choice of French as the language of his literary expression appears less obvious than in the case of the Czech-born writer. Whereas Kundera‘s literary reputation reinforced the idea of France as a haven for politically persecuted intellectuals, Makine was seen as ―un drôle de Russe qui se mettait à écrire en français‖ [a strange Russian who took up writing in French; translation mine] Central Europe.‖ New York Times 46.5 (March 18, 1999). September 20, 2010. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1999/mar/18/the-puzzle-of-central-europe. 200 (Vitaliev qt. in Garnett 290). The two writers‘ professional status also differed in terms of their immigrant journeys: Kundera came to France to take up a teaching position at the University of Rennes, while Makine arrived as an anonymous exile from the Soviet Union. As Katherine Knorr asserts, ―French book prizes get more attention when there is a story attached. The book isn‘t the thing; the author must have a legend‖ (32). Makine didn‘t have Kundera‘s legend and he slept among the tombs of the Père Lachaise cemetery while writing La Fille d’un héros de l’Union sovietique (1990), which tackled primarily Russian themes, like his subsequent novels Confession d’un porte-drapeau déchu (1992) and Au temps du fleuve Amour (1994). Makine had difficulties finding a publisher since, as a foreigner who wrote in elegant French about Russia, he was difficult to categorize. Because his first novels were turned down by several publishers, Makine resorted to a subterfuge: he passed his books off as French translations from the ―original‖ Russian, having translated his second novel into Russian for his editor in the space of a few weeks. Only when his authenticity as a Russian writer was safely confirmed were his novels deemed publishable. By writing directly in French, Makine appeared to demand inclusion in French letters – claims that Milan Kundera successfully averted in the beginning, since his first books in France were published in Czech. 76 But as a Russian writer, Makine posed no threat to the insular French literary establishment. The author‘s marketing ploy, that of impersonating an exotic foreigner, and his ironic consecration as a translated author 76 Kundera‘s switch to French in his latest novels triggered, however, the same debates about his national literary identity that the publication of Makine‘s first novels provoked. 201 reveal the exclusionary and elitist nature of the French publishing industry. They also show how literary acceptance is closely related to works‘ successful reception on the literary market, which then eases foreign writers‘ integration. Indeed, the commercial success of Makine‘s fourth novel Le Testament français (1995) earned the author his French citizenship, which had been initially denied to him. The French authorities thus extended the citizenship criteria, which the writer did not initially meet, on linguistic grounds, due to his writing three novels in French and another one about French national identity. Ironically enough, the very association of national language and literary identity is the reason for the author‘s previous rejection by the publishing industry. The story of Makine‘s literary consecration as a national author illustrates the phenomenon of contemporary foreign writers‘ easier integration in France if their writing appears to celebrate the French language and culture. It is not difficult to see why Le Testament français was such a great success: it centered on the Romantic link between language and national identity, it included numerous intertextual references to French classics, and it employed a sentimental tone that praised the properties of the French language. As such, it was viewed as a paean to France by most French critics. I contend, however, that the novel does more than celebrate a bygone France at the height of its culture. It also critiques the French model of cultural assimilation, proposing bilingualism or biculturalism as unassimilable difference. I argue that, just like Milan Kundera‘s European identity, Makine‘s biculturalism forces a reconsideration of traditional categories of national literature, East and West, French and Francophone, insider and outsider. He is a ―French‖ author through his 202 chosen cultural affiliations as well as ―Francophone‖ through the Francophilic Russian tradition and his formative environment, while he also draws on the Russian literary tradition in his novel. In rejecting the model of the assimilated foreign writer and embracing instead his Franco-Russian identity, thus refusing to settle for one language or culture, Makine contests the politics of literary labeling, which equates language with national identity or, if it consecrates foreign authors, does so by exoticizing their differences. Le Testament français is indebted to both French and Russian literary traditions. By viewing Makine solely as a French writer, the critical reception misses the ambivalence of the text, which underscores the equal importance of the narrator‘s Russian identity. The novel thus represents an apology for bilingualism as an alternative to linguistic assimilation within the nation-state. It not only glorifies French language and culture, but also exposes the arbitrary link between language and national origin in the constitution of literary identities. By looking at the narrative strategies of Le Testament français, I will first examine Makine‘s complicity in a French literary market that rewards authors‘ reinforcement of France‘s cultural significance. I will then show how a closer look at the novel‘s form as well as content reveals the author‘s ambivalent self-positioning vis-à-vis the French literary establishment and his critique of assimilationism. Le Testament français (1995) was published in France to great critical acclaim, winning an unprecedented trio of literary awards: Le Prix Goncourt, le Goncourt des Lycéens, and Le Prix Médicis, which he shared with another exiled writer, the Greek- 203 born Vassilis Alexakis, recognized for his novel La Langue maternelle. The novel was also the first of Makine‘s works to be translated into English as Dreams of My Russian Summers 77 (1997), reaching bestseller lists in Britain, Australia and the United States (Masson 62), where it won the Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year and the Boston Book Review Fiction Prize. It was translated into more than twenty-five languages and it sold over a million copies by 1997. It received rave reviews, particularly from French critics, who were less skeptical than the American and Russian press. The main reason for the novel‘s success lies in its blend of French themes, elegant and lyrical language, and intertextual references to French canonical literature, which gave critics the impression that Makine celebrates French culture in the same way that Zadie Smith was said to praise British multiculturalism. As one reviewer puts it, Le Testament français ―has been received ecstatically in France, perhaps because Makine‘s Slavic sentiment and Proustian content recall the great days of the French novel and provide relief from the aridities of post-Robbe-Grillet post-modernism,‖ being very much ―a novel about the glories of Frenchness‖ (Emck 223). As evidence, Makine‘s subsequent novels, which no longer looked admiringly at France, dealing instead with issues less palatable to French audiences, such as incest or the vicissitudes of Soviet history, were more harshly received than Le Testament français. This novel, however, succeeded in allaying French anxieties about the loss of their cultural power, especially when originating from an exotic foreigner with an inexplicable love for all things French. 77 On can speculate that the English title, which de-emphasizes Frenchness and makes Russia its central focus, because of the interest in the Soviet Union in the USA in the context of the Cold War. Furthermore, the American market was attuned to the renown and exilic stories of writers such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Vladimir Nabokov. 204 Some French reviews thus underscore the spectacular nature of Makine‘s literary integration in France, so much the more as his national origin makes him a hard fit. A reviewer for L’Express remarks that Makine has the ―aura of an Eastern icon‖ (Pons qt. in Safran par. 2), while others notice the discrepancy between his Russian looks – his ascetic appearance reminiscent of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, his long beard and heavy accent – and his excessively polished French (Liddelow 162; Garnett 294). Another writer for Le Monde remarks that ―Personne ne pouvait être mieux fait pour la légende qu‘Andreï Makine. Russe, exilé, immigré, solitaire, pauvre, refusé par tous les éditeurs, inconnu et, soudain, Prix Goncourt‖ (Van Renterghem 12) [―No one could be better made for legend than Andreï Makine. A Russian, an exile, an immigrant, alone, poor, turned down by all the editors, unknown, and suddenly the Prix Goncourt;‖ translation mine]. The reviewer thus underscores the link between exotic foreign origins and sensational literary awards. While French critics underscore the drama of Makine‘s assimilation and marvel at his linguistic capabilities, others place him in a liminal cultural space, viewing him as ―an outsider with, however, a close and sensitive understanding of French culture‖ (Masson 62) and as ―the Russian Proust (or the French Chekhov)‖ who happily blends both cultures (Lottman 222). In turn, Russian reviewers exoticize him no less, either accusing him of selling out or claiming that he remains Russian in spite of his literary success in France. Thus, Maia Zlobina condemns the author‘s catering to a French reading public, stating that ―Makine‘s novel will undoubtedly disappoint Russian readers . . . It‘s as though Makine‘s Russia is stamped ‗Made abroad‘‖ (qt. in Safran 251). In describing the 205 author as ―a philological half-breed, a cultural hybrid, a linguistic chimera, a literary basilisk,‖ Tatyana Tolstaya is critical of his fashionable cultural in-betweenness, considering him neither Russian nor French (qt. in Taras 232). Makine thus appears to be a mythological creature with an uncertain identity. In a later review, however, she readjusts her lenses, stating that the novel is ―a book written in French, in France, and about France,‖ yet it remains a ―quintessentially Russian‖ book (―Love Story‖ par. 1), suggesting that, despite his chosen literary language, Makine cannot transcend national barriers. Le Testament français is no doubt a French novel, by virtue of its being written in French about a traditional idea of French literature, but it is in equal measure a Russian book that engages thematically with the Tsarist, Stalinist, and post-Stalinist eras. As I argue, it is meant to be read as both, and Makine‘s central thematics of bilingualism points to a certain refusal to settle for any distinct identity. Critics may have missed the point that Makine does not celebrate Frenchness at the expense of Russian identity and that his cultural strength lies in fact in his defense of literary bilingualism not only out of prejudice, but also because in his novel, the author himself relies on cultural clichés. He romanticizes and stereotypes both France and Russia, while in his essays and interviews he claims that the French language frees him from the ordinariness of his native Russian. As he asserts, he wrote in French because ―Russian was too loaded subjectively …. The French language is a tool that is not mired in routine things …. It is a literary language, free from the prosaic and the vulgar. That fact creates something like a space for freedom between me and my text‖ (qt. in Pons 206 127). This statement, however, contradicts his narrator‘s concept of literariness as transcending national boundaries in Le Testament français. Makine‘s construction of French as a literary language par excellence and his equation of France with both liberty and literature are far from original, being a cultural commonplace in Russia since the French Revolution as well as in the Soviet Union. As Tatyana Tolstaya remarks, ―Dreams of France are an old Russian tradition‖ (―Love Story‖ par. 3). Furthermore, as Pascale Casanova points out, the myth of French as possessing a high degree of literariness was widespread in aristocratic circles in Europe, where it was employed as ―a second language of conversation‖ and regarded as ―the language of ‗civilization‘‖ (World Republic of Letters 68). The French language is thus inextricably linked with a position of power in a hierarchical world republic of letters, where the oldest cultures are the ones endowed with the highest symbolic capital. In his essay ―La Question française‖ (1996), Makine explores the Russian interest in French culture within the works of Russian writers who were bicultural such as Pushkin, or influenced by French literature, such as Tolstoy and Dostoesvky, and who understood Frenchness in terms of artistic formalism, or beauty of form. As he puts it, ―la francité‖ is ―l‘art de la formulation‖ (16) [―Frenchness‖ is ―the art of formulation;‖ translation mine]. Yet he nuances the historical and cultural connection between Russia and France, underscoring that the Russian attitude towards French culture was inherently ambivalent, consisting in both admiration and contestation. More precisely, Russian writers and travelers painted a double image of France in their writings, praising literary France, while critiquing contemporary French society. 207 Makine‘s portrayal of France in Le Testament français is similarly split. He juxtaposes France of the Belle Epoque (a mythic and literary France of 1910 described by his grandmother) with multiethnic France of 1987 (the year the narrator emigrated to Paris) that is struggling with the consequences of postcolonial immigration. According to Makine, France of the past and present-day France no longer mirror each other, which is also the conclusion of Kundera‘s La Lenteur. The social violence the author witnesses during the 2005 riots, when he writes his essay collection Cette France qu’on oublie d’aimer (2006), belie the idea of a multicultural, tolerant France. For him, contemporary France is ―une France vidée de sa francité, de cette puissance formulatrice qui exprimait le monde pour pouvoir le transfigurer‖ (Cette France 90) [―a France emptied out of its French essence, of this formulating power that was able to express the world so as to transfigure it;‖ translation mine]. As Makine contends, contemporary France needs a language that could reestablish the freedom of expression and tolerant, humanistic attitudes towards ethnic minorities (Cette France 66) as well as new cultural contributions that would reflect a new way of conceptualizing French literature today in terms of multiculturalism and hybridization. As I argue, Le Testament français represents such a text, as it bridges past and present visions of France and it raises ethical questions by means of literary form. In other words, even though the novel does not explore the material histories of immigrant or diasporic groups in France, it nonetheless renders the cosmopolitan idea of welcoming otherness within the folds of the nation-state by means of a semi-autobiographical narrative that paints writers‘ literary identities as a matter of choice, rather than of ethnic, 208 geographical, or linguistic background. The narrator, a Russian writer in France, insists on the positive value of difference and struggles against the exoticization of foreign authors and the commodification of their books. The novel he writes – a mise-en-abyme of Makine‘s Testament français – is ―un contrepoison‖ and ―un refuge‖ ―dans le monde où le livre, cet organe le plus vulnérable de notre être, devient marchandise‖ (Testament 320) [―an antidote‖ and ―a refuge‖ ―in the world in which the book, that most vulnerable organ of our being, becomes merchandise‖ (Dreams 226)]. Like Kundera, Makine reacts against the ways in which the contemporary literary market commodifies literary works and defends a view of literature as not entirely subsumable to market forces. Because Makine himself is, to a certain extent, invested in the marketing of his fictional works, purely aesthetic standpoints are not tenable. As I contend, the author‘s originality in Le Testament français consists in his attempt to bridge the two conceptions of French identity – a nostalgic return to France‘s literary past and a current notion of French literature that does not exoticize foreign writers but rather allows the writings of Francophone authors to regenerate it. I argue that, in writing a text that reveals traces of its author‘s Russian, Makine not only resurrects a conservative idea of France, but also overwrites this French cultural legacy with his Russian literary heritage. Like Kundera, who underscores the decline of contemporary French letters, Makine seeks to regenerate contemporary French literature and resist the current (French and global) trends of commodification by means of his bicultural identity. 78 78 While the works of bilingual, translingual, or extraterritorial authors may be fashionable commodities in a postcolonial and global literary marketplace, Makine understands literary and linguistic hybridity in 209 Le Testament français: Between Nostalgia and Satire Makine‘s aim to reconcile a conservative and a hybrid view of French literature is carried out at the level of narrative form. Stylistically, Le Testament français is written in elegant, highly lyrical, but obsolete French. 79 This gesture is, however, apposite for the author‘s resurrection of a mythic and literary France. Yet the whole plot revolves around the struggle of the Russian-born protagonist to come to terms with his Russian-French heritage. Generically, the Bildungsroman structure reflects Aliocha‘s negotiation of his bilingual identity and links his passing through several linguistic stages to his identity formation. The narrator eventually discovers his vocation as a writer through his love of French language and literature cultivated by his French grandmother Charlotte Lemmonier. Every summer, he listens to Charlotte‘s stories about the France of the Belle Epoque, gleaned from old newspaper clips, scraps of memory as well as French canonical texts such as Gérard de Nerval, Alphonse Daudet, Marcel Proust and José Maria de Hérédia. Aliocha is enchanted by the stories of the French president Félix Faure‘s encounter with Tsar Nicholas II and his wife Alexandra in 1896, the 1910 Paris flood, and the murder of Louis d‘Orléans in 1407 as he was leaving the house of Isabeau de Bavière. These tales reveal a world of chivalrous adventures and luxurious settings that relation to the ethics of labeling immigrant writers. As an extraterritorial author, he fits within several literary traditions and his novel can be read flexibly on several levels. As in the case of the other authors I‘ve studied, this complexity renders Makine and his novel less easily commodifiable. 79 See, for example, the language employed in the following reviews to describe Makine‘s style: the author uses ―19 th -century emotionalism‖ (Emck 223) and ―It is as a voice from another time and another place that he is to be esteemed‖ (Brookner 230), while his novel has ―a strangeness, a dreaminess and a lack of urgency which seem to come from another century‖ (Brookner 229). 210 contrasts sharply with the drabness of everyday life in the Siberian steppes. Whereas as a child, Aliocha identifies with the magical world of French sounds and literary characters, as an adolescent, he rebels against his French cultural background that obscures his Russian identity, and eventually accepts his linguistic and cultural in-betweenness as allowing him a richer perspective on the world. In other words, the narrator moves from total identification with French, his ―langue ‗grand-maternelle‘‖ (Testament 272) [―grandmaternal tongue‖ (Dreams 189)], to rebellious self-distancing from his new perception of French as ―une langue étrangère, inconnue‖ (Testament 252) [―an unknown foreign language‖ (Dreams 175)], and to final acceptance of his double linguistic heritage. As an immigrant writer in Paris, he writes first and foremost in a literary language that is neither native nor foreign, but rather ―la langue d‘étonnement par excellence‖ (Testament 272) [―the supreme language of amazement‖ (Dreams 189)]. Aliocha‘s realization that literary language is endowed with the capacity of defamiliarization represents a huge step in his negotiation of bilingual identity. His embrace of literariness enables him to achieve a synthesis of his two cultural heritages and therefore to become a writer who transcends national boundaries. Le Testament français thus narrates a writer‘s search for an aesthetic form that can translate his bicultural identity. In the following close analysis of Le Testament Français, I will show that Makine employs narrative strategies that appeal to French audiences, in order to insert himself in the French literary tradition. At the same time, he paints a more critical picture of France than French reviewers care to acknowledge and, despite his love of France, presents 211 Russian identity as essential to his becoming a writer. Makine thus veers between complicity in and critique of the very tropes he uses. Significantly enough, it is Aliocha‘s encounter with French literary classics that proves to be identity-changing, attesting to the power of the French language to seduce and transform. The novel opens symbolically with the description of a photo of a few Russian women who are at their most seductive when they pronounce the words ―pe-tite- pomme‖ [―small apple;‖ my translation] – that is, ―le mot qui rendait belle‖ (Testament 17) [―the words that bestowed beauty‖ (Dreams 4)]. The French language thus creates magic and beauty even when it penetrates into the remotest corners of Soviet Russia. Makine underscores here the myth of French as the language of civilization, while at the same time subtly alluding to the hegemonic tenor of the French civilizing mission, primarily through Charlotte and her French influence. That is, despite having lived most of her adult life in Soviet and present-day Russia and undergone atrocious experiences such as famine, war, rape, and the loss of her husband, Charlotte remains unchanged, embodying the quintessence of Frenchness and spreading light into darkness – to use a metaphor often employed to describe the French imperialist project. She exerts the power to transform those around her in the village of Saranza, principally through French canonical literature, ―enlightening‖ Aliocha and his sister and transfiguring their world. As a testament to the power of French culture, Makine uses the same narrative technique in his novel Au temps du fleuve Amour (1996) [Once Upon the River Love], where the Russian protagonists discover French culture by means of films starring Jean-Paul Belmondo. The idea of French literature as the embodiment of civilization is similarly 212 echoed by the Chinese-French writer Dai Sijie in his novel Balzac et la Petite Tailleuse Chinoise (2000) [Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress], where the protagonists read French classics forbidden in Communist China. In particular, their reading of Ursule Mirouët by Balzac – pronounced ―Ba-er-za-ke‖ (71) and thus exoticized in Chinese translation – triggers their sexual awakening, making them associate French language and culture with love and romantic adventures. The fact that other Francophone writers acknowledge the transnational currency of French culture brings up the well-established myth of the French language as endowed with a high degree of literariness. Like the above-mentioned protagonists, Aliocha perceives France as ―un pays livresque par essence‖ (Testament 323-324) [―essentially a bookish country‖ (Dreams 228)] and ―le pays du Tendre‖ (Testament 122) [―the domain of Cupid‖ (Dreams 82)]. His idealized view is shaped by Charlotte‘s nostalgic stories about France of the Belle Epoque and her readings of works by Baudelaire, de Nerval, and Jules Verne, which grant Aliocha access to what he calls ―cette mystérieuse essence française‖ (Testament 50) [―this mysterious French essence‖ (Dreams 28)]. The narrator locates this quintessence primarily in the formal properties of French, ―[qui] atteignait par son essence sonore chaque recoin de l‘univers que nous étions en train d‘explorer (Testament 56) [―whose sonorous essence reached into every corner of the universe we were in the process of exploring‖ [(Dreams 32)]. Aliocha ascribes the sonority and elegance of the French language to love. As he wonders, ―cette quintessence française tant recherchée, n‘aurait-elle pas pour source – l‘amour?‖ (Testament 122) [―might not this much-sought- after French quintessence have as its source – love?‖ (Dreams 82)]. Thus, the episode of 213 president Félix Faure‘s dying in the arms of his mistress triggers two different linguistically-constituted visions: ―À ma très grande surprise, revue en russe, la scène n‘était plus bonne à dire. […] Non … ce n‘est qu‘en français qu‘il pouvait mourir dans les bras de Marguerite Steinheil‖ (Testament 113) [―To my great surprise, rerun in Russian, the scene no longer made a good story. In fact it was impossible to tell!‖ (Dreams 76)]. Aliocha‘s interpretation of the event as pointing to two different realities perpetuates the myth of France as a romantic country and of French as the language of love, which contrasts sharply with Russian prudishness and lack of sophistication. Therefore, his attempts to translate this French world into the more familiar Russian reality produce mutually conflicting visions. For example, the positive vision of tsar Nicolas II during his visit to France that Aliocha gleaned from Charlotte‘s story is contradicted by the official history taught at school, which emphasizes the tsar‘s cruelty and tyranny: ―quand je prononçais en russe ‗IIAPb‘ un tyran cruel se dressait devant moi‘ tandis que le mot ‗tsar‘ en français s‘emplissait de lumières, de bruits, de vent, d‘éclats de lustres, de reflets d‘épaules feminines nues, de parfums mélangés …‖ (Testament 66) [―when I pronounced the Russian word ‗IIAPb‘ a cruel tyrant rose up before me; while the word ‗tsar‘ in French was redolent of lights, of sounds, of wind, of glittering chandeliers, of the radiance of women‘s bare shoulders, of mingled perfumes …‖ (Dreams 39)]. The beauty and the sonority of French downplay the violence of historical events. Furthermore, besides being the epitome of cultural refinement and erotic savoir- faire, the French language also connotes haute cuisine, contrasting sharply with the poor economic conditions under Soviet rule. Aliocha thus recounts an episode when, unable 214 to stand in line for food, the mere thought of the menus at the French court from one of Charlotte‘s stories – ―Bartavelles et ortolans‖ (Testament 68) [―Bartavels and ortolans‖ (Dreams 40)] – miraculously help him resist deprivations in Soviet Russia. In comparing France as the country of refinement and love to Russia as dark and exotic, Makine produces a moral duality, a picture that is not devoid of essentialism. One wonders if the novel‘s literary references, which are meant to represent Charlotte‘s personal memories, do not equally point to a very selective cultural imaginary that Makine evokes. The author barely sketches out the political and historical events in France and Russia at the period, such as the Dreyfus Affair, the separation between the Church and the State, colonialism and its aftermath. Instead, he focuses on those historical events that emphasize the beautiful properties of the French language and set it in Manichean opposition to Russian culture, history, and politics. Makine locates the tensions in the main protagonist‘s struggle to define his bicultural identity. Aliocha‘s encounter with French culture instills in him a strong awareness of the border dividing Eurasia – that is, between the East as a barbaric space and the West as the alleged cradle of civilization. Whereas the French are presented as ―un peuple d‘une fabuleuse multiplicité de sentiments, d‘attitudes, de regards, de façons de parler, de créer, d‘aimer‖ (Testament 121-122) [―a people with a fabulous multiplicity of sentiments, attitudes, and viewpoints, as well as manners of speaking, creating, and loving‖ (Dreams 81)], Russia is depicted as a country where the most violent historical atrocities take place. At the same time, it is captured in clichés for Western readers, as some critics have pointed out (Wachtel 130). For instance, the country is seen as endless space, or ―l‘infini russe‖ 215 (Testament 23) [―the endlessness of Russia‖ (Dreams 8)], while Saranza is populated by ―les babouchkas les plus folkloriques, directement sorties des contes‖ (Testament 40) [―the most picturesque of the babushkas, straight out of fairy tales‖ (Dreams 19)]. By presenting an essentialized version of Russia that is neither familiar nor foreign, Makine appears to domesticate Russian culture for a French audience already accustomed to stereotypes such as the immensity of the steppes and the Slavic soul. Equally, by romanticizing France and praising the beauty of French, Makine appeals emotionally to French readers anxious about the loss of their country‘s cultural prestige. Yet, as I contend, in openly employing Russian clichés for his French readership, Makine deconstructs them at the same time, compelling his audience to reconsider the stereotypical view through which we view the Other. He also presents the boundary between the two cultures as more porous, due to Russia‘s ambivalent positioning vis-à- vis Europe. The author therefore contradicts certain views, such as Milan Kundera‘s, that Russia is not European culturally speaking. Makine thus challenges to an extent the notion of cultural borderlands, depicting cultural identities and allegiances as fluid. Aliocha is not only an admirer of French literature, but a critic as well. His negotiation of a bilingual identity is akin to a love and hate relationship with the French language. If at first, French is ―une greffe fabuleuse‖ (Testament 56) [―a magical graft‖ (Dreams 32)], his French heritage becomes a burden in school, isolating him from his peers. Aliocha rebels against the useless refinement of Charlotte‘s France, which condemns him to live ―dans un pénible entre-deux-mondes‖ (Testament 249) [―painfully between two worlds‖ (Dreams 173)], and embraces his Russianness. The moment when 216 this linguistic in-betweenness ceases to be a burden is when he discovers that, by distancing himself from French, he can master the language. By misspelling a French word, Aliocha becomes aware that French is a foreign language and that its usefulness as a literary tool lies in his ability to defamiliarize it for artistic effects: ―Enfant, je me confondais avec la matière sonore de la langue de Charlotte. … À présent le français devenait un outil dont, en parlant, je mesurais la portée‖ (Testament 271) [―As a child I had absorbed all the sounds of Charlotte‘s language. … Now French became a tool whose capacity I measured as I was speaking‖ (Dreams 188-189)]. Aliocha‘s sentiments veer between admiration and hatred for both Russia and France, depending on his maturity and physical location. In France, for example, he appreciates Russian culture again and realizes that contemporary French culture is very different from the lost Atlantis he so admired in Russia. Despite Makine‘s juxtaposition of stereotypical images of the two countries, his point is that we should not regard them as distinct entities, but as mutually engaging geopolitical entities as well as cultural constructs. More important than Makine‘s feeding his French readerships a certain dose of Russian clichés is the outcome of the confrontation of French and Russian cultures – that is, Aliocha‘s bicultural identity. Aliocha‘s – and, since this is a semi-autobiographical novel, Makine‘s – identity as a writer is shaped by his chosen affiliations. He takes on a French identity by choosing to speak and write in French, but he is not an assimilated French writer, since his Russianness helps him maintain a distinctive identity. The novel, I suggest, celebrates neither his choice of French, nor his Russian heritage, but rather, his bilingualism. If one 217 stresses the narrator‘s Frenchness, one is then tempted to read his choice (of French as the language of his literary expression) as the triumph of a refined, cosmopolitan language over Russian, the provincial language of his childhood. From this viewpoint, the novel is a traditional immigrant narrative of assimilation. In contrast to such a celebratory reading, I contend that one should stress the narrator‘s struggle with his dual appurtenance, his realization that his art arises out of the tension between his two languages, and his subsequent refusal to resolve this tension. As Aliocha puts it, ―Peut- être ce même jour où, prononçant ‗précepteur‘ au lieu de ‗percepteur,‘ je pénétrais ainsi dans un silencieux entre-deux-langues…‖ (Testament 272; my emphasis) [―Perhaps it was on that same day, when I said précepteur (tutor) instead of percepteur (tax collector) [that I] entered a silent zone between two languages‖ (Dreams 189)]. The moment the narrator grasps the creative potential of the French language, French becomes a foreign language whose poetic qualities he can capitalize on. The narrator‘s poetics is to create a new, defamiliarized language, a cultural synthesis of sorts, which would reflect the linguistic cross-fertilization – or grafting – he experienced. From a Formalist viewpoint, art is craft, rather than the product of genius, requiring a regeneration of ordinary language. At the same time, by introducing Russian Formalists‘ concept of ostranenie and exploring the boundary between literary and ordinary language, Makine shifts the focus from national literary categories to the originality of a work, which consists in its ability to transcend ordinary language. In other words, the author shifts from a notion of ethnic or national literary identity to the identity of a writer tout court. 218 Yet, at the same time, Aliocha does not fully transcend his bicultural identities. In the final pages of the novel, Makine asserts the equal importance of Aliocha‘s Russianness to his artistic career and debunks the Romantic association of language with Volksgeist, as the narrator‘s Frenchness proves to be a construct, when a posthumous letter from Charlotte reveals to Aliocha that he had been adopted, and therefore, has no biological connection to France. Through this sensationalist and sentimental plot twist, Le Testament français is generically closer to the novel rather than the autobiography, thus embracing generic hybridity even at the level of form. Interestingly enough, Charlotte‘s letter is written in Russian, yet ironically, the sentence that reveals Aliocha‘s biological Russianness is in French, which underscores the constructedness of cultural identities. While Charlotte‘s testament represents a cultural and linguistic legacy rather than a proper will, Aliocha is French because he chooses this particular identity. In his bilingual choices, Aliocha/Makine is similar to another translingual writer, Greek-born Vassilis Alexakis, who shares the same concerns in his autobiographical text Paris- Athènes (1989). Even though he writes predominantly in French, Alexakis moves not only between France and Greece, but switches constantly between the two languages in his texts. In refusing to make a clear choice between French and Greek, he challenges linguistic hierarchies and the idea of a singular or unitary national culture. Le Testament français further problematizes the belonging of extraterritorial novelists to the French tradition in an episode that echoes Makine‘s own experience of writing for a capricious French market and his disenchantment with French critics. One of the ironies of exilic bilingualism is most compellingly exemplified by Aliosha‘s 219 predicament of being both at home in French and in exile in France. In Paris, Aliosha‘s French-language novels are rejected by publishers because he is a non-native speaker, until they are cunningly presented as French translations from the original Russian. Even then, because he writes in French about Russia, Aliocha‘s books are placed in bookstores between those of Lermontov and Nabokov, under the fashionable rubric of ―la littérature de l‘Europe de l‘Est‖ (Testament 313) [―Eastern-European literature‖ (Dreams 220)]. In other words, he is taken as culturally authoritative and authentic and his books are successful in the French literary marketplace only when he roots his identity in Russian culture. By including this self-reflexive reference to the working of the French publishing industry, Makine, I contend, interrogates the border between French and Francophone Eastern-European literature. As a French-language novel about (at least partially) Russia, Le Testament français deconstructs literary boundaries. It belongs to both French and Russian traditions through its intertextual references, formal aesthetics, and themes. Formally, the novel draws on both French and Russian canonical literature. Aliocha reads not only children‘s books by Alphonse Daudet, Charles Perrault and Hector Mallot, which evoke a distant literary world, but also school classics such as José Maria de Heredia‘s ―Les Conquérants,‖ which underscores the formal perfection of the French language, whose disappearance the narrator will later deplore. Nerval‘s ―Fantaisie‖ equally provokes Aliocha‘s nostalgia for the bygone France of Louis XIII, while Baudelaire‘s ―Parfum exotique,‖ whose two different Russian translations Charlotte compares, provides an opportunity for Aliocha to become aware of 220 bilingualism as an artistic practice. In its exploration of the past, memory and nostalgia, the novel is indebted to Marcel Proust, while the epic background of war and revolution in Russia recalls Boris Pasternak‘s Doctor Zhivago. Through this reference, the novel is also grounded in the modern Russian tradition. Furthermore, Makine draws on Lev Tolstoy, Ivan Bunin, as well as on Vladimir Nabokov‘s Speak, Memory (1951) for the pseudo-autobiographical genre (Wachtel 131). Le Testament français can thus be read as part of both the French and the Russian traditions. Yet, due to Makine‘s sycophantic and sentimental tone, it resembles neither the style of contemporary French novels, which may tend towards formal experimentation, nor that of contemporary Russian novels, which do not usually exoticize Russian culture. I thus suggest that the novel falls between literary categories, fitting perfectly into neither one. Or, in other words, it belongs to both. Contrary to critical views that see the novel as a celebration of Frenchness, the book‘s Russianness stands out as well. It begins and ends with a Russian picture and letter, attesting to the force of Russia in Aliocha‘s/Makine‘s cultural imaginary. Makine first links and later decouples language and mother tongue in the initial photo of his Russian mother pronouncing the magical words ―pe-tite-pomme‖ (Testament 17). By highlighting the artificial link between language and national identity, Makine de-naturalizes the mother tongue. He thus echoes the conception of Vassilis Alexakis who asserts that ―la langue maternelle n‘est après tout que la première des langues étrangères qu‘on apprend‖ (Paris-Athènes 71) [―the mother tongue is, after all, but the first of the foreign languages one learns;‖ translation mine]. Both writers reject the notion of attachment to ―one‘s‖ native culture, dismissing the idea 221 of cultural ―ownness.‖ Similarly, Kundera published his third French-language novel L’Ignorance first in Spanish translation and only later in French. This marketing device is an invitation to read his ―French‖ text as transnational, an entirely appropriate gesture for a novel that thematizes the way exilic protagonists experience their mother tongue as foreign upon their return to the Czech Republic. In Makine‘s case, rather than interpreting the novel in terms of the author‘s glorification of French culture or his insistence on the higher literariness of French relative to Russian, we need to acknowledge the constructedness of linguistic and cultural categories. Thematically, the novel also unsettles the nebulous border between East and West, by affirming already existing historical connections between French and Russian cultures. Because Makine contributes to debates on the cultural boundaries of Russia – i.e., whether Russia is East or West – I also view him as a transnational writer of border texts, just like Kundera in his global novel L’Identité. Yet, as I argue, images of globality within the novel are tinged with critical connotations, belying celebratory views of universalist Frenchness. By using the image of France as Atlantis, or as the ―ideal nation‖ (Porra 76), whose distinctive traits are beautiful language and refined civilization, Makine seemingly allays national anxieties about the country‘s lost cultural power on the international scene. To illustrate, by the sheer power of the French language, Charlotte evokes an imaginary ―France-Atlantide‖ (Testament 30) [―France-Atlantis‖ (Dreams 13)], which transposes Aliocha into a world of fantasy and protects him against the harsh realities of his Russian life. As the narrator puts it, ―La France de notre grand-mère, telle une Atlantide brumeuse, sortait des flots‖ (Testament 29) [―The France of our 222 grandmother, like a misty Atlantis, was emerging from the waves‖ (Dreams 12)]. However, besides pointing to an ideal republic of letters, the myth of Atlantis also has imperialist connotations. Reactivated in France after World War I in connection with the French colonial enterprise, the myth of Atlantis connotes a colonial empire like France, which spreads light, order, civilization and progress to the countries it dominates. The myth is thus linked to utopian atemporality, serving as a tool to legitimize French expansionism (Porra 78). As an allegory of France, Charlotte, who spreads the French language and culture in Russia, is also connected to an atemporal world, or to ―cet univers englouti par le temps‖ (Testament 31) [―this universe engulfed by time‖ (Dreams 14)]. Charlotte‘s France is a cultural construct, a legacy she believes needs to be preserved and passed on. Significantly enough, Makine employs the botanical metaphor of French as a graft, which suggests the narrator‘s hybrid identity. Thus, Charlotte‘s French is ―une greffe fabuleuse dans nos coeurs, couverte déjà de feuilles et de fleurs, portant en elle le fruit de toute une civilization‖ (Testament 56) [―a magical graft implanted in our hearts, already bringing forth leaves and flowers, bearing within it the fruit of a whole civilization‖ (Dreams 32)]. If Charlotte‘s planting of French civilization in a hostile Russian land represents the dream of an expansionist Francophonie, then, under the nostalgic evocation of bygone cultural era, lies Makine‘s critique of French imperialism. As an exile in France, Aliocha discovers not Atlantis, the lost paradise sketched by Charlotte‘s stories, but a contemporary society that struggles with its multicultural make-up and where the narrator himself lives as a marginal, sleeping in a cemetery crypt 223 while writing his first books. Like Kundera, Makine paints two Frances: a noble, mythic France and a postcolonial, xenophobic France. In drawing attention to the lingering exoticism within the French literary establishment, Makine suggests that one cannot simply return to a golden age of a humanistic French culture. Rather, that ongoing exoticism needs to be acknowledged and those cosmopolitan ideals need to be applied to the current context of multicultural, hybrid, postcolonial France. The role of Francophone authors like Makine and Kundera is precisely to act as mediators between these two conceptions of Frenchness. In this chapter, I argued that Milan Kundera and Andreï Makine are representative of a ―Central European francophonie‖ – an etymological, rather than a political notion, according to which French becomes the property of anyone who uses it. Through their multiple positionings as French, Czech, Russian, and European novelists as well as French/Francophone, or world writers in French, they defy national literary classifications. They are écrivains-monde en français not only because they mine the gap between local and global identities, or because they write in the language of cosmopolitanism, but also because they adopt an anti-taxonomical – hence, I argue, ethical – stance in their fictional works. They do not signal the death of francophonie, as the manifesto for a world literature in French argued, but propose instead the erasure of national hegemonic categorizations for the sake of more inclusive conceptions. In this way, I suggest, they enable an understanding of the literary identities of extraterritorial authors as simultaneously global and culturally distinctive. 224 Chapter 4 De-ethnicizing Migrant Literature in Québec: Régine Robin and Dany Laferrière’s Fictions Literature is often a debate with one‘s multiple identities. That is why the question of literary nationality cannot be answered. There are no literary passports or visas. […] Literature is a specific place for the play of imagination, experimentation, and questioning of one‘s own identity/ies. -- Régine Robin, Afterword to The Wanderer Je suis un Haïtien, je suis un écrivain, mais je ne suis pas un écrivain haïtien pour autant. [I am Haitian, I am a writer, but I‘m not a Haitian writer for that matter.] -- Dany Laferrière, J’écris comme je vis This case study of immigrant literature in Québec illustrates a different use of the meaning of francophonie as redefined by the signers of the 2007 manifesto Pour une littérature-monde en français, which I have discussed in the previous chapter. Québec represents a special case both in Francophone studies and in my corpus of immigrant texts. As a former French as well as British colony, it can be called a postcolonial space, yet the fictional texts I am interested in, which were written since the 1980s, are not preoccupied with Québec‘s peripheral status vis-à-vis France. Rather, they focus on the multiethnic composition of Montréal, an international and cosmopolitan city. Unlike other former colonized spaces, Québec is an independent, non-peripheral space also because it represents a major publishing center in North America. In contrast to Central and Eastern-European writers like Milan Kundera and Andreï Makine, immigrant writers 225 in Québec do not depend on Paris for their literary consecration. Perhaps because of the sense that Québec is culturally separate from France, and that its postcoloniality is linked to the New World, Québécois literature does not usually appear in traditional studies of Francophone literature. Yet in this chapter, I analyze immigrant fictional works written in Québec in relation to the category of ―world literature in French‖ proposed by the manifesto because, as French-language diasporic texts, they blur the boundaries between Québécois literature, Francophone literature, and the literature of immigrant writers‘ native countries. Furthermore, the two authors this chapter focuses on, Régine Robin and Dany Laferrière, struggle against literary taxonomies based on nationality, race and, language. Whereas Kundera and Makine glorified the French language and culture in their works and underscored the idea that French is still a global language, despite the ascendancy of English, Robin and Laferrière treat it more matter-of-factly, as one of the languages of Canada. They also draw admiringly on American culture and insert English and other languages in their works, producing multilingual texts that refuse to be neatly classified as French or Francophone writing. For these reasons, I suggest that Régine Robin and Dany Laferrière represent a North American model of francophonie, which stresses Canadian bilingualism and daily code-switching in Québec and which de-emphasizes cultural and historical connections to France. In that sense, because the English language and North American culture more generally play such an important part in these fictional texts, it seems apposite to end my dissertation with a case study which conjoins both Anglophone and Francophone literary concerns. In this literary study of migration, the case study of Québec is significant for 226 another reason, namely that in Québec in the 1980s, there emerged a distinct literary category called écriture migrante [migrant writing], which incorporated foreign writers who immigrated, were exiled, or sought asylum in Québec, and also engaged with Québécois debates on nation, language, identity, and literary labels. Their texts present Québec as a multicultural and multilingual society, portraying characters that display unstable identities and voice the difficulty of living between two worlds. 80 In what follows, I will discuss the ways in which écriture migrante both changes the culturescape of Québec starting with the 1980s, making Québécois literature more cosmopolitan, and gets commodified as ethnic minority literature, and thus treated as an intra-national genre or corpus. Focusing on Robin‘s and Laferrière‘s fictional texts, I argue that the two authors attempt to de-ethnicize migrant writing by contesting literary taxonomies and pressing for a more universal conception of contemporary immigrant writers and their works. For the past three decades, écriture migrante has acquired a prominent place in literary circles. Written by exiled, immigrant, and diasporic writers from different parts of the world, and addressing themes relevant to Québec society as well as to authors‘ native countries, migrant writing is by definition transnational in nature and scope. Yet it has been incorporated into the category of Québec literary studies (Harel 36, Berrouët- Oriol and Fournier 15). Given Québec‘s status as a French-speaking province in Canada, 80 See also Christine Khordoc, ―Les Deux ‗Autres‘: la figure de l‘autochtone dans l‘écriture migrante‖ (Etudes Canadiennes. Canadian Studies. 56, June 2004; p. 143), Lucie Lequin: ―Mona Latif Ghattas: Une mélopée orientale dans un espace blanc.‖ (Québec Studies 19, Fall 1994 – Winter 1995), Laurence Joffrin, ―La litterature d‘immigration n‘existe pas‖ and David Bevan. Literature and Exile (Amsterdam-Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1990). 227 this represents a regional or a national literary corpus. Because immigrant writers compel a reconsideration of discourses on Québécois multiculturalism and hospitality, they could be viewed as part of Québécois literature, whose development and evolution they have shaped. At the same time, their transnational journeys and experiences exceed the nationalist political and cultural concerns of Québec. In this sense, as immigrant and diasporic writers, they interrogate the paradigm of Québécois literature. The location of immigrant writers within the Québécois literary establishment is, from the outset, unsettled by the very ambiguity of what constitutes Québécois identity. Is Québec a nation within a nation-state, as some critics argue (Dupont 328)? A Canadian province (Harel 21)? A Francophone enclave in North America, like Acadia and Louisiana? Therefore, the central questions this chapter raises focus on the relationship between writers‘ location and their literary identities. Should immigrant writers be viewed as minority, regional, or national authors? Because their works are produced in French and published in Québec, could they also be considered ―minor‖ writers ―in a minoritized space‖ (Harel 23)? Or ―world writers in French,‖ as the manifesto for a world literature in French describes Francophone writing that is detached from the center? Robin‘s and Laferrière‘s texts do not offer clear answers to these questions, advocating the blurring of these categories. If it is true that Québécois literature is primarily defined by its preoccupation with language, as Lise Gauvin contends (67), then by writing in French, albeit in a Parisian French and an American English-inflected French, the authors I discuss both fit and transcend the category of Québécois literature. 228 How do they, as immigrant authors immediately slotted into the category of migrant writing, belong to Québécois literature? The category écriture migrante in Québec has been widely debated since the 1980s in path-breaking critical studies such as Pierre Nepveu‘s L’Écologie du réel (1988), Moisan and Hildebrand‘s Ces Etrangers du Dedans: Une Histoire de l’Ecriture Migrante au Québec (2001), and Simon Harel‘s Les Passages obligés de l’écriture migrante (2005), while Régine Robin‘s La Québécoite (1983) set the trend for migrant fiction. The principal question these studies ask is whether écriture migrante is part of Québécois literature or if constitutes a separate, ethnic corpus. Critics such as Pierre Nepveu had defined Québécois literature in relation to authors‘ place of origin (here native Quebeckers, a.k.a. ―de souche‖ or ―pure laine‖ [―old-stock‖] fit into the category), their book‘s themes relevant to Québec (such as exile, space, ethnic diversity and cultural alienation), and recent migrations from Latin America, the Caribbean, South Asia and Eastern Europe. Various taxonomies attempted to capture the distinctiveness of Québécois literature in the 1960s and 1970s: ―French Canadian literature,‖ ―Québécois literature‖ and ―the literature of cultural communities,‖ before being superseded by the category écriture migrante in the 1980s (L’Écologie du réel 201). Nepveu argues that there is no abrupt break between the last two categories, since foundational motifs such as exile, identity, lack, emptiness, and alienation, which made a corpus of diverse Québécois texts fairly coherent, were taken up by écriture migrante. He thus shows that, apart from signaling a terminological shift, the ostensible demise of Québécois literature reflects more clearly the changes undergone by Québécois society since the Quiet Revolution – that is, the replacement of the alleged cultural 229 homogeneity of Québec by cultural heterogeneity as a result of large-scale immigration in the 1980s. Other critics, such as Louise Gauthier, Lucie Lequin and Mary Jean Green, have consistently depicted the Québec of the 1980s and 1990s as a cosmopolitan society open to difference and continuously enriched by immigrants‘ cultures. Green contrasts the post-1980 novels, which she characterizes as ―a haven for pluralism, multiculturalism, and diversity in all its forms‖ to the Québec novels of the 1960s and 1970s, which aimed to forge a monolithic sense of Québécois national identity (928). In this earlier stage, Québécois literature was the mirror of the nation (Moisan and Hildebrand 41) and attempted to shore up Québécois identity. This nationalistic literature of the 1960s and 1970s addressed themes relevant to Québec geographically, linguistically, and culturally, and it sought to contribute to the construction of foundational myths of Québec. Yet this dichotomy between the image of Québec as a mono-cultural society, whose literature was founded by the Québécois ―de souche,‖ and that of a multicultural society shaped by immigrants‘ cultures are false, since the alleged ―native‖ Quebeckers were descendants of British and French settlers from the seventeenth century, therefore foreigners to Canada. 81 The question of primacy also elides the history and cultural productions of the First Nations, which are relegated to ethnic studies. Furthermore, in Les Passages obligés de l’écriture migrante (2005), Simon Harel takes up previous critics‘ debates about écriture migrante. He frames it as a new category that in many ways departs from 81 Some immigrant writers have addressed questions of historical primacy and the silencing of First Nations‘ histories in Canada – see Mona Latif-Ghattas‘s Le Double Conte de l’Exil. 230 previous classifications and previous literary corpora in the 1960s and 1970s, arguing that écriture migrante represents a new identity paradigm, taking the shape of a marginal discourse within a minority space (21). Both Robin and Laferrière renewed the literature written in Québec since the 1980s. Robin broke new ground with her experimental postmodern techniques in La Québécoite, and her rise to fame coincided with the rise of postmodernism in the 1980s. In turn, Laferrière exposed racial and sexual stereotypes still at work in Québécois culture in his debut novel Comment faire l’amour avec un Nègre sans se fatiguer. However, the authors did not only seek literary consecration through generic and thematic innovative literary strategies aside. They were also highly critical of the Québécois literary establishment – an aspect the above-mentioned studies neglect to point out. As some critics noted, it was only beginning with the 1980s that immigrants‘s hybridity was being valued in Québec; before then, they were assimilated (Berouët–Oriol and Fournier 17). Moreover, the Canadian Multiculturalism Act was passed in 1971 and entrenched in the Constitution only in 1982, a year before the publication of Robin‘s novel (Dupont 309). What these authors react against, besides being slotted in fixed categories, is also an environment hostile to foreigners, at least in the beginning of their careers. In what follows, through an analysis of works by Régine Robin and Dany Laferrière, two migrant writers who construct their literary subjectivities as transnational, I will show how these authors employ narrative strategies that de-ethnicize or de- nationalize the critical readings of their texts. Like the other migrant and diasporic writers examined in the previous chapters, Robin and Laferrière blend literary form, 231 content, and authorial biographies to construct subjectivities that are always already in excess of narrow literary and identity categories. In this way, they compel ethical readings that would need to underscore the singularity of their works, without ascribing them to particular ethnic categories or literary movements. While they both immigrated to Québec at a time when separatist concerns were much more in vogue than today, they do not deal primarily with the political, cultural, and linguistic situation of Québec, espousing cosmopolitan rather than nationalist concerns. Their fictional texts address the cultural and ethnic landscape of Montréal, rather than Québec, situating the city alongside other global metropoles. Their fiction triangulates places such as Montréal, Paris, and Los Angeles (Robin), or Montréal, Miami, and Port-au-Prince (Laferrière). Because they write predominantly urban fiction, which is concerned with migrant subjects‘ grounding themselves in place and transcending space, I use the concepts of flânerie and dérive (drift) to characterize the ways in which Robin and Laferrière criss-cross the globe and avoid any fixation in a particular place, culture, language, or identity label. These two tropes both characterize the authors‘ de-centered subjectivity and serve as structuring devices in their fragmentary texts. The particularity of Québec in the context of my research on contemporary migrant literature consists in the fact that a traditionally global language holds a minor(ity) status in relation to both metropolitan French and North American English. What is called ―Québécois French‖ is thus ―other‖ in relation to metropolitan French. Régine Robin is French by birth and Dany Laferrière rejects the term Francophone for its 232 colonial connotations. Yet, given that French-language literature written outside of France is captured by the label ―Francophone,‖ could the authors‘ works be categorized as such? Or, in light of the manifesto Pour une littérature-monde en français discussed in the previous chapter, could Robin and Laferrière be viewed as ―world writers in French‖? As immigrant authors who address diasporic and transnational themes, they seem to fit the latter category; however, they also insert traces of Yiddish, Creole, and English in their texts, shifting away from debates on the relation between French colonialism and language – a staple theme in the context of Francophone postcolonial writers as well as the manifesto for a world literature in French. Especially in Laferrière‘s case, it is the presence of American, rather than French culture that shapes and defines his writing. In turn, Robin inserts English, Yiddish, and Spanish into her fiction, destabilizing her image as a French writer and, like Laferrière, expresses fascination for American culture. Due to their multilingualism, they broaden scope of the category ―littérature-monde en français,‖ which includes writers who employ solely French. In contrast to the hegemony of the French language and culture still implied in the world literature manifesto, Robin and Laferrière offer a Québec-inflected version of these concerns. Their works illustrate the impact of the English language and North American culture on Québécois fiction and of the bilingualism, biculturalism, and ordinary code-switching in present-day Québec. 233 Régine Robin, an “Allophone Writer from France” In this section, I will examine Régine Robin‘s groundbreaking novel La Québécoite (1983), which was instrumental in establishing the category écriture migrante [―migrant writing‖] in Québec in the early 1980s and in regenerating the notion of Québécois literature. Even though the novel‘s postmodern style, which was perceived as radical in its time and place, is nothing new today, and even though the debates on Québécois identity have taken a different turn in the twenty-first century, Robin‘s book is still relevant to the current debates on writers‘ literary identities and on the changing notion of francophonie. Written with the aim of defining Robin‘s own relationship to her country of residence, and of finding her voice as a French author within Québec‘s literary institutions, La Québécoite is primarily concerned with problematizing immigrant authors‘ literary identities. It is this textual aspect that I am most interested in exploring in my close reading of the novel. I argue that, as in the case of the other immigrant texts I have examined, the formal properties of the novel are inextricably linked to the impossibility and refusal of migrant authors and texts of being neatly categorized. As a multilingual, multicultural and hybrid text, La Québécoite resists literary and generic classification and, to a certain extent, easy translation. I argue that it is the novel‘s anti- taxonomical aesthetics that expresses Robin‘s political and ethical imperatives, which are linked to the preservation of many voices and plural stories. One of the reasons why it is difficult to capture Régine Robin‘s literary identity is that she is an author who speaks numerous languages and crosses not only national literary but disciplinary boundaries as well. In addition to being a fiction writer, Robin is 234 a historian and Professor of Sociology at l‘Université de Québec à Montréal. She has written extensively on the theory and practice of literature in the sociological field as well as on questions of identity, language, and memory in works such as Le Cheval blanc de Lénine (1979), Le Deuil de l’origine: une langue en trop, la langue en moins (1993), Le Roman mémoriel: de l’histoire à l’écriture du hors-lieu (1989) and Kafka (1989). Robin‘s L’Immense fatigue des pierres (1996) and Berlin chantiers (2001) have been awarded the Grand Prix du Livre de Montréal. In her latest books, Cybermigrances: Traversées fugitives (2004) and Mégapolis: Les derniers pas du flâneur (2009), she explores the concept of global cities. In 1994, Robin was made a Chevalier of the Ordre des Palmes Académiques. Robin may be one of the most acclaimed writers in Québec today, but in 1976, when she emigrated from Paris to Montréal, she felt out of place in the Québécois society, despite the common language. The author captures what she perceived as the cultural strangeness of Québec in the 1980s in her pseudo-autobiography La Québécoite, which, as the author herself states in the Afterword to her novel‘s English edition, was an attempt to anchor herself as a writer in Québec (The Wanderer 173). Robin‘s and/or her narrator‘s literary experiment fails – at least within the plot of the novel – not only because the Québec society of the 1980s is still a hostile environment to foreigners, but also because of the complex identity of the author-narrator. Robin was born in France of Polish-Jewish parents, who had emigrated to France a few years before the war. Her native language is Yiddish, therefore she considers herself ―an allophone from France‖ (The Wanderer 181) – an expression that, in the linguistic context of Québec, denotes a 235 person whose native tongue is neither French nor English. Moreover, even though she writes only in French, her Parisian accent underscores her foreignness in Québec. As an immigrant writer, Robin was labeled as ―néo-Québécois‖ (Moisan and Hildebrand 320), a term that is used to differentiate immigrant authors from old-stock Quebeckers, or Québécois de souche. She finds this a problematic taxonomy because it lumps together immigrant authors of diverse ethnic origins, such as Sergio Kokis, Marco Micone, Mona Latif-Ghattas, Wajdi Mouawad, and Ying Chen, who were born in Brazil, Italy, Egypt, Lebanon, and China (The Wanderer 175). What these authors have in common traits is the fact that they are immigrants who write in French. This gesture of marking off immigrant authors as different is a way of signaling their non-belonging to the Québécois literary establishment. Indeed, the conclusion and one of the leitmotifs of La Québécoite is that ―Je ne suis pas d‘ici. On ne devient pas québécois‖ (54) [―I am not from here. One doesn‘t become Québécois‖ (39) 82 ]. Robin refuses to completely integrate as a writer in Québec, embracing instead a position that she describes as ―le temps de l‘ailleurs, de l‘entre-trois langues, de l‘entre-deux alphabets, de l‘entre deux mers, de l‘entre-deux mondes, l‘entre-deux logiques, l‘entre-deux nostalgies‖ (69) [―the time of elsewhere, between-three-languages, between-two-alphabets, between-two- oceans, between-two-worlds, between-two-logics, between-two-longings‖ (52)]. This identification with exile and being out-of-place is the positionality Robin‘s novel 82 This and the subsequent translations refer to the nove1‘s first English edition The Wanderer (trans. Phyllis Aronoff). Montréal: Alter Ego Editions, 1997. 236 embraces, because it escapes fixed and stable subject positions, enabling the author to move flexibly between languages, cultures, and spaces. I argue that the position the novel speaks from – ―neither fully within nor fully outside‖ (Robin, ―Afterword‖ 182) – fulfils two functions, which they are performed at the level of literary style. On the one hand, La Québécoite represents Robin‘s attempt to engage with the central concerns of Québécois society in the 1980s and to anchor herself within the Québécois literary establishment, and can be read as a Québécois or a Montréal novel. On the other, the text‘s mixture of languages and transnational literary references as well as its multilingual ideal readers make it a global novel that refuses to be read within a single national literary tradition. An ethical practice of reading would require an awareness of the novel‘s refusal of clear cultural locations, despite its cultural markers, and an acknowledgment of the politics of the novel – that is, the author‘s staunch belief that literature has no literary passports, as the first epigraph shows. On the first point, the novel‘s postmodern style attracted highly favorable reviews in the 1980s, when postmodernism was very much in vogue in Québec. Several critics noted that Robin‘s critical intervention was that she introduced postmodernism in a North American Francophone context (Klaus 93, Simon 98). However, in the 1990s, when discourses on multiculturalism and plurality predominated in a multiethnic Québec, critics accused Robin of having portrayed Montréal in a negative way, an image that no longer did justice to the contemporary realities of a Québécois pluralist society. All in all, the fact that the book created ―a whole little ‗psychodrama‘‖ (Robin, ―Afterword‖ 174), even ten years after its publication, attests to the success of the novel, which was, to 237 a large extent, due to its innovative form. One may, of course, take issue with the capacity of postmodern narratives to effect radical changes given that, in recent years, they have also been co-opted by a literary market that celebrates hybrid, self-reflexive fiction. However, I contend that the text also employs a postmodern, cosmopolitan, hybrid style in order to raise the issue of the literary nationality of authors and their texts. In other words, in playing postmodern games with its audiences, La Québécoite shows the narrowness of the traditional literary lenses through which (immigrant) fiction is being read. In her ―Afterword‖ to The Wanderer, Robin ponders the question of immigrant writers‘ literary affiliations. She asks: To what nationality should a writer pay literary allegiance? Is one a French writer? A Québécois writer? A French–speaking Canadian writer? A Jewish writer? A French–Jewish writer? A Québécois–Jewish writer? An allophone Jewish writer of French origin? A Montréal writer? (178) Robin captures the conundrums of contemporary immigrant writers whose multiple literary affiliations defy readers and critics‘ taxonomical impulses, as manifested in labels such as ―national,‖ ―ethnic,‖ ―migrant,‖ or ―néo-Québécois.‖ Thus, on the second point, Robin‘s stance is political because, in stating that literature has ―no literary passports or visas,‖ but rather it is ―a specific place for the play of imagination, experimentation, and questioning of one‘s own identity/ies,‖ she polemically contends with those who uphold the notion of the literary nationalism of fictional texts. In my analysis of La Québécoite, I will focus on the novel‘s addressing the ethics and politics of reading – a relevant aspect not only for what it tells of Robin‘s conception of literature in general, but also in its relation to the context of Québec and its concern for defining its cultural identity within English-speaking Canada and a specifically Québécois or ―national‖ literary canon. 238 La Québécoite and Migrant Writing in Québec As a pseudo-biography, La Québécoite offers a glimpse into Robin‘s own trajectory as a migrant writer from France to Québec, while it also follows the story of a female migrant narrator of French-Jewish origins in Montréal. As a meta-migrant narrative, La Québécoite blurs the line between the figures or the author and the narrator, just like Milan Kundera‘s novel La Lenteur. In this way, it draws attention to its own constructedness as a text concerned with exploring the boundaries between fiction and reality as well as between different histories and cultural memories. Within her fictional text, Robin fashions her literary identity as plural, multi-layered, because traversed by different histories, memories, and languages. The author thus points to a global context in which she invites readers to situate herself and her novel. Furthermore, despite reflecting the idiosyncratic experience of an immigrant writer in Québec in the 1980s, which Robin describes as a nationalistic and xenophobic environment, the novel purports to capture something of the universality of displacement and marginalization. More specifically, La Québécoite establishes a commonality between figures of alterity that have been historically marginalized or perceived as deviant: immigrants, women, and Jews. As Robin writes, when she introduces her protagonist, Il serait une fois une immigrante. Elle serait venue de loin – n‘ayant jamais été chez elle. Elle continuerait sa course avec son bâton de Juif errant et son étoile à la belle étoile avec son cortège d‘images d‘Épinal, de stéréotypes éculés. (La Québécoite 64) [Once upon a time there would be an immigrant. She would have come from far away, never having been at home. She would continue her running with her 239 wandering Jew‘s stick and her star, under the stars, with her train of traditional images, worn-out stereotypes. (The Wanderer 47-48) 83 ] By destabilizing the boundaries between different figures of otherness and different movements of displacement, such as modernist exile, the Jewish diaspora, and late capitalist notions of immigration, Robin unsettles the notion of a fixed location of her novel. She also juxtaposes references to several geographic spaces: Québec (where her protagonist emigrated), France (through her narrator‘s recollections of Épinal, a French town), and the lost Central European shtetl Robin nostalgically evokes throughout the novel when she highlights her narrator‘s Jewish origins. The author also creates this effect of instability by employing the conditional tense, which suggests an undefined, uncertain temporality, a tactic of evasion that suggests the impossibility of narrating a story in a coherent fashion. Generically, her narrative also wanders between modernist formal properties – such as a wandering consciousness, collage, the trope of exile – and postmodern fragmentation and unstable subject positions, reinforcing the blurred boundary between these two literary moments and movements. All these narrative strategies position the text as a plural narrative with roots in, or elective affinities to different national cultures and temporal periods. From this point of view, the novel is much more than the linear story of an immigrant in Québec, since that local geographic and cultural context is illuminated by the global context of exile, migration, and especially the impossibility of narrating traumatic memories of the Holocaust. 83 This and subsequent English translations are from the 1997 edition, translated as The Wanderer. 240 La Québécoite is thus concerned with the tropes of possibilities and limits of writing, and with speaking and voicelessness in the contexts of traumatic history and dislocation. It probes the limits of representation of marginal experiences, asking how one silenced story can speak to the narrative of another. In other words, she shows that by telling one story, one inevitably weaves in other interrelated hi/stories. The author does that through the central metaphor of the text – speaking vs. silence – as the narrative captures the protagonist‘s struggle between agency and powerlessness in a Québécois society that seems to privilege homogeneous cultures and stable identities. The very title, La Québécoite, captures the tension between the immigrant narrator‘s efforts to assimilate to Québec and her inability to speak up due to a xenophobic environment and the historical traumas she carries with her. 84 The title is a conflation of the feminine term ―Québécoise‖ and the suffix ―–coite,‖ which, in the expression ―se tenir coite,‖ means ―to keep silent‖. ―La Québécoite‖ thus suggests that the protagonist is silenced in Québec both as an immigrant and as a woman. Yet the 1993 English translation, ―The Wanderer,‖ rather than the more literal ―The Silent Québécoise,‖ misses the correlation between gender and lack of agency. 85 The English title thus gives no indication that the novel might recount the story of a female 84 Ironically enough, even though the novel thematizes immigrants‘ difficulties in adapting themselves to the Québécois society of the 1980s, and although one of the leitmotifs of the text is that one does not become Québécois, Robin certainly found a literary voice in Québec, unwittingly laying the grounds of the much-acclaimed genre écriture migrante. As in the case of Milan Kundera and his novel La Lenteur (1995) or that of Dany Laferrière and his debut novel Comment faire l’amour avec un Nègre sans se fatiguer (1985), one could say that La Québécoite is Robin‘s ―carte d‘identité‖ that consecrates her as a Québécois writer, even as she complicates and contests this classification. 85 The French title was also translated as ―voiceless in Québec‖ within the English edition, but again, it reveals nothing about gendered immigration (The Wanderer 68). 241 immigrant‘s marginalization in Québec. On the contrary, by omitting any reference to Québec, it elevates the protagonist to a universal figure. As such, it appears to celebrate the protagonist‘s flânerie, a type of urban movement that carries implications of cosmopolitan privilege. The unnamed female narrator wanders through the neighborhoods of Montréal in an attempt to appropriate the city by walking in it, which is an obvious reference to Michel de Certeau. By losing herself in the city, observing it, and drawing up lists of objects she sees and names of different places, metro stations, and cafés, the narrator attempts to domesticate space, to captures its differences before they become familiar. As she writes, ―Il fallait fixer tous les signes de la différence … . Il fallait faire un inventaire, un catalogue, une nomenclature. Tout consigner pour donner plus de corps à cette existence‖ (18) [―You had to fix all the signs of difference … . You had to make an inventory, a catalogue, a nomenclature. To record everything in order to give more body to this existence‖ (8)]. In order to express the incoherence of Montréal, Robin also includes in her narrative fragments of television programs, hockey scores, newspaper clippings on Québec‘s separatist activities, and lists of ethnic restaurants and of foreign names. Montréal thus appears as a multiethnic and cosmopolitan space, a collage of places, languages, and cultures: ―patchwork linguistique / bouillie ethnique, pleine de grumeaux / purée de cultures disloquées / folklorisées / figées / pizza / souvlaki / paella‖ (82) [―collage of languages / ethnic stew full of lumps / purée of crushed cultures / turned into folksy clichés / frozen / pizza/ souvlaki / paella‖ (64)]. The author also grasps Montréal‘s strangeness as a Francophone metropole in North America by describing it as 242 a ―Ville schizophrène‖ (82) [―Schizophrenic city‖ (64)], where ―on parle français / et / on pense américain‖ (86) [―on parle français / and / we think American‖ (67)]. Robin brings up again Québec‘s self-consciousness as a space situated between French and North American cultures when she evokes the nationalist politics of the Québécois Party and the 1980 and 1995, which asked Quebeckers if they wished to secede from Canada. As an immigrant, Robin – as well as her narrator – does not condone such separatist politics, because such attempts to construct a Québécois national identity often rest on the exclusion of ethnic and linguistic minorities. In this sense, Montréal in the early 1980s also appears to her as a xenophobic space. She describes it ambivalently, as a mixture of nationalism and cosmopolitanism. Furthermore, a different history and cultural imaginary have structured the narrator‘s identity. As she writes, ―Quelle angoisse certains après-midis – Québécité – québécitude – je suis autre. Je n‘appartiens pas à ce Nous si fréquemment utilisé ici – Nous autres – Vous autres. […] une autre Histoire – L‘incontournable étrangeté‖ (53-54) [―What anguish some afternoons. Québécitude. Quebecness. I am other. I do not belong to this ―we‖ so often used here, even in the ads. ―We.‖ ―You.‖ […] Another History – the inescapable strangeness‖ (39)]. One of the ways in which the narrator‘s alterity in Québec is expressed in the novel is through the multiplication of narrators and the constant changes of neighborhoods. In order to cope with the cultural strangeness of Québec, the narrator writes a novel about an unnamed female character –―Elle‖ – who is also a French-born immigrant in Québec. This character, in turn, writes a novel that features a Jewish immigrant professor who organizes a course on Sabbatai Zevi, a seventeenth-century 243 false messiah who epitomizes the Wandering Jew. The professor‘s stream-of- consciousness narration is an impossible task since his lecture, which follows Zevi‘s wanderings, cannot be reined in by any compositional or organizational strategies. Zevi‘s story spills out of the professor‘s control and cannot be captured wholly. So does the novel the narrator writes. As she puts it, ―Le texte m‘échappe. Je le sens glisser. […] Ce personnage encore une fois m‘échappe. […] Je me sens totalement piégée par elle. Elle finit par me prendre la main, par me guider‖ (187) [―The text is getting away from me. I feel it slipping away. […] This character is eluding me again. […] I feel completely trapped by her. She ends up taking me by the hand and guiding me‖ (155)]. The techniques of the mise-en-abyme and self-reflexivity aim to increase readers‘ confusion, who feel lost when trying to capture the narrator‘s identity. The instability of the narrator‘s migrant position is further mirrored by her linguistic use of a multiple voice: both ―je‖ and ―tu‖ (for herself) and ―elle‖ (for the female character in the novel she is writing). She wanders among these three identities just as she roams through the three districts of Montréal, like a modernist flâneuse. The trope of the flâneuse, through which Robin portrays her protagonist, as well as her lists and the collage technique, evoke the tradition of modernist urban narratives exemplified by the writings of James Joyce, Walter Benjamin, and Georges Perec, who also theorize cities in terms of spatial disorientation, lists, and fragmented spaces. 86 In depicting Montréal as a space where random itineraries can lead to haphazard encounters, she 86 The writers I enumerated are possible intertexts in La Québécoite. Georges Perec and Régine Robin share biographical elements, and Robin also writes a chapter on Perec in Le Deuil de l’origine (1993). Furthermore, the author‘s use of the conditional in La Québécoite as well as her inventories, lists, and interest in the quotidian, the cafes, the bistrots, the bus stations are a homage to Perec‘s Les Choses. 244 equally draws on surrealist fiction, such as André Breton‘s Nadja. But in her playing with notions of multiple narrators, alter egos, and mapping cities, Robin also gestures to postmodern urban narratives such as Paul Auster‘s. Clearly, she uses a fragmented style in order to suggest the impossibility of the notion of a coherent, stable subjectivity. But her blurring of the boundaries between modernist and postmodern narrative strategies could be seen within the context of her general anti-taxonomical attitude towards literature, suggesting that her novel does not fit neatly within either tradition, but rather toes the line between them. Robin‘s depiction of Montréal as a fragmented space that can only be captured in writing through fragments, as a ―Texte brisé‖ (19) [―Broken text‖ (8)], reflects the female narrator‘s feelings of uprootedness and double displacement in Montréal: as an immigrant and as a Jew. She resorts to writing in order to impose some order on her life in Québec. From the very first page, the narrator gives the coordinates of her narrative: ―Pas d‘ordre. Ni chronologique, ni logique, ni logis‖ (2) [―No order. No chronology, no logic, no lodging‖ (5)]. Yet this statement isn‘t entirely credible, as the chaotic, fragmented, incoherent style serves a very clear purpose: to underscore the idea that the identity of the narrator cannot be captured in any single way and to drive home the point that she does not belong there as an immigrant. The narrator‘s plural identity is reflected by the tripartite structure of the novel, each chapter recounting her explorations of three different Montréal neighborhoods segregated along ethnic and class lines. However, there is a common pattern to this triptych and to the narrator‘s different wanderings, which reveals a carefully organized, if deliberately labyrinthine narrative. 245 Thus, the narrator‘s three possible affiliations are explored with respect to three districts, three husbands, and three different ideologies (a Jewish cultural ghetto, a Québécois nationalist milieu, and a multiethnic district) to indicate her unstable, multiple identity. In each scenario, the narrator‘s identity is explored through differences of class, education, nationality and political affiliation. In Snowdon, an Anglophone district of Jewish immigrants, where she lives with her Jewish husband from New York, and where she doesn‘t quite fit as a French woman, her anchoring point is the culture of the Jewish diaspora preserved by her aunt. The second scenario places the narrator in Outrement, a Francophone upper-class neighborhood, where her privileged position as the wife of a Québécois politician eases her assimilation to the Québécois bourgeoisie. Yet in this nationalist milieu, the narrator‘s Frenchness, her Parisian accent, and her Sorbonne education as well as her ignorance of Québec politics only underscore her foreignness and lack of fit. For example, she is confused by the Québécois meanings of French words, as for her, the ―fleur de lys‖ (134), the lily, which symbolizes Québec nationalism, has royalist, anti-Semitic, and aristocratic connotations in France. Having a different cultural imaginary, the narrator cannot assimilate: ―Inintégrable, la jacobine, la rouge, la communarde‖ (134) [―Was it impossible to integrate her, the Jacobin, the red, the communard?‖ (108)]. It is around the Marché Jean-Talon, a multiethnic neighborhood where, in the third scenario, she lives with her Paraguayan husband, that she finds a community of other marginalized people, mostly immigrants and refugees. Each scenario represents the narrator‘s attempt to firmly place her character in the Québécois society, which ends in failure, as her protagonist returns to Paris each time. 246 The three scenarios show not only the narrator‘s impossibility of writing within fixed coordinates, but also the impossibility of writing, given her Jewish background and the memories that haunt her. As she says, ―Il n‘y a pas de métaphore pour signifier Auschwitz, pas de genre, pas d‘écriture‖ (141) [―There is no metaphor to signify Auschwitz, no genre, no writing‖ (114). Indeed, the narrator‘s narrative never manages to cross one point. The narrative limit is represented by Grenelle, a Paris metro station which marked the point of the embarking of the Jews towards concentration camps during the notorious roundup of July 16, 1942. As the narrator writes, ―Métro Grenelle. Après Grenelle. Je ne sais plus / La ligne se perd dans ma mémoire / les Juifs / doivent / prendre / le / dernier / wagon‖ (204) [―Métro Grenelle. After Grenelle. I don‘t know any more / The line gets lost in my memory / Jews / must / use / the / last / car‖ (169-170)]. The act of writing trauma does not help her come to terms with displacement, since for her writing is itself a fragmentary, schizophrenic process, an ―écriture du hors-lieu,‖ or de-centered writing – as Robin calls her own writing (Le Roman mémoriel 129). In referring to the impossibilities of narrative coherence, as exemplified in the three parallel scenarios, Robin develops the concept of ―parole immigrante‖ (55) [―immigrant words‖ (40) as nomadic (31) – ―les mots/nomades‖ (31) [―the words / nomadic‖ (19)] – in the sense that it doesn‘t settle, it is in constant flux and re-evaluation. In Robin‘s novel, nomadism is not only a trope denoting spatial displacement, as in her criss-crossing Montreal as a flâneuse – which, as a marker of privilege, starkly contrasts with peoples or cultures that are literally nomadic. It also expresses a mode of critical thinking that seeks to escape fixed categories, such as national identities. The narrator 247 does not become Québécoise, and even her Frenchness is problematic, as this seemingly coherent national identity is informed by a Jewish diasporic consciousness that make her think of France primarily in relation to the German occupation of the country during World War II, rather than France of the 1980s. Significantly enough, the postmodern subjectivity that the book‘s various narrators embody is best illustrated at the level of the language of the text. Immigrant words are thus described as ―une parole autre, multiple‖ (55) [―speech that is other, multiple‖ (40)], as ―insituable, intenable. […] Parole sans territoire et sans attache‖ (205) [―unplaceable, untenable. […] Words without territory or anchor‖ (170)]. The protagonists, like Robin, shift flexibly among several languages. La Québécoite is thus a multilingual text that includes not only Parisian and Québécois French, but also English, German, Yiddish and Spanish words. For example, the text contains fragments of Marlene Dietrich song in Blue Angel, letters from the Torah, and plays on words regarding Québec‘s bilingualism: ―Give me a smoked meet – une rencontre fumée‖ (54). As a French-language novel that frequently switches to English, it makes its translation into English difficult. The question raised by the multilingualism of the novel is how to preserve the impression of linguistic plurality in translation. The text‘s English translator, for example, underscored this difficulty of translating a novel with numerous English words into English, and identified the challenge as being not only one of translation, but also of ethics. As she states, ―For Robin, it is an ethical imperative – and not merely an aesthetic choice – to preserve the many voices, to refuse to let them be drowned by one voice or subsumed within a single story. Thus her use of a many-voiced 248 narrative form‖ (Aronoff, viii). Even though Robin states that ―I am as attached to French as the hermit crab is to its shell‖ (―Afterword‖ 180), her novel does not privilege any of the languages it employs. Rather, it makes a point of advocating linguistic as well as cultural plurality, which was Robin‘s means of resisting the policy of cultural assimilation in Québec in the early 1980s, and of affirming her singular, distinct literary identity. As I have argued in this section, the author‘s literary style is inextricably connected to her contestation of ideas of a coherent cultural and national identity. Her multilingual text calls for a mode of reading that unsettles the location of her text. As a polyglot text that also shifts constantly between Montréal, New York, Paris, and Budapest, it both belongs to and transcends the boundaries of Québécois literature. The reception of the novel and its author has been somewhat divided. Because Robin blurs linguistic and cultural boundaries in her text, the author has been viewed as part of different literary traditions: as European in Québec and a North-American in Europe (Lapierre 213), as a Jewish writer anchored in a Jewish literary tradition (Fridman 176), but also also as ―néo-Québécois‖ writer, that is, an immigrant author (Moisan and Hildebrand 320). One could argue that Robin fits into all these categories, but her literary identity is best illustrated when readers blur all these neat distinctions. One the one hand, as a Québécois, or rather, a Montréal novel (Klaus 84), 87 it engages with concerns specific to Québec, and thus it can be said that its ideal readers are Quebeckers. On the other, its numerous references to different cultural markers in Paris are more 87 In the context of Quebec, Peter Kraus speaks of the centrality of Montreal in Quebecois literature, arguing that as, a primarily urban, immigrant, cosmopolitan city, it is also the site of emergence immigrant writing. 249 readily recognizable to French readers or speakers. Furthermore, its discussion of Jewish characters such as Sabbatai Zevi and inclusion of Jewish words can be more easily deciphered by Jewish readers. In her own discussion of the novel‘s implied readers, Robin mentions all these implied readerships, underscoring the fact that the richness of the texts is revealed not through single readings based on the readers‘ nationality, but by its linguistic and cultural mixtures, by the dialogue as well as the tension between these languages (―Afterword‖ 178). In this sense, the ideal reader is one who crosses linguistic barriers willingly and flexibly. The text is then not so much a borderless novel, but rather one that problematizes cultural, linguistic, and national (and of course, literary) distinctions. It does not transcend the categories of migrant writing, Québécois, French, Jewish, North American, or Francophone literature, but unsettles the boundaries between them. Therefore, as Robin herself appositely characterizes her novel, La Québécoite is ―une fiction des frontières‖ (―Postface‖ 224) [―a fiction of borders;‖ my translation]. An important strategy in this blurring of borders consists of Robin‘s intertextual references, which link the novel to other literary traditions. The author‘s choice of literary affiliations sheds lights on the ways in which she would like to be seen, namely, as an author who associates herself with authors irrespective of their ethnic identities, because they share her literary commitments. She thus attempts to de-ethnicize literature and her place as a foreign writer in Québec. As Robin states, ―L‘écrivain s‘invente ses propres filiations. Fils de Kafka et de Cervantes, fille de Flaubert et de Melville!‖ (―Postface‖ 210) [―The writer invents her own filiations. Son of Kafka and Cervantes, daughter of Flaubert and Melville;‖ my translation]. She is also indebted to Salman 250 Rushdie, who represents for her the model of the polyglot immigrant writer who hybridizes the English language and embraces complete artistic freedom. Jorge Luis Borges represents another model because he rejects national literary identities in favor of universal ones, and whose concept of a labyrinthine, chaotic novel informs her novel (―Postface‖ 222-223). Indeed, the subtitle to her ―Postface‖ to La Québécoite, which pays homage to Borges, is titled ―De nouveaux jardins aux sentiers qui bifurquent‖ (206) [―New Gardens with Forking Paths;‖ my translation]. Furthermore, her truly labyrinthine novel is also framed by a series of epigraphs, whose purpose is to reinforce the ideas proposed by the body of the text. One such epigraph is by Edmond Jabès, a Francophone writer of Jewish-Egyptian origins, and the other one is by Franz Kafka, a Central European Jewish writer. These excerpts illustrate Robin‘s own literary concerns about how to write, in which language, and in a way that escapes reductive readings and opens up countless possibilities of interpretation. Thus, Robin‘s own ambition to write a novel that defies neat definitions echoes Jabès‘s dream of writing ―une ouvre qui n‘entrerait dans aucune catégorie, qui n‘appartenait à aucun genre, mais qui les contiendrait tous‖ (88) [―a work which would not enter into any category, fit any genre, but contain them all‖ (3)]. As for Kafka, Robin chooses an excerpt from one of his letters to Max Brod, which speaks of living ―entre trois impossibilités … l‘impossibilité de ne pas écrire, l‘impossibilité d‘écrire en allemand, l‘impossibilité d‘écrire autrement‖ (13) [―The impossibility of not writing, the impossibility of writing German, the impossibility of writing differently‖ (4)]. As a Jewish intellectual, Robin, like Kafka, faces the impossibility of not writing, of writing in French, and of writing other than in a de- 251 centered, fragmented fashion. Linked with the idea of the Jewish intellectual and her problematic identity is that of writing Jewish history. She also references an excerpt from Alfred Döblin‘s Berlin Alexanderplatz, to underscore her novel‘s roots in modernist writing which attempts to map cities, thus linking Montréal to Berlin. These intertextual references inscribe Robin into a certain literary tradition represented by French and European, but also Latin American writers, authors who are truly ―extraterritorial‖ (Steiner viii) and who also theorize literature as the space for the play of the imagination. Even though La Québécoite embraces openness and plurality, its intertextual references to numerous other texts of world literature clearly target a multilingual, cosmopolitan, and even academic audience, and require a greater interpretative effort than Zadie Smith‘s novels. For that reason, I share some critics‘ opinion about Robin‘s double move: through her novel, the author both voices her ethical project, which critics locate in the text‘s concern for ethnic, linguistic, and cultural plurality, and attempts to get consecrated by the Québécois literary institution of the 1980s (Gauvin 72; Verduyn 75). But by advocating mixtures and blurring distinctions, La Québécoite participates in a type of contemporary ethical fiction that reveals and attempts to correct rigid reading practices, just like the novels of Dany Laferrière, to whom I shall now turn. 252 Dany Laferrière, an “American” Writer Ever since the publication of Dany Laferrière‘s first novel with the provocative title Comment faire l’amour avec un Nègre sans se fatiguer (1985) [How to Make Love to a Negro Without Getting Tired], literary critics have emphasized the sensationalist aspects of the author‘s texts. These have to do primarily with his playing with racial stereotypes such as the Negro, the Blonde, and the Fat Woman, and with his inflammatory treatment of what is perceived to be a taboo issue in North America: interracial sex. For instance, in Comment faire l’amour and Chronique de la dérive douce (1994) [A Drifting Year (1997)], which take place in Montréal, Laferrière deliberately over-employs racial stereotypes, such as the sexually potent Black man, in order to highlight their constructedness and his own objectification as an immigrant in Québec. Although many of his first novels deal provocatively with Québec, Laferrière also turns his gaze to his Haitian childhood and the figure of his grandmother in L’Odeur du café (1991) [An Aroma of Coffee (1993)], Pays sans chapeau (1996) [Down Among the Dead Men (1997)], and Le Charme des après-midi sans fin (1997) [―The Charm of Endless Afternoons‖ 88 ]. The author also wrote texts about the United States, such as Cette grenade dans la main du jeune nègre est-elle une arme ou un fruit? (1993) [Why Must a Black Writer Write About Sex? (1994)], in which he underscores the ways in which American culture has shaped him, and Je suis fatigué (2001) [I Am Tired 89 ], where 88 My translation. The book has not been translated into English yet. 89 Ibid. 253 he describes his inner trans-continental geography: ―Je porte trois villes en moi. Port-au- Prince, Montréal, Miami‖ (70) [―I carry three cities inside me. Port-au-Prince, Montréal, Miami‖; my translation]. Having lived in Haiti, Québec and Miami, where he presently resides, Laferrière describes a similar triangulated literary space in his oeuvre, which critics have classified as the author‘s Montréal, Haitian, and American cycles (Mathis 229). Laferrière himself suggestively reunites a cycle of ten semi-autobiographical novels under the label ―Une Autobiographie américaine‖ [―An American Autobiography‖], which he describes as ―un seul livre en plusieurs volumes … relatant ma dérive sur le continent américain‖ (J’écris comme je vis 191; my emphasis) [―a single book in several volumes … recounting my drift on the American continent‖ (my translation)]. Indeed, as one critic points out, his novels can be seen as ―distinct chapters of a life chronicle‖ (Essar 931), since they take place in Petit-Goave, Port-au-Prince, Montréal, Los Angeles, Manhattan, Miami, and San Juan. Laferrière‘s conception of his own writings can be viewed in two ways. On the one hand, his ―dérive,‖ or drift, denotes a literary subjectivity that attempts to avoid fixation at all costs. That is why he rejects terms such as ―exile‖ or ―immigrant,‖ which suggest a re-anchoring in a new place (J’écris 105). On the other, the author‘s elective affinity to a continental, pan-American cultural space suggests his unwitting reaffirmation of a new – albeit ampler – label, which appears to contradict his radical political stance as unabatedly anti-taxonomical. In my own readings of Laferrière‘s novels, I will underscore both tendencies, paying attention to the ways in which narrative 254 form reinforces the notion of a trans-national, or trans-American literary identity, and to the author‘s contradictory self-positionings. More specifically, following Laferrière‘s cue about viewing his texts in the context of a pan-American cultural space, I will analyze a selection of his novels not so much thematically – that is, according to his treatment of migration, identity, race and sexuality – but with an eye to what aesthetic form tells us about the author‘s status as a global writer who refuses clear national, ethnic, or linguistic attachments. I argue that Laferrière constructs a literary geography that connects Haiti, the United States, and Québec, and which is deliberately de-centered, to dispel the feeling of a literary identity that is coherent and grounded in one place. His political and ethical stance is similar to Milan Kundera‘s, as Laferrière also struggles against geographical, political, or literary – besides racial – classifications. He thus requests to be viewed first and foremost as a writer, rather than as a Haitian, Caribbean, Québécois, or Francophone author. To this end, he published a novel titled Je suis un écrivain japonais (2008) [I Am a Japanese Writer] precisely so as to expose the artificiality of literary labels through which immigrant or minority writers are being read today. What interests me in this and his other works are the ways in which the novels‘ intertextuality and Laferrière‘s elective affinities (to Japan, for example) fashion a contemporary writer who escapes traditional literary categories. Refusing what he perceives as narrow labels, Laferrière shifts flexibly and somewhat mockingly between different spaces and cultures. Yet, as I will show, the author‘s attempt to position himself at once as a global and singular writer who cannot be safely pinned down is not entirely successful. His texts are mostly published in 255 Québec/Canada, albeit to bilingual audiences, and express an allegiance to a North American geographical and cultural space, even if that continental identity is by definition heterogeneous. I thus contend that Laferrière‘s works reject, but in some ways also manage to retain, national or geographical-cultural paradigms. Although Laferrière does not claim Milan Kundera, or French literature, or even European culture for that matter, as direct literary models, the similarities between the two authors are striking. Like the Czech-born writer, Laferrière makes strong authorial interventions in his non-fictional works as well as in interviews, talk shows, and at the numerous conferences to which he is invited. He also makes cameo appearances in his fiction in the guise of a narrator who is baffled or profoundly annoyed at the way literary critics generally read him. In this way, Laferrière also plays with the boundary between fiction and reality, challenging readers to interrogate the link between his unreliable narrators and autobiographical facts, and to become wary of sweeping assumptions one may make upon reading literary works. Whereas Laferrière mocks and plays with the reader, claiming to be one thing, and then adopting exactly the opposite persona, he also strives to correct misinterpretations of his work and biography, by affirming his singularity as a writer. As he states, ―[j]e déteste tout ce qui globalise. Pour moi, l‘artiste veut être unique, alors je ne comprends pas qu‘on tente absolument l‘enfermer dans un groupe. […] Il est quoi, Sollers?‖ (J’écris 79) [―I hate all generalizations. For me, the artist‘s goal is to be unique, so I don‘t understand why one may try so hard to contain him in a group. […] How do you classify Sollers?‖ my translation]. Underscoring the hegemony of literary labels, 256 which apply differently to white authors from major cultures, he declares: ―Je veux être pris pour un écrivain, et les seuls adjectifs acceptables dans ce cas-là sont: un ‗bon‘ écrivain … ou un ‗mauvais‘ écrivain‖ (J’écris 105) [―I want to be viewed as a writer, and the only acceptable adjectives in this case are: a ‗good‘ writer … or a ‗bad‘ writer;‖ my translation]. That is why he refuses to be seen in the context of exile, and through the association of literature with place. Born in Haiti, living until his mid-twenties under the Duvalier regime of both father and son, Laferrière is self-exiled to Québec, but rejects the label exiled author. As he states, ―Je n‘écris pas parce que je suis en exil, donc je ne suis pas un écrivain exilé‖ [―It‘s not because I‘m in exile that I write, so I‘m not an exiled writer;‖ my translation] (―Est-il possible…‖ 95). Furthermore, Laferrière cannot be clearly placed within Haitian diasporic literature, as he is an intergenerational writer, situated between writers who fled Haiti in the mid-1960s (such as Roger Dorsinville, Roland Morisseau, Anthony Phelps etc.) and the generation of younger writers who have not directly experienced the two Duvalier regimes in Haiti (authors like Joël Des Rosiers, Stanley Pean, and Edwidge Danticat) (Coates, ―Meet‖ 922). Laferrière does not consider himself a Caribbean writer, despite the fact that the cultural mixture he capitalizes on represents one of the defining characteristics of the Caribbean, that he has been awarded the 1991 ―Prix Carbet de la Caraïbe‖ for L’Odeur du café and that, in his latest novel L’Enigme du Retour (2009), he deals, for the first time, nostalgically, lovingly, and at times overtly politically, with Haiti. As he explains, his rejection of the label ―fait partie de ma guerre contre l‘exotisme‖ [―is part of my war against exoticism;‖ my translation‖] (J’écris 131). 257 Moreover, equally hailed as a Québécois writer, Laferrière often returns thematically to Haiti. Furthermore, even though he writes his novels in French, the language of the former colonizer, Laferrière is a self-proclaimed ―American‖ author, rather than a French or Francophone writer. Given the history of French colonialism in Haiti, he rejects his image as a ―French‖ author, an attitude that enables him to avoid postcolonial identity debates. Laferrière also refuses to be viewed as a ―Francophone‖ author because, to him, the concept of francophonie raises another barrier, that of language which, even if it has allegedly replaced nationality- or ethnicity-based labels, represents just another label (J’écris 89). When the author is published in Paris, he notes that he is read as a Haitian or Caribbean author because he can thus be mapped more easily as a postcolonial writer of French expression, whereas his goal is to blur the lines, or ―brouiller les pistes,‖ as he puts it (J’écris 77). To this end, in addition to the label francophonie, he also rejects the terms négritude, créolité, métissage (Munro 177), as well as a Haitian literary movement known as l’indigénisme (J’écris 88), as these rely on racial principles for judging a literary work. Laferrière refuses to be associated with other créolité writers, such as Patrick Chamoiseau, Jean Bernabé and Raphaël Confiant, who posit an African essentialist identity against the French hegemony in Haiti because, in his opinion, Haiti belongs to the American continent, rather than to Africa. Moreover, he writes in a simple and direct American style, as he claims, which differs from what he perceives as the baroque style of Caribbean writers (J’écris 110). While he declares himself against and beyond each of these national taxonomies, he also plays with Haitian, American and French categories, manipulating critics‘ interest 258 in such demarcations. As he states, ―Si on arrive à mélanger les trois cultures, le résultat pourrait être assez intéressant. Moi, je m‘en sers que pour épater la galerie‖ [―If one manages to mingle the three cultures, the result could be quite interesting. As for me, I only use that to impress the audience;‖ my translation] (J’écris 111). Laferrière deliberately plays with labels in order to underscore their constructedness and their permutations in different contexts. To make clear his own rejection of neat classifications, the author chameleonically changes subject positions. As he admits, [j]‘ai plusieurs chapeaux. Je suis aussi tout ce que je ne veux pas être. Je suis un écrivain haïtien, un écrivain caribéen (ce qui est légèrement différent d‘un écrivain antillais, mais je suis aussi un écrivain antillais), un écrivain québécois, un écrivain canadien et un écrivain afro-canadien, un écrivain américain et un écrivain afro-américain, et, depuis peu, un écrivain français. […] Cela me permet de voyager et de profiter des services que mes différents hôtes mettent à ma disposition. (J’écris 116) I wear several hats. I am also everything I don‘t want to be. I a Haitian writer, a Caribbean writer (which is slightly different from an Antillean writer, although I‘m also an Antillean writer), a Québécois writer, a Canadian and an Afro- Caribbean writer, an American as well as an African-American writer, and, recently, a French writer. […] This allows me to travel and to take advantage of the opportunities my various hosts offer me. (my translation) How should one read Laferrière, given than he both rejects and reinforces the above- mentioned taxonomies? As he himself jokingly suggests, ―J‘écris de manière à être lu rapidement‖ (J’écris 179) [―I write in a manner that reads fast;‖ my translation]. Through this reference to speed, Laferrière alludes to American authors such as Ernest Hemingway, whose direct and clear style he self-admittedly emulates (J’écris 182). He also grounds himself in what he describes as a fast-paced and market-driven American culture, while he equally distances himself from what he views as the ―folkloric‖ style of Haitian writers such as Jacques Roumain and Jacques Stephen Alexis, on the one hand, 259 and ―the pompous nineteenth-century French sentence that seems to have been permanently adopted by Haitian writers,‖ on the other (Coates 915). As I suggest, one should read Laferrière contextually, paying attention to his works‘ intertextual references, which cast the author not only as a hemispheric or New World writer, but also a global writer who maps his affinities to a number of other world writers. I now turn my attention to Laferrière‘s novel Je suis un écrivain japonais, which I read in the context of the manifesto for a world literature in French. I argue that in its preoccupation with enlarging the notion of Francophone literature by disregarding France as a cultural center and model, and with dismantling rigid literary taxonomies, the novel could be viewed as French-language world literature. 260 Je suis un écrivain japonais and the Ethics of Labeling Through its very title as well as content and characters, Je suis un écrivain japonais (2009) dismantles ethnic categories through which one reads literature today in Québec and elsewhere. The novel blurs the line between author and narrator, also called Dany Laferrière, and between reality and fiction, mixing several narrative layers and using irony, the mise-en-abyme technique, and numerous ethnic stereotypes in a playful attempt to underscore how ethnic labels work. The text thus appears to be a roman à these, whose main goal is to interrogate identity and authenticity. The following dialogue exemplifies the author-narrator‘s project: - Moi, je n‘en ai rien à foutre de l‘identité. - Tu dis ça, et tu écris un livre avec un pareil titre... Qu‘est-ce que tu veux dire? - Je l‘ai fait pour sortir précisément de ça, pour montrer qu‘il n‘y a pas de frontières... J‘en avais mare des nationalismes culturels. (198) - I have nothing to do with identity. - You say that, but you write a book with a title like that … What do you mean? - I did it precisely to escape that, to show that there are no borders … I had enough of cultural nationalisms. As I argue, the novel reinterprets Québécois cultural identity not through an ethnic lens, but through a universal one, by proposing a universal concept of author and text. To this end, he uses narrative strategies that expose and undermine literary taxonomies and ethnic stereotypes. For example, one way in which irony works in the novel is through the contrast between the author-narrator‘s writing a novel with the provocative title ―Je suis un écrivain japonais‖ and his constant affirmation that he is not a Japanese writer. As he states, ―Je ne suis pas un écrivain japonais… J‘écris un livre dont le titre est ‗Je suis un écrivain japonais,‘ ça ne fait pas de moi un écrivain japonais‖ (115) [―I am not a 261 Japanese writer … I‘m writing a book whose title is ‗I am a Japanese writer,‘ but this doesn‘t make me a Japanese writer‖]. The narrator adds: ―c‘est simplement un titre‖ (197) [―it‘s just a title‖ 90 ], yet this very title has triggered rave reviews and expectations in Japan, before the book has even been written. The book he is about to write is a motif that represents both an elusive concept and an actual work. The narrator tells us that he only has a title, a contract, and has received media attention, but that he has no intention of writing the book; yet we are of course reading his very book. Furthermore, his book is not well-timed, as Japan is currently preoccupied with questions of national identity, whereas the narrator is against this notion. These alleged Japanese concerns about nationality also echo Québécois social discourse on identity and language. Laferrière circumvents the latter by promoting an alternative discourse that is not centered on identity issues. On the contrary, surprised by the attention one pays to writers‘ ethnic origins (29), he writes a book with a title that he deems banal, except for the word ―Japanese,‖ thus also throwing a bait to his critics, who hurry to interpret his ―new‖ ethnic identity. The cynical and market-aware author-narrator states that a book‘s title carries a greater weight than its content, and constructs his critical reception within the pages of the novel. He describes his commercial success, based only on his title: ―Je suis un écrivain japonais. Bref silence. Large sourire. Vendu! On signe le contrat: 10 000 euros pour cinq petits mots‖ (14) [―Je suis un écrivain japonais. Brief silence. Big smile. Sold! We sign the contract: 10 000 Euros for five little words‖]. The title itself also piqued the 90 This and all subsequent translations of the novel are mine. 262 interest of the Japanese Consulate in Montréal, which offered to translate the narrator‘s book into Japanese. In Japan, he became famous overnight, but also provoked fears about the possibility that a black author writing a Japanese novel might become culturally representative and thus endanger the reputation Japanese literature might have for foreign readers, in case the latter dislike the novel: ―Avec ce titre, c‘est comme si cet écrivain était devenu … ‗l‘écrivain japonais par excellence‘‖ (199) [―With such a title, it‘s as if this writer had become … ‗the Japanese writer par excellence‘‖]. Moreover, the hype this title created led a Japanese writer to write a novel titled ―Je suis un écrivain malgache‖ (255) [―I Am a Madagascan Writer‖], triggering a veritable trend against literary nationalisms. Laferrière is being, of course, hyperbolic in all these instances, yet behind his tongue-in-cheek remarks about his implied critics lies his anxiety about being categorized as an ethnic author. His text therefore examines the act of classification itself and the superficiality and arbitrariness of labels. For instance, when referring to the two officials at the Japanese Consulate who would like to buy his copy rights, he notices that ―il se sent observé comme un insecte‖ (107) [―he feels he is being examined like an insect‖] and that they would like to ―control‖ his book (114) and disregard his ―artistic freedom‖ (164). The narrator‘s hyped reception also highlights the contrast between readers and critics‘ expectations of authenticity and the fact that he writes about ―un Japon inventé‖ (113) [an invented Japan] made up of cultural myths and clichés gleaned from magazines that he reads in French, in Québec. The narrator has never been to Japan nor is he interested in exploring the culture in an unmediated way. Rather, he seems to relish the 263 cultural knowledge about Japan literature offers him. He reads the poetry of seventeenth- century Japanese poet Basho while roaming through the streets of Montréal or in the subway, summarizing his voyages in Japan. This constant movement suggests an identity in flux, as his model is a vagabond poet, as he calls Basho (32). In addition to attempting to disable the categories of identity and nationality, the narrator also plays with the category of genre, since he cannot write a Japanese novel. As he asks, C‘est quoi un écrivain japonais? Est-ce quelqu‘un qui vit et écrit au Japon? Ou quelqu‘un né au Japon qui écrit malgré tout …? Ou quelqu‘un qui n‘est pas né au Japon, ni ne connaît la langue, mais décide de but en blanc de devenir un écrivain japonais? C‘est mon cas. (21-22) What is a Japanese writer? Is it someone who lives and writes in Japan? Or someone who is born in Japan and who writes, despite everything…? Or someone who is neither born in Japan nor knows the language, but decides all of a sudden to become a Japanese writer? This is my case. Is there a black Japanese writer, I would add? Laferrière asks through which lenses one should read a literary text, yet he offers no answers to these questions, because any definition of Japanese or any other ethnic writers would be problematic. Labels or titles have nominative power, whereas his novel‘s strategy has been to consistently defy labels. Instead of ethnic classifications, he proposes that literature should be viewed through universal prisms. He illustrates this idea with an array of favorite writers he used to read as a child, when he was unaware of the national identity of authors as diverse as Pascal, Dostoyevsky, and Mishima, whom he perceived as his neighbors (30), thus re- territorializing their works. Laferrière claims therefore that the space of the encounter between texts and readers – which he defines as the space of the imagination and desire 264 (28) – is more important than authors‘ identity or location, underscoring that such categories widen the gap between texts and their audiences. In his struggle against ethnic labels, Laferrière also attempts to go beyond the notion of a ―Caribbean‖ literature. As he states, Né dans la Caraïbe, je deviens automatiquement un écrivain caribéen. La librairie, la bibliothèque et l‘université se sont dépêchées de m‘épingler ainsi. Etre un écrivain et un Caribéen ne fait pas de moi forcément un écrivain caribéen. (27) Born in the Caribbean, I automatically become a Caribbean writer. The bookstore, the library and the university thus hurried to pin me down. Being a writer and Caribbean-born doesn‘t necessarily make me a Caribbean writer. When he is being asked if he is a Haitian, Caribbean, or Francophone writer, Laferrière defaults to the reader, saying that ―je prenais la nationalité de mon lecteur. Ce qui veut dire que quand un Japonais me lit, je deviens immédiatement un écrivain japonais‖ (30) [I took the nationality of my reader. Which means that when a Japanese reads me, I immediately become a Japanese writer]. By stating that his identity depends on his reader, the author suggests that literary identities are predicated on modes of reading, which differ from one context to another. The novel‘s dedication – ―A tous ceux qui voudraient être quelqu‘un d‘autre‖ (9) [―To all those who would like to be someone else‖] – underscores precisely the arbitrariness and flexibility of such identities. Throughout his novel, Laferrière critiques any form of identity politics and dismisses all labels as inherently reductive. At the same time, he himself employs ethnic categories, such as when he relies on the stereotype of the Japanese tourist taking many pictures in front of the Eiffel Tower, itself a national symbol. His use of such clichés is meant to undo these stereotypes, yet by repeating them, albeit with a subversive aim, the 265 author also reaffirms them, showing their stronghold in Québécois culture. Moreover, even if he takes issue with the attention paid to ethnicity, he highlights it in his novel through names and labels. His protagonists form a multicultural cast, being Korean, Greek, Japanese, Swedish, Haitian and Québécois. Laferrière does not present these different ethnicities as ghettoized, but rather as well-integrated in a multicultural Montréal. However, he cannot escape ethnic categories, as at the end of the novel he brings up the Haitian reality of poverty, homelessness, and violence when the narrator exchanges his identity as a universal writer with ―cette odeur identifiable de pauvreté‖ (204) [―this identifiable odor of poverty‖]. That is, he dishonors the book contract and gives up writing the book Je suis un écrivain japonais, whose pages we actually finish reading, reverting to his initial state of poverty, and thus getting caught up in a new label, be it that of personal odor. Even though he proposes universality as a preferable model to that of cultural specificity, Laferrière cannot escape his Haitian, or Caribbean identity, which he directly mentions when he states, in the final pages, that the Japanese poet Basho does not write with an attention to local color, as Caribbean writers do. In my examination of Régine Robin‘s and Dany Laferrière‘s writings, I have thus sought to show how, while the authors purposefully de-ethnicize and internationalize contemporary Québec literature in an attempt to resist labels, they do not completely transcend the paradigm of national literature. 266 Conclusion In June 2010, Marie-France Ionesco, the daughter of Romanian-French playwright Eugène Ionesco, ended the copyright agreement for the performance Ionesco - five short plays, directed by Alexandru Dabija at the Odeon Theatre in Bucharest. Ms. Ionesco, born and raised in France, explained that she had decided not to extend the rights of representation because her father was not a Romanian, but a French writer. As she maintained, since Ionesco‘s plays were written in French and only later translated into Romanian, the author is not a Romanian writer, or even a ―French writer of Romanian origin‖ – a label that often troubled her, as she herself admits (Lupu par. 3). The question that Marie-France Ionesco‘s decision raised over the appropriate literary identity of bilingual writers such as her father is not new, but in this case, it had serious cultural repercussions, as it prevented the performance of Ionesco‘s plays from being resumed in Romanian theaters and, more generally, it made culture inaccessible to the wider public. Literary categorizations are not only pedagogical tools for grouping writers according to national or ethnic criteria, and for studying them more easily, but also carry deep political and economic implications. That is, writers‘ ethnic background as well as the language of their literary expression is closely tied to their status as national or international authors, the reception and circulation of their works, and the symbolic and economic capital that they acquire when winning prestigious literary awards such as the Nobel, the Booker, the Pulitzer, and the Goncourt Prizes. Franz Kafka would perhaps not have attained such global acclaim had he not written his works in German, but rather in 267 Czech, which he also spoke fluently. As a writer originating from a small culture, but writing in a major language, Kafka is at once a national and a global writer. One may extend this speculation to Herta Müller, a Romanian-born German writer and winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize for Literature. Her works written in German about life in Communist Romania cross cultural and linguistic borders, challenging the boundaries of national literature. Similarly, Milan Kundera‘s international reputation is in great part due to his writing in French, a major language, in which he also translated many of his Czech-language novels. Through translation, Kundera joins a long tradition of bilingual authors, among whom Samuel Beckett and Vladimir Nabokov are notable examples, whose works belong simultaneously to two literary corpora – English and French, in Beckett‘s case, and Russian and American, in Nabokov‘s. The blurring of neat literary categories thus lies at the heart of my dissertation, which examines recent fictional works by immigrant and diasporic writers in Britain, the United States, France, and Québec. Because migration unsettles the boundaries between concepts of home and abroad and brings into contact discrete national cultures, it has the capacity to illuminate what is left out in a vision of literature as divided between ―national‖ and ―world‖ canons. My dissertation also intervenes in the field of transnational studies by considering both canonical and popular authors in two major literary traditions. They range from consecrated figures such as Milan Kundera, Zadie Smith, and Régine Robin to less established writers such as Kiran Desai and Andreï Makine. Because these authors do not fit neatly into any one national literary tradition, but rather display multiple transnational affiliations, I argue that they can be regarded as 268 world writers. My study also differs from other work in the area of world literatures and postcolonial studies in that it explores the positioning of migrant authors within ―the nation‖ and ―the world‖ from the perspective of the ethics of reading. In other words, these texts, which mix several languages and cultural traditions, encourage readers to adopt an ethical stance as they draw cross-cultural and inter-national connections between various works and shift actively between boundaries of the nation and the world, the local and the global. An ethical reading practice should acknowledge that these immigrant authors belong simultaneously to local, regional, national, diasporic, and world literary traditions, rather than attempting to fit them within distinct categories. Thus, rather than perpetuating a national-global dichotomy, I view these texts as simultaneously belonging to local, national, regional, and global literary categories. Exploring new transnational spatial configurations raises the ethical issue of how to read texts about the complex subject positions of immigrants, refugees, and a transnational labor force in ways that we can relate to Others within the nation-state. I thus situate my project at the intersection of literature and politics, showing how these migrant writers blend form and content, or employ certain narrative strategies, to stake political claims. At the same time, I examine how the political agency of migrant authors and texts is most often co-opted by a global literary market that expects and rewards texts that are self-reflexively or openly critical of the commodifying force of postcolonial and global cultures. Because they capture the tension between complicity in and resistance to global capitalism, immigrant and diasporic authors should be read, I contend, in light of 269 their texts‘ ethical and aesthetic practices as well as in the context of a commodity culture that celebrates hybrid identities. Language is also central to my argument because this is the point at which Anglophone and Francophone writers diverge. In the first part of my dissertation, I write about postcolonial Anglophone authors for whom English is a colonial language, and whose fictional texts critique the colonial and neoimperial enterprises of Britain and the United States. Because the texts link these former colonial centers to India, Pakistan, and Jamaica, I make a case for reading them as part of the South-Asian and the Caribbean literary traditions as well as the British and American ones. This multiple positioning echoes authors‘ own struggles against narrow taxonomies – such as ―ethnic,‖ ―multicultural,‖ or ―immigrant‖ writers – that are primarily based on their ethnicity. In the Francophone context, I argue that literary identity is negotiated differently, not only in relation to ethnicity or race, but also to language. The immigrant writers in Québec that I study, Régine Robin and Dany Laferrière, make a particular use of French, given that they write in a Francophone province within an Anglophone state; they do not feel threatened by the status of English as a global language and embrace North American culture as a way to bypass debates on the history of French colonialism in Haiti and the label of Francophone writers. The migrant authors‘ decision to write in a metropolitan language reveals labels such as ―World Literature in English‖ and ―World Literature in French‖ to be hegemonic constructions. On the one hand, this linguistic choice ensures a text‘s visibility on a contemporary global market that privileges a text‘s cultural accessibility over the promotion of ―minor‖ languages and cultures. On the other, it helps 270 re-define the parameters of ―Western European,‖ ―British,‖ and ―American‖ literatures through the authors‘ insertion of other linguistic elements and cultural motifs. In these texts, I explore how language is intimately tied to power structures and to the writers‘ negotiation of their literary identities. By comparing different fictional texts from several literary traditions and two languages, I have sought to analyze and suspend national distinctions. I have argued that contemporary immigrant authors belong not only to several bodies of writing at once, but also to world literature through reading practices that recognize their multiple and simultaneous literary affiliations. The category of world literature, divided in my study as well as in recent debates, between works written in English and in French, perpetuates its own exclusions and distinctions. Yet authors‘ contestation of such hierarchies has allowed for new conceptualizations to emerge: literary corpora defined by authors‘ chosen literary language(s) rather than their location (Eastern European Francophone literature or the ―bilingual Francophone‖ texts of immigrant authors in Québec), by region, rather than country (Kundera‘s Central Europe), and especially by authors‘ contestation of rigid taxonomies and universalizing or exoticizing reading practices. As I finish this project, new questions emerge. The first is related to a corpus represented by ―mainstream‖ (that is, non-immigrant) authors in Britain, the United States and Anglophone Canada, such as Rose Tremain, E. L. Doctorow, and Camilla Gibb, who also write about immigrant and ethnic minorities. In novels and short stories such as The Road Home (2007), ―Assimilation‖ (2010), and Sweetness in the Belly (2006), they blur the boundary between minority and mainstream representations of 271 migration, highlighting the prominent place such migrant narratives hold in Anglo- American culture. I would also like to examine diasporic authors who write about ethnic communities not their own, such as Hanif Kureishi, who addresses Eastern European immigration in Gabriel’s Gift (2002), and Dionne Brand, a Caribbean-born, Canadian- based author who includes Vietnamese characters in her novel What We All Long For (2005). These authors seek to decouple literature from ideas of place and authorial identity, like the authors I have discussed in my dissertation. Second, there is another atypical body of writing which consists of Francophone diasporas that are still unexplored, that is, Francophone immigrant authors from Latin America, East Asia, and other parts of Europe, such as Hector Bianciotti, Jorge Semprún, Brina Svit, Vassilis Alexakis, and François Cheng, among others, whom literary critics are uncertain how to categorize. For instance, Cuban-born Eduardo Manet, who is exiled in Paris and writes mostly in French, is often classified as a Hispanophone author. Critics are also unsure whether Slovenian-born Brina Svit is a Slavophile or a Francophone author, or why Chinese-born Shan Sa, Dai Sijie, and the 2000 Nobel Prize winner Gao Xingjian chose to write in French. Indeed, what do all these writers have in common? For one, they are not postcolonial Francophone authors, as French is not the official language of their countries, which are not former French colonies. Second, they consider French the language of freedom, linking it to human rights discourse. Third, they reside in Paris as cultural insiders who contribute to the redefinition of contemporary French literature. In the case of these writers, I would be interested in examining the role of France in East-Central European nation-building projects and of the French language as a 272 political and cultural alternative to Latin American and East-Asian writers‘ own politically oppressive regimes. Third and last, many of the authors I examined in relation to literary classifications have moved away from the genre of ethnic or postcolonial fiction in their latest works. This shift raises the question of how to read these fictional texts independently of authors‘ ethnic background or of the genre of multicultural fiction. In what follows, and in an attempt to bring my discussion of contemporary migrant and diasporic authors back to the starting point, I fill briefly focus on another novel by the first author I examined, Hanif Kureishi, in order to show what is at stake in literary labels. More specifically, I ask what happens when we read a novel like Gabriel’s Gift (2001) not through the prism of Kureishi‘s Pakistani-British identity or as an ethnic, or even British novel, as his fictional works have usually been read. Gabriel’s Gift is a coming-of-age novel, much like Kureishi‘s The Buddha of Suburbia. Yet its emphasis is not on ethnicity or the nation, but rather on father-son and, in general, family relationships. The fifteen-year-old protagonist, Gabriel Bunch, tries to cope with the break-up of his parents and especially with his father‘s failed dreams of a career as a rock musician. Gabriel has a gift for drawing and serious ambitious of becoming a filmmaker, and these artistic talents gradually become the driving force of the plot. At the beginning of the novel, Gabriel‘s drawings and strong visual imagination resulted in objects‘ surreally coming to life, yet, as his family-related anxieties subside, we are left with a realist narrative wherein the protagonist attempts to retrieve the copy he furtively made of a drawing he had received as a gift from a famous rock star, Lester 273 Jones, which is on public display. Gabriel knows he is incredibly talented when people do not recognize his drawing as being a fake, yet he also struggles with responsibility and guilt, especially since he endows art with a healing potential. Gabriel is able to weather the storm of his parents‘ failed relationship through drawing, whereas his father also manages to make use of his long-neglected talent by returning to music. The novel is thus a story about the ways in which art can regenerate and transform people‘s lives. Despite this universal message that may appeal to differently located readers, the novel has attracted reviews that interpreted it in light of Kureishi‘s ethnic background and his previous works, which dealt primarily with Asian-British themes. On the amazon.com website, for example, one reviewer speculates that Kureishi‘s reputation not only as a spokesperson for Asian-British communities, but also as an author who tackles provocative topics, might increase the novel‘s sales. Whether this might be true for aficionados of Kureishi‘s works, who may also be knowledgeable about his larger oeuvre, other readers may pay attention to the text itself, outside of its author‘s biography or the genre of Asian-British fiction Kureishi helped establish in the 1970s and 1980s. In this sense, Gabriel’s Gift appears as a fictional text that raises fundamental questions about creativity, relationships, and people‘s existence. Kureishi himself has adamantly resisted the role of spokesperson for Pakistani-British communities, insisting on authors‘ freedom to write independently of any ethnic or thematic constraints. Indeed, if read outside of fixed literary classifications, a work like Gabriel’s Gift reveals hidden aspects that ―ethnic,‖ ―immigrant,‖ or ―multicultural‖ reading lenses may leave out. 274 Bibliography Alexakis, Vassilis. Paris-Athènes. Paris: Seuil, 1989. Alexander, Meena. ―Is There an Asian-American Aesthetics?‖ Samar (Winter 1992): 26- 27. ---. Fault Lines: A Memoir. Preface by N‘gugi wa Thiong‘o. New York, NY: Feminist Press of the City University of New York, 2003 [1993]. ---. The Shock of Arrival. Reflections on Postcolonial Experience (1996). Boston, MA: South End Press, 1996. ---. ―Rights of Passage.‖ Interventions: An International Journal of Poco Studies 1.1 (1998-1999): 14-17. ---. ―In Whitman‘s Country.‖ Virginia Quarterly Review 81.2 (Spring 2005): 186‐192. Ali, Monica. Brick Lane. New York: Scribner, 2003. 275 Ali, Zainab and Dharini Rasiah. ―Meena Alexander.‖ Words Matter: Conversations with Asian American Writers. King-Kok Cheung (Ed.). Honolulu, HI: U of Hawaii P, 2000. 69-91. ―An Interview with Zadie Smith.‖ Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). 10 December, 2008. <http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/teeth/ei_smith_int.html>. Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Second Edition. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1999. Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota P, 1996. Aronoff, Phyllis. ―Translator‘s Preface.‖ Régine Robin. La Québécoite. Montréal, Québec: XYZ, 1983. vii-viii. Audoin, Alice. ―Makine: écrivain francophone où de langue française?‖ 25 September 2007. 30 June 2010. <http://mondesfrancophones.com/espaces/creolisations/makine-ecrivain- francophone-ou-de-langue-francaise>. Bahri, Deepika and Mary Vasudeva. ―Observing Ourselves among Others: Interview with Meena Alexander.‖ Between the Lines: South Asians and Postcoloniality. Eds. Deepika Bahri and Mary Vasudeva. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1996. 35 ‐53. 276 Barbéry, Muriel et al. ―Pour une ‗littérature-monde‘ en français.‖ Le Monde. 16 March 2007. 2 November 2009. <http://www.etonnants- voyageurs.com/spip.php?article1574>. Barton, Laura. ―A passage from India.‖ The Guardian. 12 October 2006. 13 March 2009. <http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2006/oct/12/bookerprize2006.thebookerprize> . Basu, Lopamudra. ―The Poet in the Public Sphere: A Conversation with Meena Alexander.‖ Social Text 20.3 (Fall 2002): 31 ‐38. Bentley, Nick. British Fiction of the 1990s. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2008. Berrouët-Oriol, Robert and Robert Fournier. ―L‘Emergence des écritures migrantes et métisses au Québec.‖ Québec Studies 14 (1992): 7-22. Bessière, Jean. ―The Reception of Milan Kundera in France.‖ Kosmas: Czechoslovak and Central European Journal 17. 1 (Fall 2003): 1-14. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 2001 [1994]. Boyer-Weinemann, Martine. Lire Milan Kundera. Paris: Armand Colin, 2009. 277 Brace, Marianne. ―Andrea Levy: Notes from a Small Island.‖ Independent. 12 June 2004. 12 February 2009. <http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/andrea- levy-notes-from-a-small-island-732211.html>. Braziel, Jana Evans and Anita Mannur. Theorizing Diaspora: A Reader. Malden, MA & Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003. Brookner, Anita. ―Violence with Decorum.‖ Contemporary Literary Criticism. vol. 198. Detroit: Gale Research Co. 1995. 229-230. Brouillette, Sarah. Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Brulotte, Gaëtan. ―Le roman de la pensée: autour de Kundera.‖ Liberté. 36.3 (June 1994): 212-219. Butler, Judith. Giving an Account of Oneself. New York: Fordham UP, 2005. Casado Gual, Núria. ―‗The Gulf Between Books and Experience is a Lonely Ocean.‘ An Interview with Zadie Smith.‖ Maria Vidal Grau and Núria Casado Gual (eds.). The Polemics of Aging as Reflected in Literatures in English. Lleida: Dedal-Lit, 2004. 30-42. Casanova, Pascale. The World Republic of Letters. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2004. [La République mondiale des lettres. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1999.] 278 Cazenave, Odile. Afrique sur Seine: Une nouvelle génération de romanciers africains à Paris. Paris: L‘Harmattan, 2003. Chakrabarti, M. K. ―Marketplace Multiculturalism.‖ Boston Review. December 2003/January 2004. 5 Jan. 2009. <http://bostonreview.net/BR28.6/chakrabarti.html>. Chandra, Vikram. ―The Cult of Authenticity: India‘s Cultural Commissars Worship ‗Indianness‘ Instead of Art.‖ February/March 2000. 10 May 2009. <http://bostonreview.net/BR25.1/chandra.html>. Charada, Ben. ―Le Mode discontinu d'écriture ou le jeu des possibles dans La Lenteur de Milan Kundera.‖ Isabelle Chod (ed.), Poétique de la discontinuité de 1870 à nos jours. Clermont-Ferrand: Presses Universitaires Blaise Pascal, 2004. 145-164. Ch‘ien, Evelyn Nien-Ming. Weird English. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 2004. Childs, Peter, Contemporary Novelists: British Fiction Since 1970. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Clément, Murielle. ―Aléas identitaires dans Le Testament français d‘Andreï Makine.‖ Dalhousie French Studies. 74-75 (2006): 297-311. Clifford, James. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1997. 279 Collins, Glenn. ―Screen Writer Turns to the Novel to Tell of Race and Class in London.‖ New York Times. 24 May 1990. 15 November 2008. <http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C0CE4D61530F937A15756C0 A966958260>. Crépeau, Jean-François. ―Le récit subversif de Dany Laferrière.‖ Lettres québécoises 137 (Fall 2010): 26. Cuevas, Susanne. Babylon and Golden City: Representations of London in Black and Asian British Novels Since the 1990s. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag, 2008. D‘Aguiar, Fred. ―Against Black British Literature.‖ Tibisiri: Caribbean Writers and Critics. Ed. Maggie Butcher. Coventry: Dangaroo, 1989. 106-114. Dalleo, Raphael. ―Colonization in Reverse: White Teeth as Caribbean Novel.‖ Tracey L. Walters (ed.). Zadie Smith: Critical Essays. New York: Peter Lang, 2008. 65-83. Damrosch, David. What is World Literature? Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2003. Dayal, Samir. ―Min(d)ing the Gap: South Asian Americans and Diaspora.‖ A Part, Yet Apart: South Asians in Asian America. Lavina D. Shankar and Rajini Srikanth (Eds.). Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1998. 235 ‐265. Delanty, Gérard. Inventing Europe: Idea, Identity, Reality. New York: St. Martin‘s Press, 1995. 280 Desai, Kiran. Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1998. ---. The Inheritance of Loss. New York: Grove Press, 2006. Dodero, Camille. ―A Writer‘s Truth.‖ Boston Phoenix. 18-24 July 2003. 10 December 2008. <http://bostonphoenix.com/boston/news_features/qa/documents/03028816.asp>. Donadio, Rachel. ―The Whole Circle.‖ PEN America: A Journal for Writers and Readers. 8 (2008): 168-177. Donnell, Alison. ―Nation and Contestation: Black British Writing.‖ Wasafiri 36 (Summer 2002): 11-17. Dupont, Louis and Nathalie Lemarchand. ―Official Multiculturalism in Canada: Between Virtue and Politics.‖ Grant H. Cornwell and Eve Walsh Stoddard (Eds.). Global Multiculturalism: Comparative Perspectives on Ethnicity, Race, and Nation. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2001. 309-335. Elkins, Ruth. ―Zadie Smith: Taking Fame with a Grain of Salt.‖ Deutsche Welle, 2003. 10 December 2008. <http://www.inspiredminds.de/detail.php?id=13>. Emck, Katy. ―Russian Dreams.‖ Contemporary Literary Criticism. vol. 198. Detroit: Gale Research Co. 1995. 223. 281 Ezard, John. ―First-Timer Beats the Odds to Take Booker Prize that Eluded Her Mother.‖ The Guardian. 11 October 2006. 17 March 2009. <http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2006/oct/11/books.bookerprize2006>. Feay, Suzi. ―More Than Just White Teeth.‖ Independent. 14 January 2001. 10 December 2008. <http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/more-than-just-white-teeth- 702117.html>. Fridman, Viviana. ―Les Immigrants d‘Eva Perón. A la recherche d‘une identité rêvée.‖ Caroline Désy, Véronique Fauvelle, Viviana Fridman and Pascale Maltais (Eds.). Une Oeuvre indisciplinaire: Mémoire, texte et identité chez Régine Robin. Lévis, Québec: Les Presses de l‘Université Laval, 2007. 175-192. Garnett, Helena. ―Writing at the Margin: an Introduction to the Exile Novels of Andreï Makine, Milan Kundera and Rodica Iulian.‖ Yvette Rocheron and Christopher Rolfe (eds.). Shifting frontiers of France and Francophonie. Oxford, New York: Peter Lang, 2004. 287-306. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1992. ---. Postcolonial Melancholia. New York, NY: Columbia UP, 2004. Ghosh, Bishnupriya. When Borne Across: Literary Cosmopolitics in the Contemporary Indian Novel. New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London: Rutgers UP, 2004. 282 Goldberg, David Theo (Ed.). Multiculturalism: A Critical Reader. Oxford UK & Cambridge USA: Blackwell, 1994. Gordon, Avery F. and Christopher Newfield (Eds.). Mapping Multiculturalism. Minneapolis / London: U Minnesota P, 1996. Green, Mary Jean. ―The Québec Novel Today: Multiple Perspectives.‖ The French Review 67. 6. (May 1994): 922-29. Gunn, Giles. ―Introduction: Globalizing Literary Studies.‖ PMLA 116.1 (2001): 16-31. Hall, Stuart. ―Minimal Selves.‖ Identity, the Real Me: Post-Modernism and the Question of Identity. ICA Documents 6, 1987. 44-46. ---. ―Cultural Identity and Diaspora.‖ Identity: Community, Culture, Difference. Jonathan Rutherford (ed.). London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990. 222-237. ---. ―New Ethnicities.‖ David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (eds.). Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. London and New York: Routledge, 2001 [1996]. 441-49. ---. ―Conclusion: the Multicultural Question.‖ Barnor Hesse (ed.). Un/Settled Multiculturalisms: Diasporas, Entanglements, Transruptions. London; New York: Zed Books, 2000. 209-41. 283 Harel, Simon. Les Passages obligés de l’écriture migrante. Montréal, Québec: XYZ Editeur, 2005. Hashmi, Alamgir. Pakistani Literature: The Contemporary English Writers. Islamabad: Gulmohar, 1987 [1978]. Hattenstone, Simon. ―White Knuckle Ride.‖ Guardian. 11 Dec. 2000. 10 Dec. 2008.<http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/generalfiction/story/0,6000,40959 1,00.html>. Head, Dominic. ―Zadie Smith's White Teeth: Multiculturalism for the Millennium.‖ Contemporary British Fiction. Eds. Richard J. Lane, Rod Mengham and Philip Tew. Cambridge: Polity, 2003. 106-19. Hesse, Barnor (ed.). Un/Settled Multiculturalisms: Diasporas, Entanglements, Transruptions. London; New York: Zed Books, 2000. Hitchcock, Peter. ―Decolonizing (the) English.‖ South Atlantic Quarterly 100.3 (Summer 2001): 749-71. Hollinger, David. Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism. New York: BasicBooks, 1995. Huggan, Graham. The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins. London and New York: Routledge, 2001. 284 Jay, Paul.―Beyond Discipline? Globalization and the Future of English.‖ PMLA 116.1 (2001): 32-47. Kakutani, Michiko. ―Books of The Times: Coming of Age in England When India Was In.‖ New York Times. 15 May 1990. 16 November 2008. <http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C0CE0D8113CF936A25756C 0A966958260>. ---. ―Books of the Times; Quirky, Sassy and Wise in a London of Exiles.‖ New York Times. 25 April 2000. 10 December 2008. <http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=990CE4DA1530F936A15757C 0A9669C8B63>. Kaleta, Kenneth C. Hanif Kureishi: Postcolonial Storyteller. Austin: U of Texas P, 1998. Kellman, Steven G. The Translingual Imagination. Lincoln and London: U of Nebraska P, 2000. Khordoc, Catherine. ―Les Deux ‗Autres‘: la figure de l‘autochtone dans l‘écriture migrante.‖ Etudes Canadiennes. Canadian Studies 56 (June 2004): 143-53. Klaus, Peter. ―La Québécoite et Berlins chantiers – Quelques aperçus de l‘univers urbain polymorphe chez Régine Robin.‖ Caroline Désy, Véronique Fauvelle, Viviana Fridman and Pascale Maltais (Eds.). Une Oeuvre indisciplinaire: Mémoire, texte et identité chez Régine Robin. Lévis, Québec: Les Presses de l‘Université Laval, 2007. 83-96. 285 Knorr, Katherine. ―Andreï Makine‘s Poetics of Nostalgia.‖ The New Criterion. 14.7 (1996): 32-36. Kovacevic, Natasa. ―History on Speed: Media and the Politics of Forgetting in Milan Kundera‘s Slowness.‖ MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 52.3 (Fall 2006): 634-55. Kundera, Milan. L’Art du Roman. Paris: Gallimard, 1986. ---. The Art of the Novel. [Trans. Linda Asher] New York: Grove Press, 1988. ---. Les Testaments trahis. Paris: Gallimard-Jeunesse, 1995. ---. Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts. New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1995. ---. La Lenteur. Paris: Gallimard, 1998 [1995]. ---. Slowness. [Trans. Linda Asher] New York: HarperCollins, 1996. ---. L’Identité. Paris: Gallimard, 2000 [1997]. 286 ---. Identity. New York: Harper Flamingo, 1998. --. L’Ignorance. Paris: Gallimard, 2000. ---. Ignorance. [Trans. Linda Asher] New York: HarperCollins, 2002. ---. Le Rideau: Essai en sept parties. Paris: Gallimard, 2005. ---. The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts. [Trans. Linda Asher] New York: Harper Perennial, 2006. Kureishi, Hanif. The Buddha of Suburbia. London: Faber & Faber, 1990. ---. ―The Rainbow Sign.‖ In My Beautiful Launderette and Other Writings. London: Faber and Faber, 1996: 71-102. ---. Gabriel’s Gift. New York: Scribner, 2001. Labi, Nadia. ―Of Roots and Family Trees.‖ Time. 30 April 2000. 15 November 2008. <http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,44008,00.html?iid=chix- sphere>. 287 Laferrière, Dany. Comment faire l’amour avec un Nègre sans se fatiguer. Montréal: VLB Éditeur, 1985. ---. How to Make Love to a Negro: A Novel. Trans. David Homel. Toronto: The Coach House Press, 1987. ---. Je suis fatigué. Outremont: Lanctôt Éditeur, 2001. ---. Je suis un écrivain japonais. Montréal: Boréal, 2009. ---. L’Enigme du retour. Montréal: Boréal, 2009. Lapierre, Nicole. ―Une Femme déplacée.‖ Caroline Désy, Véronique Fauvelle, Viviana Fridman and Pascale Maltais (Eds.). Une Oeuvre indisciplinaire: Mémoire, texte et identité chez Régine Robin. Lévis, Québec: Les Presses de l‘Université Laval, 2007. 213-220. Lee, Robert A. Other Britain, Other British: Contemporary Multicultural Fiction. London: Pluto Press, 1995. Levy, Andrea. Small Island. London: Review, 2004. Lewycka, Marina. Strawberry Fields. New York: Penguin Books, 2008 [Two Caravans. London: Fig Tree, 2007]. 288 Lionnet, Françoise and Shu-Mei Shih (Eds.). Minor Transnationalism. Durham: Duke UP, 2005. Lottman, Herbert R. ―From Russia – and France – with Love.‖ Contemporary Literary Criticism. 198. Detroit: Gale Research Co. 1995. 222-223. Lowe, Jan. ―No More Lonely Londoners.‖ Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 9. (March 2001): 166-180. 29 November 2006. 10 December 2008<http://inscribe.iupress.org/doi/abs/10.2979/SAX.2001.-.9.166>. Lupu, Gabriela. ―Marie-France Ionesco Gives Another Blow To Romanian Theatre.‖ Art Act Magazine 72. June 21, 2010. 21 February 2011 <http://www.artactmagazine.ro/marie-france-ionesco-gives-another-blow-to- romanian-theatre.html>. Makine, Andreï. Cette France qu'on oublie d'aimer. Paris: Flammarion, 2006. ---. Le Testament français. Paris: Folio, 1995. ---. Dreams of My Russian Summers. New York: Arcade Publishing, 1997. ---. ―La Question Française.‖ La Nouvelle Revue Française. 517 (February 1996): 4- 19. 289 Masson, Sophie. ―An Interview with Andrei Makine.‖ Quadrant. 42.11 (November 1998): 62-63. Maxey, Ruth. ―Interview: Meena Alexander.‖ MELUS: The Journal of the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States 31.2 (Summer 2006): 21- 39. McCabe, Colin. ―Interview: Hanif Kureishi on London.‖ Critical Quarterly 41.3 (1999): 37-56. McCrum, Robert. ―Booker Beats the Odds.‖ The Guardian. 11 October 2006. 18 March 2009. <http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2006/oct/11/morebooker>. McLeod, John. ―Some Problems with ‗British‘ in a ‗Black British Canon.‘‖ Wasafiri 36. (Summer 2002): 56-59. Mercer, Kobena. Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies. New York & London: Routledge, 1994. Merritt, Stephanie. ―Interview: Zadie Smith.‖ Observer. 16 January 2000. 10 December 2008. <http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2000/jan/16/fiction.zadiesmith>. Mishra, Vijay. ―The Diasporic Imaginary: Theorizing the Indian Diaspora.‖ Textual Practice 10.3. (1996): 421-447. 290 Moisan, Clément and Renate Hildebrand, Ces Étrangers du Dedans: Une Histoire de l’Écriture Migrante au Québec, 1937-1997. Québec: Nota Bene, 2001. Moore-Gilbert, Bart. ―Hanif Kureishi‘s The Buddha of Suburbia: Hybridity in Contemporary Cultural Theory and Artistic Practice.‖ Q/W/E/R/T/Y: Arts, Littératures & Civilisations du Monde Anglophone 7 (Oct. 1997): 191-207. ---. Hanif Kureishi. Manchester and New York: Manchester UP, 2001. Moretti, Franco. ―Conjectures on World Literature.‖ New Left Review 1 (2000): 54-68. Moss, Laura. ―The Politics of Everyday Hybridity: Zadie Smith's White Teeth.‖ Wasafiri: The Transnational Journal of International Writing 39 (Summer 2003): 11-17. Moss, Stephen. ―White Teeth by Zadie Smith.‖ Guardian. 26 January 2000. 10 December 2008. <http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2000/jan/26/fiction.zadiesmith>. Nasta, Susheila. Home Truths: Fictions of the South Asian Diaspora in Britain. New York: Palgrave, 2002. Nazarova, Nina. Andreï Makine: deux facettes de son œuvre. Paris: L‘Harmattan, 2005. 291 Ndiaye, Christiane. Introduction aux littératures francophones: Afrique, Caraïbe, Maghreb. Montréal: Presses de l‘Université de Montréal, 2004. Nepveu, Pierre. L’Écologie du réel: mort et naissance de la littérature québécoise contemporaine. Montréal: Boréal, 1988. O‘Grady, Kathleen. ―White Teeth: A Conversation with Author Zadie Smith.‖ Atlantis. 27.1. Fall/Winter 2002: 105-11. O‘Hagan, Sean. ―Zadie Bites Back.‖ Observer. 25 August 2002. 14 December 2008. <http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2002/aug/25/fiction.bookerprize2002>. Orsini, Francesca. ―India in the Mirror of World Literature.‖ Debating World Literature. Christopher Prendergast (Ed.). London; New York: Verso, 2004. 319-33. Pally, Marcia. ―Kureishi like a Fox.‖ Film Comment 22.5 (Sept. 1986): 50-55. Passot, Agnes. ―Andreï Makine: la belle langue de France.‖ Les Carnets d’Etudes. 400.6. (June 2004): 837-40. Patterson, Christina ―A Willesden Ring of Confidence.‖ Independent. 22 January 2000. 10 December 2008. <http://arts.independent.co.uk/books/features/article292446.ece>. 292 Pérez Firmat, Gustavo. Life on the Hyphen: The Cuban-American Way. Austin, TX: U of Texas P, 1994. Phillips, Caryl. ―Mixed and Matched.‖ Observer. 9 January 2000. 10 December 2008. <http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/generalfiction/0,,120151,00.html>. Reprinted as White Teeth by Zadie Smith‖ in A New World Order: Selected Essays. London: Secker & Warburg, 2001. 283-287. Phillips, John. ―‗L‘Insoutenable légèreté du rire:‘ Laughter and Power in Milan Kundera‘s La Lenteur and Vivant Denon‘s Point de Lendemain.‖ John Parkin and John Phillips (eds.). Laughter and Power. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2006. 147-158. Pichova, Hana. ―Milan Kundera and the Identity of Central Europe.‖ Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek (ed.). Comparative Central European Culture. West Lafayette: Purdue UP, 2001. 103-114. Pons, Anne. "Makine: Non, il n‘a pas changé." L'Express. 23 May 1996: 126-27. Safran, Gabriella. ―Andrei Makine‘s Literary Bilingualism and the Critics.‖ Comparative Literature. 55.3 (2003): 246-265. Porra, Véronique. ―Un Russe en Atlantide: Andreï Makine, du discours littéraire à la citoyenneté.‖ János Riesz and Véronique Porra (eds.). Français et Francophones. Tendances centrifuges et centripètes dans les littératures françaises/francophones d’aujourd’hui. Bayreuth: Schultz & Stellmacher, 1998. 67-85. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge, 1992. 293 Purdy, Anthony. ―Shattered Voices: The Poetics of Exile in Quebec Literature.‖ David Bevan (Ed.). Literature and Exile. Amsterdam – Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1990. 23- 36. Quinn, Anthony. ―The New England.‖ New York Times, 30 April 2000. 10 December 2008. <http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9901E4DF1E31F933A05757C0 A9669C8B63>. Rajan, Gita and Shailja Sharma. New Cosmopolitanisms: South Asians in the US. Stanford , CA: Stanford UP, 2006. Ramesh, Randeep. ―Book-burning Threat Over the Town‘s Portrayal in Booker-winning Novel.‖ The Guardian. 2 November 2006. 15 March 2009. <http://www.guardian.co.uk/india/story/0,,1936863,00.html>. Ranasinha, Ruvani. South Asian Writers in Twentieth-Century Britain: Culture in Translation. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007. Ricard, François, ―Le Roman où aucun mot ne serait sérieux: notes sur La lenteur de Milan Kundera.‖ Benoît Melançon (ed.). Miscellanées en l'honneur de Gilles Marcotte. Montréal: Fides, 1995. 241-250. Rice, Alison. ―Francophone Postcolonialism from Eastern Europe.‖ International Journal of Francophone Studies 10.3 (2007): 313-328. 294 Rizek, Martin. Comment devient-on Kundera? Images de l’écrivain, écrivain de l’image. Paris: L‘Harmattan, 2001. Robin, Régine. La Québécoite. Montréal, Québec: XYZ, 1983. ---. The Wanderer. [Trans. Phyllis Aronoff] Montréal, Québec: Alter Ego Editions, 1997. ---. Le Roman mémoriel. Montréal: Divers, 1997. Rochester, Sophie. ―Exclusive Interview with Kiran Desai.‖ October 2006. 17 March 2009. <http://www.themanbookerprize.com/perspective/qanda/40>. Rothstein, Mervyn. ―India‘s Post-Rushdie Generation: Young Writers Leave Magic Realism and Look at Reality.‖ New York Times. 3 July 2000. 17 March 2009. <http://select.nytimes.com/search/restricted/article?res=F30C16FC395D0C708C DDAE0894D8404482>. Rushdie, Salman. The Satanic Verses. London: Vintage Books, 2006 [1988]. ---. ―‗Commonwealth Literature‘ Does Not Exist.‖ Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981-1991. London: Granta Books; New York, N.Y.: Viking, 1991. 61-70. 295 Rustomji-Kerns, Roshni. ―In a Field of Dreams: Conversations with Meena Alexander.‖ Weber Studies: An Interdisciplinary Humanities Journal. 15.1 (Winter 1998): 18- 27. Safran, Gabriella. ―Andrei Makine‘s Literary Bilingualism and the Critics.‖ Comparative Literature. 55.3 (2003): 246-265. Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1978. Sawhney, Hirsch. ―In Conversation: Hanif Kureishi with Hirsch Sawhney.‖ July/August 2006. 10 December 2008. <http://brooklynrail.org/2006/07/books/hanif-kureishi- with-hirsh-sawhney>. Scarry, Elaine. ―The Difficulty of Imagining Other People‖ (100-106?). Martha Nussbaum. For Love of Country? Debating the Limits of Patriotism. Boston: Beacon Press, 1996. Schoene, Berthold. ―Herald of Hybridity: The Emancipation of Difference in Hanif Kureishi‘s The Buddha of Suburbia.‖ International Journal of Cultural Studies 1.1 (1998): 109-28. Sen, Asha. ―Re-writing History: Hanif Kureishi and the Politics of Black Britain.‖ Passages: Journal of Transnational and Transcultural Studies 2.1. 61-80. 296 Shankar, Lavina D. ―No Nation Woman‖ Writes Her Self: War and the Return Home in Meena Alexander‘s Memoirs.‖ Ethnic Life Writing and Histories: Genres, Performance, and Culture. Rocío G. Davis, Jaume Aurell and Ana Beatriz Delgado (Eds.). Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2007. 76-96. ---. ―Postcolonial Diasporics ‗Writing in Search of a Homeland‘: Meena Alexander‘s Manhattan Music, Fault Lines, and The Shock of Arrival.‖ LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory 12.3 (September 2001): 285 ‐312. ---. and Rajini Srikanth, eds. A Part, Yet Apart: South Asians in Asian America. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1998. Simon, Sherry. ―La Ville et ses langues.‖ Caroline Désy, Véronique Fauvelle, Viviana Fridman and Pascale Maltais (Eds.). Une Oeuvre indisciplinaire: Mémoire, texte et identité chez Régine Robin. Lévis, Québec: Les Presses de l‘Université Laval, 2007. 97-108. Sijie, Dai. Balzac et la Petite Tailleuse chinoise. Paris: Editions Gallimard, 2000. Smith, Zadie. White Teeth. New York: Random House, 2000. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Outside in the Teaching Machine. New York & London: Routledge, 1993. 297 ---. ―Can the Subaltern Speak?‖ Colonial Discourse and Post-colonial Theory: A Reader. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (eds.). New York: Columbia UP, 1994. 66-111. ---. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1999. Srikanth, Rajini. The World Next Door: South Asian American Literature and the Idea of America. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2004. Stein, Mark. Black British Literature: Novels of Transformation. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2004. Steiner, George. Extraterritorial: Papers on Literature and the Language Revolution. New York, NY: Atheneum, 1971. Taras, Ray. ―A la Recherche du pays perdu: Andreï Makine‘s Russia.‖ Contemporary Literary Criticism. 198. Detroit: Gale Research Co. 1995. 232-234. Taylor, Alan. ―The Guerilla of Suburbia.‖ Sunday Herald. 3 November 2002. 16 November 2008. <http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-9992762.html>. Tew, Philip. The Contemporary British Novel. London: Continuum, 2007 [2004]. 298 Thompson, Molly. ―‘Happy Multicultural Land‘? The Implications of an ‗Excess of Belonging‘ in Zadie Smith‘s White Teeth.‖ Write Black, Write British: From Post Colonial to Black British Literature. Ed. Kadija Sesay. Hertford: Hansib, 2005. 122-40. Tölölyan, Khachig. ―Rethinking Diaspora(s): Stateless Power in the Transnational Moment.‖ Diaspora 5.1 (1996): 3-36. Tolstaya, Tatyana. ―Love Story.‖ Contemporary Literary Criticism, vol. 198. Detroit: Gale Research Co. 1995. 223-226. Tonkin, Boyd. ―Confessions of a Tease; Profile: Hanif Kureishi.‖ Independent. 23 October 1999. 15 November 2008. <http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2- 5021900.html>. Tremain, Rose. The Road Home. London: Chatto & Windus, 2007. Verduyn, Christl. ―L‘éth(n)ique, La Québécoite et l‘écriture migrante québécoise.‖ Tessera 29 (Winter 2000/2001): 73-81. Wachtel, Eleanor. ―An Interview with Kiran Desai.‖ Brick 79 (Summer 2007): 90-108. 299 Walters, Tracey L. ―‘We‘re All English Now Mate Like It or Lump It‘: The Black/Britishness of Zadie Smith‘s White Teeth.‖ Write Black, Write British: From Post Colonial to Black British Literature. Ed. Kadija Sesay. Hertford: Hansib, 2005. 314-22. Wanner, Adrian. ―Gained in Translation: Andreï Makine‘s Novel Le Testament français.‖ Literary Imagination: The Review of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics. 4.1 (2002): 111-126. Werbner, Pnina.―Introduction: The Materiality of Diaspora – Between Aesthetic and ‗Real‘ Politics.‖ Diaspora 9.1 (2000): 5-20. Woods, Michelle. Translating Milan Kundera. Cleveland, Buffalo, Toronto: Multilingual Matters Ltd., 2006. Yousaf, Nasem. Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia: A Reader’s Guide New York and London: Continuum, 2002. Yu-Cheng, Lee. ―Expropriating the Authentic: Cultural Politics in Hanif Kureishi‘s The Buddha of Suburbia.‖ Euramerica, 26.3 (September 1996): 1-19.

Abstract (if available)

Linked assets

University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Conceptually similar

PDF

Paper pavilion and routes through transnational adoption

PDF

Colonial ventures: the poetics of migration, colonization, and labor in francophone North America

PDF

Nostalgia for the future to come: National consciousness in post-87 Taiwanese literature and cinema

PDF

Sadness after postmodernism: mood in contemporary fiction

PDF

Luso-Hispanic archipelagos: the imaginary of Asia in Brazilian and Cuban literary and visual culture

PDF

Errant maternity: threatening femininity in Caribbean discourses of family, nation, and revolution

PDF

The poetics of reemergence: psetry, subjectivity, and political violence in the neoliberal age

PDF

Antipodes of Asian American literature: heterolingualism and the Asian Americas

PDF

'L'autre chez nous': defining the national body in French literature, 1800-1848

PDF

Aesthetics of the virtual: modernity, consumption and artifice in three Latin American novels

PDF

The anxiety of interrupted kinship: Transpacific cultures of Korean historical trauma

PDF

The Chinovnik and the Rond-de-cuir: bureaucratic modernity in nineteenth-century Russian and French literature

PDF

Ivoirité: the aesthetics of postcolonial rupture in contemporary Ivorian poetry (critical dissertation); & Century worm (creative dissertation)

PDF

Modernism's poetics of dislocation

PDF

Indias of the mind: responses to cultural nationalism in Indian popular culture post-Hindutva

PDF

Imperial injuries: race, disease, and disability in North American narratives of resistance, 1908-2006

PDF

Becoming darkness: Mexico, the United States and the psychic vanishing of radical blackness

PDF

Writing exile: Vietnamese literature in the diaspora

PDF

Racial ninjas and origami tigers: cultural compartmentalization, gender mediation, Asian illegibility and the orientalization of the Asian American novel

PDF

Between good girls and vile fiends: femininity, alterity and female homosociality in the nineteenth-century British Gothic novel

Asset Metadata

Creator Sabo, Oana (author)

Core Title The world in the nation: Migration in contemporary anglophone and francophone fiction; 1980-2010

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Comparative Literature

Publication Date 04/16/2013

Defense Date 03/09/2011

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag contemporary fiction,diaspora,francophonie,immigration,OAI-PMH Harvest,postcolonial studies

Place Name Africa (continents), Caribbean (region), eastern Europe (region), North America (continents), south Asia (region), western Europe (region)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Diaz, Roberto Ignacio (committee chair), Meeker, Natania (committee member), Nguyen, Viet Thanh (committee member), Pinkus, Karen (committee member)

Creator Email oanasabo@yahoo.com,osabo@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m3750

Unique identifier UC1225465

Identifier etd-Sabo-4453 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-453649 (legacy record id),usctheses-m3750 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Sabo-4453.pdf

Dmrecord 453649

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Sabo, Oana

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu