Introduction: Frameworks History & Memory
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- Representing the ‘West’
- Postcolonial States
- Postcolonial Environment
- Selected Bibliography
- District 9 (2009)
| Introduction: Frameworks
History & Memory The Collective memory is not the same as formal history [….] General history starts only when tradition ends and the social memory is fading or breaking up. So long as remembrance continues to exist, it is useless to set it down in writing or otherwise fix it in memory. Likewise the need to write history of a period, a society, or even a person is only aroused when the subject is already too distant in the past to allow for the testimony of those who preserve some remembrance of it [….] When this occurs, the only means of preserving such remembrances is to write them down in a coherent narrative, for the writings remain even though the thought and the spoken words die. If memory exists only when the remembering subject, individual or group, feels that it goes back to its remembrances in continuous movement, how could history ever be a memory, since there is a break in continuity between society reading this history and the past who acted in or witnessed the events? [….] History divides the sequence of centuries into periods, just as the content of a tragedy is divided into several acts. But in a play the same plot is carried from one act to another and the same characters remain true to form to the end, their feelings and emotions developing in an unbroken movement. History, however, gives the impression that everything […] is transformed from one period to another. (Maurice Halbwachs, The Collective Memory) Memory and history, far from being synonymous, appear now to be in fundamental opposition. Memory is life, borne by living societies founded in its name. It remains in permanent evolution, open to the dialectic of remembering and forgetting [….] History, on the other hand, is the reconstruction, always problematic and incomplete, of what is no longer [….] At the heart of history is a critical discourse that is antithetical to spontaneous memory. History is perpetually suspicious of memory, and its true mission is to suppress and destroy it [….] these lieux de memoire are fundamentally remains, the ultimate embodiments of a memorial consciousness that has barely survived in a historical age that calls out for memory because it has abandoned it [….] Museums, archives, cemeteries, festivals, anniversaries, treaties, depositions, monuments sanctuaries, fraternal orders – these are the boundary stones of another age, illusions of eternity. (Pierre Nora, ‘Between Memory and History’) The traumatized, we might say, carry an impossible history within them, or they become themselves the symptom of a history that they cannot entirely possess. Yet what can it mean that history occurs as a symptom? [….] The problem arises not only in regard to those listen to the traumatized, not knowing how to establish the reality of their hallucinations and dreams; it occurs rather and most disturbingly often within the very knowledge and experience of the traumatized themselves. For on the one hand, the dreams, hallucinations and thoughts are absolutely literal, unassimilable to associative chains of meaning [….] Yet the fact that this scene or thought is not a possessed knowledge, but itself possesses, at will, the one it inhabits, often produce a deep uncertainty as to its very truth. (Cathy Caruth, ‘Trauma and Experience’) A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. (Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History) Representing the ‘West’ Thus, although the ‘Orient’ may have appeared in Oriental Studies to be a term with a concrete referent, a real region of the world with real attributes, in practice it took on meaning only in the context of another term, ‘the west’. And in this process is the tendency to essentialize, to reduce the complex entities that are being compared to a set of core features that express the essence of each entity, but only as it stands in contrast to the other. In conventional anthropology, the orientalisms that have attracted critical attention, thus, do not exist on their own. They are matched by anthropologists’ occidentalisms, essentializing simplifications of the West. (James G. Carrier, ‘Introduction’, in James G. Carrier ed., Occidentalism: Images of the West) The phenomenon of “political modernity” – namely, the rule by modern institutions of the state, bureaucracy, and capitalist enterprise – is impossible to think of anywhere in the world without invoking certain categories and concepts, the genealogies of which go deep into the intellectual and even theological traditions of Europe. Concepts such as citizenship, the state, civil society, public sphere, human rights, equality before the law, the individual, distinctions between public and private, democracy, popular sovereignty, social justice, scientific rationality, and so on all bear the burden of European thought and history. One simply cannot think of political modernity without these and other related concepts that found a climactic form in the course of European Enlightenment and the nineteenth century [….] The European colonizer of the nineteenth century both preached this Enlightenment humanism at the colonized and at the same time denied it in practice. But the vision has been powerful in its effects. (Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe) Postcolonial States The colonial state was in every instance a historical formation. Yet its structure everywhere came to share certain fundamental features. I will argue that this was so because everywhere the organization and reorganization of the colonial state was a response to a central and overriding dilemma: the native question. Briefly put, how can a tiny and foreign minority rule over an indigenous majority? To this question, there were two broad answers: direct and indirect rule. Direct rule was Europe’s initial response to the problem of administering colonies. There would be a single legal order, defined by the “civilized” laws of Europe. No “native” institutions would be recognized. Although “natives” would have access to European laws, only those “civlized” would have access to European rights [….] In contrast, indirect rule came to be a mode of domination over a “free” peasantry. Here, land remained a communal – “customary” – possession […] The tribal leadership was either selectively reconstituted as the hierarchy of the local state or freshly imposed where none existed, as in “stateless societies” [….] Clearly, the form of the state that emerged through post independence reform was not the same in every instance. There was a variation […] we can identify two distinct constellations: the conservative and the radical. In the case of the conservative African states, the hierarchy of the local state apparatus, from chiefs to headmen, continued after independence. In the radical African states, though, there seemed to be a marked change […] The result, however, was to develop a uniform, countrywide customary law, applicable to all peasants regardless of ethnic affiliation, functioning alongside a modern law for urban dwellers. (Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject)
I am talking about natural economies that have been disrupted – harmonious and viable economies – adapted to the indigenous population – about food crops destroyed, malnutrition permanently introduced, agricultural development oriented solely toward the benefit of metropolitan countries, about the looting of products, the looting of raw materials. (Aime Cesaire, ‘Discourse on Colonialism’) The complex (and often conflicting-ridden) web, field, or system – whatever we choose to call it – composed of the relationships between human and non-human agents or actors that define the history of the Indian subcontinent is what I understand as ‘environment’ [….] urban spaces and their various relationships with the rural, or even ‘waste’ lands and areas not inhabited by humans, are also major environmental components [….] One of my basic assumptions here has been that despite their obvious commodification as cultural objects in the contemporary global market, the ‘literariness’ of Indian literature in English ought to interest us because of the way in which its inventiveness, alterity and singularity offer a critique of its own status as desirable commodity. And it does so by registering environment simultaneously at the levels of theme and form. (Pablo Mukherjee, Postcolonial Environments) Selected Bibliography Benjamin, Walter, Illuminations (New York, 1968) Carrier, James G. ed., Occidentalism: Images of the West (Oxford, 1995) Caruth, Cathy, ‘Trauma and Experience: Introduction’ in Cathy Caruth (ed.), Trauma:
Cesaire, Aime, ‘Discourse on Colonialism’ in Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, eds., Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory (Hemel Hampstead, 1993) Chakrabarty, Dipesh, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton and Oxford, 2000) Halbawchs, Maurice, The Collective Memory (1950: New York, 1980) Huggan, Graham & Helen Tiffin, Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment (London and New York, 2010) Kaviraj. Sudipta, ‘The Postcolonial State: The Special Case of India’, http://criticalencounters.net/2009/01/19/the-post-colonial-state-sudipta-kaviraj/ Mamdani, Mahmood, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton, 1996) Mukherjee, Upamanyu Pablo, Postcolonial Environments: Nature, Culture and the Contemporary Indian Novel in English (Basingstoke, 2010) Nora, Pierre, ‘Between History and Memory: Les Lieux de Memoire’, Representations 26 (1989) District 9 (2009) Apartheid Allegory? Instantly identified upon its release in 2009 as an ‘apartheid allegory (with aliens)’, District 9, the first feature by South African filmmaker Neill Blomkamp, has achieved phenomenal critical and popular success as a fable rehearsing the conventional reverences of ethnic toleration and multicultural plurality… this rhetoric of multicultural tolerance ultimately collapses in on itself to reveal its fundamental opposite: that is, the compulsory ‘respect’ paid the other becomes simply the positive articulation of (and implicit justification for) ‘his intolerance of my overproximity’ and, therefore, finally of the assertion of one’s own ‘right not to be harassed, which is a right to r remain at a safe distance from others. (Eric D. Smith, Globalization, Utopia and Postcolonial Science Fiction New Maps of Hope) 
District 9 is by and large a very good film and a very hard film to dislike, but here I have managed it. If only because District 9 and James Cameron’s Avatar are two versions of the same film. At the heart of both films is the phenomenon of interspecies transformation, which can easily be understood through the base ideology of racial/cultural transformation. In Avatar the transformation is from white man to noble savage. In District 9 the transformation is from white man to poor black man. What is so startling about both films is that, in taking Kevin Costner’s Dances with Wolves to its logical conclusion, the main character does not only assimilate the “alien” culture but rather transforms bodily into the alien itself. (David Korotky, ‘Neill Blomkamp’s District 9, Young Daguerrotypes, 30 June, 2010) 
The ANC and its constituency did not seem well placed to manage South Africa’s transition into globalization, so South Africa’s corporate sector, the IMF, World Bank, and diplomats launched a concerted exercise … to “adjust” the ANC to the “realities” of globalized capitalism and shift their economic policies. The benefits of market economics, export-led growth, and trickle-down economics were promoted. The proselytizing exercise worked – the ANC was converted to the “Washington consensus” and abandoned the development state and socialism. (P. Eric Louw, The Rise, Fall and Legacy of Apartheid, 2004) 
While the legal exceptionality of the film’s alien internment might at first seem an allegory for the suspension of constitutional law during the officially declared South African State of Emergency in the latter days of apartheid policy (1985–1990), and the aliens’ forced eviction the slum clearances that played such a prominent role in the National Party’s political strategy (a way of both suppressing communist mobilization and inflating urban employment statistics), we should also recall that these actions were directly predicated on the state’s centralized authority to designate discrete “population groups” in order to create a legal framework for cultural separation and territorial partition”. Despite the fact that first contact with the aliens occurs in 1982, squarely in the midst of the National Party’s reign, however, neither the party nor the state plays a significant role in the film, the eponymous slum of which is not cleared until 28 years later, more than 15 years after the election of the African National Congress and the official end of the apartheid order; in fact, the absent South African state is significant only in the conspicuous ceding of its authority to MNU, and no representative of state power (neither human nor architectural nor symbolic) appears in the film. Explicitly directing our attention to this transference of sovereignty, Wickus observes during the preliminary briefing of his crew, “I think it’s a great thing that it’s not the military guys in charge this time”, a point underscored in subsequent scenes depicting the sociopathic military officer Kobus happily taking orders from the MNU director. (Eric D. Smith, Globalization, Utopia and Postcolonial Science Fiction New Maps of Hope) 
In dealing with post-apartheid South Africa, District 9 makes visible new conditions for the experience of a neoliberal landscape. In effect, the visual seductiveness of the mise-en-scène says something about the actually-existing socio-economic and racial conditions in Johannesburg. One could argue that Blomkamp is not interested in valorizing the status of black South Africans who live with constant economic and social dissolution, but rather focuses his attention on the contagious nature of neoliberalism in the post-apartheid now. These sentiments fall in line with Patrick Bond’s account that since the 1990s there has been a gradual shift toward serving the elite in South Africa over those from the disadvantaged classes. A telling sign to how the African National Congress (ANC) went back on their prior socialist policies for every class is found in the “emotional attachment to the principles of the 1955 Freedom Charter with its vague but prominent redistribution slogans: The People shall share in the county’s wealth! The national wealth of our country, the heritage of all South Africans, shall be restored to the people.” There is thus a resonance to how these slogans have failed in Blomkamp’s narrative topoi – whereby racism, class inequality and unemployment do not linger at the edges of the film but instead transmit a competitive and volatile environment that the extraterrestrials and humans alike must try to overcome: South Africa’s adoption of neoliberalism. The conflict between survivalist strategies by the extraterrestrials and the cynicism over urban destitution and “race trouble” enacted by executive power in the film offers a formula for reading the overtones of neoliberalism in South Africa. (Wagner, ‘Zones of Regulation’) 
Directory: fac -> arts -> english -> currentstudents -> undergraduate -> modules -> fulllist -> special -> newlits newlits -> Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things newlits -> Submission: Tuesday 12. 00, Term 2, Week 2 newlits -> Due on 2nd May 2017 (Tuesday, Week 2, Term 3) special -> First Assessed Essay Questions (2,500 or 5,000 words) Due on 10th January 2017 newlits -> First Assessed Essay Questions special -> Instructions: Choose one title to write a 5,000-word critical essay. You must refer to at least two texts we have studied, one of which must be from the second term’s reading list newlits -> Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things newlits -> Introduction: Frameworks History & Memory Share with your friends:
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