Annamarie Jagose’s Slow Water (2003), a novel which looks back to the period before Pākehā occupation of these islands solidified into formal colonial rule, begins, curiously and somewhat provocatively, with a scene of settler absence: “All the night, from the darkness of my blanket, I watch the dead houses, Mr Clarke’s house, Mr Williams’s house, Mr Davis’s house, all dead. Still dead, in the first curve of daylight. . . . The church roof points at the sky and you are gone from here.”[i] Stressing reciprocity of desire as one of the relations made possible by colonial “entanglement,”[ii] this letter, narrated by Philip Tohi, intimates the spectacle of eradication by which the expulsion of the missionary William Yate from the Church Missionary Society (CMS) was both expressed and enacted: “All your books are burned, your bed, even the picture of your sister. . . . Ashes from the fire fill my mouth and again I cry” (2). NOTES [i] Annamarie Jagose, Slow Water (Wellington: Victoria UP, 2003), 1. Subsequent citations given parenthetically in text. [ii] The term is Tony Ballantyne’s, who notes that “while thinking about empires through the metaphors of ‘meetings’ and ‘encounters’ allows us to imagine stable and discrete cultural formations existing after cross-cultural engagements,” the term “entanglement” better evinces the ways in which the period preceding formal colonisation drew together and integrated cultural thought-worlds in “new and durable, if unpredictable, ways.” Tony Ballantyne, Entanglements of Empire: Missionaries, Māori and the Question of the Body (Auckland: Auckland UP, 2015), 17.
“Culture is ordinary: that is the first fact.”[i]Williams’s famous phrase may, in the hands of his latter-day epigones in a depoliticised institutional Cultural Studies, have been turned towards justifications for the study of and accommodation to what is, but, in its originating New Left moment, this was always an assertion of what might be. Ordinary culture, and the cultures of ordinary people, were conceived, by Williams and his collaborators, as part of “a genuine revolution, transforming [people] and institutions; continually extended and deepened by the actions of millions, continually and variously opposed by explicit reaction and by the pressure of habitual forms and ideas.”[ii] Williams wrote, thought, and organised across his varied career as a socialist intellectual and activist, offering resources of hope and strategic reflections on how cultural work might contribute to the anti-capitalist project of working-class self-organisation and social transformation. That project, difficult enough in the post-war period of his own life and all the more urgent and complex in its conception in our own, the era of Trumpian reaction and ecological collapse, demanded that committed intellectuals parse the “dominant” culture—the culture of capital—for signs of the “emergent,” the collectivity to come, and traces of the “residual,” habits, products and processes from previous class societies carried over into, and deployed, in capitalist cultures.[iii] Dominant, residual and emergent were terms Williams used to map the complex and internally contradictory work of culture in class society, and to trace some of its tears, cracks and openings. The vocabulary he bequeathed us, from “structures of feeling” to “long revolution,” has a rich relevance for the rickety and crisis-prone world we find ourselves in now, after the holograms of post-modernism have ceased to be projected but before newly-coherent ruling-class images and narratives have formed. There are signs, in everything from Social Reproduction Theory to the so-called Affective Turn, of a Williams revival amongst committed intellectuals today.[iv] Materialist criticism has returned for our bad new days. [i] Raymond Williams, “Culture is Ordinary,” in Conviction, ed. Norman MacKenzie (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1958), 75. [ii] Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (London: Penguin, 1961), 10. [iii] See Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 121–28. [iv] See, inter alia, Tithi Bhattacharya, ed., Social Reproduction Theory (London: Pluto, 2016), an exhilaratingly revisionist socialist-feminist text studded with Williams references and asides; Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), chapter two; Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), and Jennifer Lawn, Neoliberalism and Cultural Transition in New Zealand 1984–2008: Market Fictions (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016). An extended review of Lawn’s text by Shintaro Kono will appear in the next issue of this journal.
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