Both Eva Hoffman's Lost in Translation (1998) and Edward Said's Out of Place (1999) are memoirs that recount a life of constant adjustments and re-orientations of the self, where the anchoring concept of 'home 'cannot denote a centre upon which their multiple displacements can be tethered. There is no attempt here to imply both of these memoirs can seamlessly be read together in every sense, simply because both are émigré intellectuals; however, their shared trajectory of departures and arrivals crucially foregrounds space in their negotiation of the exilic experience. For both writers, inner dépaysement gives rise to a simultaneous coming to terms with the tensions of belonging that are already apparent within that origin so longed for. To compensate, Hoffman and Said designate language a power of emplacement, in that their shared refuge in it (both linguistic and musical) turns their displaced selves into articulated, and thus inhabited, ones. In configuring the different 'belongings 'their selves undertake, the displacements and arrivals in Lost in Translation and Out of Place advocate a space for autobiography where plural identity is recognised as ontologically cohesive.
Ousmane Sembène's 1975 film Xala, a searing satire about the post-independence Senegalese elite, has received wide scholarly attention for its critique of crony capitalism masquerading as African socialism. This article seeks to examine how Xala approaches the under-studied question of subjectivity under these circumstances, seeking to trace the film's key concern with the effects of such neocolonial conditions upon the wider populace. Proposing that the central allegory of Sembène's filmthe native elite as complicit against and/or unable to spearhead national decolonisationis not the final but the starting point of the analysis it offers of the relationship between subjectivity and arrested decolonisation, this article argues that Xala centres land dispossession as the primary issue in post-independence Senegal both because it sabotages the redistributive promise of independence, and because it strips people of the material moorings of their subjectivities. In three interconnected discussions of sartorial self-fashioning, the politics of La Francophonie, and the kinship networks broken by land theft, I propose that Xala is an exposé of how structures and subjectivities are inseparably bound under conditions of neocolonialism, with the futurity of national decolonisation dependent on transforming both.
Armah's The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968) has been read in terms of its political criticism of the native elite in Nkrumah's post-independence Ghana, and for its treatment of individual consciousnessbut these elements have been treated largely in isolation from each other. This article argues that the novel establishes a nuanced interdependency between subjectivity and the material everyday of neocolonialism, grounding its exploration of the psychic strain of such conditions on its exposé of Ghana's neocolonial economy. Defining subjectivity in Fanonian terms, it argues that the multi-temporality of Beautyful Ones, and its treatment of its protagonist's interiority, illustrate how the self and its socio-economic conditions are mutually constitutive, explanatory and effectual. The neocolonial circumstances that Armah's protagonist navigates each day equip him with the consciousness to historicize his psychic malaise. In this way, the novel gestures towards what a resistant subject, responsive to such corrupt conditions, might be.
Press, 2020"This poem cannot find words / this poem repeats itself," begins the Trinidadborn Canadian writer Dionne Brand in her poem titled "October 19th, 1983." This self-reflexive opening is underwritten by shock, confusion, and even trauma. The poem goes on to list a series of names in a repetitive refrain that suggests disbelief: "Maurice is dead / Jackie is dead." Laurie Lambert argues in Comrade Sister: Caribbean Feminist Revisions of the Grenada Revolution that Brand's stuttering attempt to come to terms, through poetry, with the violence of what transpired in the Caribbean island country of Grenada on October 19, 1983, speaks to how writing functions as a "certain structure of healing" in the aftermath of revolutionary struggle and defeat (Lambert 139). In 1979, the Marxist-Leninist New Jewel movement (NJM) under Maurice Bishop overthrew the government of Grenada. While the anti-imperialist, social democratic vision of the NJM transformed Grenadian infrastructure, agriculture, and education for the better, "a thread of violence" too often ran through the everyday lives of those in whose name revolutionary change was being sought (Lambert 10). This culminated in the fratricidal outcome of which Brand writes-or rather, "cannot find words" to write-wherein a combination of internal party conflicts and external destabilization turned the revolution murderous of its own. The US military invasion that followed, which included aerial bombing and the deliberate erasure of evidence, was retraumatizing and further complicated the revolution's legacy.Comrade Sister turns to women's perspectives in order to grapple with the conflicting realities of this period of Grenadian history, itself part of a longue durée of radical political struggle in the Caribbean that dates back to the genocide of its indigenous peoples and plantation slavery. Lambert's study rests on two productive and urgent (re-)conceptualizations. One is recognizing the "queer temporality" of revolution, wherein "ideas of revolution as a chronological project of achievement" must be disrupted in order to understand, in full, how the Grenadian Revolution is imagined and remembered (127). The second is an expansion of what constitutes everyday resistance, political struggle, and revolutionary history-making-even and especially where those engaged in these everyday struggles feel ambivalent toward the revolutionary state, even if they
Buchi Emecheta’s novel about the Nigerian Civil War, Destination Biafra (1982), challenges war historiography in ways that scholarship designating it a “female perspective” on the conflict can sometimes overlook. This article focuses on how Emecheta deploys a dual narrative approach that weaves an omniscient narrator with diverse Nigerian women’s points of view in order to position their lived experiences and subjective knowledges as collectively amounting to the definitive history of the Civil War. This draws the reader’s attention to the gendered effects of the civil war as the lens whereby which all facets of the war can be understood - even and especially its macro causes in neocolonialism and petrocapitalism. By writing women who know the economic imperatives behind the conflict; exercise agency under dangerous circumstances; and employ methods of survival that safeguard others, Emecheta reveals the gendered politics of war historiography, and tests these politics by collapsing distinctions between what is habitually conceived of as the war front (and therefore to be narrated by active combatants), and everywhere else (to be narrated by witnesses, refugees, or survivors). Destination can therefore be understood as an attempt to intervene directly in historiographical method, as it rejects the designation of women’s war experiences as mere addenda and questions gendered expectations of where to look for and find historical truths.
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