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Periods versus Concepts: Space Making and the Question of Postcolonial LiteraryHistory
ato quayson

AFTER BEING EXILED FROM NAZI GERMANY AND COMPLETING THE EXTRAORDINARY MIMESIS IN ISTANBUL IN 1946, ERICH AUERBACH WROTE from Princeton University in 1952, Literary criticism now partici pates in a practical seminar on world history. ... Our philological home is the earth: it can no longer be the nation. Auerbach, who must be reckoned one of the great synthesists and literary histori ans of the twentieth century, was expressing a sentiment that will be familiar to anyone who has thought about world literature from a postcolonial perspective. While postcolonial literary studies may have helped deine the parameters of the practical seminar on world history, its full implications are still somewhat obscured by the ar guments about periodicity that are oten taken as a terminological necessity in applications of the term postcolonial. his is the burden imposed by the temporalizing post-. However, closer scrutiny of the postcolonial suggests that it contains mutually reinforcing periodiz ing and spatial functions. Many of the most common ideas that circulate in the ield, such as colonial encounter, neocolonialism, nationalism and postnationalism, hegemony, transnationalism, di asporas, and globalization, are organized around oten unacknowl edged spatial motifs. he concept of space that implicitly structures usages of postcolonialism is far from inert: there is an active dimen sion of spatializing in them that helps shape the ields distinctive ness. his is because even when the term is deployed exclusively for periodizing purposes, as in showing that the medieval period or Russia today is amenable to a postcolonial analysis, the nature of what is highlighted insistently invokes spatial practices. Once the spatial logic of postcolonialism is brought to the foreground, the complexity of its critical diagnostic as applied in the practical semi nar on world history becomes clearer. hough it is conventional to say that postcolonial studies was born with the publication of Edward Saids landmark Orientalism in 1978 and acquired further insights from Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griiths, and Helen Tiins classic he Empire Writes Back, of 1989,

ATO QUAYSON is professor of English and inaugural director of the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto. He is editor of the two-volume Cambridge History of Postcolonial Literature (Cambridge UP, 2012).

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the prehistory of the term proves slightly more colorful than is generally supposed.1 he earliest use of postcolonial in a largely periodizing, temporal sense (and with a hyphen) in academic writing appeared in a 1910 essay by T.W. Allen in the Journal of Hellenic Studies with reference to minor poets of the pre-Homeric era. Up to 1950 it was used in historical journals mainly with reference to the early American and Latin American republics. The terms first unhyphenated application was apparently in a 1952 essay in language studies. hat essay, by A.R. Dunlap and E.J. Moyne and published in the journal American Speech, dwells on traces of the Finnish language along the Delaware River. Its irst use in literary studies, unhyphenated, was in 1958 in the journal Comparative Literature in an article by Justus M. van der Kroef on the Indonesian colonial novel. By the 1960s and 1970s the term had shited to the ields of African and Paciic area studies, where the two variant uses (hyphenated and unhyphenated) were deployed interchangeably, largely in a temporal sense. Postcolonialism entered the comprehensive MLA International Bibliography in 1967, and in 1981 the listing Forthcoming Meetings and Conferences in PMLA publicized a meeting of the South Pacific Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies on the topic Nationalism, Regionalism and Internationalism in Postcolonial Literature. The word was first mentioned in PMLA articles in 1990 in an introduction to a special issue on African and African American literature by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and an essay by Debra A. Castillo on J.M. Coetzees Dusklands. In all the published usages before 1990, postcolonialism served as a temporal marker for a period ater colonialism, whether in the pre-Homeric era, postindependence America, or various parts of the world in the midtwentieth century after empire. Expanding the reach of the PMLA pieces by Gates and Castillo, the period from the 1990s on, after The Empire Writes Back,

saw a decisive shit of usage from the merely temporal to the more discursive and theoretical when Robert Young, Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, Aijaz Ahmad, Bart MooreGilbert, Ania Loomba, Elleke Boehmer, and Achille Mbembe, among others, provided key parameters for debating the ield. Laura Chrisman and Patrick Williamss 1993 Colonial Discourse and Post-colonial heory: A Reader was the irst collection of essays to present a genealogy of critical orientations in the ield. Ashcrot, Griiths, and Tiins Post-colonial Studies Reader, in a similar format, followed in 1995 and rapidly became a standard text. Although the field expanded and consolidated in the 1990s, 1983 must be taken as the totemic date for the use of postcolonialism in an exclusively nontemporal sense in public academic debate, because of the presentation that year of Colonialist and Postcolonialist Discourse, an MLA convention panel chaired by Gayatri Spivak, then at the University of Texas, Austin. Her copanelists were Edward Said; Homi K. Bhabha, then at the University of Sussex; and William Pietz, who has since let academia to work in green politics and neurocognitive training.2 Because Spivak, Said, and Bhabha have long been recognized for their significant early theoretical contributions to the ield, the 1983 panel, coming together halfway between the publications of the late 1970s and what was to become a veritable lood in the 1990s, acquires special importance. Epochal Dates and the Character of Space Making Certain dates are now viewed as classic loci of the time and contradictory temporalities of the postcolonial: 1492 (Columbuss arrival in America and the expulsion of Jews from Spain); 1603 (Lord Mountjoys colonization of the northern counties of Ireland); 17981801 (Napoleons Egyptian campaign); 17911804 (the Haitian revolution); 181025

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(the independence of Brazil and Spanish America); 1833 (the abolition of slavery in the British Empire); 1857 (the bloody Sepoy uprising in Kanpur); 1884 (the Berlin Conference and the scrambling of Africa); 1947 (the independence of India, its partition, and the birth of Pakistan); 195462 (Algerias war of independence); 1955 (the Bandung Conference); 195575 (the Vietnam War); 1994 (the end of apartheid). hese dates are as emblematic of the spatial dynamics generated by the events they mark as they are of period demarcation. Of the inaugural dates just listed, 1492 and 1947 may be taken as useful bookends for the discussion here. he explorers notorious discovery of America was to trigger a wide range of spatializing processes. Sidney Mintz points out that sugar cane was irst carried to the New World by Columbus on his second voyage, in 1493. In 1516 Santo Domingo was the irst Spanish settlement to ship sugar to Europe, and by 1526 Brazil was shipping sugar to Lisbon in commercial quantities (3234). Columbuss sugar cane signaled the progressive incorporation of the West Indies into the world capitalist economy through a particular spatial arrangement of centers and peripheries, the resultant inequalities of which are being worked through to this day. Equally dramatic is 1947, marking the independence and partition of India, which entailed the mass displacement of populations. hese dates appear nonequivalent on irst look, but they share features of historical violence and the processes of space making during and ater the colonial period. If postcolonialism is necessarily tied to the colonial owing to the simultaneous temporal and discursive framing of the ield, it is the entire domain of colonial space making and its aterefects in the contemporary world that gives postcolonialism its significance today. Colonial space making is not merely the constitution of a geographically demarcated reality, though that is important. Colonial space making is first and foremost the projection

of a series of sociopolitical dimensions onto geographic space. hese sociopolitical dimensions involve not just society and politics but also economy, culture, and a wide range of symbolic and discursive practices. Colonial space making is thus to be understood in terms of the relations that were structurally generated and contested across interrelated vectors throughout the colonial encounter (Quayson, Postcolonial Literature 1620). While some revisionist historians with an eye to identifying positive efects of empire have argued that colonial policy was often confused and unsystematic, it is still true that the British created and executed conditions for the relocation of major chunks of population during the colonial period throughout the empire. It would not be hyperbolic to suggest that the instrumentalization of population dispersal was a key component of colonial governmentality. Whether through the direct establishment of colonial administrative and bureaucratic arrangements in the conversion of what were initially trade outposts (as in much of Africa, India, and Southeast Asia), or in settler colonialism (as in Australia, Canada, Latin America, and arguably Ireland), or in colonialism in postplantation economies (as in Sri Lanka, Jamaica, and Malaysia), colonial governmentality involved the creation of conditions for the dispersal of populations, some of which coalesced into diasporas. And in several instances, such as the labor policies of indenturing, set up to bring Indians to East Africa to help build the Uganda railway linking the interiors of Uganda and Tanzania with the Indian Ocean at the Kenyan port of Mombasa, population dispersal was systematic and designed to meet particular economic needs (Bhachu; Ghai and Ghai).3 The precise features of space making may difer, but its inluence on the political, social, and demographic makeup in places as diverse as Malaysia and Singapore, Guyana and Trinidad, or Sierra Leone and Mauritius has had a fundamental efect on the postcolonial. And in each case

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the postcolonial literary history of a speciic group or location has to take account of the problematic consonance of periodization with space making that constitutes the literary and aesthetic objects of study. Independence in the postcolonial world brought about the reconiguration of the dynamics of space making. As a general rule, independence placed in view modes of epochality that afected the spatial practices internal to the new nation-states and restructured the political relations of these nation-states with their erstwhile metropolitan colonial overlords. Postcolonial literature came to directly refract these new spatial dynamics. As Dipesh Chakrabarty has pointed out, even though the postcolonial nation-state sufers from an unnatural belatedness, it was readily adopted as the default organizing principle for analyses of literary history. Starting in the 1960s, the earliest anthologies of Commonwealth literature consolidated this national principle, with entries appearing irst under regional headers (such as Africa, the Caribbean, and Asia) and then under subrubrics of nation-states (Nigeria, Jamaica, Australia, etc.).4 There is no escaping the relevance of the nation-state to discussions of postcolonial literary history, but not because the nation-state somehow encapsulates the Herderian racial and cultural spirit of a people, which was an implicit assumption undergirding Commonwealth literature. While the centrality of the nation-state continues to organize literary history in the ield, it does so under a more problematized guise, raising comparative questions and ones touching on world literature. Despite this shit, the epochality of the nation-state persists in the literary output of key writers in the ield, and this has to be accounted for in its implications for the kinds of postcolonial literary history that might be adduced. Salman Rushdies writing career is especially instructive in this respect.5 In elaborating a complex transnational aesthetic in the course of his career, Rushdie also maintained a long-

standing interest in moments of epochality as a creative inspiration for some of his best writing, whether this was the birth of India in Midnights Children, of Pakistan in Shame, or of Islam in he Satanic Verses. However, ater the infamous fatwa of 1989 Rushdie turned decisively away from the trope of the epochal, nation-state-inflected or not. He deploys a somewhat attenuated form of it in he Moors Last Sigh and by he Ground beneath Her Feet has abandoned the trope altogether. Fury, Shalimar the Clown, and he Enchantress of Florence have nothing epochal in them, but his latest, Luka and the Fire of Life, reprises the terrific storytelling for young adults he showed himself a master of twenty years earlier in Haroun and the Sea of Stories. Despite its significance for literaryhistorical purposes, the concept of nationstate epochality has to be qualified with reference to non-Europhone literatures, as Aijaz Ahmad did regarding Indian-language literatures. Karin Barber also has shown that the vitality of Yoruba literature seems linked not to concerns about the Nigerian nationstate as such but to the internal dimensions of what it is to be a Yoruba in rapidly changing concentric worlds. While this is largely true, Yoruba identity is historically tied to the imagining of nationhood, at least in the terms set up by Yoruba cultural brokers of the nineteenth century such as Bishop Ajayi Crowther and the Reverend Samuel Johnson, who are credited with others for having discursively projected the disparate tribal Yorubas as one nation. Crucially, their imagining of the Yoruba nation was marked by analogies with the biblical nation epic, which is a classic genre of space making, if nothing else. he point to be taken from Ahmad, Barber, Spivak, and others who have ref lected on the question of local-language literatures is that the predominant attention to Europhone literatures in postcolonial studies distorts the multiple reconigurations of the narrations of identity that take place in the postcolonial world.

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Spatial Logics, Social Imaginaries, and the Reading of Literature What does an understanding of the spatial performativity of postcolonialism imply for the reading of literature? First a prior question needs to be addressed: what is the literary for postcolonial studies? Despite our distance from the commentator who opined enthusiastically that a page of Chinua Achebes A Man of the People was worth a ton of documentary journalism (qtd. in Larson 16), there are still ample opportunities for misapprehending postcolonial literature as being a simple relection of conditions in postcolonial societies.6 his risk is particularly pressing given postcolonialisms correct insistence on placing an ethical dimension to the fore of literary analysis. And yet whatever our critical interests, we must not conclude that postcolonial literature is either mirror or lamp, to adopt the terms of M.H. Abramss insightful discussion of the critical tradition. In my opinion literature, postcolonial or otherwise, must be viewed irst and foremost as a textual tapestry of particularities and thresholds. Particularities inhere in cultural or sociohistorical details but may also open under pressure onto thresholds of literary signiication. he relations between particularities and thresholds is genre-speciic: thus, they difer in, say, Gabriel Garca Mrquezs One Hundred Years of Solitude and Jean Rhyss Wide Sargasso Sea or in Derek Walcotts poetry and that of Nissim Ezekiel. Furthermore, the relations between particularities and thresholds are also rendered unpredictable, or short-circuited, particularly in the literary engagement with the sublime, violence, and disability. As I have argued elsewhere with regard to disability, the encounter with the disabled character generates aesthetic nervousness in the literary text that can only be understood when the text is read as an interaction between particularities and thresholds (Aesthetic Nervousness 1519, 2224; Calibrations 2237).

An example of a particularity that is also a threshold of various relations is the inexplicable anger of the characters in Naguib Mahfouzs novel Midaq Alley. heir explosions of rage are not limited to constitutively angry characters such as the cynical Husain Kirsha and the beautiful and unpredictable Hamida. Other characters express themselves angrily and for no defensible reason: Husniya the bakeress, Salim Alwan the merchant, and the dark and evil-minded Zaita, lord of the underworld in the novel. Even the holy man Radwan Hussainy and the absentminded Sheik Darwish are described as having had an angry past, while the placid and otherwise unlappable Abbas expresses a molten anger at the end of the novel that costs him his life. Why this incredible and ferocious anger, expressed at various points in the novel, sometimes with little or no preparation? Is this to be explained by the famous Midaq Alley, where their businesses and households are found and which lends a veneer of quaintness in the face of the rapidly changing social and political landscape of Cairo? he answer must be more than that, for the social relations that unfold in Midaq Alley are actually overdetermined by another space, one that is never made directly manifest in the text but is repeatedly referred to as the narrative progresses. It is the British army camp located elsewhere in Cairo. The novel is set in the Second World War, when economic hardship and rationing are realities to be dealt with in Egypt. More important, the novel shows that all economic opportunities are ultimately tied to the British army, from Hussain Kirshas marching of to work with the soldiers and returning with a small fortune, to Salim Alwans making a killing from the commercial prospects opened up by the shortage of goods, to Hamidas discovering on her walks that the Jewish girls work in a factory supplying clothes to the army, to the pimp Ibrahim Farajs training prostitutes in the proper English comportment for servicing the British

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troops. And throughout their conversations in the infernal blackouts that mark their nights, the people in the alley always mention the British army and the war. he reasons for the characters variant anger may be that they have no avenue out of their narrow everyday lives except through the occupying army. This is a problem of the social imaginary, which in this novel is tied to the spatially layered dimensions of social relations. A thorough postcolonial literary historical account of anger and its relation to a spatial constriction would require us to start with an examination of the oeuvre of one writer and then to compare it with other writers work showing a similar dynamic, whether in the same national domain or not. he social imaginary is also the product of particularities and thresholds and reveals the interactions of space with time and space as time and as story. Periodization in postcolonial literary studies, then, cannot restrict itself to dates or periods, since the dates automatically imply historical, epoch-making events and the inauguration of various spatial relations. he challenge remains how to assemble reading practices that allow us to read the rhetorical, the historical, and the spatial all at once.

3. For a contrast to the East African example, see Patkes discussion of the language policy in Southeast Asia and its roots as the historical by-product of migrant populations brought to the region. 4. E.g., hieme and Walder are two anthologies governed by the same essential nation orientation. 5. This nation- oriented tendency can be productively discussed under a nation- and-narration rubric and would typically include some or all of the output of writers like Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Tsitsi Danga rembga, Michael Ondaatje, Isabel Allende, Raja Rao, Naguib Mahfouz, Athol Fugard, G.V. Desani, Nayantara Saghal, Anton Shammas, and many others. 6. he pitfalls of unmediated readings of postcolonial literary writing as a form of testimonial are still real; this was brought to me dramatically some years ago when I was invited to make a presentation on hings Fall Apart to a composition class at a prestigious university in the United States. Ater an hour of what I thought was a detailed examination of the novel, the irst question I was asked was, Do you subscribe to wife beating? he implications of this astounding question for understanding the assumed relation between literature and society in the postcolonial world are not as easy to overcome as they might irst appear.

WORKS CITED
Abrams, M.H. he Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic heory and the Critical Tradition. 1953. New York: Oxford UP, 1971. Print. Ahmad, Aijaz. In heory: Classes, Nations, Literatures. London: Verso, 1994. Print. Allen, T.W. he Homeric Catalogue. Journal of Hellenic Studies 30 (1910): 292322. Print. Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, eds. he Post-colonial Studies Reader. London: Routledge, 1995. Print. Auerbach, Erich. Philology and Weltliteratur. Trans. Edward Said and Marie Said. Centennial Review 13.1 (1969): 117. Print. Barber, Karin. Literature in Yoruba. Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature. Ed. Abiola Irele and Simon Gikandi. Vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011. 35778. Print. Bhachu, Parminder. Twice Migrants: East African Sikh Settlers in Britain. London: Tavistock, 1985. Print. Castillo, Debra A. Coetzees Dusklands: The Mythic Punctum. PMLA 105.5 (1990): 110822. Print. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial hought and Historical Diference. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000. Print. Chrisman, Laura, and Patrick Williams, eds. Colonial Discourse and Post- colonial heory: A Reader. London: Harvester, 1993. Print.

NOTES
1. For a fuller discussion of the genealogies of the term postcolonialism, see Quayson, Postcolonial Literature. 2. I wish to say a special thanks to David Chioni Moore and Elizabeth DeLoughrey, with whom I served on the executive committee of the Division on Postcolonial Studies in Literature and Culture in 2007, for sharing so generously the research they and earlier members of the committee had done on the etymology of postcolonialism while they were gaining division status for the ield. Moore suggested 1983 as a totemic date in his introductory remarks at the 2007 MLA convention panel Postcolonial Studies since 1983: Ref lective Assessments. A special thanks must also go to Mohamad Awad, my intrepid research assistant, who dug up all the relevant pieces tracing the etymology of the term.

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Dunlap, A.R., and E.J. Moyne. he Finnish Language on the Delaware. American Speech 27.2 (1952): 81 90. Print. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. Tell Me, Sir, ... What Is Black Literature? PMLA 105.1 (1990): 1122. Print. Ghai, Dharam P., and Yash P. Ghai, eds. Portrait of a Minority: Asians in East Africa. Nairobi: Oxford UP, 1970. Print. Larson, Charles. he Emergence of African Fiction. London: Macmillan, 1978. Print. Mahfouz, Naguib. Midaq Alley. Trans. Trevor Le Gassick. Washington: hree Continents, 1988. Print. Mintz, Sidney. Sweetness and Power: he Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York: Penguin, 1985. Print. Patke, Rajeev. Postcolonial Literature in Southeast Asia. he Cambridge History of Postcolonial Literature. Vol 1. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011. 35284. Print.

Quayson, Ato. Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation. New York: Columbia UP, 2007. Print. . Calibrations: Reading for the Social. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2003. Print. . Postcolonial Literature in a Changing Historical Frame. Introduction. he Cambridge History of Postcolonial Literature. Vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011. 129. Print. 2 vols. Spivak, Gayatri. Death of a Discipline. New York: Columbia UP, 2003. Print. hieme, John, ed. he Arnold Anthology of Post- colonial Literatures in English. London: Arnold, 1996. Print. van der Kroef, Justus M. he Colonial Novel in Indonesia. Comparative Literature 10.3 (1958): 21531. Print. Walder, Dennis. Post-colonial Literatures in English: History, Language, heory. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989. Print.