Art and the Postcolonial Imagination: Rethinking the Institutionalization of Third World Aesthetics and Theory

C A M E R O N M C C A R T H Y A N D G R E G DIMITRIADIS

I. Introduction

c
V^/ONTEMPORARY CRITICAL THINKING o n art and aesthetics

performs a n u m b e r o f well-rehearsed discursive moves decipherable i n the trajectory of cultural studies and beyond. A l l these discursive traditions we treat three below have contributed enormously to o u r understanding of the role o f art i n contemporary life, influencing a generation o f "first world" critics i n p r o f o u n d ways. Yet, a major i n d e e d debilitating constraint here is the overarching suppression or displacement of the structures, agencies, and trajectories of the colonized inhabitants o f the "third world" a n d the periphery o f the first. T h e tendency i n such criticism is to disavow or silence the historical specificity and productivity o f postcolonial narratives and genealogies i n artistic practices a n d cultural forms, a crucial a n d paralyzing elision, as we will stress throughout. T h e first discursive move has its precursors i n the work of Frankfurt School theorists such as T h e o d o r A d o r n o , M a x H o r k h e i m e r , a n d more recently J u r g e n Habermas. This move can be described as anti-populist. Proponents o f this antipopulism construct a tight, hermeneutically i n d u c e d homology between m o d e r n aesthetic objects a n d practices and capitalist wish fulfillment. T h e m o d e r n art object is located squarely i n the metropolitan centre, its elaboration o f capitalism, and its sinuous culture industry. M o d e r n art by this process is so c o m p r o m i s e d by the routinization and mass-mediated processes of the culture industry that it is said to have lost its u n i q u e capacity to critique or instruct.
1

ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, 31:1 & 2, Jan. - Apr. 2000

232

C A M E R O N M C C A R T H Y A N D GREG DIMITRIADIS

T h e second discursive move i n contemporary critical studies of art is l i n k e d to a more charitable view of contemporary art. This discursive move is pro-populist (McGuigan) and can be genealogically traced to the alternative wing o f the Frankfurt School in treatises such as Walter Benjamin's "The Work of A r t in the Age of M e c h a n i c a l R e p r o d u c t i o n " and more recently to Cultural Studies of the B i r m i n g h a m School in E n g l a n d and its analogous traditions i n Australia, Canada, the U S , and elsewhere. This discursive move o f populist hermeneutics sees contemporary art as participating i n necessary processes of political resistance and counter-hegemony, offering the masses a way out o f capitalism's debilitating logics. T h e third discursive move distinguishes itself from the previous two by suggesting a temporal and spatial shift i n h u m a n sensibilities, the nature of capitalism and, alas, art, toward a postmodern c o n d i t i o n i n which the h o m o l o g i c a l connection between art and society is problematized and ultimately severed, releasing new radical energies of multiplicity, irony, and destabilization. This approach to contemporary art goes u n d e r the banner of postmodernism. Postmodernist cultural critics, such as Christopher Jencks, see this phase o f contemporary life as ushering i n a new m i l l e n n i u m i n which all hierarchies i n the aesthetic w o r l d and i n society will be overcome by computerization of work, communications, and aesthetic form. In the postmodern move, art does not imitate life life is aestheticized and art is the genetic code for the elaboration o f new forms of existence and care of the self. A t best then these discourses of anti-populist, pro-populist, and postmodern criticism can name an archive o f tropes, themes, and motifs into which the aesthetic creations of the third world are collapsed as instances o f the Baudrillardian counterfeit, the copy that desires the place of the original the seat of the K i n g having n o real aesthetic or intellectual home o f its own. Postcolonial art therefore arises, through what H o m i B h a b h a calls a "time lag," i n the tracks of the more hegem o n i c art discourses of the West, a harlequin archetype patched together at the b e g i n n i n g from borrowed robes, a figure collidi n g with domination's undertow and wrestling anxiously to the

INSTITUTIONALIZING OF THIRD WORLD AESTHETICS

233

surface for air. In this essay, we offer some thoughts and heuristics towards a new understanding of postcolonial art, attending to its historical specificity and productivity in careful and, we hope, richly suggestive ways. We pay special attention to how these works o f art challenge received curricular practices, inc l u d i n g the institutionalization of "postcolonial theory" in E n glish literature departments as well as the humanities more broadly ( H a l l ) . T h e separation between art forms and practices into neatly delineated disciplines is, we maintain, an illusion which belies the dynamic history of dialogue between postcolonial artists and intellectuals a r o u n d and across the globe. Some definitions are in order before we go any further. As used in this essay, the "post" i n the postcolonial is not to be understood as a temporal register as i n "hereinafter" but a sign and cultural marker of a spatial challenge and contestation with the occupying powers of the West i n the ethical, political, and aesthetic forms of the marginalized. Uneven development between the metropole and periphery plays itself out i n aesthetic form, i n ways that problematize c o l o n i a l / p o s t c o l o n i a l networks of power relations as well as the Cartesian stability of subjecthood fabricated i n and through these relations. Postcolonial art forms and we include the work of novelists, playwrights, painters, and musicians here are products of colonial histories o f disruption, forced migration, false imprisonment, and pacification. These practices are of such an extreme and exorbitant nature that the claim of authority over knowledge and o f narrative fullness can only be treated as a hoax intended to deceive its audience and produce self-denial. This "post," as we conceive it, ultimately specifies a co-articulation o f colonial and postcolonial histories, not a self-serving separatism and isolationism. In what follows, we discuss some critical features of postcolonial art by analyzing the work o f a n u m b e r o f artists from the t h i r d world a n d from the periphery o f the metropole. We focus here o n the paintings of A r n a l d o Roche-Rabell of Puerto Rico, G o r d o n Bennett, an Aboriginal artist from Australia, the Haitian-American artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, Wilson

234

CAMERON MCCARTHY AND GREG DIMITRIADIS

Harris of Guyana, and African-American novelist and N o b e l laureate, T o n i M o r r i s o n . F r o m time to time we make ancillary references to other artists as is relevant. We choose to foreg r o u n d these artists because we think that their work best illustrates some of the important features of the postcolonial art that we discuss i n the rest o f this essay. We particularly want to highlight three important motifs and directions o f the work o f postcolonial imagination and draw a few conclusions. These three motifs i n postcolonial art can be summarized as follows: First, we want to highlight postcolonial art's vigorous challenge to hegemonic forms o f representation i n Western models of classical realism and technologies of truth. In these models of realism and verisimilitude, a hierarchy of discourses preserves the subjectivity o f the Western actor. These dynamics are to be f o u n d as m u c h i n seventeenth-century oil paintings and i n nineteenth-century novels as i n today's popular H o l l y w o o d filmic fantasies and documentaries as well as i n the social sciences a n d humanities. In these hegemonic discourses, the colon i a l / p o s t c o l o n i a l subject is susceptible to what Frantz Fanon calls the "bane" of Western objectivity. T h e anti-realist critique of postcolonial art offers a philosophical a n d performative indictment o f the r u l i n g narrating subject o f Western forms. In the cultural form of postcolonial artists, quite literally a n d metaphorically, the eye o f the t h i r d world is turned o n the West, and the h o r i z o n of view is deliberately overpopulated with polyglot angles, perspectives, and points of view. Second, the work of art i n the postcolonial imagination effectively rewrites the narrative of modernity a n d modernization i n w h i c h a binary logic attempts to exhaust the field o f the West and E m p i r e by creating oppositions o f "centre" and "periphery," "developed" and "underdeveloped," and "civilized" and "primitive." T h e eye of Western art is anthropological i n its gaze u p o n the other (Clifford). P r i m o r d i a l i s m is associated with the most t h o r o u g h g o i n g rationalism and logocentrism when visited u p o n the t h i r d w o r d subject. Yet, the story o f modernization i n postcolonial art is a story o f the y o k i n g of opposites i n which the E n l i g h t e n m e n t perspective is always u n d e r l a i d by

INSTITUTIONALIZING OF THIRD WORLD AESTHETICS

235

subterranean acts of atavism and brutality. In response to d o m i nant narratives o f modernity, postcolonial art draws o n the codes o f double and triple register so deeply and historically entrenched i n the survivalist practices o f the dominated (Gilroy). Culture, for these artists, is a crucible of encounter, a crucible o f hybridity i n w h i c h all of cultural form is marked by twinness of subject and the other. T h i r d , the work o f postcolonial artists foregrounds modes of critical reflexivity and thoughtfulness as elements of an emancipatory practice, one i n which the artist is able to look u p o n his or her own traditions with the dispassion o f what Walter Benjamin calls "melancholy." This skepticism is linked to an attempt to visualize a sense of community i n which criteria for membership are not given a p r i o r i i n an inherited set o f characteristics or a political platform. F o r artists like A r n a l d o Roche-Rabell, G o r d o n Bennett, and Wilson Harris, change can only take place when all preconceived visions and discourses are disrupted a n d disturbed. They suggest that transformative possibilities are not given. They must be worked for i n often unpredictable and counter-intuitive ways. These three motifs counter-hegemonic representation, double or triple coding, and emancipatory or utopic visions help define the postcolonial aesthetic. They work across aesthetic forms, inc l u d i n g literature, visual art, music, and poetry, challenging the kinds of artificial separations that increasingly serve only the imperatives o f academic institutions. O u r more integrative approach, we maintain, has particularly strong implications for r e t h i n k i n g received curricular knowledge. As G a u r i Viswanathan argues, the institutionalization o f E n glish literature d i d not begin i n E n g l a n d , but rather i n India, where it was a key means by which the English were able to maintain their colonial c o n t r o l , h e l p i n g to manage and regulate the conduct of colonial subjects i n a way that physical force alone c o u l d not. T h e seeming neutrality o f these carefully selected texts, as she demonstrates, allowed the English government to proselytize without seeming to violate the clear separation between c h u r c h a n d state and thus the transcendent invisibility o f its power. T h e result was ever-more subtle

236

CAMERON MCCARTHY AND GREG DIMITRIADIS

ways of justifying a n d absolving a brutal colonial regime, of t u r n i n g "the rapacious, exploitative, a n d ruthless actor o f history into the reflective subject o f literature" (23). Both postcolonial literature as well as postcolonial criticism have critiqued this project from within for the most part literary paradigms. As Stuart H a l l suggests, "the 'postcolonial' has been most fully developed by English scholars, who have been reluctant to make the break across disciplinary (even postdisciplinary) lines" a n d explore other kinds of questions, i n c l u d i n g economic ones (258). We argue, however, that the very separation between literature a n d other art forms is an illusory one, challenged by the histories o f dialogue that have gone o n between these artists, their ideas, a n d their work. We maintain that a more fully developed set of motifs will allow us to look beyond the institutionalization of the postcolonial i n literature departments a n d i n the humanities, a move supported by artists themselves, i n practice. Drawing o n our three motifs, we interrogate how d o m i n a n t representations have consolidated i n the humanities curricula a n d how postcolonial art offers a p r o f o u n d challenge here, destabilizing fixed notions o f identity through double- a n d triple-coding, a n d offering new possibilities for e x p l o r i n g this literature a n d these artistic creations as a space for the exploration o f difference not as a p r o b l e m but as a resource i n service of emancipatory ends. Such an approach, we argue, is one fruitful avenue by w h i c h to challenge the ways that postcolonial theory has become ensconced i n certain depoliticizing institutional practices.

II. The Critique of Hegemonic Representation

Traditions of colonialist aesthetics for example, i n the art o f the novel or perspectival o i l painting have presented a freestanding subject at the heart of aesthetic work a n d an equally coherent a n d fully integrated subject i n the i m p l i e d r e a d i n g / viewing intelligence (Berger; Belsey). As Gayatri Spivak argues, even when the work o f antimodernist/postmodernist writers foregrounds narrative collapse, it is the narrative collapse o f a singular overmastering voice. Rather, what we find i n the work of the postcolonial artist i n painters such as G o r d o n
2

INSTITUTIONALIZING OF THIRD WORLD AESTHETICS

237

Bennett, or the Guyanese painter Aubrey Williams, or Indrani G a u l from India, i n writings such as Wilson Harris's Palace of the Peacock, Isabel Allende's House of Spirits, T o n i Morrison's Song of Solomon is the effort to visualize community, a new community o f fragile or b r o k e n and polyglot souls. In contrast to the a n t i - m o d e r n / p o s t m o d e r n critics and artists m e n t i o n e d earlier, the self is always already e m b e d d e d i n c o m m u n a l though hyb r i d a n d multiple imperatives here. T h e r e is always an effort to l i n k individual will and fortune to collective possibility. In this regard, the deliberately oversize o i l paintings of A r n a l d o Roche-Rabell, published i n the catalogue entitled Arnaldo Roche-Rabell: The Uncommonwealth (Hobbs) are particularly illustrative of the struggle to construct identity and subjectivity from the fragments of an agonizing and tragic historical past a n d present. Indeed, Roche-Rabell has worked i n a period of intense anxiety over the fate of Puerto Rico as a "commonwealth o f the U n i t e d States." H e was b o r n i n Puerto Rico in 1955, three years after the island was "allowed" to adopt its own constitution, one that allowed self-governance but stipulated a "voluntary association" with the U S a dubious distinction. His oeuvre, writ large, documents multiple efforts to come to new a n d unpredictable terms with the c o m p l e x and often contradictory social, economic, a n d cultural questions at work in debates a r o u n d the island's future. Roche-Rabell's concerns with the politics o f identity and anticolonialism are prosecuted i n the creation of larger than life figures that often seem buried or interred i n deeper structures or forces. H i s c o n c e r n with the twinness or doubleness o f personality and flawed subjectivity connects themes of anticolonialism to themes o f refusal o f coherent subjectivity. Puerto Rico's history of colonization has p r o d u c e d repressed demons and monsters as he illustrates in the canvas m u r a l "Poor Devil," i n w h i c h the face of the devil projects from the head o f an intensely blue-eyed h u m a n (33). O n e can trace these concerns and practices across a range of traditions and historical contexts, i n c l u d i n g i n the work of postcolonial African-American novelists such as T o n i Morrison (who, incidentally, addresses concerns similar to "Poor Devil" i n The Bluest Eye, her first novel, published i n 1970). Morrison's

238

CAMERON MCCARTHY AND GREG DIMITRIADIS

novels, most notably, mine a broad range of literary and vernacular traditions from the Judeo-Christian Bible to the work o f Shakespeare to African-American Spirituals to African folklore to blues and jazz and beyond. In this polyglot, alchemical manner, M o r r i s o n forges a vision of black communities that are both fragile and highly resilient, communities g i r d e d by bodies of tradition that are always open and subject to multiple manifestations. H e r characters enter the Active world as partial, fragmented, constructed selves ceaselessly reconstructing the past i n the present, and always i n an open-ended a n d protean fashion. H e r work thus represents an important departure from the masculinist African-American novelistic tradition (see, for example, R i c h a r d Wright's Native Son), which l i n k e d the certitudes o f black identity and community to narrative realism. Morrison's communities are fragile, as are the souls that i n habit them. Key here is the ironically titled Paradise, w h i c h details the horrific a n d violent lives o f several black w o m e n i n a recently founded all-black a n d thoroughly patriarchal town. A m i d all the tension and contingency i n this novel as well as others, Morrison's characters always maintain, or perhaps perform, some k i n d of fragile a n d contingent cohesiveness between and a m o n g themselves. C o m m u n i t y - b u i l d i n g is always fraught a n d fragile, a n d always threatens to erupt into violence. As M o r r i s o n writes i n Jazz, "People look forward to weekends for connections, revisions and separations even though many of these activities are accompanied by bruises a n d even a spot of b l o o d , for excitement runs h i g h o n Friday or Saturday" (50). This search for identity is thus a search for a collective self, one that connects the disenfranchised to multiple traditions, both globally and locally. This hybridity, so evident i n the work o f artists such as G o r d o n Bennett, T o n i M o r r i s o n , and Nicolas G u i l l e n , allows for the transformation o f key binary oppositions privileged i n the brutal colonial imagination. These include most notably, West versus East, N o r t h versus South, the h i g h versus the low, the civilized versus the primitive. Transcending these binary oppositions allows these artists to rework the very pivotal center versus periphery distinction which has so under-girded the iconography and social sciences of Western intellectuals,

INSTITUTIONALIZING OF THIRD WORLD AESTHETICS

239

allowing these artists to look beyond its strictures to new histories, new discourses of new ways of being. Yet another example of the emphasis o n plurality a n d multiplicity that one finds i n the work of t h i r d world artists is the celebration o f epic Indian ritual i n everyday life i n a corner of the Caribbean. F o r insight o n this play of New W o r l d / O l d W o r l d identities, we turn to the work of the St. L u c i a n playwright, Derek Walcott. In his 1992 N o b e l lecture, "The Antilles: Fragments o f Epic Memory," Walcott talks about taking some A m e r i c a n friends to a peasant performance of the ancient H i n d u epic of Ramayana i n a tiny village o n the C a r o n i Plain i n T r i n i d a d . T h e name o f this village is the happily agreeable, but Anglo-Saxon, "Felicity." T h e actors carrying out this ritual reenactment are the plain-as-day East Indian villagers s p i n n i n g this i m m o r t a l web o f memory, of ancientness and modernity. H e r e , Walcott is "surprised by sin" at the simple native world unfurling i n its utter flamboyance: Felicity is a village in Trinidad on the edge of the Caroni Plain, the wide central plain that still grows sugar and to which indentured cane cutters were brought after emancipation, so the small population of Felicity is East Indian, and on the afternoon that I visited it with friends from America, all the faces along its road were Indian, which as I hope to show was a moving, beautiful thing, because this Saturday afternoon Ramleela, the epic dramatization of the Hindu epic of Ramayana, was going to be performed, and the costumed actors from the village were assembling on a field strung with different-colored flags, like a new gas station, and beautiful Indian Boys in red and black were aiming arrows haphazardly into the afternoon light. Low blue mountains on the horizon, bright grass, clouds that would gather colour before the light went. Felicity! What a gentle Anglo-Saxon name for an epical memory. (1) T h e w o r l d o n the C a r o n i Plain integrates the ancient and modern, as Indian peasants historically displaced to the Caribbean create i n their daily lives a re-memory of their past before modern colonialism. In so d o i n g , they add an extraordinary ritual and threnodic nuance to the folk culture o f the Caribbean as a whole. In the art o f living, these East Indian peasants t r i u m p h over the imposed history o f marginalization a n d the middlepassage history of indentureship.

240

CAMERON MCCARTHY AND GREG DIMITRIADIS

This vitality of multiple origins and connections informs the theatre that Walcott, ultimately, envisions for a Caribbean breaking with E u r o p e a n hegemonic norms of representation. He offers a powerful set of tropes for an equally powerful social vision: In the West Indies, there are all these conditions the Indian heritage, the Mediterranean, the Lebanese and Chinese. . . . When these things happen in an island culture a fantastic physical theatre will emerge because the forces that affect that communal search will use physical expression through dance, through the Indian dance and through Chinese dance, through African dance. When these things happen, plus all the cross-fertilization the normal sociology of the place - then a true and very terrifying West Indian theatre will come. (310) Walcott like so many other postcolonial artists challenges the ways the colonial imagination has sought to constrain third world subjects i n reductive and simplistic discourses of racial and national o r i g i n (McCarthy). These discourses, as we have noted elsewhere, have consolidated i n curricular projects i n the West multicultural and otherwise projects which have sought to quell the unpredictable noise o f dialogue w h i c h is the inexorable and interminable state of contemporary identity formation (McCarthy a n d Dimitriadis). These artists allow no such easy closure, challenging us to look to new and less prefigured representational practices.

III. The Strategy of Double Coding

T h e work of the postcolonial imagination, as realized i n Walcott's theatre, Morrison's novels, and Roche-Rabell's paintings, is characteristically marked by specific modes of operation and m e a n i n g construction. We have discussed one above. This brings us to a discussion of the second motif we want to highlight the strategy o f double coding. By double c o d i n g we are referring to the tendency of the postcolonial artist to mobilize two or more plains or fields o f idiomatic reference i n any given work, what Wilson Harris calls "the wedding of opposites." The postcolonial artist may therefore quote or combine the vernacular and the classical, the traditional and the m o d e r n , the

INSTITUTIONALIZING OF THIRD WORLD AESTHETICS

241

cultural reservoir o f images o f the East and the West, the first world and the third, the colonial master a n d the slave. H e r e , again, we want to differentiate this strategy from the type of double c o d i n g that postmodernist critics such as Charles Jencks talk about when defining postmodernism. Instead of foregrounding the collapse of master narratives o f individualistic or maverick imagination, we are p o i n t i n g to the collective purposes, collective history, the visualization of community which constitute the central issues at stake within the postcolonial artistic project. This strategy of double c o d i n g is powerfully foregrounded i n the work o f the A b o r i g i n a l painter G o r d o n Bennett. T h r o u g h his art, it seems, Bennett, the son of an A b o r i g i n e mother and E u r o p e a n father, comes to terms with the p r o f o u n d personal and political issues historically s u r r o u n d i n g identity formation i n Australia. Bennett came to art relatively late i n life, graduating from art school i n 1988, the year Australia celebrated the bicentennial o f E u r o p e a n settlement. H i s work registers the attendant tensions and concerns. We foreground here one of his pivotal paintings, "Outsider," w h i c h combines the methods of A b o r i g i n a l pointillism and Western perspectival painting to stunning effect. T h i s painting ironically quotes and densely refigures V i n c e n t V a n Gogh's "Starry N i g h t " and "The Bedroom," replacing their tense calmness with an atmosphere o f brusque, startling anxiety. H i s double c o d i n g of the West and native traditions exposes an unsettling environment o f cultural hegemony. Bennett, most important, interposes a new scenario into this "Starry N i g h t " setting: a decapitated native body stumb l i n g towards a blood-besmirched cradle o n w h i c h lay two classical Greek heads. T h e g r o u n d o f essential A b o r i g i n a l and hegemonic Anglo-Australian identities is now populated with trip wire questions located i n this motif o f double vision and hybridity. T h e work o f hybridity unearths the symbolic violence of Australian history a n d the brutality of E u r o p e a n "discovery" a n d d o m i n a t i o n o f the native. A t the same time, through this double coding, Bennett highlights the incompleteness of the m o d e r n A b o r i g i n a l search for identity. To be homeless i n one's home to paradoxically sit o n the r i c h inheritance of these

242

CAMERON MCCARTHY AND GREG DIMITRIADIS

cultural markers and symbols is the postcolonial c o n d i t i o n tout court ( M c L e a n and Bennett). Bennett himself uses art as a p r o f o u n d pedagogical tool one w h i c h challenges the histories taught to h i m from a very y o u n g age, i n c l u d i n g the story that Captain C o o k "discovered" Australia as an empty l a n d Terra N u l l u s (as Bennett calls one of his paintings). T h i s history stood i n powerful contradistinction to the more hybrid reality he lived, though it was a reality maintained and sustained every step of the way by a colonial education system. Bennett stresses the importance o f o p e n i n g up alternative kinds o f histories, alternative perspectives o n Australian history, i n art. H e speaks o f one self-portrait as a "visual text trying to o p e n up history, to say there are other perspectives that are possible" (Black Angles). Yet the power of this work lies not simply i n presenting other versions o f history. Rather, Bennett opens a space where the very project o f constructing history from a single perspective is called into question. Note the constant stress o n multiple lines o f vision typically three i n his work. Bennett offers a prof o u n d challenge to contemporary educational movements, movements w h i c h seek merely to insert "other stories" into already existing c u r r i c u l a i n an additive fashion. H i s project o f double c o d i n g d o m i n a n t motifs o f destabilizing coherent origins is significantly more powerful a n d provides more fruitful avenues for those interested i n constructing curricula relevant to the c o m p l e x lives of the disenfranchised. H e n c e , postcolonial painters, musicians, writers, a n d poets have all wrestled with the available tools of the colonial imagination i n prosecuting new a n d c o m p l e x identities. T h i s process of revision and recoding does not cannot, i n fact privilege absolute origins; it is less concerned with H e g e l i a n dialectics than with B a k h t i n i a n dialogues ( H a l l ) . O n e finds similar imperatives i n the paintings o f A r n a l d o Roche-Rabell who recodes the work o f his Puerto Rican a n d E u r o p e a n antecedents alike. Specifically, Puerto Rican nationalist Carlos Raque Rivera's famous "Hurricane from the N o r t h " became RocheRobell's "Hurricane from the South," while V a n Gogh's well known images o f sunflowers became fodder for "Five H u n d r e d

INSTITUTIONALIZING OF THIRD WORLD AESTHETICS

3

243

Years W i t h o u t an Ear." T h e former painting inverts the discourse of N o r t h e r n imperialism, o p e n i n g u p a space where power can be viewed less as a repressive than a productive force, a tool that can be deployed i n multiple practices o f the self. T h e latter inters a writhing, polyangular a n d perspectival body i n a field of vicious-looking sunflowers, serving both as a metaphor for Roche-Rabell's debt to the E u r o p e a n tradition as well as its p r o f o u n d pains. T h e work o f both Rivera and V a n G o g h seem equally important to Roche-Rabell i n his project of personal and political interrogation. This deconstruction o f d o m i n a n t representational practices so associated with the centrality and security of authentic origins a n d subjectivities the hierarchy of "high" a n d "low" is realized most explicitly i n the work o f J e a n - M i c h e l Basquiat (Marshall). Basquiat's early career was as a graffiti-artist i n New York City, painting SAMO that is, "Same O l d Shit" o n myriad public spots throughout Manhattan. Basquiat was part of the b u r g e o n i n g and (then) vibrantly multiethnic h i p h o p cultural movement i n New York City, a movement which integrated i n equal measure rap music, break-dancing, and graffiti writing i n fact, Basquiat p r o d u c e d a single featuring rapper Rammellzee (Dimitriadis). W h i l e his work contains numerous references to these a n d other cultural signifiers, Basquiat's work draws, most interestingly and with great complexity, o n the jazz i d i o m . Its artists and their themes pepper his works, from bop d r u m m e r M a x R o a c h to singer Billie H o l i d a y to (especially) saxophonist C h a r l i e Parker. This should not be surprising. T h e entire history of black diasporic art i n the U S w o u l d be inconceivable without the jazz i d i o m (see, a m o n g others, the work of Romare Bearden). Basquiat, however, separates his work o n jazz from m u c h o f the idiom's modernist imperatives (for example, see the extended compositions o f D u k e E l l i n g t o n ) , as it is decidedly non-representational, not driven by modernist concerns with coherent textuality, n o r with the prosecution o f stable cultural identities (the kinds traditionally realized i n Afrocentrism). O n e need only look at "Charles the First," a composition Robert Farris T h o m p s o n calls "pivotal," to understand this (37). "Charles the

244

CAMERON MCCARTHY AND GREG DIMITRIADIS

First," a tribute to jazz great Charlie Parker, has n o narrative core. L i k e many of his works, its energy comes from the apt j u x taposition o f radically divergent cultural signifiers. "Charles the First," i n short, does not tell a simple story n o r does it have a singular theme. As T h o m p s o n points out, this is the first o f many triptychs (compositions with three panels) which Basquiat w o u l d produce. T h e evocation o f the n u m b e r "three" has played an i m portant role i n jazz, most especially i n the work o f composer Charles M i n g u s . M i n g u s opens his 1971 autobiography, Beneath the Underdog, by stating, "In other words, I a m three." O n e is r e m i n d e d , as well, o f his a l b u m titles which include "Mingus, A h , U m , " a n d " M e , Myself, a n Eye." T h e w o r d play o n L a t i n conjugation i n the former a n d referentiality i n the latter point to the strategies o f "triple c o d i n g " so m u c h a part of jazz, a music that thrives not o n original compositions but "riffs" o n standards. Jazz, as H e n r y Louis Gates, Jr. points out, is a music o f signifying, a music that explicitly rejects the "original" i n favor of constant intertextuality (in fact, Gates links these concerns to the entire history o f African-American literature i n his now-canonical text The Signifying Monkey). H e n c e , Basquiat's title "Charles the First" points both to the kingly status o f this jazz great as well as the ultimate futility of being "the first" anything injazz. T h e point is driven home by the reference to "Cherokee," a standard p o p tune written by Ray N o b l e , w h i c h w o u l d be revised by Parker as " K o - K o " a n d "Marshmallow." T h e futility o f origins is evidenced, as well, i n the wry "copyright" logo placed dead center i n the m i d d l e o f the second panel. Destabilizing the authority o f origins i m plicit i n c o d i n g was and is a technique crucial to postcolonial artists attempting to envision a t h i r d or intertextual space o f form. It is this c o n d i t i o n o f multiple heritages a n d its open possibilities that the Guyanese novelist Wilson Harris similarly mines in novels such as Palace of the Peacock (i960), Companions of the Day and Night (1975), a n d Carnival (1985). Indeed, Harris deploys strategies o f double c o d i n g throughout his work, as illustrated i n his Palace of the Peacock. Here, the fusion o f the

INSTITUTIONALIZING OF THIRD WORLD AESTHETICS

245

colonized and colonizer subject is at the epicentre o f his novel, a novel about the psychological reintegration of opposites i n the conquistadorial search for the mythical colony o f Mariella, located i n the h i n t e r l a n d of Guyana, o n the northeast corner of the South A m e r i c a n continent. As the p r i n c i p a l character D o n n e a n d his ill-fated polyglot crew sail up the C u y u n i River i n their tortuous j o u r n e y to reclaim this colony, they discover the subtle and a b i d i n g links a n d trestles o f association between each other and the world: Cameron's great-grandfather had been a dour Scot, and his greatgrandmother an African slave mistress. Cameron was related to Schomburgh (whom he addressed as Uncle with the other members of the crew) and it was well-known that Schomburgh's great-grandfather had come from Germany, and his great-grand mother was an Arawak American Indian. The whole crew was a spiritual family living and dying together in the common grave out of which they had sprung from again from the same soul and womb as it were. They were all knotted and bound together in the enormous bruised head of Cameron's ancestry and nature as in the white unshaved head of Schomburgh's age and presence. (Palace 39) In this strategy o f double c o d i n g , the postcolonial novelist works from m e d i u m to m e d i u m to tell a story that attacks the centrality a n d security o f authentic or original subjectivity and the hierarchy o f discourses associated with the inheritance o f the classical realism as well as the bureaucratic deployment of characterization i n the nineteenth-century novelist tradition. Wilson Harris's "Idiot Nameless" i n his Companions of the Night and Day, Jorge Luis Borges's "Cartographers of the Empire,"and the C u b a n novelist R e i n a l d o Arenas's twisted characters (who in the m i d d l e o f his novel Grave Yard of the Angels announce their dissatisfaction with their lives a n d ask the author for different roles) are all examples o f this double c o d i n g . T h e ultimate argument these authors make here is that m o d e r n humanity and m o d e r n life are necessarily interdependent and deeply hybrid. T h e text of the underside o f modernity and modernization is a quilt, a patchwork o f associations, repressed i n the philosophies o f reason associated with enlightenment discourses a n d best exposed through strategies o f ambiguity and

246

CAMERON MCCARTHY AND GREG DIMITRIADIS

triple play. This text provides a necessary challenge to the ways colonial powers have sustained and maintained their "regimes of truth" through c o m m o n c u r r i c u l a and their reliance o n "reason" as a means of social control (Viswanathan). So far, we have l o o k e d at both the critique of hegemonic representation as well as the strategies of double c o d i n g w h i c h are a central a part of the postcolonial aesthetic. We have isolated these motifs a n d m a r k e d them as unique, distinguishing them from the three discursive traditions with which we opened. We want to look now, more specifically, at how histories of oppression have i n f o r m e d these motifs a n d their attendant discursive lives, how a brutal history of colonialism has necessitated the proliferation of utopic visions w h i c h also mark this art. IV. U t o p i c V i s i o n s T h e t h i r d a n d final theme of the postcolonial imagination we want to pursue i n this section o f o u r essay is the link between art a n d emancipatory vision. We argue that postcolonial art is engaged i n what C . L . R . James calls i n American Civilization, "the struggle for happiness." By this James meant the struggle of the great masses o f postcolonial peoples to overcome plenipotentiary powers a n d glean from everyday life a sense o f possibility, a stimulation of a Calibanesque r e o r d e r i n g o f contemporary social a n d cultural arrangements. H e r e , we call attention to the effort to link the techniques of persuasion within aesthetic form to the struggle o f t h i r d world people for better lives. In this regard, the paintings o f A r n a l d o Roche-Rabell, as i n "I Want T o Die As a N e g r o " (Hobbs 49), suggest the reclamation a n d the reintegration o f the repressed identity of Africa i n the Caribbean space. O n e is r e m i n d e d here, as well, o f Nicolas Guillen's "The Ballad o f the Two Ancestors" ( G u i l l e n 143-44). Also worthy of note is Roche-Rabell's " U n d e r the Total Eclipse of the S u n " (Hobbs 45) i n w h i c h body parts a n d h u m a n faces seem to rise from the shadowed landscape o f the city acropolis. H e r e , we see foregrounded the temporary eclipsing of the power o f the U n i t e d States Congress that refuses to listen to the voices o f the Puerto Rican people. In a similar manner, K o r e a n

INSTITUTIONALIZING OF THIRD WORLD AESTHETICS

247

artist Yong Soon M i n offers viewers a strikingly multilayered i n stallation, "The Bridge o f N o Return," i n which she explores the parallel realities of the separated peoples of K o r e a ( N o r t h and South) and their latent desires for reintegration across the divides o f perspectives and territory ( M i n i t ) . M i n foreg r o u n d e d the multipurpose a n d deliberately ambiguous nature of her Bridge installation when it was o n tour at the Krannert M u s e u m i n C h a m p a i g n , i n the Fall o f 1997. M i n ' s "Bridge" is a statement o f relationality and interconnectedness but also o f inbetweenness a n d alterity: A bridge is, by definition, a connection, fostering a relationship between the two otherwise separate sites at either end. A bridge also exists as its own entity, as an interstitial space to be traversed, presumably in both directions. A bridge of one-way passage, of no return, with no connection, no exchange, no continuity, defies the logic of a bridge like an oxymoron. (Min 11) This latency courses through the play o f divisions of all races and peoples at the e n d o f the twentieth century. It is this latency that is foregrounded i n the painting "Terra Nullus" ( M c L e a n and Bennett 88) i n w h i c h G o r d o n Bennett projects the footsteps o f the Australian A b o r i g i n a l people h i g h above the i m planting o f the British U n i o n Jack o n the aboriginal landscape i n the creation o f Australia. T h e art to which we refer here and throughout does not offer the viewer clear solutions to c o m p l e x problems. U n l i k e many nationalist art movements (for example, black neorealist film i n the U S a n d earlier proponents o f Negritude movements such as L e o p o l d Senghor a n d A i m e Cesaire), this work is marked by contingency, raising questions more than offering firm solutions. H e n c e , Roche-Rabell does not offer the viewer an answer to the p r o b l e m of Puerto Rico's commonwealth status. In works like "Hurricane from the South," he points to its myriad complexities a n d how they have registered o n his psyche a n d i n the political consciousness of the island. Following Walter Benjamin, Roche-Rabell and others forge visions that can sustain a n d nurture a c o m m u n a l consciousness, though always i n qualified and contingent ways. These artists

248

CAMERON MCCARTHY AND GREG DIMITRIADIS

work h a r d for their momentary victories but are sober enough to realize that struggle is not simple nor will victory come i n one fell swoop. O n e is r e m i n d e d o f G o r d o n Bennett's "Prologue: They Sailed Slowly Nearer" where the history o f colonial oppression is configured i n pop-style pointillism, p o i n t i n g to the contingency of historical formations and the possibility of new and different futures. T h e persistent reminder i n these works is that emancipation has to be built and constructed from the bottom up. There is no predictable flow o f effects from artistic wish fulfillment, vanguard theory or politics to the fruition of social solidarity and the realization o f a new community. Writers like Harris maintain that the new community must be built i n the ordinary, i n the everyday production of difference, cobbled together, piece by reluctant piece only then can the process o f dialogue a n d reintegration of opposites take place. T h e "Palace o f the Peacock," the site and g r o u n d of the play of difference, can only come into view i n the labour of the artisan, not i n the edicts and a p r i o r i declarations of theorists and pundits. Indeed, these writers suggest that we, like the characters i n Harris's Palace of the Peacock, must all give up something here, perhaps even allowing our self-interests and crass identities to be scrutinized, wrecked i n the process of transformation. This is the path o f revision and reconciliation that D o n n e , the rambunctious colonizer and cattle rancher, must go through i n the anteroom o f the Palace: Every movement and glance and expression was a chiselling touch, the divine alienation and translation of flesh and blood into everything and anything on earth. The chisel was as old as life, old as a fingernail. The saw was the teeth of bone. Donne felt himself sliced with this skeleton sawed by the craftsman of God in the window pane of his eye. The swallow flew in and out like a picture on the wall framed by the carpenter to breathe perfection. He began hammering again louder than ever to draw the carpenter's intimate attention. He had never felt before such terrible desire and frustration all mingled. He knew the chisel and the saw in the room had touched him and done something in the wind and the sun to make him anew. Fingernail and bone were the secret panes of glass in the stone of blood through which spiritual eyes were being opened. (102-03)

INSTITUTIONALIZING OF THIRD WORLD AESTHETICS

249

Donne's t u r m o i l is the t u r m o i l of the contemporary world. It is the t u r m o i l of the colonizer and the c o l o n i z e d i n search o f new possibility, a new home. A utopic theme raised i n the writing of C o r n e l West and G i n a Dent bears u p o n the link between the work o f the imagination and the realization of change. West and Dent discuss the difference between the individualized celebration of incorporated aesthetic work versus the vital dynamic of visualizing c o m m u nity w h i c h they see e m b o d i e d i n popular arts committed to alterity. They summarize this distinction i n the tension between what they call artistic "pleasure" versus c o m m u n a l "joy," a distinction that holds for m u c h postcolonial art. Pleasure is a personal a n d atomized k i n d of enjoyment, one that has been explicitly l i n k e d to certain kinds of psychoanalytic, filmic, and especially feminist, cultural criticism. Yet, as noted, postcolonial artists have always seen the self as deeply interred i n community, m a k i n g such atomized models entirely anomalous and untenable. Postcolonial artists have struggled, rather, for "joy," the experience of pleasure i n and through collective contexts, a point made throughout this essay. Such art takesjoy i n envisioning new ways for collective struggle, new political possibilities, new ways of being and acting. It is suggested by artists like Roche-Rabell, Bennett, and Basquiat and writers like Harris, M o r r i s o n , and L a m m i n g that this work is not complete. For them, the means of struggle is as important, i f not more so, than the ends. Transformation cannot be dictated. Transformation is a process i n w h i c h people work together to build change without the false security of guarantees. This art and these artistic practices look beyond the atomized treatments of individual icons and works which have come to mark so m u c h contemporary educational reform and curricula. T h e histories of dialogue and struggle which have marked the "work of art i n the postcolonial imagination" can be l i n k e d to broader struggles for freedom, struggles which cannot be understood from within simple disciplinary confines, but must speak by necessity between and beyond them. These are, inexorably, political projects that do not fit neatly into, to echo H a l l , disciplinary or even postdisciplinary structures. They are
4

250

CAMERON MCCARTHY AND GREG DIMITRIADIS

part o f a broader h u m a n struggle, taking place across multiple sites o f encounter.

V. Conclusion
Contemporary postcolonial art vigorously places art at the centre o f the struggles for happiness o f people of the so-called developing w o r l d but also o f diasporic peoples scattered across the peripheries o f the developed countries of the West. These contradictory, hybrid a n d utopic texts agonize about identity and present the future as an o p e n g r o u n d of possibility a n d negotiation. Postcolonial artists critique the authority over knowledge foregrounded i n the imperialist canonical text and the hegemonic wish fulfillment of the political, cultural, and knowledge-producing systems of the West. They instead allow us to glimpse a w o r l d of the future c o n q u e r e d by difference and the polyglot voices of the marginalized a n d oppressed. It is this world that W i l s o n Harris alerts us to at the e n d o f Palace of the Peacock w h e n D o n n e a n d his c o l o n i z e r / c o l o n i z e d crew begin the excruciating negotiation a n d encounter with their submerged others and repressed selves: The crew was transformed by the awesome spectacle of a voiceless soundless motion, the purest appearance of vision in the chaos of emotional sense. Earthquake and volcanic water appeared to seize them and stop their ears dashing scales only from their eyes. They saw the naked unequivocal flowing peril and beauty and soul of the pursuer and the pursued all together, and they knew they would perish if they dreamed to turn back. (62) T h e best i n t u i t i o n i n postcolonial art, thus, is the recognition that a j o u r n e y o f encounter, of dialogue and reintegration, must take place across the battle lines of difference a n d ethnocentrism i n a multicultural w o r l d that races into the twenty-first century. Postcolonial art taken i n its multiplicity looks beyond the disciplinary structures which have come to define so m u c h work i n the academy, offering a reconsidered and reconceived vision o f what academic work might look like. To return to this special issue's theme, "Institutionalizing English Studies: T h e Postcolonial/Postindependence Challenge," we have argued

INSTITUTIONALIZING OF THIRD WORLD AESTHETICS 251 here that m u c h work i n postcolonial theory fits perhaps too comfortably i n disciplinary a n d even post disciplinary literary paradigms. We argued here that these arts can only be understood i n dialogue with each other, that it is insufficient to deem them as so many d o "other arts" (Ashcroft et al. 1). Such efforts to separate out different aesthetic forms are fruitless, challenged by the work o f artists themselves, i n practice. This is an undeniable reality, o n e that cannot be ignored i n favor o f maintaining institutional status quo. Postcolonial art looks to a broader h u m a n vision, a vision o f emancipation that is open and most important not prescripted.

NOTES

1 See Adorno 119-32; Held 77-110. 2 See, among others, Christopher Jencks's What is Postmodernism?, Francois Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition, Michel Foucault's The History of Sexuality: Vol. 3, David Lodge's Changing Places, and the work of painters such as the postconceptualist Barbara Kruger. 3 See Hobbs 5-23 for a fascinating discussion of the Puerto Rican artist's background sources of influence.
4

See, for example, Mulvey's "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" (1975) and much of the contributions to the film theory journal Screen done in the 1970s.

WORKS

CITED

Adorno, Theodor. "Perennial Fashion-Jazz." Prisms. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983: 119-32Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. TheEmpire Writes Back: 'Theory and Practice in Post-colonial Literatures. London: Routledge, 1989. Arenas, Reinaldo. Graveyard of the Angels. New York: Avon Books, 1987. Belsey, Catherine. Critical Practice. London: Methuen, 1980. Benjamin, Walter. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Trans. J. Osbourne. London: New Left Books, 1977. Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin, 1972. Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Black Angels: A Widening Vision. Dir. J. Tristram andj. Wilson. A Juniper Film. 1994. Dent, Gina. "Black Pleasure, Black Joy: An Introduction." Black Popular Culture. Ed. G. Dent, San Francisco: Bay Press, 1992. 1-20. Dimitriadis, Greg. "Hip hop: From Live Performance to Mediated Narrative." Popular Music 15.2 (1996): 179-94. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford, 1988.

252

CAMERON MCCARTHY AND GREG DIMITRIADIS

Gilroy, Paul. "Cruciality and the Frog's Perspective." Third Texttj (1988-89): 33-44. Guillen, Nicolas. "Ballad of the Two Ancestors." Melanthika: An Anthology of PanCarribean Writing. Ed. N. Toczek, P. Nanton, and Y. Lovelock. Birmingham: L.W.M. Publications, 1996. Hall, Stuart. "When Was 'the Post-colonial'? Thinking at the Limit." The Post-Colonial Question: Common Skies, Divided Horizons. Ed. I. Chambers and L. Curti. London: Routledge, 1996. 242-60. Harris, Wilson. Palace of the Peacock. London: Faber, 1960. . Companions of the Day and Night. London: Faber, 1975. . Carnival. London: Faber, 1985. . "Literacy and the Imagination." The Literate Imagination. Ed. M. Gilkes. London: MacMillan, 1989. 13-30. Held, David. "The Culture Industry: Critical Theory and Aesthetic." Introduction to Critical Theory. Berkeley: U of California P, 1980. 77-110. Hobbs, Robert. Arnaldo Roche-Rabell: The Uncommon-wealth. Seattle: U of Washington P, 1996. James, C.L.R. American Civilization. Cambridge, MA: Blackwcll, 1993. Jencks, Charles. What is Postmodernism? London: Academy Editions, 1996. Lamming, George. Season of Adventure. London: Allison and Busby, i960. . Natives of My Person. London: Allison and Busby, 1971. Lippard, Lucy. Mixed Blessings: New Art in Multicultural America. New Y'ork: Pantheon Books, 1990. Lodge, David. Changing Places. New York: Penguin, 1975. Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984. McCarthy, Cameron. The Uses of Culture: Education and the Limits of Ethnic Affiliation. London: Routledge, 1996. McCarthy, Cameron, and Greg Dimitriadis. "All Consuming Identities: Race and the Pedagogy of Resentment in the Age of Difference." Australian Universities Review 41.2 (1998): 9-12. McGuigan, Jim. Cultural Populist. London: Routledge, 1992. McLean, I., and G. Bennett. The Art of Gordon Bennett. Roseville East, NSW: Craftsman House, 1996. Marshall, Richard. Jean-Michel Basquiat. New York: Whitney/Abrams, 1995. Min, Y.S. "Bridge of No Return." Krannert Art Museum Fall 1997 Catalogue. Champaign, Illinois: Krannert Art Museum, 1997. 11. Mingus, Charles. Beneath the Underdog. New York: Vintage, 1971. Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye. New York: Washington Square Press, 1970. . Song of Solomon. New York: Signet, 1977. . Beloved. New York: Knopf, 1987. .Jazz. New York: Knopf, 1992. . Paradise. New York: Knopf, 1998. Mulvey, Laura. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." Screen 16. 2 (1975): 6-18. Spivak, Gayatri. "Can the Subaltern Speak?" Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Ed. C. Nelson and L. Grossber. Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1988. 271-313.

INSTITUTIONALIZING OF THIRD WORLD AESTHETICS 253

Thompson, R. F. "Royalty, Heroism, and the Streets: The Art of Jean Basquiat." Jean-Michel Basquiat. Ed. R. Marshall. New York: Whitney/Abrams, 1995. 2842. Viswanathan, Gauri. "The Beginnings of English Literary Studv in British India." Oxford Literary Review 9.1-2. (1987): 1-20. Walcott, Derek. Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays. New York: Farrar, 1970. . "Meanings." Consequences of Class and Color: West Indian Perspectives. Ed. D. I.owenthal and L. Comitas. New York: Anchor Books, 1973. 303-12. . The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory. New York: Farrar, 1993. West, Cornel. "Nihilism in Black America." Black Popular Culture. Ed. G. Dent. San Francisco: Bay Press, 1992. 37-47.