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The Global and the Particular: Paradoxes of Contemporary Culture
When, in 1964, Marshall McLuhan declared that the modem world had become a ‘global village’ in his book Understanding Media, he played a decisive part in popularizing a term which has since been used to refer to a confrontational issue, that of globalization. His argument was that, with the progress of communication and the media, the whole world was becoming one big tribe.
One may interpret this message positively if one believes that the progress made by the more privileged areas of the world can be shared by and benefit the rest of the globe. This is the argument of the proponents of free-market capitalism who argue that the wealth of the richest can trickle down to the poorest. Other and increasingly vocal groups who have recently organized much publicized demonstrations at the Seattle, Davos and Genoa forums argue, on the contrary, that the world has become a playground for the rich who use the possibility of cheaper manpower in the Third World to increase their profits and make the rich richer and the poor poorer. Globalisation, according to them, is just the latest buzz word for domination and neo-imperialism, with the USA as the main guilty party.
The papers included in this volume were delivered at a conference organized at the Université de Bourgogne in April 2001 by Jean-Pierre Durix, Maguy Pernot, Stéphanie Ravillon and Florence Pannetier on the basis of an original suggestion made by Stéphanie and Florence. They address the issue of globalisation and its opposite mostly from a cultural and literary angle. This cultural aspect of the problem raises a number of interesting questions, particularly in the case of minority literatures. ‘Globalisation’ is the latest of a series of terms which have been used in recent decades to account for the relationship between superpowers and less prosperous or powerful nations. ‘Globalisation’ seems to have replaced other terms such as ‘colonialism’ or ‘neo-colonialism’. The change is not merely a question of fashion; it probably corresponds to a historical evolution.
Before the second World War, very few opportunities had been given to the colonized people to express visions different from those of the imperial master. After the Second World War, the leaders of movements of national liberation in most colonized countries began to advocate the end of the colonial system which was considered as a way for imperial centres to benefit most from cheap raw materials and preferential trade agreements while continuing to make important decisions in the running of their colonies. After the independence of such countries, economic domination continued with the preservation of unfair trade patterns. The new factor was probably the intervention of the USA, which had by then become a major world power in this neo-colonial game.
As a term, globalisation became popular with the generalization of ultra liberal policies advocated by the Reagan and Thatcher administrations. Free trade became a dogma which forced the former colonial powers to revise their trade policies. The division of the world into major and minor players has not radically changed. Still the old imperial empires have been replaced by the power of multinational corporations, many of them based in North America and in various European countries. One may wonder what the consequences of this situation can be on the cultures and literatures of the countries concerned.
In terms of book production and distribution, the shift from metropolitan publishing to new multinational concerns has meant radical revisionings: in the 1960s, British firms such as Longman and Heinemann started series aimed at the school market in the different countries of Africa that were setting up their own educational systems after gaining their independence from Britain. These books were often state subsidized and made the publication of numerous works possible and economically viable. The Heinemann ‘African Writers Series’ is a good example. With globalization and the imposition of strict free-market rules on Third-World countries, the financing of social welfare and education has been reduced to almost nothing and the market for such books has been reoriented towards Western consumption where readers are still affluent enough to afford books.
The idea of maintaining a classical canon of post-colonial works in print has disappeared and given way to the forces of free market. The risk is for products to become increasingly standardized commodities obeying marketing rules that have proved successful. One of the most telling examples is the number of international publishers that have tried to reproduce the success met by Salman Rushdie’s novels Midnight’s Children and The Satanic Verses. Writers who adopted that magic realist vein and the use of traditional orality associated with metafictional self-consciousness have multiplied. There is definitely a spate of post-Rushdian fiction with such names as Shashi Tharoor (The Great Indian Novel [1989] and Vikram Chandra (Red Earth and Pouring Ram [1995]). Similarly, because feminism has been popular on academic syllabuses, publishers have brought out many works by postcolonial women writers.
Such books have become commodities, with the result that their life-span can at times be very short. The publishers’ aim is to reach success fast, or at least, not to seem to be behind the times by failing to include a ‘postcolonial’ heading to their catalogues (Routledge being one of the most active firms in this field).
The case of Ireland appears somewhat different. The country which, in the 1960s, was a poor parent of the Western world, with children begging in the streets of Dublin and a mostly rural economy, has since become one of the most active players in the global economy. Yet the ‘Celtic tiger’ has pursued an active policy of attracting and financing artists who reside in the island with, as a result, a tremendous development of literature and the arts in general.
It may seem strange to make a comparison between the situation in postcolonial countries and that of Ireland. And yet Ireland too was for a long time under the domination of a major colonial power. In a more subtle way, the vocabulary used by the first intellectuals who theorized about the liberation of black and minority peoples throughout the world tended to be inspired by the rhetoric of Irish nationalism. The Irish case provided the foundation on which later African American and postcolonial movements could build their own agendas.
The Celtic revival of the second half of the nineteenth century led to the founding by William Butler Yeats and others of the Irish Literary Renaissance, a movement which Yeats described as providing the possibility of building a national literature which could be really Irish although the writers expressed themselves in English. The Irish Literary Renaissance was successful, not only because of the talented people who animated it but also because the historical timing was favourable: following other European countries in which nationhood had been recently achieved, the Irish were able at last to turn their ideals of regaining control of their nation into a reality. It is therefore not surprising that some of the rhetoric of the Irish Renaissance was later taken up by other movements of liberation such as the Harlem Renaissance movement in the USA in the 1920s and 30s, the Negritude movement in the 1930s and the rise of ‘Commonwealth literature’ in the late 1950s.
When, just before Nigeria, his native country, achieved independence from Britain, Chinua Achebe produced his pioneering novel Things Fall Apart (1958), he explicitly paid tribute to W.B. Yeats’ ‘The Second Coming’ in his epigraph which gives a due to the meaning of the title of his novel:
Things Fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world
Perhaps pushing the meaning of Yeats’ poem in a direction which the Irish writer had not forecast, Achebe suggests here that the old colonial centre, Britain, has lost control of the colonies which are gradually moving away from imperial domination and becoming independent. Yet, after reading Achebe’s novel, one may also wonder whether this crisis does not also affect the relations of the native cultures concerned with their ancient traditions from which they have become somewhat alienated.
Looking back over the turmoil following Nigeria’s independence, particularly the Biafra crisis of 1967-1968, one is struck by the prophetic tone of Achebe’s novel which it is worth re-reading not so much as a faithful recreation of Ibo society at the beginning of the twentieth century, as many critics have argued, but as an allegory of the years just before the period of independence.
In his re-examination of the relations between former colonizer and colonized, Achebe attempted to unmask certain colonial prejudices which were not yet expressed in terms of globalization but rather in terms of the people’s liberation from prejudices inculcated by the imperial power and what he already considered as its neo-colonial allies (American critics such as Charles Larson in particular). In this context, Achebe denounced the ethnocentric implications of such words as the ‘universal’, which he considered to be the particular viewpoint of the West taken as an absolute and essentialized. Achebe argued in favour of a use of English which made allowances for the particular African point of view that his own people, the Ibo, had over the world. In this sense he was ‘writing against’ or attempting to provide an alternative to the homogenizing discourse of the West.
When, in the 1 970s and 80s the Maori novelist Patricia Grace reassessed viewpoints specific to her own people and to their communal values as opposed to what many Maori considered as the encroaching materialistic Pakeha population, she too implicitly opposed the levelling effect of excessive globalization which appeared as a thinly veiled attempt on the part of the rich to seize hold of the resources of the world while imposing a capitalistic ethic of individual prosperity and the commodification of every available object and person. Her protest in such novels as Potiki (1986) targeted the capitalistic conception of land as an asset which could be sold and bought for profit without any consideration for its spiritual value for the people who had inherited it from their ancestors under a system of communal land tenure.
Some have argued that one of the effects of this globalization that has become a ruling ideology is to spread the use of majority languages such as English and Spanish to the detriment of minority languages. Out of the 6000 languages spoken in the world today, some predict that, by the end of this century, about half will have disappeared under the levelling effect of education which often resorts to the teaching of a majority language to the detriment of others. This trend is assimilated to a genocidal tendency inherent in the development of majority languages. In the same way as the reinforcement of monocultures leads to the reduction in the number of living species on the planet, this linguistic evolution is assimilated to a reduction of biodiversity which will in turn impoverish the whole planet.
In this context, the debates of the early 1970s in which some African writers such as the Kenyan Ngugi pleaded for the adoption of vernacular languages by African writers whereas others such as Achebe argued for an Africanization of English as an international medium of communication appear particularly important. The debate is not limited to Third-World countries; in the British Isles, such nations as Wales, Ireland and Scotland have addressed these issues with varying degrees of success. Following the example of other English-speaking countries and taking stock of the arguments put forward by the activists of the Maori renaissance, New Zealand has now officially become a bilingual country: all official notices and documents have to appear in English and Maori and the country’s official doctrine is biculturalism (a different concept from multiculturalism). This shows that, in terms of linguistic policies, a number of countries have given up the use of a ‘global’ language (English, in this case) and, instead, have opted for two languages (one ‘global’, the other ‘particular’).
This seems to be one step further in the movement leading to the colonized people’s gaining their full independence from the former colonial master. In the initial stages of this evolution, people tended to look back nostalgically towards what they saw as their authentic ‘roots’. Examples of this can be found in the back-to-Africa movement which agitated the African American communities at the beginning of the twentieth century. The intensity of the debate concerning the issue of ‘authenticity’ also witnesses to the importance of this desire on the part of oppressed or colonized people to regain what they lost in terms of culture and identity. When fighting against the imposition of a foreign order or alien interests on their economies and cultures, people may be tempted to ‘repossess’ — as they say — a more particular kind of organisation, which they consider as their own before it was ‘corrupted’ by outside influence. The problem is further complicated when such cultures — those of the black people deported to the Americas during the slave trade, for example — have been radically cut off from their roots. What can one save of the original cultures in this case?
One may also wonder whether the very idea of being faithful to one’s origin does not raise the question of one’s representation of such origin. Simplistic attempts to recover the primeval state of one’s culture have often led to the essentializing of such representations which are frozen jnto static forms, as though cultural characteristics were not submitted to the general movement of history and evolution which affects every human being and organization. Ail cultures have always been in contact with others outside themselves and have therefore always been modified by these — often fruitful exchanges. Unless one accepts the fact that identity is always partial and in the making, one fails prey to the temptation of exclusiveness with the risk of being engulfed by fundamentalism.
Perhaps such search for authenticity is the result of a belief in the necessity to choose between one culture and another when living in a context where several cultures are made to cohabit. Many British people in India and Africa were obsessed by the fear of ‘going native’, an obsession often linked with a phobia concerning miscegenation. This is well expressed in Dons Lessing’s The Grass Is Singing (1950) and in J.M. Coetzee’s In the Heart of the Country (1970), two novels whose protagonists are white people living in Southern Africa. Paradoxically, knowing Rudyard Kipling’s reputation for jingoism, his novel Kim (1901) contains elements which show the protagonist bridging the gap between East and West without too much difficulty, a reality which contradicts Kipling’s own assertion in ‘The Ballad of East and West’ (1892):
Oh, East is East and West is West and neyer the twain shah meet,
Tiil Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgement Seat;
Admittedly the poem somewhat tempers what some commentators, quoting this extract out of its context, wish to retain exclusively; Kipling adds:
But there is neither East nor West, nor Breed, nor Birth,
When two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends of the earth!
Such binary opposition between colonizing and colonized culture, between East and West has continued to be used, even by postcolonial theoreticians such as Edward Said in his classic study Orientalism (1978). Said denounces what he sees as the West’s reduction of ail foreign cultures from the Maghreb to China under the common label ‘the Orient’, which is for him a way for the West to cast a patronizing eye on cultures which are meant to be only the object of the West’s interest, curiosity and desire without being placed on a par with those of the West. Orientalism can therefore be seen as a prefiguration of cultural globalization. However, one may also object that, in his denunciation of a real prejudice, Said himself fails victim to the essentializing of the entity which he calls the West and which is probably far more diverse, complex and contradictory than he suggests in his study.
Much in postcolonial theory has been made of this binary opposition between the global and the singular, between the powers of capital and the threatened minority communities. Because it tends to place in the same category ail formerly colonized nations (the settler colonies as well as countries where the native population remained a majority), because it was originally launched by Australian intellectuals, postcolonial theory frequently fails to draw a strict distinction between the case of Australia, a country where the colonists have gained their independence from the mother country but still rule over the Aboriginal population, and that of Nigeria or India where the situation is fundamentally different. The process of ‘writing back’ to the former colonial oppressors cannot take the same forms in such different circumstances. In this sense, critics of postcolonial theory are justified in their argument that this interpretative grid can itself be considered as a vehicle for global domination. The (mostly ‘Western’) theoreticians of postcoloniality thus become accused of wishing to confiscate intellectual authority over material which belongs to mostly Third-World countries.
Confrontation and binarism are probably necessary evils when the problems cannot be solved in more peaceful ways. However such an approach often leads to the mere reversal of the arguments and methods used by the former oppressor. The main drawback in this approach is that it fails to account for the innumerable variations in the situations which cannot be reduced to a mere polarization of issues. In terms of literature and culture, the reality is generally some form of negotiation between outside influence and what is perceived as native. Exclusion of one or the other has no relevance.
One of the interesting aspects of the fight between the globalizing and the particularizing tendencies has been the emergence of new genres or sub-genres such as the ‘village novel’, the ‘culture clash’ novel, magic realism as well as the development of hybrid aesthetics. In his more theoretical works, Wilson Harris has advocated the necessity to go beyond a term-to-term opposition which he considers as sterile. He urges people to realize that such binarism often veils the existence of a third term which dynamizes this somewhat simplistic opposition. Harris’s novels do not constitute a simplistic criticism of the effects of colonialism. They show, on the contrary, that both colonizer and colonized have generally tended to objectify their opponent and to saddle him with all responsibilities for the jus of the world, without being aware of the limits of their own perception.
Faced with the colonizers’ greed and their universalizing discourse, Glissant in Le Discours antillais (1981) opposes the necessary diversity (le Divers):
Diversity which is neither chaotic nor sterile but which corresponds to the human spirit’s striving towards a transversal relationship which shuns all universalist forms of transcendence…. The Same requires Being, Diversity sets up the Relation’.’
Glissant favours ‘rhizomatous thinking’ (la pensée rhizomatique) which forms part of this search for Relation.
Despite these attempts to offset the worst effects of binarism, one cannot deny the existence of these potentiality schizoid forces at work in most cultures, particularly in those that have been affected by colonialism and imperialism. Rather than search for a clear separation between what belongs to the traditional and the imported, it appears more fruitful to trace the infinitely varied forms of negotiation between these various strands of creation.
Table des matières
Jean-Pierre Durix : ‘The Global and the Particular: Paradoxes of Contemporary Culture’ (pp.11-18).
Marta Dvorak : ‘Rhetorical Imperialism or ‘The Word in the Wild” (pp. 19-32).
Stéphanie Ravillon : ‘Espousing the Cause of Gastronomic Pluralism: Salman Rushdie and the Art of Cooking’ (pp. 33-42).
Myriam Louviot : ‘Midnight’s Children: ‘India’s Novel’ in the Light of Globalization’ (pp. 43-52).
Geetha Ganapathy-Doré : ‘The Narrator as a Global Soul in Jumpha Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies’ (pp. 53-66).
Florence D’Souza : ‘The Paradoxical Position of an Immigrant Writer: Bharati Mukherjee, Neither Global, nor Particular?’ (pp. 67-78).
Florence Pannetier-Manckoundia : ‘Revisiting the Universal: Wilson Harris and Edouard Glissant’ (pp. 79-88).
Françoise Kral : ‘Redefining the Global / the Global as Metacultural Sphere’ (pp. 89-96).
Marc Delrez : ‘The Paradoxes of Marginalization: David Malouf and the ‘Great World” (pp. 97-106).
Marie-Claire Considère-Charon ‘Globalization and the Nation-State: Ireland, a Case Study’ (pp. 107-114).
Emile-Jean Dumay : ‘Old Loyalties and New Openings’ (pp. 115-122).
Contributors (pp. 123-124).