A Study in Personal Bias

Like most of us, I had to page back through my own posts from this quarter to remember what topics I chose and why. This then became an unavoidable study in the biases I had cultivated over time towards certain aspects of scholarly work. What fascinated me most (if I can be allowed to embrace the thrilling perversity of being fascinated by myself) is the apparent resistance to close-reading. Even in my heavily idealized and hypothetical teaching posts, there is a marked distaste for creating lessons out of small, particular moments of textual analysis in Woman on the Edge of Time. In most cases, my engagement with our articles from this quarter emerges from a place of structural interest and a constitutive need to see why this thing of all the things in the article matters.

So, in continuing service of the aforementioned perversity, I'm going to somewhat grossly reduce my posts (excepting the collaborative) to a single descriptor each and use that to indulge in more wanton structural play.

• Week 2, "Can literary criticism create its own object of study?", in which I take an offhanded comment in Chakrabarty and use it to ask how we make the concept of literature an object with a pre-defined purpose

• Week 3, "Cutting the body and text," in which I have a visceral reaction to Smyth's use of the word and end up existentially wondering if it's ever really possible to avoid doing violence to a text or a body

• Week 4, "The Obligation to Instruct," in which I make an entire post out of Raley's lifehacking footnote and implicitly add to my own first post by suggesting we make the concept of literature at the same time it's always already a concept

• Week 7, "Teaching in Concentric Circles," in which I give up pretending my interest isn't completely structural and create an impossibly abstract lecture out of Spivak's idea of reading for a class that would hate it even though I started with a gesture at close-reading

• Week 8, "The Porous Body," in which I use the structure of Chen's critical/personal piece to build a lecture around my own political motivations and discover a strange value in using a fictional, 1970s ungendered (though not unproblematic) pronoun

(I have not listed the two collaborative posts with Katherine and Rebecca here so that I can avoid reducing collaborative work to my own interpretation of that work, and also because it would be curious to see a different structural analysis on the way those collaborations were pursued and enacted).

This brings me to my larger point--because of course there is one [insert bad meta-structure joke]--about the one issue I've developed this quarter. For all the variety in the articles and the richness of the text in Woman on the Edge of Time, my topic has been the same in each post: the value of The Question. For me, structural, theoretical, or merely abstract analyses are an alternative way of approaching my own frequent frustration with my work and scholarly analyses in general, which manifests as a desperate "why should I care," or even "why do I care."

Though this is something I think probably depends on an individual's ability to reconcile the practice of studying literature with the value questions asked of those studying literature, I personally find that there is great utility in asking myself what the point of doing this actually is. It's apparent to me from my posts over the span of the quarter that I have been using Woman to ask this, and, in many ways, watching it answer my question via the continued push into structure.

Several of you are already aware that I have decided to exit the program after this quarter and pursue an "alt-ac" career for the time being (and for those of you who weren't aware until now, please forgive the crassness of finding out via blog). I mention this because I think it has bearing on the topic that has been coming out of my novel and the articles for the past couple months. I would suggest that my creative process has been an attempt not so much to get at the "point of it all," as it were, but at what I think is a more crucial question in pursuing higher education: "what is the point of this for me and right now?"

If the Chen article taught us anything, it was that the critical can be deeply embedded in the personal, and I think that always defaulting to close-reading can make us forget to ask ourselves the more difficult, abstract, or structural questions about our work. In our obsession with the criticalness of literary criticism, it's all too easy to ignore that, at the same time literature is Chakrabarty's object of study, it's also an experience, a medium for self-analysis, and a strong marker of our own temporality. Graduate students are often told that they will go through phases of crisis and self-doubt, but I rarely (if ever) hear someone suggest turning to the very texts that cause this crisis and letting them show you the structure of your own relationship to your research. I think we'd all find a surprisingly ally in our work no matter what direction it seems to be taking.

Interpreting *By the Sea*: A Retrospective

I was fascinated to look back through my posts from this quarter and trace the trajectory of my analysis of By the Sea. Even though the topic of each week’s post was contingent upon the random articles that comprised that week’s readings, my thinking in fact developed along a clear line. (Perhaps this is a function of my usually choosing a general idea in the novel to think about before even reading the critical essays.) Back in October I chose By the Sea as my primary text because I knew and liked the novel, and, importantly, because I had never written about it and knew that my pre-existing interpretive framework was quite basic. There was however one topic that I knew interested me in the novel, what had made me remember it from that class I took my junior year of college: the motif of maps. My first two posts of the quarter, connecting the text to Chakrabarty and Anderson, followed directly from this interest. I am not in the least surprised by the conclusion of my first post—I still hold to it, as well—that perhaps this novel is asking us to locate a common humanity only in people being “fellow children of dislocation.”

Along those lines, I'm surprised that I never got the chance to discuss a related issue: that of homes, homelessness, and inheritance. I mentioned so many times the plot wherein Saleh takes possession of Latif’s childhood home, but I guess because I didn’t find any of the secondary readings to speak quite to this question, I never got to it. Instead, my third and fourth posts show a pivot in my thinking about the novel. They reveal the point at which I started to focus more on the intersection of storytelling and resistance, connected but not limited to Saleh’s use of “Bartleby.”

The idea that most inspired me emerged in my fifth post, dealing with Spivak. Throughout the quarter I’ve been considering the implications of By the Sea’s role as a postcolonial novel, and Spivak’s concept of strategic essentialism helped me clarify that thinking. Every post I wrote deals with the ambiguities and contradictions inherent to the postcolonial subject; how Saleh and Latif are constantly straddling two worlds; how they participate in, attempt to participate in, or look down upon the discourses of those two worlds. One way in which this comes out is through irony, which I point to in my first and last posts. As a critic of this text, I am constantly running up against this dichotomy and trying to figure out how the protagonists and the novel itself value Zanzibari and British systems of knowing in opposition to one another. To quote myself explicating the Spivak a few weeks back:

Her article argues that, if we read [the Subaltern Studies group’s] work against the grain, we can see them strategically essentializing the subaltern in order to confront the difficulty of giving the subaltern a voice (or locating the subaltern’s voice), which is actually the paradox of anti-humanist criticism: that it too essentializes, “the object of [its] criticism [is] irreducible” (Spivak 13). In deliberately and strategically projecting the lessons of subaltern studies onto deconstructionist criticism at large, she notes, “the subaltern is necessarily the absolute limit of the place where history is narrativized into logic” (Spivak 16). (Bamert)

This idea really helped me think through the narrating (and therefore vocal) postcolonial subject as a limit case. The constant back and forth and questioning of value systems in the novel, the hypocrisy sometimes exhibited by Saleh and Latif, can be read as part of this paradoxical critique of Western humanism. I’d probably say now that my very broad-stroke reading of By the Sea is that it is about the interpretation of stories. The novel enacts many varied interpretations, and it lends itself to yet others. I wouldn’t say that this is a big departure from how I read the novel before writing these posts, but it certainly does situate my interest in postcolonial dislocation and mapping within a broader and better defined discursive context.

(Thanks also to Tom and Katherine for some great collaborative post writing that helped me develop my interpretation of the novel!)

Can literary criticism create its own object of study?

There were a few odd moments in the Chakrabarty article that didn’t appear have anything in particular to do with climate change, and that struck me as containing much larger concepts than expected. They were extremely easy to pass over in reading, so my goal here is to take a second look at one of these and try to suss out the implications for literary study.

The moment in which I’m interested is on page 215 of the article, quoted below. For reference, Chakrabarty is here discussing his third “thesis” and the tensions between a deterministic (or biology-driven) view of humanity and a kind of socio-historic one that deals with the human as a subject with freedoms, etc.:

“All disciplines have to create their objects of study.”

The first fascinating part about that statement—besides the impression that it may eventually be found on an introspective tote bag—is its offhand, declarative quality. The style of the statement itself belies the expansiveness of the concepts behind it, and the sweeping gesture with which it scoops up those concepts seems somewhat out of place in Chakrabarty’s analysis.

It would be absurd to say, for example, that medicine has to first create a human being in order to study one, but the fact remains that medicine had to create the human as a being, a body, an object that can be studied and understood in medical terms before it could fit into that paradigm. Chakrabarty also says, “Absent personhood, there is no human subject of history,” but history has to do more than create the human as a person in order to study it (215). History actually has to conceive of persons as entities with the capacity both for an individual and shared past, and with the concept of a present or future against which that past can be set to mark it out as history. It also has to create “history” itself as a thing that can be codified and measured.

The immediate problem, of course, is a chicken and egg scenario. Can something be properly called a “discipline” without an object of study? Or does the act of creating the study-able object also simultaneously create the discipline, the possibility of that object being studied?

Given that paradox, what would this look like for literary study? I’ll use my primary text, Woman on the Edge of Time, to push on the notions presented in Chakrabarty’s statement.

On one level we have the easily-accessible physical object of literary study, which may not in fact be all that simple. There are dozens of material and conceptual definitions of “book” that can be argued, and the advent of digital books makes the category even muddier. I chose Woman as a literary object based on its bound physicality (signifying “book” in some way) and its complex, fictional content, but can we really argue that the discipline of literary criticism created the literary object in the first place? Or, in the act of choosing texts, did the field of literary criticism (and by extension, I) created an object out of “literariness” instead? In other words, the object that literary criticism studies could actually be something like “value in/of literature.”

This gets even stranger if we consider Woman as part of the genre of science fiction, since science fiction studies is embroiled in an endless battle over what “counts” as science fiction. Certainly the story has all the elements of a sensible definition of science fiction—there is a utopia/dystopia binary in an imagined future, a seedy and near-dystopian present where neurological experiments are taking place, and a set of extreme technological inventions in the future that are represented as at once horrifying and banal. But did science fiction criticism create an object called “science fiction” out of those things?

And what about the protagonist, Connie Ramos? When we analyze her, we take into account certain categories of human-object (in the sense of a bounded concept, not necessarily in the sense of objectified): woman, middle-aged, Latina, victim, mental patient, etc. But can we say that the discipline of literary criticism has created her? If “all disciplines have to create their objects of study” as Chakrabarty suggests, what object can be said to have been created by our own? Or does the very nature of literary studies require a multiplicity of objects?

To close, I’ll leave this with a scene from Woman where Connie learns that all children are genetically engineered, and a woman from the future tells her the reason: “Finally there was that one thing we [i.e. women] had to give up too, the only power we ever had, in return for no more power for anyone. The original production: the power to give birth” (Piercy 97). In the novel, the ability to create objects and persons changes shape over time—it might help to think of the creation of a study-able object in a similar way, i.e. as an unstable process that we have to free up to be reconstituted as something else.

Can There Be a Postcolonial "Children of the Land"?

(Please excuse the wonky formatting—I'm still figuring out how this works!)

Considering that my primary text is a postcolonial novel about a Zanzibari asylum seeker in England, you may have expected me to write about Mbebe’s “Necropolitics” article. However, I was intrigued by Chakrabarty’s questions regarding the confrontation of postcolonial and climate change studies: “If, indeed, globalization and global warming are born of overlapping processes, the question is, How do we bring them together in our understanding of the world?” (Chakrabarty 200). Industrialization and colonization, both processes effected by powerful human agents, are intricately connected. They are involved in a feedback loop, in that human subjugation of other humans has powered the industries that have fueled globalization, which in turn has threatened this very mode of existence—“human life as developed in the Holocene” (Chakrabarty 213)—at the same time that it has reinforced the inequalities upon which it is based. Because climate change threatens all people, Chakrabarty impels us to consider humans as a universal species—it is at this level that we have become a geological agent and inaugurated the Anthropocene. He admits the value of the postcolonial “critique that sees humanity as an effect of power,” but “[does] not find it adequate in dealing with the crisis of global warming” for that reason (Chakrabarty 221). I was motivated to seek in By the Sea not an answer, but perhaps a hint, a response of any kind, to the question posed by Chakrabarty: “How do we relate to a universal history of life—to universal thought, that is—while retaining what is of obvious value in our postcolonial suspicion of the universal?” (Chakrabarty 220).

This of course requires me to read against the grain. By the Sea is set during the Anthropocene, but its concerns are clearly postcolonial. While the environment—especially the sea—plays an important role in the novel, it does not address human “geological agency”—and not even indirectly. However, I think my unconventional reading is in line with Chakrabarty’s call to action; he hopes to “[probe] the limits of historical understanding” (Chakrabarty 220).

There is a brief moment in the novel that seems to me to get at Chakrabarty’s question. An overarching theme in this text about refugees is home and homelessness, place and dislocation. After being imprisoned in Zanzibar for many years, the protagonist, Saleh Omar, is moved to a tiny island where he and a few other prisoners are being held along with deportees waiting to be sent back to Oman. One day, the ship comes to take the deportees, and the prison’s commanding officer encourages Saleh to board with them. Saleh, however, is committed to his memory of home and to returning to his wife and daughter (whom we know, because this is a flashback, are likely dead by this point), so he remains on the island to stay out his indefinite prison sentence. For the next few days, the troops are more lenient with the prisoners left on the island, and one night at dinner, Saleh has this conversation with the commanding officer:

“You should’ve gone with your brothers,” the commanding officer said.

“They’re your brothers too,” I said, though I said it mildly for fear of offending our ruler, so mildly that I had to repeat it before he heard me.

“Yes,” he said laughing. “The Omanis fucked all our mothers.”

“And this is as much their home as it is mine, as it is yours,” I said.

“Sote wananchi,” he said satirically, booming with his knowing laughter. All of us are children of the land. (Gurnah 228)

Here the notion of “brotherhood” or universality is understood by the characters as ironic and “satiric.” Politics and history have differentiated Omanis from Zanzibaris, just as they have differentiated prisoners from members of the military. The idea of there being a universal “children of the land” is a ridiculous platitude. Yet, with Chakrabarty’s encouragement, we can see how all of these people’s dislocation indeed represents a commonality. Perhaps we can see them as children of the same negative space or fellow children of dislocation. The prisoner eating and joking with the commanding officer, surrounded by the sea on an island that is home to neither of them and with no sense of how long they will be there, are also in this moment stripped of the characteristics that give one power over the other, that differentiate them.

Nevertheless, even in this brief moment the possibility of universality is disregarded and enmeshed in sarcasm. We can look for a sense of species that is not biological or ecological — that accepts dislocation and disconnection from the land as its basis — but this too will face resistance.