Li-Chun Hsiao - The Indivisible Globe, the Indissoluble Nation

ibidem-Press, Stuttgart

Table of Contents

Abstract Abstract This book attempts to rethink, under the rubric of globalization, a number of key notions in postcolonial theory and writings by revisiting what it conceives of as “the primal scene of postcoloniality”—the Haitian Revolution. Theoretically, it unpacks and critiques the poststructuralist penchants and undercurrents of the postcolonial paradigm in First-World academia while not reinstating earlier Marxist stricture. Focusing on Édouard Glissant’s, C. L. R. James’s, and Derek Walcott’s representations of Toussaint L’Ouverture and the Haitian Revolution, the textual analyses aim to approach the issues of colonial mimicry, postcolonial nationalism, and postcoloniality in light of recent reconsiderations of the universal/the particular in critical theories, and psychoanalytic conceptions of trauma, identity, and jouissance. This book argues that postcolonial intellectuals’ characteristic celebration of the Particular, together with their nuanced denunciation of the postcolonial nation and the Revolution, doesn’t really do away with the category of the Universal, nor twist free of the problematic of the logics of difference/equivalence that sustain the “living on” of the nation-state, despite an ever expanding globality; rather, such a postcolonial phenomenon is symptomatic of a disavowed traumatic event that mirrors and prefigures the predicament of the postcolonial experience while evoking its simulacra and further struggles centuries later.

Introduction

Chapter 1 The Postcolonial Paradigm/Paradox: Theorizing between the Universal and the Particular

Chapter 2 Toussaint, Mimicry, and the Primal Scene of Postcoloniality

Chapter 3 In the Name of the Father: Representing Postcolonial Nationalisms

Chapter 4 Toussaint, Globalization, and the Postcolonial Spectacle

Epilogue

About the author

Bibliography

This book attempts to rethink, under the rubric of globalization, a number of key notions in postcolonial theory and writings by revisiting what it conceives of as “the primal scene of postcoloniality”—the Haitian Revolution. Theoretically, it unpacks and critiques the poststructuralist penchants and undercurrents of the postcolonial paradigm in First-World academia while not reinstating earlier Marxist stricture. Focusing on Édouard Glissant’s, C. L. R. James’s, and Derek Walcott’s representations of Toussaint L’Ouverture and the Haitian Revolution, the textual analyses aim to approach the issues of colonial mimicry, postcolonial nationalism, and postcoloniality in light of recent reconsiderations of the universal/the particular in critical theories, and psychoanalytic conceptions of trauma, identity, and jouissance. This book argues that postcolonial intellectuals’ characteristic celebration of the Particular, together with their nuanced denunciation of the postcolonial nation and the Revolution, doesn’t really do away with the category of the Universal, nor twist free of the problematic of the logics of difference/equivalence that sustain the “living on” of the nation-state, despite an ever expanding globality; rather, such a postcolonial phenomenon is symptomatic of a disavowed traumatic event that mirrors and prefigures the predicament of the postcolonial experience while evoking its simulacra and further struggles centuries later.

As with the precedents of postmodernism and poststructuralism, the expansion, together with the eventual ascent, of postcolonial studies to a paradigmatic status on the contemporary intellectual scene in recent decades doesn’t seem to help clarify many of the fundamental questions about the field. There have been theoretical debates over the parameters, definition(s), methodologies or epistemological grounds, speaking positions, and the locality of postcoloniality: For example, is the postcolonial “post” in the same sense as the postmodern or the poststructuralist? When is (was) the postcolonial, or was there ever such a moment? What is postcoloniality, and how does one conceive of it vis-à-vis postcolonialism (and vice versa)? Who are the postcolonials? Who speaks as/for the postcolonial? Are the ex-colonized and ex-colonizer “postcolonial” in the same sense? 1Like the designation “postcolonial” itself, key notions/terms in the field, such as “hybridity” or “diaspora,” tend to lapse into loosely conceived and exuberantly celebrated buzzwords as they appear more and more frequently in and beyond postcolonial studies.

In this book, I’d like to approach, in the spirit of polemics, the postcolonial “controversies,” or—as I prefer to call them—“problematics” by focusing on two of the multiple and entangled facets of the issues: 1) the spatial dimension concerning the manifestations of these problematics in the postcolonial nation and the variegated inflections of postcolonial nationalism; 2) the temporal dimension entailing the indeterminate, convoluted temporality of post coloniality, trauma of colonial slavery as the “remainder” of the history of colonialism, and a query of the presumed pastness of colonialism in certain discourses of postcolonialism. Against the backdrop of this “postcolonial problematic,” which might as well be called the point of departure of this book, I’d like to locate another, deeper, and more latent problematic in postcolonial studies—the question of the universal/particular; this latent level of the postcolonial problematic, as well as its manifest instantiations, then, has to intersect, or even be traversed by an “Event” that encompasses these contestations by both illuminating and problematizing them: Toussaint and the Haitian Revolution. 2Let me briefly explicate the centrality of the historical figure of Toussaint—whose emergence itself was an “event” in the history of colonialism—and the Haitian Revolution to this book before we move on to full-length explorations (in Chapter 1) of the universal/particular problematic in postcolonial criticism and theory.

This, no doubt, is meant to be more of a rhetorical question. Rather than supplying a biographical account or historical documentation, I’d draw attention to the historical disjunction or discontinuities in historiography through which Toussaint is largely forgotten in the Western memory of colonial slavery—a forgetfulness that is the background against which this question, in its literal sense, has to be asked, especially for those stumbling into the field of postcolonialism: no, really . . . who is Toussaint?

Maybe it would be easier to reawaken the memory of Toussaint by citing a work of canonical Western literature which treats Toussaint as its subject matter. One such rare case can be found in William Wordsworth’s “To Toussaint L’Ouverture”:

Toussaint, the most unhappy man of men!

Whether the whistling Rustic tend his plough

Within thy hearing, or thy head be now

Pillowed in some deep dungeon’s earless den;—

O miserable chieftain! Yet die not; do thou

Wear rather in thy bonds a cheerful brow:

Though fallen thyself, never to rise again,

Live, and take comfort. Thou hast left behind

Powers that will work for thee; air, earth, and skies;

There is not a breathing of the common wind

That will forget thee; thou hast great allies;

Thy friends are exultations, agonies,

And love, and man’s unconquerable mind. ( Poems 577)

Ironically, not only had Toussaint few allies, but he has been virtually forgotten, most conspicuously in Western colonial and abolitionist discourses (Hesse 164), before C. L. R. James’s ground-breaking book,