Review: In the Shadow of Hegel: Cultural Theory in an Age of DisplacementAuthor(s): Simon GikandiSource: Research in African Literatures, Vol. 27, No. 2 (Summer, 1996), pp. 139-150Published by: Indiana University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3820167Accessed: 29/07/2010 11:50

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REVIEW ESSAYS

In the Shadow of Hegel: Cultural Theory in an Age of Displacement

Simon Gikandi

BOOKS DISCUSSED

The Location of Culture. Homi Bhabha. London: Routledge, 1994.

The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Paul Gilroy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1993.

Fanon and the Crisis of European Man: An Essay on Philosophy and the Human Sciences. Lewis R. Gordon. London: Routledge, 1995.

It is ironic that the most controversial question in debates about postcolonialism and its relation to social theory-is postcoloniality an epis- temological category that constitutes a transcendence of the culture of colonialism and what is its relation to postmodernism?-is the one which unites texts as diverse in their arguments and styles as Homi Bhabha's The Location of Culture, Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic, and Lewis Gordon's Fanon and the Crisis of European Man. That texts which locate themselves in three distinctive philo- sophical and cultural traditions (Bhabha's poststructuralism would appear to be at odds with Gilroy's advocacy of modernity as a trope of black liberation; both are directly questioned by Gordon's existential phenomenology) should find common ground in the discourse of postcoloniality is important not only because it sug- gests that, whether we like it or not, postcolonialism is a concept whose time has arrived, but also because postcolonial theory has become, unconsciously perhaps, the mark of multiple intellectual anxieties. It is in the name of postcolonialism that contemporary culture struggles to find ways of talking about the crisis that has come to define it-the crisis of modernity, of identity and liberation, and indeed of such important liberal categories as freedom and citizenship, democracy and representation.

The three books under review are, of course, concerned with specific cultural and theoretical agendas: Bhabha locates himself at the intersection between modernity and postmodernity, metropole and colony; Gilroy's work crisscrosses the Atlantic seeking to establish the ways in which black cultures in Africa, Europe, and the Americas were connected and disconnected as they encountered

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each other in the temporality of modernity; Gordon sets out to read Fanon's work as a conduit into the crisis of black being which, he argues, is also a crisis of European ontology. In all three cases, however, the shadow of postcolonialism, and especially its unfulfilled-and perhaps unfulfillable-desires hover as the source of numerous cultural and political opportunities and anxieties. The ques- tions these three books raise are ultimately about how the colonized can reread their temporal and spatial geographies within the culture of the moder West now that the categories that invented moder occidentalism can no longer sustain their universal authority: Where is culture to be located in an age of shifting boundaries and unstable identities (Bhabha)? What does it mean to be black and English when the two terms have been written, in the discourse of Englishness, as mutu- ally exclusive (Gilroy)? And can reason and science, the categories that gave post- Enlightenment Europe the alibi of cultural superiority, be liberated from the racism implicit in their foundational moments (Gordon)?

Bhabha's book is a collection of some of his most important essays, works that have shaped the debate on postcolonialism and postmodernism in the last ten years. For while it is perhaps true that few people understand Bhabha's often abstruse mode of argumentation, there is no doubt that his performance of a cer- tain critique of colonialism and modernity has affected the way we engage with these important categories. My definition of Bhabha's critique as a performance is both a compliment and a censure: it is through the performative, as he often argues in The Location of Culture, that we are able to undermine the foundational (or what he calls the pedagogical) force of dominant culture; but if a critique is perceived only through its performance, and hence achieves its goals through affectivity, the logic that drives it is always in danger of slippage. Bhabha's response to this kind of censure is that to present a critique in a systematic-and hence pedgagogical way-is to fall into the categories one sets out to deconstruct. As he consistently argues in the chapters of his book dealing with the politics of culture, Bhabha prefers the grammar of displacement and negativity to the posi- tivist discourse of liberation, progress, and historicism implicit in modernist revolutionary movements such as Marxism. Indeed, if the question that opens his book is simply one of locating culture, Bhabha is never in doubt that the localities he seeks are neither historical nor cartographic; on the contrary, the grammar of culture is one of shifting boundaries, liminal sitings, hybridity, and difference. Ambivalence and hybridity are such key terms in Bhabha's vocabulary that it is difficult to see how he could exist without them.

The more immediate question, however, is this: what does the valorization of such liminal positions allow Bhabha to do? Can ambivalence and hybridity be deployed in social theory without solipsism? Simply put, Bhabha's social theory is built on the notion that liminality or marginality provides the critic of modernity and colonialism with a position of reading (I was tempted to call it a hermeneuti- cal position, but Bhabha would strenuously reject the implications of this term) that exists somewhere between the reality of such categories (i.e., modernity and colonialism) and their negation. In Bhabha's lexicon, the hybrid refers to values that have been constituted by the dominant epistemology, but have also overflown them; like ambivalence and negativity, the hybrid is the figure of excessive mean- ing. In these circumstances, Bhabha predicates his revision of the history of

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critical theory on a notion of cultural difference which he succinctly opposes to the more familiar doctrine of cultural diversity:

Cultural diversity is an epistemological object-culture as an object of empirical knowledge-whereas cultural difference is the process of the enunciation of culture as "knowledgeable," authoritative, adequate to the construction of systems of cultural identification. If cultural diversity is a category of comparative ethics, aesthetics or ethnology, cultural dif- ference is a process of signification through which statements of culture or on culture differentiate, discriminate and authorize the production of systems of cultural identification. (34) If one has to argue with Bhabha's view on what theory and culture are

supposed to do in the socius, it is important to keep the distinctions he makes between cultural diversity and cultural difference in mind: diversity is a contain- able category and an implicit value; difference signifies terms that slip from us every time we try to deploy them. One suspects that Bhabha's implicit assump- tion here-which also explains his preference for cultural difference-is that the terms of diversity are always derived from the dominant category, while differ- ence creates its own terms. In other words, people committed to diversity can only effect this commitment by appealing to liberal categories such as nation or freedom; one cannot talk about cultural diversity without appealing to such categories. A commitment to difference, on the other hand, is a recognition of the loss of meaning or devaluation of the terms that define such categories; because cultural difference is produced through signification, it is considered deconstruc- tive. What Bhabha seems to ignore in this argument, however, is the possibility that signification is itself already contained within the categories it deconstructs; differentiation is always the play of two terms one of which must be dominant. In addition, the "significatory" that enables such differentiation is itself a term of cultural or linguistic exchange.

Bhabha, of course, reads identity-even colonial identity-purely in terms of the language we have acquired from postmodernism: rejecting identity both as self-reflection and as the product of the division between nature and culture, he reads it as a "persistent questioning of the frame, the space of representation, where the image ... is confronted with its difference, its Other" (46); the space of writing is a place of "double inscriptions," not reflection. And so long as he is reading postmodern and postcolonial texts that share his theoretical agenda-Toni Morrison's Beloved, Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses, or Derek Walcott's poetry-Bhabha's version of identity formation strikes us with perspicuousness. Such texts provide him with excellent examples of the epistemological vanishing point in which the narrative of identity is written when the categories of bourgeois civility have outlived themselves; in such stories of negation and displacement, Bhabha encounters and valorizes the unhomely lives represented in the "extra- territorial novel" (9-10) and the experience of the nation as "the measure of the liminality of cultural modernity" (140). In a reading of Walcott's "Names," for example, the critic discovers "that moment of undecidability or unconditionality that constitutes the ambivalence of modernity as it executes its critical judgments, or seek justification for its social facts" (233).

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But in encountering these dazzling moments of the deconstructive readings in The Location of Culture, one cannot help wondering why Bhabha selects only the texts which seem to reject the philosophical or ethnographic notions of the subject he attacks throughout his book. Well, one could say that this kind of selec- tivity is inherent in all kinds of reading, but Bhabha's hostility to mimetic modes of represenation appears curious to those readers who may remember that he began his intellectual career with a famous attempt to understand the culture of colonialism through a reading of the problems raised by "mimeticism" in one of the most "realistic" postcolonial novels, V. S. Naipaul's A House for Mr Biswas ("Representation"). The absence of this essay in this collection is very revealing. For if all the texts Bhabha reads perform what he considers to be the signification of cultural difference, it is hard to see how their objects of representation, say colonialism in Walcott or slavery in Morrison, are, as historical occasions, prod- ucts of the strategies of splitting the postmoder sensibility-and poststructural strategy-he reads in them. For while it makes perfect sense for Bhabha to locate his reading in an enunciatory moment defined by cultural difference and the power of signification, it is another matter to read colonial culture as already performing a similar task.

Consider, then, Bhabha's influential (and very postmoder) reading of the topography of the nation in "Dissemination." Consider, in particular, how his reading is achieved through a neat splitting of the nation from its historical con- ditions, and his splicing of the terms of its constitution: while Bhabha does not deny the categories that constitute the nation-history, patriotism, and civility- categories related to their "specific histories and particular meanings," his project is predicated on a detour of historicism. Indeed, Bhabha's critique of nationalism depends on the differentiation of temporality from historicism: his emphasis on the temporal dimension in the inscription of the topography of nationalism, he argues, serves to "displace the historicism that has dominated discussions of the nation as a cultural force" (140). I am all for the displacement of historicism, but it does not lead us very far (a) if we are not cognizant of the ways in which the historical event itself is already written in the category of nationalism and hence cannot be recuperated or deconstructed without some measure of historicism (more about this later); and (b) if we are not reminded-and Bhabha does not remind us-that performativity is also a game that the nation plays to secure its authority.

I began this review by calling attention to the problems Bhabha faces as he tries to deconstruct the histories we have inherited from colonialism and moder- nity and, at the same time, reject the notion of history as an explanatory category. I find this problem intriguing because I believe that his most important work has been in colonial discourse. In chapters dealing with questions of the stereotype (ch. 3), mimicry (ch. 4), civility (ch. 5), literacy (ch. 6), and rumor (ch. 10), we can see why Bhabha can be considered to be the scholar who recentered colonial discourse in literary studies. What is ironic in these seminal essays, however, is that while poststructural theory was the enabling condition of Bhabha's critique of colonial discourse, this theory also seems to have retarded the full development of this critique. Consider, for example, the study of the colonial stereotype: Bhabha was perhaps the first theorist to provide a systematic examination of the ways in which the stereotype functioned as a discursive strategy of colonial rule rather

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than the simplistic negative image it was supposed to be in previous studies of colonized peoples and cultures in the English novel. While earlier studies of the representation of the colonized in colonial discourse tended to read images of imperial rule in a positive/negative opposition, Bhabha's essay made it possible for those of us who work in this field to conceive the stereotype as a condition of subjectivity (67). And as subsequent work in the field has shown, the representa- tion of colonial subjects as figures of radical alterity was an important strategy of rule and control (see Dirks, Thomas, and Stoler).

And yet, in rereading this essay, I had the feeling that Bhabha labors too hard to belong to a poststructuralism-in this case Lacanian--guild: "My anatomy of colonial discourse remains incomplete until I locate the stereotype, as an arrested, fetishistic mode of representation within its field of identification, which I have identified in my description of Fanon's primal scenes, as the Lacanian scheme of the Imaginary" (76-77). My irritation with Bhabha here arises from his failure to consider alternative readings of the stereotype in a colonial situation; by organiz- ing the whole production of colonial discourse around Lacan's notion of the imag- inary, he fails to consider how the stereotype is also about the constitution of European subjects in the colonial sphere. Lacan attracts Bhabha here and else- where partly because he allows him to abstract colonialism from its historicism and to filter it through ambivalence, the key term in the poststructuralist lexicon. Indeed, in an equally famous essay on ambivalence in colonial discourse, Bhabha opens his discussion with a telling quote from Lacan: "Mimicry reveals some- thing in so far as it is distinct from what might be called an itself that is behind. The effect of mimicry is camouflage" (85).

Now, two issues are at stake in Bhabha's reading of mimicry in colonial discourse via Lacan. First, Lacan enables him to provide many important instances of mimicry as a form of camouflage in which colonial power conceals its own alienated and alienating intentions behind the mask of bourgeois civility or what he calls "a flawed colonial mimesis" (87). The second issue, however, is that Bhabha feels compelled, with Lacan's nudging, to deploy the trope of mimicry as a way of leaving behind the colonial scenes he foregrounds in his essay. Indeed, Bhabha is so eager to escape the trauma engendered by colonial originary scenes that he often transposes the first function of mimicry (the histor- ical) to the second (the psychoanalytic). It is as if a historicized mimicry- the mimicry that produces "another knowledge of its norms" (86)-will draw the theorist back to the scene left behind; and thus historicism must give way to a mimicry that displaces the colonial past through a discourse of difference. "In mimicry, the representation of identity and meaning is rearticulated along the axis of metonymy," claims Bhabha (90). The problem with Bhabha's reading of mim- icry as metonymic here is simply this: what has come to be known as the culture of mimicry in colonialism is already represented through powerful metaphors of identity, nature, and civility. The "mimic men" of colonial culture are also the models of ideal colonial subjectivity. In addition, colonial power derives its power from its capacity to control and contain the ambivalence that Bhabha seems to valorize as the enabling condition of colonial conquest and rule.

Let me amplify this assertion with two examples from The Location of Culture. The first example is Bhabha's reading of John Stuart Mill's essays "On Liberty" and "Representative Government," where he shows how this discourse

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derives its authority by substituting a particular category (India) for a universal referent (liberty): "events experienced and inscribed in India are to be read other- wise, transformed into acts of governments and the discourse of authority in another place, at another time" (95). Now, one cannot argue with the now estab- lished fact that Mill uses India as a philosophical conduit, and that the particular- ities of the colony are secondary to his larger project which, as I have argued elsewhere, is ultimately about England and Englishness (see Gikandi). What I am suggesting, however, is that the doubleness of colonial discourse can be explained by a whole set of issues that Bhabha dismisses too easily-it can be explained by hypocrisy, political power, or even bad faith. But whatever mode of explanation we prefer, it is simply not true that this doubleness reveals "an agonistic uncer- tainty contained in the incompatibility between empire and nation" (96); on the contrary, what allows this doubleness is the forced yoking of these two entities. In essence, it is because England and India are written as integers of the same total- ity (empire) that Mill can make the substitutions we read in his essays on liberty, hence his argument that the moral character of Englishness can be measured by the way the imperial center treats its colonial peripheries.

A second example is Bhabha's reading of the figure of the colonial book, where his analysis confronts a difficult choice: does he read the English (colonial) book within the mechanisms it establishes-as "a measure of mimesis and a mode of civil authority and order"-or as the mark of an ambivalent and split colonial process (107)? By the time we get to this section of the book, we know what explanation Bhabha prefers (ambivalence and splitting have by now become the- oretical cliches). But I am more interested in the reasons he offers for preferring a reading of the colonial book as occupying a space of double inscription:

How can the question of authority, the power and presence of the English, be posed in the interstices of a double inscription? I have no wish to replace an idealist myth-the metaphoric English book-with a historicist one-the colonial project of English civility. Such a reductive reading would deny what is obvious, that the representation of colonial authority depends less on a universal symbol of English identity than on its productivity as a sign of difference. (108)

I, too, would not want to sanction the idealist myth of the English book, or the project of English civility, but it is clear to me that in his eagerness to distance himself from such foundationalist notions, Bhabha throws the baby out with the bath water. Simply put, colonial culture was built on the idealistic and historicist myths that Bhabha dismisses (perhaps too quickly), and it is imperative to see how these myths were constructed before we displace them from the project of postcolonial identity, indeed, the terms of displacement themselves (alterity, doubleness, and hybridity) depend on the idealism of the colonial project.

For example, hybridity, one term in which Bhabha invests heavily, would seem to work against idealism: "hybridity reverses the formal process of dis- avowal so that the violent act of colonization becomes the conditionality of colo- nial discourse," he asserts (114). But just because hybridity allows us to dislocate colonial authority, or to unsettle colonialism's originary myths, does not make it a constitutive element of colonial power. The trope of hybridity may make sense in the aftermath of decolonization (that is why it is so convincing in Bhabha's

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reading of The Satanic Verses), but hybridity was not the condition of possibility of colonial discourse. Hybridity may be implicit in the colonial project itself, but it is not a conscious part of its functions. Clearly, Bhabha wants hybridity to perform a role it simply cannot perform. For while his reading of this trope in colonial discourse shows how the ideality of the imperial project was founded on slippages the colonizer did not countenance, or even social movements colonial- ism deliberately foreclosed, this postcolonial reading of the double inscription of colonial discourse does not alter the fact that the discursive mechanisms of impe- rial rule did not take kindly to hybridity. A similar point can be made about moder- nity, which Bhabha reads solely in its "caesura" (or in its "catachrestic" instances) without considering a prior moment when the discourse of decolonization sought affinity with modernity as a way of transformings its locus.

Modernity is, of course, the primary theme of Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic. And if Bhabha's problems seem to be generated by his identification with a postmodern epistemology that seeks to detour the historicism we have inherited from modernity, it is fair to say that Gilroy's turn to the moder moment is an implicit critique of postmodernism. Gilroy does not of course express his unhappiness with postmodernism directly, but we can detect his anxieties in his powerful-and highly controversial-attempt to find a liberating praxis in the two centuries that transformed Europe into a moder culture (the eighteenth and nine- teenth) but which unleashed misery on the rest of us. Gilroy's basic premise is that any intellectual shift toward postmoderity should not mean "that the conspicu- ous power of these moder subjectivities and the movements they articulated has been left behind"; black subjects in the West must of necessity claim the legacy of modernity as one of their constitutive elements (2). Whereas Bhabha adopts the language of poststructuralism to read the slippages inherent in the culture of modernity and colonialism, Gilroy's project seeks to embrace "the intellectual heritage of the West since the Enlightenment" by calling attention to the positive and enlightening ways in which black intellectuals came to appropriate the terms established by the modernity. Gilroy's recovery of blackness in modernity is pred- icated on his belief that this blackness is one of the key foundations of what would appear to be exclusive categories such as Englishness.

As a black Englishman, Gilroy assumes that if he can only read blackness in certain discrete moments of the modern identity, then the discourse of "morbid Englishness" promoted by English conservatives and liberals alike would be undermined in its roots. For Gilroy, then, the ships that ferry black subjects across the Atlantic in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries should not simply be read, as is often the case in the metaphor of the "middle passage," as insignias of alien- ation, but as symbols of the blacks' coming into being as modern subjects: "The history of the black Atlantic ... continuously criss-crossed by the movements of black people-not only as commodities but engaged in various struggles toward emancipation, autonomy, and citizenship-provides a means to reexamine the problems of nationality, location, identity, and historical memory" (16). Gilroy's first move, then, can be termed as the conceptual recovery of blackness in modernity.

This is followed by a second move, one which is intended to credentialize African-American intellectuals and writers from the nineteenth century as essen- tially modernist and modernizing. Using the example of Martin Delaney, Gilroy

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suggests that the project of black emancipation in the Diaspora, a project that appealed to some of the central doctrines of modernity such as citizenship, free- dom, and patriarchy, was inseparable from his desire to modernize Africa and also to emplace himself in America (24-25). This assertion leads to a corollary (third) move on Gilroy's part: he reads Diasporic modernity not as a separate intellectu- al project, but as part of a continuous and dialogic relationship between blacks in the modem West and what he calls "occidental modernism." Instead of arguing that blacks in the West developed a modernity of their own, Gilroy is insistent that what African slaves and their descendants in the West produced was "a distinctive counterculture of modernity" (36). The final move he makes, then, is intended to underscore the continuous relevance of modernity against the pressures of post- moder discourse.

I find all these moves important and inviting, but they also seem to raise a difficult set of problems. Consider, for example, Gilroy's fundamental claim, in an insightful reading of Delaney's Blake, that slavery itself was a modernizing force: he asserts that in the abject conditions of slavery in the American plantation, a "new multicultural identity" was created; "the transnational structure of the slave trade" provided "a new basis for community, mutuality and reciprocity" (28-29). Now, the argument that Kunta Kinte was happier in castoffs in an American plantation than in a loincloth in the Gambia is as old as Booker T. Washington's reading of the institution of slavery as part of a providential design. What sur- prises me, however, is Gilroy's failure to contextualize or rigorously interrogate what he reads in his sources. For if modernity and modernization-and even slav- ery itself-are given a positive slant by black writers in the nineteenth century, it is often as part of a difficult, even desperate, black attempt to enter the economy of American national identity in the era of Reconstruction.

Gilroy's conceptual limitations here emerge from his failure to separate the American discourse on modernity from its European counterpart. For while it is perhaps possible to make the claim that European modernity advocated universal liberation, the foundational discourse of the American Republic did not see any contradiction between white freedom and black slavery. It is also perhaps possible to argue that the ideals of American modernity so clearly excluded blackness that it was difficult for black modernists to even read points of contradiction or coun- terculture in the providential designs of the renewed United States. Why else would black intellectuals such as Blyden and Du Bois read the ideality of moder- nity through European texts rather than through Jeffersonian paradigms?

A second question develops from the first one: does the recuperation of black agency in the discourse of modernity actually dislocate the term from its Eurocentric locus? In a curious reading of Hegel's reflection on the master/slave relationship in The Phenomenology of Mind, Gilroy argues that the philosopher's excursus calls attention to the "intimate association between modernity and slavery" (53); but he does not consider the possibility that Hegel's logic already presupposed slavery (or rather the allegory of slavery) as the foundation of mod- ern identities. Here, Gilroy seems so eager to recover the affirmative character of modernity that he is unwilling to deconstruct its foundations. He prefers to read slavery through Hegel's allegory rather than its material contexts: "Plantation slavery was more than a system of labour and distinct mode of racial domination. Whether it encapsulates the inner essence of capitalism or was a vestigial,

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essential precapitalist element in a dependent relationship to capitalism proper, it provided the foundations for a distinctive network of economic, social, and political relations" (54-55).

It is in face of such unquestioned-even reckless-assumptions that I wished Gilroy had borrowed a few tactics from Bhabha! I am not suggesting that there is anything inherently wrong in Gilroy's reading of an affirmative modernity in the culture of slavery; I am just dubious of his claim that reading how slaves per- formed their identities in subjection secures the affirmative character of either modernity or slavery. After all, isn't the culture of the plantation a moder culture? If so, what does it mean for slaves to seek freedom within the categories that had imprisoned them in the first place? Part of the confusion here seems to me to arise from Gilroy's failure to consider the obvious fact that the narratives that appeal to the ideals of modernity are written after slavery. As I noted earlier, this postfixal appeal to moder notions of freedom and citizenship is not instituted to liberate the slaves from slavery (Douglass is already free when he writes The Narrative) but to gain them entry into the American Republic. Indeed, we might even coun- tenance the possibility that questions of freedom and citizenship (in the modernist sense) do not arise except after emancipation. It is not for failure of trying that Gilroy cannot provide one single example of the invocation of modernity within the institution of slavery; even the slave songs he cites as examples of the condi- tion "in which the negative meanings of the enforced movement of blacks" was reverted into a new identity are also postfixal in relation to slavery (111). The question that arises, in these circumstances, is not whether the ideals of moderni- ty were important to slaves within the plantation economy, but whether, once they had been confined to what Du Bois considered to be their compromised emanci- pation, black subjects in the Diaspora had any other alternative but to appeal to such ideals. The African-American subject's troubled relation to Africa provides an excellent illustration of these limited choices.

I term the African-American's relationship with Africa "troubled" for the simple reason that while the slave imagination might still configure the continent as an ancestral home, or even the depository of ancestral memories, any appeal to modern ideals-those of progress and civilization-always seemed predicated on the negation of what Africa represented. For black subjects in the Diaspora-as for the colonized Africans in the continent itself-there could not be true enlight- enment without some transcendence of what Africa represented in the Western imagination. Thus, Gilroy rightly concludes, the mission to elevate the black American "was inseparable from a second mission to elevate and enlighten the uncultured Africans by offering them the benefits of civilised life" (24). What Gilroy does not state strongly enough is that if the American Republic was haunted by the shadow of blackness, Diasporic blackness was haunted by the phantasm of Africa. Indeed, if Africa seems to be strangely missing in Gilroy's book-where are those Africans who had embarked on similar projects of enlight- enment in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries?-it is because the continent haunts him, too. And thus, in reading Gilroy's systematic analysis of Du Bois's attempt to negotiate the relationship between Africa and New World modernity, we cannot help having a sense of the ways in which the critic's anxieties parallel those of his subject. If Du Bois finds it difficult to incorporate contemporary Africa into his understanding of modernity, so does Gilroy; if Du Bois reduces

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Africa to "exquisite objects" of art and music, so does Gilroy; and if in the end Du Bois can only admit Africa into modernity by reading it as a figure of lack, as a referent to "an empty, aching space," Gilroy can only engage with the continent either as the locus of tradition or as an amorphous arm in the chronotope of cultures created in the name of modernity (198-99).

All these problems arise, I think, because underneath it all The Black Atlantic's cultural project-its attempt to develop a chronotope that connects black subjects in several continents-is in conflict with its theoretical agenda- the need to question ethnic absolutism by appealing to the universal figure of modernity. This conflict becomes apparent when we read the chapter on the expa- triation of Richard Wright, who fascinates Gilroy precisely because his life and career dramatizes "the tension between the claims of racial particularity on one side and the appeal of those modern universals that appear to transcend race on the other" (147). And so in Wright's transcendental homelessness, Gilroy detects an analytic opportunity to dislodge us from racial particularity; in the novelist's later existential narratives, Gilroy sees the opportunity for a black subject to come to terms with his "hybrid identity as a modern man" (162). But as I have already suggested, Gilroy's theoretical desire to disengage himself from the particularities of race, nation, and geography is at odds with his reading of the discrete cartog- raphy that he calls the Black Atlantic. And yet there is something perversely tempting-and ironic-in what appears to be Gilroy's identification with Wright's existentialism; for what the novelist ultimately discovered in Europe was a way to disengage himself from the legacy of slavery-and hence modernity-so that he could understand what it really meant to be a black subject in America, constituted by it, but also alienated from it. Who would have thought that one would have to be an existentialist in Paris to understand black identity in Mississippi?

Existentialism is the subject of Lewis R. Gordon's little book, Fanon and the Crisis of European Man. But before I discuss this stimulating book, I need to make two prefatory points: first, it is easy to underestimate the significance of this little book not only because its invocation of Fanon would appear to be part of a postmodern voguishness, but also because we live in a time when it is very diffi- cult to convince intellectuals that existential phenomenology can have anything to say about the culture politics of our troubled age; secondly, Gordon's engagement with Fanon is a direct rebuttal, if you want, of what he calls, in an important footnote, Homi Bhabha's "efforts to interpret Fanon in a postmodern (poststruc- turalist or deconstructive) way" (111). What does Gordon find so objectionable in Bhabha's notion of a Fanon who has become the overseer of a postcolonial prerogative?

Bhabha is one of the few postcolonial theorists who has invested heavily in psychoanalysis; and because Fanon is the premier psychoanalyst of the colonial situation, he occupies an important place in The Location of Culture. What this means, among other things, is that Bhabha reads Fanon in a very particular way: his Fanon is not a biographical Fanon, the would-be assimilationist trying to rec- oncile the promise of colonial Frenchness with the realities of blackness in Martinique, nor is he the insurgent, the theorist of revolution in colonial Algeria. Bhabha's Fanon is "the purveyor of the transgressive and transitional truth"; he does not speak from contained historical moments, but from "the uncertain interstices of historical change" (40). In short, Fanon is the poststructuralist heir

Simon Gikandi 149

to Lacan, functioning in the area of ambivalence "between race and sexuality; out of an unresolved contradiction between culture and class; from deep within the struggle of psychic representation and social reality" (40).

Well, there are some enchanting moments in this postmodern Fanon. I particularly like the way he explores questions of "colonial inscriptions and iden- tification" (60). But I also miss the more unsophisticated Fanon, the one who gave up his colon privileges to identify with the Algerian struggle for independence- the Fanon whom Bhabha does not like because he "tends to explain away the ambivalent turns and returns of the subject of colonial desire, its masquerade of Western Man and the 'long' historical perspective" (61). Indeed, one of the most irritating aspects of Bhabha's critical gesture, in regard to Fanon, is how he dis- misses the foundational moments and cultural contexts of his objects of analysis. In such instances, one yearns for-yes-the innocent Fanon who did not conceive colonial desire as ambivalent and hence sought to come to terms with the "long" historical perspective.

This is the Fanon Gordon engages with in his book. In this Fanon, the masquerade of Western Man is taken seriously-in good faith, as Gordon would say. And because the crisis of race that Fanon writes about is, above all, the crisis of European Man (and thus of the bogey of European reason), the crisis of colonial subjects has to be considered as the problem of blackness only on an exis- tential level. At the same time, however, this is ultimately a crisis of the categories of moder identity around which Gilroy's Black Atlantic is constructed-the "nightmare of racist reason" (8). Gordon's central argument is that Fanon found a way around "racist reason" by seeking to transcend the cult of rationality and thus recover the essence of being. At the same time, however, Gordon posits how Fanon rejected ontological explanation because, as a condition of reflection, it left existence itself aside; cast in ontological terms, the black subject would continue not to exist for himself or herself, but always as a subject in relation to a privi- leged whiteness: "Fanon rejects traditional ontological dimensions of human beings in favor of existential ones" (10).

While I am not convinced that existential dimensions can be conceived with- out ontological criteria, there is no doubt in my mind that Gordon's existential Fanon is closer to the "real" subject, closer to the Fanon of Husserl, Merleau- Ponty, and Sartre, the colonial writer who gave us The Wretched of the Earth and Black Skin, White Masks. Indeed, despite my own affinity for Marxist and Lacanian readings, such approaches to these texts have always seemed to me mis- placed. The point is, we can put Fanon to whatever uses we want, but we should at least respect the intellectual positions he took. Thus, while my poststructuralist training and sensibility recoils from Gordon's claim that Fanon's thought was premised on "his appeal to humanism and humanization" (32), I have to listen to the echoes of humanism in his primary texts. By the same token, however, it is not an act of bad faith for Bhabha to secure Fanon's authority by reading the gaps, ellipses, and blind spots in his major texts. Indeed, one could say that the contin- uing relevance of Fanon-as of all important writers-is the simple fact that we can read them both in their relation to their enabling conditions as well as our own contingent situation. I would not have any use for a Fanon trapped in postwar humanism (Gordon's Fanon) if his ambivalence was not activated (by Bhabha) to respond to the crisis of this humanism. Similarly, I would not have much use for

150 Research in African Literatures

Bhabha's critique of modernity if Gilroy did not convince me of the centrality of the idea of the moder in the making of black subjects in the West.

I disagree with many things in the books under review, but it is because I disagree with them that I respect their authors. It is important to call attention to the nature of critique as a function informed by disagreement because one of the things I have found most distressing in the way intellectual discourse has been organized and carried out in the last few years is its return to something akin to medieval guilds, a situation where ideas derive their authority from their confor- mity to the most fashionable terms, to networks of professional connections and friendships without consideration for their merit. Those who sanction such ideals of conformity would be well advised to remember Chinua Achebe's caution, in The Anthills of the Savannah, that if the gendarine swines had disagreed among themselves, some of them might have been saved.

WORKS CITED

Achebe, Chinua. The Anthills of the Savannah. London: William Heinemann, 1987, Bhabha, Homi. "Representation and the Colonial Text: A Critical Exploration of Some

Forms of Mimeticism." The Theory of Reading. Ed. Frank Gloversmith. Sussex: Harvester, 1984. 93-122.

Dirks, Nicholas B., ed. Colonialism and Culture. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1992. Gikandi, Simon. Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism.

New York: Columbia UP, forthcoming. Stoler, Ann Laura. Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault's History of Sexuality and

the Colonial Order of Things. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1995. Thomas, Nicholas. Colonialism's Culture: Anthropology, Travel and Government.

Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1994.