On Devi and Rowling

Remember when I said it would take about, oh, a month to start some Deathly Hallows blogging? Me neither. Let's just say that never happened, shall we? Why? Well, I'm ready with Harry Potter 7 spoiler #1, of course! Are you sitting down?

Too bad I have no idea how to put things "below the fold," because this one's a doozy. I'll be as coy as possible in case anyone's even further behind the fantasy zeitgeist than I am. (You know, besides the three-quarters of my students in my Postcolonial Hawthorne class today, my dad....) The good news for you is that you don't even have to go back to my now-7-months-old-and-more Devi blogging to get this one. Quite the opposite--it's actually one where Rowling clarifies Devi.

Let's put it this way: remember how The Boy Who Lived lives up to his name towards the end of Deathly Hallows? How he's unexpectedly (if you're anything like me, that is) empowered by his acceptance of his own death and transformed by his courage in acting on it? Assuming you do, you'll appreciate how weirdly similar this is to the acceptance and transformation Devi details for the Nagesias in "Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha." That is all. A cross-cultural structural parallel that may well top my Douglas Adams-Salman Rushdie one. You may go.

[Update: Uh, wait! Before you go, check out the slyly disguised Harry Potter 1 reference in paragraph 3 of this otherwise deathly serious article. My year will be complete if Martindale owns up to it here!]

On Turning a Talk into an Article

A while back, I announced with little fanfare here that I've made a .pdf version of my Hawaii talk on Marshall, Devi, trauma, and mourning, complete with handouts, available to CitizenSE's legions of adoring fans. To depart from my usual habit of launching into close readings here, I want to talk a bit more generally about revision and publication plans for this piece.

One of the first things you'll realize if you read the whole thing is that I don't cite readings of either work from any scholars, critics, or theorists--much less mention the name of anyone besides the authors and their characters. If you've read any of my other work, or heard any of my previous talks, you'll know what a departure that was for me. If you've even just read a couple of my posts here, you probably can guess how difficult it was for me to do without close readings or citations for fifteen minutes. Of course, I did allude to controversies within and over postcolonial studies in general and particular debates over postcolonial identities (the theme of the panel), but I correctly figured that the panel wasn't going to draw too many people with any great expertise in the subjects I was addressing in the talk, so I kept my allusions issue-focused and accessibly-worded, so as not to bog down my larger argument. As I mentioned before, overall I'm happy with my choices and think the talk turned out more than halfway decent, despite all that I wanted to do that I didn't allow myself to do in it. (I've just finished a draft of an 18-page opus in an area completely, well, almost completely outside my specialty for a non-academic audience that I'll be revising over the next three weeks and delivering on the 24th, and all I can say is that those extra 10 pages make all the difference!)

The main reason why I didn't start citing other people in the talk is that I wouldn't know where or how to stop. While my prime sources were Cathy Caruth's brilliantly edited and introduced collection of essays, Trauma: Explorations in Memory, and David Kazanjian's and David Eng's equally accomplished and more recent essay collection, Loss: The Politics of Mourning, the list of people doing serious work on trauma and mourning is long and imposing--and the debates are serious, intricate, and difficult to follow. There has also been a lot of great work done on Marshall and a smaller amount, though perhaps even better, work done on Devi. Plus there's the larger traditions of critical and theoretical work on the Caribbean and on South Asia, the history of attempts to put marxism and psychoanalysis in dialogue with each other, and the ways both relate to the debates within and over postcolonial studies. So figuring out how to elegantly bring all that work to bear on developing and refining my own arguments is the challenge of turning this talk into an article.

Here's how confident I am in my larger project, though: I really can see this as a PMLA paper. Or, if I want to speak more directly to postcolonial studies folks, I could go for one of the journals that Amardeep Singh has provided links to--perhaps, in the spirit of aiming high, Ariel (it's too literary to aim for a journal like Cultural Critique, I think, and probably not Critical Inquiry's cup of tea). The point is, the eventual paper will be shaped by my understanding of its audience (first, the editors of the journal I shoot for, and only later their readers)--so it could become almost anything. What attracts me about PMLA is the potential to reach non-specialists as well as specialists, but assuming I'm successful, I would lose out on the street cred of getting into Ariel. I think at this point trying to jam it into the co-edited collection on trauma and melancholy that's been going nowhere fast for far too long is not a good idea. The point is to try to break the peer-review barrier!

So if anyone wants to give me any suggestions on the talk-->article process or even the talk/article itself, I'm all ears. I'm done with grading by the end of next week and working on another talk I'll be giving in Sendai in the first week of March while we're visiting family in Chiba, so I don't foresee turning serious attention to expanding the talk into an article until after we get back from Sendai.

This is definitely one of those old ideas of mine that's still new, so it would be smart to take advantage of a great teaching schedule from April to July to send out a big article to a major peer-reviewed journal and hopefully snag a good publication during my teaching leave. Because at the rate the book manuscript is (not) going, if I finish it next summer it will be a miracle, especially given the 4-3 load that awaits me just three weeks after I return to the States from Japan!

Now back to our regularly scheduled program of close readings and vain attempts to build a readership for the obscurest outpost of blogoramaville.

Traumatic Displacements in Mahasweta Devi's "Pterodactyl..."

Anyone who's read more than a couple posts here knows I love to quote passages from the works I'm writing on. So you'll be as surprised as I was to find out I included no long passages and barely any quotations from Marshall or Devi in my Hawaii talk, (which is still in non-.pdf format due to connection problems at the office and may not be ready in time for Saturday, even). You'll also probably be as surprised to find out that I had pegged the conference, the audience, and even the behavior of the first two speakers to a frightening degree and so made excellent choices as to what to shoot for (leave them wanting to read the two works at the end of the talk and get into debates over trauma/witnessing/testimony and melancholia/mourning on their own) and what to leave out (not just quotations but clever takes on details from the works and theories no one who hasn't read them carefully or recently would understand, much less appreciate, without far more set-up and explanation than it'd be worth it give). So it was a talk that specialists would likely be as impatient with as I am, but perfectly fine for the occasion, nevertheless. (Plus my mom [a teacher] and dad [a philosophy professor] were able to attend the talk and really liked it, not to mention that my rock star friend intimated he would give Marshall's novel another chance. Woo!)

The quotations and similarities handouts didn't go over as well, at least in the way I envisioned. I hoped and asked that people read and listen as close to simultaneously as they could, but they didn't seem to be doing much reading. At least they took the handouts with them when they left and maybe actually read them on their own (perhaps on the beach!).

So where is this going? Well, I just wanted to do a quick close read of two of the passages from my Devi handout here today, b/c those emails to students don't just write themselves, you know.

--What did Surajpratap write?
--Nothing but a story.
--That was nothing but a story?
--How do I explain? Starvation for years. Fewer children are being born to them, and the administration still doesn't attach any importance to Pirtha. They have taken it for granted for some time that the government has given them up. Now how will they explain to themselves the reason for this misfortune? Whatever the case, they need an explanation if only for their peace of mind. So they are spreading stories.

Now the SDO begins to speak in bursts. As if a badly wounded person is making a last-ditch effort to make a deposition to hospital or police, to the killers or to friends. Like that man from Chitowra.... The SDO is talking like that man. He is moving his hands, trying to explain, as if there's a tremendous communication gap between him and Puran, a tremendous (mental and linguistic) suspension of contact. Are the two placed on two islands and is one not understanding the most urgent message of the other, speaking with vivid gestures on a seashore? This asymptote is a contemporary contagion.

The primary speaker in both is the SDO, a mid-level government official who's trying to convince our protagonist, Puran Sahay, a radical journalist, to investigate the drought-induced famine conditions in Pirtha and write an expose about the national government's failure to declare it a famine region. Both passages revolve around the sighting of a pterodactyl by one of the Nagesia people in Pirtha; the second passage reveals the distanced, patronizing tone of the amateur anthropologist to be a defense against the truly traumatizing nature of even a second-hand witnessing of the pterodactyl. Surajpratap, who's referred to in the first passage, is another radical journalist, a Dalit activist, who preceded Puran to Pirtha and wrote a report that focused so much on the sighting of the pterodactyl that the SDO suppressed it (we later find out Surajpratap has had a breakdown and has disappeared). Puran's witnessing the pterodactyl itself and his decision not to try to offer any direct testimony to this experience is set against both the SDO's and Surajpratap's reactions, just as the report he does eventually write is set against the "nothing but a story" that is "Pterdactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha" itself.

And in one sense, it is nothing but a story, for the pterodactyl, the interpretation of it by the Nagesia people in the story as "the ancestral soul," the Nagesia youth Bikhia's "new myth" about it, and indeed all place names in the story are either outright inventions by the author or not to be taken literally, according to both an author's note appended to the end of the story and to the author herself in an interview with her translator, Gayatri Spivak.

But in another sense, as Spivak rightly underscores in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (I include the amazon link rather than the Harvard UP one b/c amazon allows you to browse the book), we should take note of Devi's repeated insistence in Imaginary Maps that when her story is most fictional, it aims to be the most testimonial.

What is she getting at? I think it has something to do with the impossibility and inescapability of testimony to a traumatic experience--the asymptotic communication gap that Puran, in the free indirect discourse of the second passage, comments on in almost as distanced and clinical a way as the SDO's anthropological cliches in the first, is something he experiences himself in Pirtha, with both the pterodactyl and with Bikhia. The silences in his report are a kind of testimony to that gap. But the larger story itself, in its style and structure, attempts a different sort of testimony and a different understanding of both myths and stories.

But that's a story for another post.

Marshall, Devi, and Militant Mourning

Here's a long passage from Paule Marshall's The Chosen Place, The Timeless People, part of which I'll be discussing during my Marshall/Devi talk in Hawaii on Friday, featuring American radical anthropologist Saul Amron's response to Bournehills organic intellectual Merle Kinbona's room as he watches over her while she is in a kind of coma, rendered in free indirect discourse by the semi-omniscient, semi-objective narrator of the novel:

But the room expressed something more, it suddenly seemed to his own overtaxed and exhausted mind, something apart from Merle. It roused in him feelings about Bournehills itself. He thought he suddenly saw the district for what it was at its deepest level, the vague thoughts and impressions of months coming slowly to focus. Like the room it, too, was a kind of museum, a place in which had been stored the relics and remains of the era recorded in the faded prints on the walls [of slave ships and plantation labors and punishments], where one not only felt that other time existing intact, still alive, a palpable presence beneath the everyday reality, but saw it as well at every turn, often without quite realizing it. Bournehills, its shabby woebegone hills and spent land, its odd people who at times seemed other than themselves, might have been selected as the repository of a history which reached beyond it to include the hemisphere north and south.

And it would remain as such. The surface might be jarred as it had been by the events today [the closing of the Cane Vale factory in which the Bournehills natives who own land have traditionally brought the sugar cane they have grown and harvested on their own time to be processed]. People like himself would come seeking to shake it from its centuries-old sleep and it might yield a little. But deep down, at a depth to which only a few would be permitted to penetrate, it would remain fixed and rooted in that other time, serving in this way as a lasting testimony to all that had gone on then: those scenes hanging on the walls, and as a reminder--painful but necessary--that it was not yet over, only the forms had changed, and the real work was still to be done; and finally, as a memorial--crude in the extreme when you considered those ravaged hills and the blight visible everywhere, but no other existed, they had not been thought worthy of one--to the figures bound to the millwheel in the print and to each other in the packed, airless hold of the ship in the drawing.

Only an act on the scale of Cuffee's [leader of a slave revolt that freed Bournehills for a time] could redeem them. And only then would Bournehills itself, its mission fulfilled, perhaps forgo that wounding past and take on the present, the future. But it would hold out until then, resisting, defying all efforts, all the halfway measures, including his, to reclaim it; refusing to settle for anything less than what Cuffee had demanded in his time.

I know this is Close Reading Tuesday and all, but I have to follow this up with a passage from Mahasweta Devi's "Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha," for the juxtaposition of these two passages gets to the heart of my talk's argument about the meaning, significance and stakes of the similarities and differences between Marshall's and her take on militant mourning; in it, Pirtha can be compared to Bournehills, Puran Sahay to Saul Amron, Shankar to Merle Kinbona, and Bikhia to someone like Stinger or the residents of Bourne Island's Harlem Heights, a shanty town on the outskirts of Bourne Island's capital city (italics are reproduced as in the translation, to indicate words in English in the original novella):

Bikhia, the only discoverer of the embodied ancestral soul, gives everyone oil from a small bowl at the point of a twig in a ceremonial way.

Why does this boy observe the same rule in the matter of the form of the ancestral soul as is appropriate to the funeral rites of the formerly living? No one asks this question.

Did he see its death?

No questions asked.

Did he cremate or bury it?

No questions asked.

But the flow of excitement travels like a current of electricity.

Did the soul of the ancestors come in this way? Or didn't it?

Pirtha knows, it knows.

Did they fall into mourning at a dreadful news? Pirtha knows, it knows.

There are many rites after the oil bath, Pirtha will perform them as needed.

Puran realizes that the crisis of the menaced existence of the tribals, of the extinction of their ethnic being, pushed and pushed them toward the dark.

Looking at Bikhia's tawny matted hair, freshly shaven face,he understood they were being defeated as they were searching for a reason for the ruthless unconcern of government and administration. It was then that the shadow of that bird with its wings spread came back as at once myth and analysis.

This is a new myth. For the soul of those long dead will return hundreds of years later in the form of an unknown tired bird. Such a thing is probably not even there in their oral tradition.

But from now on they will wait in their suffering and in evil times for that shadow, otherwise this deception cannot be humanly explained.

Having drawn that stone tablet Bikhia is the guardian of the new myth. He will protect it.

And this mourning, this "oil bath" has given them an assurance. Now something has happened that is their very own, a thing beyond the reach of the understanding and grasp and invasion and plunder of the outsider....

Shankar says softly, "...But we will not leave Pirtha."

He looks around and says, "Why should we leave? Isn't this our place? Now no tribal will leave. The ancestors' soul let us know that all the places it visited are ours. Can anyone leave anymore, or will they leave?"

--Is that what it let you know? Who told you this?

--Bikhia.

Shankar says triumphantly.

Puran shakes and shakes his head. They will not leave, they will not go anywhere leaving those stones, hills, caves, and river. To the fertile fields, to the plains, where there is plenty of water, and many supports for survival.

--If they want to give us aid, let them give it to us here.

Spreading his arms, he says, "All this land was ours, the kings took it from us. They were supposed to return it to us, to whom did they give it back? No, we won't go anywhere. Let them give us our dues here."

Both Devi and Marshall draw intimate connections between mourning and militancy, in these and other passages where it either happens or fails to happen for native or outsider individuals. Where Marshall might be read as celebrating a kind of postcolonial melancholia, or at least a work of mourning so protracted and massive that it takes on aspects of melancholia, Devi might be read as celebrating the completion of the work of mourning, a move from individual and collective despair and depression toward hope and resolve. But both seek to subvert and reimagine classic colonialist and racist stereotypes--of backward, primitive peoples trapped in the past by their irrational attachment to ancestral lands and traditions; of the superiority of civilization, progress, modernity, modernization, development--by showing that trauma has a history and a presence, by showing that mourning has a politics and a promise. In a sense, the apparition and passing of the pterodactyl in Devi's novella plays a similar role that Cuffee Ned's rebellion and leadership during Bournehills' brief period of independence plays in Marshall's novel: both provide material for a new story, a new myth, a new sense of identity to be created out of a past and present that seem to offer little but oppression and exploitation--all of which offer resources for survival and endurance of the repeated repetition of the traumatic history of enslavement and conquest which forms the past of Marshall's novel and, in Puran's vision, at least, the likely future of the people of Pirtha in Devi's novella, long enough to perhaps change or end it.

The distance between the realistic reports the outsider protagonists end up submitting and what Marshall and Devi try to achieve in their fiction--and their relation--is worth developing further. But I'm going back to Hawthorne the next two days, then taking a break from blogging until we return from Hawaii on the 17th. I'll report on how the talk and conference went soon afterwards and then in February devote several posts to breaking the talk down into blog-post-sized chunks. Tomorrow I plan to return to the sea and Hawthorne's relationship to Mukherjee/Conde and Thursday before we leave for Hawaii to the brook in The Scarlet Letter and its relation to Beloved.

What Would Hawthorne Say About Marshall and Devi?

It's heartening to note that after his first two children were born in 1844 and 1846, Hawthorne didn't publish much until The Scarlet Letter in 1850. And that after his third child was born in 1851 he was only able to publish one novel and the Pierce campaign biography until the late 1850s (if you don't count what he did in 1851, which I prefer not to for the purposes of this digressive intro paragraph). Because after today's adventures in moving and settling back in in Fukuoka, it really hit home to me how much we depended on my wife's parents the past two weeks. Except for brief walks to the grocery store and one jackpot visit to the ocal discount shoe store, we didn't need to shop, and when the ladies did, Baba drove them around. Except for the occasional meal, my wife didn't need to cook, as Gigi is the acknowledged master chef of both families. Coming back home to a freezing and food-less apartment and realizing that the incipient migraine my wife was suffering from on the flight would go full-bore if we pushed it today, we sent mom and imoto to bed and dad and onechan to forage for supplies. The walking was fun, actually, and it was warmer outside than inside the apartment when we left, but by the end of our three-hour tour (half of which was playtime for onechan) it was no longer so warm outside, onechan was super-cranky (until she fell asleep), and dad was itching to work. But imoto was missing him and tsuma needed to arrange our three post-Hawaii trips (2 for conferences and 1 for a visit to the sister-in-law in Okinawa and endless sparring with her three Ultraman-Power Ranger-Boukenja-loving sons, ages 9 months to 5 years) and help me wade through the forms I need to fill out for the following academic year, which is why I'm not even starting this till 8:15 pm.

OK, so this has to be fast, as it's basically warm-up writing for the last push on the conference paper tonight and tomorrow before 3 of my last 4 classes of the semester meet on Tuesday and Wednesday. But basically because I have Hawthorne on the brain, I was finding moments in Marshall and Devi that seemed positively Hawthornesque to me. And it got me wondering what Hawthorne would have made of their fiction.

Both Marshall and Devi create memorable characters who are made representative of different groups and situations by the plots of the works they appear in. In The Chosen Place, The Timeless People and Imaginary Maps, at least, both use a semi-omniscient semi-objective third person narrator who's not quite a fully fleshed-out persona, but whose voice is interesting. Both mix historical, political, and psychological insights and write with a sense of the past and its continuing presence that Hawthorne would have found interesting, even if he would have disliked their politics. (I was trying to think of antebellum equivalents--Lydia Maria Child meets Harriet Beecher Stowe meets Margaret Fuller for Devi? William Apess meets Herman Melville meets Martin Delany for Marshall?)

For instance, consider the representation and function of Carnival in CPTP--how might it relate to stories like "My Kinsman, Major Molineux" or sketches like "The Procession of Life"? Or take the haunting of Harriet (mostly by memories from her past) and particularly the last scene we see of her before her presumed suicide--how might it relate to Judge Pyncheon in The House of the Seven Gables? How might Marshall's technique of jumping from one highly charged tableaux-like scene to the next relate to Hawthorne's similar mode of compression in The Scarlet Letter? Or take Devi's creation of representative female tribal figures like Mary Oraon and Douloti in Imaginary Maps--how might these women compare to Hester, Phoebe, Zenobia, and Miriam?

These are just random examples and not even the best, as my mind is already elsewhere. I'm certainly not trying to build a case for influence on Hawthorne's part or conscious re-vision on Marshall's or Devi's part. I'm just wondering what possibilities open up when you put Hawthorne alongside writers whose politics would absolutely oppose his yet whose narrative strategies and literary techniques can be related to his....

Trauma, Mourning, Marshall, Devi

One of the great things about being an academic is that you can do a lot of work in your head. Say imoto--who I may start referring to here as Giggling Science Girl (because she giggles at the drop of the hat and has amazing powers of concentration and observation for an 8-month-old) or Standing-Already Girl (uh, thinking through the Morrison reference there, that would be a no) or maybe just Grabby Girl (nothing is safe from her now that she can crawl and sometimes half-stand half-balance on chairs and small tables or the kotatsu I love to work on because it's heated)--wakes you up at 2 am, but it's too cold in the house to seriously contemplate getting out of bed and firing up the computer, the space heater, and the kotatsu, yet in the time it took to change her diaper and go to the bathroom the cold woke you up enough to get you thinking about everything you have to do the next day, so rather than aimlessly stressing, you can do something productive like come up with an outline for the conference paper you've been working on.

Normally I don't outline when I write. I write down a lot of notes and do a lot of brainstorming by hand, then type them and key notes from my research process into a Word document, type out some key quotations I know I want to use in the paper, and agonize over my introductory paragraph or three until I feel some confidence about my thesis, and then start into the body. When I start again the next day, I edit what I wrote to get warmed up, then pick up where I left off. This process continues until I finish the first draft. Then the serious editing starts. But more on my inefficient and time-consuming writing process later.

For this paper, however, I have to be much more disciplined than usual. Here's what the panel looks like:

Friday
Time: 3:00 - 4:30 PM 1/12/2007 Room: Waikiki III (Marriott)
Session Topic: Postcolonial Identities
Session Chair: Waggaman, Beatrice

Decolonization and Surrealism in Aimé Césaire’s Two Plays: "A Season in the Congo" and "Tragedy of King Christophe”
Waggaman, Beatrice Villanova University

Literary Vestiges of France in the Mississippi Valley
Metzidakis, Stamos Washington University in Saint Louis

Traumatic Displacements and Militant Mourning: Paule Marshall’s The Chosen Place, The Timeless People and Mahasweta Devi’s “Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha”
Simon, Bruce Kyushu University

The Colonial Poems
Puch-Bouwman, Jen The University of the South Pacific

Going third in a 90-minute panel means I have to keep it to 15 minutes, because I can count on the two people ahead of me to go over time (nothing personal, everyone does it) and I don't want the person going last to hate me for the rest of my life.

So here's the outline for the paper:

Outline (15 minutes, 7 pages)
I. Intro (1): key issues, debates, claims
II. Structural Similarities (2): the chart I'm preparing will allow me to do a faster plot summary than usual b/c I'll let my audience read the details
III. Detail Similarities (1): these are bonus details that allow me to clarify I'm not talking about influence and transition into the next, bridge section
IV. Differences (4): summarize via works' different perspectives on and uses of trauma/testimony and mourning/melancholia, using chart and quotes handouts--again, I can let my audience read the details, so I can keep this short
V. Significance of Intertextual Dialogue (3): I can use this section to spell out what I mean by "traumatic displacements" and "militant mourning" and make a case for the theoretical significance of the two works
VI. Stakes of Dialogue (3): the two works together provide a meeting-space for thinking through key issues facing activists and intellectuals today--a space for debate not consensus
VII. Conclusion (1): implications for postcolonial studies, black studies, marxism

Well, this is probably meaningless to anyone but me, but I did promise I'd give the update on the conference paper today. Little did I know when I made the promise that our flight leaves 6 am tomorrow morning, which means we have to get up at 4:30 am, or that the three-year-old's formal photos we put off taking until today would be a two-hour extravaganza, complete with hair (lots of it), make-up (lipstick only!), costumes (kimono and yellow princess dress), and lighting--or that the process would be so fascinating and horrifying at the same time that I had to get it all down on video"tape" and thus would be unable to do any real thinking about the paper during it--or that it would go on so long I'd have little time to write this evening. Long story short, it's time to put the girls to bed! Next post from Kyushu!

And Now for Something Completely Different

The next paragraph's "Faulknerian feat[] of subordination" should not be read by anyone not named Scott Eric Kaufman. If you want to find out what I think about Marshall, Devi, trauma, and mourning, I recommend skipping to the third paragraph. But if you're wondering what a Hawthorne blogger is doing blogging on something and some, uh, two other than Hawthorne, the next paragraph may do. And if you're interested in how not to write when writing a conference paper, the next paragraph will most certainly do. Oh, and if you love it when the author of a blog nobody reads tells inside jokes to himself, the next paragraph is a must-read. (Must fight temptation to tell anecdote about the SF story I wrote for my AP Chemistry class and how easily amused I am. Aaaargh. OK, done. Yes.)

"Old School" readers of this blog (that empty set) will no doubt recall it used to be "mostly about Hawthorne" (and still is, in its technorati profile--I'm that lazy!). New readers (and how do you afford your rock and roll lifestyle, may I ask?)--coming here from such generous linkers (and good titlers) as The Hobgoblin of Little Minds (I'd thank BikeProf in a comments on his post, but one of the annoying features of the new Blogger, one which makes you wonder why they put it in there, is its tendency to freeze when you try to post a comment--or wait, is that just a feature of the ancient computer I'm using here in Chiba?), Old Is the New New, and Quod She--will have already noted that it now is "chiefly about Hawthorne matters" (for reasons I'm sure I'll devote a boring post to when I run out of material for Monday blogging [yes, the obscurest blog in blogoramaville has a programming schedule]). The point is, I'm delivering a paper in Hawaii on traumatic displacements and militant mourning in Paule Marshall's 1969 novel, The Chosen Place, The Timeless People and Mahasweta Devi's "Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha," a short story translated into English by Gayatri Spivak in 1995 for Imaginary Maps in T-minus, oh, less than 8 days, so the Hawthorne blogging is going to be kept to a minimum the next few days as I try to tame the formless monster that began as a paper at the 1996 American Studies Association convention on trauma and diaspora in CPTP, evolved into a submission to a collection of essays that to my knowledge was never published, morphed into a paper I was planning to insert into one of the collections of essays that I'm supposed to be co-editing, and then refused to copy itself onto the memory stick that I brought to Japan last August, forcing me to start from scratch this semester as I bring in a new topic and new writer to an already-far-too-complex (and possibly lost) old essay. So good ol' Intertextual Thursday is going to begin the project of helping me not embarrass myself more than I normally do at academic conferences, even if the main purpose of this one is to see my parents and let them see their grandkids for the only time between the Augusts of 2006 and 2007. Oh, and to make up for my most humiliating job interview ever, during which I established personal records, hopefully never to be challenged again, in the categories of inability to think on one's feet, inability to hide how flustered one is, and rapidity with which one gives up on oneself in an interview. That's all.

Anyway, my third attempt to begin this post will begin, as I tend to do here, with a quotation. It's from my conference proposal that got accepted (with a close-to-$400 registration fee, I suspect most proposals get accepted--not that that's a bad thing--so judge for yourself whether mine is any good):

Although intellectuals and activists working to define and contest the boundaries and methodologies of postcolonial studies have since its inception emphasized the comparative, transnational, and indeed global nature of the field, they have so far failed to analyze together two works of literature that offer profound meditations on the meaning, significance, and stakes of colonial/racialized trauma/testimony and mourning/melancholia in their respective times and places: Paule Marshall's novel The Chosen Place, The Timeless People for the post-independence Anglophone Caribbean and Mahasweta Devi's "Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha" for post-independence India. This failure represents a missed opportunity to bring together not only two quite different colonial/post-colonial histories and regions but also two vibrant fields of study with quite relateable trajectories.

This paper proposes to show how Marshall's and Devi's texts both represent and enact the best kinds of literary, historical, ethical, and political connections and relations postcolonial theorists, critics and scholars have been calling for, marking out, and arguing over for the past two decades. In so doing, I will suggest a certain exemplarity in the intertextual dialogue between The Chosen Place, The Timeless People and "Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha," one that has serious implications for future developments specifically in postcolonial studies and more generally in the humanities. Attending to the formal, structural, and indeed theoretical similarities between the two works will allow me to address such pressing debates within postcolonial studies as how to recognize colonialisms' impact on differently colonized groups along with the deep structures of resistance practiced by such groups, how to assess nationalist, internationalist, and transnationalist forms of resistance, and how to respond to the difficult divisions between activists from the metropole and subjects in the periphery. But it will also allow me to address such pressing debates over postcolonial studies as its intellectual and political origins, geographical and historical scope, relation to other fields, and potential for transforming both academic practices and institutions and their publics.

It may seem that I am asking a medium-length novel and a long short story to carry an inordinate amount of weight in my argument. But a quick glance at their quite similar plots and themes alone should dispel this view. Marshall's and Devi's works, although produced in different decades and regions, in response to two quite different forms of colonialism and two ambiguously (post)colonial temporalities, tell basically the same story: a well-informed and well-intentioned activist from the metropole (in the former, a radical Philadelphia anthropologist who leverages the desperation of his philanthropist funders for a success story, not to mention a tax break, into control over an alternative-to-modernization development project in the Bournehills region of a Caribbean island suspiciously like 1960s Barbados that aims to build from local knowledge and practices, empower the poorest of the poor agricultural workers in the region, and model ecological, economic, and political sustainability; in the latter, a radical urban journalist who leverages his activist and government connections to travel to and report on the failure of public and private aid efforts in a famine-stricken tribal region suspiciously like 1980s India) slowly comes to realize the profundity of the limitations of his original project (due to local, national, regional, and international politics in the Cold War era), suffers a crisis with a female lover (the former on-island; the latter long-distance), experiences reality-bending events (the former a metaphorical 'road to Damascus' conversion experience; the latter a quite magically real encounter with the 'last of the pterodactyls'), and most importantly bears witness to the historical and contemporary trauma of the rural people of the region, yet finds himself unable to offer any kind of testimony to the world outside the region. The most both sympathetically-portrayed metropolitan intellectuals can offer to the people of the region is a kind of barely articulate recognition of what they have come to dimly understand as a massive mourning project by those people for centuries-old failed rebellions against enslaving/colonizing forces.

Even this bare structuralist analysis gestures toward the deeply entangled meanings, significances, and stakes of this common Marshall-Devi story of colonial/racialized trauma/testimony and mourning/melancholia. Teasing them out and using them to take positions on crucial issues within and over the past, present, and future of postcolonial studies--and their implications for both research and teaching in and curricula and institutions of the humanities--is the project of this paper.

OK, so, sound interesting? Anyone read either or both of these works? Or heard of these authors? Thought to analyze them together? Done so? I'm under the no-doubt-mistaken impression that I am actually the first to do this. I'm happy to find out I'm wrong b/c it'll save me loads of time and space in the article that will someday follow from this....

Oh, and before I start, let me note that I've already criticized my earlier Intertextual Thursday postings as not living up to their billing--not "really" being intertextual. I've failed to do more than identify links between two works (here, The Scarlet Letter and Beloved, a much-travelled path, but one on which there is always something new to notice)--failed, that is, to explore what follows from them. As you can see from my conference proposal, years of commenting on failed comparison-contrast papers from students have vaccinated me, if you will, against falling into this trap in the genre of proposal-writing. But following through on the promises made in proposals like this one, in a way that will be satisfying both to me and my audience (assuming I have one--my 1996 Marshall paper, for instance, featured a smaller audience than panel, and two-thirds of the audience was made up of friends of mine), is the challenge facing me this week. It's not just an issue of making my balky (and nebulous and missing--cf. 2nd para if you were foolish enough to actually skip it!) prose "talky" or of concisely introducing my audience to two authors and works, two regions and traditions of social/cultural analysis of them, two theoretical concepts and two intellectual/activist projects concisely enough to leave me enough time to develop and support my claims convincingly. It's the challenge of balancing enumeration of similarities and differences with tallying of meanings, significances, and stakes with the taking and defending of positions in academic and more-than-academic wars of position.

So I'll let you "all" see the "draft" this Saturday (even if it doesn't deserve the name), in a slightly revised version of CitizenSE's Latest Crazy Hawthorne Idea. Hopefully I'll be able to actually come up with a decent ending to one of my posts on this blog that day. I may actually have to hold myself to some standards if people are actually reading this blog!