This fiction can be called 'radical' simply because it is at the root of the political: it thereby leads us back to the question of narration and myth from which we began. //]]> This is the syntax of a non-competitive society functioning without division of labour. var ue_sn = "www.goodreads.com"; Amsterd, The History of Medicine in Context Series Editors: Andrew Cunningham and Ole Peter Grell Department of History and Ph, Nation and Narration edited by Homi K. Bhabha Nation and Narration m London and New York First published 1990 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Reprinted 1993, 1994, 1995, 1999 (twice), 2000 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group The collection as a whole 1990 Routledge. Isolated, each has its weak point. He had, of course, the paradigm of Carlylean anti-self-consciousness to look to, with its bland assumption about other places as territories with no previous owners or independent cultures: Must the indomitable millions, full of old Saxon energy and fire, lie cooped-up in this Western Nook, choking one another, as in a Blackhole of Calcutta, while a whole fertile untenanted Earth, desolate for want of the ploughshare, cries: Come and till me, come and reap me?15 Carlyle's system relies upon leaders, self-evidently superior beings before whom we will willingly prostrate ourselves in this passage outwards; Whitman, the spokesman of an egalitarian culture, does away with the leaders but preserves the spirit of a system whose logical dependence upon some sort of hierarchy (for its political implementation) yet remains clear. 20 The chief enemies of the central form are the temporary and the local. 7 Postal politics and the institution of the nation Geoffrey Bennington Approaches It is tempting to try to approach the question of nation directly, by aiming for its centre or its origin. In Latin America, at least, it is also the supplement or the correction for a history of non-productive events. An Englishman is indeed a type within the whole of humanity. 1, Bhabha, H.K. Notes 1 Quoted in Peter Worsley, The Third World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), p. 5. Nation and Narration book. For the most part Whitman remains the poet of manifest destiny. This association is even more pronounced and even less concerned with style per se in Morris's 'Art of the people'. 569 and 735: and, for a brilliant analysis of Freud's version of the story, Mikkel Borch-Jakobsen, Le Sujet freudien (Paris: AubierFlammarion, 1982), especially pp. Neither in Egypt nor in China were there citizens as such. Schiller, op. D. H. Lawrence appreciated the originality and force of Whitman's determination to plant the soul in the body, thereby challenging a common dualism of Christian doctrine; but he also felt that the American poet's attitude to other people and other forms of life was at root unhealthy. 56 These features, derived from passing remarks in Caesar, Tacitus, or Strabo, had been celebrated in varying combinations down the centuries by writers as diverse as Hotman, Boulainvilliers, the Abbe Dubos, Chateaubriand, Montlosier, Renan, and even by Marx and Engels. 22 Edward F. Grier (ed. From Gillian Beer's reading of Virginia Woolf, Rachel Bowlby's cultural history of Uncle Tom's Cabin and Francis Mulhern's study of Leaviste's 'English ethics'; to Doris Sommer's study of the 'magical realism' of Latin American fiction and Sneja Gunew's analysis of Australian writing, Nation and Narration is a celebration of the fact that English is no longer an English national consciousness, which is not nationalist, but is the only thing that will give us an international dimension. cit., pp. 25 Leggett is more clearly anti-commercial than Whitman, and does differ from him on some doctrinal points, but his case against a 'superabundance of legislation' (p. 7) does underwrite the implicit emphasis of Whitman's poetry. And I take it as axiomatic that in order for us to describe the meaning of a picture, of the kind which relates different aspects of it into a statement about its significance, there has to be available a discourse in terms of which that meaning can be described. For national customs and customary institutions so shape the mind of a nation that it may be said that they constitute a people as a nation. window.Mobvious = {}; The introduction concludes with a plea for canon formation as the consequence of a discriminatory 'critical survey' instead of the prevailing protectionism which is seen as being negatively prescriptive in so far as it lays down 'conditions in which literary values are less important than social attitudes'.29 In 1982 the Review of National Literatures devoted an issue to Australia. At the beginning of this redistribution, Hazlitt who was able to write his fragment on patriotism, also produces trite pieces on 'Merrie England' and 'John Bull' 150 Simon During for the New Monthly Magazine. I am referring to data specifically about Argentina and Chile which, nevertheless, suggests a pattern for other countries too. cit., pp. . 107, 100. What better way to argue the polemic for civilization than to make desire the relentless motivation for a literary/political project? Only the painter who, 'by a long habit of observing what any set of objects of the same species have in common, has acquired the power of discerning what each wants in particular', is now 'enabled to distinguish the accidental deficiencies, excrescences, and deformities of things, from their general figures', and so to make out 'an abstract idea of their forms more perfect than any one original'. Their desire is ultimately contained in the lap of family life. 57991. But now the ideal is the abstract of every local form in the universe. Characters in novels live and die once in their novel. It was from such writers, foremost among them Boulainvilliers, that Renan's perspective on the history of France derives. 11, (Council on National Literatures, 1982), p. 120. 55 In other words, the emphasis appears to be on what Smolicz has termed 'residual multiculturalism' which may well turn out to be a 'thinly disguised euphemism for assimilation. Eugene Vaille's monumental Histoire generate des postesfrancaises10provides the following definition on page 1: [The post] can be defined as a regulated and usually governmental institution, which ensures, in conditions established in advance, both for the duration and price of transport and for its regularity, the transmission of the thought of the sender as he has transcribed it himself on a material support, (p. 1) Just before this definition, Vaille states that 'the post has the essential advantage of carrying out the transport of the very support which bears the thought of the sender as he has formulated it himself, which is a guarantee of absolute authenticity' (ibid.). 1534. Religion and the rites were family rites. 84111, p. 92. Gauls, Etruscans, Pelasgians,8 and Greeks, not to mention many other elements, intersect in an indecipherable mixture. 2 At the same time the multicultural banner obscures the battle for land rights currently being waged by the Aborigines together with a campaign for rescuing what they can of their own cultural history. It Denaturalizing cultural nationalisms 101 also transforms the 'foundations' and 'standards' (in the sense of the figurative economy) of these literary and cultural histories and, in consequence, changes the nature of the ideological closures suggested by terms such as 'excellence', 'works of international standards', and so forth which are invoked but never, of course, defined, at least explicitly. Floods her monotonous tribes from Cairns to Perth, In them at last the ultimate men arrive Whose boast is not: 'we live' but 'we survive', A type who will inhabit the dying earth.13 Stephensen's 'The foundations of culture in Australia' established a series of tropes which surface in Australian critical writing to this day and thus testify to the endurance of certain values, a textual unconsciousness, which these figures betray. This periodization is, of course, very rough. The first point to note is that Fustel's declared purpose in writing The Ancient City was to counter the use, in all of post-revolutionary French politics, of the values of classical republicanism. .48 The poet Judith Wright's adjacent essay catalogues the European's despoliation of the land and contrasts it with the careful conservation over millennia by the Aborigines. True politics is not then simply the absence of the post, but a postal network which would itself be secret, distributing the mail in the dark, without exhibiting its expeditions and letters en souffrance, an underground network keeping the secret secret. Who benefits from it in the long run? Christianity, with its universal and absolute character, worked still more effectively in the same direction; it formed an intimate alliance with the Roman Empire and, through the impact of these two incomparable unificatory agents, the ethnographic argument was debarred from the government of human affairs for centuries. (eds), The Politics of Theory (Colchester: University of Essex, 1983), pp. As the civil Imaginary responds to social and political forces, this subjectivity will hollow itself more and more into the substance of the observed, as well as the observers, until it becomes the focus, and, more importantly, the legitimation of modern representation in its own right. Copyright 2023 SILO.PUB. And, to some degree, the culture of populism is prepared in narratives that recast foundational romances to bring the soldier-citizen back into history. Where national memories are concerned, griefs are of more value than triumphs, for they impose duties, and require a common effort. 6573). The first appearance of incipient nationalist consciousness, according to Kohh, took place in the Cromwellian forces of the English Civil War. 45 If the love matches in Amalia, binding the rival cities of Tucuman and Buenos Aires, and in Martin Riuas, where northern mining interests marry commerce in the capital, are an indication of historical accuracy because they coincide with data on regional alliances, other novels may similarly help to explain not only the project but also the process of bourgeois consolidation through literal and figurative marriage. . Let me repeat that these divisions of the Indo-European, Semitic, or other What is a nation? Here is Henry Goodwin, in 1849: The poet does not bring his thoughts and impose them upon nature, or merely link them to its forms; they are there already, as truly as what are called natural or organic laws. It operates as a formal requirement of autonomous texts intent on providing a scene adjacent to the nation-state. Nicholas Jose, who at the end of his essay praises The Oxford History's advocacy of critical discriminations, sets up a group of contemporary writers dedicated to exploring 'the nature of their marginality'. 26 Eckermann, Conversations with Goethe, trans. In his work the retreat from ethics in the civil Imaginary connects with literary criticism's ranking of linguistic energy over signification. He concedes also Hazlitt's point, that the characteristic reticence of the English forbids them the free play of expression enjoyed by other European nations, but then suggests that it is precisely in the difficulty of representing faces in which the marks of character are nearly invisible that English artists excel.8 And so on. The case for revision Simon During 138 9 Sir Joshua Reynolds and the Englishness of English art John Barrett 154 10 Destiny made manifest: the styles of Whitman's poetry David Simpson 177 11 Breakfast in America Uncle Tom's cultural histories Rachel Bowlby 197 vi Contents 12 Telescopic philanthropy: professionalism and responsibility in Bleak House Bruce Robbins 13 European pedigrees/African contagions: nationality, narrative, and communality in Tutuola, Achebe, and Reed James Snead 213 231 14 English reading Francis Mulhem 250 15 The island and the aeroplane: the case of Virginia Woolf Gillian Beer 265 16 DissemiNation: time, narrative, and the margins of the modern nation Homi K. Bhabha Index 291 323 Notes on contributors John Barrell is Professor of English in the School of English and American Studies at the University of Sussex. I shall be citing from this and two other editions of Whitman's writings: the 18912 edition, published as Leaves of Grass, ed. For the later period, the key source is the History of the Franks, an account by Gregory of Tours (c. AD539594), himself a Gallo-Roman and Bishop of Tours, of life in Merovingian Gaul. For now, it is worth stressing again that the accumulative style, with its denial of grammatical subordination and hence of the political struggles and debates that such subordination would inevitably dramatize, is Whitman's image of an undivided society. This is a position all the easier to take in Australia, because here, unlike many Third World countries, nationalism is not used against large minority racial/tribal groups. The ideal is the abstract of every local form in the lap of family.!, Etruscans, Pelasgians,8 and Greeks, not to mention many other elements, intersect an. Notes 1 Quoted in Peter Worsley, the Politics of Theory ( Colchester: University Essex... 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