Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Vilashini Cooppan is Associate Professor of Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

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WORLDS WITHIN

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Acknowledgments..........................................................................................................................xiPreface..................................................................................................................................xv1 Introduction: Inner Territories........................................................................................................12 National Imaginaries, Global Flows, and Uncanny Repetitions: Conrad's Heart of Darkness and the Postcolonial Novel.....................553 The Soul of Nationhood: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Psychic Politics of Place.............................................................984 Ghostly Forms: Race, Nation, and Genre in Frantz Fanon.................................................................................1405 New Nations, New Novels................................................................................................................1816 My Nation, My Object: Severo Sarduy's Fantasmatic Cuba.................................................................................217Postscript: Remapping the Nation.........................................................................................................261Notes....................................................................................................................................277Index....................................................................................................................................345

Chapter One

Troubled Territory: Thinking the Nation in an Era of Globalization

"The history of nations," writes tienne Balibar, "beginning with our own, is always already presented to us in the form of a narrative which attributes to these entities the continuity of a subject." As defined by Balibar, the nation form owes its existence to a "retrospective illusion," a fiction of collective identity produced by a regular movement from the present into the past and paralleled by a spatial equivalent. Paraphrasing J. G. Fichte's foundational essay on becoming national, Addresses to the German Nation [Reden an die Deutsche Nation (1808)], Balibar writes: "the 'external frontiers' of the state have to become 'internal frontiers' or-which amounts to the same thing-external frontiers have to be imagined constantly as a projection and protection of an internal collective personality, which each of us carries within ourselves and enables us to inhabit the space of the state as a place where we have always been-and always will be-'at home'" (95). For Balibar the legacy of colonialism intensifies this relation as immigration from former colonies into the former metropoles effects a literal "interiorization of the exterior" that reproduces racialized practices of internal exclusion, alongside an "exteriorization of the interior" resulting from the formation of postcolonial states "throughout the immense periphery of the planet" (43). Often invoked to explain such excesses as cultural nationalism, ethnic chauvinism, and new racism, the unification of subject and nation and of interiorization and exteriorization described by Balibar also reorients us to the nation's other history as a project of plural attachments, including the border-crossing blurring of global and national identifications that has been described as cosmopolitics and linked to projects of liberation. Thinking through the subject, and lingering on its propensity to mix up the realms of inside and outside, past and present as it constructs the narrative of identity, can we rethink the nation as an entity made through movement? To do so, we must first revisit the scene of nationalism.

Grounded and bounded by the problematics of territory and identity, nationalism seems to find its central tenet in a freezing isomorphism, from European romantic nationalism's organic symmetry of soil and character, to imperial nationalism's attempt to consolidate its power by quite literally mapping identity onto space on the conference tables of Europe, to anticolonial nationalism's call for the restoration of occupied lands to their original inhabitants, to the mystified and mythified "homeland" that articulates postcolonial nationalism at home and in the diasporic abroad. Of course, not all nations can lay claim to a state, by which I understand the governmental, juridical, and economic structures attached to territory, nor can individual states assume the linguistic, religious, ethnic, and cultural homogeneity of those within their borders, or even that all of their subjects will live within their borders. Alternative spaces to the territorialized nation-state exist-the multiethnic cosmopolitan crossroads, the transnational ethnic imaginary, the regional bloc, the world-system, the network, the new social movements based in identities that cross national borders (green, antiglobalization, feminist, queer), others grounded in the local, and, of course, the ubiquitous global sensibility. Just as contemporary globalization theory espouses, in Anthony D. King's words, "the rejection of the nationally-constituted society as the appropriate object of discourse, or unit of social and cultural analysis, and to varying degrees, a commitment to conceptualising 'the world as a whole,'" these various alternatives to the nation-state reach out to the history of global connection. If some critics understand globalization, with its pluralizing flows of culture and capital, to herald what Kenichi Ohmae calls "the end of the nation-state," others argue that the standardizing reign of global capital has created new degrees of inequity among and within nations and ever more virulent forms of nationalism, including state corruption, ethnic genocide, and new imperialism. Paul Smith situates globalization's mobile utopia, "a kind of isochronic world wherein the constrictions of time and space have been overcome," as capitalism's "millennial dream," a form of capital accumulation that "derives from the moment of direct imperialism and is in many respects the continuation of colonialism and imperialism by other means."

Seemingly homogenizing and hegemonizing, a Deleuzian smooth space of flows in which capital finds its mirror image and most potent prefix, the term "global" is for many critics inseparable from the "globalization" and "globality" that together function, in R. Radhakrishnan's account, as a "descriptive totality that disallows the very chronotope of the 'outside.'" Radhakrishnan, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and others have proposed, by way of Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger, the terms "world," "worlding," and "worldliness" as alternative ways to name the rich heterogeneity, coevality, and interconnectedness of human experience, much as other critics have hastened to rehabilitate cosmopolitanism's strictly European roots for newly mobile critical uses. As I understand it, "global" names the transverse networks of influence and exchange that interrupt and cut across the fictive linearities of national history and the fictive homogeneities of national subjectivity, while also locating those mobile subjectivities and histories within the world-systems of imperialism, nationalism, and capitalism. To use, as this book will, "global" to designate the extranational is...