hosted by the graduate students in the Department of Comparative Literature at
UC Irvine
CONTESTING COLONIAL INSCRIPTIONS
Respondant:Adriana Johnson, Comparative Literature link to faculty profile
Moderator: Michelle Cho
"Viva Costaguana: Communities, Languages, and Neo-colonialism in Conrad’s Nostromo"
Robert Colson, University of California, Irvine
In this paper I explore the narrative techniques Conrad uses in Nostromo, while writing in English, to indicate the variety of languages actually spoken in the world of the text. An early reviewer of the text noted that Conrad’s “foreign-ness” and his deliberate/chosen usage of English allow for and contribute to his artistry in words. Writing in one of his non-native languages, Conrad was perhaps more deeply aware of the relationship between languages, individuals, and communities than other English novelists of the period and this is reflected in Nostromo. The self-consciousness of Conrad’s deployment of languages in this English novel (or novel written in English) has been deeply overshadowed by the overt political and ethical critiques present in the novel. This is not to say that those critiques, both within the novel and in the work of literary critics, are not significant. Nostromo is remarkable for its presentation and critique of neo-colonialism just as those new and, at times, more subtle forms of colonization and exploitation were beginning to emerge. My argument, however, is that the language of the novel’s narration is the primary source of the political and ideological critiques of the novel. That the novel is written in English about a fictional South American republic and has a cast of characters from many of the European powers of the time, each speaking one or more national languages, creates an illusion of unity necessary for the fiction to work. Yet this illusive unity brings to the forefront the underlying instability of relations and communications between characters and communities. The narrator almost successfully effaces this instability by the use of English. It is, however, an effacement that the narrative draws attention to even as it tries to present a world unbothered by linguistic difference. The linguistic instability built into the text provides two lines of critique. The novel is primarily critical of the European characters who are the principle actors in the novel. Secondarily, the novel exposes, through the language fissures in the narration, the plight of the Amerindian people who are seldom seen and even less frequently heard. The novel draws attention to the discrepancy between the reality of Sulaco (full of Spanish and Amerindian languages) and the Sulaco presented in the novel (a veritable wall of English through which the occasional word or phrase from elsewhere may intrude). This discrepancy, ultimately, is Conrad’s most forceful critique of the colonial and neo-colonial formations at work in the world of the novel.
"The Kiểm Thảo and the Uses of Disposable Time in the American War in Vietnam"
Duy Nguyen, University of California, Irvine
The use of disposable time was one of the most, if not the most important factor in determining the outcome of the American war in Vietnam (in the sense of both leisure, and the “free time” embodied in the commodified leisure activities that proliferated throughout the cities in South Vietnam as a result of American economic assistance). In this paper, I will examine one specific use of disposable time in the form of the Maoist self-criticism sessions (or kiểm thảo), used by the National Liberation Front not only as a means of training their soldiers, but as a form of total “re-education” (cải tạo). The goal of the latter can be described as the transformation of the relations of production of rural Vietnamese society by means of a re-organization of leisure.
"A Taste of Aloha: Postwar Hawaii’l and Neo-Colonial Statehood"
Amy Reddinger, University of Washington
In the years and decades after World War II, continental Americans become obsessed with Hawai’i. Subsequently, the islands begin to appear in a wide range of popular cultural sites within the US imaginary from popular fiction (James Michener’s Hawaii), to children’s games (the hula hoop), and modes of entertainment (mai-tais, tiki bars, the backyard luau). Many of these cultural phenomenon work by making non-Hawaiian Americans feel as though they belong in Hawai’i and, conversely, as though Hawai’i belongs to them. It seems important to note that most of the ways in which Hawai’i “appears” in the lives of postwar Americans is by way of the home and family; domesticity becomes the discursive conduit through which Hawai’i – the soon-to-be-state, becomes known on the mainland. This paper will explore the complex ways in which the century long colonial relationship between the US and Hawai’i is re-narrated in the postwar era. In particular, this presentation will focus on reading postwar America’s complex and shifting relationship to the islands of Hawai’i as narrated and contextualized in popular cookbooks of the period.
Rather than reducing these manifestations of Hawai’i and Hawaiian cooking to moments of the production of an exotic other by way of the production of Hawai’i-as-kitsch, this paper will take up Lisa Lowe’s challenge to read more complexly for the “heterogeneous and contradictory” elements within the hegemonic formation (Critical Terrains). For this presentation this means reading the popular “mainland” texts alongside of contemporary “local” cookbooks. Reading across a range of cookbooks for the multiple narratives that emerge allows for a more nuanced understanding of the ways in which, during the postwar era, racial and national identity are constituted, revised and challenged through the discourse of domesticity.
Central to this discussion will be the analysis of a range of cookbooks that treat and explore “Hawaiian cuisine”; these will include mainland texts such as Betty Crocker and Better Homes and Gardens, produced to inform the mainland suburban American home, as well as “locally” produced cookbooks written for a range of local and non-local audiences. This paper will take as an assumption that domestic instructional texts offer key insights into the production of postwar American racial and national identities. However, I will aim to produce a reading of these texts that expands and complicates our understanding of both postwar racial formations and the relationship between Hawai’i and US, national, identity. In particular, this paper will look at the existence of locally written community cookbooks as a particular site of the resistance of and complication of the hegemonic formations of American identity during the postwar era.