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Literary Review
Transforming the dominant
Professor Bill Ashcroft won academic acclaim with the publications of The Empire Writes Back in 1989, the work he had co-authored with Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin. More than a decade later, The Empire Writes Back remains a seminal text on theory and practice in post-colonial literatures and Prof. Ashcroft is looked upon as the founding exponent of post-colonial theory. He has been the editor of New Literatures Review for the past 20 years and his recent publications include The Post-Colonial Transformation and The Post-Colonial Future. In Chennai recently, he talked to PADMA MALINI and HANIFA GHOSH on various issues relating to post-colonial theory. Excerpts from the interview.<18>
Padma Malini (PM): From the time of Philip Sidney, painting and literature have been critiqued on the same lines. Do you think there is a link between painting and post-colonial theory?
WELL, yes; the way in which we approach painting has changed drastically because we see them as text and we read them very much the same way we read literary texts. What we see in visual text is the same kind of strategy that we use to read texts... In some respects, art is more potent because it is so immediate. So the way in which art operates is very similar to the way in which texts represent post-colonial reality.
PM: Can paintings have multiple meanings like literary texts?
I think the text has a meaning that is not endless and we see that it has its own kinds of meanings. I will give you an example. In the painting of Lin Onus (a landscape with a barbed wire running across in the foreground) the barbed wire does not have a meaning only to the person who painted it. It has a horizon of meanings: it means enclosure, harshness, imprisonment. So no matter who's putting up that image, it has a meaning as it comes out of a culture and history where barbed wires have been used. It helps us to ascertain the meaning; it is not endless meaning. It is very important in post-colonial painting and literature where there is a cultural and political focus, to avoid meaning as kind of chaotic and endless. So we have to balance the need of the post-colonial artist to express with the post-modernist endlessness of meaning. I think we can balance those.
PM: How important is `nation' and `nationalism' today?
One characteristic of post-colonialism is interrogating the term "nation". It's a very very slippery term because nationality was very important in the initial stages in the programmes of decolonisation. What post-colonial theory suggests is that nationalism simply takes over the hegemonic role of imperialism.
PM: After September 11, is there a dramatic shift in our understanding of the concept of `nation'? Is there a blurring of boundaries?
I do think it is happening at various levels — the nation exists for certain purposes for those people who are closer to the ground if you like. In Africa they cross national boundaries without much concern about those boundaries. There are things that mean more to them like language groups; so there is at that level a blurring of boundaries of nations. I don't think though that the potency of the nation has been diminished because it is always a rallying point around which people gather in order to define the "other" and to differentiate themselves from the "other".
Now, post-September 11, what we see is a blurring of many different kinds — so it is a blurring of theories on terrorists and what terrorism means and why it happens and what we find is that the dominant which is the United States is once again taking over control of representation. The U.S. represents that event in a certain way because it is powerful and the rest of the world sees it in that certain way. Here we find again — whatever is happening to the nation, the interesting thing is that power comes to control representation and the post-colonial answer to that is, that power to control representation can be resisted or possibly rejected by transforming it. It might take a little while.
Hanifa Ghosh (HG): You believe in reconciliation as transformation. Could you please explain that?
Reconciliation is a very important topic in Australia. I think 90 per cent of Australians believe in reconciliation. They want it to happen because it is the future. But what have the aboriginals to reconcile themselves to? Could they reconcile themselves to powerlessness?
HG: Is it a kind of compromise?
Yes, I think compromise is one way of saying it. But when I say reconciliation is transformation, I am looking at a form of reconciliation which empowers both sides... In most of the versions of reconciliation that we have heard talked about, we don't find that empowerment for the aboriginal people because there is no closure and there is no point at which we can be totally reconciled. And that's why I say it's an uncompletable project. We should make that a strength, make it a process, a process of transformation that goes on and includes both sides.
HG: How is this idea of transformation different from what Frantz Fanon formulated?
Fanon had formulated his idea of transformation because he was formulating an identity that is quite separate from the dominant forces but what we know here now in globalisation is that nobody can live absolutely sequestered or in a hidden way. What I mean by transformation is the way people in a globalised world take on the forces to make it work.
PM: What are the phases of post-colonial experience? Where are we going from here?
Post-colonial societies go through the nationalist phase — they go through disillusionment with the nationalist phase — then they can go two ways: go into a kind of chaotic phase or into a process of transforming the dominant. That's one of the reasons India is strong because it has the flexibility and the vitality to take dominant cultures and forms and transform them. They've been doing that all through the period of colonisation. They've been doing it for a long time. What's interesting I think is that most societies that have been colonised are themselves well practised in the ability to transform themselves and the dominant and also the global so that they can move from a colonial phase to a global phase... And that's why I think representation is so important because the control of self-representation is the key to the control of a whole range of global forces that operate on any particular society.
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