Let’s start with an easy question. What are you majoring in? Most all of you will answer “English.” And what is “English”? A language, like French and Italian and German and Chinese? When I’m asked on an airplane, “what do you do,” and I say “I’m an English Professor,” most people reply “Oh, then I ‘d better watch my grammar!”--as if “English” denotes the field of studying correct grammar, spelling, composition, etc. But most of us would say that “English” is where you study literature--from England? Not exclusively; literature in the English language. Mostly, though, that is limited to literature in English from England and the United States: so what about other literature written in English, from places like Canada, West Indies, Australia, South Africa, or India? Does that count as “English”?
That’s what this next unit of theory is about. We’ve been talking about ideology and discourse — ideology being the ways that our beliefs (and hence actions) are shaped, and discourse being the construction of knowledges or ideas that influence our beliefs (and actions). This next unit of theory follows from these ideas, looking at how the “discourse” of “English” operates to define a field of study--English and American literature--which carries with it a particular set of ideological beliefs and practices informed by those beliefs. In brief, the field we call “English” is defined through ideas about nationality: the entities we call “England” and “The United States” demarcate the boundaries of what we study in the “English” department. But those ideas of nationality designate more than just a geographical boundary: what is “English” is what has been claimed by England as belonging to English culture, as well as the island of Britain (and Scotland and Ireland) itself. There is thus a history, and a politics, connected with the idea of “English” as an area of cultural study.
Let’s think about history first. From the late 17th century through the middle of the twentieth century, England extended its national rule to countries and areas all over the world: to North America, to Africa, to the Islamic world of the Middle East, to India, to Asia, to the West Indies, South America, and Polynesia, creating English colonies in these lands and, in most cases, taking over the administration of government, so that English laws and customs ruled the people who lived half a world away from the country “England.” You can think here about the history of the U.S. as an English colony: we rebelled against being governed by a distant land, and fought a war to become independent of English rule. Our history as a British colony is somewhat unique, however, as “we”--meaning the people who became “Americans” when the nation of the United States was founded--were formerly British citizens who succeeded so well in colonizing the coastal regions of North America, and in subduing the indigenous population of Native Americans, that we shifted national identification away from Britain and named ourselves something else (Americans). Most of the British colonies of the 18th and 19th centuries did not rebel and form their own nations--largely because the people of those nations were non-whites, non-Western people. British colonial rule (and all other Western nations who formed colonies, such as France and Germany) depended on seeing the indigenous populations of these colonized areas as inferior, as therefore needing the “advanced civilization” offered by Western culture. In fact, as Edward Said argues, the West (or Occident) PRODUCED the non-white, non-Western cultures and peoples as inferior through a variety of discourses which stated the terms of their existence as inferior.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. One of the impetuses for colonization was, of course, the spread of capitalism: colonies offered sources of raw materials, cheap labor, and new markets for Western goods, and the history of colonialism is very much caught up in the economics of capitalism. But colonialism couldn’t be confined merely to the economic realm: when a country like England colonized a non-western region, it exported its legal, religious, educational, military, political, and aesthetic ideas along with its economic regime--what Marx would call the superstructure, and Althusser would call the Ideological State Apparatus, or ISAs. So that, in places like Africa and India, British colonial rule meant teaching the indigenous people about the superiority of Western practices: through setting up systems of police and courts and legislatures following British laws, through sending missionaries to convert natives to Christianity (largely Anglicanism, the Church of England) and establishing churches and seminaries, and through setting up schools to teach British customs, British history, and the English language to children and adults, in order to make them more like British citizens. And with these ideological exportations came British/Western “culture,” in the form of music, art, and literature--so that, regardless of the ancient literary traditions of India, China, or the Arab world, inhabitants of these colonized areas were taught that Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton were the “greatest” authors who ever wrote. In short, British cultural standards were upheld and all other notions of culture, of art or literature or philosophy, were denounced as inferior and subordinated to Western standards.
And this is part of what the “English” department was originally designed to do--to study and to assert the mastery of “English” literature as the most important literature (of the most important and advanced civilization) ever known. “English” departments were thus part of establishing the hegemony (meaning the dominance) of English culture worldwide.
So when I say I’m an “English Professor,” does this mean I “profess” English , that I proclaim the superiority of English literature and culture in this colonial context? Perhaps. What postcolonial theory does it take on the politics of the study of “English” literature and culture from the perspective of those who were colonized by it. Postcolonial theory would ask whether an “English department” necessarily reinforces the hegemony of Western cultural practices and thus supports the political and economic forces which have subordinated what we have come to call the “third world.”
Postcolonial theorists and scholars argue a lot about the meaning of the word “postcolonial,” and particularly about when a “postcolonial” theory or literature begins to emerge. For this course, we’ll take the easy definition: postcolonial designates the time after colonial rule, which is mostly in the mid- to late- twentieth century; this was the era when most of the British colonies, such as India, fought for their independence from the British Empire, and became separate nations. Postcolonial theories begin to arise in the 1960s as thinkers from the former colonies began to create their own forms of knowledge, their own discourses, to counter the discourses of colonialism: these postcolonial discourses articulated the experience of the colonized, rather than the colonizer, giving what’s called the “subaltern”--the subordinated non-white, non-Western subject of colonial rule--a voice. Postcolonial theorists examine how Western cultures, the colonizers, created the colonial subject, the subaltern, through various discursive practices, and examine also how subaltern cultures both participated in and worked to resist colonization, through various overt or covert, direct or subversive, means.
There’s a strong connection between postcolonial theories and contemporary African-American theories, as both look at how a hegemonic white/Western culture came to dominate a non-white culture, and at how the subordinated culture reacted to and resisted that domination. The history of black-white relations in the United States is quite different from that in England, because in the US whites imported blacks from Africa as slaves, rather than urging whites to go settle in Africa to “civilize” the indigenous peoples. But while the dynamics of racial and cultural politics are different, some of the effects are the same: in the United States, slavery and racism produced a hegemonic white culture which enforced its systems and values on the non-white population, and that non-white population both obeyed and resisted those systems and values. Both postcolonial theories and African-American theories about US racial dynamics argue that the colonized “other” learns to speak what WEB DuBois has called a “double-voiced” discourse, speaking both the language (in Bakhtin’s terms) of the dominant culture and the language of the subordinated culture.
And this is where Henry Louis Gates’ article on “The Blackness of Blackness: A Critique of the Sign and the Signifying Monkey” comes in. His article examines a particular mode of speech, a Bakhtinian “language” or sociolect, arising within African-American communities. Gates begins the article by discussing the term “signifying,” which is familiar to literary theorists since Saussure; we know “signification” as the relationship between signifier and signified which creates a sign. Gates points out, however, that the term has an entirely different meaning, and history, in African-American cultural usage. You might think here of Volosinov’s ideas about the multiaccentuality of a sign, the idea that a single word or sign might have radically different meanings in different contexts. Within the context of academic theory-speak, “signifying” means what Saussure laid out; within an African-American cultural context, however, “signifying,” or “signifyin’,” is a name for a particular linguistic practice, which Gates links to “the dozens,” calling out, rapping, and testifying.
Gates’ analysis of signifyin’ bridges the gap between the academic dominant-cultural context of the term and the African-American subordinated context; he uses academic discourse, in talking about Saussure, and about classical rhetoric, to support the idea that the African-American (or “black”) practice of signifying is just as historically significant, and just as complex, as any dominant cultural linguistic practice. In other words, Gates insists that “signifyin’” or rapping is not just how African-Americans talk because they’re not well educated or don’t know about “correct” (i.e. hegemonic dominant cultural, or “white”) forms of speech; rather, the activity of “signifyin’” comes from an African and African-American tradition, just as classical rhetoric comes from the tradition of Greek and Latin modes of speech. He thus traces the roots of black signifying to African mythology and religious beliefs; more specifically, he looks at a figure called the “Signifying Monkey” as the archetype and origin of the practice of signifying in the African-American community.
“Signifying,” according to the Oxford Companion to African American Literature, is a form of verbal play, centering primarily on the insult, whereby people can demonstrate a mastery of improvisational rhyme and rhythm; the demonstration of such verbal mastery is a mechanism for empowerment within communities where other forms of power–political, economic–are unavailable. Gates links this practice to the mythological figure of the Signifying Monkey, who is able to trick the more powerful animals in the jungle through his verbal skills. Gates points out that the link between the Signifying Monkey and the practice of signifying works in at least two directions: the figure, and the practice, come directly from African cultural mythology, and variants can be found in virtually all communities with African origins; and the figure of the Monkey in particular plays on the racist construction of Africans as like apes, therefore less human than whites. The Signifying Monkey thus takes a trope, a figure, from the white racist idea of blackness and reaccentuates it, renames it, signifies on it, so that “monkey” no longer means an inferior, i.e. black, person, but rather represents a person with verbal power and the ability to stir up conflict between those who have more social power than he does.
Gates places the Signifying Monkey at the borders of “correct,” i.e. hegemonic, dominant cultural forms of speech. You might think of the Signifying Monkey in this way as a subject position within language. That position, like the “feminine” position we discussed in Cixous’s feminist theory, is further away from a center where language is fixed, stable, and univocal; at the margins of language or discourse, speech is more fluid, more flexible, more able to “play” in Derrida’s sense. The Signifying Monkey, then, as a linguistic subject, is able to use words with greater flexibility, to “trope” and play and signify and shift meanings, than is the speaker who stands closer to the center of language.
And here we’re back on pretty familiar ground. We’ve been talking all semester about the two poles of language: the pole where meaning is fixed and stable, where a word means one thing and one thing only, and the pole where meaning is fluid, and words can have multiple, ambiguous, and indefinite meanings. All the theorists we’ve read have talked about the advantages and disadvantages of fixed vs. fluid meaning. Theories of race and postcolonialism, like most of the poststructuralist theories we’ve read, uphold the idea that fixity of meaning is associated with rigid systems of thought and government, and fluidity of meaning, play, is associated with systems of thought and government that favor multiplicity and multiculturalism. And, like most of the theories we’ve been reading, postcolonial theories say that fluidity and play and multiplicity is better, in all kinds of ways, than fixity and rigidity. In explaining the figure of the Signifying Monkey as a subject who plays with language in order to undermine rigid systems of racial dominantion, Gates celebrates the subversive power of fluid language to disrupt existing hierarchies which create binary relations of domination and subordination.