'Writers Are the Dream Mechanism of the Human Race...’

A Date with Bill | @ SCILET

The 2020 Paul L Love Endowment Lecture was delivered by Professor Bill Ashcroft at 11 am on 28 October 2020 on the virtual Zoom platform. 

Professor Bill Ashcroft spoke on the topic, ‘Postcolonialism Today’.

Dr. Bill Ashcroft, one of the founding exponents of Postcolonial Theory and a renowned critic, is currently Fellow, Australian Academy of the Humanities (FAHA), Professor Emeritus, School of Arts and Media, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia.

Professor Bill Ashcroft began by talking about the importance and relevance of postcolonial studies continues to the present contexts!

‘One reason for its relevance even today is because it is dynamic’, he observed.

Says Bill -

On developing Postcolonial studies with reference to –

Postcolonial Utopianism

Borders and Bordering

Utopianism

The Utopian Studies Society was established in the year 1988.

It was just sheer coincidence that The Empire Writes Back was published in the very next year, in 1989.

He also cited from two books, titled,

Ernst Bloch’s The Principle of Hope (1986)

And

Fredric Jameson’s Archaeologies of the Future (2005)

Excerpts from his Lecture -

There’s a difference between Utopia and Utopianism

A difference between the ‘placeless place’ and the spirit of hope, between the representation of utopia and the anticipatory function of utopianism.

Sargent, ‘social dreaming’

Levitas – “the desire for a better way of living expressed in the description of a different kind of society that makes possible that alternative way of life”.

The irony of postcolonial utopia

King Utopus invades the land, changes its name, ‘civilises’ the indigenous inhabitants and cultivates the natural ‘wasteland’!

He also spoke on Literature’s Anticipatory Function.

On the importance of art and literature in imaging a different world.

In this regard he alluded to Ben Okri’s famous line, where he says, ‘Writers are the dream mechanism of the human race’.

Vorschein or ‘anticipatory illumination’, the revelation of the ‘possibilities for rearranging social and political relations to produce Heimat.

Heimat – the home we have all sensed but never experienced or known. It is Heimat as utopia that determines the truth content of a work of art!

For Bloch, Heimat always lies beyond the borders!

Borders have become very significant for Postcolonial Studies!

What would the world look like without borders?

How would the walling in become porous?

Thinking about that becomes Utopian!

The growth of borders

End of WW II – 7 borders

When Berlin wall fell – 15 Border Walls

Today – 77 border Walls or fences

A border is not a thing, but a practice.

It’s an ideological practice.

It is both a consequence and production of power relationships.

Without borders we don’t have a nation, said Trump.

The idea of a border is something that gives us the sense of nation.

But border doesn’t go around a nation, but it goes through a nation, and helps in construction of power relationships.

He then quoted the following lines from Cavafy’s “Waiting for the Barbarians”.

Waiting for the Barbarians

BY C. P. CAVAFY

TRANSLATED BY EDMUND KEELEY

Why this sudden bewilderment, this confusion?

(How serious people’s faces have become.)

Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,

everyone going home lost in thought?

Why isn’t anything going on in the senate?

Why are the senators sitting there without legislating?

Because the barbarians are coming today.

What’s the point of senators making laws now?

Once the barbarians are here, they’ll do the legislating.

Because night has fallen and the barbarians haven't come.

And some of our men just in from the border say

there are no barbarians any longer.

Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?

Those people were a kind of solution.

Borders and the Horizon of Literature

The Borders Within

The boundary of the state never marks a real exterior… It is a line drawn internally, within the network of institutional mechanisms through which a certain social and political order is maintained! (Mitchell 1991: 90).

Bordering practices include rules, laws, restrictions, surveillance and more subtle forms of pressure such as nationalistic rhetoric.

Simonsen – Eight borders or boundary markers as criteria for national membership –

1. National ancestry

2. Being of the national religion

3. birth on the country’s soil

4. having lived in the country for most of one’s life

5. language skills

6. respect for the country’s laws and institutions

7. having host national citizenship

8. feeling as part of the nation.

Borders and the Horizons of Literature

Rushdie, Step Across this Line

Good writing assumes a frontierless nation. Writers who serve frontiers have become border guards… In our deepest natures we are frontier crossing beings. We know this by the stories we tell ourselves; for we are story-telling animals.

Edward Said – Exile is both ‘the mind of winter’ and the invigorating condition of the public intellectual’s engagement with regimes of identity control such as nation, religion, culture and ethinicity.

The Creative spirit, for which literature is a powerful metonym, is the ultimate border crosser. It is inherently postnational because its tendency is not to belong, the nationality of literatures being a function of reading rather than writing.

Heimat is not a nation but the range of possibilities.

The concept of Transnation!

Postcolonialism and the Nation

Postcolonial dissatisfaction with the concept of Nation

Soyinka – Africa carved up ‘like some demented tailor who paid no attention to the fabric, colour or pattern of the quilt he was patching together’.

The borders that form a nation are colonial borders, and a nation is a colonial construction.

Hobson says, ‘Empire bred nationalism undermined the chance of true internationalism’.

Internationalism – does not construct through bordering practices.

Partha Chatterjee – nationalism undermines the progress of decolonization because the ‘national form’ is hostile to their own cultures.

Postcolonial Utopianism and the critique of the nation state –

Tagore, Gandhi

Transnation –

Is the nation that circulates around the bordering practices of the state.

Transnation – is the fluid migrating outside of the state that begins within the nation. A way of talking about subjects who circulate around the bordering practices of the state.

Deleuze and Guattari –

‘smooth vs striated space’

Texture –

Striated space is the space of the State.

Smooth space is the space of the Transnation.

Scott, ‘infra politics’ –

1. The undramatic, everyday and mundane acts of quite evasion

2. Slowdowns, false compliance, feigned ignorance and sabotage carried out by factory workers – that when performed by many change or alter a landscape of power.

The creative spirit is the ultimate border crosser.

That’s where we bring together the notion of utopia.

The creative spirit is of unbelonging, it looks beyond the border.

Postcolonial approaches to literature generate that kind of realization, that, literature could imagine a possible world – potentially disruptive –

Particularly in Australia, they are wary of any kind of creative work!

The end of Bill Ashcroft’s Talk!

This was followed by a rewarding time of questions and answers.

Special congratulations to SCILET for having hosted such an amazing speaker of international repute.

In fact, I still remember going all the way to Pune, a couple of years ago, to listen to Bill talk on Postcolonial Utopias. [You may want to watch the YouTube video, that I had done then, on his talk, HERE]

Hence it was a double blessing to listen to Bill Ashcroft speak, from the luxury of our own homes!

Thanks a million to Dr. Premila Paul, to Dr. R.P. Nair and to all the lovely minds who made our day with Bill!

Bill Ashcroft!