HELEN TIFFIN "POST-COLONIAL LITERATURES AND COUNTER-DISCOURSE"

Tiffin's argument here is that imperialism has not only had a profound impact on the "social and political structures of the twentieth century"
(17) and international relations, but also "profoundly . . . influenced" (17) the "perceptual frameworks of the majority of people alive now" (17).
In other words, "European discourses" (17) have affected not only the "day to day realities of colonised peoples" (17) but also their very ways
of thinking. However, she contends, without ever quite explaining why this is the case, that the
contemporary art, philosophies, and literature produced by post-colonial societies are not simply continuations or adaptations of European
models. The processes of artistic and literary decolonisation have involved a radical dis/mantling of European codes and a post-colonial
subversion and appropriation of the dominant European discourses. This has frequently been accompanied by the demand for an entirely new or
wholly recovered 'reality,' free of all colonial taint. Given the nature of the relationship between coloniser and colonised, with its pandemic
brutalities and its cultural denigration, such a demand is desirable and inevitable. But as the contradictions inherent in a project such as
Chinweizu, Jemie, and Madubuike's The Decolonisation of African Literature demonstrate, such pre-colonial purity can never be fully recovered.
(17)
The reason for this is that Post-colonial cultures are
inevitably hybridised, involving a dialectical relationship between European ontology and epistemology and the impulse to create or recreate
independent local identity . . . it invokes an ongoing dialectic between hegemonic centrist systems and peripheral subversions of them; between
European and British discourses and their post-colonial dis/mantling. . . . [I]t is not possible to create or recreate national or regional formations
independent of their historical implication in the European colonial heritage. . . . (17)
Rather, according to Tiffin, "it has been the project of post-colonial writing to interrogate European discourses and discursive strategies from a
privileged position within (and between) two worlds; to investigate the means by which Europe imposed and maintained its codes in the colonial
domination" (my emphasis; 17-18).
Tiffin argues that the "rereading and rewriting of the European historical and fictional record" (18) is indispensable. These are "subversive
manoeuvres" (18), as opposed to the "construction of the essentially national or regional" (18), are the distinguishing characteristic of Postcolonial literature and "post-colonial discourse" (18) in general. She stresses that Post-colonial "literatures / cultures" (18) are "constituted in
counter-discursive rather than homologous practices, and they offer 'fields' of counter-discursive strategies to the dominant discourse" (18).
Post-colonial counter-discourse is "dynamic, not static: it does not seek to subvert the dominant with a view to taking its place, but to, in
Wilson Harris's formulation, evolve textual strategies which continually 'consume' their 'own biases' at the same time as they expose and erode
those of the dominant discourse" (18).
Tiffin's interest is in the challenge posed by Post-colonial literature to the "universalist" (18) and "hegemonic" (18) pretensions that predominate
within what she labels "Comparative Literature Studies" (18). The latter has tended to stress "extra- rather than intra-linguistic comparisons"
(18) (i.e. the difference between Francophone and Germanic literatures), to focus on "European cultures and literatures" (18), and to emphasise
"great traditions" (19), in the process appealing to "common sense notion[s] of difference" (19) and sweeping "troubling problems of dialect and
power into the footnotes" (19). Such emphases, predicated on what she characterises as a "centrist philosophy" (19), "perpetuate a political
conservatism or blindness which sidesteps the interesting challenges the 'margins' of any constituted subject inevitably pose" (19).
Tiffin argues that long before Chinweizu, et al. had sought to problematise the term 'English literature,' Anglophone Post-colonial authors
had unconsciously or deliberately been engaged in counter-discursive responses to the dominant tradition. Once colonial Calibans transported
the language or had it imposed on them, they used it to curse or to subvert. (19)
One of its most important targets has long been "literary universality" (19) which
had fostered the centrality of the dominant discourse by enshrining the values of one particular culture as axiomatic, as literary or textual
givens, and invoked policies of either assimilation or apartheid for the remainder of the English-speaking world. Either one wrote 'like the English,'
having thereby 'transcended' the merely 'local' and thus gained entry into the great imperial club, or, more frequently, one insisted on the local
and thus remained irredeemably provincial. (19)
She argues that "European hegemonic manoeuvres of this kind can wear a number of masks" (19), for example, the application of terms like
Postmodernism (by critics like Simon During) to texts that are better characterised, in her opinion, as "post-colonial experiments" (19), and the
"practices of some Post-Structuralist critics" (19) which are in fact, like the texts themselves, also "inspired by direct cross-cultural or colonial
experience" (19). Tiffin contends that Post-colonial counter-discourse also targets models like 'Commonwealth Literature' or the 'New Writing in
English' which also "implicitly or explicitly invoke notions of continuation of, or descent from, a 'mainstream' British literature" (20). Her argument
is that models which "stress shared language and shared circumstances of colonialism (recognising vast differences in the expression of British
imperialism from place to place) allow for counter-discursive strategies" (20).
Tiffin warns, however, that unless their stress is on the "counter-discursive fields of activity" (20) of the sort which she discussed earlier in her
reference to Harris, "such models run the risk of becoming coloniser in their turn. African critics and writers in particular have rejected these
models for their apparently neo-assimilative bases, and opted instead for the national or the pan-African" (20). She believes that her own 'Postcolonial' model is better than "any loose national grouping based on felt marginality" (20) and "avoids some of the pitfalls of earlier collective
models or paradigms" (20). She characterises the "alternative" (20) to this as the "national or regional study" (20) which has been the "way in
which these literatures have most frequently been considered" (20). However, there are disadvantages to doing so. Firstly, they "run the risk of
a continuing marginalisation or ghettoisation, especially outside the particular country or region concerned, and excludes . . . fruitful comparisons
between cultures and literatures which employ a dis/placed language in counter-hegemonic relation to its 'place' of origin" (20-21). Secondly, as
Bhabha points out in "Representation and the Colonial Text,"
national quests for cultural self-ratification and hence origination replicate imperial cognitive process, reinvoking their values and practices in an
attempted constitution of an independent identity. "Although the refractions of a Western tradition are accepted as ironical (if not tragic), the
demand for a literary tradition, a history, is put in exactly same historicist and realist terms--the familiar quest for an origin that will authorise a
beginning." (21)
Thirdly, the "construction of the 'essentially' Nigerian or the 'essentially' Australian invokes exclusivist systems which replicate universalist
paradigms" (21). Even though, she admits, it is "nation-based literary associations and individuals who still fight the good fight against the
continuing hegemony of British literature and European culture in our universities" (21), she concludes that for the reasons outlined above,
"national models do ultimately prove unsatisfactory" (21).
Arguing that in these much more theoretical times it is necessary to provide a "firmer foundation than one which consists in a loose association
of nations or regions whose grouping is facilitated by a 'common' language" (21), Tiffin argues that it is possible to formulate at least two not
necessarily mutually exclusive models of post-colonial literature: one in which the "post-coloniality of the text would be argued to reside in its
discursive features" (21) (the danger here lying in "post-coloniality becoming a set of unsituated reading practices" [21]) and the other "in its
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determining relations with its material situation" (21) (the danger here being the "reintroduction of a covert form of essentialism" [21]). Tiffin
states her intention to "combine the two as overarching models" (21) by applying them to the study of two texts (Coetzee's Foe and Selvon's
Moses Ascending). Her goal is to offer a "general post-colonial reading practice or practices" (21) which would be "politically situated" (21) given
that "sites of production and consumption are inextricably bound up with the production of meaning " (21). In her view, the "site of
communication" (21) is the "most important defining boundary" (21) of Post-colonial literature. To this end, she seeks to make use of Dennis
Lee's metaphor of the 'field' which connotes the
idea of an unseen but definable force which patterns the particles that fall within its influence, furnishes . . . a way of talking about the overall
structures that govern the relationships among a collection of separable items. (In physics a field can only be perceived by inference from the
relationships of the particles it contains; the existence of the field is, however, entirely separate from that of the particles: though it ma be
detected among them, it is not defined by them. (qtd. in Tiffin, 21-22)
Tiffin wants to adapt this term to the study of Post-colonial literatures "in that it avoids the problems of a post-colonial essentialism (undesirable
. . . as recursively imperialistic or assimilative), yet allows for the constitution of coherent fields of activity across diverse national, regional, and
racial boundaries" (22). Under this broad rubric, many generic "sub-groupings" (22), not limited to a specific nation or region, are possible such
as 'magic realism' (suggested by Michael Dash) and 'allegory' (Steven Slemon).
Tiffin is particularly interested in the genre which she calls "canonical counter-discourse" (22) exemplified in texts such as Wide Sargasso Sea. In
such texts, the Post-colonial writer "takes up a character or characters, or the basic assumptions of a British canonical text, and unveils those
assumptions, subverting the text for post-colonial purposes" (22). What Tiffin calls "textuality" (22) performs a particular "discursive function"
(22) in the colonial / Post-colonial context:
Texts constructed those worlds, 'reading' their alterity assimilatively in terms of their own cognitive codes. Explorers' journals, drama, fiction,
historical accounts, 'mapping' enabled conquest and colonisation and the capture and / or vilification of alterity. But often the very texts which
facilitated such material and psychic capture were those which the imposed European education systems foisted on the colonised as the 'great'
literature which dealt with 'universals'; ones whose culturally specific imperial terms were to be accepted as axiomatic at the margins. (22)
Tiffin explains that texts like The Tempest and Robinson Crusoe were an integral
part of the process of 'fixing' relations between Europe and its 'others,' of establishing patterns of reading alterity at the same time as it
inscribed the 'fixity' of that alterity, naturalising 'difference' within its own cognitive codes. But the function of such a canonical text at the
colonial periphery also becomes an important part of material imperial practice, in that, through educational and critical institutions, it continually
displays and repeats for the other the original capture of his / her alterity and the processes of its annihilation, marginalisation, or naturalisation
as if this were axiomatic, culturally ungrounded, 'universal,' natural. (23)
This is why, understandably, it has become the "project of post-colonial literatures to investigate the European textual capture and containment
of colonial and post-colonial space and to intervene in that originary and continuing containment" (22). Alluding to the work of Richard Terdiman,
not least his notions of 'counter-discourse' and "textual revolution" (22), Tiffin argues that "[l]iterary revolution in post-colonial worlds has been
an intrinsic component of social 'disidentification' from the outset" (23), its "discursive strategies" (23) involving a
mapping of the dominant discourse, a reading and exposing of its underlying assumptions, and the dis/mantling of these assumptions from the
cross-cultural standpoint of the imperially subjectified 'local.' (23)
If a text like Wide Sargasso Sea "directly contests British sovereignty--of persons, of place, of culture, of language" (23), it does so only, Tiffin
claims, by means of a "provisionally authoritative perspective, . . . one . . . deliberately constructed as provisional since the novel is at pains to
demonstrate the subjective nature of point of view and hence the cultural construction of meaning" (23). Such writers are not "simply 'writing
back' to an English canonical text, but the whole of the discursive field within which such a text operated and continues to operate in postcolonial worlds" (23). Writers like Rhys, Selvon and Coetzee "take up the complex discursive field surrounding" (23) canonical texts like Robinson
Crusoe in order "unlock these apparent closures" (23).
In the remainder of the essay, Tiffin turns her attention first to the Trinidadian Selvon's Moses Ascending before turning to Foe by the white
South African J. M. Coetzee in order to argue that, notwithstanding national, regional and racial differences, their works share certain discursive
strategies. The former, by "re-entering the text of Robinson Crusoe" (27) and, by extension, the "assumptions on which they rest and the
paradigms they reflect construct" (27), achieves a "complete destabilisation of centrist systems and an exposure of their pretensions to the
axiomatic. . . . Selvon destabilises the dominant discourse through exposure of its strategies and offers a Trinidadian / Caribbean post-colonial
counter-discourse which is perpetually conscious of its own ideologically constructed subject position and speaks ironically from within it" (27).
By the same token, Foe's "dialogue with Robinson Crusoe involves not just the subversion of the imperial perspective imposed on white South
Africans themselves, but the subversion of the perpetuated and amplified imperial impulses in the white settler communities which have resulted
in the continuing obscenities of legal Apartheid in South Africa" (28).
From this point of view, of course, not all texts are Post-colonial (in Tiffin's sense of this term, merely because they are written by the colonised
or ex-colonised, that is, merely because they are written by an African or an Indian. To be Post-colonial in the sense intended by Tiffin, a text
must be cognisant of the dangers inherent in "all triumphant subversion" (32): that of replicating the very structures which one has displaced
and thereby "becoming the dominant in turn" (32). "Post-colonial inversions of imperial formations . . . are deliberately provisional" (32) in that
they "do not overturn or invert the dominant in order to become dominant in their turn, but to question the foundation of the ontologies and
epistemological systems which see such binary structures as inescapable" (32). "'Genuine change,' Wilson Harris suggests, proceeds . . . though
a series of 'infinite rehearsals' whereby counter discourses seek not just to expose and 'consume' the biases of the dominant, but to erode their
own biases" (32).

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