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GALLAGHER - D - Creoles, Diasporas and Cosmopolitanisms
GALLAGHER - D - Creoles, Diasporas and Cosmopolitanisms
COSMOPOLITANISMS
CREOLES, DIASPORAS AND
COSMOPOLITANISMS
THE CREOLIZATION OF NATIONS,
CULTURAL MIGRATIONS, GLOBAL
LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES
DAVID GALLAGHER
ACADEMICA PRESS
BETHESDA - DUBLIN - PALO ALTO
Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book
may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission
except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Website: www.academicapress.com
to order: 650-329-0685
CONTENTS
Introduction 1
CREOLES
DIASPORAS
12. Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni and the (Im) Possibility of the Diasporic 207
Bildungsroman
21. Haunting Pasts and Evasive Present in Nuruddin Farah’s Knots 365
COSMOPOLITANISMS
David Benhammou
Bibliography 559
Notes 599
Index 655
FOREWORD
No single term perhaps better captures the city of New Orleans than ‘lagniappe.’
That little bit extra is the characteristic symbol of hospitality and gratitude in the
Crescent City, something which is and is not part of any exchange: you are never
charged for it and yet it is always expected by members of the community, even
for outsiders. This creole term fuses, in a Louisiana French orthography, the
American Spanish word ‘la ñapa’ (something that is added) with the Quechua
word ‘yapay’ (to pay or increase). At its core ‘lagniappe’ globalizes and localizes.
It depends upon the generosity of individual merchants who add that thirteenth
beignet to the dozen for free, and it embodies the confluence at least three
linguistic and cultural traditions to forge a new one in a specific place.
A logic of three reappears in the thematic triad for the American
Comparative Literature Association’s 2010 conference held in New Orleans,
‘Creoles, Diasporas, and Cosmopolitanisms,’ with each term further pluralized to
encourage the most varied and inclusive possible perspectives from our
participants. Each term in its own way explores the concept of ‘lagniappe,’ of
what is supplementary, what is not included in the official price or in segregated
and carefully tallied calculations of language, culture and literature. When the
ACLA’s board, under Haun Saussy’s leadership as president, suggested my
x Creoles, Diasporas, Cosmopolitanisms
mother’s hometown as our venue, we hoped to bring our support to the still
hesitant economy of post-Katrina New Orleans. But our choice of location
involved more than a desire to assist this complex, vibrant and often troubled
location. For the ACLA, picking New Orleans served as a way of focusing the
thoughts of more than 1,700 participants on those questions of exchange,
multiplicity and hybridity which have defined both that most creole, diasporic and
cosmopolitan of communities and have been at the heart of the ACLA and its
members’ work as well.
The choice of ‘creole’ as our first term was perhaps the easiest and most
expected, a reflection in the most exact way of the location of the meeting. It also
involved an exhortation to reconsider binary and brightly distinguished
discriminations among cultures elsewhere. Such revisionist and nuanced critique
has been at the forefront of much of the most energetic comparative work over
that past twenty years in particular. Behind the term lies a complex history of
class, and later of ethnicity and race. Both the Spanish ‘criollo’ and the
Portuguese ‘cria’ emphasize that the creole person has been raised in one’s house
and is local. Despite the varied senses of the word, which has been used in so
many colonial contexts for the past four hundred years, each usage also relies
upon belonging with a mark of difference, based on that person’s local birth and
upbringing being combined with foreign ancestry. The languages and cultures that
emerge from this foreigness, which is both at home and other at the same time,
themselves represent linguistic fusions, whether based on Spanish or Arabic,
Chinese or French. A conference such as the ACLA, with participants from more
than fifty countries presenting work in more than sixty languages embodies
‘créolité.’ Some scholars focused explicitly on the regional creole cultures of
Louisiana and Haiti, for example, but the conference as a whole invited
participants to imagine the full range of applications for this idea, one that
originates with enforced bodies and culminates in new grammars and cultural
expressions.
Foreword xi
For creoles to exist, diasporas must have taken place. In the current global
moment, whether in our personal lives or our scholarship, diasporic experience is
registered as a defining rather than an eccentric feature of culture and identity.
Indeed, while modern cultural interactions and exchanges have perhaps
heightened the immediacy and frequency of transnational movement, scholarship
refracts this dynamic process backwards so as to refashion our view of earlier
cultural moments. They too are emerging as having been far from static. Behind
the concept of diaspora lies a history of enforced movement, a scattering of
people away from ancestral homelands. If the Transatlantic slave trade and the
Jewish diaspora, for example, have been seen as paradigmatic cases of
involuntary dispersal, along with innumerable other cases from around the globe,
Benedict Anderson and others have invited us to construe the term more broadly.
For Anderson, ‘diaspora’ captures the phenomenon of so many communities that
are on-the-move without limiting itself to a single set of contextualizing factors
for that movement. While at its core lies the concept of homeland, whether in the
form of the Arabic ‘ummah’ or the German ‘Heimat,’ or construed in a myriad of
other languages (‘haaretz,’ ‘rodina,’ etc.), the conference interrogated the
experiences and implications of displacements of all sorts, whether of the Native
American nations in the United States or of those who only recently left New
Orleans itself after the hurricane. The idea of a human ‘scattering across’ has
transformed from the initial Biblical and Hellenistic uses of the term, with the
implications of exile, and immigration in the service of colonization and
assimilation, to embrace a complex nexus of expatriation and community
formation with its attendant competing desires for collective nostalgia as well as
reinvention.
While the first two terms invited our participants to focus on the cultural
experiences and their expressions in multiple media and contexts, the third term
interrogated our vantage point. Not always a term with positive connotations,
cosmopolitanism traces its roots back to Diogenes and then through Stoicism. At
xii Creoles, Diasporas, Cosmopolitanisms
its core the concept relies upon a double life of local and global belonging, of
being both a native of Sinope and a citizen of the world. Where the term has been
most critiqued is in its reliance upon a shared ethical participation. Such
universalism, despite its hegemonic potentials, sought to resist nationalism and
even patriotism. Relying upon a concept of sharedness in regard to morals,
economics, and/or politics, earlier cosmopolitanisms aimed at a global inclusivity.
At the same time, however, it risked the assimilation of otherness into a
monolithic structure that might not fully register strangeness, localness, and the
particular. Indeed this sort of cosmopolitanism might, in fact, incite resistance and
even violence, as Frantz Fanon long ago warned and modern postcolonial critics
have more recently reminded us. It is precisely because, however, of this debate
among distinguished comparatists, especially since the events of 11th September,
that we included and pluralized the term. Kwame Anthony Appiah and Judith
Butler have invited us recently to interrogate both our obligations to the familiar
and even the nature of the familiar itself. For Appiah, in Cosmpolitanism: Ethics
in A World of Strangers, our obligation to strangers in no way eschews our
obligation to the familiar, and yet Butler cautions us regarding the consequences
of using familiarity as a criterion for the valuing others in Precarious Life. One of
the most humane interventions in this debate, and one that has been echoed by a
number of critics, appeared in one of Derrida’s last works, On Cosmopolitanism
and Forgiveness. Drawing on Emmanuel Levinas, Derrida reprises the notion of
cosmopolitanism as involving the making of ethical choices to support the other.
For Derrida the foundation of all such ethical choices is hospitality. Hospitality
not only does not collapse the familiar with the unfamiliar, or assimilate the other
with the self. Rather it detects what is other within the self, even as it embraces its
own strangeness.
For Derrida, like Kant before him, people cannot exist in isolation, and
must, therefore negotiate and balance concern with the self with concern for the
other. Hospitality, and the cosmopolitanism that accompanies this obligation,
Foreword xiii
might be seen as the ultimate case of the ethics of the ‘lagniappe.’ Hospitality,
like forgiveness, is the giving of something freely, valued by an ethical not a
commercial system of weights. It is a tangible expression of the intangible, with
no thought of instrumentality. It is simply a gift, of the sort that is exchanged in
certain creolized and diasporic places in the world in which cosmopolitanisms are
at work. For three days in the Vieux Carré, colleagues at every stage of their
career and intellectual life, and from all parts of the planet, formed and inhabited a
city of refuge which sought to revisit old blending and migrations, and to imagine
new cities. At its best any academic conference such as that organized by the
ACLA embodies the principle of the ‘lagniappe,’ supplementing local careers,
demanding geographical displacements and most of all creating a creolic,
diasporic and cosmopolitan community that offers hospitality without conditions.
– Dr Elizabeth Richmond-Garza
CONTRIBUTORS
class, ethnicity, and urban and rural environments greatly influence the formation
of the identities of the female characters studied.
Jill Kinnear has held the position of Professor of Fibers at Savannah
College of Art and Design since 2009 when she moved to the States from
Australia. Born and raised in Scotland, she received her initial degree in Textile
Design from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art. Following a three year
teaching contract in Papua New Guinea at the National Art School, she emigrated
to Australia where she received both a Masters of Visual Art (Research) and PhD
from the University of Southern Queensland. She worked as a full-time artist and
designer in Australia for many years, fulfilling major public art and design
commissions for State Government, such as the 330 square metre memorial
artwork in glass for Suncorp Stadium in Brisbane. She also exhibited throughout
Australia and contributed to international group shows in the UK, New Zealand
and South Korea. Her work has been recognized through major design awards and
grants, including the Design Institute of Australia’s Design Excellence Award, a
Churchill Fellowship, an Australia Council grant for new work and Arts
Queensland funding. Her work is held in international collections including the
National Museum of Scotland and the State Library of Queensland. Her
experiences of emigration, cultural remembrance and sense of place continue to
be central to her research and textile production.
Russell Stockard Jr. is currently Associate Professor at California
Lutheran University, where he began teaching in 1991. His scholarly and teaching
interests include cultural studies, disaster studies, diaspora studies, globalization,
Latin American and Caribbean area studies, environment and media discourse and
literature, social media and information and communication technology. He has
written numerous opinion pieces for newspapers, hosted an interview program on
KCLU-FM radio in Thousand Oaks for five years, has done multimedia
presentations and photography, writes fiction and poetry, and blogs about public
discourse, multiculturalism, technology, and civic engagement at Thick Culture
Contributors xix
and about disaster, travel, Haiti, and Hurricane Katrina at Three Suns. He speaks
French, Spanish, and Portuguese and has a working knowledge of Haitian Creole.
He has A.B. and A.M. degrees in history and literature from Harvard University,
an M.B.A. degree from UCLA, and a PhD in communication in social and
economic development from Stanford University. Recent publications include:
Subverting Vulnerabilities and Inequality in Disaster Survival, second author with
R.L. Stockard Sr. and M. Belinda Tucker in Narrating the Storm: Sociological
Stories of Hurricane Katrina, edited by Danielle A. Hidalgo and Kristen Barber
(Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007), ‘The Social Impact of
Gender and Games’, in Encyclopedia of Gender and Information Technology,
edited by E. Trauth (Hershey, PA: Idea Group Publishing, 2006), Gender, Race,
Social Class, and Information Technology, second author with Myungsook
Klassen, in Encyclopedia of Gender and Information Technology, edited by E.
Trauth (Hershey, PA: Idea Group Publishing, 2006), Dimensions of Sustainable
Diversity in Information Technology: Applications to the IT College Major and
Career Aspirations among Underrepresented High School Students of Color, first
author with Ali Akbari and Jamshid Damooei in Diversity in Information
Technology Education: Issues and Controversies, ed. by G. Trajkovski (Hershey,
PA: Information Science Publishing, 2006), The Networked Poetry of Time, Space
and Connections: Globalization, Glocalization, Community Capital and the
Online Black Diaspora, in @froGEEKS: Beyond the Digital Divide, edited by
Anna Everett and Amber J. Wallace (Santa Barbara: The Center for Black Studies
Research, University of California, 2007), and ‘Stretching Horizons: Upward
Bound Programs in Stimulating Information Technology Education and Career
Aspirations among Underrepresented Minorities: Key Findings from Qualitative
and Quantitative Research,’ an article submitted to The Communications of the
Association of Computing Machinery, October 12, 2004. Lastly he is the primary
author of Computer Science Higher Education Pipeline, with co-authors
Myungsook Klassen and Ali Akbari, scheduled for publication in the Proceedings
xx Creoles, Diasporas, Cosmopolitanisms
literature and the role that the Armenian Genocide plays in constructing identity
in the Armenian Diaspora. She is currently a teaching associate at CSUN where
she teaches freshman composition. Lilit Manucharyan is a graduate of CSUN. Her
Master’s thesis is entitled ‘The Representation of Women and the Transmission of
Armenian Ethnic Identity in Twentieth-Century Armenian-American Literature.’
They co-presented a paper entitled ‘Redefining National Security: Women’s
Struggle to Resurrect Their Nation After the Armenian Genocide of 1915’ at a
2009 conference sponsored by the CSUN Intelligence Community Center for
Academic Excellence, as well as a paper entitled ‘National Identity in Twentieth-
Century Armenian-American Diasporic Literature’ at the 2009 American
Comparative Literature Association conference. In 2010, Lilit was the presiding
officer of the special session panel called ‘Reconceptualization of National
Identity in Diasporic Literature’ at the annual PMLA conference, where Andzhela
presented her paper, ‘Refiguring Cultural Consciousness: Repression,
Assimilation, and Identity in Nancy Kricorian’s Zabelle.’
Roxana Rodríguez Ortiz is Professor of Philosophy at UACM
(Universidad Autónoma de la Ciudad de Mexico). She obtained her PhD and
M.A. in Literary Theory and Comparative Literature from the Universidad
Autónoma de Barcelona, and a B.A. in Business Administration from the ITESM
(Tec de Monterrey). Professor Rodríguez Ortiz has published in national and
international journals mainly on border Mexican women writers, theories of
borders, Chicano/a literature, border cultural production, and her recent research
is on the concept of border. She has also published various chapters on other
books in Mexico. Her research areas include: Border Studies, Cultural Studies,
Gender Studies, Philosophy of Culture, Literary Theory, and Critical Theory.
Roxana Galusca was a PhD candidate in English at the University of
Michigan, Ann Arbor before moving to the University of Chicago. She wrote a
dissertation on the use of cultural narratives of humanitarianism in contemporary
U.S. anti-trafficking campaigns. Her research interests include transnational
xxii Creoles, Diasporas, Cosmopolitanisms
feminism, U.S. immigration, and women’s rights. Her publications include: ‘From
Fictive Ability to National Identity: Disability, Medical Inspection, and Public
Health Regulations on Ellis Island’, Cultural Critique, 72 (2009), 137-63,
reprinted in Turkish Translation in Sakatlik Çalişmalari, ed. by Dikmen Bezmez
et alia ( Koç University Press, 2011), a review of ‘Towards a Global Idea of Race
by Denise Ferreira da Silva’ Atlantic Studies 5.3 (2008), 405-6, a translation from
Romanian, entitled ‘The Adolescent Incubus’ and ‘The Book of Useless
Couplings’ by Ovid Nimigean, Club 8: Poetry, ed. by Adam J Sorkin (Iasi: T,
2001) and she is revising an article ‘Slave Hunters and Brothel Busters:
Investigative Journalists as Anti-Sex Trafficking Humanitarians’ for resubmission
to Feminist Formations.
Kathryn Bell received her Bachelor of Arts in English with Concentration
in Writing from Loyola University New Orleans. Her honours thesis title was
‘The Next Generation: Conscious Evolution and Environmentalism in the First
Contact Scenario.’ Her research focuses on literature and film in science-fiction,
post-apocalyptic fiction, and other related subgenres. She is currently attending
Seattle University where she is pursuing a Master of Arts in their Existential-
Phenomenological Therapeutic Psychology program.
Laurel Seely Voloder completed her PhD in Literature at the University of
California at Santa Cruz in December 2010. Her dissertation was entitled,
‘Cultural Discourses of Bosnian Identity from the Death of Tito to the Postwar
Period’. She is currently conducting postdoctoral research in Sarajevo, Bosnia.
Her publications include ‘Sarajevo Cult Band SCH: The Politics of Future Noise’,
in Slovenian journal Monitor ZSA, 31/32, vol. XI/No. 1-2 (2009), 113-22, and a
forthcoming book chapter with Professor Tyrus Miller on the historical Yugoslav
avant-gardes in Modernist Magazines: A Critical and Cultural History; Volume
Three: Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Forthcoming).
Emel Tastekin, is a sessional lecturer at the Arts Studies in Research and
Writing program at the University of British Columbia, where she completed her
Contributors xxiii
doctoral studies in the English Department. Her research interests are nineteenth
and twentieth-century histories of literary criticism in relation to the interpretation
of monotheistic scriptures, with a particular focus on the historical-philological
method and its function in Orientalist scholarship. Her dissertation Another Look
at Orientalism: Western Literature in the Face of Islam examines the work of a
German-Jewish scholar of Islam, Abraham Geiger, through Derrida’s concept of
‘Abrahamic hospitality’ and through postcolonial theories on diasporic identities.
Her current project deals with the literary aspects of religious discourses,
particularly the personal narratives of Western converts to Islam and the Qur’anic
commentary of Muslim figures within modernity, to explore the rise of global
Islamic discourses.
Orian Zakai is a PhD candidate at the Department of Comparative
Literature working on her dissertation entitled ‘Feminine Wounds: The New
Hebrew Woman and Her Others.’ Her collection of short fiction entitled Hashlem
et ha-haser (Fill in the Blanks) came out in Israel in October 2010, and her
research interests include twentieth-century Hebrew Literature, gender and
Zionism, Post-Zionist critiques, and feminist post-colonial theory.
Sten Pultz Moslund is currently working on a postdoctoral project at the
University of Southern Denmark about the role and significance of place in
literature. He specialises in postcolonial literature and migration literature. His
primary research interests are socio-cultural, discursive and phenomenological
theories of place and their relevance for the experience of place in literature; a re-
conceptualisation and differentiation of the concept of cultural hybridity; the
political, aesthetic and philosophical implications of migration as represented in
contemporary migration literature. Apart from a range of articles in the above
areas, Moslund has published Making Use of History in New South African Fiction
(Museum Tusculanum Press, 2003) and Migration Literature and Hybridity
(Palgrave-Macmillan, 2010)
Naglaa Abou-Agag is an Assistant Professor in the English Department at
xxiv Creoles, Diasporas, Cosmopolitanisms
York. He is the editor of G.I. Gurdjieff: Armenian Roots, Global Branches, the
result of the Armenia-Gurdjieff Conferences he organized in Armenia from 2004-
2007. He is also the author of Classical Spirituality in Contemporary America:
The Confluence and Contribution of Sufism and G.I. Gurdjieff. In addition to
Gurdjieff Studies and Sufism, Pittman researches and has presented on the work
of Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, and the films of Iranian director Majid Majidi.
He has also made two contributions respectively entitled ‘Soul-Making in
Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson’ and ‘Gurdjieffian Laughter: Demolition and
Reconstruction’ to Proceedings of the All and Everything International
Humanities Conference, edited by Seymour Ginsburg and Ian MacFarlane and
published in England by All & Everything Conferences in 2007.
Nelli Sargsyan-Pittman is a PhD candidate in anthropology at State
University of New York at Albany. Her research focuses on gender and ethnic
identity negotiations in transnational settings. Her dissertation research examines
the diverse ways Armenians negotiate their sexuality, ethnic and gender identities
and the implications of these negotiations in the US Armenian diaspora and
Armenia. She has published ‘Contributing to the Synergistic Circulation of
Knowledge’ in Anthropology News, 52 (2) (2011), a joint chapter with Betsy
Bowen and David Sapp entitled ‘Resume Writing in Russia and the Newly
Independent States’ in Business Communication Quarterly, 69
(2), 128-43 and with H. Kajberouni, L. Hakobyan, R. Avetissyan, S.
Kananyan, and D. Hambardzumyan, A Guide to Critical Thinking: Textbook for
3rd Year Students Majoring in English (Yerevan: Yerevan State Linguistic
University Press, 2004.)
Erika Baldt is an English lecturer at Burlington County College in New
Jersey. Her research interests include Anglo-American modernism and
cosmopolitanism. Her work has been published in Katherine Mansfield Studies,
Interfaces, and the collection Reclaiming Home, Remembering Motherhood,
Rewriting History: African American and Afro-Caribbean Women’s Literature in
Contributors xxix