The Columbia History of the American Novel

overt military force and more insidious ideological tools like the English language and British values, to American imperialism at free play in the world right now. In his 1955 text, Discourse on Colonialism, Aimé Césaire sounded a warning about the growing aspirations of American imperialist expansionism, amply evident in recent years.

United States imperialism works to its economic advantage through multinational corporations, international aid agencies, exploitation of cheap labor (creating loss of jobs and poverty within the United States). United States imperialism is also manifested in the display of military muscle and overt invasions of Grenada and Panama in recent years, flaunting with bravado both international law and the often merely symbolic U.N. resolutions. It is doubly ironic that in the recent conflict with Iraq, the United States was the loudest proponent of U.N. Security Council measures against Iraq — it suited the United States this time around to wave aloft U.N. Security Council resolutions, notwithstanding its previous record of vetoing such measures, even blocking the will of an entire world against certain types of aggression. Historical amnesia is a widely prevalent disease in the United States and it is effectively propagated by media complicitous with the status quo.

Within the United States itself, forms of internal colonizations — of -654- 'minorities' who may or may not be American citizens, 'social exiles,' and disenchanted populations on the margins of the 'American dream' — are sustained in part by United States aggressions externally against peoples of color. Terry Eagleton's distinction between 'literal expatriates' and 'social exiles' illuminates these marginal minority conditions faced by peoples of color in the United States. Hence, in the same breath, one hears of racist attacks on minority students on a college campus that is also loudly proclaiming 'cultural diversity,' 'multiculturism' in the curriculum, 'civility' codes, and so on. Just as covert and insidious as United States cultural imperialism and its impact on peoples of color outside its borders is this covert alliance between a continuing racism and a loudly proclaimed need to eradicate it.

As with British colonial aggression, which consolidated itself with the chalk and the blackboard, the tools of American cultural imperialism are often more lasting and more devastating than physical acts of aggression. Several postcolonial writers testify to the lasting and devastating psychic fractures rooted in colonial(ist) educational systems. This history is significant in terms of understanding some of the causes of expatriation and exile. Mental colonizations result in states of exile — physical displacements and metaphoric exile within one's own culture, to which, given one's education, one un-belongs.

The English language is a shared legacy of British colonialism. Language, culture, and power are integrally related, especially within a colonial history that imposed the English language and British educational systems. The economic and psychological repercussions of English-language interventions as a language of power among colonized peoples who spoke other languages are part of postcolonial societies today. The type of English one is equipped to use often shapes one's position both inside postcolonial society and outside, as immigrant. English language/s exist in standard, creole, and other manifestations — what Edward Kamau Brathwaite calls 'nation language,' an English that can imitate 'the sound of the hurricane, wind, howl, waves'; or, what Honor Ford-Smith renames 'patwah' to be distinguished from 'patois.' Issues of cultural domination, educational policies, the status of English studies, and the role that 'English Literature' played in a liberal colonial enterprise are of -655- concern in postcolonial scholarship today. Even as colonies such as India and Kenya absorbed the imposition and institutionalization of English Literature into curricula, there were countermovements — for instance, Ngugi wa Thiong'o's dramatic call for the abolition of the English Department from the University of Nairobi and its replacement by a Department of Literatures and Languages.

In her Introduction to She Tries Her Tongue: her silence softly breaks (1989), Marlene Nourbese Philip probes the complex dilemmas surrounding the use/s of the English language by writers like herself from the Caribbean and the difficult task of recovering the African aspects of their history that were often more effectively preserved in nonverbal forms like music rather than language. (Rex Nettleford's influential work is evident here, especially his concept that nonverbal forms like dance could, within the very body of the slave, preserve cultural memory in ways that language could not.) Nourbese Philip proposes that 'fundamental to any art form is the image…. The process of giving tangible form to this i-mage may be called i-maging, or the i-magination. Use of unconventional orthography, i-mage in this instance, does not only represent the increasingly conventional deconstruction of certain words, but draws on the Rastafarian practice of privileging the 'I' in many words. 'I-mage' rather than 'image' is, in fact, a closer approximation of the concept under discussion in this essay.' According to Nourbese Philip, since the English language has served to 'den(y) the essential humanity' of African peoples, it needs to be changed fundamentally by those very people now. An enforced English simultaneously gave voice to and silenced the African in terms of expressing his/her own experience during slavery and forced re-locations. 'That silence has had a profound effect upon the English-speaking African Caribbean writer working in the medium of words.' For the Caribbean writer, the situation is particularized by the fact that there is no language to return to. 'In the absence of any other language by which the past may be repossessed, reclaimed and its most painful aspects transcended, English in its broadest spectrum must be made to do the job…. It is in the continuum of expression from standard to Caribbean English that the veracity of experience lies.' Nourbese Philip argues forcefully for a subversive English transformed from 'Queenglish and Kinglish,' an English that will 'make nouns strang-656- ers to verbs,' techniques that have, in fact, linguistic roots in different African languages.

During colonization, education became the key to assimilating the 'new ex-slave society' to the norms of 'a civilized community' acceptable to the colonizers. The Reverend J. Sterling justified the education of negroes in a report to the British government in 1835: the production of 'a civilized community will depend entirely on the power over their minds.' If they are not educated, 'property will perish in the colonies.' Education was devised further to create a civil servant class that would aid a colonial administration. This same class would continue to work for the colonizers' benefit even after their physical departure (Frantz Fanon's 'black skin, white mask' phenomenon). Colonial educational policies and educational levels are also a part of the history of contemporary expatriate populations that consist of a growing number of the educated-unemployed. This class migrates to new 'homes' for employment and economic reasons.

Color, class, and gender divisions often denied educational opportunities to women in the Caribbean region, evoking resonances of British colonial practices in other occupied territories of the so-called Empire. The colonial enterprise of educating the natives was both ideological and gendered. Female colonization carried the burden of patriarchal domination that most often not only predated colonialism but was reinforced by it. English education often contradicts 'traditional' cultural expectations of female behavior; women, however 'modernized' with an English education, must remain 'traditional.' For an educated woman to overstep the boundaries as codified within patriarchal control of female sexuality can be disastrous, as explored in Zimbabwean Tsitsi Dangarembga's novel Nervous Conditions (1988). Nyasha, intellectually precocious, is uprooted from her home and taken to England at a young age. She returns 'home,' having 'forgotten' her mother tongue, Shona, and generally alienated from both her Shona identity and her English education. She finds herself metaphorically homeless to the fatal extent that she cannot even belong within her female body, which becomes, in her anorexia and bulimia, the sad victim of her mental anguish. Nyasha's authoritarian father, Babamukuru, makes her 'a victim of her femaleness,' as the narrator, Tambu, notes. Babamukuru, who has been educated by -657- missionaries in their 'wizardry,' has internalized a colonial mentality of inferiority before whites, but superiority before his own people. Ironically his colonial, patriarchal education reinforces his male privileges in the family.

Even as an English education and a liberal enterprise served by English literature within the colonies fulfilled certain ideological goals in sustaining a colonial administration, the imperialist project within the colonizers' home- spaces was carried forward by a literature of imperialism embodied, for instance, in Rudyard Kipling's 'white man's burden.' Kipling was only one among several popular writers in nineteenth-century England who dealt with imperialist matters. The very titles of some of these popular novels — like Love by an Indian River, A Mixed Marriage — tell the tale. Configurations of Empire in such works enable the sharing of a common consciousness by writers and readers mutually reinforcing stereotypes. The serious impact, conscious and subconscious, in terms of how visual and literary manifestations control the popular imagination of the British reading public (both in India and in Britain) is especially important when we historicize such images and bring them up to date, calcifying into racist manifestations that range from the subtle to the obvious.

Cultural productions in the West continue to sustain and validate such stereotypes — as exemplified by the vastly popular British renditions of the Raj in television extravaganzas like The Jewel in the Crown and The Far Pavilions, as well as in films like Richard Attenborough's Gandhi and David Lean's A Passage to India. These projects