The Work of Art in the Post Colonial Imagination

Discourse: studies in the cultural politics of education, Vol. 21, No. 1, 2000

The Work of Art in the Postcolonial Imagination

CAMERON McCARTHY & GREG DIMITRIADIS, University of Illinois,Champaign, IL, USA

Introduction

Contemporary critical thinking on art and aesthetics performs a number of well-re-hearsed discursive moves decipherable in the trajectory of cultural studies and beyond.All these discursive traditions—we treat three below—have contributed enormously toour understanding of the role of art in contemporary life, in� uencing a generation of‘First World’ critics in profound ways. Yet, a major—indeed debilitating—constrainthere is the overarching suppression or displacement of the structures, agencies andtrajectories of the colonized inhabitants of the Third World and the periphery of theFirst. The tendency in such criticism is to disavow or silence the historical speci� city andproductivity of postcolonial narratives and genealogies in artistic practices and culturalforms, a crucial and paralyzing elision, as we will stress throughout.

The � rst discursive move has its precursors in the work of Frankfurt School theoristssuch as Theodore Adorno, Max Horkheimer and more recently Jurgen Habermas. Thismove can be described as anti-populist. Proponents of this anti-populism construct atight, hermeneutically induced homology between modern aesthetic objects and practicesand capitalist wish ful� lment. The modern art object is located squarely in themetropolitan centre, its elaboration of capitalism and its sinuous culture industry.Modern art by this process is so compromised by the routinization and mass-mediatedprocesses of the culture industry that it is said to have lost its unique capacity to critiqueor instruct.1

The second discursive move in contemporary critical studies of art is linked to a morecharitable view of contemporary art. This discursive move is pro-populist (McGuigan,1992) and can be genealogically traced to the alternative wing of the Frankfurt Schoolin treatises such as Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Work of Art in the Age of MechanicalReproduction’ (1977) and more recently to the Cultural Studies of the BirminghamSchool in England and its analogous traditions in Australia, Canada, the United Statesand elsewhere. This discursive move of populist hermeneutics sees contemporary art asparticipating in necessary processes of political resistance and counter-hegemony, offer-ing the masses a way out of capitalism’s debilitating logics.

The third discursive move distinguishes itself from the previous two by suggesting atemporal shift in human sensibilities, the nature of capitalism and, alas, art toward a

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60 C. McCarthy & G. Dimitriadis

postmodern condition in which the homological connection between art and society isproblematized and ultimately severed, releasing new radical energies of multiplicity,irony and destabilization. This approach to contemporary art goes on the banner ofpostmodernism. Postmodernist cultural critics such as Christopher Jencks (1996) see thisphase of contemporary life as ushering in a new millennium in which all hierarchies inthe aesthetic world and in society will be overcome by computerization of work,communications and aesthetic form. In the postmodern move art does not imitatelife—life is aestheticized and art is the genetic code for the elaboration of new forms ofexistence and care of the self.

At best, then, these discourses of anti-populist, pro-populist and postmodern criticismcan name an archive of tropes, themes and motifs into which the aesthetic creations ofthe Third World are collapsed as instances of the Baudrillardian counterfeit, the copythat desires the place of the original—the seat of the king—having no real aesthetic orintellectual home of its own. Postcolonial art therefore arises, via what Hommi Bhabha(1994) calls a ‘time lag’, in the tracks of the more hegemonic art discourses of the West,a harlequin archetype patched together at the beginning from borrowed robes, a � gurecolliding with domination’s undertow and wrestling anxiously to the surface for air. Inthis essay, we will offer some thoughts and heuristics towards a new understanding ofpostcolonial art, attending to its historical speci� city and productivity in careful and, wehope, richly suggestive ways.

Some de� nitions are in order before we go any further. As used in this essay, the ‘post’in the postcolonial is not to be understood as a temporal register as in ‘hereinafter’ buta sign and cultural marker of a spatial challenge and contestation with the occupyingpowers of the West in the ethical, political and aesthetic forms of the marginalized.Uneven development between the metropole and periphery plays itself out in aestheticform, in ways that problematize colonial/postcolonial networks of power relations as wellas the Cartesian stability of subjecthood fabricated in and through these relations.Postcolonial art forms—and we include the work of novelists, playwrights, painters andmusicians here—are products of colonial histories of disruption, forced migration, falseimprisonment, and paci� cation—practices of such an extreme and exorbitant nature thatthe claim on authority over knowledge and of narrative fullness can only be treated asa hoax whose audience is self-deceit and self-denial. This ‘post’ is ultimately aspeci� cation of coarticulation, not of a self-serving separatism and isolationism.

In what follows, we discuss some critical features of postcolonial art by analyzing thework of a number of artists from the Third World and from the periphery of themetropole. We focus here on the paintings of Arnaldo Roche-Rabell of Puerto Rico,Gordon Bennett, an Aboriginal artist from Australia, the Haitian-American artistJean-Michel Basquiat, Wilson Harris of Guyana, and African American novelist andNobel laureate Toni Morrison. From time to time we will make ancillary references toother artists as is relevant. We choose to foreground these artists because we think thattheir work best illustrates some of the important features of the postcolonial art that wewill discuss in the rest of this essay. We do not want, however, merely and uncriticallyto celebrate this work. Rather, we posit this essay in the spirit of sober and strategicre� ection, concluding with a discussion of some of the limitations and contradictions ofthis aesthetic as well. We want, ultimately, to highlight the powerful role of identityrenarration and problematization in postcolonial art, underscoring postcolonial art as asite of profound moral re� ection bearing on techniques of self-production, identi� cationand community building.

We particularly want to highlight three important motifs and directions of the work

Art in the postcolonial imagination 61

of postcolonial imagination and draw a few conclusions. These three motifs in postcolo-nial art can be summarized as follows.

Firstly, we want to highlight postcolonial art ’s vigorous challenge of hegemonic formsof representation in Western models of classical realism and technologies of truth. Inthese models of realism and verisimilitude, a hierarchy of discourses preserves thesubjectivity of the Western actant. These dynamics are to be found as much in17th-century oil paintings and in 19th-century novels as in today’s popular Hollywood� lm fantasies and documentaries as well as in the social sciences and humanities. In thesehegemonic discourses, the colonial/postcolonial subject is susceptible to what FranzFanon calls the ‘bane’ of Western objectivity. The anti-realist critique of postcolonial artoffers a philosophical and performative indictment of the ruling narrating subject ofWestern forms. In the cultural form of postcolonial artists, quite literally and metaphor-ically, the eye of the Third World is turned on the West, and the horizon of view isdeliberately overpopulated with polyglot angles, perspectives and points of view.

Secondly, the work of art in the postcolonial imagination effectively rewrites thenarrative of modernity and modernization in which a binary logic attempts to exhaustthe � eld of the West and empire by creating oppositions of ‘centre ’ and ‘periphery’,‘developed’ and ‘underdeveloped’, and ‘civilized’ and ‘primitive’. The eye of Western artis anthropological in its gaze upon the other (Clifford, 1997). Primordalism is associatedwith the most thoroughgoing rationalism and logocentrism when visited upon the ThirdWorld subject. Yet, the story of modernization in postcolonial art is a story of the yokingof opposites in which the Enlightenment perspective is always underlaid by subterraneanacts of atavism and brutality. In response to dominant narratives of modernity, postcolo-nial art draws on the codes of double and triple register so deeply and historicallyentrenched in the survivalist practices of the dominated (Gilroy, 1988/1989). Culture, forthese artists, is a crucible of encounter, a crucible of hybridity in which all of culturalform is marked by twinness of subject and the other.

Thirdly, the work of postcolonial artists foregrounds modes of critical re� exivity andthoughtfulness as elements of an emancipatory practice, one in which the artist is ableto look upon his or her own traditions with the dispassion of what Walter Benjamin calls‘melancholy’ (1977). This skepticism is linked to an attempt to visualize a sense ofcommunity in which criteria for membership are not given a priori in an inherited set ofcharacteristics or a political platform. For artists like Roche-Rabell, Bennett and Harris,change can only take place when all preconceived visions and discourses are disruptedand disturbed. They suggest that transformative possibilities are not given. They must beworked for, in often unpredictable and counter-intuitive ways.

These three motifs—counter-hegemonic representation, double or triple coding, andemancipatory or utopic visions—help de� ne the postcolonial aesthetic. We will discusseach, bringing in illustrative examples all along the way. We will discuss the motif ofcounter-hegemonic representation � rst.

The Critique of Hegemonic Representation

Traditions of colonialist aesthetics—for example, in the art of the novel or perspectivaloil painting—have presented a freestanding subject at the heart of aesthetic work and anequally coherent and fully integrated subject in the implied reading/viewing intelligence(Berger, 1972; Belsey, 1980). As Gyatri Spivak (1988) argues, even when the work ofantimodernist/postmodernist writers foregrounds narrative collapse, it is the narrativecollapse of a singular overmastering voice (see, among others, Christopher Jencks’s What


Is Postmodernism? (1996), Francois Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition (1984), MichelFoucault’s The History of Sexuality: Volume 3 (1986), David Lodge’s Small World (1984) andthe work of painters such as the postconceptualist Barbara Kruger).

Rather, what we � nd in the work of the postcolonial artist—in painters such asGordon Bennett, Aubrey Williams from Guyana, and Indrani Gaul from India, inwritings such as Wilson Harris’s Palace of the Peacock (1960), Isabel Allende’s The House ofSpirits (1985), Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon (1977)—is the effort to visualize com-munity, a new community of fragile or broken and polyglot souls. In contrast to theanti-modern/postmodern critics and artists mentioned earlier, the self is always alreadyembedded in communal—though hybrid and multiple—imperatives here. There isalways an effort to link individual will and fortune to collective possibility.

In this regard, the deliberately oversize oil paintings of Arnaldo Roche-Rabell,published in the catalogue entitled Arnaldo Roche-Rabell: the Uncommonwealth (Hobbs, 1996),are particularly illustrative of the struggle to construct identity and subjectivity from thefragments of an agonizing and tragic historical past and present. Indeed, Roche-Rabellhas worked in a period of intense anxiety over the fate of Puerto Rico as a ‘common-wealth’ of the United States. He was born in Puerto Rico in 1955, three years after theisland was ‘allowed’ to adopt its own constitution, one that allowed self-governance butstipulated a ‘voluntary association’ with the US—a dubious distinction. His oeuvre, writlarge, documents multiple efforts to come to new and unpredictable terms with thecomplex and often contradictory social, economic and cultural questions at work indebates around the island’s future. Roche-Rabell ’s concerns with the politics of identityand anti-colonialism are prosecuted in the creation of larger-than-life � gures that oftenseem buried or interred in deeper structures or forces. His concern with the twinness ordoubleness of personality and � awed subjectivity connects themes of anti-colonialism tothemes of refusal of coherent subjectivity. Puerto Rico’s history of colonization hasproduced repressed demons and monsters as he illustrates in the canvas mural Poor Devil,in which the face of the devil projects from the head of an intensely blue-eyed human(Hobbs, 1996, p. 33).

The humanization of the powers of extreme evil is a topic pursued in the devil folkmythology of the French Caribbean, in the work of writers such as Derek Walcott (1970)in plays such as Ti Jean and His Brothers and Dream on Monkey Mountain. The devil as atrope of folk rejection of the routinization of capitalism is also present in the lore of manyplantation cultures throughout the Caribbean and Latin America, as Michael Taussig(1980) tells us in the Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America. But there is this twistthat Roche-Rabell adds to this set of observations: the devil is in all of us. Thepostcolonial soul is damaged, but in its double or multiple personality a new communityis waiting to be born. In promoting the concept of ‘the twinness of self ’ Roche-Rabellthus lodges a trenchant critique of capitalist exploitation, offering a starting point fornew, politically recon� gured communities.

One can trace these concerns and practices across a range of traditions and historicalcontexts, including in the work of postcolonial African American novelists such as ToniMorrison (who, incidentally, addresses concerns similar to those of Poor Devil in The BluestEye, her � rst novel, published in 1970). Morrison’s novels, most notably, mine a broadrange of literary and vernacular traditions—from the Judeo-Christian Bible to the workof Shakespeare to African American spirituals to African folklore to blues and jazz andbeyond. In this polyglot, alchemical manner, Morrison forges a vision of black communi-ties that are both fragile and highly resilient, communities girded by bodies of traditionthat are always open and subject to multiple manifestations. Her characters enter the


� ctive world as partial, fragmented, constructed selves ceaselessly reconstructing the pastin the present, and always in an open-ended and protean fashion. Her work thusrepresents an important departure from the masculinist African American novelistictradition (see, for example, Richard Wright’s Native Son), which linked the certitudes ofblack identity and community to narrative realism.

Hence, in Song of Solomon (1977), the main character, Milkman, comes to understandthe mysteries of his life in the US North by taking a trip to his family’s home downSouth. His past comes to him in often uncomfortable and disquieting gestures—a motherwho nursed him well past infancy, a father who wanted him aborted. His past isultimately revealed by way of a children’s song, which begins:

Jake the only son of SolomonCome booba yalle, come booba tambeeWhirled about and touched the sunCome konka yalle, come konka tambee(Morrison, 1977, p. 303)

This song draws dynamically on the Bible, African American spirituals, and diasporiclanguage practices, all in equal measure. It is through this hybrid text that Milkmancomes to understand the mystery that has been his life—‘Of course! … These childrenwere singing a story about his own people! He hummed and chuckled as he did his bestto put it all together’ (Morrison, 1977, p. 304).

Morrison’s works brim with such revelations. Infanticide, murder and insanity lieinterred in texts such as The Bluest Eye (1970), Beloved (1987), Jazz (1992) and Paradise(1998). Her characters must come to grips with these ills (which are always situated inparticular historical formations) by mining the discourses of collective—but contingentand provisional—traditions. Hence, the novel Jazz places us in the middle of a culturallybrimming Harlem Renaissance (though never named as such), following a murderouslove triangle that plays itself out by way of the rhythms and tempos of that most proteanand improvisational of musical idioms, jazz music. Indeed, Jazz does not unfold intraditional narrative form (however melodramatic the plot might seem). Like jazz musicitself, the text layers multiple voices on top of one another, blurring the line betweenwhat has been composed in the past and what is realized in the moment, making linearnarrative progression seem entirely anomalous.

Jazz music is an appropriate and telling metaphor for the processes of communityconstruction at the heart of this novel. Displaced Southerners in black Harlem must forgeselves—improvisatory voices, so to speak—by way of a contingent group identity. Thisis a delicate business. Ralph Ellison explores this connection between jazz improvisationand the constructed nature of marginalized identities in his essay on jazz, ‘The CharlieChristian Story’. In an often-quoted selection, he notes:

There is a cruel contradiction implicit in the art form itself. For true jazz is anart of individual assertion within and against the group. Each true jazzmoment … springs from a contest in which each artist challenges all the rest;each solo � ight, or improvisation, represents (like the successive canvases of apainter) a de� nition of his identity: as individual, as member of the collectivityand as a link in the chain of tradition. Thus, because jazz � nds its very life inan endless improvisation upon traditional materials, the jazzman must lose hisidentity even as he � nds it. (Ellison, 1972, p. 234)

This tension—the tension of � nding, losing and � nding oneself in and through dynamic,


traditional group processes—is on every page of Jazz and the rhythms and culturalpractices it draws on.

Morrison’s communities are fragile as are the souls that inhabit them. Key here is theironically titled Paradise (1998), which details the horri� c and violent lives of several blackwomen in a recently founded all-black—and thoroughly patriarchal—town. Amid all thetension and contingency in this novel as well as others, Morrison’s characters alwaysmaintain, or perhaps perform, some kind of fragile and contingent cohesiveness betweenand among them. Community building is always fraught and fragile, and alwaysthreatens to erupt into violence. As Morrison writes in Jazz, ‘People look forward toweekends for connections, revisions and separations even though many of these activitiesare accompanied by bruises and even a spot of blood, for excitement runs high on Fridayor Saturday’ (Morrison, 1992, p. 50).

This search for identity is thus a search for a collective self, one that connects thedisenfranchised to multiple traditions, both globally and locally. This hybridity, soevident in the work of artists such as Gordon Bennett, Toni Morrison and NicholasGuillen, allows for the transformation of key binary oppositions privileged in the brutalcolonial imagination. These include, most notably, West versus East, North versus South,the high versus the low, the civilized versus the primitive. Transcending these binaryoppositions allows these artists to rework the very pivotal centre versus peripherydistinction that has so undergirded the iconography and social sciences of Westernintellectuals, allowing these artists to look beyond its strictures to new histories, newdiscourses, new ways of being.

We bring this segment to a close with another example of the emphasis on pluralityand multiplicity that one � nds in the work of Third World artists—the celebration of epicIndian ritual in everyday life in a distant corner of the Caribbean. For insight on this playof New World/Old World identities, we turn to the work of the St Lucian playwrightDerek Walcott (1993). In his 1992 Nobel lecture, ‘The Antilles: fragments of epicmemory’, Walcott talks about taking some American friends to a peasant performanceof the ancient Hindu epic of Ramayana in a forgotten corner of the Caroni Plain inTrinidad. The name of this tiny village is the happily agreeable, but Anglo-Saxon,‘Felicity’. The actors carrying out this ritual reenactment are the plain-as-day East Indianvillagers spinning this immortal web of memory, of ancientness and modernity. Here,Walcott is ‘surprised by sin’ at the simple native world unfurling in its utter � amboyance:

Felicity is a village in Trinidad on the edge of the Caroni Plain, the widecentral plain that still grows sugar and to which indentured cane cutters werebrought after emancipation, so the small population of Felicity is East Indian,and on the afternoon that I visited it with friends from America, all the facesalong its road were Indian, which as I hope to show was a moving, beautifulthing, because this Saturday afternoon Ramleela, the epic dramatization of theHindu epic of Ramayana, was going to be performed, and the costumed actorsfrom the village were assembling on a � eld strung with different- coloured � ags,like a new gas station, and beautiful Indian boys in red and black were aimingarrows haphazardly into the afternoon light. Low blue mountains on thehorizon, bright grass, clouds that would gather colour before the light went.Felicity! What a gentle Anglo-Saxon name for an epical memory. (Walcott,1993, p. 1).

The world on the Caroni plain integrates the ancient and modern, as Indian peasantshistorically displaced to the Caribbean create in their daily lives a re-memory of their


past before modern colonialism. In so doing, they add an extraordinary ritual andthrenodic nuance to the folk culture of the Caribbean as a whole. In the art of living,these East Indian peasants triumph over the imposed history of marginalization and themiddle-passage history of indentureship.

This vitality of multiple origins and connections informs the theatre that Walcott,ultimately, envisions for a Caribbean breaking with European hegemonic norms ofrepresentation. He offers a powerful set of tropes for an equally powerful social vision:

In the West Indies, there are all these conditions—the Indian heritage, theMediterranean, the Lebanese and Chinese … When these things happen in anisland culture a fantastic physical theatre will emerge because the forces thataffect that communal search will use physical expression through dance,through the Indian dance and through Chinese dance, through African dance.When these things happen, plus all the cross-fertilization—the normal soci-ology of the place—then a true and very terrifying West Indian theatre willcome. (Walcott, 1973, p. 310)

The Strategy of Double Coding

The work of the postcolonial imagination, as realized in Walcott’s theatre, Morrison’snovels, and Roche-Rabell ’s paintings, is characteristically marked by speci� c modes ofoperation and meaning construction. We have discussed one above. This brings us to adiscussion of the second motif we want to highlight—the strategy of double coding. Bydouble coding we are referring to the tendency of the postcolonial artist to mobilize twoor more plains or � elds of idiomatic reference in any given work, what Wilson Harris(1989) calls ‘the wedding of opposites’. The postcolonial artist may therefore quote orcombine the vernacular and the classical, the traditional and the modern, the culturalreservoir of images of the East and the West, the First World and the Third, the colonialmaster and the slave. Here, again, we want to separate out this strategy from the typeof double coding that postmodernist critics such as Charles Jencks (1996) talk about whende� ning postmodernism. Instead of foregrounding the collapse of master narratives ofindividualistic or maverick imagination, we are pointing to the collective purposes,collective history, the visualization of community which constitute the central issues atstake within the postcolonial artistic project.

The � liation of such strategies, as Paul Gilroy notes in The Black Atlantic (1993) and inhis essay ‘Cruciality and the Frog’s Perspective’ (19881989), can be traced to thehistories, actions and practices of marginalized and oppressed groups. Hence, the codeswitching and multiple articulations or revisions of Christian hymns on the part ofAfrican slaves were linked to efforts to circulate meaning around and beyond the gazeof plantation owners. Similarly, the Africanesque revision of Catholicism in the Voodooor Candamble religions of Haiti and Brazil, respectively, represents a popular expressionof the double and triple register of the signifying subaltern subject.

This strategy of double coding is powerfully foregrounded in the work of theAboriginal painter Gordon Bennett. Through his art, it seems, Bennett, the son of anAboriginal mother and European father, comes to terms with the profound personal andpolitical issues historically surrounding identity formation in Australia. Bennett came toart relatively late in life, graduating from art school in 1988, the year Australia celebratedthe bicentennial of European settlement. His work registers the attendant tensions andconcerns. We foreground, here, one of his pivotal paintings, Outsider, which combines the


methods of Aboriginal pointillism and Western perspectival painting to stunning effect.This painting ironically quotes and densely re� gures Vincent Van Gogh’s Starry Night,replacing its tense calmness with an atmosphere of brusque, startling anxiety. His doublecoding of the West and native traditions exposes an unsettling environment of culturalhegemony. Bennett, most importantly, interposes a new scenario into this Starry Nightsetting: a decapitated native body stumbling towards a blood-besmirched cradle onwhich lie two classical Greek heads. The ground of essential Aboriginal and hegemonicAnglo-Australian identities is now populated with tripwire questions located in this motifof double vision and hybridity. The work of hybridity unearths the symbolic violence ofAustralian history and the brutality of European ‘discovery’ and domination of thenative. At the same time, through this double coding, Bennett highlights the incomplete-ness of the modern Aboriginal search for identity. To be homeless in one’s home—paradoxically to sit on the rich inheritance of these cultural markers and symbols—is thepostcolonial condition tout court (McLean & Bennett, 1996).

Hence, postcolonial painters, musicians and writers have all wrestled with the availabletools of the colonial imagination in prosecuting new and complex identities. This processof revision and recoding does not—cannot, in fact—privilege absolute origins; it is lessconcerned with Hegelian dialectics than with Bakhtinian dialogues (Hall, 1996). One� nds similar imperatives in the paintings of Arnaldo Roche-Rabell, who recodes the workof his Puerto Rican and European antecedents alike. Speci� cally, Puerto Rican national-ist Carlos Raque Rivera’s famous Hurricane from the North became Roche’s Hurricane fromthe South, while Van Gogh’s well-known images of sun� owers became fodder for FiveHundred Years without an Ear.2 The former painting inverts the discourse of Northernimperialism, opening up a space where power can be viewed less as a repressive than asa productive force, a tool that can be deployed in multiple practices of the self. The latterinters a writhing, polyangular and perspectival body in a � eld of vicious-lookingsun� owers, serving as a metaphor for Roche-Rabell ’s debt to the European tradition aswell as its profound pains. The work of both Rivera and Van Gogh seem equallyimportant to Roche-Rabell in his project of personal and political interrogation.

This deconstruction of dominant representational practices so associated with thecentrality and security of authentic origins and subjectivities—the hierarchy of ‘high’ and‘low’—is realized most explicitly in the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat (Marshall, 1995).Basquiat’s early career was as a graf� ti artist in New York City, painting SAMOS—i.e.‘Same Old Shit’—on myriad public spots throughout Manhattan. Basquiat was part ofthe burgeoning and (then) vibrantly multiethnic hip hop cultural movement in New YorkCity, a movement that integrated in equal measure rap music, break dancing and graf� tiwriting (in fact, Basquiat produced a single featuring rapper Rammellzee) (Dimitriadis,1996). While his work contains numerous references to these and other cultural signi� ers,Basquiat’s work draws, most interestingly and with great complexity, on the jazz idiom.Its artists and their themes pepper his works, from bop drummer Max Roach to singerBillie Holiday to (especially) saxophonist Charlie Parker.

This should not be surprising. The entire history of black diasporic art in the USwould be inconceivable without the jazz idiom (see, among others, the work of RomareBearden). Basquiat, however, separates his work on jazz from much of the idiom’smodernist imperatives (e.g. see the extended compositions of Duke Ellington), as it isdecidedly non-representational, not driven by modernist concerns with coherent textual-ity, nor with the prosecution of stable cultural identities (the kinds traditionally realizedin Afrocentrism). One need only look at Charles the First, a composition Robert FarrisThompson calls ‘pivotal’, to understand this (Thompson, 1995, p. 37). Charles the First, a


tribute to jazz great Charlie Parker, has no narrative core. Like many of Basquiat’sworks, its energy comes from the apt juxtaposition of radically divergent culturalsigni� ers. Charles the First, in short, does not tell a simple story nor does it have a singulartheme.

As Thompson points out, this is the � rst of many triptychs (compositions with threepanels) that Basquiat would produce. The evocation of the number ‘three ’ has played animportant role in jazz, most especially in the work of composer Charles Mingus. Mingusopens his 1971 autobiography Beneath the Underdog by stating, ‘In other words, I am three.’One is reminded, as well, of his album titles, which include Mingus, Ah, Um and Me,Myself, an Eye. The word play on Latin conjugation in the former and referentiality in thelatter point to the strategies of ‘triple coding’ which are so much a part of jazz, a musicthat thrives on not original compositions but riffs on standards. Jazz, as Henry LouisGates points out, is a music of signifying, a music that explicitly rejects the ‘original’ infavor of constant intertextuality (in fact, Gates links these concerns to the entire historyof African American literature in his now-canonical text, The Signifying Monkey (1988)).

Hence, Basquiat’s title—Charles the First—points both to the kingly status of this jazzgreat as well as the ultimate futility of being ‘the � rst’ anything in jazz. The point isdriven home by the reference to ‘Cherokee’, a standard pop tune written by Ray Noble,which would be revised by Parker as ‘Ko-Ko’ and ‘Marshmallow’. The futility of originsis evidenced, as well, in the wry ‘copyright’ logo placed dead centre in the middle of thesecond panel. Destabilizing the authority of origins—implicit in coding—was and is atechnique crucial to postcolonial artists attempting to envision a third or intertextualspace of form.

Basquiat captures the energy of Charlie Parker (and others), in large measure, throughthe frenetic juxtaposition of high and low cultural signi� ers. Like much of his work,references to superheroes are scattered throughout the piece—for example, the Super-man ‘S’ (which appears twice) as well as the words ‘Thor’ and ‘X-Mn’ (a reference tothe X-Men comic book). In addition, the words ‘Marvel Comics’, crossed out, with acopyright symbol next to them, adorn the bottom of the third panel. These arejuxtaposed with a reference to opera (the most elite of art forms) as well as to Parker ’sraised left hand, a near holy—though thoroughly secular—sign.

Ultimately, Basquiat was a child of popular culture as well as European and AfricanAmerican traditions. Like Bennett and Roche-Rabell (whom Hobbs calls a ‘light-skinnedmulatto’), Basquiat has a complex family history—his mother is Puerto Rican while hisfather is Haitian. In many respects, Basquiat wrestled with his complex personal andpolitical positioning throughout the course of his brief career. While he clearly had ananti-racist political agenda (see ‘Slave Auction’ and ‘Irony of Black Policeman’ amongothers), he was not con� ned by representational practices linked a priori to a stablecultural identity (Marshall, 1995). From Gray’s Anatomy (an anatomy text book) to thework of Leonardo Da Vinci, to Superman, to Charlie Parker, to Sugar Ray Robinsonand beyond, Basquiat appropriated and transformed myriad historical and culturalresources in his work to a startling and highly suggestive degree.

It is this condition of multiple heritages and its open possibilities that the Guyanesenovelist Wilson Harris similarly mines in novels such as Palace of the Peacock (1960),Companions of the Day and Night (1975) and Carnival (1985). Indeed, Harris deploysstrategies of double coding throughout his work, as can be illustrated in Palace of thePeacock. Here, the fusion of the colonized and colonizer subject is at the epicentre of hisnovel, a novel about the psychological reintegration of opposites in the conquistadorialsearch for the mythical colony of Mariella, located in the hinterland of Guyana, on the


northeast corner of the South American continent. As the principal character, Donne,and his ill-fated polyglot crew sail up the Cuyuni River in their tortuous journey toreclaim this colony, they discover the subtle and abiding links and trestles of associationbetween each other and the world:

Cameron’s great-grandfather had been a dour Scot, and his great-grandmotheran African slave mistress. Cameron was related to Schomburgh (whom headdressed as Uncle with the other members of the crew) and it was well-knownthat Schomburgh’s great-grandfather had come from Germany, and hisgreat-grand mother was an Arawak American Indian. The whole crew was aspiritual family living and dying together in the common grave out of whichthey had sprung from again from the same soul and womb as it were. Theywere all knotted and bound together in the enormous bruised head ofCameron’s ancestry and nature as in the white unshaved head of Schom-burgh’s age and presence. (Harris, 1960, p. 39)

In this strategy of double coding, the postcolonial novelist works from medium tomedium to tell a story that attacks the centrality and security of authentic or originalsubjectivity and the hierarchy of discourses associated with the inheritance of classicalrealism as well as the bureaucratic deployment of characterization in the 19th-centurynovel tradition. Wilson Harris’s ‘Idiot Nameless’ in his Companions of the Day and Night,Jorge Luis Borges’ Cartographers of the Empire, and the Cuban novelist Reinaldo Arenas’stwisted characters—who in the middle of his novel Grave Yard of the Angels (1987)announce their dissatisfaction with their lives and ask the author for different roles—areall examples of this double coding.

The ultimate argument these authors make here is that modern humanity and modernlife are necessarily interdependent and deeply hybrid. The text of the underside ofmodernity and modernization is a quilt, a patchwork of associations, repressed in thephilosophies of reason associated with enlightenment discourses and best exposedthrough strategies of ambiguity and triple play.

So far, we have looked at both the critique of hegemonic representation as well as thestrategies of double coding which are a central part of the postcolonial aesthetic. Wehave isolated these motifs and marked them as unique, distinguishing them from thethree discursive traditions with which we opened. We want to look now, morespeci� cally, at how histories of oppression have informed these motifs and their attendantdiscursive lives; how a brutal history of colonialism has necessitated the proliferation ofutopic visions which also marks this art.

Utopic Visions

The third and � nal theme of the postcolonial imagination we want to pursue in thissection of our essay is the link between art and emancipatory vision. We argue thatpostcolonial art is engaged in what C.L.R. James calls in American Civilization (1993) ‘thestruggle for happiness’. By this James meant the struggle of the great masses ofpostcolonial peoples to overcome plenipotentiary powers and glean from everyday life asense of possibility, a stimulation of a Calibanesque reordering of contemporary socialand cultural arrangements. Here, we call attention to the effort to link the techniques ofpersuasion within aesthetic form to the struggle of Third World people for better lives.

In this regard, the paintings of Arnaldo Roche-Rabell, as in I Want to Die as a Negro(Hobbs, 1996, p. 49), suggest the reclamation and reintegration of the repressed identity


of Africa in the Caribbean space. One is reminded here, as well, of Nicolas Guillen’s TheBallad of the Two Ancestors (Guillen, 1977, pp. 143–144). Also worthy of note is Roche-Rabell’s Under the Total Eclipse of the Sun (Hobbs, 1996, p. 45), in which body parts andhuman faces seem to rise from the shadowed landscape of the city acropolis. Here, wesee foregrounded the temporary eclipsing of the power of the United States Congressthat refuses to listen to the voices of the Puerto Rican people. In a similar manner,Korean artist Yong Soon Min offers viewers a strikingly multilayered installation, TheBridge of No Return, in which she explores the parallel realities of the separated peoples ofKorea (North and South) and their latent desires for reintegration across the divides ofperspectives and territory (Min, 1997, p. 11). Min foregrounded the multipurpose anddeliberately ambiguous nature of her Bridge installation when it was on tour at theKrannert Museum in Champaign, IL in the fall of 1997. Min’s Bridge is a statement ofrelationality and interconnectedness but also of inbetweenness and alterity:

A bridge is, by de� nition, a connection, fostering a relationship between thetwo otherwise separate sites at either end. A bridge also exists as its own entity,as an interstitial space to be traversed, presumably in both directions. A bridgeof one-way passage, of no return, with no connection, no exchange, nocontinuity, de� es the logic of a bridge like an oxymoron. (Min, 1997, p. 11)

This latency courses through the play of divisions of all races and peoples at the end ofthe 20th century. It is this latency that is foregrounded in the painting Terra Nullus(McLean & Bennett, 1996, p. 88), in which Gordon Bennett projects the footsteps of theAustralian Aboriginal people high above the implanting of the British Union Jack on theaboriginal landscape in the creation of Australia.

The art to which we refer here and throughout does not offer the viewer clearsolutions to complex problems. Unlike many nationalist art movements (e.g. blackneorealist � lm in the US and earlier proponents of Negritude movements such asLeopold Senghor and Aime Cesaire), this work is marked by contingency, raisingquestions more than offering � rm solutions. Hence, Roche-Rabell does not offer theviewer an answer to the problem of Puerto Rico’s commonwealth status. In works likeHurricane from the South, he points to that country’s myriad complexities and how they haveregistered on his psyche and in the political consciousness of the island. Following WalterBenjamin, Roche-Rabell and others forge visions that can sustain and nurture acommunal consciousness, though always in quali� ed and contingent ways. These artistswork hard for their momentary victories but are sober enough to realize that struggle isnot simple nor will victory come in one fell swoop. One is reminded of Gordon Bennett ’sPrologue: they sailed slowly nearer, where the history of colonial oppression is con� gured inpop-style pointillism, pointing to the contingency of historical formations and thepossibility of new and different futures.

The persistent reminder in these works is that emancipation has to be built andconstructed from the bottom up. There is no predictable � ow of effects from artistic wishful� lment, vanguard theory or politics to the fruition of social solidarity and therealization of a new community. Writers like Wilson Harris maintain that the newcommunity must be built in the ordinary, in the everyday production of difference,cobbled together, piece by reluctant piece—only then can the process of dialogue andreintegration of opposites take place. The Palace of the Peacock, the site and ground of theplay of difference, can only come into view in the labour of the artisan, not in the edictsand a priori declarations of theorists and pundits.

Indeed, these writers suggest that we, like the characters in Harris’s Palace of the Peacock,


must all give up something here, perhaps even allowing our self-interests and crassidentities to be scrutinized, wrecked in the process of transformation. This is the path ofrevision and reconciliation that Donne, the rambunctious colonizer and cattle rancher,must go through in the anteroom of the Palace:

Every movement and glance and expression was a chiselling touch, the divinealienation and translation of � esh and blood into everything and anything onearth. The chisel was as old as life, old as a � ngernail. The saw was the teethof bone. Donne felt himself sliced with this skeleton-saw by the craftsman ofGod in the window pane of his eye. The swallow � ew in and out like a pictureon the wall framed by the carpenter to breathe perfection. He began hammer-ing again louder than ever to draw the carpenter’s intimate attention. He hadnever felt before such terrible desire and frustration all mingled. He knew thechisel and the saw in the room had touched him and done something in thewind and the sun to make him anew. Fingernail and bone were the secretpanes of glass in the stone of blood through which spiritual eyes were beingopened. (Harris, 1960, pp. 102–103)

Donne’s turmoil is the turmoil of the contemporary world. It is the turmoil of thecolonizer and the colonized in search of new possibility, a new home.

One also � nds this insistence on the labor of emancipation and the incompleteness ofthe process of transformation foregrounded in the work of the Barbadian author GeorgeLamming in novels such as Seasons of Adventure (1960) and Natives of My Person (1971). Inthe latter novel, Lamming reverses the middle passage story and tells it through thetortured mind of the colonizer ship captain and his crew who search for redemption inthe founding of the new colony of San Cristobal. Lamming adds a further twist, however,as the ship, Reconnaissance, which is making the triangular trade journey, is mysteriouslystalled outside the chosen site of community, the island of San Cristobal. In this scenario,the men can inhabit the island only after a rapprochement with their women. Emanci-pation though imagined is not given. The work of change is where the practice oftransformation must truly begin. As the wife of one of the crew explains, in a somewhatironic tone, men like her husband must work at collaboration even as they consideraltering the fate of others:

Surgeon’s Wife: They would come in the evening. His company. All of thesame learning and skill. My husband’s house was like a school. Sometimes Iwould forget the indignities done to me when I saw them in such closecollaboration. Discussing prescriptions for every sickness the Kingdom mightsuffer … I felt they had a wholesome purpose. To heal whatever sickness theKingdom was suffering. To build a group of New World men. (Lamming,1971, p. 336)

Work, thus, still needs to be done—work for genuine change that must begin withthe extension of the act of collaboration to embrace the needs, desires and interestsof women.

In closing this section, we point brie� y to a utopic theme raised in the writing ofCornel West (1992) and Gina Dent (1992) bearing upon the link between the workof the imagination and the realization of change. We particularly call attention to theirdiscussion of the difference between the individualized celebration of incorporatedaesthetic work versus the vital dynamic of visualizing community which they seeembodied in popular arts committed to alterity. They summarize this distinction in thetension between what they call artistic ‘pleasure’ versus communal ‘joy’, a distinction that


holds for much postcolonial art. Pleasure is a personal and atomized kind of enjoyment,one that has been explicitly linked to certain kinds of psychoanalytic, � lm and especiallyfeminist cultural criticism.3 Yet, as noted, postcolonial artists have always seen the self asdeeply interred in community, making such atomized models entirely anomalous anduntenable. Postcolonial artists have struggled, rather, for ‘joy’, the experience of pleasurein and through collective contexts, a point made throughout this essay. Such art takes joyin envisioning new ways for collective struggle, new political possibilities, new ways ofbeing and acting. It is suggested by artists like Roche-Rabell, Bennett and Basquiat andwriters like Harris, Morrison and Lamming that this work is not complete. For them themeans of struggle is as important, if not more so, than the ends. Transformation cannotbe dictated. Transformation is a process in which people work together to build changewithout the false security of guarantees. On this note, we bring this discussion of utopicvisions to a close and move to more sobering re� ections.

Contradictions and Limitations

Throughout this essay, we have stressed the ways that postcolonial artists have interro-gated and prosecuted new and complex social and political visions. Yet, at this point, wewant to stress the contradictions and limitations of this ‘work of the postcolonialimagination’ as well, positing our own essay in counterdistinction to other, morecelebratory projects, including bell hooks’s Art on My Mind (1995) and Lucy Lippard’sMixed Blessings (1990).

As noted throughout, postcolonial artists have challenged the links between realismand stable social identities, opening up a space where new discourses can be entertainedand new battles for identity can be fought. We consider this a positive, ethicalmove—extending Foucault and others, we must interrogate the discourses and received‘common sense ’ ways of thinking we have inherited (Bernauer, 1990). Yet, we must alsoquestion whether this challenge to realism is working to break the kinds of tenuous bondsbetween artists and audiences that we � nd in much popular art. Indeed, as C.L.R. Jamesnotes, popular art forms are marked by the ways artists have had to respond to thedemands of the masses in speci� c social moments. Narrative realism is a crucial motif inmuch popular art today, as evidenced by nearly all contemporary media forms engagingquestions of ethnic and racial identity. Black popular culture—from � lm (e.g. Boyz N theHood and Menace II Society and He Got Game) to music (e.g. Tupac Shakur) andbeyond—provides a most salient example here. In fact, as we have noted elsewhere, thiskind of realism has become central for the production of social identities in this particularhistorical moment, providing stable if problematic narratives of racial identity to many(McCarthy & Dimitriadis, in press).

The political effectivity of these narratives is evidenced, most speci� cally and mostforcefully, in the ways Louis Farrakhan and others have appropriated contemporarypopular culture in creating a discursive space for neo-nationalist political movements.Indeed, in this age of poststructural and postcolonial approaches to identity, it is soberingto remember that the single most well-attended march for civil rights in US history, ‘TheMillion Man March,’ was girded by the most stable of racial narratives, that of theNation of Islam.

As such, we risk eliding important critical spaces if we attend only to the ways racehas been destabilized by global social and cultural trajectories and not to the ways thesesame trajectories have worked to stabilize racial formations for many. Clearly, realistnarratives—narratives marginalized by many postcolonial artists and critics—have res-


onated quite deeply within and across multiple marginalized populations. In this regard,we must ask ourselves what we risk losing when we attempt to challenge or re� gure theterrain of contemporary popular discourse and discussion, when we make the disruptive‘Foucauldian move’.

All this highlights the enormous gap that can exist between artists and the communi-ties they seek to invoke, describe and narrate. The tension of this gap between theindividual artist and his or her constituency(ies) is often a source of powerful creative andkinetic impulses. The great effort of these artists whose work we have reviewed is to � ndthe elements of association of being that link them and their work to larger communal,national and global ecumenical orders. This process, as painters such as Roche-Rabeland Gordon Bennett illustrate, cannot be separated from contemporary politics, includ-ing, we want to stress, the pernicious role of the state. Indeed, as critics such as TonyBennett and Donna Haraway have pointed out, a central way that the state hasproduced national subjects is through the incorporation of seemingly emancipatory artinto complex museum systems. The incorporation of post-revolutionary murals into themuseums of Mexico provides a particularly stunning example of this process, a processthat smacks less of Gramscian articulation than of Foucauldian govermentality.4 As such,the world of politics should not be entered into naively or indiscriminately. Like theartists we have treated throughout, we must be careful where and how we enter thesepolitical debates, what battles we choose to � ght, and what battles we choose to ignore.

Conclusions

In closing, contemporary postcolonial art vigorously places art at the centre of thestruggles for happiness of people of the so-called developing world but also of diasporicpeoples scattered across the peripheries of the developed countries of the West. Thesecontradictory, hybrid and utopic texts agonize about identity and present the future asan open ground of possibility and negotiation. Postcolonial artists critique the authorityover knowledge foregrounded in the imperialist canonical text and the hegemonic wishful� lment of the political, cultural and knowledge-producing systems of the West. Theyinstead allow us to glimpse a world of the future conquered by difference and thepolyglot voices of the marginalized and oppressed. It is this world that Wilson Harrisalerts us to at the end of Palace of the Peacock when Donne and his colonizer/colonizedcrew begin the excruciating negotiation and encounter with their submerged others andrepressed selves:

The crew was transformed by the awesome spectacle of a voiceless soundlessmotion, the purest appearance of vision in the chaos of emotional sense.Earthquake and volcanic water appeared to seize them and stop their earsdashing scales only from their eyes. They saw the naked unequivocal � owingperil and beauty and soul of the pursuer and the pursued all together, and theyknew they would perish if they dreamed to turn back. (p. 62)

The best intuition in postcolonial art, thus, is the recognition that a journey ofencounter of dialogue and reintegration must take place across the battle lines ofdifference and ethnocentrism in a multicultural world racing into the 21st century. In thisworld, the postcolonial artist assumes new and complex responsibilities, in mobilizingnew and speci� c kinds of militancy and resistance. Hence, following Bakhtin, these artistsmust situate their work alongside, in and against a profoundly heterogeneous world, aworld that can and will speak back in equally profound and heterogeneous ways.


Postcolonial artists, in short, must be prepared to answer for their work and its effects,the ways it opens up new terrains and the ways it leaves old ones behind.

Correspondence: Cameron McCarthy, Institute of Communications Research, 222B Ar-mory Building, University of Illinois, Champaign, IL 61820, USA. Email: [email protected]

NOTES

1. See Adorno, 1983; Held, 1980.2. See Hobbs (1996, pp. 5–23) for a fascinating discussion of Roche-Rabell’s background and sources of

in� uence.3. See, for example, Mulvey (1975) and many of the contributions to the � lm theory journal Screen in the

1970s.4. We are indebted to Mary Coffey for this observation.

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The Work of Art in the Post Colonial Imagination