Ania Loomba

"Hybridity"


from Colonialism-Postcolonialism 
(Routledge, 1998)


by Ania Loomba


I feel that one of the most important points that Loomba raises in the article is the arbitrary nature of social classification. The quote from Stuart Hall is very interesting: "the black subject and black experience are... [also] constructed historically, culturally, politically." Although it seems like a simple statement, it has so many implications in terms of how we look at "race." Loomba writes,

"The term 'ethnicity' has dominantly been used to indicate biologically and culturally stable identities, but Hall asks us to decouple it from its imperial, racist or nationalist deployment and to appropriate it to designate identity as a constructed process rather than a given essence"

The push towards "process" seems to be a fundamental step in reshaping the way that people view difference. It really makes me wonder about the state of post-apartheid poetry, since poetry is quite good for dealing with issues of process and liminality. I will have to read some of the South African poets!

The end of My Son's Story, with the switch in genre from prose to poetry, is interesting in terms of process and "in-betweenness." Ending in poetry, a more accessible form of writing during the struggle, Gordimer draws attention to the different functions of poetry and prose. In class we discussed how prose requires space, a "room of one's own." I like the idea this book being something that Will "can't publish" because it cannot represent identity. The family's coloured identity is not stable.

When we find out at the end that the entire story was constructed through Will's eyes, it changes the meaning of identity in the book. Loomba criticises Bhabha's idea that a hybrid identity is automatically subversive (177). I think that Gordimer also addresses this issue through the political activism in the novel. The black freedom fighters don't fully trust Sonny because he is coloured and associated with the whites. This idea of "in-betweenness" is complicated, as Loomba shows:

"The point, then is not to simply pit the themes of migrancy, exile and hybridity against rootedness, nation and authenticity, but to locate and evaluate their ideological, political and emotional valencies, as well as their intersections in the multiple histories of colonialism and postcoloniality" (183).

The coloured identity embodies liminality.

 

Zoe Wicomb

"Shame and Identity: the Case of the Coloured in South Africa"

from Writing South Africa: Literature, Apartheid, and Democracy, 1970-1996. 

(Cambridge University Press, 1998)

by Zoe Wicomb 

I read this article for ENGL 352 for the first time. It was interesting to read it again after actually reading My Son's Story. Since reading the novel, Wicomb's focus on the body becomes so much more interesting. In Gordimer's story, the body is an overwhelming image. I like how Gordimer uses the body in several ways: as a form of shame (being coloured and mistrusted); as a way of connecting (particularly through sex); as sacrifice (the dead at the funeral); and the list goes on.

Shame and the body have always been closely connected in Western tradition, and mainly policed through religious means. I'm very interested now in the attitudes towards the body in different African people before and after colonisation. The underlying force of Christianity is something that really grabs my attention when I engage with these texts, and through class discussions and films. Wicomb describes the identity of Saartje Baartman as a "Hottentot Venus," and then a symbol of postcolonialism, and then as someone who deserves a "decent Christian burial in her own country. I would love to read more about the connections between the body and spirituality and shame in postcolonial Africa.

I really like Wicomb's writing style. Her focus on the connections between the body and the text is really poignant. Although this isn't a new idea, I couldn't help but connect the "text" to the notion of text as something that exists as a process when it is interpreted. The body as text has a lot of implications in a country that institutionalised a certain reading of the body and used that reading for political and ideological means.