Subjectivity and the Reproduction of Imperial Power

Empire's Individuals

Daniel F. Silva

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317443384
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Théorie de la critique littéraire

This book brings forth a new contribution to the study of imperialism and colonial discourse by theorizing the emergence and function of individual identity as product and producer of imperial power. While recent decades of theoretical reflections on imperialism have yielded important understandings of how the West has repeatedly reconsolidated its power, this book seeks to grasp the complex role of subjectivity in reformulating the terms of imperial domination from early modern European expansion to late capitalism. This entails approaching Empire as a constantly shifting system of differences and meanings as well as an ontological project, a mode of historical writing, and economy of desire that repeatedly envelops the subject into the realm of western power. The analysis of an array of literary texts and cultural artifacts is undertaken by means of a theoretically eclectic approach – drawing on psychoanalysis, post-structuralism, postcolonial theory, and Marxism – with the aim of forwarding current knowledge of Empire while also contributing to different branches of critical theory. In exploring the formation of imperial subjectivity in different historical moments, Silva raises new questions related to the signification of otherness in European expansion and colonial settlement, slavery and eugenics in post-independence Americas, and late capitalist circulation of bodies and commodities. The volume also covers a broad range of geo-cultural spaces in order to locate western power in time and space. This book's diversity in terms of approach, historical scope, and cultural contexts makes it a useful tool for research and teaching among students and scholars of disciplines including Postcolonial Studies, Colonial History, Literature, and Globalization.

Part I
Conveying Colonial Space

1 Imperial Interpellations

Signifying the West’s Scene of Writing

I wish to begin with a brief outline of the two key terms of both the title of this chapter and my overall undertaking: narrative and subjectivation. More than physical occupation and physical asymmetrical cross-cultural relationships, there is a metaphysics of Empire that shapes these physical phenomena and experiences. Empire is, like the loose post-structuralist notion of narrative, an unclosed set or chain of interrelated meanings that incorporates geographies, bodies, and objects as signifiers under the heading or central signifier of Empire. It is a narrative that works across time, and is thus historical. As Edward Said points out, it “project[s] power backward in time”;¹ repeatedly historicizing itself. In other words, the narrative constantly signifies the past in the present of writing for the sake of the future. To do so, the aforementioned signifiers of Empire are repeatedly rearticulated into the narrative that is thus in a permanent state of renegotiation. Empire is thus a mode of writing that is historiographic, literary, oral, performative, intellectual, and even prophetic. Said, at the outset of Culture and Imperialism quite eloquently underlines the key characteristics of Empire as a sequence of meaning; namely, as a “monopoliz[ation] [of] the entire system of representation”² of the world through disciplines of knowledge such as cartography and natural and human sciences in addition to travel writing, historiography, and literature.

It is through the monopoly of representation that the Colonized other, for instance, becomes a repetitively articulated sign within Empire. This is, for Albert Memmi, “the mythical portrait of the colonized”; “precisely because it suits [the colonizer] too well.”³ Memmi’s text, The Colonizer and the Colonized, as a foundational contribution to the study of colonial discourse, is particularly relevant to my project precisely because of the connections it makes between individual and collective identities, for the writing of collective imperial meaning is a process steeped in individual subjectivity. “Suiting the colonizer too well” speaks to the phantasmatic nature of the dichotomized identities of Colonizer and Colonized as signified within colonial discourse. The latter, as will be explored in further detail throughout the following chapters, emerges as a fantasy of otherness through the primordial fantasy that is the Colonizer’s identity.

The Colonized, as a sign, is, for Memmi, necessarily a myth that writes colonized bodies into it while projecting the myth onto such bodies. This projection is but a form of signification. Frantz Fanon, another early radical interrogator of colonial discourse, explored the Colonized as a myth built and projected from what had to be negated from the sign of the Colonizer. Therefore, the signification of Colonizer and Colonized was, from the writing of the colonial encounter, a double move of the same swoop of meaning. This is the dialogical character of the Colonizer/Colonized dialectic within Empire where relationships of difference reside in the symbolic universe of meaning – in the Lacanian sense of the Symbolic order as the realm of language. What has been deduced from the critical study of early modern travel writing and early imperial discourse is that in placing colonized bodies into words, the archetypal colonizer body/subjectivity emerges from and into these words; that is, within imperial language from which colonized subjectivity was foreclosed. The archetype of the colonizing image becomes idealized while the colonized becomes radically othered, the negative ideal.

What I aim to explore throughout, more specifically, is this imperial scene of writing from which emerge the signifiers/sub-narratives of western History: bodies, images, geographies, monuments, among others. These signifiers, pieces of imperial meaning, become so through the (re)signification of history in different moments; whether one considers Pêro Vaz de Caminha’s travel letter detailing the Amerindian being from his European ontological site, or Luís Vaz de Camões’ transformation of Vasco da Gama’s voyage to India into an epic poem almost eight decades after the actual occurrence. The question I am looking to answer, therefore, may be phrased as: how does the writing subject that occupies this scene for Empire come to be? This is, of course, a matter of identity formation, the placing of the individual within ideology – in this case an imperial field of meaning – as a subject of it. It is a placing into History – the narrative of the world written for, and from the standpoint of, the West with itself at the center, as agent. We are urged to theoretically consider Empire as the historical process by which the West takes up this position. Or, to perhaps phrase the ordeal more directly, how does Empire make History possible?

Caminha and Camões are merely two examples of writing subjects in the early centuries of European expansion. Others include Richard Hakluyt, Bartolomé de las Casas, Fernão Mendes Pinto, and Sir Walter Raleigh, to name only a few who contributed to early meanings of Empire. The signifiers produced would later be continued by practitioners of everyday colonial life in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This is the time period that will inform the bulk of this study. The practice of everyday colonial life implies a tense maintenance of reality as the domain of imperial meaning on the part of these practitioners – colonists, teachers, soldiers, etc. It is a maintenance of meaning that is required for the reproduction of imperial narration. The role of the early modern writer of Empire within and for History is different from that of, say, a colonist in the twentieth century. The former was responsible more so for creating meaning than for strictly safeguarding it, although this was an implicit secondary task. Similarly, the twentieth century colonist also has a responsibility for creating meaning, although in a different way, through a different medium, and within a different intersubjective space. The late colonial subject’s role within Empire and its reproduction does not necessarily affect a mass audience, but is felt most crucially in his or her relationship with the other.

To explore how the early modern subject of and for Empire comes to exist in the domain of meaning, it is paramount to begin with a tentative and brief genealogy of the imperial Symbolic – the realm of imperial meaning that charts the global relationship between Europe and the rest of the world. As point of departure we shall take the expansion of the European nation into the supra-nation; geographic expansion always suggesting significational expansion as well. Expansion as a historical individual and collective experience implies the interpretation of that experience into words and meaning. This was undoubtedly the role of the earliest writers of Empire (travel writers and chroniclers), mandated by national monarchies. This was the case of the early fifteenth century Portuguese chronicler Fernão Lopes.

Lopes, as the official chronicler of the Avis dynasty, was given a notable historiographic mission by the crown: that of legitimizing John of Avis’ rise to the Portuguese throne over the legitimate heir, King John of Castile. King John of Avis was, for all intensive purposes, a usurper that led a royal coup against the previous dynasty in 1385. Historical circumstances were very much taken advantage of, as the royal crisis that followed the death of King Fernando I – who left no legitimate son – in 1383, the same year that marked end of the third Portuguese-Castilian war. Fear of Castilian invasion was not a foregone thought for subjects of the Portuguese crown. John I’s son, Edward I, bestowed upon Lopes the task of historicizing his father’s rise to power, in writing, for the first time. The task was ultimately a challenge in signification, as the dynasty’s “aim was to construct a certain vision, or version, of the history of the kingdom emanating from the centre of power that was the Crown.”⁴ What was subsequently produced by Lopes was titled Crónica de D. João I [Chronicle of King John I], dated 1443, a retroactive account of John I’s heroic intervention against Castile. Lopes’ legitimizing historicization ultimately functions around a dichotomy of nation versus otherness, more specifically the Castilian other. John I is not, however, the only hero in the text. Aside from him and Nun’ Álvares Pereira (a famous general at the time and known today as Saint Nuno of Saint Mary), Lopes also carves out a space of historical heroism for the population outside of royalty and nobility that, according to Lopes’ account, played a central role in fighting off Castilian military dispatches sent to reclaim the Portuguese throne. In other words, the Portuguese “people,” or “poboo” (fourteenth century orthography) emerge at the discursive heart of the nation. António José Saraiva, underlines how Lopes transforms the geographic signifier of Portugal into a more or less vast series of interpersonal ties and meanings known as nation:

The ‘love of the land,’ the term ‘Portugal,’ defined, no longer as a territory, but as a body of people unified under one type of thought, the expression ‘denatured Portuguese’ applied as a condemnation against those who took sides versus ‘Portugal,’ the expression ‘house of Portugal,’ applied no longer to the Royal house, but to the entire nation, constantly appear in Fernão Lopes.⁵

Saraiva essentially lists a few of the key signifiers Lopes includes that are supposedly recognizable to the individuals, or subjects, that comprise the young nation. These are signifiers, the signifieds of which, are collectively formed by the “people.” For the sake of Edward I’s plan, his father also became a key signifier of this collective sign, thus legitimizing his place in the nation, and therefore, his place on the throne. What Saraiva describes is ultimately a Symbolic order and is arguably part of what Benedict Anderson had in mind in theorizing the nation as an imagined community (1983), a signifying chain that is read and reproduced through intersubjectivity. Nation and Empire as significational entities, are, therefore, from the very beginning, hermeneutic projects.

If we return to King Edward’s original plan, we see that interpretation is at the very heart of the project’s goal. The story of John I’s rise to power had to be read as legitimate, in this case, tied to the greater good and existence of the Symbolic realm that is the nation. Ideology must be read and its narratives must be interpreted so that they may be maintained and the subject can have a place within them. What Fernão Lopes ultimately produced in the Chronicle of King John I is an interpretation of the past – in short, History, marking a point in time in which European conquest and expansion begin to write themselves. Forcefully, this interpretation served the purposes of power of the Avis dynasty. From the incipient stages of the narrative of Portugal, power played a central role in the knowledge production of and on the nation/narrative, as well as in the desire for knowledge production.

The Avis court would later summon Lopes’ successor, Gomes Eanes de Zurara, to interpret and record the expansion of the nation into the northern African city of Ceuta in 1415. This historiographic document, dated around 1450, came to be known as the Crónica da Tomada de Ceuta [Chronicle of the Siege and Capture of Ceuta], or the third installment of the Chronicle of King John I. Zurara, in this particular text, articulates (not for the first time in Europe), through writing, a different other that semantically functions in opposition to the “growing” nation: that of the Moor; thus enveloping the mission of the Christian Reconquest into the narrative of the nascent Portuguese Empire. A few years later, Zurara would pen the Crónica do Descobrimento e Conquista da Guiné [Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea], narrating Portugal’s imperial voyage South. As Portugal and imperial Europe conquer politicized lands and commodity markets, these and the othered bodies that move within them become signifi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART I Conveying Colonial Space
• PART II Nation as Imperial Project in the Americas
• PART III Empire and Late Capitalism
• Conclusion
• Index