Primitivism and postcolonial literature

doi:10.1017/CHOL9781107007031.011

30 - Primitivism and postcolonial literature

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 January 2012

Victor Li

Edited by

Ato Quayson

Show author details

Ato Quayson: Affiliation:
University of Toronto

Book contents

Get access

Summary

The one who made too much of an effort to understand, the one who underwent the agonies of a conversion, the one whose idea was that of renunciation when he embraced the customs of those who forged their destinies in this primeval slime in a hand-to-hand struggle with the mountains and the trees, was vulnerable because certain forces of the world he had left behind continued to operate in him.

Titles are never simple or innocent especially when they appear to be so. This holds true for the seemingly innocuous title of this chapter. For what should give us pause in the title is the innocent, commonplace conjunction. Why is ‘primitivism’ – a term that summons up colonial projects and projections and enables the West to assert its modernity and maturity – linked through the conjunction ‘and’ to ‘postcolonial literature’ which, one can justifiably assume, would reject the scandalous problems associated with the term ‘primitivism’? If, as literary and art historians have informed us repeatedly, modernist art and literature relied heavily on the resources provided by so-called primitive cultures, then surely postcolonial writers and artists would be critical of any form of primitivism that energized Western modernism? What, then, is the status of the conjunction in our title? Does it imply some kind of relation between primitivism and postcolonial literature? What sort of relation do we have here? Is it an antagonistic relation in which postcolonialism is opposed to primitivism? Or a complementary relation in which postcolonial literature finds primitivism useful as a strategic partner?

Information

Type: Chapter
Information: The Cambridge History of Postcolonial Literature , pp. 982 - 1005

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9781107007031.011 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2012

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Book purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Achebe, Chinua. ‘An image of Africa: racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness’, in Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness, New York: W. W. Norton, 2006.Google Scholar

Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart, London: Heinemann, 1958; repr. 1996; New York: Fawcett Crest, 1969.

Arnold, A. James. Modernism and Negritude: The Poetry and Poetics of Aimé Césaire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1981.

Baudrillard, Jean. The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena, trans. Benedict, James, London: Verso, 1993.

Bloch, Ernst. ‘Something’s missing: a discussion between Ernst Bloch and Theodor W. Adorno on the contradictions of utopian longing’, in The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988.Google Scholar

Butler, , Judith, . Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative, New York: Routledge, 1997.

Camayd-Freixas, Erik, ‘Introduction: the returning gaze’, in Camayd-Freixas, Erik (ed.), Primitivism and Identity in Latin America (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2000), pp. xiii–xiv.Google Scholar

Carpentier, Alejo. The Lost Steps, trans. Onís, Harriet, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968.

Chatwin, Bruce, The Songlines (1987; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988).

Chaulet-Achour, Christine. ‘Writing as exploratory surgery: Yambo Ouologuem’s Bound to Violence’, in Wise, Christopher (ed.), Yambo Ouologuem: Postcolonial Writer, Islamic Militant, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1999.Google Scholar

Conley, Tom as The Writing of History, New York: Columbia University Press, 1988.

Cooper, Brenda. Magical Realism in West African Fiction: Seeing with a Third Eye, London: Routledge, 1998.

Diamond, Stanley. In Search of the Primitive: A Critique of Civilization. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1974.

Echevarría, Roberto González, Alejo Carpentier: The Pilgrim at Home (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), p..

Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks (1952), trans. Markmann, Charles Lam, NewYork: Grove Press, 1967.

Fanon, Frantz, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Farrington, Constance (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), p..

Faris, Wendy B. ‘The question of the other: cultural critiques ofmagical realism’, Janus Head, 5.2 (2002).Google Scholar

Faris, Wendy B., Ordinary Enchantments: Magic Realism and the Remystification of Narrative (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2004).

Harris, Wilson. The Guyana Quartet, (The Far Journey of Oudin, The Palace of the Peacock, The Secret Ladder, The Whole Armour), London: Faber and Faber, 1985.

Huggan, Graham. The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins, London: Routledge, 2001.

Hutcheon, Linda. The Politics of Postmodernism, London: Routledge, 1989.

Irele, F. Abiola, and Gikandi, Simon (eds.). The Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature, 2 vols., Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Jameson, Fredric. ‘On magic realism in film’, Critical Inquiry, 12 (1986).Google Scholar

Kuklick, Henrika. The Savage Within: The Social History of British Anthropology, 1885–1945, Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Tristes Tropiques (1955), trans. John, and Weightman, Doreen, New York: Atheneum, 1973

Lévi-Strauss, Claude, Tristes Tropiques (1955), trans. Weightman, John and Weightman, Doreen (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), p..

Lattas, Andrew. ‘Essentialism, meaning and resistance: aboriginality and the politics of authenticity’, Oceania, 63.3(1993).Google Scholar

Lawrence, D. H.Studies in Classic American Literature (1924), Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971.

Li, Victor. The Neo-Primitivist Turn: Critical Reflections on Alterity, Culture, and Modernity, University of Toronto Press, 2006.

Márquez, Gabriel García, One Hundred Years of Solitude, trans. Rabassa, Gregory (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), p..

Malouf, David, Remembering Babylon (New York: Vintage, 1994), 197.

Manheim, Ralph as Bound to Violence, London: Heinemann, 1971.

Matthiessen, Peter. At Play in the Fields of the Lord (1965), New York: Vintage, 1991.

Montagu, Ashley. ‘The concept of “primitive” and related anthropological terms: a study in the systematics of confusion’, in Montagu, Ashley (ed.), The Concept of the Primitive, New York: Free Press, 1968.Google Scholar

Okri, Ben. The Famished Road, London: Jonathan Cape, 1991; Vintage, 1992.

Pinkham, Joan also published in Aimé Césaire: The Collected Poetry, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983.

Povinelli, Elizabeth A. ‘Cultural encounters and emergent cultures in Australia’, American Anthropologist, 97.1 (1995).Google Scholar

Quayson, Ato, ‘Esoteric webwork as nervous system: reading the fantastic in Ben Okri’s writings’, in Gurnah, Abdulrazak (ed.), Essays on African Writing, vol. I (London: Heinemann, 1995).Google Scholar

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Outside in the Teaching Machine, New York: Routledge, 1993.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. ‘Subaltern Studies: deconstructing historiography’, in Guha, Ranajit, Subaltern Studies, vol. 4: Writings in South Asian History and Society, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1985.Google Scholar

Stocking Jr, George W. ‘The ethnographic sensibility of the 1920s and the dualism of the anthropological tradition’, in Jr, George W. Stocking (ed.), Romantic Motives: Essays on Anthropological Sensibility, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989.Google Scholar

Taussig, Michael T., Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing (University of Chicago Press, 1987), p..

Torgovnick, Marianna. Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives, University of Chicago Press, 1990.

Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. ‘Anthropology and the savage slot: the poetics and politics of otherness’, in Fox, Richard G. (ed.), Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present, Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 1991.Google Scholar

Vargas Llosa, Mario. The Storyteller, trans. Lane, Helen, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989.

Accessibility standard: Unknown

Accessibility compliance for the PDF of this book is currently unknown and may be updated in the future.