LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

as a neocolonial power; rather, it designates the presence of racial minorities and Third World immigrants.”²⁷ In dialogue with writers such as Cole, Hamid, and Díaz, this book does not simply designate presence, but excavates the past in the present. I endeavor, that is, to illuminate how overlapping imperial histories—the settler-colonization of the New World, European colonialism in Africa and Asia, and more recent projections of U.S. power across the formerly colonized world—imbue and shape the cultural formations and social relations of the present, within and beyond the boundaries of the United States.

      Demonstrating the possibilities of historical recovery, Cole, Hamid, and Díaz possess a concomitant sensitivity to enduring modes of concealment and forgetting. Open City meditates on the ways in which the coloniality of the War on Terror is both obscured and enabled by the elision of imperial histories. The Reluctant Fundamentalist reveals how the futurism of finance capital and nostalgia of militaristic nationalism disable critical reckoning with the history of the present. Oscar Wao implies that the silencing of the past makes possible its eternal return. This attention to cultures of archival erasure is expressed, moreover, by the form and not merely the content of each novel. All three texts self-reflexively perform their own inability to completely transcend—or indeed their own complicity in—the silencing of the past and its presence. In Open City, Julius’s narrative voice is affectively deadened, performing the repression that the intellectual substance of his historical insights aims to undo. The monologic form of The Reluctant Fundamentalist stages an attempt at historical edification—as the Pakistani narrator Changez labors to educate his American companion on the extant history of Euro-American imperialism—that is not met, in the novel itself, with any gesture of empathetic recognition. And the unilateral narrative voice of Oscar Wao’s Yunior calls attention to those voices that remain silent, that do not possess the power of self-narration and can only be made audible through the extrinsic act of fictive imagination.

      In my readings of fiction, I am especially concerned with how novels betray and, often, self-critically address their own capacity as one origin and repository of historical narrative—one site, among the manifold formal and informal venues of historical production, wherein both archival presences and absences are created. Reflecting upon and dramatizing the politics of narrative form, self-reflexive novels in particular can help us think about the dialogue between two moments of representation: the naturalization and deconstruction of various structures of dominance. Through what narrative strategies, for example, is colonial rationality—the ideological frameworks that order the peoples and places of the world within hierarchies of race, culture, and time, and that guide imperial methods of governance and accumulation—established and normalized? And through what narrative strategies might colonial modes of reading and writing the world be exposed, undone, and countered? The novels that I consider are engaged, in specific ways and to varying degrees, with these essential questions. But in the broadest sense, I am interested in their close attention to the production of “history” as narrative—an attention, crucially, that includes a fundamental concern with those archival silences that either evade or are an effect of the act of representation.

      Both the potentialities and pitfalls of literary witness are confronted with a particular urgency by the writer whose work I examine in chapter 5, Roberto Bolaño. In accord with the fictions of Cole, Hamid, and Díaz, Bolaño’s work—which was ecstatically received across the Anglophone world upon its translation, beginning in 2003—defies the trope of rupture.²⁸ Bolaño’s counterpoint to the historical myopia of the “post-9/11” lens, though, is found in his rendering of another epochal September 11—September 11, 1973, the date on which a military coup overthrew the elected president of Chile, Salvador Allende, and installed in his place the rightist dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. Using September 11, 1973—in conjunction with an allied moment of rightist reaction, the brutal state response to student demonstrators in Mexico City in 1968—as a prism that refracts the planetary history of modernity, novels such as Amulet (1999) and The Savage Detectives (1998) imagine the space of ostensive rupture not as a wall that blocks off the past and the world but as an opening that brings deeper histories into view. Confined to a bathroom stall during the army’s occupation of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), accompanied only by a book of poems, the narrator of Amulet, Auxilio, perceives the imbrication of past, present, and future. “The year 1968 became the year 1964 and the year 1960 became the year 1956. But it also became the years 1970 and 1973 and the years 1975 and 1976.”²⁹ In The Savage Detectives this trans-temporal recognition is joined to a de-territorial consciousness and desire; Arturo Belano (Bolaño’s fictional alter ego) and his comrades move from the space and time of catastrophe in Mexico and Chile in 1968 and 1973, to postcolonial Africa, post-Franco Catalonia, and Sandinista Nicaragua (among other places). This global imagination is realized with especial scope and depth in Bolaño’s magnum opus 2666 (2004)—a novel that traces two intersecting genealogies of the present: the late twentieth-century history of neoliberal transformation in Latin America, which leads from Chile in 1973 to the U.S.-Mexico frontier at the turn of the millennium, and the longer history of permanent global war, which unites colonialism, fascism, and militarized neoliberalism on one spatial and temporal map. 2666’s rendering of these histories highlights the mutual inherency of civilization and barbarism, security and terror. One correlate of Bolaño’s expansive historical and geographic consciousness, in other words, is a heightened sensitivity to the affiliation of security and terror—the terror, and the insecurity, that accompanies the modern security project. This abiding theoretical concern is central as well to By Night in Chile (2000) and Distant Star (1996), two novels set in Chile, in the era and aftermath of Pinochet, that meditate on the complicity of literature and state violence. The latter intimacy is defined by a kind of formal mimicry. Like the novels of Cole, Hamid, and Díaz I discuss in chapter 4, Bolaño’s fiction self-reflexively dramatizes the problem of reprisal—the ways in which the technologies of erasure or “semblance” intrinsic to capital and the state are reproduced by the apparatuses of representation, literary and otherwise. But literature, Bolaño’s work demonstrates, is also capable of formal transcendence—the blasting open of, rather than confinement by, the trope of historical rupture.

       *

      Just as the War on Terror’s prehistory was elided by the mantra “post-9/11,” the continuance of its narrative frameworks and political forms was obscured by a conjuncture of putative endpoints. First, the 2008 election of Barack Obama communicated, among many other political feelings, popular discontentment with the Bush administration’s military adventurism. In the months following his inauguration, Obama oversaw the drawdown of the U.S. military presence in Iraq, and outlined a more protracted schedule for eventual withdrawal from Afghanistan. The Obama White House made a point of retiring the phrase “War on Terror,” tacitly replacing it with the more technocratic heading “Overseas Contingency Operations.” Second, the “Arab Spring” of 2011 demonstrated to a global audience that progressive political transformations in the Middle East and North Africa would be brought about not via aerial bombardment by U.S. warplanes, but from below, through popular struggle. The critique emanating from Cairo’s Tahrir Square and indeed across the region voiced a rejection of both the War on Terror and the neoliberal imposition with which it is bound. Third, in May 2011, U.S. Special Forces assassinated Osama bin Laden, an extrajudicial killing that was consumed by much of the U.S. public as a cathartic conclusion to the decade of militarism occasioned by the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Though the killing of bin Laden was not the primary goal of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the achievement of the former nonetheless served to signal the redundancy of those conflicts.

      Mirroring and magnifying the false rupture of September 11, the “sense of an ending” implied by this series of events encouraged the concealment of imperial histories and obfuscation of extant imperial processes. In texts such as Kathryn Bigelow’s acclaimed but controversial 2012 film Zero Dark Thirty, which chronicles the pursuit and assassination of Osama bin Laden, we can perceive the outlines of a narrative framework that will displace the ongoing disasters of Iraq and Afghanistan—the brutality that unfolded and continues to unfold therein—with the ultimate triumph of bin Laden’s assassination. We can discern, in other words, the techniques of historical distortion

Скачать книгу