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Counter-Fitting

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 July 2017

Peter Hitchcock
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Abstract

This essay on postcolonialism, genre, and Africa will jump scales (in its own version of geo-aesthetic impossibility). The general idea is not to think generic incommensurability as necessarily disabling, but rather that the ill-fitting tropes of genre identification are productively engaged in a politics of non-conformance, here elaborated as a logic of counter-fitting. Counter-fitting, what does not fit generic expectation, is not counterfeiting as false but is a politics of aesthetics in which generic authenticity is put into question by the very unevenness of cultural contact and expression. Like the counterfeit, however, the counter-fit reveals something of the logic of exchange in the circulation of genres while also calling into question the attachment to a pure representation. Drawing on this interpretation of the counterfeit, counter-fitting is less a “paradigm of difference,” to borrow from V. Y. Mudimbe, but rather focuses attention on how such a material production of otherness is problematized at the level of genre. Some examples drawn from Algerian fiction will help to clarify this approach.

Keywords

modernitygenrethe novelscience fictionAssia DjebarMohammed Dib
Type
Articles
Information
Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry , Volume 4 , Special Issue 2: Special Issue: African Genre , April 2017 , pp. 159 - 175
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2017 

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References

1 Trotsky, of course, is trying to understand the peculiarities of Russian history and, while the ideas in general stretch through Lenin to Engels, Trotsky’s contribution remains a pertinent provocation in terms of the present. See Trotsky, Leon, History of the Russian Revolution, trans. Max Eastman. Vol. 1. (Chicago: Haymarket, 2008), 5 Google Scholar.

2 See, WReC, , Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015)Google Scholar. As a materialist understanding and theorization of world literature, this work is crucial. Whether world literature as a project occludes the politics of postcolonialism must await another occasion.

3 Moretti, Franco, Modern Epic: The World-System from Goethe to Garcia Marquez, trans. Quintin Hoare (London: Verso, 1996), 50 Google Scholar. This book announces more than any other the possibility of genre as world system.

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7 The literature linking romanticism and revolution in this way is extensive although not always as circumspect. See, for instance, Löwy, Michael and Sayre, Robert, Romanticism against the Tide of Modernity, trans. Catherine Porter (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001)Google Scholar. It is certainly true the roles of Marxism and socialism in revolutions of the global south have been contentious; whether romanticism is fully consonant with anti-capitalism is also worth debating.

8 White, Hayden, Metahistory (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973)Google Scholar. The importance of White’s tropological historiography cannot be overemphasized, although he does not merely seek to reproduce Frye’s categories as a historiographic method. For the difference, see Frye, Northrop, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. One similarity, of course, is the general disdain for determinism of any kind.

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12 This is a different way, perhaps, to think of modernity “at large.” The matrix of modernity and colonialism has a critical genre all of its own, and genre’s relationship to it is but a subgenre. My suggestion here is that genre theory could play a greater role in understanding the dialectical dead-ends of modernity over and above its tendencies toward narrative description and typologies.

13 See, Hitchcock, Peter, “The Genre of Postcoloniality,” New Literary History 34.2 (Spring 2003): 299–330 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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20 Saadawi, Nawal el, Woman at Point Zero, trans. Sherif Hetata (London: Zed Press, 2015)Google Scholar; Saadawi, Nawal el, Ferdaous, une voix en enfer, trans. Assia Djebar and Assia Trebelsi (Paris: Des Femmes, 1981)Google Scholar.

21 See Djebar, Assia, Le blanc de l’Algérie (Paris: Albin Michel, 1995)Google Scholar. Translated as Algerian White, trans. David Kelley and Marjolijn De Jager (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2001).

22 See, Apter, Emily, “Untranslatable Algeria,” Parallax 4.2 (April–June 1998): 47–59 Google Scholar. This is part of a special issue on “Translating ‘Algeria’” focused on the civil war in Algeria.

23 Djebar was concerned not just with the silence of writing but the overderminations and intensities of silence within it. These articulate a contradictory archive, but the shaping of and from silence is a postcolonial prerogative.

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25 Derrida, Jacques, Specters of Marx, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994)Google Scholar. His intervention did, nevertheless, resound within a ghostly Marxism after the collapse of actually existing socialism. See, for instance, Hitchcock, Peter, Oscillate Wildly: Space, Body, and Millennial Materialism (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999)Google Scholar.

26 Hitchcock, “The Genre of Postcoloniality,” 305.

27 Derrida, Jacques, Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992)Google Scholar.

28 Derrida, Given Time, 12.

29 Ibid., 1.

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32 Lyotard, Jean-Francois, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis, MN: University Of Minnesota Press, 1988)Google Scholar. The argument begins, of course, by disorienting the genre in which the argument proceeds. I acknowledge the dispute but see it as more dialectically enmeshed.

33 See Hiddleston, Jane, “Derrida, Autobiography, Postcoloniality,” French Cultural Studies 16.3 (2005): 291–304 Google Scholar, but see also Hiddleston, Jane, Poststructuralism and Postcolonialism (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010)Google Scholar,especially the section on poststructuralism in Algeria and the chapter on Derrida. His “circonfession” shares much of the tension in graphing a self as Djebar’s writing “silence on silk.”

34 Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, second paragraph.

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37 Waberi, Abdourahman A., In the United States of Africa, trans. David Ball and Nicole Ball (Lincoln, NE: Bison, 2009)Google Scholar; and Towfik, Ahmed Khalid, Utopia, trans. Chip Rossetti (Doha: Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation, 2011)Google Scholar. The former is in the tradition of the empire writing back; the latter is an Egyptian dystopia more intimately tied to the present.

38 Dib, Mohammed. Qui se souvient de la mer (Paris: Les Editions du Seuil, 1962)Google Scholar. Translated as Who Remembers the Sea, trans. Louis Tremaine (Washington DC: Three Continents Press, 1985).

39 Bould, Mark, “From Anti-Colonial Struggle to Neoliberal Immiseration,” Paradoxa 25 (2013): 17–45 Google Scholar. Although the textual effects Bould identifies are significant, I tend to problematize the temporal arc at stake.

40 Dib, Qui se souvient de la mer, 121.