निषेधों का निषेध ।
तमाम घोषणाओं
एकालाप के बावजूद
निषेधों का निषेध
प्रेम को परिभाषित करता रहा
हमेशा से।
तमाम उन्मादों
धर्म और राज्य के
विलापों के बावजूद
यही प्रेम की
क्रियागत
परिणति रही
यहां कभी भी
कोई अंतिम उत्तर नहीं मिलता ।
यहां उत्कंठा
शेष रहती है
संभावनाएं
बनी रहती हैं
यहीं से मनुष्यता
उम्मीद की सांस लेती है
यहां कभी भी
कोई बात
पूरी नहीं होती लेकिन
यहां का अधूरापन ही
जीवन का
सारभूत तत्व है।
Dr Manish Kumar Mishra
Assistant professor
Department of Hindi
K.M.Agrawal College
Kalyan west
White Hegemony
Dr Manisha Patil
The Bluest Eye is the tragedy of a black girl, Pecola Breedlove, who is the victim of racism. However, this racism is not something which we find only in the external world but something which has also invaded one’s consciousness. There is no inherent objective truth about their ugliness (‘you looked closely and could not find the source.’) but only the fiction of white superiority (‘…it came from conviction, their conviction.’) and this fiction is perpetuated through culture (‘They had looked about themselves and saw nothing to contradict the statement; saw in fact, support for it leaning at them from every billboard, every movie, every glance.’). In Western civilization, dominant white culture (‘self’) is defined primarily against the black underdog (‘other’). By the logic of binary opposition or the ‘Manichean allegory’ (Abdul Jan Mohammad’s term), white is defined as good, black as bad; white as intelligent, black as dumb; white as civilized, black as barbaric; white as rich, black as poor. Even inborn physical features are assigned intrinsic beauty value: white physical features – white skin, blue eyes, blond hair – are termed as beautiful, while black physical features – black skin, high cheekbones, thick lips – are termed as ugly. In short, blackness does not have any other autonomous status apart from the distorted mirror image of whiteness.
Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist proposed the concept of hegemony which states that ‘a social class achieves a predominant influence and power, not by direct and overt means but by succeeding in making its ideological view of society so pervasive that the subordinate classes unwittingly accept and participate in their own oppression.’1 In The Bluest Eye, no white authority figure appears in person to impose his values on the black people. That job is performed by the mass culture of consumerism and capitalism. Mass culture propels all people towards a universalism which is the politics of propagating certain ideas as universal, trans-historical, as always and essentially non-contingent. However, mass culture deliberately ignores the fact that so-called universal features of humanity are the characteristics of those who occupy the positions of political dominance. Universalization helps this dominant class to pose itself as disembodied and representative class of citizens. The myth of universalism creates a tactic hierarchy between the universal/ dominant values and local/subordinate values. The universal is brought to the center while the local is pushed to the periphery. As a result, ‘Euro-American’ characteristics become universal and central and it becomes the duty of all others confined to locality and periphery to achieve those features. Mass culture also shows people the way to perform this duty: by internalizing universal (white) notions and by consuming products that reflect that universalism. Movies, advertisements, bill boards, fashion magazines and all other vehicles of consumerism constantly present us with the so-called universally ideal (or idealized) images of high-quality commodities whose consumption would result in equally ideal (white) selfhood. For example, Dick-and-Jane Primer starts with the description of a beautiful house: ‘Here is the house. It is green and white. It has a red door. It is very pretty.’ It shelters an ideal family: ‘Here is the family. Mother, Father, Dick and Jane live in the green-and-white house. They are very happy.’ (1) The Primer text creates a one-to-one connection between the two and both together provide an individual with success and happiness. Similarly, white baby dolls, Shirley Temple cups and Mary Jane candies endlessly reproduce the images of universally ideal feminine beauty first disseminated through Hollywood movies – Greta Garbo, Ginger Rogers, Clark Gable and Jean Harlow. Commodity culture turns even female bodies into the sexual commodities to be consumed equally by all – men, women, black and white. However, in accordance with mass culture’s projection of idealism, sexualized/idealized female bodies are exclusively white, turning black female bodies its opposite – demonic and repulsive. Yet again total absence of black female bodies from mass culture (result of erasure and replacement) lets black women hallucinate themselves as white beauties, making self-denial a pleasurable experience. Thus, mass culture’s deception of reality, lets subordinate classes cultivate the illusion that they are on par with the dominant class and can in fact become the most dominant class, while in reality foreclosing all the doors to equality and power.
Commenting on this process of abstracting universal and ideal notions, Jennifer Gillan says, ‘When the abstract, disembodied citizen is figured as white and male, all others cannot embody such citizenship because they are hyper-embodied by the racial and/or gendered markings on their bodies.’2 In America, theoretically all are equal (but separate), and all have equal access to power but the underlining concept of ‘abstract, disembodied citizen’ skillfully curtails blacks’ and women’s actual acquisition of power. Furthermore, America’s image-building during the World War II, as ‘the crusader against racialized forms of nationalism abroad’ disguises ‘this systematic reinforcement of a racial and gendered criteria for full citizenship’ at home. America uses the policy of ‘focusing on the wrong front’ (called ‘Maginot Line Syndrome’ by the historian Sidney Lens) – whereby there are deliberate ‘historical displacements in which something of lesser significance comes to occupy a central position and thereby effaces the more disturbing issue’ – to defocus attention from its own unjust, exclusionary, racist and sexist practices. Jennifer Gillan further says, ‘[A]s Hitler’s crimes against humanity came into sharp focus, the United States’ own conflicts over race purity were displaced and receded into the background…The domestic support for racialized nationalism is overshadowed on the international front by the United States’ intervention in the war against racialized nationalism in Europe; the economic threat of black male labor to white male ascendancy is transformed by lynching rhetoric into a sexual threat black males to white womanhood; black exclusion from national family, especially the thwarting of the black male appropriation of the breadwinner role, is superceded by the inclusion of the ideal black female servant into the white family; black economic inequality is refigured as the retardation of black male progress by the presence of a matriarchal kinship network. In each case, the original exclusionary practice is rewritten through a counter narrative of reversal or justification.’3
This whole process, then, erases the specificity of bodies, places and histories and condemns all to an abstract universal ideal. For example, Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s 1965 Department of Labor Report The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, ignores the sexual exploitation of black women by their white masters and instead reinforces the cultural myth of black rapist to uphold the false image of the Southern white gentleman as the chivalric protector of ideal womanhood. These images of chivalric gentleman and ideal woman (beautiful and virtuous: angel in the house) exclude black men and black women right from the beginning because basically they are built against the stereotypes of black men and women as ugly, barbaric and promiscuous. Similarly the white ideal of nuclear family with father as the sole breadwinner and master of the household is inapplicable to African American community because historically slavery destroyed the black families where blacks were not married but bred like horses and then sold in the slave markets. Many times the so-called chivalric white gentlemen themselves were the fathers of their mulatto slaves and they themselves sold their own sons and daughters to the highest bidders. In such a situation only matriarchal kinship structure could provide black people with the legitimate comfort, care and sense of belongingness. Even after Emancipation, the enslaving socio-economic-political conditions did not change much and the importance of matriarchal kinship networks that share household spaces, services and goods and that guarantee financial support and child care during emergencies remained intact. In fact, matriarchal kinship structure is the most important survival technique of the African American community. The Moynihan report, however, blames this system as the main cause of African American backwardness. It states that matriarchal kinship structure of black family is ‘so out of line with the rest of American society’ that it ‘seriously retards the progress of the group as a whole.’ It proposes instead African Americans’ willing adoption of white nuclear family structure as both a means of their assimilation in the larger American society and of their achieving equality with the white Americans.
In fact, this pressure to assimilate – to adopt exclusively white perspective and behavior regardless of its applicability – is very strong on the African American community. The African American community responds to this pressure by developing an interest in everything white and developing corresponding disinterest in everything black. For them even the white baby dolls become more precious than a living black girl like Pecola. They fuss over the dismembered dolls (‘Tears threatened to erase the aloofness of their authority. The emotion of years of unfulfilled longing preened in their voices.’ [14]) but look away in disgust when they face Pecola. (‘They tried never to glance at her’ [34]) In their topsy-turvy world view they fail to see the reality: white hegemony as the cause of black misery and instead start seeing what the whites want them to see: black misery as the result of black unworthiness. It causes further misery for the black people because now they themselves become disinterested in their own welfare and on the other hand, engage in the ‘disinterested violence’ towards other black people. Pecola’s scapegoating by the larger African American community is nothing but the extreme example of this disinterested violence: ‘disinterestedness is occasioned specifically by the inability to place people and events into contexts that would flesh out experience and thus make obvious the limitations of present actions or beliefs. It becomes steadily more difficult for characters in The Bluest Eye to do this because they are either separated from the supportive networks that would encourage it and (or as a result) because their placement in American culture does not sanction accurate representations of what that context would be. The result is a community of individuals who are, at times, painfully alienated from each other as each is divided within him/herself. Pecola’s split consciousness at the end of the novel is a literal representation of this doubleness(7); it affects other characters also as distortions or denials of self, but denials and distortions approved and fostered in popular iconographic representation.’4 On the whole, the result of this whole dehumanizing process is very tragic: wasting of black beauty at every step.
लगी लब से और होश उड़ा दिया
यूं पिलाया कि काफ़िर बना दिया।
हमको मयखानों का मेहमान बना
बड़ी मेहरबानी जीना सिखा दिया।
किसी के साथ थी रात देर से आई
यह कहकर उसने दिल जला दिया।
जब वो साथ थे हिसाब क्या देखते
उनका मन था बेहिसाब पिला दिया।
कल ख़्वाब में आई थी मेरे पास वह
ख़ूब बातें करके पहलू में सुला दिया।
Dr Manish Kumar Mishra
Assistant professor
Department of Hindi
K.M.Agrawal College
Kalyan west
TYBA Hindi admission started in K.M.Agrawal College. If anyone is interested then please visit to the college or contact me personally.
9082556682
Dr Manish Kumar Mishra
Department of Hindi
Application of Postcolonial Theory to American Literature
Dr Manisha Patil
After World War II, the process of decolonization started all over the world. It became easier for the colonies to overthrow the power of Western metropolitan centers like Great Britain and France whose military and economic power had weakened due to the heavy toll of the war. Along with political freedom these colonies also asserted their autonomous cultural identity. It was a period of unprecedented optimism and resultant flourishing of creative nationalist anti-colonial writings. From the mid-1960s, all the literature that came out from the British colonies during and after the era of imperialism was called ‘Commonwealth Literature’ – ironically re-inscribing the colonial relationship of center and periphery between Britain and its former colonies. ‘Commonwealth Literature’ was an umbrella term because it included the literatures of such diverse nations as white settler colonies like Australia, Canada, New Zealand; administrative colonies like Indian subcontinent and the combination of both like South Africa where apartheid was legalized. Significantly, the literatures of England and USA were excluded from this umbrella because they were (and are) supposed to be above these bundle of new literatures – England because it was the ‘mother’ country and USA because this daughter had declared its independence far, far back in 1776 and in fact after World War II emerged as a superpower pushing back the mother on periphery. In the 1990s the nomenclature changed from ‘Commonwealth Literature’ to ‘Post colonial Literature’ – foregrounding the oppositional stance of the newly independent nations toward the former imperial center instead of the continuing colonial link between the two. Still, American literature has retained its aura of separateness, specialness and sacredness. This situation is arbitrary and awkward because Canada who shares not just the border but much socio-cultural-political-economic interests and policies of the USA is included in postcolonialism. The authors of ‘Empire Writes Back’ try to justify this arbitrariness as follows:
‘We use the term ‘post-colonial’, however, to cover all the culture affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization to the present day. This is because there is continuity of preoccupations throughout the historical process initiated by European imperial aggression…So the literatures of African countries, Australia, Bangladesh, Canada, Caribbean countries, India, Malaysia, Malta, New Zealand, Pakistan, Singapore, South Pacific Island countries and Sri Lanka are all post-colonial literatures. The literature of the USA should also be placed in this category. Perhaps because of its current position of power and the neo-colonizing role it has played, its post-colonial nature has not been generally recognized. But its relationship with the metropolitan center as it evolved over the last two centuries has been paradigmatic for post-colonial literatures everywhere.’8
The above remark for not including USA under postcolonialism is unsatisfactory. It assumes that USA is a homogenous country and all the people in it are privileged and in a position of power. It ignores the fact that even within the borders of USA, not all the people are free and equal. Slavery, an extreme form of colonization and its legacy racism had been and continues to be a burning issue even today. In fact, USA is an odd combination of colonialism and anti-colonialism. Historically, America was the first colony to break away from the ‘mother’ country England and declare its independence. At the same time, as a settler colony it established itself by displacing the original inhabitants. This paradox has entered the very genes of America. On one hand, it declared itself as free country; a land of opportunity and on the other practiced institutionalized slavery. During the World War II, it fought against the Nazis and Fascists as a great defender of humanity but still followed ‘equal but separate’ policy at home questioning the full humanity of the African Americans. Even today we can see this irony. On one hand there are the ‘neo-cons’ who wish to establish the American empire all over the world and on the other, there are those minority groups – feminists, homosexuals, African Americans, Hispanics, environmentalists – who oppose the hegemony of Protestant, white, male American in various ways and inspire the marginalized people all over the world to fight for their rights. Especially the African American literature and literary theory has been inspirational to various literary and political movements. For example, Harlem Renaissance instigated Negritude movement in Africa and black literature in America motivated Dalit literature in India. In fact there is a lot of interaction among anti-colonial movements in the whole world including USA. To cite another famous example Martin Luther King adopted the non-violence technique of Mahatma Gandhi and in turn influenced Nelson Mandela.
African Americans are the community which has very consciously thought about its own enslavement and has also theorized it. In its reflections about slavery and racism African American literary theory anticipates many of the post-colonial concerns like hegemony, displacement, stereotyping, resistance, subversion, hybridity etc. ‘Hybridity’ the most important concept in post-colonial theory and a condition which is supposed to be the hallmark of post coloniality is perhaps applicable first and foremost to the African Americans. They were the people who had double heritage – racially they were essentially African but white blood had undoubtedly mixed into it. Similarly, culturally every attempt was made to wipe out their African language, culture and heritage and to turn them into a ‘tabula rasa’ by the white masters; yet African culture continued to be a very powerful undercurrent beneath the apparently pure European culture. In fact eventually African culture molded the European culture itself in such a way that during 1920s emerged a new trend known as ‘modernism’ which broke away from the European tradition completely. To go one step further, indeed ‘modernism’ and even ‘postmodernism’ are the products of slavery. Toni Morrison says,
‘…modern life begins with slavery…From a woman’s point of view, in terms of confronting the problems of where the world is now, black women had to deal with post-modern problems in the nineteenth century and earlier. These things had to be addressed by the black people a long time ago: certain kinds of dissolution, the loss of and the need to reconstruct certain kinds of stability. Certain kinds of madness, deliberately going mad…as one of the characters says in the book, “in order not to lose your mind.” These strategies for survival made the truly modern person.’9
Thus, when there are so many affinities between African American literature and postcolonialism, to treat them as totally separate is to succumb to ‘divide and rule’ policy of dominant white ideology whose interest lies in segregating people according to race, sex, class etc. and thereby yield its own power over them. I chose Toni Morrison’s novels as the main area of study because as an African American woman writer her work is informed by the ‘geometrical oppression’ (Barbara Smith’s term)10 – race, sex and class oppression – and it readily gives way to the post-colonial analysis when the vivid experiences of her characters are discussed under the headings like hegemony, displacement, stereotyping, resistance, subversion and hybridity. Indeed, her canon itself reflects the pattern of colonization and decolonization. Her early work (first four novels) struggles with the effects of colonization on African American individuals and the community while her later work (her trilogy) moves into an exploration of decolonized African American culture and history.
जो भी लगा काम का उससे रिश्ता बना लिया
खुदगर्जी में खुद को कितना सस्ता बना लिया।
मैंने कह दी जो सही बात तो बुरा मान गए हो
यूं ही नहीं तुम ने दूरियां आहिस्ता बना लिया।
यह तो निभाने की बात थी लेकिन जाने कैसे
रिश्तों को ही तुमने आगे का रास्ता बना लिया।
इस चकाचौंध वाली रंगीन जिंदगी के लिए ही
तुम ने बाजार में दिल को गुलदस्ता बना लिया।
चांदी के चंद सिक्कों पर तुम इतने फ़िदा हुए
कि कमजर्फ लोगों को ही फरिश्ता बना लिया।
Dr Manish Kumar Mishra
Assistant professor
K.M. Agrawal College
Kalyan west
