In Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities, Avtar Brah proclaims her vision of England as a “diaspora space,” a conceptual category, which is inhabited not only by immigrants and their descendants, but equally, by those whom she also
constructs as indigenous. Brah argues:
In the diaspora space called “England,” for example, African-Caribbean, Irish, Asian, Jewish and other diasporas intersect among themselves as well as the entity constructed as “Englishness,” thoroughly re-inscribing it in the process. Englishness has been formed in the crucible of the internal colonial encounter with Ireland, Scotland and Wales; imperial rivalries with other European countries; and imperial conquests abroad.
In the postwar period, this Englishness is continually reconstituted via a multitude of border crossings in and through other diasporic formations.
(209)
What Brah appears to be suggesting is that England, as the “diaspora space,” is both multiple and inhabited in different ways; based upon her argument that this concept of
“diaspora space” marks “the intersectionality of contemporary conditions of transmigrancy of people, capital, commodities and culture.” Thus, she uses the term
“diaspora space” to embrace the “entanglement of the genealogies of dispersal with those of staying out,” decentralizing the subject position of “migrant,” “indigenous” or
“insider/outsider” (242). The concept of Englishness, from the perspective of Brah, is therefore continually negotiated and reconstituted through border crossings.
Anne-Marie Fortier further extends Brah’s use of the term “diaspora space” in Migrant Belongings: Memory, Space and Identity, where she argues that this “diaspora
space” inserts itself between localism and transnationalism, intertwining new webs of belonging. In other words, both Brah and Fortier argue that transnational identities arise from the border crossings of the diaspora, leading to the emergence and development of a form of politics which is simultaneously global and local. The question relating to the ways in which both the “local” and the “global” figure within this overall formation of transnationality ultimately challenges the traditional view of Englishness; meanwhile, such question also challenges the “minoritising and peripheralising impulses of the cultures of dominance” (Brah 210).
Brah’s diaspora relies mainly upon the economic, political and cultural effects of
the crossing or “transgressing” of different borders; indeed, she notes that it is in the border-crossing experience “where contemporary forms of trans-cultural identities are constituted” (238). Meanwhile, from the standpoint of James Clifford, diaspora is seen as a transit point from which people move simultaneously from “routes” and “roots”;
in this case, diaspora is “a signifier not simply of transnationality of movement, but also of political struggle to define the local, as a distinctive community, in historical contexts of displacement” (308). To some extent, the transnational movement and experiences of displacement, which all diasporas inevitably have to come to terms with, can be seen in the “politics of identity” as a strategy to be undertaken by diasporas themselves as a way of helping them to deal with differences and “otherness,” in order to negotiate their “positionality” in the adopted or host country.25
Such diasporic experience can, however, also be perceived in a very positive light.
Indeed, as Edward Said argues, whilst “most people are principally aware of one culture, one setting, one home, exiles are aware of at least two, with this plurality of vision giving rise to an awareness of simultaneous dimensions, an awareness that – to
borrow a phrase from music – is ‘contrapuntal’” (Reflections 186). This “contrapuntal”
25 In the first edition of Diaspora: a Journal of Transnational Studies, William Safran defines a diaspora based upon shared or imagined experiences of dispersion from a homeland, but this rigid definition applies only to Jewish experiences of migration or other cases similar to the traditional Jewish model. Clifford, however, considers Safran’s definition of diaspora to be too narrow; he therefore redefines it, extending it through the conception of diaspora around the metaphor of travel (252). In this dissertation, the discussion of diaspora is not based upon Safran’s definition which concerns about a belief in a return to homeland or about the construction of homeland after people’s dispersion from their homeland; instead, the focus of this dissertation will concern about Clifford’s notion of “routes” and “roots.”
conception effectively conveys the simultaneous dimensions of diasporic identities, with such emphasis on heterogeneity in his contrapuntal conception requiring an analysis of national identity which is capable of moving beyond the homogeneous, fixed conception of one nation, one culture and one ethnicity. According to Said, the
“contrapuntal” consciousness attempts to draw out the silenced or forgotten part of one’s other history in order to demonstrate that “there was always some form of active resistance” (Culture xii).
In his observations on Said, Clifford notes that his “contrapuntal” conception characterizes one of the positive aspects of the conditions of exile, arguing that the concepts of diaspora and hybridization allow people to view contemporary life as “a contrapuntal modernity” (256). Clifford extends the “contrapuntal criticism” of Said from reflections on exile, to diasporic experiences. For Clifford, both the experiences of exile and the experiences of diasporas share the conditions of multiple visions, since their identities and experiences involve the awareness of more than two cultures;
however, as he points out, the only difference between them is that the former includes
“the more individualist, existential focus” whilst the latter involves “networks of community, collective practices of displaced dwelling” (365).
In addition to his use of the term “contrapuntal” to characterize his conception of the conditions of exile, Said also uses the term to read the cultural archives, by
introducing, in Culture and Imperialism, the way in which the music idea (the contrapuntal structure in music), can be applied to our reading of the literature or to
what he refers to as “contrapuntal reading.” According to Said,
As we look back at the cultural archive, we begin to re-read it not univocally, but contrapuntally, with a simultaneous awareness both of the metropolitan history that is narrated and of those other histories against which (and together, with which) the dominating discourse acts. In the counterpoint of Western classical music, various themes play off one another, with only a provisional privilege being given to any particular one . . . [I]n the same way, I believe we can read and interpret English novels, for example, whose engagement (usually suppressed for the most part) with the West Indies or India, say, is shaped and perhaps even determined by the specific history of colonization, resistance, and finally native nationalism. At this point alternatives emerge, and they become institutionalized or discursively stable entities. (Culture 51)
Further explaining the way that Said conceives this contrapuntal reading, Childs notes that “by turning the narrative inside out, temporarily centralizing its margins, [although]
Said aims to interpret the setting of the English novel in the historical context of colonialism in his reference to the contrapuntal reading of the novel, the simultaneous awareness of multiple histories which he attempts to evoke through his contrapuntal reading seems to me, a crucial approach to see how Englishness is negotiated by immigrants”.26 If Englishness has long been constituted as whiteness, to the exclusion of all else, and England has thus come to be perceived as “one culture, one setting, one
26 Responding to Said’s reference to “contrapuntal” reading, Childs notes that “such emphasis on borders, heterogeneity, and reading against the grain, require analyses of national identity which move away from the binaries of domestic and foreign, native, immigrant, belonging and alienation, and instead consider the people, cultures and discourses that cross or collapse these categories”; see Childs, “Where Do You Belong?” 51.
home,” the immigrants and their children in a diaspora space, like England, will be aware of both their multiplicity, which is brought about as a result of their border-crossing or their transnational, trans-cultural experience, and also by the simultaneity of their multiple histories.
Thus, if immigrants and their children are simultaneously aware of the multiple histories inscribed in English national identity, then the question arises as to the ways in which such awareness is conducted and the extent to which Englishness is at stake.
This is the main issue to be discussed in the remainder of this dissertation with reference to the postwar diasporic British novels and their challenges to the fixed notion of Englishness, along with explicit issues of immigration and race.