Resistance and Reconciliation: Writing in the Commonwealth

By Bruce Bennett Susan Cowan Jacqueline Lo Satendra Nandan And Jen Webb Eds, Canberra: The Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies, 2003, 396 pages, paperback, $39.95. Reviewed by Ken Gelder in the October 2003 issue.

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This is a collection of papers from the 2001 Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (ACLALS) conference: a small selection of the many presentations over several days. The opening editorial is defensive about its Commonwealth self-identity, and so it ought to be since some of the places covered by papers here (Singapore, India, the Caribbean, etc.) have long since gone their own way. On the other hand, the collection is generally upbeat about literature and the role it plays in what are often post-Commonwealth nations. I'll focus in this review on the contributions dealing with Australia, where the Commonwealth, of course, is still in business.

The topic for this conference, 'resistance and reconciliation', offers two apparently contradictory practices which the best essay in the collection, by Stephen Slemon, tries to draw back together. Slemon looks at two (non-Australian) examples of repatriation, so his project is not a literary one. But his concluding claim that resistance and reconciliation both need 'complex voicing' may be literary in kind nonetheless because it asks for a certain level of readership and a certain density of text. Other commentators make similar points, whether or not literature is their focus. Kay Schaffer suggests that the 1997 Bringing Them Home report confronts 'new listeners and readers with new awareness'----which it may well do, for those who are reading and listening. Dorothy Lane follows a discussion of novels by Peter Carey and Mudrooroo with the claim that 'one must unravel on a more profound level the patterns of thought and language that impelled the decisions and actions of the past'. Again, this is fine----for those literary critics who have the time and training to do just that.

The problem here is that the literary (in all its textual 'complexity') runs the risk of being reified and then offered as some sort of contemporary salvation, some way out of postcolonial impasses. For Stella Borg Barthet, a novel by David Malouf can 'give wholeness of art to the contrary movements of resistance and reconciliation'. This is cheerful faith in writing-as-therapy. In a more interesting, if convoluted, essay, Chris Prentice compares some recent Australian and New Zealand perceptions of reconcilation and cultural practice. She rightly notes that reconcilation should remain open and contested. But for some reason she then speaks against 'productive' cultural exchanges, and ends the essay with a bizarre, utopian affirmation of 'the value of reading' as the means of radically challenging 'the national image': especially 'colonial and postcolonial poetry'. So much for politics (or anything else) in this scenario. It would be difficult to imagine a greater narrowing of the field than this. But think, for example, of the landscape poetry of Les A Murray. To suggest that this poses a radical challenge to the national image (whatever that might be) is something close to fanciful.

Literature may be challenging in some respects, consoling in others. Its complexities may provoke as much as alienate; besides, it has its own various shallownesses to deal with. It can also be radically uncertain about its place in the world: who it is speaking to, who is listening (or reading), what effects it can have. But literary critics can ride over all this roughshod. Bill Ashcroft, in his essay 'Resistance and Transformation', blithely connects 'resistance literature' to 'national liberation', even suggesting that such literature has 'a powerful effect upon the dominant society and hence, upon global power relations'. This is literary cheerfulness taken to the limit, but it is really just a rhetorical flourish. Ashcroft's keyword 'transformation' is deployed in the same way. No one will argue that transformation (social? political? cultural? economic?) supplies 'a model for all postcolonial power relations'. But this is one of those generalisations that says nothing and everything: a key to all mythologies, to recall a phrase from another literary work, which locks away as much as it opens.

Sylvia Kleinart's essay 'Landscapes of Memory' speaks not of transformation but of 'cultural renewal'. She looks at the 'assimilated' artwork of Albert Namatjira and Ronald Bull, arguing instead that they work to renew Aboriginal interests in local landscapes. I wasn't really convinced by this: it would be worth knowing just how Aboriginal people do renew themselves culturally through these works, a feature this paper never explores. Other essays on Aboriginal literature take cultural renewal for granted and prefer the category of resistance to that of reconciliation (which doesn't get much support from anyone in this collection). A more interesting piece comes from Anna Johnston, on two Quaker missionaries working in Tasmania during the early 1830s. These folk emerge, precisely, as self-reflexive literary types, producing 'an extraordinary number of texts of one kind or another. For Johnston, their egalitarianism and humanitarianism arise organically out of this condition, enabling them to be cast as counter-cultural, as 'honest and intelligent agents of colonialism' no less. This fascinating essay might wish that all colonial missionaries were so well intentioned. Instead, it offers these two Quakers as both typical and idiosyncratic, representative and affecting, critical in many respects and yet almost without influence: almost, but not quite. They provide a better model for literature's role today than some of the cheerier views offered elsewhere in this collection.

Citation

• Ken Gelder. 'Review: Resistance and Reconciliation: Writing in the Commonwealth by Bruce Bennett Susan Cowan Jacqueline Lo Satendra Nandan and Jen Webb eds' [online]. Network Review of Books (Perth, Australian Public Intellectual Network), October 2003. Availability: <please cite the web address here> ISSN 1833-0932. [accessed 19 June 2013].

Back Cover Blurb

• Resistance and Reconciliation: Writing in the Commonwealth is a collection of twenty-seven essays and papers by international scholars on issues of interest and concern in Commonwealth countries.
  
  Questions of race, class, gender, religion, war, politics and aesthetics recur as contributors to this volume consider the need for resistance and the prospects for reconciliation in a variety of cultures.
  
  Contributors to this book include JM Coetzee, Stephen Slemon, Tim Cribb, Elleke Boehmer, Ken Goodwin, Kirsten Holst Petersen, Makarand Paranjape, Santosh Sareen, Ndaeyo Uko, Paul Sharrad and Bill Ashcroft.
  
  'The essays in this book show that Commonwealth writing continues to address issues of human need and significance. It continues to raise difficult questions, to challenge us to deeper levels of thought and feeling. What more could we ask of it?' - Bruce Bennett