UvA
Migrant perspectives - Peripheral relations
How literature re-imagines the Other in a Globalised Present
Tayeb Salih – Season of Migration to the North - 1969 Nii Ayikwei Parkes – The Makings of You - 2010
Ninke Overbeek MA Thesis prof. dr. M. Rosello
Content
Introduction p. 3
Chapter One p. 5
Chapter Two p. 19
Chapter Three p. 35
Comparison and Conclusion p. 57
Works Cited p. 62
Introduction
We seem to be in need of an image that describes and represents our present globalised world. This need has possibly emerged under the influence of the internet, functioning as a doubling reflection on our lives, on life itself as we see it represented, and in which we imagine ourselves as part of that representation. Under the influence of
representations of our contemporary world in modern media, it is hard to see ourselves as inhabitants of a country or even a city or village. Instead, we seem to try to relate ourselves to the entire globe at any given moment, causing our perception of a possible centre to our world to be uprooted.
Literature and poetry have the structural capacity to re-imagine our lens on the world. These written narratives can transform that which was formerly known to the Self as 'known reality' into a new perspective, which incorporates the lense(s) provided by our encounter with the Other. The lenses with which we look at the world and recognise or construct it as a recognisable coherence, are altered by our encounter with those interpretations that deviate from our frame of reference. This process is
accelerated when the perspective from which the story is narrated, is identfied as
'migrant'. But this perspective also entails a question of context. In which context do we locate, relate to and read these narratives told from a migrant perspective, and how do we start to reconstruct such a context?
Furthermore, a migrant perspective has political and cultural connotations, and is related to historical processes of decolonization and contemporary diaspora. It raises political and aesthetic questions that tie in with these historical processes in a globalised context. Lastly, it seems to operate in a peripheral space. This raises questions on the location of that periphery and of its centre: on where it is imagined, and by whom.
Reading migrant narratives in our current globalised present as I have described above, doubles the problem of these center-periphery relations. It is in this context that my questions about the relevance of the periphery as a concept to bring into relation to my objects, that both narrate from a migrant perspective, originated.
In the first chapter, I shortly introduce my objects and demonstrate how they tie in with the current debate around post-colonial and post-migratory literature. I then introduce the concepts that I will relate to these objects and formulate the main question that I will try to answer throughout this thesis. My investigation is how Rancières distribution of the sensible and Shklovksy's defamiliarisation of perception, help to further nuance center-periphery relations, and provide pathways between centre and periphery through the aesthetic. In chapter two, I analyse relations of periphery at stake in Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih. I investigate how this narrative re-imagines the context it is constituted in, and provides a new distribution of the sensible. In chapter three, I make a similar analysis of The Makings of You by Nii Ayikwei Parkes. In the last chapter, I make a comparison of the way these objects relate to my concepts and draw a conclusion.
I have aimed to depart from the objects I chose to analyse, to see how they are in dialogue with several of the concepts I am discussing. I am aware that I introduce my concepts first, but this is only for the sake of the structure of my argument. Sometimes my initial intention to understand the context in which these objects are constituted might have made me focus on center-periphery binaries too heavily, where other questions, of specific aesthetics and politics at stake within the narrative, could have been foregrounded more thoroughly. Nevertheless, I hope that my analysis demonstrates the center-periphery relations at stake in these objects with nuance and that I have re-imagined the contexts in which these narratives operate with precision.
Chapter 1
Migrant narrative, the concept of periphery
and the distribution of the sensible
1. Migrant narrative and objects
When a text is written from the perspective of a migrant narrator, something interesting is at stake both in terms of focalization and in the surrounding social, geographical and cultural context. Intersections of the personal with the political come to the fore, and the narrative seems to call for an investigation of its position within a globalising context. I am investigating in which ways texts written from such a perspective grant agency to these migrant voices, by analysing the way their focalization ties in with the globalising context in which they are embedded (Bal 41).
Ahmed Gamal, in “The Global and the Post-colonial in post-migratory literature”, emphasizes how post-migratory literature ‘can offer a definitive new
perspective on the borderline of the global and the post-colonial’ (596). He distinguishes between post-colonial literature—those narratives that emerged in the '80s and '90s of the twentieth century in a post-colonial context—and migrant literature, which is commonly understood as a subgenre of post-colonial literature. He then refers to Elleke Boehmer, who has distinguished a new category within migrant literature:
post-migratory literature. This category was introduced by Boehmer in her book Colonial
and Post-colonial literatures: Migrant Metaphors to redefine the migrant literature of
the early 2000s. (596). Gamal suggests that authors writing in this new post-colonial subgenre resist neo-imperial designs and construct transcultural contact zones (596). He writes that these authors are ‘able to combine elements of the two cultures in order to
articulate new syncretic forms and experiences’ (597). Furthermore, he states that post-migratory writers or border intellectuals ‘negotiate their relationship to the nation of the periphery (i.e. that of their birth), the history that precedes and threatens to determine them, and the centred, western canon into which they strive to write themselves’ (597).
Gamal emphasizes the possibilities of a migrant narrative perspective to renegotiate old relations between the national and the global and suggests its syncretic possibilities. But, he relates these narratives to a context of centre and periphery, locating the Western perspective in the former and the migrant narrative in the latter, and concludes that the migrant perspective strives to write itself into the (Western) centre. To me, his description describes the exact axis on which the concept of the periphery is both productive and problematic as an analytic lens through which to read these migrant narratives.
In this thesis, I will discuss two literary works, which both narrate from a migrant perspective, and relate them to the concept of periphery. The first work
discussed is Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North, a book that was first published in Arabic in 1966, and translated into English by Denys Johnson-Davies in 1969. The second work is The makings of you, a collection of autobiographical poetry written by British/ Ghanaian author Nii Ayikwei Parkes, which was first published as a collection in 2010 (4). Salih's Season of Migration to the North, seen in its historical context, can be categorised as (early) post-colonial literature written from a migrant perspective, where Parkes' The makings of you better fits Elleke Boehmer's definition of post-migratory literature. I will investigate how the contextual differences in which these narratives emerged, can be understood and imagined differently through a centre-periphery lens. Furthermore, I will investigate the ways in which Rancière's notion of the distribution of the sensible provides a perspective in which the concept of periphery
can be seen not merely as a socioeconomic construct, but also as an aesthetic lens. I will argue that the shift in perspective from the socioeconomic to the aesthetic, when
thinking of the periphery as a concept, helps to create a pathway out of the binaries that are provoked by the concept in the first place. On this point, I would like to refer to Stephen Clingman, who problematizes the imagined image of the global world as “two competing descriptions and tendencies, of the many and the one. He argues:
From a certain point of view the world of the many is the global itself. From another angle… there is a counterveiling reality, governed by the one or
singularity when it comes to questions of location, identity and
identification, whether considered in terms of ethnicity, nationality or region (Clingman 5).
Clingman refers to the images of multiculturality, hybridity and perpetual in-betweenness that have sprung from this double-bind, but argues that:
It seems we need a new form of negotiation in the face of this complexity: one that will recognise difference without assuming anything like hard and fast boundaries, which will cater to the reality of differentiation without cutting off the possibility of connection ... we need a new way to understand the complexities of identity and location ... – something even like a
mechanism for rethinking their interactions (6).
What I am proposing is that the periphery, especially when reread through Rancière, can be such a mechanism, but only under specific conditions and in specific terms, which I hope to specify in this thesis.
To emphasize the possibilities of the aesthetic realm and to add linguistic nuance to Rancière’s distribution of the sensible, I will use Shklovsky's account on the possibilities of the artistic act to slow down perception and to defamiliarize the familiar
(Shklovsky 55). Within the following two chapters, I will also take a look at Bakhtin's argument on speech genres and the interrelation between the normative and subjective within them, to make a connection between linguistic aesthetics and Rancière’s distribution of the sensible (Bakhtin 88).
2. Periphery
Esther Peeren, Hanneke Stuit and Astrid van Weyenberg open their introduction to
Peripheral Visions in the Globalizing Present: Spaces, Mobilities, Aesthetics by
questioning the relevance of the concept of periphery:
Globalization discourses, whether proposing a flattened world (Friedman) or one traversed by disjunctive flows (Appadurai), tend to stress the
inadequacy of centre-periphery models. Yet it seems impossible to
understand the globalising present without making some distinction between what is (becoming) central and what is (becoming) peripheral in
geographical, political, economic, social and/ or cultural terms. (5)
Here I will investigate shortly in which ways the concept has been used by several authors, to see how it can be productive and might simultaneously be inadequate (as Peeren, Stuit and van Weyenberg emphasize), in relation to an analysis of migrant narrative. The following authors have emphasized the periphery's function as a
socioeconomic construct. Later on I will also pay attention to those who have addressed its aesthetic image-function.
Several authors who work with the concept of periphery have taken into consideration the problematics that it provokes, noting its roots in post-colonial theory, and the implication that it represents a Eurocentric perspective, to which the 'Other' or 'outsides' are peripheral. This hierarchy seems to have its roots in a teleological
narrative, in which the Eurocentric is positioned as a modern front-runner, to which peripheral societies are 'lacking', or 'behind'. Timothy Brennan, in “The Economic image-function of the Periphery” links the problematics of the concept to the economic interests that it nurtures:
By image-function (of the periphery, my emphasis) I mean more than simply the ideological conditioning or customs governing the dissonances of civilizational value. What should emerge from the term ... is a sense of the rules of perception (my emphasis) – those demands made under capitalism in a phase when production has come prominently to include information as one of its commodities. (101)
Apart from supporting capitalism-infused economic interests, the concept of periphery, as a construct that operates in a teleological frame, is tied in with the idea of modernity. Brennan argues:
The great point of contact between economic history and post-colonial studies can be found in debates over the rise of modernity although the rarefied nature of the discussion in our circles produces a deep uncertainty, even a deliberate ambiguity, about the status of value in the study of the non-European or non-US parts of the world. (107)
Brennan hereby shows how the image-function of the periphery not only fuels economic interests, but also influences the perception of which economies are deemed modern or not. He goes on to state: ‘I am suggesting that the global periphery is a useable idea... and that its existence is preserved by a way of a fiercely defended set of regulations, governing what can and cannot be said about it’ (101). Here, Brennan's account on the image-function of the periphery already ties in with Rancière’s distribution of the sensible, which I will return to later.
It is the uncertainty about the implications of the rise of modernity for the economic but also cultural value of the non-European or non-US parts of the world, which is also problematized by Benita Parry in “The presence of the past in peripheral modernities”. She complicates the teleological worldview that the concept of periphery is constituted in, by arguing how several stages of economic and cultural development can co-exist in any given 'peripheral modernity', and that the question of whether an area is modern or not (and who has agency over that decision), cannot be answered in black and white terms:
In their representations of the colonial project, the imperial nations had cast themselves as the only creators and inhabitants of modern times, and therefore as donors or exporters of material modernization, social
enlightenment and moral progress to the retarded and dependent peoples of Africa, Asia and South America. This conceited account of the imperial centres as constituting the normative temporality, prompted the
anthropologist Johannes Fabian in the 1980s to address the scandal of denying coevalness, or the sharing of the same time, to the worlds beyond the technically advanced metropoles (14).
Like Parry, several authors have pointed out the political implications of the concept of the periphery. Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan in “Globalisation, desire and the politics of representation” distinguishes between those 'centres' of the world, often considered to be located in Europe and the United States, and those deemed peripheral or subaltern to these centres. He questions who is peripheral or 'Other' to whom, and questions what kind of sacrifice is needed – for those people and cultures that have been deemed peripheral, to be addressed and represented in a way that is more attentive to their self-preservation (321). In Radhakrishnan's account of globalization, as in Parry and
Brennan, the centre lies in the West (and in capitalism and modern society), while the peripheral lies on the outskirts. This interpretation of the concept as a socioeconomic construct, serves the Euro- or US-centric worldview that all of these authors
simultaneously try to renegotiate.
Two authors who succeed most persuasively in a renegotiation of the concept are Joe and Sally Comaroff. In their “Theory from the South: Or, how Euro-America is Evolving Toward Africa”, they paint a refreshing picture of the development of the West towards the South, conveying more agency to the emergent economies and cultural value of the African continent. They too, note that ‘the object of post-colonial theory has been to disrupt the Western telos of modernity’ (115). Just like Parry, they emphasize how modernity has never been located exclusively in Europe, that it was ‘almost from the start, a North-South collaboration’ (116). But in addition, the Comaroffs suggest:
that contemporary world historical processes are visibly altering received geographies of core- and periphery, relocating southward not only some of the most innovative and energetic modes of producing value, but the driving impulse of contemporary capitalism as both a material and cultural
formation. (117)
All authors that I have mentioned so far, have used the concept of periphery as a
socioeconomic construct, have pointed out its relation to modernism and capitalism and have brought to the fore the problematic political implications that entails. The
Comaroffs have made a first attempt to shift the centre towards the periphery and the periphery towards the centre, thereby reversing the teleological narrative of modernity starting in 'the North'.
periphery-centre divide. As Peeren, Stuit and van Weyenberg emphasize, the globalizing present can be understood in terms of ... what is becoming central and
becoming peripheral (5). I am particularly interested in the process of becoming,
because it frames the concept of periphery as a flexible concept, opposed to a static model, and suggests a possible pathway of transcendence between the centre and the periphery. Peeren, Stuit and van Weyenberg discuss this as well: ‘We want to take up Brennan's suggestion that the periphery's image-function, though heavily policed in dominant discourse, maintains a certain flexibility that aesthetic creation is particularly adept at exploiting' (21). They demonstrate this function of aesthetic creation through the methodology of William Kentridge’s 'peripheral thinking'. This method, derived from Kentridge’s artistic research to create a concept for an opera, involves tracing and noting down all thoughts and associations that come to mind while focusing on one particular object (Kentridge) This offers possible pathways to ‘openness to what comes to us from beyond the borders of what we think we already know’ and can ‘propel our thinking into unforeseen directions’ (Peeren, Stuit and van Weyenberg 30).
Simultaneously, this methodology emphasizes how centre and periphery are interrelated. Even in a socioeconomic interpretation of the concept, there is an interdependency between centre and periphery. Returning briefly to Timothy Brennan:
Among those things that need to be quantified – that must be assigned value – are unrecompensed, cost-saving services offered by the periphery,
economically necessary conditions uniquely provided by the periphery, and (…) the effect of the image-function of the periphery on the behavior of economic actors (111).
Both the aesthetic and the socioeconomic interpretations of the periphery suggest an interrelation between centre and periphery, and both offer possibilities of a pathway or
trajectory between the two. To nuance the possible workings of this trajectory, and to focus more precisely on the distinctive functions of the political and the aesthetic within it, I would like to take the concept as I have discussed it so far, and place it in a frame provided by Rancière, in his account on the distribution of the sensible.
3. Periphery and the distribution of the sensible
Rancière's notion of the distribution of the sensible in his article “The Aesthetic Dimension: Aesthetics, Politics, Knowledge” argues that there is a distinguishable divide between the realms of the ethical and the aesthetic (4-5). Several interpretations of the concept of periphery (as discussed before) can be roughly distinguished by these two categories (2). Jacques Rancière departs from Kant's Critique of Judgement to distinguish three forms of knowledge perception: perceived knowledge, perception through desire, and a third faculty, which he relates to Kant's aesthesis, and which is the distribution of knowledge through aesthetics. Kant describes three forms of knowledge perception through the image of a palace and the ways it can be perceived. ‘In the first of these, the faculty of signification rules over the faculty that conveys sensations: the understanding enlists the services of imagination in order to subordinate the sense given. This is the order of knowledge’ (Rancière “The Aesthetic Dimension” 2).
Here, knowledge is perceived through a subordination of the sensory perceptions to the faculty of signification: that which is perceived is categorised to make sense. I understand this as a form of recognition in how it relates to the normative—that which is perceived can be categorised into an already established frame of knowledge, because we have recognised it. The second faculty that Kant describes is that of desire. This faculty of sensation takes command over the faculty of knowledge: ‘This law views the
palace as an object of pride, jealousy, or disdain’ (Kant qtd. in Rancière 2). Here, knowledge perception is achieved through desire and results in an emotional response. But when it comes to the role of aesthetics, Kant distinguishes a third faculty.
There is a third way of looking at the palace, a way that sees it and
appreciates it neither as an object of knowledge nor as an object of desire. In this case, neither faculty rules over the other: the either/ or no longer
works... (Kant qtd. in Rancière “The Aesthetic dimension” 2)
From this follows that, in the realm of ethics, knowledge perception is either perceived through recognition or through desire. In this third faculty, knowledge perception is achieved through neither recognition nor desire, but a non-hierarchal form of sensory perception, which does not frame that which is perceived back into the normative. The concept of periphery as a socioeconomic construct, in my opinion, operates in the realm of the ethical, because it reinforces preconceived images and frames about the present world. The realm of the aesthetic then, can be interpreted in relation to the concept of periphery in two ways.
First, the concept itself can be understood as operating on an aesthetic plane. By this, I mean that its image-function can be seen as an aesthetic endeavor, in that it allows renegotiation of the faculties of recognition and desire into a third and unknown faculty. In The politics of aesthetics: the distribution of the sensible, Rancière elaborates on the function of the subjective in relation to the normative in this aesthetic realm,. He states:
I call the distribution of the sensible the system of self-evident facts of sense perception that simultaneously discloses the existence of something in common and the delimitations that define the respective parts and positions within it. A distribution of the sensible therefore establishes at one and the
same time something common that is shared and exclusive parts. (12)
Here, what comes to the fore is the way in which the conditions of sensory perception are distributed, partially through normativity and partially through subjectivity. When read as an image function, and especially in Kentridge’s account on peripheral thinking, the periphery operates as an aesthetic construct, which is not necessarily tied to the normativity of the concept when it operates in an ethical realm.
Second, apart from the concept of periphery itself possibly operating in an aesthetic realm, the aesthetic characteristics of the objects discussed can be related both to the concept of periphery as operating in an ethical realm and to the aesthetic interpretation of the periphery. This assumes that even the aesthetics of the given object can be renegotiated through a lens of centre and periphery.
There are several assumptions that can be made when combining
Rancière’s distribution of the sensible with the image-function of the periphery. First, it suggests that a possible pathway between centre and periphery is provided by an aesthetic endeavour, which makes it interesting to analyse the subjective perspectives provided by the objects I will analyse. Second, it problematizes the role of the political in the these objects, because the realm of the aesthetic seems to shift the lens from a frame of normativity into the realm of the subjective. At the same time, Rancière makes a strong claim for the subjective being highly political as well, because the subjective choices that are made within the aesthetic realm determine the conditions of that which can and that which cannot be perceived and by whom (The politics of aesthetics 12).
Finally, when using the periphery as an aesthetic lens, something
interesting happens to the role of the temporal and the geographical. Because they seem to be uprooted in an aesthetic context, the role of the teleological narrative in which the periphery has its function in a post-colonial context, loses its significance. This opens up
possibilities to renegotiate the relation between periphery and centre and thereby the contexts in which these migrant narratives operate.
The aesthetic realm is also described by Rancière as having a possible neutralizing effect.
The aesthetic configuration replays the terms of the difference in such a way as to neutralize them and to make that neutralization the staging of a conflict that is in excess of consensual distribution. (Rancière, “The Aesthetic
dimension” 5)
Two distinctive meanings of aesthetics as knowledge perception seem to be at stake in Ranciere's argument, which make the realm of the aesthetic a somewhat problematic thought concept. Rancière mentions Bourdieu and Lyotard's critique on the concept. Bourdieu, coming from a sociological perspective, dismisses it as a level of abstract thought reserved for privileged classes. Lyotard rejects it because of the ‘disinterested judgment’ it implies; a philosophical illusion, a translation of the disconnection between beauty and the socially constructed world of art connoisseurs (Rancière “The Aesthetic Dimension” 4). In both cases, the realm of the aesthetic is highly related to a privileged class, and makes the distribution of knowledge through aesthetics an elitist endeavor. In the description of the aesthetic configuration as mentioned above, the aesthetic is explained as a 'replaying of the terms of difference' in such a way as to neutralize difference and make that neutralizing a stage of conflict in excess of consensual distribution. In the latter description, the realm of aesthetics seems to imply a loss of agency, a depoliticizing or rather colonizing of difference into a realm of neutrality (Rancière “The Aesthetic Dimension” 5).
However, in the beginning of Kant's argument as mentioned by Rancière, knowledge perception or judgement through the aesthetic is explained as a third element
that brings together perceived knowledge and perception through desire (Rancière “The Aesthetic Dimension” 2) Rather than neutralizing, the aesthetic seems capable of adding to perception. The aesthetic can be considered as a possible realm of reimagination—a heightened or altered perception, which can provide a new frame of thought. Viktor Shklovsky, in his account on the aesthetics of poetic language, demonstrates how the aesthetic can provide an alteration or addition to consensual distribution in the ethical realm. He begins by showing how perception is impeded by habituation:
If we start to examine the general laws of perception, we see that as
perception becomes habitual, it becomes automatic ...we apprehend objects only as shapes with imprecise extentions; we do not see them in their entirety, but rather recognise them by their main characteristics. (Shklovsky 55)
Shklovsky proceeds to describe how Tolstoy emphasizes this role of habituation: I was cleaning a room and, meandering about, approached the divan and couldn't remember whether or not I had dusted it. Since these movements are habitual and unconscious, I could not remember... – so that if I had dusted it and forgot ... then it was the same as if I had not. If some conscious person had been watching, then the fact could be established. If, however, no one was looking ... if the whole complex lives of many people go
unconsciously, then such lives are as if they had never been. (Tolstoy qtd. in Shklovsky 55)
Two elements in this account need emphasizing: the importance of the role of repetition in habituating and familiarizing an object or action, and the invisibility that is implied to be the result of habitualization, of not looking consciously.
Art exists (so) that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects “unfamiliar”, to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception. (Shklovsky 55)
I would like to relate Shklovsky’s account on the function of the artistic in language to Rancière’s description of the aesthetic realm, in order to emphasize the possibility of knowledge perception through the aesthetic, not by neutralizing the 'difference' into the habitual, but precisely by widening, altering or reimagining the perceptions of the habitual, thereby opening up the frame through which it is perceived.
In this chapter, I have introduced the topic of my research: the migrant narrative perspective and the implications of its focalization, and the concept of
periphery as a lens to read these narratives and reconstruct or renegotiate the context in which they are perceived. In the following chapters I will investigate in which ways this concept is productive as an analytic approach to my objects and how, when read through Rancière and Shklovsky, it can provide an image (a mechanism in Clingman's terms), to imagine the contexts in which migrant narratives can be perceived otherwise. I am assuming that a shift in the emphasis on periphery from the ethical realm towards the aesthetic, can shine a light on relations of modernity, temporality, the political, the personal and aesthetics in the works analysed.
Chapter two
A pathway out of centre-periphery binaries in
Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North
Tayeb Salih wrote Season of Migration to the North in the 1960s, four years after Sudan gained its independence from the British. It has been described as a counternarrative to Conrad's Heart of Darkness (Shaheen, 156-171) and as an 'Arabian Nights in reverse' (Salih). It was first published in an English translation by Denys Johnson-Davies in 1969 by publisher Heineman for its 'African authors' series (Al Halool 31).1 In this
book, an unnamed narrator tells us the story of his return to Sudan after studying in London. Upon his arrival, he is introduced by his grandfather to Mustafa Sa'eed, a stranger from Khartoum who has settled in the village. Soon it becomes apparent that Sa'eed too has studied in London, but his experiences abroad were less innocent. Throughout the narrative, in repetitive patterns constructing a circular structure, he unfolds his story for the unnamed narrator, while the boundaries between their two identities become progressively less defined. One night, Sa'eed tells the unnamed narrator that, in case of Sa'eed's death, he will inherit his belongings. He gives the narrator the responsibility for his wife and sons. The next day, Sa'eed has disappeared, leaving the unnamed narrator with the burden of his legacy. The narrator discovers how much Sa'eed’s story mirrors his own. Both men have left their village of origin to study abroad in England. Both have returned to their home country and found it hard to readjust to the Sudanese lifestyle. They have become accustomed to British manners, modern ideas about the rights of the individual, women's rights and modern technology. Their identities have become those of migrants, neither at home in Sudan, nor in
1 I am unfortunately unable to read the narrative in Arabic, leaving me with the English translation for my analysis. I
have to take into consideration that this probably colors my interpretation of the narrative. Moreover, it means I will read the book in the language of the colonizer, whose legacy is thoroughly criticized throughout this narrative.
England. The fact that their newfound customs and habits belong to the former coloniser problematizes their position in England and in the Sudanese village as well.
However, there is a major difference between them. Mustafa Sa'eed was one of the first Sudanese to study in London, with all of the effects of exoticism and racial stereotyping that entailed. In addition, Sa'eed has acted a particular part in London, seducing British women and leaving them behind, after which most of them have died under dubious circumstances. Sa'eed’s story is shaped by themes of revenge and resentment, the narrator's is not. At the same time, the resemblances in their life stories and the responsibility for Sa'eed’s family which he inherits make it difficult for the narrator to distinguish himself from Sa'eed’s legacy. In this way, Season of
Migration to the North problematizes the migrant perspective in a post-colonial context.
It is this doubling of the migrants’ narrating perspective which makes the book stand out; it has a self-reflexivity in focalization that produces an extra layer of travel and of negotiation between the cultures represented (Bal 39). I will analyse the focalization in the opening chapter, to investigate how this complex perspective is introduced to the reader and how it reconstructs the context in which the narrative is constituted, through the workings of its aesthetics.
The narrative contains a peripheral narrating perspective and lays bare economic and social centre-periphery relations. Furthermore, the narrative
self-reflexively revalidates which perspectives on colonial history are central and which are peripheral, through the doubling in focalization. The book also questions
centre-periphery relations between reality and fiction, through its specific aesthetics. The narrative relates to the concept of periphery in but simultaneously seeks pathways out of its binaries. I will build on the interpretations of the concept of periphery that I
unproductive lenses to read this narrative. I will nuance the concept by the distribution of the sensible and Shklovsky's sensory perceptions in art technique.
Shklovsky argues that the artistic act can defamiliarize by slowing down perception, thereby emphasizing the subjectivity of perception and the way in which it reimagines that which can be perceived (Shklovsky 55). He helps to see the importance of the precision and consciousness of perception. Rancière takes this argument further, because he specifies the political implications of the aesthetic choices made within an artistic act and the consequences for the audience that it can or cannot address (Politics
of Aesthetics 13). Bakhtin has particularly nuanced this process in his account on speech
genres (Bakhtin 88). He describes the way in which language addresses readers through a combination of subjective and normative choices, and how every speech utterance both familiarizes and defamiliarizes the use of words and their meanings (Bakhtin 88). In this way, speech utterances, of which literature is a specific example (Bakhtin 65-66), are a very specific form of politics through the aesthetic. Considering Bakhtin's emphasis on the context in which language is uttered, my choice to analyse Season of
Migration to the North, written in 1966 by a Sudanese author, might require an
explanation. The narrative is heavily linked to the historical context it is constituted in: that of newfound independence in Sudan. In 1966, this narrative probably was
‘collusive with and an expression of the neo-colonial world’, a quality Elleke Boehmer has ascribed to migrant narratives even of the '80s and '90s (Gamal 598). Reading this same narrative in 2016, of course, alters the readers' experience. But, I would like to emphasize its role in the literary canon, making it an object that is not merely
constituted in what could be called old-fashioned 'neo-colonial' or 'post-colonial' frames (Gamal 598), but also has significance in a contemporary globalising context.
publication of Edward Said's Orientalism in 1978. The book has been published in the
Penguin-classics series, which means that, from an English perspective, it has been
incorporated into 'the canon'. It was first published in a Dutch translation in 1985 and appears in the series 'De twintigste eeuw' by publisher Atlas, which can be understood as a canonical collection (literatuurplein). The Dutch newspaper NRC’s obituary for Tayeb Salih's emphasizes that Season of Migration to the North has been called the most important Arabic work of literature of the 20th century (online archive).2 Though its
narrative questions the social conditions in post-independence Sudan and explicitly criticizes the culture of the British elites, the novel has been incorporated into the literary canon of the Western European 'establishment'. Due to the book’s adoption into these kinds of canonical literary series by Western European publishers, it can be argued that this narrative, which attempted to shift the lens on colonization and its impact on the colonized communities in Sudan was itself colonized.. One could simultaneously argue that the book as an object operates as a dissector of those centre-periphery
relations, as it has this status in both literary realms. Apart from this interesting position within the literary canon, Season, by its particular aesthetic characteristics, demonstrates possibilities for reimagining the narrative of the heritage of colonialism in Sudan and therefore already in 1966 suggested pathways out of hostile oppositions and recurring patterns of vengeance between coloniser and colonised.
Season is a fictional narrative: an aestheticization of history through the
experiences of two fictional characters. It is inspired by a lived history, but is not intended as a factual retelling of events. The narrative is constituted in the real world (it refers to real places like Khartoum and London) but contains stylistic choices that combine the realistic frame of departure with elements of surrealism and veiled
perceptions of reality.3 I would like to argue that the narrative departs from a normative
frame of reference and therefore bears similarity to several interpretations of the periphery concept as used by Brennan and Parry as described in the previous chapter. But it also moves towards altered interpretations of the narrative’s reality, that tie in with the possibilities of defamiliarization as described by Shklovsky (55). In this sens, the narrative already helps to re-imagine the location in which to imagine centre and periphery on an aesthetical plane. Furthermore, these aesthetic choices of mingling surrealism with realism and questioning achieved frames of reality, have political implications that can be highlighted further through Rancière’s distribution of the sensible. The ways in which Season's narrative operates in peripheral realms and addresses peripheral contexts, depends upon a specific analytical interpretation of periphery. I will first investigate this narrative through some of the frames of periphery that operate on an ethical plane, to then move towards the latter two theorists.
Because the book is rooted in a political frame of post-colonial
vengeance, it is tempting to analyse Season of Migration to the North as a narrative that demonstrates binary oppositions between coloniser and colonised. When focused on these binaries, oppositions between the perspective of the migrant narrators and their home country, between customs that are considered modern and cosmopolitan (and therefore linked to English society), and those considered 'old-fashioned' or 'pre-modern' (and therefore linked to Sudanese society) will be foregrounded. In “Reflections on the Excess of Empire in Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North”, Benita Parry states:
Season is... inhabited by a consciousness not only of the unevenness between the metropolitan and the peripheral, but by the disjunctions within the colonial environment where the socialities, cultural forms, cognitive 3 Examples of this I will discuss further on in this chapter.
traditions, affective inclinations and ethical sensibilities of both the ancestral and the modern overlap. (Parry 73)
Parry focuses on the timely distinction between English and Sudanese society presented in the novel. In her analysis, she chooses the socioeconomic perspective of the
peripheral versus central; the effect of this approach is twofold. First, she puts her finger precisely on the problematic relationship between coloniser and colonised. At the same time, her analysis becomes imprecise at the point where the book does not fully answer to the image of this political conflict and to her insistence on this central-periphery binary.
Shifting the gaze away from these binary perspectives of colonizer versus colonized, North versus South, modern versus archaic, could mean to leave the realm of the political for a more open, neutral point of view. Tayeb Salih himself was not fond of this interpretation of his work. During a lecture at the American University of Beirut in 1980, he remarked that ‘one of the major themes of Season is the East/West
confrontation. I have re-defined the so called East/West relationship as essentially one of conflict, while it had previously been treated in romantic terms’ (Parry 81). Benita Parry uses this argument to emphasize her reading of the novel as a narrative of revenge and confrontation. In her analysis of Season, she establishes the complex relationship between the political perspective and the metaphorical aesthetics of the novel (Parry “Excess of Empire” 72). However, the novel’s interpenetration of its aesthetics with its political narrative is underappreciated in her arguments. Although I agree that the terms of opposition between traditionalism and Westernism are not completely shattered, Parry's focus on the binary between the modern and the archaic does not do justice to the novel's complex structure. I will take a closer look at two of the binary oppositions on which Parry builds her argument, to see which binaries are still at stake, and in which
ways they are nuanced by the narrative.
Because of its primary setting in a village in Sudan, it is tempting to understand this narrative as embedded in a geographical periphery. Throughout the book, there are passages that refer to moments in which the unnamed narrator, Mustafa Sa'eed, and even the village as whole, are said to 'long for the North'. Simultaneously, there are passages which describe the 'North' longing for the 'South' (Radhakrishnan refers to this mutual longing as stereotypical, 329). This longing is sometimes described as a recurring dream, sometimes as a disease.4 In this way, the narrative relates to a
centre-periphery binary, that sometimes locates the centre in the North, in London, sometimes in Sudan, the South. Here this narrative ties in with the interpretation on centre and periphery in relation to modernity that the Comaroffs provide, when they state: 'modernity was, almost from the start, a North-South collaboration … albeit a sharply assymmetrical one.' (116). The unnamed narrator, in several passages, tries to find a way to distance himself from this endless longing for the North. He states: 'Over there is like here, neither better nor worse... The fact that they came to our land, I know not why, does that mean that we should poison our present and our future? (Salih 49) And: 'By the standards of the European industrial world we are poor peasants, but when I embrace my grandfather I experience a sense of richnes as though I am a note in the heartbeats of the very universe' (Salih 73). In this way he grants agency to the Sudanese village as a centre in and of itself. Furthermore, Season offers a point of view which imagines it as a centre independent from a Eurocentric perspective. This is a form of agency the Comaroffs describe as essential to 'African modernity' (118). The narrative does not provide clearcut pathways out of the centre-periphery devide between South 4 Examples of this can be found on page 33, in the trial against Sa'eed, in which his lawyer argues that Sa'eed 'is a
noble person whose mind was able to absorb Western civilization but it broke his heart' and that the women he seduced 'were killed by the germ of a deadly disease that assailed them a thousand years ago'. In page 104, this same disease catches the unnamed narrator and the village in Sudan, when he falls in love with the widow of Sa'eed, who is desired for the status she has gained through Sa'eed (and his connection to London): “that I like him and … milions of others – was not immune from the germ of contagion that oozes from the body of the universe.' (Salih)
and North related to modernism, but addresses and problematizes it. It suggests to re-imagine the context in which the story is constituted with regard to a globalised context.
There is an economic binary to consider as well. If considered through the interpretation of Timothy Brennan’s take on the image-function of the periphery, what would be emphasized is that the narrative operates in an area of economic periphery. Even though Brennan tries to emphasize the problematic political implications of calling a certain area of the world an economic periphery, his warning does not escape the image-function it creates. As he states, 'The image of the periphery produces blindness to the recidivist elements of the new economy, suppression of first world material
dependencies, and ignorance of the warehousing of labour’ (Brennan 111). Brennan calls this obscuring effect of the image-function of the periphery a 'serviceable abstraction', which translates as a generalising effect. When we call an economy ‘peripheral’, the precise reason for the description and the rationale for choosing to whom it is applied (and under which conditions) is obscured, while its definition is reinforced. Definitely, the Sudanese community in this book is part of an economy that does not operate in a central world position. But it is not merely economic prosperity which makes the village and the migrant narrators long for the North. It is also a need for agency, a need to be seen and recognised in their own particularity. If read through Brennan, the economic reasons for this longing become too prominent and obscure the nuances of the emotional layers underneath.
In order to read this narrative on its own merits, and to understand the ways in which it relates to centre-periphery binaries while also moving away from them, I believe that both the binary oppositions in which the narrative is rooted and the book’s specific aesthetic choices need to be considered in a combined frame of analysis. It is neither in the static frame of periphery as a socioeconomic construct, nor through mere
aesthetic characteristics that the book disrupts binaries. It is precisely the gesture that the narrative makes from the normative frame of binary oppositions between coloniser and colonised towards an aesthetic reimagination of reality, that needs to come to the fore. A static concept of periphery might not give agency to this gesture, but one that considers the ways in which peripheries are becoming central while centres are
becoming peripheral, as Peeren, Stuit and van Weyenberg argue, would bring this to the fore (5). An author that they do not mention, possibly because he does not explicitly choose the periphery as a concept, is Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan. He seems more concerned with the position of the Subaltern and its relation to the nation-state, but he nevertheless uses the image of the periphery to capture his argument about the
representation of subaltern cultures (Radhakrishnan 316). He argues that globalisation as a concept is seductive but not convincing. Moreover, he emphasizes how the idea of a globality functioning as a whole, for instance in network-theories, suggests that
subaltern communities will be granted equal agency 'as soon as we've all become interconnected'. Globality hereby obscures the inequalities in the distribution of power between Western and Subaltern societies (Radhakrishnan 320). He goes on to ask: Where and how should the Third World signify its valence both as “something in itself” and as a form of difference from the paradigm of Euro-American modernity?
(Radhakrishnan 321). The answer he provides for this question does not provide a specific image-function, but rather emphasizes that we should imagine the Other with precision: that each particular location and circumstance asks for its own nuanced description of its relation to the local and the global (330). I would like to argue that in his account on these centre-periphery binaries, the centres are fixed and power is unequally distributed towards those centres, but that it is possible for the peripheral societies to gain agency. Here, his account on centre-periphery relations ties in with the
one provided by Salih in the passages I mentioned. What Radhakrishnan's perspective does not offer, is a possibility to consider the particular role of the aesthetic in the redistribution of these center-periphery relations.
There are two specific aesthetic elements of the book that I want to draw closer attention to here, to see in which ways the narrative uses it's aesthetics to
redistribute the sensible. The first element is the book’s focalization through the doubling of the migrant narrative perspective. Then, there are the implications of the repetitive patterns within the narrative and the recurring of those parts of the narrative where the perception of reality is questioned by the unnamed narrator.
The book starts with a narrator speaking from a first person perspective. ‘It was, gentlemen, after a long absence – seven years to be exact, during which time I was studying in Europe – that I returned to my people’. (Salih 1) This first narrator, who stays unnamed, addresses us, the readers, as if an audience at a storytelling event. The story is carried by this narrator until thenineteenth page, where Mustafa Sa'eed takes over, also speaking from a first person perspective and restarting the narrative from his point of view: ‘It's a long story, but I won't tell you everything’ (Salih 19). Mustafa Sa'eed is addressing the unnamed narrator as his audience. But it is still the first narrator who is telling this story, who has merely introduced the voice of Mustafa Sa'eed. This is significant for the complex relationship between the two. Within the story, the unnamed narrator is made responsible for the legacy of the second, Mustafa Sa'eed. The unnamed narrator starts the story twice, and repeats the words of Mustafa Sa'eed. There are even moments in the narrative in which he diverges from Mustafa's story and continues from his own perspective.5 Because both voices are speaking from a first person perspective,
5 There is a shift in narrative perspective on page 67, where the unnamed narrator talks about Mustafa Sa'eed: ‘But, as
he said, they conspired against him, the jurors and the witnesses and the lawyers... “The jurors, he said, 'saw before them a man who didn't want to defend himself, a man who had lost the desire for life. I hesitated that night when Jean sobbed into my ear...”’(Salih 67-68). Here, Mustafa Sa'eed is speaking about his trial and his encounter with
the boundaries between the two narrators become blurred. Moreover, we are listening to an unreliable narrator, who holdss a grudge against one of the voices he represents. In this sense, the narrative questions, even within its own boundaries, which voice (and thus which perspective) is central to the story and which is peripheral. If Sa'eed’s legacy should be considered the central narrative, the themes of vengeance and post-colonial violence are foregrounded; whereas if the unnamed narrator's perspective is considered central, the perspective is much more diplomatic and nuanced. Thus, the focalization of the narrative in itself has political implications (Rancière).
The specific focalization in Season also complicates which audiences it possibly addresses. The opening sentence states: “It was, gentleman, after a long absence – seven years to be exact, during which time I was studying in Europe – that I returned to my people.”(Salih, 1) Benita Parry, in “Reflections on the excess of Empire” explains how the form of this opening refers to a style of narrating known in the Arab world.
The two distinctive but interrelated stories of Mustafa Sa’eed and the narrator ... are told in the hieratic oral style of a hakawati, a public teller of tales in the Arab world. The traditional beginning, “You will recall,
gentlemen...” is echoed by the narrator in the novel’s first line (“It was, gentlemen, after a long absence ...that I returned to my people”), and repeated in the course of his recitation to auditors apparently unfamiliar with both the obscure village on the Nile and cosmopolitan London. (Parry 74)
he abruptly ends the story about Mustafa's trial: ‘But I have not come here to think about Mustafa Sa'eed, for here, craning their necks in front of us, are the closely-packed village houses, made of mud and green bricks, while our donkeys press forward as their nostrils breathe in the scent of clover, fodder and water.. And the river, the river but for which there would have been no beginning and no end, flows north-wards, pays heed to nothing; a mountain may stand in its way... but sooner or later it settles down in its irrevocable journey towards the sea in the north’(Salih 69). Especially in this last passage, a shift is made from the harsh reality of Sa'eeds trial, into the metaphor of the village on the river, the village which seems to represent a certain peace, after which the image of the river flowing to the North serves again as a metaphor for the longing for the North.
In this way, the opening of the narrative addresses an Arab and an English speaking audience simultaneously yet in different manners.6 The latter group is simply informed
that a certain 'I', who has studied in Europe, has returned to his people. The former group is also addressed in a more associative and affective sense, with an understanding of the kind of story that will now unravel. For an audience familiar with this type of storytelling, the tale is much more accessible; this audience understands the genre in which the narrative operates. Again, the aesthetic approach here has political
implications.
The 'gentlemen' addressed in this opening sequence, seem to be located nowhere in particular. Parry assumes that the audience being addressed is unfamiliar with both the village and London, but I am not sure that can be concluded from these lines. It does seem that “the gentlemen” are not connected to either world that is
introduced here. They seem to comprise an anonymous, uprooted audience that could be listening anywhere.7 Similarly, the speaker addressing the 'gentlemen', cannot be located
in this particular sentence. He refers to the moment that he returned to his people, but we do not know where he is located at this particular moment, during this act of
speaking. In this way, the opening of the book locates the context in which this narrative operates (Bakhtin, 88) on an aesthetic plane (Rancière), by placing both the narrator and the addressed audience in the realm of fiction. This is important because of the political weight of the story told in Season. By placing this narrative in the realm of fiction, the author suggests to his readers that the realities of the world upon which the story was inspired could be imagined otherwise. Moreover, by putting the story on an aesthetic plane, the centre can be imagined anywhere. This uprootedness of the centre, and
6 Again, I have to take into consideration that I am reading the English translation of an Arabic novel. Would I be able
to analyse it as a translation, then this argument could be further nuanced.
moreover, the importance of the role of the reader for the imagined location of the centre, ties in with William Kentridge's interpretation of the periphery. He argues for the possibility to let the subjective perspective enter thoughts on centre and periphery, making it possible to reconstruct a centre anywhere one wants. This interpretation, related to Season's focalization and the way audience and narrator are brought to an aesthetic plane by Salih, could implicate that post-colonial binaries can be left behind. However, considering Salih's own goals with the book, I have to be careful with my relation to Kentridge. The fragmentation that Kentridge allows himself in his
interpretation of centres and possible peripheries, is a form that is too disintegrated for the rather binary-heavy narrative that Season is. Although it does grant agency to an alternative reading of its own context, I believe this must be seen as a small pathway, slight cracks in the pavement of an otherwise opposition-prone story.
Another example of a renegotiation of centre-periphery relations through the aesthetic, is provided in one of the first chapters, when the unnamed narrator tells his audience that the villagers in Sudan wanted to know about the English.
‘“Are there any farmers among them?” Mahjoub asked me.
“Yes, there are some farmers among them. They've got everything – workers and doctors and farmers and teachers, just like us”’ (Salih 3).
In this passage, through the perspective of the unnamed narrator, both audiences who are familiar with English habits and those who only know Sudanese ones, are addressed. The narrative here shows a self-awareness of the several cultural planes on which it operates. The unnamed narrator continues:
I preferred not to say the rest that had come to my mind: that just like us they are born and they die, and in the journey from the cradle to the grave they dream dreams some of which are frustrated; that they fear the
unknown, search for love and seek contentment in wife and child; that some are strong and some are weak; that some have been given more than they deserve by life, while others have been deprived by it, but that the
differences are narrowing and most of the weak are no longer weak. I did not say this to Mahjoub, though I wish I had done so, for he was intelligent; in my conceit I was afraid he would not understand. Bint Majzoub laughed. 'We were afraid,' she said, 'you'd bring back with you an uncircumcised infidel for a wife'. (Salih 3-4)
In this passage, the unnamed narrator implies that people in London and people in Sudan are the same. At the same time, he expresses to his audience that he has decided to hide this information from his friend Mahjoub. The message by Bint Majzoub, then, illustrates a prejudice about English women that might be common in Sudan. The narrative here both invites and excludes audiences represented within the narrative. It negotiates between several listeners, shifting back and forth between perspectives familiar to 'Western' and 'Sudanese' audiences. The narrator speaks from a neutral space which is located in neither part of the world; therefore, neither part can call itself central or peripheral to this section of the narrative. The reader becomes aware of the
perspective of the narrator being rooted in neither culture. By making a self-reflexive aesthetic gesture, the narrative demonstrates which centre-periphery binaries are at stake and how they can be renegotiated into a realm of common ground. It is not the free, uprooted and deconstructed image that Kentridge offers, but possibly relates to the more nuanced image that Radhakrishnan suggests: a precision in imagining the 'Other' that ties in with a centre-periphery frame rooted in Eurocentrism, but which also tries to reach beyond it.
recurring of moments in which the perception of reality is questioned by the unnamed narrator. The theme of ghosts and images of haunting recur throughout the book,
especially in reference to the identity of Mustafa Sa'eed. The unnamed narrator explains his doubts about Sa'eed’s existence after he has disappeared:
As for me, I am sometimes seized by the feeling which came over me that night when, suddenly and without my being at all prepared for it, I had heard him quoting English poetry, (...) with darkness all around us outside as though satanic forces were combining to strangle lamplight. Occasionally the disturbing thought occurs to me that Mustafa Sa'eed never happened, that he was in fact a lie, a phantom, a dream or a nightmare that had come to the people of that village one suffocatingly dark night, and when they opened their eyes to the sunlight he was nowhere to be seen. (Salih 46)
In this passage, the boundaries between reality and surreal experiences are blurred. This is a prominent aesthetic aspect of the narrative that recurs in circular patterns: the image of Sa'eed coming to haunt the village, and the unnamed narrator who questions wether 'Sa'eed ever happened'. Furthermore, the narrative relates to mirages and spirits many times, in relation to the landscape and ways in which it is perceived. Further research needs to be done on the elements of the spectral in this narrative, in relation to its politics. They add an aesthetic layer which questions the black and white binaries
foregrounded in Sa'eeds legacy. Here, I want to argue that because the unnamed narrator questions Sa'eed’s existence, his legacy which is rooted in post-colonial vengeance, loses some of its agency. This gesture implies an attempt to escape from the hostile patterns that Sa'eed legacy entails. Moreover, by questioning Sa'eed’s existence, the book questions the conditions of perception for the narrative’s reality. Seen through Rancière, the aesthetic gesture made here implies a politics of perception: a recalibration
of which parts of the narrative should be seen as its 'main points' (its most important 'stakes') and which parts are peripheral.
Salih’s aesthetic choices further politicize the narrative through a very self-aware strategy of the limited distribution of perceivable knowledge (Rancière), dependent upon the reader's context. The book's aesthetics limit the possibilities to grasp the implications of this story to the fullest, for both the original Arabic readers, the English-speaking readers and those who master both languages and are familiar with both European and Sudanese culture, all to their own extent. At the same time, the self-awareness of this narrative effect unites all readers together in a shared experience of being unable to 'see the full picture', while being made aware of this complexity. In this way, the narrative operates in a realm that is both central and peripheral, depending upon who is reading. It also operates on an ethical plane as the aesthetic workings of the book productively enhance the politics that it addresses.
Reading this narrative through a few specific interpretations of the periphery concept, nuanced by Rancière’s distribution of the sensible, demonstrates that the migrant perspective, which is commonly perceived as belonging to the peripheral, can reposition itself through careful focalization within the narrative. This is possible when specific aesthetic characteristics of the narrative question that which is commonly perceived as normative within the context of the narrative. I would like to argue that it helps to slow down perception, especially in the opening passage, and thereby
defamiliarizes, in Shklovsky's terms, the context of the peripheral migrant position for both Western-European and Sudanese audiences. Season of Migration to the North actively questions the normative concept of the peripheral in terms of the economic, the social and the cultural and offers pathways out of center-periphery binaries. It is
Chapter 3
Periphery, focalization and the role of the reader in constructing context
and identity in Nii Ayikwei Parkes' The Makings of You.
In the previous chapters, I have investigated several interpretations of the concept of periphery and the way specific centre-periphery relations are present in
Season of Migration to the North. I have discussed Benita Parry's account of peripheral
modernities and Timothy Brennan’s take on the economic implications of the image-function of the periphery. Both authors have questioned the ways in which the concept , in their particular interpretations of it, provides a productive lens to read particular political, cultural and social dynamics in the globalising present, and have to a certain extent argued against their productivity.
Where Brennan argues that the use of the concept of periphery is inherently of economic interest, Radhakrishnan contends that its use is inherently of interest to Western European nation-states and argues for a reconsideration of its use (Radhakrishnan 316). J. Comaroff and J.L. Comaroff have suggested a possible shift in the centre-periphery frame, from a Eurocentric to an African-centric perspective. Where Brennan and Parry still deploy the concept as a static frame of reference in which the centre is located in the 'West' or 'Europe', Radhakrishnan and the Comaroffs both imagine a centre with the potential to shift. I've discussed these concepts in relation to my analysis of Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih, assuming that using frames of centre-periphery as an analytic approach would illustrate but also obscure centre-periphery relations within the book. These contradictory tendencies can be measured in terms of the book’s themes, the position of its narrators, the narrative’s
focalization and the possible audiences it addresses, and finally the context in which it constitutes itself. I have argued that a shift out of centre-periphery binaries is possible when the concept is taken from the ethical realm into the aesthetic (Rancière). I have also investigated in which ways the concept of periphery can, when used as an aesthetic lens, redistribute the sensible (Rancière) and defamiliarize the familiar or normative (Shklovsky). In this chapter, I want to take this argument further, by taking a closer look at the concept of periphery provided by William Kentridge. I want to then see, again through Rancière and Shklovsky, how his concept of periphery contains the possibility of a new distribution of the sensible.
Peeren, Stuit and van Weyenberg in “Peripheral Visions in the Globalizing Present: Spaces, Mobilities, Aesthetics`, discuss a methodology of
'peripheral thinking' provided by the artistic practices of William Kentridge. They argue that peripheral thinking opens up a possibility for a ‘renewed understanding of the center, by virtue of what was initially excluded from it’ (30), thereby arguing that peripheral thinking as a methodology, opens pathways into ‘thinking in unforeseen directions’ (30). Here, I would like to take a closer look at Kentridge’s interpretation of the concept of periphery, to investigate if his methodology and the philosophy on which it is based, is useful for analysing my next object, The Makings of You, a collection of autobiographical poetry written by Nii Ayikwei Parkes. In particular, I want to examine how the identity of the author, who was born in England to Ghanaian parents, becomes an object of inquiry through his poems’ efforts to reconstruct that identity. In order to investigate the aesthetics of this work, I will analyse its focalization.
Apart from opening pathways ‘to think in unforeseen directions’, Kentridge provides possibilities to rethink the locations of centre and periphery. This reconsideration does not simply see centre and periphery as flexible positions, but
further allows us to understand them as fragmented and consider ways in which the centre can be uprooted or even eliminated from the frame. In addition, William
Kentridge deploys a specific use of the concept which allows for subjective perspectives to enter the frame. This emphasis on subjectivity connects his theory to Rancière’s distribution of the sensible, but also to Bakhtin's account on speech genres, and even to Judith Butler’s work on the Self and ways in which we can or cannot know the Self through recognition by the Other. I will demonstrate that all of these are productive to consider when reading “The Makings of You”, and when examining the ways it renegotiates global centre-periphery relations, while questioning the constitution of a 'peripheral' identity.
In his lecture on “Peripheral Thinking”, Kentridge demonstrates his theory through examples of his particular thought process during the creation of an artistic concept for an opera. First he explains how the decision to think of a singular thought or idea is always already infiltrated by peripheral thoughts that interfere while trying to focus on that 'main thing'. He goes on to state that ‘I follow the thoughts wherever they go, and (am) also clearly avoiding making an argument’ (Kentridge, no pagenr.). In this way, he invites transient ideas into his thought process that seem peripheral to his ultimate goal. Through this method of 'thinking peripheral', Kentridge allows for associations and subjective sensory perceptions related to his main themes and objects of interest to enter his artistic research. Moreover, by resisting to shape these into an argument, he refuses to reframe his thoughts back into a normative frame of reference. In this lecture, he has decided to create a concept inspired by the Chinese Cultural Revolution. He departs from physical artefacts associated with this event (for instance, banners used in student protests and a certain form of dance performed at them) but then lets his thoughts lead him away to ponderings on ballet, and the ways in
which the prima ballerina represents a European ideal. He returns to the Cultural
Revolution and is suddenly reminded of the sparrows that Mao killed. He starts drawing a sparrow and lets his mind wander off again. He works with historical facts and
perceptions gathered from a globalised present, but adds to his frame of reference the flexibility of association and subjective experiences. When considering Kentridge’s methodology in relation to the concepts of periphery I have previously explored, his work connects with ideas of economic peripherality (Brennan), questions of political representation (Radhakrishnan), and of modernity (Parry amongst others). But he does not refer to these historical and political events from a static idea of where a centre or periphery could be located. His frame of thought is not detached from the normative, but relates to it in a free manner. In that sense, I would like to argue that Kentridge’s concept of periphery opens up a trajectory between the ethical and the aesthetic (Kant qtd in Rancière “The Aesthetic Dimension”2). His methodology allows for the aesthetic approach to transform that which is perceived as normative.
By allowing association and subjective perception to become part of the frame of representation, Kentridge opens up the debate on knowledge perception and the extent to which it can be objective. He admits: ‘You have to understand that seeing and thinking is always a negotiation between that which comes towards us, and the thing which we project out’. The subjective and the objective in this sense form a negotiation. It is in this negotiation that, that which is understood as normative, can be renegotiated through the subjective encounter. This negotiation becomes political when the perceiving subject chooses to represent certain perceptions received from the object, and to obscure others. Here Kentridge relates to Rancière who argues that ‘aesthetics can be understood as the system of a priori forms determining what presents itself (my emphasis) to sense experience. It is a delimitation of … the visible and the invisible’
