Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Lee, Yoon Sun

Titel

The Postcolonial Novel and Diaspora

Ist Teil von

• The Cambridge Companion to the Postcolonial Novel, 2015, p.133-151

Ort / Verlag

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2015

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Cambridge University Press online books

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Dispersal, disintegration, and the "affirmation of a distance" lie at the heart of the novel as a literary form. In his Theory of the Novel, Georg Lukács suggested that the genre emerges from the collapse of what he calls "integrated civilisations." "Our world has become infinitely large ... our thinking follows the endless path of an approximation that is never fully accomplished." The homelessness that Lukács describes is transcendental, consisting of a rupture between the external world given to experience and the sphere of essence or eternal truth. Yet Lukács's account holds even truer for diasporic novels, which literalize his spatial metaphors. As the novel assumes the formal task of representing migration and dislocation, it continues to pursue its destiny as a genre. Through embracing the diasporic imaginary, the novel finds new ways to affirm unbridgeable distances in the world. The idea of a diasporic condition is both ancient and new. To the concept of Jewish diaspora has been added the array of displacements, both forced and voluntary, that have been experienced by ethnically, racially, or religiously defined groups across the modern world. Shaped and scaled by the conjoined projects of capitalism and empire, such migrations have produced new forms of subjectivity and sociality, and new relations to space and place. Diasporic consciousness is not always as recent as that of the post-1960s influx of immigrants to former metropolitan centers, nor is it limited to the effects of British empire. Two brief examples illustrate some of the complex layers and intersections of the global history of diaspora. In the Filipino novelist José Rizal's 1887 novel, Noli me Tangere, first published in Berlin, the protagonist, returned to Manila from Europe, finds his surroundings "shadowed automatically ... and inescapably," in Benedict Anderson's words, "by images of [phenomena] in Europe." In a 1937 novel published in the United States, the Korean diasporic writer Younghill Kang locates in the Japanese conquest of East Asia the cause of his own journey to New York.