Islands and Exiles: The Creole Identities of Post/Colonial Literature.

Chris Bongie. Islands and Exiles: The Creole identities of Post/Colonial Literature. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998. 543 PP. $65.00 cloth/$24.95 paper.

How to define the relationship between post-colonialism and postmodernism has been a peculiarly vexing question for critics for some time now. If postmodernism signals a rupture after modernism, why does it share so many of modernism's traits and obsessions? Similarly, if postcolonialism elaborates the period after colonialism, why do so many related social, cultural, and political problems appear to plague it? Do postcolonialism and postmodernism herald the birth of a new era, or are they merely continuations of the old under a new guise? What exactly is the relationship between the two?

In two similarly titled essays written about a decade ago, K. Anthony Appiah and Homi Bhabha both hung out their heuristic shingles over these questions. While their diagnoses of the problem differed (Appiah seeing postcolonialism as existing in an ambivalent relationship with postmodern commodification; Bhabha locating postcolonialism as a reconfiguration of postmodern contingency, but as a type of wily agency), both Bhabha and Appiah noted the importance of disestablishing the primacy of the Self-Other division in this equation and championed the circulations and hybridities of contemporary cultures. In Islands and Exiles, Chris Bongie takes up this question again, arguing that the best approach to understanding today's complex identity politics is not, to use a common homonym, through a modernist search for essentializing roots but in a postmodern understanding of our migratory routes. Anchoring his position in the work of Edouard Glissant and his idea of "creolization," Bongie, like Bhabha, pursues an an ti-essentialism through the invocation of the inherent hybridity of both the colonial and the postcolonial condition. Recognizing, however, the difficulties of producing any kind of political program out of ambivalence, and that a great deal of political headway can be (and has historically been) made in the name of an essentializing nativism, Bongie's book is as much an extended lament in the efficacy of his own strategy as it is a critical exegesis.

Islands and Exiles is primarily a book on Caribbean literature, where the claims toward creolization have had the greatest history and currency, but Bongie intelligently adds several texts from other parts of the world to his argument. He has ambitiously assembled a large delegation of voices to make his case that contemporary literature exists in a kind of "epistemic complicity" with its colonial past (exhibiting shades of Said's idea of the "contrapuntal"), and he draws on works extending from the eighteenth-century French writer Bernardin Saint-Pierre to the Cuban Alejo Carpentier to New Zealand's Ken Hulme. Traversing centuries and continents with ease, Bongie pursues the idea that creolite is not only the marker of the postcolonial condition but can indeed be read in the colonial literature of the Caribbean, though in this literature it more often disrupts and haunts the straightforward taxonomies of race extolled by the surface of these works. (His readings of Victor Hugo's Bug-Jargal and Faulkner's Ab salom! Absalom! are particularly intriguing in the relationship Bongie draws to what the Haitian revolution means for European racial politics.)

Bongie's contribution to the postmodern/postcolonial debate can be explained in his novel presentation of the word post/colonial. The typographical addition of the slash is meant to indicate how "the two words and worlds [colonial and postcolonial] appear unceasingly as one joined together and yet also divided in a relation of discontinuity." In other words, "we are all already contaminated by each other," as Appiah wrote, and there will be no heralding of the "new human" after colonialism. After the discovery of this contemporary truism, Bongie seems perplexed about what to do next. "How can one exist in this paradoxical time that is simultaneously pre- and post-revolutionary?" he asks. "How can one live in a world where the 'defining moment' that should have separated the colonial from the post-colonial is nowhere to be found, where one finds oneself living in what, from the standpoint of conventional history, can only appear as an intolerable contradiction, a troubling absence, an impossible mixture?"

This is Bongie's definition of the post/colonial condition, where binaries (of self-other, old-new, black-white) cannot be overcome but only exposed as constantly living inside each other. All other calls for change in the name of roots-oriented searches are seen as "ideological" (read 'misguided'). Thus, Bongie reinscribes another binary through this logic. It becomes Walcott versus Braithwaite, Coetzee versus Cliff, the early Fanon against the later Fanon. Origin searches become suspect while creole searches are honest but impotent. The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.

Intelligent attempts such as Bongie's to unravel the powerful myths of identity politics are certainly germane today, but in his overwhelming desire to prove the fundamentally ambivalent nature of postmodern, postcolonial identities, Bongie perhaps simplifies the epistemological potential of excavations of the past, if done non-coercively. Ending his book with the quotations "we are all responsible for each other" (Bernardin) and "we are all gathered together on one and the same shore" (Glissant), Bongie issues, in his call for the collective responsibility of each to the other, a good-natured, ethical sentiment. But, to me at least, it doesn't always seem like enough. Bongie, of course, acknowledges this, but by abandoning the roots-oriented search for the knowing (but ineffective) nod that ours is a creolizing world, his method tends to see history as the handmaiden to identity (rather than vice versa). Furthermore, by historicizing creole identities, is there not a kind of roots-oriented appeal to the arg ument being promoted here, and one that thus finds the genesis to identity to be the moment of European contact? Perhaps I'm being tendentious here, but as Michael Gomez, to take one example, has shown in his remarkable book Exchanging Our Country Marks (where African ethnicities in the antebellum United States are discovered and defined, sometimes through specific stereotypes that no longer have currency, and then the move from the ethnic African to the American Black is considered), the search for origins need not always march on narrow-minded stilts but, if done correctly, can perhaps not only define the past more fully but also suggest how certain creolizations are made, and how they can be invoked responsibly.