Prose of the World

4. Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), 6. Beginning with Aristotle’s category of “aesthetic emotions” in the Poetics, Ngai distinguishes “grander passions like anger and fear” and “potentially ennobling or morally beatific states like ‘sympathy, melancholia and shame’” from feelings that are “explicitly amoral and non-cathartic, offering no satisfactions of virtue, however oblique, nor any therapeutic or purifying release” (6). Such “noncathartic feelings” have been generally marginalized in “major forms and genres like Homeric epic and Shakespearean tragedy” because such aesthetic models tend to rely upon what Philip Fisher calls “vehement passions”—the more recognizable emotions, such as wrath, pity, and fear, that have clearer, more distinct and important places in the canon of values that is constructed socially as well as aesthetically. See Philip Fisher, The Vehement Passions (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002).

5. This argument has gathered significant momentum in recent years through the work of scholars who read literary modernism as a significant point of departure for the cultural globalization that comes to define the twentieth century, especially through the global expansion of English-language literature. See Rebecca Walkowitz, Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006); and Jed Esty, A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004). The clearest articulation of this specific argument of modernism as the beginning of the globalization of English-language literature is to be found in John Marx, The Modernist Novel and the Decline of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

6. Marx, The Modernist Novel, 1.

7. Woolf, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” 1:329.

8. Virginia Woolf, “Modern Fiction,” in Collected Essays, 4 vols. (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1967), 2:105.

9. Woolf, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” 1:331.

10. G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), 1:150.

12. Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, 2 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 2:956.

13. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (London: HarperCollins, 1991), 181.

14. Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990), 12.

15. Woolf, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” 1:337.

16. Lars Svendsen, A Philosophy of Boredom, trans. John Irons (London: Reaktion, 2005), 47.

17. Liesl Olson, Modernism and the Ordinary (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 1.

18. Ibid., 60–62, 65–66.

20. Heather K. Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007), 5–6.

21. John Marx, The Modernist Novel and the Decline of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 169.

22. Patricia Meyer Spacks, Boredom: A Literary History of a State of Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 62.

23. Since the early years of the twenty-first century, critical practice has begun to identify a mechanism of epistemological resistance in a range of what Ngai calls “noncathartic” motifs and objects, in aesthetic and philosophical discourse. While Giorgio Agamben, reading Heidegger, understands “profound boredom” in terms of a refusal of action, communication, or gratification, Bill Brown, John Frow, and Peter Schwenger, writing in the 2001 special issue of Critical Inquiry on “Things,” theorize the foregrounding of the object and the epistemological resistance embodied in its opacity as part of twentieth-century aesthetics’ political and ethical critique of Enlightenment paradigms of reason, subjectivity, and knowledge production. Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004), 65; Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” in “Things,” ed. Bill Brown, special issue, Critical Inquiry 28, no. 1 (Autumn 2001): 1–22; John Frow, “A Pebble, a Camera, a Man Who Turns Into a Telegraph Pole,” Critical Inquiry 28: 270–285; Peter Schwenger, “Words and the Murder of the Thing,” Critical Inquiry 28: 99–113. Woolf’s impatience with the rationalist deployment of factual details in the meticulous realism of the Edwardians can be read as echoing this critique of Enlightenment modernity that was launched by experimental literary modernism. Edwardian realism appears to assert a faith in the model of rational modernity that is thrown into a crisis by the acceleration of modernism and its experimental narrative methods. In the set of essays put together by Critical Inquiry, however, this critique is identified in writing throughout the twentieth century and not merely in literary fiction or poetry. Frow’s examples are chosen from Rilke, Williams, Neruda, and Ponge (273), while Brown, in his editorial introduction to the issue, sees formulations of this critique recurring in Heidegger, Lacan, Frank O’Hara, Robert Rauschenberg, Baudrillard, and Claes Oldenburg (14). But for both Brown and Schwenger, it is modernism that is the privileged moment of the disruptive appearance of the object, both in terms of its concrete materiality and of its refusal to be “objectified” and domesticated. For me, too, the point of greatest interest in this branch of material cultural studies that has come to be known as “thing theory” is its identification of modernist literature as the cultural-historical moment when the opacity of the banal object not only finds its most triumphant moment of aesthetic celebration, but also assumes the most striking dimensions of resistance and disruption.

24. “For thinkers and all sensitive spirits, boredom is that disagreeable ‘windless calm’ of the soul that precedes a happy voyage and cheerful winds. They have to bear it and must wait for its effect on them. Precisely this is what lesser natures cannot achieve by any means.” Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974), 108. For Walter Benjamin, boredom is “the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience,” the bird who is driven away by “a rustling in the leaves.” Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1973), 91. Kierkegaard writes: “Those who bore others are the plebeians, the crowd, the endless train of humanity in general; those who bore themselves are the chosen ones, the nobility.” Søren Kierkegaard, Either-Or, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987), 1:290.

25. Ethnographic analyses of boredom on the margins of global capitalism include Daniel Mains’s work on boredom and shame in the lives of young men in urban Ethiopia, boredom and postcolonial temporality in the Australian Aboriginal settlement of Yuendumu by Yasmine Musharbash, labor and the configuration of time in postcolonial Senegal by Michael Ralph, and Bruce O’Neill’s dissertation-in-progress on the relation of boredom and economic instability in postsocialist Romania. I discuss all these analyses in greater detail in subsequent chapters of this book.

26. The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman provides a helpful historical framework through which to identify modernity. Opening the argument of his book Modernity and Ambivalence, Bauman writes: “I wish to make it clear that from the start I call ‘modernity’ a historical period that began in Western Europe with a series of profound social-structural and intellectual transformations of the seventeenth century and achieved its maturity: (1) as a cultural project—with the growth of the Enlightenment; (2) as a socially accomplished form of life—with the growth of industrial (capitalist, and later also communist) society.” Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), 3n1. The emergence of this modernity in the seventeenth century and its attainment of cultural and social maturity with the Enlightenment and the formation of industrial society is also the key moment for another of influential theorist of modernity, Anthony Giddens, who similarly privileges this period as the historical sphere of its emergence. Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990), 1. Beyond its periodicity, however, for Giddens, this modernity has a set of abstract and concrete features, including: “(1) ^a certain set of attitudes towards the world, the idea of the world as open to transformation by human intervention; (2) a complex of economic institutions, especially industrial production and a market economy; (3) a certain range of political institutions, including the nation-state and mass democracy.” Conversations with Anthony Giddens: Making Sense of Modernity (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998), 94. Bauman’s understanding of modernism is helpful here not only because of its specification of the movement’s historical scope but more importantly because of the clarity with which Bauman distinguishes it from modernity: “Hence modernity, as I use the term, is in no way identical with modernism. The latter is an intellectual (philosophical, literary, artistic) trend that—though traceable back to many individual intellectual events of the previous era—reached its full swing by the beginning of the current century.” Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence, 3–4n.

27. For several theorists of the modern, “modernity” and “modernism” have been mutually continuous. Probably the most influential work that has woven them into a single narrative is Marshall Berman’s All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, where the experience of modernity extends from Goethe’s Faust to New York in the 1970s. Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (London: Verso, 1999). In the more recent A Singular Modernity by Frederic Jameson, too, the distinction between the two is rarely maintained. Frederic Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (London: Verso, 2002). In Writing in Limbo: Modernism and Caribbean Literature, a pioneering study of the relation of European modernism and nonmetropolitan literature, Simon Gikandi also privileges the continuities between modernity and modernism in the context of the metropolitan West. Simon Gikandi, Writing in Limbo: Modernism and Caribbean Literature (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992).

28. For an interesting survey of this debate, see Patrick Williams, “Simultaneous Uncontemporaneities: Theorizing Modernism and Empire,” in Modernism and Empire, ed. Howard Booth and Nigel Rigby (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 20.

29. The American Heritage College Dictionary (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), 106.

30. The banal “oven” is a good example of this use of this word. Common in medieval France, it was generally the property of the local feudal lord. Since personal ovens were prohibited by law, people had to pay the ovenmaster a fee for the use of the communal oven. The tradition of the banal oven system seems to have more or less died out during the eighteenth century, though historical remnants sometimes lingered on during community celebrations in later periods, mostly in rural France.

31. Thomas L. Dumm, A Politics of the Ordinary (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 13.

32. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), 71.

33. Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, trans. John Moore (London: Verso, 1991), 29.

34. Franco Moretti, “Serious Century,” in The Novel, vol. 1: History, Geography, and Culture (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006), 376.

35. Catherine Gallagher’s argument about the nascent category of fictionality is worth recalling here. According to Gallagher, fictionality liberates early English fiction from the need to portray the adventurous, even the improbable, so as to deflect the accusation that it was trying to depict the untruthful. Catherine Gallagher, “The Rise of Fictionality,” in The Novel, vol. 1: History, Geography, and Culture, ed. Franco Moretti (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006), 342. Fictionality thus enabled the early English novel to celebrate the verisimilitude rooted in ordinary life, a domain that was not quite available to it before. Also significant is the way Ian Watt brought together the demographic and the aesthetic connotations of the ordinary—the common man and the ordinary nature of his everyday life—to consolidate the narratological texture of Robinson Crusoe, which, according to Watt, “is the first fictional narrative in which an ordinary person’s daily activities are the centre of continuous literary attention.” Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 74. In The Origins of the English Novel, 1660–1740, Michael McKeon has drawn attention to the analogy drawn by Watt between “the epistemological premises of formal realism and those of ‘philosophical realism,’ the modern tradition of realism inaugurated by Descartes and Locke.” Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1660–1740 (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 2. The philosophical shifts of the time, moreover, were significantly paralleled in comparable generic shifts that were to pave the way for the rise of the novel in its modern form. Most of the significant theorists of the early English novel, in fact, agree that ordinariness and ordinary life were aesthetic and epistemological categories that were integral to the emergence of the genre. The category of the ordinary in the early English novel, however, lies at a slight angle to my reading of banality as an aesthetic form of colonial modernity; the well-theorized history of the former is perhaps best addressed here through ellipsis.

36. Michal Peled Ginsberg and Lorri G. Nandrea, “The Prose of the World,” in The Novel, vol. 2: Forms and Themes, ed. Franco Moretti (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006), 244.

37. Ibid., 244–245.

38. Elizabeth S. Goodstein, Experience Without Qualities: Boredom and Modernity (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005), 102, 107.

40. Moretti, “Serious Century,” 378.

41. Dumm, Politics of the Ordinary, 14.

43. Spacks, Boredom, 12.

45. Goodstein, Experience Without Qualities, 214.

46. Ibid., 228, 232.

47. The tension between the understanding of boredom or ennui as a spiritual condition and as a situation primarily enacted by material causes was also a key feature in post-Enlightenment discourses about these affective states. Goodstein reveals this tension through detailed archival research on the evolution of the concept. The materialist emphasis in the interpretation of the subjective experience that followed the Enlightenment increasingly shifted the explanation of boredom toward psychological and physiological causes, further away from its conceptualization as a spiritual phenomenon. Even then, the question of terminology remained crucial: “Thus, while invocations of ennui initially fell in the category of romantic and idealistic reactions to the attendant historical changes, as the language of boredom spread and evolved, it rapidly came into the force field of materialist modes of reflection” (104). In Maria Edgeworth’s novel Ennui, the feudal aristocrat Lord Glenthorn appears thoroughly bored with his life, yet the term “boredom” is never used in the novel. Glenthorn’s insistence on the French term, ennui, to describe his affective state, I would suggest, not only indicates his internalization of his aristocratic position but also a refusal to give up the “romantic and idealistic reactions to the attendant historical changes” and tune his sensibility to “materialist modes of reflection.” “Ennui,” as such, seeks to retain its elevated position over “boredom” on at least two levels—in terms of the understanding of the affect as a spiritual malaise as opposed to a materially driven phenomenon, and with respect to the superiority of aristocratic subjectivity over more plebeian sensibilities. It is the identification of boredom as an “‘aristocratic’ sentiment … out of place in Balzac’s and Stendhal’s nineteenth-century classics of upward mobility” that forms part of Bruce Robbins’s reading of the emotion as what he calls “an alternative gamut of class-related feelings” that are either “political or politicizable.” Bruce Robbins, Upward Mobility and the Common Good: Toward a Literary History of the Welfare State (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007), xii–xiii. Though Robbins uses the term “boredom,” the more appropriate term for this aristocratic emotion might be the more philosophically elevated “ennui,” as Goodstein’s analysis of the emergent tension between the spiritual and the secular implication of the affect in question makes clear: it is a tension that is at least partially rooted in the politics of class itself. Glenthorn’s refusal, therefore, can be seen as a representative gesture—whether conscious or unconscious—of the dominant class’s refusal to give up the claim to ennui as the exclusive “plight” of the aristocratic subjectivity.

48. Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, 8.

50. Dumm, Politics of the Ordinary, 1. Probably the most perfect example of the ideological prowess of ordinary consumerism was displayed, as Karal Ann Marling has demonstrated, in the 1959 American Exhibition in Moscow, where everyday consumer goods and durables from the domestic domain such as dishwashers, stoves, and refrigerators were displayed to establish U.S. affluence and power at a time when the superpowers were waging the far more spectacular struggle for nuclear and global supremacy. Karal Ann Marling, As Seen on TV: The Visual Culture of Everyday Life in the 1950s (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), 243–250.

51. Dumm, Politics of the Ordinary, 2, 3.

52. Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputat, States of Imagination: Ethnographic Explorations of the Postcolonial State (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001), 9.

53. For an interesting reflection on the disciplinary relation of anthropology and cultural studies, see James Clifford, On the Edges of Anthropology (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003), 15–19.

54. See, for instance, apart from James Clifford’s The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), Buzard’s The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to Culture, 1880–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993) and Pratt’s Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1993).

55. Michael Taussig, The Nervous System (New York: Routledge, 1992), 142, 143.

56. Bronislaw Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea (New York: Dutton, 1961), 18.

57. Clifford, The Predicament of Culture. It is not coincidental that Clifford’s book offers one of the most persuasive readings of this relationship. The book itself a classic of anthropology’s so-called literary turn (Clifford, On the Edges, 105–106) in the 1980s, implying, this time, the impact of poststructuralist literary theory on anthropological thought and methodology.

58. “The anthropology of colonialism,” Peter Pels has summarized succinctly, “is always an anthropology of anthropology, because in many methodological, organizational, and professional aspects the discipline retains the shape it received when it emerged from—if partly in opposition to—early twentieth century colonial circumstances.” Peter Pels, “The Anthropology of Colonialism: Culture, History, and the Emergence of Western Governmentality,” Annual Review of Anthropology 26 (1997): 165.

59. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1993), 6.

60. Throughout the twentieth century, both literary criticism and ethnographic discourse have acknowledged their mutual affinities, beginning with Malinowski, the pioneer of the British “functionalist” school of anthropology, and continuing to the present day. Among the notable recent interlocutions in this subject, Jed Esty’s A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004) examines late modernist and midcentury British literary texts in terms of their autoethnographic exploration of English national culture. John Marx’s The Modernist Novel and the Decline of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) considers the ethnographic implications of high modernist novels, especially those by Lawrence, Woolf, and Joyce.

61. One of the most sustained and significant critical engagements with Enlightenment modernity is to be found in Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 1–40. A significant examination of this engagement in literary discourse is Simon Gikandi’s Writing in Limbo: Modernism and Caribbean Literature. Gikandi makes a persuasive case for the contradictory relation Caribbean writers share with the historical vision and aesthetic structures embodied in European modernism. “Caribbean writers,” he writes, “cannot adopt the history and culture of European modernism, especially as defined by the colonizing structures, but neither can they escape from it because it has overdetermined Caribbean cultures in many ways” (3). The result is the striking process of literary and historical revisionism in which Caribbean writers engage with respect to the paradigms of European modernity and modernism, two terms that Gikandi appears to read as more or less continuous with each other. More recently, a compelling reading of the colonial life of European modernity is provided by Aamir R. Mufti’s Enlightenment in the Colony. In this book, Mufti makes a persuasive argument about the articulation of power and knowledge that the European Enlightenment comes to embody in the colony: “The larger problem of Enlightenment in the colony is that it brings to an auratically hierarchized social space, to an ‘enchanted’ world, a dialectic whose context proper in the metropolis is precisely the dissolution of heterogenous subjectivities and the social spaces they inhabit. The objective substratum here is not an unfinished or incomplete progress, however, but rather the distinct articulation of power and knowledge under conditions of colonial capitalism, whose logic Ranajit Guha has identified, in a succinct formulation, as ‘dominance without hegemony.’” Aamir R. Mufti, Enlightenment in the Colony: The Jewish Question and the Crisis of Postcolonial Culture (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007), 25.

62. Andrew Gibson, Joyce’s Revenge: History, Politics, and Aesthetics in Ulysses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Enda Duffy, The Subaltern Ulysses (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); Emer Nolan, James Joyce and Nationalism (London: Routledge, 1995). Some of the most stimulating approaches to the relation between Joyce and colonialism are collected in Derek Attridge and Marjorie Howes, eds. Semicolonial Joyce (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

63. John Marx, The Modernist Novel and the Decline of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 1.

65. See ibid., 169. Marx cites Robert Crawford’s earlier argument about the complementary rather than antithetical relation between the metropolis and the periphery that characterized modernism. Crawford argues that in its attempt “to outflank the Anglocentricity of established Englishness through a combination of the demotic and the multicultural, Modernism was an essentially provincial phenomenon.” Robert Crawford, Devolving English Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 270, quoted in ibid. Marx goes on to make a significant point about modernism’s export of provincialism to the metropole “in the form of dialect and regional idiom punctuating modernist prose and poetry” (ibid.). An exciting recent example of such a “provincial” approach to modernist cosmopolitanism is to be found in Matthew Hart’s Nations of Nothing but Poetry: Modernism, Transnationalism, and Synthetic Vernacular Writing (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). Hart points out the global nature of the vernacular, bringing out, at the same time, the vernacular nature of the global. His key concept is that of synthetic vernacular discourse in poetry, which hinges on the deconstruction of not only the local and the global but also that of high and low cultures, providing an alternate model of transnational poetics in the process. “Synthetic vernaculars,” he writes, “operate in the gray area between ethnonational languages and the macaronic linguistic constructions of cosmopolitan modernism” (ibid., 7). Along with Hugh MacDiarmid, T. S. Eliot, and Edward Kamau Braithwaite, Hart reads the poetry of Basil Bunting, Melvin Tolson, and Mina Loy by way of demonstrating the productive mutual dialectic of the vernacular and the transnational.

66. See Casanova’s The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005). For a detailed discussion of cosmopolitanism and its relation to twentieth-century British fiction, see the introductory chapter of Walkowitz’s Cosmopolitan Style.

67. Wicomb’s fiction generally avoids continental Europe and England. Even Edinburgh and Glasgow, where she has spent much of her adult life, occupy only a marginal place in her fiction, and that only in her more recent work, most notably toward the end of her 2006 novel Playing in the Light. Apart from the depiction of student life in Oxford in part of one novel, Afternoon Raag (1991), England has rarely figured in Chaudhuri’s fiction so far.

68. Ralph Waldo Emerson, quoted in Stanley Cavell, Themes out of School: Effects and Causes (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1984), 193.

69. Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988), 18–19.

70. The particular text by Wicomb that is my focus in this book was first published in 1987, seven years before the end of apartheid rule in South Africa. She has, of course, continued to publish fiction well beyond the end of apartheid.

71. Kelwyn Sole, “‘The Deep Thoughts the One in Need Falls Into’: Quotidian Experience and the Perspectives of Poetry in Postliberation South Africa,” in Postcolonial Studies and Beyond, ed. Ania Loomba et al. (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006), 182. Sole has significantly extended Henri Lefebvre’s reading of the everyday in terms of desire and power to the postcolonial spaces of the global South, where the interplay of such desires points to the disparity of global distribution of material resources and the colonial history that shapes such disparities. “Amid banality and repetition in those spaces,” he writes, “where constraints and boredom are produced, in a global arena where abundance and lack occur side by side, dissatisfaction and unfulfilled desires emerge as natural consequences” (185).

72. Ibid., 182, 185.

73. It would be naïve, however, to read all fiction produced from locations in the colonial or postcolonial global South as overarchingly preoccupied with the aesthetics of the spectacle. The major narrative thrust in a novel like Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, in many ways the representative early novel immediately following the midcentury wave of decolonization, is the paradigmatic story of colonial intrusion in all its spectacular intensity, notwithstanding its immediate location within the everyday rural life of an Igbo village. This dramatic historiography of the colonial encounter, however, does not exhaust the midcentury repertoire of fiction even if it dominates the narrative paradigm emerging from the (newly) former colony. A significant counterexample to this model, from the same period of postcolonial literary history, might be V. S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas, which chronicles the unfolding of the quotidian within a private sensibility and far away from the din and bustle of the mainstream public sphere.

74. Njabulo Ndebele, South African Literature and Culture: Rediscovery of the Ordinary (Scottsville, South Africa: University of KwaZulu Natal Press, 2006), 31.

1. James Joyce, Dubliners (New York: Dover, 1991), 68; further references to this work will be cited in the text.

2. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 84.

3. Ibid., 176–177.

4. James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler (New York: Vintage, 1986), 6; further references to this work will be cited in the text.

5. Joyce, “Drama and Life,” in The Critical Writings of James Joyce, ed. Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989), 45.

6. Quoted in Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 163.

7. James Joyce, Stephen Hero (New York: New Directions, 1963), 79; further references to this work will be cited in the text.

8. Rebecca Walkowitz, Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 64.

9. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (New York: Garland, 1993), 190; further references to this work will be cited in the text.

10. Garry Leonard, “The History of Now: Commodity Culture and Everyday Life in Joyce,” in Joyce and the Subject of History, ed. Mark Wollaeger et al. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 22.

11. Naomi Segal, The Banal Object: Theme and Thematics in Proust, Rilke, Hofmannsthal, and Sartre (London: University of London Press, 1981), 2.

13. Criticism arising from developments in literary and cultural studies that within the last decade have become known as “Thing Theory” has occasionally pointed to the opacity of objects as a kind of resistance. Most significant of such approaches are the essays collected in the 2001 special issue of Critical Inquiry on Bill Brown, ed., “Things,” special issue, Critical Inquiry 28, no. 1 (Autumn 2001). In his essay, for instance, John Frow quotes the poem “Pebble” by the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert. The pebble, in this poem, “has a scent which does not remind one of anything”; it “does not frighten anything away does not arouse desire.” John Frow, “A Pebble, a Camera, a Man Who Turns Into a Telegraph Pole,” Critical Inquiry 28 (2001): 271. Through the isolated banality of its existence, the pebble seems to resist meaning making, a resistance that renders parodic the courtly and romantic idiom of the poem that makes the pebble the center of its intense gaze. “The paradox of any fascination of the thingness of things,” Frow writes, is “that things posited in themselves, in their distinction from intention, representation, figuration, or relation, are thereby filled with an imputed interiority and, in their very lack of meaning, with a ‘pebbly meaning’ which is at once full and inaccessible” (272). In the end, the anonymous banality of the pebble defeats all subjective effort to assume epistemological control: “—Pebbles cannot be tamed / to the end they will look at us / with a calm and very clear eye” (ibid.).

14. Liesl Olson, Modernism and the Ordinary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 35.

15. Douglas Mao, Solid Objects: Modernism and the Test of Production (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998), 4.

17. Leonard, “The History of Now,” 14. In his later “Hystericising Modernism: Modernity in Joyce,” in Cultural Studies of James Joyce, ed. R. B. Kershner (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003), Leonard makes the argument that “in the 20th century commodified objects began to replace the subject as a guarantor of ‘inner being’ as the rise of commodity culture paralleled the decline of the ‘Imperial Subject’” (183). Joycean studies of the object have in fact mostly tended to see it as a commodity, that is, in its relation to consumer capitalism. See Jennifer Wicke, “Modernity Must Advertise: Aura, Desire, and Decolonization in Joyce,” James Joyce Quarterly 30/31, no. 1 (Summer–Fall 1993): 593–613; and Garry Leonard, “Joyce and Advertising: Advertising and Commodity Culture in Joyce’s Fiction,” James Joyce Quarterly 30/31, no. 1 (Summer–Fall 1993), 573–592.

18. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), 101.

19. Patrick Williams, “Simultaneous Uncontemporaneities: Theorizing Modernism and Empire,” in Modernism and Empire, ed. Howard Booth and Nigel Rigby (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 20.

20. Naomi Schor, Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine (London: Routledge, 1989), 3.

21. John Bishop, “The Banal, the Boring, and Ulysses,” paper presented at the Nineteenth International James Joyce Symposium, Dublin, June 12–19, 2004.

22. Segal, The Banal Object, 10.

24. Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 112.

25. Ibid., 112–115, 117.

26. Robert Martin Adams, Surface and Symbol: The Consistency of James Joyce’s Ulysses (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962), xviii.

27. Olson, Modernism and the Ordinary, 35.

28. Georg Lukács, quoted in Schor, Reading in Detail, 59.

29. Georg Lukács, “Realism in the Balance,” in Aesthetics and Politics: The Key Texts of the Classic Debate Within German Marxism, trans. Rodney Livingstone (New York: Verso, 1980), 33.

30. Schor, Reading in Detail, 60.

31. It is interesting that Erich Auerbach’s objections to Ulysses, in his book Mimesis, are very much comparable to Lukács’s position with respect to Joyce—especially to what Auerbach considered incomprehensible symbols in Joyce’s work.

32. Lukács, “Realism in the Balance,” 37.

33. Marjorie Howes, “Joyce, Colonialism, and Nationalism,” in The New Cambridge Companion to James Joyce, 2nd ed., ed. Derek Attridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 268.

34. By totality, I imply the structure within which Marxist theory perceives the relationship of the cultural and the material, moving beyond the simpler determination of the base-superstructure model usually derived from Marx’s preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Probably the best illustration of the way in which the totality model of understanding society emerges as a significant theoretical sophistication of the vulgar Marxism of the base-superstructure model is to be found in Raymond Williams’s essay “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory,” where he writes: “The totality of social practices was opposed to this layered notion of a base and a consequent superstructure. The totality of practices is compatible with the notion of social being determining consciousness, but it does not understand this process in terms of a base and a superstructure.” Raymond Williams, “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory,” New Left Review 82 (November–December 1973): 7.

35. Daniel Moshenberg, “A Capital Couple: Speculating in Ulysses,” James Joyce Quarterly 25 (1988): 345.

36. Leonard, “Hystericising Modernism,” 183.

37. Bill Brown, “The Secret Life of Things: Virginia Woolf and the Matter of Modernism,” Modernism/Modernity 6, no. 2 (1999): 1–2.

38. Marc Manganaro, Culture, 1922: The Emergence of a Concept (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002), 111.

39. James Buzard, “Culture and the Critics of Dubliners,” James Joyce Quarterly 37, nos. 1–2 (2000): 55.

40. See James Buzard, “Mass-Observation, Modernism, and Auto-Ethnography,” Modernism/Modernity 4, no. 3 (September 1997): 93–122.

42. Robert Deming, ed., James Joyce: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1970), 1:265, quoted in Manganaro, Culture, 1922, 105.

43. Manganaro, Culture, 1922, 105.

44. Bronislaw Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea (New York: Dutton, 1961), 18.

45. For an identification of this disciplinary turn in anthropology with special attention to Joyce, apart from Manganaro, see Buzard, “Culture and the Critics.” Buzard reads Dubliners “in connection with the growth of another of the twentieth century’s influential new disciplines: modern ethnographic science, in contrast to its Victorian antecedents, was centered around a plural, holistic, and relativistic ‘culture-concept’ and based upon the ethnographer’s personal “immersion” in fieldwork” (45). In his interview with Jose Reginaldo Goncalves, Clifford also points to this shift away from the Frazerian comparativist model around the turn of the century: “At the end of the nineteenth century, culture was still thought of in the singular: people had higher or lower degrees of culture. It was a very important change when it became possible to say ‘cultures’ in the plural—a specific moment, in English at least, toward the end of the nineteenth century.” James Clifford, On the Edges of Anthropology (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003), 2.

46. Manganaro, Culture, 1922, 135–136.

48. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 97.

49. Enda Duffy, “Traffic Accidents: The Modernist Flâneur and Postcolonial Culture,” in The Subaltern Ulysses (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 53–92.

50. Ibid., 63–64, 67–69.

51. Rachel Bowlby, Feminist Destinations and Further Essays on Virginia Woolf (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), 191–220.

52. Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller: Reflections on Works of Nikolai Leskov,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1973), 91.

1. Katherine Mansfield, “Prelude,” Selected Stories, ed. Angela Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 99; all further references to Mansfield’s stories in this chapter come from this volume and will be cited in the text.

2. Jeffery Auerbach, “Imperial Boredom,” Common Knowledge 11, no. 2 (Spring 2005): 304.

4. Robert Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 354.

5. While still far from the radical sense of inadequacy and nonmodernity instilled in the indigenous mind by the ideological enterprise of European colonialism, the settler colonial tedium here in some ways approximates another kind of boredom that recent anthropological research has brought to the surface. This is the boredom that afflicts decolonized peoples in the global South whose quotidian life is pervaded by the loss and shame of being excluded by the hegemonic narrative of modernity and capitalism. In such locations, boredom emerges variously as the overarching experience of everyday life and as an affective marker of the lack of progress that becomes measurable in contact with dominant colonial or neocolonial powers. For the Warlpiri people in the Australian Aboriginal settlement of Yuendumu, Yasmine Musharbash argues, boredom emerges as a concept only after contact with the European settlers. In its contemporary form, boredom pervades the everyday experience of the Warlpiri people, who are caught between the polarities of “neither-there-anymore (the boredom-free presettlement past) and a not-there-at-all (the mainstream)” that leaves them in the aggravating presence of modernities that exclude them. Yasmine Musharbash, “Boredom, Time, and Modernity: An Example from Aboriginal Australia,” American Anthropologist 109, no. 2 (June 2007): 315. The disenchanting temporality that follows this feeling of exclusion eventually turns into boredom, as it also does with a very different social group likewise haunted by lack of progress: urban youth in contemporary Ethiopia living in the global shadow of neoliberal capitalism. Daniel Mains, whose ethnographic research chronicles this experience of neocolonial boredom, reveals that the solution sought to this affective problem posed by unrealized temporality is ironically, but perhaps unsurprisingly, spatial—in terms of migration to the perceived centers of economic progress in the West, which is also seen as enabling a social freedom unimaginable in Ethiopia. Daniel Mains, “Desire and Opportunity Among Urban Youth in Ethiopia,” (PhD diss., Emory University, 2007), 668.

6. Claire Tomalin, Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life (New York: Knopf, 1988), 8.

7. Ibid. The effort to replicate English landscape and architecture in the colonies, though intended to create a “something like a home feeling,” Jeffrey Auerbach argues, only helped to further conceal the unique local appeal of the colonial world that “is such an essential component of a satisfying touristic experience.” “Imperial Boredom,” 294. This further deepened the tedium of life in these locations. Examples of such attempts at replication include the government house in Calcutta, a brick copy of Kedleston Hall in Derbyshire, and the general design of the Indian hill stations, intended to replicate English villages (294). Elleke Boehmer also points to the striking architectural resemblances across the major cities of the global British Empire, including Adelaide, Toronto, Calcutta, Sydney, Victoria, Wellington, Kingston, Harare: “Not only the architectural motifs and street names, but also the urban layout and the statuary, the sandstone or bluestone World War memorials, the societies, banks and other institutions that stand squat and large on Main Street or High Street, all are repeated or find their resonance in urban centres thousands of miles apart.” Elleke Boehmer, “The Worlding of the Jingo Poem,” in “Nineteenth Century Globalization,” ed. Pablo Mukherjee, special issue, Yearbook of English Studies 41, no. 2 (July 2011): 41–57.

8. Witi Ihimaera, Dear Miss Mansfield (Auckland: Viking, 1989), 32.

9. Quoted in Tomalin, A Secret Life, 8.

11. Quoted in Antony Alpers, The Life of Katherine Mansfield (New York: Viking, 1980), 216.

12. Kate Fullbrook, Katherine Mansfield (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986); Claire Hanson, “Katherine Mansfield,” in Gender of Modernism, ed. Bonnie Kime Scott (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990); Sydney Janet Kaplan, Katherine Mansfield and the Origins of Modernist Fiction (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991).

13. Bridget Orr, “The Maori House of Fiction,” in Cultural Institutions of the Novel (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995), 49–50.

15. For a comprehensive literary account of this struggle, see Chadwick Allen, Blood Narratives: Indigenous Identity in American Indian and Maori Literary and Activist Texts (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002).

16. Orr, “Maori House of Fiction,” 78.

17. Ihimaera, Dear Miss Mansfield, 9.

18. Elsdon Best, The Maori as He Was (Wellington: R. E. Owen, 1954), 66.

19. Elsdon Best, Spiritual and Mental Concepts of the Maori (Wellington: R. E. Owen, 1954), 56.

20. James Clifford, On the Edges of Anthropology (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003), 2.

21. Ian Gordon, “Katherine Mansfield: The Wellington Years, a Reassessment,” in Critical Essays on Katherine Mansfield, ed. Rhoda B. Nathan (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1993), 70.

22. Katherine Mansfield, The Urewera Notebook, ed. Ian A. Gordon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 59, 86, 37.

23. Katherine Mansfield, The Katherine Mansfield Notebooks, 2 vols., ed. Margaret Scott (Canterbury: Lincoln University Press, 1997), 136.

24. The story from which the quotation in this section’s title comes. Mansfield, “Prelude,” 103.

25. Patricia Meyer Spacks, Boredom: A Literary History of a State of Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 62.

27. By the term vita activa, or the active life, Arendt proposes “to designate three fundamental human activities: labor, work and action.” Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 7. “They are fundamental,” she writes, “because each corresponds to one of the basic conditions under which life on earth has been given to man” (7). Arendt, however, does not read labor as a specifically gendered activity; according to her, in classical antiquity, labor was the activity that primarily defined the slave. Labor was to be hidden in the privacy of the household, as opposed to action, which proclaimed itself in the public realm. Analyzing labor, she writes: “The differentiation between the private household and the public political realm, between the household inmate who was a slave and the household head who was a citizen, between activities which should be hidden in privacy and those which were worth being seen, heard, and remembered, overshadowed and predetermined all other distinctions until one criterion was left: is the greater amount of time and effort spent in private or in public?” (85).

28. Agamben finds the bored subject as being in “closest proximity” to “animal captivation,” though he does not relate such captivation to a gendered identity. “For this reason,” he writes, “the man who becomes bored finds himself in the ‘closest proximity’—even if it is only apparent—to animal captivation.” Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004), 265.

29. Perhaps the most well known of these systems of medical surveillance is Dr. Weir Mitchell’s “rest cure,” which claimed as its victims both Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Virginia Woolf, the nightmarish psychological consequences of which are hauntingly chronicled in Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper.”

30. Lydia Wevers, “The Short Story,” in The Oxford Handbook of New Zealand Literature in English, 2nd ed., ed. Terry Strum (Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1998), 249.

31. Andrew Bennett, Katherine Mansfield (Plymouth: Northcote House, 2004), 37.

32. Mansfield, Urewera Notebook, 86.

33. Mansfield, The Katherine Mansfield Notebooks, 1:139.

35. Kate Fullbrook, Katherine Mansfield (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 43.

36. Fullbrook, Katherine Mansfield, 43. Emphasis in the original.

37. James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 145–146.

1. In an interview with Clifford in the spring of 2002, the Japanese anthropologist Yoshinobu Ota discussed the possibility of whether The Predicament of Culture might signal the “literary turn” in anthropology. While acknowledging that the book is partly about such a “literary turn” or textualization, Clifford expresses his preference for the term “discourse” as the primary subject of the book, which he identifies as “a concept that has much broader, ‘cultural’ application, both institutionally and politically, than writing as usually understood.” James Clifford, On the Edges of Anthropology (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003), 105–106.

2. James Clifford and George E. Marcus, eds., Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 3–4.

3. James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 122.

4. Much of recent literary criticism’s interest in the ethical implication of relating to otherness or the alien is inflected through the writings of Emmanuel Levinas. For notable instances of this model of ethical relation as foregrounded in literary criticism, see Derek Attridge’s The Singularity of Literature (London: Routledge, 2004) and J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Andrew Gibson’s Postmodernity, Ethics, and the Novel (New York: Routledge, 1999); and Jill Robbins’s Altered Reading: Levinas and Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).

5. Vincent Crapanzano, “Hermes’ Dilemma: The Masking of Subversion in Ethnographic Description,” in Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, ed. James Clifford and George E. Marcus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 52.

6. Patricia Meyer Spacks, Boredom: A Literary History of a State of Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 1.

7. Bronislaw Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea (New York: Dutton, 1961), 18.

8. Peter Pels, “The Anthropology of Colonialism: Culture, History, and the Emergence of Western Governmentality,” Annual Review of Anthropology 26 (1997): 164.

9. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1993), 6.

11. Kelwyn Sole, “‘The Deep Thoughts the One in Need Falls Into’: Quotidian Experience and the Perspectives of Poetry in Postliberation South Africa,” in Postcolonial Studies and Beyond, ed. Ania Loomba et al. (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006), 182.

13. Sol Plaatje, Mhudi, ed. Stephen Gray (London: Heineman, 1978); Lewis Nkosi, Mating Birds (Cape Town: Kwela Books, 2004); Lewis Nkosi, The Rhythm of Violence (London: Oxford University Press, 1964); Miriam Tlali, Muriel at Metropolitan (Harlow: Longman, 1987).

14. Elleke Boehmer, “Endings and New Beginning: South African Fiction in Transition,” in Writing South Africa: Literature, Apartheid, and Democracy, 1970–1995, ed. Derek Attridge and Rosemary Jolly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 43–56.

15. Brian MacAskill, “Inside Out: Jeremy Cronin’s Lyrical Politics,” in Writing South Africa: Literature, Apartheid, and Democracy, 1970–1995, ed. Derek Attridge and Rosemary Jolly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 187.

16. Ndebele, South African Literature and Culture: Rediscovery of the Ordinary (Scottsville, South Africa: University of KwaZulu Natal Press, 2006), 31.

17. Sole, “Quotidian Experience,” 182.

18. Ndebele, South African Literature and Culture, 61.

20. I am aware of the ethicopolitical complications in the use the apartheid-era classification “coloured” to describe Wicomb as well as her protagonist Frieda Shenton. At times, Wicomb herself, like other progressive antiapartheid activists, has declared her preference for the term “black,” following the consolidation of all races classified as “nonwhite” under apartheid—including indigenous peoples, Asians, and coloureds. This consolidation has especially been asserted by the United Democratic Front, which brought together all these racial groups in the struggle against apartheid, protesting, significantly, the Tricameral Parliament of 1983, which gave a separate legislative chamber to the so-called coloured and Asians but withheld such rights from the indigenous black peoples. I have, however, chosen to use the term “coloured” here to distinguish Wicomb as a writer with a racially hybrid background from a black writer like Ndebele. Also, in spite of the campaign of solidarity by the United Democratic Front, it has been noted (by Carol Sicherman, for instance) that there are essential differences between the problems faced by Ndebele’s black protagonist in Fools and those encountered by Frieda Shenton—as Frieda herself comments on, in her discussion with her friend Myra in the story “Ash on My Sleeve,” noted below.

21. Carol Sicherman, “Literary Afterword,” in You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town, by Zoë Wicomb (New York: Feminist Press at CUNY, 2000), 197.

22. Graham Pechey, “The Post-Apartheid Sublime: Rediscovering the Extraordinary,” in Writing South Africa: Literature, Apartheid and Democracy, 1970–1995, eds. Derek Attridge and Rosemary Jolly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 57.

23. The title essay in the collection, to which I specifically refer, was presented as the keynote address at the “New Writing in Africa: Continuity and Change” conference held at the Commonwealth Institute, London, November 1984.

24. Zoë Wicomb, You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town (New York: Feminist Press at CUNY, 2000), 1; further references to this work will be cited in the text.

25. James Buzard, “Culture and the Critics of Dubliners,” James Joyce Quarterly 37, nos. 1–2 (2000): 55.

26. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 17.

27. Daniel Mains, “Desire and Opportunity Among Urban Youth in Ethiopia” (PhD diss., Emory University, 2007), 660, 667, 669.

28. Naomi Schor, Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine (London: Routledge, 1989), 4. Emphasis in the original.

30. Pechey, “Post-Apartheid Sublime,” 57.

31. Ndebele, South African Literature and Culture, 49.

32. Quoted in Carol Sicherman’s afterword to Wicomb, You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town, 201.

33. Pechey, “Post-Apartheid Sublime,” 57.

34. Wicomb, “Shame and Identity: The Case of the Colored in South Africa,” in Writing South Africa: Literature, Apartheid, and Democracy, 1970–1995, ed. Derek Attridge and Rosemary Jolly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 101.

36. Lewis Nkosi, “Postmodernism and Black Writing in South Africa,” in Writing South Africa: Literature, Apartheid, and Democracy, 1970–1995, ed. Derek Attridge and Rosemary Jane Jolly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 75.

1. Aijaz Ahmad, quoted in Michael Sprinker, “The National Question: Said, Ahmad, Jameson,” Public Culture 6 (1993): 9.

3. Imre Szeman, “Who’s Afraid of National Allegory? Jameson, Literary Criticism, Globalization,” South Atlantic Quarterly 100, no. 3 (Summer 2001): 806–807.

5. Nicholas Brown, Utopian Generations: The Political Horizons of Twentieth-Century Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 8.

7. Geeta Kapur, “Globalisation and Culture,” Third Text 11, no. 39 (1997): 23–25.

8. Chinua Achebe, “The African Writer and the English Language,” in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 429.

9. Amit Chaudhuri, “Modernity and the Vernacular,” in The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature, ed. Amit Chaudhuri (London: Picador, 2001), xix.

10. See Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry Into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991).

11. See Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), especially “The Public and the Private Realm.”

12. It should be noted that Jameson’s distinction of the public and the private as one “between the poetic and the political, between … the domain of sexuality and the unconscious and that of the public world of classes, of the economic, and of secular political power: in other words, between Freud and Marx” (Fredric Jameson, “Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” Social Text, no. 15 [Autumn 1986]: 69), perhaps intuitive to us today, contrasts significantly with both the Habermasian and the Arendtian conceptions of the public-private duality. Both Habermas and Arendt have been criticized for their elitist and exclusive notions of public agency; for a collection of these critiques, see Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993). For the most significant conception of the proletarian public sphere, see Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere, trans. Peter Labanyi, Jamie Owen Daniel, and Assenka Oksiloff (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).

13. See Indrani Chatterjee, ed., Unfamiliar Relations: Family and History in South Asia (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004).

14. Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993).

15. “The material is the domain of the ‘outside,’ of the economy and of statecraft, of science and technology, a domain where the West had proved its superiority and the East had succumbed.… The spiritual, on the other hand, is an ‘inner’ domain bearing the essential marks of cultural identity.” Ibid., 147.

20. Szeman, “National Allegory,” 808.

21. C. Nadia Seremetakis, The Senses Still: Perception and Memory as Material Culture in Modernity (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1994), 19.

22. Sara Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 12–13.

23. It might be of some relevance here to mention that many of these novelists have varying degrees of professional training in history and the neighboring social sciences, which they have possibly brought to bear upon their fictional vision. Rushdie’s undergraduate degree in Cambridge was in history, and Kesavan is a professor of history in Jamia Milia Islamia University in Delhi. Tharoor, whose Ph.D. is in political science, has probably had the most active and direct professional role in the global and domestic public sphere, first in his long career as a UN diplomat. Following the parliamentary elections in May 2009, he served for a period as an elected member of parliament for the Indian National Congress and the deputy minister of external affairs in the National Cabinet.

24. Significantly, this was also the first occasion since independence when the continuous, indeed dynastic rule of the Gandhi Nehru family-led Indian National Congress was disrupted, following Indira Gandhi’s declaration of emergency in 1975, chronicled in Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance. The declaration of emergency was something of a dictatorial act on Mrs. Gandhi’s part, which eventually led to the loss of her popularity, a fact that was reflected in the following parliamentary elections, the first ever that the Indian National Congress lost.

25. Chaudhuri, “Modernity and the Vernacular,” xxv.

26. Jon Mee, “After Midnight: The Novel in the 1980s and 1990s,” in A History of Indian Literature in English, ed. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 318–319.

27. Rajeshwari Sunder Rajan, quoted in Priya Joshi, In Another Country: Colonialism, Culture and the English Novel in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 230.

28. Bishupriya Ghosh, “An Invitation to Indian Postmodernity: Rushdie’s English Vernacular as Situated Cultural Hybridity,” in Critical Essays on Salman Rushdie, ed. M. Keith Booker (New York: G. K. Hall, 1999), 30.

29. Chaudhuri, “Modernity and the Vernacular,” xxiv.

30. Published in the United States as The Vintage Book of Modern Indian Literature (New York: Vintage, 2004).

31. Terry Eagleton, “Anti-Humanism,” review of D. H. Lawrence and ‘Difference’: Post-Coloniality and the Poetry of the Present by Amit Chaudhuri, London Review of Books 26, no. 3 (February 3, 2004): 16–18.

33. Amit Chaudhuri, D. H. Lawrence and Difference (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), vii.

34. Chaudhuri, “Modernity and the Vernacular,” xvi.

35. Amit Chaudhuri, Clearing a Space: Reflections on India, Literature, and Culture (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2008), 14.

36. Chaudhuri, “Modernity and the Vernacular,” xxx.

37. Amit Chaudhuri, A Strange and Sublime Address, in Freedom Song: Three Novels (New York: Knopf, 1999), 74.

38. Indrani Chatterjee, Unfamiliar Relations, 3.

39. Chaudhuri, A Strange and Sublime Address, 7.

41. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (New York: Garland, 1993), 28.

42. Amit Chaudhuri, Real Time (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2002), 6.

45. Amit Chaudhuri, Afternoon Raag, in Freedom Song: Three Novels (New York: Knopf, 1999), 181.

47. Eagleton, “Anti-Humanism,” 2.

48. Chaudhuri, Strange and Sublime Address, 53–54.

49. Michael Taussig, The Nervous System (London: Routledge, 1992), 141.

51. Vinayek Chaturvedi, introduction to Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial, ed. Vinayak Chaturvedi (London: Verso, 2000), vii.

52. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 112.

53. Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Radical Histories and Question of Enlightenment Rationalism: Some Recent Critiques of Subaltern Studies,” Economic and Political Weekly 30, no. 14 (April 8, 1995): 757.

54. Naomi Segal, The Banal Object: Theme and Thematics in Proust, Rilke, Hofmannsthal, and Sartre (London: University of London Press, 1981), 14.

55. Chaudhuri, Real Time, 46.

56. Chaudhuri, A Strange and Sublime Address, 20.

60. Amit Chaudhuri, The Immortals (London: Picador, 2009), 67.

62. Chaudhuri, Afternoon Raag, 188.

63. Amit Chaudhuri, A New World (New York: Knopf, 2000), 50.

64. See chapter 2 for a discussion of Duffy and Bowlby’s reading of modernist flânerie.

65. Amit Chaudhuri, “In the Waiting Room of History,” review of Provincialising Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, by Dipesh Chakrabarty, London Review of Books 26, no. 12 (June 24, 2004): 3.

66. Walter Benjamin, quoted in Amit Chaudhuri, introduction to Jejuri, by Aruna Kolatkar (New York: NYRB, 2005), xxiv–xxv.

68. Chaudhuri, Freedom Song in Freedom Song, 303.

69. James Buzard, “Culture and the Critics of Dubliners,” James Joyce Quarterly 37, nos. 1–2 (2000): 57.

71. “One has to convey in a language that is not one’s own the spirit that is one’s own. One has to convey the various shades and omissions of a certain thought-movement that looks maltreated in an alien language. I use the word ‘alien,’ yet English is not really an alien language to us. It is the language of our intellectual make-up—like Sanskrit or Persian was before—but not of our emotional make up.” Raja Rao, Kanthapura (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1977), vii.

72. Amit Chaudhuri, “The Construction of the Indian Novel in English,” xxviii.

1. Franco Moretti, The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture, trans. Albert Sbragia (London: Verso, 2000), 7.

2. The generic difference between prose fiction and poetry is in fact crucial to the way the ordinary is played out in different texts. Two important recent theorists of the literary significance of the everyday in modern Anglo-American literature, Bryony Randall and Siobhan Phillips, both foreground temporality as a crucial epistemological category around which the everyday is embodied. The everyday, at the most fundamental level, is what we experience every day, the day, as Randall points out, being the temporal unit whose structure is most immediately tangible to our senses. Bryony Randall, Modernism, Daily Time, and Everyday Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 1. The ordinary, in this analysis, emerges as a temporal experience, that which is repeated as part of the physical pattern of the day or the psychological iteration of habit and the inescapable structure of one’s daily life. If narrative prose delineates a linear progression through time, poetry is better suited to capture the cyclical, iterative temporality of the everyday. “Poetic time,” Phillips argues, “dramatizes the repeated manifestation of an ongoing rhythm rather than the steady advance of an oncoming climax.… Verse can even help to articulate the discrete properties of this dailiness—nonnarrative yet temporal, unplotted yet contextual.” Siobhan Phillips, The Poetics of the Everyday: Creative Repetition in Modern American Verse (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 22–23. A poetics of the everyday offers the poet a creative free will within this larger pattern of dailiness—“difference-in-sameness” or a “changing sameness,” in Phillips’s evocative vocabulary. Every morning is the same yet not quite; every action, performed out of habit or daily need, in such poetics, carries the submerged promise of newness, as the poets of her archive, Frost, Stevens, Bishop, and Merrill, reveal. In effect, such poetics of the everyday translates in temporal terms the duality of the public and the private, the mundane and the transcendental as “in their work, daily practice can maintain effective subjective freedom within an objective necessity” (4), and, accordingly, these writers “aspire to neither the potential solipsism of a private time nor the potential self-effacement of an external order” (10).

3. Liesl Olson, Modernism and the Ordinary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 75.

4. Thomas L. Dumm, A Politics of the Ordinary (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 17.

5. C. Nadia Seremetakis, ed., The Senses Still: Perception and Memory as Material Culture in Modernity (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1994), 19.

7. Such a misconstruction would have to overlook the fact that the most celebrated imagination of banality in the twentieth century has been an aestheticization of the political. In Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, the motif of banal emerges not only as politically depraved and ethically bankrupt but, perhaps more strikingly, as a force of aesthetic impoverishment. In fact, it might be more accurate to say that in Arendt’s reading, the ethical and political depravity of Eichmann’s actions derive some of their most damning force from the sheer banality of their aesthetic.

8. Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, trans. Sian Reynolds (New York: Harper & Row. 1972), 1:21, 1:20.

9. Seremetakis, The Senses Still, 20.

10. Braudel, Mediterranean, 2:900, 2:903, 2:901.

11. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 2 vols., trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer, 2 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 102. Emphasis in the original.

12. Ibid., 3, 52, 102.

13. In this essay, Cavell refers to the paper Ricoeur delivered as one of the Lionel Trilling Seminars at Columbia University on November 13, 1980. Cavell’s own essay was published shortly before the English translation of Time and Narrative appeared in print, and he refers to and quotes from, therefore, not Ricoeur’s published volumes but the paper as it was delivered. Since I have not been able to find citation information for these papers (Cavell does not provide any), I have used quotations from Ricoeur’s paper as provided in Cavell’s own essay.

14. Paul Ricoeur, quoted in Stanley Cavell, Themes out of School: Effects and Causes (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1984), 185.

17. Ibid. My emphasis.

18. Ibid., 190–191.

19. Ralph Waldo Emerson, quoted in ibid., 193.

21. Dumm, Politics of the Ordinary, 21.

22. Cavell, Themes out of School, 193.

23. Chaudhuri, “The Construction of the Indian Novel in English,” in The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature, ed. Amit Chaudhuri (London: Picador, 2001), xxvi.

24. Guy Debord, “Perspectives for Conscious Alterations in Everyday Life,” in The Everyday Life Reader, ed. Ben Highmore (London: Routledge, 2002), 244.

25. Jacques Rancière, The Nights of Labor: The Worker’s Dream in Nineteenth-Century France, trans. John Drury (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), vii.

26. Henri Lefebvre, “Towards a Leftist Cultural Politics,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, eds. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 80.

27. Sonali Perera, “‘All That Is Present and Moving …’: Thinking Working-Class Writing at the Limits” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2003).

28. Njabulo Ndebele, South African Literature and Culture: Rediscovery of the Ordinary (Scottsville, South Africa: University of KwaZulu Natal Press, 2006), 66.

29. Michael Herzfeld, The Social Production of Indifference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 184.

31. Mbembe opens his discussion of governmentality in the decolonized states of sub-Saharan Africa with a promise to explore “the banality of power in the postcolony.” Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 102. His exploration of governmentality in decolonized sub-Saharan African states relates to his understanding of the aesthetic diffusion of state power (and resistance to such power) in the micropolitics of the everyday. State power, in either its colonial or postcolonial phase, produces itself around “institutions, knowledges, norms, and practices” that shape the mundane everyday. Probably the most natural habitat of such governmental power in the recesses of the everyday in the life of the citizen is the institution that Mbembe acknowledges at the very outset of his chapter “The Aesthetics of Vulgarity” but that he also moves considerably beyond: state bureaucracy, which is an essential and inescapable venue of everyday reality in the private and public lives of citizens of the modern state across the globe. Instead, in this chapter, he primarily seeks to address the crude “belly politics” of African dictators, of which, as he points out, the bureaucratic forms only a limited part. And as it becomes clear from subsequent passages in his writing, “vulgarity” rather than “banality” is the better term for addressing the political implications of his work. Even so, his use of the notion of the “banality of power” in relation to colonial governmentality is intriguing. Inasmuch as such governmentality hinges on structures of bureaucracy, power is produced not only in the cruder space of the vulgar and the directly oppressive but also through mechanisms whose necessary affective consequence is that of banality, monotony, and the oppressive tedium of iterative temporality.