This article explores the first-person narration and the ethics of alterity in Naipaul's stor... more This article explores the first-person narration and the ethics of alterity in Naipaul's story “Tell Me Who to Kill.” It argues that readers are called upon to comprehend the emerging alterity in their encounter with the racial other; on the other hand, the textual recalcitrance immanent to the unreliable first-person narration precludes the possibility of readers' arriving at the alterity of the other and thus keeps alive the uncanny otherness. Given the two-fold reading effect, readers are invited to develop sympathy on the story level, and at the same time to identify the ethical import that underpins its textual construct on the narrative level.
Since its publication, V. S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival has been read as either a national a... more Since its publication, V. S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival has been read as either a national allegory or English postcolonial literature. Based on the dual models, critics are prone to getting trapped in identity politics, unable to break away from the postcolonial interpretive framework. In this essay, I revisit the issue of identity from a transnational perspective in hopes of capturing the complexity and significance that Naipaul invests in his representation of identity in this novel. Specifically, I argue that Enigma mobilizes identity not so much as a fixated category but as a radically revisionary act of knowing the self. The perspectival oscillation between the narrating ‘I’ and the experiencing ‘I’ enables readers’ access into the narrator’s emotional responses to his uneven development, whereby he comes to a fruitful understanding of human identity. Through a series of vision and revision, Enigma enacts a cognitive process of inward self-examination that culminates in a...
This article proposes a thesis that goes against the negativity of the prevalent assessment of Na... more This article proposes a thesis that goes against the negativity of the prevalent assessment of Naipaul's work: that his literary project partakes in writing third-world history and reconstructing humanism of the global south. In his transnational novels especially, Naipaul often mobilizes contemporaneity as a vehicle to challenge hegemonic European time, and accordingly calls for a new form of rewriting (post-)imperial history. In light of the notion of time and contemporaneity, I read A Bend in the River (1979) as Naipaul's attempt to write a post-Orientalist history of Africa that refuses to be historicized as the West's Other. Contrary to the popular view that Naipaul consigns Africa to a primitive time zone, this novel enacts an indigenous temporality in parallel with European time which denies that Africa is Europe's contemporary, unravelling their fundamental coevalness. Through a vivid depiction of (non-)interactions between characters, Naipaul uses literary realism to attempt historiography in African terms, one that contests and expands the way we think and imagine African history.
Since its publication, V. S. Naipaul's The Enigma of Arrival has been read as either a national a... more Since its publication, V. S. Naipaul's The Enigma of Arrival has been read as either a national allegory or English postcolonial literature. Based on the dual models, critics are prone to getting trapped in identity politics, unable to break away from the postcolonial interpretive framework. In this essay, I revisit the issue of identity from a transnational perspective in hopes of capturing the complexity and significance that Naipaul invests in his representation of identity in this novel. Specifically, I argue that Enigma mobilizes identity not so much as a fixated category but as a radically revisionary act of knowing the self. The perspectival oscillation between the narrating 'I' and the experiencing 'I' enables readers' access into the narrator's emotional responses to his uneven development, whereby he comes to a fruitful understanding of human identity. Through a series of vision and revision, Enigma enacts a cognitive process of inward self-examination that culminates in a kind of ethical knowledge, unravelling identity discomfort as a universal human experience at the global moment of cultural mixing in the second half of the twentieth century. Moreover, Naipaul's deconstruction of identity executes a critique of his own formation and thereby illuminates the great significance of recognizing the self's foreignness to himself in cultivating cultural cohesion in a multicultural society.
Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, Dec 30, 2015
This article contends that The Mimic Men tactically repeats and then deconstructs the colonialist... more This article contends that The Mimic Men tactically repeats and then deconstructs the colonialist stereotype of the mimic men by embedding two layers of writing within the novel: Singh’s documentary writing and Naipaul’s literary narrative, whose interplay with each other is prone to invoke ethical resonance. In juxtaposing the double-layered writings, I suggest through an intertextual reading with C. L. R. James’s works, Naipaul links the colonial story of a mimic man with the communal history of the mimic men, which mobilizes readers to recognize the ethico-aesthetic difficulty of representing the colonial subject.
This article explores the first-person narration and the ethics of alterity in Naipaul's story “T... more This article explores the first-person narration and the ethics of alterity in Naipaul's story “Tell Me Who to Kill.” It argues that readers are called upon to comprehend the emerging alterity in their encounter with the racial other; on the other hand, the textual recalcitrance immanent to the unreliable first-person narration precludes the possibility of readers' arriving at the alterity of the other and thus keeps alive the uncanny otherness. Given the two-fold reading effect, readers are invited to develop sympathy on the story level, and at the same time to identify the ethical import that underpins its textual construct on the narrative level.
This article explores the first-person narration and the ethics of alterity in Naipaul's stor... more This article explores the first-person narration and the ethics of alterity in Naipaul's story “Tell Me Who to Kill.” It argues that readers are called upon to comprehend the emerging alterity in their encounter with the racial other; on the other hand, the textual recalcitrance immanent to the unreliable first-person narration precludes the possibility of readers' arriving at the alterity of the other and thus keeps alive the uncanny otherness. Given the two-fold reading effect, readers are invited to develop sympathy on the story level, and at the same time to identify the ethical import that underpins its textual construct on the narrative level.
Since its publication, V. S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival has been read as either a national a... more Since its publication, V. S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival has been read as either a national allegory or English postcolonial literature. Based on the dual models, critics are prone to getting trapped in identity politics, unable to break away from the postcolonial interpretive framework. In this essay, I revisit the issue of identity from a transnational perspective in hopes of capturing the complexity and significance that Naipaul invests in his representation of identity in this novel. Specifically, I argue that Enigma mobilizes identity not so much as a fixated category but as a radically revisionary act of knowing the self. The perspectival oscillation between the narrating ‘I’ and the experiencing ‘I’ enables readers’ access into the narrator’s emotional responses to his uneven development, whereby he comes to a fruitful understanding of human identity. Through a series of vision and revision, Enigma enacts a cognitive process of inward self-examination that culminates in a...
This article proposes a thesis that goes against the negativity of the prevalent assessment of Na... more This article proposes a thesis that goes against the negativity of the prevalent assessment of Naipaul's work: that his literary project partakes in writing third-world history and reconstructing humanism of the global south. In his transnational novels especially, Naipaul often mobilizes contemporaneity as a vehicle to challenge hegemonic European time, and accordingly calls for a new form of rewriting (post-)imperial history. In light of the notion of time and contemporaneity, I read A Bend in the River (1979) as Naipaul's attempt to write a post-Orientalist history of Africa that refuses to be historicized as the West's Other. Contrary to the popular view that Naipaul consigns Africa to a primitive time zone, this novel enacts an indigenous temporality in parallel with European time which denies that Africa is Europe's contemporary, unravelling their fundamental coevalness. Through a vivid depiction of (non-)interactions between characters, Naipaul uses literary realism to attempt historiography in African terms, one that contests and expands the way we think and imagine African history.
Since its publication, V. S. Naipaul's The Enigma of Arrival has been read as either a national a... more Since its publication, V. S. Naipaul's The Enigma of Arrival has been read as either a national allegory or English postcolonial literature. Based on the dual models, critics are prone to getting trapped in identity politics, unable to break away from the postcolonial interpretive framework. In this essay, I revisit the issue of identity from a transnational perspective in hopes of capturing the complexity and significance that Naipaul invests in his representation of identity in this novel. Specifically, I argue that Enigma mobilizes identity not so much as a fixated category but as a radically revisionary act of knowing the self. The perspectival oscillation between the narrating 'I' and the experiencing 'I' enables readers' access into the narrator's emotional responses to his uneven development, whereby he comes to a fruitful understanding of human identity. Through a series of vision and revision, Enigma enacts a cognitive process of inward self-examination that culminates in a kind of ethical knowledge, unravelling identity discomfort as a universal human experience at the global moment of cultural mixing in the second half of the twentieth century. Moreover, Naipaul's deconstruction of identity executes a critique of his own formation and thereby illuminates the great significance of recognizing the self's foreignness to himself in cultivating cultural cohesion in a multicultural society.
Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, Dec 30, 2015
This article contends that The Mimic Men tactically repeats and then deconstructs the colonialist... more This article contends that The Mimic Men tactically repeats and then deconstructs the colonialist stereotype of the mimic men by embedding two layers of writing within the novel: Singh’s documentary writing and Naipaul’s literary narrative, whose interplay with each other is prone to invoke ethical resonance. In juxtaposing the double-layered writings, I suggest through an intertextual reading with C. L. R. James’s works, Naipaul links the colonial story of a mimic man with the communal history of the mimic men, which mobilizes readers to recognize the ethico-aesthetic difficulty of representing the colonial subject.
This article explores the first-person narration and the ethics of alterity in Naipaul's story “T... more This article explores the first-person narration and the ethics of alterity in Naipaul's story “Tell Me Who to Kill.” It argues that readers are called upon to comprehend the emerging alterity in their encounter with the racial other; on the other hand, the textual recalcitrance immanent to the unreliable first-person narration precludes the possibility of readers' arriving at the alterity of the other and thus keeps alive the uncanny otherness. Given the two-fold reading effect, readers are invited to develop sympathy on the story level, and at the same time to identify the ethical import that underpins its textual construct on the narrative level.
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