Resisting%20Cultural%20Cannibalism:%20Oppositional%20Narratives%20in%20Michelle%20Cliff

1
Resisting Cultural Cannibalism Oppositional
Narratives in Michelle Cliffs No Telephone to
Heaven

• Fiona R. Barnes

2
What terms from the PC theory text did you run
across as you read?

• Neo-colonialism
• Capitalism/Commodification of Jamaica
• Decolonization
• Resistance
• Cultural Estrangement/Cultural Imperialism
• Hegemonic/hegemony/Indigenous
• Master Narrative/Subaltern Speech
• Genre/generic foundations/Hybrid (literary form)

3
Barnes Argument

• ThesisThe novel enacts and describes the
  multiple struggles against cultural cannibalism
  and for decolonization on literary and geographic
  terrain in Jamaica.
• 1. Clair learns to oppose the domination of
  Eurocentrist history and culture and returns to
  Jamaica to unearth the repressed or resistant
  history of her native land.
• 2. On a narratological level, Cliff extends and
  critiques the traditional bildungsroman form by
  transforming the individual bourgeois quest plot
  into a collective struggle for social justice.

4
Cultural Cannibalism

• Harry/Harriet says to Clare Our homeland is
  turned to stage set too much.
• Tourism and its romanticization of Caribbean
  culture.
• Creating a fake archaeology of history or false
  media scripts reprogram popular memory.
• Cliffs novel weaves together the submerged
  stories of past and present popular resistance
  struggles in Jamaice in order to confront the
  fake Western archaeology of the countrys history
  with a more genuine or inclusive one.

5
The Film foregrounding historical/cultural
conflict

• P. 206 exposes the fake archaeology constructed
  by the foreign filmmakers.
• P. 26 of essay.
• But, Cliff doesnt make the answer simple.
• p. 26 the resistance fighters and their own
  costuming
• How is it possible to return to a real or
  genuine history without contamination?, asks
  Cliff

6
Clare as conflicted

• Torn between mother and father
• Between Britain and Jamaica
• Between black and white
• Once her political loyalties clarify, we see her
  (p. 28) abandoning her English university
  graduate work in the European Renaissance in
  favor of teaching reading, writing, and
  indigenous Jamaican History to school children in
  Jamaica . . . attempting to evade cooptation by
  Western master narratives.
• Clare becomes, according to Barnes, a kind of
  modern day Nanny resisting the domination of
  the master codes of literary genres and/or
  historical narratives, and constructs a new
  paradigm for post-colonial subjects.

7
The novels form as conflicted

• Genre code. The ideology of the form is as
  important as the theme and content of the text.
• Bildungsroman. What is it? (Middle class quest
  motif. Young individual leaves home, searching
  for self, finds answers, returns home and lives
  happily every after.)
• Post-colonial modifications of form
• Been-to narrative protagonist travels to center
  of empire and back, usually becoming alienated
  from both indigenous and imperial cultures in the
  process.
• Protagonists development parallels the political
  and social awakening of their country.
• Cliffs modifications of the form
• Clares middle class fortunes are intertwined
  with two other characters (Christopher and
  Harry/Harriet) exposing the spectrum of suffering
  in Jamaica.
• Parallel plot lines undermine linear narrative of
  bildungsroman and politicize the novel.

8
The ending as conflicted

• Their deaths resist the readers desire for a
  happy ending, which goes against the grain of the
  bildungsroman and is therefore anti-imperial,
  counter-hegemonic.
• But, their deaths also deny hope of the success
  of resistance. Like Nanny and her band of
  Maroons, they are destroyed, betrayed by a
  traitor and wiped out.
• P. 30 Cliff from Clare Savage as a Crossroads
  Character.