E3W Literature | University of Texas

Hosam Aboul-Ela

Other South: Faulkner, Coloniality, and the Mariátegui Tradition

University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007

224 pages

$24.95

Reviewed by Alberto Varon

While many studies of William Faulkner focus on his status as either a Southern writer or a Modernist, Hosam Aboul-Ela’s recent book forces scholars to re-conceptualize the author’s place in literary circles by situating him within the Global South. Through careful attention to Faulkner’s fic­tion, but exploding the critical corpus through which he is read, Aboul-Ela’s monograph drives toward a re-conceptual­ization of the relationship between American literature and the literatures of colonization around the world. Aboul-Ela argues for an alternative literary history to current scholas­tic interpretive models, models that privilege both primary texts and theoretical paradigms originating in a Western, Euro-American tradition. Aboul-Ela proposes an analyti­cal framework that centers third world thinkers at the core.

One of the most potent claims in the book is the insistence on a need for a revised approach to literary authority. If the “historicization of knowledge” has traditionally migrated from north to south as Aboul-Ela argues, Other South exem­plifies how a contraflow of ideas opens up possibilities for new understandings and challenges an existing historiogra­phy that flows from global core to periphery. Eurocentric models of global development, dating back to a Hegelian Marxist view of global history as linear, consider various societies as existing at different points along a continued unfolding of history, all in relative states of development. The linear view of history and social development as prog­ress fails to account for local particularity as well as for the existence of unique local and regional societies before colo­nialism. Thus, Eurocentric models of analysis are inadequate for describing local circumstance. The thrust of this critique of historiography lies upon the spatial emphasis of post­colonial theorists. As opposed to traditional Marxist class analyses that emphasize class discrepancies and alliances around the globe, the spatial emphasis identifies shared con­ditions of the postcolonial experience along a north-south axis, but leaves room to attend to the local particularity.

Aboul-Ela draws on the legacy of José Carlos Mariátegui, who remains among the most respected of early twentieth century Latin American political theorists in Latin Ameri­can cultural studies. A native of the country, Mariategui’s examination of Peruvian social relations and his socialist vision, with its insistence on a regional specificity, allow Aboul-Ela to posit an alternative intellectual tradition. For Mariátegui, unequal power relations are the result of global economic and political inequities, the latter resulting from an uneven distribution of resources in colonial systems. Given the discrepancy between relations of power in co­lonial systems, local specificities radically impact how crit­ics should understand a nation or culture. Though writing contemporaneously, Mariátegui’s work never achieved the same degree of familiarity as Antonio Gramsci’s, despite the fact that both argue for the importance of the organic in­tellectual to social change. Like Gramsci, Mariátegui urged that for radical political change to take place society needed to account for the local material conditions of production.

Mariátegui’s notion of local specificity comes into full frui­tion in the school of thought known as dependency theory. Dependency theory posits an inverse relationship in the ac­cumulation of wealth between the rich and poor nations. By extending beyond the classical understanding of colonial­ism, it provides a way to understand the relationship be­tween postcolonial countries and former colonial nations, or between countries at different stages of capitalism. Accord­ing to dependency theory, poor nations provide markets for and resources to more prosperous nations. In turn, these affluent nations implement political and economic poli­cies that maintain these relationships in order to assure the perpetuation of unequal wealth distribution. Dependency theory proved influential across a broad spectrum of politi­cal, economic, and cultural theory, and Aboul-Ela makes the case for the dependistas, as the Latin American intellectuals of this vein are known, as the continuation of Mariátegui’s ideas. Aboul-Ela juxtaposes Mariátegui with Egyptian Samir Amin, who promulgated dependency theory beyond Latin America. Through Mariátegui and Amin, Aboul-Ela asserts how non-Eurocentric intellectual traditions both illumi­nate third world cultures and account for local particularity.

Both Mariátegui and Amin identify an intermediary figure common to both regions. Aboul-Ela adopts Mariátegui’s term “comprador” to explain “the interstitial figure in the global economy that facilitates the disarticulation of de­velopment programs in the periphery.” It is through the comprador, or middleman, that colonial rule over the pe­riphery can persist by perpetuating the social conditions through which the colonial economy can function. The existence of this shared intermediary speaks to social char­acteristics common to multiple colonial economies. Aboul-Ela explains how political and cultural figures in what he coins the Mariátegui tradition oppose the comprador class’s vested interest in maintaining the colonial dynamic.

Through the lens of the Mariátegui tradition, the universal historical materialism common to colonial economies gives rise to shared aesthetic developments and the structures of economic dependence manifest in particular narrative or generic forms. If the linear view of history as progress has as its cultural counterpart the bildungsroman, narratives of the Global South adopt modernist techniques to con­test colonial dominance. Aboul-Ela asserts that narrative techniques of the Global South generate similar aesthetic structures, involving multiperspectival storytelling and non-linear temporal organization. He contends that the recurrence of multiperspectival narration and non-linear temporality in literatures from various global regions attests to the impact that post- and neo-colonial economies have on cultural production. Rather than progress from birth to death around a central character, novels of the Global South employ shifting narration and invert temporal pro­gression and chronological sequence in order to express the social conditions emerging from economic dependence. This narrative strategy is made visible in literature from the Global South, such as Carlos Fuentes’s Death of Arte­mio Cruz (1964) or Ghassan Kanafani’s All That’s Left to You (1966), where even place becomes a narrator. Here, narra­tive form itself reflects the postcolonial reality. Viewing aes­thetic structure as a particular expression of the postcolonial condition allows for alternate interpretations of literature. While many critics read novels of the third world as national allegory, Aboul-Ela contends that the most certain connec­tion between disparate cultures of the Global South is their experience with the colonial economy. Thus, literature is both the expression and establishment of a Global South.

If recent trends in American literary studies give priority to the hemisphere as a sphere of cultural and literary interac­tion, Aboul-Ela shows how such arbitrary boundaries fail to account for a much broader shared economic experience. Rather than a literature of the Americas, Aboul-Ela makes a case for literature common to the Souths. Rather than desig­nate relationships as the primary indicator of cultural influence, Aboul-Ela argues for a shared political and economic relation­ship as the primary commonality between and among subjugat­ed populations. The generic characteristics of narrative common to the Global South provide a new paradigm for Faulkner stud­ies, as well as arguing for a new theoretic framework for literary and postcolonial studies. Aboul-Ela’s argument builds up to his explication of William Faulkner as a writer of the Global South. He persuasively demonstrates how Faulkner’s modernist tech­niques (the subject of years of critical inquiry), when put into a more global framework, shed light on Faulkner’s own sense of the US south as a distinctly postcolonial space, emphasizing his position as a regional writer over his acclaim as a national author. Faulkner influenced scores of other writers in Latin America and the Middle East because the aesthetic techniques Faulkner employed reflect the condition of postcoloniality. Aboul-Ela chooses Faulkner to elaborate on this critique not because of a contention that Faulkner is a colonized subject, but rather to emphasize how reading Faulkner through the Mariátegui tradi­tion draws out an aspect of Faulkner studies otherwise unavail­able. In doing so, Aboul-Ela illustrates what literary studies can gain by acknowledging alternative intellectual traditions, espe­cially the traditions of the Global South commonly disregarded.

Aboul-Ela offers a brief reading of Moby Dick (1850) to dem­onstrate how narratives create metaphors that can suggest “that civilizational and cultural differences are equivalent to levels of education— ranks on a hierarchy of knowledge and train­ing.” It is precisely these assumptions of hierarchical knowledge that Aboul-Ela so effectively critiques throughout his text. Aboul-Ela uses Melville’s novel to open up a discussion about the implications of postcolonial theory and theorists on the spaces, both geographic and institutional, which they self-re­flexively address. He notes the distinctions among the theories of Gayatri Spivak, Edward Said, Michel Foucault and others to argue that as the field of postcolonial studies has increas­ingly become institutionalized, it has neglected to account for its own involvement in intellectual and economic knowledge production. Without taking into consideration the academy’s role in knowledge production, there persists the danger of rep­licating the same Eurocentric epistemology that postcolonial studies critiques. Intellectual theories of knowledge grounded in “Western metaphysics,” particularly those that emphasize textuality over material history, have tended to insist on the global commonality of intellectual tradition, an intellectual po­sitioning that does not necessarily obtain at local or regional levels. About-Ela proposes that heightened attention to political economy’s role in shaping cultural production will help account for variations in the intellectual traditions of the Global South.

One of Aboul-Ela’s most provocative assertions concludes the monograph. He notes the current trend in cultural studies of “renaming its emphasis on the ‘postcolonial’ as an empha­sis on ‘globalization;’” he further suggests that globalization marks an “international crisis.” Aboul-Ela astutely observes that the spread of globalization studies coincided with the United States’ ascension in the post-Cold War era. As currently theo­rized, globalization explains the spread of capitalism and free market economies around the globe, yet the economic sys­tem inherently maintains uneven relations of power and the distribution of wealth between countries. Concomitantly, with the rise of global capitalism, the emphasis on globaliza­tion reflects the interests of a relatively small percentage of the world’s population and hence, a monologic character to globalization. Aboul-Ela argues that by incorporating intel­lectual strategies from the Global South, a model exemplified in the Mariátegui tradition, critical inquiry “would more ap­propriately fit the phrase ‘globalization studies.’” While this critique lies latent throughout his study, Aboul-Ela stops short of fully exploring the ramifications of his criticism of global­ization studies. The distinction between “globalization” and “globalization studies” as one of multi-directionality emerges as a compelling though under-examined element in the text.

While at times the unifying logic behind the argument is lost in the text’s sweeping scope, it is precisely such theoreti­cal discomfort that is at the heart of Aboul-Ela’s Other South. Other South dislodges the reader from accustomed theo­retical underpinnings and is a compelling reconfiguration of traditional literary histories and interpretation. Though the text struggles at times with the balance between the unique­ness of the local and the commonality of the global, Aboul-Ela unites these often competing assertions with a strong case for the multiple and multi-directional routes through which knowledge is transmitted. Overall, Aboul-Ela’s Other South is a powerful re-conception not only of Faulkner stud­ies, but also of historiography and intellectual tradition.