primitives are not back in some remote age — they are not BEHIND

of the nervous system and have never in their experience witnessed t

but that he possessed knowledge, and extraordinary kno

out " life ", bitter to the individual, by a " vision of beauty ". It is a work of the imagination. It gives the feeling

Composition is in no essential an escape from life. In fact if it is so it is negligeable to the point of insig- nificance. Whatever « life » the artist may be forced to lead has

perfect

Wind is in the cane.

. Our congregation had been visiting at Pulverton, and were coming home. There was no wind. The autumn sun, the bell from Ebenezer Church, listless and heavy. Even the pines were stale, sticky, like the smell of food that makes you sick. Be

At dusk, during the hush just after the sawmill had closed down, and before any of the women had started their supper-getting-ready songs, her voice, high-pitched, shrill, would put one’s ears to itching. But no one ever thought to make her stop because of it. She stoned the cows, and beat her dog, and fought the other children... Even t

e artist must lose such lesser identities in the great well of life. The English poet is not forever protesting and recalling that he is English. It is so natural and easy for him to be English that he can sing as a man. The French novelist is not forever noting: “This is French.” It is so atmospheric for him to be French, that he can devote himself to saying: “T

the absolutespirit c

The return of the repressed, ofwhich we must rid ourselves in order to consider ourselvesas “different”: rational humans, spiritual beings.

a lesson plan for a high school classroom around the event, deve

tragedy is always and everywhere..

That watches and receives

Come, hear the woodland linnet, 10How sweet his music; on my lifeThere’s more of wisdom in it

y all this toil and trouble?Up! up! my friend, and quit your books,Or surely you’ll grow double

I’ve heard of hearts unkind, kind deedsWith coldness still returning.Alas! the gratitude of menHas oftner left me mournin

ader! had you in your mindSuch stores as silent thought can bring,O gentle reader! you would findA tale in every thing.

New objects

We murder to dissect

Come forth, and bring with you a heart

u, mid all this mighty sum“Of things for ever speaking,“That nothing of itself will come,“But we must still be seeking

In a wise passiveness

Our bodies feel, where’er they be

Rather, the deliriumemerges from the intensity of the perceived epistemological disjuncture, theexistential sense that one is standing where one ought not to be andtherefore, for Fanon, every experience must constantly be inte

I walk the maze of momentsbut everywhere I turn tobegins a new beginningbut never finds a finish

You go there you’re gone foreverI go there I’ll lose my wayif we stay here we’re not togethe

ends primarily on the degree to which the authors ofthe works themselves feel they are spokesperson

of musuo will help us evaluate various scenes inpostcolonial tragedy with the specific purpose of harnessing Aristotle toa different kind of interpretation

a beginning, a middle, and an end

symptomatic of an impasse of understa

aligns discovery/knowledg

of course, it also attempts to do, but as a means by which torethink postcolonialism through the prism of literary tragedy and vice versa

arge and varied history of tragic expression

uch ways, the most active agents of revolution canbecome its factual enemies, even while to others, and evento themselves, they seem its most perfect

he hero is dead, we are taking a part for the whole, ahero for an action. We think of tragedy as what happens tothe hero, but the ordinary tragic action is what happensthrough the hero. When we confine our attention to thehero, we are

A second wave of letters arrives.

They sizzle. They spark.

figures, and many contain shapes like waves. The annotations are written in an ink that changes now that it’s exposed to air and sun: the inscriptions—signs, lines, circles, arrows, figures—boil on the surface

Because we’re so used to thinking of ourselves as beingseparate and different from everything els

Its intense focus on a single species is motivated by aconcern for—rather than disinterest in

arine science and the artists are wary ofbeing dismissed as New-Age kooks

ental state that results profoundly shapes the experience ofinterspecies encounter, especially of the inters

he breath work does affect our mental, physicaland emotional state. I would describe it as a feeling of ‘openness

Through a kind of negative mimesis, it performs the ocean’sessential unknowability, its resistance to easy mappin

nimal encounters is not just an idle, self-indulgentcuriosity but something else, perhaps a deep-rooted and nature-afrming need to be better connected to the earthly realities thatour so-called civilization deprives us of, then these practices may besites for fostering a much

m a vital need for interspecies encounter and, on the other,from the potential damage that the fulllment of this needunwittingly inicts on the non-human species involve

pproach realizing his ambition. Repeat-edly it seems that the poem he wishes he could write-a poemexpressing deep feeling and quiet simplicity-is being under-mined by the cognitive or social

. the task of creating the taste by which he isto be enjoyed" (Prose, 111, 80)

roods over the fancied neglect of the world, in sullen andsolitary vexation.1

etry” they practice, it stands to reason that this self-definitional drivewould manifest itself not only in the poet’s criticism, as Eliot maintains, but also in thepoetry itself.46 W

and extraliterary languages, intensifying andhybridizing them, making them collide and rub up agains

ythm and musical effects that are known with our entire bodies.”20 Th

earlier works and forms, it is also “born andshaped in the process of interaction and strugg

dimension,” “the physical aspect of language.”18 InLyric Poetry, Mutlu Konuk Blasing characterizes poetry as a platform for “the emotionallyand historically charged materiality of language,” “an excess of ‘sense,’” and “a rhythmicbeat between sense and nonsense.”19 In Poetry

ereave

Ballad. It had the beat inevitable. It had the bloo

r their eyes are “deceive

HE MANI

lm ENCHANTTHEE TO REPOSE

t is possible to be monolingual (I thoroughly am, aren't I ?)and speak a language that is not one's own.

akes expansive gestures yet remains amnesiac toward non-American geographies in which America is implicated, geographies that vanish over the intellectual skyline. The spatial amnesia that often attends a bioregional ethic has temporal impl

s sense—educationally—to begin with local writing; then you expand, adding layers of knowledge.”17There is much to be said for a bioregional approach: it can help instill in us an awareness of our impact on our immediate environment, help ground our sense of environmental responsibility. However, from a postcolonial perspective, a bioregional ethic poses certain problems, for the concentric rings of the bioregionalists more often open out into transce

bourgeois morality placed the promise of happiness outside of society. He asserted that the possibility of happiness was

he idea of reason aims at universality, at a society in which the antagonistic interests of '

the domination of nature,

justify a capitalist mode of economic organization which made effic

Because they equated the highest good exclusively with the exercise of reason, they came to regard the pursuit of sensual grat­ification as something evil. Both philosophers branded as irration

a critique of what he termed 'the philosophy of reason

eudaemonistic or to a hedonistic conception of happiness, any characterization of happiness must entail the satisfaction of some human need or desire.

human happi­ness requires both the gratification of instinctual in

irrationality of sensual satisfactions marked them as dubious contributors to eudaemoni

ne possessed those things worth having and engaged in activities which were morally virtuous. Because they believed that the capacity to reason represented mankind's unique and highest endowment,

question of human happiness has been of enduring interest to philosophers since the time of Plato and Aristotle. I

aced by an aesthetic ethos which placed the pursuit of happiness above competitive economic pur­suits.

e status quo, in daring to interrupt the necessity by which we are ruled and therefore to be otherwise than we have been obliged to be by the powers that have control over our lives, revolution is almost purely a matter of action, of intervention, o

nevitably an invitation to tragedy.98 To act in freedom is to act self- disclosively among a plurality of other (only partially knowable) self- disclosive agents, themselves acting and reacting in time in relation to others in unpredictable ways and in temporally contingent circumstances. Therefore, to act in fr

therefore, are co- constitutive. Consequently, an agent’s purposes only be-come manifest, as it were, retrospectively, as they emerge from the unfold-ing action itself. Against the view that rational agents enjoy an incorrigible, immediate know

evolution, this tendency was not reversed or undone. To the contrary, it was strengthened and reinscribed in a more fatal social and political dynamic. This paternalism enhanced tendencies toward the political monopoly of power and therefore authoritarian

ognitive- affective function, but the exercise of a critical mode of sustain-ing not only the hopes of the vanquished and the common world to which we—and they—belong but, perhaps, the only way to engage the possibility of reflecti

the inspired Caribbean generation of 1968, cultivating the dream of a self- determining island republic free of the tyranny and subjection that had de

mmitments can congeal into night-mare regimes in which people are reduced to being merely the means to

ic anti- tragic figure, Williams saw in Marx precisely a thinker who grasped the long revolution as a “whole action,” as a change in the “form of activity of a society, in its deepest structure of relationships and feel-ings,” as he put it.1

rstanding as mere violence or as the mere overthrow of a standing government.

jected as intolerable and the new is as yet uncertain and unfamiliar—and, moreover, unwanted and resisted by the prevailing powers—human action is even more exposed than usual to the risks and hazards and treacheries of political affairs and therefore more vulnerable to the collisions that can lead to tragedy.

They stem from the actions of agents acting in a field of potentially rival actions and in circumstances over which they can, in the end, exercise only partial and unstable control

etermining agents acting in time are pervasively subject to contingency, and therefore to outcomes that are never entirely predictable or guaranteed in advance.1 One consequence of this incalculableness of human actions i

jet black and glossy and silky . . . and his skin was atransparent green . . . like the sea only not so deep ... and where it was drawn over the cheek bones a palebeautiful red appeared . . . like a blush .

lue smoke from an ivory holder ... was that why he loved Beauty ... one can ...or because his body was beautiful . . . and white and warm ... or because his eyes. . . one can love ­

. and in his hand he held . . . an ivory holder . . . inlaid with red

wait Alex ... and Alex became confused and continued his search . . . on hishands and knees ... pushing aside poppy stems and lily stems ... a poppy ... a black poppy ... a lilly ... a redlilly ... and when be looked back he could no longer see Beauty . . . Al

The Southern night is full of stars, Great big yellow stars.      O, sweet as earth,      Dusk dark bodies

hich read: "Light-colored man wanted." It is thistremendous pressure which the sentiment of the country exerts that isoperating on the race. There is involved not only the question of higheropportunity, but often the q

or its solution. In this it is similar to the problem ofthe solar system. By a complex, confusing, and almost contradictorymathematical process, by the use of zigzags instead of straight lines, theearth can be proved to be the center of things celestial; but by an operationso simple that it can be comprehended by a schoolboy, its position can beverified among the other worlds which revolve about the sun, and itsmovements harmonized with the laws of the universe. So, when the whiterace assumes as a hypothesis that it is the main object of creation and thatall things else are merely subsidiary to its well-being, sophism, subterfuge,perversion of conscience, arrogance, injus

heir own inferiority judged by the color line. I do not thinkso. What I have termed an inconsistency is, after all, most natural; it is, infact, a tendency in accordance with what might be called an economicnecessity. So far as racial differences go, the United States puts a greaterpremium on colo

performance principle. If social revolution is to take place, he held that it will be necessary to first change the consciousnesses and drives of the men and women who could change the world

tted to Eros in its fight against social and instinctual repression. According to Marcuse, "Art represents the ultimate goal of all

the free expression of human drives and the sat­isfaction of true human needs has e

form of the reality principle and with this term he argued that individuals are judged in this society by virtue of their competitive economic performances.4 Although

he fact of material scarcity provides an explanation for the genesis of repression and domination. Material privation has led to the division of labor, class society and the repression of instinctual gratification. For Marcuse, however, the mere fact of scarcity did not prove the necessity of repression or domination. Anthropological stud­ies, for example, have verified the existence of archaic societies which have been peaceful and egalitarian.It was Marcuse's intention to demonstrate that at the attained level of mature industrial society, an order of abundance could eliminate the repression and dcmination enforced by past orders of scarcity. To accomplish this task he combined Marxian political economy with Freudian metapsychology in order to examine the social

revolution as a “whole action,” as a change in the “form of activity of a society, in its deepest structure of relationships and feel-ings,” as he put it

expressed itself in vigor and ingenuity rather than in beauty.

s was primitive African music; it may be seen in larger form in the strange chant which heralds "The Coming of John":"You may bury me in the

walk in the moonlight, I walk in the starlight;I'll lie in the grave and stretch out my arms,I'll go to judgment in the evening of the day,And my soul and thy soul shall meet that day,When I lay this body down.

oon in the great door was an omen. Negro women improvised songs against its spell. Louisa sang as she came over the crest of the hill from

UP from the skeleton stone walls, up from the rotting floor boards and the solid hand-hewn beams of oak of the pre-war cotton factory, dusk came. Up from the dusk the full moon came. Glowing like a fired pine-knot, it illumined the great door and soft showered the Negro shanties aligned along the single street of factory town. The full moon in the great door was an omen. Negro women improvised songs against its spell.

rust me, I’ll have a farm. My own. My bales will buy yo what y gets from white folks now. Silk stockings an purple dresses—course I dont believe what some folks been whisperin as t how y gets them things now

But working in the fields all day, and far away from her, gave him no chance to show it. Though often enough of evenings he had tried to. Somehow, he never got along. Strong as he was with hands upon the ax or plow, he found it difficult to hold her. Or so he thought. But the fact was that he held her to factory town more firmly than he thought for. His black balanced, and pulled against, the wh

bring their money; they will die not having found it out.

Smoke is on the hills. Rise up. Smoke is on the hills, O rise And take my soul to Jesus.

through its gradual changes from the heathenismof the Gold Coast to the institutional Negro church of Chicago

m, then their destiny is NOT absorption by the white Americans. That if in America it is to be proven for the first time in the modern world that not only

iffers strikingly from the somber yet jewel-rich palette selected by her own discerning eye a

. But she was blind to its charm, purposely aloof and a little contemptuous, and soon her interest in the moving mosaic waned

More often than not, however, definitions of the New Negro asserted that black Americans belonged to a unique race of human beings whose ancestry imparted a distinctive and invaluable racial identity and culture.

e crucial role of the past in s

at “received a tremendous injection of energy from the historical phenomenon of decolonisation, which infused the novel with a sense of historical agency and a desire to contribute to the construction of viable postcolonial cultural identities for the new African nations” (Booker 2009: 141

the endless and melancholic repeti-tion of itself.18

nature of this internal connection: mourning can be a response not only to the death of a person but also to the loss of ideals that, as he says, have taken the place of a loved one. In other words, the attachment to such ethical- political ideals as “fatherland” or “liberty” (or “national liberation” or “socialism,” for that matter, to draw closer to the issues at hand in this chapter) is, in psychoanalytic terms, a form of libidinal displacement, a form of substitution, in which a love object is drained of desire that is then transferred, directly or indirectly, into the realm not only of ideas but of ideals. In a somewhat paradoxical way, then, political ideals are founded on object loss

tions of Memory: The Work of Mourning,” is con- cerned with thinking about the contrast between mourning and melan- cholia in relation to generations of remembering the catastrophic loss of 24 | PROLOGUE

en, the past was a social fact; now, however, it is a pathological one. The past is a wound that will not heal. What the past produces now are inward,

Curiously, it is precisely when the future has ceased to be a source of longing and anticipation that the past has become such a densely animated object of enchantment.” After

cultural forms that continue to resonate powerfully as part of what Raymond Williams calls a "selective tradition" (115).14

The "spatial turn" in current criticism of Tamburlaine is, then, I suggest, a symptom that reveals, in spite of its resolute refusal to take up current concerns, a heightened sensitivity to spatial crisis under conditions of late capitalism, and also, it seems to me, a disavowed recognition that primitive accumulation continues into the present moment as capitalism (with)draws sectors, areas, and aspects of existence into and from its active sphere. If I am right about this, we won't be able to understand what Greenblatt has described as the "historical matrix" of Tamburlaine unless we

Tamburlaine is best understood as an ‘appetitive machine’ whose identityis expressed through the devouring of lands first ‘reduced...to a map’,