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Abstract

Changes in historical circumstance, for instance the growth of English then British then American economic, political and linguistic power affected the translation of Shakespeare’s imperial theme and has become another “chapter” in the translation of empire. Like Columbus, Shakespeare has been and is appropriated by those who would explore, affirm and resist empire. Sometimes 1492 and 1611, or any significant dates in the early modern expansion of Europe, seem remote. The various celebrations and, later, commemorations of the anniversary of Columbus’ landfall— the last great burst being in 1992—provide a reminder that the present is always past and that the postcolonial contains the colonial in many senses. The postcolonial here will be something opened up and not something discussed mainly in and of itself. Perhaps, as Terry Eagleton recently suggested, “It is remarkable how hard it is to find an unabashed enthusiast for the concept among those who promote it.”1 Colonialism involved self-critique and contradiction so that a study that comes after colonialism in both senses might well be expected to exhibit some of the same tendencies. Interpretation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, as we observed in the last chapter, had become in recent decades as much a part of a movement from colonialism to postcolonialism as a Romantic aspect of Shakespeare’s farewell to his art that many previous generations had garnered from the play. The questions of cultural and intellectual property make this imperial past more immediate. Who speaks for whom? and Who tends to or owns what? are questions that still reverberate.

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Notes

  1. Terry Eagleton, “In the Gaudy Supermarket,” London Review of Books (May 13, 1999): 3. He is reviewing Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Post-Colonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). Often the most interesting critics and theorists, like artists and writers, have many dimensions to their work and this is true of postcolonial theorists. For instance, just to note one of many other aspects of three leading scholars in postcolonial studies, Edward Said has a strong interest in music; Gayatri Spivak in translation; and Homi K. Bhabha in art. I have discussed Said’s and Spivak’s work in some detail elsewhere and I would like to call attention to Bhabha’s work in art in addition to his subtle and suggestive contributions in understanding the ambiguities of colonial and “post-colonial” attitudes and cultures. See, for example, Bhabha’s essays in Negotiating Rapture: The Power of Art to Transform Lives, ed. Richard Francis (Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1996) and Anish Kapoor, Anish Kapoor: With Essays by Homi K. Bhabha and Pier Luigi Tazzi (London: Hayward Gallery; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).

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  2. Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967).

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  3. Some of the many recent books on the postcolonial that should give an idea of the variety in the field are Françoise Lionnet, Postcolonial Representations: Women, Literature, Identity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995); The Post-Colonial Literature of Lusophone Africa, ed. Patrick Chabal, Moema Parente Augel, et al. (London: Hurst, 1996); Postcolonial African Philosophy: A Critical Reader, ed. Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997); The Politics of Multiculturalism in the New Europe: Racism, Identity, and Community, ed. Tariq Modood and Pnina Werbner (London: Zed Books, 1997); Postcolonialisme: décentrement, déplacement, dissémination, ed. Abdelwahab Meddeb (Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose, 1997); Abraham Itty, The Making of the Indian Atomic Bomb: Science, Secrecy and the Postcolonial State (London: Zed Books, 1998); Sankaran Krishna, Postcolonial Insecurities: India, Sri Lanka, and the Question of Nationhood (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999); Postcolonial Perspectives on the Cultures of Latin America and Lusophone Africa, ed. Robin Fiddian (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000); Postcolonial and Queer Theories: Intersections and Essays, ed. John C. Hawley (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2001). For one of my earlier views on postcolonialism, see (with Terry Goldie) “Postcolonial Theory,” Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), 155–8.

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  4. My thanks to Bruce Ziff and Pratima Rao for including in their collection an earlier version of this chapter and, more generally, for their help and encouragement: Jonathan Hart, “Translating and Resisting Empire: Cultural Appropriation and Post-colonial Studies,” in Borrowed Power: Essays in Cultural Appropriation, ed. Bruce Ziff and Pratima Rao (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 137–68. I also thank Jane Moore, Catherine Belsey, Christopher Norris, Terence Hawkes and others at the Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory (Cardiff) for their invitation and comments on my talk “Some Theoretical Difficulties in Postcolonial Studies” (January 1994) and Ken Ruthven and his colleagues at Melbourne (July 1994) for their invitation to give the paper “Colonialism and Postcolonialism,” and for their questions. These two talks contained different versions of earlier material on the topic, some of which appears in a revised form in this chapter.

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  5. “Ventriloquy” is speaking for others, often while being unaware of doing so or pretending not to. It can also be a displacement of one voice on to another. Ventriloquy occurs as much in writing as in political speech. I had used this term for well over a decade before I began to think in the specific terms of cultural appropriation. I came to realize that voice appropriation was a kind of ventriloquy.

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  6. The Young-Rowell exchange I outline in this note is an example of what I am talking about in the text. James O. Young outlines three arguments against voice appropriation. First, members of one cultural group misrepresent other members of another cultural group and thereby harm them. Second, when a majority culture misrepresents a minority culture, it limits the audience the minority can reach in representing themselves. Third, when other cultural groups misrepresent cultures they steal the religious and cultural meaning of their stories and pictures. Young sets out to refute all three arguments, even the first, which he claims is the strongest, by means of finding exceptions or counterarguments. Rather than rehearse Young’s counter-arguments, I wish to stress only that he maintains that the representations by outsiders are not all harmful distortions. Taking up R. G. Collingwood’s view in The Principles of Art (London, New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), he thinks that the artist should steal with both hands (similar to T.S. Eliot’s view of great artists). Young argues that artists should take care in representing other cultures but should not give up artistic freedom. Artists should aim for aesthetic success, which precludes insensitive representations of minority cultures. John Rowell opposes Young’s views and says that he would wish Eric Clapton well commercially if he were singing the blues but would not fund him if he applied for a government grant. In his rebuttal to Young, Rowell says that Young obscures the real issue, which is when a member of a dominant culture uses the material of a minority culture and even sometimes pretends to be from that group. Rowell does not see transcultural borrowing as the actual subject of the controversy. He argues that funding agencies should adopt a relativism that recognizes cultural difference.

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  7. Sally Kilmister, for instance, discusses music in terms of the relation to translation, gender and androgyny: she picks up on Carl Dahlhaus’ topos of unsayability (related to the classical topos, or rhetorical strategy, of inexpressibility) and its link with Theodor Adorno’s view of music as a fetish and of listening as regression. Kilmister also connects unsayability (that which is unutterable) with Virginia Woolf’s “Impressions of Bayreuth,” an ambivalent critique of this unsayable nineteenth-century music because this essay represents “the difficulties inherent in either an appropriation or a repudiation of music’s seductive lure.” Sally Kilmister, “Aesthetic and Music: The Appropriation of the Other,” Women: A Cultural Review 3 (1) 1992: 31.

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  8. The Compact Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. (Oxford 1991), 1493. 9. Harold G. Fox, The Canadian Law of Copyright and Industrial Designs (2nd ed.) (Toronto: Carswell Co., 1967), 18.

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  10. Coombe, “The Properties of Culture and the Politics of Possessing Identity,” 253.

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  11. Ibid., 254–55.

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  12. Ibid., 270–72.

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  13. Loretta Todd, “Notes on Appropriation,” Parallelogramme 16 (Summer 1990): 32, quoted in Coombe, “The Properties of Culture and the Politics of Possessing Identity,” 285.

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  14. Coombe, “The Properties of Culture and the Politics of Possessing Identity,” 285.

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  15. Amanda Pask, “Cultural Appropriation and the Law: An Analysis of the Legal Regime Concerning Culture,” Intellectual Property Journal 8(1993): 86.

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  16. Pask, “Cultural Appropriation and the Law,” 86.

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  17. See Leslie C. Green and Olive Dickason, The Law of Nations and the New World (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1989).

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  18. See Tim Rowse, After Mabo: Interpreting Indigenous Traditions (Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 1993). The case of New Zealand is interesting. Two of New Zealand’s early governors had experience that might have prevented conflict and war in the settlement. For instance, Robert Fitzroy was a captain of the Beagle and had seen the wasting of the Yahgan in Tierra del Fuego; George Grey had become an ethnologist while serving in Australia. See Jean E. Rosenfeld, The Island Broken in Two Halves: Land and Renewal Movements Among the Maori of New Zealand (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), 125; Rosenfeld’s study brings together religion, anthropology and history; see also Keith Sinclair, The Origins of the Maori Wars (Wellington: New Zealand University Press, 1957) and A History of New Zealand (Auckland: Penguin Books, 1988); John Williams, Politics of the New Zealand Maori: Protest and Cooperation, 1891–1909 (Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1969).

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  19. Rowse, 8, see 4–9. See Brian Keon-Cohen, “Case note on ‘Eddie Mabo and Ors vs. the State of Queensland,”’ Aboriginal Law Bulletin 2 (1992): 22–3.

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  20. Rowse, 21.

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  21. See Janice Hladki, “Problematizing the Issue of Cultural Appropriation,” Alternate Routes 11 (1994): 95–119, esp. 95–96; and Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, Margaret Iversen, eds., Colonial Discourse/Postcolonial Theory (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), 4.

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  22. See Hart, “Traces” (1994).

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  23. Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982, rev. 1986), esp. 14–26.

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  24. See my other studies in the field, especially “Opposition from Within,” a chapter in Comparing Empires (New York: Palgrave, forthcoming).

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  25. For a more extensive discussion of this case, see Jonathan Hart, Representing the New World: The English and French Uses of the Example of Spain (New York and London: Palgrave, 2001), ch. 2.

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  26. Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man, 15. The following discussion draws on ibid., 15–26.

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  27. Ibid., 16.

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  28. Aristotle, De mirabilibus auscultationibus 836a: 10–15, cited in Pagden, Fall, 16.

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  29. Aristotle, Politics 1338b: 19 and Nichomachean Ethics 11486: 19ff., cited in Pagden, Fall, 18.

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  30. Pagden, Fall, 19.

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  31. In some of my other work, like Representing the New World, I have discussed more of these examples. In Comparing Empires I devote a chapter, “Opposition from Within,” to internal otherness and another, “Promoting Empire,” to promotion.

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  32. Ernst Breisach, Historiography: Ancient, Medieval & Modern (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 178–79. Breisach’s various references to examples of translatio imperii have been important for my framing of this myth.

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  33. Pagden, Fall, 10 for this and the discussion below. For Oviedo, see Comparing Empires.

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  34. Thomas B. Macaulay, “History,” in The Complete Writings, 10 vols. (Boston and New York, 1901), vol. I: 276, quoted in Breisach, 251. For my preceding discussion, see Breisach, pp. 213, 243, 245.

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  35. The case of Canada is appropriate here. D. M. R. Bentley begins his article on pre-Confederation English poetry in The Canadian Encyclopedia with J. MacKay’s interrogative address to the poets of the classical and European tradition in Quebec Hill (1797): “Ye who, in stanzas, celebrate the Po,/Or teach the Tyber in your strains to flow,/How would you toil for numbers to proclaim/The liquid grandeur of St Laurence’ Stream?” Quoted in D. M. R. Bentley, “Poetry in English,” The Canadian Encyclopedia (Edmonton: Hurtig Publishers, 1985), 3: 1431. In 1797 MacKay is still looking to European models and wonders how the poets of the European tradition could translate themselves from Italy and Rome to represent the great St. Lawrence in Canada. This problem of translating tradition, of seeing and of recognition, is as much a difficulty for the poet as for the historian and literary theorist. We do not have John Cabot’s narrative about Canada, but from Jacques Cartier onward we have responses to a new and strange land, and from the seventeenth-century accounts of Canada as a French and British colony. The problems the Spanish had with seeing the New World as new, the French and the English had read about. But they made some of the same mistakes.

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  36. And in postcolonial Canada some of the disjunctions continue between European and Amerindian, between Western ways and other ways of seeing. I want to concentrate on the way the precolonial and colonial haunt the present and make it difficult to speak about the postcolonial in Canada. There are tensions between French and English on the one hand and the various Amerindian nations on the other. This old conflict has been complicated in this period by vast movements of other Europeans to Canada, especially in the twentieth century, and in the past twenty years of Asian and Caribbean cultures. Since about 1968 the Canadian government has pursued a policy of multiculturalism, something I argued in the 1980s that needed to be recognized in the study of Canadian literature. The work of writers as successful as Michael Ondaatje, the co-winner of the Booker Prize for The English Patient, illustrates my point. Ondaatje came from Sri Lanka to Canada and went to Canadian universities. His own relation to the empire and the relation he found in Canada complicate the notion of postcolonialism in Canadian culture. The question of identity haunts postcolonialism even when postmodernism declares that we fashion our own subjectivities.

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  37. Trinh T. Minh-ha, Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 63–65.

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  38. Bartolomé de Las Casas, “Synopsis,” A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies (1542, pub. 1552) trans. Nigel Griffin, intro. Anthony Pagden (London: Penguin Books, 1992), 3.

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  39. Anthony Pagden, European Encounters in the New World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 1–15; Ross Chambers, “No Montagues Without Capulets: Some Thoughts on ‘Cultural Identity’,” ed. Jonathan Hart and Richard W. Bauman, Exploration in Diference: Law, Culture, and Politics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 25–66.

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  40. See Jonathan Hart, “Images of the Native in Renaissance Encounter Narratives,” 55–76. For more on Montaigne, see my Comparing Empires (forthcoming).

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  41. Michel de Montaigne, On Cannibals, trans. and ed. J. M. Cohen (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963), 119.

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  42. See Trinh T. Minha-ha, Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism; Edward Said, “Representing the Colonized: Anthropology’s Interlocutors,” Critical Inquiry 15 (Winter 1989): 205–25.

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  43. This opposition from within is something I discuss in Comparing Empires.

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  44. This point relates to some discussions in this study and, mostly particularly, to the chapter “Opposition from Within” in Comparing Empires.

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  45. Montaigne, On Cannibals, 108–09.

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  46. See Ross Chambers, Room for Maneuvre: Reading (the) Oppositional (in) Narrative (Chicago, 1991); Chambers, “No Montagues Without Capulets,” 1995; Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 119–51.

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  47. See Ramón A. Gutiérrez, When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality and Power in New Mexico (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 48.

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  49. This is the matter of chapter 5.

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  61. Eagleton’s discussion concentrates on the period from the eighteenth century onward, whereas Frye is talking about classical antecedents. See Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990) and Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957), 66–7.

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  86. Said, Culture and Imperialism, xxii.

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  87. Ibid., xxiii.

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Hart, J. (2003). Cultural Appropriation: Colonialism and Postcolonialism. In: Columbus, Shakespeare, and the Interpretation of the New World. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403973573_7

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