Visions of the Not-Yet: Literature and Postcolonial Utopia

The most vibrant intersection of literature and culture, and literature’s most resolute function, may well lie in the generation of hope. The capacity of the imagination to see a different world instils the possibility that the world could be different, and this is the essence of utopian thinking. Of course we are suspicious of utopia because we think of it as blindly optimistic, and optimism has had a bad name since Voltaire’s Candide in which the annoying Dr Pangloss embodies the foolish belief that everything will turn out well. So Utopia has become the term of panglossian absurdity, the vain optimistic fantasy. But in fact utopianism is not necessarily optimistic, although it is characterised by desire. Utopia is important because it imagines a different kind of future. As Ruth Levitas says, it is the ‘desire for a better way of living expressed in the description of a different kind of society that makes possible that alternative way of life’ (1995, 257). Hope is the key, for without it there is no road to an alternative way of life. Indeed, for Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch, without hope we cannot live.


Bill Ashcroft
The most vibrant intersection of literature and culture, and literature's most resolute function, may well lie in the generation of hope. The capacity of the imagination to see a different world instils the possibility that the world could be different, and this is the essence of utopian thinking. Of course we are suspicious of utopia because we think of it as blindly optimistic, and optimism has had a bad name since Voltaire's Candide in which the annoying Dr Pangloss embodies the foolish belief that everything will turn out well. So Utopia has become the term of panglossian absurdity, the vain optimistic fantasy. But in fact utopianism is not necessarily optimistic, although it is characterised by desire. Utopia is important because it imagines a different kind of future. As Ruth Levitas says, it is the 'desire for a better way of living expressed in the description of a different kind of society that makes possible that alternative way of life ' (1995, 257). Hope is the key, for without it there is no road to an alternative way of life. Indeed, for Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch, without hope we cannot live.
In the essays collected in The Utopian Function of Art and Literature Bloch asserts the critical importance of art and literature. For him they have a significant utopian function because their raison d'être is the imaging of a different worldwhat he calls their Vorschein or "anticipatory illumination". The anticipatory illumination is the revelation of the "possibilities for rearranging social and political relations to produce Heimat: "It is Heimat as utopia… that determines the truth content of a work Southeast Asian Review of English, 52.1(2014English, 52.1( /2015: 1-24. ASHCROFT2 of art." (Zipes xxxiii). Heimatthe home we have all sensed but never knownbecomes the utopian form in postcolonial writing that replaces the promise of nation.
In fact we could say that in many respects, its offer of continual possibility, its position 'nowhere', its refusal of closure, makes Heimat anti-nation. It may lie in the future but the promise of heimat transforms the present. The imaging of a different world in literature is the most consistent expression of the anticipatory consciousness that characterizes human thinking. This leads Bloch to the very challenging, even startling assertion that aesthetic representation produces an object "more achieved, more thoroughly formed, more essential than the immediate-sensory or immediatehistorical occurrence of this Object" (1986,214).
While the general tenor of utopia is that it is allied to hope, the important feature of utopian thinking is not that it imagines perfectiona eutopiabut that it speaks to the present from a position that exists nowhere. As Paul Ricoeur says: May we not say then that the imagination itselfthrough the utopian functionhas a constitutive role in helping us rethink the nature of our social life? Is not utopia-this leap outside-the way in which we radically rethink what is family, what is consumption, what is authority, what is religion, and so on? Does not the fantasy of an alternative society and its exteriorization 'nowhere' work as one of the most formidable contestations of what is? (16) The fact that utopia exists 'nowhere' is crucial in this function of rethinking, because the fantasy of an alternative society 'nowhere' is one of the most formidable contestations of what is (17). Nowhere is the only place from which ideology can be critiqued, because ideology itself is impossible to escape. This position nowhere, and thus potentially outside ideology, is crucial to art and literature.
For Gert Ueding, "Literature is utopia in the very wide sense of course that it is not identical with the reality that faces us as nature and society. It is utopia in the Southeast Asian Review of English, 52.1(2014English, 52.1( /2015: 1-24. ASHCROFT3 very precise sense that its connection to this reality is like that of fulfilment to lack..." (7). But there is another way in which creative acts gesture toward the future. For, as cultural theorist Tony Bennett points out, if 'production' is completed only with 'consumption' then so far as literary texts are concerned, their production is never completed. They are endlessly re-produced endlessly remade with different political consequences and effects (136). But this is surely not only the case for literary works alone. Whenever the creative work is engaged, it is reproduced in the context of another person, place and time. Thus despite Bruno Latour's assertion, in contrasting the created work with critique, that "It is all about immanence" (181), it is on the contrary, because it is never finished, all about imminence. The created work remains alive and constantly on the threshold of a transformed state of being. In this way created works always offer an imminent rearrangement of social and political relations in ways that critique the present.
Perhaps the most telling example of utopian imminence occurs in literature that is manifestly pessimistic, writing that seems to reject hope, and a perfect example What is the nowhere from which this poem speaks? How does it frame human possibility? On the face of it we could find no more anti-utopian poem for it rejects both faith and hope as the province of the preacher and the doctor, the poet left "wringing her hands". Yet the Vorschein of this poem lies in its perception of human suffering and the suggested injustices that launch our children "packed into this one remaining cattle truck / on their way to the future." The poem speaks from a no-place in a way that forces us to "rethink the nature of our social life," as Ricoeur says. What redeems it from simple despair is the affective response to human suffering and abjection it generates. Affect thus becomes the medium of critique. With critique comes the perception that the world could be different. The poem gestures towards a 'fulfilment' contrasted to, and evoked by, this 'lack' (Ueding 7). And in that perception of a different world is grounded the very hope that is ostensibly dismissed in the poem. What we recognise in this poem is that hope and critique are necessarily united to produce what Bloch calls 'concrete utopia.' The very exposure of the suffering of the world is the anticipatory illumination of a better world.
It is fanciful to think that literature will change the world. But while art and literature will not win wars they can imagine the future. The assumption is that postcolonial literature is committed to resistance. But if resistance is to be more than mere opposition it must have a transformative element. There is a well-worn phrase institutions leads to a regime as bad as the first, if the country does not get invaded or infiltrated by a more powerful neighbour, as in the Ukraine. This is a sobering narrative, many Springs turn to Winters, as we have witnessed in Egypt, but the good news is that the revolution continues.
In his inaugural lecture in Tubingen in 1961 entitled "Can Hope be Disappointed?" Ernst Bloch's answer was that even a well-founded hope can be disappointed: otherwise it would not be hope. In fact hope never guarantees anything.
It can only be daring and must point to possibilities that will in part depend on chance for their fulfilment. Hope can be frustrated and thwarted, but out of that frustration and disappointment it can learn to estimate the opposition. Hope can learn through damaging experiences, but it can never be driven off course. 'Revolution' has two meanings: it is not simply a revolt but a revolving, a spiral into the future. Seeing this, we can understand that the belief in the future does not stop with revolution: it remains part of the continuous spiraling of hope. Even if democracy comes, and hope, at least for some, has still been disappointed, creative work continues to spiral into the The creative cultural product is unmatched in its ability to cultivate hope because creativity itself is the act of 'stepping beyond.' As Salman Rushdie puts it: "this is how newness enters the world" (395).
Tanzanian Sam Raiti Mtamba frames the power of literature somewhat hyperbolically in his story "The Pound of Flesh" … only art and literature could unlock the mysteries of life. Before men of letters there was nothing either cabalistic or magical. It was the open sesame, the sea into which everything flowed, the sea from which everything had its source and succour. (167) This is the euphoric outpouring of a man who wants to be a writer. Nigerian Chris Abani puts it more temperately in a talk on the stories of Africa What we know about how to be who we are comes from stories. It comes from the novels, the movies, the fashion magazines. It comes from popular culture. In other words it's the agents of our imagination who really shape who we are. ( "Decolonize the screen. Thinking is speculating with images" (48). Cinema had a heuristic function for him, as "a comparative study between the existing, or real, and the possible" (48). Clearly cinema was seen to conceive the possible through the power of visual images. In the imaginative space that emerges in this way, African viewers could project themselves into a future that they themselves invented (46). ASHCROFT9 Whatever a literature's politics, the capacity to dream, and the possible worlds that are dreamt are obstinately impervious to political control. While ideology displays a utopian element, the power of the literary work lies in its capacity to speak from outside ideology, from Nowhere, as Ricoeur says. This is a point at which the imagination separates itself from agendas of political commitment. As Caryl Phillips puts it, whatever the commitment or the politics of the writer his or her first commitment is to "write well". 1 Writing well means more than writing fluently, elegantly, or convincingly: it means writing in a way that realizes the full potential of The message is that the topsoil of bad memories can be swept away, that the DawnDream can be realized.

Memory and the Future
The valuing of the mythic past in the postcolonial imagination is not only an attempt to disrupt the dominance of European history, but also an attempt to re-conceive a place in the present, a place transformed by the infusion of this past. Postcolonial utopianism is grounded in a continual process, a difficult and even paradoxical process of emancipation without teleology, a cyclic 'return' to the future. The present is the crucial site of the continual motion by which the New comes into being. In such transformative conceptions of utopian hope the "Not-Yet" is always a possibility emerging from the past. In traditional post-colonial societies the radically new is always embedded in and transformed by the past. There can be no more powerful statement of the location of the future in memoryour "Dreams must seek tenacity / In lumps of savage earth." Memory is not about recovering a past but about the production of possibilitymemory is a recreation, not a looking backwards, but a reaching out to a horizon, somewhere 'out there'.
Memory has a complex relationship with time. Technically, the present does not actually exist, at least not in stasis, but is always a process of the future becoming past, becoming memory. To remember does not bring the past into the present, but the act of remembering or the invocation of memory transforms the fluid present.
Memory refers to a past "that has never been present" not only because the present is a continual flow, but because memory invokes a past that must be projected so to While we think of time as either flowing or enduring, Kummel makes the point that duration without succession would lose all temporal characteristics. A theory of time therefore must understand the correlation of these two principles.
Duration arises only from the stream of time and only within the background of duration is our awareness of succession possible. The critical consequence of this is that If something is to abide, endure, then its past may never be simply 'past,' but must in some way also remain "present;" by the same token its future must already somehow be contained in its present.
Duration is said to exist only when the "three times" (put in quotation marks when used in the sense of past, present and future) not only follow one another but are all at the same time conjointly present… the coexistence of the "times" means that a past time does not simply pass away to give way to a present time, but rather than both as different times may exist conjointly, even if not simultaneously. (35)(36) Now what interests me about this is that such an experience of time is already present in postcolonial literatures. This is particularly so in the novel, the crucial characteristic of which is its engagement with time. Stories offer the progress of a world in time and thus can become narratives of temporal order. But magically, by unfolding in time they take us out of time. It may be that narrative, whose materiality is isomorphic with temporality, provides a way (  So the dance of life which is beaten by the drums is the birth of a new world.
Anyidoho further develops this interpenetration of past present and future in the images of the "rope" or "creeper" or "birth cord" which symbolize time, the different generations bound together by the creeper rather than separated by the line of history.
The ancestors are like the seed that gives birth to the creeper linking together the past and present members of the clan (10); the weaving of a rope represents tradition. In a wider sense, the rope or creeper is the image of life itself and in particular of man's regenerative faculties: the weaving of the rope is also a reminder of the importance of procreation, the foremost duty of every man (12). And the procreation of children is linked, in the Ewe vocabulary, to the creation of poetry and music. In his paper on Ewe funeral poetry Anyidoho says: All the activities generated by death, all the rites, the ceremonies, the funeral dance and song, may be seen as Here we find a powerful statement of the cultural underpinning of African hope and the location of the future in the present.
The origin of postcolonial utopianism lies in the resilience of memory, particularly of the "ancient joys buried deep beneath the topsoil of bad memories." It does this because memory refuses to recognise the distinction between duration and succession. But African utopianism found its most powerful expression in the persistence of hope for freedom from colonial oppression. In most cases the vision was for an independent state, which led to great disillusionment as the postindependence nation simply moved in to occupy the structures of the colonial state.
But the dynamic of hope generated by anti-colonial writers produced the energy for future thinking throughout the subsequent bitter realisation of post-independence failure.
One of the most powerful voices of hope in the pre-independence period was that of Aghostino Neto whose cry against the repressive Portuguese regime of Angola stands as a benchmark for the persistence of hope for freedom, and the clarity of a vision for the future. Neto's road to the future passes through prison, exile, torture, The lamentation of the crowd. (1974,9) In the poem "bleeding and germinating" we find that out of blood and suffering germinates hope, peace and love: Our eyes, blood and life The spiral of hope unites imagination and belief.
The trajectory of African hope and its vision of the future came increasingly to look outward towards a "concrete utopia". What literature sees is a possible future within the real; and while it may be anticipated as a subjective experience, it also has objective status" (Levitas, 1990: 89). Or as Neto puts it, "He who has strived has not lost / But has not yet won" (12). Postcolonial visions of the future, then, are driven by the dynamic of hope, which took shape in the experience of colonization, but continues through an anticipatory consciousness that is grounded in ahistorical memory. They emerge out of an empowering experience of layered time that envisages an impact on the world. Utopia is necessary because it is only from the No-Place of a utopian future that ideology, particularly the teleological ideology of History can be contested. What remains remarkable about African literature and cultural production is the stunning tenacity of its hope and its grounded vision of possibility.