London Calling: V.S. Naipaul, Postcolonial Mandarin

by Rob Nixon

V.S. Naipaul stands as the most lionized literary mediator between First and Third World experience and is ordinarily viewed as possessing a unique authority on the subject of cross-cultural relations in the post-colonial era. In contesting this orthodox reading of his work, Nixon argues that Naipaul is more than simply an unduly influential writer. He has become a regressive Western institution, articulating a set of values that perpetuates political interests and representational modes that have their origin in the high imperial age. Nixon uses Naipaul's travel writing to probe the core theoretical issues raised by cross-cultural representation along metropolitan-periphery lines. With reference to economic theories of dependency, he critiques the vision, popularized by Naipaul, of the post-colonial world as divided between mimic and parasitic Third World nations on the one hand and, on the other, the benignly creative societies of the West.

240 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1992

Reviews

[Reema · Rating 5 out of 5]

this book broke open the way i think about naipaul, who had long been a literary model of mine, for the clarity, brevity, and grace of his writing style. nixon makes an eloquent, forceful, and thorough case that under the beauty of naipaul's style lie deeply troubling politics that perpetuate stereotypes about peripheral cultures and prevent true cultural/material progress for those communities from happening. for one, naipaul's pessimistic rhetoric about Third World/postcolonial communities is built on linguistically and academically limited forays into those communities, and he seems often to travel simply to confirm assumptions, without really processing the impulses or outcomes of potscolonial grassroots struggles. for another, key tropes in naipaul's travel fiction--such as colonial mimicry, the mayhem of eastern cultures, and the universalization/idealization of European culture as civilization--seem to stem from naipaul's own prickly relationship to his poor, postcolonial past and seem designed to curry favor with the reigning literary establishment, predominantly british-american. nixon's argument is so persuasive not only because his clear, impassioned language carries the weight of extensive, careful reading, but because he offers strong theoretical and literary counterpoints to naipaul's view of conditions in the Third World: rushdie, bhabha, achebe, fanon, etc. while i still think (and perhaps this is my bias as an early naipaul reader and as a writer) that naipaul's texts are more complicated than his professed politics, meaning they do contain moments of transcendence in which he looks compassionately and objectively at aspects of postcolonial cultures, black cultures, and working-class lives, i agree that much of his travel nonfiction is neo-conservative and lacks an economic analysis. nixon's text not only revolutionized the way i understand the content under naipaul's style, but makes a powerful case for interrogating any writer's political/cultural thoughts under his/her style, no matter how seductive. one underlying philosophy under nixon's own book is this: literary texts are also cultural texts, that have the power (and obligation) to reframe social/economic realities through narrative, and that an author's siding or slanting away from difficult truths can also be a decision to choose his own "progress" over a community's.