Reconstruction Vol. 14, No. 3

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Transgression, Boundaries, and Power: Rethinking the Space of Postcolonial Literature / Dustin Crowley

<1> Space, Henri Lefebvre tells us, is a tool for thought and action. Space enables and space constrains. Alongside history and metrics like race, class, and gender, space demands our attention as a foundational feature of social production and struggle. In the decades following Lefebvre's provocatively suggestive text The Production of Space, interest in spatial studies has burgeoned across academia, and literary studies are no exception. Though still relatively nascent, spatial literary studies has already been established on firm ground by works like Robert Tally's Spatiality and Bertrand Westphal's Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces. These and other writers have already made a strong case for the necessity and usefulness of spatially- or geographically-focused criticism as a way to enunciate "the dialectical nature of the relations between texts and their real-world referents" (Prieto). Yet as Tally suggests, geocriticism is a heterogeneous field, and even as Westphal's groundbreaking text lays out a detailed analytical method, it also "invites others to engage in a debate" about the nature and practices of spatial literary studies (Tally 2-3). By way of further developing the methods and conceptual tools of geocriticism, I intend here to supplement the predominately postmodernist assumptions that have provided the basis for much geocriticism, notably Westphal's formative work. In particular, I want to challenge the tendency in such frameworks to dichotomize types of space in ways that privilege transgressive uncertainty over bounded emplacement. Refracted through the work of cultural geography and political ecology, transgression and boundedness become relational and dynamic concepts that are themselves not inherently liberatory or repressive, but are (as Lefebvre famously insisted) social products, equally subject to cooption and shaping by forces of power and resistance.

<2> Using this alternate understanding of space and borders, I hope to move geocriticism beyond categorical and essentializing assumptions about particular kinds of space, instead opening up possibilities for analyzing with more nuance the often ambiguous and complex geographical representations of postcolonial writers like Nigerian author Chris Abani and Kenyan author Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o. I have chosen to focus on postcolonial literature for two reasons: first, postcolonial literature in general (and African literature in particular) has not been much explored in geocritical analyses to date. This despite the second reason: that Westphal and others point directly to postcolonial theory as a body of thought informing their own work on the oppressive or resistive nature of space. It would seem to beg the question, then, whether the literature itself bears out the claims that have been drawn from the theory.

<3> The gesture toward postcolonialism is hardly surprising, given that field's pronounced concern for issues of geography and the relations between places under the auspices of imperialism. Edward Said, for example, has argued that "Imperialism and the culture associated with it affirm both the primacy of geography and an ideology about the control of territory" (qtd. in Seeking Spatial Justice 36). As the means of that control, European colonialism adopted "powerful spatial strategies of territorial dispossession, military occupation, cultural domination, [and] economic exploitation," practices of intrusive colonial organization that produced and reproduce spatial conditions of "exclusion, domination, disciplinary control" (Seeking 37). Westphal extends this notion to include imperialism's attempt to stifle the inherent heterogeneity of space with "the old empire of that totalizing space, of positivism, of colonialism, of the always absolute and inhuman constriction" (Westphal 38). From this basis in postcolonialism, it is not a long leap to generalizing about the repressive nature of state power in general, manifested in and executed through strict borders and controlled, controlling boundaries of all sorts. We can find support for this critique of managed spatiality from Lefebvre himself: the state, he argues, "plans and organizes space 'rationally' with the help of knowledge and technology, imposing analogous, if not homologous, measures" on space through which the state "promotes and imposes itself as the stable center" (Lefebvre 23). Premised on a certain kind of postmodernist postcolonialism, then, Westphal and others have tended to formulate geocriticism on the basic assumption that borders (and attendant notions of stable, concrete, or bounded place) are inherently problematic, typically operating as a mode of domination imposed from above.

<4> Following the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Westphal frames this problematic as "striated space." As the space of "sedentary" and restrictive city life, this space is "striated by walls, enclosures, and roads between enclosures" (Deleuze and Guattari, qtd in Westphal 39); it is the space "occupied by the state apparatus. This is the space of the polis, politics, the policed, and the police" (Westphal 39). Necessarily and binarily opposed to striated space is "smooth space," nomadic space, the space of "bedouinism" that is "virtually open to infinity" (39). In Westphal's description, smooth space bears many similarities to Foucault's heterotopia, the convergence "in a single real place [of] several spaces, several sites that are themselves incompatible," symbolized by a ship, "a floating piece of space, a place without a place" (Foucault 6, 9). It also parallels Edward Soja's thirdspace, "a space of radical openness, a vast territory of infinite possibilities and perils" that lay "beyond" any structured or bounded formulation of centers and peripheries (Thirdspace 33). There is a common postmodernist thread here, a desire to define a space which escapes definition or strict delineation, which can be opposed to the constricting tendencies of established boundaries.

<5> Yet there is also a crucial difference in the conceptions of these thinkers: for Soja, thirdspace is precisely the space that gets "beyond" binaries, that acts as "a critical 'other-than' choice that speaks and critiques through its otherness" (Thirdspace 61). The smooth/striated construction of Westphal and Deleuze and Guattari, however, enacts a clear dichotomy between these kinds of space. Though Westphal notes that these spaces are naturally "mixed" and that "the striated can become smooth, just as smooth space is exposed to striation" (Westphal 40), his reference to American military intervention in Iraq as a striating effort in the "smooth" Iraqi desert (40) strongly implies the inimical and conflictual nature of their relationship, with smooth space unambiguously the more virtuous of the two. After all, smooth space is by definition more in line with the oft-repeated claim that space itself is (and ought to be) "a heterogeneous (and socially open)" phenomenon; more smoothing, more openness, more indeterminacy of borders, then, would seem to be the privileged position of those who seek a space that "consistently escapes political control" (38).

<6> Indeed, if strictly demarcated spatial relations are the basic geocritical problem, then it follows logically that smoothing the striations of political control would be the principal solution. This is a more or less natural dynamic in Lefebvre's estimation, as "state-imposed normality makes permanent transgression inevitable" (Lefebvre 23). Westphal makes this notion of transgression a central part of his own geocritical model, claiming that "Transgression corresponds to the crossing of a boundary beyond which stretches a marginal space of freedom. When it becomes a permanent principle, it turns into transgressivity" (Westphal 47). In the dichotomous formulation of smooth and striated, where one represents the possibility for freedom and alterity in a world of global mobility and mixity, and the other represents oppressive restriction and homogeneity, transgressivity by necessity "provides the best model for spatial thinking in the postmodern era" (Prieto), an era in which we are making "the transition from a reading of the world still fully guided by residual grand narratives to an erratic reading arising from a full-fledged postmodernity" (Westphal 37). Under the sign of postmodern transgression, any borders or stable, "striated" places are shunned, penetrated, or exploded in favor of digression, indeterminacy, "borderlands, interstitial zones, and hybrid identities" (Prieto), all animated by "the principle of mobility" (Westphal 49).

<7> To an extent, this model for understanding spatial relationships aligns nicely with its postcolonial antecedents, and we might easily find similar claims being made about postcolonial literature. Critics of Chris Abani's work, for instance, have regularly argued that the urban and globalized spaces of his literature represent a fluid and liberating cosmopolitanism. Abani sets most of his narratives in the heart of heterogeneous urbanity, developing in detail each city's dynamic and multivalent character as the concrete expression of and medium for the converging relations and overlapping populations that palimpsest and blend there. In the novella Becoming Abigail, he draws attention to London's long history as a place both colonized and colonizing, with "tired crumbling walls built by Caesar" (ch. 12) and "Cleopatra's needle […] an Egyptian souvenir" with two "sphinxes [facing] the wrong way, gazing inward contemplatively […] rather than outward, protectively" (ch. 2), standing as perhaps awkward reminders of the city's imperial past. In The Virgin of Flames, he recalls the Spanish influence of Los Angeles with a description of the old Mission, "once the center of civilized Los Angeles" (154), which gave way to increasingly eclectic influences like "migrant Jews from the East" who built "two-, sometimes three-story brick buildings that leaned on rusty metal fire escapes that would have been more at home in New York" (153). As such passages suggest, Abani is keenly aware of the way urban particularities crystallize out of often far-flung movements and relations of people, ideas, and material, consciously or unconsciously taking on a global character that perhaps escapes clear definitions and betrays the porosity of its borders. We can readily see the global character of Los Angeles' population reflected in its flora: "palm trees from the Canary Islands, eucalyptus from Australia, bougainvillea from Brazil, birds of paradise from South Africa. Nearly everything now native to Los Angeles came from somewhere else" (177). By narrating the overdetermined development of cities like these, Abani writes globalization and urbanization as entwined, mutually enabling processes that mirror the smoothing and striating dynamic.

<8> The shared dynamics of global migration that shape Abani's cities also dominate the experiences of the characters that populate them. In all of Abani's narratives, characters come to cities from elsewhere, often across national borders. In GraceLand, Elvis and his father Sunday come to Lagos from a small town looking for work, and by the end of the novel Elvis is set to leave Nigeria for the United States. The title character in Becoming Abigail is sent from Nigeria to London because her father believes "London will give you a higher standard of education and living" (ch. 8). Black, the protagonist of The Virgin of Flames, is the son of a Nigerian father and a Salvadoran mother who makes his way to Los Angeles after years of wandering across America. Though all these characters have strong ties with Africa (only Black is not directly from there), they all end up outside the continent, global Bedouins of a sort, dispersed to the global cities of Britain and the US (not unlike Abani himself). The result is a diasporic engagement with Africa that resists seeing its people and places confined to the continent. Rather, Abani seems often at pains to demonstrate Africa's connections with global forces that manifest within and link together places like Lagos and London. These migrations suggest the way Africa's urbanity is relationally constituted through its exchanges with the rest of the world, just as people and materials from Africa contribute to the globalization of other places.

<9> The mutual articulation of the global within the urban makes Abani's cityscapes tempting to analyze through a framework of postmodernism or postcolonial hybridity and indeterminacy. Certainly the postmodernism of Los Angeles has been the subject of any number of studies that need not be rehashed here; suffice it to say that The Virgin of Flames in many ways adopts this familiar characterization of the city. With its "confusion of Art Deco, Hacienda, Lloyd-Wright and ugly 60s modernist architecture" and its mélange of cultures, Los Angeles is "a segregated city" with "several cities within it" that nonetheless "still managed to work as a single canvas of color and voices" (Virgin 73, 86, 177). Through this coalescing variety, the city reveals "the trick of its becoming; a city constantly digesting its past and recycling itself into something new" (153), something that can only be defined by its indefiniteness.

<10> Perhaps more interesting, however, is whether or not Abani attributes this sort of postmodernist subjectivity to all global cities; whether, say, his depiction of Lagos shares this capacity for cosmopolitan mixity and flow as part of the common urban experience. For Chielozona Eze, the answer is clearly, yes: in fact, he argues, this globalized hybridity acts as the salient feature of the city in GraceLand. He contends that the "multidimensional cultural hybridity" of the city (106) offers a space "Where people lose their primary attachment to blood in its closed, ethnic sense" (108) and instead adopt "a more open-minded or global approach to reality" (99). Assuming a natural and necessary equivalence between urbanization, globalization, and a postmodern cosmopolitan ethic, Eze writes of GraceLand's Lagos: "This is, indeed, the state of things: the postmodern, global and the transcultural condition in which ideas, people, and commodities move to and fro" (105), embodying the "idea of freedom, of the struggle to transcend boundaries" (103). In this world city, Elvis is freed from Afikpo, "one of the Igbo towns"; when he "lands in Lagos, […] he instantly links up with the larger world" (102), including a Yoruba step-family and Western books, commodities, ideas and tourists. Because his mother and one of his teachers had taught him to appreciate other cultures through American rock music and Western dance, Eze argues, Elvis's emergence into the global sphere of Lagos "is no problem for him" (107), and even facilitates his exploration of his own complex identity.

<11> Obi Nwakanma takes the productive interplay of mobility, hybridity, and freedom even further, claiming that by having Elvis leave Nigeria at the end of the novel, Abani questions "the value of nation and national belonging" (13), instead privileging the "highly mobile, literate, increasingly transnational […] Igbo traveling identity" that resists the homogenizing strictures of nationalism in favor of "migration, exile, displacement, marginalization" expressed in "the urban centers of postmodern culture" (13). In such readings, cities—as global and transgressive spaces—allow Abani's characters to doff restrictive subjectivities and relations (presumably centered in places like Afikpo) and more productively syncretize their heritage with other cultures in a transcultural, postmodern indeterminacy that allows the free expression of self.

<12> Setting aside for a moment the many reasons to be extremely dubious about such a rosy picture of Elvis's encounter with globalization and urbanization in Lagos (where he experiences abject poverty, gets entangled with crime, is jailed and tortured, and eventually exiled), Abani's whole body of literature does bear out his wariness regarding rigid divisions, especially ethnic and cultural ones. His narratives consistently (if not always directly) suggest the possibility of cities to forge or enable more flexible subjectivities, set against more traditional and divisive identities. In GraceLand, older characters like Sunday and the revolutionary leader the King of the Beggars represent problematic attachment to strict Igbo ethnicity that proves inimical to the needs and interests of Elvis and the people of Lagos generally. Frustrated by his loss of status in the new military government, Sunday clings violently to masculinist Igbo beliefs and practices, lashing out at Elvis for wearing makeup and wanting to be a dancer. Worse, he protects his brother from accusations of rape (both of Elvis and his cousin Efua), and he has his misfit nephew killed "because he was a threat to all we had […] he was killed for honor" (187). For his part, the King does not espouse the same hypermasculinity when appealing to "the beauty of the indigenous culture," but his rhetoric of protest is itself "essentialist, maybe even prejudiced, because the culture he spoke of was that of the Igbo, one of nearly three hundred indigenous peoples in this populous country" (155). Elvis is unconvinced by such thinking, noting that it "didn't account for the inherent complications he knew were native to this culture" and wondering "why the King didn't speak about how to cope with these new and confusing times" (155). By equating resistance to "the evils of capitalism" with a simple and total "return to the traditional values and ways of being" defined in narrowly ethnocentric terms (155), the King excludes the variety and diverse positionalities of the community he claims to represent.

<13> It should be noted, however, that Abani does not relegate Igbo culture to the "hitherto monolithic identities" Eze speaks of; rather, he counters the King and Sunday's rigid understanding of Igbo ethnicity in the depictions of the kola nut ceremony that precede each chapter. In one of the final excerpts regarding the ceremony, he writes,

For the Igbo, tradition is fluid, growing […] changing with every occurrence. So, too, the kola ritual has changed. Christian prayers have been added, and Jesus has replaced Obasi as the central deity. But its fluid aspects resist the empiricism that is the Western way […] The Igbo are not reducible to a system of codes, and of meaning. (291)

Still, this understanding of Igbo cultural flexibility only lends credence to Nwakanma's assertion that Abani privileges the global, cosmopolitan, urban setting as a place where that dynamism might come to fuller fruition.

<14> In that regard, Abani represents Los Angeles as a place especially amenable to complex identities and cultural crossover. It is the city where the Mexican transsexual Sweet Girl comes to escape her family that "betrayed me […] because I was different" (Virgin 270). Like so many others, Sweet Girl comes to Los Angeles to rebel, to find herself in a city where "there is no common mythology […] There is just you and what you see and imagine this place and your life in it to be, moment by moment" (206). Here she finds acceptance and camaraderie with people like Iggy, "a lapsed white Jew from East LA" who has become "a fakir-psychic" with metal rings in her back from which she "suspended her body in midair from meat hooks in order to induce a trance" (30). Iggy owns a café called the Ugly Store, cluttered with "broken toys, voodoo dolls, fetishes from Java, Africa, New Zealand, Australia and Papua New Guinea" (30), as well as "an eight-foot-tall evil-looking statue of Anubis, the Egyptian god of the dead" (29). The Ugly Store occupies a central place in The Virgin of Flames, a metonym for the eclectic embrace of the city and a refuge for cultural and sexual in-betweens like Black and Sweet Girl.

<15> Emplaced in the Ugly Store and East LA generally, Black resists his Rwandan friend Bomboy's assertion that "Your father was African, and so therefore, you are African" (195). Instead, he attempts to chart out and negotiate a more complicated and elusive identity as a "shape-shifter […] taking on different ethnic and national affiliations as though they were seasonal changes in wardrobe" (36). The relative "freedom" of the city and its cosmopolitan ethos empower Black to act out a complex sexuality in his relationship with Sweet Girl and to express himself artistically through public murals painted surreptitiously on the concrete channel of the Los Angeles River. Overall, the "expansiveness" of the city gives him "the feeling that he could become the person he always wanted to be" (53), a person that does not conform with the ethnic classification of Bomboy, the gender demands of his father, or the Catholic strictures of his mother, even as he tries to find ways to incorporate all three. It is perhaps worth noting that Abani himself, writing in London and Los Angeles, finds similar expressive empowerment within these global urban spaces. In exile from Nigeria, he gains "courage and freedom" to delve into issues especially of gender and sexuality otherwise circumscribed within an Igbo or Nigerian context (Ojaide 46). For both Black and Abani, Los Angeles might be seen as the thirdspace of Soja's characterization of that city, opening space for radical difference and empathy over the strictures of essentializing or universalizing identity politics.

<16> From these examples, we can understand and perhaps expand on Eze's characterization of Abani's global urban aesthetic and ethos as a liberating, open, connective space of transgression. The trouble here is that Abani's representation of postmodern mobility and cosmopolitanism are not nearly so directly or simplistically positive. The experiences of these characters reflect a deep ambivalence about the possibilities and sources of transgression, especially given the multiform metrics of power and control that inflect each character's entry into and position within the transgressions of global diaspora. Abani's narratives make clear that the causes and conditions of becoming inculcated into the processes of migration that bring people to these global cities are often far from benign. Paralleling Abani's own political exile from Nigeria, many of these characters lack autonomy over the dynamics of "mobility" that shuttle them to and from these cities and around the world, stemming instead from some measure of forced or coerced displacement. Elvis and his father are pushed from Afrikpo after Sunday loses a corrupt election, leaving him jobless and in debt and leaving Elvis bewildered: "How did they come to this?" he asks himself. "Just two years ago they lived in a small town and his father had a good job and was on the cusp of winning an election. Now they lived in a slum in Lagos" (GraceLand 6). Similarly, Black and his mother are pushed to East LA "After his father didn't come back from Vietnam. After they lost the small house in Pasadena when the bank foreclosed on it" (Virgin 50). And though Abigail's father consents to send her to London under the auspices of a better life, he has been deceived by a relative who wants her as part of the sex slave trade. These examples make clear Abani's understanding that while mobility is a key component of both globalization and urbanization (and whatever benefits may arise from them), movement itself is highly subject to "social differentiation" as a process that "both reflects and reinforces power" (Massey 318). As Tim Cresswell points out, theorists and writers have "alternately coded mobility as dysfunctional, as inauthentic and rootless and, more recently as liberating, antifoundational and transgressive" (Cresswell 161). Depending on one's position vis-à-vis the "power geometries" of global flows, mobility may be something chosen or something imposed, making simple evaluations unsatisfactory.

<17> Because the mobility in these texts lacks the clear autonomy and liberatory effect presumed by Eze and Nwakanma, the urban experience in Abani's fiction often involves more struggle and a sense of dislocation in the shifting, disruptive spaces of the global city than they give voice to. Black, Elvis, and others cannot simply revel in the globalized multiculturalism of Lagos and Los Angeles; rather, they often display an anxiety and desire to connect with familial and cultural heritage from which they are cut off in the city. Elvis obsessively carries his dead mother's bible and journal, which includes Igbo recipes, botanical knowledge, and snippets of the kola nut ritual. Black is "obsessed with origins" (Virgin 123), confused by and groping after cultural links he can largely only read about after his father's death in Vietnam (205). And Abigail burns names and memories onto her skin in an attempt to inscribe and solidify an identity and a past that are otherwise tenuous and unstable due to her mother's death. In each case, the feeling of disconnection from larger collective identity is exacerbated by their position in a city in which they do no always feel at home. Elvis had been "miserable and unable to fit into school" in Lagos, "where his small-town thinking and accent marked him" (GraceLand 8). Abigail, too, feels conspicuous in London, where people "would forgive you anything except a foreign accent" (Abigail, ch. 14). And Black is desperate "to get out of this town" (206) where "you have no people, without people you have no lineage, without a lineage you have no ancestors, without ancestors you have no dead and without the dead you can never know anything about life" (255). These characters find themselves uprooted in the urban space, in some ways freed from repressive or abusive subjectivities and relations, but also struggling in places where "any idea of a solid past, as an anchor, is soon lost" (Virgin 206). In an apt image for the way these characters struggle to ground themselves in the "confusing plurality of cultures" in these world cities, we see Abigail astride the Prime Meridian:

She stood on the line that cut the earth into two time zones, feet inches apart, marveling at how true to life it all was. That once could be only a step away from another world, another time, and yet caught firmly in one or the other, or in her case, trapped forever between two. (ch. 8)

In such instances, being in the cosmopolitan transculturality of the city is of little help in their search for stable collective identity and connection. That all these main characters end up either fleeing or committing suicide seems evidence enough to challenge any simplistically positive view of their experiences in global cities, which clearly engender at least some measure of troubling displacement in their lives.

<18> According to Eze, these "moments of alienation" are in fact "moments of transcendence" (108) in which characters ostensibly make the (perhaps difficult) transition from attachment to "blood" identities to a more cosmopolitan hybridity. Yet one could also argue the mobility and indeterminacy expressed here resembles the postmodern condition as famously articulated by Frederic Jameson: a "hyperspace" that "has finally succeeded in transcending the capacities of the individual body to locate itself, to organize its immediate surroundings perceptually, and cognitively to map its position in a mappable external world" (Jameson 44). Characters like Black, Elvis, and Abigail struggle (and generally fail) to ground themselves in the postmodern deracination of the urban space, casting doubt on the possibilities for transgression alone to be a liberating or resistant force in these novels.

<19> In fact, Jameson's work implies that, beyond failing to simplistically provide a productive sense of resistance to centralized power, the indeterminacies and transgressions of postmodernism (and postcolonialism) may in many ways be the products of power, manifested by an imperialism and neoliberalism that operates under a similar logic of deterritorialization, border-crossing, openness, fluidity, and difference. Though Lefebvre argues that "the trend toward fragmentation, separation and disintegration" is the result of "centralized power" (Lefebvre 9), others have noted a trend toward the dissolution of separations and boundaries as a crucial strategy of power. Though power may "originate in political and economic command centers," it is also "unequally […] clustered at centers, or dispersed across peripheries," and achieves hegemony "by extending coercion and power over spatial fields" that often extend beyond its self-established boundaries (Liberation Ecologies xiv). This complex geographic structure of power can and does utilize various, sometimes seemingly contradictory methods to extend its reach. Speaking specifically about environmental governance and control, Michael Watts, Paul Robbins, and Richard Peet claim that environmental policy has become a sort of "governance through markets," which seeks to mitigate ecological costs not through state regulations but a more "open" and "hybrid" system of financial incentives and self-regulation, coordinated under transnational institutions like the World Bank (Peet et al 7). The result of this "upward" displacement of power is a simultaneous breakdown of state control, which "provides the thin regulatory context for the smooth operation of global capital" (Peet and Watts xv, emphasis added). The parallels to the language and metaphors of smooth space here should not be missed or undersold. Where Westphal and others seem to presume transgression and smooth space to be inimical to the strict and repressive structurations of state power, these political ecologists highlight its potential usefulness to an increasingly globalized capitalism that also desires the lessening of state control through freedom of movement, border-crossing flows, and hybridized relations—though now in the service of capital accumulation and exploitation.

<20> Indeed, though Westphal claims that "Globalization assumes the homogeneity of space" (Westphal 41), Arif Dirlik counters that globalization "is not to be confounded with […] universalization of economic, political, social, and, especially, cultural forms" (Dirlik 27). In large part, this is due to the fact that global capitalism must still "take place" in distinct localities, must still transact its exchanges and accumulations within a varied geography of difference. So, "the very process of globalization results in a situation where place-based differences, which must be addressed to make globalization possible and feasible, are incorporated into the very process of globalization, abolishing the boundary between the external and internal, bringing differences into the interior of the process of globalization" (26). In other words, neoliberal global capitalism itself enacts a form of hybridity as "[t]he corporation, seeking domestication, strives for an abolition of the boundary between corporation and community" (30). The processes of globalization and imperialism are themselves "glocal" phenomena which at once engage the particularities of place and hybridize those differences so they can be mobilized within "free-flowing" and "open" markets that transgress the confines of place and borders. In fact, as David Harvey suggests, the processes of "integration and differentiation" are contradictory yet dialectically related pressures within postmodern capitalism (Harvey 305). He sums up the issue this way:

The less important the spatial barriers, the greater the sensitivity of capital to the variations of place within space, and the greater the incentive for places to be differentiated in ways attractive to capital. The result has been the production of fragmentation, insecurity, and ephemeral uneven development within a highly unified global space economy of capital flows. (296)

What I hope to elucidate here is the complicated nature of the "geographical and temporal flexibility of capital accumulation" (194), a flexibility that makes the alignment of transgression and borders with liberation and oppression respectively a tenuous proposition at best. Where postmodernist spatial studies tend to privilege transgression and hybridity as "third space […] that does not eliminate the other two spaces but enriches and complicates choice," Dirlik poses the question: "But what if the hybrid were to lead to the extinction of the originals out of which it was produced? […] Hybridity suggests merely a proliferation of alternatives, but in real life may also lead to the extinction of alternatives" as hybridity itself becomes a strategy of power and as the transgressions of imperialist capital lead to new divisions and restrictions (Dirlik 29).

<21> Here we might turn again to Abani's narratives as a representation of this contradictory dynamic, particularly with regard to the fate of Maroko, the Lagos slum where Elvis finds himself after his father's political displacement from the interior town of Afikpo. The cosmopolitan character of the city praised by Eze and Nwakanma might be attributed largely to a kind of global mobility and cultural exchange as the world and the city become mutually penetrable and penetrating. Yet to the extent that this exchange is driven primarily by the interests of capital, the hybrid parts of Lagos are clustered around the wealthiest sectors of the city, the segregated beneficiaries of globalization and transnational exchange. This sort of "hybridity," then, marks Lagos as "a site of entrenched social, political, and economic divisions" (Harrison 96), boundaries that both stem from and reproduce the city's uneven engagement with the global relations of material culture.

<22> Indeed, as Elvis discovers, most Lagosians have very little contact with these global luxuries. Just outside the affluent confines of Lagos's wealthy quarters, the underside of the global-urban dynamic sprawls out in informal settlements like Maroko. In this part of the city, Elvis experiences starkly different conditions from those of the cosmopolitan center: much of the shantytown is suspended over a swamp, built on stilts over "green swampy water" teeming with sewage and disease (GraceLand 14). Plank roads wind through a sludge of dirt, excrement, offal, and waste "whipped into a muddy brown froth" (6). At best, Elvis wakes to "the smell of garbage from refuse dumps, unflushed toilets and stale bodies" (4); at worst, to rats swimming in his oft-flooded room (32). This, too, is Lagos; this, too, Abani seems to suggest, in the nature of the urban, the "common companion of every city's luminescence—darkness ("Las Vegas" 90). By setting his narratives primarily in places like Maroko, Abani portrays the way globalization and urbanization seem to breed opulence alongside deprivation, inequality alongside access, seriously complicating the sense of liberation and progressive cultural exchange Eze and Nwakanma attribute to these phenomena and suggesting the way certain forms of transgressive smoothing might make way for new striations and divisions.

<23> In many ways, the de- and reterritorialization of Lagos/Maroko reenact the processes of colonialism that shaped the peculiar ways the region was brought into globalized urbanity in the first place. To further their economic and administrative interests, imperial powers tended to reterritorialize colonies around cities, capitals, and ports, especially for the purposes of raw material export. The development of cities like Lagos represents a "commercial notion" left over after independence (Fanon 187), disproportionately drawing people and resources from the rest of the country and funneling them to Western markets (Imoagene 60). After independence, the new era of neoliberalism "has left little or no place for Africa outside of its old colonial role as a provider of raw materials" (Ferguson 8), a role prone to creating inequality and corruption within a nation. Clashing with Eze's vision of globalization as a process helping people like Elvis "link up with the larger world" culturally, James Ferguson argues it is more divisive than connective economically: through Nigeria's petroeconomy, Lagos "is indeed 'globally connected,' but such 'global' links connect in a selective, discontinuous, and point-to-point fashion" that "leaves most Africans with only a tenuous and indirect connection to 'the global economy'" (Ferguson 14). Abani echoes this notion of disconnection in an evocative metaphor for the city: "If Lagos is a body, and the oil pipelines crisscrossing it are veins, then the inhabitants are vampires" ("Lagos" 4). Cut off from access to the national oil (and oil profits) flowing through their own city, poor Lagosians tap the lines and steal oil, for which the "body" treats them like a "virus" or "parasites," violently killed off by the thousands each year (4).

<24> It is this dynamic that primarily accounts for the huge disparities in Lagos, as export dollars are concentrated in the hands of a very few to the exclusion of the national and urban poor, all enabled by neoliberal emphasis on "free markets." Elvis remembers reading an editorial boasting that Nigeria had one of the highest percentages of millionaires in the world, but that neglected to mention that "their wealth had been made over the years with the help of crooked politicians, criminal soldiers, bent contractors, and greedy oil-company executives," an economic exploitation that also led to Nigeria having "a higher percentage of poor people than nearly any other country in the world" (GraceLand 8). The neocolonial system allows Nigeria's government and urban elites to horde the nation's wealth for themselves, "in no way [allowing the people] to enjoy any of the dues that are paid to it by the big foreign companies" (Fanon 165). In trying to help Elvis better understand the mechanisms of injustice behind Lagos and Nigeria's dichotomous conditions, the King of the Beggars tells him, "Someone does not become a beggar; we are made beggars" (31), in part by the globalization that pairs highly selective development and connection with "widespread disconnection and exclusion" (Ferguson 14).

<25> That is not to say that the people of Maroko are entirely cut off from the exchanges of globalization in the urban sphere—for better or worse, even the most degraded and deprived areas of the city are awash in the trappings of American culture as people throughout Nigeria are made consumers of Western products. Hardly an engagement with benign cosmopolitanism, we see the way these products exacerbate the marginalized economic position of many Lagosians within the structures of globalization. For instance, the movies Elvis enjoys as a child are shown free, "courtesy of an American tobacco company, which passed out packets of free cigarettes to everybody in the audience, irrespective of age" (GraceLand 146). Elvis proceeds to smoke throughout the novel, spending what little money he has on American cigarettes. We might also consider the (lack of) food pervasive in the narrative. The recipes from his mother's journal that preface each chapter remind readers constantly of indigenous foods and Igbo knowledge regarding the place and environment; yet these foods and practices are absent in Elvis's "transcultural" city life. Instead, Elvis fills his belly with Coke, Bazooka gum, and so on.

<26> Elvis's lack of access to Nigerian food mirrors the situation in the country generally, according to Bolanle Awe, where Nigeria was encouraged to grow cash crops for export in lieu of food and "to become a consumer nation importing chocolate and beverages," even to the point of needing to import staples like "rice and sugar, which were obtainable at prices cheaper than that of traditional crops produced locally" (Awe 9, 11). Through processes of disruption and substitution in global markets, the poor of Nigeria are made beggars for the products and relations they are disadvantaged by in the first place. Abani uses commodities throughout GraceLand as evidence of the uneven and exploitative potential in globalization, especially as it pertains to Africa, where the exchange is as often empty and disillusioning as it is gratifying and world-expanding. Thus we see Elvis at one point in the novel desperately "seeking words of wisdom" from Bazooka gum wrappers, only to find meaningless, culturally irrelevant platitudes like "A stitch in time saves nine" (240), signifying an utter lack of benefit from Western commodity culture. By the end of the novel, readers are fully disabused of faith in global exchange to redeem Nigeria's poor with Marlboros or rock and roll.

<27> From this understanding of globalization as a process proliferating inequalities, Abani represents urbanization also as a process made unequal through its transnational relations. Pushed from rural areas to urban centers by an export economy focused on plantation cash cropping and an oil boom, thousands yearly join what Fanon calls "the incoherent rush towards the cities" (157), drawn by the appearance of opportunity. Most, like Elvis, "hadn't known about the poverty and violence of Lagos" until they arrive (GraceLand 7), and like Sunday, they find no quality work in the city. The economically displaced become marginalized once more, pushed out of the formal urban center and made refugees of a sort in the informal periphery. Settlements like Maroko spring up to absorb the influx, hastily constructed on undesirable land, lacking services, drainage, and sewage. The global economy and state policies work in tandem "to produce informality" of this kind (Myers 73), an uneven urbanization that concentrates wealth in some areas while it simultaneously "denies people jobs in their home areas and denies them homes in the areas they have gone to get jobs" (Neuwirth 12). Echoing the King's sentiment that people are "made beggars," Garth Myers insists that the presence of informal settlements like Maroko does not reflect the intentions of its inhabitants to circumvent formal rules, spaces, and economies; instead, "the system threw them down and out to a place where that is their only choice" (Myers 82). Through his education by the King, Elvis comes to understand the selective, uneven, exploitative and often corrupt character of the global economy in Nigeria as the answer to the riddle of Lagos's schizophrenic geography of opulence and degradation. Not only do people suffer from the wrongdoing of "dose army bastards" running the state, the King tells him, but also from "dose tiefs in the IMF, de World Bank, and de U.S." (280) pushing free-market policies that enable "the smooth operation of global capital" to exploit resources without the limitations of state intervention.

<28> The deep irony of GraceLand, however, is that once the operations of imperialism and capitalist power have "smoothed" the precolonial structures and relations to make space for their own interests, once places like Lagos/Maroko have subsequently been "striated" with inequalities and divisions, the process begins again under the mantle of "development." Labeling Maroko an unsavory, unproductive place, Nigerian authorities declare "Operation Clean de Nation," framed as an "attack on de centers of poverty and crime" and an attempt to remove "a pus-ridden eyesore on de face of de nation's capital" (247). But as with most everything else in GraceLand, the costs and consequences of "improvement" are differentially distributed, primarily benefitting the already wealthy. Elvis's friend Redemption hints at the interests of the state and urban elites fueling the demolition when he points out the closeness of the wealthy to Maroko: "though dey hate us," he says, "de rich still have to look at us" (GraceLand 137). This uncomfortable proximity provides plenty of motivation to be rid of the slum, as the state employs a battery of discursive attacks on Maroko in order to legitimate its destruction. Following Nigeria's history of shunning rehabilitation in favor of "outright demolition, after forced eviction and forced population relocation" (Agbola 271), Maroko is bulldozed and its inhabitants dispersed to other slums, creating space for a "beachside millionaire's paradise" (GraceLand 248). The former residents are worse off for their "mobility," having lost what housing, jobs, resources, and communal support they had managed to develop there, and instead evicted to even worse areas.

<29> The fate of Maroko (and all too many places like it) can be cast as part of capitalism's own "transgressivity": as the built environment of striated space becomes a hindrance to capital flows, there is a constant need to deterritorialize the divisions of its own making in order to "colonize space for the affluent" (Harvey, qtd. in Seeking Spatial Justice 95) by dispossessing the poor, undoing the boundaries of their emplacement and propelling them into a forced migration. Given the experience of Elvis and the people of Maroko, the notions of movement and nomadism in Westphal's geocriticism take on a markedly different tenor. Where he argues "postcolonial space is certainly nomadic," we might be hard-pressed to disagree; yet when he claims its nomadic character stems from "constant deterritorialization and reterritorialization according to a logic that is not neocolonial, or at least that should not be" (Westphal 54), it begs the question of what ensures that it is "not neocolonial." Transgressivity itself, I would argue, provides no such assurance.

<30> Informed by Abani's narratives, we would be better off understanding the forces of territorialization and deterritorialization, movement and fixity, transgression and boundary-making not as strictly oppositional, but as complementary sides of the same spatial coin, which might be put to service by the forces of power or of resistance, or both. By the same token, then, established borders and a more concrete and stable sense of emplacement need not be relegated to the purview of domination. Though certain spatial "striation" may be erected as "a means of control, and hence of domination, of power," Lefebvre tells us, it necessarily "escapes in part from those who would make use of it" (Lefebvre 26) and opens opportunities for that bounded space not simply to be exploded or eroded, but transformed or appropriated.

<31> Perhaps no geospatial formation provides a more appropriate example than the nation-state itself, which has garnered enormous attention in postcolonialism. Much of that theoretical attention has been critical of the nation, especially in postcolonial contexts, as a homogenizing force imposed on heterogeneous peoples, both arbitrary and abstract in ways that repress the multiple and dynamic realities of a hybrid world. Predictably, the postmodern response echoes Westphal's nomadic transgression, calling for "the progressive dissolution of the nation, with its colonial and neocolonial legacies, regarding the very idea of the state as oppressive" (Lovesey 156) and instead enabling the freer play of borderlands identities and relations. Yet Laura Chrisman suggests that, in the context of exploitation by transnational corporations and financial institutions like the World Bank, the disbanding of the nation creates "a crisis of political authority" in these places that ultimately works "to block the realization of liberatory, socialist nationalism" (Chrisman 196). This seems to be the case in Ngũgĩ's Wizard of the Crow, where the fictional nation of Aburĩria suffers incredible deprivations at the hands of both a dictatorial Ruler and the Global Bank, which produces "all the laws and regulations governing the economic and monetary policies of the nations of the earth" (Ngũgĩ 503).

<32> For most of the novel, the nation-state figures as the instrument of the Ruler's dictatorship; he usurps its sovereignty by claiming no distinction between himself and the country (Ngũgĩ 136) and uses the police, the army, and the government to serve his own selfish ends at the expense of the people. He also adopts the discourse of nationalism to insulate himself from foreign intervention or calls for democratic reform. As an independent nation, he claims, "we cannot allow ourselves to take orders from the West all the time […] I want to remind you that we are in Africa, and we, too, have our African forms of governance. The democracy that is suitable for America and Europe is not necessarily suitable for Africa" (583). Instead of "Western" democracy, he imposes a nativist ideology, equating nationalism with the "march backward to the roots of an authentic unchanging past" (622) and claiming that "the real threat to Aburĩria's future lay in people's abandoning their traditions" like polygamy, wife beating, and "unquestioning obedience" (621-2). Here, nationalism and the nation-state act as the very sort of striated control bemoaned by Westphal and others, enabling the Ruler's tyranny and defending it from external political pressures. The world media in particular is a "pest" for the Ruler (611), checking his open abuses of the population and spurring "questions about the missing minister" Machokali, whom the Ruler has had killed (612).

<33> At the same time, the "new global order" of media transparency and democratization carries its own threats to the people of Aburĩria. As the US envoy from the Global Bank explains, "the history of capitalism can be summed up in one phrase: in search of freedom. Freedom to expand, and now it has a chance at the entire globe for its theatre. It needs a democratic space to move as its own logic demands" (Ngũgĩ 580). The pressure for Aburĩria to reform, then, stems not from concern for the people themselves, but for "a free and stable world where our money can move across borders without barriers erected by the misguided nationalism of the outmoded nation-state" (580). The dissolution and privatization of the nation-state equates to a form of "corporonialism" (760), in which the resources of the nation are "freed" for exploitation by transnational corporations and "the neoimperial class imports en masse the cheapest [goods] from abroad and undermines the efforts from within" (760).

<34> Against the machinations of neoliberalism, the nation reemerges as an instrument of the Movement for the Voice of the People, a claim to "political and economic sovereignty over a finite landmass" that allows them to counter the exploitative claims of global capital (Chrisman 187). The Movement's main goal is "to imagine a different future for Aburĩria after people united take power from these ogres" (Ngũgĩ 758). Unlike the Ruler's egomaniacal and nativist nationalism, however, this "New Aburĩria" is premised on "a coalition of interests all united by one desire to recover their voice in running the affairs of the land" (676). The goals and strategies of the Movement at times fit with a sort of transgressive push toward smoothing out some of the exploitative and oppressive constrictions of the Ruler's tyranny, but they are equally engaged in establishing unified bulwarks against the disruptive transgressions of the Global Bank. Here Ngũgĩ seems engaged in an effort to "reinvent the nation-state radically to serve the needs of its own people" (Chrisman 184), one that can wield its sovereignty "to protect laws for social justice" (Ngũgĩ 759) based on the specific interests and conditions of the nation.

<35> Measured against that effort to appropriate the authority of the nation to ground a unifying resistance to the large-scale disruptions and manipulations of global capital, the contention that for postcolonial minorities "instability is the distinctive feature of a unity formerly taken for granted" becomes less useful, if not troubling (Westphal 45). To the extent that such instability prevents the creation of new unities (linked together by an alternative set of boundaries and sense of emplacement), it may well serve alongside precisely the kind of divisiveness and fragmentation presumed to be the work of repressive striation, resulting in a de facto dissolution of resistance itself. According to Dirlik, "Contrary to the logic of theory, which calls for the erasure of boundaries, the inequality of power calls in practice for the delineation of those same boundaries, for without them, spaces must invade places, and an 'off-ground' economy must put an end to the groundedness of everyday life" (Dirlik 30). Faced with "a geography of power to which places are […] inconveniences" (30), bounded place itself may well at times provide the most productive forms of resistance. A trenchant postmodernism that uncritically privileges the transgression of such boundaries, then, may well serve as "an efficient way, under the circumstances, to defuse […] claims to alternative possibilities" (Dirlik 40).

<36> The critique offered here should not be taken for an outright rejection of transgressivity or its attendant motifs of mobility, heterogeneity, indeterminacy, and so on. Nor am I arguing that we replace the postmodernist understandings with a privileging of bounded place or the erasure of difference. I am urging instead that spatial literary studies take another lesson from postcolonialism—the necessity to account for the particular conditions and histories that variously shape the relations between space and place, rather than relying on dichotomous categories with preset evaluations. Abani and Ngũgĩ's narratives provide an embodiment of Dirlik's assertion, "The question then is not the confrontation of the global and the local, but of different configurations of 'glocality'" that serve different interests (Dirlik 29); we could easily substitute smooth and striated or transgression and boundaries for global and local and arrive at a fair summation of the argument I am after here. Drawing from Abani and Ngũgĩ's refusal to simply privilege or disregard either the forces of boundedness or openness, geocriticism should develop methods to examine with more nuance the multivalent relations between these spatial forms and more critically evaluate their dynamic potential for domination or resistance.

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