Djebar Assia - The long space : transnationalism and postcolonial form

Jalan Raya Pos ( De Groote Postweg ) [ The Great Post Road ], dir. Bernie Ijdis (The Netherlands: Pieter van Huystee Films, 1996). Although the camera work and editing in this documentary are rudimentary, in general the pacing and use of silence (principally Pramoedyas) are strongly evocative of Pramoedyas situation at the timea period in which Suhartos rule, though waning, hangs over Pramoedyas sense of narration. Just prior to the sequence described, Pramoedya refers directly to his problems with writers block (the phrase in Bahasa Indonesia is in English) and the scene ends with a close-up of the fire I describe. As a whole the film interweaves biographical moments of this kind with a pointed voice-over by Pramoedya that ponders the colonial and postcolonial meanings of the Great Post Road itself. I would like to thank Chris GoGwilt of Fordham University for initially bringing this film to my attention.

This phrase, earthly world, appears in the title of Auerbachs 1928 monograph, Dante als Dichter der irdischen Welt ; but as Edward Said notes in his introduction to a new edition of Mimesis , the phrase is rendered as secular world in Manheims 1961 translation. The use of secular is not unfounded but de-emphasizes the materiality implied in Auerbachs reading.

Wilson Harris, Quetzalcoatl and the Smoking Mirror: Reflections on Originality and Tradition, in Wilson Harris: The Unfinished Genesis of the Imagination , ed. Andrew Bundy (London/New York: Routledge, 1999) p. 194.

See Fredric Jameson, The End of Temporality, Critical Inquiry 29 (summer 2003): 695718. Jameson suggests that modernism begins in the interstices of two temporalities, the time lived between agricultural and urban lifea comparatist conception of deep time (699) unavailable, and therefore symptomatic, of a certain postmodern flatness or inability in depth perception. I would not claim that the long space replays this paradigm of comparative temporality, yet it is striking that the extended form of postcolonial writing addresses precisely the conflict of perception wrought by the conventions of the colonial episteme.

Jameson, The End of Temporality, 700. It has to be said that, despite Jamesons claims to the contrary, this position exists as a statement rather than as a fully engaged explanation both in this essay and in other instances where the Third World or the decolonizing South are addressed.

Mikhail Bakhtin, Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in The Novel, in Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination , ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), p. 250. Bakhtins point appears in his Concluding Remarks written in 1973, some thirtyfive years after the initial theorization in the essay itself.

In part this is a Bakhtinian insistence on being as always already co-being and, significantly, as the process of the event of being. Sobytie can simply be event in Russian, but for Bakhtin it was ineluctably linked to being itself as an event. Bakhtin will stress the uniqueness of event as that which grants being its distinctiveness, but I tend to maintain the everyday use within the philosophical principle so that eventness accentuates event as being-in-the-world. This is an event, therefore, not just of philosophical substance, but of the coordinates of co-being as time and space. Postcolonial being as event thickens in the apprehension of its chronotopes with the caveat that the aim is not the assumption of being but an understanding of the processes by which it may be subsumed, overreached.

See Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space , trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (London: Blackwell, 1991), p. 110. Although the current project is a very long way from being Lefebvrean, I am attempting, nevertheless, to connect an aesthetic process of form to the production of social space that is postcoloniality.