VIETNAM REVISITED

HISTORY, HOLOCAUST, IDENTITY IN CONTEMPORARY CULTURAL DEBATE AND COETZEE’S DUSKLANDS

Authors

  • Lena Petrović University of Nis, Faculty of Philosophy

Keywords:

historical repetition, holocaust, falsehood, identity, myth, Coetzee, Dusklands

Abstract

The paper is a response to what has been recognized by the filmmaker Clay Claiborne, the author of the 2008 documentary Vietnam: The American Holocaust, as an urgent need to face the suppressed truth about the Vietnam War as the best vantage point from which to examine the mechanism of historical repetition. The continuity of war and violence, despite declarative promises of peace and stability, is the paradox that since the WWII has increasingly engaged the attention of historians, cultural critics and commentators, and artists. In the first part of the paper the views are represented of those among them who come from different fields yet, like Claiborne, use the benefit of the same, post-colonial, hindsight to reach the common conclusion about the holocaust, not as a unique aberration, but as historically recurrent and culturally conditioned phenomenon. The strategies used to justify and perpetuate it – the second major focus in this part of the paper – are not limited to deliberate falsification of historical facts though, for beyond what Harold Pinter called “the thick tapestry of lies” concealing the crimes of the past, there is the willingness, generated by western myths of racial supremacy, to believe the lies and/or condone the crimes. Within this (imperialist, patriarchal) mythic tradition, a particular kind of split identity is produced by, and reproduces in its turn, the kind of violent history we tend to take for granted: I argue, along with J. Habermas, L. Friedberg, C. Nord and H. Giroux, that the factual truth will stop short of the transformative effect, political or moral, we traditionally expect from it as long as the deep-seated affective alienation from whatever has been construed as the other that constitutes this identity remains unrecognized and unattended. Confronting such forms of radical inner dissociation, considered normal or desirable in patriarchal culture, have been, at least since Shakespeare, art’s ultimate raison d’étre. In the second part of the paper I provide what I consider one of the supreme examples of literary deconstructions of western identity forming traditions – Dusklands, Coetzee’s novel about the continuity of consciousness bringing together the geographically and historically distant events: the colonial massacres of the African Hottentots and the genocidal assault on Vietnam. Rather than offering a thorough examination of this richly layered novel, the aim of my analysis is to point to the ingenious strategies, particularly to the ironic intertextual allusions to Hegel’s master/slave paradigm, Coetzee employs to represent the ‘demanifestation/denazification’ of western historical sense as a process parallel to that of dismantling of patriarchal identity.

References

Bieber, F. 2010. A History of Yugoslavia according to some of my students. <http://fbieber.wordpress.com/2010/05/26/a-history-of-yugoslavia-and-easterneurope-according-to-some-of-my-students/>. 28. 1. 2015.

Boal 2008: A. Boal, Aristotle’s Coercive System of Tragedy, The Theatre of the Oppressed, London: Pluto Press, 1-40.

Bak-Mors 2003: S. Bak-Mors, Hegel i Haiti, Reč, no. 71/17, 2003, 318-375. Translated by A. Kostić and Bajazetov-Vučen from Susan Buck-Morss, .Hegel and Haiti., Critical Inquiry, Summer 2000, Vol. 26, no. 4, 821-865.

Césaire 2000: A. Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, Translated by J. Pinkham, New York: Monthly Review Press.

Coetzee 1983: J. M. Coetzee, Dusklands, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

Eliot 1969: T. S. Eliot, The Four Quartets, The Complete Poems and Plays, London: Faber and Faber, 169-199.

Eliot 1975: T. S. Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent, Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, Frank Kermode (Ed.), London: Faber and Faber, 37-45.

Elkins 2005: C. Elkins, Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya, London: Jonathan Cape.

Esler 1987: R. Esler, The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future, New York: HarperCollins Publishers.

Friedberg 2003: L. Friedberg, Dare to Compare: Americanizing the Holocaust, Holocaust: Theoretical Readings., N. Levi & M. Rothberg (Eds.), Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 468-473

Golding 1974: W. Golding, Fable, The Hot Gates, London: Faber and Faber.

Giroux, H. 2013. Segment: Henry Giroux on Zombi Politics, Interview to Bill Moyers and Company. <http://billmoyers.com/segment/henry-giroux-on-zombiepolitics/>. 22. 2. 2015.

Habermas 2003: J. Habermas, On the Public Use of History, The Holocaust: Theoretical Readings, N. Levi & M. Rothberg (Eds.), Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 63-68.

Hegel 1807: G. W. F. Hegel, Lordship and Bondage, The Phenomenology of Mind, from Harper & Row’s Torchbooks’ edition (1967) of Phenomenology (1807), translated by J. B. Baillie (1910). Hegel-by-Hypertext. <https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/index.htm>. 7. 8. 2015.

Hegel 2006: G. W. F. Hegel, The African Character, from Hegel’s Philosophy of History (1831) in Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness, Norton Critical edition, P. B. Armstrong (Ed.), New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 208-212.

Korten D. 2008. We Are Hard Wired to Care and Connect, YES!Magazine. <http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/purple-america/we-are-hard-wired-tocare-and-connect>. 12. 7. 2014.

Levi & Rothberg 2003: Levi, N. & Rothberg, M., Introduction to Part IV: Questions of Religion, Ethics and Justice, The Holocaust: Theoretical Readings, N. Levi & M. Rothberg (Eds.), Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 229-232.

Lindquist 1996: S. Lindquist, ‘Exterminate All the Brutes’: One Man’s Odyssey into the Heart of Darkness and the Origins of European Genocide, New York, London: The New Press.

Miller 1987: A. Miller, Timebends: A Life, New York: Grove Press.

Monbiott 2005: G. Monbiott, How Britain Denies Its Holocausts, Guardian, 27th December 2005.

Morales 1998: A. L. Morales, Historian as Curandera, Medicine Stories: History, Culture, and the Politics of Integrity, Cambridge: South End Press, 11-56.

Nietzsche F. 2010. On the Use and Abuse of History for Life, E-text. Translated by Ian Johnston-Nanaimo: Vancouver Island University, BC Canada. <https://records.viu.ca/~Johnstoi/nietzsche/history.htm>. 15. 7. 2015.

Osborne 1957: J. Osborne, Look Back in Anger, London: Faber & Faber.

Pilger, J. 2002. John Pilger finds our children learning lies. <http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article8112.htm>. 1. 7. 2015.

Rizzolatti & Craighero 2005: Rizzolatti, G., and Craighero, L., Mirror neuron: a neurological approach to empathy. <http://www.robotcub.org/misc/review3/06_Rizzolatti_Craighero.pdf>. 3. 6. 2015.

Rubenstein 1975: R. L. Rubenstein, The Cunning of History: The Holocaust and the American Future, New York: HarperColins Publishers Inc.

Stannard 1992: D. E. Stannard, The American Holocaust: Columbus and The Conquest of the New World, New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Vidal 2000: G. Vidal, The greater the lie: Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, and the origins of Cold War - Three myths that America is ruled by, TLS, November 10, 16-17.

Ward 1997: C. Ward, A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas 1492 – the Present, San Francisco: City Light Books.

Wilder, C. S. 2013. Ebony & Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities, New York: Bloomsbury Press <http://www.democracynow.org/2013/10/30/shackles_and_ivy_the_secret_history>. 3. 6. 2015.

Downloads

Published

12-31-2015

How to Cite

Petrović, L. . (2015). VIETNAM REVISITED: HISTORY, HOLOCAUST, IDENTITY IN CONTEMPORARY CULTURAL DEBATE AND COETZEE’S DUSKLANDS. Nasleđe, 12(32), 135–150. Retrieved from http://35.189.211.7/index.php/nasledje/article/view/700

Issue

Section

Thematic issue ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE: CONTEMPORARY PERSPECTIVES