THE STRUCTURE OF RECIPROCITY IN ANGLOPHONE POST-COLONIAL FICTION: AGAINST "DESTRUCT(UR)ED" POST-MODERNISM

Abstract

Post-modernism operates paradoxically: objurgating the notion of structure while reifying the post-modern structure of random, de-territorialised, and discursive violence inherent in language, and transitively, in the subject fashioned into being by discourse; accepting, of its own structure, an internal consistency and systemic coherence as it denies the same for any other orders of organised unity; and permitting only the Self to be a coherent subject, while denying the Other the same — though each is as ontologically falsifiable and epistemologically viable, as the other. The Other becomes but an alterity structured within the subject itself, with otherness but an aspect of its subjectivity. These paradoxes present a politics of post-colonial problematics, for the Other’s relation to the subject Self is to inhabit a subsumed and subservient position within the subjective discursivity. No better topos, then, is there for considering such stakes of post-modern “destructuration”—destruction of structure—than post-colonialism. Against aforesaid post-modern hermeneutics, I propose reading through a structure of reciprocity, and provide a survey of this across Amitav Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome: A Novel of Fevers, Delirium and Discovery (1995); Ivan Vladislavi?’s Portrait with Keys: The City of Johannesburg Unlocked (2006); and Nuraliah Norasid’s The Gatekeeper (2017). A structure of reciprocity recognises that reading for a paradoxical affinity between reciprocal—that is, oft-contrary or -counterintuitive—elements ensures that the Other of the Self does not but produce an order of the same. It reserves against designating the quality of the relation between the elements, for meaning is acquired, positionally, by positionality. The only requisite for this structure is that there emerges, between reciprocal elements, “compossibility” (Bignall 211): the capacity and capability for co-existence within a structure that maintains the subjectivity of each element.