Journal Article

Intermedial Poetics in Contemporary Anglophone Novels: Re-Negotiating Western Visual Archives

Rippl, Gabriele, Neumann, Birgit

2024

Overview

In his study, Hogarth’s Blacks: Images of Blacks in Eighteenth Century English Art (1985), British Caribbean writer David Dabydeen draws attention to the multiplicity of black figures in 18th century English paintings. Paintings by, for instance, William Hogarth, Joshua Reynolds, John Hamilton Mortimer, and William Turner, are virtually populated with black figures. Typically, these paintings reduce the black figure to the status of an exotic detail (Eckstein 2005) and turn it into a fashionable commodity, i.e., a resource for gestures of superiority and related claims to ‘the right to look’ by white spectators. The “right to look”, writes Nikolas Mirzoeff in his Counterhistory of Visuality, is a precondition for “claims of autonomy” and recognition in the political sphere (Mirzoeff 2011, 1). Conversely, the denial of said right amounts to a misrecognition of subjectivity and the denial of political participation. In what follows we will first sketch some of the characteristics of the intermedial poetics in novels and then move on to more concrete configurations, namely verbal-visual configurations in postcolonial and transcultural fiction. We argue that many postcolonial and transcultural fictions use intermedial relations to enter into a critical dialogue with established visual archives and their mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion. Following Michel Foucault (2002) and Jacques Derrida (1996), we understand the archive first and foremost in a metaphorical sense, i.e., as an epistemic and normative framework, “a historical a priori”, that determines the registers of sayability and the respective truth value of discursive claims. Yet, we also go beyond this understanding by arguing that the archive is not exclusively discursively structured and can therefore not be reduced to “a system […] of enunciability” (Foucault 146). Rather, as research in the field of the visual turn (cf. Benthien/Weingart 2014) indicates, culturally normative archives are also derived from the range of available images, which establish, despite their heterogeneity, a regime of visibility. This regime of visibility perpetuates specific world-views, which are critical in structuring interpretations of reality and in determining forms of social recognition. Thus understood, the regime of visibility, prefigured by visual archives, is akin to Judith Butler’s concept of frames. Frames, according to Butler, mark “[t]he limits of […] what can appear”; they “circumscribe the domain in which […] certain kinds of subjects appear as viable actors” (2004, xvii). Like archives, frames are always “politically saturated” (2010, 1), thus regulating forms of inclusion and exclusion in the public sphere. We suggest conceiving of the relation between literary visuality and the visual archive as interdependent and mutually transformative: While literary configurations of the visual are connected to and influenced by the archive, they are never fully determined by it. Rather, due to the liberties afforded by fiction, they can also reflect critically on the visual archive and add new perspectives and novel visibilities to it.

• Publisher: Vishvanatha Kaviraja Institute of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics
• Subject: Anglophones / Archives & records / Black people / Bodily integrity / Book publishing / Bulawayo, NoViolet / Cole, Teju / Contemporary literature / Criticism and interpretation / Derrida, Jacques / Ekphrasis / English speaking countries / Epistemology / Foucault, Michel / Hemon, Aleksandar (1964- ) / Hogarth, William / Influence / Intertextuality / Kincaid, Jamaica / Negotiation / Negotiation, mediation and arbitration / Novels / Ondaatje, Michael (1943- ) / Poetic techniques / Poetics / Postcolonialism / Rushdie, Salman / Subjectivity