Abstract
In a study offering postcolonial perspectives on crime fiction, Christine Matzke and Susan Mühleisen observe that the “boundaries of the genre have become fuzzier than ever, stretching over a wide range of registers, themes and styles”. The growing diversity within crime fiction, they suggest, has created a need for new critical paradigms (2006: 2). This symposium has two related aims: first, it examines the changing formal characteristics of crime narratives, and second, and more importantly, it considers how, in an age in which crime takes the form of terrorism, industrial disaster, state violence, corporate corruption, drug wars, and cyber scams, conceptions of crime and criminality are being challenged and reconfigured within these narratives. A key concern of the symposium is the shift from a mode of writing that endorses the colonial project to one that reflects critically upon its legacies. In this respect, it extends Matzke’s and Mühleisen’s comparison of crime fiction in the colonial era, which often served to reaffirm imperial power, to a postcolonial mode of crime writing that questions the social order, launching an investigation of “power and authority” (2006: 4–5).
This transferral of focus from the individual to the social system as the subject of investigation is not a new phenomenon in crime writing. In his account of the evolution of detective fiction, Martin Priestman refers to two “national” traditions: the English detective story, beginning with Wilkie Collins in the 1860s and continuing into the inter-war “Golden Age” dominated by Agatha Christie, and the US hardboiled private-eye style of detective fiction initiated by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, which Priestman suggests evolved in “conscious opposition” to the English model of the detective novel (2003: 2). The clear-cut rationality of the detective figure who upholds law and order in the “clue-puzzle” English tradition can be compared to the confusion and angst of the private eye negotiating a corrupt and morally questionable society whose institutions cannot be trusted. As Andrew Pepper explains, “one of the distinctive features of the hardboiled crime novel has traditionally been the problematic nature of notions like ‘law’ and ‘justice’” (2003: 212).
The articles in this symposium draw attention to contemporary writers’ appropriation of conventions from both of these crime writing traditions. For example, Wendy Knepper considers how aspects of the metaphysical detective novel are mobilized in Edwidge Danticat’s Brother, I’m Dying (2003) as part of a philosophical reflection on life, death, and citizenship, and Anthony Carrigan explores how Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People (2007) playfully invokes elements of the private eye novel, taking a form of crime writing that emerged against a background of US “monopoly capitalism” in the 1920s, and placing it in the context of neocolonial “toxic capitalism” in late twentieth-century India. Both articles show how crime fiction sub-genres are transformed as they are translated into different socioeconomic settings, and as they are blended with other generic modes. The articles demonstrate the continuing usage of crime fiction conventions within contemporary representations of crime and criminality, while at the same time showing how postcolonial writers have modified or moved beyond earlier models, developing modes of writing more appropriate to their subject matter. In this way, the symposium illustrates how new conceptions of crime have generated new literary forms.
All four articles explore injustice at the level of the state. To some extent, then, the perspectives offered here on crime and policing can be compared to that of Ed Christian, who considers the “difficulties involved with detecting and seeking justice in a corrupt, totalitarian state or a state where the political situation is unsettled” (2010: 284). However, the articles collected here also look beyond the nation-state to global and transnational configurations of power. In this respect, the symposium shares Nels Pearson’s and Marc Singer’s interest in “stories about investigations that take place at specific intersections of postcolonial and transnational or multicultural life” (2009: 8). The articles comment on situations where a postcolonial state colludes with multi-national corporations or international organizations in the suspension of human rights. Exceeding the kind of “writing back” critical approach taken by Christian, they situate current forms of global power in relation to colonial history.
The articles also demonstrate the value of literary texts in presenting a challenge to legal discourses of crime and criminality. From Stephen Morton’s discussion of the nineteenth-century British Raj as a “police state” which criminalized rebellion, to Wendy Knepper’s observations on the US state’s violation of detained immigrants’ human rights, the symposium reflects upon how the language of crime and policing has been adopted in the service of multiple agendas, and is therefore not neutral but highly politicized. Taking up Chris Cunneen’s suggestion that criminology should query the universality of “western-based law and jurisprudence” (2011: 250), the symposium draws attention to the colonial foundations and continuing neocolonial bias of criminal justice systems in various parts of the world. The articles illuminate the importance of literary writing in stimulating a rethinking of crime and criminality across a range of cultural and socioeconomic contexts.
The symposium opens with Robert Spencer’s “Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and the African dictator novel” (2012), which places the Kenyan text Wizard of the Crow (2007) within the predominantly Latin American tradition of dictator novels. The article provides an overview of the presence of dictatorships on the African continent, the development of which Spencer reads in relation to colonialism; he goes on to suggest that dictatorships are a performance of power and that, by exhibiting performativity, the dictator novel acts as a reminder that “power can be performed differently”. For Spencer, this textual reminder is a kind of call for political response at the extra-textual level, an invitation that brings readers, writers, and texts into a collective of political action in which alternative, democratic modes of governance might be explored. Spencer’s article relates to the other three contributions in the symposium in as much as he works with an expanded definition of the term “crime” so as to broaden and complicate notions of “crime fiction”. He argues that Wizard of the Crow performs “power in such a way as to unveil the state itself as the principal miscreant”. In other words, the criminal according to Spencer’s analysis is the dictator state, which is a direct product of colonialism.
Like Spencer, Anthony Carrigan (2012) explores crime at the state level, but whereas Spencer reads dictatorships in postcolonial Africa as a product of colonialism, Carrigan is interested in exploring how contemporary forms of power – specifically state governments and large corporations – work together to commit crimes in the postcolonial Indian context. His article “‘Justice is on our side?’ Animal’s People, generic hybridity, and eco-crime” examines Indra Sinha’s novel Animal’s People (2007), a fictional response to the 1984 Bhopal Gas Tragedy in Madhya Pradesh, widely regarded as the worst environmental disaster of all time (Walters, 2009: 324). He argues that the novel draws on the conventions of various crime fiction sub-genres – the private eye, noir, and spy genres – to draw attention to the criminal nature of the disaster which he reads as an “eco-crime”. In combining these sub-genres, Carrigan argues, the text frustrates the formulae of crime writing and creates “hybrid forms of detective agency” which, like dictator novels, call for a revision of global justice frameworks. Carrigan’s suggestion that the text envisions a reconstituted global justice system echoes Spencer’s assertion that Ngũgĩ ’s novel works to incite a reimagining of political systems in Africa. Both of these critics look beyond the literary context to consider how their texts’ representations of “crime” (eco- and dictatorial) might inspire political change at the postcolonial-national level and at the global level.
The issue of the law, touched upon in Carrigan and Spencer’s articles, becomes the focus of Stephen Morton’s article “Fictions of sedition and the framing of Indian revolutionaries in colonial India” (2012). Morton examines the ways in which legal and literary narratives of terrorism and sedition worked together with colonial authoritarian structures to reinforce state power in the context of the early twentieth-century Raj. Providing a close reading of four Anglo-Indian novels – F.E. Penny’s The Unlucky Mark (1909), Ethel Winifred Savi’s The Reproof of Chance (1910), Leslie Beresford’s The Second Rising: A Romance of India (1910), and Henry Bruce’s The Eurasian (1913) – Morton considers how literary and legal discourses overlap to produce a language of crime and policing that criminalizes and castigates those who protest against colonial rule. This language, Morton argues, is echoed in the twenty-first century’s war on terror in the Bush administration’s adoption of a “quasi-legal discourse of criminality” in order to designate “enemies of the state” as “criminals”.
The complex relationship between empire, criminality and the juridical in the post-9/11 world is further explored by Wendy Knepper (2012) who shows how immigrants to the United States are policed and detained indefinitely in quasi-prison facilities that exist in spaces outside of the law. In her article “In/Justice and Necro-Natality in Edwidge Danticat’s Brother, I’m Dying”, Knepper, like Morton, is interested in how the state criminalizes those it regards as suspicious. Her reading of Danticat’s post-9/11 narrative shows that the text exposes, on the one hand, how migrants seeking protection from the violence of dictatorial rule in Haiti are categorized as criminals by a US state seeking to protect national interests, and how, on the other, that state itself commits crimes against them by stripping them of their human rights. For Knepper, as for Spencer and Carrigan, there is a need for restitution and political action: she concludes by arguing that Danticat’s narrative envisages an alternative “ethics of care” through which notions of global citizenship and justice can be reformulated.
This symposium is a product of the conference “Crime across Cultures”, an interdisciplinary event that was held at the University of Leeds in September 2010 and which featured forty-five speakers from twelve different countries working in fields as diverse as literary studies (English, French, and Italian), journalism, visual arts, law, linguistics, theatre, media studies, music, and anthropology. Papers examined crime and its representations in a wide range of geographic contexts, such as the US, India, Africa, Australia, China, Japan, the Caribbean, and Europe. The four articles presented in this symposium address in different ways the central concern of the conference: how discourses of crime and criminality are produced in a global context. The conference brought the study of crime fiction into dialogue with the study of crime in other disciplines with the aim of opening up mutually informative conversations. In an effort to unite scholars and creative practitioners with a common interest in narratives of crime, it also included a reading by novelist, playwright, and literary activist Courttia Newland.
We wish to thank Susan Watkins and Claire Chambers, the editors of Journal of Commonwealth Literature for their involvement in and enthusiasm for this symposium. We would also like to thank the Leeds Humanities Research Institute which funded the conference, and Isabelle de le Court, our conference co-organizer.