ABSTRACT
I have set out to demonstrate the way paradise myth functions in colonial literature as the product of a value-laden discourse related to profit, labor, and exploitation of resources, and have attempted to strip away the illusion of universality which conceals the heterogeneity of its operations, the diverse ways it has been continually repackaged, appropriated, and reconfigured in response to economic shifts in order to justify exploitation and violence in different historical, geographical, and cultural contexts. While some consistent yearning for that which is absent may persist behind its myriad manifestations, it can nonetheless only be understood through the demystification of these reconfigurations and the excavation of the world of contradictions buried within them. Myths of paradise in Mexico, Tanganyika, and Ceylon take on very differ-
ent connotations in response to the geographical imaginaries, topographies, or climates-“Occidental” America, “empty” Africa, or “Orientalist” Asia; mainland or island; tropical or volcanic; bush or highland-and economic potentials of those specific spaces. In Mexico, the myth of the infernal paradise is inseparable from the hacienda and the maquiladora, the hope and failure of land reform, the rise of Anglo-American informal imperialism. The myth of Ophir is tied to the mines of Africa’s interior, the fair land/black coast is driven by the spice plantations and tourist hotels of Zanzibar, the “isle of dharma” harks back to a time when Ceylon seemed manageable, containable, a paradise of cinnamon and tea plantations. In neocolonial discourse, paradise serves as the handmaiden of global capitalism, shaping desires for the tourist paradise and the consumer cornucopia, converting nostalgia for lost colonies into hunger for the postcolonial exotic. Paradise as gold-land serves to sustain imperial desire and justify imperial praxis; yet the myth of lost paradise has also been used to question and expose the material realities of colonies, to advocate reform. Similarly, anti-paradise expresses the repressed guilt of the colonizer, but it also bears witness to the potential for radical agency in the
colonized, whose resistance so disturbs the European observer that it must be coded as “infernal,” “depraved,” or “savage,” and points forward to the emancipatory projects of decolonization. For the postcolonial writers on which this book has focused, the paradise
myth functions as a double-edged sword. On one hand, in its negative form, it enables them to express a critique of the processes of global imperialism, to deconstruct the specific discourses which inform tourism, plantation, and consumer “paradises,” to herald and denounce environmental degradation and social corruption, and to reject originary myths of cultural or racial homogeneity. In a more positive sense, it allows writers like Gurnah and Harris to recapture a fuller sense of the multi-cultural past and the history of transcultural interaction between many peoples, a history which for Harris at least is revelatory of a possible future of communal, collective interaction without exploitation or hierarchical structures. As such paradise myth has functioned as a new economy allowing them to express values opposed to those of dominant political ideologies and economies. For these writers, to paraphrase Louis Marin’s first thesis of utopia, paradise is “an ideological critique of ideology” and “a critique of dominant ideology insofar as it is a reconstruction of contemporary society by means of a displacement and a projection of its structures into a fictional discourse.”2
