Introduction

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, Winterson’s 2012 memoir, is described on her website as ‘the silent twin’ (http://www.jeanettewinterson.com/book/why-be-happy-when-you-could-be-normal/) to the story recounted in fictional form in her now classic Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit first published in 1985. Oranges, the semi-autobiographical novel that launched Winterson’s writing career and brought her to public attention, introduced the reader to WintersonWorld, a world in which a young girl called Jeanette, primed to become a missionary, grew up in a Pentecostalist household with her larger-than-life mother and rather timid father. The story that emerges in Winterson’s first novel is that of a young girl, adopted as a baby, coming to terms with the world around her as she veers off the missionary path that her mother has chosen for her, falling in love with another girl and thereby falling foul of the expectations of her family, particularly her mother, and wider religious community. Her rejection of the norms of her community lead to her being forced to leave home and having to fight to continue her education. Books, a love of language and a love of literature, prove to be her saviour.

Yet above and beyond the sentimental education and tough life lessons that the young Jeanette experiences, including what it means to be marginalized and an outsider, it is the manner of the story’s telling that is so memorable: a narrative structured around the first eight books of the Old Testament from Genesis to Ruth that combines a story of growing up with humour and flights of fantasy, a mix that was to characterise much of Winterson’s subsequent work. For while Oranges is categorized as a work of fiction, rather than a memoir, it is one based loosely around aspects of Winterson’s own past and is notable for its hybridity, experimentalism and playfulness in terms of style, thematic treatment and mode of narration. What distinguishes, Why Be Happy? from Oranges, apart from the obvious temporal gap (27 years) and difference in generic classification (Why Be Happy? is classified as a memoir, Oranges is a work of fiction), is perhaps the fact that Why Be Happy?, while not devoid of humour, strikes a more serious note and covers a larger period in Winterson’s life than Oranges but it is precisely these differences as well as the similarities that this chapter will treat.

AMONG THE “FOUR PEOPLE” (SIMIN 四民), scholar–administrators, the literati, ranked highest (not surprising, as they were the architects of the hierarchy); peasants, who produced the food to sustain the empire, ranked next; artisans and craftsmen, who created clever and useful things, were third; and merchants, who moved and sold commodities, profiting off the labor of others, were last. However, this theoretical classification with deep Confucian roots had little bearing on social, economic, and political realities. Court and Country contains many accounts of the lives of common folk outside the ranks of the officialdom, offering curious glimpses of lives and livelihoods around the empire.

PEASANT-FARMERS

The hospitality of the common people

Chinese hospitality (hao ke 好客)—literally meaning “enjoying having guests” or treating guests well—knows no boundaries. This generosity is reflected in the following account from Court and Country:

In hosting an honored guest, families will go to extremes, taxing their paltry resources to put on a good face. Thus, when a county official and his attendants stopped by a Wang’s homestead—a once-in-a-lifetime or once-in-a-generation occurrence for the family—they intended to pull out all the stops by killing their only hen so that they might lay a sumptuous feast, though doing so would mean losing the entire brood on which the hen was sitting.

Introduction

African memoirists in the diaspora are commonly known for their nostalgic evaluation of home and the many lessons and representations that come with it. This whole body of work is an essential compilation of memoirs of authors with African origins, as what has been established in previous chapters is that African memoirs are essentially and existentially different from memoirs of authors from other parts of the world. African memoirs of slave descendants are marked by forceful migration and hundreds of years of racial discrimination, social subjugation, psychological traumas, and related plights of Africans forcefully taken into the diaspora.

However, memoirs of authors who migrated out of their volition, political exile, or self-styled exile and economic reasons are different from the memoirs of generations of slave descendants. They are media explicating precarious situations for which they left their homeland: the cultural differences between their homelands and abroad, and the indelibility of their youthful days in their home countries. Despite these differences, what is common to these variants of memoirs is that they reflect on human conditions, the continuous juxtaposition of cultural differences, and the double consciousness of being of African descent yet living in a foreign land that is sociopolitically different from home. There is also the idea of home as a physical space of structures, experiences, and history, while there is also the notion of home in relation to skin color, acclimatization to their new homes (abroad), and the constant reminder to syncretize being Black and being a minority in a new country.

The foregoing is a reiteration of the characteristics of many African memoirs. The aforementioned explications are not entirely capable of characterizing the nature of African diaspora memoirs. However, they capture a big section of what African memoirs are like. What cannot be erased from the motives of Africans in diaspora writing memoirs is that they write with the intention of getting their stories told. In African history, whether as erroneously told by Europeans or as told by Africans themselves, there is a fissure created by the unavailability of a scientific mode of writing. Most of what Africans later wrote were transcribed from oral sources, arts, and motifs. Therefore, it has always caused a debate about authenticity.

Introduction: The Limits of the Integrative Dream

In this chapter I propose to read José María Arguedas’s literary works as the culmination of the historical sequence of indigenismo that follows from Mariátegui’s integrative socialist project, which in essence conceived of the possibility of constructive mediations between the urban mestizo and the rural Indian through the agency of a new revolutionary subject.

In the first section, I consider the polemics between Arguedas and Julio Cortázar, in which the tension between regionalism and universalism emerges in the context of clarifying how intellectual labor relates to social imperatives. I show that Arguedas is led to conceive of a new universalism that would be not the opposite but the obverse of regionalism. In searching for novel possibilities of mediation between Western and pre-Hispanic forms, such a view also, like Mariátegui’s own project, imagines a collective identity for the Peruvian nation. In the second section, I trace how Arguedas aims to extend Mariátegui’s ideal of appropriating Indigenous cooperativist productive modalities, while refusing the derision of cultural concerns as proper to a residual romanticist nostalgia. In doing so, I show how he underscores the indissociable link between subjective cultural–normative factors and objective economic-productive determinations. In the third and fourth sections, I trace how an anthropologically informed conception of the Indian world in its relation to the West mediates this correction, as cultural determination becomes part of the scientific ideal of socialism. Following Ángel Rama, I show how “transculturation” becomes the lever through which Arguedas begins to think of a possible reconciliation between what he calls the “magical and rational” conceptions of the world. This leads Arguedas, like Vallejo, to search for a new language in what he calls a “superior universalism,” a “more absolute act of creation” that would preserve and potentiate the ethos of labor present in Indigenous culture. In the fifth section, I begin to assess the way in which Arguedas progressively develops the search for a new language commensurate to this “superior universalism” by thinking different forms of revolutionary transcultural subjectivity, starting from the figure of the militant Indian subject who returns from the city, as depicted in his short story Agua.

A Contextual Introduction

The Amazon is the most biodiverse ecosystem globally, home to 10 per cent of all plants and wildlife species and contains nearly a third of the Earth’s tropical rainforests (World Wildlife Foundation [WWF] 2021a). The Amazon plays a vital role in controlling the Earth’s carbon levels by regulating the general circulation of the atmosphere (Van Solinge and Kuijpers 2013; Thomson 2020). In addition, the Brazilian Amazon is the ancestral home of an estimated 310,000 indigenous peoples, with 280,000 of these living within environmentally protected reserves (Lutz 2021).

Despite the unparalleled significance of the Amazon, immense pressure has been placed upon this vulnerable ecosystem. Powerful corporations race to exploit natural resources and expand agricultural development contributing to unprecedented levels of global warming and climate change (White 2015). As a result, there are increasing global temperatures and atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, heightened frequency and scale of extreme weather (Kramer 2013). And as a consequence of environmental damage, global warming exerts exponential political, social and economic harms on humanity on a local and international scale leading to catastrophic environmental disasters which have accelerated animal and plant extinction (Kramer 2013).

In 2012, Brazil was leading in the fight against climate change, reducing deforestation rates in the Amazon by 84 per cent (Silva Junior et al. 2021). Moreover, Brazil’s involvement in the Action Plan for Prevention and Control of Deforestation in the Legal Amazon and the National Policy on Climate Change, committed Brazil to an 80 per cent reduction in Amazonian deforestation by 2020 (Silva Junior et al. 2021). However, since 2013, rates of Amazon deforestation have been rising, particularly in the last few years. In 2019, evidence shows a 34 per cent surge in deforestation compared to 2018, whereas in 2020 there was an additional 9.5 per cent (Amnesty International 2020a; Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research (INPE) in Silva Junior et al. 2021:144). This represented a deforestation rate that is 182 per cent higher in 2020 than Brazil originally committed to in 2012 under the National Policy of Climate Change agreement (Silva Junior et al. 2021:144).

With global consumption of meat rising exponentially, meat has become a new global commodity (Wasley et al. 2019).

Politicians and journalists play different though often overlapping roles in the production of the relation between truth and democracy. Agents in each of these fields are first-level observers of events and each has a different approach to their sources, constituents and/or actors, as well as to the relations between fact, opinion and truth. In the United States, in particular, both politicians and journalists are navigating a divided world that from one side looks as if a right-wing populism is moving democracy away from what de Tocqueville (1988, 504) called an American “love for the condition of equality” toward a nihilist version of freedom, haunted by the specter of white backlash, xenophobia, sexism, thuggery and general bigotry. Hacker and Pierson (2021, 45) argue an alliance has evolved between the richest faction said to be 0.1 of the 1 percent of most wealthy Americans who heavily finance the Republican Party and by association support its open-door policy to hard-right discourse, on the one hand, and large sections of much less well-off voters and activists that either are disillusioned for having been left behind by globalization and made fearful of what might be taken away or of who might “replace” them, on the other. Republicans receive three times more dark money from top donors than democrats (2021, 56). They call this “plutocratic populism” and argue it is unique to the United States—an alliance of the very, very rich with massive numbers of fiercely loyal voters with modest means.

I propose to take this idea in a slightly different direction and call out the alliance as a fake form of populism. First, it is hard to see how the interest of the richly financed faction of the economic and political elite is founded in the interest of the many constituencies and grievances that render it a people’s movement in a quest for greater democracy. Instead of rejecting all parts of the elite, the movement is fed by a faction that does not work in its interest and whose surrogates are willing to engage in practices that arguably threaten democracy.

THIS BOOK OFFERS READERS A FIRSTHAND glimpse of China in the late seventh and early eighth centuries. It is based upon more than 200 translated, annotated, and contextualized vignettes from Zhang Zhuo’s eighth-century miscellany, Collected Records of Court and Country (Chaoye qianzai 朝野僉載; hereafter Court and Country). Few sources can deliver such an immediate and authentic sense and feel for the empire during the reign of Wu Zhao 武曌 (624–705, also known as Empress Wu and Wu Zetian), China’s first and only female emperor.

Beginning from Wu Zhao’s inner palace, this book expands in ever-wider concentric circles. While the opening chapter centers on the woman sovereign’s inner quarters, where her male favorites dressed up in polychrome garments and rode wooden cranes, the second chapter moves to the outer court, examining the culture of the elite officials charged with administering the government. From Zhang Zhuo, we learn how these court denizens devised derisive nicknames for each other and tried to one-up one another at intricate word games. The third chapter looks at Wu Zhao’s “cruel officials” (kuli 酷吏), henchmen who took an aesthetic delight in their bloodsport. Next, we leave the capital and travel into the prefectures and counties in a chapter that examines a full gamut of local officials—from conscientious magistrates to clerks who preyed on the citizens in their jurisdictions. Subsequently, a chapter on the common people surveys a wide range of clever artisans (including a master painter whose trompe l’oeil birds of prey were so realistic they scared pigeons from roosting on the rafters of a Buddhist temple), wealthy merchants literally risen from the muck, hospitable peasants, gamesmen, day laborers, and street performers. Chapter 6 investigates stories of men, women, and relationships—many featuring contraventions or abuses of patriarchal and Confucian norms—with a close eye on gender and power dynamics. The ensuing chapter explores accounts of generals and military men charged with defense against border threats from the Turks, the Khitan, and the Tibetans; these defenders ranged from men with consummate martial skill, to brilliant strategists, to craven and incompetent leaders who brought down disasters upon their men.

The media and political storm that has been raging for the past seven years spreads way beyond the 2016 US election and Brexit referendum. Navigating deep divisions over what constitutes a score between the posts of truth and democracy has become increasingly difficult. Take for example someone like Dr. Fauci who journalists look to for official information about Covid-19. Somehow he became one of the most despised figures of the hard right now, struggling to take up a position at the center of the conservative Republican movement in the United States. Shamelessly slandered publicly and violently threatened in the privacy of his home, he argues back at the extremes: “There is no truth, […] There is no fact. People believe hydroxychloroquine works because an Internet charlatan claims it does. People believe the 2020 election was stolen because a former president says so. People believe that Fauci killed millions of people for the good of his stock portfolio because it’s implied by TV pundits, Internet trolls and even elected leaders” (Zak and Roberts 2022). He often concludes his interviews with the stark comment that whatever will to freedom is chosen by dissenting actors, the virus remains utterly indifferent. The pandemic has produced many perplexing examples like this.

Boris Johnson, for example, was praised by his partisans for his stand in the Leave campaign that ripped away a piece of European identity from unsuspecting UK urban youth. Journalists and members of his own party got excited about the push to make him resign because of drinking parties at Downing Street during the lockdown. I understand that he is that kind of politician who gets in and out of these sorts of situations regularly, but as an outsider to British political culture, getting fired because of drinking at an illegal party seems out of proportion, compared to whatever lies were told to get the United Kingdom out of the European Union (Webber 2022). Closer to home, a tiny minority of Canadian Truckers are reported to have reproduced a loud horn-honking imitation of the failed January 6 insurrection that brings the same fringe elements into a new hard right block on this side of the a peaceful transfer of power and no important groups are left out.

The collected chapters of this volume illustrate in full starkness the heterogeneity of injustice. Each points up those who are marked as different – for their culture, ethnicity, phenotype, sexual orientation or otherwise – and the forms of oppression enacted upon them because of this difference. The reader is presented with a spectrum of oppression that ranges from simple otherisation to genocide. The very scope and range of injustice can easily bewilder, and its apparent ubiquity can lead to the assumption that relations of domination and exploitation, and the conditions that sustain them, are inevitable. The truth is that such relations and conditions were never historically and are not now inevitable. The reason for this is that the dehumanisation which is enveloped by relations of domination and exploitation elicits within those who are oppressed a determination for humanisation, a determination for emancipation and a drive to overcome alienation. As Freire (2017:18) put it, ‘this struggle is possible only because dehumanisation, although a concrete historical fact, is not a given destiny but the result of an unjust order that engenders violence in the oppressors, which in turn dehumanises the oppressed’. Most importantly, for our purposes and so as not to fall into a state of despair, Freire (2017:18) stated categorically that because ‘it is a distortion of being more fully human, sooner or later being made less fully human leads the oppressed to struggle against those who made them so’. Gil (2013:7) also affirmed this law of struggle, adding, importantly the role of consciousness building:

In the introduction to this volume, emphasis was placed on the value of bringing to the gaze the lived experiences of those at the lowest intersections of injustice – Indigenous peoples, ethnic minorities, refugees, people with disabilities, the youth, women and children and the poor. It has certainly done this. However, in its own way, this volume also seeks to contribute to the pedagogy of the oppressed – to contribute to what Freire terms conscientizaçao, or the form of learning which leads to a perception of the social, political and economic conditions that are constitutive of oppression and the learning required to take action against these elements of reality.

Introduction: A Brief Retrospective—Indigenismo after Arguedas

In the last instance, Arguedas’s work implies a decisive extension of the project of appropriation which grounded the socialist indigenista spirit, overcoming what he perceived as a lingering economism in Mariátegui’s vision. In understanding the Peruvian nation as a complicated nexus organizing not only relations of class, legal status and ethnicity, but profoundly divergent cultural traditions, he correlates the collectivist Indigenous mode of production to a worldview grounded fundamentally in an affirmation of work-for-itself. But despite his attempt to think of sociocultural difference across a complex set of relations and subjective positions, Arguedas’s articulation of the “magical and rational conceptions of the world” still reproduced a Manichean contradiction between Western and Indigenous cultures. In this way, he ultimately conceived of an idealized process of transculturation that would render modernity and tradition compatible, a destiny other than the savagery of modern capitalism, to be seized after the collapse of the latifundio.

The agrarian reform initiated in 1968 by Velasco’s military rule proved ultimately unsuccessful in succeeding the rent-based labor economy imposed historically by the landlord oligarchy, instead exacerbating the disenfranchisement of the rural Indian by the state. As described in Arguedas’s The Foxes, mass migration into the cities implied a tectonic transformation of Peruvian society, through which Indigenous populations became subject to new forms of alienation and exploitation. Government institutions would prove just as inefficient and corruptible when protecting the Indian workers in the cities from the new capitalist oligarchies as they had been when standing in complicity with the rural landlord oligarchy of the latifundio. In response to this historical sequence, we saw how Arguedas’s late work delivered an obscure forecast, in which the promise of a transcultural collective life unravels before an ever more obscure and uncertain future. Accordingly, the image of the “post-Indigenous subject” that mediated strategically between “rational and magical” conceptions of the world no longer promised national integration: the martyrdom of the hero who achieves collective emancipation through transcultural production, expressed in the figure of Rendon Wilka, ceased to be a plausible model for a new subject and for emancipatory action.

Introduction: Indigenismo, Socialism and Philosophy

In this chapter I explore how José Carlos Mariátegui’s understanding of socialism as an “active philosophy” conceives of a new kind of literary and artistic practice adequate to a heterodox vision of revolutionary politics, within which indigenismo becomes first defined and situated historically. In this context, socialism does not merely provide Mariátegui with a theoretical lever to interpret Peruvian reality; it becomes part of an integrative practice of theory and theory of practice that articulates the labor of intellectual production, avant-garde artistic creation and emancipatory political action.

In the first section, I explain how Mariátegui conceives of indigenismo within a dialectical narrative informed not only by Marxist and Leninist tenets but also by various theoretical registers and disciplines. I show how indigenismo emerges within a unique periodization of Peruvian history, coordinating the literary and political process. In the second section, I explain how Mariátegui’s understanding of socialism as an “active” philosophy prefigures a revolutionary praxis that forges a cooperation between intellectuals and the working class, giving rise to a “national consciousness” through which Peruvian history also enters the internationalist horizon of the proletariat revolution.

In the second section, I explore the different ways in which, for Mariátegui, attending to Peruvian social reality also enjoins an amendment of Marxist theory and practice. Drawing from insights formulated, among others, by Alberto Flores Galindo, Bruno Bosteels and Alain Badiou, I show how Mariátegui reconceptualizes the figure of the proletariat subject, inspired by the principles of European syndicalism and the perceived latent potentials of rural Indigenous cooperativism. In particular, I focus on how Mariátegui’s dialectical history of the development of Peruvian society and of the place of the rural Indian within it is of a piece with a re-elaboration of the Marxist dynamics of class struggle, conducive to a more capacious concept of the working class. Adapting socialist philosophy to the Peruvian sociohistorical context implied an unprecedented coalition between intellectuals and workers, that is, the organizational tasks of the socialist party and syndicate union had to operate alongside the doctrinal and theoretical practice proposed through the periodical Labor and the multidisciplinary work of the journal Amauta.

In Chapter 1, I argued that rather than attempts of nouveaux riches Americans to gain social status by participating in title-for-dollar exchanges, titled Franco-American marriages in the nineteenth century were instead the result of social interaction within elite transnational spaces that existed between the United States and Europe and among those who identified with others of similar economic and social status rather than national origin. What follows is a continued attempt to move beyond limited explanations of these elite marriages as mere socioeconomic arrangements by more closely examining the cultural and emotional dimensions of those spaces. Here, I argue that at the intersection of encounter, elite class-consciousness and transnational coupling stood a profoundly emotional experience, and because that experience was so intertwined with cross-cultural interaction, the marriages that emerged from these spaces can be, in many respects, characterized as even more (rather than less) emotional than their national counterparts.

This chapter is divided into four parts: In the first, I demonstrate how perceived notions of cultural difference within elite transnational social circles were the driving force of transnational elite marriages. As members of transnational high society encountered one another, perceived cultural stereotypes as well as processes of othering led to what I call cultural infatuation—affection not (only) for another person but for the perceived culture to which they belonged. This long-standing, mutual fascination between French and American members of high society created for many marriage participants a longing for the perceived “other.” In this section, I also examine the role that the perception of one’s own otherness in these spaces played into marriage motivation and the extent to which this too was a profoundly emotional issue. Thereafter, the second and third parts of the chapter go further to contextualize these marriages within broader emotional and cultural shifts in European and American societies as they pertained to marriage practices. Here, I examine elite cultural rituals of transnational courting and divorce patterns in order to demonstrate how their details confirm that the emotionalization of marriage practices—a process that had begun over the previous centuries—was already deeply rooted in elite society by the nineteenth century.

Dear President Xi Jinping,

I write to you in deep sorrow at the tension that presently clouds the relationship between our two nations. I write as a private Australian citizen, one with no connection to government or political life, but also as a philosopher who has for many years cherished and championed Chinese tradition as a potential source of moral guidance for the modern world, particularly for the West.

my search for clues as to how modern civilization might reshape itself in response to the unprecedented environmental dangers that now in the twenty-first century threaten our world, I have consistently drawn on the indigenous philosophy of China, Daoism. It is thus in the spirit of all those obscure, mountain-dwelling Daoist recluses to whom Chinese emperors of old occasionally resorted, and whom I hold in such fond regard, that I venture to write to you today.

Your nation, already spectacularly resurgent, makes no secret of the fact that it is striving to become not merely a great superpower, which it manifestly already is, but the greatest, economically overtaking the United States and resuming its historical status as the Middle Kingdom, centre of world civilization.

What might this mean for a small country like Australia? It depends, I think, on the intended meaning of greatness. What is greatness, in a nation, an empire, a civilization? Certainly, it is not a matter merely of brute force, the capacity of one nation to coerce other, weaker nations to do its bidding on pain of economic and perhaps other forms of annihilation. Yet this wolfish posture is one that China seems recently to have embraced in relation to Australia and other countries: do our bidding, Chinese officials seem to say, or we will crush you – we will cripple your economy.

Admittedly Australia has, over the past several decades, been foolishly short-sighted in allowing itself to become economically dependent on trade with China. But China’s new punitive demeanour towards Australia serves only to turn us away, driving us to seek alternative markets, other partners. The example China is presently making of Australia sends a shudder of fear but also of revulsion through many countries.

Literary Context

While there have been periodic intimations of the death of the novel in the twentieth century, the first two decades of the twentieth-first century have seen an intensification of debates around the health, value and function of the novel. These debates have engaged erstwhile novelists as well as critics, reviewers and academics, as they discuss the novel’s merits in terms of its ability to respond to changing times, adapt to competition from other media and representational forms and continue to respond meaningfully to aspects of the social world. Questions of both form and function arise in these discussions as writers and critics wrestle with the novel’s potential for change in relation to what they see as its evolutionary and critical purposes at a time of crisis and transformation or what one academic calls ‘a period of extreme media and technological change’ (Hutton 2018, 193). Peter Boxall’s The Value of the Novel (2015) represents an impassioned intervention in favour of the novel’s continued purposefulness in times of uncertainty, ‘a kind of mechanism for coping with change’ ( Jeffery 2017, 8), and a signal that while the death of the novel has oft been foretold, there does not yet appear to be a corpse in sight.

The question of why the novel matters (or fails to matter) underpins discussion of both its presumed survival and, indeed, its apparent demise. For some, it is the inherent flexibility and variety of works coexisting under the ‘novel’ label that is evidence not of generic vagueness or slipperiness but of the novel’s essential multivalence, hybridity and vitality. For others, new technologies and social media risk calling into question a focus on an imagined or mimetic world realized through the medium of words, rather than images; they have the potential to shift ways of engaging with or reacting to reality that are seemingly more real or more immersive than the virtual representations of fiction. Consequently, the question of what the novel can do – what its affordances are – relative to other genres and media has come back into the frame, as have questions of credibility, relevance and truthfulness in relation to deployment of particular genres and modes of representation.