言語社会研究科 博士論文要旨

著 者吉田裕 (Yutaka YOSHIDA)

論 文 題 目 Colonialism, Gender, and Representation of the Masses:

Joseph Conrad, C.L.R. James, Richard Wright, George
Lamming, and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’oIn this thesis, I argued that the crowds and the masses were focalized incolonial/postcolonial literatures as a psychological and theoretical field in which agendered view in colonial and anti-colonial texts is made explicit. I dealt with threepoints that have been hitherto unexamined in connection as disparate matters. Firstly,the crowds and the masses in colonial, anti-colonial and post-colonial situations weresituated as the primal focus in literary criticism. The derogatory perception of urban
crowds was analyzed as a set of political phenomena contemporaneous to the process bywhich the masses in colonies become invisible for those living in the metropolis.
Secondly, gender and sexuality were introduced as a guiding principle in reading andproblematizing the process of disempowering and empowering the crowds and masses
in colonial situations and decolonizing moments. As the literary texts about resistance tocolonialism seen from the colonizer, such as those of Joseph Conrad, put forward therise and fall of a hero as a central dramaturgy, a reversed itinerary of dissent inanti-colonial texts, such as C.L.R. James’s The Black Jacobins, complimentarily situates
maleness at the centre of revolutionary narrative. Thirdly, literary texts by male writers
like George Lamming and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o were read as texts that attempted to1

deconstruct patriarchal norms and a substantialized idea of motherhood, both of whichwere on the verge of consolidation during decolonizing moments.
However, a horizontal dimension was given to a seemingly linear historiographythat predicates this thesis. In a reading of Richard Wright’s travelogue on the Bandung
Conference, the terminological origins of the ‘Third World’ was investigated inconnection with the symbolical meaning that the Bandung Conference has had inpostcolonial studies. A case of Afro-Asian solidarity between Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o andKim Chi Ha was highlighted as a literary and political praxis impacted by the Bandung
Conference. In both cases, the term ‘the masses’ was the primal focus for the threewriters, albeit antithetically. As the then nascent idea of the ‘Third World’ wasquestioned in view of Richard Wright’s involvement with the politics of the Cold War,‘the masses’ was the term used to decode and confine the possibility of the newness indecolonization rather than to recognize its heterogeneity. On the other hand, a literaryinterconnection between Ngũgĩ and Kim Chi Ha was enabled by a shared condition ofneo-colonialism, as well as by their ability to put their faith in ‘the masses’. The
context-specific reading by which the literary texts of the three authors were analyzed
compliments and enriches both the theoretically informed reading and the putative
linear historiography that undergirds the critique of the crowds and the masses incolonial/postcolonial literatures.
In what follows, the summaries of each chapter are offered in some detail.
Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 focused on the process by which the discourse on crowds wascomplicit with the colonial discourse, often making the latter invisible. In Chapter 1, I
argued that the marginalisation of colonial issues in the literary texts on crowds wasconcomitant with the other face of modernity, that is, the predominance of colonial2

praxis abroad. The mid-nineteenth-century literary texts of Poe’s ‘The Man of theCrowd’ and Baudelaire’s essay and prose poetry – ‘Crowds’ and ‘The Painter ofModern Life’ – are examined as earlier cases of literary texts on crowds in which anandrocentric viewpoint dominates. This viewpoint is, in the case of Poe, obfuscated by
the trope of ‘the double’, and in the case of Baudelaire, by the definition of ‘modernity’.
The latter section of this chapter firstly tracked a temporal completion of the discourseon crowds from Gustave Le Bon’s Foules to a contemporaneous reaction in Britishwriters, including Joseph Conrad, among others. I argued that they foreclose the tracesof colonialism in their imagination towards crowds, and that these traces are madevisible in the earlier texts of Conrad, who gears the trope of the double differently thanPoe and Baudelaire. Chapter 2 dealt with the major fiction of Joseph Conrad, especiallyLord Jim and Nostromo, and demonstrated the process by which the use and abuse of
the first-person pronoun ‘we’, foregrounded as a collective notion that dominantlyregulates the narrative discourse, marginalises but fails to contain the crowds in thecolonial scenes. I argue here that the notion of resistance, which has been located at thecore of psychoanalysis, is what distinguished Freud’s discussion of crowds from that of
Le Bon’s and that the narrative viewpoint regarding crowds in Nostromo cannot
maintain a fixed and objective viewpoint from which the crowds are analysed, decodedand psychologised.
From Chapter 3 to Chapter 5, I tracked the era from 1938 to 1960, and shed lighton the authors who knew each other and commented on the works of theircontemporaries: C.L.R. James, Richard Wright and George Lamming. In thisdecolonising era, the crowds as perceived through the eyes of those who directly orindirectly lived and witnessed colonialism are, for colonial intellectuals, reformulated as3‘the masses’ or ‘the people’. Chapter 3 focused on the Haitian Revolution from the lateeighteenth to the early nineteenth century in San Domingo, and problematized thegendered historiography in the Caribbean region in a reading of C. L. R. James’s
seminal text, The Black Jacobins, the first edition of which was published in 1938.
Though the topic and focus seems to starkly differ from the previous chapters, they
redirect the issues that the discussion on Nostromo left unexplored; namely, why heroes– males – have been presupposed as the ideal image of leadership, not only in thereactionary discourse on crowds (such as Le Bon’s or Freud’s), but also in the explicitly
anti-colonial texts (such as James’s) that were reread even at the height ofdecolonisation in the 1960s. I also examined the nuanced use of the term ‘fraternity’ in
The Black Jacobins and compared it with how it is used in the stage version written in1967. This focus in turn revealed how the ideal onto which the decolonising forces
gather is masculinised, and furthermore, how the creation of such an ideal precariously
mirrors the mode of perception that the colonisers presuppose when they face thecolonised.
Whereas Chapter 3 dealt with the interaction between Europe (especially France)
and the Caribbean shores, in Chapter 4 the stage shifts to Southeastern Asia, where theBandung Conference was held in 1955, and to Richard Wright’s report on theConference, The Color Curtain, published the following year. Although the conference
has often been equated with decolonisation, I first problematized ‘Third World’ as aterm to decode the non-European world, and secondly, argued that Wright’s explorationof the colonial leaders, the informants and the people of the newly independent nations
is distorted due to his tendency to psychologise the collective mind. I also claimed that
whereas his distorted view partly owed to his involvement in Cold War politics, his text

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ominously foreshadows the monolithic view on religion and race, especially in terms ofthe demonization of ‘Islam’, which would become an international point of contention
after the end of the Cold War. Chapter 5 geared the question towards the urgent issue of
how to psychically undo the collective stigma that the deep-seated history ofcolonialism inscribed in the psychological terrain of the colonised. It is here that I
situated George Lamming, a Barbadian writer, as an author who explored how theaffects, such as shame and guilt, undergird the notion of responsibility. I compared hiswork with a range of various colonial and metropolitan intellectuals such as Sartre,Mannoni and Fanon. His first novel, In the Castle of My Skin (1953), theorised analternative collectivity of ‘My People’ by being attentive to the effect of shame.
Lamming also realised that this newly collective notion was shackled by a gendered
image of suzerainty, or the ‘Mother Country’, whereby he identified a psychic
interdependency between the colonised and the ex-colonisers. I indicated in the latterpart of this chapter that, in Lamming’s collection of essays, The Pleasures of Exile(1960), he suggested a difficult way of extricating the psychic interdependency from asubstantial image of motherhood in his interpretation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest.
In Chapter 6 and Chapter 7, the works of a Kenyan author, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o,and the history and memory of the ‘Mau Mau’ are read as the texts that complicate thegendered image of collectivity that Lamming grappled with, in terms of the relation
between metropolis and colony as that which is problematic in the regional andcollective resistance. In Chapter 6, A Grain of Wheat (1967) is read alongside Freud’s
later text Moses and Monotheism (1938). I demonstrated that, as the messianic
discourse is grounded in what promises to be the future of decolonisation, the figure of
the maternal is imagined and idealised as that which is securely fixed and substantial in5comparison to the paternal. In the case of Ngũgĩ, this was partly due to his reading of
Jomo Kenyatta’s monograph on the anthropological study of the Gikuyu society, Facing
Mount Kenya (1938), and the reformulated use of Christian mythologies. Despite thecomplicit idea of motherhood shared among Ngũgĩ, Kenyatta and Freud, I argued that,
if read against the grain, Ngũgĩ’s novel is critical of reproductive heteronormativity as
the national ideology it seems to endorse. The last chapter revisited a post-Bandungsolidarity between Ngũgĩ and a Korean poet, Kim Chi Ha. I highlighted the sharedcondition under neo-colonialism – one after British colonialism, the other after Japanesecolonialism – and focused on Kim Chi Ha’s influence on Ngũgĩ. Ngũgĩ and Kim Chi Ha
both found a popular means to resist the accelerating pressures of neo-colonialism.
Although differently imagined within the contexts of the Gikuyu mythology and theKorean experience of Japanese colonization, both authors utilised satire to cement thegap between intellectuals and common people.

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