Imre Szeman’s "Zones of Instability" (Book Note)

 

Imre Szeman’s Zones of Instability challenges the prevailing trend in recent postcolonial criticism, which increasingly focuses on transnational and global cultural movements as the primary arenas for contemporary colonial and neo-colonial struggles. Szeman reorients the discourse by revisiting the seemingly outdated and imaginary question of the "nation." While current debates in postcolonial studies lean towards examining the circulation and management of cultural representations, commodities, and identities in colonial and neo-colonial discourses, globalizations, and diasporic imaginaries, Szeman directs attention to the persistent spatial questions of the nation and nationalist literature.

 

Szeman critically engages with Fredric Jameson's concept of "national allegory," reclaiming it from misinterpretations and redefining it as his own concept of "zones of instability." Rather than dismissing the problematic notion of nationhood, Szeman seeks to re-historicize its significance in the context of globalization, emphasizing its continued relevance for conceptualizing totalizing political strategies.

 

However, this review scrutinizes the potential pitfalls of Szeman's "totalizing" political project, expressing concern about the risk of slipping into ethnocentrism or essentialist historicism. While recent utopic projects on mass political activism have faced accusations of western-centrism and attempting to speak for everyone from privileged academic positions, Szeman's book navigates these criticisms carefully. Despite adopting the language and strategy of "totality," Szeman avoids universalizing tendencies, maintaining an awareness of historical specificities and contextual particularities.

 

Szeman's book analyzes authors from three distinct geographical regions—The Caribbean during its struggle for Federation, Nigeria after Biafra, and Canada in the years after the Massey report—to construct a comprehensive understanding of national zones of instability. These case studies, set roughly in the post-World War II era, represent critical junctures in the formation of nations. Szeman contends that, despite their differences, these scenarios share an acknowledgment of the artificiality of the nation, a construct that nationalisms transform into seemingly natural entities. Moreover, the book suggests that the artificiality of the nation is not seen as an obstacle to overcome but rather as the starting point for envisioning a new nation.

 

Szeman's work presupposes an obligation not to dismiss concepts like "the nation" outright but to grasp their limits and aporias, revealing their radical potential for resistant politics. In doing so, he challenges readers to engage with these concepts critically rather than consigning them to oblivion, ultimately offering a nuanced perspective on the intersections of literature, postcolonialism, and the enduring relevance of the nation.

 

Imre Szeman's concept of zones of instability not only embraces Fredric Jameson's "national allegory" but also extends it in the context of contemporary globalization theory. Szeman argues that globalization has not so much changed things as it has ideologically and structurally transformed them. Despite the challenges posed by globalization, Szeman contends that the problematic of the nation, with its diverse discourses, spatialities, ideologies, and collective consensual hallucinations, cannot be summarily dismissed as irrelevant. Instead, he posits that it has evolved into multiple, shifting questions of political, biopolitical, and economic collectivity within the network structures of the contemporary global sphere. Far from rendering national allegory useless, globalization, according to Szeman, makes it an increasingly vital interpretive mode or problematic.

 

In contrast to critics who have dismissed Jameson's "national allegory" as western-centric, Szeman argues that it cannot be easily reduced to such a characterization. He rehabilitates the concept's quasi-utopic totality, asserting that it offers a means of understanding how postcolonial nationalist literatures utilize an allegorical model of the nation — one with defined spatial limits but no transcendental essence or stability. This model serves as an aporetic political lever for fighting decolonization, freedom, and rights, and sometimes as an objective in itself.

 

Szeman's argument, as presented in "Zones of Instability," implicitly advocates for totality, not in the sense that legitimates theories of modernization or development but as a construction by an antitranscendental and antiteleological insurgent science. This science is open, akin to the world of possibility and potential. Totatility, in this study, emerges as the possibility of metacommentary, not merely as a secondary step in interpretation but as a condition of interpretation itself. National allegory, according to Szeman, names the condition of possibility for metacommentary that considers the problematic of the nation.

 

Rather than outrightly dismissing nationalist identity politics, Szeman proposes a more nuanced and rigorous method of reading and engaging with nationalist literary projects. He suggests approaching them as the possibility of metacommentary, where literatures contemplate the problematic of the nation in a fictive literary mode as a potential vector for imagining totalizing nationalist and decolonizing politics.

 

Szeman's book argues that the nation, in the case studies he examines, is intricately linked with the projects of nationalist literature. He asserts that the concept of the nation in postcolonial literature must be seen as a figure intricately related to the practice of literature itself in these regions — encompassing its possibility, political efficacy, and potential to transcend divisions between intellectuals and the people, forming new polities in the decolonizing world.

 

Nationalist literature, according to Szeman, acts as the intellectual adhesive capable of uniting the disparate and paradoxical zones of the nation and its people. In this framework, the writer of postcolonial literature emerges as a desiring "organic intellectual" who both destabilizes and creates the potential and promise of national collectivity through literary or critical endeavors.

 

Szeman emphasizes that his totalizing concept of zones is not an attempt to speak universally for all postcolonial political spaces but rather a reevaluation of the spatial questions introduced by postcolonial theory and literature. His concept of zones aims to keep its own totalizing project receptive to the historical, cultural, and geographical specificities of any given national imaginary. The case studies Szeman engages with view the nation as fundamentally artificial or fictional, understanding this artificiality as the source of its precariousness, power, and promise.

 

Similar to Sneja Gunew's deconstructive concept of "multi-cultural-ism," Szeman rethinks the spatial concept of nationhood as an "imagined community" closely tied to literary production. He illuminates the nation's multiple, competing fictions about its own spaces, or discursive "zones," challenging the dominance of any one discursive zone over the others.

 

Szeman's concept of zones reconsiders projects of nationhood taken up by writers of postcolonial nationalist literature as ongoing attempts to negotiate the multiple, heterogeneous, and contradictory discourses and practices within which they operate. These zones represent unique spaces of literary, historical, and discursive practices, bearing the traces of particular historical, social, and cultural trajectories, while being linked by their common tie to the British Empire.

 

Zones are described as highly discursive spaces, intellectual fields that materialize as reified sites of real, material productions of national and post-national spaces and imaginaries. Szeman acknowledges the risk of falling into essentialist historiography with the demarcation of particular national zones. Nonetheless, he argues that the nation's spectral persistence in contemporary globalization and its enduring role in postcolonial imaginaries demand a reconsideration of hidden spatial infrastructures.

 

Szeman's book demonstrates the importance of analyzing the specter of nationhood in the contemporary global sphere within postcolonial criticism. By rethinking the nation as multiple, heterogeneous, and discursive zones, the book sheds light on hidden power dynamics that might otherwise go unnoticed in the field of postcolonial cultural studies. Szeman's intervention underscores the continued importance of the nation as a site of contestation, struggle, and potential for totalizing decolonizing politics in the context of globalization.