Kunapipi XXVII:1

MELITA GLASGOW AND DON FLETCHER
Palimpsest and Seduction: The Glass Palace and White Teeth

There is much critical commentary on the use of palimpsest as a metaphor in postcolonial writing for the violent imposition of colonial culture and indeed, this emphasis is warranted. Less noted, however, is the element of seduction involved in the concept of hegemonic control in colonial or imperial situations and in postcolonial fiction. The purpose of this article is to illustrate different relationship established between these concepts as employed in the popular and critically acclaimed postcolonial novels, Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace (2000) and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000). While palimpsest — as metaphor and technique — is evident in both, this essay argues that the idea of seduction plays an important part in the understanding and representation of complex colonial relationship in both.

The term palimpsest refers to the physical erasure or the covering over of one surface with another, and in postcolonial studies it refers to cultural overlay and control of a discourse in addition to military and/or political takeover. The colonial struggle includes the imposition of cultural definitions over the existing interpretations of events. History as palimpsest refers to the writing over of previous histories in order to displace them. In terms of geographic space, colonial discourse covers over prior texts, images, names and meanings of a place, constructing it as empty and ready to receive inscriptions (Carter 23). Thus the palimpsest metaphor highlights the ‘active layering of cultural meanings’ whereby the forms and meanings of the imposed culture are privileged and prominent, obscuring and contorting the meanings and forms of past cultures (Cowlishaw 294).

The nature of palimpsest has implications for techniques in postcolonial fiction; specifically, for the tactics of the authors as opposed to the tactics of their characters. In James Scott’s (non-palimpsestic) analysis, any articulation against colonial imposition can only take place in secret or ‘off stage’, outside the official discourse, and at least the private maintenance of one’s original language is obviously relevant to that possibility. De Certeau, however, details through the metaphor of palimpsest how the oppressed tactically bend and manipulate the strategic rules of the dominant order, forging a place for themselves in the dominant overlay (29–42). Nicholas Thomas discusses this as the degree to which a colonial history may have been shaped by ‘indigenous resistance and accommodation’ rather than simply the will of the colonisers (15, 56).