The Privilege of Crisis

Die Geschlechterordnung ist nach wie vor von einer idealisierten Vorstellung von Männlichkeit bestimmt. Dennoch skandalisieren die Medien regelmäßig einen "Verfall" von Männlichkeit. Elahe Haschemi Yekani unterzieht diese "angebliche Krise der Männlichkeit" einer kritischen Überprüfung. Sie entlarvt die Krisenrhetorik als Instrument, das privilegierte Positionen absichern soll. Die Studie bietet eingehende Analysen kolonialer und postkolonialer Krisennarrative in Literatur und Film.

Auteur
Elahe Haschemi Yekani, Dr. phil., ist wiss. Mitarbeiterin am Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik an der Humboldt- Universität zu Berlin.

Échantillon de lecture
Introduction: Contained and Exposed Crises "'Masculinity' is not a coherent object about which a generalizing science can be produced." (Connell 1995, 67) The bemoaning of an alleged crisis of masculinity seems to be a cyclically recurring event, and given the still widely found adherence to the hegemony of the 'right kind of masculinity', must remain quizzical to all those who have been involved in counter-hegemonic practices for years. Currently, men in most Western societies are purportedly endangered as under-achievers in school, threatened by violence and/or unemployment and generally seen as 'less fit' to cope with the ever-increasing demands of capitalist societies and the changes this entails. While these are, in fact, issues that need to be debated more seriously, it is at least equally important to stress, as feminists such as Lynne Segal have done continually, that "it is men themselves, and their attachment to traditional ideas of 'manhood', which are very much part of the problem" (Segal 1997, xix). The realm of cultural texts has always been one of the prime arenas in which such "traditional ideas of 'manhood'" have been produced and negotiated. By focusing on the narrative patterns of colonial and postcolonial stories of male crises in this book, I want to highlight the discursive construction of crises rather than confirm that masculinity is, in fact, in crisis. The recurrence of the discourse of masculinity in crisis in colonial and postcolonial narratives is no coincidence, and I deem it necessary to relate this discourse more strongly to questions of the construction of empire and nationality. The photograph on the cover links these colonial and postcolonial narratives. This picture by South African photographer Guy Tillim of the demolished statue of Henry Morton Stanley, which overlooked Kinshasa in colonial times, was shown at the 2004 exhibition Leopold and Mobutu. It points to fissures in the construction of masculinity. Stanley's statue is lying on a rusty boat, face to the ground and the lower parts of the legs shattered. A young Congolese is depicted casually urinating at the ruined monument of one of the most famous explorers of Africa and the embodiment of the fantasies of successful colonial masculinity. Impressively, this picture visually captures a connection between old colonial myths of masculinity and the postcolonial present. The iconic image of the White man as the benevolent 'father' overlooking 'his' land is no longer valid. Nonetheless, this fall of White masculinity continues to have an effect on how gender in general and masculinity in particular can be conceptualised. As the opening quote by Raewyn Connell emphasises, this book does not attempt to provide a meta-theory of masculinity or the concept of crisis. Rather, by providing readings of a selection of sources, it seeks to critically engage with English narratives of male crises that were so prominent at the end of the nineteenth and again at the end of the twentieth century. For the field of cultural production, the notion of 'crisis' is widely considered to be a driving force of works of fiction as well as an engine for aesthetic innovation. Joseph Conrad is celebrated as one of the many innovators of English literature. In his Heart of Darkness, the search for the mysterious Mr Kurtz sparks off an existential crisis for Marlow, the narrator of the tale. Conrad, who has been praised for his ability to delve into the abyss of the psyche of colonialism, conceived an intense and complicated journey that chronicles, in the words of the narrator, "[t]he dreams of men, the seed of commonwealths, the germs of empires" (HD 105). Despite Conrad's apprehensions concerning the rightfulness of the colonial endeavour, the novella also encompasses elements that are akin to a nostalgic yearning for male adventure and an unspoiled ideal of chivalrous masculinity which links this text to earlier colonial fiction. Almost exactly one hundred years after Conrad's Heart of Darkness, a very different story of White masculinity in post-apartheid South Africa caused exuberant admiration as well as heated debates. J.M. Coetzee's award-winning Disgrace features the devastating story of the White male anti-hero David Lurie, a twice divorced academic who first loses his job after allegations of sexual harassment and who is then later confronted with the rape of his own daughter, Lucy, by Black farm workers. Coetzee has been applauded for his brutal honesty and his willingness to create this ambivalent character, Lurie, who provides the novel's point of view. Despite the important differences in time of production and setting, there is a connection between these two texts. Their value as outstanding pieces of English fiction is often linked directly to the stories' capacity to reflect the plight of the whole of humanity through the failure of a single individual. Time and again, feminists, such as the philosopher Elizabeth Grosz, have emphasised that the construction of men as 'universal' and women as 'particular' is at the heart of much of Western philosophy and a foundation of male hegemony. It is this very universalisation of the narratives of failing White masculinity in the context of post/colonialism that I want to concern myself with. But it is not only these failing masculinities that are of interest here, as I will also analyse a range of different crisis narratives - narratives that focus on a celebratory overcoming of crisis or the ultimate collapse into despair, both from a hegemonic and marginalised perspective in English colonial and postcolonial fiction. To lament the loss of male privilege in Britain was especially rampant at the turn of the nineteenth century and again at the end of the twentieth century. In the colonial context, the crisis of masculinity is linked to the still largely intact notion of universality, albeit a conception that begins to wane in the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. These colonial narratives of masculinity are part of a contained conception of crisis and try to reinforce a model of phantasmatic White male heroism or, in Conrad's case, failure, and situate masculinity firmly at the centre. In the selected sources for this period, I will analyse different figurations of masculinity. Gentlemen and hunters populate Henry Rider Haggard's fiction and photographs in the newly-successful illustrated journals. These figurations of 'heroic masculinity' in general, seem to function as a nostalgic response to the growing crisis tendencies of male hegemony. The hybrid 'Sahib' is a figuration that is specific for Rudyard Kipling's Kim, which stresses ambivalence in the encounter of coloniser and colonised. Finally, Joseph Conrad's tales often feature failures, men who, as has been briefly mentioned, threaten to despair over the atrocities of the colonial situation. However, in the texts' emphasis on the hegemonic perspective, they still adhere to what I call re-privileging tendencies and the discursive privilege of mascul…