Questing For "Universal Civilization"

V. S. Naipaul, though a writer on the margin, has provoked tremendous glorification as well as pronounced indignation since the publication of his first novel in 1957. An overwhelming majority of Naipaulian reviews, however, have cultivated entrenched prejudices against him, and failed to take into consideration the scintillations of diasporization brought into full play within Naipaul's oeuvre.With diasporic theory as a vantage point, this paper attempts to re-evaluate V.S.Naipaul, and define and delimit "Naipaulian Diasporization". Homi Bhabha, a celebrated postcolonial theorist, has advanced a cultural logic of "beyond" in his influential monograph The Location of Culture. Bhabha, in effect, implies that we are now moving away or going beyond singularities of identities and singularities ofperspective......Notions of nation should be re-imagined in the context ofglobalization. Entangled in the overwhelming network of postnationalism, V.S.Naipaul's diasporic narratives manifest two dimensions of diasporization in the"post" era-------diasporas's complex relationship with the homeland and theirrelationship with the hostland. The relationship between diasporas and homelands encompasses Naipaul's condemnation of the primitivism India under the guise of which, however, lies his inextricable concern. On the other flank, diasporas' relationship with their hostland is characterized by Naipaul's "double exteriority" and "postimperial melancholy" for the decaying of metropolitan civilization.Awakened by the primitive India and the decaying England, Naipaul develops a distinguishably diasporic subjectivity by creating the third dimension of Naipaulian diaspora—"Universal Civilization", which carves out as the cultural Weltanschauung of Naipaulian Diasporization, foregrounding the ecumenical humanitarianism, truthfulness, neutrality, and the like.