Acting upon action: Postcolonial transumption in the writings of Salman Rushdie and J. M. Coetzee

Colonial and neo-colonial discourses assign meaning to such terms as race, culture and creativity in ways that undermine the cultural authority and artistic freedom of postcolonial writers: it becomes difficult to conceive of narratives that depart from the narrative forms inculcated by colonialism and neo-colonialism. Nonetheless, postcolonial writers have intervened on their own terms in the struggle for emancipation, creating narratives that depart from colonialist discourse and assert their own systems of value. I have attempted to describe the nature of the process by which postcolonial discourse accomplishes emancipation in literary texts, specifically the process of reconstructing the meaning of some of the terms by which the colonized subject has been historically framed.;This reconstruction occurs through a process I identify with the rhetorical term "transumption." The word transumption began as Quintilian's translation into Latin of the Greek term metalepsis ("carry across"). Recently, transumption, a minor trope for medieval and Renaissance rhetoricians, has appeared as a key term in Harold Bloom's description of the individual (male) artist's assertion of control over his precursors in an Oedipal struggle for greater originality. By contrast, I consider transumption in a postcolonial literary context as the means Salman Rushdie and J. M. Coetzee use to decolonize narrative forms and to seize interpretive priority over the colonialist discourse that represents them as belonging to cultures that derive from metropolitan cultures.;Through a transumption ot the term exoticism in Midnight's Children, for example, being a migrant becomes not a stigma but a means of gaining insight into the "transcendental homelessness," in Georg Lukacs's terms, of culture itself. Impurity in The Satanic Verses becomes not a lack of sacredness but a means of resisting dehumanizing absolutisms. Being an isolated consciousness becomes in Coetzee's In the Heart of the Country not a sign of imperial autonomy but the renunciation of the birthright of communality, and in Foe being solitary makes the colonist-islander become an embodiment of the very barbarism that colonialism takes as its antithesis. The examples of transumption I have discussed are postcolonial in that they re-present cross-cultural difference to construct a position for the postcolonial writing subject as an agent of discourse.