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Introduction THE GENRES OF POSTCOLONIALISM

This issue gathers recent work in postcolonial criticism and theory. The perspectives represented and contexts considered (South Africa, Canada, the United States, India, Pakistan) are the result of an especial — and still all-too-uncommon — effort to attend to scholarship produced in the global South, rather than simply entrenching further the association of postcolonial studies with a relatively narrow coterie of metropolitan migrants. At the same time, in bringing together work engaged with subaltern studies historiography in India (particularly the contributions of Sanjay Seth and Rosinka Chaudhuri) and work explicitly concerned with U.S. imperialism and contemporary globalization (particularly the contributions of Pius Adesanmi and Mark Driscoll), the issue poses once more a question raised by the last Social Text special issue on this topic — published in 1992, in the wake of the first Gulf War — around the theorization of the postcolonial itself.1 Vigorously questioned in that setting in now-classic essays by Ella Shohat and Anne McClintock, the term postcolonial may have proven itself to be most useful precisely when it is placed under severe pressure, angled to highlight the necessarily uneasy relationship between colonial past and neocolonial present, history writing and current critique, cultural studies and political economy, as a task or problematic rather than a method or map.2 In 1992 Shohat noted what she termed the “puzzling” absence of the term postcolonial in the rhetoric of the academic opposition to the Gulf War (in contrast to commonly invoked terms such as imperialism and even neocolonialism). She wondered in response whether something about the rubric of the postcolonial “does not lend itself to a geopolitical critique”; in the open-ended present of the “war on terror,” the relative invisibility of explicitly postcolonial analysis must beg the same question.3 Instead of rehearsing those definitional debates or simply offering overviews of the essays that follow, I will comment briefly on an issue that has long haunted methodological concerns in postcolonial studies: the politics of interdisciplinarity. The following essays raise this issue in disparate arenas and different ways (whether Sarah Nuttall’s recourse to ethnography and feminist critique; Rosinka Chaudhuri’s conjoining of poetics, translation studies, and historiography; Kamran Asdar Ali’s attending to reader-response criticism as well as the sociology of religion; or Mark

Social Text 78, Vol. 22, No. 1, Spring 2004. Copyright © 2004 by Duke University Press.

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Driscoll’s “isomorphic” linking of global economics and the representational politics of U.S. supermarket tabloids). Chaudhuri’s illuminating critique of the uses of Rabindranath Tagore in the scholarship of Ranajit Guha and Dipesh Chakrabarty provides an entrée to this concern, as she asks in particular about the uses and misuses of the literary in postcolonial criticism. Stuart Hall has suggested that part of the reason for the failure of postcolonial work to deal with the economic may be that it has been “most fully developed by literary scholars, who have been reluctant to make the break across disciplinary (even postdisciplinary) boundaries required to advance the argument.”4 If so, one might note that in the past decade there has been something of a counterdevelopment, in which a great deal of postcolonial criticism, written under the influence of the Birmingham school of cultural studies, has tended to consider literary readings, especially of forms outside mass market publishing and journalism, at best unseemly and at worst irrelevant.5 It is particularly crucial in this regard to raise the question of genre, which Chaudhuri introduces but does not pursue. Challenging Chakrabarty’s claim of an “intimate” historical link between fiction and Bengali political modernity, Chaudhuri reminds us on the contrary that poetry was the more influential genre in the literature of Bengali nationalism during the second half of the nineteenth century. She notes that the novel and the nation “have been symbiotically linked together in a profusion of postcolonial works,” an understatement at best; even a haphazard review of the main works of scholarship shows that in the realm of representation, postcolonialism has almost exclusively been considered through the novel. Jahan Ramazani’s groundbreaking The Hybrid Muse (2001) is the first — and to my knowledge, still the only — book-length comparative study of postcolonial poetry in English (with chapters on W. B. Yeats, Derek Walcott, A. K. Ramanujuan, Louise Bennett, and Okot p’Bitek). Ramazani wonders at some length about the failure of postcolonial criticism to consider poetry; as recently as the mid-1940s, he reminds us, even T. S. Eliot was proclaiming that poetry was “stubbornly national,” and yet to judge by the scholarship, poetry has had little place in the cultures of anticolonial nationalism or postindependence in the global South.6 Arguing that “postcolonial criticism is largely grounded in mimetic presuppositions about literature,” Ramazani offers a partial explanation for its habitual reticence with regard to poetry: “Since poetry mediates experience through a language of exceptional figural and formal density, it is a less transparent medium by which to recuperate the history, politics, and sociology of postcolonial societies.” The point is not that poetry is less prevalent or less important, in other words, but that it is less convenient: as Ramazani puts it, it is “harder to annex as textual synecdoche.”7

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It is perhaps symptomatic that genre is one of the few issues that did not arise during the infamous exchange between Fredric Jameson and Aijaz Ahmad in the pages of this journal seventeen years ago. Jameson’s 1986 essay “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism” might be considered to have served postcolonial criticism rather well as a stalking horse in the years since Ahmad’s unsparing riposte and Jameson’s rather morose “Brief Response.”8 Countering Jameson’s avowedly “sweeping hypothesis” that “all third-world texts” must be read as “national allegories,” Ahmad criticizes Jameson’s inflexible application of “Three Worlds” theory, his cryptic proposition of a particularly Third World “cognitive aesthetics,” his reliance on a Hegelian binary that positions the nonWestern world as inherently outside history, and his reduction of the ideological variety of literary production in the non-Western world to the exclusive register of nationalism. If some non-Western texts are allegorical, Ahmad reminds us, they are not exclusively so; and moreover, some Western texts are equally “national allegories” by any standard. Considering the history, say, of peoples of African descent or indigenous populations in North America, one finds the “experience of colonialism and imperialism on both sides of Jameson’s global divide”9 (in his essay in this issue, Adesanmi elaborates on the consequences of such a recognition, at the core of any definition of the postcolonial). I will neither revisit these useful points nor respond in detail to what I find to be the serious critical limitations in Ahmad’s own position.10 Suffice it to say that the exchange has come to stand for two equally problematic possibilities in postcolonial theory; as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has recently written, “politically correct metropolitan multiculturalists want the world’s others to be identitarians; nationalist (Jameson) or class (Ahmad).” In what follows, I will instead test Spivak’s subsequent contention that “to undo this binary demand is to suggest that peripheral literature may stage more surprising and unexpected maneuvers toward collectivity.”11 To test such a contention is instructive for a consideration of the politics of interdisciplinarity, for in her recent work, Spivak has been one of the few theorists to articulate a methodological vision for postcolonial studies that would include the literary without sacrificing an attention to the social sciences and, in particular, to the complexities of a critique of capitalist globalization. She offers it in the guise of a call for a “new Comparative Literature” in a revised interdisciplinary conjuncture: It would work to make the traditional linguistic sophistication of Comparative Literature supplement Area Studies (and history, anthropology, political theory, and sociology) by approaching the language of the other not only as a “field” language. . . . We must take the languages of the Southern Hemi-

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sphere as active cultural media rather than as objects of cultural study by the sanctioned ignorance of the metropolitan migrant. . . . If we seek to supplement gender training and human rights intervention by expanding the scope of Comparative Literature, the proper study of literature may give us entry to the performativity of cultures as instantiated in narrative.12

It is worth highlighting the understanding of reading (prominent in her work at least since her 1999 book, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason) that undergirds this proposal, an understanding that, as one commentator has pointed out, “adds both to an older notion of reading as a process of imaginative projection, and to a more recent idiom which attends to a process of dispropriative invention, as instantiation of the ethical, in writing and reading.”13 I will start from one detail of Jameson’s hypothesis that escapes comment from Ahmad. In fact, Jameson’s generalization starts in even more “sweeping” terms and then narrows: at the beginning of the paragraph in question, he writes of “all third-world cultural productions,” which is then revised in the second sentence to “all third-world texts” and, later, to the novel alone, as Jameson contends somewhat opaquely that such texts are national allegories “even when, or perhaps I should say, particularly when their forms develop out of predominantly western machineries of representation, such as the novel.”14 What are the consequences of this hurried reduction of scope to a seemingly singular generic category? In her essay, Chaudhuri argues convincingly that the tone of “irritation” in Tagore’s late prose marks not so much a concern with the revision of the discipline of history (as Ranajit Guha would have it) as an impatience with those critics who would yoke literature to the concerns of history. She argues that Tagore’s work is characterized by a “belief in the transcendental function” of art and that his complexly modernist poetics of epiphany is in the end a rejection of historicist reduction and an argument for art’s redemptive power. Intriguingly, she compares Tagore and the South African novelist and Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee, who in his own manner echoes Tagore’s injunction to the pundits: “To hell with your history” (“Dur hok ge tomar itihas”). She notes that Coetzee has also written, in an oft-quoted phrase, of “storytelling as another, an other mode of thinking” distinct from historical discourse. But would it be accurate to claim that Coetzee invests to the same degree in an aesthetics of transcendence? And what are the consequences of such a friction between literature and history for a consideration of interdisciplinary method in postcolonial criticism? Rather than simply making a case for postcolonial poetry, I will press at the issue of genre by staying with Jameson’s reduced scope of the novel

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and, indeed, by reading the fiction of Coetzee. His 1999 novel Disgrace has already garnered an unusual degree of critical attention. Derek Attridge has commented that Disgrace is particularly challenging in that, with its harrowing portrait of contemporary South Africa, it “offers the temptation of an allegorical reading (a reading, for instance, that would interpret the number of relatively unsympathetic black characters as a comment on racial differences) and at the same time undercuts it, exposing such readings as part of the mechanistic attitude the novel finds wanting.”15 The focal point of the novel is David Lurie, a twice-divorced fifty-two year old who teaches at Cape Technical University. Formerly a professor of modern languages (he is a specialist in Romantic poetry), he has recently been shifted — after what the novel terms the “great rationalization”— into a position as an adjunct professor of communications. An inveterate if somewhat dispassionate womanizer, Lurie is dismissed from the university after a brief but disastrous affair with Melanie Isaacs, a twenty-yearold student in his poetry class, when he refuses to cooperate with the academic disciplinary committee by performing a public confession. Lurie moves to the Eastern Cape where his daughter, Lucy, owns a small farm and boarding kennel for watchdogs. He spends his time working on an operetta about the last years of Byron in Italy and volunteering part-time at the Animal Welfare League, until he and Lucy are attacked: three black men invade their house, beat Lurie and set him on fire, rape Lucy, and kill the dogs. Shaken by the assault and by Lucy’s refusal to report the rape (and later, her refusal to have an abortion when she realizes she is pregnant), Lurie eventually leaves and finds himself at the Isaacs family home, where he makes a strange and awkward attempt at an apology. He sells his house in Cape Town and returns to the Eastern Cape, where he takes a small apartment and continues to work on his operetta and to volunteer at the animal shelter, where he assists with the euthanasia of old, injured, and abandoned dogs. The novel has been criticized by some in South Africa not only for its bleak vision of racial politics in postapartheid South Africa but also for its challenge, as Derek Attridge puts it, to “any simple faith in the political efficacy of literature — a faith upon which some styles of postcolonial criticism are built.”16 The novel’s unyielding focalization on an unsympathetic white male character, misogynist and bitter at what he sees as the “great campaign of redistribution” that has destroyed the country, is a challenge to any reading that would attempt to approach the novel as though it were simply reportage or political advocacy.17 “The intense responses occasioned by Disgrace around the world,” Attridge goes on, “are testimony both to the power literature possesses to intervene in the global arena through its effects on readers — a power inseparable from its

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literary operations—and to its lack of any means of resistance when attacked on the grounds of its content — considered as it so often is in isolation from those operations.”18 If the novel seems to pull toward the allegorical, Attridge’s criticism attempts to consider “two major strands that don’t entail reflection on ‘the times’ ”: the operetta Lurie is writing and the dogs that populate the novel in increasing numbers.19 Against any assumption that with these themes Coetzee is offering some sort of “solution” to his portrait of postcoloniality as a state of disgrace “without term” (as the novel phrases it), Attridge stresses that “one of the novel’s great achievements (which is also one of the reasons for its rebarbativeness) lies in its sharp insistence that neither of these constitutes any kind of answer or way out, while at the same time it conveys or produces an experience — beyond rationality and measured productivity — of their value.”20 Here I will elaborate in particular on Attridge’s brief comments on the function of Lurie’s operetta in Disgrace. An extended theme throughout the novel concerns the relation between music and language. Lurie finds “preposterous” the programmatic rationale of Communications in his handbook (“Human society has created language in order that we may communicate our thoughts, feelings and intentions to each other”), preferring to think to himself that “the origins of speech lie in song, and the origins of song in the need to fill out with sound the overlarge and rather empty human soul” (3 – 4). Indeed, his turn to music marks a rejection of the very medium of his profession, English prose itself: “The truth is, he is tired of criticism, tired of prose measured by the yard. What he wants to write is music: Byron in Italy, a meditation on love between the sexes in the form of a chamber opera” (4). If “more and more” Lurie is “convinced that English is an unfit medium for the truth of South Africa” (117), he strives for a makeshift solution by attempting to slough off the language’s decayed husk (“tired, friable, eaten from the inside as if by termites”) in order to start “all over again with the ABC,” with the origins of speech in song (129). Although he founders in the effort because of his inadequate compositional skills, Byron in Italy is never simply a vain joke or a desultory pastime. Even if futile, it comes to consume Lurie, and even to consume the narrative: the final chapter opens by wrenching the reader directly into the world of the music, into the company of Byron’s forlorn Italian mistress, Teresa, now middle-aged and alone — and moreover, by wrenching the reader out of the English language: In her white nightdress Teresa stands at the bedroom window. Her eyes are closed. It is the darkest hour of the night: she breathes deeply, breathing in the rustle of the wind, the belling of the bullfrogs. “Che vuol dir,” she sings, her voice barely above a whisper —“Che vuol dir questa solitudine immensa? Ed io,” she sings —“che sono?” (213)

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On the one hand, the music serves as a space of what one might term ethical self-fashioning for Lurie: it is the mode where he can finally break free from his habitual roles as sexual predator and overbearing father. Mark Sanders suggests that the operetta is the “place where he might evade the trajectory that keeps him in the position of rapist-father. It is, in some sense, where he can shift position, ‘be the woman,’ as ‘another track’— the singing parts of Teresa and Allegra, Byron’s mistress and daughter respectively — takes over the musical work.”21 But the music is also clearly a shift in register in a generic sense: an (impossible) attempt in narrative to incorporate or open itself to lyric, to propel prose toward music. Lurie apologizes to Melanie Isaacs’s father with a short speech that can only be termed strikingly odd: “ ‘One word more, then I am finished. It could have turned out differently, I believe, between the two of us, despite our ages. But there was something I failed to supply, something’— he hunts for the word —‘lyrical. I lack the lyrical. I manage love too well. Even when I burn I don’t sing, if you understand me. For which I am sorry’ ” (171). One might say that the task of the remainder of the book (which Lurie pursues in his attempts at music composition) is for him to learn to sing while burning — not to avoid immolation but to work toward a music of that consumption. This task is the reason that Lurie, by the end of the book, has abandoned his cast of characters to focus on Teresa, alone on stage, accompanying her own voice with nothing more than the “silly plink-plonk” of a toy banjo (184). It is neither the erotic nor the elegiac impulse that is “calling to him after all,” Lurie realizes, but instead the comic (ibid.). Spivak, in a fine forthcoming essay on the novel, argues that Disgrace forces the reader to “counterfocalize,” to push against the constant privileging of Lurie’s perspective (in particular by imagining the “alternative narrative” of Lucy, in her decision to have the baby and, as she puts it, “begin with nothing”).22 Lurie, in Spivak’s reading, points at one way to understand postcoloniality, as the “end of civil society,”23 while Lucy — if the reader counterfocalizes — points at the difficult possibility of understanding postcoloniality as beginning again, bereft. I would add simply that what Spivak terms “provocation into counterfocalization” happens on another level of the text, not just in terms of figuration but also in terms of mode. And if one hears the strain of lyric against the grain of narrative, Disgrace provides another sort of provocation beyond utter loss. The “pinched, stunted, deformed” lyric impulse in Lurie (214) is nonetheless his last hope: “Teresa may be the last one left who can save him. Teresa is past honor. . . . She has immortal longings, and sings her longings. She will not be dead” (209). One might term this a basic resiliency, life starting anew with the simple refusal of death. As in the case of Lucy, one

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might also term this state an instance of the ethical, as a call to alterity, without any guarantee of response. As in the case of Lucy, the ethical hangs on what Manthia Diawara in another context has termed “loss as a prerequisite” in every “encounter with the other.”24 But as Spivak argues with a force that I am unable to reproduce or paraphrase here, the ethical in this case does not — indeed cannot — lead to a politics, to a practicable “solution” either to Lurie’s situation or to the disgrace of postcoloniality. It is not even an answer in the realm of art; even consumed “night and day” by the music, Lurie realizes that despite occasional good moments, the truth is that Byron in Italy is going nowhere. There is no action, no development, just a long, halting cantilena hurled by Teresa into the empty air. . . . He sighs. It would have been nice to be returned triumphant to society as the author of an eccentric little chamber opera. But that will not be. His hopes must be more temperate: that somewhere from amidst the welter of sound there will dart up, like a bird, a single authentic note of immortal longing. As for recognizing it, he will leave that to the scholars of the future, if there are still scholars by then. For he will not hear the note himself, when it comes, if it comes — he knows too much about art and the ways of art to expect that. (214)

This is to say that Disgrace, unlike the poetry of Tagore in Chaudhuri’s reading, forecloses any notion of transcendence or ultimate redemption through art, even as it “hopes” for “a single authentic note of immortal longing.”25 If Disgrace is allegorical, it is allegorical in the precise and unusual manner that Spivak has attempted to define that term in her recent work. In A Critique of Postcolonial Reason she defines allegory as parabasis, “the activism of speaking otherwise.” Allegory is a practice of “persistent interruption” in language where the cognitive or epistemological is continually breached by the performative or ethical, forcing the attentive reader to move against the current of the prose, to hear the charge of what it pushes away.26 This definition echoes the dense final pages of Paul de Man’s Allegories of Reading, in which allegory is described through a reading of the contradictory modes (at once confession and excuse) of Rousseau’s Confessions as “irony,” the “sudden revelation of the discontinuity between two rhetorical codes.” As Mark Sanders points out in an illuminating essay on Spivak’s A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, this sense of allegory is posed in dramatic terms, as de Man adopts the vocabulary of Friedrich Schlegel to note that “as digression, aside, intervention d’auteur, or aus der Rolle fallen, parabasis clearly involves the interruption of a discourse.”27 That is, in my

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reading of Disgrace it is the lyric mode’s interruption of narrative that allows Lurie to “fall out of the role” of paternalistic seducer, opening the text instead to the articulation of a particularly feminine note of loss that Lurie himself “will not hear.” Of course, it is not possible to take account of this effect if one assumes, as Jameson does, that the novel is both singular and exclusively privileged as the genre of postcolonial literature. It should not come as a surprise that I am going to suggest that there is something like a relation between Spivak’s espousal of postcolonial reading as allegory and Jameson’s earlier recourse to the term. Such a suggestion is counterintuitive in part because Jameson provides only a muddled definition of his sense of allegory in “third-world novels.” His readings of works by Lu Xun and Sembène Ousmane seem to place allegory in a straightjacket in order to confirm his hallucination of the essential otherness of the “third-world,” since in his words “the story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third-world culture and society.”28 And yet, Jameson initially seems to want to employ a rather different sense of allegory. Noting that it is “a form long discredited in the west” (and, he adds, the “specific target” of Romanticism), he suggests that allegory may be resurgent or “congenial for us today” precisely “because the allegorical spirit is profoundly discontinuous, a matter of breaks and heterogeneities, of the multiple polysemia of the dream rather than the homogenous representation of the symbol.”29 In fact, he argues against the “one-dimensional view” of “our” “traditional conception” of allegory defined as an “elaborate set of figures and personifications to be read against some one-to-one table of equivalences.” Recalling this rather unexpected vision of allegory as “discontinuity” allows one to note the ways that Jameson’s readings are more nuanced, as in his explication of the “double ending” of Lu Xun’s “Diary of a Madman”— where Jameson conjectures that “it is only at this price, by way of a complex play or simultaneous and antithetical messages, that the narrative text is able to open up a concrete perspective on the real future”— or in his excavation of what he terms “generic discontinuities” in Sembène Ousmane’s Xala, a novel innovative in its shuttling between modes of satire and ritual.30 Jameson focuses on a particular passage in the middle of Xala, in which the rapacious entrepreneur El Hadji Abdou Kader Baye, seeking a cure to what he considers the “curse” (xala in Wolof ) of impotence with which he has suddenly been afflicted on the day of his third marriage, undertakes an arduous pilgrimage from Dakar to a legendary healer, Sereen Mada, who lives in the interior of Senegal. Jameson quotes a long description of this journey that concludes with the following sentences:

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Sereen Mada’s house, apart from its imposing size, was identical in construction with all the others. It was situated in the center of the village whose huts were arranged in a semi-circle, which you entered by a single main entrance. The village had neither shop nor school nor dispensary; there was nothing at all attractive about it in fact. Its life was based on the principles of community interdependence.31

Jameson calls the final sentence a “searing line” added “as if in afterthought” and gushes: “Here, then, more emblematically than virtually any other text I know, the space of a past and future utopia — a social world of collective cooperation — is dramatically inserted into the corrupt and westernized money economy of the new post-independence national or comprador bourgeoisie.”32 Oddly for a scholar whose first book is a study of Sartre, Jameson does not seem to have considered it necessary, in proffering this reading of “national allegory” in Xala, to consult the French original. Although Clive Wake’s English translation is competent, the French is slightly but significantly different; this passage concludes (in my deliberately literal translation): The village had neither shop, nor school, nor dispensary, nor any point of attraction. The inhabitants practiced communitarian solidarity. [Ce bourg n’avait ni boutique, ni école, ni dispensaire, ni aucun point d’attraction. Les habitants pratiquaient la solidarité communautaire]33

Placed in the grammatical sequence of a “neither . . . nor,” the comment that the village is impoverished and undistinguished loses some of the snide tone of Wake’s translation. (It would be less susceptible to appropriation in the disturbing conclusion of Jameson’s essay, still written in the voice of a Western first-person plural relentlessly cordoned off from the “third-world”: reading the “unfamiliar” allegorical literature of the nonWest, Jameson writes, “We may well feel, confronted with the daily reality of the other two-thirds of the globe, that ‘there was nothing at all attractive about it in fact.’ ”)34 The valence of the last sentence shifts even more dramatically: the point is no longer an abstract “principle” but instead an active “practice.” The residents live in solidarity, but perhaps not in a manner that can be characterized as a rule-bound system of governmental politics. The sentence may well represent a critique of the postcolonial bourgeoisie, but perhaps not in the interest of an alternative vision (“a past and future utopia”) of the nation-state in particular. Solidarity is a looser term here, a strategy that may well indicate a different logic of collectivity, a level of

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activity below (or above) the nation-state.35 This difference is signaled in a different way in the next paragraph of the novel, which Jameson does not consider: the businessman and his companions are received with the customary courtesy of this society, all the more so as his European dress meant that El Hadji was a stranger [étranger] and a man of wealth. They were led into a hut which was unfurnished except for spotlessly clean mats laid on the ground. A second door opened onto another yard which was enclosed by a fence made of millet stalks. Beyond, a newly thatched, rectangular-shaped roof blocked the view. El Hadji was impatient to know what was happening. He felt disagreeably like an outsider [Il eut la sensation désagréable d’être un métèque].36

The word “outsider” is not an incorrect translation of métèque, but it fails to capture the delicious precision of Sembène’s French. Métèque derives from the Greek metoikos, literally “one who changes one’s house,” from meta- and oikos, or “house.” Of course, oikos is also the root of “economics,” and thus the term might be taken to signal a person who stands “outside an economy,” at a remove from the management of the household.37 The Greek metoikos was a term for a foreigner living in Athens denied civil status in the polis. In eighteenth-century French, it comes to designate a foreigner (particularly “Mediterranean”) living in France “whose aspect and behavior are judged to be displeasing” [dont l’allure, le comportement sont jugés déplaisants].38 It is a particularly piquant designation for El Hadji, a leading light of the corrupt chamber of commerce in Dakar. (In other words, étranger here connotes not just “stranger” but also a hint of its homonym in French, “foreigner,” thereby shutting the postindependence bourgeoisie out of the continuity of communitarian solidarity, which remains, patient, beyond the orbit of postcolonial urban industrialization.) One might call this characterization allegorical in the sense of Spivak’s parabasis, for it interrupts the sympathetic description of communitarian solidarity with a word appropriated from the vocabulary of French xenophobia and turned around to ostracize precisely the representative (in “European dress”) of continuing systemic exploitation in the wake of French colonialism. This is not even to take up the issue of the function of Wolof in relation to French in Xala. This issue, which Jameson does not even mention, is especially at stake in Sembène’s 1974 film version, in which the characters (notably El Hadji’s recalcitrant daughter) switch strategically back and forth between Wolof and French at key moments in the dialogue — a dynamic obscured for an English-language audience by the steady stream of English subtitles. In addition — and interestingly, in light of my discussion of the uses of lyric in Disgrace— Sembène himself composed a num-

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ber of original songs for the film sung by a griot in Wolof. One song in particular seems to haunt El Hadji through the streets of the city; Sembène has described it in an interview as an “allegory” of leadership in Africa (characterizing the postcolonial leader as a duplicitous “lizard”) as well as a “call to revolt.” Strikingly, however, the song is not subtitled in the film, leaving the non-Wolof-speaking audience bathed in its seemingly luxurious lyricism but without access to its scathing language. Sembène’s blunt explanation for the lack of subtitles might be read as a pointed rejoinder to Jameson’s implicit assumption that there are no barriers to a “first-world” audience’s consumption of “third-world” allegory. “I had thought at the start to have [the songs] translated,” Sembène says, “but in the end I gave up the idea because it is unnecessary for a European public.”39 This refusal is not only an issue of the film’s intended audience: it is another form of parabasis, a discontinuity between modes (here, between languages) mobilized for effect. The task of attending to this effect can be undertaken, as Spivak reminds us, only if one reads scrupulously for postcolonial allegory as staged in these disjunctures — and then, only if one takes the time to learn the other language. It may not be incidental that in Disgrace, when David Lurie returns to pack up his office at the university, he discovers that his replacement in the Department of Communications is a professor specializing in “applied language studies” (179). For the engaged postcolonial scholar working toward interdisciplinarity, this is one of the conundrums and challenges of the university, as it is “rationalized” and downsized worldwide: the necessity of finding space in the institution for both the old human sciences and the new social sciences — both training to track the performativity of culture in artistic instantiation, and training to move in a field, with knowledge primed for use.

Notes 1. See the special issue “Third World and Post-Colonial Issues” (Social Text, nos. 31/32 [1992]). I am thinking of a juxtaposition in that issue between historiographic essays such as Gyan Prakash’s “Postcolonial Criticism and Indian Historiography” (8 –19) and Sylvia Molloy’s “Too Wilde for Comfort: Desire and Ideology in Fin-de-Siècle Spanish America” (187– 201), on the one hand, and more presentist essays such as Arturo Escobar’s “Imagining a Post-Development Era? Critical Thought, Development, and Social Movements” (20 – 56); Bruce Robbins’s “Comparative Cosmopolitanism” (169 – 86), George Yúdice’s “We Are Not the World” (202 –16), and Grant Farred’s “Unity and Difference in Black South Africa” (217– 34), on the other. 2. See Ella Shohat, “Notes on the Postcolonial,” Social Text, nos. 31/32 (1992): 99 –113; Anne McClintock, “The Angel of Progress: Pitfalls of the Term

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‘Postcolonialism,’ ” Social Text, nos. 31/32 (1992): 84 – 98. In a somewhat more pessimistic tone, Grant Farred has called for the reconceptualization of postcolonial studies through such a focus on the relations between the historical (anticolonialism) and the contemporary (the current politics of postindependence nation-states). See Farred, “A Thriving Postcolonialism: Toward an AntiPostcolonial Discourse,” Nepantla: Views from South 2.2 (2001): 229 – 46. With regard to the economic, several critics have noted a disturbingly common failure in the existing scholarship to consider the links between postcoloniality and global capitalism; see, for instance, Arif Dirlik, “The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism,” Critical Inquiry 20.2 (winter 1994): 328 – 56; Dirlik, “Rethinking Colonialism: Globalization, Postcolonialism, and the Nation,” Interventions 4.3 (2002): 428 – 48. For commentary on this issue, see especially Stuart Hall, “When Was ‘the Postcolonial’? Thinking at the Limit,” in The Post-Colonial Question: Common Skies, Divided Horizons, ed. Iain Chambers and Lidia Curti (New York: Routledge, 1996), 257– 58; and David Scott, Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postcoloniality (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999), 136 – 57. 3. Shohat, “Notes on the Postcolonial,” 99. 4. Hall, “When Was ‘the Postcolonial’?” 258. 5. One might note that this development has to do in part with the inheritance or “internationalization” of a cultural studies methodology that in its origins (whether one thinks of Raymond Williams’s Culture and Society or Marxism and Literature or Richard Hoggart’s Uses of Literacy, or else goes back — depending on how one negotiates the genealogy in question — as far as E. P. Thompson’s work on William Blake, or C. L. R. James’s writings on Melville) had a somewhat different conception of the role of the literary. To track this lineage into the U.S. context, one might start with Lawrence Grossberg, “The Circulation of Cultural Studies,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 6 (1989): 413 – 21; Joel Pfister, “The Americanization of Cultural Studies,” Yale Journal of Criticism 4.2 (1991): 199 – 229; Wahneema Lubiano, “Mapping the Interstices between Afro-American Cultural Discourse and Cultural Studies: A Prolegomenon,” Callaloo 19.1 (1996): 68 –77; Stuart Hall, “Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies,” in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, Paula A. Treichler, and Linda Baughman (New York: Routledge, 1992), 277– 94; Michael Sprinker, “We Lost It at the Movies,” MLN 112 (1997): 385 – 99. 6. Jahan Ramazani, The Hybrid Muse: Postcolonial Poetry in English (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 2 – 3. 7. Ibid., 4. 8. Fredric Jameson, “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” Social Text, no. 15 (autumn 1986): 65 – 88; Aijaz Ahmad, “Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the ‘National Allegory,’ ” Social Text, no. 17 (autumn 1987): 3 – 25; Jameson, “A Brief Response,” Social Text, no. 17 (autumn 1987): 26 – 27. 9. Ahmad, “Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness,” 9. 10. For a partially sympathetic but in the end firm rebuttal of Ahmad, see Neil Lazarus, “Postcolonialism and the Dilemma of Nationalism: Aijaz Ahmad’s Critique of Third-Worldism,” Diaspora 2.3 (1993): 373 – 400. 11. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 55 – 56. 12. Ibid., 9, 13.

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13. Mark Sanders, “Postcolonial Reading,” Postmodern Culture 10.1 (1999): 6, muse.jhu.edu/journals/pmc/v010/10.1.r_sanders.html. For a consideration of representations of reading in this field more broadly, see Sarah Nuttall, “Reading, Recognition, and the Postcolonial,” Interventions 3.3 (2001): 391– 404. 14. Jameson, “Third-World Literature,” 69. 15. Derek Attridge, “Age of Bronze, State of Grace: Music and Dogs in Coetzee’s Disgrace,” Novel 34.1 (fall 2000): 106. 16. Derek Attridge, “J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace: Introduction,” Interventions 4.3 (2002): 320. This issue of Interventions is a special issue of essays devoted to the novel. 17. J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace (New York: Knopf, 1999), 176. Subsequent references will be noted in parentheses in the text. 18. Attridge, “J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace,” 319 – 20. 19. Attridge, “Age of Bronze, State of Grace,” 106. 20. Ibid., 109. 21. Mark Sanders, “Disgrace,” Interventions 4.3 (2002): 371. 22. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Ethics and Politics in Tagore, Coetzee, and Certain Scenes of Teaching,” Diacritics (forthcoming 2004). 23. Grant Farred makes the same suggestion in “The Mundanacity of Violence: Living in a State of Disgrace,” Interventions 4.3 (2002): 357: “Disgrace signals, in Coetzee’s text, the end of the putative South African civil society.” 24. Manthia Diawara, We Won’t Budge: A Malaria Memoir (New York: Basic Civitas, 2003), 146. 25. It should be clear that my reading differs sharply from that of Michael Holland, one of the only critics to give sustained attention to music in the novel. Holland argues that with the all-consuming operetta, the novel culminates by emphasizing the “immediate present of material existence,” or “the absolute priority of the raw material of language —plink-plunk— over any present or any presence within it.” I would not agree that the novel attempts to establish the “immediate present of language itself, its signifying function suspended and replaced by the raw sonority of onomatopoeia.” If the music represents a certain distillation or even privation, it never suspends signification: it may reduce linguistic sense, but it simultaneously amplifies the transmission of affective content in lyric. This affect is alternately described as “despair” and as “immortal longing.” See Michael Holland, “Plink-Plunk: Unforgetting the Present in Coetzee’s Disgrace,” Interventions 4.3 (2002): 404. 26. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 156 n. 64. Sanders offers the fullest account of the workings of allegory in that book, writing: “Interrupting informatics (cognitive, epistemic), by exposing the ideational and affective foreclosure of humanity (performative, ethical), the reader brings to light an ‘ethnicity’ which gets ethics going by bringing the agent before an imperative. Animating the reader with alterity, this imperative comes from elsewhere, from an other. This is how allegory is produced and staged as postcolonial reading” (Sanders, “Postcolonial Reading,” 7). My point here is that the same sense of allegory opens a useful approach to the reading of Disgrace. 27. Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979), 300 n. 21. See Mark Sanders, “Representation: Reading-Otherwise,” Interventions 4.2 (2002): 200.

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28. Jameson, “Third-World Literature,” 69. 29. Ibid., 73. 30. Ibid., 77, 83. 31. Sembène Ousmane, Xala, trans. by Clive Wake (Westport, Conn.: Lawrence Hill and Co., 1976), 69. 32. Jameson, “Third-World Literature,” 81. 33. Sembène Ousmane, Xala (Paris: Présence africaine, 1973), 121. 34. Jameson, “Third-World Literature,” 86. 35. That is, it seems to me that there is a reason that “solidarity” has been the watchword of choice for much of the antiglobalization movement during the past decade. For an interesting commentary on this issue, see Peter Waterman, “Internationalism Is Dead! Long Live Global Solidarity?” in Global Visions: Beyond the New World Order, ed. Jeremy Brecher, John Brown Childs, and Jill Carter (Boston: South End, 1993), 257– 61. 36. Sembène, Xala, 69 (121 in the French). 37. For an indispensable overview of oikonomia, see Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, ed. Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck, vol. 7 (Stuttgart: E. Klett, 1992), s.v. “Wirtschaft” (economy). 38. Le Nouveau Petit Robert, new ed. (Paris: Dictionnaires le Robert, 1995), s.v. “métèque.” 39. Noureddine Ghali, “An Interview with Sembene Ousmane,” in Film and Politics in the Third World, ed. John D. H. Downing (New York: Autonomedia, 1987), 47. See also Josef Gugler and Oumar Cherif Diop, “Ousmane Sembène’s Xala: The Novel, the Film, and Their Audiences,” Research in African Literatures 29.2 (summer 1998): 147– 58.

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Girl Bodies

It is a hot day in Johannesburg, the last day of work before the summer vacation. December 2001. From the central foyer of the offices where I work, I can see into the inner city, shards of light on the glass building shaped like a diamond, the new taxi rank, one of four going up in the city for the 800,000 commuters passing through every day, the Market Theatre, and the Mandela Bridge starting to take shape. I am reading the Sowetan, South Africa’s largest-selling daily newspaper. On the front page, a full-color, full-page photograph of Orlando Pirates and Kaizer Chiefs, ready to spar for the soccer cup on the weekend. On page 2, the “In Brief ” column offers snippets: R21,000 for Baby Tshepang A non-governmental organization, the Coalition for Children’s Rights (CCR), yesterday handed over R21,000 collected from the public for ninemonth-old baby Tshepang, who was raped and sodomized by six men in October. “Fire” Held over Child Support Sundowns star midfielder Joel “Fire” Masilela is expected to appear in the Mamelodi Magistrate’s Court today after he was arrested for alleged failure to pay maintenance.

The first snippet refers to a baby rape, the rape of the youngest baby yet, one of many since the start of the year, and the one that has most upset the public. The second snippet, detailing the arrest of a well-known soccer player for failure to pay maintenance to his ex-wife, reveals the law in action, protecting the rights of women, bringing to book men who try to get away without paying child support. Two snippets, mini states of the art unfolding along two South African trajectories: violent histories of the body, and rights that have come, if intermittently and in important redemptive pockets, to be protected by the most liberal constitution in the world. As I turn to page 4, another “In Brief ” snippet tells me that “Gauteng, MEC for Safety, liaison Nomvula Mokonyane, and Social Welfare MEC Angie Motshekga are expected to address hundreds of men who will be marching against children and women abuse and rape in Ivory Park, North Rand, at the weekend.” Another redemptive pocket. If this is

Social Text 78, Vol. 22, No. 1, Spring 2004. Copyright © 2004 by Duke University Press.

Sarah Nuttall

Figure 1. Chastity belt for infants. From “Keeping Safe Below Belt,” Charity Bengu, Sowetan, 14 December 2001. Illustration by Sunette Ehlers

one kind of action taken in relation to the dramatic conundrum of men, women, and girls’ bodies that is unfolding, page 7 reveals a quite different kind. High on the page is an image, drawn by hand. See figure 1. It is a chastity belt for babies, for small girl bodies. Not girl bodies in general but for specific parts of their anatomy — their vaginas, buttocks, torsos, and, up in a loop, their shoulders. The headline reads “Keeping Safe Below Belt,” setting up a link with safety as it draws on the euphemistic phrase below the belt, with its origins in sport’s ritualized violence. Charity Bengu (2001a, 2001b) has the story: “A chastity belt with a lock and a key has been developed in a desperate attempt to protect children from escalating incidents of rape. The device, which is designed to prevent the woman wearing it from having sexual intercourse, comes after a series of reports of child rapes.” Although the first sentence refers to the protection of children, it is only girl children, and babies, who are involved. The second sentence refers to “the woman” who will be wearing the device, but it is not for women — it is for young and baby girls. Perhaps children and women carry a greater moral invocation, as political categories, than girls? The story continues: “The South African Institute of Race Relations (SAIRR) said 58 children were raped or nearly raped in South Africa every day. . . . Developed after extensive research spanning ten years, the device will be officially launched

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in Pretoria in January next year by a group of independent researchers led by Mrs. Sunette Ehlers, a former ‘heamolatology [sic] and serology’ researcher at the South African Institute for Medical Research.” I call Charity Bengu. Charity gives me the number for Sunette. Sunette speaks to her lawyer, and invites me out to see her at her home on the edge of Hartbeespoort Dam. As I drive, I think of the story of baby Tshepang (“Have Hope”— a name given to protect her identity). Tshepang was one of 21,000 reported cases of child rape in 2001. This is the figure, at least, given by the majority of articles and press releases, though the statistical imagination, and the narratives of numbers that circulate in South Africa in relation to rape, but also crime and AIDS, often suggest wider social imaginaries of their own (Lobaido 2002, Landsman 2002). While many of these rapes involved penetration in some way and with a variety of objects, Tshepang was raped with a man’s penis, possibly several men’s penises. Initially, six men were arrested, but DNA tests subsequently saw them walk free. Now, in 2002, at the time of writing, a judge has sentenced twenty-three-year-old David Potse to life in prison plus eighteen years for the rape of Tshepang. Throughout the trial, Potse denied he had committed the rape, but the prosecution presented DNA evidence linking him to it — and his girlfriend testified that she had witnessed him committing the act. The vagina of a five-month-old baby is so small that an adult’s little finger is all that can fit inside. Raping a baby (with a penis) can result in the vagina being torn through to the rectum. In a small RDP (Reconstruction and Development Program) home outside Upington, the sixteen-yearold mother of Tshepang left her baby alone late on a Friday night. When Tshepang’s grandmother arrived a few hours later, she found Tshepang on a bed, covered in blood. One story reported that the raped Tshepang’s mother had herself become pregnant after she was raped, and that her grandmother too had been raped in the same house in which the baby was raped. Of the 21,000 cases reported in 2001, most were committed by the victim’s relatives. Around the time of baby Tshepang’s rape, a fourteenmonth-old girl from the Free State was raped, allegedly by two uncles in whose charge she had been left by the mother. The next day, a four-yearold girl from Venda died in a hospital three months after she was allegedly raped by her thirty-five-year-old father. He was charged with murder. The Women’s League of the African National Congress, I remembered, had called for life sentences for HIV-positive men who rape children. This last referred to the myth, believed by up to 18 percent of men, say the statistics, that sex with a virgin — even a child or a baby — can prevent or cure HIV/AIDS (McGreal 2002). South Africa has one of the highest AIDS rates in the world.1

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The rapes themselves made especially clear the extent to which gender relations are central to the success and failure of postapartheid South Africa.

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Leaving the city, I think of the Internet sites (theage.com 2002, Barbarno 2002) I had consulted earlier that morning, trying to establish whether this was just us, living through our history, and our at-once redemptive and devastating present. Mostly yes; and no. In May 2001, a seven year old was found raped and murdered in a casino restroom outside Las Vegas, and at least one American has testified on the Internet to her own rape as a baby. In June 2002, by the time I wrote this story, a twenty-four-year-old man in Australia has been convicted of raping an eight-month-old baby. In the remainder of this article I tell the story of what happened as I pursued this story, during my visit to Sunette. It may be worth noting first, however, some of the reasons why the story so compelled me in the first place, in a wider intellectual sense. Right away it seemed to me that the story — the specter — of the chastity belt in a context of widespread child rape presented strong political and theoretical challenges, not least for feminism itself. The press “snippets” I began with — the maintenance laws, the anti–women’s abuse demonstrations, and the rapes themselves — made especially clear the extent to which gender relations are central to the success and failure of postapartheid South Africa. Scholars of South Africa have written a great deal about contexts of impoverishment and disenfranchisement, rapid urbanization, the anonymity of urban life, labor migration, widespread population movements and displacements, social disruption and wars, especially counterinsurgency wars — in other words, cultures of violence, the legacy of South Africa’s peculiar path to development (Marks 2002). There has been much less focus on gendered violence: first, on the emergence of specific forms of masculine identity within these processes of impoverishment and disenfranchisement, and the materialities of everyday sexual relations in which manhood has come to be associated with multiple sexual partners and unquestioned, sometimes violent, authority over women (Hunter 2002). Second, in this context, there has been too little focus on the fact that girls’ abilities to protect their bodies after they have been profoundly violated — in contexts that might include sexual abuse, forced sexual initiation, teenage pregnancy, rape, HIV/AIDS — have been reduced, so that they battle to rebuild their defenses (Jewkes 2001). As Shula Marks has noted, the HIV/AIDS pandemic, but increasingly too, I would now add, the high rape statistics, and the rise of child and baby rape, have forced scholars to see the profound significance of sex and gender relations in South Africa’s history of race. This is so much so that, as I said above, it is now clear that these relations are central to the fate of South Africa. They are of nonnegotiable significance to South Africa’s capacity to reconcile with itself. Given these historical terrains of the raced-sexed body, many of us

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have felt the need to tackle questions that relate to cultures of compensation. How far do distinctive histories of propertylessness and material deprivation, such as the apartheid experience for black people, lead to therapeutic economies of compensation — such as the overinvestment in particular forms of property that are publicly visible and imply certain forms of status (at least among men)? Such economies of compensation may certainly be the case in relation to girls’ bodies, which have long been signified as commodities of a prized form (in the press, in the ubiquity of institutions like beauty contests, and in political resistance culture). Insofar as one reads current crises in terms of a culture of compensation, a key difference now, within a history of men controlling women’s bodies given South Africa’s history of material deprivation, is that the bodies being controlled have become sexualized in new ways. In the postapartheid period, the inability of many people to afford marriage, because of economic crisis, may be a key factor in understanding how a girl’s or woman’s body is seen less as a long-term investment and more as an object of sexual conquest. We are left as well with the question of how much of what we see in this gender violence is related to apartheid, and the dispossession, material as well as psychic, that resulted — and how much relates to, for example, contemporary postapartheid urban legends, such as those that surround virginity and its imagined relationship to a cure for HIV/AIDS. How much finally, in a more difficult vein, does this gender violence reveal what we could call more autonomous forms and grammars of the ego, of fear, and of relationships to death itself, new currencies of negative autonomy that go beyond therapeutic cultures of compensation as such? In thinking through these political and theoretical dilemmas of interpretation, I will keep in focus the microbiographies that are also embedded in the story of baby Tshepang and that confront us with the sharpest edge of personal horror and distress at the heart of such an interpretative undertaking. These are the narratives we only catch glimpses of: the girlfriend who saw her boyfriend raping a baby; and the mother whose mother was raped, making her the child of rape, who was raped, whose child was raped. With some of these initial frames and questions in mind, I return to the story that I want to pursue here. Soon after I arrive, Sunette tells me that she has invited her friend Kobus, a psychologist who lives nearby, to join us. Sunette is a wellmanicured middle-aged Afrikaans woman. Kobus, sunburned, in an unfashionable jersey, sits ever so slightly slumped in his chair. Later, when Sunette is making coffee, I ask him if he has a card. A little smudged, it says: “Dr. Kobus Schutte, B.A., U.O.D., B.Ed., I.Hy. Registered Hypnotist (London), M.Ed., D.Ed.” On the next line is written: “Mentor: Sek-

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suele Molestering & Gesinsgeweld/Sexual Abuse & Domestic Violence.” Kobus’s degrees are in education, perhaps educational psychology, and hypnotism, which he combines into a role as mentor. Kobus says nothing for some time. Sunette tells me she has developed two items for girls: the first, for girls up to age ten, is the chastity belt, although she says that is not her name for it: she calls it a “tamperproof undergarment.” It is the device advertised in the newspaper article. A chastity belt implies punishment, she says, but the tamperproof undergarment is “soft.” She has been working on it for fifteen years. I ask her whether that means that men have been raping babies all that time. No, she explains: men, in the past, fondled girls’ genitals, tampered with them, and it was in response to this that she developed the device, which is now meant to prevent rape (and HIV). While Sunette and her lawyers provided the Sowetan with the diagram, it becomes clear that its design is still being finalized. The device, then, will be made of soft material, but the harness and the braces will have wires running through them, and a microchip. Pulling at the pants — say, by a man — would activate the circuit and set off an alarm. The girl will be wired. What would “chastity,” the shorthand term given by Charity Bengu and beginning to stick fast, imply in this contemporary context? Securing oneself against having sex? It will be possible, Sunette says, to connect the girl to Armed Response, the security system for guarding people’s safety in their houses. Armed Response security systems are designed so that, when the house alarm goes off, an armed guard will arrive at the house within minutes and could shoot the intruder to stop him. The same system could be effectively used to prevent the kidnapping of children, or to retrieve children who have been sold, Sunette surmises. The sound of the alarm that will go off when she is “tampered with” will be a patent — and, Sunette says, “everyone” will recognize this sound; members of the public could then rush to help the girl. Just like the AIDS ribbon, worn by many people, the sound of the alarm will become an equally public icon, she hopes.2 The mother will have a device that can deactivate the baby girl’s chastity device, although there are some fuzzy details here. The girl, too, will have a code that can deactivate the system, “just like your gates.” Will the father have a decoder, too? I ask. Yes, says Sunette, grimacing. One cannot legally deny the father access to his child. Thus the father emerges as an ambiguous figure of access: in a strange amalgam of rich and poor, black and white, he is a figure who has access — to the house, the gates, and his daughter’s body. Kobus speaks for the first time and says it takes ten to fifteen seconds to abduct a child, and the child often goes willingly.

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Figure 2. Anti-rape condom. Author’s drawing

The second item Sunette has developed is an antirape condom. In the marketing survey she prepared, she describes it as an antirape condom that is really more like a tampon: “The condom is shaped almost like a tampon, this tampon, however, is hollow inside. The inner wall of the tampon is lined with small hooks.” It is “soft, flexible, and it will prevent HIV,” she says. The girl wears the condom, and when the unwanted man inserts his penis into her, the inner sheath, which is armed and wired, attaches itself to the penis (“the small hooks which upon forced penetration [rape] will attach to the skin of the perpetrator’s penis”). There is no way that the man can get it off. As the penis becomes flaccid, the device shrinks with it. To get it off, he must stretch the skin, which is so painful that it must be done at a hospital. Thus the “suspected rapist” can be identified and caught (“The perpetrator is therefore marked for immediate identification and arrest”). Sunette says: there is no harm to the penis as such — no bleeding. The condom, she says, is like a bullet wound. Figure 2 is my own drawing, based on images she showed me at a distance, since the device has yet to be patented. In this model — she has five different ones — the wire clasps can be seen in the inner sheath of the tampon. At the bottom is a ball of ink, which the penis would rupture and become stained with; another source for identification of the guilty man. Figure 3 is a diagram, which she did give me a copy of, since it had already been accepted by a panel of local experts (a general practitioner, a

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Figure 3. Patent diagram of anti-rape device. Drawing by Sunette Ehlers

psychologist, a urologist), had a patent number, and had been registered in her name. Here, the hooks, which are designed to capture the penis, run along the inside sheath in a line rather than in a circle as above. The applicator is what the girl or woman would use to insert the device into her vagina. The diagram gives rise to a feeling of violence, although an image of inserting an ordinary tampon would not look much different, in this graphic sense. This may be in part because what is in effect a soft object appears in the image as hard. Is it also that it is breaking something of a taboo, inserting an object that can violate and capture another body into a girl’s body? Still, penises have always had the potential to do this to a girl’s vagina. Kobus asked if I would wear such a thing. No, I said, it would feel like carrying a loaded gun. He looked at me and didn’t say much, as I recall, although he may have said that it would, nevertheless, protect me. In the text accompanying the diagram of which Sunette gave me the first page, it is the humiliation and “branding” of the rapist that is foregrounded. Rape, it is written, is the “ultimate humiliation,” hence the need for this product.

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I ask Sunette what other ideas she had had along the way before she came up with the antirape tampon. She says her first idea was to insert three blades at an angle, like a shredder, “but I thought of the gore and the blood — on the woman’s body.” Her second idea was a noose that would cut “his” blood circulation, “like farmers use on lambs.” “If you go back to nature, you find all your ideas.” Sunette thinks of models that derive from plants, “plants that close up over your finger, leaves which turn bitter.” The antirape tampon is not just for the penis, but also for the fingers, or the tongue. “It’s a Venus fly trap.” We pause and drink coffee. Of course you won’t be able to see the device, Sunette continues, but the girl will get a button to wear. The button, she says, is like “the small print of insurance.” The girl wears the button as a warning to indicate, “I’m guarded.” There will also be a notice on the girl’s panties: “I’m guarded.” It’s like a gun, Sunette says; it’s always loaded, it’s just that the girl doesn’t have to pull the trigger — the rapist does that. The button, too, will be all over the media, again like the AIDS ribbon that many people wear and recognize. The girl can wear it whenever she wants. What’s good about the device itself, Sunette says, is that “it’s not skin to skin.” The girl isn’t touched. Also, the girl gets to have her revenge on the man. It’s hard to tell exactly how much of this will happen and how much has been advanced in Sunette’s imagination only, although it is almost certain that what she imagines, she gives material form to.

It’s like a gun, Sunette says; it’s always loaded, it’s just that the girl doesn’t have to pull the trigger— the rapist does that.

What is this story of bodies, menace, technology? And how much of a peculiarly South African story is it? In some senses it is a local story, ringing with South Africa’s own past and present. I recognize the extraordinarily pragmatic and at times perverse pioneering spirit of some Afrikaners, taking on its postapartheid form. Sunette sees a problem and is looking less for an explanation than a solution. “The priority,” she says, “is to let girls feel safe. Men have been like this since Genesis, and there is no hope of changing them.” She is not interested in understanding why what is happening is happening, she says, or even in stopping rape. It is happening, and she is interested in “safety.” Kobus concurs, saying that “the point is not to stop rape but purely to protect the child emotionally. At least the rapist knows he can’t kill the girl; he knows he’ll be identified.” Sunette receives faxes daily, she tells me, waving a sheaf of them, from women who congratulate her on her work. While I am there, the phone rings constantly, the calls coming from German TV, manufacturers interested in the product, local business owners. During our second interview, I ask to see some of these faxes. She gives me one from a woman who writes, “How many times does one say thank you to a woman like

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Sunet [sic], who decided to “armor” herself against her own despondency, shock, and understanding of the onslaught’s [sic] on the woman’s body.” She also gives me two questionnaires, market surveys. Cecelia Dikeledi, in the first survey, gives her age as forty-two and her race as “T” meaning “Tswana,” the dominant ethnic group in the area. She states that she would wear the antirape condom, could pay up to R10 ($1.00) for it, and, she adds below, “Please hurry!” Melia, in the second survey, who would pay up to R20 for the device, also adds, “Please, hurry!” What are the different kinds of urgencies that these women share, these Africans of different races and ethnicities? They are locked in some ways in a battle against each other, in other ways against men, or some men, and in yet others against a status quo, and for that matter a state, in relation to which neither of them have much power. In Sunette’s imagination and in the materiality of the products she has developed, the metaphors of South African security systems, in place to protect people in their houses, are transferred almost directly onto the girl body. The surveillance techniques of the suburbs come to inhabit an imaginary that makes us ask, What is the body of the girl being secured, and what is it that the security of this body must entail? How does the locking up of the vagina, the figuring of it as a launchpad for an offensive against the penis, figure here? One answer may emerge if we push the analogy with general security systems a bit further. It sometimes seems that the more firms develop technological solutions to crime in South Africa, the more crime seems to be increasingly violent. Cars can’t be so easily broken into now, so hijackings at gunpoint have increased. By analogy, would the technologies Sunette is developing intensify violence against women and girls? Is a rapist going to let his penis be hooked and dyed — and what other forms of revenge might he find? Sunette doesn’t seem to have taken into account the fact that most sexual violence takes place by people known to their victims. Kobus speaks, toward the end of the visit, of the invasion of the self involved in rape. It is an invasion, he says, that makes the girl child helpless, and to be helpless, in his view, is the worst feeling, “worse than when they hijack your car.” Rape is like being hijacked, only worse. It is stealing one’s property (with all the overdetermination of the car as a racialized and sexualized symbol) at gunpoint. For the latter, you can report it to the police, he says, but the difference is that the child can’t do this because the abuser’s authority makes the child helpless. She has “severe guilt feelings.” What is the penis? I ask him, meaning what is the nature of the threat? What is the imagination of the penis within the threat? He explains that it is the size of the penis that strikes the girl, because children “see every-

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thing bigger.” The size alone is threatening. It’s not only looking at it that threatens her. She believes, he says, revealing a kind of undiluted culturalism, that if someone touches her between her legs she may fall pregnant. It is her emotions that are at stake, and a child abuser is a terrorist of the soul. Sunette adds: “It’s not only looking at it, it’s all the senses, the specific smell of the penis, the semen, that wet-grass smell.” That it is the black man’s penis that is being spoken about, or at least in mind here, although it is not named as such, adds symbolic and symptomatic overload to the discussion, the “bigness” of the latter, though envisioned from the viewpoint of a “small” child, nevertheless recalls a key trope in a Fanonesque rendering of racial relations. We have seen that Sunette and Kobus’s references, between them, to Armed Response, guns, bullet wounds, revenge, signs saying “I’m guarded,” insurance for the body, and terrorists are a vocabulary that emerges from an urban culture of security, a certain psychosis of protection that, in the move from the house to the body, the body comes to be figured as property, in a new kind of way. In a sense, all of this takes place in a certain kind of “postracist” society. Not that South Africa is not still residually racist, but that this is a society in which in certain fundamental and irreversible ways, public space and political power have been surrendered by white people. Thus the realms of property and the private become the only places that bodies can be separated/segregated, in ways I return to more fully below.

Perhaps race emerges here in new vocabularies, including the technological, in those sites of the body where it was most repressed in postapartheid public discourse?

For the moment, I want to ask why, in the context of the above, Sunette wants this man Kobus along — for what kind of protection? Kobus spouts bad clichés, bad sound bites (“terrorists of the soul,” “the invasion of the soul”), and it is Sunette who dominates the conversation. Are they both angry with black men? Black, like vagina, is an unspoken word, and both are smarter than to racialize this — at least in an older syntax. But perhaps race emerges here in new vocabularies, including the technological, in those sites of the body where it was most repressed in postapartheid public discourse? Sunette is clearly angry on behalf of women, very angry, but full of the foibles and confusion of her own narrow social context. She describes her embarrassment at having to go to the local sex shop to ask for a female condom — in case anyone she knew saw her — but unconcernedly flaps around the huge and ugly device in front of us, in order to trash it in favor of her own more discreet product. What are her own senses of security and insecurity? She tells me, too, that her sense that one must “take care of women who cannot speak for themselves” comes in part from her father, a farmer, to whom black women workers were encouraged to come to complain if their husbands were beating them.

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Thus emerges in her story, toward the end, the inevitable figure of the father, who in this case also happens to be a farmer, a Boer. Her father (who was six feet tall, “like my husband”) would then confront these men, she says, and tell them: “This is not how things happen.” She is sad that her father, who died at age eighty-five, had not lived to see these products she has developed. Big penises, tiny microchips. Big threat, retaliatory action by the stealth of the small. Recently, I read about dramatic new stealth technology designed by the Pentagon: nanotechnology, a blend of physics, chemistry, and material science. The Pentagon wants to wrap its older planes in this material (refitting all planes with stealth capability): “It would disappear, or at least it would become very, very small. Or small enough that you couldn’t distinguish it from a bird or something of that nature,” says one expert, Clemson University professor Dr. David Carroll (in a story by Mark Strassman [2001]). Also being developed is the “smart” shirt — sensors and interwoven fiber optics will monitor a soldier’s vital signs and rips caused during battle. The shirt becomes an information beacon. Its Global Positioning System can relay a soldier’s location — and condition — to anywhere in the world (Strassman 2001). In these images of increasing smallness, global reach, and surveillance, we might read, across both these cultural contexts, what Paul Gilroy has recently referred to as the “absurd racial codings” that appear in the “techno-cultural ferment of the information age”— in which, he shows, technological resources can acquire the characteristics of historical agents or actors. Another state-of-the-art device is an inexpensive, aspirin-size computer, controlled over the Internet from almost anywhere. Consumers can use the web browser on an office computer to program their VCRs, turn on their porch lights, even activate cameras to check on the babysitter. “Everything that shrinks down to size that can be embedded in small spaces will have a big impact,” says a salesperson (cbsnews.com 1999). Advanced technology equipment is now readily available for domestic surveillance. Retailers sell video cameras disguised as clocks, books, or other household objects for less than $130. Nanny surveillance has given rise to debates on the legal and ethical concerns of “spying on your nanny” (family.go.com 2002). The ultimate question, in such debates, is whether to tell her you are doing it. In their recent best-selling book Nanny Diaries, Nicola Kraus and Emma McLoughlin write about nannycams that enable parents to “review the tapes” and to be “virtually right there” (2002, 260). The nanny, in this scenario, becomes the family’s “own personal sweatshop” (302), and, the narrator, on discovering the hidden nannycam, asks, “What’s next? Periodic drugs tests? Strip searches? A metal detector in the front hall? Who are these people?” (266).

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In September 2002 the parents of an eleven-year-old British girl had a microchip implanted into her arm. The chip sends a signal via a mobile phone network to a computer, which will be able to pinpoint her location on an electronic map. The girl’s mother said it was only sensible for a parent to use technology when it was available: “If a car is stolen, it can be fitted with a computer to enable it to be tracked — so why not apply the same principle to finding missing children?” she said (Wilson 2002).3 The designer of the chip, from the Cybernetics department at Reading University, called for an urgent government debate on the issue and believes ministers should consider implants for all children. In the context of these examples, we can see that Sunettte’s ideas are embedded in local but also global imaginaries. In the closing parts of this article, I want to reflect further on the tacit enforcement of segregated space that is, it seems, a growing feature of metropolitan life. If it has up to now been property — owned mostly by whites but increasingly by blacks, too — that has been defended against “them,” the mostly black men who operate as criminals in South African society, what exactly might the implications be when it comes to the security of the body itself? Can we ensure our bodies — how and to what extent?— against violation, such as rape? And if we are ensuring them, securing them against black men, what is it that this ensuring and securing implies about race and space, and their relationship to technology? In his essay “Driving While Black,” Paul Gilroy describes the advent of car cultures in the following way. Cars, in American twentieth-century history, provided both blacks and whites with tacit, complementary solutions to the discomforts of traveling in close proximity with each other. For blacks, driving themselves could be part of liberation from their apartheid, while for whites, this tactic supplied a legitimate means for perpetuating and indeed compounding segregation in the new forms created by privatized transport. The institution of American apartheid is closely connected to the extinction of the walking city. (2001, 94)

Could one make a similar argument for the privatization of girls’ bodies, segregating black men from women, both white and black, building barriers that are policed, on and even inside the body itself? What is pragmatic in a situation of clear crisis and war of sorts, between men and women (one black woman rape counselor I met some months ago described a situation, as she saw it, of “gender genocide”), what is shocking, and what is plain peculiar? What does Sunette hope for from her products? More safety for women is certainly how she sees it, a position not much interested in more academic arguments and diagnoses of social ills. She also wants to

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make money: once the patents are hers, the products will be released to 120 countries, which will decide whether to adopt the technology. Since Sunette has calculated that there are 3.085 billion women in the world, she might stand to make a large profit. As it is, the antirape tampon will cost 75c to make and will be put on the market at R25. Even South Africa would be a scoop.

Conclusion How does the story above relate to notions of trust and civil society, and the relationship between them? Recent literatures argue that issues of civil society should be seen in terms of the problem of constituting trust in society. Trust in this context involves reconciling the demands of individuality with those of community. Classical Marxism, it could be argued, excluded trust, analyzing a social order in terms of conflict, thus rejecting the importance of civil society. Most discourses on civil society do not include the vantage point offered by sex cultures and abuses. They say little about how shifting economic, cultural, and spatial conditions in which men and women live in relation to the sexed body produce diminishing certainty, more high-risk situations, and less confidence in the future. The story I have told above helps us see that if civil society or the public realm must function on notions of trust, the biggest threat to the project of civil society comes from damage to the sexed body — and the case of South Africa helps us expose this. In a society that lives under constant threat to the sexed body, it is difficult to build a civil society, especially so when the threatened, sexed body is the body of the child, here the girl child — since the child is a radical locus of the uncertain in society. Affronts to this body, the body of the girl child, represent the maximum level of carelessness, both as an affective and as a political category. We could say that South Africa faces a need to reconstitute the domains of the public, after apartheid. The rehabilitation of public life has to take place in the context of a constitution that protects the most profound aspects of human life — a range of rights and guarantees that the state does not always have the means to effectively protect (poverty and rape) — and also in a context of the widespread NGO-ization of civil society in terms of discourses of development and poverty reduction. While public spheres have proliferated at some levels — in particular on radio and television (talk shows, etc.) — there has also been an increasing public withdrawal and disengagement from direct political participation. Related to this last is an intensification of private life as a counterpoint to public life. Technology itself assigns changing meanings to these domains of the

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private and the public. The account above has shown how technological forms can acquire symptomatic meanings beyond their material, and even symbolic, political currencies. It has also been argued that in “postracist” societies like South Africa now, the realms of the private become one of the only places in which bodies can be segregated. This is notwithstanding the fact that most rapes taking place at the moment are by black men of black women and — the focus of this article — black girls. In the different orders of rape that take place across a society like this — such as the ongoing rape of domestic workers by both white and black property owners — each speak to the other, even when each, too, represses the next. Thus although we are largely talking about black-on-black rape in the context of this essay, these different polysemies of rape and the segregationist imagination still intersect with one another. The key point I want to focus on here, though, is that trust comes to be divested from the domains of the political and invested in the domains of technology. Where people feel they can’t trust politics or the political realm, the state, to protect the rights of the Constitution, they begin, in a context like the one I have described, to put their trust in technology — as a more predictable force over which they can have more control, that which is more familiar, and more proximate than some rather anonymous public sphere. It is interesting in this context to draw out from the account above the common interest — and trust in technology — among women from different race and ethnic groups: black and white, Tswana and Afrikaner. Thus we see emerging, both here and elsewhere, sets of fantasies about technological solutions in relation to the body that are currently circulating globally, some of which I began to delineate. In other words, conceptions that one can solve a range of issues that relate to wider and deeper processes and histories of violence, desire, betrayal, fear and death, masculinity and femininity, by using forms of stealth technology — microchips and invisible wires — to curtail actual acts of interference with the body. Finally, in dealing with issues of racial and sexual trust, we are required to update our understanding of culture itself, including the changing configurations of the private and the public, and the way we understand technologies of the body, especially girl bodies, within this. In so doing, we need to be constantly thinking through the legacy not only of apartheid in South Africa but of new forms of “global apartheid,” the “south africanization of social life” (Gilroy 2001) elsewhere in the world, including what Gilroy calls “the institution of American apartheid”— as they relate to technologies of sex. We need to be thinking, as Denis Altman and others have recently begun doing, how the increasing globalization of the world — a term understood by Altman as “the compression of the world and the intensification of consciousness of the world as a whole”

Trust comes to be

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divested from the domains of the political and invested in the domains of technology.

(2001, 1) — affects how sexuality is understood, experienced, and regulated. While Altman in his recent study Global Sex focuses on issues like the increasing commodification of sexuality; the new political economies of sex and their place in the construction of international political, social, and economic regimes; and the new epistemologies of human being through sexuality, this article has focused on the technologies that emerge from this new global sexual order, and in particular on their impact on girls’ bodies. In line with the idea of a local and global configuration of technology and the segregationist imagination, one could read the devices discussed here as examples of the Afrikaner nationalization of technology. Given that Afrikaner nationalism was a fascist modernity that combined feudal sentimentalism with modern technological repression, Sunette’s invention seems likewise to be a kind of feudal cyborg invention.3 In a recent essay, Emily Apter (1991) argued for seeing the postcolony through the derealized lens of postrealist technogenres (in opposition to what she sees as rather old-fashioned “emancipatory humanism”). What I wish to reveal above is both a version of the forms of technological imagination that the postcolony can produce and the ongoing need for a humanist lens.

Notes I’d like to thank Vron Ware, Isabel Hofmeyr, Achille Mbembe, and Mark Hunter for their readings of this essay. 1. In 2000, it was estimated that 4.7 million South Africans (2.5 million women and 2.2 million men) between the ages of fifteen and forty-nine were HIV-infected. Recent projections indicate that these figures could reach 7.5 million by 2010. By then, life expectancy will have fallen to forty-three years. 2. The widespread wearing of the AIDS ribbon is one of a number of largescale health campaigns in South Africa. Another example is the Love Life campaign, which attempts to insert safe-sex messages into a youth cultural lifestyle package and uses billboards, taxis, and water tanks to promote its campaign. 3. I am grateful to Isabel Hofmeyr for this insight.

References Altman, Denis. 2001. Global sex. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Apter, Emily. 1999. Postcolonial cyberpunk: Dirty nationalism in the era of terminal identities. In Continental drift: From national characters to virtual subjects. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Baby rape “one of the most shocking” says judge. 2002. 5 June. www.theage.com.au/ breaking/2002/06/05/FFXMIDZR22D.html.

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Barbano, Andrew. Baby rape: Coming soon to a casino near you. www.nevadalabor.com/ barbwire/barb97/barb11-30-97.html. Bengu, Charity. 2001a. Keeping safe below belt. Sowetan, 7 December. ———. 2001b. Mixed feelings over chastity belt. Sowetan, 14 December. Crimmins, Barry. Baby rape: A survivor’s story. Wounded Healer Journal. www.Twhj.com/092896.htm. Gilroy, Paul. 2001. Driving while black. In Car cultures: Materializing culture, edited by Daniel Miller. Oxford: Berg. Hunter, Mark. 2002. The materiality of everyday sex: Thinking beyond prostitution. African Studies 61.1 (July): 99 –120. Jewkes, Rachel. April 2001. Gender-based violence, gender inequalities, and the HIV epidemic. Paper presented at the AIDS in Context conference, University of the Witwatersrand. Kraus, Nicola, and Emma McLoughlin 2002. Nanny diaries. London: Penguin. Landman, Ruda. Accessed July 2002. Baby rape. www.mdonet.co.za/CarteBlanche/ Display/Display.asp?Id=1872. LoBaido, Anthony C. 2001. Eye on Africa: Baby rape, Islamic soldiers, DeKlerk murder issues de jour. 12 December. www.sierratimes.com/archive/files/ dec/12/lobaido.htm. Marks, Shula. 2002. An epidemic waiting to happen? The spread of HIV/AIDS in South Africa in social and historical perspective. African Studies 61.1 (July), 13 –16. McGreal, Chris. 2001. AIDS myth drives South African baby-rape crisis. 3 November. www.guardian.co.uk/aids/story/0,7369,587165,00.html. Nanny surveillance: The legal and ethical concerns of spying on your nanny. www.family.go.com/raisingkids/child. Strassman, Mark. 2001. The high-tech war on terror. 17 December. www.cbsnews.com/ stories/2001/12/17/eveningnews/mains321614.shtml. Tiny computer holds promise. 1999. 18 August. www.cbsnews.com/stories/1999/ 08/18/tech/main58874.shtml. Wilson, Jamie. 2002. Girl to get tracker implant to ease parents’ fears. 3 September. www.guardian.co.uk.

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“Nous les Colonisés” REFLECTIONS ON THE TERRITORIAL INTEGRITY OF OPPRESSION

Whatever his degree of energy, ability, originality, man is constantly fabricating a world. — José Ortega y Gasset, Man and Crisis

My reflections in this essay have three aims. One is to suggest that an inevitable consequence of Western Europe’s self-constitution as the subject of a history made at the expense of “the rest of us”1 lies in a spatial and chromatic representation of oppression as a territory in the discourses of Europe’s historical others. Two is to show how oppression, construed as a spatiochromatic territory, aspires to an insidious foundationalist essence of those discourses. Three, I examine how the exceptionalist2 uses we make of our location in the said territory can be generative, albeit innocuously, of various processes of exclusion. My exploration will navigate various global contexts (Africa, the Americas, and the Middle East) where some of history’s most gripping narratives of oppression have been transformed into volatile and quasi-sacrosanct imaginaries of self-definition. Taking my cue from John Beverley’s comments on the centrality of storytelling to his theoretical articulations in Subalternity and Representation, and Edward Said’s privileging of the personal narrative in some of his theoretical writings,3 I begin with a personal experience. In August 1998, I arrived in Vancouver from France to commence a doctoral program in francophone African literatures in the French department of the University of British Columbia. The first week of the new session was devoted to the usual fare of course registration, teaching assistant orientations, and departmental cocktail parties. In all that frenzy, I was able to sense that I had been inserted into a politicized terrain marked by tension between an Anglo-Canadian bloc and a Québecois bloc. I was given an office in a spatial zone dominated by Québecois graduate students in the department. That signaled for me the beginning of what was to be a yearlong engagement with Québecois linguistic and cultural nationalism in its most radical ramifications.4 Teaching assistants were assigned two to an office. On my second day in our new office, my office partner walked in and introduced himself as a fellow graduate student. After the initial exchange of pleasantries, he asked me the usual Western questions about Africa: “You are working on Social Text 78, Vol. 22, No. 1, Spring 2004. Copyright © 2004 by Duke University Press.

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francophone African literatures? Are there any other writers from that region apart from Senghor and Césaire?”5 I replied, “Well, Césaire is not from francophone Africa. That leaves the whole of francophone Africa with only one writer, right?” He tried another angle: “What are the challenges for you, an African, working on African literatures?” I didn’t exactly know how to respond, so I ventured what I figured was the most sensible answer: “Roughly the same challenges you face as a Canadian working on Canadian literatures.” It was an unfortunate response; I had struck a dangerously raw identitarian nerve. I was yet to learn that it was a bad idea to label a Québecois ultranationalist, impatiently waiting for the next secessionist referendum, a Canadian. “Hey, I am a Québecois working on Québecois literature. As someone from a once-colonized country, you should know better than to toy with the identity of a fellow oppressed.” He left the office before I had the opportunity of a repartee, leaving me in utter amazement. “A fellow oppressed?” I couldn’t possibly have heard him right. The next morning he apologized for his behavior, and we got off to a fresh start. As my mind reflected on the fact that he had described me as “a fellow oppressed” the previous day, I asked for clarification. He was genuinely surprised that the “very obvious fact” that we shared a “common experience of oppression” at the hands of English colonizers could be lost on me. Then followed a meticulous historical inventory of the “horrors” of colonial oppression the Québecois have suffered from their AngloCanadian oppressors: the ever-present threat of extinction to their language, the economic exploitation of the province of Québec by the center in Ottawa, and the “sickening” reality of a people of French extraction being, technically, subjects of the Queen of England. Every sentence was, of course, laced with that problematic phrase, nous les colonisés. Nous les colonisés? This phrase, which he used repeatedly during the charged arguments we had throughout the 1998 – 99 academic year, would radically unsettle the epistemological formations I brought to North America. The entire discursive arsenal with which Africa had equipped me was suddenly threatened by his ideological self-fashioning. For sure, I had read Albert Memmi before relocating to Canada.6 However, it was one thing to read a Tunisian thinker analyzing Québec in the registers of colonial discourse analysis, and another thing entirely to sit a few inches away from someone I considered a privileged white male and listen to him operate a discursive union of Africa and Québec as co-victims of the West! For the first time I realized that I had always had a mental conception of “the colonized” as a clearly defined, spatiochromatic “territory” within whose borders I never imagined I would one day encounter a white man.7

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My instinct — and I will return to this presently — as an African intellectual faced with this unexpected situation was to go on the defensive, to establish a perimeter around the very zone of oppression to which the white male before me was staking a vehement claim. The type of oppression he was talking about evoked concrete historical and geospatial verities that I felt he couldn’t possibly grasp. What did he know about oppression? What could Cholula possibly signify for him? Wounded Knee? Thiaroye? Dimbokro? Sharpeville?8 Did his claims not constitute a second shedding of the blood of Geronimo, Patrice Lumumba, and Steve Biko? If he must gain admission into that space at all, he could figure only as the oppressor. It was too much to ask me to share the space of colonialism — to coinhabit the “we” in his “we the colonized”— with a Western white male, and I made that clear to him. His answer left me breathless. The privileged Western white male was also his problem, his “colonial master.” He, like me, had been shaped by the anti-imperialist, cultural, political, and nationalist discourses of Québec to articulate strategies of resistance against this English-speaking, cigar-puffing, white male in Ottawa who controls his destiny. In fact, his energies in critical and cultural theory aimed to deconstruct and dehegemonize the Western white male. In essence, we were not only united by a common colonial experience, we also faced essentially the same enemy. In subsequent discussions, he attempted to convince me, via an Orwellian calculus, that I was more equal than him in the territory of the oppressed. First, Africa was “lucky” because the color line was clearly drawn between oppressor and oppressed. The oppressor did not enjoy the privilege of anonymity. Québec lacks that strategic advantage, since oppressor and oppressed are of the same color, making colonial oppression far less visible than it had been in Africa. Second, as I was born after 1960, I never really knew colonialism as a concrete reality. It would always be part of my history and heritage. For him, “concrete colonialism” was a continuous nightmare from which he may never have the opportunity of awaking, to paraphrase Joyce’s famous formulation. Consequently, on the scale of oppression and suffering in the hands of the Western white male, he had greater authentic claims than I. I subsequently took courses in Québecois literature and thought, focusing on textualities of cultural and political nationalism. I read André d’Allemagne’s Colonialisme au Québec, a cross between Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth, Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, and Aimé Césaire’s Discours sur le colonialisme. While still refusing to validate his claim to my territory, I began to see where my office partner was coming from. In d’Allemagne’s vitriolic prose, Québec bears incredible resemblance to Kenya, Rhodesia, and South Africa under white settlerist

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plunder and dispossession. English-speaking Canadians resemble the colonialist ogres and predators in Ayi Kwei Armah’s Two Thousand Seasons. An unproblematized reading of Le colonialisme au Québec would create the somewhat “dangerous” impression that pre-1957 Ghana and pre1960 Nigeria were, indeed, more equal than Québec in the territory of colonialist rape. I also studied the corpus known as les romans de la terre (literally, novels of the land) in Québecois literary criticism and was amazed by the similarities between the treatment of land in that Québecois literary current and the handling of African land in the works of Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Sembène Ousmane, and Ayi Kwei Armah. Ringuet’s novel, Trente Arpents, is the major text of les romans de la terre. Reading that novel increased my unease that a white settlerist population was offering me painfully familiar narratives of oppression and dispossession that I was being asked to validate as a cocolonized. It was impossible for me to close my eyes to the overwhelming structural and thematic similarities between Trente Arpents and Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. The former reads very much like a Québecois predecessor of the latter. Ringuet’s hero, Euchariste Moisan, and his rural, agrarian clansmen, are faced with the implacable advance of “Western” modernity and cultural imposition represented by the enemies, “les Anglais d’Ottawa” and their “big brothers”— the Americans south of the border. Inevitably, Ottawa and the United States succeed in placing a knife on the things that hold Moisan and his people together, and they fall apart, to paraphrase Obierika’s famous statement in Things Fall Apart. Like Okonkwo, Achebe’s hero, Moisan ends up in exile in the United States from where news of the erosion of the cultures and traditions of his native Québec filters to him.

Within Race: Africa in/and the Geography of Color Four years have passed since these events occurred in Canada, but the specter of my office partner’s conscriptive statement — nous les colonisés — still looms over my attempts to reflect on the nature and behavior of contemporary cultural discourses and politics. I have consistently had to confront my instinctive delegitimation of Alain’s right to stage his own peculiar form of oppression and, more important, my refusal to be conscripted into his Andersonian imagined community of the colonized. Increasingly, I am forced to contend with the fact that my reaction has a great deal to do with some of the issues raised recently by Achille Mbembe in a seminal but problematic essay, “African Modes of Self Writing.” Mbembe’s essay is a tour de force that problematizes the armada of

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self-fashioning discourses produced in the last four decades by African intellectuals. Suffice it to assert, however, that the thinker’s critique of what he considers to be the essentialist extremisms of dominant modes of antiimperialist resistance writing by Africans plunges him into a monoperspectival conundrum from which he fails to emerge. In the end, I do not believe that he finds the Archimedean position from which to launch his critique without the problem of self-implication in the dilemmas he identifies. Among other things, Mbembe questions the discourses of the self and the identitarian constructions produced by Africa’s left-leaning, neoMarxist narratives ranging from the negritudinist model to the nativist/ neotraditionalist, the cultural-nationalist, and the African socialist models. His critique of the consequences of these discourses is, in my view, not matched by an equally illuminating account of the raison d’être of such epistemological formations. Moving from a fundamental disagreement with the operative modalities of the discourses generated on account of Africa’s historical experiences, Mbembe addresses himself to the task of crafting new idioms of African self-fashioning: Three fundamental elements of slavery, colonization, and apartheid are said to serve as a unifying center of Africans’ desire to know themselves, to recapture their destiny (sovereignty), and to belong to themselves in the world (autonomy). . . . In the remarks that follow, I examine these two currents of thought and draw out their weaknesses. Throughout this discussion, I propose ways out of the dead end into which they have led reflection on the African experience of self and the world. Against the arguments of critics who have equated identity with race and geography, I show how current African imaginations of the self are born out of disparate but often intersecting practices, the goal of which is not to settle factual and moral disputes about the world but also to open the way for self-styling.9 (my emphases)

Two problems characterize much of what Mbembe goes on to discuss. The first problem lies in his rather magisterial declaration that the broad and disparate discourses he brings together under the banner of African “historicism” have led us to a dead end. Since he does not specify which particular strand of African discursive historicism he has in mind, we are left to conjecture that he is operating a blanket sweep of the entire African historicist terrain. The question then arises as to what dead end we have been led, and by which particular African historicist discourse? To what dead end have Kwame Nkrumah’s reflections on neocolonialism and the African condition led? To what specific dead end have Chinweizu’s historicist strategies in The West and the Rest of Us led? To what dead end has negritude led? Even the staunchest career-critics of negritude now have to contend with Wole Soyinka’s subtle revision of his

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long-standing antinegritude position in the The Burden of Memory, the Muse of Forgiveness. African socialism, the weakest form of these discourses, had its moment. Its subsequent dysfunctionality lies not so much in any intrinsic weakness but in its proponents’ preference for articulating misdigested socialist rhetoric at the expense of a thorough understanding of the practicalities and the operational modalities of the societal form they were proposing. 10 By their very nature, anti-imperialist historicist discourses, despite the at times extreme weaknesses they may have, cannot be dead ends. Mbembe, an attentive reader of Antonio Gramsci, is most certainly familiar with that thinker’s notion of historical inventory. Africa’s historicist discourses have in them an inventory of some of the most traumatic moments of African history. Even when some of them have served their purpose or have been overtaken by events, they will still always retain the primary, residual function of inventory. The critiques we propose of them must reflect the fact that each of those discursive strands, even if they now seem passé, developed in specific ideotemporal contexts, often as a matter of expediency. The second problem of perspective in Mbembe’s treatise lies in the area of responsibility and speaks directly to my main project in this essay. Mbembe speaks constantly of the equation of identity with race and geography, and the consequent conflation of race with geography. Certain strands of African historicist discourse are supposedly responsible for these problematic constructions. I think the contrary is the case. Europe is responsible for those processes through which skin color, whiteness in this instance, became coterminous with, and reducible to, geography and space. What we witness in African historicism is largely a reflection of and a radical engagement with a historically constituted cartography of whiteness. Texts like Edward Said’s Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism, and Mary Louise Pratt’s Imperial Eyes, draw powerful attention to what Neil Smith has described as “the practical intertwining of the constructed historical geography of empire and the history of geography as a practice of empire.”11 Africa, and indeed the rest of the world, has had very little choice in the imperialistic-chromatic construction of planetary cartography begun in the fifteenth century. In an engaging essay, “Imaging Terra Incognita: The Disciplinary Gaze of Empire,” Ella Shohat discusses the connections between power and Europe’s cartographic machinations: Colonial narratives legitimized the search for treasure islands by lending a scientific aura to those quests, an aura encapsulated especially by images of maps and globes. Numerous narratives of penetrating new regions, involving detailed descriptions of maps, were inspired by the growing science of geog-

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raphy. The image-making of the land determined the significance of places through its power of inscription on the map with compass on top as the signifier of scientific authority.12

In this Conradian

What needs to be added to Shohat’s analysis is that as European adventurers, missionaries, explorers, navigators, and “discoverers” traveled in Africa, Asia, the Americas, and the Caribbean, inscribing power on geospaces they brought under imperial control, they also inscribed a concomitant process of oppressive whiteness on those territories. Superimposed on Paul Gilroy’s problematic notion of “the Black Atlantic” is the movement and circulation of hegemonic whiteness within the triangular space in which that traffic occurred. Although Gilroy has been able to carve out a comfortable space for those willing to indulge in the delusion of doing intellectual labor outside, or “against,” race, the point must be made that the agents of imperialism did not operate outside their color. The West that “is let in”13 when the unsuspecting King Mutesa welcomed the European explorer, Stanley, with a famous handshake in demonstration of Africa’s legendary hospitality is not a colorless West. Similarly, when King Montezuma enacted the same drama by welcoming Hernán Cortés to his kingdom with gifts of gold at the gates of Mexico City, it was an encounter with a hegemonic whiteness that Spain was inscribing on the Americas.14 In essence, racial identity, with its hierarchical inscription of the color white as superior to everything not white, was the first act of symbolic violence inflicted on territory after territory during the centuries of European expansion. Europe singularly constructed a global geography in which whiteness became absolutely indissociable from power, privilege, oppression, and territorial dispossession. This specter of territorialized, hegemonic whiteness is what Europe’s others, “the people without history” as Eric Wolf memorably puts it, confronted.15 It must equally be borne in mind that Europe did not merely begin conflating race with identity and territory through the physical presence of land-grabbing administrators and soulsaving missionaries, she also put some of her best philosophers and scientists to work to establish an elaborate raciological discourse in which the association of race with territory and space was further consolidated. D. A. Masolo reminds us of this in his African Philosophy in Search of Identity. Because Europe insisted on a hierarchical race-ing of the geography she constructed, it follows logically that the territories she incorporated into her modernity had to be demonized based on the skin color of the conquered inhabitants. In this Conradian equation, the black skin of the African is what transformed his or her geospace into the “dark continent.” It is against the backdrop of this chromatized geography that the var-

black skin of the

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equation, the

African is what transformed his or her geospace into the dark continent.

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ious deconstructive, resistant, and revisionist discourses of the global South emerged. One point that can be recuperated from Gilroy’s Against Race is the examination of the camp mentality that underpinned much of Europe’s geospatial projects. The slave ship, the cotton fields of the American South, the sugar cane plantations of the Caribbean, the mines and the homelands of South Africa, the Native American reservations of North America, and the concentration camps of Nazi Germany are some of the West’s most famous camps and, as Ngugi wa Thiong’o is wont to insist, the foundations of her prosperity and post-Renaissance civilization.16 When the historicist discourses of the global South peep into these “lieux de mémoire,”17 they encounter the South African baas, the Caribbean béké, or the southern plantocrats in Frederick Douglass’s Narrative supervising an implacable Fanonian regime of violence. Writing in Critical Inquiry, Walter Benn Michaels avers that “the accounts of cultural identity that do any cultural work require a racial component.”18 He could have been describing the African situation. African historicist discourses encountered epistemological territories massively overdetermined by race and raciological discourses and could only reasonably commence the deconstructive enterprise within that modality. This predetermined, racialized essence of African discursive formations is not lost on Fanon, who asserts, with regard to the North African subject, that: Le Nord-Africain n’arrive pas avec un fond commun à sa race, mais sur un fond bâti par l’Européen. Autrement dit, le Nord-Africain, spontanément, du fait de son apparition, entre dans un cadre préexistant.19 [The North African does not emerge from a foundation common to his race but from a foundation built by the European. In other words, from the moment of his emergence, the North African enters into a pre-existing framework.] (my translation)

Consciousness of the racialized foundation of Africa’s encounter with the West equally undergirds the negritude poetry of David Diop. The ascription of historical responsibility along racial lines that Diop undertakes in poems like “Le temps du martyr,” “Un blanc m’a dit,” and “L’homme qui a tout perdu” could not have been rendered in any other way at that specific historical juncture. 20 And because whiteness has always predicated its own historical agency on a Hegelian, master-slave negation of its racialized others, the subalternized entity could only launch itself on the tortuous path to agency in two ways. First was to name and assign the appropriate responsibilities to the sign of its negation, hence the emergence and the consolidation of the white-European oppressor cate-

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gory in African historicist discourses. Second was to come to terms with the equation of its own color with all things negative and its consequent containment within demonized geospatial territories; hence, the emergence of an oppositional black-victim category within the same context. This prise de conscience is the foundation of the philosophy of struggle inherent in African discourses and constitutes the informing spirit of the praxes represented by African nationalist and liberationist struggles. Mbembe’s subtle ascription of the responsibility of conflating race with geography to African discourse therefore operates from a problematic perspective. This epistemological capital, with which Africa had equipped me as I set out for the Occident, is precisely what my office partner’s articulations of a white-oppressed, white-colonized, white-victim identity threatened to usurp: hence my resistance.

Oppression’s Many Mansions On reflection, my handling of that situation speaks to a phenomenon I want to refer to as the territorializing behavior of discourse in oppressed cultures. The point must be made that oppression did not function uniformly and in exactly the same manner within the camps constructed and chromatized by Europe. The Middle Passage is not Auschwitz, and Soweto is certainly different from a Native American reservation in Canada or the United States. What unites the various camps is a supervising center that privileges race as a principal instrument of othering and subalternization. In the implacable march of history, a process occurs in which oppression and methodical vitiation of agency become inseparable from the history of the other. Peculiar forms of historically consolidated oppression are chromatized, spatialized, and territorialized. They eventually crystallize into a people’s sensitive heritage. For instance, the transatlantic slave trade as a form of oppression immediately evokes blackness (race), the slave coasts of Africa, the American South, and the Caribbean plantations (space and territory). The “pacifications” that occurred in Cholula, Soweto, Sharpeville, Thiaroye, and Dimbokro equally have automatic connotations of race, space, and territory. Gilroy makes the point when he asserts that in situations of “routine experiences of oppression, repression and abuse,” “culture . . . becomes akin to a form of property attached to the history and traditions of a particular group and regulated by anyone who dares to speak in its name.” 21 Gilroy argues further that “the emphasis on culture as a form of property to be owned rather than lived characterizes the anxieties of the moment.”22 When particularly traumatizing forms of historical oppression constitute

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the foundation of a given culture, territories emerge, rooted in the psyche and the collective imaginary of the oppressed, and this process generates all sorts of particularisms, exceptionalisms, and monolithic exclusions. Let us consider one of the most famous narratives of oppression that we frequently refer to, at least since Sartre,23 as “the Jewish question.” For much of their history, the Jews have had to contend with a world that has always insisted on their being either a “question” or a “problem,” a world that has allowed them only one bloody temporal trajectory from Pharaoh’s straw fields to Hitler’s crematoria via a traumatic experience of dispersal. It is therefore not surprising that the dual constructs —“Jewish suffering” and “Jewish persecution”— have become foundational to most articulations of modern Jewish identity in the thought and discourses of various Jewish intellectuals. Persecution and suffering become psychic, sacrosanct spaces whose “territorial integrity” must be maintained so as not to let in those who cannot really understand the particularity, the exceptionality of “our” situation. When oppression is territorialized and made foundational to an exceptional identity, it is capable of generating its own processes of othering and exclusion, as we see in some of the essays collected in the edited volume, The Other in Jewish Thought and History. Narratives such as Elie Wiesel’s Night and The Jews of Silence function within an implicit ideological paradigm of the exceptionalism of Jewish suffering. In “My People,” the last part of a volume of essays, Out of My Later Years, Albert Einstein reflects on the travails of Jewry. While he makes the occasional reference to Palestinian and Arab suffering, there is no mistaking the same streak of Jewish exceptionalism in the “territory” of suffering that undergirds the thought of the other cited intellectuals. When oppression is constructed as a sacrosanct territory, the implacable specter of Orwell emerges in which a people’s oppression is perceived as being more equal than all other forms of oppression. When a people derives its sense of history, memory, and identity from such an exceptionalist formulation, the articulation of other forms of oppression competing for narrative space is either felt as a threat, an invasion of a sacrosanct territory, or a mockery of one’s specific, unequalled historical particularity. This is the dilemma Edward Said faced as he tried to clear a narrative space for Palestinian suffering in a Euro-American topology of oppression monopolized by narratives of Jewish suffering and persecution, on the one hand, and the Napoleon-is-always-right posture of the American state vis-à-vis the state of Israel, on the other. Given this context, how do you narrate Palestinian suffering without appearing to water down the dominant Jewish narrative of suffering? How can one hold the Israeli state responsible for the massacre of Palestinian women and children in Jenin without encountering hostile counternarratives brandishing Auschwitz as

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a more politically correct site of suffering? How can one approach a territorialized staging of Jewish suffering from a critical viewpoint without appearing to be an anti-Semite? The Nobel laureates Wole Soyinka, José Saramago, and the internationally acclaimed South African writer Breyten Breytenbach had a particularly traumatizing experience with Jewish exceptionalism and its grip on the West. After visiting Palestine in 2002 on behalf of the International Parliament of Writers and at the invitation of Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, these writers released widely publicized witness accounts of the unspeakable horrors of American-funded Israeli state terrorism in the region. They were all roundly condemned and insulted by the Western media, the so-called bastions of free speech.24

Of Exclusion and Exceptionalism in the United States The United States offers a fertile context for analyzing the exclusionary consequences of the territorialization and the particularization of oppression. As we know, American modernity and prosperity derive largely from the dual historical processes of Native American extermination and black slavery. Here, discourse has behaved in such a way as to de-emphasize the linear linkages between the two processes. What results is an Orwellian compartmentalization and hierarchization of the two narratives as competing binaries in the context of the larger American story. In a situation in which Native American absence or insignificance has been discursively normalized, it is not surprising that the black narrative of suffering has become the dominant one, almost synonymous with, and certainly already a metonym for, America’s history of racial oppression. In Genocide against the Indians, George Novack accounts for the silencing of the Native American element in dominant narratives of American history: Historians continue to treat the Indians with the same disdain and lack of comprehension that their forefathers manifested in real life. The pioneers looked upon the Indians as little more than obnoxious obstacles in the path of their advancement who had to be cleared away by any means and at all costs. The English colonists rid their settlements of Indians as ruthlessly as they cleared the lands of trees and wild animals. . . . The contemporary professors do not know how to fit the Indians, and the facts of their dispossession and disappearance, into their schemes of interpretation any more than the pioneers were able to absorb them into bourgeois society. The government’s final solution of the Indian problem has been to segregate the survivors in reservations, an American equivalent of the European concentration camps and the African compounds.25

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Where Native American literatures are recognized at all, they are herded into peripheralized Indian studies or Native studies programs, the academy’s replication of the real life reservation.

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In his book The Comparative Imagination, George Fredrickson buttresses Novack’s thesis on the systematic silencing of the Native American element in American history: “American Indians were so decisively outnumbered, defeated and dispossessed in the course of American history that they have been relegated to the margins of American life and consciousness.”26 The consequence of this process, especially for the elaboration of discourses on America’s history of racism, is predictable. On the meanings attached to the notion of racism in American discourse, Fredrickson surmises: “Often, however, it is a catchall that refers to whatever was thought and done to the disadvantage of African Americans from the sixteenth century to the present.”27 Informed by radically different ideological agendas, black and white narratives of American history partake in the same process of erasing the Native American question from the picture. In white narratives of American history and, indeed, in much of American public discourse, the mythology of “the pioneers” and “the founding fathers,” which refers exclusively to the first European colonists and deliberately excludes Native American ancestrality, often behaves as though it were the very embodiment of America’s foundational moment. The institutional consequences of this sustained process of Native American erasure is most evident in the fact that most American literature programs continue to pretend that Leslie Marmon Silko never wrote novels, and Simon Ortiz and Gabriel Edgar Silex never wrote poetry. Where Native American literatures are recognized at all, they are herded into peripheralized Indian studies or Native studies programs, the academy’s replication of the real–life reservation. While the orchestrated forgetting of the Native American tragedy in bourgeois white narratives of American history can be explained as the politically motivated strategy of uneasy consciences as Novack rightfully asserts, the same phenomenon occurs in black discourses as an expression of the territorialization, exceptionalization, and particularization of black suffering. This explains the overwhelming presence of what I have chosen to call an in medias res approach in African American historical discursivity. A great deal of African American intellection behaves in a way that is hardly conscious of any antecedent process of oppression in the American equation. In such constructions, America’s legacy of racism is traced back to the plantations of the South, and a web of silence is woven around no less sinister precedents. Thus the United States offers a situation in which two memories, black and white, function palimpsestically in relation to Native American memory. Black and white memories reach back to a largely hypostatized foundationalism that rightly belongs to Native American memory. Such in medias res accounts of the history of American

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racism have become so commonplace as to appear normal. In their worst manifestation, they spin exceptionalist accounts that begin history in the middle, silencing the first half and turning the second half into the edifice of History. Here is Manning Marable, an African American intellectual, writing in Race and Class: Any understanding of American society and history must begin with the study of the black American experience in this country. This is because the status and the existence of black people, the quality of our lives and the range of possibilities which we can realistically achieve through our own endeavors, is the essential litmus test for the viability of American democracy. It is the distance between America’s rhetoric versus its reality, between what America says about itself versus what it actually is. African-Americans are at the center of the definition about what it has meant to be “an American.”28

Any understanding of American society and history must begin with the study of the black American experience in this country? Really? Why? Why should any history of the United States not commence with the foundational act of Native American erasure? Everything that can be wrong is obviously wrong with Marable’s palimpsestic approach. But Marable is not alone. In his “Cultural Revolution and the Literary Canon,” Amiri Baraka offers an overview of the cultural, ideological, and intellectual capital with which African Americans have marked a monolithic, whitesupremacist America. That in itself is a worthy venture. But the essay leaves no doubt that in the author’s consciousness, the tensions and contradictions in American culture can only be approached from the perspective of a black-white binary. At the end of the essay, he does finally demonstrate an awareness of other presences in the equation when he avers that “the cultural revolution at the university must see Black Studies, Latino Studies, Woman and Labor Studies as the missing links of progressive education and preparation for a new and more humanized world society.”29 Being invisible, Native Americans are of course left out of Baraka’s cultural revolution. Personally, I have no scholarly use for any history of the Americas that does not begin with the experience of Native Americans. Similarly, I have little use for any account of racism in the United States that does not demonstrate a satisfactory awareness of the fact that that experience did not begin with the black presence in the country. Racism in the United States started against the red, and not the black, skin. The monolithization of the black experience of oppression in America has a lot to do with the fundamental differences between the black and the Native American experience of the gaze of the master. This problem is often occluded in dominant accounts of the history of the United States.

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Of all the peoples that Europe dominated in its planetary rampage, the indigenous peoples of the Americas were the only ones who were considered perhaps too “savage” to even merit the panopticist gaze of the master. The history of European imperialism in Africa, for instance, can hardly be divorced from the relentless imposition of the master’s gaze on the dominated subjects. It was necessary to maintain the “African natives” under constant gaze for effective control. Even in British-controlled Africa, where an indirect-rule system ostensibly allowed the natives to take charge of their own affairs with minimal interference from the oppressing power, the master’s supervisory and regulatory gaze was never far away, as we see in Achebe’s Arrow of God. For the master knew the consequences of allowing the natives to escape the power of his gaze. Those who were able to do so in Kenya and Algeria took to the mountains and the forests, and the master got a pretty bloody nose. While Europe struggled to maintain a visual hold on the African, she had other plans for the Native American: she was determined to erase that subject from the purview of the gaze, hence the holocaust. Those who survived the holocaust still had to be kept away from the master’s visual range, hence the herding into reservations. However, the black slaves in the Americas were not made to undergo the same process of visual erasure. Indeed, the treatment of the black slave was consistent with the visual treatment of the continental African native. The black slave was kept constantly in view, which explains the powerful function of the master’s gaze in black textualities ranging from African American slave narratives to Patrick Chamoiseau’s Le vieil homme et le molosse. Whenever the master’s gaze slackened on the black slaves in the Americas, the results, as we saw in the case of Africa, were the reflex actions of décharge and marronage,30 both praxes of flight to redemptive sites where strategies of resistance could be articulated. Flight led to the liberal, less racist North in the United States, and to the forests and the mountains in the Caribbean. What C. L. R. James offers in The Black Jacobins is the most effective conclusion of the slackening of the master’s gaze on black slaves. Haiti, Kenya, Mozambique, and Angola are therefore products of the historical process of blacks slipping from the master’s gaze to begin wars of liberation. Marronage to the northern United States by slaves who subsequently penned their stories and drew attention to the evils of the American South played a crucial role in the processes that eventually denied American slavery its dubious legitimacy. One crucial fact emerges from these scenarios: at no time did Europe find herself in a position to be able to afford the invisibility of her black victims in Africa and the Americas. The price of such carelessness always proved to be too high. While Europe

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oppressed Africans through their visibility, she oppressed the Native Americans through their invisibility. This is why I find the metaphorical trope of the “invisible man,” now commonly applied to the black experience in the United States, very problematic. The Native American was — and still very much is — America’s truly invisible subject. For the Native American, invisibility is hardly a metaphor. The consequences of Native American invisibility in the narrative territory of American oppression are not far-fetched. Centuries of absence from a nation’s consciousness have translated into a corresponding insignificance of the Native American narrative of oppression in the larger territory of the oppressed minorities of the American nation. Native American struggles for agency and the various praxes evolved for that struggle have also, consequently, tended to be obscured by other contending narratives. The black power and black consciousness movements enacted a much weightier presence in the American and the international scheme of things than the red power movement. The Indian power movement also pales considerably in significance when compared with the African American civil rights movement of the 1960s. In terms of international stature and impact on American consciousness, the Native American struggle in the twentieth century clearly had no answer to W. E. B. DuBois, Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X. In terms of the politics of visibility and rise to dominance within the ranks of the American oppressed, the civil rights movement was black America’s finest hour. From it emerged those processes that would position the African American subject at the center of America’s countercultural and subcultural fabric, the highpoint of which is African American domination of the entertainment and the sports industries. Visible on the plantation because the planter could not afford to let him or her out of sight, visible in the 1950s and 1960s as a civil rights activist, visible since then in the entertainment and sports industries, the African American is a subaltern subject produced by a dialectic of visibility, as opposed to the dialectic of invisibility through which America produced the Native American. The dialectic of visibility, while ensuring that the African American subject is always the most visible of America’s minoritized subjects, has also maintained his or her story as the most visible narrative of American oppression. American oppression becomes a territory invested with the history, the emotions, and the sensibility of the African American, and by the time we arrive at intellectuals like Marable, that territory becomes a site for the articulation of all sorts of unworkable monolithisms and exclusions.

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The Native American was —and still very much is — America’s truly invisible subject.

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Ethnicity, Exceptionalism, and a Failed African Postcolony The exclusions generated by the territorialization of oppression can also provide useful theoretical grids for apprehending much of the ethnically driven sociopolitical problems that have become an almost permanent feature of what the social sciences in Africa now agree is a “failed” postcolonial state. The example of the Igbo narrative in contemporary Nigeria will suffice to buttress this assertion. Two major forms of postcolonial dysfunctionality characterize the nation-space that emerged after political independence was obtained from Britain in October 1960. On the one hand is the neocolonial peonage of the country to the forces of a globalized, monopolist capitalism; on the other is the far more pernicious incidence of internal colonialism spelled out in the form of an ethnicoreligious will to dominance by the numerous ethnic nationalities violently welded together by the British without any consideration for specific historical trajectories. The ethnicoreligious unit — ethnicity and religion can hardly be divorced in the Nigerian context — that controls the all-powerful federal government at the center has almost always behaved as a domestic colonizer in the Nigerian context. The Hausa-Fulani in the Islamic north have been the dominant power holders since independence.31 It is against this backdrop of internal colonialism that Igbo questions can be properly analyzed. The Igbo are the dominant ethnic group in eastern Nigeria, but within the country’s broader geopolitical history, they have been so thoroughly worsted as to constitute a conscience problem for the Nigerian polity. The Igbo have been the victims of repeated genocides in northern Nigeria since the 1960s. And a major consequence of the secessionist attempt they made in 1967 has been an almost permanent exclusion of the Igbo from the commanding heights of the Nigerian political process at the center. This is the precise point at which problems of territorialization and particularization of oppression emerge in a patently Orwellian dimension. Of all the elements — psychic, religious, cultural, political, linguistic — that can be identified as foundational to, and constitutive of, the postcolonial identity of the Igbo subject, the narrative of Igbo oppression and persecution by the Nigerian polity stands out. As a people, the Igbo do not have a singular history, religion, or culture, but Igbo leaders and intellectuals have been able to forge an overarching discourse of identity rooted in a collective sense of persecution and victimage. The exceptionalist imaginary into which he or she is socialized makes it difficult for the contemporary Igbo subject to articulate an identity in which persecution and victimage do not feature as constitutive elements. Here is a press report on a lecture delivered recently by Odumegwu Ojukwu, a respected

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Igbo politician and leader of the secessionist bid, in which he articulates an Igbo identity: Lamenting again the plight of the Igbo in the country’s socio-economic and political setting, the Ikemba Nnewi, Chief Odumegwu Ojukwu yesterday said that thirty-two years after the Civil War, the Igbo still remain an endangered species. Ojukwu spoke in Owerri while delivering a lecture titled, “Nation Building in Nigeria: Lesson of Civil War” during a workshop organized by a German group, the Konrad Adenauer Foundation. He stated that the Igbo have always been victims of any sectarian/ethnic clash in Nigeria, decrying that till now, no Igbo man has been able to take the burden of leading the course of emancipation of his people. . . . Ojukwu added: “When a Yorubaman quarrels with an Igbo, the Igboman gets killed, when the Hausa quarrels with the Yoruba, Igboman is killed, when Igboman quarrels with Hausa, Igboman is killed. It has even reached the stage that the Palestinians will fight with Jews, the Igboman is killed. What are we doing?” he queried. Ojukwu added that Ndigbo were facing a major national threat, stressing that the time has come for an Igbo Presidency. “The question of Nigeria is nationhood. There is no balance in Nigeria if an Igboman does not become president of Nigeria in 2003.”32(my emphasis)

Ojukwu’s discourse, and indeed much of Igbo discourse in the Nigerian context, is energized by the same logic behind Jewish and African American narratives of oppression: the territorialization of oppression and the investment of that space with a people’s history, emotions, and sensitivity; an almost programmatic hostility toward other narratives of oppression within the same space; and, ultimately, an Orwellian hierarchization of competing narratives of oppression. In the portion of his speech that I italicized, it is no accident that Ojukwu carefully avoids to state what happens when an Igbo quarrels with an Ijaw person, an Isoko person, an Itsekiri person, an Ibibio person, or an Ogoni person. For an engagement with the no less significant narratives of the oppression of the several minority ethnic groups who share the southeastern Nigerian space with the dominant Igbo ethnic group would have done serious damage to the exceptionalism of the Igbo narrative of suffering and persecution. It would have undone the thesis of a rigid, never-changing, ontological victimhood that is so crucial to the Igbo narrative. It would have shown that, in certain other contexts, the Igbo can become — and have been — the dominant oppressor group. Although they felt betrayed by the fact that Ken Saro Wiwa opted for the federal side during the Nigerian civil war, Wiwa’s famously frosty relationship with the Igbo can also be viewed from the prism of the threat that his later minority rights crusade posed to the exceptionalist construction of Igbo persecution within the Nigerian polity. Subsumed within

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his greater crusade of challenging the might of an oppressor — the Nigerian federal government and Western oil conglomerates — was another task of drawing attention to the plight of the ethnic minorities of southeastern Nigeria, a space in which the Igbo constitute the dominant group. Wiwa’s crusade, which he successfully internationalized, drew powerful attention to the fact that there were other oppressed peoples besides the Igbo in Nigeria. It drew attention to the fact that Nigeria is made up of so many layers of oppression as to render any rigid, Orwellian particularization thoroughly problematic. And, as I have argued, dominant narratives of oppression, in their most radical, intolerant strands, can hardly live with any perceived violation of the “territorial integrity” of their oppression by other contending narratives. A people’s oppression always exists in its undeniable, concrete materiality. But the discourses generated on account of that oppression behave essentially like the “Africa” of Abioseh Nicol’s famous poem, The Meaning of Africa: We look across a vast continent And blindly call it ours. You are not a country, Africa, You are a concept, Fashioned in our minds, each to each, To hide our separate fears To dream our separate dreams. Only those within you who know Their circumscribed plot, And till it well with steady plough Can from that harvest then look up To the vast blue inside Of the enamelled bowl of sky Which covers you and say “This is my Africa” meaning “I am content and happy. I am fulfilled, within, Without and roundabout.”33

When an African intellectual denies a Québecois the right to articulate a particular form of oppression integral to his own history, when a Jewish, African American, or Igbo intellectual stages discourses of oppression marked by an exceptionalist ideology that turns oppression into a sacrosanct space whose territorial integrity must be protected at the expense of other valid narratives, what we are faced with, beyond the undeniable materiality of the oppressions in question, are discursive behaviors in which oppression,

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like Nicol’s Africa, becomes a “concept, fashioned in our minds, each to each, / to hide our separate fears.” This process, as I have shown, usually eventuates in rigidities, monolithisms, and brazen exclusions.

Conclusion: Globalization, Transnationalism, and the Location of Oppression These scenarios underscore the enormous challenges posed to the new modalities of being in an increasingly internationalized time-space. Much of the strategic thinking in postmodernism and postcolonialism in the last two decades has helped consolidate the idea of the emergence of a multicultural, transnational, globalized, increasingly less patriarchal space. Within this space, boundaries are theorized as rapidly collapsing, staples of identity are constructed as fluid, tentative, and constantly shifting, as opposed to the assumed stabilities of an immediate past. But the complex intermeshing of race, space, geography, and the identitarian sensibilities of the contemporary subaltern subject is a certain pointer to the fact that some of the categories of cultural discourse and theory with which we apprehend the world may be prematurely celebratory. Take, for instance, the transnational space that has been carved out for the phenomenon of globalization. Because we have allowed race and color to be demonized beyond redemption as a category of cultural analysis, we are inundated with politically correct treatises on globalization, which place far too much premium on economics while deemphasizing the spatiochromatic undertones of the phenomenon. This lack of attention to what we call the color of globalization is exactly one missing dimension in Joseph Stiglitz’s illuminating perspectives in his Globalization and Its Discontents. There exists a certain chromatic pattern to those geospaces at the receiving end of the wrongheaded policies of the global financial institutions Stiglitz so effectively critiques: nonwhite, non-Western geospaces of the global South. If chromatism is absent from Stiglitz’s effort, the point must be made that he does not pretend that the oppression he decries lacks an identifiable supervising center: oppression has a source and location in Stiglitz’s work. The same can hardly be said for Michael Hardt’s and Antonio Negri’s analysis of the effects of global triumphalist capitalism in Empire. Their largely colorless Empire is a nebulous behemoth that moves freely in transnationalized, global spaces without an identifiable supervising center. It remains to be seen how this position could be valid from the perspective of the Iraqi victim of globalization.

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From the mission civilisatrice (“take civilization to the savages”) of British colonialism, to the mission libératrice (“take freedom to the terrorists”) of American imperialism, this subaltern subject has always been at the receiving end of the antics of a chromatized Euro-American center. Today, that subject knows that an American administrator occupies one of Saddam Hussein’s palaces, behaving like the district officers of British colonialism, and sees WASP executives of Halliburton and other agents of American commercial “contractocracy” on ground to “rebuild” Iraq and secure her entry into the postmodernity of the market, just like British colonial trading companies behaved in Africa and Asia. Similarly, the frequent seizures of Western expatriate employees of Shell and ChevronTexaco as hostages by host communities in Nigeria’s oil-producing regions in response to the environmental insensitivity of those oil multinationals attests to a certain subaltern consciousness of the fact that globalization is a form of oppression ensconced within the axiomatics of chromatism, space, and territory. Consequently, what is happening in “postcolonial” Iraq and Nigeria — and in much of the global South — is a situation in which structures of political, economic, and cultural domination and exploitation are being sustained by Euro-America in the name of globalization and the market. And because Euro-America almost always self-defines as white and Western and is, consequently, inscribed in those terms in the consciousness and discourses of its others in the global South, it follows that any discursive term(s) that speaks to the victimhood of those others will always carry a chromatic-territorial baggage. This explains why postcolonial and cultural theory’s attempt to grapple with the status of the victims of imperialism in places like Québec and Ireland will, perhaps, always meet with the exceptionalist unease of subjects in parts of the global South where discourses and knowledge production still operate largely from three basic assumptions: (1) the forms of neocolonial oppression that we loosely refer to as globalization or transnationalism have a clearly identifiable center in EuroAmerica; (2) those forms of oppression are not dechromatized: they are believed to be white; and (3) they speak an identifiable language: English.

Postscript As I was correcting the final proofs of this essay, my copy of Ward Churchill’s new book, Acts of Rebellion (2003), came to hand. In his introduction, “Notes on the Interaction of History and Justice,” Churchill offers this powerful statement: “It might indeed be argued that Euroamerica’s attitude towards and treatment of the peoples indigenous to the

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‘homeland’ it has seized for itself has been in many aspects definitive of those it has accorded all Others, including not least — and in some cases increasingly — certain sectors of its own nominal racial/ethnic constituency. The postinvasion history of Native America thus provides the lens through which all of American history must be examined if it is to be in any sense genuinely understood.” This speaks to an extraordinary convergence of opinions between Churchill and me in terms of my take on Manning Marable’s rendering of U.S. history.

Notes 1. I borrow the phrase from the title of Chinweizu’s book The West and the Rest of Us (New York: Vintage, 1975). Some other texts dealing with the same theme include Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1974); Aimé Césaire’s Discours sur le colonialisme (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1955); Eduardo Galeano’s The Open Veins of Latin America (New York: Monthly Review, 1973); George Novack’s Genocide against the Indians (New York: Pathfinder, 1970); and even Bartolomé de Las Casas’s A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies (London: Penguin, 1992). 2. The uses I will make of “exceptionalism” in this essay owe a lot to Joshua Lund’s theorization of the term with regard to the Latin American context in a seminal essay, “Barbarian Theorizing and Latin American Exceptionalism,” Cultural Critique 47 (winter 2001): 54 – 90. Lund defines his project thus: “I aim to signal the ways in which exceptionalism as a mode of Latin American singularity — while ultimately a critical endeavor — tends to overlook its own symptomatic relationship with Eurocentrism, and thereby succumbs to the same problems that it identifies in Eurocentric discourse” (54). I share Lund’s idea that exceptionalism is a mode of self-fashioning based on the consciousness of one’s difference vis-à-vis the West. However, I move beyond Lund’s metatheoretical preoccupations to explore the imbrications of exceptionalism with race and territory. Exceptionalism also has its uses in dominant Eurocentric discourses. In this context, it refers to the dominant group’s articulation of an identity based on its difference, distinctness from, and, most important, assumed superiority to its others. For an account of dominant American exceptionalism, see chapter 3 of George Fredrickson’s Comparative Imagination: On the History of Racism, Nationalism, and Social Movements (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 3. See, for instance, the essays “Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies, and Community,” “The Politics of Knowledge,” and “History, Literature, and Geography,” in Edward Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002). 4. Shortly after classes began, a French department seminar on Lacan, originally scheduled to be delivered in French, was changed to English for two reasons: (1) students from the comparative literature program and the department of English, who had no knowledge of French, registered for it; (2) since the registered Québecois students were all bilingual in French and English, the professor in charge felt they would understand the necessity of delivering the seminar in

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English. She was sadly mistaken. The Québecois students interpreted it as yet another act of Anglo-Canadian oppression and decided to withdraw from the seminar en masse. Naturally, they expected me to join the protest withdrawal. I didn’t, and some of them wasted no time in telling me they felt betrayed by my action. Again, they expected a better understanding of the situation of the colonized from me. 5. If I have learned one thing from my interactions with fellow continental Africans in France, Britain, Canada, and the United States over the years, it is that in interlocutory scenarios with Westerners, we always anticipate questions and comments that would reinforce our convictions on the West’s monumental ignorance of Africa. Although this attitude essentializes and stereotypes the Western subject as always ignorant of Africa, the almost compulsive negative, neoTarzanist representations of Africa in the West would cast it within the justificatory dialectics of Sartrean antiracist racism. 6. See Albert Memmi, Portrait du colonisé (Montreal: L’Etincelle, 1972). 7. Admittedly, postcolonial studies has been able to problematize the status of white subjects in former European settler colonies like Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States. There has also been a resurgence of postcolonial studies on the Irish condition. The case of Northern Ireland is particularly instructive. That space presents all the classic features we have come to identify with the post–slave trade colonial possessions of Western European powers in Africa and Asia, chief among which are economic exploitation by a dominating power, demeaning forms of linguistic and cultural imposition, and, most important, lack of political sovereignty. These elements often inform the very rich postcolonial scholarship in which the Irish figure as colonized subjects. Yet reading the historical and theoretical scholarship of African and Indian thinkers in the last three decades, there are always effects of discourse pointing to the underlying fact that only the non-Western, nonwhite victims of Europe can truly claim the highly politicized status of the colonized. One hardly needs to look beyond the opening sentence of Chinweizu’s West and the Rest of Us to buttress this assertion. When two subjects from Belfast and Soweto are subsumed within the category of the colonized, there is always that assumed added quality/baggage to the colonized status of the Sowetan. Consequently, race is what transforms the colonized into a contentious and contested discursive category. 8. Cholula, Wounded Knee, Thiaroye, Dimbokro, Sharpeville: all theaters of Europe’s periodic bloody “pacification” of “natives” in the Americas and Africa. 9. Achille Mbembe, “African Modes of Self Writing,” Public Culture 14.1 (2002): 240 – 42. 10. See Narasingha P. Sil’s analysis of the failure of Nigerian socialism in his essay, “Nigerian Intellectuals and Socialism: Retrospect and Prospect,” Journal of Modern African Studies 31.3 (September 1993): 361– 85. The essay offers a magisterial brush of the history of Nigerian socialist discourses from the early unionized protests against the colonial government to the explosion of a socialist trend in Nigerian literatures. Socialism never had a chance in Nigeria because, in Sil’s opinion, there was always the easy recourse to jingoistic revolutionary rhetoric at the expense of praxis. 11. Neil Smith, “Geography, Empire, and Social Theory,” Progress in Human Geography 18.4 (1994): 493.

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12. Ella Shohat, “Imaging Terra Incognita: The Disciplinary Gaze of Empire,” Public Culture 3.2 (spring 1991): 45. See also Harry Garuba’s essay, “Mapping the Land/Body/Subject: Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies in African Narrative,” Alternation 9.1 (2002): 87–116. 13. The last stanza of David Rubadiri’s famous poem, “Stanley Meets Mutesa,” is worth quoting in full to underscore how the poet achieves one of the most gripping accounts of the encounter between Africa and Europe: The gate of reeds is flung open / There is silence / But only a moment’s silence / A silence of assessment. / The tall black king steps forward, / He towers over the thin bearded white man, / Then grabbing his lean white hand / Manages to whisper / “Mtu mweupe karibu” / White man you are welcome. / The gate of polished reed closes behind them / And the West is let in. For the full poem, see Poems from Black Africa, ed. Langston Hughes (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963): 44 – 46. 14. For a description of the encounter between Cortés and Montezuma, see Bartolomé de Las Casas, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies. 15. For a fuller discussion of the relationship of whiteness to its constructed others, see Manthia Diawara’s essay “Englishness and Blackness: Cricket As Discourse on Colonialism,” Callaloo 13.4 (autumn 1990): 830 – 44. 16. See his essay, “Borders and Bridges: Seeking Connections between Things,” in The Pre-Occupation of Postcolonial Studies, ed. Fawzia Afzal-Khan and Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 119 – 25. 17. I owe the expression to Pierre Nora. See his essay, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” Representations 26 (spring 1989): 7– 24. 18. Walter Benn Michaels, “Race into Culture: A Critical Genealogy of Cultural Identity,” Critical Inquiry 18 (summer 1992): 82. 19. Frantz Fanon, Pour la révolution africaine (Paris: Maspero, 1969), 13; my translation. 20. The three poems are published in David Diop’s only volume of poetry, Coups de pilon, which has remained one of the most powerful testaments of the negritude movement. 21. Paul Gilroy, Against Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 38, 24. 22. Ibid., 24. 23. I am thinking of his Réflexions sur la question juive (Paris: P. Morihien, 1946). See also Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (San Diego: Harcourt, 1969). 24. For a detailed account of this incident, see Wole Soyinka’s essay, “Project Nationhood: The Chosen against All Others,” Daily Independent Online, 13 March 2003. 25. George Novack, Genocide against the Indians (New York: Pathfinder, 1970), 9. 26. George Fredrickson, The Comparative Imagination: On the History of Racism, Nationalism, and Social Movements (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 39. 27. Ibid., 77. 28. Manning Marable, “Rethinking Black Liberation: Towards a New Protest Paradigm,” Race and Class 38.4 (1997): 1– 2.

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29. Amiri Baraka, “Cultural Revolution and the Literary Canon,” Callaloo 14.1 (winter 1991): 156. 30. Chamoiseau’s novel, Le vieil homme et le molosse, offers the most subliminal exploration of the concept of décharge that often eventuated in marronage during the period of plantation slavery. Décharge, that trance-like, psychic anger, that inexplicable spasm that grips the slave and makes him want to just go. Even the master’s giant dog, set after the old slave who escaped to the forest, seemed to have understood the necessity for the slave’s flight. The ultimate encounter between the master’s beast and the slave in the forest represents one of the most captivating moments of pathetic fallacy in fiction. The dog that was expected to tear the old slave to pieces took one look at the man and understood. 31. The fact that a Yoruba man from the southwest is now president of Nigeria has not affected the stranglehold of the northern Hausa-Fulani oligarchy on the reins of power at the center. 32. The Guardian of Lagos, www.ngrguardiannews.com, accessed 15 December 2002. 33. For a full text of the poem, see Poems from Black Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963), 40 – 43.

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Reverse Postcoloniality

The British Empire has had a pretty lousy press from a generation of “postcolonial” historians anachronistically affronted by its racism. But the reality is that the British were significantly more successful at establishing market economies, the rule of law and the transition to representative government than the majority of postcolonial governments have been. The policy “mix” favored by Victorian imperialists reads like something just published by the International Monetary Fund, if not the World Bank: free trade, balanced budgets, sound money, the common law, incorrupt administration and investment in infrastructure financed by international loans. These are precisely the things Iraq needs right now. If the scary sounding “American Empire” can deliver them, then I am all for it. — Niall Ferguson, New York Times Magazine We endorse the recent Pentagon Defense Planning Guidance’s blueprints for maintaining U.S. preeminence, precluding the rise of a great power rival and shaping the international security order in line with American principles and interests. — Project for a New American Century Modernization will create a new post-colonial relationship between the northern and southern halves of the Free World. . . . As the colonial ties are liquidated, new and most constructive relationships can be built. . . . a new partnership among free men — rich and poor alike. —Walter Rostow, National Security memorandum to Theodore Sorenson In 1993 Hussein was photographed with his gay lover. The daring dictator is famous for frequenting area gay bars and calling gay escort services. But this queer lifestyle may be taking its toll on the wacky Iraqi — his last few boyfriends have reportedly died of AIDS, and now there is speculation that Saddam may have contracted the deadly virus himself. —Weekly World News

Preempting Postcolonial Growth Following on the boot heels of the privatization and deregulation agenda of neoliberal discipline, the last two decades have witnessed shrinking foreign-aid portfolios of the G-7, omnipresent signs of dramatically Social Text 78, Vol. 22, No. 1, Spring 2004. Copyright © 2004 by Duke University Press.

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increased poverty and infrastructure failure in the South, and huge transfers of wealth from the South to the North in the form of debt repayment and repackaging — worth $1.345 trillion in the 1980s alone (George 1992).1 Responding to this and the intensified resistance to what has been termed the “Washington Consensus” (WC), on 8 September 2000 U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan called for a Financing for Development (FfD) conference scheduled for March 2002 in Monterrey, Mexico. Meant to address the issues raised in the Millennium Declaration against global poverty as they applied to economic development, Monterrey partly fell sway to pressure from two agencies suffering massive legitimation crises — the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Despite pressure from large NGOs to limit the role of the WTO and the IMF, the U.N. reiterated that the raison d’être of the FfD was to forge tighter alliances among states, business, and global civil society in order to improve governance in the world economy. From the beginning, Annan was adamant that new partnerships could not be reached without including all relevant “stakeholders,” including the Bretton Woods agencies and the WTO. Approximately seven hundred Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) who attended the “Foro Global” (held just prior to and in preparation for the FfD) collectively denounced the official Monterrey report, as “it failed to offer new mechanisms to achieve the Millennium Development goals.”2 The consensus at the Foro Global was that the U.N. document was merely a repackaging of the malodorous WC (Washington Consensus), marked by a constellation of policy dicta encouraging the dependence of developing nations on foreign investment, export-led growth, and massive government reductions in spending for infrastructure, health, and education. The CSOs expressed their suspicion of trade and financial liberalization forced on developing nations and “emerging markets,” given the present horizon delimited by increasing protectionism (by the IMF’s own admission, agricultural subsidies in the North in 2001 cashed out to $300 billion, six times the amount spent on development aid to the South) and growing financial volatility. In fact, these policies are construed by many as the cause of poverty and political upheaval in the South.3 In other words, the U.N. report was a recipe for stagnation, not policy that would lead to sustainable development and growth. Alas, weren’t these critiques of what the bourgeois press in the North unanimously judged a good-faith attempt by the U.N. to deal with global poverty simply more of the same old whining and whimpering from the so-called anti-globalization movement? Let’s play some of the Monterrey Consensus and see. Although the official summary of the FfD conference — called simply the Monterrey Consensus (United Nations 2002) — attempted some dam-

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age control, the twenty-page document still reads in many places like the notorious Bush doctrine that would follow it by six months. The fifth line of the Monterrey Consensus puts the theme of the FfD in bold by stating: “Mobilizing and increasing the effective use of financial resources . . . will be the first step to ensuring that the twenty-first century becomes the century of development for all” (2). The next pledge on the first page sets up the series of proposals that follow in the rest of the document: “We commit ourselves to mobilizing domestic resources, attracting international flows, promoting international trade as an engine for development . . . and enhancing the coherence and consistency of the international monetary, financial and trading systems” (ibid.). This is tantamount to saying that the international capitalist regime is not structurally flawed in the least, its coherence and consistency need only be “enhanced,” and its sound doctrines (developing countries are natural importers of capital from the North; comparative advantage in the form of low-cost exports from the South to the North is the tried-and-true method for growth; etc.) religiously remembered and rehearsed. The U.N. conveniently forecloses on the increasing awareness that, instead of firing the “engines of development” and growth in the South, these “sound doctrines” continue to underwrite the development of uneven overdevelopment of the North, the planet-threatening production of overproduction, and structural emiseration of the South.4 The policy center of the Monterrey Consensus begins on the second page with a heading called “Leading Actions”; the first category is called “Mobilizing international resources of development.” The first lines in the section read: “Private international capital flows, particularly foreign direct investment, along with international financial stability, are vital to national and international development efforts. . . . A central challenge, therefore, is to create the necessary domestic and international conditions to facilitate direct investment flows” (5). Because private international capital is “vital” in the new century, the assumed role for the U.N. is to advise countries in the South on how to become as attractive as possible to outside investment. Accordingly, the U.N.’s advice is: “To attract and enhance inflows of productive capital, countries need to continue their efforts to achieve a transparent, stable and predictable investment climate, with proper contract enforcement and respect for property rights, embedded in sound macroeconomic policies and institutions that allow businesses, both domestic and international, to operate efficiently and profitably” (5 – 6). After this section calling for the South to make themselves up as provocatively as possible for international financiers through creating a better “investment climate” (decode the contents of this cosmetic kit as: disci-

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Decode the contents of this cosmetic kit as: disciplining labor, reducing taxes on multinationals even further, and eliminating environmental protections

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plining labor, reducing taxes on multinationals even further, and eliminating environmental protections), the next major section discusses liberalizing international trade. A universal, rule-based, open, non-discriminatory and equitable multilateral trading system, as well as meaningful trade liberalization, can substantially stimulate development worldwide. . . . In that regard we reaffirm our commitment to trade liberalization and to ensure that trade plays its full part in promoting economic growth, employment and development for all. We thus welcome the decisions of the WTO to place the needs and interests of developing countries at the heart of its work program. (7)

After this shameless pitch for the WTO, the final sections address the need for countries in the North to offer more Overseas Development Assistance (ODA), but while doing so the Monterrey Consensus warns countries in the South to keep paying back those debts to banks in the North. “Sustainable debt financing is an important element for mobilizing resources for public and private investment” (11). This seems to be a kind of threat not to default on loans. If countries do, the U.N. has gone on record warning that it will be difficult to “attract” more portfolio investments and Direct Foreign Investment (DFI). For anyone who would see the U.N. as an anti-U.S. organization that betrayed the United States and Britain by refusing to give carte blanche to their war machines, the Monterrey Consensus shows just how much the U.N. is beholden to global capitalist governance in the North. According to Focus on the Global South (2002), the FfD proved that “the UN is weak and compromised and is now signing off on a political document which delivers nothing on debt, nothing on redistribution and reparations, nothing on the regulation of markets and corporations and nothing for the global South.” Similar to what the political economist Susanne Soederberg (2002) has uncovered in the recently concocted New International Financial Architecture, the Monterrey Consensus reinforces and relegitimates the disciplinary regime of transnational capital, in particular its capacity for capital flight or investment strikes if domestic conditions in the South are “unattractive.” Therefore, from the perspective of corporate neoliberalism and its U.N. ciphers, the only plausible solution to the problem of increasing poverty and diminishing resources in the South is to insist that developing countries continue to adhere to neoliberal dogma and open up their markets even further to the exigencies of the transnational capitals. Fundamentally, Monterrey seems to be demanding that the South repeat the steps that led to the crisis in the first place; the crisis that initialized the

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rollback and reversal of certain postcolonial developmental gains won during the 1960s and 1970s. Reframed along these contours, the “policy mix” in the Monterrey Consensus (the same one celebrated by the embedded academic and reverse postcolonialist Niall Ferguson in the first epigraph) should be seen as structurally preventing growth in the South and preempting postcolonial development. “Reverse postcoloniality” is what I call this revocation of the post – World War II promise of the North to assist in the development of the former colonies of the South and the concomitant rollback of the global advances of postcolonial hybrid politicocultural forms.5 This essay identifies three discrete, but isomorphic instances of this reverse postcoloniality: the first (“Reverse Postcoloniality I”), as I’ve just described, is the apparent victory of global neoliberal economic governance in the form of the Washington Consensus; second (RP II) is the inscription and prescription of dehybridization and ethnocultural cleansing in the U.S. supermarket tabloids; and third (RP III) is the racialized rejection of recombinant hybridity and métissage in the “embedded academic” discourse of professors like Samuel Huntington and Francis Fukuyama. What did the world look like before Reverse Postcoloniality I and economic and military preemption? What kind of capitalist order operated when a more substantial understanding of “development” of the South was on the agenda? The post–World War II economic order was consolidated at Bretton Woods in 1944 through the birth of its twins, the World Bank and the IMF. For some three decades or so the capitalist regime was regulated by fundamental rules: fixed exchange rates, commitments to free currency convertibility for trade (but not capital) account transactions, and extended leniency toward noncompliant countries in practice. The widespread adoption of the Keynesian paradigm (in the South it was called the “developmental state”) was designed to support growth through enhanced liquidity and stability, therefore obviating the calls for global social revolution. The effects of this regime (called “growth,” “Fordist,” and “peripheral Fordist” by Regulation School Marxism)6 certainly produced massive structural dissymmetry and gave us the paradigms of dependency theory and world systems theory. But what has come after it makes this period seem downright social-democratic. It’s indisputable that the end of formal colonialism saw trade and capital largely “mimicking” previous colonial structures (South Asia therefore relinking with the U.K.; Latin America with the United States; and later, East and Southeast Asia with Japan), and colonial-like profits continued in the resource sectors, and technological rents resulting from the shift to the production of producer goods in the North led to neocolonial depen-

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On 1 May 1974 the General Assembly of the U.N. passed two resolutions challenging the established economic power of the North: 3201 (S-VI) and 3202 (S-VI).

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dency. However, there were also situations where postcolonial “development” happened differentially in the South during this old “American century.” As Samir Amin explains: The fact remains that from 1955 to 1975, UN institutions carried out essential political and ideological support for the Bandung Project of Third World countries. The role of the Economic Commission on Latin America (ECLA) and Raul Prebisch, a pioneer of what would eventually become the ideology of development, and the part played by the UN Conference for Trade Development (UNCTAD) — an important contributor to the crystallization of the NIEO project proposed by the Third World in 1975— were not negligible. The initiatives of those institutions probably did not have much influence on the policies of the World Bank, but on the other hand they did have an obvious effect on the UN Development Program (UNDP) and the specialized institutions in their heyday. (1997, 23)

Furthermore, as Akhil Gupta (1998) points out import-substitution policies in the South often contravened the centers of capitalist production and control in the North, which at times played to the South’s advantage. How this played out differed greatly from region to region, but to use the problematic index of GDP, in Syria, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia it averaged out at 6 to 7 percent during the period 1960 – 80 and rose 5 percent per year in Latin America during the same period. Africa’s GDP as a continent climbed 4 percent in the two decades of the 1960s and 1970s, but in the sub-Saharan area it was considerably lower, at 1 to 1.5 percent. But again, this should be contrasted against negative growth in much of Africa during the period of what I’m calling reverse postcoloniality in the 1980s and 1990s, and lots of negative growth in Latin America during the “lost decade” of the 1980s.7 In the three decades beginning in 1950 and ending in 1980, the South’s average rate of GDP was not only higher than the rate in the North during the same period but also higher than the North’s during their comparable early stages of development (South Commission 1990, 32). It’s almost impossible to conceive of this now, but on 1 May 1974 the General Assembly of the U.N. passed two resolutions challenging the established economic power of the North: 3201 (S-VI) and 3202 (S-VI), the Declaration and the Program of Action for the establishment of a New International Economic Order (NIEO). This was followed on 12 December by the passage of the Charter of Economic Rights and Duties of States. The NIEO project should be seen as a watershed moment for postcolonial development. These resolutions were hopeful for the future of growth in the South and provided a basic framework for how that must materialize. The first element was the insistence that the unequal global

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distribution of wealth must be rectified immediately. Resolution 3201 states that this can take place only with “full participation of lesser developed countries in global economic decision making” and by control over multinationals. Resolution 3202 argues that efforts should be made to promote collective self-reliance by encouraging the formation of regional markets within the Third World. In other words, partial delinking. By the early 1970s the Third World countries constituted the majority vote in the U.N. General Assembly and, through the impetus of Bandung and the Group of 77, found a common purpose and solidarity enabling them to override First World opposition to the NIEO and the Charter of Economic Rights and Duties of States, which passed by a vote of 120 to 6 (Sauvant and Hasenpflug 1977, 120). Later in 1974, John A. Scali, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., sharply assailed this “tyranny of the majority” (Sauvant and Hasenpflug), warning of impending global chaos if concrete steps weren’t taken to roll back these threatening platforms. Scali’s reaction is symptomatic of the organized backlash that would follow almost immediately, one of the nodal points of reverse postcoloniality. Now, thinking about this huge historical gap between the U.N. of the Monterrey Consensus and the NIEO U.N., let’s fast-forward six months from Monterrey to the publication of the “National Security Strategy of the United States of America,” a.k.a. the Bush doctrine. In a speech at the West Point commencement four months after the Monterrey FfD, in June 2002, Bush declared, “America has, and intends to keep, military strengths beyond challenge, thereby making the destabilizing arms races of other eras pointless, limiting rivalries.” The open threat to any groups or countries that dare challenge the geopolitical stasis carries over directly into the Bush doctrine. This is a formal declaration of U.S. imperialism, threatening rivals, insisting that U.S. military strength will remain unchallenged into the foreseeable future, and warning against regional and global destabilizations, all of which support the strong commitment toward maintaining the status quo that we saw in the Monterrey Consensus. (Here Bush appears to be channeling some of the positions of the powerful lobbying group Project for a New American Century cited in my second epigraph and whose all-male members include Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz.) What’s the best way to guarantee the continuation of that status quo? The answer given in Monterrey was to expand and intensify the neoliberal revolution begun back in the 1970s. With a rhetoric seemingly lifted from the pages of Monterrey Consensus the Bush doctrine pooh-poohs the need for development aid and assistance to the South.“Trade and investment are the real engines of economic growth. Even if government aid increases, most money for development must come from trade, domestic capital,

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and foreign investment. An effective strategy must try to expand these flows. . . . Free markets and free trade are key priorities of our national security strategy” (White House 2002, 22). Free trade, free markets; free trade, free markets — the mantra is repeated over and over, soliciting a religious recitation. But what about acknowledging the free association and free movement of deracinated peoples and the exchanging, crosshatching, and hybridizing of ideas and bodies; until fairly recently the basic, albeit mystifying, melting pot postulate of “American ideology”? But let’s get “real”: The only entities with mobility and the capacity to transcend Gemeinschaft place in this cynically conservative worldview are the Pentagon and commodities, whose cadaverous exchange is raised to a “moral principle.” The Bush doctrine states, “The concept of ‘free trade’ arose as a moral principle even before it became a pillar of economics. If you can make something that others value, you should be able to sell it to them. If others make something that you value, you should be able to buy it. This is real freedom, the freedom for a person — or a nation — to make a living.” (18) The “real freedom” of cold market exchange is so central to this vision that it warns countries against considering different accumulation regimes, measures that would terrorize this one, true freedom. The Bush doctrine warns that it will press other countries to “adopt lower marginal tax rates” and actively encourage “pro-growth legal and regulatory [sic] to encourage business investment, innovation, and entrepreneurial activity” (17). Apparently, U.S. national security depends on tax cuts for the rich and environmental degradation. So here we have one way to maintain the continuation of the Washington Consensus: guarantee that finance and commodity capital can move anywhere, anytime. Marx (1978) sent out a warning signal long ago that when the value form is globalized in this way, “commodities become citizens of the world,”8 and only they will have passports and valid visas. This preempting of development in the South to further accumulation in the North will be secured by the unprecedented strength of a military that must be allowed the “freedom” to guarantee the stability and regulation of markets and resource areas. But the second way to preserve the World Order of the foul WC (Washington Consensus) is through guaranteeing that the primordial right to map that world will belong exclusively to the United States; that is, preemptive first strike capability and caprice. Similar to what we saw hinted at in Monterrey, the Bush doctrine warns any state (both advanced industrial or “developing”) or political group not even to think about redressing the awesome structural imbalances in the global distribution of wealth and resources. A tropology of cultural-national exceptionalism that organizes the first (“distinctly American internation-

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alism”) and last page (“our unique responsibilities”) of the Bush doctrine and appears centrally throughout the document is all that’s required to authorize this horrific vision.

The Tabloids of Civilizations The U.S. supermarket tabloid the Globe’s 2 October 2001 issue initialized a blitz of articles about the sex-gendered deviancy of the United States’ demons of the moment: Osama bin Laden, Mohammed Atta, and other al-Qaeda members.9 The cover screamed out: “Wanted: Bin Laden. Inside his Sick, Twisted World.” Inside were juicy details of deviancy thereby, within the reproduction of the fundamentalist, compulsory heterosexuality of the tabloids, naturalizing the wrath of the U.S. war machine. Among the stories included was one on the “central al Queada [sic] leader,” whose purported “cultural” background is mustered to support this psychological profile and profiling: “What emerges is a startling picture of a mentally ill, drug-addicted fanatic with an inner rage caused by sexual inadequacy” (8). That conclusion is buttressed by the morality play reiterated across a variety of media “brows” from before and after 9/11 warning against the fusion and eroticocultural blending of what are assumed to be nonhybrid and ontologized differences. In the tabloid case, the raciologized10 tragedy (cum sublated bedroom farce) of interracial sex features bin Laden as the rich Saudi club kid chasing white women in late-1970s, cocaine-infested, party-filled Beirut. The white woman supplying the information for this story had purportedly been pursued and “hunted” by the young Saudi until she finally agreed to go out with him. The navel of the narrative is located in a first-class hotel they retired to for sex after one of these dates. According to the story, when they began to disrobe the woman burst out laughing as soon as she caught a glimpse of bin Laden’s “underdeveloped sexual organs” (Globe 2001, 8). This humiliating encounter, provided by CIA sources,11 is offered as reason enough for the Saudi man’s irrational rage at the United States. Here, it’s perhaps too easy to see how the raciologized and sex-gendered elements of the ideological fantasy of North American media work to displace domestic phobias onto “foreign” ones: recreational drug use and interracial sex. But even more than “mere” ideology where, to paraphrase the old Marxist saw, the ruling fantasies are the fantasies of the ruling class, the omnipresence of the CIA in these tabloid pages gives these fantasemes — the microelements of the fantasies — a striking instrumentality. Instrumentality? If you were thinking at all about the supermarket

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tabloids in ways other than elitist dismissal, you may have configured them at some point as heteroglossic playgrounds of the Bahktinian carnivalesque, where popular pleasures are encoded and incipient resistance to hegemonic bourgeois form and content are celebrated. For the most part, what could be called “vulgar cultural studies” has dominated the too-few studies and has limited a general analytic of the supermarket tabloids to themes of formal subversion and celebrations of “the popular.” 12 I don’t want to be a theory unilateralist in dismissing this reading strategy, but like other activist critics and scholars supporting a certain politics of the popular, it’s been frustrating to witness how popular forms have been painlessly sutured to a reactionary geopolitical politics in the present conjuncture. Although we “know” that there’s surplus and deferral in these texts, it seems urgent to mark the seemingly instrumental suturing of the popular to globopathic and globocidal U.S. geopolitics. This essay fleshes out some of the operations of this suturing of the popular. However, part of the challenge for thinking the present moment as its common sense is being produced is to try to decode how the popular lines up in what Antonio Gramsci called the “moving equilibrium” of hegemony with other levels of political-economic discourse. Drawing on reading protocols suggested by Gayatri Spivak,13 I propose to read economic policy generated at the U.N. and World Bank (Reverse Postcoloniality I) along with geopolitical plans and projects uttered in the disciplines of political science and international relations (RP III) together with tropes like these in the supermarket tabloids (RP II) as partners in producing reverse postcolonial common sense around notions of race, sexuality, property, and, of course, “culture.” Stuart Hall’s frequently invoked and astute download of Gramsci’s notion of hegemony holds that it operates in contradictory ways on, against, and through popular media. Although Hall’s writings could easily be mobilized to support what I’ll do here, a different though compatible way to think about hegemony in another philosophical register would be the deployment of “isomorphy” in Deleuze and Guattari’s Milles Plateaux.14 Isomorphy is configured there as an overarching “diagram” whose logic is to establish its own reproduction in a number of disparate sites. They insist that isomorphy does not necessarily imply homogeneity but operates on, over, and through a real diversity of formations (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 464). Although there are “relative autonomies” and significant differences between this or that tabloid text, the Bush doctrine, the policy of global economic elites vis-à-vis development, and Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations, I am arguing that they are isomorphic at this conjuncture.15 The imperative subtending the story of bin Laden and the white

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woman — that difference should not intermix and hybridize but should be locked down in a holding cell and quarantined — was repeated over and over after 9/11. For example, the origin myth of John Walker Lind becoming an “American Taliban” was repeatedly given as his suburban hip hop identity, exacerbated by an exposure to black literary-historical classics like the Autobiography of Malcolm X. As Paul Gilroy argued, the mainstream media constantly construed Walker Lind’s proximity to blackness as the monocause for his joining the Taliban. Here the media coded hip hop in particular and blackness in general as a dreaded contagion, one best quarantined from whiteness (Gilroy 2002). Moreover, the contagion of black culture was compounded by what was disdainfully called the “politically correct high school curriculum” (implicitly urging its immediate substitution by a patriotically correct curriculum) in the San Francisco/Bay Area suburb of Marin County, where innocent white kids like Walker Lind were dangerously exposed to world religions like Buddhism and Taoism and, occasionally, to postcolonial critiques of mono- and multiculturalism. Likewise, in the other scene of Muslim boundary transgression, the ill-advised and underprepared immersion in “Western secular society” was deployed repeatedly as the explanandum for Mohammed Atta and the other hijackers’ reactions and overreactions. In other words, if ontologized cultures and racialized ethnicities just scurried back to where they came from and kept properly to themselves — the shared moral lesson of Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations and the Bush doctrine alike — then these problems arising from immoral hybridization and métissage interruptus could be avoided. For twenty years or so postcolonial cultural studies has developed a rich analytics of hybridity, diaspora, and métissage. This analytics had been impelled to a significant degree through negotiating what Aijaz Ahmad (1992) calls the historical “redoubled vacuum,” which was produced initially by the defeat of European colonialism by socialist decolonization movements, and then by the limitations of postindependence cultural nationalism. It’s not surprising then that the ethicopolitical concerns of postcolonial cultural studies have arisen as a historical critique and a futural semiotics attempting a leap beyond the redoubled vacuum. Against both the historical memory of a violent and forced assimilation to British and French colonialism and against the homogenizing centrifuges of Third World nationalism,16 much of postcolonial cultural studies has foregrounded hybridity and difference. These last are often claimed to have been latent within colonialism itself and, with the coming of postcoloniality, are provided with a heightened salience. As to the de rigueur charge from many critics that capital’s inherent tendency toward globalization has outflanked this critique and vampirized postcolonial hybridity, my response

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is that when you look at specific local and regional instances, this charge — expressed most recently in Hardt and Negri’s Empire— is rarely plausible. In fact, my argument here runs directly against that dismissal of postcolonial cultural studies in insisting that there’s been for some time a reactive, though emergent, moment in global governance of forced dehybridization and homogenization, of the fortressing of parts of the North, and a tendency in global capital toward what Samir Amin (1997) calls exclusion and “Fourth Worldization” of regions in the South.17 Reactionary reverse postcoloniality has profiled its various postcolonial enemies in the global form of the Bandung successes at the U.N. in the 1970s, in the recent regional forms of incipient deglobalization, and in the EuroAmerican “culture wars.” As my methodological wager is to locate the reverse postcolonial isomorph of dehybridization, balkanization, and homogenization across several sites, I’m calling this second tabloidized mode “Reverse Postcoloniality II.”18 The emergence of Reverse Postcoloniality II has one of its nodal points in mid-Reaganism where the abjection of improper hybridization in the form and figure of Michael Jackson was a staple of the supermarket tabloids. In Jackson and later in the coding of the biracial couple O. J. Simpson and his ex-wife Nicole (Star 1994), the narrative logic of the tabloids emplotted a disaster scenario and tragic ending to any crossing and mixing of difference. Although these narratives were doubtless received at times contradictorily and in inverted forms, the overriding and overcoded message of the tabloids was that punishment awaited those who dared to transgress their raciologized givenness. Moreover, while these warnings worked to police border transgressions within North America, the transcoding of these abjected and tabloidized figures onto the geopolitical “Other question” became increasingly pronounced. A slightly altered take on what Lee Edelman (1994) called “homographesis” goes a long way toward theorizing the operations of this transcoding as it applies to the new post–Cold War demons. First came Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega. The Panama Invasion/Deception of 1989 came at the height of the AIDS pandemic in North America and the attack on queers, intravenous drug users, and sex workers. To support the invading troops and tropes the tabloids continually referenced (in Edelman’s terms they produced it in “writing” as graphesis) Noriega’s homosexuality and bisexuality, his purported addiction to injecting cocaine, supposed predilection for wearing women’s underwear, and his queeny “yellow suits.” This frank homophobia had the temporary effect of both naturalizing the U.S. blitzkrieg and reabjecting the domestic enemies of George Bush I. But the U.S. and British aerial massacre of Iraq in 1991 provided a new legibility to the instrumentality of the tabloids.

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For example, the tabloids ran several features about Saddam Hussein’s projected and purported erotic predilections including S-M, pedophilia, homoeroticism, and cross-dressing. The cover of the National Examiner of 12 March 1991 featured an outrageously doctored image of Hussein in a slinky one-piece dress next to the heading “Secret CIA report reveals Saddam Hussein’s Bizarre Sex Life” ending with the aside, “He even wears dresses.” I would argue that the openly homophobic slippage in the enunciative slide from “Saddam” to “Sodom,” used by almost everyone in the Pentagon, State Department, and mass media, was made possible by the homographesis of the Iraqi leader, where week after week the only news some North American citizens received concerned Hussein’s projected cross-dressing, sadism, and obsession with androgynous boys. Drawing on centuries of Orientalist phobia and fantasy, the images of Hussein in what Roland Barthes called “texte limite”— the limit text of the tabloids — discursively naturalized the homophobic coding of Hussein as the embodiment of Sodom. Sure enough, always already embedded journalist Thomas Friedman’s 1 December 2002 New York Times editorial dutifully titled “ ‘Sodom’ Hussein’s Iraq” has initialized a new round of Orientalist queer-baiting and bashing, where about one-third of the nominations of the Iraqi president’s name on Fox News and CNN reiterate the 1991 slippage to “Sodom” Hussein.19 But this wouldn’t have much hegemonic stick or hold without discursive hedge fun(d) from the supermarket tabloids. Accordingly, the 10 December 2002 Weekly World News is the first repetition of the earlier Gulf War theme in the tabloids. With the cover promising “Secret Medical Records Exposed!” next to a huge picture of Hussein, the feature on pages 30 and 31 is subtitled “A Gay Old Time” and, next to a picture that claims to be Hussein with a young male lover, reports: “The daring dictator is famous for frequenting area gay bars and calling gay escort services. But this queer lifestyle may be taking its toll on the wacky Iraqi — his last few boyfriends have reportedly died of AIDS, and now there is speculation that Saddam may have contracted the deadly virus himself.” An astonishing telos of the joining of two levels of homophobia appeared in the tabloidized Newsweek of 7 April 2003. With the cover eliciting “Wanted: More Men and Muscle,” on page 10 there’s a boudoir picture of what turns out to be a Hussein look-alike provocatively opening his military jacket to reveal the tan-line from a bikini top accentuating white, feminine breasts against his hairy chest. As it’s the only picture in the section without a caption attached, readers have to dig to find out that it’s actually L.A.-based Hussein impersonator Jerry Haleva.20 I want to reiterate that the tabloids offered the first full narratives about Osama bin Laden and the hijackers, where purported desires and

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The tabloids ran several features about Saddam Hussein’s projected and purported erotic predilections including S-M, pedophilia, homoeroticism, and cross-dressing.

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fascinations weren’t shied away from. To conclude this brief section on the isomorph of reverse postcoloniality operating in the supermarket tabloids and to move into a reading of Reverse Postcoloniality III, I’d like to introduce one final story, continuous with the stories of Hussein and Noriega above. After months of queer-baiting and innuendo including Internet sites that encouraged giving bin Laden what he “really” wanted — anal penetration (see Rai and Puar 2002), the tabloids’ homographesis of Osama bin Laden started at the beginning of 2002. Once again relying mainly on “strategic information” from CIA sources, the Weekly World News of 26 February 2002 reported that after his apparent escape from the Tora Bora raids where bunker busters and other WMDs were deployed, bin Laden had been hiding out in the Australian nude beach Cobblers, popular with queer locals and gay and lesbian tourists. Filled with penis jokes right out of the homosocial parole of North American junior high school, the heading on page 37 reads, “Now we know why they call him ‘tiny.’ ” The article itself begins with: “Hunted fugitive may be the Mr. Big of terrorism, but sometimes he comes up short — as stunned witnesses learned when they saw him letting it all hang out at a nude beach.” A local surfer dude elaborates, “You really need a magnifying glass to see the poor bloke’s equipment, and since he’s so tall that made it [look] even smaller.”

He Who Lacks First, Lacks Last? There is a sense in which rapid economic progress is impossible without painful adjustments. Ancient philosophies have to be scrapped; old social institutions have to disintegrate; bonds of caste, creed and race have to burst; and large numbers of persons who cannot keep up with progress have to have their expectations of a comfortable life frustrated. — United Nations, Measures for the Economic Development of Underdeveloped Countries

I want to open onto a definition of Reverse Postcoloniality III by decoding the inscription of castration anxiety cited above. One axiom shared by the tabloids, mainstream media in the global North, and national security discourse alike is to displace the political economy of global conflict onto racial and “cultural” explanations. Although there are other possible readings, I want to argue that the identification of lack with Osama bin Laden is isomorphic with the inscription of modernization shortcomings in capitalist developmental discourse. That is, the coercion of one single model of development and sociohistorical progress onto the semiperiphery and periphery of the world system consolidated a structure where lack was

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naturalized for places outside the North. 21 Although the Bandung project partly contested this naturalization of lack during the Cold War, aid and investment were to an overwhelming degree handed out depending on the mimetic obedience to a monolithic Euro-American developmental model, what Gayatri Spivak calls in a somewhat different register “Euroteleology” (1999, 418). Moreover, through this overt imposition of mimesis (all countries are assumed to want to be like Euro-America, or with Lacan, desire to desire them — le désire du désire) a structure of lack was constructed. So, for example, Mexico, Colombia, Egypt, and many other places were assumed to have bureaucracy and market-transparency lack, if not fullblown modernization lack. As is evident in the case of Osama bin Laden and similarly queered Others of U.S. geopolitical fantasy, it would seem that he who lacks first, lacks last. Up until now, much of postcolonial theory has critically coded this imposed Euroteleology and lack — where the United States and the G-7 are always granted temporal precedence, structural authority, and aesthetic and technological superiority — with a language of mimetic ambivalences, almosts, and interminable waiting periods. Dipesh Chakrabarty’s (2000) notion of the “waiting room of history”22 is the most recent critical articulation of this Euroteleological imposition where the global South is structurally forced to wait patiently until the bearers of World History dispense modernity to them. And when that dispensation does take place, some critics have pointed to the identificatory slippages and fissures that occurred in the coerced operations of colonial “mimicry” (similar to what modernization theory called “convergence”) of the North by the South. Clearly, this strand of postcolonial theory is emphatically opposed to the same historical process that was judged affirmatively and promoted enthusiastically across multiple sites (the United Nations, as in this section’s epigraph; the disciplines of economics and sociology; the World Bank) after World War II under the sign of modernization theory. Modernization was the theory designed to replace colonialism with what the late Walter W. Rostow called, in 1961, “the new post-colonial relationship between the northern and southern halves of the Free World” (Latham 2000, 16). Modernization theory is often referred to as “convergence theory,” which in the epistemics of Talcott Parsons and his followers assumed that all places would eventually “converge” into simulacra of the United States: sub-Saharan Africa would be better-off cloned from the universalized small-town Ohio where Parsons was raised, and Istanbul and São Paulo’s future would be brighter as serial copies of Chicago. This convergence obviously required violent deterritorializations and top-down social engineering, but the managers and theoreticians of convergence deemed modernization well worth the price. Samuel Huntington, for one, refused

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to pull punches about the intensity of the deterritorializing attendant upon modernization. “Modernization is a revolutionary process. This follows directly from the contrasts between modern and traditional society. The one differs fundamentally from the other, and the change from tradition to modernity consequently involves a radical and total change in patterns of human life” (Huntington 1971). Here at its most extreme, U.S. convergence theory was explicit about the erasure of difference necessary for all developmental roads to lead to the North American Same. Citing Cyril Black’s Dynamics of Modernization (1966), Huntington underlined the homogenizing dynamic in his famous “The Change to Change” essay cited above. “Modernization is a homogenizing process. Modernization produces tendencies toward convergence among societies. . . . ‘the universal imperatives of modern ideas and institutions’ may lead to a stage ‘at which the various societies are so homogeneous as to be capable of forming a world state’ ” (1971). Huntington is arguing that as modernized development moves to advanced stages, sociocultural difference is narrowed and ultimately eliminated. Although modernization theory came to be critiqued for its implicit ethnocentrism, it was often explicit in its calls for cultural cleansing and social engineering. At the dawn of the hegemony of the cultural relativism of post-Boasian social science, even the United Nations called for developing countries to converge with the model insisted upon by Euro-America. The imposed mimesis of British and French colonialism cedes in U.S. modernization theory to a historically new neocolonial model, that of convergence. Although the first contributions to the discourse of convergence in the late 1940s and early 1950s came in the form of policy recommendations from development professionals in the United States and the U.N., through modernization theory’s gradual diffusion into think tanks and the academy, it quickly morphed into a triumphalist vision of having achieved a historical destiny. Especially in the field of sociology, where Parsonian structural functionalism became the lead dog, modernization quickly got to work establishing a master narrative that would combine all the processes necessary to “converge” a nonindustrial country in the South with a parent country in the North. As its ideological matrix modernization theory installed, in the words of Ankie Hoogvelt, “the compatibility or correspondence between certain advanced economic institutions (money, markets, occupational specialization) on the one hand, and certain modern political, cultural, and social forms on the other, thereby turning the latter into necessary prerequisites or logical requirements for the former” (1997, 36). Accordingly, modernization studies insisted that industrialization would inevitably lead to the nuclearization of family structure where the whole of the South would become clones of Leave It to Beaver and would

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“naturally” install a democratic political system consequent on the transplantation of a free-market system. Initially, when “traditional” and semideveloped societies failed to achieve any of these natural trajectories, their various “dysfunctionalities” were read against a normative, universal model, and the corrections applied accordingly. It should be pointed out that during the 1950s and 1960s in the South modernization was received very differently, as leaders like Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana and Nehru in India saw the term as less value laden than the process of mimetic “Westernization” that had preceded it in the colonial era. Moreover, it was not construed as something that necessarily demanded cultural “cleansing.” As this was a more luxurious time when the South could play off the two Cold War powers, the nonaligned countries often challenged the modernization project both in its specifics and in its Euroteleological metaphysics. Almost immediately, a broad-based resistance to the modernization project of sociocultural engineering developed in the then Third World, to say nothing of the massive attack on it from the communist and socialist bloc as but a more advanced stage of First World imperialism and neocolonialism. With support from the critique of ethnocentrism in post-Boasian cultural anthropology, there gradually developed some conceptual differences within North American circles as well. When open resistance to Peace Corps community building or other agencies of U.S. neocolonialism occurred, or when Third World societies failed to achieve Rostow’s “takeoff ” toward modernization as outlined in his 1960 Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto, the question of how and why some places seemed to have an innate animadversion to modernization had to be posed. Why do some places refuse convergence and, rather, diverge from the proper path toward modernization? Are some cultures, especially “traditional” or older cultures, predisposed against convergence, and, conversely, are some cultures endowed with traits that position them in the driver’s seat of modernization? In other words, shouldn’t some places and countries be considered exceptions that naturally diverge from the supposed universality of convergence? Key modernization proponent Lincoln Gordon put it later, discussing the late 1950s, that “we believed that the larger countries of South America and Mexico were on the threshold of a Rostovian take-off. There were, of course, institutional and social obstacles, but not cultural ones such as Oriental fatalism, sacred cows, or caste systems” (Scheman 1988, 74). In other words, Gordon concedes that in the 1950s some places in the South were already being written out of the convergence narrative; a justification for this would be found in exceptionalist-divergence theory. Therefore, when blockages to convergence appeared, aid workers in

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the United States and the U.N., and some North American social scientists, began to reject the ethnocentric vocabulary of “dysfunctionalities” and explain these obstacles to radical transplantation of technology and capital from the First World to the Third in terms of “culture.”23 Since modernization theory’s rabid anticommunism had already foreclosed on colonial history and class being included in the set of Parsonian variables, “culture” became the fallback explanation for — depending on one’s politics — either the refusal or the inability to modernize. Drawing on Max Weber and the analytic of Japanese culture written for propaganda purposes in the United States during World War II — Ruth Benedict’s Chrysanthemum and the Sword — scholars of modernization configured culture as something that looked very much like immutable “nature.” Benedict’s famous study was undertaken while she was working for the U.S. Office of War Information during World War II. In it she avers that in Japan cultural forms and archetypes dating back more than a millennium provide objective understandings of Japanese behavior during the 1930s. It should be pointed out that, in an obscene reverse postcolonial irony, all of her field subjects were Japanese American and her work was conducted exclusively in the United States. Overlooking these hybrid and diasporic inconveniences, she argued that as Japan had not been blessed with universality, the oscillation between the opposing endowments of “chrysanthemum” and “sword” installed an ethical environment where Japanese behaved in accordance with situational, or particularistic, laws. Benedict opposed this particularism (which quickly became one of the main codes for non-Euro-American exceptionalist-divergence, barely disguising its inheritance from colonial discourse’s coding of the “inscrutability” of the colonized subject) to the universal schematic of ethical value in Christian Euro-America. In other words, absolutely opposed to the equanimity of the ethical subject of the “West,” in Japan the same person would be polite and courteous under certain circumstances, violent and brusque under others. In emergency situations this non-Western subject usually withdrew into what social scientists at the time called the “obedient herd.”24 However, within the parameters of modernization’s understanding of “culture” as largely unchanging, this situation was considered a given. Gradually, modernization theorists came to ask: Couldn’t much of the culturalist characterization of Japanese fascist society in studies like Benedict’s be mobilized as a ground for capitalist modernization if provided with the right mix? What was first placed under the rubric of modernization theory in the 1950s, but came into prominence in the 1960s, was the notion that in countries like Japan, divergence came to be construed as not hindering modernization. Instead, the sociocultural difference from and exception to

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the universalist-convergence norm was seen as something that could coexist with certain processes of modernization. These were nominated the “exceptionalist-divergence” cases: Japan after the United States–imposed “reverse course” established it as the model capitalist beachhead in Asia; Iran after the CIA-backed overthrow of 1953; and Wahhabist Saudi Arabia after it agreed to pimp petrol to U.S. oil companies.25 Therefore, alongside the convergence tendency in modernization theory since the late 1940s was the, today, largely forgotten tendency of exceptionalistdivergence where some countries were excused from the sociocultural norms of convergence. Fixed as culturological doctrine into the new area studies programs in the United States (especially Middle Eastern studies and East Asian studies, the fields currently supplying much of the content for the new “terrorism studies” courses), exceptionalist-divergence acted as a stopgap theory applied to places where full reterritorialization by the United States was considered unwise or ineffectual. Some modernization theorists came to see the value of their antihistorical understanding of culture in providing a ground under which the violent upheavals of capitalist modernization could take place.26 In other words, when U.S. planners were mapping the social engineering of postwar Japan, in the shift from fascist imperialism to model capitalist democracy, “Japanese culture” was deployed as the ideological bromide that would ground this shift, if, in fact, much of a shift took place at all. The oscillation here between universalist-convergence and exceptionalist-divergence was not at all antagonistic, but operated in what deconstructive philosophy would call a relation of supplementarity; each pole is mutually prosthetic of the other. Although the convergence side was preeminent in the 1950s, it seems that the present hegemony of reverse postcoloniality can only be fully apprehended when we foreground the new emergence of exceptionalist-divergence. To be quick and dirty, the historical difference between the 1950s and 1960s supplemental relation of convergence and divergence and its present configuration is that, first, within the present horizon of cultural relativism all countries and civilizations are considered exceptional, nonhybrid, and fully bounded; second, the United States itself has only recently come to have a “culture” of its own. In the 1950s the United States didn’t need “culture”; it had “history” instead. Some modernization theorists understood the lack of “culture” (i.e., the fortunate absence of a sociohistorical anchor that would deter progress in the United States) as the main reason that “history” had motored the development of the United States faster and further than other countries. The fact that the United States was cultureless retrofitted with the convergence model of modernization, which demanded a global ideal-ego that was new, modular, and universally applicable. It was con-

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In the 1950s the United States didn’t need “culture”; it had “history” instead.

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The integral survival of the West is said to depend on its ability and willingness to undergo cultural

sidered the order of things that other countries would have to struggle to “catch up” to mimic and converge with the United States. The famous tropes of postcolonial theory — almost, but not quite; the waiting room of history — critically posit this gap and éspacement in the temporality of convergence a priori. But what if that moment is residual and past right now? What if hegemonic power isn’t concerned about convergence and therefore, as I tried to show in my discussion of Reverse Postcoloniality I, has foreclosed on development on the old modernization model?27 What if hegemonic power isn’t operating any longer in terms of the centrifugal “world state” of modernization-convergence theory cited above or in the similar paradigm of the global Leviathan identified in Empire? But this gets overly speculative. What I want to do briefly in the last section is to extend the reach of reverse postcoloniality into one last isomorphic site.

and, by implication, ethnoracial cleansing to purify itself.

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Reverse Postcoloniality III In the mad rush to apply the argument from The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order (1996) to the post-9/11 world, Samuel Huntington’s past as one of the central proponents of modernization theory has not been foregrounded. In Huntington’s worldview “civilization” metaphorizes “culture,” which metaphorizes “race” in turn and whose number corresponds to the nineteenth-century fashion (now largely discredited) of classifying the world’s races. Huntington’s text can be fully understood only through the modernization supplements of convergence and exceptionalist-divergence, now dressed up as “globalist” and “realist.” Therefore, The Clash of Civilizations should be seen as a bid to reestablish exceptionalist-divergence as the Overcode for configuring contemporary world affairs. In Huntington’s morality play civilizations and cultures are purified and homogenized entities whose ruinous disintegration is assured whenever they become hybridized through those multis so dreaded by reverse postcolonials: multiethnic, multiracial, and multicultural. In what could be called the sensationalized yellow academicism of The Clash of Civilizations, the integral survival of the West is said to depend on its ability and willingness to undergo cultural and, by implication, ethnoracial cleansing to purify itself: “While Muslims pose the immediate problem to Europe, Mexicans pose the problem for the United States” (Huntington 1996, 206). Isomorphic with the imperative against hybridization and métissage in the supermarket tabloids (RP II) and isomorphic with the violent exclusions and exceptions that characterize contemporary global economic governance (RP I), the way to ensure the integrity and consistency of raciologized culture — and avoid the inevitability of race wars

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within the North — is to quarantine it off into bogus civilizations, where mixing and hybridization are morally and politically punished. Huntington’s most recent version of this, called Culture Matters (Harrison and Huntington 2000) and edited with Lawrence Harrison, the author of Underdevelopment Is a State of Mind, argues that the fields of international relations and political science have until very recently downplayed the role of culture in politics, and, through the recentering of the old modernization classics of Ruth Benedict and Max Weber, it’s time to resituate it at the center of those disciplines. Moreover, similar to the oscillations between convergence and exceptionalist-divergence (lubed by the similarly raciologized and essentialized understanding of “culture”), most of the other writers and embedded academics in Culture Matters insist that “culture,” read as either “traditional culture,” “core values,” or “social capital,”28 is the last stopgap against what some neocons are calling the “New Dark Ages.” Homologous with the erasure of politics and colonialism in modernization theory, Huntington’s new centering of dehybridized civilizations in The Clash of Civilizations can only be grounded through the evacuation of the histories of political struggle and the elision of free and forced hybridization in his homogenized civilizations. For instance, Japan is said to be the possessor of its own discrete culture, which conveniently elides the histories of hybridization with Asia, and represses and reverses Japan’s extensive colonial empire that encouraged mixed marriages between Koreans and Japanese, and Chinese and Japanese. Racializing Japanese ethnicity by separating it from millennia of pan-Asian history and migration, Huntington follows other exceptionalist-divergence scholars like Ruth Benedict and Dr. Seuss (more famous for his popular children’s books like The Grinch Who Stole Christmas), who authored one of the first major introductions to Japanese culture and literature outside Asia in the New York Times of 22 March 1955. In that introduction Dr. Seuss wrote, “The rediscovery of Japan’s long cultural tradition is crucial. . . . People working together ever since the war feel very strongly that unless we and the Japanese learn to see eye to eye, the Japanese may learn to see eye to eye with the Russians” (33, 10). By repressing colonial history and homogenizing “culture” in Japan, exceptionalist-divergence proponents Huntington and Dr. Seuss reversed postcoloniality in East and Southeast Asia, becoming the Grinches Who Stole Hybridity from Japanese ethnicity. The rest of us “Whos” living in our planetary “Whoville” need to realize that exceptionalist-divergence in its many avatars is functioning very well these days to support global economic power at the World Bank (in the form of “microcredit” and the fetish of “traditional culture”), the U.N. (in the various forms of cultural relativism), and the IMF (sovereign debt

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restructuring mechanisms), sometimes topped supplementarily by convergence and at other times not. The various isomorphs of reverse postcoloniality cohere around an exceptionalist sense of propriety and property, where “nature” in the form of the market and “culture” in the form of one’s organic and immutable givenness need to be preserved against the chaos of crosshatching, promiscuous sharing, and mixing. These maximumsecurity zones require frequent ethnocultural and historical cleansing operations to preserve the absolute divergence of any one group from the Other. The waiting room of history? IMF-imposed privatization sold it off to a Northern multinational with offices in Toronto, Kuala Lumpur, and Paris. Not to worry; the World Bank thinks it could fund a project to develop a small golf course on the now-vacant land. To hold off the reverse postcolonial Grinches the Mitsein in Whoville (what Giorgio Agamben might call “whateverville”) should be understood as not being the proper possession of anyone, or belonging as commodified property to a certain someone. Only the radical abandonment of the proper as it is coded in Reverse Postcoloniality I, II, and III can lead to the understanding that all of us Whos are in common, mixed and meshed with a multiplicity of others —Who exactly, we can’t know in advance or completely. At any moment of doubt about this being-in-common, the Grinches of reverse postcoloniality are ready to move in their occupying forces and militarily seal off hybrid areas. Then the embedded academics will be flown in to assign proper places, reify purified pasts, and fetishistically establish culturological and raciological myths as truth claims.

Notes This article would not have been possible without the conversations and camaraderie of Gamal Abdul-Shehid, Gail Faurscho, Satoshi Ikeda, Scott Mobley, Sourayan Mookerjea, Susanne Soederberg, and Marcus Taylor; Randy Martin offered insightful suggestions. Diane Nelson got me through all the reversals, and backlashes, and so much more. 1. For the U.N.’s own figures demonstrating the net transfer of money to the North from the South, see the Trade and Development Report, 1989 (UNCTAD 1989, table 19, 38) and Trade and Development Report, 2000 (UN 2000). Note that these include only officially recorded net transfers. 2. Bretton Woods Project, Bretton Woods Update 27, April 2002. 3. Conversations with my colleague Susanne Soederberg at the University of Alberta have dramatically improved this section. 4. For more learned elaborations of these ideas, see the most recent take in Walden Bello’s Deglobalization: Ideas for a New World Economy (2002) and the insuperable classic, Cheryl Payer’s Lent and Lost: Foreign Credit and Third World Development (1991).

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5. There are entire academic journals devoted to some of the thematics hastily trotted out here. Briefly, let me state the antihistoricist common sense that hybridity is not a phenomenon that springs miraculously from the successes and failures of the independence movements that largely followed World War II. Hybridity has a very mixed political legacy, given histories of forced assimilation, diasporic nationalism, and official multiculturalism. Moreover, the foregrounding of British and French colonialism in postcolonial cultural studies in the North has had the effect of eliding the fact that hybridity in the form of mestizaje was the official ideology of the postindependence state in Latin America and, in the form of pan-Asianism, was the operating software for Japanese colonial-imperialism in East and Southeast Asia in the 1930s and early 1940s. 6. On the various terminological drifts of the regimes of accumulation, see the excellent collection Théorie de la régulation: L’état des savoir (Boyer and Saillard 1995). 7. See Samir Amin’s Maldevelopment: Anatomy of a Global Failure (1990). 8. This barb is from an appendix to the first version of Capital I called “The Value Form,” where Marx writes that the fetishizing form of value allows each commodity to stand in social relation to the “world of commodities. . . . As a commodity it is a citizen of this world” (1978, 142). 9. Along with the Weekly World News and the National Enquirer, the Globe is one of the most widely purchased news sources in North America. 10. Paul Gilroy (2000) develops the term raciology to emphasize how modern science and culture have tended to “explain the smallest human idiosyncrasies through the ‘inner truth of race.’ ” Gilroy argues that the logic or “truth” of race as a totalizing explanation has managed to maintain an “allure” even during the present conjuncture when its deconstruction is often assumed. 11. In leftist circles (or squares) the tabloids have long been rumored to be one of the centerpieces of U.S. intelligence’s “black information,” whose operations and budget are classified. Suffice to say that some of the tabloid features are explicit about their reliance on CIA sources. 12. See especially Kevin Glynn’s Tabloid Culture (2000), one of a handful of serious studies of the “tabloidization” of the news. Despite its many strengths, its formalist bias, which assumes that the weekly supermarket tabloids necessarily subvert the supposed “scientific rationalism” and bourgeois politics of the mainstream news (CNN, New York Times, etc.) seems insufficient. Insisting throughout on a binary opposition between mainstream and tabloid media (assigning a postmodern playfulness and organic deconstructiveness to the latter), Glynn overlooks how the print tabloids work on a “media continuum” where consumers read the tabloids, attend sporting events, surf the Net, peruse USA Today and the Wall Street Journal, watch TV, and experience this not as a series of epistemological fractures as Glynn suggests, but as the veritable media lifeworld of subjects in the global North. 13. On the necessity for left-wing critics to read disparate media — including the tabloids — together in the same ideological-discursive field, see Spivak’s stillsage “Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value”: “I choose the New York Times because the broad spectrum that contains the Sunday supplements of newspapers, Scientific American, Psychology Today, as well as the National Enquirer, constitutes part of an ideological apparatus through which the consumer becomes knowledgeable, the subject of ‘cultural’ explanation” (1988, 169; my emphasis).

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14. In the interests of restraining what I call “theory unilateralism,” I think it’s important to try to establish translation codes and schemata between, say, a Hall-Gramsci and Spinoza-Deleuze. I have an essay in progress titled “Not Even a Gramsci Can Save Us Now?” 15. Thanks to Sean Callaghan for the Kenneth Surin piece, “On Producing the Concept of a Global Culture” (1995). 16. See Ella Shohat’s essay “Notes on the ‘Postcolonial’ ” (1992) and Stuart Hall, “When Was the ‘Postcolonial’? Thinking at the Limit” (2000). 17. Almost twenty years ago in Delinking Samir Amin dismissed totalizing analyses like that presented in Empire as merely positing the tendency toward globalization and transnationalization in capitalism as what “provides an excuse for those who deny the specificity and inequality of . . . such and such a region. . . . It is to make an implicit supposition that this intensified transnationalization operates in the same way and with the same effects on the various components of the system. Nothing could be more wrong than this hypothesis if one admits that the specific roles played by this or that component offer the peoples and social classes profoundly different prospects, again in the horizon of a foreseeable future defining the consciousness and political and social attitudes of the historical subjects” (1990 [1985], 3; my emphasis). 18. Race and sexuality are clearly central issues in both postcoloniality and reverse postcoloniality, but I don’t have the time here to address issues of sexuality throughout Reverse Postcoloniality I, II, III. My forthcoming book version of this essay will treat sexuality more centrally. 19. At crucial moments such as Bush’s State of the Union address and during Colin Powell’s Adlai Stevenson mimesis “proving conclusively” that Iraq possessed WMDs aplenty during his presentation at the U.N. Security Council in early 2003, the pronunciation of “Sodom” for Saddam was repeated ad nauseum. 20. The wartime patriotically correct homophobic coding of alterity has relegitimized and unleashed right-wing virulence, as in Republican senator Rick Santorum’s April 2003 Associated Press interview, where he wildly compared “homosexual acts” to “man on child” and “man on dog” actions. 21. Majid Rahnema writes, “The word ‘poverty’ is, no doubt, a key word of our times, extensively used and abused by everyone. . . . For one reason, almost all the definitions given to the word are woven around the concept of ‘lack’ or ‘deficiency.’ This notion reflects only the basic relativity of the concept. What is necessary and to whom? And who is qualified to define all that?” (1991). 22. This configuring of the “waiting room of history” is not meant as a critique of Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe, a project I endorse wholeheartedly. As a supplement to Chakrabarty’s text, I would argue that through reverse postcoloniality, Euro–America has in part committed itself to something that might be called “auto-provincialization,” a partial delinking of the center. 23. See modernization proponent Alex Inkeles, “Convergence and Divergence in Industrial Societies” (Attir 1981). 24. For ways this notion of culture delimited postcolonial potentialities in post–World War II Japan, readers of Japanese should consult Komori Yoichi’s Posutokoroniaru (2001). 25. This has been repressed in part because of the Iranian Revolution, OPEC, and the so-called East Asian economic miracle. 26. For a contemporary version of this, see Thomas Friedman’s The Lexus and the Olive Tree (1999), where he posits the proper globalist desire for Lexus

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ownership contrasted with the premodern attachment to place and traditional culture synecdoched in the olive tree. Once the Lexus-ization of the world has reached its assumed Hegelian conclusion, Friedman suggests that there just might be an ancillary role for the olive tree (if any remain after the heated engines of overproduction have cooled, that is) not in political antagonism with consumer capitalist globalization but as a culturalist buffer against its more violent effects. 27. I’m not suggesting that the normalizing violences inherent in processes of assimilation to a dominant have relaxed at all; in fact, the 9/11 world has made the North a scarier place for nonwhite citizens than it was before. I’m only suggesting that a global mimesis and ideal-ego have been displaced and fractured with the emergence of reverse postcoloniality. 28. Fukuyama’s chapter in Culture Matters summarizes his argument in the reactionary The Great Disruption: Human Nature and the Reconstitution of Social Order (1999). Remember everything you thought differentially about dudes and girls in junior high school? You’ll find scientific verification for your junior-high “common sense” inserted under the rubric of the new “evolutionary sociology” in that text.

References Ahmad, Aijaz. 1992. In theory. London: Verso. Amin, Samir. 1990 [1985]. Delinking: Towards a polycentric world. London: Zed. ———. 1990. Maldevelopment: Anatomy of a global failure. London: Zed. ———. 1997. Capitalism in the age of globalization. London: Zed. Attir, Mustafa O. 1981. Directions of change: Modernization theory, research, and realities. Boulder, Colo.: Westview. Bello, Walden. 2002. Deglobalization: Ideas for a new world economy. London: Zed. Boyer, Robert, and Yves Saillard. 1995. Théorie de la régulation: l’état des savoir. Paris: Editions La Découverte & Syros. Bretton Woods Project. 2002. Development finance summit a fiasco, say campaigners. Bretton Woods Update 27. www.brettonwoodsproject.org/topic/ reform/r2726ffd.html. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2000. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial thought and historical difference. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. 1987. A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Edelman, Lee. 1994. Homographesis: Essays in gay literary and cultural theory. New York: Routledge. Focus on the Global South. 2002. The road to Monterrey passes through Washington. Focus on Trade 75 (March). Friedman, Thomas. 1999. The Lexus and the olive tree. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. George, Susan. 1992. The debt boomerang. London: Pluto Press and the Transnational Institute. Gilroy, Paul. 2000. Against race. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ———. 2002. Diving into the tunnel: The politics of race between old and new worlds. www.opendemocracy.net/debates/article-2-49-138.jsp.

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Globe. 2001. Wanted: Bin Laden. Inside his sick, twisted world, 2 October, 7– 8. Glynn, Kevin. 2000. Tabloid culture: Trash taste, popular power, and the transformation of American television. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Gupta, Akhil. 1998. Postcolonial developments. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Hall, Stuart. 2000. When was the “postcolonial”? Thinking at the limit. In The Post-Colonial Question: Common Skies, Divided Horizons, edited by Iain Chambers and Lidia Curti. London and New York: Routledge. Harrison, Lawrence, and Samuel Huntington. 2000. Culture matters. New York: Basic. Hoogvelt, Ankie. 1997. Globalization and the postcolonial world. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press. Huntington, Samuel. 1971. The change to change: Modernization, development, and politics. Comparative Politics, 3 (April). ———. 1996. The clash of civilizations and the remaking of world order. New York: Simon and Schuster. Komori, Yoichi. 2001. Posutokoroniaru. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. Latham, Michael. 2000. Modernization as ideology: American social science and “nation building” in the Kennedy era. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Marx, Karl. 1978. The value form. Capital and Class 4 (spring): 130 – 50. Payer, Cheryl. 1991. Lent and lost: Foreign credit and Third World development. London: Zed. Rahnema, Majid. 1991. Global poverty: A pauperizing myth. Interculture 24.2: 5. Rai, Amit, and Jasbir Puar. 2002. Monster, terrorist, fag: The war on terrorism and the production of docile patriots. Social Text, 72: 117– 48. Sauvant, Karl, and Hajo Hasenpflug. 1977. The new international economic order: Confrontation or cooperation between North and South. Boulder, Colo.: Westview. Scheman, L. Ronald, ed. 1988. The alliance for progress: A retrospective. New York: Praeger. Seuss, Dr. 1955. The past is nowhere. New York Times, 22 March. Shohat, Ella. 1992. Notes on the postcolonial. Social Text, 31/32: 99 –113. Soederberg, Susanne. 2002. The new international financial architecture: Imposed leadership and emerging markets” in Socialist Register 2002, edited by L. Panitch and C. Leys. London: Merlin. South Commission. 1990. The challenge to the South. New York: Oxford University Press. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1988. In other worlds: Essays in cultural politics. New York: Routledge. ———. 1999. A critique of postcolonial reason. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Star. 1994. Tony Frost, Nicole uncensored. 25 October, 25 – 27; I watched in terror as O.J. beat Nicole, 8 November, 24. Surin, Kenneth. 1996. On producing the concept of a global culture. South Atlantic Quarterly 94.4 (fall). UNCTAD. 1989. Trade and development report, 1989. New York: United Nations. United Nations. 1951. Measures for the economic development of underdeveloped countries. New York: United Nations. ———. 2002. Monterrey consensus. www.un.org/esa/ffd/aconf198-3.pdf. White House. 2002. The national security strategy of the United States of America.

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Reason or Reasoning? C L I O O R S I VA ?

Everyone, we moderns believe(d), has a history, though not everyone has historiography. The West developed a tradition of history writing; the Muslim world and the Chinese are admitted to have had such a tradition, albeit in an underdeveloped form; but most cultures had myths and religious epics instead of history writing, even if they sometimes confused the former for the latter. But because everyone nonetheless had a history, that history could be narrated in the terms of a rational historiography that would redescribe this past in terms alien to those whose past it was. Their own forms of recording and relating to the past — be they myths, legends, religious epics, or other — could serve, at best, as (rather unreliable) raw materials in the reconstruction of this past. This did not occasion any discomfort, for these indigenous intellectual traditions were held to have demonstrated that they were unequal to the task of recording and narrating their history by mixing myth with reality, wish with fact, gods with men. And the epistemic commitments that suggested that these were people incapable of representing their own past were the same as those which further suggested that these people were backward. Or vice versa: that these people still belonged to the past was indicated, among other things, by their inability to properly represent their past. Let us call this complex of attitudes Reason, or more accurately, the commitment to an idea of a Reason that is singular and universal. Let us note that although this Reason has not been dethroned, under the combined but variegated assaults of feminism, queer theory, postmodernism, postcolonialism, and other intellectual currents, it is nonetheless (to switch metaphors) tottering on its pedestal. But the nature of the challenges raised by these currents, and the movements that have often provided their conditions of emergence, differ. It is an important argument (if by now a commonplace one) that the very idea of Reason was constituted in part through a series of exclusions — of madness, of woman, and so on. One strategy for problematizing Reason is therefore to demonstrate the contingencies and exclusions that went into its making. The case of the non-West is somewhat different, for unlike Woman, say, the savage and the Oriental were not so much the excluded Other of Reason as something that fell short of it. Historicism, the idea that the savage and the Oriental were backward and belonged to a time past, even as Social Text 78, Vol. 22, No. 1, Spring 2004. Copyright © 2004 by Duke University Press.

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they inhabited the present, was the main mode by and through which the reason of the non-West was declared to be lesser. Suppose “we” were to reject such historicism (the “we” in question, let it be noted, is not an essentialist “we,” and certainly not a particular race or peoples; this essay is written by an Indian who works within the Western intellectual tradition and teaches aspects of this tradition in Australia, to students of mostly European origin): reject the notion that different intellectual traditions and the ways of being that sustain them can be plotted on the same (temporal) grid, such that non-Western intellectual traditions are revealed to be inadequate approximations of Reason, mere steps on the way to Reason. Two implications would follow. First, Reason itself would no longer appear as singular — it would clearly be someone’s reason.1 And second, once Reason was pluralized, there would be no easy way to compare intellectual traditions, let alone declare one superior to all others. This, not in the name of some flabby liberal tolerance that declares everything equal and nothing subject to criticism, but rather because there would be no Archimedean point, a point outside any tradition from which one could adjudge which traditions are better and truer. If we had to learn to think not of Reason in the upper case, but rather in terms of traditions of reasoning, this would have great implications for history writing. The remainder of this essay explores, and makes an argument for, some of these implications. In the first part I outline what I take to be the circumstances in which it has become necessary to entertain the possibility of including the understandings of those whose histories we write in those histories; of finding a way to reconcile Clio with Siva. The second part argues that where historicism seems to attend to difference, it does so only by recuperating this within a wider sameness. History is a code, I argue; and it is incapable of coding non-Western pasts. The concluding section suggests that while we will of course go on writing history, we need to reconceive what exactly it is we are doing when we write the past of others in terms very different from their own; we need to think of history not in an imperial vein, as the application of Reason to the past, but rather as a dialogue between different traditions of reasoning.

Clio and Siva Historicism, Dipesh Chakrabarty has recently reminded us, “is what made modernity or capitalism look not simply global but as something which became global over time, by originating in one place (Europe) and then spreading outside it.” And just as European modernity was enshrined as the future of everyone, so too non-Western intellectual traditions were

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inferior anticipations of the universal Reason that might, one day, be theirs. But because it was not theirs yet, such peoples were not yet ready to taste the fruits of democracy and self-rule; for as Chakrabarty also reminds us, “historicism . . . came to non-European peoples in the nineteenth century as somebody’s way of saying ‘not yet’ to somebody else.”2 Historicism was what allowed a liberal like John Stuart Mill to aver — in the middle of an argument championing liberty and representative government — that many peoples were not yet fit for democracy, and required an extended period of British rule and its civilizing effects before they would become so.3 The developments that were a direct political refutation of such historicism — the anticolonial insistence on the right now, ultimately victorious against the colonizer’s “not yet”— should have brought this historicism into crisis. With nationalism and decolonization the Third World, that repository of backwardness and anachronism, is part of our present; and within that Third World, the peasant and the tribal has (sometimes) become a citizen, become a part of political modernity. That which was previously historicized as the premodern, the survival, the fragment of a past continuing into the present (and at times this included whole societies), now also participates in the rituals and practices of the modern — statehood and nationhood, citizenship, and so on. That “denial of coevalness”4 which anthropology and historicism presumed and authorized is now, or should be, deeply problematic. The non-Western world, and within it the peasant, has now become our contemporary. But there have always been many, quite possibly a majority, of the world’s population whose world is peopled by gods who act in and on the world and whose agency must be registered in any account of the world, just as there are people whose temporality as it is lived allows for their dead ancestors to directly intervene in their affairs. It is certainly the case in India that the world of the peasant is populated not only by humans but also by gods and spirits. If we can no longer relegate the peasant’s time to a time-past, does this not require that we also try to find a place in history for peasants and their gods? But how do we do so, how can we find a place for gods and spirits in modern historical consciousness and history writing? One possible method is a nominalist one, and here we can look to the law for precedents. An interesting example is that of how contemporary British law found a place for the Indian god Siva. Richard Davis recounts this story in his Lives of Indian Images.5 In 1976 a landless laborer in the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu discovered a number of buried icons. One of these was a twelfth-century bronze Nataraja, an image of the god Siva in his pose as Lord of Dance,

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alternately dancing the cosmos into creation and into destruction. The finder sold the statue, which, through the operations of the international market in “art objects,” ended up in London in the British Museum. Concerned at the large numbers of such objects being smuggled out of India, the Indian government made this a test case, engaging in a lengthy and expensive legal battle in British courts that eventually resulted in the statue being repatriated to India. The Indian government funded the case (India v. Bumper), but for technical reasons, it did not qualify as a plaintiff. The Indian side therefore nominated as plaintiffs the state of Tamil Nadu, the Visvanathasvami temple where the Siva statue had once resided, the executive officer of the temple, and later added a fourth plaintiff — the god Siva, who laid claim to the icon that had originally resided in his temple. The British judge accepted the claim that as a “juristic personality” the god Siva was party to the case (the defense argued in appeal that as the U.K. was a Christian kingdom, this should have precluded foreign gods from bringing suit). Siva and the other plaintiffs won the case, which caused some consternation in international art markets, with one dealer warning that potential buyers would have to consider the risk of a “writ from Siva.” The god returned to India, where he was to be restored to his temple and resume his life as an image of worship. (Postscript — sadly, his crumbling temple was not fit to receive him, and plans to rebuild and reconsecrate it never materialized; the Nataraja ended up in the government-maintained Icon Center at Tiruvarur, safe from art thieves, but unworshipped, and “in danger of suffocation and heatstroke.”)6 It is of course true that recognizing Siva as a juristic personality is not quite the same thing as treating him as a historical actor. It is also true that the law provides only limited parallels with, and thus guidance for, the writing of history — despite the fact that history writing borrows so many of its guiding metaphors from the law. But perhaps this little episode is instructive, nonetheless? Perhaps the nominalist option is a feasible one — if a British court could make room for Siva as a juristic subject, can we not find a place for him in the tribunal of history? Is it not possible for Clio to dance with Siva? The possibility is an intriguing one, but the answer must be a blunt no. For modern history writing, and the historical consciousness it produces and is produced by, is connected to some phenomena — the emergence of the modern nation-state, progress, the sharp separation between past and present, scientific rationality — and not others, such as magic and the gods, which it in fact was defined against. History writing is born of certain fundamental separations that constituted it as a rational practice, and these disallow the possibility of writing a history with gods and goddesses playing an active part in it. The historian in writing history can

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register the fact that people believe gods exist and are active in the world (note that to cast the issue in terms of “belief ” is already to situate it within human consciousness and is thus to effectively exorcise the world of gods and spirits), but the historian cannot write history as if these gods and spirits were in fact active historical actors. To produce a history that included Siva would be incoherent; it would correspond to no one’s tradition and appeal to no one’s sensibility. An obvious objection to the argument so far is that if it is belief in gods and their agency that is taken as the marker of that which cannot be coded in history, this does not serve to distinguish West from non-West. God may now have been privatized in the West, but once there, he too strode the world stage, performing miracles and intervening in the world He had created. And thus writing the history of the Christian world before, say, the seventeenth century might also be problematic within the rational, secular code of history.7 Michel de Certeau thinks that this is exactly so, that the very enterprise of representing religion within the rational(ist) code of history is a curious one.8 Seeking to comprehend religious phenomena historically, he writes, “is tantamount to repeatedly asking something else of them than what they meant to say . . . taking as a representation of the society what, from their point of view, founded that society.”9 This paradox is only an extreme case, according to Certeau, of what history writing necessarily involves. To constitute an object as an object of historical investigation involves dividing it from our present, marking it off as different, definitively separated from the present; and the practices and protocols by which we do so are always those of the present (what else could they be?). But the procedures and categories and protocols of the present are themselves (sometimes) connected to the past that is being objectified. When Western historians write of “their” past, they encounter those who believed in witches, and sometimes even burned them, and those who believed in a God who intervened directly in human affairs. But this undeniable part of the past is (seen as) part of the same past that then gave up belief in witches, and that withdrew from God his agency in history. That is, this was part of the same past that subsequently disenchanted and desacralized the world (not the same thing, note, as secularization), and engaged in rational practices like writing history. And so the historian’s past included both the fact of witches and God(s), but also their decline. In Certeau’s words, “Just as the ‘model’ of religious sociology implies, among other things, the new status of practice or of knowledge in the seventeenth century, so do current methods — erased as events and transformed into codes or problematic issues of research — bear evidence of former structurings and forgotten histories. Thus founded on the rupture between a past that is its object, and a present that is the place of

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its practice, history endlessly finds the present in its object and the past in its practice.”10 But that is precisely what it cannot do in the case of the non-Western world. Here history continues “to find the present in its object,” but it does not find “the past in its practice,” for the past of nonWestern countries is not history’s past. We are back to where we started, then. The rejection of historicism that is implied by decolonization and the entry of peasants into political life requires us to at least entertain the possibility of taking their own views of their world into account when describing their history. However, the attempt to do so founders, because history writing is constituted by a rejection of the agency of gods; it can register the fact of belief in them, it can attempt to make sense of this belief, but it cannot include the gods. It is true that this is also the case for European history, before that point when God was stripped of historical agency. The seventeenth-century transformation of an opposition between the spiritual and the temporal into the (quite different) separation between the political and religious is what makes it possible for the historian of Europe to write of religion in the rationalist code of history, objectifying it, treating as representations or beliefs, what Christians regarded as facts about the world. Often this will mean that the historian will project into the past a category that is inadequate to it; but the fact that this category is nonetheless itself a product of this past (thus bearing “evidence of former structurings and forgotten histories”) gives some warrant for this anachronism. And in this way history writing can perform one of its most important social functions: that of enacting or performing a society’s continuity, “affirm[ing] our consciousness of a shared experience over generations of an external and real world.”11 The same is not true of the Indian subcontinent; its human inhabitants have shared this part of the world, and many continue to share it, with their God or with their numerous gods and goddesses. If history writing cannot find a place for these actors in its script, then that marks the distance of rational practices such as history writing from this world and its pasts; here history does not secure a society’s continuity with its past, but rather registers a profound break in that continuity. But I anticipate. Implicit in these remarks is the presumption that history is not a fact of the world that is more (in rational historiography) or less (in myth and epic) accurately represented, but rather that it is but one way for a society to constitute the past and establish a relation with it. The problematization of Reason that is part of our current intellectual climate makes it possible to raise such questions, but I have not yet established that there is good reason for regarding history writing as just one possible way to represent the past. I seek to do so in the next section.

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Historicism and Its Critique It is often pointed out that history is unusual in that the term for the discipline simultaneously designates its object.12 Underlying this happy coincidence — it has also been pointed out — is an epistemological naïveté, one in which history, unlike other disciplines, has no need to think its object, because its object simply is. History-as-fact simply happens, and historyas-discipline is the attempt to re-create that happening to the degree that its documents allow us to do so. The result, as Louis Althusser points out,13 is that the discipline of history takes methodology for its theory, and historiographical debates are more often than not methodological debates, debates over the craft of history. But in fact this naïveté cannot obscure the fact that history as a discipline is not so innocent of preconditions. The past is not forever available to the present, a mute entity waiting for the historian to give it voice. History writing is not simply a “craft” that is applied to a preexistent, natural object, but rather, like any discipline, it conceives and constructs its object. This manner of constituting its object is labeled a “code” by Claude LéviStrauss, who goes on to argue, “the distinctive features of historical knowledge are due not to the absence of a code, which is illusory, but rather to its particular nature: the code consists in a chronology.”14 Dates are history’s code, or rather, classes of dates; for these dates are not natural or given, part of the inevitable flow of time, but rather selected by the historian, who groups or classes them into series, sometimes short or “hot” chronologies (where the relevant classes of dates are years, or even dates within a year), at other times “cold” chronologies (where the relevant classes of dates are centuries, even millennia). The important point is that these dates are not given in advance, as it appears to the unreflective historian, so that the task is “to define relations (of simple causality, of circular determination, of antagonism, of expression): between facts or dated events: the series being known. . . . [it is] simply a question of defining the position of each element in relation to other elements in the series.”15 Rather, the series is not known; it is history as code that constitutes the series. The times of history are discontinuous and multiple, rather than continuous and singular; they are constituted by history as a code, not given in advance and simply broken up into smaller segments by historians for reasons of convenience in practicing their craft. If the general point is true — namely that history-as-fact is not a natural category that history-as-discipline simply finds and then asks questions of, but rather something that comes to historians as already worked, constituted (one need not concur with Lévi-Strauss on the details of what constitutes the code of history;16 nor is it my argument that historians are

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It is not that there is Man, who makes possible and authorizes History; rather, the idea of history helps produce and secure humanism.

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always unaware of this17) — then why does the discipline nonetheless usually posit its object as always already there? There is more than one answer to this, but at the heart of all answers is that what history writing naturalizes is not principally history itself, but rather the object that this is the history of, the subject of all history writing — Man, humanity.18 The fiction that history-as-discipline is the study of a history-as-object that is given serves to make human consciousness the subject and source of all that happens: history is where a “transcendental humanism” (Lévi-Strauss)19 is instituted, where a “transcendental narcissism” finds its home (Foucault).20 This “humanism” (Althusser) or “anthropology” (Foucault) or “metaphysics” (Derrida) is what underpins the code(s) of history and is why the critique of historicism has been so vigorously resisted. Unable to maintain the fiction that men make language, that the text embodies authorial intention, and so on, history alone is “the last resting place of anthropological thought,”21 the fortress in which the sovereign subject and its consciousness take refuge. In other words, it is not that there is Man, who makes possible and authorizes History; rather, the idea of history helps produce and secure humanism. If this is so — if historicism generates an illusion where effect is mistaken for cause, such that Man is taken as the ground of history when in fact he is an effect of representational practices, including history writing — then the Man of humanism must in fact be a particular man, and history writing someone’s code. And so it is: the Man of this humanism, and this anthropology, is white or Western Man, whence Derrida’s description of metaphysics (and the history it underpins) as “white mythology”— “the white man takes his own mythology . . . his own logos, that is, the mythos of his idiom, for the universal form of that he must still wish to call Reason.”22 It is often said that exactly the reverse is true: unlike the abstract Reason of the Enlightenment, historicism is attentive to the particular, the unique, the different. The founder of the “historical school of law” claimed that unlike the invariant and universal categories of natural law and the Enlightenment, “the historical spirit . . . is the only protection against a species of self-delusion . . . namely, the holding of that which is peculiar to ourselves to be common to human nature in general . . . see[ing] our thoughts in the false light of universality. . . . There is only the historical sense to protect us against this.”23 In light of the above arguments, however, we might wonder whether claiming that everyone has a history, but a different one, is not to attend to difference but rather to universalize a particular way of conceiving, relating to, and recording the past. Could it be that when it comes to recognizing and representing difference, historicism is part of the problem, rather than the solution?

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Baudrillard offers a telling critique of one of the most potent historicisms of our age, that of Marx. In one possible reading of his work, Marx historicized categories that bourgeois political economy treated as eternal. Thus, for instance, behind the forms of production characteristic of capitalist society, Marx finds man producing differently in different ages, including even producing himself as “man” differently in different ages. A radical historicism indeed, but also one, argues Baudrillard, which in historicizing the categories of political economy (labor and production) also and unwarrantedly makes these universal anthropological postulates. In fact, “productivity is not primarily a generic dimension, a human and social kernel of all wealth to be extracted from the husk of capitalist relations of production”; rather, “the abstract and generalized development of productivity [in bourgeois society] is what makes the concept of production itself appear as man’s movement and generic end. . . . in other words, the system of political economy . . . produces the very conception of labor power as the fundamental human potential.”24 Thus to criticize political economy from such a historicist viewpoint is at the same time to generalize it.25 And once we start by assuming the existence and importance of production, other societies are “illuminated only in terms of this model and not in their specificity or even, as . . . in the case of primitive societies, in their irreducibility to production.”26 The last point is the critical one; it is not that labor and production in some societies are historically different, even that they come “mixed up” with religion and the gift; it is that the very categories of labor and production may be inadequate to their object. I will give another example, from my own current work. I am writing a book on pedagogy and subjectivity in colonial India, a book that is in part a history but that also has built into it a reflexive moment which asks what it means to write a “history” of those who have not always lived in history. I have in front of me the draft of a chapter on “cramming.” In this I document a century-long complaint that Indian students crammed, by which was meant not that they studied at the last minute but rather that they learned by rote, indifferent to the meaning of what they were learning. In this chapter I ask what anxiety this complaint testifies to, and also ask what presumptions one must make in order to see cramming as a “failure” of education. My answer (to baldly summarize) is to suggest that cramming is only a failure if we take as our norm a historically specific conception of knowledge, linked to a historically specific conception of the subject. This modern ideal is one of the subject as a self-determining, autonomous agent, the source of meanings and values, who inhabits (and confronts) a nonpurposive world that is itself devoid of meanings and values. The social revolution that creates this subject shifts the locus of gravity from the world, as a meaningful order that one comes to know by

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reading it as a text, and coming into harmony with its underlying order, to the subject who confronts it as a set of mechanical laws and regularities, and who to understand it must internalize it. There is a further, romantic or expressivist inflection of this, in which learning is linked with authenticity; only that counts as knowledge truly gained which wells up from inside the subject and which is connected to and in some way articulates that subject’s own unique personality. The anxiety over cram expresses the fear that in colonial India modern Western education was failing to create this sort of subject, with this relation to knowledge; indeed, that instead Indian students had bent the new education system to their own strengths, utilizing “traditional” methods of memory learning to commit the new knowledge to memory, thereby subverting its intent. This is a typically historicist argument, one which derives its intellectual charge from demonstrating the historicity of a central category of analysis and, in thus denaturalizing it, also opens our eyes to other possibilities (in this case, the possibility of another sort of subject, whose relation to knowledge and the world might be radically different). The intellectual gains of such historicizing moves are not insubstantial, but they also come at a (less obviously apparent) cost. The argument I develop in the draft of my chapter and that I have briefly summarized makes, I think, a valuable point, but I am now also troubled by the fact that my historicist move, while refusing the identification of “subject” with modern Europe, achieved this precisely by universalizing the category “subject.” Historicism, it seems, does register difference, but only (in a manner that seems resolutely Hegelian — the Hegel who, in Merleau-Ponty’s admiring words, “initiated the attempt to explicate the irrational and to integrate it into an enlarged reason”)27 by widening its net so that the difference so recognized is recuperated within a wider sameness. It will be recalled that something like this is the charge that Derrida levels against Madness and Civilization:28 that Foucault did not (and could not possibly) succeed in writing “a history of madness itself, that is, madness speaking on the basis of its own experience and under its own authority.”29 To write an archaeology of madness, to restore to a silenced madness its speech, even if that “speech” is in fact a silence, is already to situate oneself within Reason, and therefore to reiterate that founding moment (of speech and of historicity) when madness was expelled and interned. Derrida asks, “Is not an archaeology, even of silence, a logic, that is, an organized language, a project, an order, a sentence, a syntax, a work? Would not the archaeology of silence be the most efficacious and subtle restoration, the repetition . . . of the act perpetrated against madness — and be so at the very moment when this act is denounced?”30 In a similar vein, could it be that to historicize is to give difference its due only

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by entangling it all the more securely in History and thus in Reason? So that even the form in which we acknowledge the provincialism of our own master categories is that of recognizing that historicity has a history, and of writing sentences like “the medieval attitude to history is itself a historical phenomenon requiring explanation”?31 Even Nietzsche, whose reflections and animadversions on history are one starting point for any attempt to problematize it, can formulate the peculiarity of historical consciousness only in historical terms: “When I view this age with the eyes of a distant age, I can find nothing odder in present-day man than his peculiar virtue and disease called ‘the sense of history’ ” (emphasis added).32 Could it be that once we are in history, the most we can do is recognize that living in history is not inevitable or universal — which does not necessarily equip us to better know those whom we realize are not similarly placed, let alone enable us to get out of history? The same strictures apply, of course, to my own argument. To seek to problematize history and history writing is not to find the constitutive outside of Reason, and thus better equip oneself to know the Other. In any case, as should be clear, the aim of this essay has not been to make the code of history more adequate to non-Western pasts or to provoke and promote better history writing. It has rather been to show the limits of history writing and in that sense to provide a critique of historical Reason: not by demonstrating what we can and cannot reasonably expect of a singular Reason, but rather by pluralizing Reason.

Reason or Reasoning? It is not the case, as historians often imagine it to be, and as is usually taught in the history departments of universities, that the “fact” of history leads (in societies that are sufficiently literate and “developed”) to history writing and historicism. To live in history, and to wish to write it, is not a universal anthropological postulate (and it most emphatically is not rooted in an existential experience of time),33 but is rather a certain way to conceive of and be in the world, at once a tradition of reasoning, a way of being, and a certain practice of subjectivity. The emergence of this orientation to the past and to the self is specific to certain people (societies, classes) and not others. It is connected to some phenomena — the emergence of the modern nation-state, “progress,” scientific rationality — and not others, which it may indeed define itself against (magic, gods). History writing is one way to conceive of and relate to the past (one that highlights certain things and excludes others, such as the gods). The fact that it is a code, and thus that other codes are possible, is obscured by

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the fact that the idea of history presumes, and helps secure, the idea of Man. This humanism anchors the notion that there is a single Man, but many histories of him. To call this humanism into question and to recognize that it is history writing that produces history, rather than the fact of history that produces history writing, is to open thought to new possibilities, including the possibility that what we have is not Man, the Subject of history, who is then pluralized into so many different histories of men, but rather that from the outset we have men, different human societies that conceive of and relate to the past in multiple ways, pasts that are not accessible to them (or us) outside the codes and representational forms we use to represent them. If it were indeed an ontological fact that there exists a secular, godless time inhabited by all, in which causality operates in certain ways, then of course “our” mode of representing this past, as a “history” constituted through rational protocols of history writing, would be by far the best. But if these are not facts but effects of representational practices, and if pasts are not accessible to us outside the codes and representational forms that we use to represent them, then things begin to appear very differently. If we drop the idea that the past exists independently of our representations of it, then the question becomes, not which way of representing the past is true and which not, but rather, how do peoples constitute different relations to pastness? Myth and epic then appear not as instances of getting one’s history wrong, or as primitive precursors of a proper historical consciousness, but rather as other ways to construe one’s past and one’s present relation with that past. Of course, it is true that history writing is increasingly imperial in its pretensions to represent all pasts, and that this is not just a matter of arrogance, but a real consequence of the transformations of the world. It is also true that the insistence that everyone has a history has not come just from the West, but perhaps above all from those peoples who were afraid of being categorized as “peoples without history” and who clamorously denied that this was so, insisting that they too had a history, representable in the code of history writing. In India the demand that Indians write their own history was made by Bankimchandra Chatterjee in the nineteenth century,34 and this demand was echoed — and met — in subsequent decades. Indian nationalism was one of the main vehicles for this — it succeeded both in producing a nation and in producing a history of that nation.35 The more the processes of social transformation do their work, and the more Indian elites succeed in giving us a history — to continue with our chief example, the more the gods are expelled from the world into people’s consciousness — the more capable history writing becomes of coding these pasts and presents. But this process is itself an uneven one,36

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and we should be wary of assuming that it is a process that is proceeding apace and nearing completion. Some Indians have learned (for example) to regard the Lal Qila (Red Fort) in Delhi as a historic monument, a valuable part of the national past, even a symbol of the syncretism that went into the making of a diverse yet united nation. Others treat it as one more city wall on which one can relieve oneself. That the former group despair at the latter’s lack of civic consciousness, national pride, and so on, goes to show that much is at stake. History and historical consciousness are prized because they are seen as connected to citizenship, patriotism, secularism, certain narratives of social justice, and the like. It may be that for these reasons it is desirable that we all come to live in history; or it may be, as Ashis Nandy for one has eloquently argued, that for everyone to inhabit the world of history would constitute a political and ethical calamity.37 At any rate, at the moment the process is far from complete, and unless and until it becomes complete, history writing as a code will continue to be inadequate to non-Western pasts. This is not, of course, to say that we should cease writing histories of India. I am not proposing that historians embrace a self-denying ordinance. Even less am I proposing that we abandon argument and criticism. To pluralize reason is not to abandon reasoning; to deny that there is an Archimedean point from which one can criticize is not to call for an end to criticism. But it is to call for a reconsideration of what we think we are doing when we redescribe the past(s) of peoples in terms that are alien to them. If there is not Reason but traditions of reasoning, not History and its representation in history writing but rather many pasts re-presented in many ways, then we cannot write with any presumption of epistemic privilege. We have to conceive writing history in the Western, modern mode not in an Imperial vein (we are not correcting others’ misperceptions about their pasts) but as a translational exercise (we are translating their self-descriptions in terms that make sense within our intellectual traditions). We do not resile from our traditions — these are what we must begin to reason out of if we are to reason at all — but we do not grant them an a priori epistemic privilege. As a description this is, I am well aware, wildly utopian. The reason the modern and Western mode of history assumes epistemic privilege is connected to imperialism; Kalahari bushmen do not do anthropologies of the white man, just as Indian pandits do not, by and large, write Puranic “histories” that tell the story of colonialism.38 But if we take this as a regulative ideal — not a regulative ideal of a singular reason, in the Kantian sense, but as a regulative ideal of how to give reasons when confronting other modes of reasoning — it may serve to make history writing an ethical rather than an imperial practice.

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Notes My thanks to Dipesh Chakrabarty, Brian Fay, Barry Hindess, and Vanita Seth for their comments on an earlier version of this essay. 1. To make the same point with reference to debates over morality and forms of life: Kantian Moralität would now appear not as a placeless universal but as the Sittlichkeit of Western Europe at the beginnings of the modern age, a specific (and in that sense parochial) morality trying to pass itself off as if it were derived from Reason itself. 2. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), 7– 8. 3. J. S. Mill, “Considerations on Representative Government,” in Utilitarianism, Liberty, and Representative Government (London: Dent, 1964), 178 –79. 4. The phrase is taken from Johannes Fabian’s Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). 5. Richard H. Davis, Lives of Indian Images (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997), chap. 7. 6. Ibid., 259. 7. Religion is itself an example of a historically and culturally specific category, which has been universalized and used to classify and analyze phenomena that do not easily come under its purview. Talal Asad points out that the anthropologists’ understanding of religion “is in fact a view that has a specific Christian history”(Genealogies of Religion [Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993], 42). 8. “The religious history of the seventeenth century . . . implicates a difference between two systems of interpretation, one social (so to speak) and the other religious; that is, between two periods of consciousness, or between two historical types of intelligibility, ours and theirs. . . . we have to wonder what may be the meaning of an enterprise that consists of understanding a time organized as a function of a standard of comprehension other than ours”(Certeau, The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley [New York: Columbia University Press, 1988], 138). 9. Ibid. And while one might write religious history because one is a Christian, one can no longer write it as a Christian. 10. Ibid., 36. 11. Nancy Partner, “Writing on the Writing of History,” in History and Theory: Contemporary Readings, ed. Brian Fay, Philip Pomper, and Richard T. Vann (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 75. 12. In Germany, this happened when Geschichte came to replace Historie, a semantic shift that, according to Reinhart Koselleck, signaled “a new space of experience and a new horizon of expectation” (“On the Disposability of History,” in Futures Past, trans. Keith Tribe [Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985], 201). 13. Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar, Reading “Capital” (London: New Left, 1970), 109. 14. Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1972), 258. 15. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Harper, 1976), 7.

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16. For example, Michael Oakeshott’s characterization of what constitutes history-as-discipline is very different from that of Lévi-Strauss. What they have in common is not an answer, but the fact that they both think it important to ask the question, “How does the discipline of history constitute its object?” They ask this question because they do not accept that the object of history is simply just “there” waiting to be found and written about. Thus Oakeshott begins his exploration of what it is that constitutes a specifically historical “mode of understanding” by observing that “a mode of understanding cannot be specified in terms of a so-called subject matter; here, as always, the conditions of understanding specify what is to be understood”(“On History,” in On History and Other Essays [Oxford: Blackwell, 1983], 5). 17. See, for instance, Lucien Febvre’s programmatic text of 1949, where he declares that history “arranges [facts] in a series” and does so “in accordance with the needs of the present”( “A New Kind of History,” in A New Kind of History and Other Essays: From the Writings of Febvre, ed. Peter Burke, trans. K. Folca [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul], 41). In the case of the Annales school this recognition shaped their historical practice. 18. Thus Febvre, cited above, also argues that the word history be replaced, and suggests as alternatives anthropochronology or ethnochronology (ibid., 35). The dissatisfaction with the word history arises because it has “worn out” its meaning, and because it is equivocal, signifying both event and the science of that event. The alternatives, it will be noticed, embody both his recognition (anticipating Lévi-Strauss) that history is a code, with chronology at its heart, and the continued embrace of the idea that the subject of this code is Man. It would seem that it is easier to recognize the constructedness of the code (the creative historian can turn that to his account, by writing different and better histories, such as histories of the longue duree, and so on), than it is to problematize the humanist philosophical anthropology, which provides this code with its subject. 19. Lévi-Strauss, Savage Mind, 262. 20. Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, 203. 21. Ibid., 14. 22. Jacques Derrida, “White Mythology,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 213. 23. F. C. von Savigny, quoted in D. R. Oldroyd, “Historicism and the Rise of Historical Geology, Part I,” History of Science, no. 17 (1979), 193. 24. Jean Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, trans. Mark Poster (St. Louis: Telos, 1975), 30 – 31. 25. Which is Baudrillard’s conclusion —“having failed to subvert the foundations of political economy, historical materialism results only in reactivating its model at a world-wide level”(ibid., 91). 26. Ibid., 86 – 87. 27. Quoted in Michael Roth, Knowing and History: Appropriations of Hegel in Twentieth-Century France (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988), 48. Merleau-Ponty goes on to declare that “this remains the task of our century.” 28. I am grateful to an anonymous reader from Social Text for drawing this point to my attention. 29. Jacques Derrida, “Cogito and the History of Madness,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 34.

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30. Ibid., 35. Driving home the point: “The misfortune of the mad is that their best spokesmen are those who betray them best; which is to say that when one attempts to convey their silence itself, one has already passed over to the side of the enemy, the side of order, even if one fights against order from within it. . . . In this sense, I would be tempted [!] to consider Foucault’s book a powerful gesture of protection and internment”(36, 55). 31. Julian H. Franklin, Jean Bodin and the Sixteenth Century Revolution in the Methodology of Law and History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), 18. 32. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Josephine Nauckhoff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 190. 33. Time as people live and experience it has many forms, the more common of which are not historical (e.g., the year my son was born . . . the time the crops failed . . . ). Paul Veyne makes the point well: “History is a bookish, not an existential notion; it is the organization by the intelligence of data relating to a temporality that is not that of Dasein”(Writing History, trans. Mina MooreRinvolueri [Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1984], 72). 34. On which see T. W. Clark, “The Role of Bankimchandra in the Development of Nationalism,” in Historians of India, Pakistan, and Ceylon, ed. Cyril Henry Philips (London: Oxford University Press, 1961); Sudipta Kaviraj, The Unhappy Consciousness: Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay and the Formation of Nationalist Discourse in India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), chap. 4; Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995), chap. 4; Ranajit Guha, An Indian Historiography of India: A NineteenthCentury Agenda and Its Implications (Calcutta: KP Bagchi and Co., 1988). 35. In so doing, nationalism produced a rational historiography, a mode of relating to the past altogether different from that embodied in indigenous traditions, including what Guha has labeled the “vernacular pasts” of the subaltern classes. In Guha’s inimitable rendering, “the subaltern in caste, class and gender would continue for a long time yet [i.e., after the rise of a nationalist historiography] to speak of their own pasts . . . in dialects that were conspicuous by indifference to the lingua franca of a monistic nationalism. The writs of these pasts ran within strictly local jurisdictions, beyond the pale of the Raj and the nationalist kingdom-come. The accents, idioms and imageries that characterized them were foreign to the lexicon of a post-Enlightenment Reason that provided historiography and nationalism with much of their distinctive vocabulary. They defied generic incorporation into historical discourse, and were put into words by genealogists, balladeers, story-tellers and wise old people — that is, by the custodians of communal memory — rather than by historians” (“The Authority of Vernacular Pasts,” Meanjin [winter 1992]). 36. It was one of the important arguments of the early volumes of Subaltern Studies that there were two domains of politics and consciousness in colonial India, an elite one and a subaltern one. See Ranajit Guha, “On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India,” Subaltern Studies 1, ed. Ranajit Guha (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982); and Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Invitation to a Dialogue,” Subaltern Studies 4, ed. Ranajit Guha (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1985). In a somewhat different vein, see Sanjay Seth, “Rewriting Histories of Nationalism: The Politics of ‘Moderate Nationalism’ in India, 1870 –1905,” American Historical Review, 104.1 (February 1999), 111–12.

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37. Ashis Nandy, “History’s Forgotten Doubles,” History and Theory, no. 34; see also Nandy, “A Report on the Present State of Health of the Gods and Goddesses in South Asia,” Postcolonial Studies 4.2 (2001). See also various essays by Vinay Lal, including “History and the Possibilities of Emancipation: Some Lessons from India,” Journal of Indian Council of Philosophical Research (June 1996). 38. Though they once did, such as Mrityunjay Vidyalankar’s Rajabali (1808), which spans a period from the kings of the Mahabharata to early colonial times. Eventually such accounts ceased to be written; “indigenous” history came to mean nationalist history, anticolonial perhaps, but still written in accordance with the protocols of a rationalist historiography.

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The Flute, Gerontion, and Subalternist Misreadings of Tagore

Ordinary history is traditional, higher history mythical, and highest mystical. — Goethe, cited in Bhudev Mukhopadhyay’s epigraph to Pushpanjali

In the epilogue to his History at the Limits of World-History (2002), Ranajit Guha, the founding father of subaltern studies, turns, in an act of despair, to the poet Rabindranath Tagore, who had apparently stated in an essay that the past “renews itself creatively in literature, unlike academic historiography with its insistence on keeping its narratives tied strictly to public affairs.” Guha uses Tagore to voice his own reproach on the “poverty of historiography,” turning Tagore’s meditation on the processes of creativity into an emphatic call on all historians to move toward a “creative engagement with the past as a story of man’s being in the everyday world.”1 History as a narrative concerned with the everyday world: this is the objective Guha wishes historians to attain, and for a ready-made manifesto for this program he turns to one of Tagore’s prose writings called Sahitye Aitihasikata, or Historicality in Literature (1941). Guha sees Tagore, in this essay, speak up against the “pedantic historian,” and consequently, somewhat startlingly, he endorses the idiosyncratic approach of the creative writer to history as an aim for historians generally. Guha’s attempt to sidestep the necessity, for a historian, of the tools of the trade, of facts that constitute the “net of external events,” leads him through Tagore and the Upanishads to the “facticity of being” in Heidegger, which is opposed to the “factuality of historiographical representation.” It is facticity that leads to that desirable historicality that Tagore invokes, for facticity, in Tagore, is “an instrument of appropriation by which the self has made the world his own.” The “object-historical conventions of historiography” that Tagore opposes is countered by a facticity located in the primal scenes of his childhood, for, “unlike the factuality of historiographic representation, the facticity of being must be grasped in advance” (79). This is an ideal method, proclaims Guha, for the prehistory of Tagore’s growth as a writer is contained there; thus historicality is situated at a depth beyond the reach of the “academic historian.” Guha’s need to challenge and change the nature of historiography thus leads him to a different field altogether, “over the fence” as he puts it, “to neighboring fields of knowledge” like literature, which historians must Social Text 78, Vol. 22, No. 1, Spring 2004. Copyright © 2004 by Duke University Press.

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learn from in order to deal with “historicality” (5). While the foundational aim of the subaltern project had been to critique elitism in South Asian historiography, twenty years on Guha stretches that intention to its limits, and at a depth, he acknowledges, unknown to his work until now. Guha’s vision of a new historiography had been located then on the question of subaltern representation in history; “history from below” had, in a sense, incorporated an element of creativity and imagination from its very inception. But the extraordinary plea here for the historian “to recover the living history of the quotidian,” this appeal to “recuperate the historicality of what is humble and habitual” (94) (in effect, Tagore’s own description of his aim in writing the Galpaguchha), attempts to turn the historian, it seems, into a creative writer. Ironically, literary history shows that it was, in fact, the high-modernist conception of art that defined the task of the creative writer as involving such a recuperation of the “living history of the quotidian”: Proust, Joyce, and Woolf come to mind immediately. In an appendix to his book, Guha takes it upon himself to translate the essay by Tagore that he has discussed in the epilogue to History at the Limits of World-History. The reading of Guha’s appendix and epilogue is an interesting experience, because it alerts the reader to a number of simultaneous developments in the thinking of not only Guha but also his colleague and fellow subaltern historian, Dipesh Chakrabarty, in his essay on Tagore, “Nation and Imagination,” in Provincializing Europe (2002). It is worth noting here that a number of Bengalis fundamentally associated with the subaltern studies project, namely the two mentioned above, Gayatri Spivak (whose Deuskar lecture at the Center for Studies in the Social Sciences, Calcutta on 10 February 2003 was titled “Disgrace, Tagore, and Primary Education in West Bengal”), as well as Partha Chatterjee (who delivered the Sunil Sen Memorial Lecture at Rabindra Bharati University, Calcutta, titled “Rabindrik Nation ki?” [What is Tagore’s nation?] in Bengali on 29 April 2003), seem to all be returning to Tagore (not infrequently reviled in his time for his wealthy, elitist family background) in articles, speeches, and epilogues. This sudden rediscovery of Tagore, that icon of the middle classes, after thirty-odd years and a lifetime devoted to the subaltern project, is in itself a sociological phenomenon worth commenting upon for the deeply bhadralok — Bengali genteel bourgeois — instincts of a group of intellectuals who represent a generation fundamentally influenced by the culture of Tagore. Without venturing into any larger generalizations on the portent and symbolism of these Bengali subalternists’ qualitative investment in Tagore and what that might mean to subaltern studies generally, it should be enough to remark merely that perhaps at the root of this return to Tagore lies the shared personal and intellectual traditions of growing up in post-Tagorean Bengal, and that the

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current preoccupation perhaps reflects the very nature of the beginnings of the subaltern studies project, whose internal coherence has been seen by critics to be as much intellectual as personal, and the endeavor being impelled by both ideological imperatives and group loyalties.2 Tagore then becomes a site in which both these elements — the personal and the intellectual — that inform these subalternists’ project come together in a problematic way. Tagore formulates a poetics in his essay constructed around a moment of epiphany or transcendence that lifts him out of his everyday existence into a communion with the sublime, which is the essence of creativity. That moment of joy is reminiscent of Wordsworth’s most important conceptual image in The Prelude: those “spots of time” “that with distinct preeminence retain / A renovating virtue . . . enshrining, / Such is my hope, the spirit of the Past / For future restoration.” Wordsworth continues: “Such moments / Are scattered everywhere, taking their date / From our first childhood,” and in it, “ordinary sights” become “visionary.”3 For Guha to suggest that the academic historian should try to enter that state of heightened perception leading to creativity in order to rid historiography of its “statist blinkers” is, at the very least, a misreading of Tagore’s intention. “All we need to do,” Guha quotes the French philosopher Henri Lefebvre as saying, just as Tagore did, “is to open our eyes and see”: advice that has been “ignored by historians these last sixty years” (94). Such a clarion call to historians to arise, awake, and change their methods and aims is, paradoxically, eerily reminiscent of the countless exhortations of nationalists such as Vivekananda in the nineteenth century who similarly commanded the people of India to “open their eyes” and slumber no more; that this paradoxical echoing is completely contrary to Guha’s own lifelong politics of historiography, fashioned against Indian elitist or nationalist historiographies in favor of a study of the societies, histories, and cultures of the dispossessed is obvious, but still unnerving. All historians from now on, Guha suggests, should situate historicality in a paradigm that shall go beyond the reach of the ordinary academic historian of today. This impulse to go beyond the confines of history has been a familiar charge among novelists and poets who have had a traditional quarrel with the expectation of critics of their unmediated relationship to history; to find a historian making a similar complaint, as Guha does here, is both unique and extraordinary. Taking a closer look at the essay Guha is dealing with further illuminates the matter. Guha translates the “Bangla original” from the centenary edition of Tagore’s works, where it is chronologically the “last article but one of Tagore’s prose writings.” He mentions that “it is an authorized transcript of what he [Tagore] said in the course of a conversation with

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Buddhadev Basu, a leader of the younger generation of Bengali writers.” Guha also says that he has checked his facts with an authority on Tagore, Professor Sankha Ghosh, who should, perhaps, have mentioned to him that, rather than there being “no ground for doubt,” there is indeed very considerable “ground for doubt about the authenticity — and, for that matter, finality — of the statement” (95). Because the history of this article is slightly more complicated than its summation by Guha here, an investigation into its publication and subsequent retraction by Tagore throws all of Guha’s conclusions apropos its statements into confusion. About its composition, at a time when Tagore was very ill, Basu writes: He doesn’t sleep well at night, has various strange dreams, even talks in his sleep. Wakes up at two o’clock at night and finds it impossible to sleep again. At such times he then begins to relate a story or an essay orally. One day I gave him a few written questions on the relation between history and literature. I had expected no more than a few words on the subject from him. The next day as soon as I arrived he said: “what a lot of trick questions [borthokano prasna] you have come up with. Here.” With that he handed me a manuscript written down by Rani Chanda; he began it after he woke up and by the time we had woken up, it was finished. Two days later he felt that he had not said enough on the topic, so he added another short article to it.4 (my translation)

A letter from Tagore to Basu, dated 24 May 1941, mentions the conversation and carries the entire text of the article; the editor of Tagore’s Chithipatra [Letters] refers to this as a “typed letter-article [patra-prabandha].”5 Basu had reproduced the letter as an article in letter form in the journal Kabita in 1941 under the title “Sahitye Aitihasikata O Sahityer Utsa” [Historicality in literature and the source of literature]. The second part, “Sahityer Utsa”— missing from the centenary edition Guha uses — is in complete contrast to the first, being a vague and generalized pronouncement on the essential characteristics of creativity in mankind: from the delight of his own history in the first part, we turn now to a programmatic history of man. Crucially, a couple of sentences at the start and a final concluding sentence here are missing from the text of the first part, “Sahitye Aitihasikata,” as it appeared in the centenary edition. Tagore begins, in his letter, “Buddhadev, when I talked to you yesterday of historicality in literature, I had always known in my own mind that I was exaggerating. The reason for such deliberate exaggeration was that much bitterness has accumulated somewhere inside me.” The concluding sentence of the letter reverts to this theme: “That is why, if you people go too far [barabari koro] with your insistence on the lessons of history, then I too shall get ready for battle [komor bedhe] and begin to go too far [barabari korte].”6

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Basu’s questions, according to Nepal Majumdar, were a mere pretext for Tagore’s outburst, caused by the bitterness that Tagore mentions had been accumulating in him for some time before the writing of this epistle. It had its antecedents in “the fact that for quite a few years, Realist and Marxist literary critics had been judging and analysing Rabindranath’s poetry and achievements in literature from a historical/materialist [aitihasik bastubaad] standpoint. Because of this, a suppressed grief and dissatisfaction had accumulated in the poet’s mind.”7 The publication of an issue of Kabita devoted exclusively to Tagore’s poetry had been Basu’s personal act of atonement for any perceived public denigration of Tagore; however, the very issue meant as a celebration of Tagore contained a few pieces that displeased him. Majumdar cites Dhurjatiprasad Mukherjee’s “Rabindranath’s Politics,” Nihar Ranjan Ray’s “Content in Rabindranath’s Novels,” and, most galling of them all, Debi Prasad Chattopadhyay’s “Rabindranath’s Prose Poetry” as the articles that instigated the greatest grief. Devi Prasad’s Marxist tendencies resulted in criticism that was not only wrongheaded but also fixed according to his party affiliation. He began: “Firstly, to call Rabindranath bourgeois should not be understood as an insult, it is merely a historical truth. And it is an unavoidable historical fact. In the sense that just as it was unavoidable that India should have a merchant class, similarly, it was unavoidable for him to be anything but a bourgeois poet.”8 Reading Tagore on the meaning of those childhood moments Guha draws our attention to, I would suggest, therefore, that the concern, in Tagore, of the conflict between historicality and literature is an old preoccupation that needs to be linked, not to “the logic of a developing critique of historiography” (86) as Guha reads this essay to be, but to the poetics Tagore formulated toward the end of his life in response to the accusation of younger Bengali writers that his poetry lacked a sense of social realism. Guha summarizes the essay as Tagore’s “last testament . . . on the relation of literature to historicality,” but wrongly interprets Tagore’s complaint, “I find it difficult to put up with the pedantic historian when he tries to force me out of the center of my creativity as a poet” to indicate “unmistakable hostil[ity]” toward “history and historians” (77). The irritation was to do not with history or the historian but with critics who insisted on the importance of history to literature; Guha’s translation of the Bengali term aitihasik pandit as pedantic historian in itself begs the question, for while the noun aitihasik refers to a historian, used as an adjective for pandit, it may simply mean, slightly derogatorily, the historically minded pedant. “Sahitye Aitihasikata”: the stress, as far as Tagore is concerned, is almost invariably on the first term, Sahitya, or literature; the historicality referred to in Aitihasikata is related to facts or events, which, Tagore says,

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mean different things to the historian and different things to the poet. Do not ask the poet to be a historian, Tagore’s plea seems to be: his disgust with the insistence of Calcutta critics that he is disengaged from contemporary events leads him to say “Dur hok ge tomar itihas” (to hell with your history).9 It would be more accurate to conclude, therefore, that Tagore’s intention in “Sahitye Aitihasikata” is to demonstrate how literature has been impoverished by the critic’s preoccupation with history and realism; he is, arguably, not really bothered about historians or the discipline of history and how it deals with facts; he is concerned, rather, about the business of creative writing and how that should deal with facts. To further reinforce the direction of the thoughts with which Tagore was preoccupied at the time, we have the evidence of another conversation on similar lines that Tagore had with younger writers. Sutapa Bhattacharya, the editor of the Letters, mentions, in a footnote to another letter, Rani Chanda’s book Aalapchari Rabindranath (1962), where a conversation is recorded on the same day that the letter to Basu on “Sahitye Aitihasikata” was sent: 24 May 1941. There, Tagore reiterates, in a discussion and in a language reminiscent of the essay: “Pandits judge the merits and demerits of literature; but you have brought together the joy of pure enjoyment. . . . On one side there is flavor [rasa] and on the other enjoyment. If pedantry [panditya] is brought between these, then that takes a different form [rup]. Its field is different.”10 He had complained elsewhere, similarly that “in our country, we call the display of book learning criticism. I don’t agree. On the one side there is the thing to be appreciated/tasted, on the other the one who enjoys; when these two meet, then that is criticism. Whether the thing is Mughal or Pathan, feudal or capitalist: there is no point in looking for that. It is full of rasa, you have liked it: speak of these things properly. Don’t bring pedantry [ panditya] into it.”11 For a final word on the subject, however, we may turn to the troubled history of the article’s appearance in print. That Tagore was dissatisfied with his utterances on the subject of historicality and literature was evident when he spoke of the fact that he had exaggerated; in the next letter to Basu, too, he referred to the article, saying: “This time you left the ashram after having gathered many baskets of scolding. I can only hope that all twelve annas of that are not useless rubbish.”12 But with the passing of time, that dissatisfaction turned into something like despair. In a desperate effort to curtail the damage he perceived himself as having done in allowing his thoughts to be put into these articles, he revised and rewrote them for prior publication in Prabasi before Basu could bring them out in Kabita. In three successive letters to Ramananda Chatterjee, editor of Prabasi, on the second, sixth, and eighth of June that year, he expresses his

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unease. In the first of these, he complains: “I am unsure about whether these articles, which I have spoken aloud, are worth anything.” In the next letter, he is more worried: “All those things I had said to Buddhadev in this condition, from my sick bed, have really no value. . . . Keep only those things that are worth publishing. I think there are some new things on literature that are worth keeping. But those have not been captured.” By the third letter, he is categorical in his denial of the articles: This time, by introducing various subjects in a detailed manner with me, Buddhadev has clouded my brain. I am yet to recover. Noticeably, there is a discrepancy between what I had said and what was written down. I was unwell, that is why I could not check it myself — now I see I was wrong. . . . It is not done to publish such scoldings spoken orally. One’s own standing is reduced by doing so, I have really understood that now.13

Thus it came to be that “Sahityer Utsa” was rewritten and published in Prabasi as “Sahitya, Shilpa” [“Literature, art”] before Basu could bring it out himself, with an editor’s note by Chatterjee attached: “The poet, despite his illness, had revised and edited as far as possible the conversations between Buddhadev babu and Rabindranath that had been transcribed. Not satisfied with that, he has written and sent us this short article.” Basu must have been dismayed with these developments, for he writes to Tagore on 25 June 1941, requesting him to write a small note for the publication of the pieces in Kabita, so that readers could distinguish the articles as genuine—that note, however, was never sent. He published the pieces regardless, with the plea: “To understand the poet’s entire intention, it is essential to read this [entire version].”14 Tagore had found himself, in fact, unable to accept the first piece, “Sahitye Aitihasikata,” as well. A revised version of that, too, was sent to Prabasi, this time transcribed by Sudhir Kar, but Tagore eventually changed his mind yet again and withdrew it from publication. Significantly, in this version, the poet had given it the title “Sahitye Samasamayikata” [The contemporary in literature]; the title “Sahitye Aitihasikata” [Historicality in literature] seems to have been Basu’s own rather than Tagore’s.15 In his reading of “Sahitye Aitihasikata,” Guha recognizes that Tagore is upset with “those literary critics who wander about so extensively in history as to rob it of all its specificity” (90); what he fails to recognize is that the entire essay is a riposte not to the historian but to the literary critic. Thus he says, at the start of his epilogue, “In joining issue with the kind of historian he criticizes, Tagore is evidently not interested in taking a stand against history as such but in pleading with a different approach to it” (77). Or again, “it seems to be his [Tagore’s] intention to demonstrate how history has been impoverished by historiography’s preoccupation

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with the public and the average to the exclusion of the individual and the creative” (89). However, a glance at the concluding line of the letter form in which “Sahitye Aitihasikata” originally appeared (where Tagore says: “That is why, if you people go too far [barabari koro] with your insistence on the lessons of history”) will show that by the phrase “you people” Tagore meant not the historian but the critics represented by Basu, and that the “lessons of history” were lessons to be learned by the creative writer in the matter of how his writing should engage with history, not by historians in the writing of historiography. How does such an interpretation of Tagore’s intent in this essay, and, subsequently, of Guha’s misinterpretation of that intent, affect the mission of subaltern studies? If what is at stake for subaltern studies is the apprehension and representation of subaltern agency in history, and if Guha sees Tagore’s words on the matter of history as influential to the degree of issuing a mandate on what historiographical representation should be, then his marked misinterpretation of Tagore should say something about the state of subaltern studies today. What of Guha’s hope that this creative history would be a better way of writing history — does that include his original historiographical mission of grasping subaltern agency? While there are no easy answers to such questions, the vexed relationship between creative writing and subaltern history might be nominally illuminated by the example of at least one subaltern historian who has an alternate incarnation as a creative artist. Partha Chatterjee has written, adapted, and staged plays in Bengali for the last twenty-five years in Calcutta — contrary to Guha’s vision, in his case the two spheres have so far remained completely segregated on paper. It may be remarked, though, that one of Chatterjee’s plays, Ramnidhi, published in Ekkhon magazine in 1985, is an interpretation (not an adaptation or Bengali version, he writes) of Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus and deals, in fact, with the nature of creativity and the creative imagination, contrasting the inborn talent of a famous nineteenthcentury Bengali songwriter, Ramnidhi Gupta, with the methodically attained plodding expertise of a professional rival, Kriparam.16 Here Chatterjee, in a sense, has dramatized the concerns of Guha in The Poverty of Historiography, presenting the contrast between a man who attains a degree of competence through hard work (Guha’s “pedantic historian”) in the figure of Kriparam and the spontaneously creative artist, Ramnidhi, whose individual perception transforms music-hall trivia into the artistic sublime, within the ironic framework of the play itself. Guha’s idea, on the other hand, is to blur the line separating history writing from literary creativity, demanding now, it seems, that history be written in literary terms; what the repercussions of such a move may be on the future course of subaltern historiography remains to be seen.

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“Piercing the Veil of the Real” Tagore’s formulation of his notions about the moment of epiphany in the essay “Sahitye Aitihasikata” could have been said to have been a reformulation, in another context, of his phrase “piercing the veil of the real,” discussed by Dipesh Chakrabarty alongside a late Tagore prose poem, The Flute, and the same literary debates in 1930s Bengal between younger poets and Tagore that form the backdrop for “Sahitye Aitihasikata.”17 Chakrabarty, in his analysis of The Flute, fails to carry the argument to Eliot; a study of Eliot’s Gerontion alongside Tagore’s Flute, however, illuminates the latter’s preoccupation with the nature of the modern late in his life in unexpected ways. The remarkable discovery that Ranajit Guha, too, has Eliot’s Gerontion in mind in relation to his book (he quotes, in an epigraph, the following lines: “After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now / History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors / And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions, / Guides us by vanities”) only lends added piquancy, surely, to this discussion.18 A close reading of “Sahitye Aitihasikata” shows that the emphasis there is quite clearly on the extraordinary character of certain ordinary moments in Tagore’s life. In this short monologue of less than four pages, a little less than two are taken up with describing, in great detail, three instances in his childhood when he was touched with a strange joy. The recurrent motif, in all three cases, is one of sheer bliss touching the child’s/poet’s soul amid the poverty or mundane nature of his life. First he describes a garden in his house, “indigent like myself,” in which, at daybreak, the “light fell on the trembling coconut fronds and the dewdrops burst into glitter.” In the second instance, upon returning from school he found “a dark blue cumulus suspended high over the third storey of our house.” This is described as “a marvellous spectacle” and followed, a little later, with another “amazing spectacle” of a cow fondly licking the body of a donkey as Rabindranath watched “with enchanted eyes.” “No one else,” he concludes, “was instructed by the history of that day in the profound significance of that sight as was Rabindranath.”19 This poetic vision is exactly captured by the phrase “piercing the veil of the real,” used by Tagore to characterize Sister Nivedita’s mission in India, and is valuable to us for showing perhaps a certain continuity of thinking in Tagore. Nivedita was able to love India, Tagore had suggested in a speech on the occasion of her death in 1911, because she was able to “pierce the veil of poverty and incompleteness in the country as a whole.” She was able to see what other Europeans had not; where they had stopped at the real disappointments of life in India, she had gone beyond those. Tagore’s point of view here, as Chakrabarty puts it, was that “real-

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istically seen, India could indeed be disappointing. . . . To be able to love India was to go beyond realism, to pierce the veil of the real, as Tagore put it” (150). The use of metaphors in the construction of opposites in both cases is very similar: on the one hand the garden, or India, is poor, miserable, indigent, but possessed of true beauty once the veil is torn, or seen through, at a particular moment. Interestingly, the stories Tagore wrote in Galpaguchha in the 1890s find an important place in both Guha’s and Chakrabarty’s essays, and are worth a short digression. Chakrabarty analyzes the stories to claim that they represented Tagore’s “critical eye,” that is, they embodied that side of him which “sought out the defects in the nation for the purposes of reform and improvement.” In contrast, the “adoring eye” “saw the nation as already beautiful or sublime” in Tagore’s poetic compositions. The division is easy to illustrate: Chakrabarty offers examples from the stories and quotes from Bengali literary critics who show how the stories embodied “the evils of dowry, the domination of wives by husbands, of oppression of women, of selfishness between families marrying into each other, . . . of quarrels among brothers over property” (151). In his poetry and songs, Tagore depicted the same Bengali villages as sites “of arcadian and pastoral beauty” “blessed with divine grace,” and Chakrabarty quotes from the song “My golden Bengal, I love you,” as well as from Dui bigha jami as examples. He concludes: The former [the stories] was amenable to historicist and objective treatment; it stood for the familiar and political desire of the modern to align the world with that which was real and rational. The poetic, argued Tagore, took us outside of historical time. Together, prose and poetry posed and answered the question of the two ways of seeing in Bengali nationalism. (153)

There is a problem here, however, even with the examples used: the reference to Dui bigha jami is strange, because the portion quoted, as Chakrabarty himself mentions, is an often-anthologized extract and only a small portion of the whole. What Chakrabarty doesn’t mention is that the extract is also directly opposite in temper and tone from the rest of the narrative, which is stridently polemical. If the single verse “I salute you Bengal, my beautiful mother” is to be read as illustrative of Tagore’s adoring eye, then it may be argued that the framework of the actual poem itself within which it is contained (about a rapacious landlord and a false court case robbing a poor man of his ancestral land) is representative of the critical eye. The construction of the stories as didactic and the poems as celebratory thus breaks down even before it is properly built up. Chakrabarty’s compartmentalization of Tagore’s strategies in the initial period of his writings from 1890 to 1910, when he wrote the stories in

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Galpaguchha, as a “division of labor . . . between the prosaic and the poetic” are based on the fact that Tagore developed his theories on the prose poem (although, by the term gadyakabita, Tagore is largely referring to free verse rather than the literal prose poetry) much later, in 1932, when he said: “That which gives me the taste of the ineffable, I will not refuse to accept as poetry, regardless of whether it comes in the shape of prose or verse.”20 To treat the prose as prosaic and the poetry as poetic in the early period, however, confuses form with content; it is remarkable how, in the Tagore essay Guha deals with, “Sahitye Aitihasikata,” Tagore himself identifies his prose as emptied of history. There, the same stories in Galpaguchha are evoked by Tagore to claim (referring to himself in the third person): “Thanks to his [the poet’s] creativity, what came to be reflected in Galpaguchha was not the image of a feudal order nor indeed any political order at all, but that history of the weal and woe of human life which, with its everyday contentment and misery, has always been there . . . manifesting their simple and abiding humanity across all of history” (99). While Tagore’s intentions do not necessarily negate Chakrabarty’s contention that the stories contained “a trenchant critique of society and a clear political will for reform,” it is still interesting to note that Tagore himself characterized their writing as “gathering those wonderful impressions of weal and woe in my heart” in which his “inner soul delighted.”21 What Tagore denies here is exactly that reading of Chakrabarty’s that would align these short stories with the “prosaic”; to be able to write these “sketches of country life month after month in a way nobody had done before,” it was necessary for the “creator” to work “all alone in his studio.” “Like the Supreme Creator, he [the poet], too, creates his work out of his own self,” Tagore declares, and in his mind, it is clear from the essay, there is no distinction between the lyrics in Chitra, the narrative poems in Katha O Kahini, and the stories (Tagore’s term, “sketches,” also blurs the line) in Galpaguchha, which are discussed together in one long paragraph or, since the essay was spoken and transcribed, in the same breath, so to speak.22 Both are rooted in an act of creation in which the maker delves into his own resources (which come from “delight”) to fashion a representation located beyond history (Mughal or British, it doesn’t matter, Tagore says) in the joy of craftsmanship. Chakrabarty’s reading of the stories as prosaic and as “amenable to historicist and objective treatment” is exactly what Tagore means, one might conclude, when he uses the term pedantic, for it is this sort of historical reading he is reacting to when he had said, as he might have to Chakrabarty if he had been a contemporary, “Dur hok ge tomar itihas.” This brings us to a larger point about the novel and the nation that have been symbiotically linked together in a profusion of postcolonial

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works. Here Chakrabarty seems to fall into the same trap of treating the two entities as two sides of a coin, when he takes his argument about the division between the prosaic and the poetic in Tagore further to say: “The new prose of fiction — novels and short stories — was thus seen as intimately connected to questions of political modernity.” Ironically, in a chapter devoted to poetry, Chakrabarty elides any mention of verse only at the crucial instance of the formulation of national modernity, when a cursory glance at the history of Bengali literature (the site in which Chakrabarty’s argument is located) will show that the nation was first imagined, and arguably more influentially imagined (for we tend to forget how much more influential poetry was in the nineteenth century), in the poetry of Rangalal Bandopadhyay (Padmini Upakhyan, 1858), Michael Madhusudan Dutt (Bangabhasha, Bharat-Bhumi, 1860), Hemchandra Bandopadhyay (Bharat Sangeet, Bharat Bilap, 1871), or Nabinchandra Sen (Palasir Juddha, 1875). In the year 1923, the president of the literary wing of the Bangiya Sahitya Sammelan, Amritalal Basu, had this to say about the wave of national feeling that had engulfed the Bengali people through their poets in his youth: Although Iswar Gupta’s Mutiny and other poems had enthusiasm, the person who brought real excitement to the hearts of new Bengal, sowing the seeds of patriotism there, was Rangalal. I have, as a child, recited his lines: “Who wants to live without freedom, who wants to live?” [Shadhinatahinatay ke bachite chay re, ke bachite chay] while brandishing a bamboo stick [bakhari] during play. Khidirpur is famous for its docks where ships are repaired; but here, at one time, a few very big ships had been produced, and of them, the most important three were called — Rangalal, Madhusudan, and Hemchandra. The agitation caused by the big and small waves that these three ships set in motion when they passed is still rocking all of Bengal.23

While it would certainly not be wise to dispute that “the new prose of fiction” was connected to political modernity in Bengal, it would be historically more accurate to mention that poetry had not only preceded it in that regard but also remained a powerful arbitrator in matters of political modernity right up to the 1950s in Bengali culture. Issues of authenticity and nationalism in modern Bengali poetry had agitated society in its search for a new, modern idiom with which to articulate the nation long before its advent in prose, and subsequently in simultaneous concert with it, throughout the period under discussion.

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The Function of the Poetic in the World of the Modern Gerontion, written originally as the prelude to “The Waste Land,” was the first poem in T. S. Eliot’s Poems, 1920, and symptomatic of Eliot’s preoccupation with the fractured, spiritually moribund condition of Europe after the disastrous Great War. The “little old man” of the title is symbolic of a sterile civilization, corrupt, like Kurtz in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (a figure that affected Eliot’s consciousness considerably), who, like the old man in the poem, had said he was “lying here in the dark waiting for death.” The many allusions and references in this poem are even more obscure and private than those in Prufrock and Other Poems, and the arbitrariness of these make for an inchoate articulation of the spiritual sterility of modern man, divorced from religion and his past, surviving in the meaningless chaos of history. Tagore had read Prufrock (1917) and quoted extensively from “Preludes” in his essay “Modern Poetry” [“Adhunik Kabya”] in 1932.24 Banshi [The flute] was also written in the same year; even a cursory reading of this poem points the reader in the direction of Eliot and Tagore’s preoccupation, at the time, with the nature of the modern. Dipesh Chakrabarty, in his discussion of the poem, brackets it within his discussion of gadyakabita, which was used most extensively by Tagore between the years 1932 and 1936. According to Chakrabarty, its use carried “a polemical charge” because “it helped Tagore to make his point about the specific relationship between the poetic and the real [bastab]” (163). Banshi is then used as a prime example of Tagore’s gadyakabita, and the reason for Tagore turning to the prose poem seems to be, according to Chakrabarty, because he could thus introduce the prosaic elements of the everyday world into his verse; a poem in rhyme could not be used as a vehicle for the “real,” so the prose poem was brought in to cope with such subject matter. This made Banshi emblematic of “the distinction he had made between prose and poetry in the 1890s” (166). Just as the distinction Chakrabarty makes between the prosaic and the poetic in the early years is brought into question when we look at Tagore’s own comments on the writing of the Galpaguchha, there is a small question mark that may be introduced here, too, as the poem Banshi does not, in fact, qualify as a prose poem at all and therefore does not fall into the category of gadyakabita. It is written in the aksharbritta chhanda of Bengali meter, which uses, as a basic unit, the rhythmic pattern of 4, 4, 2, or multiplications thereof — 8, 8, 4, and so on; the line may be expanded or contracted according to multiplications of four. Tagore uses this meter for Banshi in the cleverest way and writes it as if it were a prose poem, when actually it is a classic example of aksharbritta chhanda. The poem is, in fact, cited as an example of a clever

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use of this particular meter in a popular Bengali classroom text such as Nirendranath Chakrabarty’s Kabitar Class.25 Regardless of whether Banshi is a prose poem or not, however, it certainly engaged with Tagore’s conceptualization of what “the function of the poetic was in the world of the modern” (163). Here, Tagore’s attempt seems to be to articulate his engagement with modernity and the nation in a definitive way; not only to show that he could do what Eliot did and what the younger generation accused him of being unable to do, but also to frame and present the difference of his own particular aesthetic. Placed by the side of Gerontion, Banshi has fewer stylistic transitions and abrupt departures, for while it is impossible to impose narrative coherence on the former, the latter has a tale to tell and, more important, a superimposed message to convey. While the differences between the two poems are certainly as important as the similarities, the correspondences in the imagery, however, remain remarkable. Tagore’s narrator, like the old man in Gerontion, is a weary soul who lives in the milkman Kinu’s lane, in a rented room. The rented room is a motif that recurs in Gerontion: the old man says, “I stiffen in a rented house,” and it is mentioned that the owner is a Jew, that the house is in a poor condition, “draughty” and “decayed”— the last lines of the poem read: “Tenants of the house, / Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season.”26 Tagore’s description of the rented room, evocative for the Bengali reader of countless other such depictions in modern Bengali literature, the apotheosis of which may be Satyajit Ray’s visualization of Apu’s rented room in Apur Sansar, is one in which “the damp walls have lost their plaster here and there, / with moist patches in between.”27 More invocations of a rootless urban existence follow: the narrator spends his evenings at “the Sealdah railway station / saving on electricity. / The engine’s dhash dhash sound, / the sound of the whistle / the rush of passengers / the clamor of coolies.” Gerontion’s evocation of the clutter and dirt infesting a cosmopolitan and rootless London (“My house is a decayed house / and the Jew squats on the window sill, the owner . . . / Blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in London. / The goat coughs at night in the field overhead; / Rocks, moss, stonecrop, iron, merds.”) is brought to mind in Tagore’s complaint about the “besmirched modernity” of modern poets in English, for whom “the world that they view and show is crumbling, dustblown, and choked with rubbish. Their minds today are morbid, discontented, unsettled.”28 The word rubbish, which Edward Thompson has mentioned as being a great favorite of the poet’s in conversation, is used in its original English. In Banshi, Tagore himself, however, is not averse to depicting rubbish heaps:

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On the corners of this lane collect and rot in heaps mango seeds and skin, cores of jackfruit, gills of fish, dead kittens mixed with ashes and other assorted rubbish.

These lines, and the poem in which they occur, would have been impossible without Tagore having read Eliot, as any follower of Tagore’s poetic development over the years would recognize. Here, he describes the banal and the tawdry as modern poets do to demonstrate, in the end, that he believes there is something that transcends the mundane, lifting us beyond the ugliness of modern life toward an eternal beauty. Something similar, he found, occurs in Prufrock, and in “Modern Poetry” Tagore shows that even a modern poet like Eliot cannot be “dispassionate in the scientific manner.” After quoting lines from “Preludes” that depict a “tawdry evening and tawdry morning filled with smoke, mud, various stale smells, and tattered rubbish,” a “picture of contrasting nature,” Tagore says, is to be found in the mention of “the notion of some infinitely gentle / Infinitely suffering thing.” So Eliot’s conclusion, “The worlds revolve like ancient women / Gathering fuel in vacant lots,” is an expression of distaste for this world, except that he “differs from earlier times in having no desire to lull the mind with a fictitious world of colored dreams.”29 Realism, Tagore had said elsewhere, was but a preference, as “in fact the real is a product of human selection, conscious or unconscious.”30 By deliberately choosing to describe “flowers that are withered and wormeaten,” modern poets were like the “aghori sect,” deliberately selecting an “offensive diet and unclean objects.” The depiction of reality for the sake of realism is useless; thus, his anger, in the same essay, at Eliot’s Aunt Helen, where the butler sits with the chambermaid on his lap after the demise of their strict mistress, before whom they had been so careful before. It might have happened, Tagore says, but “is that enough?”31 Tagore’s purpose behind the accumulation of images of rubbish in Banshi seems to be for it to act as a contrast, in the poem, to a final moment of epiphany or transcendence directly reminiscent of the moments of childhood joy in ordinary surroundings recounted in “Sahitye Aitihasikata.” After describing the trapped shadow of the monsoon in the damp room and comparing it to the feeling, in the narrator, of being bound on all sides, tied to a half-dead world, the poem comes to its denouement. Comparing this climactic penultimate verse to a “dissolving shot,” Chakrabarty shows how the poem now “mounts nothing short of a full-scale attack on

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the historical and the objective” (166 – 67). Although, confusingly, it is also referred to once as a flute, and Tagore uses flute in the title, the poem describes how the sound of the cornet (commonly used in theatrical performances in Bengal) transforms the lane at dawn or in late afternoon: Suddenly some evening the raga Sindhu-baroan would be played, and the whole sky would resonate with the pain of separation of all times. And then in an instant it becomes clear that this lane is a terrible lie like the insufferable delirium of a drunkard.32

The realization this music brings is that “there is no difference at all / between Akbar the emperor and / Haripada the clerk,” that “the imperial parasol and the broken umbrella go together toward the same Vaikuntha” (167). The music fills the narrator’s heart, and he has a final redemptive vision then of the Dhaleswari River at the auspicious hour of twilight shaded by tamal trees, and of the woman he did not marry, waiting in a courtyard, dressed in a dhakai sari, with the vermilion mark of marriage on her forehead. Once more, then, surroundings that are tawdry and banal, or miserable and indigent, which are the words he used to describe his garden, as well as the reality of the India Nivedita had served, are transformed by the epiphanic moment, brought about here not by the play of light or a heap of clouds but by the sound of music floating above the lane. This belief in the transcendental function of art or love in Tagore is at the root of all his problems with the modernists. For the vision of the emperor and the clerk transcending the reality of the dirty lane to move together toward eternity denies history and takes refuge instead in the redeeming power of art. This emphatic assertion seems almost to be, in the context of the essays discussed above, a poetic formulation of his cry: “Dur hok ge tomar itihas”— to hell with your history — a cry that has resonated often enough in the annals of literary conflicts. Thus early in the twentieth century we have the popular image in Doctor Zhivago of the protagonist/writer accused of writing love poems while ignoring the apocalyptic chaos of the Bolshevik Revolution happening all around him, while as late as the 1970s and 1980s we may witness the indignation of J. M. Coetzee, similarly arraigned by critics for writing novels that were too literary, that did not reflect adequately the cruelties of the apartheid regime in which he lived. In a talk in Cape Town in 1987 that became an essay titled “The

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Novel Today,” Coetzee “portrayed himself as a ‘member of a tribe threatened with colonisation,’ his provocative figure for the novelist whose own specifically literary discourse was in danger of being appropriated by the discourses of politics, ethics, and, most notably, history.” Coetzee strongly objected to “the ‘powerful tendency, perhaps even dominant tendency, to subsume the novel under history,’ where history was taken to be a fixed, self-evident reality to which the novel was supposed to bear witness.”33 The historical parallels between the situation in which Tagore found himself in the 1930s in pre-independence colonial India and that of Coetzee, battling with the view that “only those novels that in a realist mode put their literariness in the service of ethics, politics, and history deserved to be valued and taken seriously in the pressing circumstances of South Africa in the 1980s,” are remarkable. Both writers were reacting to elements in the system having a judgmental, bureaucratic cast of mind (censors in the case of Coetzee, critics in the case of Tagore), and both responded by insisting on literature as a specific kind of discourse, distinct from the discourses of history, politics, and ethics; Coetzee characterized this as “storytelling as another, an other mode of thinking,” while Tagore reiterated, referring to himself in the generalized third person, that “in his own field of creativity Rabindranath has been entirely alone and tied to no public by history. Where history was public, he was there merely as a British subject but not as Rabindranath himself.”34 This objection to history as a fixed, self-evident reality is also the omnipresent feeling in Gerontion: “Think now / History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors / And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions, / Guides us by vanities.” Without going into the complications of the relation between modernism and Tagore, which would have to include a discussion on the relation between the urban and the modern, on the importance of nature to Tagore, and on the moment of epiphany in modernism contrasted to the Tagorean moment transcending the real, it might be apposite to end by pointing out that Eliot, here, is closer to Tagore than Tagore would have suspected. For an appreciation of the commonalities in their positions we need, perhaps, to reread Tagore as a modern poet in many instances, relying on the fragmentary, imagistic, and intense songs of the Gitobitan rather than on the programmatic and somewhat forced protestations of poems like Banshi. Those high priests of modernism, Flaubert and Pound, for instance, had advocated concreteness and exactness as well as an appeal to the subconscious through suggestion and indirectness as the prime objectives of the modernist writer; the very qualities that at least one recent writer and critic has found in Tagore:

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Indirectness, in these songs, is both Tagore’s literary mode and his subject matter. This indirectness, this articulate evasiveness, was also reflected in the life of the Bengali middle class before, and to a certain degree after, independence. It has been the source of much that is modern about modern India; but it has also been traditionally cut off, and sometimes it has cut itself off, from central political power. . . . Thus Tagore’s most enduring creative legacy to the Bengali bourgeoisie was . . . a gift of songs in which the consciousness of Bengali modernity first found utterance and in which the impress of its creation and history was subliminally contained . . . [in] lyric moments of implication and inquiry.35

Placed in the context of modern Indian history and, more specifically, in the context of Bengali middle-class culture, Tagore is freed from the essentialist, universal reading of his poems as repositories of mystical wisdom and spirituality, and consequently as the very antithesis of the modern. Chakrabarty’s location of Tagore’s modernism in poems such as Banshi depend on his reading of the poem as an attempt by Tagore to “libidinize the very materiality of language,” by demonstrating that “the poetic and its powers of transport” were “a powerful means of transfiguring the real and historical Calcutta”; his conclusion that, thereby, Tagore’s poems become “as much a resource for living in the city . . . as any modernism could be” depends too heavily on a false construct: that of an oppositional relationship between the prosaic and the poetic, and perhaps misunderstands the nature of the modernist enterprise (170 –71). The flickering image of the aged but still-powerful poet raging against the forced inculcation of a fixed history into readings of literature, agitated about misrepresentation in his last essays, still debating the nature of the modern in art that we have come away with here, should lead, in the end, to a more radical reinterpretation of his role as a modern poet than has been possible either in Chakrabarty or in this space.

Notes 1. Ranajit Guha, History at the Limit of World-History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 5 – 6. All further references to this work are indicated in the text. 2. See David Ludden, introduction to Reading Subaltern Studies (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001), 3, who places the imperative more on group loyalties than on intellectual imperatives. 3. William Wordsworth, The Prelude: Book Twelfth (1850), ll. 208 –10. 4. Buddhadev Basu, Shab Peyechhir Deshe [Wish-fulfilling country] (Calcutta: Vikalp, 2001), 78.

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5. Sutapa Bhattacharya, ed., Chithipatra (Letters), vol. 16 (Calcutta: Vishwabharati Publications, 1995), 154 – 55, 159. All subsequent references to Chithipatra, unless otherwise mentioned, are to vol. 16. 6. Ibid., 159. 7. Nepal Majumdar, Bharate Jatiyata O Antarjatikata Ebong Rabindranath [Indian nationalism and internationalism and Rabindranath], vol. 6 (Calcutta: Dey’s Publishing, 1996), 313. 8. Chattopadhyay had continued: “I am of the opinion that Rabindranath wanted to incorporate the lower middle classes into his prose poetry because socially too, the bourgeoisie had wanted the lower classes on their own side. That is, the help of the middle classes in the political struggles of 1919 –1922 and 1929 –1934 and immediately following that, bringing the middle classes into his poetry — the proximity of these events was not unrelated or surprisingly sudden.” Majumdar says: “And this sort of confrontational attitude was not the preserve of Devi Prasad alone, there was a time when Buddhadev babu, and along with him other extreme left Marxist literary critics, had made the same mistake. In reality, instead of trying to make Rabindranath more closely their own, they pushed him away, even tried to put him in the opposition camp” (Bharate Jatiyata, 316 –17). 9. My translation. Guha’s version, “Off with your history,” is more literal, but too archaic. 10. Bhattacharya, Chithipatra, 399. 11. Cited in Majumdar, Bharate Jatiyata, 354. 12. Letter from Tagore to Basu, 4 June 1941 (Bhattacharya, Chithipatra, 162). 13. Letter from Tagore to Ramananda Chatterjee, 8 June 1941(Chithipatra, vol. 12 [Calcutta: Vishwabharati Publications, 1986], 219). 14. Bhattacharya, Chithipatra, 16:402. 15. See letter from Tagore to Chatterjee, 7 July 1941 (Chithipatra, vol. 12, 219). 16. Partha Chatterjee, “Ramnidhi,” Ekkhon: A Journal of Literature and Culture (autumn 1985): 65 –115. 17. Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Nation and Imagination,” in Provincializing Europe (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002), 149 –79. All further references to this work are indicated in the text. 18. Gerontion has been mined for its riches by other postcolonial critics as well; the most obvious example is that of Homi Bhabha’s essay that paraphrases Eliot’s line, “Signs are taken for wonders” in its title. 19. All quotes from Tagore’s essay are from Guha’s translation in the appendix of History at the Limit of World-History (95 – 99). 20. Rabindranath Tagore, “The Prose Poem,” in Selected Writings on Literature and Language: Rabindranath Tagore, ed. Sisir Das and Sukanta Chaudhuri (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001), 332. 21. Chakrabarty, “Nation and Imagination,” 151; Guha, History at the Limit of World-History, 99. 22. Guha, History at the Limit of World-History, 98. 23. Brojendranath Bandyopadhyay, ed., Sahitya Sadhak Charitmala, vol. 3 (Calcutta: Bangiya Sahitya Parishat, 1956), 7.

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24. Notes, “Modern Poetry,” in Selected Writings, 401. 25. I am grateful to Gautam Bhadra for his advice in this area. 26. T. S. Eliot, “Gerontion,” in Collected Poems 1909 –1962 (London: Faber and Faber, 1975), 39 – 41. 27. All the excerpts from Banshi are from Chakrabarty’s translation in Provincializing Europe, 164 – 67. 28. Tagore, “Modern Poetry,” 290. 29. Ibid., 287. 30. Tagore, “The True Nature of Literature” [“Sahityer Swarup”], in Selected Writings, 328. 31. Tagore, “Modern Poetry,” 290. 32. Chakrabarty, 167. 33. Peter McDonald, “The Writer, the Critic, and the Censor: Waiting for the Barbarians and the Question of Literature,” unpublished paper, Oxford University, 2003. 34. Guha, Appendix to History of the World at the Limit of World-History, 97. 35. Amit Chaudhuri, “The Flute of Modernity,” New Republic, 19 October 1998, 46.

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“Pulp Fictions” R E A D I N G PA K I S TA N I D O M E S T I C I T Y

Maulvi Saheb saw a packet with monthly Ismat printed on it. Beneath it, in red ink, the packet was addressed to Sheikh Irfan ul Haq’s daughter. Maulvi Mehrban Ali could not believe his eyes. He forgot his own money order and returned home with a new story to tell. He relayed that a magazine bearing the name of Irfan ul Haq’s daughter is lying at the post office to some of the more mature individuals in the neighborhood. But such news cannot be kept from people for long. Soon the news of magazines arriving for Irfan ul Haq’s virgin daughter spread like wildfire. Magazines coming for an unmarried daughter itself was embarrassing enough; furthermore, it had the daughter’s name on the envelope. Delhi is far away; who knows how many and what kind of men had read her name? — Intezar Hussein, Ehsan Manzil

The above passage is from an Urdu short story by Intezar Hussein.1 The story narrates the changes within the domestic sphere in Indian Muslim households. Hussein gives us a sense of how religious reform, expanding educational opportunities for both genders, and colonial modernization in the first quarter of the twentieth century undermined and challenged the more traditional aspects of middle-class Muslim life in North India. The community’s anxiety over a woman’s name being exposed to strangers is echoed in depictions of households from other parts of the Muslim world. For example, Assia Djebar, in her book Fantasia, similarly shows how her female relatives in colonial Algeria were scandalized when a postcard sent by her father arrived specifically addressed to her mother. Hence the postcard, letter, or magazine subscription to a woman in the family became a metaphor for modernity, the public and the outside penetrating Muslim moral boundaries and domestic ethos. In this article I seek to understand the process of this change within the social context of contemporary Pakistani domestic space. I use examples from Urdu fiction in popular women’s magazines in order to comprehend how middle- and lower-middle-class literate women articulate notions of family, individuality, and sexual mores in a rapidly changing social and economic milieu of present-day Pakistan.2 In short, I will explore how popular Urdu writings tend to inform and represent domestic life. These Urdu magazines, known commonly as digests, contain a specific genre of short stories that are considered far below the highbrow Social Text 78, Vol. 22, No. 1, Spring 2004. Copyright © 2004 by Duke University Press.

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literary production of more established yet less commercially successful literary journals. The closest translation of these narratives into a EuroAmerican idiom would be to compare them with Harlequin romances or television soaps. As these writings reflect women’s traditional roles as daughters, wives, and mothers, and predominantly portray women as sexually naive, passive, and submissive in their relationships to men, the similarities to Western romances are obvious. However, the comparison does not quite capture the particularity of the genre itself, which has deep social and cultural links to the development of the modern Urdu short story and also historically to the specifically women-oriented narratives of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century North India. 3 This said, as much as these writings retain a dialogic relationship with high literary forms, they have in recent years attained a polyphonic tendency that contains a semblance of the carnivalesque (Bakhtin 1968); a carnival that typically combines critique and “indecency” that Rabelais relied on for his source (Willis 1989, 130). The multiplicity of voices and themes invoked in this genre have strains of the older oral tradition of women’s storytelling and other forms of popular performances. That tradition, as Sumanta Banerjee (1990) shows for late-nineteenth-century Calcutta, included the transformation of the rural folk culture of songs, dances, theatrical performances, and recitations by the newly urbanizing poor men and women. These popular creative expressions were condemned by the modernizing Indian elite and colonial officials as “vulgar and voluptuous” (Banerjee 1990), as they had not yet been disciplined and sanitized by the more modernist and somewhat “veiled” literary forms (Najmabadi 1993). To be sure, this article is not an exhaustive survey of the literature.4 To investigate the domestic sphere in contemporary Pakistan, I present two short stories from a popular Urdu digest published in the 1990s. I analyze these narratives beyond established reading practices of Harlequin romances and popular women’s writings in the West; although such practices are critically attuned and sympathetic to female voices, they also share a progressive agenda of emancipatory politics (see, among others, Modleski 1982, Radway 1984).5 The question for me is not to find a preconceived progressive or retrogressive politics in the texts. I suggest a reading that may enable us to move away from liberal modernist interpretive strategies that force the plurality of social life into the representational apparatus of a particular political philosophy, “no matter how different the circumstances within which the philosophy originated might be from the culture under study” (Chakrabarty 1995, 757). With this in mind, the task before me is to translate the particular cultural and historical milieu of the narratives into a sociological language while remaining sensitive to the plurality of interpretive possibilities open to us.6

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My reading also positions the production and reception of these narratives as a challenge to those aspects of dominant Pakistani national culture that historically can be traced to the reformist politics of the Muslim elite in North India. In this regard digests and the genre of writings discussed below complicate, pollute, and “corrupt” the sanitized and moral renderings of a Muslim polity commonly found in the representations of Pakistani society favored by the Pakistani political and social elite.

The nationalists refused to negotiate with the colonial power on the

Muslim Reform and Women’s Literature

women’s question

To situate the argument it is important to look at women’s literature linked to the reform of Muslim domestic space in colonial India. In a much-cited work, Partha Chatterjee (1993) shows how Bengali nationalists sought to close the domestic space to colonial penetration through constructing the categories of home (spirituality and culture) and the world (modern science, materialism, and technology). He argues that the issue of “female emancipation” disappears from the public agenda of nationalist discourse because the nationalists refused to negotiate with the colonial power on the women’s question and the “inner” space. But as much as Indian nationalists resisted the penetration of the inner space by colonial discourse, the changes they advocated were always a reflection of the outer public domain. To reform domestic space, albeit on their own terms, and to claim moral superiority over the colonial agenda, was also to concede a “lack” in the nation’s present (Prakash 1999, 158). Hence, the reforms instituted within households were always under the shadow of colonial governmentality; criticizing it by articulating alternate values, yet continuously influenced by and in dialogue with it. In the same work, Chatterjee also argues that Bengali Muslims were, however, excluded from the formation of this national identity. Hence, the reformulations of Muslim domestic space needed further negotiations between the Muslim elite, its Hindu nationalist counterpart, and the British colonial power. Within this context, in the late nineteenth century Muslim reformers resisted the rising Western cultural hegemony by emphasizing sharia (Islamic laws) and the advancement of Muslim cultural heritage. Muslim religious reformers, like the Deobandi Ulema, also published religiously oriented reformist texts in which they advised women to distance themselves from the realm of custom (deemed as superstitious, un-Islamic, and irrational).7 Adherence to reformed practices helped some women gain more rights within the emerging middle-class households. To accept the authority of men in the interpretation of religious practice provided a future in which rewards and divine blessings were to be the same as those

and the “inner”

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space.

received by men. Literacy skills and modes of reformed behavior opened spaces for these women to articulate their rights in marriage and property. Yet the gains were at the cost of losing separate spheres of female activity that were condemned by the religious reform movement as the realm of the nafs, the area of lack of control and disorder.8 Such reformist tendencies are also seen in the works of Nazir Ahmed, a more secularly oriented nineteenth-century Urdu novelist who wrote award-winning texts on women’s domestic life and education (see Naim 1984).9 In his novels Ahmed stresses the reconfiguration of the Muslim household, where practicality and reason would triumph over superstition and irresponsible behavior. In his several books he emphasizes how the British have reason and aql (wisdom), portraying them as embodiments of progress and practicality, which enables them to rule India from thousands of miles away. During the first part of the twentieth century, the social influence of these early reformers and the compulsions of the “new era” led to an increased interest in women’s education among the middleand upper-middle-class Muslim families (primarily North Indian).10 Some of this social agenda was taken up by women’s journals that competed for attention among a small group of literate Urdu-speaking female readers (Minault 1998). These magazines, such as Ismat, Purdah Nashin, and Khatun, emphasized the benefits of the new educational opportunities for women as they improved their housekeeping and child-rearing skills (Minault 1998, 133).11 By and large, the advice given to women in these journals was restricted to sharif bibias (respectable women) who could define and set themselves apart from the popular and coarse culture of the street and the rural areas. This was a tiny group indeed. In 1924 merely 137,800 Muslim (four out of every thousand) women qualified as literate, and out of these only 3,940 had received some Western learning (Jalal 1991, 81). However, female voices in such journals also provided competing visions to an essentially upper-class male discourse of creating citizen-subjects for the future Muslim nation. Similarly, on the one hand, organizations like Anjuman-e-Khawateen-e Islam, or the All India Muslim Ladies Conference, founded in the early part of the twentieth century, contested those national organizations that claimed to speak for all Indian women (Jalal 1991, 83). On the other, they worked for the social and educational uplift of the Muslim woman. Through such vehicles, upper-class Muslim women questioned male-centered representations of the domestic and called on their own for more education, autonomy, and independence for women. Further, as much as they shared the reformist male agenda, the women themselves held diverse opinions on issues of gender segregation, wage work, secularization, veiling, and Islamic revival. The consensus for social change was mitigated by

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women’s own response to the evolving situation. Irrespective of patriarchal social norms, middle- and upper-class women did shed the seclusion of their households to acquire education, yet they still veiled themselves in public and studied in segregated institutions. In this regard one of the main contributions of the Anjuman-e-Khawateen-e-Islam was to introduce a new style of burkha — a garment that covers women to their ankles — patterned on the Turkish model (Minault 1981).12 By the late 1930s, many Muslim women had transgressed boundaries, albeit on their own terms, and left their homes to acquire an education, work in public spaces, and increasingly participate in politics.13 Representing this trend between the 1930s and 1950s, a group of Muslim women writers exploded onto the male-dominated Urdu literary scene. Ismat Chughtai, Qurutul ain Haider, Rashid Jahan, Hajra Masroor, and Khadija Mastur are some among the many who have since become eminent in this sphere. Highly critical of the older reformist literature, these writers constantly undermined the class-based pedagogical underpinnings of the earlier writings. Taboo themes like sexuality, interreligious romance, and antipatriarchal politics were openly discussed. Some, like Chughtai, were initially condemned for being vulgar and indecent. But their works have survived and are respectfully included in the pantheon of Urdu literature. Important as social critics in depicting the changing norm within the Muslim domestic realm, these voices have remained limited to a narrow percentage of the reading public because of their high literary style and small-scale publishing venues. In conjunction with the more highbrow literary works, an ongoing tradition of Urdu novels and short stories specifically targets middle-class female readers. This genre borrows heavily from the more established techniques of Urdu literary writings but thematically is more attuned to domestic life. Authors like Razia Butt and A. R. Khatoon are famous among Urdu-speaking households in the subcontinent for their productivity within this genre. Pakistan’s independence, along with expanding urbanization and educational opportunities, has resulted in the growth of the commercial market for mass publication of multiple magazines and for diverse media outlets serving the various demands of the newly consolidating urban middle and lower–middle classes.

Pakistani Urban Space: Ethnicity and Gender Since Pakistan’s creation in 1947 as the homeland for Muslims of South Asia, the country has been a configuration of shifting alliances and competing political and social ideologies. One dominant feature of the state

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has been the nonresolution of its ethnic problem. Culturally, the Mohajirs (literally, refugees, those who migrated from India) along with the majority Punjabi ethnic group have been the most closely linked with Muslim nationalism and with Urdu as being the Pakistani national language (see Zaman 2002).14 Almost half a century after its independence and more than thirty years after the creation of Bangladesh, the Pakistani state has been unable to resolve the question of national integration of its many cultures and diverse linguistic groups. Where English has remained the language of government and commerce, Urdu has retained its pivotal place. Urdu’s dominance of the cultural center has bred a sense of exclusion among other linguistic groups leading to a proliferation of ethnic nationalism and the strengthening of regional identities, which further hinders the emergence of a national culture that democratically includes the diverse voices and languages present in the Pakistani cultural spectrum. The politics of ethnic difference linked to urbanization and ruralurban migration has led to ethnic and social heterogeneity in most urban spaces. For example, if we take Karachi as a microcosm of Pakistani social life, we see a glimpse of the nation’s history unfold with all its social and political tensions. About half of Karachi’s growth since the 1970s is attributed to migration from rural and other urban areas of the country.15 In the twenty-first century, Karachi remains the industrial, commercial, and trade center of Pakistan, as well as its major port. It’s home to approximately 8 percent of Pakistan’s population and 24 percent of the urban population (Zaidi 1999). Spatially, the city is segregated into privileged neighborhoods with private security arrangements (a phenomenon seen globally in major cities) and independently managed social services. Its phenomenal growth has resulted in the maldistribution of civic resources to the poorest of its population. These social and spatial processes are partly reflected in a politics of consolidation of various communities on the vertical axis of ethnic identification and religious groupings, making Karachi in the 1990s one of the most violent metropolises in South Asia. Within this context of cultural politics, urbanization, and ethnic polarization the Pakistani state has, as in other postcolonial societies, periodically tackled the demands for female emancipation connected to discourses on cultural authenticity. Women’s changing status in Pakistan has been portrayed largely linked with the role of Islam in the modern state. The political question has been how civil and gender rights that are common in Western societies can be reconciled with Islamic family law within a Muslim polity. The passage of Muslim Personal Law in 1948, which gave women the right to inheritance under sharia, and the Family Law Ordinance in 1961 are seen as major victories in this struggle. The latter did provide some legal curbs against polygyny, expanded the right for

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women to initiate divorce proceedings, and also dealt favorably with inheritance rights for women. Its impact on the lives of a large majority of women in Pakistan, who remain illiterate and also live under the rule of more restrictive social conventions, has been minuscule. The state, at least in this instance, sought primarily to regulate the private sphere (Rouse 1998, 55). Bangladesh’s independence from Pakistan after a protracted and brutal civil war in 1971 forced the Pakistani military to hand over power after thirteen years of rule to the elected civilian government led by Zulfiquar Ali Bhutto. Bhutto’s more socially progressive and populist government that came into power with the slogan Roti, Kapra aur Makan (food, clothing, and shelter) is seen as an important milestone in the history of women’s rights. During this period, the state passed the 1973 constitution that for the first time guaranteed full citizen rights to women. The Bhutto government also signed the U.N. Declaration on Women’s Rights, set up a Women’s Institute, and promised universal education for both genders, yet it did little to ensure that such measures had permanence (Rouse 1996, 62). Moreover, neither the Family Ordinance Law nor the various populist efforts during the Bhutto years significantly raised the issue of violence against women. Rather, Bhutto’s progressive regime with all its populist rhetoric and pro-women stance is remembered by many for its political intimidation of opponents and its threats against their women (Jalal 1991). General Zia-ul Haq’s regime (1977– 88) ousted Bhutto with a military coup in 1977. Along with the laws that discriminated against minorities and curtailed civil rights in Pakistan, the issue of women’s honor and sexuality became one of the most important aspects of Zia’s regime. The Hudood Ordinance in 1979 instituted harsh punishments for adultery. Poor women have been the main victims of these laws, which are still on the books today.16 Of course, like anywhere else, Pakistani women have varied histories and abilities to negotiate state-imposed and social restrictions. Hence, in what Ayesha Jalal (1991) calls the phenomenon of “convenience of subservience,” most women from the middle and upper strata, even under the most antiwomen regimes, have retained social and familial privileges as long as they did not transgress social norms (78). Keeping the history of state repression of women’s rights in perspective, studies on women in Pakistan have largely been written in the context of the struggle of elite and urban women against the antiwomen laws and structural changes that have adversely affected women’s lives. Important as this literature has been, such representations have traditionally ignored the experiences of the majority of poor and rural women and women’s domestic experiences. They have also been framed in a teleological grid

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as histories of progress and setbacks.17 To circumvent these thematic lacks and ideological underpinnings, Shahnaz Rouse (1996) has argued for a return to sources where we find women speaking in nonpublic spaces. The proposed remedy seeks to incorporate the analysis of Pakistani women’s autobiography, diaries, fiction, and journals to enhance our work on the private sphere of their lives. Thus my close reading of popular fiction focuses on those aspects of Pakistani contemporary life that are generally underrepresented in social-scientific literature by flushing out aspects of Pakistani social history that remain hidden in the margins and interstices.

“Pulp” Fiction Since independence Pakistan has seen a steady yet extremely slow increase in education levels for women. The current national literacy rate of 16 percent for women as compared with 35 percent for men conceals a major rural-urban differential within it. The literacy rate for urban women is 37.3 percent, more than five times the rate of rural Pakistani women (7.3 percent). In recent years, because of economic pressures and the dissolution of extended families in urban areas, many more women are working for wages than in the past. Recent estimates put the level at between 15 and 20 percent of the labor force, which is a conservative guess, as traditional notions of propriety lead families to conceal the extent of work performed by women.18 The increased level of education and wage-based employment among urban women has transformed the publishing industry in Pakistan. Until the 1960s audiences for digests were gender neutral. Except for older established reformist magazines for women like Ismat, most digests included a specific women’s section or an interest column for women. In the 1960s and 1970s competing women’s magazines emerged that targeted different readerships. Publishers focused upon younger urban working women who were leaving domestic spaces to work as stenographers, telephone operators, bank clerks, and schoolteachers. Some digests were pitched to women studying in Urdu medium colleges in middleclass neighborhoods of larger Pakistani cities. Other publishers went after the growing number of female readers in smaller towns where substantial numbers of women were acquiring at least a high-school diploma if not a higher college degree. The popularity of these digests has been phenomenal. According to advertising expenditure data, the number of magazines published in Pakistan grew from 214 in 1993 to 406 in 2000. The majority were women’s magazines, in Urdu. The same sources document that about 7 percent of the adult population of 141.5 million read these

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magazines. Women’s digests such as Pakeeza or Dosheeza have monthly circulations of 60,000 copies reaching an average of 300,000 adult readers, far more than the first run of the most respectable literary publications.19 Moreover, they have helped create and consolidate a whole industry of female writers, editors, sketch artists, and designers who make a living through the publication of these digests. I chose the following stories because they represent contemporary examples within the genre of popular women’s fiction in Urdu. Over the past two decades, Pakistani society has seen an “increase in traffic, restaurants, video outlets, expensive boutiques” (Rouse 1998, 61). It has also witnessed a diminishing of female presence on the urban streets linked to an increase of public and domestic violence against women. In an increasingly hostile and restricting public sphere, the stories may represent social aspirations of lower-middle-class women, who have to brave public spaces without the social protections that class bestows on elite women. The stories discussed below statistically may not be the norm. In my reading of various digests of the past several years, however, I periodically encountered similar themes in several forms. Most of these stories were published in the 1990s, and the overtly sexual content of the following narratives may perhaps reflect the opening of social space that digest publishers and women writers have experienced after the more censored atmosphere of the Zia era. These particular stories were published in the journal Pakeeza in 1995, which, like others of its kind, caters to a range of readership. Digests like Pakeeza consist of various sections: interviews with celebrities, cooking tips, Q&A columns, and several different fashion spreads. One of the most popular sections is “three women three stories.” The editors introduce these stories, which are edited, as true depictions of women’s lives.20 Women are encouraged to send in their stories to share personal social and moral dilemmas with the larger reading audience. The stories discussed below are taken from this section. In “Chains” [“Zanjeer”], the protagonist, a woman named Salma, narrates her story in a long flashback sequence. She tells us that she lived with her family in a small town in former East Pakistan. There, her family was close to two Urdu-speaking families, Rahman’s and Naseer’s, who lived nearby. She liked both of them but had particular feelings for Rahman. She thought that if permitted to choose her life’s partner she would choose Rahman, as he wanted to succeed in life by acquiring higher education. In contrast, Naseer, although a friend, was more money minded in his outlook toward life. Time passed, and the families moved to West Pakistan long before Bangladesh’s independence. The families remained friends and prospered. Salma’s parents received marriage proposals for

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her from both the families. Given a choice, she decided in favor of Rahman, whom she had always liked and admired, and who now had a respectable job. The preparations for her wedding were under way when the news arrived that Naseer had had an accident in which he lost a leg. The wedding was postponed. A few weeks later Rahman informed Salma that she had to give up the idea of marrying him and instead marry Naseer. He said that not marrying her was a huge sacrifice for him, but Naseer had begged him to consider it. Naseer had told him that as he was now handicapped, no woman would ever look at him again, and he would become a social outcast. Rahman implored Salma to marry Naseer; initially, she resisted the idea, but then she agreed. On the wedding night Naseer came into the room. After giving her an expensive present and talking to her, he went and lay down on the sofa without touching her, while she remained waiting for him on the bed until dawn. The same thing was repeated every night. Naseer would come into the room but not near her. Salma describes her feelings by saying, Why was he treating me like this? I keep on burning. After all, I am a woman. I cannot say much, but I was worried. I felt unwanted. Marriage also means something else; was he taking revenge? But after our wedding I have never even thought of Rahman. I am an Eastern girl. Our upbringing compels us to live only for our husbands. My respect and love is only for Naseer now, can he not see that?

After some months had passed, Naseer told Salma how he had succeeded in his determination to marry her. Further, he said that in the accident he had lost not only his leg but also his masculinity — he was impotent. Salma was shocked by this news. He asked her for a divorce, as he was ashamed of what he had done.21 Salma was furious and said that she would never divorce him because that would set him free. She was his wife and she would remain so, but she would never forgive him and see to it that he received adequate punishment for his deeds. In the days that followed, Salma’s demeanor toward Naseer changed, and she became more affectionate toward him. After a few years she persuaded him to move to Islamabad from Karachi. They bought a house outside the city in a fairly deserted new neighborhood. Within a few years of living there most of their relatives passed away. Normally, Naseer slept without his artificial leg. One day, while Naseer was sleeping, Salma removed the leg from the room and threw it away. When Naseer woke up, he started screaming, but Salma did not respond, knowing full well that he could not move without his artificial limb. After

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a few days she mixed some tranquilizers in the food, and when she was sure that he was asleep she went in and tied him in chains, which she pushed through a hole in the wall, and secured it to a heavy iron bar in the garden outside. The chains allowed Naseer only to move around in the room and go to the bathroom. Naseer was totally under her control. After a few days of shouting and screaming he became docile and passive. Salma, during this same period, became depressed herself. She started taking care of Naseer; changing his clothes, combing his hair, washing him. Eventually, as days passed, she felt herself falling in love with him. She would take care of all his needs, read him the newspaper, and make the foods he liked. She realized that he was not the only prisoner: she herself had become his captive. If he was confined to the room, she was also trapped in the house. Thirty years after their marriage and years after she had chained him, one morning when she called him for breakfast, he did not respond. He had passed away, finally escaping from his imprisonment. The story renders a sense of Pakistani history and geography that makes the terrain very familiar to the native reader. The invocation of East Pakistan, of Bangladesh’s independence, the move to Karachi, as mentioned above, Pakistan’s largest city and commercial center, and then Islamabad, the sleepy capital where the protagonist could live unnoticed by her neighbors for years, all provide a cultural and spatial context for the story. The story also lends itself to a range of readings. The affirmation of the Eastern girl as faithful, self-sacrificing, and unsure of herself all reestablish stereotypes. Her violence can also be interpreted as a classic trope of the revengeful woman. Even though she identifies with her captive and falls in love with him, she proclaims, “I was not ready to free him; I had to take revenge.” Her rekindled love for Naseer also allows us to indulge in a reading that can attribute this act as seeking pleasure through inflicting pain on her lover-husband. Can we translate her actions into the idiom of sadomasochism? Is Naseer’s consent not necessary in the liberal formulation of this pleasurable practice? Before following this line of thinking, I would argue for caution, as it is difficult to fix the precise sociological meaning of how Salma receives pleasure in her acts. To inscribe a practice from another cultural space onto Salma’s actions may be an act of excessive translation. (For example, although German brot and French pain both refer to the same object (bread), they are culturally specific and historically unique [Benjamin 1968].) Yet Salma does give and receive sexual pleasure and, in so doing, challenges perceptions of “proper” behavior within polite Pakistani society. Salma’s predicament is multilayered. The choice of partners, the

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adjustment to married life, betrayal, her right of conjugal pleasure, and her revenge are some of the more obvious themes. Her narrative may resonate with women who feel trapped in nonsexual or bitter marriages. It is a fantasy that may have broad appeal not only in Pakistan but also in many other cultures. Irrespective of the moral language, Salma’s actions can be read extremely sympathetically. Further, although Salma explicitly condemns her own measures, specifically through her periodic voicing of self-doubt, her sexual practices are presented as one of the many forms through which people give and receive pleasure. Denunciation and disapproval of assertive or “deviant” sexual practices, in a Foucauldian sense, coexist with the proliferation of a discourse about them. There are, of course, two levels at which pleasure can be analyzed here, one experienced by Salma and the other by the reader. We can perhaps assume an individualized pleasure by the reading subject who is experiencing a performance, a privatized carnival in the shape of a polyphonic text that also portrays the grotesque features of a handicapped chained person. It is a fantasy that questions social conventions from a specifically female point of view. The transgressive potential of this carnival, as Stallybrass and White (1986) point out, is perhaps limited because the social force of a public carnival is shifted to the private space of individualized readership. Yet such stories force the concerns of the domestic private sphere into a more public domain of popular literature. In doing so they not only challenge the representational norms of literary production, but also critically insert a different narrative on women’s personal histories (Willis 1989). Before developing a broader analysis, let me turn to my second narrative. Loosely translated as “The Great Sin” [“Gunnah Kabeer”], the story starts in the northern Pakistani town of Charsaddah, and also ends there via a detour to the ghettos of the southern city of Hyderabad. It begins with the protagonist, Zaitoon, marrying a forty-year-old man, Aziz Khan, who was home on leave from his work in Hyderabad. The bride is described as being in her late teens. Only three months after the wedding he wanted to return to Hyderabad. When Zaitoon asks him to stay, he says that he does not have much interest in women and that he married her because of family pressure. Aziz Khan impregnates his wife before leaving, however, and does not return for five years. During this period Zaitoon gives birth to a child, Ameer Khan. A few months after her husband’s second visit, Zaitoon travels with her young son to live with Aziz Khan in Hyderabad. She finds the abject poverty of their urban existence extremely difficult to adjust to. Leaving a semirural life, she is forced to adjust to the dark and airless hovels that are the residences of the urban

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poor in Pakistani cities. Soon they have another child, and within a year Aziz Khan is killed in an electrocution accident at his work, leaving Zaitoon alone with two children to care for. To support them she starts washing dishes in middle-class homes. In a few years, her son Ameer Khan becomes an apprentice in an automobile workshop and earns a little money. Time passes, and the family’s living standards improve as Ameer’s income increases. Zaitoon is able to work less. She remains worried about Ameer, however; every evening he goes out with friends whom she does not know. She occasionally hears rumors that Ameer is associating with the “wrong kind of people.” One day Ameer tells his mother that he is going to Karachi and will not live in Hyderabad anymore, as his master has passed away, and he does not want to continue to work at the workshop. One day Ameer comes home with a young woman whom he introduces as his wife, Gulzar. Zaitoon is taken by surprise and is angry. All along she has dreamed of her son’s wedding, and he has turned up with a woman by his side. Having no choice, she accepts the girl as her daughterin-law. After some months, Zaitoon suggests that Gulzar get pregnant. She insists that Gulzar should go to a doctor for a checkup, as women with small breasts, according to her, are prone to infertility. Gulzar resists these demands until one day they have an argument. When Ameer comes home from work, Gulzar says that she cannot stay in the same house with her mother-in-law anymore. Zaitoon gets angry and explains that she has simply asked Gulzar to go to the doctor. At this stage Kabeer, the younger brother, says that Zaitoon should not have insisted, as Gulzar cannot have children because she is a man. Zaitoon cannot believe what she hears. Kabeer describes how he had accidentally entered the bathroom while Gulzar was taking a bath and had seen everything. Ameer confirms this is true. Gulzar is the son of wealthy family in Karachi, but because of their mutual love he is willing to live in a hovel. Now both of them leave together, never to return. Zaitoon has a half brother in Charsaddah and decides to return to her ancestral land before Kabeer gets involved in what in her mind are immoral acts. She sells her house and arrives at her brother’s place. The brother runs a restaurant, and Kabeer starts sitting at the cash register. Kabeer is a handsome young man, and soon the Khans (local elite) start coming to the restaurant after hearing about his beauty. The uncle laughs and makes fun of Kabeer because of his many suitors, but Zaitoon is worried. One day, news circulates that Kabeer has been murdered by a jealous Khan, who is himself killed by a rival lover. A fight breaks out among the supporters of the different Khans, and the restaurant is burned

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to the ground. Zaitoon is devastated and now waits out her last days writing this piece for us to hear her tragic story. Zaitoon’s story of betrayal, and her social and economic hardship, fall into a genre of representation in Pashtun culture that emphasizes gham (sorrow) and suffering as a form in which female folk narratives are constructed. Remaining within this genre of representation, this story has a more realist setting than the previous one and a complex sociological background. The suggestion of Aziz Khan being from Charsaddah cannot be translated. It conveys, in unsaid forms, to many Pakistani readers a moral geography and a certain ethnic marker connected to a sexual economy in which same-sex relations among men are acceptable.22 It is a stereotypical construction of Pashtun ethnicity. As much as rural Pashtun men travel far and wide to find work and sell their labor, their negative construction also compels middle-class families in many urban areas to frighten their children from the Kabuli-wallah 23 who prey on adolescent boys. Pashtun or otherwise, it is common for urban boys traveling to school in crowded public buses to sometimes live the reality of men pressing against them and learn to deal with it on their own terms. These realities are shared and experienced by urban men and women who grow up on the proverbial other side of the tracks in Pakistan. Moreover, same-sex desires are commonplace enough that the mostly female readership of such stories can easily identify with the homosexuality depicted in the story as an experience familiar to them within their own family structure. The moralizing on the issue of homosexuality notwithstanding, the story does let Ameer Khan affirm his love for Gulzar, and he leaves his mother to live with his partner. The story also depicts how Kabeer enjoys the attention he receives from his many lovers. Again, as in the previous story, denunciation of the practice by Zaitoon coexists with the representation of same-sex desire and the proliferation of talk about it. There is also a related point here. Pakistan in the last decade, as mentioned above, especially in its large southern cities like Karachi and Hyderabad, has experienced endemic ethnic violence and rivalry. Within this context we see two men, Gulzar who is depicted as a Muhajir (because he is from Karachi, a marker of Muhajir ethnicity) and Ameer a Pashtun (two rival ethnicities), falling in love, albeit Gulzar is the wife. Muhajir, as suggested above, are descendants of those families that migrated from various parts of India during and after the division of the subcontinent in 1947; Pashtun belong to the North West Frontier Province bordering Afghanistan and Central Asia. Not only are ethnic boundaries crossed, but class is also overcome, as Gulzar belongs to a middle-class family yet becomes involved with a man of Ameer’s social origins. The story’s depic-

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tion of people from different ethnic and class backgrounds seeking to share common destinies is emblematic of late-twentieth-century Pakistan, where a diverse, multilingual, and ethnic population considers the challenges, pitfalls, and compromises of coexistence. I am not arguing that these stories are allegories of some larger national narrative, yet such stories do reflect a changing cultural process and radically diverge from the older portrayals of Muhajir family life as an unmarked universalized experience in Pakistani Urdu literature. The story’s move toward depicting other cultural and ethnic realities not only speaks to people’s own lived experience but may implicitly contest and undermine the dominance of Muhajir and Urdu cultural standards. Hence such stories should be read not only as moral sagas but as narratives that seek to represent the changing social and cultural space of contemporary Pakistan.24 The irony remains that this diversity of experience is mostly available to the multiethnic-multilingual literate readership through the Urdu language. The story also explicitly deals with the issue of rural migration and women’s labor. Social changes in the last few decades in Pakistan have forced a large percentage of women from all classes to work in traditional and nonformal sectors of the economy. In urban areas the poorest women, like Zaitoon, often work as midwives, domestic servants, urban laborers, sweepers, and nannies for compensation outside the home. More often, poor urban women remain at home and sell manufactured goods to middlemen for compensation (Lewis 2001). Similarly, the narrative sensitizes us to the migrations of ethnically Pashtun laborers to the southern industrial cities of Karachi and Hyderabad, where they join the lower rung of the urban poor and are, like Aziz Khan, consumed by the city. Since the 1960s, Pashtun labor has been ruthlessly exploited in the textile industry, the least-unionized sector of Pakistan’s industrial spectrum. When Aziz Khan returns home after some years, he is shown to be suffering from lung disease brought on by his long hours in a cotton mill. It is such a factory that eventually takes his life. How the poor survive in their private and work life in Pakistan’s expanding cities are stories and histories that are yet to be told, or written.

Such stories should be read not only as moral sagas but as narratives that seek to represent the changing social and cultural space of contemporary Pakistan.

Conclusion Romance novels, Cora Caplan (1984) argues in her reading of the 1977 novel The Thorn Birds, have helped women to become progressively reflective about sexuality, but unreflective and uninterested in thinking about politics. Fantasizing, she claims, is a constitutive part of being human, yet,

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A recent article in the English press in Karachi condemns the stories in women’s digests as intensely emotional and as stripping women of their individual identity.

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she argues, we should also pay attention to the progressive or reactionary politics that these fantasies are bound up in. Such arguments in their less-sophisticated incarnations are echoed in Pakistani English-language press and in feminist academic volumes (see Hussain et al. 1997). Even though Urdu maintains a certain hierarchical relationship with other languages in its position as the state-sponsored national language, English still retains an elite status that Urdu has not been able to displace. English-language press at times takes on a modernist and pedagogical voice of social criticism against traditional, or “backward,” cultural practices. For example, analyzing the proliferation of romance stories in popular Urdu digests, a recent article in the English press in Karachi condemns the stories in women’s digests as intensely emotional and as stripping women of their individual identity (Ahmar 1997). Linked to this loss of identity is the portrayal of women as commodities that are traded in the act of marriage to accomplish the preordained role of procreation. Such comments in the English press are partly emblematic of the larger cultural difference between Urdu and other national languages and the hierarchically arranged symbolic power of English in Pakistan. Borrowing from Arvind Rajagopal’s (2001) argument on the English and Hindi press in India,25 I argue that the English press in Pakistan is not only linked with secular and modernist ideals but also with a defined progressive politics steeped in the tradition of analytical, rational, and responsible reporting.26 This press signifies a readership that might not wield the power it used to possess, yet still demarcates the context of sophisticated culture. The critiques offered of conservative ideals by English periodicals imagine the female consumers of Urdu digests as more traditional and as passive recipients of these narratives. These lower-middle-class women are represented as being trapped in a social milieu where change is stifled by an authoritarian domestic realm. In contrast, implicitly, the English-speaking audience is constructed as graduating from Mills and Boon, Barbara Cartland, and other romance stories to more serious and enlightened European literature. An underlying argument about the English language makes such readers more critical and analytical, open to self-reflection and to change. Urdu digests’ readership hence is constructed as victimized women who are crushed under the weight of patriarchy and need to be jolted out of their misery by some consciousness raising. It is akin to a universalizing narrative that privileges an assumed solidarity among women by abstracting out specific histories and local experiences (Butler 1998). In contrast to the dominant forms of readings in Pakistani elite circles, I suggest such “fictions” might be an intrinsic part of, as Arjun Appadurai (1996, 58)

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puts it, the conceptual repertoire of contemporary society. The themes discussed in contemporary stories such as “Chains” do not merely shock us but rather reassert a sociocultural milieu in which most women readers find themselves. Women may come to these stories conscious of them as part fantasy and part reality, based on their own social experience and surroundings. Fantasies, as Fredric Jameson (1983) writes, reflect our deepest desires and most fundamental hopes, but for them to be meaningful they also need to have a connection to our lived experience. For example, both stories portray women’s anxieties about male betrayal and violence. Salma and Zaitoon are married to men who are not, in their terms, real men, one impotent and the other more interested in men. Although Salma seeks revenge for her treatment, Zaitoon does not have the class or material privilege to take that route. Within hypermasculine and dominant heterosexual social mores, these fantasies about “inefficient men” (the impotent, the homosexual) may, for example, resonate with women’s anxieties about the sexually threatening public sphere in which the readers of these stories find themselves in their everyday life. Along with the state guarantees to protect the honor of women, especially during the Zia regime, Pakistan has unfortunately witnessed a marked increase in cases of rape and domestic violence in the same period.27 As women increasingly become the victims of male violence, such stories allow us to fantasize about the reversal of the status quo. Still, the stories, at least the way I read them, are not entirely dismissive of the male characters and do sympathetically depict the choices they make. Therefore, the narratives force us to seriously consider how people fantasize, and imagine possibilities in shifting and ever-changing social situations. Their moral tone notwithstanding, these stories provide spaces where there is an exchange and negotiation of desires and of imagined lives. In the process these stories continuously escape the larger moral tropes they are structured into and transgress the very boundaries that they inhabit. Popular narratives may further offer a glimpse into some of the ways in which literate Pakistani households think about themselves. Reading these texts provides us with not only a sense of change and the shifts in people’s lives but also a representation (albeit a fragmentary one) of their own views on the body, self, and community. To carry this argument further, these notions of self and community can be sites of contestation for the universalized international standards of emancipation that constitute the agenda of modernization with its related emphasis on the liberal laws and the free market. It can constitute a narrative of people’s lives, as Partha Chatterjee (1993) so eloquently puts it, that is unyielding through its alternate constructions of the individual and the social to the disciplinary

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and hegemonizing pressures of modern norms. Such a reading does not mean a rejection of modernity, or an attempt to resurrect some residual past; the idea is to situate other narratives of being and existence that are as much a part of modernity as the globalized history of progress and emancipation (Dhareshwar 1995). For us to appreciate the diversity contained within these stories, we must allow ourselves to critically investigate the teleological grid of modernist readings imposed upon these popular romances. In light of Chatterjee’s (1993) above-discussed suggestion, a critical reading of stories like “Chains” may make us aware of how in postcolonial spaces such as contemporary Pakistan, the construction of bourgeois individualism may be tempered by other visions of the self that coexists with it. Through Salma’s own contradictory inclinations of revenge and of spousal service, we see a coming together of different worlds and impulses in the construction of her own self,28 a self that may accept, contradict, and even transgress the imposed construction of the mythical, yet desired “emancipated” autonomous individual.29 In such renderings we notice how women’s assertions of their conjugal rights, situated within the construction of individualized agency, may cohabit with their desire to be modest, self-sacrificial, subservient, and humble. Such illiberal representations are not that dissimilar to the forms in which pre-independence, middle-class, Muslim women, as shown earlier, left the seclusion of their homes to acquire education, yet did not shun the veil. Similarly, the same-sex relationships depicted in “The Great Sin” expose us to how poor urban men create sexual and social relationships in environments that have been historically hostile to them. Migration, the degradation of industrial labor, and the pressure to settle down and reproduce create spaces for a range of options. Men, women, and families respond to these circumstances in multiple scripts, none taking precedence over the other. Where early-twentieth-century reformist literature had its overt pedagogical task, the digests are a more fluid and complex genre. I do not wish to argue that to have a sexual awareness of the kind depicted in these stories places women readers in a progressive moment in society’s history. Such an attempt would merely help me reinsert Pakistani consumers of these stories into a historical trajectory that produces the humanistic subject. I also want to avoid labeling readers as falsely conscious, or condemn their reading habits as vicarious pleasure that does not lead to “correct politics,” labels and condemnations that are very much a part of “progressive” (elite) reading of such processes. Further, I do not want to assume that readers are ignorant of the effects of these stories. Rather, I have sought to use these texts to see how they may resonate in the larger

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community and how desires and fantasies are created in specific cultures and histories. These fantasies are embedded in social practices in a historical moment of economic insecurity and restrictive public space for urban women, along with a proliferation of urban lifestyle, global media, new art forms, cinema, and international migration. Therefore, popular narratives, the kind that I have discussed in this paper, remain local yet borrow from a variety of influences. They represent local histories in a global moment, as these localized stories become afflicted by cosmopolitan scripts that influence domestic life along with other social processes in Pakistan. Hence, before succumbing to the desire of categorizing these fantasies into a rigid grid of progressive or retrogressive politics, it may serve some purpose to understand how these texts resonate with women’s own experiences. Walter Benjamin (1968) argues that the task of translator is not to turn Hindi, Greek, or English into German; rather, it is to allow the power of the foreign language to penetrate the translation. I read this as a call for a culturally situated and historically grounded rendering of people’s lives, before imposing on them changes that have run their course in other cultural landscapes.

Notes This article has been through many incarnations, and along the way I have benefited from comments and suggestions from Nafiz Aksehirlioglu, Nusrat Chowdhury, Ward Keeler, Gail Minault, Norma Moruzzi, Afsaneh Najmabadi, Bettina Ng’weno, Carla Petievich, Martina Rieker, and Katie Stewart. I am grateful to Adnan Asdar and Mahboob Khan, who went to great lengths to gather and send me older editions of the digests. Earlier versions of this article were presented at Columbia University, the University of Chicago, the University of Rochester, and the University of Texas, Austin. I thank the hosts of those events for providing me a venue to share my work and the audiences for their valuable input and comments. Finally, I thank the editors of Social Text, especially Michèle SharonGlassford and Gyan Prakash, for their critical reading and assistance in bringing this article to its final shape. 1. My translation. 2. The magazines are marketed as women’s magazines, but they are as popular among men from mostly the same class background. 3. Urdu is unique among the major literatures of South Asia for its emphasis on the short story as the primary genre of narrative fiction (Mufti 2000, 9). See Mufti 2000 for a theoretically sophisticated treatment of this issue. 4. I am primarily interested in Urdu prose in this article. The history of Urdu poetry by women has a somewhat different trajectory and thematically may also allow for a variety of experiments. See Petievich 1992.

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5. See Dickey 1995 for an analogous analysis in the South Asian context. 6. I borrow this argument from Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe (2000). 7. See Metcalf 1990 for an analysis of Maulana Ashraf Ali Thanawi’s Beheshti Zewar. 8. Afsaneh Najmabadi (1993) eloquently details similar processes in turn-ofthe-century Iran. She shows how the advent of social modernity linked to new schools for girls and the new press transformed women’s language and the domestic sphere. 9. During the mid–nineteenth century Nazir Ahmed rose from a humble background with training in the traditional subjects and in Arabic and Persian. Later he joined the educational services, became inspector of schools, and then was promoted to the revenue service, becoming deputy collector of revenue for the North Western provinces. 10. Nazir Ahmed; Sayed Ahmed, the founder of Aligarh Muslim University; and Altaf Husein Hali, among others, were a group of Muslim reformers who had experienced the revolt of 1857. British rule profoundly affected their lives henceforth (Minault 1998). 11. See Beth Baron 1994 and Lila Abu-Lughod 1998 for discussions of similar processes in early-twentieth-century Egypt and the Middle East. 12. These attempts have to be seen in contrast to the processes in other Muslim countries during the same period. In Iran, Egypt, and other parts of the Middle East the main struggle for feminists and educated women was the removal of the veil (see Badran 1995 especially for Egypt). 13. They were a crucial voting bloc that the Muslim League (the party seeking to represent the Muslims of British India) relied on during the 1945 – 46 elections. 14. It is indeed a popular assertion that Urdu was the language of North Indian Muslims. This claim is historically inaccurate, as in late nineteenth and even in the twentieth century Urdu was the first language for many Hindus and Sikhs, and some of the most famous Urdu literary figures are non-Muslims (see Mufti 2000, Ahmad 1996). 15. It was one of the world’s fastest-growing cities between 1947 and 1972. With a growth rate of almost 5 percent between 1972 and the present, its population is estimated to have grown from 3.6 million to 13 million within this period (Zaidi 1999, 81). 16. In 1993, five years after the end of Zia’s regime, 75 – 80 percent of all women in Pakistani jails were charged with Hudood offenses (Rouse 1998, 61). 17. Hence the famous title — nods to Lenin’s tract notwithstanding — of a 1987 book written by two Pakistani feminists (Khawar Mumtaz and Farida Shaheed), Women of Pakistan: Two Steps Forward, One Step Backward. 18. The 1980 Pakistan agricultural census showed that women’s participation in agricultural labor was 73 percent. The 1990 – 91 Pakistan Integrated Household Survey indicated that female labor force participation in rural areas was 45 percent, with 17 percent in the urban areas; hence, a more realistic yet still conservative estimate of female participation in the labor force may lie between 30 and 40 percent (United Nations n.d.). 19. Pakistan 2001– 2. 20. The editors of these magazines are mostly women who have college degrees in Urdu literature and are well informed about the literary trends in the

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country. How contributions are solicited, who the regular writers are, and how themes are identified are questions that require further research with the writers and editors and are beyond the scope of this article. 21. Pakistani Muslim personal law does give women the right of divorce under a range of circumstances if this has been stipulated in the marriage contract. Historically, several schools of Islamic jurisprudence give women the right of divorce in the case of a husband’s impotency (Mussalam 1982). 22. In recent months, articles have appeared in the New York Times on the preference for boys among Pashtun men (Smith 2002). What is a lived experience for many in Afghanistan and Pakistan has now become available to the West as an example of liberated sexual politics. 23. This literally means those from Kabul. In South Asia, Afghan men have been long-distance traders of a variety of goods for centuries. 24. Of course, to incorporate an increasingly non-Muhajir readership it makes financial sense for the publishers to accept and celebrate difference. 25. See chaps. 1, 4. 26. See Abbas 1993 for a discussion on the continuing emphasis on English education in Pakistan and its links to global flows of capital. 27. According to the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan’s report (1995) a woman is raped every three hours in Pakistan: half the victims are minors; onefourth are gang rapes. 28. I am indebted to Dipesh Chakrabarty (1994) for this line of argument. 29. We need to also pay attention to Carol Pateman’s (1988) reminder that the conception of the modern individual belongs to patriarchal categories of thought.

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Baron, Beth. 1994. The women’s awakening in Egypt. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. Benjamin, Walter. 1968. The task of the translator. In Illuminations: Essays and reflections, edited by Hannah Arendt and translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken. Butler, Judith. 1998. Merely cultural. New Left Review 227: 33 – 44. Caplan, Cora. 1986. The thorn birds: Fiction, fantasy, femininity. In Sea changes: Essays on culture and feminism. London: Verso. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 1994. The difference — deferral of a colonial modernity: Public debates on domesticity in British India. In Subaltern Studies 8, edited by David Arnold and David Hardiman. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. ——— .1995. Radical histories and questions of Enlightenment rationalism. Economic and Political Weekly 30: 751– 59. ———. 2000. Provincializing Europe. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Chatterjee, Partha. 1993. The nation and its fragments. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Dhareshwar, Vivek. 1995. Our time: History, sovereignty, and politics. Economic and Political Weekly 30.6: 317– 24. Djebar, Assia. 1993. Fantasia: An Algerian calvacade. Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann. Dickey, Sara. 1995. Consuming utopia: Film watching in Tamil Naidu. In Consuming modernity: Public culture in South Asia, edited by Carol A. Breckenridge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. 1995. Report for 1995. Lahore: HRCP. Hussain, Neelam, Samiya Mumtaz, and Rubina Saigol, eds. 1997. Engendering the nation state. Lahore: Simorgh. Jalal, Ayesha. 1991. The convenience of subservience: Women and the state of Pakistan. In Women, Islam, and state, edited by Deniz Kandiyoti. London: Macmillan: 77–114. Jameson, Fredric. 1983. Pleasure: A political issue. In Formations of pleasure. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Lewis, Jone Johnson. 2001. Pakistan: Status of women and the women’s movement. http://womenshistory.about.com/library/ency/blwh_pakistan_women.htm. Metcalf, Barbara Daly. 1990. Perfecting women. Berkeley: University of California Press. Minault, Gail. 1981. Sisterhood or separatism? The All-India Muslim Ladies Conference and the nationalist movement. In The extended family: Women and political participation in India and Pakistan, edited by Gail Minault. New Delhi: Chanakya. ———. 1998. Secluded scholars. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Modleski, Tania. 1982. Loving with a vengeance: Mass-produced fantasies for women. Hamden, Conn.: Archon. Mufti, Aamir. 2000. A greater short story writer than God: Genre, gender, and minority in late colonial India. In Subaltern Studies 11, edited by Partha Chatterjee and Pradeep Jeganathan. New York: Columbia University Press. Mumtaz, Khawar, and Farida Shaheed. 1987. Women of Pakistan: Two steps forward, one step backward. Lahore: Vanguard. Mussalam, Basim. 1982. Sex and society in Islam. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Naim, C. M. 1984. Prize–winning Adab: A study of five Urdu books written in response to the Allahabad government gazette notification. In Moral conduct and authority, edited by Barbara Metcalf. Berkeley: University of California Press. Najmabadi, Afsaneh. 1993. Veiled discourse — unveiled body. Feminist Studies 19.3: 487– 518. Pakeeza (Lahore). 1995. No. 9, December. Pakistan: World Magazine Trends. 2001– 2. fipp.com. Pateman, Carol. 1988. The sexual contract. Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press. Petievich, Carla. 1992. Assembly of rivals: Delhi, Lucknow, and the Urdu ghazal. New Delhi: Manohar. Prakash, Gyan. 1999. Another reason. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Radway, Janice. 1984. Reading the romance. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Rajagopal, Arvind. 2001. Politics after television. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rouse, Shahnaz. 1996. Gender nationalism(s) and cultural identity: Discursive strategies and exclusivities. In Embodied violence, edited by Kumari Jayawardena and Malathi De Alwis. New Delhi: Kali Press for Women. ———. 1998. The outsider(s) within: Sovereignty and citizenship in Pakistan. In Appropriating gender, edited by Patricia Jeffery and Amrita Basu. New York: Routledge. Smith, Craig. 2002. Taliban Gone, Sex with Boys Return. New York Times, 2 February. Stallybrass, Peter, and Allon White. 1986. The politics and poetics of transgression. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. United Nations. n.d. Sustainable Development Department, FAO. Asia’s women in agriculture, environment, and rural production, Pakistan. www.fao.org/sd. Willis, Clair. 1989. Upsetting the public: Carnival, hysteria, and women’s texts. In Bakhtin and Cultural Theory, edited by Ken Hirschkop and David Sheperd. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Zaidi, Akbar S. 1999. The new development paradigm. Karachi: Oxford University Press. Zaman, Mohamad Qasim. 2002. The ulama in contemporary Islam: Custodians of change. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

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Contributors

Pius Adesanmi is an assistant professor of comparative literature at Pennsylvania State University. He specializes in francophone African and Caribbean literatures, with an emphasis on women’s writing. He has twice been a fellow of the French Institute of South Africa and was a French government scholar. His essays on African literatures have appeared in journals and as book chapters. Kamran Asdar Ali is an assistant professor of anthropology and Middle East studies at the University of Texas, Austin. He is the author of Planning the Family in Egypt: New Bodies New Selves (University of Texas Press). His current research focus is on Pakistani cultural and political history, and he is writing a manuscript on Pakistani labor politics in the 1960s and 1970s. Rosinka Chaudhuri is a fellow at the center for studies in the social sciences in Calcutta; she completed her doctorate at Oxford University. Her book, Gentlemen Poets in Colonial Bengal: Emergent Nationalism and the Orientalist Project, was published in 2002 (Seagull). Her current research focus is on issues of nationalism and authenticity in nineteenth-century Bengali poetry, and she is writing a book on this subject tentatively titled “Poetry and the Nation State.” She is also editing a comprehensive edition of the works of Henry Louis Vivian Derozio for Oxford University Press, Delhi. Mark Driscoll is an assistant professor of Japanese and international studies at the University of North Carolina. His monograph on the Japanese colonial writer Yuasa Katsue will be published in 2004 by Duke University Press. He is currently in Tokyo, Japan, finishing research on a long project on Japanese imperialism called “Absolute Erotic, Absolute Grotesque.” Brent Hayes Edwards is an associate professor of English at Rutgers University. He is the author of The Practice of Diaspora (Harvard University Press, 2003) and coeditor with Robert G. O’Meally and Farah Jasmine Griffin of Uptown Conversations: The New Jazz Studies (forthcoming from Columbia University Press).

Sarah Nuttall is a senior researcher at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. She is coeditor with Kate Darian-Smith and Liz Gunner of Text, Theory, Space: Land, Literature, and History in South Africa and Australia (Routledge), with Carli Coetzee of Negotiating the Past: The Making of Memory in South Africa (Oxford University Press), and with Cheryl Ann Michael of Senses of Culture: South African Culture Studies (Oxford University Press). Sanjay Seth teaches political theory at La Trobe University, Melbourne. He has published widely on political theory and modern Indian history, including Marxist Theory and Nationalist Politics: Colonial India (Sage). He is coeditor of the journal Postcolonial Studies and in 2003 was a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science research fellow at the University of Tokyo, where he was completing the manuscript for a book tentatively titled “Subject to Pedagogy, Subject of History: Debating Western Education in Colonial India.”