*Gandhi and the Art of Dying

“Martyrs of Humanity”, cartoon by D. R. Fitzpatrick in The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 12 February 1948

[On the occasion of the anniversary of the death of Mohandas K. Gandhi (January 30)]

There is but no question that Mohandas Gandhi remains, more than six decades after his assassination, the most iconic figure of modern India. He was one of the most widely photographed men of his time; an entire industry of nationalist prints extolled his life; and statues of his abound throughout India and, increasingly, the rest of the world.  Gandhi has been a blessing to cartoonists, ever since he signalled his arrival on the political scene in South Africa; and most Indian artists of consequence over the course of the last half-century, from M. F. Husain and Ramkinkar Baij to Ghulam Muhammad Sheikh and Atul Dodiya, have engaged with Gandhi in their work.  What is equally striking is that this immensely rich visual archive, which encompasses such unusual items as caricatures of Gandhi in Fascist publications, anti-Gandhi Soviet propaganda posters, and lewd comics of Gandhi from Tijuana, Mexico, has altogether escaped critical scrutiny –– barring some recent scholarly work on nationalist prints, and an occasional article on Gandhi and photography.

A distinct iconography began to develop around Gandhi’s figure in his own lifetime.  Indeed, it would be no exaggeration to say that, deities, the great bhaktas, and the founders of religion such as the Buddha aside, there is no figure in the history of India who could be so readily signified, whether by Gandhi’s trademark spectacles, his walking stick, the sandals he himself made, or the time-piece tucked into a corner of his dhoti.  Cartoonists delighted in those large ears that prompted Sarojini Naidu to dub him ‘Mickey Mouse’, and some of the most striking photographs are those where, in the midst of men dressed in overcoats, silk suits, or other formal wear, Gandhi appears singular in the shining armor of his nakedness.  One cartoonist had the good sense to represent the battle between Gandhi and the forces of violence as the struggle between ‘the shirtless’ and ‘the shirted’.

However, the various representations of Gandhi cannot be interpreted as offering a seamless narrative on his unique place in the national imaginary or as a figure of global protest.  What we do not see is just as important as what we do see.  Printmakers, photographers, painters, and sculptors are alert to different considerations.  The photographers of Gandhi, for instance, were naturally sensitive to the play of light and shadows, while printmakers drew on mythic material that they construed as the grounding of Indian civilization. The interpretation of public statuary leads us to a different set of questions:  where are statues of Gandhi placed, with what effect and consequences, and to what end?  The vast archive can also be viewed in the light of other interpretive strategies.  We can speak, for example, of ‘the seated Gandhi’, ‘the walking Gandhi’, ‘the spectral Gandhi’, and so on.  A consideration of ‘the sartorial Gandhi’ would enable us to gauge his life from the clothes that he wore at different stages of his awakening, and arrive at an assessment of how, after he had made a decision to reduce his clothing to the bare minimum, he came to embody, in the most profound ways, the idea of nakedness in its fullness.

It is, as we approach the anniversary of the Gandhi’s assassination on January 30^th, of ‘the martyred Gandhi’ that I shall now speak.  Many have argued that Gandhi had a premonition of his death.  There had been several assassination attempts on his life in the preceding fifteen years.  What is unequivocally clear is that he spoke often, especially in the aftermath of Indian independence and the country’s vivisection, of wanting to die –– as he told his grand-niece Manu after the failed attempt on his life at Birla House at January 20^th, ‘On this occasion I have shown no bravery.  If somebody fired at me point-blank and I faced his bullet with a smile, repeating the name of Rama in my heart, I should indeed be deserving of congratulations.’  On January 27^th, Gandhi, still recovering from the fast that brought peace to Delhi and conviction to Nathuram Godse that the old man no longer deserved to live, told the visiting American journalist Vincent Sheean, ‘It might be that it would be more valuable to humanity for me to die.’  Yet, at other times Gandhi had, with equal assurance, declared that he wished to live for 125 years.

Some still dispute whether Gandhi died with the name of Rama on his lips.  The front cover of the 25 January 1970 issue of Illustrated Weekly of India echoes the confusion and shock experienced by all those around him; unusually, the revolver seems almost suspended between the assassin’s hands, though by all accounts Godse executed the task with firm and efficient resolve.  Indian printmakers went to work almost immediately after Gandhi’s death, likening him to Christ and Buddha:  though Gandhi was no founder of a religion, he seemed to some of his contemporaries to have had a similar impact on those who encountered him or had some awareness of his teachings.  These printmakers borrowed effortlessly, recognizing no cultural boundaries.  Gandhi adored Michelangelo’s Pieta and would have been humbled by the comparison.

Gandhi was also a world historical figure and his death was registered across the globe.  In the United States, the eminent cartoonist D. R. Fitzpatrick, long associated with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, was reminded of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.  His cartoon, ‘Martyrs of Humanity’, points to the place that Gandhi had come to occupy in the American imagination.  One doubts very much that the nation-state meant to Gandhi what it meant to Lincoln, but the image provokes precisely such questions.  Two decades later, another assassination would shake the world.  More so perhaps than any other cartoonist, Bill Mauldin of the Chicago Sun-Times captured the poignancy of the killing of another architect of non-violent resistance.  In his famous cartoon, published in April 1968, an avuncular-looking Gandhi stretches out his hands towards Martin Luther King in a show of solidarity and says, ‘The odd thing about assassins, Dr. King, is that they think they’ve killed you.’  Men such as Gandhi, who knew better than most the art of dying, have to be assassinated repeatedly.

(First published under the same title in Sunday Times of India, 27 January 2013, p. 9)

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*Thesis Nine: The Dissent that is Beyond Dissent

 

A meeting at Penang in autumn 2010 of like-minded intellectuals and activists from the Global South committed to a radical decolonization of knowledge commenced with a screening of the late Howard Zinn’s documentary, We the People.  A few years ago, the World Social Forum in Mumbai opened with a screening, before thousands of people, of the documentary, Manufacturing Consent, focused on the ideas and work of Noam Chomsky, the most well known American voice of dissent at home and abroad.  In either case, most people would be justified in thinking that the choice was sound.  Howard Zinn’s book, A People’s History of the United States — a work attentive to the voices of the marginalized, critical of mainstream narratives, sensitive to histories of labor and the working class, and so on — has sold over a million copies in various editions; moreover, Zinn’s life, marked by an ethical impulse to do, in common parlance, what is right and stand by what is just, is one that many might seek to emulate.  Chomsky, for his part, has been the most relentless and forthright critic of American foreign policy:  if there is one liberal voice which to the world represents the ability of the United States to tolerate its own critics, it is surely the voice of Chomsky.  Critical as Chomsky is of the United States, one suspects that he can also be trumpeted by his adversaries as the supreme instance of America’s adherence to notions of free speech.  Chomsky is simultaneously one of America’s principal intellectual liabilities and assets.

 

I am animated, however, by a different set of considerations in this discussion of Zinn and Chomsky.  Why, we should ask, did the organizers settle for Zinn and Chomsky, both American scholars – and that, too, at meetings, especially the Multiversity conference in Penang, committed at least partly to the idea of intellectual autonomy, self-reliance, greater equity between the global North and the global South, and so on.  An ethical case might reasonably be made for the gestures encountered at Penang and Mumbai.  No less a person than Gandhi sought alliances, throughout his life, with the ‘other West’.  Holding firmly to the principle that freedom is indivisible, and that it is not only India that needed to be free of colonial rule, but also England itself that had to be liberated from its own worst tendencies, Gandhi sought out those writers, intellectuals, and activists in the West who had themselves been reduced to the margins.  His tract of 1909, Hind Swaraj, which is intensely critical of the modern West, lists ‘eminent authorities’ whose works Gandhi consulted, and the bulk of them are figures such as Tolstoy, Thoreau, Edward Carpenter, and Ruskin.  Those who rightly recall this critical aspect of Gandhi’s life conveniently forget that Gandhi, on more than one occasion, also described the West as “Satanic”.  If he accepted English, America, and European friends as allies in the struggle for Indian independence, he also never wavered from his firm belief that ultimately Indians had to fight their own battles.  Thus, following  him, some difficult questions that come to mind should not be brushed aside.  Is the Global South so colonized that it must borrow even its models of dissent from the West?  If the theorists of global import, from Barthes, Foucault, Derrida, Adorno, Heidegger and Althusser to Lacan, Habermas, Levinas, Judith Butler, and Agamben all hail from the West, are the ultimate dissenters also from the West?

 

What begins in people’s minds can only end in people’s minds.  All over the colonized world in the nineteenth century, Locke, John Stuart Mill, and Tocqueville were held up as the torchbearers of freedom.  Almost no one recognized Tocqueville, even today a sacrosanct figure in the United States, as the holder of the most virulently racist ideas about Arabs and Muslims.  Mill’s ideas about representative government extended only to people he conceived of as free, mature, and possessed of rational faculties.  The habits of simulation in the global South are so deeply engrained that Americans become the ultimate and only genuine dissenters.  The rebellions of the dispossessed, oppressed, and marginalized are generally dismissed as luxuries possible only in permissive democracies, as the last rants of people opposed to development and progress.  However, the problem of dissent is far from being confined to the global South:  it is, if anything, more acute in the United States, where the dissenters have all been neatly accommodated, whether in women’s studies, ethnic studies, or gay studies departments at universities, or in officially-sanctioned programs of multiculturalism, or in pious-sounding policies affirming the values of diversity and cultural pluralism.  The dictators of tomorrow will also, we can be certain, have had “diversity training”.  Is there any dissent beyond what now passes for dissent?   How will we recognize the dissent of those who do not speak in one of the prescribed languages of dissent?  The United Nations has officially recognized languages, but the world at large has something much more insidious, namely officially recognized and prescribed modes of dissent.  Those who do not dissent in the languages of dissent will never even receive the dignity of recognition, not even as much as a mass memorial to ‘the unknown soldier’.

CONCLUDED

See also the previous posts in this series:

Thesis Eight: Postcolonial Thought and Religion in the Public Sphere

Thesis Seven: The Geography and Psychogeography of Home

Thesis Six: In incommensurability is the promise of more democratic futures

Thesis Five: The Moral and Political Imperative of South-South Dialogues

Thesis Four – Nonviolence: A Gaping Hole in Postcolonial Thought

Thesis Three: Postcolonialism’s critique of the nation-state remains inadequate

Thesis Two: Postcolonialism has had nothing to say about the imperialism of categories

Thesis One: Postcolonialism never mounted an effective critique of history

The Politics of Culture and Knowledge after Postcolonialism: Nine Theses (and a Prologue)

 

 

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*Thesis Six: In incommensurability is the promise of more democratic futures

One narrative of colonialism insists that, however adverse the consequences of colonialism for the peoples of the Americas, Asia, Africa, Latin America, Polynesia, and so on, it opened up these worlds to the modern West and its scientific, technological, intellectual and political advancements.  This argument has seen an extraordinary resurgence over the last two decades, and its advocates point sometimes to the ‘failed states’ of Africa, and at other times to the rise of militant Islam, to suggest that the colonial powers let down their subjects by pulling out too early.  Some commentators insist only on the supposed ‘fact’ that the colonized subjects have repeatedly shown themselves incapable of (good) governance; others advance the view that colonialism can productively be understood and condoned as the narrative of provincial and insular cultures being opened up, even if forcibly, to the salutary and progressive influence of the West in all domains of life.  Some historians of empire continue to indulge in a similarly puerile exercise, weighing the ‘good’ that colonialism wrought for the darker races against the ‘bad’ that, mostly ‘inadvertently’, was done by a few rotten specimens of the white ruling elites in the colonies.  Paul Johnson, Niall Ferguson, and Dennis Judd are among the many commentators and academic dons who have never been in doubt that the ‘good’ easily outweighed the ‘bad’; they have been joined by politicians such as Gordon Brown, who declared on an official visit to Britain’s former East African colonies in 1995 that Britain no longer needed to apologize for colonialism since it had contributed many ‘positive’ values to the lives of its colonial subjects. (Engulfed as we are by apologies, it is for the better that Gordon Brown decided not to contribute to the epidemic.)

We know what the ‘opening up’ of Australia and the Americas, to take two obvious and gruesome examples, meant for indigenous peoples.  It is barely necessary to rehearse the histories of genocide, the devastation of lifestyles and cultural inheritances, and destruction of ecosystems that must be understood in their most expansive sense as encompassing complicated relationships between humans, animals, plants, the soil, and the elements.  Scholars engaged in postcolonial criticism scarcely need to be reminded of the manner in which histories of European expansion and genocide are inextricably intertwined.  The question before us, rather, is whether the theoretical trajectories of the last few decades have not, inadvertently or otherwise, also opened up formerly colonized subjects to the knowledge systems of the West and thereby paved the way for the extinction of the little cultural and intellectual autonomy that might have remained in colonized societies.  There is a legitimate question to be asked whether there are ever any ‘pure’ categories of thought, and it may even be that the scientific methods and categories of the West have themselves been deployed to stake arguments about the history and authenticity of a local knowledge tradition (as, some would argue, is true of Ayurveda).  Nevertheless, what cannot be doubted is the massive inequilibrium between modern knowledge systems and knowledge systems that remain local, indigenous, suppressed, or marginal.  On the liberal view, to take one instance, the West has shown itself to be increasingly accommodating to alternative knowledge systems, and in medicine liberals will point to the growing acceptance of homeopathy, acupuncture, Ayurveda, traditional Tibetan medicine, and naturopathy in the US and Europe.  But are these merely viewed as complementary systems, or do practitioners of allopathy permit their assumptions about medical care to be seriously put into question by practitioners of other medical knowledge systems?

Let us consider an analogy:  Foucault’s History of Sexuality has had a seminal place not only in recent understandings of sexuality in Europe and the Americas but also in the attention being lavished on sexuality in Indian variants of cultural studies.  As in economics and anthropology, the assumption persists that Foucault has furnished a universal template for the study of sexuality, even if notions of femininity, masculinity, sexual conduct, the care and practices of the body in India may not be amenable to his cultural histories.  Fortuitously, another bespectacled bald man, this one in India, had an abiding interest in sexual practices.  I have in mind, quite surprisingly, Mohandas Gandhi.  Unlike the two bald men fighting over a comb, Jorges Luis Borges’s memorable description of the squabble between Argentina and Britain over the Falkland Islands, Gandhi and Foucault would, I suspect, have disagreed over much that is truly substantive for our understanding of human sexuality.  I wonder when the history of sexuality in Europe will be opened up to the penetrating gaze of the sexual practices of Gandhi, who had firm and deeply rooted ideas about the public and the private, masculinity and femininity, the violence of sex and the sex of violence, and the joys of sexuality without sex.

Though it is now an axiom of modern thought and sensibility that the moral imperative of the day is to enhance cultural cooperation and comprehend the various ways in which the world is shrinking, it is rather the case that conditions for even remotely equal exchanges and flows do not exist.  In the present state of affairs, keeping in mind the enormous iniquities in the world system, little diminished by the alleged erosion of American power or the ascendancy of China, and nowhere better manifested than in the fact that modern knowledge systems are generally derived in toto from the West, there can be no more desirable outcome than to reduce certain contacts, for instance between the Global North and the Global South, and repudiate certain conversations.  In the totalizing conditions of modern knowledge, we have the intellectual, political and moral obligation, at least from the standpoint of those living in the Global South, to increase incommensurability.  To deny the South this choice, to compel it to enter to the stream of world history the teleological center of which remains the Euro-American world – Fukuyama’s bland “end of history” being a case in point — notwithstanding all the critiques of recent decades, would be the clearest sign of surrender to a resurgent colonialism masquerading as the harbinger of the familiar universalisms of freedom, progress, development, and the like.

See also previous posts in this series:

Thesis Five: The Moral and Political Imperative of South-South Dialogues

Thesis Four – Nonviolence: A Gaping Hole in Postcolonial Thought

Thesis Three: Postcolonialism’s critique of the nation-state remains inadequate

Thesis Two: Postcolonialism has had nothing to say about the imperialism of categories

Thesis One: Postcolonialism never mounted an effective critique of history

The Politics of Culture and Knowledge after Postcolonialism: Nine Theses (and a Prologue)

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*Thesis Five: The Moral and Political Imperative of South-South Dialogues

It has been argued that postcolonial thought only became possible owing to the presence of intellectuals and academics from formerly colonized countries in the metropolitan capitals of the West (or, more narrowly, in the better American research universities).  Leaving aside for the moment the critique leveled by Aijaz Ahmed against Edward Said, which (in part) focuses on Said’s supposed fetishization of ‘exile’, and leaving aside also the question of whether the relationship between the metropole in the West and the capitals in the global South has really changed all that much over the last few decades, we might try to pursue another implication of the post-colonial location of intellectuals from the global South in the global North.

Why, we should perhaps ask, must the West mediate between the conversations that the people of Asia or Africa might have amongst themselves?  Postcolonial studies may have familiarized South Asians with the writings of Ngugi, Achebe, Walcott, and Jamaica Kincaid, and Africans with the writings of Kipling, Forster, Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh, and Arundhati Roy, but the mediation of the academy in the US and UK has been central to nearly all such enterprises.  As a historian whose canvas extends considerably beyond India, for instance to the worldwide Indian diaspora, it took me very little time to come to an understanding of that peculiar phenomenon which is termed comparative history. Comparative history has generally meant nothing more than comparing Latin America with the West, China with the West, Japan with the West, Africa with the West, and so on.  For European scholars without much of an interest in Europe’s former colonies, it has generally meant extending the canvas from one nation-state in western Europe to several, to encompassing France, England, Germany, Italy, and so on, with an occasional foray into the dreaded territory of the Slavs.  The pattern is unmistakably clear:  in comparative history, one axis remains the West, and the other is determined either by the scholar’s national origins or area of interest. Just as the United States found it unacceptable that its services and mediation should have been rejected when Turkey and Brazil last year sought to negotiate directly with Iran over the question of its compliance with the NPT (Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty), so the historian is baffled when the Euro-American world is not explicitly or at least tacitly present in the enterprise of comparative history.

It is transparent that when humanists and especially social scientists from China, India, and Africa speak to each other, if at all they do so, their discourse is invariably mediated through the West.  The matter may be put this way:  however impressive the rise of China, whatever the consequences of its increasing military reach, its creation of a blue seas navy, and its economic penetration of the world, what kind of categories has it contributed to the edifice of modern knowledge?  Which Chinese philosophers, social scientists, literary critics, or humanists have become part of the ‘indispensable’ canon?  English is the language of international social science, but if Foucault, Badiou, Derrida, and countless others can be translated from French into English and Chinese, just as Habermas, Adorno, and Benjamin can be translated from German into English, Chinese, and French, why is it that Chinese social science or philosophy is unavailable in English (not to mention Indian languages)?  Or, as is much more likely, is it not the case that Indians, Chinese, Africans and Iranians tacitly understand that to read each other is, in each instance, effectively to read someone who is merely replicating some model of the economist or theory of the anthropologist from the West?  If nearly all social science in the global South is derivative, why bother at all reading each other?

In 1931, the journalist Edgar Snow, renowned at one time for his accounts of China, was on a visit to India.  He described himself as being “impressed with the amazing fact that these two countries, with the oldest continuous civilizations, with close religious and cultural ties, and which between themselves hold about half the men and women of the world, had such poor means of communication between them.”  That Snow was adverting not merely to the poor technological, transportation, or communication networks as these are ordinarily understood is transparent from what follows:  “Their cultural centers”, Snow wrote, “were farther from each other by existing land routes than either one was from Europe or America – just as far apart, in fact, as in the days when Buddhism was carried over the Himalayas to the Chinese Empire.”  The model for this insensitivity may well have been the bhadralok intellectual from Calcutta, who – throughout the second half of the nineteenth century and into a couple of decades after India’s attainment of independence — always found London much closer to Calcutta than Bombay, Pune, Surat, Madras or Hyderabad.  Beastly Delhi was nowhere on his horizon.

It has not always been this way.  China, the east coast of Africa, southeast Asia, the Gulf states, and India were all part of an Indian Ocean world before the coming of the Europeans. Afghanistan may be a byword in Europe and the US for backwardness, relentless patriarchy, and the tyranny of the Taliban, but Afghan rulers left behind a legacy of cultural refinement in north India centuries before the commencement of India’s relations with European powers.  It may be argued that the Bandung conference of 1955 sought to capture some of this legacy, and one could also speak, in this vein, of various (failed) attempts at Asian–African solidarity, but the imperative of South-South contacts cannot be met only by enhanced contacts between the nation-states of the global South or by officially orchestrated cultural exchanges.  The Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR) may be doing a commendable job in sponsoring folk dances of Mongolia, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, even if these are performed in largely empty auditoria, but these cannot substitute for the liveliness of interactions that stem from a political awareness of the real meaning and implications of South-South exchanges.  A more far-reaching view of the necessity of civilizational dialogues, attentive to a wide range of structures of thought and feeling, will have to be entertained.

See also:

Thesis Four – Nonviolence: A Gaping Hole in Postcolonial Thought

Thesis Three: Postcolonialism’s critique of the nation-state remains inadequate

Thesis Two: Postcolonialism has had nothing to say about the imperialism of categories

Thesis One: Postcolonialism never mounted an effective critique of history

The Politics of Culture and Knowledge after Postcolonialism: Nine Theses (and a Prologue)

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*Thesis Four – Nonviolence: A Gaping Hole in Postcolonial Thought

The enterprise of making a nation is fraught with violence.  People have to be not merely cajoled but browbeaten into submission to become proper subjects of a proper nation-state.  Overt violence may not always play the primary role in producing the homogenous subject, but social phenomena such as schooling cannot be viewed merely as innocuous enterprises designed to ‘educate’ subjects of the state.  One of the most widely cited works to have put forward this argument with elegance and scholarly rigor is Eugen Weber’s Peasants into Frenchmen, where one learns, with much surprise, that even in the Third Republic “French was a foreign language for half the citizens.”  The making of France entailed not only the modernization of the rural countryside but creating, often with violence, proper subjects of a proper nation-state.  The making of the United States offers another narrative of the role of violence in the production of the nation-state, with the extermination of native Americans long before and much after the ‘Revolutionary War’ constituting the most vital link in the long chain of violence that marked the emergence of the United States.

Postcolonial thought, attentive as always to the politics of nation-making and nationalism’s complicity with colonialism, bestowed considerable attention on the various phenomena that can be accumulated under the rubric of violence; however, it had almost no time to spare for a pragmatic, ethical, or even philosophical consideration of nonviolence.  The violence of the nation-state may have always been present to the mind of postcolonial theorists, but generally this was reduced to the violence of the colonizer.  One thinks, of course, of Fanon, Cesaire, Memmi, and many others in this respect.  In those works that have underscored the complicity of nationalist and imperialist thought, a principal motif in the work (say) of Ranajit Guha, the violence of indigenous elites also came under critical scrutiny.  [See, for example, Guha’s Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India, or his programmatic note on subaltern studies in Volume I.]  It is characteristic of most social thought in the West that it has been riveted on violence – here, postcolonial thought barely diverged from orthodox social science, mainstream social thought, or the general drift of humanist thinking.  Nonviolence is barely present in intellectual discussions.  We see here history’s continuing enchantment with ‘events’; nonviolence creates little or no noise, it merely is, it only fills the space in the background.

One of the many genuine insights at which Gandhi arrived was the recognition that the practitioners, theorists, and ardent believers in nonviolence in Europe and America had become entirely marginal to dominant intellectual traditions of the West.  The Tolstoy who turned to anarchism and nonviolence was seen as having betrayed the finest humanist traditions that he had once embodied; Thoreau was dismissed as a freak; and Edward Carpenter was reduced to obscurity.  That the supreme novelist of 19^th century Europe, feted and celebrated not only in aristocratic and learned circles but in the much wider and emerging public sphere, should have turned to philosophical anarchism, renouncing his own works and embracing a political view of Christianity that put him in the path of confrontation with the church, is something that passed the comprehension of Tolstoy’s contemporaries.  Gandhi was similarly inclined to view Christianity as a firm repudiation of Christ’s teachings on nonviolent resistance, though what role Tolstoy had in shaping Gandhi’s conception of Christianity remains uncertain.

The point cannot be reinforced enough:  nonviolence has never had any salience in Western thought, and postcolonial thought has in this respect scarcely deviated from the intellectual traditions of the West.  Once we leave aside Indian scholars such as Partha Chatterjee and Ashis Nandy, for whom Gandhi perforce has had an inescapable presence, we find that postcolonialism in the Western academy never had the slightest truck with the histories and practices of nonviolence.  The fetish for violence manifested itself in a sustained interest in Fanon among postcolonial theorists; but Gandhi has long seemed, shall we say, unsexy in the extreme.  The case of Edward Said is instructive:  though he had gotten in the habit of furnishing lists of anti-colonial thinkers and texts to his readers, Gandhi remained singularly uninteresting to him.  It is informative that in a voluminous collection of interviews with Edward Said, edited by Gauri Viswanathan and published in 2004, the name of Martin Luther King, Jr. appears twice:  but where King is remembered around the world chiefly and justly as one of the chief architects of the civil rights movement, the preeminent prophetic voice of an aggrieved black America, Said mentions him both times only (and I should say without any just cause) as an unequivocal supporter of Zionism.  Many have pointed to the fact that the oppression of the colonizers was much more visible to Said than the resistance to colonial rule; but, even within the canvas of resistance, the idea of nonviolent resistance, and its histories, was not even remotely on Said’s horizon.  Nonviolence has been a gaping hole in postcolonial thought, and this alone points us to the irrepressible and uncomfortable truth of the deep structuring of violence in the entire edifice of modern Western thought.

See also related previous posts:

Thesis Three: Postcolonialism’s critique of the nation-state remains inadequate

Thesis Two: Postcolonialism has had nothing to say about the imperialism of categories

Thesis One: Postcolonialism never mounted an effective critique of history

The Politics of Culture and Knowledge after Postcolonialism: Nine Theses (and a Prologue)

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*Thesis Three: Postcolonialism’s critique of the nation-state remains inadequate

The nation-state is the only game in town; and, since we only have a conception of finite games, this game has winners and losers.  (As an aside, it is not accidental that the United Stats, which embodies the idea of the nation-state as well as any other country, remains incapable of comprehending games that are not finite.  ‘Finite’ and ‘infinite’ games, as James Carse has deployed those terms, go well beyond games as those are ordinarily understood, but for our purposes the literal examples of games [as in sports] will suffice beautifully.  American games, among them basketball, football, and baseball, cannot countenance the possibility of a draw:  a draw is not an acceptable ‘result’, and if the score is tied at the end of regulation play, the games goes into over-time, and if necessary into double and triple over-time.  Cricket offers the greatest contrast:  Americans are among those who are gravely puzzled by a game that, in its ideal version, could last five days and end, as was more often the case than not, in a draw.  Cricket in its classic test match version has long seemed to be a game where the killer instinct could not be exercised.)  In this scenario of finite games, a nation-state advances at the cost of another nation-state.  These nation-states [or, in the awkward grammatical version, nations-state] exist in a highly hierarchical relationship to each other, an idea equally to be encountered in the very apotheosis of the nation-state, namely the United Nations (where, as is transparent, the General Assembly that in principle deems all nations to be equal is wholly subservient to the wholly undemocratic organ known as the Security Council).

Well-meaning people like to speak of win-win situations, and hope for such outcomes, but the relentless logic of the nation-state permits no easy consolations.  One modern narrative, about the renewed ascendancy of China and India, shows as clearly as anything else how modern political discourse has succumbed entirely to the zero-sum politics of our times.  A prolific literature, which we can see multiplying before our eyes, adverts to various aspects of the race between the two countries.  The only points of comparison seem to revolve around the number of new cell phone connections, the amount of foreign exchange reserves, the share of each country in world exports, the growth of domestic product, the growth of the automobile culture, rapidly expanding consumer markets, and the like.  To be sure, such discussions are leavened by apparently more sophisticated considerations, such as whether India is, in comparison with China, disadvantaged by restraints on growth placed by adherence, however nominal, to democratic freedoms, or whether China’s one-child policy will work to its detriment as its population ages at a much faster rate than is the case in India.  Those interested in geopolitical considerations have taken this narrative further, comparing and contrasting the growing reach of India and especially China throughout Africa.  If the Chinese are tapping the mineral wealth of Africa at an astronomical rate, Indian telecommunications giants such as Airtel have also made spectacular inroads.

In these comparisons between India and China, the illustration I have taken (and discussed as a particular kind of modernist discourse in an article published two year ago), any reference to the fact that India and China long enjoyed civilizational ties before they knew each other as nation-states is dismissed as nostalgia or soft-headed romanticism.  The hostility to civilizational discourses in Marxism is well known, but postcolonial scholars have held a similarly corrosive view of civilizational languages and have not permitted civilizational frameworks to shape their arguments.  Tagore’s views, expressed in his manifesto on nationalism in 1917, are instructive in this regard.  He was obviously not unaware of the oppression wrought in the name of civilization, and nearly everyone with a modicum of awareness of colonial histories recognizes that the idea of ‘civilizing mission’ served to keep some people in a state of submission.  Nevertheless, Tagore also understood that ‘civilization’ offered the only countervailing force to the nation-state. The ‘Nation of the West’ was Tagore’s quaint if brilliant term to convey the idea that every nation, not merely those in Western Europe, will be made in the image of the nation-state as it emerged in the West: civilizations vary immensely, but the nation-state demands homogeneity not only within but in its very form.  Modern civilization is a strange thing, Gandhi opined in ‘Hind Swaraj’, but stranger still was the nation-state.  Civilizations are less insistent on homogeneity and more accommodating, in various ways, to ideas of plurality, diversity, and difference.

The civilizational framework may be important as it furnishes cues on how to think about such notions as ‘cosmopolitanism’, ‘citizenship’, and the ‘commons’.  The best of liberal discourse on citizenship seems positively anemic, operating, even after policy prescriptions are given full consideration, at a level of abstraction which says little about how, say, workers inhabit the condition of dwellers at home, in the workplace, and in the myriad pubic spheres of the nation.  The discourse of cosmopolitanism – “citizen of the earth”, to return to the term’s Greek roots – may be afflicted with similar problems, judging from the literature on ‘world cities’ that has been generated in recent years.  It may be argued that the idea of ‘world cities’ should be warmly embraced, if for no other reason that it shows a way out of the iron grip of the nation-state.  What new hierarchies, we may then ask, are established?  How does the present conception of world cities differ substantively from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century web of cities criss-crossed by imperialist and nationalist elites alike?  Do contemporary notions of citizenship offer a more expansive conception of hospitality and mode for thinking about, in Appiah’s phrase, ‘ethics in a world of strangers’?

See also related posts:

Thesis Four – Nonviolence: A Gaping Hole in Postcolonial Thought

*Thesis Two: Postcolonialism has had nothing to say about the imperialism of categories

*Thesis One: Postcolonialism never mounted an effective critique of history

*The Politics of Culture and Knowledge after Postcolonialism: Nine Theses (and a Prologue)

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*Thesis Two: Postcolonialism has had nothing to say about the imperialism of categories

It is nearly an axiom of contemporary thought that we live in a shrinking world, in a world of unprecedented transnational exchanges, the global movement of peoples, flows of goods and ideas, and so on. The world has never seemed smaller, some commentators argue, and clichés about the present situation abound, among them the idea that the world is a ‘global village’; others, in a variation of this argument, speak of a world that is increasingly ‘flat’.   Global village sounds trendy, chic, even sexy and, in some vague way, ethically responsible.  It gives rise to the satisfying idea, which however demands no action on our part, that our humanity links us all.  We may be all connected, in much the bland way envisioned in cell phone ads; at the other end, if one is to take a highly optimistic view of the matter, perhaps the idea of ‘global village’ may be said to have been anticipated in John Donne’s famous observation, ‘No man is an island’.

There are obvious rejoinders, of varying complexity, to the notion that our world has shrunk and that information travels at immense speeds not even remotely imaginable a mere few decades ago.   Visa and passport regimes have been considered tightened, borders have never seemed so hostile and insurmountable, and walls – in Palestine, between India and Bangladesh, along the US border with Mexico, and many others — have come up where they never existed before.  The increasing turn towards biometric measurements and national identity cards points to the fact that surveillance regimes have the world over become normalized.  One wall, in Berlin, came down, but many more have come up in its place. There are, of course, many walls besides those built with brick and mortar, or with electric wiring calculated to leave dead or shock into submission those daring to transgress the law of borders.  It is not even necessary to enter into discussions about whether the Euro will survive over the next decade or two; of more interest is the question whether the EU is at all the harbinger of a freer and more ecumenical world as it is sometimes made out to be.  Free trade agreements offer relatively unhindered movement of goods, but no nation-state will even remotely contemplate the free mobility of outsiders across its borders.  Those living in the Global South can barely indulge in the idea of wanderlust.  (On a recent visit to Germany, the Schengen visa issued to me, a citizen of India with permanent residency in the United States, holding professorships at leading universities in India and the US, specified the exact dates during which I was permitted to be present in the land of former Nazis:  21 to 25 November 2010.  Just how easy is it for those without invitations, immediate family members in the country of destination, professional positions, or reasonably lucrative businesses to travel to the Schengen zone or North America?)  Leaving aside, however, for the present such obvious criticisms of the regnant ideas of the day about our so-called ‘global village’, what would a more trenchant critique look like?

There is much talk of ‘knowledge cities’ and ‘knowledge societies’, and no one doubts that the sum total of our ‘knowledge’ of the natural and social world is much greater than it has ever been before.  But everything hinges on what we mean by knowledge, and what relation knowledge has to awareness, wisdom, perspicaciousness, and insight; moreover, any pride we may feel in our capacity for knowledge is at once moderated when we begin to ask, whose knowledge, to what end, and for whom?  Even as our knowledge of the world has perhaps grown, the means by which we oppress and remain oppressed have grown dramatically.  Oppressive class relations, the military-industrial complex, feudal norms that stipulate the place of overlords and servants, the brutal exercise of sheer military force:  all these have persisted through the advent of modernity.  Nevertheless, there is little if any awareness of the fact that oppression is increasingly exercised through what might be described as the imperialism of categories established by modern knowledge systems.  What are the categories of knowledge bequeathed to us by the social sciences through which we are induced to comprehend the world around us, and how have these categories become nearly impermeable to critique?

One of my earliest books, Empire of Knowledge:  Culture and Plurality in the Global Economy (Pluto Press, 2002; enlarged Indian ed., Sage, 2005), is largely orchestrated around the idea that, if knowledge helps to liberate us, it also enables a more thoroughgoing and rigorous oppression than anything else that we have so far witnessed.  Even concentration camp inmates understood that it was possible to be broken in the body but not in the mind.  From there we move to the more complex idea that the interpretive categories through which we understand the world have shrunk rather than grown, even as disciplines have developed and multiplied and the entire knowledge industry has grown by gargantuan proportions.   The social scientist may object that certain categories are dropped as they are found to be inadequate, false, misleading, or unproductive, but in truth the social scientist establishes an imperialism of categories.  If the idea of the nation-state holds us in captivity, as is obvious to those who have thought about the fact that the nation-state appears to be the only form in which corporate political community is now conceptualized, why should we expect that the categories with which economists and social scientists work, such as ‘development’ and ‘growth’, or ‘poverty’ and ‘scarcity’, to be any less compromised?  The Palestinians and Kurds may simply want ‘freedom’, but why does freedom necessarily have to take the form of a nation-state?  [See Thesis Three, next, for a greater elaboration of this point.]

How did a category such as ‘literacy’, if I may take another example, become so normalized as to become sacrosanct?  The Oxford English Dictionary reminds us, usefully, that though the word ‘literate’ was first used in the English language around 1432, the word ‘literacy’ only entered the language in 1883.  [See the essay on literacy by Barry Sanders in Ashis Nandy & Vinay Lal, eds., The Future of Knowledge and Culture:  A Dictionary for the Twenty-first Century (Viking Penguin 2005).]  There have always been literates and illiterates, but ‘literacy’ as an evaluative scale, used to judge one nation-state in relation to others, only came into use in the age of eugenics.  To reiterate: even though military domination, class relations, and other familiar structures of hierarchy may not have diminished, increasingly oppression will be exercised through the imperialism of categories established by modern knowledge systems.  The corollary is that our conceptual categories have, contrary to received opinion, shrunk dramatically.  The implications of this are all the more frightening to contemplate when we consider that the Global South cannot even remotely claim intellectual autonomy since the practice of the social sciences is borrowed lock, stock and barrel from the West.

See also previous and subsequent posts in this series:

Thesis Four – Nonviolence: A Gaping Hole in Postcolonial Thought

Thesis Three: Postcolonialism’s critique of the nation-state remains inadequate

Thesis One: Postcolonialism never mounted an effective critique of history

The Politics of Culture and Knowledge after Postcolonialism: Nine Theses (and a Prologue)

 

 

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*Thesis One: Postcolonialism never mounted an effective critique of history

The French feminist Luce Irigaray speaks for many intellectuals when she voices the opinion that “the dominant discipline in the human sciences is now history.”  The likes of Saul Bellow and Allan Bloom argued that the Yoruba had never produced a Beethoven, Bach, Goethe, or Shakespeare, but no insult is calculated to arouse as much anger indeed outrage as to suggest to a people that they have no history.  Eric Wolf captured this idea in his book, Europe and the People without History:  however else colonized people may have been perceived by their vanquishers, they were often rendered as people bereft of history.  India, a prominent colonial official and intellectual wrote in 1835, had a “history abounding with kings thirty feet high and reigns thirty thousand years long, and geography made of seas of treacle and seas of butter.”   If this was true of an ancient civilization, one that had even aroused the admiration of some of Europe’s most prominent intellectuals and writers, could it at all be doubted that Melanesians, Polynesians, Africans, Australian Aboriginals, and many others were a people ‘without history’?

Irigaray speaks of history becoming predominant in the present.  History had, however, become ascendant much earlier, certainly by the early part of the nineteenth century as I have already hinted.  When, to continue briefly with the case of colonial India, James Mill and Thomas Macaulay sought in the first half of the nineteenth century to demonstrate that Indians were not much given to rational thinking, they adduced as evidence the lack of interest in history among Indians and the sheer inability of Indians to deliver even simple chronologies.  Europeans marveled at the fact that the only historical work produced by pre-Islamic India, Kalhana’s Rajatarangini, a 12^th century chronicle of the Kings of Kashmir, enumerated kings that were said to have ruled for three hundred years.  If any Indian was disinclined to believe the European charge against Indians, all that was required was to flaunt Gibbon, Hume, Macaulay and later Ranke before the skeptic and ask if any Indian text could even remotely meet the standards of historical reasoning that had become commonplace in Europe.  As I have written elsewhere at great length, in the History of History: Politics and Scholarship in Modern India [rev. ed., Oxford UP, 2005], nationalist intellectuals took it as their brief to respond to the colonial charge.  Thus the nationalist response remained oblivious to the consideration that Indians may very well have disavowed any intellectual or social interest in history, except that they did so for very good reasons and never saw it as a lack.  I suspect that our forefathers generations ago would have been astounded by the idea that a sense of history should be construed as a sign of a people’s capacity for rational thinking or the maturity of a civilization.

The relationship between history and the nation-state has been well established.  No sooner is a nation-state born than an official version of the history of the nation in the making is authorized.  Postcolonial studies’ practitioners have sought to show how all such histories are partial, often as oppressive as the colonial histories that they seek to supplant.  One response has been to ensure that those who were written out of history – women, religious and ethnic minorities, and so on – are written back into histories.  That such enterprises may be nothing more than ‘additive histories’, barely questioning the template of dominant histories, is also well understood.  The resurgence in ‘world history’ in the United States has been another response, and its many defenders and practitioners have been fired by the noble sentiment that the history of the world should no longer be, as it has been so often, the history of the West.  They also presume that world history is the best antidote to national history (and, in the US, to proverbial American insularity), though here, as is often the case, what is good for the West is presumed to be good for the rest of the world.

There have been other, yet more sophisticated, responses to the problem of history.  Dipesh Chakrabarty has made a case for ‘provincializing Europe’, though the gist of his argument is, in many respects, encountered in Rabindranath Tagore’s Nationalism, published in 1917; he has also argued, quite rightly, that the reference point for histories, even those of India, Africa, or Latin America, somehow always remains Europe.  But Chakrabarty remains unwilling to disavow the language of history:  not only are all critiques of history made within the space of history (but such is the case for critiques of the nation or of modernity), but he views a sense of history as empowering, indeed as a necessary tool of ‘citizenship’.  The incapacity of historians to make any substantive contribution to contemporary debates, even those revolving around the question of ‘historical truth’ and questions of evidence, was driven home when, in 1992, the Babri Masjid, a sixteenth-century mosque, was destroyed by Hindu extremists.

My point, then, is three-fold, suggesting in what manner we need to go well beyond the framework of postcolonial studies with respect to the question of history.  First, a more radical reading of the particular ways in which a sense of history may be unproductive or disempowering is needed.  One may have some form of historical awareness and yet not be committed at all to the sense of history: if the adage, ‘a nation that has no history is a happy nation’, is at all to be intelligible, it can only be so on the supposition that the task of forging a nation is a bloody one, and history is almost always complicit in such an enterprise.  The historian need not be pulverized by the thought that such an argument is calculated to make her or him obsolete.  Secondly, we shall have to enter into a more sustained conversation with other modes of accessing the past, among them myth.  If the choice word of abuse for the Marxist critic is ‘romantic’, for the historian it is surely ‘myth’.  And, yet, who would want to settle for the historical narrative of the origins of a city – for example, Bengaluru [Bangalore] or Mumbai — when the myth is so much more interesting or richer?  Thirdly, if a persistent case has been made for remembering, an equally persistent epistemological, cultural, and philosophical case has to be made for forgetting.  It may well be that certain forms of forgetting are yet ways to remember the past, but the postcolonial critique of history cannot be said to have even remotely ventured in this direction.

See also:  The Politics of Culture and Knowledge after Postcolonialism:  Nine Theses (and a Prologue)

Thesis Two:  Postcolonialism has had nothing to say about the imperialism of categories

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*The Politics of Culture and Knowledge after Postcolonialism: Nine Theses (and a Prologue)

Postcolonial theory, it has been argued, has run its course.  This is the premise of a meeting held recently in Berlin.  Some scholars have underscored the importance of poststructural thinkers in the shaping of postcolonial theory; others point, in particular, to the publication of Said’s Orientalism (1978) as the foundational movement of postcolonial studies; and yet others have been drawn to such intellectual developments as ‘Subaltern Studies’, often seen as the form in which postcolonial studies took its most distinctive shape in India.  As is true of nearly every field of intellectual inquiry, fractures and fissures gradually opened up within postcolonial studies.  One of the founding members of ‘Subaltern Studies’ and among the most eminent scholars of Indian history, Sumit Sarkar, effected a departure from the Subaltern Studies collective less than a decade after its inception with a stinging critique of postcolonial studies.  He charged it with being ineffective, as incapable of any ‘real’ intervention in a world where the last pockets of resistance to neoliberalization policies and capitalism’s surge had apparently been abandoned by the early 1990s, and as so enamored with its own languages of interpretation and intellectual concerns as to be spectacularly insensitive to questions of material culture and political economy.

On the other hand, there is the view, which has a large number of adherents, that (to borrow from the language of the meeting’s concept note) “postcolonial studies have been proven extremely effective for the humanities.”  Phenomena that were formerly at the margins have been brought to the forefront; those who were left out of the narratives of history, and of the nation-state, have struggled, often successfully, to make themselves heard.  The master narratives of the Enlightenment are no longer accepted uncritically, and it is widely recognized – though postcolonial theory has been scarcely alone in coming to this awareness – that many of the universalisms taken for granted are particularisms, often of an insidious sort.  One could continue in this vein.  Even among the adherents of postcolonial studies, however, there is a growing recognition that exhaustion has set in, the questions put on offer are predictable, and that one is only likely to encounter regurgitation of familiar arguments.

I shall, in successive posts, put forward nine theses (preceded by a prologue) that do not so much enter into this debate as they attempt to suggest that the practitioners of postcolonial studies, for all their achievements and insights, were entirely evasive about some fundamental questions.  We should be thinking of ‘ecumenical futures’ which, however, are not possible without a rather different intellectual framework for understanding the nature of oppression in contemporary society and the place of modern knowledge systems in consolidating intolerable forms of inequality between the Global South and the Global North and even within the Global North.  Indeed, the dominant strands of contemporary theory, since from around the 1970s, have, I think it can reasonably be argued, been largely insensitive to most of the considerations raised in the posts that will follow enumerating the theses.

Prologue:  Before we speak of ‘postcolonial fatigue’, we should perhaps be asking whether everyone is suffering from this fatigue in equal measure.  Curiously, even if practitioners of postcolonial studies often saw themselves as heavily indebted to the insights of Derrida and Foucault, postcolonialism had few adherents in the French academy and the enterprise remained largely confined to the Anglo-American world and perhaps the wider Anglophone academy.  How far this has to do with ‘French exceptionalism’, and with the sense (embodied, to take one infamous illustration, with the Law of 2005, previously referenced on my blog) that French colonialism left behind a glorious inheritance, albeit one squandered and trivialized by formerly colonized subjects, is an interesting question in itself.

However, there is little reason to suppose that postcolonial studies were as pervasive even in the American or English academy as is sometimes assumed to be the case.  True, nearly every American university or college of some standing had resolved, some years ago, to hire at least one postcolonial scholar, but postcolonial scholars remained in a wholly distinct minority, even if on occasion they managed to attract a disproportionate amount of attention.  In similar fashion, it is possible to argue that the authors most frequently referenced by postcolonial scholars – Conrad, Kipling (usually ‘Kim’), Forster, Fanon, Achebe, Rushdie (generally ‘Midnight’s Children’), among others – were joined by other authors over the years, but nevertheless postcolonial scholarship turned on a rather small sliver of original (and most commonly literary) texts.  I recall, fifteen years after Said had published Orientalism, meeting the chair of the department of English at a small college in Michigan who had never heard of Said; more to the point, however pervasive the writings of Said, Spivak, Bhabha, or James Clifford in departments of English (and, for reasons that are obvious, in anthropology, a discipline originating under colonialism) among a small coterie of scholars, the practitioners of many other disciplines proceeded in their work in complete indifference to postcolonial studies.  Once one moves outside the domain of the academy, there are far more unsettling questions about the at best tenuous relationship of postcolonial studies to the wider public sphere.  The three decades that postcolonial studies has flourished in the American academy are precisely those where the US has engaged in rapacious conduct around the world, from its illegal mining of Nicaragua’s harbours to the Gulf War of 1991 and, more recently, to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  One can be certain that postcolonial studies, even if some of its practitioners occasionally deluded themselves into believing that their interventions and interpretations were calculated to make a difference in the ‘real’ world – and, yes, one might legitimately ask how ‘real’ is real, and why literature should not be construed as being just as ‘real’ as the nitty-gritty stuff on the street – made no difference to the outcome of US foreign policy.  The gist of all this should, in any case, be transparent:  before we convince ourselves of a postcolonial fatigue, perhaps we should seriously ask if postcolonial studies traveled as far as is sometimes alleged.

Next — Thesis One:  Postcolonialism never mounted an effective critique of ‘history’

Thesis Two:  Postcolonialism has had nothing to say about the imperialism of categories

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*The Mosque at ‘Hallowed’ Ground: Part I, The Controversy and the Meaning of ‘America’

Nearly all the fundamental questions that might animate anyone interested in what I would call ‘the question of America’ seem implicated in the swirling controversy that has arisen over the so-called Ground Zero Mosque in lower Manhattan.   As much as any other place in the world, the history of the United States is inextricably interwoven with the narratives of immigrant groups.  Muslims are, for the most part, among the more recent of the immigrants who have made their way to the United States, furnishing the latest challenge to those who insist that America remains the ultimate haven of religious freedom.   Are the Muslims as welcome in the US as the adherents of any other religion?  If so, what arouses the passions of those Americans who, to put it mildly, feel resentful about the proposed installation of an Islamic center and mosque at what is called ‘Ground Zero’?  If not, does that tell us something about the limitations of religious freedom in the US and expose the grand lie that the freedom of religious belief and practice is the most venerable of all the freedoms, real or imagined, to which America is said to give unrivalled expression?

There are other prior questions:  are immigrants from Indonesia, the Gulf states, North Africa, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and many other parts of the world which are predominantly Islamic to be viewed first as Muslims and then as being immigrants from those countries?  If, as is apparently the case, the answer is in the affirmative, is that because (say) Indonesian or Pakistani Muslims themselves insist that their principal identity is as Muslims, or is it because in the United States, as in most of the West, it is fondly imagined that religion is the fundamental and most irreducible part of an identity in what is characterized as the Muslim world?  Was it not the ‘Muslim world’ that Obama addressed last year, and can one imagine a Muslim, Hindu, or Buddhist leader addressing the ‘Christian world’?  Why is it even that the ‘Muslim world’ comes so effortlessly to the tongue of most people, including those we suppose are intelligent and even leaders of free societies, but that the phrase ‘Christian world’ would strike the same people, even when they are observant Christians, as awkward?

The unseemly controversy over the mosque has brought many other considerations to the fore.  No one who has been keeping abreast of events in recent months, never mind the last nine years since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 brought down the Twin Towers, could have failed to notice the rising tide of Islamophobia.  Considering how little intelligence has been displayed by some previous occupants of the White House, such as his grey eminence George W. Bush, one should expect almost nothing of the likes of the Lieutenant Governor of Tennessee, who came up with this inexcusably stupid formulation:  “You could even argue whether being a Muslim is actually a religion or it is a nationality, way of life or cult, whatever you want to call it.”  One of the highest-ranking retired officers in the American armed forces has openly stated that practitioners of Islam are not entitled to the protections accorded to the adherents of other faiths in the Bill of Rights.  And so might one continue in this vein, but all this gives rise to the glaring question:  is the US in the grip of Islamophobia?  Some will suggest that Muslims have replaced communists:  it is not difficult to fathom the argument, certainly, that the gargantuan military-industrial complex is constantly in need of new enemies.  But there are other, more interesting, complexities to this Islamophobia.  The remarks now so cavalierly bandied about as characterizations of Islam would not be tolerated if they had been made apropos the practitioners of another faith.  One is tempted to say that the abuse of Islam is the new and fashionable anti-Semitism of America.

Let us consider also another distinct oddity in the present debate.  Among the ‘national’ organizations that have expressed their strong displeasure at the proposed construction of the Islamic Center and mosque is the Anti-Defamation League.  So just what is it that rankles Abraham Foxman and the League about this mosque?  Unless Jews, or more precisely Zionists, have some proprietary interest in this matter, why should their opinion matter so much or at all – their opinion, that is, as Jews rather than as human beings who may, like any one else, feel invested in this subject — and why should they even presume to suppose that their have more of a vested interest in this mosque than Hindus, Buddhists, or Sikhs, all of whom are represented in not insignificant numbers in contemporary America?  At a demonstration last month against another proposed mosque in Nashville, Tennessee, protestors appeared waving American and Israeli flags.  All such evocations of jingoism are nauseous, but should we not be mystified at the presence of demonstrators carrying Israeli flags?  Should we suppose that this signifies that America is fundamentally a country built on the Judaeo-Christian tradition, and are Israeli flags meant to put Muslims on notice that any assertion of Muslim identity, even if this is taking place in a country purportedly built on the edifice of individual liberties and religious freedom, will be taken to be an affront not only to the US but to Israel as well?

That the word ‘Muslim’ itself signifies acute discomfort in the United States is also signaled by what, to people with a modicum of intelligence, must appear as the rather comical and persistent confusion about whether Barack Obama is a Muslim or not.  According to one poll conducted last week, almost a third of all Americans now believe that the American President is a Muslim.  The word ‘now’ is underscored since the figure increased from 18% only a short while ago:  Obama’s apparent defense of the right of Muslims to build a mosque ­at Ground Zero has fostered the impression that he belongs to the Muslim faith.  If other words – at Ground Zero, for instance — in my own discourse have to be underscored,  it is only a sign of the fact that nothing in this discourse is as it seems.  Far from being a Muslim, Obama, according to a White House press release, is a practicing Christian who consults daily with spiritual advisors.  We can marvel at a more apt moment about Obama’s intense religiosity and pray that he does not turn into another Tony Blair, the once boyish-looking Prime Minister turned into an evangelist.  I suspect that the degree to which Obama has now become a fervent and emboldened Christian has some proportional relationship to the degree to which he is imagined to be a Muslim by a good number of Americans.

There are, then, many elements of the discourse surrounding the proposed and inaptly named ‘Ground Zero Mosque’ that need to be parsed in substantial detail; and I shall do the same in subsequent posts over the next few days.  In the meantime, however, the larger meaning of this controversy should not be obscured.  The ‘debate’ – a rather dignified word to describe some of the squabbles in front of the ‘hallowed’ ground, not to mention the rantings of the right that have filled the airwaves – implicates many of the central questions in American history since the ascendancy of the European colonists.  Just what is signfied by the ‘American way of life’?  Why does every dispute become an occasion to affirm, for those on either side of the divide, an American exceptionalism?  Is American exceptionalism itself the pretext for permitting Zionism a special place in American politics, a place that exempts it from the critiques that one might direct at other ideologies?  Why, and in what respects, is religion so critical to the American imagination, and does the United States truly know how to live with religious and cultural difference?  Is the United States at heart a Judaeo-Christian civilization, and, if so, what does it portend for the more recent wave of immigrants?  Is American-style multiculturalism the only template for contemplating diversity and pluralism?  Can American Islam assist in shaping the future of Islam worldwide?  What role if any might Muslims in the United States play in the arguments that seem to inform most contemporary discussions about Islam?   As we begin to unravel these questions, much will be revealed about the meaning of ‘America’ – a meaning in which, for better or worse, every nation is heavily invested, considering the nonpareil symbolism that American presents to the human imagination.

See also Part II, Some Notes on the Politics of Place and Name

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