Mushin-Sho

Senior endured the multiple health problems of the very old, the daily penances of bowel and urethra, of back and knee, the milkiness climbing in his eyes, the breathing troubles, the nightmares, the slow failing of the soft machine.––Rushdie

A running critique of American culture, one that has become a cliché, holds that Americans don’t value their elderly like people in the old world. The nuclear family being the standard unit of existence, the elderly are confined to retirement communities, nursing homes, or other rarely seen quarters. The elders, as an ideal old world would argue, are not to be treated this way; they are integral to the family as supplemental guides to both their children and grandchildren and should properly assume their post with the regal air proper to one with white hair.

Things are never that simple. The dignity of hard won wisdom decays slowly with the flesh; the beautiful wrinkles of a full life stiffen with the bones they cover; the mind slips and breaks hips irreparably.

I visited my ancestral home village, Sankapalli, and visited my dead grandfather’s younger brother. My grandfather was a police officer after independence before his eyes began to fail. His pension days were filled with reading, a task made less daunting by the numerous eye surgeries that his two doctor-daughters-in-America made possible. These daughters were the product of a union that emphasized education above all; in his last years, however, he wasn’t able to see those precious printed words.

And suddenly, here was his little brother honoring the dead sibling by wearing the same face. The resemblance was uncanny; my Mom noticed it first. He had recently suffered a series of minor strokes, suddenly going blank and falling flatly on the stone floor, distressing his wife. He stood waiting for his guests, us, to sit down first but took a seat on his family’s insistence. I sat directly in front of him and held his hand. They told him my name and asked if he remembered me. He tilted his head left and right: yes, he remembered.

My Telugu failed me miserably and my body tensed from the awkwardness. He couldn’t care. I looked at his downcast eyes as they floated through their milky paths and wondered when I too would be disconnected.

“Are you doing well?” I asked politely, trying to get a few words of him
“Yes”

And that was the end of that.

My mother asked him questions about his health: when was the last time he had fallen? Was he in any pain? Is he visiting his neighbors? Is he reading?

That was not my role. I was merely a grandson paying proper homage to an elder. What does one say to another who is dying? Whatever questions I wanted to ask were in a foreign tongue made worse by an incomprehensible accent. There was no need for a dialogue when presence sufficed, no need for questions when the final answer was so close, no need for a story about to end. I simply wanted to drink his aura and digest these final lessons.

People can die again. My grandfather will die again in his little brother. And again, his grandson will wonder if such a death is a punishment or a blessing.

I’ve just returned from Tirupati and the trip solidified an idea that was already coming together in my mind. I will never go there again. I will never visit another temple that has any kind of VIP Darshans. Period.

Because we are privileged and my aunt is a ranking government officer, she was able to get us special tickets to a puja my mother wanted to attend. This same access allowed us to receive Darshan twenty minutes after the puja and leave the Temple complex entirely within a few hours of getting there. A lot of rupees and connections were used to make this all happen.

My very privileged experience, indeed the easiest trip to Triupati I’ve ever had, is in stark contrast to what most people have to go through. Certainly, those with enough money, even without government contacts, will be afforded similar treatment. Most of the temple’s visitors, if the three-kilometer Darshan line is any evidence, have to wait all day, if not days, for a glimpse of an avatar’s stone image. The glimpse is only that, and even if one’s hands are clasped in prayer the guards on duty will angrily shove you through the congested line and yell for you to keep moving. As if there is nothing to see.

There are many among the throngs of people who bare this inequality with awesome devotion, starting waves of “Govinda, Gooovinda” chants, or repeating the name more quietly. There are many who are irritated, angry, push and shove their way forward. I can understand both, revere the former but identify with the latter. Save the setting, nothing about Tirupati strikes me as godly; I have no desire to worship inequality.

I ask my Mom mildy, “So what is so special about Tirupati? Did something holy happen here?”
“I don’t know,” she smiles slightly embarrassed, “it’s just a popular place.”
I ask my aunt the same question, hoping more from her sincere desire to be there.
“I don’t really know what the story is. I’m not sure,” she replies with a confused face.

Horrible Temple practices are enough to make me angry, but the blind adherence to those practices, affirming them with money and time, by educated people makes me furious. What is godly about uncritical attendance of pujas repeated mechanically by disinterested priests?

A more generous narration would attend to the sincerity of my family’s devotion, the serenity gained from being at the Temple, and their belief that real blessings have been gained. But I find this to be too generous. Those benefits of faith are nowhere evident. Instead, those family members who are quick to anger, wear perpetually annoyed faces, carry themselves humbly or too proudly continue to do so even while performing their devotions. Nothing changes. I am often too critical of my family but my criticisms usually center on the same issue, blindness: of critical questions, of self-critique, of learning better methods to achieve a goal, etc. I can’t see why they don’t see.

On a final note I’d like to say, especially for those who may be googling, that The Golden Temple of Sripuram is a spiritual shithole. This gigantic waste of time, space, money, and energy is a tourist destination and nothing more. There is even a “deluxe hotel” next to the temple (note the lower case ‘t’) that is built to look like a temple itself. Their desire to suck the money out of you while giving you a godly excuse is bold enough, but that they succeed is appalling.

Built to anticipate massive numbers of visitors, the line to the actual place of Darshan is almost two kilometers long and traces a star shaped path along lush gardens, which must be quite expensive to maintain in the South Indian heat. Fortunately, there are also stalls selling milk biscuits and water to the devotees. More obnoxious still, numerous signs posted along the way offer “wisdom”. These are little more than “spiritual” platitudes about creating good karma, being kind to others, the necessity of devotion, etc. Pick up a book of proverbs or two from any “Eastern” spiritual tradition and you will receive the same lessons; that is apparently what the self-aggrandizing toolbag of guru did. There are pictures of “Amma,” the aforementioned guru, that literally have him crowned, holding weapons associated with the gods of Hindu cosmology, wearing garlands, and being bathed in milk (again, a tradition reserved for idols). Of all the fake spiritual teachers and leaders I’ve heard about in India, this idiot gets the “blatantly-hypocritical-asshole-who-gives-spirituality-a-bad-name award.” Congrats.

God is a practice. Even without the grand narratives of religion, of which I’m not a fan, one can believe in the divine potential of human beings, of their ability to perform godly behaviors. I am thinking of both great spiritual figures in human history and those minor deities in all our lives whose passion, patience, kindness, or equanimity, inspire us to be better, to practice being divine humans.

We arrived at the Temple in our large car, were given access to a close parking spot reserved mostly for large, that is to say important, people, and out tumbled our large bodies round with American spare tires.

A man met us there, and said he had already arranged everything for us. We left our sandals in the car and walked on the hot, wet, stone dirtied by the march of people. After washing our feet, for symbolic reasons clearly, we walked into the Temple interior and met with a small heard of cows whose foreheads had been properly anointed with bottus and other colored powders. The holy cows were sanctified again at the temple. My uncle took the rope to one, and I was given the rope to another. I looked at her,  privately apologized for the weirdness of human behavior and asked for her patience during this ritual that I had never heard of or performed. (It is for good health). She tried to walk elsewhere and I pulled on the rope, shortening it to keep her close so that the little children wouldn’t be scared. She followed obediently.

We were to make a full circle of the Temple interior and my private, indeed telepathic, conversation with her continued. “You’re beautiful and certainly know this route better than I do, so lead the way.” She stayed slightly behind, as if to reinforce a hierarchy of species. I slowed down so that I was by her head. We turned a corner and I had to step carefully around the remnants of recently washed away dung that her partners blessed the Temple with. A slow pace. A serene expression in her eyes and, what I imagine must have been, a confused and slightly distant look in mine. I tug again to keep her moving and away from a snack of flowers she has discovered. Damn humans.

Returning to our starting point, I am told to place the rope’s hoop around an anchoring stone, which is also anointed with sacred powders and must be bowed to. I say goodbye and think, could swear that, she glances for one hopeful moment at me then turns and returns to snack finding.  I wonder what she hoped for?

My family and I are guided through a series of narrow corridors formed by temporary mental fencing. A guard opens a gate and we slip form the crowd and are taken to God’s abode from the side. We are to gaze at infinity askew. This is the V.I.P entrance given to those who can donate generously. One Darshan (the blessings gotten from glancing at a saint or his image) follows another and we barely interact with the other visitors. Small gates open to grant us front row visions. I’m baffled by the brazenness of this setup, and begin praying for greater equality among people. I’m not sure God heard me.

One can never just leave a Temple without sitting for a moment in the sacred space. We are guided to a thick carpet to enjoy our holy pause. No less than five priests are chanting divine words, led by a finely aged renunciant at whose feet we bow before leaving. Generous donations are given.

I’m wearing black shorts and white polo shirt, Ying-Yang colors. People stare at me and I feel like an ungodly space alien.

As we exit, I notice again a begging child, a beautiful little girl who is no more than five years old. She tugs at the saris and pant legs of strangers, none of whom miss a stride across the holy ground. I have no change, only 500 Rs ($12) notes that I am too tempted to hand over. I fail to do so. Beggar women outside gesture their need for food, all five fingers touching and reaching for the mouth with nothing but air.

We take some family pictures. I wonder if I should smile. And we drive away.

The central mistake I’m trying to avoid while being in and thinking about India concerns time, particularly Fabian’s “denial of coevalness.” Or, to paraphrase Conrad’s language from Heart of Darkness, to penetrate into the wilderness was to go back in time, back to the origins of the planet. The place you are exploring, then, does not exist at the same calendrical moment, but is rather what your own home must have looked like decades or centuries ago. This view is blind to the complexity of the globe, the false universalism of modernity and dislocates places from the present by rendering them “backward.”

My Athamma (maternal aunt) points to a large complex of buildings with small one room apartments and tells us––as we speed by in a (for India) luxury car––that these are government housing initiatives for the “backward classes.”

The hip clothing fashion here, as I said in a previous post, is mostly incongruous with a climate and, in my elitist view, a poor miming of Western dress. Middle and lower class men, especially in Karminagar (where I am right now), dress in 1970s fashion: bell bottoms that are tight at the thigh and flared at the bottom, shirts with wide collars and flared sleeves, in patterns that are dizzying and colors that rival the noon South Indian sun. But my language, and its underlying episteme, is wrong.

There are frequent power outages here. “Current poyindhi,” my relatives say. The electricity is gone. The electric current went away. The current, the present is elsewhere.  

I was going to write in detail about this moment, but found a YouTube video that will do the job better. This is DJ ZTrip paying homage to all that is Detroit, all the sounds that allowed everyone who performed at Movement, (including the douchebag who kept shouting "Chi-Town") to do what they do.

Hip-hop beats with drum kicks at Techno bass frequencies, scratching samples, Plastikman’s infamous Pakard track overlaid, LL Cool J mixed in, and some things that unfortunately don’t make the video: scratching that turns into pure noise and sounds like the wind, mixing in a lone "De Troit" that repeats, echos, fades and comes back; this was an pure and absolute Detroit moment; the sounds would simply not make sense in another space, and would certainly not be the final peak of a DJ set; an homage that deserves homage.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTxHylpVDgo

 

 

I was nearly in tears. For the rest of the festival, if a DJ didn’t make a gesture to acknowledge Detroit, to acknowledge that this post industrial wasteland gave birth to their sounds, he could fuck off.

A friend asked me if Hyderabad was exciting as it would be to her. Here is my reply:

India generally, and Hyderabad specifically, frustrates me a great deal. I’m attached to this place, mostly through childhood memories and a sense of gratitude for shaping some key early experiences, no matter how joyous or painful they may have been. I’m also deeply annoyed by the filth, congestion, disarray, lack of consistent electricity etc… Shopping malls have arrived here and my aunt and uncle were rather proudly showing us the sights. It’s the dawn of hyper-consumerism and thus, tacky, repulsive, aggravating to the senses and sensibilities. I know I sound like an elitist prick––something like Adorno’s critique of mass culture––but these are my feelings nonetheless.

Hyderabad and India don’t have the appeal of the exotic for me. It feels more like an outcast family member, a shameful thing that one still loves or is obliged to love. I’m hoping to change my sense of this place as I stay here longer.

_____________________________________________

I bought and am reading Salman Rushdie’s Shame here, hoping to use him to think through Indian political history as well as my own troubled reactions to this place. The novel serves to remind me that powerful minds have sought to think through India’s political-cultural ethos, and I have arrived belatedly. Or rather, I have returned belatedly.

The stark contradictions are too easy to see. “Contradictions” is perhaps the wrong word, although it has the benefit of echoing Marxist critiques of capitalism.  But I’m not comfortable with it because it has the power of a quick explanation, an inner satisfaction that you have just made sense of what is before you. The feeling is intoxicating, and I’m addicted enough to enter the academy for it. “Contradictions,” I feel right now, simply doesn’t do justice to the incomprehensibility of it all.

What I’m looking at: Next to massive Western style shopping malls are small pan (not pawn, but pan, tobacco) shacks, motor bikes with five people on them including a few small children ride next to a new mass of small cars and some larger cars including BMWs and Benzs, while virtually all seem to ignore the amputated and age wrinkled beggars––they have developed city eyes––women in old saris bearing heavy loads are walking along the roads to god knows where, but the servant in our house may be a clue, because I’m sure she too walks to this place in our Colony.

A Resort: My Babbai and Pinni (paternal side aunt and uncle) decide to take us to a Rajastani Resort on the outskirts of the city; we just want to spend time with each other. “Resort” doesn’t mean what I thought it would mean; I mistranslated the term. This “Rajastani” space is a resort in the sense that Disneyland is a resort; it’s a theme park for the middle class and their little children. We arrive early and miss the official greeting of drums, a horn and a bottu (a red dot, but extended, so a streak between the eyebrows). My littlest cousin, who is also a little sister and on her way to becoming a doctor, keeps asking if I’m bored. I keep replying, “No,” that I find the whole place funny and entertaining (gumathgi unadhi); she’s not sure how to take this and I’m not entirely sure what I mean, except that it is the most honest reply I can give. At first, I take the place to be sincere, an attempt to replicate an authentic Rajastani village, complete with tree climbers (who, from high up, will surely have a view of the swimming pool), and buildings that are all trying too hard. But it’s so damn kitschy that I’m laughing, amused by its failed sincerity. Pinni says she wishes my Mom were there too. I agree, she would get a genuine kick out of this place. I think of my nephew Samarth and how much he would really enjoy running around this kid friendly space. And I’m having a weird brand of fun.

We watch a puppet show, where a drummer sings the narration while playing and the puppets dance the story. It’s a miniature spectacle. My sisters seem to get a kick out of it. Pinni feels bad for the workers who are just trying to make a living. Paapum.

The sun sets and, as my sisters promised, covers the resort’s defects. Lights come on and dimly illuminate pathways leading form one Rajastani moment to another. We attend a stage show, a summary of all the resort’s human performances, including puppet show, a few dance numbers, a magic show, and an M.C. who can also balance spinning wheels on his palm, head, foot and chin. The whole thing is impressively cheesy and strangely enjoyable.

As I recount this to my friend, she asks if the place was really sincere. I think about it twice and wonder if I have mistranslated again. I remember the bored and distant look on the workers’ faces, glancing elsewhere as they performed, a sincere glaze over their eyes as they repeated the act for the thousandth time. I wonder what roads their thoughts travel and if there is room for a few Benzs.

An Enclave: My Mom wants to see the “Financial District” and the surrounding new developments. We travel a different direction, away from Rajastan, but to another outskirts and pass a road that leads to the gated communities of multimillion-dollar (not rupees: current exchange rate is $1: 45 Rs) homes. The roads become narrow, bumpy and littered with lorries (trucks) that bump you into the dirt. Then the buildings come.

They are not that impressive at first, resembling too closely the same steel and concrete structures that are common to India. But soon we come upon a massive building, with a curved front and the beginnings of a green reflective glass skin. My brother is stunned and wants to get a picture; my Mammaya (maternal uncle) is worried that he may get arrested. I reply, arrogantly, that he would just have to show his passport (U.S citizen, I am not) to get his release and am answered, laughingly, that it will get him in more trouble. The sprawling Wipro compound is next. They used to make detergent when I was young, and still do apparently, but have expanded into many electronic ventures as well. Microsoft, Infosys, Franklin Templeton Investments, HSBC, UBS, and a bevy of other multi-nationals have or are setting up shop here. There is another financial building, for a company I’ve never heard of, which dwarfs the rest; I remark that the company may be trying to build an Asian, or at least South Asian, headquarters here.

Within fifty yards of each transnational temple is a shantytown for the workers building them, complete with a few pan shops. “And the contradiction,” I say as we drive up to one. Mammaya doesn’t understand what is surprising about this, and will remark later, after we look at the housing developments, that the menial laborers who will work there are sure to set up similar shantytowns all around. There is something happy about this because the wealthy will never succeed in convincing themselves that they are somewhere else besides India.

There are more multimillion-dollar homes to be constructed in this district, which, if the billboards are to be believed, eerily resemble the McMansions of Arizona or Southern California. Another massive housing enterprise will boast over ten towers of forty floors each, and four units on each floor. We pass through a gate manned by a man in a too traditional (and too black for the damned summer) guard’s uniform to visit some models. An agent shows us through demonstrating knowledge about this complex and details about every other development his parent company owns. The units are spacious enough but with odd annoyances like proportionally small kitchens and bathrooms, doors that open into storage spaces, oddly placed control units and other features that will drive the detail obsessed insane. After the rupee to dollar conversion, they were being sold for a reasonable (for the Western middle class) price.

We are shown a scale model of what the whole housing development will look like, including the numerous identical towers, massive courtyard complete with 35,000 sq ft clubhouse and its amenities. The agent is proud to note that the complex will span over twenty-six acres, include full shopping malls, “specialty and super-specialty” hospitals and a host of other things my immediate shock didn’t allow me to hear. The implication was rather clear; one wouldn’t have to leave the complex for most things, if anything. A bubble that would keep most of India outside, except when cleaning was required.

Outside the complex’s entrance, another pan shop.

 

If “contradiction” doesn’t do justice to the emotions such places evoke, perhaps another borrowed word from another foreign tongue will: aporia. Puzzlement, unresolved or irresolvable bafflement, a starting point to begin thinking and asking what is to be done? 

 

 

I’m in Hyderabad, which along with Bangalore has become shorthand for outsourcing. Thomas Friedman is a Jackass. That has nothing to do with my point, but he helped put these places on the map as boogie monsters challenging American supremacy.

On to the clichés: Overcrowded, polluted by toxic gasses and blaring horns, auto-rickshaws still battling in the streets with families on scooters and bikes (motorized and not), no real traffic laws except some bare logic of don’t hit and don’t get hit, no personal space either on the road or in public spaces––driving two inches from other vehicles is common place––people bumping into you like a natural barrier, idiot male machismo that won’t step out of the way even if they’re in the wrong––physically and during conversations––horrific miming of Euro-American male fashion that is totally inappropriate for the climate––seriously who wears a sweater vest over a dress shirt with a popped collar during the summer in India?––and tacky combinations that make the eyes hurt, tiny low powered cars that are trying to emulate Bentlys from Rap videos––an auto-rickshaw is not supposed to bump, although that was pretty cool––among many other oddities.

“Learn to queue you fucking savages.”

The people are so much smaller than me it’s crazy. I’m not very tall, am a bit stocky, but I’m at least a few inches taller than most and much thicker. I’ve unhappily developed an American spare tire, which my family is happy to point out.

I used to be looked at like a space alien, my NRI (non-resident Indian) status plainly obvious, but not so much now; a quick glance if anything, then they are moving on.

My two wonderful weeks in Munich were over, and because they were so rich with success, touching down at Detroit Metro Airport felt more like a crash landing. The two-week high, quickly reached and peaking at every moment, ended, and I needed an upper.

My nephew Samarth was the first person to teach me that one can kill out of love. As I frequently tell my students, after they have gained some insight into the processes of dehumanization that make violence possible, there is no one who would survive an intent to harm him. They wouldn’t walk again. I’ve studied martial arts for eight years, I tell my students, and continue to do so. But that is irrelevant. There is already a consensus, silent smiling head nods that sign off on the invisible ethical imperative. My students agree. We would kill.

Wayne State University, located in Detroit, accepts a wide range of students and the quaintly named “non-traditional” students. There are some who could attend any university in the world, but choose Wayne for financial, personal or even political reasons. There are others who can barely, if at all, write a complete sentence. Older students who have returned to school, voluntarily or because of a “restructured” economy, work full time and raise kids, are the first to understand the crudity of my nephew ethics. There is no need to explain further. And when I tell them that they have just glimpsed the ethical clarity of one who believes he kills out of love, for family, for country, the full force of the problem hits them. We sit for a moment wondering what to do.

When I returned my nephew, student and teacher, was in the suburbs of Detroit celebrating his little brother’s birthday with his doting grandmother. I was thrilled to see him. “Itchy,” says Samarth, squirming and giggling as I tickle him with a two-week old beard. And we’re off to play.

Back at my apartment later that night, the loneliness is staved off by a sticky sweet voicemail message.

I arrive back at Peddamummy’s house in time to play with Samarth alone before his own birthday party begins. We play soccer in the basement, but it quickly turns into a game of keep away. I don’t let him get the ball easily and when he does, I challenge him at every turn. He is smiling all the time. Merrily, Merrily, Merrily….

I want to teach him to be doggedly, happily, persistent.

Spiderman arrives. He gathers all the kids and leads them through games, dances and other shenanigans. I’m watching Samarth all the time and, although a bit confused, he’s really digging it. At least one kid is terrified of Spiderman and refuses to venture near the superhero’s suburban abode. The adults empathize; they’re weirded out too.

Spiderman begins a magic show just as I’m handed a video camera. Right on. I squat down between two cynical teenagers making fun of the show, quell the desire to punch them in the throat, and point the camera at my nephew. Nothing matters except his reactions. He’s delighted, genuinely surprised when an empty tube suddenly fills with candy, and asks his Mom if she too witnessed the moment of creation.

As things quiet down, I coordinate plans to head down to the Detroit Electronic Music Festival, formerly called the DEMF, now Movement.

The notion of a rooted-cosmopolitan is paradoxical despite the insistence of those who have argued that local and global feeling can flow in the same direction. To insist on the paradox is to pay closer attention to those moments when our rooted feelings block the route to their global expansion. This is true enough, but there are a few ways of inhabiting this paradox besides simply insisting on the clash between global and local.

First, and to use my own guilty language, we must locate the paradox in and as a historical moment. While this is academic common sense, it is worth noting because it rejects the universalism of the paradox, transforming it instead to a necessary and unsettled position. That is, we may have to face both ways at once for now, but this may not hold true in the not too distant future to come. Rooted-cosmopolitanism is less a paradox then and more the political position necessary for a Left that must attend to the decay of American urban centers because of job loss, and to the possibility that job movement overseas helps ‘those’ people. However, it is possible to imagine a moment when newly industrialized spaces abroad develop unions, and unionized labor, that turn to their American brethren for transnational solidarity. This crudely Derridian position is strengthened when we take account of power’s spatial relations.

Power is a slippery thing for poststructuralists generally, and Foucault particularly, because, following Gertrude Stein, “there is no there there.” One consequence of this, often unsaid, is to acknowledge that we (the dissenting public) have power. Note, for instance, the careful avoidance of the word “camp” in relation to Guantanamo Bay. The Bush administration was aware of that word’s memory and rejected its use for fear of the public’s disapproval; implicit here is an acknowledgement that public opinion, at home and abroad, must be attended to lest they lose what Bush called “political capital.” In this moment, there seems to be a synergy between the global and local so that “public opinion” becomes something of a transnational force to be reckoned with. Recent Israeli aggression in Gaza, however, reminds us that the power of public opinion is not always so holistic, but may create the circumstances where rooted-cosmopolitanism is indeed a paradox.

Those in American hopeful and optimistic that Barack Obama’s presidency will right the ship as it were should be called by their proper name, patriots. His silence, or rather lack of explicit condemnation of the Gaza strikes, has been disappointing. There is a disjoint here between national and global feeling here because we are at once patriotic––disappointment and criticism too is a form of patriotism (Chomsky?)––and want to end the Gaza massacres. These two feelings, however, may be more inline than previously noted, however, because we want Obama to speak out against Israel, to let the world historical record note that America condemned these actions. What we want, in other words, is a public opinion. (Divestment, of course, is this opinion’s material realization) Israel’s cooptation of the American “War on Terror,” I think, is an attempt to sway the superpower’s (and its voting public’s) opinion in its favor, to create a synergy between local feeling and its more cosmopolitan instantiation in the form of backing Israeli actions. If you support a(n American) “War on Terror,” you must back our efforts as well. Here, however, other forms of power muddy the picture.

Are the public relations machines only directed at the militarily and economically powerful? Are those the only spaces that matter for Israel, or do they also need to court something like “world opinion,” including less well-endowed countries?

It seems to me that there are two ways to suffer. You can either be fully human and suffer all the usual vagaries of existence or try to be superhuman and suffer the successes and failures of each ecstatic reach.

As I prepare to write a review of Joseph Slaughter’s Wellek Prize winning book, Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law, I want to use this space to think through some moments including one that I misread.

In the third chapter, Slaughter argues for that human rights law presumes the existence of an operational public sphere that disseminates and naturalizes “the basic assumptions about the human personality and socialiaty” (146). If exclusion from this public sphere constitutes a human rights violation, a mode of repression, it is because “human rights law treats the individual person as a figural embodiment of (a synecdoche for) a group of which it part and effect” (160). The point, Slaughter argues, is that violations of individual rights also aim to harm “the texture of social relations and the scope of the public sphere” (162). Individuals, then, are not Enlightenment’s monads but the “atomic unit[s] of social relations––the embodiment of group personality and vulnerability.” A genocide victim, in Slaughter’s example, does not die as the particular but “as an instance of a racialized, ethnicized, nationalized” group (161). While this makes sense, especially given genocide’s etymology, I am disturbed by the weird epistemic system in play here.

Bluntly said, if Slaughter’s analysis is right, and I believe it is, human rights law necessarily dehumanizes the particular individual. Although the human rights person is in a dialectical relationship with a larger group identity through the public sphere, that relationship subsumes violations against individuals into a larger concern for the group or their shared public sphere. The point here is not to discredit human rights discourse, but rather to question again the relationship between epistemic and bodily violence. That is, despite legal human rights discourse’s explicit desire to prevent violence of all sorts, it nevertheless performs an epistemic violence by subtly dehumanizing the individual. Epistemic violence, then, does not necessarily lead to or a requisite for the possibility of bodily violence, but can in fact prevent or prosecute it. Weird.

I am unsure if this reasoning is correct, but this is the space of play.

The previous post was supposed to discuss clarity but turned in its own terrifying direction. No more. I shall impose my will on this page! (booming voice)

During a very dark period early in the summer, I wrestled with an existential crisis that threw me into every knowledge reserve I had. The darkness was not quite Plato’s cave, but did bring me back to a very Greek inquiry; “What is the Good life, and how does one live it?” This is part of the reason my posts on Crusoe turned into playful ramblings on the “Good/good.” These old questions joined with two intellectual interests, the ethical turn and Marxism, so that the individual good life could, indeed should, only be understood in relation to larger collectives and humanity in general. What then does one do with gift-curse of consciousness when other conscious beings (humans primarily) suffered on a daily basis? Each one of these terms–––consciousness, being, human, suffering, action–––would break apart into nothingness when looked at too closely, but their aggregate somehow had crushing weight.

If I thought about death, it would only be in terms of a utopian longing to be outside myself, in a different consciousness. Another way to die, it seemed to me, is to dedicate one’s life utterly to the service of others. This seems a plausible, even worthy, solution until one questions how one is to serve properly and make the best use of one’s abilities.

Clarity.

At some point, I realized that the most utopian desire is the one for ethical clarity.

One answer to the question that closes my previous post comes in the colloquial reassurance that pain is a prod to grow. Perhaps, but I think instrumentalizing pain is disrespectful to a moment’s suffering and, more importantly, to the sufferer whose tears must then stream into a larger teleology. The grander scheme, the divine plan, the inevitable growth does not comfort but robs suffering’s immediate weight only to replace it with the larger burden of a predetermined future. One can no longer suffer in peace. They must stand, however shakily, and live in a future that has colonized the present.

One can, however, grow by living fully in painful moments without flinching and looking ahead to its absence. Here too the future lives, but without predetermination. The future comes as the present’s servant, bowing to its master and listening carefully to his muddled instructions. He orders two opposites in one breath, tries to seduce the servant before prostrating shamefully. Suddenly, he speaks clearly and announces, “my deepest desire is for ethical clarity,” before collapsing pitifully on the floor. The future notes these words and leaves the sufferer.

The past, present’s tyrannous unbending father, arrives and proceeds to beat the shit out of his son, taking care to strike harder unhealed cuts.


Oh purple prose, how I … thee

The discipline did not die; it just went on a family trip to San Jose and nearby Lake Tahoe. I was hoping to experience the Sublime but the wind blew that desire away, literally. Too choppy water and too shaky gondolas prevented us from getting properly imperial views of the lake and its surrounds. When my brother, cousin and I tried a mountain bike trail, the altitude defeated us. The air was too thin at 7,000 ft and the ascent to sharp, a 1,000 ft over five miles, for our mediocre conditioning to handle. I did, however, gain a new perspective during the trip.

As a literature student and critic in training, one is taught to make much of “Culture” by granting it the power to mold our perceptions. Or, in Ranciere’s reading of Kant, to train us in “the sensible:” that is, we learn both how to perceive, and more radically, what to perceive, and politically what is possible. But I lost track of all this, and worse, forgot why I studied culture so closely.

Then I spent time with my Indian relatives some of whom are my age. The difference between them and me? They are married, have stable jobs are essentially set to live out their lives in a predictable, not unfulfilling, future primarily concerned with family. If this sounds like an indictment, it is not and I did not experience the thought with a smile. Rather, I was very envious of their general security, their wealth relative to my student wages and, perhaps most importantly, the smaller universe they desired and created for themselves. This universe, however, is not purely an autonomous creation; it is co-created by Indian-American culture, which demands nothing less than everything they have already attained. All of which is to say that, for the whole weekend, I felt very very behind in the “life narrative” that Desi culture writes so fervently.

Is pain always the prerequisite for an insight or re-realization?

Are an extra hundred words enough to make up for a lost day? No, but seeing old friends may be worth the loss.

Onwards.

During a recent conversation with my martial arts teacher, we discussed certain “life narratives” that we create for ourselves. These narratives shape our lives by giving day-to-day occurrences meaning in a larger narrative. A minor car accident, for instance, is proof our own exceptionally bad luck, or our impossible clumsiness, or a Divine reminder to let go of attachments to the material world, or a million other possibilities. Psychotheraphy, of course, is partly about bringing such narratives to the surface, and engaging in conscious behaviors that help rewrite any undesirable stories. During out discussion he gave language to two more that haunt me, namely the desire to be, or believing that one is, more than human or less than human. Both these narratives have one very worldly effect, exhaustion.

If I am more than human, I do not need the sleep required by mere mortals and can, should, work more hours with more intensity than my peers. The narrative ‘logic’ is at once helpful and harmful. I may, at times, be motivated to keep going despite some obstacle and this may indeed be a good decision. When the drive turns competitive, however, then the source of pleasure turns from doing and finishing work to its quality relative to one’s peers. Even more troublesome, and this is my struggle, is that once motivating narrative transformation into a dictum; why have you stopped working? There is always a chance to do more, and through that possibility enters the guilt of not doing so.

more later…I don’t feel like writing right now

My last post went off track when I realized that Crusoe inadvertently links Christian morality, the Good, with material accumulation, collecting goods, through the loosely cognized term “Use.” While that proved interesting, I would like to return to the moment I meant to focus on yesterday.

The context is the same. Crusoe is pondering Providence, reading the circumstances of his life through Christian morality, when he begins the ironic sermon against Covetousness I touched on yesterday. As Crusoe goes on, however, Use is linked to something even more slippery than the Good and goods, namely thought itself. “Another Reflection,” says Crusoe, “was of great Use to me,” only a moment after he finishes his lecture on Covetousness like this: “All our Discontents about what we want, appear’d to me, to spring from the Want of Thankfulness for what we have” (130). An ascetic reading of these two moments tells us that one should be ever happy because ever thankful for what one has, reflection and its uses. Reflection, then, becomes an itemized good that has Use and, insofar as it is being put to good use, is also the owner’s Good.

Reflection does not necessarily equal reason, rationality or a host of other things. For Crusoe, it seems to me, Reflection is linked with morality if not a moral quality itself. That is, Reflection is taking a God’s Eye view of myself; this is its highest Use and if this God given good is employed in that manner, it is also doing-being Good. And the source of happiness.

The introduction of pleasure into this equation is rather odd. Employing my Reflection, I realize that I should be thankful for what I have including, and perhaps especially, the ability to Reflect itself. If I am thankful, says Crusoe, I am also content. This final move is the oddity, perhaps only because I am collapsing contentment, happiness and pleasure, each of which have their own histories. My terminological sloppiness, however, may be productive here because it allows for the uninstrumental to emerge at the heart of an instrumental equation. In other words, pleasure and happiness are the end points; they cannot, or are not, Useful in the same way that Reflection, or even the Good, is.

This is not simply mental masturbation. As the opening of yesterday’s post indicates, the context––perhaps stakes––of these thoughts lie at the nexus of aesthetics, pleasure, use value, cognition and perhaps, if yesterday’s “good”ness is included, imperialism.
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Unedited

Ever get the feeling that what you have just written is total garbage. Yeah, me too.

Day two of a new discipline is always very hard. I was going to say “the hardest” but that seemed hyperbolic and, more importantly, ran against the realization that every day of a difficult discipline is ‘the hardest’. Lest this exercise turn into a narcissistic admiration of my difficulties, let me turn my attention to two observations made during today’s reading.

First is Robinson Crusoe, which has lovely introduction by J. Donald Crowley in my Oxford World’s Classics edition. Among the many things Crowley’s introduction provides is a nice review of the criticism to date, as it should. Notable among these is Ian Watt’s reading of Defoe’s protagonist as “Economic Man,” the details of which deserve more thought than I have time for at the moment. Watt’s term, however, rose to the surface because some friends and I had been discussing “use value” in relation to both Crusoe and aesthetics more generally. Today’s reading included Crusoe reflecting on his condition, especially his wants.

The section runs for few pages and is encased in a larger discourse on his relationship to Providence, previous “wicked” ways and current repentance. The Island is thus part great punishment, for his past sins, and great fortune, because it brings him closer to God. (Crowley provides a brief history of this paradox, termed “the fortunate fall” by theologians). Amidst these reflections, Crusoe says, “all the good Things of this World, are no farther good to us, than they are for our Use” (129). There are two conclusions to be drawn from this statement. First, given the larger religious context and the diatribe on “Covetousness” that follows, Crusoe suggests that we acquire only what we need and nothing more. Second, there are “good Things” in the world that are potentially “good to us” and these two ‘goods’ are linked by “Use” (129). Things and morality are joined together as “goods” when they are joined in goods that are of Use. This is why Crusoe can remark, without irony or self-awareness, that he is “Lord of the whole Mannor,” “King, or Emperor over the whole country which I had Possession of,” a short paragraph before his discourse against “Covetousness” (128).

Here, then, is a short primer on the “rationale” behind British Imperialism. Crusoe’s anti-covetousness stand is cancelled out by the potential of good Things to be good to him. That is, the world must be explored for good Things, which must then be tested to see if they can be potentially good to us. The natives, of course, are not aware of all the uses of their local stuff and so must be pushed aside for their own good. Even more, they are not using their lives for the ultimate good that is worshipping and serving the Christian Go(o)d; thus, they too can be put to good use. If I become “King, or Emperor over the whole country,” it is not because I am covetous, but because Providence is blessing me for doing Good (with goods); I am simply putting all the good things in the world that can be good to us to good Use.

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Unedited:

None of this was what I was originally thinking about, but hopefully it has done me some good.

 W h a t   a r e  t h e s e   t h I n g s ?   Disjointed words, broken into letters without homes. The space in between is very personal because it is not empty, but rather filled with the anxiety of perfectionism, fear, and the inevitable failure of one’s abilities to live up to their ideals.

All of this is a rather abstract, perhaps pompous, entry into a simple, personal project: 200 words. Put down two hundred words per day on this blog. Why make a personal project public? Simply because knowing that these words will be ‘out there’ raises the very demons I am trying to exorcise: Judgment and its brother Fear. The prose will have to be readable, perhaps meaningful, and even edited slightly. Whatever is necessary.

Some of the aims of this project have already been stated: discipline, anxiety control etc. Ultimately, however, the purpose is to have no purpose or goal. My hope is that the process becomes its own meaningful end, and enjoyable again. When the ends take over, there is little less enjoyable than being and doing under their authoritarian rule. In this chosen academic life, being and writing are intertwined; perhaps, by disciplining writing I can discipline being and Be without end.

By Samarth: 

When I’m a red light, I’m bad.
When I’m a green light, I’m good.
I’m between good and bad.
I’m an ambulance.

 

My nephew is very interested in knowing who the good guy is and who the bad guy is. Amazingly, however, he is already willing to acknowledge that there are people who are “between good and bad.”

Nephew:  1

Most adults:  0

Weinbaum, Alys Eve. “Interracial Romance and Black Internationalism” Next To the Color Line: Gender, Sexuality and W.E.B Du Bois Eds. Susan Gillman and Alys Eve Weinbaum. Minnesota UP (2007): 96-123


Project:
    “This essay suggests how a Du Boisean obsession with interracial romance became constitutive to the substance and success of his antiracist, anti-imperialist, internationalist politics in the 1920s” (97).
    “The aim of this essay is thus twofold: first, to demonstrate the centrality of representations of interracial romance to Du Bois’ political project during the 1920s; second, to demonstrate Du Bois’ repeated deployment of “the stuff of Romance” as a form of propaganda that conjures a black imperialist response to both U.S racism and Euro-American imperialism” (101).


Weinbaum rereads and recontextualizes Du Bois’ famous passage from “The Criteria for Negro Art” in which he declares, “all art is porpoganda and ever must be.” In so doing, Weinbaum reads that statement as a culmination of a larger argument for internationalist solidarity, especially through miscegenation. There is also a distinction between “romance” and “Romance” to be made; Du Bois leaves the former term “uncapitalized and thus colloquial,” while the latter is capitalized and elevated “to the status of a literary genre with roots in narratives of heroic conquest, and back further still in the chivalric tradition” (100). The latter, Weinbaum argues, is the key genre in which Du Bois articulates a larger project for interracial international solidarity.

“Of all the generic forms that he might have elected as his principal vehicle for propoganda, Romance is the logical and natural choice. Romantic themes and Romantic forms are germane to expression of black life in the United States and black insurgent activity in the world. Romance is the idiom and romance the content in which black life is expressed and lived in rebellion against Jim Crow and imperialism the world over” (100).

On Darkwater:
    “As he suggests, the whiteness produced in the context of U.S. racial nationalism is part and parcel of a world straddling imperial whiteness that seeks to establish itself as a world economic power” (102).
    A close reading of the stories “The Comet,” in which heterosexual union trump race to give birth to “the race to be,” and “The Princess of Hither Isle.” The latter presents imperial conflict “as racial conflict that is in turn subtended by sexualized racial violence such that the consummation of interracial romance amounts to the symbolic resolution of global race war” (107).

On Dark Princess:
    The text “gazes outwards toward emerging struggles for decolonization, while simultaneously working to position African Americans as participants in such historical world events” (108). The focus is now on those factors that prevent solidarity between various colonized peoples, namely the “color line within the color line.”
    Weinbaum’s close reading of this text reaches a peak when she reveals an “affective logic” to black internationalism, one that refuses the symmetry of Pan Africa and Pan Asia but sensitive to the shared structure of feeling; “they together reveal the lineaments of a form of consciousness that connects all the world’s darker people into a single, world shaping force” (112).
    Du Bois’ suggestive articulation of this affective logic is unprecedented in his writing, Weinbaum continues, and sheds new light on his thinking through international solidarity movements. Indeed, these thoughts are shaped by and intervene in the communist debates that linked both the “Negro question” to the “colonial question.” Weinbaum finds traces of this context in the novel’s language.

The Problems:
    Thankfully, Weinbaum does not close the essay without noting the elephant in the room. In Dark Princess, Du Bois glosses over centuries of “Brahmin caste prejudice against blacks,” posits elitism and heterosexual reproduction as the means to overthrow imperialism. The novel relies heavily on Orientalist tropes rather than undercutting them and uses “ a form of legitimation by reversal––a mere revamping of the racial nationalism that undergrids an array of propagandistic works of art produced in the interwar period by nativists, restrictionists, eugenicists and white supremacists…”
    Noting these limitations is a scholarly responsible move, but one that unfortunately restricts the stakes of her essay to a slight rethinking of Du Bois scholarship. Unlike the high point of the essay, when Du Bois seemed to offer an affective axis of solidarity, its conclusion points to the treacherously essentialist ground one treads in thinking through these issues. Dark Princess, it seems to me, is more notable for its limitations and as an index of a particular historical moment; it reminds us how not to think.

Donnelly, Jack. “The Relative Universality of Human Rights” HRQ 29 (2007): 281-306

Thesis:
    “I defend what I call functional, international, legal, and overlapping consensus universality. But I argue that what I call anthropological and ontological universality are empirically, philosophically or politically indefensible. I also emphasize that universal human rights, properly understood, leave considerable space for national, regional, cultural particularity and other forms of diversity and relativity” (281).


Thirty years deep into this field, Donnelly provides a rigorous examination of basic tenets through a sociological-legal framework; the list of secondary sources offered in the footnotes alone is worthwhile. He begins by distinguishing conceptual and substantive universality. The former, he argues, are implied in the idea of human rights itself. Conceptual universality points to rights that “one has simply because one is human,” and that these rights are universally applicable to all humans (282). This universality, however, does not answer central questions: 1) are there such rights? 2) what are they?  These latter questions are central to contemporary human rights debates, especially when the rights in question are those specified by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and make up substantive universality.

Either frame of universality, Donnelly continues, relies on sovereign nation-states to defend/ protect human rights. Although there are “internationally recognized human rights” and “norm creation has been internationalized,” this does not mean there is a universal enforcement of such rights. That is still left of sovereign states.

In his most polemic sections, Donnelly rejects that human rights have always been defended (historical universality) and that every civilization can trace human rights norms in their own cultural practices/ history (anthropological universality).

    “Such claims tot historical or anthropological universality confuse values such as justice, fairness, and humanity need with practices that aim to realize those values. Rights––entitlements that ground claims with a special force––are a particular kind of social practice. Human rights––equal and inalienable entitlements of all individuals that may be exercised against state and society––are a distinctive way to seek to realized social values such as justice…” (284).

Donnelly explicitly locates the creation of human rights as a concept and practice in the seventeenth century. Before that, he argues, all societies––especially Western––had no such working concept. Donnelly goes through a small genealogy of the pre-modern and even early-modern bases for individual rights. “Divine commandment, natural law, tradition, or contingent political arrangements,” not human rights, shaped both the conceptions and daily functioning of an individual within society. Finally, and quite astutely, Donnelly argues that although claims for anthropological universality are rooted in desires to demonstrate cultural sensitivity and coevalness, “they misunderstand and misrepresent the foundations and functioning of the societies in question by anachronistically imposing an alien analytical framework” (286).

Functional Universality:
    Although locating the first iteration of human rights in Locke’s Second Treatise on Government, Donnelly argues that “the socio-cultural “modernity” of these ideas and practices…not their cultural “Westernness” deserves emphasis” (287). Here, Donnelly begins to become more of a historical materialist. The rapid expansion of capitalist markets and their penetration into traditional societal structures ruptured “systems of mutual support and obligation.” The increasing fragmentation of social structures and the atomization of lives left individuals “to face a growing range of increasingly unbuffered economic and political threats to their interests and dignity. New “standard threats” to human dignity provoked new remedial responses” (287). Donnelly makes the obvious next step to state that, “the spread of modern markets and states has globalized the same threats to human dignity experienced in Europe” (287). Human rights, for Donnelly, represent the best response mechanism to deal with such pressures; they are not, however, the only avenue available. Thus, “although historically contingent and relative, this functional universality fully merits the label universal––for us, today” (288).

International Legal Universality:
     Here Donnelly is political scientist in full, although brief, flight. Basically, human rights, as articulated in the Universal Declaration and in subsequent conventions, have become widely recognized and accepted. Although no universal mechanism of enforcement exists, hence the continued reliance on sovereign states, “protecting internationally recognized human rights is increasingly seen as a precondition to full political legitimacy.” Donnelly points to Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe and China as examples. Again, like function universality, such acceptance is contingent and is not guaranteed to last.

Overlapping Consensus Universality:
    Borrowing from John Rawls’ distinction between comprehensive religious and philosophical doctrines from “political conceptions of justice, which address only the political structure of society, defined (as far as possible) independent of any particular comprehensive doctrine” (289). Consequently, although there may be many religious or philosophical conceptions present in a given society, there exists the possibility that an “overlapping consensus” of a political conception of justice may be reached (289).

The rest of the paper is dedicated to defending against or critiquing other positions. I, however, found most helpful and informative the framework laid out above and the extensive footnotes. Moreover, this article has also helped me realize how ‘interdisciplinary’ human rights debates are and must be; I am both excited and appropriately nervous about driving toward ‘expertise’ in this field.

Located at: http://www.tamilnation.org/ideology/fannon.htm

This one is a bit more scattered and hurried.

Sartre’s introduction provides a context, namely the colonial structure of feeling in France, for Fanon’s groundbreaking text. Contextualizing Fanon is also an extension of his project because, argues Sartre, The Wretched of the Earth is not addressed to Europeans; indeed, this is part of the text’s scandal. “He speaks of you often, never to you” (3). If Sartre’s astute observation is correct, then Fanon has replicated, and reversed, the colonial structure of address; we speak about you, even for you, but never to you. Replicating imposed methods but reversing them in the name of subversion and freedom, argues Sartre, is precisely Fanon’s goal. That is, the violence exhibited by anti-colonial movements is not the exhibition of an inherent savagery but of lessons learned too well from the imperialists themselves. The opening pages of Sartre’s introduction, accordingly, are spent in reviewing certain colonizing methods.

––Creation of native elites, as a bourgeois buffer between metropole and colony: Transfer of European humanist ideals without noting the inherent contradiction of colonialism relative to them: dehumanization: physical violence:

3:  “Europe has multiplied divisions and opposing groups, has fashioned classes and sometimes even racial prejudices, and has endeavored…to bring about and intensify the stratification of colonized societies”

5: “Everything will be done to wipe out their traditions, to substitute our language for theirs and to destroy their culture without giving them ours.”

But then Sartre offers a different logic, one based on labor and production. Slavery requires bodily and spiritual suffering in order to properly subjugate its victims. By doing so, however, “you reduce his output, and however little you may give him, a farmyard man finishes costing you more than he brings in” (5). Constrained by the profit-motive, the settlers “are obliged to stop the breaking-in half-way; the result, neither man nor animal, is the native” (5). Sartre’s move here is impressive. By tracing the roots and limits of physical violence to market pressure, he places capitalism as the master of the colonial enterprise. Neither colonizer nor “native,” then, are granted subjectivities prior to their location in capitalist logic. Such a genealogy also allows Sartre to locate hope in capitalist logic. “Because he can’t carry massacre on to genocide, and slavery to animal-like degradation, he loses control, the machine goes into reverse, and a relentless logic leads him on to decolonization” (5). We must be careful to note Sartre does not equate decolonization with freedom from market logics, but rather with their realization; implicit here is our always already implicated position in the market.

Weirdly, Sartre then moves to strange psychologizing that posits a depth model of subjectivity and anti-colonial violence as “the same [settler] violence thrown back upon us as when our reflection comes forward to meet us when we go towards a mirror” (6). The logic is strange and almost replicates imperial epistemology; we know how they work and they are essentially higher order monkeys who are good at emulating us. Perhaps I am not being fair to Sartre, but we move on.

A quote that may be useful for the Rwanda project:
 
6:  “In order to free themselves they even massacre each other. The different tribes fight between themselves since they cannot face the real enemy –– and you can count on colonial policy to keep up their rivalries; the man who raises his knife against his brother thinks that he has destroyed once and for all the detested image of their common degradation, even though these expiatory victims don’t quench their thirst for blood.”

Notes on the French Left:

7:  “The Left at home is embarrassed; they know the true situation of the natives, the merciless oppression they are submitted to; they do not condemn their revolt, knowing full well that we have done everything to provoke it.”

“They would do well to read Fanon; for he shows clearly that this irrepressible violence is neither sound and fury, nor the resurrection of savage instincts, nor even the effect of resentment: it is man re-creating himself. I think we understood this truth at one time, but we have forgotten it –– that no gentleness can efface the marks of violence; only violence itself can destroy them.”

Although I deeply disagree with the last sentiment, Fanon’s move to link anti-colonial movements to the French Revolution (the forgotten truth) is an interesting and provocative one. He does not conflate but merely alludes, perhaps in the service of the larger Hegelian claim for historical teleology that he closes with.

8:  “This book has not the slightest need for a preface, all the less because it is no addressed to us. Yet I have written one, in order to bring the argument to its conclusion; for we in Europe too are being decolonized: that is to say that the settler which is in every one of us is being savagely rooted out.”

Gotta love the language of that last clause!

What makes Sartre so interesting in this introduction is the complicated, and sometimes contradictory (dialectical?), way he oscillates between granting agency to the actors involved and subsuming them within larger forces (markets, Man—transhistorical subjectivity, movement of history etc).

9:  “Try to understand this at any rate: if violence began this very evening and if exploitation and oppression had never existed on the earth, perhaps the slogans of non-violence might end the quarrel. But if the whole regime, even your non-violent ideas, are conditioned by a thousand year old oppression, your passivity serves only to place you in the ranks of the oprressors.”

Is this how Humanities scholars or their projects percieved?

Edwards, Brent Hayes. “Langston Hughes and the Futures of Diaspora” American Literary History 10.3 (Fall 2007): 689-711


    “I will argue that the archives of internationalism can be read for a sensibility––or more precisely, a poetics––that allow diaspora to serve as a critique of the totalizing pretensions of globalization. I will focus, in particular, on the ways that interwar internationalism might be read as a reformulation of diasporic eschatology…, especially through a range of bilingual or multilingual practices in literature” (691).

Edwards locates his project in several contexts, including contemporary debates on diaspora(s) and globalization. He begins by reexamining the Jewish scholarly tradition around diaspora, one that he says has been sadly ignored, to disorient the term’s connection with historical remembrance only. Rather, Edwards recovers a tradition connecting “the diasporic condition to futurity” (691). Through a close reading of Hughes’ “Letter from Spain,” Edwards demonstrates that the future may not be redemptive but does hold “a potential internationalist solidarity” among what is now called the global South.

Edwards’ argument rests on a close reading of the aforementioned Hughes text. Attention to the poem’s form, genre, rhyme scheme and structure of address is interlaced with historical details form the poet’s life. Deploying biographical details but not limiting himself to them, Edwards lays out the various contexts within which the ballad is written: the Spanish Civil War, Hughes’ work for various newspapers and a translation of Federico Garcîa Lorca’s Gypsy Ballads. These contexts shape Hughes’ text at the level of content and form. Unlocking both is the key presence of salud closing the poem.

Outlining various readings the presence of this word allows, Edwards argues that it calls for a “diasporic responsibility [that] can only be signaled here at a distance, in the specific instance of encounter, through the specific interface of communication: the war in Spain and the particular Spanish idiom it engenders” (697, his emphasis). This particular vernacular moment consolidates the rest of the poem whose narrator is a black soldier writing home about his encounter with a dying enemy Moor soldier. The encounter is narrated in an English vernacular that is the “formal parallel”––not direct emulation––of Garcîa Lorca’s style. Content, context, form and structure of address intersect so that, suggests Edwards, “the singular idiom of “Salud” is grafted into the letter in a manner not just to carry over and commemorate that singular instance in Spain, but also thereby to transform the contours of English, and of “brotherhood” at home” (697, his emphasis). The poem is not a redemptive gesture, a healing, but the keeping open of a wound––the conscription of darker peoples in the logic and wars of European powers––and thus the possibility of solidarity at home with an internationalist consciousness.

A version of this brilliant and elegantly written essay was delivered a lecture during the 2006(?) Humanities Center Globalization Conference at Wayne State University. At the close of his talk, Professor Ken Jackson––himself very invested in “the religious turn”––prodded Edwards on both the overt and implicit “religious” logic his argument presents. The question was not taken as seriously as it should have been. Edwards’ claim that diaspora can, and indeed already has in the Jewish tradition, have an intimate tie to futurity parallels Derrida’s argument of the radical Other “to come.” The poem is, as Edwards repeatedly says, not redemptive but holds open the possibility of a new/ renewed diasporic consciousness; is this not solidarity “to come?” More importantly, Edwards seems to follow Derrida in an attempt to keep both the transcendent and immanent in play simultaneously. In Edwards’ argument, the poem is absolutely located in its historical, spatial and linguistic moment. And yet, the text attempts to transform a distant place (America), though a different language (the Spanish idiom) in the service of imagining a diasporic responsibility that is not yet available (i.e. that may yet come to be). The poem, in other words, takes uses its immanent context to build a bridge that will transcend the oceans.

And why not? I see nothing embarrassing in such an endeavor and I certainly don’t think that an elucidation of this logic undermines Edwards’, or Hughes’, project in any way. In fact, it may allow for a greater conversation between diaspora studies as articulated by both Jewish and global South scholars. Thinking through immanence and transcendence is difficult enough without limiting our tools and, as Edwards’ essay brilliantly demonstrates, one has to be immersed in the immediate contexts to even suggest possibilities to come.  

This is the first post under the new category "Reading Notes." As I move toward my Qualifying Exams and narrow my focus, creating these brief precis of important or thought provoking arguments will be a standard intellectual exercise. I will post them as I complete them, although many will not be in the full prose form that follows below. (I also have to do this for one of my final classes; the timming could not be better!)

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 Cheah, Pheng. “Posit(ion)ing Human Rights in the Current Global Conjuncture. Transnational Asia Pacific: Gender, Culture, and The Public Sphere. Eds. Shirley Geok-lin Lim, Larry E. Smith, Wimal Dissanayake. Illionois UP: 1999: 11—42


Cheah argues against Human Rights normativity based on a Kantian transcendental “regulative idea” or the Hegelian notion of the state as the concrete embodiment of the universal. The former is rejected as blind to the historical forces shaping and transforming “norms,” and as operating at such a level of abstraction as to have no valuable effects on the “cultural, institutional context in which meaningful action can take place (14). Such a philosophy, moreover, is ostensibly backed by the presence of an international public sphere that acts something like humanity’s conscience. Cheah argues that claims for a “transnational political morality are implausible because they are grounded in a rationalist conception of normativity that the actually existing capitalist world-system renders untenable" (16).
    Neo-Hegelian bases for Human Rights, meanwhile, miss the real normative force international human rights discourse has. This philosophy, like Kant’s, is predicated on the presence of rational actors behaving according to rational obligations (15). Again, Cheah argues that the current world-capitalist system renders such faith in rationality naïve because based on a transcendental human subjectivity (32). Cheah points to Asian governments, especially those NIEs (Newly Industrializing Economies), as deploying the Hegelian-statist model for Human Rights, justifying their authoritarian rule as necessary for national economic development, which in turn will provide the material grounds for human rights.
    “Rather, the task is to rethink the normativity of human rights claims within the original contamination and violence of global capitalism, that is, within ineluctable historicity” (32). To this end, Cheah uses Derrida to call for a justice that “must be immanent and transcendent at the same time” (34). “Justice ought not to be exhausted by rational action in the present. But at the same time, it must have an effect on the present through rational action” (34). That is, the norms and ideals we use to defend human rights are born from the “shifting field of historical forces” that makes up a given present. Simultaneously, the possibility, “the ineradicable promise of ethical transformation” remains open precisely because these forces are always in flux, “and cannot be captured by the hegemonic forces of a given historical present” (34). So, pace Kant, norms rise out of concrete historical situations, not absolute human rationality. And, pace Hegel, the nation-state is not the sole manifestation of Geist (Spirit) because it is located in and accountable to a greater field of forces (global capitalism) that may radically alter its duties.
    I find this to be a brilliant attempt to think through the need for both historical materialism and transnational normative ideals. I would push this project by prodding further the source of human rights’ normative power. Although Cheah locates norms as being produced out of particular historical-material contexts, there does seem to be a world public opinion based on an implicit Kantian idealism. Witness, for example, the popularity of various (and admittedly problematic) “Save Africa” campaigns. Explaining the presence of such movements does not need recourse to a transhistorical human subjectivity, but a renewed sensitivity to historical residue. To borrow and deform Benjamin, there may be futures we have not yet forgotten. That is, the normative force of human rights claims may not reside totally in either the present’s play of forces or a transhistorical idealism. Rather, we are carrying the debt of previous generations whose ideals––themselves arising out particular historical moments––are with us as regulative norms. These norms seem transhistorical because they have become internalized in institutional discourse, literally taught in schools. This may all seem rather obvious, but it is a useful reminder and perhaps a complication of Cheah’s ‘ethical transformation to come’ move borrowed from Derrida.
    No proper historicist would argue that the “field of forces,” especially economic forces, have not significantly (radically?) transformed since Kant, Hegel, Marx and the French Revolution. Yet, as the normative power of human rights attests, their revolutionary ideals linger in the very language we use to prosecute our world. The presence of these traces seems to severely undercut the hope implied in the claim that “contextual conditions are subject to radical mutability” (35). Radical changes have emerged, become dominant and left as residue their norms. Perhaps there is no transhistorical subjectivity, but neither is there a subject made up entirely in the present.