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

    “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).

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?

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.

Prefatory Aside:

I don’t remember who said it, but a professor told me that once the highest complement one can receive from a colleague is that you are open to critical feedback. Trying to live up to that ideal is quite the challenge, however. I have just received my papers from last semester with my teachers’ comments; they are spot on. Both papers received similar comments, that the argument is “suggestive” but “incomplete.” This is mild criticism, hopeful in tone and helpfully calling for greater thought. My confidence, however, took a slight blow and for the past few hours I have been trying to stabilize. Why such a reaction to such mild feedback? Well, partly because graduate students are neurotic and depend on praise like insulin. More importantly, it is a reminder of how much I don’t yet know, how much of my own extrapolations and theorisings have already been written down. This is, I remind myself, a part of the process. But knowing that you don’t know stinks.


Kim:

I assigned myself this text over the break to move my “Basic backgrounds” project. These are readings that everyone is familiar with, that are often alluded to and are a part of the general cannon of my ‘field,’ which is yet to be specified. Kim, I thought, is going to be an exercise in controlling my gag reflex as I am forced to ingest all the orientalist tropes. And there are plenty of those, even when clothed as Oriental-philia. The text, however, is much more nuanced and interesting than I anticipated. What follows are a few excerpts and my ruminations on them. Considering the canonicity of this novel, I assume that much of what I will say is, as one professor recently remarked about a paper, “ground well tread upon.”  


“ ‘If I live and God is good, there will be a price upon my head, for I am a Son of the Charm—I, Kim.’
    A very few white people, but many Asiatics, can throw themselves into amazement as it were by repeating their own names over and over again to themselves, letting the mind go free upon speculation as to what is called personal identity” (181)

Even a cursory reading of the passage must note the use of the essentialist identity categories, “white people” and “Asiatics.” That such terms are deployed in a paragraph contemplating identity itself is an interesting phenomena, one ripe for (auto)deconstruction. I want to focus on Kim specifically, “the orphaned son of a drunken Irish sergeant and a nursemaid mother, [who is] brought up by a Eurasian opium eater” (xix, intro to B&N edition). The dark skinned youth is able to pass easily for a ‘native,’ while also dawning the costumes of a Sahib (Englishman), Muslim, Hindu & Tibetan monk, amongst others. His ability to perform all these identities is key to his espionage practices.
  

“Perform” is, of course, the key word here. I wish I were better acquainted with Butler and those who take up her argument to offer a solid gloss on ‘performativity’. Instead, let me say how I think this is working in the text. Kim’s identity performance is always adjusted to the needs of the situation. His language, clothing and manners are, generally, adjusted to match his interlocutor so that he can be deferential, equal, or authoritative as needed. There are interesting exceptions where Kim thinks in either Hindi or English despite the exigencies of the situation; following these up would require more time than I can offer at the moment. Despite Kipling’s frequent use of essentialist identity categories, then, Kim sometimes slips into the wrong identity. That is, there seem to be multiple essential cores within Kim, none of which are entirely under his control, if those eruptions are any evidence. Given the vagaries of his birth, childhood and profession, moreover, Kim often asks himself “What is Kim?” Framing this question as a “what” rather than “who” is part of the answer. As I began to say earlier, Kim is an unfixed performance, a “what” not a “who.” Language is a key to Kim’s performance, but it also unlocks the syntax of identity.

In the passage quoted above, Kim is enamored with the thought of being hunted (becoming something of a prize, another ‘what’) and joining in the “Great Game” of espionage. He makes two distinct identity statements. First, “I am a Son of the Charm,” referring to the locket he and fellow spies wear. This mode of belonging has a certain existential weight to it, at least if we pay attention to the phrasing. “I am….” His rebirth as a spy, the son of a network, is a mode of Being, an all-permeating professional existence. Except to his four direct superiors, however, only a number marks this professional identity. Imagining people introducing themselves like that, “I am E.24,” is strange and a kind of existential self-negation, the denial of a ‘soul’ even while identifying with it. Second, and more accurately, there is this articulation of identity; “I, Kim.” The absence of the “am” negates the kind of existential identification he made with his profession. The “I” and “Kim” are not necessarily linked, allowing the proper name “Kim” to become an identity without Being. This, I think, is Kim’s understanding of performance: identity without Being. I like this phrase; it has a certain sexiness to it. Unfortunately, I’m not sure it actually means anything. First of all, it could be tautological. I am trying to argue that Kim’s identity is a performance, but define performance as identity without Being. Weird. Second, using a philosophical term like ‘Being’ without invoking Heidegger, or the volumes of thought before and after him, is blasphemous. The phrase could hold value but needs much more thought in its account.
 

Still, performativity is often invoked as a way to escape fixed identity categories and the epistemic pressure to see “what you really are”; this is especially true when negotiating gender and sexuality. More broadly, performance is a way of negotiating power as exerted by discursive regimes. In Kim, power manifests as full-fledged orientalism. The whole espionage plot line is guised as knowledge-seeking of the innocent scientific variety, ethnography and mapping. There is, of course, nothing innocent about a drive to ‘map’ the natives into their proper places, and Kipling’s text overtly links these tools to the imperial project. Indeed, the semi-climactic event has Kim stealing maps and geographical surveys away from a French and Russian duo; the mission is said to be in the service of protecting the colony. Given Kim’s ‘nativism’ and abhorrence of rules, shaping him into a disciplined spy is a difficult project, an elucidation of which gives us an insight into how an imperial sensibility reproduces itself.
Kim’s formal schooling, away from the master spies Hurree Babu, Mahbub Ali, and Lurgan, takes place at St. Xavier’s, the eminent private school for colonial elites. He shows a “great aptitude for mathematical studies as well as mapmaking” and wins a book as a prize, The Life of Lord Lawrence, a biography of the first Baron, viceroy and governor general of India (160 + footnote). That is, Kim’s excellence in those skills necessary for his espionage specifically, and imperial sciences generally, have earned him the right to closely study the life of a great imperialist. How wonderfully incestuous! He is then deployed––“ ‘removed on appointment’ ” (161)––on some safe training missions with Mahbub Ali. They journey to “the mysterious city of Bikanir” (166). Kim uses a rosary to keep track of distance, a compass for orientation, and a “survey paint-box” to illustrate his surroundings. Mahbub Ali asks him to make a written report as well, telling Kim that, “It must hold everything that thou hast seen or touched or considered” (166). The arrogance of this request is striking and instructive. Kim’s whole experience can, and must, be transcribed, transmitted and received as it is to his superiors. Language, and writing specifically, is not representational here, it is a transparent carrier of meaning. This is precisely the logic behind colonial travel writing, or written reports of the ethnographic and geographical societies; language can not only represent mere landscapes and city architecture but also “the temper and disposition” of the native peoples (166). Kipling again, and I think quite consciously, links such ‘scientific’ missions to their military counterparts.
    

Mahbub tells Kim that his report must be treated with great care, as much as if he knew it was going to the Commander-in-Chief coming “by stealth with a vast army outsetting to war” (166). Kim laughs that no army greater than a thousand men could come through the area, due to the lack of water sources. Mahbub tells him to write that down as well. Indeed, the ethnographic mission is the stealth army, a reconnaissance mission gathering data appropriate to the imperial project.

I must close this because other (graded) projects wait. A couple of closing thoughts I wish I could have followed up on:

First, returning to Kim’s performativity, his ability to conduct these missions stealthily is based on his ability to pass for ‘native.’ It is not, unlike his French-Russian counterparts, based on his privileged position as a wealthy Sahib, but as a poor disciple to Tashoo Lama. There are two thoughts here. Despite all the language of essentialism, Kim’s ability to ‘be’ a native is no more than emulating a series of surface level features: clothing, colloquialisms etc… I said something of this above. The category “Native” becomes nonsensical, or at least staves off essentialism. Second, Kipling’s text is a reminder that colonialism requires local help. Creating native elites as a buffer between the metropole and the colony is an old idea, but one that plants the seeds of revolt. The hesitant solidarity between the Hindu/Atheist Hurree Babu and the Muslim Mahbub Ali is one indication of this.

Finally, there is another knowledge-seeking mission throughout the text, Tashoo Lama’s search for Enlightenment. When, in the final few pages, he finds (or achieves) it, the experience is described in transcendental terms or, rather, a transcendence that is immanent everywhere. “I saw them at one time and in one place; for they were within the Soul” (277). The Lama experiences a release from his body, from time and space. Within this experience, however, he also experiences every body, every time and space. I’m not sure what to do with this but it bears further thought.  

I begin with Benedict Anderson and Salman Rushdie for reasons I have already articulated.  

Moving to Tropic of Orange will bring us back to the Americas and continue the magical-realist writing style. Yamashita’s Americas, however, include no white-male perspective, despite the use of seven character perspectives. If Saleem Sinai drives toward nationalism despite innumerable fissures, both in his own body and in the society he attempts to represent, then Tropic is a rejection of Saleem’s mission. That is, the book’s fragmented and marginal perspectives never allow one to settle on a single story of the nation. We are, instead, given multiple, semi-autonomous storylines; they are threads that sometimes knot together and sometimes just rub. This formal layering of narratives and narrative styles––the shift in prose structures in remarkable––performs a critique of the drive toward the national story generally, while also taking on NAFTA specifically. Indicting the Trade Agreement for maintaining systemic poverty, Tropic rejects one’s ability to think the nation without locating it in a transnational world system. I am not sure I would trust my ability to communicate all of this to my students, but I have our Detroit surroundings as a tragically ready example.

If I have succeeded in the past two sections, then transitioning into Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient should not be too disconcerting, despite shifting in time to WWII and the location to an Italian villa. There are, at least at present, two key thoughts I want to continue into this book. First, I want to continue to think through marginal spaces, those disavowed, even temporarily, by all nations. The title character was once a desert explorer whose friends were limited to those interested in the same work. These associates, however, belonged to many different countries, all allegiances to which were forgotten in that arid landscape. Such unacknowledged spaces, then, need not simply be tragic if we can see their ability to create bonds among different peoples. The hospital/ villa in which the story is told performs a similar role. Secondly, we can use Ondaatje to think through how a seminal event in American history, WWII, and the dropping of atomic bombs, can be written through a marginal perspective. I am thinking specifically of Kip’s reaction to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We will, hopefully, be able to tie space and narrative perspective together to see the forgotten stories of WWII and write the spaces left in its wake.

Finally, and perhaps most adventurously, I want to bring my students to Murambi, The Book of Bones, a narrative about the Rwandan genocide. Saleem, and his drive to write a nation, will have become something of a punching bag by this point. The aim now, however, will be to recover that project in the guise of this statement: If we posit the Rwandan Genocide, through Diop’s text, as a misrecognition of fellow citizens, then perhaps more nationalism isn’t always a bad thing. We must be careful here not to slip into a sloppy relativism (“nationalism is sometimes good sometimes bad”) and consider how group identity is formed in the text. Is there a Hutu nation posited?  How does the “Hutu” identity come to be historically, and how do its militant advocates narrate it?

I offer this book as the final one despite, or probably because of, my own investment in it; I will be writing a paper on the text, which is to be delivered at NEMLA. For the class, however, I want to channel my student’s emotional investment into a greater intellectual sensitivity. If the class has been successful, then we will have to think Diop’s text through an attention to Anderson’s argument, layered and disjunctive narrations, marginal spaces and their colonial inheritance, and our transnational connection to butchered children.